The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels

Book 315: Mammoth Books

by Maxim Jakubowski

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Some of the most popular and innovative writers of erotic literature today have contributed to these twelve short novels that explore everything from love and longing to the darker emotions of pain, ecstasy, and total submission of the self to another. Longer and more satisfying than a short story, novellas allow the author to create perfect settings for thrilling and imaginative worlds, with a greater sense of involvement for the reader. Amongst those selected we find: The promiscous escapades of a journalist and photographer in Thailand. The success of an author's first book that ends five years of celibacy with an astonishing series of encounters. The journey an older man takes to New York to meet a young sex slave on the internet. A retelling of the classic tale of a maid's submission to her dominant master.

Release date: September 1, 2011

Publisher: Robinson

Print pages: 544

Sample

The short novel, the novella, the long story – call it what you will – is a tricky art form, especially for writers who write for publication, rather than
self-esteem. While this literary form is considered (especially in mainland Europe) just that – an art form to be mastered – the situation in Britain and America, where commercial
considerations dictate much of what is published, is more problematic.

Not long enough for solo book publication, too long for inclusion in magazines or anthologies: these are some of the obstacles the novella finds in its way.

However, the short novel is also the perfect form for literary erotica, allowing writers to develop their characters to greater depth beyond the gymnastics or hydraulics of the sexual act in all
its myriad varieties. Both the editors of this anthology modestly claim to have, in the past, written some of their best erotic work at such length and this has been recognized by critics. We
proudly refer you to MJ’s “The Map of the Pain” or “The State of Montana” or MH’s “The Naughty Yard” or “The Dress”, as satisfying
examples (available in previous Mammoth Books of Erotica anthologies or in single volumes).

The contributions we have had from some of the best writers of erotica currently practising the art, which we include in the present volume, prove the point: the reader isn’t faced with a
whole book of sensual forays, yet the reader also stays around longer, gets more involved, than they would with just a few pages of titillating prose and a “tableau vivant” in the form
of a story.

We are confident that, once again in this series, you will be aroused, piqued, fascinated – hypnotized, even – by the halls of sexual mirrors our writers have conjured here. Some
stories sound disturbingly autobiographical; others are fantastical; some are meditative; others full of action.

Putting this anthology together, with e-mail messages spanning the globe, was a joy and, at times, a pain, as so few writers could be included without fear of turning this mammoth into an
unwieldy and too heavy and expensive volume, and many a good story could not be used. It’s all part of the process. But, at the end of the day, this is a damn good book of erotic literature
– there’s definitely some sexy, thoughtful, funny and sad stuff going on in these pages: all the complexities and wonders of human sexuality. So, buy copies for friends, give them out
as gifts, slip them mysteriously under the bed or on the bookshelves of those you are feeling rather amorous about . . .

Maxim Jakubowski & Michael Hemmingson,
London & San Diego, 1999

Part One

East Hampton, 1976

ONE

Mora and I had been in East Hampton for two days waiting for the sun to come out when we ran into Charles and Vy. It was July, the Bicentennial Summer, and we were on our first
vacation as man and wife. We’d accepted a friend’s invitation to spend a few days at his beach house, but the afternoon we arrived the rains came, and lasted through the following day.
We were grumpy stuck inside. We wanted to lie naked in the sun.

The next morning, the sun made its appearance, and it was windy when we walked to the beach. We had the ocean to ourselves, but it was too rough to go in. Empty blue sky, empty white beach,
empty green ocean. The freckled, lively children further down the beach who were our only neighbors had to be content with building sandcastles. Mora read a novel and wrote in her journal, frowning
and chewing her lip. It was her way of arguing with me without saying anything, and also of arguing with herself instead of with me. I shrugged at her silence and went for a long run on the wet
hard sand, where high rolling breakers left thick clumps of seaweed, but I couldn’t outrace my frustration.

By evening, we were speaking only when spoken to and being scrupulously polite with each other. We brooded in marital silence over cold gin at Peaches, a restaurant in Bridgehampton where summer
people went that year for a hamburger or a salad before rushing off to the parties that seem to run around the clock, summer weekends on the South Fork. When there was a breeze from the ocean, the
leaves of the giant maples on the sidewalk outside scratched softly at the window screens. On each small round table a slender mirrored vase held a single rose. It should have been romantic;
couples all around us thought it was.

