The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 9 Read online

This time, from behind, he hung his hands off the belt of her skirt, the sides of his thin arms brushing her breasts and even flexing a little, so she’d feel it.This time, as they took off, she felt the erection in his jeans up against her behind, half-exposed in her tilted and distorted panties, still not fully fixed from the last time. He used it to push open her cheeks the way he’d barreled by people in the crowd, and it felt fatter than the only other one she’d felt, the one of her ex-boyfriend, what was his name, and she tensed her ass around it, something she’d never done before and yet knew immediately how to do. He moved slowly up and down against her opening, and then suddenly he stopped moving and his arm rang tightly around her waist and he kissed into her hair and whispered, “Oh, no, not here,” and Allie felt sorry she had forced something from him, a promise or a story from his past, except she suspected he really was going to share it with her, anyway, and only wanted her to think she’d convinced him to, she was that sophisticated now.

  After standing there utterly unconscious, Allie looked up. For the first time, she was aware of someone watching her, from only inches away. It was a middle-aged man in a business suit with a ferrety face and a five o’clock shadow Allie was immediately prepared for his disapproval – and weirdly she couldn’t look away, as if not allowed not to wait for it – but instead he stared back with a mixture of desire and disgust so strong that it startled her. She had never been aware of provoking such intense feelings in someone (though she had, in the very guy from the gas station who’d seen her grow up, though he never stood so close, that was another difference in the city).Allie stared back to confirm and then truly understand what she had inspired. But her comprehension was cut short by their arrival in a station she had not even known they were approaching.

  “Seventy-second street,” an unseen robot woman said.

  They raced across the platform to the 2 train – child of the first, look what they had created! – and, as far as they were concerned now, the more crowded the better. For a change, they sat down, covered by a curtain of people, and he had one hand under her and the other around her and his feeling and fingering of her was so intense she felt it caused the train to blast by stations, as if the thing itself was staring at them and lost its place, as Allie herself had, so far from home. Then she noticed the word “Express” where the train’s number was and knew that meant they had been matching its momentum and not it their own.To muffle her moans, she pushed her tongue into the boy’s ear, another new experience, and it tasted nasty like everything adult did, she figured, before you learned to like it.

  They got off at 125th Street, a stop actually and improbably outside. The crowds were sparser, and the boy seemed in no more hurry to catch another ride. Instead, holding her hand as gently as a child, he guided her slowly to an escalator so long it looked like something out of that song “Stairway to Heaven” Dan had droned along with, except this one led oddly up to Earth, which turned out to be a street hiding shyly beneath an elevated track.

  The boy brought her to a brownstone, the bottom floor of which held a Spanish restaurant, and the tasty smell of cooked bananas followed them up the stairs until they climbed so high they lost it and stopped at the top.

  His apartment had two or three rooms and, though they were alone in it, Allie could tell there were other inhabitants, that maybe he still lived with his family, too; she hoped so, for this would link them more.

  In the kitchen, which had a bathtub, he gave her a glass of water but he was kissing her before she could finish it. His own room had just a bed and TV and a few self-help books on shelves. He mumbled something about his mother having gone to work; it was around five and, if she had just gone and was not now coming home . . . but before she could ask or he offer anything else, he was on his knees, raising her skirt, kissing lightly between her legs, then licking at the rose itself before, nearly begging her, he took off her underwear altogether.

  It was different from how it had been on the trains – they were alone, obviously, and less hot because a breeze blew in from the window – yet she still had a sense of their subverting other people’s desires, maybe just his mother’s now and not the whole city’s. And it was different from the other time for her – there were no TV ads in the background, no sounds at all except an occasional car horn passing or a car radio playing salsa – and it was not as fast as the first time: as he completely undressed and touched and kissed her all over, she felt everything he intended her to feel, and when she reciprocated it was not out of resentful obligation as before but with a sense that getting and giving were now the same thing, a new idea she could not completely explain, even to herself.

  She whispered “wow” when she finally found him in her hand, almost unnerved by how much there was and how complicated it seemed. There were so many lines and streams and little dots like stars upon him, as if he had his own transportation system and was so big the map of it was magnified, she could find her way around it easily: she was surprised by how much more excited she was about this penis than the last one.

  He fought a condom onto himself and she helped him do it, gingerly, not wanting to hurt him, but she did, anyway, when the rubber got caught in the hairs at the base, and he had to pull each one out individually, wincing the whole way.

  Then, it was funny, both were wearing nothing but gold chains. Allie’s said “Allie” and his said “Tony” – it was his real name at last; she read it the instant he entered her, as if she really only knew him then, and she said his name and kept saying it each time he pushed inside, expanding her knowledge of the world. He came a second after she did, he actually had that ability, it was incredible, and Allie thought (typically for her, for she was still the same girl) he was one of the very few and maybe the only person on Earth who did.

  Then he turned her over on her belly and straddled her and whispered, as an apology, “I have to do this,” as if it was a secret no one else could ever know, and he didn’t enter but only adorned her, and his sweat and other body liquids lacquered her, and she felt enjoyed to the last drop like that turkey on Thanksgiving everybody liked so much; so little had been left of it, and that’s what she wanted, too, to disappear for his pleasure, leaving only bits of skin behind; he’d need a new one of her next year.

