The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 3

by Maxim Jakubowski

  She pressed deeper, the tip of her cock just kissing the tight fist of his asshole. “I want you to say it.”

  He grunted. “It can’t possibly mean the same thing to different people.”

  “You’re holding back out of fear. Just like with your music. You won’t commit the last three per cent. That’s why you’re still playing dives like this.”

  “We’ve been over this a thousand times. It’s worthless to say it.”

  The tight bud of his asshole opened at her nudging insistence. “I know it’s what you feel. Just say it.”

  “It’s meaningless if you have to ask.”

  “It’s everything.”

  He made an incoherent noise as she slipped in a centimetre, then another. Isabella still worked with metrics.

  “It won’t kill you,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m done talking. You . . . uhn, you just do what you have to do to make your point.”

  “I’m not stopping till you say it.”

  Crafty Isabella had just thwarted herself. Her cock crept its slow, methodical way into his body; Orlando didn’t want her to stop. Considering his preoccupation with rear ends, it now struck him as odd that he’d never considered his own. His morning post-coffee toiletries and a vigorous scrubbing were all the attentions he’d ever thought of bestowing upon it.

  “You’re pressuring me,” he quipped, disguising his level of enjoyment with the sort of response that had incited her to this in the first place.

  She slapped his ass. “Say it.”

  Orlando was silent.

  Slowly Isabella worked her slippery dick in. She was being careful, he could tell, cautious not to really hurt him. His ass now pressed firmly beneath the swell of her belly. The front of her thighs nudged the back of his. Her high-heeled feet, calculated for the height she would need for this manoeuvre, were wedged between his scuffed cowboy boots, swathed with his jeans and boxers like the base of a Christmas tree. The hem of her dress tickled his lower back. Orlando had never experienced the blindness of having someone make love to him from behind, never felt the surprise of every touch by their hands or body. Isabella often mounted him while he lay on his back, telling him to hold still until she’d used him for her own friction, but he could still participate, teasing between her legs or massaging her breasts, communicating with facial expressions. This was powerlessness of another order. Total abandon, at her mercy. An absolute trust and giving of oneself. And she had done it so boldly, so baldly, so often.

  She grabbed fists full of his scant hips, and leaned over to whisper in his ear. “Say it.”

  Orlando pushed back against her.

  Isabella began to fuck him in earnest. Her breath changed to short pants of hot steam on his back. Her movements became more calculated. She had gone from anger to arousal. He sensed her surprise, that this fucking would afford her pleasure, too. She picked up her pace, forgot the metric system and took a quantum leap. Isabella gave him her last three per cent, going deep.

  She grabbed his hair. “Say it!” She punctuated her repeated demand with the insistent sound of her belly slapping against his ass. If someone had peeked through the steamy front windows into the dim bar, all they would have seen was the flapping red tent of her dress, the spread wings of an exotic bird.

  Orlando opened his mouth but couldn’t catch his breath.

  “I love you,” Isabella said softly. She broke through his barrier with her thrusts.

  “I . . . Damn it, I love you,” Orlando half sobbed. She had burst some dam within him. Some massive, concrete structure that had allowed only trickles of truth to get through, leaving those on the other side thirsty and parched. The granite crumbled, and years of pent-up, churning water deluged the desert. “I do. I really do.”

  Isabella abruptly stilled.

  “Don’t stop! Don’t.”

  “Say it. Say it.”

  “Jesus,” he bit his lip. “I fucking love you. I fucking love you. Oh, God, fuck me, I love you. Christ. Let me love you.”

  She was right about his music, about everything. He had cassette tapes crammed with serious songs. Lyrics that expressed his ache and longing and, yes, his love. But he feared they were sappy, that he would be laughed at, and so he made laughter at his humorous songs a certainty. No risk. Isabella’s thrusts knocked those tunes loose, setting free a flock of singing birds in his head. Stored up inside him for years now, they tumbled out.

