Eye, page 20
“What do you mean?”
“Like that bit where you confided in her, and turned her on just enough to trust you to mount her one more time, then hurting her when you did it.”
Colin performed that little twitch of the head that announced he was guiltlessly at sea. Whatever.
“Come on, Colin, when you told her, oh, Valentina likes to watch? That united you both against me — the voyeur and you immediately exploited that trust, and hurt her.” Valentina’s eyes held level and gray. “That’s a tactic I’d expect from a chess player.”
Colin smiled to cover the truth — he did not know what in hell Valentina was talking about. But her money spent excellently.
She snapped her fingers to bring him back. “You were asking what came next?”
A naked brunette is sucking a horse’s penis, or trying to. The head of the penis is the size of a cantaloupe, which makes the woman look like a small snake trying to swallow a large egg. Her mouth is wide open as she sort of smears her face around the tip of the erect member. The shaft looks three feet long.
Colin blinked. Looked again. The woman was still naked. Funny, that he wasn’t reacting to her nakedness.
The phallus is all there is, as she tries to tame it.
Colin did not notice how nice her breasts were. No implants.
The horse is some kind of muddy chestnut. Its head is out of frame. Its dick dominates the view, obliterating cognizance of virtually any other consideration, and there’s suspense, too — not will it go off, but how soon?
Essentially, this was what men and women have joked about for centuries, the legendary big dick, the scepter of supposed male power. All men are supposed to want big dicks the way all women are supposed to want bigger breasts, and anyone who denied this, traditionally, was either lying, or already packing.
The horse ejaculates. The force of it seems to physically shove the woman back, like the kick of a gun. She tries masterfully to field what looks like about a half-gallon jetting Flicka come. She manages a mouthful, the kind that balloons her cheeks. Then she wrenches forward, coughing, live and in real time, nothing edited. Her cupped hands overflow with regurgitated horse jizz.
Colin imagined it to be pretty warm, like gravy.
It gushes from the woman’s nose as the cock keeps spurting past her face. Horses, apparently, come as much as they shit.
Colin wondered what this woman sought in a sex partner when she wasn’t sucking off stallions for home video. The business end of the horse dick put Colin in mind of a baby’s head, and he questioned whether this anonymous mystery woman had ever borne any children. Whether she joked about men with tiny dicks. Whether she liked men at all. He imagined a quick, nonspecific fuckfest in which, to fulfill her hunger, somebody has to shove a baby up her twat.
“Last week I saw one on the internet where a woman bends over, spreads for the camera, and squeezes out a full Coke can,” said Valentina, over Colin’s shoulder. “Letting a lens record this sort of thing is not the most dignified road to immortality, is it?”
“What, do I get a lecture, now?”
“It was a rhetorical question.” She lowered her eyes in a studied move that made her look bemused. “I apologize.”
Somehow Colin did not feel empowered. This time, when he entered the bedchamber, he just sat on the bed. He’d done the tour last time. He felt the lenses, watching him.
He couldn’t push Valentina’s little Wild West video out of his mind. He kept circling back to the idea that it was not intended as outrageous … it was meant to overwhelm with inadequacy all who viewed it. Beyond the beery, frat-boy gross-out lurked an agenda which humiliated the woman gulping horse come last of all.
For the first time, Colin pondered whether women were repulsed by the taste of his own semen, then whether the women he’d like to fuck might be. He had tasted it himself slippery, alkaline, not as “salty” as bad porn would have you believe. Perhaps his own was a special mix. Perhaps it would seem saltier if he were compelled to chug a tumbler of it. He thought about going down on women he’d known, on women he’d like to know. All that glaze and lube was just mucous, basically. You don’t think about licking your girlfriend’s nose when she has the flu.
Get real, he chided himself. The horse didn’t care whether it was being jacked off by a man, a woman, or a milking machine run berserk. The mystery woman had to have been solicited, acquired, and willing to do all this buck-naked, drugs or not. And paid, assuredly. It was not some sniggering plot targeted on his own sexual fears; that required thought, and nobody actually thought about this shit — they just went ahead and did it.
