by Violet Blue
Table of Contents
Title Page
Introduction
DROUGHT
TWEETUP
EDDIE’S ALL-NIGHT DINER
PLEASURE’S APPRENTICE
THE NYLON CURTAIN
A BIG DECK
BAD
DOLLY
NO REST FOR THE WICKED
THE SKIN DOCTOR
PAGODA
A WIDER WORLD
ALL’S FAIR
NEIGHBORLY RELATIONS
LET ME IN
LOLITA
THE GOURMET
Day One
Day Two
Day Three
THE MAGICIANS
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Copyright Page
INTRODUCTION: A FINE SMUTTY ROMANCE
Just before working on this edition of Best Women’s Erotica, I was interviewed by an MFA lit class about erotica, erotic anthologies and specifically, Best Women’s Erotica 2011. The students were surprised that the stories in this popular little anthology were not classic porn writing, nor were they traditional romance. They seemed perplexed that it was literate smut they were reading, which by its nature ought to be far from love and happy endings. What on earth, they wanted to know, was this sought-after hybrid of literate erotic fiction, and what makes it tick?
I wondered if this question came from a perception that erotic writing for women must include romance—and its doppelganger, porn writing with explicit sex, must not. And never the two shall meet—well, that’s how it used to be, anyway. I think this is a common assumption, but not here, and not anymore. The truth is, what I’ve found in erotica is that what women want from their “bodice-rippers” is far more interesting than the simple equation of porn versus romance.
The widely held perception the students brought to a book labeled “erotica” and yet marketed to women was that there must be a trend away from romance. They asked me, is it that women don’t want “happily ever after” anymore? No, I explained. It’s that we want hot sex and sublime romance, thank you very much, and we don’t feel like apologizing about it anymore. Also, as you’ll see in this edition of Best Women’s Erotica, each woman’s vision of romance is as unique to her as her tastes in sexual adventure are.
Not to mention that current erotic romance as a genre has undergone a serious transformation in the past ten years. The trend is not necessarily away from romance, but it’s also no longer required—though desire always drives our erotic heroines’ hearts, minds and bodies. The stories here reflect the cutting edge of this transformation, where there is more sex, less apology for wanting it, and strong, self-actualized characters.
The lack of apologetic female characters in Best Women’s Erotica will surprise you. In fact, this edition is full of surprises. If you compare this collection to a more traditional collection of racy reads for women, the female protagonists in those volumes always seem to need an excuse for sexual desire. Those stories are often given titles like “The Birthday Gift” or “Day Pass.” It’s like they all have to get some sort of permission for the sex they want, as in, there is always some reason outside of the fact that they really want it.
The women in these stories are driven by desire: physical, emotional, and occasionally erotically fueled intellectual curiosity. In this, the genres of smut and romance are no longer diametrically opposed, but now work in concert to give us everything we want, and more. Even if sometimes, like a few of the women in these stories, what we want is kinky and taboo.
We also want realistic sex, believable stories and real characters—on top of that, we don’t want the scene to fade out when the sex begins. High erotic tension, risk and reward, something unpredictable and inspiring—we want women at the center of pleasure. And for me, as the editor and a devoted erotica reader and fan, each story has to be unforgettable. I want to wish I were there, in each and every story; each should be a tale so riveting and smart and layered and filthy I want all my friends to read it as soon as possible.
And I want my friends to read every single story in Best Women’s Erotica 2012.
In “Drought,” by Olivia Glass, a woman becomes stuck in highway traffic on a wetly hot afternoon, thinking about the man she left asleep in her bed. She surprises drivers as she takes matters into her own hands, as she relives the hot sex she has every time her man comes over and tears off his suit.
Louise Lush’s “Tweetup” is a delightfully arousing and playful tale of a woman who tweets about porn and her pet frogs, then attends a meetup only to end up in bed with her favorite tweet-flirt, with rapturous results. “Eddie’s All-Night Diner,” by K. D. Grace, is the ultimate clandestine dining frisson. In it, a woman who frequents an all-night diner to secretly watch other couples engaged in sexual flirtation is approached by a big hot guy who obviously knows what she’s up to—and silently challenges her limits of sexual daring in the middle of the restaurant.
In “Pleasure’s Apprentice,” by Remittance Girl, a college dropout goes to work in a silver shop and becomes party to tense sexual encounters with an older man who instructs her in silver—and sex. They never talk; she learns to polish silver and have dirty, dominated sex, until she leaves a year later. “The Nylon Curtain,” by Elizabeth Coldwell, features a quirky, sexy and happy ending after a young woman with plans of writing a book about her experiences of Internet sex trawling agrees to meet a man with a vintage stocking fetish. When the ’40s-era stockings and garters push her own arousal buttons, she pushes his farther than he’s prepared to go, with unexpected results.
Rosalía Zizzo’s “A Big Deck” is all about what happens when a woman who plays poker with a group of men teases the main player about his “big deck”—resulting in a riveting, satisfying performance of oral sex in front of the other guys. “Bad,” by Kay Jaybee, is fraught with daring as a woman involved with a kinky guy has to decide just how bad she’s willing to be when he phones her up and challenges her to do naughty stuff with another woman while he watches.
