Best Lesbian Erotica of the Year, Volume 1

by D. L. King

  “Now there’s a way to treat a person with a cane,” Anna chides, cheeks red, eyes glittering.

  “Mm,” Ellen agrees, digging in deeper, “you can treat me to your cane.”

  She tugs at the shirt, pulling the lapels down and to the side so that she can press her lips to the very tops of Anna’s breasts. Anna shivers. The doors of the lift ping open. Ellen spins around, covering her rumpled partner-in-crime with her back. Of course, there’s no one there.

  “Partner-in-crime? Really?” says Anna, scanning the numbers along the corridor for their room.

  Fine. Just partner, then.

  “I like partner-in-life,” Anna suggests, pushing the key card into the lock of the door to the right. Ellen flushes with delight. The door clicks open. Here we go.

  Bags are dropped to the floor. The cane is summarily discarded in the easy chair by the window. Ellen sits on the queen-size bed and Anna sits on her lap, on cue, wrapping her slim, trim legs around her, letting her chosen partner-in-life finish what was so rudely interrupted by the opening of elevator doors. Ellen unbuttons her shirt. Pushes the cute but in-the-way off-white bra out of the way. Fills her hands with soft, rosy treasure. Or better yet—tits.

  Anna holds onto Ellen’s shoulders, close to purring, as her lover licks and sucks, fondles and squeezes, forgetting all about plot, structure, grammar rules and anagrams. Who needs anagrams, for that matter, when you have kilograms of Anna at your disposal?

  “Kilograms?”

  Ellen comes up for a breather, her hair pointing directions to all over the place. Her face is brimming with bliss.

  “Pounds and pounds,” she nods, and weighs the palindrome in her arms.

  Anna is already unbearably wet. Ellen should know this. But she is taking her sweet time.

  “Could we…?” Anna indicates the length and width of the bed. Ellen helps her out of the constraints of her crumpled shirt.

  “Why not? While we’re at it.”

  And into bed they tumble, naked, skipping out on the preliminaries (you know the drill). Ellen pulls Anna close. Anna pulls Ellen closer, her legs parting to accommodate Ellen’s thigh. A tremor runs through them both as Anna’s wetness slips along Ellen’s skin. Their pubic bones press together, heat prickling and flashing wherever body parts meet in joint, frustrating desire. Anna nibbles at Ellen’s ear, finding the spot, there, here, scratching it with her teeth, muttering: “I’m going to die if you don’t fuck me soon.”

  Ellen is only too happy to comply. Lifting Anna’s bottom up from off the mattress, she plunges two fingers into her, heading right for the nubbly spot of her vaginal wall. Anna’s head falls back with a guttural “Yes,” her body arching like the old round-stone bridge across the river of the town of M-(or is it Here?) to meet her thrust, to take her even deeper. Arousal drips from Ellen onto the crisp Egyptian cotton of the hotel’s bedsheets, as she finds her rhythm, that rhythm that has her lean-limbed love writhing and gurgling with joie de vivre. Comme il faut. She bends her head to French kiss Anna’s puffy parts, keeping her fingers pushing and slipping, stressing and dipping, punctuating her message with the silky, insistent sweeps of her tongue.

  “Oh fuck!” Anna eloquently enjoinders, and Ellen revs it up a notch, increasing her pressure, tripping up the speed, her free hand finding Anna’s to stroke the tingling, sensitive point of her racing pulse with her thumb, and Anna is coming, coming as surely as the train from Here to There, roaring down the rails like a tour de force, like a stutter of hand-holding exclamation marks, again, again, again, the bridge tensing and crumbling, the river flowing with the spring flood, Ellen’s fingers refusing derailment, sucked, as it were, into an airtight lock.

  Anna hits the mattress orgasming, tangling with the source of her enjoyment. The source buffets her with her head. They disentangle, for an instant, to make heads and tails of the bed again.

  Ellen props herself up on a pillow, her cunt swelling with self-conceited pride at the sight of Anna’s (temporarily) sated glow. She looks like…

  “Stop! No more poetry, for the moment, please—though you certainly have a way with French.” Anna closes in, her fingers trailing down Ellen’s abdomen. Ellen’s breath catches.

