Chapter 3
The glass contained a tiny remnant of beer, just enough to justify not leaving the cafe. For the last hour it had held the same small amount and Ahmed ben Lulla's hands had lain idly on either side of the glass, his elbows across the table.
Nobody had come to sit opposite him at the small table. Most people stood at the counter, swallowed a beer, a glass of wine or pernod and then went off on some nocturnal pursuit. A few couples occupied tables farther back in the salle over which the patron, sitting in regal immobility behind the till, glanced from time to time without expression.
While he'd been sitting in the window, aimlessly watching the passing scene, the young prostitute opposite had been upstairs four times. That was good going in a couple of hours, with so much opposition, and he'd wished he could make money so easily. As far as he could see, the luck of the older whores was out tonight; nobody had taken any notice of them. Occasionally one of them had taken a little strutting walk along the street and up the boulevard but without result.
Ahmed sat on and on. His thoughts, which had been all inturned, now fixed only on things outside himself as if his brain had rebelled and was giving itself a rest from depressive exhaustion. He noticed everything in great detail without having any particular concern about it. He watched the waitress in the tight skirt tnd sweater which was in keeping with the area. She was quite a dish and knew it. Once a large, handsome Frenchman had come in and they had stood talking for a moment at one end of the bar while the patron glanced at them occasionally in irritation that the girl was wasting her time, although as far as Ahmed could see, there was nothing for her to do at the time. As they parted, the man had placed his hand along the girl's full breast for a moment and pressed it, at which she had smiled at him. The incident had sent a sharp, painful despair to Ahmed's heart. It was a long time since he'd had a woman. He needed a sexual outlet, but, even more, what had pained him was the recognition of belonging one to the other that he'd read in their eyes. His thoughts moved fatefully back to the visit he'd had.
He considered telling the police. But they'd be as-likely to assume that he was part of the National Liberation Front as well. They'd take his information and then beat him up and set him free. The NLF would inevitably get him. The loss of an odd killer would not make all that difference to its powerful organization. There was no work. He would have gone anywhere that there was work, back to Algeria, even although he remembered the bidonvilles with even more horror-filled suffocation than when he thought of his room. Algerians were suspect and there were not enough jobs for them and for Frenchmen as well.
Life should be simpler than this. When one wanted so little, such ordinary things.
While he mused hopelessly against a background of hopelessness, a couple of policemen with Sten guns came in and looked over his papers. They also ran their hands over him for any concealed weapons. They taunted him while they searched.
"What dirty little game are you up to-dirty little Algerian?" He didn't answer. "Too stupid to talk-you'd better not be funny with us." He still had said nothing and, not finding anything, they'd gone out of the cafe and wandered off down the boulevard looking for other people to stop and search and taunt into insulting them back so that they could manhandle somebody and take him in.
His mind had hardly rid itself of the hurt pride at this latest unpleasantness when he realized the young, successful prostitute had come in and was at the bar drinking a coffee. He glanced out through the window at the hotel door to make sure he was not mistaken and then looked back at her, excited a little at the thought that this girl had recently been ridden naked on a bed by four different men one after the other in a short anonymous blaze of passionate necessity. She showed no signs of the experiences. She looked composed and sipped her coffee with slow, deliberate gulps, staring straight across the bar at her distorted reflection in the chrome coffee machine. He understood, now, why she had done such good business. She looked quite young and fresh. He thought she must be new at the game. She was quite attractive with short, blonde hair curled up over her head and blue, almond-shaped eyes. Her lips were well-shaped, neither thin and mean in tight lines which the majority of these women tried to hide with wads of ill-applied extra lipstick; nor yet too full and sagging in the vacancy which was so often the alternative. Her nose was straight and broad at the nostrils and her chin firm and rounded with the skin drawn smoothly over her high cheekbones. She might have been an attractive schoolgirl. But her clothes were the uniform of this part of the world-a tight yellow sweater which emphasized well-shaped breasts and a tight black skirt through which the hems of slight briefs could be seen hardly protecting her nicely-rounded buttocks.
Watching her he wondered how much she was. But he thought of his 534 francs-and he'd not yet paid for his beer-and looked sadly away out of the window.