Amelia Thornton’s “Dolly” is the most controversial of the selections; in it a woman’s role-play Daddy has gotten her a life-sized Dolly—a woman playing a consensually submissive mannequin—and she sits in her playroom smacking the dolly first with her hand, then with a hairbrush and much more. In “No Rest for the Wicked,” by Jacqueline Applebee, a woman turned on by fear and danger meets a guy at a friend’s wedding party, and when she gets him back to her room, at her urging he becomes the scary, knife-wielding tough guy she hoped he’d be.
A cheeky female poet stars in “The Skin Doctor,” by Tsaurah Litzky, where a doctor’s visit pairs her woman-centric-poet principles with a nasty and arousing doctor, and a hell of an examination as the centerpiece. A shutterbug couple’s ritual of going to a strange pagoda in their neighborhood and having secretive full-moon sex takes a turn in Sommer Marsden’s “Pagoda” when he ups the ante by blindfolding her and making the encounter more public than private. Donna George Storey’s “A Wider World” reveals what happens when two couples try having slow, at first fairly tame sex in front of each other; until our heroine can’t take the tease and jumps right into a beautiful ménage with her husband.
You can feel the furious arousal when the fighting couple in “All’s Fair,” by Tiffani Angus, escalate their confrontation as she strips off to take a bath and he chases after her, only to get a lesson in being a gracious loser in a searingly surprising sexual encounter. Dorianne’s “Neighborly Relations” is what happens when a girl has boring sex with a guy who brags to his friends about it—only to have her say Oh no you didn’t and throw down the gauntlet for him to make her come, culminating in a surprise
development where everyone’s invited to play. The tension of conflicted desire becomes lushly heated in “Let Me In,” by The Empress, in which a young Indian woman fights with her sometime lover, a hot, uncouth guy, climaxing in a white-knuckle ride of a sexual scenario.
Languid and lyrical, “Lolita,” by Zahara Stardust, follows a young, free-spirited female backpacker into exotic locales, notably one where she meets a very handsome and sexy older man and invites us into their sexual exchanges full of playful flirtation and hot sex.
Lip-licking delicious is how I’ll describe “The Gourmet,” by Chaparrita. In it, a female restaurant owner and chef, famous in the United States and on vacation in Mexico, has three different smutty and taste-inspired encounters with local men, from whom she gets just what she wants. Valerie Alexander’s “The Magicians” begins at a reunion of old friends where a woman sees again for the first time since graduation her onetime boyfriend and his best friend, with whom she had a failed threeway. This time, she’s surprised when the guys are hot for her and each other, and the unexpected results will have you hot for the possibilities found in the power of three.
I hope you find these stories as unforgettable, surprising and erotically inspiring as I do. These writers are stars, and my only caution for you going forward from this page is to expect the unexpected.
Violet Blue
San Francisco
DROUGHT
Olivia Glass
Halfway down the highway, she is imagining his hand inside of her.
The image displaces all of her musings about the goats grazing on the hill she just passed and whether she’s paid her electric bill. She swerves slightly, her wheels flirting with the double yellow line. Another motorist honks, and she brings herself back in time to avoid an accident.
Deep inside of her, something twinges; her mind thrumming across a cello string that runs from belly button to clitoris, notes resonating up her spine. Her mouth parts a little, an oh rising to her lips; her hands tighten around the wheel.
A ripple of illuminated brake lights starts near the tunnel entrance and surges back toward her. Cars slow and then stop. She presses the ball of her bare foot into the brake pedal, breathing out with the motion, and rolls down her window, straining to see what’s happened.
Ah. A fender bender near the entrance of the tunnel. The drivers climb out of their cars. She can almost hear the groans of the other motorists, rising up like heavy smog that hangs above their vehicle roofs.
“Fuck me,” she intones. She turns on the radio, but the stream of breathless news is too much for a day like this. A flick of her wrist, and the speakers go silent.
The heat that rises from the blacktop begins to seep into her car. She lifts a leg from beneath her skirt and rests it against the dashboard. Her eyes glance at the car next to her, where the driver is slowly drumming his fingers on the top of the steering wheel, his other hand out of sight.
What if he’s jerking—
The thought is only half formed, and she feels a burning sensation rising in her face. It isn’t so much a blush—she doesn’t blush, not anymore—but a flush of heat that comes from somewhere deep inside her, prickling on her skin. There’s another twinge between her legs.
She bites her lip, harder than she intends. Her tongue probes the cut and she tastes copper. Her mind begins to wander away from the car, back to her house; back to the four-poster bed that she had to leave this morning, a man beneath the red sheets, a suit crumpled on the hardwood floor.
That suit. It feels like he’s always emerged from the day in a starched shirt and tie, dress pants, belted, and those shiny shoes in which she can see her own reflection. She loves the way he comes through the door—loosening his tie, tugging the knot down, letting the fabric slide out of his collar. There is so much promise in that motion. She loves the way the tie slides.
