It was her ex-husband who told her about Amy, the toothless old Vietnamese woman who gave the best head in Da Nang. Amy was renowned among American soldiers, who came to her for, well, succor. When he first told her about Amy, she was pissed. Were our tax dollars paying for this? Sexual and racial imperialism, colonial exploitation of women, and so forth. But Amy intrigued her. Who was this woman—a victim of political exploitation, or an accomplished businesswoman? Did Amy turn the loss of her teeth into a boon, taking the secret pain and polishing it, using it, until it became something beautiful, the basis for her famous craft and art? So her ex-husband taught her how to do him just like Amy, as if she were toothless, unarmed, a gummy mistress who gives the ultimate, bite-free blow job. She learned to pull her upper lip over her top teeth and her lower lip over the bottom ones, so that as she sucked, she felt like a toothless wonder, and her lip muscles grew strong and resilient.
So she’s giving Michael the Amy Special, and he’s happily moaning, and then he inevitably says, “I want to eat you.”
So what does she do? She doesn’t argue with him, she slides up and kisses him on the mouth and falls off to the side, languorously, because languor suits her. And he starts kissing her thighs but she moves him up to her nipples and says, “Start high,” and he practices his magic on her nipples with his tongue, pulling and rolling and sucking and flicking. Then he gradually moves south, stopping for nips here and there, down to her belly and her panties. He slides his tongue under the elastic and all around the edges, moving down to the apex and flick-flick, he teases her at the edges of the crotch of her panties. She is fairly soaked now, waiting, impatient, but enjoying the torture. She doesn’t want to beg, but she wants him to get on with the show. She starts to moan, and then—this is what she remembers most about him—he traces his fingers along the edges of her panties as if he’s finger-painting in slow motion, and hooks his fingers under the elastic right next to her pussy and slowly pulls them down. At this point she stops breathing. She knows breathing is a good thing but she stops anyway while she waits. Then he picks up the nipple action again, but now with his fingers, twisting and pulling and pinching, and her breath comes out in pants and plaintive sounds, mewling sounds that she would stop if she could but she can’t so she waits while he licks around the edges of her hair and labia until he gets closer and closer and laps one side of her pussy, and then the other. She lets out a sigh of relief from deep in her throat, which is short-lived because then she is on the next rise of terror and pleasure, as he starts in with the slow circles. The circles trace around her clit but don’t quite reach it, which is torture and of course she could take his head and move it but at this point she has given up control, hoping that he will really take her there, won’t he?, that she won’t be abandoned at the crest or just before it, that it really will happen and just as she is fighting this last shred of control, he moves his tongue over to her clit and she lets out a guttural sound of affirmation, and then they are on the homestretch, and he goes slower and slower, which gets her closer and closer until she is so close that if he would only go a little faster she would go over the edge but he knows and she knows that if he goes too fast she will never come at all so he keeps going slower until she wants to pound him, but she waits because she knows that he knows what he is doing and finally it does hover and break, and she is screaming even though she has promised herself to try not to make so much noise, it could wake the neighbors, it’s too much, she’s too much, she’s embarrassed even, but then it doesn’t matter after all, it just comes out of her like a righteous wail, and she comes like a long fountain, one of those luxurious comes that starts locally and spreads to her womb and toes and mind and she confirms this with a soft sigh of relief.
And then it is quiet. Almost. Because now he is putting on a condom and sliding himself in, wasting no time, and he is making those extended animal sounds and saying things like, “I’m going to pump you so good, do you want me to?” and she is whispering “yes, yes, yes” like Molly Bloom, and he is filling her up, it feels like coming home, they are both coming home, and this brings on a different kind of come now, a ripping, longing love sort of come, a don’t-ever-leave-me kind of come, a you-belong-to-me-don’t-ever-fuck-anyone-else kind of come. And she’s looking into his beautiful dark eyes and she says, “I feel it—I feel it in my heart.” She doesn’t know why she’s saying this, but it’s as if her cunt and womb had moved up into her heart, no longer relegated to their functional geography, and he says, “I want you to—I want you to feel it in your heart.” And then she’s having another one of those bonus orgasms riding the tail end of the last one, a ripple effect, and then he comes too, thrashing and moaning, and then they are lying there, sweaty and proud of themselves, and breathing hard into the silence, and that familiar feeling comes creeping over her, she can’t help it, the habit of it, and she thinks, What will I remember most about him?
