As he scurried along towards the Laika, keeping on the outside where the shadows were darkest, Frank added up in his head. Would he have time, yet, to finish what he’d started with Niamh, and still catch the last boat? Was it worth the risk?
His cock twitched in his trousers, and he could almost hear it reason with him like a little devil-voice. Burn off the adrenaline, wouldn’t it? Almost make up for losing out on six hundred odd grand. He smiled as he reached the driver’s door, and pulled it open with a rush of relief.
Primed for a swift, stunningly satisfying shag, Frank climbed into the cab of the Laika with a filthy great smile on his face. So when he went through to the back and failed to notice that the overhead lights were now out, he maybe dived a little too quickly towards the banquette where his oblivious, sweetly horny ex girlfriend was trussed up waiting for him.
Only as he groped for a breast did he realise, with a slowly growing sense of horror, that the chest he was feeling was hairier than his own.
You know, the Irish fellows never fail to surprise me. I might never have believed that Dublin’s second hardest gangster was capable of the gentlemanly restraint that Eddie showed as he untied me and sat at the table, respectfully turning his back when I asked for some privacy to dress.
Perhaps nobody would ever have thought Eddie for the type to turn his back on anyone, least of all a woman with a temper and an unresolved orgasm. But he did, meek as a choirboy, and allowed me time to lift the mattress and find the satchel and get a good swing at him. I’d only to lamp him the once. Force equals mass times acceleration, as we all know.
And perhaps no-one would have thought that I, Niamh Carmichael, with the bobbed hair, the good job and yoyos to spare, would have the gumption to take not only the satchel full of cocaine, but also, by way of getting a simple answer to a simple question that I asked Eddie nicely – though I admit I’d to slap him awake and hold his own pocket knife to his big sweaty bollocks right enough – get the combination of the safe, easily slip into the club by flashing my lipstick smile at the bouncers, and collect the money in the safe – a large sum but not too large to fit in my handbag, no, not the roomy leather one I’d splashed out a week’s wages on – before scarpering in a taxi, so, for the last ferry, and freedom, and even if nobody believed it and wondered where I’d got to, and whether I was at the bottom of the Liffey, it didn’t matter so much.
No, I thought as I looked out over the Irish Sea towards fresh horizons. Home was home, and sometimes that was a good enough reason to leave. I thought of Frank and Eddie, stuck in that foul little caravan under the streetlights, and raised a glass to toast them.
‘May the devil make ladders of your backbones while he’s picking apples in hell, boys.’
About the Story
MY FIRST TIME IN Dublin I was with a black-haired blue-eyed man full of all that rough charm the Irish do so well. I remember all the deep, vivid, acid colours of the place and the cobbles and the fights we had.
Dublin seemed to be two cities at once – an actual stone and brick city with a river and locals and traffic and that beautiful song-like accent floating about everywhere – and the simulacrum of Dublin overlaid (or perhaps rather plonked on top). So there were shops with velveteen emerald green leprechauns and Guinness hats and shamrock-bedecked tat jostling alongside the self-conscious hipness of Temple Bar and the new Euro-cool atmosphere blending with the hugely rich history and culture of the place.
I wanted to try and convey that sense of a city with different faces – Frank being the prodigal returning and unsure of whether he misses the place or loathes it, Niamh being the adopted Dubliner whose relationship to the city hovers between pride and frustration.
I suppose because the story is so rooted in its location I ended up exploring the idea of home as somewhere we can love and loathe at the same time; whether it’s comfortably awful or horribly pleasant. Niamh and Frank’s affair is an echo of that idea; old flames that are guaranteed to be more trouble than they’re worth, yet remain an irresistible temptation.
I hope I’ve managed to capture something of the city, or at least how I’ve experienced it and its people. I wanted to get that daring dash, the deeply roguish quality that I remember from the times I’ve spent there, mixed with a thread of black humour and a nip of something strong and illicit.
