Before that happened, going back many hours, Dyana and I and a couple of sailors were the only ones who stayed aboard.
After a light lunch, Dyana and I tried again. We tried all afternoon to no avail. Dyana felt pleasure, and we still shared an intimacy, but she couldn’t cum. I came only once - more at her insistence than anything I felt like doing. As supper time approached, Dyana suggested we stop, eat a little, and then see if we wanted to try again. She felt she had gotten as far as 75 percent there, but couldn’t go the last lap.
I once again offered to let her buzz my hair, in the hopes that it would turn her on enough to push her over the edge. I knew she was deeply aroused by my short hair. It was both the fact that it was short, and that she had done this to me that was the turn-on for her. I would have let her shave my head if it would have made her cum, given her that last 25 percent.
She refused, of course. I could tell her frustration level was very high, which was why I thought she might take me up on my offer. I tried to convince her that she’d thrown a switch within me and that, now, the whole idea of her cutting my hair turned me on. Which was true. She bought the argument, but said she wouldn’t buzz me just so she could cum. I couldn’t change her mind.
We tried everything either of us could think of for five hours after supper. We were both sore and profoundly disappointed. They had apparently cut her deeply enough that the nerves to her G-spot were also seriously disrupted.
Dyana wasn’t going to cum. Most likely, she never would. I suggested she find a guy with an average-size penis and excellent stamina and try it with him. She just looked at me, glassy eyed, and shook her head no. I thought, over time, that she would at least try that. I truly hoped it would work for her.
After that unsatisfying, marathon session, both deep inside and right at the forefront of my mind, I finally realized that Dyana could no longer be successfully loved - fucked - by any woman, including me. She didn’t have the capacity anymore. She was something less than a lesbian lover. Something much less …
It was neither her fault nor mine, but it was there. It was very real to each of us and demanding to be recognized. We would not be able to ignore the reality that Dyana had been rendered incapable of satisfying sexual relations with another woman. At least, she could glean no orgasmic satisfaction from such a coupling. I thought it was probably unlikely that a man could satisfy her either. Her ability to climax had been stolen from her.
The sun had gone down a couple hours earlier, while we tried and tried, in the early evening, the dusk and the night. I didn’t want the sun to go down on Dyana and me. But it already had.
I started to cry uncontrollably, and I refused to let Dyana see me. I kissed her as tenderly and lovingly as I knew how, and I returned to my little cabin. Sleep came much later. Somewhere in there I sensed and saw Tia, holding hands with a baffled, befuddled Toni.
**********
We had our weekly leadership team meeting after lunch the next day. Robbie, the Ausie, had tied one on while ashore and wasn’t up to attending.
A good portion of the Alexandria nightlife scene had apparently escaped the fundamentalist government’s attention, making the ancient city something of a party stop for westerners now in Egypt. Dyana, Sagi and I were in the conference room when Tex bounded in, full of energy, and with a certain glow about him.
“You scored, didn’t you?” I said laughing.
“Y’all know I don’t kiss and tell,” he replied, grinning even more broadly.
“Where’s Toni?” Dyana asked. Ted turned every color of red known to mankind.
“She’ll be along shortly …” Before he could elaborate, she stumbled into the room in khaki shorts, a white tank top, and barefoot. She looked much worse for the wear.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I look a mess. Had quite a day, yesterday.”
“Hair looks great,” I noted, smiling. Actually, it did. So did those thin brows. Then I noticed a large gauze patch over her bare, upper right arm. “What’d you do to your arm?”
She looked at me strangely and said, “Huh?”
“You’ve got a patch on your arm, Toni,” I pointed out to the obviously hung-over undergrad.
“Oh. Yeah. Uh … it’s a tattoo. Tex helped me get a tattoo.”
Ted looked more sheepish than any other human I’d ever observed.
Dyana was about to bust a gut. I could tell she was trying as hard as she could to hold it in. “What did you get?” She asked, snorting back a laugh.
