by Amy Brent
I think it’s sad, really. I bet if you asked her today she wouldn’t be able to tell you the name of a single man—including my father, whoever he was—that she had sex with just for the sake of having sex. Sex was simply an act of commerce with mama. It was never about love or feelings. She always had an ulterior motive. Like I said. Sad, really.
One of her suitors (that’s what she called them), an older man named Homer Vance, even gave her a used Corvette to drive when I was in elementary school. I’ll never forget that car because it was so loud in every way. It was a candy-apple red Stingray convertible with shiny chrome wheels and a stereo that would jar your teeth and mufflers that would rattle the windows. I can still remember her dropping me off out front of the elementary school in that car. She’d barely give me time to slam the heavy door before revving the engine and speeding away. Then one day, she picked me up from school in her old gray Toyota Corolla. Seemed that Homer Vance had found a new sugar baby to drive his Corvette.
“His loss,” mama said with a carefree shrug as she ground the gearshift into first and tried to ignore the screeching sound of the worn belt beneath the hood. “His fucking loss.”
Most of the time things worked out the way she wanted, probably because she had very low expectations of the men she surrounded herself with.
She said that if we lived in Miami Beach or Beverly Hills or someplace like that she could catch us (not her) a rich man to take care of us for the rest of our lives. Pickings were slim in Arlington, she said.
Sometimes I thought she was just afraid of settling down with one man. She could have found a good man to take care of us (her) if she had really wanted one. There were a lot of good men in Arlington and DC just across the river, but none that interested her. Truth be told, I think mama enjoyed the hunt more than she enjoyed the catch. To her, it was all about control.
“The power of the pussy,” she liked to call it. “When you got the pussy, you got the power.”
And she had lots of pussy power, she said, because the good Lord had seen fit to endow her with a nice, tight one. It was pretty and pink, with a plump clit and perfect lips and wispy blonde curls. And it was one of the tightest, hottest, wettest holes in all of Arlington County. I guessed that claim had been made by a number of the men she’d been with who were qualified to make such a comparison. I could just picture mama handing a guy a comment card to fill out as he fucked her from behind in some dive bar restroom.
The power of the pussy… Why shouldn’t she use it to get what she wanted out of life? “If you’re smart,” she said, serious as a heart attack, “You’ll use it, too.”
I had not gotten into the habit of bringing strange men home for sex like mama still did on occasion, though less frequently than when I was younger. I think it might have something to do with me being all grown up now and looking the way I do. I look like a nineteen-year-old version of her, only with bigger tits and perfect teeth. I think she sees me as completion for some reason, probably because of the way her men friends ogle me when they see me running around the house in a string bikini or getting out of bed in the morning wearing just my panties and a t-shirt. Hey, it’s my house, too, and this is how I dress. If you didn’t like it, or even if you do, keep your hands and eyes to yourself.
Despite her “pussy power” advice, which she offered freely in front of half a dozen of my girlfriends and surrounding diners at Casa Mexicana on the night of my sixteenth birthday, I had yet to fully utilize the power of my pussy to fight evil or satisfy men.
I wasn’t sure that I would ever be as free with my pussy as she was because I really did believe in the power of love (wasn’t that a song?) and the concepts of monogamy and commitment. Oh sure, sometimes I’d see a handsome older man in a suit at work and think about asking his name. Or flirt with the DJ at the bar I went to sometimes with my girlfriends. Then there was my boss at Starbuck’s, Lennie, who looked like a thirty-five-year-old surfer dude. He’d fuck me at the drop of a cappuccino spoon if I’d let him. All I’d have to do was just bend over and wiggle my ass at him. He’d probably cream all over his green apron before he could even get his cock out.
