The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Volume 3

Drift by Christopher Hart

It was a hot summer night and I was at a party in a large, dark garden somewhere, nowhere in particular. The hosts might have called it London, only because they didn’t know what else to call it. But it wasn’t London. The garden was too big.

It was later summer, everything sighing and dying, the most lethargic and dreamy time of year. BMWs and Jags snoozed and purred on the gravel drive round the front, and round the back, light spilled out from the open windows and across the lawn and caught our champagne glasses as we stood around in the darkness, the air filled with murmurous insect voices. I couldn’t even be bothered to drink much, and I never did like champagne. Filled you up with gas, made you feel like you were about to take off. I was very bored.

Then I saw a girl stepping out of the french windows and coming across the lawn. She was striking rather than pretty, in red heels and a figure-hugging long red dress and very white arms and shoulders and long red hair. I hate that look. And despite the loud, loud colour signals, she walked quite shyly, head down. It was obvious I had to go and talk to her.

“You don’t have a drink.”

“My boyfriend’s just getting me one,” she said, not even registering me, nodding back inside. Perfect.

She relented a little. “A cocktail of some sort, so he says.”

“Ah, so – is he a cocktail waiter by profession?”

She gave me a look and something inside me whimpered. I quite enjoyed it really. “No,” she said, very slowly. “He works in LA. Title credits.”

I was beginning to like her. “What, you mean the lettering? How to spell Nicole Kidman and things?”

She ignored that one entirely, looked away, and lit a cigarette. I was really beginning to like her. Then she looked back. “And if you dare to say I remind you of Nicole Kidman I’ll put my heel through your foot.”

“As if,” I said. “There’s nothing sexy about Nicole Kidman.” No response. “So he’s out there a lot, is he? In LA? Mixing his cocktails? Leaving you all alone?”

She looked very, very bored. I felt quite perky now. We stood a while longer in companionably mutual dislike, plus something else. Finally she muttered “fuck” and dropped her cigarette and went back inside. She came back with a glass in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other.

“No cocktail?”

“Seems he’s too busy,” she said. And then, ah! Like a little beam of light between a woman’s thighs, she looked up and smiled. Admittedly it was a smile made up about half and half of unhappiness and malevolence. But it would have to do.

There weren’t many guests left outside, and we were at the end of the garden in deep gloom, when the music changed. “When a Man Loves a Woman”, of all things. So I slipped my right arm round her waist and laid my left hand on her cool white shoulder and pulled her as close to me as I dared and we started swaying. She didn’t resist. Although the way she continued to swig from the bottle while we danced seemed to me kind of detached. I felt myself hardening already and pressed myself closer. She ignored it, continued to swig from the bottle.

Over her shoulder, the other guests all looked like they were in black. And as if they were frozen, not moving, unable to see us back here. I felt suddenly hot. Something was wrong, or very, very right. Something was out of control, anyhow. I leaned down and kissed her. She kissed me back. We were like figures in a painting coming mysteriously to life and beginning to move, while everyone else was still and silent, dressed in black. And so cold.

But her small waist was warm under my hands; hot, even. We kissed and revolved anti-clockwise and nobody saw us, noticed us. We would have been more subtle, teasing, educated in our kisses, if we had pulled back, taken breath, then kissed some more. But we couldn’t do that, couldn’t pull apart, remained caught; there was only one kiss between us and we couldn’t escape.

The first I knew of it, the pressure on the soles of my feet had gone. Like your health, it is not something you notice till it goes. There was no pressure there, just loose, bewildered blood. Her feet too were dangling free in the air, and kicked lightly against mine. We were six inches off the grass, a foot, two feet and rising. We were also drifting dangerously towards the house.

“Um…” she said, cautious, English. “Is this…?”

I was cool about it. “Gravity seems to have failed us.” I didn’t feel cool about it all. This was supposed to be a hollow seduction, nothing more. Not this, not now. Not this serious. I kissed her some more. She pulled back again.

“I think this is quite serious,” she said, looking down between our feet. We were now above the guests’ heads. No one had noticed us yet. But if one of them should just happen to glance up…

“They’ll see us,” she hissed. “And it’ll really freak them.”

I don’t think we cared. There didn’t seem to be much we could do except kiss again. I wrapped her in my arms and slid my hand down over her bum, the fabric of her dress cool to the touch but her flesh so warm beneath. Her eyes opened, upturned, beseeching, needy, and closed again. We both opened our eyes again when we bumped up against the side of the house. About twenty feet up. I grazed my knuckles slightly on the brickwork, and the bottle she was still holding clanked noisily.

“Jesus,” she whispered.

But it was too late for that. I pressed her against the wall and dropped my hand down between us and pinched her breast so lightly she didn’t even gasp, but her eyes flared wide. We began to slide upwards again.

The light was on in the bathroom and we were heading straight for it, like insects illuminated. I loved her face then, and my hand already loved the giving curve of her waist. We pushed off from the wall and floated past the window. Inside there was a girl on the loo and another standing nearby, gossiping. Ideally, I suppose they would have been going for it too, if this was just another erotic dream. But it wasn’t.

She managed to lodge the champagne bottle in the guttering, and then we pushed off harder, out over the lawn again, and started to pull each other’s clothes off. I had her dress rucked up around her waist and her knickers down to her knees, floating back, my face buried between her thighs, when she whispered urgently about…

It was true. I couldn’t just drop them, they could land on somebody’s head below. I stuffed them in my jacket pocket and she began to unbuckle my trousers. We were drifting towards a tree, a big old copper beech.

Half naked now, we slid in among the covering leaves, which rasped and tickled against our bare hot skin. In another month or two the leaves would brown and fade and crisp but now they were their rich summer copper and soft and generous as skin. We drifted in, scraping our bare limbs on the bark, past caring, wondering if those down below would see the shimmy of the branches, hear the gasps from above.

We draped our clothes over the black branches as we went past, tucked my shoes away in a cleft, but I made her keep the red heels on. Some things never change, even in zero gravity.

For a while I held us steady with my hands on a branch above, and she spread out in front of me on a wider branch and I slipped straight into her, she leaned back taut, unable to fall if she tried, I fucked her in slow steady strokes, and then I let go of the branch and she wrapped herself around me and we rose higher, up through the last thin top leaves and out into the night sky.

There was no wind, or we could feel none. We just drifted. In a hot air balloon you never feel the wind, because you travel exactly at its speed. Maybe that was us. Our discarded clothes lay on the branches below, flirting with the wind, but we couldn’t feel it. We rose higher.

Instead of the wind I had her white limbs wrapping around me. The moon was a black disc with a white splinter on its back, and, above the street lights, we could now see all the stars. And looking down, we could still see the guests on the lawn, a vertical view of the tops of their heads and sometimes their feet poking out below. She whispered, “There’s my boyfriend,” but it was a hollow word now and didn’t carry.

Below us the town was laid out like an illuminated map, parks and gardens and cats under the cars. We could see it all. Though in the east already the night was fading away, and before long we’d have to come down. Brush down past the swaying branches, scramble for our cold clothes, nod our goodbyes. But not for now, not yet, not while I was still inside her and she was arched back from me and I leaned down and took each breast in my mouth in turn, not yet, trapped in a dream of flying and no desire to escape or come down at all.