The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 12: Over 40 outstanding pieces of short erotic fiction (Mammoth Books)

by Jakubowski, Maxim

  “Give up your life,” he said, “and you will win me.”

  “My flat?”

  “Abandon it.” He tugged at the laces around her waist. As they came free, she exhaled noisily.

  “Thirty servants. A steamtrap and driver.”

  “Set them free.”

  He pulled the shell of her corset away in two halves, as though he were removing the shell from some sea creature. Underneath, her bare skin was marked with lines where her underclothes had bitten into her skin.

  “A place at court. Invitations to the very best parties.”

  Gustav raised an eyebrow. He took hold of her petticoat and ripped it apart, tearing it from her waist to her knees. Violet shrugged, and stepped out of the ruined skirt. She laughed as though she had breathed in for the very first time.

  “The proceeds of my trust?”

  Gustav paused. “How much?”

  “More than I need.”

  He nodded. Traced a line from her chin, down her collarbone, to the gentle curve of her breast, where he circled, as if entranced. Her eyes dropped to the twitching fingers of his metal hand.

  “How did you lose it?” she asked.

  “I was impatient,” he said, lifting his wooden-tipped fingers, as if to surrender. “I wanted to master the world. Be the greatest inventor that ever lived. And I refused to listen to anybody.”

  “Sounds familiar.”

  She took the hand and examined it. He held it still, not flexing the spring-loaded joints, not curling the delicate beaten-tin fingers.

  “I built it myself,” he said.

  “That must have been difficult.”

  “Yes. But now – it works. It is part of me,” he said at last.

  Violet looked up at him, then bent to kiss the worn leather of the machine palm. She drew the hand down, to her drawers, and placed it between her legs, pressing against it through the slit in the cotton.

  “It works?” she said.

  Gustav nodded. He pulled her towards him, crushing the awkward metal of his hybrid hand between them, making her moan.

  “Like any man, my body is weak,” he said. “Only I have been blessed with a hand of my own devising.” He interspersed each sentence with caresses, raining kisses down on her bare neck and shoulders like molten lava. “With it, I can create miracles.”

  The blunt tips of his fingers pressed and pushed at her, the polished wood hard but curiously supple too, so that it felt he was making love to her with a wondrous mix of urgency and tenderness, the sensation circling, rising and dipping to some intricate pattern of his own creation. Violet felt a scream build in her belly, low and urgent, as though her voice was not her own.

  With his other hand, Gustav had freed his cock from his trousers, and now he pushed her against the couch, lifting her buttocks so they perched on the curve of the headrest.

  His first thrust was almost desperate, rushing her hard and deep so that she cried out involuntarily. At the sound, he lunged again, and bit down hard on his lip.

  “Forgive me,” he started to say.

  “Never,” she replied, and pulled him to her. This was what she had been seeking, she realized, as he sank into her, meeting the rock of her hips with the jut of his own. This unbearable proximity, this suffocating closeness. To be filled with him, to swallow him up. This was the prison she would never wish to leave.

  He ground against her, and his mechanical fingers drummed a fantastic tattoo around her sex, thrumming there on the most sensitive part, the little screw that held it all together, as she thought of it.

  They beat against each other as if locked in a struggle, both reaching, clutching hold, writhing as if climbing the ladder of each other’s bodies. She felt herself rise, and grow furiously dizzy, calling out to him as she did so, slamming against him as if she could join their flesh by violence.

  As the sensations grew ever more urgent, she dug her fingernails into the flesh of his back. He moaned and bit down on her neck. That moment, she wanted to be marked by him, wanted them to both be changed, irrevocably changed. As she milked his cock and wrung a climax out of his heated, struggling body, his mechanical hand worked at her and she felt herself tumble, a wound-up machine gone wild, spun out of control, overtaken by the exquisite and miraculous machinery of the body itself, fuelled by blood and spit and desire, attracted irresistibly to this man by some inexplicable force, both damned and redeemed by this fabulous creation, this wonderful cage, this beautiful trap that she found herself, for once, glad to be contained in.

