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

  “I don’t think we have enough tomatoes for the salad,” he says.

  Her husband the vegetarian.

  She fails to answer.

  “I said we’re low on tomatoes.”

  The information registers through a haze of mental confusion.

  “I’ll pop over to the 7-Eleven on the High Street,” she volunteers. “They’re still open. I should have bought more stuff over lunch at the Goodge Street Tesco. It won’t take me long,” she says.

  “I’ll come along,” her husband says. “Keep you company.”

  “No, it’s all right,” she answers. “You can prepare the dressing.”

  He’s always been good that way, willing to cook and do things in the kitchen. She picks up her shoulder bag, with her purse and the manuscript she’s working on and walks out onto the mews.

  The night air is stale and sticky. She is wearing her white jeans and an old promotional tee-shirt.

  She walks at her usual jaunty pace past the Common. Toward the shops. And breezes past the convenience store where a few spotty youths are squabbling by the ice-cream counter, and a couple of drab, middle-aged men are leafing through the top shelf girlie magazines. She heads on to the railway station. Network South East. The next train to Charing Cross is in five minutes. She uses her monthly Travelcard.

  At the London station, she calmly collects her thoughts. Smiles impishly at the imagined face of her husband, waiting all this time for the final ingredients for the salad, back at their house. She catches the tube to Victoria and connects with the last train departure to Brighton.

  Once, with her lover, she had gone there for a weekend, yeah a dirty week-end, she supposes. It was on the eve of a political party conference and the seaside resort had been full of grim-faced politicians and swarms of television journalists. She’d spent most of her time outside the hotel room where they had fucked more times than she had thought possible in the space of thirty-six hours, absolutely terrified of venturing across her spouse, or some colleagues of his who might be familiar with her, even though he worked on the business and economics side and she well knew he could not be in Brighton right then.

  Katherine spent the night ambling up and down the seafront, enjoying the coolness of the marine breeze and sea air after the Turkish bath of her London suburbs and the publisher’s offices where she worked. It was wonderfully quiet; no drunks to accost her, just alone with her thoughts, the memories, the scars of lust, the mess that her life now was.

  Her lover had betrayed her. And she, in turn, had betrayed both men.

  She wanted to wipe her mind clean of everything, to erase the wrong-doing and the pain she had inflicted on them. To start anew, like a baby arriving into the world, free of fault, innocent, like a blank tape ready for a new set of experiences, a new life almost.

  In the morning, she booked herself into a small bed and breakfast on a square facing the old pier. She shopped for new clothes, which she paid for by credit card. She ate fish and chips, like a tourist and even found the Haagen-Dazs ice-cream parlour she remembered from a previous visit to one of the backstreets. Maraschino cherry delight. The weather was warm but nowhere near as bad as London. On the promenade, she bought a floppy straw hat to protect her pale skin from the fierce sun. She took a nap in the afternoon in the cramped room of the small hotel. Before dozing off, she had switched the TV on and seen her husband on screen looking all jolly and smug on the business lunch programme, reporting from the car park of an automotive parts factory. It had been recorded two days earlier. She awoke later from a dream-free sleep, enjoyed a leisurely bath during which she depilated her legs and cut her toe nails, and, clean and refreshed, slipped on the new lightweight dress she had purchased earlier, low-cut, dark blue with white polka dots, billowing away down over her long legs from a high waist.

  “First night away,” she remarked to herself, as she walked out into the dusk.

  She meets this guy in a pseudo-Texan Cantina. He says he’s from one of the unions. She’s had a couple of beers, and he offers her a glass of tequila. It burns her throat and stomach.

  “I canvass for Labour locally, where I live,” she tells him, to indicate that at least they share the same political affiliation. She’s always suspected, despite his indifferent denials, that that bastard of a lover she’d been involved with had actually voted Tory. How in hell could she have slept with him?

  He smiles at her, well, more of a leer really.

  So what? she thinks.

