The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Erotica

Bottomless on Bourbon ^{Maxim Jakubowski}

He had often promised to take Kathryn to New Orleans.

But it had never happened. They had spectacularly fallen apart long before the opportunity arose. In fact, the travel they had managed to do in between feverish fucks had proven rather prosaic. So much for promises. They hadn’t even visited Paris, Amsterdam or New York either.

So, whenever he could, he now took other women to the Crescent City.

For sex.

And fantasized about Kathryn’s face, and eyes, and pale breasts, and cunt and more.

New Orleans was for him a city with two faces. Almost two different places, the aristocratic and slightly dishevelled languor of the Garden District on one hand and the hustle and bustle of the French Quarter on the other, contrasting like night and day. The touristic charms concealing darker, ever so venomous charms. The heavy placid flow of the Mississippi River zigzagging in serpentine manner through the opposing twin shores of Jackson Square and Algiers. The gently alcoholic haze of New Orleans days and the enticing, dangerous attraction of fragrant New Orleans nights. Nights that smelled and tasted of sex.

He loved to see the women sweat as he made love to them, enjoyed the feel of bodies sliding against each other in moist, clammy embraces as sheets tangled around them. He took unerring voyeuristic pleasure in watching them shower after, washing his seed away from their openings, cleaning away his bites, the saliva that still coated their nipples, neck or ear lobes which he had assaulted with military-like amorous precision.

Those were all memories he treasured. Stored away for all eternity in his mental bank vaults. The curve of a back, the soft blonde down slowly being submerged in a small pool of perspiration just inches away from her rump, highlighted by a solitary light bulb, as she kneeled on all fours on the bed and he breached the final defences of her sphincter and impaled himself in her bowels. The sound of a moan, of pleasure, of joy. Ohhh… AAAAHHH… Chriiiiiist… The tremor that coursed through the girl’s taut body as he discharged inside her or she rode the ocean waves of her oncoming orgasm.

Yes, New Orelans, his city of sex.

Endless walks through the small streets between hotel room episodes. Invigorating breakfasts of beignets and coffee and ice-cold orange juice at the Café du Monde; oysters and thick, syrupy gumbo at The Pearl off Canal Street; loitering hand in hand in the markets full of the smell of spices and seafood, chewing on garlic-flavoured pistachio nuts; obscene mounds of boiled crawfish at Lemoyne’s Landing; hunting for vintage paperbacks through the dusty shelves at Beckham’s; po’boys at the Napoleon House; zydeco rhythms at the House of Blues; a routine he could live on for days on end. Until he would tire of the woman, because she bored him once past the mechanics of fornication, never said the right thing or talked too much or simply because she wasn’t the woman he really wanted to be with in New Orleans.

There had been Lisa, the software executive, Clare, a lawyer who looked like Anne Frank had she ever grown up and liked to be handled roughly, Pamela Jane, the investment banker he had met at the hotel bar who wanted to be a writer and Helene the biology teacher from Montreal. He didn’t feel he was being promiscuous: four women in six years since Kathryn. Some he had found here, others he had brought.

But somehow none had fitted in with this strange city and, even though the sex had been loose and fun, and the company never less than pleasant, there had been something lacking. Even at midnight, buckling under his thrusts on bed or floor or sucking him off under the water streams of the shower, he knew they were creatures of the day, anonymous, predictable; they had no touch of night, no share of darkness. And the darkness was what he sought. In women. In New Orleans. What he knew he had once detected under Kathryn’s fulsome exterior.

He had high hopes for Susi.

She was Austrian, in her late twenties, and worked in a managerial capacity for a travel agency in Vienna, which made it easier (and cheaper) for her to jump on a plane for purposes of pleasure.

They had met in New York some months earlier. It was spring and the weather was appalling for the season. The rain poured down in buckets and all Manhattan was gridlocked like only New York can manage. He’d been in town promoting a book and negotiating the next contract with his publishers there (he never used an agent) and was booked on an evening flight back to London. He’d been staying, as usual, at a hotel down by the Village, off Washington Square. He had booked a car to JFK and it was already half an hour late. They had checked at reception and found out that the driver was still blocked in traffic near Central Square and Columbus Circle. He had promptly cancelled the car and rushed with his suitcase to the hotel’s front steps to hail a yellow cab. They were few and far between, and he wasn’t the only hotel guest heading for the airport. Both he and the tall, slim red-headed woman went for the same cab which declined the airport ride pretexting the conditions. They agreed to share the next cab to come along. She was even later than him, as her flight preceded his by twenty minutes.

