The constant drone of the aircraft’s engines filled my ears. One of my legs ached and the other was numb. I shifted sideways in the seat, trying to fold them up slightly differently so as to encourage the blood to start circulating again. My knees pressed against the back of the stool in front of me. Some of us had woken and lifted a few blinds from the windows and sun streamed into the cabin. It was probably a shaft of sunlight that had woken me. I looked around the aeroplane at my fellow passengers, most of them arranged at awkward uncomfortable angles, deep in slumber on thin pale yellow airline pillows and under thin pale yellow airline blankets. I raised my backrest as much as I could without trapping myself against the reclined chair in front of me, and then lifted my own blind to look out at the bright blue sparkling ocean stretching out to the whole horizon beneath us. I had no idea what the time was nor where we were nor how much longer we had to fly. It was my first flight on an aeroplane and my first trip abroad and excitement welled inside me. My name is Steve and I was on my way to Thailand!

My uncle Roger lived in Thailand with his Thai wife. He sent regular letters describing a very sedate peaceful life in a tropical paradise and sometimes there were pictures of him and his wife Nin. Roger had prematurely white hair and looked older than his 50-odd years. Nin was a short plump Thai lady who always seemed to be smiling. None of the family had actually met Roger in years and no-one had ever met his wife and Roger was beginning to leave heavy hints about how everyone was welcome to come visit them. For some reason he never contemplated them visiting us. The hints in his letters had gotten louder and louder and, in the spring, he had outright suggested that I spent a gap year before uni with him in Thailand! At first everyone had dismissed the idea, but the seed was sown and soon it was accepted that I could spend my summer holidays in Thailand visiting Roger! I just had to finance and arrange it.

The family’s disdain for Roger’s seedy life choices only became apparent to me after it was agreed that I would go. I hadn’t thought about it much before, but Nin was possibly a mail order bride? This was just becoming a thing in England and uncle Roger could have been an early adopter. My uncle Sam was over for a barbecue one spring evening and, after dad and he had had a few beers, started teasing us about how Roger was going to lead me astray. Mum was riled and I was scared that suddenly the trip was off.

What actually ended up happening was dad took me aside a few days later and tried to teach me the-facts-of-life. I was mortified, it not being a conversation any kid ever actually wants to have with parents. Dad seemed equally uncomfortable but he had promised mum he’d talk with me. I’m not sure what exactly he had promised mum – probably rallying along the lines of Nancy Regan’s just-say-no campaign – but dad took a more pragmatic approach and tried to scare me off ever touching a Thai girl with fear stories about the risks of sexually-transmitted-diseases and giving the impression that Thailand was full of hookers and girls wanting to find rich husbands. If he had meant to scare me he failed: he actually made me excited about the potential prospects ahead. With only the films Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now to guide my imagination I was looking forward to a very seedy baptism indeed!

And now it was June, 1997, and I was sitting on a plane on my way to Thailand for the adventure of a lifetime! I was so excited. A stewardess passed through the cabin and I beckoned her over to ask if we were nearly there yet.

The oppressive heat and humidity hit us like a solid wall as we got off the plane in Phuket. We had to go down the steps and cross the apron to reach the shock of the cold air-conditioning of the small terminal building and it was one of the hardest short walks I’ve ever done. I felt dizzy by the time I reached the sanctuary and shelter of the building. The queue for passport control took forever but I got my first ever stamp and I examined it excitedly. By the time I got through my luggage was already lapping on the baggage carousel and I quickly headed through the exit to the arrivals lounge.

Here I saw uncle Roger and auntie Nin immediately. After much shaking of hands with uncle Roger and a chaste one-armed hug from auntie Nin I nervously fished around in my rucksack for Nin’s present that I had been entrusted to carry. It was a very elegant and expensive but also very dainty gold watch that my mum had selected as a present from the whole family. A belated wedding gift I guess. Nin became ecstatic, tears of joy running down her cheeks, and I got a mite tighter fonder second hug from her. She barely came up to my chest.

