Funny, Brutal, Tender

I first met C. Garcia-Sanchez, like so many of the authors whom I admire, through the Writers list of the Erotica Readers and Writers Association. I honestly can’t remember exactly how we struck up the first of our many email conversations. I do, however, recall him asking me if I would read and critique his work in progress, “The Color of the Moon”. And I remember being stunned and amazed by the beauty, wisdom and depth of that piece—even as I was playing the role of a responsible crit partner, suggesting cuts and changes. His compelling tale of ancient Japan, with its itinerant Buddhist monk and passionate ghost, was like nothing I’d ever read. Certainly, despite its intense eroticism, it was a far cry from the salacious tales I typically critique and review.

“The Color of the Moon” is more than just an erotic story. It’s about the conflict between religion and spirit, the addictive power of desire, and the nature of reality. It’s a love story, a ghost story, a historical tour de force. He had a tough time finding a publisher (although Whiskey Creek Press finally took the chance) because the work just didn’t fit into anyone’s boxes.

Since that first experience, I’ve had the privilege of reading many of Garce’s tales. His work continues to defy categorization. I don’t know anyone else who could write an erotic story about a suicide bomber (“How Paradise Comes to the Blind”, in Coming Together: Into the Light) that could still arouse—but Garce managed. He can be hilariously funny, shockingly brutal, achingly tender—but he is always original. The stories in this volume are no exception. You will be laughing so hard your stomach hurts one moment, gasping in terror the next. As you plunge into this volume, expect the unexpected.

Garce writes from his heart and his soul. His stories are often difficult. They challenge both intellectually and emotionally. I don’t want to scare readers away, but I also must warn you. You will not read this book and remain unchanged.

The proceeds from Coming Together Presents C. Garcia-Sanchez will benefit the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (http://www.rainn.org/). RAINN is the nation's largest anti-sexual assault organization. It operates a national hotline, educates the public about sexual assault; and leads national efforts to prevent sexual assault, improve services to victims and ensure that rapists are brought to justice. Garce picked this charity after writing one of the stories in this volume (“Miss Julia’s Cake Club”). When you read the story, you will understand why.

Garce is always self-deprecating about his own abilities. He claims that he’s just an apprentice and calls me his “mentor”. I tell him that you can learn craft but that means little without inspiration. Personally, I’m honored to be able to present this collection of stories by one of the most talented authors I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. I hope that you’ll appreciate his visions as much as I do.

[In case you haven’t figured this out, I edited this collection. Leave a comment and you could win a copy of my sci fi erotica story, The Antidote. But I hope you’ll consider picking up a copy of Garce's book, for yourself or someone you love.]

Here’s a bit from the stunning coming of age story, “El Pimientero”.

That first time going in, how does that feel for a boy? It was not like I expected. It felt keenly strange. To feel the wet flesh yield and envelope the tip of my cock, to feel it go in like a blade.

I looked up at her eyes to see if I was hurting her. She was looking away from me, at nothing, almost indifferent, it seemed, to what I was doing to her. I pushed forward firmly but gently and watched from above as my stiff cock disappeared an inch at a time. Deep and down into her slickness, her open woman’s wound. The feeling. It was as complex as wine. The animal strangeness of being inside another person for the first time. To look down between her legs and see our mounded hairs bunched up against each other tightly, and just below that the hard shaft disappearing into her. The delicious warmth wrapped all around the shaft of my cock. The tip of my cock was throbbing and tickling me madly. A couple of strokes and I would surely pop. It was important to wait. To prove to her I could do it. But I could feel the excitement building, even as I kept still, leaning into her, but not thrusting. Only holding it there and feeling the maddening sensations getting away from me.