THE HEART IN MY GARDEN
Carol Queen
THESE DAYS THERE’S A LOT OF MONEY TO BE made if you’re in the right place at the right time, if you keep your shoulder to the wheel. That’s how Mike and Katherine got their nice house, their cars (hers with that new-car smell still in it), an art collection, and a healthy nest egg. The house is close to San Francisco. Her car is a Mercedes. The art is mostly modern, up-and-coming painters you’ll read about in ArtWeek any day now.
They’re young enough that they don’t have to worry about kids yet, so they don’t—if you asked them, both would say, “Oh, kids are definitely on the agenda,” though they’d sound a little vague. They’re old enough that the honeymoon’s over, neither of them quite remembering when it ended.
Seven years is a long time to be married. Still, aside from that, things are sweet. The rhythm of their weekdays, long-familiar now, has them clacking along toward the weekend like they’re on a polished set of tracks. They fill weekends with rituals of their own.
It dawns on Katherine very, very gradually that she can’t remember the last time they made love. She knows they did when they spent that weekend in Monterey—Mike’s last birthday. In that romantic B&B, how could they resist the impulse to fall into each other’s arms? And it’s always a little exciting to be away from home. But they had to break it off in time to get in a day at the aquarium—the whole reason they went—so Mike could see the shimmery glow-in-the-dark jellyfish, delicate neon tendrils floating in the black water. He had seen a special about them on the Discovery Channel, had to see for himself. She lost her heart to them too: she and Mike stayed in the darkened room for almost an hour, silent, side by side with their hands clasped together so lightly that for minutes at a time she lost track of the sensation of his skin against her palm.
That’s what she likes about being with him. It’s so easy. They can drive together silently, not feeling as if a conversational black hole has swallowed them; they can spend Sunday mornings reading the paper and trading sections with a touch on the arm; they fill each other’s coffee mugs without being asked and hand back the steaming, fragrant cups accompanied by a little kiss. After that they work in the garden, sometimes side by side, sometimes like her grandparents used to: Granddad in the vegetables, Gram in the flowers. She can imagine the next fifty years passing this way.
They must have had sex since Monterey—that’s four months ago—but she can’t remember it. Mostly now they do it late at night, right before sleep, but it’s not on a schedule like practically everything else. Neither is it very predictable, tied to watching the Playboy Channel or Real Sex on HBO; lately they don’t watch those shows much anyway. If you asked Katherine, she’d probably say she doesn’t really notice, nor does she notice being turned on, wanting sex, thinking about it very often. There was a time when she lived in almost constant arousal, but that was years ago. She and Mike had just met; she was so much younger then. She’s always too busy now, tired all the time, except when they get away for a few days. And they haven’t had time to leave town since that weekend in
Monterey. Katherine’s a lawyer; Mike’s software company will go public early next year. And if you asked Katherine whether her friends have more sex than she and Mike, she’d probably tell you not much—everybody’s so busy now. Everyone has to concentrate on reaching for the brass ring. How else could you afford a house with a garden, two cars, the basics?
Katherine masturbates sometimes after Mike has fallen asleep. Lines of code lull him into light snoring, while Katherine’s legal cases keep her awake. She goes over arguments, making mental checklists of every point she’ll have to hit when she’s in court the next day. She considers this productive time, until she has it organized in her mind—then the arguments begin to repeat themselves and she’s so wound up over them she can’t nod off. When she gets to this point, she pulls her vibrator out of the nightstand. It’s one of those quiet vibrators, barely audible—even though Mike sleeps right next to her, once his breath has evened and slowed she won’t wake him.