In the dark street he saw the two older whores coming across the road towards the cafe. A general strike, he thought, one would think they'd take advantage of her absence. He looked back at the girl at the bar and felt heat in his loins. He imagined her on a bed with the four men who'd had her that night. He wondered how firm her flesh was and how it felt to hold one of her buttocks in each of your hands, feeling it overflow in your fingers as you buried your despair in her and gained a brief respite from the ugly world. He wondered if she stripped entirely and what her breasts were like without clothes. And whether she just lay passively or whether she ever got excited. He wondered, finally, if she'd got syphilis or anything like that. It wouldn't take long for her to spoil, to look just like these other two old beat-up poules who came through the open door of the bar and scowled in her direction.
He transferred his attention to them, surprised at first by their hostile glances at the girl but understanding in a moment the fierce desperate jealousy they must feel not only for her youth and looks in a profession where they were all-important, but also in the suffering they underwent through loss of business.
They went to the other end of the bar and the girl didn't look at them although she must have realized they were there. She continued to sip her coffee and looked away from her reflection in the coffee machine to the inside "salle." For a further instant she glanced at Ahmed sitting alone at his table, held his eyes for a minute, probably in anticipation of another customer, and then looked away again.
Ahmed gulped to relieve the constriction of his throat. She certainly was fresh. Why, he wondered, doesn't she get a reasonable job and live a quiet, simple, pleasant life out of this hard, gaudy, brassy tinsel of Pigalle where everything is slowly destroyed through commerce and anxiety and sometimes through a bullet or acid in the eyes or a knife in the back? He was overcome with a surge of self-pity. He felt no hope. He wished he had the cocky self-confidence which he read.in the girl's face. He seemed to remember he'd had it once. But it didn't take long for a life with no work, little money and no hope to undermine the strongest morale. He wondered if he just went up and asked the girl if he could have a go for free whether she might take pity on him as she'd been so successful tonight. It was strange how, when everything else was low, when there was no hope in anything else, what he sought was a woman to help him ride the depression, as if it really made a difference to the outside reality of events ... as if.
One of the older whores had moved along the bar and placed herself next to the girl. She was saying something to her quietly and he couldn't make out the words. She looked very angry and the girl looked disdainfully defiant in return.
The other woman had stayed at the far end of the bar but now she came up next to her crony, sliding her glass of beer along the counter with her.
Suddenly the young girl raised her voice.
"Je m'en fous," he heard her say. "Qa ne me regarde pas. I have my own life to live."
The anger on the face of the older woman deepened, her eyes looked hard and dangerous and her lips were a thin, unforgiving line.
"You dirty little bitch," she snapped back. "You'll clear out of this quarter or it'll-be the worse for you."
"Leave me alone," the girl retorted, her breasts seeming to lift in pert defiance. "You can't frighten me, you old crone."
The older woman grabbed her by the hair without another word and swung her head down so that the girl's face was staring up at her in startled astonishment.
"Dirty little bitch," she rasped again. "I'll fix you."
The girl kicked out then and the woman shrieked but didn't let go of her hair. The other whore, her face wrinkled with hatred, downed her beer with a single gulp and smashed the glass on the counter.
The patron started to move round the bar but he would have been too late to save the girl's face. It was Ahmed who, propelled as if by some nervous reflex, found himself between them, knocking the glass from the woman's hand so that it smashed in a hundred splinters behind the bar and then hauling the other whore off the girl, forcing her to release her by a quick twist of her free arm.
The patron was between them too, then, and roughly pushing the older women away. A few passers-by-so quick to sense a drama-had stopped outside and were gathering in a small crowd to watch.
"Get out of here," the patron barked. "I don't want the police in here-and you'd better watch out for yourselves."
"Throw out that dirty bitch-that cutthroat little pig," one of the whores shouted as she nonetheless allowed herself to be pushed from the bar. Her companion shouted a few filthy words and spat at the crowd which hastily made way for them.
The patron came back and looked at Ahmed and the girl without smiling.
"You'd better get out, too," he said. "It's better if you've all gone by the time the police get here."
"I'll come with you," Ahmed said to the girl, "It'll be safer for you."
"All right," she said. "Thanks."
They went out in the street together. The two whores, still cursing and swearing, had wandered back towards their hotel. The crowd made way afresh for Ahmed and his companion and then began to drift off when they realized there was nothing further to see. Farther along the street, two policemen, attracted by the sight of the small crowd, were making their way quickly towards the scene.
Ahmed began to cross the road which led on from Pigalle towards Clichy. The girl glanced down at the two women who'd attacked her and then walked after him.
