Velvet Interrogation

But I knew the Israelis were going to bomb the camps—I knew it for a fact far better than did the man from the American embassy who had driven into the camp in his battered-up bus for a too-little, almost-too-late, guilty-conscience act of mercy. The Americans had gotten a conscience—or at least a partial one. But I didn't care. They knew the what, but by using my own resources, I also knew the when—and the specific where—and I'd just about given up hope of finding a way to get out of the camps in time.

The worried American was trying to convince me that the danger was a reality, and I was far beyond him on that. I knew I had to get on that bus, while making him think that I was indecisive.

So, I stood there in the door of his bus and said, "Who would want to go with you? Who trusts you?"

I could tell far better than this man intended that he was interested in me—and interested me in the age-old way. I had used my body before—my young, pretty-boy looks—to get what I wanted, what I needed to survive—from both women and men. And I naturally fell into that stance now, putting a foot up on the step of his bus, leaning into the windshield pillar, and making sure that my shirt was parted and he could get a good view of my boyish chest and my firm abs.

He lowered his voice and whispered to me—only to me, "The Israelis have said they will bomb this camp."

"So who believes the Israelis?" I answered, trying my best to appear unbelieving and not caring. But all along I cared very much, very much indeed. I had to be on this bus.

"Because they usually do what they say they will do," was all he said.

I was desperate to climb on his bus then. He hadn't been able to fill the vehicle from the list he'd brought with him—family members of those who worked for the American government, who the Israelis had grudgingly said could be taken out of the camps as long as they were also taken out of the region and didn't come back. He was offering seats to any who were willing to pretend to be those who wouldn't come back or who couldn't be found in the camps in the short time he could be there. All but the young men, that was—the young men like me. He showed me the list, and I saw I could be dressed to pass as one of the teenage daughters of a family on the list who could not be found in the camps.

But I wanted to be sure he wouldn't suspect anything, and I wanted to be sure that he wanted me—that I could control him. Because I was thinking far beyond getting out of the camps. I had to get somewhere else, beyond the region, so that I could work my way back without being compromised. What I knew could be done, he had to think of himself. I had to hope that he was a quick and clever thinker.

I turned and walked away from the bus. Then I looked back over my shoulder. The man was looking devastated. This was what I wanted to see. He had looked concerned when others had balked at getting on his bus, but he looked panicked and almost crushed when I walked away. I waited for a few minutes—I couldn't wait long for fear he would find someone else to take the seat I could have—but then I returned and gruffly said I was going on the bus, and I moved past him and down the aisle to the rear of the vehicle. When he'd let his mind work it out and taken the risk of dressing me as a woman to get by the checkpoints—guaranteed trouble if I was found out—I knew that I had the control over him that I sought.

When we reached Beirut, it was late at night. Housing had been prearranged for many of the people on the bus—mostly those who had been on the original list. When these people had been left off, the American embassy man drove the rest of us to a small hotel on a side street and told us that rooms were prepared for us there and that someone from the embassy would come to the hotel the next day to start processing us for other refugee camps outside of the region until and unless we could contact relatives who would take us in.

I made sure I was the last one in line to leave the bus. When changing from the girl's clothes, I'd stripped off my shirt, tousled my curly mop of jet-black hair, and pushed my jeans down low on my hips. I stood there, in the dim light coming out of the entry to the hotel, my crotch close to the face of the man sitting behind the wheel.

"Do you really want to just leave me here?" I asked him.

"Someone will come to help you in the morning," he answered. His voice was low, though, almost a groan.

"Do you live alone?" I asked.

"Yes, but—"

"Don't leave me here. Let me come home with you. I have nowhere to go; no one to go to."

He hesitated, and I could see his hands were trembling as they gripped the steering wheel hard. "I can't. Someone will come to help you in the—"

"I would like to make you want to take me to America with you," I murmured in a low voice, coming close to him, letting him smell the scent of me. "I could please you. I know what you want from a young man like me. I can give you pleasure."

