Introducing Janelle's Best -- #lesbian #erotica #FF @JanelleReston

About the Anthology

Hot Drinks Press is thrilled to present nine delectable stories of lesbian love and lust by Janelle Reston, the best-selling queen of Sapphic eroticism. Experience shower sex, outdoor loving, BDSM, and a variety of forbidden pleasures. From first-time sexual experiences at a women’s college to the kinky exploits of experienced dommes, these scorching hot stories have something for everyone.

Purchase Links

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Check out these sizzling F/F tales, from vanilla to kinky, including BDSM, femdom, anal play, and role-playing/sexual cosplay!

Body Shots

A first-year college student goes wild at a party thrown by the women’s rugby team.

An Amish Girl Experiments with Chemistry

Rachel Yoder has long discarded her drab Amish garb for hot pink short-shorts and loud music, but she hasn’t forgotten what she learned growing up — that love is best expressed through baking. 
That philosophy has made her downtown bakery among the city’s most popular, so she hires Leticia to help her out. Leticia’s learning a lot about food, but she wants to taste more of Rachel’s love than melt-in-your-mouth cinnamon rolls can provide.

Bicycling Puts the Fun Between Your Legs

Two women experience lust—and maybe love—on a long-distance bike ride through New Jersey’s Pine Barren’s to the Atlantic shore.

Water & Air

Miranda is an ordinary young woman resentful of the magic that runs in her family but has skipped her generation. If she had such powers, she certainly wouldn’t be like the witches who descend on her lake resort town every summer, wasting their powers on stupid party tricks.

But when Miranda meets a water witch named Hazel, she starts to wonder if the practitioners of magic aren’t so bad after all. And if reconciling herself to the world of witchcraft means she has a better chance of sleeping with Hazel, well, so much the better.

Making Snow

In this sexy, modern take on the Grimm fairy tale “Frau Holle” (“Mother Hulda”), a ski resort manager falls through the ice and finds herself in a new world of sensual delights.

Dance for Me

Miranda Jamison’s submissive tendencies awaken under the rigorous teaching methods of dance professor Hannah Lacey. But Miranda soon discovers not any Domme will do. Only Professor Lacey knows how to break Miranda down, then make her more whole than she was before.

In a Pinch

Grad students Jess and Kendra have always had a pretty vanilla sex life. That all changes when Kendra overhears Jess making strange sounds behind a closed door.

Alien Vibes

A couple’s obsession with The X-Files and little gray aliens goes deeper than most.

Wordless Surrender

A Deaf dominant plays with the submissive female partner of her dreams. All About Romance says this story “has an extremely strong sense of character alongside a rapturous sense of love for bondage and dominance that translates well even if you don’t kink to it.”

Excerpt From “Alien Vibes”

The smooth, stainless steel wand gleams in the light from our kitchen window. I can’t resist the urge to reach out and touch.

“Do you like it?” you ask, eyebrow quirked. You release your grasp on the T-shaped handle so I can feel the wand’s full weight in my hand. At just six inches long and less than an inch in diameter, it’s surprisingly heavy. It seems almost as dense as the lead musket balls I carry on my belt during steampunk cosplay. I wonder if it’s solid steel all the way through, or if it has a denser metal at its core.

“What is it?” I say. Your profession is metal sculpting, but in your free time you’re always designing something new—often for cosplay, although sex toys are another of your talents. Is this apparatus for either of those applications, or perhaps both? I certainly wouldn’t mind feeling its solid length between my legs.

“If I told you, I’d be taking all the fun out of this game,” you say. “I’m more interested in what you think it is.”

I consider. Its highly polished surface makes me think of medical labs and hospital equipment. Its weight, on the other hand, makes it seem magical and otherworldly. I turn it over to study the handle. It features something that looks like a trigger, plus ergonomic grooves that seem destined for fingers—except they’re spaced too far apart to accommodate the average human hand comfortably. Plus, there are five of them, instead of the standard four. So it’s not for humans or any of our primate cousins. That leaves one option. “Is it an alien artifact?”

