The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 3

by Maxim Jakubowski

  The waters which lapped and splashed around us were lit from a frosted greenish bulb set into a fixture located at least twelve feet above us in the domed ceiling. The bathwater itself felt sensuously silky, almost oily; its warmth brought the scent of sea salt and some bright, green odour to mind, something living, something tangy to the nostrils, yet sweet, too, as if concealing a flowering centre.

  The inside of the tub gently sloped, so that we could recline side by side without slipping to the bottom. My hair – now pinned up to the top of my head, only ringlets hanging down to my wet shoulders on each side of my face – rested slightly damp on my head, as if Claudia had imagined me being in the tub so long that the surrounding moisture would wick into my tresses. Claudia’s hair, while still short, still sleekly wet, had been coaxed into one coy, tight curl along the left side of her forehead. Letting my hands glide down along her lithe, limber body, I rubbed my fingers over her Mound of Venus, the short hair down there now silky smooth and soft over her fleshy cleft. As I eased one finger into her slick, tight quim, she reached over and began fingering my nipples under the water, massaging each of them in a counter-clockwise motion, while she thought: This is better than your tub, isn’t it? Would you like to body-feel it? Actually . . . see it?

  So this is real?

  A mental pause, as the fingers spread out over my breasts to tenderly cup them, then: Doesn’t it feel real? Doesn’t it sound real? She bent one of her legs at the knee, so that it broke surface with a liquid splash. Working my fingers deeper into her, gently rubbing her clit with my middle finger, I returned: Yes, and yes, but . . . I feel the tub, I feel your flesh, but . . . how do I feel within you? You’re an empath, so –

  The hands on my breasts stiffened, then slid down off them, to the slightly convex roll of my belly, then down, down, to my waiting watery-drift of loose curls, and the slightly gaping ache between them. I had to lean back hard against those tiny, knoblike tiles. First she fingered me, then, after shifting around so that she was facing me, ducked her head under the surface and began tonguing me under the rippling waters until my pelvis began thrusting upward in short, hard pulses. I started to reach my arms outward, hugging the surrounding curve of the tub, while she thought: Just relax, feel it . . . never mind about me. Just let it flow –

  And as the shivering jerks of the orgasm made my leg muscles writhe under the damp flesh, I felt her tongue narrow and burrow deep within me like a bee tunneling into a half-opened rose. When the tip of her nose brushed against my clit, I lifted my pelvis free of the water, feeling the air touch it warmly, yet with a strange completeness. When I opened my eyes and took in my own familiar bathroom, in all its familiar pink-and-whiteness, it was like being exposed to a flashing bulb, for my eyes had grown so familiar to that soothing blue-violet blackness.

  But as I slid deep into my bath, letting the water rise up to my chin, my lower lip, I heard Claudia’s parting thought, slightly distant and muffled, as if shouted underwater, but nonetheless clear:

  I’ll tell you the meaning of my name when you visit me . . .

  I moved to an upright position with a noisy splash, asking: Visit . . . as in see-see you? In . . . person?

  This was something almost unheard of in esper circles. The whole purpose of the newsletter, of all the esper singles newsletters all over the world, was to facilitate meaningful mental relationships. Not the petty body-dates which were based solely on looks and other uninspired, mundane aspects of our bodily trappings. Phone calls were only used as a tool to better solidify an esper transfer. For most of us, making voice contact intensified the images, made the emphatic bonds all the more tactile and real.

  Since Claudia’s bond was already so strong (if lacking in my being able to read her physical responses, something I’d chalked up to some sort of shyness on her part), I already thought we had something special, something even a phone line couldn’t really improve upon. But her answer was unmistakable, if faint:

  Of course . . . how else do people visit? Phones are for wussies. Dive in, the water’s fine here.

  Before I lost all contact with her, I leaned forward in the tub, my forehead almost touching the spout, and shouted:

  How do I find you??

  Her reply was as faint as the distant drip-drip of a faucet left barely turned on in a far away room:

  I’m in the book, Sima . . .

