The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 6

by Jakubowski Maxim

  “I honestly thought he would leave his wife. Couldn’t imagine any other outcome, in fact. She was heavy, so I thought I’d naturally be more desirable. She was older than I was, too, and I thought the combination would make his decision to leave her even easier. But as the years went on, it became clearer to me that he was afraid to upset the life he’d made for himself and his family. He told me he couldn’t abandon his little girl. He bought a house with his wife. But none of it mattered to me because when we were naked together, the world stopped and every fantasy I had was realized.”

  Julia glanced at Paulette, whose big blue eyes were locked on her with worried attention. What was she thinking? Was she fitting the pieces together in her mind, figuring out time tables and slowly recognizing Julia as the woman who once came to that new house and refused her offer of lunch?

  “He fed me. Not with food but with sex. I was only satiated when our skin met. He could make any promise to me – or I could imagine that he made any promise – and I would have no reason to eat.

  “Yet, I always wondered about his wife. Did she know? Did she hate me? Did she wonder why her husband pulled away from her or why he woke up in the middle of the night with the sweats? I tried to put myself in her position and each time I did, I felt a little more disgusted with myself. As time went on, sex with her husband got raunchier. We delved to levels that I’d never gone with any other man.”

  As Julia spoke, she remembered how he had bent her over her raised bed and pushed his cock into her ass while she wailed her acceptance. How even the pain had been surreal and heady, and how even now, the memory of it made her body melt. She would have undressed for him right at that moment had he walked into the room.

  Was this how Step Five was supposed to feel?

  “After nine years, the frustration of waiting and hoping got the best of me, and for my sanity, I stopped seeing him. I learned later that he and his wife did divorce. Ironic, isn’t it?”

  Paulette’s eyes were bloodshot and it seemed that the corners of her mouth trembled. Yet, when Julia met her gaze, she smiled at her as if to urge her to continue.

  “I’ve been eating ever since,” Julia confided. “I’m still grappling with whether I eat to recall the fullness he provided or whether I have an appetite for something greater than either food or sex.

  “But that’s for me to figure out. For now, all I can do is tell you good people about my mistakes. I’ve justified my sexual hunger and now my food consumption with all kinds of excuses, none of them terribly enlightened. I’ve always been hard on myself, rough even, but my capacity for denial is immense. Kind of like my size right now.”

  She waited for the laughter, but of course the room remained silent. Nobody guffawed at fat jokes at an OA meeting.

  “I justified my behavior with the weakest excuses: she was fat and unlovable, she couldn’t have cared about him, I deserved happiness, blah blah blah. With every morsel of food I’ve eaten since I broke up with him, there’s some little piece of my subconscious that says ‘take that!’ for hurting a woman I didn’t even know. I hurt his wife then and I’m hurting myself now. I’m truly sorry. I can’t hide behind lame justifications any more.”

  She looked down at her lap, which was spotted with tears. Her hands, so carefully placed there, bore the wet streaks of emotion. And when she looked back up at her fellow compulsive overeaters and realized she’d been crying throughout, she choked and wept aloud until the person next to her had to reach over and hold her hand.

  “It’s okay. You’re safe here. Go ahead and cry,” the woman whispered, obviously trying to fight back the urge to hold and comfort Julia.

  Because no cross-talk was allowed at the meeting, somebody else filled the awkward silence that followed Julia’s confession with a description of his day and how he fought back his cravings. Julia struggled to regain composure as he spoke and within ten minutes or so, had stopped weeping and was breathing normally.

  She didn’t know what she expected after the meeting, but what happened had not been among the possibilities in her imagination. Paulette did not make a point of going up to her, didn’t go out of her way to reassure her that her disclosure was a positive step. Instead, she talked with other attendees and laughed with a kind of gaiety Julia found offensive in light of her admission. She showed no indication of recognizing Julia as the woman who drove the wedge between herself and her husband of fifteen years. Julia stayed attuned to her every movement, right up to the point where Paulette got in her car and drove away.