“My name is Soliel.” The voice whipped Colin’s head around; he’d been caught with his alarms off.
The second thing that nailed him was how plain this one looked. No aerobics android, here. She had kept the nose Catherine Ankrum had erased. Her complexion was hit and miss; she was not so much unattractive as undistinguished. She came clad in the sort of junk women wear to hide their bodies when they feel ugly.
Soliel fondled his crotch, unzipped his pants and did her best to suck him up hard. Cohn recalled the high school joke about fat chicks; it took him forever to petrify. In his mind, he had to lapse purposefully back toward his reliable autopilot. Pretend he was on a set, fucking Cherry Canyon’s honey-hole (or vice-versa); play the game where he strove to hump so long that the crew ran out of film, or, even better, videotape.
Soliel was due for the trick where Colin orgasmed, stayed inside, kept pumping, re-engorged and orgasmed again. Despite his performance she seemed a universe away, enwrapped in her own sensations. Her vagina was capacious and elastic, making sustained friction a problem.
Colin kept thinking about the damned horse, and never managed that second erection.
He was able to locate nine of Valentina Sykes’s films in one day, though it required four different video stores, none of them Blockbusters. His mini-marathon had nothing to do with plot and everything to do with characterization. Valentina invariably portrayed strong-willed women who would destroy those around them rather than bend. Love was generally a bad idea that led to destruction. There remained only manipulations of greater or lesser finesse … and, sometimes, a victor, or at least a survivor, usually Valentina.
“I was an actress, Colin … what did you expect to see?”
It was easier to see her face, then, in her face, now. “I don’t know; I’m not sure. I want to know what all this makes you feel, I guess.”
“You don’t know, you’re not sure, you guess.” Valentina threw back enough straight Polish vodka to keep a tiki lamp going for an hour. “Did you masturbate or not?”
“In the end, yeah. Halfway through The Stars in Her Eyes.”
“Ah. The corset scene.”
“It’s the most naked you ever got in any of your pictures, when you stripped down to that lingerie.”
“You’re forgetting my bathing suit stuff.”
“I haven’t forgotten. The lingerie was more intimate.”
“Made me look more available, you mean.”
“I guess so.”
“Don’t guess.” She pursed her lips. He could see secrets stacked up in her eyes, inscribed like petroglyphs in a language he could not fathom. “You wanted to make love to me, the way I was, then.” She did not wait for an answer. “Stupid question, really. Would it pique your interest a bit more to know that Soliel is my daughter?”
Colin swallowed hard, trying to make room in his throat for a response. The lump there decided to stay. He felt his heart speed up. He paled.
“Yes, Colin. Soliel — your previous ‘date.’ The one you were so … preoccupied with, or should I say during? I’d think that given the opportunity you’d be more than eager to make love to my daughter. The results weren’t so tabloid-worthy, were they?”
“I didn’t know,” he choked out.
“But it shouldn’t make any difference, should it? I guess sex may really be all in the mind, like they say” Her gaze critiqued him, seeking flaws when before it sufficed with approbation. “Still … I’d think that would be your dream encounter, to have sex with the daughter of the woman you fantasize about while masturbating. And you really couldn’t get it up that second time.”
“It happens.”
“It doesn’t happen to me.”
“It won’t happen again.” Not as long as I can distance myself from that damned horse video, Colin thought. “Sometimes under the best conditions, with the sexiest woman in the world, the rhythm just gets bollixed.”
“We’ll see, won’t we?”
Valentina rewarded him with a low-slung, sturdy vixen with genuine breasts, the type whose strong, saucy walk was both an announcement and a warning to those who would aspire to get between her legs. Her name was JodyRae and carnality was her main ingredient. She shamed the anorexic bimbos of men’s mags and provided a full-body workout for Colin. All the time he pounded her, he was thinking of how much better he would perform if he ever got another shot at Soliel. Valentina, naturally, had anticipated this. The time for Soliel had passed, and JodyRae was just a warm-up for what was to follow.
