One Thing About Chocolate
Sex with Susan always made Roger crave chocolate.
The last customer in Bubba’s, he was propped dreamily by the midnight window. The freckled waitress brought his UltraFudge.
She dipped a finger in his hot fudge and smeared it over his lips. “Can I sit down?”
He grinned at her generous breasts.
She grabbed his spoon and dug into the sundae. “I spent an afternoon boinking Gary. Boinking makes me crave chocolate.”
“Me, too. And then the chocolate makes me . . .”
“Me, too,” she laughed, and opened her mouth for the fudgy kiss that was sailing straight at her.
Embracing
Lucy Taylor
In the heat of midday, I set up my easel at the edge of the Decatur Street garden, dab paint on my palette, and wait for the man with skin the colour of Cuervo Gold to come strolling. I saw him yesterday and the day before. Last night I glimpsed him inside his house, making love to another man behind the lacy shades. There were others, too, men and women both, their limbs intertwined like the vines of wisteria and ivy that crawl over the exterior of the fine old Greek Revival house with its two pairs of columns, Doric below and Ionic above, and the black wrought iron balcony that overhangs a great exuberant festival of rose bushes.
I tell myself I’m coming here to paint the garden, the jungle-like greenery interspersed with bright blossoms, and the raised flower borders where the many blooms, most unfamiliar to me, are identified only by tall bronze plaques that bear no English words, only strange hieroglyph-like symbols. But I am lying to myself, and I know it.
The wet heat of the New Orleans August nuzzles next to my skin. I open some buttons on my lavender blouse, where a strand of pearl-like sweat shimmers in the furrow of my cleavage.
When I look up again, the man is standing on the opposite side of the garden, bending to inhale the fragrance of some roses. Tall and sinewy with a glistening hairless dome, like the knob on some giant-sized cherry wood bedpost. He wears white cotton pants and a saffron-coloured shirt. A gold hoop embedded in one earlobe glints in the sun. He’s humming some soft, lilting tune with echoes of samba and reggae. But for all his grace and dignity of bearing, it’s also clear there’s something wrong with him, which makes me watch him all the more intently, for, being one myself, flawed people fascinate me. The studied, halting way he lifts his ivory cane, the slight hitch to his gait, as though once on this very path he might have twisted his foot and so treads decorously even now. He leans so far into the flowers, sniffs so deeply, that you would think they must be giving up their secrets.
Setting my brush aside, I imagine him sniffing as deeply into me and ask myself, what would Kevin do if he were in my place? What clever phrase or artfully languorous pose would he employ to convey his lewd intentions? If seduction is an art, then Kevin might have rivalled Renoir. We were married, but we never fucked. Not till the end at any rate. We weren’t to each other’s taste – but then that was the whole point of the marriage. It gave me the freedom to study art and Kevin the liberty to revel in the joys of flesh other than his wife’s.
By now, the man in the garden is very close. I open up my blouse completely and let my breasts loll forth. They make a tiny smooching sound as they sigh against the slope and swell of my belly, but the man never turns away from the flowers. A fluttery sensation and a surge of sharp inner heat sizzles through me – like I’ve just eaten a huge meal of boudin and jambalaya – as I, who haven’t removed my clothes for anyone of either sex in close to a decade, sit bare-breasted in the sunlight.
But I like the feeling of doing something illicit, forbidden, so much in fact that I go a step further, hike up my flowing skirt and part my legs. A puff of breeze slithers up beneath the fabric and flutters against the lips of my pussy. Wetting a finger on my tongue, I touch myself, smiling as I do so at the image I must make – a partially clad Venus of Willendorf posing obscenely, pussy spread wide open like a mouth grinning at her own audacity.
Now the man turns, lips parted quizzically, and comes towards me with one large, veined hand extended. “You?” he says. “You were here yesterday. I like the way you smell. Like orchids.”
But the garden is a sea of competing fragrances; of ripples and currents and eddies of scent. How could he possibly detect, amid this profusion of olfactory stimulus, the dab of perfume that I applied this morning or the musky undertones of my sweating skin?
