Asian Heat (11 page)

“And you’re not
that man?”

I grinned. “Not
by a long way,” I said. The waitress brought me the bill and I paid.

As I stood up to
go, she looked confused. “You’re going?”

“I don’t want to
waste your time.”

She pouted. “I
though we could have a drink. In The Huntsman, maybe.”

“You’re serious?”

“I’ve nothing
else to do,” she said. “And I like you.”

She really did.
She liked me. I kept thinking she was going to hit me up for money, but she
didn’t. We went down to the bar and had a few drinks – I was on Carlsberg
and she drank white wine. We had some food – I had fish and chips and she
had Pad Thai. We listened to the band and we talked some more and at eleven
o’clock she leaned over, kissed me on the cheek and whispered in my ear. “I
want you to come home with me.”
 
So
I did.
 
Well, it would have been
rude not to.

She lived in a
small room in a block off Sukhumvit Soi 11. It was a fifteen minute walk from
the Landmark. I’d been in dozens of rooms just like it. It was about thirty
square metres, with a small bathroom at the far end and a balcony where she did
any cooking and hung her washing out to dry. There was a double bed and a small
dressing table, a cheap wooden wardrobe and a small flatscreen television on a
table.
 
But unlike most of the
rooms I’d been in there were no cuddly toys on the bed or pictures of Korean
pop stars plastered on the walls. There were a few framed family photographs by
the bed and a picture of the King above the door.

There was no small
talk. She gave me a towel and pointed at the bathroom door and I went and
showered. Then I lay on the bed and waited for her to shower. She came back
wrapped in a small white towel and lay down next to me. She started kissing me,
pulled off my towel and rolled on top of me. Her body was spectacular. Her
breasts were so perfect that at first I thought they were fake but as I cupped
them I could feel that they were real. Her skin was flawless, not a mark or
blemish anywhere, and touching it was like brushing silk. There was no foreplay
and she didn’t say a word. She just slid down onto me and began moving up and
down, her eyes fixed on mine. I matched my movements to hers but she was going
too slowly so I rolled her over onto her back and began pounding into her. She
laughed and raked my back with her nails, bringing her legs up so that her
knees dug into my waist. I came in less than two minutes and then rolled off,
panting for breath. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

“For being so
quick.”

She laughed again.
“You can take longer the second time,” she said.

She was right,
the second time did take longer. And then I went home. She didn’t ask me stay
the night and she didn’t ask me for money, both plus points. But I didn’t call
her. That wasn’t my style. I wasn’t going to do the chasing.

A week went by
and she didn’t call and then I changed simcards.
 
Three more weeks passed and I had pretty much forgotten
about her when she got in touch through ThaiLoveLinks.
 
“You not want to see me again?” she
said in a message.

I messaged her
back with my new number and she called me straight away.
 
We chatted for about ten minutes and
then she asked me if I wanted to go to her room. I did. She was only wearing a
towel when I got there, and she didn’t ask me to shower, just knelt down in
front of me, unzipped my jeans and took me in her mouth. God, it was the
softest, most amazing, blow-job that I’d ever received, and I had been with
some real professionals in Pattaya.

I thought she was
going to let me come in her mouth but at the last moment she pushed me onto the
bed and mounted me. We came together, then she leant down and kissed me full on
the mouth. “Thank you,” she said.

“You’re crazy,” I
said. “Why did you call me?”
 

“I like you,” she
said.

“But you’re still
looking for a man to take care of you?”

She rolled off
and snuggled up next to me. “Still looking, yes.”

“No luck yet?”

She kissed my
shoulder. “If I have luck, why did I call you?”

She had a point.
It was a stupid question. We lay on the bed together for a while and then she
undressed me and made love to me again. Afterwards I showered and put my
clothes back on and left. She didn’t call me for a month. This time I was on
Skype and I saw her come on line and then she Skyped me. Half an hour later and
I was in her room. That became the pattern for the next six months or so. She’d
call, we’d have great sex, and I’d leave. She never asked me for anything. It
was the perfect arrangement, for me anyway. I was still seeing other girls
– lots of them - but I always looked forward to seeing Nok.

