Juliette

I was elbow-deep operating a falcon's wing when the horns sounded.

Three of them, long and low, the kind of note that makes a bird's heart flutter against your palm. My patient, a two-year-old peregrine with a torn patagium, gripped my leather gauntlet and turned his head almost all the way around, fixing one furious black eye on the courtyard gate.

"Easy," I murmured, smoothing a thumb along his breast. "Nobody's here for you."

The sun in this country is not a light; it is a weight. It had been pressing on the flat roof of my clinic since morning, and the air smelled of dust, diesel, and the dry sweetness of the bougainvillea climbing my wall. I had spent the morning doing what I always do: sutures, salves, a bad case of bumblefoot in a sheikh's prized goshawk, and a houbara with a cracked keel. Hunting birds. In a country where falconry is not a hobby but a genealogy, a man with steady hands and a quiet voice becomes quietly, indispensably rich—and quietly, indispensably watched.

I had told nobody it was my birthday.

Which is why, when the first white limousine nosed through my gate and crunched to a stop on the gravel, I laughed out loud.

The rear door opened before the driver could reach it. Out stepped Sheikh Halifa bin Kamad, in a dishdasha the color of cream, his ghutra folded with the careless perfection that only men raised to it can manage, sunglasses pushed up into his hair like a boy on holiday. He was grinning already. He was always grinning. He had been my best friend since we were eleven years old, and he had broken my nose over a disputed football and then paid for the stitches with money he'd stolen from his own father's glovebox.

Behind him, the other two cars disgorged. Six bodyguards in dark suits fanned out with the unhurried competence of men who have secured a thousand perimeters, and one of them peeled off toward the back of the property without being told. My compound is small. It takes four minutes to walk it. He would walk it twice.

And then, from the second car, the third passenger.

She got out the way you get out of a car when you have been told all day exactly what to do, and none of it twice. One hand on the frame. Feet together on the gravel. A small breath, taken and held.

She was young—nineteen, maybe twenty. Long honey-brown hair, straight and heavy, falling past her shoulder. A face that was almost girlish in the cheeks and entirely a woman's in the mouth: full, unpainted, curved into a smile that was trying very hard to be calm. Brown eyes, warm, with the long lashes of a girl who has never once needed mascara. Skin the color of milky tea—tanned arms, tanned legs, and the small pale band on her wrist where a watch had been.

She was wearing a short dress, white with navy horizontal stripes, thin-strapped, cut high on the thigh, and flat sandals. Nothing else. No jewelry, no bag, no phone. It struck me, standing there with a falcon on my fist, that she had arrived with less luggage than my bird.

"Happy birthday, my friend!" Halifa bellowed, arms wide.

I laughed. "How did you know?"

"Oh." He waved a hand, delighted with himself. "We know things."

"You know things," I repeated. "You are a man who knows things."

"I even have several men who know things." He kissed both my cheeks, hard, then held me at arm's length and looked me over like livestock. "You look old. Very old. It suits you."

"I'm thirty-four."

"Ancient," he said, and turned to gesture at the girl, who had not moved from the car. "I brought you a present."

She walked up. Not to me—to him, three steps, and stopped, and stood with her hands loose at her sides and her eyes down, waiting for the next order like a sentence waiting for its full stop.

I frowned. "What is this?"

"Juliette," he said, as if that explained anything.

She took two more steps closer, and now she was near enough that I could smell her—clean, faintly of hotel soap, and something floral in her hair.

"I'd like to give you a little gift," said Halifa.

"You said that."

"She is yours now."

The falcon shifted on my fist. Somewhere behind me a sprinkler ticked. She is yours now. I turned the words over, and they didn't click into any shape I knew. Was this a slave thing? Was this some inheritance of the old world that had survived here while the rest of the planet moved on? I was a foreigner in a country of limestone and air conditioning, and every month it surprised me a little more.

He read my face, of course. He always did.

