The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels (46 page)

“Let’s switch positions,” Karl suggested.

He laid down on the bed, and Lori got on top of him. I got behind her. Her asshole was a gaping hole; it was like someone had bored a cavern into her ass, it was so wide. Obviously, I
didn’t have any trouble putting it in her, and I felt nothing. It took a minute for her sphincter to undilate, and snug around my cock. When it did, it was nice, but now her cunt was being
drilled by Karl’s monster. I closed my eyes and came into her bowels. Lori reached back for me as I pulled out, took my cock in her mouth, and cleaned it. Karl got up, gently pushing her onto
her stomach, so he could get on top of her, and go back into her ass. I stood there and watched his prick violate her ass in a glorious way – he was fucking her hard, she was crying into the
sheets, he started laughing, and came himself. He got up, his body covered in sweat, and said, “Look at that.”

Lori lay there shaking, her ass once again blown open.

“I love wrecking her rectum,” he said.

The woman who’d published my collection of stories, her name was Brianna. She had spiked, dyed blonde hair and a number of piercings and tattoos herself, and was two
years younger than me. I didn’t have any ideas about her because she was a lesbian, and lived with her lover, Raven. Raven didn’t like me, I could tell; Raven had dyed black hair and
was goth and had a whole lot of tattoos.

Brianna’s publishing my book was a fluke. She had a small company that released industrial bands (mostly San Francisco home grown) on CD, and she published a quarterly magazine with a
focus on alternative music and literature. She’d published several of my stories, and soon began accepting so many that one day she sent me an email suggesting she publish all the stories as
a book, because she also had a novel by this professor in Utah that she wanted to publish. So now she was a book publisher, her press was unknown – another small press in a sea of many. My
books were warehoused in her basement. Like the publisher of my first novel, she was a one-person operation, for the most part, and she was probably going to lose a lot of money putting my words
into the world.

“So you went to Karl and Lori’s,” she said.

Her lover, Raven, wrinkled her nose.

“Yeah,” I said.

Brianna grinned, and shook her head.

That evening, Luke and I did another reading, at Small Press Traffik. The attendance was small, but the people were very interested in the work. I signed a few books.

Brianna wasn’t completely alone in her venture as a publisher; she had her friend Kate helping her with publicity. Kate was at this reading, and she came back to Brianna’s apartment,
where we drank tequila and vodka, and Brianna and Raven smoked pot. Kate started smoking, and so did Luke. Then Luke wanted to order pizza, so we ordered pizza.

Luke retired early to the guest room; he had to go back to Utah in the morning. Raven also went to bed. I was going to sleep on the fold-out couch in the living room.

It was me, Brianna, and Kate.

The three of us got drunk. Brianna started dancing around the room, saying, “Why am I so crazy? Why am I so crazy?”

She bumped into a bookcase, a tall bookcase, that almost came crashing down on her.

“Bri!” Kate said, laughing.

“Oooohhh,” Brianna went. “I’m fucked up. Maybe I should go to bed.”

“I’m too drunk to go home,” Kate said, “but here’s a pillow!” and she laid her head in my lap. I was sitting on the couch.

I looked down at her.

“Hi,” she said.

I touched her round face, and caressed it. I ran my fingers through her thick, dirty blonde hair.

“What a cute sight,” my publisher said.

I tried to reach down and kiss Kate. It was hard. She sat up, and we kissed. Brianna watched us, weaving.

“I had a feeling you two would hit it off,” Brianna said.

“Go to bed,” Kate said.

Brianna stumbled into her bedroom.

“Turn off the lights,” Kate said.

I got up, switched the lights off, as Kate folded the couch out into a bed. As she adjusted the sheets, I got undressed. I got on the bed. She also took her clothes off, leaving her bra and
panties on. I held out my arms; she came to me, and we held each other and kissed.

Her body was small and plump and warm.

“When I saw your author photo, three months ago,” she said, “you know, for the book?”

“Yeah.”

“I knew I wanted you. I knew I’d have you.”

“Wow,” I said.

“What?

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You’re sexy,” she said.

“You don’t know anything about me,” I said.

“You don’t know anything about me. Do you know my last name?”

“No.”

“See.”

“You know mine,” I said.

“Yeah. I know a lot of things about you.”

“Like what?”

“Your stories are very painful,” she said.

