The Fix
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The light from the street lamps shone on the dark puddles 
on the damp pavement. A fine drizzle continued to fall, 
dampening Martin's spectacles as he strode along the 
forbidding streets. It wasn't really the night for a stroll. And 
this wasn't a part of town where a man would be wandering 
for the sights or the restful ambience. But Martin was a 
man on a mission. And this was the best part of town to be. 

He wasn't alone. Resting by lamp posts, or in the doorways 
of shuttered shops, or in the shadow of hedges, he could see 
the occasional silhouette of women, dressed provocatively, 
frequently smoking, and eyeing him with rather less 
reserve than how he eyed them. Martin shivered. Did he 
have to? he wondered. But then, of course, why else would 
anyone choose to come out to this part of town?

In the nearly fifty years of his life, the usual pleasures of 
marriage or children had somehow eluded him. He had 
tried. God! He'd tried! But it just hadn't been his destiny. 
Women just didn't take to him somehow. And the chances 
were getting fewer, as his hair thinned, his paunch grew 
larger and his future shrank ahead of him. And it wasn't 
just romance that had eluded him. In everything he did, he 
knew that he had under-achieved. He wasn't one of life's 
winners. He'd never got the promotions he'd wanted. At 
least not until so late it was more a recognition of his 
seniority and patience than any native ability. Time and 
time again, he'd seen younger men leapfrog ahead of him. 
For them advancement, romance, marriage and respect just 
came naturally.

But not to him. He had no exciting past to reflect on, no 
youthful excesses to regret, nothing in his life that he could 
positively identify as an achievement for which he could be 
the envy of others. But he was a man. And he had needs 
the same as any other man. And if they weren't to come to 
him effortlessly through the exercise of his charm and 
personality, then they would have to come to him the only 
other way. And that was by the exchange of dollars and 
cents.

Prostitutes had become his release. In fact, they almost 
become his chief hobby. The main source of pleasure in his 
life. Something he would plan in advance and savour the 
prospect. Something to reflect on after the event and 
inevitably about which to feel some degree of shame. But 
always something ultimately more satisfying and more 
exciting than downloading images off the Internet, poring 
through glossy magazines or watching women in 
improbable ecstasy on DVDs. The feel of real warm flesh 
against his own skin, his penis tugged and pulled and 
sucked, and then sometimes the pleasure of penetration 
(always a little more expensive and that much more to be 
cherished) as his prick was eased into the condom the girls 
always thoughtfully supplied and then into the warm liquid 
embrace of the two fleshy lower lips. He only regretted that 
he so rarely tasted the lips on the girls' mouths. But that 
was an intimacy they always denied him.

Martin strode along, his eyes darting nervously about as he 
evaluated the women on display. Part of him actually felt 
quite sorry for them. It couldn't be much fun to be standing 
around in the evening drizzle, waiting for cars to slow 
down and pick them up. And they really weren't dressed 
for the weather. The skirts were so very short, the tops so 
very brief, the heels so tottering and precipitous. And the 
faces. Sometimes so thick with make-up that it was 
difficult to imagine what the actual features underneath 
might be like.

And then Martin saw her. And he felt a slight tightening of 
the throat and a thump in his chest as the excitement of 
encounter came closer. The girl he'd had so many times 
before that he was almost a regular. She wasn't the prettiest 
in the world. But none of them were really. She was 
skinny, with large broad feet, and a twisted mouth on a 
face with a sharp chin and a long pointed nose. There she 
was (and of course Martin had no idea what she might be 
called), in her long pale tights, smoking her cigarette on the 
street corner, her heels so high that Martin could see right 
through them to the pavement edge.

And then she wasn't there. A dark brown Mondeo slowed 
down, and in a trice she was gone. Martin sighed as her 
tight, if rather fatty, bum disappeared through the car door. 
The last she saw of her was a glimpse of her bleached, tied-
back hair through the streaks of drizzle on the passenger 
window. So nearly and yet not nearly enough.

Disappointed, Martin paused in his steps. He almost felt 
like abandoning his quest altogether. He pushed his hands 
into the pockets of his overcoat and continued striding on. 
He couldn't come this far and just turn back. Even though 
he knew of a nearby bar where he could at least drown his 
sorrows.

"Are you looking for something?" he suddenly heard a 
woman's voice break into his reverie. He turned his head to 
see the dark shadowy figure of a thin woman, dressed in 
black with long unkempt black hair, just by a telephone 
pole.

He smiled more from politeness than anything else. "Yes," 
he heard himself mouth as he looked at her pale emaciated 
face. She didn't look like she'd eaten for a long time. She 
had virtually no fat obscuring her high cheek-bones and her 
perpetually startled gaze. "How much?"

The girl hesitated. "Twenty dollars," she announced at 
length.

"For what?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "A fuck," she decided 
noncommittally.

A fuck! That was cheap. What was the catch? He studied 
her face. It was so ill-looking. She must be a junky, Martin 
decided. Out for a fix. She must be desperate. But twenty 
dollars! He couldn't turn down an offer like that.

"Yeah! That sounds fine!" he decided. "Where?"

"My place," she said, emerging from the shadows in black 
tights that emphasised the bony knees that punctuated her 
slim legs, and the tiny skirt beneath the flimsy high-
collared black blouse. She obviously didn't feel the cold. 
"Follow me."

