by Violet Blue
B E S T
W O M E N ’ S E R O T I C A
2 0 1 5
Edited by
VIOLET BLUE
Copyright © 2014 by Violet Blue®.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in the United States by Cleis Press Inc.,
an imprint of Start Midnight, LLC,
609 Greenwich Street, Sixth Floor, New York, New York, 10014.
Printed in the United States. Cover design: Scott Idleman/Blink
Cover photograph: Novastock/Getty Images Text design: Frank Wiedemann
First Edition.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Trade paper ISBN: 978-1-62778-088-9
E-book ISBN: 978-1-62778-103-9
“More Light,” by Laila Blake, was previously published in Best Erotic Romance 2014; “The Kissing Party,” by Rachel Kramer Bussel, was previously published in Bound for Trouble; “The Seven Ravens,” by Ariel Graham, was previously published in A Princess Bound; “Postcards from Paris,” by Giselle Renarde was previously published in Slave Girls. All published by Cleis Press.
CONTENTS
Introduction: Diamonds Are Better
The Ghostwriter • Valerie Alexander
Roxanne • Tamsin Flowers
Click-Click-Click • Annabeth Leong
Star Fucker • Malin James
The Art Teacher • Rachel Woe
Gwendolyn and Mario Go to Philadelphia • Gwendolyn Kansen
Accidental Transmission • Beatrix Ellroy
Groped • Lana Fox
Postcards from Paris • Giselle Renarde
Magic Tricks • Sue Lenèe Cix
The Kissing Party • Rachel Kramer Bussel
A Not-So-Subtle Spice • Alison Tyler
Tryst of Fate • Lydia Hill
Triplet Trouble • JT Louder
The Unrequited Orgasm • Dani Bauter
The Dancer • Evey Brett
More Light • Laila Blake
The Seven Ravens • Ariel Graham
About the Authors
About the Editor
INTRODUCTION:
DIAMONDS ARE BETTER
This being my tenth year of editing the Best Women’s Erotica series, I naturally looked up what the traditional wedding gift would be after crossing the threshold of ten years of hot sex, an online sexual revolution for women and porn, and a growing readership spanning digital divides.
Image my disappointment when I found out the gift for a decade of bliss was tin.
This is what we get for slogging through all that bad erotica, packed with gross puns, puerile poetry, and twenty-page “Penthouse Letters”–style porno in pink Comic Sans? After going beyond “keeping the spark alive” to showcase women’s fantasies about fucking as they transcend into literary supernova territory? We get a bendy pie plate?
Luckily, Hallmark had the foresight to take this dubious tradition and upgrade it. Now, they say, it’s diamonds for a ten-year marker. Phew.
And what a glittery jewel box is in 2015’s haul, dear reader.
My voyeur and I had never met in person, but he was the one who came to mind whenever someone asked if I had a boyfriend. Our arrangement had lasted five years by then. Every couple of months I traveled for a weekend to a town I didn’t know and gave Ron hints about where I’d be. He always sent me the pictures afterward, and it made me feel like a celebrity to sit down at my kitchen table at home and deal out the glossy eight-by-ten prints he’d made of me, some in color and some in black-and-white. He usually caught some shots of me getting undressed before bed, sliding my panties down my thighs, but others he grabbed while I was out doing seemingly ordinary things, crowning me with unexpected sexiness. The pictures were erotic but generally not explicit, and more than once I’d caught myself wondering how my pussy would appear under his lens.
—“Click-Click-Click,” Annabeth Leong
A question I’m often asked after over a decade of editing explicit erotica and running an adults-only blog is, “Don’t you get tired of erotica? Haven’t you seen it all by now?”
The long answer is a languid story about a confectioner who never tires of her luscious, sweet creations and the songs they sing on her tongue and the palates of others. It stars a heroine-as-reader (that’s you), who is more afraid of a life less lived than of swimming into uncharted erotic waters. At the end, she realizes there is no such thing as having “seen it all” and that’s so delightful and powerful and freeing that none of us want to stop looking for the next delicacy, the next unknown taste, and in this case, the next erotic adventure put to page by a woman as daring as we all strive to be.
The women in Best Women’s Erotica 2015 are these very women, and their compelling, surprising, skillfully told, ridiculously sexy stories star erotic heroines that I guarantee will have you holding your breath before you turn the page—no matter how many servings of erotica you’ve sampled.
He described how Rebecca shared him with the CEO of a petroleum company in a hotel suite, Giles stripping for the two of them and sliding his hard cock in the CEO’s mouth.
“It’s irresistible when someone knows what you want before you do,” he said. “You wonder what else they know about you. They become your sexual oracle.”
“Did she? Know what else you wanted, I mean?”
“Of course. The first time she tied me up, I thought I would explode. The absolute powerlessness and fighting her authority—then succumbing to my own need for that powerlessness, which is the true humiliation.”
