The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Erotica

What Happened to That Girl ^{Marie Lyn Bernard}

Christy, my fourth and final foster sister, disappeared from our home on the morning of her eighteenth birthday, three weeks before both Jason and I left for college in Santa Barbara. Now apparently Christy’s a porn star. Jason called me this morning at 9 a.m. to break the news.

We ’re grown-ups now, the kind that don’t talk about things like Christy or things like porn. We have grown-up lives – I’m working on my masters in biology, Jay’s a computer programmer. I still masturbate to those eighties videos we’d buy at the smut shop out by the airport; I still salivate for the women in legwarmers, their bangs as fluffy as whipped cream. But when we talk about sex now, it’s a lot like talking about football.

I remember the afternoon of Christy’s departure vividly, even though Jason and I never speak of it. She shared a room with our other foster sister, Rochelle, but Rochelle was at tap class that afternoon and so we were free to lie in Christy’s bed and bask in the air she left behind: the lingering scent of drugstore Vanilla Musk and weed. We held her abandoned panties to our faces and inhaled. We closed our eyes and remembered her, mutually avoiding the fact of one another’s hard-ons, those nasty flags in our track pants.

I often reminded myself: Jason wasn’t my real brother and Christy wasn’t my real sister. Our family played host to a number of foster kids over the years and our house felt, at times, like some sort of privatized orphanage. My mother liked it that way. Perhaps she felt the guilt of the newly and unfortunately wealthy – my father was killed in a car accident while I was still a baby – or perhaps she was just restless without her husband. My mother has a heart like the Tupperware she hawked at neighbourhood barbecues: sturdy, durable, long-lasting. She has a fierce ability to endure heartbreak. I, her only biological son, do not.

Jason, the son of a Dominican teenager, was the closest thing I had to a permanent sibling. He moved in when I was eight and stayed. He was the kind of guy that never looked back, and I’m the guy who misses things even before they go, who clings to worthless relationships, dead-end jobs. Even when Jason reminded me that Christy would surely flee upon becoming legal, I imagined she’d change her mind, that our lives of varsity athletics and chicken dinners would quell her thirst for fast cars and drugs and the dark corners of the human psyche that enabled her to live so easily without love, and without family.

That afternoon was a mess of taboo. Resigned to unrequited lust in Christy’s bed, we pumped our hands around our own shafts, simultaneously, the air dense with the potential of our love. I worked my clean-cut dick and saw that it was smaller than Jason’s, which was uncircumcised and thick, the kind of dick I imagined girls wanted inside them, the dick that still makes me tentative to unveil my own.

A strange kind of dance, that mutual masturbation: our synchronized movements, my fingers rubbing the rim of the head, our exhalations swimming in a fog of long-deferred desire.

I still think of Christy every day, of how she was then: a year older than us with the reading skills of a grade-schooler and the coy wit of someone who didn’t need something so trivial as reading skills. She streaked her short black hair with skunk-lines of red and white, wore pigtails and stocking caps and bandanas during all the wrong seasons. I remember her slight body; her handful-sized breasts, her skinny pale limbs, her irresistibly full mouth lined with shoplifted glamazon lipstick. She hung out in punk bars, and hung out on my favourite couch, legs sprawled everywhere, playing Chutes and Ladders with Rochelle and yelling at the adulterers on television talk shows. When I dream of her, it’s those legs, wrapping around my back like some kind of giant, earth-shattering hug.

“Seth, you aren’t gonna believe this,” Jason tells me on the phone. “You’re gonna bust a nut. I was like – I don’t even know. All I know is, you gotta see this. You gotta see it, like, now.”

“Bring it over,” I say. “I was gonna study, but I mean, this is like, a special occasion or some shit—”

“Dude, I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” I feel my chest. Hot. My forehead. Hot.

“All right, man, I’ll see ya.”

Hot. Hot.

By the time Christy moved in we were grown. Mom was always out – taking yoga, flitting around with her social circle of estranged housewives – so she didn’t care, really, that Christy pranced around the house in men’s wifebeaters, her nipples visible beneath the flimsy fabric, or that Christy sometimes didn’t sleep at home, or that Christy had become Rochelle’s mentor, or that Christy played loud music at inappropriate times. Christy went to school – diligently, dressed in my father’s old college hoodies – and she was always on time for dinner, so it didn’t matter.

And my mother didn’t know that Christy liked to bound through the bathroom door when I was washing up, announce, “Shower time!” and strip bare, naked all of a sudden and setting my veins on fire with her callousness, to jump into the shower, pulling the curtain tight just before my erection reached full-mast.

