The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 3

by Maxim Jakubowski

  He thought of a conversation he’d once had with two friends of his, a man and a woman, about when sex begins. When does sex begin? With a kiss? With the removal of clothing? Which article? The shirt? Pants? What has to be touched? Finally his friend brought it all to an end with his quote: Sex begins when you know you’re going to have sex. He knew that feeling, that undertow that could take hold in any room. He thought he felt it now.

  It was when he tried to picture it happening that it all fell apart. Any picture he could call up felt ridiculous. The trouble was his cock. The choices – her being “won over” by what he had, or, instead, her coolly humouring him, humouring it – both stopped him cold. Also, any pretence that he was different, that he was not just the same as all other men, would disappear the moment that came out into the open.

  “I wish I was a lesbian,” he said sometime after their fourth drink. He’d waited until then so she’d believe it was the gin talking and forgive him the way she always did. What she said surprised him.

  “You’d make a terrible lesbian.”

  He felt hot blood rush to his face and knew this had actually hurt him. “Why?”

  “Because,” she smiled, “you’re such a man.” She said the word man like what she meant should be perfectly obvious to him but it wasn’t. He had no idea what she meant.

  “That’s a shitty thing to say.”

  She laughed. He saw she didn’t understand he was serious, but he laughed with her anyway because that still felt better than anything.

  All his life he had been most comfortable around women. There was a softness in him that wanted to come forward to meet theirs; when it did, boundaries fell, but never the one he wanted. For that he still had to act, remind himself to remind them that he was a man, which felt like acting by that time, so soft had he become, and it occurred to him on this night sitting in the red vinyl bar with the rain lashing the windows that he could just keep going, let himself go softer and warmer until every man-part of him had sunk out of sight and there would be two women sitting at this table, not one woman and this in-between thing he became sometimes.

  If he could make it happen, he knew he would want it to happen with her. She would know what to do with him, and he would let her.

  There would be some slow unbuttoning in the hallway. Both of them in their big coats, his back against the row of mailboxes, her long white hands would part his coat like stage curtains and go to work slowly but surely, cupping his new soft women’s breasts that would be there under his shirt. Under his bra. Would there be a bra? If she would like it, he thought, and that made him like it too, the thought of her eyes shining at the lavender or dark brown material, surprising against his skin. For her. His nipples tenting the material in the centre of each cup, scratching the palms of her hands, moving in slow circles. In the dream he was having wide awake, he felt his nipples graze the palms of her hands, felt it in his own hands and realized he was now her, showing himself to himself, but this was wrong, was not what he wanted, to crowd her out like this, and he looked for a way to bring her back in.

  He tried to feel what it would be like to have what she had between her legs between his. But he could not. He could only feel it as an absence, a hole. It was when he thought of her putting her fingers inside him that the jolt went through him like an electric shock.

  She would do it to him standing up, both of them standing in the dark hallway with the radiator ticking and pinging, making its little music for them. He thought of her fingers sunk deep into the hot cave between his legs, her knuckles pressed hard against the crisp hair he would still have down there, hair that would be the same and not the same. She would whisper things into his ear, things he’d never realized he wanted to hear until now.

  As the vision frayed and dissolved, he realized what he’d known from the beginning, that this woman’s body was a ruse, a Trojan horse, a costume he wanted to wear to trick her, to let her let him enjoy her. Not for her to enjoy him. He could get close to that thought but not close enough. In the end he would shut her out that way. He would always shut her out that way.

  “What’s wrong?” she said. “Are you crying?”

  “You know,” he said, looking out the window at the cars, “sometimes I’d just like to cut my dick off. Just cut it off and throw it down the fucking toilet like a piece of fucking shit.”

  In the long silence he thought he could hear snow falling. Soon he would be covered up by the cold. Then he heard her say, quietly, “Don’t do that. You may want it back some day.”

