The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 5 (17 page)

That was the beginning of me. My mother was fired and she never saw my father again.

Does this surprise you? That a daughter should know so much about her mother’s sex life, that a daughter should be privy to the intimate details of her mother’s fuck? My mother doesn’t keep secrets. I didn’t realize until high school that no one else’s mother talked about “getting wet” or “zipless fucks”. No one else’s mother decorated the living room with Mel Ramos nudes (I still dream about pale women making love to ketchup bottles, to gigantic cigars). So it was only natural that I’d grow up feeling different from the other girls in my class. Instead, I was close to the oversexed boys who knew about the same things I did, boys educated via porn and older brothers. I did my best to further their education with invitations to feel my new breasts or with open-season kissing practice.

And it’s only natural that, when I grew up into the red-haired vixen my mother had once been, I’d end up in a similar place. I have my mother’s hair, her breasts and her complexion, but my father’s skinny limbs. I radiate sex. My mother passed sex on to me like other mothers pass on manners. So why wouldn’t I repeat the sins of my mother?

I’m twenty-three, fresh out of college, where I’ve fucked my way through the core curriculum and written a glorious thesis on Dorothy Parker. I’m living outside of Chicago. I’m engaged to Carter, a wonderful, forgiving man, a law student at Northwestern who wakes me up before his 7 a.m. torts lectures for lazy, delicious morning sex. I wake up five hours later tingling and wet. He makes me feel all kinds of new things, like the desire to be faithful.

I work at Goldie’s Steakhouse, an easy job that got me through college. I cling to this job like some girls cling to families, boyfriends: the one part of my life that stays the same. I’m waiting for a journalism job to fall into my lap.

I step out to the back dock of Goldie’s, carrying a mug of merlot and my cell phone. My mother’s on the phone, delivering a diatribe on menopause, interrupting herself periodically to exclaim, “Oh! Hot Flash!” like a DJ announcing a new dance.

“Where are you?” she asks suddenly.

“Umm – at work?”

“At work? Jesus – you have tables, honey? Don’t talk to me if you have tables.”

“No, I’m done for the night, I just have my sidework.” I sit down and extend my legs. With my right hand I roll my nylons off, revealing the sun-desperate legs underneath. I’ve shaved my legs this morning. I’d been waiting for Carter to complain about the hair, but he hadn’t, and before long I couldn’t take it anymore. I lathered up, slid the razor up and down each leg and delicately around my pussy. I love feeling smooth. I’m constantly amazed by my body, by how smooth my skin is. The night manager has gone home, and I’m free to be bare-legged, and I like the way the night cold feels against my naked limbs.

“Are you smoking?”

“What? Why? I haven’t smoked since high school. Are
you
smoking?”

“You’ve had a lot of stress lately,” my mother says. “I don’t want you to hurt the baby.”

“Mom, I’m fine,” I take a long drink of wine. “And I’m not fucking pregnant! Lay off already.”

“You could be.”

“Mom, I have a fifteen-minute break. Anything else you’d like to talk about?”

“I want a grandchild,” she says softly.

“I must have the wrong number. What happened to the ‘don’t settle down’ lecture? The ‘men are only good for one thing’? The ‘if he can’t make you come, get rid of the bastard’?

She sighs, mourning herself. “I guess it’s menopause.”

I wiggle my toes, watching the light from our outdoor lamp that bounces like stars against my cotton-candy-pink toenails.

And then something moves in the parking lot.

A man. A single man. A rarity at this corny family place, he emerges from a white Lexus. He steps out like a politician on a small-town tour, taking a quick look in his mirror, touching up his hair with a wet thumb, preparing to encounter the citizens.

“My God, Mom, my prince has arrived.”

“Huh?” I imagine her at the kitchen table, fanning herself with a page of the Trib. “Carter’s there?”

“No! When have I ever called Carter a prince? Whatever – I’m kidding – Look, I gotta go fill the barbecue sauce bottles.”

“Okay, okay,” my Mom sighs. “Take a pregnancy test.”

“Mother! I’ll be fine. Don’t start planning a baby shower, okay? I’m not even married!”

Silence on the other end of the line. I’m holding my breath, realizing what I’ve said. “I love you,” she says, finally.

“I love you, too.”

