Best of Best Women's Erotica (11 page)

I pinched my clit between my thumb and forefinger, then drew it away from my body and tickled the stretched skin with dancing fingers. Swirling circles dipped into my growing dampness, spread across my inflamed skin. I fueled the fire as I willed myself to feel him inside me. Suspended above me, he was inside her—but our eyes joined again in the mirror and I realized that she was just a proxy. He was making love to me through her.

“Harder,” I mouthed. My body rose from the mattress, my neck angled and exposed like a virgin in a vampire movie. I pinched my nipples. Shivers shot between my legs. “Harder,” I silently demanded.

He pulled her ankles to his neck. Recklessly, I braced a leg against the wall and openly humped my fingers. My ring finger pressed against my anus while the index finger skated through my brine and stroked my clit. My scent rose and mingled with theirs. The combined aroma hung heavy as night jasmine in the air.

Grit lifted his head and pulled in my perfume, he looked like he was tasting it on the back of his tongue like a wine connoisseur testing for hints of raspberry or oak in a cabernet. He pounded into her; I pounded into myself. Our eyes locked; Janine's eyes stayed closed. She started making little noises that sounded phony, noises she didn't really mean, like a telephone
actress. I bit the inside of my cheek to stop growls from escaping my throat. Grit threw his head back. My muscles clenched. Wave after wave rolled through my pussy. I gushed hot release onto my fingers. He moaned and spurted into her.

We all collapsed. Two of us exhaled contentment. After a minute, she climbed off the bed and went to the shower. We waited in silence for a few minutes. My pussy throbbed lush joy, thankful that I'd brought her pleasure again.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed. My head was swimming. Blood refused to return to my brain—it pumped around my legs and clit, looking for one last tremor of orgasm to surf.

I could see him in the mirror, lying on his side, his cock slowly shrinking. He caught me admiring the package and flashed a smile. Then he went through his cigarette lighting ritual again, complete with the eye-lock on me.

I stood carefully and rested my elbows on the frame of the bed. Our heads were at the same height. My lips could've easily reached out and caressed his. I yanked the cigarette from his mouth and took a long toke on it. “Do her doggie next time.” I said. “I want to see her tits shake while your balls slap her clit.”

“Damn, you've got a dirty mouth for a girl.” He shook his head in admiration.

“Not dirty,” I told him. “Just a little gritty.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HE ASKS IF I'VE BEEN TIED UP BEFORE. I TELL him yes, and he wants to know for how long. Tell me about it, he says. I feel shy; I don't want to go into details. We're sitting in Vesuvio's at four in the afternoon, drinking gin and tonics. He has his hand on my thigh. I'm madly in love with him—we've known each other three weeks. I'm not ambivalent like I usually am, everything about him seems perfect: his close-cut black hair, the way he puts his tongue down my throat when he kisses me, his blunt, square hands. He's the sexiest man I've ever been with. It scares me that I can feel so happy. None of our friends think it will last.

I want to tie you up, he says. I want to do things with you that you've never done with anyone.

A man at the bar is doing card tricks. He holds up the queen of diamonds and shows it to a pale, pretty girl in a black leather minidress, black fishnet tights, and heavy black combat boots. The girl looks bored. She glances over at us and sees me watching her. She takes a card from the magician's deck, looks at it, and sticks it back in.

We get drunk sitting in Vesuvio's. At seven o'clock we're still there, kissing passionately, his hand under my T-shirt squeezing my breast. No one pays any attention to us. The magician is still there, too, talking to another woman. He holds up the queen of hearts. Finally we get hungry and walk around the corner to Brandy Ho's and eat Kung Pao chicken and Szechuan shrimp, sitting next to each other in the red leather booth. I feel like I'm in an alternate universe. Everything looks familiar but it's different than before. The sexual intoxication is overwhelming, I can't function in the real world: I haven't called my friends, paid my bills, read a newspaper since all this started. I don't want it ever to end. I feel vulnerable and it's terrifying; I can't help being in love with him, even if he leaves me or treats me like shit I can't hold back the way I usually do, I have to give him everything. Then I won't know who I am anymore.