"I bought her," he said, gently now, "from her parents. Good family. Poor family, but good. I had her checked. Her hymen is still intact." He said it the way a man reports the mileage on a car he is proud of. "I wish you many pleasant nights, my friend."

"Halifa—"

"Come inside," he said, already moving. "Please, may I offer you a coffee?"

"You offer me coffee? This is my house."

"You see? You are a terrible host. You have not even asked us in."

I laughed despite myself and stepped aside. "Come in. Yes. Please. Coffee."

We went in. Behind us the bodyguards arranged themselves around the walls, and two men from the cars began, without instruction, to sweep the roof.

"Come with me, Juliette," I said. "I'll show you the machine."

And I led her into my kitchen, telling myself very firmly that I would not fuck her right there against the counter, and knowing perfectly well that I probably would.

She stood in the middle of the tiled floor and looked at everything. The large kitchen, the appliances, and the gas ring, which she had never seen. She was nervous—I could see the little pulse in her throat and the way her fingers found each other and laced, unlaced, and laced. Whatever she had been told about me, it clearly hadn't come with a floor plan.

"The coffee comes out here," I said, opening the lid, showing her the pods. "One at a time. This is the water tank. Fill it here. Press this, and then this. Nothing burns, nothing spills. You can't do it wrong."

"Nothing burns," she repeated, quietly, testing the English.

"That's right. Nothing burns." I put a cup under the spout. "Would you like one too?"

She looked up at me fast, then away. "Only if you allow it."

"I allow it." Something in my chest went soft. "Have you ever had coffee?"

She shook her head once, side to side.

"Then let's not start you on the strong stuff. Have a latte macchiato. It's softer. More milk than coffee. It's basically warm milk with an opinion." She smiled then—properly, the first real one—and it changed her whole face, making her look her age instead of her circumstance. "You'll like it."

I made three. Hers was the last one, and I steamed the milk longer than I needed to, because she watched the steam with her mouth slightly open, like a child at a fair.

When she carried the tray into the living room, she did it carefully, both hands and eyes on the cups, and set it down on the low table without a single drop. Then she straightened and stood next to my chair, waiting.

“Could you please take off your dress, Juliette?” I asked her, as Halifa and I small-talked about the weather.

She dutifully did so and quickly dropped her summer dress onto the floor.

I admired her young body, thanking Halia for the pretty birthday gift.

Her body was tanned all over and tanned evenly, which means she swims, which means somewhere behind all this there was a life with a pool in it. Slim, athletic, no softness anywhere. Nice, perky breasts, high and set a little wide, pale pink at the tips, with a faint pink flush on them. The skin there is a shade lighter than the brown chest around it. I made a mental note I should tell her that she was only allowed to swim naked in my pool.

“She must have been expensive.” I praise Halifa.

He just smiles and replies that the coffee she made tastes excellent.

"Sit," I said. And then, because standing seemed like too much work for a girl who had crossed a country in a limousine today, "on my lap."

She sat. Halifa smiled at me over his cup and said nothing, which, from him, is a speech. The foreigner slowly starts to understand how to use a slave, he thought. Good for him.

Her weight settled against me, small and warm, her back straight, her hands folded in her own lap. She smelled of soap and the coffee she was too polite to drink yet. Her butt was a compact, furnace-hot invitation, sitting square and easy on a cock that had been dormant all morning and was now showing signs of wanting to know more.

Halifa talked. Of course he talked. He talked about the currency, about the index, and about a cousin in Dubai who had lost four million on a hotel that had turned out to be a hole in the ground. He talked about the price of falcons, which is a real market and a real number, and about a prince he hated. He talked, and I made noises, and under the noise I was learning the shape of her.

She drank her latte macchiato in small sips, holding the cup in both hands, and after the third sip she said, very softly, without turning around, "It's good."

"Told you."

She nodded once. She took another sip.

Halifa leaned back in his chair, put his cup down, and grinned at me with all the satisfaction of a man who has just handed over a birthday present he knows is better than anything the man bought himself.

