Best of Best Women's Erotica (2 page)

By nightfall I was hopelessly infatuated with this total stranger who, in the course of a single day, had eradicated all memory of other men, proof that the best moves we make
can't always be planned in advance. We were inseparable for the few days we had left. Many mornings we would linger late in bed and play chess. Our games always ended unfinished, with the chessmen tumbling to the floor while we explored new ways to move each other. He never managed to take my queen again.

But the days passed too quickly and we never made time to talk about us, or what would happen while I was away or when I came home again. And I never told him I was in love.

 

Adam's weight shifts in the bed as he moves closer. His fingertips draw through my hair, starting at the temple and combing slowly to the ends, pulling the length against his chest. This is what he did once when I went to bed with a headache. I assume he's about to give me one. The silence between us is heavy with the innuendo of our stilted conversations.

“There's something I need to tell you….” His fingers stop stroking my hair and slide down the bare flesh of my arm. This is it and I'm not ready.

“It doesn't matter,” I hear myself say. “You don't owe me anything.” I already know what he wants to confess. I already know I can't bear to listen. He's met someone else. She's slept in our bed. Maybe he's fallen in love with her. I decide on a preemptive move to save him the trouble of destroying me.

On the pretense of stoking the fire, I leave the bed, dragging the sheet around me. I grab the iron curtain rod and beat ineffectually at the flames.

“I don't need to hear this, Adam,” I say. “It's not like we're involved in some deep, committed thing. You can see who you want, do what you want. It's not like we're together—not lovers, not anything.”

I've never known when to shut up, and I still don't.

“I mean, I called here a couple of weeks ago and a woman answered the phone. So I know about her. I don't care. It doesn't matter.”

My diatribe complete, I turn to face him. His expression is one of stunned disbelief. He gets out of bed and begins to put on his clothes. He doesn't look at me.

“No. That's not it. That's not what I was talking about.” My heart falls to my feet. “I had this card game here while you were gone. Me and some of the guys, my friends. We played poker here a few times.”

I don't understand what this has to do with me. I stand there staring at the back of his head, uncomprehending. My mind stumbles over all the things I've said, trying to recall. What I remember is very bad.

“I lost your guitar.”

“My guitar?” My voice rises a couple of octaves, the way it does when I've had too much to drink. “My guitar? How'd you lose my guitar?” It dawns on me that this is what he wanted to tell me.

Not a woman. Just a guitar.

“I bet it and I lost. He had a straight flush. It was stupid and I'm sorry. I really am. I'm trying to get it back.”

Adam is dressed now, and walks past me to the door. He still won't look at me and he stands in the doorway, with his back to me and his hands braced against the doorframe.

“I wasn't with any other women while you were gone. My sister stayed a couple of days, that's all. She must have answered the phone when you called.” His voice is thick and I can barely hear him. “I wasn't with anyone else because I didn't want to be. It mattered to me.”

And he leaves, his boots beating a steady rhythm down the stairs, not pausing, not waiting for me to run after him. He's gone. I hear the door open and close and I know he won't be back. In some long-dormant area of my brain, the words to an old song begin to play and trigger an epiphany.
Love has no pride.

I run to the window and try to open it. Hopelessly stuck. I wipe away the frost and see him getting into his car. Heedless of the sheet tangling dangerously around my legs, I dash down the stairs. He's left the apartment key on the table by the front door. I retrieve it, and my only thought is getting this key back into his hand.

Adam's car is backing out of the driveway, already swiveling into the street. Snow is falling heavily now and his headlights aren't on. I'm not sure he can even see me in the blizzard of white, draped in a sheet the same color that makes me only part of the landscape. I run into the yard and stand there, buried in snow to my knees and waving the key at him. He finally sees me and the engine dies.

I yell at him. “You forgot your key!” After endless seconds, he starts the car again and pulls back into the driveway. He opens the door and gets halfway out, one foot in the car and one foot on the concrete. He looks at me like he thinks I've gone insane. Finally he closes the door and begins to walk toward me, his boots crunching on the snow. I'm shivering and crying and turning blue. I no longer feel my toes.

“I lied, it
does
matter,” I begin, blurting out all the things I should have said earlier. “I was hurt and I didn't want you to know.”

He comes closer.

“I don't care about the guitar. I can't even play it. I want you.
I want chess, naked in bed with you, and whole days making love.” I say more that runs together in a stream of nonsense about guitars and chess and things that lurk under my bed, but at least he's listening.

He's heard everything. It's still my move.

“I love you.” I hold out my hand, offering him the small silver key. Snow falls into my palm and he stares at the key as if visualizing his life with and without the key. Life, with and without me.

Finally Adam takes the key and stuffs it into his pocket before lifting me up out of the snow. My arms wrap around his neck as he stomps across the porch and into the house. His lips are warm on my frozen cheek, tasting the tears that haven't stopped yet.

“Don't cry.” His voice is soft and sympathetic. He brushes the snow from my hair. “It's okay,” he says.

It will be. I climb the stairs with Adam close behind until he veers suddenly away, heading back toward the door.

“I forgot something. Be right back.” I stand at the door and watch as he shuffles through the snow to the trunk of his car. He returns with a large box.

“What's that?”

“Chess,” he says, trudging up the stairs.

“A new chess set?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Did we need one?”

“We needed this one.” He drops the box to the bedroom floor and unlaces his boots, tossing them in front of the fireplace to dry out.

“What's so special about it?” I move toward the edge of the bed where Adam sits, unbuttoning his shirt. The box is a
bothersome obstacle on the floor between us, and I step over it to get to him.

“You'll see.” He flashes that wicked grin that I love.

I straddle Adam's lap and rock against him, communicating my desire. I unbutton his jeans and stroke him through the parted fabric. “Love me,” I whisper against his ear.

