No answer.
“I told you I’d bring a hole to fuck. An asshole. Here it is, take it or leave it.”
John can be such a sarcastic dick when he bullies people.
I tried not to think about what was happening to me when I heard the tear of wrapper and the grumbling that came with it. I tried to go blank as the man’s dick pushed into me. I struggled to divorce myself from the snorting beast he became as he arched over me, furious in his intent and desire.
I imagined the spring peepers instead, hearing them in the idle of my mind. Fruelings, my late grandmother had called them, fruelings. Such a sweet word, it celebrates the very sense of spring as it rolls off the tongue. Like that other word my grandmother would use, liebeskind. But that word had dark beginnings. “Nothing good will come of this,” she had hissed to my mother when first she held me, before she welcomed me into the family with her kisses and her cooing. Liebeskind – me, the child tainted by an accident and abandonment, cherished despite the shame.
As the cock shuddered within me, I choked on my shame, knowing that that man’s orgasm had fulfilled my grandmother’s old world prediction.
In the safety of daylight, after that first time, I walked to the bridge to marvel at it and at what had occurred beneath it. Built just before the stock market’s bust had robbed Connecticut of income, it connected two disparate sides of the small city I called home, and the Department of Transportation had spared no expense in making the bridge a notable landmark. Over each footing sat a giant thread spool, sculpted from stone and bare of thread, marking the city’s glory as a one-time thread manufacturer. At each end of the bridge, upon two taller and more majestic spools, sat eleven-foot tall bullfrogs. There they perched, each copper green with bulging gold eyes. Crouched on three legs while a hind leg stretched luxuriously down over the spool, each looked upwards towards the sky, but not quite at it, vacant and dumb.
The state of Connecticut had pompously named the bridge “Thread City Crossing” but everyone around town called it what it was: the frog bridge. And beneath the clean lines of its design, hiding under its commemorative presentation, lay evidence of the city’s less savory reality: the waste of lives lived marginally measured in booze bottles, discarded needles, cigarette butts, and condom wrappers. Amid which I had croaked plaintively while an anonymous horn dog had fucked my ass.
And yet I wait for another one of these clandestine and dirty encounters.
You’d think I’d be ready for whoever approaches me, but experience has not brought me any ease. I still stand there, tensing in the dark as I wait to see whether cock or fist or toys will be used on me.
Yes, some men like toys. Voyeurs, they touch themselves as John shines his penlight on me, on the whole aching ordeal. I hear them when they come, and for reasons I’ve yet to fathom, I find the sounds of masturbation always more lurid than those of sport fucking.
Footsteps. I hear them now, muffled but close. Code words are spoken and John’s hand is at my neck, pushing me to bend over. I hear a zipper, a condom wrapper, twin sounds of ripping, of things being readied. Cold lube slathers my hole. John’s finger slides into me, prepping me.
The anonymous taker steps up to me, but I’m startled when I feel a slight, small hand on my hip as the man presses into me. What enters me is slender and long – the guy must be skinny, I think – but it feels different, lacks something, and I’m at a loss to say what.
My asshole, however, says something of its own. It rejects the cock, protesting in painful spasms. Skinny Guy doesn’t notice; he just keeps pushing and it pisses me off. All I can do behind the hood is howl and although it feels futile, John recognizes the tenor of my complaint.
“Hold up there,” he tells the trick. “Stop pushing. Rectal spasms.”
Skinny Guy heeds him and, as they wait for me to settle down, John talks shop with the guy. “First time out since last year. It tends to panic at the first fuck of the season.”
It. Damn, that word, it. The sound of which stuns me and makes me stupid. Stupid enough that my asshole opens right up.
I know why John does this to me, why he brings me here. Once, between tricks, he told me how in the years before men had to worry, he’d bring “his boy” to the bathhouses. How he’d bend the guy over and let cock after cock take his ass, how used the hole would look, by night’s end, all stretched and weeping white. He told me he kept his boy naked the next day so he could “test the burn” with dry fingers. He recalled the rent parties he staged, where people would pay for an evening cluster fuck. There, he could take instant photos, capturing anonymous, tight shots of holes, cocks, and mouths.
