A dozen girls line up according to height. They wear very little apart from smiles and enough body hair to prove that no one worries too much about being like ferox up here. In age they range from late teens to early thirties, and in looks from the acceptably attractive to so beautiful it makes me want to cry.
I ignore the most beautiful. We’ll have nothing to say to each other and she looks delicate, the kind of girl to be scared by the scars she’ll find on my back. I ignore the oldest and youngest as a matter of principle. One will be bitter, the other sullen, and I can do without the fuss.
In the end I choose the one in the middle, quite literally.
In the middle of the line, middling in looks and size and age. Her name is Caliente; at least that’s the one she gives me.
“I’m Sven,” I tell her. “Do we need to find a room?”
She looks embarrassed that I can ask so stupid a question in front of the other girls. “We have rooms,” she says. “Perhaps you’d like to make a choice?”
As she leads the way, I’m happy to follow, not least because Caliente’s hips are wide and her buttocks curved, and I can see enough light between her thighs as she climbs the steps to let me know what I’m getting.
Who knew beds came in so many shapes and sizes?
The room we choose is smaller than the others, less ornate. It is the final one on offer and she seems both surprised and reassured by my choice.
“You can read a man by the room he chooses?”
She shrugs away my question, and when I return to it decides to give me an honest answer. “Most of the time.”
“And this room says what?”
“That you ask too many questions.”
I smile and let the matter drop. Every profession has its secrets. Why should hers be any different? I want to ask how Caliente comes to be in this job, whether it’s from choice, how long she’s been aboard the ship. But my ignorance about not needing to buy a room has made me cautious.
“What do you want?”
“What can I have?”
Caliente smiles sadly. “Anything,” she says, as if that should have been obvious. I guess that answers my question about choice.
“I want a bath,” I tell her. “And time to talk and sleep and do the other stuff in between.”
And so it happens.
She doesn’t bite or howl and we don’t fight each other for scraps of food when it’s all over, and for that I’m grateful. Instead Caliente sits astride me, with her breasts overflowing my fingers and her nipples hard beneath my hands, and she talks about nothing very much, until the slow movement of her hips takes away my need for conversation.
“Take what you want,” she says later.
It’s dark in the room. A single clap of my hands will summon light and a click of my fingers will dim it again. Caliente has a trick that involves flicking her fingers and tapping her index finger against her thumb that somehow microadjusts the lighting so that each change is almost imperceptible.
She has many tricks, although only one to do with adjusting the lights. So many tricks, in fact, that I’m rapidly beginning to discover how much I don’t know about sex and what makes women happy.
“I’m serious.”
A clap of my hands summons lights and she nurses them down to a gentler level, smiling to show she knows I didn’t intend to make them that bright.
“What?” I say, seeing something in her eyes.
Her face goes blank, and remains blank as I sit up on the bed and reach down to stroke her face with my good hand. Despite herself, she looks at me and I recognize pity.
“When’s your mission?” she asks.
What mission?
I fall back on the traditional excuse, and she’s apologizing and I’m trying to wave away her apology before I’ve even finished telling Caliente that it’s confidential and I’m not allowed to talk about it.
We stroke the lights back to near-darkness and I go down on her. Spreading her thighs to bury my face between her legs and force my tongue deep into her. Caliente tastes of salt and soap and something else, which I realize is me.
She breathes deeply and her body begins to tense, her thighs tight around my skull. And then her hand reaches down and grips my head as she forces my mouth hard against her. She has her fingers wrapped into my hair and her sex grinding under my tongue. I can taste blood from my lips where they’re bruising against bone.
“Don’t stop.”
Her demand is urgent.
So I do what I’m told, swallowing blood and salt and myself, and remain that way until her fingers twist in my hair, her hips rise one final time, and she pushes herself against me, whimpering.
It’s a first, both going down and having a woman come for real, but I’m careful not to tell Caliente that. And I was told by my old lieutenant-although I don’t know if it’s true-that in the minutes following release the muscles around a woman’s anus relax. So if a man’s tastes run that way…He told me many things. Not all of them suitable for the twelve-year-old boy I was.
Caliente says nothing when I roll her over and merely smiles in the near-darkness when I tuck a pillow under her hips to raise them slightly. It’s as if she always knew this is how we’d end up. Sweat slicks her spine and beads between her shoulder blades.
When I lick it, she shivers.
“I’m sorry about my arm,” I say.
“It’s okay.”
“I can take it off,” I tell her. “But that would probably look worse.”
“Really,” she says. “It’s fine.”
So I spit on my hand, having supported myself on my arm, and carry my fingers to her buttocks, sliding one finger inside.
“In the drawer,” she says. “The pink sachet.”
It’s lubricant of some sort, so I use that instead, slopping it around her and on me until she tells me it’s enough. And then I ease myself inside her and stay like that, for a count of a thousand, until Caliente asks if I’m okay.
“Fine,” I say.
Sometimes need is more complicated than it should be.
The girl lets me stay until morning, shares her breakfast when she realizes no plans have been made for me, and helps me shower, watching as I struggle back into my too-small uniform with its cutaway badges. If she has any more questions of her own, she keeps them to herself.