One moment, it’s just us on the bed, with me writhing against the persistent pressure of Terese’s fingers and teeth, then Gerard’s there. His pale skin glows against the velvet of the curtains as he climbs in next to us. Terese lifts her face and bares her fangs at him, my blood staining the pale glow of her chin. “Share and share alike, sister dear,” he responds as he kisses me and I know they’ve done this before. For an instant, I wonder what happened to the others: are they dead or what?
Then I find myself on all fours, my face buried between Terese’s suddenly very naked thighs. I lick fiercely because I want to be the one they keep, the one they share between them and tell all their secrets to. I want them to want me like I want them: desperately, all barriers gone. Terese is very dry against my tongue, but I hear her breath hiss against her fangs, feel her body stiffen slightly.
Gerard slides up behind me, his fingers guiding himself inside me until he fills me with his biting cold. Terese pulls my hand up to her mouth and sucks fiercely on my wrist as he rides me, my groans muffled in her flesh. I try not to get too distracted, my tongue still coaxing her clit, begging her to lose herself in me. Gerard sinks his teeth into my shoulder and I whimper at the momentary pain. I want to surrender but my instinct for survival is too strong and I struggle, fighting against losing myself utterly.
Terese releases my wrist and slides down between my arms to kiss me. “Gently, little one. We will not hurt you. Much.” Her voice purrs on the word and I relax into her arms as Gerard shifts position so his fingers can stroke their way up between my thighs. He is still inside me when I come again, howling against Terese’s neck. As one, they drop their mouths onto both sides of my neck and begin to feed. My body shivers in arousal, in terror until I pass out.
When I come back round, I’m at Gerard’s computer, fully dressed and very tired. It’s the end of my shift. I notice that the stack of invoices is gone from the basket and I feel as empty as it is at the sight. Are they out of work for me? What if they don’t want me back? The place is very quiet as I log out and get my jacket and there’s no one around to ask if they have work for me to do next week. I crawl home, depressed at the loss.
I don’t remember why I’m so tired or sore, at least not at first. But I don’t have any dreams that night. Then Bob from the agency calls in the morning and says that Forever Insurance loves my work, but they don’t have anything for me just now. He tells me about some other gig and I answer like a robot until I can get off the phone. Then I curl up and cry around the big empty space inside me. I wonder what used to fill it. My fingers find my wrist and I massage a sore spot, dully surprised that it hurts at all.
I get up to look at myself in the mirror and I look like I haven’t slept for days. Bats could nest in the dark caves of my eye sockets. I wonder what Terese and Gerard would have seen in me, if they could see anything in me at all. The imagined touch of their hands thrills me for a moment, and I close my eyes, then open them and make myself head for the fridge. It wasn’t real, none of it. I just have to get over them.
I’m insanely hungry this morning, for whatever reason. It’s only after I rummage around for a while and the cold freezes my fingers that I realize that I’m supposed to remember last night as an elaborate fantasy. But what if it wasn’t? Then I got used: a little blood, a little sex, and then put away like yesterday’s news. The words hang there in my mind until I get good and pissed. Who the hell do they think they are? I wanted them to keep me, maybe even make me one of them, but what do they do instead but try to glamour it all right out of my head.
That night I will myself to sleep, thinking of nothing but my dream until I am back on the road. Nothing pursues me yet because no one knows I’m here. I lean against a tree in the dark, waiting, my own blood running freely down my legs. They will come, called to me by its rusty scent. My fingers toy with a small crucifix, then stroke the rough wood of the stake that I dream into being. They need a new employee at Forever Insurance. I just hope they can see that before I have to hurt them. Much.
No Solace for the Soul in Digitopia
John Grant
My wife Xanthe was standing naked at the counter in the bathroom brushing her teeth when I woke up. Still lying in bed, I watched her back with a voyeuristic frisson for a few moments, then I climbed out quietly and padded across the bedroom to creep up behind her.
