The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 9

by Maxim Jakubowski

  As a married man, and as a human entitled to a little personal space, I automatically leaned away towards the window, though it is conceivable now that I likewise slid the lower half of my body even closer to her. She’d gone back to scrounging through her bag. When the bus rounded a sharp corner a minute later however, the momentum of the turn forced her nearly into my lap, and sent an old man getting up for his stop crashing into the partition near the folding doors.

  “Well, you sure know how to liven up de bus rides,” she giggled, like I was somehow responsible for her body unexpectedly resting half on top of mine. “An’ you certainly are warm. Maybe you should just take off your jacket. I don’t t’ink dat loosening your tie has done you much good.”

  “Really, I’m OK,” I answered, no longer making the slightest attempt to move away. I could easily have hugged her tight right then, though I didn’t.

  “Now come, let me help you.” She shifted again, and precariously – because of the bus, not because of the act – began undressing me as if I were her child. First, she completely removed the tie; then she unfastened the top three buttons of my shirt, working diligently with her tongue sticking out the side of her mouth; next came my jacket, which she helped to cast off and placed neatly in my lap. After she boldly tucked a wayward curl behind my ear, I felt as if I was naked, and my penis, long since risen, began to ache. I was finding it hard to breathe.

  Two more passengers got on the bus and sat across the aisle from us. All of a sudden, she became still as stone.

  “It’s Brigitte – my name.”

  “Nice to meet you, Brigitte.” I wriggled my hand free for a shake, possibly to diffuse pent-up energy, and possibly because I wanted to touch her directly, to get her going on me again.

  She clasped my fingers with the same eagerness that was stirring in my pants. “My goodness, you are hot! Your hands is sweating. Are you always dis way?”

  “Ummm. I guess,” was my answer, though I wanted to add, “but only since I’ve met you . . . Brigitte.”

  Our enthusiastic grasp persisted, spanning the shallow divide between her legs and mine. She began stroking my forearm with her free hand, gently plucking and twisting at the short brown hairs that grew there. When her devilish touch drew a sigh of pleasure from my lungs, she placed her palm on my thigh. A few more people came and went, and I suffered the fabric of my slacks like a giant bur on my skin.

  Two blocks past my stop, Brigitte was turned sideways, partially blocking us from observers. With one hand, she held my pants; with the other, she unzipped them. She then slid her fingers into the modest opening, and fumbled with my boxers until she found my penis. Thumbing over its head, she watched my face, eyes fixed, questioning – Is this acceptable?

  Yes. Definitely yes, I smiled, some of my juices oozing out to greet her. Like two old friends reconnecting, my heart luxuriated in her touch.

  When she cupped my balls, my mind strayed towards a foreseeable future: Brigitte straddling me, on a different kind of seat in a different kind of place, her bare feet pressing, perhaps, into a wall. I knew she would grip my shoulders for leverage, and with panties pushed to the side, we’d grind away – with her pulling and scooping her opening onto my shaft, and me shoving back hard, so hard I’d leave bruises. I envisioned myself deep in her vagina, her skirt billowing around us, innocent witness to our lust, as from underneath, her bush of coarse black hair (I was positive she’d have that) would abrade my flesh. The moisture we’d create would be audible, and her musk would be pungent. This last detail was already evident.

  Reality rushed back the second Brigitte clamped her fingers around my pipe and began working me. I tried to relax – but that’s when the questions poured out. I couldn’t stop them. They shot from the cannon of my mouth and she returned answers just as quick.

  “Would you ever share me?”

  “Never.”

  “Do you know what a labial reduction is?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “Do you have air conditioning?”

  “Goodness no! What’s de point?”

  “What about pubic hair?”

  “Oh, a veritable forest.”

  I ride the bus every day now, going anywhere and everywhere the public transportation system of my fair city allows. I see Brigitte on a regular but very unpredictable basis.

  I haven’t told her this yet, though I think she knows: things would be different if it weren’t for my children. Brigitte sees other men – I can’t control that, nor could I ever expect it to be otherwise – but when we’re together it’s as if we are the only two brilliant stars in a vast empty sky.