“To you?”

“To me, to you, to anyone. You’re a sad soul.”

“Sometimes I’m sad,” I said. “Right now, I’m happy.”

“I’m happy, too.”

We kissed more. I unclasped her bra, touched her round, large breasts. I reached between her legs.

“I haven’t had sex in a year,” she told me.

“Oh.”

“Since my divorce.”

“OK.”

“But I’m ready to have sex.”

Sex with Kate wasn’t wild, bizarre, or kinky. I got on top of her; she wrapped her legs around me. We fucked slowly, and it was very nice. It was very warm. It was like we’d known
each other for many years.

We slept in each other’s arms.

In the morning, she was gone. I looked at the ceiling. Luke was gone, too. I had a flight back home late in the afternoon.

I was sitting in the patio of the campus bar, drinking a pitcher of dark beer with Bart. Bart had been drinking since noon; he was pretty gone.

“One of these days,” Bart was saying, “you have to share one of your women with me!”

“I don’t have any women,” I said.

“Yeah, right.”

“Nothing real, like a girlfriend,” I said.

“But you get some now and then.”

“Now and then,” I said.

“Did you really used to fuck Alexia? Before she vanished?”

“Yeah. She’s in San Francisco.”

“You liked her?”

“And Hanna.”

“Hanna?”

“You know Hanna.”

“Of
course
I know Hanna,” Bart said. “I fucked her once. Maybe twice.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Hanna
fucks
,” Bart said.

I nodded.

“OK, I didn’t fuck her: I was lying,” he said. “But I know some people who have.”

“OK.”

“Hey, there’s Zina,” he said.

He started waving.

Zina was a poet in the MFA program, whom I’d met several times in passing. She had light brown skin and dark hair, wide brown eyes and a chiseled, distinct face. I knew she was
half-Spanish, half-German, something like that, she’d told me once, at a party, I think. She joined Bart and myself.

“Have a beer, Zina,” Bart said.

“I was just on my way home,” she said.

“You can have a beer,” I said.

“I usually don’t like beer,” she said. “Maybe I’ll have some wine.” She got up and went to the bar, returned with a glass of white wine. She was wearing
tight, dark slacks and a blue blouse.

The three of us didn’t talk about much – some gossip, some b.s. on the nature of poetry. It was starting to get dark out. “I wanted to get home before it got dark,” Zina
said.

“Where do you live?”

“Two blocks away. I don’t like walking in the dark. You think you could walk me home?”

“I could,” I said.

“See ya,” Bart said.

So I walked with Zina.

“You’re a strange character,” she told me.

“Why do you say that?”

“No one can figure you out.”

“Do people try and figure me out?”

“Some people do.”

“Like who?”

“People.”

“Maybe you’re the strange one.”

“I
know
I’m the strange one,” she said. “My rabbit is going to be mad at me. I’m late; he’s hungry I bet.”

“Your what?”

“My rabbit,” Zina said. “I have a pet rabbit. He’s an albino rabbit.”

“You keep him in a cage?”

“Not at all. He roams free. I mean, he does have a cage. He doesn’t stay in it much.”

“Doesn’t he shit all over the place?” I said. “Dingle-berries, or whatever they’re called.”

“No. He’s trained to poop in his cage,” Zina said.

“No, he’s not. You can’t train rabbits to do that.”

“I did.”

“I thought they weren’t in control of where they crapped,” I said.

“My rabbit has control.”

“Your albino rabbit,” I said. “I don’t believe you,” I said.

“Think I’m making this up?”

“You’re pulling my leg.”

“Do you want to
see
my albino rabbit who’s trained to shit in his cage or what?” Zina asked.

She lived on the second floor of the apartment complex. I went inside with her. Her place was sparse of furniture, heavy on books. A small, albino rabbit (white fur, red eyes) was waiting at the
door.

“Moby Dick!” She picked up the rabbit and hugged it. “This is Nick; Nick, this is Moby Dick.”

I nodded to the rabbit.

“He looks hungry, doesn’t he?” she said.

I nodded.

“He’s very hungry,” she said. I went with her into the kitchen, where she put the rabbit down, and put some rabbit feed and a carrot stick in the rabbit’s wire-mesh cage.
“You want something real to drink?” she said. “Besides that god-awful beer.”

“What’s wrong with beer?”

