The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 2

by Maxim Jakubowski

  He took a deep breath.

  Aina lay curled, close to his head, and she stroked his face with one languid hand. She whispered to him, and he smiled, not understanding the words but knowing their meaning.

  He came time after time after time, and hours later when he lay on the sheets, exhausted, Aina uncurled, and drew herself across him, her mouth fastening on him, and he had no choice but to satisfy her.

  He awoke the following night, not convinced that he’d really seen the women. Surely it had been a dream. Or had it? He was exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept in days, and he remembered vaguely a woman with copper hair kissing him, while twins took turns mounting him. There was something about Aina and the blonde . . . but what? . . . He wondered why he couldn’t remember. If it had actually happened, that is.

  Wishful thinking, he told himself while he smiled. He rose after a moment and went to the washstand across the room to splash water on his face. Perhaps that would make him feel better. He squinted into the mirror, then stumbled back in shock. The face there wasn’t his. It couldn’t be. It was the face of a man many years older.

  How long had he been here? he asked himself. Days, perhaps a week or two at most.

  No more . . . no more than that, surely.

  But there lingered the doubt that it might have been more. No, it couldn’t. He could remember each night, could account for his time . . .

  But can you? asked the silent voice within, and he knew he couldn’t. The days . . . the weeks . . . the months? . . . had become a blur to him.

  So much time . . . lost forever now.

  He was well now; he must leave and go home. As much as he would have liked to stay with Aina and her sisters – for surely that was who those women were – he had to return home. His parents would be worried. His uncle would be worried. And he had much to tell his uncle.

  “Stay with us,” Aina said, and he realized he hadn’t heard her approach. But then he rarely did. She walked . . . glided . . . so quietly, so carefully, as if she were a cat creeping up on her prey.

  Her arms slipped around his waist, and as he stood there, he felt her tug at his trousers.

  “No,” he started to protest, but she drew his hand away, and he could say no more, as she pushed his pants down and led him back to the bed.

  Aina straddled him, and, heavy-lidded, watched him. He pulled her down by the chains of pearls. The strands broke, and hundreds of pearls went flying, some pelting his chest. She smiled and pushed herself down onto him, and Sasha felt her coldness sucking at him, drawing his warmth, his life, his youth, and willingly he gave himself up to her.

  He opened his eyes to see the face of the small woman, and she too was smiling at him. He cupped one heavy breast in his hand, and she bent down as if to kiss his shoulder, but instead bit him hard, drawing blood.

  He cried out and squeezed her breast in response, and she bit him again. He squeezed harder, pinching her nipple, and her smile widened.

  She reached down and raked her nails across his penis. He gasped from the pain . . . and the pleasure it brought, and she kissed him hard then, bruising his lips.

  When he came, it was like a thousand barbs tearing into his body.

  And he liked it.

  When next he saw himself in the mirror, he was even older.

  Or looked older, he thought. He couldn’t have aged all that much, he rationalized. It was from doing too much at night, too little otherwise, he told himself. He must awaken during the day and walk around the grounds a little. He needed fresh air, he needed . . .

  . . . needed . . . the women.

  They came to him, melting out of the shadows, and he felt their hands fondling him, stroking, arousing him, awakening his desires, delving into every crevice of his body until he thought he would go mad with delight, and he sobbed, and leaned with his arms propped against the washstand as they took him there, and sweat and come and blood flowed freely.

  He didn’t know when the pleasure and the pain had become entwined, and it frightened him. He couldn’t have one without the other now, and each time he fucked, it hurt beyond belief. And yet he wanted more. He had to have more.

  And the women knew it.

  “I must go home,” he whispered to Aina, who lay next to him. She was caressing his chest, twining the greying hair there around her fingertips.

  “You are home,” she said.

  “My parents . . .”

  “Gone.”

  “Gone?” He couldn’t figure out what she meant. “Gone?” he repeated dully.

  “They are dead, Sasha.”

  “My uncle . . .” he began.

  “Vanya is also dead.”

