by Lisa Cach
" 'Pod" was short for tripod, a novice player who used his hockey stick like a third leg. "My head's not in the game," Russ admitted.
Greg thumped Russ's helmet with his stick. "Get it in the game or you're going to get hurt."
He was right; injuries happened when you weren't paying full attention. In their thirty-five-and-over amateur hockey league, injuries were scrupulously avoided. One bad knee blowout could end your days on the ice forever.
It was Emma Mayson who was screwing up his game. Since yesterday's wild conversation, he hadn't been able to concentrate on anything except the accidental agreement they'd made.
Today at work Kevin had glumly announced that Emma had canceled their date, since she was moving to a new apartment. She'd refused his offers of help, and refused to set up another date. Kevin had vowed to keep trying, anyway.
Russ had given a one-shoulder shrug. It wasn't as if he could tell his friend, "Don't feel bad. The real reason she canceled is so that I can pay her for sex three times a week."
Christ.
With great effort he kept his focus for the remaining ten minutes of the game, but as soon as it was over and he was heading to the locker room, his thoughts went back to Emma. The other guys were laughing and bantering about the game, giving each other a hard time and reliving the highs and lows as they showered and dressed, cans of La-batt's beer appearing out of gear bags and getting tossed to eager hands. It was all white noise.
Why the hell hadn't he cleared things up the moment he realized she thought he wanted her to be his mistress? The words had been halfway out his mouth before a voice inside had stopped him. She's already agreed to it, the voice said. She'd be humiliated if he told her he'd only meant to have dinner three times a week, not sex.
He'd thought that the best way to save her from embarrassment was to wait a few days and then tell her that he'd changed his mind and only wanted her to cook for him. He'd say that his conscience had bothered him, and that he could tell that she didn't truly want to do it.
All of which sounded well and good, but why, then, had he made an appointment to see his doctor and get a physical?
She's already agreed to it, the wicked voice said again. It hadn't been clear that she didn't want to do it either; in fact, there were moments during their "cooking" negotiations when he'd thought she was coming on to him. That made perfect sense, now that he knew her mind hadn't been on pot roasts.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up.
"Are you going to put that sock on or just fondle it?" Greg said.
Russ looked down at the sock in his hand. He was fully dressed except for one foot, and a quick look around the locker room showed that most of the other guys had already left, headed over to Harold's Tavern for a more in-depth rehash of the game and colder beer.
"I fondle it, but it just lies there," Russ said.
Greg laughed. "You've got to spend more time with women. Are you coming to Harold's?"
"Yeah." Dwelling on the Emma situation wasn't making it any better, so maybe avoiding it would help.
The Harold of Harold's Tavern was eighty-five and possessed an even dozen Lincoln Continentals, all of which took up the front lot of the tavern, forcing patrons to park around the side. Harold himself was a thin man with fluffy white hair and pink skin that shone with cleanliness. The bar's half-block proximity to the ice arena made it the favorite hangout of the hockey players despite its being an utter dive.
A faded life-size cardboard cutout of Kathy Ireland in a bikini shared space with a 1970s big-screen TV, its blue projection light the only one still working. One corner of the bar was inexplicably filled with junk for sale, everything from a hot dog vending cart to a bright green lamp in the shape of a palm tree, a brown plastic monkey clinging to its side. Two pool tables got infrequent use, and most patrons eschewed seats at the U-shaped bar for the faux-wood grain Formica topped tables and brown vinyl-padded conference room chairs that took up what space remained. Several of the tables had been haphazardly pushed together for the use of the players.
For Russ, hockey and Harold's were like family and home, albeit in a peculiarly male fashion. You knew your teammates were there for you on the ice, watching your back, and here at Harold's they valued your company without wanting to know too much about you. It was an unwritten code among men that the less you knew about the guys you liked to do things with, the better. If you got to know them too well you might discover they were assholes, and then there went your fun.