  Ménage à Denim

  Jeremy Edwards

  They looked the same, folded on the laundry table, but of course they smelled different. Michael’s jeans, even freshly washed, had his tangy aroma, the same olfactory signature that Dina knew and loved in the perspiration on his back, on his abs, in his groin. It evoked a combination of green tea and the richest olive oil.

  Charlotte’s jeans, even when permeated with fabric softener, intoxicated Dina with a fragrance that suggested nutmeg, caramel, and Chardonnay. Dina knew this scent from the smooth skin of Charlotte’s throat and the tight skin behind her ears and, in particular, from the ticklish place where the seam of seams clutched Charlotte so snugly. Dina also knew how to make more of this scent arise, as if by magic, from that seam.

  Dina thought of herself as the luckiest one in the world, the one who got to have her cake and eat it, who never had to choose. The one who woke up in the morning to green tea and olive oil and went to bed at night with nutmeg, caramel, and Chardonnay lingering in her senses.

  In the morning, Michael’s jeans, washed a thousand times, were soft against the insides of Dina’s legs. His denim knees split her gently open, and Dina felt girly in her kimono . . . and womanly without her panties. Everything she wanted him to touch was displayed, propped open, right there. Reliable as sunrise.

  Man’s square hand reaching in. Man’s thick fingers parting convoluted flesh, dipping into pooling moisture. Man’s broad tongue coaxing her to feminine ecstasy. Man’s manhood bursting out of blue jeans and filling her womanly core.

  In the evening, Dina felt no less womanly as she let her hands roam hungrily over Charlotte’s ass, while it lounged across her lap. Dina let her own wetness seep preciously into the gusset of the thong that adorned her nakedness. She was an insatiable goddess, a proud-nippled immortal who could peel the jeans off a beautiful woman’s bottom like she was peeling a succulent orange, who could nibble the cheeks and lick the cunt as if she literally depended on them for sustenance. This incarnation of the goddess had a tendency to be the worshipper rather than the worshipped. Her breasts hung joyously over the denim derrière she revered. She teased herself with anticipation while she smiled over the still-wrapped parcel, admiring its roundness, limiting herself to little pats and squeezes until Charlotte’s wriggles and her own crazy dampness told her it was time to pull those fucking Levi’s down and smother that soft behind with kisses.

  In the middle of a Thursday afternoon, Dina was getting herself off with the fresh memories of last night with Charlotte and this morning with Michael. Afternoon was her private time, when both of them were out of the house. It could be her most productive time as far as her home-based business was concerned . . . or not. Sprawling by herself across the tautly made-up bed of a weekday afternoon, she could fuck and be fucked, pretend that the fingers in her cunt were Michael’s or that the cunt around her fingers was Charlotte’s. Or both. All of it. Everything.

  It was a big apartment, but Dina could fill it up with a wailing orgasm in the middle of the afternoon.

  Michael and Charlotte were great together. Like a brother and sister who had outgrown their rivalry, leaving pure, distilled affection. Charlotte looked at Michael’s “eat-me-up” torso, his lean, powerful pelvis, his penetrating eyes and sensuous lips . . . and saw simply a cuddly, comfortable guy who it was fun to have pizz
as and martinis with on a Saturday night. And, looking at Charlotte, Michael saw not the ocean-deep smile or the landscape of curves and skin as delectable as cake frosting . . . but only a button-cute girl roommate, the kind you loaned your sweaters to and threw pillows at.

  Dina lay on the bedspread, fingers cupping her crotch to separate her delicate flesh from the wet spot she’d made when she came. She didn’t want to move just yet – she wanted to use the peace to think.

  The relationships were compartmentalized, weren’t they, thought Dina. Like the pockets of her favorite pair of jeans . . . Keys, rigid and ready, always in the right pocket. Soft, fresh tissues, always in the left.

