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.