It was the ultimate compliment: he had seen beneath the surface, whereas I had taken him at face value. Had I stopped to analyse the heightened emotions I might have recognised the attraction sooner. Owing to the editorial process our own relationship had accelerated, but I hoped we would improvise on a theme rather than follow the script to the letter. He had no need to disclose his sexual likes and dislikes, I already knew. As for mine, he was reading me flawlessly.
How confusing it is for men now that women no longer need rescuing.
Chapter Nine
He was still fully dressed but my near-nakedness no longer made me feel vulnerable; in his beautiful hands I was free from harm. Tracing the curve of my hips, he lingered over the straps of my suspender belt. “You might be right about the stockings.”
I acknowledged his concession with a “told you so” grin. He slapped me playfully on the bottom, but hard enough to let me feel its impact.
“That’s for being so smug.”
I had been chastised for a minor misdemeanour, another subtle variation on his fictional inclinations.
There is no desire without restraint, but walking hand in hand with fear he almost let her slip away.
Chapter Eleven
Crouched at my feet, he looked up at me and said, “Do you remember their code?”
I did, but I wanted to hear him explain it.
He moved up the bed, his legs straddling me. “The code is a safety device,” he said, releasing my stockings from their straps. He slipped them off me and ran his fingers down my bare legs. I responded by lifting my calf to his face and he rubbed his cheek against it like a cat making friends. “You need a safe word,” he said, “so I know how far to go. I want you to resist me, but ‘No’ doesn’t mean ‘No’, it means ‘Go on’, no matter how you phrase it, and ‘Please stop’ means anything but stop.”
My breathing was shallow and fast as I imagined what he might do that would warrant a safe word.
“I don’t need one,” I said, not quite believing it.
“Oh, yes, you do. You have no idea what I have planned for you. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks.”
I was stunned. The attraction must have been immediate.
“When we met, I watched you read over those first few pages and thought ‘Who is this self-possessed, smiling woman?’ ”
I faltered: the false attribute left me exposed. There’s a price to pay for masking our secret fears and its coin is confusion. He had recognised mine and found it precious. I conceded the self-possession and composure and he kissed me. Any remaining mistrust melted.
He was shocked at the sound of his own laughter, as if it were an old friend he hadn’t seen for years. Trapped between responsibility and enchantment, she was his last hurrah before middle age claimed him.
Chapter Thirteen
“Tell me your safe word.”
I thought for a moment, it would have to be something intimate and relevant . . . Chapter Eight. “Your name is the safe word.”
He looked surprised. “I like that. Let’s break the anonymity.”
As I mouthed his name silently he placed his hand over my eyes. His breathing quickened and I felt something soft and silky against my cheek. It was one of my stockings, and I knew what he intended to do with it.
She wanted to take the pain away, to touch his chest and heal him, but broken men are broken for a reason, and he had cast her as the woman in white.
Chapter Fifteen
“Do you trust me?” he said.
Reading the certainty between us, I nodded and he raised my hands above my head. “I need you to understand,” he said as he tied the stocking around my wrists, “trust is more important to me than anything.” This was not merely submission, it was surrender, the ultimate act of acceptance. I was about to give him something he had probably never experienced.
At that moment I finally understood the unanswered questions in his novel. His eyes told me that what lay beneath was vast and deep and full of monsters: the sadness expressed as anger, his fear of abandonment, the euphemism for love, the extremes. He believed he was a damaged man who could not trust and therefore could not be trusted. But he was no longer unfathomable.
She was like lightning on a hot summer’s night; you know you shouldn’t look but you just can’t stop yourself.
Chapter Seventeen
Themes of loss and isolation echoed throughout his work, his novel a conduit for unmet desires and deepest fears. I imagined his commitment was total, but absolute investment is always fraught with danger, especially in matters of the heart. I had taught myself to hold back, that final five per cent an insurance against emotional bankruptcy; it was a lesson hard-learned. Our vulnerabilities may have sprung from a different source but they inspired a mutual understanding: he had seen something in me that made him feel secure. Perhaps he knew me better than I knew myself.
That spark of optimism had gone. The laughter and playfulness died the moment she’d gone, and he felt guilty with or without her. He wanted her to miss him as much as he missed her, and that only added to the guilt.
Chapter Seventeen
“I’m going to take you to the very edge,” he said, and I knew exactly what he meant. “Turn over. I want you whimpering into the pillow.”
His words shot through me like a well-aimed arrow and my submission was immediate. He gently bit the nape of my neck, his mouth travelling downwards. I almost sobbed when he reached my shoulder blades: he’d found my exterior G-spot.
The muscles surrounding my spine contracted. The fragile structure that supports us and makes us human, its nerve endings so over-worked and stimulated, was now laid bare, protected only by a thin layer of skin. I begged him to stop, and he understood without my using the safe word. I was at the edge but not yet ready to fall.
There is always a confessional aspect to sex, and his was both catholic and Catholic: he allowed her as much pain as pleasure would permit.