Recognition flooded my face in a warm blush. I tilted my head so that my hair covered my cheeks.
“I see that’s how it is for you,” he said.
I laughed nervously. My legs felt weak and my underwear was wet.
“I'll show you.”
—“The Ghostwriter,” Valerie Alexander
Finding these gems wasn’t easy. As with every year, during an open call of only four months, I read hundreds (this year, again over three hundred) of submitted stories that had never been published, most written in the express hope of being published among the eighteen finalists here.
Not satisfied that I’d turned over every rock trying to find the best, I also read everyone else’s erotic anthologies and collections claiming to have “the best”—and shook down editors everywhere to tell me about the hottest stories they’d read all year. When I found new stories that shined beyond the rest in other people’s collections, I plucked them like a greedy raven to fill a place of honor in my hoard of erudite smut (with permissions and blessings, of course).
This manuscript has been a joy for all involved, and in it you’ll find lusty anonymous gropings, chem majors with erotic chemistry short-circuiting their logic functions, Peeping Toms and Peeping Thomasinas, boys who like boys who like girls, strong takes on rough men, sweetly rushed orgasms with celebrity crushes, and much more.
A college couple visit his family home in Vermont, and he gives his fiancée the ultimate Christmas present when he triple-teams her with his two identical brothers. A hacker finds himself in a predicament when he accidentally leaves his webcam on—and his female chat partner won’t let him off the hook.
A female ghostwriter indulges a wealthy businessman, and he uses her for far more creative purposes than just ghostwriting— even loaning her out to his business associates. A woman becomes determined to find a dirty stranger to feel her up on the subway after watching a porn of
public sex and groping—and she does.
The stories here were a delight to find, and we’re excited to share them with you. We hope you enjoy this smart, arousing, sparkly treasure as much as we have.
Violet Blue
San Francisco
THE GHOST WRITER
Valerie Alexander
A cold November drizzle streaked the windows of the conference room where I waited to see if my career was going to skyrocket. One of the most powerful men in business was six leather swivel chairs away from me, reviewing my portfolio on his laptop; the lights were off and the long table was surrounded by empty chairs that seemed filled with the ghosts of executives past.
Outside the conference room was a corridor of empty offices, an empty secretarial area and an elevator. We were alone up here on the forty-second floor.
I wished my back wasn’t to the windows, so I could look out at the city and not at him. A financial genius, the media called him, famous for getting the best of every deal, a man who’d made the cover of Forbes and Inc. and all those other business magazines I’d written for. At fifty-eight he was stylishly handsome with thick salt-and-pepper hair and trendy glasses. But none of his photos had conveyed the dominant, slightly menacing charisma currently making my heart skip in erratic beats.
I waited for him to dismiss me. Send me back down to his company’s marketing and PR departments who regularly hired me to ghostwrite articles for their executives. He won’t pick me, I thought. He’ll pick a famous ghostwriter with bestsellers for other industry titans under his or her belt.
Rain plopped on the glass.
“There will be the usual nondisclosure agreements,” he said. “And you’ll have to clear your calendar for the next few months.” He lifted his green eyes from the laptop screen. “You would come to this conference room every day. Recording our sessions is fine, but I would need you here for at least three or four hours a day. The publication schedule is tight.”
“That won’t be a problem,” I said. But I found it hard to believe he had three hours free a day. The executives I usually ghosted for could barely find twenty minutes to let me interview them.
“This won’t be a typical business biography,” he said. “More of a memoir. The company isn’t hiring you, just to be clear. Your contract will be with me.”
“I understand—” I had to cut myself off before calling him sir.
“You can call me Giles.” He paused. “I’ve had an unconventional life outside the boardroom and part of that includes a deep immersion in BDSM. The principles of which aren’t that different from business, as it happens. From your column, I gather you know something about that.”
Now my heart began to bang hard in my chest. I wrote a column covering the local BDSM scene for an alternative weekly, but it was under a pen name entirely different from the name I used for ghostwriting. The thought of my corporate clients reading about my experiences with bondage, degradation and being a switch made my toes curl with embarrassment. But that was the thing about being a writer—you never knew who was reading.
He saw my expression. “A lot of people owe me favors,” he said with a small smile. “Anyhow, I learned immensely useful lessons from BDSM and that connection will be spelled out. Nothing too graphic, but I need someone who won’t be disturbed. Someone who will accept more…unorthodox methods of communication.”
I nodded, suddenly aware of my visual presentation: my high heels on the carpet, my manicured hands gripping the armrests. My black suit and pearl earrings. “No disturbance here. I’ve been involved in some extreme edge play.”
Then I stopped—I’d ghosted for enough executives to know that not one of them wanted to hear about the writer’s private life. But his smile was amused; skeptical; at twenty-eight I was too young to grasp the extremity he’d seen, that smile let me know.
“You’re the right person,” he said.
We started two days later with Giles describing a brutal rite of passage when he joined the Marines. “Just hazing,” he said. “Although hazing can serve a purpose, as you know.”
