The Mammoth Book of the Best New Erotica

by Maxim Jakubowski

  She wore her sleek hair bobbed and was always dressed in the height of fashion. She never wore corsets or other restraining undergarments, not even knickers. When I asked her why she chose not to wear what other women considered such finery, she replied blithely that she liked the freedom it afforded her body. Her body. Her fine body. It was true that it would have been an insult to nature had she strapped it in or belted it down. Her body mirrored her soul. Her body was wild, animalistic. Her breasts were small and sat high on her slim torso. Her nipples’ areolae were a deep-brown colour, and her torso, her hips, were virtually without curve. She had a dangerous body, and whenever I came near her I could smell that fire and needed to possess her. I could hardly keep my hands from tearing away the sheer silken dresses she wore. I could hardly stop myself from falling on my knees and taking her in my mouth, beginning with her feet. I needed to genuflect before her and taste her sex.

  She almost always wore low-cut dresses with subtle slits in the sides of the skirt that rose perilously high on her long, slender legs. She decorated terrifying eyes with make-up, swearing, as she applied the make-up, that it served a protective device. She never went out without kohl smudged heavily around her eyes, the eyes of a corpse, blue-black and empty. Only now and again would they light when I took her in a violent way. Her eyes haunt me still. As if to compensate for such iciness, her full lips she painted with a flaming red tint she called “Madder Crimson”. Her mouth was her vitality, and her smile was eccentric and not really beautiful. But it was human. Her painted red lips matched her luxuriant cinnabar hair. I loved watching her stand in front of the mirror, methodically making up her face. I watched her go through this preening ritual, and never did I grow tired of it.

  One evening, I lay on my bed. The sheets were a sea of sweat and semen. We had been making love all day, and she said it was time to go out. To go out and see what kind of hell we could release upon a city like Paris. She wanted to go up to Sacré-Coeur and look out upon the city that loved her best. Paris was a city that looked good on her. It matched her lips and eyes. I was unable to move from the bed, half-mesmerized as she put the make-up around her eyes. Her back was to me, and she was naked, yet I could see her face and breasts in the mirror.

  “Come here,” I said to her quietly, almost unwilling to disturb her in her ministrations. But the sight of her body naked and pale and her face dressed for the evening gave me the strangest sensation. She looked nearly like a boy from behind, yet her face was clearly a woman’s.

  “You must come here if there is something you want,” she said, her mouth smiling, her eyes dead.

  “Please come here.”

  She ignored me and continued to put the finishing touches of light-pink rouge on her cheeks. And then she did something she didn’t ordinarily do as she prepared herself for Paris: she took the powder puff and began to make slow circles around the tips of her breasts. Then she dipped the white puff in another powder that was a deeper red and began to rouge her nipples. My cock was already stiff. I had begun to imagine she was a young boy from the back and a gorgeous woman from the front. The idea of taking her from behind overwhelmed me. I had never entered her there. She had not permitted it. Her uncanny eyes were following my hand as it went involuntarily to my sex. She continued to slowly decorate her nipples, never turning.

  Edith Piaf sang out defiantly and permanently damaged, her song wafting out in a thin line from the radio in the next room. It was summer and slightly humid. The flowers next to the bed violently perfumed the air. She was looking at me still. At last, I stood and went to her, taking the powder puff from her hand. Rather than put it on the vanity, as she suspected I would do, rather than take her immediately, I surprised her by dipping the make-up puff into the pot of rouge and reaching down to rouge her sex. She smiled and allowed herself a low sound of pleasure, realizing I had only just started.

  “You look like a boy from behind. Are you my boy?”

  “Yes,” she answered, “I am your boy.”

  “I want to fuck you, boy. I am going to take you.”

  She made no reply, but raised her eyebrow at me in the mirror. She had a quizzical look on her face that was mixed with pleasure as I continued to lightly tease her pussy with the powder, making her blush between her legs. I set down the puff.

  “Of course, from the front, you are the most exquisite woman I have ever seen.” As I said this, I was dipping my fingers into a jar of pomade. My desire for him was unimaginable. My need for her was desperate.

