Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories (8 page)

I choose easily. I don’t tell them my trick: I don’t consider who I want to fuck. I start with who I’d kill.

They’re disappointed in my answers, my speed. I didn’t give them the high, the little taste of pleasure that they’d hoped for.

The jug goes around, more cigarettes get lit and passed—each of mine tastes like whichever boy’s mouth it started in. As the fire starts to soften, the edges of their faces fall into shadows, their eyes darken. Patrick presses on one side, Connor’s never left the other. I swear I can feel his skin, even through his clothes. The seam of his jeans bites into my leg where the wind has pushed my skirt up.

“Let’s do real people,” Patrick says after a bit. He pushes, he cracks his knuckles under his rings, he licks the side of the jug while he watches me—he thinks this makes him the one, but he’s not. I know that as sure as I know the moon is starting its slow descent. It’s Connor, isn’t it, with his blue-blues and his silent, smoky mouth? He’s the one you want for me. For us.

“Let’s,” I say.

“Really?” Patrick’s lips curl at the edges, and I think how well you know me. How I would have done it with this dragon-ringed boy, but he’s not the one I would’ve wanted. You knew before I did.

“Really. Give me my choices.”

I lean back and rest the side of my hand against Connor’s thigh in the dark as though it is just another piece of wood. He doesn’t move, doesn’t make a sound, and I wonder if he knows that I’ve already chosen.

Patrick, of course, lays out the choices. “Me,” his grin is almost yellow against the flames of the fire. “Jeremy. Connor.”

Of course.

“Patrick, I’d fuck you,” I say. His grin widens, and he rushes for me. I let him. It’s true, I would fuck him in a second. He’d be aggressive in the way that well-behaved dom boys are. He’d work me up slow, make me wet before he turned hard. He’d let me lick his tattoos and bite the black dragon on his hip that he doesn’t know I know about. He’d hold me down without truly holding me down and use his hands, his shiny silver rings, at the curve of my ass. His cock—as long and lean as he is, as milky white—would slip into me, nearly fill me. I’d put my fingers to my clit because he wouldn’t be strong enough to stop me, and I’d come.

The boys lean forward, wait to hear. The fire licks my face, too, wanting answers. Only the moon and Connor stay quiet, hiding their faces against the dark.

“Jeremy, I’d have to marry you,” I say. I reach across the space and touch his knee with the hand that isn’t on Connor’s thigh. In the fire-light, his face doesn’t even fall. He is that sweet. The other boys pat his shoulder. No one wants to be the marrying type. It’s the kiss of death.

“We’d get to live together, though,” I say. “Think of that.” It almost makes him smile. If I could, I’d tell him how it would be. A big house, me waiting for him every evening. The kind of fucking that can only be called “making love.” Soft kisses and smooth sheets and his mouth, so wet and gentle, on my breasts, my belly, between my thighs. His hard pink cock that tastes of salted cream, the way I’d lick it for hours, making him come. And, later, how he’d slide inside me so slow that I’d tell him I loved him, and he’d believe it. And then he’d come with me wrapped around him, in that grateful, quiet way that nice boys do.

The fire jumps up and cracks the dark. Everyone looks at Connor.

“That just leaves you, man,” Patrick says to Connor. “Sorry, buddy, that’s harsh.”

Connor flicks his lighter, inhales smoke from the sky. Oh, the way he turns to me. Fucking blue-blues showing nothing and everything. The slow exhale. The slow smile, tooth by tooth.

“I’ll live,” he says, flicking his ash, and my skin comes alive, every inch, every cell, lighting up to burn against the cold.

In the dark, Connor grabs my wrist, hard, and moves my hand to press it down on his cock. The hard pulse of it throbs against my palm. Where I thought there was no room between us before, now there truly is none. His body presses the air from my lungs, makes me gasp. The cigarette in his mouth flares red, a hot contrast to the blue of his eyes.

