The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 5 (60 page)

Some men are so facile with their charm they astound me. I love that much moxie. He asked. I went. Simple. His sunglasses made him look professorial. He smiled a tiny, tiny inscrutable smile the whole way. We didn’t talk on the drive. Not much. I mouthed some appreciation of the raw power of his words. He waxed philosophical and stressed how important his work is to the culture of the Island. The ego – but I got that he wasn’t making it up. I suggested we save it for the interview proper. Pausing in speech, he had the distracting habit of touching his tongue to his upper lip. It made my insides twitchy. I looked out the window. I watched his hands, slid my eyes to the side and examined his belly; the tented folds of his loose trousers. If I wasn’t conscious of it before, I acknowledged it now: I’d sleep with him, should that occasion arise.

We stopped for groceries. The clerk eyed me with some interest and looked pointedly at Mackenzie, but he offered no explanation of my presence. When we left, I felt the cashier’s eyes on my back and didn’t turn around.

He stayed on the Island in a beach house, where the ocean raced up to meet the land, and the wind battered the thin grass flat. Sandpipers raced ahead of the surf and chased it back as it sucked in upon itself, sighing. They peeped as they ran. Palmettoes spiked the grainy ground around the house. I thought it was a miracle the place still stood, a survivor of countless storms. The pale yellow paint peeled on the clapboard. I walked up the tall steps, the house high on its pilings, its hedge against the cruelty of the sea. A pelican stood on the roof. I stood outside for several minutes before stepping in.

“Y’all like hush puppies?” he called from the bright kitchen. It was a blaze of sunflower gold.

“Sure. I’ll eat anything.”

“Greens?”

“Anything, honestly.”

“Fried clams?”

“Sure.”

“Well if you want ’em y’all’ll have to get ’em. There’s a pail and a digger out on the porch. Go get us some, then. Know how to find ’em, right?” I nodded. “Make sure you bring ’em in some clean water. Tide’s out so it’s perfect. They’ll be frisky, though. Work fast. See if you can find some crabs, too.”

I was back in half an hour, the bucket filled. He puttered in the kitchen, pots clattering, conversing as he worked, and emerged shortly with two steaming plates, topped with sliced tomatoes, dusted with pepper and parsley.

Over lunch and for part of the afternoon, I asked the questions, got my answers, sipped on the Bud he’d pulled out of the fridge.

“Ya’ll are welcome to stay and I can drive you back in the morning or whenever y’all have to get back. Nothin’ ever happens out here, anyway. They be talking about you back at the store. That’s how dull it is in this part. I c’n hear ’em talk about how y’all got lost from the other side. Should be with the country-club folk.” He laughed. “Should keep them going for a while. Might as well give ’em something more to talk about. Besides, it looks like the day is turning rough. Check it out.” He pointed out to the darkening sea.

A squall had blown up offshore and the surf rose with the tide until water licked close to the verandah’s stilted legs.

“Shouldn’t we be getting away?”

“Nah. Seen worse ’an ’at. Not likely going to go higher than ’at, and there’s a spot down the road a ways where there’s more chance of a washout than here. Might not get past that point, anyway. Might as well stay and enjoy the show. It’s best if you get out on the porch an’ stick ya head into the wind. Always makes me feel like a sea captain. A reg’lar pirate.” His twin earrings shook.

So we stood on the porch while the waves sucked at the ground and the rain sliced and swung like a curtain parted and swaying upon itself. It turned and drove itself into us like needles. A huge explosion of lightning made me jump, crashing into him, sodden. We scurried back inside.

“Damn.” He was laughing, a big boom, boom, boom of a laugh like thunder.

“I feel like a drowned rat . . .”

“Y’all look like one, too, sorry to tell ya. I’ll fetch you a towel and if you like I can throw your stuff over the drying rack. I’ll getcha something dry to wear.”

He came back with a huge towel and a sweatshirt, then passed me some flannel pajama bottoms with a drawstring waist. “You can change in the bathroom or the bedroom, wherever you like.”

“Thanks.” I chose the bath, took some time drying my hair. When I came back out, I found him standing in the same place, but dressed in a floor-length plain linen caftan. Barefoot. He looked like a prince. Like Fishburne in
Othello
. . . He was smoking a joint.

“Y’okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.” I handed him my wet things. He put them on the table and turned back to me.

