Aladdin Baba was taking a drag of opium as he fucked her.

That’s how he always fucked them, so he could see their faces and they could see his. His face was his best feature: caramel-smooth skin, a long jawline, high cheekbones, and warm, flirty eyes. Or maybe it was his sinewy chest or strong arms. Right now, it was his thick, unforgiving stone protruding from a thatch of dark, masculine foliage. It was almost too wide for her to take, and she moaned. He liked that. Then she’d lose control, wetting his dick in waves of blissful orgasms, one after another, all night long, until dawn, when they finally collapsed on the bed, drenched in pheromones. He could smell her on him, like roses and frankincense.

In the slickness of sex-sweat, Aladdin Baba rolled to his side for the hookah.

This brothel had the finest opium. The buzz had been a good one. The luxurious hot pink, purple, and red silks lined with gold fringes that adorned the walls and vibrant greens and beiges of the fine couches never looked brighter, and the bed felt as if he’d been fucking her on a cloud. She was the third girl tonight and had nicknamed her Labiwa, meaning ‘lioness.’ It was an extremely offensive insult used to describe a sexual woman, reflecting her fierce and bold nature. She had rightfully earned it. Plus, he didn’t care to know her name.

Yet she was the one he always came back to.

“Labiwa,” said Aladdin, “perhaps we can bury the snake once more before I am forced to flee.”

“You are a primitive beast,” she responded. Labiwa was already out of bed and slipping on her embroidered morning dress. She reached with delicate hands for the golden blouse resting on the back of a chair.

Aladdin smiled from the bed. “Thank you.”

“It was not a compliment.”

“Then why did you let me in?” Aladdin said, and he slipped his hand up her thigh to where he could feel the brush of her pubic hair. His fingertips found the soft, hot opening, slick with their fluids, until she pushed his hand away.

“It was out of pity. It won’t happen again.”

“That’s what you said last time.” Aladdin grinned. He reached for the bowl containing figs on top of the side table and popped one into his mouth.

“Don’t you have a home to go to?”

Aladdin jumped from his bed. Still naked, he strolled with confident strides to the window, his semi-erect penis leading the way. “Agrabah is my home.”

From the third story, he could see across the city to the eastern wall of the golden palace.

Aladdin, of half-Chinese and half-Syrian descent, had survived on the streets since he was five when his mother died. By six, he was an adept thief. It was how you survived on the streets.

The need to survive forced him to be stealthy and even quicker with his escapes. His body grew strong by leaping across rooftops and swinging from fixtures and posts.

No one loved Agrabah as much as he did. He knew it from every angle and tunnel as if it were his private lover, and he could slip through the darkness as if his muscles were made of shadows. As he grew from a child to a young man, he watched his city grow. Buoyed by extraordinary levels of immigration, the population of Agrabah exploded, setting the city land aflame with a property boom. Waves of more than ten thousand people seemed to arrive throughout the year in caravans, bringing with them more luxurious exotics to pilfer. No other place in Agrabah, with the exception of the brothel, bathhouses, the Round City, and of course the palace, was as luxurious as the south-east end known as Rusafa. Here rose the caliphal and Barmakid palaces, sylvan gardens, royal stables, markets filled with valuable foreign foods like Egyptian corn, public baths, cemeteries, and winding canals. Wealthy citizens worshipped at the mosques peacefully alongside Jacobite and Nestorian churches, and at night, music and other revelry from street performers from all corners of the world could be heard as far as Aladdin’s distance neighborhood. Disguised, Aladdin could always find a way to blend in among the elite. When he was in disguise, he could, for one moment, pretend he was a member of Agrabah’s finest.

“You are a street rat,” Labiwa told him.

Aladdin disliked being called a street rat, but not as much as Labiwa hated being called Labiwa. Coming from her ruby lips, though, the street rat possessed a sense of endearing charm.

“I prefer to think of myself more as a diamond in the rough,” Aladdin responded.

