Maneater

By Anavey Andes

How do you go from dreaming about becoming a nun to devouring three young men in one weekend? How do you go from living behind the Iron Curtain, in a country hermetically sealed from the world, to making love on four continents?

Maneater is a coming-of-age story of one woman who decides to live life on her own terms. Her journey will take you through dilemmas, struggles, and heartache, but it will also walk you through exotic places, such as the Phra Nang cave in Thailand, filled with carved dildos, and the golden palaces, floating markets, and the red-light district of Bangkok. You will take in the view from the shadow of the Christ the Savior statue in Rio de Janeiro. You will feel the heat of New Orleans and walk into a quaint wedding chapel in Lake Tahoe. Her stories will take you back in time to an island at the tip of the Great Lakes, where time stood still, and it will take you on a road trip across Transylvania, right up to Dracula's Castle.

You will walk down the street with Romanian revolutionaries and with the leather-clad men at the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco. You will dance at the Carnival in Rio, and you will join in on the water fight at the Songkran festival in Bangkok.

You'll also meet the men she encountered along the way: the blond street musician from Vienna; the dimpled bellman from San Francisco; the blue-eyed surfer from Texas; the handsome, tuxedoed bouncer, off spring of Afghani warriors; the green-eyed salsa dancer from San Salvador; and many, many more. And you will fall in love with Moon, her young prince, whose sexual coming-of-age begins where her journey ends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503595910

Anavey Andes

Anavey Andes was born in Romania, where she worked as a freelance writer and magazine correspondent. She moved to the United States at the age of twenty-seven, where she worked as a cocktail server, English teacher, independent-living-skills instructor, call center manager, corporate trainer, and human resource director. She has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in business administration. She currently lives in California. This is her first novel.

Book preview

ADRENALINE JUNKIE

L IFE ISN’T ALWAYS all that fascinating. That’s why we love movies. In the movies, the characters always have the perfect comeback (sure, some screen writer thought about that fabulous line long and hard). In the movies, there’s always an interesting story line and good looking people go through a lifetime’s worth of great loves, tragedies, adventures and victories in 95 minutes, whereas it takes us mere mortals years to finally fall in love or have our fifteen minutes of fame, or even get into a minor brawl or just catch a fish big enough to brag about.

I am an adrenaline junkie. Having a quiet everyday life has never been enough. I was thirteen, sitting on the porch of a little house in Eastern Europe, on the outskirts of town, on a warm summer night, listening to the whistle of a nearby train and dreaming about being far, far away from there. I wanted my life to be an action movie. I wanted to be well known and famous, to be exciting and notorious and outrageous. I look back now, and my life so far looks like the scattered pieces of a beautiful puzzle. I see great loves, great passions, unforgettable adventures, precious friendships.

It started with me getting on that train at 14, having been sent to boarding school. The lights and sounds of the city at night were a fascinating adventure. I ran away from boarding school. They sent me back. And I learned to cope. I made friends who are still like brothers and sisters to me. I fell in love with that city. I fell in love with a boy. I wrote poems and sang songs. Four years later, a bloody revolution swept over my home town. Freedom came to that Communist country. But high school also ended and my sweet freedom was over. I got engaged. I panicked. I broke up the engagement. And after that, life became a blur of constant search for adrenaline.

Alone in Vienna, listening to street musicians wearing tuxedos and playing Mozart. Moving to the USA. Waiting tables and meeting a musician who played for me, at closing time, every weekend, As Time Goes By on the saxophone. Up in the air again. Falling in love with San Francisco and moving there on a whim. Meeting celebrities, smiling for the cameras, ending up on the front page of the newspaper on the first day of the Millenium, wearing a red satin gown and gold-feathered hat. Making more lifelong friends. Skydiving over California. Rock climbing in Thailand. Naked at night in the lagoon on Railay Beach, by the Princess Cove. Bangkok and golden palaces. Eloping and getting married at midnight at a little chapel in Lake Tahoe. Honeymoon in Rio. Carnival. New Orleans heat. Vegas lights.

Whirlwind breakups. Moving on and moving down the coast. Running from the wrong men. Running from the fear that Dad will drink himself to death. And he did.

When I got pregnant and realized I might have to stay put for a while, I panicked. I was waking up in cold sweat, with that suffocating feeling. I was leaving the house at midnight and running down the street. Just running. Running from certainty and permanence. Running from the threat of that boring, steady, predictable life.