I reached for her hand and she put it quickly in her lap.

“What the hell is wrong with us?”

She sighed and I knew she was grateful that I’d spoken first. The answer was sitting on her tongue. “It’s marriage. Holy Wedlock.”

“You want to expand on that?”

“I don’t have to. We both know it’s that – why it’s that.”

So we did. Jealousy. Possessiveness. Insecurity. Fights, screaming, threats, feeling trapped. And keeping score – that was the worst. That computerized reference file constantly added to
of insult and injury, a never-to-be-erased tape of gritty misery.

“OK. What do we do now? Throw in the towel because the honeymoon isn’t working out?”

“I don’t know, Richard. I just think being unhappy is a waste of time.”

“Agreed.”

We stared at each other. Neither of us really wanted to be married. Not really. We were romantics, we weren’t interested in snug harbors – when we spoke of love, we meant
passion. Rub us together and you got fire.

From the time I first saw Mora I was under a spell. I know some magic was involved, because I was on the defensive after the break-up of a relationship I’d taken more
seriously than I should have. The home truths I’d learned about my needs were so lacerating, I vowed eternal celibacy.

For six months I’d been living like a monk in a basement sublet in Brooklyn Heights. It had a single bed I used and a kitchen I didn’t, and little else except for a color television
set and a well-equipped darkroom. No pictures on the walls, no plants to be watered, no cats to wrap themselves around my ankles when I came back late from my studio on West 17th Street.

It was a low, unhappy period in my life. I told myself I’d snap out of my funk any day, but the truth was I was drifting, getting by in a low key. I had let being in love become a way of
defining myself. Alone, I didn’t know who I was.

Mora came along just when I was beginning to spend so much time in Village bars that the bartenders knew my name, occupation, and marital status. One of them was an actor I had used as a model.
He knew a woman who needed some pictures.

“She comes in here all the time. Lives just around the block. She’s real intense.”

“You don’t understand. I take pictures of products, not egos. I don’t do portfolio glossies and I don’t want to meet any women.”

It was noisy in the bar, right before dinner. Maybe he didn’t hear me.

“She’s a lot of fun. Just let me tell her you’ll do it.”

A few days later she showed up at my studio. I was fussing with lights around an ornate, old-fashioned bathtub with claw feet. Later in the day, the agency that had had it delivered to me would
come to fill it with towels – I did catalogs, too.

I earn a living with a 35 millimeter camera because when I was a boy I picked up a Brownie for the first time and discovered my third eye. I have a gift for seeing with the camera lens what the
naked eye misses, moments when formlessness becomes form. When Mora walked through the door, it was one of those moments.

I stared. She stared back. She was so small I could have fitted her in a large camera bag. The top of her head came to the middle of my chest. Her curly hair was short but not mannishly cut, a
chestnut brown that smelled like oranges.

Her white skirt showed off her slender legs, and she had thrown a linen jacket over her thin shoulders. She wore a figa – a small, fist-shaped Brazilian good luck charm – on a
gold chain around her throat, but no earrings, no bracelets: only a trace of lip gloss. Her tan was so deep, she looked like she’d just stepped off a plane from someplace south.

I looked away first, after seeing the mischief in her calm green eyes. “Ever modeled before?”

She shook her head. “Only for my boyfriend’s Polaroid, but the pictures always came out blurry – you know how those things go. He found it hard to concentrate.” She
suppressed a smirk.

“You don’t say.”

We were grinning at each other. Hers was impish, provocative. “Have you acted before?”

“Never, if you don’t count Gilbert and Sullivan in grade school. But I’ve tried everything else and all my friends are in theater this year, so I thought, why not?”

Her self-confidence was dazzling. It came out in the standard portrait shots I did of her. Her dark features were wonderfully mobile, and she kept that glint in her eye. After the shooting, I
cancelled my appointment with the bath towel people and took Mora to dinner.

And so we met. And we made love. She was just as bold in bed as she was before the camera, very passionate and open; her energy was astonishing. A month later, I left Brooklyn
and moved into her second floor apartment on Cornelia Street. Things happened fast around Mora.

We lived together for a year, more happily than I’d thought possible. Business went so well in the studio, I hired a part-time assistant; Mora didn’t have to work because her father
owned a shopping mall and sent her a monthly allowance. When she decided she had no acting talent, she got into politics for a while, and then she just started spending all her time at home cooking
exotic meals; she told her friends she was too happy to concentrate on anything more.

