Eighty Days Amber (3 page)

Initially I was more interested in the blissful taste and consistency of the bananas than in their shape, but Valya insisted I practice for evenings on end until she pronounced I was ready to do the deed.

His name was either Boris or Serguey. I still can’t recall his features in much detail, or his name. Because after Boris (or Serguey) came Serguey (or Boris) a few days later, as I quickly became a recidivist. He studied – well, they both did – at the nearby Technical Institute. I was sixteen and I guess he was just a year or two older. Valya had engineered our meeting, advertising the fact I was willing and, no doubt, pocketing a few roubles for the service. We met at the ice-cream parlour. I remember it was a day when they had additional flavours, and I chose to sample the wild strawberry alongside the classic chemical vanilla. He paid. Later, we walked hand in hand to the red wall behind my school and Valya acted as a lookout. He undid the belt circling his thin waist and pulled his frayed corduroy trousers down to his knees. His underwear was halfway between white and grey. He looked me in the eyes. He seemed even more
terrified than I was. I gingerly extended my hand down to his crotch and took hold of his penis through the cheap cotton. It felt soft, limp like a piece of cheap meat. He froze. For a moment, I suddenly didn’t know what to do next, however much Valya had rehearsed me in preparation for this moment.

Then I remembered. I got down on my knees. The ground was cold. I pushed the material aside and saw a man’s cock for the first time. The spectacle was both frightening and fascinating. It was not what I’d expected. Smaller, maybe. I took a deep breath. A musty smell reached my nostrils, the smell of man.

I now took Boris’s (or was it Serguey’s?) cock in my hand. It jerked. I could feel his pulse through it.

I opened my mouth, steadied it, and presented his cock to my lips.

I extended my tongue and first licked his stem, and then traced the vein downwards to his balls sack, something Valya had recommended should he not be hard at first sight.

Again, a tremor coursed through his penis.

Finally, I took a deep breath and placed the mushroom-like head of the cock inside my mouth.

Within seconds, before I could suck, lick, grip or anything, I felt it growing, filling me.

It was a revelation.

As my lips took a firmer hold on the quickly hardening cock, I felt its smooth solidity, its sponge-like, resilient texture.

He was moaning, even when I did nothing.

My mind was geared to overdrive, storing the experience,
noting the sensations, dissecting the conflicting emotions. It was like entering a whole new world.

But the moment barely lasted for more than a minute before Boris (or was it Serguey?) brutally withdrew from my mouth and spurted a white stream of ejaculate across my chin and the top half of my dress. He looked at me quickly, mumbled an apology and pulled up his trousers. He turned and fled, leaving me on my knees like a supplicant, my mouth still open, my mind still abuzz.

‘So how was it?’ Valya asked. ‘Exciting?’

‘I don’t know,’ I told her truthfully. ‘It was interesting, but it all happened too fast. I’d like to try again.’

‘Really?’ Valya said.

‘I don’t think I was doing it wrong,’ I added. ‘Maybe it was him.’

The next morning when I was brushing my teeth, I took a long hard look at myself in the mirror and I saw a new person. The child had gone. I finally looked into the eyes of a woman. Now, I know the transformation does not take place overnight, but it was as if a metaphorical bridge had been reached and crossed, triumphantly conquered.

I realised that I had achieved a distinct sort of power over the young man’s cock and I was the one who had enjoyed the sensation most, contrary to expectations and tradition.

The second one, who could have been Serguey, was already hard when I pulled him from his trousers, and his penis was even more beautiful, straight like a ruler, a beautiful pink hue, unmarked by veins and with heavy balls hanging low beneath it.

He even tasted different.

Over the next year or so, led by insatiable curiosity and a deep attraction to the world of sex, I would come across a
whole variety of cocks. I had no interest whatsoever in the men they belonged to. They were typically local, so often uncouth, inarticulate, clumsy, heavy drinkers for the most part, quite uninteresting to me. But they were the only sort around.