You wink flirtatiously. “You’ll need to be more specific to win the prize.”

“Is it used for research on humans?” We’re both big fans of the Roswell aliens and all their cultural permutations, from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Communion to Alien Autopsy. I’ve always loved the X-Files episodes where subjects lie immobile on tables as thin, genderless aliens with bulbous heads, hairless gray skin, and huge black eyes experiment on them. The scenarios are designed to frighten, and they do. But they also leave me aroused. Being held to a table with shiny metal cuffs and having my nether regions prodded while a dozen pairs of black, baseball-sized eyes coldly observe the proceeding—that’s been my go-to fantasy as long as I can remember.

You touch a finger to the metal wand. “Can you guess what kind of research?”

My thighs quiver. I want the thing inside me. I soothe my palm over its rounded tip. “It makes me think of an anal probe.”

You smirk. “You say that with such certainty. Have you been probed before?”

I bite my lip, feigning timidity as I shake my head—a lie if I ever told one. None of my holes are virgin. “All I know is that I’ve been abducted. But the memories are so hazy. And I don’t … I don’t think that thing could fit inside me.”

“You’d be surprised at what aliens can accomplish with their technology.”

Heat seeps between my legs. My opening is damp and my clit rock-hard. “Well, if the research has to be done …” I say tentatively, then clear my throat to shift to a more confident tone. I look into your eyes. “I’ll make that sacrifice. For humanity.”

About Janelle Reston

Janelle Reston lives on a lake with her partner and their black cats. She loves watching Battlestar Galactica and queering gender. Her work has been featured in Best Women's Erotica, Volume 2; Best Lesbian Erotica, Volume 2; and the 2018 Lambda Literary Award Finalist Unspeakably Erotic. You can keep up with her at www.janellereston.com.

Do your characters work out? (#exercise #sex #dancing)

A screaming siren wakens me at four-thirty. The sound fades off into the distance, but my heart continues to pound against my ribs. Somebody else bleeding, maybe dying. Another victim.

I try to argue myself out of these dark thoughts and back to sleep, but it’s no use. The rectangle of gray that is my uncurtained window gradually brightens: first to charcoal, then to ash, finally to pearl. I turn my thoughts to Jimmy Ostermann, but they keep sliding away to Tony Pinelli.

Finally, around six, I give up and head downstairs for a cup of coffee. Throwing open the back door, I take a deep breath of the early morning. The air is cool and smells of earth and growth. It’s drizzling, the sticky warmth of the previous day only a memory.

My work means late nights. I don’t usually get out of bed before noon. I hardly know what to do with myself at this time of day. Munching on a piece of toast, I consider the question.

Rainy weather. Good for paperwork: paying bills, filing receipts and so on. Maybe I’ll spend some time looking through those Adriatic cruise brochures I got last week.

And Tony? Some other part of me interrupts my planning session. You need to figure out what’s going on with this situation, she says. If only to protect yourself. How did Tony’s widow know who you are, or how to find you? Why did she come by, and why did she seduce you? And why did you tell her that Mr. Clean—Andy—intended to shoot you in the hotel room? What’s going on, Stella? You’re a smart lady; figure it out.

This other voice is giving me a headache. Okay, I’ll spend some time on these questions. But bills first, and then a bit of a workout. After that, I’ll sit down and do some serious thinking.

Telephone, electric, gas, dry cleaning account. (My costumes need special care.) Department store charge. (They had a big sale last month, and I do like to dress well.) Maintenance fee for my dad’s cemetery plot. With a sigh, I update the balance and slide my checkbook back into the desk drawer. I can take care of myself, but it feels as though I have been doing it for an awfully long time.

Some stretching will pull me out of this funk. I change into leggings and a jog bra, then carefully unwrap my ankle. It’s still swollen, but a lot less discolored. Definitely better. When I put full weight on it, though, fiery pain shoots up my leg. Okay, so I’ll go easy for today and just do floor work and my weights.

