Black Sheep Pt. 05

Hey, everyone. Thanks for patiently waiting for this chapter. I've read all the comments and I'm glad some of you are especially critical, it helps me examine my characters to see where I could improve.

This chapter is just going to be Henry because I felt that the story needed some more background on the kind of relationship he had with Ishtar. Hopefully the next chapter won't take as long as this one did.

Thanks for all the support. Hope you all enjoy it.

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CHAPTER 5: HENRY

As soon as I left Ishtar's place I made my way to Ben's—he was on old friend I met in East Africa five years ago. He was now married, settled down with kids and everything. He was supposed to be teaching science at one of the inner city schools. As soon as I told him I was back in the States he wanted to meet up. Now that I'd evicted myself out of the hotel and didn't have a place to stay, he and his wife offered their couch for me while I was still working on my travel documents and permit extension.

I mean, I could have continued to stay at the hotel with my mother and also continued to help my brother with his wedding preparations, but I knew that was going to blow up in my face pretty soon because I wouldn't be able to pretend anymore.

I couldn't be around Ishtar and not bury my nose in her neck to inhale the scent of her perfume. I couldn't continue to watch her in Christopher's arms, kissing him, and Lord knows what else she did to him when no one was around. So I left a note for my mother telling her that I needed to rush away, and that was that. All I needed to do was make sure that I didn't run into her or Christopher for the rest of the time I was still in New York, which would be a week or so.

At least I said goodbye to Ishtar. It hurt like hell, and there were times when I almost turned around so I could beg her to come with me, but I knew she'd say no and I wasn't sure I could take her rejection again. I'd probably end up ruining her wedding out of spite.

I tried to get her out of my mind countless times. But the only thing I ended up doing was thinking about her and the past we shared. It was like one of those thought experiments where someone tells you not to think of something, like an elephant, and your mind immediately starts thinking about all kinds of elephants—pink elephants, baby elephants, elephants in the Serengeti, elephants in fantasy movies where they're used as weapons, elephants being poached—basically, every kind of elephant there is. It was exactly like that.

I kept telling myself: "Look towards the future, Henry, because you've lost her again and this time you're not getting her back." That didn't help, either. If anything, it made me feel worse.

She was going to marry my brother. That was that and there was nothing I could do about it. But every time I thought about the two of them together...God, I felt like I was losing my mind. I almost turned right back around a few times. Because, I reasoned to myself, if we fucked just one more time she would remember how good it could get between us.

Sure, we'd get in some kind of stupid fight as soon as I came inside her. It was always about money. She hated it whenever I spent any kind of money on her. Sometimes I think she just didn't want to feel like she owed me anything, because for some reason she never wanted to belong to me. I never fully figured out why at the time but it kind of stung whenever I got that feeling, especially since I made it clear that that wasn't what I was trying to do.

I know I'm a dick, I can say that now, especially with half the crazy shit I did after leaving home, yet for some reason I hated the idea that that was how Ishtar saw me. I realized that she thought I was trying to buy her or some crazy shit like that, which, of course, made me try even harder to show her that money wasn't a huge deal to me; which, of course, made her reject the money even more, even when she needed it to fix all the broken things that were always getting broken in that shitty apartment of hers.

But we'd also get back to fucking some more and everything would be fine. She would crawl into my arms and I'd feed her some hippie vegan salad we got from down the road. She'd fall asleep in my arms, with her head resting against my torso and my arm wrapped around her waist. At some point around the middle of the night she would turn around, back her ass onto my dick and gently fuck herself.

I remember one time when that exact scenario happened. We started by fucking in the hallway of her building. Granted, it was two in the morning and we figured no one would be around to see us. I'd been finger fucking her in the backseat of the cab (while at the same time trying to pretend that we weren't doing anything out of the ordinary), so by the time we were in the hallway she was literally begging me to fuck her against the wall. Honestly, I was turned on by the idea so I gladly obliged her.

I turned her around, slid her panties down, pulled up her dress, and slid my cock into her. Her wet pussy was my cock's home; I knew I was pussy whipped by then. She moaned very loudly and said: "Fuck, Linc, you feel so good inside me."

