The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 4

by Maxim Jakubowski

  She took a brush to her laundry after applying Stain Be Gone! White was the worst. Blood and food stains were tough. She held the cotton fabric in her left hand and agitated the brush with her right. White . . . whiter . . . whitest . . . goddamnit! Housewife. Housewife! What was she, married to a house? She might as well make love to it . . . embrace it . . . roll naked in its piles of silky laundry . . . straddle her vacuum cleaner and ride its vibration as she cleaned Cleaned CLEANED, her physical orgasm melding with a psychic one, her rocking grasp satisfied, her sanitary standards met – before slipping falling dripping into soft fragrant fabric folds, pulling their texture around her mounds and curves; around her neck and under her arms and between her legs . . .

  BBBBBRRRIIIIIIIIGGG! The doorbell brought a flushed Donna to reality. Her friend Susie was at the door, sporting magazines, chocolate cake and brandy. Donna loved their occasional mornings together.

  “Catch you at a bad time?”

  “No, not at all. I’m ready for a break. Come into the kitchen.” They took a seat opposite one another at the table and spread the goodies on red Formica.

  “Fork for that? Or do you just want to use your hands?”

  Susie smiled and sloshed St Regis into two jelly jar glasses. They sipped and gulped and dug into chocolate cake.

  Susie thumbed Women’s World magazine. “So, I was reading this article. The Yesnik Report says that 62 per cent of women masturbate, and that clitoral orgasm is natural and superior to vaginal orgasm.”

  “Really?”

  “S’true, the article says. Donna, do you ever masturbate? Have you ever seen your clitoris?”

  Donna laughed and swilled her slightly fiery brew. “I’ve touched myself, sure. But I’ve never really seen that part of me. My clitoris.”

  “Get a mirror.”

  “Susie!”

  Donna leaned back on a vinyl chair. Through her parted robe, blue silk panties shone.

  “S’okay. Go ahead and slip them off.” She refreshed Donna’s drink.

  Donna lifted her hips and rolled her panties down, pulled them off and tossed them aside. She leaned back on the chair and parted her legs. Susie held the angled mirror inches away. With her right index and middle finger Donna slightly spread her labia and saw the mirrored reflection, a steamy pink jungle of curves and folds and bumps staring back at her from the small round mirror frame.

  “The clitoris is at top center. S’ hidden, like. Now, put your finger there and rub . . .”

  Donna pressed a fingertip into herself and watched it slightly disappear.

  “Hic! Oh shit. HIC! Now I’ve got the hiccups! I hate it when this happens!”

  “Donna, first you need to take a teaspoon of sugar. Then hold your breath and drink 12 ounces of water. Hold your nose as I plug your ears. Always works for me.”

  “HIC!” She ate the sugar and gulped water – held her breath and held her nose. Susie stood closely behind and plugged Donna’s ears.

  Donna began to laugh as the doorbell rang. Probably another salesman, she thought. She choked on laughter and spat water across the kitchen. “HIC!”

  “Just a MINUTE! Be right there!”

  The garment bag hung in Donna’s closet. She took it from the rod and laid it on the bed, unzipping it and flinging it open. Padded hangers were stacked between layers of hot pink softness. In front of the mirror she adorned her body with black pearls; bra and panties; shirtwaist dress; apron; gloves. She slipped on black high heels and walked to the kitchen. Her heels clicked and clacked on the black-and-white squared linoleum; her calves curved and bulged and protested at the assault of three-inch heels; spinal alignment threw her head and pelvis forward. Layers of cashmere trapped warmth; her kitchen trapped warmth.

  Stuart entered the kitchen. Donna stood at the stove with her back to him. He was hit with a wall of odor: cooking browning bird, raw white onion, pungent spice, sulfurous vegetables; of moist rising yeasty bread dough in a cotton cloth-covered bowl; of Youth Dew perfume, and coconut shampoo. Had the scene been depicted in a cartoon, a cloud might have enveloped him.