What happened was that we got cocky. All the traditional signals had gone off at the right times, and we started thinking we were different, that we could nail our feelings to the wall where
they would never change. One thing led to another and, before we knew it, we were standing in City Hall, saying our vows. Afterwards, we threw a party for our friends, and then when the shock wore
off and we realized what we’d done, we stayed drunk for two days and had a terrific fight so we could squeeze the last ounce of passion out of making up.

Why did we do it? Talk to anyone: marriage is like getting a diploma in living as an adult. The license certifies a certain wilful madness for, as we found out, everyone lies about marriage,
especially its kinkier aspects: the manacles of words at each wrist and ankle, the eager vows that become expectations. The endless expectations.

We were on our third round of drinks and Mora was snapping her foot back and forth restlessly and staring off into space. I looked around for a waiter so we could order dinner,
when I saw Charles Venturi sit down at a table near us. He was the last person I expected to see. He’d been off in Europe for years – since the early seventies, when we had served time
together on the same slick magazines. We were never close, but I had sought him out and spent time with him because he fascinated me.

Sitting across from him was a tall blonde woman in her late twenties who had lovely cheekbones, hollow cheeks, and long delicate wrists, the supple carriage of a dancer, the long neck and waist
of a model. She was beautiful in the wiredrawn way that well-bred New England daughters who sing Bach on Sundays can be.

“Look over there,” I said to Mora. “That’s Charles Venturi.”

“They’re a handsome couple,” she admitted. “They look interesting.”

She followed me over to their table.

“Charles! How long have you been back?”

We shook hands and I introduced Mora. The woman with him was Vy Cameron. In the years I’d known Charles, I hadn’t seen him with a woman who looked so capable of keeping up. I liked
the determination I saw in her pale gray-blue eyes, and the demure way she shook my hand, fingers wrapped lightly around fingers. A lady, with an agenda.

The two of us exchanged the usual inane comments that pass for casual conversation in the Hamptons, but we kept our eyes on our mates. Mora and Charles were hitting it off. While he talked, she
was giving him what I think of as the Treatment. The Treatment consists of her undivided attention, of long, smouldering looks, and sudden, surprising smiles that promise a lot more than
understanding. It’s flattering, and nearly always effective.

After a while, I interrupted them. I saw a chance to change the weather between Mora and I, the possibility of sun behind the clouds.

“Let’s get together. Where are you staying?”

“With the man Vy lives with, Maurice.”

I raised my eyebrows, and he looked unexpectedly sheepish for a minute.

“It’s a long story. I’ll save it for later.” He winked.

He suggested that we meet on the beach next day. We talked about time and place – he knew a beach where it was possible to go without bathing suits – and returned to our table.

In bed later, Mora asked me to tell her more about him. I was suspicious of her interest and reluctant at first, but she cuddled up to me and I starting stroking her and talking. In the dark,
her emerald eyes glowed like a cat’s. A cat in heat.

TWO

When it comes to women, Charles has a gift. He hears what they’re saying between the lines. They find him inordinately seductive, although there isn’t much about
his appearance other than his provocative black eyes that would suggest such powers of attraction. But he’s solid and dark and intense.

His restless energy is the source of his charisma. His hunger for the varieties of experience. He grew up fast on the Italian Catholic streets of East Harlem, where he learned to see the world
as a stage, and his part in it as an infinitely adaptable player. He was attracted to both the smell of incense and the smell of sex, the sharp aroma of men and the secret fragrance of women. By
the age of forty his resume read like eight lives had been crammed into one. He’d been a translator, a student of Gurdjieffian teachings, a psychotherapist, a librarian, an editor of
men’s magazines – even a novice with shaved head in a Zen monastery. His appetite for biography was prodigious.

All this time, he was writing furiously; when he published the books that established his reputation, his radical ideas about sexuality were treated respectfully by slick national magazines, a
few maverick critics, and even one incautious Nobel Laureate. It didn’t hurt that he was called a pornographer by a few midwestern district attorneys who had no idea what he was talking
about.