A Supremes CD in my compact stereo, I begin with some leg lifts and sit ups. It doesn’t take long before I’m shimmying my shoulders in time with the beat, singing along with Diana. “Stop, in the name of love,” I moan as I alternate bicep curls with pec presses. “Before you break my heart, think it over.” Old as it is, this music never fails to cheer me up. Three quarters of an hour, and I feel like myself again: Stella Xanathakeos, queen of the strippers, one tough cookie.

~ From Exposure by Lisabet Sarai

Exercise has been part of my life ever since I was a kid. With my coke bottle glasses, clumsiness and flat feet, I was never athletic. However, for some reason my general klutziness didn't extend to dancing.

Growing up, I became used to seeing my mom put a record on the hifi (hey, this was a while ago!) and do stretches and dance exercises. Like me, she had dancing in her blood – she even worked as a professional belly dancer for a while. Sometimes I'd join her. I took dance lessons as a kid and belonged to the modern dance club in high school. I even performed in the school talent show, dancing the role of Bonnie in a number a friend and I choreographed to the theme from “Bonnie and Clyde”. (My eagerness to perform was another paradoxical contrast with my terrible shyness during this period.)

In college I swam laps as well as doing more modern dance. In grad school I swam, bicycled and belly danced. When I got my first job and moved to the west coast, one of the first things I did was to join the Y so I could use their pool. Later, I discovered Jazzercise. I was addicted to this lively, rowdy activity, doing two or three classes a week for more than two decades, even though I had to drive three quarters of an hour each way. (Now I guess it's a bit passé, superseded by Zumba, pole dancing, and the Vixen Workout - which I have to admit sounds like incredible fun.)

Anyway, I've always enjoyed (moderate) exercise, especially when it involves music. When I don't work out for a while, my stress level noticeably increases. Like my heroine Stella, I find that exercise cheers me up and gets my mind off whatever's bothering me.

Of course, for an erotica author, exercise, with its tendency toward minimal clothing and lots of sweat, can serve as an intro or an excuse for characters to get involved in other sorts of physical activity. Gym equipment presents all sorts of opportunities for novel positions and sensations. And given my penchant for writing BDSM, how can I ignore the fact that a gym makes a fantastic impromptu dungeon?

****

I want sex, I need release, but it doesn't seem that I'm going to get it tonight. I stand, stretch, realize that my muscles are stiff and sore. Perhaps from my awkward position this afternoon. Perhaps because I haven't worked out in several days. Then I remember the well-equipped gym Rick showed me during our tour of the house. Just the thing.

I change from my sweat- and sex-damp dress into a sports bra and shorts, pull my hair into a low ponytail, and wend my way down the dark corridor toward the back of the building, where it settles into the hillside. Everything's very quiet. There's no light under Rick's door, or under Margaret's.

It crosses my mind that Margaret was odd and unfamiliar tonight, less diffident, more assertive than usual. She seemed to radiate a happy confidence that overwhelmed her usual seriousness. I guess that she has gotten over her embarrassment about her interlude with our host. I'm pleased at her resiliency.

The gym is even darker than the corridor. Like Rick's office, it has only small windows set high in the wall. I grope for the light switch, turning on the track lights overhead. Experimenting, I find that I can dim them down to a more pleasant, less blinding level.

I start with some stretches at the barre, watching myself in the mirror opposite me. I don't normally spend much time gazing at myself. I know I'm beautiful. But the woman I see reflected back at me tonight seems a stranger. Her petite frame, her small breasts, her delicate ankles, make her seem fragile. With my hair pulled back loosely, I look young. Innocent. Vulnerable.

I have to laugh at this fancy. I know that I am strong and full of power. I shift to one of the stationary weight machines, working my triceps and biceps until they burn. I've stopped watching myself. Next I turn my attention to my quads and adductors, pushing the weights apart as I open my thighs, working against their force to pull my legs back together again.

