Camilla Pt. 08

I shook my head unconsciously, wanting the thought to stop. An image of a beautiful red-headed woman with wise eyes popped into my head. She was smiling at me over a large cup of coffee. Her eyes twinkled. She winked and nodded approvingly at me. As if I finally understood what she had tried to explain to me. I wondered if I had dreamt of her, like Camilla. Remembering her smile, her coaxing, approving face, I felt calmer. Perhaps whoever that woman was had seen some potential in me.

I answered the barber's small talk and probing questions tersely, putting them on edge and confirming their suspicions I wasn't the usual. Their curiosity made me feel braver. I ordered the Cadillac package; haircut, straight razor shave, and posh skin treatment. A fat man, at 11 am on a Thursday morning, throwing money around on a 60-minute beauty sesh when everyone legit should be at work. Yes, that was who I was going to be.

I couldn't help but play it up. I was happy to bury the previous man and all the shame that went with him very far away. He had been such a small man. Now I was an unknown. I had money. A month's pay. Another contract in the pipeline. I had delivered for Kata, regardless of her attitude toward me - I had made her successful. She got emotional at my place, why? Because she wanted something more? I had made her successful. Ugly, disappointing useless man. I delivered the project. I worked through a bender. I delivered. I was valuable. I was a good worker. Maybe I could be a mobster. I could carry the image. Talk with them. Joke with them. Maybe earn their respect. I relished in their uneasiness.

"You want a drink? Is it too early for a drink?" one asked. His thick accent bit off the ends of the words through thin lips.

"No," I said. "Never too early, right? Is it Sunday?"

They laughed. Mobsters always seemed to have religion.

Three small shot glasses, opaque with frost, were filled with cold vodka. It took all I could not to react to the potent liquid blowing out the back of my head and sending a quake through my body.

They noticed, quietly impressed and possibly - hopefully - respectful.

Another cold shot.

A warm ball of fire began churning in my stomach. The alcohol's powerful numbing effect swept through my body, erasing all sorts of pain - physical and emotional. I felt as limber as I had on Sunday - which seemed a lifetime ago. I sat back on the chair and relaxed.

He cut what hair I had. My combover became a clean-shaven scalp. A straight edge with a black handle and a red skull was prepped with alcohol, and a strop and billows of lather heated in a cup were brushed across my face. With intense attention, he cut, sculpted, and shaped the hair of my chin, eyebrows, face, and nose.

The face I saw in the mirror before he wrapped it in a warm towel steaming with soothing eucalyptus oil was more relaxed, in control, and more confident.

I was not the small man. Fuck Kata. Fuck her for not seeing more of me. Fuck her for using me. I delivered. I helped finish the project. If it weren't for me - she'd not have completed it. She wouldn't have been where she is. I was an asset - a fucking asset.

I laid back again, breathing in the purifying scent of the towel, feeling on top of everything. Yes, this is what I needed to restore myself. A moment among men. Seeing me as not on the level where I was knocked down; wounded, and beaten by other people's ambitions but seeing me as a man. A good man. A hard worker. Someone to be feared and reckoned with. I was ready for more--a great man again who could do anything. I let the sounds of the barbershop absorb me.

"I'm with him," Camilla said.

"Hello, Camilla." I said from under the towel.

I didn't rush to pull off the towel or make small talk with her. I waited. She had to wait for the Mighty Ed to be ready.

"Would you like a coffee?" said one of the barbers.

"Yes, please," Camilla said.

"He'll be a few minutes." The other said.

"I'll wait."

I heard that fantastic ass sink into one of the chairs near me. I imagined it flattening a bit as it came to rest in the pit of the seat. Her thin waist. Her small breasts. With Kata out of the picture as a potential, I could return to fantasizing about her. I had hoped she was wearing another lycra outfit.

She was, and it was amazing--a sexy, textured two-piece. The pants wrapped and pulled into places and required none of my imagination. A small halter top pushed her breasts into delicate, beautiful mounds where I would love to bury my face, deeply breathing in her scent. Her naked arms and shoulders were barely hidden by a light sweater, which periodically slipped off one shoulder and then the next as she fidgeted, waiting for me.

