The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Lucy Taylor (20 page)

I
N HER DREAM
, the witches bend over her cradle singing a lullaby. The words change, but the meaning is always the same: men are evil and lust-crazed. Fantasies of brute power lurk behind their avuncular smiles. Women exist to be demeaned and defiled and destroyed – the phallus is the sword that a woman falls on when she decides to kill herself.

We tell you about these terrible things only to protect you
, coo the witches.
Only because we love you and wish you to come to no harm
.

In another land, the witches might have spread her legs and carved away her clitoris and labia. These hags do their mischief with loving lies and lewd caresses.

But you must never want these men
, they croon as they gaze at her – so young and promising, her whole life spread out before her – with eyes made dead by jealousy.
You must never want to be the object of their lust
.

No good girl ever wants this
.
And so is laid the curse.

There are good men in the city where she grows up, goes to school, and studies painting. Kind and generous, nurturing men. She meets them/likes them/goes to movies and to dinner with them, but she cannot recognize them as potential mates. For it is not these men that make her moist and swollen as she flies toward them like a heat-seeking missile. These men don’t give her nightmares from which she wakes up wet. They don’t make her heart brake to a skidding stop and cause her blood to whip and flutter like it’s full of tiny electric eels.

It’s the men the witches told her she must never want that make her feel like that.

She doesn’t realize this is what she’s looking for until she finds him.

She meets him at a meeting for people like herself who suffer from addiction problems. She never expected to find
this
kind of man at such a meeting. For aren’t these men in recovery? Isn’t theirs an enlightened masculinity, strong yet sensitive to women’s needs? The kind of men that make good friends, but never lovers? She doesn’t even permit herself to think of sex when she sits in the meeting rooms – she thinks that would be wrong. She crosses her legs and neuters herself and assumes everyone else does the same.

But from the first words they exchange, there is an uncanny link between them, the kind of instant empathy that, if they were into New Age beliefs, might lead them to conclude they’d shared a previous lifetime. Their eyes lock with a click like handcuffs closing. No bombsquad could defuse such incendiary chemistry. Right away they guess each other’s secret song. For a band of witches presided at his cribside, too, only their lullaby was different and their curse was for not only him, but for his future mate:
women want only one thing – to be defiled, debased, destroyed. A woman’s submissiveness is the yardstick by which a man measures his phallus
.

But you must never want to do such things, they sang as they caressed his baby penis.
Good boys don’t
.

And you must never want this.

And so it is lust at first glance, rivetting and irrevocable and, after a few exchanges, he follows her out to her car.

Eyes her up and down as if she’s something shiny in a gemstore window and he’s about to smash the glass to get to her.

“Do you have any clothes you wouldn’t mind having destroyed?”

She meets his black ice gaze. “Why?”

“Because I want to rip them off you.”

She smiles and shivers, slides into her car.

But the game’s begun. The distant noise she hears is the sound of witches howling.

A day or two later, their enactment of the curse is well under way. She sprawls in his bed, limbs akimbo, her brain on hold as she gazes at this source of her enchantment. He is hirsute and sinewy, virile and veined, she can barely get all of him down her throat. When she thinks of having him inside her, her pussy grips and pulses like the mouth of a child that hasn’t been fed.

“This doesn’t feel like a fling,” he says. “I’ve never wanted anyone so much. I think I’m falling in love with you.”

She nods and murmurs that she feels the same, although since meeting him, the night terrors from her childhood have come back. She’s seen him dip his cock in poison before he puts it in her mouth.

He pulls her to him, folds her flesh against him like a silky garment. He closes his fist in her hair.

“I’m not letting you go. Understand? I’m never letting you go.”

Her body’s reaction to this mix of menace and endearment is so intense that it temporarily obliterates the power of thought. Her inner muscles start to clench and unclench; the motion travels to the muscles in her belly, which start to undulate. It’s like giving birth in reverse – she wants to pull him in, possess him as utterly, as wantonly as he now possesses her.

He hovers at her entrance, then plunges in and halts. Like one well-studied in the tantric arts, he stays inside her, hard and motionless.

“Do you line your pussy with silk?”

She does a rippling belly dance upon her back. It’s getting hard to know where his skin ends and hers begins. Her brain cooks with heat and pheromones.

“Did you mean it? About never letting me go?”

He doesn’t answer, but starts to thrust. What begins as a languid glide accelerates into the stomping/pounding/piledriving frenzy of a mosh pit. Her mind glazes over, but her body was never so alive as she arches up to meet the blows delivered by his hips.

She has her answer.

If their nights are dedicated to sensuality, their mornings are monotonously mundane. She has coffee with him in the living room while the morning news is on. He turns pages of the paper and reads snippets of current events to her. She dips her bagel in her coffee. It smells moist and sweet as his sweat. She puts on a tasteful business suit, picks up the alligator briefcase that he suggested she buy.

He kisses her. “Good-bye, gorgeous.”

When she looks back, he is standing naked in the doorway with a hard-on. The jut of it snags at her heart. She wants to go back, fall to her knees, pay homage with her mouth. At the same time, she want to leap out into traffic and let something fast and huge and hard smash her to rubble and get it over with.

“Good-bye sweetie, see you tonight.”

Since childhood, she has believed that she will never marry or have children. The legal contract, the binding ties, it smacks, she’s always thought, of bondage. And as for children, there’s this secret fear in her – she can’t say why, but has the deep suspicion that something in her might some day wish to do her children harm.

