Only in the City: Erotic Tales of City Life
Edited by Nico Vreeland and Cecilia Tan
Published by Circlet Press
edited by Nico Vreeland and Cecilia Tan
Copyright © 2010 by Circlet Press, Inc.
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Cover Illustration © Andrejs Pidjass | Dreamstime.com
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Table of contents
By Eric Del Carlo
By Elizabeth Coldwell
By Shanna Germain
Of Blood and Fire: The Medellín Contract
by Renatto Garcia
By Elizabeth Hyder
By Kaysee Renee Robichaud
Living in the city fractures us, it makes us split ourselves in order to find a part of ourselves to deal with this or that scenario, this or that person, this or that facet of the city. It doesn't wait for us, it doesn't give up ground, it doesn't come to us; we must go to the city, and we must adapt ourselves to its demands. City life is cluttered and high-density but anonymous. We're constantly surrounded by strangers, constantly anxious about making a connection with another person. We're physically crowded but emotionally isolated, even from ourselves.
And so, when people come together--emotionally, romantically, sexually--it can be explosive. Add a dose of the fantastic--sometimes even the supernatural--and you get the stories in this anthology: powerful and electric in the way of desperate connections, but also unique to their settings. Some of these cities are ancient and magical, others are gritty and futuristic, while still others are familiar to us in the here and now. Each city pulses with life, but it is that constant beat that wears down our protagonists. These characters have been hardened, cracked, and sometimes broken, and it's often not until they're presented with something they've never dreamed of that they realize what they've been missing.
In “As Far as I Can See,” a New Orleans man has discovered exactly how easy it is to slide into anonymity and loneliness in the city. He passes through his surroundings solitary and unseen, but what happens when he meets someone who is, literally, unseen? In “Camille/Leon,” a prostitute has a unique talent: she can shift genders at will. This has allowed her to make a terrific living, but it's forced her to split herself in two. Can she ever realize the whole of herself in a society that tears people apart? All the protagonists of these stories have lost something of themselves in the erosion of city life, but each of them will find something unexpected or precious through the erotic connections they make, whether fleeting or forever, that could only happen in the city.
Nico Vreeland
August 2010
By Eric Del Carlo
The blear of daylight drew me home. I had gin for blood this morning, and had started the transfusing late last night, very late, at three or four a.m. venturing, restless, unsleeping, unwilling to just lie and lie in bed. Why sleep, when the Quarter won't, when the madcap drinking laws don't close the bars, ever?
Thin light, not even sunup, but enough to spook away the muggers. Summer's humidity was coming, starting earlier every year, readying to deep-fry bruised and brazen New Orleans yet again. For now, though, it was a pleasant warmth, an easy semi-heat, and staggering through it I reached the stone steps that climbed to my house's front door. I'd hit more than one bar, engaged in murky talk with sidelong elbows and shoulders, saying nothing, hearing nothing, just boozy blather all around. Out there for what? Looking for meaning, for a coherent thought? Hoping to get my cock sucked in some dark corner?
I was forty-three. My hair was threaded with gray. My blood had a proof this morning. I was standing at the foot of my steps in the French Quarter's predawn, and I felt aged and defeated.
My fingers curled over the wrought-iron railing. Equilibrium twirled. I lifted a foot, for that first stony step.
Felt obstruction. Heard a grunt. My foot hadn't properly come down.
I felt furrows surfacing on my face. Drunken muddle, where the laws of physics start snapping off of reality one by one. But I was still upright, still possessed of motor skills; and so I could reason that something was truly amiss.
I backed off. The street was a watery silence all around, the furor of Bourbon blocks away. I strained my senses forward, listening, smelling, seeing only steps and risers, four stone stairs to my door. I drew my key from my pocket, wanting to get inside. But wanting also to understand why I thought I'd just stepped on someone.
Why I felt a person here, before me, a quivery animated presence, something vibrating unseen on the steps of my house. Too specific for a garbled fancy; and not enough gin in me--a lot, but not quite that sufficient quantity--to truly unbend my mind.
I'd heard a grunt, as of someone disturbed from sleep. Did I now hear...breathing?
Key dangling, ears straining. From empty windows across the street I looked like an idiot. Were I to go groping about these steps, a blind-man's-bluff searching, I'd be just another early morning booze-zombie, overdrunk, fumbling for that familiar door that meant home. Pathetic.