Like mama, I do have a strong sex drive that seems to be getting stronger every day. I started getting little tingles in my cunt even before my blonde peach fuzz pubes started to sprout. I always rode the neighbor boy’s bike because I liked to rub my young cunt on the crossbar that my girl’s bike didn’t have. I could remember pressing my hairless cunt to the washing machine when I was eight years old, letting the spin cycle vibrations shudder through me, making me feel all tingly inside, even though at the time I had no idea what an orgasm was or what it felt like to have one. But I soon learned how things worked, thanks to older girls at school, the internet, and my mama’s willingness to talk frankly to me about sex and men.
Her version of the birds and the bees went something like this: the guy’s cock gets hard and he shoves it in your pussy and moves it around until you both cum. Any questions?”
Uh, yeah, lots…
She told me that it would hurt when I lost my virginity, but that pleasure would quickly replace the pain. She told me that if I gave up the pussy too quickly boys wouldn’t respect me, but sometimes respect was overrated.
“Use your pussy to get what you want, Lolita,” she told me when I was probably twelve or thirteen. “Men can’t resist a tight young pussy. They’ll do anything to fuck you. Just you wait and see. Trust me, I know. And if one of them tells you he loves you just to get in your pants, you tell him to fuck off!”
My friends were always shocked that mama talked to me this way. I wasn’t shocked. I was grateful. She was doing what she thought was best for me. Telling me what I needed to hear without beating around the bush. She did it because of the mistakes she’d made when she was my age. She was a horny girl just like me, only she didn’t have someone like her to guide her along. Her mother, my grandmother, was a religious prude who said that sex was dirty and should only be used to procreate, not for pleasure.
“Sex is the devil’s tool,” grandma would say. “Let a man put his member inside you and no good can come of it.” I guess I was proof of that.
So, mama—Sandy Carter’s her name— was a horny kid who was left to her own devices when it came to learning about sex. She claimed that was why she lost her virginity at sixteen to an older man she met at her job at the Sonic Drive-In. It happened right there in the Sonic parking lot late one Saturday night. She remembered him as being an older man with salt and pepper hair to his shoulders and a scraggly beard, chunky fat, dressed in a white t-shirt with blue paint stains and a white painter’s cap pushed back on his head. He ordered two double cheeseburgers and tots, and when she came back to pick up his tray he gave her a five-dollar tip and invited her into the back of his windowless van for another five-dollars. Without hesitation, she climbed inside and wiggled out of her shorts and panties and he took her virginity, which she willingly offered, on a pile of old rags that smelled like gasoline and paint thinner. Five minutes later she stood in the parking lot with the tray between her hands and the ten dollars in her pocket, watching him drive away. She said she never saw him again. She didn’t even get his name. She just remembered that he wreaked of sweat and grunted like a fat hog when he came.
She said that lit her fuse and she couldn’t help herself. She started sleeping around and got pregnant at sixteen, and became a single mom at seventeen. To this day, she claims that she has no idea who my father is. I’ll probably never know and I guess I’m okay with that. She said it was a good thing I didn’t know who he was. Now, I was free to imagine that my daddy was a great man who did great things and not some asshole she had fucked in the backseat of a car after a high school football game.
She missed her entire senior year and only by the grace of God and a GED was she able to build a life for the two of us. My grandmother, the hypocritical religious cunt, kicked her out of the house when she learned that she was knocked up, so mama lived wi
th friends until I was born. Now she worked as a legal secretary for this sleazy asshole in Arlington named Earl Butts. I swear to God, that’s his name. His shitty TV commercials scream, “In a wreck and need a check? Better call Butts!”
She could have aborted me, but she swore the thought never crossed her mind. I owed mama a lot and she reminded me of that fact often, usually when we were fighting and screaming at one another. Mama had sharp claws and they came out without warning sometimes, usually when she was drunk or pissed off about something that reminded her that her life had been mostly spent providing for me.
“I wonder where I’d be today if I hadn’t gotten pregnant with you,” she said one time as we were watching an old movie about a woman who had gotten pregnant and gave the baby up for adoption. She didn’t say it in a hateful way, more like she was in a daydream talking to herself. “I wonder how different my life would have been if I’d finished high school and gone to college. I always wanted to be an interior designer. Did you know that? Who knows, I might have had my own company by now. Instead I’m typing up legal briefs and getting coffee for Earl fucking Butts...”