And then it was time to spill out of the terminal and into their little white Suzuki jeep parked outside. Mercifully there was a covered walkway out into the centre of the carpark which kept the sun at bay but the hot sticky air still pushed back at me as I threaded my way through the foot traffic out to the jeep. Luckily the jeep was a hard-top with air-conditioning and, after the very uncomfortable five minutes in a hot oven the temperature plummeted as we headed out into the afternoon traffic.

There was an incessant rumble as we drove because the roads were concreted in sections and there was a slight bump as you passed from one section to the next every two or three seconds. The road was swarming with mopeds and strange little open mopeds-with-side-cars called ‘tuk tuks’ and minivans. We seemed to be overtaking and undertaking in equal measure, zig-zagging between mopeds with whole families on and tuk tuk taxis. The roads were lined with shop fronts and house fronts with flat tin roofs and there were thick black rubber power-cables criss-crossing between buildings and pylons everywhere. People sat around everywhere and small children weaved along the roadside. There was just so many people! It was a shock to see that much humanity.

Uncle Roger veered off the high-road suddenly and took us down a smaller backstreet and around the back of the houses. As we came to a stop auntie Nin jumped out and opened some impressive white steel gates and the jeep pulled into a bare paved back yard. We had arrived.

Uncle Roger and auntie Nin – I’m going to start calling them Roger and Nin from now on to save on the typing – lived in one of the many combined-shop-and-home units along the roadside. Theirs was markedly better tiled than many of the neighbours and they had air conditioning. The shop part at the front was not actually a shop and instead furnished as a living room. To this day I’m unsure what Roger and Nin had for any kind of income but they seemed to live quite well. I never saw them work in a conventional sense. Roger and I sat down in the living room with the big shop show window looking out into the hustling bustling street, and Nin brought us out nice cold bottles of water and then disappeared. Roger looked me over expectantly and asked what I thought of it all. He grinned at my discomfort and unease at my sensory overload and said I’d be used to it in a few days. He let me rest a bit and so, as suddenly as I’d arrived, I was alone in a strange house in a strange land and I felt lonely. The flight had messed with my body-clock and I was actually quite tired so I slipped into a merciful sleep.

That evening I was poked awake by a giggling Nin. She talked with a charming broken English, missing lots of words but still very easy to understand and communicate with. “You wake now” she barked and giggled again. I got up and stretched. Then we headed out, the three of us, for an evening meal.

It was very dark out but there were lots of very yellow dull street-lights and lots of traffic. The air was still very warm but it was much more comfortable to be outside in the evenings. A tuk tuk pulled over in front of us and we ambled onto the bench in the big side-car. The tuk tuk took off again, straining under our weight, as Nin and Roger chatted amicably with the chauffeur in Thai. It seemed Roger could talk passable Thai. Nin linked her arm through mine, perhaps partly to make sure I didn’t fall off the end of the bench into the traffic, but mostly I think to make me feel part of the adventure. It was a cheerful group that got dropped off at a nearby restaurant just a minute or so later. We were so close to home we could have walked, but I quickly learned that it was the done thing to hail a passing tuk tuk for even the shortest of journeys. Roger led the way in and Nin followed behind me.

The restaurant was a large open-sided terrace with a big pitched roof spread over it. It was like a house without walls. We sat on comfortable low sofas with a low table between us. Roger and Nin took one side and I sat across from them. Roger was trying to explain how everything worked in Thailand, from the tuk tuks to the restaurants to the shops and markets I hadn’t seen yet. Coming from England where tipping was the exception even in cafés to a land where everything seemed negotiable but you were expected to tip and haggle at every turn seemed daunting.

The waitress was gorgeous. Drop dead gorgeous. I was quickly noticing that all the young girls were thin gorgeous things and all the middle aged ladies were plump ugly things just like Nin! I was kind of unsure how the pretty young things turned into plump ugly things but there didn’t seem to be any in-between states. I would search my whole holiday for a glimpse of the missing-link thirty-something Thai lady but never spotted one!

The food was hot. Roger had taken care of ordering and at first I thought he was trying to trick me, but with time I began to get used to it and came to accept that all Thai food is quite spicy. That first night I tried lots of different small dishes but mostly ate a very good massaman curry. Massaman curry is, on a Thai scale, mild. Its a kind of spicy soup stew mix with whole potatoes in. Its absolutely delicious.

