F4: Edge of Tomorrow

(Author's note: This story is an entry into FAWC (Friendly Anonymous Writing Challenge), a collaborative competition among Lit authors. FAWC is not an official contest sponsored by Literotica, and there are no prizes given to the winner. This FAWC was based around the theme of music, with four songs given to choose from. The song that inspired this story was "Tomorrow We'll See," by Sting.)

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"Get out of my truck." He reached across me, shuddering as his arm brushed my boobs, and opened the passenger door. At the same time his other hand went to the dashboard where he'd laid three twenties.

Unaffected by his response—I did get that occasionally—I put a hand over his on the dashboard. "I've already earned one of those twenties, doll," I said. His grip on the money was strong, but my grip on his hand was stronger. He relinquished his hold.

"Then take it and get outta my truck. Now."

"Sure, honey," replied. "But just give it a thought. It was the best BJ you've ever had. Think on that as you drive back to the boonies."

He couldn't get away from the curb fast enough in that Ford 150 of his. It did happen from time to time, unfortunately mostly with the young, cute ones. He'd been all "oh, my god," with the blow job, but when he'd put his hand up my skirt for the start of the next act, he went ballistic.

I nearly turned my ankle being propelled from that pickup. These new heels of mine weren't worth shit. I didn't know if I'd ever master walking in heels.

The john must have been some honky in from the sticks—a young, hunky honky, though, I'd liked to have ridden him. He should have known what he'd find on this block of 18th Street off Dupont Circle. Only one kind of hooker to find here. Most of the time I have no trouble with that. Most of the time, the john knows what he's looking for when he comes to my corner. Most of them aren't as young and good-looking as that one was, though. It was always the naïve hunks who went into shock.

I managed to make it back to the corner where Geraldine was standing, even though my ankle hurt and it wasn't easy walking in these new heels—and my skirt was so tight, the john who got that far would have to scrape it off of me with a knife.

That stopped me, though. There had been a couple of knifings of us girls in this area over the last couple of weeks. The cops had stepped up their patrols. And some of them had given us girls some grief about that, claiming it was for our own good. The regular cops and us had an understanding, but these added cops didn't seem to get the balance of the economy in this neighborhood.

We'd discussed it among ourselves, me and the girls—the knifings. How scared we were about that, with most of us not being scared enough to stop the life, though. It's the only way most of us knew how to live. And for some of us, like me and Geraldine, it was the ultimate kink.

"But how would you want to go?" Josephine asked. "Would you want to be knifed?"

"Quick," I said, and I continued after a moment of thought, "Everyone's got to go sometime, sugar. And there are days that get so heavy, when the burdens just keep fallin', that I'd be willing to give up tomorrow. Some days I'm so close to the edge, I want to just spill right on over into the afterlife."

"If a knife were part of the ultimate fuck . . . if it gave me the ultimate experience . . . I could want that way."

That had been from Geraldine. She'd always lived on the edge of tomorrow, but who knows if it was just talk or not?

"What . . . what do you see yourselves doing ten years from now? Where do you see yourselves being?" Josephine had asked.

"Dead," both Geraldine and I answered in baritone and bass chorus.

And we'd left it at that.

Both Geraldine and Josephine were on the corner. The evening was young and I was already $20 ahead of the rent man, but it had rained. God, how depressing it was on this corner in the rain. The streets were wet and the lights on the poles, some of which still worked, hadn't come on yet. Despite the twenty, my mood was as gloomy as the weather. There was no telling when it would start raining again and force us off the street.

"Been lookin' for you, Samantha," Geraldine said to me, as I approached. She had her superfriendly face on—the one that said she wanted something from me. And sure enough, she did.

"Donny said I shortchanged him from last night," she said. "He said if I didn't have more for him when he showed up tonight, he'd cut me. I ain't had no business yet. I didn't short him, but maybe you could spare somethin' . . . just 'til I get ahead on tonight . . . in case Donny comes around before I've built up a wad?"

