Gwen’s head felt light and the restaurant swayed around her. “Excuse me,” she said, fumbling money out of her wallet and standing up. “I have to go now. I forgot I — I have to do something. It was nice meeting you, Tom.”
Gwen fled the restaurant, glaring at George and Gracie as she passed them, but they didn’t seem to notice. Caught up, no doubt, in being the center of attention. She managed to make it all the way to her car before losing her croquettes on the blacktop.
Gwen lay on the couch eating peppermint stick ice cream and brooding over her fate. George and Gracie were back again, but she knew it didn’t mean anything. They could leave again at any moment and no bra could stop them. She wondered if she really needed them anyway. Maybe they were more trouble than they were worth.
She put down the ice cream and lifted up her shirt, looking down through the neck hole. They were pretty breasts, she had to admit. Gracie a little more so than George, who was larger and kind of droopy, but they both had a soft roundness to them which was very appealing. She snaked her arms beneath her shirt and ran her hands under them, hefting them in her palms, enjoying their watery weight and warmth. A thought occurred to her. If they could detach . . .
She cradled George in her hands, raised the jiggling lump of flesh to her mouth and rolled the nipple over her tongue. A jolt of pleasure shot down her body, making her toes tingle. Restless, Gracie rolled into her lap and burrowed at her crotch. Gwen relaxed her legs even as she continued sucking on George’s nipple. It felt good. It felt so good it was almost certainly wrong, but so what? Her life was already ruined, why not wallow in whatever debased pleasures the situation offered? Stuffing as much of George into her mouth as she could, she unfastened her jeans and reached for the ice cream.
Gwen lay in a sticky stupor on the couch, the ice cream carton tucked into the crook of her arm. Inside George and Gracie lolled indolently in the melted pink froth. They really loved that stuff. Gwen sighed and gazed at the ceiling with blissful satisfaction, not caring, at least for the moment, why and how she felt that way.
Someone knocked on the door. “Gwenny?” came her mother’s voice from the other side.
Gwen shot up off the couch, grabbing the lid to the ice cream and shoving it over George and Gracie. She refastened her jeans and wiped away the worst of the ice cream film with a paper napkin. “Just a second, Ma!” she yelled, racing into the bedroom to throw on a bulky sweater.
She answered the door and her mother swept in dressed in a powder blue micro-fiber jogging suit, her bleached curls sticking out from around a coordinating headband. “Sweetheart, I was just over at Kohl’s, and they have the cutest little sweater sets that’d be just perfect for you.” She leaned forward to give Gwen a kiss.
Gwen quickly pecked her mother’s cheek and backed away before she could get a hug in.
“They’re on sale,” her mother continued. “I thought maybe we could go back together — maybe have a little lunch while we’re out.”
Gwen took a deep breath to steady herself. “Oh, no thanks, Mom. I’m uh, kind of busy right now.”
“Hmm. I can see that.” Her mother glanced around the disordered apartment and then turned to eye Gwen closely. “Are you okay?”
“Oh yeah! Yeah, I’m fine.” Desperately Gwen searched for something to distract her mother. “H-hey, look what I found,” she said, pointing at the statue on the coffee table.
“Oh, isn’t that pretty!”
Gwen flushed. “Thanks, Mom.”
“Where did you buy it? Was it on sale?”
Gwen stared at her. “Mom, I made it. In high school, remember?”
Her mother shook her head. “I don’t remember you ever sculpting, Sweetie. You’ve always been such a good, practical girl.” She looked around the apartment again in disapproval. “I just wish you weren’t so messy. I mean look,” she picked the ice cream carton up from where Gwen had left it on the floor, “how can you just leave this sitting out like this?”
“Mom, please . . .”
But her mother ignored her. “I bet it’s all melted now,” she said, opening the lid.
Her eyes widened briefly and then she froze, staring into the carton. It wobbled slightly as her hand shook. She shot a glance at Gwen, taking in her bulky sweater, and then looked back into the carton. She replaced the lid carefully and set it down on the coffee table next to Gwen’s statue. She sat down on the couch. “They are yours?”
