For the pubic hair lovers: an excerpt from "Topiary" by KD Grace in Obsessed

An excerpt from the story "Topiary" by KD Grace in Obsessed: Erotic Romance for Women.

At first Aden simply strokes my heavy curls, his face in deep concentration. His creative juices, like my own, are flowing. I begin to thrust lightly against his stroking, impatient for him to get on with it. But he won’t be rushed. There’s a stroke with the comb here, a shove of my leg there, a shivering with his fingers as he plumps and fluffs. “Yes, I see it now,” he breathes. “I know exactly how it’s supposed to be.”

He begins.

He combs and snips and says half under his breath, “Mm-hm, uh-huh, just a little more. That’s right. Perfect.” Then he switches to another pair of scissors. I can’t tell the difference, but he says he needs to create texture, depth, a sense of perspective.

“The landscape should always showcase its finest feature.” His fingers press in around my clit, and he rubs and strokes it to prominence.

I try to sit still as he clips and combs, but I’m slippery and swollen and all of the fantastical shapes in Aden’s exquisite topiary now appear orgiastic, spreading wide, thrusting upward, pouting and arching. The bench is damp beneath me and Aden’s trousers look as though they’re about to lose the battle for containment. He breathes like there’s a windstorm in his lungs, and with each snip, he squirms and shifts.

Read the whole story in Obsessed!



Order Obsessed from:

Amazon

Kindle edition (available August 15th)

Barnes & Noble

Powells

IndieBound (search for your local indie bookstore)

Cleis Press

Obsessed excerpt: "Spellbound" by Garnell Wallace

I'm thrilled to share the news that Obsessed: Erotic Romance for Women is officially out, and is shipping from Amazon and Cleis Press. More links and ebook coming on August 1st. For now, in honor of the first Amazon.com review, which I've posted below, here is an excerpt from "Spellbound" by Garnell Wallace, an author I'm publishing for the first (but hopefully not last) time. More excerpts are coming soon.



Spellbound
Garnell Wallace

My name is Kia Monet and my family thinks that I’m under a voodoo spell. It is the only way for my Haitian-born parents to explain why I’m wasting my life in the slums of Port-au-Prince with a low-budget filmmaker instead of being a trust-fund trophy wife in California.

If I was under a spell, it was Jonah’s smile, Jonah’s voice reciting French poetry in the dark during a respite from his magnificent cock. His cock is black magic; an evil one-eyed sorcerer, powerful enough to turn me into a quivering mass of nerves with just one twitch. I like to sleep with it buried deep inside me, its comforting pliability lulling me into the blissfulness of sleep. Even his long, tapered fingers buried deep in my pussy can bring on multiple experiences of what we French call la petite mort, or the little death, when you are so inflamed with passion at the moment of surrender it feels like you are about to surrender your soul as well. I’ve died a thousand times in Jonah’s arms in the time we’ve been together. With each rebirth, I feel more alive, more like the person I am meant to be. I am bewitched and have no desire to be cured.

Here's the Table of Contents again:

Silent Treatment Donna George Storey
One Night in Paris Kayla Perrin
Concubine Portia Da Costa
Love and Demotion Logan Belle
Mephisto Waltz Justine Elyot
Then Emerald
It’s Gotta Be Fate Jennifer Peters
Hooked Ariel Graham
Aftershocks Bella Andre
Secret Places Adele Haze
Loser Charlotte Stein
Here In Between Kristina Wright
Spellbound by Garnell Wallace
Raven’s Flight Andrea Dale
Raindrops and Rooftops Elizabeth Coldwell
Topiary K. D. Grace
I Want to Hold Your Hand Rachel Kramer Bussel
Storm Surge Teresa Noelle Roberts
Undercover Kink Louisa Harte

Do join us at the book party on August 25th in NYC! Here's the Facebook invitation if you want to spread the word.

