lola666>relationships in BOOKS
trollfan1234>pretend it’s a story
lola666>no.
trollfan1234>sigh
lola666>
trollfan1234>OK, enough of AT, pick another author?
lola666>I know we just finished Barchester but there must be others
trollfan1234>Minor, would annoy you even more
lola666>OK well let’s do Dickens then
trollfan1234>
lola666>what?
trollfan1234>Dickens takes v long time to read, we wouldn’t talk for weeks
lola666>flattered
trollfan1234>well I like talking to you
lola666>me too
trollfan1234>pick short books!!!
lola666>we could do Dickens but split up the books/discuss them every 10th chapter?
trollfan1234>Great idea they’re written as serials after all
lola666>shall we do it chronologically?
trollfan1234>no one’s ever asked me that before!
lola666>funny
trollfan1234>let’s start with David Copperfield I’ve always meant to read that
lola666>OK I’ll go to the library
trollfan1234>lovely library books with hard plastic covers you can read in the bath
lola666>and that dirty, musty smell
trollfan1234>I thought you said no personal stuff
lola666>funny. Not.
trollfan1234>when’s good for you next time?
lola666>Monday? 1.00?
trollfan1234>five days . . . do I have time . . .
lola666>thought you were the one complaining about not meeting for ages
trollfan1234>OK you talked me into it. I may be a bit behind
lola666>do your best
trollfan1234>yes ma’am
lola666>see you on Monday
trollfan1234>I wish!
lola666>TALK to you Monday
trollfan1234>sigh
lola666>I’m very disappointing you know
trollfan1234> me too we could be disappointing together.
lola666>
trollfan1234>OK, I know, I know. Want me to talk about the weather?
lola666>will it be interesting?
trollfan1234>actually no, I never know what the weather’s like, I have no idea what’s happening outside right now. I’m on the 8th floor, I have double glazing and my windows aren’t that clean because the landlord’s lazy about getting that done, also they have these catches which slip and slam back down on your hands so I’m nervous about opening them . . . sometimes I don’t even know if it’s raining. I’ll go out into the street and feel like an idiot.
lola666>happens to me too, most of my windows are stuck, the only one I can put my head out of is the bathroom and it looks onto an air shaft. And I have five floors/no lift, it’s a nightmare working out what coat to wear in the morning.
trollfan1234>my offices are airconditioned, windows can’t open, etc, even more insulated. Once I was working late & there was a hurricane & I didn’t even realize, got out onto the dark street and it was covered with broken glass and people with cardboard patching up their windows. Ours were fine, we’re all triple-strength glass etc. More insulation. Shows how detached we are from the world.
lola666>my offices are like that too
trollfan1234>so we end up talking to each other through computers – down a modem line and bounced off a server to end up God knows where – insulation again.
lola666>that was a very neat connection
trollfan1234>thanks. I was quite impressed with it myself
lola666>have to go now
trollfan1234>OK, till Monday
lola666>bye
trollfan1234>bye
I turn off the computer and get into my pyjamas: flannel, huge, the kind of thing you can only wear when you sleep alone. A shot of whisky, to take to bed with me. And the nagging annoyance: why must he always push for more? Why does he keep asking to meet me? Can’t he see that the whole point of this is this perfect, focused connection? Meeting would ruin everything. It’s not that we might find each other unattractive; just the opposite. What if we did? It would ruin everything. I have everything in balance just the way I want it and I’m not going to mess with that. It’s working. I’m happy. I take half a sleeping pill and wash it down with a gulp of whisky. Library tomorrow. Lovely. I’m happy. I really am.
Bottomless on Bourbon
Maxim Jakubowski
He had often promised to take Kathryn to New Orleans.
But it had never happened. They had spectacularly fallen apart long before the opportunity arose. In fact, the travel they had managed to do in between feverish fucks had proven rather prosaic. So much for promises. They hadn’t even visited Paris, Amsterdam or New York either.
