The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 5 (10 page)

Later, as they sat up in bed cross-legged and naked, facing one another, they exchanged gifts. Sam gave her a gold necklace with a ruby pendant. Tyler gave him a lapel pin, an Egyptian scarab she’d had copied from the Treasures of King Tutankhamen. On the back she’d inscribed: All My Love Forever.

Turning on the radio, Sam found a slow song so they could dance. Still naked, the couple embraced and moved slowly to the haunting voice of Marvin Gaye. Tyler felt her excitement growing with their bodies pressed together, moving with one another.

In the middle of the second song, by Nat King Cole, Tyler felt her nerves acting up again, felt the depression pouring in on her. She fought it. She fought it hard and told herself she was with her man for Christmas. She was
with
her man for Christmas. She was
with
her man for Christmas!

But she knew. Tomorrow, he would be gone.

It came to Sam as soon as he woke. He had to go. He lay there for a while, Tyler pressed against him, her breath falling on his neck. He tried to concentrate on
why.
Why did he have to go? He couldn’t figure it out. There was something he had to do, something important. He had to go. That’s all he knew.

He tried to fight it. Told himself he wasn’t going anywhere. He would stay with Tyler. But he knew, as sure as he knew the love in his heart for this woman was real, that he had to go.

Pulling the covers back, Sam looked at Tyler as she lay on her belly next to him, facing away from him, her right leg curled up. Her creamy skin looked so beautiful in the morning light. He watched her, studying the lines and curves of her sleek body. He reached over and ran his hand along the small of her back, over her ass and around to her breasts. She felt warm. When Tyler woke with a start, he kissed her and smiled at her.

As soon as he told her, she blinked her damp eyes and said hoarsely, “I know.”

They made love once again. They made lingering love in their bed on the second floor of the old Klamath. Sam caressed Tyler as he’d never caressed anyone in his life. He was certain of that. He kissed her as if the world centered on that kiss. He filled her with his semen until there was no semen left. He loved her so much his heart ached.

Tyler felt it. She felt every scintillating emotion. She felt. . . loved.

Banks of snow from the blizzard had been shoveled away from the railroad tracks, piled into little white hills. The air wasn’t as crisp that morning. The sun was bright in a sky the color of Sam’s eyes. Tyler looked at her man and saw tears in those eyes, which caused her throat to tighten once again. She tried her best to keep from crying.

Sam put his hands on her shoulders and blinked his tears away. She could see his bottom lip quivering as he struggled to speak. She kissed his lips. As soon as she pulled away, he said, “I love you.”

She nodded, her eyes blurred now.

“I love you so much, babe,” he said in a voice filled with emotion.

She told him she loved him too. Her throat was so tight she could barely speak.

Sam took in a deep breath and said, “I don’t know why I’m crying. I’ll be back.”

“I know.” She barely got it out.

Sam kissed her. She kissed him back like it was the last kiss of her life.

The train whistle blew again reminding them it was time. They kissed once more and Sam slowly pulled away. The train began moving. Sam stepped up on the platform and brushed his hand across the scarab pin on the lapel of his overcoat.

Tyler mouthed the words, “I love you.”

He mouthed them back.

Smiling at his love, he caught sight of the station sign over her head and repeated what he’d told her a few minutes earlier. “I still don’t understand why my name’s up there.”

Tyler wiped her tears away and said, “I love you. Oh, how I love you.”

She watched until Sam’s image blended against the train and all she could make out in the distance was the blueness of his overcoat. She continued to watch until the train was a speck on the horizon and long after it was gone.

Sam watched the Grayville station shrink behind. The frigid air washed over him, chilling him deeply, tearing against the heartache pounding in his chest. When the station and his hometown were gone over the horizon, Sam stepped back into the train. He made it just inside the door before a piercing jolt of white-hot pain jammed his chest, took away his breath, and doubled him over. Faintly, as he sank to the floor, he felt a familiar agony, a long excruciating familiar agony.

Turning slowly, Tyler looked at the station sign and said the words aloud, “Sam Hyde Station.” She had to sit for a moment, on the bench. She buried her face in her hands and let it out, let it all out.

