Liaisons

by Various

  Though he never really did his job properly, and set me alight instead.

  Number Three:

  Number Three was the naughtiest thing I’ve ever done. He was not allowed. I should have been a better person, etc.

  But I wasn’t a better person. Numero Uno and Mr Two had made me a naughty girl, damn them to hell, so I became a naughty girl at work too.

  There was this patient, you see, this patient who had spent a lot of time in hospital. He had a tumour close to his spine and, though it had been removed and everything was fine – it was fine, it was really OK – he still had trouble walking. And me being a physiotherapist, I had to help him walk better.

  It seemed that I helped him do other things better too. Or maybe he helped me, I don’t know. He was a rascal, that one. He was a bad, bad boy. I had to be that bad just to keep up with him. I had to be cheeky and flirty and probably risked my job.

  Oh, very inappropriate.

  ‘But, oh, who cares, it’s us,’ he said, as he slid a cheeky hand up the skirt I never wore to work before he was there.

  God, he was so handsome. He knew he was handsome even when he was sick and weary and struggling, those big dark eyes always undressing me as he called me Doctor Hottie. Paging Doctor Hottie, Doctor Hottie to the bedroom.

  ‘Kiss it, and make me feel better. Give me a sponge bath, doc, and make me feel better.’ ‘Hey, I really need something more curvy to hold onto when I walk for you today. Do you have anything in mind?’

  He started off with the parallel bars. He ended up with his hands on my hips. My hips make great walking aids apparently. Other things on me make great walking aids too, such as my breasts, which when flashed make a complaining patient walk another five steps.

  He told me: ‘I’d walk barefoot across a burning desert for those breasts. On broken legs. With only a can of Mountain Dew to quench my thirst. It’s a real shame we can’t do all of this semi-naked.’

  I told him that I didn’t think my boss would approve of promising nakedness to patients, but he just laughed at me and said that I shouldn’t pretend I wasn’t into that. Getting caught by my boss. Bad girls love getting caught being all unprofessional by their bosses.

  He said he’d seen me looking at one of my handsome colleagues, Jason or James or something J that he couldn’t recall, and that he knew I was the type to accost him in a cupboard somewhere or in the elevator like some bad hospital soap opera, and he got a kiss from me for that.

  ‘No,’ I told him. ‘No, never. Never Jason or James or whatever.’

  I’d like to say that I didn’t fall in love with him because he was sick, but I don’t think that’s exactly true. Seeing a man like him – strong and vital and achingly handsome – being vulnerable made me weak at the knees and weak in my heart, and I loved him desperately for it. I loved him for being strong even as he was vulnerable, and I wanted him more, much more than One or Two.

  I wanted him because of that, and because it was forbidden. ‘Tell me it’s forbidden,’ he would say to me, and then find a way under my top to my always electrified skin, as I did something innocuous like fluff his pillow.

  ‘It’s forbidden,’ I’d reply, as he smiled slow and syrupy, and said to me that I was his undoing.

  ‘Now you’ve gone and done it, girl. Now I’m gonna make you pay.’

  It had been a long time since One and Two, and even his breath against my cheek was like being woken up inside. And then when coupled with words like: ‘Tell me I can still make a girl horny’ and ‘You’re as soft as sin’ and ‘I dream about that mouth doing what good girls shouldn’ t …’ Oh.

  Oh, Three. How could you not have known how sexy you still were, how vital and glorious and all the things I’ve ever wanted in a man? I remember you tasting all strawberry, like hospital jelly, and doing such slight, innocent things that the surroundings made dirty, like sucking my finger instead of a thermometer, and sighing when I brushed the hair from your forehead.

  One and Two gave me lessons in anatomy; Three revealed to me a world of subtlety and hidden looks and soft caresses when no one was looking. We made out like teenagers while watching daytime television on his hospital room TV. We held hands and told each other dirty stories and filled out crosswords together with entirely wrong and entirely filthy words. Somehow he turned seven down into I want to mount you. I turned twelve across into pogofuck.

