Dare

'BASTARD!'

She sat on the warm curb-stone of a pavement Taverna, watching people eat. The sensual warmth comes up through the seat of her cut-down Levi's. It - and the close proximity of food - at least, is comforting. The sun burns her neck making her pleasingly drunk, or high, on hunger. She hasn't eaten in two days. 'Down-And Out In Coastal Greece' - sounds like last year's cliché. The title of a thirties book she should've read, but hadn't. The next line would go 'cast adrift and directionless in some god-forsaken fishing village...' Even as she smiled at the thought, he was approaching her. She'd seen him at a near table, furtively glancing across in her direction. Dark-skinned with long unruly hair pulled back into a ponytail. Totally compelling eyes, brown as his tan, and the near-swaggering gait of natural self-confidence.

'You share bread and wine with me? Psomi? Krasi?'

She nods.

He hunkers down beside her and passes a bottle, moving in a lascivious animal way that's slow and predatory. She slurps at the bottle-mouth greedily, embarrassed by her eagerness even as she does so. Intimidated by his raw health that so obviously contrasts her palour.

'English?'

Nod.

'Nowhere to stay?'

A shrug.

His accent is American, but measured and reassuring. 'Broke, busted, disgusted? And the face and figure of Sylvia Kristel.'

She doesn't know how to react, so she takes another pull at the bottle. 'Tina' she says at length, 'and Sylvia Kristel's a brunette.'

'Davey R, from Boston Mass. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Tina. Cheropoli,' with a mock-courteous flourish that has her choking on laughter.

The sun is lipping low over the horizon now. When he stands, extending his hand to her, she hefts up her backpack and sleeping roll, the action stretches her T-shirt taut, moulding it to her, concealing and revealing in equal proportion. And she follows, thoughts racing. 'Mark, there's strange men trying to pick me up - could be rapists or sex killers, and if I'm too weak to resist it's YOUR fault, 'cos you should be HERE. You Bastard!'

On his feet and walking fast, she has to hurry to keep up with him. Past the big square at the top of the rise from the harbour, where the old-town streets narrow down, her senses suddenly working overtime like they haven't since the split-up. Like she's been in shock, some kind of trauma trance since he walked out on her, and she's seeing this place for the first time. The town is pleasantly lazy, looks and smells Greek, from the thick aroma of Turkish coffee to the proud moustachioed old men and black-shawled crones, to the boisterous unshaven drinks vendors by the battered inland-bound coaches to the market-stand displays of rich spices, fresh veg and local fruit - tomatoes the size of oranges, shiny red and green peppers, grapes, melons and lemons...

And Police. There seems to be a high profile police presence on each street intersection. She avoids their inquisitive gaze - mindful of vagrancy charges, dope frisks, planted evidence. Mark had told her all about the Astinomiko! And as she walks it all comes pouring out of her about Mark, the Kerouac dream of thumb-tripping Europe which they'd lived clear down to... somewhere around here, where he'd gotten snared in with some dope-run to Morocco and she'd woken to find him gone.

'Can't you wire home for cash?'

'No.' That'd be to admit she'd failed. They hated Mark from the start and the more they'd hated the more she'd wanted him, because he WAS 'dangerous'. The Sod. 'They said he'd ditch me. I won't give them that satisfaction.'

And Davey R - on a sabbatical to 'do' Europe that gravitated down to leisurely employment in the sun for - who knows how long? Until it ceases to be fun. 'Mr Karabinis lives there,' a nod in the vague direction of the high hills overlooking the sea. Some villas lost in the pines, the whiteness of bare rock and rich greens of shaded lawns. 'Paralysed from the waist down, but made his million first. Now lives as a near-recluse but for the occasional - girls. Not that he uses them himself, y'unnerstand? But he likes to watch bodies in his garden, preferably nude, young and entwined. He's generous too. A week'd get you a plane ticket home and then some. But you could stay for a week, you could stay for eternity - whichever comes first.' And those eyes are on her, opening her like a sexual penetration. 'You fuck 'n' suck for pleasure 'n' profit?'

It stops her dead. A month earlier she'd have turned and walked, but now she's indecisively gaping. Licking dry lips for some quick and witty response that won't come. 'Does the Pope shit in the woods? Is Groucho funny?'

And the grin comes slow and easy. Greece, a land of gods, poets and heroes - and he's all three. Suddenly, Mark isn't quite so important. 'Why me? Do you make a habit of giving succour to waifs, strays and fallen women?'

