Best of Asian Erotica, Volume 2

THE POLITICIAN Amirul B. Ruslan, Malaysia

Everything had to be discreet. This was the seventh time he had done this, but each time he still felt the usual pangs of worry, of guilt. Voices played out in his head. One of them was the monotone of a newsreader as she—he always envisioned it as a she, and so it must be a she—presented the lurid details of this scandal. One of them was the cruel chastising by his late mother, a voice gone from this earth over twenty years, but constantly returning to haunt his subconscious each time he performed this deviant act.

The hotel he was now staying in on the blissful, blisteringly hot island of Penang was a colonial relic. His father wouldn’t have approved.

His father hated all things colonial, and indeed gave up his life fighting colonial oppressors. First the Japanese, then the British. He fought proudly to Independence and marched into—no, the politician thought, no. He cut the thought there and then, questioning, pleading to his mind: Why do I have to reminisce on my father’s achievements now? Was it because he was a religious man? Was it because if he knew, he would call me a deviant, a pervert?

The hotel was grand and almost over-the-top in its pretension. Whatever British elegance it had in the 1920s when it was built was now hidden behind layers of coarse Malaysian ‘aesthetic’ of out-of-place Ionic pillars, tiled floors and wide, gold-painted door frames. The politician had been an architect before he became a politician, and even after decades of being in the country’s less-than-refined body politic, this vulgar so-called sophistication wounded his senses.

But what mattered most was not the furniture or the windows or the high ceilings or the grand piano in the lobby or the way the staff—Malays no less, good Malays playing submissive servants to the under-dressed hedonist tourist masses that flocked to this island paradise-shuffled around. What mattered most was that everything today stayed discreet. And as he walked along the corridor leading to the hotel lounge, brushing away an overeager bellboy asking, ‘Y.B., anything I can help you with?’ with that subservient tone in Malay, he saw her.

She was standing by the reception, looking busy. She had her BlackBerry out, and while it seemed like she was furiously tapping out a message, some important email, no doubt, the politician knew that she was paying attention to the lounge with her darting eyes. When their eyes met from across the hall, she pocketed her BlackBerry and gave a small nod. That was all. A small nod.

She looked good, just as she always did, this thirty-five-year-old woman who had been sneaking away to rendezvous with him for over four years now. She was a whore—he couldn’t bear calling her profession by any other name, as they all felt overly sanitized. Prostitute? Escort? Call girl?

Courtesan? Don’t kid yourself, Y.B., she’s a whore, pure and simple. But she was a whore he felt a great deal of attachment to, and he treated these trysts with a great deal of excitement.

He met her at the elevator. He was already inside, the only person in there, when she rushed towards the closing doors. As if to show his potent chivalry, instead of pressing down on the Open button, he instead lodged himself into the doorway, letting her pass. Cunningly, he also sneaked a grope in as she squeezed past, one hand reaching out to feel the fine curvature of her ass. She didn’t seem to like it. He did.

His room was on the seventeenth floor, a luxurious suite that was overly indulgent, even to him, for someone who was only going to be staying on the island for one night. The elevator lurched upward. He idly whistled. She smoothed her blouse. She was standing at the corner, almost vulnerable as she seemed to hide away. A poster partitioned away by a cold glass pane sat beside her, promoting the latest Filipino house band that was playing at the hotel. He opened his mouth, and tilted closer to her. Fifth floor. ‘Dahlia…’

he began.

She didn’t even seem to pay any attention.

Sixth floor. He inched closer again, small inches growing to bigger inches. He cornered her where she was. She looked up at him. Finally, some eye contact. His hand tried for her thigh, the one wrapped in the fine black stocking under her skirt. He half-expected her to slap him. She didn’t. Her furious, cold stare still kept his gaze, as his fingers brushed up. Eighth floor.

Her skirt lifted just a bit…

Then she commanded him. ‘Step away right now.’ She spoke with such strength in her voice. Domination. He instinctively followed as she instructed. He moved back to his corner. Ninth floor. She turned to face him, brushing her skirt back to its previous meticulous, flawless state. Her voice softened, but there was no mistaking the vigor still within. ‘Are you stupid?

There’s a camera right there, up above where you’re standing.’

So there was. It wasn’t like he didn’t know that; of course he knew. He just couldn’t resist. He couldn’t resist being told off, being called stupid, the sort of verbal abuse he could only find from her, or in Parliament.

‘For someone who makes such a big deal about discretion…’ she trailed off, as if uninterested in continuing in that thread. The politician looked up at the ceiling, a smooth surface refashioned as a mirror. He saw the top of her head, the push of her bounteous breasts. It was like topography to him. A silence held. Thirteenth floor. He didn’t want to succumb to apologizing. He knew he would be doing a lot of that later, in the room.