With his glasses on he looks like a different person: shy, slightly studious, younger. It's as if he's in disguise; I don't recognize him as the same person I fuck. I like him in his glasses, like the idea that there are things about him no one could ever guess from the way he looks. He takes his glasses off, sets them on my kitchen table.

Take off your clothes and stand against the wall, he says.

I peel off my T-shirt, drop my skirt and underwear, and lean against the wall, facing him. He tells me to put my arms above my head. We've just finished dinner. He pours himself more
wine and tips his chair back, drinking the wine, watching me.

Don't move, he says. He leaves the kitchen. I hear him pissing in the bathroom. I'm excited, scared, I don't know what's going to happen next. I close my eyes, listen to the stream of piss hitting the water in the bowl. My neighbor in the next apartment starts playing the clarinet. She's just learning so it's all honks and squeaks. The walls are thin, I'm worried someone will hear us, I don't want anyone to hear us. I don't want anyone to know what we do together, what he does to me.

He comes back to the kitchen, zipping his pants. He takes an apple from the bowl of fruit on the table.

Open your mouth.

He shoves the apple against my mouth; my teeth sink into it. I'm gagged. He's not gagging me. I can drop the apple any time. I want him to dominate me, use me; I want to be his slave. I have to understand submission, why it's so erotic for me; I can't reconcile it with the rest of my life. I've never let myself physically explore how I feel because intellectually I can't accept it. Women are shit, they're only here for men's pleasure, men control everything.

My beautiful slut, he says. Look how wet you are. He puts his middle finger inside me, then in his mouth. He unbuckles his belt and takes it off in one smooth motion.

One Saturday night when we're fucking the condom breaks. I know I'm ovulating, I don't want to get pregnant. He calls a sex information hotline and asks what we can do, and they tell him there's an abortion pill I can take; I should call a doctor to prescribe it.

I call the advice line at Kaiser and get put on hold. I wait forty-five minutes, then a voice comes on the line and says there's one more call ahead of me. I wait ten more minutes. The woman on
the other end tells me she can't help me, I need to talk to Doctor X. I ask her to connect me. She connects me to the wrong extension ; the people there tell me to call a different number. I hang up, dial the main hospital, and ask for Doctor X.

He's not on tonight.

I explain what's happening. The woman on the other end insists that Doctor X isn't there, and no one else can prescribe the pill. Finally someone else gets on the phone and tells me that Doctor X is being paged. I'm put on hold again. A Muzak version of “We've Only Just Begun” by the Carpenters plays, followed by the Beatles' “Here, There, and Everywhere.” Twenty minutes later another person gets on the line.

Can I help you?

I think I'm being helped. I don't know. I've been on the phone for an hour and a half, I'm trying to reach Doctor X.

I want to scream at the person on the phone but she is very nice, it's not her fault, there's nobody to blame, I don't want to scream at her. I don't want to have a baby. I'm thirty years old, I work at a café and never have enough money for art materials. My mother was a painter, she stopped after she had me. I can't be a painter if I have a baby. He doesn't want a baby either. Not this way, he says. Not by accident.

Please hold, the nice person says. I listen to a few bars of “My Cherie Amour.” A minute later Doctor X gets on the line.

You have to come to the Emergency Room to pick it up, he says.

Can't you just call it in to a drugstore?

We have to see you, he says. There are certain risks involved.

He says that if the pills don't work and the fetus is female it could be turned into a boy by the hormones. Masculinized, he
says. The fetus might be masculinized and if you decide to have the baby there could be problems.

I don't want to have the baby, I say. I want the pills. If they don't work I'll have an abortion, but I've had three abortions already and that's why I want the pills. Please, I say. Can't you call it in?

You have to come to the Emergency Room, he repeats, sounding annoyed. We have to have a record that we've seen you.

