Best Women's Erotica 2010

by Violet Blue

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  SHOE SHINE AT LIVERPOOL STREET STATION

  PRIME SUSPECT

  VEGGING

  FUCK THE FANTASY

  TIMBRE

  STRAIGHT LACED

  AMY

  IN A HANDBASKET

  THIN WALLS

  WHERE THE RUBBER MEETS THE ROAD

  ON MY KNEES IN BARCELONA

  MAN ABOUT TOWN

  STRIPPED

  STABLE MANNERS

  EQUIPMENT

  STILL LIFE

  SECRET SERVICE

  SHIFT CHANGE

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Copyright Page

  INTRODUCTION: THE CHOCOLATE TASTER

  More than once in the eight years that I’ve been an erotica editor, someone has compared my job to that of a chocolate taster. It’s a dream job, especially if you have a sweet tooth, and a full-on fantasy every day if you love chocolate. You can study the art of chocolatiering, and nerd out on how chocolate is made, the history of cocoa (violent, romantic and exciting), and go so far as to become ecologically minded and educate people on the greening of chocolate (fair trade cocoa, ecofriendly processes).

  It sounds like a world full of sweet, endless possibilities; a job that would never resemble the drudgery of waiting tables or making plastic chairs on an assembly line five days a week. For me, editing erotica has been just that sweet dream. But, my friends counter, you must get tired of it. It must get old after a while, they tell me. Even chocolate lovers, they’re convinced, must grow to dread having to sample every morsel of roasted goodness that’s shoved under their noses and feel forced to offer an opinion on every truffle that crosses their palate whether they’re in the mood or not.

  Erotica, my concerned friends worry, must eventually become so tedious that it has the opposite of its intended effect. They ask me if I just can’t stand to read about another seduction, if the idea of another first-time public sex encounter on the page is actually a turn-off. If reading all that erotica is actually ruining my sex life, or at the very least making me immune, or worse, numb. Desensitizing me to Eros.

  It’s true that I read—and after all these years, have read—an unbelievable amount of erotica. Like a good chocolate taster, I study when I’m off the clock. I read other people’s erotica collections to stay current with the competition. I check out what new and seasoned authors are up to. I watch erotica trends with a keen eye (such as the latest craze, explicit romance novels).

  I pay close attention to who’s editing collections and how they’re being treated by their publishers. The process is just as important to me: I found myself reading erotic anthology author and editor contracts for e-books that I had no intention of participating in, but wanted to know if everyone was being treated fairly and being paid the market rate (they weren’t). I also read erotica written by friends to help them polish stories for publication in other books. When I get inspired, I read my favorite erotica stories aloud for my podcast, Open Source Sex.

  On the clock, I edit at least two collections of erotica a year. Each one has around twenty stories in it. For award-winning, best-selling and prestigious Best Women’s Erotica, I read every one of the more than three hundred story submissions I get a year for the book. I don’t want a great story to slip through my grasp. And when my publisher tells me I have selected too many astoundingly hot stories for the book (as I did this year) and I have to let a couple of them go, turning down authors, I feel like I’m giving up a piece of gold. It’s almost painful. I have an irrational need to see the hottest stories published, and I fight not to let go of even one gem.

  Of course you must be wondering if it gets tiresome. You might be guessing that my sex life is suffering. On the contrary: I’m constantly inspired to try a new fantasy with a lover and often read the hottest gems out loud to the hot pan au chocolate that’s in my bed, savoring the exclusivity of the experience—and always, the effect of the explicit storytelling. Let’s just say it works.

  But tiresome? Okay, I’ll admit that I have experienced more than the safe human allowance for exposure to bad erotica. Sometimes, the writing is so bad and the scenarios so ridiculous that not only would no woman in her right mind believe the story itself, but I want to yell at the page or computer screen, “This is not ‘Penthouse Letters’!” More than once, I have been just one “heaving bosom” or a “throbbing member” or “wanton love muscle” away from hitting “delete all” in my inbox and heading to Harlequin HQ with a pitchfork, a can of gasoline and a road flare.