  Their ecstasy split the moment in two, and they collapsed onto the couch, knocking levers and bruising themselves on protruding parts. Violet lay across her incredible machine, overtaken by waves of laughter as Gustav rose and disentangled himself, reached for the bottle and returned to lie with her in glorious, foolish disarray.

  “May we live long and never leave each other,” he said, his dark eyes locked on hers as he took a swig from the open bottle.

  “And cherish our freedom,” she said, taking the bottle from him. “Us penniless outlaws.” She spilled whisky and he leaned forward to lick it from her arm, sending a fresh wave of laughter rippling through her.

  “May we make our own miracles,” she said.

  “And recognize them when we find them,” he said, bending to kiss the whisky from her lips.

  Statues in the Snow

  Steve Finn

  The shuttered apartment was so warm I didn’t want to leave. The food was good, the conversation lively. The host was an American film critic, and I was young and ambitious and I wanted to get him onside so that maybe he would give me some freelance work writing about the movies. I was the last to leave, and we talked into the small hours. He was gay, but I knew he wouldn’t make a move on me. He offered to call me a cab, but I told him the streets around his apartment in the Faubourg Montmartre were always full of them: I would have no problems.

  Neither of us was aware, cocooned in that warm flat, that while we coffee-housed, six inches of snow had suddenly fallen on Paris. As the outside door slapped shut behind me, I took in a sight I had never seen before: Paris, empty. There was no sign that a human being had ever visited this outlandish white place. There were no people, no cars, certainly no taxis. There wasn’t even any sound. I pondered whether I should ring the bell again and explain my predicament, but then the enchantment of what was before me took over. I had a long walk ahead of me, right across the ancient heart of Paris to my tiny garret on the Left Bank, but it was a walk I knew I would never have a chance to experience again.

  So suddenly there was noise in this silent city: the grainy crunch of rather too-thin shoes on fresh snow; the warm laboured breath of the determined pedestrian; the soft expletives of wonder as each turn revealed something new, something refreshed and redefined. Thankfully it is always warmer when it snows, and my spirited walking made up for my lack of a hat or scarf, though I was glad of the lined leather gloves my girlfriend had given me when last I saw her in London.

  The wonders of the newly naked city took me out of my direct route home. The distant green and gold and now white of the Opéra drew me down the Boulevard des Italiens, way off my southerly course, and then the prospect of the severe Madeleine softened by snow kept me tramping and crepitating on my south-westerly route. A good hour, perhaps, I had been walking, and staring at the church where Bel-Ami had prospered made me think of the warmth of my bed. Not being a fan of the desolation of Place de la Concorde, I wound my way through the side streets onto the rue des Pyramides, passing without a glance the gilt statue of the ancestor of my future, as yet unmet, wife and crossed the deserted rue de Rivoli into the Jardins des Tuileries.

  My thoughts had been full of the growing dampness of my feet and the ache of limbs unused to the effort of walking through snow. But as I crossed the Tuileries a realization grew that now, finally, I could have my moment of consummation with my favourite Parisienne, and the prospect warmed me and quickened my steps.

  Fr
om the courtyard of the Louvre down to Place de la Concorde ran the formal gardens of the Kings and Queens of France, the Tuileries. I am not fond of formal gardens and usually the Tuileries are packed with tourists waiting to visit the Louvre or recovering from said visit. But scattered about the gardens are the wonderful statues by Aristide Maillol: life-size bronzes of nude women in arresting and unusual poses. One in particular I adored: a naked girl, resting on her right hip, which was the only contact statue made with pedestal, her strong, shapely legs straight, toes pointed; her torso cocked upwards, her left arm held straight out along her line of sight, the fingers cupped strangely so that she might be sighting something through them, or holding (and contemplating) something invisible within them.

  She lay, as though roughly thrown, just above a sunken part of the gardens, and my steps grew more hurried as I got nearer, realizing that I could now, in this hivernal emptiness, finally touch those strident out-thrust legs, those tempting nates, that deliciously carved back without anyone officiously telling me not to.