  “I love you, I love you, I love,” he said, in time with her thrusts. She arced. He knew her sounds, could tell how close she was. She slapped against him, harder and faster. He was so full of her, to the depths of his core, that he could hardly stand it. And he couldn’t believe it, but he was coming. Without a touch from her on his cock, he was coming, too. He cried, and came, shouting that he loved her. She burst, and he burst, and they stood shuddering. The red dress shimmered with the trembling of their joined bodies.

  She played with his hair and nibbled on his shoulder, her arms tight around his belly, her breasts smashed against his back. He didn’t want this moment to end. He didn’t want her to ever pull herself out of him. He wanted her to take up residence in his guts. Except that then he would never have another good look at her ass.

  The Holy Bright Number

  Andy Duncan

  Once a high-yellow business girl named Clarissa lived in a dead cropper’s place at the head of a trail in a hollow up Tobaccoville way. The trail was made by deer and widened by men and narrowed again by the mountain itself in the years after the last cropper died and burley leaf dropped cheaper than souse meat and the bank let the fields go to laurel and huckleberries, so as she picked her way up the hollow the first time, she must have been walking on faith that the way led anywhere at all. Or maybe instead she had no faith, and walked into the woods for that reason instead, which is another kind of faith and one often borne out in the hills. But walk she did, and was surprised or not by the one room cabin she found at the head, and that very evening the folks on the other side of the ridge saw smoke pluming up from the dead cropper’s chimney and resolved to coon hunt elsewhere for a spell, for the dead have been known to kindle a fire. Soon the trail started widening up again, as fear of the dead lessened or grew, either way leading men all over the country to tramp the trail to pay their respects to Clarissa. On a chestnut stump at the edge of the clearing she set an unopened box of Red Devil Lye: on its side meant please abide; standing straight, no need to wait. Those who waited stood several trees apart, smoking, not speaking, each imagining himself alone between the great black woods and the lighted window.

  One new moon night when only a granddaddy coon could have found his way from the turnpike to the head of the hollow, a stranger named Charlie Poole sauntered up the trail whistling, banjo in one hand and bottle in the other. As he passed the Red Devil he kicked it over. When he reached the front door he kicked it open. “Whoa, now,” said Clarissa as he plucked her up dripping and kicked the washtub a-slosh across the floor. Her wet cat shot onto the stove, snarling.

  Later Clarissa said, “I got a good notion to gate that trail. How’d you find me in the pitch black dark?”

  He fought free of the friendship quilt, grabbed the back of her head and said, “This dowsing rod here.”

  Later she said, “I purely hate a banjo.”

  “For the rest of your life on this round Earth,” he said, “whenever you hear a banjo, that’ll be me, talking.”

  Still later Clarissa padded naked as a jaybird through the dewy gray grass, snatched up the Red Devil box and carried it back to the porch. A groundhog watched her from the garden patch.

  “Look, then,” she told it, and went inside, slamming the door.

  Months passed. Visitors got no farther than the stump, where, confused, they turned back. No one entered, no one left the hollow.

  (Many years later, a young woman writing notes by hand amid a stack of books and records at a little desk in the college library in Chapel Hill a
sked herself what Charlie Poole could possibly have been doing for four and a half months in the spring and summer of 1924. The answer occurred to her even before she set pen to paper to record the question, and she snorted with laughter at herself, a sound that so emboldened the young stranger at the adjoining little desk that he peered over the partition and spoke to her. Whatever he said wasn’t much, but it was enough.)

  One afternoon in the cabin in the hollow, Charlie Poole was laughing fit to bust. Clarissa’s tabby had decided his bouncing pecker was a play-pretty and was trying to jump up and bat it as Charlie galloped from one end of the cabin to the other, daylight breaking through the floorboards each time he landed, Clarissa’s arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and her lips against his ear murmuring giddyup. But Charlie’s laughter faltered and died as he slowed to a canter and then to a walk. Clarissa had to lick him to get his attention.

  “Charlie! I said, let’s fetch that tick and straw from the yard and get this bed back together. It’s aired enough, and there’s thunder coming.”

  “You hear it, too?” Charlie said, standing still.

