Best of Asian Erotica, Volume 1

panties.

He watched her cup one hand under his testicles and, with the other, slowly, expertly, and tenderly produce an erection. She made sure it was good and firm before putting it in her mouth. After a minute or so she took it out again.

‘You want to come like this, or you want to fuck me?’

‘I don’t know,’ Fred said, still half drunk, ‘to tell the truth I think…’ He put out a hand to steady himself on her thin shoulder. A spasm.

Now his sperm was all over her tiny brown hand. She shook it as if she was shaking off a cobweb. Suddenly anxious to save her from indignity-

beauty had that effect on him-he grabbed a box of Kleenex that was on the bedside table and handed it to her. She first cleaned him, then her hand.

‘Well,’ Fred said, still leaning on her shoulder and feeling dizzy.

She looked into his eyes. ‘You want me to stick around so you can do it properly? Or are you always like this? Are you alcoholic?’

‘How much d’you want?’

‘Two thousand baht, same as if you fucked me. That’s because I stayed the night with you.’

Two thousand baht: that was less than he’d spent on champagne on that one and only night with Penny. And it wasn’t even a full night. He’d had to get in his car at a freezing 3 am because she couldn’t sleep with someone else in the bed with her. ‘I understand.’

‘So?’

‘We don’t have to do it. Just stick around for an hour or so, I’d like to ask you some questions.’

‘Again?’

‘Was I that drunk? Did someone spike my drink?’

‘Why would anyone do that? Have you been looking at one of those websites?’

A pause while he looked around the room. ‘Maybe I do have a drink problem,’ he said, mostly to himself. He remembered, now, how wired he was when he hit the bars. When wired, he drank. It went with the job.

In London, if you wanted people to talk, you bought them drinks. No one likes to drink alone, so you drink with them.

He’d never had such a complete memory blackout before though.

Maybe it was the jetlag. He shrugged. ‘Did I ask you about Isaan?’

‘Yes.’

‘And about that case?’

‘The English guy who got shot to death? Yes.’

Fred pulled his shorts back up and sat next to her on the bed. There was something deeply troubling about this situation that he could not quite put his finger on. She was so friendly, chummy even, like they were old pals. It wasn’t right to feel this relaxed with a stranger, a whore, in a country he’d been in for less than a day. Culture shock: he couldn’t think of anything so thoroughly un-British. Where was the paranoia on both sides, the mutual contempt between prostitute and client, the guilt, the nausea? And how was it he was starting to feel horny after he’d just come? That hadn’t happened to him since he was sixteen. He slipped a hand up her back under the T- shirt, then round to her breasts. Full, young, firm. He felt that hand again, working the outside of his shorts this time. He groaned with a sense of foreboding: If this is as good as it looks where the eff have I been all my life?

She slipped out of her T-shirt and panties, pushed him back on the bed so she could pull his shorts off, straddled him, worked on both his and her private parts until both their bodies were ready for fluid exchange, then reached behind him to find a condom, which she spread wide and slipped on.

Now she eased him inside her. He couldn’t believe it. Exactly five and a half thrusts and he was jerking uncontrollably again. She eased herself off of him, carefully removed the clotted condom, cleaned him again, took the condom to the bathroom, returned, naked, with another of those incredible smiles.

‘Why are you crying, Fred?’

‘I don’t know,’ Fred said.

‘Don’t know?’

‘I think it might be because you’ve just made a fantasy come true, and that scares the living shit out of me.’

She blinked. He’d lost her in his culture shock. ‘You need an interpreter when you go to Isaan?’

‘Oh Christ yes,’ Fred said, wiping his cheeks with a Kleenex.

‘You’ll have to pay my bar fine for as long as it takes.’

‘Whatever,’ Fred said, ‘It’s all on expenses.’

‘Really?’

‘I mean the interpreting, not the sex.’

She pulled on her T-shirt and panties and fished a mobile out of a handbag. She spoke rapidly in Thai, then closed the phone. ‘You have to pay for a week, in advance. Give me the money so I can take it to the mamasan now. Or is a week too long?’

‘How about we make it a year?’ Fred said.

That made her laugh, an old-fashioned belly laugh like his granny used to have. In London they didn’t laugh like that anymore.

‘Eleven hours,’ Fred muttered, looking at his cellphone.

3.

‘D’you love me?’ Fred said.

‘Of course not,’ Lalita said, ‘I hardly know you.’ She smiled. ‘I love your money, though, and the way you’re being so nice to me.’

‘Aren’t your other customers nice to you?’

She thought about it. ‘English are mostly nice, but they drink too much and get hysterical. Germans are too harsh, but okay… Japanese are weird but have tons of dough and- ’

‘Stop,’ Fred said. ‘D’you always have to be so honest?’

‘Why? In your country you’re not honest?’

‘No. We lie all the time.’

‘About what?’

‘Compared to you, everything.’ He let a beat pass, then added: ‘I love you, though.’

‘Liar.’

He’d let her drive the hire car. She explained that there were surely going to be cops to bribe sooner or later, and the bribes would be lower if she was at the wheel, rather than a farang.

‘So, are we near the village where that bloke was murdered?’

‘Not so far, but we’re not going there. We’re going to the village next door.’

‘Why?’

She frowned as if he were retarded. ‘Because at the village where he was murdered they won’t tell us anything. They’ll be afraid of losing face. At the village next door, they’ll tell us everything so the village where he was murdered will lose face.’

‘Got it,’ Fred said.

Paddy fields the dense green of pool tables, ramshackle wood houses on stilts. The roads were almost deserted except for a few pick-up trucks with farm labourers in the back, their faces swathed in cloths and T-shirts against the sun and dust. Lalita reached across to his crotch and squeezed.