The Mammoth Book of the Best New Erotica

by Maxim Jakubowski

  I don’t know what I want to do most: watch or join in.

  Then Uncle grins at me, rummaging around in his silky blue crotch. He exposes his cock and moves it against Tom’s face, tipping it back and forth like a windscreen wiper. “Come here,” Uncle says to me. “Bring us titties.”

  He’s dead right: I want to join in. So I cross to them, whipping off my top half as I do so. Greedy and urgent, I scramble up onto the carpets and Uncle welcomes me by holding out a brawny arm. He opens his mouth and I fill it immediately with soft, pink breast, pressing a hand to his crisp chest hair, my body pushing against the bulk of his belly. His tongue lashes my nipple and he delves under my sarong, searching eagerly for my hole. With a force that makes me gasp, he plugs my wetness with thick, crude fingers. Grinning up at me, he holds my nipple between his teeth and gently pulls on it, stretching my flesh. I hold his gaze, daring him to keep right on going.

  For the first time, I notice how stunning his eyes are. They’re a hard amber brown, sparkling up at me like topaz. But this is no time to be romanticizing because the guy’s moving us into position, my sarong and belt are off, and I’m utterly naked, poised above that prodigious cock, buttocks split in his big, rough hands, cunt wide open. With heavy luxury, I sink down on him, groaning all the way until I’m stretched and stuffed to capacity.

  Truly, it’s a beautiful moment, made more beautiful by the fact that beside me is Tom, being sucked off by the Boy. They’re both naked too, Tom with his knees apart, the Boy’s shorn head bobbing in his crotch, his pert little butt stuck up in the air. Sprawled against the carpets, Tom has an arm flung wide, eyes closed, mouth open. I’ve never seen him looking quite so dead. I wonder if his expression’s the same when I go down on him. My guess is not. All the same, I try to commit that face to memory, thinking maybe I can reproduce it some time in charcoal and pencil.

  Tom must sense me looking because, as I start to slide on Uncle’s cock, he reaches out with a blind hand to stroke my arse. In that tiny affectionate gesture, I feel such a connection with him, such warmth. And I feel free to fuck like there’s no tomorrow, knowing Tom and I are united, mutual support in mutual depravity; for richer, for poorer; for better, for worse.

  Uncle clasps my hips, bouncing me up and down, and I’m as light as a doll in his hands. This man can do what he wants with me, I think. And I don’t mind if he does. It’s a while since I’ve been overpowered. The two of us mash and grind, silk hissing beneath me, sweat forming on my back where sunlight heats my skin.

  “Hey, brother,” calls Uncle, addressing Tom. “Does she like it in her ass? Huh? A big prick in her tiny little asshole?”

  Tom’s too zonked to reply immediately. He just sprawls there, half dead, before his head rolls sideways, eyes still closed. When he finally speaks, it sounds as if it’s costing him an enormous effort. “Probably,” he croaks.

  The Boy pulls away from him. Tom groans in despair.

  “Dirty little slut,” says the Boy excitedly. His cock is ramrod stiff, its ruddy tip gleaming, and against his scrawny frame it looks grotesquely large. He springs off the carpets, takes a small copper can from near an Aladdin’s lamp, and pours thick clear liquid into the palm of his hand. “Uncle,” he says. “You in her pussy, me in her ass. Bam, bam, bam. We fuck her hard, yes?”

  Uncle laughs lightly.

  “No,” I whisper. Then louder: “Yes. God, yes.”

  The Boy leaps back onto the carpets, lubricating his cock with lamp oil. Tom groans again. I reach out, feeling sorry for him, and Uncle, gent that he is, shuffles us closer. I lean over to kiss Tom and he responds eagerly, our tongues lashing awkwardly as Uncle pounds into me. Sweat dribbles down my back into the crack of my buttocks and I feel the Boy’s greasy fingers press against my arsehole. He wriggles a finger past my entrance and I’m groaning into Tom’s mouth as the Boy opens me out, forcing the ring of my muscles wider, making me slick and ready.

  “Keep her still,” urges the Boy, and Uncle obliges, his cock lodged high.

  “Lean forward,” orders the Boy and I obey. His knob nudges my arsehole and pushes into my resistance. I think I’m going to be too small for him, my other hole too full, and that it’s all going to hurt like hell. I make a feeble cry of protest.

