The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels (49 page)

“I don’t see any French fry places,” she said, driving.

“Well, it doesn’t matter.”

“You’re hungry.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I’m hungry,” she said, “but I guess it doesn’t matter.”

I don’t want French fries, I don’t want to be here; I wish we were home.

Alexia met me at a coffeeshop in San Francisco – it was easy to get there from the airport. I’d made an impromptu flight from LA to The City, calling Alexia on the
phone just before I got on the plane. “I’ll be there in less than two hours,” I said.

She was wearing a black bodysuit and a little hat, and her glasses. She already had a chai tea. The coffeehouse served beer, and I had a beer.

We kissed, lightly. A peck, really, between old friends.

“So where are you reading, this time?” she asked.

“Nowhere.”

“You’re not here for a reading?”

“No.”

“You’re just here?”

“I don’t know why I’m here,” I said. “Maybe I’m here for you,” I said.

“I don’t believe that,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “I’m here.”

“I’m glad you’re here.” She reached over for a quick kiss. “I’ve been wondering about you,” she said. “It’s been a while. I even missed you.
Do you believe me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you want to go back to my place?”

“Yes,” I said.

I couldn’t do it.

We were in bed, we were naked, we were touching, kissing, tasting, all that – a finger in her ass, her hands cupping my balls.

I moved away from her.

“Nicky?”

“I feel like I’m using you,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “There’s something very wrong. But it’s OK.”

“I think I was in love,” I said.

“Love is nice.”

“The past five months, I was living with someone. I was actually sharing my life with someone.”

“I see.”

“We went to LA. In LA, she told me she was staying at her brother’s for a week. She said when she got back, she wanted me and my stuff out of her place. She said a week was enough
time. Is a week enough time,” I said, “to alter one’s life?”

“So you came to San Francisco?”

“It was an impulse.”

“A good impulse.” She put her head against my back, her arm around my waist.

“I called you,” I said.

“I was here,” she said.

“I feel like a shit,” I said.

“
Do
you love her?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What the hell do I know?” I said.

“I thought I loved you, once,” Alexia said. “But I was using you.”

“How?”

“People always use each other,” she said, “for one reason or another. It’s a selfish world. You know this. You just have to accept it,” she said, “and embrace
it.”

“You loved me?”

“What’s love?”

“This is OK?” I said.

“It’s very OK,” she said.

Alexia told me I could fuck her pussy, if I wanted; she was no longer a virgin.

“What happened?” I asked.

She said, “The whole wait-till-I-get-married thing was bullshit. I was away from my family, and I started to think about it. I said the hell with it.”

“Who had the honor?” I couldn’t help but think of Mo.

“It was with some guy,” Alexia said. “Just this guy. He’s living in some stupid place like Arkansas now. I didn’t even care for him. A fuck-buddy. I didn’t
even tell him I was a virgin. I was all prepared for – I don’t know what. Pain. Blood. Ecstasy. Angels singing. Bands marching. Motions of love and truth and the face of God. It was no
big deal. It was nothing. He put it in and that was that. I was no longer a vagina virgin. And my life was just the same.”

I didn’t want her cunt. I wanted her like we used to be, a grasp of my past. I fucked her in the ass, very deeply in her ass, and it was good, her ass all over my cock,
her ass clamping down on my cock. We went into the bathroom, she opened her mouth, and I peed in her mouth, I peed deeply into her mouth, down her throat, on her tongue and teeth, on her lips and
chin. It was good, my urine in her mouth, its taste filling her, warming her. I lay on the bed, she spread my cheeks, and she reamed my anus, deeply tongued my asshole, licking and sucking. It was
good, her tongue up my ass.

As I knew it would be good.

It was getting dark, and I held her in my arms. In the bed. In her room. In her home.

I touched her hair.

She touched my hair.

I kissed her.

She kissed me.

Our smell . . .

“This is very nice,” Alexia said.

“Yes it is,” I said.

