The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Maxim Jakubowski

by Maxim Jakubowski

“It’s not a problem, Thalie.”

  “It’s wrong for a slave to seek her own pleasure, without the consent of her master. You must punish me.”

  His heart sinks.

  So this is the way it is.

  He handcuffs her hands to the bed post and arranges her nude body in the shape of an X across the soft green bed cover. She is not wearing the safety pin. As he widens the angle between her legs, her cunt gapes.

  He hangs the “Don’t Disturb” sign outside the door and leaves her in the room, captive, laid out like an offering. Although not for the maid!

  He loiters around the reception area until he finds a suitable male. A German tourist, wealthy-looking but with no taste in clothes. At first, the man does not take him seriously, but he insists. They share a coffee in the breakfast room. He explains. They do the deal. He gives the German the card key to their room.

  He has no wish to watch.

  “You have two hours,” he says. “Be out of the room by then. She is handcuffed. I have the keys with me. She will not speak, or cry, or scream.”

  “And I . . .?” asks the German, begging for confirmation of his wildest dreams.

  “She is totally yours. Anything you want.”

  They are two of the slowest hours of his life. He walks four blocks North, then five blocks South. Peruses every window without even noting their varied contents. When he finally returns, Thalie is still handcuffed to the bedpost, the taste of another man still leaking from her, dotting her stomach, her face, her breasts.

  She smiles at him.

  His slave.

  That night, he sleeps badly, his mind in tumult.

  Sunrise comes early, with a blanket of low clouds waltzing over the top of the highest skyscrapers.

  He tells her about the dream.

  In it, he has failed abysmally at becoming a master and the only alternative is to become a slave himself. To stay with Thalie, he sends a begging letter to Anne-Louise, offering himself in exchange for further time with her. His pitiful demeanour makes her laugh but, as a game, she accepts.

  Initially, she puts him on a diet, having no need of an overweight slave. Then, when he becomes suitable, she shaves his pubic hair and brands him, a large B carved into his buttocks. He is allowed to sleep in the same room as Anne-Louise and Thalie, but on the floor, at the foot of their bed, where he is forced to listen to their lovemaking and Thalie’s severe beatings. He is beaten, too, made to wear an apron and serve their food; if ever he is caught with an erection, he is whipped until he bleeds. But he is happy now, just living under the same room as his companion of slavery. Eventually, he is allowed to attend the special parties where his role is to suck all the men to hardness before they fuck Thalie, then to lick them clean after they have withdrawn from her orifices. In turn, she is to prepare the men who bugger him. He is no longer allowed to touch her, only to watch the increasing stations of her degradation. But the punishments get worse and worse, as he finds it impossible to repress his excitement as his cock invariably reacts shamelessly every time another man penetrates her.

  Finally, the circle of masters decree the ultimate punishment at the next party he is to be brought to.

  Which is when he awoke.

  “A companion in slavery,” Thalie remarks. “Yes, I think that would be quite appropriate for you . . .”

  “Would I?”

  “But it’s all a dream, you know. Anne-Louise hates men; she would never want you as her slave. If you had a wife to offer in exchange for time with me, maybe then she might entertain your proposal. Dream on.”

  “I will,” he says.

  Q & A

  “What did you do when Anne-Louise threw you out?”

  “I pleaded, made a fool of myself, threw myself at her feet. Even begged to be retained, if only as a servant, so that I may look after her and her new, young mistress”

  “Did you meet her, this new girl?”

  “Yes, some months later. Tall, blonde: everything I wasn’t. New. Virgin territory for Anne-Louise’s cruel whims.”

  “But she didn’t allow you to stay on?”

  “No. I was desperate. I knew my parents would never have me back. I had given up my studies without obtaining any diplomas or qualifications. How could I find a job, somewhere to live? During the two years I had spent with Anne-Louise, I had deliberately lost the few friends I had before our encounter. I had nothing. I never even had any more normal clothes to wear. Anne-Louise had once mentioned, almost as a joke, a couple who had on two occasions visited her soirées and been witness to my servility and asked where they could find a similar maid. Maybe I could go and place myself in their service. The idea didn’t appeal to me. Become a servant to people I had already privately served as a slave. But I had no other alternative. Anne-Louise phoned them and a deal was agreed.”

