by Lucy Taylor
Santos leaned forward, pressed his full mouth to hers. His lips parted. Val entered him with her tongue, probing, thrusting, then . . .
She pulled back, skin goosefleshing, with a cry of dismay.
Santos grinned at her, opened his mouth wide for her inspection. His mouth was empty, a vacant cave, the stump of tongue a grey cauterized root deep in his throat. He gave a gurgling, half-formed sound, a kind of muffled oink.
Scarcely flinching, Val snatched up her handbag and dug out a pen and paper. “Answer my questions,” she commanded. “Write it down.”
Santos held the pen as if it were a foreign object. At the top of the page, he scrawled an “X.” Val asked again and got the same response. The boy was either illiterate or pretending to be so. His cock, however, was far more communicative. Fully erect now, it pressed lewdly against Val’s belly. She slapped the offending piece of meat aside and began to dress.
Santos would tell her nothing, and she was furious. But in another way, she realized, perhaps he’d told her more than she really cared to know. That made her even angrier and, perversely, more anxious than ever before to see the City.
“You didn’t keep him very long. He must have disappointed you.”
One green lynx eye winked at her above a full mouth uptilted at one corner with bemusement: the pretty young thing from the bar. He’d come up beside her when she left the club and fallen into step.
“He was fine,” Val said. “Quite worth what I paid.”
“Except he’s maimed.”
“Not where it counts.”
“Unless you purchased him more for what you hoped he’d say than what he’d do.”
“I didn’t buy the boy for conversation.”
“Oh, didn’t you?”
Val stopped. They were walking along a narrow street, still in the St. Pauli district, but a good mile north of the Reeperbahn’s famed glitz – all neon, sizzle, and glare – and a hundred years away in atmosphere. Here, winding cobbled streets converged and serpentined, dead-ended and then reemerged, a medieval maze of narrow, gabled houses illuminated by pale cones of incandescent light thrown by iron streetlamps. Alone, Val had been content to wander, even at this hour. Now she considered summoning a taxi and going back to the hotel where she’d left the overnight bag with the few belongings she’d seen fit to bring from Geneva. Tomorrow perhaps she would fly back, resume her tryst with her Nagasaki Romeo, assuming he’d not found other company himself.
She turned and stared into those feline eyes, darkly flecked with green and amber.
“Who are you?”
“Majeed,” the boy said, extending a pale, long-fingered hand which Val ignored.
“Why are you following me?”
“I’m not following you. I only thought perhaps I might offer you what Santos, with his unfortunate speech impediment, could not. I know you came here seeking information about the City. It’s possible that I could help. But now I see I’m only bothering you. You want a hard cock like your little slave’s, and here I’m offering you merely words. I’ll leave. I wouldn’t wish to force my company on you.”
He turned to go and Val let him – for six paces. Then curiosity overcame her pride and she called out, “Wait. You’re right. I didn’t come to Das K for a hard cock. I came for information.”
As it turned out, however, Majeed apparently had both. Val took note of the bulge in the tight jeans, sculpted to the youth’s body. Majeed told her he had an apartment merely blocks away, but when they arrived, his “home” turned out to be a dilapidated hotel, the kind where rooms are rented by the hour and the sheets are blotchy with questionable stains.
“You will come in with me?” Majeed pulled Val into the shadows. He slid a hand behind her neck, pressed his mouth to hers, enticing her with a lithe tongue made all the more erotic by its equivalent’s repulsive absence in her most recent lover’s mouth. The boy smelled of musk and cloves, his lips flavored with the lingering trace of mint liqueur. He sucked and nibbled Val’s lower lip as one would suck the pulp from a slice of citron.
Val reached down to massage the sweet protuberance at Majeed’s groin, but he took her hand away, kissed the perfumed wrist and palm and laid it on his shoulder.
“You aren’t afraid?” he said. “To go late at night to the room of a man you barely know?”
Val scrutinized those subtly slanted eyes. She’d been with dangerous men before; it was, in fact, her preference. She’d taken chances all her life and was not about to change her habits now.