"I'd better not go back there tonight," she said frankly. "Tomorrow I'll have to get some protection."
Ahmed felt wet heat on his hand and glanced down at it. There were thin streaks of blood where he'd cut himself on the jagged edge of the glass.
The girl saw it too and caught hold of his hand to look.
"C'est pas grave," she said. "We can go to my place and I'll fix it for you."
"It's not important," he said. "I don't want to put you to that trouble."
"Do you think I'm attractive ?" the girl asked.
Ahmed was taken aback. Was she trying to solicit him?
"Very," he said.
"Well I wouldn't be any longer if it hadn't been for you," she said. "Come on, let's go."
They walked on through the bustle of the Boulevard de Clichy, where the noise of traffic made talking unnecessary, and turned off to the left into a quieter street.
"I thought you lived in the other hotel?" Ahmed said.
"No," she said. "That's my office."
He followed her into a quiet-looking hotel with a staircase beyond the door. The hotel-keeper didn't bother to give them a glance as they passed his lodge.
"Very nice," Ahmed permitted himself as he took in the dark shape of a single tree in a bed of earth in the centre of the cobbled courtyard.
The girl said nothing and he followed her into a small foyer and up a flight of stairs with a narrow carpet running up their centre. His eyes were just below the level of her buttocks as he followed some steps behind. Her legs were flawless and shapely and the buttocks so pert and firm-looking that he longed to reach out and touch them.
They went up to the second floor and the girl took a key from under the mat.
"They're informal here," she said. "We don't have to hang our keys on a nail like a lot of schoolchildren." She unlocked the door and switched on a light.
Ahmed followed her across the threshold into a room which was twice the size of his, better-furnished and improved by various little evidences of the personality "of its tenant. On a sort of washstand in a corner was an electric ring, which meant she cooked for herself. Ahmed felt hungry at the sight of the ring.
The girl walked to the end of the room and pulled back a curtain which he'd taken to be a makeshift closet. Beyond it was a washbasin with hot and cold taps. It was a long time since he'd seen such luxury.
"Come here," the girl said. "You can wash your hand first and then I'll bandage it."
He washed his hands, delighted at the warm caress of the water. The cuts were long but very superficial. He let the blood run in the water and suddenly remembered that he was under what amounted to sentence of death. He supposed it was the incredibility of the situation which enabled him to dismiss it from his mind so easily.
The girl straightened up from a small cabinet under the washbasin. She had a length of bandage in her hand and she stood looking at him, waiting for him to finish the cleaning. They had spoken very little.
She took his hand and he let her take it and hold it and bandage it, not because he thought a bandage necessary, but to feel her human warmth against his, to sink into an agreeable acceptance of someone else actually occupying herself in doing him a kindness. He couldn't remember the last time someone had actually done something for him as if he were a brother or even as if he meant anything at all.
Neatly, the girl tore the end of the bandage, splitting it into two thin laces and then she tied them gently around his hand, looking at him to see if it was all right or whether perhaps it was too tight.
He watched her concentrating on the task of bandaging and suddenly remembered the four men who'd sweated with her within the last few hours. The thought gave him a strange little chill in the pit of his stomach. Close up he saw that her skin was just as soft and smooth as it looked from a distance and that her features were, indeed, those of a high-school girl. He found that he no longer felt an urge towards her which was purely sexual. He wished they could spend a day in the country, lying in some field near a stream.
"There," she said. "That's the best I can do."
"Thank you," he said. "The cuts are really nothing.'
There was a short silence. Neither seemed to know whether they should now end the brief relationship which had sprung up. Each seemed a little shy.
Ahmed looked away round the room and remarked on what a nice little place it was. The girl followed his eyes as if she'd never really looked at the room herself before and agreed that it was pleasant enough.
"Would you like a cup of coffee?" she asked as he made no move to leave.
"But you must be tired," he said. "I don't want to trouble you.
She gave him a quick glance from her almond-shaped eyes. She sensed a trace of sarcasm in his voice, but she wasn't quite sure.
"It's not all that tiring to lie on your back and have things done to you," she said, as if to show him that she wasn't ashamed of what she did.
He held her glance and then smiled.
"Well in that case-yes, I'd like some coffee," he said.
She reached up and opened the top section of a cupboard, standing on tiptoe so that the muscle of her calf contracted and stood out and the skirt pulled tighter around her buttocks which hollowed obviously through the material. He envied all four of the men who'd had her.
