Personal. Real. That’s what he needed.
So he turned to the personals ads, found someone who pushed a few buttons. Mmm, redhead yes. Non-addict? No problem. No fatties? He’d sit up straight, and besides, he’d seen lots worse lardbellies than him— like his daddy for one. Looking for someone spiritual and sensitive; he qualified most definitely, having read Out On a Limb once or twice. Worth the 900-number charges—besides which he had his own personal phone, so he wouldn’t have to wonder who’d think he was into phone sex.
He dialed, listened to her message, Janice her name, fell into the depth of Janice’s voice: “Hello, I’m in my mid-thirties, I have long red hair, I’m fit and trim, one child who lives with his father. Oh yeah, yes, my name’s Janice. I’m an established professional and I expect you to be too. I’m looking for someone in good shape, honest and open with his feelings, at least five-ten. No facial hair. Someone who has wide cultural interests and who is a good listener but can hold up his end of things. There should be a depth to your thoughts, a kind caring quality in your voice, a breezy independence that isn’t afraid to begin and sustain an intimate relationship.”
There was a little more, about leaving a message. A demon said, “Leave one now,” drowning out the angel whose advice was to write something down first, then call back. So he punched in the leave-a-message choice. One minute? Christ, you couldn’t say anything in a minute!
The phone beeped at him, a prompt.
“Um, hello, my name is Brad. Short for Bradley. My work is professional, and I really like your voice. Hair color is vaguely brown, I’m thirty-eight, hazel eyes, not a bad body. I like to sit around and chat, and I think I have a lot to offer the right person. And Janice (that’s a pretty name, by the way) maybe you’re that right person and maybe I’m right for you. Hope so anyway. Umm, let’s see, what else: I could use a caring person and you sure sound that, and I’m ready for a direct, open, honest one-to-one relationship and then we can see where things want to go from there.” Suddenly he remembered the minute and managed to slip in his phone number before the final beep cut him off.
He hung up, stared at his pork-hand on the receiver, picked up the newspaper and read over her ad again. Then he tilted the mini-blinds upward. He fancied he could see her, a surge of curves, a sweet face, shiny red waterfall of hair sweeping down upon white freckled shoulders. His hand rustled Up whip-whip-whip three Kleenex from the box by his bed, pastel blue, weren’t making them as strong as they used to, used to take just two and now the paper, as he wiped clean, would stick annoyingly to his dicktip. A minor matter. He laid them neatly square on the bedspread and had his shorts and Jockeys down about his knees in no time, positioning himself so he wouldn’t overshoot. Then he stared at her ad again, moving, moving, whispering her name, Janice, and conjuring him and her and that hot babe his dad had practically fucked by pool edge yesterday, an amazing threesome right here on his bed, the smell of the bedspread mingling with the aroma of pussy and the lovely feel of twin lips twining up and down his manhood.
Janice weeded out four callers at once, those with a tad much eagerness for red hair, or the bozo who liked to go four-wheeling (she had no idea what four-wheeling was, but she saw huge-tired trucks colliding under floodlights and x’d him out), or the ones whose words laid a cold hand on her brain stem for reasons Janice couldn’t figure. Of the ones remaining, she felt drawn to this Brad character the most. Boyish and firm, a little bit awkward, sincere in tone as far as she could tell. He wasn’t ideal. None of them were. But he’d do for a start, meet him at least and check him out, let her bullshit detector do the rest.
He lifted on the third ring. “This is Brad.” Solid rock, a no-nonsense directness that had its appeal.
“Hello. It’s Janice. From the personals?”
He fumbled and she liked that too: “Oh, yes, hello, Janice. Thanks for calling, I mean, well, that sounds like a sign-off or something, which I hope it isn’t. Ummmm, so you liked what I had to say?”
“What you said, how you said it.” Janice could hear the amusement in her voice, but she felt relaxed, not put upon by some macho with a psychic wall, and that seemed a promising thing to feel about Brad.
“So would you like to meet?” Too eager? Maybe, but this meeting through ads wasn’t exactly the natural thing to be doing. She gave him the benefit of the doubt.
