Loading...It had been a long, bumpy flight, I hadn’t slept, and I was feeling skeevy around the edges. Needed something to hone that edge off, so I stopped at an old friend’s up in Laurel Canyon before going to my hotel and picked up a few joints. Decent stuff, but I wished I’d brought my tin from New York – unfortunately, not with airport security these days.
Anyway, I checked into my room up at the Four Seasons– the quietest place when I’m in town on business. It was about 9 in the evening, midnight east coast time, and I had meetings tomorrow. Just enough time to light up a bone and kill a few brain cells on the balcony before drifting into slumberland.
Which is what I was doing when the door to the balcony of the room next door popped open and a young girl rushed out. I palmed the joint and looked innocent while she sniffed the air. Looked to be late teens, long brown hair down to her waist, wearing a Good Charlotte T-shirt and jammy shorts. Looked pissed, like someone was having fun and she wasn’t. Cute, with big eyes behind clear round glasses, even if they were narrowed at the moment.
“Do you smell that?” she asked.
“Smell what?” I answered. Just some guy her dad’s age catching the air.
“Nothing,” she said, and went back inside, closing the door. I paused then took a long draw off the joint, held it in my lungs and felt the day’s bullshit start to fade. Bam, she was out on the balcony again.
“Are you getting high?”
Exhale. Sigh. “Yes. Is it bothering you?”
She laughed, sharply, impatiently. “Only if you don’t share.” Her smile was there but distant. All business.
I shrugged and reached over, handing her the joint across the three feet of air that separated her balcony from mine. She snagged it easily, held it to her lips and cupped it, fanning the glow. Looking at me without trying to look like she was doing it; that was fine, since I was doing the same.
“You don’t even know what that is,” I said. “Could be laced with anything.”
She paused, looked more directly at me. “You’re not the type, though, are you?”
I shook my head, held out my hand. She passed the joint back. We were silent for the next few minutes, passing it back and forth, both taking in the sight of L.A. stretching out before us. I didn’t know about her, but the wind sweeping up from the flats always gives me the weirdest sensation of warm chills when I get to the city.
She broke the silence first. “That’s nice shit.”
“Thank you.”
“You just get here?”
“Mm-hmm. How did you know?”
She shifted her gaze away.
“There was a different couple there this morning. My parents and I heard them arguing.”
“I’ll be quiet. I’m just sleeping here; I’ll be off on business tomorrow.”
I passed her the joint.
“Nice that you get to go somewhere.”
That brought me up. “How’s that?”
“My parents are at a party tonight, and I’m not allowed to go.” She sighed. “Some record label bullshit for my dad to schmooze at and my mom to dress up and feel like she’s my age. I stay here. Not for ‘kids’. They don’t want me cramping their style.” She noodled on the joint until I motioned for her to pass it back. “‘My parents took me to Los Angeles and all I got was this lousy hotel room,'” she said with a laugh. She flipped her hair back with a naïve cynicism that was actually pretty touching.
“That well and truly sucks,” I said, and I meant it. I remembered the vast gulf between who I was and who my parents thought I was when I was that age. “What, are you supposed to watch Disney movies all night?”
“That’s pretty much the plan,” she said. “I’ve seen ‘em all, though. Not the Disney, but the regular movies. And my dad would bust me if I tried to look at the porno.”
“Only thing to do is raid the mini-bar, then.”
Her laugh an annoyed bark. “Bastard took the key.”
This struck me as just plain mean, so I went back into my room, pulled two beers out of my fridge, and came back out on the balcony.
“Catch.”
That caught her by surprise, but she was good – she caught it. And I got the first unforced smile I’d seen from her.
“Hey. That makes my night.” We popped our caps at the same time and raised bottles to each other. She sipped, then thought of something. “Be right back.”
She came back with a cellphone and put it on the little plastic table on her balcony. “They said they’d be checking up.”
“So, this is your first time out of the nunnery?” I asked.
She smiled at that too, but tried to hide it. “My dad owns a bunch of record stores in Des Moines. Iowa. This is his big yearly trip out west to meet and greet. He takes my mom usually, but last year he figured out that if he doesn’t bring me, I’ll throw a party while he’s gone. He’s right.”
I shrugged. “Couple of days in L.A. – what’s not to like?”
“Staying in this hotel room every night while they go out and act like teenagers. Sick.”
I laughed. “Rapunzel.”
“Huh? Oh, yeah… I hadn’t thought of that, but yeah. My hair’s not long enough, though. And where’s my prince?”
“Don’t look at me, lady.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, pal.”
