The Mammoth Book of Erotic Romance and Domination

Introduction

2012 was the year that erotica changed forever thanks to the success of a certain trilogy.

Not that the genre hadn’t been around before as my own editing efforts in the field for the past two decades and the stories and novels of countless writers with a taste and talent for erotica can historically demonstrate. But it was the year when it moved from a relatively confidential corner of the bookstores and shelves to a wider and surprising appreciation and acceptance by the reading public, and in the process attracted the silly moniker of “mommy porn” when it was established that so many of it was being lapped up by women with young families. As an aside, I can certainly vouch for this curious segment of the public if only from the comments on the website and Facebook pages of the collaborative alter ego under which I have also committed much literate if commercial fare in the genre and adorned the bestseller lists to my great surprise in the wake of E. L. James.

What this means for the future of erotic writing is still unclear, as the inevitable flood of copycat books was promptly unleashed on readers by publishers and has quickly muddied the waters and a disorderly retreat is already in progress, but one can only hope that the fad will leave a lasting impression and that, in the future, the sales and popularity of erotica will have moved a few steps ahead from where they stood far back some years ago.

Of course, the determining factor in the success of Fifty Shades of Grey was the way it opened people’s eyes and minds to the existence and importance of BDSM and its varied practices in the complicated world of sexual relationships and brought them into the open. Not a revelation for us grizzled veterans who had been writing around and about it for ages or the silent majority who had always indulged in real life, but a new world altogether for the average man and woman, it appeared! Where had they been hiding?

As is well reported, the Victorians freely indulged in the art of spanking and corporal punishment, a BDSM variation of sorts which still remains highly popular in deeds and words, but the genuine introduction of BDSM and its physical as well as psychological games of dominance and submission only fully came to light with the publication of the classic Story of O by Pauline Réage (a pen name for French academic and critic Dominique Aury) in the 1950s, a groundbreaking excursion into the byways of kink and sex which brought BDSM out from the under the counter territory it had long occupied and proudly into the open. Several generations later, and with all due respect to E. L. James’s mega-selling phenomenon, I daresay that no one has bettered Story of O for its visceral and shattering impact and the way it thrust what had previously been taboo sexual practices and games of power into the limelight of the written word and paved the way for so many other, ever more explicit variations by the likes of Anne Rice, Molly Weatherfield, Laura Antoniou, Laura Reese, Michael Perkins, Alison Tyler, Kristina Lloyd, myself even and a whole palette of new erotica practitioners.

Hence the reason for this new collection: a wish to present to the reading public how varied and imaginative the influence of BDSM is in everyday life and how sexy (and scary) it can prove on the written page. Unlike my annual Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, which mostly relies on previously published material, all the stories included between these covers were written specially for the volume by the absolute crème de la crème of contemporary writing as well as a handful of brand-new talents. Only a few authors I had hoped to include missed the deadline due to personal reasons or because of crowded deadlines, but overall I would venture that the line-up of contributors is one of the most prestigious that could be assembled today, and the contents are likewise challenging and so terribly exciting.

We open with a sensational new novella by Sunday Times Top 10 bestseller Vina Jackson, which ties in with her recent Eighty Days and Mistress of Night and Dawn novels. Another welcome newcomer to my anthologies is Stella Knightley, whose recent trilogy of sexy romances was one of the best post-F.S.O.G. efforts and who, like Vina Jackson, is also a ferociously colourful writer with a unique eye for kink and works far from the quasi-vanilla shores of the colour grey! Also on-board are Booker Prize-long-listed author Matt Thorne with a most unexpected take on a familiar theme, award-winning Science Fiction star Ian Watson, ebullient bonkbuster queen Rebecca Chance and the dazzling new star of Italian erotica, Ilaria Palomba as well as the very top ranks of British and American authors on their very best and worst behaviour . . .

Much to savour and make your eyes spin: imagination truly unbridled. But don’t try any of this at home, please!

On a sad note, I would like to dedicate this anthology to the memory of Michael Hemmingson, who died shortly after delivering his story. He was a great friend, collaborator and writer who will be sadly missed.

