The Altar of Lamented Toys is on a low shelf in the walk-in closet, so I can sit in front if it cross-legged to reminisce. The toys are arranged like a field of monuments. They rest on the blue velvet of a dress I cut up; when I touch it, I remember the way the lining of a fancy casket would depress beneath your hand. Woven in between the toys are dried flowers and offerings of useless coins from the old world. Brass swans flank the edges, guarding my souvenirs. There are photos of old friends and our last dog, Lucy.
Two of the vibrators are smooth, ergonomic. I preferred them during the weeks when people were first getting sick, and I did so many lumbar punctures in the hospital that I got tendinitis. At the perimeter, near the swans, there are some ancient toys kept for sentimental reasons alone. One looks like a rabbit and never got me off despite its hype. But it was the gateway vibrator. Another is dolphin shaped. It symbolizes the kitsch of that world. I never wanted to be fucked by a porpoise.
Behind the mammals begins my line of pulsators, marketed a few years before the fall. My favorite one is firm to the touch but smooth, like brushing my hand over Beau’s bicep. I try not to think about his absence, the sensation of my chest caving in. The pulsator has furrows, like the crests of a series of waves cast in silicone. Even looking at it, my cunt clenches and my nipples harden. It still works in a way. It slides in and out of me slowly, each edge catching the entrance of my sex, getting me ready to be fucked hard by Beau’s cock.
My favorite toy of all time looks like a copper-colored electric toothbrush. So much so that I would become aroused brushing my teeth years ago. This toy didn’t vibrate, and it didn’t pulsate. It plugged into the wall and oscillated your clit. Unlike my ridged pulsator, the clitoral attachments on this toy are useless now. Before we owned it, I wasn’t multi-orgasmic. The first time I used it, a gift from Beau on my thirty-fifth birthday, I came three times. Eventually, I would push it to eight or nine times. Cross my heart.
“Where’s my Eroscillator?” I yell. The toy isn’t in the center of the altar where I’ve stared at it for years.
I crouch onto my hands and knees, getting closer to look for it. I start to sweat, and a tremor begins in my hands. I eye each of the other toys with suspicion.
“Where the fuck is it?” Sticking my head in and out between the vibrators, my pulse speeds.
“Where the hell could it’ve gone?” I cry. It isn’t on the shelf next to the altar, tucked between the curing onions and garlic. I knock over jars of sorted herbs on the shelf above, but there’s still nothing. Starting over, I search again through the toys on the altar. Three or four times more I do this, and the Eroscillator still isn’t there. I feel defeated, stolen from. Who could’ve taken it but a ghost?
I walk out to the garden. There’s still no sign of Beau. If he doesn’t return, I’ll have to climb onto the roof alone to empty the squirrel traps. Without him to pin them down, they’ll stare at me when I club their heads. Would I even survive a winter without his body pressed close to mine in bed? More importantly, would I ever smile or laugh again without him?
The long grass curls between my legs and brushes my thighs as I lay down next to the garden. I look up to the sky, staring into the blueness that won’t end.
* * *
I fall asleep in the grass, and wake up in the fluorescence of sundown. In the old days, I could’ve flipped a light switch and continued the search for the Eroscillator. Is it worth it to burn a candle and waste a match for this? From the standpoint of physical survival, it isn’t. Beau could cut himself in the middle of the night and I would need the light to suture him. If he comes back. There are a handful of batteries that still carry enough charge to dimly light a flashlight. Those are for true emergencies. But there is a part of me that longs to still be alive in another way besides simply eating, staying cool, and staying warm. I used to be so much more than just survival.
The candle stash is in the basement. Dusk is so far progressed it will be a grope to find one down there. I enter the house, still and peaceful. Descending the stairs I hear a rattle, the smack of metal on metal, and the small sound of a knife slicing. I’m in the pitch black, and someone else is down there. If Beau had come home he would have seen me by the garden when he came in the side fence.