  Hot nausea percolated in Julia’s stomach as she realized that for a second time, important information had presented itself to Paulette and been completely, almost blithely, ignored.

  Julia had never made a confession to which no response had been forthcoming. What was the point of baring one’s soul if not to cope with the reaction of the listener?

  “I love you,” she had said softly into Matthew’s ear one night after the third or fourth time they’d made love. It was the ultimate confession.

  And it had been met with silence.

  “Did you hear me?” she asked, half expecting that he was teasing her by not responding.

  “Yes, I heard you. I don’t know what to say. I love you, too. As much as I can.”

  She’d been fondling his balls as she snuggled against him but stopped to look at him. “As much as you can?”

  “I can’t give you everything you need while I’m still married. You know that. I love you as much as the situation will allow me to.”

  Confessions, it would appear, were rarely the catharsis they were touted to be, thanks to the unreliable nature of the confessees.

  There was so much she wanted to say to Paulette. What she’d divulged at the meeting was only the beginning. She wanted to right every wrong, sex act by sex act, yet knew such enthusiasm ran counter to the tenets of Overeaters Anonymous.

  She longed to pour her disappointments into a bowl, mix them with ice cream and chocolate sauce, and reintroduce them to her body, where she’d nurtured them for such a long and unrewarding time. Instead, she devoted herself to repeated reading of the remaining steps she needed to complete.

  She learned that her disclosure at the meeting might have covered not only Step Five but also Step Nine: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Could the completion of one step coincide with the completion of another, she wondered? Or worse, could one step contradict another? Had her confession injured Paulette? Had it been just as self-serving as the affair itself?

  It was times like this she knew that having a sponsor might be helpful. But the only person at the meeting who emanated the kind of peace Julia hoped to have someday was Paulette, and the likelihood of turning to Matthew’s ex-wife for guidance felt disingenuous as well as counter-productive.

  Paulette did not attend the next week’s meeting, which infuriated Julia, who had endured the previous week only to arrive at this evening. What could the woman be doing that would take precedence over an OA meeting where your ex-husband’s former lover awaited some reaction from you?

  But she was there at the next one, smiling and warm but uncharacteristically subdued. Because it was only a few days before Christmas, attendance was low, creating an especially intimate atmosphere in the room.

  “Hi, everyone. I’m Paulette.” As if everyone didn’t already know her.

  “Hi, Paulette.”

  “I was very affected by Julia’s share a couple of weeks ago and it made me start to think about some of my own issues. How maybe I haven’t taken as thorough an inventory as I need. How maybe I haven’t admitted all the wrongs in my past that led me to this point in my life.”

  Julia’s pulse fluttered and twitched. Her ears rang and her palms sweat right through the fabric of her jeans.

  “I was in a friendly but loveless marriage for a long time. There was warmth and devotion but not much passion. I turned to food to sustain me during that time becau
se it was there when I needed it and I never had to wonder if it split its affection between me and somebody else.

  “It took me a long time, probably years, to face the fact that my husband was involved with another woman. When I finally faced it, I would imagine myself as his lover when we had sex. I thought that if I could convince both of us on some subconscious level that he wanted me as much as he wanted her, I would be able to keep him. I wanted to be her and I wanted him to believe he was with her whenever he was with me. But it never worked and the more he distanced himself and lied to me, the more I turned to food for solace.

  “I remember how much I hoped that one day, that woman he loved would be as rejected by him as I was, and that she, too, would get big as a house. I wanted her to be alone and fat and miserable because that’s what she’d done to me. I ate at her in direct proportion to how much of him she got. I despised her as much as I despised myself.”

  Julia could not help but notice that Paulette looked at everything and everyone in the room except her.

  “I forgave her long ago when I realized that hating her accomplished nothing. What I failed to do, though, was to forgive myself for my cruelty. I didn’t understand my role in my husband’s behavior and I was confused and hurt. I did the only thing I knew how to do, which was to wish my unhappiness on the person who seemed to be the cause of it.”