Seventeenth floor. When the elevator doors opened, he stepped out with confident strides left, towards his suite. He shuffled through his coat pockets to find the keycard. Room 1726, there. A cleaning lady, Malay again, another deferential Malay with incessant bowing, stepped away as he passed, muttering, ‘Good evening, Datuk Haji.’ The last honorific was particularly ironic. They called him a Haji as if he were truly the religious man he appeared, even as he used their facilities for illicit pleasures.

He reached his door and craned his neck to see the corridor as he grasped the handle and slid the keycard in. His whore had not followed him yet. She was professional like that. His room, when he entered, was spotless. The large bed had been done, probably less than ten minutes ago, and he stepped to the bathroom. Both the suite and bathroom doors were left slightly ajar, to invite his guest in to join him.

In the bathroom, he felt another sudden pang of worry: it was because he saw his reflection. But with the light off there, he first saw a different figure. He saw his father, the real Datuk Haji, a political heavyweight who was as much the Malay warrior before Independence as afterwards. He saw his father frown at him, liquid disapproval causing him a near panic attack.

When his clammy hands reached for the light switch and the room bathed him in light and warmth, the reflection melted into the somewhat more comforting sight of his own face.

He heard the door swing gently open as he washed his hands, staring at himself. He looked like a true Captain of Industry. At nearly fifty, he was still in perfect health, with a body that was more accurately described as

‘sturdy’. His features were solid, and in their own way, handsome. His beard was trimmed just enough, a calculated move to make him appear vaguely religious while unquestionably professional. He had a lot of hair still, in contrast to most of his party’s leaders.

He wiped his face with wet hands. He looked a lot like his father, except for missing the warrior’s icy eyes, the permanent disapproving frown. Again he dispelled the thought as he loosened his tie, hung his coat on the rack, and kicked his shoes off. He stepped towards the bed. Dahlia was already there, waiting for him.

The whore wore a grey skirt from some famous Italian brand that ended sharply at her knees, and her blouse was white and immaculate. She had glossy black high heels that highlighted her beautifully shaped feet, and black stockings like a fabric version of his yellow brick road. To top it off, she wore glasses that magnified the fortitude in her eyes. He sat down beside her.

She looked at him wordlessly, and rotated ever so slightly, one hand placed down between them and balancing her and she placed her right leg on his lap. Her foot fidgeted, and he removed her shoe. ‘No,’ she said, in English, always English, even though English was his much weaker language, ‘Put it back on, and do it again.’

There was a strict precision to this process, and she didn’t let him deviate from it in any way. He rubbed his thumb against her ankle as he slipped her black heel off. He must have done it correctly, as he was rewarded with her kissing down on his clothed shoulder, feeling her hot breath over his shirt.

She withdrew her right leg and proffered her left, one hand tracing over the politician’s back. Her fingernails pressed against the fabric of his shirt. She continued kissing. He continued removing her shoe.

Every act she chose to do was a carefully calculated step in her flawless seduction. Were the politician a more worldly man, he would have compared her grace to a geisha’s. He kissed her toe and received a sharp knock to the back of his neck from her wrist in return. He looked at her, bewildered. ‘Not yet,’ she said, glaring. The good whore giveth and the good whore taketh away: she slid both legs away from him, and no longer kissed his shoulder.

‘Maaf,’ he apologized quickly. In public he was a man of very few apologies. A scandal in Parliament two terms ago as a result of a remark deemed racist had effectively cost him a minister’s post. It wasn’t racist, it was a fact of life, he reasoned. A man must speak with conviction, and never back down. That last saying was his father’s… again. God, why did he have to come down from Heaven to advise me now? he thought, returning his attention to Dahlia.

She had taken to the far end of the bed, propping pillows to support her back. She spread her covered legs but pushed down on the middle edge of her skirt, limiting what he could see. ‘For a whore, you are really…’ But that was the best his English could say. His words faded away. She paid those words no mind.

Still pressing down the hem of her skirt as she spread, a twinkle in her eye, a rare approving one, invited him to come get her. ‘Unbutton my blouse,’

she commanded again. He positioned himself between her legs and leaned forward. It was timid, careful. He started with the top; she only ever let him start with the top. The politician’s fingers no longer had the dexterity of his sketching days, and they groped for the button. He released each button with the sort of precision he knew she wanted, and then with each, she sighed a little. These micro-moans were so soft it seemed as if it were only for her own ears. He was three buttons down when he felt Dahlia’s hands wrapping his neck. She felt his neck, and with thumbs she began to choke him.

