The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 5 Read online

  In moments her arms collapsed under the intensity of their coupling; her cheek and breasts pressed hard against the cold window. The two of them cried in counterpoint, she at each thrust, he with each momentary withdrawal.

  In the yellow rectangle of light immediately below them a woman brought a birthday cake and set it twinkling in the center of a circle of friends. In the next window, a couple rose from their chairs to leave the image of Jennifer Aniston gesturing to an empty room. In another, a woman stood with a man’s arms around her waist, swaying as she chatted on the phone.

  Now each thrust lifted her clear of the floor. The window moaned in its frame.

  “Turn!” he grated.

  “What?” She was gasping, bewildered.

  “Turn,” he said, and pulled himself out of her. He spun her to face him and plunged in again. She knotted her legs around his waist as he slammed her back against the window.

  He kissed face, mouth, neck, biting and licking. “Come with me!”

  Her head snapped back and boomed against the glass. “I am,” she said.

  His thrusts accelerated. They grappled fingers into each other’s hair to jerk their faces closer. His tongue raked the roof of her mouth. She bit his lip to draw blood, sucked it.

  He slammed home in her with a guttural shout and went still, every muscle in his body locked and straining. With a rising wail, she began to come around him. He slammed deep again, and held. Her climax blurred into a series of contorted spasms centered on the root of his cock. He began to empty into her.

  He slammed home a third time with such force it drove the air out of them both. With a hisssssssss the entire wall of safety glass shivered white and collapsed. The icefall of glass showered down. They teetered on the brink, eight stories up, braced, faces buried in each other’s necks, each clutching the other to keep from tumbling outward.

  He regained his balance as the seed ceased to pulse from his body; she settled against him, glittering shards still cascading from her hair and shoulders. He stepped back, his feet crunching in the snowdrift of glass.

  She locked her hands with his and with a laugh threw her upper body backward, out into the cold night air. Their hands were slippery with sweat; it took all his strength to hold her. Tinkling fragments of glass still fell from them.

  The woman clutching the phone stared up at them, pressed into her lover’s embrace. The birthday party had drifted away from the table, out of view. Beyond the nearest houses lay the City, house after house, tower after splendid tower, as far as the jewelled hills across the Bay and further, beyond seeing. A net of longing and fulfillment glowed and sparked across the land, meetings and passings, losses and embracings in a ceaseless dance, uncounted, passionate and careless. Unnoticed in the heavens, the company of stars drifted west, eternal, empty of all desire.

  The Scarless

  Marcelle Perks

  It was a big bed, something she could still appreciate. The plain white cotton sheet drained the heat from her exposed skin. The cameramen weren’t ready yet and the longer she waited, the more the indent of her body pressed into the dampness. Yet she remained motionless, frozen to the spot. They always stressed that it was important to lie absolutely stiff, to “play dead.” But they didn’t want to see her soul dancing in her eyes, unlike the banal lingerie photographers who roved unfettered by their own demands and expected her to keep pace with their every turn and nuance. In cruel heels, she pranced for hours giving the camera what it wanted. Spreading her lips. Afterward, her face itched from semi-permanent smile lines that took all-night crying to rinse out, to return to the doll-blank face that was her own. Until the next shoot. Here, at least, her facial expression was underexposed, an outline for a figure, or a blur. Only the body with its signature of overstretched skin connected to the powerful lens; the burning studio lights; the strange rubber domwear of the extras. Although afterward she might have to cancel studio work for weeks until the wounds faded, it gave her a numbing lull. Her body was there, but she was not. The rabbit grin that constantly fretted between her mouth and eyes would be pushed back, temporarily plumped.

