Chapter 11

Two Weeks Ago

The girl was out of her clothes in record time, and now she was tugging off my jeans and hastily unbuttoning my shirt. She landed hot and heavy kisses all over me and pushed me on my bed. I let her. I felt her lips run across my skin and felt her taking me inside her mouth. Her fingers danced all over my body. I heard her heavy sighs and moans as she pleasured herself while doing so.

I stared up at the ceiling, into emptiness. Little by little the noises and touches faded away from my thought. My mind was elsewhere.

“What’s wrong, hotstuff?” I heard the girl say but I didn’t bother looking down. I felt her hand, then her mouth sucking the root alternately. “Come on get hard, hotstuff. I want this inside me,” I heard her say. Again I ignored her.

“Are you, like, tak boleh naik or something?” the girl said and I snapped out of that weird trance.

“What?” I sat up and pushed her away.

The girl looked disappointed and angry at the same time. “What? You wanna fuck or not?”

I sat at the edge of my bed, sudddenly feeling an urge to cover myself up. So I hoisted my jeans back on, stood up and walked to my bedroom balcony. I heard the girls voice behind me.

“Seriously? All those lines to pick me up and now you don’t wanna fuck?”

I was quiet. I didn’t feel like saying anything.

“Ah!” the girl exclaimed behind me. I heard her gathering her clothes up. I glanced behind to see her; a stocky girl, with big breasts, slim waist and wide hips. She was pretty, cute as a button. I don’t know her name, nor, at this point, do I bother to. She angrily put on her panties and then saw me looking at her. When she did, she cupped her breasts in her hands and said, “You don’t want any of this?”

I looked at her absently.

“I’ll call you a taxi,” I said.

***

One Week Ago

The Chinese lady across the bar had been looking my way since a few hours ago. She was with a group of friends, all of them pretty, all of them in cocktail dresses. They must have come from a party, and decided to stop by for a few beers or wines. The one looking at me was sipping white wine from a tall wine goblet. She was dressed in a mini  black dress, shoulderless, with a sexy choker around her neck.

I was at the bar, drinking a club soda and talking to the bartender (what a cliched scene). The news was on the flat-screen TV hanging above me and I pretended to pay attention to it, all the while noticing the lady looking at me from 30 feet away. I even noticed her friends nudging her and sending approving glances my way as well.

When she had walked up to the barman asking for another glass of wine, we smiled at each other and I offered to buy her that drink. She ended up sitting on the barstool next to me, and we talked while she drank her wine and when, I suggested if she wanted to go somewhere else she nodded and said yes, I knew she would be in my bed in the next hour or so.

And she was; her hair, dyed a heavy copper, spread on my pillow nicely, and was in stark contrast to the coarse black stuff between her legs that felt like I was dipping my wick into a bramble bush. She was breathing heavily and rubbing her chest as I pounded her… but then I lost interest, and I couldn’t do it. After only five minutes, I suddenly felt I didn’t want to have sex anymore. I pulled out and for a moment she must have thought I wanted to fool around so she sat up and fondled me and kissed me all over.

 But when I went the opposite of being turned on and hard, she bit my ear gently and asked me if anything is wrong.

“Nothing is wrong,” I said, feeling more offended that I should have. I pushed her away.

“Come on, I want to do it, I’m horny as fuck, I want to do it,” she said, as she took my hand and put it between her thighs. What was her name? Cecilia or something. I didn’t care.

“I’m sending you home,” I said to her. At first she thought I was kidding. When she realized I wasn’t, she scowled, angrily put on her clothes and went silent the whole time I sent her back to her house in PJ. She slammed the door to my BMW when she went out.

Whatever.

***

 Two Days Ago

The club was in full swing, and the revellers were hitting the dance floor hard. The flashes on neon lights, the artificial smoke and the scent of liquor was heavy in the air. Music boomed through the speakers as the DJ got to work. There were screams and shouts of ecstacy, drowning out the attempted conversations all around me. The bar was packed to the seams, and luckily I managed to secure my favorite vantage point earlier.

As usual, my eyes were on scanning the crowd, looking for prey.

Maybe it’d be this girl in the neon green tank top and white hot pants. I saw how there was no bra beneath that tank top. Her short hair was shaved at the sides, and she danced like there was no tomorrow, flailing her skinny arms and legs about. I wondered if she would be that energetic when she fucked.

