The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 2

by Maxim Jakubowski

  He shrugged.

  “Right, then.”

  She kicked off her shoes, undressed quickly, folded her clothes over the back of an antique chair, then slipped into bed, not once looking at him.

  “It’s a gun,” said Martin, leaning over her, hoping she would tease his pleasure.

  She looked up and frowned. “You know I don’t go in for that sort of thing. Besides, the children will be back from school at three-thirty. It isn’t as if we had all day, darling.” She lowered the covers, her body a target. “You do understand, don’t you? Say yes.”

  Unzipping himself, he took her right hand and guided it between his legs.

  “You devil,” she said, fondling him.

  Martin undid his belt, uncoupled his pants, let them drop to the floor. Annette pulled his briefs down.

  “Good Lord,” she said, reluctantly drawing him to her mouth. “Slowly,” he said, watching her lips encircle him. He traced delicate patterns around her ears while rocking her head back and forth.

  “My turn,” she said. “You’re on top. Come along, darling. Well, come on.”

  Annette threw herself back, parted her legs and waited. Martin sheathed himself.

  Embracing her, he gently pulled himself inside, pinned Annette down, pushed softly, then hard, then plunged himself full forwards into her body.

  “You . . . you demon,” she stammered. “Wherever did you learn that?”

  “Shh . . .” he said, prompting her legs around him. She tried moving her hips in time with his. Shifting sideways, he guided her, suckled her breasts, kissed her, gripped her buttocks, felt the tingling sensation begin.

  “Slowly . . .” he whispered, and cleared his mind.

  Annette was driving; traffic lights blinked red-green-red. She eased the huge vehicle into the drive way, carried on about her garden, the foliage; he glimpsed the village beyond the wood line, heard bodies run past, smelt the foul enemy scent, shook as machine guns fired, flinched as the wounded screamed. Am I all right? Doc? Am I all right? How bad is it? How bad? Beneath him, her body arched and trembled; her lips formed an involuntary exit for the moaning sound. He watched her jaw clamp shut, stunting the pleasure. He groaned. They slept.

  Annette kissed him awake, short, lacklustre pecks on one side of his face. It had happened again. The frustrated lovemaking; the war inescapable.

  “Well, aren’t you the quiet American?” she snickered.

  He remained motionless.

  “Are you all right, sweetheart?”

  She fluffed her pillow as though spanking a child.

  “I was thinking of something. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Oh, bloody hell, why not?”

  Curling up next to him, she twirled the hairs on the back of his neck. He nearly turned to kiss her.

  “It’s always good to travel in pairs,” he said. “Backpacking. Ever done that?” He nibbled her hand.

  “All that muck and filth? Good heavens, no.”

  He continued speaking.

  “We found a cheap place with an air conditioner, flush toilets, mosquito nets . . .”

  “Mosquitoes? Where on earth were you?”

  “I’m getting undressed, Alex is stepping out of the shower, towel wrapped around him, in walks this girl. ‘Boom boom? You want boom boom?’ ”

  Annette lifted her head from the pillow, slapping the bed as she spoke.

  “What the bloody hell is ‘boom boom’?”

  “Sex.”

  “Really? What kind of people would call the most intimate expression between two people boom boom? Dear God, that’s absolutely horrid.”

  Lying back, she caressed him.

  “The Americans,” he said.

  “And how would you know?”

  She stretched with anxious pleasure.

  “We spoke that way during the war,” he murmured, wondering why he had told her.

  She paused, eyebrows knotted in puzzled concentration.

  “Not in that awful mess . . .”

  He trailed his finger tips up and down her arm.

  “She was pretty. Better-looking than the woman in Phnom Penh.”

  “Goodness, you do get around, darling. Isn’t that the capital of . . .”

  “Cambodia,” he said, recollecting the event.

  They had choppered into an enemy base camp. No one expected to live.

  “In June we were overrun,” he heard himself whisper.

  She drew his hand to her breast, at the same time turning opposite, her backside pressing against his manhood, making him big.