Standing there, looking at her smiling eyes over her shoulder in the mirror, I ran the tips of my fingers softly down over her shoulder blades and then the length of her spine until I reached the lower curves of her buttocks. With my fingernails I repeatedly stroked gently outwards from the fork of her legs along the twin creases beneath the smooth swells, all the while brushing her back with the soft hairs of my chest and nuzzling my nose in among the sleepy tousles of coppery red that fell over the back of her neck.
She gave a sort of bubbling moan through the froth of toothpaste and relaxed her stance, moving her feet apart and bending at the waist, supporting herself with her left hand flat on the counter. I stopped my stroking and reached round her hips to let my fingers play among the tangles of her pubic hair, teasing the strands tenderly, then slid one forefinger down to the topmost fold of her sex.
Xanthe’s a tall woman, taller than I am, so when my erection slipped between her thighs to find a harbour it was only the ripe bell of my penis that lodged between her labia, cupped in moist warmth. She carried on brushing her teeth, though her steady rhythm was by now becoming disjointed; stuttering vibrations caressed the head of my penis and transmitted themselves softly down its shaft. The movements of my hands, too, were becoming uncoordinated as I alternately cradled her buttocks and rubbed the rounded ridges of her pelvic cradle, leaning against her once more as I kneaded the sides of her small breasts with the soft skin of my inner wrists, touching the taut raspberries of her nipples and gripping them fleetingly between paired fingers.
She dropped the toothbrush into the basin and gulped, the gulp causing a muscular contraction that tweaked the top of my penis with a little kissing sound. Almost immediately afterward further delicate movements there told me that she was having a small orgasm.
She put her other hand down on the counter and, with a long low gasp, bent her legs, easing outward and downward and backward so that the full length of my shaft was slowly engulfed by her hotness and she was almost sitting in my lap as I took part of her weight.
“Good morning,” I said in her ear, looking at our faces smiling side by side in the mirror, casting my gaze down a little to where my hands had settled on her breasts. Her skin was flushed pinkly down one side of her neck and over her chest, the pale tint spreading across the top of one breast.
“Morning,” she sighed.
Supporting herself with just one hand once more, she reached with the other between her legs to couch my balls, rolling them lazily back and forward against each other, rubbing with her thumb at the base of my penis where it met the stickiness of her.
For a minute or more the motion of her hand as she fondled my balls was the only movement between us. I could feel a steady pulse building up in the lower part of my shaft and an almost painful tingling at its tip.
Then she began to sway herself against me, up and down along my penis, also giving a small swivel to her hips. In the mirror her lips were still forming a contented smile and her eyes were still dancing, but through my own closing eyes I could see my mouth was pulling into an earnest grimace. I dipped my head and began to cover her shoulders with my kisses, my own hips beginning to move now in counterpoint to hers, feeling her smooth buttocks squeezing down onto my lower belly and then pulling themselves momentarily away again. Grunting a little, I ran a hand back down to her sex and found her clitoris with my fingers; the first touch drew a whooping cry from her, and the speed of her movements against me quickened. She shoved backward, taking a small, uncontrolled step, making me nearly stumble, dropping her head so that now she was almost bent double, pushing me deeper and deeper and more a
nd more forcefully into her, the wet sounds of us slapping the walls with muted echoes.
It was as if there were no longer two of us, just one single organism trembling and pulsing in a quest for unitary pleasure. I felt as if I were being absorbed entirely into her, so that her breath was my breath, her velvety morning skin-smell a warm cloud that embraced both of us, her twitching shoulder blades in front of my eyes a plain of flesh that was my own flesh.
Each plunge of her buttocks against me was now almost like a punch. With each thrust she was yelling – incoherent sounds, wordless cries. At some time she’d given up holding my balls, which were now rolling of their own volition, my scrotum beginning to tauten and shrink, above it the base of my penis seeming to swell as it prepared itself.
“Shall? We?” I could hardly keep my mind together enough to form the words.
“Do? This?” Someone else might not have recognized her noises as speech.
“Together?” I gasped.