“You want some?”

“Sure,” I said, holding out my hand. “Sure. Love to.”

“You need more research for your article?”

“I’m always open for new information.”

“What do you need?”

“I don’t know what else to ask. So I’ll just remain open.”

Lightning blued the light in the room.

“You want an exclusive?” That funny smile I’d seen in the truck reappeared.

“Like what? I thought I already had one.” He touched his tongue to his lip, again. I passed the joint back, sputtered a little. He put it down. And he kissed me. “Oh,” said I. A peck behind the ear, a suggestion laid upon the nape of my neck, an invitation pressed to my lips, an invocation upon my tongue. We stood like that for a long time, tasting. I mouthed his neck, at this darker hollow in a dark hollow near the collar bone. In that spot the smell of salt and wind was strong. I licked it. Salty, too – sweat and sea spray.

“Shoulda jus’ given you the towel,” he said.

I stroked him through his robe, testing weight, length, breadth and started to feel giddy at the thought of slowly jerking this man off through what looked like an exotic house-dress. Was that all I’d do? Maybe he would just want to be sucked. My legs wobbled. Where would this end? The kitchen table? The paneled wall of the den? Domestically in bed, missionary style?

“Leni, are you in there?” She kicked me on the shin. Charmaine was looking at me. I snapped back to the present. The Bam Boo’s purple-haired waitress hovered.

“Yeah . . . just thinking about what you said. You’re gonna have to take my word for it. I did. We did. He’s not entirely who you think he is. Who he says he is.”

After our lunch, Charmaine came over to my house for the first time. I showed her the pictures.

Proof. Sort of.

“Damn, I could just kill you. I’m so jealous I could spit.”

“Well, get over it – it’s not like I married the guy. He was very cool. He was fulla himself, though. A regular cock of the walk . . . but he was . . .” I sighed, “. . .for two days he was the finest man I ever was with. Sometimes I get mad, thinking about it. You know, you have the fling and it gets under your skin. You want more and it’s not there.”

“Please put me out of my misery and tell me about it . . .”

“About what?”

“About it all . . . his cock. What he said . . . Sometimes I read his poetry and I start thinking stuff . . . and I want to put it there . . .”

“Oh girl, you have it bad,” I said. I felt that shift again, the rip in the universe. If I let something go, I might get what I craved. But should I? I wasn’t the kiss-and-tell sort. Still, this could be my ticket. She wouldn’t touch me. Fuck it.

So I told her. I told her everything. She
so
wanted to know. I tormented her. I told her about lifting the linen robe very slowly, until it bunched over the high curve of his ass, held there by my fist; how his cock drizzled wet across my rib cage. Her mouth fell open, her lips wet, wet, wet, too. Looking into her mouth I remembered taking him in mine, the smell of salt marsh and wet earth, the clay tang of him as his wrinkled sheath rolled back and my tongue snaked around him, his hands in my hair. This, I told her. With her next exhalation, I was back sprawled on his sofa, exulting in his tongue parting my lips, and his words, “You taste like the sea,” eddying over me as he dragged my clit between his gapped teeth and tortured it slowly with the very same clever, pink source of all that jive that had sprung from his mouth. “I’m floating on your sea . . .” And at this her mouth dropped open again, and in it I saw desire, and I leaned forward and put my mouth on hers, and said, “This is how it all went down . . .” On her, I redrew the map – rewrote the history of that travel. The key to this had been so simple, and so unfair to use.

She writhed on the couch beside me, ripe, like a mashy Mission fig – soft. I stroked the narrow silk gusset of her panties, slick already. She was unfashionably and beautifully unshorn, a dense mat of hair peeping all. around, spreading to her upper thighs, up the inner cheeks of her ass, the indigo ribbon of her lips glistening then parting slightly: pink, like conch, inside, a recollection of the sea.

I whispered how, for all the gushing wet pouring out of me, he still hurt me with his thing. How it took working slowly, until he said, “Pull the skin fo’ward,” and then pushed into me in one slick motion. Farting and sucking from my stretched insides, gales of air caught and released. I bunched my fingers, two, three at a time, into her. She mewled. I pushed, felt resistance, pushed again and again until my hand was clenched around its breadth by her gaping mouth and she broke like surf on it. “Like that,” I said. “Big, just like that, Charm. I was bent over the windowsill, with my face in the glass, facing the storm, the rain pelting the window, running down the glass. He made me shoot. That never happened before. It hasn’t happened since.”

