Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) (14 page)

We stripped off our clothes. There was block of hard soap on a ledge and we washed each other in the antediluvian shower with the sun falling over the sea somewhere behind us. I soaped his back, his shoulders, his bare chest, his genitals, his cock that sprang to attention. I had been thinking of his cock all day. Even when the boy slid sneakily into me from behind it was Samir’s soldier that entered my imagination. The arc of water washed away the soap and I fed his cock into my mouth.

We dried in the lingering heat. I tasted the buttery yeast of his pre-cum and left his cock wanting more, pushing it against his belly as I stood, the moist tube of flesh throbbing between us. I ran my tongue between his teeth, feeding his own zesty tang into his mouth. We were cannibals. We wanted to eat each other. He pressed back, his kiss that had always been reluctant, uncertain, filled with vigour and passion as if his own taste was as much an elixir to him as it was to me.

The women must have been busy downstairs in the kitchens. I could smell the scent of baking bread and roasting meat rising up through the stairs and corridors of the fort and my own body rose like dough, cooking in the hot air of the late afternoon as the sheikh lifted me in his arms and carried me into the tower below the golden dome.

We entered a round room, the floor layered in carpets, the light diffused through slender arches, windows without glass. Already my body was coated in perspiration. Moisture leaked from between my legs and trickled down my thighs. He stood me down and we kissed again. As we parted, I gazed up at the inner circle of the dome and felt a rush of vertigo. My head was spinning. I wanted him to slap me. Shake me. Remind me what it is to be fully awake and living in the present.

I leaned forward in his arms and bit his bottom lip until he winced with pain.

His eyes blazed in sudden confusion and I grinned as I slipped from his embrace. I fell to my knees and scurried off, sniffing out the corners of the round room, barking and wailing, wiggling my ass. The sheikh thought me totally mad, I’m sure, but naked together we spoke the same language and when his hand came down on my rump I let out a long sigh of relief. I had been a naughty girl that morning on board the boat. I needed to purge my sins. I remained on all fours, pushing out my bottom, revelling in each slap that warmed my skin and brought the memory of the bullwhip back to life.

Yes. Yes. Yes, I cried.

Aewa. Aewa. Aewa.

The sheikh’s hand came down again and again. Slap. Slap. Slap. Gleaming trails of discharge slipped down my legs. Warm juice coated my labia. I pressed my eyes shut and the secret chemistry that converts pain to pleasure was like a shot of adrenalin injected straight into my heart. The ring of those slaps echoed around the room, escaping through the arched windows, and I thought briefly of the bells tinkling about the ankles of the girl with the hennaed face and hands, those big drop earrings like stars about her carved cheeks and long elegant neck.

When Samir tired of slapping me he fed his erection into my vagina, my hot oils greasing the way, the mystery train of erogenous zones and nerve endings flexing, parting, drawing him in until I was filled to the brim, and had there been more I would taken everything. I held his weight on my outstretched arms, my fingers spread on the wine-red arabesques patterning the carpet, my breasts shuddering. My clitoris was a burning bush and with each thrust the flames grew higher.

He was about to come. I was about to come. Worlds colliding. It was too quick. I needed more. I always needed more. I collapsed on the floor and as he fell on top of me, I wriggled from his spread limbs and rolled him on to his back. His cock quivered above his belly like an arm reaching out of the sea. His limbs were tense but the muscles of his body relaxed into a state of grace as I took his erection into my throat as the lock consumes the key, as the threads on a nut take a grip on the coils of the bolt, my mouth a silken cloak that wrapped his precious manhood in its limpid chains.

Agh
.
Agh
.
Agh
.

He sighed. He cried. He arched his back and gyrated his hips. I sucked his balls. I rimmed the gash in his helmet with the tip of my tongue. I nipped and nibbled, sucking like a child with a piece of toffee. I coated the purple head in saliva and licked it off again. I ran my teeth up and down its silky length as if his cock were a mouth organ and I was a virtuoso playing the blues. I could hear an acoustic guitar, drums, the slow growl of a saxophone, Soho nights gone, for ever gone, scattered ashes of the past. I had slithered from that old snakeskin me and would never be able to climb back into it again.

Just as women adore their breasts, men adore their cocks. They want you to go down on bended knees, worship them, pay obeisance, genuflect, make offerings. It makes sense that the phallus through the ages has been revered and venerated, sculpted and exaggerated. All life emerges from the cock. I loved this cock. I wanted his cock. I wanted to bite it off, gobble it down and keep it safely inside me.

