I Was Waiting for You

by Maxim Jakubowski

  The light.

  The room.

  The bed…

  Jack dropped his luggage to the carpeted floor. Opened the window slightly to let some air in and lowered the heat level on the thermostat.

  He sat himself on the corner of the bed. Closed his eyes. Opened them again. It made no difference. He could still see the long silhouette of her pale body spread across the double bed, her legs apart, her slight breasts barely hillocks amongst the blinding, white landscape of her torso as she lay on her back and earth’s gravity pummelled them down to almost non-existence, the soft brown pinkness of her nipples like two minuscule beacons in the sea of flesh. The billion ebony dark curls in her hair washing over the sheets. The way the sun on a summer day past had caressed her dormant skin as its rays whispered their way through the open windows and caressed her nakedness.

  It was as if she were still here.

  Or maybe it was the ghost of her, following him along from country to country, from hotel room to hotel room, like a Flying Dutchman’s curse as he sought to escape her memory. But he knew inside he never would. You don’t forget the unforgettable.

  His brain cells, out of control, now began to focus on all the sharper details of her anatomy, the angles, the curves, the indelible memories of her softness, the smell of her breath, the colour of her teeth, the longing and the thousand questions ever present in her eyes and it was like yet another stab wound piercing both his heart and his gut in one swift decisive movement.

  Tears welled up inside him. He loosened his belt and pulled his trousers down to his waist and his fingers took hold of his half-hard cock and began caressing its velvety mushroom tip, arousing himself, allowing all those lost images of her to inspire him, to stimulate him. Had she not one day revealed that waiting for him to arrive from the airport in another hotel room in another southern city she had not been able to suppress her urgent need for him and had eagerly masturbated herself to a thunderous climax even though she knew they would be reunited just a couple of hours later following his own flight’s arrival?

  But today Jack could not achieve sufficient hardness, and soon gave up.

  It was as if the hotel room itself was alive and was whispering to him on the sly that he would never know her again in the physical sense of the term and there was no point jerking himself away to her memory, to her spirit, but then, the room suggested in his ear that there were other options, weren’t there?

  Pulling his black trousers back up to his waist and tightening the belt, he moved over to the travelling bag in which he kept his laptop, pulled the computer out of its protective sheath.

  He opened the lid and booted up.

  Scoured the familiar chat rooms in search of sex.

  There were some possibilities but after a few lines of dialogue with various other seekers of nsa activities, he realised there would be too much work, explanations and lies involved to convince any one to actually meet quickly enough, let alone do the deed. Unless he moved on to the gay or bi rooms, which on this occasion he was not yet in the mood for. Or desperate enough.

  Jack checked his mail. Mostly spam and the customary offers of cheap Viagra, Levitra or no money back penis- and breast-enhancing products.

  He undressed.

  Looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. Wished he looked better, slimmer, younger, less morose.

  Back in the room, he balanced the laptop on his knees and began writing Giulia a letter. Maybe now she was back in Rome she would finally respond.

  Dear G.

  I miss you. Terribly.

  I know I have no doubt written this many times before, but you have left a hole inside of me. A deep, hollow cavern full to the brim with love and longing and despair.

  You no longer even answer my messages and ignore me as if I were dead, but I don’t mind. Writing to you in this way — which you probably find either despicable or pitiful — keeps you alive in strange ways. I can’t let go of you, I just can’t. Sorry.

  I miss you. I hope you are happy, even if it is others who are now pleasing you, touching you, making your heart flutter somewhere, far away from here and me, which I foolishly, mistakenly still believe is where you should really be.

  I’m in X. It’s festival time again. You won’t believe this, but I am in the very same hotel room. Room 411. Remember? I didn’t ask for it. Maybe the hotel staff had a record of me being in the room before or it was sheer coincidence or again the bookings computer proving mischievous.

  Being here evokes such strange feelings, Giulia.

