“She was my life, Anthea. And they killed her.”
There was nothing to say, so I stayed silent.
After a while, he looked up. His eyes had no strength in them, only sorrow. I kissed them one at a time. Then I kissed his mouth, again and again, small healing kisses.
I put his hand between my legs. I don’t know why I did it. Words seemed so inadequate. I gave him what I had. The sex started slowly. I sat astride him and pulled him into me. Then I carried on kissing him. He stopped crying. He held me so tightly that it left bruises. Then he started to fuck me, fiercely, passionately, as if fucking me was the only thing that kept him alive. He clung to me even after he had come. I still hadn’t spoken to him, but now it was me who was crying.
I think he was saying goodbye to his wife that night. I know he was choosing me, choosing life. It turns out that we were also creating one.
I shiver in the cold and realize I have been outside a long time. Drazen is asleep when I reach the bedroom. The moon is washing his face with silver. He looks older, more vulnerable. I want him so badly it frightens me.
Time to choose: trick or treat?
I stroke his face, following the moon, then I sit astride him. He doesn’t wake until I kiss him. I place his hands on my breasts and rock gently on his cock, which is lying flat against his belly. I lift my hips and he slides into me. So good to have him there. So good to have him.
“There is something I need to tell you,” I say.
Drazen puts his finger across my lips pulls my head down to him. He pushes upwards, slowly, without urgency, until he is all the way in. “What shall we call the child?” he says.
Thanksgiving
“You want me to sleep here?”
“Well, this is where you slept when you lived here, Helen. Why should it change now? I thought you’d be pleased to have your old room back.”
I try to read my mother’s face. She must being doing this deliberately. And she must know that I can see what she is doing. But she still has that innocent, not-quite-connected-to-planet-earth look that she uses to avoid any minor questions about her decisions that my father might be rash enough to voice.
I stare in disbelief at the single bed that I slept in as a child. It’s a very narrow single bed.
“I know that you prefer to ignore the fact that Peter and I are married, Mother, but he is my husband and I expect to have him in my bed. We can’t sleep here.”
“Really, Helen, I have no idea where you get these impressions from. I have no opinion about Peter. As I said at the time, who you chose to marry was up to you.”
What she’d said at the time was, “Are you sure you want to marry Paul, dear? He’s such a bland man. I can see the advantage of having someone manageable but marriage needs a little spice if it’s to last. I’ve always preferred to wake up to Huevos Rancheros. The problem with Paul is that he’s just so . . . oatmeal.”
I’d stood there, with my hands balled into fists and my jaw clenched, trying to quell the desire to hit her. “His name is Peter, Mother,” I’d spat out.
“You see, dear, not even his name is memorable. Ah well. It is your decision, of course.”
Now, seven years later, I find myself having to bite back my anger one more time. My mother is talking. I’m trying not to strangle her.
“I didn’t think that you and Peter would mind being separated for one night. I’ve given him the fold-down bed in your father’s den. He’ll be perfectly comfortable. I had to give the guest bedroom to Troy and Dianna; after all, they have the baby to think of.”
The baby. Of course, we should be thinking about the baby. My younger brother (what kind of mother calls their kids Helen and Troy?) produced a grandchild right off the bat. I, of course, committed the sin of putting my career ahead of my duty to deliver grandchildren, although even that became Peter’s fault in my mother’s mind. “If Peter has a problem dear, I can recommend an excellent clinic.” My mother had left that helpful tip on our answerphone in the second year of my marriage. Peter played it back to me when I got home from work.
I don’t resent the fact that Troy and Dianna got the big bed. I resent the implication that Peter is so bland that I won’t even notice his absence.
“I want him here with me, Mother.”
Even I can hear how petulant I sound.
“Well, if it’s that important to you, dear, I’ll ask your father to move the fold-down bed in here. I’m sure he won’t mind. Although, of course, he has only just set everything up in the den. But then your father always makes sure that his little Helen gets what she wants, doesn’t he?”