“There’s only one thing I really fear,” she said, “and that’s not being free to do what the fuck I please.”
Majeed laughed. “Oh really? So what if I were to shackle you to the bed and walk away? Just leave?”
“That might be exciting.”
“And if I never came back?”
“You would.”
Majeed unlocked the outer door to his derelict abode. They crossed an inner courtyard to a second door which Majeed unlocked, then ascended three flights of stairs. The room into which he ushered Val smelled of herbs and incense, the heady fragrance of decaying temples, untended gardens. The narrow bed was made up with a brocade spread worn thin in places, its gold fringe trailing upon a grimy floor. Scant decoration. On the walls a crucifix; in the windowsills, a treasure trove of incense burners in every shape and size: a gold Buddha and cloisonné-style jar, a terra-cotta pagoda. Majeed selected one and lit an incense stick. The room filled with cloying fragrance, orchids past their prime or rotting camellias.
“So you know about the City?” Val began. “Is it even half-true what I’ve heard, that Sodom and Gomorrah would seem places of sweet innocence and childlike games by comparison?”
“Not having visited either Sodom or Gomorrah, I wouldn’t know.”
“But you have visited the City?”
“Perhaps. Or maybe I’m just another drugged-out sicko suffering delusions.”
“Either way, you must have some tasty stories.”
“Which I will tell you,” said Majeed, “but first, lie down with me.”
Fondly, with neither undue haste nor passion, he began disrobing her. Val allowed it, finding in the movements of the boy’s long fingers a mesmerizing languor. As he undressed her, Majeed kissed her neck and eyelids, her nipples and the cleft, still moist from Santos’s use, between her legs. His tongue flicked and traced the plump curves of flesh from her clit to the puckered bud between her buttocks.
“Now you,” said Val. Kneeling, she unzipped Majeed, whose heavy, uncut cock lolled out into her mouth. She peeled back the foreskin, rimmed and licked the velvet head before swallowing the length of it.
Majeed had still made no move toward taking off his clothes. Perhaps, as he had undressed her, he wished to be undressed himself, Val thought. She stood up and began unfastening the buttons of his vest. Pulling this off, she commenced with the shirt itself, working open half a dozen tiny pearl buttons until she could fold back the silk – to reveal a pair of breasts bound tightly to Majeed’s chest by a bra designed to minimize.
Val had seen transsexuals before, but had never partnered one. She hadn’t expected this oddity of Majeed. She tried not to show her surprise, but it must have registered on her face for Majeed was smiling, enjoying – as he must always savor it – the look on a new lover’s face when he unveiled himself.
Val rolled the tight bra up and over Majeed’s head. His breasts were unexpectedly full, with small nipples rouged as dark as straw-berries. Val sucked one into her mouth. Majeed moaned and arched his back.
“You’re a man on his way to becoming a woman?”
Majeed laughed and pulled her down with him onto the bed.
“Guess again.”
“A woman on her way – well on her way – to becoming a man?”
“Neither.”
“Then . . .”
“Why don’t you finish undressing me?”
Val stooped to remove Majeed’s shoes and socks. He lifted narrow
hips while she tugged down his jeans. His erection bobbed. At the base: two small but perfectly formed testicles. Behind those, where in most men the perineum would be, a moist and parted slit shaved hairless as an egg. It gaped at Val, a single eye, defined by pink and fleshy lids.
“A vagina.” Val gazed in wonder at this miracle. She touched the fleshy, dangling labia, then inserted a finger inside Majeed’s cunt. He contracted inner muscles, seized and squeezed.
And laughed again, causing breasts and cock to wobble in jarring juxtaposition.
In all her wandering, all her years of sex in strange places among foreign people, Val had never before encountered such a creature. Now, confronted with this marvel, she felt both aroused and awestruck.
“You’re splendid,” she told Majeed. “Unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
“Any one you’ve ever seen,” Majeed corrected her. “I’m not a freak, you understand, though some people think me one. I’m a hermaphrodite.”