My eyes follow the prince as he walks, moving in and out of the slivers of light cast across the parking lot. It’s like a cartoon: with each flicker of illumination he looks more like a superhero, approaching me in a series of comic book panels, growing more handsome, and larger, with each new image.

The dregs of my wine sting like pine needles in my throat. I almost float, free of gravity and logic, back inside the restaurant. I float like that to the guy’s table, where he’s just settling in. On closer inspection he’s kind-looking, gentle and blue-eyed. His jaw is broad; his nose almost hooks, but in a good way. I avoid the looks of the other servers – they know Carter – and set up my napkin-folding station next to him. I stretch my legs under the table, resting my feet on the chair next to him. I leave my shoes on the floor.

He looks up as if I was his dinner companion. “So,” he smiles, “what’s good here?” His voice is soft, like a boy whispering in class. He stares intently at me afterwards. I like it; it makes him hard to figure out. He’s removed his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, loosened the collar, draped his tie over his chair.

“Get a burger.”

“I don’t eat red meat.” He’s offhand, as if the information’s inconsequential.

“Well, you’ve come to the wrong place.” I laugh, folding a checkered napkin into a neat pattern.

He lets his eyes meet mine, then chuckles and looks back down at the menu. “You must have something.”

The night closing waitress arrives, interrupting our triumphant love scene. She goes through the menu with pointy red fingernails, discussing each dish with gusto, as if this was a real restaurant worth talking about.

“So, you work here?” he says when she’s gone.

“No, I just think this shirt looks good on me. And I enjoy folding napkins. It’s kind of a hobby.”
So is fucking cute strangers.

He shakes his head, as if he’s saying,
You’re gonna make me work for this, aren’t you?

I slide over in the booth so I’m sitting across from him. I don’t give a fuck, really, about getting fired, because I’ve worked at this place for so long I practically have tenure, and besides, I’m doing my best to provide one-hundred-percent guest satisfaction.

He looks like a soccer coach, or a grown-up frat boy who still writes checks to his alma mater’s philanthropic fund knowing every cent of his charitable tax-write-off will most likely pay for kegs. Does this make it easier – his goodness? Does it make me feel, as my cunt ripens and swells, like I’m not a cheater? Maybe. It feels like it’s past time to remove my damp panties, but I can’t do it alone.

Under the table, I stick my foot between his legs. He just raises his eyebrows, smiles that charming smile again, and leans back. I move my toes up and around the bulge in his pants, tracing his cock.

His salad arrives, and I set my foot down.

“I’ll be right back.” I slide out of the booth, my panties wet and warm. I feel like my juices are purging fidelity, all the life I’ve been trying so hard to want.

I do my sidework. Then I walk over as he’s paying his bill.

“How was everything?” I ask.

He just signs his credit-card slip and stands up. He motions for me to follow him, and so I do, out to the parking lot, and I run towards his car to see if he’ll try to catch me.

He comes after me. I am leaning against the car, still panting. He takes my hipbone in broad hands and lifts me onto the hood of his car. The car is wet from a sprinkle of rain, but I don’t care. I can’t imagine any rainstorm wetter than my pussy. My pussy: it opens up like a fire-eater’s throat preparing for the plunge of the torch and the sweet, salient ecstasy of penetration.

“I saw you,” he whispers. His hands glide through my hair, his eager lips plant kisses up and down my neck, biting and sucking and licking.

“Where?”

He bites my earlobe, and I gasp. He traces the rim of my ear with his tongue before answering, his breath so hot that his words feel like sex. “Outside, taking off your tights. I saw you. You were sitting under the light.”

“I thought you were hungry.”

“I was,” he says, and he demonstrates by biting my neck. I scoot forward to feel the pulse of his cock against my panties.

“But I was lost.” He reaches up under my shirt, fingertips grazing my stomach, and lifts my shirt over my head.

“I needed directions.” He slides his hand between bra and breast, rubbing one nipple and then the other. They’re as erect as earring studs and I want so badly for him to suck them.

“But then I got hungry.” He unsnaps my bra and it falls to the dingy pavement, and I don’t care. I love the feel of my bare buds against his chest. I love knowing that I’m almost naked and he’s altogether clothed, because it makes me feel vulnerable, ethereal, lusty and alive.

