The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Volume 3

Diver’s Moon by E. M. Arthur

My oncologist squeezed my hand and pronounced me in full remission. “I’m sorry, Skyler,” he said, “about Danni.”

Danni had been my live-in nurse when I was too weak to get myself to the john. She was a youthful cliche of blonde, buxom beauty. My wife, Andrea, spent a lot of time with her. When my body betrayed my marriage, Andrea found comfort in Danni’s arms.

“I couldn’t have known when I recommended her,” the doctor said. His narrow face went red with embarrassment. His hand sweated in mine.

He’d saved my life, but what did he know about my missing soul? What did he know about losing my body, a body that could grab the rings and rotate an iron cross into a dead still handstand? What did he know about watching your wife make love to another woman as a gift to you when the best you could manage was to hold your limp member in an emaciated hand?

“No,” I said. “You couldn’t have known she was a lesbian.”

He pulled his hand back and hid it in the pocket of his smock. “I knew about that,” he said. “It just never occurred to me that she and your wife would, well, leave you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Took me by surprise too.” We stared at each other for a long awkward moment.

I broke the silence. “Thank you, doctor,” I said.

“Maybe you should get away for a while. Take a good long vacation. Go someplace new, someplace where there are no reminders you were sick.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Someplace where you can enjoy being healthy.”

I nodded, left his office and headed home to face my emptiness alone.

I pulled my Subaru wagon to a full stop at the intersection where Martin’s Court crosses Black Diamond Way, the street that ends in my cul-de-sac.

Dark windows from across the paved circle stared at me. My grey, split-level ranch nestled in behind my weed-covered gardens and my brown, gone-to-seed lawn, accused me of failures. I sat in the August heat for a moment, white-knuckling the wheel. Hot beads of sweat rolled down my neck and under the collar of my shirt.

I couldn’t pull across the street and drive up to that house of betrayals. When I was 34, I had a thriving business coaching gymnastics. My teams were winning. My body was my best asset.

At 35, I was old. I’d lost nearly a hundred pounds lying in a bed in that accusing house. I’d vomited in every room. My body had betrayed me, then the insurance company dumped me. I’d had to sell the gym. Finally, there was Andrea and the sponge bath that had gone too far.

Andrea only wanted to help me. My nurse had wanted to help us both.

I banged my head against the steering wheel. I wanted to drive the memory of that night from my head. It was too late. The images, the smells, the sounds rose up and filled me again. Danni had come to my room. She lit candles and burned incense. She put a card table beside the bed, draped it in a linen cloth, and set out a basin of warm water, some sponges, and scented massage oils. She pulled her blonde hair up and clasped it with a tortoise shell clip, then she took off her skirt and her white, button-down blouse. Beneath, she wore only her tan, cotton underwear, and a blue sport bra. “Don’t want to get these wet,” she said, dropping her blouse to the floor.

She’d given me sponge baths before, but she had never taken off any clothing. “Andrea?” I asked.

“She’ll be along in a minute.” Danni sat down on the bed. Long-fingered hands dipped a sponge in the basin of warm water. She squeezed the sponge until it stopped dripping. Then she pulled back my sheet.

Shame for my ruined body filled me. I felt like the sponge in her hand, like an empty, seeping, brownish lump.

Andrea came in from the bathroom. Andrea. Dark and succulent, my wife, my friend. She was half Mestizo, and her skin was molten bronze. Her dark eyes caught the flickering candlelight. She wore my green terrycloth robe.

“Danni’s going to show me how to give you a special sponge bath,” she said. She opened her robe and let it fall. White silk panties, stockings, garters, and bra made her skin all the more exotic. I wanted to lift a hand and touch her. I wanted to push Danni aside and pull my wife to me, to give her my love.

I tried to sit up. Danni’s hand was firm. She used the sponge to press me back. She stroked my neck. “There, now,” she said. “You relax and enjoy. Let us do the work here. We’re taking care of you, not the other way around.”

Andrea sat on the side of the bed beside pale Danni. Andrea leaned over and kissed me. Her breasts, cupped in white silk, pressed against me. Her breath was warm and sweet. The perfume I’d given her for our last anniversary promised me her love.

“Like this,” Danni said. She handed Andrea a second sponge. She wrapped her pale hands around Andrea’s dark fingers. Together, they squeezed the sponge. “Keep enough water to dampen the skin,” Danni whispered. “You don’t want the sponge to scratch.”

