Best Women's Erotica of the Year, Volume 2

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

The knock at the door came again. As far as Gwynn knew, Emily was the only person in the world who knew exactly where Gwynn was, and there was little to forage for that time of year. It was possible, she thought, and the burning fragment on the screen flitted and danced. Gwynn squeezed her eyes shut. Women don’t like you. The burning fragment collapsed into the flames and vanished.

  Gwynn pulled herself up onto stiff legs and answered the door. It was Emily holding a jar of jam. Having clearly learned the lesson of getting lost, she was over-prepared for cold this time, wearing a coat with a fur-lined hood that framed her face.

  “I told you you didn’t have to return the jar,” Gwynn said and looked away, cringing at her own gruffness.

  When she drummed up the courage to look at her again, Emily was holding out the jar to her.

  “I thought I’d bring a little taste of summer,” she said.

  Gwynn took the jam, and the touch of their fingers where they met over the jar lingered like a burn. All canning jars look alike, but Gwynn was certain this one was hers. She opened the door a little wider, a hesitant invitation that forced Emily to brush past her as she came in the house. Her hair still smelled like raspberries. She’d made the jam herself.

  Gwynn watched with her hands in her pockets as Emily took off her coat, and the reason for the heavy coat became evident: Emily was wearing an unseasonal tank top and tennis skirt that showed off her legs perfectly. The clothes Emily had worn last time had hidden the most delicious curves. Gwynn tried not to stare as Emily took in the room with frank curiosity, finding enough distraction to be polite by trying to imagine the place from the other woman’s perspective.

  Would Emily think it was odd the way she lived? The room was bare as a cell, empty except for a potbelly stove, a table with one chair, her bed and the meditation rig. The bare-board walls and exposed beams, instead of making it all look rustic, only emphasized how spartan the cabin was, but she didn’t mind. She was going to be leaving soon, anyway, and anything that might have felt homey would have only made her feel more attached. Anyway, it would have been impossible to meditate without falling asleep, if she’d been truly comfortable.

  Meditation. The meditation rig. The sensors. They were still on her head! In an instant, the screen on the floor was a wall of flame, and Emily looked down at it and laughed.

  “Is that one of those fireplace videos?” she asked.

  Humiliated, Gwynn took the sensors off her head, and the flames were swallowed in static, but Emily’s face was filled with awe as she looked from the sensors in Gwynn’s hand to the screen and back again. “How did you do that?”

  “Do what?” Gwynn asked.

  “Draw fire with your mind,” Emily said. “That’s what you did, right?”

  “Sort of,” Gwynn said, putting the sensors back on her head. “Fire is just a metaphor. You can translate the data into other things: waves, ripples, sculptures, blobs of color, music.”

  “Fire has its own music,” Emily said and looked Gwynn in the eye with an openly intense look. That look hit her like an arrow to the chest, and the flames leaped so high that the room became brighter. Gwynn had never felt so naked. Fire is just a metaphor, useless for communicating thought exactly, but now it might as well have been a neon sign that said: I WANT YOU.

  The only sign that Emily had noticed was a knowing smile. Was there pity in that smile, too? Gwynn hoped not. She hated it when women felt bad for her for being attracted to them. It had been a common enough occurrence before she moved out to the woods that the absence of the pity-look had added to the relief of being alone. The thought of it after all this time sent the flames snapping this way and that. She forced herself to focus on the conversation.

  “Most of the people who play around with this stuff use it for art, I guess, but I’m more interested in the way you can use it to train the mind.”

  “Biofeedback,” Emily said, and Gwynn brightened. She had forgotten Emily was a physical therapist. “But don’t you need a clear target? Something obvious to strive for, so you know you’re on track?”

  “I do,” Gwynn said. “You can’t see it now, but when I really work at it, I can make the flames focus. Have you ever seen a crème brûlée torch?”

  “Show me,” Emily said.

  Gwynn laughed. “It’s the work of a lifetime. Sometimes when I really work at it for hours, I can focus for an instant. Come back when I’m old, maybe.”

