The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 4

by Maxim Jakubowski

  A fake Natalie Marahat.

  What made the fakery obvious was exactly that: the flawlessness, the absolute perfection of her every proportion. It was as if her body had subliminal erotic triggers implanted in every pore. The result, instead of making my mind blaze with desire, was an overload of eroticism that brought into stark blatancy the chill of her artificiality.

  As this vision of loveliness put her arms around me, I thought as fervently as I could of the naked Kath I had left just moments before.

  “Fuck me, baby,” said Natalie Marahat.

  And so I fucked her.

  Later, after we’d taken the veerigogs off, I tried to coax Kath into lovemaking on the futon, but she said she was tired and anyway The West Wing was just about to start on television.

  I left her during the first commercial break.

  She didn’t notice me going, of course, because there was still the familiar slumped male on the couch beside her, nibbling crackers as he watched a woman on the screen tell him how he could say goodbye to all his allergies with only a long list of minimal possible side-effects. I slipped on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and a pair of old, worn-down sneakers, and made my way out of the apartment and down three flights of stairs and out into the streets of a city that was a blare of light and sound. I sensed that everywhere around me there were people busily watching other people doing things that they wished they could do themselves, or plugged into one device or another that would effectively obstruct their every fortuitous leaning toward discovering the ways that you can skip through the interstices of the polycosmos, pausing wherever you will to fuel it with the love it needs to keep on living and becoming. All of these machines, driven by the properties permitted by the laws of physics to belong to the electron shell of the antimony atom in only a tiny percentage of the realities that make up the everness – all of these machines pretending to stimulate yet instead inhibiting the imagination from roaming through the infinite possibilities that the polycosmos reifies.

  I stood on a street corner, listening to the clangour, and offered up thanks to the surly dark artificial orange sky that digitopias are so infinitesimally few among the boundless realities.

  And at the same time I felt a great rush of pity for the individual souls trapped here.

  Souls?

  Half-souls, quarter-souls, shrivelled relics of souls, more like. Their only blessing is that they don’t recognize their trappedness, believe instead that their undiscovery of love represents the fullest freedom of them all. They’re prisoners who aren’t conscious of the cage’s bars, who look at the window of their cell and see just reflected grey light which they believe is the world . . . and see nothing of the riot of colours and brightness beyond the razor-thin imprisoning glass they could shatter with a touch.

  I turned away from the scowl of the angrily uplit sky, took a few paces along the sidewalk and was in a field of bright green grass with my many husbands. I called out to them in merriment, and they grinned and waved at me, then began to walk toward me, singly or severally.

  The insides of my thighs were already damp by the time the first one reached me.

  I loved them, I loved my husbands, and they loved me, their wife. We always love each other.

  And today, with the sun shining down upon us and the blue and yellow flowers bobbing their heads in the breeze that caressed the grass, we had a lot of lovemaking to do if the infinite realities of the polycosmos were to continue eternally to bring forth their blossom.

  Swimmer’s Body

  Patrick Califia

  Time for morning laps, Surfer Boy, Gary told himself. No dawdling. Well, maybe a few extra deep-knee bends, just to show our bronzed and god-like body to the stolid Swede in the far lane. Wonder if he can see the crack of my butt in this new suit – or do the leopard spots (which make Coach Bassett cluck his tongue) camouflage the dividing line between my buns, which have been unbuttered for far too long? He did an imitation of Coach Bassett’s cluck. “A young man, so much promise, so little – what? Let’s just say he wouldn’t marry the boss’s daughter.”

  The outdoor pool was perfectly smooth turquoise Jell-O™ in a white, Olympic-sized trough. Gary thought (peeking between his toes) that it might really be like diving into a thick gel, and he would simply flounder, unable to pull his smoothly shaved torso through it, no matter how long his reach. It would be a fitting end to these deadly dull two months (and two still to go!) at the Little Dixie training camp.

