The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Lucy Taylor (10 page)

“Baubo?” Mira repeated, unfamiliar with the name.

A faint trace of slyness leaked into the first speaker’s large and bovine eyes, the closest thing to an expression of amusement that Mira had seen since coming to the island.

Mira wanted to question the women further, but the goats were straying, the girls obviously impatient to be on their way. Mira thanked them, hoping she had understood correctly, and pedaled on.

A few miles farther on, she walked her decrepit bike (no less ancient, however, than her legs were beginning to feel) up a steep hill topped by stands of poplars. Wind-flogged for their entire lives, the trees were permanently bent before their batterer, slanting out of the loose and rocky soil like broken bones set by a sadist, all weird twists and angles.

But for the grotesquely warped trees, the hilltop appeared as forlorn and barren as the rest of Kirinos, abandoned even by the wind today, but for a sluggish breeze.

And Baubo’s temple? If it existed at all (and Mira was beginning to imagine that she’d been sent on a wild-goose chase reserved for the most gullible of tourists – a Greek snipe hunt, as it were), it must be on still higher ground, well beyond the capacity of both her bike and calf muscles.

Still, the idea of coming back from her day’s excursion with not even a small discovery or adventure to recount was incentive enough for Mira to make one final assault on the hilltop. Leaning her bike against a tree, she forced herself on foot up a rock-strewn incline that offered, to mountain goats perhaps, a facsimile of a path.

She reached the top panting, legs atremble.

And halted, disappointment smiting her like a blow across the cheek.

The temple, if that was what it once had been, was now a crumbled relic, defiled by weeds and shat upon by birds. Small lizards sunned themselves on its chipped stones and scurried into shaded cracks at Mira’s approach. Only two half-columns yet remained – the rest were tumbled over, sections scattered here and there in what looked, to Mira, like the vertebrae of some long-dead dinosaur, huge cousin perhaps to the toy-sized ones now baking on the stones. The decay and desolation of the place was both disturbing and, somehow also, morbidly alluring. Mira had seen fallen temples before, of course, but either in museums, their bleached stones carefully divided up and labeled, or cordoned off and renovated for display, tramped across by infestations of noisy, camera-snapping tourists.

This was something else. This ruin was deserted, empty, private as a tomb. A tumbled wreck, it well might be, but for the moment, it apparently belonged entirely to Mira. And if the temple was less than she had hoped for, the view from her high perch was stunning, the first vista Mira had found worth setting eyes on. From this vantage point, the sea was so bright it seared spangles on her retinas, each wave composed of a treasure trove of individual gems – turquoise, topaz, and emeralds in a seething jewel box of light.

Clambering over a row of fallen stones, Mira unhooked her daypack and sank down onto the ground. She spread her lunch out around her – a canteen of ice water, now tepid slush, granola bars purchased in Athens, grapes and pears from the kiosk outside the hotel.

A breeze nipped and flitted at the damp hair on the back of her neck. She sank her teeth into a pear, its nectar overflowing her lips and dribbling down her chin, and thought of C.J. back at the taverna, probably chatting up Greek girls and maybe boys as well, if she’d imbibed enough retsina.

But maybe
, Mira thought,
C.J. had the right idea. At least she’s never lonely, isn’t eating her lunch right now at the bitter end of nowhere without even goats for company
.

The breeze picked up a bit, moaning plaintively through stunted tree limbs.

It died off, but the moaning didn’t. The sound continued unabated and took on, in fact, a distinctly human timbre.

Mira froze, unsure of what to do. To pursue the sound might invite involvement in some drama in which Mira, as a foreigner and tourist, could ill afford to embroil herself. Neither was it clear to her if the sounds were fathered by great pain or by pleasure. If the former, then decency demanded she investigate. There could be a hiker hurt, a young child lost, even an injured animal, although more and more, Mira doubted that the noise could have any except human origin.

She crept forward as quietly as her bulk allowed, scuttling the last yard or two on hands and knees, and peered between some scrubby bushes.

At first glance, she saw but didn’t really
see
, so improbable was the spectacle before her that she assumed her vision must be playing tricks, creating the illusion that a trio of the bleached and fallen stones were now a woman’s round thighs and ivory belly. No hallucination this, however, Mira realized; the flush and jiggle of abundant flesh was all too real.