  “I’ve heard,” Emily said, “there are other ways to start a fire.”

  There was no ambiguity in that tone, no denying the desire Gwynn heard in it, just as there had been no denying the desire Gwynn had projected into the flames. The image on the screen, for once, followed mind and body. The fire split into two flames that twisted around each other as Gwynn and Emily embraced. They kissed, and the flames met and burned down—low, low, low—as the two women sank to the floor.

  Emily rolled on top of Gwynn and cupped her face with her hands, kissing her with a passion that could only be described as hungry. Someone wanted her. Wanted her. The knowledge of it. It was too much. The fire burned lower still, and Gwynn answered Emily’s hunger with an open mouth, igniting another wave of passion that pushed her head into the hardwood floor.

  Nervous for the safety of the sensors, Gwynn went to take them off, but Emily covered her hand with hers.

  “I’ve always wanted to make love in front of a fire,” Emily said, and flicked Gwynn’s bottom lip with a hard tongue. “And I want to see what it looks like when you come.”

  “I’ll have to be on top, then,” Gwynn said as she wrapped her arms around Emily’s waist and rolled over to straddle her.

  Emily looked disappointed, and for an instant Gwynn thought she had made a mistake, but Emily half sat up, grabbed the back of Gwynn’s head and pulled her into another kiss while deftly moving one leg out from between Gwynn’s legs. Then she began to grind, hand moving from Gwynn’s head to her neck, down her collarbone and between her breasts to the button of her jeans, which she tugged at playfully, making the seam between Gwynn’s legs tease her clit.

  The room was nearly dark. Gwynn grabbed Emily’s ass, lifting her off the floor as Emily undid the button on Gwynn’s jeans and slipped her hand down, plunging her middle finger into the wetness. Gwynn’s head fell back, mouth gaping, an expression so open that it would have, only a few moments before, filled her with abject horror, but now there was nothing in the room, no sensors, no fire, no potbelly stove, no table, bed, chair or even jam. There was only Gwynn and Emily and the pulsar between them spinning faster and faster until Gwynn came, plunging the room into darkness. When Gwynn opened her eyes, she saw that, far from being gone, the fire had become a single tongue of blue flame.

  MIND CONTROL

  Violet R. Jones

  The cat made a pathetic, prolonged meow, but edged closer to the electric piano keyboard we had set out on the floor, and Zack and I both held our breath. The white-and-brown-spotted cat lifted one delicate paw, and with perfect musical timing, unmistakably tapped out the refrain of “Shave and a Haircut—Two Bits!” Zack and I both cheered. I grabbed Zack and pulled him into a tight hug. “You did it!”

  As soon as Zack got distracted, the cat yowled and hissed, darting away from us into some corner of the laboratory.

  “We did it,” Zack corrected earnestly. Zack’s dark eyes were nearly black. I noticed the way he was holding me was qualitatively different from the way I started it, more than just friendly, celebratory hugging. I pulled away, and moved to stop the tape that was recording our session. Zack held on just long enough to make it clear he didn’t want me to move away.

  “I’m not the one with the special ability,” I said, laughing. Trying to laugh. Trying to make a joke of it. I focused on the computer, logging the tape into evidence rather than looking at Zack.

  “You might not be psychic, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have a special ability,” Zack argued. I could feel him behind me. I could feel him looking at me, a
nd where his eyes moved over my body, it felt almost as if he were touching me. “Who knows where I would be now if I hadn’t met you.”

  Zack had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as an adolescent, and before I met him, had been on a heavy drug cocktail for the past few years. The drugs made him lethargic and slowed his thinking down, but also mellowed the effects of the voices that Zack heard almost constantly. The drugs did not stop the voices, they just made the voices, and everything else, seem a lot less important.

