The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 9

by Maxim Jakubowski

  I think about how I rubbed my naked crotch up and down a parking meter in a deserted parking lot one night, my pink panties around my ankles. Let’s just say my ideas of traffic and mobility management are fucked up. I wasn’t worried about getting caught that night; if I’d been caught, I probably wouldn’t have been penalized. I mean, think of all the crap that goes down in Las Vegas. Plus, I once read that a North Dakota man who got busted for having “simulated” sex with a mannequin didn’t commit a crime of indecent exposure, according to the state Supreme Court. The court record did state its opinion that having sex in public with a mannequin would likely offend people though. Would a half-clothed woman, sexing up a parking meter, be equally or more offensive? Well, thank goodness the buddies of justice are keeping people safe from the sight of fully clothed men fake-fucking mannequins.

  I turn the reports into my boss. It takes me twenty-five minutes. Later that night I look up Giovanni’s phone number and address in the phone book. I think about visiting him but call him instead. It rings twice and his deep voice hangs in the air on the other end.

  “I like to watch NASCAR,” I whisper. “You only realize the driver’s skill when there’s a crash.That’s where the truth is, in the mistakes.”

  There is silence on the other end.

  “Who is this?” he asks.

  “I like the photos.” I hang up. I am shaking.

  I turn on the shower. As I masturbate, I think about the Hoover Dam on the nearby Colorado River.The hydroelectric marvel was finished in 1936 and now lights the neon signs in Sin City. As I come, the phone rings. I imagine it’s Giovanni, and he wants to spank me for messing up an important crime scene investigation.

  Two years before Hoover Dam was completed, the Model-T-Ford was in favor in America, and mechanical brakes stopped all automobiles. Around the clock, thousands of workers were mobilized and transported to the dam. To carry the workers to the dam, large trucks were modified with decks of seats that held one hundred and fifty men at a time. There were no devices to dig large rock tunnels. Large trucks weighing ten tons were customized to support platforms holding thirty drills, which were used to prepare the rock face for dynamiting tunnels. Massive spider-like webs of steel wire cable were stretched from towers high over the dam to lower the concrete, large pipe, and men down the sheer cliffs into the canyon.

  I towel off, dry my hair, eat a tomato-and-mayo sandwich. I feed Macey and head out in my Dodge Dart, looking for inspiration and humiliation in the face of a road sign. I fall into a pattern. I find a particularly intriguing sign, like “Road Construction, 1500 Feet,” or a sign with the “no parking” symbol, and masturbate.This becomes some sort of game with Giovanni and I. He finds me somehow, snaps pictures of me and they arrive in a plain manila envelope in my office a few days later. He’s twice my size. His hands are big and beautiful. I know he follows me but I don’t stop him. Sometimes after I look at his photos, after I think about him developing them in a private dark room, I have to masturbate in a stall in the ladies’ room.

  I make sure there are no surveillance cameras near any of the signs I use; some of the county commissioners are looking at options to catch vandals who are destroying and stealing road signs. They’ve also started to change the signs to fiberglass; they’re taller than the existing aluminum signs. Some have even been bolted on opposite sides of a hollow square post to thwart potential vandals.

  Then just as mysteriously, the photo taking stops; I don’t receive envelopes anymore.

  After driving around Nevada roads for hours, listening to Elvis Costello, I get the courage to go to Giovanni’s house, knock on the door. It’s raining. I’m holding a newspaper over my head.

  He opens the door and is holding an ice pack to his head. He’s wearing jeans. He’s shirtless. His eyes are bruised and swollen, his upper lip split grotesquely. Instinctively I reach out to touch his face and he draws back.

  “I . . . miss you,” I say.

  He looks surprised.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  In the dark canyons of his face, I see that at the moment I don’t bear any resemblance to the image of the girl in the photos, the girl I think I am. I catch a glimpse of the room behind him.There are steel sculptures and models everywhere. Framed junkyard photographs adorn his walls. Most of the furniture is modern and steel.

  “Look, you shouldn’t miss me,” he says. “In fact, you should get out.”

  “I don’t want to leave.” It takes every ounce of courage I have to say it.