The tone was light, joking. This was clearly the first actual conversation she’d had in days. She raised her head, listening, and peered inside.
“Hold on a second – no, I thought it was them. Listen, I’m going to have to toss you this beer if they come back all of a sudden.”
“How old are you?”
“18, but 12 in their eyes.”
“You could take a walk outside.”
“I could. I did. There’s not a lot to see.”
“Wait a second.”
I went inside and opened the door connecting our two rooms, then went back out, telling her she could open her door and put the beer just inside my room if it came to that.
“Hm. Okay. Hadn’t thought of that. Are you a perv?”
“Not tonight. Too tired.”
She gave me the once over, decided I wasn’t immediately dangerous, and went inside. I heard her open her connecting door and expected her to reappear on her balcony. She outfoxed me; the next thing I knew she was on my balcony, sipping her beer and picking the joint stub out of the ashtray. I nodded, and motioned for her to sit.
“I’m sorry, I had to get out of that room.”
“I understand. The view’s so much better from here.”
We sat in silence for a long while, just taking in the night. I admired her legs – long, tan, an interesting scar on her left knee with a story behind it I’d never hear – and smiled at the orange toenails in blue flipflops. Her chestnut hair was thick, glossy, draped about her shoulders and waist like the folds of a shawl; it was her pride, and she knew it. Ears a little big and sticking out, lips full and ripe with contempt for the world, chin sharp but soft, eyes a dark brown and rather stoned at the moment. If she had a body, I really couldn’t tell under the oversized T-shirt.
The lights of late-night Beverly Hills reflected off her glasses, making her appear owlish, oracular. I’d begun to peg her as a good girl who only recently had figured out the pleasures of being a bad girl, and smart enough to still use the former as a cover for the latter. I could tell I was crossing her signals, getting both girls at once and probably something close to who she actually was.
After a bit, we started to talk. I told her about my job, my ex-wife, my girlfriend, my girlfriend’s kid. She told me about her boyfriend, her tastes in music and books and movies, her dog. It was as if we were sitting on a porch in the country, half-baked and old friends; a pleasanter time I couldn’t imagine. So it threw me for a loop when she asked, “You ever watch porno?”
I coughed and hacked like a boy with his first joint, and she cackled at that.
“Excuse me?”
“You ever watch ‘adult movies?'” Air quotes.
“Of course I have. Who wants to know, and why?”
She shrugged. “I saw a few recently, back home. My friend works at a videostore. She brought over one of the gay ones.” She made a face that was half horror and half awe.
“I tend to stick to the male/female variety, sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. I liked it. Made me…” She drifted, then snapped back into focus. “Why do you watch them?”
“Why do you think? They turn me on. The good ones do, anyway. Are you sure you want to be talking about this?”
She ignored me. “Do you, um, you know…”
My turn to laugh. “Do I what? Get myself off?”
“Yeah,” she asked, looking out at the night, her ears an unusual shade of crimson.
“Of course I do. That’s what they’re for. Don’t you?”
“I’ve never tried. I mean, not with a video. I did, though, after my friend went home.”
Silence.
“It was good, I take it.”
She grinned. “Oh, man.”
I smiled. There was a shoe waiting to drop, but I had no idea what it was.
“Does your boss get mad if you watch them in your hotel when you travel?”
The other shoe dropped. I didn’t answer immediately, just rolled the infinite number of conceivable responses around in my head. I chose the one that left as many doors open as possible. I left her sitting on my balcony, went to the TV facing my bed, cued up the adult film menu, came back out and handed her the remote.
“Go to town.”
“What’s this?”
“You want to watch a sex flick, go ahead. Your parents won’t be any the wiser, and I’ll sit out here on the balcony and read.”
She sat looking at the remote like it was the Rosetta Stone.
“Your boss won’t mind?”
“I am my boss.”
A pause. “How do I know you’re not going to try anything?”
“Because I’m not. Because you’re a nice kid and a cute kid but I’m not into seducing nice or cute kids just at the moment. Believe it or not, I’d rather read my book. Close the balcony curtain for all I care.”
She grinned to beat the band. “Yeah, you just want to smell the sheets afterward. ‘Cute kid.’ Fuuuck you. All right, let’s see what you’ve got.”
We went inside, and she thumbed through the menu of offerings. The titles made her blanch and make gross-out noises, but I could tell she was intrigued by all of them. She finally chose something called “Trading Pussies,” a hardcore goof on home improvement shows, and was all ready to select it when she stopped.
“Where’s my cell?” she asked, and ran back to her room to get it. After a pause, I heard her talking to someone, and from her exasperated drone, I could tell it was a parent. She came back in, holding her cell phone and rolling her eyes.