Labiwa rolled her eyes. “A diamond? Does that mean you plan on paying me this time?” She crossed the room to gather the two scarves, one pink and the other gold, to complete her outfit.

“I’ll give you all the diamonds I have,” Aladdin said.

“So, nothing.”

Aladdin turned so that he faced out the window once more and placed his arms on the ledge. The smooth surface was hot from the blazing sun and gritty from the sand that blew in from the desert.

Agrabah offered a breathtaking view no matter the time of day or night. Of course, like any city, Agrabah wasn’t without its problems—poverty and crime have worsened since he was a kid, and the number of neighborhood militias has increased since the sultan’s reign. Crime and Aladdin’s name had become synonymous among the city guards and local merchants, but Aladdin was merely a petty thief, only stealing what he needed to live and nothing more. His crimes were many and small, more of a nuisance to the vendors than a dangerous threat. It was his charm and agility that had gotten him out of capture, but it was his charm and good looks that got him into the beds of many women. Some men would too if they provided him with food, jewels, and a bed to sleep in.

“One day,” Aladdin said with a sigh, “I will have diamonds and rubies and all the gold you could ever need.”

She couldn’t help it, seeing Aladdin gazing across Agrabah with that dreamy, childlike wonder in his eyes.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“Oh, Aladdin.” She let her arms fall to her sides and crossed the room to kiss him on his bare shoulder. He smiled back at her.

“Then we can live a beautiful life together,” Aladdin said. “We could travel across the whole world. We’ll live happily ever after.”

Labiwa shook her head. “Aladdin, this isn’t a fairy tale. This is Agrabah. There are no happy endings here.”

Aladdin watched her pick up a jar of fragrance without feeling put off by her remarks. She didn’t understand. Riches were for the rich, and life as a street rat did have its perks.

Aladdin leaned out the window to see what caused a raucous sound on the street below. As a thief, Aladdin was always conscious and alert to loud noises, especially shouting. There was always a lot of shouting. Labiwa appeared beside him.

“What’s going on?”

A muscular guard with a thick neck, groomed facial hair, and arms so large he had to wear his sleeves rolled up intimidated a small, frustrated-looking trinket vendor that Aladdin had stolen from earlier this morning. The trinket was a porcelain elephant that he planned to sell in exchange for some stew and bread, but gave it to a little girl dressed in rags he’d seen scrunched up into a corner at the edge of an alleyway. Her bare feet were blistered from the heat of the roads. With it, he told her to buy food and clothes and directed her to a vendor he trusted to look after her.

The vendor Aladdin stole the trinket, raised his hand to indicate Aladdin’s height, proceeded to gesture to his shoulders, the length of Aladdin’s hair, and then pointed at the empty space on his cart where the trinket had been.

“You shouldn’t be such a free spirit all the time. What you did was very sweet, but now you’d better get moving,” Labiwa advised.

Aladdin snatched up his salwar, vest, and leather sandals. Dressed, he wrapped his arm around Labiwa and kissed her plump lips underneath the veil. He could still taste himself in her mouth.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Aladdin said when he pulled back.

“I never want to see you again,” she replied.

“I’ll be back at dusk.”

“Aladdin, please take care of yourself.”

Aladdin kissed her again.

From the bed, the other woman propped herself up. The sheets dropped off her breasts to her waist as she rubbed her groggy eyes. “What’s happening?”

“Aladdin was just going,” Labiwa said. And then she said to Aladdin, “You’d better hurry. The guards are not nearly as frightening as Mother should she catch you here.”

Mother was what all the women called the burly, middle-aged woman who ran the brothel and looked after the women. Her husky voice was as subtle as a drunken elephant and just as equal in body mass, with a fat nose on her pushed in face. The thought of Mother catching him motivated him to go to the side window, where below was a canvas awning that he could land on before slipping behind a stack of wooden crates. Behind the wooden crates he kept a burqa, a disguise that proved useful often.