  He moves the ice pack to his right eye and stares at me with his left. Then he yanks me inside and slams the door shut. Sheryl Crow’s “Steve McQueen” belts out from his living room stereo. He pulls me through the living room to a study. He puts the ice pack down on a large, masculine mahogany desk. “Bend over,” he says. I comply.

  All kinds of intricate model airplanes dangle from the ceiling. Metal. Spectacular.

  “You always do what people tell you?” he asks.

  I swallow. I don’t speak.

  He spanks me. Hard. “Whore. I asked you a question.”

  “Sometimes . . . I don’t know . . . yes . . .”

  “Pull your skirt and panties down.”

  I pull them down.

  A moment passes. I hear him unzip his jeans.

  “Look at me,” he commands.

  I stay bent over the desk, turn my head and look back at him. He has a beautiful, hard cock.

  “You like that?”

  “Ummmm,” I say.

  He spanks me again. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” He keeps spanking me then stops. I turn and watch him, study his frenzied beat as he strokes himself. I watch as he eventually comes on my backside, breathing hard, his hand on my back to keep me in my place.

  He closes his swollen eyes. “I can’t do this anymore,” he says.

  “Do what?” I ask.

  “Take your picture . . . when you . . . demean yourself.”

  “Demean myself? But I . . . like it,” I say.

  “Jesus.” He rakes a hand through his dark hair. He spanks my bare bottom again. He spanks me for a good five minutes more. Then he collapses against me, his heart beating hard, holding his cheek to my back. I feel a slight tremble pass through him right before he stands up.

  “Get out,” he says.

  “But . . .”

  “Go home. Wash yourself off. Don’t masturbate to any more road signs.”

  I cry all the way back to my tiny apartment.The wind rubs me, sighs against my face through the open car windows. My bottom is sore. His sticky essence is still on my back, my clothes, and I like that too.

  Two weeks pass in a melodramatic haze. Maybe it’s three. I walk around like a robot, processing my evidence and reports. But I don’t masturbate to any more road signs.

  Macey’s health starts to decline.The careful musing silence of my apartment drives me mad. Macey’s back legs just don’t work right anymore. One night I carry her to my car.We drive around all night, looking at the big Nevada stars. I stop at a service station to use the restroom. I get some gas, pay for the gas and doggy treats, give them to Macey, who wags her tail. I pull out onto the highway again.

  The thing is to keep going, keep moving. I drive with one hand on the steering wheel, the other scratching Macey behind the ears. “I love you, Macey,” I say, over and over.

  Macey falls asleep for a while as the Nevada desert scenery whittles by. I drink in the earth. I don’t even notice the road signs.

  I find an old junkyard and stop the car. I put a radio station on; it blasts jazz. Macey loves jazz. She eases her old self up from the blanket on the front seat and I carry her to the dusty grass that lines the front of the junkyard. The sculptures are magnificent in the moonlight. An old rusting motorcycle. Piles of crushed cars. A busted microwave. Old golf clubs. She looks up at me, grins in her way, and then dies. I cry as I carry her back to the car. I cry a lot over the next week. I have her cremated and put her
ashes in a beautiful wooden urn, which I keep on top of my entertainment center.

  It’s raining. Almost midnight. I miss Macey. The TV is on and I stare at it, but I’m not really watching it. A knock on the door and I am nearly startled out of my pants. I open it and Giovanni stands there. He holds a newspaper over his head.Water drips down his beautiful face and neck. He’s like a sculpture.

  “I’m sorry about your dog,” he says.

  “How did you know about my dog?”

  “I saw you that night. It wasn’t a moment I could interrupt.”

  “Oh.”

  “Listen, I want to show you something. Will you go with me?”

  “I don’t know . . . I . . .”

  “Go with me.” I grab my coat and follow him to his car. I respond to masculine commands almost without thinking. It gives me pleasure.

  He drives a dark blue pick-up truck. I climb into the front seat.We start off into the night. He doesn’t talk while we drive. I sit and enjoy the jazz-pop-thump of windshield wipers on the glass, his presence, the fat sound of rain on the roof.

