Peninah had noticed the missed call that I had sent to her phone while she and the ships cook Onkwani were fucking the Indian woman Anushka. They won and claimed the $5000 prize from the competition I had organized to find which Kenyan sailor could make the middle-aged Indian woman cum the greatest number of times. She had phoned back and after some meaningful small talk, well at least she remembered who I was after a minute or so, I had accepted a personal tour from the Chief Petty Officer of the largest ship in the Kenyan navy: the 280-foot long P3124 Jasiri. The flagship and pride of the Kenyan navy was in Melbourne for 2 weeks before heading to the South Pacific Ocean for joint USA Australia and smaller nation war simulation games. Like a lot of the smaller vessels, she was temporarily based in Melbourne’s Westernport Bay while the large warcraft like the 1,100-foot US Navy Carrier Gerald R Ford were too big and therefore were based in Sydney Harbour.
There wasn’t much to see on the claustrophobic sized warship and I must admit most of my sightseeing was directed at the full arse of the 35-year-old woman as it was threatening to burst the seams of the white trousers stretched over it and her thighs. But we seemed to connect, and the conversation was natural and flowed and lasted longer than the tour. It was time to go so I played my big card. “You are from Kenya. You must like coffee. How about I buy you one?”
She rolled her wide round eyes and laughed. “Can’t you come up with anything less corny? You sound like a 14-year-old asking out someone for the first time.”
But it worked and the waitress came to take our order and I was about to say my normal order of a cappuccino. It’s my normal order as they all taste the same to me and I know every coffee shop has it. Peninah cut me off. Looking directly at me and not the waitress, she sensuously licked her full lips she said, “Today, for the first time he will try a long strong black and I will have a flat white with extra cream because I that’s what I want.”
We did the usual Melbourne city sights: the Eureka Tower’s 88th floor extending Skydeck which is the highest public viewing platform in Southern Hemisphere at 984 ft with the tower itself is the world’s tallest residential structure, a walk along the Yarra River, The Shrine. To be truthful there is not much in Melbourne as most things to see or do are an hour or more away. After lunch in the Vietnamese shopping strip in Richmond and a quick tour of my offices there, another coffee in the Italian dominated Lygon Street, Carlton we ended up in the luxury old style Windsor Hotel.
Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. I had expected the day to consist of a bit of monosyllabic conversation, then me dazzling her with my sophistication and flashing of presumed wealth. A bit like European nations dealing with American natives really in the early days of discovery. A quick fuck, then never to be seen again. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. But I found she was intelligent and articulate. Far more so than our current average University undergraduate. It was a welcome surprise to me as most of my conversations with women for the past years were in my adequate but basic Vietnamese or their limited English, or recently the inane chatter of sing-song Indian spoken English. On top of that we had a connection; we were interested in the same topics and appeared to have similar views on most subjects. Stupid as it sounds it existed; the same quirky humour, the way a conversation somehow segued to a different yet to us connected point.