“My name is Susanne, but my friends call me Susi with an i,” she had introduced herself as the driver made his slow way towards the Midtown Tunnel.

Despite clever shortcuts through Queens, the journey took well over an hour and a quarter, so they had much opportunity to talk as they inched towards their planes. She had been in town for a week, visiting her parents who both worked as diplomats for one of the big international organizations.

She did miss her flight, while he caught his with a few minutes to spare. Email addresses were exchanged, and they had remained in touch since.

They had quickly become intimate. He’d sent her one of his books, and she had remarked on the sexual nature of many of his stories and confessed to some of her own sexual quirks. She was an exhibitionist. Would sometimes take the subway back in Vienna dressed in a particularly short skirt and without underwear and allow men to spy on her genitals. She was shaven, so they had a full view of her naked mound. She was also in the habit of masturbating in parks, where she could be seen by passers-by, actually encouraged voyeurs to do so and knew that, sometimes, men were jerking off watching her just a few metres away.

She would pretend her name was Lolita. He asked her why.

Because she had little in the way of breasts and her bare pubis evoked a child or a doll, she answered. She was submissive by nature, she told him.

She sent him a series of photographs taken by an ex-boyfriend she had broken up with shortly before the New York trip. He found them wonderfully provocative in a tender sort of way. In the first, her long, skinny frame stood in contrast to the sluttish, traditional black lingerie of embroidered knickers, suspender belt and stockings almost a size too big for her. Yes, she had no breasts, barely a hillock worth of elevation and no cleavage and, he imagined (the photographs were all black and white), pale-pink nipples like a gentle stain in the landscape of her flesh. Her hair was a bit longer than when she had been in New York, her eyes dead to the world. In the second photograph – he could guess the sequence they had been taken in, pruriently imagined what the boyfriend in question had made her do, perform, submit to, after the camera had been set aside – she was now squatting only clad in suspender belt and stockings, her cunt in sharp focus, lips ever so ready to open, her head thrown back so you could barely recognize her features. Photograph number three saw her spreadeagled over a Persian carpet and parquet floor, one arm in the air, both legs straight, holding herself up by one arm, like a gymnast, her face in profile, a most elegant and beautiful vision of nudity with no hint of obscenity at all, her body like a fine-tuned machine, a sculpture. In the fourth, she was standing and the photographer had shot away from crotch level and her body was deformed like in a hall of mirrors by the skewed perspective, the focus on her enlarged midriff. The one thing that struck him as he kept on examining the photos on his laptop screen was how her sex lips didn’t part and how he wished to see inside her. The final photograph she had sent him (were there more? more explicit or extreme? she answered that others were just out of focus but his imagination as ever played wildly on) was both the sexiest and the most vulgar. She was on all fours, her arse raised towards the camera in a fuck-me pose, long legs bent, rear a bit bony, the line of her cunt lips straight as a ruler and continued by her arse crack and darker hole. Every time he looked at this one, he couldn’t help getting hard. And he knew that she enjoyed knowing that.

He told her about the delights of New Orleans and invited her to join him there one day.

To explore possibilities, he said.

Initially, she only said maybe.

But he persisted, courting her with a modicum of elegance, and she agreed. It took a couple of months to find a week when both could free themselves from previous commitments (ah, the sheer logistics of lust!) and arrangements were made. Flights to New York were coordinated – her job came in useful – and they both arrived in Newark an hour or so apart.

Curiously enough, there are no direct flights between New York and New Orleans and their connection went via Raleigh-Durham.

As they emerged from the airport luggage area, Susi smelled the heat that now surrounded them like a blanket and turned towards him, kissed him gently on the cheek and said, “I just know I’m going to like it here… Thanks ever so much for bringing me.”

By the time the taxi dropped them off at the small hotel he had booked on Burgundy it was already dark.

It was summer. Moist, no wind from the Gulf, the air heavy with the powers of the night, the remains of the day lingering in patchy clouds; they were both sweating, their bodies not yet acclimatized.

They dropped their bags, and he switched the air conditioning a notch higher and suggested a shower.

He undressed her. Now she was no longer black and white. The nipples were a darker pink, closer to red than he expected and darkened a shade further when he kissed them. Her pale body was like porcelain. Long, thin, exquisitely supple. Since Kathryn, none of the other women, here or elsewhere, had been anywhere as tall.

