The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

PRENUPTIALS by Lucy Taylor

IN HER DREAM, the witches bend over her cradle singing a lullaby. The words change, but the meaning is always the same: men are evil and lust-crazed. Fantasies of brute power lurk behind their avuncular smiles. Women exist to be demeaned and defiled and destroyed – the phallus is the sword that a woman falls on when she decides to kill herself.

We tell you about these terrible things only to protect you, coo the witches. Only because we love you and wish you to come to no harm.

In another land, the witches might have spread her legs and carved away her clitoris and labia. These hags do their mischief with loving lies and lewd caresses.

But you must never want these men, they croon as they gaze at her – so young and promising, her whole life spread out before her – with eyes made dead by jealousy. You must never want to be the object of their lust.

No good girl ever wants this.

And so is laid the curse.

There are good men in the city where she grows up, goes to school, and studies painting. Kind and generous, nurturing men. She meets them/likes them/goes to movies and to dinner with them, but she cannot recognize them as potential mates. For it is not these men that make her moist and swollen as she flies toward them like a heat-seeking missile. These men don’t give her nightmares from which she wakes up wet. They don’t make her heart brake to a skidding stop and cause her blood to whip and flutter like it’s full of tiny electric eels.

It’s the men the witches told her she must never want that make her feel like that.

She doesn’t realize this is what she’s looking for until she finds him.

She meets him at a meeting for people like herself who suffer from addiction problems. She never expected to find this kind of man at such a meeting. For aren’t these men in recovery? Isn’t theirs an enlightened masculinity, strong yet sensitive to women’s needs? The kind of men that make good friends, but never lovers? She doesn’t even permit herself to think of sex when she sits in the meeting rooms – she thinks that would be wrong. She crosses her legs and neuters herself and assumes everyone else does the same.

But from the first words they exchange, there is an uncanny link between them, the kind of instant empathy that, if they were into New Age beliefs, might lead them to conclude they’d shared a previous lifetime. Their eyes lock with a click like handcuffs closing. No bombsquad could defuse such incendiary chemistry. Right away they guess each other’s secret song. For a band of witches presided at his cribside, too, only their lullaby was different and their curse was for not only him, but for his future mate: women want only one thing – to be defiled, debased, destroyed. A woman’s submissiveness is the yardstick by which a man measures his phallus.

But you must never want to do such things, they sang as they caressed his baby penis. Good boys don’t.

And you must never want this.

And so it is lust at first glance, rivetting and irrevocable and, after a few exchanges, he follows her out to her car.

Eyes her up and down as if she’s something shiny in a gemstore window and he’s about to smash the glass to get to her.

“Do you have any clothes you wouldn’t mind having destroyed?”

She meets his black ice gaze. “Why?”

“Because I want to rip them off you.”

She smiles and shivers, slides into her car.

But the game’s begun. The distant noise she hears is the sound of witches howling.

A day or two later, their enactment of the curse is well under way. She sprawls in his bed, limbs akimbo, her brain on hold as she gazes at this source of her enchantment. He is hirsute and sinewy, virile and veined, she can barely get all of him down her throat. When she thinks of having him inside her, her pussy grips and pulses like the mouth of a child that hasn’t been fed.

“This doesn’t feel like a fling,” he says. “I’ve never wanted anyone so much. I think I’m falling in love with you.”

She nods and murmurs that she feels the same, although since meeting him, the night terrors from her childhood have come back. She’s seen him dip his cock in poison before he puts it in her mouth.

He pulls her to him, folds her flesh against him like a silky garment. He closes his fist in her hair.

“I’m not letting you go. Understand? I’m never letting you go.”

Her body’s reaction to this mix of menace and endearment is so intense that it temporarily obliterates the power of thought. Her inner muscles start to clench and unclench; the motion travels to the muscles in her belly, which start to undulate. It’s like giving birth in reverse – she wants to pull him in, possess him as utterly, as wantonly as he now possesses her.

He hovers at her entrance, then plunges in and halts. Like one well-studied in the tantric arts, he stays inside her, hard and motionless.

“Do you line your pussy with silk?”

