The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 5 (7 page)

That was what I was thinking about when I was busted. The head cashier caught me blatantly staring at another woman’s crotch. How can I go back there now? Of course, it’s the only place that carries my favorite no name sugar pops. My boyfriend, Michael, would never go get them for me. He hated the place. Moreover, the head cashier was always there, wearing her 70s frosted shag hairdo and dangling earrings like she existed in a time warp. I swore she never went home.

I can’t believe I lost my no name sugar pops to a camel toe.

Michael thinks I’m cheating on him because he found a note with my handwriting in the laundry. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal. I write a lot of notes, but this note was about a physical exam with Dr. Eric. I had written how much Dr. Eric turned me on with his swarthy dark looks and his warm hands on my legs.

I tried to explain to Michael that it was part of a story I was working on, but he wasn’t convinced because I had recently gone to the doctors. Trying to clarify it further, I told him I was writing it from the point of view of the character, not me! It was hopeless. He just couldn’t grasp the concept. So I gave up on the explanation and hoped to get the note back. I had defiantly written something sexy I needed.

“Where is the note?” I asked.

“I threw it away,” he said.

“Why would you do that? Aren’t you supposed to confront me with it?”

He looked as if it had never occurred to him.

“I was pissed so I threw it away,” he said and stormed out of the room.

Once again, he was proving that some really good-looking guys aren’t too bright.

When we first met, I thought he was a little too slick and cocky for me. We went to the same health club. I swam laps. He ran. We kept bumping into each other in the coed hot tub and steam room. Since I never considered him an option, I acted like myself for a change. Also, he had already seen me at my worst in my nasty old swimsuit. You have no idea how many swimsuits I’ve ruined because of the chlorine, so now I buy the ugliest, cheapest suit I can find because it’s only going to last me a few months anyway. On top of that, he’d seen me with swimming goggles on, and that was just not a good look.

I figured he had to be talking to me because he was bored. Mostly to shock him and alleviate my own boredom, I told him about my part time porn career. He didn’t seem too shocked, thus proving the boredom factor in his motivation to talk to me.

Imagine my surprise when he kissed me in the parking lot one night. He was a very good kisser, leaving me breathless. Then he told me he had been harboring a secret crush on me for months. I didn’t believe him, but he convinced me with some more kissing. We moved in together six months later.

After dealing with Michael, you can imagine my relief going to lunch with Jen, my one sane friend, although she was a little wild. She rented a big loft near the Eastern Market, and she goes to all the clubs on the weekends, where she likes to wear “fuck me” clothes and then acts surprised when men look at her.

We met at La Shish Kabob. I loved the Arabian Night atmosphere with the arched windows, brass chandeliers and fabric draped across the ceiling. The place was empty except for one other table. Of course we were seated close by them and there were kids, who amazingly were eating Happy Meals.

Over our freshly made pita bread, spicy salsa and mango smoothies, Jen started telling me in vivid and lengthy detail about the three way she had over the weekend. She had done it with two guys she was currently dating. Casually, she’d mentioned it to them as a fantasy she wanted to fulfill. To her amazement, they both agreed.

“Did they do each other?” I asked.

“No. Just me.”

“So how did it happen?”

“I went and sat on the bed. Alex went into the bathroom and came out naked. It really broke the ice.”

“Did it hurt?”

She shook her head.

“One hole or two?” I asked, eagerly.

The manager came over to us.

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” he said. “There has been a complaint. Your topic of conversation is inappropriate for the restaurant.”

We glanced over our shoulder at the family. The mother was glaring at us. Those kids were way too little to know what we were talking about.

“What if we change the topic?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Can we at least get our food to go?” I asked.

I couldn’t imagine leaving without our vegetarian platters with hummus, tabbouli, spinach pie and grape leaves.

“The manager says you have to leave. That is his sister.”

“What about an order of the baklava?” I pleaded.