Inside the cupboard when it swung open he saw packets of biscottes, a few tins of things and several eggs. He licked his lips, hunger rising up in him in a tormenting wave. The girl turned round with a tin of Nescafe in her hand and saw his eyes, aching and fixed on the food.
"Are you hungry?" she asked, in surprise.
"Yes," he said, simply.
She reached up again and brought down some of the eggs and a packet of biscottes.
"There's really not much here at the moment," she said. "But if you really want something to eat this will keep away the worst pangs."
He sat down on her bed and she busied herself with preparations for a scratchy meal. He supposed that if they'd messed up her face she would really have lost all hope of future business for a time. It was a small thing for her to fry him a few eggs.
"When did you eat?" she asked.
"Oh I have some bread and pate most days," he said, not answering her question directly. "And often I buy some chips and a sausage."
Arranging a small saucepan on the heater, she glanced round at him briefly as if she were reconsidering him.
"No work?"
"No," he said. "Not for some time."
"What were you doing?"
"I worked in several factories but there were always too many Frenchmen looking for jobs."
She nodded sympathetically. That's what got me," she said. "There were always too many women looking for jobs-and what wretched jobs, for what wretched pittances."
"I guess you make quite a bit now."
She straightened up from buttering a couple of biscottes and looked him straight in the eyes. When people asked questions like that they were usually wondering how much they could make out of you. It hadn't taken her long to find out what a hard, selfish world it was. He looked back at her, knowing what she thought. He'd had the same thought himself so often.
"I don't want to know," he said. "It's just that it's fascinating to see someone being successful at anything on the level on which we operate."
"I don't do too badly," she said, relaxing. "But I have to pay some of it to the syndicate."
"Uh-huh." He didn't want to sound interested any longer.
"Still," she said, "it would be much more difficult without them. They'll give me protection tomorrow from those old crones.
She made the coffee and put a small frying pan on the heater. Soon an oily aroma of eggs was steaming through the room. She sat down next to him on the bed and they both sipped the coffee from cups without saucers. She sat in a relaxed, not unfriendly manner. She seemed to begin to feel quite pleased that he was there and she had someone to talk to. Her commerce with men enabled her, when the mask of invitation was rejected, to talk to him quite naturally and without coquettry as she might have done with another woman.
"When will you get work?" she asked.
"Who knows," he said. "I try all the time."
' It must be difficult to live."
He shrugged at the understatement. He didn't really feel like discussing it and he remembered, now, the shadow which hung over him.
"It's not a very pleasant life," he said. "But when the NLF begin to get tough it makes everything else seem a trivial trial."
She took the eggs off the heater and reached up to the cupboard for plates. Her breasts rose up tautly under the sweater and a loose fold of skirt furrowed above the protrusion of the buttocks.
"You owe them money."
"Yes."
"What happens if you can't pay?" He ran his hand across his throat.
"Really," she said. "Even if you just can't pay?"
"They're quite happy if some people can't pay," he said. "It gives them a reason for liquidating them and that keeps everybody else in order."
She passed him a plate with two eggs and a thickly buttered biscotte. Her eyes were clouded with disgust.
"Will you be able to pay?"
He shook his head slowly.
"I had my last warning today," he said. "There's nothing to be done. I can't pay them."
"Can't you get away?"
"Where? How? On what? My only chance of work is here. Elsewhere I'd have no hope but slow starvation."
"But the police?. . . "
"Perhaps you'll get to know the police some day. But for your sake I hope not."
"How much do they want from you."
"Three thousand francs."
After a minute or two of silence she said: "It's such a small sum really."
He didn't answer. He was tired of it. He didn't want to think about it.
"So what are you going to do?"
He shrugged again. He didn't know what he was going to do. He had never thought of himself as a fatalist, but there was a great streak of it in him.
"How can you just wait for them to kill you?" she said, with a little burst of vehemence.
"There's nothing I can do," he said. "Perhaps they won't kill me after all." He didn't add what was after all an unformed thought in his mind: that life gets to such a pitch of dull hopelessness and monotony that giving it up does not seem such a terrible thing.
"I'll give you the money."
She said it in a matter-of-fact, undramatic way, this, that simply sweeping away the difference of life and death for him. He was surprised that he felt no emotion except one of pleasure that she was willing to give him the money. Some perversity in him even brought out an argument.