  As always, he was in the water before he knew his body had decided to throw him into it. It was a good dive, and the shock of pleasure he felt at his own skill made him lose consciousness of the need to time arm-strokes, breathing and kicks. Instead, it felt as if a wave flowed down the whole, single muscle that was his body, propelling him smoothly, without thought or strain. Then he rolled (toes brushing the electric eye that timed his laps) and kicked harder, suddenly furious to be done with it. He had hoped, when he sent in his deposit, that the heat and isolation would make it easier for him to stay in the water here, building his peak for the spring matches.

  But he hated swimming when he was only training, hated it as much as someone who wasn’t any good at it. It was his ticket to college, to something other than obscurity and a desk job in a medium-sized city. He loved competing – the adrenaline rush, the knowledge that, win or lose, you didn’t dare hold anything back. But everybody in the pool came ready to win. You had to train, and it never got easier for him, only harder, and he was so upset with himself that he took in a lungful of water instead of air and had to haul himself up on the rim of the pool, choking like a little kid in his first Red Cross swimming class.

  The Swede finished before he did, and Gary passed him in the shower on his way to his locker. Larsen was bigger than Gary. His muscles looked like slabs of pale stone when he was in repose, but in the water he was a buoyant streak of speed. His impartial, careful hands applied soap evenly to his body, completely unaware of the beauty of what they touched. Gary made the clucking noise again. He couldn’t imagine anybody snapping a wet towel at his ass in this locker room, much less waving anything more interesting around.

  Back in the dorm, Gary saw a small stack of mail on his cot. He immediately cheered up. Under a letter from his mother and a letter from his “roommate” Aaron (the return address had only a discreet initial before the surname) was a thin plastic envelope. The Advocate had finally caught up with him. He had debated whether it was wise to notify the magazine about his temporary change of address, then figured he would go nuts without a little contact with gay life. Since nobody was in the dorm, he slit the package and skimmed the magazine. The letters (even Aaron’s) would be safe to read at lunch. This was not.

  They had sent him the east coast edition. He chuckled at the restaurant reviews for New York City and Washington, DC. No excuse not to have a swinging weekend now! It would take him – what – only a full day of driving to get out of the deep South? There was probably nothing in the classifieds either, but what the hell, he didn’t want to read the opera review or a feature about gay involvement in the anti-nuke movement. There were four whole columns of ads from California. Unbidden, his eye picked out Aaron’s post office box and flipped up to read the ad (“Straight-appearing young executive looking for summer fun, no strings, no games, no fats, fems or downwardly mobile types”). Well, they had agreed there was no sense in Aaron coming home to an empty apartment every single night . . . Feeling a little pain behind his sternum anyway, Gary flipped to the end of the classifieds. Well, what do you know – there was actually one entire ad running under his state. “Fine mind in a swimmer’s body seeks same. Let’s make a big splash!”

  Gary couldn’t stop laughing. He ripped the ad out, stuffed the magazine back into its envelope and, on his way to the cafeteria, as he buried it under a bunch of trash in a big oil drum, he was still laughing.

  Over lunch, Coach Bassett stopped and handed him a thick packet. “What’re these?” Gary queried ru
dely, around a mouthful of despised salad.

  “Publicity photos. Pick out the three you like the best. You can keep the rest or pitch ‘em.” Gary had forgotten all about the photo session last week. Surely this was an omen. He fanned them out on the table and picked one of himself on a stand, with his arms up and tense (showing off the deep armpit, his beautifully proportioned lats). His quads stood out nicely. Unfortunately for the newspapers, so did his basket. But the anonymous advertiser (read “geek”) would appreciate it. Before he went to the track to run his laps there (“Are you a man or a merry-go-round, Surfer Boy?”), he stopped at the dorm again for an envelope and stamps.

  “This is a real swimmer’s body,” he wrote on the back of the photo, “and if you can match it, drop a pic c/o,” and the address of the camp. “If not, don’t bother.”

  Three days later (three days during which training seemed less arduous), he had a snapshot of a man (still young, but older than Gary, with a nose that looked like it had been broken) treading water. Even wet, his dark hair curled. His thickly furred chest was so broad that Gary wondered if it didn’t churn up too much water resistance to make good time. But those biceps and forearms looked burly enough to drag the Titanic to safety. He reluctantly conceded that in this case, the phrase “swimmer’s body” had not been just a euphemism for “ninety-pound weakling.” He turned the picture over and read, “All this, and I have my hair,” and a phone number. Gary ruefully rubbed his shaved skull. He was so used to other swimmers’ faces, he had forgotten how odd his pale blond eyebrows and bare pate would look to anybody who wasn’t in training. Cocky fucker. Where was the pay phone?