Open mouthed, Gwen nodded.
“Well, that’s something, at least.” Her mother sighed. “Dotty Greenfield’s boy wound up with somebody else’s testicles and he got his girlfriend pregnant with them. It was a mess.”
Gwen couldn’t contain the laughter that burst inappropriately from her lips.
Her mother scowled, frown lines standing out around her mouth. “Oh, you think that’s funny, do you?”
Helplessly, Gwen nodded her head and sank to the couch, weeping with laughter. She laid her head on her mother’s shoulder and suddenly her giggles became sobs.
“Oh, now. There, there, Honey,” said her mother, wrapping her arms around Gwen and rocking her, just like when she was a little girl. “Come on now, don’t cry. It’s not so bad.”
Gwen sat back up, rubbing her eyes. “Not so bad? How can you say that? You’re not the one whose breasts are gallivanting all over town!”
“No, but I was, once.”
“What?” Shock made Gwen’s hands and feet tingle.
Her mother sighed again. “Oh yes. I was a little older than you, but they say every generation matures earlier, so . . .”
Gwen shook her head. “So you’re saying this happens to everyone? How come I’ve never heard about it before?”
“Well, it doesn’t happen to everyone, dear. Just an unlucky few. And of course no one talks about it. I mean, it’s just too embarrassing, isn’t it?”
She nodded in agreement, and for a while they sat in silence, staring at the ice cream carton. At last Gwen said, “But it happened to you?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“B-but it doesn’t anymore?”
“No. Thank God.”
Gwen turned and looked at her mother. “So what happened?”
She shrugged. “One day, they just didn’t come back.”
“Oh my God! How horrible!”
“No.” Her mother shook her head and took Gwen’s hands in hers, gripping them tightly. “No. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. And the best thing for you to do is tape that ice cream carton shut, pop it in the freezer and never take it out again. Take it from me Gwenny, you’ll be better off without them.”
Gwen stared at her mother in horror. “How can you say that?”
“Because they will publicly humiliate you over and over again if you let them, until you lose your friends, your job, everything. They will destroy your life unless you give them exactly what they want.” She released Gwen’s hands and folded her arms.
“What they want?”
“Mmm-hmm.” Gwen’s mother gave her a sinister look.
Running a hand over her sticky jeans, Gwen thought she had a pretty good idea what George and Gracie wanted.
Gwen’s mother patted her knee and stood up. “Now you need to get your mind off all of this, Gwenny. Focus on something else.” She smiled brightly and clasped her hands together. “I know, why don’t you put the ice cream away and come shopping with me? Mervyns has some lovely oversized knits you might like.”
Gwen shook her head. “No thanks, Mom. I think I’d like to be alone for a little while.”
Her mother sighed and pursed her lips. “Suit yourself,” she said as she headed for the door, “but believe me, you’ll feel a lot better once you take matters into your own hands.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Mom,” said Gwen, following her. “And thanks.” She gave her a big hug. “Thanks for stopping by.”
Armed with a cost-estimate form and the bulging Pottery Barn file, Gwen approached Charlie Axel. Charlie
was on the phone, so Gwen stood in front of his desk waiting. Her arms ached from holding the huge file, but with the enormous graphics monitor, the scanner, and countless printouts and CDs, there wasn’t a square inch of space open on his desk.
“Okay, I’ll email you a thumbnail this afternoon, and as soon as you approve it, I’ll go ahead with the final layout… Great. Bye.” Charlie hung up and immediately dialed another number. “Hey, Baby, how you doing? . . . Ha! . . . Me? Not much . . . Hey, you want to go to the Icebox tonight? DJ Jah Love is spinning.”
“Um. Excuse me,” said Gwen.
Charlie glanced at her and put his hand over the receiver. “Just a sec,” he said.
