I was down on all fours facing the glory hole. No, I was not in some stinky men’s restroom. I’m way too civilized for that. I was on my hands and knees in an empty refrigerator box. Let me explain. I had stayed home from my law office to take delivery of the new refrigerator – a big stainless steel thing with French doors. After the delivery guy installed it, he started to cart away the heavy-duty cardboard shipping box w...

If I hadn’t gotten wet, things never would have gone farther than my son getting hard. But I got so very wet. Reggie was eighteen, and his aunt and I were driving him to his first semester in college. Becka’s Grand Caravan was packed to the gills. We were hauling Reggie’s stuff for his dorm room, plus boxes of my sister’s ceramics that she was delivering to an art gallery in the same college town. Reggie’s double bass vio...

I was enjoying the food portion of the World Music and Food Festival at my university. For lunch, I ate spicy Filipino pork barbecue; it was delicious, but not especially exotic. I’m adventurous, so for dinner, I tried a Southern Thai dish called gaeng tai pla that combines kaffir leaves – whatever they are – with fermented fish guts and other strange flavors. It was so fiery hot I broke into a sweat; it made calling the...

“Where were you last night?” I rolled onto my side and a headache thunder-clapped through my skull. A nude woman occupied with me a bed so broad it seemed a landscape of satin sheets. “Where did you go last night?” she asked again. Whoever she was, she was royalty. A holo-tattoo of the Imperial Dragon coiled around the pupil of her left eye, shimmering iridescently. A princess? A queen? By all the gods and goddesses! Mayb...

Honestly, I think the whole lusty affair began the moment – the very first instant – “Claire” entered my life. Let’s call me “Tom.” I’m going to tell you how my stepsister and I went too far. Claire is only four days older than me and we were both high school seniors when her dad began visiting our apartment, courting my mom. When things between them got serious, he began bringing Claire along on family dinners and trips...

“May I buy you a drink?” He’s good-looking. He’s my type. And he uses correct English grammar. “I’ve already had two,” I say. “That’s my limit.” “My god, I’ve just met a responsible drinker,” he says. “Well, may I buy you a ginger ale, so I can sit here and flirt with you?” I’m wearing a low-cut, scarlet silk blouse over a black leather miniskirt. My demi-bra is cupping my breasts, plumping them like pillows. His hungry e...

My mom was up on a ladder with a watering can, replacing the sugar water in the hummingbird feeders hanging from the banyan tree in our backyard. I was stabilizing the ladder from below. I was sixteen, a high school sophomore, and my mom, who had me when she was my age, was a young-looking thirty-two. She owned a successful yoga studio, and her years-long practice of yoga had molded her body into a harmony of supple curve...

I would like to claim it began in innocence, but I think I knew all along I was playing with fire. I had learned the art of hypnosis from a colleague. Turns out, I was really good at it, and I didn’t charge a dime. Word-of-mouth supplied me with clients, and I kept getting better at the techniques of deeply relaxing people and opening their minds to receive my hypnotic suggestions. A year into my new hobby, my sister, Car...

Tuscany is everything you hoped it would be. Rolling Mediterranean hills lined with cypress trees, acres and acres of vineyards, delightful architecture and arts, marketplaces that are a feast for the senses, cuisine to die for, and sunny, cool weather that is as yummy to your skin as the food is to your tongue. You remind yourself again that Charles, your boyfriend of two years, is bankrolling this entire vacation. That...

The giant slept on her futon mattress, his feet hanging off the end onto the bamboo floor. He’d slept all through the night while Zarafa perched on a shipping crate, studying his face and body in the moonlight for hours. He had not used the blanket to cover himself. Obviously, he felt no shame about his nudity; but then, why would he? Zarafa had never seen a more beautiful male physique; it was as if some mad scientist—a...

Zarafa Rio sprawled on her belly on a futon, her Titian red hair spilling off the top of the mattress onto a woven grass tatami mat. Sunset bathed the room in a carmine glow that rouged her skin like petals of a dusky rose. A few thousand yards from her one-room bamboo-and-thatch hut, the surf crashed against white sand that powdered the islet of Aitanu like sugar on a donut. Outside the glassless window, orange-throated...

Parkour is how I broke my neck; to be specific, missing the ledge of a wall. After a stint in the hospital, I got to go home to my own bed in my apartment. My head and neck were held perfectly still by a metal brace that literally screwed into my skull. My injury required me to lie in bed on my back without moving for a full week. After that – for six more weeks – I’d be free to walk around in the Frankensteinian contrapt...

There was no way that Candy Shaw and I were going to be lovers. She was captain of our high school’s varsity cheerleading squad and she dated the football team’s quarterback. I was president of both the chess club and the engineering club, and at eighteen, I was still a virgin. A Jewish matchmaker would have paired me with some girl in eyeglasses who plays violin and appreciates Bach, and paired Candy with… well, yeah, th...

The students around me in the lecture hall held their breath. “Feels like when they open the envelope at the Academy Awards,” someone near me said. We were attending Dr. Hightower’s graduate seminar, “Art in the Age of Velvet Tea-Gowns.” Rosy light from stained glass windows silhouetted the professor standing at the podium in her invariably perfect posture. Her auburn hair was imprisoned in a tight bun, and she wore a hig...