He escorted Susi to the shower cubicle and switched the water on. She looked at his cock, growing slowly at the sheer sight of her nudity. He soaped her with infinite delicacy and tenderness and explored her body under guise of washing, refreshing her from the transatlantic journey and its grime and tiredness. He fell to his knees and wiped the suds away from her crotch. Her gash red against the mottled pinkness of her pubic mound. She hadn’t shaved there for a week or so; they had agreed she would let him shave her clean. A delight he had long fantasized about. He parted her thin lips, like opening a rare flower and darted his tongue inside to taste her. Susi shuddered.

The first time was good.

They were shy, affectionate, slow, tentative, testing pleasure points and limits with great delicacy.

She was extremely self-conscious of her lack of opulence breast-wise and he lavished particular care on her there, sucking, licking, nibbling, fingering her with casual precision until he caught the precise pulse of her pleasure behind the gentle swell of her darkening nipples.

They came closely together. Silently.

The later days filled quickly between wet embraces and ever-more feverish fucks as they grew used to each other’s quirks and secret desires. She had always wanted to take a riverboat down the Mississippi and they spent a day doing so, passing the Civil War mansions and lawns and observing the rare crocodiles still lingering in the musty bayous. Just like tourists. Which they were. Sexual tourists with, so far, no taste for the local fare. Breezing down Magazine Street in mid-afternoon as the antique shops reopened for business. Taking a tram to the Garden District. Lingering, with verbose guides, in the atmospheric cemeteries, with their ornate crypts and walls of bones. Visiting the voodoo museum, trying to repress their unceremonious giggles. He covertly fingering signed first editions at the Faulkner House.

Susi never wore a bra – she had no need for one – and neither did she slip knickers on when they would go out walking. Long, flowing, thin skirts revealing the shape of her legs when she faced the sun, only he knowing how unfettered her cunt lips were beneath the fabric, sometimes even imagining he could smell her inner fragrance as they walked along hand in hand and conjuring up the thoughts of other, lubricious men passing by had they known of her naked vulnerability. It turned him on, this constant availability of hers, this exhibitionistic desire to provoke. Walking along Decatur, passing one of the horse-drawn carriages waiting there for tourists, a dog held in a leash by a small black child wagged a tail frenetically and brushed against Susi’s leg. He smiled. She asked him why.

“He could smell your cunt,” he said.

“Do you think so?” she remarked, her eyes all wide.

“Yes,” he told her. “You smell of sex. Strongly.”

Her face went all red, approximating the shade of her short bob, and he watched the flush spread to her chest and beneath the thin silk blouse.

“It turned him on,” he said.

“Oh…”

“And me, knowing how naked you are under those thin, light clothes,” he added.

She smiled.

Later, back in their hotel room, she insisted they keep the curtains open when they made love, knowing any passing maid or room-service staff might see them in the throws of sex as they walked past on the steps outside the window and, as he moved frantically inside her, he saw she kept her eyes open, was actually hoping they would be seen. The idea excited her.

The same night, a few blocks before Bourbon, she suddenly said, “I have to pee.”

They’d only left the hotel a hundred yards or so ago, so she must have known the need would arise. He offered to go back to the room.

“No,” she said. “The side street there. That will do.”

It was dark, no one around, although the risk of passers-by emerging off Toulouse was likely.

Susi pulled her long skirt upwards and bunched it around her waist, her thin, unending legs bursting into pale view, the plumpness of her cunt in full display under the light from the illuminated wrought-iron balcony above them, and squatted down. He watched, hypnotized, as the hot stream of urine burst through her labia and splashed onto the New Orleans pavement. Her eyes darted towards the main street, begging for someone to come by. None did. Her bladder empty, she rose to her feet, the skirt still held above her waist in insolent provocation.

“It’s a bit wet,” she said to him. “Would you dry me?”

He got down on his knees, wiped her cunt lips clean with the back of his hand then impulsively licked her briefly. Her clit was hard, swollen. Susi was in heat.

“Fuck me here,” she asked him. “I don’t mind if people see us.”

“I can’t,” he said. “We’ve only just got out of bed. I don’t think I could get hard enough again so quickly.”

Susi glanced at him with disapproval.

She dropped the folds of her dress.

They began talking.

“Does it turn you on?”

“Yes.”

“What is it? A feeling of control over people, men, that they can see you but not touch?”

“I don’t know,” Susi remarked. “My body is nothing special, but I love to show myself. Gives me meaning. It’s a bit confusing.”