  Diving Into Oceans of Air

  Renée M. Charles

  Just as I sliced open the packing tape which sealed the large, flat box of Gunter Blum posters I’d special-ordered directly from the photographer’s native Germany, I heard a metallic whump! from the old-fashioned horizontal flap inset in my shops front door. (The slot was occasionally useful for my infrequent snail-mail, like my Empaths Unlimited newsletter). The whump! was followed by the muffled whuff! of something thick being wedged tightly into the narrow opening. After ripping open the top of the greyish box and confirming that they’d sent the right set of art-quality blow-ups (that almost take-off of Lewis Hines Steamfitter with the beautifully lean and slick-haired model posed against a grittily rendered piece of machinery, the hair on her pubis wiry and fierce against her taut thighs), I hurried over to the door. A tightly wound roll of sticky dots sealed paper jutted through the tight labial opening like a crude dildo.

  The Blum posters could wait. The Empaths Unlimited newsletter only came out once a month, snail-mail thanks to it being too massive for an e-mailing. I’d been a long time between mind-seductions. Not that I didn’t get my fill of illicitly-obtained fuck-fantasies gleaned from the fuzzy little brains of my customers, the men and women who either boldly or timidly entered my establishment, to fulfil whatever moist fancies their minds and bodies craved. But after a while, their craven wants grew tiresome and even easily anticipated – the stately, perfectly coiffed matrons who selected the largest, thickest dildos to use on their college-age lovers, both male and female; the I’m buying this for my collection types who were already yearning to shoot a steaming wad at the model in the sexcapades CD ROM they’d just shoved into their initial-adorned briefcase; or the eyes-cast-at-the-floor meek ones who tried to rip the edible panties they’d just bought off their own bodies once they got them home and wiggled into them in their lonely, steamy bathrooms.

  I could picture and feel each one of their memories, their wildest (or tamest) conceits, as they drifted about my store like windborne dandelion seeds, aimlessly letting their eyes drift over items they had no intention of using, would never want to own, lest I discern their true desires should they hone in too quickly on the object of their longing. Perhaps I should have written warning: telepath/empathic on duty! under the heading under the existing lettering on my store’s front window. But as it was, I thought that homme-donna was already a bit artsy-classy, surely enough to keep away the truly vile and the hopelessly tacky away from my establishment.

  Glancing quickly at the clock above my counter, I noticed that it was close enough to closing time for me to turn around the OPEN/CLOSED – PLEASE COME AGAIN sign resting at the bottom of my discreetly mauve-curtained window and turn my full, pussy-throbbing attention to my torn-open newsletter. Once I’d seated myself in plain view of the Richard Avedon framed, non-glare-glassed posters opposite my counter-stool (several actresses and models whose names I only vaguely recalled caught in nude, but dignified glory), I flipped through the “Women Seeking Men”, “Men Seeking Women”, “Men Seeking Men” sections. Each bore that alphabetical string of abbreviations along the bottoms of the pages: M = Male, F = Female, E = Empathic, T = Telepathic, PC = PreCognitive, G = Gay, Bi = Bisexual, FT = Fetishist, N/D = No Drugs, N/S = Nonsmoking, and so on. The list purposely omitted the more typical Singles Paper designations, B = Black, W = White and H = Hispanic because that particular point was a moot one when it came to espers like me,
and the other readers of this newsletter. I finally chose Women Seeking Women.

  Three pages’ worth in this issue, both sides of each sheet. But I’d scanned the first page and a half of listings (“BiFT seeks open-minded/open-hearted G/BiFT/E for discreet but intense shared visions of–”), and come across nothing but the same-old, same-old, variations of “Let’s blend feelings and fantasies” with no inherent bite, no suggestion of something fresh in their advertisements – let alone the one or two word “MindBytes” which followed each listing. Those teasers, when concentrated upon by the reader, gave off a faint, residual echo of that person’s thought-waves, their fingerprint-like unique signal which could be momentarily savoured like a whiff of encapsulated perfume molecules trapped between the folded strip of paper in a magazine insert.

  By the time I was halfway through this month’s crop of psipotentials my mind was gummy with after-images of romance novel-cover tepid embraces under the ubiquitous full moon and wisps of cloud, and cloyingly cuddly mental snuggles under postcard perfect sunny skies. Weren’t there any hot-minded lesbian or bi empaths left any more?

