Captain Charming (Tales of 1001 Flights)

by Alice May Ball

She leaned against him, “It’s so great to see you, Roger,” and he winced at her breathy Valley-girl meets gangsta bitch voice. Well, I assumed that was what made him wince as she wrapped herself around him. Whatever it was, his wince didn’t slow the flapping of her eyelashes.

  Roger held her face, pulled her roughly to him by the waist. “Oh, yes,” her voice was extra-dreamy. “Do it, Roger. Do what you want with me.”

  She nuzzled him and put her lips on his neck as his hands slid all over her body. She had on a crisp white shirt and a short pleated plaid skirt over black tights. She cooed into his neck.

  “I know you might want to be rough, Roger. I don’t mind,” She rocked her hips, pressing her sex against the ridge of his cock, “I really don’t.”

  He made her kneel on the floor and face the closet. Looking at the mirror, I guessed. Her nervous eyes flicked behind her and her face was a mass of conflict. He knelt behind her, put his hands over her body. Slid over her shirt, grabbed and squeezed her breasts. Then he lifted her skirt and ran his hands all over her thighs. He bit her neck and her eyes rolled.

  Then he undid the first few buttons on her shirt. Her big breasts heaved, looking like they’d bust out of her black lacy push-up bra. He ripped downwards and the buttons flew off her shirt. Her breath fluttered, and she moaned as he slipped his fingers into the bra. One by one, he scooped her tits out.

  He tweaked and pinched her nipple, then the other. His hand went to her throat and he bent her backwards to plant great hickies on her neck. As he did it, he looked up at the cupboard He sunk his lips to her breasts as his eyes found mine through the slats.

  My breath caught as he yanked the shirt down over her shoulders. Right at the bottom it was still done up, so it was like she was tied up with it. Her neck craned towards him. She planted big, wet kisses wherever she could reach his face or his neck, but he pulled away from her each time.

  I tingled all over as he pulled her skirt right up, enough that I could see her white cotton panties under her sheer black tights. Her stomach rolled. I found it hard to stay still. The tops of my thighs were hot and wet. I ached from my throbbing nub all the way to my own hard, sore nipples.

  When he ripped her tights and rubbed the darkening, damp cotton of her panties, her hips writhed and snaked. Mine, too. As his fingers pressed along the center and the fabric clung to the folds of her crotch, her thighs opened and stretched apart, and I found my fingers had made their way into my own panties.

  I had to bite my wrist to keep from making a noise as he pulled up the wet, white gusset and ripped it. His fingers dove into her swollen lips, hooked inside her and hammered in and out. My own fingers did exactly the same.

  Her back arched, and her head lolled from side to side. She bit her lip as he pulled her thighs wider apart. She leaned back against him. I saw a spark of his wicked grin as looked up at me again and he pushed her back.

  Then he hauled the front of his pants open.

  My fingers opened my weeping folds and rubbed over my thrumming clit as he grabbed the back of her hair. His eyes flashed right into mine as he jammed his cock in her mouth. I don’t know how she didn’t hear me as my dam burst.

  I bit into my arm and gushed into my hand as all of my muscles spasmed in orgasm. I couldn’t weigh then how much I wanted him and I didn’t care if it was wrong or right. I would have given anything to have taken her place, that ungrateful girl.

  We had talked about it endlessly, he and I. “We can’t,” I said.

  He looked very seriously into my eyes. “Not ever. Never.”

  New Jersey Blues

  AND THEN, ONE NIGHT THERE WAS the most horrible row and Roger wasn’t there the next morning, and we lost touch. Well, I lost touch with him, I guess. I don’t suppose he gave a thought to keeping in touch with me.

  My stupid mother stayed Father. He had some scheme for having Roger declared illegitimate. That would have been easy enough, and he said the DNA would prove it. I got the feeling he’d had the tests done long ago. He wouldn’t take a chance on a thing like that.

  In my life I never met a more penny-pinching, skinflint miserly man but if he wanted something, he had the wealth to get it. When something mattered to him, he would spend any amount.

  His “duty” as he saw it meant that he couldn’t only have Roger made “A certified bastard,” as he put it, without establishing another line of inheritance. To do that would be simple enough, apparently. But it would mean granting the title of ‘Lady’ to Mother and Lord Chatterton hated the idea of that and, maybe even worse, he would have to have me, “the girl” named as the heir.

  For that short time when Roger had been there with is, it was only then that I heard anything about Father’s wealth at all. Until; Roger came I thought “Lord” was just a silly title that he called himself by and it probably didn’t really mean anything.

  Roger used to yell at him about how he kept the family in “poverty.” We weren’t poor by the standards that we saw around us, but Roger talked about castles, country estates and private jets. I couldn’t make much sense of it.

