‘No, I can’t. It’s okay, I have to go.’
‘Come on, Mira. Just for a minute.’
I told him no again, that I had to go home, but he just kept saying, ‘It’s okay, we’re right here, just for a minute, just a minute.’
I really didn’t want to. I didn’t want to go inside that house.
John squeezed hard at the back of my neck. His hand felt so big, as if my whole head fit in it. I don’t know why I thought that I couldn’t just go home – run away from him even. I thought for a second that he might chase me if I ran. Or maybe he would’ve grabbed me around the neck so I couldn’t breathe.
‘One minute, come on. Just for a minute,’ John whispered. ‘I don’t say these kinds of things to everyone, you know.’ He was shaking me back and forth a little by the shoulders. It made me hiccup one last time.
It smelled like smoke right inside the front door. There was a narrow black staircase that we had to go up. John moved aside so I could go first. I thought he was watching how I walked. I felt my hips move from side to side, even though I didn’t usually walk that way.
He was going to touch me. As I climbed the stairs I knew what was going to happen. He was going to touch me.
‘Thanks,’ John said quietly to the back of my head. ‘For coming up.’
I thought again of running, but I was already at the top, waiting for his hands to come around and unlock the door.
It seemed as if the apartment was all in one room. There was a kitchen in one corner, a TV and a couch in another. There were videotapes all over the floor. It smelled as if someone had just been cooking.
I walked over to the window. There was a hole in the screen. I heard some kids screaming and I thought the noise was coming from the huge apartment building with the foil on the windows that we had passed. I could still see it far off, standing like a rock. The sun was orange, just about to disappear.
‘So this is where I live, baby.’
John came up behind me and turned me away from the window. He was pointing to a couch. I squinted as I moved toward it. John was smoking again. I knew I should call home, but my parents were probably already out for dinner.
‘Why don’t you take off your shoes and get comfortable?’
John laid his cigarette in an ashtray on the coffee table. He stood in front of me and gently pushed me down onto the couch. Then he moved the table back a bit so he could kneel on the floor in front of me. Smoke was filling up the room. I squeezed my thighs.
‘It’s okay,’ John said, sliding off my shoes. ‘I like you a lot, you know.’
Holding my bare feet in his palms, John started sliding his fingers between my toes. I was sweating. I didn’t want him to do that. I curled up my feet and tried to pull them away.
‘Okay, okay. Anything you want, Mira,’ he said. But he didn’t let go. He started kneading the arches of my feet with his thumbs. I let my head lean back and closed my eyes. It made me stop feeling like a sound was going to come out. My hands were on the couch beside my hips. I was bracing myself. It was like he knew something about me.
‘You’ve got beautiful feet, Mira.’
I lifted my head. John was pulling my toes up to his lips. I couldn’t believe he wanted to do that! He was smiling, watching me trying to watch him. My eyes kept opening and closing. I couldn’t keep them open.
‘Relax, baby … ’
I felt my feet go all wet with his steam. A suction came down.
‘Mmmmmmira … ’
His slippery tongue pushed in and out of the cracks. My whole body started to shake. I thought for a second I was laughing with my mouth closed. John stopped and looked at me.
‘You’re a funny girl, you know,’ he said.
John stood up and took off his T-shirt. There was no more sun in the room.
‘I know you have a beautiful body under there.’
My teeth were chattering. A beautiful body? I stared down at my smashed thighs. I heard the zipper of John’s pants. My fingers were pushing under the elastic of my skirt. I wanted to do it and I didn’t. I was wiggling around. My underwear slid off at the same time as my skirt. I knew I should call home.
‘Oh man, that’s sexy.’
I felt my fingers behind me, unhooking my bra.
The father’s tongue makes her take off her clothes. The father puts his penis in the mother’s vagina.
‘Oh god, yeah. You have beautiful breasts.’
I stared at the hair above John’s penis. His penis was starting to jerk around. It moved to the side, looking soft then looking hard. It looked like a worm turning purple in the rain.