Roger had ordered us tall big bottles of Singha beer, a very popular Thai brand, and we got quite drunk. Alcohol is quite expensive in Thailand, approaching English prices, and the food probably cost less than the beer. As Roger settled the bill I stole a glance at it and was surprised by how cheap everything was and it began to dawn on me just how far my spending money I had converted to Thai Baht in England was going to take me. We left a tip and left. A short tuk tuk ride brought three very sated people home for a nightcap and bed.

My bed was in a very western-feeling room. The whole house was kind of western furnished, but with tiled floors and glass tables. It was actually nice to have cool surfaces. No carpet anywhere. I kind of wonder how icky carpet would get in such a warm wet climate.

I awoke awkwardly early, my body clock still way out of sync. My first full day started with a breakfast of sliced fruit and yoghurt in the tiny kitchenette in the house. It was clear that Nin rarely cooked at home, although there were some stocks of things in the cupboards.

As I said, I have no idea what Roger and Nin did for a living. Certainly when I was there they weren’t working. They set about entertaining me.

The first trip that first morning was to a large market. There was a sea of market stools spread out under a large rusting corrugated iron roof. Many pitches were just cloths spread out straight onto the ground with bowls and bustles of chilis and fruits and nuts packed on them. Other stalls were trestle tables stacked with t-shirts and shorts and belts and things. The market was bustling with natives and I was one of the few tourists. As Roger explained, June was early wet season and the market would be full of tourists during the dry season December through April. I had simply come at the wrong time of year? Roger shrugged it off, saying Thailand was paradise all year round and the tourists didn’t know what they were missing.

Roger told me to look over the stools and, if I saw anything I liked, I was to just make a good note of the stall and how it looked. Then I was to describe everything to Nin afterwards and she’d go back and buy it. Apparently if I tried to haggle, or if the market stall owners knew that Nin was with me, we’d get a less stellar deal. Everything was negotiable in Thailand.

That’s a lie. Straight after the market, where I had gotten a pile of t-shirts and shorts and a good pair of sunglasses and a straw hat, we went into a normal shop. Apparently in normal shops there is no haggling and the price on the shelf is the price you pay, always. I was actually comfortable with that concept, and comfortable with the shop’s air conditioning too, and was a bit reluctant to leave and head out back into the hustle and bustle of the high street.

That afternoon Roger took me out to ‘see the town’. Nin came with us. I wasn’t quite sure what he had in mind but we were quickly in a part of town that was just one long interconnected chain of bars! Now this was what I had imagined uncle Sam had alluded to...

Go-go bars are bars full of scantily clad young ladies. Their asserts are on full display with nothing left to the imagination. As we passed along the street the girls would try and catch my eye. Nin had her arm linked through Rogers and I trailed behind, the siren of the blushing waving girls in the bars we passed making me stumble and become disorientated. I didn’t know which way to look. On every side I was being bombarded with eyefuls of beautiful young bodies available for hire.

We stopped at a normal bar; that’s to say a bar without girls. We were the only customers but the barman, an old white bloke with a strange accent I think was German, seemed to know Roger and Nin well and we sat at the bar chatting with him. Roger introduced me to Otto. Apparently Otto owned this bar and quite a few of those we had passed with the girls. Technically, apparently, a foreigner can’t actually own property in Thailand but Otto, predictably, had a Thai wife and her family held the deeds and Otto held the real control. If he was a local small-time mobster he was very nice about it.

Sitting down and getting comfortable I began to get excited at all the flesh so enticingly close by in the surrounding bars. There were very few ‘johns’ about and the girls were underutilized and scanning me regularly, hopefully, expectantly. I figured it was just a matter of time before I built up the courage to visit with one of them. It was a strange feeling, to have prostitution so on-display and straightforward and it was liberating to be so far from home. I had a feeling that Roger was fine with it and I just had to build up the courage to make this happen.

Another middle-aged Englishman drifted into the bar and I was introduced again. Soon this Englishman was chatting with Roger and Nin and I was left out, staring across the bamboo bar at the girls in the next bar across. Otto slipped around the bar and came sat beside me with a beer of his own.

