Best Women's Erotica of the Year Volume 1
By: Rachel Kramer Bussel“Are you ready?” Troy asked. Angela nodded. When he started to ease his way into her, she felt like her body could not remember this first thrust ever feeling so full, tight and electrifying all at once. She clutched his lower back and felt him move even faster, but not too fast. He listened to her breathing and synced his breath with hers. They clutched each other’s hands and Angela rose her hips to meet his. She got louder. Troy said, “Damn, girl, it’s like that?” A small smile parted Angela’s lips.
“Yeah, it’s like that.” She felt the familiar tightening of a man’s legs and saw Troy’s eyes clench before he asked her to slow down.
They waited for a few breaths before he flipped her on top of him in a quick, confident motion. It reminded her of how comfortable he was just standing in front of a room full of people, and how she found that sexy—but now she wanted to scream, though she knew she was not quite there. She was on top of him now and leaning forward. She wondered what all his designs looked like on her body from this angle, but she was leaning into him to feel all his heat, his skin. He pulled back just enough to almost be free then plunged inward to enter her even deeper. She leaned down with her elbows on either side of his head and grabbed his face to kiss him so hard that she could almost feel his teeth. She nipped at his lip.
They started moving faster, and she guided him into a steady, rhythmic pace, where she felt the orgasm growing like the quick moment when a sparkler ignites and then blooms into bright sparks. Shuddering, she said his name. She gripped the shaft even tighter while he began flexing inside her. It felt like a second pulse beating hard and fast, and soon Angela was yelling “Don’t stop.” They were clamped onto each other so tightly that she didn’t even notice how loud they both were until she collapsed and rested her head on his chest.
“You loud as hell, girl,” Troy said. He was smirking now. Angela hit him with a pillow.
“I can be loud again. What you gonna do about it?” They giggled softly.
“Just let me know when you need me to be a canvas again,” Angela said.
DEMIMONDE
by Valerie Alexander
On the night of the séance, my cousin Ora lays on my bedroom chaise and tells me that we are about to be visited from beyond the grave. “They say Celeste Clair saw her dead mother appear right there in the dark—and Miss Greenbow was told she’d marry by summer.”
I wind my long black hair into a rope and pin it up. “You’ll be told of your future husband too. These traveling mediums deal in flim-flam, Ora. Pure nonsense.”
Ora sits up, indignant. “Elizabeth! Why are we going to the spirit parlor tonight if you’re going to be gloomy?”
I check my reflection in the looking glass. The séance will be held at Lady Wentworth’s, and all of her Fifth Avenue friends will be there; it’s important my deep-blue evening dress with the open neckline is respectable for a widow of thirty-one. “How else am I to amuse myself?”
Down the oak staircase we go, electric lights burning dimly from hallway sconces. The house is quiet, my infirm mother-in-law asleep upstairs for the night. The butler opens the heavy front door to a snowy 72nd Street.
“Mother says these table-tappers are a wicked blasphemy,” Ora says happily as we climb into the hansom. “She will be so livid that we’ve gone.”
My cousin is quivering with excitement; at twenty-four, she rarely goes out unescorted at night. Despite it being 1899 and New York perched on the edge of a new century, my aunt is terribly strict about Ora’s freedoms. A member of the temperance movement, she is scandalized when we ride bicycles in Riverside Park and frowns on my uncle’s cognac and cigars. She is desperate for Ora to marry soon, and considers me a bad example for refusing to remarry in the six years since my husband’s death.
Like everyone else, she thinks I’m waiting for a wealthy railroad magnate, maybe, or a banker from an old family. Or, possibly, that I’m waiting for my sweet bedridden mother-in-law to pass on before I choose a new husband to replace her son. It never occurs to anyone that I’m waiting for passion. But I know I could meet someone; I could meet the devil himself, handsome and tall, with a beautiful mouth like the doorway to the doom where all fallen women go.
Fallen women. It’s the worst fate that can happen to women like Ora and me, but the idea of the falling itself sounds like a swoon in a dream.
I could meet someone like that. I could meet him tonight.
Off we go in the hansom. Snow is falling past the gas lamps. Ora reminds me that tonight’s medium, Madame Morgana, is known throughout Europe. “She is not like those soothsayers in the Bowery. Real spirits will appear to us!”
