The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 2

by Maxim Jakubowski

  I don’t know what it is about type on a computer screen that one can find attractive, but even before I saw her that first afternoon I was concocting scenarios. She slipped into the coffee shop with no eyes and no expression, and all through our conversation she never allowed her features to grow more animated than a vague upturn of her mouth. We talked about art, we talked about the deer population in New Jersey, we talked about George Bush. To every point I made she responded with a nod. I remember sitting there, wondering what this woman was hiding. Then she looked away from me and towards the window, watched people stroll by on the street. The corner of her lips curled upwards. “You chose a nice place,” she said.

  “I like it around here. But I like anything to do with the water. Put anything within a quarter-mile of a river or the coast and it seems to take on a whole new personality.”

  For a moment she considered that. “You like the definition,” she decided. “You like the boundary. Water gives everything a defined beginning and end. You like that.”

  “I don’t know if that’s true,” I answered in an even voice. In the pit of my stomach I was vaguely offended. “I think I like the rhythm of the water, more than anything else – the way you can just sit and watch it move. It makes me think of exploring, of going to new places.”

  “Oh,” said Rayban. “Do you travel a lot? Do you go to many new places?”

  “Not as many as I’d like.”

  “Where do you go, when you travel?”

  “I go to Massachusetts,” I told her. “I was born there.”

  “So you go home,” she said, nodding. “That’s your adventure. You go home.”

  She pulled away my clothes with force enough to hurt, put her hand between my legs and squeezed. “Does this scare you?” she whispered. “Do I scare you?”

  “No,” I breathed. “Just a little.”

  “You shouldn’t be afraid of people you fuck.”

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “I might be a crazy woman,” she hissed, sing-song. “I might be a cra-zy girl.”

  I laughed but she ignored it. “Later you’ll lick me,” she said. “But first you have to fuck me, so you won’t be afraid any more.”

  “You don’t believe in taking time, do you?”

  She stroked me, her rough gestures easing to a feather touch. “When we’re out of time, I’ll tell you,” she said. “When we’re out of time, you’ll know it.”

  “You’re married,” I had observed in the coffee shop. “What do you want a boyfriend for?”.

  She shrugged. “How do you know I’m married?”

  “Your profile says you are.”

  “And you believe it. Just because I typed it, you assume it’s true.”

  “Are you really like that? Would you really type something like that just to see what happens?”

  “No,” she said. “I’d type something like that to throw the losers off the scent So I could watch their eyes when I told them I’m single, no attachments, maybe crazy. You wouldn’t believe how scared guys get when they think you’re going to rock their world.”

  She wouldn’t take me to bed the first time we met. She took me the second time, after our second meeting for coffee. She drained her cup and pointed her Raybans at me. “What’s my name?” she asked.

  “All I know is Rayban.”

  “Would you fuck me if that’s all you knew?”

  “Well, it would be nice to know your name,” I told her. “It would be nice to know what people call you.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  I frowned at the table. “Yes,” I said, after what I thought was a suitable pause. “Yes, I would.”

  She nodded. “I figured you would,” she said. “That’s no surprise at all.”

  The whole time she kept her eyes towards me, but for one moment. When finally we were both naked and she had swung her leg over to straddle me, she took my cock in her hand and glanced down as she guided it inside her. I watched the way she wrapped her fingers around me, held my breath as she hesitated above me. As she lowered herself, she looked down at me again, her eyes still hidden, her face still set, and when I reached for her glasses she pushed my hand away. “You have to let me see your eyes,” I breathed.

  “I’m fucking you,” she said. “I don’t have to do anything else.”

  “Let me look at you.”

  “Oh, just fuck me,” she hissed. “There’s no time to look at me.”

  All of a sudden I had this thought that I shouldn’t have even been there. By then it was too late. Rayban was all around me, and if I tried to look anywhere all I saw were her silver eyes and my own self underneath her. I am not a handsome man and the agitations of sex aren’t anything like a dance with me. They aren’t possessed of anything like grace or rhythm, they are simply manoeuvres of my body, dictated by the mechanics of my spine and my nerves and my desire. Until that moment I had thought otherwise but there on Rayban’s face was sheer reality, tinted in silver. I watched horrified as I thrust beneath her. I reached again for her shades. Behind them her eyes would be glittering, amused.

