Chapter 2

“Was the last time you kissed a woman in college?” I asked.

“Such a long time.”

“Do you think about it often?”

“Do you think about women when you pleasure yourself?”

“…Yes,” her voice cracked. She shivered.

“Mmm…I like that,” I whispered. I put my mouth to her ear. “I like to imagine you pleasuring yourself to the thought of women.”

Her body swayed as I coaxed her mouth to mine with my hands. Her mouth went open.

I put her up against the window, pinned her against it by the wrists, and kissed her, putting my tongue into her mouth. At first, her tongue was shy but soon found its confidence. She kissed with awkward excitement like she had never kissed. And it was hot. There is no better kiss than the awkward neophyte kiss of teenagers, which is how Victoria Strickland kissed.

She stretched out her neck to me as an offering. I gladly accepted it, planting kisses from her jaw to her collarbone. Delicious. So delicious. So, I needed more. I was hungry.

To satiate my hunger, I went for her luscious breasts.

I curled a finger around her bra and tugged it away from her skin to glimpse her erect nipple. A beautiful thing, her nipple. Coral pink. It’s large, puffy size and the large size of her areola concomitant with the size of her breasts.

Slowly, I brushed my lips back and forth across her nipple, warming it with my breath. Her face twisted into delightful shapes of excruciating pleasure. When I traced circles around the edge of her areola with my tongue, she braced herself against the window, her mouth gaping open. When finally, I sucked, she squealed, “Oh Lord! ”

How intensely wonderful it must be to have a woman suck your tits for the first time after wanting it for so long.

I unclipped her bra and tossed it aside, and similarly attacked her other nipple while I used my fingers to pinch and fondle the former. Finally, I rolled her dress over her hips, causing it to fall loosely into a pile around her ankles. Then I went to my knees, planting kisses down her front until I reached her black-laced panties.

Through the intricate lacework, I could see the blonde patch of her bush. I could smell her sweet sex. I could feel her pulsing heat. I could see her glistening wetness.

By this point, the purse camera had caught more than enough to jeopardize her career. From here, I could do anything I wanted. I could even stop if I wanted to. I could stop and leave and not give her all she craved. But I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to taste all of her body, and I wanted her to taste my body. It had been so long since I gave my body to another woman. I needed it now, even if that woman was Victoria Strickland.

I traced my tongue down and up the curving creases of her thighs. I kissed and nibbled at her soft skin while her fingers threaded through my hair and clawed at the back of my skull.

“Oh, Karina,” she gasped. “Oh yes. Ple-ee-ase!” She begged with the stilted intonation of a deeply possessed soul.

To hear the ecstasy in her voice made me so hot. Suddenly, she wasn’t a senator anymore. She wasn’t a target. She was a woman desperately in need of satisfaction, and I wanted to be the woman to give it to her. I wanted to hear her scream when I slid my tongue into her slit. I wanted to hear her cry out my name again.

I pulled her panties down her legs. Her bush was downy soft, lush, and, in the dim candlelight, the color of strawberry cream. With two fingers, I parted her pussy lips, exposing her swollen, glistening clit to my tongue. She parted her legs to give me better access.

She moaned without inhibition. She uttered profanity. She writhed against the window, trying not to collapse under the intense pull of pleasure to her loins.

It had been too long since I had been with another woman. The last time was when I was still in training. Her name was Sofiya, and I was young, unbroken, eager, and in love for the first and only time. My mind frequently drifts to the alternative reality, where I ran off with Sofiya rather than choose my career. She always talked about Greece. She was enamored with an island called Naxos and always talked of escaping there with me to run a café on the coast. But then she died in a car crash. They said it was just a drunk driver. i suspected otherwise. I suspected our love had been discovered, and she paid the penalty. But I was too afraid to discover the real truth.

From time to time, I like to imagine that she never died but had somehow eluded her death and escaped to Naxos to live out our dreams. Such fantasies were a meager well-spring of happiness in my dark reality.

