The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 3

by Maxim Jakubowski

  A few hours later, they got a bite to eat, beef tacos, beans and yellow rice, chased with three chilled bottles of Corona beer. She wanted to walk around town after the meal, although the sun was still strong and very few people were out. He relented and let her have her way. On the outskirts of town, they rented horses from a wizened old man who thought they were gringos, albeit “Los Negroes Americanos”, brought in to repair the roof of the ancient cathedral there. They rode out into the flatlands several miles away, following a dusty trail that ran south along the river. She laughed when his horse, a brown stallion, whinnied loudly from thirst and stopped to drink the grimy water. He stayed atop the animal, clutching the reins tightly, feeling its warmth and bulk beneath him. She dismounted and walked in front of her horse, near the ragged sagebrush and cactus. For him, it was good hearing her laugh.

  Eventually, they tied up the horses, took off their clothes and waded out into the river. The water went up to their necks, briefly cooling them. She swam closer to him, smiling, and put her arms around his neck. Her weight made him slip and he went under, the water going into his nose and mouth before he could resurface. They laughed and kissed after he got his breath back. He watched her swim out into the middle of the river with short, powerful strokes, the water shimmering as it rolled off her back and neck. Twice she dived under the surface of the water, with her exposed sex pointed up toward the heavens. He swam out to meet her and they played like kids, swimming side by side, floating on their backs and splashing water on each other.

  When the frolicking was over they swam back to shore, where she took a blanket from her animal and brought it out to the riverbank. They sprawled on the blanket, ate the last of the dry tacos, shared the remaining warm beer, and cleaned sand from their toes. She kissed him and closed her eyes, holding an arm over her face to shield it from the blazing sun. He lay there silent beside her, enjoying her company.

  After a time she moved close to him, touching his face. “Baby, I left some things out.”

  “Huh? What?”

  She said nothing else. Her full, soft mouth covered his own and her tongue slid easily between his lips. Maybe his leaving everything behind was not so bad. His ex-wife was never this hot or spontaneous. Everything was planned, thought out to dullness, according to schedule.

  “The man I killed was my husband.” Her voice was drab, lifeless. “He deserved to die. He wouldn’t give me a divorce. I was in love with another man and he knew it. He made my life hell. I only turned to someone else because he was such a mean bastard. My young lover left me too, walked out, after I killed my husband for him. Something went haywire in my head. The doctors said I had a complete psychotic break, totally nuts. Lost my mind completely. Do you hate me now? Do you still love me?”

  “Yes, I still love you,” he stammered. But he had some doubts and fears.

  “Does this change anything with us?”

  “Not really.” He examined her face carefully for obvious signs of madness and found none.

  “I really am nuts, you know,” she said, taking his hand to suck on his fingers until he pulled away. He could feel his sap rise along with his dread of her.

  Later, they made love all night, going at it in every variation possible, until they collapsed exhausted in the juice-soaked sheets, totally sated. He slept the sleep of the dead, as the saying goes. When he awoke, Amina was gone, all of her belongings as well. Most of his remaining money was gone from his wallet. She had left him chump change, a few dollars. Panicked, he raced down to the street to see if everything was gone, and yes, his precious black 1949 Mercury Club Coupe had been stolen too. His woman with the deep red voice. Damn her!

  While he stood bare-chested in his shorts in the spot where his car had been parked, a very pretty Mexican woman with dark features carrying a basket of white plastic skulls approached him, holding something. An envelope. She stood and watched him open it.

  The letter consisted of four sentences, hurriedly scribbled in childish handwriting. His hand trembled with anger as he read its painful black-widow message:

  I still left some things out. I am crazy and you could get hurt. I really like you. There have been others, before you, like you. This is the best way, for both of us.

  He stood there dumbfounded, completely confused, like he had been slapped three or four times in the face with a blackjack. Or knifed in the heart. A real fool. Threw everything away for one night of pleasure, his entire life. Across the square, he saw three people in skeleton outfits marching in a group toward the empty market. A truck full of mariachi musicians, fully dressed in their stage costumes with guitars, pulled up and the men jumped off and walked into the hotel. One of them held a large skull in his hand.

  Tomorrow was the start of the two-day Mexican Day of the Dead festival, the celebration of Death and its many wonders – how appropriate for him right now.

  And maybe he was crying a bit because the cute Mexican woman patted him softly on the shoulder and said: “Mujeres, ellas dan mucha lata.” Which loosely means: Women can sometimes be a pain in the neck. Possibly true, if you don’t know where and how to pick them. But not in this case. Amina knew who she was and what she was about. He was the one who didn’t know anything about himself. She did him a favour, walking away before she took his life too, and added his scalp to the others. A real blessing, her gift of his life after that night of miracles. In his hands was this new start, this fresh possibility, Aminas gift. All he would do now was wash up, eat, and take another accounting of his few assets, and then there was time to think about tomorrow and the day after that.

