Edward was taking me on another one of his damned adventures. I swear, if he weren’t like a brother to me, I’d be done with him. He shouted from the drawing room for me to hurry and dress, but I couldn’t get the damn bow tie right. Looking in the mirror, I remembered what my uncle once said: “leave your tie a bit askew, so that a pretty girl might come up and fix it.”

Then it was a quick brandy, and we were in a taxi heading downtown.

He wouldn’t tell me where we were going, but last time he was this excited, it was for Nijinsky’s Scheherazade. He had the same boyish glee as we sped down Park Avenue.

We stopped farther downtown than I expected, somewhere just outside Chinatown. It was a nondescript red door halfway down an alley that stunk of fish.

Inside though, was a lush little foyer, all done up in black wallpaper with gold flocking. The design was of various couplings, like a Kamasutra. A half-door opened, and there was a coat check girl. She was quite young, with short-cropped hair. She wore the cap of a bellboy and no shirt, merely suspenders that barely covered the nipples of her small breasts.

She took our jackets and gave me a sly little smile. I was charmed by her and charmed by the whole place. Still, I wondered if it was some kind of brothel, and suddenly my mind was being consumed by anxiety. 

The foyer led to a narrow staircase, and so we took the creaking stairs up, until we found another red door. Edward, turning to me with a wink, gave the door a complex morse code of knocks. The door opened.

A man led us in. He was tall, with slicked-back black hair and red blush on his pale cheeks. He wore a black Nehru jacket that gave him the look of some foreign soldier. He did not speak, but led us to a small bar. The bartender looked identical to the coat check girl, though her eyes were somehow cruel where the other’s were coquettish.

The room was small and had two other doors opposite the one we came in. All the doors were closed, and no instructions were given. Edward led me to the small bar, which was no bigger than a lectern.

There was whiskey, champagne, and absinthe. Edward ordered us the last, and the girl prepared it in a beautiful copper fountain. The cloudy green concoction was potent and sweet, and my head swam from the first sip.

Like the doorman, the bartender said nothing. Edward and I seemed to follow suit and were silent as we sipped and waited, for what, I did not know.

As we finished, we saw a man and a woman exit one door. The woman’s hair was a bit mussed, and the man’s face was red, and his smile nearly rictus. They nodded at the doorman and were led out.

The doorman checked his pocket watch somewhat dramatically and, after a full minute, turned to us and bowed his head. He then went to one of the doors and opened it for us.

“Tür vier,” he said in a throaty German. Edward nodded.

We entered a long dark hallway that was lined with four doors on each side and a red door at the end. The doors were numbered, and Edward led me to door four. He held the knob for a moment and looked at me.

“Follow my lead, will you? There are a great many rules here,” he said plainly, in a serious manner that was strange to hear from my always humorous friend. I nodded.

He opened door four, and we entered a small square room lit by moonlight and streetlight coming in through a window opposite the door.  Three feet in front of the door was a black curtain open and tied to each wall with gold ropes. This framed our view of the rest of the room as if it were a stage. There were two chairs on our side of the curtain, but Edward ignored them.

There was a bed in the center of the room, and in the center of the bed was a woman. There was no other furniture, save a bedside table topped with an ashtray, a pack of Eckstein cigarettes, a bottle of champagne, and a half-full glass with a red lipstick mark.

The woman was perhaps twenty. She was thin in the face and limbs, with some thickness in her hips and bottom. She wore a black kimono and black stockings. Her hair was very short, slick finger waves and a single curl that seemed pasted to her forehead near her left ear. Her hair was black, her eyes were dark, her tan skin seemed pale in the moonlight.

Her lips were crimson red, the only color in the room. Her eyes were thickly lined in kohl. She looked bored and perhaps a little angry, though it might have been that she was German.

She eyed us for a moment and then sat up and stretched. She reached for her glass and finished her champagne in one sip. Then she pulled at the belt of her robe and opened it. She got up on her knees, facing us. She was nude under the robe, save her black stockings rolled down to her knees, garterless. 