John brings me here, does this to me, because he misses those days.
Skinny Guy starts up again, fucking me at a slow, steady pace. He utters an “oh yeah, nice” and his other hand comes to rest on my hip. The voice is gruff but shallow, lacking just like the hands.
But the dick that reams me knows what to do and wastes no time going about its business. It plows me, stretches me. Sometimes it grazes a nook of bliss, sometimes it hits a cranny of discomfort.
But Skinny Guy isn’t wham-bam rhythmic like the others who’ve used me. He mixes it up. He grinds his pelvis, cork-screwing his dick into me. He fucks slowly; he fucks fast. When he goes deep and holds it there, I sense that he loves his dick far more than he enjoys my ass.
The variety of movement he foists on me begins to overwhelm me and I want to escape the sensations. I seek refuge. But where can I go?
I think of frogs, again, but this time of their past. I think about that night in 1754 when a sound so terrifying rose up that the village folk feared that if the French and Indians weren’t descending upon them, then Judgment Day had. Morning’s light revealed that it was neither men nor God who had waged war, but frogs. Hordes of them. And they had battled to the death over a millpond as it went dry and their amphibious screams had sent people spiraling into fear.
Whereas me? I only had a cock up my ass.
Still, I want the frogs to scream for me, to sound the alert, to save me. I long for them to rescue me on this my judgment day.
It won’t happen though. The water moves too fast for all but those stoic and stupid copper frogs. No, I won’t be rescued and I can’t scream in death knell fervor either because my suffering is a myth and a myth is never the truth and my truth is darker and deeper than any mass frog extinction ringing out in the black of night. Because deep down inside, I like what happens to me. I may fear it, I may tremble before it, but ultimately I like it.
The dick pulls out and the void left in its wake is mysterious and confusing. I’m not certain an orgasm was had. But Skinny Guy says “nice hole” and pats my ass. It’s the only acknowledgment I receive. No farewell, no clumsy inquiry about whether I’m tucked forward or tapped shut.
As footsteps sound and recede, it dawns on me. The small hands, the underdeveloped voice, the dick that didn’t quit with orgasm, he – he who had me – understood all too well how concealment works, how anonymity can mean something other than the obvious. Dysphoria, it would seem, seeks its outlets in camouflaged appearances and finds its solutions in unusual realities.
In the hour just before darkness lifts, I lie in bed, unable to sleep. Outside, the birds haven’t waited for daybreak; they chatter in the dark. House wrens, finches, even the occasional robin make noise. A brief ruckus in the tree outside our bedroom window tells me that even baby birds need an a.m. feeding.
But these sounds will fade as the breeding and brooding subside in the heat of summer. So, too, will one of two things that croak, namely that which sings sweetly, collectively, historically. The other won’t be that lucky. It will protest and plead in falsetto and false struggle every time it’s taken out and made anonymous.
But at least by then the days will be long and the nights, short. And maybe June will be as rainy a month as the entire winter was white.
Whichever, I’ll take my comforts where I find them.
; Eye of the Beholder
Mark Timlin
I’d been sitting on the floor inside the walk-in closet for over an hour before I heard the key in the door of the hotel suite. I’d slid in like a ghost using a duplicate when I knew she’d left to meet him, and before I went to my hiding place I wandered around for a few minutes picking up things here and there: a used glass, an item of soiled underwear that I’d put to my face to smell her musk. I wondered what the hell I was putting myself through again. She’d left her portable CD player on repeat, playing an old Joni Mitchell album that I’d always liked, and I nodded my head in time to the music.
Inside the closet her clothes hung close to me and I could smell old perfume, old makeup and just the hint of sweat. But that might have been from me. It was hot in there and I had only cracked the sliding, mirrored doors an inch or so, just enough to see the king-size bed lit softly by the bedside lamps that she’d left burning.