  Although she wasn’t in the Manhattan directory, there were plenty of view-phone books for surrounding cities in my shop. The next morning (after a night spent wallowing in moist, blue-tinged dreams) I shoved aside the still unpacked box of Blum posters and looked under my counter, through every view-phone book on the shelf, until I finally found the name Muirfinn, C. A., in the Lake Placid directory. Hers was the only address listed for that particular street (Blue Fin Drive, appropriately enough), so I suspected that hers was either one of those spreading country-style estates, or a private cul-de-sac.

  The Blum posters – and my meagre-visioned customers – would have to wait a few days . . . until I’d rented an old-style gas-powered car (thanks to her place being too far away for an electric car’s reserves) and personally checked out C.A. Muirfinn.

  And, as if to acknowledge the Tightness of my decision, Claudia whispered in my mind: You were right the first time . . . it is an estate. Right near the lake, in fact, before closing off the contact, leaving only a subtle whiff of briny sweetness in my nostrils . . .

  It was a long drive up to Lake Placid, and another five miles beyond the city to Blue Fin Drive, which was within less than one hundred yards of the twin islet-dotted lake itself. As I made the turn onto her winding, sinuous driveway, which led in lazy loops and twists toward a massive, deep blue-sided, grey-roofed deluxe ranch-style mansion, I couldn’t help but notice that the driveway looked incredibly new, as if few cars used it. There was a two-car garage near the house, but the gravel before it looked virtually pristine, as if this was the bottom of a fish tank, and not someones private driveway.

  When I exited the car in front of the garage door closest to the house, I noticed that there was no actual landing before her front door, just a slightly sloping-concrete walkway which slanted subtly upwards, plus a metal hand-rail next to it, decorated with stylized verdigris-coated brass dolphins. The house seemed to grow larger as I walked up that slight incline; it had to be over one hundred and twenty feet long, and almost half that wide, not counting the garage. That the place was only one-storey didn’t detract from its sheer size: in many ways, it reminded me of an ocean of air, capped by a pale, glittering island of silvery sand.

  While Claudia had remained strangely silent, even when I’d tried to use her MindByte while trying to figure out how to gas up the unfamiliar car I’d rented at the automated garage a few miles back, during my trip up here, she did choose to speak to me just as I was about to place my finger on her door-bell:

  You came . . . you actually did come to see me.

  There was an unexpected pause in her mind-voice, followed by something akin to awe in those silvery tones. Before touching the bell, I thought back: But didn’t you invite me? Tell me to look you up?

  Her answer was as soft as the plash of raindrops on new grass:

  Of course, of course . . . but I didn’t think that you wanted to so badly.

  Pressing my forefinger against the bell, I was about to think her a retort when I felt a twinge of queasiness ripple through me, the first empathic touch I’d felt from her. Not a physical sensation, but a deep feeling of – what? Could it actually be fear, of me?

  Bold Claudia fearing more reticent Sima? On the second ring, the door swung open on its own, revealing a cathedral-like expanse of blue-green-violet lit hallway carpeted in what had to be a soothing low-pile sandy broadloom, its surface delicately pebbled in the diffuse light. No furniture adorned that long hall, but the walls were dotted with wall-mounted fishing nets from which hung sand dollars, flat shells, and rigid starfish and dried sea horses . . . and as I entered that p
assageway, and lightly touched the various remainders of the ocean, I felt the deepness of Claudia’s affections for each object, and knew/felt that she’d gathered them all herself.

  The hallway stretched out for about fifteen feet before it opened onto an extraordinary room – that same sandy-nubby flat carpeting ringed the outer parameters of the huge room (fifty by fifty, or twice that much?) whose centre was dominated by an amorphous blue-green-black tiled pool whose waters gave the room a faint but not unpleasant chlorine smell. This scent was almost masked by the hanging rattan baskets of pungent dried herbs and flowers which dangled from various hook-suspended chains all around the pool area. The area around the pool was brightly tiled, with hand-painted sea creatures fired upon their surfaces. The overhead lights cast bright, rippling ribbons of light upon the pale aquamarine waters: almost blinding in their intensity, they made me partially shield my eyes against the glare, so that I missed Claudia’s initial entrance on the opposite side of the room. But when that queasiness gave way to a sense of heart-lopping panic, I looked across those waters and saw –