  Soon they would start doing it. She couldn’t see or smell or touch it, but the sense of it was a tendril of shame, an idea, like a germ, she couldn’t allow to get hold of her. One of the extras was unpeeling his rubber trousers, by the sound of it, to unleash what was, undoubtedly, a large dick. Without faces or skin required for the males, they could afford to harvest the biggest dicks on the circuit, from those that in other departments had fallen from grace. Underneath the rubber, the flesh was allowed to sweat unchecked, corseted to superman proportions by the ten-thousand-dollar designer suits. Domwear for the corporate analysts and Wall Street kids who could afford to have it sitting in their vast closets while they imagined wearing it. The enormous metal tripods, stationed like stranded penises, straining now, overreaching themselves. Click, click, a flash of light. Something was being recorded while she didn’t even recognize what position she was in. And then the whispers again, the uneasy sss sss seemingly both near and distant, the exact meaning falling just out of reach. These masks, sometimes even without eyeholes, rendered speech muddy, the actors drowning men trying to give their names out.

  Without direction of how to carry that morning’s expression, she was unsure her body could live up to scrutiny when she wasn’t living in it. She wanted to look good still, even if she did not. Even as an anonymous actress under the replica nineteenth-century face mask, she was becoming precious, trying to work out which way the camera was working. Did they worry about not knowing when to stop or not wanting to stop? The men were like sticky, stretchy robots, hidden in the stretched synthetic hides, being the animals they wanted to be. Two of them perhaps, working at her now, through all the inches of identity-blurring rubber. Later she would never recognize them. The squealing burn, as familiar to her as the scent of her own front room, simply stunk, the worst part about the job. Underneath the rubber, the sweat formed grooves that wobbled as they worked. But the activities of its wearers was without tangible sensation, the rubber zipped mouth dry-fucking her a burlesque of her day work, its motions insincere, dry. The guy eating her tits had no teeth now to bite them, so she didn’t have to be nice to him. With rubber men, it was the shape of their bones that defined them, and the sheets beneath her that felt like flesh, the lovers she should have had. The rubber creaked and shifted. Somewhere artificial lubricant was preparing the flesh, basting it for action. The crude dull dance of their ordinary lives, displaying them as puppets without faces, working without their needing to feel something. Until they stopped trying to be lovers and became rubber men with toys.

  She didn’t really want to be here now that her body was reacting back into consciousness, but she didn’t want to spoil it either; in fact she wanted to go down the slide, all the way to another place where everything was different. Time, rather than uselessly ticking past her, was becoming precious, every second assuming a profound significance. Uncomfortable now, she thought that she enjoyed it, but even pleasure has its doubts. Her mind wandered as the army of arrested goose bumps jumped through her skin, and the dumb pink eight-inch dildo in her pussy was forced even higher, its sound a nasal swamp beat, mud squelching under paws, prodding unkindly the prickle of the rashly shaven lips. Specially bought pan foundation evened out the red first, then got messed up, like frosted underarm sweat, under the lights. In this line on your CV they wanted to read: perfectly symmetrical pussy, no marks or pimples. Flesh baby-button pink. She had done it yesterday, thinking this time might be the last, before she could let the hair grow, haltingly recover. But the agent had called today to beg her to do another photo session next week. Another retro Betty Boop chic shoot, with her ebony wig and own magic shoes the color of blood, and they had requested that she turn up clean shaved. She was getting into the fetish mainstream market as well these days. So her pussy lips, shaved by her lover of yesterday, the dark-haired bi dancer from Metro’s, were being mauled by t
heir own hair follicles. Skin the color of dull veal, delicate and unwavering under the brash lights, something not meant to be exposed. Unstopped, it might begin to burst, crease into blood orange, pulped. How will they know when it really hurts? The rubber men can’t really see or feel what they are doing either.