I work hard, trying to burn my arousal away into exhaustion. Somehow, it's not happening. Every time I spread my thighs apart, I'm acutely aware of my throbbing, swollen clit, hidden in my soaked shorts. I increase the force and pace of my repetitions, determined to be the mistress of my body and my urges. It's almost as though I'm climbing the slope to orgasm. The harder and faster I work, the more excited I become.

Finally, I have to stop. I lie back in the apparatus, panting. The room smells of musk and sweat. With a pang, I recognize the odor not only of my perspiration, but of his. Rick's. Damn. I close my eyes wearily, willing my body to relax. Damn, damn, damn.

There's a sound. My eyes fly open. I am no longer alone. For the briefest instant, I think that it's Rick, and my heart accelerates as though I were still working the machine. Then, with an inner smile, I realize my error. Raoul.

"Ruby!" he says in that soft Latin voice. "Sorry, I didn't mean to intrude. I had no idea that there was anyone here."

He has obviously come for his own workout. He wears a loose pair of shorts, nothing else. My eyes trace the curlicues of hair on his muscled chest. I smile. He smiles, sniffs, strolls over to stand between my spread thighs.

"I was having trouble sleeping," I tell him, knowing that he's reading other messages in my body, in the air. "Exercise is usually a good way for me to get rid of tension."

"Maybe I can help," he says, almost whispering. His hands on the tops of my thighs, he leans over and kisses me full on the lips. It's a simple, uncalculated kiss, no hidden agendas, no power trips, just texture, wetness, warmth. It's an invitation.

I accept. As he bends over me, I raise my legs and clasp them around his waist. I can feel his delicious hardness, pressing against me through our clothing. He gives a soft laugh, pulls up my bra and takes my nipple in his mouth. Lovely, to feel that texture, warmth, wetness against that sensitive flesh.

He gives me long minutes of bliss. When he stops, my nipples are round and rigid as ceramic beads. "Let me go for a moment," he says, and I release the clutch of my legs.

He stands and with a grace I find in few men, removes his shorts. I can't help but marvel at his beauty. Muscles that swell rather than bulge, curves that flow under his bronzed skin and lush fur. His cock juts proudly from a jet tangle at his groin. I have a sudden, uncharacteristic impulse to kneel at his feet and take him reverently into my mouth.

Before I can evaluate or act on this impulse, though, he seats himself on a recumbent stationary bicycle and leans back against the seat, one bare foot in each stirrup. His cock stands straight up, swaying a bit as he moves. It's simultaneously silly and wonderfully lewd.

He grins up at me. "Care to come for a ride, Ruby?"

~ From Nasty Business by Lisabet Sarai

****

Later in this same novel, I set a long femdom scene in this same personal gym. Weight benches are great for bondage, I discovered. And the mirrors that line the walls of many gyms mean that both the dominant and the victim have an excellent view of discipline's effects.

Lately I haven't been working out as often as in the past. A hip replacement and a fractured knee have made me less flexible and a good deal more conservative in my routines. And I have such a long to-do list, I sometimes feel that I can't spare the time.

That's crazy. I know how delicious it will feel to get away from the computer, do some stretches, and shake my booty to some classic rock. If it's good for Stella and Ruby, I know it'll be good for me.

The Dance and the Dancer (#passion #vision #excerpt)

Lisabet belly dancing

I love to dance. I always have. At four years old I spun round and round, drunk on movement, till I slipped and split my chin open on the unyielding linoleum. Six stitches left a scar I still carry proudly. For my fifth birthday, my parents took me to see the ballet “Giselle”. I remember afterwards, the thrill of being awake at midnight. I watched the snow drift down as we waited for the bus, still entranced by the unearthly grace of the dancers. At eight I had a solo in a community performance, improvising to Gershwin’s “Summertime”, and in high school I danced the role of Bonnie to my best friend’s Clyde.