I didn’t know, but I nodded. He smiled grimly. “You’ve never been hazed.”
“I—no.”
Silence fell in the conference room. I waited for him to rise— fearful, throat tightening—and then felt disappointed when he said, “Well, I’m not going to haze you. So apparently you’ll never know.”
A charming smile. In just my few hours here, I’d already learned that he used that smile as a passport, getting himself into people’s good graces and out of obligations.
“On to life after the military,” he said. “I wanted to be important. No, that’s wrong. I thought I already was important and I wanted that to be recognized.”
I typed rapidly, never wanting the hypnotic spell of his voice to end. “You wanted validation?”
“I would never use that word,” he said. “Don’t use it.” He glanced at the red light on my recorder. “I thought it was all about me and bulldozing my way in. Then I got a new boss, Rebecca. She taught me to stop thinking about myself and focus on the other person—the rival, the client, the customer. She showed me this by making me her dog and her slave. And I was a better man for it.”
His smile twisted. “You have to realize how different everything was when I entered the workforce. Thirty-five years ago, people were just starting to talk about sexual harassment and most of us thought it was a joke.”
“So you’re saying you…”
“Slept my way to the top? Not exactly. More like I slept with a lot of men and women I met on the way up. And this woman changed my life. Masterfully.”
He leaned back in the leather chair. “In finance, there is no stability. Interest rates rise and fall, the market plunges because of a CEO’s remark, firms go bankrupt. So I learned early to stay agile, like a cat—and adapt as situations demanded.”
He told me about making a faux pas at a client dinner one night and winding up in Rebecca’s office with his pants down, bent over the desk, as she took her hairbrush to his bare ass again and again.
“I was humiliated and outraged and hard as iron. And I came at the end of it.” He described how Rebecca shared him with the CEO of a petroleum company in a hotel suite, Giles stripping for the two of them and sliding his hard cock in the CEO’s mouth.
“It’s irresistible when someone knows what you want before you do,” he said. “You wonder what else they know about you. They become your sexual oracle.”
“Did she? Know what else you wanted, I mean?”
“Of course. The first time she tied me up, I thought I would explode. The absolute powerlessness and fighting her authority— then succumbing to my own need for that powerlessness, which is the true humiliation.”
Recognition flooded my face in a warm blush. I tilted my head so that my hair covered my cheeks.
“I see that’s how it is for you,” he said.
I laughed nervously. My legs felt weak and my underwear was wet.
“I’ll show you.”
My stomach dropped as he rose and walked around the conference table. Against every professional code, he was going to take control of me and use me, just like I’d been hoping and dreading. I watched as he removed black nylon rope from his suit pockets and tied my wrists to the arms of the swivel chair.
“You look fetching like that,” he said.
“But overdressed.” He unbuttoned my pin-striped blouse and pushed the lace cups of my bra under my nipples. Then he gathered my loose brown hair behind my shoulders, to put me properly topless on display.
And then, to my immense disappointment, he walked back to his seat.
“I can’t write like this,” I said, hoping to be punished for complaining.
“You don’t need to write,” he said. “It’s all being recorded. You need to listen.”
I shifted restlessly against the ropes. But he only went into a story about his first major business deal before yawning abruptly and looking at his watch. �
��I have a meeting uptown.”
Before untying me, he slid his hands over my breasts. “From now on, you’ll be tied up while I dictate,” he said, “and you’ll transcribe the recording later.”
He was almost doubling my workload with hours of tedious transcription. But I would have said yes to anything at that moment, and spending more time immersed in his world seemed a privilege anyhow. “If that’s how you want it.”
He untied me and I adjusted my clothes. I wondered why he wasn’t fucking me right then, how he could stand to have an attractive and much younger woman tied up half-naked in his conference room.
“People are easier to manipulate before they come,” he said as I packed up. “Not after. In business you want to make people fall in love with you, and then keep them short of satisfaction all the time for maximum pliability.”
It had to take confidence, baldly stating his strategy. Then again, we both knew I wasn’t going anywhere.
A cold, dreary December day. It was a routine now, taking the elevator up to the forty-second floor, so high I needed a special badge for access. Sometimes by the lobby fountain I ran into the marketing and PR directors I’d freelanced for and they’d ask how the book was going. I stayed vague. How could I tell them that their corporate god liked me to lay naked and spread-eagled on the table while he explained how to assess risk, seduce enemies and use people’s vanity against them? He was a master in the dark arts of business domination and every day I learned his secrets. How to assassinate a rival’s career. When to be invisible and when to be a star. How to identify companies and executives ripe for the plundering and make them think the plundering was their idea.
Today Giles was on the phone when I arrived. I strolled through the empty offices, looking at the unused mahogany furniture. How grand and stale it all was. The floor belonged to a lost era of commanding male executives and sexy secretaries and martinis in the office.