Charmaine grasped my hand, shuddered, jerked like a spastic or a Voudoun in trance, babbled in a strange tongue like that of love; then cried, hiccoughing into my chest.

Later I made her some of the coffee he’d given me; a gift in parting. One of his friends fronted him the expensive Jamaican grind. The stuff cost a fortune. I kept it, sealed in my fridge. Rationed it.

We smoked one too, and I petted her hair, twisted the ends and rewrapped the scarf around it so it stood up in spikes like dragons’ tongues. She looked like a queen. She checked my work in the mirror, and was surprised. “You did a good job.”

“I have hidden talents.” We laughed.

I haven’t seen Kayo since that time. A year. We keep missing each other. I’m always where he’s not. I don’t feel like I’m entirely done. Like the poor SOB jonesing twenty minutes after his first stem of rock, I’m not done. It keeps me on edge. Moist and restless.

I can hear her stirring upstairs. The place is already beginning to heat up. It will be a clear, calm day, perfect for summer idling. I know that part of the past is why she continues to see me, sometimes calling in the night for a fix. We keep apart unless it’s to fuck, or in this case to flee into the country. Anais and June . . . Much as I’d like to, I can’t call it making love. We’d have to be in love with each other. Seems we’re both in lust with him. It’s not a fair trade. We don’t talk about him, either. That would be too much an acknowledgment of this two-sided triangle. Kayo’s the lacuna, the space between, the spirit in the bed. That’s my dry, hollow place. If I shut my eyes I’ll allow her to be my diviner and I’m her channeler, her shaman. The water flows from the cracked pot, out of the space within its walls. I talk to her. I know the words. Blunt. My fist is his cock – my tongue is his too. It fills her gap. I know what it felt like. I can take her there – almost. I wish it were enough. One day I might have to deal with her finding him herself, except not by accident. She’ll go looking. Then, I don’t know what will happen. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t told her, but in this game the end justifies the means. It’s what I dealt for.

In the meantime we revolve about each other in an uneasy orbit, listening to the loons laugh like unhinged spirits on the lake. Pretending. I make her herb tea. I must make a trip into town to get some coffee. I’m out.

Walking along the Bay St Louis levee, my new Nikon dangling from my neck, I found exactly what I was searching for. A black man sat fishing next to an old dock. It was a typically warm Mississippi day, bright and windless. The man, who looked to be in his early to mid-twenties, was handling the heat well. He had stripped down to his shorts. I wasn’t as lucky with the heat. Wearing a white blouse and a black wraparound skirt, my long dark brown hair tied in a pony tail, I was so hot I felt perspiration dripping down my back.

As I descended the grassy levee, the man looked up and smiled at me.

I raised my camera and said, “Y’all mind if I take your picture?”

He seemed surprised, but was eager to oblige. He wasn’t having much luck fishing. He told me his name was Freddie. Tall and slim, Freddie had a wide smile.

Kneeling on one knee next to him, I focused on his dark face and felt my skirt opening around my legs. When I sat down, I could see that my skirt had opened a great deal and Freddie had noticed also. I closed my skirt and took another couple pictures. But my mind wasn’t on the pictures anymore, it was on the rush I felt when I’d noticed him looking up my skirt.

In the past, I had caught men looking up my dress and it always gave me a thrill, especially if they were black. Once, at a shoe store, while I was trying on sandals and wearing a skirt that was much too short, I discovered the black man helping me in and out of my sandals was staring right between my legs. I became so turned on, I tried six pairs before leaving.

Sitting only a few feet from Freddie, I decided to go for the rush again. I pulled my knees up to my chest and rested my camera atop my knees. I looked through the camera lens at him and snapped away. My skirt slowly opened around my thighs. Through the lens, I could see him peeking at me. I felt a flush cross my face because I knew the white panties I wore were very sheer.

After an exciting minute, I put my camera next to me and leaned back on my hands. I closed my eyes and lifted my face toward the sun. The heat on my face matched the heat building within me. I could
feel
him staring at me. When I looked back, he was looking at my ass. With my knees as high as they were, the entire bottom of my panties was open to view.