“It’s about letting go,” she had said, one evening at the cine. The projector was threaded with an Arnold Schwarzenegger flick. We sat there in the hot little loft, side by side, drinking Squirt soda from scratched green bottles and eating cookies. “It’s hard to let go, especially for the man,” she continued. “It’s hard for the woman during sex also, but it’s hard to let go in other ways, ways that are different. The man has to calm his penis in the beginning so that he doesn’t lose control and shame himself. Or you can do it the other way too. I had a lover named Horatio. He had a runaway pinga, like a pistol – bang! He didn’t fight it. He simply shoved it in and said ‘This one is for me, Maria, the next is for you!’ and bang and bam and thank you. Not even a minute. But he got it up again quick and he was good for the rest of the night. It was like taking a rock out of his shoe. For a woman, letting go is about letting go of your heart, of letting yourself be open. It can be very difficult.”

I felt myself letting go and my breath becoming faster. I grunted and tensed against it, grinding my teeth, trying to perform the special stopping act I had practiced. But my body was beginning to win.

“Get off of me!” she yelled.

“Wuh?”

“Get off of me!” She twisted away, put her foot up against my belly and shoved me out of her. My cock throbbed as I doubled over, holding it in. A single pearl drop burst forth and dribbled, dangling a second like a tiny rope and then dripped away to the floor. I looked up at her. Her face was red.

“What are you doing, Chacho? Do you want to fuck your grandmother? What would your mother say if she saw what we’re doing? Who do you think are?”

“Doña?”

“Leave me alone!”

“I’m in love with you!” I shouted it out. “I’m in love with you, Doña Maria Soledad. Why shouldn’t we have each other?”

She curdled into a ball, pulling up her knees. She bunched up the blankets and buried her face. I heard a wail and she curled up tighter, covering her face with her hair.

I had seen Doña Soledad in almost every mood there is but I never before seen Doña Soledad cry. I had no idea what to do. Just when she had made me feel like a man, she made me feel like a stupid boy again. 

Thanks-Giving Back Hop Links

Sunday 22 November

http://lisabetsarai.blogspot.com/2015/11/sunday-snog-for-good-mm-201.html

http://leighwantsfood.blogspot.com/2015/11/coming-together-giving-back-hop.html

Monday 23 November

http://lisabetsarai.blogspot.com/2015/11/giving-it-away.html

http://delilahnight.com/2015/11/23/giving-back-blog-hop/

http://paidbytheweird.blogspot.com/2015/11/coming-together-thanksgiving-giving-back.html

http://wp.me/p1EqZm-Vt 

Tuesday 24 November

http://lisabetsarai.blogspot.com/2015/11/funny-brutal-tender.html

Wednesday 25 November

http://lisabetsarai.blogspot.com/2015/11/erotic-visions-for-brave.html

Thursday 26 November

http://lisabetsarai.blogspot.com/2015/11/bloody-good-erotica.html

http://annabetherotica.com/

Friday 27 November

http://lisabetsarai.blogspot.com/2015/11/release-day-for-another-coming-together.html

Saturday 28 November

http://lisabetsarai.blogspot.com/2015/11/where-no-man-has-gone-before.html

 

Telling Stories for Fun and Kindness

By C. Sanchez-Garcia

I realize what a great opportunity this is to plug my Coming Together book, and I suppose I should get to that, but what I really want to do here is say something else.

Alessia Brio? Are you reading this? Thank you. Take a bow on behalf of us wannabes and the old timers too.

Thank you, Alessia. Somebody needs to say it. And you don’t edit this part out.

I would also like to offer a giveaway to a selected commenter – my novella from Whisky Creek Press The Color of the Moon.

If a journey starts with a single step, a story collection starts with a single story. A single story starts with an idea, in this case an idea I came across while baking cookies. I’m a guy but I love fresh cookies and I love cook books. Cookbooks for the most part hold out a kind of wonderful lie, like exercise magazines. You look at them and persuade yourself you can get those abs, and bake that soufflé and impress the ladies all around. I was thumbing through a cookbook on cookie recipes that had illustrations of cookies, sure, but also of antique cookie jars and very old baking products advertisements. There was an old retro ad for sugar cookies that showed a young mother in a sunny kitchen looking sort of like Mary Pickford rolling out cookie dough surrounded by her three adoring children. “The cookies that everybody likes!”