  It was a brief call. Something wrong with the connection. He even had trouble making out the guy’s name – Marvin? Martin? No – Marcus. But it turned out he lived just a bicycle ride away. Gary explained his situation at the training camp – so many days of working out, followed by a break day – and received a standing invitation to come over any time during his “off-day.” Tomorrow, as it turned out.

  That night, in his sleep, the lumpy cot turned into the chest and thighs of the well-built stud in the photograph. He lay face-down on him, his hands pinned between them, searching for the other man’s cock. He knew it would be thick, the foreskin like folds of silk, the balls heavy in a sac covered with crinkly black hair. The whole flexible, flaccid shaft could be cupped in one hand until he began to squeeze and massage it, then it would slowly add inches until it protruded beyond his fist.

  Instead, Gary woke up, and realized it was his own cock that was thrusting in his grip. He took a deep breath, listened. Nobody else was awake. Then the urge to come was so sharp, a pain in his lower stomach, that he said, “So what?” out loud and took himself over the edge. The splashes of cum felt good on his knuckles, hot, and the tangy smell made him realize he had not jerked off since his first night here. When was the last time he had felt a pronounced need to spurt, instead of having to coax that good stuff out of his balls?

  Aaron had been a real find, a business major he met in an economics class. It had been fun, in the beginning at least, to put the moves on somebody who pretended to be a little reluctant. Aaron turned out to be the oldest son of a conservative rabbi, and his coyness was not just flirtatiousness; he still was not out to his family about being gay or even living with another man. While Gary enjoyed the new side of himself that Aaron brought out, a more toppy, aggressive persona than even he’d realized existed, after a while he began to wonder if Aaron really wanted to have sex with him. He didn’t mind pushing Aaron in the direction of the bed most of the time, all the while gently insisting that he really was going to fuck his brains out (and the front door was locked, and the oven was off, and no important phone calls were expected). But once in a while, he wanted Aaron to be the one doing the pushing and insisting.

  Laying on his uncomfortable dormitory bed, Gary rubbed his hands over his own body, resenting the smoothness of his own skin, but needing the reassurance that he existed, he could feel, the envelope that contained his consciousness was still alive. He couldn’t even remember what he looked like with his fur intact. There was something emasculating about shaving so often, as if he were stripping away any physical impulse that had nothing to do with swimming. He admitted that it wasn’t just the training camp and the constant rejection of being surrounded by straight boys that made him feel extremely lonely. Didn’t everybody need the passionate reassurance of a lover’s uninhibited desire, the experience of being taken somewhere by someone else’s touch? Maybe he wasn’t attractive to Aaron. He could easily conjure up his lover’s bespectacled, usually serious face, and see his kissable lips move in the fond phrase he repeated several times a day: “I love you, Gary.”

  Wasn’t it sophomoric to want something more, something else, something more dirty, perhaps, even dangerous? Gary conjured up the photograph of Marcus, and realized that he wanted to see it again, to study it, to see if he could glimpse some hints about the rest of the big man’s body beneath the opaque water. Did he have a big thatch on his lower belly? Were his balls large enough to hang low, two separate eggs in a fuzzy, crinkled sac? And did his cock have a slight curve to it, with a tulip-shaped head? Gary wanted to run his tongue along the rim between the head and the shaft of that cock, and lap at the little tangle of nerves at its base. He wanted to slip his tongue into the piss-slit of that cock and savor the thin salty clear pre-cum that would tell him the dark man lusted after his hungry mouth. He wanted two hands around his ears, to be lost inside another man’s need, to be able to stop thinking and exist only as a tunnel for his cock, a hole that offered just enough resistance and response to give that cock the best ride of its life. Sucking and sucking as if he needed Marcus’s cum instead of air.

