The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Erotica

Only Connect ^{Lauren Henderson}

It’s a truism that men can only concentrate on one thing at a time. Isn’t that the stereotype, that women can juggle twenty different tasks at once, running from one pole to the next, keeping the plates spinning with a few swift flicks of the wrist? Men are supposed to be the opposite: so single-minded that if they try to do more than one thing simultaneously they end up messing up both. It’s a neat little theory but it completely fails to account for what Dan is doing to me right now. One hand on the wheel, the other between my legs, his eyes never leaving the road, his index and third fingers stroking me through my silky French knickers. A stereotypical man would be completely thrown by the speed bumps; but Dan, far from treating them as an obstacle, is actually using them as a choreographic motif, working his fingers round the edge of the material and into me a split-second before the front wheels hit the first bump, then remaining frustratingly still, allowing each subsequent bump to drive his fingers a little deeper into me, like a wedge, so that I find myself grinding my hips in anticipation as we reach the next one, barely able to wait. Dan starts rubbing the heel of his hand against me, his fingers still inside me. The seam of my knickers, caught between us, chafes against me so successfully that it might have been specially designed for the purpose. I am moaning. Dan is still looking straight ahead – it’s pretty much a point of honour – but his lips are curved into the smuggest smile I have ever seen on a man.

I’m the one here who can’t concentrate on anything else. It doesn’t occur to me for a moment to reach over and stroke Dan through his jeans, slip my fingers between his waistband and belly, rub my thumb down the coarse hairy line of skin to the hot, smooth, slightly damp and swollen-to-bursting head below. I am totally selfish when I’m being fingered, incapable of doing anything but lying back and letting out a crescendo of what I hope are highly encouraging moans. To be fair to me, I am just the same when I’m going down on someone; I don’t want any interruptions, no matter how well meant. I like to give my full attention to the task in hand.

By the time we reach my flat I have come once and am looking almost as smug as Dan. Not quite, though. Dan’s one of those strong silent types who loves nothing more – not even football – than seeing me go completely out of control. He gets excited too, of course, but only once he’s already reduced me to a babbling, jelly-legged sex object with glazed eyes and rising damp.

Which is fine with me. Every relationship has its patterns and if Dan insists on making me come repeatedly before even so much as unzipping his trousers, who am I to complain? Early on, in the interests of balance as well as for my own enjoyment, I tried to buck this trend, but Dan just removed my hands, threw me over the sofa and slid his thumb into me as if he were testing me for ripeness, and I promptly forgot about everything else.

I manage to get out of the car without falling over, though my legs are so weak by now this is more of an achievement than it sounds. We walk decorously, which is to say without touching, up the steps to my front door and I am just pulling out my keys when Dan sits down on the stone wall that borders the flight of steps. He’s just waiting for me to get the door open, but I look at him, his eyes meet mine, and I can’t manage a moment longer without being in physical contact with him; dropping the keys back into my pocket I climb onto his lap, my bottom on his thighs, my feet on the wall for balance, and start kissing him. It’s a dark night and as usual half of the street lights are out, or at best flickering spasmodically. And the steps are high off the street, at first-floor level. We’re in the shadows, a couple of closely entwined shapes, no more. What we’re actually doing would be visible only to someone with night-vision goggles and a good vantage point. I hope.

Because by now Dan has what feels like his entire hand up me and is fucking me with it in slow steady strokes, fucking me actually better than he does with his cock, which is a curiosity I’ve noticed before but never really have much time to dwell on because my brain is pretty much fully occupied with other things, foremost of which right now is doing my best not to scream. I have what feels like my entire fist crammed into my mouth and am biting down on the knuckles in pursuit of this good-neighbourly goal, an arrangement which is amusing Dan tremendously. His hand is almost hurting me, slamming into me like a pile-driver, but I couldn’t bear him to stop. I lean fully into his other hand, on my back, balancing me, supporting me so I can take the full force of what his other hand is doing to me without falling off the wall. God, this is good. There are so few moments in life of absolute transcendence. Or maybe that’s an over-elevated way of putting it. I cannot think about anything else right now, anything at all; disconnected thoughts rush through my brain, gone almost before I’ve registered them, so fleeting that they come only to remind me that there is something outside this intense sensation, to stop me losing myself to it so completely that I can never find my way back.