"Happy birthday, my friend," he said again.

And Juliette, warm on my lap, finished her first coffee and rested her head, just barely, against my shoulder.

"You know things," I say to Halifa, but I'm still looking at her.

He talks. He talks through the whole thing—the price of falcons, the index, a cousin in Dubai—and I make noises, and underneath the noises I keep looking.

Finally, I have the time to process what I saw outside as I greeted Halifa.

She got out of the second car, and my eyes went to her before they decided to.

That's the thing I notice first—not her, but me. A falcon is sitting on my fist, and it takes four seconds before it stops being the most interesting thing in the courtyard.

She stands up out of the back seat in stages. One hand on the doorframe. Both feet together on the gravel. A small breath, taken and held, the way you breathe when you've been told all day exactly what to do and none of it twice.

And then she's just there, in the middle of my courtyard, in the middle of my life, and I have to look at her properly.

Young. Nineteen, twenty—young enough that the age of her is a fact I keep rolling around like a stone in my mouth. Her hair is long, dead straight, and blonde in a way that isn't quite blonde: dark ash at the roots, the color bleeding down through honey and out into something pale and burnt at the ends, as if she's spent a season in the sun and never once thought about it. It's parted down the middle, heavy, and a few strands have come loose around her jaw. She hasn't fixed them. She probably doesn't know they're there.

Her face is oval, the jaw soft, and the chin small—and the whole of it is the color of milky tea left in the sun, glossy along the cheekbone and the bridge of the nose. Dark brown eyes, big and almond, so heavy-lidded with lashes that they look almost sleepy, with a faint smoky smudge beneath them that no one in this courtyard could have applied today. Dark, thick brows arched the way a girl arches them when she's been told she's pretty often enough to believe it.

And the smile. God. She's wearing a smile she's clearly rehearsed, holding it steady, and it isn't quite reaching her eyes yet because she doesn't know the room. Straight white teeth. Full lips, unpainted, pink, and parted a little.

A short dress, white with navy stripes, thin straps, and high on the thigh. Flat sandals. No bag, no phone, no jewelry, nothing in her hands. She has arrived with only one suitcase.

I don't tell her to get up. I don't ask.

She's naked on my lap, warm and small and settled, the stripe of her tan line showing where the dress used to be, one hand curled loosely against my chest — and the conversation with Halifa has run down to the index and back and neither of us has anything left to say about the index.

I say it the way you say a thing that has been true for an hour.

"Juliette. Suck my cock."

Her face lits up, happy to receive an order she had been trained for.

She moves so fast it's almost rude. Off my lap, down off the chair, and then she's on the rug between my knees, kneeling with her back straight and her hands folded and her eyes up—and the whole time she's doing it, she's watching my face, reading it, and checking that she's read the order right.

Halifa, across from us, sets his cup down and settles back like a man who has paid for the theater and intends to enjoy the second act.

She puts her small hands on my thighs first. Cool fingers. Then up to my belt, unhurried, working the buckle, the button, and the zip, she pulls the trousers and the shorts down just far enough and no further, which is somehow more careful than stripping me would have been. My cock comes out of the cloth half-hard and heavier than it's been all day, and she holds it in both hands like something she has been given to look after.

Then the foreskin. She doesn't yank it. She uses the pads of her thumbs and peels it back slowly, a few millimeters at a time, watching it happen, and when the head comes free—pink and glossy and swollen in the lamplight, blinking at her—she makes a tiny sound, almost a hum, and her brows go up.

There it is. She's been told about this part. She's clearly been told.

She leans in and dabs it. Not a lick—a dab, several of them, quick and light with the very tip of her young, pointed little tongue, right on the crown, one, two, three, four, like a girl testing whether a bath is too hot.

I go hard so fast it's embarrassing.

She feels it happen in her hands, and her eyes flick up to me, and that's when the smile comes—the real one, the one from the kitchen, the one that's all cheeks and teeth and no rehearsal. She's pleased with herself. She's earned something.

