Mother of Storms (22 page)

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Authors: John Barnes

BOOK: Mother of Storms
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She bumps up against him, and the two men notice the way she’s moving and stare at them as she goes by. She’s squirming around, and she whispers to Jesse, “Come on, reach
in
.” As if he’s hypnotized, Jesse slides his hand forward, bringing that big mass of red hair close to his face—it smells funny and he realizes that she’s perfumed it with something, and used too much—and finds he is clutching a nipple as big as a Ping-Pong ball.
She squeals, straightens up under his arm, moans and gasps. Her hand, outside her shirt, closes over his underneath, and she rubs up and down, panting and then groaning.
The two men stare at them. Jesse wants to look at the dirt at his feet, but if he does, his attention will concentrate on the moaning in his ear and the huge tough-surfaced breast under his hand. So he does look up, and he sees the carefully polished shoes, the tailored pants, the spotless ironed white shirts—and the fascinated stare. They aren’t excited, particularly, or eager, or anything like that—what they are doing, he knows, is looking at another rude
gringo
couple that has no idea how to behave in public.
Synthi seems to be having a full-blown orgasm; they stare at her as if she were part of a sideshow, and one of them waves, almost shyly, at Jesse, as if in salute at his conquest. He wants to tell them this is not him, this is not what he’s like or who he is—but they’ve turned and gone already.
She subsides and takes his hand in hers again, holding it over her shoulder. “God, it feels good to fake an orgasm and not have ten million people over my shoulder knowing it’s fake. So how do you like the industrial knockers?”
“I, they’re—”
“They don’t feel much like real ones, do they? But wait till you see them slapping up and down while I ride you. Come on, the house I’m renting is right around the corner. Mind you, the servants are not going to approve—Mrs. Herrera is a dear, but really twentieth, and her husband Tomás is much more a gardener than a butler—no wink-and-nudge ability at all, if you know what I mean—”
He’s pulled around the corner, still not sure what he feels about all of this. The feeling in his stomach is mostly butterflies, as if he were going to throw up, and his legs feel rubbery, but on the other hand he can’t remember ever being this erect.
Abstractly, he thinks maybe it’s just a matter of years and years of programming to want
this
instead of a woman, and that if he could just step back for a minute and think, he wouldn’t be anywhere near
this
—
Another part of him is growling that this might be his only chance and he has to know what it’s really like.
The “little house” she is renting might make an apartment building for four Tapachulan families in the better part of town; in fact, he’s walked by
here many times and if he’d thought about it that’s what he’d have assumed it was. As they approach the door, it opens—apparently the small, muscular, beautifully dressed man who opens the door has nothing more pressing to do than watch the path.
Despite her warning, the servant appears neither surprised nor disapproving; he nods and says, “Miss Waterhouse. Will you be—”
“We’re going directly to the master bedroom, Señor Herrera,” she says, “and after that, perhaps the gentleman will be staying to a late dinner.”
To Jesse it seems that they float up the long marble staircase, and into the big room that looks like nothing so much as an old movie set. There’s a lot of red velvet around, and maybe that was sexy once but what it looks like to him is a restored movie theater, the kind they fix up in Oaxaca or San Cristóbal for the tourist trade. His head is spinning—maybe he had a little more beer than he thought he did, and they went up that staircase pretty fast.
One advantage Jesse found out about long ago with what Leftie girls wear—it comes off in a flash and there are a lot of ways to get a hand under it. In this case it seems to take Synthi Venture, if it’s really her, only a breath to kick off the sandals, undo three or four buttons, and then whip off the shirt, unfasten the front catch on the bra, and yank down skirt and underwear together.
Jesse is stunned; the hair really is red, not the shade of normal human hair and not rough like most dye jobs make it, but natural, soft, wavy human hair the color that red hair is in an old comic book, and the little tuft of it that doesn’t quite hide her labia is a shade brighter. She gives a loud giggle, and for the first time he realizes that she’s really drunk, or high on god knows what (she can probably afford and get anything), or maybe she has just cranked up the happy center in her brain into the red zone, supposedly XV stars are wired to do that.