I just looked at her from my end of the couch, unsure of what to say. I mean, how do you respond to something like that? I wonder what my life would have been like if you hadn’t come along and fucked it all up, Lolita? After a moment, she shook her head and blinked at me, like she had just realized that I was even in the room listening. Then she forced a smile and wiped her eyes on the front of her t-shirt and held out her hand.
“Then again, I wouldn’t have my girl.” She turned on the couch and opened her arms and waved me in for a hug. I slid into her arms and she hugged me until I couldn’t breathe. We both knew her life would have turned out much differently if she hadn’t had me, but it was too late to do anything about it now.
Then again, maybe her life would have been much worse, given her lack of judgment when it came to men.
She’d made a lot of mistakes in her life.
I was bound and determined not to repeat them.
That said, I’m a lot like her in a lot of ways and most of the time I’m okay with that. The one big difference between us is I am far pickier than she is when it comes to who I let in my pants. Okay, I’m not saying that she was a slut, but come on. We should have installed a revolving door on the front of our little house, so many men have come and gone through it over the years.
Most of the time I didn’t even bother to learn their names because I knew they wouldn’t be around for long. Most of them were scuzzy assholes who bought her drinks all night and expected something for their money. A return on their investment, if you will.
Sometimes she brought home a decent guy that hung around past the weekend. Guys like Jerry Falk, who was her “boyfriend” for six months or so when I was sixteen.
Jerry was forty-two, a tanned and muscular general contractor who drove a shiny black pickup truck and treated my mom better than most guys had. For a while, I thought he might even be “the one” that would marry her and make an honest woman out of her.
Then Jerry started coming in to kiss me goodnight after I had gone to bed. Sometimes he’d “accidentally” come into the bathroom while I was naked in the shower. Sometimes he’d hug me a little too tightly for a little too long. I knew what he was doing and I should have told mom, but I was a stupid girl whose young cunt was always on fire and I found the attention exciting. I loved the way his goodnight kisses and bear hugs made me feel all warm and toasty inside, how his lips on my forehead and his arms around my shoulders made my pussy gush and my nipples hard. The truth was, I wanted Jerry to fuck me, probably as much or more as he wanted to.
I was a virgin and my cherry was ready to pop.
To my shame, I decided that Jerry would be my first, even though I knew it would hurt my mom if she ever found out.
Sometimes stupid girls do stupid things for stupid reasons.
That was me at sixteen.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Stupid and horny.
And determined to have Jerry’s cock inside me no matter who got hurt.
Chapter Four: Ryder
In my humble, well-travelled opinion, Mosul, Iraq is the motherfucking armpit of the Middle East, kind of like Bogota is the armpit of South America and Detroit is the armpit of the North. Actually, Detroit and New York City run neck and neck on the shithole scale, but they were both heaven on earth compared to fucking Mosul. I mean, Jesus Christ, I could not think of a place I hated more, and I’d been to places you wouldn’t even send your worst enemy to. Most of Iraq sucked ass, but Mosul was a shithole of the highest magnitude, even worse than Kandahar and Lebanon and Kabul and Bagdad; and that was saying something because all those places were premier shitholes, too.
Everything about Mosul sucked. The heat. The food. The water. The people. Everything. It was a hundred and five in the fucking shade and the entire place stunk like shit. Everywhere you turned there was some raghead motherfucker staring you down, like he was trying to kill you with his eyes. I usually just stared right back, knowing that one on one, there weren’t too many men that could beat me in a fist or knife fight, or kill me before I could kill them if the guns came out. We both knew that if no one was watching, we wouldn’t hesitate to put a bullet in each other’s brains. But somebody was always watching, just waiting for some asshole American like me to fuck up and do something the world considered unjust so the video of my transgressions could be plastered all over the fucking internet. So, I usually kept my head down and my mouth shut when I wasn’t working, though sometimes it was excruciatingly hard to do.
