Lust Dance

He looks at her, tries to remember what drove him to possess her. She seems oblivious to his scrutiny, pulling at wayward straggles of bristly hair on her legs, pinching the skin between mid and forefinger. She looks like a monkey searching for fleas.

Has she always been this way? She thinks I won’t walk away. She thinks I don’t notice the prime young honeys who hang on my words, who direct their sly little smiles and winks at me when she’s not looking.

He remembers how she used to delight him with the same sly smiles and winks back when all he could think about was her creamy skin, the silky white-blonde hair, the huge emerald eyes with their sloe-eyed slant. He sneaks another look: her skin is still creamy and smooth, still flecked with a dusting of freckles. He used to tease her about her freckles–back in the beginning when he wanted to possess her more than money.

Her hair, naturally white-blonde and silky smooth, is tied off her face with a leather thong. A few tendrils have pulled free and, curly from the heat and humidity, frame her face.

We don’t have the same feelings, he thinks, remembering the long steamy lust filled weekends they used to share. He tries to remember the last time they lost their minds to lovemaking. He can’t.

He thinks about the bronzed blonde from the diner, her throaty laugh, the skintight thigh-high shorts, the heavy breasts straining against the gauze thin material of her T-shirt. He could take the bronzed blonde somewhere tonight, show her a good time. But, the more he thinks about it, the more it seems like work. And for what? If he wants sex, Angelbabe is here, now.

He’s comfortable with their relationship, doesn’t feel that she’ll be judging or giving him a grade–if he’s not at par, well, there’s always another time. Not so, he thinks, with the bronzed blonde. One time, either skyrockets or duds. There’d be no second chance for romance with that one. But maybe that means he’s growing old. The thought makes him shudder.

He decides the bronzed blonde is shallow and he attributes it to her young age. Young enough to believe she’ll never wrinkle or fade, old enough to know all the right moves.

He steals another look at Angelbabe. A charcoal pencil is clamped between her teeth, her lips drawn back in a snarl. She squints at the drawing tablet in her lap, takes another charcoal pencil from the cup on the table next to her chair–having forgotten about the pencil between her teeth–and makes a broad swipe across the paper. Other swipes follow and the faint image of a naked female takes form as he watches. It’s the bronze beauty from the diner, only Angelbabe supplies the complete body parts for him to look at, start his lust once again.

“You’ve been tapping in again, haven’t you?” he asks, embarrassed for his thoughts, angrier still for her intrusion into them.

She looks up, smiles as sweetly as anyone can when they’ve got a pencil between their teeth, returns to her drawing and rubs a deep pink onto the tips of the lush breasts she’s created on the tablet.

“We agreed–you promised!–You wouldn’t do that!” he splutters. Now he’s angry. She had no right! How dare she! He’ll show her!

“If I hadn’t drawn her you wouldn’t have known, but it wouldn’t have changed the doing,” she says in her soft melodious voice that makes him think of reed flutes.

He knows she’s right but it doesn’t temper his anger at the invasion he feels–the anger of a guilty man.

“It’s just habit,” she says by way of apology, the only one she plans to give, as she continues to add more detail to the sketch of the young waitress.

You said you could be selective, that you’d exclude me, he thinks.

“Well, yes!!” she says and then stops as she realizes he hasn’t said anything out loud, that he’s conversing with his thoughts to see if she’s still tuned in. “Sorry,” she says.

So you know I’m still attracted to other women, he thinks, certain she hasn’t left his mind yet. Fine. That sets the ground rules.

She sits quietly drawing tawny gold hair in tumbles down a tanned lithe back. “She goes to a tanning parlor,” she says. “That’s why she’s got such an all over even tan. They cause cancer, you know, those tanning booths. They’re just as bad as baking under the sun. Maybe worse.”

He thinks her blathering is a ploy to give him time to cool down but he’s determined to stay angry. “I don’t care how she does it,” he says out loud to make certain she knows. “All I give a damn about is that looking at her makes me horny.”

She puts the pencils, tips up, into the cup, and tosses the tablet to the floor, bronzed blonde down.

“I’m really very tired,” she says in that croony sound that means she’s not really very tired. It’s an invitation to go upstairs and bang their brains out, clear the air, ease the tensions, put the bronze beauty to rest, clear his pipes. But he’s not buying.

“Well, you take a little nap,” he says jovially, because this game is his now. “I’m going out for a while.”

“Be gone long?” she asks with a little wailing sound.

“Long enough,” he says as he conjures up lewd thoughts of the bronzed blonde poised naked over his prone body. If she’s still tuned in, he plans on her getting the maximum effect of his lust for the girl. If she’s not, it’s no waste since he’s produced an abundance of internal heat that he plans to use on the bronzed blonde. There’ll be no failures tonight.

He leaves the apartment with a flourish after freshening his cologne and styling his hair. It’s only after he gets down to the street that he realizes he never would have had to put on cologne or redo his hair during the early days of their relationship. Then it hits him. He’s become just as complacent — although he thinks of himself as comfortable within the relationship — as Angelbabe. It takes him another block before he realizes that she, too, might have reason to roam.

He hurries back to the apartment, lurid visions of Angelbabe entwined in the arms of a dark hulking stranger flashing through his thoughts.

She’s waiting for him, wrapped in the red kimono, her hair loose and tumbling down her back. He pulls her to him and as he buries his face in the silky hair, he smells the musky perfume of her body.

He gathers her into his arms and starts to carry her to the bedroom when he catches sight of the drawing pad on her chair. There’s a rough sketch on the page, and despite the passion he feels, he strains to view her latest drawing. The lines and squiggles appear nonsensical and it isn’t until he’s almost in the bedroom that he realizes what she’s sketched.

“Are you mad?” she whispers in his ear and then makes little nibbles with her teeth along his neck.

I should be, he thinks, feeling certain she’s going to continue to mind read despite his objections. And now this new wrinkle, the one he never would have believed if he hadn’t seen the sketch of the hulking stranger.

“I can almost forgive your invasion of my private thoughts,” he says softly. “But, I would much prefer to at least control those thoughts.” Suddenly, the randiest images flood his thoughts, obliterating everything except the yearning to drown himself inside her hot, juicy body.

© Pat Gaudette