After about six
of these monthly visits, Nok Skyped me and asked me to go around and see her. I
could tell from her voice that there was something wrong, but as soon as I
stepped into her room she pushed me on the bed, ripped off my clothes and
practically raped me. Afterwards, as she lay in my arms, she told me she’d
finally met a man who was going to take care of her.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” she
said, and kissed my hand.

His name was Ray
and he was Australian. He worked out in one of the Gulf States, something to do
with the oil business, she wasn’t sure exactly what. He was divorced with two
grown-up children but he hardly ever saw them.

“How old is he?”
I asked.

“Fifty-seven,”
she said. “But he looks good.”

Fifty-seven? That
meant he was almost thirty-five years older than her. Old enough to be her
grandfather.

She’d met him on
ThaiLoveLinks while he was out in the Gulf. They talked on Skype and the
previous week he’d flown over and spent ten days with her in Phuket. On their
last night together he’d proposed. Actually, it was more of a proposition than
a proposal.
 
Ray wanted to retire
to Thailand, and he wanted someone to spend the rest of his life with.
 
If Nok would marry him, Ray would take
care of her and her family for ever. He’d buy her a house and a car and he’d
make sure her family were looked after. He’d buy farmland for them and a new
house if they needed one.

“He’s buying
you.”

“He’s taking care
of me,” said Nok. “And that’s what I want.”

I didn’t try to
talk her out of it. Why should I? It was her life, and her call.

“So it’s over,
you and me?”

She rolled over
and buried her face in my chest. “I can still see you. If you want.”

“What about Ray?
He’ll be your husband. You’ll be his wife.”

“You can be my
Gik,” she whispered. A Gik is more than a friend, less than a lover. Something
like a friend with benefits.
 
Lots
of Thai girls have a Gik, sometimes more than one.

“Okay” I said.
She kissed me on the lips and her hand slid between my legs and a few minutes
later she was raping me again.
 
Actually, I didn’t put up much of a fight.

Ray was as good
as his word. He started putting thirty thousand baht into her bank account
every month.
 
He bought a field
close to where her mother lived and paid to have it planted with rubber trees.
He bought her mother a brand new Toyota pick-up truck and paid for her sister
to go to a decent school. They got married that summer, in Saraburi. She showed
me the photographs, the two of them dressed in traditional Thai clothes. She
looked beautiful. He looked old and as happy as a pig in shit.
 
He was stick-thin and his hair was grey
and he was only about five-eight.
 
He looked as if a slight breeze would blow him away.

“Do you love
him?” I asked as I looked at the photographs.

“Of course,” she said.
“He takes care of me and my family.” Then she made love to me on her bed, the
wedding pictures strewn across the floor.

Ray was serious
about wanting to retire to Thailand and after he’d married Nok he paid five
million baht for a house on the outskirts of Pattaya, a ten minute drive from
the sea. It was a nice place with four bedrooms and a swimming pool. Nok
proudly showed me photographs of her new home. She quit her job and moved in
with her younger brother who’d moved down from Saraburi, and Ray started paying
for him to go to an international school in Pattaya. She kept paying for her
room in Soi 11. She said she wanted to keep her own place but I liked to think
that it was because she could still see me. The phone calls kept coming. Never
more than once a month, but she was always happy to see me. And the sex got
better and better. I never stayed the night, though. I never broke any of my
golden rules.

The arrangement
continued for more than a year.
 
She’d phone, I’d go around to her room, we’d make love, and I’d
leave.
 
Ray kept paying her and
every two months he flew over and spent two weeks with her.
 
The following summer, he took her to
Australia to meet his mother. She was in her early nineties and was in a
nursing home. It was after meeting his mother that Ray first mentioned that he
wanted a child with Nok.

“You’re not
serious?” I said when she told me.
 
