The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Maxim Jakubowski

by Maxim Jakubowski

  When he returned to the room, Susi was speaking on the phone. She put the receiver down as he walked in.

  Maybe he shouldn’t have asked, but he did. Force of habit. He’d left the hotel number with a few friends back in London, in case of sudden business, magazine commissions.

  “Was that for me?” he asked Susi.

  “No,” she replied. “It was Louis, from the bar.”

  “I see.”

  “I wanted to find out about the . . . secret places, the real New Orleans, so to speak . . .” She looked down as she spoke, the white sheet lowered down to the whorl of her navel. There were dark patches under her green eyes, from lack of sleep and the intensity of the sex. He’d never found her as attractive as now, he knew.

  He set the bread, snacks and fruit juice bottles down on the bedside table.

  “And?”

  “And he’s given me a few addresses. Said it’s his night off, offered to show us around.”

  “We barely know him. Do you think it would be safe?”

  “You always told me that New Orleans was a city of sex. Not vampires or voodoo. That it was constantly in the air, you used to say, remember.”

  “I did.”

  “Well, it would be silly not to find out more, wouldn’t it?”

  “I suppose.”

  “He’s picking us up from the hotel lobby around nine tonight. He’ll show us beyond Bourbon.”

  They walked through the market at midday. Beyond the food area full of cajun spice mixtures, chicory blends, pralines, nuts and colourful fruit and fish, there was a flea market of sorts, stalls selling souvenirs, bric à brac, clothing, counterfeit tapes of zydeco music, hand-made bracelets and all the flotsam that draws people to a tourist town. On a previous visit on their second day here, Susi had spotted a black felt table where a long-haired superannuated hippy was selling fake body jewellery, which could be worn without the need for piercings. She selected several pieces.

  Late afternoon, back in the room, she retreated to the bathroom for a shower. She emerged half an hour later, splendidly naked and scrubbed clean, her dark red hair still wet.

  “Do you like it?” she asked him.

  He looked up from his magazine.

  She took his breath away. How could her body be so damn pale and so heartbreakingly beautiful? She had rouged her nipples a darker shade of scarlet and accentuated the bloody gash of her sex-lips with the same lipstick. A courtesan adorned for sexual use.

  She had also strategically placed the small rings and clips she had purchased in the market across her body. A ring hung from her lower lip, stainless steel clamps from her hardened nipples and a stud appeared to have been pierced into her clitoris from which a thin golden chain hung, which she had until now worn around her wrist.

  “Like a creature from a dream,” he said. “From a very dirty dream, may I add. You look great.” He could feel his cock swell already inside his boxer shorts.

  “Come here,” he suggested.

  “No,” she said. “I have to dry my hair. Anyway I also want you to conserve your energy. Your seed . . .” she concluded with a smile.

  “As you wish,” he said, unable to keep his eyes away from her jewelled cunt.

  “This is my fantasy night,” she said.

  It felt like a stab to his chest.

  He already knew what she had arranged with Louis.

  It was a very private club on Ramparts, at the other end of the Vieux Carré. From outside, it looked like any other house, slightly run down and seedy. But the moment you passed the door, you could almost inhale the familiar fragrance of money and sin.

  “You sure you still want to?” Louis asked her as they walked in to the lobby.

  “Yes,” Susi said.

  Louis guided them into a large room full of framed Audubon prints and a fake fire-place and asked them to make themselves comfortable. And left through another door after showing them the drinks cabinet.

  Alone with her, he said nothing at first. Then, sensing his unease, Susi said:

  “It’s not quite the fantasy I told you about. Just the second part, really . . .”

  “Oh . . .”

  “And I want you to be one of the men . . .”

  “I’m not sure I . . .”

  “I’d feel more comfortable with you there,” she interrupted him. “You’ll enjoy it, you’ll see. Anyway, you knew what I am, what I like, when you suggested we come here. You’ll get a kick out of it. You like watching. I see it in you. Even when we fuck, your brain is like a machine, recording it all, storing every feeling, every tremor, every moan away. Memories that will last forever.”

