Best Women?s Erotica 2006

Donna George Storey

I’m the last person in the world you’d expect to be hurrying through the November dusk dressed like a phone-sex addict’s dream girl. It’s no lie either. Under my raincoat, I really am wearing a short black skirt, thigh-high stockings, and not a stitch of underwear, not even a camisole under the stretchy blouse I chose especially for the way it reveals my nipples, now painfully taut in the evening chill. Worse yet, gusts of wind are blowing up between my legs, pawing my exposed pussy like a rough, impatient hand.

Fortunately the east side of campus is quiet at this time of day. I haven’t run into any of my students, although one man, a stranger, did turn and give me an odd look. “Bit cold tonight, isn’t it?” he called out cheerfully. As if he knew. Maybe he does. Oblivious as most men are, they seem to have a knack for sniffing out females who aren’t wearing panties. Low on the horizon, the full moon’s light bleeds into the swirling clouds like the gaze of a probing, silver eye. On an evening like this you can almost believe there is a grander force up there, governing the affairs of the tiny creatures rushing around in the darkness below.

Daniel’s office is on the second floor of an old Victorian on Maple Street. The lights are on in his suite, but I see no figures moving inside. As I start up the stairs, a woman walks out, closing the door briskly behind her. She is tall and slim, although at first I can’t make out her features in the half-light. Dog or wolf? As we pass, I notice she is in fact quite handsome and her lips are set in a small, secret smile. Of course, it’s not proper etiquette to stare at another client at a shrink’s office, so I look away. Is it Daniel she’s just seen? Daniel who left her with something privately amusing to remember as she glides into the night?

Inside, I take a quick right to the waiting room and snap on the “client has arrived” button next to Daniel’s name. I’m too restless to sit down, so I study the fancy carving on the mantelpiece. This room was clearly the visiting parlor in the building’s past life as a bourgeois mansion, the place where the young ladies of the house must have received their suitors. I can almost see them in their Sunday finery, lifting teacups to prim lips, pinkies curved. It would certainly bring a blush to their cheeks to see the visitors now, come to confide our darkest secrets to modern-day ministers of the soul.

I hear footsteps. It’s Daniel, his forehead creased in a frown. No doubt about it, the man is handsome, his boyish features nudged toward the professorial by a neat golden beard.

“Emma.” There’s a hint of question in his voice, but he seems glad to see me.

“I hope I’m not too late for a session.”

He smiles and shakes his head.

I follow him up the stairway. A faint floral scent lingers—the slim woman’s perfume, or perhaps the ghosts of those young ladies descending in their ball gowns.

Daniel is easy on the eye from behind, too. He dresses well: a forest green shirt of soft, fine cloth you want to touch, well-pressed khakis that curve nicely over his firm ass. And then there’s that discreet ponytail, a hint of some wilder life. Am I the only one to picture his dark honey hair loose against a pillow, his smooth mask crumpled into a grimace of ecstasy?

Daniel’s office is equally restrained: white walls, a bookshelf with titles like Family Therapy and Men and Sex, a tidy desk in the corner watched over by several framed diplomas. One armchair—his—faces an expensive-looking couch. The scent of leather permeates the room, recalling the tack rooms of my teenage equestrian days, saddles, horse sweat, and some foreign spice, unnamable, but ineffably male.

I lower myself onto the sofa with as much decorum as I can muster in my fuck-me heels.

Daniel remains standing.

“I wanted to discuss something…something I can’t talk about anywhere else but here.”

Hardly an original opening, but I have to soften him up a bit. Don’t mind me, I’m just like all the rest. I glance toward his chair. Daniel says he lets the client set the tone for the session. The “expert” doctor role makes him uncomfortable, he claims, although some clients try to corner him into it. True to his philosophy, he follows my cue and sits.

Daniel’s silence is more than an absence of sound. I should have remembered that. It’s an expensive silence, pregnant with significance. Although I have my next move carefully planned, I’m overcome with a desire to blurt out something altogether different: the real reason I’m here tonight.

I glance around the room to get my bearings. The cord of the blinds on the window by his desk has fallen into the trash can, a tiny glimmer of imperfection. I’m tempted to get up and fix it—so tempted my fingers actually twitch—but I resist that particular urge. I look back at Daniel, still waiting, legs crossed. He’s wearing his wedding ring today. Sometimes, he says, he takes it off for the first meetings with troubled couples or other clients with conflicted feelings about the institution of matrimony. Did he put it in his drawer for the benefit of the woman who sat in this very spot just minutes ago?