I was desperate and being that direct could go several ways. He froze up, though. He didn't get angry and push me off the bus, so I knew he was struggling with himself, but I also knew now that he wouldn't commit here.

"Sorry, I misjudged," I said, trying to make my voice sound contrite. "Give me your address at least. I don't want to just leave without thanking you."

"You needn't thank me."

"Your address, please. Please."

With trembling fingers, he pulled out his wallet and handed me his card, which had his "political officer" title at the embassy on it and a telephone number and a home address in Beirut.

I waited for him to drive away in the bus, but then I didn't even go into the hotel. I started to walk. I knew Beirut well, and I knew I could be at his house, waiting for him by the time he turned the bus over and came home.

* * * *

Something that was said on the other side of the glass—the mention of the American University maybe—brought me back to the interview room. Yes, it was the mention of the American University. Iskandar. Let him not mention Iskandar, a voice was screaming inside me. I could feel the sweat running down my spine, and I knew that Joseph was watching me even when he was being careful to show that he wasn't. If he had any idea that Chet knew of Iskandar, this interview would be over.

* * * *

It had not been as hard back there in Beirut as I thought it would be. The struggle Chet was consumed by in the bus evaporated when we got inside his door.

I was lurking out in front of his building. There was security. The American embassy employees in Beirut had not yet been pulled into their own compound—the terrorist bombings had not reached the level to prompt that quite yet—and so I had to hang around across the street, in the shadows of an alley. When the taxi pulled up in front of the building, I started to walk as soon as the American was pulling out his wallet to pay the taxi driver. So, I was there at his elbow when he turned toward the entrance of the building and the taxi was pulling away.

"You," he said.

"Yes, me. I don't care if I can't stay, but I want you. I want to make love to you. I want to fuck you. You saved my life, and I want to be with you, to thank you and celebrate with you. Take me inside, or go with me to a hotel. Just don't say no to me."

He stood there for the longest moment, losing his internal battle; then he raised his voice, no doubt for the benefit of the two guards standing near his front door. "Well, if the paperwork won't wait for tomorrow, I guess you'd best come in. And as you've found no hotel and the work will take half the night, I'll make up the guest room for you." The latter evidently was to explain the backpack I was carrying.

As we passed them, one of the guards sniggered—and as I just stayed there from that point, the guards obviously figured out what was what. But I didn't care—and after I fucked him, Chet didn't seem to care either.

He barely was able to get the door unlocked, he was trembling so hard, and so, after we'd gotten inside and the door was shut, I sank in front of him and unzipped and pulled away his trousers and sucked him off until his knees went to jelly and his groans subsided into whimpers—and there was no room for retreat or indecision. And then I took him to bed and fucked the stuffing out of him, slicing my hard cock into the softness of him again and again, with him melting and sobbing like he hadn't had any for years. He wanted to do it in the guest room, but I didn't give him even that—I needed to establish full control as quickly and as totally as possible. We fucked in his bed, so that it would be me who made the decision of leaving if I wanted to. But after the first fuck, I didn't want to leave him—and he didn't want me to leave him either.

I never relented in my campaign for him to take me to the States. When he wouldn't commit, I told him it was all that my family wanted me to do—to get out of the dangers of the life of a young Palestinian man in the Middle East. When he indignantly pointed out that I'd told him I had no family now—that they had died in the bombing of the camps the day after he saved me—I used that opening to spin a tale of hardscrabble existence that forced me to lie and use my body and to do whatever else it took to escape the region.

"You used me for sex too," I said to him in anger. "I have no choice but to give my body to men to survive. But you had a choice in taking advantage of me, of using my body for your pleasure."

"I am not using you," he said, with a choked voice. "I would never use you. I . . ."

He couldn't bring himself to say it, but we both knew he wanted to say that he loved me. I took him to bed and fucked him tenderly then. I didn't say it either, but I conveyed it in bed. We didn't fuck; we made love. I made love to his body with my body. That was the way to get around him from the very beginning—to fuck him—to make love to him. He needed someone to fuck him so bad.

