The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels (37 page)

The door buzzed.

“You going to let me in?” Arc said from the landing, looking up with a pure white smile. Her eyes were hidden behind cheap black sunglasses.

Arc was strong. That was one of the things that reached between the two of them and tugged, hard, at Pell’s heart. But it was a kind of strong that was precious and
priceless because, for Pell, it had come with tears. The strong only share their tears with you if you’re special, trusted.

“New?” Pell said as she tried to make good coffee out of freeze-dried beans and yellowish tap water.

“Nice, isn’t it?”

Pell wasn’t looking but she knew that Arc was – staring at her own right hand with a connoisseur’s squint, daring its perfection to show her a loose screw, a matted sensor dot,
a dull gleam to the polished metal. Her concentration was a Geiger-counter series of clicks from her eye.

Arc had tried to show it to Pell without really waving it under her nose – so, instead, the street girl had acted like a child trying to catch the eye of an adult, to have Pell notice, to
ask, about the new prosthetic.

“He’s a freak – but at least the fucker’s got taste.”

It was beautiful. There was no denying that. It didn’t have the jeweler’s magnificence of her eye but, still, it had the clean loveliness of a perfect machine. Minimal extravagances,
no filigree or bevels. It was the beauty of a revolver, the sensual streaming of a missile. Pure form has its own form of elegance.

“Japanese tech. All the way. See the chop at the wrist. Danomoko. Grow the whole thing in solution, I hear. Just feed juice to those little robots and they grow the thing. Stronger than
fuck. Neurofibre optical hookup to meisomolecular fibres. Feels just like a hand, moves just like one, too – but motherfucking fast and
strong
.”

Cool metal glided along Pell’s cheek. She shivered, mostly from the coldness of it. Looking down at the hand, she saw the puckered ring of tissue where it mated to Arc’s wrist, a
rubber gasket. Absently she noted the hand wasn’t black at all, as she’d first thought, but a deep kind of blue. Like, she imagined, the blue that the sky gets just before it passes
into space. Dark to the point of lightlessness.

“Wasn’t expensive, actually,” Arc said, stepping back and running it – her hand – up and down the corded muscles in her strong legs. “Not that he told me or
anything. I thought about having it taken off, you know? Replace it with a cheaper one and pocket the change but,
hell
, I thought it’s a fine hand, right? Besides, gotta keep the freak
coming back for more. Wouldn’t do to see him with a cheap thing stuck on my wrist.”

“That makes sense,” Pell said, turning from the cheap microwave with two steaming cups of almost, but not quite, coffee in her hand.

Arc patted the bed with her new hand. Pell sat down next to her and, for some reason, put her head on the taller woman’s shoulder.

Arc got quiet and tensely sat up straight. The motion was soft, though – not a twitch and definitely not a pull-away. Just a slight electric shock of the contact. After a few thudding
heartbeats, Pell felt Arc’s new metal hand reach up and stroke her ugly brown hair.

Neither said anything for a long time. Arc repetitively stroked Pell’s hair and Pell did nothing but let her. Finally, Arc moved a bit more than usual, a kind of squirming on Pell’s
old mattress, and Pell straightened up. Her head felt loose and full of sparkles, like she’d held her breath for too long.

“Hey,” Arc said, turning to look at Pell with her one steel and one steel gray eye, “I saw where your friend lived – but it don’t look like he’s there any
more. Get sent?”

Pell nodded. “Month or two ago. Could have probably slipped to Australia but he waited too long.”

“Hey, if we’re lucky, maybe he’ll buy it, ya know? One less artist to worry about . . .”

Arc laughed and so did Pell, even though it wasn’t funny. After a point they stopped talking, it got dark, and they snuggled together under Pell’s old sheets. Pell expected the new
hand to get in the way, to be a burst of shocking cold when Arc touched her: but was surprised when, if she closed her eyes, she could almost not feel the difference.

Almost
not feel the warm metal of Arc’s hand – grown in a vat of microscopic robots, sold to a mystery, given as a present, or as part of an exchange –

Almost
not feel the strength of it – a strength beyond that which Pell loved in Arc. As she touched Pell, it seemed not to be the same contact – to come from the same woman.
Arc’s touch was gentle, yes, loving . . . if that could be the word. But it was also fast, covering Pell’s slightly larger, definitely softer body. Not a slow progression, as before . .
. lips, chest, breast, nipple . . . more hurried, rushed: straight to her already swollen nipple, the cooler fingers of the artificial hand gripping tighter than before, much faster.

