The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Volume 3

The Shape of Cities by Maxim Jakubowski

She used to come with me to foreign cities.

The ways of lust were impenetrable as it turned us into involuntary and much incurious tourists. After all, we couldn’t quite spend the whole duration of every trip barricaded in our hotel room fucking like rabid rabbits, could we?

So, between the hours of sex, we walked, explored, I dived into any bookshop I would pass and she would buy lingerie (on my credit card), we ate too much, saw movies. The Grand Canal in Venice smelled; maybe it was because we were not in season; in the bay in Monterey the otters were silent; in Amsterdam, we had a rijstaffel which made our stomachs churn for hours later; in Barcelona, the Ramblas were overflowing with foreign soccer fans; in Brighton, mecca of dirty week-ends, television cameras were everywhere for a forthcoming party political conference as opposed to a blue movie capturing our sordid exploits, but somehow every city felt the same as it harboured our frantic fucks. They had no shape, just a strange presence dictated by the intensity of sex.

Of course, eventually, she tired of travel, of me.

All I now have left of her is this photograph. Black and white. Of a woman naked against a dark background. A hotel room, no doubt. It’s not even her, I am ashamed to say. Just an image in a book that somehow reminds me of her. I never had a talent for photography, couldn’t even master the simple art of photographing my lover by way of Polaroids. Sad, eh?

This is the way she looked as she stripped for me in a hotel room.

Maybe it was in Paris, a hotel on the rue de l’Odéon with wooden beams crisscrossing the rough texture of the walls and ceiling. Or then again it could have been the Gershwin Hotel, just off 5th Avenue in New York City, where the smile of a Picasso heroine illuminated the wall next to the bed and watched our love-making through the walls of darkness. Or whenever we also kept the light on. Maybe it was a small hotel in Amsterdam, windows overlooking a murky canal, with the noise of drunk revellers and cars parking keeping us awake at night. Oh yes, we frequented many hotels. Those sometimes elegant, often sordid last contemporary refuges of illicit sex. The one in Chicago which was being renovated and where she preferred to sleep in the second bed because I snored too much (in fact, the final hotel that harboured our pathetic affair; maybe the excuse was just an early sign of her fading interest in me), or the St Pierre on Burgundy Street in New Orleans, far enough from the hubbub of Bourbon Street, where I forgot to take her dancing (she only did in Chicago, but it was with other men).

Or the one whose memories I cherished best. Our marine and pastel-coloured room at the Grand Hotel in Séte, where the balcony looked out on quite another kind of canal, where local jousts on long boats took place at the weekend. A coastal port where she took a shine to the limping waiter who served us one evening in a seafood restaurant, and seriously suggested we should invite him back to the room later. Nothing happened, but for months on end after that I would fantasize wildly of watching her being fucked by another man and even got to the point of lining someone up when we next visited Manhattan, only to have to cancel it because she had her period that same week.

In my dreams I wasn’t even jealous to see her in the throes of pleasure as another man’s cock slowly entered her and I would listen to her moan and writhe, and watch in sheer fascination as her so pale blue eyes took on a glazed sheen. After our first time, as I walked her back to the train station, she had told me her partner would know immediately she had been with another because her eyes shone so much. No, I felt no jealousy at the idea of seeing her perform with another. It would be for my pleasure and edification. I would position her on all fours on top of the bed, her rump facing the door and would let my fingers slide across the cleft of her buttocks and dip into her wetness as I would introduce the stranger to the beauty, intricacies and secrets of her body. See how hot she is inside I would say, how that sweet cunt will grip your cock and milk it dry. I would be the director, set it all up, orchestrate their movements, stroke myself as her lips would tighten across his thick penis and take him all in, sucking away with the energy of despair (hadn’t I told you how good her blow-jobs were? she sucked with frantic energy as if her whole life depended on it but still retained that amused air of innocence in her eyes as she did so, demonstrating her sheer enjoyment of the art of fellatio, much as I hoped I did when I went down on her and tasted her and shook while the vibrations of her coming coursed through her whole body and moved on to my tongue, and heart, and soul, and cock).

So, she stripped for me in a hotel room. Now down to just her stockings. Delicately undulating, thrusting her pelvis out, shaking her delicate breasts, allowing her hanging arms freedom, her hands caressing her rump in a parody of sexiness, just like a stripper in a movie. No music, just us in the otherwise empty room. A jolt, a jump, a shimmy, there just like Madonna in that video, just a tad vulgar but sufficiently provocative, there exuberant like Kylie Minogue, but never as frantic as Jennifer Lopez or Destiny’s Child.

And I drank in every inch of her body. The pale flesh, the moles and blemishes, the deep sea of those eyes which never reached bottom, the gently swaying breasts, the ash-blonde hair now growing down to her shoulders, the trimmed triangle of darker pubic curls through which I could easily see the gash of her nacreous entrance, the thicker folds of flesh where her labia, lower down, grew ever so meaty and protruded, the square regal expanse of her arse which looked so good in the thong briefs we had purchased together at Victoria’s Secrets on Broadway.

