Timid little thing. I could see the nerves jumping in her. She took her time. I used it against her.
‘No problem,’ I said, with no hint of anything in my voice approaching bad feelings – I’d taken her silence as a no, but fuck it, so what?
‘All right,’ came out. A letter at a time, it sounded like. Maybe she felt something for me; maybe she felt I’d been let down. Kids of her age look up to people who’ve been good to them. Don’t like to feel they’ve let them down.
‘Sure?’
‘Yes.’ It croaked out. She cleared her throat. ‘Yes.’
‘OK. Come on. Here.’ I handed her two hundred. ‘Makes no odds to me who gets this.’
Up we went.
I keep the bedroom nice. I rarely sleep in it. The bar staff know why I use it. No doubt the other waitresses and Gemma had talked about me amongst themselves, how I never hit on staff (and some of them were more than fuckable), how I kept it all on a detached business footing. Maybe Gemma felt a little special. I neither knew nor cared. She’d bunged the money into her back pocket anyway.
I peeled off and sat up on the bed. She went to lie next to me.
‘Get the gear off, Gemma.’
Took her aback, that one. Perhaps she thought this would be a necking session to begin with, or a touch of lovemaking foreplay. She might’ve been into lovemaking. I fuck – that’s it. She stood back up, looking nervous. The light was low. I wanted to see the goods. I’d a reason. Not the turn-on one – another one.
Gemma had no tits. She wore thick jumpers trying to hide it. Why? Self-conscious probably. You know what young girls are like, always worrying about how they look. If they’re well stacked, they think they’re top heavy; if they’ve nice tits, they think their arse is too big, or their hair’s … I dunno, something wrong with it anyway. Gemma was built like a kid. Smaller than I usually go for, but she was nice all the same.
I ignored the way the shyness was getting to her.
‘You’ve a nice figure, Gemma,’ I told her, just to make her feel better. Helped get rid of her inadequate look anyway. Fuck knows what she was worried about. Some men go in for kid-like girls.
‘OK – I like a blowjob then a fuck. OK?’
Shoulda seen her face. The gulp came quicker this time.
I was sitting up. She knelt on the bed and gave me a blowjob. Then I fucked her. I won’t describe it. I’m sure you know what a blowjob and a fuck are like. If not, ring Ted Lyle. And if you want to find out what other kinds of sex are like, he’s your man too.
She even cuddled into my chest afterwards. No pro ever did that before. I didn’t fancy the cuddle.
‘OK, Gemma,’ I said. ‘I have to be going.’
‘Did you like it?’ she asked. Jesus, I dunno. Talk about insecure kids.
‘Of course. You’re nice. I have a thing for girls who shave between their legs though, but other than that, fine.’
Her reaction to that would tell me something in the weeks to come.
‘Next Friday night? OK by you?’
She nodded. Went red again too. It was my way of proving I’d meant what I said. That she was worth the money.
Now the following Friday, I got what I’d hoped for. I could tell by the way she’d been acting all week that the fuck was between us. I doubt she’d mentioned it to the others. Maybe she did. But there was something in her shy little smile when she passed me or caught my glance. Kids’ stuff.
And when I took her up to the bedroom to repeat the exercise, there it was. The jeans came off. She was watching for my response. The pants came down. It was comical. Sweet, some might say. Not me. Though I let on I was pleased. She stood before me, her skin as pink as a newborn. And the blonde hair had gone. She’d shaved it for me. The smile of embarrassment and of waiting for my reaction said it all.
I pulled her over and kissed her. She read affection or love or some such shit in it. It wasn’t there. Just manipulation.
OK, you’re probably wondering what all this is leading up to. How would Gemma having electrolysis tell me how Lucille had reacted to that birth certificate?
Well, it’s like this: there’s probably a fancy word in the dictionary for people like me, and I don’t know what it is, but what I do know is that I seem to have a way of adapting other people’s circumstances to help my own.
Me and Charlie Swags play poker every Sunday night. Have done for years. It’s not one of these schools like you see sometimes where you need a big wad to get in. The money is big, but it’s incidental. Me and Charlie and a few lads going back a lot of years get together and that’s it. No one else.
He was telling me there a while back about a guy called Drake who owned a garage with land attached to it near the city centre, enough land to build a nightclub on. Charlie wasn’t interested in the garage. He was gonna sell that bit off. The price had been agreed and Charlie’d had plans drawn up and all that. Then Drake started fucking about, wanting more money. Charlie was fed up with the cunt.
So while all this business with Gemma was going on, what Charlie was saying was beginning to tie in with it. How and why would be too difficult to go into now. Call it instinct, a sense of what might happen – it’s up to you. But with me, both Gemma’s and Charlie’s situations were coming together. I was starting to look at them as a likely opportunity.
What I did was