She immediately started thrusting her hips backwards, driving my cock deep into her, and I obliged her need by meeting her thrust with my own. I grabbed her hips with my hands because at the rate she was going, I was going to cum all over her ass in only a few seconds. I needed to steady her a little. Of course she protested because once she got dick inside her she just couldn't get enough of it. "Slow down," I commanded.

Again, she moaned in protest. She said: "Okay, okay, I'll slow down if you just shut up and fuck me." Reaching out her right arm and grabbing my head so I could nuzzle her neck, she begged: "Please just make me cum."

"You're not allowed to cum right now, okay."

"But I want to, please, uh...please..."

"Your wish is my command."

I thrust deeper into her, harder, a little bit faster—because that was what she kept asking for. I briefly relinquished my hold of her ass and moved my hands through her dress, up and up until I was massaging her tits. She really loved that. "Oh fuck, Linc, don't ever stop fucking me," she moaned, speeding up her thrusts. "Please don't stop. Please don't stop," she repeated over and over again.

I think I saw one of her neighbors open a little crack in their door so they could see who was perverted enough to fuck in the hallway. I'm sure we looked like a scene from a porn movie: with Ishtar's arms planted against the wall, her dress bunched up above her hips, her legs spread wide, and some guy pounding into her from behind like she was a street walker. Being the show-off that I was, I asked Ishtar: "What don't you want me to stop doing?"

She was close to cumming at that point, so her breath was erratic and most of her words incoherent. Placing her hand over mine and guiding them back to her ass, she said, "Please don't stop fucking me. I...uh, uh, um..."

"What is it, my little nymph?"

To be honest, I was enjoying torturing her like that because I intentionally thrust deeper every time she was about to finish her sentence. And when she was just about to catch her breath, I withdrew my cock from her and left only the tip inside her. She tried to back into me, to fuck herself the way she always did whenever I played that game with her. But I pulled away and her sweet hole kept missing, so every time she moaned with both anticipation and frustration, I slid in by just a little bit and she rewarded herself by moaning out another word.

"I," she tried to swallow, "I uh...love your dick," she finally finished.

"Why do you love it?"

More moans, more backing up her ass to fuck herself on my dick until at last she could manage to whisper: "It's so big, so hard, so uh...so goood. Uh, uh, uh..."

That was it, that undid me because the next thing I knew I was matching her very erratic pace. I didn't care who was watching us at the point. And to be honest I couldn't exactly control myself. The feeling of her tight pussy around my dick was driving me crazy. When I looked down at us I was wildly more turned on by the vision of my dick sliding in and out of her, by her pussy gladly welcoming every inch I had to offer. And every time my dick slid back out, it was creamed with more of her juices. I knew I was going to cum at any moment.

"Are you on birth control?" I asked her.

"Yeah, yeah," it all came out as a moan. "Oh yes!"

That was the first time I came into her. Her pussy squeezed every drop it could of my cum; the leftovers ran on her inner thighs. For some reason that excited me more because in some primal way, I felt like I marked her with my cum. She trailed her index finger on the stream on her leg, wiped everything up, and licked it without a second thought. Still breathless, she turned around to look at me. She was trying to smile but at the same time, trying to catch her breath. She was also trying to say something but instead she just kept closing her eyes and giggling.

I gently swept away a strand of damp hair from her face and tucked it behind her left ear. Although I was also breathless, I was better at expressing myself; so I smiled and rested my forehead against hers. "I think one of your neighbors is spying on you," I whispered.

She suddenly regained her senses. "Shit, Linc, you're gonna get me kicked out." She pulled up her panties, wiggled down her dress, and held my hand to lead me into her apartment. "Shit!"

"Good. That means you can finally leave this shitty place and crash at my place."

She slammed the door for some reason, and I could tell her mood had changed because when she spoke she was no longer my playful little nymph. "You know I can't do that, Linc," she said, letting go of my hand and taking off her shoes.

By then I was sure we weren't going in for round two, so I zipped my pants and followed her into her bedroom. "Why not?" I asked.