  I think it’s the only time I’ve ever seen a word puzzle give a man an erection.

  Number Four:

  Number Four was softer and sweeter than all the rest. Something had happened to him, and he couldn’t quite do the job he used to do. So he was a musician instead. He wrote songs about girls with big green eyes and black hair, and lips that bewitched him, and a voice that made him himself again.

  Oh, he smouldered, my guitar guy. The girls all swooned over him, bought him drinks in the bar he sang at and threw their knickers at his head. He was always self-deprecating about it, and in between songs told them to go and find themselves a younger man, a sexier man, while some rum gal always shouted back that he was plenty sexy enough for her, honey.

  He was plenty sexy enough for most of the women in any of his audiences, and they couldn’t get enough of his sly smiles and his songs riddled with euphemisms.

  But it was me he came home with.

  I’ve never known why. I have no idea why it was me. It’s easy when a guy’s attractive and no one else seems to notice, but when other girls are hollering about just how good he looks, it’s harder. Though, I have to say, I forgot about all of that when he wrote songs with fewer euphemisms in them, just for me.

  Fewer euphemisms, and more direct explicit sentences about doing it.

  He wrote me rhymes and limericks and ditties. Some were tame:

  I’ve been to Rome and China and France,

  But nothing gives me a rise

  As the sights and sounds and glorious thrills

  Of that place between her thighs.

  And some not so tame. Some not tame in any sense at all. Ones that used the real words: cunt and cock and clit. Sometimes rhyming, sometimes not. Always telling me what he really wanted while he sat up there on that smoky tiny stage, and sang songs about driving down long dark tunnels in big cars.

  When he was away, I would lounge in our big bed in covers that I hadn’t washed so that they would still smell like him, and surround myself in paper covered in his words. I would read the word cock written in his scrawling handwriting, and think about that said same thing sliding into me as slow as butter melting in faint warmth. The sound of his husky voice telling me to turn over so he could see me as he fucked me, but, oh God, I loved feeling him fuck me with my face in the pillow.

  ‘Fuck me,’ I’d snap at him. ‘Fuck me harder.’ But he wasn’t like One or Two. He was slow and patient and a fucking tease, and he would draw it out until it was agony. I’d berate him, but he would just laugh and pull me to him and say that I should like being savoured. I should like it and, besides, he wasn’t going to do anything else because he knew what it was like to have something taken away from him.

  He wanted to savour me, and he did. He would get home from the bar late and still find time to make love to me, and then get by on three hours’ sleep so that he could follow me into the shower in the morning. We had different sorts of shower gels and potions, because he liked to spend forever feeling slick and rough and soapy things against my skin.

  We’d stay in there until we could barely see for the steam or until the hot water ran out, though it usually took us a while to notice either of those things.

  Then we would get out and start all over again. He wanted to start all over again, all of the time. He’d do it until he was exhausted and then fall asleep on my back, or with his cheek resting on my belly or shoulder. He’d do it until he died, and only stopped running himself ragged when I started telling him that he didn’t need to do a damned thing to prove himself to me.

  He was all man just falling
asleep on my belly. He was all man sharing a pizza with me in our bed. He was all man when he was too tired to do me, and all man when he wasn’t.

  I told him that he was all man while he screwed me sitting in his lap, his hands in the hollows between my hips and my thighs, my back to his front and his face pressed into my throat and my hair. All man, my man, who could just say one word and turn me up too high. He asked me what that one word was and I told him it was his name, and his name turned into ‘Oh, baby’, and ‘Oh, baby’ turned into ‘Oh, God, oh God.’ Praise the Lord for Number Four.

  His callused fingers on my clit, his husky voice singing in my ear, his dark eyes like hollows at the centre of the world.

  Number Five:

  Number Five was my super villain. He had a thing for dressing up as his favourite comic book character when we had sex, a thing that he didn’t tell me about until I screwed it out of him. He dressed up as him for a Halloween party, and I told him how much I liked seeing him be bad in leather, until he caved like a man with a gun to his groin.

