Chapter 13: The Pathetic Revenge
The hotel room’s air was a chilled, scentless void, but Mustafa could still smell the phantom reek of another man’s sweat on his wife’s skin. The prostitute, a tired-looking woman named Laila, lit a cigarette and watched him undress with the detached interest of a mechanic assessing a broken-down car. “Come on, baby, I don’t have all night,” she said, her voice raspy, tapping ash into a plastic cup. His hands, still trembling from the scene in his living room, fumbled with the clasp of her cheap, sequined bra, the memory of Ran’s defiant smirk making his fingers clumsy and weak. He finally got it open, revealing small, slack breasts, but the sight stirred nothing in him, his own cock lying soft and pudgy against his thigh. Laila sighed, a long-suffering exhalation of smoke, and reached down to take him in her rough, practiced hand. She pumped his limp flesh without rhythm or warmth, her other hand checking the time on her phone glowing on the nightstand. “Think of your wife,” she suggested flatly, but all he could think of was Fahad’s dominant growl, the wet sounds from behind the bedroom door, the violent certainty of that other, harder body. A feeble, pathetic twitch was her only reward. “Maybe next time, habibi,” she muttered, extinguishing her cigarette and swinging her legs off the sagging mattress. She dressed with efficient, impersonal speed, the sequins of her top catching the ugly neon glow from the street below. Mustafa lay there, exposed, the stale scent of her perfume and his own failure clinging to the sheets. He heard the door open and shut, the decisive click of the lock a final punctuation on his humiliation. Silence expanded, filled only by the hum of the faulty AC unit. He looked at the damp, wrinkled spot on the sheet where her mouth had briefly, disinterestedly, touched him. He thought of the warm, used condom he’d once held, and the hot, naked claiming he’d witnessed on his couch. A low, animal sound tore from his throat, part sob, part roar of utter negation. He grabbed his own soft, useless flesh and pulled at it, a punishing, frantic tugging that brought only a dull ache. Tears blurred the neon sign’s flicker into a smear of red shame against the dark ceiling. He was, in that cheap room, exactly what Ran saw: a damp spot, an apology, a nothing. The phone on the nightstand buzzed once; it was a message from Ran, a single question mark, a perfect period to his sentence.
Laila, the prostitute, gave a curt, professional sigh and knelt between his splayed legs on the stiff hotel carpet. She took his soft, uncircumcised cock into her mouth without ceremony, her tongue circling the flaccid head with a rhythm that felt clinical, detached. He stared at the water-stained ceiling, trying to conjure Ran’s face but seeing only the arrogant curl of Fahad’s lip as he’d zipped his trousers. Her suction was insistent, a hollowing of her cheeks that should have drawn blood, drawn life, into him, but his flesh remained a lifeless, pathetic weight on her tongue. She worked him for two silent, agonizing minutes, her hand cupping and kneading his balls with a rough familiarity that felt like an inspection. “Nothing, eh?” she finally said, releasing him with a wet pop, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Some men are just empty.” She stood, collected the crumpled bills from the nightstand, and left without another word, the door sighing shut on his silent, naked ruin. The neon glow from the street painted his pallid flesh a sickly red. He reached for the buzzing phone, the single question mark from Ran screaming up at him: “?”. It was not a question of location or concern; it was a taunt, a probe into the hollow she had carved out. He imagined her sending it from their couch, from the very spot where Fahad’s seed had dripped, her thumb tapping the screen with idle cruelty. A corrosive heat, not of desire but of festering shame, finally began to burn in his gut. He drove home through the bleached, pre-dawn streets, the memory of Laila’s disappointed click of the tongue echoing louder than any engine. Ran was awake, silhouetted in the kitchen doorway, drinking a glass of water. “Well?” she asked, her eyes scanning his rumpled clothes, smelling the cheap perfume clinging to him like a confession. He said nothing, walking past her toward the bathroom, but her hand shot out, cold and firm, wrapping around his wrist. “Did you fuck her?” Her voice was low, curious, almost bored. “Could you?” She pulled him into the bedroom, her strength surprising, and pushed him onto the bed he had not shared in weeks. “Show me,” she commanded, unzipping his trousers with ruthless efficiency, her nails scraping his soft stomach. Her cool fingers wrapped around him, stroking with a mimicry of passion that was worse than Laila’s indifference. “This is what you tried to pay for?” she whispered, her face close to his, her breath smelling of wine and another man. “This sad, little thing?” He squeezed his eyes shut, the images of her with Fahad, of her bent over the table, flooding back with nauseating clarity. She mounted him then, forcing his limpness inside her with a brutal, downward grind of her hips, taking what wasn’t offered. “Feel how loose I am for you?” she hissed, rocking slowly, a grotesque parody of intimacy. “He stretched me open so wide you just rattle around in here, like a pea in a cup.” He felt nothing but a smothering, wet heat and the vast, vacant space she described, a cavern another man had forged. A single, hot tear leaked from his clenched eye, tracking through the dust of the Kuwaiti desert on his skin. She laughed, a short, dry sound, and climbed off, leaving him exposed and weeping on the bedspread. “Empty,” she said, echoing the prostitute’s verdict, and went to shower, washing his non-existent touch away.