I don’t believe it. She is still jealous of the fact that Dad will do things for me.
“There won’t be a lot of room in here. You’ll have to fold up the bed before you can open the door. But, if that’s what you want . . .”
Oh God. It is always like this. A constant trickle of words that erode my will. I either have to get angry or shut down and give in. Giving in is easier. If I push her now, the topic will come up at dinner. And again in the morning. And the next time we come to the house. If there is a next time.
“Never mind, Mother. Peter can stay where he is. Let’s just concentrate on getting dinner ready.”
“Well, if you’re sure, dear.”
How did this woman live so long?
“You look tense, Helen. Why don’t you take a moment to freshen up? Dianna is changing the baby in the bathroom but you can use the en suite in the master bedroom. I’ll be in the kitchen when you’re ready.”
And then she is gone. The relief is physical, like when your ears pop at altitude.
I don’t really need to freshen up but it gives me a reason to delay going downstairs. Nothing has changed in my parents’ bedroom. The huge wrought-iron bed with the chintz canopy over it is still there. I used that bed the first time that I fucked Peter. I used it because I liked the headboard, because I wanted revenge on my mother for all the times I’d had to listen to her thrashing in this bed in the middle of the night, and because I wanted to see if good, nice, sensible Peter Brader would do what I wanted him to do.
I sit on the stool by the dressing table and summon up the memory of a nineteen-year-old Peter, lying on this bed with his wrists tied to the headboard; so calm and trusting that, except for the impressive erection he was saluting me with, he might almost have been ready to sleep.
Other boys I’d known had only pretended to submit. They’d made comments as I tied them to establish that it was all a game and, as soon as they’d come, they’d started to fret at their bonds, demanding to be let free. Peter didn’t do any of that. He just waited for me to use him. But his serenity wasn’t passive. Somehow it managed to amplify everything I did. The harder I fucked him, the harder I wanted to fuck him. His cock was my lightning rod, calling me forth, daring me to spend myself on him, taking everything that I could give and leaving me discharged and sated.
Afterwards I’d left him tied to the bed while I sat and brushed my hair. A beam of sunlight was shining down on him, highlighting the sweat on his muscles and the small scratches and bites I’d visited on him. He looked happy, even grateful. I’d shown him my wildest side. I’d sworn and fucked and bitten and scratched and shouted my come with my head thrown back and he hadn’t pulled away, he hadn’t been threatened. He was waiting for more. He was waiting for me. For the first time in my adult life I felt as if I’d found a home.
Peter wasn’t my first fuck, but he was my first lover. Actually, he is my only lover. To me that is a statement of how rich my life is rather than how narrow my experience has been.
“Helen dear, if you’ve finished up there, you can help your father lay the table.”
The sound of my mother’s voice makes me feel guilty and furtive and childish. I get off the stool quickly and smooth the cover of the bed, as if I had just used it. Why does coming home always turn me back into a little girl? And why do I hate that so much?
There are six of us at
dinner but there is food for at least a dozen. The conversation is stilted at first. Troy and Peter have the mandatory road-number-filled review of the drive to my parents’ house, even though I actually did the driving. I ask Dianna about the baby, revealing my ignorance of modern child-rearing with each question that I ask. Mother fusses over Dad, ensuring that he gets the best slices of meat, touching his hand when she passes him things, keeping his glass full. She always makes sure that he knows he is the centre of her attention. Dad catches me watching them and gives me an unapologetic grin. This is how the world is, that grin says, and it’s too late now to change it.
As the wine flows, words become easier for everybody but me. I feel as though an invisible barrier has settled between me and everyone else. I watch but I don’t speak.
Peter fits in so well. He is a good listener. People relax when they talk with him. When they talk with me it is as if they are always just a little on their guard. Dianna is talking to him now. Peter isn’t talking to her about the baby. Somehow he has learned that she paints and within a few moments the woman I could barely exchange a word with is sharing her passion for abstract art.