Molly, You Have 4391 Words, Start Now …
by Maxim Jakubowski
… AND I GAZED AT the drunkards roaming up and down Lower O’Connell Street at midnight, and gusts of wind were directing empty, dirty moulded yellowish polystyrene containers stained with ketchup and strands of wet lettuce, on a twisting journey, floating between kerb and pavement, and I almost stumbled over a rogue piece of detritus as it caught my heel, and I don’t know why but it made me think of my French lover and I sighed.
I had been here for almost six months now, and still I couldn’t banish him from my mind.
Why him? Why now?
Maybe these were the Primark shoes I had worn on the last occasion we had spent together. Or maybe not? Four-inch heels, deep blue silk-like fabric, thin straps gripping ankles. Elegant and practical.
‘Hey, darling,’ another inebriated bastard shouted at me, stumbling out of an all-night convenience store, clutching a bottle of some foul beer in a paper bag in his left hand, ‘need company, pretty one?’
I ignored him and moved on, without a further glance at the guy, in the direction of the river; the Liffey that somehow always smelled to me of Guinness and faded hopes. Go figure.
But that fleeting memory had again flared up inside me, and all of a sudden the wetness in my cunt felt like a fire, expanding outwards from my sexual epicentre like a blaze out of control.
I halted my steps for a minute or so, stood still, attempting to regain my composure; even if it meant that I now looked to others from a distance like yet another Saturday night drunk on the lash. Another Dublin woman of easy virtue.
Oh yes, right then, all shreds of my innocence were long gone and buried. Standing there, trying to repress the insidious heat coursing through my insides, I could feel the clamminess inside my cunt, the private secretions beginning to pearl slowly down my thighs and possibly staining my skirt in all too visible areas. The come of men, the seed of strangers.
Just five minutes ago, I had made my way through the over-lit lobby of the Gresham Hotel, dodging the possibly inquisitive looks of the night staff, emerging into the warm night. Could they tell from my face, the deep sheen of my eyes, that I was freshly fucked? I wondered. He used to tell me, back in those glorious days, that, after we had made love, my eyes could not conceal the fact. They shone, he said. Like diamonds. Or was that only because I believed I loved him? Which was far from the case with the men I’d just left behind in that hotel room. They had no faces, no names, just cocks that had used me thoroughly while I lay there almost like an observer, passive, sluttish, damaged.
I had met them in a pub near Trinity College. I was feeling lonely, almost on the verge of tears and drink was not enough of a solution. One of them had approached me, and I had in a daze stumbled through the mechanics of social communication, accepted another drink, then a second one, and he was joined by two friends. ‘My name is Molly,’ I’d told them, ‘I’m studying here, on an Erasmus exchange programme. I’m from Seattle.’ Fact is my name is anything but Molly, although the rest was true. Well, this was Dublin after all. None of them remarked on the literary association, not that I expected them to.
I nodded, smiled feebly, never quite said no as weak jokes quickly turned into overtly indecent suggestions, and an hour later found myself in the room at the Gresham, smuggled through the large reception area towards the bank of lifts and transported down unending corridors, with hands roaming across my rump, to the scene of the crime.