  “So…” Anna lifts an eyebrow, fingertips dawdling along the edge of Ellen’s pubic hair. “What was it you were saying earlier? Something about my cane?”

  In the wee hours of the night, they empty the contents of the minibar onto the bed. We’ll call it a feast.

  “I’m sorry about the restaurant closing and all,” Anna offers, crunching on ridiculously salty mini-pretzels, not, to be frank, looking all that sorry. She does on the other hand look good enough to eat. Hours of lovemaking will do that to you.

  Ellen takes another swig of her half-emptied Carlsberg. “Don’t.” Anna breaks open a chocolate bar, scrambling to find the remote for the ceiling-mounted TV in the corner.

  “What?”

  “There is not a jot of energy left in me. Not a gram, you hear? I’m emptied out, dried up, a complete desert in between rain periods. It’s too late for this. Also, I need my news fix. You’ll just have to wait.”

  Ellen puts the bottle down on the nightstand. Takes a bite of the chocolate Anna holds out to her as a distraction. The TV flickers to life.

  With a contented sigh, Anna leans back against the headboard. She smooths the duvet out over them both. Ellen hands the candy bar back to her.

  “All comfy?” she queries, a distinct glint in her eyes, and sure enough, seconds later she is under the covers, burrowing into a little nest just, as it happens, between the thighs of her news-watching nubile. The would-be nubile protests.

  “I feel more like a geriatric wing dropout, you know, and you better stop that, what will the readers.”

  Ellen’s head comes up to meet Anna’s gaze, haloed by tousled sheets.

  “You can see the screen from there, can’t you?”

  Anna’s eyes flit over to the flurry of images and text. She has put it on mute, because it’s three o’clock in the morning, and people need their rest.

  Some people.

  Ellen looks at her earnestly.

  “You really want me to stop?”

  Anna makes a face. Shakes her head. Ellen dips down to lick some stray grains of salt from Anna’s strained, sweat-streaked midriff. A quiver ripples over the hypersensitized flesh. Anna groans. Opens her legs a touch wider. Her sex is luscious, warm and inviting. Ellen puts her face up close, her exhalations enough to make a little moisture ooze out from between those kiss-stung nether lips.

  “I could stop,” she says, enunciating her words carefully, struggling for a moment’s sobriety. “Just tell me to stop.”

  Anna reaches over to the pile of loot from the minibar. She tears open another bar of chocolate, splitting off a healthy chunk. Her eyes locked on to Ellen’s, she parts herself with the fingers of her left hand and nudges the piece of sticky sweetness in between her folds.

  “You could stop,” Anna allows, melting down the headboard as quickly as the chocolate. “But it would stain.”

  Ellen would never let good foodstuff go to waste. She is much too much of an environmentalist. Chocoholic. Sex addict. Take your pick. (Also, she hates to leave a mess for the cleaners. Which Anna knows fine well.)

  INK AND CANVAS

  Geonn Cannon

  I tensed when the nib touched my shoulder, cold ink and even colder steel against skin still supple from my bath. “Okay?” Lina whispered. I nodded; I wasn’t allowed to speak while she was writing. I was kneeling on the bed with my feet under me. The towel was still around my waist, but I was otherwise naked. Lina sat behind me on the bed. She was still fully dressed in the suit she’d worn to work, missing only the blazer to show off her sleeveless silk blouse. She brought the stylus back to my shoulder and drew an arc. I suppressed a shudder and faced forward. My eyes closed, my lips tight, as I kept track of the words she was writing.

  Livid with its strong lines, peaks and valleys.


  Extraordinary, a long word that stretched across my shoulder blade, and then brought her back through the word to cross the X, the T, and dot the I.

  Lyrical with its ups and downs increased by making the letters tall and slanted.

  The movement of the sharp stylus tip across my skin made me shudder. The ink was cool and I could feel it drying when Lina moved on to the next word.

  Supple.

  Possession.

  Sydney.