  “Well, don’t stop now, darling. This is absolutely delightful!”

  The blood rushed into his face.

  “She wanted ten dollars,” he said. “A lot of money for what I wanted.”

  “What on earth?” she shrilled with excitement.

  “They have a problem with AIDS,” he said, and felt her stomach tighten. “Alex got dressed and went out for a walk. We bargained in sign language.”

  “He flashed the fingers of his right hand directly over her head.

  “You beast, you absolute Minotaur!” Annette shrieked. “Go on. Oh, do go on,” she squealed.

  The girl had kicked off her clogs and perched on the spring coil bed, squatting Viet Cong style. He pantomimed; she removed her blouse.

  “She didn’t understand,” he said, tracing a phantom arc of confused and awkward movements in the space between them. “Pulled and pushed my cock every which way.”

  Perplexed, the girl had closed her eyes, making her more beautiful.

  “It was awful.”

  Annette shook with laughter.

  “This is too much, darling. You are absolutely precious! A hand job, was it?”

  She wailed with delight.

  “I had to show her,” he said.

  His voice was not pleasant.

  Annette curled the O shape of her thumb and forefinger around his swollen cock.

  “Like that?”

  ‘Yes. Like that”

  He kissed her harshly on the mouth.

  “This is brilliant . . . brilliant! Oh, go on! Go on!”

  He pushed her tight clenched fist away.

  “I stopped her,” he said. “Just held her in my arms. Even travellers get lonely. Know what I mean?”

  “Are you trying to tell me something, darling? Don’t you think I’m sexy? Well? Don’t you?”

  She was impossible.

  “Maybe. Maybe not”

  Annette wagged a school marm’s finger in Martin’s face. He swatted it back.

  “What then, darling?” she tittered.

  “What then?” he mimicked. “I kissed her breasts, her mouth, pinched and rolled her nipples between my fingers until they were hard. You should have seen the way her eyes lit up.” He had held her close, smoothed and kissed her hair. She had spoken to him while dreaming.

  “Well, don’t stop!” Annette commanded. “What happened next? Oh, do tell! Do tell!” Hours later, in the musty bathroom they had showered and towelled each other dry. Dressed, they went out for food.

  “You-good-me,” she had said.

  That night he bought clothes for her children.

  “So the little bitch couldn’t wank you,” Annette crowed.

  He shrugged indifferently.

  “Oh, darling, this is priceless. Better than Waugh . . . than Lawrence. Have you read them? Surely you’ve read Frank Harris?”

  She paused.

  “Darling, did you ever see her again?”

  “No,” he said, turning away.

  “Well, after all . . . she was just a tart,” Annette stammered, “A slut, really. It was business, for God’s sake.”

  For several minutes they lay without moving. Martin watched the second hand of the bedside clock swerve past the illuminated roman numerals. The memory always stopped at the clouds of cordite smoke spewed forth by their weapons. There were ten of them. They lay where they fell, bodies perforated, the death agony having last
ed all night. Sometimes the scream sounds made him weep. A machine gun burst decapitated one survivor. The Lieutenant shot the second at close range. He saw it now. The platoon scavenging the dead for souvenirs. Now the woman moved, her uniform brain spattered. She groaned, then raised a feeble arm, clawing at his canteen. The others bickered how best to kill her. He knelt down and tipped the plastic jug to her dreadful lips, watched as she suckled herself back to life. He shielded his eyes so the others would not see.

  Still blinking, Martin removed the wet hands from his face. Annette stared at him; wordless sounds spilled from her mouth. Except for his lowing sobs, which rattled and shook both their bodies, for a very long time they did not move.