… and all too soon the words ceased and it all became a clandestine world of grunts and instructions and aggression; savage lust unleashed and that familiar disorienting blend of being lost
, pleasure, guilt, and downright humiliation, and there were faces blank and grimacing, littering my often restricted field of vision, and landscapes of bare skin in the unforgiving penumbra of the hotel room, fingers lingering all over my body, touching me, pinching me, invading me everywhere, pulling at my limbs, stretching me, forcing my limits. Oh yes, there were cocks, taking turns in all my holes, the redolent taste of dried urine invading my mouth, of hanging, hairy ball sacks whipping my chin and my arse cheeks as all three men took turns fucking me in turn and then together as they conjured up further positions which could allow them all to fit inside me at some point at the same time and my sinews screamed and my flesh expanded to extreme dimensions in the immediate periphery of my now bruised openings and I ran out of words and became a creature, an animal who could only express herself with dull grunts, moans, sighs, all obscene sounds that betrayed the absolute submission I had surrendered too. On the other hand the men were, in contrast with the piece of meat I had willingly become in this ritual of transformation, verbal and hungry, and they shouted at me, whispered in my ears, screamed with every new and painful and insistent thrust cutting me open, apart, oh yes they could effortlessly master all the right words in the thesaurus of copulation: ‘bitch’, ‘cunt’, ‘slut’, ‘pig’, ‘whore’, ‘breed her’, ‘cow’, ‘slave’, ‘bag of bones’, ‘dog’, ‘piece of shit’, ‘slapper’, ‘take it deep, now’, ‘come on, gag on it’, ‘open up more’, ‘filth’, ‘suck’, ‘swallow’, ‘take that’, ‘lick me clean’, ‘stick your tongue in’, ‘girlie’, ‘foreign tart’, oh they never did run out of things to say, as they crucified me and fucked me for hours. But it didn’t matter to me that, escorted by these men whose names I didn’t even know or wish to know, I had switched off from the very moment I had passed over the hallowed threshold of the Gresham Hotel, and had moved into that strange zone where I became just an observer and disconnected from my own body and mind. I had made myself available. Full stop. So it mattered not that after they had exhausted all the normal avenues of penetration, and I was dripping from every aperture, I was then ordered to lick the come dripping from me onto the carpet, or that one of the men sat on my face while the others held me stretched on my back over the ravaged bed and, dissatisfied with my tongue’s efforts inside his crack then farted into my mouth while laughing his head off. Yes, there was pain when they twisted my nipples until they became red and sharp, or spanked me until I could not stop screaming or fisted me or spat in my face and one, the oldest I think, not that I can now even remember who was who or did what, finally dragged me, stumbling, to the bathroom and forced me into the bathtub and urinated all over me. Oh yes, this was not happening to me, but to another surely? A woman who had never enjoyed a French lover and known joy and a million epiphanies. The pain would go, the marks on my white skin would vanish, time would pass. There was no right and no wrong, no morals involved, just the yearning and the missing and unknowing what tomorrow would bring. I sat on the edge of the bed, sweat and come pouring from me, my hair in disarray, still obscenely open everywhere, panting and slightly out of breath from my exertions and their relentless attentions as the three men dressed, ignoring me, almost as if now embarrassed by my presence. ‘Can I take a shower before I leave the room,’ I timidly asked. One of them nodded indifferently and they slammed the door on me. Oh yes, another night in Dublin.
And now I was back on O’Connell Street, dancing an invisible waltz with the drunkards and the gently coasting McDonald containers littering the kerb like flowers.
And the night was still young.
Still badly wet between my legs, I ventured into a side street near the General Post Office and in a dark corner slipped off my dirty knickers; then hesitated a brief moment, wondered whether I should just stuff them into my small handbag, but then decided to just chuck them. I would never wear them again, would I? Lost in my thoughts of my French lover who once ordered flowers to be delivered to my door ten days in a row, which had my parents fuming and ever quizzing me as to my enterprising, and romantic suitor. Ah, the flowers, roses in white and red and pink, and their smell intoxicated me, and then one day he scattered dark chocolate amongst them, which melted inside my mouth with the sheer sweetness of his come and one night, lonely in my childhood bed, I even forced a square of the dark, fragrant chocolate into my cunt and allowed it to dissolve, fucking myself with its clinging butter, coating the pinkness of my innards, staining the sheets, surrendering to the wonderful madness of my French lover’s crazy courtship.
A night breeze caressed my cheeks as I approached the river and crossed where Lower O’Connell Street morphed into Westmoreland once past Aston and Burgh Quay.
