The Mammoth Book of the Best New Erotica Read online

  The grey-haired man is at the head of the table and indicates she should sit to his left. Facing her is a very beautiful woman whose splendour has however seen better days, a thousand wrinkles smiling, a thousand small pains betraying her long and cruel past.

  On her left is the youngest man in the room; he is younger than her even, his face and skin barely out of teenage years, radiant, almost effeminate. He is all smiles and his conversation is artfully banal.

  The meal offers all that Provence can supply, from the most refined to the most colourful dish. Her taste buds sing along. Stylish servants see that their glasses are never empty and provide the right wine for each course: a sublime Cassis white followed by a racy Gigondas from the Aix vineyards, and soon champagne, small bubbles adhering under her gaze to the shape of the cut glasses. Very soon, she experiences a new kind of drunkenness, like an aggravated echo of her dizziness on the train. The feeling surrounds her like a scarf; she feels she is burning up, her legs are like cotton wool, her breath is short. Her breasts rub anxiously against the silk of the dress, her nipples harden again under the black material, becoming quite visible. She has the impression that everyone present is watching her, evaluating her, judging her, as if the woman facing her, eating her strawberries and drinking her champagne, is already promising her a whole set of caresses and indulgences. She feels as if her stomach is incandescent, a combination of fire and water, and the wide smile of the woman across from her indicates she is aware of it, that she recognizes the torment inside her body, that behind the combined fragrance of the wines and the food spread across the now crumpled tablecloth, she has caught an early whiff of the purple taste of her inner juices. Right then, a foot deliberately brushes against hers, caressing her ankle, gliding across her leg and the silk sheathing her. She isn’t sure if it is the smiling woman or her attentive host, or maybe the gauche young man on her left. The champagne bubbles float upward to the surface of the crystal glasses, and her eyes are transfixed by the thin rising columns, as if she were the one drowning inside the glass and her oxygen was running out . . .

  When they all rise to make their way to the living room, she stumbles.

  “Come,” says the woman, holding her arm, “are you feeling unwell? You must lie down for a quarter of an hour, allow all that alcohol to settle . . .”

  Together, they climb the monumental stairs. “I’m in number seven,” she stammers.

  “No need to go that far,” the woman says. “I’m in one.”

  The room is predominantly green, with an array of heavy brown curtains; the bed is covered with a dark-green satin quilt, which feels so wonderfully cool when she settles her cheek against it and allows herself to relax. The woman helps her lie down, pulling her shoes off, caressing her thin ankles, taking them into her hands as if she were about to handcuff them.

  But the girl is still overcome by dizziness and knows she will allow anything to happen.

  She tries to overcome the feeling, she turns her head around, sees a painting on the wall, attempts to focus on its image, to capture some sense of reality from the shimmering fog in which the painting floats.

  It’s a small canvas, like the country scene in room seven, in which a court jester is offering a rose to a comedic maid – the very image of card one in the tarot – but the woman here has pulled her skirt up and is displaying a regal, sculptured ass to him. On closer inspection, it appears that the jester is actually not about to offer the rose to the young woman, but is preparing to pin the thorny flower straight into her satin globes. It even looks as if he has begun punishing her: a long, pink cut already criss-crosses her right ass cheek, petals lie on the ground following the first blow, and the girl’s face reflects pain and submission.

  This is when she realizes that the older woman has folded her dress back up all the way to her thighs, and is now twirling the blonde curls of her pubis with her fingers, even briefly inserting a finger into her gash, then smelling it with half a smile before licking the wet finger clean and returning her hand below to stroke her swollen cunt.

  The woman suddenly stands and walks over to the wall, where she rings a call bell. Then she leans back over the prostrate young girl, lips grazing her mouth, skimming the breasts barely concealed by the crumpled silk of the dress, lingering over the uncovered stomach and the thighs that part automatically under her caress.

