Edge Running

Abu Dhabi

The plane from the Philippines to the Middle East—Abu Dhabi, I was told, the fifth time I asked someone—was transporting more Asian workers than it had from Cambodia to the Philippines. They had been taken good care of in the three weeks we were in Cebu City, though, if being held in captivity could be considered “good care.” It probably was in better circumstances than they had come from, though. Benjie Reyes had admitted that they were a mixed bag—house servants mainly, but some prostitutes too. Almost all of those were women, although some prostitutes were men. Not many, though.

“Homosexuality is very much against the law where we’re going. Even when they are being lenient—as when some prominent family is involved—it can mean five years. Death is what is on the books,” Reyes told me. “If they are going to risk it, they generally want a courtesan rather than just any peasant from the fields who will say he’ll lay down and open his legs.”

By courtesan, you mean men like me, is what I thought, but I didn’t say it. “By ‘where we’re going’ you mean Abu Dhabi?” I asked.

He gave me a pained look, probably not pleased that I even knew a place called Abu Dhabi existed, but his expression verified the destination I had tricked out of one of the stewardesses. “If you say so,” he uttered, pursing his lips.

I almost wished he hadn’t acknowledged where we were going or where most of these people were destined to serve in real or virtual slavery. It meant he wasn’t worried about what I’d tell anyone else. I pressed the issue, since it appeared I had nothing to lose.

“So, why am I going along? If homosexuality isn’t tolerated where we’re going, what need is there for a male revue dancer? Am I just here to ensure the health of your other passengers?” I didn’t want to rile him by calling them slaves. “Will I be going back to the casino in Cebu with you or will you be releasing me from my contract to find my own way?” I didn’t want to beg the nasty question of there being other choices.

“We shall see when we get there,” he said. “You are far more than a dancer, and we both know it. For now, I suggest you pass through those in the back to ensure that no one needs medical attention.”

I did do a pass and, thankfully, no one in steerage was in the need of doctoring. Steerage also wasn’t that bad. Reyes was delivering his cargo in good condition. I didn’t have any complaints in that department, either. He’d even given me some of the money he’d promised me, although not all, by any means. Of course, my original contract with Kenon Jackson that had taken me to Bangkok hadn’t panned out financially as advertised either. That seemed to the be lot of Western dancers performing in Asia. I wondered if performing in the Middle East would be any different.

* * * *

Performing in Abu Dhabi was different from the casinos of Asia. I did dance and I did often get fucked afterward, but in Abu Dhabi it was to a much smaller, more select audience than it had been in Bangkok, Poipet, or Cebu City. What came after the dance was, in general, more cruel and demanding than I had experienced before, however. I was much more just a vessel for sexual exercise for Arab men, the fuck being impersonal and done almost as a guilty, “can’t help myself” or victor-putting-the-enemy-to-the-sword act as much as homosexuality was publicly reviled in the Muslim religion. It might be publicly reviled but there were just as high a proportion of Arab men who wanted to have sex with other men than any other nationality I had observed first hand.

These Arabs, as rich and forward-thinking with technical modernization as the world they created in places such as Abu Dhabi were, were primitive and not long out of the desert in their sexual activity. This was a world in which the economically successful Arab man used others not as sexual partners but as sexual prey, vanquished enemies, and slaves.

Benjie Reyes unceremoniously parted ways with me as soon as we landed at Al Bateen Executive Airport. He went with the Asian workers being deplaned and I was escorted away by Arabs in pristine white robes I later learned these were called %thobes and white head scarves called %ghutras, held in place by a black rope band called an egal. I didn’t learn much else in Arabic. They all spoke impeccable English, with a British accent, and they didn’t want me to understand what they were saying when they spoke Arabic. Reyes didn’t so much as say good-bye to me. I sometimes wonder how much of a profit he took in selling me to the Arabs.

