The laugh turned out to be on me after all. I ambled into the break room the next morning to find the personnel manager and a young girl waiting for me. Okay, the “young girl” probably wasn’t any younger than Alexandra had been when I met her, but that had been a long time ago. She looked damn young to me.
She stood straight like she had a stick up her ass, or was posing for a Marine Corps recruiting poster, or both, and a body that would’ve had Danny panting and climbing the walls. I admit I admired her charms, discreetly, myself, but I also noticed her level gaze that flicked periodically around the room before always returning to me.
“Mr. Parker, I’d like you to meet Angela Vasquez. She’ll be your new uniformed partner. Ms. Vasquez, this is Lloyd Parker. I hope you enjoy working together.”
Angela had a firm grip and an inquisitive eye. She favored me with a social smile, but I’d seen her eyes flick from my face to my ring to the earbud and back to my face again before the rep had gotten fairly started on his retreat to the safety of the management offices.
“REMF,” Angela muttered under her breath.
“Excuse me?” I said, not catching the reference.
She waited a beat until we were alone. “Rear Echelon Mother Fucker,” Angela explained, watching me closely.
I snorted. “Very apropos. Armed Forces?” It wasn’t a very risky guess.
“Does it show?” she asked, grinning to show she knew it was a silly question. “Army. I was in Iraq; two tours.”
That impressed the hell out of me. “Well, I hope you find this a little more restful. Would you like the ten-cent tour?”
“Sure; lead out.”
We didn’t do much more that day than walk the store, every floor, so I could show her every door, every changing room, the blind spots where shoplifters seemed to think the security cameras couldn’t see, the few spots where they really couldn’t see, and most of the other quirks I’d picked up in two years.
I could see Angela treated it like a combat exercise, never mind that the bad guys almost never fired back here. She didn’t ask many questions, but the few she had were worth the asking. I found it easier to talk to her than I expected, so much so that I was a little hoarse when our shift ended.
“You look younger than I expected,” she told me at the end of the day.
The compliment took me a bit by surprise, and made me feel good. “You’re older than you look,” I said in turn.
“Yeah,” she said with a sad smile. “They say it wears off a little bit after a while; I don’t know.” The smile brightened a bit. “Well, until tomorrow, Lloyd?”
“See you then, Angela. Have a good evening.”
I started looking forward to the day job. I got a lot of razzing from the guys, until Angela nearly broke a few fingers off the hand of the idiot who thought the way her ass filled out her uniform slacks gave him license to pat it. After that, they treated her with the respect you’d give a tiger, and put down our cordial partnership as another facet of my mysterious bearing.
My secret was that I simply treated her like a daughter or granddaughter instead of some centerfold picture. I wouldn’t have thought you needed a psychology degree to figure that out, but maybe I was wrong.
Angela was intelligent and inquisitive, sometimes annoyingly so once she got over her initial reticence. She reminded me a little of Alexandra, more so when I found she was working this job during the day to make money for school during the evenings. The Army had paid for her undergraduate degree, but she was determined to get an MBA and break into a good management job. “Nobody ever got rich working for somebody else.”
Our shifts grew to resemble freeform dialogs on the topics she encountered in class, occasionally interrupted by the need to dissuade misguided shoppers from eroding the store’s bottom line. Angela’s gratitude was obvious, since she didn’t have much free time off for studying. I was happy to keep our conversations on safe topics.
Nevertheless, as that summer faded into memory, a degree of tension worked itself into our friendship. Part of the problem was me; I’d been extremely reluctant to say anything more about myself other than I was a widower who didn’t want just to sit home alone. Nevertheless, I could see the wheels turning in Angela’s mind — figuratively — every time this old geezer undercover officer she worked with managed to answer, at length and off the top of his head, nearly every question that came up in her coursework. A good deal of the art of our profession was noticing things that looked out of place, and I knew it was bothering her.
The other part of the problem also was me, so to speak. It seemed I was finally waking up to the fact that I was still a man — one who hadn’t gotten laid in more than five years. I remained stubbornly faithful to my memory of Alexandra and the promise I’d made her, but it was starting to get hard.
The girls at Home Run were walking inducements for sex and treated me with the careless familiarity of someone who was harmlessly androgynous. It wasn’t exactly like being the palace eunuch; rather, the thought that someone of my ancient decrepitude might retain a sex drive just never crossed their minds. Danny wasn’t that much younger than me, and he was still active. Anyway, I thought I’d become inured to it all.