  There is a discreet knock at the door. “Come in,” the woman says, without looking up. It’s one of the servants who had served at the dinner table; he has a peasant’s wide and tawny features, which she had earlier found almost comical beneath the powdered wig he is now no longer wearing. But he is still attired in the Louis XV outfit meant to emphasize his thin waist. On him it has the contrary effect, highlighting his thick muscles, the incredibly wide shoulders and the lack of neck. He is a heavy-set man; his ferocious eyes remind her of a dog’s.

  “Come here,” the older woman says. “Take your uniform off. That’s good. Show us your cock, now. So, what do you think, my dear?”

  The object emerging from the salmon-coloured silk pants is just like the man himself: short and massive. Sitting on the edge of the bed, the woman takes hold of the purple glans between two fingers, just as earlier she had been handling the strawberries. With her nail she gently pulls on the cock’s crumpled surplus skin and the shaft begins to grow. Short but very thick, no more than fifteen centimetres long, but so thick she has to use both hands to circle it. The prone young girl sees it all as if in a cloud; the painting on the wall is the focus of her attention, but another part of her is also aware that she is about to be breached by this almost unreal object. The mushroom head is dark purple, the blue-black veins bulge, the hard brown shaft is pointing towards her, emerging from dirty pink boxer shorts – the whole thing seems more animal than human.

  “Fuck her now,” the older woman orders.

  The domestic positions himself between the girl’s thighs, spreads them wide, and places her feet high up on his shoulders, his thick shiny cock lurking at her entrance. He gradually forces himself in. Slowly, his cock plunges in, her diameter expanding obscenely as if it were literally sucking in this monstrous cock, and she finally feels its head butting her inner walls as the silk of his pants and the rough touch of his pubic hair rub against her thighs. She comes immediately – the tension was too strong, the expectation too intense.

  Now the domestic methodically plows inside her with brute force, and she cries out repeatedly, the inebriation of her orgasm blending with the alcohol vapours, thrusting her ever higher on the scales of sheer pleasure. She can’t help crying, throwing her body forward, impaling herself even deeper, opening herself wider. At the same time, she feels ashamed to be enjoying this weird cock so much, and the shame doubles her pleasure, as if her being whored in this improvised way gives her latitude to scream as no other man has made her scream before, to give herself like she has never given herself before.

  Prompted by the woman, still sitting close to her, the domestic withdraws from her and, with two sharp movements of his wrist, jerks himself off, long, creamy jets streaming across the now for ever soiled black dress, thick snail trails of sperm jetting from his bursting cock and landing all the way up to her neck.

  The woman dismisses him with a single gesture.

  Once again, she leans over towards the still breathless girl, who is on the brink of tears as her orphaned cunt still gapes open, mumbling under her breath like a fish out of water, begging for the return of the cock that stretched her so, and she kisses her. The taste of her tongue is sharp, warm, and clever.

  She then guides the girl to the nearby bathroom and undresses her. “Arms up,” she says, as if to a child. Helping her out of the long, soiled sheath of the dress, pulling it over her head, and then the blissful feel of water running unendingly down her neck, her back, her breasts.

  Then she brings her back to the large bed of crumpled satin, her body so deathly pale against the green surface, and dries her, methodically m
apping every contour of her body, drying behind her ears even and between her splayed toes . . .

  The woman indicates the silk dress, now all crumpled up at the foot of the bed. “Won’t be much use again,” she says.

  From a dresser, she pulls out a maid’s outfit, almost the same as . . . what was her name? Nora? was wearing earlier. A straight black skirt, a black shirt, and a white apron with an embroidered pocket. Before she is allowed to slip the uniform on, the older woman helps her roll on a pair of hold-up opaque black stockings and, finally, hands her a pair of small, dainty, zippered boots.

  The woman quickly separates her hair into thick plaits and arranges a faultless chignon, with just three or four hairpins, almost a work of art.

  Inside the apron’s pocket, there is a key.

  “It’s a pass,” the ageless woman explains. “It allows you access to every room on this floor or the next. Come, girl. It’s all up to you now. You must prove to us that we can trust you.” And with a gentle slap on her butt, she dismisses her from the room.