Then she stops dabbing and starts working. Tongue flat, dragging up the underside of the shaft from root to crown, slow, then a wet lap around the rim of the head, then down again, and again, until the whole thing is slick and shining and I can hear the small wet noises of her in the quiet room. One small hand has closed around the base of me and twists gently as she goes—not hard, never hard, just enough that I feel it—and the other one has slid down underneath, cupping my balls, weighing them, her thumb rolling over them in slow circles while she licks.

Then she takes me in.

Her mouth is warm and wet and much too good at this, and she goes down further than I expect a girl her size to go on the first try, cheeks hollowing, and moans while she does it—an actual moan, low in her throat—and the sound of it travels straight up the shaft and into the base of my spine.

She comes up for air, slow, dragging her lips. A bead of precum is sitting on the tip of me, bright and clear. She sees it. She looks at it the way a child looks at the last sweet in the tin. Then she licks it off in one long, deliberate stroke and swallows and starts again.

Down. Up. Moan. Her hand twisting. Her other hand cupped and rolled. Her lashes are down. Her eyes are up.

She is eager in a way that isn't servile — she wants this to be good, wants to be seen to be good, and every time she comes up, she checks my face like a girl reading a scoreboard.

Which is a mistake, because my face is a wreck.

My jaw is locked. My head has gone back against the chair. My hand has found the back of her head and it is not pushing, not yet, just lying there in her hair, and my knuckles on the armrest are white. I can feel the sweat starting along my hairline. I can hear myself breathing like a man who has run somewhere.

Halifa watches all of it. Then he speaks, from the armchair, with the calm of a man reading a newspaper.

"You see," he says. "I showed her films. Many films. Very bad films. Very good films." He waves a hand. "She sat. She watched. She asked questions. Then she watched again."

She takes me deeper at that, as if on cue, and hums, and my knees move.

"And the videos were good," he goes on, "but the pupil — the pupil is everything." He tilts his head, evaluating her like a falcon on a perch: the angle of her back, the hollow of her cheeks, the rhythm, the wet sound, the way her hand keeps working the shaft while she breathes. Then his eyes come to me, and my ruined face, and he nods once, satisfied.

"She has been trained well," he concludes.

Then, milder, almost to himself:

"Better than my second wife."

And I would answer him; I really would—except she's just taken me to the hilt and stayed there, her nose pressed into my belly and her throat working around me, and my hand has closed in her hair, and the word I was going to say has left the building.

Later, much later, the limousines are gone and the house is quiet, and she is standing in my lamplight with the dress in a heap on the chair, and I get to look without pretending to listen.

Her body is tanned all over and tanned evenly, which means she swims, which means somewhere behind all this there was a life with a pool in it. Slim, athletic, no softness anywhere. Small breasts, high and set a little wide, pale pink at the tips, with a faint flush on them like she's been caught in something—and a tan line at the bust, the skin there a shade lighter than the brown chest around it. A fine line of lamplight runs straight down her sternum. There's a small dark mole high on one side of her chest. Another one is lower on the other. A few faint freckles scattered on her upper arms, the kind you only see from up close.

She squares herself to me. Chin up a fraction. Shoulders back, and not in a way she's learned—in a way that's just how she stands when she's decided she's being looked at.

And here's the thing I keep coming back to, standing there at thirty-four with a birthday I told nobody about:

She isn't nervous any more. She was outside—I watched her fingers lace and unlace behind her back. But now she's standing in my house, and she is smiling at me like she's decided something about me, and she hasn't told me what it is.

"Juliette," I say, just to hear whether she answers to it.

She does. Immediately. Head tilted, eyes up, waiting for the next order.

And I think, "All right, then."

It starts in my balls before it starts anywhere else.

They draw up—a slow, heavy, tightening pull, like two fists closing—and she feels it, because her hand is already cupped around them, and she reads it instantly, the way a rider reads a horse changing gait a stride before it does. Her thumb stops its slow circles. She presses, gently, just enough to feel them against her palm, and a little noise of understanding goes into my cock from somewhere in her throat.