Gwen stood there for fifteen minutes while Charlie and his girlfriend made plans for the evening, discussed the local music scene and critiqued their friends’ fashion sense.
“Dean should have stuck with black work. His new Elvis tattoo clashes with his hair . . . Oh, you gotta go? . . . Catch you later then baby, bye.”
“Excuse me Charlie,” said Gwen, edging closer to the desk as he hung up and returned his gaze to the monitor. “I need to talk to you about the Pottery Barn account.”
“Sure, what do you need to know?” he asked, fingers briskly tapping at the keyboard. He never took his eyes off the monitor.
“Well —” Gwen shifted her weight and adjusted her grip on the file as a blush crept over her face. Suddenly she was furious with this smart, smarmy, hotshot young “artist,” sitting there, not even looking at her, barely acknowledging her as a human being.
What gave him the right? What made him better than her? That he had talent? Well everybody has talent, just not everybody gets to use theirs. He was lucky. He was lucky and that meant he could treat her like a moderately bright stapler? “There’s a few things,” she said sweetly as she very gently shoved half the crap on his desk onto the floor and made room for the Pottery Barn file.
“What the hell are you doing?” She had Charlie’s undivided attention at last. He gaped at her as she walked around his desk toward him.
“I have to file an invoice for this job tomorrow,” she said, brandishing the cost-estimate form. “And I don’t have one useful piece of information in this whole stack!” She smacked the Pottery Barn file with her other hand.
The noise made Charlie jump. “Geez, chill out! It’s just an invoice. That’s valuable work you just threw on the floor, dude!”
“Not if we can’t bill for it,” she said, resting one hand on his desk and leaning in toward him. “It may be ‘just an invoice’ to you, but it’s my freaking job, dude. For weeks now, you haven’t been letting me do my job.”
Charlie blinked. “Okay, okay. Relax. Just leave the form with me and I’ll fill it out and get it back to you tomorrow.”
“Oh no,” she said as she hauled a chair over beside his. “We’re going to fill in the information on the form right now. And then I’ll have what I need, and I can leave you alone, which is what we both want. And next time, you can avoid all this by filling out the form yourself.” She looked Charlie in his bratty, talented, dumbstruck face, and she smiled.
When Gwen got to the elevator the new guy in accounting was just stepping inside. He held the door for her. He had sandy brown hair and an earnest, slightly perplexed expression. “Thanks,” she said, and then wondered if he’d witnessed her little freak out with Charlie. She blushed and stood very still, staring at the brushed stainless steel of the elevator doors.
“I hate that guy,” he said conversationally. “My first day here he kept me waiting at his desk for half an hour while he negotiated a new deal with his cellular provider. All I needed was his signoff on a Fed-Ex receipt. What a jerk.”
Gwen smiled and glanced at him, and found him smiling back.
“That needed to be done,” he said, and his smile became a grin. He swept one arm out in front of him, “Swoosh!”
*
Though her social life was in ruins and her job hung by a thread, Gwen’s relationship with her breasts had improved considerably. They seemed to appreciate the attention she gave them. They didn’t go out quite as much, and when they did they always came back in the manner of excited children eager to share their adventures. Gwen would wake up around four or five in the morning, her breasts bouncing on top of her chest. She’d fondle them for a little while, until they got sleepy and nudged away the covers so they could reattach themselves.
One night she awoke to find three blobs of flesh wiggling on her. She fumbled for the bedside lamp and beheld in the amber glow George and Gracie perching proudly on either side of a semi-flaccid penis. It was a testament to her reconciliation with her situation that she didn’t scream and fling the thing across the room. Clearly, her breasts had meant well, but there was no telling where this little cock had been, and no way she was going to let it join their nocturnal games.
Groaning, Gwen sat up and stared at the penis, which regarded her with cycloptic innocence. She took a slip from the floor by the bed, draped it over the wayward penis and scooped it up, padding across the room to her dresser. She placed the penis gently in her underwear drawer, shut it, and went back to sleep.