What could be more punchy and to the point? Hemingway on his best day could not have written better prose than that. I just fell in love with that cookie ad and the young woman and her kids and imagined a lost time when mothers did stuff like this with children hanging around pinching cookie dough behind her back and silently worshipping her. Later I saw another ad of a ‘50s housewife in checkered dress and the inevitable pearl necklace holding up a handsome cake on a platter. And for some reason, god knows why, I imagined her with a black eye. Then I wondered where the black eye came from. Then I took another look at the cookie ad. I grabbed my yellow pad, found a place to hide for awhile and roughed out “Miss Julia’s Cake Club”.

You won’t find this kind of story in the usual erotica anthologies. Miss Julia is not a story publishers would easily touch. It’s grim. It’s painful. And the pain is real, not the playful kind. Miss Julia is a story of erotic transformation and spiritual endurance that viscerally hurt to write, but contains its own kind of truth. Alessia Brio doesn’t back off from tough stories, she gives them a spotlight and that takes a lonely kind of guts. “Miss Julia’s Cake Club” is part of a dedicated collection of stories called Coming Together Presents C. Sanchez-Garcia, and not for nothing is that collection dedicated to RAINN, The Rape And Incest National Network, for the sake of helping all the real life Julias out there in the world.

There’s other things in there too, they’re not all grim, but a lot of them are not the stories you’ll find in most places. A young man in the Caribbean learning about love from an older woman, a love letter I should have written and never did. An older man whose wife has Alzheimer’s Disease and a forgotten memory which enables them to rediscover their passion for each other for a fleeting moment, because all old lovers and all moments of love are fleeting. And some silly stuff, too. A good lover should also make you laugh in bed.

But in all stories, in any genre, I think there should be characters with soul, someone to cheer for even when they’re very different from us. Take a look at the beginning of "Miss Julia’s Cake Club":

*****

The flame under the battered old soup pot was getting weaker, shrinking from blue to orange. That’s the end of the gas, she thought. I made it last four days this time, but it’s running down. She kneeled on the dirt floor next to the little stove, picked up the aluminum gas tank and shook it. There was no sloshing sound. It weighed almost nothing now. Judging by the little ring of orange flame under the pot, she might have a half an hour, probably less.

She thought of her next door neighbor. Maybe she could bring the pot over there and heat it. But it seemed she was always asking her or begging her for something. It was too much. No, the flame would last. If she covered it she could get a boil going faster. It would be getting dark soon. Jorge would be home any time.

There were still a few minutes to look. Just time enough to look. If she hurried.

She put a frying pan on top of the pot and turned the flame up as high as it could go, but it barely rose. Bending down, she picked a couple of chipped bowls from the little shelf next to the sink, the shelf she’d made from some scrap plywood she’d found near the soccer stadium. She rubbed Bingo! Soap on the bowls, rinsed them in the sink under cold water and put them on the table. She laid a stamped metal spoon next to each bowl and waited, listening for his steps at the door.

Just time enough to look.

On her hands and knees, she knelt down next to the stove and carefully reached behind it. Feeling around in the dirt, until her fingertips brushed up against the cool slick paper, she pulled out a magazine.

On the cover was a picture of a perfectly browned rack of roasted prime rib, displayed with flowers on a gilt edged porcelain serving tray. She glanced up at the stove and saw the flame had changed color slightly, but otherwise it was holding up. She might make it. She sat in the dirt by the stove and leaned against the wall. With a sigh of contentment she drew up her calloused bare feet and rested the magazine on her knees. The page was turned down where she’d left off, and she opened it to the photograph she’d been looking at everyday for a week.

That’s the stove I want. She mouthed the letters of the oven name. V-I-K-I-N-G. It was the oven of the angels. What would it like to have a real oven, a magnificent oven, big enough even to stuff Jorge into? In the full page advertisement, the V-I-K-I-N-G oven was built into the wall of the house itself, and the rich gringa woman was about to open it to reveal some gorgeous creation for her guests. Guests. Dinner guests. How must it feel to have dinner guests? To have guests at your table, come to see you from far away, come to eat the food you’d made to please them with love and style, just for them. That would be the perfect life.