That was only five years ago. But it seemed like another life. Since then, I’ve only had men and none I was attracted to. But that didn’t matter. It was my job to be with them.

To my surprise, Victoria brought me a feeling that I had long thought lost. She brought back memories of Sofiya. She rekindled a long-forgotten fire inside me.

Full of desire and out of breath, I stood. I held her face and kissed her strongly with her sex smeared on my lips.

She helped me with my dress as I fumbled to remove it, her impatient hands pulling it over my head, sliding into my bra, and grasping at my breasts.

After pulling off my bra and panties, I dragged her to the couch and pushed her onto it, then pounced atop her to continue the writhing procession of kissing, touching, and moaning.

“I want you to cum for me, Victoria,” I muttered. Words I’ve said so many times, but this time I meant it.

We rolled off the couch in our hasty lovemaking onto the soft rug going beyond the reach of the camera’s view. I didn’t mind. It had already captured what it needed to.

Victoria tried to climb back onto the couch, but I pulled her back to the rug.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Nowhere, I guess,” she laughed.

“That’s right. You’re staying here with me.”

I kissed her. I looked into her eyes and saw in them not the gas-fire rage of a firebrand senator that had put a spell on this country but a deep blue ocean of a woman who quivered with an urge for love.

I crossed my legs between hers, pressing my wet vulva against hers. We sat propped onto our elbows to rub against each other.

I could not keep my eyes off her while we ground our pussies together. The whirlpool pull of her desperate eyes was too strong to avoid. Her uninhibited and eager yearning for my body, my touch, and the pleasure I provided made me feel safe to yearn for the same from her. It was a feeling I had all but forgotten, but now, as we lay on the rug of her penthouse suite, our bodies colliding rhythmically, I felt I could shed my past, my identity. I could become, if only fleetingly, a woman completely surrendered to the throes of passionate love.

That was only my punch-drunk ecstasy talking, of course. Only my carnal fervor. I knew full well that when this was done – once Victoria made me explode with pleasure, and when I made her explode – reality would wash away the dream like heavy rain. After the sex, I would button myself up quietly while Victoria contemplated her beautiful refractory, then I would demurely collect the money and depart her penthouse for the corner of 9th and L, where I would deliver the purse containing the camera and the microphone that recorded our intimate night, to a man in a car. The next time I meet Victoria Strickland, our meeting will not be so pleasant. A cold, blank abyss of betrayal would replace the passion I see now in her eyes.

But for now, my legs were entwined with hers. She was not the junior senator from Montana, and I was not a spy disguised as an escort. We were lovers sparking ecstasy with each wet collision of our bodies. That and nothing else.

Sweat dripping down my brow stung my eyes. My body shook. So did hers.

“Oh Karina, yes! Make me cum!” she moaned through gritted teeth.

“Only if you make me cum with you,” I breathed, giving her a ravening grin.

She reached a hand up to caress my face. I leaned my face into the soft palm and felt heaven there.

Our thrusts became stilted. Labored. Tremors took me. Victoria saw this, and determination filled her eyes. She ground her pussy into me harder and harder, and I did my best not to waver, despite the repeated powerful waves threatening to knock me to the ground. But eventually, the waves became too powerful. I collapsed, exhausted, on the floor. Victoria held tightly onto one of my legs as a brace while she continued grinding her pussy into mine.

“Oh fuck!” she screamed, arching her back like a she-wolf howling at the moon. “Oh fuck!” she squealed.

Then it happened. To both of us at the same time. Into the sea of ecstasy we went. Deep, deep into that joyous sea.

When I emerged, I found Victoria clutching my raised leg as if for dear life, her body twitching in tense jolts. When she finally relaxed, she crumpled into a writhing, breathless form beside me and crawled into my arms, kissing me tenderly. I held her quietly.