Gingerly, but with a certain measured dignity and determination, I put my foot to the bottom step again. Felt stone. Felt reassuring ungrunting solidness. I shifted the foot right and left a bit. Nothing. No unexplained extra matter. Nobody.
I climbed to my door. The breathing I heard was the rustle of my clothing; the odor of livingness was just the general organic bouquet of the Quarter. I slotted my key, pushed open the door...
...and felt the brush of someone going ahead, into my home, the warmth of a being. A human? That question jolted me. I shook it away, a violent shuddering there on my threshold. Of course a human, I told myself, my brain already grappling, already insisting on adjustments, on reevaluations. The invisible intruder had to be a human being, I instructed myself. No further divergence from normalcy would be permitted. An invisible man? Very well. But it goddamned well was going to be a man.
No ghost for the flouncy-shirted tour guides to bark about one day, as they led gaggles of yokels through the narrow streets, weaving voodoo from the sultry air, selling the cheapest of thrills, the stimulation of the gullible imagination.
Still I stood in my open doorway. Retreat? Go elsewhere? A person, okay, an unseen person in my home; but I couldn't make a guess as to disposition--hostile, benign? Not even my resetting mind could provide an answer to that one.
But this was my house, goddammit. I was tired, inebriated; I wanted to be indoors, my indoors. I stepped across the threshold and pushed the door shut. I reached behind, clicked the lock. Home.
My heart was beating hard, not just with alcohol stress--and not entirely from fear either, I found. The steady thump on my eardrums owed something to the excitement of this. This wasn't usual. This wasn't every other arrival home. Gazing around the entry hall, I saw walls and carpeting and light fixtures and furnishings with acute attention to detail. Everything appeared overbright, as if irradiated. Fear did tickle in my gut, but I felt more than that. I was interested. I was engaged.
I was searching the foyer for some sign of my intruder. Having one's house broken into was a frightening experience, especially if you were on the premises at the time. That my burglar had no visual reality didn't detract from that, did it? Then again, I knew intention no better than disposition. Here to plunder, or here to...what?
I watched for footprints appearing of their own on the carpet, for objects disturbed by no perceivable force. I tried to use a mental radar. That feeling someone was watching--that was practically a classifiable phenomenon, wasn't it? If so, it failed me just now.
A floorboard creaked, pure haunted house thrill, and I jumped; then recognized that it had come from the adjacent living room. I stepped into the doorway, thinking I should keep it blocked. But one could go into the kitchen from the living room as well. How could I trap this interloper? And did I want to? When a wasp is buzzing around inside one's home, you open a window and shoo it out.
I listened above the thumping of my heart. My senses focused. I felt the alcohol burning away.
"Who's here?" I asked, pleased with the steadiness of my voice, the simplicity and relevance of my query.
And I heard...a sniff. A snigger maybe. But breath from a body, definitely, from somebody. Somebody in the room who wasn't a part of optical corporeality.
A magazine flapped up off the couch. It tumbled toward me through the air, pages riffling. I ducked aside as though a bloodthirsty eagle had swooped at me. The magazine struck the floor behind me, just as I heard the grunt of a laugh, as of someone mildly amused by an overused joke. The laugh had a masculine timbre to it.
I spun back toward the couch, looking for the edges, seeking a discrepancy against the light bleeding through my shutters. I'd had a lover once who liked to point out CGI flaws and telltales in movies. It was a habit that helped wear out his welcome fairly quick. But I saw no giveaways, none, just blank air.
"What's your name?" I liked this question too. It demonstrated that I wasn't panicking, that I understood it was a person here in this room with me.
A long breathing pause came. That and the throw gave me an idea where he was standing. I looked at the rug, but its nap was too thin for footprints.
"What you wanna call me?" An almost piping voice, post-adolescent but still young. My mind instantly tried to concoct a face to go with it, like you do for a radio deejay; but all I got was youth, undoubtedly over eighteen, but maybe not old enough to drink.
Not old enough? Hah. When all he had to do was walk into any bar and take what he wanted?
But I was neglecting his counter-question, and it was a good one. I said, "How about Harvey?"
