What were the concealed pleasures of adulthood?
He was willing to look anywhere, to discover them.
His father had a wealthy friend named Sean Williams, and on vacations James’s father liked to take his son and his self up to Williams’s estate, in the country. There was nothing to do there but ride horses, but James enjoyed the visits, not knowing why the first few times, but eventually realizing that Williams was a man of the world, and it was intoxicating being around what he knew. James’s father only brightened at his son’s receptivity to the strictly planned and scheduled father/son activities.
As his father mingled with some carefully summoned friends, James sat brooding but enjoying night air and punch beside the grill. Warmth sang out around him of frogs and bugs and fragrant flowers, and none of the bullshit of the city whatsoever. He didn’t care much for the country, but a man who could afford to live outside the city could make his own rules.
“Nice night, isn’t it, kid?”
Williams had approached him, and stood right next to him like a ghost, without the boy even realizing it. The rich man sat down, and James fought for demeanor.
“Yeah, yes, I guess it is.”
Williams smiled, cradling his drink, his eyes remaining distant, laced across the green horizon and the lights of landing jets.
“Can I ask you something, James?”
“Sure,” he kid said, sitting upright, in spite of himself. If this were going to be a real conversation, he didn’t need to play a role. What could this man who had everything need to know from him?
“What do you want from life? I mean, what does a kid like you really want?”
“Well, sir, I...”
“I’m not asking you to help me understand my son,” he said sharply, and took a sip of Scotch. “I see you sitting here, unusually bright, brighter than your father, that’s for sure, and I wonder what’s got you all twisted up.” He looked at the teen. “Amaze me.”
James smiled, almost bitterly, and looked down at the patio before them, not believing anything good could come from telling the man who could grant anything about the needs that tore him apart. He held his drink between his knees, and smiled.
“Just growing pains, I guess.”
“A woman?” asked the millionaire.
“No.”
“Women?” the older man persisted.
“You’re in the ballpark,” the boy said, smirking, and the millionaire laughed.
“How about just the right woman, entering your life at just the right time, in an explosion of truth and sensation that deafens cheesy fantasy?”
The boy looked up at him in confusion almost painful. How had he known?
“Follow me.”
James did.
In Mr. Williams’s office, James sat in the guest chair, a few inches lower than the main chair, a massive desk between them, as Williams chatted and dodged irrelevancies for agonizing, empty minutes on the phone.
When he finally hit the speed dial, and smiled and winked at the crumbling teenager, James had almost forgotten why he was there.
“Yes. Yes. Yes. Good,” Williams spoke into the phone, and snapped his fingers twice at the drifting boy, waking him quickly up and getting him to scribble his apartment’s address on a piece of desk paper so the millionaire could read it off into the phone in a businesslike fashion. “Good. Good. Thank you,” he said, and hung it up.
James smiled, feeling it was the appropriate thing to do.
Williams leaned in close, elbows on the desk, fingers interlaced, and stared at him.
“Tomorrow. 8 p.m.”
The boy nodded.
At 7 on the following night, James sat in an Oxford shirt and black slacks and shoes on his puffy pseudo-leather couch, cringing with a horrible realization that this would not be enough. He had no thoughts for his own first time, or the sanctity of that moment, but he had to experience this transition to adulthood in its proper setting to experience it fully, and this boy’s pad might suffice for those who didn’t care about having things in their essence, but it wasn’t going to be good enough for him. He had to have it accurately, every detail of the setting giving itself over to support the meaning of the action as a whole. Every part scrutinized, and synchronized.
By 7:45, in defeated despair, he dimmed the lights on their rotary switch, crossed his leg over his erection on his imitation couch, and hoped for the best, or at least a miracle. He took a sip of champagne.
At 8:25 p.m., his cheap bell/buzzer rang, and James stumbled to the intercom. His leg was asleep, and his stiff cock wasn’t helping the blood-loss problem.
“Yeah, hello?” he sang, expecting anyone other than the date prepared for him.
“James?” came the voice, soft, succulent, and feminine.
“Yeah, uh, yes,” he said in a cracked voice. He winced. “Yes?”
“I have a car for you.”
His breath hovered, in his throat, between his mouth and his lungs. Had his angel descended? Would they not have to enact the scene of his transformation in his house? The air went into his stomach.
“Just a minute,” he said, and burped into the microphone. His eyes shut tight as he cursed every atom of himself with all his feelings.
Downstairs, some static was allowed to broadcast up to him, and then nothing, as though she’d been too excited by him to think of anything to say. What had that space meant? That buzzing? Was she disgusted? Was she turning back, giving him only a minute to get down to her, to do everything and anything to convince her to be his?