  I smiled when she wrote my name, turning my head to acknowledge without saying anything. Lina shifted on the mattress. She had been using one arm to prop herself up, but she moved it to my hip. She wrote beach, sensual, tongue, thigh, and my breathing increased as each word became more suggestive. Lina wrote small, but the words still crowded one quadrant of my back. She finished with a cursive—fini—and put the stylus down. She leaned close, her lips almost touching my skin, and blew across the words she’d written to dry the ink faster. Her hand slid along my hip, under the towel, and stroked the inside of my thigh.

  I leaned back against her and said, “Thank you, Ma’am.”

  “You’re very welcome.” She kissed my neck and accepted my weight. She ran her writing hand over my other hip, over my stomach, and cupped my breast. The skin was still tender where she had written today’s words. I had another list on my other shoulder, faded by the bath but still legible. Rosemary and bright and shallots and champagne, these written in an arc that followed the line of my shoulder up to my neck. More words, faded even further, marched down the length of my spine: sweet, lie, caress, cerulean, difference, labia, dew, harken. I remembered them all even though I had never seen them. I’d only felt them being written.

  None of the words would be visible when I dressed for work in the morning; my Lady would choose an outfit that covered them all well. We weren’t embarrassed by the ritual. It was simply something that belonged to only us.

  It started not long after we first became a couple. Lina discovered my submissive personality and began exploring her Dominant side. The first few weeks, all of her demands were formed inquisitively. “Would you like it if I laid out your clothes for work?” or “What if I asked you not to speak for an entire evening?” I would always reply with, “If it makes you happy, my love.” She gave me the option and I handed it back to her with my head bowed. She became my Mistress, and I was simply hers. Her property, her most treasured possession. Sometimes she called me darling, sometimes pet. My favorite was toy, because I am her toy. She could play with me whenever she wanted, however she wanted.

  The first time she wrote on me was at an art auction. She’d never purchased anything in the time I’d known her, but she liked to see the lots, to see a spirited competition between bidders, and to spend an hour or two in such exquisite company. I had never been to one, but I was quickly enamored by it. Everyone looked like refugees from another time, a more gilded age. The auctioneer wore white gloves and spoke with a sharp New England accent, all stiff jaw and proper enunciation. I wore a black gown that my Lady had chosen for me, and she was dressed in a black pinstripe suit with a lacy, low-cut top.

  We watched as priceless artifacts were placed next to the auctioneer’s podium and listened as he detailed each one’s provenance and history. The pieces were contemporary and all came with names I’d never heard of—Adrian Ghenie, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein—along with artists whose names I recognized— Warhol and Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Peyton.

  Midway through the show, my Lady reached over and used her fingers to widen the slit on the side of my gown. She exposed my upper thigh, the lacy top of my stockings. My cheeks reddened at the thought of the man on my left seeing what she had done, but I didn’t dare complain. I bit my lip and looked toward the front of the room. She had been taking notes on each item, but she moved the pen and pressed the tip against my thigh. The first letter was large and made of two smooth curves that ended with an upward tick. It was followed by a curvy, upright line that looked like a crowbar. Another arch, and then a curl like a pig’s tail.

  MINE.

  A feeling of happiness spread through my chest. I covered her hand, which she had flattened over the marking. The warmth and weight of her hand pressing against the word seemed to burn it into my skin. Even all these years later, I could still feel the sharp scroll of that pen as it moved over my sensitive flesh and left a black mark in its wake.

  That night, when she scrubbed away the mark in our bath, I asked if she would give me a tattoo. The act of letting her mark me that way was such a turn-on, I could only imagine how it would feel to have something etched into my skin for her. But she said no. “I don’t want to commit to anything permanent. I would like to keep you as my blank canvas.”

  There currently wasn’t any ink on my front, but sometimes she drew pictures on my thighs. A sparrow, a flower. Sometimes she would write her name in a belt around my waist, linking the letters in a chain I could feel all day even though it was just ink. I loved having her words on me. I loved wearing them and felt sad when they finally faded. But if they were tattoos, I would have been covered from knee to collar with my Lady’s thoughts, her whispers, her creations. As much as I wanted that, I wanted even more to see what else she could come up with.