The following afternoon was J. Thomas Design’s annual office party. They’d taken over the lobby of the Hilton for the event. Towering posters of award-winning advertising images stood about, guests mingling among them. Gwen almost didn’t mind being there. Since she’d been pleasuring her breasts there’d been no more public incidents and she felt more in control of her life than she had in weeks.
“. . . so I figured, at least with accounting I could always find a job,” said the new guy in accounting. “All in all, I think I did the right thing, switching majors.”
Gwen, who’d been taking full advantage of the open bar, smiled pleasantly and allowed herself to focus on his nicely formed shoulders.
He smiled back at her, but at the same time his eyes darted nervously over her shoulder, like he was looking for someone. He seemed to catch himself and refocus on her. “So what about you, how do you like working here?” he asked her.
“Oh, it’s great,” she said, feeling her smile calcify into a rigid grin. “J. Thomas is a great company to be with and I love working around creative people.” As she paused to drain her third whisky sour, she distinctly felt something warm and soft roll free from under her bra and drop down the front of her dress. She looked down in time to see George scampering beneath the hors d’oeuvres table.
No. Oh God no, not now. Swearing under her breath, Gwen ran after her left breast. She pulled up the tablecloth and stuck her head under the hors d’oeuvres table. George was nowhere in sight.
A pair of men’s brown oxfords appeared beside the table. “Did you lose something?” asked the new guy in accounting.
She straightened, slamming the back of her head against the underside of the table, creating a minor shower of pigs in blankets. The new guy in accounting helped extricate her from the tablecloth. “Careful now. Are you okay?”
“Oh! Oh yeah.” She folded her arms across her chest, as much to imprison Gracie as to hide George’s absence. “I — I, um, lost my earring.”
He wrinkled his brow. “But you have two now.”
“Oh, oh yeah.”
At the far end of the room stood an enormous poster of a model in a dress comprised entirely of pink balloons. The crowd before it parted momentarily, and she thought she saw George rolling behind it. “Excuse me,” she said, and dashed off to investigate.
The poster stood in an alcove, one side pushed up against the wall, forming a little cul-de-sac behind it. And there in the shadows was her breast. Gwen got to her hands and knees and squeezed behind the poster. George rolled to the far corner, but could not escape. With a cry of exultation, Gwen grabbed her.
Awkwardly she managed to unbutton the top of her dress and push her bra down, but as she tried to put George back in her rightful place, the breast bucked, causing her to bump the poster with her elbow. The foam-board w
obbled, and then, with a whooshing sound, toppled over. Gasps erupted and everyone turned to stare, and then silence fell as they saw Gwen, on her knees, naked from the waist up, clutching her left breast in her hands.
Still shaking with humiliation, Gwen rummaged in her bedroom closet until she found the box she’d kept her statue in. She got a roll of duct tape out of the junk drawer and put them both on the coffee table next to her high school masterpiece. Now maybe she’d be able to keep her job, she thought, steeling herself. Now maybe she’d meet someone and settle down to a nice, ordinary life. She stripped to the waist, and took George and Gracie lovingly in her hands. “I don’t want to do this, but you’ve left me no other option,” she told them.
As she grasped them more firmly, George and Gracie wiggled free from her hands. They rolled under the couch and she shoved it over onto its back. They fled to the bedroom and tried to hide in the bed covers. Gwen fished the butterfly net out of the closet and pulled the covers back in a whoosh. She swiped at them with the net, missed and dashed across the bed after them as they rolled into the bathroom.
Twenty minutes later she had them trapped behind the refrigerator. She rousted them out with the handle of the net and almost got them as they slipped out between the refrigerator and the stove. As they raced back into the living room, Gwen was right behind them. They sprinted across the carpet, heading for the television, but the overturned couch was in their way.
They thought they were being clever; George went one way around, Gracie the other, but Gwen leapt onto the couch and caught them on the other side. Unable to stop themselves, they rolled into her waiting net and she swung it up with a shout of triumph.
The Best of Talebones Page 7
