The Last Queen of the Gypsies. William Cobb

along with his face, and he had a little black Van Dyke beard around his mouth. His skin was ruddy, weather-beaten. His legs beneath his shorts were covered with wiry black hairs, and he wore a thin off-white linen shirt that tied at the neck. He had soft brown eyes. He was forty-six years old. That is: exactly twenty-nine years older than Minnie.

      He escorted her up the stairs to wild cheers from the lounge. The old wide floorboards were so uneven they squeaked, even squawked like you were stepping on a small bird, when you walked on them, and you could stump your toe even under the fake oriental rugs that covered the floors. They went down the hall to the room that Miss Hooten had fixed up for the occasion, lacy green curtains, a matching spread on the bed. If Minnie was nervous she didn’t show it. Captain Sledge sat in a straight chair and watched Minnie take her clothes off. She was all that he had expected, compact, smooth, shaped as though with the fine hand of a master sculptor. Her erect little nipples stuck straight out. The hair at the bottom of her stomach was as thick and rich as the hair on her head.

      “Take your clothes off,” she said, a slight trembling of her voice threatening to betray her. Minnie stretched out on the bed and opened her legs, the way Paula had done it that day. She could hear the faint male voices from the lounge below, occasionally punctuated with a laugh or a bellow, smell the high bitter cigarette smoke mixed with the thick, sweet cigar and pipe smoke that seeped upward through the cracks between the wide boards of the floor. She watched Captain Sledge remove his clothes. She marveled at the size of his dick (she might as well begin to employ the words for it that she had learned since she’d arrived there): it was much longer and thicker than the one Paula’s client had had. Captain Sledge approached the bed, and like Paula’s client, he, too, dropped to his knees and buried his face between her legs; Minnie tensed, then threw her head back and relaxed into the warm manipulations of his tongue.