By Margo Perry  (margo707 AT rogers DOT com)
Copyright 2004 by Margo Perry, all rights reserved.

Kevin limped toward the bar, the post-polio ache in his hips more pronounced than usual.

“Seen Red this morning?”

“No, I think it’s her day off. But try Cook, he’ll know for sure.”

“I left my briefcase here last night and she . . .”

“Try Cook,” Len repeated and returned to the polishing of his already gleaming glassware.

There was an air of expectancy and ordered confusion in the restaurant the few hours before opening: waiters and busboys were preparing their stations, cooks discussed ingredients, dishes and menus. Kevin awkwardly negotiated his course, wishing he were invisible, suspecting that he was interrupting the flow of things. He had just gotten off an extra graveyard shift at the hospital and the bursts of clipped instructions and constant chatter of the bustling staff was giving him a headache. He wanted to leave now, retreat to the quiet of his apartment, but he couldn’t. He’d been careless enough to leave his briefcase here last night and he needed to retrieve it.

He walked up to the gleaming chrome counter that bordered the kitchen. The spicy smell of baking lasagna and barbecuing chickens teased his nostrils. He hadn’t eaten since last night and he was hungry. Well, no time for food now.

“Seen Red?”

“Yeah Kevin, she’s waiting for you back in booth one.”

“Thanks,” Kevin said to Cook who hadn’t moved from the chopping block.

Cook was both chef and owner of This Café and he’d been running the neighborhood hangout, with his unique blend of gruff kindness, for all of Kevin’s thirty-five years. Two blocks from his apartment, it had become Kevin’s home away from home. When his survival had hung desperately on the tight thread stretching between work and caring for his Mom whose life was being decimated by the aggressive assault of Alzheimer’s, Cook and the staff went beyond the call of duty to assist him with meals prepared and delivered, often without charge; and since she’d died two years ago, Kevin had dinner here almost every night. He knew they felt sorry for him, knew they called him Lonely Guy when they didn’t think he could hear; but he didn’t mind. He craved their kindness and attention and didn’t mind being their mascot, as long as they liked him.

Red was sitting in the booth, waiting. Kevin imagined picking her up for a real date, swaggering out of the place, her hand in his. How ridiculous was that idea! Red so named for the flaming glory of shining curls that fell helter-skelter all around her saucy freckled face would tower over him. He’d look like the dog hanging on to her leash of an arm. No, Red was his ultimate Dream Girl and all he could ever hope to be was the puppy waiting to warm her feet. Every night he sat in her station just for the pleasure of hearing the sound of her voice as she recited the specials, watching that beautiful body move to and away from him. She was the most popular waitress in the place. Every man wanted to be near her and Kevin was thrilled to be the one she saved a booth for, catered to; even if it was because she pitied him. He’d accused his mother once of trying to give birth to a Danny DeVito clone and failing miserably; Kevin had his stature but lacked his ambition and charm. Kevin had had only one girlfriend in his whole life and she, the class nerd, only because he was the only one who would date her. That relationship lasted only until she developed humungous breasts and became the most popular girl in school to disappear behind the bleachers with. She dropped the ingenuous Kevin like a used Kleenex and broke his heart. He hadn’t bothered with girls after that, preferring the controlled and certain world of his dreams and fantasies which brought him back to Red and his case.

“Hi Kev,” Red drawled. Her intonation wasn’t southern, just lazy, as if she had much better things to do with her lips, mouth and tongue than to form words.

Kevin dropped into the booth. He’d seen Red so rarely dressed in anything but her outdated pink cotton uniform and white apron that he couldn’t help staring at how different, gorgeous she looked. According to Cook, if that outfit was good enough back then it was good enough now and nobody dared guess when ‘back then’ was. But this morning there was no collar or sleeve; her long neck, slender shoulders and arms were bare and creamy. She made Kevin think of a dessert, rich and sweet and decadent; newly created, yet to be tasted.

“Did you go to work after you left here last night?”

“Yeah, they were short staffed.”

“I admire you, Kev. We need more nurses like you. Have you eaten this morning?”

“No that’s alright. I’ll grab a bite when I get home. Len said it’s your day off. Thanks for meeting me.”

“No biggie. I like to cook on my days off and I go to the market early. Do you cook?”

Red jumped up and was gone before Kevin could say, “Not really.” His briefcase lay on the seat and he eyed it with a mixture of relief and concern. Would Red have opened it? Nah, why would she care what was inside? He wanted to grab it, check, make sure everything was intact, but something stopped him. He didn’t want her to think he didn’t trust her. He’d wait until she gave it back. Wait until he got home to open it. But it wasn’t easy. His stomach was queasy with apprehension. He thought of Marsellus Wallace’s case and smiled grimly. The inside of this case glowed, too, but with Kevin’s secrets, the private passions meant for him alone.

