Desire

by Mariella Frostrup

  And as the afternoon turns to dusk and the lights come on across London, Porteous discovers an unknown world inhabited by a girl whose sole desire is to bring him to life. On the bed where his father had died, she resuscitates him impatiently and guides him inside her for the first time, operating him like a muscular machine until he feels that his body will explode; she makes him examine every intimate inch of her body, guiding his tongue and his fingers into her perfect, wrinkled little anus and demonstrating to him the budlike button of her clitoris and showing him how she likes it to be touched, particularly when “I am out and about during the day and you can find a quiet moment,” and for hours they lie entwined, her pussy spread across his eager face while she takes his cock into her throat and makes him wait until finally she sucks his impatient come from his shuddering body.

  Dusk has come and gone and once more they are looking down at the gardens, illuminated now from a scattering of brightly lit sitting rooms around the square. Porteous lies on top of her, his cock resting in the valley of her bottom, when he sees the little wicket gate open with a jolt and The Duke stalking into the glow of light from the porter’s lodge followed by Sergeant Hoskins, holding his bowler hat in his hands and looking self-conscious. Porteous stands up, “It’s him,” he says, “and he’s brought his bloody policeman with him.”

  Nellie rolls over, pulling on her pants and is dressed before Porteous can find his socks. “Give me the keys,” she says, “I’ll deal with this,” and she is away leaving him to stand forlornly in his underpants, watching from the bedroom as she appears by the gate standing, arms on her hips and having one of those conversations with a man who is somewhere in line to the throne. In five minutes it is done with and The Duke is passing an envelope and touching his rat catcher as he turns to go.

  “Got any eggs?” she says when she returns, “we need building up.” And Porteous looks at her and says, “What happened?” “Oh well I gave him a piece of my mind, told him to stop following me around and to behave himself and he said he’d only come to give me the wages he owed me for today.”

  Porteous takes her in his arms and breathes deeply because from that moment he knows he is enslaved. “Early night?” he says, and so they have supper on the carpet and go straight to bed.

  ON THE BEACH

  Nina Gibb

  Nina Gibb has published feature articles, interviews and illustrations in national and international publications including the venerable literary blog Bookslut, and was a longtime columnist for ‘attack journal’ The Lifted Brow. She has also run and hosted projects as a part of Melbourne’s Emerging Writers’ Festival. Nina lives in Melbourne where she works as a bookseller.

  They weren’t brothers but people thought they were. They had been asked three times since they had come here. Once Richard had agreed when someone asked and the stranger had nodded. They had only known each other two days. Now they sat on the shore.

  Richard looked right into her eyes when they fucked but then as he got closer to coming he’d reach up and take a handful of her hair and pull it then twist his other arm under her, between her body and her arms so she was pinned with her breasts arched out against him. He would tell her he was coming and she would turn her head so his breath was warm in her ear. John was different. Slimmer. He was easier to laugh with. With him sex was rough but then he would find her mouth and kiss her with tenderness.

  John got up and said “I’m going in.”

  Richard turned around to face her – “Coming?”

  She shook her head. They took off their clothes down to their underwear. The sun was hot. She watched them, rubbing her foot in the sand.

  John moved fast and gangly like a boy. His hair in soft curls beside his eyes. Richard’s skin was gold from the sun. They really did look like brothers – John younger. They ran down to the surf, jumping over mounded piles of kelp and beached jellyfish that had started to stink in the heat. John picked one up and threw it at Richard, who pulled another one, clear like aspic, and pushed it into John’s hair. Then they both dove under. They swam way out.

  She lay back in the sand. She thought about John, about last night when she had run back across the road and kissed him quite hard, while Richard had watched from the far kerb, how after a moment he’d kissed her back and it had been like a song, with verses and a chorus and an ecstatic reprise. When she had put her mouth on his time had expanded inside her and then it expanded again as she walked home. Again when she lay down. One kiss all night. She had gone home with Richard and left John on the corner but Richard had only fallen asleep, so she lived in the expanding song of the kiss until morning.