“There’s something basically barbaric about beer,” she said.

“What do you have?”

“Let’s take a look.” She opened a cabinet above the stove. I think, for the first time, I took a good look at her body (and her ass) and admired what I saw. “Rum and
vanilla sherry,” she said, “it’s all I have.”

“Coke?”

“Pepsi.”

“A rum and Pepsi sounds good.”

“Your wish is my command.”

We both had rum and Pepsi, sitting at the small table near the kitchen. The kitchen was littered with toys – dolls, army men, action figures, dinosaurs.

“Toys for your rabbit?” I said.

“Toys for me,” she said, “I like toys.”

She was twenty-nine, had majored in religious studies as an undergrad, at this same university. She’d had an affair with one of her professors. We began to drink sherry.

I’ll skip right to the sex. We were both pretty drunk. I’m not sure where it began; yes, I was very drunk and we were talking and getting closer and the next thing I knew we were
frantically, almost violently kissing. She was sitting in my lap, the way she would sit many times later, and she opened my shirt up and said she liked my chest, said, “It looks
delicious,” and she bit into it, bit into my skin, but I didn’t care, the pain was OK, like the pain when she bit my lips as we kissed, and how she grabbed my throat and started to
choke me, the air leaving me, letting go just at the right time. I opened her blouse, unclasped her bra, her nipples at my fingers, her dark eyes glaring at me, and the circles under those eyes.
The circles under her eyes would come to haunt me some day, and I only wish I knew then what I was about to get into.

She had a double bed in her bedroom, and a computer on a metal desk. There was an opened document, what looked like a poem.

I was too drunk to fuck; she said it was OK. We were partly undressed. I took her sex to my mouth – she tried to stop me, once, but didn’t the second time – her sex small and
salty like the sex of any woman, and then she tried to do the same for me but I stopped her because she was hurting me with her teeth and she said she was very drunk, she never got this drunk, and
we lay there holding each other. I couldn’t sleep, and I wanted her; I thought she was asleep but she wasn’t and we were kissing again and I started to put myself in her, whispering,
“It’s OK, now,” and in the dark I saw her eyes roll up in her head and she grabbed the metal rail of her bed and we finally fucked. An hour later, still drunk but awake, we tried
again, she told me she liked
men coming in from behind
, but we were still too drunk to be very amorous and she began to masturbate. She masturbated with a frenzy, lying on her stomach, her
hand going at it on her cunt like that hand was possessed. I watched and she said, “I’m sorry, I like doing that. I like getting myself off.”

She seemed to sleep well. I couldn’t sleep. I kept hugging her warm body next to me. I liked it here with her. I liked her bed, her company, more than any of the others, these past few
months – my divorce from celibacy, my entrance back into the world of sex and women.

In the morning we looked at each other, feeling awkward, and when I asked if this would happen again, she said, “That’s up to you. You can come over any time.”

The next night, we made love and we weren’t drunk and we were like two regular people connecting and everything seemed to be just right.

Zina’s alarm went off, and we both jumped. Zina grabbed her alarm clock and threw it against the wall. It stopped. Naked, we looked at each other, and again there was
that awkward feeling. This was my third stay at her place.

“Oh,” we both said.

“God,” she said. “I hate alarm clocks.”

“What time is it?”

“Must be eight.”

“I, um, Zina,” I said.

She touched my lips with her hand. “Don’t say anything. You don’t need to say anything. Do you need to go anywhere? I have an early class. Do you actually attend classes?
It’s not like I’m prying. I just want to start some kind of conversation in an obviously maladroit situation. Listen to the words I use. So I’m a poet and, uh, you already know
it. Huh. Like we look at each other and say: ‘What should I say?’ Is anything really on both our minds? There must be a lot. I’m really not sure what’s on my mind. I have
this very small mind, you see. Not that I’m small-minded, just that my brain is small like my body is small because I’m small person. I always wanted to be a tall person: so my
mind’d be tall with tall thoughts all the time. Are you married and don’t want to tell me and: am I assisting in adultery? You’re not married, no, I can tell. Maybe you were once
married: don’t know. Not that I wouldn’t have slept with you if you – were married; but I really don’t like to sleep with married men any more. Oh, hell, I don’t care.
I could just pretend I’m sick; we can stay naked and stay in bed and sleep or make love or watch TV –”