Maxim Jakubowski: The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels

However shocking or perhaps just plain perverse it may seem, when I saw Mora naked with Charles and Vy it wasn’t jealousy that I felt. It was lust that grew in my belly, like a sapling putting down roots. I knew the voyeur’s stunned delight in achieving erotic perspective. Our nakedness created the illusion that we had entered another dimension, a counter world of the id, where our apprehensions were removed with our clothes and past and future ceased to exist.

Vy’s bedroom was white, but by no means chaste. White walls, white sheepskin rugs on the parquet floor, huge antique mirrors, white vases filled with daisies, and a platform bed on which the three of them sat as if on a tongue sticking out of fluffy clouds, for the silk spread was white, but the sheets underneath were crimson. Satin.

I sauntered around the room, determined to be casual, sipping my brandy and looking at things, conscious of the cool night air on my bare skin. I studied four large framed photographs of Vy on one gleaming white wall, two of them by young fashion photographers I knew. In the portraits, she was elegant and stylish, with formidable cheekbones and a frosty gaze; I didn’t see in them the woman I’d watched kneeling before Charles on the beach.

When I walked over to the bed, Mora and Vy were lying on each side of Charles like houris, watching him stroke himself. His tongue moistened his dry lips, and his strong hands moved slowly from his knees up his firm thighs to his rounded belly. His breath came in shallow gasps. His chest swelled and his nipples pointed. I shivered. We would play a game, a sexual Simon says.

We drew matches and Charles won. He asked that Vy and Mora stretch out between his thighs and handed me the Polaroid. I was happy to hide behind it because I felt flushed and my ears were ringing.

It was the first time I’d seen Mora hesitant about lovemaking; her touch was tentative at first and she followed Vy’s lead. Charles’s swollen flesh glowed wetly in the soft light of a bedside candle. From my new perspective as voyeur, I saw that what was exciting about oral sex was not the mechanics of one person satisfying another, but the selfless art of it, the submission of ego to pleasure. The women’s tongues and fingers worked gently and assiduously; Charles groaned. The phrases that broke from his lips were the mutterings of gratified desire. I waited until they had forgotten the camera before I snapped a picture.

They all blinked and looked around dazedly when the flash went off. Once again; and then it was time to draw matches. Mora’s turn. I was surprised when she moved toward Vy instead of Charles, but when she touched Vy’s breasts, Vy turned her long body to the side.

“Not yet,” she said huskily. “Let me warm up, first.”

Mora smiled as if she’d expected the rebuff, and crawled to Charles, climbing atop him, swivelling her hips to claim his hardness. The two of them flowed into each other.

For a moment then, it hurt like hell. I remembered every time Mora and I had made love, the heat and wetness, our nerves rushing to release, our ragged romantic promises, the closeness of sex during times when we couldn’t even speak to each other. I was drawn to her; I handed Vy the camera and knelt beside them, kissing Mora and stroking her taut breasts, placing my fingertips on her pubic mound to feel the movement of Charles’s flesh inside her, beneath the soft maidenhair.

The room melted, contracting so that only the bed existed. My hands moved over their bodies, urging them together, teaching Charles about Mora’s responses, sculpting them. When the flashbulb went off, we blinked like animals in the dark.

It was Vy’s turn. “ Whoo , boy,” she exclaimed. “This is most extraordinary. Hot, hot, hot.”

“Tell us what you want, before things get out of hand.”

“I want to take Richard into the next room.”

“No pictures?”

“Just the two of us, no silly cameras.”

I was more than a little frightened of Vy. Shyness, I suppose, and the fact that I was attracted to her. The room she took me to was obviously a guest room. Rattan furniture in the shadows, a colorful hand-sewn quilt on a large brass bed, moonlight making patterns on a faded Chinese rug.

We didn’t make it to the bed. I reached for her but she slipped away, onto her knees, and took my flesh into her warm mouth. I thought my knees would fold, and my hands went to her shoulders for support while fire raced up and down my spine. It was over before I could take a deep breath, while my fingers were still caressing her silky hair and finding the secret places of her delicate skull.

I was shaking all over. “ Whew! ” I breathed after a moment spent looking for my head, which had shot like a rocket to the ceiling. “That was too fast.”

She chuckled, licking her lips like a cat over a saucer of milk. She rose gracefully and shrugged her square shoulders into her caftan. “That calls for a drink,” she said, going into the next room for the brandy.

I was aware of a steady, rhythmic thumping through the wall and wondered for a minute if she’d return. I lighted a hurricane lamp next to the bed and waited. She reappeared with the bottle and two glasses, looking younger and more vulnerable in the flickering light.

“So the doors of marriage creak open,” she said.

“I think you oiled the hinges with that one.”

“Well, I’m good at what I do. I enjoy the power of doing that. It wasn’t until I saw men from that perspective – on my knees, in absolute control of them – that I realized they weren’t omnipotent.”

She was too glib; it had bothered me since our first conversation. She sensed my skepticism. Not about what she’d said, but about her sophistication in regard to swinging.

“I was born this way. No illusions. I look at things in black and white. It’s like not having eyelids.”

I wanted to hold her, to press my body against hers, to feel the length of her thighs on mine, but she sat away from me, smoking one of her cigarettes. Her sharp profile cut through the aromatic blue haze.

“I wish I didn’t love Charles so much, that I could turn it on and off.”

I lifted my glass. “Here’s to marriage.”

She sniffled. She was squinting and her eyes were wet, but that might have been the smoke.

“Marriage? That’s for victims. I don’t intend to be a victim ever again. That’s why I stay with Maurice, even though I know it drives Charles crazy.”

“What have you got against marriage?”

She pouted mock-dramatically.

“His name is James Lee Tait. My used-to-be. Three years of holy wedlock made a sorrowful woman of me. He promised everything – he had the gift of promise, you know? – but in the end it was the same old song and dance.”

“So you divorced him.”

“Not without a lot of turmoil. A woman gets attached to you creatures, and a divorce is like losing… your past, maybe your future.”

I wanted to understand. “Do you hate him?”

“No, not really. Let’s just say I envy his get-up-and-gall. I suffered over that. He’s a singer, and I waited in the wings of his career and let mine slide; I had my own ambitions.”

“You make marriage sound like a minefield.”

“It’s no picnic. It’s the most dangerous relationship you can have. A contract made in hell.”

“And Charles? How does he fit in?”

“He doesn’t believe in marriage, and he lets me do what I want to do. We have a pact: no apologies. Jimmy was the kind of man who was always saying ‘I’m sorry’ while he was stepping on my feet – but I could have twisted his balls into a daisy chain. Charles, on the other hand, makes no bones about being exactly who he is, and he never apologizes. I don’t expect anything from him, so I’m never disappointed.”