I hang up. It's ten P.M., we haven't had any dinner. He puts his arms around me.

He says, I hate to see you go through this.

I hate doctors, I say. I hate Western medicine. I hate Kaiser, you never see the same doctor twice. Nobody knows you or gives a shit about you, you're a name on a chart. Why can't they just give me the pills?

Let's go eat first, he says. I'll take you some place nice, we'll forget about this bullshit. The Emergency Room will be open all night.

He takes me to North Beach. We drink a lot of wine. I start to feel better, now it's an adventure we're having together instead of a lousy experience. We joke about it, he puts his hand over mine on the red-and-white checkered tablecloth. I've never been so in love with anyone. I tell him I don't think I want any children.

I'll get sterilized, I say. I'm no good at birth control, I always blow it one time and get pregnant from that one time. I'll make an appointment and get my tube tied. I only have one tube and ovary because I had an infection once and had to have an operation. A gynecologist told me once that if I ever got sterilized it might be major surgery, because of the scar tissue from the other operation.

I'll get a vasectomy, he says. It's easier, it's just an office procedure.

What if we break up and you want to have a baby with someone else? As I say this the thought of it makes me jealous and depressed and I'm sure it will happen.

I can go to a sperm bank, then. Besides we're not going to break up. And you might change your mind. Five years from now we might want a baby and we could have one.

We get to the Emergency Room a little before midnight. We sit in the waiting room, and after half an hour a nurse leads me through a curtain and takes my blood pressure.

I'm only here to pick up a prescription, I tell her.

She ignores me, fastens a yellow plastic ID bracelet with my name and policy number around my wrist. She leads me to an examining room where there's a metal table with stirrups, and puts a blue plastic gown on the table.

Wait here, she says.

I sit down on the only chair. After forty-five minutes a Chinese medical student comes in.

I need to examine you, he says.

No, you don't. I'm not sick, I just need a prescription.

I'm supposed to examine you.

I think of him looking at me, my legs spread apart, my heels in the cold stirrups; I don't want him to look at me. I start crying and saying I just want the pills, there's nothing wrong with me I don't want a baby you don't need to examine me, please just give me the pills so I can go home.

He writes something down on his chart, then walks out, muttering something I can't hear. A minute later the nurse says I can go back to the waiting room.

A man with long blond hair is passed out in one of the chairs.
Three well-dressed black people are sitting together. The man is doubled over, holding his side, and the two women are on either side of him talking to him and rubbing his shoulders. There's a Toyota commercial on the TV, then an episode of
Miami Vice.
The nurse comes out after twenty minutes and tells me that Kaiser's pharmacy doesn't have any more of the pills; there might be some at Mount Zion, she has to call and then send someone there to pick them up.

I lean my head on his shoulder; he strokes my hair. The blond man wakes up and looks around the room. Fuck this shit, he says. He gets up and walks out.

At three A.M. the nurse calls me in behind the curtain and hands me a paper cup of water and another paper cup with three tiny white pills in it. She gives me three more to take in twelve hours.

When we leave, the black people are still sitting there.

I have an almost pathological need for other people's approval. If someone criticizes me I fall apart, I feel useless, stupid, insignificant. When I confess this to him he says I need to learn not to internalize other people's negativity. I experience this as subtle criticism and move to the edge of the bed, away from him.

I used to sleep with men so that they would like me. I always had a lot of lovers. Now I only fuck him; he excites me more than anyone. When I masturbate I don't think about strangers fucking me, the way I used to; I think about him looping a rope through a ring screwed into the top of the doorframe, slapping my breasts and cunt. I think about the way he growls low in his throat, the violence of his orgasms. I masturbate imagining he is watching me, and come saying his name over and over. My life before I knew him seems impoverished, a desert. I'm
afraid of losing him; he has to keep reassuring me that he loves me and wants me. At parties I'm jealous if he talks with other women. I'm convinced they're more attractive, more desirable than I am.