The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 3

by Maxim Jakubowski

  She’s whispering now. I’m your mother. She tells me. You need a good sucking my poor baby and you know I always look after you and she tells me to stroke myself gently now while mummy goes to sort out my brother who’s in agony she says and needs to wet himself.

  I WATCH HER GIVE HIM AN INCREDIBLE TEASING BLOW JOB. AND THEY SAY HE’S INTO BOYS. I’M SCARED TO TOUCH MYSELF IN CASE I COME I’M SO WIRED UP AND SHE’S HERE. OHMYGOD HER HEAD’S DEEP BETWEEN MY LEGS AND SHE’S TURNING ME OVER AND LICKING MY BALLS AND NOW SHE’S WHISPERING. SHE WANTS ME TO PLAY GAMES NOW. SAYS I’M HER BROTHER. SHE’S MY OLDER SISTER AND SHE’S COME TO SHOW ME WHAT’S WHAT CAUSE I’VE BEEN EYEING HER UP FOR MONTHS AND SPYING ON HER IN THE BATH AND NOW SHE’S GOING TO GIVE IT TO ME. I BET THAT VIDEO’S GETTING ME AND SHE’S ROLLING ME OVER AND I FEEL SORT OF HELPLESS. THERE’S A ROLL OF FILM AND A CAMERA ON THE TABLE WITH THE PHONE BETWEEN ME AND HIM AND I CAN’T LOOK AT HIM BUT I CAN SEE HIM WANKING OUT THE CORNER OF MY EYE AND HE’S MAKING THESE SOUNDS AND I DON’T WANT TO HEAR THEM. BUT BEFORE I CAN THINK ABOUT WHAT THEY REMIND ME OF SHE’S TELLING ME TO BEG HER LIKE A BROTHER TO TAKE ME INSIDE HER.

  I’M THAT CONFUSED I FEEL SHE’S MY BROTHER AND I’M BEGGING HER TO FUCK ME. TAKE ME. I WANT YOU TO TAKE ME AND SHE’S RIDING ME. AND ONLY NOW I SEE HER BODY. CURVY. HER BREASTS ROUND AND FIRM AS THEY RIDE IN AND OUT MY LINE OF SIGHT. BEYOND HER THERE’S SOMETHING FAMILIAR ON THE TV. MY EYES ARE SHUT AND I FEEL LIKE A GIRL AND SHE’S MY BROTHER OR MAYBE HIM WITH HIS NOISES GIVING ME A GOOD BANGING AND I’M SCARED AND I CAN’T KEEP THIS UP MUCH LONGER IF SHE DOESN’T STOP.

  This is speeded-up Super 8 like a home movie only it needs soundtrack like a trip to the beach or scary rides at Thorpe Park on the big screen shot in Steadicam, with cranes and 360 degree turns like Tarantino or de Palma. I’m taking them higher and higher riding the waves above the empty restaurant, available for private functions with her gourmet four-course dinner menu, including drink and coffee at £26.50 p.p.

  She’s making me keep up this long slow pull. She’s her breast in my mouth and she tells me it’s feeding time. Her baby’s starving and she’s my mother. And I don’t know why. But when she tells me this she takes my cock in her mouth to clean me she says. And I know he’s watching and I can hear my sounds as if they come from another room. From another place. Mother! I sob. Mother!

  And the room turns quiet from all of our breaths. Nothing moves except for my shaking and the sound of this voice muffled as if from another time. Somewhere else.

  Mother!

  I cry.

  Diver’s Moon

  E. M. Arthur

  My oncologist squeezed my hand and pronounced me in full remission. “I’m sorry, Skyler,” he said, “about Danni.”

  Danni had been my live-in nurse when I was too weak to get myself to the john. She was a youthful cliche of blonde, buxom beauty. My wife, Andrea, spent a lot of time with her. When my body betrayed my marriage, Andrea found comfort in Danni’s arms.

  “I couldn’t have known when I recommended her,” the doctor said. His narrow face went red with embarrassment. His hand sweated in mine.

  He’d saved my life, but what did he know about my missing soul? What did he know about losing my body, a body that could grab the rings and rotate an iron cross into a dead still handstand? What did he know about watching your wife make love to another woman as a gift to you when the best you could manage was to hold your limp member in an emaciated hand?

  “No,” I said. “You couldn’t have known she was a lesbian.”

