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Off Haifa
by Richard Ennis
(02/19/03)
There was Genevieve Mennucci, living the life of Riley. The good life, the high life, la dolce vita. Little Geni was living it up.
There she was, behind narrow black rectangular frameless Gucci sunglasses, licking pink gelato. A drop of it plopped on the palm of her perfect left hand and she kissed it off. There she was, cross-ankled on a chaise longue on a private veranda on her latest boyfriend's 295-passenger luxury liner, anchored 50 miles off Haifa. Ah, la dolce far niente!
A beautiful Greek sommelier strolled in and uncorked something from South Africa that she waved away. He bowed and began to back out.
"Wait."
He returned. She wiggled her index finger until he leaned in close. She put a hand on the back of his head, wove her fingers into his well-oiled hair and kissed him. "You've been sipping the product, son," she said, pulling off her shades and winking.
He smiled at his polished shoes. "And you have a cold strawberry tongue," he said, daringly enough, in a thick Thracian accent.
"How old are you?"
"Eighteen."
"You're pretty."
He blushed. "So are you."
"Will you come to my room tonight?"
"Yes."
"Midnight. Don't knock. Wear bikini trunks, nothing else. Take this, I'm done." She gave him what was left of the ice cream cone and flicked her fingers for him to go.
Then a white-waistcoated waiter with a cute frown and a nose-ring knocked. "Lunch?" He seemed to apologize as he said it. She sighed wearily. He doffed the lid of the silver platter and presented her with a fork as if it were a rolled degree at a PhD convocation. She picked at the--
"What is it?"
"Breaded monkfish with crayfish sauce."
She wrinkled her nose. He returned the lid and relieved her of the fork and then backed away. "Suck my toes," she said.
He reddened and avoided her eyes, but put the platter down. Kneeling, he cupped one of her feet and then started fellating her toes, soft then hard, and finished by kissing her insteps. He stood up, still avoiding her eyes.
"Come to my room tonight. Twelve-thirty." He nodded and stumbled out, red-faced.
Geni stretched and yawned. Here she was, nude enough to fluster suave serving-men. Breasts as divinissima as hers weren't meant for the skimpy triangles of Mediterranean bikinis. Well, okay, yes they were. They didn't fit. They spilled out the sides and the top and they peeked under the bottom and that was just fine. That was the entrance fee. One glimpse at those immense assets of hers and some pretty powerful guys were offering her their tuxedoed elbows to take hold of. The longer she went ricocheting from fleeting infatuation to fleeting infatuation, the more impressive the list of ex-lovers became. There were British newspaper barons, Wall Street magnates, Texas oil tycoons, scions of New England blueblood families, CEOs of blue-chip multinationals, top-seeded tennis stars, Colombian drug lords, reclusive Swiss billionaires, and New Age gurus from India with a different-colored Rolls Royce for every day of the year. And on and on.
A maid in a company-monogrammed T-shirt and white summer shorts inched through the sliding glass door. "Mr. Thurmond said to say he's waiting in the piano bar."
"Let me guess. Is he stinking up his beard with a cucumber-sized Upmann and scratching his fat gut between buttonholes under the table and sweating like a pregnant sow and liquoring himself stupid with a whole bottle of Turkish raki?"
The maid bit down the start of a smile. "He was smoking and -- I think I saw a glass..."
"Just say yes." The maid quit fighting it and grinned. "He asked for his own bottle at the table, didn't he?"
"That's what the maitre d' said."
"And it's half empty now and Mr. Thurmond is shouting for me and the maitre d' rushed you up here to get me."
"Yes."
"Tell the maitre d' to go fuck himself. Tell Mr. Thurmond that I'll be down after I do some free weights with my trainer in the fitness room, have my nails done, go for my reflexology with Heidi, shower, dress, do my hair, and take ten minutes of fresh air on the front deck."
"Very good."
"And then tell the maitre d' that in about thirty minutes when Mr. Thurmond passes out he should not be carried up to my suite. Just put him in his own suite or toss him into one of the spare rooms downstairs. He'll sleep it off through tomorrow morning."