  In the corridor, the young girl hesitates. Should she walk down again? With the pass, she opens the next door, number three.

  It is empty.

  On the wall there is a painting depicting a city scene with three young women wearing fancy hats, all holding each other by the arm, all totally naked. Somewhere behind them, another woman seen from the back is walking away, same hat, same nudity. She appears to be following a soldier whose silhouette can be glimpsed in the distance. The three women are aligned by height, from left to right. Curiously, the shortest one sports the heavier breasts, the next one’s are pear shaped, well proportioned, and the tallest woman’s are barely the size of two small apples, high on her chest, tiny.

  “The tarots,” she says to herself.

  She leaves the room just as another identically dressed maid comes running.

  “Ah, there you are, hurry. Number twenty has called again.”

  Off they go; she follows instinctively, entranced by the madness of the place, down the corridor, up a spiral staircase, then through another passageway where they come across two other maids, one of whom is Nora, the only one whose name she actually knows, standing outside the door marked twenty.

  “What took you so long?” Nora asks.

  She knocks on the door and turns the handle while doing so, just as a loud “Come in!” reaches their ears. Inside are four men playing cards, with a fifth man watching them – the grey-haired man from the train, the commander.

  The girl barely has time to register the fact that these are the same four men, one of whom is black, the tarot players from the Paris-Nice TGV train – was it just this past afternoon? – when the grey-eyed man calls to them: “Come, girls, come!”

  Flabbergasted, she watches as her three companions go to kneel before three of the men and, without even being asked, burrow inside their respective trousers and quickly gobble up the still soft cocks they discover there.

  “Come here, young one,” the man insists.

  And now she finds herself on her knees by the black man, but the cock surging through his fly is already hard. It’s like a long ebony stick, shining like polished wood under the light of the room’s lamps, its skin taut like bark, an endless mast whose girth is fortunately moderate, so she doesn’t have to dislocate her jaw to take it all into her mouth. However, the cock soon reaches the very back of her mouth and brings tears to her eyes, a sudden burst of nausea she represses as she moves her lips back down to the cock’s head. But soon she finds the right rhythm, the adequate depth.

  “Keep at it,” says a voice.

  The man exudes an animal smell, strong, tenacious. It occurs to her that she could well be sucking a horse or a wild beast. With the hand that is not holding on to his cards – none of the men has stopped playing – he occasionally applies pressure to her neck, precisely communicating the changes in rhythm he wants her to follow. He holds her by the chignon, forcing her to first slow down and savour every one of the centimetres she swallows and then relinquishes her; then he makes her speed up and suck faster and faster, as if he were about to ejaculate in ten seconds, each time assaulting the very back of her throat, fiercer every time.

  All of a sudden, there is a clap of hands. The black man pulls her away and slides his cock out of her mouth. Fascinated, she looks at the glazed, obsidian member. He pulls her up, flips her round and throws her down on the table, pulling her skirt up at the same time. She is face down on the table, as are her three companions, heads aligned next to each other; her cheek touches Nora’s. The black man bends over her and with no word forces himself inside her. His saliva-coated cock plunges deep into her asshole, quickly reaching the bottom, and never before has she felt so deeply impaled. Like an iron bar reaching for her heart, then retreating, before digging into her again. Never has she been fucked in the ass so hard, so deep as by this harder than hard ebony-coloured cock, this iron cock, this cock from hell.

  On the table, right beneath her eyes, is the last hand of cards, and the courtly smile of the excuse card, and his mandolin.

  Nora turns her head in her direction and kisses her, digging her tongue as far as she can into the girl’s mouth, holding on to her tongue, both women grasping each other with the energy of despair as the continuous thrusts burrow through their asses, kissing and crying as the table shakes beneath them. There is a scream, a deep guttural roar, and the black man stops, still planted deep inside her ass, and she feels his come pouring out, burning her. She distractedly visualizes the powerful white jets irrigating her guts, like an unholy, boiling enema. Nora pulls herself away from her mouth and screams in turn, a shout of triumph as her flesh welcomes both pain and joy. But instead of withdrawing, the black man comes and goes a few more times inside her ass and she climaxes yet again, maybe because of the angle of the table pressing hard against her clit or the influence of the many orgasms occurring all around her. She swims in a sea of lust.

