Sweet Love

When you’re in love, or at the very least about to fall in love, precariously perched over the heart’s precipice, it seems that every question becomes a lover’s question. What to wear? Should I…? How do I answer? Questions, and their answers, become charged no matter how innocent. He will see me again. She will see my socks. He will feel my mood. She will smell the perfume I choose, oh, so very closely. All my decisions are to be seen in the reflection of another’s eyes.

It’s exciting, thrilling, and life shared by two is indeed a thing worth having. It’s also fun to share the experiences of reading and fantasizing. The first book I put together with couples in mind was Sweet Life: Erotic Fantasies for Couples, and its success attested to the existence of many couples who yearned for the sweet life and enjoyed the ideas and inspiration the book had to offer.

It’s one thing to read a story to someone. It’s another thing entirely to try one out. I’ve always aimed for my anthologies to be erudite literary erotica, as unforgettable as top-shelf character-driven fiction, but also suggesting fantasies so perfect they might be enacted in real life. But I hadn’t yet found a person to do the thing I’d made obvious all along to myself and past lovers: to try it at home.

Until I was assembling this book.

Saying yes to your sexual fantasies, when you finally find yourself in that place, with an excited and willing play partner, is the most exciting thing you can do. You can trust me on this, as I now have experience taken directly from the pages of this book. You might say it has been road tested.

My ardent hope is that this book provides sexual inspiration and compels you to recognize love and sex in the complex characters as much as in your own life. The stories I’ve chosen are explicit, well thought out, cleverly crafted, and arousing as hell.

Trust me. I tried it at home.

Which story, I’ll let you guess. But I’ll tell you: the sexual experience I took from these pages and applied to my own romance, with all its trust and adventure, was like shining a light into two hearts and having it come back from the depths of a pool clear, bright, shining and true.

These stories illustrate why we’re compelled to take the characters’ sexual fantasies and make them our own. In the prolific Thomas Roche’s “Clearing the Air,” a woman finds herself in the position many of us do when faced with a sexy, slightly intimidating ex-girlfriend of our current beau: to be friends, or not? When she decides to “clear the air” between them, we learn new ways to refine our current lover’s impressions of the one who came before. Renowned and compelling author Janine Ashbless takes us backstage in a daredevil act where the layered characters draw us in and make us hold our breaths as we anticipate what will happen if they “Jump or Fall” into their greatest sexual fantasies, and possibly love.

Accomplished novelist N. T. Morley opens our eyes to the possibilities of blindfolds and sexual fantasies as birthday presents in “Five Senses,” a mesmerizing story about a woman in charge, a man with restricted senses and an evening out of his control, but entirely focused on pleasing his five senses. Accomplished erotic writer D. L. King takes the notion of “Her Turn” and turns it on its head when a sexy, slightly jaded peep show- booth worker gets home to her boyfriend and takes “her turn” while watching him in the shower.

Andrea Dale’s “Storming the Castle,” while lighthearted, does not disappoint for explicit sex, public risk and sexual fantasy, and pure storytelling. Kristina Wright delights and erotically delivers in her story “(S)pan(k)cakes”: not just pancakes and a spanking, but a wonderful read that’s a story fit for two—and a recipe to make your own, as the theme dictates.

In Emilie Paris’s “Clothes Make the Man,” the saying may be true, but panties make the leading lady squirm a little more when she’s over her boyfriend’s knee—and a surprise awaits a man who’s come to expect a demure girl in Louboutins. Kat Black’s shadowy and exciting entry, “Playing Rough,” was difficult not to share before publication and leaves no detail of a very intense fantasy out: let’s just say that parking garages might just enter your fantasy world in a surprising new way, as they have on this side of the editor’s desk.

Kay Jaybee’s “Searching for Her” distills the spirit of this book in a succinct tale of fantasies desired, abandoned and then at last discovered in a café—a kinky sexual adventure retold for our reading delight. “A Week and a Whip” is Allison Wonderland’s entry into our lives, in which a woman seeks the help of girlfriends in understanding where her marriage went dry, with a solution as exciting as the title implies.

Felix D’Angelo is a regular in my anthologies and in my reading, and in “A Little Push” he does not disappoint. Here, we’re pushed right into the action from word one, with a torrid anal sex encounter and a girl who wants more and gets it, with much happiness for her surprised boyfriend. It’s also dripping with his trademark humor. When Jan Darby’s female protagonist tires of her boyfriend’s shortcomings (sexual and otherwise) in “Dishpan Hands,” their relationship comes back to life in a way you likely won’t expect: the “upper hand” indeed. And speaking of turnabouts, in Jude Mason’s “My Turn,” a woman’s dominant mate decides he wants to experience what she does, and she more than rises to the occasion.

One of the names to watch for in erotica is Teresa Noelle Roberts, and she proves her mettle in the lyrical and very unusual story “Do You See What I Feel?” In it, a woman is bound in silky ropes and with her sweetheart’s aid, is surrendered to a sightless dominant. “Better Bent Than Broken,” by skillful Amanda Fox, playfully describes the range of a woman’s response when discovery of her lover’s secret porn stash reveals his longtime fantasy, one she isn’t entirely comfortable with. But once she thinks about it and figures out how to make it hot and real for her husband, she relishes taking control, strapping it on, and driving him all the way home into orgasmic bliss for two.

How far can a fantasy go into the corners of our minds? As far as gets us off when we love and trust our partners, as revealed in the well-told story, “Safe,” by Vanessa Vaughn. Here a woman experiences the night of her life—after thinking she’d bedded down at home alone, safe in her bed. Supremely skilled author Alison Tyler gives us an unforgettable serving of “Bachelor’s Dessert,” in which a woman gets distracted on her way home to her husband, giving in to a dirty, hard-edged sexual fantasy that has nothing and everything to do with him.

Filthy, hot and no holds barred is how I’d describe new author Dylan Reed’s sublime piece of fiction, “Extreme Dogging.” If you know what dogging is—public sex in cars, in view of strangers—then you have an inkling of how the story begins, but you’ll never guess how it ends, with more than just a couple and a uniform thrown in for good measure. But it’s the complex, very realistic and super-hot, “A Guy She’s Never Met,” by another favorite writer of mine, Zach Addams, that caps the tension and sweet release of the anthology. In it, a couple takes her number-one fantasy—him watching her have sex with a stranger—and gives it a modern twist, an unforgettable edge, and enough erotic inspiration to last the night (and beyond).

Take my advice. If you ever get a chance to try out your number-one fantasies—and I assure you, there will be more than one—in real life, say yes. It’s well worth it. May this book, its adventurous authors, and the daring and satisfied characters, be your guiding inspiration.

You’ll never get what you want unless you ask. And you’ll never find satisfaction until you say, “Yes, I want it”—to yourselves, and to each other.