'It's been know to happen.'

Coming out now through the plaza. A Citroën idling, vintage Human League on stereo speakers - 'I picked you out, I shook you up, and turned you around, and turned you into something new.' She can see herself in the smoked Perspex and doesn't like what's looking back, ragged silver-blonde hair, uncombed like any other sub-Hippie derelict washed up on this coast. The extruded mounds of her nipples punctuating the 'R' and 'X' of the 'RELAX' on her grubby slept-in last-year's T-shirt, moving as she walks. Her Levi's hacked-off and frayed above the knees. Backpack and...

'...who he?'

A skinny Greek with jet-black hair greased into a fifties quiff, slumped behind the steering wheel. Faded denim jacket and that kind of aggressive macho posing assumed by some Greek males.

'Who he? He Stevo. That who he. He is gardening. He is chauffeuring. He is troilism. As you'll find out...'

-- 0 --

The villa, screened by cypresses and hidden behind high walls, is cool and spacious. The garden rides down a slope of six terraces - lawns and flowerbeds, with a pool on the third. The fitted wardrobes in the apartment she's designated are filled with dresses and outfits (but no underwear), many of them her size. Where are they all from? Who'd worn them last? She luxuriates in a shower and changes into the first clean clothes she'd worn since leaving England.

She meets Mr Karabinis at the evening meal held in a conservatory overlooking the sparkling blue Aegean sea. He sits at the head of the table, wheeled in by Stevo, who then sits beside Davey R. Conversation is conducted in Greek, effectively excluding her. She tries to catch Davey's eye, but he's always talking, so she turns her attention to the food. 'Greek cuisine is really Turkish cuisine prepared by poor chefs' Mark had said. Lathera - with Feta cheese, heavy with oil, dusted with marjoram, followed by kafe tourkiko. Bored and tired she quits for bed - unmolested, with her hunger pleasingly sated.

'I can't go through with this.' Morning feels different. The house seems empty, cold and alien. She feels trapped into a bargain made when she'd been weak with hunger, not a little drunk on cheap Greek wine, and hypnotised by deep brown eyes. Then, 'relax. It'll be OK. It's just like a game of 'Dare'. You can't back out of a Dare - and where'd you back out to? - onto the street? It's not your fault. It's Mark that's to blame - the bastard. I was HIS responsibility. If it wasn't for him I wouldn't be here.'

In the lounge a silent TV flashes up monochrome Mug-shot faces of teenage girls accompanied by lines of indecipherable Greek script. Police officers talk to camera with serious expressions... murder? Mystery? Suspense? Missing girls? Sex killers? Before cutting to commercial jingles - even more mindless for their being in nonsense language. She loses interest. There's a bikini in the wall unit. She tries it on, then, with an effort, leaves the top in the drawer. She looks good despite her sun-bleached hair, flakes of dry white skin peeling from her shoulders. Freckles too, dusting across her back, but her breasts are full and firm, large golden areola's swelling smoothly to perky nipples. She poses at the mirror, matted hanks of hair hanging over her forehead like so much seaweed, a gamin's face, and good boobs she decides, sticking her tongue out and wrinkling her nose at the reflection.

She's conscious of the sensual bobbing of her breasts as she walks the gardens. Stevo studiously tending flowerbeds, he ignores her, seems hostile, almost murderously so at times. She avoids him. And Davey nowhere to be seen. Disappointed she lies in the warm shade of trees, watching gulls gliding on thermals up from the sea. She drowses. Later - before bed, she critically examines herself, tits, thighs - the pale and sparse mat of pubence that gives her an almost pre-adolescent appearance - 'a pubic blonde as well as a public one' as Mark said. 'So what the hell's wrong with me that they don't fuck me and get it over with? Just what're they waiting for? Why don't they make a move on me? Why don't they hurry up and DO IT?'

-- 0 --

Bodies in the garden, nude, young, and entwined. Vintage Human League on the ITT portable - 'I love your love action, love's just a distraction, no talking, just looking, watching your love action.' They're damp-gleaming from the pool, Mr Karabinis hunched in the shadow of a cypress, watching from his wheelchair as they 'arrange' her, treating her as an object for manipulation without will or personality. They sit her demurely, the slight shock of cool damp grass prickling and tickling her bare bottom, breasts nodding to her rate of heightened breathing, her pale complexion coloring.

