by Cara Bruce
He tells me his traveling salesman story, the exquisite details of selling hospital equipment, while I brush his leg with my boot and watch the surprise in his eyes at his luck. He’s a Rat, I find out—outwardly cool, self-controlled but passionate.
“Push the button on my watch,” he says, holding his wrist out for me to see.
I push the button.
“Tell me what it says, Kenna.”
I’m stifling a laugh. Can I pick them or what? “It says, ‘WANNA FUCK?’” And in capital letters, no less. “Pretty damn clever.” I don’t remember any mention of Rats having crass taste in jewelry.
“I had it made special in Taiwan.”
Maybe, just maybe, I’ve found what I’m looking for, and on my first try. I don’t want to sleep with him. So I will.
“Wow,” I say, flipping my ponytail. “And, yes. But do you know where the word fuck comes from?” Now why on earth would I share this with him? But I do. “It’s actually a mystery, but they think it might originally be from the Scandinavian fokka. There’s one written record of the word in 1278, and then nothing—nothing at all until three hundred years later, maybe because it was such a taboo to say it.” They probably didn’t even make these watches back then.
He reaches over and twists my hair in his meaty hand and whispers, “I’ll show you where fucking really comes from, sweetheart.”
A kiss, the check, and he’s guiding me to his room.
“Take off all of your clothes, lie down on your belly, and close your eyes,” the Rat orders after we enter the tackiness that is room 413 at the Holiday Inn. “I want to show you something.”
Another watch? His cock? Some strange hospital equipment? But this is my game, and I’m stripping down and stretching out.
He’s searching in his bag and I’m peeking out of one eye and he’s bringing out what looks like a bottle of oil.
“I used to work as a masseur,” he says as he climbs up on top of me and begins with my back. “Let me massage this fine body, sweetheart.” When his hands start in on me I see this boy starting to slide way up my sexual-rating chart. By the time he’s worked me over with his oil, front and back, I’m completely limp in his hands and ready for anything and he’s entering me from behind and riding me hard and holding my hair tight with one hand and slapping my ass with the other. He’s got me hollering, “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” and I know that if this Rat had been around in the fourteenth century they would definitely have written the word down.
“OK, so looks aren’t a good indicator of bad sex, Holly,” I admit, safely back in her pink bed. “But what can I do—interview people and ask them if they’re a lousy lay?”
Holly’s reviewing my log. “All it says here is ‘his hands, his hands,’ Kenna.”
“Shit, that’s all I can remember. It was great.”
She sighs, but we begin to plan the ex-lover possibility next. Julia was the love of my life ten years ago, until she decided she was too good for me and dumped me coldly. She’s a Monkey—clever, witty, manipulative, and pretentious. The Chinese chart doesn’t really say all that: I’m just projecting. I do distinctly recall her saying she was only going to sleep with Ph.D.’s after our breakup. And that she was only with me because she was crazy about my breasts. This has to be bad.
I find her at her modern dance class, where I show up in a low-cut black leotard to get her attention. I lie to her over lunch, tell her about my newly minted Ph.D. in the thirteenth-century dialect of Baedel Fokka, and get invited back to her place. I make up other stories for her about the places I’ve been and people I’ve met. When I create an imaginary friendship with Camille Paglia, whom I know she idolizes, I’m in. She spreads her legs for me and I’m devouring her and I suddenly can’t remember why I found her so attractive in the first place, but I go for the sex just to show her how hot I am, and it works.
When I leave and turn at the door to tell her, “I’m sorry, I won’t be back, because I just realized that I should really only sleep with tenured professors,” I realize that this is the most fun I’ve had in weeks.
I try to dive back into work and forget this whole idea, but every research question I’m asked sounds like sex. I’ve started watching everybody I see and thinking all the time about how they fuck, why they fuck, where they fuck, is it good, what do they do badly. When I’m not answering the phone I can be found doing some heavy breathing back in section 306.7, reading every sex book I can get my hands on. Hell, I’m so immersed in it I could practically write a thesis—maybe you can get a Ph.D. in Bad Sex.
