Surrender to Mr. X Read Online Free Page A

away from my eyes. These of course were the ones I later sought out when he wasn’t in the house, standing on a chair and books to get them down. It was thus, when I was ten, that I’d first come across a passage by Herodotus about Ishtar’s sacred harlots written two and a half millennia since.
    â€œBabylonian custom,” he wrote, “compels every woman of the land once in her life to sit in the temple of love and have intercourse with some stranger … the men pass and make their choice. The money that passes hands makes the act sacred, but its amount is of no consequence, the woman will never refuse, for that would be sinful. After their intercourse she has made herself holy in the sight of the goddess and goes away to her home; and thereafter there is no bribe however great that will get her. So then the women that are tall and fair are soon free to depart, but the uncomely have long to wait because they cannot fulfill the law; for some of them remain for three years or four.” I liked temple life. My vocation was to serve Ishtar today, and the Hotel Olivier was her temple. I was fair, not short,I was comely enough to return home almost at once, but I preferred to leave it a while.
    Herodotus also observed that many of the temple whores returned home to marry and have children, but that was then. Personally I’m for an academic career when this period of my life is over. I believe later Sumerian texts advise against marrying a professional temple prostitute, since she would tend to be too independent. That figured. “Besides being accustomed to accepting other men, she would make an unsympathetic wife.” Indeed. She would make comparisons and that is hard for a man to take. Joan Bennet, the figment I had created for Alden the cripple’s benefit, was a girl of little experience if not downright virginity. But she was an aspect of me, taking my shift at a sacred duty: I was no professional.
    As I reflected on these things, the tennis star came, but went on and on—with all the stamina of someone used to world championships—until my knees were sore, my mouth began to stiffen and threaten cramp, and my interest waned. I was beginning to be bored. I made him come again, and gasping, removed myself and lay back upon the bed, half hoping he would take matters further to a different and less mechanical conclusion but he did not: his wife was joining him the next day and he probably liked to be faithful. For many men, like President Clinton, sucking doesn’t count. In church car parks of the Democratic mid-west, bumper stickers were displayed during his time of trial taking,in his support, the biblically arguable view that Eatin’ ain’t Cheatin’.
    But now my champion was on top of me, his trousers kicked away, thrusting down into my mouth from a more productive angle, unnaturally huge balls banging my nose, and finally reason abandoned me and I squirmed and gasped as he stretched and jerked and shrieked and more semen spurted at 140 miles an hour, and trickled down my throat and that was—finally—that.
    Freud said there was a vaginal orgasm (superior) and a clitoral one (inferior) but in my experience there is also an oral one, linked more to the imagination, the shock and wonder of the event, than to any physical stimulation. You observe it in the mouth but you feel it in the vagina.
    It seems rude to wash one’s mouth out after such an encounter so I desisted, rearranged my dress, as he did, finished the guided tour—here is the television wand, here the pay-movies card, here the spare pillows; was there anything else you required, sir?—while he retrieved his chinos, looked in his wallet and peeled off two Centre Court tickets for Wimbledon.
    â€œMen’s Finals on June 28th,” he said, handing them to me. “You’ll get fifteen hundred each on eBay. Unless you want to watch me win.” Tickets were in great demand. And he