My parents danced. When my dad led my mother onto the floor for a jitterbug, they’d immediately attract a circle of admirers. He would swing and twirl her, their steps in perfect synchrony, while the crowd applauded. At weddings and bar mitzvahs, I’d be overwhelmed with pride, and the desire to emulate my talented, sexy mother and my ultra-cool dad. It’s a pity they didn’t move to the same rhythms off the dance floor.

In graduate school, I enjoyed an extracurricular career as a belly dancer in a local Middle Eastern restaurant. People actually paid me to dance. I was astonished. The experience was magic. No thought, no fear, no plans – just the music flowing through me, shaping my arms, swirling my hips, guiding my feet. I was beautiful, beloved, free.

Flamenco, tango, rock and roll. The fluid control of Balinese dance, the frenzy of Rajastani steps, the smooth synchronization of a Broadway musical, the hectic kineticism of hip hop. I love it all. Watching a dancer may bring tears to my eyes. Or it may make my own limbs twitch and ache to join in the dance.

Dance for me is both a reality and a metaphor for the union of body and spirit. I use dancing in many of my stories. Incognito opens with a scene in a disco, in which a seductive stranger sweeps Miranda across the floor and awakens her latent passion. In Exposure, Stella exists in a trance-like state of heightened awareness as she performs her strip routine, half-convinced that she sees reads the minds of the men in her audience. Here’s a passage from a novel fragment that is sitting on my hard drive, waiting for new inspiration, called Unveiled.

On my ninth birthday, my parents took me to see the great Nehir perform, and my destiny was sealed.

I sat bolt upright in my velvet seat, there in Symphony Hall, hardly daring to breathe, as the lights dimmed and the musicians strolled onto the stage. They settled themselves in a row of chairs toward the back. The drummer and the clarinetist whispered together for a moment, then nodded to the man with the oud. Then, an intricate sequence of notes dripped from his strings, rising up in the hall and falling again like plaintive rain.

The house went black. The oud solo still shimmered in the darkness, shivered down my spine, a lament centuries old. A bolt of light shot from the back of the theater, defining a perfect circle of brightness on the stage. There, motionless in the spotlight as though frozen by a flashbulb, stood a diminutive figure swathed in layers of turquoise and gold gauze.

The oud faded to silence. My chest hurt from anticipation. The dumbeq player coaxed two musical beats from his goatskin drum. Nehir raised her arm simultaneously, as though her movement had precipitated the drumbeats rather than the other way around. Two more beats, another gesture. She shifted her hips, making her jeweled belt sparkle, as the drummer matched her rhythm. She pivoted and bent backward, her veils brushing the floor behind her, to the next beats.

The clarinet joined the drum. Nehir’s bare arms snaked through the air. Her hips made slow circles, rising as the melody rose, dipping down when it sank to a lower register. The musicians were in taksim mode, improvising to a free form rhythm, and Nehir perfectly matched their every musical gesture, remaining immobile between notes.

The oud player picked up the melody, and abruptly, the drummer swung into a fast, regular beat. All at once, the dancer was all motion. Her shoulders shimmied, her hips shook, her fingers feathered the air. I could see her rise on her toes as she twirled, translucent fabric trailing behind her.

My heart beat in time with the drum as I drank in Nehir’s fluid, voluptuous movements. Her bare feet were light and sure as she traced the intricate steps of the age-old, ageless dance. She removed her outer veil, swirling it in sinous patterns around her, so that for a moment it seemed that she had a partner. My chest ached with nameless longing.

Nehir did not listen to and interpret the music. The music filled her, bore her up, swept her away in frenzy of glorious energy. She surrendered to the music. She allowed the rhythm to have its way with her. Let the melody enter her, take her, bend her into impossibly graceful forms, travel up her spine until her whole body rippled like water.

Her name meant “the river”, my mother had told me. As I watched her the floodgates opened inside me. I wanted to dance as she danced, wanted that more than anything in the world. I wanted the music to take me and use me as it did her. I craved the knowledge of motion and stillness that, even as a child, I read in her perfect gestures. And I knew, even then, that this was not a mere childish whim.

