The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Lucy Taylor (21 page)

Earning his love is a full-time job. A career choice. A commitment.

She hones her acting skills. She knows he senses the slightest rebellion in her heart, the smallest cache of secrets. He has nothing to do with his days but focus on her, meditate upon each nuance of her speech and body language. Is her love diminishing? Does she talk too much on the phone, take extra minutes getting home? Is she being subtly neglectful of his vast and mounting needs? Is she such a fool that she might plot to leave him?

When he grows bored, he amuses himself by finding fault with her. At other times, he gazes at her with the pride of one who’s just retouched a museum masterpiece, brought it back to its former splendor, improved it, and when she questions the intensity of that look, he says, “Just thinking of all the plans I have for the rest of your life.”

She had plans, too – once. If she could just remember what they were . . .

He finds her sketchbook one day, and his derision of her drawings if so surgically adroit that she feels naked as a peeled persimmon. Later, when he sees her tears, he soothes her with his skillful tongue and nurtures her with semen.

Sometimes she contemplates his Smith and Wesson as one would study a map of some exotic land. She parts herself with the cool, hard barrel and thinks that she should let the gun become her lover, that this must be the ultimate fuck. Even hotter and harder than him.

Nonsense
, she tells herself. She can walk away from him when she gets ready. She can quit at any time. She gave up alcohol, didn’t she? Almost five years without a buzz. No counting the high she gets from sucking cocktails from their original container. She knows he isn’t good for her – she devours self-help books like bonbons. She’ll quit this, too, and get on with her
real
life – it’s just that she’s not ready.

Yet.

She knows the game is aging her. Grey half-moons smudge her eyes. Her face has a haggard, refugee quality, but her body still throbs in sync with his. The athletic and aesthetic quality of her erotic performance is undulled. She can mimic dying with a hot, uncanny sensuality, as though she’s done it many times. In the quiet of the night, she fancies she can hear her soul unraveling.

“I want to marry you.”

Sometimes she says the words alone, to herself, marveling at how they sound, at the unnaturalness of them. What started as a game, a tease, is becoming real.

Love, honor, and obey.

She loves him not at all and honors him only when she must, but obey she will. She must. For doesn’t she deserve to die? She’s a bad girl, isn’t she? For craving his flesh in her mouth, in her cunt, for aching to eat him like some ripe and rotting fruit, the sweet center spewing into her mouth and seeping down her throat as she bites and sucks and hungers more for having sucked his poison.

“I’d kill for you,” she whispers.

She almost means it now. The ledge on which she walks is getting narrower. The abyss at the bottom of her lover’s eyes croons to her and bids her jump.

One night he ties her with soft sashes and runs a knife across he flesh. He parts her lips. Tells her, in snuff flick detail, what he could do to her.

He could. He
might
. She’s wet just thinking of it.

For doesn’t love mean being fed upon, consumed, annihilated in the arms of the beloved? She learned that somewhere long ago. It feels like it’s imprinted on her soul, encoded into her very DNA. Carried on her X chromosomes like a gene-linked disease.

He puts his hard-on to her lips, then the knife, then his cock.

“Which one?” he says. For a moment, she can’t choose.

The only thing she fears more than him is the thought that she might lose him.

On the day that she will marry him (an elaborate ceremony on the East Coast City where his parents live), she looks into the mirror as if into a crystal ball and sees the future like an evil spell spread out before her. She cannot leave him; she’s too far gone. She no longer believes she can exist without him. But as her dependence on him has increased, so has her hatred; she longs to pay him back for what she’s let him do to her.

Soon after their wedding, she comes into their bedroom, thinking that she’ll let him fuck her one more time, give him a final opportunity to end it before she does.

She finds him fallen asleep with the tv on, hair like black fur against the pillow, thighs parted just enough that she can be tempted by his beauty one more time.

But good girls never want this
.

She puts the pistol against his temple, admiring the aristocratic plane of his jaw, the thick black lashes, wondering what it would be like to fuck him with a bullet.

But she wasn’t raised like that. She isn’t meant to kill this way. No, her killing must be done in increments and secret.

She puts the gun away and comes to bed. The old nightmares threaten her, but she takes solace in his skin.

When she gets pregnant, he says he doesn’t want the child. A baby will take time away from him – he tells her they’ll be happier without one.

For the first time since she’s known him, she stands up to him. Her wrath shocks her and frightens him. The power of mother love seems to give her resolve she’s never known. A child, she thinks, will be something to belong to her – to take the place of the life that she will never have. For the first time since she’s known him, her life soothes down into a sluggish calm, a kind of tranquil torpor. Finally there is something of her own he cannot take away.

The baby is healthy and beautiful. She names it for her mother, and she loves it with a fierce and cannibal cunning.

But the father is the one seduced and charmed. The child becomes his little sweetheart. He dotes on her and plans for her a future full of independence and achievement.

When the baby is a few months old, she sits beside the crib one night, admiring the beauty of her daughter’s face, her laughing eyes and guileless zest. Surely this child will have a charmed life – unlike her cursed one.

The baby frets as she bends over the crib. She has her father’s mouth. The mother feels a rush of loss and loathing. How dare
his
daughter look forward to the kind of life that she has forfeited. Black envy seethes inside her.

She searches her mind for a gift appropriate for the daughter of the man that she despises.

And it comes back to her – bitter and seductive, the words like licorice laced with strychnine, dark and sweet and sickening.

The words change, but the meaning is always the same: men are evil and lust-crazed and dangerous . . . women exist to be debased and defiled . . .

. . .
but good girls never want this
.

You must never want this
.

And so the curse is passed.

That night, when she lies down next to her husband, her sleep is deep and dreamless.