I watched my wife do as she was told. I felt her sponge on my neck, on my face. Relax, I told myself. This may be the last time you experience anything like this. God, I tried to relax. But part of me wanted to rise, to give, to be more than a recipient.

Danni guided Andrea through my cleansing. It was warm, long and slow. Danni wrapped her arms around Andrea to better guide her hands. Danni’s white arms embraced my wife from behind. “Can you feel the warmth?” she whispered to my wife. Andrea looked into my eyes. She seemed to be asking me if I was OK. I wanted her to be happy, to have what I couldn’t give her. I forced a smile.

Andrea nodded.

Danni kissed her neck, nuzzled her beneath the ear, beneath the dark, silken ringlets of hair. I saw the goose flesh rise on Andrea’s arms.

I moaned. I reached for myself.

They laughed. Together, they moved me farther onto the bed.

Danni lifted a bottle of oil from the table. She opened it and poured it onto Andrea’s open palms. The scent of patchouli and vanilla filled the room. Danni worked the oil into Andrea’s hands and forearms. She placed Andrea’s hands on my shrunken chest. Andrea slipped a leg over me. She sat above me like she had so many times. She looked down at me, her eyes both sad and filled with desire. Deep inside her dark eyes, I saw pity. God, that hurt more than anything else I saw that night.

Danni worked on my feet, slowly massaging, oiling, and working her up my calves and thighs.

I watched Andrea’s face. I felt Danni’s hands between my legs. I prayed I would respond. Then I realized Danni wasn’t reaching for me.

Andrea gasped and arched her back.

Her bra fell away, released from behind. Her oiled hand went to one breast. A pale hand came around her from behind and took her other breast.

I felt Danni moving her fingers between my legs, beneath Andrea.

Andrea leaned forward, giving Danni more room to work.

“Andrea?” I asked.

“Oh, shit!” she said.

“Here,” Danni said. She pulled Andrea off my hips. She helped her out of her panties and stockings. Andrea tugged at Danni’s sports bra and panties.

I rolled on my side, trying to reach for my wife.

Danni pushed me back. She took my limp member in her oiled hand. “He wants to help,” Danni said. She helped Andrea lift a leg and slip it over my oiled chest. She carefully settled my wife into position so my tongue could reach her rear. “Gently,” Danni said. “You take it easy.”

I nodded.

Danni put a pillow under my head. She slipped a finger into Andrea. When she pulled it out, she let me lick it. It tasted of oil and the familiar spice of my wife. I closed my eyes and savoured the taste.

Danni laughed. Then she disappeared toward the foot of the bed. I began to tongue Andrea’s ass. I did what I could for her, but I knew her moans of pleasure were not from my feeble tongue.

I felt Danni’s mouth on my cock. Oiled hands massaged my sac. A finger slipped between my cheeks. God, it should have been heaven. If my body had not betrayed me, it would have been.

My neck got sore. I had to let my head fall back, had to let Andrea go. Eventually, Danni gave up on making me hard.

Andrea turned herself around. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “It’s OK. It’s not your fault.” She kissed me then started to lift herself off me, but she stopped, straddling me, ass high, supported by one extended leg, kneeling on the other. Her eyes rolled upward and her back arched. “Shit,” she said. “Danni. Oh shit.”

Between Andrea’s dark legs, I saw white hands pinching nipples on white breasts glistening with oil. Danni’s blond hair had come loose from her clip. It brushed at those hands and breasts. Her face was in my wife’s ass. The wrinkles on the bridge of Andrea’s nose, the way her eyes rolled upward, the tension in her belly muscles. I could see my wife was about to come.

Poised above me like that, she screamed a woman’s name. I wanted to be happy for her release. I wanted to be a man who loved his wife so much that he felt joy in her pleasure even when he couldn’t be the source of it.

I wasn’t the man I wanted to be.

Danni and Andrea rolled away from me. They made love on the bed beside me, oblivious to my pain.

It was the last time I saw Andrea nude, the last time I touched her, tasted her.

Andrea and Danni had stayed until I started gaining weight, until I was working for the gym part time. They had helped each other through until my hair came in enough to cut close for that Bruce Willis look Andrea said was sexy. The day I managed my first pull-up, I came home to an empty house. Andrea and Danni took my dog, the living room furniture, and exactly half my remaining bank account.

I continued my recovery without them, at least physically. I fought until I could do 20 pull-ups. I cursed my wind and skinny legs until I could run for half-an-hour. I fought to improve, to live. Now, I was cured. The fight was over.