She does a rippling belly dance upon her back. It’s getting hard to know where his skin ends and hers begins. Her brain cooks with heat and pheromones.

“Did you mean it? About never letting me go?”

He doesn’t answer, but starts to thrust. What begins as a languid glide accelerates into the stomping/pounding/piledriving frenzy of a mosh pit. Her mind glazes over, but her body was never so alive as she arches up to meet the blows delivered by his hips.

She has her answer.

If their nights are dedicated to sensuality, their mornings are monotonously mundane. She has coffee with him in the living room while the morning news is on. He turns pages of the paper and reads snippets of current events to her. She dips her bagel in her coffee. It smells moist and sweet as his sweat. She puts on a tasteful business suit, picks up the alligator briefcase that he suggested she buy.

He kisses her. “Good-bye, gorgeous.”

When she looks back, he is standing naked in the doorway with a hard-on. The jut of it snags at her heart. She wants to go back, fall to her knees, pay homage with her mouth. At the same time, she want to leap out into traffic and let something fast and huge and hard smash her to rubble and get it over with.

“Good-bye sweetie, see you tonight.”

Since childhood, she has believed that she will never marry or have children. The legal contract, the binding ties, it smacks, she’s always thought, of bondage. And as for children, there’s this secret fear in her – she can’t say why, but has the deep suspicion that something in her might some day wish to do her children harm.

No, she will be an artist, will work only to support her art – wait tables in Aspen or Redstone or Carbondale – cultivate the friendship of free women like herself, maybe enjoy a lesbian love affair or two and pity the humdrum lives of the tourists, couples always, snotty kids in tow, who surely must be envying her unfettered artist’s life. Her recurrent dreams of rape and domination will be transformed into brilliant canvases of wind-whipped mares and earth goddesses with swollen breasts and thighs as thick as tree trunks.

She will let no man contain her.

But she has forgotten her own Bewitchment and the lush allure of her cradle song.

And she hasn’t counted on him and how they both get high on escalating the erotic games, making more real and harrowing the fantasy of possessor and possessed.

In the course of a few days, they play with ropes and knives and, most dangerous of all, they play that they’re in love, that she will be his wife, and that this will last Forever.

They craft bondage scripts that they act out with her spread-eagled on the bed, bent over the balcony railing, posed bitch-style on all fours before the mirrored wall, and without an ounce of alcohol, she gets drunker and drunker until the room starts spinning, and open is the only posture that she knows.

“After we get married,” she says, toying with her words as her fingers massage and cup and stroke, “what if we go to a party, and I flirt with another man?”

“Then we’ll have to leave,” he says coldly.

“That what?”

“We’ll get in the car and drive away. As soon as we’re out of sight of the house where we’ve been visiting, I’ll reach over and tear your blouse open and rip open your bra. I’ll call you a whore, and I’ll drive very fast and you’ll be afraid – with good reason.”

“I know,” she says, shivering closer to his heat, “I’ll be very afraid. I’m afraid now.”

“Good,” he says. He is very hard now. His erection presses against her thigh.

“After we get home,” he says, “I’ll throw you down across the bed. I’ll fuck you till you can’t remember that you’ve ever been with any man but me. I’ll make you plead for my forgiveness. I’ll make you love me.”

She can feel her flesh melting into his, merging with his body, at these images. Her clitoris is pulsing as if it will erupt into flame.

“I already love you,” she says. Her sigh sounds like blood seeping out of a wound. “I love you, and I want to marry you.”

“Oh, you will.” He says it like a death threat, and it is. He kisses her, turn her around and mounts her from behind. He yanks her head back by her hair and puts the other hand across her mouth, riding her wildly and brutally, transforming her into something as bright and beautiful and lifeless as the paintings she no longer paints, suffocating her will down to embers and ash.

She has never been sure what he does with his days. For a while, she fancied that he had a secret life, perhaps some enterprise outside the law, perhaps another lover. She almost hoped he did. Now she believes he simply stays at home and naps and watches rented videos, does a 12-Step meeting now and then, meets friends for tennis. Idleness becomes him. He’s like a great, sleek lounging Tom who stirs himself only to yowl and feed and copulate. He’s like a force of nature. He need only be.

