Big Chicago

Big Chicago Part 4…..by Samayel


Satellite TV with hundred of channels. Furnishings worth more than most people make in a year. Wardrobes full of clothing with brand names that have risen to the top while I was away. Convenience. Luxury. Opulence. Champagne lightly chilled for my arrival. Penthouse suite, my ass…this place is the entire top floor of a building. It used to be warehousing on the quiet end of town, but inside the old brick façade is a hidden paradise. The driver escorted me to the elevator, and I could tell when he opened the door for me that the bump in his pocket was not caused by driving gloves. Armed security, and he’s quiet enough that I suspect he’s well trained, but I don’t think he likes me very much. Who cares what he likes? Harry Black likes me…and Harry Black is absolutely, filthy, stinking rich!

I get handed off to the maid and the cook, who actually bow for me when I arrive. The only tragedy is that I hate being seen the way I look right now. Frowzy and hagridden, dressed in the things a man I want to forget bought me, and stinking of the cesspit from which I came. I get guided to the bedroom suite. The bathroom is larger than four or five cells put together. Carpets so thick my feet get lost in them. I beg for privacy so I can bathe, but it’s really because I don’t want to be seen gawking anymore.

The tub is more like a Jacuzzi. Enormous. They must have known approximately when I’d arrive down to the minute, because the ice in which the champagne is resting is still fresh. Moet and Chandon. White Star. I’m back. This is heaven. I’m home, but he’s not with me yet. For this…I can wait as long as I have to. How the hell does someone like Harry Black, who lives in a place like this, wind up in that abominable shithole I just left? This place is what I’d expect of someone like him. It’s luxurious without being ostentatious, something a lot of people can’t pull off. It makes no sense. He belongs here…and I, frankly enough, belonged there. Not that I mind Prince Charming riding to the rescue when he did. Could have shown up about seven years earlier though.

It’s hard to figure out what to do first. So many things. So much I haven’t seen or done or lived in years and years. In just a few days I’ll be twenty five years old. What a way to celebrate it! I pop the cork on the champagne and fill a glass, then set the tub to fill, pouring in the exquisite scented bath oils that garnish the edge of the tub. I try not to swill the nectar of the gods like some thirsty wino, but it’s so very, very perfect, and it’s been so damn long.

I kick off the high heels I’ve been wearing. My feet hurt, and I realize that I just lived through seven years of wearing flats! I’m out of practice, but I’ll get it all back. Then it’s time to lose the skirt and top, and it’s only a few more scraps of cloth before I’m stark naked. More champagne. The mirror is huge. More like a wall than a mirror. The boy in the mirror isn’t eighteen, and that comes as a shock.

I only really needed a mirror for my makeup in prison, and it was just reflective, relatively soft plastic. I don’t look good. Not as I good as I did seven years ago. What does he see in me? Why would he want this? Is it because he knows I’m desperate, and because he can control me easily? I don’t know. All of this is intoxicating…but it’s also scary. My eyes are more hollow than I remember, and I look a little skinnier than I used to be. Not in a healthy way, or in a sexy, waifish way. My skin has lost a little color, and I was pale to start with, but now my hair and flesh seem lackluster.

Still, I have a slim waist and faintly flared hips, which lends a bit to the illusion of femininity, and my stomach is still flat and tight, but not chiseled by exercise. I still look small…and soft…the kind of creature that makes men’s nostrils flare and that triggers a gut level response from them. Most of the time, even straight men find themselves wondering about sex when they’re near me for too long. I give off all the right signals, and I’m not sure they can even help it most of the time. That confusion can make some men violent, but most of the time…it just makes them horny and easy to deal with. It certainly kept me from going the way of Nott in there.

I move to turn for the bath and there it is in the mirror. F. My scar. My one physical reminder of where I’ve been. The rest is locked in my head for all eternity, but that fucking letter stares back at me, bringing back a few thousand acts of degradation with it. Flint. Maybe I’m not his bitch anymore, but he certainly left his mark for all to see.

Fuck Flint. Fuck woolgathering. The bath is full and a third glass of champagne is starting to go to my head. In fact, I’m fucking giddy when I slide into steaming water full of products that practically clean me without any effort on my part. That’s not enough though. There are soaps and body scrubs, shampoos and conditioners. I use them all…repeatedly. If I could burn this body and build a new one from the ground up, I’d do it rather than have any trace of that god awful place left on me. The only reason I stop is because I really do want to relax. I almost forgot how. I still feel like I’ll open my eyes and find myself daydreaming in my bunk.