  “And that’s where you are now?”

  “I’ve now worked here two years almost. They leave for work – they are both senior managers for a large insurance company in a nearby town – early in the morning and my duties are to keep the house clean, wash, iron, dust, prepare the food. I am not allowed any mail or telephone calls. I play on the Internet. Watch TV. They are hard on me. The woman has custody of the padlock key, but she is capricious and often declines to set the rings free, particularly when I’m having my periods. It amuses her. Most of the time, I am just their servant, but sometimes they remember my nature and my past, usually when they have drunk heavily. He fucks me while she watches, then has me lick her. Christmas last, I was seemingly too enthusiastic while he used me extensively and the next day, out of jealousy, she beat me badly.”

  “Do you still hear from Anne-Louise?”

  “Not often. She keeps in touch, though.”

  “Do you still love her?”

  “Yes, as much as ever.”

  “Will she ever have you back?”

  “I live in that hope, but I realise how unlikely it is. I’m realistic.”

  “Are you happy?”

  “Yes, in my own way. But living with my owners is boring. The house is in the middle of nowhere. The only contact I have with other human beings is when they take me on holiday with them. Spain in the summer; a house in the mountains in France near Easter. In Spain, I am allowed to wear shorts and bikinis. The padlock is taken off and I am allowed to be naughty. I fuck boys; with rubber protection, of course. They don’t mind, as long as I’m not late back at their villa to cook the meals.”

  “Can you see your life remaining the same for years to come, Thalie? A leading question, I know.”

  “I’m only twenty. I am a sub . . . But I do harbour hopes of convincing Anne-Louise of giving me to B.”

  “But he’s the man who tried to brand you?”

  “I know, but I think he would be a good master for me.”

  “It’s your life.”

  “It is.”

  “And I’m no knight in shining armour, Thalie. I have no mission in life to change your nature. You touch me, though. I feel much tenderness for you.”

  “Do you think you could be my new master, then?”

  “I’m not sure. Willing to give it my best shot (hear my smile between these lines) . . .”

  “If you were a true dom, you would know already. I don’t think you are, somehow.”

  “I’m sadly aware of the fact. But I still want to see you. Badly. Can you find a way to get away for a few days? Meet me somewhere? Anywhere? There must be some pretext you can use, a white lie. That aunt in Paris who’s left you the deeds of the apartments she owns and rents out, for instance. You could invent a reason to go there, to sign legal papers . . . Please, Thalie.”

  “Maybe. Let me think.”

  He packs.

  He had asked the day before whether they should purchase a case for the clothes they had bought together, but she declined. She came with nothing and insists she should return to her owners similarly. It would be suspicious otherwise and, unlike Anne-Louise’s, she does not appreciate the
ir beatings. He realizes he had never even asked her what alibi, what lie she had used to justify her trip.

  He watches as she stuffs the barely-worn chenille jumper, the rainbow skirt, the cream see-through blouse, the stockings and sundry knick-knacks into the hotel room’s wicker waste basket. He’s packed the cuffs and the strap-on in his own case, although he’s thinking of disposing them in a washroom at the airport. It would be too embarrassing to be searched at customs.

  They take the lift in heavy silence. He settles the bill with his credit card and the doorman hails a cab.

  “Newark.”

  It’s early morning, ahead of the commuter traffic. The journey barely takes half an hour. Throughout, he holds her hand in his.

  Way down his throat, there are a million words he wishes to say, but they break up like flotsam against the rampart of his lips. He knows he hasn’t the eloquence to change her life. Or his.

  Her flight is a whole hour earlier than his.

  Her thin, fragile silhouette disappears down the neon-lit corridor that leads to her departure lounge. He has checked: her plane is on time. They haven’t even said goodbye. Before the bend, she turns, smiles and blows him a kiss.