I look back and there are not really 43 years behind me but 95 minutes of an action-packed movie. Some days are quiet and I feel my veins pulsing. It takes a huge effort to just sit and bear the silence. There is a pair of roller skates in the corner. These skates have traveled the world with me. They’ve flown over bridges in Stockholm and rode the hills in San Francisco. I put them on, and I’m Captain America and G.I. Jane and Xena the Warrior Princess. My life is an action movie again, adrenaline pulsing in my veins as I’m running the red light.

CUPID’S BOW

I T WAS 2 am, my arms were handcuffed behind my back, I had the fresh trace of a five fingers on my bottom and I was panting. He was panting too but held his breath as he picked up his cell phone. Sorry, I have to take this, my mom is calling, he said politely. He walked out onto the hallway and I heard him say: Yes, Mom, I did my chores. No, Mom, I told you I’m having a sleepover at Mike’s house today. He got off the phone, he un-cuffed me and kissed the small of my back.

I called him Moon and he was California-born but of Spanish and Sri Lankan ancestry; he had the chiseled, soft and noble features of some prince from an exotic island. When he wasn’t naked, he always wore black. He was living with his parents; he was a college student by day, pizza delivery boy by evening, singer in a metal band by night. 20 years of age, gorgeous, lean, with honey brown skin, shiny black hair, alabaster teeth and a perfect Cupid’s bow above his lip. I found the most attractive part of the human body to be that shapely dent above the lips called Cupid’s bow. But on his body, everything was perfect. After all, he was 23 years younger than me. How could he not be perfect?

By this time in my life, men decades younger than me had become my favorite weekend treat. It was mostly them finding me on some dating site but there were so many, begging for their cougar-experience, that I could cherry-pick the most beautiful ones. I wanted them fresh-faced, handsome, smart, polite and wild… like a properly raised ‘good son’ who gets his hands on a porn magazine and goes to town with it – this was how I described my ideal boy toy to Moon when he contacted me online with the question What do I have to do to appeal to older women ?

Moon had sex with only two young girls prior to him talking his way into my bed, yet he was the most versatile and talented lover I have met in my adventurous 43 years. With his velvet skin, shapely lips, oval face and high cheekbones, he was perfectly androgynous, looking like a beautiful transvestite from Southeast Asia. His shoulders were widening into manhood and I could just picture the lady killer he was to become in the next few years. He was one of six new lovers I had devoured that month and he was to become the only one I wanted for months to come. He was a night owl and so was I. He used to arrive around midnight every Saturday. I had to wait for my mom to fall asleep so I can sneak out, he explained. And that worked well, because I had to wait for my two little sons to fall asleep so I can sneak him in.

I had been a man-eater since I first discovered my power to attract young males within minutes. However, for the first decade and a half of my life, before I learned how to harness that power, I was prey, not hunter….but more on that later. By the time I entered the fourth decade of my life, I was a typical cougar, tall, blonde, fit and ready to pounce. However, by my mid-twenties, I was already a quick and lethal man- hunter.

At the break of dawn, as Moon fell into a deep sleep, I watched the sun rise and reminisced back to a day, sixteen years prior when I had won a summer scholarship to attend the University of Vienna. It was my first time alone in a foreign country. On my last day there, I walked the romantic cobblestone streets of that lovely city when I spotted a tall, blond, young street musician. He had his guitar propped up against his bike, ready to pack up and go home. He was squatting down and I lowered myself to his level so I can see his face which was hidden under the rim of a cowboy hat. He lifted his gaze and I noticed his Cupid’s bow. I asked him to play one last song for me. It was early fall, dusk fell slowly and mildly, and Vienna smelled like honeysuckle, fresh pastry and dust. The blond boy asked me to go for a walk with him. My German was good enough to hold a conversation but he was happy to practice his English so we chatted the night away in college-level English. We were walking down Mariahilfer Strasse, a street of the wealthy with neatly lined up penthouses and their balconies. This handsome youngster motioned toward one of the sprawling balconies above us, inviting me to his place for a coffee. You live here ?!, I couldn’t hide my surprise. This street musician turned out to be the son of one of the wealthiest men in Vienna. We watched a magnificent moon rise above this romantic city while sitting on that balcony among carved gargoyles and stone lions. The penthouse had 15 rooms. I only entered one- his bedroom - devoured this young man and left, never to see him again. I was 26 years old and a newlywed, fresh off of a sexless honeymoon in Palma de Mallorca. My husband was a sweet and loving man, with no desire to get crazy between the sheets. I left him 2 years later but we remained close friends for years afterward. I also left the earrings I wore at my wedding on that handsome stranger’s nightstand on Mariahilfer Strasse.