  She follows him, his name is Adam Smith, back to the bar of the Old Ship where he is staying for the conference. It’s already pretty late, and there are only a handful of people left in the penumbra of the bar. She has a couple of vodka and oranges. Her head feels light. Better this than the heavy burden of all the memories and the guilt, she reckons.

  “Is that a wedding ring?” the guy enquires, pointing at her finger.

  “Yes,” she answers. “Does it bother you?”

  It all floods back. How her lover would delicately slip both the wedding and the thin engagement rings off her fingers before ceremoniously undressing her from top to bottom, before they would make love in the basement to the sound of the whirring fan and the light of the long-life candle she herself had bought near the Reject Shop on Tottenham Court Road.

  “No, I was just wondering, that’s all,” he remarks.

  “If it bothers you, I can take them off,” Katherine says.

  “No, no,” he says, annoyed by this turn of events. But while he is still saying this, she has already wet her finger and slipped both the rings off, deliberately dropping them at the bottom of her glass.

  “Satisfied?” she asks.

  Is she drunk, he wonders? “They’ll be closing the bar any minute, I reckon,” he says, ignoring her earlier remark. “Can I entice you up to my room for a final nightcap?”

  She isn’t drunk. Just a bit lost, she guesses. She looks at this man called Smith of all things. His tie isn’t straight, his shirt has a few drink stains, scattered across its front. She can read him like a map. But what the hell?

  “Yeah, why not?” she answers, grabbing her bag still loaded with the manuscript from her old life, and stands up, abandoning the rings in the half-empty glass of booze.

  As he inserts the electronic card into the door, he leers at her again. Why must he be so obvious, Katherine thinks?

  The door swings open.

  He stands aside and Katherine walks in.

  The room is medium-sized, dominated by a large king-size bed. A door on the right leads to a bathroom. On the walls, anonymous prints of naval victories from the Napoleonic wars. She smiles; it might have been worse: it could have been the classic print of the Eurasian woman with the blue face. If it had been, she thinks she might have walked straight out again.

  He follows her in and the door slams quietly.

  He walks to the bedside table where a large bottle of scotch stands, no, bourbon. Four Roses.

  He takes his jacket off. His shirt is straining at the waist, his girth stretching the button holes.

  “Drink?” Adam suggests.

  She hates the stuff but answers “Why not?” That’s how it’s supposed to go, isn’t it?

  “So,” he sits down on the edge of the orange-brown bedspread, loosens his tie. “How much?”

  “How much what?” She hesitantly sips the harsh booze from the glass.

  “How much do you charge? All that married woman crap doesn’t cut much ice, you know. I don’t care, I’ll pay the going rate.” He takes a thick black leather wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket. Opens it and pulls out two fifty pound notes. Katherine notices there are quite a lot more where they came from.

  He hands her the cash. “Okay,” she says, taking it.

  She stands to begin undressing.

  He smiles.

  She unzips the dress where it cinches her waist and pulls it up above her head. And off. All she is wearing is her underwear. The black bustier and knick
ers set and the matching suspender belt and dark stockings. What she always wore for the assignments with her lover. Her skin is pale, her tummy flat like a marble table, her thighs full, the tight suspender belt biting in to the skin above her hips.

  She moves to unhook the bustier but Adam interjects: “No, keep your top on. You haven’t got much up there. I’d rather you didn’t.”

  She stands there, legs apart, wondering what to do next. Thinking, why am I so passive? I know what I’m doing. Fleetingly, she remembers how, one night, in the thrall of rapture, he had whispered in her ear: “One day, Kate, you will walk all the sexual stations of the Cross, you see.” At the time, she hadn’t quite understood, but had found it sexy, him saying things like that, it fired her lust up even more. Now, she was beginning to understand.

  He gulps down the contents of his glass. She obliges, doing the same. He pours more bourbon.

  “Well?” she asks.

  “Take your pants off,” the union representative demands.

  Katherine unhooks a stocking, but the guy interrupts:

  “No, keep your stockings on.”

  She bends and pulls the knickers down, slipping the thin fabric across the nylon and over her flat shoes. She leaves the garment on the hotel room floor and straightens up again.