  “Don’t pretend,” snaps the Boy. He grasps my hips then there’s a flash of pain and, with a sudden slippery rush, he’s fully inside me, and I’m swamped by dark, fierce pleasure. Uncle calls out triumphantly. I feel I’m on the brink of collapse, the intensity of having both holes packed so solidly taking me to a place I didn’t know existed. I gasp into Tom’s mouth, quite beyond kisses now, as the two men start to drive into me. Bam, bam, bam, as the Boy said. I have to pull away from Tom. I need air. I need to groan and wail.

  Beneath me, Uncle’s face is flushed with exertion. He spots me looking at him and he grins, meeting my eye with a deliberate gaze. There’s the weirdest kind of friction going on inside me, the two men jostling my body as they fuck. And then I know I’ve lost it. I know pleasure has reduced me to lunacy because I see something wild in Uncle’s eyes. His pupils contract and, for a moment, they are like the Boy’s: bright with black, slit pupils.

  It’s the light, I tell myself, the light, the light. And I can’t bear to look. I flop forward onto Tom, seeking a kiss, wanting the reassurance of his mouth, his nose, his face. I’m close to coming and so is Tom because the Boy, gorgeous greedy creature, is sucking him off again. As the two cocks shove fast and hard inside me, I nudge my clit and then gasp into Tom’s mouth, our lips so hot, so wet and loose: “I’m coming, I’m coming.” That sets him off and he groans and pants, his body twitching as he peaks. My orgasm rolls on and on, and Tom is still gasping into my mouth, still coming. It feels sublime, orgasm-without-end. Our lips slide and smear, and nothing else can touch us. It’s as if we’re melting into each other at every breath. And I am him and he is me, and we are all ecstasy, all delirium, all gone.

  Sex, I think, will never be the same again.

  We didn’t buy a carpet for the hallway that holiday. But sometimes it’s like that. You go out hoping to buy one thing and come home with something totally different. I’ve stopped drawing Tom in the middle of the night as well. I don’t feel the need any more. I don’t have that yearning to capture him. Because I have my Tom, I have him entirely, from now until the end of time. And if I ever start to doubt it, I just need to picture his face, glazed with rapture at the point of climax. He doesn’t know what he looks like. I don’t know what I look like either. People don’t, generally speaking, do they?

  All I know is that he’ll never look at another woman like that; he’ll never be able to. Because when he comes, something shifts in his eyes. He rides the wave, annihilated with bliss, the two of us breathing so hard and so deep. And when he looks at me, his beautiful blue eyes have black, slit pupils. And I am him and he is me. And I know we are possessed.

  Don’t Look Back

  Alison Tyler

  I Google him. Sometimes occasionally, if I’ve got a minute to kill while the printer is churning out my latest project. Sometimes obsessively, staring at the computer screen until my eyes water, drinking straight vodka as the minutes blur. Sometimes recklessly – not bothering to delete my history afterwards. “Deleting history” seems like too much of a cheat. It would be dangerously easy to strike out all the pages I’ve visited on my endless, circular search. You can’t do that in real life.

  I know he isn’t the doctor in Minneapolis who specializes in exotic-sounding diseases, or the professor on sabbatical in the Orient who beams his latest pictures up to his website every two or three days – lovely lush landscapes that I’ve grown fond of viewing. Sure, people change, but not that much. I’m absolutely certain he’s not one of a pair of Bluegrass-loving brothers who live in Utah. They hit local bars every few weeks, playing warm-up for bands I’ve never heard of.

  I’ve done the online White Pages searches, as well, turning up addresses from fifteen years ago,
six or seven places in a row, apartments I remember visiting when I cut class to fuck him. I actually think about calling the numbers – one might be current – but I can’t make myself. There was no caller ID back then. Now, I might get caught. And what would happen to my well-ordered life if he Star-69-ned me and my sweet boyfriend answered?

  So I resort to Googling.

  Googling takes the place of those late-night drive-bys, looking to see if his Harley was in the spot out front of his building. My muscles tighten up the same way now as they did back then. Maybe I’ll see him. Maybe I won’t. So why do I even bother? Because I fantasize that one day when I type in his name, up will come all the information that I crave. What he’s been doing for the past decade and a half. What he’s doing now. Who he’s with. How he’s aged.