"Because," she sighed impatiently and flung her hands into the air. "Because I can't just do that."

"Why not?"

She turned around to look at me and I could immediately tell that she was getting more and more pissed by the second. "You actually want me to move in with you?"

The last time I considered moving in with a woman was when I was still dating Crystal. I figured that we would get married one day; I mean, she was a pretty decent human being and most of the time I caught myself wondering what she was doing with me; but my dad ruined the chances of that when he released her nudes. It had taken me and Crystal roughly two years to get to that point in our relationship, and we both worried that we'd grow tired of each other. Still, we were willing to do it to see how our relationship would survive.

Maybe that should have been a clue—the fact that we both saw it as something we were 'willing to do to see if the relationship would survive.' We should have known that maybe things wouldn't work out so well. At the end of it all I felt like I could never do that sort of thing with any other woman, until a few months later when I met Ishtar and she made me feel all kinds of stupid clichés that I didn't even know how to explain.

It wasn't just that I wanted to move in with Ishtar, or as I put, that I just wanted her to 'crash at my loft while she was looking for something better.' Fuck, all these years later and I still don't know how to explain it. But I'll try anyway. Here's the best I can do, and this is what I told her when she asked me about whether I really wanted her at my place. Well, I only told her some of it because I didn't want to scare her away:

The night we met, when she fucked my brains out and created the before-and-after effect I told you about, that was supposed to be my last night in New York. I was on my way to Brazil, or somewhere in South America, it didn't really matter as long as there'd be a beach, a few night clubs, and beautiful women who weren't looking for a relationship.

But then I met Ishtar, a few minutes later we were fucking against a wall in some overcrowded club, and twelve hours later I was missing my flight because my dick was buried deep down her throat, because she said: "This is the best birthday gift I've ever received." Luckily, I'd signed the lease for the loft on a whim only a few days earlier, so I still had a place to stay.

My life was spiraling into some kind of darkness. I was angry with my family, disappointed with how little potential I turned out to have, and all around just feeling sorry for myself. I'd tried ecstasy for the first time only a few nights before I met Ishtar.

I mean, I wasn't an addict or anything like that, but I liked the way it made me feel. And I mean, I still smoke some weed every now and then because it helps me relax when I'm all tensed up. But the feeling I got with ecstasy was very different, and the truth was that I liked it because it helped me forget all the crazy shit happening in my life. Even if that relief was brief, it was still worth it.

Call it lust or whatever, but every time I was inside Ishtar, every time she nibbled the tip of my cock with her tongue until I felt like I was going to explode, I felt like I was fucking high. But Ishtar was better, oh so fucking better. My dick craved her all the time. And she had this way of making me feel calm without doing anything.

Plus, she didn't know me or any of my failures, or the people I'd disappointed, so I felt like I never had to prove anything with her. I could simply be myself and she was completely okay with that. I know I sound like a parasite, but I needed that energy in my life. I needed her. It wasn't like with Crystal when I was 'willing to live with her to see how it would all end up.' Without even realizing it, I'd become addicted to Ishtar to the point where I wanted to constantly be around her.

So what did I actually say when I answered her question? Well, as could be expected, I was a total dick about it. "I mean, we might as well do it," I said. "We enjoy each other's company, right? I'm always here, anyway. My neighborhood is way safer. You'd save a lot of money. And besides, I really don't understand what the big deal is with you and this place."

"The big deal with me and this place is that it's mine. And the reason you're always here is because this side is easier for me to get to school and you always want to fuck. Jeez, I don't force you to be here, you know."

Rolling her eyes pretty far into her head, she stomped all the way to the bedroom. Still dumbfounded as to how I could have possibly offended her, I followed her. "Hey, what did I say?" I tried to hold her hand but she just slapped it away. "Ishtar," I tried again, "what did I say that got you like this?"

"Everything!"

"That doesn't really answer me."

"I don't expect you to understand why I choose to be here. I can't just suddenly depend on you. You're just a passer-by, remember. You can't just fuck me and then pay for me."