“You know, the girls won’t come to this bar” he told me quietly. He started to explain how the system worked. I just had to go sit at one of the other bars and hostesses would hover around me until the conversation drifted around to what I wanted to do. I could be very direct. Once negotiated, I would pay the barman and then be led away to one of the rooms tucked off to the side. It was low season and a lot of girls had gone home to visit their family. But the girls who were left were desperate for business. “Very safe, very safe” he kept repeating, “Police leave us alone”.

When I didn’t make any move he whispered conspiratorially “You like boys? We have boys too! We even have boys who dress like girls...”.

Although everyone seemed so comfortable with buying sex – Roger even had Nin with him – I was feeling extremely awkward and nervous. Faint, even. But no matter how slowly I sipped my beer I was running out of beer. I looked down forlornly into my empty glass. “You want another beer?” Otto asked cheerfully. I nodded. “Sorry, barman not here!” he exclaimed, sweeping his arm out over the empty bar. Duh, the barman was sitting beside me. He didn’t show any sign of moving back around the bar. “Perhaps you try another bar?” he grinned broadly. I had been outsmarted. I got up and stretched and Otto stood beside me, one arm pressing hard on my shoulder as he spun me around and gave me a shove off back down the row of bars.

Walking alone along the the path between the bars made me a target. Every girl was staring at me, trying to entice me. I got half way along the path and I swear it was getting narrower, the girls much closer, all saying “hello” and “hi” and trying to get my attention. I felt the heat on my cheeks and the sweat running down my spine. I scanned the girls. Somehow their obvious availability was intimidating and off-putting; a shy nervous first-timer like myself was going to get eaten alive!

And then I saw her. She was noticeable because she was the only girl not trying too hard to get my attention. She was even on the far side of a bar, apart from the other girls. She looked inexperienced and shy and beautiful and I felt my leap at the sight of her. Two out-of-place young scared people in a world surrounded by scarily overt sexual tension. Subconsciously drawn, I turned sharply and approached her bar.

As I got to the bar the other girls parted so I could slip onto a bar stool. There were about ten girls milling around me now, purring, trying to get me to appraise them. There were no other customers at all in this bar. The quiet girl stayed on the far side of the bar. I looked up across the bar at her and she saw me looking and cast her eyes down. I felt such pity.

The barman, who spoke excellent English, noticed my gaze. He went over to her and said something rough and she steeled herself and came around to my side. The other girls seemed to resent her somehow, them all being cheated out of a john and all. The girl slipped into a barstool beside me, becoming the only girl sitting down. “You want to buy Kohsoom a drink?” the barman asked expectantly and I nodded. To my horror I saw him popping a cork on a large chilled bottle of something bubbly and I suddenly had the sure knowledge that this was going to be an extremely expensive afternoon.

“Hi, I’m Steve” I said to her, offering my hand. “Hi Steve, I’m Kohsoom” she replied in good English. As soon as we held hands the other girls drifted back to facing the path again, leaving Kohsoom and I to drink and chat. Kohsoom didn’t let go of my hand. Almost immediately she had put my hand, palm down, onto her silky smooth thigh and pinned it in place with her near hand as she took a sip of her cocktail with the other.

The barman drifted away too, leaving Kohsoom and I to get down to business. It was weird but her shyness actually made me braver. It was obvious that she was just as for-sale as all the other girls but her demur made me see her almost as an equal and I tried to get her comfortable by talking to her. She kept asking questions about my life and where I came from and what I was going to study and everything. She kept diverting my questions back about her life and future. She seemed to come out of her shell a bit.

The barman came back and pointedly suggested I buy Kohsoom another drink. I guess its bad for business to occupy a girl without paying for the privilege. I accepted. Kohsoom confided that it was non-alcoholic and actually quite nice. She was talking quite quickly and quietly and nicely now and we joked about how seedy this place, Patong Beach, was.