Of course she'd shortchanged her pimp. She'd always done that. I was just surprised that Donny had caught up with her, he was such a dumbass. He was mainly why I worked a one-girl operation. The last thing I needed was a pimp sucking off my tits. All a girl really needed was a protector. I had Demont. He was head over heels for me. Ran with a bad crowd and used, which I'd never gotten into, thank God—one habit was enough for me and cocks were a better habit than drugs. But Demont was good at my favorite habit. And he was good to me. You know what they say about black cock. Well, he was the poster boy for black cock.

"Sure, sugar," I answered. "I only got a twenty at the moment, but you can borrow it. That should be enough for Donny." Saying it that way, I was making a statement on the little man that Donny was. Not that Geraldine would get the picture. Geraldine wasn't too many steps ahead of Donny in that department. But she was family . . . she was corner of 18th and Q Streets family.

After I gave her the twenty, she turned her attention on Josephine, who was giving her a rough time in not understanding—or pretending not to understand—what Geraldine was asking. I knew why Josephine wasn't understanding. She'd scored twice in the time I'd been out here this evening—twice just that I knew about. Geraldine and me, we were beautiful, but Josephine was downright gorgeous. And she was a real pro. A guy could have fucked her three ways from Sunday and never have caught onto what he was fucking.

The cars stopped for her twice as often as for the rest of us together. It wasn't that hard for me to give up a twenty early in the evening. Josephine had more to lose. Geraldine's memory on who she owed what wasn't all that great. She was one of us, though. I wouldn't begrudge her a twenty here and there. She was moving along in years and wouldn't be able to do this much longer.

Headlights hit us—the first of the gathering dark of the day—and we all set into our poses. The street lights were buzzing on overhead too. I could see it was a blue van—sky blue, not a dark blue—as it slowly went by us. It only moved a block up and then pulled to the side and flicked its taillights a couple of times.

"This one's for me. I know this guy," Geraldine said. Josephine and I were slow to react. Whether Geraldine really knew the blue van or not was questionable, but she already had her strut up the street going for her, her big butt swaying, the two orbs of it wrestling with each other inside her tight skirt like two cats fightin' in a sack.

Josephine wasn't about to challenger her. She'd just escaped an attempt to cut into her night's take. I was thinking of taking up the strut beside Geraldine, just to give the blue van a choice if she wasn't on the level about being why it was here. But a black and white was pulling into the curve, so I backed off and started checking my new black tights as if I'd had to stop on this corner only because they were sliding down on me.

It was one of the new cops who had been added to the drive-bys because of the recent knifings. He was a cocky little guy. Heavyset but most of that in muscle. He and his older guy partner gave Josephine and me a rough time about being out here and talked about running us in. While the older cop was talking to Josephine, though, the cocky one said maybe we could work something out in the alley and they wouldn't have to take us in and ruin our night. He might have been new to the beat, but he'd learned the ropes around here real fast.

He fucked me up against a dirty cinderblock wall near the entrance of the alley. It had started to rain again, with a drizzle, but we were protected here from everything but the sound of traffic. There wasn't much traffic on this block—that's why we had chosen this corner—but you could hear it from the nearby busy Dupont Circle.

He tore my new black tights. Ripped the butt seam right out of them without even a word of apology. And when he was done I discovered a run had been put in them too. There went the twenty dollars earned so far tonight, even if Geraldine remembered to pay it back. And this cop wasn't going to pay me for this, that was certain.

Fucked me right against the wall, my back to the wall, and him crouched under me with my thighs resting on his and him thrusting up into me with grunts and groans and coming pretty fast. Not caring about me or what I'd like at all. And then just pulling out of me and stepping back, almost letting me fall down into the muck of the alley floor. And zipping up and moving slow, proudly, out of the alley.

I wasn't a person to him; just a piece of meat with a warm hole. He probably went home to a dumpy wife and two-point-five children after his shift and didn't give me a second thought.

When I came out of the alley, the black and white was gone. So was Josephine. I didn't know if the rain had moved her inside or if the cops had taken her with them for dessert. In any case, the rain had stopped again.

I was looking down, examining the run in the black tights, when headlights reflected off the shimmer of the rainy street. A big black Mercedes sedan with smoked windows was gliding up the street toward me at a snail's pace. I looked up and down the street to be sure the black and white wasn't lurking nearby and then set my pose, winked and smiled at the car's grill, and waved my hand in a welcoming "Yes, it's me you came to pick up" gesture.