An old joke between us. An affectionate little playful joke it had been at first, in the early days of our lovemaking, but now become so intimate that it was as erotically charged as anything else we did together.
“Yes!” she shrieked.
And began to come, this time not with one of the many little minor orgasms that had been tickling my penis all along but with full intensity, so that it felt as if firm hands were clutching at my shaft. Inside me a dam, held momentarily against the rush of my own orgasm, then was breached by a final powerful thrust, and my juices were surging in slow irresistible convulsions all up the length of me to gush into her in great viscous spurts that seemed to tug at the sensitive flesh of the meatus before launching themselves.
For long seconds my entire universe was just a haze outside the brilliantly glowing focus of our conjoined sexes. I was the smell of her and the taste of her and the touch of her and the breath of her. Then slowly I became conscious that my cheek was nestling against her spine and that I was moaning softly. She was still coming, her orgasms tumbling one on top of each other, my penis lovingly buffeted by their strength, her buttocks moving in spasmic little jerks. Mingled moistures seeped out of her, running over the root of my penis and down the tight fist of my scrotum; a couple of drips fell to the floor. The air was rich with the smell of our lovemaking.
Finally she stilled.
I held onto her with both arms around her belly, dizzy, needing her support. I was still hard within her, hard as stone, so hard I thought I would never, ever stop being hard like this, would never stop being in this embrace with her, would be making love with her for eternity and all the while be growing harder . . .
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you,” she replied.
Eternity is quite a lot shorter than you think it is, and so half an hour later I was showered and fully dressed and out on the street, walking to the bus stop where I could if I wanted catch the number 264 bus to work. My whole body felt satisfied, as if it had been given an extensive internal massage complete with sweet-scented oils. I kissed Xanthe goodbye when she stopped at the car, and watched her, waving loosely, as she drove away to join the streams of traffic toward the other side of town, where she worked as a marine architect.
Standing there in the warm morning sunshine, I was somewhat vague as to what precisely my own profession was, and so instead of carrying on toward the bus stop I turned up a small alley and was in bed with my wife Lyssa.
Lyssa is small and blonde and so petitely cute that it almost hurts the eyes to look at her, as if so much beauty shouldn’t have been crammed into such a small compass, and right at the moment she was coming drowsily awake with her face burrowing into my side. I pushed silky near-white hair back from her forehead and squirmed around so that I was facing her and could kiss her into full wakefulness. Even as her eyelids pulled slowly open her eager little hand was tickling its way down over my belly to where my erection was slowly, then swiftly, mounting.
She wrapped her hand around the shaft, pressing her thumb down on top of the tip, grinning through the increasingly fervent kisses I was placing on her lips. Gripping a little more tightly, she began moving the thick satiny skin of the shaft slowly up and down.
“The kids are awake,” I whispered, pulling my face back from hers. “I heard them moving around a little while ago.”
She pouted, half-mocking, half-serious. “Damn,” she said.
When Lyssa and I make love it tends to get noisy. The kids know better than to charge into our bedroom unannounced, of course, but they’d be bound to ask us later about all the creaking and yelling. We’ve tried making love silently, and it’s kind of fun because it feels as if we’re committing some sort of delicious naughtiness together; but at the same time inhibited lovemaking has its limitations.
“Still and all . . .” I began, leaving the sentence unfinished as I rolled her onto her back.
I kissed her again, harder this time, our tongues probing into each other’s mouths, caressing within, our breath becoming loud in each other’s ears. Then I ran the tip of my tongue around the edge of her cheekbone and down to her chin. She arched her head back as my tongue moved on to the crease of her neck, tasting her sweetly salty sleep-sweat there. In moments I was kissing her breasts, taking each of her small nipples in turn between my teeth, not biting, not even gently biting, rolling my lips over my teeth and pressing gently. She held my head in her hands, breathing more deeply now, her hips moving reflexively against my chest, her legs parting to either side of my torso, her furry little sex making small wet noises of its own against my abdomen. Between her legs, my erection against the sheets seemed heavier than it had any right to be, as if it were becoming larger than all the rest of me put together.