In a trip through streets incongruously bordered by both traditional mud compounds and modern skyscrapers, an ongoing urban renewal effort in the extreme, I was driven, in a black Mercedes—there were black Mercedes everywhere—into the old souk area of the city. Here, within two hours of the plane I’d been in having touched down in the desert kingdom, I had been stripped and prodded in front of men sitting around in a circle, drinking and smoking from water pipes, and I had been sold to the highest bidder. The demonstration of “the goods” included me, naked save for my black boots, being fucked in the missionary position by a big black African bull on a padded ottoman, with the buyers gathered round. The African was very big and very good and I gave the voyeurs good value in my response to his attentions.

The highest bidder was a young Arab who was close to my age and who was a handsome, well-formed young man the others gave deference too. Although pronouncedly hawk nosed, he was hard-body trim, dark complexioned, with black hair and dark, flashing eyes. The sealing of the deal—his final acceptance of the transaction—involved him unbuttoning and flaring his thobe, covering me where I lay on my back on the ottoman, still panting from the African’s demonstration, and fucking me himself to the entertainment of the losers in the bid. He was very, very good and I verified the bargain he got in digging my fingers in his shoulder blades, providing “I am being royally fucked” facial expressions—which were easy to provide in his case—and moving with him in the fuck.

As it turned out, the other voters didn’t give my buyer much opposition in the bidding because losing to him didn’t mean they couldn’t use me at some time or other as well—but without having to maintain me.

I was hustled into another black Mercedes, with my buyer and me sitting at the back, a beefy bodyguard with a mean look sitting in a jump seat facing us, and two men in the front. As we drove into the city, the mud-walled compounds giving way to the more modern skyscrapers, the young man who bought me more thoroughly—very thoroughly—checked out what he bought. This extended to cavity searches and I was tempted to ask him if he’d found the bug the U.S. intelligence agent, Winterberry, had claimed I’d been outfitted with for the Thai insurgent gun running caper.

I held for him, under the eagle eye of the bodyguard and let myself open to the young man’s touch. I lay back in the corner of the backseat, with him hovering over him, and spread my legs and lifted my tail. If he wanted to fuck me again there, I wouldn’t struggle. He was young, handsome, appeared to be well-muscled and was, I thought, probably as good as I was going to get in Abu Dhabi.

In that I was right.

He opted to nearly fist me, leaning over me, with his hand up to the knuckles inside me, with me slitting my eyes and rocking on the knuckles, both of us, I surmise, wondering if he’d breach the sphincter and fist fuck me. He seemed a bit surprised that I was rocking on the hand rather than sobbing and begging him not to fist me. The ride was shorter than a decision was made to do it.

The Mercedes turned into a garage under what looked like a soaring skyscraper of fifty or sixty stories, I was gruffly told to put my clothes back on, and, when I had, I was escorted out of the car to a bank of elevators, an Arab on either side of me and the young man walking in front. We entered an elevator, and it whispered its way up into the heavens. I never, over the next few months, came back down to ground again. I wasn’t in Abu Dhabi as a sightseer.

The three top floors and roof pool and caged tennis court of the skyscraper were occupied by a club—a very exclusive male-on-male entertainment club and brothel, which, no doubt was kept secret from anyone but its very select high-flying clientele. This clientele included most I’d seen at the auction for me, which meant they could rent what they hadn’t been able to buy.

The lowest floor was for group entertainment. Here I and other young men danced for the older men coming to the club, then were selected and paid for, and were taken to the bedrooms in the next flight up and fucked. The top floor housed a gym, the offices of the club, and the corner apartment of Badr al-Bunduq, the young man who bought me and who was the manager and presumably owner of the club. It was here, spread-eagled and tied off at the four corners of a bed floating over the ancient-modern, water-surrounded capital city of the United Arab Emirates, where Al-Bunduq slapped me, helpless, into groaning submission and fucked the stuffing out of me immediately after I first entered the brothel where I was to be a lead dancer and favorite lay for the next three months. He was a cruel top, but not the most cruel of the Arabs who used me to get themselves off in that time—not by far. I think much of it was because I was an American and they felt empowered when they had put it to America.

Despite not being the cruelest, Al-Bunduq did, in the comfort of his own silk-pillow covered divan, put a greased and gloved fist inside me, and fucked me interminably with it. This was to prove to be a favorite Arab demonstration of domination of another man.