  Afterwards, he considerately cleaned her off with a Kleenex, then kissed her gently from her neck to her knees before she saw his pretty face again.

  She slept for an unknown amount of time, anywhere from two minutes to twenty-four hours. When she woke up, not knowing where she was, she saw the boy too close to be in focus, stretched alongside her, staring right into her eyes and smiling, like a child waiting for a parent to get up.

  They took a shower together, and they would have started up again – there was something about his being so wet and scrawny except for, well, you know where; and ready to go again, he was like the New York City subway, available at any hour – but, through the tiny bathroom window, she saw that the sun had set, and she realized what time it must be and what trouble she was in.

  Allie was surprised how different the kinds of disobedience could make you feel. This kind immediately eliminated any interest she had in more love-making and made dread an almost physical feeling, a form of nausea.

  She quickly put her clammy clothes back on, which were soaked by shower water she had hardly wiped away, and her hair was so wet it dripped even more on her shirt and skirt and onto the floor, where it made an amazingly big puddle for someone with such a small head, and it was helpful to concentrate on that and not on the dialing of Dan’s cellphone on Tony’s home phone, which was just about to end, oh, why weren’t there more (a never-ending amount of) numbers to it?

  To her relief, Dan was more frantic than furious, and his cellphone had such bad reception she only caught every other excoriation. His main points, however, were clear: he had trusted her and she had betrayed him, he hated but would have to tell her parents, this was no day to be running around wild in the city, he didn’t know
who this boy was, anyway, and they had to leave now, not in half an hour but now.

  Allie noticed that Dan could give full flower to his fears now that the day was over and there could be no more selling of miche. Nonetheless, she would have been mortified by his admonishments if Tony had not been standing beside her in his underwear, dripping wet as well, making screamingly funny faces to mock what he was sure Dan was saying.When he put his hands on his narrow hips and strutted around like a stupid idiot, then moved his lips as if Dan were a pissed-off pigeon or something, Allie had to lightly bite her cheeks not to laugh when she said, “I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

  When Tony heard that, he got strangely serious. He pulled over a piece of old newspaper, then swiftly scribbled on its side margin, then raised for her to read: “Take the train. I want to see you off.”

  The certainty of the words impressed Allie, more than Dan was impressing her – after all, what had he done for her today? Tony knew where it all stood in the city – the truth about the threat – he was the wisest person she had ever met, and she felt closer to him than to anyone in the world. Egged on by Tony nodding over and over, pointing to his penciled message – not aware he looked kind of funny now, because he was the one so serious – Allie obediently blurted out, “I’ll take the train,” then pressed the button and deserted Dan, a gesture nowhere near as satisfying as slamming down the phone but the best she could do and actually not so bad.

  They took the subway back downtown. By now, there were only a few passengers scattered through the cars, those who chose not those who needed. The tension – the terror – of commuting during a catastrophe had eased, and the people who remained were either resigned or indifferent to it, and too few for it to be fun or feasible to fool around in their midst. Besides, the urge had passed.

  When they reached Penn Station, it seemed massive and clogged but not in a good way. Allie felt small and lost in its frankly grubby expanse – so many people were pushing valises on wheels with the sad faces of those traveling to funerals of friends – and she held onto Tony’s arm tightly now, not wanting him to drift away an inch.

  She noticed that he seemed impatient, glancing around, as if anticipating something. “All’s clear here,” he said, and sounded disappointed.

  Then the two of them stopped, because they were forced to.

  Three policemen in the near-distance were waving at them and everyone else. Not wasting time with courtesy, they yelled to “go back” and “get out.” Soon other officers of all sizes and both sexes were crudely herding then virtually pushing them back the way they came.

  Dozens of them were deposited outside, many obviously late for trips they had planned much longer than Allie had her own.

  Those who joined them were offended, annoyed, or – quietly but it was clear – made uneasy by having this happen. Allie heard someone say, “They found something,” and someone else, “a suitcase,” and finally, in a New York-accented voice trying hard to sound more inconvenienced than afraid, “Jesus Cwist.” Then there was the approaching sound of sirens and car after car after car of cops pulled up.

  When Allie looked to Tony for an explanation, she saw he was smirking in his by now signature style.

  “Idiots,” he said, with certainty. “All of them.”

  Allie was comforted by his typical tone of voice which seemed to restore and bring about calm. Yet she couldn’t help recalling that he had said he’d see her off, yet had never mentioned seeing her again. And that he breathed a bit easier – and spoke with satisfied bitterness – now that the cops had found a bag. “It’s nothing,” he said. “A fake. And they fell for it. They always will.”

  He lit a cigarette, something she had never seen him do, and exhaled smoke with indifference into the surrounding crowd. He appeared to enjoy the discomfort it caused and replied with a smiling obscenity when someone asked him to stop.

  Allie couldn’t help it, she saw more images from awful movies: Tony dissolving into a wolf or whatever villain the actor really was. Was there not a second he could be serious about such a thing? Was that how deep his disgust with the world went? And what did that say about how he felt about her? She was afraid to ask.