I wanted to get rid of the thing that was tightening inside me. I thought that if John just lay on top of me, everything would be fine. I knew what sex was. It was Nadia’s fist.
‘I could look at you like this forever, Mira.’ My vagina started to feel strange on the couch, like powder dissolving into the ground. ‘Aw, baby, why’re you cold?’
John’s body came down on me quick. His hairy chest pressed into my breasts. He was so heavy I didn’t think I could breathe. I felt his penis start to move on my thighs, there was some kind of stuff on it, shiny, lukewarm. I was going to say stop, but John put his lips directly over mine. He was kissing me hard. His tongue was in my mouth. I was breathing out the side.
‘Mmm, good, you really know how to kiss.’
I started doing it like he was, it seemed like forever. I bit into his lips and he bit my lips back. John’s hand wriggled down between both our stomachs. My legs spread wider. His finger poked around.
‘Shhhhh, shhhh. Babe, you’re so wet … ’
I tried to look down between the darkness of our bodies. John’s hand was holding the top of his penis. I moaned as he started to push it to my vagina. My moaning was there to keep the tiny space I had left between me and him. John was grimacing, wagging his penis up and down. He was pushing it deeper, then pulling it away. The head of his penis was shining with gloss.
‘Open up, baby, open your legs.’
I knew it wasn’t right. He was supposed to use a condom. But I felt myself plug. The plug made me mute.
John kept pushing and pushing, he couldn’t go in any further. I didn’t want the feeling of the tightness inside me. I wanted to break. John forced my knees open and whispered too loudly, ‘Open up, come on! Open up! Open up!’
One of my legs suddenly fell off the couch.
‘I’m inside you, babe. Come on, babe, come on!’
Bone into bone. The plug was a wall. The only fist I felt was my actual fist.
John lifted his hands to the side of my head, used his hard shining forehead to keep me flat down. My eyelids were grinding.
‘Good girl, shhh, good girl … ’
I needed to move side to side in my hips. It felt different when I did it, different better. I pushed my hips up into his body. I used my fists to hold myself up.
‘That’s it. That’s the way … ’
Something was stuck there inside me, like a log stuck in fire.
‘Yeah, baby, fuck, good girl, that’s the way … ’
It didn’t hurt more when I moved a bit faster. There was just something burning, a fever down there. John’s hands squeezed my ass, his hands spread me open, spreading until I was bigger, unstuck. Oh god, I was doing it. It! Really It! I was feeling him move faster in and faster out. I was trying to feel every in, every out, but I couldn’t keep up, it was going too fast. I didn’t even know if I was feeling him or feeling me. I shut my eyes, I tried to relax …
‘Yeah, fuck, you’re so hot.’
Something flew up inside me. I heard myself grunt. It flooded my insides, flooded my head and I floated, floated, just for a second … Then John’s head hit my chest and I was back in the room, back on the couch, knuckles under my bum as John trickled out of me, saying my name.
‘Mira! Mira!’ The men at the club called me by my real name.
I was doing my
trick: lying on the ground with my hands behind my shoulders, then pressing up, my back in an arch. I walked that way to the edge of the stage so that in front of their faces, my cunt touched the pole. It looked like a split-open flower they’d stepped on.
‘Oh yeah, baby! Go for it!’
I stood up red-faced and turned around slowly. I imagined their claps slapping right on my ass. I tried to smile backward over my shoulder, but I could only do it for a second. It was a baby’s smile, a dog’s smile.
I ran downstairs right after I finished. Lani and Coco were smoking in the hallway before they went on. A lot of the girls there never really liked me, so I couldn’t ask them for a puff, even though I wanted one. All I ever needed was one puff.
It was disgusting for us down in the basement. Paint was flaking off the ceiling and it smelled like piss because the pipes were too hot. Adi was down there getting ready. I looked at myself beside her in the mirror. My eyes were starting to run. Sometimes I thought I looked like a hot sexy bitch right after I danced – not some pig-breathed, nineteen-year-old thing. But if I kept staring and staring, I saw a smeary-eyed person whose head didn’t belong on her body, whose tits hung too low, whose legs were too big.