“One thing I forgot to mention. No smokers. You’re not a smoker, are you?” Damn, he was going to be a four-pack-a-dayer, a type-A loser with a cellular phone glued to his ear in some high-demand profession, heart pounding and hurtling him toward an early grave.
“Filthy stuff,” came his answer. “You know, I tried it a total of once, just to see, you know, a long time ago cuz I figured why not, see what the big deal is. I guess there was some vague buzz there, but no great appeal, and it looked weird in the mirror. So that was that.”
“Good,” she said, relieved. “I left that out of the ad and then kicked myself. I guess it was so obvious, my mind just skimmed over it.”
“Pretty kicking, I bet.”
“Excuse me?”
“The kick, pretty legs—oh nothing, a backhanded and ham-fisted compliment, never mind, forget I said it.” His stammering had an endearing quality to it; not mealy, not in the least. His voice felt like suede leather stitched over steel, very indrawing and comforting.
She laughed. “It’s forgotten. And I do have pretty legs, not that it’s any of your beeswax.”
“Of course not.” He’d picked right up on her flirty tone and batted it right back, good as he got.
“So let’s meet,” she said, and after he’d proposed a dinner date at a swank restaurant, she countered with her standard frozen-yogurt-in-the-mall offering. It was well lit, populous, and ideal for quick, diplomatic thank-yous and good-byes if the chemistry proved, in those first five minutes, to be absurdly wrong.
He ended, more confident than he’d begun, on a joke. When she cradled the receiver, she felt hearth-warm in an odd full-tummied sort of way. Spirits lifted after a day of feeling like nobody special, the same old dusty mopers surrounding her at work. On impulse, she dialed the free number and skipped to Brad’s response, listening to it in silence, stilling her fancies, playing it over again, the real human being behind the fumbles now engaging her more fully. Could she hear her one-and-only in his voice? If she listened past the wine-fruity baritone, could she see and feel her soul mate pining to get through?
When he drove up to his beachfront home, their faces were pressed like kitten faces to the front window. Once they’d been human, once borne a touch of rare uniqueness, a thing that had singled each one out. But fetching-time was long gone for them, that time teetering between human and undead, when their teeth had not yet turned to hollow fangs and their nips and clits and labia had not yet gone razor-sharp and as blood-receptive as leeches.
“All this is yours?” She was used to opulence—that he knew. But it was the privacy of the drive in, and how proximate the ocean waves pounded, that clearly impressed her.
“The world meets my needs,” he said.
She drew to him, felt him below, that enticing pulse in his eyes drawing her. “I’m not usually so bold.”
“It’s something to learn.” He accepted Esme’s kiss, warm press and lick and withdrawal. “Come inside.” Hard to believe her uniqueness was subject to vanishment. But he’d seen it with the three inside and countless times in ages past. Esme’s turning he vowed to prolong, resisting the end of fetching-time for an eternity if he could.
The door swung open at his touch. They stood at the edge of the hallway, their faces raptored on Esme. Mopsy had two fingers inside Cottontail’s pussy, and Flopsy, at their left, worked at pleasing herself. Dried bloodspray from past climaxes rhubarbed their inner thighs, and their vulvas glistened red and wet with arousal.
“Pay them no heed,” he suggested. Then, raising his arms and advancing toward them, he intoned in the ancient language of his forebears the words t
o keep them off. At the instant he began, they hobblefooted backward over the blood-spattered oak floor, torn between pure need and the impelling power of his injunction.
In the past, Esme had shown restraint in initiating, in accepting, sexual advances—much more so, she thought, than most of her generation. It had paid off too. Close scrapes with near intimacy, because she’d deflected them, had kept her wounds superficial when bad choices revealed themselves.
But with him (names didn’t matter), that foolish not-quite-yet coyness dropped away. Odd feeling. Completely in control and yet not like herself at all, the trappings of ponderous convention having been cast off like a thick fur coat she hadn’t known she was wearing.
Esme gestured. “Who are these—?”