When James had died, sympathy from the guys had been of the slap-on-the-back-"Hey man, I'm really sorry" and "I've been there"-variety, jaws set against remembered pain of their own. And then they talked about hockey, giving Russ the distraction that he needed and allowing him to keep his grief behind the facade of "dealing with it."
Greg was the only one he'd talked to about it in any depth. Their friendship went beyond the hours at the rink and Harold's: Russ had been best man at Greg's wedding eight years earlier and was godparent to one of his two kids. So as the evening wore down, it was to Greg that Russ finally said, "I have a date next Friday."
Greg put his beer down. "No fucking way!"
"It's a mistake."
Russ could never reveal to anyone the exact nature of his relationship with Emma, but even without the mistress factor there were plenty of issues. "She's ten years younger than me."
"So what?"
"Have you ever dated anyone that much younger?"
"Once. She made me feel like an old man. She listened to music I'd never heard of."
"So you see my problem."
Greg waved away his words. "Who needs music? Is she hot?"
"Yes."
"Then go for it! I'm married now. I have to get my thrills vicariously."
"Oh, shut up," Russ said. "Your wife is beautiful and about the sweetest woman I've ever met. It's a miracle she has the patience to put up with you." Greg's talk was all for show; Russ had never met a man who loved his wife as much as Greg loved his.
"It's obvious why she likes you. You take her side." Greg took a sip of beer. "So how'd you meet the hottie?"
"My sister hired her to clean my house," Russ said.
Greg laughed. "You've got to be kidding me. Fishing off your own dock, huh?"
"She's not going to clean my house anymore. But, er."
Greg raised his brows, waiting.
Russ sighed. "I rented my old apartment to her."
Greg's mouth dropped open. Several speechless moments went by, and then, "She must be fucking gorgeous."
"I thought I was helping out. Then suddenly we had a date planned, which I didn't want, and now I have to find a way to get out of it without hurting her feelings."
"Why do you want to get out of it?"
"She's ten years younger! She lives in a completely different world. She's immature. She's trying to find her place in the world."
"And she's hot. Let's not forget that she's hot."
Russ rolled his eyes.
"That's why you're talking to me," Greg said. "You know it's hopeless, but she's hot and you want her."
"If that thought doesn't make me want to break it off with her, nothing will. I don't want to be a creepy old fart."
"Stop being so hard on yourself. Frankly, I'm proud of you."
"What?"
Greg sat back, crossed one ankle over his knee, and said in an expansive, professorial tone, "It means you're getting on with life. And what a way to get on with it!"
"You're not much help."
"You don't want help. You want someone to validate your choice to jump her. You want to be absolved of guilt for being a lech."
Russ scowled. "I have to cancel this date."
Greg put his foot back on the floor, leaning forward and slapping both palms onto the table. "Don't do that, Russ," he pleaded. "You're living the dream, man! You're single, you're rich, and now you've got a hot young thing eager to jump your bones. You have to let her. Keep living the dream
! For me. For your teammates. For every man who wishes he still had all his hair, a thirty-inch waist, and sex without begging."
Greg turned toward their teammate Tom, a forty-six-year-old accountant sitting at the other end of the row of tables. "Tom! Tell Russ what your wife did last week!"
"She went down on me," Tom said, a note of awe in his voice. His eyes gleamed as if recounting a visit by a saint. "For the first time in three years. And I didn't even ask. It was a beautiful thing." He touched the corner of one eye and made a noise suspiciously like a tear being sniffed back. "Beautiful."
Greg nodded at Russ. "You see? Three years without a blow job. That's what the future holds."
"You're depressing me," Russ said. "This is what life holds?"
"You're the last of the wild cowboys. We look at you as our symbol of freedom. That's why everyone's wife tries to set you up, marry you off. They want to take away our hope. They want us to forget that we, too, once ran free."
"Then why do we all end up married in the end? Why aren't the lot of you out roaming the range?"
"Gotta have someone to take care of me when I'm old," Tom said from down the table. "I already got arthritis in one foot. High cholesterol, bowel troubles-bad bowel troubles. Who's going to take care of me but my wife?"
