Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 10 includes my Adam and Eve retelling with a pro-nonprocreative-sex agenda (and a lot of vivid nature metaphors), “With Wand’ring Steps and Slow,” along with 20 other stories. Publisher’s Weekly says “[Editor Rachel Kramer] Bussel never fails to bring together a diverse and titillating collection of bite-size erotica, and this is no exception. Though not every piece will work for every reader, there’s something here to please any erotica fan.”
“With Wan’dring Steps and Slow” in Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Vol 10
He folded it aside, out of the flames’ reach, and joined her close to them. The apron of woven vines around his waist shifted. She looked at it, around it, at what she knew she shouldn’t look at but wanted to see.
Nakedness…it did not feel like a name he had made, though he was the first one to say it. You shouldn’t see me like this, he told her after eating the fruit she shared. She had seen him naked before they learned what it was. But now they could no longer trust nakedness. Like they could no longer trust the fruits of the trees. The Voice that drove them from the Garden had issued, among its final commands, a warning against something called poison. No knowledge grew from the branches outside the Garden, but other fruit, it seemed, could be just as bad. Desire had somehow turned dangerous.
She closed her eyes and felt the fire’s warmth on her face. Muscles jumped in her calves after the long day of walking. Tired and thirty, she longed for the fruits of home. Safe ones they could bake to sweet mush, or tubers she could dig and roast tender. But not that one, honeyed-bitter, beautiful, cloying in her memory. Like the heavy taste in her mouth that formed as, walking away from the Garden, she had performed the action she and the man decided to call weeping.
Tired of new names, new experiences, she opened her eyes again to look up on the most familiar part of the world.