She looked up at the wall across from her. An oven like that? Judging by the height of the gringa lady, why an oven like that—it would fill up the whole wall by itself! You could roast a chicken in it, a dozen chickens!. Pies. Wonderful cakes. Lovely, lovely cakes. That would be the best of all, to bake cakes every day. People would come to see her, and she would serve them cake. She could even sell the cakes. The cakes themselves would pay for the cost of the oven. She could start a bakery with an oven like that. People would come to her little house just to look at it.

****

I won’t pretend to be humble about this - I love these stories. I love the people in them. I love poor Julia. I want you to love them too. They’ll help you get through the commute on the bus, the lunch break, an hour after class in detention hall; where ever you crack them open and just begin.

I come from a fun and disreputable tradition. My literary heroes were the old pulp fiction writers, names to conjure with like Raymond Chandler, Richard Matheson, Robert E Howard and Ray Bradbury. They wrote one-shot wonders for magazines made from cheap wood chip paper with lurid covers of fair maidens in peril often dressed in brass brassieres and little else. For two bits, a factory worker or school kid could buy a world of stern jawed heroes, plucky heroines, exotic villains, and bloody murders he could roll up and stuff in a lunch box or a jacket pocket. They were written for the common man who had no patience with bullshit or dullness. The old pulp writers had one commandment and one commandment only – Thou Shalt Not Bore Thy Reader.

Thou shalt not bore thy reader, nor thy reader’s children, or thy reader’s servant, or thy readers ox or thy reader’s ass, or bore anything that is thy reader’s, no, no, no. Amen. I think it says that in the Bible somewhere. If it doesn’t it ought to.

The old pulps have died out, but to my way of thinking Alessia Brio has brought them back for many of us in her series of Coming Together Anthologies. These are the children of the pulps, the prurient and promiscuous carriers of their DNA with their chocolates box scatter mash of stories by different writers with all their different passions – and different demons. A wise person told me early on, kid, love your inner demons. They only look scary because they’re the guardians of your treasures.

I’ll make a covenant here and now with you the reader; I promise I will not bore you. I will never waste your time. You have a right to expect that. I also promise if you read these stories well you’ll see something of your own horny humanity in them too. Because you have a right to expect that. And that goes for all the other veteran story tellers and wannabes that our big mama Alessia has given a fair shot to. A lot of us are people you’ve never heard of, but after reading any one of these anthologies, you’ll definitely want to know us better.

Mama don’t raise no bums.

Don't forget to leave your email in your comment, so I can send you your prize!

BIO

C. Sanchez-Garcia lives and writes in rural Georgia with his family and cat, where his personal library is bursting the walls of his house. He believes in the power of passion, and that a good love story with soul is the best medicine for melancholy.

Stories of Our Fathers

By C. Sanchez-Garcia (Guest Blogger)

My son knows I read erotica, much more than that he knows I write erotica, stories that I won’t let him read just yet. I suppose by the time he’s old enough to read his old man’s stuff he probably won’t want to. Or more like he won’t make it past the first few pages before he snaps the book closed and sneers “Gross!” I don’t think my stories are all that gross if you like that kind of thing as much as I do, but what’s gross is the realization your parents are aware of sex. Reading of the act of sex in all its mammalian sweaty stickiness, and souls wrestling in the torment of passion, knowing it emerged from the keyboard tapped by the fingertips of your old man, like evil rays emanating from the fingers of the Emperor Palpatine is just . . . eewww.

But Luke - I’m your father.

Theoretically we know that one night exactly the number of your present years plus nine months or so ago your father knelt over your mother, naked, tumescent and demanding, hungry eyed and primitive as a rampant chimpanzee, and your mother, the one who cooked your dinner and scolded you off to church, who wept when you graduated high school, that woman, rejoiced at having her clothes yanked from her and body spread out nude and eager on the bed while this hovering beast nipped her neck, suckled her nipples and then shoved it right in, unhh! and together launched you into this veil of tears on a celestial fanfare of squealing bed springs, masculine grunts and low feminine groans.

Unless of course, as you suspect, you were immaculately conceived of a virgin in which case you really should aspire to a much higher calling than this one.

