The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels (35 page)

“You coming?” the woman said finally and, not smiling, reached out and took her hand. Her eye, her single artificial eye, looked at Pell with more warmth and sincerity than did her
gray, real one.

But the hand was there, out and firm. Strong and real. A gesture in more ways than just an invitation to crawl in.

So Pell did, removing her clothes and moving into the small bed with a fluid, natural motion that defied her quaking nervousness. Long arms, still somehow cold from the night out, wrapped around
her. Taller, Arc’s head was above her, the woman’s breath a periodic hot wind through Pell’s hair. For the smaller woman, Arc was a strong, corded neck and the slope of a hard
chest. A fluttering excitement surged through her, and it was all she could do to resist scooting farther down, to see close up, to have Arc’s brown nipples close to her lips.

A rough pat in the top of her head snapped Pell out of her tense anticipation – tilting her head up she looked into one crystal, one gray, eye . . . and a face stone still.

The same part of Pell that wore that dress, that stepped outside her constant fear, moved her face close and kissed Arc on her cool lips.

Click, one real, one not looked hard at her. Arc’s gaze was penetrating and distant at the same time – holding for too long. Then she lunged – predatory and quick –
returning the kiss, but lip to lip, so hard that Pell pulled back suddenly, fearing bruising. But ever stronger, Arc pushed further, roughly parting Pell’s lips and striking with a hard, dry
tongue.

A beat, maybe two, of Pell’s fast-hammering heart, and her tongue met Arc’s in the hot duel. The force was strange to Pell, an oral fistfight when she was used to dancing – but
her body welcomed it, even though her mind was chilled by the roughness: her nipples became aching points, so hard as to hurt, and deep between her lips her clit jumped as if shocked and the hidden
folds of her cunt grew hot with moisture.

Arc’s hand was similarly hard and quick, from somewhere it came between them – grabbing Pell’s right breast in a muscular clamp. Gentle caresses, butterfly kisses, stroking
touches . . . the shock of the grip, the strength was a hard rush – Pell felt her cunt gush hot moisture, felt a voltage shock in her clit, her nipples. She gasped, breaking their kiss and
breathing heavy into Arc’s face . . . who laughed, deep and brass. Grabbing the heavier girl in those two strong arms, Arc pushed her further up the bed, flopping Pell’s bigger breasts
into her firm face. Pell started the scream, the cry, long before Arc’s teeth met on her left nipple – but let it continue out in a sharp animal sound. On their own, her arms reached
down to push the strong woman away – to force her clamping teeth off her nipple – but there was no strength in them, no real desire to break the agony. Her clit, already throbbing,
reached out on its own and clamped her legs together in a thigh-clenching near-masturbation.

Then a hand, now warm, reached down and yanked them apart. A smashing ache snapped up through Pell – the initial throb of a sprain – but, again, she let the pain rock up through her,
just another kind of stimulus. Deep down, she was crying – fear quaking her, making her sweat cold, her breathing shallow, but she was also too far into it to care, to ask for it to stop. She
was more scared of the pleasure she felt, that she was so wet, that her clit was so damned hard, than what she imagined Arc would do.

Her legs were wider apart than they had ever been before – for no one else she’d opened them, allowed them to be forced apart. She showed her cunt to Arc, buried under the cheap
sheets – she spread, hungry, wet and open for her.

Sensation, down among the short, brown curls, the wide, wet lips, the pink finger of her hard clit. At first she didn’t recognize it, couldn’t place it – a filling, a firm
thrust that went deep and long into her. For a moment, puzzlement and near-panic flashed through her, and her yawning legs almost snapped shut: dick? Was there something obvious about Arc that
she’d missed?

No, that wasn’t it – besides, Pell was too far along to really care if she was being fucked by the woman. Fingers, yes – rough, hard, fucking fingers. She didn’t know how
many . . . not one, not two, maybe three: she hoped not four. But fingers, yes, Pell was being finger-fucked, hand-fucked, by Arc.

She repeated it to herself, a mantra, with the hard-edged and mean images that came with it: finger-fucked in her hot, wet cunt. Fucked by a butch’s hand. Fucked with her legs open –
images, words, thoughts that would have made her blush, now just made her cunt drip onto the cheap mattress.