Although we had only been talking for perhaps half an hour the bars were already getting more lively. I was no longer the only punter and the other girls were less openly trying to get some action from me. There were now a steady stream of johns strolling down the path between the bars and the girls reverted to trying to lure them instead. One of them, a talk ugly sun-burned tourist, came and sat on the stool beside me. Suddenly all the girls jostling to be around him were rubbing their back up against me. Kohsoom giggled and pointed out that there was much more space around the other side of the bar island, which was completely empty. We decamped and retreated and were now standing alone on the far side of the bar, looking across the ring of counter and out onto the street.

Kohsoom was standing very close to me now, her bikini-clad bust – all the girls were only wearing bikinis – brushing against my arm as we talked. She knew what she was doing. Soon one of her hands was stroking broadly up and down on the inside of my thigh as we talked innocently about the weather. Apparently it would start to rain any minute now; it rained every afternoon in Phuket this time of year. “Perhaps we should go somewhere drier?” I asked suavely. “I thought you’d never ask” she replied relieved, “I’m already wet!”

Our relationship taking a new turn, Kohsoom coached me in how to ask the barman to ‘release’ her from her bar job being a hostess. She even confided in me the going rates and explained how to haggle. That was for future reference, of course. She seemed okay with letting me pay normal rate despite my inexperience and her sure knowledge I would have naively paid her ridiculously high opening bid. Kohsoom deftly signalled to the barman, who had been attending to the other johns lined up on the other side of the bar island, and I paid for a full hour of ‘everything’, which was the top price tier. Even with the drinks, this wasn’t actually all that much. A quick bit of mental arithmetic intruded into my brain as I calculated that I could easily afford to visit Kohsoom daily.

Kohsoom linked her arm through mine and led me away. It was hard to reconcile the shy lady who had first caught my eye barely an hour earlier with this consummate courtesan leading me away from a go-go bar on Patong Beach. Behind the bars there were some huts, barely hovels, where the girls lived and slept and entertained their johns. Kohsoom led me to a second row of huts behind the first row, this row even more dilapidated and down-run. Perhaps Kohsoom was a second-tier prostitute?

The hut was actually very clean and tidy inside. It was just one room, with mats on the floor and walls and a mosquito net over the mattress that was laying directly on the floor. There was a small dim lamp on a small low beside cabinet. As we ducked in through the door it began to rain, lightly at first, but quickly a downpour. Kohsoom laughed and said I might have to stay for more than an hour. She shut the door behind her and, in one quick motion, removed her bikini top.

Of course I had appraised her body the moment I first saw her an hour ago. But somehow, now she was topless, I got caught up staring and drinking in her appearance all over again. She was short, like many Thai women, but slim and youthful looking. Her tight little tummy and slender arms and legs had not an ounce of fat on them. Her breasts were large, if not nearly the largest of the girls at the bar. They were quite pointy. I had a healthy urge to explore and caress them, these two firm gravity-defying pyramids of flesh. But it was really her face, her hesitant shy look, that had drawn me to her and somehow that look had past and now she was just as confident as the other girls. Somehow that was less attractive. I guess perhaps that’s the hard business face of a girl prepared to sell her body for money?

My shyness returning, Kohsoom moved seductively towards me, her hips swaying. She pushed down on and stepped out of her bikini bottoms as she walked, leaving them deposited in the middle of the mat of this tiny room. I suddenly bumped into the edge of the mattress, not conscious before that that I had been moving backwards as Kohsoom advanced on me. “Its okay,” Kohsoom purred, “I can tell its your first time with a girl”. She smiled a sweet smile that spread to her twinkling eyes and I felt a lot better. She put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me down onto the mattress. And then, slowly, she undressed me.

She surprised me when she gently nestled down beside me. I had been expecting her to just grab my hard cock and start pumping, or something. Instead she slipped onto the mattress beside me and cuddled. The warmth of her body against me was really comfortable. A finger tip gently caressed my chest as she looked into my eyes and studied me as I studied her. She was so beautiful again. Such perfect skin, such symmetrical face, such small dainty features, such deep warm eyes. Perhaps all girls look extremely beautiful when seen at such a close intimate distance? Kohsoom was gorgeous again. I wanted to kiss her. But somewhere, in the back of my head, a little voice was telling me that she had just sucked some other john’s dick. That wasn’t a thought that could be ignored. Kohsoom looked puzzled, as though she could tell that I had had a sudden change of heart. “Sorry” I smiled awkwardly, “I’m not used to this”.

