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

I remember being shy, so nervous, still unaccustomed to being naked in front of a man. I could strip at the gym, in front of my peers, but taking off my clothes while he watched was something entirely different. Mark liked me like that. Not just naked, but nervous. He liked to put me off centre, to make me feel as if I were always on a teeter-totter, the ground rushing up to meet me when I fell. He watched through half-shut eyes that told me of his appreciation as I slowly took off my pink halter top, my cut-off jeans, my candy-coloured bikini top and bottoms.

And then he covered me with the scented liquid, until I gleamed, shiny and gold, the smell of papayas and coconut swirling around us. He rubbed the oil into my breasts, and over my flat belly, and down my hips. He coated me with the shimmering liquid, and then he fucked me like that, slippery and glistening, staining my sheets, ruining his pants.

Nobody had fucked me like that before.

Nobody’s fucked me like that since.

“Come on, Carla,” he says now, leading me from the nondescript alley to the parking lot in back. There is a pickup truck waiting. I know it’s his. He always drove motorcycles or pickups. They suited him. I look behind us, take one last look like Lot’s doomed wife. I could go back, wander through the alley, hit the shelves in the nearby Borders, buy the latest issue of Allure magazine, get an iced coffee in the café. I could go back to beige and safety and predictability. To reviews in Consumers’ . To my Mr Coffee machine – a six-time winner.

“What do you need, Carla? Tell Daddy what you need.”

Back in high school, I’d needed to be spanked, and he’d taken care of that need with the most exquisite care. He hadn’t laughed at me. He hadn’t refused my desires or been disgusted by them. He’d simply assumed the role, once I confessed. Once I’d finally got the nerve and spelled it out:

I’d needed him to bend me over his lap and lower my jeans. I’d needed his firm hand on my naked ass, punishing me. Or his belt, whispering seductively in the air before it connected with my pale skin. Then I’d needed him to cuff me to his bed and fuck me, to flip me over and fuck my ass until I cried. Until I screamed. Is that what he’d seen on the day we met? A yearning in my eyes that told him I was in need? How had he found me? How had he known?

Most importantly, I’d needed him to show me that I wasn’t a freak for having the cravings that I did, the white-hot yearnings that kept me up late at night, kept me away from the high-school boys and the safety of what I was supposed to do and who I was supposed to be, and he’d given me everything I needed.

Don Henley says: You can never look back.

“What do you need, now?” Mark murmurs, lips to my ear. I know suddenly what I don’t need. I don’t need to erase my history with a keystroke, when history is all that I’ve got.

My fingertips grip the handle of his vintage blue Ford. I slide the door open and climb inside.

You know, I never liked Don Henley much anyway.

The erotica writer’s husband bangs open the front door and stomps outside. Barefoot, with his fly half open, he’d interrupted his current activity when he heard barks and feline screeches.

His wife’s cat, puffed up to dramatic size, hisses from the safety of the yellow window box. Marigolds splash against bristling black fur. Fastening the buttons of his 501s, the sex author’s spouse scans the yard for the offending dog, but the husband’s eyes meet the neighbor’s, instead.

“Sorry!” The neighbor snaps a leash onto the collar of his now slash-nosed and cowering mutt. He notes the open-flied jeans of the erotica writer’s husband. “Oh hoh , your wife must be home. I bet you spend a lot of time with your pants down, being married to a porn writer and all. Doing research .”

“Uh-huh. Well. Gotta get back. She’s waiting.”

“Don’t let me keep you!”

The sex author’s spouse waves and carries the angry cat inside. The cat rakes his wrist in one final protest and leaps free. But instead of returning to the slick and sprawled wife his neighbor imagines, pen tucked behind her ear to take notes as she commands him to enact tawdry scenarios, he returns to the john to finish his interrupted piss.

His buddies and neighbours, jealous of a man married to a scribbler of lewd tales, imagine his rampant and orgiastic sex life. His wife is obsessed with sex manuals and adult websites, they think, not home decor catalogues like theirs.

In fact, as husband to a smutty authoress, he suspects that he’s getting less than they are. He doesn’t know whether to dissuade them from their faulty beliefs in order to gain their sympathy or to continue to bask in the glow of their misplaced admiration. After all, they think he’d been stud muffin enough to capture a lusty wench in matrimony, whereas they had landed frumpy fraus more interested in dozing than dildos. There were worse things a guy’s friends could assume. They’d given him unsolicited and unearned respect, rarely seen by a monogamous, suburban man with no aptitude for sports. How empty would their lives be if they no longer had his prowess to worship? Who was he to disappoint them by correcting their misapprehension?

As he contemplates the remote control or a nap, the erotica writer herself cracks open her study door. Her laser printer huffs in the background, expending more energy over sex than husband and wife have in the past month. “Everything OK?” she asks.

“Just Dufus Rufus chasing Frizbeehead again. She scratched me.” He holds out his clawed arm.

“Better sterilize that. Antiseptic’s in the bathroom cabinet. Oh, mind doing the dishes? I’ve got this deadline.”

“Sure, hon. Listen, can we talk, I—”

“Damn, now I’ve forgotten that perfect word. Shit, I spent the last half hour with a Thesaurus and now… stupid dog. Somebody needs to put him out of our misery.” She scoops the cat up and closes the door.

He wishes she would spend a half-hour with her finger in something other than a book.

That evening he suggests that they might spend some time together, since it’s the weekend, but she encourages him to go watch the game with his pals. “Go out and have some fun. Becky’s giving me her feedback on that story I’ve been working on.”

“The slaves in the ice castle one? In Greenland?”

“Not Greenland. A hidden fjord in Svalbard. No, I couldn’t figure out how the characters could stay warm enough to be turned on. I got cold just thinking about it. Now they’re on a boat. Only the Master goes ashore, but that gives the favourite slave time to secretly practise his violin. But of course someone hears him playing the Paganini Caprice No. 24 and finds him, and then he has to decide whether he wants to stay willingly.”

“Still working the gay market? I thought you’d had it with all that spunk.” He knows better than anyone that both the dentist and doctor have documented her strong gag reflex, which precludes certain bedroom activities.

“Pays better, and you said yourself the truck transmission’s about to go. Anyway, the slave’s going to have a guiche, so I need to do some research before Becky gets here.”

“I know how to make quiche.”

“A guiche. Not quiche. A piercing down there .”

“Ouch.”

“Then I’m hitting the hay early so I can get up to do my edits. Mind sleeping on the couch when you get home so you don’t wake me up?”

“How about we roll in the hay instead of hitting it?”

“Funny man. I married you for your sense of humour.”