  Think, think about another place. The hotel where it all began. It was elegant, like her dreams, where she auditioned for the Northern Lights Contemporary Dance group at just eighteen. Twelve years of constant training, the whittled body eager, alive. She danced just like she knew she would, passionate and controlled, a wild animal available for hire. The movements were perfect, inspired, but her body rendered it false. The instrument was wrong. They didn’t like her look. Recalling it, her feet are twitching now, unhurt, unneeded, inexplicably cold. In her later life, it was the inside of her body that would be performed with, cared for. She is walking back down to her audition again and now she can feel her feet are numb, pressing into the plush red carpet of the hotel. Every step destroying something that should have formed, little flowers pulped into a mash. Her feet no longer belong to her, she does not need them. She wants her ballet shoes, to cover them up, russet like in the Michael Powell film, The Red Shoes, the film of her teenage dreams, but they are lost. Her nubile, trained body can no longer respond and dance. Trudging over the sumptuous, plush carpet, she probably doesn’t need the shoes to leap up, she goes along the intermittent corridor, the red carpet fading, murky, the walls jumping and dancing about, breaking up, the connection in her dream uncentered. She still believes she can make it, even though once you put the shoes on you have to dance until you die. Then she stops before a surprisingly workmanlike, steel utilitarian lift. Incongruous, that such a meat cart should be waiting here in this place that crushed her dreams. They had said her hips were overly luscious, breasts too firm. Perhaps her sex jutted too conspicuously from its leotard, her nose knelt too large in her face. She was eighteen, guys called her hot, and they could tell she had been fucked. The lift was also wrong, as fake as the yuppie elevator fuck set in Fatal Attraction that they only used to make it easier to film the pretend penetration long shots. Now the soles of her feet are sticking to the cold floor, she can hardly lift them, her body is so heavy. Even the square resistance of the buttons against her fingers in the lift seems massive, just pressing them hurts. The lift falls, ten years on, now she knows she will never be a dancer. Now she is back here, she doesn’t want to go out. Don’t think now, some things have to be blocked off, forgotten about, removed from the equation. The dancer’s body has been remade, laid and spread like a vestal virgin again, red on black.

  She shivered furtively, using a hidden reflex. It was important to remain expressionless, body dumb, limp. On the bed she was still, consumed with waiting, holding on to the edge of a prickling, mounting pain that, if she was to let go of it for a even second, would rise up and knock her down flat. And it wasn’t possible to think of why she was here, how she could be doing this. The center of meaning had moved down from the head, the capital, now it was at the pressure points that her idea of existence was scrabbling. The lights seemed to be shining more brightly now, she could feel tears trickling down her face unseen, a faint tickle that mocked, compared and contrasted, with the biting torment that the straps were inflicting elsewhere. Yes they had done it tightly, constricting the blood flow as she had requested. And something has to give.

  The pressure to cry out, go purple, thrash uncontrollably, say something, was mounting as if her very anguish was affecting the rules of gravity. Normal blood flow was being circumvented and she could hear the tick tick panic of her pulse stiffening and bludgeoning around the restraints. The blood surfing in pointless waves in the veins of her arms and legs, bulging thickly like a painful bladder as if she had woken up with four new genitalia strategically placed. And her own vagina dilating as if it might turn itself inside out, releasing a hidden trickle of heady juice that told of her excitement in restraint; of the pleasures to come. All the colors and shapes and distances of things were changing as she lay there responding witlessly to the squeeze and pressure. This was the start of when things started losing their meanings.

  She had never felt more alive and receptive. Her body seemed both heavy and light, an oxymoron she couldn’t explain, the very idea of herself slipping from memory consciousness. All the little trivial afterthoughts like, was her pussy still looking fresh? had vanished. That information was not filed, not found here. You know what you can feel. In this sensitive state it was like being born again, just assuming consciousness, waking up and discovering that the whole world was one big sensory masterpiece that you had created just for that moment. Pain was an art that could never be repeated, only rehearsed, each foray a different distance, another addition to the scar tissue. Idly she wondered how long she would be able to keep up regular modeling if she kept returning here.

  And the knife, when it comes, is like a little bit of love all in once piece. The tip of it, held up to the light, gleams pretty, inches seemingly into infinity. The sharp end, symbol of horror movie posters, the part that does the damage, looks so wicked and long-drawn because the idea of it hurts. And the curl and snarl of the point gleams under the eye’s scrutiny. But when it is whittled over the flesh, which is expectant and boiling in its own blood, the tip feels like a kiss, a little sting of attention. Blink away the thought of it and skin really parts so easily, incredible but easy, like Moses parting the Red Sea. So when the blood comes, the seeping of it soaking into the cloth is actually a relief. A slippery soothing milk to take out the pain. We bleed so we do not need to die.