  He pulled his hand back and hid it in the pocket of his smock. “I knew about that,” he said. “It just never occurred to me that she and your wife would, well, leave you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Took me by surprise too.” We stared at each other for a long awkward moment.

  I broke the silence. “Thank you, doctor,” I said.

  “Maybe you should get away for a while. Take a good long vacation. Go someplace new, someplace where there are no reminders you were sick.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Someplace where you can enjoy being healthy.”

  I nodded, left his office and headed home to face my emptiness alone.

  I pulled my Subaru wagon to a full stop at the intersection where Martin’s Court crosses Black Diamond Way, the street that ends in my cul-de-sac.

  Dark windows from across the paved circle stared at me. My grey, split-level ranch nestled in behind my weed-covered gardens and my brown, gone-to-seed lawn, accused me of failures. I sat in the August heat for a moment, white-knuckling the wheel. Hot beads of sweat rolled down my neck and under the collar of my shirt.

  I couldn’t pull across the street and drive up to that house of betrayals. When I was 34, I had a thriving business coaching gymnastics. My teams were winning. My body was my best asset.

  At 35, I was old. I’d lost nearly a hundred pounds lying in a bed in that accusing house. I’d vomited in every room. My body had betrayed me, then the insurance company dumped me. I’d had to sell the gym. Finally, there was Andrea and the sponge bath that had gone too far.

  Andrea only wanted to help me. My nurse had wanted to help us both.

  I banged my head against the steering wheel. I wanted to drive the memory of that night from my head. It was too late. The images, the smells, the sounds rose up and filled me again. Danni had come to my room. She lit candles and burned incense. She put a card table beside the bed, draped it in a linen cloth, and set out a basin of warm water, some sponges, and scented massage oils. She pulled her blonde hair up and clasped it with a tortoise shell clip, then she took off her skirt and her white, button-down blouse. Beneath, she wore only her tan, cotton underwear, and a blue sport bra. “Don’t want to get these wet,” she said, dropping her blouse to the floor.

  She’d given me sponge baths before, but she had never taken off any clothing. “Andrea?” I asked.

  “She’ll be along in a minute.” Danni sat down on the bed. Long-fingered hands dipped a sponge in the basin of warm water. She squeezed the sponge until it stopped dripping. Then she pulled back my sheet.

  Shame for my ruined body filled me. I felt like the sponge in her hand, like an empty, seeping, brownish lump.

  Andrea came in from the bathroom. Andrea. Dark and succulent, my wife, my friend. She was half Mestizo, and her skin was molten bronze. Her dark eyes caught the flickering candlelight. She wore my green terrycloth robe.

  “Danni’s going to show me how to give you a special sponge bath,” she said. She opened her robe and let it fall. White silk panties, stockings, garters, and bra made her skin all the more exotic. I wanted to lift a hand and touch her. I wanted to push Danni aside and pull my wife to me, to give her my love.

  I tried to sit up. Danni’s hand was firm. She used the sponge to press me back. She stroked my neck. “There, now,” she said. “You relax and enjoy. Let us do the work here. We’re taking care of you, not the other way around.”

  Andrea sat on the side of the bed beside pale Danni. Andrea leaned over and kissed me. Her breasts, cupped in white silk, pressed against me. Her breath was warm and sweet. The perfume I’d given her for our last anniversary promised me her love.

  “Like this,” Danni said. She handed Andrea a second sponge. She wrapped her pale hands around Andrea’s dark fingers. Together, they squeezed the sponge. “Keep enough water to dampen the skin,” Danni whispered. “You don’t want the sponge to scratch.”

  I watched my wife do as she was told. I felt her sponge on my neck, on my face. Relax, I told myself. This may be the last time you experience anything like this. God, I tried to relax. But part of me wanted to rise, to give, to be more than a recipient.

  Danni guided Andrea through my cleansing. It was warm, long and slow. Danni wrapped her arms around Andrea to better guide her hands. Danni’s white arms embraced my wife from behind. “Can you feel the warmth?” she whispered to my wife. Andrea looked into my eyes. She seemed to be asking me if I was OK. I wanted her to be happy
, to have what I couldn’t give her. I forced a smile.

  Andrea nodded.

  Danni kissed her neck, nuzzled her beneath the ear, beneath the dark, silken ringlets of hair. I saw the goose flesh rise on Andrea’s arms.

  I moaned. I reached for myself.

  They laughed. Together, they moved me farther onto the bed.

