The Mammoth Book of the Best New Erotica Page 37

  “Never mind that,” Ivy interrupted, “what I want to know is, what is Anita like in bed?”

  I answered both their questions, at length, by telling them the story of my past week. This time I definitely wasn’t trying to reel anyone in, knowing that all three of my friends were happily married mothers who weren’t short of money and liked to think of themselves as decent, moral individuals. Ivy was the first to start turning the conversation. Her approach was obvious, getting me to repeat the concept over and over again (“So, let me get this straight. You’ve been paying your friends for sex?” “Yes, Ivy, that’s right, I’ve been paying my friends for sex.”) until it no longer sounded outrageous and they’d all accepted it as an acceptable thing to do.

  But Hazel was the one who made it personal.

  “Would you pay me for sex?” she asked.

  “Would you like to have sex with me?”

  “Maybe. How much money are we talking about?”

  “Well, I paid Vicki a thousand, Tracey somewhere around five hundred and Anita two-fifty.”

  “You paid Anita the least amount of money?” Ivy exclaimed, shocked.

  I smiled, amused by her indignation. “I asked all three of them to name their price. Anita wanted two-fifty.”

  “That’s terrible,” said Elizabeth. “She must have such low self-esteem.”

  “How much would you want to sleep with Jesse?” Ivy asked Elizabeth.

  “Definitely a thousand,” she said, “at the very least.”

  It was fun checking into a hotel with three women. We went to the Tenderloin, a tacky rock-themed hotel that Ivy claimed was the only place for an afternoon assignation. I was shocked by her knowledge and wondered whether I’d been right to think of these women as being so innocent after all. We took the lift up to the third floor and found our room. I could tell the three women were enjoying themselves, although I thought it probably had less to do with the sex than the fact that we were all doing something secretive together. They always got like this whenever we left the café, even on the most innocent of missions. I think it was because we were moving outside the expected limits of our friendship, and none of us had the emotional maturity to cope with that.

  Ivy took off her shoes and jumped backwards onto the bed. She was the shortest of my prospective partners, although none of them was tall.

  “So how are we going to do this?” asked Hazel. “Are you up to having sex with all three of us?”

  “Not in a straight way.”

  Elizabeth looked worried. “I’m not doing any lesbian stuff.”

  I laughed.

  “I mean, not that I don’t like you both and everything,” she said to Ivy and Hazel, “I just don’t think I could bear it.”

  “I’m not sure about the masturbation part either,” Ivy admitted. “I don’t even do that in front of my husband.”

  “What is it that embarrasses you?” I asked. “Doing it in front of me or doing it in front of each other?”

  “Each other,” they agreed.

  “ ’Cause I could call down to reception for three blindfolds. They do do that sort of thing here, don’t they?”

  “They do,” Ivy admitted. “There’s an S&M bag they give to favoured customers.”

  “What do you think?” I asked them.

  “I’d still be embarrassed,” said Elizabeth, “even with only you watching.”

  “I don’t mind doing it,” Hazel told me, “as long as you do get the blindfolds.”

  “Ivy?”

  “Oh, God, honestly, Jesse, I don’t think I’d even enjoy it. Can’t you just fuck me?”

  “Well, I will, but I wanted us all to do something together.”

  “OK, how about if I strip down to my underwear and watch you having sex with Elizabeth while Hazel masturbates?”

  “But Hazel doesn’t want you to see her masturbating.”

  “And I don’t want you to watch Jesse having sex with me,” added Elizabeth.

  Sighing, I decided to cut my losses. Ivy would wait in the bathroom, Hazel would masturbate, I would fuck Elizabeth. The women would all wear blindfolds. I worried that this would turn the afternoon into a slapstick comedy, but they were adamant. We moved everything they might bump into and called reception, who sent up a boy with three blindfolds on a silver tray.

  I asked if anyone wanted to undress before I blindfolded them, but they all wanted to stay fully clothed to begin with. Their anxieties had made me feel uncomfortable and I began to wonder whether this was such a good idea. But even if we stopped now our friendship would still be changed for ever, and in spite of everything, this was still a sexual experience I wanted to have.

