Left hand down the wet briefs, pressing firmly against my aching cunt. I thrust my hips hard against my fingers and moaned.
In my mind, Arvo was fucking me from behind, grasping my hair, pushing my face into the mattress. Bringing us both to the limits of filthy pleasure.
I wanted it to be real so fucking bad.
CHAPTER 17
ZEPHYR
For reasons beyond understanding, there was an actual glass-box payphone plonked down at Slip 18 on the western pier at Williams Maritime’s dock in Tangier Med. That was my one point of connection from Tangier to Stormcloud.
On my first day at Tangier Med, I hauled over to a hanut in town and bought, like, twenty prepaid phone cards. And every night, I dialed forty numbers into the payphone and made a call to Arvo’s room to get the latest news from Stormcloud. To hear him tell it, Sol had mostly stopped hiding his contempt. He would regularly disappear from campus, coincidentally during the same time that Dean Schmidt was gone.
Every call, I had to talk Arvo out of ripping Sol’s fingernails out with pliers. Things were falling apart in my absence.
I was still happy to have Arvo running the show while I saw to the docks. This situation had clarified shit for me. You can’t have two equal lieutenants. One will always be more loyal. One will turn on you sooner or later.
Caesar learned this with Pompey. Lenin with Trotsky. You had to be ready for the betrayal and have the backbone to knife the motherfucker before he killed you. I wasn’t prepared to cut Sol’s throat yet, but inside, I accepted it would happen sooner or later. I just needed to reconcile that to myself.
In that regard, being exiled on a commercial dock in northern Africa was a blessing of sorts. It allowed me distance from the Stormcloud drama. It helped me analyze the flaws in my leadership and determine solutions.
It also freed me from the distraction of Biba Quinn. After I’d hopped on my dad’s Cessna two weeks ago, I’d told myself I would not entertain the idea of speaking with Biba until shit was in order at Tangier Med.
When I’d arrived at the dock, it was pandemonium. Guys were running around shouting to each other in twenty different languages. Half the cranes were dead still. With a little supplemental help, I’d cleared some of the shipping congestion. In a few more weeks, I might be able to have things running like normal, which would make Dad happy and buy my ticket back to school.
So it was at the end of week two, with some of the slips actually vacant, that I decided to reward myself with a call to Biba on the payphone at Slip 18.
The sun was on the cusp of setting. Already the marina was illuminated with hundreds of white streetlamps and extra-powerful lights on the cranes. I dialed the code on the back of my scratch-off phone card and followed with Biba’s number.
The call had to be done at the payphone, just like my calls with Arvo. My relationship with her was just as confidential, at least as far as my family was concerned.
After an endless series of clicks and chirps, it started ringing.
When Dad had caught wind of Biba’s arrival at Stormcloud, he’d made a point to take me aside and warn me to steer clear of her.
Quinns cannot be trusted, he’d said. They had interfered with Williams business in the past, and they would do so again.
I had agreed with him wholeheartedly. I’d made a point of scorching her the moment she arrived on campus. It was a thing of beauty, honestly. We’d isolated her, doused her in piss, and made every waking moment of her life miserable. To top it off, I’d torched whatever school-kid courtship she and Theo had in the most fun way possible, making her gargle my cock at the Equinox Ball. That should have shattered her past the point of reassembly.
Turns out I didn’t know Biba Quinn.
She was the most resilient, unyielding chick I’d ever seen. She’d busted my balls from day one and never let up. That should have pissed me off, but it didn’t. It intrigued me.
More than that, it turned me the fuck on.
Still ringing.
Dad would lose his mind if he knew the girl sharing my bed was a Quinn. He detested that family. It was always a matter of them versus us.
The Williams were doers. We built an empire and had a responsibility to expand it.
The Quinns were parasites. They tried to destroy great men like us because they were incapable of accomplishing anything in their own lives.
That was the line I’d received from an early age, but Biba Quinn didn’t seem to fit this description. She had more steel in her spine than most of the men in my family. I could easily see how she would piss off my dad. But goddamn if I didn’t go to sleep each night wishing she was in bed with me.
No answer. Fucking weird.
I dialed again and waited. In the distance, I could see the old stone structures of the casbah, the ziggurats and domes. Purple and blue lights flashed in the windows of discotheques.