The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 9

by Maxim Jakubowski

  He didn’t answer with words. He braced himself, his arms at either side of her head taking the bulk of his weight. Now it was an adrenaline-fueled strength that compelled him to fuck her – to fuck her very hard. He pushed deeper into her, feeling the wet heat of her hole swelling around his fully erect cock, hugging his shaft at the same time that it made room for him.

  How mysterious it all was, this fucking-business, he thought; this baby-making stuff; how mysterious and how entrancing. “Oh god,” she was crying repeatedly, rhythmically. Her need for him delighted him, propelled him in his task to fill her – to make his presence in her good enough and hard enough and filling enough.

  Oh god, oh god.

  She kicked off the annoying blanket, spread her thighs wider. She pushed open her hole for him, so incredibly open. Oh god. He was going in deep. She couldn’t remember it ever feeling this good, this incredibly enticing. She was so aroused and so insatiable for fucking, for the feel of his cock invading her, going up into her all the way, until it made her cry out – the pain was so deliciously sweet; she kept wanting to feel that tender pain. Her body pushed itself open for just that feeling – that thrust of his cock way up into the center of her. She was hungry for it, that’s what it was; starving for his cock, for him; to be filled with him. She clung to him tight as they both began to sweat.

  In a burst of passion, his rhythm suddenly increased. “God, Kay,” he said, panting, breathing hard. The thick head of his cock pushed way up into her, into that place deep inside her that normally blocked his path; now it too was swelling open for him, thick and fleshy and soft, it felt too good, that place. His cock drove up into it repeatedly, seemingly with a will of its own. It pounded into her.

  Oh shit, yes. I’m going to come.

  Her body held itself entirely open now. She’d never felt this impaled, this delirious with lust. Yes, yes. She could feel his whole body stiffen, could tell he was going to come. His breath came out in little explosive cries, that thin line of ecstasy and agony, as his body jerked against her, propelling his whole world out and up into hers. The constant hammering against her cervix shot her into orgasm. And for a moment, Connor was entirely rigid, except for those hard, quick, short little thrusts . . .

  “Shit,” he gasped, panting. “Shit. Oh man, Kay. Wow.” In an instant, his full weight collapsed on top of her. “Wow,” he said again. “That was good. Did you come? It felt like you were coming.”

  Kaylie was panting just as hard. “Yes,” she said, nodding her head, feeling happy. “I came.”

  They looked at each other, wondering if that had been it: the spark of life. And whether it was or wasn’t, they still had the whole weekend ahead of them. Connor couldn’t wait until they could get the car started, get back home and do it again.

  “To think I was so excited about seeing the Flyers take on the Rangers,” he said.

  Kaylie’s hips still rocked gently beneath him; her breathing steadier now, returning to normal. She didn’t say anything. She just looked up into his face, luxuriating in the sound of his voice, in the feel of him on top of her, as he talked about hockey and about how little it really mattered in the grand scheme of things. I am ready for this, she was thinking, as if in some hypnotic daze. The unimaginable mystery of life, of everything love is; I am so ready for it.

  Connor eased himself out of her and then sat up. “Christ, it’s freezing,” he said. “We should probably get dressed, don’t you think?”

  “Probably,” she agreed. “We don’t want to catch pneumonia.”

  “No,” he said. “We sure don’t.”

  They hurriedly got into their clothes and then snuggled back under the blankets. They did their best to keep themselves warm while they waited for the call to come. They talked about what they might have for dinner later, about what they had in the house, or should they stop at the store first before they got completely snowed in . . . It was just as easy as that, really – without even knowing it, they were making plans for three now.

  Through Alice Glass Darkly

  Larry Smith

  “I’ve not gone that far before.”

  She saw the light in his eyes. It was the light of the lover’s triumph, the sort she’d come to adore. The moment she said it, the awesome power she angled for passed right through her. It was all around the room. She thrilled at this power in him, which was all for her. It made him so happy, and she knew how to conjure it. She loved it more than anything else in life.