  Little since you has ever been the same. I am now nothing without you, but in the same time you have made me a better man. A man who knows what love is, can potentially be. No woman had ever given herself to me so freely, without reservations, so wildly, and made me realise the terrible strength of love unleashed as you did.

  From that first, sometimes hesitant evening in room 411. Unveiling the beauty of your body, inch by inch, touching the paradise of your small breasts with my rough, undeserving touch, silent in awe at the perfect delicacy of the combined shades of pink of your nipples (which I had somehow expected to be much darker), slipping my fingers inside you, experiencing the divine heat of your cunt, spreading your wetness across my hand and learning the musky, hypnotic smell of you, fingertips travelling slowly through the mass of your pubic curls then moving into more dangerous territory towards your rear hole. And the worried “No, not there, please” of your voice. “Why?” “Just not there, please.”

  That first night we did not even fuck.

  Once stripped, we caressed each other, hardy explorers of new-found lands, we cuddled, we merged, we embraced rather frantically, skin against skin, lips against lips, sweat against sweat. You rode me repeatedly, like a young stallion. Dry-humping me like no one had ever done before. Rubbing your cunt and protruding bone against my hard cock, until I was even hurting but would never ask you to stop. I thought you would even tear my cock’s outer skin off in the savage assault of your passion, while all the time I tried not to come, as if ejaculating on you would have been a crime, a sad admission of my innate vulgarity.

  We writhed that way all night, between torrents of words, endless stories of our respective pasts and inevitable questions about what might lie in our future. From the very first mail, months before, we knew this could only be an impossible love. But then it was also more than just animal attraction. We were so wrong for each other: ages, geography, past, activities, personalities. But, on the other hand, we were also so supremely right, weren’t we? Remember how when apart we were almost telepathically in touch, always knowing when the other was about to call or do something particular. E-mails criss-crossed the web with mighty abandon; SMS messages littered the airwaves.

  But mostly we were creatures who lived in hotel rooms, as we could not be seen publicly by others, irrespective of the foreign cities we travelled to.

  I told you stories about the women who came before, the other hotel rooms I had lived in, seen. How, when once staying at the Algonquin in New York one night I had been kept up until the small hours of morning by acute sounds of pleasure from a woman in the room on the other side of the thin wall, who kept on achieving incredulous orgasms one after another for hours on end. Never had I heard a woman so vocal in the throes of sex, moans, loud sighs, cries, shouts, rumblings, she went through the whole gamut of possible sounds, time after time. The bed in the opposing Algonquin room would bang repeatedly with every new thrust of her lover inside her against our common wall, and the anonymous woman would shriek, purr, scream; it was primeval, basic, awesome. And arousing: I must have come myself at least three times during the night, manually, provoked by the hurricane-like waves of pure sex streaming through from the other room. It was unavoidable. All I had to do was close my eyes, imagine the reverse image of the room I was staying in, and myself fucking her in every conceivable position of the Kama Sutra, with every new variation evincing a new kind of explosion from deep inside her throat. To say
she was both loud and enjoying herself was something of an understatement. I even imagined that no man was capable of extracting such sounds of pleasure from a woman alone and that it must have been a sheer procession of men entering the room and taking turns with her as she lay there with her legs splayed open and her apertures moist and slick and ripe for plundering at every turn.

  Towards four in the morning, I finally managed to get some sleep.

  The next day, I had to leave the hotel shortly after breakfast to go to a business meeting downtown and just as I exited my Algonquin room, the door to the next room opened and a woman walked out. I had imagined the creature being so royally fucked in countless, alluring incarnations: sleek, blonde, redhead, brunette, tall, dusky, pale, opulent and skinny, beautiful and mysterious, but none of the visions I had evoked throughout the night corresponded with the reality!