  Without her clothes she has mercifully lost part of her senses. Horizontal and bound, the world didn’t feel right to her, or like the way it was. It was soothing to be so disconnected, untouchable, like a faulty electric machine taken out of service. Now they were perhaps cutting her, needling the skin, cameras crunched up tight to capture every single drop of blood. The cameramen not wanting to see it, but having to do it anyway. Special footage this, not normally available. It existed for a rarefied punter who realized he had special tastes that could be pandered to, paid for. By now she could think through most of the pain, anticipate and correct for it, toy mentally with what remained. A little game, a self-imposed mind fuck for her to wrestle with, no audience. What she felt, her own currency not exchangeable. And it was the pain, and the things that it brought, not the unexpectedly good pay, that attracted and repulsed her.

  A job, like any other, except that what had started off as something she couldn’t even think about had become addictive, an acquired taste, a curious relief. Her body, that hunk of flesh, her life’s work the controlled environment of its skin that she had spent so much time preparing this morning, was slowly being released from her care. The challenges: to get enough sun for it to glisten as a gold-textured surface, shiny, oiled, even, permanent, but never too much. Never to burn or malt. Or to get dry patches. Every day to feel just the right temperature floating in the bath, to scour every centimeter she could think of afterward with man-made bristles of a dry skin brush, savage-thoroughly, and then once again to reassure herself all of the circulation had been moved into life. Prodded. The oceans of buttermilk that have been applied, soaked-in overnight, rubbed off all over her sheets, every single piece of furniture tainted by it, reeking of decomposing grease, her body a man-made pet she can ill afford, and then all the effort, all the expense, only to wash it all off next morning, and the tedious process initiated again. Again and then again. And then the blockages, the buildup of dirty fat, slippery strings of goo, stinking fat and skin residue patties that clogged up the only orifices she relied on: the bath, the shower, the sink. The wooden floors dotted with greasy imprints, like the paws of some alien creature unaccustomed to human habits. The room deadened by the ghost of deodorants sprayed on in the past, sting of perfume catching you raw-boned in the throat, and over everything a dry residue of talcum powder, hovering, waiting to reattach itself t
o the skin. Even the washing machine reeling from the over-creaming, the careful measurement of the flesh, the smoothing, plucking, surfacing over the cracks.

  In the straight world, without the brutal purity of pain, the women who, like Katje, were twenty-eight, youngish, were now often not young enough to face the haughty cameras; or backstage, the nubile makeup assistants, whose average age, like soldiers preparing for war, was nineteen. The irony: just as you reached the point where you had trained enough; been in enough work to have the contacts, experience; reached the point where it could start to happen, along came the first alarming gray hair, gradual dipping of the breasts, a skin change. The professionals, if they could, dated pharmacists, befriended beauticians, worked at it harder, paid for surgery when they could find it, but they expected it. It was their job, they said to everybody. Annoyed boyfriends who couldn’t grip why it took them so long to get somewhere; roommates sick of seeing half-dressed neurotics at any hour, doing something to themselves, stretching, scraping, taking something out of a bottle. Nothing had been given. Not ever. They had been doing everything specially as a way of life for so long that stopping now had to be learned again. Allowed. And it had always been work. Then as children, now.

  Katje thinks back to a magazine feature she once read about a model who complained that her “normal” friends didn’t understand how annoying it was not to be able to eat what she wanted. It’s all right for them! But the girl next door, your friends, someone off the street, got it worse. Although in the course of everyday business they could cover up most of the piece, never had to think about spots on their bumcheeks or lighten a strip of pubic flesh, just in case, nevertheless in them throbbed the dirty desire. The desire simply to be adored. Their everyday bodies ached with it just as the models, the dancers, and the actors did, the desire unchanged, but without professional motivation. For them no tax deductible allowances for anything, and mostly hardly any time to keep it up. And other big issues that stood in the way that were always more important. It was the real women who often had the feeling that these bathroom rituals could never be enough. That the minute you started rubbing yourself dry after stepping out of the bath, the skin under your breasts was already leaking sweat. That even as you stood and blow-dried the freshly wet hair, you could feel heat perspiration breaking the barrier of the clean skin. The impossibility that you could ever feel you looked the way you were wanted to look.