In my dreams, I imagined bad boys with more sophistication, elegant men with a sense of the wicked who would seduce me in all impunity and weave their evil ways around my deflowered innocence. I wanted the big league players, the men whose voices could make your knees tremble and electrify the senses. I knew that somewhere they existed and were waiting for me, ready to plunder and excite me. But until they came my way, I had to satisfy myself with the provincial boys who just weren’t bad enough but nonetheless gave me a taste of the forbidden.

Once the rumour spread in our limited circle that I was willing and available – at any rate for blow jobs – they came running. Few were satisfied with just that, though, and invariably sought more, but I made the rules very clear. My body would retain its mystery and any attempt to breach my limits would result in immediate dismissal from my favours. Of course they tried it on, but my will was implacable. I would suck cocks but nothing more. And, of course, none of them were ever allowed to touch me, either.

The young Russian men I had the opportunity to meet seemed cut from the same unattractive pattern, but the rumour was that foreign men were another species altogether. Nina, one of our seniors, who had once had the privilege of travelling abroad as a replacement in the corps de ballet of a minor touring company had informed us girls in the dormitory that foreign men not only had bigger cocks but also were poets.

In my own naive way, it was a quest. How mistaken I was! And to compound my unease, my willingness to entertain the boys gave me a bad reputation and I found it difficult to make friends. On one hand they were jealous of me, while on the other they feared I might one day steal their men. The minds of young women do work in mysterious ways.

But even though now I no longer remember the faces of any of my Russian bad boys, I still recall with a smile on my face – call me mischievous, if you will – the cocks I serviced in the interest of my worldly education. Ah, my bad boys! But quickly I tired of them and their lack of originality and vocabulary and their clumsiness, and longed to meet bad men.

I resolved that I would move overseas at the first possible opportunity.

But without Valya to line up men for me as she had boys outside the school wall, my sexual discovery came to an abrupt end when I left St Petersburg.

Until Chey.

My first real lover. The first man who had entered me, owned me.

And he was a man, not a boy like the ones from the ice-cream parlour. He had known exactly what to do with his cock and, better still, what to do with me. Life with him made me selfish in bed, bored with other, inferior men.

My relationship with Chey had marked me, with lines as permanent as the ones I later had etched onto my flesh in the form of a tiny smoking gun, only an inch or two from my inner thigh, a place that most women kept secret, for only the most intimate friends and lovers to see. But by then
I had become a nude dancer, and Chey’s gun was displayed to a roomful of people night after night. I saw when their eyes alighted on it. The initial curiosity, as they wondered what it was, perhaps a flower in bloom, and then the shock when they realised that I had a weapon burned onto my skin, pointing directly at the most powerful weapon of them all, my cunt. And then the hunger from men and sometimes women who saw it as a sign that I was wanton, dangerous in bed or looking for pain. A bad girl.

But I wasn’t a bad girl. I was Chey’s girl.

I remembered the day that we met. I was nineteen, and I’d just arrived in New York.

Encouraged by a well-meaning older tutor, I’d auditioned the previous year by videotape for a scholarship with the American School of Ballet, in the Lincoln Center.

My application was declined.

Another girl in my year got in, but she had wealthy parents, a father who had made quick money buying up steel and fertiliser plants for next to nothing in the economic collapse of the eighties while the rest of the population starved.

She was blank faced with limbs as thin as a bag of matchsticks, but she had grace and an obvious pliability, a uniformity to her movements that must have appealed to the scrutineers.

I took her address, and used her as a contact for my visa application after I graduated. Through my aunt, who had distant relatives living in America, I managed to get sponsorship. I was granted a three-month post-graduate stay, long enough to find my way around and build up a little local work experience as a waitress, and when my permission to remain expired, I melted into the back
streets of Ridgewood, Queens, a neighbourhood that was full of Eastern Europeans. Slavs, Albanians, Ukrainians, Romanians, they had all come looking for a new life in America and ended up living virtually the same existence on new soil under the shadow of a different set of buildings.

