The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 5 Read online

“Yes, they smell of the people who rode in them – unwashed.”

  “You should have been in the cab I drove a couple of days ago – it smelled like pussy. I didn’t mind.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yup, someone was well and truly fucked in the backseat before I got it. Damn, made me randy all day.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  The driver shrugged.

  They just entered the tunnel when the passenger asked, “Did you say you were between positions?”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah. I lost my regular job seven weeks ago. It was outsourced.”

  “I see. Well, you’ll just have to adapt. It’s an evolving world, you know.”

  “Evolving? Outsourced? Do you remember when they called it ‘downsizing’? It seems every decade or so they come up with another euphemism for tossing people out on the street.”

  “My company outsources,” he said with a hint of satisfaction. “It’s a global economy – workers in this country – in the entire developed world – will just have to adapt and evolve along with it.”

  “Really? I suppose we’re supposed to evolve into a Third World workforce.”

  “Labor is a commodity, young man. Those are cold hard facts, but facts nonetheless. Adapt or perish.”

  The driver rolled his eyes. “I have two degrees, and I haven’t even paid off the student loans on the first one. Am I supposed to go into debt to get another – to adapt?”

  His passenger sniffed again. “It smells like stale popcorn back here.”

  “What are you, some top-suite executive?”

  “Yes – yes, I am.”

  “So, if you hate cabs so much, what are you flagging one down on the street for?”

  “My wife was supposed to pick me up. I don’t know what’s happened to her. I can assure you, this is the last cab I’ll ride in if I can help it.”

  “Maybe you just missed her. What does she drive?”

  “A Jaguar.”

  “Hmm, seems I recall seeing a Jag in the area a few times last week – not tonight, though. Oh, well, sit back and enjoy the ride.”

  “Not likely.”

  “Really, mister, a lot of strange and wonderful things happen in cabs.”

  “I can believe the ‘strange’ part.”

  The driver chuckled. “Well, yeah. Like for instance, remember I told you about the cab I drove all day that smelled of pussy.”

  “Yes.” He winced.

  “The reason it smelled that way is because the night before I drove it, my pal, Raul, was at the wheel.”

  “Oh? Does he rape his passengers?”

  “Ha! That’s funny. No, sir. It was Raul who was nearly raped. See, he had picked up this woman in the financial district – a handsome babe she was. She had a buck too. Anyway, as soon as she got in the cab she started coming on to Raul, talking dirty to him. At one point she says – now get this: ‘Give me some of that greasy spic cock.’”

  “Sounds like she had issues.”

  “Issues? Man, she had issues soaking her pants, is what she had. So Raul fucked her in the backseat. She took him every possible way she could. Finished up with an inspired ass-fuck.”

  “Driver, you really don’t need to share this with me.”

  “Oh, I beg your pardon, sir. I thought you might be interested. You see, she was obviously a well-to-do woman. Who knows, she might live in Manchester-by-the-Sea.”

  “Driver, I really am getting irritated. There is a number here that I can call to complain, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “Sorry, sir. I really did think you’d be interested. I’ll shut up.”

  The passenger nodded. He was silent for a few miles, then he peered at the driver in the rearview.

  “Why did you think I’d be interested – in the woman, I mean?”

  “Huh? Oh, it’s just – well she was something of an enigma, that is until she came on to me.”

  “You?”

  “Yes, sir. I was getting to that. You see, this chick has been showing up off and on in the same area for about a month now. She parks, then trolls for cock. She isn’t fooling anyone. And it isn’t just cabbies she picks on, I’ve spotted her pick up guys stumbling out of bars, any guy who looks a little rough and ragged. You see, I figured she had some sort of self-humiliation thing going – some women are really into that.”

  “Like I said, she must have some serious issues. I think she needs help. I hope, for her sake, her family finds out and gets it for her.”

  “That’s a nice thought, sir, but that isn’t what she’s about.”

  “Oh?”

