The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Maxim Jakubowski Read online

  “Come here,” he had asked. “Take me in your mouth.”

  She now holds the belt in one hand, a red silk scarf taken from her bag in the other, picks up two stockings hanging on the door and comes towards him.

  “Tie me up,” she asks him.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, you’ve never tried that before, have you?”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “Well, there always has to be a first time. Tie me hard, tie me firm, both hands and feet.”

  She couldn’t move and moaned under the weight of my body as I forced myself into her brusquely without foreplay. Later, she tied me down also. Then she licked every part of my body, starting from my toes, sucking on them in a way I had never experienced before, sending shivers through the whole length of me. In time, not only my cock, but my balls in her mouth.

  Tomorrow, they would be shooting her final scene in the movie, where Ramon, the Mexican pimp (played by an elderly French utility actor), catches her red-handed concealing part of the take from the heist and knifes her in the stomach, leaving her to die in a pool of blood, in the back room of the cantina.

  Then, she would be returning to California where her agent had managed another good-time girl small cameo in some other movie no doubt bound straight for the video shelves.

  “Go to the fridge and get a cube of ice.”

  “What for?”

  “Squeeze it inside me, I want to feel what it’s like.”

  “There?”

  “No, behind.”

  And later she would do it to me, too.

  We were on the road to nowhere, prisoners of our senses. She returned from the studio that day, wearing a thin white cotton tee-shirt through which her sharp nipples were clearly visible.

  I felt a pang of jealousy that other men might have seen her breasts thus on the drive back from the shoot.

  “Well, that’s it. I’m now officially out of work,” she said.

  “How did it go?” I asked.

  “Well, he killed me cleanly. We only needed three takes.”

  “How does it feel to be killed?” the journalist in me asked her.

  “It turned me on. I almost wet myself.”

  “You slut,” I said, jokingly.

  “Yeah, well, that’s what I am,” she answered, laughing. “But now, listen, I want you to do absolutely everything I tell you to. It’s important, this might be our last time together and I want you to remember it forever.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  I undressed her, her body was on fire, feverish, burning with emotional incandescence, she bit my lips to the blood as I pulled her head back by her hair. I tied her up, watched her crucified body spread-eagled over the bed. I prepared to undress. My short-sleeve shirt was sticking to my torso like an unwanted skin.

  “Cover my eyes,” she begged, as I lowered my body over hers.

  And as we made love, it was as if we were buried in a deep well of despair as we both knew all too well this must be the last time. There was nowhere else to go. Nothing more that we could do. We had tried everything, every position and most perversities and still we wanted more, but it just wasn’t there. Is this all there was to love? Togetherness and future domesticity surely could not be the answer, felt rather ridiculous a concept in fact, anything further would only dull the immediacy, the passion, the desire, the lust.

  As we came, almost together, I opened my eyes and saw a tear rolling down her cheek. “What is it?” I asked her solicitously.

  “You know what it is,” she answered calmly.

  Yes, I knew.

  It was then she asked:

  “Kill me.”

  The sweat was drying over our bare bodies. There was a full moon over Miami Beach.

  So I did.

  The sound of her neck breaking was muted and gentle.

  Outside, it’s now raining. In the distance, I can hear the jets hovering over Coral Gables on their way to landing at the International Airport, ferrying passengers to and from South America. It’s been a few days already. I’m feeling hungry. I still haven’t dressed and sometimes I disgust myself as unwanted erections manifest themselves when I gaze at her dead body, laid out like a cross over the grey bedsheets. Her crooked smile is now permanently carved into her face, her pubic hairs are shyly growing back and her fixed eyes keep on watching me.

  I wonder what she is thinking now.

  Yes, that’s the story that started it all.

  I came across her late in the evening at the bar of the hotel where all the delegates to the festival were staying. I’d ventured into town with a bunch of other writers, in a group of twenty or so, and we had ended up in a decent curry place. I’d somehow managed to get myself squeezed in between two local nincompoop librarians, half the length of the table away from a small, flame-haired Murdoch Empire book editor I sort of fancied. Through the spicy meal, I kept on thinking of how our eyes had crossed paths at the reading. It was almost midnight when we all returned to base and the small bar was crowded. There she was, standing in distracted conversation with a couple of reviewers. I realized who she was: a junior editor for some small publishing outfit whose books you never actually saw in shops but who seemed to profitably stay in business mainly stocking library shelves with totally unpromoted novels and churning out badly designed cookery books, new age clap-trap and self-help and how to dress manuals.

  She stood out like a beacon. All blonde, curly-haired, wonderfully tall five feet ten of her. I looked at her. My heart skipped a proverbial beat. I walked over.

  “Hello.”

  “How are you.”

  My imagination no sooner ran out of things to say to her in this artificially social context.

  “I’d like to talk about things someday,” I clumsily blurted out and made my excuses, as she probably gave me a strange look while I moved away.