  Going Out With Angela

  David Surface

  He met her in a writing workshop in the basement of an old church. The other women seemed either angry, fearful, contemptuous, or unapproachable in some way. She alone moved and spoke like what in some other place and time might be called a lady – settling herself into the ridiculously small school chair with a calm, deliberate grace, measuring out her words the same way.

  When she read a story about the house she’d grown up in, it was clear to him that this was someone who cherished things. It was generally not permitted, he was noticing, to cherish things. People here wrote the same way they drove their cars, to establish dominance, to force their personalities on the world and mow each other down with their big, angry voices. Like the skinny woman with the spiky black hair who turned on her one night, calling the story she’d just read “sentimental”.

  “Thank you,” Angela smiled. Untouched.

  “Thank me all you want.” The dark woman wouldn’t let up. “Crap is still crap.”

  Despite the evidence of his eyes and ears, he’d still thought she might need some comforting after that, so he spoke to her for the first time after class.

  “Don’t worry about her,” he’d said. “She’s just mad because she can’t write like you.”

  “Oh, her.” Angela smiled sweetly. “She’s just mad because I wouldn’t fuck her.”

  Her laugh, a throaty giggle, made him feel like something was coming untied inside him. Her skin was soft white, her features, small and delicate like a Victorian doll, did not go with the black leather biker jacket with its unfriendly arsenal of zippers and the single earring that dangled over her soft cheek like a little scimitar. He knew that if the point pressed too hard there would be a single drop of blood that would look almost black against that white cheek.

  They began going out for drinks after every workshop, to the dark little bars she knew on the scrambled downtown streets he still had trouble figuring out. Walking past all the lighted windows with people eating and drinking and talking inside, he used to imagine he was being shown a series of beautifully lighted tableaux he could make his own if he wanted to. Now he was part of one of those couples in one of those lighted windows, and he thought of the young man or woman outside, newly arrived in the city, walking by and looking in – what would they see? A man, still young, leaning across a booth toward an ageless-looking
woman in flowered silks and black leather, hanging onto her every word, struggling to make his own equal to hers.

  When she talked about fucking it confused him. Women fucking women. He did not understand how that was supposed to work. Did they use something? Angela laughed. “I thought that’s what all men liked to see – two women together.”

  He had seen it, of course, in magazines and videos, but most of it did not move him and he’d fast-forward through those scenes to get to something he could recognize.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s kind of like watching a woman make love to a mirror.”

  “So,” she said. “One woman is just like any other woman?”

  “No,” he said, quickly, “I mean – I’m talking about that stuff in magazines and films. You know.”

  “So,” she said. “You need to see a man.”

  “Sure.” Then, quickly, “With a woman.”

  “Not by himself?”

  He realized he’d never seen that, and he said so. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that.”

  “Of course you haven’t,” she said, “You see plenty of women by themselves, but never men, because the men who make those films think straight men don’t want to see that. They don’t even care if a woman might want to see it.”

  “What about you?” he said. “Would you like to see it?” He was drunk now, by God.

  “Honey, please.” She smiled, reaching into her purse. “I’ve seen it.”

  While she talked he was aware of her digging around in her purse. Cigarettes, he thought, until he saw smoke from the one she already had burning in the ashtray. He glanced back down in time to see her withdraw the hypodermic needle from her soft white forearm and slip it discreetly inside the slim, cream-coloured plastic case and close it with a pop.

  “So,” she said, quietly. “Does this bother you?”

  “No. I mean – why should it?” He didn’t think his face showed any alarm but when he looked into her eyes he knew he was caught.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Why should it?” He couldn’t tell if she was angry with him, then she smiled her sweet smile again and he wondered if what she’d just put in her arm was already working on her. “It does bother you.”

  “No.” He couldn’t get rid of the lie – he’d been raised to lie where other people’s feelings were concerned. “It’s just – I guess I’m just not used to seeing that.”

  “You will be,” she said, taking a sip of her martini. He felt a conspiratorial energy surge across the space between them.

  “I don’t think I could ever do that. Not with a needle, anyway.” More than anything, he didn’t want her to think that he was afraid of it – or of her. He leaned across the table and half-whispered, “Can you toot it?”

  She stared at him over the rim of her glass, eyes wide and unbelieving. “Toot it?”

  “Yeah, you know.” He put a finger over one nostril and sniffed. She stared for a moment longer, then laughed a wild, undignified laugh he’d never heard from her before and covered her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “Sure, John, we’re all junkies here in New York.” Then she told him. “It’s insulin.”

  The shame hit him so hard that he went blind for a moment – wasn’t that what happened to diabetics? “I’m sorry . . .” he said.

  “Don’t be,” she said, still laughing a little. “Maybe I should try it that way.”

  If he could have made himself disappear into the ground he would have done it. Instead, he sat with his eyes shut tight, unable to look at her.

  “John,” he heard her say, “Open your eyes.”

  He heard something low and musical like a challenge in her voice, and thought, Kiss me. Then he felt cold liquid running in all directions down his scalp, through his hair and into his collar. He opened his eyes and saw her smiling at him, his empty gimlet glass still in her hand, then the big manager who was suddenly standing over them, frowning.