  When he came to me at age eighteen, he’d been a runaway. He was off his meds. His long, blond hair was dirty, and he was dangerously thin and sunken-cheeked. He showed up at the office I shared with three other graduate researchers and told me he was responding to an ad that I placed looking for research subjects that hear voices. Zack had seemed genuinely confused when I told him that I had approval for an experiment like the one he described, but hadn’t placed the ad yet.

  I gave him a sandwich and asked him some questions. At first, I wasn’t at all sure that Zack was the subject that I was looking for, but I didn’t want to send him away when I had a pretty good idea that he had nowhere to go. So, breaking a few campus policies, Zack went home with me that night. That was three years ago.

  Experience had proven my initial impression wrong. Zack was a better subject that I could have ever dreamed. He was the real deal. A genuine telepath.

  At first, the struggle was in keeping the voices out, keeping them quiet without the drugs that Zack absolutely refused to take. I’m about as psychic as a grilled cheese sandwich, so I was working completely in the dark. I used what I learned about guided meditation during my psych rotation and helped Zack build up some mental walls and doorways.

  Day by day, session by session, Zack built up more control and the evidence built up as well. Tonight’s session marked the end. The final success. I would be ready to present my dissertation to the senior professors, evidence in hand, and finally serve up some of that crow I had been eating for the past few years because I dared look into the dark corner of parapsychology.

  After I didn’t—couldn’t—answer, Zack continued, “Dead, probably.”

  The experiment was a success, but it was over. While Zack could probably provide me with research material for the rest of my life, it would not be fair to him. The skinny, dirty-haired runaway had grown into a handsome, intelligent young man. A young man who was more than ready for his life to start.

  Zack made a disapproving sound. “Turn around.”

  I turned to look at him. He had a thoughtful little frown. I saw myself in the expression. It meant something that we had been together for long enough that our expressions had started to mirror each other.

  “This has been good for you too, hasn’t it?” Zack asked.

  “Better than good,” I replied. “Zack, you have been the best thing to ever happen to me.” Shit. Why did I have to say it like that?

  Zack smiled. “I…I’m really glad…” He reached out to stroke my cheek. I pulled away.

  “Zack, I’m your doctor,” I said sharply. The stern and disapproving tone had worked much better three years ago. As Zack had grown physically and grown into his power, it was more and more often met with an indulgent smile rather than the quiet contrition that it inspired when we first met.

  “Okay, then, just continue being my doctor. There is a lot more that we can do together,” Zack said.

  “What we have already done is enough to transform the field of parapsychology on its own. And besides, don’t you want more out of life than being my lab rat?”

  “I am not your lab rat,” Zack replied. There was a sharpness to his tone that startled me.

  “No, of course not,” I agreed. “I mean—”

  Zack didn’t let me finish. “In my whole life, you are the only person who knew what I could do but always treated me like a human being.”

  “Zack—”

  “I don’t want you to let me go for my own good. I don’t want our time together to be over.”

  “You can’t sleep on my couch for the rest of your life,” I replied.

  Zack’s eyes dropped to my mouth. He stared. My lips started to tingle. “Well, I would like to stop sleeping on the couch.”

  “Zack!”

  “Don’t,” Zack said gently.

  And I forgot what I was going to say.

  “Besides, there are still so many more things we can do. We haven’t even tried the experiment on another person yet.”

  I shook my head. “Testing on people requires a whole other set of ethical considerations. We’d never get university approval, and even if we got it, I’m not sure it would be right.”

  “I’ve been doing it,” Zack admitted.

  “Doing what?” I asked dumbly. “Using your power on people?” The thought should not have been shocking but it was. Zack always seemed more than a little afraid of his power.

  Zack nodded, looking a little scared. “I used to do it unconsciously before. But you taught me how to be aware of my power. How to control it, and not let it control me. I think I use it on people less now, but…I can do more than get a cat to play the piano. I can get people to do things. People are easier, especially if the thing that I want them to do is something that they really want.”

  No, no, no… “That is completely—”

  “Kiss me.”