  The apartment was a generous one, and she reflected on how they had, consciously or otherwise, taken advantage of that to formalize the compartmentalization. There was Michael’s room, where he and Dina began their day with ten o’clock cappuccinos, hours after Charlotte had left the house. Michael’s was the room in which Dina was a woman who wanted a man. Michael’s bed was the bed in which she satisfied her need to be filled with a warm and insistent cock, her need to feel playful swats from a masculine palm on her feminine rear, and her need to feel coarse, stubbly cheeks stroking her inner thighs while she writhed upon a boyish mouth, clutching sharp elbows that she knew smelled like green tea and olive oil.

  These were the sorts of things that happened in Michael’s room in the morning.

  Whether their schedules suited her biorhythms out of pure serendipity or her circadian rhythms had quietly adjusted to the schedule, Dina was always ready for Charlotte’s room by the time Charlotte returned home. Charlotte’s room was for the intimacy of reciprocally smeared lipstick and one pussy sharing juicy confidences with another, cunny mouth directly to cunny mouth between scissored, quivering legs. Bras and panties nested and tangled together, deep in the crook of the covers, where countless painted toenails strained in ecstasy against a womb of silk sheet. Charlotte’s bed was where it was always girls’ night in.

  Usually their evening lovemaking comprised two sessions. Dina liked to pounce on her lover when she came home each day; if it weren’t for the fact that Charlotte always had to pee first, they might have rolled their asses around just inside the door, squeezing each other into the corner by the potted plant to taste each other’s tender spots. But the bathroom was right next to Charlotte’s bedroom, and her bed was more comfortable than the floor of the hall.

  And, after dinner for two, it was this room they returned to. Always Charlotte’s room, with wallpaper that looked like gift-wrap and a bedside lampshade that glowed like an exotic cocktail.

  Until this afternoon, it hadn’t struck Dina how odd it was that a woman with two live-in lovers should, as a rule, sleep alone. But Charlotte the early bird had to be tucked in and kissed goodnight by 10:00, like a nutmeg-imbued pie put into the oven nightly. Every night, Dina was tempted to climb in there with her; but she knew that if she did so, she would toss and turn till her natural bedtime of midnight, and no doubt disturb Charlotte in the process.

  At 11 or 11:30, Michael would return from a full day of work followed by band practice. Dina liked the fact that he could usually find her in the living room, accessible, rather than tucked away in Charlotte’s bed. Michael was usually too tired at night for anything beyond a hello kiss and a little cuddling, but Dina wasn’t one to knock kisses or cuddling, and she treasured the time at the kitchen table with Michael, where she watched him make an ad hoc meal of whatever happened to be in the refrigerator. She approved of the efficient manner in which he prepared himself nutritionally at night for the demands she’d make on him in the morning.

  On any such night, she would have been welcome in Michael’s bed . . . but she usually opted for her own room instead. She wanted to be fair, and she didn’t want to break the spell of her relationship with Charlotte by forming part of a snoring duo behind a single door when Charlotte tiptoed around the apartment at 6 a.m. Likewise, though Michael wouldn’t have dreamed of standing in her way had she chosen to slip into bed at midnight beside the long-slumbering Charlotte, Dina didn’t want to leave him staring wistfully after her ass as she crept into someone else’s bedroom.

  It occurred to her that even her identity was compartmentalized. Gorgeous hunk’s fuck-happy girlfriend in the morning, and gorgeous hunk’s midnight-snack babe thirteen hours later. Lovely girl’s ravenous lesbian admirer from 5 to 10 p.m. nightly. Of course, she loved them both 24/7. But Dina was, at heart, the type of classic lover who felt most fulfilled when spelling “love” as s-e-x.

  There were occasional Saturday nights when they all climbed into bed together. But these were chaste slumber parties, chummy conventions of underwear or even pajamas, with Dina in the middle, poking and tickling and nudging her loved ones but not daring to go further, lest she violate an intangible boundary.

  “Damn!” she suddenly said out loud, to an empty Thursday afternoon house. Damn. It had hit her with surprising suddenness how much she wanted to be unchastely in bed with both of them, to climb and be climbed on, to tickle all the places that really counted and feel intimately connected with all parties concerned, in sync and in heat. She was the woman who had it all, but suddenly she was feeling that she wanted to have it all at the same time. She wanted to be all of herself at once, not this or that compartment of herself.