“Here’s something to nibble on.” Red placed a cup of coffee and a plate with a muffin, a hunk of cheese and a handful of strawberries in front of Kevin. “Just to hold you over,” she said smiling.

She was wearing loose-fitting white jogging pants and sneakers, but her strapless top was an elastic second skin whose emerald sheen matched the color of her shining eyes. She lounged in her seat with a careless grace: head lolling sideways, shoulders relaxed, her large breasts thrusting relentlessly forward. She was irresistibly attractive. And she wasn’t wearing a bra. Her clearly outlined nipples, long and hard, were reaching out to him. Kevin’s pulse raced and his mouth was dry, but his eyes watered with longing.

“Kevin!”

His name and Red’s laughter spooked him out of his trance. He’d been staring shamelessly at Red and he wished it had been her face that had captured him. He was proving himself to be that creature women talked about; the letch who couldn’t control himself, the one who was a slave to breasts, who worshipped breasts. Kevin could feel the stirring, the gentle tingling that came just before his body betrayed him. His cock was growing and it felt too good. He had to stop, think of something else. Curling: the ice, the brooms, the concentrated sweepings. One of the orderlies at the hospital was an enthusiast who dragged Kevin to the rink now and then. Kevin hated curling.

“Eat up, Kev,” Red said, still laughing as she handed his case across the table. “Don’t worry, it was safe with me.”

“Thanks,” Kevin said.

What did she mean it was safe with her? Just that, he reassured himself. She was kind enough to take it home and keep it safe. That’s all she meant.

Kevin nibbled at his food. He didn’t want to seem ungrateful and he was truly hungry, but he couldn’t relax and wouldn’t be able to until he’d looked in his case and ascertained that the plain brown envelope remained unopened. He could feel her eyes on him, studying him, and while it both pleased and excited him, it also made him wary. It was like she could see into the shadowy corners of his soul; see the horny demons that lived there.

“When is your next shift? You look done in. Are you getting enough sleep?”

Her concerned and motherly tone brought him back to reality, back to the true color of her interest in him; dove white empathy, kindness from one being to another. “I’m off today and tomorrow. I’m fine,” he answered.

“I have an idea. Why don’t you come around to my place tonight and I’ll fix you a homemade meal. I’d enjoy the company. I get lonely sometimes.”

“Yeah, sure, sure, sure . . . I’d love to,” Kevin stammered.

This was a fantasy come true, a night alone with Red. He remembered when her stupid husband had run off with one of the younger waitresses. The place had buzzed with that gossip for months and everybody figured that the fool had switched a true diamond for the box it came in. But that hadn’t stopped Red’s heart from breaking; hadn’t stopped bitterness from drawing lines around her eyes and peppering her sentences with acrid invectives against men in general. But Kevin never suffered the sting. She seemed to have exempted him from conviction. Probably because she didn’t really think of him as a man, he figured.

Red was scribbling on a napkin.

“Here you go,” she said, passing it to Kevin.

“590 Fyne Street. That’s just around the corner from me.”

“Okay, I’ll expect you around eight.”

Kevin grinned his way through breakfast which he gorged excitedly after Red left. It was 11: 30 AM and the brunch crowd was already filling up the place. Humming off-key, Kevin pocketed his napkin and grabbed his briefcase. In eight and a half hours he would be knocking on Red’s door, but first would come the treats in his briefcase and he couldn’t wait.

It was the kind of Sunday that encouraged hope. The sun shone brightly out of a baby blue sky, squawking birds flew overhead and the sidewalk and avenue traffic of people and cars seemed to have slowed, become less dense and tense. Kevin was happier than he’d been in a long time. What would he wear to dinner? In what turned out to be her last fully rational act, his mother had pressed money in his hand and insisted he buy something nice for his birthday; that was three years ago. He bought himself a pair of tan slacks and a red sports jacket. He’d wear that with a tan t-shirt. He’d been working out in the hospital therapy room and he was proud of his developing musculature. Yeah, he’d wear that. His usually slow apartment elevator was waiting for him on the ground floor. Things were really going his way!

Kevin believed in delaying pleasure. He undressed, took a leisurely shower and put on his terrycloth robe before placing his briefcase on the coffee table in front of the couch. This ritual began one of his favorite things: the opening of the brown package that brought his harem of large breasted women into his life every month. He’d imprint their images on his mind, breathe life into them and then call them by name as he masturbated. He had yet to advance to the wonders of the internet. When his Mom was alive it had been out of the question and since then he kept putting it off. The grandness of his obsession with the models in the magazines was impressive enough. A whole day off could pass in a haze of erotic bliss: Kevin on the couch, his eyes thin slits of passion gazing at tits, his oily hand on his cock pumping his way to the edge of pleasure for hours and hours on end. A part of him was deathly afraid of the internet and its potential. He was afraid that it was a pleasure pit that he’d fall into, never to recover again.