Arc’s fingers became a brutal beat into her – one, two, three, four. A hammering, as fast as she could – or almost as fast as she could. Cold fear again, the thought of
internal bruising, of warm wet from blood and not just from hot moisture, having her cunt not just fucked but beaten.

She came – with a wave of shame and fear, thinking of hot blood, she came. It was a hard, fast ride – a teeth-clenching, body-rigid come and slammed her soft, spread legs down around
Arc’s brutal hand in a tendon-aching lock.

The quakes went on and on and on, rolling down into a body-quiver, a whole self tick that seemed to follow the beating of her near-spasming heart. Distantly, she was aware that Arc was moving up
the bed to spoon up next to her.

After a point Pell fell asleep, a dreamless empty, to the soft clicks of Arc’s eye, watching her as she did so.

In the morning, Arc was gone. Though she was never proud of it, Pell spent most of that morning looking through her cheap, broken or worthless possessions to see if Arc had
taken anything.

The inventory turned up nothing missing. Nothing was left, either. No note. No number left conveniently for her to find. Nothing at all.

Pell spent the rest of the day staring at her pad, frozen in the middle of her own gesture, her own reach to trap the girl in pen and ink, paint and charcoal. She stared at it for what felt like
hours, crippled by having her own natural eyes, her own native perceptions.

After a point she got up and moved around the apartment, putting down things and picking up others, absently cataloging the minutiae of her little life – wondering how the woman would have
seen them – either through her click-click-clicking sight or through her gray real one so used to seeing things at a street level.

She was two people, walking around doing nothing. One of her was somewhere else, distant on a plane of excitement, who desperately wanted the woman again, fevered for her hand in her wet cunt,
for the pain that had been so much a part of her pleasure. The other Pell, though, was frightened – who didn’t want to spread her legs again – even in masturbatory memory of the
night previous: who was terrified that she had enjoyed any part of it.

One side won. Without a conscious thought, she found herself in her small bed, the sheets still faintly smelling of herself. Rest, she told herself, tired. But she found herself moving against
the firm resilience of the mattress, pushing her pelvis down into it, calmly relishing in the memory, the sensations. After a point, she knew she could not go any further – couldn’t
escape, so she brought her hand down between her legs, finding herself wetter, her clit harder, than ever she could remember.

At first she started down a very familiar road – one finger gingerly, softly stroking her hard nub . . . but Arc intruded – or rather the hard memory of her. Just one finger
wouldn’t do; soft thighs pressed together wouldn’t work. No, after a single moment of fear and shame, she parted her legs – again – as wide as she could and slipped two of
her own fingers (three being too frightening) into the molten wetness of herself.

She imagined a lot of things, under the cool sheets of her small bed. Arc’s touch, the sight of her brown nipples, the cool strength of her in the bed, and then she came, she bellowed and
roared in a powerful wave . . . thinking of a slight amount, just the tiniest trace, of blood on come-slick fingers as Arc had fucked her the night before.

Sleep again, this one lit by dreams of crystal and gray – of clockwork clicks and a cool presence, burning but also remote, removed. After a long few hours, she awoke to darkness beyond
the dirty windows.

Getting up to shower, and prepare something simple and cheap to eat, she noticed the bill, laying forgotten and discarded near the crumpled remains of the night before. The meal had been
expensive. Very. And Pell could not help but think, couldn’t stop herself from pondering, how much Arc charged for a night, and if that amount was the same as a very expensive meal of Chinese
food.

Pell hadn’t forgotten her. It was a long time, yes, a week and some days, but Arc’s memory was strong in her mind. At first it bothered Pell a lot to have the tall
woman’s face, mannerisms and voice still lurking around every corner in her mind. But soon it became a background of the city, a rhythm to her existence. Water from the faucet was Arc washing
her hands after eating. A window was how she’d seen the woman’s face reflected there, caught her watching Pell again with her steel-gray and just plain steel eye. Her dirty underwear on
the floor pinged a memory of the fear she’d felt, walking into her place that night. It took her a long time to finally pick them up and add them to her laundry bag – simply because she
subtly enjoyed the memory of that rush of panic at seeing them: the first time they’d been together.