  When his pecker quit bobbing, the cat lost interest and went to wash itself under the stove. Clarissa slipped off Charlie’s back and knelt beside the water bucket, drank deep from the dipper. “God damn, it’s hot in here,” she said. “Wish that storm would come on. Might break the weather a little.”

  “Ain’t no storm,” Charlie said. The way he said it made her look at him.

  Another boom boom boom sounded, closer now, as if just the other side of the ridge. The canning jars rattled.

  The cat yowled as Charlie trod on its tail in getting to his clothes. The rocker righted itself a little at a time as Charlie relieved it of britches, brogans, shirt.

  “Charlie,” Clarissa said. “Charlie?”

  The booms were in the hollow now, continuous and evenly spaced, like a heartbeat or a funeral march.

  Charlie’s gaze met hers for a second as he slipped on his braces. “You ain’t dressed yet?” he asked.

  One more deafening boom, then a silence painful to the ears.

  A voice rumbled from the front yard.

  “Charlie Poole, come out and be known to the Lord.”

  Clarissa stood, mouth open, arms at her side, staring at the door, heedless of her nakedness, of the dress Charlie was trying to thrust into her hands. He finally draped it over her shoulders like a shawl.

  “Charlie Poole, come out.”

  A heavy thump like a body flung down made the porch boards groan and jumbled the knick-knack shelf. A souvenir dish from the Natural Bridge fell to the hearth and smashed. Another thump, then another, coming closer. With each one a bit more daylight appeared beneath the door.

  Clarissa was trying to put on the dress, really she was, but in her terror and her focus on the door her arms were leaden, and her fingers wouldn’t work. It was like trying to button when she was a girl, while watching the contrary Clarissa in the head-to-toe mirror at the Federated store in Winston.

  Behind her, someone pounded on the sash, but she didn’t look around. The whole floor of the house now sloped toward the door. Off balance, fearing she would pitch into the arms of whoever was now turning the handle, she instead fell backward onto the sagging ropes of the bed frame, where she clawed for purchase like a spider as the dress slithered to the floor.

  The sudden breeze as the door swung open smelled of summer mud and honeysuckle. Filling the doorway, stooping to peer inside with deep-set ice-blue eyes, was the largest man Clarissa had ever seen.

  He wore a bluish-white seersucker suit, jacket buttoned, pants creased as sharp as the ridge line, shirt collar hooked tight but no tie. His neck was as thick as Clarissa’s waist, his jaw ponderous, his mouth wide and crooked like the glancing blow of an axe, his rectangular head made more so by his terrible haircut, razored so close that he was patchily bald. His nose and brow were lumpy, too much in them. Meeting his steady, shadowed gaze, Clarissa thought of two miners’ headlamps deep down in the seam.

  The well-dressed giant bared his teeth and said, “Evening,” so loudly she flinched and so low in pitch that her bones vibrated.

  The giant stepped inside, massive shoulders hunched, buzz-cut head sweeping dust from the ceiling. The little cabin rocked like a cradle as he moved about, gazed at the dime store gifts that cluttered the shelves, the few dresses huddled in the chiffarobe, the stove battered as if clenched in a fist and unfolded again. Clarissa suddenly hated her whore’s nest, and all it contained, and herself.

  “No, you don’t,” the giant rumbled, his back to her. She gasped, the answer to her unspoken thought more invasive than this uninvited hulking presence among the scraps of her life.

  The giant knelt and began picking up the shards of the Natural Bridge, piling them in a calloused palm. They clicked together like a cricket’s legs. “You don’t hate nothing, Clarissa,” the giant said. “You’re just ashamed of a right smart of it.” He drew one last shard from between two floorboards, topped off the pile, then cupped his palms together and rocked them. “Afraid this plate here has been to breakfast,” he said, looking mournful, but in his hands the bits looked less like fragments of something broken, a ripped jumper, the insides of a jack-o’-lantern, and more like fragments of something yet to be made, the squares of a quilt, kindling. The cat twined around the giant’s ankle, purring, and rolled onto her back to present her belly.

  “He lay down as a lion, and as a great lion,” the giant recited. “Who shall stir him up?”