  69 Love Songs

  Maxim Jakubowski

  1 It begins like a movie. With a white screen and a wash of music, massed strings or more likely synthesizer chords, rising to a majestic crescendo. Images coalesce and a melancholy melody emerges from the unshaped wall of sound . . . Porcelain by Moby maybe, or the soundtrack for an imaginary western whose ending will turn out to be particularly bittersweet. A tune that aims straight for the heart but hints at sadness to come. Sadness, yes; because tragedy is too strong a word. The credits roll and then shapes emerge out of blurry chaos throughout the rectangular geometry of the once silver screen. Panavision format. A woman’s voice is heard, plaintive, across the fading sounds of the music. Is she singing? Has she a quaint, somewhat exotic foreign accent?

  2 Like all men with talent, he had many flaws. But his worst trait was how he romanticized over women time and again, never learning from experience. How the emotions they created inside his head and body skewered his perception of them and coloured all his relationships. He was aware of the fact, but knowing the existence of this Achilles’ heel didn’t help him avoid the same old mistakes over and over again. Was it the way he was brought up; the fact his father never had the guts to tell him all about the birds and the bees? How he mentally stored and interpreted the distorted facts about the way men and women coexist and war from tell-tale stories circulating amongst school kids? How he was savagely wounded by the unknowing betrayal of the first girl he felt longings for?

  3 Her presence in a world of men had nagged her from early teenage years. They fascinated and attracted her, but at the same time there was something fearful about these other creatures. They were different. She had always been accepted as a fun person by the groups she wove in and out of, at school, at play, mingling with her elder brother’s friends. Always rough and ready for a game, a tumble, she was treated as an equal. Her breasts came late and were never quite as opulent as many of her girlfriends. She would eventually grow into a B cup, barely. But from the moment those bumps made their bow inside her blue school shirt, the young men, the older men she would see in the street or in shops seemed to look at her in a new way. Thus did she discover lust.

  4 Catherine Guinard was not the prettiest young girl in the class during his first year in a mixed school. Nowhere near; Rhoona DeMole, Beatrice, Elizabeth and Jacqueline ruled that roost. But something about her touched him inside, where it mattered. Maybe that was his main flaw: he thought with his emotions, not with his cock. She was small, had thin, mousey light brown hair and slightly crooked teeth. But you know how it is, it’s not just the way they look that does it; it’s the way they laugh or their eyes sparkle at a given moment. He worshipped her from afar. Helped her with her class work. Then, one night, at a friend’s party, Pierre what’s-his-name in a game of Truth or Dare revealed he had already fucked her and, compounding the injustice, said she wasn’t even that good in bed. His heart had dropped a thousand vertical paces to the ground at the unexpected news.

  5 Her parents were anything but intellectuals; her father installed shower units and her mother worked in a local government office, but they both loved opera. So she was called Mimi, in homage to La Bohème. It puzzled her for a long time. Nobody in Estonia seemed to be called Mimi apart from her. That’s because you’re special, her mum and dad would say to her. Which became, as she reasoned it out, a reason for great satisfaction: her brother was just plain Pavel. When unhappy days ended and she lay in bed listening to the silence invade the room and darkness take over, she would invariably remind herself that she was special. I am special. Then fall asleep with a smile on her face. That expression later became almost permanent, and her lips always appeared to be smiling, whether she was happy or not. That was one the thing that attracted men to her like fireflies.

  6 Catherine Guinard was the first to carve a deep notch across his damaged heart strings. Others would follow. Over 39 years, it became a gentle litany of hurt. Many of them were blonde. So he did learn to approach blonde women with the utmost caution. Maybe he wasn’t good enough for blondes, he reasoned. Or they were too good for him. And sometimes, juggling memories, tried to balance his past sexual statistics by hair colour. The results never made sense.

  7 Men liked Mimi. But they wanted more than she was willing to give them, she soon realised. As much as she enjoyed their company, dancing across the smokey floors of youth clubs and downing endless glasses of vodka, she knew that the roving hands caressing her body, clumsily fingering her, were just an overture to fucking her. And she also knew she wasn’t ready to be fucked. As much as sex attracted her, and mad thoughts of its horrors and delights flew across her dreams and nights, something inside also told her none of the callow boys she went out with was right for her yet. Sex must mean something.