  The Mermaid’s Sacrifice

  Christopher Hart

  We were in the garden behind the villa when he came to call.

  Kit was hunched up on a sun lounger in the shade, reading a book. He wore a distant frown. I was wandering around on my own, in my usual daydream, skimming my palms ticklishly over the heads of the bougainvillea flowers, the oleander and hibiscus and the green tracery of the jasmine. It was very hot. There was a light wind but it was humid, the libeccio, blowing in from the southwest across the Mediterranean from North Africa and picking up all the summer mist of the sea as it came. It muffled everything, made everything, even the lizards on the crumbling villa walls, dreamy and slow. My thin cotton dress clung to me with light perspiration. I thought of nothing. Except maybe Kit.

  A man was standing just the other side of the gate when I looked up and saw him, gasped, almost swallowed my tongue. I held my hand up to my mouth, schoolgirlish, infuriated by my own timid reaction. He smiled. He had a wolfish smile.

  In fact, all his features had the properties of beasts of prey: the wolfish smile, the aquiline nose, the leonine mane (albeit greying at the temples), the deep-set eyes of some other unnameable hunter species glaring out of the dark night. “Signorina?” he said. His voice was a low growl, of course.

  “Signora,” I corrected him, lowering my eyes briefly to check for the shirt unbuttoned to the navel, the extravagantly hairy chest, the gold medallion. But he wasn’t like that: navy blue shirt, only top button undone. No jewellery that I could see except a fine gold wedding ring. I opened the gate to him.

  He was lean and rangy, with a high sunburned forehead and a wide sensuous mouth that looked good when he smiled, which was rarely. His hands were large, with strong, prominent veins; his stare piercing but not hostile – well, not quite. I guessed his age to be about mid-fifties, maybe older.

  He held his hand out to me. “Leopoldo,” he said, in a cultivated Italian accent. “My wife and I live next door.”

  I shook his hand. “Nancy,” I said. “My husband and I . . .” I paused, bent my head, smiled self-consciously. I was beginning to sound like the Queen. I looked up again. “Kit – my husband – we’re just staying here for a couple of weeks. It’s lovely here.”

  He nodded gravely, said nothing, He stared at me for fractionally too long for comfort, and then said, “We would like to invite you over to dinner tonight. Just a simple dinner – the four of us.”

  I babbled that it was very kind of them to invite us, and what time should we be over, and we’d be delighted. He told me, nodded again, and turned and strode away. When he was gone I felt my shoulders relax.

  Kit, of course, doesn’t want to go.

  He lays his book down on his chest and looks up at me and holds his hand up to his forehead to shield his eyes from the setting sun. A hank of hair flops over his hand. So young. I love him so m
uch. “Do we have to?” he says.

  “I’ve already accepted.”

  “You could have consulted with me first.”

  “I thought you’d . . .”

  “I came here to get away from all that, and now you’ve gone and fixed up some tedious dinner party with a couple of old farts who’ll have nothing to talk about and expect us to entertain them all evening, Thanks a lot.”

  “He didn’t look like an old fart.”

  “Who didn’t?”

  “Leopoldo.”

  Kit mouths Leopoldo back at me in a sarcastic fashion, and then slams his book down and struts off into the villa to get ready for dinner.

  I love him even when he’s petulant.

  Kit wears his ivory linen suit that he knows I like him in. So that’s OK. I’m not so sure about the tie – too hot, surely? But I don’t say anything.

  I wear my long emerald-green dress with the narrow shoulder straps, and some bright red lipstick. Really bright. Kit looks quite startled when he sees me, and then smiles. “Hi, beautiful,” he says, kissing me delicately on the forehead.

  We walk next door arm in arm.