  “I am going to fuck you in the ass, my boy, my love. You’d like that, you little queer, wouldn’t you?” He nodded . . . while she managed a wan, almost frightened, smile.

  I rubbed my finger, lubricated with the pomade slowly up and down the crack of his ass. She sang with “La Vie en Rose”. She opened her mouth. Edith Piaf opened her mouth and a flower scent came out. My love opened the lips of her crimson sex. I was to christen her a man. I wasted no time, though the heat in the flat made me feel as though I were moving exceedingly slowly, moving through an erotic heat that was material, that weighed down my caresses, and I noticed how heavy my hands were on his slim hips. I touched her breast, and the tip of my sex entered him slightly. She winced and moved backward in shock; he moved over me with delighted pain.

  “Oh, my love. I’ve only just started. Does it hurt . . . ? Don’t speak . . .” I whispered, suddenly afraid.

  If he opened his mouth, I would know it was her. It had been so long since I had made love to a boy. She had distracted me from such need. She inhaled deeply, her eyes expressing nothing, the corners of her lips a mocking sneer. But within her strange smile she was urging me to take her. Without hesitation, I thrust my cock deep into his virgin asshole, violently needing to tear into her body, to enter a place I had not been before. She screamed. I put my hand over his mouth, while I took her nipple between my fingers and pinched. She fell towards the mirror, his cheek rested against the glass, and I reached down between her thighs and found her pussy wet. His body was perfect and delicious, and I took hold of his boyish hips with my free hand while I licked her clitoris with my fingers, expanding the possibilities of our bodies with every thrust of my hips, with every movement of my fingers into her soft, pink psyche. He fell hard against me. She fell hard against me. I could feel her breathing through her sex while I made a man of her. I crashed against her and she continued to look at me with that serene indifference. Once in a while her eyes lifted towards the ceiling. A diamond bead of sweat cut a path through the white powder on her high forehead.

  His asshole was announcing her pleasure as it fit around my cock like a diabolical mouth, sucking me into a dark place of moral indistinction. I wanted to tear him apart, I wanted to drink the blood that was coming from between her legs. I wanted to consume her. I wanted to consume him. I could feel the white heat bloom from the back of my neck and cut a blazing trail down my chest. I thrust my fingers inside her terrifying depth. My cock was buried to the end of its capacity. She cried out and I came, pulling her hips over me, covering me. I looked in the mirror and saw her face instead of mine. Her eyes open, her mouth open. Edith Piaf sang.

  “You make quite a lovely boy,” I told her as we walked up the steep steps of Sacré-Coeur later that evening.

  “May God forgive you,” she said, laughing. “I hope we burn in hell together. I should hate to be there alone. Of course my husband will be there too, you know.”

  We walked up the stairs of Sacré-Coeur and surveyed the city that was nothing more than our fashionable accessory. We were perfectly happy that night, knowing that we shared one another’s insatiable taste for the bizarre. That night we inaugurated, acknowledged, our mutual hungers.

  I suppose I was a concession her husband could make in order to keep her by his side. It was the dead of morning, and we were stumbling down the street, intoxicated from an evening at Les Bals Nègres. Josephine Baker had been dancing that night, and the magnificent sight of her body, her immaculate breasts
and legs, ah, Josephine Baker’s legs . . . Watching her had fueled fantastic images of pleasure as she had moved wildly, mimicking, at times satirizing, the drama of the bed. It was all there, all of her to be seen, moving as though created to be desired.

  As we tripped down a dimly lit street, we drank the remaining champagne of our last bottle. In the warm mist of the early summer dawn, an extraordinarily thin man stepped out from a dark doorway. His presence was abrupt and he stood in front of us, unmoving, his head cocked slightly to one side. She began to giggle at his appearance; I believe she laughed mostly out of fear. I could only make out his face when we got very close, an extremely bizarre visage that made me draw back for a moment. His prominent cheekbones created sunken hollows in his face, the effect heightened by the dreary gaslights of the alley. He wore all black, including a silk dress hat and opera cape, which she thought wildly funny, so dramatic a costume on a hot summer morning. His teeth and eyes shone in a peculiar way in the strange half-light.