  Paulette trembled in her chair under the harsh fluorescent lights of the church basement. Upstairs, the choir practiced its upcoming performance of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.

  Julia dug her nails deeply into her thighs to prevent the flood of tears that Paulette’s words evoked. This was the woman she had dismissed as oblivious, dense, and practically asexual. Seeing her so human now and in need of comfort triggered both sorrow and relief about her own confession. Had Julia been right to divulge what she had? She hadn’t wanted to hurt Paulette but rather to apologize to her. As a result of Julia’s confession, however, Paulette had found a way to forgive herself as well as the woman who’d been the bane of her existence for more than nine years.

  Tonight, Paulette had provided the absolution Julia hungered after but something still nagged at Julia.

  Did Paulette know who Julia was? Had she absolved the nameless “other woman” or had she absolved Julia?

  Julia didn’t go up to Paulette after the meeting. Instead, she slipped out quietly into the parking lot, where several inches of fresh snow muffled everything except her thoughts. The snow required careful, deliberate steps as she headed toward her car, where she finally sat to ponder the exchange of confessions.

  She found, though, that all she could muster was a steady stream of tears. Tears for the time she wasted with Matthew, the lies she could never rescind, the pain that Paulette endured, and the emotions that emerged and dissipated by way of dress size. She cried with relief and she cried with residual remorse.

  She would never know for certain whether Paulette understood that Julia was the one she had forgiven but she knew that letting go of Matthew proved to be a powerful appetite suppressant for both of them.

  The Hula-hula Girl

  Simon Sheppard

  It’s been an all-nighter, unloading coffee or some damn thing off a freighter from Brazil. Woozy and more than a little winded and sore, I cross the Embarcadero, stop into Sal’s for a cup of Java. Which is where I see him, sitting at the counter, the dawn light picking out the gold in his hair. Navy boy, looking just out of high school. Gold.

  He glances over at me when I sit a couple of stools down from him, smiles, then goes back to his ham and eggs. My coffee arrives, black like I like it. I ask for a cruller, then look over at him. He looks up again, innocent as an angel in navy blue. I screw up my courage and slide my coffee in his direction. “Mind if I join you?” I ask, but I’m short on sleep and the words come out a croak.

  He smiles, broad and even. “That’d be fine,” he says. He’s got a Southern accent.

  So we sit there and talk.

  He’s part way through three-day shore leave, about to sail across the Pacific. It’ll be his first time off the mainland and he’s excited, I can tell.

  I think about my own story. How much to tell him? New York Jew, fresh out of City College and planning to be the next Steinbeck, makes his way west. Gets to San Francisco just in time for the Dock Strike of ’34, long time ago now, seven years. Once the strike is over, he joins the union and goes to work as a stevedore, real glad to find a job in the depths of the Depression. Spare time taken up with Communist meetings and with trying – most often without success – to get laid. There’ve been a few women, a few drunken visits to pros, but generally it’s been men. Men, if he’s lucky, like the young, beautiful sailor beside him.

  I figure it’s best to tell him almost nothing of this, not even the Jewish part. So I give him the abridged version. He’s sopping up the last bits of yolk with his toast. It’s now or never.

  “So what are you doing the rest of the morning?”

  “Not much,” he smiles, but it could mean anything. “It’s my first time in Frisco. Any suggestions?”

  We somehow end up walking up to my apartment on Bush Street, talking as we go. He needs a place to relax, he tells me; he was out carousing the night before. I offer him my sofa. I’d like to believe he knows what’s happening, but he seems so fresh off the farm that I have my doubts. I also have my fears: He certainly seems too sweet to roll a queer, but I’ve heard stories. Still, I’m strong, with arms that have lately seen more action lifting freight than writing the Great American Novel.

  We get to my apartment house. I rarely invite men back. The walls have ears. And eyes. Shore patrol? I have no idea whether his being here means he’d be in trouble. I don’t want to know, not really.