  The next morning, the final hours of the festival, I spotted her on her own on a seat in the hotel’s reception area reading a paperback crime and mystery novel by one of the previous day’s main speakers. She looked up as I passed by, moving towards the bar where I had some business with an American film director. Half an hour later, I returned, she was still sitting there, a picture of vulnerable beauty, wearing a long loose black dress with small white polka dots. I moved towards her.

  “Have you enjoyed the festival?” I asked her.

  She looked up at me, smiled, the dress slid slightly down her left side, baring her pale left shoulder and revealing a thin black bra strap.

  “How are you getting back to London? I have spare passenger space in my car if you’re interested.” I enquired.

  “I have a lift,” she replied.

  Then someone called me away, and when I looked back in her direction, she was gone.

  I thought of her a lot on the motorway back.

  The Secrets of Her Anatomy

  Dear K.C.

  You were probably wondering on Sunday morning what the hell I wished to talk to you about. Sorry I left you guessing. I just didn’t know what to say and how to say it, I suppose. The propriety of making a gentle pass at a beautiful woman eludes me when she has witnessed me the day before reading “dirty bits” aloud in public.

  At any rate, I must confess I found you wondrously attractive and have thought about you a lot since the weekend.

  I’d love to see you again, if only to talk or have a meal. Would you?

  Until then I remain,

  Lustfully but respectfully yours,

  Maxim J.

  Dear Maxim,

  I somehow guessed that you were not really interested in discussing the art of crime fiction with the likes of me.

  Your letter made me smile. Yes, I’d love to meet up for a drink. Give me a call.

  Yours,

  K.C.

  Three weeks elapsed before they finally met. She had been on holiday to Ireland in the meantime. Searching for her roots, she joked over the telephone.

  On that first evening,
following a drink and a meal, he found out she was married while they sat in the basement of a noisy Soho pub. All the wrong tunes were blaring out from the jukebox.

  “So where do we go from here?” he wondered.

  But when he drove her to her train station, she gently put her hand on his while they waited in the queue to exit the Central London underground car park.

  Everything was unsaid, but they could feel the mutual attraction simmering in the air like electricity. All they had done was partly exchange life stories and publishing gossip, but she said: “We must meet again.”

  “Yes,” he concurred.

  On the occasion of their second meeting a week later, they quickly agreed after the first round of drinks that all Soho pubs were much too noisy in the evening, and they must find somewhere else to talk. He suggested his office. As a director of the company, he had a set of keys and knew no one else would likely be in at that time of evening. She readily agreed.

  As he switched the lights on, she said:

  “Don’t, it’s too bright,” and pulled out a metal candle holder with a large candle speared in its centre from a Habitat paper bag, which had been buried in her backpack full of manuscripts. “I thought this might come in useful.”

  He found a match. In the flickering of the candle, he looked in awe at her amazon figure. He’d never been with a woman this tall before, he thought. Her tousled hair was a mass of Medusa-like curls. Her eyes, he now saw, were dark brown. He moved towards her and kissed her. She responded.

  The thin coat of scarlet lipstick melted under his tongue, tasting slightly sweet. She opened her mouth wider and allowed him to insert his exploratory tongue. A warm stream of air from her lungs raced inside him. She skipped a breath.

  That evening, he kissed her deep and passionately, touched her knee, her thigh but no higher. She wore an open neck short sleeve white sweater and after delicately moving his roving fingers repeatedly over her face, her nose, her chin, his hand moved downwards to her soft shoulder. There was a light brown mole at the onset of her cleavage. He caressed it, and moved his hand further and cupped her small left breast. She looked deeply into his eyes, anxious, interrogating, hopeful, but kept on saying nothing. His fingers slipped behind the thin fabric of the shirt, inside her bra and kneaded her nipple, then as she still offered no resistance he delicately pulled the breast away from the flimsy texture of her black bra. Then, the other. A black beauty spot peered at him close to the aureola of the right breast. She stood there, her breasts unceremoniously, wantonly on display, as he drank in this exquisite vision of her. The colour of her nipples was a discreet pink in the overall pallor of her torso.

  Later:

  “I have to catch the train home,” she said, her upper clothing in disarray, her cheeks flushed, some buttons of his shirt undone.

  “Where did you tell him you were?”

  “With one of my authors.”

  “Stay longer, please. I want to make love with you,” he asked her in the office penumbra.

  “Not today, we just haven’t got the time. Next time.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll find it difficult to wait. Every minute until I see you again, I shall doubt you, I will fear that in the cold light of day all tonight’s fumblings will appear foolhardy and wrong to you and you will change your mind.”

  “I won’t,” she replied, but once they were walking along the night road to Charing Cross station, she moved faster and faster, in her characteristic manly and slightly gawky way, and she said little, almost as if embarrassed to be with him in public, swimming through the evening crowd.

  The next day, he sent a single red rose to her office, bought from a flower stall in Covent Garden.