"But can you afford that much-and why should you do this for me?"
"Good God," she said. "You don't place your life very highly."
"I've lost most of the feeling I ever had about life. It doesn't seem to amount to very much."
She reached out involuntarily and touched his hand, a light touch which she withdrew immediately as if ashamed of showing any emotion.
"I will give you the money," she said. "And you can eat here with me every day ... " she petered out searching for a reason to explain what she'd just heard herself say. "It's terrible ... it's ... inhuman not to care about life."
Ahmed ben Lulla was astonished to hear her talking in this way and to recognize that she had conceived a sudden overwhelming pity for him. He felt unworthy of pity. He felt in no sense tragic; his existence had just become a sordid headache.
"You are very kind," he said. "It will be a great burden on you ... "
"It will be nothing of the sort," she said. "I happen to think that human life is ... is sacred. We do lots of things which are not very nice, but to throw away life for a few thousand francs ... it's too terrible to even think about."
He sat there, staring at her. It was on his lips to say: "I've never heard a prostitute so concerned with her fellow men before," but he stifled the words in his throat and said nothing.
She stood up, reaching again into the cupboard, and he found his eyes drawn yet again to the curve of her bottom. Now that she had become definitely involved with him of her own free will, he saw possession of those buttocks as a distinct possibility. He looked away, suddenly a little ashamed of his secret thoughts which were so hard and selfish compared with hers.
She tipped a little pile of fruit onto the bed-bananas and oranges.
"Help yourself-and peel me an orange," she said. "I have to clean up."
He skinned a banana and then began to peel an orange, biting first through the skin and then levering the thick peel away with his thumbnail. The girl stepped into the small alcove where the washbasin was and pulled off her sweater. Ahmed stared, his heart quickening, as, completely unconcerned about his presence, she turned on taps and gathered things from a little cabinet below. Her brassiere covered her breasts fully, but it was made of a strong-looking but very thin material through which he thought he could see the color of her skin. Certainly there was a darker patch where her nipple stabbed out.
Ahmed had let the half-peeled orange fall into his lap. He was guiltily unable to take his eyes from the girl. When she had arranged the things she needed-talcum powder, perfume, soap on a small shelf below the mirror above the basin-she turned to pull the curtain across and caught his eyes. It took a second or two for her to realize that he was staring at her and then she glanced quickly down at her breasts and up at him again as if a recognition of their sexual difference had only just occurred to her. She pulled the curtain across with a slow, thoughtful movement and he could no longer see her.
Slowly he ate the banana. He studied the room, the long window, the little table with some cinema magazines on it and a French-English phrase-book. The phrase-book reminded him that she made her money by opening her thighs. He wondered how many GIs she'd entertained and how many words she managed to say to them in English. He noticed that she even had a small radio and he wondered again how much she charged.
His eyes wandered back to the alcove. He could hear her slithering out of her skirt. She was getting rid of the sweat and semen of the past hours, he thought, freshening up after the day's work. He stared at the curtain as if he'd pierce it with his eyes, but he couldn't see anything, except its occasional movement as she brushed against it.
After several minutes she said to him: "There's a dressing gown in the cupboard. Will you pass it to me?"
He opened the cupboard and saw the thick dressing gown on a hook in a line of skirts and sweaters and blouses and one decent-looking suit.
The girl extended a long bare arm between the curtain and the edge of the alcove and he put the dressing gown over it. After a few minutes more, she came out with the dressing gown swathed around her, knotted tightly by the cord around her waist. In her hands she carried the skirt and sweater and some underclothes which she flung into the bottom of the cupboard. She seemed very unconcerned about her nudity under the dressing gown, but Ahmed felt a little shiver tremble through his chest.
She sat down on the edge of the bed and took the orange which he held out to her.
"God, what a relief," she said. "I feel a new person."
"You look fine," he said. Any trace of tiredness seemed to have been washed away. Her eyes looked softer as if they had relaxed with her body, her face had a slight flush from washing. She hadn't bothered to put on any cosmetics and now he saw that her skin was fresh and school-girlish. She still looked good without any makeup. It was difficult to think of her as a prostitute.
She glanced quickly at him over a bite of orange. It was as if any hint of sexual reference took her by surprise, as if she hadn't yet quite equated them as man and woman.
"Are you still hungry?" she asked.
"No."