I knew I had a problem when I caught myself thinking one afternoon about what Angela’s ass would look like if she were in heels instead of her black athletic shoes. I gritted my teeth and told myself to focus on the accounting problem we’d been discussing.
My conscious mind was one thing, but I started waking in the mornings with erections and unsettling fragments of half-remembered dreams that all featured a lithe, dark-haired beauty with a flashing smile. I felt vaguely guilty, but there was nothing I could do about it.
I started going off the deep end in October. Some of Angela’s friends from school were throwing her a party for her 25th birthday, and she invited me. I mumbled something non-committal at the time, repeatedly counted up the reasons I shouldn’t go, and ended up taking a night off from Home Run anyway.
The place was some restaurant I’d never heard of before, and I knew I shouldn’t have come the moment I stepped in the door. I took a long look at the cluster of youngsters gathered around Angela and realized I was probably older than all of their professors. Unfortunately, Angela spotted me before I could retreat.
“Lloyd!” she screamed, bouncing to her feet. Maybe a dozen pairs of eyes were focused on me while she hurried over and embraced me. “I’m so glad you could make it! C’mon over and meet everybody!” My body tingled where her breasts had brushed it, and what she did to a pair of jeans had to be illegal.
Angela introduced me around to her friends, whose names I uncharacteristically forgot, as her partner, and parked me on a stool next to hers. All of them were acquaintances from the University, save one young man whose eyes held the same faintly haunted expression as Angela’s.
“I brought your something,” I told her during a lull in the noise. “You don’t have to open it here.”
She looked at the slim package, wrapped in expensive paper from the specialty store in the mall, and then at me. “That’s so sweet, Lloyd; you didn’t have to do this.” Before I could react, she leaned over and pecked me on the cheek.
My paralysis lasted a minute or two while she tucked the gift into her coat pocket, and nobody else commented on our interchange. I was intensely aware of Angela’s proximity the remainder of the evening. The left side of my body felt her heat, even when I was drawing out her acquaintances on their experiences at school.
“Hey, you want to go clubbing with us?” Angela asked me after the remains of the meal had been cleared away and we’d embarrassed her with the obligatory “Happy Birthday” chorus.
“Are you kidding?” I laughed, and then blinked. The mental picture of myself trying to bounce along to the crap I heard filtering out of the Abercrombie changed channels to the image of Angela drawing a bare knee up my leg, spreading her tiny miniskirt, and arching her back to emphasize her breasts through an indecently thin top. I hurriedly added, “My heart would never survive it.”
“You aren’t as old as you think you are,” she chided me with a smile.
The erection filling my underwear begged to differ, and I remained close to the table as the group began to break up and made their goodbyes.
I welcomed, and simultaneously dreaded, a farewell hug from Angela. “Thanks again for coming, Lloyd. And thanks for the gift; you didn’t need to get me anything.”
“You’re welcome. Have fun; I’ll see you Monday,” I replied.
I drove home to my dark apartment, carefully undressed, and masturbated for the first time in decades. My hand hadn’t forgotten what to do, my cock was aching for release, and there was still a hint of Angela’s scent on my shirt. A little lotion for lubrication soon warmed to body temperature, and each slow stroke I made pulled the tension out of my body and concentrated it beneath my hand.
The pace didn’t stay slow for long. I closed my eyes and started fantasizing, dreaming of delicate feminine fingers replacing mine on my heated manhood. A moist tongue extended to touch me, warning me of the warm lips that were about to engulf my glans. In my imagination, my hands were free to guide her head closer, but the hair threading between my fingers remained stubbornly dark and it was Angela’s face that looked lovingly up at me, not Alexandra’s.
“I didn’t thank you properly,” she’d say, releasing me and crawling sinuously up my body. Angela was naked, and bare like most of the girls at Home Run, so there was nothing to obscure the view as she inserted me into her glistening folds. My penis felt like it had entered a sauna, and her muscles gripped me like a hand, but her hands were supporting her body so I could admire her compact breasts and the ruddy nipples capping them.
My hands pulled her forward, dragging her off my spear, so I could taste her skin, capture one of those buds between my teeth, and stretch it before allowing it to pop free. Her lips parted with an inarticulate sigh that left us both trembling, and when I pushed her back to spear her again, she was wetter than before.
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