I imagined him smelling like the cheap cologne and soilings of that man from the bar. I lay back down, with a desire to touch myself as David snored peacefully beside me. I threw the white sheet off David and reached for his cock, trying to waken him with my touch. Now I really needed him to enter me, fuck me hard, fuck me loud. I wanted Sergi to hear it all.
David let out a cranky moan as I planted my face between his legs, lifted him up from his buttocks, like a mother lifting her child to change him. Trailing his hair-lined stretch from anus to testicles with my tongue, I took his flaccid cock in my mouth and it came to life, even before David fully came to.
“What are you doing?” he asked. Propping himself up on his el bows, blinking hard. He was startled, his heart beating fast. I didn’t answer; enthralled on getting him off, I held on with my mouth, kissing, sucking as loudly as I could.
There was no sound coming from the hallway or from any part of the apartment any more. The house was frozen in screaming silence aside from my mouth’s wet popping sounds and David’s gentle moaning. He was lying down again, tossing his head from side to side.
“God, I love you,” he said softly. And I loved him too. But maybe I hated him more right now for making me feel so vulnerable. I wanted to hurt him, to hit him. So I did. I sat on top of him and slapped his face. It was harder than I meant to. He shot up like an alarm clock had gone off under him.
I pushed him back down and laughed loudly. I splayed his arms out like Jesus on the Cross and bit his neck hard, wanting to leave my marks on him for everyone to see.
“Stop it” he said. “That hurts.”
And he looked hurt. I didn’t feel like comforting him. “Wake up and fuck me then,” I said. I got on all fours and lifted my ass to him. He obeyed like I knew he would. He licked my ass and stuck his fingers in my swelling cunt.
“Fuck me, David,” I demanded.
He placed his delicate hands on my hips and positioned himself to carefully enter. And he pumped slowly, softly, as if he were nod ding off on a swinging hammock. I closed my eyes and moaned for him. It felt so sweet, like being rocked in a lullaby. Holding my breath, I felt the first tinglings of an orgasm.
Then I saw a pair of strong thick legs with light-brown hairs on the shapely calves and a fat, rose-coloured prick being stroked happily in my peripheral vision. I didn’t hear him enter the room, but I knew he’d come. I felt it.
I refused to look up at his face and concentrated on David inside of me instead. I wanted him to defend me, to scream for him to get out. He didn’t. Instead, Sergi sat on the edge of the bed and cupped my left breast, weighing it, massaging it, as if he were buying a cantaloupe from the Boqueria market. He was whetting his mouth, moaning, “Mmmm,” at the premonition of sweetness to come.
While Sergi concentrated on my torso, David’s pump had gotten increasingly faster and even deeper with Sergi in the room. I could feel him spasming, becoming more erratic in his thrusts. I had be come disconnected from my body. I floated to the corner of the room, took a seat, and saw it all. Sergi’s power, David’s frailty, my complete submission. My heart pounded, so did my head, my throat and my dripping cunt. Sergi stuck his hand in my mouth and I obediently sucked on his fingers. Where had those long and dirty fingers been all night? I caught whiffs of cigarette, semen and garlic.
It was all beginning to hit me hard and my entire body hot-flashed. Sensing this, Sergi ran his fingers through my short hair and clenched the taut skin on the back of my neck. Like you would a cat. David pinched my nipples and slapped my buttocks. I tingled and shivered, growing weaker and weaker with overwhelming pleasure. “Do you like us touching you?” David’s voice was close to cracking from the excitement.
I heard a yes hissing from my throat and I wasn’t sure where it had come from.
I was one of them now. Before meeting them I was woman who demanded respect. Now I’m a woman who accepts humiliation. There is a beautiful kind of strength in this kind of shame.
Sergi shoved his penis into my face. He hit my forehead, my eye lids, the bridge of my nose, with his swollen sword. He was getting back at me for the entire night, for something. Something he probably couldn’t understand himself. Then he took aim and shoved his cock to the back of my throat. I gagged and coughed, unable to lift a hand.
Still on my knees, Sergi got off the bed and went somewhere be hind David who had resumed fucking me. I hadn’t felt Sergi get on the bed with us so I figured he was standing somewhere in the room. But where?
David put his lips to my ear and whispered, “Please don’t be mad at me.”
Then, as if David had just been shot in the head, he collapsed his entire weight over the curve of my back. Straightening myself, tensing my muscles, I held him up with all my strength while Sergi let out a wail and David cursed the air. Sergi was hurting him, thrusting himself gratuitously, forcing himself into David’s small channel. Our interconnected motions awkward, stunted; like being connected to a long, thick, knotted sailor’s rope catching, bumping, and slithering up the edge of a boat.
I fought and contorted myself trying to keep David inside of me. Caught in between us, David was falling apart, on the verge of burst ing. He was snorting like Quixote’s Rocinante, shouting for God, sobbing quietly, for all of us. I joined in their guttural wails. It was the holiest and saddest of choruses. And then like a crescendoing car alarm screaming at the night, it was over.
Sergi pulled out and walked out. David fell into a ball of wasted flesh in coital position beside me. At that moment, I couldn’t imagine a greater pain than loving a weak man. He couldn’t look at me, at least not yet. Then I thought of my mother, thought of what she would think, if anything as terrible had ever happened to her in her life.
I craved solitude and began sliding my body off the edge of the bed. My knees cracked, my joints ached. I reached for my pants suit lying in two disjointed pieces on the floor. I grabbed my shoes, my bag, and walked barefoot out of the room, down the swirling corridor of mosaic tiles, past Sergi’s room with its door closed, and out the front door, leaving them alone in their stifling silence. My heart pounded loudly in my ears.
As I stepped out of the elevator and on to the shaded entrance of La India’s outer lobby, I remember thinking that I didn’t feel a single emotion. Neither happy nor sad. But I must have been wearing some kind of face, because a straight line of cheery tourists slowed down to look at me as they passed. I rummaged through my bag and found a last bent cigarette. I gave it one puff, looked right back at their innocent sun-blotched faces and had the urge to vomit.
Turning the corner off Carrer de Carme, I let it all out. The en tire night’s bile released on to the grey, rounded-stone streets of this Iberian port city that had witnessed so many centuries of misery.
I hung my head down for a while and watched the last string of saliva detach itself from my mouth. Holding myself up with one hand on the stone wall before me, I found its coldness provided a sobering effect. I wiped my chin with my sleeve and slicked my hair back from my face. As I straightened myself up, an old and squat Catalan couple walked by me, cautiously observing me with two sets of beady brown eyes. There was a rose in her hand and a book tucked safely under his left arm.
It was Diada de Sant Jordi. The sun felt strong. It’s nice to be warm when you’re feeling cold. I decided I would walk to las Ramblas and browse all those books I had yet to read. Buy a book, maybe two, maybe three. It was the new beginning I had wanted, though it was a beginning to an end. But I was good at endings.