He became a cult figure in the sexual underground. When he stepped out of the shadows into the spotlight, he represented the forces of eros to the media. There was applause. He titillated
people. Amused them. Sometimes even succeeded in outraging them. Then, one week, he was on the cover of Life magazine wearing eye shadow and mascara and grinning about the confusion of sex
roles he embodied. It seems improbable, but it was the sixties. The pot boiled, and he was there to take his turn stirring it, along with student radicals, Black Panthers, Yippies, Weather People,
and self-destructive rock stars. The seventies were a let-down for him. I think he went off to Europe primarily because he was bored and he wanted to see if he’d been missing anything
there.

When we met him on the beach, next day, the sky was cobalt blue, and the ocean was calm as bathwater. Mora smiled at the sun. She was happy again. We found Charles sitting
cross-legged on an orange beach towel at the foot of a golden dune, brown arms on his knees, gazing out over the rippling water. A lone sail boat patrolled the line of the horizon. I was
disappointed when I didn’t see Vy.

“Thank God for the sun,” I said.

“That’s a big ocean. I’m glad to be on this side of it.”

I unfurled our blue chintz beach spread and Mora helped me to anchor it with our sandals. We took off our jeans and sprawled next to Charles. Mora began rubbing lotion into her legs.

“Where’s Vy?”

“She had to play hostess for a while.”

“For Maurice?”

He nodded. “She won’t be long.”

“You share her with him?”

He shrugged. “That’s how it is.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“He loves her in his own way, I guess.” A faint smile played on his lips as he studied Mora. Her tight smooth flesh overwhelmed the white terrycloth bikini she wore.

“You’re so casual,” she said. “Have you known her long?”

“I met her when I got back from Europe. Some friends threw a welcome home party, and she was there. As soon as I saw her, I knew I was in trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“I was turned on, and I knew we wouldn’t be any good for each other – but I had to have her. I met my match.”

“I want to hear more. All about her,” Mora said. Erotic style fascinated her, and any woman who could live with two men deserved a great deal of study.

“What does she do?”

“She’s a dancer. But she has many talents.”

“You can tell us more than that.”

“Well, you can ask her yourself,” Charles said, pointing to a tall, erect figure walking down the beach toward us. Vy wore a Japanese kimono and clogs, and her blonde hair was piled
on top of her head. We could hear her singing in a high, lilting voice when she got closer, but the words were lost in the muffled slap of the surf on the beach.

Her first words were breathless, almost hoarse. “I’m so fucking dry I’m going to have to do a little deep throat to get my voice in the right register. I’m a tenor in the
heat.” She patted her chest. Her palpitating heart.

Mora and I looked at each other. What heat?

“It’s my coloring,” Vy said. “I’m more susceptible than most people. I don’t like the sun. It causes cancer and it dries up the skin.”

“I worship the sun,” Mora said.

“Well, nothing could have seduced me down to this beach but the thought of you three doing something delicious without me.” She was overwhelming, regal. In supplication I opened the
bottle of cold Retsina we’d brought, filled four paper cups, and handed one to her. Charles lit a joint and passed it around.

She settled herself on our blue spread. Mora watched her with narrowed, admiring eyes. “Now tell me what I’ve missed. Have you been talking about me? I hope so – it would make
me feel so good. All Maurice talks about any more is deals. Buy that, sell this. Sometimes when he refers to me it’s in the same tone of voice, and I feel like a jewel he’s tucked into
his safety deposit box.”

She leaned back on her elbows, her gaze fixed on my face, the slender joint stuck in the corner of her mouth.

“I don’t own a safety deposit box,” Charles said.

“I don’t own a bathing suit,” she purred in a cool, milky voice, removing her kimono with ladylike panache. Her plump, berry-tipped breasts, flat white belly and wide hips were
exquisite. Her skin blushed that faint pinkish hue found in the center of certain roses. In the cool salt breeze, she trembled almost imperceptibly, like a rabbit in a field of shotgun fire. I felt
a sudden stabbing urge to take her in the crook of my arm and press my fingers gently in the wet hollows of her throat, her elbows, her knees; my groin was beating like a second heart.

Mora wasn’t to be upstaged. She untied her bikini top with what was meant to be a casual gesture, but I knew that she was tense. Her normally puffy copper nipples were tight and
hopeful.

Charles grinned happily at the women. “We are fortunate men, Richard.” Then he told us a story that set the mood for what happened later as much as the hot sun or the empty
beach.