* * * *

I hung, naked, on the St. Andrews cross, spread-eagled and restrained at wrists and ankles, by aching back to the room, staring out beyond the apparatus through a full wall of glass down into the peninsular city of Abu Dhabi. I had been bound loosely enough that I could writhe as the whip laced into my back, buttocks, and thighs. The leathery-skinned old man of the desert standing behind me and welding the whip was teasing me, I knew, or was just at the beginning of a long ordeal. He was not striking me with the force behind it that I knew his sinewy-muscled body could muster, but there was the threat of that to come. His pauses, to run his hands down my flanks and to bring them around to stroke my nipples, belly, balls, and cock were longer in duration than the whippings were.

“Ah, still hard as a rock,” he murmured. “Still want it. You’re such a slut.”

In some sense he was right. As long as it was going to happen, I tried to get some pleasure out of it myself. I did what I could to please him—and to prolong the pauses, leaning back into him, panting and moaning, and offering my face for kissing, if he wanted. He didn’t want. He wasn’t a lover; he was a user. He wanted to use my body for his own arousal, not to treat us as lovers.

He gave me a couple of more lashes and ran his hand down from my pecs to my balls. “Even harder now, I think,” he whispered in my ear. “What shall we do with you?” Standing close behind me, he hefted my balls in his cupped hand, lacing his fingers in them and distending them until I groaned. Then he gave my cock several strokes, only stopping when I moaned. We clearly weren’t here for my pleasure.

His thobe was unbuttoned down the front, showing a hard-worked, leathery-skin, sun-burnt body of a man in his fifties who had lived the toughened life of a desert sheik. It also showed his massive erection. He clearly enjoyed the cruelty of this work.

He struck me again and again, enough to raise welts; not enough to break the skin. Badr al-Bunduq stood across the room, a room filled with implements of sexual torture, both primitive and modern in design, several of them having already been employed with me over the past few days, and watched, his thobe also unbuttoned down the front and flared aside, his hand stroking his cock, and his tongue licking his lips. These were two hawk-nosed colleagues of the desert, the younger the spitting image of the older, both cruel, although the old man working me now was the crueler by far. He also was the more experienced in bringing both me and himself to the edge and pulling back to get more mileage out of the sexual torture.

I cried out as the first whip slice to do so broke skin. I was loathe to acknowledge it, but his attentions had made and were keeping me hard, and if I’d had a hand free, I’d have been stroking myself in a heightened emotion of need, desire—and I’m afraid to say it—pleasure. Before coming to this Middle Eastern kingdom, I had become numb to what one man would do to another in sex—what men did to me, almost daily. The Arab men of Abu Dhabi had shown me that there was pleasure in pain—in being subjected to sexual torture—that heightened and focused the sensations.

I was hard for this leathery-skinned, sinewy-muscled, cruel old Arab of the desert. He struck me again and again as I writhed under the lashes.

“Yes, yes! Fuck me. Fuck me now!” I cried out—involuntarily, although some nerve inside me sensed that if this went too much further blood lust would consume him and I’d be unconscious for the fucking part, at least, or dead at most. I wanted the cock, and I wanted it now. I also wanted to live.

“Fuck me! Give it to me! Stick it in!”

The old man laughed, but then he dropped the whip and saddled up close behind me, preparing to give me what I was crying out for.

“Oh, so you want it now. You want your master’s shaft.”

“Yes, yes, fuck me, master,” I cried out. It mostly a plea for the beating to stop, but it also was a need for the cocking to start. I ached to have the old man inside me. His erection pressed into the small of my back. He would be hard to take he was so thick, but I trembled and moaned, wanting it inside me. His hands moved over my body, around to my pecs, fingering my nipples as he licked the welts and the few cuts he’d made on my back. His lips and tongue moved down to the welts on my buttocks, and his tongue flicked into my butt crack, found the goal, and pressed inside.

Writhing, I cried out, “Now! Now!”

