Travel on a journey to new places and sexual experiences with the Sex in the City series of destination erotica from Xcite Books. Each volume contains three stories that take you to the heart and soul of the city, its places, people and lovers.
Volume Two Introduction Maxim Jakubowski The Same Fifty Taxis Jeremy Edwards Obit for Lynn Tsaurah Litzky Two Natures Shanna Germain
The SEX IN THE CITY series is devoted to the unique attraction that major cities worldwide provide to lovers of all things erotic. Famous places and monuments, legendary streets and avenues, unforgettable landmarks all conjugate with our memories of loves past and present, requited and unrequited, to form a map of the heart like no other. Brief encounters, long-lasting affairs and relationships, the glimpse of a face, of hidden flesh, eyes in a crowd, everything about cities can be sexy, naughty, provocative, dangerous and exciting. Cities are not just about monuments and museums and iconic places, they are also about people at love and play in unique surroundings. With this in mind, these anthologies of erotica will imaginatively explore the secret stories of famous cities and bring them to life, by unveiling passion and love, lust and sadness, glittering flesh and sexual temptation, the art of love and a unique sense of place. And we thought it would be a good idea to invite some of the best writers not only of erotica, but also from the mainstream and even the crime and mystery field, to offer us specially written new stories about the hidden side of some of our favourite cities, to reveal what happens behind closed doors (and sometimes even in public). And they have delivered in trumps. The stories you are about to read cover the whole spectrum from young love to forbidden love and every sexual variation in between. Funny, harrowing, touching, sad, joyful, every human emotion is present and how could it not be when sex and the delights of love are evoked so skilfully?
The Same Fifty Taxis by Jeremy Edwards
1987
Unwritten rule: If you were in a rock band in New York, you looked like a Ramone. Leather jacket and black hair. This applied to the women as well; all of us, the guys and the gals, were gritty parcels of leather and denim, no matter what was going on underneath anatomically. I remember the thrill of a bra strap, spied through a hole in Milly’s T-shirt, emphasizing – as if any emphasis were needed – that this punk was a girl.
The Upper East Side belonged to another generation. I was an outsider, if a grateful one, paying my deflated, token rent to basically house-sit for a year in a co-op owned by Jay’s grandparents. It was against the building association rules – the way I thought of it, I was against the rules – and every doorman on the staff knew it. They didn’t hassle me on the technicality, and I was grateful for that too. But their stiffness reminded me, whenever I crossed the threshold, that I was a scruffy kid of twenty-two living there on borrowed time and space.
Once I tried to tip the senior doorman, who had just helped me wrestle an amp into the elevator. He looked at me indulgently, shaking his head, as though I were a five-year-old trying to offer him my last lollipop.
I felt especially incongruous when I masturbated in the grandparental bed; not because it was a sexual act, but because of the specific flavour of the sexuality. There I was, feverishly jerking away my boyish sexual tension while visualizing Milly’s presumably smooth ass, miraculously unwrapped from its cloak of strained denim. But I was doing it in a bedroom whose decor suggested perfumed sex with a woman who visited a hairdresser; maybe with opera music coming over the radio.
If I ever fucked Milly, it wouldn’t be here.
Her band and mine rehearsed on the same night: Wednesdays from 10:00 to 11:00, in neighbouring practice rooms in a rent-by-the-hour facility. And from the first time I saw her freckled nose and tight jeans, I wished I could take her to a different sort of rent-by-the-hour facility.
She lived with her mother in a walk-up on East Eighty-third, and we usually rode the subway back uptown together. Because the singer in my band was friends with the drummer in hers, we had officially met, and so we didn’t have to share the commute as strangers. It was, in other words, acceptable under the rigid terms of 1980s New York etiquette for me to speak to her.
Milly was a bass player – a very dexterous one, with a complementary gift for writing lyrics – while I was what my father the musicologist would have called ‘second guitar’. Fifth wheel was more like it. I’d been invited in – into the band and into New York – by Jay, at a time when his group thought they could use a separate rhythm guitarist to free Jay up for the flashy stuff. As it turned out, this worked well for about one song in ten, leaving me superfluous the rest of the time. I was always being asked to turn my volume down.
She was a sympathetic listener each Wednesday, when I rambled on about my insecurities within the group. But this wasn’t what I wanted to be talking to her about. I wanted to get to know her, with all that this implied; but I was trapped by my own repetitive, self-pitying repertoire. The potent sexuality I read in her eyes deserved better than the wimpy, tedious soundtrack I heard coming from my voice box.
The intersection where we parted every week, a few blocks after exiting the subway, became a crossroads of hope and unfulfilment on my mental landscape.
One Wednesday, after we’d climbed up to street level at Seventy-seventh, she asked me if I wanted to have a beer, then led me over to a bar on Second Avenue when I accepted. We sat by the window, and fluorescence from a nearby street lamp made her dyed black hair shine.
‘Did you have a girlfriend in Pittsburgh?’ Milly gazed attentively at me as she took her first sip from a bottle of Molson Golden. In the background, I heard cases of beer being ripped open, a confident proclamation that people would be having fun here when the weekend arrived.
‘Sort of. I guess you could say that Lori and I dated by default. Everyone else in our little dorm group was paired up.’
‘Dating by default,’ she repeated, with an ironic air of authority. ‘Ah yes, I know it well. It’s right up there with sex by default.’
A tremor of promise, coated with fear, ran through me. I took a snapshot of the situation in my mind: I was alone with Milly, and she was steering the conversation toward sex. ‘Yeah. We did a little of that, too,’ I said into my beer.
She kindly shifted the burden away from me, talking of her own relationships. Within a few minutes, she had all but finished her drink.
‘You know, I don’t think much of sex by default, Marc. But there are other kinds of sex I like.’
‘Me too,’ I managed, as if in a dream.
‘Should we go to my place and discuss that?’