She does a little pirouette, and now he sees the thin white scars on her ass and her thighs where they sewed her into the “perfect” shape, and as she turns around he sees, ever so faintly, a kind of strange surface under the skin of her belly and knows that they put a sheath in there to hold her tighter than her own abdominal wall can.
And now that they are out in the open, the enormous, outsized breasts have visible scars too, places where they were reshaped and rebuilt. At fifty feet, or in dim light, or through the sort of vague gauze that is imposed by XV, she would look impossibly, magically perfect; but here, up close, in the plain light of the overdone bedroom, he can see how the trick is done, and once you’ve seen how it’s done the magic is over.
He thinks for an instant that he will lose his erection, and then he looks into her eyes. They are pale blue, and under the abraded crow’s feet, he sees
a strange set to them, a kind of desperate look, and somehow or other the thought that forms in his mind is that—god knows why, but there it is—what she wants is him, that she’s so hungry for him that she’ll do anything, that if he turns and goes now she’ll weep for hours, and that she will be grateful if he just uses her.
She is coming on like a cheap whore behind schedule, not because she’s enjoying it but because she has to know whether he will reject her. All this comes to him in an instant, before he knows how he knows it.
He wants to think it’s empathy, that he can relate to rejection fear because of Naomi, but that’s not true at all. It’s knowing how little Naomi would approve of this, that it would make her feel shoddy to know that this crude horny old bitch was going to give him at least as much pleasure as all her sensitive gentleness.
It’s knowing that feeling of power, knowing that if he wanted to he could call Synthi a horny old bitch and she’d still do whatever he wanted just so he would take her in any way at all. And a part of him that he’d never thought about, too, is that he knows that in a month this woman can have more of everything than he can ever have in his life, that things he would have to plan and work for years to do, she can do on a whim—just plain sheer envy that she can get all that, and get it mostly from people like him, entirely with her cartoon body and crude acting. There’s the thought of at least making her pay for it by, just once,
really
giving him what he’s dreamed about through Rock and Quaz and all the others for so much of the last ten years.
It doesn’t come to him in words at all, but the feeling is deep and cold and lusts to hurt. He likes it. He grabs her hair close to her neck and mashes her mouth with a hard, chewing kiss, and she doesn’t even wince; she just pulls his other hand to her crotch, and he jabs his thumb into her vagina, hard, suddenly, wanting her to be dry so that she’ll scream—
Instead, she is wet and already open, and she flows around him and moans with pleasure. Her hands are on his belt, undoing his jeans, pulling his penis out, and she’s much too rough, hurting him, but he’s too excited to care. She stands up on her toes and slides down over it, so that the first time takes about one minute, and he doesn’t even get time to get his pants below his knees.
She doesn’t let him rest, or even look down to see if he’s scratched and bruised; she has him in her mouth at once, and yanks his jeans and underwear down to his ankles so fast and hard that he almost falls over.
The next half hour or so is a blur; she’s rough with him and crude, and he never seems to get a moment to breathe. His penis is so sore that he’s practically in tears, and there’s an empty ache in his scrotum from being drained repeatedly; he avenges himself by slapping those grotesque breasts,
by choking her with deep thrusts of his penis, and toward the end of it all he gives her a sudden, hard fist up the anus just to see if there’s anything she will say no to.
Finally he is limp, sore, hurting, and her rough hand trying to bring him up again is unbearable. His head and stomach ache, and he has a vague feeling that if this goes on much longer he might throw up. As he looks at her now, with all desire pulled out of it—and with the red rage dying out of him as welt—he sees nothing but desperation and hunger, and abruptly pushes her hands away and backs off.
She stands there panting, frantic, and finally says, “Shit, are you okay?”