"That's a gay name. You sayin' you think I'm gay?" It wasn't quite hostile, but it had the sound of challenge, of reflexive youthful menace.
"No, I'm not saying I think you're gay." I couldn't expect him to have been raised on Jimmy Stewart films and other classics like I'd been. "In fact, I'm gay. So it wouldn't have been an insult." Too late it occurred to me that this might've been a mistake. But I'd been living in the Quarter a long time now, since well before Katrina, and I'd gotten very used to being out and not having anybody blink about it.
If one could hear another person mulling, I heard it now. Finally Harvey said, "That's cool."
I felt relief. What I didn't feel anymore--or not much of, at least--was fear. Somehow I had eased myself into this situation. I had a guest in my home. Uninvited or not. Immune to the visible spectrum or not. And guests, here in the Deep South, merit hospitality. It's the real deal down here, gentility and genteelness.
"Well, my name's Donnie," I said. I almost put out my hand, but left it at my side. "Since you're here, can I get you something? A drink. Are you hungry?" I was more than a little impressed to hear myself saying these words.
He hemmed and hawed a moment before saying grudgingly, "I could eat something." It sounded to me like the reluctance that comes from being too young to comfortably ask anybody for anything. Or maybe I was reading him all wrong. I had no visual clues, after all. Who knew what this kid's life was like? How long had he been in this state? All his life, maybe. It occurred to me, again belatedly, that his walking into a bar and grabbing whatever he wanted was an ignorant fantasy on my part. He couldn't just go around moving things, not without drawing serious attention, or even starting a full-blown panic.
He had been sleeping on my doorstep when I'd stepped on him. Was that a typical night for him?
I went into the kitchen and cooked up some eggs, buttered some toast. I could've called Verti Marte, just a couple blocks away, for a delivery of po' boys, but I didn't want to open my door again. Didn't want...what?...for Harvey to slip out? I tried to stop interrogating myself and sat across the table as he ate.
It was fantastic to watch. Fork lifting, eggs disappearing. But I consciously didn't gawk. I don't believe there are freaks in this world. Or else we're all equally freakish, in some sense or other.
The fork rattled onto the yolk-smeared plate. "That was good."
"Want more?"
"Naw," came from the opposite chair. "It's makin' me sleepy...." And I heard a yawn.
Which had me immediately stifling one of my own. Interesting. I guess one doesn't need the visual cue; the audible will do. What, though, was I to do now? Where did my hospitality reasonably end?
I didn't want him to go.
The thought had the confidence of absolute instinct. I said, "You want to sleep here? In a bed. Upstairs."
Less hesitation this time, less perceptible reluctance. "Yeah, Donnie. I'd like that."
I led the way. I could have asked him a thousand questions, then a thousand more--all the hows and whys--but I didn't. Mine was a lonely life, and growing more pointless by the month. I had royalties paying for everything I owned, which meant I didn't even need to actively engage the world. But I felt a connectivity, here and now. And even as outrageous as all this was, I wouldn't squander this opportunity.
I opened the door into the bedroom, a disheveled space, probably needed an airing. Harvey brushed past me again. I felt the whispering movement of him, felt myself stirring.
"Do you want some pajamas?"
He laughed again. "No. I ain't a kid, y'know."
"Just going to wear what you've got, then?" I was still in the bedroom doorway--lingering, I realized.
"Ain't wearin' nothing," Harvey said.
Of course. Why would clothes share his invisibility? He would be empty clothing walking around, which would certainly call the kind of attention he obviously didn't want.
But my mind seized on the more immediate fact: he had been naked all this time. The stirring in me became a familiar tingling, the slow uncoiling of arousal. I didn't know what he looked like; but the thought of him nude in my bedroom tightened the breath in my chest.
I watched the sheet peeling back from the bed, my heart resuming its earlier quick tempo, now for different reasons. I saw the indenting mattress. I saw Harvey's shape for the first time as he slid the pastel blue sheet over himself, over his trim naked form.
I stared and stared, but it still wasn't a gawking; it wasn't any so-called freakishness that drew me.
Maybe he sensed that. Maybe he was just lonely too. How could he not be?
Voice a little thick now, he asked, "You gonna get in with me?" There was a post-adolescent shyness in his tone. "I...want you to, y'know."