  The next morning John had called to say they should all go to the beach. She had wondered where they would stay and he’d said it was hot and they didn’t need to stay anywhere. She woke Richard with a coffee.

  “We’re going to the beach. John will be here in twenty minutes.”

  And Richard had pulled her into bed and did that thing he did where he only half kissed her, half touched her, until she was crazy with lust but then he pulled away and leapt out of bed when the knock on the door came – sharp and joyful in the clear dry morning.

  They had arrived by mid afternoon. They went straight into the water and then afterward they fell asleep on the sand, letting the salt and the wind and the sun melt away their hangovers. After a while they climbed up into the shade in the rocks at the headland and she kissed Richard and then John and John slid his hand up so his thumb rested against her bathers where they were wet between her legs. Richard buried his face in the crook of her neck, from behind, but nothing more happened. It was cooler there and soon they fell asleep, legs tangled, ants crawling over them. When they woke up they came back down to the beach.

  The sun was starting to go down but it was still very hot. She sat up in the sand. The boys had gone a long way out and from this distance you couldn’t tell one from the other – they were just two shadows sometimes bobbing up in the swell.

  She pulled the blanket up over her head like a tent for shade. A man walked past with his daughter trailing behind him. She had seen them earlier way up the beach – the daughter’s small hands filling a bucket with sandy mud while her father tried to help, laughing at the urgency of her little voice as it instructed him in proper bucket filling technique. She watched them until they faded away against the light and then when she looked back the boys had come in again. They came up out of the surf towards her. She could not tell one from the other. They came closer. She still could not tell. The one on the left looked down at the sand as he walked and the one on the right looked at her with what she had just now realised was the same look both of them had when they saw her – a look that lovers had. Maybe not lovers: fuckers. It was a look that said “I will have you again.” The other one lifted his head up from where he had been watching his feet scuffing up shells and seaweed as he walked. He had the look.

  She said “I could murder a beer” and one of them said something funny and they all laughed. They went up to the pub and got drunk. They were slow with sun and sleep. She wondered aloud “Where will we sleep?” and one of them replied that they should go under the pier. “There are fires down there and people hang out all night. We’ll take the blankets out of the car.”

  While they drank, although she watched very closely, she could not tell one from the other. Sometimes one of them would say something to her that was a very “John” or a very “Richard” thing to say, but she thought that these identifying things were not coming distinctly or in a pattern from one or the other in particular. The one on her left made a joke and then a few minutes later the other one picked up the joke and kept it running though it was unlikely they would make this same joke. Then it would reverse and they would both be “John-like” for a while. Or they would do things that were distinct to one of them; one would scratch the back of her neck very softly like John did and the other would lean back and look at her while he talked, swinging his knee back and forth so
it stroked her thigh – like Richard. And then they would swap.

  Eventually they went down to the beach, under the pier, to fuck. They had two blankets, one underneath and one over and they made a fire. It was warm and the breeze from the sea was welcome. She thought to herself, part way through the night when she had fallen almost asleep and been almost awakened by one of them sliding inside her again, by a mouth against her breast or arms pulling her shoulders back and pushing her into the softness of the blanket over the sand, that if there were three, four, many others here they would all be this. She wondered what woman she was for them and thought that tomorrow perhaps she would go out and find another woman and they would swim together out past the kelp, past the jellyfish, so that her and the woman were two shadows bobbing in the sea. So that then she could swim back in and just look at the other one to see what it was to be a woman to these men.

  THE MIDWESTERNERS

  Ruby McNally

  Ruby McNally was born in Boston, USA. She double-majored in psychology and cognitive linguistics before ultimately deciding her talents lay elsewhere. She grew up hiding her diary from her five brothers, who will never know she writes in the erotic vein. She continues to live in Boston and has no cats.