Dan gives a particularly frenzied thrust into me which definitely emphasizes the pain aspect over the pleasure. He’s losing control. We have to get inside my flat. We have to have sex. We are having sex, of course, but I mean something more specific by that. I grab Dan’s wrist as he pulls back for another grind into me, though I’m whimpering with frustration at making him stop, even for a moment. With a near-heroic effort of will I drag out my keys and get the door open. We manoeuvre past the ground-floor neighbour’s damned bicycles – why was I trying not to make any noise outside? I should have wailed like a siren and woken the bastards up, the amount of times I’ve ripped my tights on their bicycle spokes. Stumbling past the second one I reach the stairs and hold out a hand for Dan, who is momentarily snagged on a handlebar. He drags himself free, grabs my hand and trips over a pedal, all at once, landing on the steps with a stumble that could send us both off-balance.

In that moment our eyes meet. We could recover; I could grab the newel post and brace myself against Dan’s fall; but I don’t. We don’t. I let myself tumble back onto the stairs – which are carpeted, I’m not that much of a masochist – and Dan’s weight comes down on top of me like the one thing I’ve been craving all my life. As soon as he lands we are scrabbling at each other’s clothes, grinding into each other, every bit of our bodies that can wrap around the other’s doing so as if for dear life; feet, knees, hands all desperate for as much contact as we can possibly manage. It must look anatomically impossible. I have a flash of intense frustration that I’m not completely double-jointed.

My skirt’s around my waist, my knickers are down, Dan’s unzipping himself – ah, that sound, that wonderful anticipatory sound, like a trumpet fanfare before the entrance of the key player on the scene – and two seconds later he has jammed himself up into me and we’re fucking on the stairs. The relief is almost unbearable. I mean, I love everything else, all the preliminaries and the flourishes and the fanfares; I come much more thoroughly and repeatedly before the actual act of fucking than I ever do during it; but by God there is absolutely nothing like it. My eyes roll back, my hips tilt up so that Dan can get his hands under them, my feet lock round the back of his calves, I am bracing my hands clumsily against the wall and the stair riser, and we’re fucking, thank God, I thought I would die if we didn’t manage to fuck at this precise moment, not a second later, I thought I would actually explode.

Dan never lasts that long, which is maybe why he dedicates so much time to all the other variations before the main theme. I can scarcely complain; he’s already reduced me to a boneless sex-craving wreck, dripping with moisture – how unattractive that sounds, though it’s exactly what I feel like – and now he’s taking a much briefer pleasure than mine. His hip bones grind into my inner thighs, his fingers bite into my bottom and with an arch of his back and a split-second pause he sinks into me one last time, his lips curled back from his teeth in that sneer he always makes when he comes, his eyes almost closed, the slits of white glinting as eerily as if he were having a fit. He collapses on top of me. That’s good too. I love the weight, and Dan isn’t too big, not a great slab of meat trying to crush me out of existence. Besides, he’s completely absorbed in his own sensations, overcome by them; even as I take the full weight of his body, his entire focus is on the spasms of his cock, me beneath him a collection of body parts, the woman he loves to fuck, nothing more. I hope. Otherwise I’d feel as suffocated as if he were twenty stone of loose rolls of fat.

His cock gives a couple of convulsive twitches inside me, last moments of past glory, and then everything subsides and suddenly we can hear our breathing, which is as frenzied as if we had just done a three-mile sprint. I’m always reluctant to move, even if right now the stair riser is biting into my back as painfully as if I just had sex up against an iron joist. I like to lie here, feeling the cock slowly shrink and curl up inside me before slipping out wistfully, stickily, a sad little aftermath of what was once such a proud trophy. No wonder it was a man who invented existentialism. Think of the mood swings: how important it must be to them to live in the moment. A limp, post-orgasmic cock always provokes great tenderness in me – well, if it’s just done its job to my satisfaction – but one quickly learns not to use the words “sweet” or “cute” about a cock, even if you have just demonstrated how much you like getting fucked by it, tucks it away immediately, almost always insists on wearing briefs in bed. I gave up trying to understand men a long time ago. Now I just go with what seems to work. It’s so much easier.