  Slowly, she felt an alteration in herself, as well. She felt her judgment of others returning; from fear of being tossed away by him, she was morphing like people in movies, too, back into a moralist.

  “Well,” she said. “I think it’s awful.”

  “What?”

  “That someone would do such a thing. Plant a bag.”

  They certainly would never have done it back home – a phony phone call was the worst kind of prank they pulled.

  “Don’t get on your high horse,” he said.

  “I’m not.”

  “You’re going to buy into this now?”

  “Well, why not? What would officials get out of faking it?”

  “Lots of things. Keeping us controlled. Making us behave. And what do you mean, ‘get out of it’? It’s not like you did so badly by it.”

  The remark shook Allie like seeing a death notice in a newspaper of someone she knew. She imagined ringing in her ears like a kind of cash register, the daily exchange of services that went on where they were, that you would always hear as long as the city existed, no matter how many silent computers took their place to do the tally: the way of a world in which people lived too close to do anything decent with each other. Even in this new era – even if it was the end of the world – there were opportunities to make a deal, and she’d been smack in the middle of one and was mortified by it.

  “Please get away from me,” she said.

  Allie fought through the new crowd – after those which had been so secret and stimulating, this one felt fit to suffocate her. Her need to escape was greater than the crowd’s to gather and so soon she was free of it and him, the boy she hated now because she was vulnerable and he had made her ashamed.

  “Help me, help me,” she said to a female cop whom she crashed into and who – not very kindly – told her to please clear the area.

  Allie hid a few blocks away in a chain coffee store, one not yet transplanted to her town. She checked out the window with false casualness, but she never saw Tony approaching. Did she want him to pursue her? Definitely not, which meant yes, though Allie was so rattled it was hard to imagine what he could have said to mollify her, and besides, he didn’t come or couldn’t find her.

  Soon some of the people chased from the station had drifted as far as she had fled and were standing outside and smoking, philosophically. A few even joined her in the shop, shaking their heads at the modern world, and that’s how she heard that the station was open again, the emergency was over, and the bag had been a bad joke.

  She walked back in the dark, asking strangers for directions when she only had to retrace her steps, not wanting to know, to be at ease any longer in this environment. When she reached the station, she saw no one she recognized – he was not there waiting, in other words. She paced outside, ostensibly to catch her breath but really to see if he’d show up; but she was soon shooed inside by overeager cab drivers who could tell she was a tourist (the fanny pack was just the beginning) and wished to take her anywhere on Earth for way too much.

  On the escalator going down and in, Allie called Dan’s cell and told him she was on her way, her parents shouldn’t worry, let him break it to them that she’d be late. Maybe – she thought with hope that was really fear that was really disillusionment – they might not mind so very much.

  Dan was still on the road, alone in his truck without even bread along for the ride, and was relieved and conciliatory. He told her what train to take, something she could have learned for herself, if she hadn’t again made herself helpless.

  After she boarded, Allie watched out the window to see if Tony would come running in, last-minute, like someone from another movie, a romantic one this time, and maybe he’d get stuck on the train because he’d taken so long to say he loved her, and he’d
have to actually go upstate with her, and that would be the end. But he didn’t come or had gone to the wrong car.

  The train pulled out – it was a commuter model, with cushioned seats unlike the subway and still sort of crowded, for there’d been back-ups due to the disruptive bag. Allie stared at the receding platform and thought about the boy. She cried in great choking, child-like sobs, hoping the humiliating sound would be smothered by the train’s exhaust. Then she dried her face on her bare forearms, for she had no tissue or even sleeves.

  By going to her home the train seemed to be taking her back in time. Yet – like everything else on Earth – Allie was actually going forward. Slowly, she felt even angrier now than before she’d come, more prone to punish, and this was a mere glimpse of how she’d be later in her life.

  On her cellphone, she dialed 911 and spoke loudly enough to be heard by the operator but low enough not to disturb her seatmate, a man dozing fitfully. She didn’t know the boy’s last name or actual address, but she knew his first name and the number on his family’s phone, and she thought someone could use the information.

  “He was dark, probably foreign. Maybe he had something to do with planting that bag.”

  Even though he was innocent, he might be taught a lesson and given a good talking to. She didn’t say her own name and hung up when they asked.

  Then the train went into a new tunnel, one so dark she could no longer see herself. And in it, she fell asleep.

  The alert, in which the boy had not believed, was about to become very real for him. For Allie, it would quickly become an edited, censored, self-aggrandizing anecdote she repeated to her family and friends back in town.And, inevitably, it would fade like a flower, until it was a memory as distant, foggy, and half-forgotten as a dream.

  Exam Room 3

  N. T. Morley

  It had stopped raining and the sun was out by the time Jessie parked in the lot and entered the doctor’s office, but she kept her raincoat buttoned. “I’m Jessie Adams, I’ve got a 5:30 with Dr. Hannah,” Jessie told the receptionist. The receptionist was probably in her mid-twenties, with red hair, freckles and a slim, tautly athletic figure. She handed Jessie a clipboard, she asked, “Would you like to hang up your coat?”