  8 He also had dreams. Dark-eyed, always elegantly dressed, Pierre was fucking Catherine. She lay passively on her back, legs held wide apart by the young man’s weight while he thrust in and out of her. The scene was always silent. It brought tears to his eyes, but it also made his cock hard as he strained to move closer and observe the movement of the penis breaching her entrance. But he could never see enough. He would have to wait until his first trip to Scandinavia where hardcore films were legal to witness the copulation of others at first hand and on a large screen.

  9 He was not a violent person, but he reasoned Pierre should die. But at 17, you have neither the imagination nor the means. His betrayer being run over by a bus seemed to be the best option. But it didn’t happen. Next time, he decided, maybe he should take matters into his own hands, and began noting methods of murder and execution in his notebook, gleaning necessary information from the crime paperbacks he was reading: James Hadley Chase, Brett Halliday, Peter Cheyney, Claude Rank, Jean Bruce. Although the latter seemed to be more interested in the minutiae of sexual torture. Which also provided him with regular erections.

  10 Catherine Guinard was quickly forgotten after the school year ended and she returned to France. He followed her to Paris a year later, but by then the world was full of blondes.

  11 At first, Mimi estimated the men would be satisfied if she consented to let herself be kissed. Real kisses, of course, with tongues. It pleased them briefly, but failed to satisfy her. They tasted of stale alcohol and tobacco and she found the experience of kissing her dance partners and boyfriends definitely unpleasant. And still their hands, encouraged by their locked lips, would venture further and they would suggest full sex; almost demand it. She confided in friends and the consensus was, if she wished to retain her popularity within her circle of friends, that she should give in or at least accept to provide the men and boys with blow jobs.

  12 Elizabeth was the first blonde to break his heart. Well, you have to begin somewhere. She was much more sexually experienced than him, and years later, he would marvel how in hell he had managed to hold on to her for all of six months. Her pubic hair was short and curling, thus initiating another of his obsessions, and a shade or two darker than her mid-shoulder-length straight blonde hair, which puzzled him mightily, ignorant as he was then of hydrogen peroxide. They fucked like rabbits. She found him fun but he made the capital mistake of falling in love with her. One day while she was sleeping, he read pages from her diary and discovered to his disappointment that he didn’
t even rate very high in her sexual pantheon.

  13 Mimi had never before given too much consideration to men’s cocks. She knew they had them; had seen enough of her brother’s dangling genitalia, even her father’s. At first, the idea of taking one inside her mouth felt a bit ridiculous, but she was also curious to know what it would feel like to experience one swelling up and growing under her lips, tongue or ministrations. Would a penis have a specific taste? A particular texture? The thought intrigued her.

  14 When Elizabeth finally tired of him, she broke the news gently. After all, she had a good heart. Not ready for commitment and all that. Naturally, he took it badly and, melodramatically, a couple of weeks later slashed his wrists, cunningly arranging for her to discover him just in time. Which didn’t bring her back to him. She even left the country to avoid seeing him again. Another lesson learned.

  15 So, while some of her girlfriends were losing their virginity time and time again in the back of cars or in the badly lit backyards of local jazz clubs or in the fields that bordered the fun fair near the chemical plant, Mimi became the blow job queen of their home town. After all, she reflected, it’s only a piece of flesh, harmless in this form, and even though some men seemed overly keen on pushing their cocks too far and made her gag, she knew she was always in control. And however many cocks she sucked, she was still a virgin, waiting for the right man to come along. The one who would at last matter. Wasn’t too keen on swallowing their come, though . . .

  16 Even though his attempt had been far from earnest, he also developed an unhealthy fixation on suicide and death. And years before Woody Allen came on the scene, already equated love and death in strange juxtaposition. Even began making listings of how famous people, actors, writers had committed suicide or been killed. Columns for poison, knives, guns (broken down into manufacturer and calibre of course), car and other accidents, etc. But then he was a far from cheerful young man. The gloom surrounding him would not dissipate much until he turned 30 and had made love to further blondes in various countries.