Colin had been told the new girl’s name was Jillian, and he found her already undressed and waiting for him the moment he entered the chamber. She did not say much of anything and only seemed dimly aware of what he was doing. Her body was flabby instead of detailed, pale in an unhealthy way, and her movements against him were clumsy and ineffectual, as though she was doped, or not accustomed to getting laid well. She smelled bad, a combination of body odor and starchy diet, plus a diapery pall that put Colin in mind of nurseries and baby drool.
This one was bedflop; no potential and no hope beyond a quick ram in the rack. What the hell was Valentina thinking?
Jillian grunted a few inarticulate words; Colin shellacked his expression and played strictly to the camera. Okay, she was obviously doped; it wasn’t as if he’d never ridden that train himself.
He pushed off her and wiped down with the towel that was always there, waiting, on a small valet rack. Jillian was still making noise and when he actually paid attention he saw that she continued to murmur and thrust against air as though he was still inside her. Her arms looped around nothing above her; a ghost embrace.
That was when he finally realized: She’s mentally retarded.
He could not get to the shower fast enough.
In his street duds, in the corridor, not twenty minutes later, he ran into Soliel. His brain was racing, trying to find some way to scour the previous hour out of every convolution.
“It’s you,” she said, looking at his crotch. They all did.
“Hey.”
Panic formed a fireball in Colin’s head. He was trying to summon cheap charm and seductive small talk, to cultivate Valentina’s daughter — for later — and all that would display was You FUCKED A SLOBBERING RETARD, UNH-UNHUNH. His machine gun nest of pheromones was dozing on duty.
“I have to kind of explain. About my mom.”
“You don’t have to explain anything. I just — “
She overrode him. “No, stop. You don’t understand, even if you think you do. It might all seem very strange. But she does it for love.”
He stood absorbing her, sensing his snap judgment was off. He could see Valentina in her daughter now, around the eyes, in the shape of the mouth, in the general body carriage. The prevailing makeup fashions of the Fifties would have made Soliel’s brows thicker and she probably would have bangs over her considerable expanse of forehead. She smelled pleasantly of night-blooming jasmine. When she said she does it for love she had reached out and touched Colin’s hand, in entreaty, then withdrawn it hastily, as though stung.
“What, even to the point of throwing her daughter into the mix, and watching her fuck?”
“That’s not it. It’s subject to my approval. I saw some of your movies and I said okay.”
Colin abruptly remembered the capacity of Soliel’s limousine-sized vagina. She had seen his dick in a few adult films and voted yea. She had volunteered to fuck him based on seeing his movies in the same way Colin was actualizing his vintage fantasies about Valentina Sykes. It scuffed his ego. He had treated Soliel like a charity fuck while she’d been going to the races.
“And you did it for your mom.” He tried his best to sound wounded.
She touched his face. “Hey. You were wonderful. Really. I gotta go.”
Somehow it didn’t surprise Colin that his next “date” was a man. His name was Larry, and Colin forgot it as soon as he heard it. He’d done boy-on-boy scenes before, so it was no big deal. By the end of the month he had also fucked a bilateral amputee and a toothless Skids sterno-drinker who cackled and stank of piss.
He got a bonus when he actually made the wino come. Hence, when he had to fuck a cadaver, he appreciated its cleanliness.
“I hate it,” said Soliel. “She’s gone overboard. It’s become like a tug-of-war between you and her.”
“She’s not going to win,” Colin said, mopping his groin with a damp towel. “I can fuck anything she throws at me, but I want you to be honest and tell me something.”
Soliel’s nipples were tumid from her latest climax. She teased them idly and the reverberations tingled her toes. She hefted Colin’s cock. “The truth, you have to work for.”
“Does Valentina want me to fuck her?”