“Your body’s great. You shouldn’t underestimate yourself,” he answered. “But you must be careful. On the nude beach outside Vienna, with your girlfriend along, there’s an element of safety, but elsewhere it could be risky, you know.”

“Yes.”

“Some people could read other things in your need to exhibit yourself. You could get yourself raped.”

“I know,” Susi answered, with a slight sigh in her voice. “Sometimes, I even imagine what it would be like. Several men.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Five of them. First they fuck my every hole, then I am made to kneel, still naked, at their feet and they all jerk off and come in my face and hair.”

“A bit extreme…”

“I know…”

He tried to lighten the mood. Already anxious as the darkness neared. “The ultimate facial treatment. Better than soap!”

Susi laughed and led the way back towards Bourbon Street.

He described how Bourbon Street would be when Mardi Gras came. The noise, the coloured beads, the floats, the beer, the wonderfully hedonistic atmosphere that gripped the whole French Quarter, the fever that rose insidiously as the alcohol loosened inhibitions and the music from the bars of either side of the street grew in loudness, competing rhythms criss-crossing on every corner, clouding minds and bodies.

How the revellers on the balconies would bait the walkers below, sprinkling them with drink, offering beads for the flash of a nipple or a quickly bared backside to massive roars of approval from the wild crowds.

He could see Susi’s eyes light up. Yes, she would enjoy Carnival here. No longer requiring an excuse to bare her parts to one and all and the more the merrier.

“And what happens behind doors?” she asked him.

He shuddered to think. He’d only ever stayed in New Orleans for the first night of Mardi Gras. Had heard mad rumours of uncontrollable excess, of sex in the streets. He’d once come across a range of video cassettes in a 7th Avenue porn joint in New York documenting the sexual side of Mardi Gras here year after year. But like with wine, he was unaware which were the good years or the bad years and had never sampled any of the cassettes in question.

His mind raced forward. To a clandestine video cassette in a white box and Polaroid cover shot of Susi’s porcelain-white body, face covered with come, labelled SUSANNE “LOLITA” WIEN, MARDI GRAS 1999. A vintage performance, no doubt.

Bourbon Street night deepened as the beer flowed ever more freely, spilling into the gutters from plastic cups being carried up and down the street by the Saturday night revellers. The music surging from all around grew louder, the lights more aggressive and the crowds swayed uncertainly. Young kids tapped away for a few cents or break-danced outside the bars, the neon signs of the strip clubs entered battle, pitting male strippers against female ones, topless joints against bottomless ones. A row of mechanical legs danced a cancan from the top of a bar window, advertising further displays of flesh inside.

Susi was curious. “I’ve never been to a striptease place before. Can we?”

“Why not?” he acquiesced.

They entered the dark bar. A woman down to a shining lamé bikini was dancing around a metal pole at its centre. A few men sat by the stage desultorily sipping from half-empty glasses. They ordered their drinks from a sultry waitress and watched the stripper shed her bra with a brief flourish. The performance was uninspiring and the most exciting thing about the dancer for him was her gold navel ring which shimmied in the fluctuating light. His mind went walkabout as he tried to recognize the rock and roll tune she was, badly, dancing to.

Several shimmies and swirls later, and a liberal shake of silicon-enhanced mammaries exposed, the song (some country and western standard given an electric and gloom Americana twist) came to an end and the stripper quickly bowed, picking up a few stray dollar notes thrown onto the stage by the isolated punters on her way off.

“Is that all?” Susi turned to him asking.

“I think so,” he said.

“But it’s not even bottomless. She didn’t even show her cunt!”

“Maybe because it’s a bar. I don’t know,” he said, ‘there must be some local by-laws or something. Don’t know much about the rules in American strip clubs,” he continued, surprised by Susi’s interest.

Another stripper, black, stocky, took to the stage and a soul number burst out of the speakers. The previous performer was on the other side of the dance area, soliciting tips from some of the men. One whispered in her ear as she accosted him. She nodded. The man rose and he followed the woman, who now wore a dressing gown, to a darker corner at the far end of the bar. Susi nudged him and they both peered in that direction.

They could just about see the stripper throw back her gown and squat over the lap of the man who had now seated himself.

“A private dance,” he said to Susi.

“Wow! Cool!” she said, one of the more irritating mannerisms he had picked up on when they chatted online back in Europe.

There wasn’t much to see. The stripper moved in silence. The man appeared to keep his hands to himself, but the darkness engulfed the couple.