“I was walking on the beach this morning. I didn’t know where I was going, just walking and thinking and looking for driftwood. There were no people around, so I took off my trunks.
It was about ten o’clock when I realized I was walking through a gay beach. I almost stepped on a man who was lying in the surf, masturbating. Something in his face made me stop –
whether it was pleasure or invitation, I don’t know. I went down on him, and for five minutes, maybe ten – it seemed like hours – we were as close as any two bodies can get. Such
an absolute passion – and it happened with a total stranger! Afterwards we didn’t say anything, but neither of us were looking for romance.”

“I love it,” Mora exclaimed excitedly, clapping her hands. Her cat eyes flashed. “Anonymous sex, no attachments. It’s too bad heterosexuals can’t be so
honest. I see so many people I’m turned on to, yet I don’t want to talk to them. I want to take them. Just make love. Between men, it’s better. You both know what you want,
without any illusions . . .” She was breathless.

Vy crossed her arms and cupped her hands over her breasts protectively, as if guarding her heart. She closed her eyes and sat quite straight and still. “All there is is romance. The rest
is technique,” she said, without opening her eyes. “I’ve had expert lovers who couldn’t get me wet because they didn’t know any of the magic words.”

She opened her eyes and focused on Charles. He stretched out casually next to her, propped on his elbows, looking out to sea. Something seemed to draw him: he started crawling crab-like on his
belly out to the water, leaving a broad, wrinkled trail in the tawny sand.

We all stared after him. Mora sighed wistfully. “I should have been a man. You just don’t know how much I fantasize about certain . . . situations.”

“Well, my dear,” Vy said coldly. “We all have to learn the hard way.”

“I guess it’s something I want to learn,” Mora replied, unwilling to give Vy the last word. “Anyway, Charles says you’re a part of the world I want to learn
about.”

The sharks might have envied Vy’s smile. “I keep myself entertained.”

The static between them made me decide to follow Charles into the surf. I crawled for a bit, felt silly, and walked the rest of the way. He was lying on his back, letting the sudsy foam wash
over his body, decorating his hirsute chest and legs with green seaweed and fragments of sea shells. Looking at him lying there, I thought of the man in his story.

“Let the two of them work it out,” he said. “We’re just in the way.”

“I’m grateful that Mora’s found someone to talk to. She’s been in a funk.”

“Tell me about her.”

“What you see is Mora. She hides nothing. She’s an all-or-nothing type. Black or white, no grays.”

“Get out of her way when she decides what she wants.”

“Exactly. She wants my soul. She gets jealous if I talk with a bank clerk too long. I try to tell her that I’m not interested in anyone but her, but she sees what she wants to see.
Marriage has done us in, I think.”

He shook his head sympathetically. “But before you got married – how were things?”

“God was in his heaven and all was right with the world . . . You know what it’s like.”

“So why did you do it?”

“Get married? I guess I’d have to plead insanity. I knew better, and I did it anyway.”

He snorted in recognition. “I’m sorry, but I think you’re taking it all too seriously, Richard. Loosen up.”

“How do I do that?”

“Stop arguing. Stop anticipating.”

“Is that what you learned in Europe?”

He laughed this time. His eyes lit up with mirth. There was a patch of wet sand on his cheek. “What do you know about me, Richard?”

“Not much. But I always thought you knew about women.”

“Then let me tell you something: Mora wants more than marriage can offer her right now. She wants to play, it’s as simple as that.”

“Simple?” I couldn’t swallow that.

“Look, you’re on vacation. Try something different.”

He winked amiably, walked into the water to clean the sand off, and sprinted up the beach. I knew what he meant because the idea had been lurking in the back of my mind since we’d met at
Peaches; but I knew that I didn’t want anyone but me making love to Mora.

I knew she’d had lovers in the past, but they were shadows framed by shadows. Charles was sharp and immediate. Yet I had to admit to myself that the image of the four of us together on a
bed heated my imagination – that perhaps my curiosity was stronger than my apprehension.

I wanted Vy, but I tried to shake my head clear of her as I walked back up the beach to our blue chintz island in the sand. Sleeping with other people when you’re married leads to trouble,
I told myself.

I should have listened, but of course I didn’t.