I know this is how it will be: Soon, the moon above us will start to lay her body down in the bed of the sky. The fire will suck the last of its fuel and begin to die, to return to the cold dark that it came from. The boys will drink and smoke and drift away, the game over, on to something more promising, something they think still carries its dark secrets in a locked box.

But it will be Connor who gets my secret—our secret—won’t it? Connor will pull me to the darkest corner of this place, the one where firelight and cigarette eyes cannot see. He’ll throw me on the ground and push up my flimsy summer dress. He’ll push my thighs open. I know what his cock looks like—the red pulse beat of it that I felt in my palm, the blood that will thump beneath its skin. I will beg to taste it, to wrap my lips and tongue around it, but he won’t let me.

Instead, he’ll fuck me. He will not ask. He will not get me wet and he will not be nice. He will take me and bend me and break me and tear me. But I won’t scream.

As he begins to come, he will lift his head. He will tear the thin choker from his neck and bare his beating pulse. I will lift my mouth to that dark, quick throb, and he will give me what I want. What you want. What he wants.

THE LEGACY

Donna George Storey

D
ON CHOSE THE PERFECT MOMENT
to tell us about the cunt book. The second pitcher of sangria was empty. So were the dinner plates, except for a few charred pieces of barbecued lake fish and slicks of vinaigrette shimmering in the light of the citronella candles.

We certainly needed a nudge to keep the fantasy going: that we’d invited Meg and Trevor over for their amusing rich kid ennui, not because they were the only other people with a summer cottage on this end of the lake. That I was here as lady of the manor instead of the semisecret girlfriend of my nearly divorced boss.

Don even gave his story a title of sorts. “Let me tell you,” he said, “about Uncle Jacques’ legacy.”

Don called him “Uncle Jacques,” but he was really his father’s childhood friend, a second-generation Frenchman with Cardinal Richelieu’s nose and pockets full of caramels for Don and his brothers. It was always an event when he came to dinner. Don’s mother worked in the kitchen for hours making odd foreign dishes, beef wrapped in pastry or stews that made the boys tipsy from the vapors alone. Uncle Jacques was what they used to call a confirmed bachelor—though he wasn’t gay, Don was very sure of that. His mother was always trying to fix him up with her unmarried friends: prim maiden ladies and pretty widows. Around Uncle Jacques they giggled and touched their hair. But his mother’s hopes always came to naught.

When Don went to Paris his junior year of college, his parents insisted he visit Uncle Jacques in the Languedoc, where he’d retired to his ancestral village. Don went for the free meal and stayed on for half a bottle of Sauternes—a golden liquid so sweet it made his mouth ache. Uncle Jacques was surprisingly easy to talk to for an old man. He admired Don’s camera, a Nikon F2, and confessed his own interest in the art of photography. Don spouted some nonsense from an art course about the pursuit of ideal form and the challenge of conveying depth— and suddenly, there in his hands was a photo album, the old-fashioned kind with thick black pages and a cord at the binding. He thought at first he might be required to
ooh
and
ahh
over European landmarks, or worse yet, pictures of Uncle Jacques and his father as boys. But then he opened the book to the first page. What he saw took his breath away.

“What was it?” Meg was the first to bite.

“Art photos,” Don replied with unusual delicacy.

Trevor twisted his lips into an amiable prep school sneer. “He means pictures of naked women.”

“Or parts of them,” Don corrected. “In extreme close-up. I wouldn’t have guessed what it was at first, except for the fingers, holding the outer lips wide.”

“It was a book of cunt pictures?” The sneer stretched into a cartoon leer.

“Yes. On one page,” Don said. “On the facing page was a formal portrait of a lady fully clothed. The kind you might see displayed on any mantelpiece. I’d guess from the hairstyles that some were from the forties and fifties. But others were recent, too. Girls my age.”

“How decadent,” Meg cooed. “Do you think he screwed them all?”

“I wondered that myself, but didn’t have the nerve to ask. He did tell me that since he had no son of his own, he wanted to pass the book on to me one day if I thought I might have use for it.”

“Do you have it now?” Trevor’s question had a hopeful lilt.