  He knows he will never see her again. The letters will continue for a short time; then they will slow down and a day will come when she just disappears, the property of a new master, who will forbid all contact with her former life. And his mind will imagine the worst. Violation. Torture. Death. Because the life she has chosen is a one-way street.

  And his heart doesn’t own the right passport.

  Bottomless on Bourbon

  Maxim Jakubowski

  He had often promised to take Kathryn to New Orleans. But it had never happened. They had spectacularly fallen apart long before the opportunity arose. In fact, the travel they had managed to do in between feverish fucks had proven rather prosaic. So much for promises. They hadn’t even visited Paris, Amsterdam or New York either.

  So, whenever he could, he now took other women to the Crescent City.

  For sex.

  And fantasised about Kathryn’s face, and eyes, and pale breasts and cunt and more.

  New Orleans was for him a city with two faces. Almost two different places, the aristocratic and slightly disheveled languor of the Garden District on one hand and the hustle and bustle of the French Quarter on the other, contrasting like night and day. The touristic charms concealing darker, ever so venomous charms. The heavy placid flow of the Mississippi river zigzagging in serpentine manner through the opposing twin shores of Jackson Square and Algiers. The gently alcoholic haze of New Orleans days and the enticing, dangerous attraction of fragrant New Orleans nights. Nights that smelled and tasted of sex.

  He loved to see the women sweat as he made love to them, enjoyed the feel of bodies sliding against each other, in moist, clammy embraces as sheets tangled around them. He took unerring voyeuristic pleasure in watching them shower after, washing his seed away from their openings, cleaning away his bites, the saliva that still coated their nipples, neck or ear-lobes which he had assaulted with military-like amorous precision.

  Those were the memories he treasured. Stored away for all eternity in his mental bank vaults. The curve of a back, the soft blonde down slowly being submerged in a small pool of perspiration just inches away from her rump, highlighted by a solitary light bulb, as she kneeled on all fours on the bed and he breached the final defences of her sphincter and impaled himself in her bowels. The sound of a moan, of pleasure, of joy. Ohhh . . . AAAAHHH . . . Chriiiiiist . . . The tremor that coursed through the girl’s taut body as he discharged inside her or as she rode the ocean waves of her oncoming orgasm.

  Yes, New Orleans, his city of sex.

  Endless walks through the small streets between hotel room episodes. Invigorating breakfasts of beignets and coffee and ice-cold orange juice at the Café du Monde; oysters and thick, syrupy gumbo at The Pearl off Canal Street; loitering hand in hand in the farmer’s market full of the smell of spices and seafood, chewing on garlic-flavoured pistachio nuts; obscene mounds of boiled crawfish at Le-moyne’s Landing; hunting for vintage paperbacks through the dusty shelves at Beckham’s; po’boys at the Napoleon House; zydeco rhythms at the House of Blues; a routine he could live on for days on end. Until he would tire of the woman, because she bored him once past the mechanics of fornication, never said the right thing or talked too much or simply because she wasn’t the woman he really wanted to be with in New Orleans.

  There had been Lisa, the software executive; Clare, a lawyer who looked like Anne Frank had she ever grown up, and liked to be handled roughly; Pamela Jane, the investment banker he had met at the hotel bar who wanted to be a writer and Helene the biology teacher from Montreal. He didn’t feel he was being promiscuous; four women in six years since Kathryn. Some he had found here, others he had brought.

  But somehow none had fitted in with this strange city and, even though the sex had been loose and fun, and the company never less than pleasant, there had been something lacking. Even at midnight, buckling under his thrusts on bed or floor or sucking him off under the water streams of the shower, he knew they were creatures of the day, anonymous, predictable; they had no touch of the night, no share of darkness. And darkness was what he sought. In women. In New Orleans. What he knew he had once detected under Kathryn’s fulsome exterior.

  He had high hopes for Susi.

  She was Austrian, in her late twenties, and worked in a managerial capacity for a travel agency in Vienna, which made it easier (and cheaper) for her to jump on a plane for purposes of pleasure.

