The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 11

by Maxim Jakubowski

  She looked at him.

  “Put them on.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Put them on. Now.”

  Thrown into confusion and finding his nervousness return tenfold, Charles took off his shoes and the socks he was wearing and slipped on the rough, scratchy red socks. They just about fitted him but he knew that after one wash they’d be fit only for a toddler.

  “Now strip.”

  “What?”

  “Off. Everything. Everything else. I must search you.”

  Oh shit, thought Charles. I’m going to be banged up in some ghastly hell-hole in the GDR and the Stasi are going to torture me with live electrodes and I’ll never be seen again.

  He stripped down to his gingham M&S boxers. Why oh why couldn’t he have worn black trunks?

  The woman looked him up and down.

  “Those too.”

  He took a deep breath and removed his shorts, flipping them over his feet. He put his hands in front of his genitals and stood like a schoolboy waiting for matron to administer something unpleasant.

  “Turn and face the wall,” she instructed.

  He did so, fear rising in him like lava.

  There was a scuffling and rustling noise behind him.

  “Now turn around.”

  He turned and gasped. She had stripped down to her underwear and stood provocatively before him. Her body was voluptuous and magnificent, her well-formed breasts straining against the material of her brassiere, a cleavage deep enough to get lost in. Below her waist, where her rounded abdomen curved down in a gentle incline, a pair of knickers barely contained the fertile growth of her pubic hair. Even in his confusion he couldn’t help noting that she was a natural blonde.

  Her underwear was exactly the same shade of red as his newly acquired socks.

  “Snap,” she said.

  Beneath his cupped hands, he felt his cock start to stir. He pressed down hard, trying to hide what was happening. She approached him, her breasts swaying slightly in their flimsy packaging, and gripped him by the shoulders. She pushed him onto the desk and he fell backwards on top of the open magazine. He inadvertently moved his hands to stop himself from falling and his cock sprang up. Lying back on the desk, with his knees dangling over the edge, he was helpless, like an overturned tortoise. His feet encased in his red socks became very hot.

  She reached behind her back, unfastened her brassiere and removed it, allowing her breasts the freedom they had so clearly desired. She rolled her knickers down her thighs and stepped out of them and climbed onto the desk above him, placing her knees on either side of his hips.

  “Umm,” he said. She slapped him lightly across the mouth.

  He didn’t say anything else.

  She held his cock with one hand and guided it into her and seated herself on his loins. For the first time since he had set eyes on her, she smiled.

  As she began to ride him, he could feel her cunt throwing off hot wet fluids that made him think he was in danger of being scalded. She bucked wildly and leaned backwards, almost breaking his cock off at the roots, before leaning forward again into a more comfortable position, and continued to ride him until he gave up all resistance and any thought for his immediate predicament and safety. He reached up to take her breasts in his hands and she slapped them away. She gripped them herself and began to squeeze and knead them, pinching the nipples until they glowed dark red.

  There was nothing else for it but to allow himself to be fucked into oblivion. Resistance was futile. For you, Charlie, he thought, the war is over.

  As she approached her orgasm she squirmed and rode him faster, shifting her buttocks from side to side. He could feel his own climax rising and hoped he wouldn’t let her down by arriving at their destination before she did. He didn’t want to be shot for dereliction of duty.

  Her eyes blazing, she reached down and gripped his neck and banged his head against the wooden desktop as she came, groaning and growling deep in her throat. As she soaked him with her hot, flowing tide he let go inside her and slid into a semi-coma of pure, unfettered ecstasy.

  He was in the American Sector when he came to his senses.

  “Are you OK, Charlie?” said a voice he vaguely recognized.

  One of the teenage punk girls was looking up at him with concern. Her two companions were behind her, chewing gum and giving him quizzical looks.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m fine,” he said. His cock was sore and his head ached. But at least he was alive.

  “We thought you’d got lost.”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “So we came to meet you,” she said.

  “Very kind of you,” he mumbled.

  “You have to be a bit careful on the other side,” she said. “We should have warned you.”

  “Well, I made it back.”

  “Yeah, and we wanted to show you another aspect of the city.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, we thought you’d appreciate a taste of Berlin hospitality.”