Joe’s Bait Shop is the local dive bar. Holly scoped the place for me over the weekend and thinks it’s a guaranteed bad time. Every possible sport on a dozen big-screen TVs, pool tables in the back. The bartender’s a babe. It’s amazing how fuckable everyone looks when you’re looking for people who aren’t.
I’m wearing black tights, a long baby-blue sweater, black suede boots, and nothing underneath. I’m getting a few looks but no bites because of the damn football game. I forgot it was Monday night. Maybe this is bad sex, when you can’t even draw a man away from the television.
I get myself a drink and wander toward the back room. There’s some kind of a meeting in progress and no TVs, so I slip in and sit down in an empty card chair in the back to check out the crowd.
“My goal,” the handsome man speaking says, “is to help others achieve sexual sobriety.”
Wait, wait. Sexual sobriety? Is this where you only fuck before you get drunk?
“The twelve steps were my saving grace,” he continues. “I turned my lust over to God.”
Holy shit, I think I’ve wandered into a meeting of Overfuckers Anonymous.
I laugh. Heads turn in my direction, followed by frowns at my laughter. I can’t help it. I know they’re deadly serious. But maybe God knows what bad sex is. I wonder, does God like having all this lust turned over to him? Didn’t God turn it over to us in the first place?
The speaker is looking right at me and smiling. “Who would like to share their story with us today?” He’s got piercing green eyes and big shoulders and a fuzzy beard that I can already feel rubbing between my legs and I’m considering making up a quick, sad story to tell him and I know I should consider getting the hell out of here instead.
I do not volunteer. They’d never believe me if I told the truth about why I’m here. But, wait: bad sex, bad sex. These folks have potential. Oversexed people trying not to have sex could be really bad. Or would they be really good, heading toward Better/Best, like reformed Catholic girls let loose?
At the break, the speaker comes directly over to me and introduces himself.
“My name is Tony,” he says with a gorgeous grin. Oh, my. I don’t even have to ask, I know he’s a Tiger, as in the Year of, the Hour of, the Moment of, the Bed of, the Cock of, and I’m heading for trouble.
“I just stopped in here accidentally,” I say. “Giving up lust? This is like a bad dream.”
“I know,” the Tiger says. He pauses, asks my name, and then takes my arm firmly and guides me out toward the dark back corner of the bar where he chooses a stool. He smiles. “But I bet your dreams are spectacular, darling. You look like a girl who knows how to dream.” Fresh drinks in hand, strong arms wrapped around me.
“Do you dream in color, Kenna?”
That’s the best pickup line I’ve heard in ages. “Everyone does, Tony, or they can. Did you know that nobody ever questioned this fact before the advent of black-and-white television in the fifties? Not Freud, not Jung….” I hear my little librarian voice being smart, yet at the same time I feel my knees shaking like a little girl and I just want to climb up on his lap and let him turn his lust over to me instead of God.
He listens to me as though every word I utter is golden. He knows the secrets: words and hands and eyes and laughter. Attention paid; intensity gained. But it keeps sneaking through the haze of my desire that this man is one of them.
“Tony, didn’t I just hea
r you discussing ‘sexual sobriety’ as a way of life?” I ask as he pulls me onto his lap. His hand goes higher and higher on my thigh. It’s so high and so right that I think I imagined it all, and that this is my punishment, or maybe my reward, for thinking and dreaming about sex day and night and pretending I know a single thing about what it all means.
“For you, darling, I’m willing to fall off the chastity wagon.” His mouth is on mine and he’s biting my lip with the force that I need and I am going, going, gone. I don’t believe a word he says and I don’t care. The cock of the Tiger is hard beneath my ass and all the lines are slipping away and Good is blending into Better and heading off the chart and he’s whispering in my ear and I want it all. Finally we’re out the door.
Before he starts the car he says, “Pull your tights down and spread your legs and let me see.” I do and he just watches me. When he stops the car at Sunset Park a short drive away and leans over, his beard is rough against my thighs—exactly as I imagined it—and he’s biting and sucking and I’m in heaven and then he’s suddenly slowing way down.
