Mr. Fix-It

by Crystal Hubbard

  Left in only a dainty pair of sheer black panties, Khela’s skin prickled under Carter’s bold scrutiny. His fingers grazed her abdomen, making her skin jump, on their way to her hips, where he hooked them into the waistband of her panties. Slowly squatting, Carter drew her delicate panties down the length of her legs. She bent and rested a hand on his shoulder to maintain her balance as she stepped out of them.

  Carter neatly folded them and placed them with her bra.

  Knowing that his eyes were tracking her movements, Khela went to the bed and slid beneath its lightweight duvet. The massive sleigh bed was a near-perfect square and slightly bigger than a standard king. Through heavy-lidded eyes, Khela watched Carter undress, enjoying every second of what seemed like a great unveiling.

  His belt came off first, and he put it on the bench with Khela’s clothing. Next, he unbuttoned his button-down, shrugging out of it with the bored ease of a man in no special hurry to climb into bed with the woman he loved and craved. His eyes on Khela, he took off his pristine white T-shirt.

  She shifted her head on his pillows, giving herself the perfect view of his bare torso. Bracing one hand on the big burled pine dresser facing the foot of the bed, he bent and removed his socks, apparently in deference to one of her long-ago observations that there was nothing funnier than a man wearing only his socks.

  His pants and sports briefs came off last. Khela sighed at the sight of his nude body. He appeared to have grown only more beautiful in the time they had spent apart. His long legs, shapely in the distinct way that only a man’s legs can be, brought him to the bed. His strong arms, the biceps and triceps working gracefully under his tawny skin, pulled back the duvet.

  Khela welcomed him into the silken warmth of his bed, a place now made most inviting by her heat and presence. Carter aligned his body with hers. She rested her head on his right bicep; he clasped her backside, plastering her hips to his. He worked one of her legs between his and embraced her, assuring that her heartbeat was as close as possible to his own.

  He nuzzled her hair, breathing deeply of her, reacquainting his senses with every detail of her. His abdomen moved hard against hers, and Khela took his face in her hands.

  “Are we all right?” she whispered, her dark eyes searching his lighter ones.

  He nodded, afraid of what else would spill out if he dared speak.

  “I missed you,” she said, her voice as soft and gentle as a caress.

  Carter kissed her then, his tenderness planting the seed for a belief Khela thought herself incapable of, that love—the kind she wrote about, the kind she wished for—actually existed.

  Sliding slowly down her body, Carter continued to cover her with chaste kisses, occasionally darting out his tongue to taste a specific part of her, or learn its texture anew. His warm breath, firm lips, taunting teeth and talented tongue at her breasts left her gasping for more of him.

  He eagerly obliged, disappearing under the duvet to dot her taut belly and lower abdomen with kisses. He positioned her fully on her back before settling between her thighs. Khela caught a glimpse of his hunched shape beneath the covers before she closed her eyes and pushed her head into the soft pillow.

  Carter braced the backs of her thighs on his shoulders, and he held her hips in his hands, as though presenting the feast of her body to himself on a platter.

  Khela shivered in anticipation, hungrily awaiting what would come next. Through the duvet, she clutched at Carter’s head and back, her spine arching upward. Friend Oceanwater had introduced them to dozens of tools that would accomplish the simple goal of sexual release, but Khela was confident that Friend and Aphrodite’s Feather had nothing that could surpass Carter’s ability to please.

  He parted her wet folds by stroking upward with the bridge of his nose, anointing himself with her slippery perfume. He finished the stroke with the flick of his tongue, eliciting a sharp intake of air from Khela. Carter smiled against her dampness within the tent of the duvet. Pulling her thighs as widely apart as possible, he held her to his lips and tasted her, his tongue probing, swirling, lapping and thrusting.

  The duvet protected Carter’s skin from Khela’s fingernails, which would have dug into him from the strength with which she was clutching his head. Carter held her tightly, breathing hard and fast against her, almost as hard and fast as the movement of his tongue and jaw.