  He watched her cook. He smelled chicken juices steamily drenching sage stuffing in her hot Amana. She made gravy. In a skillet bubbled seasoned browned drippings. She added Half and Half, poultry seasoning and coarse ground pepper. As it began to boil she added a flour and water paste and turned down the heat. Fat, starch, moisture and heat chemically colluded, combined and expanded, its mass getting thicker and creamier and larger.

  He approached and stood behind her, the molecular essence of her skin and clothing mingling in his nose and brain. His bare skin brushed the back of her dress; he stroked her breasts. His erection pushed against her buttocks, moving in soft cashmere folds; she loved the feeling of its stiffness against her; she yearned to envelop it. He untied her apron and let it fall. He lifted her clingy dress up and over her head; static electricity sizzled between it and her lingerie, between it and her hair. In a synergism of warm skin and fibrous fluff, she faced him and gripped his cock with a gloved hand. He watched her vivid, pink-fluffed fingers stroke his peachy-pink blue-veined cock. She gently, firmly grasped its head, then quickly slammed her hand down its shaft – slowly gently up! Quickly firmly down! She moved to the table and sat on its edge, leaning slightly back, legs apart, black high-heeled feet askew. The pink cashmere panties were to spec: bikinis with a slit in the crotch. Her pussy looked a study in color, a surreal blossom, flesh pink surrounded by hot pink fibrous softness, upon red Formica. He stood at the edge of the table and stroked the panty; he stroked her exposed pussy. She guided his hand. “Here . . .” His finger parted her and angled upward, flesh-hook rubbing her clit. He explored more deeply; he felt an odd texture. He seized slick round hardness and pulled. Out slid glistening black pearls. “Cashmere Cunt With Pearls, On Red” the painting might be named. He pushed his cock into her as she melted over the edge; she wetly slammed herself against him, around him. As she straightened her back, the angle of his cock pounded her more forcefully. Her clit was electric white-hot; he prodded her higher and deeper as forms of sensation merged and released in her screams. Faster he stroked her cashmere covered cunt as he tensed and came, shooting pearly white into pink, on red. White bodies sprawled on red. On the stove, rich brown gravy bubbled over edges of stainless steel and splattered onto a white surface, as it made its way to a drip pan.

  The Arb

  Nicholas Urfé

  I’m neck-deep in trying to figure out how to squeeze Mircea Eliade and the intersection of the sacred and the profane into three pages double-spaced when the phone rings, so of course I leap to answer it.

  “Hey,” says Jamie.

  “Hey.”

  “I, uh, got some really good stuff. You know? From Chris.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “And Eva’s here,” she says, but I’ve already heard her laughing in the background. Sounds like they’re listening to Tom Waits.

  “I’ll be there. Give me fifteen minutes or so.”

  “Okay,” says Jamie.

  “What’s up,” says John as I grab my jacket, my favorite four-button, black-and green check jacket.

  “Jamie’s got some good pot.”

  “You hate pot,” says John.

  “Yup,” I say, headed for the door.

  I’m wrong. It’s not pot, it’s hash. Jamie pinches off a little chunk of it, brown and glistening with oil like a crumb of really intense granola, and puts it on a saucer stolen from Dining Services. She sets it smoldering with a match, then drops a big glass bell jar over it. The thick white smoke curls up inside. Eva’s shaved her hair back down to virulent yellow fuzz again, which makes her face look harsh and delicate all at once. Her eyes are swimming blue behind thick black-rimmed glasses. She’s lounging on Jamie’s bed in anonymous grey underwear and a grubby white V-neck T-shirt that says “Queen Dick,” and I don’t ask where her pants are. Jamie at least is dressed, in baggy jeans and a flannel shirt buttoned up enough to mostly hide h
er bra.

  “Go on,” she says, putting her hand at the top of the bell jar, and I stoop down so when she tilts it up I can suck the smoke billowing into my lungs. Whoa. Shit. I’m dizzy. I sit down heavily in Jamie’s desk chair. I don’t think I like hash much, either.

  Eva giggles. It’s Jethro Tull playing now, the mouse police, you know, never sleeps. Never sleeps. Now Jamie’s giggling, breaking off another pinch.

  “I never said I wasn’t a cheap date.” For some reason it seems important to point this out.

