The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Maxim Jakubowski

by Maxim Jakubowski

  To explore possibilities, he said.

  Initially, she only said maybe.

  But he persisted, courting her with a modicum of elegance and she agreed. It took a couple of months to find a week when both could free themselves from previous commitments (ah, the sheer logistics of lust!) and arrangements were made. Flights to New York were coordinated – her job came in useful – and they both arrived in Newark an hour or so apart. Neither flight was delayed.

  Curiously enough, there are no direct flights between New York and New Orleans and their connection went via Raleigh-Durham.

  As they emerged from the airport luggage area, Susi smelled the heat that now surrounded them like a blanket and turned towards him, kissed him gently on the cheek and said: “I just know I’m going to like it here . . . Thanks ever so much for bringing me.”

  By the time the taxi dropped them off at the small hotel he had booked on Burgundy it was already dark.

  It was summer. Moist, no wind from the Gulf, the air heavy with the powers of the night, the remains of the day lingering in patchy clouds, they were both sweating, their bodies not yet acclimatised.

  They dropped their bags and he switched the air-conditioning a notch higher and suggested a shower.

  He undressed her. Now she was no longer black and white. The nipples were a darker pink, closer to red than he imagined and darkened a shade further when he kissed them. Her pale body was like porcelain.

  Long, thin, exquisitely supple. Since Kathryn, none of the other women, here or elsewhere had been anywhere as tall. He escorted Susi to the shower cubicle and switched the water on. She looked at his cock, growing slowly at the sheer sight of her nudity. He soaped her with infinite delicacy and tenderness and explored her body under guise of washing, refreshing her from the transatlantic journey and its grime and tiredness. He fell to his knees and wiped the suds away from her crotch. Her gash staring red against the mottled pinkness of her pubic mound. She hadn’t shaved there for a week or so; they had agreed she would let him shave her clean. A delight he had long fantasised about. He parted her thin lips, like opening a rare flower and darted his tongue inside to taste her. Susi shuddered.

  The first time was good.

  They were shy, affectionate, slow, tentative, testing pleasure points and limits with great delicacy.

  She was extremely self-conscious of her lack of opulence breast-wise and he lavished particular care on her there, sucking, licking, nibbling, fingering her with casual precision until he caught the precise pulse of her pleasure behind the gentle swell of her darkening nipples.

  They came closely together. Silently.

  The later days filled quickly between wet embraces and ever more feverish fucks as they grew used to each other’s quirks and secret desires. She had always wanted to take a riverboat down the Mississippi and they spent a day doing so, passing the civil war mansions and lawns and observing the rare crocodiles still lingering in the musty bayous. Just like tourists. Which they were. Sexual tourists with, so far, no taste for the local fare. Breezing down Magazine Street in mid-afternoon as the antique shops reopened for business.

  Taking a streetcar to the Garden District. Lingering, with verbose guides, in the atmospheric cemeteries, with their ornate crypts and walls of bones. Visiting the voodoo Museum, trying to repress their unceremonious giggles. He, covertly fingering signed first editions at the Faulkner House.

  Susi never wore a bra – she had no need for one – and neither did she slip knickers on when they would go out walking. Long, flowing, thin skirts revealing the shape of her legs when she faced the sun, only he knowing how unfettered her cunt-lips were beneath the fabric, sometimes even imagining he could smell her inner fragrance as they walked along hand in hand and conjuring up the thoughts of other, lubricious men passing by had they known of her naked vulnerability. It turned him on, this constant availability of hers, this exhibitionistic desire to provoke. Walking along Decatur, passing one of the horse-drawn carriages waiting there for tourists, a dog held in leash by a small black child wagged a tail frantically and brushed against Susi’s leg. He smiled. She asked him why.

  “He could smell your cunt,” he said.

  “Do you think so?” she remarked, her eyes all wide.

  “Yes,” he told her. “You smell of sex. Strongly.”

  Her face went all red, approximating the shade of her short bob, and as he watched the flush spread to her chest and beneath the thin silk blouse.