  Truthfully, I don’t know all that much about him. If I were to tally up all the facts, they wouldn’t fill an index card. Or a matchbook cover. He was older than me, but by exactly how much, I don’t know. Twenty-seven to my eighteen. That’s what I remember, but he lied all the time. He could have been lying about that. In my online search, I found a man with his name who graduated high school in 1978 somewhere in Southern California. Is that him? His middle initial was D, but he never told me what it stood for. Donald? David? Daniel? Dean? None of those seem right, yet I’ve found men with those middle names on the internet. Might he be one of them?

  There’s a fellow in the midwest who runs marathons. I can’t imagine Mark breaking a sweat unless he were running from a cop. But he had a sleek runner’s physique way back when. Could he have transformed himself to an athlete? Has he given up pot in favour of healthier substances? Has he hit the pavement to kill his demons?

  Googling takes my mind off my modern-day problems. Googling makes me forget about deadlines and pressures and what we’re going to have for dinner. Delivery pizza, again? Sounds good. Far easier to answer that mundane query than the other nagging questions pulling on me until my stomach aches: should I pay the $29.95 and do a search of prison records? Because that’s where I’ll find him. I’m sure of it.

  I don’t enter my credit card. I don’t think I actually want to know.

  After spending hours on the computer, I dream about him. My eyes hurt and my head spins. I hit the pillow and recreate his image from the puzzle pieces that I remember: the black-ink Zig-Zag man tattoo on his upper arm. The way his blue eyes could turn grey or green depending on what he was wearing. Depending, even, on his mood. His paint-splattered jeans. His grey shirt. His body.

  Oh, God, his body.

  I remember our first date, if you can call it a date. A walk from the beauty supply store where I worked after school back to my home – with a lengthy sojourn in a deserted alley behind the beauty supply. And I remember our first kiss – moments into our first date. What was I doing out in the rapidly darkening twilight with him? Who was looking out for me? He was.

  He pushed me up against a wall and kissed me so ferociously that there are days I swear I can still feel his lips on mine. When I run my tongue over my bottom lip I feel where he bit me. Can you feel a kiss fifteen years later? You bet you can.

  His large, warm hands gripped my wrists over my head while his powerful body held mine in place. He pressed against me, and I could tell how hard he was, and I could understand – finally – what all those whispers about sex were about. I hadn’t got it before. Look, I wasn’t an idiot. Just naive. I knew where babies came from. I’d watched enough old movies to understand the steaminess of the looks between hero and heroine. But there’d been no appeal to me in the high-school fumblings at dances. In the background make-out sessions at parties. I’d been an outsider, an alien, gazing in wistfully from a distance and knowing for certain that nothing present was right for me.

  With Mark, everything was different.

  In that back alley behind the cosmetic store where I was a shop girl, he slid a hand up under my shirt and ran his fingers over my pale-pink satin bra. In a flash, I wished that the bra was made of black lace instead. He touched my breasts firmly, as if he owned them, as if he owned me. He took my clothes off, unbuttoning my jeans himself, pulling my shirt up over my head, exposing me for what I really was.

  “A slut,” he said, “You’re my little slut—”

  I shivered, but stayed silent. I knew who the sluts were at school. I knew that I wasn’t one.

  “Aren’t you? Tell the truth.” His hands were everywhere. His mouth on my neck, his fingers pulling down my panties and parting my lips to see how wet I was.

  “Come on, Carla. Tell the truth—”

  I Google him. Endlessly. Dangerously. Desperately.

  Because he knew me. I was just out, taking that first shy step out into the world . . . and he knew me.

  I understand why I do it. So why the hell do I find it so odd that he Googles me, too? That I get an email, short but not sweet, asking if I’m the one he remembers.

  Yeah, I am. Sure, I am. Of course, I am.

  I think I am.

  Mark waits for me in our spot, leaning against a grey concrete wall, looking almost exactly the same despite a fifteen-year absence. Do I look the same, too? I’m not. Not a teenager any more, not trembling with desire, not – dare I say it? – young.

  But I was young. Back then, I was new.

