The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 5 (48 page)

“Come up?”

My footsteps and breath stuttered to a stop, color scalded my cheeks. “Don’t you need to . . . work?”

“Too hot for the tourists now. They’ll be back in the evening,” Esmee said, stopping one step up. “I’m not wrong about you, cher, am I?”

I almost asked, wrong about what? I didn’t, couldn’t. “No,” I whispered, “not wrong.”

“Then come up.”

Up, indeed. Three floors up, but at least it gave an excuse for my flushed face and pounding heart. Her apartment was small, a bed-sitting room decorated in nouveau-hippie: India-print fabrics and squashy pillows. The room smelled of curry and incense. The single window had no real curtain. It probably didn’t need one with its view of rooftops and tree crowns, but she’d hung a beaded curtain of rainbow-colored plastic. The slanting afternoon light threw drops of jeweled brightness on the dusty floor. She kicked off her slippers with a sigh of pleasure.

“Sit down. I’ll get some wine.”

I chose a cushion and slipped my sandals off. My sundress wasn’t long enough to make sitting on the floor easy. I finally settled for curling my legs to one side. Esmee, returning with two lovely but mismatched stemmed glasses, sank gracefully to sit cross-legged, her skirts billowing around her. She lifted her glass and held it until I copied her. “Bon chance!”

“Good luck?” I sipped. It tasted like chablis, but I’m not sure I could have told the difference between champagne and turpentine at that moment.

“To good fortune,” she corrected. “The good fortune that brings us together.”

The atmosphere in her room was suddenly so thick that I could have written my name in the air with my finger. No, not my name – “I Want You,” in large letters. I’d dreamed, if not of this, then of a hundred variations of it for years. But in those fantasies I hadn’t been paralyzed, staring like a fool, afraid to trust my luck.

Esmee took the glass from my fingers, placing it and her own on the floor beside her. She caught my wrist and turned my palm up.

“Do you read palms, too?” I asked, then felt like an idiot when she dropped a kiss into my palm.

I had never been so conscious of the size and shape and structure of another’s hand. Her fingers were shorter, her palm broader, but size for size, very like my own. Callused and strong, but so different from a man’s. When she leaned towards me, I met her halfway, drawn like iron to a magnet.

That first kiss was like a sixty-second faint with my eyes open. Her full lips were warm and lush, tasting faintly of wine. Our lips clung, as though my flesh was loathe to part from hers. The second kiss was even better, deeper. Her tongue was small and quick and pointed like my own, a
pas de deux
instead of a duel. She touched the planes of my face, tracing eyelids, cheekbones, and the curve of my jaw delicately, reading me in Braille.

“I’ve never done this before,” I whispered against her cheek. “Been with a woman, I mean.”

“But you wanted to, didn’t you?” Her tongue traced the inner curve of my ear and I shivered when I felt her breath against the moisture.

“Oh, yes.”

“Don’ worry. Like fallin’ off a log, cher. It’s easy.”

God, yes, it was easy. Like falling off a log, like falling off a cliff, like falling in love. Easy and total and irretrievable. Whatever I’d suspected in the past, I knew for certain now. I reached out and caught her shoulders, warm and solid beneath the ruffled blouse. A simple push bared her breasts, the garment catching at her elbows for moment before she slipped her arms free.

She reached for me on another kiss, canting her head to fit more perfectly as she groped for the zipper on my sundress. The slur of my zipper underscored the inhale and exhale of our breathing. Her laughter against my mouth as she fumbled for the fastening of my bra went to my head more than supermarket wine could ever do.

“Stand up,” Esmee said urgently and I did, dizzy and unsure of my footing amongst the pillows. She shimmied out of her blouse and long skirt in one gesture, nothing beneath them. I undressed quickly and didn’t worry about whether she thought my hips too wide, my breasts too small. All my attention was on her.

She was perfect – smooth café au lait skin over a solid, close-coupled frame, curly dark hair cropped close to her elegantly shaped skull. Her nipples were generous and dark.

“Like Hershey’s Kisses,” I said, touching one with reverent fingers. The tip hardened.

“And yours like raspberries, all pebbled up. A pretty good combination, cher, raspberries and chocolate.” Esmee bent and drew my nipple into her lips. We were of a height so when she straightened, our breasts nuzzled together, firm and soft. “Come here, sugar.”