  She gasped when she got closer and looked into his unnerving face, and then, being drunk, she laughed and asked the man if he wouldn’t like some champagne, holding up the bottle. He held out his hand, but only to beckon her closer. His ominous figure alarmed me, but, being young and stupid, I rushed forward. My mistress held my arm and quieted me. She moved cautiously, leaning her ear to his mouth to hear what he had to say. I couldn’t help desiring her just then. Watching her neck tilt in that weird light, slightly terrorized, slightly mesmerized by the danger he presented. I wanted to possess her. I loved her so drunkenly that my thirst for her body could never really be quenched. I stared at her neck, at the lines of her collarbone, as she listened to what the stranger had to say.

  He leaned in, his lips hovering dangerously near the nape of her neck. I almost yelled out. He began to whisper in her ear, and, as he spoke, I could see her become slowly breathless. Her back began to arch the way it did when I stroked her breasts. Her mouth fell open, and her lids half-closed over her eyes. It seemed as though the man were making love to her, but of course I could see that his hands were not touching her at all. I moved closer, moved by the tableau the man and my mistress formed in the grey morning light that was trying to get into that alley. And then I suddenly heard her beginning to making low moaning noises, her breasts falling out of the low-cut dress. And then quite suddenly she drew back, tossing her head back defiantly, and she began to laugh. It was inexplicable, whatever was occurring between her and this stranger, and there was a part of me that found a hollow solace in the fact that she had moved away from him. I also found that I was aroused in a way that was extraordinary. My feelings of desire were tinted with a bleakness, a sense of real danger that exceeded the games that she and I had indulged in at my flat.

  She was moving towards me, beckoning me to come closer. I hesitated, still overwhelmed by a finishing sadness, a vague anxiety mingled with a potent desire to have her. Finally, I moved. The stranger leered in the background.

  “He’s asked us to come with him. He wants to show us a very exclusive cabaret. It sounds absolutely perverted. We really must go!” She paused and then whispered breathlessly, “He says it’s called ‘L’Enfer’. Isn’t that superb! Come.” And she took my hand.

  I meant to ask her who the man was, and how did she know we were not stepping into some sort of terrible trap, but when I saw her slip the man a number of francs it was clear she had decided against reason. Of course I could not leave her alone and so began to follow their dark shadows down the narrow alley.

  Remembering the silhouette of her breast, and her tongue flicking over her full lips as he had whispered in her ear, I wanted to take her, I wanted to push her against one of the doorways, lift her sheer dress, and take her. I still had the pounding rhythm of Les Bals Nègres in my ears. I wanted to fuck her to the cadence of Josephine Baker’s feet. I wanted to rape her, gently, and then more and more forcefully. I could feel the familiar ache of desire, the pain she caused in my groin, but my mistress was already falling into the darkness of the alley, following her compelling stranger.

  “What did he say to you, my love? What did he whisper in your ear?” I asked as I moved up behind her, holding her tightly around the waist. There was, perhaps, some ill-concealed jealousy creeping into my voice.

  She said nothing but answered me with a devious smile that came when she was aroused, an expression that was made more corrupt by the lusterlessness, the obsolescence in her eyes.

  After winding down a series of unfamiliar and narrow streets, we stopped in front of a nondescript door. Our “guide”, as I had come to think of him, knocked lightly, paused, and then rapped in loud and quick succession. I felt something extraordinary on the other side, but part of me hoped there was nothing, that our guide was nothing more than a petty crook who had taken her money. Part of my body was ready for the confusion of an unforeseen adventure, and another portion of my being wanted nothing more than to drag her away, get home to the creamy eiderdown, the cotton of our sheets.

  The door slowly creaked open. Humid air coloured with various scents of smoke came out. I thought I smelled the pungent, sticky smell of opium. We were greeted by a man who who had the colouring of a Gypsy, but no trace of an accent. His French was impeccable. For some reason this unnerved me. He had green-yellow eyes and luxuriant black hair in curls to his shoulders. He was well dressed. The door closed behind us, and I turned, startled. Our guide had left us.