Try as I might, grimly at best, I can't imagine my father with a hard on. I can't imagine my mother nude, much less sexually excited. I never saw my father read pornography, much scarcer to come by in his day, and I never saw my mother, who disliked being touched, read a romance novel. She preferred history and crime fiction, and finally at the end as she descended into paranoid fantasies, nothing at all.

My father, always a well read man, when he divorced my mother had a "hippie pad" as he called it, well stocked with the books he'd been uncomfortable to read before when we were around. It was his time of busting out. Scanning his bookshelves I came across Henry Miller and Lenny Bruce for the first time and without hesitation he explained to me who and what they were and even allowed me to borrow and take them home. For intellectual wannabes, explaining Henry Miller to his son would have been the equivalent of taking him on his first mastodon hunt.

I’m not sure why it’s hard to think of our parents in this way or to write of them in this way. I don’t know if it bounces up against incest or what, but there is something definitely cringe worthy of it. The only instance I know of is Anais Nin writing in her endless diaries of her incestuous relationship with her father, whom she had hardly known otherwise as a father. In the end it’s easier to think of them like Barbie and Ken dolls, which, when nude, have nothing so much as a plastic bulge down there.

Sex and story have always been a part of our story telling tradition. As soon as human beings came across the notions of making things from other things, and then making representative art they began making erotic art. There are stone sculptures of huge breasted women, at least one cave painting of an immense cave woman straddling her lover from above. Our earliest Biblical stories, the ones you don’t hear in Sunday school, tell of King David falling in lust with married Bathsheba while seeing her bathe in the nude on a rooftop and then sending her husband Uriah to the front lines to expediently die in battle. Or of Lot’s daughters getting him drunk and committing incestuous acts with their father to make sure the blood line of their family would go unbroken. Joseph being sent to prison for refusing to have an affair with the Pharaoh’s wife. These stories mean more to me than the prophets, because these are the human stories that tell me that even if civilization changes, people are still much the same.

I’m not sure our kids will ever read our stuff, or even if they should. That’s part of the price you pay for suiting up for this game. In our many dialogues and noodlings, I've often said to Lisabet that we don’t choose the genre we write in. The genre chooses us. The book is the boss. Any story can be just a little deeper just as any person can be deeper if you allow yourself to know them. The great writers weren't any smarter than the rest of us; they were more persistent lovers of the story. They looked deeper and then looked again, the difference between making love or just passing a quick hand over life. The story is always deeper than we know.

Bio: At this particular time in a wandering, often bizarre and unexpected life, C. Sanchez-Garcia is living quietly in eastern Georgia, where the size of his personal library is bursting the walls of his little house. He stubbornly believes in passion, God, sensuality and spirituality, and that a good love story is life's finest medicine for melancholy. He is the author of the erotic novellas Mortal Engines and the Color of the Moon. Coming Together Presents C. Sanchez-Garcia compiles some of his best short work, in a charity anthology whose proceeds benefit the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. Several of his stories have been published in several volumes of the Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica and Coming Together anthologies as well as in the Erotica Readers and Writers Association's online gallery and permanent archives. If you would like to meet him, you will find him on Facebook and at the Oh, Get a Grip! writer's blog where Sanchez-Garcia's blog appears hell or high water every Wednesday.

Colors of the Moon

By C. Sanchez-Garcia (Guest Blogger)

Stories of strange love from Whiskey Creek Torrid.

Buy Now!

“Kwaidan” are a great tradition in Japan. These are ancient ghost stories, which are passed down from generation to generation, embodied in Noh and Kubuki plays, and lately in modern Japanese Horror cinema such as “The Ring”. The most famous of all the traditional kwaidan-shu is the tale of “Mimi Nashi Hoichi” or “Hoichi the Earless”. This is the story of a buddhist monk who sings and chats stories accompanied by the Biwa, a Japanese lute. Hoichi encounters the restless dead and barely escapes with his life. I love these old stories and was determined to write a series of erotic folk tales from Asia and other countries, and the novella “The Color of the Moon” is the eroticized retelling of this most cherished of all Japanese ghost stories.