  “Dead?” He blinked. “But how? . . .”

  “It has been a long time, Sasha. A long time. They are but ashes now.” She rolled over onto him, and slid down, pushing his penis between her breasts. She rode her breasts up and down his penis, the friction making him erect. As the tip of his penis emerged from the cushion of her breast, she gave his glans a quick swipe of her tongue. The pain tore through him like red-hot pincers.

  “Dead?” he wondered aloud, then thought no more of family or home, as he came violently, and she smiled down into his agonized face.

  “You are a vampire,” he said. He was familiar with such a creature, for there were tales of vampires in his country.

  She shrugged. “A lamia.”

  He had heard of that, too. There might be a difference, but he couldn’t see it. Not now.

  She laughed, a lilting musical sound, and the fear and desire rose in him.

  His lips raw, bleeding, he kissed her, and tried feebly to push her back onto the bed so that he could mount her. But she was far stronger, and she flipped him onto his back, and automatically he opened his legs, and she grabbed him and jerked hard, and he begged her not to stop.

  She didn’t.

  He came hour after hour after hour, and finally slept like the dead.

  As she crouched above him, running her mouth across his chest and down to his groin to suck at him once more, he realized there were vampires who took more than blood from their victims. Succubi or lamia. Those who sucked out the very soul or essence – or youth – of a man.

  “And what does “Aina” mean?” he murmured.

  “Always, until the end.”

  And she smiled as he screamed, but whether in pain or in pleasure, he could no longer tell.

  Glyph

  Simon Sheppard

  Antigua, Guatemala is a town entrapped, haunted by its own past, in the shadow of volcanoes, left desolate by earthquake, catastrophe, surviving. I was staying at the best of the town’s cheap hotels. The man in the next room was exceptionally beautiful. From the moment I first saw Ben, I longed to ask him two questions. First: how did it feel to be so handsome, to live behind a face that drew all eyes? And: what would it take for him to condescend to having sex with a man like me?

  Even if these were questions that could have been spoken easily to a stranger, something about Ben’s aquiline features, a certain impassiveness, discouraged asking the questions of, in particular, him.

  For two days, I watched him greedily as he sat in the hotel garden, writing postcards and drinking bottled water. When he went back to his room, I would retreat to the bathroom of my own. Our baths shared a common vent which readily transmitted sound. I’d sit on the toilet in the dark as the music of his pissing filled my ears. I stroked myself into a frenzy, imagining the sight of hot liquid coursing from the inner recesses of his body, jetting from the tip of a perfect cock. Better still, I could hear him shower, hear the subtle changes as water flowed over his muscled torso, between impressive thighs, down the wiry, tanned legs his shorts had revealed. I imagined the water swirling around his feet, myself face down on the floor of his shower, lapping up the liquid that had cleansed his flawless body. I was lost in envy and desire.

  The second night, Ben spoke to me, asked about a new restaurant in town, the only place in all Guatemala to
get good Thai food. I cautiously suggested we go there for dinner. He accepted.

  Conversation, over spicy yum-na and local beer, was polite, safe. I could feel myself straining to maintain the right balance of formality and friendliness. Watching that face, hearing him speak to me, was a privilege and a gift. The slightest sign of the urgency of my desire might scare him off. All the while, I wanted to yell: You are one of the most beautiful men I’ve ever seen. I wanted to beg him to use me as he saw fit.

  On the way back to the hotel, through cobblestoned streets shadowed by the ruins of antique cathedrals, he stopped to buy some beer and invited me to his room for a drink. I followed him up the stairs, watching his muscles shifting beneath the thin shield of his clothes.

  His open suitcase was on the room’s only chair. We both sat on the unmade bed. I could look past him, into the bathroom where he’d been naked. I caught my breath.