Without Andrea, the fight had been all I had.

I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel between my hands and started to shake. I was alive. I was coming home a cured man. It was supposed to be a wonderful moment, a celebration.

Instead, I had no idea who I was. My new life was empty. My body betrayed me. It left me with a wiry, stranger’s body. My wife betrayed me. She left me a house full of ugly memories.

An impatient driver behind me laid on the horn.

I yanked the wheel left and headed for the interstate.

Three days later, I was in Glenwood Spring, Colorado, standing on top of the ladder of a three-metre diving board over an Olympic-sized pool. I hadn’t stood on a board since diving in high school. My skin was oil slick from the minerals in the hot spring-fed pool. A ballet of steam danced across the surface of the water below. The sun was high. A fresh mountain breeze caressed my chest and arms.

The view could touch the soul, if a man had a soul to touch.

In front of me, three wings of chalet-style resort hotel wrapped around the steaming pool. Beyond and above the red-tiled roofs, snowy Rocky Mountain spires reached for the belly of a sky deeper and bluer than the pool below. Even I paused to stare.

“You afraid of heights?” the woman on the ladder behind me said.

I stepped forward onto the fibreglass diving board, then I turned to face her. “Sorry,” I said. “The mountains are so…” I let it trail off, suddenly aware of how skinny I felt, of how explanations had become so complex, so tiring.

She smiled. “I know,” she said. “It’s a stunning view.”

The dancing freckles on her smile-wrinkled nose held my gaze the same way the view had. I hadn’t seen a woman smile like that since my first few weeks with Andrea, since before…

She stepped up onto the board with me. Her dark hair was wet and smoothed to her shoulders. Her dun eyes flashed with humour under the high mountain sun. The lines near her eyes suggested maybe 30 years of well-lived life. Her dark-blue one-piece was a swimmer’s suit, not a sunbather’s advertisement for attention. She reminded me of a sleek, happy river otter in a Speedo.

Her smile faded. She cocked her head to the side, pulled her hair away from her neck, and twisted it until water dripped onto the board. “You don’t want to stand up here too long,” she said. “The breeze is cool, but that sun’ll give you cancer.”

I almost laughed. She wouldn’t have understood. I wanted to say something else, to say something that would make her smile again. But I knew better. My blond hair was still close-cut. I knew I was still pale. I was getting stronger, but I looked more like a tofu-fed yoga instructor than the pommel horse, rings, and high-bar man I had been.

I wanted to run and jump from the board. I wanted to hide in the deep blue water.

“I’ve never seen anything -”

“New eyes on ancient beauty,” she interrupted. The otter’s smile returned.

I nodded.

“It reminds me to appreciate the things I see every day,” she said.

“You live here?”

“Assistant manager,” she said. “You going to dive?”

Dive? I was on a three-metre board for the first time in maybe 17 years. An otter woman was flirting with me. The sky was suddenly bluer and the air colder. A breeze swept in from the snowy peaks. Gooseflesh covered me.

“Breeze makes me a little cold up here,” she said. Goose flesh rippled up her legs and under her suit. Nipples suddenly stood from the modest rounds of her breasts. She crossed her arms. Her breasts swelled.

My chest and legs were chilled, but my crotch moved, stretched, and warmed for the first time since… I wanted to reach out and touch those hardening peaks.

She caught me staring. Her smile was gone.

I knew the flirt we had shared was gone, too. “You go ahead,” I said. I stepped aside.

She strode to the end of the board, tugging at the bottom of her suit to seat it under the muscled curve of her ass.

At the end of the board, she turned around. The otter’s grin came back. She nodded to me. Then her eyes changed. The spark left, replaced by a distant focus, by a look that turned inward, that found some quiet centre.

I knew that look. She was about to mount the beam. She was going to spike a new vault. She was fully in herself, and she was beautiful.

She lifted her arms in a ritual of balance I knew well. She set the toes of her right foot, then her left, on the very edge of the board. The mountains beyond her seemed to lean inward, anticipating her, preparing to spot her if needed. I wondered what it would be like to put my hands on those hips, to hold her aloft, to help her move through lithe, stretching tumbles.

She tested the bounce of the board.

Automatically, I stepped back onto the ladder so my weight wouldn’t kill her spring.