Her eyes looked heavy, sleepy or drugged. She let the robe fall off her shoulders and slipped her arms out of it. She had rouged her nipples. I could see how the red was imperfectly applied, the circles of her somewhat brown areola round where the rouge was an uneven thumbprint.

I liked that very much, though I couldn’t explain why. She had a bruise on her left hip, and I liked that too.

Her breasts were small, high up, they made her look younger than when she was in the robe. Her pubic hair was dark, trimmed short, it grew in a pattern where it looked brushed into the center, making a line that pointed down, down to the split between her legs.

Edward took a step forward, and so did I, though I noted he didn’t cross where the curtain hung, and so I kept that boundary as well.

She spoke to Edward in German, and I could only understand some. Something about “which one of us was the boss?” He answered, but I made out even less. They both laughed. He asked her a question, his German fast and impeccable, and she considered it and then nodded. Then he took my arm and pulled me forward until we were standing next to the bed.

She looked at me, not smiling, but seemingly slightly less bored. She licked her lips and then bit her bottom lip. Her eyes were hypnotic, dark pools of ink. She touched her lips with one finger and then sucked that finger. Then I followed the wet finger, and she moved it down, to her long neck as she lifted her head back.

Her finger moved to her collarbone, tracing the shape, then down to her breast. She cupped her breast and squeezed it. Her fingers left brief marks, white for a moment, then red, then gone. I swallowed and felt my breathing quicken. She smiled at my reaction.

She leaned back and sat back on the bed, her legs together. She lifted her legs, her movements like a dancer. She turned and showed us her generous bottom. She bent like a cat, arching her back, ass in the air, and I saw the split peach of her cunt between her thighs.

Edward moved closer and pulled me to join him. Our knees were against the mattress.

“I saw her the other day and knew you had to meet her,” he said with his wide grin. His hand on the small of my back, pushing me forward a little more.

I saw our reflection in her eyes. Two well-dressed men, standing close. She looked from Edward to me and then back, and her red lips curled into a smile for the first time.

She said something else in German, I only caught the word “Freund,” friend. Edward chuckled and nodded, his eyes on the surprisingly clean and well made white sheets on the bed.

She leaned back and spread her long legs slowly. Her finger went between her breasts, and she dragged a nail down her chest to her belly. Her nails were red lacquered like her lips. Her mouth was open just a little as her finger moved down further to the sparse hair between her legs.

Edward conversed with her quickly, his voice a little tenser, and she raised one eyebrow. 

“Vielleicht,” she replied as her fingers moved down and she slowly traced that split between her legs, up and down.

“Vielleicht,” she said once more. It meant “perhaps.” Her voice was slower, the hint of a growl in it.

Edward leaned into me, his hand on my back.

“I told her about your proclivity,” he whispered into my ear.

I stiffened. There was a pregnant pause as Edward stayed close to me, his mouth near my ear. “And about my own predilection.”

His body was strong and warm against me. I could feel the heat of his skin even through our suits.

“She said she might be agreeable to allow you to partake in yours, if–” he swallowed, his voice sounding hoarse.

“Well, she said, perhaps, if she could watch me partake in mine.”

There it was. The night’s adventure explained.

Edward was often very taken with pretty girls, but they were not his main desire. His longings were not exactly alien to me, but he was far more experienced in them.

His hand moved to the small of my back once more, and there was an insistence in his movements.

“If you like, I mean. You could just lean forward and enjoy yourself with her and I, um, I mean, I’m sure I would be fine kneeling here,” he said, his lip brushing my ear as he spoke.

She smiled, our eyes locked. She spread her legs wider and spread herself open for me with her fingers.

“You like to kiss here?” She asked in a thick accent.

I nodded without really meaning to. The black around her eyes, the darkness of her eyes, the red of her lips.

“I like it very much… wenn richtig gemacht,” she said, her fingers splitting the peach between her legs and showing me the lurid coral between those lips.

