Adios, Scheherazade

“Well, of course,” she said, still smiling, looking up at me through her eyelashes. She turned away and poured the soapy water into the sink, put the basin and soap and washcloth away, rinsed her hands, dried her hands, and unzipped the sweater.

She undressed without looking at me, neither rushing nor dawdling, undressing as though alone and simply preparing to take a shower or go to bed. Beneath the sweater was a yellow bra. She folded the sweater and put it on the dresser top, and then she took off her shoes, carefully with each one, and put them together under the dresser. Then she took off her black stretch pants and there was the black panty hose with white panties peeking through. She folded the stretch pants and put them on the dresser and then took off panties and panty hose together, and stood there naked except for the bra while she pulled the legs of the panty hose straight and put the panties on top of the stretch pants and draped the panty hose down the front of the dresser as though the bottom half of a clown was going to sit on the dresser and watch us in the act.

Her body was hard-looking. Her ass, which I saw first, was round and smooth and looked as hard as a football player’s shoulder. There was a deep cleft between the cheeks, as though she were in a permanent clench, but there was none of the muscle rippling that goes with clenching.

Her legs were graceful, but slender, tapering away to narrow ankles, looking like a runner’s legs, lean and graceful and functional. Her belly wasn’t merely flat, it was slightly sunken, with a knob of bone on either side, way down near the top of the leg, like mountain peaks on either side of a crater of the moon.

Her pubic hair was thick and black and snarled, but when she lifted her arms in folding the stretch pants I was surprised to see that she shaved her armpits. People use the word underarm these days, because armpit sounds ugly, but if you’ll look at one you’ll see that it is ugly, that it is the only part of the human body, bar none, that nothing can make less than ugly, and you will see that it is in truth an armpit and it doesn’t matter what anybody says. And she had shaved hers, which I think had more to do with self-image than any attempted impact on the customers. She didn’t care about the customers, they barely existed for her.

Once again I was barely existing. Translucent, perhaps even transparent. And terribly unimportant.

It is the worst thing in the world to be unimportant.

She gave me her meaningless smile when she was done arranging her clothes, and reached for my hand to lead me to the bed. I gestured at her bra, saying, “What about that?”

“That doesn’t matter,” she said, and put one knee on the bed, and moved forward over the knee, bending over it as she got onto the bed, and then I knew I wanted to fuck her that way, but I was embarrassed to ask.

Besides, there was still the bra, and I was already in that conversation. I said, “I want to see them,” and tried a smile of my own.

“They’re just titties, dear,” she said.

I just remembered that I left something out. The minute we walked in the door she held her hand out for the money. I gave her two tens and she put them in the top drawer of the dresser. Then everything else followed as I said.

I wonder why I left that out?

Anyway, she said, “They’re just titties, dear,” and beckoned to me to come up and get on top of her.

I did, and she put her legs on either side of me. I put my right hand along the side of her left breast, against the cloth of the yellow bra, and I said, “I want to suck them.”

“I don’t do that, dear,” she said. Still with the smile, still with the soft voice. But her eyes said she didn’t want to be argued with.

So did her hand. She reached down between her legs to where my cock was hanging and grabbed it and gave it a surprisingly hard yank. It hurt, and it felt good in a weird way, and it surprised the hell out of me. “Come on, dear,” she said. “Stick that thing in.”

So I stuck that thing in. Her cunt was so different from Betsy’s, that surprised me too. Betsy’s cunt is soft and warm and moist, but the hooker’s cunt was hobnailed, it seemed to have hard little bumps all over the inside that really worked against my cock. It was the loveliest sensation Oscar ever experienced.

It was too lovely. She was about to earn her money at a rate of about five dollars a second, so after a couple of strokes I bit my lower lip and I stopped moving, leaving it inside her to the hilt.

I was lying on top of her now, my face buried in the pillow beside her head, my eyes squeezed shut. When I stopped she said, “What’s the matter, dear?” and because of our positions it sounded as though she was behind me. It was strange to feel her under me and hear her behind me.

I lifted up on my elbows and smiled down at her, trying for some empathy, some human contact, some compassion and understanding. “I don’t want to come too soon,” I said. My lip hurt where I’d bit it.