  Yet I am far from desensitized. If anything, I’m hypersensitive to the best that erotic writing has to offer. I can feel it in the first two paragraphs. I understand the life of the chocolate taster who can’t get enough pure cacao, the sommelier who spends every weekend tasting for his private cellar.

  It’s when you know how something’s supposed to taste, or in this case, the predictable arc of a story that includes sex, and you’re surprised by an especially refined note (or moment) that turns the whole experience of tasting into feeling like you’re trying a new flavor for the very first time. It happens in the best chocolate: a note of smokiness or a hint of citrus, a floral that changes the candy into a different experience by the end. It’s not what it started out as; it’s something more.

  The stories in this year’s Best Women’s Erotica will show you exactly what I mean. Not a single one of them is what it seems, and each of them contains a surprise flavor that turns the experience on its head, while engaging you in a character’s journey into a searing sexual encounter and turning you on at the same time. To borrow the phrase and tell you plainly why each story in this collection illustrates why I love my job: each one is better than chocolate. And each one is an explicit, erotic surprise.

  In “Shoe Shine at Liverpool Street Station” by Scarlett French, one young woman’s first time having her boots shined turns into a public sex encounter with a twist: sexual tension and release so contained that in the middle of a crowd, no one’s the wiser. Louisa Harte’s “Prime Suspect” is a superb piece of turnabout, where a female police officer turns a lineup exercise into erotic punishment (and pleasure), taking the upper hand with a macho braggart coworker, much to the satisfaction of both officers.

  K. D. Grace’s “Vegging” is a tense yet playful tale of a woman and vegetables, which seems like a stereotype, but this is no ordinary woman and the garden isn’t hers: the narrative peaks with vegetable debauchery, thievery, the thrill of getting caught and a most unusual erotic punishment. Fantasy becomes reality in Loz McKeen’s “Fuck the Fantasy,” which moves from an ordinary day in martial arts training class to a hard-edged fuck where an instructor teaches a student a lesson he’ll never forget, and we’re treated to a two-man, one-woman bisexual threeway we won’t soon forget, either.

  Amazingly, Angela Caperton’s “Timbre” is based on a real-life story where a girl working as an independent contractor doing transcription winds up with a hardcore BDSM scene to put into words; transcribing sounds, conversation, all noises in the room—she finds that the male dom not only turns her on, but brings her further into the action with every mysterious envelope she receives. Outrageous, hot and furtive are the best words to prepare you for Carrie Cannon’s “Straight Laced.” Here, we spend a moment in a lingerie shop where the horny female staff occasionally “model” for clients, culminating in a scene where the dressing room is a backdrop for a model and client tryst with an unexpected, lingerie-laden twist.

  More mysterious envelopes and even more sexual surprises await in Heidi Champa’s “Amy,” in which a girl receives video DVDs by post made expressly for
her voyeuristic pleasure: each video is yet another girl submitting to one man’s rough pleasure and punishment in the exact place where our narrator once kneeled for the camera (and the man) herself. Set in Hollywood, Alison Tyler’s masterful “In a Handbasket” delicately balances a small girl and a big man who turn longtime friendship into a deep challenge of belief and a hammering need for release, spun around the conflict of a lapsed Catholic. It’s the kind of sex on paper that makes you flutter inside and sets your nerves on fire.

  Anyone who’s ever slept in a room where it seems your neighbors are only separated from you by cardboard will appreciate the imaginings that go on in Aimee Herman’s “Thin Walls,” where a girl listens, fantasizes and moans during the masturbatory sessions of her hot male neighbor, finishing off with a neighborly surprise. Giving in to the unexpected is the name of the game in Aimee Pearl’s rough yet sweet “Where the Rubber Meets the Road,” a high-fetish, public, seemingly endless sexual encounter taking place throughout a series of dates that begin at San Francisco’s kinky Folsom Street Fair, blending dykes, femmes, bois and lots of rubber meeting the road (and silicone meeting every opening our submissive heroine possesses).