“My wives,” he said. And that was all right. Still more startling, they were all right with her, these lynx-eyed creatures from a world of nightmare. Esme saw them, yes, for the red-crusted fright-hags they were, but could not deny their allure, not deny the staying power of eyes that comforted and caressed nor the sensual craving these three had set going in her heart and soul. Then abruptly he appeared in front of her, gazed a wounded longing into her eyes, crouched, never breaking that gaze, brought his right arm up under her dress, bunching it upward like the spooned-away crust of a custard, until his biceps saddled snug against her crotch, his hand splayed on the small of her back, and he lifted Esme straight into the ocean-rich air and walked with her, eyes locked upon hers, through a high arch into a faintly metallic-smelling room bathed in candlelight and awash with pillows.
In lowering her, steadying her torso with his strong left hand, he drew her lips downward to his, obliterating melt of flesh upon flesh, and his right arm slid by moist lace until his warm fingers cupped her cunt through cloth and fondled her so beautifully that her briefs clung like sodden terry cloth against bare skin. She came like that, moaning into his mouth, feeling the odd dentition against her tongue but not caring, not at all, not even the sting of lipcut where he moved slightly there and left numbness behind like mosquito puffiness.
“Love me,” she whispered into his ear, and his whole body felt so good, shaped against hers as his hands undid her dress at the back. But wait, it was a frontbuttoner, and yet his fingers parted cloth along her spine as if it were Velcro’d on, a gentle controlled ripping and rending that bared her shoulders and her breasts, soft red-tipped lovelies he blessed with his mouth. A stinging there too but it only drove her excitation higher, like breath taut from the sudden thorn-prick of a sweetheart rose.
And then she was naked and his clothing too was gone and she touched his penis, thimble-hard it seemed just at the very tip, just about the slit of his warm rubbery cap of cock. But he brushed away her hand, and laid her upon soft pillows, and mounted her, easing in deeply, quickly, amazingly, she was so moistly receptive, so needy for his flesh. She reached up and hugged him fiercely, moving to his long slow thrusts. Then orgasm claimed her again, at her G-spot an incredible spread of goodness, and his love stayed hard and beautiful in her sight, dark and muscular and young and ancient all at once. She was still pulsing beneath him, still moist with fucksweat. “I want to make you come,” she said, her yoni moving about him yearningly like the idle sway of a belly dancer winding down.
But he stopped her, held her hipbones in both hands, a thick bible thumbed open by a god, and drove as deep as he could inside her, his head turned aside. “You’ll feel a tiny sting,” he said, apology and promise in his voice.
Then she did.
It began very small, a burning sensation deep in her vagina, the front wall where his cocktip rested. Then it widened, a needle of pain (flashback to the bedclawing of arterial blood being drawn from an arm); but she embraced the small agony of it, seeing the radiance in her lover’s eyes, feeling how turned on by it he was. He was drawing something, a deep strength from her, and she gave it with all her will. Gold touched her. The ability to give him such pleasure seemed miraculous, made her want to cry for joy. And then, his excitation becoming audible, the pain suddenly ceased, and he was again thrusting, past the odd puffiness he’d left, back and forth against it, massaging it to distraction with his cocktip. He seized her and in his coming she heard the wounds of ages crying forth; and hearing them, she sobbed uncontrollably, cradling him and comforting him in the locked cling of their bodies.
Brad found the mall, one he’d been to just after its opening a few years back. Plant theme. Skylights, glass elevators with golden Christmas lights down the sides. A jaunt up a steep escalator and he spied the yogurt place, its blue-and-pink plastic motif managing miraculously not to be garish but somehow tasteful. Not close enough yet, this Janice possibility hidden from him, if she was there at all. He checked the time, ten minutes late and damned if she wasn’t going to ding him for it.
Then he saw her. Had to be her. Brilliant puffs of red hair on her head and a long luxurious fall down to an antic flip at the shoulder blades. A slight, slender girl, her tight ass perky on the pink plastic chair. She arced her neck, saw him, knew it was him, gave a wave. Oh dear Jesus, he thought; she was cute and snazzy and sweet, and she had seen him and not immediately cut him cold.
Careful, don’t trip on anything. He was moving, the butt, the petite strain on her blouse front, coming round to sit opposite her, her full reddened lips, collagen not an impossibility there but he suspected hers were natural and, as he glanced across them, he ran his tongue in fancy along the inviting rip in her mouth. “Janice, right?”