The two of them had been drinking and were noisy as they came in, straight to the bedroom, where I was waiting. No messing with niceties like a schooner of sherry or an after-dinner mint. I appreciated that. The closet was getting warmer and warmer by the minute, and as they entered the room I squinted through the gap to see them both, and what they were going to do to each other.
The woman was tall and blonde in a leather coat with her hair piled up on top, and they’d obviously been having such a good time in the bar that some of it had come loose and strands hung around her face. Even so, she looked great, and even better when she did something to it at the back and it fell to her shoulders. Her hair had always been beautiful: shiny, lustrous, the colour of butter melting in the sun.
Lucky bloke, I thought as they stood by the door and kissed. She had the face of a Hollywood star on a movie poster and blue eyes that said, “Come to bed, and I mean right now”.
He was taller, older, florid, ugly, as it goes, and I felt my spine contract at the sight of his face. He was big, but not fat, in a pinstripe suit cut to make him look slimmer, a blue shirt, striped tie and black slip-on shoes. When they broke away from each other he slammed the bedroom door behind them, as she slipped off her coat to reveal the inevitable little black dress. She tossed her coat over a chair and he threw his jacket down and grabbed her again. She didn’t object when he kissed her once more, and neither did she object when he spun her round and pulled the zip of her dress down to her waist and peeled it off her shoulders so that it fell to her feet like a pool of ink before she stepped out of it.
Underneath she was wearing tart’s gear, whore’s kit. But by Christ she did look good in it. Black fuck-me shoes with five-inch heels, black nylons that gleamed in the light with thick bands of double black at their tops, then pure white thighs, the colour of fresh milk, slashed by the black bondage of suspenders, lace briefs just see-through enough to give a hint of the goodies underneath, and a black lace bra that her breasts hardly needed for support but to flaunt their beauty. To tease. Her tummy was flat as a billiard table, her waist was tiny then flared into rounded hips and when she turned round she shook the twin peaches of an arse to die for.
I could see he appreciated the sight as the front of his pinstripe trousers tented, and when she turned back she reached for his cock straight away. She seemed to be pleased with what she found and she knelt down and unzipped him, reached in and pulled out his prick. It was long and thick, gorged with blood, and she spat on her fingers and rolled back the foreskin before taking it in her mouth, both of them groaning with pleasure.
It was getting hotter in the closet as I watched, and I felt myself harden too and I hated myself for it.
“Wait,” he said, and she stopped for a moment, releasing his prick. He kicked off his shoes, undid the button on his trousers, and pushed them and his boxer shorts off, looking comical in shirt-tails and socks. No one ever knows how silly they look having sex.
As he tugged off his tie and pulled at the buttons on his shirt, almost popping them off the material in his haste, his cock hardened even more as she took it inside her soft mouth again and she put her fingers in the bush of his pubic hair and gathered his balls into her hand. Bitch, I thought, as she sucked on his dick like a baby at a tit. Bitch. Just you wait. It didn’t help that my cock was now unbearably hard and all caught up in my underwear, and in the position I was in I couldn’t adjust the damn thing to get it comfortable.
Anyway, after she’d feasted on his prick for a few minutes she let it slip out of her mouth and it was all shiny with spit and they went over to the bed and really got down to it after he’d pulled off those stupid socks. First, off comes her bra and by God she’s got a pair of tits. He held them in his big hands and started sucking on each nipple until they were as pink and hard as pencil erasers, and she started wanking his cock in her hand and I was worried he was going to come all over her and I’d be stuck in that damned closet until he could get it up again. But she knew just how to get him to the peak of orgasm before she let him slip back.
He was loving all that, squeezing her breasts and rolling her nipples between his fingers, making her cry out half in pain, half in pleasure. After a minute or two he went for the main event, running his hand down her belly and inside her knickers and he obviously liked what he found as I could see his fingers were slippery with cunt juice, and he took a big lick and then kissed her again, a long, lingering snog, and at the same time pulled her pants over her hips and down those long legs and let her kick them off. She opened her legs wide and I could see that her cunt was shaven close to the skin which somehow made her look even more naked, like a young girl, even though she was still wearing the suspender belt, nylons and those shiny black shoes. So now was the time for them to start fucking. The man lay on his back and she climbed on top, her favourite position, and she guided his prick up inside her and slid down hard.