In my nervousness, I’ve forgotten to take off my coat. I do it now, awkwardly twisting my arms from the sleeves. Unfortunately the room is so warm the thin cloth of my blouse lies chastely over the swelling of my breasts. Even the black miniskirt looks rather tame when I’m sitting down, and I’m not about to spread my legs and show off my other surprise—yet.

His eyebrows lift ever so slightly, but then his expression reverts to impassive calm. No doubt he’s probably bored with thirty something wives expressing their inner harlot.

So much for my first salvo, but I have more ammunition in reserve and it’s best to get started. In here, all you have is fifty minutes, max.

I swallow and soldier on. “I’ve never talked about this before, but recently I’ve been troubled by a memory. Of something that happened when I was rather young.”

Daniel tilts his head.

“I think it might help if I tell someone. You.”

He nods, a careful movement that seems at once encouraging and detached. I wonder, briefly, if they give nodding classes in shrink school.

“May I lie down?” I say.

“If you think you’d be more comfortable.”

I stretch out on the couch, my head on the armrest. The skirt finally cooperates and rides up high over my thighs, but strangely enough, the last thing I feel is sexy. The leather is more like a cradle, warming to my skin.

When I rehearsed my story this afternoon before my seminar and a few times before that, my main worry was that I’d giggle and ruin the effect. But here, in front of Daniel, levity has turned to something more like fear. My insides are knotted, my mouth parched and ticklish. I take a deep breath and close my eyes.

“It was the summer after my sophomore year of college. I was nineteen. I’d taken a crappy job at the university library—English majors don’t have much to choose from you know—but I took a few weeks off at the end of August to go to my grandparents’ farm in Pennsylvania. It beat reshelving books all day, but I was bored out of my mind. Then one afternoon I decided I needed an adventure, so I saddled up their horse, Mitsy, and rode up Peter’s Mountain.”

Under the veil of my lashes, I check for signs of boredom. Daniel leans forward, the picture of attention.

“I used to ride a lot back then, you know,” I continue. “Sometimes guys would make rude remarks about girls on horseback, but the truth is, a saddle doesn’t touch the right places. There is something else to it, though. Mitsy was a big bay mare with a rolling gait, and it did give me pleasure to feel such a powerful animal move beneath me, respond to the faintest pressure of my thighs….”

His chair creaks. I don’t open my eyes, but my legs suddenly feel hot, seen.

“It was very still up on the mountain. Just me, the song of the insects and the muggy heat pressing on my skin. After a while I realized I was riding past a row of huge blackberry bushes, heavy with fruit. There were so many fat berries I just had to reach out and pop one in my mouth. It was sweet. Not like we get in the markets here. You could actually taste the sun in the juices, tiny explosions of crushed berry essence. I ate another, then a few more. I slipped off of Mitsy’s back and shoved fistfuls into my mouth while she grazed. I didn’t stop until my stomach ached.”

A flutter of my eyelids shows me that he is in fact staring at my legs, or rather, at the lacy band that holds the stockings in place at midthigh.

“And then, well, only then did I notice that everything was all too neat and orderly. I wasn’t feasting on wild berries, I’d stumbled onto a plantation, someone’s property. They raised these things for money. There I stood with my stained fingers and palms. My lips and chin were probably purple, too. A thief caught red-handed.”

Daniel chuckles softly. I know he enjoys wordplay.

“I probably should have gotten back on Mitsy and high-tailed it out of there, but I was frozen to the spot, waiting for someone to discover me, scold me, force repayment for my theft. But nothing happened. Just birds chirping and the noon sun pounding down and little by little my fear turned to something else. I felt…brazen, for lack of a better word. As if I were an actor in someone else’s X-rated dream and the director was whispering—go ahead, honey, don’t be shy. Almost in a trance, I pulled the picnic blanket from the saddlebag and spread it out on the ground. Then I took off my halter and shorts, even my underwear, and I lay down, my pale and tender parts exposed to the sun, and I…”

My throat closes around the next word. This isn’t going the way I’d planned at all. I meant to unsettle and arouse him, but instead I’m back there again, a naked girl on a blanket, quivering with shame and excitement.

Daniel’s patient voice floats into my head as if from far away. “What did you do, Emma?”

I tried to speak, but all that came out was a croaking sound.

“Did you masturbate in the field?”

Did they give classes in that in shrink school, too, saying naughty words out loud with nary a tremor?

“Yes,” I squeak. “Funny, I can’t seem to say that word here.”

“Don’t you feel safe?”

“I know I should. But instead I feel nineteen again.”

“There is no reason to be ashamed about any of this, Emma.”