Maxim Jakubowski

---

White is Not Just the Colour of Snow

Vina Jackson

As far back as she remembered Nelle had always dreamed in black and white. Colour never came into the equation. The illogical and haunting events that surged out of nowhere when she slept were also invariably soundless, like a silent movie although a touch more explicit than early days cinema would ever have allowed.

Even the blood that often gushed was white in this strange world of her perverse imagination.

There were moments when her conscious mind half realized she was moving through a dream and made a clumsy attempt to influence the plot or the outcome but it was, time and time again, to no avail. The dream kept to its inexorable path and she was carried by its tides to the ever-distant but fixed conclusion when she would wake, damp with sweat, her heart palpitating to the rhythm of a tango or pounding like death metal music. Breathless. Panicked. Lost.

She often tried to recall the strange course of events that had swept over her mind, and body, during the actual dream, but as soon as her soul found peace and she was able to orientate her consciousness, it all crumbled, vanished into a confused mass of faraway clouds, shards flying away to all corners of her memory, and the screen in her brain was just a Cinemascope landscape of white as far as the eye could see.

Lately, however neutral it was as a colour, black had been draining away from her dreams and all she could remember hours later was an immensity of white. Devouring both the land and the sky. Through which she fell, ran, stumbled, drowned. As you do in dreams.

That morning, she had rushed from the bed while it was still dark outside and made her way to the bathroom and stood for ages under the hot cascade of the shower, half dazed by the heavy sense of oppression and fear the dream had left her in the grip of. Water was dripping from her hair and shoulders as she slipped into her bathrobe without bothering to dry herself and walked downstairs to the kitchen. She had slept alone. Joseph had not joined her and had likely spent the night in his study.

He was sitting at the counter, absorbed by the eerie glow of his laptop screen, sipping a coffee. He didn’t look up when she came in.

“Hi,” Nelle said. “You didn’t come to bed last night. Did you complete your research?”

He raised his eyes. “Your hair is still wet. You’ll catch a cold,” he replied, ignoring her question.

Nelle was unsure whether the remote prospect of her falling ill would pain or inconvenience him. His tone was so neutral. He was always like this when working on a new trick. But before she could protest, Joseph spoke again.

“You must take next week off work. We’ll be going north.”

Nelle shivered. “The Ball?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Far. It is to be a White Ball,” Joseph said.

So this was it, she recognized. What she had been both fearing and expecting for some time now. The event that they had talked about for so long. That Joseph had attended in the past, but never with her. She hadn’t been ready, he’d said. Maybe the reason why her dreams of the past weeks had gradually been morphing into something else, as if the unconscious part of her brain had already been preparing her for the days to come. She shuddered. Her body tingled with anticipation. They ate their breakfast in silence, lightly toasted bagels with a thick spread of cream cheese and then she noticed she was on the point of being late and rushed upstairs to dress and ran out of the house with just a wave goodbye to Joseph, who barely looked up, as she straddled her bike, and pedalled down the grey road, her wheels crunching the autumn leaves.

Even now, the memory of their first meeting was etched on her mind like writing on a stone tablet.

Nelle had been distracted. Living on autopilot, relying on her innate sense of grammar and punctuation to get her through the working days that she had previously relished, and barely awake the rest of the time. Still hungover on a past relationship that was leading nowhere slow and had eventually petered out with not even a sense of relief, leaving her wondering whether she had it in her to ever be happy. Or at any rate content.

Joseph was an up-and-coming magician. He had something of a cult reputation, she had read in a magazine article, compounded by his refusal to ever perform on television. He had been signed up by one of the small publishing houses she had worked for as a freelance copy editor for several years, and his manuscript had only recently been assigned to her. Nelle had received the commission with his copy attached out of the blue, and then been told by one of the publishing company’s administrators that another copy editor had been offended by the contents of his work, stopped midway and had asked to be reassigned, slowing down the whole process.

Nelle had expected the book landing in her lap would be one explaining his tricks and the art of subterfuge and trick-ery, but it was, surprisingly, actually a novel.

Had Nelle been less distracted at the time, she probably would have been intrigued at the thought of reading whatever had left one of her colleagues so inflamed, but she merely added the script to her electronic to-do list and then continued with her work, barely registering the interruption to her schedule.