Edward was pulling at my jacket, and I let him help me off with it. He undid his bow tie, and I watched as he put our jackets on the chairs. My eyes came back to the woman, and she seemed far more interested in the entire situation. Her smile lingered, and her fingers lazily played.

My eyes followed her fingers to pink and her red nails.

When Edward walked back over, he pushed me forward, a bit roughly, and my face was inches from her fingers. She looked down at me and smiled. I could smell the salty scent of her, that and perfume. The perfume seemed to be made to mix with her scent, and as I breathed it in, I felt dizzy. She brought her finger to my lips and traced my mouth softly.

My mouth opened instinctively, but she only traced my lips. Teasing me seemed to make her smile brighten.

“We can all have what we desire,” she said, looking me in the eyes.

I nodded again, no pause, no thinking. Then Edward was on his knees next to me, his possessive hands on my hip and ass. Then he was undoing my slacks. 

She looked deeper into my eyes and reached forward, taking my hair in her hand.

“You will be a good boy for me,” she said softly, her fingers in an inverted V over her sex, holding her lips open for my mouth.

I opened my mouth wide and covered her sex with it at first. I wanted all of her, I just wanted to bury myself in the scent of her the taste of her. Her breath caught, and it filled me with elation. I wanted to give her pleasure. I wanted to be the source of her pleasure.

Then as if some strange circuit was being completed, Edward had me in his hand, and the warmth of his mouth covered me. I groaned into her, and she let out a low little laugh.

“What a good friend you have,” she said, pulling me against her by my hair and pushing her hips out so that her cunt covered my mouth and my nose for a moment.

After a moment, she moved back and pointed with one red fingernail at the little swell where her lips met. She was pointing just to the left of that spot, and with narrowed eyes, she said, “just here, right here.”

I rushed to obediently lick that spot. I found a rhythm, and I lapped at her like a kitten. She pet my hair like one as well. All the while under me, Edward took me further and further into his mouth, silent and skilled.

The woman was panting a little, and her eyes fluttered. She moved her finger to the other side of her clit and said, “here,” and I continued licking, seeing what she meant for me to do and teasing that little knot, dancing around the side of it, but never touching it.

Edward took my whole cock in his mouth and pressed himself against me, his nose against my crotch, and I heard him choke and gag. Then he returned to shallower stroked.

I pictured not his mouth, but her cunt. I imagined slipping into to her, wet and hot and raw. Pushing into her until our bodies ground against each other. My whole cock inside of her.

Her breathing was faster, and she pulled my hair again and moved my tongue right over her clit. Her breath was hitched, and her hand said in my hair, the pulling making my scalp burn. All the while, Edward sucked.

In my mind it was Edward’s mouth, it was her cunt, it was both of them, it was somehow as if I had a cunt and a cock was pushing in and out. The smell of her was all around me and that perfume, and then she was moaning and lifting her hips, and the victory of her orgasm and the heat of his mouth made me come.

It was like the circuit we made overloaded, and it seemed like I kept coming and coming, and a fear burst in me that I might never stop.

She pushed my face away, and I leaned on the bed gasping as Edward continued to suck, now painfully on my spent cock.

Finally, I pushed him away, and he laughed, sitting on the floor, red-faced, and wet lipped.

The three of us panted for a few moments, all giddy in the dark.

Standing, I watched as she leaned over the other side of the bed and brought up a bottle of champagne. She drank from it and then poured some into Edward’s open mouth. Then the two of them kissed, and I wondered how much of this they had planned, what he had told her.

After another moment, there was a knock on the door, and Edward rushed to fix himself and handed me my jacket.

I looked at her once more, and she smiled at me, curling a finger and motioning for me to come closer. Then she kissed me too and pushed me away with a laugh.

“You smell like me! You reek of me. Go out into the city like that! Hah,” she laughed and sent us away.

I did. It was everywhere. Her pussy and her perfume and the champagne and her cigarettes.

We stumbled into the hall to the dour face of the doorman. He looked at his watch disapprovingly, and we made our way out, down the stairs, to gather our coats and head into the night.