Whatever it had meant, it had the right effect on him. He practically fell down as he pulled on his jacket, turned out the light, and locked his apartment door behind him.
When he got outside, the black stretch limo was there waiting for him; impossibly large, seemingly aware of him, grumbling: a living beast, inviting him to ride in it.
“Oh, baby,” he said, in spite of himself.
“Baby?” the female voice came, and he turned in shock to the woman leaning against the small segment of fence on the bushes at the edge of his walk. Her pose was less than dignified, he noted, with her arms splayed out on the length of the top beam of the fence behind her, and her high-heeled legs crossed in front of her. Her body language had a nerdy, almost baby-sitter air, and he wondered if Mr. Williams had sent over in fact a woman and not just another inexperienced girl. Still, his eyes took the predictable moment to feast upon her.
Everything she was wearing was black. From her high heel shoes (four inches, not that she needed them) to her obscure long stockings, to her mini dress and hair, which was straight to her mid back and held back by a felt hair band, also black. The band, thought James, made her look more like a sensitive black-wearing artist, than a hooker.
She came away from the fence, and sauntered up to him, burning her image into his mind, and his doubts were erased. She took his chin in her hand, and just as soon forgot about it, whispering into his momentarily pursed lips, “Ride’s waiting,” and she walked up to the car, and waited. She placed her hands high above her hips, kept one leg in line with her spine and sent the other out tangling, playfully toying with the soil ground underneath her merciless and turning heel, and waited for him to open the door for her.
As her head sank into the purring limousine, a thought overtook his mind.
A woman of the world.
He ran around the trunk, and got in through the other side.
On the ride to wherever they were going (he forgot to ask) she never took her sardonic eyes off of his, and she kept her hands overlapped on the knee of her left leg as it rode and rubbed on her right one. He was on her left, and felt it difficult to take his eyes from her slightly smirking, satisfied, red lips as they shone from her.
He was too afraid to talk (the great, ready, conqueror of women and the adult world) and he tried to pin his gaze to the furry limo floor before him, but her silky voice brought him cruelly back into her lips and their blushing, flourishing desire.
“What brings you out, tonight, James?” She obviously already knew. His brow crunched with self-pity.
A surprising surge of his usual audacity rushed back to him. He faced her, head on, eyes to eyes.
“I intend to become a man.”
“And what do you think a man is?” she asked, not missing a beat.
She was well trained. This only encouraged him.
“You’ll know by morning.”
“Maybe sooner,” she said, as the car rounded the circular drive of her hotel, and he was not quite sure if he’d been insulted as the doorman opened her side and welcomed her back to her home (Thank you, Tom) with an outstretched, gloved hand, and shut the door behind her.
James found his own way out of the car on the dark side of the limo, wondering for a second if he had to tip the driver. He scurried up behind her, now feeling totally emasculated by his frantic lack of self-control, but not looking too deeply for the answers to what he could do to correct the situation. She had a black bag over her shoulder, now, and had pulled from it a compact and lipstick which she applied as they entered the palace of light and glass, and he was her simpering monkey to the scorn and mockery of passers by all the way to the elevator, which the two entered.
James, the great lady killer, had met his match, been beaten by her, forgotten, joined for a rematch, beaten again, and driven from town on international television, all before the contest had begun.
In the mirrored, rising room, he tried to reinsert into the spiraling situation some suggestion of what he’d wanted the evening to be.
“I just want you to know,” he said...
Ding.
“Our floor,” she said, returning her makeup to the purse, and stepping off of the elevator.
All of a sudden it dawned on him.
Am I being frightened by a common hooker?
He was back in control.
They entered the room, and he kept an inner eye on his determination as he scanned the magnificent opulence splayed liberally about him.
“Drink?” she asked. Her purse gone, she had walked to the wall bar, and he realized again that this was no mere prostitute. The way the fingertips of her left hand settled on the marble, the way she poured with her right. The bend of her right, stockinged leg. The straightness of her left leg, carved perfectly out of night. Her skirt, and her hair. This was a creature of power.
Natural assets were limited, he had heard once in a movie. The desire to exploit them is infinite. For the first time, he understood that sentiment, and the power it implied over his weak, quick, male mind.
But he remembered that control was his as long as he wanted to keep it.
“Champagne,” she said, and offered him a glass. She must have smelled it on him. “To old friends,” she said, and drank without waiting.
“Old friends,” he said, and sipped.