Oh yes, he had spoiled me rotten and beautifully. My French lover, like a sailor from Gibraltar returning from his journeys and I was his Penelope, laden with roses in all shades of the spectrum, chocolates, CD box sets, exotic teas, necklaces which he always insisted I wear for him in the bedroom when naked, a ritual. Oh, his cock, the veins pulsing down its thick trunk which my tongue would slavishly follow in its methodic and forensic exploration as I took him into my mouth until his mushroom stumbled across the back of my throat and I felt like gagging, and the smell of his body, of his balls, of his arse when he asked me to force a finger inside, of his piss blending with his pre-come as he leaked under the serenade of my lips. My French lover, my parachute, my very first lover, my professor of sex, oh yes, the furrows of his ball sack, the scars on his back, oh yes, he wanted to take me one day to New Orleans where he would show me the Mississippi and fuck me on a wrought iron balcony oh yes he would oh yes he should oh yes he would make me a bayou queen and feed me gumbo with a spoon and smear the jambalaya across my flesh and eat from my skin, spice me, flavour me, fuck me, eat me, fuck me, eat me, oh yes, and where was my French lover today, where oh where?
Held back by the bewitching maelstrom of my memories, I had walked past the quadrant of Trinity College in a state of total oblivion.
The bright lights and shop windows of Grafton Street beckoned. I’d never liked this pedestrian enclave of consumerism. I couldn’t afford most things anyway, but what irked me most was the fact that it didn’t even feel like Dublin; it could have been any city in the world, same shops, same brands, same products, same indifference. I didn’t linger. Emerged onto St Stephen’s Green. I stopped for a moment. The men’s abandoned come inside me had stopped seeping out, although my rear hole felt uncommonly raw.
A car cruised over towards my side of the pavement.
‘Hey girl …’
Another faceless man behind the steering wheel of a metal grey BMW 318i Estate. Eyes full of hunger. He liked me. Could he guess that I no longer wore any undergarments under my thin skirt and blouse? Could he smell me?
‘Hi.’
‘Looking for company?’
I sketched a vaguely appreciative smile. His hair was graying. Just like the hair of my French lover, I reflected wryly.
‘Maybe.’
‘How much?’
I laughed.
‘I’m free. Quite free.’
‘Really?’
‘Truly, madly, deeply.’
‘Perfect.’
He would do. A cock is just a cock.
‘What’s your name,’ the driver called out.
‘Penelope.’
‘Can I call you Penny instead?’
‘Fine with me.’
‘Want to jump into the car? Might be warmer.’
‘No. I don’t get into car with strangers.’
‘So?’
No point in making matters any easier for him.
‘Go park your car. I’ll stay here for another 10 minutes or so. Wait.’
‘Sure?’
‘Of course.’
‘You’re not going to just piss off, Penny, are you?’
‘Not unless it starts raining.’
Which was unlikely tonight. The dark skies were cloudless and it was almost a full moon up there.
&nb
sp; ‘Deal.’ He drove off in search of a legal parking space.
He was back within five minutes. Eager.
He was taller than I thought.
We smuggled ourselves into St Stephen’s Green, as he helped me over the small fence, touching up my arse through the thin skirt as he did so, then following me over.
‘Where?’
‘Does it make any difference.’
‘You’re so right, Penny.’
He face fucked me on the bandstand. Then fucked me proper, from behind, on the small stone bridge, raising my skirt to my waist and adding his wetness to his earlier predecessors, pulling my hair bunched inside his fist brutally backwards with every contrary thrust, impaling me. He was thick, hard as rock, and his breath smelled of booze. He came fast, like a volcano, flooding me with unbearable heat and I could feel him dripping down my legs, the stream of come drifting down my spread thighs and staining my shoes. Then he collapsed over my back, his breath halting, savage sounds of lust still gurgling in the back of his throat. Embedded together for a moment in silence, unholy joined, we stood in silence, half supporting each other. He finally flopped out of me. Pulled his cord trousers up and then hesitated a second or two. Took hold of my hair again and ordered me into a kneeling position, my wet arse still exposed to the air with my skirt bunched around my waist. As I squatted, I could feel myself leaking like a fountain.
His hands guided my mouth to his cock still jutting from his unzipped trousers.
‘Lick me clean,’ he said.
‘Please?’
‘Yes, of course. Pretty please, Penny …’ he chuckled.
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