  For several long minutes we sat wordlessly, drinking the slightly sour beer. He complained about the lingering heat of the day. Rising from the bed, he kicked off his sandals and, standing just feet away, unbuckled his belt and let his khaki shorts fall to his feet. Opening another beer, he sat crosslegged on the bed. His white boxer shorts gaped open at the fly. I had no choice; I stared at the thatch of black pubic hair, at a patch of smooth white flesh. He shifted slightly. The base of his cock came into view.

  Ben reached over, put his hand under my chin, firmly raising my head until my gaze met his. His beautiful face gave nothing away. I stared into his eyes. He took my hand in his, pulled it over to him, to his crotch, to the gap in his boxers. To where he was warm and hard.

  As he unbuttoned my shirt, I felt vaguely ashamed of my body. I touched his cheek, ran my fingers over his perfect profile, his nose, his mouth. Leaning over, he opened my lips with his tongue. He pulled off my shorts, releasing my swollen dick. I was naked, a poor gift for his perfection.

  He took off his boxers. His dick was much bigger than mine and oddly shaped, massively thick at the base, tapering to a smallish head where precome glistened in his piss-slit.

  He reached over to his suitcase, pulling out a rubber and a small tube of lubricant. He unrolled the latex over his stiff cock and covered it in lube. He put both his hands on my shoulders and shoved me back on the bed. I wrapped my legs around him and he lowered himself into me. I gasped as he slid in, opening me with the thickening shaft of his cock.

  As he fucked me, his face remained expressionless. And he was still wearing his T-shirt. Even as he thrust into me, he remained somehow armoured, half-hidden from view. But I was wide open. I needed to bridge that gap.

  I reached to his waist, running my palms up under his T-shirt, over his flat, hairless belly, the flawless torso I’d imagined as I’d masturbated. His nipples were small and hard. And his chest . . . What was that? The flesh of his chest was textured, a network of ridges running across what should have been perfect skin. My fingertips found their way along a welter of intersecting scars.

  In that moment, Ben’s face had altered radically. Gone was the frozen mask. In its place was grief and something like anger. He pounded harder and harder until it hurt, until I had to grit my teeth. Just when I thought I could take no more, when I was about to beg him to stop, he came with a shudder and a shout.

  He pulled out and went to the bathroom to peel off the rubber and wash up. Left alone on the bed, I pulled at my dripping cock until I shot hot flows of come over my sweaty chest.

  Ben had returned, was standing over the bed, his face had softened. He took off his T-shirt. His beautiful chest was scarred, lighter lines against a deep tan. Someone had carved into his flesh, inscribed three Mayan glyphs, geometric symbols the ancient Indians had used as their writing. I must have gasped. Ben smiled, wrapping his arms around me.

  “I have,” Ben said, “a story to tell you . . .

  “Javier and I had been together six years. I thought he looked like a Mayan prince. Smooth brown skin, that incredible profile. His family came from the highlands of Guatemala, almost pure-blooded Indian, but Javier had never been further south than Tijuana. We loved each other a lot.

  “Javier was HIV-positive when we met. I remained uninfected. From the first, we’d made plans to visit Central America, see the village his parents came from, tour the ruins at Tikal. But we were both always busy with school, and then work, and when we did find time for vacations, we’d end up on Maui or Key West.

  “Then one summer, symptoms started to appear. Nothing much at first – Javier got tired more easily, got rashes on his beautiful skin. But his bloodwork wasn’t promising. We realized that if we were going to visit Guatemala together, time was growing short.

  “We landed in Guatemala City, came here to Antigua, went on to Lake Atitlan. Visited Sololá, the Indian village his family was from. Got my wallet lifted on market day.

  “By then, Javier wasn’t feeling all that well, occasional fevers, was losing a little weight. Still, we were able to finish our trip. We’d saved the best for last. Took a plane from Guat City to Flores, made our way to Tikal.

  “Have you been to Tikal yet? You’ll love it. It’s the most incredible Mayan ruin of them all, a huge lost city in the middle of deep, lush jungle. In the centre of it all is the Great Plaza, a huge open space surrounded by ruined temples. Two huge pyramids, Temple I and Temple II, stand at the plaza’s east and west ends. With special permission, you can stay in the Plaza after dark, until eight o’clock. Well, Javier and I had something else in mind, so as the sun went down and the full moon rose over Temple I, we climbed the hill to the Central Acropolis and hid in the shadows. The stones of Tikal turned a misty white in the moonlight.