A woman, endowed with Junoesque proportions, lay spread out upon the rough ground, Her knees were bent, thigh’s widely V’d. With three fingers of her right hand, she rhythmically fucked herself, while with the left she parted the pink creases of her labia, plucking at the engorged clitoris with her thumb. Though she lay in shadow, sunlight broke through in places, dappling her flesh with spots and splashes the color of buttered Brie. With each thrust of her fingers, the woman moaned and arched her back, black tresses tumbling over the earth like so many writhing serpents. Sweat rolled off her mounded breasts and belly, shimmered on her nipple tips like opals.

Mira knew she had no business witnessing this display and yet she couldn’t bring herself to look away. She gazed on, rapt, and was still staring, fingers of one hand lightly touching her own bosom, tweaking at a nipple, when the woman’s eyes suddenly flashed open and she looked directly at the spot where Mira crouched.

Her eyes held the force of twin beacons. Mira cringed before their power, determined to keep silent, but the very underbrush was bent upon betraying her. A twig snapped beneath her shifting weight; a stone, dislodged by her heel, went skittering.

“Who’s there?” the woman called out in Greek.

Mira’s head thundered with blood.

“I’m sorry,” she blurted out. “I’m going.”

“Wait.”

Mira halted, bracing herself for a lambasting the individual words of which she might not comprehend, but whose meaning would be all too clear as well as justified.

The woman, who’d made no attempt to cover herself and whose garments, Mira noted, were nowhere in view, stood up and approached her. And kept approaching, past that invisible boundary which varies with each culture, but whose limits with regard to personal space are normally respected.

“
Pedhi mou,” my girl
, whispered the woman and put her mouth to Mira’s.

Her kiss was hot and salty, tasting of sweat and sex and female juices. It was, thought Mira, like giving head to a woman in the final stages of arousal, the pussy dripping with desire, the vulval lips engorged and oozing sex.

This is madness
, she thought, and yet her lips were parting to allow access to her mouth and she was unresistant when the woman began to unbutton and peel off her blouse and shorts, her sweat-drenched undergarments. Mira’s large breasts were squashed against a bosom far more abundant that her own. Her head spun with the folly of her own lust, with a passion so unnatural to her character that she felt at once transformed and yet possessed, as though surely something outside herself inspired this abandon.

The woman’s body, lush and hot, bumped and rutted against Mira’s. Fingers probed and parted her, a tongue both skilled and playful teased her lips and lashes, then ducked down to drink from the tiny cup of sweat that was her navel.

And all the while the woman made noises – sucking, gobbling, slurping, laughing – as their bodies thumped and squeaked together in a carnal melody. The woman guided Mira to the ground onto a bed made of her discarded clothing. Her avid lips sought out the mouth between Mira’s parted legs, where she drank of sweat and cunt juice. Mira thrashed and cried out as an orgasm shuddered through her, contractions like a birth of pleasure throbbing all the way into her womb. The woman’s tongue explored new crevices and creases. More climaxes were wrung from her, the last of these so violent that Mira locked her thighs together and cried out for a respite.

Her lover, however, suffered no such loss of appetite. Leaving Mira on the ground, she pranced and strutted like an obscene jester, tweaking brown nipples the size of coffee saucers, strumming at her clitoris with the fast and fluid motions of a virtuoso guitarist. Muttering some words that Mira didn’t understand, she squatted over the rough earth, reached down and spread herself wide in a parody of childbirth. Astonished, Mira watched this spectacle, unsure if this outrageous lewdness was prelude to some new bout of lovemaking. Her nether lips still throbbed and tingled from the force of her last orgasm. She felt undone, sapped senseless by the heat and the intensity of sex. She had neither the strength nor will to do anything but recline and watch the dance.

Which turned suddenly, before Mira’s bewitched gaze, into a monstrous birthing. The woman spread her thick thighs wide, parting vaginal lips that hung down more than an inch below the black thatch of pubic hair. She released a gust of laughter that stirred the still air and raised the hair on Mira’s arms with it’s dark mirth.

Something slick and shiny glistened wetly at the lips of her vagina. The thing pulsed there for an instant, like the damp head of a grotesquely misshapen child, then fell to the rough ground, where it uncoiled powerful hind legs and leaped away.

