Read Online The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Lucy Taylor by Lucy Taylor - Free Book Online

Nicholas could answer, they both heard the footsteps approaching. Then the door that opened onto the stairwell was kicked open with a crash that reverberated throughout the room. Nicholas leaped to his feet, galvanized by an appalling and incongruous vision – Sonny Valdez, his wife, and the gun that Sonny was now pointing at him and Myriam.
    Someone screamed. Maybe it was Beth or Myriam or even Nicholas himself – maybe all three of them were screaming at once – but he hurled himself in front of Myriam, who was still on the floor, and the gun went off and suddenly the room was filled with a terrible red rain.
    In the instant it took Sonny to recock the trigger, Beth grabbed his wrist and twisted it with all the strength in both her arms. The gun fired again – this time into the ceiling – as Sonny shoved her away and aimed at Myriam again, firing into her as she lay in a spreading pool of blood on the mattress. With a cry, Nicholas charged Sonny, wrestled the gun away from him, and then slammed the grip into the man’s skull, again and again, like a gong striking the side of a bell, and he didn’t stop, but kept on bashing the caved-in head, even when Beth grabbed him and shouted, “It’s all right, Nicholas, it’s all right! He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead!”
    After the police got through investigating, when they were convinced Nicholas had been justified in taking Sonny Valdez’s life, after Myriam was cremated and her ashes scattered in the churchyard of St Benedict’s, Nicholas and Beth went back to Detroit and pretended to be making an effort to resume their lives. A grim joke, thought Nicholas, given everything that had taken place. He’d told Beth the truth about his past, about Elise, and about how Myriam had somehow cleansed his infected blood: everything except the experience he’d had while he and Myriam were making love. That he couldn’t put into words and he was afraid she’d misunderstand, think he was describing sexual passion and, while that was a component of what he’d undergone, the experience was really so much more.
    Nor could he explain why, week after week, he avoided having sex with Beth – that the encounters he’d had following Myriam had been so frustrating in their departure from what he sought that he didn’t want to risk adding Beth to his list of bitter disappointments or, worse, using her as a momentary distraction from what he perceived as an unutterable and never-ending grief.
    “Do you want me to leave?” he asked her when they lay in bed one night.
    “Is that what you want to do?”
    He thought about that, really let the idea sink into him. If he ever wanted to walk out on his marriage, this was the time. If he had lost Myriam and all she represented, he could still go back to the solace of addictive sex and drugs, immerse himself in the quest for debaucheries that would bring only deeper and darker oblivion.
    But what he said was, “No, I don’t want to leave. Unless you’d rather I did.”
    She was silent a few moments. Then: “I want you to stay. But at the same time, I love you. And if what you found with that woman Myriam, what you tried to tell me about on the phone that day when I wouldn’t listen, if you need to go and look for that, then I’d be wrong to try to stop you. It would be more than wrong, I think it would be evil.”
    A great swelling of relief passed through Nicholas. Relief and gratitude that seemed to thaw his loins and melt some of the ice from his heart. He was free to leave her if he wanted to, to look for what he’d lost. That meant that he was also free to stay. Desire, faint but hopeful, stirred in him.
    He wrapped Beth in his arms and pulled her to him. She felt warm and welcoming and her body shaped itself to his in the old familiar ways, yet even with some trepidation, there was nothing timid or hesitant about his lovemaking. He forced her legs apart and mounted her. She arched her hips and guided him inside.
    You’re