No, she will be an artist, will work only to support her art – wait tables in Aspen or Redstone or Carbondale – cultivate the friendship of free women like herself, maybe enjoy a lesbian love affair or two and pity the humdrum lives of the tourists, couples always, snotty kids in tow, who surely must be envying
her
unfettered artist’s life. Her recurrent dreams of rape and domination will be transformed into brilliant canvases of wind-whipped mares and earth goddesses with swollen breasts and thighs as thick as tree trunks.

She will let no man contain her.

But she has forgotten her own Bewitchment and the lush allure of her cradle song.

And she hasn’t counted on
him
and how they both get high on escalating the erotic games, making more real and harrowing the fantasy of possessor and possessed.

In the course of a few days, they play with ropes and knives and, most dangerous of all, they play that they’re in love, that she will be his wife, and that this will last Forever.

They craft bondage scripts that they act out with her spread-eagled on the bed, bent over the balcony railing, posed bitch-style on all fours before the mirrored wall, and without an ounce of alcohol, she gets drunker and drunker until the room starts spinning, and open is the only posture that she knows.

“After we get married,” she says, toying with her words as her fingers massage and cup and stroke, “what if we go to a party, and I flirt with another man?”

“Then we’ll have to leave,” he says coldly.

“That what?”

“We’ll get in the car and drive away. As soon as we’re out of sight of the house where we’ve been visiting, I’ll reach over and tear your blouse open and rip open your bra. I’ll call you a whore, and I’ll drive very fast and you’ll be afraid – with good reason.”

“I know,” she says, shivering closer to his heat, “I’ll be very afraid. I’m afraid now.”

“Good,” he says. He is very hard now. His erection presses against her thigh.

“After we get home,” he says, “I’ll throw you down across the bed. I’ll fuck you till you can’t remember that you’ve ever been with any man but me. I’ll make you plead for my forgiveness. I’ll make you love me.”

She can feel her flesh melting into his, merging with his body, at these images. Her clitoris is pulsing as if it will erupt into flame.

“I already love you,” she says. Her sigh sounds like blood seeping out of a wound. “I love you, and I want to marry you.”

“Oh, you will.” He says it like a death threat, and it is. He kisses her, turn her around and mounts her from behind. He yanks her head back by her hair and puts the other hand across her mouth, riding her wildly and brutally, transforming her into something as bright and beautiful and lifeless as the paintings she no longer paints, suffocating her will down to embers and ash.

She has never been sure what he does with his days. For a while, she fancied that he had a secret life, perhaps some enterprise outside the law, perhaps another lover. She almost hoped he did. Now she believes he simply stays at home and naps and watches rented videos, does a 12-Step meeting now and then, meets friends for tennis. Idleness becomes him. He’s like a great, sleek lounging Tom who stirs himself only to yowl and feed and copulate. He’s like a force of nature. He need only
be
.

As for her own ambitions, she gave up the idea of Art in Aspen long ago. She lacks the time, the drive, the will. Making art requires energy and freedom, both of which are forfeit to her obsession. So she works at an office job and congratulates herself on her practicality and how well she manages to support them both.

At work, she is a model employee, concise and punctual, dependable. Only now and then, distracted, seeming almost dazed, she makes careless mistakes, receives a reprimand. She always takes it well. She is so prompt, so malleable, so docile.

A few of her co-workers have tried to be friends. She smiles and offers a facsimile of friendship, but in truth she is too ashamed to let them know her as she is, a one-time artist, now merely a part of
him
that goes out into the world, that plays a part. She cannot let them know she is addicted to his flesh, that she is a suicide in progress.

“When we get married,” she whispers, “I want the ceremony to include the words love, honor, and obey.”

“Oh they will,” he assures her. He stops fucking her and grinds his cock inside her, grips her wrists. Impaled and pinned, she can feel her mind entering that red trance of sex-bliss, that small death from which she knows that she may not emerge. “You will always obey me. You
must
.”

“I want you to own me,” she says, hating herself as she says the words. Hating the words. Not knowing where they come from, but hating the self-loathing that inspires them.

Hating
him
.

“I already own you,” he says. His dark face hovers above her. He is handsome, almost beautiful, a terrifying angel with black brows and the subdued snarl of the gentleman rapist in his voice.

She feels herself become more willing, more daring as she teeters on the edge of the void. Surely no aerialist ever practiced so thrilling a maneuver on the high wire. She is drunk with danger, half swooning from her sense of self-destruction, her seeming inability to save herself.

“I want to marry you,” she says, knowing what she really wants is not to want him. But he is the one that the witches sang about. He is her destiny.

He knows very well what she wants. He is inhumanly hard now.

“You are already wed to me,” he says. “You are already owned.”

She arches against him. She wants to feel the tip of his cock draw blood from her heart. She feels like she is ageing in reverse. She is that little girl again that the witches loved as their own and hated as their rival, and every kiss upon her face is poison and every touch re-opens unseen scars. In her folly, she thinks that her lover is healing the wounds, that he is filling her with him.

God, she loves Him.

One night they watch a movie where a woman kills a man to avenge her lover’s death. He seems to relish this. Rewinds the tape to watch the scene again.

“Would you kill for me?” he asks.

No
.

“Yes, I’d kill for you,” she says in that whispery, on-the-edge-of-orgasm voice.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I
would
.”

When she falls asleep with her face pressed to the black pelt on his chest, she is a child again and she is loved – she has only to please him always, do whatever he says – and she will be loved forever.