August 25, 7-9 pm, FREE
JOINT BOOK PARTY FOR OBSESSED and THE LOST
Join editor Rachel Kramer Bussel and Obsessed contributors Logan Belle and Jennifer Peters, along with The Lost author Caridad Piñeiro, and Tied Up Events for a fabulous book party celebrating paranormal romance The Lost and Obsessed: Erotic Romance for Women! Free cupcakes, snacks, giveaways and more! Free goodie bags from The Pleasure Chest!
Fontana’s, 105 Eldridge Street, NYC
obsessederoticromance.com
caridad.com
tiedupevents.com
The Pleasure Chest

Want a postcard? (US only) Email obsessedantho at gmail.com with "Postcard" in the subject and your mailing address in the body.

And here's that Amazon review by Ilovebooks - thank you for those who signed up to review it who already have your copies! Stay tuned for Women in Lust in the fall.

What does it mean to be sexually obsessed? That's the question Rachel Kramer Bussel and her contributors aim to answer in this latest Cleis Press erotic anthology. The collection features 18 stories by such well-known erotic names like Donna George Storey, Kristina Wright and Teresa Noelle Roberts. Caridad Pinero, author of the Calling series, touches on some of the many meanings of obsession in her foreword.

My favorite stories include "Mephisto Waltz" by Justine Elyot, an author who works with the Black Lace erotic publishing company. It concerns a piano teacher and his student. I don't know, I just think there is something intrinsically hot about someone instructing you in the ways of love. The narrator also has an appealing voice in this story--an entirely believable virgin who is unsure of herself in music and love. And the story is erotic without being overly raunchy, which is a difficult trick to pull off. I liked this story in addition because it was about real characters, who you could envision in any scenario, not only an erotic one. I'd like to see a whole novel dedicated to these two characters.

Then there is "Here in Between" by Kristina Wright. This is another story with real-life characters. A woman gets a flat tire and finds herself flat on her back with a handsome stranger. The dialogue here is fantastic, and the ending gives one hope that these strangers will one day become more to each other than just ships passing in the night.

Spellbound by Garnell Wallace just gets points for having the best first sentence I think I've ever read in a short story: "My name is Kia Monet and my family thinks that I'm under a voodoo spell." After reading this story, you may want to book a flight to Haiti. Garnell Wallace's strength is her knack for describing even the smallest erotic detail.

Other highlights include "Raindrops and Rooftops" by Elizabeth Coldwell and Rachel Kramer Bussel's own contribution "I Want to Hold Your Hand." What happens when a partner loses weight and you liked him better thin? Or when you go to a movie for reasons other than what's playing on screen? Some pretty sexy stuff, that's what.

Overall, a nice collection of stories to keep you even hotter than usual this summer...

"The Weight" to be published in Best Bondage Erotica 2012

Lately I am trying to be lighter, physically and mentally. I'm working on getting to my goal weight and fitting (better) into this slinky tight tan dress I bought that's basically the same dress I have in gray but is tighter for whatever reason. Mentally, well, it's tough. Yesterday was a day of such highs and lows. I waved like a fool on the Staten Island Ferry looking for my friend, watched two little kids instantly bond over drawing, laughed over nothing with friends old and new, and went to my friend Cheryl's wake. I was okay...as long as I didn't walk by the big box with my friend's body inside it. I could admire the gigantic, bigger-than-I've-ever-seen flower displays. I even took a prayer card even though my thoughts on prayer are a bit muddled.

I'm working on purging both belongings and negative, unhelpful thoughts, along with the extra pounds, and talking to my friends and seeing how they each deal with their grief was telling. I don't think there's a right way or wrong way, and I teeter between being so outraged for Cheryl, that her life was cut short, and recognizing that my outage isn't going to bring her back. I can't feel light about her death, in any sense of the word, but I am honored to have known her and heartened to keep on seeing such an outpouring of support and love for her.

I will probably be working on this lightening that my whole life. So the fact that I wrote this story is both interesting and fitting. I'd say curious but to me it represents the way I think of BDSM when it works perfectly, which is like this yin and yang, people who have different urges, but urges that contrast perfectly in their extremity. Or what I think of as extremity; obviously that word means different things to different people. There are definitely things I've done I never thought I'd do and things I have and do think about that I'm not sure I'll ever do, and a lot of that comes out in fiction. "Foot and Mouth" you'll have to wait until next year for, but "The Weight" is going to be in Best Bondage Erotica 2012 and the part that is curious but also complimentary is that desire for weight on someone else, for the force of a body as a weapon.