Then she would look down and see me, no doubt with tongue hanging out and my erection straining against the dark material of my slacks, and she would smile, and my heart would melt. And though I right then wanted to fuck her until we would both be raw and out of breath, I would also strangely feel so full of kindness, a sensation that made me feel like a better man altogether.

This body I have known so intimately that I could describe every minutiae of her sighs, the look in her eyes when she is being entered, the stain on the left side of her left breast, the dozen variations in colour of the skin surrounding the puckered entrance of her anus and the hundred shades of red and pink that scream at me when I separate her lower lips and open her up. And the memories come running back, like a hurricane, rapid, senseless, brutal. Of the good times, and the bad ones too. Of the time we went naked on a beach swept by a cold wind. The visit to the Metropolitan Museum when she felt so turned on by the Indian and Oceania erotic sculptures that we almost fucked in the nearby restroom (I was the one who felt it would be too risky and by the time we had reached the hotel again, the mood had evaporated…). The e-mail informing me she had shaved her pussy and then a few days later another terse communication informing me that she had found a new lover and my anger knowing he was the one who could now see her bald mons in all its erotic splendour. The first time she allowed me to fuck her, doggy-style, without a condom, watching myself buried inside her and moving to and fro, our juices commingling. The evening we ate oysters, she for the first time, and she recognised their flavour when she swallowed my come some hours later in the hotel room.

That hotel room where she stripped for my entertainment and amusement, eyes lowered, a sober gold necklace around her slender neck, where once down to her fishnet stockings she slowly moved towards me – I was sitting on the edge of the bed – and, the delicate smell of her cunt just inches away from my face stepped onto the bed cover, towered over me and opened her legs wide, the obscene and wonderful vision of her visibly moist gash just a couple of centimetres from my wide-open eyes, teasing me, offering herself, my naked lover, my private stripper, my nude love.

“You like it, Mister?” she asks, a giggle stuck in the back of her throat.

I nod approvingly.

She lowers her hand and, digging two opposing fingers into her wetness, she widens herself open.

“You want, Sir?” she inquires of me.

I smile with detached and faint indifference. Somehow come up with some relevant joke which I can’t for the life of me recall now. She bursts out laughing. Once upon a time, I could make her laugh like no other. I warn her to temper her hilarity and remind her of the time on the Boulevard St Germain when she had actually peed a little in the convulsions of laughter. She hiccups and lowers herself on me. The hypnotic warmth of her naked body against me. I am still fully clothed.

All now intolerable memories, of hotels, of jokes that were once funny.

Now, too much has happened since the times we were together and happy in our simple, sexual way, and she wants us to be friends, and no longer lovers. There has been a Dutch man, married, now divorcing, a Korean with dark skin and God knows who else. And finally I am jealous. Like hell. Surely, she insists, we can still have times together, just be friends, no sex, it’s better that way. How, I ask her, but then I would, wouldn’t I? How can we spend days in foreign cities, share a hotel room and ignore the fact her body and her eyes and her smell and her words and her cunt just shout out sex to me and I know I couldn’t accept that ridiculous compact of just friendship any more.

You can go with other men, I say, and I will not blame you, hold it against you, I understand that I am not always available and that you are young and have needs. But she knows I am lying inside. That I would say anything to have her back.

In hotel rooms.

Stripping for me.

Laughing with me. Laughing at me.

In darkness she moves; I am deaf, can’t hear the music she is dancing so sensually to. Maybe a blues, a song by Christine McVie or Natalie Merchant. Or “Sing” by Travis. Or maybe it’s Sarah McLachlan’s “Tumbling Towards Ecstasy” (the Korean man who later abandoned her for a Russian woman, after breaking her fragile heart, had introduced her to that particular music; ironically a man of melodic taste…). Or again that Aimee Mann song from Magnolia (we saw the movie together; oh, how she enjoyed seeing movies with me). I hear nothing. Can only try and guess the tune from the languorous movements of her body as every piece of clothing is shed to reveal the treasures of her flesh, her intimacy. The crevice of her navel, the darkened tips of her nipples (so devoid of sensitivity she would always remind me), her throat, the luminosity of her face, her youth, her life.

I open my mouth but I can’t even hear myself saying “please” or “come back” or “forgive me”.

She dances, my erotic angel, my lost lover.

The silent words in me increase in loudness, but she is lost in the music and no longer even sees her audience. Behind her, the hotel walls are all black and she is frozen like a photograph, her pallor in sharp contrast to the surroundings. Stripper in hotel room. A study in light and darkness.

Like in a nightmare, my throat constricts and words fail me totally. I shed a single tear of humid tenderness, all too aware of the fact that I will never again be able to afford a private stripper. Let alone a hotel room.