  – the woman of my mind-fucks, only she was wearing this oddly strapped and buckled and reinforced-from-without blackish-blue bodysuit, which covered her entire body, fingers and all. For a second, I was reminded of some of Gunter Blum’s more personal-looking shots from the mid- I990s, the studies of that bald-pussied woman trussed up in those leather and vinyl corsets and lace-up bustiers, her legs encased in semi-opaque black stockings, but Claudia’s outfit didn’t look so much erotic as . . . functional. Like every strap and supporting rod had a very specific purpose.

  When she took a step toward me, I recalled another image, also from the last century – that film about the robot-man with no hands, only flicking, twitching scissors, the man whose body was his strange leather suit. Each movement she made was twitching, seemingly isolated from the next, and her legs didn’t so much as scissor but jerk forward, forward, as if the strings guiding her were welded by a palsied hand. Her arms didn’t quite move in synch with her legs, but randomly pulsed out, to the sides, and back again, as if yet another set of hands were guiding those strings . . .

  But when I saw her pinched, deeply concentrated expression, I realized just who those guiding hands belonged to . . . or rather, to what. I’d heard of suits like hers, read about the late-twentieth-century limbs-only prototypes which plugged directly into the limbs themselves. But I’d never before seen a full-body walking suit in action.

  As Claudia reached the outer edge of the carpeting on the other side of the pool and paused to make the transition between the nubby surface and the slicker tile (I saw something move on her “booted” feet, and suspected that some sort of grippers were now positioned on her soles), I actually spoke to her . . . aloud:

  “How did it happen to you? Was it . . . a diving accident?”

  Stopping, but only as if she’d planned to, she awkwardly brushed at the sides of her tight-shorn head, and replied, using her own voice (which was quite similar to her mind-one), “Yes . . . I was at a diving contest . . . the board had a flaw in it. It broke and I fell straight . . . down, hit the edge of the pool. All this around you is part of their insurance settlement, and most of the lawsuit. Paid for this suit, too. Luckily, I still could breathe, after being weaned off the respirator. Had good muscle tone, so the suit was my best option . . . but, it isn’t everything –”

  As in, it couldn’t give her back physical sensation, couldn’t feel for her . . . not in the way another empath could. Making my way closer to the edge of the pool so that I was stepping on the colourful marine-inspired tiles, I asked, “Was that why you . . . so I could be your skin, your . . .”

  “ ‘Pussy’? Not actually . . . I can mind-fuck with the best of them, even before this happened . . . but, theres something else -

  Unable to speak what she so deeply felt, Claudia felt it to me:

  The fast-moving rush of flat water coming close, closer to my forward-pointed fingers, then the enveloping, sensual closeness of the water churning over and around me, seeping into my private parts, rushing across my close-cropped head, like being buried in the juiciest quim, flowing with musky oils.

  Despite the exactness of all the sensations she felt toward me, I realized by their fuzziness in duration that I was actually feeling only a memory of sensation, not her current state of being.

  As realization crept over me, I thought to her: You . . . you can’t get into that pool any more, can you? Not while wearing that suit –

  And when it’s off of me, I’m helpless. Can’t get in or out of the pool alone. My attendants, they come by twice a day, to wash me, but . . . they’re mundanes. Not even gay or bi. To them, I’m just a limp body studded with receptor plugs. I can’t even get into water, not all the way. The plugs by my neck are water-sensitive. Have to be sealed shut just to wash my hair. Can’t even . . . can’t even dip my feet into the pool. But I like to see it –

  Coming closer to her, to the pool, I began to unbutton my blouse, then dropped it onto the decorated tiles at my feet, while slipping off my clogs one foot at a time. Freeing up all my senses, leaving myself as wide open as mentally/physically possible, I stepped lightly across the cool tiles, my feet splapping with each forward, clothes-shedding motion, until I was standing slightly shivering and naked at the edge of the pool, directly across its shimmering surface from Claudia. She’d been watching my every move, feeling each sensation, and her eyes were half-closed in something far greater than ecstasy – something almost serene in its blissful intensity.