“I shouldn’t do this,” he mumbles with his mouth still buried in my pussy. Oh, God, I think—maybe this is the bad sex I deserve, when it begins to orbit off the chart and you know that somehow when it’s over it’s going to wrap right back around and come up on the awful horrifying side as chastity reclaimed.
“I shouldn’t do this,” he repeats, and I think maybe he’s waiting for me to save him. This is one of those damned defining moments in life. Define the moment or it defines you. Screw him, or screw him? Fuck it. Or fuck me.
I reach down and stroke his hard cock through his jeans.
“I’ll be good for you, Tiger. Don’t stop, don’t stop.” He lifts my sweater and we’re tumbling toward the back seat like teenagers in lust and I’m not sure I’ll be able to excuse this behavior later as research but maybe I don’t even care. My tights are off and my legs are wrapped high around his big shoulders and his cock presses into me. He leans down and begins to bite my nipple and to send me over the edge. He pauses and I think I will die if he stops one more time.
“You’re right, darling,” he whispers, driving into me hard. “For tonight, there’s no such thing as bad sex.”
About the Authors
LISA ARCHER’s work appears in Best Women’s Erotica 2002 and numerous other publications, including Bad Subjects, Black Sheets, GettingIt.Com, HIV InSite, NOW Toronto, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, ScarletLetters.com, and VenusOrVixen.com. Lisa Archer is a pseudonym.
JEN COLLINS writes short erotic fiction (a.k.a. smut) and creative nonfiction essays, and maintains a love-hate relationship with poetry. Her work has appeared in Set in Stone: Butch-on-Butch Erotica and Young Wives’ Tales: New Adventures in Love and Partnership, as well as a handful of periodicals. She lives in southern Maine with her partner, Anna.
SUSAN COSS is a San Francisco writer and a returning reader at the annual Pussy Lips Breast Cancer Benefit. This is her first published story.
NINE DECLARE was born in Northern Ireland in 1977 and graduated in sociology with gender studies from the University of Edinburgh. Sadly, she is better known for her hair than for her writing. She can be found at www.awkwardsilence.org.uk.
ERICA DUMAS has written erotica for Sweet Life: Erotic Fantasies for Couples and the forthcoming Noirotica 4. In addition to writing, she plays several musical instruments and listens to lots and lots of jazz.
ASTRID FOX lives in London. She is the author of the novels Rika’s Jewel, Primal Skin, and Cheap Trick. She has also had erotic short stories published in Sugar and Spice 2, Wicked Words, Viscera, The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Erotica, and Wicked Words 4. The polymorphously perverse thirty-two-year-old once clocked in a personal celibate best of two and a half years, although these days she leads a wicked, sinful life.
R. GAY is a writer and editor living in the Midwest. Her work can be found—past, present, or forthcoming—in Clean Sheets, Scarlet Letters, and the anthologies Herotica 7, Does Your Mama Know?, Sweet Life: Erotic Fantasies for Couples, Best Transgender Erotica, and others. She unabashedly admits to having a fetish for white boys.
ESTHER HAAS is a slut-about-town and low-stakes blackjack player who, when not dreaming of hitting the progressive jackpot on a Betty Boop quarter slot, likes to dabble in porn. This is her first published story.
ARIEL HART was born and ill-bred in Brooklyn, New York, where she lives with her husband and son. Her works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in publications like Seventeen and Screw—and practically everything else in between. She has also written close to one hundred produced adult screenplays.
THEA HILLMAN’s writing has appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, On Our Backs, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. She has performed her work at poetry slams, bookstores, literary festivals, and other venues throughout the United States. She has also performed a birdcall on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno; has appeared on the cover of the Oakland, California, phone book; and holds a tag-team haiku championship title.
SUSANNAH INDIGO is editor-in-chief of Clean Sheets Magazine (www.cleansheets.com) as well as the editor of the Slow Trains literary journal (www.slowtrains.com). Her writing has appeared in many anthologies, including The Best American Erotica, Herotica, and Best Women’s Erotica. She is also a contributor to Salon Magazine. See her website for more information: www.susannahindigo.com.