  You can absolutely expect the unexpected in “On My Knees in Barcelona” by Kristina Lloyd, in which a sweaty summer vacation evening in a Barcelona bar turns into a pay-for-play, slippery oral encounter, and the heroine surprises herself in how far she’ll go with a strange man—and willingly pays a price for her own risk (and pleasure). And if you think you can predict what’s going to happen in Amie M. Evans’s “Man About Town,” you’ve got another thing coming. Here, a straight boy who likes lesbian girls who like transmen finds himself masquerading as a drag king and falling for a femme lesbian who thinks he’s a biological female—culminating in gender-bending sexual frustration bar none and a searing man-on-transman, gay male, bathroom oral-sex tryst like nothing you (or I) could have imagined.

  Just when you think the sexual surprises couldn’t get any more exciting or arousing, Anastasia Mavromatis’s “Stripped” offers a complex story of sexual roles laid bare when a woman who comes from a strict Greek family with stricter marital traditions finds herself rooming with three men. If that wasn’t taboo-breaking enough, the roommates unexpectedly strip down to one another emotionally, leading to a powerful multipartner sexual encounter where a lot more than clothing is stripped, and every moment of the revealings is deliciously savored. Lily Harlem’s “Stable Manners” is a tightly written surprise of secret sex taken quickly and silently amidst the chaos of horseback riding instruction.

  It’s not riding gear that provides the surprise in Kay Jaybee’s superb “Equipment,” but the right set of tools for the job when a very big, tattooed, macho lover expects a night of tying up the damsel and instead finds the slowly savored, lovingly enforced view from the bottom—literally, his—to be just as satisfying. Taking us to the outer limits of the unexpected is skilled Sommer Marsden, who delivered a story that left my head spinning for days. “Still Life” is hot, explicit, arousing and very nasty in all the ways I require a story to be, but the process our narrator goes through to get off in her head and the physical enactment of her very unusual fetish will likely have you doing a double take as well.

  Then there are the stories that catch you just slightly off guard but make you wish they’d come true, ASAP. Rachel Kramer Bussel’s fantastic “Secret Service” is where “Kitchen Confidential” meets Best Women’s Erotica: here, culinary arts meet oral sex in service to ladies who lunch, and then quite a bit more, when the owner of a very special New York restaurant tries a random taste (in a manner of speaking) of what’s on the menu. Finally, bringing the fantasies nearer to reality is the book’s closer and showstopper, “Shift Change” by Emerald, which makes sure that for us, a trip to Apple’s Genius Bar will never, ever be the same. And the wait will seem just a little more endurable with the fragments of Emerald’s multipartner story floating wishfully—and giddily—through our heads the next time we have to “take a number” to get a minute with a Genius.

  I hope you find this year’s collection as arousing, entertaining and truly surprising as I did—and as my lovers surely will, when I read them every unpredictable piece.

  Violet Blue

  San Francisco

  SHOE SHINE AT LIVERPOOL STREET STATION

  Scarlett French

  Passing through Liverpool Street station on my way from the overland train to the Underground Tube, I caught sight of myself in a full-length mirror in a shop window display. Yeah, I thought, I was right to choose “smart casual” for today—the meeting was an important one but I knew that wearing a suit would feel overdone. The fitting black shirt, vintage glass beads, and green velvet A-line skirt were just right. And with my slightly-over-the-knee, leg-hugging, soft-as-butter black leather riding boots, there was no need for fussy, ugly panty hose. I smiled and walked on, feeling (mostly) confident that today was going to go well. And I had allowed plenty of time; I would arrive calm and have a few minutes to collect my thoughts beforehand.

  I decided to grab a takeout latte before joining the madding crowd descending into the good old London Underground and veered off course to get a decent brew. As I approached my preferred coffee chain, well, coffee wagon more like, I passed a shoe shiner stationed beside a brick pillar. He was bent over, shining the shoes of a City Boy. The banker was reading a broadsheet, his arms splayed and his hands clenched, holding the pages open. As the shiner buffed the shoes vigorously, the man turned the pages in a studied fashion. He seemed to find the service uncomfortable somehow, a man at his feet working up a beading on the brow, in that way that some people who have a housecleaner feel guilty about it. Perhaps he used the paper to create distance between them. “Watch where you’re going!” said an annoyed woman as she swerved around me, rushing toward the Tube. She was gone before I could apologize.

