White and Other Tales of Ruin

“Love you,” Tom said, but his words were stolen by her pussy pressing into his mouth. He told her with his tongue instead, a gentle touch as if he were eating the dish of his life. She let slip a small squeal of pleasure.

None of them had ever done that with him before.

He paused, she stopped sucking him, and they lay there for a few seconds looking at each others’ sex and wondering what was happening.

And then they started again … but it was different. There was a tenderness that hadn’t been there before. Tom lost his sense of desperation — he didn’t have to come, not just yet — and she started taking her time. It became a pleasure, instead of simply a transaction.

“Love you,” he said again, careful this time to pull away so that she couldn’t help but hear.

There was no reaction. Tom gazed at her goose-pimpled buttocks, the sweet crack pouting at him from between them, and suddenly he wanted to shrug her off, turn her around and kiss her.

But kissing was never allowed. Too many viruses were targeted orally.

“I love you,” he said again, trying to force her off. In his naivete he thought that showing her she didn’t have to suck him would set him apart in her mind. But when he flipped her over her stare was as hard as before, her mouth firmly set. Her eyes, though … there was a depth there that had been absent when he’d first entered the room.

She sat beside him on the bed, staring.

“What’s happening?” Tom said, because something was. The whore shook her head, but there was doubt in the way she hesitated, doubt or confusion.

She — Honey, she’d told him her name was Honey — reached out and grabbed his dick, squeezing and kneading it like a cow’s teat. He couldn’t lose his hard-on, much as he believed this to be so much more than sex, and when she lowered her head and started sucking he sat back and closed his eyes.

Wondering what was going on.

Thinking of the women, genuine or artificial, he’d thought he could love.

Realising here and now that this was, in reality, the one and only time.

He came, and when the pleasure had passed and he looked down he thought he’d sprayed across her face. But then he saw that the moisture on her cheeks was tears.

She smiled and wiped her mouth. There was no hate in her eyes.

That, at least, was a start.

“What do you like?” Tom asked.

“I’m not allowed to like anything.”

He smiled. “Yes … but what do you like?”

She looked at him so long and hard that he thought she’d malfunctioned. But then she let the ghost of a smile touch her features. “You’re talking as if we’re on a date.”

“We are, aren’t we?”

“How much did Hot Chocolate Bob charge you for this?”

He thought of the slimy, drugged up pimp he’d negotiated with on the street. “Two hundred.” Realising he’d forgotten to do it, he plucked a credit card from his pocket and offered it to Honey.

She nodded her head slightly and glanced over his shoulder at the wall clock. “Then for another seventeen minutes yeah, we’re on a date.”

“So…?”

She took the card, tapped in the amount and scanned it. She should have shown him first so that he knew he wasn’t being swindled, but he trusted her. Stupid of him, blind, but he trusted her.

“Isn’t it a bit late to ask me?” Honey said. “You get your kicks out of knowing what you missed?”

“Sorry?” He frowned, genuinely puzzled.

Honey smiled again as she handed back his card. “I like it from behind so I don’t have to see the customer’s face. I like it up the arse. It gives my snatch a break. I like it fast, that way I don’t have to pretend — ”

“You weren’t pretending just then.”

She shrugged. “Sometimes it feels okay.”

“Don’t believe you. Sometimes

? How often?”

Honey didn’t answer. The silence hung heavy and awkward until Tom spoke again.

“Anyway, I didn’t mean sex. I meant everything. What do you like? Whether it’s permitted by your pimp or not, you must have your likes and dislikes. You must have enough life for that, at least?”

Honey looked down at her feet, stretching her toes. She was still naked, but it didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest. Then she looked up at Tom through her golden fringe. The image was so shy and lonely that he wanted to take her in his arms, buy her, get her the hell out of here forever.

Trouble was, there were no places to go.

“I like dancing,” she said. “There’s a club three floors down in the basement, and sometimes if I’m having a slow night I’ll dance to the music.”

“On your own?”

“Of course on my own. The music’s torn apart by the time it gets up here, gutted by the floors and rooms between us, but I still get the beat. Sometimes I can even identify the songs.” She looked away from him, out the window. It was still daytime but heavy smog made it twilight. The sodium street lamps fell like moonlight on her face. “I like the slow ones.”

“I can’t dance,” Tom said, full of regret, wanting so much to be able to hold her for his remaining twelve minutes, pirouette around the room, jive into true love.