  “Great,” he said. “Where are we going?”

  “Back to your hotel room,” she said with a wicked smile.

  Charles couldn’t believe his ears. Beyond resisting, he let himself be led away by the three girls.

  “And Charlie?”

  “Yes?” he whimpered.

  “Love the socks.”

  The Red Brassiere

  EllaRegina

  Outside Pascal’s bedroom window, erect nipples pressed against the glass. They shivered in the early hour crisp, waiting for him to awake, bucking towards the white duvet rectangle with a gentle persistent knock. Pascal’s fingers, curved around his morning hard-on, idly synchronized their rhythm to the odd staccato.

  As the sun rose over the quartier, a shadow edged across the stone facade of the grey building overlooking Rue de Ménilmontant, then fell through the panes into Pascal’s room on the top floor where the patch of darkness landed on his face like a cloud blocking a piece of blue sky.

  Pascal opened his eyes and looked towards the sound coming from the window. Paris was always grey to him, even though it was in colour. Now, suspended over the balcony and breaking into the black-and-white image, was a Red Brassiere – a buoyant arrangement of lace curves and negative space, alert and fastened, as if enclosing a body. The garment was animate, not clothesline-limp; it appeared to be levitating, like the velvet top hat hanging from the invisible fishing line above his bed.

  Pascal considered himself a fine magician, though he had yet to make a woman disappear. He glanced around his bedroom. Everything was in order. The dove was quiet in its cage, under a canvas night cover. His props were in place near a battered green suitcase – scarves, card decks, a pile of rings. Near the door an arm emerged from the wall at the elbow, dressed in a navy-blue suit sleeve, hand extended as if to shake another, its fingertips holding his velvet cape and black cane.

  His performance the previous night had gone without incident; he had been onstage as usual, standing in the dank, ancient, dimly lit Marais subterranea, twenty-five metres directly below a vitrined jelly-doughnut pyramid in a Jewish bakery, correctly guessing the identities of female audience members, prompted by spontaneous appearances of their names – a moving rash of line on foreheads – written slowly in his loopy handwriting.

  Pascal got out of bed and opened the floor-to-ceiling window. He squinted up at the next building – a hand and forearm shaking out a grey rag. He looked down at the cobblestones – a black cat curled on the sidewalk, licking its genitals. The Red Brassiere moved aside. It was free-standing, apparently, not a snagged runaway specimen from the nearby marché volant.

  Pascal stepped onto the balcony. The Red Brassiere bolted out of reach in a wide arc, then came closer, tentatively. It rubbed up against Pascal as if locked in his embrace. When he lunged for a shoulder strap it pulled away again. Not much for teasing, Pascal returned to his bedroom and closed the window, the Red Brassiere quickly following in a silent swoop, slipping inside bef
ore it shut.

  Pascal returned to bed, unaware that the Red Brassiere was behind him. It flew up to the rafters, under the skylight, and angled downwards as if worn by a woman on a ladder. Pascal’s erection resurfaced and he closed his eyes, resuming his morning routine, stroking himself with more than the usual intensity. The Red Brassiere descended from its lofty perch to investigate, placing itself squarely above Pascal’s hidden hands. A perfume filled the room – that of Genevieve, an early love; the pungent grapefruit and cumin of her armpits, the private spices between her legs – and with it a distinct vision occupied Pascal’s imagination: Genevieve, on all fours, his full cock in her mouth, her wine-stained lips encasing him.

  As he pulled at himself the smell grew stronger. Pascal opened his eyes. The Red Brassiere swayed at his face, emitting a heat along with the unmistakable scent. It did a bob and a bounce. The duvet rolled back into a croissant and Pascal’s pyjama pant buttons undid themselves one by one. His cock sprang out, shaking off his gripping hand, and disappeared into what felt like a mouth but was just empty space above a quivering piece of lingerie. The length of his penis came in and out of view as unseen lips slid over him. It was as if he were a figure drawing being erased and then re-sketched with the mouth’s advances and retreats. His palms grazed the Red Brassiere’s pebble-like nipple bumps. The fabric felt warm, inhabited. Pascal’s head flushed as if wrapped in a feverish blindfold. His eyelids burned. The invisible mouth took him deeper, containing him completely. He rubbed until his magic lamp released its oil then relaxed, all muscles spent. The Red Brassiere collapsed for a moment, folded at Pascal’s feet. He observed the silk and lace. On a shiny white label flattened at the inside, near the underarm area, a size number and style name were written in his loopy script: 90C Genevieve.