Chapter Nineteen
He moved to the end of the bed and I resisted the temptation to watch him undress. Kneeling beside me, he said, “I promised I’d never hurt you.” I knew he meant it, but I held my breath, waiting for his next move.
My heartbeat raced as his fists twisted around my knickers, the sound of fabric tearing a reminder of his strength. He leant against me, his weight pinning me to the bed. I had yet to see him naked, but he allowed me a moment of fore-knowledge when he pressed himself into me.
“Turn over,” he said, and untied my wrists. I touched his body for the first time. His muscles were hard but my lips were gentle. I licked the soft hollow of his collarbone and my back arched when he echoed the movement towards my nipple. He stopped, teasing me again. I ached for his mouth and begged him to go on. “Suck me,” I whispered.
“Bad girl,” he said, and squeezed one nipple hard as he sucked the other. The switch was instinctive but he already knew the effect it had on me.
The pain was exquisite, his mouth and fingers controlling it by degrees. As his name was about to pass my lips the pressure subsided: he knew how far to go. I wanted to touch him, to feel how hard he was. My hands slid down his back to his waist but he stopped me. “Not yet.”
“Please let me touch you.”
He shook his head with a look that told me he was enjoying my torment. I was being manipulated by an expert: in place of resisting, I was now pleading with him.
She ran barefoot down the street calling his name, forgetting that silent is an anagram of listen.
Chapter Twenty One
I ran my nails along his back. “I’m in agony,” I said.
“I told you I was going to take you to the edge.” With a trail of kisses down my stomach, he pushed my legs apart. He leant back as I revealed my most intimate secret. Lost in the moment and unaware of me watching him, he looked as though he was gazing at the most beautiful work of art.
We were entranced by our separate perspectives. “So pretty,” he murmured, then looked up a
t me. His lips grazed over me, his every move causing the current running between us to amplify. He slid two fingers inside me as the pressure of his mouth increased.
I wanted him to go on, to make me come like this but I stopped him, seconds before. I drew his face up to mine. His mouth was wet and tasted sweet as I licked myself from his lips.
He ran his fingers down my cheek, now a gesture of assurance, and lay beside me. “Touch me,” he said.
A top note of compassion with a base note of cruelty, the scent of him lingered on her clothes and skin, as potent as if he were there beside her.
Chapter Twenty Three
“Leave your marks on me,” he said, and I knew he needed to feel the pain as much as I did. I worked my way down his body, my nails scoring red symbols across his skin, proof of his trust in me. Almost there, I hesitated. “It’s your turn for the agony,” I whispered as my mouth hovered over him.
“Suck my cock,” he said in a tone that was as much an order as a request. My fingers encircled him and I moved my hand down, shocked at his length. He was so hard I could almost hear the blood pulsing through him.
“I said, suck it.” Both his voice and size made me shiver, knowing that he could hurt me, but never would. As I licked him, my tongue almost sizzled against the heat. I took him into my mouth and sucked him until he pleaded with me to stop.
He flipped me onto my back and held me close, whispering reassuringly as he eased into me. The momentum was cautious, measured by reading my body. When he finally reached my depth he pulled out. “Beg for it,” he said, forcing the words out of me.
All self-control renounced, I begged shamelessly, shocked by my unleashed dark side. He kissed my face as his cock thrust into me harder and faster. I couldn’t hold back any longer and he knew it. “I want to hear you come,” he said, grinding into me.
Seconds later, I let go and heard myself come louder than I ever had before. The volume increased as he came with me.
Holding me tight he looked into my eyes and said, “I want to take you to Devon.”
I smiled. “You already have.”
He had reached inside her and written his name on her heart. In return she negotiated with his demons, shook hands and made a deal. The settlement was not taxing, it just took a little acceptance and a lot of love.
from a story by the Editor
The Author’s secret life was not so secret after all. The walls he had so carefully constructed were made of paper rather than bricks and mortar, and the Editor’s touch sealed the fissures.
As for her, she no longer lived vicariously. Editing was a frustrating business, knowing she was interfering in another’s dreams. The Author’s words had set her free, and despite the battle of wills, released in her the confidence to submit her own work. The mutual debt of gratitude was complete: he was no longer so angry at the world, and she no longer hid behind her title.
The reviews of his novel were mixed: few critics grasped its complexity, choosing instead to focus on what they could not hope to understand. He almost forgave them their short-comings. When he read her stories he basked in her forth-coming glory, and said, “You will eclipse us all, including me.”
The Editor’s collection is about to be published. The Author allowed her to steal moments from their time together, many of which appear in this story. They often travel to Devon, by car and by metaphor.
Monkey See
Matthew Branton
March
He looked at people getting it on all day and hadn’t got one on for his wife in four months. Not while she was there, anyway.
He had a list like a film censor – a table he’d knocked up in Claris Works at home – that ran to six sides of A4. One pile of each page filled a six-shelf tray next to the PC: top shelf for couples, second for threes, third for fours-&-mores, fourth for pain, fifth for toileting, ground floor for children and animals. He ordered it that way based on the frequency of what he saw, so that the most frequently used sheets were on the top. He meant no pecking order by it.
