I walk in the door at the Borders at North and Clybourn. One glance over at the cash counter and see who I’m looking for. 10pm. If she’s here, she has to be closing. We keep meeting like this: She’s there when I walk up to the counter, and it’s either mid-afternoon rush, or I’m busy at work, or … our conversations never stray to making plans. We just talk.
We talk about books. We talk about a film she’s just seen. We talk about our favorite kinds of teas. Last time it was a This American Life expose on the geese overrunning the area parks and the people who hunt them. There was an innuendo at the end of that conversation, but it left me so red I’d forgotten what it was by the time I was in the subway car. Too bad. It was perfect, and very very effective…
With only scant, precious seconds, we don’t waste words, but our conversations are always always seem to end on “Um,” and I make a fumbling, hurried hike out the door as the person behind me starts to get antsy. She wrote her phone number down for me the other day in a receipt and I lost it on the train home, like an idiot.
I wave. She smiles. I walk to the back of the store and pick up a copy of Everything Is Illuminated. The protagonist’s easygoing style, full of malapropisms will make me laugh and put me at ease. I hope the conversation doesn’t end at “Um,” tonight.
Mollie and I were good friends in college, but it’s been a few years. We used to sit out on the quad and talk about each others’ relationships, what we were going to do when we graduated, professors in other departments, her friends, my friends, food. We’d talk for hours until we had to go to class. I don’t know why it never occurred to me at the time that she loved me. I never paid attention to that kind of thing while I was in school. Someone told me after we graduated.
“Evening, Ken,” by way of getting the barista’s attention. “Just a large black coffee, room for cream. “
“Large coffee, room for cream. Anything else?”
May as well use this metabolism while I have it… “Carrot cake, but one of the small slices, okay?”
I sit down, and try to think of what we could do after 10pm on a Thursday evening in Chicago. I’m blank. I nervously scrape the frosting away from my cake and eat the heart out of it. I read. I sip at my coffee.
I’m still blank, damnit, but the PA comes on and announces 15 minutes, and then shortly thereafter 5 minutes till the store closes. I wait a bit longer, till I’m sure I’ll be the last customer. Then I walk down. She’s not there, and my heart falls for a second. Then I see her coming down the escalator.
“There you are!” like she’s been looking for me all this time. “I was afraid you’d gone while I was in the bathroom.”
“Hey! When do you get off?”
“I’ve got to do one carrel of re-shelving after we close and then I can go. Probably 20 minutes. I thought you might be waiting for me to get off. I told Ken to save the decaf for me, but if you ask nice he’ll let you have some. You mind waiting around? You’re lucky, I’m totally free tonight.”
“Sure, you’ll meet me upstairs?”
“Yep,”
She rings me up and I walk back upstairs and read until Jonathan meets our linguistically challenged narrator.
“Ready!”
I look up into brown eyes, a smile, and the rumples of her slightly too-large sweater. I get up and we walk out into the night. “This is as far as I’ve thought. I keep trying to think of what to do, but it’s so late, and I’m not normally a night owl.”
“It’s okay, let’s just walk. It’s perfect weather, and I like to walk the city sometimes. I’ve never walked it at night before. My apartment’s in north Lakeview on the coast.”
We strike off in a vaguely northerly direction. Now we talk about the city as we walk among streets still crowded with theater-goers, shoppers on their way home. I point out bits of interesting architecture that someone forgot to erase from the Lincoln Park facade. She talks about independent bookstores. We both chatter on at each other about Jonathen Safren-Fohr’s latest book. We never mention the old days, once, or ask “How’ve you been?”
There doesn’t seem to be a need. It’s like no time has passed between us at all, somehow. But now, I can see how heartbreakingly beautiful she is. Long brown hair, brown eyes, grey sweater that tries to look frumpy and fails miserably at it, sitting over a red silk skirt that gives the slightest hint of her legs when she strides to keep up with me.
At some point there’s a cafe still open, and we sit down and talk. We talk about books. We talk about movies. We talk about talking about This American Life, and then we talk about things we haven’t talked about in a long time. Then, the flirting starts.
She slips an innuendo in under my radar, and I go bright red across the table from her. We volley back and forth for a minute, weaving double entendres into our sentences until we both break down in a fit of giggles. She pinches my knee and laughs, and says, “I need caffeine if we’re going to keep this up. You want anything?”
“Decaf, I had some real back at the bookstore,”
“”You sure? I need you fully awake, alert, and ready if I’m going to be.”
“Ginseng tea, then,”
She turns to the barista, “Small coffee for me, and a ginseng tea.” She glances my direction and straightens her silk skirt, “Use two teabags,” and flashes me something between a grin and a hungry glare. “Why are we sitting at a table? We’re the only people in here. Grab a couch.”
She hands me my tea and slides into the couch, slipping her legs up over mine in one smooth motion and fanning her hair out over the sofa arm. She smooths her sweater down and couches her coffee between her breasts, so that the line makes two gentle, perfect hills in the fabric. We continue talking and flirting.
Tea in hand, half gone and I feel positively lusty, but the conversation’s slipped into our graduation. I don’t want to break the mood, it’s gotten so playful, but I have to say something, “Someone told me the summer after we graduated that you loved me. It’s just I spent so much time on classes and orchestra that I never had time to think about you like that, and it seemed like you were dating your roommate about half the time. I’m sorry.” A look I can’t identify flashes across her face for a bare instant, “Spent a month fantasizing about that.”