As the courses go by, I drink and eat more than I should. I want to speak to Troy. I want to sit and exchange deep truths with him, except that those truths remain just out of reach of my tongue so I remain silent. By the time we reach dessert I am quite drunk. It seems to me that Peter has abandoned me. Everyone has abandoned me.
“I think you might want to have little lie down, dear.” My mother is leading me back to my little virgin bed. I’d protest except that I can’t find the words. And I’m tired. Very, very tired.
I wake with a fierce thirst and a vicious headache. It’s dark. I’ve slept through the afternoon. I groan in self-pity. I’ve made such a fool of myself. I know that mother will be secretly pleased.
I want Peter. Except Peter isn’t here, my mother saw to that.
Sitting up is not pleasant so I lie down again.
The room has not changed since I left it seven years ago. I’ve changed so much since then that it seems incongruous for me to be occupying the same space that I did then. Peter is responsible for most of those changes. Living up to how he sees me, using the quiet space he provides for me to seek refuge in, has changed who I am.
Who would I have been without Peter?
Back before Peter, I’d never really been that comfortable with boys. It wasn’t that I was shy; it was more that I saw them too clearly and I didn’t like what I saw. For them, girls were trophies to show off to other boys. I used to imagine them at swap meets, talking to each other about girls like they were baseball cards: “Had her. Had her. Had her. Want her. I’ll swap you two Heathers for an Alicia.” But the worse thing was that, when it came to sex, they all seemed to want to be in charge although very few of them seemed to know what to do.
I knew enough about my own body to know what I wanted: where and how I wanted to be touched and for how long. I also knew the kind of body I wanted to do the touching: tall, lean, strong. Unfortunately, most of those bodies seemed to come with the supersized ego option as standard.
I tried a few anyway. It wasn’t hard to get their attention – I was attractive enough in a petite, androgynous sort of way – the challenge was to stay in control. The first couple of attempts were an education.
“Tall ’n’ Lean #1” put his hands everywhere but he didn’t know what to do with them. And he got irritated when I moved around. I was supposed to be his bendyfucktoy, something he could pose for his convenience. His dick was nice, smooth and hard, but he wasn’t interested in me touching it for long, he wanted to “slide it home”. I moved to climb up on his lap but he wanted me on my back. He wasn’t in me for long before he came. Then he asked me if I wanted to go get a burger. I realized I’d just had the sexual equivalent of a drive-thru meal: smells good, is over too quickly and lies like a lump on your stomach afterwards.
“Tall ’n’ Lean #2” wasn’t interested in entering anything other than my mouth. He wanted me on my knees, looking up into his eyes. I had no objection to the idea in principle. It was corny but it had a sense of theatre to it. What turned me off was him placing his hand on the back of my head and using my mouth like an extension of his hand. I’ve seen drains unblocked with more finesse. I had to grab his balls to make him stop. I thought he’d be angry with me, maybe even try to hit me, but he actually whined like a little boy, “What did you do that for?” It was the question I was beginning to ask about sex as a whole.
I decided to do some research before seeking out “Tall ’n’ Lean #3”. I went to Barnes and Noble to see what kind of books I could find on sex. I’d done the “Insert Part A into Part B” manuals and the Joy of Sex hippy-type manuals but they didn’t give me what I wanted. They were too much like cookery lessons and not enough like good food. I moved on to the erotica section and found The Story of O and The Taking of Sleeping Beauty. They definitely got my attention. Hours of it. The thing was, I didn’t want to be O or Beauty, I wanted to be the person doing things to them. Well, not them in particular. I wanted to be doing things to “Tall ’n’ Leans”. I’d lie in my narrow little bed, exhausted from my reading or listening to my parents having sex in the room next door, and I’d think about what it would be like to have that kind of control. Then I got to thinking about how I might make it happen. As it turned out, it wasn’t that difficult but it wasn’t that much fun either.
I found “Tall ’n’ Lean #3” in a karate class. I’d signed up because I wanted to be able to protect myself and because I figured the boys there would be more disciplined. He was beautiful, his sweat smelled good, he was a black belt and he was older than me. I waited for him in the parking lot after class. I had decided to be direct.