  “More for us,” drawls Eva. Jamie, having set up another chunk, flops back onto the bed to watch the smoke, thick and white, trapped and raging under the glass. Eva strokes her thigh. I’m not jealous. I’m not. I mean, Jamie’s my girlfriend and all, but I’m not the jealous type, you know?

  The mouse police never sleeps.

  “Hey,” says Eva, after sucking in another lungful of smoke. She blinks, thickly. “Hey. Let’s go for a walk.”

  Back in January, it’s two in the morning, we’re walking back the three of us from a New Year’s party at the Ministry of Truth. It was warmer than usual – there was one of those amazing fogs that’s just thick enough to be beautiful, trees looming out of it in new and fantastic shapes, all the street lamps ringed by perfect circles of colored light. But Jamie was chilly nonetheless and Eva was feeling butch so it was Jamie twirling in Eva’s leather jacket, buckles jingling, the cuffs swallowing Jamie’s hands. Eva looked cold in her sleeveless T-shirt. Gooseflesh pricked her upper arms, the Celtic knotwork tattoo ringing one of them, a vaccine scar pocking the other.

  Jamie stops twirling and dances up close to Eva. “You look cold,” she says. And Eva shakes her head and starts to say, “No, I’m not,” I think, but she stops suddenly and instead says, “Oh, fuck it,” and kisses Jamie, and Jamie, arms outstretched in that leather jacket too big for her, is too surprised to do anything but kiss her back.

  I looked away.

  The thing that happened next, though – there was a crunch of gravel, a footstep, and then Eva’s kissing me.

  See, that’s what practically knocked me on my ass.

  May, and Eva’s buttoning on, Christ, a skirt, though it’s more of a kilt, really, pleated, but in a weird plaid, yellow and red and orange on black, that I don’t think any Scot would ever claim. She throws on a ratty black cardigan. Jamie pulls on some muddy hiking boots. “Where we going?” I ask.

  “The Arb,” says Eva, as if this is self-evident.

  I look at my thrift-store wingtips and sigh.

  The Arboretum: it’s, I dunno, fifteen? Twenty? How the fuck big is an acre, anyway? It’s a considerable chunk of the northeastern corner of the campus, laid out half-wild more through neglect than design. There are thick stands of trees mostly free of undergrowth, some open fields, a creek, and the town’s two reservoirs, square lakes side by side, held back by tall earthen ramparts. Given that 3,000 liberal arts undergraduates hang out hereabouts, going slowly mad as they study literature and music theory and political science and the weird cyclic history of Yeats and Mircea Eliade and his sacred and his fucking profane, and all of them wrapped up in the soap opera hothouse of college sex, well – there’s a lot of weird shit that’s supposed to have happened here. It’s one of Those Places, you know. There’s the big house on the hill there, that’s one of the tonier dorms now; supposedly, the stables were down there, at the edge of the Arb, and they burned down one night and now the ghosts of the horses roasted alive are supposed to go galloping through the Arb with the full moon. Or maybe it’s the new moon. You can’t hear jets flying overhead, they say, or the cars on the highway just past that stand of trees, and no one knows who owns the creepy dogs that seem to bark at any time of day or night from nowhere in particular. My first acid trip, I came here and heard the trees calling my name and danced with weird lights in the middle of one of the fields, and a friend swears he woke up in the middle of the night and came out here for no good reason he could name to find a bonfire, in that clearing down there, with no one around to have built it, and he sat and watched it burn itself down until morning. But he drinks a lot. Witches’ Sabbats, secret trysts, handfasting ceremonies, stupid jock pranks, open-air Shakespeare, drugged-out cliques desperate to escape overdue papers and looming exams – the Arb has seen it all.

