I punched in for my shift feeling a little seedy and worse for wear. For one thing, I could have used a shower. I washed up a bit in Eleanor Kaminski's bathroom, but it wasn't enough to completely purge the funk of our exertions on her floor. I kept catching stray whiffs of Mrs. Kaminski's talcum-powder-suntan-lotion-herbal-shampoo-spray-deodorant-cigarette-smoke bouquet—a strange, cloying, chemical mix—with undertones of my own stale sweat. I imagined everyone else catching it, too, if I let them get close enough. It would wear off, or my own sense of it would dull, as the day went on, but I still couldn't shake that unpleasant, sticky feeling.
I was joined on the first part of my shift with a bagger I didn't work with very often, a skinny, pale sixteen-year-old named Tommy, who stole. All the baggers knew it, but no one else who worked there seemed to. He was always five-fingering Pop-Tarts and Little Debbies and chocolate milk, and would hide back near the Shithole scarfing them down. I felt bad for him; he was a raggedy looking kid, and I figured his family was probably struggling like most of the others in that town were struggling in those days.
Tommy clocked out at three, when Sally and Jim punched in to share the busiest part of the day with me. As soon as they hit the floor, Jim was in my ear.
"I need you to do me a favor," he said.
"No," I said.
"Come on, you don't even know what it is."
"I'm not going to ask Sally if she likes you," I said. "What are you, in eighth grade?"
"No, that's not it."
"Then what?"
"I need you to cover the second half of my shift for me tonight. Six to 9."
"No way."
"Please."
"Look, man, first of all, The Hill— Mr. Byrd is probably not going to allow me to work a 9-hour shift."
"Yeah, he will," he said. "I already asked him, and he said if you agreed, it would be okay this one time. And you'll get a half-hour dinner break for working a double shift. Sort of double shift, anyway."
"And second," I continued. "I don't want to."
"Aw, come on. What's the difference, a couple more hours? There's still plenty of Saturday night left when you're done."
I thought about it. I could always use the extra money, and a couple more hours wouldn't make a lot of difference.
"All right," I said, "but before you leave, you have to restock all the registers with bags, and clean the break room and employee bathrooms."
"Done," he said.
"And sweep the aisles."
"Aw, man..."
"That's the deal. You want to get off at six or not?"
The Hillbilly snuck up on me while I was bagging a big order and told me to take my break after I rounded up shopping carts from the parking lot. He always did that kind of thing. One minute you'd see him up there in the customer service cage, smoking and looking at something, and then next moment he was standing right behind you. I looked around for the Mormon, figuring I could pawn the cart round-up off on him—one more payout for covering for him—but he was off doing one of the other shitty jobs he'd agreed to.
There was a breeze cutting across the parking lot but it wasn't a cooling one. The air smelled like rain. I was putting together a train of carts in one of the parking lot lanes, and as I headed off to retrieve a wayward one at the far end of a long row, the rear door of a Chevy Impala—the only car parked that far away—suddenly flung open in my path.
Eleanor Kaminski was sitting in the back seat of her car. She was wearing a tube top and cutoffs—her most fetching ensemble—but the tube top was already pulled down, and her big, beautiful were staring right at me, there in the A&P parking lot.
"Get in," she said.
"Holy shit, Mrs. Kaminski," I looked around, surprised as hell and commensurately jumpy.
"Just for a couple minutes," she said. "I want to suck you."
"I can't," I'm sure I sounded a little panicky. "If someone sees me..."
"Okay," she said. "Then don't get in."
She scooted closer to the open door and grabbed the waist of my jeans, pulled me in close to the car. She yanked down my zipper, reached in, and pulled out my cock through the flap of my shorts.
"Holy shit," I said again, mostly under my breath.
She already had my cock in her mouth, all of it because it was soft, and starting giving it a pulsing kind of sucking.
We didn't say "freaked out" back in those days, but that's what I was, looking toward the store, trying to see if someone was looking out into the parking lot and wondering why I was leaning up against the side of a car, because that's how it would have appeared. She grabbed my hand and placed it on one of her breasts. It was gloriously heavy in my hand. I began kneading both while she sucked me. My cock grew in her mouth, despite my paranoia, and as it became fully erect, she began bobbing the length of it, fucking it with her mouth, running her lips along the shaft.
I'd had plenty of sex with Eleanor Kaminski that morning, and would have expected another orgasm so soon to be hard won. But the eroticism of the situation caused lust to rise like a sudden fever in me. Her big bare breasts were slippery from the sweat of my palms. My body was trembling from the nearness of my release, and I had to place my hands on the roof the car to steady myself.
"Oh, shit, you're going to make me come," I said. "You want it?"
"Um-hmm, um-hmm," she hummed, rapidly fucking my prick with her mouth.
A fat raindrop pinged the hardtop. Then another. I clenched my ass, then released, and began pumping my semen into her mouth. I watched her; she stopped moving, holding the head of my pulsing cock between her lips, her eyes closed and brow furrowed in concentration as she swallowed.
When I'd finished, she let my softening cock drop from between her lips.
"Go," she said, pulling up her tube top. I tucked myself back in and zipped up, backed away as she pulled the car door closed. I grabbed the shopping cart I'd come down that aisle to fetch, jogged it toward the line of others I'd already collected, rammed it in place, and wrangled the whole train of them toward the store, not looking back. The summer storm began in earnest just as I was maneuvering the whole contraption through the pneumatic doors. I was hit like a slap by the store's weirdly chilled, vegetal-smelling air.
I was flushed, sweaty. My face felt like it was on fire, and I still trembling slightly. Sally turned sideways to look at me as she snapped open a paper sack. I took the register next to her and began bagging an order.
