"Um, I guess."
"And you can update it later. I update mine every month."
"You turned eighteen like three months ago."
"Exactly, and I've updated it twice already. If you don't update it, they don't look at it again. You just make a new video each time. It's... well, kind of sexy and fun..."
"That is kind of weird, Jasmine."
"But it's every girl's fantasy. Imagine: he chooses you, he picks you up with his big arms, carries you to the bedroom in his palace. Servants scatter rose petals in your path."
"That's too funny."
"Well, it's just a fantasy anyway. No boys like Trevor are pulling me up against their boner so what am I supposed to do?"
"Please. The boys are lined up."
"Not boys like Trevor."
— — — — — — / — — — — — — — — —
Despite Dilara's protestations, Jasmine's suggestion sows a little curiosity in her, and she goes on the website the very next night.
First she wants to know more about Raoul Cock. Everyone knows that he's the richest man in the world, now on his way to being a four-hundred-billionaire, and of course everyone knows how good-looking he is.
But everyone knows he was involved in some kind of weird stuff too, even if they, like Dilara, don't remember exactly what it was. She needs to find out about that before she lets Jasmine get her in some kind of trouble.
The front page of the website is simple. At the top is the title, dark green words in an elegant cursive font on a light green background:
"El Paraíso de las Doncellas Bellas."
That's apparently the official name of his harem. "The Paradise of Beautiful Maidens."
A video in an oval window beneath the title shows Raoul sitting on a bench with his wife May, both almost unbelievably good-looking. The power of his massive body rests latent but palpable beneath a precisely tailored dark gray suit.
Next to him, May looks fragile with her bright red dress closely hugging her tiny waist and pretty hips. Bright white pearls cascade from her neck to her bust, matched by earrings and a bracelet.
Putting her earphones in (just in case her mom or dad can hear anything through the door), Dilara clicks the play button.
"Hello, I'm Raoul," he says in a voice so deep and wide that it seems to echo from a volcano. She's heard him speaking in various videos, on the news, and so on, and every time she hears his voice it startles her.
He speaks an airy and charmingly inflected English dialect, which Dilara will later find out comes from Camfordshire, where he went to school, but with hints of aspirations to Received Pronunciation. His diction, alas, is alarmingly littered with Americanisms, but sometimes spiced with a bit of Singlish, lah.
Just Raoul, he says, not Raoul Cock. Which is too bad. She'd like to hear how he pronounces his name in that accent. She smiles, imagining him being introduced somewhere, perhaps even in the queen's presence, as "Lord Cock."
Imagine a boy growing up with that name. Cock this, Cock that. No wonder he's messed up.
"And I'm May," his wife lilts like a songbird, apparently the sweetest, softest little belle ever to escape the American South, "and we'd like to thank you for your interest in El Paraíso de las Doncellas Bellas. We hope you'll find all the information you want here on our website."
Remembering what Jasmine told her, Dilara eagerly notes that May does look "exotic," and for that matter so does Raoul. Both have warm, golden skin, though his is about two shades darker than hers.
His thick curls are coal black, and when May turns her head to look at Raoul — and she can hardly stop looking up at him — a dark brown ponytail flows genie-style from the top of her head all the way down her long body to her waist.
With a short but thick black beard covering his sharp jaw, his facial features are both commanding and cute. His mouth is a little pouty, and his large brown eyes seem haunted by a secret pain, so that Dilara longs to pull his head against her chest and console him.
May's features, though, are intensely sexy-cute, with endearing dimples in her hollow cheeks, and her eyes are filled with unhidden admiration for her man.
Even through the screen, an aura of intimidating charisma surrounds them, making Dilara instantly ache for their approval. In person, she thinks, she would be too shy to approach them.
"If you are a young woman interested in bearing one of Raoul's children," May continues as if she were talking about the most ordinary thing in the world, "and you're between the age of eighteen and twenty-six, we encourage you to just go right on ahead and apply. Raoul here" — touching his leg lightly, she adopts a playfully confidential tone — "just loves meeting new ladies and making babies with them, so every day we welcome new women from all over the world, and nine months later a few of them give birth to wonderful, beautiful babies."
"That's right," Raoul agrees, glancing somewhat wryly at May. "We'd
both
love to meet you here."