"Very good."
"Very polite, aren't you?"
The maid gave a half-shrug, as if sensing her job description was about to change.
"You're German?"
"Dutch."
"Twenty?"
"Next month."
"Come here." The girl came forward. Geni reached between her shoulder-blades and popped the clasp on the bikini-strap. Then she flipped the two triangles up over her shoulders and pushed her breasts forward. "A well-traveled girl of your age should know what to do now, if you want to pocket that stack of cash sitting on the mini-bar. I saw you staring at it. Give a little bit of teeth and lots of tongue."
The maid knelt down and took hold of Geni's breasts. The feel of hot breath on her nipples made Geni close her eyes and groan just before the girl's tongue-tip made contact. Unhurriedly, the Dutch girl nursed her. Geni worked her hands into the girl's blonde hair and pulled gently. The anguish of pleasure went from breast to breast for twenty minutes. Then the maid pulled back, wiped some saliva off her chin, and stood up, breathing heavily.
"Will you come to my suite tonight?"
"Yes. I'd love to."
"One o'clock. Wear something pretty with plenty of fluff. A little pom-pomed camisole, say."
"I can't wait."
"Go now."
The maid dashed out, grabbing the cash without stopping.
Geni reached under the chaise longue for one of the sample-sized Evians in the ice-bucket and sipped the tiniest portion of it, trickling the rest over her nipples and belly and the red wedge of lycra that sheathed her pussy. Her glasses went back on and she searched the horizon, the fusion of the sea's sapphire with the whiter, washed blue of the sky. With just a bit of bum-clenching and some fierce fingerwork around her clit, she came with her lips apart and her eyes shut.
Then, as her breathing slowed, a sirocco scented faintly with fennel and acacia from Egypt swept hotly across her face. She took this as a cue to seek some air-conditioning.
It was barely one o'clock. A thought struck. She ambled over to the mini-bar, poured a full martini glass of aquavit, inhaled, closed her eyes, and gulped it down with a shiver, then giggled. Her Motorola was on the glass coffee-table and she went to it, sotally tober, and dialed Jin Soon's salon.
"Jin, sweety," she giggled. "My weights and reflexology? Cancelled, okay? Instead, a nice ocean wrap, a peppermint pedicure, lots of shiatsu. And tell Heidi..." She bit down on the next giggle. "Tell Heidi that, before all that, I want an enema. No, I'm not. Two-ish? Two-sharp. Love you, girl. Bye."
She went inside and went to her walk-in closet, put on a white scoop-neck top and pink spandex micro-shorts, knotted a mesh sarong at her hips and stepped into a pair of kitten-heel slides. She switched her black shades for big pink ones that looked silly on her face, but pretty pushed back above her hairline. She twirled in front of the wall mirror. No wonder Thurmond loved her ass more than anything else, lurching at her every night he didn't pass out first, with his tube of Astroglide and his guilty chortle. But, the dumb billionaire sod, he was right. She swiveled her hip toward the mirror and spanked herself. It was a fabulous ass. In fact it was almost too pretty to sit on.
She decided to go kill some time at the coffee-bar of the Sun Lounge, nursing a double-shot breve and bantering with the bartender. He was a hairless muscleman more or less half her height who cheerfully informed her he'd spent ten years in a Lisbon jail for murder.
"You naughty boy. Hey! What's 'fuck me' in Portuguese?"
"Foda-me!" he said, giggling like a twelve-year-old, and then stared at her chest. "And meu deus, que peitos, means, my God, what tits."
"Oh really."
"And eu quero seu corpo. Means, I want your body. Vindo a minha cama hoje a noite, bebÍ -- Come to my bed tonight, baby."
"How fascinating. But I can't, I have other plans."
"But I wanna fuck you, baby! Eu-imploro-o!"
"And I do too," said an uppity English voice at Geni's shoulder. "But perhaps just a small latte would do for now, if o cavalheiro here would oblige me."
