“Yo niggah, I’m still on the phone with my girl.”

“Just wanted to say that was unbelievable, my man.”

“No doubt.”

“No doubt, indeed.”

At this point in the conversation I tossed a fry into my mouth and wondered if I should mention what I’d seen in the kitchen. Should I bring up the fact that my longtime friend and current employer had just an hour ago been looking like a Man Date magazine cover boy? Eventually I would ask him. I would. Just not on Super Bowl Sunday.

Instead, I mumbled, “Okay, Walter, I’ll let you go.”

“Aiight. My niggah.”

“Yeah. Peace.”

I sat there, munching on my fries, remembering the pleasure and trying to forget that damn dildo. A brother came in wearing a Tennessee Titans snorkel. “Tough, my man,” I said to him.

“Naw, dog. Nothing like being in the Super Bowl. Don’t know when you’ll be back. Getting in the game is all you can ask, you know?”

He held out his knuckles. I met them with mine. Then I stood up, luxuriating in how sore my whole body was and smiling at how it got that way.

NELSON GEORGE

on “It’s Never Too Late in New York,” first published in Best American Erotica in 2005

I’ve always found New York to be a place of limitless possibility. Anytime you walk out your door, the day could take you away onto a great adventure or, perhaps, a major tragedy. That sense of the unexpected led me to write “It’s Never Too Late in New York.”

The day/night that inspired the story was supposed to be about a little weight-lifting and a couple of games of full-court basketball. With one conversation, the trajectory of my day changed, and I entered a world of escalating erotic possibility and risk.

I guess this night could have happened in another city, but it never has (though hope springs eternal). I’m not even sure it could happen in squeaky-clean twenty-first-century New York. New York City is different, and so am I. Some of this did happen. But the devil is in the details, and it’s the devilish details that turn reality into fiction and possibility into a really fun story.

The Year of
Fucking Badly

Susannah Indigo

“There is no such thing as bad sex,” I say to no one in particular.

We’re at the big oval table at the Empress Gar-dens eating dim sum to celebrate the Chinese New Year when it all begins. It’s the beginning of the Year of the Ox, a year that is supposed to bring the promise of new discoveries, or maybe fertility, I forget.

“Of course there is, Kenna,” my friend Bill replies. “Bad sex: sex so awful, so unexpected, so terrible that just telling someone about it later makes them turn away in laughter, or horror.”