  She was a tiny little Chinese woman in her mid-fifties, with a wrinkled face and a shapeless body over which she had draped a faded brown fur coat which had known better days. She looked up at me and her face betrayed no feelings of recognition or any embarrassment at having likely been overheard in the demented throes of her sexual exertions by a neighbour.

  We both walked towards the elevator in silence and went our own ways for ever.

  I wonder, Giulia, whether others ever heard us and tried to imagine what we looked like, or with less obvious difficulty, what we were up to?

  Not that we would have cared. Would we?

  After we had technically become lovers at last, your own appetite and curiosity for the pleasures of the flesh no longer knew any bounds, surprising even me, as you wanted this whole new world and wanted it now. Within a day we were taking baths together with no shame. By the end of the first hotel room episode, that taboo word ‘love’ was already leaking freely from our hearts.

  We quickly became experts at living in a world of our own, a world within the existing world of rules and conventions, rules which we openly flouted, oblivious to the eyes of others.

  Like the half-assed leers of the men at the front desk of the hotel in Barcelona as they saw us pick up our key and walk arm in arm towards the elevator, noticing the disparity in our ages and looks and guessing all too well the boundless fornication we were about to embark upon. In that room, in the shadow of Gaudi’s Parc Güell, where we fucked mercilessly, leaving blood all over the sheets, as your period caught us in ambush, but never slowed our frantic ardour.

  The breakfast room at the Washington Square Hotel in New York, where the Filipino waiter imprudently (or was it unprofessionally) remarked how much my daughter looked happy. The only time I saw you blush.

  A bathroom in a hotel in Sitges where my sense of transgression knew no bounds and I burst on you sitting peeing and harvested your hot stream in the cup of my hands, a sensation of heat that has marked me for ever and which I have craved after ever since, not just on my hands but all over my body in my desperation to capture the sheer essence of you.

  Was it Paris, New York, Calcata, Washington D.C. or somewhere else where I hastily withdrew my cock from inside you and came too early, my white seed pearls like beautiful stains across the thick jungle surrounding your cunt lips? A mishap that provided us with an unholy scare as you feared a most inopportune pregnancy and all future fucks had to be lessened with a condom from then on.

  “Oh, how you fill me,” you would say.

  “Oh, how I want you,” I would say.

  Oh, how my heart would break into a thousand shards every time I took you from behind and the incomparable sight of my dark cock stretching your pink lips and burying itself deep inside you while the eyelet of your arse would almost wink at me, as if inviting further depredations. And the obscene thought that one day other men would see you thus, would contemplate the tragic pornography of your indecency, was enough to make me cry.

  But I did not have the right to ask you to be mine and mine alone. I was scared to do so. Not because it would have been wrong; it would have been. But because I was in fear of your answer. Knowing your awful pride and will for independence. Later I realised that there were actually days and nights when you would have wanted me to do so and offer a more permanent form of commitment. Becoming genuine girlfriend and boyfriend, whatever that meant or entailed. Move to the city where you lived so we could see more of each other or you might be able to call me at any time of day to meet up, however innocently, for a coffee and a chat.

  Why is it that love grows at different speeds between people who care for each other, need each other badly? Not fair, is it?

  Many hotel rooms later, you finally left me. You wanted to live your life. You wanted other adventures. From the very first night, you had told me you were a gypsy and that you would not allow any man to ever catch you, imprison you. Let alone me.

  An urban gypsy flitting through the lives of men, destroying hearts and souls with cheery insouciance, a falling star amongst us mortals. Oh, how you burned me.

  Where are you now, embarked on what beautiful adventures with witty and sexy strangers, witnessing horizons I know nothing of? The last time we spoke, you would no longer even tell me of your plans because you guessed right: whatever news you provided me with would be betrayed by me one day, used in a story somewhere as some exotic fictional character which only you and I would recognise. You did not want to be a character in a book, Giulia. Forgive me. But then all I wanted you to be was a lasting character in my life. Fiction is only second best, you know, a consolation for the unworthy.

  I still want you badly.

