Do Not Disturb - erotic fiction by Cleis Press Inc. - review by Jenny Swallows

The hotel bar was exactly what I expected, the usual gaggle of businessmen, brokers and touristy types, their general uniformity broken only by the occasional girl who might have been a hooker, but was as likely somebody’s mistress, tarted up for a night of naughty passion with some guy she only suspected might be married. I ordered a drink and a salad and took a seat by the window, wondering what a lone woman in a strange city was supposed to do when she didn’t know a soul.

I pulled out my book, and was glad that the front cover didn’t give too much away, at least to anyone passing by. Editor Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Do Not Disturb doesn’t hide its light beneath a bushel, the subtitle “Hotel Sex Stories,” is clear enough if you look. But bare legs on a bed could be anything these days, and when I opened the book, my fingers covered the words. I know, because I checked.

Hotel erotica is a peculiar beast. Bussel’s introduction sets the stage, telling us all the options that could be open, and hinting at a few that will be taking place. Amanda Earl’s breathtaking “Welcome To The Aphrodisiac Hotel” and Stan Kent’s “From Russia With Lust,” neither going in expected directions, and concentrating more on the voyeur than the vice girl in us all; Earl’s heroine watching and willing a couple to hook up; Kent standing at his window, masturbating while he watches another couple fuck. Because that’s what hotels are really all about, and that’s why I bought this book with me. When in Rome....

Author Tess Danesi at “The Royalton.” A high class call girl on her latest assignation. I gazed across at the woman who had just entered the bar, and was standing in the doorway, her eyes uncertainly searching the room. She is dressed in the same way that Danesi writes, not outwardly of course because it’s too public for that, But “lace topped thigh highs and delicate lacy undergarments” would suit her to a tee and maybe she catches the light in my eyes, or maybe she just doesn’t want to share any of the other half vacant tables. A few lonely-looking salesman types, a couple with a rambunctious baby... she looks around and makes her choice.

“Do you mind if I join you?”

I shook my head. “Please….”

She was stunning. Taller than me, with reddish hair that cascaded to her shoulders, perfect features, perfect figure. Her top was tight enough to show off the swell of her breasts, her pants framed legs that went on forever. I wanted her more than I had ever wanted any other woman; wanted her like the two women in the book wanted one another, Elizabeth and Maxie in a cheap hotel, one newly married and convinced she is frigid, one older and gay with a psych degree. “Heart Shaped Holes” by Madlyn March, I wondered if my companion had one of those? And what it would take to fill it?

Her name was Lisa. We talked, we laughed. We took a walk, we picked up some wine, then we took the party up to her room. And with my heart in my mouth, I kissed her, feeling like... my mind flicked through the book. The housewife on the sequestered jury showing off her sex toys to a fellow captive? Not her. Teresa fantasizing tropical grottoes in a snow-swept Massachusetts motel room? Not her, either.

I closed my eyes and wrote my own story, Jenny in a hotel bar being swept to paradise by a girl she’d never met and maybe that was the most exciting part of it all. In all the stories I’d read and grown wet to, there's always that one point where you just know that something’s going to happen. A word, a gesture, a glance, a something. Like in “Tightly Tucked,” when the cleaner comes along and catches Elian alone with a boner. You just know she’s going to want it, even before you know that he wants her.

And now the book was forgotten, my mind drained of its contents because it was drained of everything. The threesome that got me so hot on the plane, and the short trip to Memphis that sucked me so deeply into author Gwen Masters’ plot that I actually had to put the book down and remind myself that I was only going to Dallas. All the stories were forgotten because I was living them now, and who cares about plot when you reach the denouement? “My body felt like liquid fire,” Masters declared and that’s not a feeling you get every day. “I exploded... with a cascade of color behind my eyelids.” Yes! That’s it exactly.

Ex-act-ly.