I walked into the high end bar situated in the high end restaurant (itself located in a high end hotel), looking to score a 'high end' "happy ending" to my feminine drought-filled existence. I knew that many of the women here were "out of my league," but figured I might get lucky if I merely showed up.
I'm not the most handsome of men, but I'm not exactly ugly either. With my long black ponytail hanging down my back, I looked 'exotic enough' to pass for 'interesting,' and the gallery used that "artiste" image as best they could.
I'm an artist, showing at a fairly well known gallery in town. I had a show every couple of years, with my big landscape canvases, and I'd been around this kind of 'money' people floating through the gallery where I exhibited each year before. But I was only "The (Poor, Starving) Artist token at that point. I was on 'exhibition' myself those times almost as much for that tokenism as much for my art work.
Hopefully at each of those openings, I could "work" the room enough to pay for yet another year of my expenses. My loft studio (which doubled as my 'humble' residence), and my occasional vacations for 'inspiration' to Europe and other places abroad.
My 'professional' name is Roberto Callas. I used that instead of using my fathers name and my true given name... Robert Collins. My mother was just enough high Castilian Spanish to give me a little bit of 'native coloring' to pass for true hispanic, although I was raised not speaking anything other than English (as my father liked the idea of his wife 'being hispanic' more than the actuality of it).
Here I was, walking through this crowd and wondering if I was really going to be able to be here without drinking and running, when I saw Her.
Rosa Ibanez. (She pronounced it Ro-sa in a way that shivered sexily out of her mouth.)
I'd known her through my church at one point, had found her attractive but not exactly my body type (I liked my women to be on the thinner and less endowed side). And Rosa was very endowed, and very "curvy" as well.
She was a "thick" Latina. Ample breasts and hips, with a round and succulent face, with long flowing black slightly curly hair. (That part had me, if nothing else. Her Hispaniola mixed black and Spanish heritage had always screamed "sexy siren" to me. When she wanted to be, that is.)
I'd mainly known her as being the cool professional: Dr. Ibanez. A psychologist and fairly well to do business woman, she always seemed to me to be alluring, but unattainable. She moved in those monied circles that to her seemed to be second nature.
I was later to find out that she had not always been the well to do person that she now reeked of, but had once been a poor child in the streets in Santo Domingo. Through hard work and determination, she had clawed her way out of the Dominicano ghetto to become the well respected woman that she was today.
I had grown up (ironically) fairly well to do, with a wealthy, but very distant father. I was expected to become a lawyer (as he was), but I "failed him." I had no talent for studying, but was instead drawn to that "abhorrent gypsy existence" called being an artist. "When will you learn to be practical!" he had once screamed at me. The answer was unfortunately for him... never.
If it weren't for my mothers side of the family being fairly well off (but not rich) perhaps I might have been that "starving artist"after all. To my fathers very judgmental chagrin, my mother "coddled" me with my — "soon to be disastrous" — wasting of my talents. He had muttered on more than one occasion, "It's good thing your mother is so gorgeous and sexy, or otherwise I'd have flipped her for a young and more pliable woman years ago."
I had more than once almost come to blows with my father for how he treated my mother like that. Instead, we never talked. My mother was always wanting for us to reconcile, while knowing not to hold out for that possibility.
A couple of years ago, Rosa had found someone who she had thought was her perfect lover. I had seen pictures of her on his yacht. Of their world traveling chi chi lifestyle. So very above and beyond me.
But then she had caught him fucking another woman at a party they had been to in Majorca, and that was that. With as sexy and succulent as she was, even
his
eyes (and prick) just had to wander.
She had crashed and burned bad. She was not used to being so used and rejected (although she should have known — most guys when they have a really good thing, think that they need even
more
"good things" — elsewhere).
So here she was, standing right in front of me. She was looking both poised, and yet so vulnerable.
"Roberto," she walked up to me, with a shy smile that said me she didn't know what else to say to me. We had talked rather infrequently for my having seen her at church, but didn't know much else of me except that I was an artist.
"Rosa," was all the I could think to reply. I wanted to tell her,
You're so succulent, I could eat you right here...
but that was totally inappropriate (I thought). "How are you doing?"
I had watched as she had bounced back from this bad previous disaster, but here before me, she had that look of anguish as to what to say. "I'm sorry that I didn't come to your last show," she said, with hurt hiding just behind that sad smile.
I hadn't even been aware that she had been following my career. "That's ok. I know that you're quite the busy woman. And we don't even really know each other that well."
She brightened up and asked, "What are you doing here? Are you meeting someone?"
I wish, I almost told her. "No. Just coming in for a drink. That's all." She brightened up some more, and walked over to me and inserted her arm though my right arm hanging loosely tucked into my pocket.
