His goatee was easier to part with—he trimmed that frequently, sometimes incredibly short. It felt nice to have more of his face shine through. Perhaps cutting his hair wasn’t going to limit his pickup numbers at all; it was just going to shift their demographic. Over the next year’s regrowth period, he’d exclusively target women who preferred their men clean-cut. He could invent a military background.
When he finished, Jasper got a wadded-up paper fast-food bag out of the trash and scooped all the hair inside, then put the bag next to his suitcase. He didn’t know what his eventual plans for it would be, but he did want to bury it or cremate it or something. He’d once conned a woman, Lila, whose twin sister had died of cancer when they were teenagers. Her parents had gotten the cremains of her dead sister put into a diamond ring. Had Lila been forced to pawn the sister’s cremains diamond for cash after he’d taken her money? He’d feel bad about that, but he doubted it had happened. What sort of negotiation process with the pawnbroker would that be: Also, this ring has dead-person ashes in it. But maybe that happened all the time; maybe lots of people were walking around wearing diamonds they’d bought at pawnshops that were secretly cremains diamonds. Jasper decided he wouldn’t mind a man ring with the cremains of his hair in it. Maybe it would kind of preserve its power, Samson-style. He thought of all the wins he’d had with that hair, all the women he’d taken money from. His hair’s length was like a ruler by which he could measure his progress as a con artist. He couldn’t get rid of it. Saving it and bringing it with him would make him feel less sad. He could pretend he was going to go to a clinic where it could be reattached someday.
Things were going to be fine. He still had a tiny knot of unwelcome feelings at the base of his spine, but maybe that would be there for a while, until all this Dolphin Savior business in the media died down. Stepping into the shower to remedy the sadness with a quick orgasm before he got on the road wouldn’t hurt. Then he’d be on his way.
Jasper’s usual masturbation routine involved a visit to a mental room he’d named the Trophy Museum. There were a few items there that had nothing to do with his conquests—favorite porn clips, teenage hookups, images of asses and breasts and abdomens he’d seen on the beach and admired but whose owners were broke university students or full-time underearners or average workers in debt. These formed the collage of the room’s wallpaper, but the furniture was certainly the women he’d both slept with and gotten money from; it was the combination that made their memory so attractive. Sometimes he wished he could call and tell them this—I still think about you all the time when I jerk off. I’ll think about you when I jerk off until the day I die. Sore feelings would keep the women from being touched by this, but wasn’t it a little nice how he continued to sexually worship them? Wasn’t it evidence that he wasn’t as terrible a person as they probably felt him to be? They likely assumed that, having gotten their money, he’d never give them a second thought. But leaving them, especially with their funds, was an assurance that Jasper would remember them forever. He’d never forget one of his victories.
Touching himself now in the hotel shower, though, none of these visual images came forth.
What happened instead felt like a TV broadcast getting pirated. The programming of his usual channel had been replaced with mental footage of the dolphin. A picture of shimmering wet gray skin filled his mind; it looked smoother than any shaved thigh. He had a sort of urge to run his lips across it.
Jasper stopped, cracked his knuckles, and tried to start again. He told himself to choose a very specific target to focus on. Why not his latest triumph, Moley E., so fresh in his mind and maybe even a little hotter for being so pissed about the whole 401k thing? He’d gotten her good. He thought about the way she used to squat on top of him and move her hips in a slow circle while she tilted her head back and moaned; when this happened Jasper liked to gaze at her various torso moles and draw constellations in his mind between them—he’d find a series that could be connected to form a giant triangle (left shoulder, right underarm, the flattish and broad one below her navel), then would try finding outline points for increasingly complex shapes as she began her long journey to orgasm. Moley E. took forever, and of course not bringing the cons to orgasm was out of the question; even rushing the cons to orgasm was out of the question. This was all right though; he was good at entertaining himself: if he counted the small reddish birthmark between her breasts and adopted a relaxed interpretation of symmetry, a dodecahedron was possible. Recalling the tense, pleasurable build in his groin that swelled deeper and drew taut as she’d ride him, as he’d craft geometries focused around her left breast so that its nipple would be his hypothetical ejaculatory bull’s-eye—this was always a sure thing to help him finish.
But lust was failing to surge in. He couldn’t force even a light drizzle of ache for that image. Jasper tried moving his hand frantically, tried moving it slowly, tried taking his hand off completely and drumming his fingers on the shower’s tile for a few seconds to let his penis reset. No sexual love at all for Moley E. astride him. Instead, when he reached down and grabbed himself, the moment his fingers applied pressure, what filled Jasper’s ears was the sound of the dolphin’s chatter. This noise overwhelmed him with the needy warmth an amorous feminine moan usually delivered, brought the same quaver as Moley E.’s grinding hips.
It felt so good that it was hard to take his hands away, despite the disturbing audio. His body felt a need for it that frightened him. Regulation of his lust, particularly his orgasm’s pacing and timing, was the bedrock of his sense of stability in life. Nothing else was fixed or certain or completely in his control, but he was master and commander of that arena. His livelihood depended on it.
Now, though, he felt helpless: all he wanted was to let the surge of pleasure overtake him, hear that sound, see flashes of the dolphin’s body being slicked over with foaming ocean waves. He held his cock and stood very still. He worried that if he moved his hand at all, even to let go, he’d orgasm. Then he had to stop worrying about that because it was happening no matter what he did. He could hear his disturbed groans, equal parts ecstasy and terror, echo inside the shower.
He opened his eyes. Jasper felt something drip down from the vaulted ceiling and land on his newly bare scalp, and even though he knew it was his own semen, he had the sensation of having just been shat upon by a bird.
Jasper exited the shower, made a provisional throne of pillows on the bed, and ordered an erotic pay-per-view movie. He’d had a wacky orgasm but would now set it right with a normal one. A visual aid would help him overcome a case of cross-species sexual jitters.