  One nice thing about Josh having more money than God these days, even if the rest of it is colossally weird: whenever they hang out now, the food is always amazing.

  “Remember in high school when we used to cut seventh and go to Taco Bell all the time?” Natalie asks, knifing a slice of cheese off a block that probably cost about as much as this semester’s grad stipend. They’re sitting on the back porch of Josh’s cabin, sun just starting to sink and Lake Michigan glittering through a cluster of pine trees, a long pathway snaking down to a dock.

  “Uh-huh.” Amanda grins, taking a sip from her wine glass. She’s wearing a long stripy sundress, bare feet propped on the outdoor coffee table; they’ve hardly been here an hour and she looks as relaxed as if she’s lived this way all summer, like she fits in seamlessly wherever she goes. Her curly hair’s a dark blonde corona around her face. “What’re you, jonesing for a gordita right now?”

  Josh comes through the sliding door before Nat can explain, tucking his cell phone into the back pocket of his designer jeans. “Julie and Mac just bailed,” he says, reaching down for a couple of crackers and some dip Nat’s pretty sure has truffle oil in it. “Julie had early contractions, I guess? So they’re gonna stay put.”

  “The baby okay?” Amanda asks, looking concerned. Julie and Mac rounded out their group when they were teenagers in Lake Forest, the two of them pairing off and staying that way in the near-decade since they graduated. Their first kid is due in the fall. Nat and Amanda went to the shower last month, decorated onesies with fabric paint and ate tiny tomato sandwiches. Then they went out and got drunk.

  “Yeah, I think everything’s fine.” Josh scratches at the back of his neck. His hair’s less floppy than it used to be, cropped close like he’s finally found a decent barber. Nat used to like to sift her hands through it, when they dated. “Just like, not fine enough to make the drive.”

  “Well.” Amanda sets down her wine glass and stands up, nudging politely at Nat’s legs until she holds them up and out of the way. “If no pregnant ladies are coming to this party, I vote we switch to the hard stuff.”

  Natalie hmms noncommittally. Less than three weeks ago, Amanda would have climbed right over the top of her to get to the ice bucket, no respect for personal space at all. She’s always been touchy, even when Nat officially came out their sophomore year of college and Julie stopped playing with her hair for two whole weeks, like the petting might somehow be misconstrued. “Cunt,” Amanda later pronounced, drunk as a skunk in Nat’s childhood bedroom. “Like you’d ever go for her, she’s a freaking five at best.” Privately, Nat agreed. If it was going to be anyone from high school it would have been Amanda, that button face and all those yards of ridiculous hair, her talking hands that never sat still. But she was smart enough not to say so, and when they finally passed out, sticky with coolers and schnapps, it was with Amanda curled in close and drooling on Nat’s neck. Just like always.

  Now, six years later, she’s treating Nat the same way Julie did in those first homophobic two weeks.

  “Hard stuff like tequila?” Josh asks, setting down his craft beer to help Amanda root through the ice bucket. Natalie’s been drinking her way through the sixer of Bud she brought along, not even sure herself what kind of point she’s making. “I think I have some of the stuff you’re supposed to sip.”

  “Oh, we’re not sipping it,” Amanda says, yanking the giant bottle out and holding it aloft victoriously. It’s that fancy aged tequila from TV, Nat can see even from here. “I don’t care what you guys do back in California, Nat and I are shots girls.”

  Well, that’s pointed – they were doing shots the night everything went to shit. But Natalie just shrugs. “We are that,” she agrees.

  Josh narrows his eyes at her, the same searching look he’s been wearing for the past hour. They dated for three years in high school, her and Josh, and Nat loved him even if she didn’t love him. He used to know her better than anyone. “You sure you don’t want dinner first?” he asks quietly, rubbing his bare neck again. All of a sudden, Nat misses his doofy hair more than anything in the world. “Could grill.”

  “He’s afraid of us,” Amanda says cheerfully, reaching for three of the tumblers set on the side table like something staged for a Pottery Barn catalogue. “He’s worried about what’ll happen if he doesn’t carb us up first.”