  He fully exposed her, and then gently clamped his teeth on the pulsating nub no longer hiding within its hood of slick flesh. He gave it a tiny tug, flitting the tip of his tongue over it, and Khela responded with a guttural moan that echoed off the walls and high ceiling.

  Her thigh muscles hardened, her back curved, and her hands clenched into tight fists, and for one short second she was utterly still. But then her hips began moving against Carter’s mouth and chin, working her into the hottest, most heavenly frenzy.

  He fit his tongue into her in time to feel the violent constriction of her dark tunnel. Her body undulated, and Carter wished he could see her from outside the covers. He imagined how lovely she looked in the throes of rapture, and he found himself erupting in an amateurish display reminiscent of his earliest adolescent fumbling under the covers in the quiet of night.

  Explosion after explosion rocked through her until her flesh became so sensitive, she could only whimper in mindless bliss as he continued to expertly gnaw at her.

  “Carter,” she exhaled weakly, “please. I can’t…”

  He pushed aside the duvet. “Do you want me to stop?” he asked against the warmth of her inner thigh.

  Yes, was in her mind, but her love-starved nerve endings forced out a breathy, “No.” For the first time ever, Khela’s eruptions stacked, building higher and higher, the sensations intensifying until she felt she would shatter. Something within her did indeed break, and to her surprise, it turned out to be the very last of her reservations about giving herself, in total body and mind, to Carter.

  He sank once more into the heaven between her thighs and, as the light of the golden sunrise flooded over them, Carter took Khela to a place where her cries of pleasure sounded like the songs of angels.

  * * *

  They finally left the bed just after noon for a picnic in Carter’s living room. White carryout containers from Rami’s covered the coffee table and sat on the floor around them and their plates. Carter, dressed only in grey sports briefs, scooped up the last of the baba ganoush with his finger.

  “I think the carton is edible, too,” Khela joked. “Go on, try it.”

  “Hardy har har,” Carter said. Passing on tasting the box, he did turn it upside down to shake the last bits of eggplant into his mouth.

  “Have you ever been to Rami’s?” Khela asked him.

  Having scoured his plate clean with a piece of pita, Carter moved on to the next container. “I’ve never had food like this before. What is it? Greek?”

  Khela marveled at how good ol’ Southern boy ignorance and urban sophistication resided side by side within him. “How can you have lived in Boston for so long without sampling some of its Middle Eastern cuisine?”

  He shrugged. “I just like American food better, I guess.”

  “I’ve never seen you lick your plate after eating a hamburger,” Khela said.

  “Okay, so this is a little tiny bit better than a hamburger,” he admitted. “What was in it? I can’t really tell.”

  “Eggplant, lemon juice, cumin, olive oil, parsley, tahini—”

  “Tahiti?”

  “Tahini,” Khela repeated more clearly. “It’s a sauce made of sesame seeds.”

  “I bet tahini would taste good on pork rinds.”

  He said this with a straight face, but then he started laughing and Khela knew that he was just teasing her.

  “Have you tried the penis stew?”

  Carter’s laughter abruptly died. “They put real penis in a stew?”

  “Well, how do you make your penis stew?” she asked with a sardonic smile.

  Carter’s
face wrinkled in disgust. “Man, that’s nasty.”

  “I’m kidding. Rami’s doesn’t make penis stew. You’d have to go to Malaysia or China to find a restaurant that delivered penis stew. You could probably get bull, goat, deer—”

  “I don’t need to hear the flavors,” Carter laughed.

  “Try one of the spinach borekas,” she offered, handing him one. “They don’t taste a thing like penis.”

  He took her wrist and held her hand in place so he could nibble the potato and spinach-filled turnover right from her fingers. When he finished, he licked her fingertips, sucking every crumb of pastry, every tasty bead of filling, from them.

  Khela purred her approval. “Would you like to try a meat kabob?”

  Tugging her by her wrist, Carter pulled her into the hollow formed by his crossed legs. “I like the theme you got goin’ here.” Grinning suggestively, he took her hand and wrapped it around his personal meat kabob.

  “Ooh,” Khela murmured through prettily puckered lips. “This could feed a family of eight.”