A tremulous voice mimicked that from across the room. “%Jamaih al-bahth alami al-holandih! Alane aptah—Now! Now, Father!” And the old man released my ankles from the X-frame, coaxed my legs up so that my feet pressed into the window I was facing, grasped and spread my butt cheeks in his gnarled hands, thrust up inside me, and fucked the shit out of me. I helped him, rocking against the buried shaft inside me by leveraging off my feet pressed to the hot window glass—unashamedly crying out for the cocking.

He had a whole lot of stamina and jism for a man his age. Once he was saddled, grasping my hips in his hands, snorting, straining, panting, and thrusting up inside me again and again, he was much as any experienced, big-cocked man—meaning he took his pleasure but he gave me pleasure as well. I wasn’t a male whore because I had to be. I got pleasure from giving primeval pleasure such as this to other men. For the long time—the twenty minutes or so—that it took him to work me with his shaft and release, I was transported to another dimension, my arousal heightened if anything by the possessive pain he had put me through to get here. From time to time, he stopped thrusting to savor my own dedication to the fuck—leveraging off the window with my feet to fuck myself on the thick shaft—and he laughed at the knowledge that I had to have him as much as he wanted to have me.

After a respite, with me still hanging on the X-frame and the old man and his son taking tea and cookies at a table, served by an Asian servant, no doubt one supplied by Benjie Reyes, two burly Arabs came into the room, released me from the St. Andrews cross and dragged me over to what the old man called the prayer bench. I was set, kneeling on a padded bench, facing a railing topped by stocks for my wrists to fit in. My belly lay on the top of the rail, and my torso hung over the side. Once secured, the old man approached me with a paddle in his hand and moved from patting me on the buttocks to striking me hard enough to make me writhe and cry out. When he was in the mood for it, he mounted me from behind and fucked me, running long, leathery fingers into my hair and arching my head back cruelly into his chest.

Once again he showed that he could fuck for twenty-minutes or more and had the release of a much younger, virile man.

After he was done, his son spoke from across the room, “You are satisfied? Do you wish to keep him down here for a while?”

“He is a beauty and quite sufficient for now. Handsome and experienced if a bit overused. I do enjoy putting it to Americans, though. I wish to have him for my exclusive use,” the old Arab answered. “You will not miss him in the club?”

“He was a favorite there, but they are always looking for variety and something fresh. We have a couple of new dancers—Germans. You may have this one, if you like.”

“And when I grow tired of him or he’s too damaged to continue to use?”

“Dispose of him as you will.”

The guards came back into the room, released me, and laid me on the floor on my back. Exhausted, I lay there, panting. The old man crouched beside me, smiling. He took my legs, one after the other and bent and spread them, placing my feet flat on the floor. I knew better than to fail to leave them exactly where he placed them. I lay there, looking into his eyes, eyes still full of lust and cruelty, not struggling in any way, letting him manipulate my body as he wished, signaling my surrender to whatever he did with me. One guard handed him a bolster, which the old man put under the small of my back, raising and rolling up my hips. The other guard brought a bowl of oil. My wrists were bound to a post above my head. The guards withdrew from the room. The son moved his chair closer to us.

He was going to do more than just fuck me. I knew what it was. I had already learned this was a favorite form of sexual mastery with the Arabs. I was whimpering—I couldn’t help it—but I knew it wouldn’t do me a bit of good.

The old Arab was humming as he dipped his right hand into the bowl of oil. I felt the lubricated fingers at my hole, entering the channel. One, two, three—slowly, up to the knuckles. As the knuckles breached my sphincter muscle, I arched my head, staring at the dark blue ceiling which had been decorated with the stars of the firmament . . . and began to whimper and groan.

I panted, harder and harder, as the fist was buried up inside me, moving, in and out, flexing, in and out. He hovered over me, his face close to mine, his free hand on my brow, running fingers into my scalp, massaging me there, humming and intently watching the expression on my face as the hand moved—in and out, flexing in and out. I knew he wasn’t watching my response so closely to ensure I was enjoying this—with my secret being that despite the challenge of it, I was giving me a certain level of sexual satisfaction—but to gauge how close I was to losing consciousness—and thus negating his pleasure. He pulled the hand out, moved his body over mine again, ran an arm under my waist to lift and tilt my pelvis to him, penetrated, and resumed cock fucking me—in and out, in and out.