  “It turned him on,” he said.

  “Oh . . .”

  “And me too, knowing how naked you are under those thin, light clothes,” he added.

  She smiled.

  Later, back in their hotel room, she insisted they keep the curtains open when they made love, knowing any passing maid or room-service staff might see them in the throes of sex as they walked past on the steps outside the window and, as he moved frantically inside her, he saw she kept her eyes open, was actually hoping they would be seen. The idea excited her.

  The same night, a few blocks before Bourbon, she suddenly said:

  “I have to pee.”

  They’d only left the hotel a hundred yards or so ago, so she must have known the need would arise. He offered to go back to the room.

  “No,” she said. “The side street there. That will do.”

  It was dark, no one around, although the risk of passers-by emerging off Toulouse was likely.

  Susi pulled her long skirt upwards and bunched it around her waist, her thin, unending legs bursting into pale view, the plumpness of her cunt in full display under the light from the illuminated wrought iron balcony above them and squatted down. He watched, hypnotised, as the hot stream of urine burst through her labia and splashed onto the New Orleans stone pavement. Her eyes darted towards the main street, almost begging for someone to come by. None did. Her bladder empty, she rose to her feet, the skirt still held above her waist in insolent provocation.

  “It’s a bit wet,” she said to him. “Would you dry me?”

  He got down on his knees, wiped her cunt-lips clean with the back of his hand then impulsively licked her briefly. Her clit was hard, swollen. Susi was in heat.

  “Fuck me here,” she asked him. “I don’t mind if people see us.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “We’ve only just got out of bed. I don’t think I could get hard enough again so quickly.”

  Susi glanced at him with disapproval.

  She dropped the folds of her dress.

  They began talking.

  “Does it turn you on?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What is it? A feeling of control over people, men, that they can see you but not touch?”

  “I don’t know,” Susi remarked. “My body is nothing special, but I love to show myself. Gives me meaning. It’s a bit confusing.”

  “Your body’s great. You shouldn’t underestimate yourself,” he answered. “But you must be careful. On the nude beach outside Vienna, with your girlfriend along, there’s an element of safety, but elsewhere it could be risky, you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “Some people could read other things into your need to exhibit yourself. You could get yourself raped.”

  “I know,” Susi answered, with a slight sigh in her voice. “Sometimes, I even imagine what it would be like. Several men.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Five of them. First they fuck my every hole, then I am made to kneel, still naked, at their feet and they all jerk off and come in my face and hair.”

  “A bit extreme . . .”

  “I know . . .”

  He tried to lighten the mood. Already feeling anxious in premonition as the darkness neared.

  “The ultimate facial treatment. Better than soap!”

  Susi laughed and led the way back towards Bourbon Street.

  He described how Bourbon Street would be when Mardi-Gras came. The noise, the coloured beads, the floats, the beer, the wonderfully hedonistic atmos
phere that gripped the whole French Quarter, the fever that rose insidiously as the alcohol loosened inhibitions and the music from the bars of either side of the street grew in loudness, competing rhythms crisscrossing on every corner, clouding minds and bodies.

  How the revellers on the balconies would bait the walkers below, sprinkling them with drink, offering beads for the flash of a nipple or a quickly-bared backside to massive roars of approval from the wild crowds.

  He could see Susi’s eyes light up. Yes, she would enjoy Carnival here. No longer requiring an excuse to bare her parts to one and all and the more the merrier.

  “And what happens behind doors?” she asked him. He shuddered to think. He’d only ever stayed in New Orleans for the first night of Mardi-Gras. Had heard mad rumours of uncontrollable excess, of sex in the streets. He’d once come across a range of video cassettes in a 7th Avenue porn joint in New York documenting the sexual side of Mardi-Gras here year after year. But, like with wine, he was unaware which were the good years or the bad years and had never sampled any of the cassettes in question.

