I was attracted to her from the moment I saw her. She was an erotic fantasy that materialized, miraculously, from within the perspiration scented aisles of Wal-Mart. Her light brown hair, rich with luxurious wavy tresses, framed a porcelain, angelic face and trickled down to the tops of her breasts. Her brown eyes sparkled like exotic gems. The smile she flashed from her pouty red lips when she looked up and noticed me noticing her put a flutter in my heart and a leaping pulse in my private regions. I wondered if I had blushed, my cheeks were so hot. How silly of me, a man of nearly forty, blushing like a schoolboy at a pretty face under the flickering fluorescent lights of Wal-Mart. Right here in front of the laundry detergent and the Mop-N-Glow.
I smiled back at her, trying my damnedest not to look like a wolf. She was so young -- mid to late twenties at most. I was almost old enough to be her father, I thought. Yet here I was, smitten, maneuvering behind my shopping cart to hide the bulge in my pants and answering her smile with a big, dopey grin of my own. My heart fluttered a second time when I saw her smile deepen and her eyes seemed to rove from top to bottom of my six-foot two-inch frame.
I had to talk to this woman. I had to hear her voice. Would there be a tremble of attraction in it? Say anything, Ben, you idiot, anything except the god damned weather.
"I see you use Tide Ultra-Soft," I said, lamely, the best thing my brilliant mind could come up with. "I'm an All-Temperature Cheer man myself."
There followed a pause so pregnant, I thought it would give birth to a wriggling baby crying on the unwaxed, industrial tiled floor.
Then, from a great yawn of silence, I heard her voice. It was soft and melodious, like the coo of a dove. "I have to do a load tonight," she said, and then she reached into her cart and held up her box of Tide as if she felt the need to prove it.
I laughed.
She laughed.
My steel blue eyes gazed into hers and in my mind I said, "I've got a big load for you, baby." Thank god my mouth, my big stupid mouth said something else.
"I do my laundry at Bryan's Laundromat over on Foothill Blvd."
"That's where I do mine!" she lied, doing her part to keep the conversation going. Truth was, she had a washer and a dryer in an alcove just off the kitchen in her apartment.
Then I got bold. I knew this woman in her expensive designer dress was way out of my league, that she had to have a boyfriend. Or ten. But I decided to go for broke anyway.
It was my turn to fib now. "Tonight's my laundry night," I said. "Would you, um, care to join me in a wash at Bryan's, say around seven o'clock?" Oh. My. God! That had to be the lamest date offer, ever. But I was desperate. I hadn't been with a woman in over three years, not since my wife had died. Dating was a lifetime ago -- an ancient, forgotten memory. I broke out in flop sweat, waiting for her reply.
"That sounds like it might be kinda fun," she said. "We could share a dryer and watch our unmentionables tumble and toss together." She smiled at me again, showing a brilliant row of dazzling white teeth.
My cock pulsed. This vision of heaven, this sexy, beautiful woman was actually coming on to me!
"Great. I'll meet you there at seven. I'll bring wine." Oh, good thinking, Romeo. There's nothing quite so romantic as swilling booze in a laundromat. Are you going to pass the bottle to her in a brown paper bag, too? "I'll bring glasses," I said as an afterthought.
"Oooh, glasses. Nice touch," she giggled. "Can you make it Merlot?"
"Merlot it is."
"Then it's a date. I'll meet you there at seven. By the way, my name is Kim."
"My name is Ben. It's a pleasure to meet you, Kim."
It's a date. Her words echoed in my mind. A god damned, actual date! I almost did a little dance as I wheeled my cart away, totally forgetting what I came here to buy, and caring even less.
* * * * *
I glanced at my watch for the twentieth time. It was 7:20, and there was no sign of Kim yet. The chilled bottle of Merlot was beaded with droplets and a prominent ring was forming on the table beneath the bottle. As I looked at it I had the sinking feeling that I'd been stood up. "I'll give her ten more minutes," I thought, "and then I'll just pack up and go home." The laundry was clean anyway; I had pulled all of it from dresser drawers and stuffed it into a laundry basket. I had just done my weekly laundry the night before.
At 7:21 she arrived. Gone was the designer dress that hugged her generous curves. Now she was wearing a flimsy pink top with spaghetti string shoulder straps that showed off her silky shoulders and left no doubt she wasn't wearing a bra. A pair of white cotton shorts hugged her bottom like cling wrap on a ripe peach and highlighted her long, sexy legs. Her toes, nails polished bright red, peeked from the tips of Italian leather sandals. She spotted me pushing clothes into a top-loader machine and hurried across the room to join me, a basket of laundry bouncing in her hands.
"I'm so sorry I'm late," she said, a little out of breath. "My cat got out and I had to hunt all over the block to find her. I would have called, but you never gave me a number." What she failed to tell me was that she had actually spent the last twenty minutes on the internet, frantically looking for directions to Bryan's Laundromat.
"Well, let's fix that right now," I said with a friendly smile. And in the next minute we were both busy punching each others phone number into our cell phones.
I watched with amusement as she plucked an inordinate proportion of bras and panties from her basket of wonders and dropped them, one by one, into the washing machine next to mine. I wondered, briefly, whether this was all an elaborate little tease just for me. Maybe all those bras and panties were already as clean as the clothes I brought to wash. I had a sudden, half-hearted urge to snatch the pair of panties from her hands and sniff them deeply to get to the bottom of it.