‘Look at me,’ I said.
Adi was looking at herself.
‘Look. I look disgusting.’
Adi rolled her eyes.
‘I look like an elephant.’
‘No.’ Adi laughed. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be grey and fat.’
So why was I always looking down when I danced? Why did my tits feel like elephants’ trunks?
Adi got up and came behind me. Her long skinny arms roped round my waist. She stared at us both in the mirror and said, ‘Up there, on your hands and knees, you put some kind of spell on them. Makes them go crazy!’
Adi could stop me from crying. Well, I wasn’t really crying. Adi whispered at my neck, ‘You look so good. Everyone sees.’
I sat down and watched Adi finish her makeup. Her straight white-blond hair was tied in two ponytails. She put baby-blue eyeshadow high on her lids. All of it seemed so easy for her. I thought she must’ve known how to do this stuff forever. Makeup made her look even more beautiful.
Adi gave me a little kiss on the cheek before she left for upstairs. I tried to fix myself up, but I couldn’t do it right. I put too much gunk in the grooves around my nose. All I had was a pink skirt and a red tank top in my locker. I never really matched but I didn’t care. I didn’t think that the men cared either. If they didn’t like what I was wearing, so what. I had high heels and big tits.
Adi was the only thing that ever made me get back up there. I wanted to see her dance. The way she moved made it seem like nothing bad had ever happened in her body. Pushing away the floor with her feet, shaking her hips, smiling: Come with me, come … Adi’s tongue slid in front of her teeth, you had to be quick to see how she did it, first coming out between her two lips, then curling over her teeth, licking: Come. When she shook her ass at a guy, it was like she was in love with him. Her pussy out in front of his mouth, she’d hold his chin and practically feed it to him.
It was as if Adi had no fear. The way a vulture has no fear when it’s eating the dead.
When I watched her dance, I knew I could do it too. Rush through the beat of those hundred white eyes, plow through the stink of their forced-back come. The men in tight circles, with gritting teeth and short breaths, moving their bottles up to their mouths.
‘Mira! Mira!’
It all happened in slow motion. Those men didn’t know if what they were looking at was real.
‘Hey, I liked your dance, sweetheart,’ said the bald one in front of me. His stomach bulged out like a baby’s. ‘Sweetheart, c’mere.’
The guy tapped his knee. I moved hip to hip toward him and turned myself around. I always showed them my ass right away.
‘Yeah. I like that, darlin’.’
I sat on his thigh and wiggled around, pretending to get comfortable.
‘Yeah, shit! I like that.’
I arched my back over the guy’s gut and pumped my hips in time to the beat. I felt heat from the floor move up to my cunt.
‘Name’s Bill, darlin’.’
I kept moving myself.
‘How much for another?’
‘Forty.’
‘All right, another. I like how this one moves.’
There was a man at the table with Bill, a skinny guy who’d taken off his glasses. I saw his hands move underneath the table. Two of them, I was getting off the two of them! Bill started snorting behind me, telling me I was a wild girl. I thought for a second that the whole bar was watching my tits move up and down in my top, watching the way that my ass did a grind. I thought all the guys were going to gather around just to witness my cunt glistening.
‘Wild, Mira, wild!’
I stood up and braced my hands on the table. I bent my knees deep and pumped back in his face.
‘Oh man, shit, she likes that!’
I turned around quickly and raised my hands in the air. I was dancing now, just like Adi. I looked down at Bill’s eyes. They were squinty and roaming. I put my hands on his chin and made him look up.
‘I’m gonna take this wild one back to the hotel!’
‘Don’t do that,’ I heard the other guy say. ‘They have it right upstairs if you want it.’
I’m shaking, I thought. All I’m doing is shaking.
‘Nah. I want this one back at my place.’
‘I don’t do that,’ I said, smiling.
‘Yes you do, darlin’. How much you want?’