I, like my protagonist, am much more partial to the human body as a tool than I am anything else when it comes to kinky play, and by "body" I mean both body parts but even more so the mind. In this excerpt you'll see that it's both this character, Damian, the narrator is so attuned to, but also the phrase his knee, the look on his face, his eyes. It's all of those body parts working in concert with both her and all that has come before. For me it's the kind of story I long to write, and am proud of, but couldn't do every day, just like I couldn't do anything like that every day. It's part of, maybe, my recovery process, my getting over someone who is seemingly ubiquitous, inescapable. Or maybe it's something else I'm not even aware of. But I'm looking forward to sharing this story with the world. It will close out my book, which should be in stores by Thanksgiving. I'm working on more food stories, lighter ones, ones that dance around their kinks, rather than dropping them on the reader so, well, heavily. I'm writing a story named after a Cyndi Lauper song now. But I also think that "lighter" is relative. We all have light and darkness inside us and for me lightness is a goal not at the expense of mental or emotional weight, but as a coping mechanism. Anyway, here is an excerpt from "The Weight." More bondage erotica excerpts closer to pub date! Much of the book, and my introduction explores this, features women tying up men, because that was what the majority of the submissions included, so I hope you femdom types will buy it. I think there is a wonderful mix of types of bondage and motivations for it, and I hope I'll get to keep on editing more bondage erotica because it's always an interesting process.

This is fiction, for sure, but the kind of fiction I sometimes think is more truthful than any essay I write could ever be.

From "The Weight" by me:

I don’t gulp in greedy deep breaths of air; that would be too obvious. I take the smallest breaths I can, savoring them, making do with what I can get, while I can. He rises just enough to turn me over, settling down again with his knee planted firmly against my pussy, so firmly it hurts a little. He’s not trying to make me wet, or make me like it. I know that much by now. He’s trying to simply tell me that even his knee owns me, that even his knee can make me do anything he demands.

It’s the look on his face that makes me shudder as surely as if someone zapped me. I can breathe a little now, but I can’t move, not really. He has me pinned, strapped in as surely as the fanciest of handcuffs. The shudder rises from my red-painted toenails on up. I tremble against him where his knee is greeting me, and he shifts so the pressure lands at my wrists, where he’s raised them above my head. At any moment he might shift both wrists into one meaty palm and tickle me, threatening my bladder, threatening my control.

I’m tempted to bite my lip, but I don’t. He’d only force them apart, force my mouth, like the rest of me, open, shove something, probably his fingers, many of them, inside. I’m not sure if I miss his weight yet, because I love how strong he is, how his strength brought to bear full bore demands an equal showing of strength from me. I look up at him, not sure which Damian I will see. Sometimes his hazel eyes are dark and stormy, and he’ll lean down and bite my lip, digging his teeth in, clamping down until I mewl to get away, and then giving me a few extra seconds of pain before rising and spitting into my mouth. Sometimes he’ll raise his hand so suddenly I hardly have time to be aware of what’s about to happen, then strike my cheek so hard my ears ring. Sometimes he shackles my arms above my head, to the cuffs secured to the headboard, and pinches my nose and mouth shut, holding them tighter and tighter until I start to truly thrash, and then he’ll let go of one hand, keeping the other in place. Like I said, I’m not into all the accoutrements of bondage, but I gladly give him my arms, and savor the tightness of a cuff or the sweetly deceptive smoothness of a silk scarf, even though he is my favorite sex toy of all.

Gay male erotica story "Sexathon" out now in Afternoon Pleasures anthology

My short story "Sexathon" is in the new anthology Afternoon Pleasures: Gay Erotica for Couples edited by Shane Allison. I don't have my copies yet, but I can share a little snippet of my story. Here's the first three paragraphs - if you like it, do check out the book!

I used to work the door at a lesbian sex party that was held in what was usually a gay male sex club, and that setting inspired this story, which is admittedly among my wackier ones, but I also think I was trying to get at the way a couple could feel kinship by fucking other people, by opening their relationship but sharing it. That’s also a theme I’m pursuing in another gay male erotica story I’m working on.