  Danni lifted a bottle of oil from the table. She opened it and poured it onto Andrea’s open palms. The scent of patchouli and vanilla filled the room. Danni worked the oil into Andrea’s hands and forearms. She placed Andrea’s hands on my shrunken chest. Andrea slipped a leg over me. She sat above me like she had so many times. She looked down at me, her eyes both sad and filled with desire. Deep inside her dark eyes, I saw pity. God, that hurt more than anything else I saw that night.

  Danni worked on my feet, slowly massaging, oiling, and working her up my calves and thighs.

  I watched Andrea’s face. I felt Danni’s hands between my legs. I prayed I would respond. Then I realized Danni wasn’t reaching for me.

  Andrea gasped and arched her back.

  Her bra fell away, released from behind. Her oiled hand went to one breast. A pale hand came around her from behind and took her other breast.

  I felt Danni moving her fingers between my legs, beneath Andrea.

  Andrea leaned forward, giving Danni more room to work.

  “Andrea?” I asked.

  “Oh, shit!” she said.

  “Here,” Danni said. She pulled Andrea off my hips. She helped her out of her panties and stockings. Andrea tugged at Danni’s sports bra and panties.

  I rolled on my side, trying to reach for my wife.

  Danni pushed me back. She took my limp member in her oiled hand. “He wants to help,” Danni said. She helped Andrea lift a leg and slip it over my oiled chest. She carefully settled my wife into position so my tongue could reach her rear. “Gently,” Danni said. “You take it easy.”

  I nodded.

  Danni put a pillow under my head. She slipped a finger into Andrea. When she pulled it out, she let me lick it. It tasted of oil and the familiar spice of my wife. I closed my eyes and savoured the taste.

  Danni laughed. Then she disappeared toward the foot of the bed. I began to tongue Andrea’s ass. I did what I could for her, but I knew her moans of pleasure were not from my feeble tongue.

  I felt Danni’s mouth on my cock. Oiled hands massaged my sac. A finger slipped between my cheeks. God, it should have been heaven. If my body had not betrayed me, it would have been.

  My neck got sore. I had to let my head fall back, had to let Andrea go. Eventually, Danni gave up on making me hard.

  Andrea turned herself around. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “It’s OK. It’s not your fault.” She kissed me then started to lift herself off me, but she stopped, straddling me, ass high, supported by one extended leg, kneeling on the other. Her eyes rolled upward and her back arched. “Shit,” she said. “Danni. Oh shit.”

  Between Andrea’s dark legs, I saw white hands pinching nipples on white breasts glistening with oil. Danni’s blond hair had come loose from her clip. It brushed at those hands and breasts. Her face was in my wife’s ass. The wrinkles on the bridge of Andrea’s nose, the way her eyes rolled upward, the tension in her belly muscles. I could see my wife was about to come.

  Poised above me like that, she screamed a woman’s name. I wanted to be happy for her release. I wanted to be a man who loved his wife so much that he felt joy in her pleasure even when he couldn’t be the source of it.

  I wasn’t the man I wanted to be.

  Danni and Andrea rolled away from me. They made love on the bed beside me, oblivious to my pain.

  It was the last time I saw Andrea nude, the last time I touched her, tasted her.

  Andrea and Danni had stayed until I started gaining weight, until I was working for the gym part time. They had helped each other through until my hair came in enough to cut close for that Bruce Willis look Andrea said was sexy. The day I managed my first pull-up, I came home to an empty house. Andrea and Danni took my dog, the living room furniture, and exactly half my remaining bank account.

  I continued my recovery without them, at least physically. I fought until I could do 20 pull-ups. I cursed my wind and skinny legs until I could run for half-an-hour. I fought to improve, to live. Now, I was cured. The fight was over.

  Without Andrea, the fight had been all I had.

  I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel between my hands and started to shake. I was alive. I was coming home a cured man. It was supposed to be a wonderful moment, a celebration.

  Instead, I had no idea who I was. My new life was empty. My body betrayed me. It left me with a wiry, stranger’s body. My wife betrayed me. She left me a house full of ugly memories.

  An impatient driver behind me laid on the horn.

  I yanked the wheel left and headed for the interstate.

  Three days later, I was in Glenwood Spring, Colorado, standing on top of the ladder of a three-metre diving board over an Olympic-sized pool. I hadn’t stood on a board since diving in high school. My skin was oil slick from the minerals in the hot spring-fed pool. A ballet of steam danced across the surface of the water below. The sun was high. A fresh mountain breeze caressed my chest and arms.