“I’m turned on,” Susi said in his ear.

“Really?” he said, finding the atmosphere in the bar quite unerotic, the black stripper now strutting her square rump a few feet away from his face.

“Yes,” Susi added. “I don’t think I’d make a good stripper. No tits, as you well know. But I sure could lap or table dance. I’d like to do that for you…”

He grinned.

“Sure. Later in our hotel room, I’ll look forward to your demonstration.”

“No. Here,” Susi said, a deep tone of excitement in her voice.

“Here?” he queried.

“Yes.” He could see that her right hand was buried in the folds of her dress, that she was fingering herself through the material. “Can you arrange it? Please. See the guy at the bar, he appears to be in charge. Get him to agree. Please pretty please?”

He shrugged.

It cost him fifty bucks and some haggling.

He walked back towards the stage where Susi was downing the rest of her Jack Daniel’s.

He nodded. “It’s yes,” he said.

She rose, a mischievous glint in her eye. She took him by the hand and led him to a chair, nowhere near the darkness that offered shelter further down the bar but in full view of all. She pointed a finger, indicating he should sit down, which he did. Sensing what was to happen now, the bar attendant stationed himself at the door to Bourbon Street to prevent further spectators and a possible loss of his licence. Susi camped herself facing the chair he now sat on and pulled her dress above her head. You could hear a pin drop as the barman and the few spectators dotted around the stage witnessed her naked form emerge from the cocoon of the fabric, whiter than white, shaven mound plump, and so bare, like a magnet for their disbelieving eyes. A couple of the attendant strippers peered out from the dressing room on the side of the bar counter.

The music began and he had no clue what it was, his mind in such turmoil.

Susi began writhing a few inches away from him, knowing all too well how much she was the centre of attraction.

She danced, wriggled, swerved, bent, squatted, obscenely, indecently, her hands moving across her bare flesh in a snakelike manner, her fingers grazing her, by now, erect nipples, descending across the flatness of her pale stomach and even, although he hoped he was the only one to notice, lingering in the region of her cunt and actually holding her lips open for a second or so.

He felt hot. Even though he by now knew every square inch of her skin, this was a new Susi, a creature he had only guessed at.

It was quickly over.

He held his breath.

A few people clapped in the background.

Susi’s face was impassive but flushed.

She picked up her discarded dress and slipped into it. “That was good,” she said. “Can we go, now?”

On their way to the door and the muted sounds of Bourbon Street, the barman handed Susi a card. “You’re quite a gal,” he said, as she brushed past him. “My name is Louis. If you’re seeking more serious fun, just call me.”

Susi slipped the card into her side pocket without even acknowledging him and emerged into the twilight. “I’m hungry,” she said.

One of the nearby hotels had an oyster bar. They shared a plateful each of oysters and clams. She smothered them with a generous helping of tomato-flavoured horseradish as she gulped them down.

“One of your fantasies realized?” he asked her.

“You might say that,” Susi answered. “But there are others.”

“I have no doubt.” He smirked, still uncertain of the path they had embarked upon.

“Don’t look so glum.” She smiled. “You did say we would come to New Orleans and explore possibilities, didn’t you?”

“I suppose I did.”

The rawness of their sex that night was compelling and savage. She sucked him with hungry determination and wouldn’t allow him to withdraw from her mouth when he felt his excitement rise. Usually, he would hold back and penetrate her, which prolonged the pleasure. He came in her mouth. She let him go, and he watched her tasting his come before she finally swallowed it.

“You taste sweet and sour,” Susi said.

The following day, she insisted they visit a place called the Orgy Room. On Bourbon, of course. As pornographic films were projected on the walls, a group of people pressed together like sardines in a can were force-fed into an exiguous room and allowed to jostle and play on pneumatic fun-fair carpets or were they water beds? Most were drunk. The constant contact was, he felt, somewhat unpleasant, and far from arousing. Soon, he was separated from Susi in the swaying crowd but could still see her at the other end of the room. She deliberately exaggerated her movements and rubbed herself against others, often pulling her short black leather miniskirt up her thighs so her genitals were fully visible to those closer to her. He observed as various men took note of her and soon congregated around her. He could see her face flush amongst the laughs, and the human wave of bodies soon directed her against the back wall where she stood motionless, her skirt now bunched at her midriff and a couple of men frantically fingering her as she pretended to ignore them. He watched from afar, not quite knowing what he now felt. Eventually, the siren rang and the crowds thinned and made for the exit. As Susi reached him, trailed by the puzzled men she had snared in her net, she took his hand in hers. The men observed this and interrupted their progress towards her. Sweat poured down her forehead, her thin red hair plastered down against her scalp. They walked out. He looked up at the sky. There was a storm brewing.