  “Afraid of you, maybe,” Josh corrects, but he takes the glass she offers him and swallows. “Everybody here knows what kind of drunk you are, princess.”

  He’s kidding, same grin on his face as when he used to clown around during study hall, but for a second Amanda’s eyes cut to Nat’s anyway – like maybe Nat told him or something, the night of the shower and Amanda fresh off a breakup with a guy from the design firm, her tan skin and the sharp, limey taste of her tongue. Natalie looks back.

  “What?” Josh asks, pretty smile fading as he glances between them. “Okay, what?”

  “Nothing,” Natalie tells him, and knocks back the tequila as fast as she can.

  *

  They’re smashed by the time it’s full dark out, the booze mostly gone and the snacks finished too, frogs or crickets or something making noise out in the trees. Josh lit a citronella candle to keep the mosquitos away and their faces are cast in shadow, all sharp jaws and high cheekbones. They’d make a nice couple, Natalie thinks. Makes a point of examining her toes.

  “I have steaks,” Josh is insisting. They’ve covered Amanda’s promotion and his boring-sounding girlfriend in LA and now he’s circling back to food again, sounding for all the world like his mother. He’s got his ankle wrapped around Nat’s, familiar.

  “Grass-fed rib-eyes?” she teases, although it comes out a little sharper than she means it. “Prepared in your state of the art outdoor kitchen by one of your many servants?”

  Josh doesn’t laugh. “Okay, are you mad at me?” he asks, looking sort of disproportionately stung. He turns to Amanda for backup. “Is she mad at me?”

  Amanda shrugs loosely, cross-legged on a wicker armchair. She’s stopped being careful about her dress and it’s pulled taut over her knees, a shadowy gap underneath that Nat’s trying real hard not to examine too closely. “Dunno,” she says, all slippery consonants. “Natalie seems to be mad at everyone these days. You’re too rich, I’m too stupid... We should start a club.”

  “’Manda,” Nat says, this sensation below her breastbone like she’s been sucker-punched. She knows she hurt Amanda’s feelings when she refused to hash everything out the morning after the baby shower, but it’s not like – God, what would they even have discussed? Amanda’s straight. Natalie knows that. She doesn’t need her nose rubbed in it with a talk about how they made a huge mistake.

  “Okay, what’s going on?” ask
s Josh, sitting up and – bizarrely – curving a protective hand around Natalie’s knee. “You guys have a fight or something?”

  (“Do you have a thing for Amanda?” he asked Nat years and years ago, when she was visiting him in California for his twenty-first birthday. He hadn’t made all the money yet, was still living in a shitty apartment where all the taps were on backwards.

  “Get bent,” she told him, zipping her sleeping bag to her chin. She wouldn’t talk to him again until he went out at the crack of dawn and bought her an iced cap and a donut.)

  “Yikes,” Amanda says now, drawing both knees up to her chin. “You too, huh?” Then she looks straight at Nat, eyelashes gone spiky and wet. “I wasn’t experimenting, you know, or whatever the fuck you think. I made out with Sophia Taback in tenth grade, remember? That was my experimenting.” She stands up, sundress falling around her ankles in a whoosh. “If you weren’t into it, you should have stopped me.”

  “What the hell?” Josh asks when she’s gone, cupping both of Natalie’s cheeks in his warm, drunk hands. They were good at sex, Josh and Nat, however bizarre it seems now. His fumbling teenage moves got her off just fine. “Jesus, Nat, what happened?”

  He’s close enough to kiss, the way he’s peering into her face. Natalie learned how to kiss from Josh; she wonders if they still have all the same habits. “Christ what do you think?” she says, prying his fingers off her wet cheeks. “We fucked.” Then she stumbles inside too, fully intent on crying her eyes out in one of the four spare bedrooms until she throws up or passes out, whichever’s first.