He snapped the locks of his briefcase and slowly opened it up. He gasped. Gone was the plain paper wrapping. Busty Nowles, her long pink tongue lapping at her nipple, her eyes smoky with raw lust sneered up at him. A video tape entitled, ‘Wanting’, lay across her legs. Where had that come from? Red, Kevin breathed aloud in the empty room. Red had opened his case. Red had seen his magazines. Red had put the video in his case. Red had invited him to dinner. Why? What did it all mean? Kevin couldn’t stop the questions that ran in circles around his head. Nor could he stop the emotional whirlwind that blew hot and then cold, garnered fear and then excitement, left anticipation and then dread in its wake. Perhaps the answer lay on that video. ‘Wanting’ it called itself. Wanting what? There was only one way to find out. With trembling hands, Kevin took the video, crossed the room and slipped it into the machine. On trembling legs, he hobbled back to the couch, grabbed the remote control and pressed play.

The introductory snow dissolved into a frame of a woman whose head was blurred like so many of the goddesses in his magazines: wives, sisters and mothers who generously shared their physical bounties, but jealously guarded their identities. Women to put faces to; women who would become whomever he wanted them to be. This one was an alluring catalogue of contradictions. She sat backward, facing away from the camera in an armless office chair; her legs spread obscenely wide, her head resting on her arms that were folded innocently across its back. Her high-heeled patent leather platform sandals were laced up her long race horse legs to within an inch of her crotch, suggesting the arrogant sexual boldness of a whore; while her too short pleated plaid skirt and white long sleeved cotton shirt was the uniform of a naughty schoolgirl.

“I want to tell you something about wanting something. May I turn around?”

Her accent was British, as rich and alluring as honeyed Devon cream over fruit, and just as dangerous. Kevin’s skin tingled as he slipped into that arousing, erotic vortex that he knew and loved so well. That feeling was grabbing hold deep inside, reaching into his balls, rushing along his shaft. This woman was the spider, he was the fly and in her web there was no room for worry or questions or consequences, only lust; only a growing, growling obsessive horniness. Kevin reached for the baby oil.

“May I please turn around? I want to see you. Please.”

The voice washed over him like a warm bath filled with invisible caressing fingertips.

“Yes, turn around,” he heard himself answer.

As if she could hear, the woman stepped her feet in a circle, wheeling around to face him. Heaving from her blouse, her breasts hung low over the back of the chair. Kevin oiled his hands, spread extra on his fingertips. He opened his legs, his mouth loose, his breath raspy with expectation. He began drawing circles in that space between ass and balls, rubbing, pressing. His cock jerked alive and his legs tensed with pleasure. His eyes swam like salmon upstream from her shadowy nipples that pushed insistently against her blouse all along the river of cleavage that was longer and deeper than any he’d ever seen. Busty Knowles, his mind summoned, and the blurry face dissolved into the threateningly sexual grimace of his favorite model.

“Busty,” he breathed as pre-cum dribbled out of his standing cock and down its sides.

“I want you to like these,” she said, cupping her pendulous treasures, offering them up to him and then letting them fall weightily back down. Kevin gloried in the after waves. She stared down at her chest, feeling her tits, tracing their shape. She ran her hands over her hair and down the sides of her body. “I want you to like me, all of me. Do you know why?” she paused expectantly.

And Kevin played the game. “Yes. I want to know.”

“Because I want to serve you; I want to please you. I want to make you horny, hornier than you’ve ever been. I want to make you come like you’ve never come before.”

Kevin loved the feeling of wetness. He drenched both his hands. One returned to that lovely spot over his prostate. The other began to slowly and lovingly stroke his cock, down and up; playing his foreskin over its head, adding his seeping love juice to the mix.

“Your cock is beautiful, so beautiful. If you wanted me to, I’d do that for you.”

Keeping one hand long, fingers squeezed together, Busty slowly fucked it with her other. Kevin imagined her tongue licking her lips, her eyes warm and wet with desire. Her tongue wanted to be in his mouth, his cock and his ass. His cock head pouted out of its foreskin with each teasing stroke. It spit one large glob of pleasure onto his hand and Kevin had to stop. It felt too good; stroke and stop; stroke and wait for the tide to subside.