“Oh. Uh … it’s … uh … I got a … Tex? What did I get again?”
Ha! This was too funny! She apparently had killed off enough brain cells with ethanol that she’d forgotten what happened. Or her inebriated mind had never recorded it in the first place.
“We can take this off now,” Tex said, gently peeling the tape on the edges of the gauze patch. It came off to reveal a bright, beautiful blue dolphin leaping from a turquoise sea. Behind the dolphin was a yellow and orange setting sun. The tat was lovely – and big! It must have been almost five inches high and four wide.
Toni stood there with her mouth forming a huge “O” as she looked down at her rather impressive artwork. Her mind hadn’t yet caught up with what she was observing. “Uh … it’s a dolphin,” she said needlessly. “A BIG dolphin with a sun behind it.”
At that point, we all lost it, including Sagi, who’d observed the whole exchange with an expression of curiosity, then borderline hysterics about him. Toni looked around at each of us in turn, then began to giggle nervously, before she finally broke out in loud guffaws herself. I remember thinking, chauvinistically, that at that moment, my innocent undergrad had finally been forced to grow up. By me.
**********
During the next week, I slept with Dyana every night, cupping her from behind, holding her throughout the night as best I could. She was broken in body and spirit. It tore me up, and I tried to do my best to help, without getting in the way. I’m pretty sure she felt that, and appreciated it and me.
After all, we had been lovers. We still would be, except for her … disability. Except for her accident and the misguided society that had cut her.
That’s the kindest I can be to Egypt, and what they did to my lover. To both of us.
My mature, successful, brilliant, beautiful, lover, my Mistress had been rendered less than a woman. This sick, misguided society had seen fit to ruin the most awesome human being I’d ever known. They’d left Dyana a shell of what she’d been. They’d mutilated her body, but even more, they’d dissected her soul.
Given Dyana’s funk during the day, I tried to make sure she did what she needed to do in order to keep the project on track. Sagi was heading off to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to present an update on our work at a conference there. He’d be gone about a week.
He actually surprised me by asking me, along with Dyana, to sit in on and review the slides and discussion he’d use in Jeddah. Tex, and Robbie, the other senior team members, hadn’t been included.
I told myself that I’d be quiet and listen attentively. Dyana was sitting next to me, and Sagi was standing in front of us, with a remote control for the PowerPoint slides being projected. He came across as smooth, poised and confident.
I never considered myself a submissive personality by natural inclination, though I've discovered that I can comfortably submit to someone as talented, sexy, in-control and knowledgeable as Dyana. At Sagi's rehearsal, however, in spite of my decision to be quiet, I reverted back to my more forceful, penetrating nature, and I couldn’t resist speaking up to tell Sagi what I thought he could do better. I spelled it out in detail each time, and gave him a view of the talk at a high level, that caused him to think about what he was saying, and how it was being said.
Sagi seemed to genuinely appreciate my input, which kind of surprised me. After the run-through, I sat down with him for two hours to go over my thoughts, and watched as he made copious notes and changes based on my suggestions.
The night before Sagi was to head to Cairo and fly to Jeddah, we received a satellite call, relayed from his mother. His father had suffered a serious heart attack, and wasn’t expected to make it. He decided to head to the airport in Cairo and to leave for Aswan as soon as he could get a flight. That completely toasted his plans for the Jeddah conference.
I got a message from him to come to his quarters. There, he asked me to cover for him in Jeddah. Dyana had suggested me instead of herself, because she’d been essentially off the project during her injury, and felt I had more detailed knowledge of what had been happening. I was also more generally up-to-date.
I was blown away, and really, really didn’t want to go in either his place or Dyana’s. I’d given a couple of conference talks, but only at regional meetings in the US, never at an international conference. The problem was that if I didn’t go and present, some of the grant funding agencies might not sign on to renew their contract with our discovery team.