He finished unbuttoning, having tugged out the tucked-in portion of her blouse, and now her blouse was no longer tight and precise, but dangling out, releasing those breasts. He thought in Malay, and then in English, that there was no truly accurate word for them in both languages. They were not just breasts, they were more than that. Bosom was too formal. Tits was the closest that he could think of, but that word was too dirty and American, and not a word he would ever think of using.

‘What are you thinking?’

He looked up at her, wrenched away from that distraction. ‘Nothing,’ he assured her.

‘You never think.’ It was the end of the conversation already. She had incredible power in her words; no party leader had that sort of authority. The Prime Minister, all the Prime Ministers in the past, none of them could match up to her sovereign vocal will. The word he thought of, for some reason, was supremasi. Supremacy?

Next she placed both feet on his chest, blocking him. He rubbed the back of her thighs with his hands, feeling light sweat on her skin. He leaned closer but she pushed him back, still. She made a minor striptease as she removed her stockings. Each move was elegant as she writhed to free herself. Her feet dropped, toes catching onto the band on his pants, and with adroitness he had never seen before, even from her, she was able to unzip his pants, her feet doing all the work for him. Her hands moved behind her and slipped under her blouse. She undid her bra, an elegant French piece with laces and frills she wouldn’t let him see or touch, and it slipped right off, falling forward.

The politician looked at his Rolex, but that moment of inattention earned him a brief kick to his chin. He apologized again. ‘Kiss my feet,’ she said, speaking seductively, brushing her feet up against the politician’s face.

He did as she said. It was a strange feeling for him to be treated like this, to be instructed. He kissed up from her legs, up, up, until reaching her moist inner thighs, sweat-slicked, perspiration the only reminder that she was as mortal as he was. As beholden to urges as he was.

He waited for her to instruct him to pleasure her, but she never did.

Without this permission, he seemed to be unable to kiss further, tentatively rubbing where he couldn’t kiss with a thumb. He could smell her, now. She wore dark grey nylon panties similarly laced and frilled as her bra. She still remained stoic and silent.

‘I want to—’ he attempted, before she shot him down with a glare. He kept that gaze for a while, before she prodded him with a foot down against his groin. She probably wanted him to continue, but not progress further. This teasing was just like her.

This went on for another ten minutes. Up and down, up, slightly, then down, slightly, tracing this invisible iron curtain. He knew she liked it, because he could smell her getting heavier with lust, a stronger, more potent, physical scent. At one point, licking her thigh, he even tasted something different, other than the taste of moist flesh and salty sweat. Earthier, more real. Surely it would not be long, the politician thought.

Eventually she relented, two fingers moving the panties aside. He stretched forward, an instinctive motion. He somehow could sense his late father chiding him, though this time not because he was some deviant adulterer, but instead because he was now this servile, obsequious pathetic creature made to follow specific instructions from this whore.

But ayah, he thought, she is not just any woman! She could control anybody if she wanted to. His father shot back an angry, otherworldly retort: Be a man and take what you want, when you want it. When you grovel, you bring disgrace to your so-called achievements, you bring disgrace to your role as a leader of men, head of your family.

He lapped her up when she unthinkingly allowed him, with no other desire than to give her pleasure. He was not actually there; he was arguing with ghosts. If he were there, he would have heard Dahlia’s moans, first starting short and small, and then growing in volume.

His face was full of it, all in it. He faced his father and asked aloud, antagonized, ‘What do you want from me?’

‘More,’ he heard a confident, salacious response, but it came from Dahlia, not his father. This brought him back to where he was. No ghosts were here.

He pulled back, wiping his face. He simply could not go on. Dahlia didn’t look like her usual self anymore, suddenly. She no longer looked flawless and professional. Her hair was slightly untidy, and she was blushing, and she bit her lip and looked… different. She was partially undressed, and so was he. He looked around and no ghosts were here.

He reeled back in horror. ‘Go, just… go.’

‘What?’

‘Please, go,’ he pleaded. He took his wallet out of his pants pocket and pulled out crisp notes. Fifty ringgit. A hundred. Another hundred. Two, three, five, eight hundred. He flicked them her way.

This broke her icy coolness. She was confused, but so was he. ‘You haven’t even…’ she stuttered.

‘I don’t want to.’

A long moment passed, tense between them. She collected the notes from the bed, repositioned her panties. She took her bra and didn’t even ask him for help putting it back on. He just stared at her. She put her shoes back on and walked over to the door. She gave him one last look, and this time he saw some strange vein of pity in there. Pity for who, for him?

When she left, he exhaled. He stared to the ceiling as he lay down in bed. Her scent was strong, and her lasting presence was damp on the covers.

As he stared up, he tried to conjure those ghosts, begging for their approval, that now she was out of the way, they could talk. But no ghosts were here.

No ghosts were here.