Dan braces himself against the stairs and lifts himself off me. As always, the removal of his weight is sad, but immediately makes me stretch my limbs, as if to test their new freedom of movement. He hauls me to my feet. One thought has been running through my mind for the last ten minutes, almost as soon as Dan’s cock slid into me; I don’t want him to stay the night. This is perfect just as it is. If he even comes into my flat it will be ruined. Tactics have been running through my brain. If I were really brazen I would just wish him goodnight firmly and continue upstairs, but I can’t quite manage that.

“God, I’m exhausted,” I say. “You’ve worn me out.”

“Yeah?” He smirks, bless him.

“I’m just going to pass out. I’m shattered.”

I try to look regretful, intimating that I would love to ask him in but have already been so overcome by his prowess as a lover that any further bout tonight would severely damage my immune-deficiency system. This is of course a total lie – it’s Dan who couldn’t manage another bout; once at night, once, if I’m lucky, in the morning is his limit. But it works perfectly.

“You’d better get some rest, then,” he says, smugger than ever. “I’ll see you round.”

We kiss. He goes, climbing uncomfortably through the massed ranks of mountain bikes to the door. I sigh in relief and head upstairs. I don’t even mind the fact that I live on the fifth floor. It’s more distance between me and Dan.

My best friend David says that men adore being treated like sex objects and I should stop being concerned about this kind of thing with Dan. “Just pay him lots of compliments about the sex and he’ll be fine,” David assured me. I don’t agree. I remember all too well the guy in college with whom I was supposed to be having a sex-only relationship who agreed eagerly the first night and then never wanted to have sex with me again. Moreover he became very bitter towards me, especially when I started going out with someone. I think this is a much truer reflection of the male psyche. Men think they want sex only, but they are only comfortable with this set-up when they’re the ones after sex while the women want something more. As soon as you make it clear that you too just want to fuck their brains out on a regular basis but not have to talk to them about their families in the interim periods, they’re off faster than a speeding bullet.

My body is exhausted, quite literally – temporarily worn out, used and satisfied – but my brain is buzzing. It’s partly frustration; it didn’t get used much this evening. Dan insists on us going out to dinner every so often. I much prefer a film, a drink, and a swift journey to my flat, as this limits the conversational necessities as much as possible. But despite the fact that we obviously have very little in common and any occasion in which we try to talk for more than ten minutes is full of laboured questions and terrible pauses, Dan still keeps suggesting dinner. God knows why. It’s another reason I part company with David. Dan’s constant wish to go out to dinner with me can only be explained as a need to enact what he sees as being the tableaux of a conventional relationship, the other things men and women do together apart from fucking on staircases, as if you have to have the one to be able to do the other. I plead my way out of the dinner dates as much as I can but sometimes he just won’t take no for an answer. Tonight was as awful as ever. It never gets any better.

I look at my watch. Midnight. Perfect. Plenty of time for a long, hot soak in the bath. I wish now that I had made the appointment for 1.00, instead of 2.00: I thought it would be too early. But Dan and I have managed to satisfactorily conclude the evening’s business in much less time than I had projected. How efficient we’re getting. I have a long bath, make myself some coffee, pour myself a drink, and by 1.40 I’m wrapped in a big towel, wafting aromatic bath oil every time I move, logged on, in the chat room, waiting for my second date of the evening.

I know it’s stupid, but there are butterflies in my stomach as I sit there waiting for him. I know it’s stupid because he’ll be there; he always is. And sure enough, at 1.56 it scrolls across the screen:

and a lovely wave of relief and happiness floods through me and I type:

I turn off the computer and get into my pyjamas: flannel, huge, the kind of thing you can only wear when you sleep alone. A shot of whisky, to take to bed with me. And the nagging annoyance: why must he always push for more? Why does he keep asking to meet me? Can’t he see that the whole point of this is this perfect, focused connection? Meeting would ruin everything. It’s not that we might find each other unattractive; just the opposite. What if we did? It would ruin everything. I have everything in balance just the way I want it and I’m not going to mess with that. It’s working. I’m happy. I take half a sleeping pill and wash it down with a gulp of whisky. Library tomorrow. Lovely. I’m happy. I really am.