Soliel shot him a glance. “Does that mean what you really want is to fuck my mom?” She began pumping. “Does that get you hard?”
“I wanted to fuck your mother when she was an image, an ideal. I toyed with the idea of fucking her when I met her, as a challenge. Now, after jumping through hoops for her, the answer is no. It must have been kind of the same for you, I mean, growing up with a manipulator.”
“Yeah … what I’d expect to happen next is, now that you’ve rejected the notion of fucking her, she’d try to find a way to make you want to do it anyway, if that makes any sense.”
“It makes too much sense.”
Soliel had shown up on Colin’s doorstep between his “dates” with Dayna, the amputee, and the cadaver (whose name Colin never did learn).
“I’m sorry I was rude the other day. Here.” She’d handed Colin a little box of chocolates.
Colin was honestly moved, insofar as he could be. “Did your mom send you?”
“No. I need you to help … um, fill a void in my life.” Her gaze came up steely and wanton. “And if you laugh, I’ll break your teeth out of your head with a wrench.”
Colin had not laughed, and pulled her into his arms instead. He spent private time wondering whether she was a spy, just as she doubted any and all of his motives. In a bizarre way, they were a good couple — mutual interests kept their relationship completely indoors.
Soliel loved sex with Colin. She whipped him up like a berserk rider, telling him that her size, her capacity, caused him to swell even larger inside her. Their sex became a runaway engine with the governor dumped, terminating in high-speed collision and the popcorn stutter of machine-gun multiple orgasms. It was worse than a letter to Penthouse.
Colin loved sex with Soliel. But then, Colin loved sex with anyone. It was his reason for being; he did what he was good at, and it was more than fun — it was why Valentina had hired him. The more he fucked Soliel, the more the old Valentina, the movie-fantasy Valentina, seemed to emerge from her daughter. Colin would never admit that his relationship with Soliel had the power to ground and stabilize him in a healing way, so he just stuck with the fantasy.
And when Colin was working, he fucked whatever flavor Valentina could conjure up from her kettle of pleasures and nightmares, until the day she actually drew him aside for a warning.
By now, Colin was used to being shocked, so Valentina’s attempt to cushion him came as a complete surprise.
“Normally, I’d let you navigate on your own,” she told him. “But if there is one cultural constant that cuts across every ideal of what is sexually attractive around the world, it is the absence of disease. You’ve done dirty-filthy-nasty, and it’s not the same. I’m talking about you having sex with someone who is diseased.”
“We talking AIDS, here?”
“No. You are in no danger of contracting anything. I’m more concerned with the danger of you not being able to handle the idea of making love to a partner who is diseased, repellently so. I’m talking about sights you may not want to see, smells you definitely don’t want to inhale, and textures that would make you sick to your stomach.”
“I fucked a dead person for you, Valentina.”
“That’s clinical. Not the same.”
“What about the chick with no limbs and the screaming wino lady?”
“This is different.”
“No it isn’t. Are you offering me the opportunity to refuse?”
“I’d rather you didn’t. We’ve come a long way and I have big plans for you.”
“Then what’s my incentive? I got a bonus for getting the wino lady’s rocks off.”
“You’ll get a bonus for this.”
“I want something new. I want you to give up something valuable. The money is nothing to you.”
“You want my daughter, by now, I suspect.”
“I already have your daughter.” The sense of power over Valentina at last was giving Colin a hard-on. “I want you.”
“Young man, haven’t you given up your wet dream of screwing a woman old enough to be your —” She stopped. She had spieled off this script already.
“Not this particular old woman.”
“You’d be disappointed.”
“More disappointed than I was when I fucked a dead body?”
“You’re going to insist, aren’t you?”
Colin held fast, not giving an inch … so to speak.
“It seems I’ve outsmarted myself.”
Her crooked little smile resurged. She appeared to run scenarios in her head. “And what would I be giving up, exactly, that seems so valuable to you?”
“Power. You’re going to have to relax your grip on things, just once.”