“Me neither” Kohsoom said quietly, almost to herself, as she skirted down and engulfed my throbbing cock.

The ecstasy was total. Within seconds my mind was blank, unable to focus on conscious things, as the extreme new sensations seeped from my crotch up through my body. My whole body began to tingle. Just a few seconds of attention was enough for my hair trigger: it was about to happen.

Kohsoom, her mouth clamped around the head of my dick, looked up questioningly at me. She grabbed my base and held it tightly, extremely tightly, and took her mouth off of my cock. She smiled a big grin and with laughing eyes said “You too fast! Sorry!” apologetically. Was she worried I would spend my, eh, money too quickly?

Under her unrelenting tight grip my near-orgasm abated and and slowly calmed down. Then Kohsoom gently stroked and tugged on me, bringing gentle waves of euphoria over me but keeping my orgasm at bay. She seemed both amused and pleased.

“Do you ever play with yourself?” she queried thoughtfully. The question came out of the blue. Somehow, it wasn’t spoiling the mood. She seemed to genuinely want to know. I was embarrassed to answer, but I nodded reluctantly eventually. She smiled again. “Good” she said softly. Then, after a pause, she carried on “How many times can you come?”. Now that was an extremely technical question, and one I wasn’t quite sure of the answer to. I shrugged, wondering why she was asking. It wasn’t exactly romantic mood-setting lovey-dovey pillow talk. “I will let you finish in my mouth now” she explained authoritatively, “if you promise me to get hard again after.” She looked at me expectantly as though we were doing a deal. “Or we can just take it slow” she said more quietly as though that wasn’t her preferred option. I nodded. “Which?” she asked me to clarify. “I promise I’ll get hard at least three times” I replied in a strained voice in a sudden sweep of bravado. Kohsoom just giggled excitedly and beautiful small dimples teased the edges of her mouth as she did so.

Kohsoom knew what she was doing. Taking my cock in her mouth again, she was soon sucking on me as she pumped the base of my cock with one hand and tickled my balls with the other. And in no time at all I was shooting burning hot cum into her tight little mouth and she was swallowing it all. She never let go of my dick as she continued to suck and play on it, preventing it from going down as she looked me full on in the eyes.

Then she jumped up and stood over me, bending over to open the beside draw. Looking up I could see her large breasts and glistening pussy just up out of reach, swaying above me. I instinctively lifted my head from the pillow and kissed the nearest nipple and Kohsoom shrieked playfully and giggled some more.

Kohsoom returned back to my cock with a condom. I’m eternally relieved she did this because I wasn’t able to think straight and wouldn’t have asked her to use one. She slipped the condom over my cock which was still achingly hard. Slowly she lowered herself onto my cock, impaling herself. It was heaven. Again, strange new sensations emanated from my crotch and swept over my whole body as my eyes stared greedily at Kohsoom’s upright torso rising and falling on our joining. Then she sat down fully on me, sinking right down to the base, and started rocking her hips backwards and forwards. She put her hands down onto my chest to steady herself and crunched her eyes closed and panted sexily. Her eyes flickered open and she looked at me with intense longing before they snapped shut and her brow furrowed and she gasped and signed and shook.

Suddenly she was back to sawing up and down on me, her breasts swinging wildly to her rhythm, and I felt the familiar sensation building in my balls and surging up as I again orgasmed for her. This time my first ever time in a woman. I was no longer a virgin!

Kohsoom felt it and opened her eyes and locked them on me. She seemed pleased. She slowly lifted herself off of me. She pulled the condom off of me and tossed it straight into a small bin by the door like a basketball star. Then, without hesitation, she put her head down and licked and sucked all the cum off my dick again.

Soon I was getting hard again from her attention, and she cooed and giggled. “You are a man who keeps his promise!” she teased me playfully and holding out her hand with three fingers up. Then she got up, standing straddling me again, and reached for the beside cabinet draw. She wriggled to give her breasts some life and they swung pendulously above my face again. I think she was deliberately lower this time and I got the message, lifting my head to suckle on the nearest nipple. She took her time getting the second condom and let me play.