If you asked her, Katherine would admit that this proximity feels erotic: a little illicit but comfortable too, like the comfort of being with him while they weed or watch glowing aquarium fish in companionable silence. She sometimes slows down her breath to match the rhythm of his, a lingering synchronicity within which they are alive, alone, together—it doesn’t matter that he’s not conscious of her; it calms her down. Her climax, when it comes, drifts up on her gradually, and its power always surprises her.
Sometimes she gently places herself against him: pressing against his back when he’s turned away from her, or reaching out with just her toes to make contact with his soft-furred calf. It’s funny that she doesn’t necessarily think of making love with him during these times, but in a way she is making love with him. If you asked her, Katherine would say that Mike knows she’s doing it, knows it in his sleep. (When she first developed this habit she used to ask him if he had dreamed about anything in particular, but he could never call up sexual dreams. Or if he knew, he never said so.) Katherine respects Mike’s sleep too much to thrash or buck, and really this is more about her own tension than about passion. And a tension-tamer orgasm can be quiet, an implosion that rocks her to sleep without rocking her world.
She wakes up refreshed the next morning and goes to court.
Mike has his own private time a couple of days a week, after Katherine leaves for the courthouse. He works a flex schedule, a perk of having stayed at his job for over five years, and two days a week he works at home. He’s just as efficient at the home office as at the one downtown, even though this one overlooks his and Katherine’s garden. In fact, he’s more efficient at home, getting at least as much work done in less time. He takes one if not two breaks to jack off, the first in the still-rumpled bedclothes right after Katherine leaves (she accepts without question that Mike will make the bed on the days he stays home).
The first one is his favorite, especially because the bed still smells faintly of Katherine; he buries his nose in the pillow and lets the scent keep him company as he strokes himself hard. It’s his way of keeping her comfortably close, even though she’s already halfway to work by the time he begins. He takes plenty of time, a slow hand-over-hand on his cock while his mind wanders; he’s in no hurry. His eyes closed, usually, he drifts through a lifetime’s worth of mental images until he finds the one that sends a jolt of heat through his cock, maybe makes it jump a little in his hand. That’s the one he’ll use, embellishing it into a fully fleshed-out fantasy. If you asked him, he’d say he doesn’t feel that he guides the fantasy. He feels like he’s along for the ride, almost like the folio of erotic images riffling inside his brain has a life of its own, each separate image, in fact, a separate reality that he’s simply stumbled into the way Captain Kirk is thrust into a new dimension if his crew doesn’t set the transporter controls just right.
For half an hour twice a week Mike drifts in and out of dreams that take him to all sorts of places, sometimes even out of himself. When his orgasm comes it almost always swells up like music at the climax of a movie, the place in the plot where you’re supposed to just give yourself over to the story, cry if it tells you to, or clench your fists in fear. When he’s done he almost always writes code for two or three solid hours before even thinking of making himself some lunch. When the weather permits he takes his sandwich out into the garden.
He doesn’t always take a masturbation break in the afternoon. Sometimes he’s on a roll and wants nothing more than to work—Katherine comes home at six or seven and finds him still at it, though on those days he falls asleep really early. But once every week or two he gives himself an hour or two to surf the Net.
He has his favorite sites bookmarked. On the Net he always travels with a tour guide, the sensibility of all his favorite webmasters leading him into cul-de-sacs of sexual possibility he hadn’t even known existed. Katherine uses the Net for email and shopping at Amazon.com—for her it’s just a handy extension of the local mall—but Mike goes to the bad neighborhoods and stays there as long as he can.
He thinks about going in and never coming out. Only his work ethic stops him from spending all day in this perpetual peepshow. If he overindulges, he knows, he could get his telecommuting privileges yanked, so he doles out his Web visits, perks he allows himself when he’s done a good afternoon’s work.