They had not even completely crawled under the covers before Arc’s hand grabbed her. In shock, Pell pulled away, sending a bolt of agony through her body when Arc’s hand did not let
go. After, Pell thought – believed – that perhaps the mechanism just wasn’t responsive enough. She knew it was a lie, but she had to believe it, nonetheless.

Pell turned, eventually freeing herself. Turning, she sat and looked at Arc as the taller woman crawled into the old bed. Her eyes glimmered – the artificial with the click, click, click
stare of her perception, the gray with a shimmering concentration. The lights were on this time, neither of them moving to turn them off.

The gunmetal hand reached out and laid itself, warm and cool at the same time, on Pell’s inner thigh. Reflexively, Pell started to close it – but Arc pushed with its artificial
strength, spreading Pell even wider. To hide the nerves that made her shake like the room was cold (it wasn’t), Pell laughed – but it sounded like Arc’s new hand: artificial and
cool.

“I want to fuck you,” Arc said, looking straight into Pell’s eyes. Click, click, click and cool gray. There was a strength there –
that
strength: a dramatic
firmness, a theatrical burst of power. Pell felt her knees go weak and her cunt start to warm . . . soften, melt.

The hand started to stroke her, slowly, up and down – swell of her ass-cheeks to the tuft of hair at the top of her mons. Up and down, up and down, fine mechanics following the contour of
Pell’s cunt, fingers sweeping through her tangle of pubic hairs. Back and forth, up and down – then one finger, out a bit more than the others, slipped between her lips. The motion
slowed, hesitated – the finely-machined metal was cool, but not cold. She could feel its hardness press up, against the opening to her deep cunt. Arc held it there – held her new hand
there – and Pell could feel her own pulse against the cool metal.

“I’m going to fuck you –” brass in those words, a metal as hard as her new hand. Pell, frightened and filled with a chilling excitement for the power in Arc’s
voice, grabbed a pillow from behind her and positioned it – quickly, feverishly – so she could lean slightly forward, to get a better view.

Click, click, click – Arc’s view seemed to synch with hers, the taller woman’s gray, artificial sight was between Pell’s passionately spread legs, hypnotized by her own
actions, by the slow up-and-down, up-and-down of her artificial fingers between Pell’s moist cunt-lips.

The hand was smooth, its action more precise, more finely engineered than anything Pell had ever seen. Where she’d expected joints, hinges, sockets, and the like, instead there seemed to
be immaculate mechanisms. She couldn’t tell exactly how – a combination of every hinge, every joint, or a Japanese paper-folded mentality of design – but the gunmetal flesh of the
hand just seemed to move. It was more a study in flesh and blood, executed in machined metals, than an approximation of a hand’s actions.

And two, then three, of its blue-steel fingers were deep inside of her.

No fingernails. She’d noticed that. Smallish indentations, yes, but not cosmetic details. Watching the first two fingers of Arc’s new artificial hand, her metal prosthesis, slide in
and out of her cunt, Pell had a clear view of the thumb – a space, that small bit of sculpture, a bow to the needs of some woman, somewhere, to paint their metal art with some kind of gaudy
color. For Arc, though, it remained blue-steel, polished. It was its own art, its own beauty.

Four, and hard steel tapped against Pell’s G-spot. The shivering started then, the pressure deep within herself. Like taking a piss, like holding it back. A kind of slow, building force
that started somewhere inside her cunt and spread, tightness, firmness, up through her body.

She shivered – just slightly. In and out, in and out, the fingers precisely fucked her. “I’m fucking you,” growled Arc, locking a click, click, clicking stare into
Pell’s quivering eyesight. For a beat, or thousand, of their hearts they locked like that – Pell into gray and machinery, Arc into Pell’s softer eyes. Hold, hold, hold –
Pell thought she was close, on the lip, looking down to where the real Arc lay, hiding. Then a clicking, hard, blink, and Arc turned her head away, looked to the side, and then down – down to
where her false hand was fucking Pell’s very real, and very wet cunt.

Four. Pell knew it must have been that number – in concentration and to remove herself from the memory of Arc breaking the stare, she leaned slowly back and closed her eyes, trying to lose
herself in the in-out, in-out fist-fucking. It wasn’t a hard rhythm, yet, wasn’t a hard fuck, yet.