  As Pascal’s empty cock lay in repose the word vanished from the satin tag along with any traces of Genevieve’s fragrance. The Red Brassiere hovered motionless above the bed, as if waiting for a sign, a signal, an instruction.

  Pascal enjoyed the company of women. Many many women – each one, one at a time. He was a sexual cartographer, leaving semen imprimaturs in bodies across Paris like inkblots on a map of the city. He had bedded women from every arrondissement, in every arrondissement, several times over. His erect cock had been a directional pointed throughout Paris as frequently as a Vous Êtes Içi map indicator. He could summon the chronicle of his roving carnal travelogue at will. Its various destinations were also the settings for his fantasies, both daydreams and nocturnal reveries.

  To Pascal’s highly developed sense of smell each woman was a snowflake – there were no two alike, even when they wore the same perfume. And of all the characteristics women presented to him their personal scent was the thing he found most arousing and the feature most indelible in his memory. He could recall the specific melodies of each one, the way a gourmand has the ability to detail a history of refined meal courses. And, despite the esoteric differences between them, they were linked by an irrefutable underlying aura of femininity as a given, an aroma which also varied but was fundamentally and ultimately similar, exhibiting the entire olfactory spectrum, from highly pitched to low and broad.

  Pascal eyed the Red Brassiere intently and rewrapped his fist around his rigid cock. He closed his eyes and concentrated. The first woman to enter his thoughts was Delphine, the private tour guide who had fellated him in the artificial lake pooled beneath the Paris Opéra. Delphine liked to have sex in public or nearly so. She enjoyed being stripped naked except for a pair of high heels and a string of pearls. She favoured wearing a chef’s toque during intimate relations and bought them by the half-dozen at a uniform store on Rue Turbigo. She wore Mitsouko – he could always smell her before he saw her.

  Pascal tugged at himself with ferocity, conjuring Delphine from puffy hat to pointy toes, filling in more of her details with each hard stroke. He raised his eyelids. He was face to face with the Red Brassiere, its cups enlarged as if supporting Delphine’s abundant breasts, the bedroom smelling like a Mitsouko tornado.

  In that moment Pascal understood that the Red Brassiere was both a tabula rasa under his control and an object that could hold him simultaneously under its spell.

  Pascal spent the entire day in bed with the Red Brassiere as his travel companion. He plugged and played, repeatedly. With each change of character the Red Brassiere assumed specific dimensions and offered Pascal a particular scent; the label changed its size and name information accordingly. He journeyed the entire city without leaving his bed.

  Noémie had persuaded the man taking tickets for the Eutelsat tethered in the Parc André Citroën to let them up alone. Once the dirigible halted 150 metres over Paris she bent over and Pascal entered her derrière. Noémie’s dark hair smelled like roses. Pascal watched as the Red Brassiere showed its back to him – a narrow band of hook and eye – as he imagined Noémie. The odour of rosewater filled the room.

  He and Agnès had visited the Panthéon forty-five minutes before closing. They’d positioned themselves against a column where Pascal could slide himself unseen inside her from behind and fuck her to the rhythm of Foucault’s slow-swaying pendulum. All the while Agnès kept a straight face, so as not to betray what was happening. The Red Brassiere tilted almost imperceptibly from side to side like a slow metronome wand as it gave off Agnès’ personal fragrance, a mixture of sex and tea tree oil.

  Octavie was – appropriately – an accordionist who played beneath the arcades of the Place des Vosges. She and Pascal spoke about the perfect acoustics of the space then went for a pastry at Sacha Finkelsztajn on Rue des Rosiers. Afterwards, Octavie played Pascal’s organ in private. She wore perfume made for babies. The Red Brassiere seemed to heave as if taking deep breaths while it replicated her bouquet.