  His mind and imagination raced forward. To a clandestine video cassette in a white box and Polaroid cover shot of Susi’s porcelain-white body, face covered with come, labelled “SUSANNE ‘LOLITA’ WIEN, MARDI-GRAS 1999”. A vintage performance, no doubt.

  Bourbon Street night deepened as the beer flowed ever more freely, spilling into the gutters from plastic cups being carried up and down the street by the Saturday night-revellers. The music surging from all around grew louder, the lights more aggressive and the crowds swayed uncertainly. Young kids tapped away for a few cents or break-danced outside the bars, the neon signs of the strip clubs entered battle, pitting male strippers against female ones, topless joints against bottomless ones. A row of mechanical legs danced a can can from the top of a bar window, advertising further displays of flesh inside.

  Susi was curious.

  “I’ve never been to a striptease place before. Can we?”

  “Why not?” he acquiesced.

  They entered the dark bar. A woman down to a shining lamé bikini was dancing around a metal pole at its centre. A few men sat by the stage desultorily sipping from half-empty glasses. They ordered their drinks from a sultry waitress and watched the stripper shed her bra with a brief flourish. The performance was uninspiring and the most exciting thing about the dancer for him was her gold navel ring which gleamed in the fluctuating light. His mind went walkabout as he tried to recognise the rock and roll tune she was, badly, dancing to.

  Several shimmies and swirls later, and a liberal shake of silicon-enhanced mammaries exposed, the song (some country and western standard given an electric and gloom Americana twist) came to an end and the stripper quickly bowed, picking up a few stray dollar notes thrown onto the stage by the isolated punters on her way off.

  “Is that all?” Susi turned to him, asking.

  “I think so,” he said.

  “But it’s not even bottomless. She didn’t even show her cunt!”

  “Maybe because it’s a bar. I don’t know,” he said, “there must be some local bye-laws or something. Don’t know much about the rules in American strip clubs,” he continued, surprised by Susi’s interest.

  Another stripper, black, stocky, took to the stage and a soul number burst out of the speakers. The previous performer was on the other side of the dance area, soliciting tips from some of the men. One whispered in her ear as she accosted him. She nodded. The man rose and he followed the woman, who now wore a dressing gown, to a darker corner at the far end of the bar. Susi nudged him and they both peered in that direction.

  They could just about see the stripper throw back her gown and squat over the lap of the man who had now seated himself.

  “A private dance,” he said to Susi.

  “Wow! Cool!” she said, one of the more irritating mannerisms he had picked up on when they chatted online back in Europe.

  There wasn’t much to see. The stripper moved in silence. The man appeared to keep his hands to himself but the darkness engulfed the couple.

  “I’m turned on,” Susi said in his ears.

  “Really?” he said, finding the atmosphere in the bar quite unerotic, the black stripper now strutting her square rump a few feet away from his face.

  “Yes,” Susi added. “I don’t think I’d make a good stripper. No tits, as you well know. But I sure could lap or table dance. I’d like to do that for you . . .”

  He grinned.

  “Sure. Later, in our hotel room, I’ll look forward to your demonstration.”

  “No. Here,” Susi said, a deep tone of excitement in her voice.

  “Here?” he queried.

  “Yes.” He could see that her right hand was buried in he folds of her dress, that she was fingering herself through the material. “Can you arrange it? Please. See the guy at the bar, he appears to be in charge. Get him to agree. Please, pretty please?”

  He shrugged.

  It cost him fifty bucks and some haggling.

  He walked back toward the stage where Susi was downing the rest of her Jack Daniels.

  He nodded.

  “It’s yes,” he said.

  She rose, a mischievous glint in her eye. She took him by the hand and led him to a chair, nowhere near the darkness that offered shelter further down the bar but in full view of all. She pointed a finger, indicating he should sit down, which he did. Sensing what was to happen now, the bar attendant stationed himself at the door to Bourbon Street to prevent further spectators and a possible loss of his licence. Susi camped herself facing the chair he now sat on and pulled her dress above her head. You could hear a pin drop as the barman and the few spectators dotted around the stage witnessed her naked form emerge from the cocoon of the fabric, whiter than white, shaven mound plump, and so bare, like a magnet for their disbelieving eyes. A couple of the attendant strippers peered out from the dressing room on the side of the bar counter.