  “You are going to wear a condom, aren’t you?” asked Ivy.

  “And not the same one,” Hazel added. “A different one for each of us.”

  “I don’t have any,” I said.

  We called reception and they sent the boy back with a packet of extra-safe Mates. Ivy went out into the bathroom and closed the door. Hazel took off her shoes. Elizabeth lay on the bed. She whispered to me that she wanted me to undress her, so I took her shoes off and unbuttoned her jeans. I felt most worried about having sex with Elizabeth and was trying to make sure the experience didn’t feel inappropriately intimate. I pulled off her jeans. She was wearing simple pale-cream knickers. I removed them quickly and looked up at her face, watching her breathing as I went down on her, again trying to make the sex feel as straightforward and competent as possible.

  I was paying so much attention to Elizabeth that I hadn’t even had a chance to look at Hazel, who was probably the one of the three I was most excited about going to bed with. I gently nuzzled and kissed Elizabeth’s clit, reaching up under her jumper and pulling the cups of her bra down from her large breasts. Behind me I had heard Hazel getting out of her dress, but she was managing to masturbate almost without making any sound at all.

  I continued sucking Elizabeth, realizing my only real opportunity to look back at Hazel without Elizabeth sensing it was during the few moments it would take me to move from licking her cunt to fucking her. After that I could probably get another couple of glimpses but would have to really strain my neck. I would’ve sucked Elizabeth for longer, but I was so eager to see Hazel that the moment I thought Elizabeth was wet enough to fuck, I stopped and turned round. Hazel was wearing a long stripy top that, together with her hand, almost entirely obscured my view of her cunt, but her facial expression and the quick movement of her finger suggested that she had got over her embarrassment of masturbating in front of me.

  I turned back from her, fixed my condom and slid my hard cock into Elizabeth’s cunt. She was wet, but it did take a couple of thrusts before I was moving smoothly inside her. Seeing Hazel like that made me excited again, and I worried I wouldn’t be able to last long enough to satisfy all three women. Elizabeth had been avoiding kissing me, so I didn’t force it, gratified when I felt her hands holding my hips. I didn’t want to get Elizabeth too close and then stop, as I knew that would prove frustrating to her. I also didn’t know where she was going to go when I swapped over to Hazel. In the bathroom with Ivy, I guess. I slowed down, and Elizabeth nodded, seemingly happy for me to stop. I pulled out of her, and helped her get dressed and go into the bathroom. The moment the bathroom door closed, I walked over and snogged Hazel. She seemed perfectly happy to kiss me, wrapping her arms around me and reaching for my cock.

  “Hang on,” I said, “I’ve just got to get rid of the condom.”

  “Forget the condom. Just get rid of it and fuck me.”

  She reached up and untied the blindfold. I snapped off the condom and lifted her off the chair, pushing my cock into her as I pressed her against the wall. She grabbed my hair and we started fucking furiously, finding a satisfactory position somewhere between standing and a crouch. We continued like that until I said, “I’m sorry, I’m getting close. And I’ve got to stay hard for Ivy.”

  “Can’t you come twice?”

  “No
t usually.”

  “OK. Go down on me then. I’m pretty close too.”

  She lay back on the bed and I gave her head until she came. Afterwards, she squirmed and reached for my hand. I kissed her and we stayed on the bed until Hazel called out to Ivy, “He’s all yours.”

  “Come in here then,” she called back.

  “No, don’t worry, I’m going down to the bar.”

  Hazel dressed and left the room. Ivy walked in, still blindfolded. I let her come towards me. She gave a short, dirty laugh as her fingers reached my chest.

  “Come on, then, what have you got left for me?”

  I felt vaguely irritated at Ivy for stopping me from properly satisfying Hazel, and for the way she had always previously been so flirtatious with me, but then joined in with Elizabeth’s squeamishness when it actually came down to us all getting together. So I went down on her until her fingers were digging into my head, then fingered her as I fucked her from behind, making her come just before I emptied myself into her.