  She was delicately iced with snow along her length, but even so she looked both serious and coquettish at the same time. I slowly approached her, pulling off one glove to reach a bare hand to her no doubt frigid bronze flesh.

  “Elle est belle, n’est-ce pas?”

  I must have choked some recognizable expletive as I turned to see the figure behind me.

  “I’m so sorry, I startled you,” she said, in heavily accented English. A woman, in a long black coat over boots, a fur hat on her head and a heavy scarf draped around her. “You are American?”

  “English,” I managed to say, trying to recover from my hour-long solitude, so instantly ruptured.

  “And you also like l’oeuvre de M. Maillol?”

  “I admire his work, yes, but I have always loved this statue.”

  The woman came closer to me. “She looks cold lying naked in the snow, doesn’t she?”

  I had recovered enough from my shock to think that perhaps I ought to hold an end up in this conversation. “She looks, as ever, impervious I think.”

  She turned to look at me. I saw that she was much older than my twenty-five, perhaps twice that, but handsome still. She looked down at my bare hand and smiled.

  “I think I interrupted you. You wanted this chance to touch her, non? Sans les gardiens et les touristes?”

  I felt embarrassed that she had read my mind so easily, and she must have read that easily too.

  “Allons-y.” She took my arm in her gloved hand and led me closer to the statue. “Dina won’t mind.”

  I looked at her, wondering what she meant.

  “Dina is the model for this statue you love so much. She’s an art dealer now. We say hello now and then. Of course, she was very young when she sat for this. Can’t you tell . . .”

  She startled me anew by taking my ungloved hand and placing it square on one of the statues high, pert breasts.

  “. . . these are the tits of a young woman.”

  And they were. And they were icy cold.

  “They were warmer then.”

  The nipples, though sculpted in detumescence, were nevertheless hard against my palm.

  “Her breasts are what we French call ‘an honest man’s handful’ – just enough, you understand!”

  And she laughed, a shocking sound in that muffled silence: and her laugh had that little ragged edge that spoke of a smoker. Her hand then took mine lower, down the gentle contours of an adolescent belly and up onto the proud haunch of a woman unafraid of work and along the calf of a woman with the strength to keep going, and down to the toes that I had always thought would look so beautiful splayed in orgasmic bliss.

  I thought her hand would continue with mine on this erotic excursion around this beautiful form. Instead she pulled me back, and then around to the head with its peaceful yet puzzling expression.

  “What are you thinking, young man?”

  Her voice was suddenly sharper.

  “Do you think she is ready to fuck? Do you think she is opening her legs for her lover? That her enigmatic hand is grasping the cock that she seeks to pull into her wet mouth? Well?”

  I must have looked like a goldfish, my mouth opening and closing as I searched for an answer to her aggressive questions, for suddenly she was laughing that rough laugh again.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Forgive me, I’m only teasing you. Put your glove back on, your hand is frozen.”

  And it was, from that sensual glissade along Dina’s body. I hurriedly put my glove back on.

  “But what I said is what I hear, most days, from louts and perverts who hang around here and whisper the foulest things about her: about what they would do to her, about what she would do with them. About how she is a tart who spreads her legs for the world to see.”

  A mute young Englishman watched a tear start in the eye of this strange Frenchwoman, swathed in black.

  “But I knew her you see, know her still. She was a sweet and innocent young girl who happened to have no shame in her naked body, and he was an honourable old man whose art was dead and she brought it alive again. Please don’t sully her with your fantasies.”

  “I didn’t mean to . . . I just love the statue.”

  She looked at me then, and sighed a great cloud of breath.

  “I wish her story could have been mine.”

  Puzzled, I began to speak, but she stopped me with her cold gloved hand on mine.

  “I need a hot drink. If you would like one too, my apartment is not far.”