So, whenever he could, he now took other women to the Crescent City.
For sex.
And fantasized about Kathryn’s face, and eyes, and pale breasts, and cunt and more.
New Orleans was for him a city with two faces. Almost two different places, the aristocratic and slightly dishevelled languor of the Garden District on one hand and the hustle and bustle of the French Quarter on the other, contrasting like night and day. The touristic charms concealing darker, ever so venomous charms. The heavy placid flow of the Mississippi River zigzagging in serpentine manner through the opposing twin shores of Jackson Square and Algiers. The gently alcoholic haze of New Orleans days and the enticing, dangerous attraction of fragrant New Orleans nights. Nights that smelled and tasted of sex.
He loved to see the women sweat as he made love to them, enjoyed the feel of bodies sliding against each other in moist, clammy embraces as sheets tangled around them. He took unerring voyeuristic pleasure in watching them shower after, washing his seed away from their openings, cleaning away his bites, the saliva that still coated their nipples, neck or ear lobes which he had assaulted with military-like amorous precision.
Those were all memories he treasured. Stored away for all eternity in his mental bank vaults. The curve of a back, the soft blonde down slowly being submerged in a small pool of perspiration just inches away from her rump, highlighted by a solitary light bulb, as she kneeled on all fours on the bed and he breached the final defences of her sphincter and impaled himself in her bowels. The sound of a moan, of pleasure, of joy. Ohhh . . . AAAAHHH . . . Chriiiiiist . . . The tremor that coursed through the girl’s taut body as he discharged inside her or she rode the ocean waves of her oncoming orgasm.
Yes, New Orelans, his city of sex.
Endless walks through the small streets between hotel room episodes. Invigorating breakfasts of beignets and coffee and ice-cold orange juice at the Café du Monde; oysters and thick, syrupy gumbo at The Pearl off Canal Street; loitering hand in hand in the markets full of the smell of spices and seafood, chewing on garlic-flavoured pistachio nuts; obscene mounds of boiled crawfish at Lemoyne’s Landing; hunting for vintage paperbacks through the dusty shelves at Beckham’s; po’boys at the Napoleon House; zydeco rhythms at the House of Blues; a routine he could live on for days on end. Until he would tire of the woman, because she bored him once past the mechanics of fornication, never said the right thing or talked too much or simply because she wasn’t the woman he really wanted to be with in New Orleans.
There had been Lisa, the software executive, Clare, a lawyer who looked like Anne Frank had she ever grown up and liked to be handled roughly, Pamela Jane, the investment banker he had met at the hotel bar who wanted to be a writer and Helene the biology teacher from Montreal. He didn’t feel he was being promiscuous: four women in six years since Kathryn. Some he had found here, others he had brought.
But somehow none had fitted in with this strange city and, even though the sex had been loose and fun, and the company never less than pleasant, there had been something lacking. Even at midnight, buckling under his thrusts on bed or floor or sucking him off under the water streams of the shower, he knew they were creatures of th
e day, anonymous, predictable; they had no touch of night, no share of darkness. And the darkness was what he sought. In women. In New Orleans. What he knew he had once detected under Kathryn’s fulsome exterior.
He had high hopes for Susi.
She was Austrian, in her late twenties, and worked in a managerial capacity for a travel agency in Vienna, which made it easier (and cheaper) for her to jump on a plane for purposes of pleasure.
They had met in New York some months earlier. It was spring and the weather was appalling for the season. The rain poured down in buckets and all Manhattan was gridlocked like only New York can manage. He’d been in town promoting a book and negotiating the next contract with his publishers there (he never used an agent) and was booked on an evening flight back to London. He’d been staying, as usual, at a hotel down by the Village, off Washington Square. He had booked a car to JFK and it was already half an hour late. They had checked at reception and found out that the driver was still blocked in traffic near Central Square and Columbus Circle. He had promptly cancelled the car and rushed with his suitcase to the hotel’s front steps to hail a yellow cab. They were few and far between, and he wasn’t the only hotel guest heading for the airport. Both he and the tall, slim red-headed woman went for the same cab which declined the airport ride pretexting the conditions. They agreed to share the next cab to come along. She was even later than him, as her flight preceded his by twenty minutes.