Russ dropped his face into his hands, shaking his head. "More than I wanted to know, Tom. More than I wanted to know."
"Of course, the wife's the one who's making me go in for that colonoscopy." Tom scowled into his beer. "I'm not sure a blow job makes up for a camera up my ass."
"You see?" Greg said, his face a mask of pathos. "You gotta run free. For all of us. Seize the hottie, I say! Seize the hottie!"
"I'm too young for a midlife crisis. I'm breaking the date."
"Traitor."
Russ shook his head and promised himself he'd call Emma first thing in the morning and cancel their arrangement.
Chapter Six
Emma looked at the clock and whimpered. Russ would be there in fifteen minutes and she wasn't ready. Nothing was ready! Her eyes went to the microwave and the sexual accessory waiting within it.
Okay, so one thing was ready. But everything else was a disaster! It had been a week since she moved into the apartment, yet somehow that hadn't been enough time to get ready for this night.
She'd been late getting the stuffed, boneless leg of lamb into the oven and it still had forty minutes to cook, plus another fifteen minutes to rest before she could cut it, according to the recipe she'd downloaded off epicurious.com. The lima bean puree with garlic and rosemary had been made ahead and waited now to be rewarmed, but the utensils she had used were piled on the counter and in the sink, and her immersion blender had flung gobs of green puree onto the backsplash, the cupboards, and her blouse. The mint truffle ice-cream terrine for dessert was safely in the freezer, the homemade chocolate sauce in the fridge, but the mint sauce that also went with it was no more than a bag of leaves at the moment.
The table was only half-set. Her hair and face were a mess. Her body was a mess, the shower she'd taken earlier now a distant, sweaty memory.
She took a deep breath, assessing the situation. The lamb was cooking on its own. Setting the table and making the mint sauce could wait. The mixed greens salad was ready to throw together, giving him something to eat while she finished everything else up. If she was going to clean herself up, though, now was her only chance.
She looked down at her hands, which were shaking. Now that she was pausing in her frantic cooking rush she realized that her gut was sloshing with acid, her heart irregularly thumping, her vision blurring from the overdose of adrenaline.
The nervous anticipation was worse than on any first date. It was even worse than the night she lost her virginity.
Am I really going to do this? Am I really going to let a man I hardly know have sex with me three times a week?
She hovered on the thin edge of indecision, swaying between telling Russ to forget it, it was a mistake, she had to have been crazy to have said yes, and going ahead with the arrangement.
Is this really what I want?
She imagined the evening: Russ eating the dinner she'd made and then looking at her, silence falling between them as they both recognized that the time had come. She would send him to her bedroom while she prepared for the sexual experiment she'd downloaded off the internet; he'd said to be creative, after all. The activity was nothing she herself had ever done and at the thought of it, her body fluttered between arousal and the fear of humiliation. Russ might be turned off by it, and she might end up looking the fool. But if it worked…
At the end of it she would climb on top of him, her thighs parting over his hips, and guide the tip of his hardened shaft to her opening. She'd feel herself stretching as she eased herself down on him, his erection filling her as she had longed to be filled for so many lonely months, and then his hands would come up to grip her hips and guide her to his own rocking, thrusting motion.
Oh yes. A warm rush went through her loins. Yes, this was what she wanted, nerves be damned! And let the opinions of others be damned as well!
Emma tossed down her oven mitts and dashed for the bathroom to give herself a sponge bath and slap on some makeup. Sitting on the back of the toilet tank was the cold-waxing kit she'd bought earlier in the week and had conveniently forgotten about. She stared at it. She lifted her short skirt and looked down, parting her thighs enough to see if it was really so bad that she needed the wax.
Holy hairy monkeys!
She couldn't show that tangle to him. Couldn't send his penis fighting through that thicket, with its dark curls creeping down the insides of her thighs like vines.