  Leopoldo’s wife is called Teresa, and she is extremely beautiful. She is perhaps ten years younger than he, very elegant and self-possessed, with eyebrows permanently arched high over her big eyes. Not plucked, just arched: sceptical, amused, worldly, permanently set for flirtation. Her skin appears finely stretched over high cheekbones – but not, please God, face-lifted – and her lips are quite thin. She compliments me immediately on my dress and on my lipstick, and she kisses me warmly on both cheeks. She herself is wearing a long black evening dress, and a gorgeous hematite choker, and, would you believe it, long black gloves up and over her elbows. Like some fifties film star: subtler than Sophia Loren, more voluptuous than Audrey Hepburn . . . a darker, more Mediterranean Grace Kelly?

  Teresa obviously likes dressing up for even the smallest occasions. She must notice me eyeing her gloves because she looks down and caresses them lightly, each one, and gives me her most charming smile, and says, “Oh, any excuse to dress up these days, my darling!” in her charmingly accented English. Leopoldo takes my right hand and kisses it, his eyes fixed on my face from under his heavy brows as he does so.

  Dinner is taken out in the garden. And what a garden.

  We couldn’t see it from our side because of the dense row of cypresses that they have growing around their private patch. Leopoldo leads us immediately round the side of the villa – I can tell it is large, and in rather better condition than the one we’re renting – but other than that we don’t get to see inside it. Behind, a wonderfully elegant, classical-style lawn stretches down to a grove of almond trees at the end, and down the centre of the lawn runs a very ancient-looking, stone-clad, long and narrow pool. Walking beside it I see that the pool is lined randomly with coloured tiles that reflect through the water and give it a strange metallic sheen. Leopoldo to my right, taking my elbow in his large hand, says, “Perhaps a swim later on, if we have not eaten and drunk too much?”

  I nearly blurt out that I haven’t brought a swimsuit, but I stop myself just in time, realizing that it would only justify his making some lecherous remark about skinny-dipping. I bite my tongue. Something lurches, deep inside me. I feel a slick of sweat over my upper lip.

  It is all impossibly beautiful. The night is warm, and we dine outside, among the grove of almond trees that thickens into an orchard beyond. To either side are citrus orchards too, their tangy fumes filling the night air. The libeccio has dropped off, leaving the air still and sultry. An oval pine table and four chairs stand in the grass, surrounded by flambeaux on chains and poles dug into the ground. When we sit down, the orange light from the naked flames leaps and dances over our faces, emphasizing the brightness of our skin and our eyes, and (I imagine with a thrill) the sluttish scarlet of my lips.

  Teresa and Leopoldo – “Call me Leo, please” – have a cook, of course: Tancredi. (No one could afford so palatial a villa along this bit of coastline and not afford a cook as well.) Tancredi mixes us our drinks – Kir Royales all round to start with – and then brings us our meal: zuppe di cozze, mussels in a hot-pepper sauce. Leopoldo tells me they were fresh this morning, relishing their taste, his wide lips glistening in the torchlight. Kit by my side starts to relax, I can feel it, and with the second glass of wine – some unidentifiable but perfect floral white – he begins to talk. And when Kit actually chooses to talk, he is wonderful. Soon he is deep in passionate argument about the real significance of the bull-run in Pamplona, and then the bull-leapers of Knossos, and then he even engages Teresa in conversation about the sad decline of haute couture. Teresa used to be a model – naturally. She often stays with Yves St Laurent in his pad in Morocco, it appears, and she tells an amusing story about Yves and the time he unwittingly ate a raw potato.

  Leopoldo doesn’t laugh, I notice. He watches her from the other end of the table, taking a steaming mouthful of sea bass – our main course – his dark eyes fixed on her, weirdly adoring. Teresa, it seems, rather ignores Leo. Clearly she knows him well. I feel I do too, already: and his name may be Leo, but if he’s not a Scorpio – I’ll swim naked in that pool, indigestion or not.

