hoping to raise her ultimate price. The man, immature in the art of picking up a woman, didn’t have a clue about the game he was getting himself into. He was about to lose his mind with the hors d'oeuvres Helen was “generously”offering, and, being overloaded with hormones and petrodollars, he wanted to indulge himself with the main dish. He extended an offer of one hundred thousand dollars if Helen would join him for a one-week trip to the south shores of the Persian Gulf in his private custom-made 727 Jet. She accepted the offer coquettishly, received the money in advance, and told him she would join him in Kuwait in two days then went to his hotel. Once they arrived in his room in the Continental Hotel, Esmat refused to get naked, only pulled her skirts half up, lay on her back – and let the man receive enough pleasure for his money. Helen never set foot in Kuwait and never saw the Arab’s palace or any other parts of Kuwait.
She would brag about her high value to her other customers often, but kept it a secret from her “tired baby.”
Chapter Four
If the angel of happiness knocks on anyone’s door only once in a lifetime, for Zee-Zee it took place early on a hot August afternoon. While Helen was taking her long beauty nap in her room on the first floor, young and fragile Zee-Zee was restlessly and innocently entertaining herself by trying on some of her old dresses and practicing dance moves in front of a mirror in a secluded room on the third floor. A large window was left open, inviting the cool breeze from the mountain to come in. She was unaware that a young boy in his late teens was in ecstasy, watching and enjoying every curve of her tender body from a window in a house across the street.
She tried on a dress, twirled around, looked at her body in the mirror and bowed to an imaginary audience, and then tried on another one. She would then appear completely nude delighted by watching the movements of her own proportionate body in the mirror, busy playing a sweet guiltless game of youth.
Each of her coquettish glances at the mirror seemed to be a desperate need for a simple response, for the mirror to tell her that she was indeed beautiful. She, whispering, would ask an imaginary tall handsome young man, chocolate-suntanned, dressed in a white silky suit and turquoise-blue shirt, in the mirror, “Do you think I’m pretty, you devil young handsome crazy man?” She would then laughingly reply as if she were the man in the mirror, “Of course, you are, aziz-e man!”
Completely naked, as she twirled around, thinking she was dancing only for the eyes of the imaginary handsome young man in the mirror, her eyes accidentally caught a glimpse of the young man across the street gazing at her. Frozen, she stood in the middle of the room for a few seconds, gazing back at the man. To avoid his sharp hungry eyes, she dove to the floor and remained there motionless for a few long minutes. She felt a rush of anger at first as she listened to the pounding of her heart throbbing in her chest. But it soon gave way to a sense of shame, then eventually to an ambiguous joy and excitement very foreign to her. She crawled to a corner, grabbed a piece of clothing, put it on and bravely went to the window, only to discover that the young man had vanished, evaporated into thin air. She had never seen him before; then again, they had moved to the neighborhood only recently. As she bent to pick up a dress from the floor and before she could complete her loud expressions of disgust, “A coward, thief ...”, she heard a crackling noise. A piece of paper wrapped around a small rock sailed through the window, hit the opposite wall and fell to the floor. She picked it up, opened the paper and read: “Forgive me for looking at you. You must believe me. I couldn't help it. I was just admiring your beauty. How can one stop looking at a beautiful flower? If anybody should be blamed for this intrusion into your privacy it must be you, because you’re so beautiful. How I wish to see you, to speak to you, to be able to touch you, so I can tell myself that you're not a dream, that you are real, as real as a rose in the garden. Your suffering admirer, Faramarz.”
She liked the words. It was the first time someone had expressed tender feelings with such poetic words to her, those beautiful innocent words, so different from the hollow ones she had memorized in her songs’ lyrics. With a sense of pleasure suspended in her mind she went to the window again, but he was gone and with him those piercing hungry eyes. She was no longer angry, only excited, and even elated, and that was all that mattered to her.
She hid her nervousness from her mother and busied herself the rest of that day. She kept quiet through the night and the rest of the following morning. She waited for him in the same room at the same time, and as soon as he appeared at the window, a thrill went through her body. They introduced themselves to each other only with indulgent smiles. Then, in the scorching heat of that summer afternoon, while everyone else slept, they expressed their feelings of interest for one another with unspoken words, and later with messages thrown through their windows. Over days, she returned his many tender love poems with many of her own.
A few weeks later, inevitably, when neither of them could stand being so far apart, they risked it. As Helen snored in a room on the first floor, Zee-Zee opened the front door and let him in; her heart pounded in her chest with excitement. Even before setting foot in Zee-Zee’s house, he knew he was very much in love with her.
Faramarz, a nineteen-year-old, was the son of a wealthy and influential government official. He was a university student, a tall handsome and shy romantic boy.
A combination of fear and anticipation pushed Zee-Zee’s heart rate higher. It was as if she had run non-stop for miles. She felt her heart was about to burst any second. She searched for his hand, held it tight, and tiptoed upstairs to the solitude of her room. The words he had lined up, the many beautiful verses, love poems, and poetic phrases that he had memorized from books to express his feelings, to mesmerize her, jammed up in his dry mouth. He felt a tremor in his heart once he was alone and a few inches from her.
Shyly, unable to even blink, she sat on the edge of the bed, and he sat next to her nervously. He struggled to contain his passion and act properly as he had repeatedly told himself he would do, but soon he lost control. When, with the slow but tenacious journey of his hands, he touched her soft hair, she trembled, turned and submitted her hot swollen lips to his, and those two moist rose-petal lips melted into his. He became the first man who sucked at her tasty neck, soft as satin and smooth as white marble. He undressed her trembling body with his shaking hands. Inhaling the scent between her breasts and kissing them, and then sliding his lips downward intoxicated him enough to lose all his inhibitions. Intoxicated herself, she submitted herself to him without any resistance. Then the non-calculated movements of his fingertips cruised over the curves of her velvet naked body, and he followed the tracks of his touches with gentle kisses. When his hands reached the mounds of her breasts, he licked the sweetness of her soft skin. And then, the sensation of her soft silky pubic hair under his fingers, the wetness, the aroma that he inhaled, drove him to the edge of insanity. They soon became one; under the influence of their desires, euphoric, basking in the tender glow of passion that raced through their tender bodies. The intense ecstasy of their union was license enough to allow them to ignore the possibility of future regret.
After that encounter, it was literarily impossible for him not to visit her almost every afternoon in the sanctuary of her room, which felt like an undisturbed Garden of Eden to both. They had fallen in love even before they became physically intimate, but after a few weeks of lovemaking, when the uncertainties vanished from their hearts they began to carve a future for themselves in their innocent minds as all young lovers do.
The ecstasy they compacted into those three brief months of daily unions was enough to last them a lifetime. But it had to come to an end, and that began to happen when Zee-Zee excitedly told her mother about Faramarz and the fact that she was pregnant. Expecting a volcanic eruption of anger when she broke the news to her mother, she was stunned by Helen’s receptive attitude and later by her joyful reaction. Helen welcomed the relationship provided he would send his parents to formally ask permission to marry her. Happily Zee-Zee mentioned her mother's wishes to Faramarz, who optimistically promised to tell his father immediately.
Intoxicated
