Maxim Jakubowski: The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Volume 3

After a couple of hours of this, she’d excused herself for a minute to dash up to her sister’s toilet, and, as she parted her legs on the toilet seat, she had heard (above the murmur of the reception downstairs) her cunt make a sucking noise. She’d decided then that she had to make love to this man.

Alone now in her house in Edinburgh, she held up her cotton shift. The stain on it was in the shape of a phallus, but that was coincidental, of course. The shape was actually created by his come being squeezed out, little by little, by the contractions of her own orgasm, and spilling into the cleft in her arse as she moved it beneath him. Similarly, the stain on her spencer was caused by her lying belly-down on a wet spot as he eased the head of his prick into her arsehole. He had moved too gently at first, until she’d begun to buck to give him the idea.

On the bus many hours later, sitting on the arse she had urged him to fuck deeper, she had almost regretted it, but later still, in her house in Edinburgh, she squirmed experimentally on the sofa and took joy in the vestige of pain and the memory of his hoarse cry as his pelvis fell against her buttocks for the last time.

It was her impression that he knew exactly what to do when they were fucking, though perhaps she was constantly letting him know what she wanted without really being aware she was doing it. If his hands were on her nipples just when she wanted them there, how did her breasts get uncovered in the first place? He wanted all of her, so she gave him what he wanted, but in the order she wanted it taken, perhaps. She couldn’t be sure. There were things he had done that she hadn’t been aware she wanted done to her, which she’d craved instantly and desperately as soon as she felt him begin.

It didn’t even occur to her to decide whether or not he was a good lover; that would be like a four-year-old child wondering if its sibling was a capable playmate.

She had just wanted to keep fucking and talking and laughing all night and all day, and (looking back at it now) she liked to fancy that at 7.35 pm yesterday afternoon, when her plane lifted off the runway on its way to Edinburgh without her, she’d been coming hard against his warm, wet fingers, cradling his head on her shoulder.

Pushed down into the tub of sudsy water, her underclothes relinquished their hold on his stains and hers. The house was quiet around the swirling of the water as she rubbed and wrung the submerged garments. Detergent and grey-brown water dissolved the difference between the sweating she’d done on the plane to London and the sweating she’d done while fucking her man. She would put these things in the tumble-dryer and they would come out dry and pale, while she herself would have a long shower and wash the last of his smell off her body until she, too, emerged dry and pale.

Later that day, very sleepy from the warmth of the shower and the hairdryer, she went out again, to the local shops. She could still feel him, ever so slightly, in her arse, if she walked really stiffly. She walked that way every now and then, when she thought no one was looking.

She bought a new handbag in the first shop she walked into. It was not even as expensive as her old one (which she still had with her), but she liked it better. She transferred a few things from the one to the other, things her husband would lack the imagination to be surprised had not been in her handbag when it was “stolen”. The rest, including her e-ticket confirmation and her credit card, she destroyed. She’d already thrown away her mobile phone in London, afraid of her husband catching her out making calls on a gadget she claimed to have lost. The empty, flaccid handbag she now deposited in a charity shop collection bin.

The post office had telephone cubicles outside, two in a row. She entered one of these and extracted from her new handbag one of the things she had not discarded: her address book.

Leaning against the side of the cubicle, she dialled the newest number with its 0207 prefix, getting as comfortable as she could in preparation for a long conversation. Running out of money was not a worry: on the cubicle shelf she’d put a small handful of pound coins. If they ran out, she had another four hundred-odd pounds’ worth she could convert to coin, and that was an awful lot of talking.

His telephone, six hundred kilometres south of hers, rang about eight times before he answered it.

“Hello,” he said noncomittally.

“Hello,” she replied, as fresh sweat prickled into her newly-laundered underwear. “This is -”

“I know who it is,” he said at once, in the same warm, teasing tone with which he’d told her, such a deliciously short time ago, that he was about to come inside her. “It’s so good to hear your voice.”

The red, overstuffed chair sat on the dying lawn like a throne in an overrun kingdom. Marlo could not take her eyes from it. The yard was cluttered with scuffed leather shoes, stupid knick-knacks, chipped glass lamps the colour of burnt amber, and torn paperbacks, mostly romance novels. A rack of brightly printed shirts stood proudly on the outer edge of the lawn. Marlo ran a single finger up the arm of the chair. She could feel the wooden skeleton underneath the worn red fabric. It wasn’t the shape of the chair, or the feel, but the colour. Marlo had a proclivity for the colour red.

It had started when she was young. She would lie in her parents’ big king-sized bed and watch as her mother flitted back and forth in her bright red nightie. It was a slip-type thing with dainty, clever lace at the top and a scalloped edge at the bottom. Marlo remembered admiring how the slip hugged her mother’s ample bosom and rear, hoping that she would have a body like that someday too. Then her memories shifted to sorting through her mother’s closet, looking for something to bury her in. She took the red slip out and held it up to her own body, noticing how she still didn’t have the body of her mother. Her own frame was tall and straight, muscular and almost boyish. Lesbians loved her. Men were curious, but standoffish. She usually didn’t mind. The slip was worn thin, almost threadbare, and the lace at the top was torn, shrivelled, like tiny, dying flowers.

The second instance of red Marlo remembered was a bra and panty set that she had found discarded in the woods in back of her suburban apartment complex. The panties still had a wet stain in the front and Marlo had squatted down in the patch of dead, fire-ready leaves and sniffed them. They smelt like sex. Marlo had sat cross-legged with the bra and panties in her hands, rubbing her thumb and forefinger over the silky material. She made up stories about what the woman who had been wearing these had been doing. She had been a waitress or a bartender – jobs Marlo had always thought were glamorous back when she was young – and some man had come in and swept her off her feet. Marlo imagined the young woman gingerly slipping her long, sculpted arms out of the pretty bra. Marlo was too young to wear a bra back then and wasn’t quite sure how big the woman’s breasts would have been. She slipped it over her powder blue Camp Little Rock T-shirt and left the back unhooked and dangling behind her. The panties she just held carefully, not wanting to wipe off the fresh scent. It was the closest she had ever come to sex. She wasn’t even sure what sex was, but she compared it to kissing Jimmy Thomas, the boy with two first names, in the coat closet of their first grade classroom. He had asked her to pull up her shirt so he could take a Polaroid and she had done it. He passed it around to all the other kids in their class until her teacher saw it and gave it to her Mom. Her Mom held it limply in one hand and cried, shaking her head, looking down at the photograph and up at her face. Marlo had been confused, concerns about her body implanted in her mind.