“My name is Susanne, but my friends call me Susi with an i,” she had introduced herself as the driver made his slow way towards the Midtown Tunnel.
Despite clever shortcuts through Queens, the journey took well over an hour and a quarter, so they had much opportunity to talk as they inched towards their planes. She had been in town for a week, visiting her parents who both worked as diplomats for one of the big international organizations.
She did miss her flight, while he caught his with a few minutes to spare. Email addresses were exchanged, and they had remained in touch since.
They had quickly become intimate. He’d sent her one of his books, and she had remarked on the sexual nature of many of his stories and confessed to some of her own sexual quirks. She was an exhibitionist. Would sometimes take the subway back in Vienna dressed in a particularly short skirt and without underwear and allow men to spy on her genitals. She was shaven, so they had a full view of her naked mound. She was also in the habit of masturbating in parks, where she could be seen by passers-by, actually encouraged voyeurs to do so and knew that, sometimes, men were jerking off watching her just a few metres away.
She would pretend her name was Lolita. He asked her why.
Because she had little in the way of breasts and her bare pubis evoked a child or a doll, she answered. She was submissive by nature, she told him.
She sent him a series of photographs taken by an ex-boyfriend she had broken up with shortly before the New York trip. He found them wonderfully provocative in a tender sort of way. In the first, her long, skinny frame stood in contrast to the sluttish, traditional black lingerie of embroidered knickers, suspender belt and stockings almost a size too big for her. Yes, she had no breasts, barely a hillock worth of elevation and no cleavage and, he imagined (the photographs were all black and white), pale-pink nipples like a gentle stain in the landscape of her flesh. Her hair was a bit longer than when she had been in New York, her eyes dead to the world. In the second photograph – he could guess the sequence they had been taken in, pruriently imagined what the boyfriend in question had made her do, perform, submit to, after the camera had been set aside – she was now squatting only clad in suspender belt and stockings, her cunt in sharp focus, lips ever so ready to open, her head thrown back so you could barely recognize her features. Photograph number three saw her spreadeagled over a Persian carpet and parquet floor, one arm in the air, both legs straight, holding herself up by one arm, like a gymnast, her face in profile, a most elegant and beautiful vision of nudity with no hint of obscenity at all, her body like a fine-tuned machine, a sculpture. In the fourth, she was standing and the photographer had shot away from crotch level and her body was deformed like in a hall of mirrors by the skewed perspective, the focus on her enlarged midriff. The one thing that struck him as he kept on examining the photos on his laptop screen was how her sex lips didn’t part and how he wished to see inside her. The final photograph she had sent him (were there more? more explicit or extreme? she answered that others were just out of focus but his imagination as ever played wildly on) was both the sexiest and the most vulgar. She was on all fours, her arse raised towards the camera in a fuck-me pose, long legs bent, rear a bit bony, the line of her cunt lips straight as a ruler and continued by her arse crack and darker hole. Every time he looked at this one, he couldn’t help getting hard. And he knew that she enjoyed knowing that.
He told her about the delights of New Orleans and invited her to join him there one day.
To explore possibilities, he said.
Initially, she only said maybe.
But he persisted, courting her with a modicum of elegance, and she agreed. It took a couple of months to find a week when both could free themselves from previous commitments (ah, the sheer logistics of lust!) and arrangements were made. Flights to New York were coordinated – her job came in useful – and they both arrived in Newark an hour or so apart.
Curiously enough, there are no direct flights between New York and New Orleans and their connection went via Raleigh-Durham.
As they emerged from the airport luggage area, Susi smelled the heat that now surrounded them like a blanket and turned towards him, kissed him gently on the cheek and said, “I just know I’m going to like it here . . . Thanks ever so much for bringing me.”