  There’s cheese, and fresh grapes and almonds, and peaches baked and drizzled with sweet almond wine, and we are all a little drunk, I think, but not so drunk that we will feel ill tomorrow morning. Drunk only on conversation and good food and fine wine and flirtation and the strange and unexpected beauty of this hidden garden and these two enigmatic people – as old as our parents but, I have to admit it, far, far cooler.

  I need the loo. Teresa gives me directions – “Go in through the sitting-room doors and turn left and then right down the corridor and . . .” Something like that. But by the time I’ve got there I’ve completely forgotten, so I stumble around the darkened villa, giggling softly to myself, wondering at how huge it is, and badly needing a pee.

  Somewhere down one of the hallways I find myself in a smaller room, with bare terracotta walls and a small, circular fountain in the middle, of grey-green stone, maybe marble, and looking very ancient. The fountain is running softly, trickling down over the stone into the basin, and above it is the figure of a naked girl. But not the kind you’d see in a civic fountain – not doing what she’s doing. Not with that brazen abandon, her eyes stone-blank and closed, entirely absorbed in her own erotic oblivion.

  And then I am abruptly aware of Leo beside me. He doesn’t look at me, only at the naked figure there over the fountain. “Isn’t she beautiful?” he says.

  “I . . . yes, I suppose . . .” I stammer, wishing I could think of something wittier to say.

  Then, only then, he turns to me and says, “I will tell you all about her. But later. First you need a bathroom, I think?”

  At last! He shows some sign of chivalry!

  But it doesn’t last. The “bathroom” he leads me to doesn’t have a lock on it. In fact, it doesn’t even have a door. It is a beautiful little room at the back of the villa, tiled in sand and terracotta with marine motifs in the walls and floor – but no door. Quite open. Leo sees me hesitate and shrugs. “Go ahead,” he says. “I won’t watch.”

  I could have been offended. But suddenly I think, Fuck it, and do as he says. And what does he do?

  He lights a cigarette. And watches.

  Afterwards we walk back to dinner arm in arm as if it is all quite normal.

  Maybe it is, round here.

  Kit by now is gently, sweetly drunk. He gets drunk quite easily and becomes even more boyish than ever.

  Teresa looks up and smiles at me. “Your husband is a university professor,” she says to me. “So clever – and so young!”

  “You wouldn’t think it to look at him, would you?” I say dryly. Kit grins at me.

  “Ah, poor darling,” says Teresa, reaching out and squeezing his thigh. “I think he is – delicious.”

  Delicious, but drunk. Which is, no doubt,
why he has completely forgotten, by the following morning, about their second invitation: to the island.

  Instead, after final grappe e caffè corretto, and kisses and arrivederla’s and domani’s all round, we stumble back to our villa and fall into bed. And I want to make love to him then, across our bed, or rather for him to make love to me, pulling my dress up, not even taking it off. I so want him to make love to me. But he is too drunk. And even if he wasn’t, I know too well that he would probably just turn away from me and murmur that he was tired, another night, and then fall asleep.

  I do not sleep. I feel the blood coursing through my body and it is full of wine and a certain anticipation or even fear, as if I know something is going to happen, something beautiful and terrible, before this holiday is over. And my blood is awake, wide awake. Some time later, lying there, ears straining to hear the waves breaking on the shore below, I hear louder sounds: splashing, and screams. They are coming from next door. I get up and go to the window but I can see nothing beyond the cypress trees. As if in a dream I go down into our garden and across the cool grass barefoot to the trees, and the cypress branches brush against my skin and I press in close and look through.

  Leopoldo and Teresa are making love. Still clothed, or at least half-clothed, they are wrestling with each other, standing waist deep in the shallow end of the pool, Leo grimly silent, Teresa bucking away from him, screaming and laughing as he holds her tight. Then they fall silent, first as he closes her mouth with a long and ardent kiss, then as he flings her back across the side of the pool and falls on top of her. She is wearing only stockings now, and her black choker, and the long black gloves. She wears them for him, I realize. She still knows how to make herself desirable to him. Hungrily he trails kisses down her belly and between her thighs. I see her move her thighs wider apart, raise a hand to her mouth. They make love then in silence.