For the barbers, the aura of mystery was completed. A sweet, hot thing like Camilla waiting obediently for me to finish my session. Not my daughter. I wasn't an unemployed nobody she met hung over on a playground. Maybe I was someone trying to keep us both out of the way. We were illegal and dangerous.

When I was young - sixteen or so - somewhere between dreaming of who I'd be and accepting who I was. My friends and I would carry ourselves like mobsters. We lived in a neighborhood filled with first-generation Slavic families. I was one of the few that wasn't, and my Slavic friends would put me - fat me - in the center of their imaginary gang as "The Don." I did nothing more than be fat to get the esteemed role. At the time, there were only Italian mobsters in the news. We modeled ourselves after all the hitmen and bosses who were winding up dead in gutters, streets, and restaurants. We'd overdress for nights out; too much cologne and cheap gold, while projecting a profound disdain for all around us. Those people outside of our pretend life of crime didn't understand our intensity. They weren't burdened by having to live on the razor's edge between enjoying life and dying in a storm of bullets by a hitman lying in wait just out of view. Right in the shadow over our shoulder - waiting for the right time to kill us all. Yes, we pretended to live under a sword, savoring the indulgences of life in a way only a mobster could with the measured restraint of knowing our lives weren't our own. We saw those things - a conversation, a drink at a hotel with a pretty woman, a steady paycheck - of little importance. We were ready to die the same way we lived, with the perspective that nothing was important.

I was pretending again, but I was pretending from a much older point of view. Had I known then what I know now, how being old and so much closer to the end of life than the beginning brightens and saturates your senses, driving you to savor and cherish, I would never have been the way I was. This old mobster regretted everything now. He would've danced, talked, and indulged in those moments. I would have looked crazy and been teased, laughed, and laughed at. I was pretending once more and regretting every single moment of my younger pretend life.

"Can we get a cup of coffee somewhere?" she asks me. My face was steamed red, smelling of eucalyptus oil.

"We could talk." She looked at the two barbers trying hard not to show how locked in they were on our conversation - a nervous, pouty, fidgety sex kitten and the slick mobster cooly ignoring her.

"But I'm going to be here for a bit more," I said.

"Ok. Look, is there someplace we could talk now?" She emphatically, "Do you guys have a private room here? I need to talk with you - please - for just a moment."

"Yes, we have a back room," said one of them. "It's clean." He turned to me, "you can take a break and come back, ok?"

Camilla sprang up, her thin designer tennis shoes tapped lightly over the marbled floor to the back room. A barber held the door open for her as I heaved myself off the reclined barber chair and followed her in.

"Thank you," I said to him.

"No problem." He nodded deferentially. He turned on the room's light and closed the door tightly behind him as he left. I heard him turn up the radio, blasting some rap music.

The space was larger than I expected. With a high-backed ancient office chair probably pulled from the garbage on a sidewalk. It was a multipurpose space for barber supplies, a waxing table, a simple wire storage shelf, a small desk, and a computer nested among a pile of documents. I subconsciously checked to see if it was off.

Camilla had perched on the table. Her lovely figure settled across its top. She crossed her ankles and gripped the table's edge, biting her bottom lip nervously. She looked younger than I remembered. Her shoulders were hunched forward. The sweater falls from one shoulder, then the next. She pulled it up with a gesture that made her arm catch and offer up a breast, and then another. She caught me looking at her struggling with her sweater and ashamedly looked away, giving me a chance to guiltily drink in the view of her playful chest and the show she was offering me.

"Do you know who Stavros Stanisloff is?"

"I don't."

"He took pictures of me."

"Pictures. Ok. Bad pictures, yes?"

"Yes."

"Ok?"

"And now he's going to post them if I don't pay him."

"How much?"

"Thirty thousand dollars."

"OK," I caught myself sympathizing with her and stopped. I didn't know who she was and what choices she had made, whether she was fair with her boyfriend Stavros or, like so many other women in my life, she was critical and harsh. I wanted to give him, as no one had given me, the benefit of the doubt.