“But there’s more. You see, I didn’t do it the usual way, trying to get off as quickly and quietly as I could under the covers. This time I rubbed myself very slowly until I was sopping wet and just about ready to come, then I’d ease off and start again. As if I were daring someone to catch me. Then I saw him….”

“Who?” For Daniel, the timing is uncharacteristically abrupt.

“The workman, the caretaker. In the shadows at the far end of the row. He was watching me.”

Daniel sucks his breath, faintly, as if drinking through a straw.

“His hand was moving, about waist level. Up and down. What a normal girl would do, if a normal girl happened to find herself naked on a mountainside jilling off, is cover up and get out of there fast.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. I spread my legs wider and spit into my palms and circled them over my nipples and made all sorts of sounds in my throat, like an animal. By the end it wasn’t even an act. My thighs trembled and my chest was so flushed you’d think someone had slathered berry juice all over my breasts. When I came I groaned so loud, Mitsy walked over and nuzzled me to see if I was okay.”

“And the man watching?”

“When I looked over again, he was gone.”

“Do you think I’m sick?” I hadn’t planned to say that either, but my heart skips two beats as I wait for his answer.

“I don’t believe labels are very productive, Emma. ‘Sick,’ ‘exhibitionist,’ they’re all terms of judgment and shaming. What matters here are your feelings, in particular your desire to have your sexuality be seen and accepted.”

I can tell he makes a living at this. But I didn’t come here for soothing words. “Isn’t it a problem if I act out those feelings? In front of a stranger?”

“It could be, but in this case…”

“You think it was just my fantasy, don’t you?” I sit up suddenly.

Daniel’s head moves back an inch or two, in what for him must pass as surprise. Is it the strength of my reaction or an unexpected flash of naked pussy?

“I’m not sure that matters so many years later. The scene itself has elements that would be beneficial to explore, whether or not it happened in fact.”

“What if I told you I checked afterward and found a puddle of spunk in the grass right where the guy was standing?” In truth I didn’t, but I want to keep the engagement on my territory: action, not analysis.

His upper lip curls slightly. Jealousy? A touch of counter-transference?

“I still believe what’s most important now are your feelings and why you chose to tell me this today.”

I check the clock on his desk, conveniently turned to the couch for the client’s benefit. Twenty minutes left and so much more to accomplish.

“Okay, sure, I’ll admit most of my sexual fantasies are about being seen and accepted.”

“And loved?” Daniel asks softly. “That’s what we all want, isn’t it?”

I nod. He is good at this. Unable to meet his eyes, I study the Oriental rug that covers the floor between us. The pattern seems backward—the round flowers are like roots, sprouting stems and leaves that beckon with graceful green fingers—tell me, tell me. “The truth is I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Since the beginning really. I want to do it here. On this couch. I want you to watch.”

The room falls into silence.

Except for the taiko drummers, pounding away in my chest and my skull. What started as a joke—repressed hostility as Daniel likes to say—is now too real. As the moments pass with no answer, it occurs to me that Daniel might actually reject me. Even if he wraps it up in a bandage of professional ethics—We can’t take it that far, Emma, I have a code of conduct in here—I’ve offered myself and he’s saying no thank you. If only I could disappear, like that workman of fifteen years past, flesh dissolving into phantom. It might happen. Already my thighs are wet against the leather of the couch, melting.

I’m pulled back by a mere whisper.

“All right, Emma. I’ll watch you.”

As if in a dream, I watch Daniel rise and close the blinds, lock the door against the autumn night. Suddenly it’s summer again. The golden light from the lamp on the end table glows like an August sunset.

I pull a towel from my shoulder bag. “Like the blanket I brought for the picnic,” I murmur. Plus, of course, I didn’t want to mess up his nice couch.

He nods, but with a new air of distraction. The flush on his cheeks and the tent in his khakis suggest he, too, has caught summer fever.

I scoot forward on the couch and part my legs.

Daniel stares. His chest moves rapidly beneath that fine green shirt. “You really aren’t wearing underwear. I thought I was imagining it.”

I smile and slide my hand over my damp fur, spreading the lips. The click of finger on wet flesh fills the room.

“Do you like looking at me?”

“Yes.” His speech is thick, like a drunken man’s.

“But you’re so used to it, aren’t you? Having women show you their private secrets on this couch.” Daniel says his real job is asking the hard questions. I’m enjoying this part, turning the tables.

“Not like this,” he says.

“But you’ve thought about it?” I want to hear him say yes. And I don’t.