I watched her breathe. Her breasts grew, stretched her suit, then relaxed. She lifted on toe tip. A muscled line appeared in her thigh, pointing upward to the hem of her suit. The blue fabric wrapped her flexing abs and curved under her, gripping her mons and cradling her sex in mineral dampness. She dropped her weight through her heels. The board flexed low, then rose. She lifted upward. Glossy thighs snapped up against perfect breasts; muscled arms embraced bent knees. She spun backward, hair spraying. She had more than a full rotation before she dropped below the level of the board. I saw her otter’s eyes flash, and I swear she winked at me.

Two-and-a-half reverse. She stretched full out and her hard body slipped through mineral mists and disappeared without a splash.

She came up. The breeze shifted the mist. I saw her breasts above the water, the flash of her smile. She teased me with a long, slow backstroke toward the shallow end of the pool.

She was challenging me.

I stepped up onto the board. It had been a long time. I wasn’t in shape for it. I considered a simple jump. It might be less humiliating than a failed dive in front of her.

Forgotten pride rose and took hold of my mind.

When she dove, I’d felt the board rebound. I knew the bounce. I knew I could manage something simple, something that at least showed some control, some training.

I stepped out to my mark. I checked the water. She was there. Steam rose off the surface around her. She was watching, treading water, waiting.

I locked my eyes on the snow peaks. I took my breath. I let it go. The breeze was cool, the mountains silent. In the distance a hawk circled, sun glinting off its red tail.

One step. The board bent.

Two. The rhythm of the flex.

Three. Lift the knee and rise.

My body remembered. In the moment I touched down on the board to take my full bounce, I knew my new body would give me its full measure. I was, in that moment, fully in myself for the first time in over a year. I felt the grit of the board, the bend in fibreglass and knees, and I knew I had what I needed to make the otter woman laugh. Safe was no longer part of the dive. In my rise, I rolled my shoulder inward and crossed an arm over my belly. I had a full rotation with a full spin as I passed the level of the board. I carried the momentum into my second flip and spin. I nailed a double double and sliced the warm water toes-on.

I slipped deep through the silken water. My feet touched the bottom of the pool. I let myself fold downward through the caressing warmth. For a long, silent moment I hovered, fetal, near the bottom. Above me, liquid blue rippled and soothed. Tears cooled the warm water on my eyes.

The moment was forever, and it was less than the time it takes for breath to call for the next breath. I pulled my feet under me and pushed against the concrete floor. I broke the surface, took air, and looked for the otter woman.

At the shallow end of the pool, she climbed an aluminum ladder. I kicked into a breaststroke, not daring to dip my head into the water, not wanting to lose sight of her.

She stopped near a deck chair and picked up a hotel towel. She began drying her hair. She glanced my way. Her eyes flashed. Her smile played hide-and-seek behind the dabbing towel.

I kicked harder.

She turned away and padded across the concrete.

“Otter!” I called.

She disappeared into the shadows of the hotel.

I followed as far as the first shadowy intersection of corridors, but she was gone.

I returned to the pool and did several more dives. They were adequate, even skilled. My time in the gym had given me a new kind of flexibility and strength. Even so, without her watching, none of the dives held the magic of the first.

I fantasized that I might see her at dinner in the restaurant. I let myself linger there for hours, but she didn’t appear. Later, in bed, I imagined us together in a tract house in Illinois, or in a cabin in Oregon, or in any of half-a-dozen fantasy homes where I thought her strength and smile might fit.

It was near 1 a.m. when moonlight slipped into my room and bathed my face. I decided it was ridiculous to stare at the ceiling wishing for the touch of a stranger with an otter’s smile. I got out of bed, splashed cold water on my face, put on my suit and headed for the pool.

I ignored the hours signs and climbed over the damp wrought-iron railing. Thick mist blanketed the water, tendrils snaked upward, tickling the belly of the cool night. Moon-silvered ripples invited me to swim with them beneath the teasing mist.

I dropped my towel and climbed the tower to the board. I looked up to the moon and thanked it for the stranger’s smile and the dive earlier in the day.

One.

Two.

Knee high.

Flex and stretch. Spin and tuck. Extend and reach for warm and wet. Penetrate, slip deep, smooth and slick. I slowed and smiled in the warm deeps. I snapped my hips to spin myself in the warm wetness. The silky mineral water kissed every inch of exposed skin. One long stroke. Another, and I was moving slow and weightless beneath the misty surface.

I broke surface and rolled onto my back. The board above me still shook from my dive.