  We were inseparable for months, me, a high-school kid, and this twenty-seven-year-old hoodlum. This handsome, so handsome, man with the cold blue eyes out of a Who song and the iron jawline. A man who seemed to know everything about me. What was I doing? What was I thinking? Christ, what am I thinking now, fifteen years later? He’s in his forties, but still effortlessly lean and tough with only the slightest lines around his eyes and the same tall, hard body I remember. I have on jeans and a black sleeveless T-shirt that says, “I break things” on the front, something I dug out of a box filled with memories in the attic. I can pass for twenty-three rather than thirty-three if I have to. My dark hair is long to my shoulders, my glossy bangs in my eyes, as always.

  He doesn’t say a word. He just looks at me. I close my eyes tight and remember – the loss of him when he disappeared, the way no boy could replace him after he was gone. I spent years trying to recreate the exact connection that we’d had. I slutted myself out with a variety of losers, all of whom possessed at least one rebellious quality of Mark’s, but none who owned the whole package. Some spanked me. Some fucked me in public places. None made me feel anything other than disillusioned. Ultimately, I gave up hope. Now, even though I am with someone else, I’ve come running at Mark’s call.

  What the fuck am I doing here?

  “Carla,” he says, hands in my thick hair, lips on mine, and it is suddenly summertime again, and I’m missing him.

  “Carla,” he says, and I open my eyes and I look at him, and see him, the man, the danger, the reason I’m who I am today. If I hadn’t met him in high school, who would I have become? Some other girl. Some smart chick. Not a person who would leave a loving relationship in order to track down that fleeting emotion of lust from a decade and a half ago. Not a moron who could still go weak-kneed at the first sight of her long-time crush.

  “What do you need, baby?” he asks, and I find myself cradled in his strong arms, as always, my legs shaky, my heart pounding at triple-speed so that I can feel the timpani-throb in my chest and hear the clatter in my ears. “Can you say it, now? Can you tell Daddy what you need?”

  My throat grows tight. There’s a man at home, waiting for me. A simple man with a true soul who does not know where I am, but who trusts me to always return nonetheless. Yet suddenly the very concept of trust seems immensely overrated. What’s trust to lust? Which emotion would win every time?

  “Carla,” Mark says. Just that word. Just my name, and I am lost all over again, head spinning, heart dying.

  “Let’s go.”

  He has no power over me. I’m not a kid any more. You can’t impress me with a stolen Harley. You can’t turn me into a puddle with a single k
iss. I’m only here on a crazy dare. I’m only here because of Google. I can leave him. I can run. I have a safe home furnished with faux antiques from Pottery Barn and appliances purchased only after careful consideration of the advice of Consumers’ Choice. I have a place to be. Mark doesn’t own me, not any part of me.

  “Come on, baby.”

  I suppose I’ve hidden it well, the desires that burn in me. I chose normal over interesting. I chose safety over adventure.

  “You know you want to.”

  Back then, I’d never have been so fucking lame. Back then, I’d always take the risks when offered. Jesus, I invented the risks when there were none available. Slipping out my bedroom window to meet him. Cutting class to ride to his apartment on the back of his pilfered Harley. Letting him handcuff me to his bedframe so that he could do anything he wanted to me. Anything at all.

  Can I change? Is it too late?

  My hand is trapped in his, held so tightly. The heat between us is palpable. Some people never find that heat. That summertime heat that melts over your body and leaves you breathless. Some people search their whole miserable fucking lives for some semblance of a sizzling kiss, and they die believing that “true love always” is just a bitter myth. But I found that heat as a teenage kid and I knew for real that it existed. Even if I’d never found it again, I’d had it once.

  How many places have I looked? How many other dark alleys have I gone down with nameless, faceless men, trying to find that old summertime magic from years ago?

  Mark bends to kiss my neck and I remember in a flash, in one of those blinding jolts, that he’d covered me in suntan oil one sultry afternoon. I’d spent the whole day at the beach, the first truly hot spring day, and he’d come to my house afterwards and dumped out my red-striped canvas tote bag onto my floor and found that bottle of oil. My group of friends had no fear of wrinkles yet, no worry about sun damage, not like the ladies in my circle now, the ones who Google StriVectin with the passion that I’ve Googled this man. We used the oil back then, for “the San Tropez tan”. Mark coated his strong hands while he told me to strip, and I’d watched his hands for a moment, dripping with the oil, knowing what he was going to do.