She had asked the question as if she wanted to avoid a silence after his compliment and he answered her as if he preferred the silence to remain.
They sat looking at each other without speaking. Her lips embraced and then swallowed quarters of orange which she chewed gently, her cheeks hollowing, her eyes thoughtful.
"You really look fine," he repeated.
She looked at him warily. He couldn't understand what thoughts she was hiding behind the alert watchfulness in her eyes. She seemed purposely ready to set up a barrier and he said with a sudden passionate bitterness: "But you'll lose it all before you realize what's happening."
"Oh, nonsense," she said, as if she'd often had this argument with other people, or perhaps with herself.
"You've seen them," he said. "You've seen their slack bodies, their pockmarked faces, those worn faces and dull eyes. It's inevitable."
"It's just that they're stupid," she said. "They don't know how to look after themselves and they don't bother either. It's quite unnecessary to become an old slut at 30 in any case I'm not going to be lectured by you or anyone else."
He relapsed into silence, surprised at his own vehemence. Thinking about what she was and how she'd be was like standing by and watching some beautiful bird dashing itself against the bars of a cage until it was reduced to a straggling mess of feathers.
Goaded by his sad eyes looking at her, the girl added: "I want money. I want to have enough money to buy the things I want and this is the only way I can get it. Nobody forced me into this and I had a good, ordinary job with no prospects before I started it." Her voice seemed to fan out like a cat's back bristling.
"I can get 3,000 francs a time and I give a thousand to the syndicate. I've made 8,000 francs for myself tonight and I can do twice as well as that. How else could anyone my age be getting that sort of money? I'm not Francoise Sagan and I'm not Brigitte Bardot and there's no other way to make it."
"It's your life," Ahmed said. "It's just that I find you so attractive that-maybe I feel a little jealous."
"Jealous!" she said.
"But if I had 3,000 francs," he went on, "I'd be wanting to go to bed with you, so that wouldn't exactly be consistent with the tone of what I've just said."
"Is that how you'd think of it, too?" she asked. "You'd give me 3,000 francs and then use my body and forget about it?"
"Is that exactly how it seems to you with all the rest of them? " he countered.
"Oh, the first few times I was nervous and I got excited," she said, frankly. "But afterwards it became just something I did without caring. It's really very easy not to be moved by the whole thing."
"I suppose it is," he said. "I wouldn't like it that way. I'd prefer to spend 3,000 francs on beer if I knew you were going to be as indifferent as that."
"Why should it matter to you?"
"I like things like that to be a little more human," he said. "Like you, I have ideas about human life."
She studied his face, searching it with her blue, almond eyes. A fleeting trace of something close to longing fled across her face and then she seemed to snuff it out.
She stood up and went to the basin to rinse her fingers under the tap and after watching her for a moment he got up too and stood behind her, looking at her in the mirror. He felt all of a sudden an inevitability about their having met. It moved him to a feeling of closeness with her which he wanted more than anything to communicate, but which he knew was made so difficult by what she was and what she expected in the attitudes of men towards her.
She saw him in the glass and stared back at him for a long moment. Then she turned slowly to face him, looking up at his eyes as if again trying to read his thoughts. The longing had moved into her eyes again and was not yet, this time, snuffed out.
"I could fall in love with you," he said.
She went on looking at him, her eyes questioning and a little sad and then he leaned forward and kissed her. For a moment she made no response and he took his mouth from hers and said: "If you don't believe me or if it doesn't matter to you I'll go now."
And then she moved in towards him and kissed him and her lips swallowed his and seemed to draw the soul df his feelings out through his mouth. He put his arms around her and pulled her body gently in against his so that he could feel her warmth along him. They didn't use their tongues as if in this first moment they each wanted to show that there was something more than just sexuality in their action.
When their faces moved apart she smiled at him.
"It's so-so different to hear you say that," she said.
"I don't care if you don't really feel it, just as long as I can feel that for once somebody feels something."
He kissed her again and then ran his lips over her face as if they were sensitive fingers tracing the lines of her features. She slipped her hands round him and linked them in the small of his back as she searched out his lips and locked them with her mouth And this time he moved his lips, sucking on hers, and her tongue slithered out into his mouth and he felt a growing weight in his loins.
"Do you feel like it?" he said. "Or are you tired?"
"I feel more like it than I ever have before," she said softly.