He punched in deep and I blacked out.

* * * *

After the three months in the club, serving under Badr and the men of his choosing at the young Arab’s whim, I no longer was a novelty, I had been moved to the floor below the club. Here lived Badr’s father, Sheik Zayed al-Bunduq, no doubt the power behind everything. He was a virile, vigorous man in his fifties, tall and muscular, so hawk nosed and ugly that he was attractive, and cruel in his sexual demands. He worked me sexually in ways I’d never experienced before—the X-frame, the stocks, whipping, the fist, sounding, and anything else that amused him. One of his favorite positions was covering me in the dog position while I was in a four-point kneel on the floor, and me baaing for him, at his direction, like a stuck sheep, while he covered and pounded me from above. He was a man running along the edge just as I had been doing for some time. But his perspective was from the primitive desert and he controlled the edge and called the shots.

Zayed didn’t share at first—not even with his son. But after a few weeks in which he totally and constantly used me in every way, he too lost the sense of novelty. Then he began using me in his business interests, giving me to men who came to his apartment floating up in the cloudless heavens to seal business deals. Relieved of Zayed’s inventive uses, life was less cruel for me—but also, I’m almost ashamed to say, less interesting.

Most of these men too were cruel lovers, though—the men using me as a chit in a business deal more cruel than the men using me as a club privilege after I had danced for them had been. I came to see that as a trait of the men of the desert. Many of them were fat and ugly, but even they were hard of body and cock and seemed to savor they were involved in activities they shared with other men in the kingdom that could get them executed if they were of lesser influence and privilege. Men who were still full of vigor beat me and fucked me; those past their sexual prime still took pleasure from beating me and watching others bring me off.

Both Badr and his father were excellent tennis players—hence the wire-screen caged tennis court adjacent to the club’s swimming pool on the roof of the Bunduq Tower. They liked to play foursomes and were delighted to learn that I had been a collegiate-level tennis player. They included me in play with club members and businessmen Zayed was in discussions with. I participated in this willingly, needing the exercise, although I was given access to the club gym, as they wanted me to be in pristine shape. I was quite happy in getting my exercise on the tennis court.

Imagine my surprise when I showed up to the court one afternoon to find that the fourth player would be Sam Winterberry, the CIA man I’d last seen—and had assumed I had successfully ditched—in Poipet, Cambodia, some six months earlier. He just smiled and shook my hand when Zayed, using the same name for him and affiliation—American intelligence agent—that I knew Winterberry by. So, these weren’t business negotiations the two men were in; it was something more in the interests of the U.S. government. Who was able to differentiate Zayed’s interests between those that were for government and those in business? In the Arab world, among the leading families, the two were the same.

Winterberry didn’t acknowledge he already knew me, so I said nothing either. More disturbingly, he didn’t seem the least bit surprised to have found me there.

We played a match, Zayed and Winterberry taking two of three sets against Badr and me. We were the younger men, but we didn’t give the match away. Zayed wasn’t better than we were—Winterberry was the best of all of us, and he knew how to make Zayed’s play look brilliant. After the match Zayed asked whether Winterberry was really a tennis pro he recognized by another name who had dropped out of the circuit and disappeared, and Winterberry acknowledged that he was.

Zayed laughed. “Shall we go back to my flat then? I do believe we can do business together. After we talk, you may bed young Doug here, if you like.” He was pointing to me.

“Yes,” Winterberry said, with a smile. “I would very much like to bed this young man.”

“He likes it rough,” Zayed said.

“That’s good to hear.”

Winterberry gave it to me rough in a bed outfitted with restraints and a bolster. Both Zayed and Badr sat across the room, their thobes unbuttoned and flared, showing their tanned, hard bodies, and their cocks in their hands, stroking them, as Winterberry played in my ass with thick dildoes and a string of beads before mounting me and riding me hard like he was galloping a thoroughbred stallion across the desert. I lay on my belly, spread-eagled and tied off at the four corners, with the bolster under my belly, raising my ass, totally vulnerable to his pleasure, as he covered and penetrated me and rode me hard. As he was coming into the home stretch with me, he pulled me up on all fours and beat me on the rump with a riding crop while he rode me to his finish.