“When you were born, your parents . . . what did they . . .?”
“They were appalled, to say the least. They said I was a monster, or so I’m told, and sent me to a home in Lexington for freaks and retards.”
“And since then?”
“I’ve lived as a man. I could have an operation to make me more conventional – a chop job or a stitch job, as it were – but I was born like this. I’ll die like this. But in the meantime, I prefer to be a male.”
“Why is that?”
“It’s the females that fall in love, isn’t that usually the case? I don’t need that weakness.”
Val gazed up into eyes as emerald as the towers of OZ. “So you’ll be a man tonight?”
“As always.”
Majeed lay back upon the bed. Val mounted him. Grinding her hips upon his cock, she reached back to fingerfuck his pussy. She bent forward; their breasts met and mashed together as she sucked on Majeed’s lips and sent her tongue exploring the crevices and contours of his mouth.
They made love in all the ways and combinations that Majeed’s wondrous anatomy allowed. For the first time in months, Val was able – for a little while – to forget about the City. For surely in Majeed she’d found a prize to please a sultan, the dream-lover of all who hunger for the novel, the bizarre, and yes, Val thought, the freakish, too. Despite his protestations, Majeed was unquestionably a freak, though one of unsurpassing elegance and beauty and, yes, femaleness, too.
To take Majeed’s erect cock in her mouth, then dip below and lap and tongue-fuck his pussy was a dizzying excursion into androgyny. To reach up to squeeze those silky breasts while the owner of those breasts drove his cock into her throat, these were pleasures beyond all Val’s experience, Majeed’s strange beauty an intoxicant of the most seductive sort.
They lay together afterward, hermaphrodite and woman, in a sidelong embrace, genitals still locked together in a gentle clench. From the courtyard down below footsteps sounded. They drew nearer, ascending the inner stairs, and approached along the apartment corridor.
Although his face bore no change of expression, Val could feel Majeed’s muscles tense. His cock, well-drained, slid out of her with a soft smacking sound.
“Don’t make a sound,” Majeed whispered.
The footsteps stopped outside the door.
Val’s head was still on Majeed’s breast. She could hear his heart tripling its pace. She held her breath.
“Majeed?” The voice was teasingly seductive and well modulated, a foreign-sounding voice that twisted with difficulty around the German sounds. “Majeed, my love, I know you’re in there.”
The doorknob turned, but the door was both deadbolted and chained.
The voice dropped to a near whisper and said with renewed cajolery, “Open the door, you little cunt.”
There was something about the voice that made Val’s heart commence a sprint into her gorge. It was too soft, too honeyed, the voice of a corrupt priest saying prayers while fondling an acolyte in the confessional. And its persuasiveness reached entrails deep, for even as a part of her was terrified, there was another part longing to unlock the door.
“Come on, you pretty little turd. Unlock the door and show me what you’ve brought home to desecrate tonight. You know how much I like to watch you whore around. So let me in, and I won’t hurt you too much.”
Val looked at Majeed, who’d gone bone white and appeared almost spellbound with terror. For some reason, she had the feeling that the talk outside the door was some kind of game, that had the owner of the voice desired to, he could have broken the door open without a moment’s pause.
“You piece of cum-encrusted shit, you worthless bitch! You know this will only make me hurt you worse when I next see you. And I will see you again. You can’t run from me. You need me. You can’t survive without me.”
Those last words scared Val most of all, for something in Majeed’s entranced stare argued for their veracity. Nor did she expect the sweet-voiced brute beyond the door to leave peacefully. She was sure that in another instant the door would be kicked in.
But no blow came. There was silence for a few minutes, the would-be intruder evidently remaining where he was, listening no doubt, for signs of someone inside the room. To Val this ticking quiet was far more ominous than taunts and threats. The idea of someone lurking in silence just outside the door, pretending not to be there but waiting for a chance to pounce or plotting his next move, aroused long-buried terrors. Her phobia of being trapped slid into consciousness like a stiletto blade parting fat and muscle. She lay motionless in Majeed’s trembling embrace, but she could feel the old fears swirling and spiraling around her, rising up to fill her chest, her throat, her mind, like flood waters above a drowned village.