  Her pubic curls lie flattened against her damp skin. He gazes at her lower stomach, all traces of his smile now disappearing as he drinks in the sight of her nudity.

  “Come here,” he says. She moves closer to him, her cunt facing his eyes, as he remains in the chair.

  His fingers invade her thatch, spreading the dark curls. He slips a finger into her gash. Probes.

  “You’re not very wet, are you?”

  Katherine stays silent.

  He withdraws his finger from her sex. Brings it up to his nose, sniffs. Grunts.

  “Suck my cock.”

  He unzips his fly.

  Katherine kneels by the chair. He pulls his penis out. It’s semi-erect, pinker than others she has come across. Not that she’s encountered that many. A handful of clumsy groping sessions and fucking in the darkness at University, following alcoholic parties, and then her husband, uncircumcized and reliably sturdy, and five years later the damn lover, circumcized, thicker, darker, pulsating, veined like a tender tree. Life as an uninterrupted parade of male members!

  She takes the man’s cock between her fingers, pulls on the foreskin and the glans emerges, reddish, the colour of fever. She lowers her head, opens her lips and takes the member into her moist insides. He’s not too big. She hates it when it makes her choke. Her tongue slowly makes contact with the swelling penis, circles its extremity; he tastes different, a slightly acrid, sweaty odour, musk and urine. Suddenly, she feels his hand on her head, fingers burrowing into her thick curls, pressuring her mouth to go deeper and swallow his cock up to its hairy hilt. The tip of her tongue dallies over the cock’s small hole. When she touches him there, there’s a trembling, a nervous shudder that courses through his whole body. She senses he is about to come and sucks harder on his now fully-grown member. He tries to hold back but she stimulates the base of his cock with her fingers while her tongue relentlessly keeps on teasing his opening.

  “You bitch,” he sighs, aware that she is trying to finish him off. Expediting the job.

  But the surge can’t be halted, and within a few seconds his whole body spasms. As this happens, Katherine opens her mouth wide to disengage herself from his throbbing cock, but he viciously holds her head down even harder and comes inside her mouth. She gags on the hot stream of come and has no other choice than to swallow the stuff. Bastard, she mutters under her breath. It sticks in her throat. She feels like being sick. Finally, he releases his hold on her head and she is allowed to pull her mouth back. She wipes her lips with the back of her hand, to eliminate the lingering taste of his seed.

  His quickly shrivelling penis still dangling like a marionette from his open trousers, he gets out of the chair before she has time to stand up again and signals her to the bed. She sits on the edge, and he forces her down so that her long legs dangle over the side. He lowers himself down to the carpet, and sticks two fingers into her cunt.

  “Still dry, hey?” he says, forcing his way past her labia.

  She looks down at him, his face cunt-level, thinning hair bobbing up and down between her thighs. She distractedly notices there’s a ladder near the knee of her left stocking. How did that happen, she wonders?

  His fingers slip in and out of her sex. She has no feeling of excitement. This is what being an object is, she reckons.

  “Your cunt hair is too long,” he tells her, parting the curls around her opening.

  “I don’t go to the barbers very often,” she attempts a feeble joke.

  “Wait there. Don’t move,” he says, rising and moving over to the settee where a battered attaché-case lies. He opens it and pulls out a nail kit and a small pair of scissors.

  He pulls on her pubic curls, untangling the longer ones and trims the extremities along a straight line. It feels funny. She looks down after he has completed the work. Her bush is now distinctly thinner, and the lips of her sex are plainly visible behind the growth.

  “There, that’s nicer, isn’t it?” he remarks. “Now you can see the merchandise.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “I want to see inside,” he says. “Use your own fingers. Open up.”

  She obeys.

  He peers inside her, his eyes piercing her innards.

  Her lover used to say that her insides were the colour of coral. She closes her eyes.

  “I’m going to fuck you now,” Adam says. “Where do you keep your condoms? In your handbag?”