  Pascal went through his personal index of intimate sights and smells. He thought of the dark-skinned Sidonie (lilacs), whose long thin nipples echoed the dome tops of the Sacré-Coeur. He recalled Irène, into whose patchouli-cloaked nakedness he thrust until the houseboat on which she lived drifted away from its moorings. He remembered Odile, who had welcomed him inside her on all of Paris’s thirty-six bridges (Chanel No. 5, thirty-six times). There was Eugénie, whom he had balanced on his cock for fifteen minutes in an automated street toilet, at her insistence (baby perfume with a hint of bleach). Clémentine gave Pascal a hand job at dusk one summer night in the centre of the labyrinth at the Jardin des Plantes. She smelled not of clementines but of lemons. Vignette took him in her mouth on a rented boat in the Bois de Boulogne, lying flat so that he appeared to be the sole passenger, rowing as slowly as he could to keep the craft – and Vignette – going. She liked the smell of his semen in her hair.

  Pascal dressed and left his apartment. The Red Brassiere followed him down the building’s spiral stairs in a corkscrew blur like a thrown party streamer. He stopped at the Bar des Sports for an espresso and a brioche. The Red Brassiere clung to his back, protected from onlookers, as he leaned against the zinc bar. He watched the twin peak line of red strap tops, like a child’s drawing, reflected in the mirror. A boy of twelve or so was playing a noisy game of flipper, head down. Pascal paid for his breakfast and a few loose cigarettes and was on his way, the Red Brassiere at his shoulder. He picked up a newspaper at the kiosk.

  As Pascal walked, the Red Brassiere played with him, evading his grasp when he tried for a strap, pulling a storey above, then falling down like a torpedo to reclaim its place beside him, each time smelling like someone else, a woman whose fleeting image had just made an appearance in his head because of something he noticed on the street, some je ne sais quoi suddenly noted, which struck him, awakened him, moved him – an object, a sound, a memory.

  It began to rain. As its fabric soaked up the drops the Red Brassiere got richer in hue. Pascal unfolded his newspaper in an attempt to shield the garment from the elements. Before he could fully succeed, a series of umbrellas opened like black flowers, clutched in hands at the ends of extended ma
le arms left and right, one after the other like a choreographed dance, offering the Red Brassiere dry passage. It hopped from the shelter of one to the next, for the three-block duration of the cloudburst.

  They passed a lingerie store where the Red Brassiere stopped for a moment of camaraderie with the black and white models in the display window, worn by silently laughing mannequins, until Pascal sensed its absence and walked back for retrieval, firmly hooking his fingers around the elastic straps.

  At the flea market the Red Brassiere admired its own reflection in an antique mirror, its nipples brushing the hard surface as if kissing itself.

  Back at his building Pascal tapped in the entry code and opened the heavy green wooden door. As he pushed inside, the Red Brassiere broke free and flew to the top storey, hanging outside Pascal’s bedroom window until he arrived himself.

  The next morning there were already several people waiting at the bus stop near the Rue des Pyrénées. An old woman bumped headlong into the Red Brassiere as if it were invisible but the men stared at it, unblinking, and stepped out of its way.

  They boarded the 96 which would deposit Pascal in front of the magic club. The bus driver made him pay two fares. It was standing room only. A man with a white cane occupied the handicapped seat near the door. The Red Brassiere loomed above his shoulder in the last available wedge of space, overlooking a blonde woman in a blue trench coat flipping the pages of Oh Là! magazine. The Red Brassiere appeared to be reading over the woman’s shoulder.

  “Marie-Blanche?” asked the blind man, arching his head in the direction of the Red Brassiere, “est-ce que c’est toi?”

  The blonde looked at him quizzically. “We do not know each other,” she said curtly.

  “Non – pardon,” replied the blind man, “I was talking to her,” again motioning his eyebrows towards the floating garment.

  “Qui? Il n’y a personne içi, monsieur.”

  “Oui!” he insisted. “Marie-Blanche!” he continued in a singsong, “I was just thinking of you!”