The eyes from the wheelchair are occluded by reflector shades, but she's uncomfortably conscious of him visually caressing her. Dirty old sod. Stevo's shifting behind her, hands clamping against the sides of her head limiting her movement. Davey facing her, also naked, legs bent. An obscene limbo dancer. A gunfighter, sperm-shooter in hand aimed at her brain, pulling at it playfully. She's scared to look, but can't look away either. He's laughing, thrusts his hips at her, grabs her by the hair, angling it down to attack her face, its shadow falling across her. It's glistening, quivering an inch from her nose. He's masturbating deliberately, vertical slit eye opening and closing like some ludicrous fast-forward fish-mouth, the fat blunt arrowhead bulging purple as he's squeezing.

She feels clumsy, embarrassed, awkward and inadequate - 'are my tits big enough for him? Can I do it like he wants it?', temples roaring in giddy silence. She squirms, pretends to resist as the cock-head nudges up, squashing against her lips insistently, but Stevo's slipping his right hand beneath her chin, a quick wrist-movement moulding her jaws apart. With a debauched whore-like sensation the tulip-head slides into her mouth - 'over the teeth, over the gums, look out tonsils here it comes.'

She knows what to do. Mark's shown and tutored her, and she proved to be such an exemplary student, eager to please, after all - if she hadn't done it for him, he'd have found some other slut who would. Right? The bastard. If he could see her now he'd regret running out. Don't get mad - get even, and what revenge THIS is! She sucks tentatively - a slight taste of pool chlorine, as Stevo, his fingers in her hair, applies gentle but increasing pressure, forcing her to gulp more down. She glances up over the smooth muscular plane of Davey's stomach, the thick curling body-hair beaded with wetness undulating with sharp intakes of breath as her tongue teases little lapping touches around his shaft. A broad mocking grin as he watches her crouch, head buried in his thigh. And he looks so good - 'a man to look up to. This is for YOU Davey R, just for you.' But slowly, inexorably, he withdraws, strings of saliva sparkling along its inflamed length, a trickle of his pleasure coursing down her chin, threading freckles like a dot-to-dot diagram.

Stevo releases her too, and he lays back on the grass, toying his penis at the sky. 'Again' hisses Davey, 'on all fours this time, holding your hair outta the way so's Mr Karabinis can see your expression.' She complies without hesitation, at his mercy, no show of reluctance any longer, shuffling down submissively, fanning hair back with one hand in a way that has her breasts standing out firm and pointed, stiff nipples noticeably swollen, and crouching so they hang low, head dipping, tongue flick-flickering onto Stevo's fat wedge of cock, enveloping it like a Venus Fly-Trap traps a fly. The hard strong smell of his sex-sweat in her nostrils. Her pursed lips slide over the silky dome, guzzling it voraciously, tasting the moisture oozing into her mouth, cheeks caving, eyes closed in what could be humiliation - or ecstasy, but conscientiously holding her hair so Mr Karabinis can see the nibbling clasp of her straining lips, soft, but tightly ringing it.

Davey moves in behind her, erection swaying ponderously, brushing her thigh en passant, he's pressing down on the small of her back so her bottom pouts rudely outwards, separating her buttocks, feeling the dark liquidity between her thighs until she squirms and wriggles in reaction to his spidery touch. But he's prising her legs apart, raising her hips crudely so her sexual parts gape, gash like a raw fleshy wound. His index finger runs down the parted lips, then thrusts, squelching deep into the moist vulva as far as it'll go.

Mr Karabinis's breath is hissing rapid and irregular through clenched teeth, throat moving unconsciously as he watches her inelegant splay of legs laid open to him. Davey hefts his hard penis up, lodges it where his finger blazed the trail, and slides it in, inch by inch, watching in fascination. She's moaning around her fleshy gag, emitting slurpy animal noises. Until he rams home violently, propelling her suddenly forward, the cock slops out of her mouth leaving a messy comet-tail as she sprawls, a look of panic wincing her face. Her breasts smudge into Stevo's thigh, her face disappearing between his legs, his cock bouncing and wobbling through her hair. They're laughing cruelly, but she's pressing backwards, fumbling for the slippery penis, drawing its blood-bloated glans back to her face. Mumbling 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry' in a confused eagerness to get it back into place, smearing its tip across her chin until it slots awkwardly between her lips, distorting the shape of her cheek with its hard outline. Her eyes closing as it relocates and sinks in, the confusion on her face melting.