When she did finally click open the attachment and begin reading, it was the tone of his writing, even more than the content, that first began to waken the spark in her that she had not felt for so long she had nearly forgotten it had ever existed. His voice was strong and, to Nelle’s mind, masculine. But the novel was not written from the point of view of a man, but rather that of a young woman. A dancer, who performed a series of erotic routines on stage in London’s music halls and the homes of wealthy patrons in the twenties and thirties.

The heroine of Joseph’s novel was not described as beautiful in any traditional sense of the word. Nor did she meet any of the other characteristics that were typical of the romance books that Nelle was now accustomed to trudging her way through, a genre that she was so often assigned to work on.

His heroine, Joan, was tall – too tall – and thin to the point of lankiness, flat-chested and with hair that was a perfectly ordinary shade of brown. Not unlike Nelle’s own appearance.

Joan was not described in a more flattering light when filled with the heat of lust, or love, either, a state that possessed her often, as she was highly sexed. In fact, Joseph’s writing was as cold as it was sparse and elegant, and his sex scenes verged on the anatomical.

There were many sex scenes. But none described lovemaking as Nelle had ever known it. She was not even sure that sex was the right word to use, as most of the erotic passages did not include penetration, but rather narrated the heroine’s elaborate dance routines, which became more and more perverse under the tutorage of her mentor and lover, an older, stern Russian man, who by the end of it had Joan performing ballet naked, blindfolded and en pointe with knives affixed to her shoes.

It was animalistic, shocking, yet beautiful, and it wasn’t until Nelle reached the end of the text that she realized she had stopped actually copy-editing by the third chapter and simply allowed herself to be carried along by the flow of the story until the early hours of the morning when she reached its final chapter and then had to start over again, this time with an eye to her work.

Joseph’s story had continued to fill her thoughts when she finally switched off her desk lamp and slid into bed. She had not been able to sleep until she had slipped her hand between her thighs and brought herself to orgasm with the artful movements of her fingertips playing over her clitoris, as his images played in her mind, only in her imagination it was not the heroine, Joan, who danced naked on knife blades in front of a faceless audience, but her, Nelle.

She had typed his name into her Google search bar the following morning with the guilty feeling of someone steaming the envelope of correspondence meant for another. Nelle heartily disapproved of nosiness, but she could not seem to assuage her curiosity. Besides, she told herself, it was research. Finding something about the man himself and his past career might help her to better understand his current work.

What she discovered surprised her at first. But the more she read, the more it made sense, in light of his novel.

Joseph had once been a chemist by education and trade. He had published a handful of academic articles in obscure journals, most related to the study of minerals, and had worked as a teacher for a time, before leaving to pursue a career as a magician. Albeit one of a different nature, where the illusions he unveiled in public had a touch of the supernatural and proved more subtle than pyrotechnic. In the rare interviews he had granted, he would talk of opening up the door to secret worlds, which could be accessed through abolishing one’s sense of reality through a mastery of the senses.

The erotic nature of his story then, was a surprising as well as a logical departure. Try as Nelle might, she couldn’t erase his lines and the tale remained painted across her mind, even days later.

With the return of her sexual urges, she regained some of her usual joy for life. The leaves on the trees seemed brighter. Her daily swims at the local lido in nearby London Fields again made her feel as though she was gliding through the water effortlessly, for pleasure alone, and not for the sake of scheduled exercise. Even her morning coffee tasted better. And she looked forward to crawling under the covers each night and letting her mind drift away into the world of her private imagination, where she replayed the words of Joseph’s novel again and again as she brought herself to orgasm.

Sometimes she woke in the night, hot, sweating and desperately aroused to the point of discomfort, face down with her long limbs sprawled across the damp sheets, her pelvis grinding the mattress in an imitation of intercourse, her mind too carried away by the events reeling within to prevent her body from following suit. She felt compelled to seek out other erotic literature, hoping that she might find something else that struck the same chord in her, but it was no use. Other words aroused her, of course, but none engaged her mind as well as her cunt in quite the same way as the story of the ballerina on her knife blades, enduring pain for love.

Why it aroused her so, she couldn’t say, though in her darker moments she wondered if there was something wrong with her for relishing the thought of discomfort so heartily, and worse, pain administered by another. So long as it was fiction, she supposed, it didn’t matter what got her off.