  Before he could answer her, the door opened and Louis came through with three other men. Two of them were black, tall, built like football players, the other white man was middle-aged, stocky, silver-haired.

  “Here we are, Susanne,” he said, without introducing the others. “You’re in charge now . . .”

  The thought occurred to him he had called her Susanne. “Friends call me Susi,” she had said back all those months ago as they caught that New York cab. So Louis was not considered a friend!

  Susi indicated the centre of the heavily carpeted room.

  “A circle around here.” There was something more Germanic than usual in her voice as she ordered them to clear the heavy chairs away from the room’s epicentre.

  The circle soon emerged, as the furniture was set aside.

  Susi stationed herself there and undressed.

  “You all stay dressed,” she said to the five men. “Just cocks out, okay?” She positioned herself and as the men’s eyes followed her every movement she opened her legs and stuck a finger inside herself. She was already visibly very wet and there was an audible squishing sound as the finger penetrated her. Louis unzipped his jeans and pulled his cock out. The others followed his example. One of the black guys, he noticed, was enormous, at least ten inches and thick as hell. He discreetly examined the other cocks, and was reassured that his was still reasonably sized in comparison. Joint second biggest, he reckoned, not without a wry thought.

  Susi now introduced a second finger into her cunt, secretions now flooding out and dripping down the gold chain.

  There was both a sense of the ceremonial and a sense of the absurd about them all. Six human beings masturbating frantically. Five men with their cocks out, fingers clenching their shafts, rubbing their coronas, teasing their glans, heavy balls shuddering below as the woman in white at their centre teased her cunt in a parody of lovemaking.

  “Not yet,” she warned. Had one of them intimated he was close to coming?

  Time felt as if it had come to a standstill, swallowing all their halting sounds of lust.

  She adjusted her stance, now kneeling, her hand buried deep inside her crotch, almost like praying, and indicated she was finally ready for her baptism of come.

  The men came, one by one, spurting their thick, white seed into her face, as she leaned forward to receive them. He was the third to orgasm and noticed the arc of his ejaculate strain in the air separating him from her body and the final drips landing in the thin valley between her muted breasts. Soon, she was covered with the men’s seed, like syrup dribbling across her thin eyebrows and down her cheeks. He didn’t think she herself had actually come, although all five men had.

  There was a long silence as they all stood there, the men with their cocks shrivelling already, the drenched woman in quiet repose.

  Finally, Louis spoke:

  “Well, Susanne, just the way you wanted it?”

  She nodded as the men began zipping up.

  “Care to move on to your next fantasy?”

  What next fantasy? he wondered. What else was she after?

  “Yes,” she said, rising to her feet and picking up the green towel Louis had previously left on a nearby chair and wiping her face clean.

  “Good,” Louis said. “There’s quite a crowd out there waiting.”

  Still not bothering to put
her clothes on again, Susi asked him: “Can you give us a few minutes alone, before, please?”

  “Sure, Susanne,” he said and the four men trooped out of the room.

  “So,” he asked her the moment after they had closed the door. “What else have you planned for the menu, Susi? It must be a fantasy I am unaware of. You’re so full of surprises.”

  “I know,” she answered. “I should have told you before. I’m sorry. It’ll only happen once and then I shall return to my boring life, you know. Maybe the time will even come for me to settle down, marry some decent guy and even have kids. A nice Hausfrau.”

  “What are you talking about, Susi?”

  “I want to be fucked in public . . .”

  “What?”

  “Just one man, that’s all. But I have to know what it feels like with people watching, you see. You said this was a city of sex; I’ll never have the opportunity again. Just this once. We’re miles away from home, no one knows us, we are not likely come here again. Only you and I will ever know . . .”

  “You mean with me?” he asked.

  “Yes. If you wish to be the one.”

  “I . . .” He was at a loss for words.

  “It’s all arranged with Louis. We’ll even get paid five hundred dollars.”

  “It’s not the money . . .”

