There’s a cafe called ‘Figero’s’ right next to the bakery. And a strip joint. Brian waltzes into the strip joint. With his luck, the Buchners probably own it too. With video surveillance.
Inside, a few tired strippers are dancing around metallic poles. They look up as he enters. It’s five in the evening. A few older men are guzzling beers and smoking cigarettes. Brian goes to the bar and plonks himself down on a barstool.
“Is this place always this zombified or is this just the graveyard shift?” he quips.
The bartender is cleaning a beer mug.
“What’ll it be?” he says gruffly.
“Stella.”
“She ain’t working tonight.”
“I meant the beer.”
The bartender fills Stella Artois into a chilled mug. Brian lights a cigarette.
A stripper sidles up to him. She wears a bright yellow thong and two equally bright yellow pasties on her ni**les. The pasties are in the shapes of stars.
Elegant.
“Hey, stranger,” she purrs, digging her fingers into his hair. “Never seen you around here.”
“That’s original.”
“I can give you a lap dance if you want.”
Tempting, but she smells of someone else’s cheap cologne. Probably the last guy she wanked off. Anyway, he rarely paid for anything.
“Say, you wouldn’t happen to be invited to an engagement party by the Buchners tonight, would you?”
“Hell, no.”
“In that case . . . ”
He lets her kiss his mouth in an extremely provocative way. And then his chin. And his neck. Meanwhile, her hands roam all over his body, prodding his muscles and sliding down his abs to his expanding crotch.
There’s something he has to remember before his brain gets too fuzzy.
He says to the bartender, “Say, you wouldn’t happen to be invited to an engagement party tonight by the Buchners, would you?”
“Fuck the Buchners. They’ve been monopolizing this town for too long.”
“Good to hear.”
The stripper rubs her hand against his straining bulge. “I’ll monopolize this.” She turns to the bartender. “Frank . . . what the f**k is ‘monopolize’?”
There’s yet another something else he definitely has to remember. Averting his head from her pink mouth, Brian scans the strip joint again.
He turns back to the bartender. “Are any of these people going to the Buchners’ tonight?”
“Damned if I know. What’s your obsession with the Buchners anyway? You f**kin’ any of them?”
OK. So this isn’t going to work out in public. The stripper nuzzles his ear with her quicksilver tongue – an exquisitely erotic gesture that sends his groin into an extreme heat zone.
He whispers in her ear, “You have a back room?”
“Why, you are a naughty boy. Follow me, sugar.”
The bartender ignores them as she leads him by the hand to a small, dark room behind the bar. There’s no one in there and she immediately pounces on him again. She kisses him with sound and fury and passion and moist interlocking lips and her hands roam here, there, everywhere up and down his body, especially focusing on his crotch.
He responds in kind. He gropes her large br**sts and feels for the erotic points of her ni**les beneath the pasties. Her body is young and firm and hot beneath his large hands. He dives for her thong. She’s already soaking wet as his fingers wrench the little yellow string away to reveal her pu**y lips. He burrows and wriggles into her sweet little hole, which unfortunately isn’t as tight as he wants it to be, and she rips his shirt open and seizes his ni**les.
She lowers her mouth to his pointed tips. Her tongue leaves a rotund trail around his areolas. He has always been amused when a woman sucks his ni**les.
He’s extremely aroused by the time she slides her wet tongue down his belly – down, down the line of soft downy, barely visible hair that traverses his midline, right down to his pubis. She seizes his belt. A clack of metal against metal, and she has unbuckled it. She unzips his jeans. He doesn’t wear underwear and so his penis springs out from its moorings – a lever released.
“Wow,” she says. “You’re hung.”
“Glad you like it.”
“I more than like it. I – ” The rest of her words are drowned as she takes him in her mouth and sucks.
He leans against the wall and closes his eyes. She has a very clever mouth. Her tongue makes butterfly wing movements over and across his turgid flesh, especially concentrating on the crown and the little slit at the tip of his cock. Her cheek muscles pull at his column. His breathing quickens. He clasps her head.
“Take it slow,” he says.
He wonders how much he has to pay her at the end of this.
Sam’s words echo in his head. No picking anyone up either. This is a small town and word gets around.
How small is this town exactly?
And you promised. It’s part of the deal.
The stripper’s mouth is like an anemone – all moist and intense suction. He finds himself tripping over the edge. Guilt riddles his conscience.
Damn.
He’s not the type of person to renege on promises. Even if he thinks it’s a stupid promise and a stupid bet. Which of course he lost fair and square in trying to do his friend a good deed.
He says, “Um, maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all.”
He gently pushes the stripper’s head away. His c**k is still as hard as a wooden block. It glistens with her saliva.
“What’s the matter?” she says, disappointed.
“I made a promise not to f**k anyone this weekend.”
“I can still give you a blow job.”
“No . . . f**king, sucking . . . I think they all go together in one time space continuum. I’ll take a rain check, OK?”
He fishes out his wallet from his jeans pocket and extracts five hundred dollars from it.
“Here, buy yourself something nice to wear.”
The stripper’s eyes bulge at the largesse. “Wow, you’re definitely not from around here.”
He zips up his pants after ascertaining that he can contain his erection. When he walks out of the strip joint, he feels a lot lighter, and he’s not talking about his wallet.
8
When he gets back to their hotel room, Sam is already dressed. Brian flings open the door with such force that it slams against the wall.
“Honey, I’m home,” he calls.
And freezes in his tracks.
Sam stands there, resplendent in a cerulean blue gown with shimmers on its skirt. A pretty lapis lazuli necklace encircles her throat, and she is radiant in her carefully mussed up hair with romantic tendrils floating around her face in wisps. Her blue eyes sparkle, and her eye shadow is dusty silver.