  The warmth of your mouth around my pulsing cock.

  Your fingers weighing my swollen balls, learning how a man is constructed at his most intimate.

  The generosity of your eyes.

  The foolishness of your wonderful youth.

  The ghostly pallor of your body in a hotel room where we have just made love. The flowers in your hair when you accompany me to an official function and are proud to say “This is my man”.

  So, here I sit in room 411 of the Palace Hotel. I am naked. I am pitiful. I am lonely. Hotel rooms remind me of sex, of you.

  Oh, just to hear the sound of your voice.

  You belong here.

  I send you this forlorn kiss.

  Jack

  Jack pressed “Send” and the e-mail made its way to wherever she would pick it up, if she ever did. He expected no answer, of course. That would be asking for too much. Things were clear cut by now and he would never see her again. Maybe occasionally hear about her through third parties (although not Eleonora he guessed), but then even that was unlikely. Different countries, languages, ambitions.

  He exhaled.

  Washed his face with cold water and slipped on the white terry cloth bathrobe and returned to the computer.

  The emptiness weighed on him. Once again, he clicked his way into a chat room.

  A sharp sense of unworthiness settled on his mind.

  As if Jack finally realised that he had done Giulia wrong.

  Guilt was a dangerous thing.

  It called for punishment.

  Oh yes.

  There was a discreet knock on the door. Jack walked across, still wearing the white bathrobe. Outside the hotel room windows, night was falling and the sound of distant sirens — police? — ambulance? — firemen? — echoed through the town as it pursued its descent into darkness. He opened the door.

  The stranger looked even larger than the photo he had posted online and forwarded to him during the course of their conversation and ensuing brief negotiation.

  A swarthy guy, gym-sharpened and feral.

  “You ‘slave of G’?” the man asked brusquely.

  “Yes,” Jack lowered his eyes submissively. It was the unimaginative handle he had earlier used online.

  “Good,” the man said, taking a decisive two steps into the room. He looked Jack up and down, maybe checking that the few details he had been willing to reveal during their halting chat room conversation and th
en over the telephone were correct. He appeared satisfied and slammed the door shut behind him.

  A point of no return had been crossed.

  “So, this what you want? You’re sure? No going back now?” the visitor asked.

  “Yes,” Jack meekly answered. Fear was now turning to resignation.

  “Yes, sir,boy,” the man ordered sharply.

  “Yes, sir,” Jack said in a low voice.

  “That’s better.”

  The taller man approached Jack and forced him to take a few steps back into the room, until he was standing by the bed. The visitor lowered his hands and took the bathrobe belt and undid it, then quickly pulled the garment off Jack.

  Jack stood naked.

  Again, the visitor looked him up and down. And smirked.

  Jack had already obeyed the initial instructions he had been provided with once the assignment had been arranged. He was fully bare, having shaven all the hair around his cock and balls while the stranger was en route to the hotel. Jack shivered briefly.

  “Nice cunt, looks clean enough,” the man remarked, examining him.

  “Thank you, sir,” Jack answered obediently. The act of shaving down there made him feel even more naked, available, ripe for all sorts of humiliation.

  “On your knees, slave,”

  Jack duly obeyed.

  The man untied his trousers and exposed himself, presenting a thick, half-hard already cock to the kneeling, naked host.

  “Open your face hole wide,” the visitor said.

  Jack took the semi-tumescent cock inside his mouth, where it hardened like rock within a few seconds, thrusting hard against the back of his throat, as he tried not to choke. The man took a violent hold of his hair and conducted his movements with brutal, steady regularity.

  The man’s penis had an acrid taste and its texture was surprisingly spongy, which Jack had not expected. As he mechanically continued sucking the stranger’s member, the room surrounding him seemed to murmur to him “See, now you know what it felt for her, and all those other women, to take your cock into their mouths… now you know what it must feel like to be a woman, to be on the receiving end…”