  That was the last I saw of Elizabeth, Hazel and Ivy. They never contacted me again, and didn’t return my calls or emails. Anita and I met once more for sex, but then she got involved with someone else and said she couldn’t see me any more. Tracey, too, seemed to have decided against further meetings with me, and although Vicki was happy to talk to me about money, there was no chance of anything sexual happening between us. At first I was glad to be free of Marianne, happy to have the house to myself, but it didn’t take me long to become lonely. And with no friends left, there was no possibility of pursuing my previous path. I lasted two weeks before I started buying pornographic videos again, watching them with a hunger I had never had previously. And when they stopped working I found myself in a phone box, intending to try Tracey again, but after getting halfway through her number, stopping and dialling the digits on a small colour card in front of me, finally ready to begin the next stage of my existence.

  Gators

  Vicki Hendricks

  It was a goddamned one-armed alligator put me over the line. After that I was looking for trouble. Carl and me had been married for two years, second marriage for both, and the situation was drastic – hateful most times – but I could tell he didn’t realize there was anything better in the world. It made me feel bad that he never learned how to love – grew up with nothing but cruelty. I kept trying way too long to show him there was something else.

  I was on my last straw when I suggested a road trip for Labor Day weekend – stupidly thinking that I could amuse him and wouldn’t have to listen to his bitching about me and the vile universe on all my days off work. I figured at a motel he’d get that vacation feeling, lighten up, and stick me good, and I could get by for the few waking hours I had to see him the rest of the week.

  We headed out to the Everglades for our little trip. Being recent transplants from Texas, we hadn’t seen the natural wonders in Florida. Carl started griping by mid-afternoon about how I told him there were so many alligators and we couldn’t find a fucking one. I didn’t dare say that there would’ve been plenty if he hadn’t taken two hours to read the paper and sit on the john. We could’ve made it before the usual thunderstorms and had time to take a tour. As it was, he didn’t want to pay the bucks to ride the tram in the rain – even though the cars were covered. We were pretty much stuck with what we could see driving, billboards for Seminole gambling and airboats, and lots of soggy grassland under heavy black and blue-layered skies. True, it had a bleak, haunting kind of beauty.

  Carl refused to put on the air conditioner because he said it sapped the power of the engine, so all day we suffocated. We could only crack the truck windows because of the rain. By late afternoon my back was soaked with sweat and I could smell my armpits. And, get this – he was smoking cigarettes. Like I said, I was plain stupid coming up with the idea – or maybe blinded by the fact that he had a nice piece of well-working equipment that seemed worth saving.

  At that point, I started to wonder if I could make us swerve into a canal and end the suffering. I was studying the landscape, looking ahead for deep water, when I spotted a couple vehicles pulled off the road.

  “Carl, look. I bet you they see gators.”

  “Fuckin’ A,” he bellowed.

  He was driving twenty over the limit, as always – in a hurry to get to hell – but he nailed the brakes and managed to turn onto a gravel road that ran a few hundred yards off the side of a small lake. One car pulled out past us, but a couple and a little girl were still standing near the edge of the water.

  It was only drizzling by then, and Carl pulled next to their pickup and shut off the ignition. My side of the truck was over a puddle about four inches deep. I opened the door and plodded through in my sandals, while Carl stood grimacing at the horizon, rubbing his dark unshaved chin.

  We walked towards the people. The woman was brown-haired, wearing a loose print dress – the kind my grandma would’ve called a house-dress – and I felt how sweet and old-fashioned she was next to me in short shorts and halter top, with my white-blonde hair and black roots haystack style. The man was a wiry, muscular type in tight jeans and a white T-shirt – tattoos on both biceps, like Carl, but arms half the size. He was bending down by some rocks a little further along. The little girl, maybe four years old, and her mother were holding hands by the edge.

  Carl boomed out, “Hey, there,” in his usual megaphone, overly friendly voice, and the mother and child glanced up with a kind of mousy suspiciousness I sometimes felt in my own face. It was almost like they had him pegged instantly.

