Best of best womens erot.., p.1
Best of Best Women's Erotica 2, page 1
BEST
OF
BEST
WOMEN’S
EROTICA 2
BEST
OF
BEST
WOMEN’S
EROTICA 2
Edited by
VIOLET BLUE
Copyright © 2010 by Violet Blue®.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in the United States
by Cleis Press Inc., 2246 Sixth St., Berkeley, California 94710.
Printed in the United States.
Cover design: Scott Idleman
Cover photograph: Douglas Menuez/Getty Images
Text design: Frank Wiedemann
Cleis Press logo art: Juana Alicia
First Edition.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 13: 978-1-57344-379-1
The following stories are reprinted from Best Women’s Erotica 2006: “Just Watch Me, Rodin” by Cate Robertson; “The Upper Hand” by Saskia Walker; “Another Assignation with Charles Bonnet” by K. L. Gillespie; “Heat” by Elizabeth Coldwell; “Paid for the Pleasure” by Adrie Santos. The following stories are reprinted from Best Women’s Erotica 2007: “Chill” by Kathleen Bradean; “Becky” by Kay Jaybee; “Call Me” by Kristina Wright; “Voice of an Angel” by Teresa Noelle Roberts; “Worth It” by Alison Tyler; “Animals” by Rachel Kramer Bussel. The following stories are reprinted from Best Women’s Erotica 2008: “Mercy” by A. D. R. Forte; “Wet” by Donna George Storey; “Lost at Sea” by Peony; “Penalty Fare” by Jacqueline Applebee; “Rear Window” by Scarlett French. The following stories are reprinted from Best Women’s Erotica 2009: “Fly” by Valerie Alexander; “The Bitch in His Head” by Janne Lewis. The following stories are reprinted from Best Women’s Erotica 2010: “Amy” by Heidi Champa; “On My Knees in Barcelona” by Kristina Lloyd.
CONTENTS
Introduction: My Body, My Heart, My Bones
Animals • RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL
Call Me • KRISTINA WRIGHT
Voice of an Angel • TERESA NOELLE ROBERTS
Just Watch Me, Rodin • CATE ROBERTSON
Another Assignation with Charles Bonnet • K. L. GILLESPIE
The Upper Hand • SASKIA WALKER
Heat • ELIZABETH COLDWELL
Chill • KATHLEEN BRADEAN
Penalty Fare • JACQUELINE APPLEBEE
The Bitch in His Head • JANNE LEWIS
Becky • KAY JAYBEE
Paid for the Pleasure • ADRIE SANTOS
Cruising • LEE CAIRNEY
Rear Window • SCARLETT FRENCH
Lost at Sea • PEONY
Worth It • ALISON TYLER
Mercy • A. D. R. FORTE
Wet • DONNA GEORGE STOREY
Amy • HEIDI CHAMPA
Fly • VALERIE ALEXANDER
On My Knees in Barcelona • KRISTINA LLOYD
About the Authors
About the Editor
INTRODUCTION:
MY BODY, MY HEART, MY BONES
I’ve broken many bones: ribs, toes, fractures under the knee, my right ankle, my nose, once. My heart is not a bone. It breaks, though, too. When it breaks it feels like it will never mend. If it were a bone, things would be easier. But just as hearts can break, they can be filled, treasured, even stolen. Not long ago, while someone I once loved was asleep I whispered in his ear that if he gave me his heart, I would keep it safe: I would put it in a beautiful precious box and bury it in a place only I know about near the most beautiful flowers in all of Golden Gate Park, and I would make sure nothing bad ever happened to it.
He never gave me his heart. But I learned this: the only things in life worth having are stolen.
Stolen glances in a circle of friends, when a little pull in your chest makes your eyes return to that one person—and he meets your gaze yet again. A stolen kiss when you least expect it. A turn of your head, an unexpected meeting of lips, and that thing you desire most comes along in one heartbeat of space; someone says, “I want you so recklessly I don’t care anymore.” You rip off each other’s clothes, nuzzling, licking, biting with that frantic raw edge of desire found only in the stolen moment of absolute yes. It’s fleeting, and it must be taken and savored.