I had promised Michael I would bring him some back. I couldn’t leave without it. This was the only place I knew that made their baklava with pistachios instead of walnuts, and they used an orange syrup instead of the usual lemon. Michael would flip if I didn’t bring some home.

The waiter shook his head. After taking one more sip of smoothie each, we left.

Our lunch plans ruined, we stood in the parking lot, staring at one another. Jen didn’t look happy with me, but it had been her fault as well. She was the one having the three ways. I promised to call her soon and we parted. I went home, where I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich by myself.

Lately, I’m not having too much luck with my friends. My other friend, Constance, was acting nuts. She claimed she was into corsets, but she had never bought one. I caught her complaining the other day that her bra was too tight. You would have thought she would have liked that. She worked at an upscale bed linen store with thousand count sheets and wrought iron beds, and yet she chowed down on little greasy hamburgers at places truck drivers would stop.

Constance thought I wanted her, because I took a scrap of our conversation in a dressing room and inserted it into a story about two women doing it in a similar dressing room. What happened was this. We were trying on lingerie in a dressing room together because the place was so crowded during a sale. Constance mentioned that she had been checking out girls recently. I didn’t pay her much attention because she was always saying stuff like that, but nothing ever came of it.

In my story, I had the two girls in the dressing room hook up after the confession with admiring glances of long limbs, lots of lace and garters. In real life, I had been trying on a yellow rubber duck design nightshirt, and Constance had been trying on a boring white slip.

I was so excited about seeing the story published on this classy erotica Web site that I sent her a link to the story online, totally forgetting where the inspiration for the story came from.

Now she kept leaving me voice mails, asking me to get together for lunch and lingerie shopping.

A few days later, I finally finished the Dr. Eric story. It was truly a masterpiece of sexual degradation, and it made me so horny I had to masturbate.

Michael’s cat wanted some attention. He’s had this cat ever since he was a little kid, and now she’s like seventeen years old. I gave her points for lasting this long, but sometimes she was a pest. She had the most unimaginative name in the world, “Kitty.” I’ve thought about upgrading her name, but Michael won’t hear it, so sometimes I’ve added adjectives like “Pretty Kitty.” Michael just rolled his eyes. Sometimes, I think it was more important what his cat thought of me than his parents.

I tried to pacify her with a couple quick pets and hoped she would go away. I was not going to do it front of her. Rolling over onto my other side for some privacy, I accidentally knocked her off the bed. The sensitive little snot head shot under the bed like I had struck her with a broom.

That was when Michael came home and found me trying to coax her out.

“Why is Kitty under the bed?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe a breeze blew on her and she took it the wrong way.”

Sizing me up on the bed, he raised and an eyebrow. “You look sexy lying there,” he said. He took off his shirt, his signal that he wanted to do it. He’s never been big on foreplay. It’s more like “let’s kiss” and “let’s do it.” But since I was already sort of warmed up, I nodded.

I did feel a little guilty about the masturbating thing so to make up for it I initiated butt play with a dildo. This was something he wanted to do to me for a long time. Thank goodness, he didn’t ask me, “why now.” Then I would have to explain I needed the details for another story.

It was a little uncomfortable at first, but toward the end, I got into it, good enough to have a mind-blowing orgasm and then pass out.

When I woke up, I couldn’t find the dildo. The little pink plastic butt fucker was gone.

Please don’t let Kitty be using it as a cat toy, I thought. Michael was still sleeping. Quietly, I got out of bed and bent over to look for it on the floor when suddenly I farted. The dildo shot out of my ass.

After I recovered from the dildo incident, an editor called me. He couldn’t use the story I had submitted to him, but he liked my style of writing. He wanted to me to write these 200 word blurbs for beneath some photos for another one of his magazines. I happily agreed.

The photos came by overnight mail. I pulled them out their envelope and raised an eyebrow. These young women looked very young, maybe a day or two past eighteen at the most. I kept thinking about myself at that age. Did I want horny men looking at my crotch?