So seven hours later, I was on my way to Cairo International to pick up a flight to Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz International Airport, along with an even more disconcerted, freshly re-trimmed, tattooed and terribly-short-haired Toni, my reluctant, nervous assistant and traveling companion. We’d be met by a [required] male escort in Jeddah.
When the Egyptair flight left Cairo, we expected to arrive in Jeddah on time, at about 3:00 in the afternoon. It was about 2:20 when the pilot came on to say that there had been some kind of domestic terrorist incident in Saudi Arabia, and that our plane was being diverted to the closest available non-Saudi airport, which was about an hour and a half from our current position – in Massawa, Eritrea. Apparently, since this was an Egyptian plane, that seemed the safest place to land.
“I have never heard of Eritrea, Toni said fearfully.”
“I haven’t heard much about it,” I admitted. “It’s a mostly federated collection of sheikdoms between the Sudan and Ethiopia. I’m not sure, but I think Massawa is a port city on the Red Sea, which is below us right now. I think it’s farther south than we were going, but I assume better safe than sorry."
Toni rubbed her short buzz in nervous irritation. I remember thinking that she was picking up a new series of expressions that went with her terribly short hair. I was pretty sure that she was a creature of habit. Since Dyana and I had given her a new normal, I doubted that she’d ever have longer hair again. I found that to be tremendously satisfying, for some reason.
So it was that we landed at Massawa International Airport, in the mostly unknown, former Italian colony that was now a conglomerate of principalities known as Eritrea.
We barely made a successful landing. The airport runway was almost too short for our plane. We disembarked and awaited word on what would happen next. Our expectation was, at the worst, that we’d have to hop back on a refueled plane and return to Cairo. That didn’t happen.
There was apparently a dispute between Egyptair and Eritrea, about whether or not this airport’s runway was long enough for a takeoff. The Egyptair pilot just wanted to refuel, gather everyone aboard, and get the hell out of there.
No, no. Not that simple.
In the end, they decided to bus us about 45 miles to the capital, Asmara, to take a plane from there. Okay, inconvenient, but not a catastrophe. Toni and I got on a bus. She'd struck up a conservation with a young Saudi businessman named Fouad, whom I’d sort of blown off when he started flirting with me while we were waiting around to see what would happen next. I like flirting as much as any single girl, but I thought the guy was something of an arrogant dick. I had probably made no secret of that fact.
While we were stuck there waiting for our bus to arrive, Fouad and Toni killed some time together in a restaurant in the airport. Meanwhile, I went from desk to desk, trying to make sure we were really going to get out of there.
When I returned, Fouad was nowhere to be seen, and little, buzzed Toni was alone, nervously rubbing her teddy-bear hair, and looking more than somewhat afraid. Of course, her new, high, thin eyebrows tended to make her looked shocked all the time anyway.
She got up with her bag, purse, carry-on, and two other small packages. The small items were little toiletry kits that apparently Fouad had talked the airline into providing for all the passengers still waiting there. They were little canvas parcels with the Egyptair logo on the side. She told me to take one and after I did, she put the other in her own carry-on. Just then an airline agent came up to us and told us to hurry out to the bus, which was now waiting outside. I shoved the toiletry kit into my carry-on and we rushed out to our ride.
We boarded the bus for the hour or two ride to Asmara. There were only a couple of single seats left. Fouad had saved a seat for Toni so she sat with him. I squeezed in between a teenaged girl and a wizened, older man on the long seat in the back of the bus. There was barely enough room, but it was the only choice other than standing, which the last two men aboard actually had to do.
On the way, we were stopped at the border between Eritrea proper, and a tiny principality, the self-declared “Kingdom of Salat,” which was actually a part of Eritrea, but was in the midst of a dispute with the mother country. Sort of like, but more seriously disruptive than Scotland/Britain or Quebec/Canada disagreements.
As I mentioned earlier, Eritrea was an agglomeration of separate sheikdoms, kingdoms and principalities. It was originally a colony of Italy. In this case, one of those agglomerated kingdoms had decided it didn’t like the way the government was proceeding in Asmara, and was trying to declare itself an independent country.