‘I don’t do that.’
‘Told you. She doesn’t do that.’
‘How much?’
‘No.’
‘Come on … ’
‘No.’
‘She thinks she’s better than you, Billy.’
‘How much you want, wild one?’
‘You can come to the back,’ I said.
‘Yeah? What’s at the back for a young guy like me?’
‘Private dance.’
‘All right, sweetheart, lead the way.’
‘Oh boy, now you’re fucked, Billy.’
I turned on my heels, holding on to Bill’s hand. It was soft and fat, all the fingers stuck together. I really thought everyone in the club was watching. ‘All right, Mira!’ they shouted. ‘I’m next! I’m next!’ The sound of my heels pockmarked the floor. A vulture, no fear, eating the dead.
In the booth at the back, I sat on the table. Bill slid in front of me, eyes at my crotch. Light pricked all over his face in white dots. I inched my panties down to my knees.
‘That’s it, sweetheart.’
I started rubbing my clit around with two fingers. Bill followed my rhythm on the mound of his pants.
‘That’s it, Mira. C’mon, how about a kiss?’
Still rubbing myself, I leaned close to Bill’s face. He smelled like perfume mixed up with beer. I pursed my lips at his torn-up beard. Then I leaned back and rested my ankles on his shoulders. I gave Bill a view. That’s what he wanted, to see: That’s how she opens, that’s where I fuck.
All of a sudden, Bill gripped me hard by the waist. I slid off the table right onto his lap.
‘I know you’re a wild one!’
With me wedged in between the table and his gut, a tight little spot started to pulse in his crotch.
‘Another song, sweetheart.’ The music kept pounding. ‘Come on, darlin’, you know what I like.’
‘Sixty,’ I said.
Bill breathed like a fool. I was jiggling, splayed open, trying to turn myself around.
‘I see your pussy! What a pretty little pussy you got there.’
My skirt was up around my waist. I undid my bra and let him pinch my nipples as I tried to settle on his legs in the right spot. I was bouncing up and down. I wanted the cash.
‘Yeah, lemme feel.’
His hands moved to my ass. It smelled different in the room, like a match had just been blown out.
‘There you go, lemme feel.’
His finger was a slug.
‘You’re wet, sweetheart, yeah … ’
‘More?’ I whispered, looking behind me.
Eyes screwed shut, Bill was nodding his head.
‘Ninety.’
‘Yeah, just suck it, please.’
His finger fell out of me.
‘Kiss it, sweetheart, kiss it, please.’
I slid under the table. Old cigarette butts stuck to my knees. I swam forward an inch through the walls of his thighs. I trickled some juice on him, forming a suck. I looked up at Bill. He was as hard as the floor.
Just a few sudden mouthfuls of cock and I swallowed his cash like a curse down my throat.
‘Are you okay?’ I remember the way John stroked my forehead after we’d had sex for the first time. It felt repetitive, insistent.
I wanted to hide.
‘Mira. C’mon, baby, open your eyes.’
There was a candle making shadows on the ceiling. My back was glued to the couch. John was squeezed in beside me.
‘What time is it?’ I asked.
‘It’s okay, Mira. It’s not late at all.’
I was covering myself with my arms.
‘Why don’t you say something?’
‘I have to go home.’ The whole room was flickering.
‘Stay just a few more minutes,’ John said. He started drawing circles around my breasts. ‘You never finished telling me about your cousin, what’s his name?’
‘Who?’
‘Your cousin?’
‘Oh.’
‘Well … ?’
‘Ezrah.’
John dipped a finger in me. ‘Wow, you’re still wet.’
‘Stop!’
‘You want me to stop?’
I felt buzzing in my body. Buzzing through my nipples and all down my legs.
‘Okay, baby, okay.’
John reached over me to open a drawer under the coffee table. He took out a thin cigarette and lit it from the candle. He started taking deep puffs. Then he put it between my lips.
I shook my head.
‘Trust me, baby, it’ll make you feel good.’
Little Cat Page 10