“Yeah, we’re good. Man, are we good. My mom is dragging my dad to an afterparty up in the hills. They won’t be home until three.” She stood there looking at me with big, innocent eyes that said “So…?” until I got the hint, grabbed the novel I was reading, and went back onto the balcony. I didn’t close the curtain, but she did. I noticed, however, that she didn’t close it all the way. In fact, I didn’t even have to move my chair to have a view of her sitting lotus-legged on my bed. So I didn’t move my chair.
I tried to read my book. Really, I did. Even with the low, insistent sounds of video fucking leaking out from inside. I stared at a paragraph for several minutes at a time, telling myself not to look up. When I finally did, she was staring at the screen, her mouth a stoned O of amazement and incipient horniness. The cold blue light of the TV played across her face and legs, and I noticed her hand dandling between her legs. Not doing anything, mind you.
The next time I looked up, her eyes slid away from me so quickly I almost missed it. I went back to my book. The plot was interesting. I think there was a plot.
She wasn’t looking at me when I next shifted my gaze. At least I think she wasn’t; her glasses reflected the TV tube, like twin coming attractions. Tiny figures conjoined and humped in her lenses. I kept watching, bad old me. Her right hand had dropped into the open leg of her shorts, and she leaned back against the pillows, stroking herself so gently that I wouldn’t have picked up on it if not for the slow rhythmic pulse of her hips. I felt the blood divert to my cock and the warm, happy stiffness of erection. Her hips pistoned a little faster; her hand busied itself more frenetically, and her mouth hung open in astonishment and lust. I don’t know what was going on on the screen, but it was doing the trick. After about five minutes, she hunched over, gave out a quiet cry that was just loud enough to reach me on the balcony, and held absolutely still for a long stretch of seconds. Then she relaxed with an audible phlump against the pillows and diplomatically rearranged her shorts. This time I could tell she looked at me, and I slid my eyes away.
But not for long. There’s only so much I can take of a carrot like that at the end of a stick like that. I sighed loudly, closed my book with an audible snap, rose, stretched, and stood in the doorway to the room. She looked at me like God’s own archangel.
“How’s the dialogue?” I asked
Smirk. “Lacking.”
A pause. “You want to come see.” Not a question but a neutral offer.
I nodded. “If it’s okay with you. My curiosity is piqued.”
“Is that what you call that?” she asked, looking at my hard-on.
“Someone who comes all over other people’s bedcovers has no business making fun of other people,” I said, and she blushed – blushed! I hadn’t expected that. For a brief moment she looked her age.
“Can you keep your hands to yourself?”
“Of course,” I said, sitting on the bed a good ways behind her and getting my first decent look at the on-screen action. It was what it always was: a silicon bimbette sucking the swollen johnson of some anonymous mullethead, to lousy music. Stimulating, yes; interesting, only if you’d never seen one before.
We watched in silence for a minute or two, her cross-legged with her back to me. I discreetly stroked the hard edge of my cock through my jeans.
“Do guys really like tits like that?” Her question broke my fugue state.
“Implants? I guess. Not all of us do. Why, are you feeling insecure?”
“Baffled, more like. They don’t move. Why is that a turn-on?”
“Because it’s a fantasy, maybe – closer to the plastic blow-up girlies in the magazine. Less threatening than a real woman. Personally, I like ‘em life-sized.”
“Ha. You’re just saying that.”
“Suit yourself.”
Pause.
“What about mine?”
“What about yours?”
“Are they threatening?” she laughed.
“Do you want to know if I think you have nice breasts? I can’t tell. You haven’t shown them to me.”
“And I’m not going to.”
“Right.”
She thought for a bit, then cinched her loose t-shirt tightly around her chest. I could see her curves more clearly; surprisingly womanly for a girl her age, and I told her so. She seemed to like that.
“Trust me for a second,” I said.
“Why should I?”
“All right, don’t.”
Long pause.
“Okay.”
I skootched up behind her so her back was almost against my chest, and gently cupped her breasts with my hands. A quiet intake of her breath, but she stayed with me, and I simply let my fingers wander over her, feeling her nipples respond, enjoying the sensation of warm, firm, yielding skin, doing little more than exploratory caressing. And then I stopped.
“Believe me, you have nothing to worry about,” I told her, and we went back to watching the movie. But now there was something else in the room.
After a minute or two of the onscreen actor with a dick as big as an anaconda, I said, “Besides, if we’re talking about insecurities, guys have it much worse.”
That broke the tension. She guffawed and said, “Poor little man with the poor little penis.”