And then, as I deliberately shift my position, my nipple brushes the palm of his hand. His fingers curve beneath my breast and for a moment I’ve an image of a man at an open-air market, judging the heft and weight and ripeness of a honeydew.
His voice is low and gravelly, his accent flavoured with the tang of the Caribbean as he says, “This is a private garden. You shouldn’t be here.”
“I only came to paint. I thought visitors were welcome in the French Quarter gardens.”
His hand, still fondling my breast, now moves up to my neck, my mouth, then skims across my eyelids and explores the corners of my eyes. More harshly now: “You don’t belong here. This is a private garden. This is a garden for the blind.”
I could make it simple and say that after Kevin died, I moved to New Orleans because I wanted to get laid, but I could have done that in New York. Just because I wasn’t getting any and wasn’t going after it didn’t mean sex wasn’t on my mind much of the time. In the Village, I knew the bars where the leather dykes loitered like panthers, in heat and hungry, and the bars where the Marlboro Men wannabes parked their Harleys in hopes of parking their dicks later that night in some sweet warm piece of cooze and even the trendy uptown cafes where some future Donald Trump might be showing off his stock portfolio while the scars from his liposuctioned love handles healed.
But I wanted to be in New Orleans for the heat, torrid and swimmingly thick. New Orleans, where the crawfish etouffee is succulent and burningly hot and the Pimm’s Cups potent with gin, where everyone’s skin seems hungry all the time, and the cloyingly sweet odour of gardenias and wisteria and jasmine are enhanced by the underlying fragrance of lust. I wanted to simmer and stew in my sexual juices, to explore the places where Kevin went with impunity, but where I never dared go.
Ours was a marriage of affection and convenience, Kevin’s and mine. I believe we loved each other. Tried to, anyway. We went to movies together and ice hockey games and had brunch at Sardi’s. All the things other young couples do, everything but make love. We had grown up together in a tiny midwestern town and got married right out of high school. Kevin was small, bookish, and effeminate – the butt of the jock kings’ cruelties. To change his image, he bulked up with weights and acquired an impressive array of tattoos. To change his image even further – and to my everlasting shock – he asked me to marry him.
I was an even more obvious outcast – when other kids were experimenting with sex in the back seats of cars and downstairs in their parents rec rooms, I was armouring myself with fat, developing relationships with Godiva Chocolate and exploring the exotic sensuality of halva and baklava.
I feared sex as much as Kevin feared being openly gay. Our marriage and subsequent move to New York was an alliance against those fears, a safe harbour, an island of mutual respite.
Over the years, though, Kevin changed, while I did not. In the beginning he was cautious and chose his partners with care. A handful of lovers came and went, a couple of them serious enough that I offered to move out, get separate living quarters. He said no way. But gradually his lifestyle grew more reckless, his short forays into promiscuity became extended and obsessive. I knew he sometimes connected with strangers in the back of sex shops or in public parks, that sometimes he took money. What I didn’t know until later was that he also attended parties where the practice known as barebacking – unprotected sex with multiple partners – took place.
He came home one morning with a new tattoo. Some sort of Celtic scrollwork on his upper arm framing a symbol that
was almost ominous in its simplicity. Inside the empty patch of skin: a single horizontal line. The design looked unfinished, incomplete. “You’re going back, aren’t you?” I said. “It isn’t done.”
“Not yet.” Then he explained what the tattoo meant. When I stopped crying, I told him he was crazy, that if he wanted to kill himself, why not just use a gun like any normal suicidal maniac? He got angry, said he was tired of being afraid all the time, tired of watching his friends die, tired of condoms and tired of tests – will I or won’t I, is he or isn’t he? Embrace what you fear and fear is vanquished, he told me. Say fuck off to fear and you’re free.
Bullshit, I said, all that happens is you die.
So be it, he said.
He died last year, and I was left with fear I had no desire to embrace. His death, though, left me no choice. That’s when I decided to move to New Orleans.