  The music began and he had no clue what it even was, his mind in such turmoil.

  Susi began writhing a few inches away from him, knowing all too well how much she was the centre of attraction.

  She danced, wriggled, swerved, bent, squatted, obscenely, indecently, her hands moving across her bare flesh in snake-like manner, her fingers grazing her by-now erect nipples, descending across the flatness of her pale stomach and even, although he hoped he was, because of his close proximity to her dance, the only one to notice, lingering in the region of her cunt and actually holding her lips open for a second or so.

  He felt hot. Even though he, by now, knew every square inch of her skin, this was a new Susi, a creature he had only guessed at.

  It was quickly over.

  He held his breath.

  A few people clapped in the background.

  Susi’s face was impassive but flushed.

  She picked up her discarded dress and slipped into it.

  “That was good,” she said. “Can we go, now?”

  On their way to the door and the muted sounds of Bourbon Street, the barman handed Susi a card.

  “You’re quite a gal,” he said, as she brushed past him. “My name is Louis. If you’re seeking more serious fun, just call me.”

  Susi slipped the card into her side pocket without even acknowledging him and emerged into the twilight.

  “I’m hungry,” she said.

  One of the nearby hotels had an oyster bar. They shared a plateful each of oysters and shrimps. She smothered each with a generous helping of tomato-flavoured horseradish as she gulped them down.

  “One of your fantasies realised?” he asked her.

  “You might say that,” Susi answered. “But there are others.”

  “I have no doubt.” He smirked, still uncertain of the path they had embarked upon.

  “Don’t look so glum.” She smiled. “You did say we would come to New Orleans and explore possibilities, didn’t you?”

  “I suppose I did.”

  The
rawness of their sex that night was compelling and savage. She sucked him with hungry determination and wouldn’t allow him to withdraw from her mouth when he felt his excitement rise. Usually, he would hold back and penetrate her, which prolonged the pleasure. He came in her mouth. She let him go and he watched her tasting his come before she finally swallowed it.

  “You taste sweet and sour,” Susi said. “Must be all those oysters you’ve been eating.”

  The following day, she insisted they visit a place called The Orgy Room. On Bourbon, of course. As pornographic films were projected on the walls, a group of people pressed together like sardines in a can were force-fed into an exiguous room and allowed to jostle and play on pneumatic fun-fair carpets, or were they water beds? Most were drunk. The constant movement was, he felt, somewhat unpleasant, and far from arousing. Soon, he was separated from Susi in the swaying crowd but could still see her at the other end of the room. She deliberately exaggerated her movements and rubbed herself against others, often pulling her short black leather mini skirt up her thighs so her genitals were fully visible to those closer to her. He observed as various men took notice and soon congregated around her. He could see her face flush amongst the laughs, and the human wave of bodies soon directed her against the back wall where she stood motionless, her skirt now bunched at her midriff and a couple of men frantically fingering her as she pretended to ignore them. He watched from afar, not quite knowing what he now felt. Eventually, the siren rang and the crowds thinned and made for the exit. As Susi reached him, trailed by the puzzled men she had snared in her net, she took his hand in hers. The men observed this and interrupted their progress towards her. Sweat poured down her forehead, her thin red hair plastered down against her scalp. They walked out.

  He looked up at the sky. There was a storm brewing.

  “I came,” she remarked. “Jesus . . .”

  “Susi . . .”

  “Take me back to the hotel,” she ordered. “Tonight, I want you to fuck my arse.”

  The next morning, she expressed a desire for breakfast in bed. They had woken up too late for the hotel room service. He volunteered to fetch food from a nearby 24-hour deli. The night rain had swept away the heat momentarily and the cool air came as a welcome relief as he walked the few hundred metres to the shop and back.