Busty unbuttoned one, two and then three of her shirt buttons. There was so much flesh that Kevin couldn’t see a bra. Busty unbuttoned two more of her tiny buttons and Kevin saw her bra. It was a strapless white half bra that couldn’t even pretend to hold her. Her nipples reached over the edge, ready to feed hungry mouths. Kevin was milking his balls, carefully gauging his pleasure, just like he’d like to be milking her tits. She climbed off the chair and moved toward him. She sat on a towel on the floor. She was in Kevin’s face, spreading her legs.

“I’ve come to get you, baby,” she cooed. “I’ve got to have you, baby.”

What was Red trying to do to him?

Red! His mind had tricked him. Gone was Busty Knowles; here was Red, Red with a British accent.

“When I think of you I get hot and my heart beats quick and hard.”

She had placed her hand demurely over her heart.

“And my pussy gets all agitated and oozy.”

She was rubbing herself through her white lace panties. “Oh my,” she said, “I wish you could touch me here; only if you want to, of course. I bet you have a nice warm tongue. You could make me feel real good; only if you want to of course. And I could make your cock and your balls feel real good; only if you want me to.”

Kevin could feel a rumbling, the beginning of an earth shattering quake. His hands flew away from his body and he tensed, contracting muscles, deflecting the explosion that was looming large.

Red pulled her panties aside and slide two fingers inside. Her breathing was ragged. She was bucking against her fingers. “I wish you were here. I wish you were here fucking me; but only if you wanted to. Do it for me and I’ll do it for you.”

Kevin maneuvered himself onto his side. Supporting himself with one hand, he cupped the other palm like it was a wet, perfectly fitting pussy. He moved his hips, pumping to the rhythm of an ancient drum, from base to head and back. His breathing was groaning, groaning. He was fucking himself. For Red, he was thrusting his pelvis, his cock into his warm, wet hand; he was fucking himself.

“Show me how you’re going to do me. How you’re going to fuck me like you own me.” She was rubbing her clit, tapping her clit and then shoving fingers inside herself. “Hurry, oh please hurry. I’m coming.”

“Me too, I’m coming, Red. I’m coming.”

And he did. He gave in, relaxed his mind as his stomach flexed and released, his legs tensed, as his level of arousal broke through the bounds of sanity into the world of no sense, only sensation. He gasped as thick liquid ejaculated out of him, again and again; so much wanting spewing out of him.

He collapsed, eyes closed, his breathing struggling toward normalcy. When he opened his eyes the screen was blank except for snow and the only sound was a constant hiss. Kevin enjoyed the nothingness.

He finally climbed off the couch, the only vision in his head that of his bedroom with the shades drawn. He went to the bathroom, wiped himself up a bit and cleaned his teeth. He set his alarm for 6:30 PM and fell into bed.

At 6:30 PM his alarm roused him out of a dreamless sleep. He felt groggy, still tired and soon nodded off again. It was past seven when he finally got up, showered, dressed and left. In the elevator he remembered the bottles of wine he’d meant to bring. He went back to the apartment, grabbed the bottle of white from the fridge, the red from the counter and put them in a gift bag.

By 7:50 PM he was leaving his building. He’d get there just in time. He thought about Red and his briefcase. That she was aware of that side of him left him feeling exposed and very vulnerable in the shadow of feelings that hovered overhead. He felt disconnected from them and suspected that the whole situation was too much for him, too complicated to own. He knew only two things: One that Red and the restaurant meant everything to him; and two, that he was desperately afraid of losing both. His legs hurt as he limped along.

“It’s Kevin. I’m downstairs.”

In her lobby, he punched the elevator button and rode to her floor. He felt like a puppet on fortune’s string. He couldn’t think.

Red was waiting, her door open.

“I want to tell you something about wanting something. Won’t you come in?”

Her accent was British, as rich and alluring as honeyed Devon cream over fruit, and just as dangerous. Her high-heeled patent leather platform sandals were laced up her long race horse legs to within an inch of her crotch. His eyes swam like salmon upstream from her shadowy nipples that pushed insistently against her blouse all along the river of cleavage that was longer and deeper than any he’d ever seen.

“Won’t you please come in?”

Kevin stepped inside. Red brushed against him as she moved to close the door behind him, twirling to expose white lace panties beneath her too short plaid skirt. She leaned against the door, immobilizing Kevin with her hungry stare.

“I want you to like these,” she said, rubbing her hands over her huge breasts. “I want you to like me. I want to serve you.”

Kevin passed Red the wine. Fantasy and reality collided, sending erotic currents zinging along his every nerve. He could feel his cock bolting awake, insinuating itself against its fabric bed. And Kevin blushed with embarrassment as a he felt a burst of pre-cum expel out of him. He’d wet his pants.