I’m drunk. I’m…I’m starved…and there’s a cook who lives here! Huge, soft towels and a hairdryer serve me perfectly. The way my hair hangs is all wrong. I need a stylist…a good one…to undo years of braiding it back to keep it out of the way. Clothes…I need clothes! That’s one amenity that’s lacking. His closet is so huge I could do a back flip in it, but only one side is occupied, the other is empty. All I can find that even hints at suitable for the moment is a set of silk pajamas that are so large on me that I have to roll the waist down and the legs up, and the shirt is hanging off me like a freaking gown. Fuck it. I’m not here to impress the staff…I’m here to impress Harry Black.

It’s still the middle of the afternoon. As it turns out, the maid barely speaks English, and the only Spanish I know is classical European. Maria’s legal, but born Venezuelan and fairly new to the US, and she adores Mister Black. Fat chance, sister! Mister Black swings my way, and once he gets here I’ll make him mine and keep him that way! At least I managed to make enough sense to find the cook. Therese is probably sixty if she’s a day, looks perpetually angry from spending a life over a stove, and keeps giving me a look that stinks of disapproval. Maybe it was that, after seven years in the pen, I didn’t exactly challenge her skills by asking for a pizza. Or maybe it’s that her employer invited a cheap whore from prison into the house. It’s so hard to tell.

It’s a long wait at the table, and she wasn’t in the mood to leave me anything in the way of snacks. I can’t really muster the nerve to order people around. This isn’t my place…even if I’d like it to be. It’s quiet except for the sounds coming from the kitchen. Too quiet. I’m used to thousands of people packed in like sardines, with a soft susurrus of background conversation, snores, laughter, shouts and catcalls going on almost sixteen hours a day if not more .

The pizza comes. Not the stale cardboard and government cheese garbage from prison, a real fucking pizza. Not just any pizza either. It’s a masterpiece. The dough has herbs and spices baked into it and it’s been brushed with olive oil. The cheeses are probably mozzarella, Romano and at least one variety of goat’s cheese that I haven’t had before. There are fresh cut mushrooms that look like imports and tiny peppers peeking out here and there. The sauce is thick and spicy, but without the acid tang that so many often have. This is a work of art. I should be ashamed of eating it.

I try to be proper and thank the frowning woman, then risk a single bite. I could say that I was acting, and trying to butter her up and win her favor. That would be a blatant lie. I cry because it’s the best thing I think I’ve ever tasted, and if she seems to warm up to me because I broke down and wept for her food, then so be it, but the tears were real.

There is a den full of shelves with books by the ton. There’s a study with a music system that shames the one I had at home when I was sixteen. Classical music, jazz, swing, big band, blues. CD after CD of it. There’s a computer that looks ready to go and better than the one I grew up with. The funny part is that, with a building to explore and a world just outside of it that I haven’t seen in the better part of this decade…I just want to go to bed.

It’s firm and still soft. I’ll probably never know what kind of quantum mechanics go into making a mattress that can be both at once. Science was never my thing. Art, music, history, language and literature…the liberal arts…oh…and sex. Those were things I excelled at. The mattress is still perfect. In the aftermath of the champagne and the pizza and the bath…I’m just tired. Culture shock. Overload. I woke up this morning in cut-off short shorts with a scratchy wool blanket on a bunk with a mattress that felt like it was made of lumpy iron. Everything smelled disgusting…like the bowel movements of a few thousand sub-human bastards, and I was just another one of them. But look at me now.

It’s been less than twelve hours since I woke up, but I’m exhausted. I curl up and try to sleep, which shouldn’t be hard, but I catch myself half afraid that I won’t wake up here.

The pillows. Everything here is so clean…so perfect and untouched. Like no one really lives here. The pillows have a scent. His scent. This is where he sleeps. You can wash the covers but the pillow itself still carries his scent. He’s real. He’ll be back. I’ll see him again. He’d said he’d see me soon. This is all going to be mine, and the crown jewel in my empire will be Harry Black.

There’s something else I haven’t done in years too. Fear, stress, pain and self loathing do nothing for the libido, not to mention the fact that, for the most part, I have very little interest in my own penis. I’m horny, inside and out, tipsy, and excited by the faint hint of his scent that teases me. I haven’t done this in a long time. It wasn’t important to me in there, surrounded by thugs and with a perpetually sore ass, but here it’s different. I’m clean and smell divine, everything is soft and comfortable, the temperature is perfect no matter what it’s like outside, and I’ve had the best meal of this decade. My dick is as hard as it’s ever been, and I want Harry here now! I want him to do all of those things he wouldn’t force me to do against my will. I want to write his face and eyes overtop of every memory of Blaise or Flint or anyone else I’ve ever been with, and I want to give him everything I have…even if the only thing I have to give is myself.