  I leapt forward, throwing my arms around his neck. The impulse to kiss him was very familiar. It was difficult to pull apart the pieces that didn’t actually belong to me. He leaned down to kiss me. His lips were soft and moist against mine, and when he sighed against my lips, his breath was sweet. I smacked him on the back of the head.

  “What are you thinking?” I shouted, pushing him away. “That is exactly the kind of ethical violation I was talking about! After everything we—”

  He held up his hands. “Dr. Ryan…”

  “—have been through together—”

  “…do you remember when you told me that smart people are more suggestible than other people?”

  “—to have you just casually—”

  “Gillian! I didn’t use my power.”

  “What?” I snorted.

  He had the nerve to look calm. To smile. He pointed to the monitor. I had forgotten to disconnect him and the little round receivers were still attached to his skin. I looked at the readings. His temperature and heart rate were a little elevated, but there had been no activity in the area of his brain associated with using his powers in the last minute or two.

  “You didn’t use your power to get me to kiss you.”

  Zack stepped forward. “I didn’t. I swear.”

  “But you did use it on me.” There were signs of it being used twice after the cat experiment.

  Zack at least had the decency to look embarrassed. He didn’t move away though, not giving any ground. “To get you to turn around and stop you from telling me to stop flirting with you.”

  “You could have planted a suggestion for me to kiss you,” I observed.

  “I probably could, but I didn’t. I wouldn’t,” Zack replied.

  “And you’re saying that this is the only time you used your powers on me?” I challenged.

  “No, I am not saying that. But I am saying that you can trust me. And when you kissed me, it was because you wanted to.” I believed him. I trusted him.

  “Thank you,” Zack said. He stroked his fingers though my hair and I tried not to let myself notice how good it felt.

  “Just because you want something—”

  “Doesn’t make it wrong—” Zack interrupted. “Look, Gilly, I’m not the same scared eighteen-year-old who wandered into your office. I have a GED, a job, friends, a life. And I have that because of you. And even though I’m grateful, this isn’t about gratitude either. I don’t love you because I am grateful to you.”

  “Zack, you—”

  “I love you because I know what’s in your heart better than anyone. I know the way you think, sometimes b
etter than you know yourself. And you are beautiful. I do know what love is, and I love everything about you.”

  My heart was in my throat. I could not speak. Zack smiled at me gently and wiped the tears from my eyes.

  Yes. Yes, I want him. Yes, I will let myself have this.

  Zack pulled me close against his young, firm body. He buried his hands in my hair, and he kissed me.

  My breath went out in a soft moan, and Zack pushed his tongue into my mouth. He took hold of my wrists, one in each hand, and pulled them over my head. I didn’t understand what he was doing until he had my wrists held tightly in one hand. I had thought about this before—being with someone who I could trust to be this vulnerable with. Zack must have known. He lifted my hands higher, so that I had to stand on tiptoe. His free hand found my breast and even through my lab coat and shirt, he made me shiver.

  “Trust me,” Zack urged quietly. His breath was warm against my lips.

  I strained against his hold, but it was solid. “I do. I do trust you.”

  “No,” Zack replied. “Trust me enough to give up control.” When I realized what he was really asking, I froze. But I thought about all of the ways that Zack had trusted me. “Yes. Okay.”

  “Thank you.” Zack pressed a light kiss to my lips. “Don’t move.”

  He stepped away from me. I should have fallen without him there, but I didn’t. My body was rooted in place.

  “Oh,” Zack moaned softly. “If only you could see yourself.” Then again, more coherently. “You should see yourself.”

  He moved to get the camera we had used to record the session with the cat.

  “Zack, what are you doing?” I was relieved that I could still talk when I could not move.

  “If anything is worth recording, this is.” He turned to me and smiled. “And I like hearing you talk.”

  He started setting up the machine, pointing it toward me. He was quick and efficient. He had been helping me set up for years.

  “How long have you been this aware of what I was thinking?” I asked. My legs burned from holding this position, my arms were sore and my cunt ached. I wanted his body against me. In me.