  “It’s all right.” Angela smiled graciously up at the big man. “We were just going.”

  For the rest of the evening, whenever he heard her rattling around in her purse he kept his eyes trained on her face and would not look down until he heard the pop of the syringe going back into its plastic case.

  “I’m sorry, you can’t do that here.”

  John looked up and saw their waitress looking down at the space on the floor between their table and her feet.

  “What do you mean?” Angela said – quietly, but with an unmistakable edge.

  “That,” the woman said, thrusting her chin toward the hypodermic needle in Angela’s hand.

  “This is insulin. I’m a diabetic.”

  “I know what it is,” the young woman said, “But you can’t do that here. You’ll have to go somewhere else.”

  “Like where? Where do you think I should go?” Angela’s smile, her voice stayed calm. “Would you like me to go into the restroom? In the toilet stall? Maybe out back in the alley?”

  John saw the waitress stiffen. She was getting more than she’d probably bargained for – John almost felt sorry for her. She made one last attempt. “My boss says you can’t do that here.”

  “Listen,” Angela said, “you tell your boss to show me the law that says I can’t do this here.”

  John watched the young woman walk away and huddle by the bar with a big man in a stretch green sport shirt. “You were pretty tough,” John said, admiringly.

  “She’s just doing what that asshole is telling her to do.” John saw the man point his finger at them, talking faster, the young woman looking down and shaking her head.

  “Is there a law?” John asked.

  “They don’t want me to stop because it’s illegal. They want me to stop because they don’t like seeing needles.” Angela lit a cigarette and frowned against the smoke that curled around her eyes. “If I have to see it every day, they can see it once in a while.”

  They had many things in common, he was finding. They had both suffered at the hands of men. She in a different way than him, but also not different, he thought, not so different at all. Neither of them had been raped, exactly, but both had got caught in something that had gone too far. He thought of the common phrase he’d heard in discussions of rape, that when sex becomes violent it’s no longer sex, and he wondered if the inverse was true, that when violence becomes sexual, is it no longer violence?

  They had held him down. In the bathroom of the high school, on the cold tile floor with the smell of piss and disinfectant in his face. While they were hurting him he’d wished that he could no longer have what he had between his legs so they would have nothing to grab onto, nothing to hit and hurt. If he’d been a girl, he imagined, they could not hurt him, at least not in that way. How could you hurt what wasn’t there?

  He wondered if she had been held down too. She did not seem to be the type that could be held down. He pictured her dissolving under someone’s grunting, blind weight, turning to white smoke in their hands, leaving only her black leathers behind, and one glittering earring.

  Outside, he was surprised to see it was still light. He wanted to walk on the hoods of all the cars like stepping stones, walk all the way to the river like that. With her. They came to a park, a sort of triangular brick island where the avenue split in two with giant sculptures of twisted metal painted fire-engine red, sharp and dangerous-looking. He was looking up at them when he realized she wasn’t walking beside him any more. He turned and saw her sitting on one of the benches several yards behind him, head bowed like she was praying.

  “Are you OK?” he asked.

  “Yes. I’ll be fine in a minute.” Her voice sounded flat and strange to him, and her face looked more pale than usual. She was holding herself perfectly still like she was listening for something. He felt panic start its slow, cold rise inside his stomach.

  “Do you want me to go get you something to eat?”

  “No.” He waited to hear I’ll be all right in a minute, but she didn’t say
it. He stood over her, feeling clumsy and useless, knowing there was nothing he could say but unable to keep from saying it. What can I do?”

  “Nothing.” He understood and was prepared to do nothing since that was what she wanted, then she spoke again. “Just don’t look at me!” Anger flashing out at him through whatever she was fighting. It was the first time she’d ever spoken in anger to him and he felt tears jump into his eyes.

  He went to a bench several yards away, sat with his back to her and waited, completely held there by what she’d asked him to do. He could no more have moved than if he was bolted to the ground like one of these sculptures.

  He knew she was up before he looked. “OK.” He heard her voice, still a little strange but better, “Let’s go.” He turned and saw her on her feet, adjusting her skirt and blouse. Smiling and walking toward him.

  It was over the third martini that the idea came to him, sitting in the corner bar with the huge red vinyl booths with a hard rain peppering the plate glass windows that flared up with taxi light and faded.

  She was angel thin with lovely breasts that were not large but seemed too large for her slender boy’s body. “I love the smell of gin,” she told him.

  “Smells like Christmas trees,” he grinned and she grinned back, both of them meeting in the gin and the pictures that the word Christmas caused to flash inside.

  The rain had stopped making noise and for a moment he thought it might be snowing, even though it was only October. He wished it was Christmas so he could give her something, though it was probably too early for that too. He wished she was not gay so he could kiss her. More than once it had felt like they were going to kiss but even drunk he could not bring his mind around to a place where that would be possible. Still, he wondered how she would kiss, whether the kiss would taste like the gin or the cigarettes she smoked or some third flavour that would be her.