Eighty Days Amber (5 page)

Chey hired a boat at the marina, a small white speedboat with
Valya
painted on the side in faded black. It felt like an omen to me, seeing the name of my old friend, the girl who
had set about my sexual awakening. I wasn’t sure if it would turn out to be a positive or a negative omen, but I felt instinctively that it would lead to sex.

And it did.

We flew over the water in
Valya
, my hair whipping back behind me in the wind and the taste of salt in the air like a kiss from the sea.

‘This is La Isla Catalina,’ he said, when we docked the boat at a small marina dedicated to the resort and he helped me to jump overboard. The sand was almost white and the water clear and pure as crystal as we waded to the shore.

We walked across the dunes, under palm trees and passed other little bays with no more than a smattering of people dotted across the hot, thin sand. Children playing with plastic buckets and swimmers spread out in the water, bobbing in the gentle waves. He led the way, and so I was able to get a better look at the tattoo that covered the right side of his back, bare apart from the thick strap of the hold-all bag that he carried, which obscured my view, but only partially. It was a cat of some sort, etched in golden ink. A leopard, I thought. Its sleek body rippling along with his muscles as he walked; its head invisible to me beneath the fabric of the bag strap.

I had further opportunity to investigate when we arrived at a secluded beach with a ring of trees blocking the view from anyone who wandered nearby. Chey bent down in front of me and pulled a blanket out from the bag, exposing his shoulder and the head of the leopard, its eyes black and teeth bared in a fierce growl.

‘I’m a pussy cat, really,’ he said with a smile, when he turned and caught me staring at him.

He sat on his haunches on the blanket as he pulled more things out of the bag. A bottle of champagne, two glasses, some bread and cheese.

We ate, and talked. Little about him, more about me.

‘So what do girls in boarding schools do in Russia to pass the time?’ he asked, with a suggestive smile.

‘You mean when we weren’t bribing the boys for cigarettes?’

‘Yes. Why did you come to America? What did the little Luba want to be when she grew up?’

‘A prima ballerina, like all Russian girls. But I wasn’t good enough. I was too lazy.’

‘Now that I don’t believe.’ He poured more of the chilled champagne into my glass. ‘Do you still dance?’

‘Never. Not even when I sing in the shower.’

‘Will you dance for me?’

Perhaps it was the champagne that had so swiftly gone to my head, along with the cocktail that I had finished earlier, or maybe it was the dream-like setting that was straight from a Hollywood movie, or the fact that I felt like I owed him something for bringing me here, and I always paid my debts. But I got to my feet, and began to move on the sand, swaying gently in time with the movement of the trees and the rhythm of the waves cresting and falling behind me.

I was aware of the effect that I was having on him. My body was close to nude in the tiny bikini, my nipples visible through the thin gold fabric now that the air had begun to cool.

Chey’s eyes glittered, fixated on me.

My world turned still for a moment under the intensity of his stare and I was filled with a rush of adrenalin, just as I had experienced by the red-brick wall in the school yard in
Donetsk. But instead of a provincial Russian boy, here I was faced with a beautiful and generous man, and one who obviously wanted to watch me. The thought of exposing myself to him and revelling in his gaze set my whole body simmering.

I reached a hand behind my back and flicked the small clip that held the strap of my bikini top, letting the fabric drop down to the sand as I raised my arms over my head and continued to dance.

‘And the rest,’ he demanded, the path of his gaze travelling from my exposed breasts down to the gold triangle of my bikini bottoms.

The pants were fastened with strings tied into a bow on each of my hips so I was able to cast them aside with just a few tugs, and then I froze, not out of fright but purposefully, allowing him to examine my body as I stood still under the bright light of the tropical moon.

‘You’re a mermaid,’ he said. ‘You move like the sea.’

He took my hand and pulled me towards him, and I sat astride his waist, shifting my body a little so that I could feel the hard bulge of his cock straining under the fabric of his shorts and enjoy the feel of the rough material against my skin.