My skin rises into bumps, and my hair becomes hackles like a wolf’s before it decides to go forward or retreat. Before I can decide, a slow glow glissades around the corner of the staircase. It’s so beautiful, softly yellow and so easy.
Better than witnessing the electric light burning in the basement is discovering Beau bent over a car battery. I haven’t seen one in so long, it seems like a cartoon. He looks up and smiles while he continues to fiddle with a copper cord, an inverter and the battery.
“Happy birthday, Jax! I love you!”
I hug him to me and breathe his body odor, like a mix of tobacco and pepper and garlic. It’s a fantastic relief to smell him right now.
“Holy shit. I didn’t realize,” I say. “I missed you,” I continue. “So much. What were you doing out there?”
“Looking for this.” He nudges the battery with his toe.
“But there are cars less than a mile from here.” In my few adventures out, I’ve seen them. “And aren’t they all dead this many years out?”
“That is correct.” He replies with a nod. “That’s why it took me so long to find one that still had enough charge.”
His hand behind my back makes a clicking noise. The vibrating sound that comes next is a slow purr, like an old electric toothbrush. My sex clenches. Beau makes a seduction of revealing the buzzing Eroscillator to me, mimicking a striptease. He ends it with, “Ta-da!”
He pulls back from my arms and sticks the pebbled attachment he’s chosen onto his tongue to lubricate it with spit. But there’s no need for that. He sets the oscillator on my clitoris, and I exhale as if the entire world has been on my shoulders.
In less than three minutes I’ve had my first orgasm while he kisses my mouth and oscillates my clit. He lays me on my back beneath the glow of the solitary light he’s rigged. He pushes the toy into my hands. Its weight feels like comfort. This vain consumption of electricity should shock me with its uselessness. Instead, it transforms me.
Beau pushes his hardness into me with ease as I spread my legs for him. The Eroscillator zooms over my clitoris. Every inch of his dick pressing into me is a delight. From my head to my toes, my body feels as if it is charged with voltage, waiting to surge. Each thrust is punctuated by my vibrating clit that grows and swells. My blood is a current of waves through my body, illuminating me. My sight blurs; I’m looking through a kaleidoscope. I scream when I come again, the sounds of a woman leaving behind a destroyed world, comforted by her last friend.
MATILDA’S SECRET
by L. Marie Adeline
The dusty motel room near Lake Charles only had one lamp (thank God), over which I threw my thin red cardigan. But I still could make out Jesse’s sculpted body as he pulled his T-shirt over his head and draped it to dry on the radiator next to my jeans. His short, cropped mess of brown hair and hazel eyes made him look like a student, but his torso was covered in tattoos, some elaborate, some crude, giving him the air of a recently released prisoner, let out on good behavior. I had wanted this, him, from the moment we met, but I wasn’t feeling that familiar sense of sexual abandon kicking in. It could have been that the storm had shattered my nerves. Or because we were not strangers anymore, and feelings were leaking into places I hadn’t allowed them in years.
Mostly it was the fact that I felt our age difference. And I felt it acutely. Jesse was thirty-two. I’d just turned fifty. Prior to Jesse, my interest in sex was healthy, but it had begun to slow, then naturally wane. On that strange night, while a violent storm raged on outside our rickety walls, I felt crazed with want of this young man I’d just picked up hitchhiking on Highway 10 outside of Houston—the kind I hadn’t felt in a long time. But I was suddenly shy to show him.
From the bathr
oom Jesse yelled, “Didn’t your momma tell you never to pick up hitchhikers?”
“She wasn’t much for advice,” I yelled back. He exited the bathroom, still brushing his teeth. He was shirtless, a towel around his lean waist. Good God he is hot, my stray cat hitchhiker.
I sat in the middle of the sagging bed, my arms wrapped around my bent knees, clutching a scratchy water glass that had a mouthful of warm vodka left in it. I still had my underwear on, but my sweatshirt was pulled over the top of my knees. I tried not to stare, but the bad lighting cast ripped shadows down his torso as his arm worked the brush in his mouth. He looked at me like I was the best idea he ever had, swallowed the toothpaste, and tossed the brush over his shoulder.