Wonder of wonders, the man who didn’t want me in his private garden seems to have changed his mind. Perhaps somewhere between my nipples and my inner thighs this change of heart occurred.
Already I’ve learned his name is Martin, he’s from St Croix and that his cock is long and rapier-like, hot and hard as an andiron fresh from the fire.
I haven’t had a man inside me in so long, not since that one night long ago with Kevin. I hadn’t realized how much I missed the feel of it, the squeak and friction of hot, hard sex, the intensely pleasurable pain when I’m first stretched open, penetrated.
I close my eyes for privacy, then open them again, remembering Martin’s eyes are closed forever, although I can see thin, milky crescents below the lids. He’s drenched in sweat, I can taste the salt on his skin. The muscles of his shoulders bunch and knot as he penetrates me with the same exquisite slowness with which he meandered in the garden earlier, more mindful in his blindness of this new terrain that he traverses.
The sun slides behind a cloud, then pops back out, throwing a checkerboard of light and shadow across our bodies, his naked, mine still clothed – sort of – blouse open, skirt rucked up in a silken sash around my waist. I do very little, but let him proceed. I watch his mouth as it closes around my nipple, his hands as they knead and squeeze my breasts, big hands but not nearly big enough, even when he splays his fingers wide, trying to contain the flesh.
His penis is a different colour than the rest of him, deep purple at the crown and lighter, rosy-brown at the root. Up on his arms now, thrusting, I watch him slide inside me, pull back out, and resubmerge.
I bend forwards so I can scoot my tongue along his flat, hard belly, see him flinch a little as though the sensation has surprised him.
I remember that he cannot see me.
I feel beautiful.
I am not beautiful.
I’m a big woman, very big, tall and well over two hundred pounds. Amply proportioned and generously endowed. Lusted after by that small, but dedicated subculture of men addicted to what the magazines that cater to them euphemistically describe as chubby chicks. I was once offered a thousand dollars to pose for photos for a magazine like that, where the women are all three hundred plus and recline split-beavered on satin love seats like an obscene parody of an Ingres odalisque.
I turned it down. Not because I oppose such things in principle – men who love fat women need stroke books, too – but because – and this is the absurd part – someone I knew might see me on display like that and realize I was fat. Amazing how the mind deceives and tricks us, how we fall prey to our own insanity. As if no one had noticed before, as if the tent-like, brilliantly-patterned dashikis and swirling caftans and bedouin-like robes I wore were merely some kind of eccentric fashion statement and in no way indicative of the girth of the body concealed beneath.
Over the years, I convinced myself I didn’t really need or want sex. After all, I had my art, a form of sensuality and self-expression I loftily placed above mere crass carnality. Besides, whether consummated or not, the fact remained I was a married woman.
But when Kevin died, the years of celibacy caught up to me in a tidal wave of longing and wanting and fierce, unrequited lust.
A few years into our unconsummated marriage, Kevin and I had vacationed in New Orleans. What a lush and sensuous city, at once vampish and aristocratic, coquettish and campy. I remembered eating Beignets covered with heaping drifts of sugar at the Café du Monde, licking the sticky sweetness off my fingers, the smell of hot chicory coffee, the cool darkness of the interior of St Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square. I remembered the lithe, half-naked women offering brief, teasing glimpses of themselves from the doorways of the strip clubs on Bourbon Street and the winsome, smooth-chested young men who caught Kevin’s eye and mine. Most of all I remembered the odour of flowers, a hundred subtropical blooms overflowing the flower boxes along the Moonwalk and the Farmer’s Market and Pirate’s Alley, growing wild among the tombstones in St Louis No.1.
It was the flowers, I tell myself later, that drew me to the garden in back of the Greek Revival style house on Decatur Street, where I set up my easel that first day. The smell of olive and jasmine and the swelling masses of shiny green foliage scraping the side of the pale, mint green house.
It was also the dark man I saw silhouetted behind the frills and lace, the two women I glimpsed embracing behind one of the magnolias. And others who passed along the cobblestoned path, embracing, nibbling, fondling and caressing as they made their way to the portico of the house and disappeared inside. All sightless and all of them in lust.