“Unfortunately not. Uncle Jacques must be over eighty, but he said in his last Christmas card he’s feeling quite fit.”

“I don’t know if it was wise of him to make the offer,” Trevor said. “Now he’s got someone eager for him to die.”

“Who? You?” Meg asked with a grin.

I asked Don if he recognized any of the faces. One of those maiden ladies or pretty widows?

“Hell, maybe one of them was your mother,” Trevor laughed.

Don gave him an indulgent smile. “That I would have noticed. Frankly, I didn’t pay much attention to the faces. What struck me was how different the women … “

Meg’s Adirondack chair creaked. I saw Trevor’s hand settle over her thigh.

“How different they looked
down there
,” Don continued. “Far more variety than you find on lips on a face. One was nearly fleshless, a slit peeking from a thicket of curls. The next was plump and meaty, almost prehensile. And then a baroque extravaganza, folded and draped like swirls of rich cloth.” He leaned back in the lounge chair and closed his eyes. “It’s been thirty years, but I can still see those photographs.”

We all gazed into the darkness as if we could see it, too—a woman’s legs dropped open like butterfly wings and the secret, scarlet fruit within, suspended before our eyes in the summer night.

* * *

What was it that made me doubt him? The way he touched me between my legs as soon as we got into bed, murmuring satisfaction when he found me wet? Or—and this occurred to me as he cupped my breast and stroked the nipple with his thumb—was it the way that cunt book story put him so firmly back in charge, throwing Trevor off his game, making Meg squirm around on her little heart-shaped ass? He already knew my weakness for stories of his young, impressionable days—but surely he could do better than a libertine uncle who was, of all things, French?

I turned to face him. “Did your uncle really have a book like that?”

Without his glasses Don’s eyes looked smaller, the tender skin mapped with lines. He smiled.

“Do you really have an Uncle Jacques?”

His smile broadened. “Would I lie to you?”

He saved me from the answer with a kiss. In the year we’d been seeing each other, I’d become used to his evasions, about his wife, about his feelings for me. The price for sleeping with a man who was almost old enough to be my father. Or my uncle.

If the story was real, there was so much I wanted to know. Did he get hard in front of the old man? Did he masturbate later that night in the guest bedroom, vintage vulvas fluttering through his head? Which picture did he see first when he took his cock in his hand? Or when he came, biting back his groans so Uncle Jacques wouldn’t hear?

But he’d never tell me these things. I knew that. Don’s tongue was too clever, dancing lazily, darting in and out, feeding me a taste of the pleasures to come. Feeding me pictures, too, rising from the growing heat in my belly. Of a lady, lips glossed and softly parted, gazing heaven-ward as they always seemed to do in pictures back then. But down below she was hitching up her skirt, spreading her legs, half-teasing, half-shamed, to show her secret to that cool glass eye. She wanted it, even back then, when proper ladies didn’t do such things. Or didn’t tell. And I wanted it, too. I wanted it to be real.

I pulled away and lay back on the pillow. “Take my picture.”

Don looked at me blankly.

“Take my picture. Down there. Will you do it?”

In the dim light it was hard to read the play of expression on his face. But then he said: “Yes. I’d love to.”

* * *

The next morning we drove into town for the necessary supplies. The general store had only one roll of black-and-white film, verging on expiration. Don fretted that he needed an umbrella reflector to get the lighting right—impossible to find in that outpost of civilization— though we did score a remnant of black velvet, dusty, but on sale at half price.

It seemed to take him forever to place the chaise lounge at the right angle to the window and drape the velvet properly, set up the tripod and take a light meter reading, while I waited in my beach robe rubbing my feet to keep them warm.

When he was finally ready, he gestured for me to undress and lie down. I shifted around to show off my best angles until I remembered it didn’t matter where I placed my arms or if my breasts looked perky. I glanced down at my triangle of pubic hair, trimmed back for summer. Suddenly it embarrassed me, at once too lush and somehow inadequate. Through the light brown curls I could see the indentation, like a thumbprint, where the groove began.