THIEF OF NAMES

Lucy Taylor

Afterwards, Nicholas wondered how he could have ever thought the little blonde with the tattoo on her tit could have been worth the risk she posed to his marriage, his
self-respect, and – as it turned out – so much more. Yet still, there was that moment of insanity when he actually debated the point, before admitting that nothing could have been worth
what the encounter cost him. It was that second’s hesitation, though, that gave an indication of how much Nicholas Berringer valued sex – or at least what sex represented to him.
Fucking, to him, had always meant freedom and conquest and masculine power. Even when consensual, the act was at heart, forced entry and violent gratification, the plundering of empty space by
protuberant member. It was also safety and solace and the warm dark heart of his mother’s womb, the sacred place where there was no Nicholas, where nothing was named and there was only
One.

Although he would not have put it quite that way. Had he been asked, he would have simply said that fucking made him feel alive, gave him the willingness to make the effort of drawing the next
breath. He would have said that, as exclamation points marked memorable sentences, so erections punctuated the climactic points of a man’s life.

Now, as he drove well above the speed limit on I–75 in the pouring rain, headed toward the Ambassador Bridge and the US/Canadian border at Detroit-Windsor, he wondered if trying to track
down Sonny Valdez wasn’t the journey of a masochistic fool, a pathetic attempt to feel like he was taking charge, doing something, for God’s sake, to try to save his own life.

I’m going to ask Sonny Valdez for help
, he thought, grimacing at the irony of it, for he could scarcely stand to inhabit the same planet as the man. The three best years of his
life, of his marriage, had been when he believed that Sonny Valdez was dead, having expired wretchedly in some flophouse in Toronto’s commercial sex district. But Valdez, as it turned out,
was still very much alive, and now Nicholas needed his help.
Jesus
,
I am fucked
, he thought bitterly,
I am truly royally fucked
.

“Do you like to fuck?” the cute blonde in the blue satin blouse had asked him.

Her exact words. He’d almost dumped his beer in his lap. She had to be a hooker, of course, but still – talk about coming on strong.

She read his expression and giggled, showing slightly crooked front teeth. “Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m not a working girl. Well, I mean I work, all right. I work on a road
construction crew. I’m what they call a flagger, which basically means I’m one of those chicks stands out in the broiling sun on the highway all day holding a sign says
Slow Down
and the good ol’ boys goin’ by in pick-up trucks holler at us and try to grope our tits out the window.”

“I never knew that,” he said, quietly bemused.

“I don’t usually talk to guys in bars, either, but my boyfriend – ex-boyfriend, that is – he’s off with some trailer trash whore he met in a honkytonk. I figure
what’s sauce for the gander’s goose is – I mean, sauce for the goose –” She giggled raucously. “Aww, you know what I mean.”

She was drunk, of course, and he reminded himself that he didn’t care much for sex with drunken women. They had nasty habits like throwing up on your cock or passing out in the middle of
sex. They tended to walk off with your Rolex or look through your wallet when you went to the John.

“So
do
you?” she said.

“Do I what?”

“
You
know.”

“What you said?”

“What’sa matter, you scared to say the F-word?”

“I think you’ve had too much to drink.” He turned to the bartender, signaling for his check. He was only in Cincinnati for the one day to look at some lots zoned for
residential development. The lots had proved disappointing – people in the market for half-million dollar homes didn’t usually want a view, however distant, of an industrial park
– and he was scheduled to fly home to Detroit the next morning. Beth was going in late to work so she could meet him at the airport.

Beth – God, what about Beth? If she had been homely or overweight or uninterested in sex, that might have been one thing, but she was lush and lithe and seductive and fucked the way he did
– like her life depended on it. Every time he cheated on her, he swore to himself it would be the last time. Afterwards, he would go to church like the good Catholic boy he once was and
confess to the priest and vow to be different: yet, sooner or later, it would happen again.

“C’mon, honey, you look like you need to relax.” The girl leaned forward, allowing him to look down her blouse and see the tattoo of a bumblebee on the inner swell of one
breast. It was done in vivid black and yellow, its stinger pointing downward at her nipple. “I can help you relax real good.”

“I’ll bet you can.” He debated, but only a moment, for his dick had already decided that she was his type. Her slender, sinewy little body was thinner than he would have
preferred, but she exuded that slutty decadence that always made him feel like a conqueror on the verge of sacking some foreign city notorious for its depravity. Eau de wench, essence of whore.