Another girl was sat at one of the lounge sofas. She looked like a Punjabi girl, and she seemed very shy and awkward to be sitting amongst her group of friends who were drinking beer, and talking and laughing very loudly. She was dressed in a white one-piece party dress, with a ‘window’ that revealed the olive skin of her cleavage. By the way she behaved, I figured this was her first time ever clubbing, as I saw her decline invitations to dance. She was probably just drinking coke. I could pick her up easily, and experience has told me that these shy girls are sometimes wild as hell when it comes to fucking.

As I had sat at the bar, I saw the glances and smiles thrown my way. The girls were young, and sexy, and gorgeous. All of them seemed willing, and wanting, to throw their inhibitions away and spending the night with me, a handsome stranger that would have given them the best fuck they will ever receive. All I had to do was extend my smile, some talk, and they would have been home with me and doing the naked tango in no time.

I could have had any one of them.

But instead I paid for my drinks, and I went home.

***

 Sunday

“Yas, Jas, please don’t play in the sun, come inside, Mommy made pancakes!” Nissa called from the dining room to her little girls who were, of all things, digging in the garden with a plastic shovel. Nissa shook her head. “Habis garden aku budak-budak ni.”

I helped her lay out plates while she brought the food in from the kitchen. There were pancakes, small jars of honey, peanut butter and jam, chicken sausages, scrambled eggs and some kuih I had bought before I arrived at my sisters house. I poured coffees for me and Nissa, and helped make two cups of Milo for Yasmine and Jasmine.

The twins came running into the dining room, giggling non-stop and crashed into me, hugging my legs.

“Uncle Dhani jom main masak masak kejap lagi jom la Uncle D jom jom jom jom,” Yasmine, today dressed in a white t-shirt and denim overalls, ‘said’.

“A’ah a’ah jom main masak masak kalau tak nak main masak masak kita pergi shopping beli toys nak uncle please jom la please,” said Jasmine, the twin sister, in a pink t-shirt beneath her denim overalls.

“Okay, okay, why not we go do both? After breakfast, after lunch, we go out, would you like that?” I said.

“YAYYY” the girls squealed in delight and took to their chairs (bolstered by pillows) and hungrily wolfed down their pancakes and sausages.

“You spoil them too much,” Nissa said as we ate breakfast.

“I’m the Uncle, I should spoil them to death,” I said.

“Buy any more toys and I’ll need to buy more boxes to keep them in,” Nissa said, shaking her head. But I knew she didn’t mind. Besides, I don’t spoil the girls that much, anyway.

“But I do want to go out, anyway, after we have lunch. I want to buy some clothes and some books. Maybe some groceries as well,” my sister said. I agreed, and said we can all go together.

After breakfast we watched some television and the twins fell asleep on my lap. Nissa said they have been up since seven in the morning, playing and screaming and shouting and generally being four-year old girls with all the time in the world. I stroked their hair as they slept. For a moment I felt that, in this house, there was peace. The three people that mattered the most to me lived here, and I came every week to share this sanctuary and escape from the world out there. The world I live in. Sometimes I do wish I could just stay here with my sister and help her with the kids. But Nissa is a fiercely independent woman, and she was more than comfortable to be doing the job on her own. An excellent job, I might say. Besides, as much as I love the comfort and calm of her house, I wasn’t too sure I wanted to leave my life.

But was I? Something has changed inside me. But I’m not too sure why.

“You’re very quiet today, little brother,” Nissa said. She was sat on the sofa, across from me.

“I am?”

“Yes,” she said. “You are. Is something bothering you?”

I was quiet for a moment. “I’m not sure.”

“Come on, you can tell me. I’m your sister, not a stranger.”

I contemplated this. And without realizing I was about to speak, I said, “There’s this girl…”

“Aha, a girl,” Nissa grinned. I looked at her and she raised her palms flat towards me. “I’m not saying anything, go on.”

I gently lifted the twins heads off my lap and laid them on squishy pillows. I stood up, unsure of what I was going to say.

“About a couple of months ago, this girl started work at my place,” I said. “She’s in legal.”

“What’s her name?” Nissa asked.

“Damia,” I answered. “Damiawati Isahak.”

“That’s a lovely name. Same initials as yours.”

“Right.”

“So what about this girl?”

Indeed, Dhani; what about this girl? I thought back about Damia. What was about you? I thought about the past couple of months ever since she started work at the company. The first day I met her, and the days that followed. I thought about the first time we had dinner, and the lunches that we begin to have very often. I thought about the day I saw her crying in the park, and how I had let her hold my hand all the way until we had reached the office afterward. Now, before I tell my sister, I’m about to tell you something about what happened after that day in the park. After that day, not a day passed by that I didn’t have lunch with Damia. And often, dinner too. I saw her almost everyday except the weekends. Want some more information? After that day in the park, after that day I hand lent her my handkerchief to wipe her tears, we texted and instant messaged constantly, day and night.