“You must be Brad.” No hand offered; handshake’d be gauche, uncool. Tight waist. Must work out, jog, clingy leotard and a rainbow sweatband about that pillow-perfect tumble of crimson hair.
“Pleased to meet you,” Brad said.
“Pleased to meet you,” she echoed. “I recommend the coconut custard, dusted with carob shavings. Like a full helping of Breyer’s without the consequences.”
No fool, he had it. Pleasantries passed between him and this beguiling stranger. Nice eyes. Beautiful eyes. By god, what was the world coming to that such a kissable darling felt it necessary to place an ad in the personals column? He’d been hoping for a cut above average, no dog at any rate—but Janice was sheer wonder, a moving target and a devastation waiting to befall. Don’t get too close to her, he cautioned. She’s being polite, leading to the letdown at the end, nice time but we’re not right for one another— meaning you’re too ugly, you’ve got hair on your ears, the thought of touching you revolts me.
But he could play pretend as long as she cared to do the same; and he decided to enjoy himself, be natural and forthcoming, take her in, all the way in. And later that night, alone in bed, he could replay those images, replay her words, her smiles—and have her six ways from Sunday, courtesy of the Kimberly-Clark Corporation and his expert groin-shift and stifle-come, developed through decades of practice, upon the sheets.
Janice appraised him. No Redford, no Costner, but no Quasimodo either. He seemed, what, comforting as he went on, spooning up yogurt, talking about his managerial work at the studio. Didn’t seem overdressed or too casual. A cologne (she usually hated scent on a man) both vague and pleasing buoyed his words.
He skimmed a melt of yogurt onto the spoon as Janice leaned forward, elbowing the table. “Does it bother you, meeting me through the ad?” Of course Brad would say no, but, beyond that, the answers to this question were often revealing.
“Not at all,” he said. “It’s refreshing. You supply a what-you’re-looking-for list, give some kind of essence of you. I look it over, maybe I’m not a match in all the particulars, like that ‘very handsome’ stuff, now I’m not exactly—”
“I like the way you look.”
“Well thanks. Okay, maybe that was a bad choice cuz I’m decent enough I guess, and you, by the way, are sweet as honey on the eyes—”
That was touching. She could sense his appreciation of her, a deep non-surface directness that warmed her and startled her. He was human. Not at all pushy or leering the
way some clueless guys were. It was subtle, the bond forming between them, but it existed and felt good.
“—but anyway, we get to turn over this distillation of who you are and what you want, examine it, peek around it and play with it. I guess we use it as a base, a kind of nucleus, for whatever comes after.”
Janice smiled. “I was pretty careful, wording it to screen out the riffraff. If you don’t say no addicts, a nice loaded word, they come flooding in.” She told him a few of her horror stories, that time with seamless Henry, a tiger in bed (she left that part out) and seemingly all hatches battened down in his head—then the dependence on her coming clearer, Chinese fingercuffs holding harder to her the more insistently she tried to pull loose. Brad’s reaction was warm and commiserating and endearing.
Too soon, the hour was over.
“Let me ask you something,” he said.
She said sure.
“I’ll bet men, maybe all of them, say I’ll call you, even if they’re not going to. Well I do want to call you but only if you want me to. Do you want me to?”
She did. Oh my, did she ever. “Yes, please, Brad,” she said. “I’d like that.”
He smiled and rose and said good-bye, ambling off. A total fix on him, craning to see this engaging man shrink along the upper mall walkway, then vanish slice by slice, diagonal escalator cuts taking him down. There was going to be sex, and soon. And with luck, there would be love.
When he returned from dropping her off, the three of them, in the moonlit driveup, crowded his car, not daring to smear it with their touch. Once they had, each in her turn, been special to him. Now they were raw convenience alone, to be fed upon as they had fed upon fresh victims, to be fucked in the sweet mire of total animal abandon, a surge of blood-come pumped into one or another orifice or showered hot and bisque-pink upon breast or face.
He got out, pinged shut the car door. Esme wouldn’t leave his thoughts, the lingering taste of her liquids, a depth to their intimacy he’d never known before.
Love in Vein Page 35