The last time this happened, I’d been watching the boys playing their instruments onstage, all the pretty girls dancing, many just watching him. I love to watch the girls—and the boys—watch him, photograph him, dance for him, try to get close to him. I’ve watched them for years. He went away for a couple of those years, in prison for a while for something stolen. But he was back with the band now, even more like Steve McQueen than before: bigger muscles, more sway, a quiet strength with a boy’s smile.
His shirt came off, as all the clothes eventually do when the band plays. Afterward, in the green room, I picked up his trumpet on the couch. The last time I’d seen him, he’d stolen a kiss; an electric spark that was our secret. I looked up, and there he was to collect his trumpet. The chaos of the band and dancers was all around me; everyone was half naked, drinking, still dancing, splayed and gyrating in the tiny green room backstage in the old, legendary San Francisco jazz club. Sexy dancing girls were letting me take pictures of them with their legs nastily and playfully spread; horn players and drummers were toasting me, tickling me while I tried to take pictures, flirting with me, asking to see a little more skin. I got plenty of theirs in return, and it seemed like the party would never end.
Looking up at him at that instant flipped a switch inside; I recalled the same feeling when I was a kid and jacking food from a store and had a hair-second to get it in my sleeve or pocket or be caught, or have to give up the prize and keep going. I met his eyes, extended my long fishnet-stockinged leg up off the ratty couch, and put a gloriously spiked black lacquer high heel on his stomach. He smiled and leaned over to get his trumpet.
I leaned into him for a split second and said, “Come back to my place and let’s make out.”
“I have to give people rides home,” he replied.
I said, “Okay, good night.”
I’d been home for ten minutes when there was a knock at my door.
All lanky and long, he leaned, filling the doorframe, with a sly smile. He had a beer bottle in one hand. I laughed, bit my lip, and led him slowly up the stairs to the kitchen, still in my fishnets and sweat and beaded dance costume, up to the table for a game of long-awaited cat and mouse.
The seats kept us too far apart, he insisted. I told him he’d ripped my fishnets during the show. Stealing his hand into my purse, he fished around and came up with the switchblade he knew I carried. “It’s very sharp,” I told him as he flicked open the blade.
The neighbors in the house behind me have a fantastic view. It also includes my kitchen. They were stealing something, too.
He took his time, sometimes using the tip of the blade, sometimes the sharp serrated saw at the base. Cut, cut—kiss. Cut, cut—kiss. Salty boy. Big hands. I shuddered with each cut, so close to my skin, especially when he reached between my legs. Our mouths locked for longer and longer, my heart beat up into my throat like I was going downhill too fast, driving a car with no brakes. Mid-kiss, he set down the knife and lifted me up, all the way off the ground like a doll. I held on tight, and then we were drowning in our own drunken hearts and kisses in the place where I rest my body, my heart and my bones—my bed.
After five years of secret desire, we fucked now like we wanted to tear each other’s skin off, like we wanted to hold each other tight against the gale force of all the things we’d broken; like we wanted to get inside each other in every possible way, to wrap each other in desire and wet sex and the kind of passion that breaks you in half and heals you all at once. There was never a space between us. We licked and sucked and fucked and held each other tight all night, without sleeping, kissing every exposed part whenever there was movement.
When the light poked through the blinds, and he said that leaving me made him want to quit his job, I laughed.
He forgot to kiss me good-bye.
Being the editor of the Best Women’s Erotica series for five years has been like that night: Cut, cut—kiss. So much desire, so many stories, and a fucking thrill every time I check my email for more submissions, the whole process a thrill to fuck by. I’ve often read submissions aloud to lovers, with the desired result of needy mouths and swollen bits grasping to take what they need.
Every year, I’ve culled from upward of three hundred stories for each volume. I’ve whittled it down to around twenty-two for each collection, and it’s never been easy, though it’s always been raw and filled me with passion for the craft of these incredible authors. The result of taking all five years’ final selections, over one hundred stories, and choosing the very best—the ones I couldn’t ever get out of my head, the ones that turned me (and others) on almost dangerously fast, like a match to gasoline—was worth the wait. Like that trumpet player.