  Her mouth turned up like sensual question marks as she observed the Gypsy man’s beautifully sculptured ass while he led us down a narrow corridor papered in dark-red velvet and lit with gaudy gilt candelabra. There seemed to be heat emanating from the walls and a muffled sound, not quite far away, vibrating them as if they were breathing and sweating like giant sheets of sex-blushed flesh. It was grotesque and nauseating. I felt the familiar tug of my cock, and was surprised at my arousal in this strange atmosphere. She was moving forward as if in another element beyond her. I watched carefully as she walked down the narrow hallway in front of me, her hand involuntarily caressing the red walls.

  Quite suddenly we found ourselves in front of another door, and the vague music I thought I had recognized could be heard more clearly on the other side. The Gypsy swung open the door with ceremony and with a sweep of his arm motioned us inside. After she had handed over more money, of course.

  What we beheld behind that door made us both gasp.

  A gale of hot opium air and jazz exploded on our faces. There were beautiful young girls and young men. There were old men, bald and dying in the arms of prepubescent nymphs. Old whores danced with wealthy young students. But something else had made us gasp.

  There were young boys and girls hanging hairless and well muscled, suspended from leather harnesses connected to the ceiling. There were four or five of them, and all the hanging men were naked, utterly exposed. Some hung from their arms and ankles, others from the centres of their torsos. I don’t know how many of them were suspended thus in the centre of what seemed to be a large underground theatre. Their bodies nearly receded into the vast subterranean darkness, a sea of swaying, glowing flesh in the pale-red light of this very queer theatre of sex. The force of the music was lost in the face of these beauties hung low enough to touch in any way in which the patrons of this select cabaret could wish.

  Imagine. Human beings, fresh young human beings, suspended in apparatus resembling something dangerously close to an item from the Inquisition. There were black girls with smooth, dark flesh, their nipples nearly purple in the orange light. I could see the ripples and dark hair of a Gypsy boy, or perhaps he was an Italian, the smooth flesh of his ass and hairless chest evoking that day, not long ago, when I had taken my mistress from behind. I was frightened by so much available flesh. There was an Asian girl with long, silky black hair that swept the floor, and near her a European girl with pink skin contrasting viciously with the black straps of her harnesses.

  She clutched my arm, her mouth moved to ma
ke tiny O’s. I did not know whether this unreal spectacle was seizing her with desire or disgust. Her eyes were without expression.

  I could see men, clearly well bred, standing two at a time, taking a girl from front and back. A Japanese girl floating like an angel from the underworld, legs opened, sex exposed, was held aloft in murky opium clouds. Her cunt was being treated to a kiss by what appeared to be a woman of means, judging by the clothes she wore. I could see that her nipples were erect against the silk of her evening gown and I have to admit that the erection that had plagued me in the alley had not subsided; my balls were suffering with passion and need. The cold desire I felt disturbed me, for I wanted to possess not only my mistress but all those bodies suspended before me like so much provocative fruit.

  Before I could lend words to my actions, I took my mistress roughly by her hair and began to bite her neck. The need to have her delicate flesh between my teeth was an absolute necessity. If I didn’t take action, if I didn’t claim her body in some way, however small, I would be lost. It is not something that I can, even now, rationally explain. I was satisfied only when I could taste the metallic copper and iron of her body across my tongue. It was only then that I could release my mouth from the nape of her neck. In this place, in this strange place far beyond even the darkest secrets of Paris, I had to mark her in some way. I had to know, she had to know, that in this flesh jungle where anything might happen she was still my mistress. I could hear her on my lips. The ruby colour of her pain and the rumbles of her acute desire played symphonically on my fingertips and tongue. She turned to me, to my lips, where there was a droplet of her blood. She gingerly put her finger to it and her eyebrows slanted as if to say she was shocked at my bestial need to be so possessive. But then her mouth softened and she raised her bloodied finger to her lips and drank of her own body. Then, while keeping her finger in her mouth, she parted her lips slightly, suggesting something with her teeth and tongue.