She appeared there, tall and silvered in the moonlight.

One step.

Two.

Knee high, and she flew, stretched upward, arms out. Long, arched, sensual, and simple – she dove.

In the shallower end of the pool, my toes found the grit of the concrete bottom. She surfaced three feet from me. Through mist and moonlight, nose just above the surface, she pulled herself effortlessly toward me.

I backed away. She was too close. I was suddenly unsure, afraid. I was sick. No. I’d been sick.

She reached. One hand touched my chest.

I remembered Andrea and Danni. I remembered my failure.

Her other hand slid along the ridges of my belly. The root of my spine thrilled to her touch. My suit suddenly felt tight. I wanted her touch, knew she was what I had come to Glenwood to find. As certainly as my body had known how to dive in the afternoon sun, I knew I could reach out to her. I knew how to fold her into my arms, how to bring my lips to hers and how to slide thigh along thigh in the silken warmth of the pool.

We kissed. She tasted of the lime and sulphur of the pool. She tasted of heat and hunger. We parted to breathe. The mists surrounded us. She ran her hand up my thigh, across my bulging suit and up my belly to my neck. “Lean, sky dancer,” she whispered.

“Otter smile,” I said.

“I like that,” she said. We kissed again, turning slowly in the water.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

I slipped the strap of her suit from her shoulder and put my lips to the pulse at her neck. The mineral slickness, the warm water, her arching and her tiny moan all filled me. I bit lightly. I teased at her pearl earring with my tongue.

She laughed and twisted in my arms. Her hand slipped behind my thigh, slid upward, and gripped my ass. She pulled herself against me, and we fell back into the water, sinking slowly, kissing, rolling in the water and molding flesh to flesh.

She slid my suit off. I helped her with hers. Somehow, we knew when the other needed air. Like dolphins, we sank, surfaced, breathed, and let ourselves sink into the embrace of the healing waters again.

Slowly, we danced our wet dance. My mouth found her lips, her fingertips, her breasts, her belly. We touched bottom and rose again to breathe.

Sinking, her lips found my ear, the nape of my neck. Her fingers wrapped themselves in my hair. I dove deeper and bit at her thigh and traced my tongue along the mineral slickness of her outer lips, then the otter-musk sweetness within. I stayed there, tasting her, searching her for deeper mysteries, for watery pleasure. Her fingernails caught in my scalp. She writhed and shook. I plunged my tongue deeper, driving inward to taste her primal wetness fully.

She bucked against me and pulled at my head.

I broke away, and we rose to the surface to breathe.

In mist and moonlight, we kissed. Her hunger matched mine. Her soft hand pulled at my hardness. For a moment, I was surprised I was hard. It had been so long. Then she guided me to her, guided me from warm mineral water into her deep, healing wetness. She clasped her legs around mine and our hips found a rhythm that rotated us in the water, spun us one around the other, slowly sinking and rising and sinking again.

For minutes or for hours, we were one body, one soul writhing in primal waters, surging forward toward an epiphany of life. Our rhythms grew urgent. We sank deep into the silvery warmth. We pulled at one another, spinning faster, sharing what breath we had. We both knew we needed to rise for air. Instead, we pulled together tighter, harder, and we spun in liquid darkness one last time, separating our lips, screaming underwater, freeing joy and precious air in rising torrents of bubbles.

Gasping and laughing, we floundered to the surface. Together and silent in the moon-silvered water, we retrieved our suits then stroked to the edge of the pool. She climbed the ladder first, and I nipped her rear as it passed near my face. I followed her to her towel, and we slowly and gently dried one another.

My belly pressed to her back for warmth, I towelled her moonlit breasts. “What’s your name, Otter Smile?” I asked.

“Cassey.” She put her hands on mine and moved my towelling lower. “I like Otter Smile,” she said.

“My name’s Skyler,” I told her.

“You’re a hell of a diver,” she said.

“You know how to move pretty well yourself,” I said. She turned, and I dabbed her cheek with the towel. “Think you’ll be able to sleep now?” I asked.

She took the towel, and we kissed. “I’m not planning to,” she said. She took my hand, and we headed for the hotel.

Before we entered the hotel, I looked back at the mist-covered pool and thanked the moon, the mist, and the diving board. My body had never betrayed me. It fought. It brought me to Glenwood. I’d been reborn, given a diver’s body. I was beginning my new life, a life that included laughter and love in the arms of a woman with an otter’s smile.