I lingered at her breasts tantalizingly longer than I knew she wanted me to, then my mouth continued its downward exploration of her body, pausing once more when I reached her navel, probing the tiny folds with my tongue, tracing damp circles around the concavity. Her belly is flat and smooth, even though she has borne our two children; through its wall I could hear her blood rushing and her insides making modest gurgling noises. Often enough in the past I’d held my cheek here and listened to first my son and then my daughter moving in her womb, felt their diminutive kicks and punches. I knew I was smiling broadly as I kissed her here now, sensing the tension building up in her loins, remembering those other moments of intimacy . . .
Half-kneeling, I pushed her legs gently yet farther apart and sank my head to rub my nose over the silky skin of the inside of first one thigh and then the other, breathing deeply the warm muskiness of her pinkly unfolding sex. Her fingers began clawing the sides of my head as she tried to force my face toward her vagina, but I deliberately resisted her just a little while longer, continuing to rub and kiss her inner thighs as her behind squirmed frenziedly against the sheets.
At last I relented, first placing a broad warm kiss over her wet opening, sucking slightly, tasting the juices; then I puckered my lips and, pulling her labia aside with my thumbs, very daintily kissed her clitoris. She jerked against me, even that brief and inconsequential contact bringing her to the brink of orgasm. Once more I kissed the little nub of her clitoris, and then I pushed my tongue between the warm folds of her vagina, blowing gently.
Her hands scrabbled through my hair. She mashed my face tight up against her tuft of wet pubic hair. Her hips jolted upward, clear of the bedding, and despite any resolves to keep silence she let out a long, soft cry as she came, her thighs juddering against my ears, her fluids pouring into my mouth, the muscles of her belly writhing and tautening. I slipped my tongue out of her vagina and ran it swiftly over the underface of her buttocks and in the groove between her sex and her rear, and she gave a great convulsive heave of aftershock, then another and another . . .
When she was at last done I pulled myself up alongside her, my penis, though somewhat smaller here than usual, still a dominating presence in my mind. I could feel the wetness of its tip where cle
ar juice had escaped. I gazed at her reddened face, at the beloved crinkles of her ears, at those pale blue eyes still half-closed, at the parted pink lips, at the corner of her mouth where a trickle of saliva glistened, at the darling curls of damp-darkened blondeness flattened against her scalp around the back of her ears. I truly love this woman of mine – love every part of her, both spiritually and carnally. I caressed her cheek and jaw with my hand, feeling her heat and her perspiration, and, despite the throbbing of my erection, began to drift into a half-doze, cradling her in my arms against me.
But then her hand walked its way down to my erection again and clasped it.
“Wait here,” she breathed.
Pushing back her hair with her other hand, she wormed her way slowly down the bed and took my left ball into her mouth, sucking it softly, easing and increasing its ache at the same time. Then she kissed the underside of my penis, working slowly up from root to tip, where she tickled with her tongue tip the tight cord of folded flesh that joins skin to head.
I shut my eyes and saw visions of rushing through space among the stars, my consciousness ebbing toward the tingle of her tongue tip’s touch and the warmth of her breath on the bulging bell of my penis head.
The movements of her tongue grew broader, and then she was taking me into her mouth, almost coyly at first, as if her mouth were experimenting demurely, then more fully, her lips gripping the skin and sliding it backward and forward, a finger and thumb gripping the base of the shaft to steady it.
Within just a few seconds I felt myself beginning to come. Lyssa felt it as well, starting to press rhythmically with her thumb at the throbbing area near the base of my erection’s underface. She speeded up the motion of her head, clamping my penis more firmly between her lips, her tongue dashing hither and thither across the meatus on each retreat of her head. She was stroking my balls with her palm, feathery strokes, just brushing the springy hairs on my sack, sensitizing the whole area there until it seemed I could feel the individual molecules of air jostling against that wrinkled flesh.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 4 Page 48