  “No,” the driver said. “People who are into humiliation – well, they get off on their own degradation. Picture a soccer mom allowing herself to be fucked by some greasy slob. She’s thinking, ‘Oh, I’m so pure and wholesome, and this dirty beast is defiling me with his dirty cock.’ But she loves it – see what I’m saying?”

  “Hmm, are you some kind of psychologist or something?”

  “Amateur – but you get my meaning.”

  “Yes, driver – degradation, fresh scrubbed soccer mom allowing herself to be violated.” He tried to sound bored.

  “Exactly – hey you’re a lot sharper than a lot of the execs I run into.”

  “You’re very close to having a complaint lodged against you and your company, young man.”

  “Sorry – you still want to hear about the woman, right?”

  Feigning exasperation, he sighed. “Go ahead.”

  “Well, you see, she wasn’t into degradation – not her own anyway. She was just looking for a stud. She liked them rough and dirty, but she made no bones about it, she was in charge.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “When she fucked Raul, for instance. She called him everything: lousy spic, grease ball, taco fucker. Told him he was a dirty, greasy mongrel, and how she was privileging him by letting him fuck her rich, white suburban ass.”

  “Issues.”

  “Maybe. Now, Raul, he doesn’t give a shit. He’s getting his balls drained, and she can call him anything she wants for all he cares.”

  “Well, no one’s cheated if everyone’s satisfied,” his passenger sniffed.

  “Hey, that’s good. I have to remember that.” The driver laughed, a sharp hard laugh.

  “Now,” he continued. “This same crazy bitch came on to me just the other night. She waved me down and told me to drive to the waterfront. We parked in a lot and left the meter running.

  “This babe – well, she might have been in her early fifties, but she took good care of herself. Nothing sagged – I’m saying she had a body as taut as a 20-year-old girl. She was rich, you know? And she looked like she’d paid top dollar all her life to keep her body in pristine condition. She smelled good too – expensive.”

  “And?”

  “Hold on, I have to tell it right. Anyway, she says, ‘It’s your lucky night.’ And she kneels on the seat and lifts her skirt up. She’s got no panties on, and she pats one cheek and says, ‘You get to fuck this fine piece of ass.’

  “So, I say, ‘Yes, ma’am’ and I climb in back to oblige her. Then she hands me a jar of some nice-smelling cream and says, ‘Grease my asshole’, and I say ‘Yes, ma’am’.

  “So I’m sliding my finger in and out of her back door and she’s snarling: ‘That’s right, grease me up good, I want your whole cock in my bowels.’”

  “Did – did you?” his passenger said, his voice hoarse.

  “Mister, I pushed my pole through her pucker hole in one thrust – no stopping, right up to my balls. Then I began to pound her, and she started talking real dirty. She says, ‘Yeah, come on, shitfucker – you filthy lout . . . fuck me.’

  “So I decided to give her as good as she’s dishing out, and I say, ‘What’s up, princess? Can’t your old man get it up for you?’

  “Just then she gets real squirrelly. She says, ‘You dirty pile of shit – my husband makes more in a day than you will your entire, pathe
tic life. Now shut the fuck up and fuck me, that’s all I want from you, you fucking insect.’”

  The passenger chuckled.

  The driver eyed him through the rearview. “Yeah, she thought it was funny too – right up until the second I pulled out of her ass and shoved her through the door.”

  “You did what?”

  “Threw her out. Damn, you should have seen her face. There she was crawling around the pavement on all fours. Her stockings were torn, her clothes all muddy, “cause she fell right into a puddle.”

  “What – what did she do?”

  “Glared at me. She said, ‘You prick, I’ll have you charged with rape.’

  “And I said, ‘Go ahead, you twisted bitch. And I’ll tell the cops how you’ve been slumming for meat – I’m sure the pudgy Honduran driver you fucked yesterday will back me up, and if he doesn’t do the trick, then those truckers you sucked off in the alley beside Cabot’s Bar and Grill.’”

  “What – what did she say?”

  “You kidding? She didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. Her jaw dropped to the pavement where her knees were. I shut the door and drove away laughing, but not before I took my fare from her purse and tossed it out the window.”