He felt now a vague jealousy for all those other times she'd been had that very night. He wanted to ask her questions: "Did you have an orgasm? Did you get excited? How does this feel different? Did you undress completely? Did you put your tongue in their mouths? What did their groans of passion sound like? Did any of them hurt you?. . . " But instead the questions joined in an unvoiced whiplash to his own passion, as if with his lovemaking he wanted to wipe away all memory she might have of previous occasions.
He ran his lips down her neck, drawing Little red marks from her soft skin. He saw a bruise already there and the sight of it made him want to get into her immediately, almost to punish her with his love for the bruise she had allowed to be given her in the heat of someone else's passion and perhaps her own.
He reached down to the cord of her dressing gown and unknotted it so that it fell open and her bare skin was pressed against his body. He slipped it from her shoulders and she slithered her arms out of it, letting it drop to the floor. He ran his hands over her back and down to her bottom, letting his fingers revel on the firm skin, his loins tingling, his whole body trembling at the feel of her nakedness, so firm and resilient.
He moved his face down her body, finding her breasts which were as firm and full as he'd expected and which responded to his kissing with a tautening of the nipples. He drew his fingers gently along their bulging sides, from her ribs round to the nipple, just his fingertips. And then he bit her smudge of nipple gently so that she gasped and clasped his head.
With a pulsing in his jeans, he pushed her back to the bed and slithered down her body as she sat back on the edge of the bed. He thought again of those who had possessed her within the last few hours. Those who had done what he was doing, perhaps produced the same reactions in her, and he ran his lips over the flat, little belly and down between her thighs, which she opened with a little moan.
Between them he found the warm lips and licked them with a tongue which, too, seemed to tremble and tingle. His tongue entered her, its moisture mingling with her own and she slipped forward on the bed, moaning and held his head against her crotch.
He licked and sucked and found her clitoris moving up to erection. He fastened on it and she began to wriggle her hips in little, contracting movements as if she was trying to control her passion.
Her quim had opened and there was a perfumed moisture on his tongue. She smelt of perfumed soap and her skin, the skin of her thighs which clasped his face in a gently, never-still embrace, was soft and sweet-smelling.
He felt her hands on his head, trying to pull him up. She wanted him now and he stood up, quickly, stripping off his clothes. She lay back on the bed with her eyes closed, her body wracked with heaving breath. Her body was just as lovely as it seemed in her sweater and that tight skirt. They didn't lie. She was firm and youthful and hebody was full of vigor and passion.
Naked, he moved over and knelt beside her, running his hands over her breasts, her stomach, her thighs, up and down over her nakedness with trembling hands which brought out a response of gasping and quivering from her.
She opened her eyes and pulled his head down on hers, her tongue searching immediately with a strong, rigid pressure as if she wanted him to emulate her movement with his penis in her.
"Now darling, now," she breathed.
Again he saw the bruise on her neck and it made his stiff prick a hot pulsation which throbbed against her thigh so that she could feel its scorching heat like a stick of hot metal.
He ran his hands over her and rummaged between her thighs which opened to admit him and stayed open, moving continuously in a little passionate tremulation.
"It was never like this," she whispered, choking on her words.
Her words seemed to ease the painfulness of his desire to punish her for the existence of the bruise and he moved over, slithering on her body, feeling it warm and springy under him, feeling it quiver helplessly.
She reached down under her thighs which she drew up gently and he felt her cool hand on his prick. Her hand stabbed a shock into his rigid flesh and his uncircumcised foreskin ripped back and she gently guided him at her vagina until he could feel the moist, fleshy warmth against his prick waiting for its entry.
"Darling, darling!" she whispered, losing the words in a groan which broadened and deepened as he thrust into her.
Her moist heat clamped him like a warm, resisting jelly, and he barked a gasp out into the room and began to give quick, aching thrusts up into her vagina, thrusts which slowed and lengthened as he filled her yielding passage to greater and greater depth.
Under him her body quivered and trembled and her nipples pushed into him with a pointed, erect pressure; her warm belly brushed against his and her thighs clamped and undamped, holding and releasing him in waves of flesh-warmth and air-coolness.
"Oh-oh," he groaned as he felt her quim squeezing along the length of his cock which seemed to expand and maintain a point just below bursting point.
"Darling, darling," she whispered over and over again as she bucked and writhed under him. Her face moved from side to side, marks appeared on her lips where she bit them and every so often her mouth came against his and her teeth bit into him and she sucked his tongue and forced her own between his lips, panting warm breath into his throat.