  “Try nine.”

  “Friend Oceanwater had a table full of B.O.B.s built like this,” Khela whispered against his neck. “Tell me, what power source does this require?”

  Carter closed his eyes and expelled a low moan. “It’s manual,” he sighed. “Good old-fashioned elbow grease gets the job done every time.” He opened his eyes. “What’s a B.O.B?”

  “Battery-Operated Boyfriend.” Khela put a little more elbow into the movement of her hand in his lap. “I think some of the girls went home with a couple of them last night.”

  Carter reluctantly moved her hand aside. “Exactly what did you and Daphne do last night?”

  “We went to an Aphrodite’s Feather party.” She slid off his lap and onto the floor, nearly sitting on a shallow box of pitas.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s, um…” She tapped her chin with her index finger. “It’s like a Tupperware party, only instead of storage containers and measuring cups, you get to see samples of vibrators and edible panties.”

  “Oh,” Carter said, reaching for a pita. Then he spun around and faced Khela. “What?”

  She fell over laughing, upsetting her glass of Mideastern-style lemonade. Carter quickly grabbed a pile of white napkins from the coffee table to clean up the mess. After picking up the flecks of mint and the orange blossom that had garnished and flavored the beverage, he used bottled water to dilute the remaining liquid. He dabbed at it until no traces of it remained in the carpet.

  “All better?” Khela asked after he’d wadded up the soiled napkins and stuffed them into the empty baba ganoush carton.

  “Thank God, I had the carpet treated with a stain guard,” he said.

  “It’s just lemonade, not sulfuric acid,” Khela commented. “Or cat pee. Or ketchup. Or grape—”

  “I get it, smarty,” he chuckled. “I like to keep my things nice.”

  “You do realize that children will destroy this place,” Khela said.

  “Children? What children?”

  “Your children. When you have them.”

  “Oh, I won’t be livin’ here when we have kids. This is my big-city bachelor pad, my playboy penthouse. Our kids are gonna have a house with a big ol’ yard to run ‘round in.”

  Khela kept her eyes on her half-eaten falafel. She didn’t want him to see how his use of “we” and “our” affected her.

  Carter had chosen those words deliberately. “You do want to have kids some day, don’t you?” he asked when she continued to avert her eyes.

  “Absolutely,” she said, finally meeting his gaze squarely. “I grew up with parents who chose me, so I always felt that I was the most special little girl in the world, at least to them. I want someone who belongs to me completely. I want to know what it feels like to have someone with my eyes looking back at me. Or who flashes my smile at the world. I want someone who’ll love me, no matter what.”

  “You got that, girl.” Carter stood on his knees and cupped her face. “You got that right here, and then some,” he said, covering her mouth with his and easing her onto his cushy, spotless carpet.

  * * *

  Sitting in the rear of the Crispus Attucks High School auditorium with Khela’s shoulder handbag on his lap, Carter squirmed uncomfortably. Every seat in the cavernous space was occupied by a student, teacher, parent or guest who wanted to listen to Khela, who had been invited to the school as part of its Weekend Mentor Lecture Series for Seniors.

  Carter knew nothing about Crispus Attucks High, other than what he discovered upon their arrival—that it was a public school in the Dorchester section of Boston and two armed security guards patrolled its parking lot during weekend functions. His own alma mater, Dearborn Academy, was as different from Crispus Attucks as an ostrich from a shark.

  Dearborn’s 60-acre campus was nestled in the quaint bedroom community of Concord, where median housing prices were close to $900,000. The rowhouses neighboring Crispus Attucks High were vacant, condemned, or occupied as evidenced by raggedy furniture, broken toys, uncollected newspapers and garbage strewn across patchy front lawns. Underneath their ugliness, the red brick structures had so much character, so many beautiful architectural details. Riding past the houses, Carter had wished that he could adopt the buildings as one would neglected children.

  He had pushed the depressed state of the neighborhood to a deeper part of his mind once Khela had taken the stage in the auditorium. Just as she had inspired the authors at the convention, she encouraged the new seniors of Crispus Attucks to put pen to paper and record their innermost thoughts, wishes, prayers and dreams. She demanded that they record their histories in stories, songs, drawings—anything. The form of the record didn’t matter, only that the record was kept.