This is not exactly what he’s been expecting. He looks down to see that his penis is bruised and scraped, with a little bit of blood welling to the surface in a couple of places. All at once he can really feel it, and he leans forward, holding it. “Oh, god, oww w.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Did anyone ever tell you you’re really fucked up, lady?” He’s had blood contact, so if she’s got anything he’s not vaccinated for then his chances of having it are really good, his dick feels like he’s had it in the blender, and he can’t believe what he’s just let himself get into. He needs out of here, and a doctor.
And to piss. They say you can piss stuff off your mucus membranes if you do it right away. He looks frantically, sees the private bath, rushes in and pisses like a horse, a big stream of it—beer and fear combined—and it bums like acid. “Shit, how many guys have you done this with? What the fuck is the matter with you?”
She’s starting to sob. “Just you. I mean really just you.”
“You expect me to believe that?” He’s yanking on his shirt and buttoning it frantically. “God, I can’t believe I did this, I can’t believe I let myself come here—”
Now she’s crying outright. “I don’t have anything, really, really, I don’t, you’re the first since I started this vacation and the net gives us a full set of prompt tests every three days. I’m sorry I hurt you but I haven’t killed you, I haven’t, uh—” She stares at him blankly.
His pants are in hand and he’s fishing his underwear out, but he hesitates a moment; at least she sounds like she means it.
“God, what the hell am I? I didn’t even ask you your name.”
“Jesse Callare.” He pulls the underwear out more slowly and asks, “Do you have any kind of ointment or something? I’m hurt.”
“Oh, shit, Jesse, I’m really sorry.” She dashes into the bathroom and brings out a tube of hemorrhoid painkiller, a spray antibiotic, and a disposable antiseptic wipe. “At least let me clean you up and put this on it. I’ll be gentle, I promise, I didn’t want to do that to you.”
She kneels in front of him, and before he can flinch away she has the wipe around it. It stings and he gasps, but she really is gentle and careful, cleaning him off quickly and neatly, then spraying on the antibiotic. “God, I hope all this happened to you after you were in my ass, there’s all kinds of things up there that can infect a cut or a scrape—do you have a doctor you can go to? You can use mine and I’ll pay—”
“You seem awfully concerned, considering,” Jesse says. What she’s doing, after the initial stinging, really is making it feel better, and there’s something comforting about her concern.
She puts on the cream, and it’s amazing how soothing it is; he almost relaxes. “Jesse, Jesse, I can’t believe I did any of that, are you okay?”
“I’ve been better,” he says, gently disentangling himself and continuing to dress. The pain is gone and he’s not nearly so scared.
“I suppose it sounds stupid but I wish you’d stay to dinner. I can try to explain all this and I’d really like to make it up to you.”
It’s a different kind of feeling from what he felt before, but there’s a certain similarity—he couldn’t leave now if his life depended on it, because he’s dying of curiosity. “Sure, I’ll stay. Nobody’s gonna believe what happened to me anyway, might as well have a completely wild story.”
“Just a moment while I slip into something more like me. Hope you don’t mind a baggy sweater and a baggy pair of pants, because that’s what’s comfortable, and I left all the gold lame back in Alaska.”
She’s pulling the stuff on as she says it. Now that they are clothed and know each other’s names, and Jesse is not in pain anymore, they don’t seem to have much to say.
There’s a long awkward silence, and then she says, “Lamb
tacos oaxaqueños,
is that okay?”
“Uh, what?”
“For
cena.
Señora Herrera is from Oaxaca province, somewhere up in the hills, so she tends to make those kinds of dishes. I ordered lamb
tacos oaxaqueños
before I went out and I told her husband, Tomás, that you might be staying to dinner as we came in—remember?”
He grins. “I remember. Yeah, it sounds wonderful. Uh—can I ask—”
“Anything at all, after dinner—but let’s go down and eat together just as if we didn’t know each other and we were only just getting acquainted.”

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