  When we stop, he shuts off the ignition and the lights. It’s not raining anymore.We are parked in front of the junkyard where Macey died, where she looked up at me with some last unbent metallic late-night breakfast belly-scratching bit of happiness. Giovanni grabs some camera equipment off the floor of the truck and a portable CD player and gets out. I follow him into the junkyard, where everything glitters with the fresh kiss of rain. Massive spider-webs of metal.

  He puts his camera together and waits as I start to walk through the jungle of dumped memory. My heart beats fast. My face and neck are hot. Mountains that are pink to rust by day are now steel gray in the darkness. I stand before the skeleton of an old motorcycle and look at him, tears filling my eyes.The great hulking mounds of metal, shaped and shapeless at the same time, are beautiful.

  He puts a CD in and Louis Armstrong’s “No One Else But You” dances into the aluminum night.

  “Touch the metal,” he orders, his eyes feral.

  I lick my lips. I hesitate. “I don’t know . . .”

  “Yes, you do know.Touch it.Touch everything the way you want to.”

  I swallow and run my hands over the ripped leather seat of the old motorbike, the handlebars.

  “And then touch me the same way.”

  My head snaps up when he says this.

  I lose all track of time as I put my hands on myself and on old automobiles, rub my naked thighs over their rounded hoods, press my breasts against the rough old lips of giant tires, ragtops that knew a lot of summers, my bottom against a wheelchair, lips on rings of metal bolts. “When the Saints Go Marching In” drums in my head, in my veins and blood. Giovanni snaps more pictures.

  “When you take a drive down a desert road, never know what you’ll find,” he breathes.

  I am completely naked when he pats the hood of another old automobile. “This is a 1940 Mercury four-door sedan wearing a 1939 hood. Only the second year of production for Mercury. Improvements over the 1939 model included sealed-beam headlamps, a two-spoke steering wheel, a steering column-mounted gearshift, and vent wing windows. Ain’t she a beauty?”

  Yes, yes you are, I think. You certainly are a beauty.

  “The Preacher and the Bear” throws itself out of the CD player:

  Oh Lord, didn’t you deliver Daniel from the lion’s Den?

  Also delivered Jonah from the belly of the whale and then

  The Hebrew children from the fiery furnace

  So the good book do declare

  Yes! Lord, if you can’t help me,

  For goodness sake don’t help that bear.

  “Each piece has its own sexual style,” I say to Giovanni. For the next half hour or so, I demonstrate my point on old aircraft bones, a left rear fender, a water heater, a toaster oven, and an abandoned washing machine that displays an unusual tendency toward impressionism.

  We drink the gin he had stashed in his truck. After running my hands over the grill of the Mercury, I run them over his Adam’s apple, run my tongue over it too; I’ve always wanted to taste it.

  “Why do we love metal so much?” he asks, kissing my neck, running his hands over my body; all the while he’s still fully clothed. I can hardly think with his hands on me but I know my answer is important.

  A new song plays:

  fed you since last fall, you rascal, you.

  I fed you since last fall, you rascal, you.

  I fed you since last fall,

  Then you got your ashes hauled.

  I’ll be glad when you dead, you rascal, you!

  You asked my wife to wash your clothes, you rascal, you.

  You asked my wife to wash your clothes, you rascal, you.

  You asked my wife to wash your clothes

  And something else I suppose.

  I’ll be glad when you dead, you rascal, you!

  You know you done me wrong, you rascal, you.

  You know you done me wrong, you rascal, you.

  You know you done me wrong,

  You done stole my wife and gone.

  I’ll be glad when you dead, you rascal, you!

  Trumpet notes punch the air like screaming steel rivets.

  “Spread your legs.”

  I obey.

  His fingers are inside me when I answer him. “They have the hard-won beauty . . . of things that intermingled with people and weather for years.They tell us the story of their own lives but also tell us about . . . the people who owned them.”

  He fucks me with his fingers. I moan. “I like sad, old, worn-out things. I like how they make me feel,” and I am crying. “Your bruises are healing,” I say.

  “I like to pick fights with strangers just to feel alive. I usually win, but it’s not about winning, and I got my ass kicked last time. Guy had the biggest knuckles I’ve ever seen.”