A laugh, and a warm smile, “I didn’t know either back then, don’t worry about it. It didn’t set in until there was this you-shaped hole in my day when the summer ended,
“Anyway, just a month? The stuff we got up to was worth more than a month of every college boy’s private fantasies. Ever heard an opera singer come?” I’ve spent half my time now red… it’s embarrassing I blush so easily. I’ve been absentmindedly stroking her calf below the hemline for half a minute, though, and I stop self consciously at the mention of orgasms. “Hey. Hold my coffee. I’ve gotta pee, and then let’s walk some more. I don’t want to be sleepy yet.” She kisses me lightly on the lips as she gets up and hurries to the restroom. She’s gone before I realize that’s the first time our lips have ever touched. They tingle, and I don’t move them at all lest the last bit of the sensation she left fade before I’ve savored it.
She’s so much like she was before. We’ve both grown, yes, but I’d feared conversations longer than fifty words hastily carried out at a checkout counter. They might have been awkward. In fact they might have been anything, but I didn’t dare hope that they’d be anything like the one we’re having. No more teachers or relationships or college concerns. No trace of teenage angst or awkward youth. She’s the friend I remember.
She walks out of the restroom, one fist clenched tightly and walks into me with a furious kiss. Her hands unfold in mine as her lips part. Her perfect teeth tease my mouth into an open kiss. She presses a wad of warm fabric into my hand and whispers into my ear. “Put those somewhere. Come on, let’s walk. It’s a beautiful night out there.” Panties. I felt heat boiling up inside me and a blush of epic proportions floods my face as I shove them as far down into my left pocket as they’ll go.
We walk along the path, bikers still passing us even at this late hour, until we finally reach a ruin of a garden with a wood and cast-iron park bench couched between two overgrown shrubs. “Have a seat.”
An early morning jogger passes us without looking over. She kisses me again, deeply, the force of her lips and tongue pushing me down into the bench. I can smell her sweet scent hover and mingle with the night air. I bite my lip… so damn nervous. Two more people go by without a glance in our direction. The whole world should be able to see us; I have her unspoken word that no-one will. Trust fills me.
She slides down onto my lap, gracefully straddling me, letting her legs dangle down behind me on the park bench. I felt her hands rest on my fly gently through the silk of her skirt. I know what she wants, I’m paralyzed with nervousness, but she’s more than willing to take the initiative.
She teases the zipper out of the fold through the fabric as if it wasn’t there. As she pulls on my zipper with one hand, she holds me to her with the other and floors me with a long, penetrating kiss. I feel a quick flick at my button. My boxers give way to my hardon, and I feel the tip of my cock already wet, cooling in the close air under her skirt.
Silk slides over her thighs which slide over my thighs and I ache with the wish that my pants were down to my ankles so that I could feel the skin of her legs brush me as she tightened her body’s grip on me. I want to reach under her skirt and feel the wetness of her pussy with my fingers. Taste her. She breaks her kiss long enough to say “Don’t worry about protection. I put on a female condom before I handed you my panties. Just don’t move and no-one will notice us.”
“Just.”
“Let.”
“Me…”
Wet droplets of her overwhelming desire cover my cock as she inches her way painfully slowly onto me. Her skirt dangles in the still air, covering indiscretion only barely from the passersby I can see strolling by us, talking to each other animatedly. I close my eyes. If I can’t see them, they can’t see us. I force everything else away from my mind and concentrate on the movement of her pussy, her lips moving slowly across the shaft of my still-swelling cock.
For close to a minute, there is nothing, no reality to the world except terror of being found out gradually being squeezed away into the feeling of her cunt covering me at a painfully slow crawl. Her muscles contract over my shaft. She stops sliding down only halfway onto me and shivers in silence. I start, and almost jump, but manage to break the kiss and hiss under my breath, “Are you…” But I open my eyes and she is coming. I dig my nails in and kiss her passionately, feeling her shivers shake my whole body.
Now she continues her glacial descent. When I feel her grind to a stop against me, unable to push herself any further, she opens her eyes. Without ever taking our lips away from each other I can read her smile in those eyes. She starts moving again, off, away from me, and I hold myself utterly still against every ounce of my body’s will.
MInutes pass. Out. In. Four more passersby whom I can hear out on the edge of perception. In those minutes, just six more thrusts, thorough and sloiw and precise as a cat creeping towards its prey, and I am coming in her. I clench my jaw, my chest, my thighs, my ass, and my cock all at once. I tear my mouth away from hers and bite down on her shoulder as gently as I can manage just to keep myself from screaming at the release of it all. She bends into it and teases at my ear. To the outside word, if they were watching, we look like two lovers innocently, playfully necking, but under the red silk folds of her skirt we come into each other in wave after wave of buried, painfully contained ecstasy.
She slides away slowly as I softened, still with the poise of a dancer. Dawn creeps over the lake across the way. We’ve been out all night.
“Do you have any place to go?” She says quietly through a yawn.
“No. Well. Home. I have to go to work.”
She points past me and I turn my head to follow her finger. “That’s my place there. Come on up and we can shower and I’ll make you breakfast. I don’t have to be anywhere till my next shift at Borders and that’s not till tonight.”
It crept up on me before we sat down to make love on the bench that I knew I loved Mollie. How many hours now have I been in love? Two, three, four? Not more than eight. A crush fueled by being reunited with an old friend, but she’s grown like I have since college. We’re better people, but still so familiar, and she feels as much like home now as she did years ago.
I look up at her window on the third floor, pane open, letting in the clean morning air. I look over at her and grin, inwardly unable to bear the thought of going to work — of leaving just yet, “I’ll help you make breakfast. I’ll take off work until noon or so. I need some rest, and I want to spend more time with you.” She just smiles and nods her head, and then we walk home.
Fin.
Delicious. Thank you!
[...] erotica, female condom, fiction, safe sex, sex, sex writing I’m pondering a question. In my latest story, which I published last night, I originally published it without any kind of protection being [...]