The first time, she peeked out only moments later, her smooth skin covered in droplets of water: “I’m sorry – does that bother you? I’m so used to like, well, living with a bunch of girls.” Christy had been in a home. Or rehab. These were the things we didn’t know about her, because she never talked about anything but the immediate present.

“Um… no,” I said, maybe too enthusiastically, and she grinned.

“I didn’t think you minded.”

But that was the closest I got to sex. Instead, I fumbled around with the breasts of my bright girlfriends, trying to get someone into bed before graduation. Even in the thrust of high-school love, I thought of Christy.

It occurred to me once – maybe she got naked for Jason, too? But I could’ve thought about that until it split me open, so I chose not to.

An hour later, Jason’s here, in sweatpants, grinning.

“Get ready for the best hour of your fucking life, dude,” he says, pushing past me to the living room.

“Can I see the cover?” I ask. “Is she on the cover?”

Jason hands it to me as he clears a spot on the couch, fiddling with the remote.

She is on the cover. Christy. Christy-of-the-shower, Christy-of-the-white-tank-top, Christy-of-my-wettest-wet-dreams. Honour Roll Cocksuckers. Christy, clad in a plaid skirt and saddle shoes with suspenders tight across her new boobs. Her face is covered in come and her hand is down her skirt.

“Hot, right?” Jason asks. “I always wondered what happened to that girl.”

All the time, I want to say, I wonder about her all the time. “Yeah, me too. Kinda makes sense, y’know?”

“Yeah, especially if she’s still into drugs.”

I brush off his accusation. “You’ve already seen the whole thing?”

“Nah,” he says. “I watched like, the first five minutes. I thought – uh – I should save the rest to see with you.”

A silence. We’re men now, I think, but weren’t we men then? In college, a buddy and I bought blow jobs from the same hooker, and I waited in the room during his and then he saw me get mine, and wasn’t this like that, except less so? And why should I feel unsettled anyhow, with the object of our desire so clearly a woman? But I prefer him being here. I’m drawn to that nakedness, that vulnerability that feels like family.

“Cool, cool,” I nod.

Honour Roll Cocksuckers is the opposite of seeing a movie star on the street. Christy, in pigtails and a skirt with breasts straining against her selectively buttoned shirt, is “taught a lesson” by the principal and then the janitor, and then both at once. The film unfolds at a pace that’s like your train charging past when it’s supposed to stop, like watching a game that you wish would go into a third overtime just to see if he can score like that again – over, and over, and over.

Bend her over, I yell silently. Bend her over and fuck her everywhere. I wanna see that round white ass, the same ass that lazed around the house on Sunday afternoons in boxer shorts, the ass connected to those legs laid absently across my lap as we watched TV.

The janitor bends her over the desk and yanks her panties off. She yelps. He smacks her ass and she yelps again.

A close-up: beneath the thicket of black hair that once coated her pussy lies a shaven, beautiful hole, lips like a canoe around the slippery line of her clit, better than I imagined. The janitor rubs his dick against her and slips in. She yelps again, and he smacks again. Then he fucks her madly, pounding her – it cuts to her face, her intense eyes and her skin still white as soap.

The principal approaches the front of the desk, fitting his body between her arms and shoving his dick into her mouth. She moans and tightens her glossy lips around him.

I look at Jason but he won’t look at me. Maybe this is too much, I think, maybe this isn’t right, Jason with a dick like the Hispanic janitor’s, and me skinny and white like the principal, me at her front and him at her back, me fucking Christy’s throat and him, now, pulling his dick from her cunt to tickle the rim of her asshole, which flexes, eager for penetration.

When he breaks into that tiny hole, cupped by her perfect cheeks, I can’t take it any more. I slowly unbutton my pants and extract my dick… and rub. I have no inhibitions now; just a kind of drunkenness.

Out of the corner of my eye I see Jason doing the same.

The janitor lies on the floor and Christy mounts him. The principal takes her from behind while her ass bounces over the janitor’s dick.

“Double penetration,” Jason says. I smile too, and feel better everywhere.

The moment I pop is bright white, like Christy’s spotless ass.

I look at Jason smiling at me, his hand unapologetically smeared. He goes to the bathroom, and I’m limp, rendered half conscious by the power of porn. By Christy and the Honour Roll Cocksuckers.

The movie moves on to other girls, other scenes, as Jason and I navigate the tender terrain of our situation. He brings washcloths and we clean up. He sneaks me another smile and I feel okay, a safe distance from our frightening adolescent desires.

When Jason speaks it’s like the end of a football game: “Some good shit, man, right? She did good.”

“Hell, yeah, she did.”

Jason nods solemnly. I zip my pants.

“But dude – I didn’t even tell you the best part.”