These days, I don’t dance as much as I would like to. As the result of over-enthusiastic Jazzercizing over two decades, I developed arthritis in one hip. Then I had a hip replacement. There's probably another one in my future, on the other side. Anyway, my days of doing splits are long-gone.

Still, I dance when I can, in bars or clubs or at parties, and pay the price afterwards. While the music holds me, I am weightless and beyond pain. Later, my gratitude soothes the pangs in my poor weak flesh.

Years ago, I was trying to understand (as we all do) who I was and where I was going. What is your vision? one book asked. How do you see your life in relation to the world?

My answer to that question was the poem below.

Vision

 

My life will be a dance.

I will try to tread lightly,

bouyant

joyful

touching but not trampling.

I will trust my partners

and be trustworthy in return,

Follow through, complete the steps.

I will dance abundance

accepted and shared;

Faith, power,

peace and wonder,

And always, love.

Remember that the dance

flows from the inside out,

spirit to body

and out to the world,

And that all, spirit, body and world

are sacred.

Even when solo, know

that I dance a part

in a larger pattern.

Leave behind

some increase of joy,

some greater beauty.

Idyll

By Teresa Lamai

In my non-Teresa Lamai life, I work in a refugee agency and write mainstream fiction. People I meet sometimes ask me why I don’t write novels based on the fascinating stories I must hear every day from clients. I still haven’t figured out how to respond. There’s not really a polite way of saying, “Because that would be exploitative and creepy?”

And yet I can’t afford to be too much of a prig about it. In one of my first stories I did just that—sort of.

“Idyll” is the first real story I wrote, based on a house I shared whilst working in Zagreb in the ‘90s. On a tiny budget, I rented a room in a shared house on the edge of town, near the cemetery, with a broken gate, impossibly thick rosebushes, and an overturned rowboat in the lawn. The drunken landlord appeared from time to time but lived, mysteriously, elsewhere. The occupants were drifters like me, some anarchist students, and some Bosnian refugees in transit to other places.

On my first morning, jet-lagged, I made my way into the kitchen and explained I hadn’t had a chance to go shopping—could I have just a piece of bread? One of the students—who wasn’t named Goran—said, “This is Balkans, and I am anarchist. Please never ask for bread, just take it.”

The room I occupied had traces of bird-seed on the windowsill, and an amaryllis blossom only half-faded, and no other traces of who might have lived there before me.

There were shared meals in the evening, and morning cups of tea out in the sunlight, around the peeling rowboat. As the summer went on, the occupants of the house moved away till there was only a handful of us left.

I don’t remember when we all started lying in the grass of a morning, but once we started we couldn’t stop. I would come home from work to find everyone still lying in the unmown lawn, staring up into the dappled heat as if drugged, and I would lie down to join them. For hours I would listen to their breathing and watch the sunlight through my lashes, feeling time slow and pool around us. I knew that I would always be there.

No, I wasn’t involved with anyone in the house, and I wasn’t in love with any of them. If there were lovers among the residents there, they kept it to themselves.

My only purpose in inventing Fatima and writing her story was to get back to that hot grass, where you felt you could live forever.

I’m glad that “Idyll” is included in Coming Together Presents Teresa Lamai. As you’ve seen, all of the proceeds will go to Amnesty International. As a gift to the first commenter, I have an anthology called Just Watch Me, edited by Violet Blue, in which I have a story called “In Snow.”
Idyll

In Coming Together Presents Teresa Lamai

“Fatima, just take it. You don't have to ask.”

There was fresh sweet bread on the table and for the first time in months I felt hunger sharply. My new housemate Goran got angry when I asked for some. I was still learning that Goran prides himself on not owning anything, not wanting anything. I didn’t notice Amel smirking in the corner until he was suddenly standing next to me. He twisted off one end of the bread and said, “Come see the garden.”