  Carter didn’t have enough fingers and toes to count off the number of guest speakers he’d been forced to sit through in Dearborn special assemblies—politicians, professional athletes, CEOs—there was always some parent eager to blow balloon juice about their career to a captive audience of fourteen-to-eighteen-year-olds.

  Glancing at the purple print-out of the high school’s lecture calendar, Carter saw that a reverend had spoken the previous Saturday and a parole officer was on deck for next week. Carter wondered if other speakers drew the same turnout as Khela.

  The lecture was the only reason Khela had left his apartment after their lunch interlude to go home, shower and change before meeting Carter in front of the brownstone, where they hailed a cab that took them into Dorchester.

  Students milling outside the school prior to the lecture had given him long looks as he accompanied Khela into the building. Dorchester was racially diverse, but as Carter walked Khela through the packed auditorium to the stage, he saw few faces with his complexion.

  Sitting between a bright-eyed young Latina, who flashed her braces at him in a dreamy smile every five minutes, and a scrawny Asian with tufts of purple hair and the X-Men character Wolverine tattooed on the back of his right hand, Carter felt completely out of place now that Khela’s talk was over and she was fielding questions from her young audience.

  He regretted his decision to sit in the center of the back row, a position he had wanted for its perfect view of Khela. His location made it impossible to make a smooth exit without having to squeeze past ten students in either direction. Hugging her huge Cape Cod leather handbag to his chest, he swallowed his discomfort and tried to enjoy the question-and-answer session. It was easy with Khela down on the stage in an elegant white silk blouse, a tan linen pencil skirt and tan heels.

  That hundreds of students had given up a sunny August Saturday afternoon to listen to Khela impressed Carter. What impressed him even more was her ease in front of such a diverse crowd of young people. She had been so uncomfortable addressing her peers at the East Coast Writer’s Association convention, but she radiated self-assurance while speaking to this audience.

  A three-minute standing ovation followed Khela’
s remarks, after which the principal took the stage. In her smart brown pantsuit, she looked like a shorter, younger Ruby Dee.

  “I would like to thank the senior class for coming out today,” the principal said, “and for being so attentive and respectful of Miss Halliday. As you know, our budget for speakers is limited. I met Miss Halliday at one of her signings last year, and when I asked her to come to my school and speak to my children, she didn’t have her people call my people. She accepted right there on the spot.”

  More applause interrupted the principal, who raised her hands to quiet the auditorium before continuing. “Not only did Miss Halliday forgo her usual speaking fee to talk to you today, she made a donation to our Library Improvement Fund. Miss Halliday has made it possible for us to purchase the new computer stations we need!”

  A last round of applause drowned out the principal’s final thanks to Khela. Even from the back row, Carter could see a blush tinting Khela’s cheeks as the principal gave her a warm handshake. When the students and guests began to file out of the auditorium, Carter made his way down the center aisle to the stage, where quite a few students had hung back to speak further with Khela or to get books signed.

  Taking his place in line behind them, Carter smiled and gave Khela a small wave. She responded with a quick wink without interrupting what she was saying to a student.

  The young man immediately in front of Carter, his slight form drowning in baggy black jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt with cortez in gold gothic-bold lettering across the front, turned to look at Carter. “Nice purse,” he said, a smirk forming beneath the twenty black hairs forming what appeared to be a mustache.

  “Thanks,” Carter said brightly. “But it’s not mine.”

  “Why you gonna go an’ start makin’ trouble, Cortez?” came the high-pitched, heavily-accented voice of the girl in front of Cortez, the color high in her caramel-colored cheeks. “You know that’s Mr. Halliday, ’cause you saw him come in with her!” she chastised, punctuating it with a sharp smack to the young man’s upper arm.

  “I told you not to hit me, girl!” he said, his tone menacing but his body language meek and mild. “Dude is standing up here holdin’ onto his woman’s purse, so why you on me?”