  There is a pause. Then she hears hands clapping, slowly, in the background, ironic; the commander is smiling, complimenting them all.

  “Excellent, ladies. Thank you. Now you may go.” And specifically to the girl: “You’re awaited in room four,” he says.

  She knocks on the door; there is no answer, but she enters anyway. There are two men in dressing gowns sitting on either side of a table, talking. The first thing she notices is that they are identical twins, although one already sports white hair, as if he has aged prematurely. She wonders what sudden emotion one day caused his hair to turn so white. He can’t be much older than forty. She recognizes the two men, they were at dinner earlier, but they were seated at the other end of the table and she hadn’t really noticed them.

  The man with the white hair is handing a piece of paper to the other man. The heavy dressing gown’s belt is loose and uncovers his right thigh, a heavy-set leg which she didn’t expect from his cultured facial features.

  The other man, not even acknowledging the presence of the visitor, is reading aloud: “They caress each other for a few minutes. He squeezes two fingers into the swamp of her sex, two very long fingers, nails cut short, into the deep of her belly, exploring her so much better than a penis could, his almost feminine scientific intuition aware of her innermost desires . . .”

  He stops. “Not bad. But why ‘sex’? Or ‘penis’?”

  “Why indeed? What would you have written?”

  “I don’t know . . . ‘pussy’ and ‘dick’? A sex, it’s so anonymous.”

  “What would a woman say when referring to her sex? ‘Vagina’ is too scientific, ‘uterus’ is too medical. In this present context, maybe ‘pussy’ is too vulgar. Or it might depend on the woman. Anyway, I’d definitely cut out the ‘swamp’. Reminds me too much of the worst of Henry Miller. In Quiet Days in Clichy, doesn’t he write of ‘a drooling pussy that fitted me like a glove’? No, ‘pussy’ just won’t do. So we’re left with ‘sex’.”

  “And ‘penis’?”

  “Sti
ll too generic. Its so-called exploration is no more than a continuous series of thrusts into the pit of her belly. Too prosaic for what the male member is capable of.”

  “Why not use a metaphor?”

  “Which? A split apricot? A dick-shaped mussel? A mustachioed wallet? As it is I’m uneasy with the ‘swamp’, although I do enjoy its muddy, soaked-earth quality, a combination of liquid and hard matter.”

  “And her cunt? Just call it a cunt? Do women really think of their parts that way?”

  “There’s just a surfeit of metaphors. You can’t just string too many of them together. ‘Her cunt’s swamp’: it just feels wrong, too strong an image.”

  “The truth is you don’t like metaphors.”

  “That’s true. So, what would you suggest?”

  “ ‘He slides two fingers into her divine gash, all the way down her magic walls, exploring her so much better than . . .’!”

  “You’re getting funnier all the time. But not very practical. Laughter and fucking, you know . . . Many years ago, when I was still fumbling among the amatory arts, at the beginning of my literary career, I was writing erotic stories with a friend; we were trying to use every expressive resource we could, we wanted to avoid all vulgarity, to retain a dash of poetry about it all. We tried everything: the subjective point of view, long sentences and little punctuation, like James Joyce in the midst of tits and ass, if you see what I mean, then more subtle metaphors – ‘under his fingers the flower of her love garden blossomed . . . at the end of the path the labyrinth of Cytherea . . . exploring her so much better than all the previous arrows of desire had punctured her . . .’ all rubbish of that kind, a compost heap of mythologies. But all it proves to us is that metaphors, however deceptive and clever they might be to the intellect, just pour cold water over any hard-on; a man who thinks too much just disconnects, if I can put it that way . . . But why don’t we ask this girl . . .” He turns towards her.