This being my tenth year of editing the Best Women’s Erotica series, I naturally looked up what the traditional wedding gift would be after crossing the threshold of ten years of hot sex, an online sexual revolution for women and porn, and a growing readership spanning digital divides.
Image my disappointment when I found out the gift for a decade of bliss was tin.
This is what we get for slogging through all that bad erotica, packed with gross puns, puerile poetry, and twenty-page “Penthouse Letters”–style porno in pink Comic Sans? After going beyond “keeping the spark alive” to showcase women’s fantasies about fucking as they transcend into literary supernova territory? We get a bendy pie plate?
Luckily, Hallmark had the foresight to take this dubious tradition and upgrade it. Now, they say, it’s diamonds for a ten-year marker. Phew.
And what a glittery jewel box is in 2015’s haul, dear reader.
My voyeur and I had never met in person, but he was the one who came to mind whenever someone asked if I had a boyfriend. Our arrangement had lasted five years by then. Every couple of months I traveled for a weekend to a town I didn’t know and gave Ron hints about where I’d be. He always sent me the pictures afterward, and it made me feel like a celebrity to sit down at my kitchen table at home and deal out the glossy eight-by-ten prints he’d made of me, some in color and some in black-and-white. He usually caught some shots of me getting undressed before bed, sliding my panties down my thighs, but others he grabbed while I was out doing seemingly ordinary things, crowning me with unexpected sexiness. The pictures were erotic but generally not explicit, and more than once I’d caught myself wondering how my pussy would appear under his lens.
—“Click-Click-Click,” Annabeth Leong
A question I’m often asked after over a decade of editing explicit erotica and running an adults-only blog is, “Don’t you get tired of erotica? Haven’t you seen it all by now?”
The long answer is a languid story about a confectioner who never tires of her luscious, sweet creations and the songs they sing on her tongue and the palates of others. It stars a heroine-as-reader (that’s you), who is more afraid of a life less lived than of swimming into uncharted erotic waters. At the end, she realizes there is no such thing as having “seen it all” and that’s so delightful and powerful and freeing that none of us want to stop looking for the next delicacy, the next unknown taste, and in this case, the next erotic adventure put to page by a woman as daring as we all strive to be.
The women in Best Women’s Erotica 2015 are these very women, and their compelling, surprising, skillfully told, ridiculously sexy stories star erotic heroines that I guarantee will have you holding your breath before you turn the page—no matter how many servings of erotica you’ve sampled.
He described how Rebecca shared him with the CEO of a petroleum company in a hotel suite, Giles stripping for the two of them and sliding his hard cock in the CEO’s mouth.
“It’s irresistible when someone knows what you want before you do,” he said. “You wonder what else they know about you. They become your sexual oracle.”
“Did she? Know what else you wanted, I mean?”
“Of course. The first time she tied me up, I thought I would explode. The absolute powerlessness and fighting her authority—then succumbing to my own need for that powerlessness, which is the true humiliation.”
Recognition flooded my face in a warm blush. I tilted my head so that my hair covered my cheeks.
“I see that’s how it is for you,” he said.
I laughed nervously. My legs felt weak and my underwear was wet.
“I'll show you.”
—“The Ghostwriter,” Valerie Alexander
Finding these gems wasn’t easy. As with every year, during an open call of only four months, I read hundreds (this year, again over three hundred) of submitted stories that had never been published, most written in the express hope of being published among the eighteen finalists here.
Not satisfied that I’d turned over every rock trying to find the best, I also read everyone else’s erotic anthologies and collections claiming to have “the best”—and shook down editors everywhere to tell me about the hottest stories they’d read all year. When I found new stories that shined beyond the rest in other people’s collections, I plucked them like a greedy raven to fill a place of honor in my hoard of erudite smut (with permissions and blessings, of course).
This manuscript has been a joy for all involved, and in it you’ll find lusty anonymous gropings, chem majors with erotic chemistry short-circuiting their logic functions, Peeping Toms and Peeping Thomasinas, boys who like boys who like girls, strong takes on rough men, sweetly rushed orgasms with celebrity crushes, and much more.
A college couple visit his family home in Vermont, and he gives his fiancée the ultimate Christmas present when he triple-teams her with his two identical brothers. A hacker finds himself in a predicament when he accidentally leaves his webcam on—and his female chat partner won’t let him off the hook.
A female ghostwriter indulges a wealthy businessman, and he uses her for far more creative purposes than just ghostwriting— even loaning her out to his business associates. A woman becomes determined to find a dirty stranger to feel her up on the subway after watching a porn of public sex and groping—and she does.
The stories here were a delight to find, and we’re excited to share them with you. We hope you enjoy this smart, arousing, sparkly treasure as much as we have.
Violet Blue
San Francisco