“Please, it’s not that little. It’s just not a genetic freak of nature.”
“Yeah? Let’s see.”
That stopped me cold, and she could see it in my face. “Okay, you’re right. Let me feel.” And before I could stop her, her hands were running down the length of my shaft as it pressed up through my jeans.
“Jesus. That’s… that’s pretty impressive.”
“Average, but thanks.”
“Maybe I’ve been hanging out with below average guys.”
She was still massaging my cock – the beer, pot, and movie had conspired to put her in a daze of quizzical horniness – and the friction was getting me bothered. I could either stop her, or fight back. I reached around and let my thumbnail graze up her leg and press along the inner seam of her shorts. She relaxed into my chest with a little yawp.
“Ah, god, what’d you do that for?”
“Should I stop?”
“Ah… Hum. no.”
And so we sat there for maybe ten minutes, leaning into each other at an oblique angle while our fingers wandered and wondered and twinked and stroked. Her eyes stayed closed; she let out a low humming sound as my knuckles glided up the leg of her loose shorts and along the slippery outer lips of her pussy, very tentatively at first and then with a stoned, insistent rhythm. My fingertips found the grooves on either side of her clit and slid back and forth, tugging sexy, helpless huffs and grunts out of her. I liked the way her glasses slid down to the end of her nose and the way her long curtains of hair parted and opened in front of her face as she rocked.
For her part, she found my zipper soon enough and freed my cock, but she was getting so bothered by what I was doing to her that she wasn’t able to do much to me. Fine; getting her going was reward enough. Our foreheads touched as I stroked her higher and higher and she ran her uncertain hands up and down my shaft; our eyes closed and our breathing gradually sped up. When I ran my free hand under her shirt and circled a rough thumb around her nipple, stubby and hard, she moaned in pure lust and then laughed at her own loss of control.
“Do that again?”
I peeled the nightshirt up and over her head, leaving tendrils of long brown hair floating down in the charged air. Her arms instinctively crossed her breasts and then uncrossed, as she chucked her self-consciousness, lifted her chin, looked straight at me. It was a clear decision: She gave herself over to my gaze.
I had a sudden impression of an odalisque, of a woman of deepest confidence from another age. Here I was in a hotel room at 11 at night, stoned off my ass and diddling an 18-year-old girl, and it felt like I was in the back pages of a Henry Miller novel, sailing into the unknown with a fellow traveler. She was beautiful – womanly, as I said, with curves that her fall of hair only accentuated, and breasts that were neither small nor large but that were simply hers. I ducked my head and grasped a nipple between my teeth, lightly rolling it and hearing her “oh” of pleasure. Her grip on my cock suddenly tightened; her hands pumped me roughly.
“Easy there,” I said and tilted her back onto the bed, shucking my shirt but leaving the pants for the time being.
“Are we going to fuck?” she asked me. Asking permission. I thought I’d string her along a bit.
“I don’t know. There’s something I want to do first.” That brought the look of alarm in her eyes and I had to laugh. Still caressing her pussy, I said, “Look. I will not hurt you. This is as bizarre and enjoyable to me as I hope it is to you. Maybe less weird, but whatever. All I want to do is make the top of your head pop off. And I don’t have to do it with my cock. Yet.”
“What if I want you to?” she asked as I kissed slowly down her neck, to her collarbone – oh, that is my favorite part of a woman – to her ribs and belly, then used my teeth to tug her shorts down to her knees. No underwear.
“I’d say you talked a good game,” I said. “How much of this have you actually done?” She slid the shorts down to her ankles and off, allowing me to kiss her thighs and nose my way up into her tangle of mossy pubic hair, to where the heat and the funk was. She smelled ripe, clean; maybe she’d been taking a lot of showers out of boredom. The movie was long over by this point and the bedcovers were a mess. Any social niceties had ceased to be observed. She jackknifed around and brought her lips to my cock.
“I’ve done this.” Her wet mouth engulfed my rod, stiffening it even further, and she roughly tugged my pants and underwear down and away. Points for chutzpah if not for technique, and, anyway, I was more interested in swirling my tongue around her clit and sucking it back and forth between my lips like a small, prized BB. No one had done that to her before, and she immediately clamped her thighs around my head and started swearing like a sailor.
“Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck – God damn! Oh, fuckfuckfuckfuck…”
That made me laugh. And that’s how I found out that you can make a woman come by laughing directly into her cunt.
It was the longest, most surprised come I’ve ever heard, a guttural siren that started low and escalated by steps, each accompanied by a tightening of her thighs around my head. I felt the gush of pungent liquid onto my face and almost came myself then and there, but held on as her muffled shouts of release gave way to ragged breathing. She kept arching her slick pussy against my face, as though her body wanted more. Her own face slid against my cock; with a groan I felt the long strands of her hair wind around it and tug me toward release.