  He wore a little domino mask that made him look as wicked as the edge of a carving knife, almost as though he was perpetually laughing gleefully about something awful. I think he knew it made him look like that too, and that he looked deliciously macabre. I didn’t mind what sort of kink he had when it was as good as that macabre look was.

  We had sex while both wearing masks, laughing like super villains who had just killed the hero, and it was like being with Number One: I was made open again, and turned into something new. He was too. He was my playful evil boy, and I was his playful evil gal.

  We ruled New York and Mexico and Shanghai and various other places around the globe with iron fists, and made love in impossible and ridiculous places. Sometimes while wearing masks. Mostly just in our civilian clothes.

  We had sex at the zoo in a cage of stone animals that periodically made weird recorded sounds. No one was around because it was parade day and late, but I doubt my super villain guy would have cared. He took a picture of me standing in front of a stone rhinoceros and then said: ‘Oh, and I guess it’s now time for you to take those panties off, you wicked, wicked girl.’

  I did. Of course I did. Who knew when the next opportunity to be fucked against a stone rhinoceros would present itself. He was quite a bit taller than me so I had to sort of half perch on its sloping back, but other than that it was as easy as walking, because he was always big and stiff and ready and I was perpetually wet.

  Oh, but the best outdoor pursuit we had was in the library. Breckenridge University library. We only went there for my reunion, but after the drinks and floppy sandwiches I showed him the place I spent the most time at, while enjoying the best years of my life. Not with those faces I barely remembered in a bar I never hung out in, but in that old library with the cubicles and desks that still had my name scratched into them.

  I showed him the copy of Love in the Time of Cholera that still had my handwritten addition: ‘One day I’ll wait fifty years for someone.’ Before he tossed it over his shoulder and launched himself at me like a six-foot three-inch laser guided slab of man flesh.

  Mrs Doddy, the seven-thousand-year-old librarian, caught us on the floor half underneath a desk. Apparently she approved of super villains, though, because she just looked at us as we stopped mid-thrust, before leaving us to it. I would say that we feared security but, of course, super villains never fear security. Especially when they’re busy giving each other intense orgasms.

  The best orgasm I ever had, though, was not in a library, or on a plane, or in some place whose name I can’t pronounce, or while against a fire truck, or forbidden and in a hospital bed, or among song lyrics of terrible dirtiness, no. The best orgasm – the best sex I ever had – was when he took his mask off.

  He sometimes asked me, as we fucked in zoos and libraries and on planes, if I was so easily excited now because of all of these strange and new places we found to make love in, and he never gave me a very super-villainy sort of response when I told him I wasn’t. ‘No, it isn’t the places. It’s just you, my darling, you.’

  ‘But you must have fucked around with sexier guys,’ was his retort. ‘Hotter guys that made you hotter, real studs who bucked you ’til you could barely walk?’

  ‘Real studs like you,’ I said to him. ‘Real studs just like you. What more could I want but you? Here, take your mask off and let me look at you.’

  And I did look at him, in our cold bedroom. It was cold because the old tree in the backyard had come through the roof a few nights before, and the plastic wasn’t covering it right, and it was snowing inside our house. We should have moved downstairs, but he wanted to stay. And in the cool wintry moonlight he looked wicked and gleeful, even without the mask on. He looked sexy and exotic and heroic and vulnerable.

  I kissed him long and slow, and then deeper and deeper until it became urgent. I remember the taste of him, not like cigarettes any more but like the cold, and like him. That little agile tongue of his working its way against mine, while his hands found my breasts beneath layers of T-shirts and cardigans.

  I remember his hands being warm, much too warm for the cold room, and he whispered in my ear that he had been keeping them underneath his body to make sure they weren’t too cold to touch me with. My hands were freezing, so I blew into them before he stopped me. He always liked ice against his skin.

  ‘Except for here,’ he told me, and cupped my sex with one big hand. ‘Here, I like it when you’re burning up.’