I feel taken, and even with my feminist morals I love to fantasize about being dominated. I’m a waitress hungry for tips, outside on the hood of a car, pussy dripping like the gently falling rain. Her seducer, in a dry-clean-only suit, drives his pelvis into her like he’s trying to push through his pants and all the way through her body.

I unbutton his shirt, and he throws his head up to the sky like he’s eating rain. His body bursts from his shirt: Clark Kent turning into Superman. We’re beautiful. We’re a pornographic Hallmark card. We’re two kids necking in the high-school parking lot.

He looks at me for a few silent seconds with his unbelievably tender eyes – the eyes of a boy, not a lusty, swashbuckling lover. I think of how he
is
that kind of lover. Our bare chests smack together. He kisses me. I’m waking up from a coma of fidelity, Sleeping Beauty resurrected by impassioned lips.

I clasp my thighs around his legs, pulling my knees towards each other and drawing his package up to my stormy cunt. It’s raining harder, and my hair is sticking to my neck.

He wraps his mouth around my right nipple, its erect tip.

“Bite it,” I whisper, and he looks up half-smiling like I’ve just confessed all my sins, all my secret desires.
So you’re like that, are you?

And then he bites down so hard I scream. The pain is followed by a deep rush of pleasure, a tingling down my spine to my pussy.

I take him by the shoulders and pull him up, and he looks at me like a teenage boy about to take my virginity –
Are you sure I’m the one? Are you ready?

I smile coyly and pull his head towards mine. As we kiss I undo his belt and let his pants drop to his knees.

I reach inside his shorts, where his cock is hardening and shifting, and he laughs quietly as I stroke his balls with my nails. They’re smooth and bare, his balls, just like my cunt – and thinking of my baby-bare pussy makes me crave his dick even more.

I push down his boxers, which fall in a ring around his feet. We must look ridiculous, I think, but then I stop thinking altogether, stroking the underside of his shaft, grabbing hold of it with both hands . . . and I notice that it takes both hands to hold his cock, and I’m already imagining how it will feel slipping between the walls of my cunt, filling me, all of me.

His legs slide between mine. He starts playing the skin of my thighs like a piano. I pull at his cock like tugging on a rope. It’s uncut and generous; he rubs its head up and down and across my clit and I gasp every time, thinking he’s about to enter me. He’s biting his lip, looking up at me like a kid, and I can’t help but pull him towards me and kiss him in a fit of tenderness – which is when he plunges himself inside me.

The first thing I think is,
This isn’t Carter’s penis
. It presses against the muscles of my cunt, which seem to have forgotten everything but the shape of Carter, and now they retract as this foreign cock intrudes, staking its claim.

I feel like he could fuck right through me. He grabs my ass with his hands and pounds. He clenches his face, his arms bulge, he squeezes me, tighter and tighter, and I feel like he hasn’t done this in a long time. My stagnant fidelity and his. I want to know if he’s thinking of someone else – a wife, a girlfriend – but I don’t want to ask, so I just surrender to the pulsing. A thousand nerves up and down my insides fire like a pinball game where every shot wins.

I want to feel his tongue lap against my clit. I want to come all over his mouth. So I set my hands on his hips and grind his thrusting to a halt, wind him down like a toy out of batteries, and he looks concerned.

“Let’s get in the car,” I tell him. “I want you to eat me out.” I say it sweetly, demurely, like a girl asking him for a walk to school.

He shuffles to retrieve his keys and opens the trunk door. I crawl in and start to pull off my skirt. He reaches over my body to lower the back seat so I can lie out flat, ready and waiting.

“I’m gonna come inside you,” he says, “and then I’m gonna go down on you when you’re wet with my come.” He hesitates, needing my approval. So I give it to him: I flip onto my stomach so he can take me from behind.

He fucks me. He fucks me like I need to be fucked. He fucks me like I deserve it. And then his body jerks. It vibrates. He wraps his arms around me tight with his orgasm.

He pulls out with his juice still dripping down my legs and gives me the most amazing eating out I’ve ever had. He plants kisses up and down the insides of my thighs, up to my pussy and back down the other leg until I’m mad with desire. His tongue flicks my clit and then he puts his mouth tight over my cunt and slaps his tongue back and forth until I scream and climax.

He pulls back and wipes his mouth with his hand, and I giggle. He shrugs in unwarranted apology. Rain spatters against the roof and along the windows. I feel like we’ve just made love in a car wash.