Come on, I thought, get on with it. We haven’t got all day. But she took her time, riding him like a jockey, her head thrown back, eyes closed, her hands clenched tightly in the hairs on his barrel chest, until she froze solid, gripping him tighter inside, and came with a whoop. They stayed like that, a human tableau, for a moment that seemed to go on for ever before she rolled off onto her side, her cunt opened to my eyes, all red and wet and raw inside before she leant up on one elbow and looked directly at the closet door. I imagined she was looking straight into my eyes but she gave no sign that she could see me or anything else after her climax. Maybe she was admiring herself in the mirror, or maybe she just didn’t give a damn.
But the man wasn’t going to allow her a rest. His fat, red cock was still erect. Still ready to shoot his spunk up into her belly. Good job, I thought, as he grabbed her again and stuck his face between her legs, slurping like a pig at the trough, then with dripping lips, covered her face with her own juice and threw her down onto the bed. I waited until he climbed on top and pushed his cock deep inside and started to move. As he rose and fell I could see her cunt bulge from the girth of his knob and his huge balls banging against the crack of her arse, and I swear I could smell the stink of their sex clear across the room.
They both began to moan as they approached climax, she for the second time, he for the first. Hers a slight whimper from the back of the throat and his harsher, louder, just as I had expected, and was waiting for. There was no chance they could hear as I gently slid the closet door open, its runners carefully greased earlier. I stood up slowly, the surgical gloves on my hands hot and damp inside, much like her vagina, I thought, but dismissed the thought immediately. On rubber soles I crossed the carpet silently, and just as he was beginning on the short strokes I tapped him on his big, bare, suntanned shoulder with the silencer on the end of the .22 automatic I held tightly, but not too tightly, in my right hand.
He stopped in mid-thrust and turned his head with a look of astonishment on his heavy features.
“Hi. How’s it going?” I asked, “Having a good time?”
“What . . . ?” was the only word I let him say befo
re I stuck the barrel of the pistol in his ear and fired once. The report was no louder than a virgin’s sigh, but I could imagine the small, powerful bullet ripping around inside his skull, scrambling his brains into a bloody mush, as his eyes almost popped from their sockets from the pressure within his head. He collapsed onto the woman’s body.
She screamed a small scream then, not as loud as the one she’d made when she’d orgasmed a few minutes before, and tried to heave his dead weight off herself. I put the smoking barrel of the gun to her forehead and smiled a smile I was glad I couldn’t see, and she flinched as I knew she would when my finger tightened on the trigger again.
We stayed like that for a brief moment before I said, “Come on,” in a voice I hardly recognised as my own, as I eased off the pressure and removed the gun from her face. “We’ve done what we were paid for, let’s get this place cleaned up and get out of here.”
“You didn’t even let the poor bastard come,” she said as she pushed at his torso and I helped her roll him over, his almost flaccid cock popping out of her cunt like a cork from a bottle. “You could’ve at least let him do that.”
“Fuck him,” I said, “No one comes into my wife but me.”
Indigo White, Burnt Umber
Cheyenne Blue
I’d walked too far. The Landcruiser was an indistinct blot on the wavering horizon, hulking down among the saltgrass and low dunes on the southwestern shore. The water licked ankle-deep, clear, white and warm. Curls of silt oozed between my toes; I sank slightly at every step. Beside me, Jeremy was intent on small discoveries, head bent, studying the water.
“Look, Petra.” His thin face was alight with enthusiasm. “There’s shield shrimp here! Lake Eyre hasn’t flooded this far in nearly thirty years, yet the shrimp survive.”
The biologist in him. I nodded absently, more interested in finding words to describe how the light moved and danced in this place. Indigo white, burnt umber. The artist in me.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 4 Page 15