“I do.” Adam pulls the sheet away. It hangs in loose folds to the floor and his hands cover me.

“Fuck me.” I bite gently at his bottom lip, no longer shy about saying what I want.

Adam eases me from his lap and onto the bed, pulling me beneath him. I watch his eyes, knowing what I'll see reflected there.

“I will,” he answers, his mouth descending to mine. “But first, I'll teach you how to play chess.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MONICA'S LATEST BOYFRIEND THINKS SHE LIVES alone. He has no idea there's someone living in her closet, not a roommate, really, but a woman Monica thinks of as a fellow sufferer on the road of life. “Chandra,” Monica whispers, feeling the syllables slide off her tongue. Surely nobody's parents could come up with such a name, but Chandra says hers did.

“It's Sanskrit, for
daughter higher than the moon and stars,
” she says in the bored tones of someone who has been repeating this information all her life—but Monica is still impressed.

“I love the way it sounds like Sandra, but not so ordinary,” she says.

 

The first time Monica saw Chandra was through the peephole on her front door, a view that
pushed Chandra's beautiful face forward, her curls framing her head like a dark halo. Monica had no idea who this bell-ringer was, so she opened the door cautiously, leaving the chain hooked. It was like looking into a mirror that reflected an image of what she wanted to be—a slender girl wearing nothing but a silky tank top and matching jogging shorts, her hair pulled on top of her head in a scrunchy, bouncing on her toes to cool down from her run.

“Hi,” she said breathlessly. “You're Monica, right? You don't know me, but a mutual friend told me where you live. We have a lot of the same connections in D.C. I'm Chandra.”

Monica took the chain off and opened the door a bit wider. Of course she knew that name from the newspapers, from television, from radio, and knew the hell of having everyone know all about what you once thought was your private life.

Chandra stopped moving and pulled the scrunchy off her head, shaking her curls.

“I read you'd been missing for three weeks, but you don't look like you spent all that time running from Washington to New York,” Monica said.

“Of course not. I've been traveling, staying with people I meet along the way. I'm no long-distance marathon runner, but since I'm running away, I thought I'd actually run the last couple of blocks.”

“I'm starting a new life here, too,” said Monica, pushing on the door. “I'm letting D.C. go. That's something I've learned in therapy. I'm sure I don't know whoever it is who told you where I am.”

Chandra put out her hand to hold the door open. “I met your guy Bill once,” she said. “We've got more in common than you think.”

Caught off guard, Monica relaxed her hold on the door enough to let Chandra into her living room, where all the windows were open to the sun.

“You didn't…” she began, but Chandra immediately laughed and shook her head.

“I have my own man, I don't need yours.” Chandra blinked, as though used to dark rooms.

In the bright light, Monica could see that her well-made-up eyes were slightly red around the rims, with white cover-up no doubt hiding dark circles underneath. Monica knew the signs.

“So, Gary told you to take a hike?” she asked.

“No, I just took off. Obviously. I'd had about enough.” She sank to the couch and held her head in her hands while she sobbed. Monica didn't need to hear the story, which she knew by heart from her own life.

“So where's your luggage?” asked Monica.

With a dismissive wave of her hand, Chandra answered, “I left everything behind me, except these keys.” She threw her key ring onto the coffee table with a clank. “The last thing I wanted to keep,” she said. “I'm not going back. I don't need any of that old stuff.”

But Chandra did need a place to hide, some place where even her best friends wouldn't find her, so Monica gave up her closet, the one the size of a small room that was in fact being used as a baby's bedroom when she'd first looked at the apartment. There was a smaller closet in her bedroom across the hall so it was no trouble to make room for Chandra by removing coats, and boxes of stuff she hadn't unpacked yet. She even bought a futon, something she'd been meaning to get for guests, and curtains for the small window. She took out the clothes bars, except for one so Chandra could hang a few things, and put
in a four-drawer dresser and an extra bedside table she had. Until the room was ready, Chandra slept on Monica's couch; Monica let no one in, telling even her boyfriend that she'd gone to Miami for a couple of weeks.

 

Lying on the futon in her new room, Chandra begins to spill her secrets, most of which are common knowledge by now, but Monica notices how Chandra avoids watching the news or reading the papers, and knows how rude it would be to tell her that everyone's already heard what she's telling. Monica lies beside her, like girls do at a slumber party.

“He shaved his whole body,” says Chandra, clutching a pink flowered pillow she carried in from Monica's couch. “We had this ritual before sex—we'd have a bath together and shave each other all over. He even shaved my crotch, and I shaved his. He had a thing about hair, hated it anywhere but on his head. He'd had hair transplants and I used to tease him that he should use his pubic hair there, and his underarm hair, but he really didn't think that was funny. Actually, he didn't think much of anything was funny.

“You know, all that smooth skin, it was like making love to a snake.” Chandra shudders. “I should have known. Especially after he talked me into getting a Brazilian bikini wax where they even do your pubes and your butt, yanking every last hair so it won't grow back for months. The only really nasty thing he ever said to me was that Jews are just too hairy down there. But even then he was apologetic, like it was his fault.”

Monica sighs. “Yeah, both of us should have known, especially when they pretended to be so nice. Excessive politeness is always a bad sign.”

“Right. That's why I came to you. Who else would understand?
I mean, everyone knows what you went through with…”

“Yeah, but I'm so over him now.” Monica takes a deep, meditative breath. “There was a time I thought—well, you know what I thought—that the big creep would leave his wife, quit his job, abdicate just for love of me. Me!” She laughs, but Chandra, who isn't ready to laugh yet, can only manage a weak smile when she whispers, “My guy still might, if I tell him.”