Davey slithers back, swollen cock hideously erect, blue veins standing out in a harsh relief lit with her pussy-juices, watching it extract until only the knob remains embedded in the cloying folds of vaginal flesh, holding for a moment, her buttocks tensing, then he's pushing forward, forcing her into Stevo's thigh this time causing her to take the impaling phallus into her throat until she grunts a strangled gurgling noise. His dark ring of pubic hair like a surrealist beard and moustache planted around her mouth.

And he begins a steady fucking rhythm that has his testicles swaying and knocking up against her, her cunt streaming sexual seepage making its opening soft and clinging, like sinking into the moistness of overripe fruit. Three-way fucking like animals, the natural savagery of primal, elemental forces flooding all that's rational. She's responding instinctively, breathing heavy, head light, swerving out of control, legs sprawling further apart, hips bracing to accept each thrust, whimpering audibly with undisguised arousal. Groaning in throaty spurts, breasts shuddering and trembling along Stevo's thighs, shiny with sweat, wet tendrils of body-hair matted. She's writhing and spasming, spitted on two pulsing cocks when the full heat of orgasm rips like flash-fire from one to the other, passing through Tina as though she's no more than a conducting medium.

The audio tape clicks off.

Mr Karabinis coughs.

-- 0 --

Even now, as the TriStar engines thrum, the slight vibrations communicating up through the plane fuselage to her, she imagines she can smell sex on her fingers. Still see the betraying grass-bruises on her knees and elbows. Still feel the ache in her jaw, the salt taste of semen. The warmth deep between her legs. Still see Davey's hypnotic brown eyes peering out from beneath the unruly debris of curls. It could have - should have, worked out so differently. BASTARDS!

Just that once on the lawn with My Karabinis's voyeur-eyes on them from the wheelchair, neat tartan rug tucked in over his useless legs. Just that once, and then she'd been ignored. Davey R, you shouldn't have done that, it could've been so good, we could've been together now. But she'd paced the lawns and she'd lain in the sun, she'd eaten her meals with the images of sexuality burning into her, feeling sex oozing through her like drug.

She'd always been betrayed by the sensual streak in her nature, but had been afraid to surrender to it, afraid of unleashing what she'd be unable to control. Instead, she'd lived through her men, sublimating her own desires to please them, to be what they wanted. What happened just once in the garden was merely its most extreme and exaggerated form. Now that control was sluiced away from her by events, and she was carried along by its momentum. And yet Davey was ignoring her! At last she sought him out, down through the six empty tiers of the garden. There was writhing movement by the poolside and she came upon it unexpectedly. Stevo and Davey R. At first she took it they were nude wrestling - but they weren't wrestling...

And the anger explodes in her with a force and vehemence she couldn't believe herself capable of. First Mark, and now... THIS! Mark had preferred the dope-trail, while Davey R had always preferred fucking Stevo, screwing her had never been more than an extra chore to be undertaken. Part of his employment contract. BASTARDS! BASTARDS!! Back in the house she's punching out the 'phone connection, then pacing in an agony of uncertainty as the vast empty grounds and the cold alien villa await the Police cars. Awaiting her revenge.

'Lured here, then - held against my will, used sexually in the most vile and disgusting ways. Can't bring myself to describe the full horrors, Officer,' it pours out of her so easily.

Mr Karabinis railing in furious Greek at an apologetic Policeman. The Astinomiko - Mark had told her all about them. Davey R, big brown eyes confused and sad. Stevo flashing expressions of hatred at her whenever their eyes meet. Suppose her story won't stand? Vagrant, no money, she asked for all she got, deserved it. The macho conspiracy. Vagrancy charges, dope frisks, planted evidence. What then?

What then was the first of the bodies unearthed from the flowerbed. The gardens Stevo so conscientiously tended. Then another. TV faces of teenage girls whose dresses and outfits hang in the wardrobe - many of them her size. She couldn't believe it - even now. Can't take it in despite the soothing Consulate Officials explaining, and the international media coming round to buy her story, the poor little English girl, stranger in a strange land, used and abused by a nest of perverts like in the unfinished scenario for a snuff movie.

The flowerbed seeded with their previous victims.

Mark, Davey R - I don't need ANY of you. Bastards - all of you. I've come out of this stronger. From now on I'm living for ME!

The plane begins to taxi for home...

by

TRISTAN TROTSKY