Well, I'd officially reached rock bottom. Here it was, a Friday night in this midsize town in upstate New York, and here I was, doing my laundry.
I'm Fiona Ryan. Yep, you got it--I'm Irish. Or at least, of Irish ancestry. My people came from the Emerald Isle several generations back, so I guess that makes me about as American as they come. I'm twenty-six, and I think I'm fairly good-looking. I have this nice oval face surrounded by jet-black hair, and even though I'm slender, I have boobs that will make any man salivate (36D, if you care to know). And I have firm, curvy butt that more than one guy has called a work of art.
So why the hell didn't I have a date for Friday night?
Okay, the town we live in isn't exactly New York City, and maybe eligible men aren't as common as they could be. But they're out there. For some reason they haven't figured out what a glorious piece of femininity I am. Not to be crude about it, but it's been months since a guy stuck his dick into me, and I'm already getting pretty crabby and irritable about that. Men aren't the only ones who need regular sex to feel right.
Anyway, here I was in the laundry room in the basement of the fairly big apartment building I lived in. The room itself was pretty cavernous, and to my dismay it was totally deserted. Well, why wouldn't it be at around 10 p.m. on a Friday night? Most normal people had better things to do than wash their clothes: they could go to restaurants, dance in a club, or get laid.
I was doing none of those things.
I was stuffing the clothes into the washer all higglety-pigglety--unmentionables along with skirts, blouses, and even a few towels and washcloths. But so what? There wasn't anybody around to criticize my laundry etiquette. Once the washer started, I debated on what I should do. Usually I stuck around to make sure that no one walked off with my things, but with the place looking like a ghost town I wondered whether I should bother. But then, sitting around in my empty apartment didn't sound like a load of laughs either. So I just decided to wait there, watching my stuff get all sudsy from the detergent.
Actually, I pulled out a paperback book and started to read it. To my amazement, I got engrossed in it, so I was surprised how quickly the washing machine finished with my clothes. I put the book down and heaved the stuff into a dryer, inserting several quarters into the machine for a cycle that would probably run about twenty-five minutes.
It was only when the dryer was almost done that I noticed the guy.
I thought I recognized him--he must have lived in some unit not terribly far from mine. He was fairly big--almost six feet tall (compared to my five foot six)--and pretty stocky. Not at all bad-looking, as far as guys went. His hair was dark and untidy, but I didn't mind that. And his face looked sort of craggy, kind of like the old Dick Tracy cartoon.
Only he didn't have the bearing of Dick Tracy. In fact, the guy looked about as scared as a rabbit transfixed by a coyote bearing down on him.
And what he seemed scared of was--me.
Maybe that sounds silly. The guy probably weighed close to two hundred pounds, and I'm just a little over half that. But there are plenty of guys out there who find women terrifying, for all kinds of reasons. I smirked to myself, thinking:
Well, if this guy tries anything funny, then I'll just use his fear of me to my advantage.
I really didn't know what this guy wanted. He was far away in another part of the room, but he wasn't doing any laundry; he was clearly fixated on me. He tried not to stare, but there wasn't anywhere else to look--I mean, no one's going to find much entertainment gawking at row after row of washers and dryers. But he was doing his damnedest not to seem as if he was staring at me.
I just rolled my eyes. I may be what old books from the nineteenth century called "a little slip of a girl," but I'm no shrinking violet. In my fairly wild college days I'd dealt with my share of arrogant guys who were full of themselves--especially those who thought they were God's gift to women. Hah, what a laugh! I'd put more than one of those jerks in their place with swift kicks (in a manner of speaking) to their posteriors. So a little weasel (well, okay, a big weasel) like this guy didn't frighten me a bit.
I stuffed my laundry in a basket and headed upstairs. There was no elevator, just several different flights of stairs in this five-story building. Just to be on the safe side, I made sure the guy wasn't following me. He didn't seem to be.
And yet, when I got to my apartment, put the basket down to fish out the key from the pocket of my pants, and opened the door--well, the next thing I knew the guy was right behind me, shoving me in and closing the door behind him.
This was an interesting development! Even so, I wasn't alarmed. Remember, I'm a tough gal, and I'd dealt with the likes of him before. But, as he peered at me, his face breaking out in sweat (it was a warm night in June, and the humidity hadn't tapered off yet), the one thought that ran through my mind was:
This guy is, like, petrified.
I could see the whites of his eyes all around his pupils as he stared at me, and his breathing was kind of fast and ragged. I'm pretty sure he was startled, even horrified, at what he'd done. Here he was in someone else's apartment--and a woman's at that. I could already have him arrested for something. I knew that the way to get out of this awkward predicament was to be firm with him.
"Look, guy," I said severely, "I don't know who you are or what you want, but you'd better get out of here right now."
The thing was that he was in front of the door, and he'd have to be the one to open it and vamoose. And he didn't seem to show any inclination to do that. I looked him over more carefully--and I have to admit that the tight little T-shirt he was wearing and the super-short shorts (almost like swimming trunks) he had on made me think certain things that, at this moment, I probably shouldn't be thinking of.
I put my laundry basket down and sized him up. Maybe an appeal to his good side--he probably did have a good side, since he wasn't lunging at me or anything--would help.
"Hey," I said, "you seem like a nice fellow, so why don't you just leave me alone? You don't want to get into trouble, do you?"
That didn't seem to have much effect either. But then he did something that I didn't expect at all.
He came toward me and fell on his knees in front of me. Wrapping his arms around my hips, he . . . How can I put this? He started to cry.
It was more like sobbing or even wailing. There were real tears coming out of his eyes--I could feel them getting my pants wet. Jesus, what the hell was going on? Men don't cry, do they? They're not supposed to, anyway. But then, maybe they should every now and then. There might be fewer scumbags in the world.
But what he didn't notice--although I did--was that, while he was holding me in a vise grip around my midsection, his actions were causing my pants (they were just some old sweat pants with a fairly worn-out elastic band around the waist) to slip down over my hips. And my underwear was going with them.
Incredibly, the guy didn't pay the slightest attention to the fact that, now, his face was pressed up against my naked delta. That's right: the guy was crying right into my pubic hair. (Yes, I have a bush--a pretty thick one.) That was a first for me! The situation was getting pretty embarrassing. I'd actually long gotten over the fear of this guy: as I've mentioned, he seemed a lot more scared of me than I was of him. But I couldn't help noticing that his hands were now pawing my butt as he continued to press his face into my groin.
Then all of a sudden he did figure out what was happening. He stopped crying for just a moment; then, sniffling, he began to lick me.