Blurb

In Sanchez-Garcia’s first book of stories, love takes strange and deadly twists of passion and madness for a musician-monk and a lonely noble woman in eleventh-century Japan; and in the near future, where a man seeks a last chance at redemption with a desperate machine built for love.

Excerpt

Shoji stood up and held out his arms. Hirome inventoried her work, taking time to touch up spaces she had missed. Shoji had become a living text of sutras. His shaved head was covered in the words of the Lotus Sutra, in Kanji she didn’t know how to read. His ears, neck, throat, shoulders and shaved arms were filled with marching rows of stark images. His back, waist, ribs, chest and belly. The backs of his legs. His round strong buttocks, she had taken her time with those. The insides of his thighs. His ankles. His feet. She turned him around.

“How do I look?”

“Like a strong and beautiful book,” said Hirome. “You make me wish I knew how to read.”

“Would you like to learn?”

“Oh, yes.”

“When this is over, I can teach you. But it will take time.”

“It’s all right if it takes time. You can stay here longer, as long as you want,” she said, caressing the Kanji paintings on his chest. “I don’t want you to leave. If you stay, I’ll paint you this way every year in remembrance.”

Shoji noticed his cock beginning to swell and rise again as she touched her work on his skin. It had not been painted yet. “I think there is one place left.”

She stepped back and looked down. “Oh!”

“Can you?”

“You could if you wanted to.”

“I like it when you write it. I don’t wish to embarrass you, but anyway it’s easier to paint it when it’s stretched out hard.”

“I see,” she said. “Well, Ichinori said we must cover everything.”

She kneeled down in front of him. His thick and risen cock was level with her face. She cradled it gently in her fist and gave it a little squeeze. Shoji sighed and closed his eyes, and let it rise freely as it wished. She caressed it to make it stretch out all the way, fully strong and hard. She began to paint.

Shoji felt the intolerable tickling of the brush along the tip of his cock, and her fingers handled it lovingly, wantonly, painting the tip, until it swelled and reddened under her brush. And then the shaft, pulling on the skin like silk over warm steel, to tighten it as she worked. She painted down to the root, stroking it lightly to keep it stiff, blowing on it to make the ink dry faster. She painted the root of it, where the hair had been shaved away. She cradled his balls, pulled them down to stretch the skin taught and painted all of it. She painted under them.

“Oh look,” she said. “I painted this part wrong.” She rubbed the tip of his cock vigorously with her hand, and seeing the ink remained, she placed it in her mouth and licked off the ink. She looked up at him intently as his knees sagged and he moaned. “There. It’s off now.” She spat out the ink.

Holding his hardened cock firmly in her fist, she painted the characters again. “Oh, another mistake.” She took it in her mouth and licked off the ink again.

Bio: At this particular time in a wandering, often bizarre and unexpected life, C. Sanchez-Garcia is living quietly in eastern Georgia where his personnel library is bursting the walls of his little house. He stubbornly believes in passion, god, sensuality and spirituality and that a good love story is life’s finest medicine for melancholy.

He is the author of the erotic novellas Mortal Engines, and the Color of the Moon, and the anthology Coming Together Presents C. Sanchez-Garcia. Several of his short stories have been published in the “Mammoth Book of Erotica” series and the “Coming Together” anthology series, as well as in the Erotica Readers and Writers online gallery and permanent archives. If you would like to meet the author you will find him on Facebook as Christobal Sanchez-Garcia and at the Oh Get a Grip writers blog where Sanchez-Garcia’s blog appears hell or high water every Wednesday.

Peering Into the Heart

As I may have mentioned in other posts, I work with Alessia Brio on her Coming Together altruistic erotica project. Alessia has published more than a dozen anthologies of exceptional erotica and erotic romance, for the benefit of causes that range from AIDS research to conservation. Several of the books have won national awards. About a year ago, after contributing stories to a number of these anthologies, I agreed to serve as editor for a new Coming Together project, the “Coming Together Presents” series.

