Best Women's Erotica(61)
We lie there, facedown, filthy and grimy, hearts punching in our chests. Somewhere at one of the houses a radio plays loud country music. At another, a dog barks. Gus laughs softly and kisses the back of my ear. It sounds like a gunshot it’s so loud.
“Come on. Let’s get you home. Get you in the shower.” He tugs up his jeans, buckles his belt, helps me step into my damp clothes.
When he kisses me, I clutch at him—to thank him, to feel his warm skin under my fingers. Gus runs his fingers through the tangled train wreck of my hair and says, “We’ll come back. Day after tomorrow. I’m bumping you up to five and a half miles. Running, walking, sprints and whatever else I think of.”
My brain jumps into gear. Five and a half miles—that’s twenty-two laps. And at the end is…this. If I’m good. Twenty-two hard-core, balls-to-the-wall, whatever-he-says laps. I can do that.
ESPIONAGE
Rachel Kramer Bussel
You tuck your new pink and black coat, the one purchased earlier in the day just for this special evening, around your body, pull it tight like it’s cold out, except you’re indoors and the fire is roaring. You are cold, but it’s the kind of cold that can’t be heated by rubbing two sticks together or turning up the thermostat, the kind of cold that can only be vanquished once your heart catches up. Your heart is cautiously icy, watching and waiting; it isn’t safe to let it melt just yet.
Instead, you look—you could say spy, except you have an invitation, an elaborate listing of reasons this will be the party to end all parties, delivered right to your inbox. You’ve been promised bubble baths, servants, champagne, s’mores, drugs, debauchery. Those things intrigue you, sure, since you’re used to zoning out in front of the TV, quiet dinner parties, wholesome events like comedy shows and trivia nights, but you’d have shown up for gin rummy if it were held right here, in these rooms that hold a life that will never be yours, a life you’ve been given glimpses of but never truly peeked inside. Even better than any promise of party pampering, you’ve been granted access to this sacred space, this love shack you’ve up till now only imagined vividly. This is your chance to enter the inner sanctum, and you cling to it in the same way you hold your coat, and your heart—close. Still, despite the tacit permission, you feel like a spy, an Anaïs Nin emissary, as you walk through the rooms that make up their home, their urban house of love and lust and lasciviousness, a house you will never inhabit no matter how many times you fuck the master of it.
You’ve been invited here before, of course, when the lady of the manor was away; you don’t quite know where she spent the night, and it doesn’t really matter. Maybe she’s a bed hopper, too. That night the coveted marital bed was yours for the taking, for an evening of borrowed, perhaps stolen, pleasure. It was so tempting, except the man you love would only be yours on temporary loan. Plus, you like the other beds you’ve christened with him, the beds that became yours with the ease of a credit card, the swipe of a key; the beds that are almost communally owned, yet allow you to feel like they are yours for the borrowed time they’re allotted to you. You declined that chance to slip between his sheets, spending the night instead in a glamorous threesome with frosting and vodka, tonguing the one, bathing in the other, letting them take you away to something not quite an orgasm, not quite shameful enough to make you burn the way you need to, to come.
That burning, that fire that lights you up from the inside out, which turns pain into the most wicked of pleasure—he knows how to do that, the man of the house, the woman in the sheer black slip’s husband. He knows exactly how to hold the match between his fat, meaty fingers, to strike it in such a way that the blaze erupts in one part of your body and spreads instantly to the rest. He can do it with a word, a whisper, a text, a hand, an image; the truth is, he can do it even when he’s not doing anything at all. You only need conjure him in your mind and you’re enflamed, a mixed blessing of desire and curse. He’s told you he thinks about you when he puts on his belt, the one whose leather made you scream in Kentucky, whose buckle pressed against your throat in Montana, whose tip you kissed with sore, swollen lips in California. You’ve traveled so far to pretend he is yours, yet here, at ground zero, you realize just how mistaken you were; no matter how many states you undress in for him, she will always be there, wrapped around his ring finger, permanently embedded in his soul. On these trips, he tells you how he misses the scent of your vanilla perfume as you lie on those borrowed pillows; you in turn confess to miss the way he breathes deeply of your neck, like he’s getting high off of it, snorting a line of euphoria directly to his brain. That is your ground zero: the smell, taste and touch of each other’s body. Home has no place in your affair; instead it’s a base you can claim in any state you find yourselves together in.