Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) (7 page)

With the beachcomber, after the initial shock of his hand crossing my backside, I discovered the perverse pleasures of bending over and being spanked. I had shamefully screamed fuck me, fuck me, fuck me during that brutal assault by the man in black. The humiliation of being naked on the beach had transcended to the immaterial by the time the immigrants arrived and only returned when I saw myself through their eyes.

I was lying there now cosy and satiated, ripe like an animal in heat with a stranger who held over me the power of life and death.

The reverberations from that orgasm echoed through my womb. I panted for breath. I was staring up at the sky and, in the movement of the stars I was struck with sudden insight. It was a Zen moment.

I had a plan.

I untangled myself from the sheikh and he seemed content when I began to massage his feet, pressing my thumbs into the arches, pulling each little toe. I rubbed his shins, his thighs, his chest. I urged him to roll over and he did so after a moment’s hesitation, a moment’s doubt, a moment when he remembered that no woman ever commanded him to do anything, that women were there to obey and serve.

He looked back at me, then buried his head as I sat astride his waist and pressed the heels of my hands in a slow dance up the his back. There was no tension in those strong muscles, but like a cat being stroked he wriggled and writhed. I massaged his neck, his head, and I rolled him back over again. I kissed his nose, his lips, his chin and by the time I moved slowly down his torso, the little creature awoke from his slumbers ready to play again.

‘You are a clever boy,’ I said, and planted a friendly kiss on the winking eye of his helmet.

‘Shush,’ he replied, and I gave it a good shake to remind him that while he was the boss, I had power over the little sheikh between his legs.

It was nice taking it small and limp into my mouth and feeling the blood race back into the thickening shaft. Up and down, sucking toffee, biting and nibbling, teasing the eye of the needle. I adored this smooth rod of flesh. I was going to dream about it on long winter nights when I awoke with Bobby, or some replacement Bobby, in my cold bed in the shoebox garden flat at the down-at-heel end of Fulham. Up and down. Getting harder. The 14 bus. The bars and shops. Lick and suck. The cappuccino, comfort food, the unfinished croissant. I dribbled spittle over that stiffening cock and like a doctor beating life back into a still heart I beat the wet flesh up and down, up and down until the spring was rewound and it was fully charged and ready to go.

Sucking for breath, slithering up his body like a snake, pussy slippery as a fish, his cock glided into me like a kite through warm air; a stiletto through nylon; a knife through water. It’s just so nice fucking after a really colossal orgasm. There’s no hurry. No urgency. Nothing to prove. You slide up and down that oiled column of flesh like it’s a piston in some marvellous machine, a lightning rod, the mast of a sailing ship. You roll over so he’s on top, pushing in further, deeper, like a missionary with a duty to perform, rolling back again, his knees raised, feet pushing into the sand, the sarong coiled in a ball, his eyes gleaming like black gold.

You can feel it coming again. He’s coming again. His neck is thrown back. His body tenses. He’s leaking sweat that smells of roses. He’s thrusting hard. He’s trying to reach something just out of reach. He’s an athlete going for gold, a man attempting the pole vault. The bar is set high, higher than he’s ever been before. He’s making that last run, breath short and sharp, loud and clear. He’s going faster, his body a concentrated fission of nuclear energy. He digs the pole deep in the groove, he throws himself into the air and he makes it.

He makes it.

‘Agh, agh, agh.’

His hot come spurts in short jabs over the saturated canal of my burning pussy. His face distorts with tension, ecstasy, relief, too. As he has reached up for something out of reach. I reach down and find a little lost orgasm like a baby kitten which I nurse until a dribble of milky sap slips over my thighs. I can at that moment imagine nothing more wonderful than being a girl.

The stars when I roll over have realigned.

The world is on course. The moon is in Mercury, messenger of the Gods, fleet-footed. The young sheikh remains on his back, breath gradually slowing and growing even. I kiss his neck. Snuggle at his side. With one hand, he unrolls the balled up sarong and brushes it down over us, hiding our nudity from the eyes of the night.