In the living room of her small red brick home on the south side of Grayville, Tyler Sproul sat cross-legged in front of her fireplace. Wearing only a nightshirt, she had pulled the shirt down over her knees to fend off the chill in the air. Next to her left knee was a glass of white wine. In front of her were the memories of a lifetime. She opened her high school yearbook and found her own picture first, a young face that seemed a little heavy. Smiling in her graduation picture, Tyler’s hair was long and curled. She’d worn a black-and-white-striped sweater over a light blue turtleneck pullover.

She turned back the pages until she found him. There, between a boy named Hudson and a girl named Indihar was Samuel Dennis Hyde. His hair was styled in a Beatles haircut, a slight smile on his lean face. He was wearing a blue button-collar shirt. Beneath his name was listed: “Senior Most Likely to Win an Olympic Medal.” Tyler read the credits below: “State Swimming Champion 100 Meter Freestyle and 400 Meter Freestyle; District Champion in 9 events; Letters in Swimming (4 years); Key Club; Young Democrats Club.”

Thumbing through the pages she found the only other photos of Sam, both taken at swim meets. In one, he wore his two gold medals from his state championships. He had the same slight smile on his face. The other had Sam diving at the beginning of a race. He wore a striped bathing suit.

Closing the yearbook, Tyler opened a tan leather scrapbook. She moved the fingers of her left hand across the news articles as she read each again. Delicately, she turned the pages and continued reading each and every article in which Sam Hyde was mentioned in
The Grayville Gazette.
She read about each of his triumphs and stared at more pictures of Sam, grainy black-and-white photos yellowed with age.

She stopped and studied one particular picture. It was the only photo in which both of them appeared. In it, Sam was receiving a district champion medal. Off to his right and slightly behind was Tyler’s beaming face. She was in her cheerleader outfit, a pom-pom in her hand.

She turned the page and felt her breath slip away slowly, as it always did when she read the article: “Olympic Hopeful Drowns in Little Blue.” She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until she finished the article and let out a deep sobbing sigh. She put her hand over her mouth and took in a deep breath. She fought back the tears and turned the page.

Sam’s graduation picture was used in his obituary.

She turned the page to a later article, which featured the same photograph. Beneath it was a line Tyler had underlined years ago. “Originally thought to have drowned, a medical exam revealed Mr. Hyde succumbed to a congenital heart defect.”

Tyler shut her eyes to keep in the tears. Her mind continued working, flashing memories of a funeral in the rain, of touching his coffin before it sank into the earth, of that first heart-wrenching phone call the following Christmas Eve from a voice she’d known, a voice she’d cherished. She remembered crying and not believing, then dressing up and going to the Klamath anyway. She remembered Sam’s smiling face and all the Christmases after.

She opened her eyes and turned the last page. She didn’t bother reading the last article, the one about how the train station was named for Sam Hyde. She closed the book and reached for her wine.

Her hand was shaking so she was barely able to get the glass to her lips. She couldn’t drink, and had trouble putting it down without spilling it. Closing her eyes once again, she took in another deep breath and tried to fight the sadness. But it was no use. She thought of all the lonesome nights ahead until he would call again. The tears came. She caught her breath and, for a moment, tried to think of what Sam would look like at thirty-six.

We weren’t very nice about it. That was the surprising part. I expected the cliché of scented oils and gilded candlelight and slippery limbs entwined. But how we acted afterwards was unforeseen. Alone together, reliving the night, Sam and I were truly cruel. Here I was, operating under a false impression for so many years: you see, I always thought I was a nice girl.

Others reminiscing over the experience might focus on the way Sheila’s gray-blue eyes lit up when I pressed my mouth to her freshly shaved pussy, or the look on her husband Richard’s craggy but handsome face as he started to slowly stroke his long, uncut cock. But not this girl. The best part of the evening for me was the laughter with Sam afterwards, giggling all the way home about the freaks we’d spent the evening with. The freaks we’d just fucked.

They were decades older than us, and richer by far, and they’d run a charming ad at the back of the Pink Section of the
SF Chronicle.
Filled with dizzy anticipation, we met for drinks, to check out the chemistry.