We were in bed together. That’s where we did most of our talking.

“Why not?” she
said. “I can have a baby, easy.”

“With him? He’s
almost sixty.”

‘He’s a good man,
Dave. He takes care of me. If he wants a baby, I can give him one.”

I was lost for
words. Nok was on the pill so I’d never used condoms with her. I’d never
imagined she wanted a child, and certainly not with a man as old as Ray. And to
have a child simply because he was taking care of her was just too horrible to
even contemplate.

As it happens, it
wasn’t as simple as Ray thought. They spent the next six months trying to get
Nok pregnant, but without any luck.
 
She didn’t make me wear a condom, thank God, but she stopped letting me
come inside her. Her timing was amazing – she seemed to know the precise
second when I was about to explode and would deftly slide me out and finish me
off with her hand. I tried to fake her out and pretend to be less excited than
I actually was but she was never fooled.

Ray started
flying back more often, his visits coinciding with Nok’s fertile days, but she
still didn’t fall pregnant.
 
Ray
asked her to go with him to see a specialist at a fertility clinic where they
both underwent all the necessary tests and Ray deposited his sperm.
 
The plan was for them to try IVF.
 
Ray was determined to do whatever it
took to get Nok pregnant. That was when Nok called me and asked me to go around
to her room.

She showed me the
paperwork the clinic had given her. All the reports were in Thai but she
translated them for me. The simple fact was that Ray was firing blanks.
 
Nok was confused because he’d already
fathered two children but the doctor had said it sometimes happened with older
men, their sperm just stopped working. To be honest I was relieved because I
didn’t like the idea of her having his child anyway. By the time the kid was in
its twenties, Ray would be eighty. Or dead.

“I have to give
him a baby,” said Nok. “He wants a baby more than anything in the world. His
own children don’t like him anymore so he says this time he wants to do it
right.”

“If he’s sterile,
it’s not going to happen.”

Nok shook her
head firmly. “No,” she said. “If you help me, it can happen.”

That’s when Nok
told me her plan.
 
She wouldn’t
tell Ray about the problems with his sperm.
 
She’d tell him the clinic was going to give her IVF using
the sperm he’d deposited.
 
But
she’d have sex with me. A lot of sex. Unprotected sex. And as soon as I got her
pregnant she’d tell him the IVF had worked. She and Ray would then bring up the
baby.

At first I
couldn’t believe what she was suggesting, but she serious.
 
“What if he checks the DNA?”

“He won’t. He’s
my husband. I’m his wife. And the baby will be his. And mine.”

“Except it’ll be
mine?”

She shook her
head. “It’ll be his. His name will be on the birth certificate.”

“I’m just the
sperm donor, is that it?”

She grinned
mischievously. “I’ll make the donating fun,” she said. She unbuttoned her
shirt, and I have to say I didn’t need much encouragement. As I threw her on
the bed and entered her she whispered in my ear. “I stopped taking the pill two
weeks ago. Give me a baby, darling.”

Nok was almost
scientific in her approach to getting pregnant. She began taking her
temperature every day and she was able to map her fertility cycle as the clinic
had shown her. On the days she was most fertile she’d call me and I’d turn up
and do what was necessary.
 
Her
love-making was as enthusiastic and energetic as it had always been, but there
was no oral sex because she’d read somewhere that saliva damaged sperm.
 
She made love to me in all the
positions she enjoyed but she made sure I always came the same way – lying
on top of her with her legs wrapped around me. And when I came she’d hug me so
I couldn’t move and she’d keep me inside her as she contracted her muscles,
milking me of every drop.
 
When she
did finally let me go she’d slip a pillow under her backside and stay that way
for fifteen minutes, giving every one of my swimmers a chance to make it to the
egg. And I must have some strong-swimmers because in just under ten weeks she
was pregnant. I was there when she did the test and I heard her shriek from the
bathroom. She came out waving the little plastic stick. “I’m pregnant!” she
said.