Men, young and beautiful men with a Cupid’s bow were easy to find and easy to get even before the dawn of the Internet. But once technology permeated everyday life and everyone had a cell phone, finding people to have sex with became no more complicated than online shopping. Easier, in fact, due to no credit card charges and an open-ended return policy. It was man-eater heaven. I discovered this unending source of fresh prey during the previous summer, after I found out that my long term lover, 17 years younger than me, left some girl pregnant. With a baby on the way, he was no longer an easily available boy toy. So I went on a virtual hunt.

My first online lover found me on a Sunday in September, shortly after I joined the online community of daters. He only saw a few tame photographs of me on the dating site. That day I decided to get playful and tweak my dating profile to say that I was a Catholic nun, looking for someone to rock my world. It was all in good humor and men took it as such. I did not reply to any of the messages until late afternoon. Then one message came through….his screen name was Surfer Boy. That meant …muscles, youth and a daredevil attitude. Right up my alley. I looked at the message. It said: I’ll rock your world, just tell me when and where.

He lived four cities down the freeway. I was heading to the gym and wasn’t going out of my way for a date so I suggested he meet me at my gym for a dip in the Jacuzzi. He showed up in a tank top, swim trunks, baseball cap. He was either calm or aloof – I couldn’t figure it out. He barely spoke. We ended up at my apartment, lounging by the pool. I tried to make small talk …he wasn’t eager to share. But then he took off his tank top and baseball cap and I realized that I had just caught a goldfish; he was gorgeous: long eyelashes, mischievous green eyes, a lovely Cupid’s bow above his lip, the wide shoulders and strong thighs of a swimmer. He looked way younger than his 28 years.

I invited him into the pool and started playing mermaid, playfully chasing him and dunking him under water. He let me play around a bit then nonchalantly said: Are you ready to go back to your place? Sure. I’ll see you in the shower, I motioned towards my poolside apartment.

Twenty minutes after we said hi, this handsome stranger was in my shower and shortly thereafter, his face was between my legs. Before he left, he asked are we doing this again, or what?! So we did that again and again for the next 8 weekends: I’d get his favorite beer, some fast food, a movie. He’d bring his surf board, smoke weed, watch a movie and let me ride him. Sometimes he’d spend the night and catch the morning surf in my seaside California town, other times he’d leave after the movie. We had nothing to talk about, but the movies filled in the silence and gave him time to recover from my attacks.

In the years to come, I made sure to remember each weekend lovers’ favorite cuisine, drink of choice, sexual kinks and fantasies. Surfer Boy’s was being taken advantage of in his sleep and I gladly obliged, four times a night.

But there had been a time when I myself was under attack…and wasn’t ready for it. My sexuality hadn’t always been about the blessing of being able to reach multiple orgasms and the fun of playing out sexual fantasies. Once upon a time sex was a mystery, a sin and a scary, scary thing.

REBEL WIVES DANCING BY THE FIRE

M Y STORY BEGAN among the buildings with chipped paint and crumbling walls of the once majestic Austro-Hungarian architecture of my home town, Timisoara, on the Western part of Romania, back in the seventies.

If my beloved grandmother, my mother’s mom, were still alive, the first story she’d tell you about me would be the story of her and I sitting in a solemn Roman Catholic Church during a Baptism ceremony. In the echo of the church one could only hear the murmur of the robed priest blessing the newborn child who was wrapped up in a lettuce-looking white satin contraption that was covering her in layers and layers of useless fabric. I wondered about how the baby might feel and I shuddered at the thought of being wrapped up like that. Even then, at the age of four, I preferred to be naked.

To keep me quiet during the ceremony, Grandma offered to tell me the story of how the stork dropped that baby through the chimney, straight into her parents’ arms. Outraged by her lack of knowledge in such worldly matters, I loudly corrected her: The stork doesn’t carry no baby. The mom and the dad go to bed and MAKE the baby. The echo carried my words through the church, making the people attending the ceremony look back at us and chuckle. My sweet, demure grandma wanted to sink into the church floor.

That was the first sign of my rebellion against those stupid fairy tales. But boy, did I love fantasy. I wanted the truth and nothing but the truth, only to be able to wrap it in a magic cloak of