Before Chey I’d only been kissed by one boy. One who had found his way to me and the red brick wall at my school through Valya. The only one who hadn’t wanted his cock sucked, who preferred a little tenderness. Or maybe he had just been shy. His name was Sasha, and when I fell to my knees and moved my hands to his trousers, he pulled me up again, and instead pressed his lips to mine.

Now Chey pulled me lower and kissed me. He tasted of champagne. His lips were firm and his tongue probed my
mouth gently. He held my chin in his hand, directing our kiss. Then ran his hands over my shoulders, caressing my arms, my breasts, stopping at my waist. I shimmied down in one sudden movement and began to undo the tie and button that held his shorts together so that I could show him my trick, the only trick that I knew.

Chey laughed when he realised what I was trying to do.

‘No, my mermaid, allow me,’ he’d said, pulling me up and flipping me over so that I was on my back, staring up at the stars that shone like fireflies in the night sky as he dropped his face between my legs and pressed his firm tongue to my pussy.

I gasped in shock as a wave of pleasure coursed through me.

It had never occurred to me that a man might return the favour so quickly, and I’d never had any cause to wonder how it would feel if he did. In the dormitory back in the Ukraine, we had gossiped feverishly about many things, but this had always been one of the most shocking for us somehow. The girls boasted about their skill at taking cocks into their mouths, but the idea of men going down on us had been unspoken, shameful.

Of course, I had touched myself many times and orchestrated a whole palette of pleasure in the process, but all so often in the dark, beneath the sheets and the bed covers, straining to remain silent. I knew the geography of a penis like the back of my hand, but I’d never had the opportunity to see myself in the light, had never imagined what it might be like for the boys learning to pleasure women. If that was part of their high school education, if they came hoping for more than just their trousers pulled down and if they left wanting.

So the touch of Chey’s tongue against my nub was like a stab to my heart. Electrifying. The physical experience immediately transmuting the psychological one and setting off a blazing fire at the core of my being.

It felt like falling into the sun and I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to the sensation of his strokes, sometimes quick and sometimes slow, short and sharp or long and languorous, moving in time with the rise and fall of my body as I responded to each new caress.

He followed with his fingers, and that too was a revelation. I’d never used a dildo. I wasn’t too embarrassed to be seen in the shops off Broadway with their pink, red and purple window displays and tacky lingerie on plastic hangers, but I budgeted each dollar I earned with military precision and had just enough for my rent, food, subway fares, emergency savings and books, the one luxury that I allowed myself. Spending money on sex toys would have been a ridiculous extravagance.

Chey’s dance with his tongue had made me wet, and his finger slipped in easily, moving inside me, exploring, teasing, and he soon followed it with another.

‘God, you’re tight,’ he breathed, as I thrust my hips against his hand, wanting him to fill me more, go deeper. I’d been a virgin long enough, I felt, and this was the last hurdle that I had yet to breach on the road to womanhood.

I hadn’t been saving myself for marriage. I was far too practical for that. I just hadn’t wanted it to be with one of the boys against the red-brick wall, or some man in a bar with fierce alcoholic breath who would leave me with a baby and no future, like Zosia in the yard with the skeleton trees. What better opportunity would there be than handsome Chey under the light of a tropical moon? And if the sand
beneath the blanket was a little cold and hard compared with the king-size bed in the resort, then that was an inconvenience that I was prepared to put up with.

I reached down, eager to feel his cock in my hands, to discover what sort of man he was. It had been a long time since I’d felt one and I missed it. I wanted to weigh his balls in my palm, wrap my fingers around his girth, trace my fingertips along each bump and crevice.

‘You’re impatient,’ he told me, and batted my hands away, as he continued his own explorations of my body.

He slipped a finger into my anus, penetrating both holes together as he continued to stroke my clitoris with his tongue and the sensation was blinding. Better than anything that I had experienced before, multiplied a hundred times over, and I forgot him entirely as my own pleasure consumed me. I gripped his hair with my hands, and pushed myself upwards, impaling myself on his tongue and trapping his head against me in case he thought for a moment that he might move away or stop or breathe, for any change in his rhythm might ruin everything. Then I came in one great rush like a wave from the sea behind us peaking and crashing and then fading away.