The drum of his breath fades until I can’t hear it any more. His heart and his pulse beat in silence like a digital clock. He is a man. A satisfied man. And what satisfied men do after two orgasms is they stretch their backs, they roll on to their sides, they raise their legs like giant foetuses and, sated, like tired little boys, they fall fast sleep.

I am wide awake, my heart pounding like footsteps in a hollow corridor, ears cocked listening as his hushed breath grows louder again, catches and resounds in a sigh of contentment. He burrows into the sand. I kiss his arm. He doesn’t feel it. He is lost in his dreams as I roll from his side and remain motionless against the edge of the dune staring up at the sky. I close my eyes and count to one hundred. I wait. I listen for his breath and hear that same long rumble of satisfaction.

Men are exhausted after fucking. Girls are rejuvenated. They want to go out and dance, drink, laugh, kiss, kick off their shoes. My body was filled with carbohydrates and male sperm, an energy drink that warmed my blood as I climbed out of the dune and raced across the sand towards the path that led up to the old lighthouse. I moved like a city fox, my feet barely touching the ground. The cactuses were deformed ogres with spines shining like blades in the moonlight. One of those monsters took a nip at my arm. I spat on my fingers, rubbed at the wound and kept going.

The air swirling around the tower tasted of old dust and long memories. I crossed the peak and, as I began to descend towards the far shore, the stars seemed to fade and the night grew darker. I remembered the razor shells and fossilised starfish that littered the beach and picked my way as carefully as I could over the dunes to the sea.

I paused on the shore, catching my breath, the tide lapping at my feet. I glanced back across the hillside. There was no movement. The sheikh was sleeping still. The tall palms along the beach could have been a corps de ballet, black swans with arms moving imperceptibly. Ahead, the waves spread as far as I could see, vanishing invisibly into the sky.

You can do it. You can do it.

It had probably taken me about forty minutes to swim to the island. At the half way point going back, I expected to see the lights on La Gomera. When I saw the lights, I would be home and dry.

You can do it.

I strode into the surf, plunged in and the sea chilled the nervous sweat coating my damp on my body. I emerged for breath and warmed myself striking out in a fast crawl before switching to the less demanding breast stroke, conserving energy. This isn’t a race, I kept telling myself. Don’t panic, keep your eye on the same spot on the horizon and keep going, one breath, one stroke, another few yards between the island and safety.

Having swum across the strait during the day, I knew I had the strength to make it back. But at night with nothing before me except the long march of the waves, I began to fear that I might get lost. I knew in the desert when people thought they were going in a straight line they eventually walked in a circle. Was it the same at sea? I didn’t know. All I could do was rise over each swell of the ocean and press on into the next. The wind whipped the surface of the water and stung like razors that seemed to be striking my face with the indifference of the beachcomber striking my backside and the man in black beating me with a broken cane, fucking me until I screamed for more. I didn’t know that girl parading naked with a remarkable lack of self-consciousness, a disdainful bravado, the touch of vanity concealed behind every club door that opened to let her in. Was it really me? Was that the girl I wanted to be and the girl swimming through the waves was the shell of who I had once been, that composite of other people’s designs and dreams and ideas?

I was thrilled to be swimming back to La Gomera, but it struck me that in spite of everything that had transpired that day on the hot sands, I felt no shame, no conscience or self-doubt. We all cast ourselves in different roles, re-write the past. We all find the perfect thing to say after the moment to say it has past. We all have a fantasy life and the island was a fantasy. The fear we have of opening the box concealing our secret self is the fear of what we might find, the fear of what others might say or think, the fear of what we might think of ourselves.

As I pushed through the waves, I thought about the sheikh, how he was nervous of that first kiss, how there was a look of wonder in his moonlit eyes as his cock vanished into my mouth. I had been beaten against my will and I had seduced the sheikh to engineer my escape. I had done nothing to be ashamed of.

It was getting colder. I knew that the temperature of the sea changes very little at night, but the air cools and on the current were icy hands that crept over my body like a foreboding and made me shiver.