  “No one ever came in your mouth before?” When she shook her head, with the studied timidity she knew men found attractive, he smiled intently, all the more intently because he didn’t part his lips at all. Because of her, he would walk home the next day in the early morning autumn drizzle alive with the sense of nonpareil conquest. The October light churned inside him. Elated, he’d greet each passer-by with a hello. The world is yours, Mark Fargus.

  Alice Glass was demure, diminutive, nearly exquisite. Her eyes really were green. She had lovely thin lips. Naked, when she’d admire her puckered blood-red nipples in the mirror, she imagined the joy of men seeing them for the first time. How sweet to the suck they must be! Alice walked on girlish little chicken legs. Her back tapered smoothly to her bum. Sometimes, she cropped her dark blond hair. Other times, she put it up in a bun like a schoolmarm’s. She knew how men exalt to make a schoolmarm moan. Howling was the gift she gave the men she wanted happy. Alice was not an eye catcher in the sense that strangers stared at her on the street. But men who spent time with her, and got to know her, or just spent an extra moment or two to look at her, realized how beautiful she was.

  Jack Rutter, aroused with love in the April bloom, thought it extraordinary to have his thing in her mouth. When he finished up, he marveled at the daisy-like loveliness of the face he had dumped in. It was beauty itself, like an abstraction, the very definition of loveliness and beauty that he’d penetrated. Jack was intelligent enough to recognize abstraction when he saw it and he savored it accordingly. But it was when she bowed her head and smiled, and said, “I must tell you, I’ve not gone that far before,” that his very self hovering above her expanded like a bellows.

  “You’re kidding,” he said.

  “Well, no. I’m not kidding,” said Alice. She pressed his hand to her cheek. “I didn’t think I would, but I was enjoying it so.” She looked up, grinning. “I just couldn’t stop!”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Honest Injin!” she laughed. “And might I say thank you?”

  “Thank you!” He beamed.

  She was studying hard for a Masters from NYU. Her specialty, and her passion, was modern fiction. Alice treasured it for the great sensuality in the best stories her favorite writers wrote even when they weren’t writing about love. How wonderful she thought it would be, this power to entrance the world like great writers do. Yet she also spotted a raw adolescent sensibility in some of what she studied, and that she did not admire so much. The Alexandria Quartet figured into her thesis, for example, along with The Magus. Both works were about illusions, or at least different ways of fabricating reality, and in that theme she found their common ground in modernity.

  Yet both fell short in ways that left her dissatisfied. Durrell needed Coptic conspiracies and picturesque foreign hosts because he lacked imagination for the fantasias of everyday life, which, for Alice, were as alluring, or probably more alluring, than most such far-flung exotica. But at least The Alexandria Quartet was an adventure, to be savored as such, what with all its strange people doing strange things in their sinister silky places. By contrast, The Magus was, finally, mired in the everyday.

  Its landscapes are banal despite the Greek island locale (how much more banal, ironically, the real Spetsai had gotten by the time Fowles wrote his superfluous revisions). The beloved’s transformations are belabored, clinical, predictable. The fantastic inventions that feed the action are contrived to a point where the narrative is practically amateurish. Nor does Nicholas Urf
e justify such extravaganzas. Fowles made all the world a stage just to teach harsh lessons to a British boor. Mystification, she gleaned, ought to have bigger goals and better men in tow.

  Dennis Gaffney poured over her. He was an angry sort, a social throwback, rebel without a cause. He even wore a 1950s hairstyle. A flourish of sandy hair sculpted in grease stuck upward from his head. She despised him a bit, yet his pomposity would only make the triumph she foresaw all the more prepossessing. She was happy to flatter the callow persona.

  “This would kill my husband,” said Alice, smiling uncomfortably.

  “Where is he tonight?”

  “At a conference in California.”

  “What does he do?” asked Dennis.

  “He’s an orthopedic surgeon.”

  “You cheat on him often?”

  Alice averted her eyes. “To tell you the truth, this is my first time.”