“I came,” she remarked. “Jesus…”

“Susi…”

“Take me back to the hotel,” she ordered. “Tonight, I want you to fuck my arse.”

The next morning, she expressed a desire for breakfast in bed. They had woken up too late for the hotel room service. He volunteered to fetch food from a nearby twenty-four-hour deli. The night rain had swept away the heat momentarily and the cool air came as a welcome relief as he walked the few hundred metres to the shop and back.

When he returned to the room, Susi was speaking on the phone. She put the receiver down as he walked in.

Maybe he shouldn’t have asked, but he did. Force of habit. He’d left the hotel number with a few friends back in London, in case of sudden business, magazine commissions.

“Was that for me?” he asked Susi.

“No,” she replied. “It was Louis, from the bar.”

“I see.”

“I wanted to find out about the… secret places, the real New Orleans, so to speak…” She looked down as she spoke, the white sheet lowered down to the whirl of her navel. There were dark patches under her green eyes, from lack of sleep and the intensity of the sex. He’d never found her as attractive as now, he knew.

He set the bread, snacks and fruit juice bottles down on the bedside table. “And?”

“And he’s given me a few addresses. Said it’s his night off, offered to show us around.”

“We barely know him. Do you think it would be safe?”

“You always told me that New Orleans was a city of sex. Not vampires or voodoo. That it was constantly in the air, you used to say, remember.”

“I did.”

“Well, it would be silly not to find out more, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

“He’s picking us up from the hotel lobby around nine tonight. He’ll show us beyond Bourbon.”

They walked through the market at midday. Beyond the food area full of cajun spice mixtures, chicory blends, pralines, nuts and colourful fruit and fish, there was a flea market of sorts, stalls selling souvenirs, bric-a-brac, clothing, counterfeit tapes of zydeco music, hand-made bracelets and all the flotsam that brings people to a tourist town. On a previous visit on their second day here, Susi had spotted a black felt table where a long-haired superannuated hippy was selling fake body jewellery, which could be worn without the need for piercings. She selected several pieces.

Late afternoon, back in the room, she retreated to the bathroom for a shower. She emerged half an hour later, splendidly naked and scrubbed clean, her dark-red hair still wet. “Do you like it?” she asked him.

He looked up from his magazine.

She took his breath away. How could her body be so damn pale and so heartbreakingly beautiful? She had rouged her nipples a darker shade of scarlet and accentuated the bloody gash of her sex lips with the same lipstick. A courtesan adorned for sexual use.

She had also strategically placed the small rings and clips she had purchased in the market across her body. A ring hung from her lower lip, stainless-steel clamps from her hardened nipples and a stud appeared to have been pierced into her clitoris from which a thin golden chain hung, which she had until now worn around her wrist.

“Like a creature from a dream,” he said. “From a very dirty dream, may I add. You look great.” He could feel his cock swell already inside his boxer shorts. “Come here,” he suggested.

“No,” she said. “I have to dry my hair. Anyway I also want you to conserve your energy. Your seed…” she concluded with a smile.

“As you wish,” he said, unable to keep his eyes away from her jewelled cunt.

“This is my fantasy night,” she said.

It felt like a stab to his chest. He already knew what she had arranged with Louis.

It was a very private club on Ramparts, at the other end of the Quarter. From outside, it looked like any other house, slightly run-down and seedy. But the moment you passed the door, you could almost smell the familiar fragrance of money and sin.

“You sure you still want to?” Louis asked her as they walked in to the lobby.

“Yes,” Susi said.

Louis guided them into a large room full of framed Audubon prints and a fake fireplace and asked them to make themselves comfortable. And left through another door after showing them the drinks cabinet.

Alone with her, he said nothing at first. Then, seeing his unease, Susi said: “It’s not quite the fantasy I told you about. Just the second part, really…”

“Oh…”

“And I want you to be one of the men…”

“I’m not sure I—”

“I’d feel more comfortable with you there,” she interrupted him. “You’ll enjoy it, you’ll see. Anyway, you knew what I am, what I like, when you suggested we come here. You’ll get a kick out of it. You like watching. I see it in you. Even when we fuck, your brain is like a machine, recording it all, storing every feeling, every tremor, every moan away. Memories that will last for ever.”

