The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 5 (4 page)

His tent was almost packed, his gear ready to hit the trail. Solitary and preoccupied in the midst of the bustle, he felt a touch – and of course, when he turned, it was the elf, hand on hip. The day before in the crowded lodge they had not been able to interpret a single word each other said beyond their names. George guessed she was Danish. Or maybe Dutch, though for a time he’d wondered if her strange vowels and convoluted consonants might be Portuguese. She leapt and swerved through her sentences; when she talked he was able to do nothing but watch her bright lips and pink, pink tongue. She’d worn a gold band on her delicate brown fingers and nodded when he tried to mime
husband
, but then she put his hand over her breast again and tossed her head.

Now she danced around him, waving toward the far reaches of the valley, walking fingers along her forearm with one eyebrow arched into a question.

“You . . . want a hike?” he said. His first impulse was to decline, to flee, but as her ring flashed he became conscious of the ring missing from his own finger. A shadow passed over his face as he remembered the brief happiness of that single year, now half a dozen years distant.

“Hi-ee,” she said, poking him to regain his attention. “Hieek!” She scampered away, but returned in moments carrying a scuffed leather knapsack with brass buckles. She mimed eating, waggling her eyebrows. He understood that she had food, but beyond that his comprehension would not go. She had the most beautiful tongue he’d ever seen.

“Jhoorj,” she said, tugging at his hand, “Hieek!”

They sat crosslegged in the midst of the Baejarstadaskogur, Iceland’s only forest. Beneath pale birches, most scarcely a dozen feet tall, the grass was starred with the blue and white of Canterbury bells and sandwort.

He spread jerky and dried fruit on his parka, brought from the States for his solitary summer. She had a small, tough loaf of rye bread and at least three kinds of cheese. They talked and chewed, and he began not to care that neither of them could understand a word. She sat close, thigh pressed against his; the contact warmed his whole body.

Their mutual incomprehension made it easy for his words to pour out. He confessed he’d come to Iceland to be lonely, shyly told her of his passion for wild places and his hunger for solitude. And he spoke of his larger solitariness, its longings and hesitations. He told her of the weeks alone hiking the ffordlands and the desolate interior, encountering swans and Arctic foxes and fumaroles and vast, distant icebergs calved from Greenland. He spoke of the contrary happiness his loneliness gave him. And the sadness. He told her everything.

He had no idea what she told him. She stopped in mid-speech when she caught him staring at her mouth, and then laughed and put her warm hand on his thigh. Her tongue-tip traced the line of her upper lip once, and again.

Suddenly she kissed him. She proclaimed something remarkably like “Fender rumpus room!” and then sprang to her feet and pulled him up after her.

She peeled his sweater over his head. His heart began to race. “No,” he said. “You mustn’t.”

She threw the sweater away, over her shoulder, and unbuttoned his shirt. It followed the sweater. “You’re married,” he protested.

She ignored his words, sniffed his undershirt and wrinkled her nose theatrically. She lifted it off him and tossed it, tangling it in the branches of a birch.

“I’m sorry—” he said. Falling to her knees, she tugged his boots off, and then his socks.

How could he stop her? She sang a strange small song with short lines and intricate, intertwined rhymes as she unzipped his pants. Murmuring, she pulled each leg of his pants down and off, did the same with his longshanked underwear, her lilting voice barely a whisper.

He was erect, of course. Wide-eyed. Frozen in place. Daintily, watching his face, she took thumb and forefinger and squeezed him until a single clear drop of fluid appeared. “Hah!” she said, as if she had proved something of great importance. And then she pecked him on the cheek.

She turned and went with a dancer’s measured steps to the edge of the meadow, but spoke sternly and thrust a hand back toward him when he stumbled a step toward her. He stood, shivering, uncertain, while, facing away from him, she began a lazy, on-again-off-again disrobing, as if she might have forgotten his existence. Hot sun fell on his shoulders and warmed his rump; tendrils of cool Icelandic air tickled his scrotum and made each hair on his muscled legs stand up.