  As I unlock my door, I feel my cock starting to pound. He’s so beautiful, so innocent, and he’s in my apartment, flopping down on the sofa, stretching out, hands behind his head.

  “Beer?” I ask. Stupid. It’s far too early.

  “Sure,” he says, “if you’re havin’ one.”

  So I go to the icebox and pull out two bottles.

  “What’s that?” he says. He’s looking at a picture on the wall, a page torn out of Life magazine.

  “Photo by a man named Robert Capa. A Spanish loyalist being shot in the Civil War.” Dangerous ground. This is not the time or place to talk politics. Or death. I hand him a beer.

  “Damn shame,” he says, taking a swig. I want him so bad. I go over to the record player, one of the few luxuries I’ve allowed myself, and put on a song. Artie Shaw. Begin the Beguine.

  “Mind if I make myself comfortable? I’m bushed.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Hey, thanks. Your name was Lenny, you said?”

  “Yeah. And you’re Karl?”

  “Yep.” Karl pulls off his overblouse. His undershirt rides up, exposing half his flat belly. He starts to pull it back down, thinks better of it, and takes it off as well. What the hell is he doing? He’s gotten shirtless on my sofa. Could any hayseed actually be that innocent? Doubtful.

  The hula girl. The hula-hula girl, right there on his chest, next to his dog tags and a St Christopher medal. He’s got her tattooed on one of his nicely muscled pectorals. Grass skirt, lei just barely covering her tits, ukulele in one hand. Not the sort of thing you’d expect a queer to want painted on his skin. Pretty clearly, I’m hoping up the wrong tree.

  Karl catches my stare. “You like her?” he asks. “Watch this.” And by clenching his fists and tightening and releasing the muscles in his chest, he makes his hula girl dance, sort of.

  “You have any tattoos?”

  “Nope.” I never did find the idea of getting tattooed attractive. Too permanent, not allowing for the possibility of change. You put somebody’s name in a heart on your biceps, and three months later you fall out of love. Why tempt fate?

  Karl unclenches his fists and puts his hands behind his head, revealing thickets of blond hair under his arms,
the only hair I can see on his trim body. “You got a bed here?”

  I don’t know what to say. “A bed?”

  “Yeah. I want to relax.” Cagey? He’s giving nothing away.

  “That sofa folds out. Want to see?”

  He stands up and, as I pull out the folding bed, he begins unbuttoning his bell-bottom pants. By the time I get the bed out, he’s standing there in his skivvies, nursing at the beer.

  “You should get a tattoo, Lenny.”

  I’m not about to argue. Not now. I stand there dumbly as Karl runs his hand under the waistband of his undershorts.

  “You got a girlfriend?”

  “Nope,” I say. I look down at the hula girl and she winks back. Come to me, I hear her say, to a place where soft tropical breezes blow.

  “No girlfriend, no tattoo. So just what do you do for fun?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I bet I know what you do, Lenny.” His Alabama accent is growing more distinct. He downs the last of his beer. I haven’t touched mine. “You invite young sailors back to your apartment, don’t you?”

  I’m getting good and nervous. “I thought you wanted to take a nap,” I say.

  “And what do you want?” He pulls his hand out of his shorts and wraps it around his crotch. “You want this?” He gives his hidden cock a squeeze.

  Maybe the smart thing would be to ask him to put on his clothes and get out. I figure I can handle him, whatever comes up. But the hula-hula girl just won’t shut up. Come lie on the beach at Waikiki, she purrs, all colored ink and firm young flesh, and let the warm waves wash over your body.

  “Do you? You do, don’t you? You want it.” Karl looks me square in the eye and slowly, slowly begins to pull down his underwear. The hula girl twitches.

  I nod.

  “Come get it, then. Come get it.” His shorts drop to his feet, revealing a hard, brown-pink cock standing straight up.

  I walk the few steps between him and me and get on my knees. I touch it, gently, then lick the head. He sighs. “It’s been a long time,” Karl says. “A long time.”