Then she takes control of the whole thing.

One small hand wrapped hard around the base of me, working me steady, holding me exactly where she wants me. On the other hand, on my balls, cupping, weighing, keeping them snug and hot in her palm, squeezing in a slow rhythm—squeeze, release, squeeze—as if she's milking them, as if she knows precisely where the pressure needs to sit. And her mouth, God, her mouth, working the head and the first two inches, tongue rolling around the rim, lips sealed, cheeks hollowed hard enough that the shape of her face has changed.

Nineteen years old, and she works like a woman who has spent a decade in a bed in a city.

Down. To the root, nose against my belly, throat opening around me, holding, holding—and then she moans, long and low, and the moan is a vibration, and the vibration is a hand around the shaft.

Up. Wet drag, lips tight, tongue flicking at the slit, eyes up, checking.

Down.

My hand closes in her hair. My hips lift off the chair an inch. I hear myself make a sound that isn't a word.

And then it goes.

The first pulse is so hard it's almost painful—deep, gut-level, and pulled up out of me like something being wrung. She takes it in the mouth, deep, and holds. And then the second, and the third, and it's not a dribble; it's ropes, thick and hot, and in time with her squeezing hand, and she swallows—she actually swallows—her throat working around me, cheeks caved in, eyes shut, brows drawn together in concentration like a girl doing sums.

But there's more of it than she planned for.

The fourth pulse and the fifth arrive faster than her throat can keep up, and a thread of it escapes the corner of her mouth and runs down the shaft, and she makes a small panicked mmph around me and keeps swallowing anyway, refusing to let go, refusing to lose a drop. Another rope and the seal breaks properly—cum spills out past her lips and down her chin, thick and white, and hangs there and drops, landing on her own chest, on the slope of her young breast, on the pale tan-lined skin, and she does not stop.

She is nineteen and she is swallowing my cum like she's been thirsty all day for it.

My balls are tight and drawn and starting to ache—that deep, sweet, hollow ache of being emptied—and she keeps the rhythm going, keeps milking, hand squeezing, mouth pulling, and every pulse is smaller and every swallow is easier, and she still doesn't come off me. Her throat works. Her hand squeezes. Another rope, fainter. Another. She moans around the last of it, and the moan sounds like a girl who has just won something.

Until there's nothing left. Until my balls are flat and sore against her palm and my cock is still twitching in her mouth like a rope let go.

She holds it for a moment. Then she lets it out of her mouth slowly, lips dragging, and sits back on her heels and takes a breath that's almost a gasp and looks at it—really looks at it, head tilted, like a woman inspecting something she's just finished making.

Then she licks it dry.

Slow, thorough, and methodical—no part of it missed. Tongue up the shaft, lips over the crown, one small hand lifting it to get the underside, the last of the mess at the base. When the cock is clean, she goes after the rest of it—the drip on her chin first, wiped with two fingers and into her mouth; then the smear on her breast, scooped with a thumb; then with the flat of her tongue when the thumb isn't enough; then the corner of her lip; then the back of her wrist where it ran down.

Every mouthful goes down. Every time she swallows, she makes a small sound—Mmmmhh—eyes closed, entirely unbothered, a girl eating the last of something sweet. Not performing it, either. That's the part that gets me. She isn't doing it for me. She's doing it because the taste is sweet and salty and new and it's hers now, and she wants all of it in her belly.

She finds the last trace on the inside of her lower lip, works it loose with her tongue, swallows it, and then kneels there in the lamplight with a damp chin and a chest with dried patches on it and my softening cock resting against her cheek, satisfied like a cat that has finished a saucer of cream.

She looks up at me. From down there. Smiling. Waiting for my next command.

And across the room, Halifa lifts his coffee cup back off the table, takes a sip, and says—mildly, to nobody in particular, but at me—

"Happy birthday, my friend."

To be continued.