A lot of people may not know this, but I did my homework on this subject. There are two types of orgasms that men can have: the traditional penile one, and the more mysterious and slightly frightening prostate orgasm. There is no happier or more sexually contented creature on earth than a queen who likes to bottom and knows it, and has been blessed with a reasonably sensitive prostate. It’s a two-edged sword at times, since I lost interest in coming the popular way after the first time a date made me come ‘inside’. Masturbation frequently lacks charm anyway, and was out of the question with an audience made up of psychopaths. Nothing quite satisfies the way being pounded through the mattress and headboards does, but at the moment I just don’t care. My fingernails are too long to stimulate myself the way I like, and they get in the way a bit while I try to find a way to get a proper stroke, but I finally find one that does the trick.

Every so often, Blaise would go down on me and actually suck my dick, which has always been a bit ticklish. It never threatened his precious manhood to do so, since mine was probably half the size of his. Even though I was circumcised just a few days after I was born, the head is still sensitive and I don’t like too much contact with anything there. Mostly, I just tuck it back and out of the way and try not to think of it. This time, the need to relieve built up stress is too overwhelming to cope with, so I tug gently at the head, wriggling back onto the sheets, knees clenched tight together while I try to imagine that thing of Harry’s inside of me. He’s good at everything else, decent in every way that other people have never been, so why wouldn’t he be good at this too?

It isn’t the same, having at it this way, wishing for something more tangible, but it has to do, and it gets results quickly enough. The embarrassing part is that when I get a little sense back in my head, I realize that I’ve just come all over myself and I haven’t even got a towel handy. The bedspread is fucking thousand count Egyptian cotton for Christ’s sake! Only a heathen tramp would trail spunk all over it. I haul myself to the bathroom and clean myself up, then flop back onto the bed and collapse into a heap.

If it ever gets out, I’d have to hang myself from shame, but hardened tart that I may be, I still desperately want a cuddle after I’ve come. Blaise always hated that. I want Harry Black…here…now…not his pillow…him! Sleep finally chases me down and pulls me under, but it doesn’t come without a fight.

Funny. I slept like a rock in prison. Here, in the proverbial lap of luxury, I wake because my dreams are too much. It’s an alien environment, soft and clean and just too different. The pillows are like clouds, and the sheets are a cocoon of the finest silks and linens. It’s summer in Chicago and I should be roasting, but the suite has central air and the temp is perfect. Wrong. It all feels wrong.

I dreamt of Flint. Of Blaise. I dreamt of faces I haven’t seen in years. Tricks who paid well and weren’t too rough. Club kids who shared drugs and sex like schoolchildren sharing candy on a playground. Maybe it was jerking off that triggered it. I remember liking sex so much that I wanted it more than drugs or money. That was what comes of being seventeen and horny all the time. I’m not that kid anymore.

Three in the morning knows all my secrets, and I’m clearer headed now that the champagne is out of my system. Now I have time to be scared. Harry Black is an enigma, a weird riddle waiting to be unlocked, and like Pandora’s Box, I may not be able to deal with what comes out of it all. I’m helpless. He’s dangerous. What will happen if he’s angry with me? Maybe he’s done this because he has to have someone too desperate to run away from him. Who would take a prison bitch home after a few weeks of not having sex and four blowjobs? He really did a number on me.

The logical part of my brain is sure that there’s a catch, and I’ll pay for this largesse somehow. The tired queen who was tipsy on Moet and Chandon White Star wanted to believe in something…anything…and was willing to entertain the flight of fancy that a man who is just my type could fall out of the stars and take me away to heaven without any price. I know that that kind of fantasy just doesn’t come true.

Fact. Mr. Black has loads of money, and yet he’s in prison. Fact. Mr. Black was working some angle, making deals while he was there, and that means he’s no ordinary dirtbag. Fact. Mr. Black is better trained in the martial arts than most Olympic competitors. He’s had real training, years of it, and he knows how to employ that training effectively. Fact. Mr. Black is cultured. The music, the books, the refined sense of humor. He’s been well off for some time, and that spells education.

He doesn’t seem like the generic Mafioso, like Blaise, but there are mobs most people don’t know about. The Triads and the Tongs for the Asians, the Irish mob, the Jewish mob, the Greeks and the Arabs. The Latin American and Mexican cartels. The Russians are a tough bunch too. More quick to violence than most. They don’t waste time with subtlety, they go straight for what they want. Look at the walls in the Post Office sometime. Check the Most Wanted lists. You’d think that in the aftermath of 9/11 that it would be all terrorists. Nope. Latin Americans, Asians, and Eastern Europeans are all over the lists. Oh, there are generic murderers and dealers that were born here too, but the organized criminals come from practically every culture you can name. Every operation and culture has it’s own rules, and Harry Black doesn’t fit in anywhere. He could be ex-military, or some kind of federal agent, but they usually don’t have this kind of money to throw around.