But it would not stay fiction for long, as she came to meet him the very next day.

The pool was usually near empty when Nelle swam. She avoided the very early mornings when city workers ploughed ferocious laps before they scurried like ants to their office buildings, and the lunchtime aqua aerobics classes, which were full of expectant and new mothers, the elderly and the very overweight, who preferred to exercise beneath the sheet of invisibility and comfort that water brought.

She stood for a few moments and watched the only other swimmer in the pool, a man swimming laps in the fast lane. His singularity put him in the spotlight, a lone figure gliding through the water like a solitary ship in a vast sea, the swift movements of his arms creating a current that followed him like a rip tide.

Nelle lowered herself into the pool and began to swim in the lane alongside him, her mind and body quickly adjusting to the rhythm of her strokes, until it seemed as though the world around her had vanished entirely and there was nothing but her body and the vast cavern of her mind, as empty and weightless as the water that encased her like a shroud.

When she finally finished her allotted number of lengths and reached for the metal bar near the pool’s edge to pull herself out, he was standing nearby with his back to her, wet shorts clinging to muscled thighs, his face half hidden in his towel as he vigorously dried his hair.

Again she caught herself staring, transfixed not just by the angles of his body but also by his solitude, his habits. The way he swam, moved, suggested that this man and Nelle shared whatever characteristic it was that drew them both to the lido at the quietest time of day to be as alone as it is possible to be in London, removing even the company of the earth beneath their feet, replacing the ever-bustling sounds of the world around them with the steady lapping of water.

Alerted by her presence, or perhaps the rushing noise the water made as she pulled her body from the pool, he turned, and their eyes met before Nelle could look away.

She recognized him immediately. Just that morning she had gazed at the photo on his website, the same close-up picture that appeared on the proof of the back cover of his book. Nelle had paused and stared at the face that watched benignly back at her from the screen, handsome, she supposed, but harmless. Academic yet approachable. The sort of face that looked as though it belonged to a science teacher. Not the sort of face that she imagined belonged to a magician with an undoubted flair for the erotic.

Nelle had quickly dismissed the thought as ridiculous. People rarely looked how you expected anyway, which was why she generally refused to turn the final page to find the author’s picture on the inside or back covers of the books she enjoyed, preferring them to remain anonymous and not have reality intrude on the far more flattering light of her fantasy.

In the flesh though, she saw it as soon as he turned to face her. He possessed whatever it was that made a person appear sensual, as if the strength of his sexuality was such that it was apparent even in the lines on his face. His lips were much fuller and his mouth wider than it appeared in his photograph. His eyes were a darker shade of brown, so dark that they were nearly black, like pits of coal that she could fall into, but would surely burn up if she did. His hair, still wet, was thick and dark and clung in damp curls around his forehead.

“Joseph?” she said aloud, before she could stop herself. His mouth dropped open slightly in shock.

“Yes?” he replied in the wary tone of someone who has been cornered by the dullest guest at a party or found themselves trapped in an elevator with a salesperson. His eyes darted over her face and then away again as if he was mentally running her features through his mind’s eye, seeking out some detail that might remind him of where they had met, before he was forced to admit that he did not remember who she was.

They were trapped now. The unspoken laws of etiquette required that although they were both dressed only in their bathing suits, her feet still resting on the top step, half in the pool, she ought to explain herself, justify her intrusion into his privacy, put him out of the misery of wondering if he had committed a sin of terrible rudeness in forgetting her identity.

“Oh, no, you don’t know me. I’m sorry. I recognized you. From your book cover.”

He looked still more confused. And embarrassed.

“But the book hasn’t yet been published,” he protested.

“Maybe you’ve seen my website. Are you a fan of magic?”

She realized her mistake, and felt her skin begin to redden despite the cold.

Joseph furrowed his brow, now seemingly wondering if she had mistaken him for somebody else.

Nelle explained. “I work with your publishers. Copy-editing. I finished reading your manuscript just last night.”

Was he blushing, or was she imagining it?

“It’s very good,” she added. “I enjoyed reading it.”

“I didn’t think you copy editors actually read anything. Just scanned for all the infelicities.” His eyes crinkled up at the corners in the beginnings of a smile.