I had the worst time making up the scenarios, but I did the best I could and sent them off. The editor didn’t like them. He said I tried to cram too much story into a small space. He wanted a single scene.

Michael once said he had read a lot of these magazines when he was younger. Wanting his advice, I visited him in the bathroom as he was taking a shower. I sat on the toilet seat, explaining my frustration.

“What’s the deal with these girls?” he asked.

“Well one girl is a babysitter who finds a pair of naughty panties and whacks off with them. The other girl is trying to seduce older men at a pool.”

“So say this,” Michael said.

And he launched into the raunchiest word festival I’ve ever heard come out of his mouth. Maybe the hot water was doing something to his brain. I hadn’t expected him to come up with something this quick. I had a pencil tucked behind my ear, but no paper, so I used the inside of a tampon box.

Watching him in the shower, I thought he looked sexy right now. I should hop inside the shower with him, but I wanted to get these words down. I ran to my desk, but I felt like I was leaving something important behind.

My computer locked up this morning. Michael had already left for work. I told the editor I would have the scenarios to him by this morning. Since I can’t email them to him, I decided to fax them from work.

At work though, under the fluorescent lights, I was concerned my copy wasn’t dark enough for our crappy fax machine, so I made a darker copy first. Thank god, it went through the fax the first time, but as I got back to my desk, I realized the last page of my original draft was missing. Of course, it was the page with the big orgasm scene with the babysitter.

Panicking, I ran back to the copy machine to find it gone. I glanced down. It was in the trashcan, ripped neatly in half. Oh no. Someone found it. Looking around the room for the culprit, I realized my boss was staring at me by the postage machine, an eyebrow raised. I swallowed.

“Oh my Lord,” I said. “Who would write such filthy disgusting stuff? I’m so glad someone ripped it up.”

With that said, I headed back to my desk, feeling like I had betrayed myself.

After work, I came home to find Constance’s car in the driveway. What was she doing here? I went inside and heard voices coming from the kitchen. At first, it looked like a normal scene. One of my girlfriends had stopped by for a visit and my boyfriend was sitting at the kitchen counter talking to her, but then I saw Michael’s face. It was drained of color. What on earth could make him look like this? Had something happened to Kitty?

“Your girlfriend wants to do a three way,” he announced.

“What?” I asked, stunned.

“Your girlfriend came over here, and she said she wants to have sex with me and you, because she has a crush on you, and it might be easier if I was there. Apparently in some story you posted online you communicated to her that you felt that way too.”

“I didn’t post it. It was published,” I said.

Michael rolled his eyes.

“What the hell is going on?” he demanded.

“Are you crazy?” I asked her.

Acting embarrassed, Constance crossed her arms over her chest and looked at the floor.

“So, Penny, what happened in a lingerie dressing room?” Michael asked.

“That was a couple months ago. Remember when I brought home the rubber ducky nightshirt.”

“You went to a lingerie store and came home with that?”

A color was coming back to his face. It was red.

“Constance,” I said to her, like a parent might to a naughty child. “I told you that was a story. It’s not real life. I just put a lost dildo up the ass in a gay story, and I’m not a gay man.”

“You put the dildo up the butt thing into a story?” Michael asked. “That was personal.”

“But Jen said you were really into three ways,” she said.

Oh, God.

“When did she say this?” I asked.

“We’ve been seeing each other. Meeting for shopping and lunch.”

“You guys hate each other.”

Constance shrugged. I tried to compose myself, but I couldn’t believe they were seeing each other behind my back.

“Why does Jen think you’re into three ways?” Michael asked me.

“She did one the other weekend and she was telling me the details at La Shish Kabob. We were kicked out for inappropriate conversation.”

“That’s why no baklava,” he announced, like a private detective figuring out a twist in the crime.

I looked at Constance.

“Look, Constance,” I said as gently as possible. “I like you as one of my friends, but I do not want to have a three way with you or any other way, as a matter of fact.”