As for her own ambitions, she gave up the idea of Art in Aspen long ago. She lacks the time, the drive, the will. Making art requires energy and freedom, both of which are forfeit to her obsession. So she works at an office job and congratulates herself on her practicality and how well she manages to support them both.

At work, she is a model employee, concise and punctual, dependable. Only now and then, distracted, seeming almost dazed, she makes careless mistakes, receives a reprimand. She always takes it well. She is so prompt, so malleable, so docile.

A few of her co-workers have tried to be friends. She smiles and offers a facsimile of friendship, but in truth she is too ashamed to let them know her as she is, a one-time artist, now merely a part of him that goes out into the world, that plays a part. She cannot let them know she is addicted to his flesh, that she is a suicide in progress.

“When we get married,” she whispers, “I want the ceremony to include the words love, honor, and obey.”

“Oh they will,” he assures her. He stops fucking her and grinds his cock inside her, grips her wrists. Impaled and pinned, she can feel her mind entering that red trance of sex-bliss, that small death from which she knows that she may not emerge. “You will always obey me. You must.”

“I want you to own me,” she says, hating herself as she says the words. Hating the words. Not knowing where they come from, but hating the self-loathing that inspires them.

Hating him.

“I already own you,” he says. His dark face hovers above her. He is handsome, almost beautiful, a terrifying angel with black brows and the subdued snarl of the gentleman rapist in his voice.

She feels herself become more willing, more daring as she teeters on the edge of the void. Surely no aerialist ever practiced so thrilling a maneuver on the high wire. She is drunk with danger, half swooning from her sense of self-destruction, her seeming inability to save herself.

“I want to marry you,” she says, knowing what she really wants is not to want him. But he is the one that the witches sang about. He is her destiny.

He knows very well what she wants. He is inhumanly hard now.

“You are already wed to me,” he says. “You are already owned.”

She arches against him. She wants to feel the tip of his cock draw blood from her heart. She feels like she is ageing in reverse. She is that little girl again that the witches loved as their own and hated as their rival, and every kiss upon her face is poison and every touch re-opens unseen scars. In her folly, she thinks that her lover is healing the wounds, that he is filling her with him.

God, she loves Him.

One night they watch a movie where a woman kills a man to avenge her lover’s death. He seems to relish this. Rewinds the tape to watch the scene again.

“Would you kill for me?” he asks.

No.

“Yes, I’d kill for you,” she says in that whispery, on-the-edge-of-orgasm voice.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I would.”

When she falls asleep with her face pressed to the black pelt on his chest, she is a child again and she is loved – she has only to please him always, do whatever he says – and she will be loved forever.

Earning his love is a full-time job. A career choice. A commitment.

She hones her acting skills. She knows he senses the slightest rebellion in her heart, the smallest cache of secrets. He has nothing to do with his days but focus on her, meditate upon each nuance of her speech and body language. Is her love diminishing? Does she talk too much on the phone, take extra minutes getting home? Is she being subtly neglectful of his vast and mounting needs? Is she such a fool that she might plot to leave him?

When he grows bored, he amuses himself by finding fault with her. At other times, he gazes at her with the pride of one who’s just retouched a museum masterpiece, brought it back to its former splendor, improved it, and when she questions the intensity of that look, he says, “Just thinking of all the plans I have for the rest of your life.”

She had plans, too – once. If she could just remember what they were…

He finds her sketchbook one day, and his derision of her drawings if so surgically adroit that she feels naked as a peeled persimmon. Later, when he sees her tears, he soothes her with his skillful tongue and nurtures her with semen.

Sometimes she contemplates his Smith and Wesson as one would study a map of some exotic land. She parts herself with the cool, hard barrel and thinks that she should let the gun become her lover, that this must be the ultimate fuck. Even hotter and harder than him.

Nonsense, she tells herself. She can walk away from him when she gets ready. She can quit at any time. She gave up alcohol, didn’t she? Almost five years without a buzz. No counting the high she gets from sucking cocktails from their original container. She knows he isn’t good for her – she devours self-help books like bonbons. She’ll quit this, too, and get on with her real life – it’s just that she’s not ready.