"Please don't be shy, y'all" May coos encouragingly, brushing aside his mischievous innuendo. "Unless you try, you'll never know if you could join our family here and become one of our lucky mothers. The entire process is completely confidential, and our admissions teams are happy to assist you in any way they can."
"We'd appreciate you giving
us
a chance to meet
you
," Raoul says, and for a moment Dilara feels him looking through the internet almost right at her.
"And we guarantee that if you visit us here," May resumes, "it'll be absolutely the time of your life. So you just look around the website and find out anything you need to know, and then apply as soon as you can so we don't have to wait any longer to see you."
"Thank you," Raoul says, and May, waving with a radiant smile as the video ends, sings, "Goodbye now, we look forward to meeting you soon!"
— — — — — — / — — — — — — — — —
Wow, Dilara blinks, they got straight to the point.
She watches the video again to confirm that May really says what she thought she says: essentially, please come fuck my husband.
I'd like my gorgeous, amazing, handsome, perfect husband to fuck you in your pussy and put his babies in you.
And sure enough, that's exactly what she was saying.
Even though Dilara can hardly believe the meaning of their words, and she knows that tens, maybe hundreds of millions of young women have seen that video, something about the way they speak — perhaps the friendliness of their tone, or their comfortable, relaxed body language — makes her feel that somehow they were talking almost directly to
her
.
As if they went to all that trouble just to reach her.
She actually feels
personally
invited to El Paraíso de las Doncellas Bellas.
Is that a paradise
for
beautiful maidens, Dilara wonders, trying to shake off her absurd credulity, or a paradise of beautiful maidens for
Raoul
?
Or, she wonders, correcting herself, is there actually a difference?
— — — — — — / — — — — — — — — —
Below the video are three buttons. The one on the left reads, "Click here for more information about El Paraíso de las Doncellas Bellas."
The one on the right, "Click here to seek employment at El Paraíso de las Doncellas Bellas."
In the center is the largest button: "Click here if you want to conceive a child with Raoul at El Paraíso de las Doncellas Bellas."
She looks at that middle button for several seconds, tempted.
God, he's handsome. The thought of him — she can't even think it. She's not ready to click it.
"More information," she decides.
— — — — — — / — — — — — — — — —
There's an "About Raoul" section with basic facts about his life, but it seems too fawning, so Dilara doesn't trust it. She opens another window, Oogles his name, and spends a few hours learning about him.
She watches videos of his acting when he was a teenager, and judges that he was great in
Matter of Britain
but mediocre in the
Fist Punch
movies. The eye candy factor was always there, though, and watching the Obsessed for Men commercials, with closeups on his nipples and abs and butt, dripping with sweat (or, she knows, more probably oil) gets her rather hot and bothered.
Tempted to start touching herself, she remembers just in time that she needs to find out the weird stuff about him, so she checks his Shikipedia page. It turns out that not long after he became the world's richest man in 2008, having aggressively shorted basically all the major financial institutions in the world, someone leaked a video of him with a gaggle of Russian prostitutes, probably a sour act of revenge by someone who'd lost a lot of money in the crash.
After that, Raoul was even arrested, but at his trial it emerged that he'd been a CIA agent from 1995 to 2004, and apparently a great one. According to one website, in addition to his prodigious multilingualism, his wealth gave him the unique ability to put tens of millions of dollars on the table without raising questions about where he got the money, which meant he could infiltrate criminal organizations at levels that normal agents would never have access to. He'd hindered or even helped to bring down human traffickers in Eastern Europe, drug smugglers in South America, money launderers in East Asia, and small arms dealers in Africa.
In other words, in those apparently scandalous videos, he was actually working. The girls in the videos, it turns out, were enslaved, and thanks to him most of them had been rescued, given new identities, and hopefully been able to live free lives.
Dilara does find some people on a pinkkit thread who claim that the story of him being a CIA agent is implausible, that Raoul somehow bribed the CIA to make it up. No doubt in part swayed by his looks, Dilara takes his side, dismissing the conspiracy theories.
Any man that handsome is a good guy.
Being that handsome is practically the definition of "good guy."
So that's settled, but there's other weird stuff.
For example, she finds discussion groups of women literally worshiping him. Women around the world apparently write love letters to him, poetry about him, erotic literature.... Many have named their vibrators "Little Raoul." Some — it is hard to distinguish satire from reality — apparently prostrate themselves in prayer before images of him.