  As I waited for my latte, I wondered what it would be like to have my shoes shined. My only knowledge of the profession had come from the characters of Dickens novels—consumptive children shining the shoes of the aristocracy and dreaming of a better life, boys who were the men of their households after Dad had been taken by illness or the drink. It seemed very different now—the shoe shiners were enterprising young men running their own businesses. Having seen the price board, it seemed to me that this guy could make more in a morning than I made all day. Still, there is something about feet and submission that lingers. I could think of several examples, including Jesus and the foot washing that so humbled his disciples.

  As I headed back past the shoe shiner, sipping my latte, I paused. He was perched on his footstool awaiting his next customer and he looked up as I lingered. He wasn’t at all my type—he was blond and square-jawed and his face had been somewhat scarred by the ravages of teenage acne. Yet there was something that made me look away shyly. I stared at my feet, noticing now that my boots were a bit scuffed around the edges. Given that they were my most prized footwear—and in an almost fetishistic way—I really ought to have taken better care of them.

  “Can I help you?” he asked. His accent was a crisp Eastern European.

  I looked up and answered, “Oh, ah, I have an interview. I mean, a sort-of interview. So I was thinking I should have my boots shined. How much do you charge for boots like this?”

  “Well, yes, they are a bit taller than the usual boots I do for a fiver. But let’s just say five pounds anyway.”

  Now that I’d been offered a deal I couldn’t really walk away. And I had plenty of time to kill.

  “All right, that’s great. I haven’t had my shoes shined before so you’ll have to tell me what to do.”

  “Sit down in the chair here.” I sat on the wooden foldout chair against the pillar. He swiveled around on his footstool to face me and moved his legs apart to fully straddle it. “Put your foot here,” he said, indicating the rubber grip-covered footrest that protruded from his stool at a 45° downward angle. I placed my foot there
and felt a little embarrassed—no, that’s not it—aware that his crotch was literally an inch or two from the toe of my boot.

  First, he used a spritz bottle to spray a fine mist onto the toe and around the sides where the sole meets the leather. He rubbed a cloth back and forth over these areas, presumably removing any dirt. I felt like I should say something.

  “Are you Polish?” I asked.

  “No,” he answered. “Are you?”

  “Oh, no, I’m from New Zealand originally.” This city is such a mix that sometimes no one is really sure where anyone is from.

  “I’m from Estonia,” he said, as he picked up a blackened toothbrush with very worn bristles, applied shoe polish, and began to brush it over the toe and around the edges where he’d just cleaned with water.

  “Tallinn City,” he said. “It’s the capital of Estonia. Have you been there?” I felt a tickling sensation across the bridge of my foot and in my toes every time he ran the brush over the top of my boot. A smile curled across my face, but I suppressed it; to my chagrin he looked up at that same moment and I thought he might have seen it, though if he had, he didn’t let on.

  “No, I haven’t been there. But I’ve been to bits of Eastern Europe: I’ve visited Budapest and Prague. What’s Tallinn City like?”

  He put down the toothbrush, picked up a shoe brush and applied polish.

  “It’s wonderful,” he said, as he began to run the brush over the foot of my boot in short, sharp movements. Something was happening to my foot, my leg and beyond. I shut my eyes for a moment. Yes, I thought, it’s wonderful all right.

  “It has big beaches and it is very picturesque. To me, it is the best place in the world to spend the summer.”

  The brush made its way up my leg, in those same short, sharp movements, causing a tingling as it went. As he neared my knee, the leather scrunched a little as he brushed downward. I suddenly felt his hand on my knee. My eyes flew open and I saw his hand, cradling my knee and holding the top of my boot.