Goran and Amel are the only Croatians living in this tiny house by the cemetery in Zagreb. They came to the city for the University, but their families can’t afford the new tuition. So instead they load trucks and work in Peace and Anarchy, a youth center built in an abandoned gasworks. The rest of us are from Bosnia. I should say we’re refugees from Bosnia, here in Zagreb in a strictly provisional sense, on our way to Pakistan or Germany or the US.

As the only girl, I have my own room. Slavica, an older woman my mother had known, was living in the front room with her father and her baby son when I arrived. They’ve since been relocated to Austria. There will most likely be more refugees to take their place but for now it’s just the three of us. Amel and Goran live in the larger upstairs bedroom, and I in the smaller bedroom.

Just seven months ago, it became clear I had to leave Bosnia. My parents were gone soon after the sniping started, and my brothers got German visas for their families. Sarajevo is like a dream now. I can’t always separate the reality of what happened from the rumors that consumed us like a collective psychosis.

I may eventually join my brothers in Germany. I may get a visa for the US. I may stay forever here with Amel and Goran.

The sun here is stronger, more Mediterranean. Even in the early morning it’s like an ancient power in a limpid, fragrant sky. The first mass is ending at the cathedral across the street and the shaded cemetery is already flickering with plastic memorial candles. The courtyards of the blue painted Romani tenements next door are filling with children. I’m washing the sheets in our yard. The garden is a late summer mess of palm trees, kiwi vines, and wild roses. There’s no sense in grooming anything since no one stays here long.

Goran comes out, fat pastry in one hand, guitar in the other. His long curls are wet, snaking down his bare back. He puts the guitar on the ground and sits next to me to help. Amel has been out here all morning, simply because, like a sly shadow, he is never far from me. Goran laughs at himself as he wrings one corner of a sheet. His fuzzy thigh presses into my skirt. Warmth on my shoulders and soft pulls at my skull tell me Amel is behind me now.

He’s braiding grass into my hair, as he likes to do when we’re outside.

We sit quietly for a long, long time. Every time the breeze stops, I can almost hear our hearts beating.

I’m in love with Goran because he’s generosity and sweetness without limits. He carries his large, masculine frame with a sense of wonder and discomfort, as if he just grew into it. His wide shoulders make the house seem small. He towers over me. I think he is intent on keeping his round blue eyes clear of unkind thoughts, as if he believes innocence will protect him like enchanted armor. He fed me constantly when I first arrived here, cutting me slices of bread and cheese and asking if I preferred coffee or chocolate milk or maybe green tea until I burst into exasperated laughter and started smacking him. Our first kiss was a week later, when he came home with a bag of birdseed for me to feed the sparrows outside my bedroom window. As if he expected me to be here forever. I couldn’t stand it. I grasped round cheeks between my palms, drinking in his unsettled gaze for a few moments before touching my lips to his. His startled moans made me wet.

His innocence feels less contrived when I’m pressing into him. I’m teaching him that love is selfish. I grab his ass strongly enough to hurt, digging crescents into the flesh, sometimes leaving tiny scabs. I have never told him I love him but he knows from the way I kiss him, the way I run my tongue over his neck and the warm sweet mounds of his chest. The first time I gripped the base of his hardening cock and nipped at his scrotum, he gasped, “That’s good, that’s so good,” with genuine surprise in his voice. I know it’s unbearable for him to lie still when I’m teasing the silky head of his cock from its foreskin, using just my tongue. I tell him to lie still anyway because I want us both to be free from what he thinks he should do. I just want to torture him until he’s angry enough to fuck me without thinking, his hands tight on my pelvis, cock scorching through my cunt, both of us transported and beyond hurting.

I love Amel for his black silent eyes that seem to absorb everything he looks at. He is slight and dark, speaking rarely, disappearing into the night when it falls. Goran says Amel seems to always be ashamed. Amel follows me stealthily like a cat as I move through the house, settling in the kitchen when I cook or unexpectedly lying on the carpet beside me when I read. We’re not sure where he goes in the evenings.