Other memories, the first sight of Arc’s hard nipples, her teeth setting down onto Pell’s own, Arc’s fingers slamming into her wet cunt. The ornate mandala of her artificial
eye, the clicking of her examination, the music of Arc’s sight: How could she ever forget?

No, she hadn’t forgotten, but when the buzzer sounded she actually wasn’t thinking of her. She was working, having caught sight of a book’s partial title in a
store window the day before:
The Peacock
. . . The images that’d tumbled through her imagination at seeing those words brought her almost running back to her tiny place and forced her
pencil into her hand.
The Peacock Eye
was what she thought she’d read, though she was sure that wasn’t the title, and that was what she started to draw. First with smooth sweeps
of charcoal and graphite and then with a fine camel-hair brush that’d cost her breakfast, lunch and dinner for three days, she started in.

An hour later, the eye started to look like the image she’d formed from that half-seen book. She was lost and alone, caught up in the storm of sketching. It was a good feeling to be not
herself, to be captured by the pursuit of the work. It felt great not to just sit on the edge of her bed and let the room, and everything in it, remind her of Arc and that night.

The medium was paper, ink, charcoal and graphite. The image was the eye on the end of a peacock feather. She’d filled its center with geometries and forms like steel gears, compass points,
brass fittings, screws and miniature bolts. The form seemed to stare out at her with a cool logic, an immaculate watchmaker’s perception.

Then she heard it, deep inside her mind – shattering the turmoil of creation: Click-click –

–
click
.

Then the buzz of her doorbell. Getting up, numb from the hard revelation that Arc still lived deep within her, she went to the door.

“I need someplace,” the tall woman said from the street, looking up at Pell through the heavy iron security gate with one hard, cold mechanical eye, and one red-rimmed with a patina
of almost tears.

She wouldn’t talk – at least, not much: “Just let me sit over here, OK?” was what she said, coming in and sitting in the left-hand corner of the room,
wedged in between Pell’s kitchen door and her brick-and-board bookshelf. There, she slumped over so that her head rested on the dog-eared familiarity of Carroll’s
The Basketball
Diaries
.

Drawing her long legs almost up to her chin, Arc closed both her eyes – bloodshot real and too clear, too crystal, artificial, and gently rocked back and forth.

Pell wanted to touch her, wanted to pull the woman into her arms and mimic that rocking, to take her back to a place where, somewhere, she was small and vulnerable. But she didn’t. It
wasn’t that she wasn’t able to – it was as if a cold truth had dropped down onto her shoulders: that this, what she was seeing, was just about all of Arc. If she did go down
there, drop down into the pain, then she might be walking through the woman’s last shut door, last safe place.

So she didn’t, though she wanted to.

Instead, for three hours without moving, she sat on the edge of her mattress and calmly watched Arc. For those three hours, Arc remained as she had been since she walked in: head on the softness
of a well-read paperback, knees pressed into her strong skin, eyes closed. The only sounds she made were her rattling breaths, in and out, past lungs that had either cried too much or could break
the clouds to start, and her eye – which, soft, muffled, clicked and gently whirred within her puffy lid.

After three hours Pell had to go piss. After, she made some Darjeeling tea and put it at the woman’s feet. Arc didn’t stop making her two noises, didn’t open her eyes (one
fake, one real).

Pell went back to her bed, her mattress, and watched Arc till her eyes grew hot and heavy.

She must’ve, she realized with some horror, fallen asleep – but the embarrassment and disgust with herself was tempered with silk and a single hot, slow, breath on her eyelids and
forehead – faded with the tender sensation of Arc’s long, lean body slowly slipping into the bed.

Cool, almost cold, before – Arc was warm, near burning, and her skin seemed . . . real, silken. For a long time, they just held each other – an embrace of soft skin, of breaths
mixing on each other’s shoulders. Pell remembered Arc’s slow, ragged breathing, the way she seemed to suck each breath in on the verge of a shattering moan. Then – after how much
time, Pell could never be certain – Arc moved forward and kissed Pell’s shoulder – as much as the roughness before, this kiss sent even more current tingling through her. It
didn’t seem to be Arc behind the kiss as much as the small child within her. It was a hungry kiss, a kiss of reassurance – the same kind of grounding happened when her strong hands
reached up and cupped both of Pell’s heavy breasts.