After he had come, he untied me and rolled me, moaning in low tones, over onto my back. I went immediately into an open, vulnerable stance, signaling that he had conquered me and I surrendered totally to whatever else he wanted to do. He stretched beside me, grasped my cock, and stroked me, edging me as he had done in Poipet.

At this point, the Bunduqs, father and son, lost interest. He wasn’t punishing me. They’d both come while he was, though.

“You may fist him if you like,” the old man said, but, happily, Winterberry didn’t take them up on that offer. The American spy had big hands. They unbuttoned up their thobes and left the room.

When they were gone, Winterberry put his mouth to my ear, kissing me there, but not taking his lips away. “I can get you out of here,” he said. “I can make you part of the deal I’m making with Zayed. I can make the deal sweet enough to include you.”

“You can?” I asked. Then I added, “but what do I have to do for you if you do?”

He laughed. I’d been right. He wasn’t going to get me freed out of the goodness of my heart or, certainly, because he wanted me solely for himself.

“I want you to come work for me. You know I work for the CIA and you have some idea of the operations I run. The office I manage is called, informally, the Candy Store Unit. You needn’t know the official title. If you come with me, you’ll be doing mostly what you’ve been doing anyway—prostituting yourself, but now for the needs of the U.S. government and at the government’s sufferance. Most of what else you do would become sanctioned. You would just be directed to support U.S. interests, as you were in Thailand.”

“I left Poipet to get away from you—you and your work frighten me.”

“I realize that. But you didn’t get away from me, and you appear quite able to get into frightening situations all by yourself. I’ve known where you were all of this time. I’ve been keeping tabs on you—and, whether you know and appreciate it or not, I’ve been protecting you.”

“You’ve been keeping tabs on me? How?”

“Have you forgotten that we implanted you with a homing device? Two of them just for good measure.”

Shit. Yes, I’d forgotten that. “Where are they?”

“One is implanted in the sole of one of your boots—you’re the kind of lay who keeps his boots on. One in your watch band.”

“I’ll have to remember to—”

“No, for your own safety you’ll leave them there. You are a handsome young man, with sex-worker skills and talents,” Winterberry continued. “And, on top of that, you’re a doctor. You’ll be very valuable to the work my unit does—to serving the interests of the United States. You’d be staff and paid well—the best medical coverage and a handsome retirement annuity. The U.S. government treats its prostitutes very well—and they aren’t all politicians.” He laughed at that. I was too much on edge to share the joke. “I’ve already had you vetted,” he continued. “You can start as soon as I take you away from here.”

“You say ‘will,’ not ‘would,’” I whispered. “You seem very sure of yourself.”

“I am, and you should be grateful. You aren’t still in the club. These are fickle men. They don’t maintain interest in a young man forever, no matter how beautiful and talented he is. You were moved from Badr’s bed to the club and from the club down to his father, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And after his father had used you in every way he could imagine, he started sharing you with his business associates, didn’t he—and with me?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any idea where you get moved to next? Maybe common brothels and, at any time after leaving Zayed’s bed, you may become dispensable. Homosexuality is punished terminally here in the UAE unless you are from one of the ruling families here. Men who run clubs like this one don’t leave evidence around. Think on that.”

I certainly would have to, but I’d already heard where my next stop was likely to be. Badr had spoken to his father in terms of disposing of me. He made a convincing argument. I was looking at a continuing world of running on the edge. But for how long? Were my chances of it being longer better with Winterberry or the Bunduqs? There didn’t seem to be much of a question of which one.

“If you come with me—willingly—I think you’ll like the first operation you will be included in.”

“Which would be . . . ?”

“We’re going to take Benjie Reyes down. We’re going to end his white slavery business. Does that appeal to you?”

“Yes.” I had to be honest; it did. I’d felt powerless to do anything to save those other people on the plane.

“Don’t think long,” he said. “I’ll have to go see the sheik soon, and I’ll need to know if you are part of the deal or not.”