"What did you do to get these pictures taken?" I asked bluntly, knowing the answer. Because deep down, I wanted to know more details about the photos. Would she have been tamed by this man? Did she behave like in my dreams, climbing on top of him and grinding away? I wanted more images to fuel my future fantasies and perversions. It would be satisfying to see her squirm. To admit to me that she was rash, and dumb, and her choices were reckless. I wanted her to need me. But more so, darkly, after all that had happened to me, I wanted to see her wounded and debase herself even further than what harm had already happened to her.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Were you hurting someone?"

"No. No. I wasn't hurting anyone. They were of me and him."

"Doing?"

"Y'know we were - does that matter?"

"If this was a crime - and you want out of the crimes and the pictures - "

"No, I was blowing him. I was giving him a blow job, and he took pictures of me doing it.

"That's it?" I felt myself getting harder.

"We did it doggy style, too, he did some then, too."

"How many pictures?"

"I don't know. Maybe 40? I heard the camera go off a lot."

"$30,000 for 40 good shots. That's a little less than 1,000 per picture."

"Yes."

"What do you want me to do - loan you the money?"

"I want you to help me. I need your help, please. I know who you are... I know what you people do. Please - "

"What do I do?"

She slid from the table and threw her arms around my neck. She began kissing me. Grabbing and holding my face and pulling me back to her even when I tried to pull away. A kiss. A kiss. Another. Another.

"Please. Please. Don't talk. I know how this works. I know what I need to do...." She kissed me across my face and neck, running her fingers over my head, sending shivers through my body.

She leaned hard against me. I felt her breasts pressing against my chest and her hips rolling into mine. She pushed me down into the chair, pulling the gossamer sweater off her slight shoulders and draping it around my neck. She stepped back and pulled her top down, freeing one tit and then another. Her nipples were bright and pink and eager. Kata's had been dark and cynical. For the second time that week, a woman I'd only dreamt of climbed onto my lap. She pushed one nipple and then another into my mouth.

"I want you to kill him for me. I want you to shoot him." She whispered hotly into my ear. Her hips swiveled, and she ground against my cock. Her round, generous ass pressed against my hips. The chair was spacious enough for her to straddle me and squeeze my legs between hers, making my cock and balls pinch and bulge against her. She began twerking atop me, her ass undulating in gentle, firm circles against me like a stripper.

"Oh please, oh please." She blasted into my ear over and over again. My head swam with her attention. I was a mob boss. I was the man. Was I was I doing? I didn't want to but for her for her oh God this stupid precious girl she was desperate and dumb and reckless and I felt the heat of her crotch, the sensation of her way out of my league, someone who I would never have guessed - her hand pinched and pulled one nipple causing her to moan unconsciously, her breath warm against my face. She buried a sloppy, wet kiss on my mouth shoved a nipple into my lips encouraging me.

"C'mon. Come on. Please. Please." She coaxed.

The blood had rushed from my head and from any sense or judgment I had. My cock bulged and strained against her grinding spandex hips.

My disbelief paralyzed me. It frustrated her. She let out a little bleat of frustration, sprung from my lap, and upped the conditions of our agreement.

"Please. Please. Please," she said as she undid my belt.

My cock sprung from my pants.

Her mouth latched on. The pressure of her lips around my shaft, moving up and down so perfectly, sucking me off.

Her head bobbed up and down, making loud wet grunts and gurgling noises. She popped off my dick, a strand of saliva tying her to me. "Please, please, daddy. Please." Then back down, gurgling again.

My toes curled from her efforts. I never had a blow job. Not like this. I was euphoric. My whole body was alive and enveloped in pleasure.

"Please, kill him for me. Please. Please." She pleaded. Her mouth latched back on. More grunts and chokes.

My nerves were on fire. My body prickled and popped. It was the most incredible feeling I had ever felt.

Her hand scooped and cradled and squeezed my old useless tired balls.

What was it again that I was living for?

I unconsciously cried out - then uncontrollably exploded into her mouth. My whole body erupted and quaked.

"OK! OK! Yes!" I cried out, "I will! I will kill this man for you!"