The car stopped. The passenger window shushed down—a million-dollar sound on a million-dollar chariot. My mind was already adding zeros. His smile was tentative. A professor type. Benign looking. Pepper and salt hair, cut expensively. A good, kindly face. Trim from what I can see. Preppy clothing. Khakis and a button-down short-sleeved shirt. White. All vanilla—other than the kink that made him stop here.

"Were you looking for me?" I asked, taking another couple of gazes up and down the street, looking for the heat. In that way I knew to do to keep them saddled until settled, I leaned an elbow on the window sill. I had the big sedan pinned down, just like that.

"That's very possible," he answered. "You have the time?"

"If you have the money," I said.

"I ask, because I would want to take you someplace."

"For what?" I asked.

"For whatever I want," he answered.

Couldn't be much, I thought, taking a closer look at him and still coming up with "benign and shy." I named a price.

He laughed and took off a zero. Two hundred actually sounded like a gravy train to me. I opened the door and slid into the seat. As insurance, though, not wanting to waste my time in what was so far a bust evening financially that was moving into night, I said, "You do know what this block offers, don't you?"

"Yes," he answered. "I do want cock with it."

"If you take me from here, you have to bring me back."

"No problem," he answered. "Get in."

When I'd done so, he gave me a little worried look like maybe I'd soil up the upholstery of his fancy sedan, but he didn't say anything, and I made sure to rub my back a bit on the passenger seat to get some of that grease from the wall in the alley off me. Benign and rich as he looked, he wasn't any better than me.

He tried driving there in circles, but I wasn't from the Maryland suburbs. I knew my way around D.C. And if I hadn't kept track of where we were and closing in on, the sounds from the lions' cages in the zoo would have told me we ended up on toney Woodley Park anyway.

It didn't take long after arriving for me to understand why he'd tried to cover his tracks. He had a special basement room in a house that was so expensively set up that it could be a museum of decorative arts. I wasn't so far down in the mud of life that I couldn't gauge genuine treasures. And that room had a four-poster bed, one with restraints dangling from the posts.

I knelt on the floor, legs together, at the foot of the bed, naked, with my arms spread to the side, bound to the restraints from the posts, a ball gag in my mouth, so I wouldn't compete with the lions' roars over in the zoo, I supposed.

He flogged me and then raised me up, bent me over the bed, and fucked me roughly. So much for the benign professor assessment. Why did a guy like this rate a townhouse mansion filled with lovely art and I lived in a one-room walkup, I wondered. There was no justice in this world. It was nothing I normally signed up for, and when it happened, it depressed me about life, leaving me in a blue funk. But $200 was $200, and he did drive me back to the corner of 18th and Q. That he couldn't look me in the face while he drove was a little added payment on top of the money—but not much of a comfort to my slashed back and buttocks.

We were pretty far into the night now and the rain had started again. Josephine hadn't appeared. Neither had Geraldine. I was about to call it a night—not a bad night financially, although a night when the degradation of what I did—what I couldn't stop doing because there wasn't much of anywhere else in life that girls like me fit and because I did, indeed, crave cock—when another black and white pulled up to the curb. This time the red light was revolving. That was the sign of serious business.

Another free trip to the alley, I thought—and an added indignity that would be taking me close to the edge tonight. That wasn't completely fair, I thought. While they had their dicks in me, fucking me, everything was all right. It was just what the present was wrapped in that was pulling me down.

But it wasn't that—another conjugal visit. It was two of the straight-arrow cops, Officer O'Brien and his fat sidekick, Whatshisface, both notable because there were damn few of that type of cop in this section of town.

"Here all alone tonight, Samantha?" O'Brien asked, having rolled down his window and hung an elbow on the window sill. Guess he was telling me this wasn't a short visit. Whatshisface was at the wheel.

"At the moment, yes," I said. "I'm just on my way to the store. Ran out of cigarettes."

"I can see that it must have been a nicotine craving or something, since you didn't bother to get dressed much," he answered.