“I don’t think I can handle anything else,” I say, laughing. I’m in a dark room surrounded by ghosts, and naked girls are fucking on television.

“OK. I’ll call you tomorrow,” Jason says. “Get some work done, schoolboy.”

Jason takes the movie with him, and I’m back in my apartment feeling like I’ve just had the best sex of my life. I dream of smacking Christy’s ass, of punishing her with her skirt over her head. I wake up wet and alone.

Jason picks me up after the exam. “We’re going on a road trip, my man.”

“A road trip?” I’m groggy, half awake. “Where?”

Jason grins. “You’ll see.”

The rocks in my head knock around wearily, too worn out to imagine anything. I fall asleep.

I wake up as we pull up to a nondescript office building. Jason calls someone as we lumber out of the car, and I fix my hair in the window’s reflection.

“Where the fuck are we, dude?” I ask. It’s painfully sunny. I’m thinking of Christy, of all the bodies that came in and out of our house, no one ever sticking. I feel the emptiness that pounds when I think of her, of Jason, of my mother, of the difference between knowing where you’ve come from and knowing you’ve come from nowhere.

My mind is still murky as we ride the elevator up to “Untitled Scream Productions”. Jason’s grinning like a kid on his birthday.

I rub my eyes. Is this real? Will I see her, knowing now what it’s like inside that quivering pussy? Will I slide my hand along her taut stomach, tickle the Playboy bunny in her bellybutton?

There’s an empty desk and Jason buzzes in. We’re greeted by the principal. He and Jason are – apparently – friends. I’m dizzy, everything in slow motion like an acid trip. It’s one of those moments where life slows down and opens itself up like an orgasm and everything in you turns into so much air.

I am following Jason, feeling like I’m in a children’s book, the kind where you feel three times smaller and follow imaginary friends into strange rooms.

This sparse room, with black leather couches and a view of the Hollywood Hills, is strange. Because Christy is in it.

Right there. There she is. She’s wearing grey sweatpants and a white tank top, her full breasts peeking out of the sides. I liked her real tits better, but I don’t care; being near her is more than I can bear. I don’t know if I’m going to get a hard-on or throw up.

“Blast from the past,” she says, but it sounds like a come-on. What has Jason set up? “It’s my brothers.”

She hugs us, and squeezes me as she hugs. I’m already hard.

“Things haven’t changed, I see,” she whispers in my ear, tapping the head of my dick.

She’s still so skinny, but she’s a woman now; why is she still so skinny? Still so pale, living in the Valley and still so pale?

But I don’t care. I want to bend her over the table, fuck her with the wrath of all my mornings of blue balls, all the times she riled me up and left me dry.

I want to fuck her for not leaving a note. I’d said that to Jason, too, then, that she didn’t leave a note and he’d scowled and said, It’s not like she killed herself, and besides, look, she left all her panties.

“Sit down, boys,” she says, and we sit on either side of her.

She makes small talk, asks us what we’re doing, how Mom is, tells us she dropped out of art school, that she’s been doing porn for a year now and she really likes it, that it’s her calling, that she lives with Matt, who co-owns the company with Jeff, who’s a friend of Jason’s from college, and that she was surprised, really, when Jeff told her that we’d called. She thought about us, she said, from time to time, not all the time but sometimes, and felt a little bad about leaving without saying anything, but she was just a kid, not that she was all together now, but that she knew things, some things, like why people leave notes when they leave for ever, and why people tell other people where they are going and why they don’t.

Then she has her hand on Jason’s inner thigh, tickling near his dick. He leans back and closes his eyes.

“I wanted to do this then,” she says, getting on her knees in front of Jason. She breathes hot between his legs.

There’s something sad lingering in her face, something that makes me angry and mixed up but then she’s pulling Jason’s huge cock out of his pants and scratching his balls, wrapping her lips around his dick. Did Jason pay for this? I wonder. Is this why we’re here? Or is she just doing this because she wants to – because she wants us?

Is she so good at performing on cue?

She undresses and I’m wide-eyed at her new breasts. I want to watch all her other movies, over and over again for hours and hours, for as long as I live.

She sucks Jason’s dick like a porn star, all the moaning and the moisture, all the upward glances for approval. She doesn’t resist when he places his hand on the back of her head, pulling her closer and shoving himself deeper. I watch her lips move up and down the length of his cock and mine hardens like concrete. Her breasts nudge his knees.

“Seth,” she says, popping Jason out of her mouth. “Why don’t you fuck me while I suck Jason off?”

I look around like there’s another Seth in the room.

“You want me to, uh – fuck – to fuck you?”

“You want to, don’t you?”

“Uh – um – of course.”