  To me it seemed like there were two completely separate worlds. The one that we inhabited, and another one where Roger had been and maybe Father, but it was never going to be any part of my reality.

  The things that Roger talked about, all the things he said, of course I believed them. I believed everything that he said. Somehow, though, I thought of them as part of a world that I would simply never see.

  When Father wanted me to sign his papers, he tried to make me believe that he was giving that world to me. Not only allowing me to be there and see it, but to own it all. Completely.

  I wanted none of it, I didn’t care about his money or his land or his stupid fairy-story titles. Deep down, I didn’t believe any of it. There was no contradiction, or at least I didn’t see one, in me believing in the world that Roger talked about, but not the one that Father said he wanted to give to me.

  As soon as I possibly could, I got away. I got a place at a community college in Manhattan and a job in a bakery. In Orange, New Jersey, I shared a tiny, dark brown room with a billion roaches.

  Half the time that I had for my studies was in the mornings and evenings, rattling on the train to and from Manhattan. I had to try to read or even write essays standing up and jammed between grey commuters.

  Relationships for me were rare, brutish and short. I had a particularly horrible breakup with a boy who was more interested in my weight than I was—and not from any concern about my health.

  I quickly began to suspect that his focus was much on my shape than the person inside it or anything else about me when he started to come around with big cakes. Then he wanted to watch me eat them. My sense of self-worth was not at the highest then so I agreed to eat a huge cream sponge and to let him watch.

  I gorged on the cake. With with my hands I pulled it apart and stuffed gobs of cake and cream into my face. It felt bad. And in too good a way. The clean, overwhelming sensation of abandon seemed like the most powerful and positive thing.

  Then I looked up from the mess on the paper plate and saw the fire in his eyes. I lost my appetite. In that second I got over him and resolved to take better care of myself. That resolution came more often than New Years.

  Father called and harassed me for a signature on something. I never even fully understood what it was and I didn’t care. He said it was the most important thing for me and I’d just be poor forever if I didn’t sign and God knows what else. I hung up on him, but for the next month I felt really low.

  It may have been longer. It could be that I just got used to feeling that way. Those days I was exhausted and miserable as well as being about to flunk college.

  Even after all the work, all the damned double shifts and all the damned, hard-earned money that I’d sunk into it, I was going to flunk out. My professor told me, “You need to get some proper sleep. You aren’t putting enough effort into your work.”

  Well, duh! I was putting
in more than enough effort, it’s just that most of it had to go on working to pay for my classes, my books, and my rent. Even though I lived way out in my tiny, toxic room in an Orange, NJ brownstone that should have been condemned in the 1900s, I still had hardly enough money to feed myself.

  When Professor Harding called me into his office for a “serious talk,” I started to believe that somebody actually cared about my welfare. Especially when he encouraged me to rest on the couch in his study. Right up until I woke up with the smell of his penis, bouncing in his hand a few inches from my face.

  That sunny afternoon I walked around Manhattan dejected. I felt lost in the familiar surrounding, out of place on the streets that I knew. I passed hip lunchtime shoppers in Union Square, meandered unseeing up Broadway and past the Flatiron in the hazy heat, I barely registered the spicy scents of lunch vendors in the amiable bustle around Madison Square Park.

  Following nothing but my feet, I drifted alone through the crowds, up Madison and across to Park Avenue. Down by Grand Central, I saw a Hamptons Jitney minibus pull up. On a whim, I jumped on the little bus and took off for an afternoon at the beach.

  Escape

  THE JITNEY WAS FULL OF IMMACULATELY dressed refugees from Manhattan to the Hamptons. Quiet voices with long vowels spoke the weary drawl of Long Island natives.

  The long journey soothed me. As the dark, shiny Hudson slipped by below the ridge, the high canyons of the city gave way to scraggy suburbs. Along the endless roadwork delays and stop-start of the Long Island Expressway, I thought, This must be one of the worst-named roads on the planet.

  Four passengers alighted at the Southampton stop with me. None of them wore drab jeans and dirty sneakers, or a grayish t-shirt. None of the other passengers departed without a car to meet them or an SUV parked nearby.

  The route on foot from the Jitney stop to the beach came back to me like I was there yesterday. The bigger sky and a little salt in the breeze lifted my step as I crossed the dry grasses and my feet sank into the pale sand.

  It wasn’t a place people came to be miserable. Or ‘contemplative.’ I wasn’t the only person on the beach carrying their shoes, but I was the only one wearing normal clothes. Everyone else wore this season’s beach colors, the shorts all at exactly this week’s length, t-shirts with this morning’s logo or ironic slogan.

  More than that, I probably stood out for not wearing expensive shades. It didn’t matter to me. My slo-mo life was heading for such a dull and drab wreck, I couldn’t care less how I appeared. After I wandered a while in the salty air, my eyes drifted gradually up from the sand and found the misty horizon.