Before he could answer her, the door opened and Louis came through with three other men. Two of them were black, tall, built like football players, the other white man was middle-aged, stocky, silver-haired.

“Here we are, Susanne,” he said, without introducing the others. “You’re in charge now…”

The thought occurred to him he had called her Susanne. “Friends call me Susi” she had said back all those months ago as they caught that New York cab. So Louis was not considered a friend!

Susi indicated the centre of the heavily carpeted room. “A circle around here.” There was something more Germanic than usual in her voice as she ordered them to clear the heavy chairs away from the room’s epicentre.

The circle soon emerged, as the furniture was set aside.

Susi stationed herself there and undressed. “You all stay dressed,” she said to the five men. “Just cocks out, OK?”

She positioned herself and, as the men’s eyes followed her every movement, she opened her legs and stuck a finger inside herself. She was visibly already very wet and there was an audible squishing sound as the finger penetrated her. Louis unzipped his jeans and pulled his cock out. The others followed his example. One of the black guys, he noticed, was enormous, at least ten inches and thick as hell. He discreetly examined the other cocks, and was reassured that his was still reasonably sized in comparison. Joint second biggest, he reckoned, not without a wry thought.

Susi now introduced a second finger into her cunt, secretions now flooding out and dripping down the gold chain.

There was both a sense of the ceremonial and a sense of the absurd about them all. Six human beings masturbating frantically. Five men with their cocks out, fingers clenching their shafts, rubbing their coronas, teasing their glans, heavy balls shuddering below as the woman in white at their centre teased her cunt in a parody of lovemaking.

“Not yet,” she warned. Had one of them intimated he was close to come?

Time felt as if it had come to a standstill, swallowing all their halting sounds of lust.

She adjusted her stance, now kneeling, her hand buried deep inside her crotch, almost like praying, and indicated she was finally ready for her baptism of come.

The men came, one by one, spurting their thick, white seed into her face, as she leaned forward to receive them. He was the third to orgasm and noticed the arc of his ejaculate strain in the air separating him from her body and the final drips landing in the thin valley between her muted breasts. Soon, she was covered with the men’s seed, like syrup dribbling across her thin eyebrows and down her cheeks. He didn’t think she herself had actually come, although all five men had.

There was a long silence as they all stood there, the men with their cocks shrivelling already, the drenched woman in quiet repose.

Finally, Louis spoke: “Well, Susanne, just the way you wanted it?”

She nodded as the men began zipping up.

“Care to move on to your next fantasy?”

What next fantasy? he wondered. What else was she after?

“Yes,” she said, rising to her feet and picking up the green towel Louis had previously left on a nearby chair and wiping her face clean.

“Good,” Louis said. “There’s quite a crowd out there waiting.”

Still not bothering to put her clothes on again, Susi asked him: “Can you give us a few minutes alone, before, please?”

“Sure, Susanne,” he said and the four men trooped out of the room.

“So,” he asked her the moment after they had closed the door. “What else have you planned for the menu, Susi? It must be a fantasy I am unaware of. You’re full of surprises.”

“I know,” she answered. “I should have told you before. I’m sorry. It’ll only happen once and then I shall return to my boring life, you know. Maybe the time will come for me to settle down, marry some decent guy and even have kids. A nice hausfrau.”

“What are you talking about, Susi?”

“I want to be fucked in public…”

“What?”

“Just one man, that’s all. But I have to know what it feels like with people watching, you see. You said this was a city of sex, I’ll never have the opportunity again. Just this once. We’re miles away from home, no one knows us, we’ll likely not come here again. Only you and I will know…”

“You mean with me?” he asked.

“Yes. If you wish to be the one.”

“I…” He was at a loss for words.

“It’s all arranged with Louis. We’ll even get paid five hundred dollars.”

“It’s not the money…”

“I know… I understand if you don’t want to. Arrangements have also been made for another man, if you decline. But I do want you to watch… really…”

His thoughts were in turmoil. This had all gone too far. He had played with fire and the flames were now reaching all the way through to his gut. As they always did. He never learned the lessons, did he? Long before Kathryn, he’d been going out with a woman who was avowedly bisexual and it had planted a bad seed in his mind. Not for him the common fantasy of watching two women together, no. The idea of bisexuality had preyed on his mind for months and one day, curious to know what it must feel like to suck a man’s cock, from the woman’s point of view (after all, they never minded sucking his, did they?), he had agreed to an encounter with another man. He distressingly discovered he enjoyed sucking cock and had been irregularly doing so for years now, in secret, whenever a woman was not available and the tides of lust submerged him. He had never told any woman about this. Feared they would misunderstand. Blamed his insatiable sexual curiosity. Even Susi wouldn’t understand, he knew. Not that this was the time to tell her. He always went that step too far. And paid for it. Emotionally.

