In her picture she was wearing a large silver necklace that rested on her chest, covered in beauty marks, and her bare neck. On the app her name was Niña, but as soon as she was at the door I knew it wasn’t her real name. Everybody knows her name in this city. Before she took off her shirt she placed the necklace on my nightstand. It was ridiculous that she was wearing it at all that night.
She told me I couldn’t write about it. I told her that I probably would, but that nobody would believe me anyway.
We had sex. She was on top of me and grabbed me by the shoulders. It felt good, too good, and besides I was nervous because it isn’t every day you have sex with the mayor, so I climaxed far too quickly. She didn’t seem to mind, sat up straight and looked at me tenderly. The moonlight fell across her face through a gap in the curtains.
‘All right, now tell me everything that’s happening in my city,’ she said. She ran a finger from my hairline to the tip of my nose. I felt like a little lamb.
The little lamb started talking. About the fact that I had become single only recently, and now lived in this small room in this big building into which the local authorities (meaning her, but I didn’t say that) had stuffed a bunch of artists. About the fact that I had mentally let go of my previous relationship long before it ended, and thus, a day after I finally got a place of my own, installed every single dating app in existence on my phone.
My first match was with a woman who designed pillowcases in this very same building. She lived on the ground floor, brought her own vegan condoms to my place and, after we had made one another come by tongue, wanted to look at my profile on the app together. She told me she mainly viewed sex as a sociable activity, almost like scouting, only for people in the big city.
The man and woman in their fancy apartment on Wittenburg Island. I was only allowed to come over in the middle of the night; they had placed some kind of wrestling mats, meant for sex, against the wall behind their houseplant, and because I had been dim-witted enough to ring the doorbell they first had to pack their kid back off to bed before we could start. We were eating raspberries, and after I had sucked him off there had been a tiny little seed on the tip of his cock.
The Dutch bench-press champion who took an Uber from the Skate Café to mine. She had scratched my back entirely open, she had bit into my shoulder, she had stood naked on my bed, with her hands against the ceiling, while I licked her. In the morning, I noticed a text from one of my roommates, complaining about the noise. The champion had taken off by then; left at 5 a.m. due to dust mite allergies.
The woman in the nice lingerie on Kattenburg Island, who was married to a woman with a child but felt like being with a guy again for a change. She had a great shower and great tits. She had lied and said she was in her late thirties, even though she was in her early fifties and I, happy as a clam, in fact loved it.
As I was telling her all of this, my cock became increasingly less hard, so that the semen started dripping down my scrotum and into the sheets. It was cold.
The mayor leaned in and gave me a long kiss, much more focused and devoted than before. Then she sat back up and it was her turn.
She mostly did it with expats, because they usually didn’t recognise her.
A woman from Indonesia who lived here with her husband, but whom she tongued on her rooftop terrace, high above Amsterdam Zuid, and who sighed incredibly deeply as she came.
A guy from Georgia who worked at Schiphol and hit her on the ass so hard she could feel the bruises the next day, chairing the council. She didn’t hit him back. She did tie him up with his own belt and made him come with her hand so many times in a row that he eventually started sobbing in her arms.
The Englishman she grabbed fiercely by the throat, spitting in his mouth; the Eritrean guy with whom she lay behind a bush in the park at night, because he still lived with his parents. He had giggled incessantly during sex.
And if she happened to find a Dutch person hiding behind an English pseudonym, she did it anyway. The risk excited her, the chance that this someone would be declared insane was much higher than that she would be found out. The lawyer, the plasterer. The student whose cheeks flushed when she came had begged her to please come back some time, but of course it was out of the question. A visit from the mayor had to remain special: it was the greatest possible honour, apart from having the queen over for tea. Nobody was allowed to see her out, she was afraid to be spotted at the door. Nobody was allowed to watch her leave.
I looked at her full lips as she spoke. Then from her lips to her neck, to her chest, to her navel, to the lower part of her body, where her stories had caused the little lamb to grow back into a kangaroo in a boxing stance. She noticed, she gave me a playful rap on the jaw. She started moving her lower body back and forth, not up and down, but back and forth. At first she kept talking, but she stopped mid-sentence. My cock started heating up. It took a long time. I wanted to grab her by her ass, but she wouldn’t let me, she pushed me deeper into the sheets, by my wrists. She bit me in my collarbone. I called out her name, but then she let herself fall on top of me with her heavy breasts to shut me up. Otherwise my roommates would hear. She stretched out fully, with her feet in some type of hold around my legs. A pinned-down starfish, a little Jesus of pleasure. She placed her open mouth on mine, not to kiss it, only to growl. We climaxed simultaneously as the tram on Surinameplein rode past with its tinkling bells.
In my dressing gown, which was full of holes, standing on the smokers’ balcony, where I could see her but she couldn’t see me, I of course did watch her leave. She walked neither slowly nor fast. Somebody cycled past her, but didn’t seem to recognise her.