The perfect opener is Rachel Kramer Bussel’s “Animals,” where in a fast and crazed moment of pure lust, a girl opens herself to her boyfriend—heart, mind and body—in a fuck that will leave you as breathless as the two lovers, and as alive as the marks on their skin. In Kristina Wright’s
Teresa Noelle Roberts brings us the unforgettable “Voice of an Angel,” which culminates in one hell of a stolen moment backstage at the opera, but as with many of the complex stories in this collection, the journey is just as erotically enveloping as the sweet notes sung at the destination. Cate Robertson’s fierce young female protagonist takes the upper hand in “Just Watch Me, Rodin”—another story that followed me around the streets of San Francisco as I remembered fragments of the girl’s increasing erotic one-upmanship with the older, sexually dominant male artist who paid her for the pleasure of drawing her.
Everything about K. L. Gillespie’s “Another Assignation with Charles Bonnet” sends the senses into overdrive, like that long-awaited fuck, but this time there’s a twist (and a turn) when we rocket through sexual desire from behind the eyes of the sightless. “The Upper Hand,” by Saskia Walker, not only shows why Walker is one of the hottest explicit erotic authors on the scene, but also what happens when two naughty young boys think they can play games with a neighbor who’s got a firmer hand than Mrs. Robinson.
When I think of the hottest, most graphic and furious moments I’ve read in sex writing, I think of Elizabeth Coldwell’s “Heat.” Here, a barmaid decides she’s not putting up with her asshole boss anymore, though the tables turn more than once before everyone gets to the boiling point of being hot, hard, and uncontrollably wet. To dispel the fire, Kathleen Bradean’s “Chill” follows up with the most unique and compelling female sexual fetish I’ve ever seen written out, and the tale is so well-crafted that by the time you get to the very unusual point of orgasm you’ll find your muscles cramping in sympathy, and likely in shared ecstasy.
Sometimes the price you pay for getting caught stealing is the whole reason for transgressing in the first place, as we see in the daring, lip-smacking oral encounter in Jacqueline Applebee’s “Penalty Fare.” Janne Lewis’s “The Bitch in His Head” is so much more than a complex relationship between a control freak corporate king with a very pernicious phobia, and his made-to-order (but very sneaky) call girl. It’s an outrageous example of turnabout as fair play, but with ropes and the skilled use of special sex toys.
Kay Jaybee’s “Becky” takes the office job well into the realm of nasty tongue-in-cheek fantasy within the first few paragraphs, as a wide-eyed (but not so innocent) Becky learns that spilling coffee in the break room gets you way more than a reprimand in an office where corrections involve canes and paddles. And for those of us who graze Craigslist for erotic fodder, Adrie Santos’s nervy, cautious “Paid for the Pleasure” scratches more than one itch as a girl decides to let a man pay her—to receive oral sex.
Just when you think you have gender play all wrapped up in a nice and tidy bow, Lee Cairney’s “Cruising” takes you trolling with a lesbian late at night in a park where she doesn’t belong. What happens to her anonymously in public is as surprising as it is incendiary. Meanwhile, across town, Scarlett French is looking out her “Rear Window,” watching her male neighbor and his trick provide full, explicit service for her to enjoy.
Peony’s “Lost At Sea” is the most lyrical and rapturous of the bunch, more a tone poem of raw passion than a tale; it’s complex, beautiful, and impossible to get out of your head. Then the legend of erotica writing Alison Tyler gives us one of the edgiest and most intense encounters of her writing career (so far) in “Worth It,” in which a woman wants her fiancé to do the nastiest thing that he can think of to her—to see if she is indeed, “worth it.”