The bartender, as spooked as Geni was by this intrusion, bowed and got to work. A suit-and-tied, okay-looking man of about fifty with a heavy gray moustache smiled at her as he sat down.
"Ms. Mennucci, I believe," he said. He continued, in response to her raised eyebrows. "Your name is on the guest list. Plus I met you before, years ago. I was a friend of your adoptive father -- a regular customer of his vineyard and a fellow Dante fan. We used to ring each other up when we discovered a rare edition. You, I first met at your eighteenth birthday party, though you probably don't remember. You were dancing with all the men -- kissing them, letting them hold your breasts, even fornicating with them in bathrooms, or so I imagined. But you managed to stop long enough to talk to me for a few minutes. Toward the end of the party, poor Antonio leaned against me, wringing his hands and looking up to Heaven like he always did, and he said -- I wish somebody would keep an eye on that girl. She will come to no goodí. I still remember how close to tears his voice sounded when he said it, God rest him, poor soul. Ten years ago, that must have been."
Geni watched him darkly. "And who might you be?"
His latte arrived. He smiled down at it. "Just a fellow traveler. Actually, I'm the Duke of Suffolk."
"Well, I'm the Duchess of Fuckoff, okay? Vaffunculo!" And she waved a hand at him and turned away.
The duke sipped, unperturbed. "You are so much more beautiful now than you were ten years ago. I really can't believe it." He reached into his jacket. "Humor a smitten old man, wouldn't you? Read this when you find the time." He laid an envelope on the bar and stood up after a final sip. "Bom," he said with a wink to the bartender, and left.
By now it was two o'clock. Geni, her heart beating hotly, put the envelope in the pocket of her shorts and marched off to her appointments. When they were over she felt calmer. She changed into a white halter dress, spritzed and barretted her hair, and went to dinner alone. No sign of Thurmond, who was probably still sleeping it off, as usual. A plate of pan-fried sea bass over braised salsify was proudly laid before her, but after a nibble she ignored it, lost in the duke's letter. She read the ending over and over again: In fact, you've come to far greater good than I ever could have believed. I know you're no Catholic, but il Dio li benedice, il mio caro.
She went back to her suite and phoned him.
"I'd love to," she said, wiping at her tears. "Thank you. How about eleven?"
She hung up and, sleepy with table wine, dozed off on the semi-circular sofa until the duke's knock woke her. He stayed for five minutes, making things ready, then kissed her hand and left. It was now eleven-fifteen -- forty-five minutes to midnight.
She did some simple asanas in the nude on the lynx-rug in the living-room to ready herself, bathed, scented her body with primrose oil, killed the lights, lit herbal candles, put a Bach harpsichord fugue on low, and pondered the collection of lingerie in the walk-in closet. Which one would do? Finally, time ran out and she had to grab a black spiderweb-lace teddy before going to the door, on which somebody timidly tapped.
It was her pretty Thracian. His black hair and brown skin in the bad light looked darker because of his white bathrobe. He said nothing but his eyes were big with fright and hunger. He let her take his hand, which was damp and hot, and pull him in and shut the door. She undid the belt and pushed the robe off his shoulders, so it fell at his sandaled feet. He had the lean muscled grace she imagined he would, and there was the bikini brief she'd asked for, black and bulging.
She knelt and stripped him and seized his cock at the base, prompting a light whimper and then, when her mouth enclosed him, outright groans. The hot crown throbbed against her palate. Her tongue pressed the underside of the shaft, a soft architecture of veins and nodes, fluted on each side of the corpus spongiosum like a Greek column, and tastier than candy. His palms came to sit on top of her head as gently as birds, but the rest of his body was as taut as a high-tension wire. She released him and rose. They were the same height, eye to eye. Both of them were panting, both on the brink of surrender. But before he could fasten his hands on her face and start devouring her mouth, she stepped back.
"My name's Genevieve," she said, with fake coyness. "What's yours?"
"Stamos," he managed to choke out.