I was working on it right after I got dumped last May, right when I was going to visit my mom's house for the first time. Basically, a stressful time, but I was trying to capture something with the story. No clue if I succeeded, you can be the judge of that, but I'm always proud to have a new story published, all the more so when it's a gay male story. Now I have to get some of that writing mojo I've lost back and I'll be myself again.



Sexathon
by Rachel Kramer Bussel

When Doug told me he wanted to enter the sexathon at our local sex club, at first, I looked at him like he was crazy. We’ve been together for ten years, and in many ways it seems like a lifetime. I’m thirty-five and he’s twenty-nine and most of our friends look to us as a model couple, and maybe we are. I often joke that we’re like any old married couple--we tied the knot four years ago, finally--with each of us having our own spot on the couch, our pillow, our mug; in short, our places within our home. Yet we both welcome those niceties, those symbols that go far beyond the solid gold wedding rings we exchanged during the ceremony. And we’d been monogamous, save for a few random threesomes we’d taken part in, which had been hot--don’t get me wrong--but in general we were one-man men, focused on building our lives together, eager to share everything from sex to breakfast to road trips. The adventures we’d shared up until then, including traveling everywhere from Belize to Alaska, as well as being godparents to our friends’ son Peter, had only brought us closer together. We had our spats, sure, but I was certain that without Doug my life would be far worse off than the one we shared.

Doug explained that the club was having a fundraiser, but instead of a marathon or walkathon, it was a sexathon. You got points for everything from deep-throating a dildo to how far your ejaculation landed when you jerked off to how many partners you hooked up with, and people were suppoed to pledge a dollar or more for every point you earned. Condoms would be mandatory. When he told me about the points and prizes—a trip to Paris, a big-screen plasma TV—I knew there was no talking him out of it. The thing about my man, though you’d never know it unless you were in a specifically sporting situation with him, is that he’s incredibly competitive. Whether it’s doing crossword puzzles, guessing the answers on Jeopardy, playing bingo at our gay community center or even taking part in pickup softball, he plays to win.

“What about me?” I asked. I’m not insecure, but even the most solid long-term relationship can hit its rough spots. Was he having a midlife crisis? Did he regret not having more partners in his younger years? We’d discussed this, and not just when we first got together. Back then, we’d been youthful and idealistic, and while we were definitely falling in love with each other in those days, we were also in love with the idea of love. I thought the men who picked up a different trick every night were fools. Who’d want a new cock when you could have a man like Doug: tall, strapping, husky, hairy; who could be by turns savage (teeth and nails clawing at me), and tender (taking care of me in countless ways)? Not me. And those kisses! The kind that went on forever, that left me breathless, that seemed to come out of nowhere and for no reason--he’d stop me in the middle of a sentence just for the pleasure of sticking his tongue down my throat.

Publisher description:

Shane Allison presents bedtime reading for gay couples. Filled with romance, passion and lust, Afternoon Pleasures offers irresistible erotic fun while celebrating the coming together of souls as well as bodies. Two traveling husbears meet a willing twink in Jeff Mann's "One Afternoon in the Bible Belt." A sneaky environmentalist gets sandwiched between hedonistic mountain men in Bob Vickery's "Loggers." Two partners share a leisurely Sunday morning with scintillating surprises in Hank Edwards's "Breakfast in Bed." Rob Rosen's "Skyrockets in Flight" is particularly delicious with naughty bits in every line.

With contributed stories by Bob Vickery, Jonathan Asche, Pepper Espinoza, Jeff Mann, Gregory L. Norris, Jay Rogers, R.J. Bradshaw, Rob Rosen, Hank Edwards, Kyle Lukoff, Heidi Champa, Logan Zachary, D. Fostalove, Stephen Osborne, Nathan Burgoine, Rachel Kramer Bussel, and Shane Allison.

Violet Blue calls my "Espionage" "one of the most powerful stories I've ever read

Two very cool bits of news. First, editor Violet Blue has this to say about my second person story "Espionage" that she included in Best Women's Erotica 2011 (Cleis Press):

Not only famous in erotic writing, Rachel Kramer Bussel is an online media sensation. In one of the most powerful stories I’ve ever read, “Espionage” seems to pull from a very deep place to create a story I’ve returned to more than once. Here, we are the girl at the party who’s been having a torrid affair with the man of the house, seeing his wife for the first time as guests float in and out and finally mustering up the force to do something that dares him to be ours, even if just for that one intense moment that rips our fishnets.

