Лорен Хендерсон: The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Erotica

The Boy pulls away from him. Tom groans in despair.

“Dirty little slut,” says the Boy excitedly. His cock is ramrod stiff, its ruddy tip gleaming, and against his scrawny frame it looks grotesquely large. He springs off the carpets, takes a small copper can from near an Aladdin’s lamp, and pours thick clear liquid into the palm of his hand. “Uncle,” he says. “You in her pussy, me in her ass. Bam, bam, bam. We fuck her hard, yes?”

Uncle laughs lightly.

“No,” I whisper. Then louder: “Yes. God, yes.”

The Boy leaps back onto the carpets, lubricating his cock with lamp oil. Tom groans again. I reach out, feeling sorry for him, and Uncle, gent that he is, shuffles us closer. I lean over to kiss Tom and he responds eagerly, our tongues lashing awkwardly as Uncle pounds into me. Sweat dribbles down my back into the crack of my buttocks and I feel the Boy’s greasy fingers press against my arsehole. He wriggles a finger past my entrance and I’m groaning into Tom’s mouth as the Boy opens me out, forcing the ring of my muscles wider, making me slick and ready.

“Keep her still,” urges the Boy, and Uncle obliges, his cock lodged high.

“Lean forward,” orders the Boy and I obey. His knob nudges my arsehole and pushes into my resistance. I think I’m going to be too small for him, my other hole too full, and that it’s all going to hurt like hell. I make a feeble cry of protest.

“Don’t pretend,” snaps the Boy. He grasps my hips then there’s a flash of pain and, with a sudden slippery rush, he’s fully inside me, and I’m swamped by dark, fierce pleasure. Uncle calls out triumphantly. I feel I’m on the brink of collapse, the intensity of having both holes packed so solidly taking me to a place I didn’t know existed. I gasp into Tom’s mouth, quite beyond kisses now, as the two men start to drive into me. Bam, bam, bam, as the Boy said. I have to pull away from Tom. I need air. I need to groan and wail.

Beneath me, Uncle’s face is flushed with exertion. He spots me looking at him and he grins, meeting my eye with a deliberate gaze. There’s the weirdest kind of friction going on inside me, the two men jostling my body as they fuck. And then I know I’ve lost it. I know pleasure has reduced me to lunacy because I see something wild in Uncle’s eyes. His pupils contract and, for a moment, they are like the Boy’s: bright with black, slit pupils.

It’s the light, I tell myself, the light, the light. And I can’t bear to look. I flop forward onto Tom, seeking a kiss, wanting the reassurance of his mouth, his nose, his face. I’m close to coming and so is Tom because the Boy, gorgeous greedy creature, is sucking him off again. As the two cocks shove fast and hard inside me, I nudge my clit and then gasp into Tom’s mouth, our lips so hot, so wet and loose: “I’m coming, I’m coming.” That sets him off and he groans and pants, his body twitching as he peaks. My orgasm rolls on and on, and Tom is still gasping into my mouth, still coming. It feels sublime, orgasm-without-end. Our lips slide and smear, and nothing else can touch us. It’s as if we’re melting into each other at every breath. And I am him and he is me, and we are all ecstasy, all delirium, all gone.

Sex, I think, will never be the same again.

We didn’t buy a carpet for the hallway that holiday. But sometimes it’s like that. You go out hoping to buy one thing and come home with something totally different. I’ve stopped drawing Tom in the middle of the night as well. I don’t feel the need any more. I don’t have that yearning to capture him. Because I have my Tom, I have him entirely, from now until the end of time. And if I ever start to doubt it, I just need to picture his face, glazed with rapture at the point of climax. He doesn’t know what he looks like. I don’t know what I look like either. People don’t, generally speaking, do they?

All I know is that he’ll never look at another woman like that; he’ll never be able to. Because when he comes, something shifts in his eyes. He rides the wave, annihilated with bliss, the two of us breathing so hard and so deep. And when he looks at me, his beautiful blue eyes have black, slit pupils. And I am him and he is me. And I know we are possessed.

I Google him. Sometimes occasionally, if I’ve got a minute to kill while the printer is churning out my latest project. Sometimes obsessively, staring at the computer screen until my eyes water, drinking straight vodka as the minutes blur. Sometimes recklessly – not bothering to delete my history afterwards. “Deleting history” seems like too much of a cheat. It would be dangerously easy to strike out all the pages I’ve visited on my endless, circular search. You can’t do that in real life.

I know he isn’t the doctor in Minneapolis who specializes in exotic-sounding diseases, or the professor on sabbatical in the Orient who beams his latest pictures up to his website every two or three days – lovely lush landscapes that I’ve grown fond of viewing. Sure, people change, but not that much. I’m absolutely certain he’s not one of a pair of Bluegrass-loving brothers who live in Utah. They hit local bars every few weeks, playing warm-up for bands I’ve never heard of.

I’ve done the online White Pages searches, as well, turning up addresses from fifteen years ago, six or seven places in a row, apartments I remember visiting when I cut class to fuck him. I actually think about calling the numbers – one might be current – but I can’t make myself. There was no caller ID back then. Now, I might get caught. And what would happen to my well-ordered life if he Star-69-ned me and my sweet boyfriend answered?

So I resort to Googling.

Googling takes the place of those late-night drive-bys, looking to see if his Harley was in the spot out front of his building. My muscles tighten up the same way now as they did back then. Maybe I’ll see him. Maybe I won’t. So why do I even bother? Because I fantasize that one day when I type in his name, up will come all the information that I crave. What he’s been doing for the past decade and a half. What he’s doing now. Who he’s with. How he’s aged.

Truthfully, I don’t know all that much about him. If I were to tally up all the facts, they wouldn’t fill an index card. Or a matchbook cover. He was older than me, but by exactly how much, I don’t know. Twenty-seven to my eighteen. That’s what I remember, but he lied all the time. He could have been lying about that. In my online search, I found a man with his name who graduated high school in 1978 somewhere in Southern California. Is that him? His middle initial was D, but he never told me what it stood for. Donald? David? Daniel? Dean? None of those seem right, yet I’ve found men with those middle names on the internet. Might he be one of them?

There’s a fellow in the midwest who runs marathons. I can’t imagine Mark breaking a sweat unless he were running from a cop. But he had a sleek runner’s physique way back when. Could he have transformed himself to an athlete? Has he given up pot in favour of healthier substances? Has he hit the pavement to kill his demons?

Googling takes my mind off my modern-day problems. Googling makes me forget about deadlines and pressures and what we’re going to have for dinner. Delivery pizza, again? Sounds good. Far easier to answer that mundane query than the other nagging questions pulling on me until my stomach aches: should I pay the $29.95 and do a search of prison records? Because that’s where I’ll find him. I’m sure of it.

I don’t enter my credit card. I don’t think I actually want to know.

After spending hours on the computer, I dream about him. My eyes hurt and my head spins. I hit the pillow and recreate his image from the puzzle pieces that I remember: the black-ink Zig-Zag man tattoo on his upper arm. The way his blue eyes could turn grey or green depending on what he was wearing. Depending, even, on his mood. His paint-splattered jeans. His grey shirt. His body.