Thankfully, it was a quick ride from my hotel to the base where Major Dickerson was waiting. Corporal Yates sat behind the wheel with his hands at ten and two and his eyes locked straight ahead and didn’t say a word as we made our way through the crowded streets. He was sweating like a pig at a Texas barbecue. He looked like he would shit his pants if anyone asked him for the time of day.
I powered up the satellite phone and scrolled through the calls I’d missed. There were three calls from Dickerson’s office all within the last hour (that would have been Yates trying to reach me because Dickerson never called himself), and two from Quinn Blackstone back in DC where BSS was headquartered.
Quinn was building his company off the sweat of dozens of his old pals like me. In just three years, BSS had made him a wealthy man, with multimillion dollar contracts with governments and corporations all over the world. When Quinn started the company, he offered to cut me in as a partner, but I didn’t want to leave the SEALs. If I had, I’d be sipping coffee at that moment in my air-conditioned office in DC rather than sweating my ass off in motherfucking Mosul. And maybe my wife wouldn’t be divorcing me now. Or maybe she would. Who the fuck knows.
“Why didn’t you leave a message?” I asked, holding out the phone and giving Yates a sideways look.
Yates shrugged without taking his eyes off the road. “Major Dickerson said not to leave a message, sir. He said to just go and find you.”
“When the master calls, the dogs come running,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Excuse me, sir?”
“Nothing.” I pressed the button to bring up the list of voicemails, expecting to find a couple from Quinn. There were no messages, which I didn’t find too odd since Quinn hated voicemail. If you didn’t answer the phone right away, he’d just hang up and go on about his day, then you had to track him down.
I glanced at my watch. It was 2:05 in the afternoon Mosul time, which translated to 7:05 A.M. in DC. I checked the time stamp on the calls from Quinn. He’d last tried to call an hour ago, around 6:15 A.M. his time. That was early even for him. I pressed the call return button to give Quinn a call back. I huffed as the call went straight to voicemail. I swiped a hand over my sweaty face and waited for the beep.
“Hey, Quinn, it’s me. Just saw that you called. Give me a shout back when you get a minute. I’m on my way to meet your buddy, Dickerson.�
��
Yates stopped at the guard gate long enough for them to glance at our IDs and wave us through. Security was getting pretty laid back because there hadn’t been a major act of terrorism in a while. A few years ago, we would have been held at gunpoint while the Jeep was checked by bomb-sniffing dogs and the undercarriage checked by mirrors on long poles. Now, if you had on a uniform and they vaguely recognized your face, it was just a wave and go. It would be this way until the next asshole got horny for his heavenly virgins and drove a car bomb into the gate or strolled up wearing a vest laden with explosives.
It used to worry me, but now I was like, fuck it, I had another month and then I was out of there and had no intention of every coming back. Quinn had picked up a big corporate client in Dubai. That’s where I would be heading next, since I had no reason to stay in Arlington anymore.
I’d sign the divorce papers, spend a few days with my son, and climb back on a plane. Dubai was still a Middle East shithole with one of the largest slums on the planet, but the hotel where I’d be staying had air conditioning and there was American fast food on every corner. And no raghead motherfuckers giving me the evil eye.
Dickerson’s office was in the command center located at the middle of the base, a three-story gray concrete building with no sign or windows in the front and a couple of guards standing at the front door smoking like they were on break. Yates stopped at the curb and nodded at the building without shutting off the engine.
“Major Dickerson is in his office, sir,” he said. “You know the way.”
“I do,” I said, taking a deep breath and blowing it out slowly. I gave him a hard look that made his Adam’s apple bob. “You sure you can’t give me a head’s up as to why Dickerson needs me on my day off? If the shit’s about to hit the fan, I’d like to know it.”
“No idea, sir,” he said with a defeated shrug. “They don’t tell me shit. I just drive.”