His body was beginning to stiffen, spasm, the thick clotted cream stored somewhere in secret places warming, growing, bursting from their pots and erupting in a great wave that filled my throat with the clean taste of the sun and sea, lemon and honey, figs and yoghurt. I stopped myself swallowing, crawled up his chest and let his sperm slide over my tongue into his mouth. We kissed, his spunk lubricating our faces, and I went back for seconds. I sucked him until he was hard again and when he was ready, warmed like a loaf in the oven, he fed the holy phallus between the cheeks of my spanked bottom into the wet walls of my pulsating anus.

Fuck me. Fuck me. Fuck me.

I swivelled my hips and wiggled my bum. I was a machine gone wild, a train without brakes. I could hear the slap, slap, slap of my breasts against my chest, my lungs screaming like overworked bellows, the fierce beat of his breath like the motions of the sea, one hand tucked in my groin, the other beating the plump spread flesh of my backside. Come on girl, you can make it. Faster. Faster. My clitoris was fully erect, fully aflame, and the fire spread through my entire body as an orgasm burst from me like a tiger bursting from a cage.

The light had changed. Night was coming. I lay beneath the crook of his arm, spent, drained, mouth open, Samir taking short sharp breaths like a diver, his cock flaccid against his thigh, my ass burning, and I thought of Azar and the girl.

Samir ran his palm softly over the bronze curls of my pubic hair. He said something and of course I had no idea of the meaning. He went up on his knees to explain in mime, whipping up lather in his palm, making a razor from his forefinger, shaving the hair until my pubis was shiny and smooth like a sea shell. He ran his finger from my pussy in a line up over my belly, between my breasts, over my chin and I sucked his razor finger when he reached my mouth.

There is a moment’s melancholy after orgasm. Something has come and something has gone. Something created has crumbled to dust. Something saved is spent. There were twelve arched windows spaced evenly like the digits of a clock around the tower. He seemed to know it was time to go and I felt like the lover when her man leaves to return to his wife, and perhaps that’s what I was.

H
E LEFT ME PANTING
, tingling from the top of my head to the soles of my feet, my rump burning, my rear slicked in his sweet jism.

I thought of Umah and smiled.

It didn’t matter. Nothing matters. It was the sheikh who made my body sing. A digit slipped instinctively between my wet cleft and the pad of that moistened fingertip ran in circles around my clitoris, the feeling making me drowsy, and I thought the shape of my distended clit was the same as the dome above my head, that magnified a million million times the two would make a perfect fit.

My eyes closed. I must have slept and, when I awoke, the room with its twelve arched windows was silvery with starlight that bathed my body in fairy dust. I showered beneath the water jet and dressed in my suit of clothes.

When I reached the door from which we had entered the walkway around the battlements, I was surprised to find it locked. I pushed at one side, then the other. I ran my palms over the woodwork; it was smooth, buffed by wind and sand, the surface furnished with a brass ring coated in verdigris and a row of studs spaced along the cross spars. The key hole was framed in a decorative brass plate. I bent to look, ran my fingers over the design, and realised it was the shape of a spider. I tapped tentatively with the brass ring, the sound muted in all that empty space, and stopped myself knocking again. It was more dignified to wait, to allow events to unfold.

The night was warm, clean, pure, the sky like velvet, the light pale as a ghost. I wandered along the battlements watching shooting stars, the death display of exploding planets, the music rising from the compound slow, lyrical, hypnotic. I was a prisoner of the universe and wondered for a moment if I would be able to fly should I leap from the fortress walls. I was locked behind a studded door but felt totally free.

On board the boat I had found myself, the inner me, masked in the subtle manipulations and influences of our times, the me hidden by the very clothes I chose, or rather had been chosen for me by designers and photographers, the editors of magazines, by the consumer machine. Little girls are dressing like adults, their hobby now is shopping not playing, their dream to grow breasts so they can flaunt them in the high street. Long before boys awaken from the long sleep of childhood, girls are aware of their sexual selves, the erotic potential school and society and mothers combine to crush.

I thought about Mummy with her straw hat and leather gloves, a hostage to the garden with its busy trellises hung with wisteria and roses, its old olive jars bursting with rhododendrons, the plastic paddling pool folded away in the shed like a guilty secret. Mother had always done the right thing, said the right thing, dressed and thought and behaved the way she had been told to dress and think and behave. Once we moved back to England from Geneva, Daddy started doing whatever it is he does in Whitehall, and Mummy became a shadow; a woman who had lost herself because she had never found herself. She had always done the right thing, and I had a feeling that the right thing is always going to be the wrong thing, that you find yourself by stepping out of yourself.

Mother was tall and slender. She could have been a dancer, an actress, a something, and she chose to be a garden ornament, a foot soldier in the war against the weeds inside the garden walls and the chaos outside in the big bad world.

Time slips by like the wind.