The only sounds that punctuated the tender aftermath were the muffled thrumming of the midnight traffic. It sounded almost like the wash of waves over a beach. Waves on a beach in the Aegean Sea. And Victoria’s warmth was like the kiss of the Aegean sun and the sweat on her neck, like the taste of sea salt. At that moment, she was everything I ever longed for. She was the long-lost lover that my soul sorely sought.

Just when I was on the cusp of nodding off, the heavy rain of reality began to patter against my dream world, washing it away like watercolors down the drain and bringing me back into the fold of my dark existence.

Remembering that I had a purse to deliver to a man waiting in a car on 9th and L, I stood, stirring Victoria awake from her hazy half-sleep. She smiled and watched me from the rug like a lazy cat as I dressed.

I did my best not to look at her, or if I did, I tried to remember who she was, what she stood for, and what she meant for my mission. Her desperate desire for love? Only a weakness to be exploited. And I had exploited it utterly. Soon, she will be an agent. My agent. Soon, she will realize that I had corrupted her to my cause. That I am not a lover but a nightmare.

As I buttoned the last button on my coat and grabbed my purse off the coat rack, Victoria finally stood. She put on a robe, then grabbed a white envelope from the fireplace mantle and held it out for me to take. She cleared her throat and said, “I hope it’s enough.”

I took it and stuffed it into my coat without looking.

“I trust that it is,” I replied.

She gave me a tepid smile.

“I had a wonderful time,” she said. “Thank you, Karina.”

“So did I,” I replied, hating myself for meaning it and hating that it didn’t matter.

I turned back to her.

“Yes, Victoria?”

Her hands clung together nervously in front of her. She held her breath. The city lights reflected the pitiful hopefulness in her eyes. Her eyes were so beautiful.

“Um. If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would it be?” She asked after a long hesitation.

“What an odd question.”

Her face reddened. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

Feeling obliged to give her an answer, I gave her one that felt true, if nothing else.

“On an island in Greece called Naxos,” I replied.

She smiled. “That’s nice.”

“Was that really the question you were going to ask?”

She hesitated. Chuckled embarrassingly and replied, “No.”

“Ask me what you wanted to ask.”

She huffed. Crossed her arms and coyly, she said,

“I wanted to ask you to spend the rest of the night with me.”

I needed to leave. It was too hot in that room, and I started choking up. And my eyes. Something in the air was making them water. And my heart. I could hear it breaking.

I shook my head and gave her a weak, pitying smile.

“Sorry, Victoria. But that is a bad idea. You and I know I cannot be seen walking out of this hotel in the morning.”

I opened the door and turned to leave but paused with my hand still on the doorknob. I looked back at Victoria again. The light from the hallway spilled across her pale semi-naked body. Her face, just in the shadows, had that desperate look of loneliness that reminded me of how lonely I was and how, tonight, just for one night, I did not feel lonely.

I went to her, kissed her deeply, and gazed into her eyes without saying another word, pretending we were lovers for a moment longer. Then I left.

The night was biting. A puff of white condensation escaped my mouth as I exhaled the frigid air on Pennsylvania Avenue. The midnight mist was thick and shimmered silver from the ghostly light of the street lamps. The chill cut straight to my bone, so I cinched my coat tightly around my body.

I had to meet my minder in front of a tobacco shop on the corner of 9th and L.

D.C. is a hauntingly beautiful city at night. The stillness gave the streets and the buildings an ancient grandeur, like Rome before the fall, or at least, an imagination of Rome, which I once learned in school was the conceit of the architects of this city. In the misty shadows thrived the demons that threatened the city’s fall. I had long learned not to be afraid of those demons. After all, I was one.

I stepped out of the lamplight to better conceal myself from any tails. I doubted there would be any, but being mindful of the risks was always better.

Before long, I was on the corner where I would meet him. His car was parked in front of the tobacco shop as he said it would be. A black Mercedes S-Class that screamed foreign diplomat. For two reasons, seeing the car always made me cringe. One, because of the attention it drew in a city full of spies, and two, I never enjoyed meeting the man it belonged to.