Naked, she turned to him, unreadable. Voids swam through his field of vision. His toes curled, cramped, into the moist turf. His jaw ached. Tiny-breasted, slender-hipped, she might have been no more than fourteen, but the smile lines and feral glow around her eyes hinted at thirty or forty. His cock jumped to the too-rapid tumble of his heart.

She spun away – and ran! Every muscle in his body tensed.

After twenty feet or so, she stopped and looked back at him, rooted next to his crumpled pants. She stamped the ground with her tiny foot. He took a tentative step toward her—

– and she ran!

His balls cramped. He lunged, but she was already scampering up the hillside, swerving among trees, the soles of her feet flashing at him.

He ran. Once he thought he’d lost her, till a stone thumped at his feet and he spun half round to glimpse her again. Minutes later he hurled himself panting up a stream bank, certain he was about to catch her, but as he reached the top she sprang out of the grass and shoved him. He toppled head-over-heels down the hill, tangled in her laughter.

He sprinted up a narrow defile, splashing in and out of a clear rivulet, careless of anything but pursuit, thoughtless of where he might have left his clothes. He rounded into a sun-flooded glade; there, a foot-wide cascade chuckled down the black cliff. She stood at the glade’s center, chest heaving, slight shoulders bright with sweat, arms spread in welcome.

Headlong, he fell onto her body. Her nails raked him from buttocks to nape as he drove inside her.

She beat him with her heels as they fucked, grabbed his ears, bit his lip, and came. She came again, and then again, until he felt his own release boiling up – but just as a climactic roar was about to burst from his lips she threw him off and ran again.

Staggering to his feet, watery-kneed, he saw her a hundred feet away. She thrust her pelvis at him, displaying her engorged genitals, bright in the sun. He hurled himself after her.

They did this over and over. Each time he tried to hold her as he came; each time she somehow twisted herself from under him just before climax and leapt away, laughing.

At the end, though, she waited, motionless, back pressed against a slender tree. He charged at her, but she slowed him with her great liquid eyes, gentled him, took him tenderly and held him until his heart slowed. She stroked him. She kissed him open-mouthed and eased him closer against her body. When their kissing reached its deepest place, she twined one slender leg around his and brought him into her body. They moved bonelessly on each other, as if they were water. She climaxed around him in waves, sighing, holding his eyes with hers, and then led him higher, and higher still – calm, touching their whole length, breathing one breath – and higher yet, until with a long wordless note he emptied into her and she received him, coming with him once again, around him, all his solitude and hunger, all his fear, every locked-away yearning bursting out of him, flowering, as if the bright Arctic day were rising over the green land again and he was dissolving in its light.

Fourteen years.

How often had she sprung to mind? How many times had he let her go? Past is past, he told himself.

But one day, sitting at the computer in his Burlingame condo with San Francisco Bay twinkling in the middle distance, he typed her name. Of course, he cautioned himself, he was unlikely to find her. Names changed, people died . . .

It took an act of will to hit the enter key. In 0.31 seconds, the search engine noted, an email address appeared on his screen. He wrote a simple, conventional note, not thinking it appropriate to presume connection but simply recalling fondly their time in Iceland. He hoped she was well. It was a letter he might have written to a casual acquaintance. Two hours later, a reply popped into his inbox: a telephone number, with no other message whatever. It was a San Francisco number.

Three days later he had assembled the courage to dial it.

“Hallo. Merete here.” She paused. “Hallo?”

“You speak English!”

A long silence. “Is this Jhoorj? Jhoorj Sutton, from Iceland. This must be.”

“Yes, yes. When did you learn English?”

“Ah, dear Jhoorj, in school, in Copenhagen. When I was seven years old.”

“But . . .”

“It would have made more magic, eh, if we had negotiated over sex, or told stories of our lives? Or you had worried all day at me about my husband?” She made a small, pleased sound. “I see from caller ID that you live somewhere close. When do you visit me?”