  “Hmm, that’s quite a story, young man.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “It seems preposterous that a woman of the caliber you describe would risk her position, her marriage so recklessly. It’s an insightful fantasy, though.”

  The passenger directed the driver off the highway and through the rustic, tree-lined streets of the town. They passed a row of mansions, set well back from the road, then the passenger directed him to turn into a crescent drive. The cab stopped in front of a huge brick house, just behind a dark, green Jaguar.

  The passenger got out and counted out $36 exactly. “I hope you didn’t think that fairytale you told would earn you a tip.”

  “People with money don’t generally tip well,” the driver said.

  “In that case, here’s a dollar for your imagination – that’s about what it’s worth.”

  The driver grinned. “You know, mister, I was thinking – what you said about a woman like that not wanting to risk her marriage and such.”

  “Yes, what of it?”

  “I don’t think she looked at it that way. See, I figure she really wasn’t getting satisfied at home. – You know what I think she was doing?”

  “What?”

  “Outsourcing.”

  The man glared.

  “And I just realized another thing – she drove a green Jag – just . . . like . . . that.”

  The driver grinned and pulled away. “Have a nice night, sir.”

  He left him standing in his driveway – shaking.

  Five States

  Cheyenne Blue

  “Arizona?” said my mother. “Watch out for the pricks.”

  I think she meant the cacti.

  I was young and crazy, living on the beach in Mexico with Jonno. Hippies, I guess you would call us, running ragged and barefoot over the burning white sand, living on shellfish and marijuana, sex and sunlight. Our canvas tent was set amid the swaying eucalyptus that fringed the beach, set back from time and tides, a discreet distance from the village of dark-eyed Mexicans who studied our movements. Jonno said they were envious; I guess that was one explanation for the silent faces that watched us fucking on the shore and heard the gasps of satiation that we offered to the moonlit night. They never intruded, merely watched. I sensed their vicarious pleasure and often the thought of those fish-net roughened hands stroking their cocks to climax would send me spiraling to my own completion.

  Free spirits, Jonno called us. We drifted through the villages, buying nopales, frijoles, and cheap tequila with the money we earned from selling strings of shell beads to the few American tourists who ventured our way. Free spirits, tied to no corporate world, no nine-to-five and, as I found out eventually, to anybody.

  I saw Jonno fucking Rosa from the village one sun-dappled afternoon. The sun burned through the swaying eucalyptus, painting his golden body with a sunshadow collage of leaves and seagulls’ wings. Rosa was small and plump, curved belly arcing toward the ground as Jonno pounded her from behind.

  I watched. I couldn’t not. Hell, it was exciting, even as my heart was shattering. I confronted him later, when it was just us spooned together in our canvas world, just him and me and the night rush of waves on the shore.

  “Free spirits, Moni,” he said. “I have only myself to give. To share my body only with you would be selfish. I’m not like that.”

  Yeah, right.

  I left him the next day, bumming a ride to the Arizona border with a fisherman who was carrying shellfish and his daughter to a better life in the United States. I walked across the border at Nogales into Arizona, carrying only a daypack containing a change of panties, a bottle of tequila, and a ten dollar note. Once in America, I stuck out my thumb on 1–19.

  A family in a shiny sports utility picked me up almost immediately.

  “Where to?” The white-shirted husband looked like he was regretting the decision to stop, even before I climbed aboard.

  “Canada,” I said.

  He looked uncomfortable. “We can take you as far as Tucson.”

  “Whatever.” I settled into the leather upholstery. Silent children watched me over their handheld computer games.

  “What’s your name?” A small pale-eyed girl with a sullen mouth asked me.

  “Rosa,” I replied.

  She returned to her game, and no one said a word to me until they dropped me off on the outskirts of Tucson in the hot July night.

  My next lift took me to Sedona. Ah, Sedona, with its tapestry of new age and new money. My ride was a pony-tailed businessman from Phoenix, who was spending a weekend in Sedona “discovering his inner self.” I didn’t like to tell him that he could do it on a beach in Mexico, high as a kite on dope and tequila, for a fraction of the price.