  And, with the clattering, blinding brilliance of familiar facts exploding into revelations, she amazed herself by noticing that she had never asked them.

  Once fixated on this realization, she was incredulous. How could it be? But she would certainly remember asking them.

  She had never asked them.

  What the fuck is wrong with me? She mouthed the question into the pillow she was clutching. Dina, a person who would never hesitate to ask a restaurant server if spinach could be substituted for green pepper or potatoes for salad, had never thought to ask Michael and Charlotte if they might like to . . . try something different. She had just accepted that what was, was, as though that meant it was all that could be.

  The shape of their life all together had developed so organically. It had begun with the budding lesbian relationship between Dina and Charlotte during college, a textbook case of self-discovery through which two very fortunate women who’d been bureaucratically inserted into dormitory slot “A” as roommates emerged from slot “B,” a couple of years later, as lovers.

  Charlotte, an angelic, freckle-nosed blonde who was quietly confident of her identity, had seduced Dina just by being herself. By kissing her on Valentine’s Day. By going to bed in the nude and getting chilly in the middle of the night. By telling her she loved her, leaving Dina to interpret the word as she saw fit. Dina had welcomed all of it – Charlotte made it so easy. Tender flesh to kiss and a big heart to hug, all offered on a silver platter. Any inclination to hesitate, to wrestle with identity, had been dispersed to the four winds by the tangible succulence of Charlotte’s love.

  But during that process, and after, Dina had never stopped dating guys. She liked guys. A lot. Charlotte understood that. So Dina would date this guy and that guy, casually, while cherishing the bond she had formed with Charlotte. She would hook up and move on, never sticking to the same guy for long.

  Never sticking . . . until the guy she got stuck on. Michael.

  He was more sensitive, more nurturing, more everything. A gentle, curly-locked poet who was a tiger in the sack. Maybe he was a cliché, but as far as Dina was concerned, the world could use more such clichés. And instead of each date nudging her closer to adieu, each date had solidified her need for him.

  He really cared about her relationship with Charlotte. To Michael, Charlotte was neither a threat, nor a curiosity, nor a shallow turn-on of the “hot girl-on-girl action” variety. As Michael saw it, Charlotte was the most important person in the world to Dina. And Dina was the most important person in the world to him.

  Dina had felt unusually vulnerable when she brought Michael home to the place she and Charlotte h
ad rented after graduation. When she saw that Charlotte approved of the idea of Michael, even embraced the idea of Michael, she cried with happiness.

  “Don’t lose this one,” Charlotte said.

  “You’re not jealous?” Dina was still a little wary.

  “Is the food jealous of the water?” asked Charlotte, who had perhaps taken one too many Zen classes. “You need both, babe.”

  Apartments go condo every day. People have to move; and if the place they find requires a third roommate, they get one. An outsider probably would have made nothing of the fact that Michael, who needed a place to live, became the third inhabitant of the big apartment Dina and Charlotte had snagged.

  But the three of them knew what they were committing to on the day Dina greeted Charlotte and Michael on the front stoop and silently divided up the three keys, which had been given to her on a single ring. Dina was aware that the mood was almost ritualistic, and she took care not to break that mood.

  The experiment had succeeded. An adventure had quickly become the status quo. Three bedrooms. Two relationships. One happy man, one happy woman, and one very happy woman.

  But in the quiet of this afternoon, Dina became certain that it was time to push the envelope.

  She had no clear idea of how to get from point A to point B – point A being the status quo and point B being a vague, but irresistible image she was already forming of the three of them piled merrily under the covers. Was it really as simple as just asking? Somehow that seemed dingy and unromantic. What she did know was that Saturday – the day they were all free – would be the evening to do whatever it was she was going to do about it.

  Dina had begun stroking herself again while she contemplated all this. Now she focused on channeling her vivid anticipation of future events into a luscious, present-moment climax. Images of herself being touched all over fluttered madly through her mind as if someone had unleashed a pack of pornographic playing cards in there.