Nearly every night, I wake up after midnight. The moon has shifted. The air is still. I never hear Amel come home, or open my door, or undress, or pull the covers off the bed. I’ve never seen him naked in the daylight. His voice is what wakes me first, followed by the smooth glide of his belly on mine. The smoky, sweet smell of his hair as it falls on my forehead. His hands are so painfully delicate on the back of my neck that I forget not to moan.

His skin starts to gleam, slippery with our sweat. He moves slowly as if he were underwater, and the breath is sucked out of me as he writhes, his full weight on mine. I’m fascinated by the slick heat of his body. I press one damp breast, then the other, into him, stretching my back to let the arcs of our stomachs kiss. He keeps his hips away from me until this moment. He knows I’ll be wet when he lowers his cock to slide against my aching lips, just splitting them to let the scent fill the room. This is when he finally kisses me. He lets me try to devour him with my mouth and my pussy, and he knows that he can do whatever he wants with me.

I move to lock my ankles behind him but he pulls me to the edge of the bed. Kneeling on the floor, he leans into my shaking thighs and laps with astonishing patience, from time to time sucking on the inner and outer labia until they burn under his breath. The heat in my chest suffocates me. When he starts to massage my clit with two fingers, I buck and he stops suddenly, moving up my body to kiss me with swollen lips that taste like seaweed and old red wine.

Amel plays this game over and over until just before dawn. When the first birds start singing, he slides himself into me slowly, as if he’s afraid he’ll be burnt. I’m not sure if I can take it when I first start to come, impaling myself desperately. I don’t care anymore about the obscene sounds I’m making; I feel this racing sweetness will kill me if I don’t let it out somehow. My cunt clenches tight, pulling on him until he stops, his spine twisting sideways as the come moves through him. He breaks into the exhausted, final thrusts as the sky becomes light.

I let him sleep. I get up because Goran and I always have our breakfast early in the garden. Goran is usually up already, wearing just his shorts, slouching in the moss-covered bench. He puts aside the guitar and holds out his arms to me. His chest is sun warmed.

Lately there has been no work for them, so they stay home with me all day. We read in the morning, sometimes go to the market to buy flowers or vegetables, and lie in the shady grass all afternoon. The lemon tree is starting to bear fruit. We are not sure how much longer we can go without paying rent.

The third notice came for me today. If I fail once again to report in a timely manner, I’m told, the offer of a US visa will be retracted. I can’t finish reading this right now; it’s time to make lunch. I drop the letter behind my bed and walk out to the patio.

****

Bio: Teresa Lamai was born in a car crash on Sandy Boulevard, Portland, Oregon, in 2003.

The woman in the passenger seat had been a dancer and a refugee activist, but a back injury from the crash left her laid up with far too much time on her hands. The world was turning just a little grey. Though she'd never written fiction before, somehow she found herself writing inappropriate stories, ones she couldn't possibly put her real name to. And so Teresa Lamai came to life.

Teresa Lamai’s erotic stories have appeared in anthologies ranging from Best Women’s Erotica to Zane’s Caramel Flava to Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Online, her stories have won awards at Clean Sheets. Reviewers have called her work "breathless," "searing," "miraculous," and "odd." She finds her inspiration in other art forms such as painting and dance. This anthology presents the best of her stories over the years--and some new ones besides.

Nowadays Teresa's real-life self still works in a refugee agency, and has begun writing novels and radio plays which have brought her a tiny bit of recognition and a huge amount of happiness. When she's not writing she reads novels, studies human rights law, takes on great quixotic projects in her garden, and bakes fantastic quantities of cinnamon rolls. Occasional dancing still occurs, especially when she learns that someone has enjoyed reading what she wrote.

She's chosen the charity Amnesty International, of which she's been a member since 1984, for its uncompromising defense of human rights around the world. We all of us have the right to live free of exploitation and oppression, so that we can get on with doing the marvelous things we were born to do.