I waited. It is the way of the desert. When the lock finally turned and the door opened, it was Umah who had come to get me. He looked nervous, and I stroked his cheek as you may stroke a spooked pony to reassure him. He beckoned, drawing me behind him as you tease a fish from the sea on the end of a line. I followed barefoot down the narrow flights of dark stairs to the courtyard.

During the day, the fort had the shabby look of a grand ruin from the Middle Ages. At night, a celestial display above our heads, the space lit by oil lamps and flaming torches, the compound was vibrant with music, dancing flames from an open fire, the smell of frankincense, hashish, cooking oil, the spiced and seasoned foods arranged on wooden platters and in silver dishes under the arches along one side of the courtyard, the women moving like whispers in their long flimsy
djellabas
, the bells about their ankles softly ringing.

Musicians played flutes cut from gourds, lutes of the sort troubadours played at the time of Shakespeare, timbrels, finger cymbals, drums covered in stretched animal skins. The drummers maintained a complex, contradictory beat in an atonal rhythm different from anything I had ever heard before. It was music that didn’t merely awaken the senses, but impregnated them with lush sensuality.

As I moved beyond the musicians I saw the girl who had vanished earlier in the grip of Azar’s big hand. She was dancing, framed by the firelight, her movements captivating, mesmerising, so astonishing it took my breath away. I gasped. My heart beat faster. Sweat prickled my underarms. Samir was sitting cross-legged on a mat among a group of men. He turned, aware of my presence. Our eyes met and he flashed a look I had never seen before. As he focused once more on the girl, I did the same, my toes moving involuntarily in the red dust beneath my feet.

The girl was performing a belly dance, leisurely, to the rhythm of the slow drum, as if she were making love, her gestures snakelike, her hands above her head plaiting a rope from the sky, her hips, sharp as knives, cutting a poem from the sultry night. I was moved by the sheer immodesty of the display, but also the immodesty of her costume that didn’t so much conceal her nakedness, her sexuality, but enhanced it. She wasn’t dancing, she was masturbating, she was performing fellatio and cunnilingus with herself and everyone who saw her. Me included.

The girl’s head was covered in a beaded, tight-fitting cap which extended over her face in a veil made from the same pearly-white beads. Her fiery eyes looked out from two diamond-shaped slits and the pearls hung in strings that jiggled over the lower part of her face. The same pattern of loosely-threaded beads stretched across her breasts and, as she moved, so one breast was briefly uncovered and then the other, her timing so precise that she was both continually covered and naked at the same time, the effect like a shimmer, a flicker, a mirage, her restrained movements accompanied by the jangle of the bracelets slithering up and down her arms and the bells about her hennaed feet.

The dancer wasn’t fat, she was thin with gracefully carved limbs, but she had a belly, a small, round perfectly formed dome of gyrating flesh that made my eyes water and my mouth go dry. Her belly button was adorned with a green gemstone and, below her belly, just above the pubic line, she wore a skirt of chiffon strips like those in the cabin on the boat, each tucked into a beaded belt, the transparent veils shifting in such a way that you could see glimpses of her pudenda, her round bottom when she turned; these hints of her sex coupled with the fact that her face was hidden by the beaded veil all the more alluring.

I had never been attracted to girls. I had experimented, of course. All girls do. But that night in the desert, my vagina throbbed with yearning, ached with desire. I wanted to feel that little round belly pressed against mine, her tongue in my cleft, my tongue sucking her sweet juices. I desired her as I had never desired any man. Not even the sheikh.

It was at first a shock that such an erotic performance would exist here among primitive people, but I realised instantly that this was the prejudice of my old world coming back to haunt me. We assume we have conquered the market in all things sexual with our tabloid newspapers, celebrity gossip, the reality shows that capture a world that is unreal; silicone breasts, lap dancing, speed dating. We imagine the girls in magazines and the hunks that guide them into limousines are having better sex, more sex, tantric sex, erotic sex, threesomes, orgies.

We ask ourselves why our own sex lives are empty without stopping to think that the flawless breasts and square jaws decorating the covers of magazines have been doctored, air-brushed, back-lit, that half-starved girls and pumped up men on steroids aren’t having better sex, they aren’t having sex at all. Our world is a fantasy, a sleight of hand, a trick of the eye. Even the money in our banks is an illusion. Perhaps Mother knows that. Perhaps that’s why she has escaped from the world and vanished into the garden.

The men and women in that compound on the edge of the desert, an unmarked and unmapped oasis in Africa, didn’t have these thoughts, these doubts. They were living the life we imagined, the life we dreamed existed, a life guided by the senses; the forces of nature. These people were real and, as I stood there with my long skinny body hidden by the white tunic and pantaloons, I felt invisible, mind without matter, the light left from a shooting star that died long, long ago.