Martin obeyed her command and followed her along some 
ill-lit lanes toward a large dilapidated apartment block, 
which she entered. His steps followed her steps as she 
ascended the stairs in the flickering bulb-light, taking the 
advantage to examine the girl's strangely old-fashioned 
black high-heeled shoes and the bony contours of her arse. 
She finally arrived at a door on whatever floor Martin had 
lost count, opened it with a key and let him in.

Martin had been in girls' flats before, and he was used to 
their spartan functionality. But this one was almost too 
minimal in content. In the single room of the apartment 
there was nothing except a mattress, bare even of sheets, 
on the stained bare dark floor-boards illuminated by the 
inadequate aura of a single low wattage light-bulb. Thick 
dark curtains hid all evidence of the street outside.

And they weren't alone. Slumped in the corner, staring 
vacantly in front of her, was another girl, and one, despite 
the chill in the air in an apartment that didn't even have the 
luxury of heating, who wore no clothes at all. Fuck! These 
junkies! They have no standards or decorum at all. And 
like the girl who'd picked him up, she was painfully thin 
and pale. In fact there seemed to be an unhealthy blue 
pallour about her. Her scrawny breasts hung on her 
stomachless chest, and her feet were stretched in front of 
her, not attempting to obscure the long dark hairs of her 
crotch.

There was no ceremony, but that was usual. Martin 
removed his clothes to reveal his paunchy waist, his slim 
arms and legs, and stood in the room in just his socks and 
spectacles. At least there was no mirror by which Martin 
could compare his ageing frame with his fondly held self-
image of a somewhat younger man. With even less 
ceremony, the girl pulled off her own clothes, leaving them 
in a black heap on the bare floorboards. Without her 
clothes, she was exactly like her slumped friend. Pale, thin 
and ill-looking. Her large black eyes shone darkly from 
beneath her brow, not appearing to care about or even 
recognise Martin's existence.

And then she lay down on the bare mattress, buttocks 
sinking into its worn springs, her legs wide open and a 
shocking black crotch that Martin knew was soon to be all 
his. "Now?" he asked uncertainly.

She nodded, with a fixed stare expressing neither emotion 
nor meaning. Not exactly the warmest welcome Martin had 
ever had. But at twenty dollars. Well, you couldn't 
complain.

He bent his knees down onto the dark-stained mattress, 
feeling the well-worn springs flag under the weight of his 
hairy knees. At least his penis was awake. It wasn't always 
so well-behaved. Sometimes it needed a bit of coaxing. 
Sometimes a lot of coaxing. There were the occasions 
when even after an embarrassed ten minutes of fellatio, 
he'd had to admit defeat, but still be as much out of pocket 
as if it had been fully erect. But today it was fully erect, a 
full five inches of fat, throbbing flesh, its glans pushed 
beyond the confines of the foreskin, ready to take 
possession of the pale girl's cunt.

And then he was on top of her, his hands around her white 
angular shoulders, his chin in her hair and the hairs of his 
chest brushing onto the small empty breasts with their long 
dark pink nipples. Her skin was so cold. Colder than he 
believed flesh and blood could ever be. The drugs these 
girls take. What do they do to you! He carefully eased his 
penis into the condom he'd brought. Uncharacteristically, 
this girl didn't seem to care for her health even in that 
department. But Martin was cautious. He had no intention 
of catching anything. And he'd heard that junkies were the 
ones most likely to carry all sorts of sexually transmitted 
diseases. Even the dreaded AIDS. That was one illness he 
could do well without.

The condom was all that kept his prick warm as it thrust 
deep into the girl's cunt. She continued to stare blankly at 
the ceiling as he thrust away, not even pretending to enjoy 
his passion. But in a strange way, this lack of emotional 
attachment was quite arousing in him, as his fleshy 
stomach pounded against her sharp hips and the hairs of her 
vagina tangled in the hairs of his groin. In. Out. Back. 
Forth. Push. Push.

And then, unexpectedly, a cold hand on his shoulder. He 
turned round to see that the other girl was there, not 
smiling, but quite clearly with intent. She ran her cold 
fingers down his chest, and then impulsively grabbed his 
prick. She pulled it out of the first girl's cunt, and 
manoeuvred it toward her own. And then, it was inside her, 
as she lay by the side of her friend, who at last came to life. 
The two girls wrapped their arms around each other, 
brushing their heads together, while Martin's bursting erect 
penis transferred its attention inside the second girl's cunt, 
thrusting with an excitement he'd hardly ever experienced 
before. Two girls! And only twenty dollars. He didn't care 
whether he had to pay more. He'd so often masturbated 
over the fantasy of having sex with more than one woman 
at the same time. And now it was happening!

The first girl eased the condom off his erect prick and took 
it between her pale lips, her sharp teeth closing gently onto 
its base, while the other girl nuzzled around his neck. 
Fuck! This was paradise.

And then a sudden sharp pain. And a hiss. What the fuck! 
And a warm liquid on his face. And it wasn't semen. He 
grimaced in horror as he realised that it was blood. And his 
horror sharpened as he realised it was his own. And then a 
sharp agonising pain in his prick as the first girl tightened 
her bite. And it was the horror of seeing his penis pulled 
from his groin and gripped in the long fang-like canines of 
the girl he'd met less than half an hour before in the street 
that caused the blood to rush from his face and his 
consciousness to slip.

In his last few moments, he was vaguely aware of two 
sharp-toothed women, blood streaming from the corners of 
their lips, take chunks of flesh out from his stomach, his 
face, his neck, while what blood wasn't taken into their 
mouths to feed their addiction sprayed onto the floor and 
mattress to join the congealed scabs of previous victims.