Having made the decision, he felt emboldened, eyeing her up and down with overt and calculating lust, before he said, “But regarding your question, the answer is, ‘Yes. Yes, I
do.’ ”

Was it his imagination, or did she flinch slightly? Maybe she’d just been trying to shock him. Maybe this was some kind of game – somebody had dared her to come on to a man in a bar,
and secretly she’d been hoping he wouldn’t take her up on her offer. For a second, her lower lip quivered, and her boldness seemed on the verge of disassembling into little-girl sobs.
Then she rallied, took a deep breath, and seemed to pull herself together from sheer force of will. From the looks of the effort she exerted, it didn’t seem like she had it in her to do that
too many more times.

“My name’s Elise.” She slid her fingers through his. Her skin, he noticed, was surprisingly cold, but she managed a grin as she said, “You got a room?”

“718.”

“You got a wife?”

Now it was his turn to grin. “Not tonight.”

The rain hammered the windshield of the Volvo with such force that the wipers couldn’t work fast enough to sweep it away. A semi, lumbering past like a maddened
triceratops, sent up an arc of grey water that inundated the car and forced Nicholas for a few moments to drive blind. When he saw the lights of immigration at the Detroit-Windsor border crossing
up ahead, he braked cautiously and pulled up next to a booth, where an immigration agent, after glancing perfunctorily at his license plates, waved him on.

Accelerating back into the rain, Nicholas let out his breath which, until that moment, he didn’t realize he’d been holding.

Although his business trips took him to Toronto three or four times a year, he was always absurdly relieved when it was done, when no need was seen to run his name through the computer to check
for misdeeds in his past. Even if the immigration agents pulled his record and realized it was a convicted felon passing through their country’s symbolic portals, there was nothing they could
hold him on, of course. In the years since he got out of prison, he hadn’t committed any crime more serious than minor traffic violations. But if they knew about his past, they might be
inclined to detain him while they searched him and his car. And this time, for once, there was something for them to find – the 0.9 mm Biretta stashed in the vehicle’s console.

By five o’clock that evening, Nicholas was in Toronto, sipping a Scotch and soda in his lakefront room at the Harbor Castle. He debated whether or not to call Beth, but hated having to add
to the web of lies he’d already conceived. Supposedly, he was up here at some kind of Home Builders Convention and would be home Sunday night. Should he need more time, he’d have to
invent an explanation for the extended stay and hope Beth wouldn’t ask too many questions.

Too early to hit any of Sonny Valdez’s haunts just yet. He knew he should eat something, but appetite was a memory, these days. His head hurt. He ran cold water over a washcloth and laid
it over his eyes as he stretched out on the bed. Outside, the rain was still pounding, grey metallic teeth gnashing against the panes. In the street below, sirens screamed.

When they went up to Nicholas’s room at the Cincinnati Sheraton, the girl – Elise – gigglingly chugged two of the little bottles of Scotch out of the minibar
while Nicholas unbuttoned her blouse and reveled in the enchanting sounds of her skirt zipper going down and her silk stockings unrolling. Naked, she was even thinner than he expected, and the
untanned areas of her skin stood out in pasty contrast to the rest of her body’s dark, glossy-looking bronze.

Appraising her, Nicholas reflected that she was certainly no prettier or sexier than Beth; her body hinted at no mysteries to be uncovered or exotic depravities to be unleashed, nor did he get
any inkling of a psyche ariot with new and perverse fantasies. Indeed, if anything, there was a certain sad banality to the girl, as though she were somehow grievously miscast in her role as a
slut, a tramp, an easy piece of ass.

And yet, for all that, Nicholas could no more
not
fuck her than he could have not fucked the women who had preceded her. Like a compulsive gambler viewing a slot machine or a lottery
ticket, for Nicholas, each new sexual encounter seemed to promise the possibility of some as-yet-undreamed-of ecstasy. Each pussy was the potential passage to some state of higher bliss that
flickered across his mind in dreams and yet always eluded him.