“Would your momma have advised you against driving from Texas to Louisiana in the middle of a hurricane?” He came toward me on the bed, looking like a panther cornering prey.
“She’d have called me crazy.”
“Pulling into a shady motel…”
“Bad idea, she’d say.”
His face was inches away from mine, his eyes regarding my face. I noticed the scar on his upper lip, a couple dotting his brow. I could smell the peppermint on his breath.
“Would she worry…you here alone with a mean stranger?”
“You’re not mean.”
He pried the glass from my fingers, finished off my vodka, and gently placed it on the nightstand.
“What would your momma think of you fucking someone you just met two hours ago on a dark highway?”
“Well, momma would have understood. Plus I can’t very well make you sleep in the car.”
The rest of your clothes will have to come off, Matilda. This is not the time to be bashful. Where did this sudden shyness come from? He is bringing out fears in you that you do not want to examine. Emotions were crowding in like enemies.
I flashed back to two hours earlier, as I watched him run toward my old, trusty Mercedes, the rain shellacking his T-shirt to his chest, his body compact like a fighter’s. He told me he was hitchhiking back to Louisiana, where he was from, to start life over. Houston hadn’t been good to him, he said. He had sold everything, including his car.
You have a knack, Matilda, for finding the heartbreakers, my old friend Carolina would say. She had long passed away, but our little venture we’d started was thriving, and that night I was returning to New Orleans from Houston after a successful recruitment trip to find new talent. This was before back taxes and financial troubles forced us to sell some of Carolina’s best paintings to keep our venture afloat. This was when our little S.E.C.R.E.T. was working perfectly.
To put me at ease, the hitchhiker told me his name, Jesse, and started asking me questions: where was I from, what did I do for a living? I told him the truth, that I was an executive recruiter. I left out the part about recruiting men to execute sexual fantasies for S.E.C.R.E.T., which Carolina and I had started while Jesse was probably still in grammar school. Staying secret was the group’s chief mandate, but the letters stood for Safe, Erotic, Compelling, Romantic, Ecstatic, and Transformative—key components, Carolina and I decided, to really good sex, the kind of sex every woman should have plenty of.
When we started the group, a woman looking for just sex and not love was still a little revolutionary, and most men didn’t know what to do with women like us. Over the years, sex for the sake of sex had become more acceptable, but good sex was still something many women didn’t know how to find. As for bringing their sexual fantasies to life, that’s where we came in. We found the women, orchestrated their sometimes simple and sometimes elaborate sex fantasies, and recruited and trained the right men to participate in them. What was in it for us? Well, for starters, because of S.E.C.R.E.T., fifty wasn’t as difficult as I’d thought it would be. And though I was still enjoying the process of recruiting, I was beginning to experience a normal drop in sexual interest. Sometimes I’d pass mirrors naked and note the creased elbows, the loose upper arms, the breasts beautiful but pendulous, the slight ridge of jowls, the spots on my décolletage.
I tried to shut off the inner voice, the one that said I was no longer sexually viable. But part of me was also ready to ease up on the pleasures of the flesh and cultivate my internal life, make art, mentor other women in S.E.C.R.E.T., and age as gracefully as possible.
Then came Jesse and for the first time in my life I wished I were twenty years younger.
When Jesse asked more probing questions in that dark car, I kept it vague and light, painting a picture of a woman with varied interests, single by choice, too busy to settle down. Most of it was true, but the weather, and, frankly, his proximity, was making it hard to concentrate on the conversation. I slowed to a crawl around a washed-out bend of the blacked-out highway, a power outage darkening the path. The rain was coming faster than the wipers could slap away.
“Can I make a suggestion?” Jesse asked. “Up ahead, there’s a motel. This rain is as bad as I’ve ever remembered it. I say we stop for the night.”
When we pulled in, the parking lot was crowded with similar-minded people, all of whom, we discovered, had beat us to the vending machines, drinking all the soda pop, eating all the chips.
