Quiver

by Tobsha Learner

  A P L U M E B O O K

  Q U I V E R

  Tobsha Learner was born and raised in England and has lived in both Australia and the United States. She is a playwright as well as an author and writes for several genres. Other collections of erotic short stories include Tremble and Yearn; her historical fiction includes The Witch of Cologne and Soul; and among her thrillers are The Map and Sphinx. She divides her time between London, San Diego and Sydney. If you want to read another erotic short story, go to www.tobshaseroticfiction.com and click the link for a free download of the story and subscribe to Tobsha’s quarterly newsletter.

  Q U I V E R

  A B O O K O F

  E R O T I C T A L E S

  Tobsha Learner

  A P L U M E B O O K

  PLUME

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa • Penguin China, B7 Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. First published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd.

  First Plume Printing, July 1998

  Second Plume Printing, May 2013

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Tobsha Learner, 1998

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  has been applied for.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-62005-2

  Printed in the United States of America

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

  ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON

  The Khoisan are the hunters and gatherers of the Southern African savannah. They are known to hunt with arrows and have a respect for their prey that borders on the mystical. Besides their hunting pouch, they also have a smaller, magical quiver filled with tiny love arrows. These are kept for the women they desire.

  CONTENTS

  The Woman Who Was Tied Up and Forgotten

  Man of Sighs

  The Man Who Loved Sound

  Pomegranate

  Ice Cream

  Tulip

  The Listening Room

  Looking for Strange

  The Short Man in Crime

  Doubt

  Peel

  The Promiscuity of Bats

  Q U I V E R

  THE WOMAN WHO WAS

  TIED UP AND FORGOTTEN

  Sandra and Brian are a middle-aged couple. Sandra is a statuesque blonde with a purposeful stride. She has been an architect for a long time and, like many people lucky enough to be focused early in life, she is now rich thanks to regular clientele and some astute property investment.

  Brian made his money specializing in orthodontics, and has found a niche amid zinc fillings, metal wire and plastic plates. His patrons are the rich matrons of Double Bay who sit in his surgery clasping the hands of their bucktoothed offspring, and find Brian’s brown suits strangely comforting.

  Sandra and Brian have a routine to their lovemaking. It begins with a series of signals. The first comes from Sandra, who puts on her flannel nightdress after a regime of skin care. It reminds her of boarding school. It makes her feel naughty. She then reclines on the bed and switches off the bedside lamp. Brain, dressed in his cotton shorts, obediently follows her cue.

  The second signal involves Sandra suddenly wrapping her leg over Brain’s torso, inadvertently brushing the tip of his penis. In the ensuing silence Sandra mounts the compliant Brian and rides him until she reaches orgasm. Brian’s climax, a high-pitched whimper, usually follows a second later. Afterward she likes to get up to brush her teeth.

  Sandra is larger than Brian and likes to be in control; Brian likes to think he enjoys being dominated. This is their equilibrium.

  Sandra has just submitted a proposal with the Sydney City Council to design a museum to house firefighting equipment dating from the beginning of the colony. She has spent months drawing up her design. The council is to announce its decision about the museum that evening.

  Sandra and Brian are dressed for the opera: Brian has donned a light summer suit in an unfortunate shade of beige and Sandra is in pink organza. Sandra sits by the phone, waiting. The heat makes her glisten. A fan spinning in the corner blows her hair away from her face. Her portfolio lies open on the desk. The drawing of the museum is a collision of swirling red arches and stark vertical chimneys thrusting up into a charcoal sky. It looks like fire, as if the building itself is struggling with the elements.

  The phone rings. She jumps and grabs the receiver. Brian heads for the drinks cabinet—either way he is prepared to fix his wife a scotch. He watches her face as he pours the drink. Impenetrable, masklike, with only a light film of sweat betraying her. She answers the clerk on the other end of the line with short, polite affirmatives. It is this cool control of hers that Brain finds impossibly erotic. He watches the ice cubes tumble into the whisky then bob to the surface.

  He hands her the scotch. She puts down the receiver slowly then swallows the drink in one gulp. She throws the glass against the white stippled wall. It just misses Brian’s head.

  “I’ve got it!” She dances around the fan, her pink organza flying. “I’ve got it!” Tentatively he reminds her that they are running late for the opera.