Second is that I don't have my author copies yet, but I read that for free with my free sample I downloaded from the Kindle edition. Many Cleis Press anthologies, including my Peep Show, Bottoms Up, Fast Girls, Orgasmic, Smooth, Passion, Please, Sir, Please, Ma'am and Spanked (probably others too) now allow you to preview the book, reading the introdution and one story, sometimes part of a second. So check it out and read her sexy, ice cream-meltingly sweet and dripping and luscious introduction.



You can also order the paperback from Amazon or directly from Cleis Press.

Here's the start of my story "Espionage:"

You tuck your new pink and black coat, the one purchased earlier in the day just for this special evening, around your body, pull it tight like it’s cold out, except you’re indoors and the fire is roaring. You are cold, but it’s the kind of cold that can’t be heated by rubbing two sticks together or turning up the thermostat, the kind of cold that can only be vanquished once your heart catches up. Your heart is cautiously icy, watching and waiting; it isn’t safe to let it melt just yet.

Instead, you look—you could say spy, except you have an invitation, an elaborate listing of reasons this will be the party to end all parties, delivered right to your inbox. You’ve been promised bubble baths, servants, champagne, s’mores, drugs, debauchery. Those things intrigue you, sure, since you’re used to zoning out in front of the tv, quiet dinner parties, wholesome events like comedy shows and trivia nights, but you’d have shown up for gin rummy if it were held right here, in these rooms that hold a life that will never be yours, a life you’ve been given glimpses of but never truly peeked inside. Even better than any promise of party pampering, you’ve been granted access to this sacred space, this love shack you’ve up til now only imagined vividly. This is your chance to enter the inner sanctum, and you cling to it in the same way you hold your coat, and your heart—close. Still, despite the tacit permission, you feel like a spy, an Anaïs Nin emissary, as you walk through the rooms that make up their home, their urban house of love and lust and lasciviousness, a house you will never inhabit no matter how many times you fuck the master of it.

And while I don't necessarily "set out" to write bisexual protagonists, bisexuality weaves its way into many of my stories. In part, it's because I'm bi, and in part, it's because in erotica it adds all sorts of nuances and intrigues—you can definitely have those without it, but I like mixing things up.

You feel his eyes follow you around the room, feel his palms sweat as you tilt your head back and let the journalist whose byline you’ve read countless times tilt your head against her breast and slide her red lipstick over your lips, painting them as if she were making love to you. In a way, maybe she is, her fingers crushing your jaw, the not-quite-liquid, not-quite-solid of the waxy ruby pressing hard against your hips, hard the way he used to crush them, hard the way you like it.

She laughs an almost evil laugh that makes you wonder what else she could do with the lipstick, and feel a frisson of static pass from her small, bony hands into your cheeks when she pinches them, inspecting her work. You wonder, of course, if he’s fucked her, even though it shouldn’t really matter. Lots of things that shouldn’t matter take up space in your mind, fragments of jealousy on permanent repeat. You pucker up just to give your lips something to do, someone to make contact with who is not him. Her tongue traces the red, teases, darts but doesn’t claim you as her wicked laugh did. You let her know, with your lips, that she could have you, but she simply pulls back and smiles, her nails digging into your upper arm. Suddenly you want to pull her bleached blonde hair, tug hard until she can’t even make a sound, the feral domme inside of you wicking at your insides, aching to be let out for a moment. Instead you just smile wide and she slinks away to find another victim.

After, you think the lipstick will be smeared—that’s only right, isn’t it, after someone’s just fucked you with a tube from Mac?—but instead, it’s perfect. Redder than red, redder than you’d ever dare in your daily life. Fancy that. They should put that in an ad campaign. You go back to your spying-cum-ogling, your lips now signaling that you are the hussy you know yourself to be, the other woman come seeking vengeance, seeking something you will never have because it belongs to someone else.

Read the whole story in Best Women's Erotica 2011.