Every morning I’d receive a ‘good morning Dhani J’ text from her and I’d reply, smiling, with a ‘good morning Damia J’. We talked about so many things, from work to entertainment. We talked about the latest movie and whether we wanted to go see it; oh yeah, we’ve seen three movies together in the past couple of months. We would joke and laugh, and we would spend hours drinking coffee and becoming lost in conversation. And when we had said our goodbyes for the day, the whole thing would start again with the good morning text the next day.

I had become, in the past few weeks, cheerier, happier and feeling less of a condescending, arrogant summabitch. Sharmini, my secretary, remarked not a few days ago.

“Mr. Dhani, you seem very happy lately. Is something going on?” she had asked, wryly. I just smiled and said “Jangan sibuk.” Damia and I didn’t talk much at the office, but whenever we passed by one another we’d exchange this quiet, almost shy look and lock eyes. And of course the whole office exploded with gossip about what was going on between us. And we didn’t bother. It was as if the office didn’t exist except for the two of us. I thought about Damia, and her beautiful mind, and her beautiful face; I thought about her and saw beauty in more ways than I could ever imagine. I was surprising myself by NOT thinking about her as a pair of tits and ass.

“So?” Nissa said, pulling me out of my own head. “What about this girl, Dhani?”

I told her about Damia. Everything I could tell, anyway. Nissa was trying to avoid smiling the entire time so I asked her.

“What’s funny?”

“Nothing!” she said. “So she’s a pretty girl, right? You’ve dated pretty girls before.” Nissa knew I dated casually, though of course she didn’t know about my entirely secret life.

“I know, but…” I tried to find the words. “Okay, when I first asked her out to dinner, I was expecting it to be nothing more than dinner, right?”

“Right,” Nissa said, clearly enjoying this.

“But I didn’t expect her to be charming, and witty and funny, and so smart! She’s the smartest girl I’ve ever met, excluding you of course, Nissa,” I said. Nissa laughed. I continued, “And she’s so… beautiful. In every sense of the word. The way she speaks, the way she carries herself, her actual physical looks. God!”

“Do you have a picture?” Nissa asked. I did; I actually did. I fished out my phone and showed Nissa a picture of Damiawati. I had taken that picture secretly, when she was talking and thought I was just replying a text. In the picture she was wearing a light yellow tudung, as usual in the style of that Hana Tajima girl, and a pastel peach blouse. We had been at Rakuzen that night. Nissa looked at the picture and nodded approvingly.

“She’s a lovely girl, Dhani,” Nissa said.

“She is,” I said. “She is…”

“So, what’s bothering you? I don’t see anything that should.”

I frowned. Now this was the part that I couldn’t tell her, and this was the part that has been at me for the past three weeks or so. Yes, I see Damia very often nowadays, but the weekends were still my hunting time. And for the past three weeks, I haven’t been able to get it up or finish or simply become interested in hunting anymore, haven’t i? It’s suddenly not good enough. And let me tell you something deeper: three weeks ago when that stocky girl was sucking me off, I couldn’t get hard because I was thinking about Damia. Then when I had tried to fuck that Chinese lady but lost thrust midway, it was I was thinking about Damia.Then last week at the club, I decided to go home and NOT pick up a girl for once, was because I was thinking that I’d rather spend the night talking to Damia, which I did, over the phone, when I had gotten home. I even tried to jerk off, and tried to imagine what it was like to fuck Damia but the image refused to settle in my head. Instead, I’d instantly feel guilty (whatthefuck, right?) and stop. I couldn’t think about Damia in that way.

Instead when I thought about her, I felt… happy. At ease. She puts me at fucking ease, and for the first Goddamn time, I am admitting that I do look Goddamn forward to seeing her every fucking day, and I do look forward to talking to her and receiving that stupid fucking good morning text every fucking morning. That is what has been fucking bothering me.

“Dhani, what’s bothering you?” Nissa asked again. I didn’t answer. I just frowned.

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” Nissa said when she decided that I wouldn’t say a thing.

“What?” I asked, a bit more provocatively that I intended.

“You like her, you like this Damia girl, very much. It’s so obvious from the way you spoke about her, and how your eyes sort of mist over thinking about her,” Nissa said in her best sisterly tone.

“I don’t like her,” I said.

“You do.”

“I don’t.”

Nissa was quiet for awhile. Then she leaned forward and said, “Dhani Ibrahim, dear brother… are you in love?”

Alarm bells went ringing in my head.

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