  “Finally, at eight, the last loudmouth tourists headed back to their hotels and the guards’ flashlight beams vanished in the distance.

  “We made our way down across the Great Plaza, all alone beneath the hulking ghost-white pyramids, their staircases leading to the heavens. You know, I used to have an idealized picture of the Maya; they were this peace-loving civilization destroyed by bloodthirsty Spaniards. But it turns out that on festival days the Mayan high priests would stand atop the pyramids and sacrifice enemy warriors to the gods, cutting out their hearts with obsidian blades and letting their still-warm, bloody corpses tumble down the stairs.

  “On the north side of the Plaza there’s a long row of sacrificial altars. At one of them, a large carved column shows Yax Kin, one of the greatest rulers of Tikal, standing on the body of a bound prisoner. At its base, a round altar stone is carved with the image of another prisoner lying on his back, arms and legs tied with ropes, awaiting sacrifice.

  “There, in front of Yax Kin’s altar, we stripped off our clothes. Javier put on a loincloth he’d made. I lowered myself onto the altar stone. I can still remember the coolness of the carved stone pressing against my naked back. Javier took some ropes from his backpack and tied me down. Rope around my ankles, my wrists, rope tight against my thighs. Lying there, head thrown all the way back, I could see the upside-down shape of Temple II. Everything was inverted. The great sweep of the staircase, which had been aimed at the heavens, now seemed to lead downwards toward some darkness that had become light. The night was anything but silent; the scream of the jungle filled my ears. As Javier tightened the ropes, my dick grew hard. He put his wet, hot mouth on it, took me down his throat. I arched my back, pressed myself against the comforting restrictions of the ropes.

  “He let my throbbing dick slide from his mouth. I could hear him rummaging through the backpack. I couldn’t see him, but I knew what was coming.

  “Javier put his face to mine, whispered that he loved me, and cut into my flesh. I lay there, feeling the sting of the sharp blade, as my lover traced out three glyphs: the Mayan symbols for Tikal, for the god Smoking Mirror, ruler of fate, and for the phrase Na-wa-ah, which means the gaining of merit through the sacrificial shedding of blood. As the moments passed, the pain became something other than itself, as though time had ceased
to exist, as though there were no distance at all between the days of the Maya and that full-moon night amidst the ruins. I was in my body and yet not in my body; I don’t know if that makes any sense to you. I’m not sure I understand it even now.

  “When he finished carving the glyphs, Javier took my dick in his mouth again, quickly bringing me to the brink of orgasm. Then, just as the ancient Mayans had done in their bloodletting ceremonies, my lover took a sharp needle and pierced the underside of my swollen dick. The love I felt for him at that endless moment was greater than anything I’ve felt before or since.

  “Finally, as we’d agreed beforehand, Javier removed his loincloth and straddled my body, stroking his uncut dick until he came all over my bleeding chest. He lay upon me, smearing together my still-warm blood and his stinging hot come, and sobbed as he held me in his arms. Dawn lit the sky above the temples of Tikal.

  “In a way, it all seems like a dream I had a long, long time ago. Javier’s gone now, but he left me with these warrior marks in commemoration of that night. Here, just over my heart, I carry the glyph for Na, which means ‘to feel, to know, to remember.’ And I do.”

  His story finished, Ben fell silent. He stared at the whitewashed wall of the hotel room, toward some far-off invisible volcano. I stroked his beautiful face, running my hands down his throat to the marks on his chest. In each other’s arms we drifted off to sleep, my hands still resting over his heart.

  We became sometimes-lovers after that night in Antigua. Back in the States, we tried living with each other for a while. But Ben wasn’t the easiest man to know. There was often something remote and frozen about him, a place where my caring couldn’t reach.