Someone honks. At the tunnel entrance, there is no sign of movement.
Her fingers are roaming over her damp underwear.
She glances at the shoulder of the road: only a few feet of space before the road narrows and there is nowhere to go. Does she have enough room? The car purrs as she yanks her wheel to the right and pulls off.
Domino effect: the lane where she had been sitting shifts exactly one car length. Drivers look up; hope flashes across their faces. When they realize that the traffic is still stopped, they rest back in their seats, annoyed.
She, however, is free.
Slipping on her flip-flops, she pushes open the door and steps onto the road. The pavement is sticky from the heat, and her soles cling to the blacktop with every step. A few people watch her, confused. She looks up at the hill. Parts of it are bare and exposed to the sun, but there are whole swaths covered in trees.
She begins to climb.
The hill is steep, but not too steep. Her sandals don’t last long. As she scrambles over some rocks, one slips from her foot and falls away. The other, then, is useless; she takes it off and places it in the crevice between two rocks. Her car grows smaller, the traffic becoming less real and more like meticulously arranged toy cars with every minute.
The grass is hot and dry and crunches beneath her feet. God! California. She marvels at the images that she’d always harbored of a California dense with lush, green summer vegetation, and how wrong they were. This grass is brown, and it hasn’t rained in months. No wonder everything is dying. It isn’t like this in Pennsylvania. There, hot summer days are punctuated by violent thunderstorms; lightning slicing open the sky, thunder making the windowpanes rattle, rain turning the streets into narrow rivers where the water writhes and gushes. There is something so satisfying about those storms, about the release after the day’s long and agonizing heat. But California—no. The summer is just one big denial.
She reaches a shady alcove, sits beneath a tree, and leans her back against the thick, knotty bark.
The belt always follows the tie. Oh fuck, the belt. She loves the metallic click as he unbuckles it, the shhhh as he slides it from its loops. The belt means business. She lies in the bed watching this—the tie, the belt, shhhh—her hand buried between her legs, fingers sliding through her wet topography. And then the pants drop, easily.
In the white starched shirt and white briefs, he stands next to her. She always wears a soft black housedress when he comes over—no bra, no underwear. He stands there peering down at her, her hand moving steadily beneath the blanket, her nipples hard points beneath the thin cotton. And he smiles. He always smiles.
The traffic is out of sight. The highway is visible, but only as a thin, meandering line, silver in the sun. She can see the white steel skeletons on the edge of Oakland, the glittering bay, the hilly urban landscape of San Francisco and the wide expanse of ocean.
She licks her lip; it stings. She looks up.
She can go higher.
She continues ascending. The grass changes. Some of it rises higher than the rest, tickling her skin. She reaches down and runs her hands along the blades’ feathery tips. The trees open up into a large field, and she charges through it, grabbing fistfuls of grass and wildflowers and ripping them up by their roots with a savagery that thrills her. She swings in a circle and lets the flora go flying. A wanton scream tears from her lungs, careening across the field like a flash flood. Birds rise, startled. She laughs, her throat raw, her chest heaving.
She keeps moving.
He is always hard when he kicks the pants away. She can see his cock, angled against his torso, held there by the fabric of his underwear. If she is in a teasing mood, she’ll lift a free finger and trace it along the firm length, making him shiver. Sometimes she’ll work that finger through the slit of the fly, touching the silky-smooth skin. But if she’s feeling ravenous she’ll sit up in the bed, tugging down the elastic band, and catch his cock in her mouth as it springs free.
All of the men she’s ever been with before have been silent, even when they came. But not him. No, the warmth of her mouth around him evokes a beautiful
moan, ragged as if it were being dragged across stones. She releases him from her mouth long enough to pull the tip of her tongue along his cock. When her tongue catches the ridge beneath the head, a drop of precome beads, and she catches it with her lips, salty. He comes down and kisses her, hard. She tells him how wet she is.
She feels as if the physics of her body are changing, here on the hill, as if the air is getting thinner, though that can’t be—she isn’t that high up. Her heart pounds harder, and each beat seems sluggish but thunderously loud. She can feel her blood’s movement in her fingers, her heartbeat in her cunt.
He cannot wait. He shoves the black dress up past her hips and consumes her, messily, as if he is devouring a piece of fruit. He writhes against the bed, sucking slowly, steadily on her clit. And then—oh, Jesus, here she has to stop moving—and then he brings up fingers to go inside of her. When they’d begun, he’d hesitantly used one, maybe two, but now he starts with three and goes up, because he knows. He understands what she wants. By now, she is so wet and open that once he hits four she asks for another, and he holds his thumb close to his palm, working it around inside of her. The walls of her cunt pull at his hand, perfect in its size, and as he twists his hand and sucks on her—fuck, fuck—she comes in waves, the muscles around his hands convulsing like a truck braking over miles and miles of road.
As she begins to reenter her body, he gently slips his hand out of her—she releases him with a shudder of pleasure—and comes up to her face, kissing her neck and the corner of her mouth.