As the sensation subsided and my movements slowed, I was suddenly acutely aware of the rustle of the trees, the firm press of the sand against my back under the blanket, the occasional snapping of twigs that might have been an animal or even a person spying on us, the gentle breeze that brushed my skin and the sheer number of the stars that glowed in the sky like silent witnesses to my adventures beneath them.

He pulled himself up to lay alongside me, cradling my
body against his, until the warmth that filled me subsided and I relaxed into his arms.

‘Shhh,’ he said, rocking me back and forward as though I was a child.

It was the first time that a man had ever given me an orgasm.

He didn’t protest when I pushed myself up to my knees and fiddled with the catch on his shorts, then pulled them down and tossed them onto the beach alongside my discarded bikini. His cock was still hard as a rock and as bronzed as the rest of him, as though he had spent weeks sunbathing nude.

He moaned when I lowered my head to his groin and licked all the way along his shaft to his tip.

‘Oh, Luba,’ he said, shuddering as I took him into my mouth.

Chey tasted wonderful, and his cock filled my mouth in a way that I had never experienced before. I took my time over it, my tongue darting along his glans and circling his head as he continued to moan my name and wrap his fingers ever so gently in my hair. But I wanted to abandon all sense of duty and technique and simply feel him sliding in and out of me, thrusting to my depths.

He shuddered, and withdrew, gently caressing my chin as he did so.

‘Luba . . .’ he said again, reverently.

‘I want to ride you,’ I replied.

I had waited long enough, and now I wanted to know what it would feel like to have a man inside me, filling me to my depths. But I didn’t want to end up carrying his child, and though I knew that I could take pills afterwards to stop that from happening I had no idea how to get hold of them
here, so I was relieved when he reached up to his rucksack and pulled a box of condoms out from the pocket, and more relieved when instead of handing one to me he tore the wrapper open himself and rolled the thin rubber down to the base of his cock. Getting hold of bananas to practise blow jobs was one thing, but being caught with condoms in the dormitories, even if we could have got hold of them, would have meant immediate expulsion.

I was still wet after my first orgasm and aching to sate my arousal. I climbed onto him, lowering myself slowly onto his hardness, stifling a cry when he reached my wall which had not yet been broken, and a sharp bolt of pain shot through me. The pang lasted only a moment, and then I realised that this was it, I was having sex. The sensation was disappointing at first in comparison to the feeling of his tongue against me, and I briefly wondered what all the fuss was about.

Then I began to move, and he put his hands on my hips and rocked me back and forth, slowly at first, then gradually faster. I discovered that I could stimulate myself even more if I leaned forward a little and ground my clitoris against his stomach muscles. I watched the expressions of pleasure and abandonment flit over his face and I decided that all the blow jobs in the world were nothing compared to the power a woman had when she was straddling a man.

Chey didn’t lose himself within minutes like the school-yard boys. When I’d begun to tire of thrusting against him he flipped me over again with one swift turn of his arm so that I was on all fours, staring up the sand dunes into the line of palms swaying in the distance, feeling his heavy ball sack smack against my thighs with each thrust, revelling in the sound of his moans as I pushed myself back against him, bringing him to climax.

Then he came, gripping my shoulders with his strong hands and driving his cock impossibly deep inside me until he was spent and I could take it no more and we broke apart panting, ecstatic.

For a while we lay tangled in each other’s arms, wishing that we could be transported magically back to the resort without needing to go to the bother of the long walk and boat ride ahead of us, romantic though both would be in the moonlight.

He ran his hands along my body, over my stomach and then my thighs, pausing when he found the streaks of blood that decorated my legs.

‘It was your first time,’ he said, his voice full of wonder. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘I have a lot of catching up to do,’ I replied, and he laughed.

‘I would be very happy to oblige.’

For the next few days we made love at every possible opportunity, until we both felt raw and exhausted. Making up for lost time.