He’d had to draw up the lists himself because no one had done this job before him. He was the only one in the nick who knew much about PCs so he got it. The PC in front of him only had room to run Quicktime these days and the printer beneath his desk had taken one scuff too many. The lists he’d had to do at home had been xeroxed so many times the gridlines looked like they’d been drawn in his step-daughter, Lori’s eyeliner. The pen in his left hand moved up and down the boxes as his right hand clicked.
DI Sturgess put his head over the partition and said, “Derek, mate.”
“Two secs,” he muttered, not looking up.
Sturgess glanced at the screen, turned his mouth down and ducked back.
Fran rang before lunch, told him to pay the gas. The bill had come in that morning and there was a £7.50 credit for prompt payment. She told him to make sure he did it before he left. He asked about her day and she said her team leader was trying to do her head in.
It brightened up in the afternoon and he had to swivel his screen away from the low sun, turn his cuffs back over his freckled forearms. He was working down a stack of page twos, a rush-job – the case against the hard-drive’s owner had to go to the CPS by the end of next week, the sticky had said – and he stroked six boxes with his pen even as he hit control-W, revealing the picture behind the one he’d just ticked off.
His eyes shifted focus and saw a woman taking one man in her mouth and another up her front – what he’d come to term a spit-roast – squatting on one with his feet towards the camera: he’d named this the cross-bow, because if you drew it with stick figures it looked like one. He checked the box on page two labelled SR and the box labelled CB, ran his eye over the other options to see if any applied: did any of the participants appear to be under eighteen? No. Were any of the male organs unusually large? And if so, was there pain involved in the penetration? Borderline. The guy underneath had a girth on him, no barney there: but the girl was looking up at the bloke she was blowing, which suggested – to Derek at least – that she was maybe halfway into it. He left the box blank. Was the grouping mixed race? Possibly – the girl looked a bit like Jennifer Lopez, and he wrote “F-PR?” in the box next to the I/R designation. I/R meant inter-racial, PR, Puerto Rican. Since most of it came from the States he’d learned a lot about the ethnic mix there, saw it himself last September in Florida. Pointed them all out to Fran, not that she’d been interested. She’d said she didn’t want him bringing his work home but he’d had a sense there was more to it than that.
He remembered the gas as the tea-trolley came round. He got a custard Danish that had sat around too long and a cup of builder’s, ate the cake while he waited on hold for the bank. The girl who eventually answered was Manc, though the bank was in Leeds: he gazed vacantly at a woman with a wolfhound while the Manc girl took him through security. He couldn’t remember his memorable fact – it was usually his mother’s maiden name or his first wife’s birthday – and he had to ask for a hint and then think hard for a moment to get it.
He never knew whose computers he was checking. Most of the time, he was aware, they were just looking for leverage: had a look on your hard disk, Short-eyes: you can talk to us or you can talk to Vice and I’ll tell you for nothing, you don’t wanna talk to Vice. Fraud collar, he bet, silly sods. He didn’t have to be told to know: fraud was the growth industry, and the hardest to pin without some help from the suspect. So 14-gig tapes piled up through the internal mail; he took one off the top every morning, set it to upload onto his own, 20-gig drive, and picked up a butterscotch-with-sprinkles from the canteen while it was spooling. He liked to get his breakfast down before he started.
There were several ways to do it. He could run the Yank app. that looked for picture files, then check those files for the percentage of flesh-tone pixels: but too low a setting picked up holiday snaps, too high missed the latex and leather, or the close-ups. It took ten minutes just to pull files for you and crashed your mac
hine more often than not. He hardly ever used it.
Better was to search for file names that would lead to the folder you were looking for. Hardly anyone was stupid enough to leave filetype identifiers on the end – jpg, .rm, .mov – and most of the time they renamed them completely, so you searched for naming systems. BJ was always a good start. CS for come-shot, or MS for money. FCL. DP. WS. Eight times out of ten you got a result.
If you didn’t, you had to work harder, try and think like them. People kept it buried in their hard drives, usually the system folder, in his experience, where there were thousands of plug-ins and extensions to lose their collection amongst. But they wanted to get at it fast when the urge was on them: at the fag-end of the day, when the wife had gone to bed scowling about work; when they were lonely and tired and needed to feel like part of the human race again. They didn’t want to be opening a dozen folders to find the good stuff, so there was usually a shortcut near the surface that would take you in deep: a folder alias hidden behind a document icon was a common one. You had to get a feel for the way they liked to organize; then think like them, say to yourself where would I put it, if this was mine, if this was what I needed?
He’d got good at it, hit paydirt inside two minutes almost always. He was only meant to be doing it for three months to begin with, but no one else in the nick had any talent for it. Three months turned to six, then to nine, now to fourteen. He heard the uniform call him Bitchfinder General around the canteen till he put a stop to it. He was proud to be good at his job but once you’d found the stash the rest was monkey work. Open the pix, tick the boxes: monkey see, monkey do. He knocked off at five-thirty while the uniform went through till seven. Who was the monkey there?
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 1 Page 9