  “Yeah?” he asked, glinting. Later that evening, kissing her goodbye – she had to get back home because her husband would be calling from the Coast – he jabbed two fingers up her ass. He probed her like that deeper, finalizing pride of ownership. Walking down the stairs of his apartment building, the strong feel was still up her there. The arrogant empowerment he took care to convey was exhilarating.

  Alice lived in a three-room apartment in New Jersey. The part that overlooked the river had the feel of a studio. The light at certain times poured gloriously across the bare floor. There was an alcove off the bedroom big enough for workspace. The place though small was all hers and fit right. Sometimes the light made it look deceptively expansive. Other times the intimacy was uncanny, as if just she and the sunshine were alone on the Hudson. The sunlight took her over every morning. Of course, there was the sight of the great city too, the steely light off the glass Babels and the great murky canyons down where the island tapered off. Spells are cast by a city that can be anything anybody wants it to be.

  A year passed. Soft-spoken Geoffrey Baron reached for Alice’s hand across the table as they finished dinner. He was a middle-aged black businessman over six-feet tall, imposing in manner as well, what with a certain vague authoritarianism in the way he carried himself. He seemed to speak from large reservoirs of experience. She returned the gentle squeeze, her fingers creamy white in his deep brown grip. Visual charm became physical longing. She saw herself all white and frail against his big body, a fruit of the mind’s eye somewhat forbidden still.

  She bowed her head and softly said, “I have to admit it’s a little unsettling to be close like this with a black man . . . I don’t mean to offend you . . .”

  “I’m not offended.”

  “It’s a new experience for me. But I’ve thought about it, you know . . .”

  “Yes, I know,” he kindly smiled.

  “How do you know?” she asked, amiably.

  “I can tell.”

  “Lord, I guess you’ve just got my number!”

  “We’ll have a fine time together.”

  “Honestly, I’ve thought about doing this for so long, I’m kind of nervous about what might happen.”

  “What are you afraid of?” he asked, his eyes narrowing slightly, intrigued.

  “Exposing myself,” she answered.

  She thought hard about what she studied. Ambiguity, the soul of art, infused all life and thought. But, as an insidious medium of hidden truths, it was nearly discredited by Empson and his followers who made it seem so trivial a thing. There is enormous inexorable ambiguity in language and in the images we form of the world but these critics reached into such puny little spaces to find it. “Do, with like timorous accent and dire yell/As when, by night and negligence, the fire/Is spied in populous cities,” exhorts Iago. Empson looks real hard at that. Personifying the “negligence,” he concludes that there were idlers in the street who must have spied the fire in the dark. It is the only instance, he adds, where Shakespeare makes “a flat pun out of a preposition.”

  Such a busy mischief of the mind! Of course language disintegrates when you read it hard enough, but what an indifferent passage for exploring the effect. It particularly irritated her to find such exegetical contrivance in the grandiose context of this particular drama. Alice admired Othello. Lust and shame rage on there, apocalyptic, without supportable justification on anyone’s part. The white devil, fearing himself cuckolded by everyone, makes the noble black man envision unspeakable ecstasies of the beloved. Power is fed and forced by delusion. But Alice didn’t really like Othello. The power was ugly. The delusions were unhappy, a torturous contrast to her own delighted machinations. Othello was a fly in her very private ointment.

  Lee Johnson was a jazz musician she admired. “I have to admit it’s a little unsettling to be close like this with a black man,” she told him, bowing her head a little. “Please don’t misunderstand. It was just a new experience for me.”

  “Are you still unsettled?”

  “It would be hard enough for my husband if he knew I was with another man, but this would really threaten him,” she said, nervously. “Don’t be insulted. I’m just being honest.”

  “I’m not insulted,” he said. Just the thought of the small pale grasping hand aroused him.

  “I used to think about you sexually,” she said. “From your pictures on your albums.”

  “I’m flattered,” he said, sincerely.

  “Once I thought of you when I was with my husband,” Alice said softly. “Years before you and I met.”