“The vultures got here first,” Jesse said, slapping the machine, exaggerating his Cajun accent. He was funny, this cute hitchhiker. And now my funny man was sitting next to me on the bed, gently lifting one of my hands to his mouth to suck a finger.
“You are beautiful, Matilda May,” he said, his tongue swirling around my finger. “I know you’re thinking otherwise. But you’re wrong as the rain tonight.”
“I feel.beautiful… I do. But, Jesse, I—”
“Matilda, I’m telling you, men don’t see age the way you think we do.”
He knew me already, knew what I was thinking.
“What do you see then, when you look at me?”
I braced for the answer as he brought his mouth to my ear.
“I see heat. I see…lushness. Is that a word? Lushness.”
I nodded as he reached around behind my head and tugged the elastic holding my long red hair in a messy ponytail. It fell around my shoulders in a cascade of curls. Maybe I was too old to hold onto my tresses, but I was proud of the fact that I didn’t have a lot of grey hairs to cover. I was a natural redhead, all over.
“Good. That’s better. Where was I? I see a woman. A grown woman who I want to fuck, who I want to make scream. I see a strong woman who knows what she wants and can get it, but who only wants me.”
His words were making me wetter than I’d been in years. He began to walk a hand under me, his fingers firmly stroking under my thighs, nudging, asking for permission to enter. His hazel eyes seemed glazed, the scar on his upper lip deeper in the shadowy room.
“Where’d you get this?” I asked, touching his lip.
“I told you I was mean.”
We locked eyes and I let my knee drop open. He curled a finger under my panty elastic, found my slit and played with the outside of my pussy, coaxing out more wetness from between my lips with the back of his thick knuckle. He began to slowly finger fuck me.
“You’re wet,” he whispered. “You’re teenager wet.”
“You make me that way.”
“You make me this way,” he said, placing my hand under his towel. I could feel his erection, stiff and insistent.
“Oh God.”
With that, his kiss was on me, firm and insistent, pressing me back down on the bed. I let my hands drift up to his hair. He stopped kissing me as his other hand tugged the sweatshirt up over my breasts, over my head, leaving my arms bound up in the shirt. His mouth found a tense nipple, and he took it between his lips. His warm tongue traced circles around each one as I arched into him.
“Look at you all tussled on this fucked up bed.”
His mouth made a heated trail down my stomach, and when he closed in on my throbbing clit, he paused. I gazed down to watch him dip the tip of his hot tongue, barely touching my tight little knot, reli
shing the way his teasing made me squirm.
“Do you want me to make you come?”
I nodded, my knees going completely slack, my arms useless over my head. He slid a finger inside me while his wet, muscly mouth swirled around my fat clit in achingly perfect circles, stopping every once in a while to suck and nibble on my tender thighs before engulfing my pussy hungrily. The build was excruciating; he took me close to the sweet edge of orgasm only to pull back, ever fucking me with two fierce fingers. Finally, mercy, as he covered my clit with his whole, hot mouth, his perfect, talented tongue gently slashing and circling, carrying me higher and higher, closer and closer…
“Oh god, Jesse, don’t stop…” I hissed, my hips bucking into his face. “Yes…make me come, baby…do it…”
My wild surrender made him moan with victory. He pressed my thighs wide open, his tongue now a hot, crazed motor. I don’t know if my body came or he just detonated something in me; I had the kind of orgasm that exploded from my center out, the sound coming from my throat animal and desperate. I flung my arms down, both still twisted together in the sweatshirt. I placed my hands on the back of his damp head as his tongue lapped and pulsed, bringing me to earth, the crescendo waning, my whole body just washed ashore in a pool of sweet bliss.
“Jesse, you wrecked me,” I murmured to the stained ceiling, my eyes shut. Before I could crane up to gaze at his glistening mouth, he expertly, quickly, flipped me over onto my stomach. Then he buckled my hips back into his groin, his hand pressing down on my back, pushing me into the bed. I could feel his erection prodding my lips, soaked and ready for him.
Best Women's Erotica of the Year, Volume 1 Page 10