  We walked in silence within the greater silence of the city, her arm crooked in mine, across the Pont des Arts and up into the Left Bank streets. She lived not far from where Oscar Wilde died bemoaning the bad taste of the wallpaper, on the fifth floor (no lift, of course). The place seemed warm but poky when she switched on the lights, but then I realized the room we were in was cramped by heaped piles against each wall, covered in heavy cloths. It pushed the furniture into a small area in the centre of the room, like a wagon-train besieged by Indians. The kitchen area was curtained off with an expensive-looking drape, which she swept aside and hooked up. I could hear the sounds of a kettle filling, a match struck, gas igniting.

  She came back in, unbuttoning her coat, which she threw, along with her hat, gloves and scarf, onto one of the formless piles against the wall.

  “I am having a tisane. What would you like?”

  “A coffee, if you have any?”

  “I can reheat some. I think I have some whisky too. You like?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer, but swept back into the kitchen nook. Another pan was set on another ring and the bitter smell of coffee soon filled the flat, vying with the herby aromas of her tisane.

  “I was also a model, like Dina.”

  She was curled in one of the big armchairs, her tisane in its outsize cup steaming away on one arm while she took a sip of her whisky. Her dress was black and shapeless: a large piece of freckled amber hung from a gold chain on her breast.

  “I grew up in Normandy, near the sea. I was a good student, and was sent to the Lycée in Caen. It was a long walk from the bus stop home and the buses were irregular, so my parents were used to me being home late. The walk took me past a large dilapidated house, an old gentilhommière. I had heard that an artist lived there, but no one seemed to know much about him, which was a shame as the idea of an artist living close by certainly piqued my adolescent interest.

  “I had seen no sign of life there until one day in the spring of my final year. I was early, for once, dawdling on a nice afternoon when I heard this voice. ‘You girl, come here.’ I saw this big, shambling . . . well, mountain of a man coming down from the hitherto empty house. I remember he had on this loose white shirt over blue trousers, both dirty and stained, and his hair and beard were wild and straggly. He looked a mess, frankly, but if this was the artist, well . . . wasn’t that how they were supposed to look?

  “As he came closer to me, I could see he was l
ooking me up and down in the rudest way. If it had been one of the Caen boys, always trying to look up our skirts, I would have said something. I had a sharp tongue. I was known for it. Not now. ‘You’ll do,’ he said, and grabbing my arm pulled me towards the house. ‘There’s money in it, if you’re good.’

  “Why didn’t I fight? Why did I let him drag me into his house like a goose? I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. He pulled me along a dark corridor into a back room suddenly full of light and the appalling mess of a painter in mid-flow. A large easel, canvases stacked everywhere, paint over all, every surface streaked and dirty, and an old brass bed in front of the windows covered with a greasy-looking spread.

  “‘Get undressed,’ he said, leaving me suddenly marooned mid-room. I stood there in my drab school uniform as he grabbed a sketchpad and charcoal. He saw I hadn’t moved. “Get undressed!” My hands trembled as I obeyed him, but the first man I stripped naked for never even looked. As I hastily removed my knickers he threw the charcoal into a corner and started instead to sharpen a fat pencil. Horribly aware of my nudity, I waited until he was satisfied with his preparations. Only then did he look at me.

  “‘You young girls don’t eat enough,’ he said quietly as he came up to me. There was a smell about him that . . . it made me wrinkle my nose, but . . . More whisky?”

  I must have goldfished again. She chuckled and produced a half-crushed packet of cigarettes and a tiny lighter from somewhere in her dress. She lit up and exhaled a perfect cloud of smoke in the still air.

  “Help yourself to more. He briefly felt my small tits, my nipples puckering madly as he handled them, then he stepped back to look down at the dark hair at my groin. His hand gripped my shoulder to twist me so he could see my bum. He handled me like meat. I was eighteen and had kneed a boy in the balls for touching my bum at last year’s St Jean. Why did I let him treat me like meat?

  “‘Lie on the bed, on your back, arms above your head, crook your left knee open.’ I did as he told me, and he sketched: quickly, violently, a page finished and ripped off the pad and thrown to one side. ‘Pull your knees to your chin.’ ‘Hold your tits.’ ‘Rub your slit.’ ‘On all fours.’ ‘Dip your back and push your arse out.’