Who is Harry Black? What does he really want from me? I want a stylist, and a manicure and pedicure, and the clothes to knock his socks off when he comes back. I want him to want me, and I don’t feel like I can do that like this. Does he really want a worn out club queen who fucked gangsters to survive? Will he have any interest in the kind of queen who prefers to dress as a woman but still keeps the parts that make him a boy? I may have very little use for it, but I never really wanted my dick removed. I’ve known real transsexuals, pre-op and post-op, and unlike them, I don’t really mind being born a boy. I just mind that I was born into a world that doesn’t much appreciate a boy who looks good in a skirt. What does he want? He’ll get bored or decide he doesn’t like me. I’ll piss him off and he’ll throw me away like an old newspaper, and I’ll just drift down the street on the breeze like the trash I am. Too much. Too much to think about.

I grab the remote off the nightstand. I never watched much TV in prison, mostly because I was at Flint’s beck and call, and he never wasted much time on TV. I remember people making a big stink about the ‘luxury accommodations’ for prisoners. Cable TV for our society’s throwaways. Free room and board while prisoners live it up with modern conveniences. Such an outrage! Bullshit. It isn’t a gift to the prisoners…it’s a godsend to the guards. There are always more prisoners than guards. Always. The staff is outnumbered hundreds to one some of the time, because it’s expensive to house thousands of human beings and employ people to guard them. TV is a more powerful weapon of control than any number of clubs, or even guns. It works because it’s a Trojan Horse. A gift that charms and disarms. When you see slack jaws and empty eyes staring at a tube for hours you realize that the goal is quiet and peace, and TV delivers that like an angel of mercy.

Men who are staring at Vanna White’s ass while she spins the letters and wishing they were banging the huge-chested starlets of Baywatch aren’t kicking the shit out of each other or testing the limits of the guards. TV is an investment that reaps a profit margin so huge that it pays for itself ten times over. It’s easy to be bitter about some criminal who doesn’t deserve any mercy getting something for nothing, but for a guard who wants to go home alive and unscarred, any tool that works is a winner.

Flickering light makes the room a series of sharp angles and soft, blurry corners. So many channels. I haven’t seen much of anything in the last seven years, and I don’t remember much of what I saw a couple years before that. I had better things to do than vegetate, since I had drugs to do that for me while I shook my ass on the dance floor or buried my face in a trick’s pillow, but tonight I need distractions. Bad movie…bad movie…really bad movie…good movie, but I’m so not in the mood for it. Financial news channel, of no use to me…sports news, how utterly uninteresting…unless I’m trying to nod and smile while a guy explains his favorite sport…local news…and Holy Fucking Christ!

’…federal penitentiary is under lockdown after seven hours of prisoner riots. No demands have been made by prisoners yet, and very little information has been forthcoming from the warden. Early reports hinted at a gang related war that broke out between rival factions, and we know only that in the first hours, several prisoners were killed, including incarcerated members of three separate criminal organizations. Prison officials say the situation is rapidly calming, and that they expect to have all blocks under control before dawn. Back to you, Bob.’

Dead gangsters. That had to be the goal. They were targets. My heart feels like it’s palpitating. Harry Black is a killer, and he made this happen. How? Why? Who does he work for? What the fuck have I gotten myself into?

Harry Black is a mystery, and it’s a mystery in itself that he would want anything to do with me. I’m in the penthouse suite of a man who infiltrated a prison and incited a riot, just to cover his tracks while a few marked men lost their lives. I’ve done stupid things, but I’m not stupid. I should have taken the money and headed out of state fast. He probably needs a private whore he can use at his convenience, and he wanted one that was desperate and grateful but could still pass for classy when it’s necessary. He’ll come back and spell out the rules, and it won’t be much different from in there. Keep quiet and do what I’m told, and I can enjoy the good life, but if I push my luck I’ll be in more trouble than most sane people could imagine.

Sleep isn’t coming tonight. I’m in oversized silk pajamas in a bed so big that it makes me look like an infant, holding onto a pillow and wishing the sun would come up. I’m afraid…and I have every right to be.

Harry Black is coming here soon…if he’s still alive. I’m not gambling against him on that. He said he’d be here soon, and I bet that he’ll show up just like he said. When he gets here, all of this becomes real. Not a convenient dream or a vacation from hell. Real. I’ll have to pay for it.

Who is Harry Black? I’m going to find out, and I’m shit scared of the answer to that question.


TBC!!!