She'd shaved inside her thighs before, but it always left sharp stubble and a rash. If she was going to be someone's lust object, she wanted to be smooth and sleek and not worried about whether he was going to get sandpapered by her thighs.
She stripped and gave herself a quick sponge bath, put on some red lipstick as the quickest way to brighten up her face, combed her hair and smoothed out the frizzies with water and silicone serum, then sat on the edge of the tub and tore into the wax kit.
The instructions were full of cautions, but she'd waxed her legs a few years ago and figured she understood the basics. The cold wax came in a tube and had the consistency of honey. She squeezed a blob of it onto the small plastic spatula from the kit, smeared it over a quarter-sized patch of hair inside her thigh, pressed a strip of cloth over it, then held her skin taut with one hand while ripping off the cloth with the other.
"Holy crap!" she screeched, and slapped one palm down over her offended flesh, hoping that pressure would ease the pain. A moment later she lifted her hand and examined the damage. Her skin bore faint pink dots where each hair had been exhumed, but was otherwise a smooth, lovely patch of civilized hairlessness amid the wilds.
Emma darted naked out into the kitchen and checked the time: she had eight minutes. She darted back into the bathroom, hoping Russ would be late.
If she waxed in sensible one-inch patches it would take her forever to get it done, and impatience drove her to slather progressively wider and longer strips of wax on her skin, press on the cloth, then pull it off in a series of short jerks. Stray dollops of wax attached to her fingers, to the tub, to hairs she didn't intend to pull.
The doorbell rang and her hand jerked, sending a smear of wax from her inner thigh into the hair on her mound. "Dammit!" With the spatula she tried to scrape the wax off, but it made things worse. She took a cloth and slapped it down on the mess of wax.
He knocked on the door.
"I'm coming! One second!" she shouted, and tried to rip the cloth off. "Monkey Christ!" she shrieked, and tumbled in pain to the bathroom floor, her thighs clamped shut over the agony.
"Emma?" Russ called from the other side of the front door, his voice muffled.
"I'm okay!" she squeaked. "I'll be right there!"
She lay for a moment, breathing heavily and wait
ing for the pain to fade, then pushed herself up into a sitting position and looked at her crotch. The white cloth was attached to her like a bandage, running diagonally across her mound and down between her thighs. She lifted up the top corner and gave it a little jerk.
"Jeee-zus H!"
There was too much wax and way too much hair. She snatched up the instruction sheet, scanning it for what to do. She turned it over, then turned back to the other side. Where did it say what to do? Where?
"Emma?" Russ called again.
"Dammit! Dammit dammit dammit!" She'd have to figure it out later. She grabbed all the waxing paraphernalia and shoved it into the cabinet under the sink. She got up off the floor and yelped as she tried to straighten up. The damn wax and cloth had glued her left leg into a raised position. Standing up straight stretched her skin painfully. "Crap!" She'd have to hide her limp as best she could. She pulled on her bra, sleeveless white blouse, and short green skirt, skipping the underpants. She didn't want those stuck to her as well.
With the waxed cloth tugging painfully with each uneven stride, she hobbled barefoot to the front door and put her hand on the knob. She rested her weight on her right leg, the left one cocked and on tiptoe, as if it were a sultry pose. She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself, and planted a welcoming smile on her lips.
Ready or not, here she was.
Russ approached the door to his old apartment with an unsettling mix of familiarity and alienness. It had been home to him for several years, but never in that time had there been a woman behind that door with dinner waiting and the intention of taking him to her bed. As wrong as he intellectually knew this arrangement was, as wrong as he emotionally felt that it was, part of him wanted it the way a drowning man wanted to see a ship in the distance. It might be an illusion, but what a beautiful illusion it was.
And wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong, he reminded himself. All week, he had meant to call Emma and break their agreement. He'd meant to do that even as he express-mailed her a loaded Visa card. He'd meant to do it as he e-mailed her a link to his lab test results. He'd meant to do it as he bought a bouquet for her, walked into the building, and rode up the elevator-and now, as he stood before his old door, he still meant to do it.