“Your work was fine,” she reassured. “I’ve seen much worse.”

He laughed. “Well, that’s a relief.”

She stepped forward and extended her hand, remembering too late that she was still dripping wet, but he shook it anyway.

“I’m Nelle,” she said. “Sorry about the wet hand. Not the most convenient place to meet, is it,” she added, looking around at the harsh grey concrete of the poolside, broken by a long line of locker doors painted in bright primary colours but bereft of seats. The café at one end that opened in the summer serving cold drinks and ice creams was now closed.

“Here,” he replied, offering her his towel. “It’s mostly dry.”

She took it, wrapping the fabric around her like a cape, grateful for the warmth and the opportunity to cover her body, although she had noted that Joseph had not cast so much as a glance below her neck. He was polite, in a very English sort of way. Nelle knew that, like her, he wore his social graces like a mask.

They paused, searching for something else to say, or some way to end this unplanned encounter between two strangers that had already gone on too long.

Nelle shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She licked her lips, embarrassed, wishing that she had never engaged him in conversation. The fantasies that his work had inspired in her had little bearing on the reality of meeting Joseph in person.

They spoke at the same time.

“Well,” she said, “I should be . . .” as he asked, “Would you like to join me for . . .” “getting on,” she finished, “coffee?” he said. “Yes of course,” she replied, interrupting him again as he backtracked, “no problem.”

They laughed uncomfortably, in unison. “There’s a Vietnamese coffee shop towards the market,” he said. “They serve it with sweetened condensed milk. Very warming.”

“That would be lovely,” she replied, firmly this time, to counteract her initial rejection.

She handed back his towel.

“I’ll change. Meet you out front in five?”

He nodded in agreement.

She turned away from him to fetch her change bag from her locker, conscious of the way that her bathing suit clung to her and crept up as she walked, exposing the tops of her thighs and the rounded edge of her backside. She tried to feign confidence, nonchalance, and did not stop to adjust herself. Was he watching? she wondered. Did he like what he saw?

Nelle looked good in a one-piece, and she knew it. Her slim legs sometimes appeared too thin to her eyes, in jeans, or a dress. Somehow the addition of clothes made her figure even more boyish. But her bathing suits accentuated what little she had in the way of curves, which was part of the reason why she owned so many of them but had relatively few other clothes. She’d never been particularly interested in shopping, or fashion.

She paused as she bent down to open the locker door, giving Joseph ample opportunity to let his gaze linger on her rear, but when she turned back again he had disappeared into the men’s changing rooms.

When she emerged through the lido’s glass double doors, he was already waiting for her, dressed in black running joggers and a grey jumper with the hood lying loose around his shoulders. It was an anonymous sort of outfit, the kind of clothing that advertised nothing at all about his economic status or sartorial taste.

Nelle had expected to return straight home after her swim, and hadn’t even brought a bra with her, just a long-sleeved blouse, a skirt that hung down to her ankles and a pair of casual flat shoes. She’d hesitated over removing her bathing suit and left it on in the end, thinking that more modest than appearing braless, but by the time she had dried her hair and gathered her things her thin cotton shirt had begun to dampen and now clung to her like a second skin. The chill present in the air hit her as soon as she stepped out to meet him and her nipples immediately hardened.

“Sorry,” she said to him, excusing her bedraggled appearance. “I wasn’t expecting to meet anyone today.”

“No need to apologize,” he replied. “You look fine. And I’m hardly dressed for a lunch date, either.”

He spoke as if he were cracking a whip, his tone brusque and his intonation clipped. She liked this quality in him. Joseph was honest, and his honesty relaxed her.

Nelle disliked meeting new people. She found it hard to be fake, a quality that, to her mind, almost all relationships required to begin with. Nelle simply didn’t care much about people that she didn’t know well enough to really like, and she resented pretending empathy for the sake of politeness, so spent a lot of time alone.

They fell into silence as they walked the length of the tree-lined footpath through London Fields to the Broadway Market. Nelle quickened her pace when she noticed that she was staring at Joseph’s back. Almost without thinking about it, she had fallen into a gait slightly slower than his, so she was walking half a step behind him.