  When I slid feet-first into that warm pool, feeling my skin goosebump lightly as it entered that swirling moistness, Claudia slowly, laboriously, got down to her knees, then stretched out alongside the pool, to better watch me swim across toward her. With each stroke, I was myself and Claudia, so that the waters around me were now an ocean kissed by a ruby setting sun, then the waters of the lake beyond the house itself, then a bubbling jacuzzi filled with champagne froth . . .

  Each of her water-memories were so vivid, so detailed, I realized how hard it had been for her to give up her beloved seas in favour of an almost independent, if totally arid, life. When I reached the opposite side of the pool and was close enough to Claudia to reach out and touch her smooth cheeks, her firm chin, I whispered, “You promised to tell me what your name meant. I was rewarded with a burble of only slightly ironic laughter, as she said, It actually means lame of all the crazy things . . . one of my nurses told me, in the hospital. Showed me the name in a book, just to prove it. Isn’t that delicious? As if my mother was a PC instead of a mere empathic . . .

  Her laughter was a brittle thing that echoed off the waters and distant walls around us, until I clambered out of the pool and sat down spread-legged and dripping beside her, and asked, “Do the fingers . . . work? If you’ll do me, I’ll share it with you . . . I love the feel of leather on my pussy,” while pulling up the top of my mound with my fingers, so that my slit was a taut, vertical smile before her. And when those band-reinforced leatherette fingertips caressed my labia, my clit, both of our eyelids became suffused with blood, as we peered at each other through the capri-shells of our lowered lashes, and everything in the room grew crimson-bright . . .

  And when she creakily bent down her head (the neck encased up to the bottom of her hairline in a collar-like device) to tongue me, I stretched out with one hand lazily dipping into the pool, the other caressing cool, slick tiles, so as to give her the most sensation possible, until I was so blown away by my climax that my entire universe was that wiggling, supple tongue poking deep in my most sensitive fissures and folds . . .

  Later, much later that evening, I watched as her attendant undressed and bathed her in that same blue-green-black tiled room she’d shown to me during the mind-fuck . . . only she’d left off the special plastic contour chair upon which she had to sit while being bathed from that sloping tub. She’d merely told the woman doing the bathing that I was a visiting friend from her c
ollege days, to which the woman (older, coarser, and totally disinterested) merely grunted.

  Claudia had told me to watch very carefully, which hadn’t been necessary. Rather than being saddened, or repulsed by the sight of her pale, pluglike studded limbs and torso, I was fascinated by the soft texture of her skin under the greenish light, which made her resemble an exotic sea creature cast up on a shining marble shore. As the woman mindlessly moved the soapy washcloth over and around Claudia’s inert, statuelike limbs, I tried to tune into what she was feeling, but there was simply nothingness. No cold, no wet, no . . . anything. Not from the face down. Just memories of touch, and the eagerness to feel through me . . .

  Before the woman had a chance to dress her, Claudia asked, “Could my friend help you?” Another noncommittal grunt, then she began showing me where each male end of the inner suit fitted into Claudia’s artificial “female” parts, until we’d suited her from foot to neck in the metal and plastic armoured suit, and she was able to place an arm around my waist as the woman trundled out of the little sea-coloured room, leaving us alone.

  Without a need for words, I slipped off my clothes again, and slid into those still soapy waters, and began massaging my body with that same cloth, while Claudia shared each swipe and caress of my terrycloth covered fingers. Once she’d felt what had been happening to her for too many physically unconscious years, I drained the tub, then refilled it with clear, pure water, in anticipation of a mind-fuck like no other I’d ever experienced.

  Once Claudia entered my mind, it was like there were two of her in the room with me: an inert insect-like being who sat rigidly on a corner chair, almost out of our sight, and the live, pliant Claudia who sloshed in the tub with me and fingered and tongued me until I was gasping too much to see or hear . . .