Indelible image: Charles was standing in a half crouch, swimming briefs kicked aside, feet planted heavily in the sand, calves bulging, body glistening, while Vy’s blonde head bobbed
vigorously between his thighs. Mora was leaning back, breasts free, snapping pictures with my Pentax. In her hands it was almost a sexual instrument. I threw up my hands in surprise and she swung
around to take my picture. Far down the empty beach, a boy was throwing rocks into the surf, but he was a speck in the distance.

Snap. There are glimpses, in a late afternoon sun, of the future. They come unbidden, and they enter the heart and lodge there. The dark fuzz on Charles’s thighs; the shuddering in
Vy’s back as she pulled him into her; Mora’s obvious arousal as she clicked the shutter. There was an excitement in the air – of people about to experiment with their lives
– that wasn’t to be dissipated by the salt breeze.

“It feels right,” Mora said brightly when she handed me the camera.

“Does it?” I was doubtful. I had fists at the ends of my arms, fingers closed tightly into my palms. My tongue fluttered helplessly, like the tail of an animal I’d gotten stuck
in my throat.

Vy leaned back from Charles, licked her lips delicately, and lighted a black Sobranie cigarette. She winked at me. Charles sat in the sand, looking seductive. I thought I could hear the wheels
turning in his head.

“Why don’t we have dinner together? We can whip up something easy at Maurice’s, and let the evening take care of itself.”

THREE

Vy drove off in a blue Mercedes. She blew a kiss through the window and scrunched gravel as she left the beach parking lot. The gesture seemed to enlarge her: fingertips to her
lips, the wide unexpected smile, the pressure of her foot on the gas pedal. We followed in Charles’s Clunker Deluxe. “ ‘The station car’,” he joked.
“That’s what they call vintage Detroit iron out here. It’s what I can afford. Maurice watches that Mercedes like a hawk. I think he has the soul of a chauffeur.”

I shrugged. “Shoulders were made for burdens.”

I sat on the outside and Mora was squeezed between us. We dripped sand on the floor of the car and the hot vinyl seats stuck to our thighs. Despite the heat, Mora’s skin was cool and
moist.

“You’re a Scorpio sandwich,” Charles said to her, reminding me that we shared our birthdays. Then he touched her.

We were heading down the Montauk Highway and had slowed on the outskirts of Amagansett, where a train had derailed. The road swarmed with police, gawkers, and dazed passengers. Charles lifted
his hand from the steering wheel and pressed the back of it against Mora’s breasts. Lightly. It was the simplest, most casual of gestures, so natural I felt like I was stealing something from
them because I stared. I looked quickly out the window, feeling embarrassed – and angry at myself for feeling that way.

Mora giggled and clapped a hand over her mouth. She put her left hand on Charles’s knee and her right hand on my thigh and stroked us both. Her face was red, even through her tan.

I don’t know how to explain it, but I was as shocked as if Charles had stroked my nipples. Those weren’t his breasts, they were mine. Mine. But I could tell by the way
Mora was breathing that she didn’t agree that marriage had made me a man of property.

We passed dunes tufted with islands of waving sword grass, rows of beach cottages, the potato fields of July, and then I saw the windmill in East Hampton. We drove through the town’s
sparkling center. In the late afternoon light it was still, unreal, a postcard.

“An extraordinary afternoon,” I said in the silence. There was more I wanted to say, but I couldn’t find the words. Mora’s fingers were having the desired effect on
me.

I was confused by the male complicity I felt with Charles. When he touched Mora, she became a strange woman we’d picked up together. From then on, two plus one equaled more than three.

FOUR

However shocking or perhaps just plain perverse it may seem, when I saw Mora naked with Charles and Vy it wasn’t jealousy that I felt. It was lust that grew in my belly,
like a sapling putting down roots. I knew the voyeur’s stunned delight in achieving erotic perspective. Our nakedness created the illusion that we had entered another dimension, a counter
world of the id, where our apprehensions were removed with our clothes and past and future ceased to exist.

Vy’s bedroom was white, but by no means chaste. White walls, white sheepskin rugs on the parquet floor, huge antique mirrors, white vases filled with daisies, and a platform bed on which
the three of them sat as if on a tongue sticking out of fluffy clouds, for the silk spread was white, but the sheets underneath were crimson. Satin.

I sauntered around the room, determined to be casual, sipping my brandy and looking