MARILYN JAYE LEWIS’s novellas and short stories have been widely anthologized in both the United States and the U.K. Editions Blanche (Paris) will publish the French language edition of her critically acclaimed collection of novellas, Neptune and Surf, in fall 2001. She is coeditor of The Mammoth Book of Erotic Photography and is the winner of Best Erotic Writer of the Year in the U.K. As webmistress, her erotic multimedia sites have won numerous awards. Visit her website: www.marilynjayelewis.com.
LYNN A. POWERS holds a master’s degree in art history from Virginia Commonwealth University and has not accomplished much with it except to write her first published nonfiction book, Killer Art: Art That Has Maimed, Killed, and Caused General Destruction Throughout the Centuries. She is at work on two novels and resides in New Orleans with her husband, David, and their two dogs, Newman and Whisker Puss.
CAROL QUEEN got a doctorate in sexology so that she could impart more realistic detail to her smut. She is the author of many erotic stories, as well as essays and sex information. For a complete listing, check www.carolqueen.com. When not writing, she works at Good Vibrations, and she and her partner, Robert, are working on founding a new organization called the Center for Sex and Culture.
RACHEL RESNICK is the author of the Los Angeles Times listed best-selling novel Go West Young F*cked-Up Chick (St. Martin’s) and is a contributing editor at Tin House Magazine. She’s had fiction, plays, and nonfiction published in the Los Angeles Times, Tin House, The Ohio Review, Chelsea, Absolute Disaster: Fiction from LA, and LA Shorts, among others. “Scenes from Thailand” is an excerpt from her new novel-in-progress, currently titled Education of a Cunt. She lives in Topanga Canyon, up the street from where Charles Manson used to park his bus. Visit her website: www.rachelresnick.com.
MICHELLE SCALISE has sold nearly two hundred poems and short stories to magazines and anthologies such as The Darker Side; Viscera; Bell, Book, and Beyond; Darkness Rising; and Best Women’s Erotica 2001.
HELENA SETTIMANA lives in “The Big Smoke,” Toronto, Ontario, with her partner of many years and a tiger tribe of four. When not writing erotica, or teaching, she poses as a potter, painter, and clay sculptor. Her website is located at http://evilzz.net/hsettimana.
ELISE TANNER’s poetry has appeared in Sensibilities, West Coast Review, The North Coast Literary Review, and Illusions. She has also written erotica under various names for Taboo Letters and other publications. She lives on the north coast of California with her lover.
LANA GAIL TAYLOR lives in Colorado with a lazy cat, an adorable son, and a whole lot of Poison, Slaug
hter, and Ratt CDs. Her erotic short stories have appeared in Playgirl Magazine, Dare for Women, Cleansheets.com, Mind Caviar.com and Bedroom Eyes: Lesbians in the Boudoir. Meanwhile, Lana is writing as much as possible and insists she isn’t wearing any spandex.
JOY VANNUYS is the pseudonym of a chef and food writer who lives in Brooklyn, New York.
About the Editor
CARA BRUCE runs Venus Or Vixen Press and the erotic web magazine VenusOrVixen.com, which won the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s Best of the Bay 2000 prize. She is the editor of Viscera and publisher of Embraces: Dark Erotica. She is coauthor, with Lisa Montanarelli, of The First Year: Hepatitis C (Morse & Co.). Her fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Best American Erotica 2001; Best Women’s Erotica 2000, 2001, and 2002; Best Lesbian Erotica 2000; The Unmade Bed: Twentieth Century Erotica; Starf*ckers; Uniform Sex; The Oy of Sex; Best S/M Erotica; Mammoth Best of the Year Erotica; Hot and Bothered 3; and Noirotica 4. Her nonfiction has appeared in Salon.com, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, While You Were Sleeping, On Our Backs, and Bust, among others. She is the editor of Good Vibrations Magazine. She is also editing Obsessed: Fetish Erotica for Cleis Press. She is very busy but always makes time for the best bisexual sex.