Still playing the schoolgirl, she twirled a sprig of hair and fluttered her eyelids. "In Italian, Genevieve means white wave. Do you think you're ready to roll in my surf, Stamos?"
This broke whatever leash had been holding him, and he sprang at her, snarling. She skipped back with a squeal and slipped through a door that led to the circular waterbed, a sea of blue silk encircled by flickering candle-pots and Bach's faint polyphony. There she let him tear at her teddy and manhandle her breasts.
His excitement became so extreme that she thought he'd squirt his joy into the sheets before they'd even gotten started. He held her breasts from underneath and marveled at their mass, at the sheer abundance and supple buoyancy of them. He then pushed her onto her back and buried his face in them, groaning. The lingual tricks he played with her nipples soon gave way to tongue-work elsewhere: soft lapping at her yearning cunt, feathery visits to her clitoris, and finally relentless, languorous anilingus. At one point, as his tongue returned to her clit and his thumb massaged up inside her bum, she felt the advent of a blinding orgasm, and pushed him off.
"Come on, now. A real fuck, honey."
They were both covered in sweat, breathless, and crazy-eyed. She wrestled him onto his back, mounted him and started bouncing as hard and as fast as she could. Her ass smacked the tops of his thighs, her tits were crushed in her hands. She flung her head back, gritting her teeth. He groaned Greek curses up at her and dug his fingers into her hips, his body a high-tension wire once again. He was close, a mere spasm from Heaven. As she bore down on the gates of paradise herself, she leaned back and rested her weight on her hands, continuing to move on his cock until a full-body, G-spot climax seized and shook her like epilepsy and delivered her, for one drawn-out redemptive instant, into perfect bliss.
Somewhere in the middle of her joy he hit orgasm too, yelping out a string of high-pitched hosannas. When she lay back down on him at last he only petted her face and her bum, and caught his breath. He whispered things into her hair too, but they were Greek and she just cooed and kissed his ear in reply. He must have been up way past his bedtime or something, her poor pretty Thracian, because his tenderness soon grew listless and his breathing slowed, and then his hands slid off her and lay palm-up on the sheets. Geni rolled off him. When he shifted in his sleep into a fetal curl, she snuggled her bum into the hollow where his crotch was and pulled one of his limp arms around her, and sighed dreamily.
It was now twelve twenty-five. Any second her next bedfellow would knock. She could hardly wait. Her loins were already yearning for further attention. But for now she just lay there with a serene smile and blew a kiss to the pulsing red eye in the darkness of the closet that faced the bed -- the blinking indicator light of the camcorder that the duke had placed there, with many grateful thank-yous, an hour before.
"It ís me that should be thanking you," Geni murmured now to the recording angel in the closet. "That was the sweetest, kindest love-letter I ever got from anybody in my whole life, ever. I mean, here I am with a racehorse, a topsail schooner, even a book of verse, all named after little old me, and I didn't even know it. You're a sweet lovesick fool and your wife shouldn't laugh at you, Michael. And don't you show her this videotape, either. This is my gift to you, because you reminded me of how far I've come from all that loneliness and poverty. I forgot I'd ever told anybody what my life was like before Papa adopted me."
There was a knock on the door and Geni's pulse jumped. "He's here! Oh, you're going to love what we do to each other! You know what I did? I made my ass all nice and clean for him. So I want you to watch his face when he works himself inside my bum. Pretend it's your face. Because I want you to feel as happy as he looks, whenever you think of me." She jumped up, giggly as a teenager, but then hesitated. "Anyway, thanks for helping me to remember how happy I really am. Sometimes I forget. I mean, after all, here I am, right? Little Genevieve Mennucci, a kid from the backstreets of Napoli, living the life of Riley."
She would have said more but another knock interrupted, and this time she didn't hesitate. "Ciao!" she cried, and went running.
©2003 by Robert Ennis
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Richard Ennis is the pen name of a 31-year-old Canadian writer whose short fiction appears online and in print in the U.S. and his native land. An excerpt of this story originally appeared in literoticaffeine.com .
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