  They get there just as the lights are dimming. It is a production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. The director has created a Gothic nightmare of epic proportions. From where Sandra sits she can see the tenor sitting on a giant chair, his feet swinging a good ten inches above the floor, his golden curls and painted pink lips a pederast’s dream. The witch trills madly as she binds his feet and arms to the wooden limbs. As the final knot is pulled tight Sandra feels a strange heat flooding her lower limbs. She looks at Brian, who is leaning forward, face flushed, his tongue playing with the
gap between his front teeth. She looks back at the stage. The opera singer’s legs lie parted, tied to the chair with bright pink ribbon. Perhaps it is the feeling of success that makes Sandra unusually aroused. Perhaps it is the humidity that hangs like a collective mist over the audience. Sandra suddenly finds the image of the singer tied to the chair more than a little sexy.

  In the dark, Brian’s hand takes hers and places it firmly on his growing erection. The witch throws back her head and begins to sing, her bright red mouth stretched wide. Brian throbs to a climax under Sandra’s moving fingers.

  The next night he brings home a length of pink ribbon.

  Lying there afterward, her ankles and wrists stinging, her body still warm from an orgasm whose voluminosity had surprised even herself, Sandra realizes they have stepped over a boundary displacing their equilibrium. She glances over at Brian, who lies with his back to her, his skin glistening.

  The demands of Sandra’s commission begin to dictate their lives. She is in a frenzy, bent over cardboard models in which the doorways yawn red, the turrets shoot up like flames and the external fire escape spirals down like drifting smoke. The more she scrawls her designs across the heavy draft paper, the more she feels her cells, her muscles, her juices thicken in expectation. The movement of her heavy pencil as it sweeps across the graph of her building suddenly holds the promise of a penis. A compass swing imagines tracings across a nipple. She wants her every orifice filled. She wants to lose control. To lose responsibility.

  Every night, after hours of exhausting drafting and debate, she succumbs to Brian’s little knots. His manipulation of her limbs makes her scream—stretching her, opening her—while the night breeze drifts in through the balcony doors, carrying faint shouts and the wailing of fire engines.

  Sandra visits Brian during his lunch hour. Between the X rays, plaster casts of jaws and root-canal work she arrives, breathless. Brian, recognizing the click of her stilettos on the concrete steps of the fire escape, dismisses his assistant. Still wearing his white surgical gown, he leads Sandra by the hand to the dentist’s chair. He ties her hands and ankles to the steel frame and gently places a gag in her mouth. He picks up a scalpel and cuts away at the crotch of her nylon tights. Kneeling, he hoists up the chair until her crotch is almost at eye level, then carefully splits her white underwear. With trembling fingers he folds the fabric back to reveal her Gold, as he calls her thick bush of blond pubic hair and cunt. To the sound of Stravinsky, he spreads her nether lips open and very slowly begins to snip away at the fringes of pubic hair around her vagina with tiny scissors, until the pink labia shine under the heat of the dentist’s lamp. Brian pauses. Sandra is transformed. She trembles silently under his fingers. Her huge eyes roll above the gag. The only visible flesh is her vulva. Brian’s hand brushes the tip of her clitoris. It flushes a deep red. Sandra revels in her helplessness. Brian, unaccustomed to this mute, malleable Sandra, fixes a small brush to the end of the drill. He bends down and, with one hand parting her labia, he caresses the tip of her clit with the spinning brush until she begs for mercy and comes, writhing, still tied and gagged to the chair.

  The semen dries on the inside of Brian’s thigh. Sandra takes a new pair of tights from her handbag and rolls them over her full, firm legs. She uses the reflective surface of the overhead lamp to apply her lipstick and adjust her hair. Completely clothed in a conservative grey suit with padded shoulders, her permed blond hair immaculate except for the curls that have stuck to her sweaty brow, she tucks her portfolio under her arm and heads out for an appointment with the Sydney City Council.

  Brian watches her from the window and begins to grow hard again, thinking how no one would guess that this woman belonged to him, this dynamic controlled woman, who was, a minute ago, completely in his power.

  Time is running out. Most nights Sandra comes in after eleven. She slips her clothes off and collapses exhausted on top of the blankets, still dressed in her underwear. Brian lies there, his eyes open, feeling her breath rise beside him. He wants to touch her but now all that is forbidden. Shut out, a part of him starts to hate her.

  The closer the completion date of the building, the more distracted and obsessed Sandra becomes. Conversation evaporates. She can talk only of work, poured concrete and foundations. Brian thinks he is disappearing, fading into insignificance.

  Soon their only real contact is during her lunchtime visits, when she is slave and he is master.