She put her glass down on the coffee table, and sat on the luxurious white couch, arms at her sides on the top of it, legs crossed again, this time making use of their form in the black stockings, inviting and forbidding simultaneously, seductive.
“Can’t we just be friends?” she asked, and he joined her on the couch, nervously.
Looking at her from this new angle, he was taken and owned by her raven beauty.
She leaned in toward him.
“Why must we fight for dominance?” she whispered, nails cutting softly the back of his neck. “That’s a boy’s game. Like the teams at your school play,” she coaxed. His eyes were closing. “I thought you wanted to be a man,” she breathed.
“I do,” he gasped, her nails on his scalp contorting him lightly like a dummy.
She smiled, invisible to him, in the darkness and pleasure she had wrought.
“Then, be a man for me.”
With that, it was all over. His will, which she was fighting to make reality, was now her will, as he surrendered to her. It was a paradox of endless sweetness, as old as the bonds of time.
James had never been with a woman of the world, before. He wasn’t sure how to proceed. Oh, he knew the mechanics of it, but he doubted his ability to adequately revere her perfect, luminous and naked form as it sat upright, patiently but wanting, in front of him. It was no more a question of pleasing her than it had been a question of making his first time special; no. It was a question of treating her body properly, absorbing every aesthetic pleasure that it offered, of making love to her as a man was supposed to make love to a woman who, he had discovered, was without physical flaws (he gulped) even by his exacting physical standards.
“I’ll take care of you, baby. Just turn it over to me.”
He had the strangest feeling, watching her lie back on the plush and welcoming white carpet, that he would definitely cum too early. He knew that she knew that he would make a mess of it, too. Still, he lay down between her perfect, muscular, small legs, and entered her, as naked as she was, and rather than be taken aback at how owned he felt by the sensations from inside her, he was captivated by the calm of her slit black eyes and smile; confident, reassuring, and most importantly, forgiving and expecting many more tries leading up to perfection. She owned him in a different way, by promising him chances.
Is this love, he wondered. Fortunately, he knew it wasn’t, but the power she cast over him with the promise, invitation, of her angelic face was as bad and large as love could ever be.
“That’s it, baby. Good, baby. Now you’re going places,” she mewed.
All he wanted was to make the most of what she offered him.
He watched her breasts rock up and down with his gently insistent pushing.
“What can I do?” he asked her.
“You’re doing it,” she replied convincingly.
He slowly fucked her, but at that degree of uncertainty and awe, it was more like making love.
He had to make the most of her.
“Watch carefully, now,” she said, and he thought he was finally getting some results; he was doing something right.
Under her mental control, the room around him began to dissolve.
He gasped, but her shapely legs casually encircled him, interlocking at the ankles over his ass, and he was free, again, of doubt, concern, and anxiety.
“What’s happening?” he asked, reflexively.
“You’re doing it to me. This is what men do to women. This how a man makes love.” She threw an arm around his shoulder. “Rock my world, baby,” she said, and thrust faster. His face contorted briefly in sudden confusion. He had completely lost the need to come. But she rutted with him, and stroked his ribs up and down with the backs of her fingernails, and the strangeness of his circumstances seemed to evaporate from his fevered mind.
His body had never moved so responsively. It was like he was a machine, not feeling the effort in his chest, not feeling fatigue in his limbs.
“O, now you’re doing it to me, baby. Keep doing it the way I like it. Keep doing it like a man.”
His eyes stared forth moronically, as his body only pumped slightly faster, calling on reserves of strength without tiring, the way psychics seem to use hidden portions of their brain when bending spoons.
“Oh, yes, that’s it. No woman’s ever had it so good.”
The world around them, as he saw it, was now changing quite horribly. He was unable to react.
Concentration camp scenes, parades of starving children and murders, adulteries, rapes and child abuse flickered in every pocket of creation known to him as he pressed into her, each push only seeming to hit the UP button on the remote control for the television that reality had become, changing the location and increasing the number of the atrocities around them as he lay pinned and locked into his primal, pleasuring course.
“Oh, baby, you know what I like!” That time, she seemed to be displaying some real emotion. Almost.
As the horrors and abominations, headless infants, satanic sacrifice, masochistic rites, swarmed harder and faster and quicker and surer into the wet waiting eye of his mind, the succubus called out a monstrous cry.
“Fuck me, Man!”
And he awoke, not surprisingly, in the hotel room, with a huge bill to pay, a disapproving sun beating down on him, and no sign of the vamp who’d left him robbed of his youth.
Suddenly, it was not so difficult to understand why Mr. Williams was so rich.