“You little trick, I know you’re there. Go ahead and have your fun tonight, but when I come back for you, you’ll pay and pay until you can’t stop screaming.”
The footfalls, a soft and shuffling tread, receded along the corridor.
Val breathed again. She leaped out of bed and crouched down below the windowsill, ignoring Majeed’s protests. Presently, a figure emerged into the courtyard, a man in late middle age, tall and stooped, almost emaciated, but with a lush mane of jet hair threaded through with white that fell around his shoulders.
“Get down!” Majeed hissed.
The man crossing the courtyard paused and turned, directing his gaze toward the window through which Val peered. The room was dark, the courtyard lit with moon. She was sure he couldn’t see her, and yet, she felt a frisson of both dread and longing, repugnance mixed with lust, as his eyes turned in her direction.
For an instant, just before he turned away again, she experienced the tang of want and craven need: it chilled her utterly.
“Goddamn it, don’t let him see you!”
“It’s all right. His back is turned. He’s leaving.”
Majeed cleared his throat, as though reaching for an offhand way to phrase his question, and said, “What does he look like?”
“What do you mean ‘what does he look like’? Don’t you know?”
“Sometimes he wears . . . disguises.”
“Well, tonight he looks like one of those carved saints from the Day of the Dead in Mexico. Like he doesn’t eat enough and never loves.”
“Yes,” sighed Majeed, as though that description were all too familiar to him.
“Who is he?”
“Just someone I’ve had some business dealings with.”
“What’s his name?”
“Why do you care?”
“I want to know.”
“Dominick Filakis.”
“Your pimp?”
Majeed did not reply, but got out of bed and put a fresh stick of sandalwood in one of the incense burners on the sill. In the gray, rain-washed light of coming dawn, Val could see the ridges of his spine bisecting broad shoulders and tapered waist, the incongruous silhouette of full breasts as he turned again to face her.
“You’re a prostitute,
” said Val.
“You say that like it surprises you.”
“Very little surprises me.”
“Then you haven’t looked hard enough.”
The room filled with scents of sandalwood and strawberries that mingled with the smell of sex to form a heady musk. Majeed slid back into the bed, pressed his persimmon lips to Val’s.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to charge you. You’re not a trick.”
“Why not?”
“You asked about the City. Not many people even know about it, and fewer still want to go there. They value life too much.”
Val breathed in semen, musk, and flowers. She reached up, tongued Majeed’s closed eyes. “Life hasn’t got much value if it isn’t lived. I lost a big part of my life a long time ago, and I’ll never get it back. I made a vow to live what’s left me to my own satisfaction.”
Majeed sighed. “Spoken like a true Lost Child. One who never had a childhood.”
“You could say that.”
“You’ll have to tell me about it.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But we’re going to be together, aren’t we? That is, if you still want to see the City.”
Val felt her pulse and heartbeat quicken. Her mind spun an erotic web – of decadence past imagining, depravities beyond the capacity of the mind to comprehend, and those few elect, the connoisseurs of flesh who would endure anything in order to experience everything.
“I’m leaving for the City tomorrow,” Majeed said.
“You mean today?” said Val, nodding toward the window, where meager flecks of light managed to penetrate the shade, illuminated the cobra shape of scented smoke arising from the incense burner.
“Today, yes, after we get some sleep.”
“Filakis, will he come back?”
“Not today,” Majeed said, cat-stretching with a languid ease. “He has others to police. I’m small fry in his game plan. By the time he loses patience and kicks the door in, we’ll be halfway to Africa.”
“Africa?”
“I didn’t tell you? That’s where the City is. At least, that’s where the entrance is.”
He took Val’s hand and guided it underneath the covers, passing over his erection to the moist and avid opening beneath it.