It was the odour of their lust that drew me.
The night after Martin fucks me, my pussy burns and throbs so intensely I can imagine he is still inside me, that he lies behind me, cupping my breasts while his cock moves slowly, like the sweat that, despite the best efforts of the ceiling fan to cool me, still trickles between my breasts, along my thighs.
When I finally sleep, I dream I am inside the mint green house, which breathes like a human body. Smooth cool-looking columns stand at intervals in every room. I can see the columns breathing too, convexing and concaving, before reforming into long white supple arms and legs and heaving ribcages. Not columns at all, but bodies intertwined. Blind bodies whose limbs coil upwards together like plumes of smoke, bodies whose ability to know and touch the world comes from between their legs.
When I wake up, the soreness between my legs only serves to goad me into moving more quickly as I shower, dress, and make my way back to the garden.
But I’ve misjudged the time. I thought it was mid-morning, but by the time I reach Decatur Street, it’s already early afternoon. The sky dulling down, crowded with long, streamlined clouds the shape and colour of low-swimming sharks. Grey blurry cirrus clouds, like small waves, lap at the horizon.
The two women that I’ve seen before are here today. Unlike Martin, neither carries a cane or walking stick, but each drags her fingertips along the edge of the wall on either side of the path. At the places where the Braille markers identify the flowers, they pause and touch and bend over to inhale the aroma of the blooms.
The taller woman’s hair is caught back in a flowing honey-coloured ponytail. Orangey freckles dot her small, deeply tanned face. Her friend is shorter and plump, with large breasts that stretch the top of a yellow sundress. She looks up into the sun without seeing it, caresses her lover’s face, and murmurs something. Her hands glide down along the blonde woman’s hips to caress her between her thighs. Then she retreats back towards the house.
Alone, the blonde woman approaches me. When she’s within a few feet she stops and cocks her head like a small, inquisitive bird. “Natalie?”
“I’m over here.”
She smiles. “Yes, Martin said you would be. My name’s Lily. Are you painting?”
“Yes.”
Her full lips curve into a smile. “I thought as much. Come here and let me look at you.”
I walk beside her and she touches my face, fingers penetrating slightly between my lips. Her fingers smell faintly of saffron and oranges. Her hair
brushing my arm feels silky and cool, like a Siamese cat’s.
In the centre of the clearing there’s a stone sundial with an inscription that reads: The kiss of the sun for pardon, the song of the birds for mirth, one is nearer God’s heart in a garden, than anywhere else on earth. It isn’t in Braille, but the letters are engraved deeply enough into the stone that I’m sure the non-sighted can read it easily.
A little farther back, there’s a kind of grotto where the palm trees and banana trees crowd so thickly they block out the sun. It’s here that she starts to caress me. Our clothes slither and whisper and slide to the grass. Our breasts and lips mash together. She is sleek and well-muscled, like a horse bred to run. Her blind eyes are beautiful, slitted and cloudy like water frozen into a pattern inside an icicle.
“You feel wonderful,” she tells me, as she explores with her hands and her tongue, “plush and bountiful. You feel like a feast.”
Which is what she makes of me, lapping and tonguing and nibbling her way from nipple to cleavage to belly to thighs, strumming and sucking my clit, tonguing her way up inside me. We lie on the grass, getting drunk on the lush, syrupy odours of gardenias and iris and cunt. Much later, although it seems like only minutes, I watch the sun shimmer and set behind the fiery gold coils of her hair.
“Do you live here with Martin?” I ask her.
She nods yes.
“I’d like to sleep here with you tonight – inside the house.”
She shakes her head, sadness or regret or something else tinged with the tang of despair, freighting down the corners of her mouth. “You must go,” she tells me. “This place seduces all who stay here. You won’t be able to leave.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
She sighs and shakes her head. “Go home, Natalie. Before it gets too dark for you to see.”
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 2 Page 17