  He puts his coat between me and the rusted hunk of metal car, between me and the world, removes his clothes, and fucks me, demanding that I wrap my legs around him, then demanding I spread them wider, then demanding that I squeeze him again.

  The dead rock climber was trying to release a jammed rope from a previous rappel when a rock dislodged, causing her to lose her balance and fall.The remaining members of her group didn’t have a rope long enough to complete the final rappel. We couldn’t determine whether it was a climbing harness failure or a problem with her equipment or an error. The girl was once quoted in a Nevada newspaper: “As a climber, you need to pick hard enough climbs because those are the walls where you’ll learn the most.”

  That Christmas, in our apartment, with his metal airplanes spinning on the ceiling in the hot blasts of an overeager heater that drives up our electric bills, Giovanni and I exchange gifts. He gives me a metal chastity belt. The kind where he has the key and will tell me how long I have to wear it.When it’s on, I won’t be able to touch myself. I take it off only when he says I can take it off. I give him a book called The Pleasures of Being a Female Sexual Submissive because it’s the only way I know how to tell him what I need to tell him.

  It’s raining. In our apartment, we’ve created a world of gold, silver, water and neon. A place where you can’t fall down. A place where you can’t get too high.

  A Secret Night in Grouse Woods

  Karen Sutow

  The autumn breeze kicked in through the door, bringing with it two men and a woman. I glanced up from my cappuccino, foam peppering my top lip.The taller of the men brushed past me, his thin hips nearly caressing my shoulder as he squeezed between the tables. His blue jeans hugged his ass and his white T-shirt accentuated the muscles on his back. He carried something black in his hands, though what I could not see, my view now obstructed by his friends, who had joined him at the counter.

  I turned to Lacy, noticed her eyes fixed on the men, and leaned into the table straining to see them. On the left stood the man in the jeans, his back still facing me. On his right was the woman, drink in hand, h
er eyes taking in the room. She was petite, not more than five-foot-two, maybe five-foot-three, with short, wavy black hair – sexy yet sleek. Deep brown eyes, sculpted face. Not a lick of make-up, yet attractive as hell.

  The guy on her right smiled before resting his hand on her shoulder, then said something to the other man, the one who held the black object. He shifted the object to his left hand, then ran his fingers through his short brown hair and smiled before returning his attention to the barista.

  “You ever see them before?” Lacy asked.

  “No. Where you figure they’re from?”

  “How would I know? Probably just passing through on their way to somewhere.”

  “On the way to where?” I said. “This town’s between here and nowhere.”

  Lacy laughed, and I laughed with her. Almedia, with its population of 1,683, was a blip on the map. It took a good two hours to drive through the rolling hills to the nearest town and four hours to Carlton City, if the weather was good and a landslide of rocks and mud hadn’t wiped out the road down the mountain. Life was simple – folks lived off the land, neighbors helped each other out, not that gruff mind-your-own-business-and-I’ll-mind-mine kind of thinking you get most everywhere else, especially in the big cities. Of course, young folks don’t stick around long – rushing off to find something new and exciting – and the population keeps dwindling. Lacy and I are pretty much the exception, though I don’t know how much longer that will last. I feel the city calling me and I’m desperate to experience adventure. Must be a mid-life crisis or something, although I don’t know how much it’s mid-life when you’re just hitting thirty.

  “What do you think they’re doing?”

  “How should I know?”

  The two men and the woman had moved to the far wall and stood facing the room.The one with the black box stared, first at Mrs. O’Leary, with her coiffed grey hair and wrinkled face, then at Mabel Osterburch, whose head was buried in a book. Mabel licked her bottom lip, oblivious to the man watching her. His attention shifted to Mabel’s right and rested on Robin Koots, who sensed his gaze, looked up from her newspaper, and smiled so wide you’d have thought he offered her the world. He nodded ever so slightly, then looked at the box and gently ran his finger across the side, as if caressing a lover. I swallowed hard. Shifted my gaze from his finger to his face, locked my eyes on his piercing blues as he looked directly at me. Smiling.Teeth so white. I couldn’t help but smile back, my lips opening so far it was almost embarrassing. Lacy kicked me under the table as the man strode toward me. The other man and the woman remained in place.