  At that point, I had no clue whether I could make up enough grades to pass the year, or even if it was worth trying at this point. Next year, I’d only have to work even harder than I did this year, just to stay in place.

  If I did flunk, then all that I’d worked for and spent on classes would be wasted–I didn’t believe at that point that I’d ever find the energy to go back and pick up my studies later.

  On the other hand, would there be any point making the effort? Wouldn’t I just be throwing more good money after bad? A shudder went through me, like it did whenever I caught a cliché that I associated with Father.

  It was only because of him that I knew this beach though. Him and Roger. The bright afternoon wasn’t exactly cheering me up, but at least getting some distance had lightened the load some. It all seemed as awful as it had back in the city, but out on the ocean shore, it didn’t feel as if it mattered quite so much.

  Hunger called, and I looked around for somewhere to get food. It was stupid of me not to eat in Union Square or Madison Square Park where food would have been way less expensive than out here. I was determined to find something that I would enjoy, though.

  I’d scrimped as long as I could remember. This one afternoon was going to be mine, even if it meant walking a few miles for a train back.

  A white clapperboard cafe in the distance had a wide deck around the outside. Gray roofs sloped to the surrounding tufts of pale grasses and my pace picked up as I trudged towards the promise of refreshment.

  When I stepped up onto the deck, a waiter in smart whites with a sliver tray gave me a look up and down. Most of the tables were vacant and heavy white linen tablecloths rose just a little in the sea breeze.

  I picked a table in the shade, the one with the most empty space around it. Solitude wasn’t a great comfort, but I wasn’t ready to give it up yet. The same waiter gave me a sideways glance as he set a menu card on the tablecloth in front of me. He raised an eyebrow as he stood with his pad poised.

  “Something to drink, madam?” he had a trace of a European accent, maybe Dutch.

  “A glass of white wine.”

  He turned the menu card and pointed. There was a whole column of white wines by the glass. I chose a white Spanish Rioja. The waiter didn’t hide his surprise and looked me up and down again.

  His eyebrow curled. I had the sense that he was going to repeat it, White Rioja. The look I gave him changed his mind.

  The sails of a few little boats wove along the horizon. Seagulls squawked above. I wished I had a pair of shades, even cheap ones.

  The deck shuddered under the pounding weight of a tall, blond-haired man in a gray suit. Surrounded by a milling entourage, he strode to the table next to mine. Maybe half a dozen boys and girls in their twenties buzzed around him. They all wore similar pale khaki pants and short-sleeved shirts. All of them carried little black tablets, little folders and flappy little shoulder bags.

  The way they hung back, made space for him, cocked their heads to everything he said, they were like minions, attached in clusters to do his bidding. They all wore very nice shades, although not as nice as his. I shifted my chair so my back faced the group.

  The waiter brought my wine in a high-stemmed glass on a sliver tray. He set it out nicely and took my order for a club sandwich. The deep, plummy English voice at the next table was one that could not be ignored. He drawled instructions loudly into a phone. I thought it was funny how people in the best places often had the worst manners.

  “I want a Gulfstream G 150 ready for my pilot to collect.” A lump of ice dropped through me. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Not the words, those didn’t matter, but the voice was so familiar. “I want it at LAX, certified and fueled up the day after tomorrow. Call me back at four on the dot with your best price. No second chance, understand?” It couldn’t be true. I was afraid to turn my head.

  “When you call back, tell me only your finished, all-inclusive price. One number. Nothing more.” I turned. It was him. “It will be a straight cash purchase for the best bid of six.” And he hung up. I turned and he looked up, over his shades. Those pale gray eyes shone into mine, and way down inside me a depth charge thudded.

  The entourage fell silent and their eyes all swiveled to me. I hadn’t seen him in, like, forever. I almost didn’t recognize him with the short, dark stubble.

  The sound of his voice was what I had responded to. And, I mean, I responded. God, the purring rasp of that voice had reached down inside me and stirred me up like a Long Island Iced Tea.

  He raised a hand. All of the entourage turned their heads to his hand like baby birds, waiting for his hand to feed them. His fingers flicked like they dusted the air. Silently the group gathered their tablets, notepads, and bags, and they melted away.

  When he stood, my heart pounded. His muscles were tense, but not as tense as the expensive fabric on the front of his elegant pants. That was tented tense. A weight pressed against them. It prodded familiar feelings in me. The deck shook under his feet as he strode the short distance to my table.

  He stood with his feet apart. He was so near, so tall, that I had to crane my neck to look up to him. He stared at me, although I couldn’t see his eyes through the Oakleys or whatever they were.

  The waiter came up behind him with my sandwich on the silver tray, but he couldn’t get around and he was flust
ered. Roger didn’t even turn his head, he just took the tray.