She stands up, walks to the desk and bends over it.

“Jason, wanna break me in first?”

Jason, glee in his eyes, erection in hand, goes over to the table and rubs himself against her ass, like in Honour Roll. He gives me a look: Isn’t this a good movie?

She reaches back and guides him south into the sticky wetness of her hole. She grabs his balls, rolling them in her palm. Then he begins to nail her, and my mouth falls open. He makes sounds I’ve never heard from him before. He fucks her like a hellhound, like he’s drilling into something thick and thorny and that he’s got to get through to the other side.

Then he whips it out, jerking, and the foam from his dick slides over her ass like soapsuds.

“You ready, Seth?” she says, still bent over. Ready? I want to fuck her up the ass. I want to fuck her in the mouth. I want to come in her ass, on her tits, I want her to take my cock in her mouth and swallow my come until she gags. Fuck, I want to be a porn star too. Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

But I don’t.

“Let’s, uh—” I’m nervous. “Go to the couch?”

Jason’s on the other couch, cleaning himself with paper napkins. I try to pretend he isn’t there as Christy leaps across the room, obediently, and bends over. I edge closer to her, my dick in my hand, but my stomach flips, and flips again, and I can’t.

“No – no—” I say. “Lie on it.”

She does, looking confused.

“On your back,” I say, watching her pert ass roll over.

I get on top of her, our eyes locked, and I ease myself in like I’m the first one, breaking her open, setting that thing loose in her that got her here in the first place. She gasps but doesn’t moan and I shift, in and out, gently. I look into her eyes and I grab her hair in fists.

I make love. To her. Inside her it feels pure, a million miles away from cameras and lights. It feels utterly private.

We kiss, we suck and pull, our tongues courting and wedding and dancing.

I lie on top of her. I kiss her ear. I want to whisper so many things but instead I just tickle her ear lobe with my tongue. I kiss her nose, which is red at the rims and sad. I look at her eyes, and she looks back at mine, and it’s almost like I could cry.

She reaches out and grabs my ass with her hands, her finger softly rimming the outside of my asshole, but she doesn’t enter it. We roll over and she’s on top of me.

The muscles of her cunt tighten around my cock – she’s a pro – and she rides me. Her breasts bounce like tennis balls, her soft hands grip my biceps. She rubs back and forth, her clit grazing the hair above my dick.

“This feels so goood, baby.”

“Yeah, it does,” I say. There are dirty words we could exchange like endearment, but we don’t.

She smiles, clenches her muscles hard around my cock. “Ah – yeah!”

She lowers to me. “Let’s go back the other way. I wanna feel you over me, is that OK?”

So we roll back over. We are careful, athletic, on the limited space of the couch.

Jason might still be in the room, and he might not be. But as I continue, thrusting deeply, feeling her clench around me at just the right moments and grind her ass up and down with finesse, I see that she’s going to come, and I know that I can too, and so we do, together, and I come inside her even though I know I shouldn’t.

I rest my head between her breasts, which are supple though clearly fake. I feel her breathe. Jason is no longer in the room; I can hear him laughing outside, him and another man laughing.

I feel naked but not empty any more. Not for just that second, the second that I lie inside her, silent.

“That was nice,” she says finally.

“It was,” I respond, giving a smile that looks like an apology. “Thank you.”

She smiles. “Thank you, Seth.”

“For what?”

She shrugs as I slip out of her and stand up. She sits up, thinking. She’s naked. With me.

“For loving me, I guess. Even if it’s just for—” She looks at the clock. “For twenty minutes.”

I shake my head and laugh. “Twenty years. At least twenty years.”

I watch as she dresses, her eyes still huge and empty. I realize that I’ve never known someone who needed love as badly as this girl – more than my mother, more than the twelve other kids shuffled in and out of our house like supporting actors, more than Jason when he first arrived on our doorstep, tattered and broken and hardened to the bone. Maybe even more than I do.

“Maybe I’ll see you guys again?” she asks.

“Maybe.” I smile. “I hope so.” Even though I don’t know if that’s true or not.

That’s the last thing I say, because then Jason comes in, triumphant and sportsmanlike. “Dude, you ready to bust?”

I nod. In that same dreamlike state I entered with, I leave the office and we get in the car. We pull onto the highway and drive until the building fades into the millions of office buildings around us, recedes under the ominous landscape of the hills.

Jason recites his play-by-play, eager, and then says, “Hey man, what happened after I left?”

I shrug. “Same thing, more or less.”

He nods. He keeps talking. The radio plays, the car moves, and we move on, together, in his car, in our strange, beautiful brotherhood, the kind that stands naked in front of itself, unashamed.