Sizing up potential fuck partners is a heady business. Nobody else in the trendy after-work bar knew that we were responding to a personal. Not the cute curly-haired bartender. Not the female executives lined up against the wall like pretty maids all in a row. The thought of what we were actually there for made me giddy with excitement, and desire showed rather brightly in my dark eyes.

The woman said I was pretty. Her husband agreed with an anxious nod. All evening long, they looked at me rather than Sam, and I knew why. Sam is tough. He has short, razor-cut hair and a gingery goatee. If you met him in a back alley, you’d offer him your wallet in a heartbeat. You’d beg him to take it, the way I beg him to take things from me every night.

The couple didn’t understand Sam. So they talked to me instead.

“So pretty,” the woman repeated. “Like Snow White.”

I grinned and drank my Cosmo, then licked my cherry-glossed lips in the sexiest manner I could manage, leaving the tip of my tongue in the corner of my mouth for a second too long. Iridescent sparkles lit up my long dark hair. Multicolored body glitter decorated my pale skin. I wore serpentine black leather pants and a white baby-T with the word SINNER screaming across the chest in deep scarlet. There was an unspoken emphasis on how young I was in comparison to the woman. She was holding firm in her mid-forties, while I was just barely getting used to being in my early twenties. Her entire attitude was both calculating and clearly at ease, obvious in the way she held court in our booth, in the way she ordered from the waiter without even looking up.

“Two Kettle-One Martinis, another Cosmo, another Pilsner.”

I was her opposite, bouncy and ready, a playful puppy tugging a leash. More than that, I was bold from how much they wanted us, and we from how much I wanted Sam. When he put one firm hand on my thigh under the table, I nearly swooned against him. We’d be ripping our clothes off each other in hours.

After drinking away the evening, we made a real date with the rich couple for the following weekend, a date at their place, where they promised to show us their sunken hot tub, wrap-around deck, and panoramic view of the city. In cultured voices, they bragged to us about the gold records from his music-producing days and her collection of antique Viennese perfume bottles accumulated with the assistance of Ebay. But though I listened politely, I didn’t care about their money or what it could buy. All I wanted was all Sam wanted, which was simple: four on the floor.

We had done the act already, nearly a year before, with a lower class duo Sam found for us on the internet. The woman was thirty-eight, the man twenty-six. They’d been together for two years and had wanted to sample another couple as a way of enhancing their already wild sex life. After dinner at a local pizzeria and two bottles of cheap red wine, Pamela and I retreated to the ladies’ room to show each other our tattoos. Hers was a dazzling fuchsia strawberry poised right below her bikini line. When she lifted her white dress. I saw that not only was she pantyless, but that she’d been very recently spanked. She blushed becomingly as I admired her glowing red cheeks, where lines from Andy’s belt still glowed in stark relief against her coppery skin.

“He gave me what-for in the parking lot,” she confessed. “Told me that he wanted me to behave during dinner.”

“What would he think of this?” I asked, stroking her still-warm ass with the open palm of my hand.

“I think he’d approve.” She grinned.

I gave her a light slap on her tender skin, and she turned around and caught me in a quick embrace, lifting my dress slowly so that she could see my own ink.

Teasingly, I turned to show her the cherries on my lower back, then pulled down my bikini to reveal the blue rose riding on my hip. She traced my designs with the tips of her fingers, and I felt as if I were falling. Her touch was so light, so gentle, and in moments we started French-kissing, right there in the women’s room at Formico’s. I could imagine what the men were doing: speaking macho to one another, sports and the recent war, while growing harder and harder as they waited for us to return to the red-and-white checked table.

Sam and I followed the duo to their Redwood City apartment and into their tiny living room, overshadowed by a huge-screen TV and a brown faux-leather sofa. Pamela had her tongue in my asshole before my navy blue sleeveless dress was all the way off, and my mouth was on Andy’s mammoth cock before he could kick off his battered black motorcycle boots.

The TV stayed on the whole time we were there. Muted, but on. We had crazy sex right on the caramel-colored shag rug in front of it, while heavy metal bands played for us in silence. It was like doing it on stage with Guns & Roses. Surreal, but not a turn-off.