With her pinioned by his arm of thick flesh, he thought again of the others who'd had her in just this way, holding her with big, horny hands, digging up into her most intimate core with big, blunt pricks, producing from her just such gasps and perhaps movement while they groaned and sobbed out their coarse male passion into her slim, delicate girl body.
He felt a chill course down his spine at the thought and gave an extra hard thrust which seared into her and brought forth a throat-rasping groan: "Ooooh! Yes, darling ... please."
Did she ask them when they fucked her "Ooooh yes darling ... please?" He lunged again, stabbing in in a bludgeoning thrust which tore roughly deep into her cunt and she groaned and murmured: "Oh Cod! God!"
He slipped his hands down her sides and slid them under her moving buttocks, clasping them one in each hand, remembering that that was the very thought he'd had, of holding her buttocks, bare, in his hands.
They were tensing and untensing, firm, hollowed and then relaxed and oozing around his fingers which he dug into their orbs with fierce pressure. Her pulled her hips against him as he in-thrust and felt her pull back her thighs a little more.
He slipped his fingers over the taut, stretched flesh of her rump and found the unconcealed anus, smooth and hot and working itself as she tensed and relaxed.
He dug it with a finger and it yielded and his finger, a replica of his rod, moved into soft, warm depths, bringing new gasps and exclamations from her ever-working lips. He intruded another and felt the tight resistance slowly give as she screwed her anus back on his fingers and soon both were moving and circling in her and she was impaled in both her orifices and wriggling in abandon under the dual rifling.
Her legs, on cither side of his impaling, were jerking and writhing like puppet legs in abandon. He felt their warm fleshy pressure as they held him tight and then they would move off and she would pull them up to her shoulders or sling them out at right angles to her hips, moaning and gasping continuously.
Her eyes were closed; all the time her mouth worked and trembled and her neck was strained as she thrust back her head in the intensity of her feeling.
Ahmed was aware of no part of his body but his heavy, too-full prick which moved deeply in and out of her, lovingly clasped in the excruciating warmth of her. He moved his fingers from her rectum, sliding them down through her crotch, tracing where buttocks ran into thighs and then feeling the soft folds of flesh and his own prick moving into her, making those folds yield and give way as they held his organ in a tight, contracting grip.
He stroked and pinched the folds and she jerked and cried out afresh. She was almost whining and the heat from her body seemed to envelop him.
"Oh, darling, darling!" she moaned. Her voice rose on a high, gasping note. "Now, now ... coming ... coming ... farrive!" she groaned and choked.
He felt the sudden widening of her hole, the relaxing of the pressure of his penis and then the liquid surrounding him as if he were stabbing his rod into a lake.
Hot and pulsating, he quickened the rate of his thrusts as she continued to moan, more gently. He felt his own passion reaching up to a pin-point of highly-defined sensation at the very tip of his prick, all gathering in the aching knob of his organ.
For the last time he thought of those others who had reached this stage, about to pump their heart into her quim, with her lying under them, accepting their passion, their semen with widespread legs and breasts which dug warmly into their hairy chests.
He gripped her buttocks and squeezed with a pulverizing pressure, feeling her cringe, wanting in a strange way to hurt her as he reached up and up to that culminating point.
"Oh-oh-oh-oh!" He grunted and groaned and slowed his stroke, grinding slowly and deep so that his abdomen smacked firmly against the flanges of her sex and his stiffness reached to its farthest point in the recesses of her body. He felt himself coming and pulled back her thighs to her shoulders, hearing her moan and applying all the pressure of his body down there at his loins and the long aching finger which drove into her.
"Daaaaarling!"
With a sudden wet, warm relief which was too much to bear he shot into her and he shot and shot and shot into her all the pent-up emotion of weeks in a greut, overwhelming relief which her body encouraged him in.
Trembling, he relaxed on her and she put her arms around him and lay there against him, neither of them speaking for several minutes.
"It was never-never-like that," she whispered.
His passion relieved, he no longer cared about the bruise on her neck which was somebody else's doing. He felt comfortable and pleasant lying close to her other human warmth.
"I'm glad," he said. "I don't want it ever to be like that for you with anyone else."
When they both fell asleep it was without any worry shadowing their dreams. Their difficulties for the moment seemed not to exist. Such is the moment of discovering another human being.