As a result, we all had to get off of the bus, go through customs, and then continue on towards Asmara. The other Eritreans wouldn’t stop us as we left the Kingdom of Salat, because they didn’t consider Salat a separate kingdom at all.
Fine. Just get me outa here.
Toni and I waited in line, but not together. Since I was in the back, she was already in line by the time I got off the bus, and I told her to just go through with Fouad. I saw her go through, straight ahead, and disappeared on the other side. Ten minutes later, I stepped up to the border guard/customs official to do all the usual stuff. He stamped my passport, but motioned for me to go somewhere other than where Toni had gone.
It was a customs' inspection point. I’d been randomly selected. Oh joy, another delay.
A female agent was waiting at her station for me, the bored look of a bureaucrat evident on her face. She went through everything in my suitcase, finding nothing, of course.
She went through my purse, and finally my carry-on bag.
She pulled out the package Toni had given me.
“What is this?” She asked in Arabic. I told her it was a gift of toiletries from Egyptair, which was printed on the small, canvas pack. Of course, I had no idea what toiletries it contained because I hadn’t had time to open it before we had to rush out to the bus. I’d forgotten about it by the time I finally got settled into my seat.
She unzipped it. There was a tube of toothpaste, tiny bottles of mouthwash and lotion and a small washcloth on the top. She took them out and there, to my absolute horror, was a tightly-wrapped block of white powder! That shocked the hell out of me! I was even more shocked when she pulled out a gun and in seconds I was surrounded by three other border guards with machine guns in their hands!
She motioned for me to put my hands up and I was taken into custody, completely befuddled and having no idea what just happened!
The next thing I knew, I was in handcuffs, and was being led into an interrogation room. I suspected that I was in big trouble, and I had no idea where Toni was!
**********
Of course, there were drugs in the package, specifically cocaine. As was obvious to me, the Saudi guy had substituted the cocaine brick for whatever had been in there. He’d then given the airline gifts to Toni, for us to unwittingly take through customs. Toni had apparently been duped and I had walked right into it. I was royally fucked.
I’m sure Toni tried to get to m
e but they wouldn’t let me see anyone. Of course, there was no American consulate in the tiny, break-away Kingdom of Salat. There was no one I could call, and my rights in this place seemed to be whatever they said they were.
I demanded a lawyer and got one. Unfortunately, I never even saw him until I arrived in court the next morning, having slept a total of maybe an hour in a chair, hungry, alone and scared to death. I didn’t know what had happened to Toni, but I asked and they said no one else from the bus had been detained. I thought that maybe she could help me once she got back to Egypt. I certainly hoped so!
The courtroom was in an annex to a mosque. I had no idea who the presiding judges were, but there were three of them – all older men with full, ugly, gray beards and blazing eyes. I assumed I’d enter a plea, and they would set a trial date. I expected to get out of here before I ever had to face a real trial.
It didn’t happen that way at all. The trial began as soon as the judges were seated. A man in a huge turban stood and read from a hand-written document in barely understandable Arabic. My lawyer, in English, told me he was reading the charges. I was able to follow the Arabic a little. Basically, I was accused of being a drug smuggler.
I told the judges that I wasn’t guilty, and explained what had happened, trying not to get Toni in trouble, on the outside chance that she was still in this hell-hole.
They listened, asked me a few questions which I answered as best I could, and listened to my lawyer try to convince them that it was all a big misunderstanding, and I had never intended to be here in the first place.
The judges looked at me accusingly. When there were no more questions, they nodded to each other.
If this were actually a trial, I was a sultana of the Ottoman Empire.
As it turned out, as I feared, it was a trial, but I was no sultana.
The three-judge panel exited the rostrum at the front of the courtroom with the stern, judgmental countenance of the righteous etched onto each of their faces. Their deliberation was brief, and they returned to the courtroom less than fifteen minutes later.
Destiny Taken (Destiny Lost Book 1) Page 14