  Eva is the Residential Advisor for my floor, and back in the fall semester we used to go for long walks here, me bitching about classes and being homesick and not being able to deal with my high school girlfriend two states away, and her doing the “mm-hmm” and “yeah” and “I understand” thing that good RAs are supposed to do. Her hair was a little longer then, long enough to coil into a little Kewpie curl at the top of her forehead, but it was just as yellow and her glasses were as thick and heavy and her T-shirts as grubby and cryptic (a black one, I remember, with an Indian on horseback printed in red, holding up a compound bow), her jeans as ragged and holey, her big black boots kicking up drifts of dead leaves. I was head over heels in crush. It was on one of those walks that I made my grand pronouncement: my decision. I would, I said, call Christine, and tell her this wasn’t working. Not two states apart. I sighed, and felt, physically felt some provident angel swoop down and lift this heavy pack off my back, straighten my shoulders, pat my ass, whisper you go in my ear.

  “You have to do what you have to do,” said Eva, slumping down on a log. “I mean, if you’re not happy – you can’t stay in something like this out of some sense of obligation, you know. It’s not fair to you, but it’s also not fair to her. Not at all.”

  She was so – wise, you know? And so powerful. And beautiful. I sat down on the log next to her, looked at the late afternoon light gilding the edges of her face, touching her hair to a slow smoldering burn, glinting off those glasses, her lips, pale, uncolored, parted just so.

  “You know,” she said, without really looking over at me, “that I’m gay. Right?”

  “Well,” I said. “I mean, yeah,” I said. “Duh.”

  So the sun is setting and there we are, the three of us, hand in hand at the gate to the Arb off the highway. A semi judders past, and Jamie squeezes my hand, and I’m still light-headed from the hash. I can’t think on the stuff, you know? See, I start this thought, any thought, and I get maybe halfway through it, and I lose track of what I was thinking, so I figure maybe if I follow my train of thought back, I’ll figure out what it was, and so I start to do that, and get maybe halfway through, and lose track, and . . ?

  Which is maybe why I’m not asking any of the questions I ought to be asking, like, what are we all doing here, now, why is Eva on the other side of me, squeezing my other hand like nothing’s happened, and why are we walking into the Arb when we all know, yes we do, what’s going to happen?

  Which might very well be the reason why I smoked the hash in the first place.

  After that confused New Year’s Eve, or rather New Year’s morning, sloppy half-drunk kisses and chilly flesh tumbling over Jamie’s narrow dorm-room bed, tits and lips and hands and cock and skin and legs and mouths and cunts and no one ever really quite sure who was doing what to whom – after that, Jamie wanted to buy Eva a Christmas present.

  “It’s a little late for that,” I said.

  “So it’ll be an Epiphany present,” she said. “That’s not till January sixth. You know, the day the wise men actually showed up and gave him frankincense and myrrh and all that shit. That’s why there’s twelve days of Christmas, you know.”

  I knew, but I let her tell me anyway.

  So we hop a ride on the shuttle bus to the only mall worth the name in a thirty-mile radius, and you’ve got to understand – I can be really slow, sometimes. I didn’t figure it out till she pulled me to a stop outside the Victoria’s Secret outlet.

  “Oh, geeze,” I said.

  “You deserve it,” said Jamie. “Besides, I think she’ll get a kick out of it. Wait here.”

  See, for Christmas I’d gotten her a copy of Long Dark Tea-ti
me of the Soul – but I’d also gone to Victoria’s Secret, grinning like a goon at my daring, and blown fifty bucks on a lacy black teddy. She’d blushed when she opened that present, the night before we’d all flown to our various homes for Christmas break. And then, her long lean body cupped in black lace, she’d lain back in my arms and kissed me as I fingered her, gently, her hand on top of mine.

  So, that night – she didn’t wait till January sixth – they make me wait in the hallway outside of Eva’s overheated dormer room. So I fold my arms and lean back against the wall. I couldn’t keep the slap happy grin off my face. Somebody walking past to his own room gives me a look and I shrug. One of them inside giggles. “Come in,” says Jamie, and I open the door and there’s two tall blonde girls in black lace, Jamie striking a supermodel pose, her golden curls snaking down her back, Eva half-insolent, half-amused, one hand on a startlingly bare hip, crypto-sexy with her short, short hair and those absurd office-nerd glasses. “Get in here,” she says. “Close the door.” And then Jamie’s kissing Eva, they’re wrapped up in each other, bare legs twining around bare legs, arms wrapping around bare backs, hands on blonde hair, black lace, bare skin.