  The first few words were written with whatever pen happened to be convenient. She wrote in red, in blue, in black, in purple. After a few months, when we both understood just how special this ceremony was, I gifted her with a beautiful wooden box with solid brass hardware. When she got home from work she found me seated on the divan with it on my lap. My hands were folded over the ornate carving on its lid. I held it out to her, looking up through my lashes.

  “For you, my Lady.”

  She took it from me and thumbed open the latch. Inside she found the calligraphy set. There were three styluses, each hand-carved from different kinds of wood for a variety of weight. It had six interchangeable nibs, sharp and elegantly curved to give her a choice of thickness in her lines. It came with a small jar of black ink, and Lina brushed her fingers over the glass with a look of wonder. She lifted the bottle and smiled at me.

  “Go to the bedroom and undress.”

  That night I’d gotten my first installment of words. Lina started with beautiful, gorgeous, lovely, submit. She moved on to harsher words like slut and whore, but she drew them with such care and elegance that I felt they were terms of endearment in this context. She could have written anything on me with that stylus and it would have felt like the highest of compliments. She also wrote her full name—LINA ROSE RYAN—across my forehead and then kissed the ink.

  “I love my gift, Sydney. Thank you.”

  I smiled at the memory. The wooden box was on the night-stand, but the stylus was on the mattress next to me. I wasn’t allowed to touch it unless instructed, but sometimes I wondered what I would write on Lina’s body if she gave me the chance. Dominant, of course. Grand. Elegant. Love. I closed my eyes and let my legs fall apart. My Lady dragged her hand up the inside of my thigh and placed her hand on the mattress between my legs. I sank down until my pussy was against her wrist. She bowed down and kissed my lips, her other hand still playing with my breast as I rolled my hips. First up, along the length of her arm, then back down, digging my heels into the mattress, my toes curled. I moved my hands back to grip her legs for leverage.

  “My Lady,” I whispered, “please…”

  She moved her hand up so that her fingers were against me, the two in the center stroking along my folds before easing them apart. I raised my head and Lina made me stretch to find her mouth. My lips were trembling when they met hers, and she moved her hand from my breast to cradle my head. I pushed myself up so I was lying more completely on her lap as she twisted her fingers inside of me.

  When we broke the kiss, I lay back down across her lap. I kept my eyes open to watch my Lady, her black hair pinned back, her lips ruby red, her brown-black eyes running up and down the length of my body to watch how I reacted to her touch.
I trembled and whimpered; my toes curled and my hands clutched at her skirt.

  “Come for me, darling,” Lina whispered.

  I arched my back and did as she commanded. She dragged her fingers from me and used them to tease the sensitive spots of my clit and my folds before dragging her nails over my mound. I shivered and closed my eyes as I settled back onto her lap. I stretched my legs out straight and sighed.

  “Thank you, my Lady.”

  “You are more than welcome, woman of mine.” She smiled and bent down to kiss my lips, dragging her tongue across them as her hand continued to roam over my body.

  When I was able, I sat up and helped Lina out of her clothes. Each item was carefully folded and placed into the hamper, where it would stay until I took it to the dry cleaner. When my Lady was nude, she spread her legs and I knelt between them. She guided my head down and I used my tongue on her. I drew words of my own with the tip of my tongue: gracious, kind, adoration, queen, tight, wet. She pushed her hands through my hair as I made her writhe.

  I wrapped my arms around her legs so I could flatten my hands on her stomach. I applied gentle pressure and she took my hint, lying down as she brought her feet up to rest them on my back. Her gasps and whimpers were like music to me; I had taken away her words, they were burnt on my skin, and now all she had left were the moans that I could elicit with my tongue and lips. My Lady’s fingers curled when I pushed her to orgasm, pulling my hair as she cried out. Her shoulders lifted off the bed for the duration of her climax, lowering only when her entire body went limp.

  “Is my Lady satisfied?”

  “Yes,” she sighed. “Your Lady is very satisfied. You were a very good toy tonight.”

  I smiled and crawled up her body. I lay on top of her, my head on her chest as she enclosed me in an embrace. She kissed the top of my head and I craned my neck to find her lips. She flickered her tongue against my mouth and I laughed quietly before returning the gesture. She squirmed away from me and I sat up.