"That's not what I was saying..."

"You didn't have to..."

"Ishtar, you're not making any sense..."

"You're not my boyfriend, Linc. You're just a guy I fuck sometimes. I can't just suddenly live with you. I know my poverty makes you uncomfortable..."

At the time, I was in denial about which of the things she'd just said had hurt me the most, so I simply jumped on everything. "I know I'm not your boyfriend and that I'm just some guy you fuck. And when the fuck did I say your poverty made me uncomfortable?"

"You don't have to say it."

"So now you're a fucking mind reader?" At that point my voice was getting higher. To match it, Ishtar raised hers as well.

"Hey, don't raise your fucking voice at me."

"You're raising yours at me."

"I'm not, and you're fucking deflecting right now. Gosh, you're always trying to throw money at me, either because you feel sorry for me or you're rewarding me for sucking your dick. And when I mention it you try to brush it off like it's nothing, like it doesn't matter. Well, it does. It matters to me and it should matter to you."

"Why should it matter? I mean, I'm not your boyfriend, right? I'm just some random guy you fuck sometimes. So tell me why the fuck it should matter." I felt terrible as soon as the words left my mouth because her face displayed a myriad of wild emotions, chief among which was some kind of pain. I immediately tried to reverse the situation by walking over to her, to make amends before the whole thing escalated into something even more confusing and nonsensical.

"Ishtar, please..."

She wouldn't hear any of it. She briskly brushed past me while muttering: "Fuck you, Linc! Get the fuck out of my shitty apartment. I know you don't want to be here, anyway, so just go."

I didn't even know how we'd gotten to that point, why we were fighting, or why I didn't just leave like she told me to. I really should have left because firstly, we weren't exactly in a relationship, and secondly, I wasn't even looking for any kind of relationship. I mean, she didn't even know my real name and for some stupid reason I was still roaming around her apartment trying to resolve an argument that I honestly didn't understand.

I lowered my voice and followed her to the kitchen area, where she was furiously opening and closing drawers and cupboards, and furiously rearranging her cutlery and dishes. For the millionth time, I noticed how cheap everything was, but also how clean and well-looked after it was. Also, because most of it belonged to Ishtar, everything was brightly colored.

Every plate and cup and glass was unique in color and design, such that it looked like instead of buying them, she'd simply collected them from memorable moments. Her favourite was a light green bowl that had the words 'Just because you're crazy, doesn't mean you're wrong' written inside. Her dad had apparently given it to her after some kids bullied her at the playground. From what I gathered, the other kids didn't like her clothes (because they were old and patchy). She'd had that plate since she was eight. I couldn't remember owning anything for that long.

When I remembered that story I realized I probably seemed like an entitled asshole to her. "Ishtar, please. I'm sorry." I could tell that she didn't want me to touch her or be anywhere near her, so I kept a few inches between us. Also, whenever I stood too close to her I simply couldn't think straight. I didn't want to mess up my apology because even though I didn't particularly understand it, I could tell that her annoyance with me was valid, and that her feelings were rooted in something I needed to understand.

She continued to rearrange the kitchen; when she was done putting stuff in one place she'd go right back to putting it back where she took it, over and over again, until, I suspect, she didn't know where she'd gotten the stuff in the first place. All through that madness, she kept her mouth firmly shut.

"Do you really want me to go?" I asked.

She immediately stopped what she was doing. Her face looked like she was about to cry. She nervously bit her lower lip and shook her head.

"I want to hug you. Can I do that?"

She nodded. Just as soon as she did I briskly closed the distance between us and engulfed her in my arms. Suddenly, it didn't feel right to discuss who was whose boyfriend. There was still an awkward kind of tension between us about that. Still, I wanted us to talk about the money issue because it always came up. I briefly buried my face in her hair...gosh, she smelled so good. Anyway, I had to whisper by then because I didn't want to disrupt the peace we'd arrived at. "I can tell you right now that you're absolutely wrong about one thing," I said.

"Please don't start this again, Linc"

"Don't you want to know what it is?"

"Only if it won't get us into another fight."