Mira gaped, unable to comprehend what she had seen, but the miracle was only just commencing. The woman was giving birth to toads, hordes of the wet and mottled creatures dropping from her cunt, a slithering rain of amphibian life upon the stones. Born full grown, they leaped in all directions, a sea of bright, bulging eyes and livid mouths.

Mira gasped and clutched both hands across her breasts, although they offered scant protection against the unnatural hordes that were still plopping, like dollops of green dung, from the woman’s cunt.

A toad leaped at Mira’s face and landed in her hair. Another bounced across her belly, a third’s passing marked her breast with smears of dirt from its webbed hind feet.

Mira screamed and writhed, dislodging the toads on her legs and head only to find three more arranged like horrid tumors upon her breasts and belly. The largest of these, endowed with shining amber eyes, seized the soft flesh below Mira’s navel and delivered a painful bite. Blood slicked the toad’s wide mouth, and bile rose up in Mira’s throat. The world turned. She tried to rise but found her limbs were powerless, her vision growing inky at the edges.

Through a gauze of sick terror, she could still see the horrid birthing taking place. As she passed out, her ears rang with the woman’s mad laughter that almost – but not completely – drowned out a sound far worse, the soft, throaty glugging of the toads.

“You shouldn’t have gone out in the heat today,” C.J. said, nibbling at a piece of fried octopus. “You look like hell.”

“I’m all right,” said Mira, cutting into the leg of lamb the waiter had just set before her. “Just hungry.”

Hungry and – if truth be known – bizarrely energized. Her belly throbbed, but not with pain. More like concentric circles of appetite and energy radiating out from the wound on her stomach. The toad appeared to have nipped out a tiny chunk of flesh. The bleeding had been copious on her bike ride back to town. Mira had been forced to hurry back to the hotel, where she had shed her filthy clothing and stuffed it deep inside her duffle bag.

Fortunately, other than remarking on Mira’s appearance, C.J. had shown little curiosity about her day. Now she added some more water to her glass of ouzo and sipped the milky liquid with that look of studied smugness that Mira had come to recognize as presaging some admission aimed at provoking jealousy.

“I met someone today. His name’s Stavros. He grew up here, but he worked in his cousin’s restaurant in New York for a couple of years, so he speaks really good English.”

Mira shrugged and forked a chunk of meat into her mouth. “So did you fuck him yet?”

C.J. recoiled. “No, of course not. I’m with you, aren’t I?”

“I don’t know. Are you?”

“Jesus, we’re in a pissy mood tonight.”

“So what’s the point of telling me about some guy you met? To make me jealous, right? To remind me how fucking desirable you are to each and every gender. Well, fuck him if you want to. Suck his dick until it falls off. I don’t care.”

“God, Mira, what’s got into you? I only said . . .”

“This looks so good,” said Mira, reaching over with her fork to poke at C.J.’s food. She chose the longest piece of octopus, a tentacle pale and tender as the flesh of an armpit, studded with small, rose-colored suckers.

C.J., misunderstanding her intention, said, “I thought you didn’t like octopus. You said it was disgusting.”

“I didn’t say I was going to eat it.” Mira plucked the tentacle from the fork and held it between her fingers. “Look here.”

She glanced to either side of her. Only a few of the tables in the taverna were filled and these by locals whose faces, in most cases, were either directed at their plates or wreathed in a fog of cigarette smoke. Slowly, savoring C.J.’s agitation, she undid the top three buttons of her blouse, revealing ample cleavage unfettered by a bra.

“I wonder if your friend Stavros would like to do this with his tongue?” She slid the octopus between her freckled breasts. Up and down, down and up, leaving a sheen of grease against the pale skin.

“Jesus, Mira, stop it.”

“But then your tits are smaller than mine, so he might rather tonguefuck you other places.”

She slid sideways in her chair, pulled her cotton skirt up to mid-thigh. She wore no underpants, and her cunt was moist and ready. On the first push, the tentacle got away from her and slid so far inside, she almost lost it. Mira threw back her head and howled with laughter at the thought of walking around being fucked with an octopus dildo inside her, but then her vaginal muscles clenched and pushed the slippery stob back out. It slithered into her fingers.