No, not yet.
I looked up and saw her face in repose, eyes closed, eyelids violet with passion or blood flow or something. Her hair a fine and lovely tangle, eyeglasses akimbo, and my cock still trembling against her cheek, a silver strand of jewels stretching from its tip to her cheek. I swung up to cradle her from behind, her smooth warm back expanding and contracting against my chest, and I kissed the back of her neck. She mooshed her hips up against me, purring. My cock slid between her legs and sawed gently back and forth along her cuntlips as we breathed. I could have stayed like that for a century or two.
She smiled when I told her about my vasectomy, and before she’d even had time to assent, I changed the angle of my hips just enough to glide straight into her with one long, slow, steely thrust. She grabbed my hand and cried out, pushing back harder with her ass and lifting her leg to give me better access. She was gloriously tight, and I knew she could feel every inch of me. We picked up speed; the next thing I knew she was face down on the bed while I plowed into her from behind and she howled ecstatically into my pillow. I held onto her tightly muscled little ass and drove in with all my might, feeling her pussy squeeze me with an intense liquid vise-grip. I was close to heaven; she seemed already there.
At some point I flipped over, and I remember a long, timeless, hard fuck: her on top trying to fuse her hips with mine, that shiny curtain of hair falling around me, blocking off everything but the sight of her face, dreamy and snarling. Her glasses finally came off and we laughed raggedly about that, then tucked ourselves into each other’s crevices and fucked until we were right at the top of the mountain, sweaty and ready to plunge down the other side. My fingers slid along her ass and danced a tarantella around her sphincter, and that’s all it took to send her over, neck cords taut and each intake of breath deeper and more guttural than the next. And that’s all it took to send me over, finally jetting hot ropes of come into her while her fingernails raised welts on my arms and we cried out into each others’ necks.
It had been a long, long time since I’d come together with a woman – hard enough to see stars – and it was worth the wait.
We lay there grinning like two idiots for who knows how long. We dozed, and as I drifted into sleep my mind indulged my loins in a silly little fantasy in which I was ten years younger and she was ten years older and we made a go of it. Silly, like I said. I wouldn’t have dreamed of telling her about it.
She woke up with a start at around two in the morning, listening carefully to make sure her parents hadn’t yet come back. There wasn’t much for us to say by that point. When she thanked me, I laughed and threw her shorts at her head. At the door between our rooms, we kissed quickly, with sudden teenage passion, and then I let her go. About 20 minutes later, there came the sound of a hall door opening, voices, the bumping of some drunken someone against the wall. Then I slept the sleep of the exhausted and guilty.
In the morning I could hardly walk, but I made it to the shower, dressed, got my papers in order. Then I headed for the elevator, and as I closed my door, who should step out of the next room but my dear little kinkette and her parents. They were carrying a few small traveling bags. Her dad looked nothing like me, thank God; a solid chunk of midwestern propriety, he was talking angrily into a cell phone about a missing delivery. The mother was 45 going on 20, or so her clothes and make-up indicated. She was listening to an iPod, tunelessly singing along to Alicia Keys, I think. The girl, my girl, was dressed plainly, jeans and nice purple silk blouse, and her eyes were locked on mine. All the laughter and sex of the night before was in her stare.
We piled into the elevator, dad talking a mile a minute, mom bopping, girl and me silently smiling. Then she turned to me and said in a perfectly conversational tone, “You know, that was easily the best sex I’ve ever had last night. You fuck like an animal.” I stiffened and glanced at her parents, but they had heard nothing, lost in their respective techworlds. Her father glanced at us, but as far as he was concerned his daughter was making small talk with a stranger.
There wasn’t much I could say in return without giving up the game, and she knew it. “Thanks. I only give as good as I get.” My ears were burning.
“I accept the compliment.” She paused and looked at the floor. “I… last night, I almost wished we could have kept going. No, not really. That you were younger. Or that I was older. Or –”
I lightly touched her arm to get her to stop, and it was her turn to blush. “Me too,” I said, and then the elevator doors opened and we went our separate ways, I to a breakfast meeting, she and her parents to the front desk to check out. Her father looked quizzically back at me for just a moment, half-sensing that he’d missed something, maybe something big.
The last I ever saw of her was in the revolving glass doors of the hotel. The California sunlight caught in her long brown hair and reflected off her glasses, and I couldn’t tell if she was looking back at me. It didn’t really matter, because then she was gone.