Earlier in the day, when I had stood with the beachcomber at the foot of the tower and looked back the way I had come, the clouds on then horizon warned me that a storm was coming. That storm finally arrived, announcing itself with a stripe of lightning and a roll of thunder that drove a line of stamping sea horses pounding into my face. The stars above like light bulbs in a string of seaside illuminations went out one after the other. The world turned monochrome, my white arms clawing at the grey waves below a sky now black as pitch. The pale silver path lit by the moon disappeared and spots of rain the size of coins struck the water like drumming fingers. I closed my eyes and swam without looking and didn’t know if the briny tang in my mouth belonged to the sea or my tears.

When I opened my eyes, everything was black except distant spots in the dome of the sky that turned blue as lightning crackled in long zigzags like a pattern on a piece of cloth. The crash of thunder hit the sea in sonic booms that plunged me below the surface and, like a dolphin, after each dive I leapt higher to take another breath.

There was a cramp in my leg and I rolled on to my back and kept going, kicking with one leg, panting, filling my lungs. I was 22 and in six months I would be 23. I didn’t want to grow old, it seemed pointless growing old, but I thought in the next ten years, by the time I was 33, I could do a lot of things, achieve something, be something, do something other people don’t do. Until now I had done nothing. I had gone to university and idled my way through long months of long nights drinking, flirting, sleeping with different boys, sleeping through morning lectures, cramming for exams.

When I got my modest degree I felt like a complete fraud stepping up on the stage in Durham Cathedral and staring out with my embossed scroll at the graduates lined up in black gowns like beetles, all identical, all carried to uni on the same mediocre mother ship. Even my job at the publishing house was acquired through family friends. I was a shoe-in. Eye candy for the office, nicely spoken, nicely shaped, a blonde with full pink lips, a short skirt, a slice of cleavage on show for the authors, those middle-aged men pretending to be young, those middle-aged lesbians writing to succeed in what they saw as a man’s world. Nothing I had read in the last year was original and nothing I had written for jacket notes and PR handouts was original. I was going to drown there that night in the sea and the only original thing I had ever done was fuck three Arabs in one day.

I wasn’t swimming any more. I was surviving. I was being tossed about in ten foot waves. I could have been moving with the tide back to the island or out into the open sea where oil tankers and cruise ships plied the sea lanes between Europe and America. A vicious burst of lightning ripped the sky in two, the light was brilliant, a ghostly blue, and the thunder that followed was like a barrage of guns, boom, boom, boom, the shock waves lifting me up in the air and throwing me deeper into the sea.

Down I went, spinning under water, down and down, eyes open, mouth open. I’m never coming up again. I’m never going to get back to La Gomera. In two weeks my mum and dad would be wondering what had happened to me. They will set out for the Canary Islands. They will talk to the police and no one will have a clue where to look for me and no one will understand a word they are saying. I didn’t want that to happen. It would ruin their lives.

I kicked down and shot up through the murky water and breathed again. I had almost drowned. I had almost died. That’s not going to happen, I told myself. I didn’t panic. I took deep breaths. The storm, as if we were subtly linked, was moving away. The rain stopped as quickly as it started. I could just make out a line of red fairy lights. I rubbed my eyes. Was I seeing things? No. They were there. A few more lights were dimly flickering on the horizon and I realised I had reached the half way mark. It was La Gomera that I could see and I set off again in a steady crawl.

In a few minutes, I switched to breast stroke. The lights were stronger now. They outlined the building that carried the Spanish flag, the landmark guiding me home. The lights gave form to the hill, the village where I had found a room in a fonda. I smiled. I would have to stride back through the streets wearing nothing but the St Christopher, the patron saint of travel, the necklace a reminder that what had happened that day wasn’t a fantasy. I had swum off into the sea dreaming of adventure and the adventure was over. Perhaps I’ll phone Bobby, tomorrow, give him another chance.

The moon was back in the sky, lighting the beach, the sand at night grey like pewter. The stars burst into life. The wind died. The only sound I could hear was my arms and legs cutting through the water.

Then, quite suddenly, from the distance, like a murmur, came the steady drum of a motor beating like a train getting closer and louder. I turned on to my back and could just make out a white shape moving towards me. The beach was a hundred yards away. I could do that in five minutes. I turned back on my front and set off again in a fast crawl, the fatigue sliding from my limbs, my breath steady, three strokes and breathe, three strokes and breathe.