  The intrusive memory of Aaron’s cold little personal ad intruded on the building tension of a second erection. It was out of character for Aaron to take the initiative like that, to put himself out there as a sexual actor. What kind of man would answer that ad? Would somebody else plow the tight, round little ass that Gary had marked off as his own? Would Aaron do things for the man (or men) who answered that ad that he refused to do for Gary? Would he swallow that shadowy stud’s cum? Or lick his asshole? Would Aaron get down on his knees and beg to be taken? Could it be that Aaron might be the one who told his trick to get up on all fours so that he could plow them from behind? And did the specter of Aaron with his cock in somebody else’s butt or face make Gary feel better or worse than imagining his lover’s face distorted with discomfort and pleasure as he was penetrated by a stranger?

  When they saw each other again, could it be that the bond between them, for all its faults, would be changed or even damaged? The rational part of Gary forced him to admit that it might be good for Aaron to loosen up a little, but the concrete picture of his boyfriend actually being loosened up by somebody else’s hard dick made him unbearably sad.

  By answering Marcus’s ad, wasn’t Gary going to put Aaron through exactly the same sort of sorrow and uncertainty? No, Gary told himself, I will not feel guilty about wanting to get laid. They had talked this over. He had Aaron’s permission to get lucky. It would be distinctly uncool to take such emotional baggage to his encounter with Marcus, but in his cold and rough sheets, Gary longed to put his head on Marcus’s big chest and receive absolution and comfort. He wanted to feel those hands rolling his cock back and forth, giving him a sort of sexual blessing, drawing him into a world where he didn’t have to ponder such difficult questions. Eventually his imagination conjured up such a clear image of Marcus’s red nipples, surrounded by swirls of bearish fur, and the sensation of that eager, arching cock sliding into the crack of his ass, that Gary’s hard-on came back with a vengeance, and demanded some wrist-music.

  Normally, Gary just needed to jack off and come once; it was easier to get it up again when another man was present to give him bad ideas and a raunchy second chance. He was curious about what this orgasm would feel like, and it was as ambivalent as h
e was. His second shot was smaller in volume, but the feeling was more intense, as if his urethra was on fire. Despite that, he wanted it to go on for longer than it did; he was abruptly dumped back into a damp, sweaty, soft-cocked state. How could you actually feel dissatisfied after coming twice? Gary fell asleep before he could answer this or any of the other big questions he had about the mysteries of Eros.

  He made himself eat the next morning, made himself wait. He read a newspaper that was two days old and started a letter to Aaron that he knew he would not finish. But it was only 9:30 when he got his ten-speed out of the shed and pedaled away from the training camp, a note with directions he had already memorized tucked carefully into the pocket of his T-shirt. He was only on the macadam for twenty minutes before he peeled off and went down a dirt lane. A pheasant broke cover and beat frantically across his path. He swerved, then realized it was already safe in the brush at the other side of the road. The sweat between T-shirt and skin reminded him of the shape of his own body, how it had felt to rub his palm across his nipples last night, and pinch one of them gently, to make himself come.

  Gary heard the creek before he saw it. The bike bumped across a wooden bridge. Then the road took a turn to follow the creek. Even when the water was hidden from view by thick growths of willow, he could hear it, laughing to itself. This charming, bucolic stream would eventually become one of the tributaries of America’s largest river. On either side of the river were marshlands that had been set aside as protected habitat, a bird sanctuary. He wondered briefly about the existence of a private residence in the middle of a federal park. It must have been there for a very long time. The wild land and the free-running water was a reminder of how close Gary was to the gulf, to the salty father of all waters. But that ocean was not the lovely blue Pacific where he had learned how to swim and surf, where he knew a dozen beaches like the palm of his own hand. This was a land where water meandered, became swamps and sandbars. The Gulf of Mexico seemed to Gary to be older than the Pacific Ocean, more corrupt, and the way to it was treacherous, full of false turns and snags, alligators and other strange fauna. It was a place for a bayou boy, poling his pirogue, low and slow, silently blending into the background of drowned trees and Spanish moss. Death to a boisterous mob of young guys with California tans and freshly waxed boards.