She drew me towards the bed: several mattresses stacked together, her coverlet a patchwork of velvets and satins all in shades of maroon. Her tawny skin was marvelous against it, and I wondered if she’d chosen it for that reason. I wondered other things, too. I wondered what she’d feel like under me, on top of me. What she’d taste like.

“Don’t look so worried, bébé. I’ll teach you.” She laughed then, and patted the bed. “I almost said, ‘I won’t eat you,’ but of course, that’s not true! At least I hope not.”

I sat on the edge of the bed. “I want to go first. Eat you, I mean.”

“Soixante-neuf is nice,” she said. “You know, sixty-nine?”

Too distracting for the first time, I thought and besides, if I couldn’t do this or couldn’t do it right, I didn’t want to owe her. Failure seemed highly unlikely. I’d never felt this sure about a first time with any boy. But still. I shook my head. “Please?”

“Sure.” Esmee lay back, spreading herself before me like a landscape of gently rolling hills and wooded valleys. Her generosity made me catch my breath. I kissed her mouth, her throat, and feasted on her breasts. It wasn’t imagination; she smelled and tasted of cocoa-butter.

She had a racing stripe, a line of darker pigment that ran from below her navel to her sex, like an arrow showing the way. Goosebumps rose on her belly as I ran my tongue down that stripe. Heart thumping, I settled between her legs. I lost my concentration for a moment, distracted by the contrast between Esmee’s honey-colored thighs and my pale freckled hands; the contrast between my fantasies and the reality in my arms, inches from my lips. Uncertainty stilled me. “I want this to be good for you.”

“It will be. You got an advantage, girl. Just think ’bout what you like and do it. It’ll be fine.” She touched my hair. “You’ll be fine.”

I kissed the hollow of her hip on each side and rubbed my lips and nose across the crinkly black nest of pubic hair. She smelled like me but also different, salt and musk but warm, like a tropical sea and also flowers. What sort of flowers bloomed on tropic isles?

I parted her outer lips and marveled at her. In theory, I knew how a woman is made – how I was made – but this was different. I’d always thought of women as being all neatly tucked up inside, not bobbing absurdly out in front like men. Caring for and even pleasuring myself had never challenged that notion, but her sex was a structure more subtle and complex than I expected.

Her inner lips were a baroque fantasy, ruffled like an orchid and richly pink. Ah, yes, orchids! Her vagina was a mysterious well of deeper hue, her clitoris prominent. She caught her breath as I gently slipped the hood back to expose the tiny inner knot, then released a long sigh as I touched it with the very tip of my tongue.

The first taste led to a deeper kiss and it was like having oral sex for the first time ever, not just the first time with a woman. The act for its own sake, not as a way station on the road to something else, but an end in itself, and a thing of mutual pleasure. Her every shift and sigh fed back to me.

Her musk grew stronger, her thighs dewed with perspiration as they tensed and relaxed, and her sighs became murmurs of pleasure and then moans. Time spun away from me. I came back to myself to find her clitoris fluttering like a tiny live creature between my lips. When her cries told me “too much” I set it free and dropped my forehead to rest against the arch of her pubic bone, breathing hard into the hollow formed by her outspread legs, filling my lungs with her scent. Though aroused, I felt no desire to move. I could have lived in the canyon of her thighs forever.

Esmee plucked at my shoulder. I crawled up the length of her body slowly and collapsed against her. The planes of our bodies meshed like drowsy serpents – my shoulder under her arm, my cheek against her bosom, the swell of her hip into the narrow of my waist. “Cher, if you never done that before, you got natural talent you been pure-dee wasting.”

She scooted down till she could kiss me. The taste of her lips through the taste of her sex made me reel. Sweet tangle of lips and tongues, sweet mingling of perfumes, sweet mixture of desire.

“First time ever,” I whispered, still feeling solemn, “but not the last.”

“Dieu, I hope not. So what you think ’bout eating pussy?” she asked and kissed my temple.

“It’s wonderful, and – I don’t know – it’s so easy. I thought it would be harder, the first time.”

She laughed, a rich caramel laugh, that I felt as much as heard. “Well, why would it be hard?” she asked with perfect logic. “Hard’s for men, not for us. Your turn now, bébé.”

She sat up, leaned over, and kissed me, lips as soft as rose petals. She slipped one finger into me, gathering my fluids so her touch slid silkily over my clitoris with just the right pressure. When my hips rose to her hand, she flung one leg over my thigh and rubbed her sex against it, rough hair and hot, wet labia riding me. We rocked together, drinking each other’s sighs and whispers, until I shuddered to climax.

