Lots of Fridays I end up at a bar with some guys from work. It was already a tradition when I started there years ago, and we're still doing it, even though most of the original gang has retired or died. The current crop of guys are about my age, coming up in the company, we aren't kids any more but young enough to loosen it up every now and then. In a good way. Some of them are married, so we keep it pretty mellow but, it seems to me, life is better when there is some nonzero chance of crazy shit occurring.
This week we had ended up at PJ's, a kind of neighborhood place with bands on the weekends. The bar has been here forever and probably holds fifty or seventy-five people, if it filled up, which it usually doesn't. The bands are okay, rock and roll for dancing, and us single guys usually have a good time checking out the women there, though it's not much of a pickup joint. Like I say, that's not really what we're looking for anyway, it's all just fun now that we're not kids any more.
I was getting a little bored, watching the same old band do the same old songs, when I sensed that a lady at the bar was sending out secret brainwaves on my frequency, if you know what I mean. I noticed her out of the corner of my eye and turned to check her out, but she wasn't looking at me, she was staring off into space. She looked like a regular girl-next-door, cute, wearing a short denim skirt and a buttoned blouse with a couple of buttons open. To repeat, the skirt was short, let me say: very short. I wouldn't say her legs were "spread," but I would not say her knees were together, either. In fact, from where I was sitting you could see right past the hem of that little skirt and all the way to her unpantied cootchie. Though there was shade down there, I could clearly make out the ruffles of her labia and the texture of pubic hair. Her legs were long, her posture inviting, and she seemed to be sitting by herself. The band finished a song and was fucking around on stage like they do.
"Just a sec, guys," I said, "I gotta say hi to somebody here."
In the quiet minute between songs I got up and walked back to the bar. The woman's hair was that kind of casual-looking tangle that might take hours to perfect, or she might not give a fuck, you can't tell. Her shirt was wrinkled and had a delightful way of not clinging to her, and her skirt was mostly legs. It looked like she'd cut the hem off herself; it must have required some courage to wear that, as short as it could be, with tantalizing strands of threads lying against the smooth skin of her thighs. Her eyes shifted from the bandstand to me as I seemed to be coming toward her.
"Excuse me," I said. "Did you realize your pussy's showing?" Note to reader: this is not a line I had ever used before to start a conversation.
Her eyes looked into mine without blinking. She was holding a beer bottle, Modelo Negro, by the neck. "I hadn't noticed," she said. "Is it?"
"Yeah, from where I'm sitting over there, I can see it," I said.
"So how's it look?" she asked me.
"What do you mean, 'how's it look?'"
"I mean, like, does it look okay? Should I do something to it? Put lipstick on it, maybe?"
"Oh, no, it looked fine to me," I said. "You got a patch to match, looks like."
"Yeah," she said, "I think that's pretty normal."
"I haven't really thought about it," I said. "But not everybody's matches."
"Sure," she said. "Especially blondes, sometimes the hair on their head bleaches because of the sun but their pubic hair is dark."
"Huh, I didn't know that," I said. "I figured their blond hair was fake."
"Not necessarily," she said.
What followed would be called 'an awkward pause.' At least for me. The conversation had moved at a brisker pace than I had anticipated, and she had be entirely off-balance for the moment, which is rare. I am not typically shy around women, you might say. She seemed perfectly comfortable sipping her beer and watching the crowd, while I stood there contemplating her. She did not shift her legs. I could not quite see her pussy from my place standing beside her.
"Well I just wanted to mention it to you, in case you didn't mean to flash everybody."
"Yeah, okay, thanks," she said, and she gave me a warm smile that seemed polite and normal, if we had been talking about anything else. "I hope I didn't offend you."
"Offend me? Why would it offend me?"
"You never know these days."
"For the record, I am totally in favor of naked women, including exposed body parts," I told her.
"Can you see my tits?" she asked me.
"Standing here I can," I said, making a point of not darting my eyes toward them.
"So I guess you're in favor of that too?"
"Oh, yes, absolutely," I replied. "I think you are displaying them perfectly."
"It's not too much, huh?"
"No, somebody has to be looking for it."
"And you were."
"Well, yeah," I said. I felt a little embarrassed but I obviously didn't need to be. "I guess my eyes just automatically do that."
"And that's how the world goes round," she said with a smile.
"That seems like a good thing to me," I said. I was feeling a little challenged for some reason.
"It does?"
"Sure. If you want someone's attention you can get it. If you don't want it, you can button up an extra button or whatever and they'll move on. Sort of a way for controlling somebody else's mind."
She looked at me as if I might have surprised her by saying something halfway intelligent. "That's a good point, I guess," she said. "People can sort of control other people's behavior with their own self presentation."
"So when you sit showing your pussy to a room full of people, don't you think somebody's going to notice?" I asked her, coming back at the sensed challenge.
"Oh absolutely, I hope they will," she smiled. She was still sitting the same way, facing the tables where people were sitting with their eyes at pussy level.
"Is that why you do it?" I asked her, going for the coup de grace.
"Oh, I'm doing it because my girlfriend told me it would work. I had thought I would prove her wrong but that does not seem to be the case."
"She told you it would work? To do what?"
"Yeah, I was bitching about how hard it is to meet guys. Told her I was getting sexually frustrated but couldn't meet anybody. She said, 'hey it's easy. Just flash your pussy at 'em, they'll be on you like flies on shit,' is what she said."
"Huh, I see. I guess we're a little predictable, aren't we."
She shrugged. But in a nice way. "Well it seems like a way to meet men, I don't know that it helps me any with the frustration part."
"Yeah I guess sitting at the bar talking to some creep is not exactly satisfying."
"No," she said sweetly. "It only moves the solution one step further away. So a guy comes over because he saw your pussy. Does that mean you invite him to your apartment, or go with him to his?"
"Well?" I tried not to sound too hopeful.