“Would you like me to fuck you?”
He didn’t look stunned, offended or even pleased, just curious. “Are you sure you mean it that way around? Most girls want me to fuck them.”
“I’m very sure.”
He eyes licked slowly over my body. Then he smiled. “OK,” he said, like he was agreeing to grab a pizza, “but I have a question.”
“Yes?”
“What’s your name?”
I blushed at that. It hadn’t occurred to me that while I’d been noticing the muscles in his forearm and the tight curve of his butt, all he’d been paying attention to was his karate technique.
My parents were away on one of their pagan weekends. Sex was the bedrock of their marriage; you only had to look at the two of them together to see that. The pagan weekends gave them the opportunity to concentrate on fucking each other’s brains out without worrying about making a noise.
I’d decided to have a mini pagan weekend of my own. I brought Tall ’n’ Lean #3” back to my house. I was more than a little nervous. He didn’t touch me or hassle me but there was a confidence behind his eyes that was unsettling. I took him into my dad’s den and gave him the speech I’d rehearsed.
“OK, here are the rules. I want to fuck you. I want you to do what I tell you while I fuck you. If you don’t do what I tell you, the fucking will stop. Do you understand?”
It was supposed to be my first step to establishing mastery over him. He sat on the edge of my dad’s desk, like he had a right to be there, and said, “That speech would work better if you said, ‘I am going to fuck you. You will do what I want.’ You have to sound like you mean it.”
He slipped off the desk and onto his knees in front of me without breaking eye contact. “Tell me how to serve you, Mistress.”
In theory this was just what I wanted. But he was laughing at me. It was gentle laughter, but laughter all the same.
“Shit,” I said.
For a second he looked surprised. He thought I was giving an instruction.
“I so wanted to tie you to my dad’s chair and tease you and fuck you. But it’s not going to work, is it?”
He stood up, lifting me like I weighed nothing at all and placed me on Dad’s desk.
I felt a little bit of panic and a lot of excitement.
“Your dad’s chair? How old are you, Helen? No. Don’t answer that. You’re a pretty girl, Helen, and a brave one. You know what you want but you don’t yet know how to recognize who can give it to you.”
I’d known he was a little older than me but I hadn’t expected him to talk to me like I was a child. Who did he think he was, my camp counsellor?
“Well, why did you come here, then?” My eyes were hot with embarrassment.
“You sounded convincing in the parking lot. And I don’t mind switching from time to time.”
“Switching?”
“I’m a dom, Helen. I normally do the tying up.”
“You think I’m stupid, don’t you?”
“No. But I think you need to learn to recognize a sub when you meet one.”
Then he kissed me. It was a slow kiss, passionate but friendly. It made me wonder what it would be like to be tied up by him. To let him do whatever he wanted. Then he wasn’t kissing me any more. “Gotta go, Helen. My name is Jon, by the way. I’ll see you at karate next week.”
I picked up a book from the desk and threw it, but it only hit the door closing behind him. I was mad at Jon for the rest of the day. Then I started to think about how things might have gone wrong: about the risks that I’d taken; about how gentle he’d been. Gentle and strong. I could see why women would let him tie them.
Jon and I became friends but not lovers. He gave me things to read and told me about his life. I left the “Tall ’n’ Leans” alone for a while and concentrated on getting to college. I’d got through two more “Tall ’n’ Leans” in college before I met Peter, both of them one-nightstands, both of them left me feeling hungry and somehow cheated.
My head is feeling better so I check my watch. Somehow it has reached 10 p.m. I’ve missed Thanksgiving and they’ve all forgotten about me. I hug my sense of hurt to me tightly. It serves me right that I’ve been abandoned. You see, I made a mistake. Such a big mistake. I gave Peter away to my best friend. I was so sure of him you see. So certain that I was what he wanted. I thought I could lend him out. Share him with a friend.
The Mammoth Book of the Best New Erotica Page 47