Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

And if he insisted that his children obey him in everything, he was only demanding the honor the Scripture said was due a parent. If he forbade them to marry or even to have friends, he was only trying to protect them from the worldliness and evil he saw everywhere. He had only their best interests at heart.

None of which explains why Robert Browning, who had befriended the invalided daughter, wrote her, “You are in what I should wonder at as the veriest slavery,” and “I truly wish that you may never feel what I have to bear in looking on, quite powerless and silent while you are subjected to this treatment.”

“Don’t think too hardly of poor Papa,” Elizabeth wrote Robert, and described her father as “upright and honorable.”

None of which explains why she fled her father’s house, telling no one, not even her sisters, because “whoever helps me, will suffer through me,” and taking her dog Flush with her because she didn’t dare leave him behind.

I may be wrong about her reaction to this story. Her easily embarrassed Victorian soul would have been shocked by the language, of course, but she would have recognized the story. And the characters.

R. C. Matheson is an acclaimed author as well as a screenwriter and producer for television and film. He has worked with Steven Spielberg, Bryan Singer, Roger Corman, and many other directors. He is also the president of Matheson Entertainment, a production company he formed with his father, Richard Matheson. Currently, Matheson is writing and producing several films, and adapting and executive producing a four-hour miniseries based on H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine . He has published more than seventy-five stories in magazines and anthologies, including various “best of the year” anthologies.

Matheson has investigated several paranormal cases with a parapsychology lab at University of California, Los Angeles, including the infamous house upon which the film The Entity (1983) was based. Matheson has also been a professional drummer for over thirty years and studied privately with the legendary Cream drummer, Ginger Baker. He has played with the Rock Bottom Remainders, among other bands.

Matheson’s new novella, The Ritual of Illusion , is forthcoming. His critically lauded collection Dystopia is available as an ebook. In addition, Matheson recently compiled and edited a collector’s edition of Battleground , commemorating the Emmy Award–winning adaptation of a Stephen King story.

SHE STARED.

TRYING TO be sure. Trying to hide it.

He was somehow perfect, somehow virulent; handsome in a way that slit her restraint open. Drew her in. He was about thirty. By himself in the bar. The town, asleep ten stories below, was flat and black. Streetlights stared up, inspecting the hotel bar with orange eyes, and occasionally a sleepy police car would pass, roving pointlessly.

She stared more, wiping long nails with a napkin.

She was becoming sure. It was in his eyes.

The thing.

Maybe even more than the ones before.

She ordered another kamikaze and walked to the pay phone, passing him. He stared out the window, chewing on a match, and she noticed the way his index finger traced the edge of his beer as if touching a woman’s body.

The look.

Every location, she found it.

When the company was done filming and she’d finished going over the next day’s setups with whichever director she was currently working under, she’d grab the location van back to the hotel the studio had booked the production team into, pick up mail and messages at the front desk, and go to her room. Always exhausted, always hating being an assistant director. Hating not being the one to set the vision. Run the set.

Be in control.

Then she’d strip; shower. Let the water scratch fingernails down her body as she closed tired eyes. Try to let the sensations take over. Try to feel something. But she never did.

She couldn’t.

The sensual voyage her girlfriends felt when they were alone and naked, touching their bodies, allowing their skin to respond, no longer interested her. Her body searched for greater responses. Searched for the one who could hold her the right way, touch her with the exact touch. Make her respond; transcend. Stare into her eyes when she came.

Stare with that look.

She stood at the phone and called collect. Her husband was asleep and when he answered told her he loved her. She said it back but kept watching the man. He was pressing his lips against the matchstick, gently sucking it in and out as she stared in unprotected fascination.

Her husband offered to wake the kids so they could tell her good-night.

“They miss Mommy,” he told her, in a sweet voice she hated.

She didn’t hear what he’d said then, and he told her again, asking if she were all right; she sounded tired, distracted. She laughed a little, making him go away by calming him. He told her again he loved her and wanted to be with her. To make love. She was silent, watching the man across the barroom, catching his glance as he tried to get the waitress’s attention.

“Do you miss me?” her husband asked.

The man was looking at her. Her husband asked her if she was looking forward to making love when she got back into town. She kept staring at the man. Her husband asked again.

“Yes, darling. Of course I am….”

But it was a lie. It never stopped being one. He did nothing for her. She wanted something that would make her forget who she was, what her life was. Something real.

Something unreal.

Her husband had gone to get the kids though she told him not to. He wouldn’t listen, and when she lifted cold fingers from her closed eyes, head bowed in private irritation, the man was standing next to her, buying cigarettes from a machine.

“Say hello to Mommy, kids.”

The kids spoke sleepily over the phone while the man stared at her, lighting his cigarette, eyes unblinking. She told them to go to sleep, and that she loved them. But she was watching the man’s eyes moving down her face, slowly to her neck, her breasts. Further. He quickly looked back at her and she allowed the look to do whatever it wanted.

They went to his room.

Nothing was said. They made love all night and she clutched at the sheets on either side of her sweating stomach with both hands, bunching up the starched cotton, screaming. He touched her so faintly at one point, it felt like nothing more than a thought; a wish. Her body arched and tensed, the pillow beneath her head soaked.

He tied her to the bedposts with silk scarves and blew softly onto her salty mouth, gently kissed her eyelids. He circled his tongue around her ears and whispered rapist demands that made her come. He massaged her until her skin effervesced, until her fingers pulled wildly at the scarves that held her wrists to the bed. Until she moaned with such pleasure, she thought she was in someone else’s body.

Or had left her own.

Everything he did aroused her like she’d never been and when he finally untied her, she slept against his chest, held in his soothing arms. She murmured over and over how incredible it had been, stunned by what he’d made her feel. What he was still making her feel.

He said the only thing he would.

“You won’t forget tonight.”

When she awakened at dawn, he was gone. No note, no sign. There was a knock on the door and she answered, wrapping a towel around herself. Room service rolled in a large breakfast, complete with omelet, café au lait, and a newspaper.

He’d taken care of everything.

She sat in bed and ate, untying the newspaper, aching sweetly from the evening, covered with tender welts and bite marks. The food tasted delicious and the flavors on her tongue made her want to make love. She smiled, listened to the birds outside her window. Their soft opera gave her goose bumps, and as she opened the newspaper, the sound of its crisp folds made her nipples tingle. She laughed a little, remembering the incredible way he’d licked and sucked them last night. They were still sensitive.