  Two days later, he received a letter telling him he had been right, and that the reality of their circumstances had appeared to her all too clearly as they had been walking towards her train. She just couldn’t, she wrote. She didn’t wish to hurt her husband, she just felt she could not deceive her husband, and how anyway could they conduct an affair without it becoming sordid, cheap hotel assignments, stealing time out of time, deceitful. No, she just couldn’t. He felt right gutted and answered as best he could, with a long letter justifying his feelings, the state his life was in and could not help himself evoking the erotic feelings she stirred inside him, how he already dreamed of their lovemaking, the caress of flesh against flesh, how their skin touching would feel. Please, he implored, change your mind. But he didn’t really think she would and after receiving no answer, all he could do was write again. The hours and the days were heavy and lasted forever those weeks. Then another letter, and another. The tone moved from loving, suggestive, explicit to angry, resigned, desperate.

  She phoned.

  “Your last letter made me very angry (he could not for the sake of him recall what he had said in it that he he had not written before). But I just keep on thinking of you in spite of myself. We must meet again and talk.”

  They settled for the bar of a big hotel.

  He explained again, she nodded her understanding; he told her how he did not wish to harm anyone, that this was just between the two of them, that no one else would know, and as long as no one was hurt, why did they not accept what was happening between them and the way they felt?

  Sipping her drink, she looked breathtakingly radiant. His heart was just ragged, being with her, detailing every facet of her features, the way her nose turned slightly upwards, her hair hid her ears, how the faint trace of a scar on her right cheek revealed itself in the bar’s muted lighting.

  She acquiesced in silence, her eyes piercing through him, her sadness touching him in parts he didn’t know he had, her long dark stockinged leg like an endless object of desire parting her orange slit skirt.

  He looked back at her, he hadn’t asked a question.

  Their eyes, soundless.

  “Yes,” she said, almost inaudibly, under her breath, and looked down at her lap.

  “You mean?”

  “Yes, I will,” she firmly answered.

  He was overcome with naked fear rather than joy. She was saying she would become his lover, did she? Or was he interpreting her wrong?

  “But we must agree we must not ever harm others, it’s very important. You said so yourself.”

  Immense relief coursed through him. And irrational disbelief. This can’t be happening to me, surely.

  “You won’t change your mind again, will you,” he asked her, falling into fourth gear into a pit of newly-found insecurity.

  “I promise I won’t,” she assured him.

  At last, he allowed himself to smile, to relax. The waiter brought some more peanuts and olives to their table.

  “When?” he finally asked, after what he felt was a decent interval, after they had become more talkative and managed to cast the ghost of the coming affair away to laugh a bit about publishing and writers’ gossip. He loved the way she tittered when he said anything a touch witty or mischievous.

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it, really.”

  “I don’t want the first time to be vulgar or sordid,” he said. “Not at the office. I’ll think of some hotel where no one knows us or is likely to recognize either of us. I’ll make the arrangements.”

  She nodded.

  It would be two weeks. In the meantime, she came once more to his office a few nights later, and she allowed him to undress her when they embraced on the uncomfortable sofa he kept for visitors. But when he wanted to pull her black knickers down over her wide, ample hips, she said “Not now, we must keep something for next time.” She had arranged a day away from her company, under pretext of some imaginary contracts seminar. He agreed, and touched her sex through the dark, thin material, she felt wet and so warm.

  Cos I know that you

  With your heart beating

  And your eyes shining

  Will be thinking of me

  Lying with you on a Tuesday morni
ng.

  The Pogues

  They became lovers on a Tuesday morning in August, in the identikit room of a chain hotel in the metaphorical shadow of the Heathrow runways. J.G. Ballard territory almost.

  He had brought along a bottle of white wine and strawberries bought earlier that morning from a small greengrocer near Hampstead Pond, before picking her up in front of the tube station. She wore dark glasses during the drive.

  “You’re sure you still want to go through with this?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “I thought you might have changed your mind.”

  “I thought you would.”

  “Well, I was going to give you a few more minutes and then I was going to leave, thinking how can the bastard be late or not come?”

  “I was here on time, but I was looking out for you in front of the cinema on the other side of the road. I almost missed you . . .”

  He undressed her first. Item by item. Layer by layer. Her waistcoat. Her long flowing skirt of many colours. Her quaint lace-up boots. Her wedding and engagement rings. Kissed her throat, then her lips, then bit gently on her ear, nonchalantly licked her forehead and her smooth shoulders. Pressed his lips against her throat and held her tight against him. She wore a black bustier, garter belt and stockings.

  “How lovely. It’s been ages since I’ve seen stockings, old-fashioned but so nice, watching you like this is enough to turn anyone into a raving fetishist . . .”

  “I thought you would like them.”

  After rolling the warm silk down her endless legs and briefly tickling her funny-shaped toes, he got up from where he had been kneeling, drank in her sheer splendour and pulled down her final piece of underwear.

  Her pubic hair was darker than he expected, all flattened curls against the marble expanse of her lower stomach. He kissed her bush with reverence, like a priest in holy homage.