  He talked about his karma and his katra and his cat for all that I was listening. I put my hand on his thigh. Underneath the smooth suit he was jagged with tension. He had probably fantasized about someone like me.

  We fucked at the site of an energy vortex, deep in the red rock country surrounding Sedona. The ground was hard; dusty and unyielding and the red ants ran over my thigh as I flexed and pulled him into me, let him pound my slick walls. My pussy stretched to accommodate the shape of an unfamiliar cock. Jonno had been long and solid; slightly curved in arousal and full of the jutting prominence and swagger of the young. My businessman was more assured; confident in his ability to please me. The pungent sharp smell of sage was in my nose, the tickle of impending hayfever blending with the esoteric promise of ritual and knowledge.

  Sacred sex? He seemed to think so.

  I didn’t care; I pulled him to me, forcing his head to my breast, encouraging his mouth to open on my nipple with guttural grunts. He bit down, hard, and I pinched his buttocks with my fingers, drawing his surging cock deeper into me. He came in short, hard spurts, and I welcomed his stickiness, his seed upon my thighs.

  Take that, Jonno. My thoughts were hard and vicious, just like the cock exploring my inner depths, diving and delving into sticky heat.

  We washed afterwards in a natural spring. The water sprang from the loins of the earth. His cock sprang from his loins too, but I wasn’t interested any more. I was still engorged and dilated from his fierce fucking earlier and right now the knowledge that he wanted me again was all I needed.

  I didn’t let him have me again; instead we dressed and I teased his twitching cock with hot fingers, letting him think that any moment now I was going to rip off my pants and let him back into me. He drove me north, up Oak Creek Canyon, and I left him without a backward glance, left him gaping in astonishment, his cock tenting his pants like a teepee.

  “What’s your name?” He called the words after me into the stillness of the desert highway.

  “Lil
eth,” I called back over my shoulder. I don’t know why; it just seemed to fit.

  I hitched up my shorts, feeling the seam bite deep into my engorged sex, pulled down my top so that my breasts were barely covered, and stuck out a thumb.

  Somewhere in the banging and heat of the vortex, I had decided that I would fuck one man in every state to Canada, and only one. So it was easy to resist the backpackers who picked me up next. They must have smelt my scent; the pungent smell of sex must have been rolling off my body in waves, blending seamlessly with sagebrush, pine, and dust. I made them drop me at the Utah border; a new state and I didn’t want to waste my opportunities.

  Hah! I should be so lucky. Utah passed in a blur of minivans, disconsolate housewives, teenagers with babies on their hips and a wave of pale skin. I stopped for a beer in a silent, deserted bar and met Jorge, a trucker of eastern European descent. Sturdy and thickset, his short stubby cock matched his short stubby body. He grasped my hips and pounded me with short fat strokes, crying a name that wasn’t mine at the moment of climax.

  He left me unsatisfied, but my resolution wouldn’t let me assuage the ache in Utah. Nevada was closest, so I headed west. Jorge dropped me on the state line.

  “My fey and silent brown-eyed one,” he mumbled into my hair. “So beautiful, so willing and I don’t even know your name.”

  I told him the name he had called at the moment of his orgasm and watched his eyes widen in fascinated horror.

  I walked for a while in Nevada; miles along the heat-hazed bitumen, feeling the bite of sun on my exposed shoulders. The road was a shimmering ribbon, evaporating into the horizon. I heard the sounds of small and wild things; the click of the crickets, the buzz of a rattler, the loud rasp of the sagebrush against my legs.

  I heard the pickup long before I saw it; old, a diesel with a missing beat in the thrum of the engine. I stuck out a thumb without looking behind and heard it slow and shudder to a halt.

  “Lift, ma’am?” The drawl was mischievous, as if the owner knew my intent before he picked me up. Maybe he did; the shorts were stuck to my ass in the heat and trickles of sweat ran in rivulets down my back, sheening the strip of skin between shorts and top.