  “I don’t have any,” Katherine replies. “I’ve already told you, I’m not a whore.”

  “Bloody hell,” the man says. “Shit. You don’t think I’m gonna put my cock inside there; I don’t know where you’ve been before.”

  “You didn’t mind my mouth,” she says, a tad angrily. “That was good enough for you, wasn’t it?”

  Only five cocks before, she thinks. A bloody woman of experience . . . No, not even, the first two she never gave head to.

  She looks at this man, and finds him ridiculous. Overweight, standing there with his small cock peering out between the curtains of his half-open trousers.

  She giggles.

  He reacts badly and slaps her across the cheek.

  “Don’t . . .”

  “I’ve paid. I’ll do exactly what I want to do, woman.”

  “Bastard.”

  He slides his belt out of the trouser top, and she’s totally unprepared for this, as he grabs both her wrists and binds them together. Tight. She’s too slow to react. Vulnerable, obscenely undressed in front of this stranger with her cunt wide open, her black stockings in disarray, her small breasts feeling heavy inside the cups of her bustier, her cheek still on fire from the blow. Adam pulls her by her bound wrists towards the bathroom, pushes the door open with his foot.

  Katherine is frightened. What now? She has read too many serial killer novels. For Christ’s sake, she edits them. In her bag over at the bed and breakfast, there’s even a manuscript for one that takes place in Arizona. Fiction editor found slaughtered in Brighton hotel. Will he slit my throat and arrange my mutilated body in a pornographic vision that goes beyond obscenity? Will he carve off the tips of my breasts, insert the carving knife in my cunt and slit me all the way up like a chicken? Will he cut my labia off and display them partly chewed inside my open mouth?

  She shudders.

  He pushes her down on the toilet.

  “There,” he says.

  “Yes?” she enquires.

  “I want you to pee, and I want to watch. Come on, open those legs wide, wider, now. Come on. Show me that piss squirting out of you.”

  “No,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “Undo my hands, then maybe. If I can manage it.”

  He does. She trie
s.

  Katherine has never peed in front of a man, of any one. She blushes intensely. Closes her eyes and concentrates. He fills a toothbrush mug with water and forces her to swallow. And again. She can feel the warmth inside her stomach, the muscles tensing. He keeps on standing there, silent now, watching entranced the quivering, moist entrance to her cunt.

  Finally, the flow is unleashed. The odorous liquid flows.

  It feels both painful, like a particularly strong period bursting from her and rupturing some remote part of her body, but also pleasurable, like a fourth division orgasm, a satisfying but unremarkable feeding of the lust inside, not unlike the routine lovemaking she had been having for ages with her husband.

  Adam watches as the thin stream of pee first dribbles out, then streams arc-like into the bowl, emerging from the thin opening between her cunt lips. As she tightens her throat, he approaches a finger, allows the liquid to pearl over it like a cascade, and inserts it suddenly into her pouring aperture. Then another finger, yet another and savagely stretching the muscles inserts his whole fist into her. Katherine screams in agony. But the windows of the hotel room are closed and Brighton doesn’t hear.

  Finally, the flow stops and he withdraws his hand. It still hurts and she is about to cry, as he slaps her face again and cries out:

  “You bitch, you enjoyed that, didn’t you.”

  She nods.

  “Stick a finger up your arse.”

  She makes a gesture of protest but he swings the belt close to her cheek.

  He pulls her off from the toilet bowl, pushes her onto her knees, on all fours. Manipulates her so that her rump points upward and guides her right hand (how could he know she was left-handed?) toward the dark cranny of her anus.

  “Now,” he said.

  To urge her on, he places his foot above her other hand, as if to tread on it.

  She slowly inserts her middle finger into the puckered aperture. The ring of muscles rebels against the intrusion and she barely manages half a nail.

  “More,” Adam says, and steps harder onto her free hand.

  She pushes the finger harder. The ring of flesh relaxes. She feels another need to pee, but holds back. Finally, the finger plants itself deep inside her arsehole, spearing herself up to its first joint. The feeling is not unpleasant.