We lay twined together, her soft, damp weight a precious burden until she shifted and propped herself on an elbow. She touched a finger to the end of my nose and frowned in mock sternness.

“There’s just one thing about eating pussy I gotta warn you about,” she said.

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah. It’s wonderful, but it ain’t filling. Course, it ain’t fattening either! There’s a Thai restaurant down the way. Coconut soup and garlic shrimp? We can bring it back here.” She pushed herself up and sat cross-legged, smiling.

“Is it good?”

“You never had Thai? Second best thing you’ll ever eat! Trust me, cher. I told you your life was gonna change. The cards, they never lie.”

In a dimly lit room I stood at the bottom of a winding staircase; the sound of wind chimes played from an upstairs porch on a hot night. I wore a white blouse, tight red skirt, and spiked high heels. I watched the man walk toward my front pane-glass double doors. His brown hair was slicked back; his cheekbones were prominent; his long thin nose slightly flared over his mustache. He jiggled my door handle; the door was locked. As I watched him he searched the ground for something. Picking up a large stone, he used it to break my glass door pane; he reached inside and turned the lock. He threw open the door and approached me, holding and kissing me and unbuttoning my blouse. His hand rubbed my cunt through my silk skirt and panties.

“Maybe . . .” I whispered.

He lowered me to the floor. He pushed up my skirt and pulled down my white panties, slipping them over my thighs, knees and calves, and over my strapped, spiked heels. I breathlessly shook.

I awoke moaning in bed from another orgasmic dream; I’d mentally recreated a scene from the film
Body Heat.
I was Mattie Walker, my perfect, fit-in-a-champagne-glass breasts throbbing in my perfect white blouse, my hungry cunt throbbing in my perfect red skirt. I recalled the first time I’d seen the film in the early nineteen-eighties. In a cold, empty house I’d sat huddled under a blanket. I was emotionally and physically transported to the lush, warm, wet environs of South Florida – was it my imagination or did steam visibly rise from grass and earth, from Mattie and Ned, as they fucked in the boathouse?

I thought of my vibrator nestled in the night stand drawer. I deferred. It was getting late. I got up, dressed in a robe, and went to the kitchen for coffee. I took a cup of Colombian into my office and checked my schedule for the day. I’d get off easy today: only one appointment, later in the day. Driving south-west through the hills in my Jeep was relaxing, a perk before hitting the freeway. To the sound of Santana’s
Samba Pa Ti
I floated through green-hilled space. Highway 120 was winding. With my tendency to speed I had to be careful, lest I totally lose it on a curve. The hitchhiker stood on the west side of the highway. He wore a blue flannel shirt and jeans. His long dark hair was tied in a ponytail. What would he be like? I wondered. A snake-hipped stud with knowledge of the
Kama Sutra
and Tantric sex? A masseur and sex magician? A lover who’d spend hours discovering and lingering on a woman’s sensitive spots? Did he smell of recently showered male and exotic fragrance, his hair of coconut shampoo? I imagined the male bouquet drifting from his skin and through my nostrils, into the limbic system of my brain.
Get a grip, girl. He’s probably a serial killer.

Dr Wellman’s office was located on Citrus Avenue between Back, Neck and Shoulder Pain, and Anti-Ageing Clinic. I walked the maze between offices and entered the lobby at 3:50 p.m. The receptionist, Melanie, was pretty, perky and tan.

“Hi! Have a seat, Ms Waites. He’ll be right with you.”

I sat on a cream-colored leather sofa. The decor reminded me of a Woody Allen film set, with its calming vibes of neutral shades white, off-white, eggshell, oatmeal, beige, mushroom and sand. At 3:59 I walked into the office and took a seat opposite Barry. We sat in comfortable overstuffed chairs.

“How’ve you been, Anna?”

“Busy.”

“Anna, are you taking care of yourself? Exercising? Eating right? Socially interacting?”

“Yes, yes. Who are you, my mother?”

Barry smiled. “How’s work going?”

“I’m adapting my novel into a screenplay, remember?”

“That’s right. Wonderful. Your novel about the female independent film maker?”

“Yes, that’s right! But I wonder if people will pay to see yet another inside-the-industry satire. No action figures or computer games will result. Industry accountants will likely be unenthusiastic.”