“If I said ‘no,’ would you leave me here with them?”

“We’ll never know because you’re going to say ‘yes,’ aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, recognizing the inevitable.

“If you come with me, I am the master and you are the slave.”

“I understand.”

“I am a cruel master.”

“I have already found that to be true.”

“I’ll have to be very cruel now. You know I’ll have to show them how much I want you as part of this deal, don’t you—but also how much like them I am? They will be careful about releasing you from their control. They don’t like loose ends. I’ll have to assure them that I’ll use you as they have and dispose of you as they would. You must understand that.”

“Yes,” I answered.

As I knew he then would, he rolled over on top of me. He was in magnificent erection. He was still edging me. He wouldn’t let me come until he’d had his way with me again. He fucked me hard, pulling back to where the glans nearly dislodged and then thrust back in, hard, deep. I gasped and writhed under him, but he held me in a painful grip. He loosened it enough, though, for me to sense that I could wriggle out of his grip. When I tried, though, he slapped me hard across the mouth, drawing blood at the corner of my lower lip. I sagged back onto the bed, collapsing, completely open and docile to him now, panting shallowly, barely touching the tips of his shoulders with my fingertips as he settled down to a steady beat of the fuck.

“I will admit that you give me pleasure,” he murmured. I felt his right hand glide down my flank, across my upper thigh, and under my balls, grasping his cock, running down the sides, but more than that, he was entering me with them, augmenting the size of what was penetrating me, giving the effect of being doubled.

“Oh, shit. Oh Fuck!” I moaned.

“Take it. Take it,” he hissed.

“Oh, F-U-C-K!” the fingers were working me vigorously, pistoning inside me on three sides of the pounding shaft, and they were pushing out, forcing me more open, making me take the fingers and the cock deeper. This was every bit as filling as fisting would be.

Sensing or having heard the fuck become more active, more challenging, the Al-Bunduqs, father and son, rustled back into the room, unbuttoned and flared their thobes again, took their engorging erections in their hands, and settled down to watch the resumption of the debauchery.

I tensed, fought to relax, arched my back and neck, crying out to the ceiling, and extending my arms straight out from my body in a sacrificial stance, being fully open to him, as he covered me, thrust up deep inside me, and began the fuck again.

As taxing as this was, I had to admit to myself that this was exciting—that Winterberry gave me pleasure in the fuck.

But then, to make his point, he rolled off me again, turned to the nightstand, taking up a bottle of lube. He generously lathered up his right hand. “Open your thighs wide and arch your hips up,” he growled.

“Shit. Fuck!” I involuntarily cried out as he cupped the fingers of his right hand out and started opening me up with him.

“Oh, my god, you’re going to fist me!”

“Yes, I am. There will be more pain if you fight me. Perhaps I’ll have more pleasure if you do.” He said it loud enough for the Arab men to hear.

He hovered over me, his eyes looking directly down into mine. I would have been crushed if I’d found his eyes dull, businesslike, but I didn’t. I discerned lust and something else in them, something I couldn’t gauge but that gave me hope. I clutched at him tightly, raised my pelvis further up to him, opening as much as possible to the inevitable, and panted hard as, just like an army of Arabs before him, Winterberry’s knuckles breached my sphincter muscle and he started to fist me: in and out, flexing, in and old.

“Fuck! FUCK!” I cried out. “Mercy! Mercy!” This was exclaimed for effect, but it wasn’t far off what I was really feeling. There was no mercy. The fist went in up to the wrist, back out to the knuckles, in to the wrist, flexing. Back out to the knuckles. Panting heavily, clinging to my master, I took it and took it and took it, firing off and collapsing back onto the bed. But the fisting continued, ignoring my pleas of “Please! Please!” . . . until I blacked out.

. . . Or perhaps I was just leaving the impression for the Arabs that I had blacked out for my new boss and master.

If the Arabs had been testing Winterberry—whether he could be as cruel and ruthless, and Arab, as the Arabs were—he now was passing that test. And for him—and, presumably, the U.S. government—that’s all that counted here.

End