  The offerings in last month’s issue had been little better. I’d received a long-long-distance virtual finger fuck from a woman in England who was expert in transmitting her bodily sensations to me via a phone line (her voice was even sexier than her mind), and the telepath over in Queens whod been too timid to phone me was marvellous at pseudo-cunnilingus while we both literally pictured ourselves in a Grecian temple, but neither woman was seeking anything more than a one-mind stand, as it were. Once the last of the orgasm died down, I felt their minds gently but firmly close to me, leaving me sated but hardly satisfied.

  Things were getting so bad for me, I’d recently been trying to tune in on the thoughts of some of my customers after they’d left my shop, discreetly bagged purchases in hand, but tracking them amid a clamouring, seething ocean of mental voices and bodily sensations was often much too difficult – aside from one store-to-apartment track on a rainy, not too bustling evening, when I’d seen/felt an outwardly confident-looking young executive type receive a deliciously thorough whipping/humiliation from her surprisingly femme-looking Mistress, my efforts at connecting with Unawares were close to futile.

  The best Mindfuck occurred between two espers, period. Which is why the Unlimited was created. The only trouble was, most of the truly hot and gifted espers already had partners, and didn’t need to advertise for a mind-mate.

  I morosely flipped through the remaining listings, letting my gaze wander over to that opened cache of Blum posters (what was in that model’s mind, I wondered). I was sorely temped to run my own advertisement: “GFE/T wants to know – are there any hot G/Bi/E/T/PCs out there? With imagination and libidos to match? . . . until my eyes drifted back down to the tight columns of newsprint, and saw:

  TIRED OF MIND-F – KS THAT LACK IMAGINATION? Try me. I’m G/T/E, N/D, N/S and a water F/T; seeking G/Bi-? to swim the steaming waters of my mind. Shed those clothes along with your hangups/inhibitions! Think: *OCEANOFAIR

  If the Unlimited’s listings weren’t so blasted PC (and I’m not thinking PreCog here), she could’ve come out and said “Mind-Fucks” in print, but knowing that she was thinking it, and not wallowing in pseudo-Romanticism only, was a most bracing revelation.

  Squirming in place on the already-smoldering vinyl cushion of my stool, I closed my eyes. I let my mind go placid, numb, figuratively limp, then clearly imagined the huge, cerulean word OCEANOFAIR across the forced-clear backdrop of my mind’s eye.

  So suddenly I felt almost literally cold, actually drenched, my body was diving into a horizon-to-horizon ocean of wave-lapped slightly frigid waters. Once I was submerged, I wiggled forward with almost no effort, toward a waiting, legs-scissoring figure, whose dark hair was clipped professional-swimmer short. Only a gently waving thatch of sea-grass-shifting hair was on the top of her head, and a matching close-trimmed wedge of sharply angular pubic hair covered the rising mound of Venus. The straps of her diving gear crisscrossed between her small, nipples-jutting breasts, and the clear diving mask over her nose and eyes revealed a light dusting of pale freckles over her nostrils and lower bridge, and a pair of orbs whose dark-brownness was intensified by the light-diffused blue-green waters around her.

  With each kick of her flippers-encased feet, she moved closer to me . . . me, who wore no diving gear at all and who just then realized that I didn’t need it. My own legs and lower body now sported overlapping, glistening scales, which culminated in a fin-leg tipped with delicately feathery fins which undulated and writhed in the rippling waters which surrounded me.

  Glancing down at my own breasts, I saw that they were coyly cupped with purple-and-white mottled shells, strapped with thin ropes of sea-kelp. My hair – now suddenly long, waist-touchingly long, was floating about me like a nimbus of green-tinged gold. As she moved nearer, her left hand reached out to caress what would’ve been my own mound of Venus, but now, as I glanced down at it, was a small, tight vertical-lipped orifice resting parallel to my former hip and pelvis area. As her fingertips, cool yet subtly ridged along the fingerpads, made contact with my rippling, scaled flesh, I quivered. The touch of her skin on my own transformed fish-skin was exquisitely sensual, like being finger fucked with a leather-gloved digit.

  As the first pulsing wave of pre-orgasm rippled through me, moving in ever-smaller concentric rings toward the narrow base of my tail, my body began arcing backwards in the cushioning waters, until I completed a full circle in that ocean. She maintained contact with my transformed mermaid’s cunt, keeping that one pressing, gently probing finger in contact with me as she matched my gyrations in that soothing liquidity, now using one of my breasts to better hang onto my whirling body.