Yet.

She knows the game is aging her. Grey half-moons smudge her eyes. Her face has a haggard, refugee quality, but her body still throbs in sync with his. The athletic and aesthetic quality of her erotic performance is undulled. She can mimic dying with a hot, uncanny sensuality, as though she’s done it many times. In the quiet of the night, she fancies she can hear her soul unraveling.

“I want to marry you.”

Sometimes she says the words alone, to herself, marveling at how they sound, at the unnaturalness of them. What started as a game, a tease, is becoming real.

Love, honor, and obey.

She loves him not at all and honors him only when she must, but obey she will. She must. For doesn’t she deserve to die? She’s a bad girl, isn’t she? For craving his flesh in her mouth, in her cunt, for aching to eat him like some ripe and rotting fruit, the sweet center spewing into her mouth and seeping down her throat as she bites and sucks and hungers more for having sucked his poison.

“I’d kill for you,” she whispers.

She almost means it now. The ledge on which she walks is getting narrower. The abyss at the bottom of her lover’s eyes croons to her and bids her jump.

One night he ties her with soft sashes and runs a knife across he flesh. He parts her lips. Tells her, in snuff flick detail, what he could do to her.

He could. He might. She’s wet just thinking of it.

For doesn’t love mean being fed upon, consumed, annihilated in the arms of the beloved? She learned that somewhere long ago. It feels like it’s imprinted on her soul, encoded into her very DNA. Carried on her X chromosomes like a gene-linked disease.

He puts his hard-on to her lips, then the knife, then his cock.

“Which one?” he says. For a moment, she can’t choose.

The only thing she fears more than him is the thought that she might lose him.

On the day that she will marry him (an elaborate ceremony on the East Coast City where his parents live), she looks into the mirror as if into a crystal ball and sees the future like an evil spell spread out before her. She cannot leave him; she’s too far gone. She no longer believes she can exist without him. But as her dependence on him has increased, so has her hatred; she longs to pay him back for what she’s let him do to her.

Soon after their wedding, she comes into their bedroom, thinking that she’ll let him fuck her one more time, give him a final opportunity to end it before she does.

She finds him fallen asleep with the tv on, hair like black fur against the pillow, thighs parted just enough that she can be tempted by his beauty one more time.

But good girls never want this.

She puts the pistol against his temple, admiring the aristocratic plane of his jaw, the thick black lashes, wondering what it would be like to fuck him with a bullet.

But she wasn’t raised like that. She isn’t meant to kill this way. No, her killing must be done in increments and secret.

She puts the gun away and comes to bed. The old nightmares threaten her, but she takes solace in his skin.

When she gets pregnant, he says he doesn’t want the child. A baby will take time away from him – he tells her they’ll be happier without one.

For the first time since she’s known him, she stands up to him. Her wrath shocks her and frightens him. The power of mother love seems to give her resolve she’s never known. A child, she thinks, will be something to belong to her – to take the place of the life that she will never have. For the first time since she’s known him, her life soothes down into a sluggish calm, a kind of tranquil torpor. Finally there is something of her own he cannot take away.

The baby is healthy and beautiful. She names it for her mother, and she loves it with a fierce and cannibal cunning.

But the father is the one seduced and charmed. The child becomes his little sweetheart. He dotes on her and plans for her a future full of independence and achievement.

When the baby is a few months old, she sits beside the crib one night, admiring the beauty of her daughter’s face, her laughing eyes and guileless zest. Surely this child will have a charmed life – unlike her cursed one.

The baby frets as she bends over the crib. She has her father’s mouth. The mother feels a rush of loss and loathing. How dare his daughter look forward to the kind of life that she has forfeited. Black envy seethes inside her.

She searches her mind for a gift appropriate for the daughter of the man that she despises.

And it comes back to her – bitter and seductive, the words like licorice laced with strychnine, dark and sweet and sickening.

The words change, but the meaning is always the same: men are evil and lust-crazed and dangerous… women exist to be debased and defiled…

… but good girls never want this.

You must never want this.

And so the curse is passed.

That night, when she lies down next to her husband, her sleep is deep and dreamless.