  “Oh you knockout!” he exclaimed, drawing her close.

  “I love your balls,” she murmured lewdly. “Your balls make me happy.”

  The cherub-like beauty burrowed in his brown body. She fondled him between his legs until he was aroused again. She stared at him in admiration and bent down to put the hard dark thing back into her mouth. She peered up at him as she sucked. Her kittenish green eyes bespoke sheer abandonment – she knew this was so wrong in so many ways, she just couldn’t help herself – and the look in his eyes her eyes inspired caused Alice to exalt unutterably.

  “You make me feel so white,” she whispered, after he came in her mouth.

  “Oh baby!” he exclaimed.

  These days Alice would often tell men she was married. It prolonged the chase and intensified the conquest. Later, she could escape these men leaving the power she had given them intact. Duty and affection forced her return. This couldn’t continue. Her husband was a good man. He’d be terribly hurt, threatened. She had to break it off. She left them, studs at twilight alone on doorsteps or park benches. They would miss her. They even loved her. But they had drunk her full. And, they knew she’d always remember. She’d be haunted through all the mundane domestic rounds ahead. Far from bereft, they savored the last of pretty Alice Glass’ passion as she ambled sadly off to face the future.

  Taylor Jones pursued her on the Path Train many mornings. “I hope I haven’t been intruding on you,” he said to her one day. Jones was a burly man with a large beard. She imagined a broad hairy chest. He greeted her gaily and self-confidently whenever they met. Walking out of the station, discussing music or their jobs or politics, he’d bow in her direction, almost imperceptibly. It was a slight gesture that lent him the disarming air of a gallant from some other time. It was tangible masculine power tangibly restrained, made additionally gracious by what was, she sensed, an instinctive appreciation of women on his part.

  “I enjoy being with you, but you do know I’m married,” said Alice.

  “How long?”

  “Four years.”

  “I’m sure you must be very happy,” he said, quietly.

  “Yes,” she said. But there was enough tremulous uncertainty in her reply to hold his interest.

  In the meantime, she met Billy Aikens at a restaurant in New York. He was a radiant-seeming young man with chiseled blond features except for a pug nose Alice adored for the way it sat incongruously amid all the Greco-Roman perfection. Other women admired him slyly on the street, which made
her feel proud when they walked together. They were an enviable couple. When he licked her between her legs for the first time, she confessed, “I’ve never done oral sex before.”

  “Really?”

  “Honest Injin!” she said. His features filled with delight. Once again, delight was power, his to feel and hers to give. Her face was so soft the pale skin looked the consistency of powder. Alice whimpered as he sucked, and then she sucked too until he was so aroused with the sweet wet mouth, and the thought that this was the first time she’d ever done this, that he fucked her face like a cunt. When he shot, it was part in her mouth and part down her chin. Alice lay there with his jizz on her. “I can’t believe I did that,” she said. “I’d be so awfully embarrassed if I weren’t so awfully happy.”

  The white teeth of his gleamed like magic in the pale face. There was a dark power she wanted to wrench out of the world. But she wasn’t strong. She’d have to sneak it out. She wanted it in all its abstraction. Alice postulated two kinds of abstraction. One is a calculated avenue to power when a Goebbels or Stalin uses concrete imagery, e.g., heroic peasants, to caricature experience until it stands for something they want it to stand for. The other is power itself, a Platonic real, the raw essence of reality which can often be seen in fine abstract paintings.

  Yet Plato was also a fascist. She thought hard. Fascists can be very sexual. They dramatize crude power in the abstract, like a Nazi bitch in leather. On the other hand, fascists and communists hate abstract art. Why do they hate abstract art? Is it simply because they don’t understand it, and so fear it? At the same time, educated imaginations dote on sexual abstraction because it objectifies the lover in order to make him or her pure concept – like she herself on many occasions. A lovely innocent tasting cock for the first time. The Idea of a lovely innocent tasting cock for the first time is an abstraction for which the fascist and the connoisseur of abstract art alike must yearn.