I put the burden on him. If he would not sponsor me, would not protect me, I would be dead within months. He lived here; he knew that part wasn't a lie. I only had to keep giving him fuckings that he moaned for to win him over to being as anxious as I was to gain my passage to the States.

"You will have to be someone of value to those in the States, then," he said on the day that he caved in and said he'd try to take me out of the region. "Do you have a college education? What skills do you have?"

I lied. I told him I hadn't been to the university. I had, but I couldn't tell him which university that was. The questions then would be endless. "And I have no skills that I know of," I answered.

"You speak English very well," he said. "What other languages do you speak?"

"Arabic, of course. And Hebrew. I've had to learn Hebrew to figure out what the soldiers wanted me to do fast enough that they didn't shoot me. Some of them just wanted me to move out of their sight. But some of them wanted me to go on my knees and take their cocks in my mouth. Israeli soldiers are no different from any other nation's soldiers. Did I tell you how I started with men? Did I tell of the unit of Israeli soldiers who grabbed me in the rubble of my village and forced me behind a wall and stripped me and thrust their big—?"

"Languages, Nabil," he had said. "It's impressive and is a foundation if you speak Arabic and Hebrew as well as you speak English. Any others?"

"A smattering of Farsi," I said—although it was more than a smattering, and I wasn't about to tell this American of my time in Iran. "And some German. A German merchant picked me up off the side of a road, and the language was one of many things that man taught me."

"Umm, I can imagine," he had said, looking a bit exasperated.

"You have no complaints at how good the head is I give you," I had retorted with a smile. "You can thank the German merchant for that. He taught about, what do you call them? Blow jobs?"

"Yes, well, if I can get you into the American University here in Beirut, will you study languages? With good language skills, you'll have a usable skill in the States. And I know people there who can get you work."

And thus began my studies at the American University of Beirut, which progressed rapidly, not least because, unknown to Chet, I was retracing studies I had already accomplished. He—and my professors—just thought I was an incredibly quick study in languages.

When the bombings of diplomatic facilities started in earnest in Beirut, Chet had to move into an embassy compound—and I moved into the single room of a dormitory at American University. Still, we met frequently enough for me to continue to hold sway over him with my cock.

I almost lost him then, though. But in the end, that little slip worked to my advantage. Shortly after making my way to Beirut and getting settled with Chet, I was able to make contact with my masters—Joseph's cadre—who were surprised and pleased to learn that I had escaped the camps before the Israelis had wiped them out. They were always quick to make demands on what I was to do for them, but rarely as quick and clever to extract me from danger. The Palestinian camps incident was not the first in which they had left me in danger's way to figure out my own escape. My masters approved my plans to try to get to the States and said they would give me what help they could. Even then, though, Joseph cautioned me about the American—that I couldn't let him know too much. We would use him, but that he was expendable if he became a danger to us. And even then I was able to give Joseph pause to consider how dangerous it would be to eliminate an American diplomat in the Middle East.

At no time did I tell Joseph, though, that the sway I held over the American diplomat was playing on his sexual need for men. In fact, what I told Joseph as part of how I influenced the American is that I provided him with girls to fuck. Joseph never questioned that.

I was assigned a contact, Iskandar, nominally another student at the American University. We did not become close friends—Joseph didn't want that—but we had to meet in private occasionally, for me to report what I had learned from being close to the American embassy political officer and for Iskandar to tell me what other questions Joseph and his people had.

I panicked that day I saw Chet arriving at the front door of my dorm and Iskandar was sitting on my bed, giving me instructions. There had to be a reason that Iskandar was there other than the true one.

By the time Chet reached my door, I had Iskandar's pants off and my cock half way up his channel, as he cried and groaned, making all of the sounds of a surprised and compromised virgin that he very well might have been—at least in the way I was using him. I was stretched along Iskandar's side, facing away from the door and lifting his leg—facing him away from the doorway as well as I could—my pelvis in relentless motion, my cock sinking deeper, and Iskandar moaning for me to go slower, give him more time, as I sensed Chet standing in the doorway. But only for a few moments. And then he was gone.