  We stopped near them. The guy came walking over. He had his hands cupped together in front of him and motioned with his arms towards the water. I looked into the short water weeds and sticks and saw two small eyes and nose holes rising above the ripples a few yards out. It was a baby gator, maybe four feet long, judging by the closeness of his parts.

  “There he is!” Carl yelled.

  “Just you watch this,” the guy said. He tossed something into the water in front of the nose and I caught the scrambling of tiny lizard legs just before the gator lurched and snapped him up. “They just love them lizards,” the man said.

  Carl started laughing, “Ho, ho, ho,” like it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen, and the guy joined in because he’d made such a big hit.

  Us women looked at each other and kind of smiled with our lips tight. The mother had her arm around the little girl’s shoulder holding her against her hip. The girl squirmed away. “Daddy, can I help you catch another one?”

  “Sure, darlin’, come right over here.” He led her towards the rocks and I saw the mother cast him a look as he went by. He laughed and took his daughter’s hand.

  The whole thing was plenty creepy, but Carl was still chuckling. It seemed like maybe he was having a good time for a change.

  “Cannibals. Reptiles eating reptiles,” he said. “Yup.” He did that eh-eh-eh laugh in the back of his throat. It made me wince. He took my hand and leered towards my face. “It’s a scrawny one, Virginia – not like a Texas gator – but I guess I have to say you weren’t lying. Florida has one.” He put his arm across my shoulder and leaned on me, still laughing at his own sense of humour. I widened my legs, to keep from falling over, and chuckled so he wouldn’t demand to know what was the matter, then insist I spoiled the day by telling him.

  We stood there watching the gator float in place hoping for another snack, and in a few minutes, the squeals of the little girl told us that it wouldn’t be long. They came shuffling over slowly, the father bent, cupping his hands over the girl’s.

  “This is the last one now, OK, sweetheart?” the mother said as they stopped beside her. She was talking to the little girl. “We need to get home in time to make supper.’’ From her voice it sounded like they’d been sacrificing lizards for a while.

  The two flung the prey into the water. It fell short, but there was no place for the lizard to go. It floundered in the direction it was pointed
, the only high ground, the gator’s waiting snout. He snapped it up. This time he’d pushed further out of the water and I saw that he was missing one of his limbs.

  “Look, Carl, the gator only has one arm. I wonder what got him?”

  “Probably a Texas gator,” he said. “It figures, the one gator you find me is a cripple.”

  Carl had an answer for everything. “No,” I said. “Why would one gator tear off another one’s arm?”

  “Leg. One big chomp without thinkin’. Probably got his leg in between his mother and some tasty tidbit – a small dog or kid. Life is cruel, babycakes – survival of the fittest.” He stopped talking to light a cigarette. He waved it near my face to make his point. “You gotta protect yourself – be cruel first. That’s why you got me – to do it for you.” He gave me one of his grins with all the teeth showing.

  “Oh, is that why?” I laughed, like it was a joke. Yeah, Carl would take care of his own all right – it was like having a mad dog at my side, never knowing when he might tum. He wouldn’t hesitate to rip anybody’s arm off, mine included, if it got in his way.

  The mother called to her husband, “Can we get going, honey? I have fish to clean.”

  The guy didn’t look up. “Good job,” he said to his daughter. He reached down and gave her a pat on the butt. “Let’s get another one.”

  It started to rain a little harder, thank God, and Carl motioned with his head towards the car and started walking. I looked at the woman still standing there. “Bye,” I called.

  She nodded at me, her face empty of life. “Goodbye, sweetie.” It was then she turned enough for me to see that the sleeve on the far side of the dress was empty, pinned up – her arm was gone. Jesus. I felt my eyes bulge. She couldn’t have missed what I said. I burned through ten shades of red in a split second. I turned and sprinted to catch up with Carl.

  He glanced at me. “What’s your hurry, sugar? You ain’t gonna melt. Think I’d leave without you?”

  “Nope,” I said. I swallowed and tried to lighten up. I didn’t want to share what I saw with him.