Her husband opened the door, a broad, well-dressed man on his way out. He offered a blunt-fingered, blond-furred hand to George, addressing him in that odd accent that betrays someone whose English has been learned late, on the Continent. “So, you are the famous George of Skaftafell! Merete recalls you most fondly. She is glad I was in Reykjavik those two days.” He smiled. “I am afraid I am on my way to an evening meeting. I trust you to have a good visit.” He bowed and made his way down the stairs. George was left standing in the doorway.

Merete sat in one of those extravagant, high-backed African chairs, one leg draped over its wicker arm. Behind her, ceiling to floor windows framed the sweep of the City and its spangled lights. Smile lines had deepened around her eyes and expressive mouth, and her copper hair was salted with gray, but she was still utterly elfin.

“Come, come,” she said, patting the chair arm. “Would you like a drink? Juice?” He glimpsed her tongue. “Or would you prefer wine?”

Her smile was transparent, melting him. “Juice,” he said, “or whatever you’ll be drinking.” She disappeared into the kitchen and reappeared moments later with two brimming glasses. He was still standing near the doorway.

“Bring that hassock and sit near me. I want to look at you. It’s been a very long time.” She touched his hand, gently, with her graceful fingers and he felt remembered heat. “You look well. Are you married? Have you been in good health? Have you ever been back to Iceland?”

He shook his head no, then yes, then no again.

She brought his hand to her breast, the fabric not bulky wool but silken. “I do not think you really want juice, do you, Jhoorj? Come with me.” She sprang from her chair and was across the room before the heat of her breast could fully register in his fingertips.

He followed, trembling inside.

Merete stopped in the bedroom door to take his arm. “You have barely said a word, Jhoorj. Perhaps it was better when I spoke only Danish.”

She waited.

The melting had continued, washing something loose in him. His heart slowed; half surprised at himself, he took her hand and led her to the bed, where they lay side by side. He put a hand on her cheek and spoke in a low voice, stumbling over the first words. “You . . . you gave me a gift in Skaftafell. And you took something away.” He brought her into his arms, pulling her closer until he felt her heart beating against his. “It wasn’t the lovemaking, you know.”

She giggled, and he looked first puzzled and then contrite. He smiled for the first time: “Lord knows, that was as magical as anything ever in my life. But no, it was the chase. Or catching you.”

Solemnly: “You didn’t catch me. I called you to me when I wanted you too much to tease any more.”

“Then it was the chase. Letting myself want that much.”

She nodded.

“You knew, didn’t you?”

“My Jhoorj, you told me. You told me and told me when you thought I didn’t understand. To make a man who had never been. . . who had never wanted, to make you want that much!”

“Are you living here?”

She shook her head. “We work for DanskeBank. We go back at the end of the month. So, since that time? Have you let yourself want?”

“No, not much. Not until now. And now we have just this little time. Like Iceland.”

She watched, saying nothing.

“So I should practice wanting. And not being afraid.”

Still she was silent.

He moved his hand from her cheek, slid it underneath the silk to hold her breast. Her breathing quickened, but no sound escaped.

He lifted her blouse, eyes looked with hers, and grasped her bra-covered nipple in his teeth. Still no sound.

“Stand up,” he said. She stood.

He unbuttoned her blouse, his mouth twisting as he struggled with the tiny buttons. Trying to puzzle out the clasp of her bra his face reddened; he grabbed it suddenly in both fists and tore it apart, flung it into a corner of the room. She laughed aloud, her breath labored and shallow.

He flung her skirt away. He ripped her panties at the sides, jerked them from between her legs and dropped them at her feet.

“Go into the front room.”

“Jhoorj, the windows,” she objected. “All those houses just down the hill.”

“I know. Go to the windows and put your hands on the glass. And wait for me. Without moving.”

When he came to her, he pressed against her from behind, stirred by the familiar scent of her brown skin. She tilted her hips and he slipped immediately into her, both of them watching their faces reflected in the glass. In the night outside, people moved in bright-lit rooms, busy with dinnertime ritual, window after window multiplying into the distance.

She spread her legs to let him enter more deeply. With each thrust the window bowed and the reflection of their faces shrank and ballooned.

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.