I found a dingy apartment on a quiet street that was fairly cheap and close to a subway line that could deliver me quickly into Manhattan where I had found a job in a patisserie and coffee shop on Bleecker Street. The cafe was run by a Frenchman named Jean-Michel who had just broken up with his wife and didn’t care that I was illegal, so long as I was beautiful and applied only the most delicate touch to his pastries. The croissants and petits pains au chocolat he baked were the best in the Village, light, fluffy, their smell a siren call to delicate stomachs, and the mille-feuilles were to kill for, so it was no hardship selling them. I’d always been a patient person, perhaps as a result of having no particular ambition, no maternal clock ticking, no one to hurry me along, no one to report to, so I never rushed the dough, always let the uncooked croissant mixture sit for as long as it needed to before gently rolling it out and over a butter square, turning the dough and rolling it again and again, folding it into towers with each turn, and eventually adding the bittersweet chocolate mixture and baking it in the oven until the shop was filled with the rich scent of two dozen pains au chocolat ready to be stacked on a glass dish in the window. And Jean-Michel’s frequently wandering hands across my rump as he repeatedly instructed me in the art of baking according to his style were just a minor inconvenience, as long as I made it quite clear that was as far as I would allow him to venture.

Fall was just beginning to turn into winter. The days
were still bright and the sky blue. Local New Yorkers had started to carry scarves and gloves in their handbags in preparation for frosty evenings, but I was accustomed to much colder weather and I liked the chill that settled on my bare arms as I walked down West Broadway. It was the first Sunday in November, and I was alone in the shop. Jean-Michel was out running the New York marathon, pounding the sidewalk in a desperate effort to stave away the pounds that had inevitably gathered when he’d succumbed to middle age and American servings and his belly had grown in accord with the size of his croissants.

The bell on the door had tinkled, making me jump and nearly drop the tray of pretty pastel macaroons that I had spent all morning making, mixing egg whites with ground almonds and sugar, and piping the sweet nutty paste onto a sheet of paper, ever so careful to make each piped circle perfectly round, smooth and all exactly the same size so that they could be filled once they’d cooled and then packed into boxes with ribbons and sold to city girls who came in looking for a treat, or guilty husbands who couldn’t find a florist on their way to the subway.

I’d burned the tips of my fingers and a line across my palm in my rush to right the tray before my sweets tumbled onto the floor, and I was annoyed and impatient when I hurried from the kitchen to the counter to serve my next customer.

Chey.

‘You should put some ice on that,’ he said, nodding towards the vivid red welt on my hand where I’d been scalded by the hot tray. I’d flinched when he set the coins onto the counter instead of on my waiting palm, in exchange for a chocolate croissant and a cappuccino.

‘Yes,’ I replied, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

He was dressed casually, in a university athletics sweatshirt and a pair of jeans and non-descript trainers, and his tousled blond hair glinted like hay in the sun that flooded through the windows, as though he’d just been out for a walk in Central Park, or on one of the streets that wasn’t cut off for the marathon runners.

An all-American look, apart from his eyes, which were evidently sharp, but also cold. He met mine when he looked up from my hand. His were blue-grey, the colour of the sea on a cloudy day, and somehow didn’t blend with the rest of his attire, or the sound of his voice. He didn’t have a New York accent. It was something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on.

He looked out of place in his casual clothes, like someone who had woken up in the wrong house, alongside someone else’s wardrobe.

I shivered when I handed him his change. A quarter.

He sat inside on one of the stools along the bench that faced the window, flicking through the pages of a book so quickly that it seemed as though he wasn’t really reading it, while I stood hidden between the kitchen and the counter and stared at him, watching as he held his croissant in his left hand and dipped it into the milky foam and ground chocolate that decorated his coffee, leaving behind bits of feathery pastry that floated away and stuck to the sides of the cup.

It was hot in the small shop, warm from the ovens, and soon he pulled his sweatshirt over his head, bringing his T-shirt up with it for a few moments before he shimmied it down again, revealing a tanned, muscled back and a glimpse
of a tattoo that wound around his right side. His T-shirt was short sleeved and just tight enough to display taut arms with sinews that rippled as he lifted his cup to his mouth.