“I just can’t, Susi. I can’t.”

“But will you…”

“Yes, I will watch.”

There was a crowd in the other room of the house on Ramparts. They had been drinking liberally for an hour or so, it appeared. There was a heavy air of expectation about them.

Louis led Susi in. Like a ritual, holding the thin gold chain secured to her clitoris, her eyes covered by a piece of dark-blue cloth. This is how she had wanted it to happen. She didn’t wish to see the audience. Just feel it and hear it around her as she was fucked.

They had cleared a low table in a corner of the room and Susi was taken to it, carefully installed across so that all the light was focused on her already gaping and wet red gash, and positioned on all fours, her fake jewellery taken from her body. She was helped to arch her back and raise her rump to the right level. The man who had won the quickly organized auction came forward. He looked quite ordinary, late twenties, an athlete’s build, not very hairy. He had kept his shirt on but his cock already jutted forward as he approached Susi’s receptive body. He was uncut and his foreskin bunched heavily below the mushroom cone of his glans. He was very big.

The man found his position at Susi’s entrance and buckled forward and speared her. A few spectators applauded but most remained quite silent. From where he sat, he couldn’t see Susi’s face, only her white arse and the hypnotizing sight of the dark-purple cock moving in and out of her, faster and faster, every thrust echoed by a wave of movement on the periphery of her flesh, like a gentle wind caressing the surface of a sand dune.

It lasted an eternity, longer he knew than he would have ever managed. The guy was getting his money’s worth. And the audience, many of whom were blatantly playing with themselves in response to the spectacle unfolding before them. She would be very sore at the end of this. Sweat coated Susi’s body like a thin shroud as the man digged deeper and deeper into her and he watched her opening enlarge obscenely under the pressure of that monstrous cock.

Shamefully, he couldn’t keep his eyes away from the immediate perimeter of penetration, noting every anatomical feature with minute precision, the vein bulging on the side of the invading cock as it moved in and out of sight, in and out of her, the very shade of crimson of her bruised labia as they were shoved aside by the thrusts, the thin stream of inner secretions pearling down her inner thigh, and neither could he help himself getting hard again watching the woman he knew he had fallen in love with getting fucked in public by a total stranger.

That night, she curled up against him in the slightly exiguous hotel room bed, drawing his warmth and tearing him apart.

They had packed and waited in the hotel’s lobby for the airport shuttle they had booked earlier that morning. One suitcase each, a Samsonite and a Pierre Cardin. They hadn’t discussed the previous night, acted as if nothing had happened. They had the same flight to Chicago where they would part. He on to London, she to Vienna. Now he knew he would want to see her again, in Europe. It would be easier. They had come through this crazy experience and he realized how much she had touched his heart.

The blue mini-coach finally arrived, ten minutes late, and he picked up the suitcases and carried them to the pavement. As he was about to give her case to the shuttle’s driver, Susi put her hand on his arm.

“Yes?”

He had never realized how green her eyes were.

“I’m not coming,” she calmly said. “There’s nothing for me back home; I’m staying in New Orleans.”

“But…”

She silenced him with a tender kiss to his cheek. When he tried to talk again, she just quietly put a finger to his lips indicating he should remain silent. “No,” she said. “No explanations. It’s better like this.”

The driver urged him to get on board.

As the shuttle moved down Burgundy, he looked out of the window and saw Susi walking to a parked car with her suitcase. Louis stood next to it. The shuttle turned the corner and he lost them from sight.

The short drive to Moisan was the loneliest and the longest he had taken in his life.

He would, in the following years, continue to write many stories. That was his job after all. In many of them, women had red hair, green eyes and bodies of porcelain white. And terrible things happened to them: rape, multiple sex, prostitution, drug addiction, even unnatural forced sexual relationships with domestic animals. But they all accepted their fate with a quiet detachment.

He would continue to occasionally meet up with strange men and take uncommon pleasure in sucking them off. This he did with serene indifference, because in his mind it didn’t count. It was just sex, meat, it was devoid of feelings.

He never visited New Orleans or saw or heard of Susi again.