He winces. “Yes, but not the way you think.” He keeps his eyes trained on my cunt as if he’s explaining himself to her. “It goes a long way back for me, too.”

“Why don’t you tell me all about it, Doctor?” I begin to rock my hips as I up the tempo on my jiggling finger.

“It’s funny, it was also summer vacation when I discovered my dad’s girlie magazine stash in the back of his closet. My parents were both at work and I sat there for hours, surrounded by his suits and shirts, the smell of his aftershave, sifting through my treasure.”

“Go on,” I breathe.

“I couldn’t believe it. All of those naked women, splayed out over satin cushions and brass beds, smiling out at me from fur rugs in fire-lit libraries. I remember one girl standing in front of a red velvet curtain, touching her fingertip to the water in a fish bowl that strategically shielded all but one thin crescent of blonde pubic hair. Of course I was turned on. My whole body felt like a huge, throbbing cock. But my head was swimming, too. With questions. What kind of woman would take off her clothes and let men see her? Did she like it? Did that water feel cool on her fingertip? I wanted more of her than flesh. I wanted to go deep inside her mind, her desire.”

I moan, low in my throat, even though I’ve stopped rubbing myself. Daniel’s words alone are enough to make my clit throb in sympathy and longing for that teenage boy with a hard-on in his parents’ darkened closet. As if I could go back and help him, answer all of his lusts with my own.

For the first time this evening I look straight into his eyes.

“Come inside now,” I say.

I expect hesitation. His chair is no more than five feet from the couch, but it marks the boundary between talk and touch, sacred territory here. But he surprises me by practically lunging forward, fumbling at his zipper as he kneels between my legs. He pulls out his cock, sunburn red and weeping a droplet of sea water. Cradling his tool in one hand, he aims carefully, then in another surprise move, thrusts all the way inside me in one stroke.

I grunt and strain forward to grind my pussy up against him, wrapping my legs around his buttocks. His finger dips between us to find my clit, but I shake my head. When I’m this turned on, I don’t need it.

“Pull up your blouse so I can see your tits.” I like the command in his voice. Apparently he can play Dr. Expert well enough when the mood strikes.

I yank the shirt up to my armpits. My breasts are swollen, mottled with berry juice stain.

“No bra, either, Emma? You do like to show off. And you know how much I like to watch.” Daniel smiles and takes one nipple in his mouth and feasts while he rolls the other between his fingers.

I sigh, almost a growl of pleasure. So many sensations, so many dreams fulfilled. Cool, distant Daniel now shaking and sweating, swallowing his moans so his colleagues won’t hear. My own body vibrating as he strums the magic strings that join my nipples to my clit. There’s nothing left to do but let go, bury my cries in his shoulder, come. Daniel’s deep, gliding thrusts tell me he’s right there with me. The couch joins in to make a threesome, squeaking faintly in release.

Daniel holds me close until our breathing is steady.

I glance over at the clock. Exactly forty-eight minutes from start to finish. A very productive hour indeed.

As we mop ourselves with the towel and straighten our clothes, I can’t help but notice how Daniel’s face glows, just the way it did back when we first met. We’d fuck for hours in his grad student dorm, stumbling out of bed at midnight to refuel on pancakes and coffee at the corner diner so we could fuck some more. These days he usually looks tired, with so many clients to see and problems to solve.

I finish buttoning my raincoat and smooth my hair. “One more thing before I go.”

He raises an eyebrow expectantly.

I walk to his desk, pick up the blind cord, and arrange it properly outside of the trash can.

“Details, Doctor, details. This has been driving me crazy for the whole hour.”

Daniel hooks an arm around me and gives me a quick kiss. “You are a very naughty girl. And always have been.”

“Does that mean I need a good spanking?” I wink.

He grins and slides his hand down over my ass.

I pull away, regretfully. “You know if I’m not home by six-thirty sharp, the nanny turns into a witch.”

He nods. I can almost see the mask settle back in place. Duty calls us both.

The hall is dark and empty. The air is thinner here, not like Daniel’s room, thick with confessions and tears, guilt and pain. Occasionally he talks about his clients—never by name of course—a particularly touching case or a humorous bit of dialogue to amuse me. Still, I can’t help but wonder about the things my husband will never tell, the secrets other women share with him, the ways they test him and touch him, if only with words.

Yet such things don’t bother me tonight as I float down the stairs, the taste of Daniel’s lips lingering in my mouth like fine fruit brandy. I step out on the porch and close the door behind me. Suddenly I realize I’m smiling, but I know exactly why. On this, I’m sure his clients would agree: a little therapy with Daniel always does you good.