“They’ve had enough of you. it seems. Look.” Labiwa pointed out the window.

Aladdin returned to the window and saw five guards approaching the brothel. They knew he was here, Aladdin realized. "Clearly, they are not fans of Aladdin Baba. All this over a little toy elephant?”

“Quickly! Make haste!” Labiwa was urged urgently.

Aladdin went to the other woman in the bed, cupped her right breast, kissed her mouth, and then returned to the window. One leg was already out when Labiwa stopped him. She held out her hand. In her palm, she offered him three gold coins. They were enough to buy his way out of trouble if it came down to that, plus food to spare.

“I knew you cared about me,” Aladdin said in an I-told-you-so manner. He pursed his lips for a kiss from her. Instead, she gave him a gentle shove out the window.

Aladdin slipped down the angled roof, landed on the canvas awning, and rolled off into a cart of wool.

By the time Aladdin removed himself from the wool and cart, Mother had answered the guard’s knock. Her red face bulged, and her pudgy eyes squinted in disdain. She shouted with a booming, mannish voice that Aladdin could hear from around the corner. The guards appeared equally irate, all of them flapping at their mouths. Mother’s chin wobbled, and her breasts, giant pendulous things, lumbered side-to-side as she shook her fists.

One of the guards drew his scimitar and impaled her. Screams rose from within the brothel. Among the voices were Labiwa’s, urging them to return to their rooms and lock the doors.

Mother had been impaled but hadn’t fallen down right away. Even fatally wounded, she was stubborn. She opened her bloody mouth and pressed her tongue between her lips to make a flatulent sound, a most insulting gesture in Agrabah.

The guards at the door appeared more shocked than angry and were probably not used to being treated with such disrespect—especially by a woman. A woman of matched size and strength. A woman who could’ve easily pummeled at least two at once. Even with the sword stuck in her, Mother swung her heavy, trunk-like arms at the largest guard and grabbed him as if she were starving and he was a plump autumn roast.

A quick flick of her wrists, and the guard’s neck snapped. The guard stood for a brief moment. His head remained turned and cocked to one side with his left eyelid half-closed and the other dull eye looking off in another direction.

Mother reached out once more for the next guard, whose expression was pulled tight in a mixture of terror and shock. She would’ve snapped his neck too if the third guard hadn’t slipped behind her and drew his scimitar across her throat.

Even on the way to her knees, she fought, clawing at their skin and biting his arms. Her teeth breached the soft flesh of his wrists, and she chewed at the tendons underneath. The line of red ribbon around Mother’s neck spilled down the front of her clothes as the light from her eyes faded, and though she collapsed dead on the stoop, her body seized, her jaw still locked tight on his arm.

The street was in uproar as the guards confronted the brothel. The remaining guards had run toward the palace, screaming that they had seen the devil’s fury in her eyes. People pushed and shoved one another as they fled, and vendors fought off the impoverished as they attempted to steal the goods that had fallen from the damaged carts.

Aladdin heard the girls sobbing in the brothel. He wanted to check on them to console them, but there were still other guards nearby terrorizing the citizens as they searched for him.

Aladdin had seen many murders in Agrabah. Some occurred during drunken fist fights, others from street gangs, vendors defending themselves from thieves, women who had been beaten to death by their husbands, and women who had offed their husbands for jewels. There was something disturbingly nostalgic about this murder and the chaos. Something made his face twist into a frown and his skin tingle.

As he looked up at the window, he realized why this chaotic scene felt so familiar to him. The window he had crawled out of was the same window where he had once eaten the figs he had stolen just before the guards murdered the vendor’s family in front of their innocent child.

What happened to that poor boy? Did the guards catch him? Did he die of starvation? Was he sold into slavery like so many others?

When he looked back, he saw a repulsive man with a fat nose and bulging, lazy eyes shove a canvas bag over his head.