  “I know . . . I understand if you don’t want to. Arrangements have also been made for another man, if you decline. But I do want you to watch . . . really . . .”

  His thoughts were in turmoil. This had all gone too far. He had played with fire and the flames were now reaching all the way through to his gut. As they always did. He never learned the lessons, did he? Long before Kathryn, he’d been going out with a woman who was avowedly bisexual and it had planted a bad seed in his mind. Not for him the common fantasy of watching two women together, no. The idea of bisexuality had preyed on his mind for months and one day, curious to know what it must feel like to suck a man’s cock, from the woman’s point of view (after all, they never minded sucking his, did they?), he had agreed to an encounter with another man. He distressingly discovered he enjoyed sucking cock and had been irregularly doing so for years now, in secret, whenever a woman was not available and the tides of lust submerged him. He had never told any woman about this. Feared they would misunderstand. Blamed his insatiable sexual curiosity. Even Susi wouldn’t understand, he knew. Not that this was the time to tell her. He always went that step too far. And paid for it. Emotionally.

  “I just can’t, Susi. I can’t.”

  “But will you . . .?”

  “Yes, I will watch.”

  There was a crowd in the other room of the house on Ramparts. They had been drinking liberally for an hour or so, it appeared. There was a heavy air of expectation about them. Louis led Susi in. Like a ritual, holding the thin gold chain secured to her clitoris, her eyes covered by a piece of dark blue cloth. This is how she had wanted it to happen. She didn’t wish to see the audience. Just feel it and hear it around her as she was fucked.

  They had cleared a low table in a corner of the room and Susi was taken to it, carefully installed across so that all the light was focused on her already gaping and wet red gash and positioned on all fours, her fake jewellery taken from her body and was helped to arch her back and raise her rump to the right level.

  The man who had won the quickly organised auction came forward. He looked quite ordinary, late twenties, an athlete’s build, not very hairy, he had kept his shirt on but his cock already jutted forward as he approached Susi’s receptive body. He was uncut and his foreskin bunched heavily below the mushroom cone of his glans. He was very big.

  The man found his position at Susi’s entrance and bucked forward and speared her. A few spectators applauded but most remained quite silent. From where he sat, he couldn’t see Susi’s face, only her white arse and the hypnotising sight of the dark, purple cock moving in and out of her, faster and faster, every thrust echoed by a wave of movement on the periphery of her flesh, like a gentle wind caressing the surface of a sand dune.

  It lasted an eternity, much longer he knew than he would have ever managed. The guy was getting his money’s worth. And the audience, many of whom were blatantly playing with themselves in response to the spectacle unfolding before them. She would be very sore at the end of this. Sweat coated Susi’s body like a thin shroud as the man dug deeper and deeper into her and he watched her opening enlarge obscenely under the pressure of that monstrous cock.

  Shamefully, he couldn’t keep his eyes away from the immediate perimeter of penetration, noting every anatomical feature with minute precision, the vein bulging on the side of the invading cock as it moved in and out of sight in and out of her, the very shade of crimson of her bruised labia as they were shoved aside by the thrusts, the thin stream of inner secretions pearling down her inner thigh, and neither could he prevent himself getting hard again watching the woman he knew he had fallen in love with getting fucked in public by a total stranger.

  That night, she curled up against him in the slightly exiguous hotel room bed, drawing his warmth and tearing him apart inside.

  They had packed and waited in the hotel’s lobby for the airport shuttle they had booked earlier that morning. One suitcase each, a Samsonite and a Pierre Cardin. They hadn’t discussed yesterday night, acted as if nothing had happened. They had the same flight to Chicago where they would part. He on to London, she to Vienna. Now he knew, he would want to see her again, in Europe. It would be easier. They had come through this crazy experience and he realised how much she had touched his heart.

  The blue mini-coach finally arrived, ten minutes late and he picked up the suitcases and carried them to the pavement. As he was about to give her case to the shuttle’s driver, Susi put her hand on his arm.

  “Yes?”

  He had never realised how green her eyes were.