  I was – he only had to kiss me to make me hotter than the sun. His kisses were wicked and indulgent, and he had no problems liberally spreading them around. At the hollow of my throat, the soft slope of my breasts, the turn of my hip, the plane of my thigh. He kissed me almost everywhere until my pussy became a little juicy pouting mouth, waiting for similar attention there.

  But I kept myself on edge, and stopped his kisses when they ventured between my thighs, and gave him some exploration instead. I traced the lines of his twin tattoos – one on each arm – and his scars in the place where his back began to curve. I licked where he liked it best: just underneath his jaw; over his nipples; around the strong curve of his gorgeous cock. I kissed his hips and the strange sinuous muscles that surrounded them, a little less there than they used to be but still sexy. He was always sexy.

  Sometimes he knew it. But I liked it just as much when he didn’t, and in the dark spaces we occupied together – somewhere just after waking in the middle of the night, perhaps – he would ask me. Am I still sexy to you, am I still a man, to you, am I still?

  He was always more than a man, to me. He was everything that a man could or should be, and I was so grateful to have had him. When he made me come around his cock, with his hand gripping my thigh tight and his mouth open over mine, I tried to tell him that he had meant more to me than any man I had ever known. I tried, but all that came out was wordless pleasure, wordless mindless glorious pleasure that I poured into him in thanks, for being my man.

  That’s my list. I hope you like it, though I doubt you will.

  I have that picture of you sitting in the doorway of our new home, still smoking like an ass, that odd look on your face that was partly happy and partly sad. The light is hitting you just right, making you seem dark and deadly and soft and subtle all at the same time, and your feet are bare like they always were. How lovely you are! How lovely you were, my Jonah, my man who was many.

  It was always and only you, my Latino love god, my fireman, my patient, my musician, my super villain. I have only one list of all my men, and all of them are you.

  Charlotte Stein has contributed stories to the Black Lace collections Lust at First Bite and Seduction. Her first single author collection, The Things That Make Me Give In, is published in October 2009.

  Junking

  Alison Tyler

  ‘THERE’S A FINE line between “broken in” and “broken down”,’ Todd snorted. ‘Why can’t we just buy a new sofa like norm
al people?’

  ‘Who wants to be normal?’ I asked, gazing at the leopard-print lounge in the far corner. Even from a distance, my trained eye noted that the fainting couch was circa the 1890s, with claw feet and a curved mahogany frame. I could easily imagine Todd fucking me on that seductive sofa, one of my treasured petticoats pushed forcefully to my waist, shiny black satin panties ripped aside, stockings and garters askew.

  His fist would grip tightly into my dark cherry-cola curls, dragging my head back for a kiss while my hands sought uselessly for purchase on the lion’s face adorning the sofa rim. As Todd slammed into me, I’d close my eyes and pretend to be a Victorian maid, caught in a quiet room by the master of the house and fucked royally while the mistress was away. Afterwards, we’d collapse on the couch together, limbs entwined, and whisper dark fantasies about all of the other lovers who might have used the sofa before us. What tales a 140-year-old couch could tell. And why couldn’t Todd see what I saw?

  ‘That one’s a beauty.’

  I turned to see who had spoken, while Todd continued to show every sign that he was ready to flee the packed second-hand store. The stranger was familiar looking. An actor? In L.A. ‘Where have I seen him before?’ can generally be answered with the name of a soap opera or a pain-relief commercial. But, no, although he was attractive, the man didn’t seem the actor type. There was something too real about him. More substance, less show.

  I saw Todd eye the man, then stand up straighter, and I had to bite my bottom lip to hide my smile. Both of us had realised simultaneously that Todd was the shorter of the two men. My eye – at the moment trained not on mahogany but men – also noted that the stranger was built lean, no spare meat on his six-foot four-inch frame. Was Todd sucking in his gut, too?

  The stranger ran a hand over the back of a chocolate 1960s modulated sofa and, if I were that piece of furniture, I would have started to purr. ‘Authentic Naugahyde. They don’t make them like that any more.’

  ‘For a reason.’ Todd’s scowl deepened. ‘That thing’s uglier than sin.’