In Mike’s mind there’s no infidelity in exploring chatrooms and cybersex sites as long as he stops before Katherine gets home, as long as she’s busy doing something else. He’s never told her about it but he doesn’t think she’d mind, as long as he gets his work done and their marriage doesn’t suffer. For all he knows, she has her own favorite bookmarks on her computer at the office. He wouldn’t mind that; it’s just play, nothing real. Virtual.
It isn’t often that Katherine comes home early. Once in a while she can get out at midafternoon on Friday, usually because she and Mike have decided to go up to the wine country or to a spa weekend. In the eighteen months Mike’s been working at home, she’s never arrived home before 5:30.
He makes sure he’s zipped up by then, either back at work on his code or in the kitchen starting dinner. They often cook together, and sometimes Mike has dinner waiting when she has to work late. She pages him and dials 7:30—he knows that’s when to expect her. He doesn’t even call back unless he needs to ask her to swing by the store for bread or a bottle of wine. They shop on Saturdays, though, so usually everything he needs is waiting in the kitchen. Mike likes to cook. So does she, though she rarely makes dinner by herself.
Today, though, the judge continues Katherine’s case because a prosecution witness didn’t show up. She’s out of the courtroom at noon. She usually eats with the rest of her team on court days, so they go around the corner to the little Italian place. It’s so close to the courthouse that Katherine almost always recognizes most of the diners—judges, other attorneys, people from the jury pool.
She’s working with Marla today, the newest member of the practice. Marla’s just-married, still trying to balance an intense work life with being in love. She’s never late, but Katherine has seen her come to work breathy and flushed—if you asked her, Katherine would say she remembers those newlywed days when once in the morning and once at night wasn’t enough, when she and Mike would sometimes skip dinner because they were on each other the minute they got home, when once Mike even got them a motel room at noon.
Marla fishes around in her purse and shows off the set of cufflinks she’s gotten Bill for Valentine’s Day. They’re porcelain ovals with tiny pictures painted on them: one has a bottle of champagne, one a cancan girl with her ruffled skirts thrown high. “Wine, women, and song!” says Marla gaily. “And I got him a really good bottle of French champagne, and I’m taking him to see Cabaret. Katherine, what are you doing with Mike?”
Katherine hasn’t planned anything special with Mike because she’s forgotten that today is Valentine’s Day. Jesus, wasn’t it just Christmas?
“Ummm, just a really nice dinner and some private time.”
This is the best Katherine can come up with without notice, but it satisfies Marla, who has very few brain cells to spare for thinking about Katherine and Mike. She’s probably too busy imagining the way she’ll tug Bill into an alley when they leave the theater, and give him a sneaky hand job right there in public, Katherine thinks, only a little sniffy about Marla’s single-minded focus. You’re only young once.
Still, with the afternoon suddenly free, Katherine decides to give Mike a Valentine’s Day surprise. He’s probably forgotten it too—he’s been just as busy as she has—but thank goodness it’s a holiday that lends itself to last-minute planning. Katherine detours by Real Foods on the way home, picks up a good wine, some big prawns for scampi, a couple of cuts of filet mignon. On the way to the register she passes the bakery and adds a little chocolate cake to her basket. Strawberries too, she thinks, if they’re any good yet. The store has a heap of huge ruby berries that look like they were grown in the Garden of Eden. And right next to the flowers stands a card display. She picks one that looks like a handmade Martha Stewart crafts project, a slightly-out-of-focus heart against a sapphire-blue background, blank so she can customize its message. She stops at the coffee shop downstairs for a latte and writes Dearest Michael, you are the heart in my garden. All my love, Kath.
She thinks about using the pager—3:30—but decides against it, decides instead to slip in and surprise him. If she can get into the kitchen via the back door, she might be able to start dinner quietly without interrupting his work. She parks the Mercedes a couple of houses down from theirs.
Best of Best Women's Erotica Page 11