  Her urgency consumes her. Her orgasms feed her work. Her work inflames her further. To save time, she has stopped wearing underpants and taken to wearing a garter belt. She has also shaved off her pubic hair. Everything is closer to the skin. As she walks through the council chambers in her high heels and long skirt she can feel the movement of her legs rub the spheres of her sex together. In a boardroom meeting, caught in a ring of men, she relishes her secret nakedness. Everything is designed to maximize the moment. The frenetic pace she lives her life has taken on a rhythm. This is her new equilibrium.

  A man is perched on some scaffolding, just below a neon sign reading BERYL’S COOKIES ARE THE BEST. He sees a woman, beautiful at forty. She walks into a dentist’s office in the building opposite. The man immediately senses something in her poise—her very gait—that suggests sex. As he draws closer, he fancies for a moment that he can smell through the glass, through the steel, sensing the rich pungent scent of her sex. Silently, out of view of his colleagues, he swiftly lets down the pulley so that his section of scaffolding is directly opposite the dentist’s window. Hidden by a section of flimsy hardwood, he watches at his leisure the beautiful woman opposite whom he thinks is in love with a dentist. He watches as she walks into the center of the room and then lifts the edge of her skirt. The dentist walks up to her and pushes his hand roughly between her legs. It is as if the man can feel the damp imprint of her sex on his own wrist as the dentist pushes the woman toward the chair.

  She falls slowly into it, her hair bouncing slightly on her forehead as if in slow motion. The dentist opens the woman’s legs with his rubber-gloved hands and ties her ankles to the chair. She puts up no struggle, but stares down at him with wide eyes. The man watching fancies he can see her bosom rising and falling in fear, in excitement, in submission. He moves closer to the hardwood panel and presses his erection against it. She has large breasts hidden under a tight white cotton blouse. It is this exterior of demure righteousness that pleases the watching man. He imagines that under the white cotton she would have long brown nipples that would harden against his teeth.

  The dentist lifts her arms and ties her wrists to the head of the chair. The man watching would unbutton that blouse and release those full breasts. That’s what he’d do. He would weigh them thoughtfully in each hand, then slowly run his thumb over those hardening nipples until they became erect. Then he would squeeze them firmly together and begin to suck at one and then the other until he could hear the woman moan. That’s what he’d do if he was there. But the dentist seems only interested in touching the other. The best part. The bit he’d leave until last. The man watching reaches down and touches himself with his calloused hand, imagining the lips and tongue of the woman pulling down over the shaft of his penis, then over the knob with small circular motions, taking him deep into her throat. He always likes leaving the best part until the end.

  Now the dentist has his face buried between the woman’s legs. The man watching looks at the woman’s face. Her cheeks are flushed and her eyes are rolling back in pleasure. She moves her arms backward and forward, chafing against the rope binding her to the chair. The man watching closes his eyes and comes against the grain of the wood. Every day after that he eats his lunch suspended in the little steel cage that hangs down the side of the building opposite the dentist’s office.

  It’s now mid-December and the pressure on Sandra is immense. She feels as if her whole life is focused onto a thin point, and that thin point is the commission. Everyone else recedes, defined only by their function in relati
on to the execution of the building.

  The more obsessed she becomes, the more Brian’s anger ferments inside him. He hates the cardboard model of the museum, with its red turrets and display windows large enough to house several fire engines. He hates the way his wife burns with beauty as she manages four phone calls, two builders awaiting orders and a landscape gardener. He hates the way she has begun to look through people until they say words like façade treatment, tilt slab and clerestory lighting. He tries folding up his anger and slipping it between his gum and lip, but like an abscess it festers. He decides that he will confront her. He will force her to take a day off. But when he rings her office the line’s engaged, when he tries the mobile the call is diverted; the fax is always busy.

  He finds himself waiting for lunchtime. He finds that tying her down excites him more than fucking her. The equilibrium tilts back with the chair.

  It is the end of summer. The reflective glass is now fitted to the steel frames, and the man’s work is almost done. He sees a small blue BMW drive up a ramp and disappear into a parking lot in the street below. He smiles to himself and starts counting.

  Twenty. He knows it takes twenty counts for her to be in the opposite building and seated in the dentist’s chair.

  Nineteen. “Just off for a smoke!” His mates smile knowingly. He climbs into the small steel cage and begins lowering the pulley by hand.

  Fifteen. He can see her walking swiftly across the road, her blond hair white in the sunlight. He is excited by the knowledge that he alone knows where she is going and why. The pulley stops with a jolt. It sways slightly, then rests against the steel brackets. He squats close to the iron-mesh floor and stares into the office. The room is empty, the lamp is illuminating the vacant dentist’s chair. The green of the leather shines, desolate and medicinal. He hates the dentist.