“Now I’m really going to fuck you.” Strength touching on anger, firm words from Arc. Four fingers and something else, a new – sharper – kind of pressure.

Pain. Pell screamed – no, cried – no, yelled. She made some kind of noise, a mix and match – her own kind of strange movement to match the elegant watchmaker workmanship of
Arc’s hand. It was a sound that went all kinds of way at once. Frightened – both from the sound and the tearing pain between her legs – Pell put her hand down – quick
– and tried to stop Arc’s thrusts . . .

. . . no fingers. A hard steel wrist, a ring of rubber where artificial met natural, a seam of skin. No fingers there – all of them gone, hidden deep within her own cunt.

The reach to stop became a reach to explore. Moving herself carefully up, Pell reached down between her legs and touched, keeping her eyes tightly closed. Arc wasn’t fucking her –
just wrist, rubber gasket, slick skin, hard metal – suspended in her cunt.

Pell started to breathe hard, fast. The orgasm came, quick and hard, from a direction she didn’t expect – the surprise, fear and shame forcing her eyes even more closed. It was a
soft come, a jittering come. No screams, no cries, no lip-biting, not even a clamping together of her wide-open legs. It was a body-rush, an electrical charge that went from dull glow to brilliant
light.

The shame was a heat on her face, in her cunt. The ghostly image continued to hover, just out of reach, just out of understanding, on the verge of her mind. She didn’t want to see it, but
also felt its allure was too strong to bury away.

Arc, slowly, started to fuck her harder and harder – wet noises from between her legs, feeling to Pell like somewhere distant, removed. Dimly, she was aware that she was even wetter than
before, that her juices were flowing, streaming down onto Arc’s brand-new hand. No, not juice – piss, maybe. It felt like something inside herself had just let go, draining out of her.
She let it, entranced by the feel of the fluid pouring out of her, and the sense of hot release.

A second orgasm – more familiar and welcome – rocked her, tearing her eyes open, forcing her shaking hand down between her legs, feeling the gasket again, the hot skin again, the
cooler metal – again – but this time the fast, then slowing, piston action. As she touched, then gripped – hard – Arc’s wrist, the clenching of her cunt around the
metal prosthesis slowed, dimmed. It didn’t stop, not for a long time.

“Push,” Arc finally said, and she did: like birthing or taking a shit – a swelling pressure, a bearing down, and she eased out the metal. Even though her eyes stayed closed,
she opened them long enough to catch a sight of glistening metal fingers, flexing and flashing in the dim light, strands of cunt-juice webbing between them, the smile on Arc’s face . . . that
might – just might – have been as cold as the metal they were made of.

The mattress was soaked from her ejaculate. Wordlessly, Arc pushed her off – making Pell a little nest of the faded blankets, the pillows, that had escaped the drenching, and neatly
flipped it over. Watching her through slit eyes, Pell knew that the stain, the dampness, would linger, but was beyond caring.

Then, carefully so as not to disturb her, Arc moved her back, tucked her in and – just before the silence that came before sleep – squeezed her throbbing ass-cheeks with her new
metal hand, and said in a gruff voice: “You are a good fuck.”

The last thought Pell had that day, before being drawn down into unknown – forgotten – dreams, was that she’d wished that Arc had really fucked her, really touched her with
– hard flash of fear and shame again, the image that had pushed her over into that first come – even the raw skin of her fleshy arm, the cauterized stump of her real self.

They stayed together for most of the next day, rolling to and from Pell’s bed stopping only to make bad coffee and sprint through the chill, nipping air of the
apartment.

It was a sweet time – as if the hard sunlight that streaked through Pell’s windows had somehow pushed aside the shadows of the night before. Arc’s kisses were passionate, and
several times the thought of bruised, purple lips skated across Pell’s mind, but they were gentle in her way – and lingered long enough for a dancing touch of tongues.

One time, reason forgotten, Pell had gotten up – gone to the stained sink and washed her hands. Arc had stepped up behind her, a cat tracking a spot of light on the floor, and grabbed her
– first her ass, which made Pell yip like a startled child, and then, when she whipped around, hands still dripping, her tits. Arc had held her there, hands on her tits, fingers (some real,
some metal) rubbing casually back and forth across her soft, then hard, nipples. Then Pell had leaned forward, just a little, and closed her eyes. The kiss had felt soft, fleeting, and all too real
– a real kiss from the real Arc.