  He closed his eyes, brought his cupped hands to his mouth and blew into them, his cheeks inflated like a child puffing out a candle. “Restore unto Clarissa this geegaw, O Lord,” the giant said, and blew again, then opened his eyes and his hands. The smashed bits of plate were unchanged. The giant’s whole face wrinkled as he beamed at Clarissa. “Indeed, the Lord’s work is ever marvellous to behold,” he said. “You got any glue?”

  Sitting on the edge of the bed frame now, a rope burn streaking across her thigh, she shook her head.

  The giant grunted and stood, shoved double handfuls of plate into his jacket pockets like a bashful suitor. “My name’s Ralph Poole,” he said. His smile faltered on “Poole.”

  Since the giant entered, Clarissa had not been studying about Charlie. But now, with a pang of guilt, she looked for him. She, the cat and the giant were alone in the room. The tatty curtains in the open window billowed in the rising breeze.

  “Gone, of course,” said the giant Poole, shaking his head just as she realized, with something like nausea, that Charlie Poole was never coming back. “No matter,” the giant continued. “He ain’t no harder to find than cigarettes and beer.” He reached for the dipper, one huge hand enfolding the battered tin handle all the way to the bowl. He peered into the bucket as he stirred, the dipper clanking against the sides. “I reckon you know, Clarissa, that my little brother stinks like blinky milk. He is a varmint and a rake-hell and a hard, hard man.”

  “I know him,” Clarissa said, enraged – I could have gone with him but you stopped me, somehow you stopped me – and blinking back tears. “But I don’t know you.”

  The giant Poole lifted the streaming dipper, swung it toward her. “Drink,” he said.

  The dipper rasped across her cheek once, twice, leaving a damp trail.

  Still furious and sick at heart, she also was suddenly thirsty. She parted her lips. She drank the hot, metallic well water that had come to taste like home, looking into the giant’s eyes as he gauged her throat movements and tipped the dipper steadily, unerringly, as if his arm were hers.

  When she was done he dipped more water and poured it onto her upturned face, onto her shoulders, her chest, and somehow she felt calmer and less naked, not more. The water was colder now and she shivered, her body awakening despite herself, as the rivulets coursed down her arms and back and backside and legs. Empty dipper still in hand, the giant Poole regarded her nipples without expression, a look Cla
rissa knew well.

  She weaved a bit as she stood. Wanting to hurt him, she spread her feet a bit farther apart for balance, put her hands on her hips and said, “It’ll cost you.”

  The giant Poole’s high-pitched chortle made Clarissa flinch and sent the cat streaking beneath the bed. “You think I don’t know that?” the giant asked.

  He scooped her dress off the floor one-handed and tossed it at her. She tried to snatch it from the air but her body caught most of it, the fabric plastering to her damp skin. She had no trouble putting it on. Then the giant handed her the cat. It lay draped across his hand, purring.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “To get some glue.”

  Outside, the sun was past the ridge line, and a cloud was rolling through the hollow, spattering rain as it brushed the tops of the chestnuts and poplars. On the porch, leaning against the woodpile, were a gnarled walking stick and a double-headed, leather-handled drum. The giant reclaimed these as he passed. Clarissa held the cat close for warmth as she stepped from the porch onto the flat, mossy, rain-hollowed rock that served as a step, a puddle already collecting at its green centre, and then onto the clover that long since had taken the grass. Splintered locust wood, then water and stone, a damp cushion of green – she stood for a moment on each, her bare feet digging imaginary toeholds to mark the place as hers forever, and then walked forward, following the mist enshrouded figure of the giant along the path.

  Entering the woods, the giant began to beat the drum one-handed with the stick, the steady boom boom boom flushing quail and squirrels and larger creatures, too, that crashed and slid and plopped out of sight as he advanced. Clarissa quickly saw that however she hurried, inviting stumbles over roots and thrashes among clinging, clammy leaves, the gap of twenty feet between her and the giant never closed, so instead she took her time, content with the drumbeat and the purring mass against her chest and the familiar underfoot treacheries of the trail. She tasted the rain and filled herself with the bullfrog-scented air.