It stung a bit, but he never went further than this—mild rebukes for the life I choose to live—so I just took the sting as an embellishment on a really shitty night so far in the self-esteem department. "When's the last time you saw Geraldine?" he continued.

"I don't know. A couple of hours ago," I answered. A couple of cocks and a beating ago, I thought. My back stung something fiercely. I wanted to do something about that, and had just decided what before O'Brien and sidekick had shown up. "Why? Is Geraldine lost?" I asked.

"No, Geraldine's dead," O'Brien said. "Cut up like the others. We're trying to track this guy down. You want to help or not?"

I staggered into the back door of the cruiser and almost slid down the side.

"Whoa, there," O'Brien said, quickly coming out of the cruiser and helping me to stand. "I didn't mean to—"

"You didn't mean to think that we girls had feelings, is that it?" I jabbed him with. But I was grateful for the supporting arms, and I could understand how hardnosed and frustrated a cop could get on this beat. And I liked O'Brien. Of all the cops who took their protection out with a poke, why was the one cop I had a bit of feeling for not interested? Go figure.

"Again, I'm sorry, Samantha. It's just that this gets to us. We can't protect you guys . . . you girls unless you help us get sick fucks like this off the street. I didn't think you and Geraldine were all that tight."

Geraldine and me were financial partners, I thought bitterly. I could kiss that twenty good-bye now. And then I dug my long fingernails into the heels of my hands to welcome the pain. I was becoming as hardened as everyone else around me. "No, I wasn't all that fond of Geraldine," I answered. "But she's family."

"Oh, Christ, I had no idea you two were related," he said.

He'd completely misunderstood, but I didn't correct him. He was being the nicest to me tonight that anyone else had been—or was likely to be. Although there was Demont, of course. That's where I had planned to go before O'Brien showed up—where I still planned to go after O'Brien was gone.

"We need the help, Samantha. What did Geraldine do the last time you saw her? And when was that? It's for your own good. For the good of all of you out on the street, although God knows these knifings should be enough of a wakeup call for you to get off the street."

"And do what?" I cried out, turning on him, fists bunched. "Look at me, officer. What else the fuck do you think there is for someone like me to do? Teach Sunday school?"

"There's help. There's—"

"I don't need your fuckin' help," I retorted. "I don't need nobody's help. I just need to be left the fuck alone." Even as I said it, I knew it was a lie. I didn't want men to leave me alone. I wanted them to want me, to find me beautiful. To fuck me and stroke me off while they were doing it. I didn't want to be anyone else, anything else. But at the moment, I was struck with my vulnerability and isolation, knowing that there wasn't anywhere for me to fit. Certainly nowhere for me to grow old like I was doin' before my time out on the street.

But I cooled down as quickly as I had flared up, realizing the futility of it all. And I told him, as closely as I could figure what time I'd last seen her. It helped that I remembered that the street lights came on just then. He could check when the lights out here came on. It was either by time or by the light change. Either one could be pinned down to provide a time. And I told him she had been chasing down a van—someone she knew, she'd said, but I also told him that it was only 50/50 that she had been telling the truth about that.

But I didn't tell him the color of the van. I kept that back, saying it was too dark to tell—that the van was a dark color even though it was a not-all-that dark blue. I didn't know why I held that back. It only was later that I knew why.

After he and Whatshisface moved on, I went up to Demont's apartment, on the third story of a tenement on Q street. He looked only half glad to see me when I arrived.

"Naw, I'm glad to see you, Sam," he said. "Just that I thought you were my supplier. I'd be more glad to see him."

I already was stripping my blouse off as I stood in the middle of his combination living and dining room, wanting the comfort of him inside me as soon as I could get it.

"What's that?" he asked in shock, moving around me, and touching the welts on my back gingerly. "You've been whipped."

"Flogged," I answered. "A riding crop, I think. A whip would have done more damage." There wasn't much that could do more damage than the degradation of that tonight, though, I was thinking.

"Let me put some salve on that," he said, moving back toward his small bedroom and the bathroom beyond that.

"What I want is some lovin', Demont. What I want is for you to hold me—and to fuck me—to give me that big cock of yours. Make me forget what a shitty day it is—how shitty this life can be. Knowing I'm taking cock because I want to, not to make money off it."