By the time the taxi dropped them off at the small hotel he had booked on Burgundy it was already dark.
It was summer. Moist, no wind from the Gulf, the air heavy with the powers of the night, the remains of the day lingering in patchy clouds; they were both sweating, their bodies not yet acclimatized.
They dropped their bags, and he switched the air conditioning a notch higher and suggested a shower.
He undressed her. Now she was no longer black and white. The nipples were a darker pink, closer to red than he expected and darkened a shade further when he kissed them. Her pale body was like porcelain. Long, thin, exquisitely supple. Since Kathryn, none of the other women, here or elsewhere, had been anywhere as tall.
He escorted Susi to the shower cubicle and switched the water on. She looked at his cock, growing slowly at the sheer sight of her nudity. He soaped her with infinite delicacy and tenderness and explored her body under guise of washing, refreshing her from the transatlantic journey and its grime and tiredness. He fell to his knees and wiped the suds away from her crotch. Her gash red against the mottled pinkness of her pubic mound. She hadn’t shaved there for a week or so; they had agreed she would let him shave her clean. A delight he had long fantasized about. He parted her thin lips, like opening a rare flower and darted his tongue inside to taste her. Susi shuddered.
The first time was good.
They were shy, affectionate, slow, tentative, testing pleasure points and limits with great delicacy.
She was extremely self-conscious of her lack of opulence breast-wise and he lavished particular care on her there, sucking, licking, nibbling, fingering her with casual precision until he caught the precise pulse of her pleasure behind the gentle swell of her darkening nipples.
They came closely together. Silently.
The later days filled quickly between wet embraces and ever-more feverish fucks as they grew used to each other’s quirks and secret desires. She had always wanted to take a riverboat down the Mississippi and they spent a day doing so, passing the Civil War mansions and lawns and observing the rare crocodiles still lingering in the musty bayous. Just like tourists. Which they were. Sexual tourists with, so far, no taste for the local fare. Breezing down Magazine Street in mid-afternoon as the antique shops
reopened for business. Taking a tram to the Garden District. Lingering, with verbose guides, in the atmospheric cemeteries, with their ornate crypts and walls of bones. Visiting the voodoo museum, trying to repress their unceremonious giggles. He covertly fingering signed first editions at the Faulkner House.
Susi never wore a bra – she had no need for one – and neither did she slip knickers on when they would go out walking. Long, flowing, thin skirts revealing the shape of her legs when she faced the sun, only he knowing how unfettered her cunt lips were beneath the fabric, sometimes even imagining he could smell her inner fragrance as they walked along hand in hand and conjuring up the thoughts of other, lubricious men passing by had they known of her naked vulnerability. It turned him on, this constant availability of hers, this exhibitionistic desire to provoke. Walking along Decatur, passing one of the horse-drawn carriages waiting there for tourists, a dog held in a leash by a small black child wagged a tail frenetically and brushed against Susi’s leg. He smiled. She asked him why.
“He could smell your cunt,” he said.
“Do you think so?” she remarked, her eyes all wide.
“Yes,” he told her. “You smell of sex. Strongly.”
Her face went all red, approximating the shade of her short bob, and he watched the flush spread to her chest and beneath the thin silk blouse.
“It turned him on,” he said.
“Oh . . .”
“And me, knowing how naked you are under those thin, light clothes,” he added.
She smiled.
Later, back in their hotel room, she insisted they keep the curtains open when they made love, knowing any passing maid or room-service staff might see them in the throws of sex as they walked past on the steps outside the window and, as he moved frantically inside her, he saw she kept her eyes open, was actually hoping they would be seen. The idea excited her.
The same night, a few blocks before Bourbon, she suddenly said, “I have to pee.”
They’d only left the hotel a hundred yards or so ago, so she must have known the need would arise. He offered to go back to the room.
The Mammoth Book of the Best New Erotica Page 31