  “I’m not coming,” she calmly said. “There’s nothing for me back home. I’m staying in New Orleans.”

  “But . . .”

  She silenced him with a tender kiss to his cheek. When he tried to talk again, she just quietly put a finger to his lip indicating he should remain silent.

  “No,” she said. “No explanations. It’s better like this.”

  The driver urged him to get on board.

  As the shuttle moved down Burgundy, he looked out of the window and saw Susi walking to a parked car with her suitcase. Louis stood next to it. The shuttle turned the corner and he lost them from sight.

  The short drive to Moisan was the loneliest and the longest he had taken in his life.

  He would, in the following years, continue to write many stories. That was his job after all. In many of them, women had red hair, green eyes and bodies of porcelain white. And terrible things happened to them: rape, multiple sex, prostitution, drug addiction, even unnatural forced sexual relationships with domestic animals. But they all accepted their fate with a quiet detachment.

  He would continue to occasionally meet up with strange men and take uncommon pleasure in sucking them off. This he did with serene indifference, because in his mind it didn’t count. It was just sex, meat, it was devoid of feelings.

  He never visited New Orleans or saw or heard of Susi again.

  Edward Hopper Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

  Maxim Jakubowski

  I’m sitting on a high stall in a bar called Phillies with my back to the nocturnal street. Across from me to my left, a man and a woman silently stare straight ahead at the white capped, blonde clerk busy cleaning dishes. The fedora wearing man negligently nurses a cigarette while the woman, red haired, in her late thirties I guess, peers at her well manicured nails. There is no juke box, there is no noise except for the occasional gurgling of the twin coffee percolators on the nearby counter; it’s a perfect three in the morning silence, made for night hawks and lonely hearts. She is thin, even gaunt, the silky fabric of her red dress draped across her shoulders, opening up across a V of indifferent,
pale flesh. She sports scarlet lipstick, just like you imagined vamps did in black and white forties noir movies. They haven’t spoken to each other since I walked into the joint. But their body movement betrays the fact they are a couple. Only deep familiarity expresses itself, communicates in such a display of common silence.

  Outside, it’s been ages since even a car has driven by. We are enveloped in a sea of dead time, listening to the mute voice of the downtown Los Angeles night. Figueroa Boulevard is just a few blocks away, even more deserted at this time. There was no game tonight at the new stadium by the nearby convention centre, so no stragglers ambling by or zigzagging their way past the flaming radiance of this old-fashioned street corner bar in search of a car parked forgetfully around some hours earlier.

  I’m sipping my second glass of Coke. The ice has long melted and diluted the syrupy sugar fix of the drink. I keep on watching the couple, imagining their story, embroidering a whole scenario to justify their presence here, to explain the way they once met and the curious reasons that seemingly keep them together when they visibly have so little to say to each other. Surely, they have somewhere to go back to? I don’t. In a few more hours I will call a cab and get him to drive me back to L.A. International for the first morning flight of the day to La Guardia and my apartment on Washington Square full of books and CDs, where I will while the days away until the next telephone call summons me for a job. No rush, I don’t need the cash. But practice makes perfect, they say and I never say no when offered a hit. I have a reputation to protect.

  I quietly wonder whether the other insomniacs keeping me company in Phillies also speculate about my own presence here? I don’t think so. I am anonymous. No one remembers my face. My hat is grey felt and my two piece suite a boring anthracite blue, my hair is cut short and my shape somewhat stocky. I guess I look like an insurance salesman. Good; it’s a suitable appearance. Forgettable, indifferent. Safe. I should know, I was once a cop, a run of the mill detective who happened to be too much of a loner to make the grade. Tradition dictates that cops should run in pairs, play the buddy game. Just wasn’t my style and I quietly alienated all the partners I was assigned. Nothing spectacular, no fights or endless arguments, caused the obligatory rift, but eventually they all moved on of their own accord, leaving me with a bad reputation as distant and uncooperative. Which was fine with me, but not too good on my record. So, one day, I just took early retirement and moved across to the other side.