Each Coming Together Presents collection features the work of a single erotic author. At this point, we've released three volumes in the series: Coming Together Presents Remittance Girl, Coming Together Presents M. Christian, and most recently, Coming Together Presents C. Sanchez-Garcia. Remittance Girl's book benefits the ACLU. Sales of the M.Christian title support Planned Parenthood. C. Sanchez-Garcia has designated the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) as beneficiary of proceeds from his collection.

Anyone who reads erotica will already be familiar with M. Christian and Remittance Girl, though their names may be not ring a bell for romance readers. C. Sanchez-Garcia, however, is relatively new to publishing. His work is wild, original, arousing and sometimes, deeply disturbing. He doesn't settle for easy solutions or comforting clichés. He digs deeper. Even his humorous work (and he can be extremely funny) does more than just skim the surface.

Garce's Coming Together book includes stories about a man who changes the course of time, a man who wakes up transformed into a woman, a man caring for his Alzheimer's-afflicted wife. One of his most unforgettable characters is a woman battered by her husband and tortured by a corrupt government. These aren't typical characters for either erotica or romance, but you will not forget them. C. Sanchez-Garcia peers into the hearts of his creations, bringing them to life on the page.

One of my favorite stories in the collection – one of the most deeply romantic – is “El Pimientero Mon Amor”. It's a tale about knowledge and sin, justice and memory, but most importantly, it is a love story. It just happens that one of the lovers is a young man barely out of his teens, the other a woman of the world, probably in her fifties. Before you protest that this scenario does not appeal, read the following excerpt:

We stood in the doorway of her bedroom. I don’t know what she was thinking. She was never more mysterious to me than in that long moment. For myself, I was frightened. Thrilled. A man with homemade glider wings standing on the edge of a cliff. I was never more alive. I took her shoulders and walked her in a little ways towards the bed, which seemed to loom ominously. I felt my courage rise as her resistance fell. Gently I pressed myself against her back, pushing the hard tip of my erection against her ass.

She did not resist or question me as my hands began to roam over the front of her clothes, feeling for the first time the strength of her nipple nubs pressing out against my pinching fingertips. A woman responding to me. Her body responding to me. My palms slipped under her breasts, my fingers holding them and hefting them within the confinement of the cloth, hinting at the thick weight of them. I lifted and dropped and lifted her breasts as I inhaled the scent of her hair.

"Gatito. If you do this thing, it will all change. We won’t be friends anymore."

I was so frightened. I was so excited. Like a man who has stepped out onto a stage in front of people to give a speech, and discovered he is naked. You have to go on.

"Is this really what you want?" she said, and placed her hot dry hands over mine, pulling them chastely down and holding them at her sides. "The bed is there. But we will be different when we leave it. Is it what you want?"

My tongue was thick in my mouth as I tried to answer. I wasn’t even sure in my languidness and ferocious need if she had even spoken words or had entered my thoughts. I took my hands away from hers and she didn’t stop me as I reached up and began my fumbling descent, first the top button and then the next. I let my fingers answer. After I had undone the fifth button all the way to her belly, I slipped my hands inside her open shirt, palming the rolling softness of her warm ribs which rose and fell with her breath, fingering her navel, seeing her nude already with my fingers. I took the top of her shirt as she stood and allowed it, and tugged it fiercely open. The last button popped off and clicked off of the wall.

She raised her arms high above her head. I felt her shake once. There was a sniffle. "I didn’t mean for this to happen to you, gatito. Them, yes. I'm so old. Do you want to do this to me? And also to us? I will lose you if you do."

My hands were already gently drawing off her shirt. I tossed it across the room. I could hear the sound of my own animal breathing. She stood as she was with her back to me, in her bare feet with the thick loose skin of her bare back crossed only by her bra. “You won’t lose me,” I whispered. I pressed my face into her hair, hugging her tight to me. She was shivering.

The depth of emotion in this story can't help but touch you, regardless of how shocking you find the premise. C. Sanchez-Garcia proves that eroticism transcends age, that love can transform even an old woman into the object of intense desire.

If you're willing to have your assumptions challenged – if you're tired of reading the same stereotyped erotic stories – if you want to do something for women who have been abused – get yourself a copy of this book.