The dance went on and on, the girl’s shadow magnified by the firelight and repeated around the walls like a vast mural. The music quickened, the girl moved faster without losing grace, that quintessential object of desire becoming more desirable, a reminder that if there is a God he placed us here on this earth to mate, to love, to find joy and happiness in everything we do and where else but in our sexual nature can we find complete and utter bliss? We are not made to work, to save, to achieve, to appear on reality TV. We were designed for sex. This thought had been approaching me every since I sailed away on the sheikh’s boat, and the girl’s erotic performance had finally embraced my mind like a revelation.

The dance ended. The string players and cymbals stopped suddenly and, to the slow beat of a single drum, the girl vanished like a will-o’-the-wisp, her feet barely touching the ground as she slipped into the shadows and was gone. There was no applause. The men remained where they were sitting while the women floated from the arches with bowls of baked fish, roast chicken dipped in red sauce, green peppers, onions, falafel, rice, unleavened bread hot from the oven.

The men dug in with their fingers, working the rice and peppers and fish together into precise balls they popped into their mouths, and it occurred to me that even in the way the people took their food there was a spontaneity, a naturalness we had reduced to ritual with our knives and forks, our manners and conventions. We had formalised eating to a level where all joy had gone, replacing the taste sense with alcohol, a glass of white at lunch, a beer after work, a good Rioja at dinner, but not too much. Even our needy little greed for the grape we diminish counting units, drinking, while regretting every glass; eating, while trying to stay thin; seeking friends who endorse our own opinions. People like us. I suddenly didn’t want be people like us. I wanted to be people like them. I wanted to be me and, standing there in the moonlight knowing no one, without a name, in mortal danger, I felt more like me and more alive than I had ever felt in my twenty-two and a half years.

I watched until Samir beckoned and sat where he indicated, at his side but just behind him, in the circle but not a part of the circle. I noticed Hanif, out of blue jeans and wearing a white
djellaba
, the same as Samir, his white turban held in place by golden braids. He was one of several men who were clearly chieftains of some sort, while Azar, Mohammed and Umah were part of a secondary group of a dozen or so men who completed the ring in the shadows beyond the firelight.

The two older men who disapproved of my presence wore the same sour expressions and one of them spat as the sheikh slowly unwound the turban I was wearing, unveiling me like a painting. I shook my head and my sun-bleached curls spilled about my shoulders. He was showing me off as people show holiday snaps after their two weeks in Tenerife; as in the days of exploration travellers returned to Europe with rare birds and tobacco and natives with bones through their noses.

The men continued eating, nodding meditatively as they studied my hair, my eyes, their dark gaze following my fingers as I went to unpin the spider brooch at my breast. In those weeks on the boat, I had grown accustomed to nudity. Without clothes I was the version of me that fitted my vision of me, the
alter
that was real, organic, pagan. Perhaps I may have felt a need to compete with the beauty who had danced in those diaphanous veils; that in this world of the senses I was validated by my sensuality, by revealing what is normally kept hidden.

Samir covered my hand with his to stop me and I looked up into his eyes. He squeezed my waist, digging into the spare flesh, demonstrating that the gold standard for beauty here in Africa where people went hungry, wasn’t skeletal sacks of skin and bone but the well fed belly of the dancing girl. He sent me off to join the women, gesturing to his mouth that had swallowed his own semen that afternoon to indicate that I should go and eat.

Like the men, the women were neither welcoming nor unfriendly. I was flotsam brought in on the tide. I would remain or I would depart, and both eventualities they treated with equanimity. The woman whom I had assumed was Mo’s wife waved her small hands over the bowls and platters. I ate standing up. I was suddenly ravenous, and the food was delicious, fresh, strange, exotic, tastes that touched my senses and made my fingertips tingle. I moved from one bowl to another, filling my belly, testing everything, the turmeric and red sauce burning my cheeks.

The girl appeared, still practically naked, the veil gone, a cape about her shoulders, the bracelets motionless. I could see in the light of the oil lamps lines of henna radiating over her features. A black beauty spot rested above the curl of her top lip and, from just below her bottom lip, a finely-etched tattoo ran down her chin, over her throat and continued in a thin blue line between her breasts, over her seductive belly and disappeared below the low slung belt of beads, the line following the same course the sheikh had taken with his finger down my body that afternoon.

I looked into the girl’s eyes, two balls of black fire floating on lakes of the whitest white; eyes full of vivacity and mischief. Her long lashes and heavy eyebrows were darkened in kohl. Around her eyes and curving down her cheeks were two arcs of pale green and dark green sequins, the same shades as the stitching on my tunic; a sign, it seemed, that everything is connected. She smiled. I smiled. She moved closer, close enough for our bellies to touch, and licked the turmeric stains from my cheeks.