Sparks in Cosmic Dust Read Online Free PDF Page A

when your shift finishes, would you like to, you know…have me…with a meal? I mean have a meal with me?
    Hey, Maggie. Wow, you look great. You know…I always wanted to ask you out on Crichton. I promised myself I’d do it as soon as we got off. I mean left. How about it?
    Hey, Maggie. Fancy grabbing something to eat later? There’s somewhere I need to bite you.
    Hey, Maggie. Will you marry me?
    Hey, Maggie. Will you —
    He stopped dead. His body sagged. Maggie was busier than he’d realized—with another desk clerk—the two of them alone behind a door that eased open without their knowledge. The bastard’s hands were all over her bare breasts, and he was pounding her against the door frame, making her moan. Solomon looked twice in disbelief, horror chipping away at his heart. The shock propped him up for a moment, wouldn’t let him collapse. Another employee swept up round the back of the cube lockers.
    So this was the end of Maggie’s shift? Or just break time? He stole away in a plush fog. At his most exposed, his most vulnerable, he didn’t have a chance. In an instant the walls came crashing down and swept her away and she was lost to him forever.
    He didn’t remember leaving the hotel or how he got back to the Delfin or why he’d ever obsessed about Maggie in the first place. But he had obsessed. All those months of agonizing, dreading she’d turn him down, were now expunged. But were they? It had all happened so quickly. What now?
    A gaping hole, bigger than himself, ached inside. It throbbed with bitter fury. All those months wasted in piety and fucking celibacy on Crichton’s Folly screamed out, begging to be avenged. To be sated.
    The primal red-and-black curves of the bacchanalian maze stretched hundreds of yards uphill. The main entrance was up there, shrouded in steam. A gateway to outright carnality and wickedness the likes of which Preacher McDougall would explode at the sight of. Fuck him. Fuck all those self-righteous be-this-way-or-else fucks. Fuck Dad. Fuck Maggie, that cock-tease fucking slut.
    He bolted uphill and didn’t stop until he’d reached the permanently open double doors of the Delfin. All manner of sleaze-heavers and half-naked regulars loitered in the dark but surprisingly well-kept foyer. An overpowering smell of cheap perfume enveloped him. Ahead, a holo-display of two Amazon women cat fighting naked on a pedestal drew tongues from mouths and hands down trousers around the foyer’s perimeter. Solomon scoffed. They were all burned out, probably penniless or smogged to the gills. But he was raring to go, in tiptop physical shape, and he had money. A full year’s wages.
    In scrolling neon lights the name VARINIA WILCOX blazed over the front desk, followed by Next Vacancy…10:30 E.T…50 Credit Buy-in…Twenty Game Limit. Reaching into his shoulder belt, he retrieved a handful of his fifty-credit octagonal discs. Enough to get him started. The epitome of carnal sin? She was worth a shot. And if he couldn’t win her, he’d at least be able to search out the hottest hooker on Kappa Max and slake his lust in style.
     
    “Hold your horses.” Varinia yawned the miserable morning away, plucked her chewing gum from her open mouth and stuck it under the console. “Okay, let the next genius in,” she advised the usher over the intercom.
    At her lowest ebb in some time, she wished for the day to end so she could soak for a few hours in the Delfin’s centrifugal VIP whirlpool tub, a spinning bathhouse with a three-sixty ring of warm water she could slide about in and forget which way was up. Archie had promised she could have it to herself for once.
    But it was barely ten-thirty, at least five clients shy of wrap-up, and the previous two had already given her enough shit for a week. The first, a girl barely of age, had stripped naked for Varinia before a single card had been dealt. She’d then started to pleasure herself against the glass. Not that that hadn’t happened