In Heidi Champa’s “Amy,” a girl receives mysteriously mailed DVDs made expressly for her voyeuristic pleasure: each video portrays yet another girl submitting to one man’s rough pleasure and punishment in the place where our narrator once kneeled for the camera (and the man) herself. A woman makes a snap decision and takes what she wants in “On My Knees in Barcelona” by Kristina Lloyd, where a sweaty summer vacation evening in a Barcelona bar turns into a pay-for-play slippery oral encounter.
A. D. R. Forte’s “Mercy” is merciless when it comes to taboo sex; male and female high-power business associates decide that the hazing ritual for a sexy new male employee is to see how far he’ll go, culminating in an intense bisexual first-time three-way. Another story made for masturbation and intense memories of the places it takes you afterward is Donna George Storey’s “Wet,” in which an American woman immerses herself in Japanese culture, fantasizing about submission and rough sex in the baths—and gets more than she asked for, much to everyone’s slippery delight. The first time I read (and the next several times I reread) Valerie Alexander’s “Fly” I realized that some stories are perfect when they leave you wanting more. When Tiger Lily tops Wendy and comes all over Peter’s face as the start of her evening, you know it’s a win for everyone. As Tiger Lily takes what she wants (just as Peter has in stealing Wendy) we truly learn that the only things in life worth having are stolen.
When you find that raw fuck, that passion; when you want to breathe in that stolen moment of pure sexual being until you drown, whether for a minute or an hour—take it. Take it with your body, your heart, and your bones.
With every ounce of passion for a series I love,
Violet Blue
San Francisco
ANIMALS
Rachel Kramer Bussel
“I want you to hold me down and fuck me hard. Don’t treat me like myself, or like a woman at all—treat me like an animal,” I told him, the last such pronouncement I would make. Aidan was the kind of guy who always made me feel depraved, and he had a special knack for making my pussy tighten so fiercely I worried that it would stay that way permanently, the way parents warn their kids their eyebrows will stay furrowed if they keep on frowning. I’d been lusting after him for almost a year, but had finally broken through my own fear and told him what I wanted from him, only to find he felt the same way. I’d never asked anyone anything of the sort—a little spanking, a few minutes of bondage, a few dirty words thrown my way, but that was about it. This was different. This was real, raw. That’s how much I wanted him. At first, I wasn’t sure if he got what I was saying—I didn’t want him to hold back, at all. I could tell that he had been holding back, just enough to make me long for more, to make me feel slightly put off, as if he thought I was too fragile to take what he could really give me.
Maybe it’s because, outside the bedroom, I’m his boss at our small town’s indie record store. I’m the girl all the wannabe guitar players drool over—five nine, long jet black hair often tinged with green or red, eyebrow ring, purple lipstick, powder-pale face. My clothes, some mixture of black, tight, and sexy, usually paired with imaginative stockings and combat boots, never fail to make at least one set of eyes turn at the store. But Aidan, unlike most of the guys who passed my way, caught my gaze immediately. He was smart, not just some snot-nosed punk looking to steal CDs when he thought I wasn’t looking. Aidan could talk as easily about Dorothy Parker or Bukowski as he could the Buzzcocks or Braid or even the Beatles. He didn’t lord his intelligence over anyone there, either, it just came out if you provoked him enough and stayed hidden, like a turtle under its shell, if you didn’t. He was more clean cut than the other guys, so you had to peer a little more closely to see his edge, to catch a sneer or raised brow, to see the smirks that were gone almost before they’d even formed. He had plenty of scars and dreams and fantasies, but they were wrapped up so tight I didn’t know if he’d be able to let go, even though it was clear from his rock-hard cock and the look on his face, eyes half-lidded and wet mouth slack, that he wanted me.
I was sick and tired of lying back and letting some guy rock his cock inside me as if we were on a seesaw, gliding gently upward, pausing, then zooming downward at the most predictable pace imaginable. Even at twenty-five, I knew that sex should take you out of the everyday, should make you as wild and ferocious as a rabid dog—in heat. The guys before Aidan had been cute enough, but they just couldn’t give me what I most craved, what I dreamed about, squirming against my slithering fingers as the walls of my bedroom shook with the latest single the store had sent our way.