When I was sure we were alone, I told Iskandar that I was sorry—but that I could think of no other way to avoid an encounter where Chet could see him better and start to wonder who he was—and began to pull out of his ass. But Iskandar continued to moan and clutched at me.

"No, please, no. Don't stop now," he growled. And so I didn't, thereby adding complication to my life.

Later I went to Chet, knowing there would be fireworks, but having to pretend like I had no idea what he'd seen. There were no fireworks, but Chet was distant and wouldn't let me bed him. I asked him what the problem was, and he said that we would have to stop seeing each other, that security was getting too tight, that he couldn't afford being with me anymore. I cried for him and told him I couldn't live without him—but all along I knew this had gone too far, that I held sway over him, that it was he who could not live without me. And I was right, less than a week later he was at my dorm door again, begging to be fucked.

Then Chet got a new assignment. He was going to the Sudan, not back to Washington. By this time, my masters were very interested in my going to the States and continuing to feed them information I managed to obtain through my connections with Chet—and they didn't care about the Sudan whatsoever.

I never could be sure, but the bomb that went off in the office next to Chet's in the embassy and that wounded him slightly and was accompanied by the release of flyers accusing him of being an American intelligence agent always seemed much too convenient to me. I never directly asked Joseph who exactly was behind these events, and he never gave the indication that I could ask him. I also wondered if there was any truth to the charge that Chet was working as an intelligence agent, that his political attaché title was a cover. If so, we both were walking a higher tightrope than I'd thought.

But the bomb, and Chet's minor wound, and the charges of his affiliation with U.S. intelligence put him right where Joseph's cadre wanted him—on his way back to a Washington assignment and, ultimately his early retirement from the Foreign Service, and with his promise that he would send for me as soon as he could get my green card paperwork done.

Right at the moment, though, right here across the glass from the interview room, this memory did not comfort me. There were two worrying threads. Was Chet really an intelligence officer in Beirut and thus as potentially using me as I was him—and did Joseph know of this? And, especially if that was true, did Chet know more of Iskandar than that brief voyeuristic moment in my dorm room when he saw us fucking? Did Chet take steps to learn any more about Iskandar—out of jealousy or curiosity or professional interest? If he did, and if he now even mentioned Iskandar's name—or even indirectly, Iskandar's existence—I hadn't the slightest doubt that Joseph would bring the interview to an abrupt and bloody close.

Chapter Four: Chet

I'd had casual sex with men before Nabil entered my life. I was divorced because my ex had enjoyed a ten-year affair with her boss and I had got fed up with being the cuckold just because it enhanced her career. And in all that time, there had never been another woman for me. I'd hoped she'd stop it one day. So, when I was so needy I had to have it, it had been casual, anonymous male sex with no strings. I'd never imagined living with a man or wanting more than that, though.

Nabil just moved himself in, and I couldn't tell him to leave. I was infatuated with him. And instead of being lonely and alone, my life was suddenly filled with young, vibrant, beautiful him. I had no children; my wife's career had been too important to her to make room for them when there had still been time. Now I was unencumbered, confused, and in lust.

I didn't want people thinking there was anything between Nabil and me, even though there was, and neither did he. I took to acting as if he was my son or nephew or something who had come from the States to live with me while he studied languages at the American University of Beirut. I made Nabil dress conservatively and tried to make him what I'd have wanted a son to be like. And in public I tried to behave as I imagined men behaved with their sons. I imagined it fooled people, and maybe it did. People occasionally remarked to me what a fine son I had. I was also dark haired with dark brown eyes.

On rare occasions Nabil would bring friends home from the university and take them into "his" room, the guest room that was never slept in, rather than in the bed in the master bedroom we shared. I insisted on this, on my bed being just for us. There were men and women friends, and I would disappear to read or do paperwork and act like it was normal. I heard him tell them I was a member of his extended family, from America. His friends were all from well-off and influential Beirut families, and a few times we were even asked to their homes, and we went together. Even then he was building his support base.