Saturday, July 12, 2014

Short Fiction--The Guy Next Door: Part 16


He caught me completely undone. I’d have been mortified if not for the tequila. To make matters worse, I was with my photographer friend. Not “with”, not like that. I had my legs all tangled up in hers. I mean--look, let me just explain.

Zena is a world class photographer, but wishes she were a writer and so lives vicariously through me. She’s tall, lean and very, very lovely. She’s got such full lips I can’t help staring at them as she speaks to me. They are THAT distracting. But, then, many feel that way about my breasts, so I suppose we all have our thing. Zena’s thing is her lips. A-YUM.


“Oh My GOD! Do you see what you’ve done here?” she asks enthusiastically, holding out my latest manuscript and pointing. “Gosh! Such grace! What you can do with the English language is like sex in a vat of chocolate in a champagne sun shower beneath a double rainbow.” I may be the writer but she’s the beatnik. She’s reading again, softly brushing her forefinger against her lips, absentmindedly.

“No kidding?” I say, amused. I’m shy about praise and so bring out the peppermint oil and we push our chairs closer towards one another and begin pushing up our skirts and rolling up our pant legs. With our legs hoisted onto the other’s laps, we proceed to massage one another’s feet while we share the highlights of our respective weeks.  “Toes and Tequila” we call it. It works for us.

Started in the pool when we were much younger, actually. At the time, she lived in Palm Springs with hubby #2. She had these art deco, mesh floaty chair things and the current kept pulling us apart when we were trying to have a conversation. We had tethered ourselves to one another by propping our feet besides one another’s hips.

So, here we are the other night, having stripped down to our bras after dancing up a sweat, bottoms pushed aside, practically straddling one another, rubbing pink lotion onto one another’s muscular legs, flushed from a few tequilas when GND walks in.

“Decent?!” He shouts as he pushed the door open and steps inside.

“Well, sure we are, baby!” said Zena. And, making matters worse, she asks from beneath her heavy lids, taunting him purposefully by accentuating her lips as she speaks, “Question is, are you?”

GND blushed from head to foot because he’s got a boner and she doesn’t have the decency to ignore it until it passes. Having met him a few times, she’s interested in him and in her mind its no-holds-bar as far as flirting goes. Especially a man over sixty with a job AND a boner.

“It isn’t like I’m getting any younger!” she justifies. I’m too shy but girlfriend here can pull it off wonderfully. She slithers over to him in her lace push-up and I take my turn at living vicariously through her. Oh to be sexy like the supple sleek she-cat that is Zena.

GND likes her, too, but is enmeshed in a sticky situation with his current gal. Turns out, he didn’t quite tell the wife about her, but he had told the girlfriend about the wife, who he had invited to shack up with him in his cozy one bedroom bungalow over the past weekend. None-the-less, he’s flirting right back at Zena and I find myself losing my buzz with all the clichéd innuendos spewing around the room. Later, I take him up on this.

“Seriously, that’s all you could come up with?” I spat at him.

“What was I supposed to say?” he laughed.

“Well, she had just handed you a plate of food. ‘Thanks’ would have been sufficient.”

But, no, it hadn’t been, not for GND. He had to go on to say, ‘I gotta tell you, these breasts are just what I needed—tender, succulent and full of flavor.’ My eyes had popped out of my damn head when I heard that. Zena just laughed and he proceeded to beam at his well received cleverness. I wanted to puke.

I can’t imagine a more tedious evening than one spent with two of the world’s most profound flirts. Yet, I couldn’t just kick them out or ask him to leave, now could I? And, he didn’t have the courtesy to see that we were otherwise occupied, now did he. NO he did not—he wanted in on the action. I already knew that she wanted him. So, I was hostess-with-the- utmostess to two people who would have rathered I find some chore in the nonexistent basement.

Oh, where is the Dog Who Thinks he’s mine when I need him. Because just about then we’d have excused ourselves for a long, long walk.



What a bloody waste of good tequila.

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