  They had met in New York some months earlier. It was Spring and the weather was appalling for the season. The rain poured down in buckets and all Manhattan was gridlocked like only New York can manage. He’d been in town promoting a book and negotiating the next contract with his publishers there (he never used an agent) and was booked on an evening flight back to London. He’d been staying, as usual, at a hotel down by the Village, off Washington Square. He had booked a car to JFK and it was already half an hour late. They had checked at reception and found out that the driver was still blocked in traffic near Central Park and Columbus Circle. He had promptly cancelled the car and rushed with his suitcase to the hotel’s front steps to hail a yellow cab. They were few and far between and he wasn’t the only hotel guest heading for the airport. Both he and the tall, slim red-headed woman went for the same cab which declined the airport ride pretexting the conditions. They agreed to share the next cab to come along. She was even later than him, as her flight preceded his by twenty minutes.

  “My name is Susanne, but my friends call me Susi with an i,” she had introduced herself as the driver made his slow way towards the Midtown Tunnel.

  Despite clever shortcuts through Queens, the journey took well over an hour and a quarter, so they had much opportunity to talk as they inched towards their planes. She had been in town for a week, visiting her parents who both worked as diplomats for one of the big international organisations.

  She did miss her flight, while he caught his with a few minutes to spare. E-mail addresses were exchanged and they had remained in touch since.

  They had quickly become intimate. He’d sent her one of his books and she had remarked on the sexual nature of many of his stories and confessed to some of her own sexual quirks. She was an exhibitionist. Would sometimes take the subway back in Vienna dressed in a particularly short skirt and without underwear and allow men to spy on her genitals. She was shaven, so they had a full view of her naked mound. She was also in the habit of masturbating in parks, where she could be seen by passers-by, actually encouraged voyeurs to do so and knew that, sometimes, men were jerking off watching her just a few metres away.

  She would pretend her name was Lolita. He asked her why.

  Because she had little in the way of breasts and her bare pubis evoked a child or a doll, she answered. She was submissive by nature, she told him.

  She sent him a serie
s of photographs taken by an ex-boyfriend she had broken up with shortly before the New York trip. He found them wonderfully provocative in a tender sort of way. In the first, her long, skinny frame stood in contrast to the sluttish, traditional black lingerie of embroidered knickers, suspender belt and stockings almost a size too big for her. Yes, she had no breasts, barely a hillock worth of elevation and no cleavage and, he imagined (the photographs were all black and white), pale pink nipples like a gentle stain in the landscape of her flesh. Her hair was a bit longer than when she had been in New York, her eyes dead to the world. In the second photograph – he could guess the sequence they had been taken in, pruriently imagined what the boyfriend in question had made her do, perform, submit to, after the camera had been set aside – she was now squatting only clad in suspender belt and stockings, her cunt in sharp focus, lips ever so ready to open, her head thrown back so you could barely recognise her features. Photograph number three saw her spread-eagled over a Persian carpet and parquet floor, one arm in the air, both legs straight, holding herself up by one arm, like a gymnast, her face in profile, a most elegant and beautiful vision of nudity with no hint of obscenity at all, her body like a fine-tuned machine, a sculpture. In the fourth, she was standing and the photographer had shot away from crotch level and her body was deformed like in a hall of mirrors by the skewed perspective, the focus on her enlarged midriff. The one thing that struck him as he kept on examining the photos on his laptop screen was how her sex-lips didn’t part and how he wished to see inside her. The final photograph she had sent him (were there more? more explicit or extreme? she had answered that others were just out of focus but his imagination as ever played wildly on) was both the sexiest and the most vulgar. She was on all fours, her arse raised towards the camera in a fuck-me pose, long legs bent, rear a bit bony, the line of her cunt-lips straight as a ruler and continued by her arse-crack and darker hole. Every time he looked at this one, he couldn’t help getting hard. And he knew that she enjoyed knowing that.

  He told her about the delights of New Orleans and invited her to join him there one day.