  The view could touch the soul, if a man had a soul to touch.

  In front of me, three wings of chalet-style resort hotel wrapped around the steaming pool. Beyond and above the red-tiled roofs, snowy Rocky Mountain spires reached for the belly of a sky deeper and bluer than the pool below. Even I paused to stare.

  “You afraid of heights?” the woman on the ladder behind me said.

  I stepped forward onto the fibreglass diving board, then I turned to face her. “Sorry,” I said. “The mountains are so . . .” I let it trail off, suddenly aware of how skinny I felt, of how explanations had become so complex, so tiring.

  She smiled. “I know,” she said. “It’s a stunning view.”

  The dancing freckles on her smile-wrinkled nose held my gaze the same way the view had. I hadn’t seen a woman smile like that since my first few weeks with Andrea, since before . . .

  She stepped up onto the board with me. Her dark hair was wet and smoothed to her shoulders. Her dun eyes flashed with humour under the high mountain sun. The lines near her eyes suggested maybe 30 years of well-lived life. Her dark-blue one-piece was a swimmer’s suit, not a sunbather’s advertisement for attention. She reminded me of a sleek, happy river otter in a Speedo.

  Her smile faded. She cocked her head to the side, pulled her hair away from her neck, and twisted it until water dripped onto the board. “You don’t want to stand up here too long,” she said. “The breeze is cool, but that sun’ll give you cancer.”

  I almost laughed. She wouldn’t have understood. I wanted to say something else, to say something that would make her smile again. But I knew better. My blond hair was still close-cut. I knew I was still pale. I was getting stronger, but I looked more like a tofu-fed yoga instructor than the pommel horse, rings, and high-bar man I had been.

  I wanted to run and jump from the board. I wanted to hide in the deep blue water.

  “I’ve never seen anything –”

  “New eyes on ancient beauty,” she interrupted. The otter’s smile returned.

  I nodded.

  “It reminds me to appreciate the things I see every day,” she said.

  “You live here?”

  “Assistant manager,” she said. “You going to dive?”

  Dive? I was on a three-metre board for the first time in maybe 17 years. An otter woman was flirting with me. The sky was suddenly bluer and the air colder. A breeze swept in from the snowy peaks. Gooseflesh covered me.

  “Breeze makes me a little cold up here,” she said. Goose flesh rippled up her legs and under her suit. Nipples suddenly stood from the modest rounds of her breasts. She crossed her arms. Her breasts swelled.

  My chest and legs were chil
led, but my crotch moved, stretched, and warmed for the first time since . . . I wanted to reach out and touch those hardening peaks.

  She caught me staring. Her smile was gone.

  I knew the flirt we had shared was gone, too. “You go ahead,” I said. I stepped aside.

  She strode to the end of the board, tugging at the bottom of her suit to seat it under the muscled curve of her ass.

  At the end of the board, she turned around. The otter’s grin came back. She nodded to me. Then her eyes changed. The spark left, replaced by a distant focus, by a look that turned inward, that found some quiet centre.

  I knew that look. She was about to mount the beam. She was going to spike a new vault. She was fully in herself, and she was beautiful.

  She lifted her arms in a ritual of balance I knew well. She set the toes of her right foot, then her left, on the very edge of the board. The mountains beyond her seemed to lean inward, anticipating her, preparing to spot her if needed. I wondered what it would be like to put my hands on those hips, to hold her aloft, to help her move through lithe, stretching tumbles.

  She tested the bounce of the board.

  Automatically, I stepped back onto the ladder so my weight wouldn’t kill her spring.

  I watched her breathe. Her breasts grew, stretched her suit, then relaxed. She lifted on toe tip. A muscled line appeared in her thigh, pointing upward to the hem of her suit. The blue fabric wrapped her flexing abs and curved under her, gripping her mons and cradling her sex in mineral dampness. She dropped her weight through her heels. The board flexed low, then rose. She lifted upward. Glossy thighs snapped up against perfect breasts; muscled arms embraced bent knees. She spun backward, hair spraying. She had more than a full rotation before she dropped below the level of the board. I saw her otter’s eyes flash, and I swear she winked at me.

  Two-and-a-half reverse. She stretched full out and her hard body slipped through mineral mists and disappeared without a splash.