  Remembering that I, too, was free to touch her, I mashed my hands – now greenish-tipped, with pearlescent nails – over her taut breasts, feeling the tender, puckering nipples dig into my palms. As her ribcage heaved toward me, pressing her manna tighter into my kneading hands, she shoved her finger all the way into that hermetic glory-hole, until the tip brushed against what had to be my deeply buried clit.

  As we cart wheeled in aquatic free-fall, the depthless blue of the waters now frothy with bubbles, I heard her clear, chimelike thought-question: Your name . . . what is it?

  Not missing a rotation in those buoyant waters, I thought back, Sima Rozyczka . . . that’s Scottish for “listener” and Polish for “rose”.

  No sooner had the thought burst from my mind than she and I were out of the water, out under the low-hanging brassy sun, resting on a beach covered not with sand, but with millions upon billions of tightly curled, dried white rose petals. Their scent was an overpowering contrast to the salty brine of the sea, whose waves lapped at our now bare feet and outstretched legs. Both of us were nude, our shining skin covered with dewy beads of some exotic scented oil. I was once more shorter-haired, the artfully braided and beaded coils only reaching down to my shoulders, and a glance at my pelvis revealed my usual thatch of golden-brown curls. Beside me, her sheared-short black thatch was dried to a lacy covering over her swelling labia and high-rising upper mound. But both our breasts were tipped by raisin-shrivelled nipples, the darker brown flesh around them dimpled and pulled taut above the smoother pale mounds below.

  As she lay on her side next to me in that shifting shore of petals, she fluttered her thickly-lashed dark eyes and thought: Mine is Claudia Muirfinn . . . the latter is also Scottish. For “dwells near the beautiful sea”. My sea is beautiful, is it not?

  An encircling expanse of calm azure waters surrounded our isle of convoluted, deeply curled petals, the sunlight shining off the surface like a wide-flung scattering of golden coins.

  Very beautiful, I thought back: then, as I rolled on my back, letting the sun press down on my waiting body, I asked: And Claudia stands for . . . ?

  I felt a swath of shadow cool my midsection when she stood up abruptly before padding out to the edge of the
sea with long, loping strides. Turning her head sideways toward me, so that I could see one dark winking eye, she flashed back: Something you’ll find out all too soon . . . I’ll swim back to you soon. What is your MindByte?

  She was already diving into the waters as I concentrated: Listener! As her left arm rose up above the waters, followed by the strong kick of her legs and feet, I almost slid off the counter stool, and broke my almost-fall by slamming both hands hard against the inside edge of the counter.

  That had been the most intense MindByte sample I’d ever experienced. Usually the newletter’s customers only expended a minimum of intense imagination when leaving their MindByte, just enough for a brief taste of their mind. But Claudia Muirfinn’s Byte was more like a feast, a gushing forth of long-stifled images and experiences, concentrated in – I glanced up at the clock, and was astonished by what I read there – a mere three minutes of actual thinking time.

  But, as I massaged my sore palms after getting to my feet, I realized that Claudia’s MindByte was merely that. Her ad had clearly stated that she was an Empath, too, yet I hadnt felt one thing she was experiencing during the Byte.

  For Claudia, “soon” meant a mere hour later, when I was back in my west-side apartment, soaking in a tub filled with a sprinkling of fragrant herbs and a few drops of lavender oil. As I went to gently massage a huge sea-sponge between my slightly parted-at-the-knees legs, I instead felt her fingers wrapping around mine. We lolled in a circular tub whose surfaces were composed not of porcelain, but of close-set slightly domed individual small tiles, in a mosaic of ombre blues, violets, indigoes and deepest black, a swirl of grout-divided colour that extended up onto the deep ledge which also surrounded the tub, extending out three feet or more. Beyond the tub and the ledge was a room mirrored in black-veined smoked mirrors and dividing panels of oiled ebony wood. Only one of the wooden panels was knobbed, a smooth black-enamelled irregularity in all that linear shining perfection.