Two Nights

I didn't have a girlfriend at that time. Well, I had ... girls. I was playing in a band at a wild place along the beach, and the tourist women made sure the band didn't do without. They'd swarm into our town and go crazy for a weekend, doing all the things that would wreck their reputation back home, and then they have a lifetime of stories to repeat and elaborate, to remember when real life loses its sparkle. I had a few that came back occasionally, and a lot that I saw once. Sometimes I didn't remember their names, but only their faces, and sometimes not even that; I'd be packing up my guitar at the end of the night and somebody'd be waiting at the door and we were lucky if I got a name. For some valley cutie this was what a traditional California vacation was all about, you go to the beach and go crazy for a few days and then dream about it for another fifty or sixty years of boredom and security, and then you die.

I understood that everybody did not get to live like that. The tourists came over from the valley and imagined a life like mine, they drank like fishes trying to keep up with the band, trying to pretend for a few days that they were living in a libertine paradise, and then they got in their SUVs and returned to the same old shit. But me and the guys didn't go back to anything. This *was* the same old shit to us, new chicks every night, wake up at noon and fuck the one from last night again and send her on her way, bring another one home at closing time and repeat.

The band had a four night schedule, playing Thursday Friday Saturday night and then Sunday afternoon, and then the other band did the other half of the week, Sunday night through Wednesday. Sometimes we traded halves, but we had the better deal, the busy nights, most of the time. Sunday afternoons were often the wildest, you had your day-drinkers and people trying to squeeze one more drop out of their vacation before they had to head back to the grind.

One thing about the Sunday gig was that the tourists, for some reason, thought it was funny to get the band drunk in the afternoon. Often there was also cocaine involved, and it was not unusual to play two to six and then find ourselves shutting the place down at two in the morning, dancing and acting like fucked-up idiots.

Then you would get to Monday. I'd send last night's cutie packing and I had my place to myself for a few days. Nobody was looking for me, I didn't have any schedule, nothing needed doing. I would stretch out and watch the hummingbirds, walk on the beach, sometimes I'd go to a second-hand bookstore and see what turned up -- because of the history of the area as a hideout for philosophers, spiritualists, sexual revolutionaries, and artists you would often find amazing treasures, some books a hundred years old, full of forgotten wisdom. I would find one of these treasures, bring it to my room, and lay naked on top of the covers with the windows open, reading, the ocean breeze cooling me while I escaped into the magic of another world.

This particular week was going to be a little different, because my friend Larry and his wife Amy needed to go out of town, and I had agreed to watch their house for a couple of days. My place was admittedly a little heaven on earth, one room rented in the back of a house, near the beach, hidden from the world, but Larry's place was also splendid. They had a small company and regular incomes and a mortgage on a real house up on the hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean. They had a yard full of ice-plant and a row of marijuana plants growing in pots alongside the driveway, a big-screen TV and a talking macaw. Well actually, the only thing the macaw had learned to say was, "Shut up, you fucking bird," but he said it very clearly.

Obviously I didn't mind crashing up there for a couple of days and escaping my own anti-rat-race. They had a stocked refrigerator and bar, a view, excellent stereo system. I was going to watch the place, feeding the bird and otherwise just kicking back, from Monday afternoon until they got home Wednesday evening.

Monday morning when I woke up in my own room there was somebody named Sharon in my bed. I woke up before her and showered, and she joined me in the shower as I was finishing up. She knelt and sucked my dick while I rinsed off, and I got out and let her finish up in the bathroom while I scrambled some eggs in the hot plate. We sat naked on the corner of the bed wolfing down some good bacon and eggs and lukewarm instant coffee -- my specialty, tap water and coffee crystals -- and watching the hummingbirds and look, this would be the best moment in anyone's life. Eggs gone, we sipped coffee and tipped back on the bed for a leisurely half hour of fucking. And then Sharon had to go. I threw on a pair of shorts and drove her back to the bar for her car and she left my life forever, driving back to the valley with her memories.

I did my usual shit for a while and headed up to the house. Larry and Amy were sitting on their deck when I arrived. She was the beautiful California wife in a peasant blouse and capris -- I always had a soft spot for her, which is funny because I don't mean "soft spot" at all. She was charming, smart, beautiful in a different way from my Valley girlfriends, and she liked to tease me a little but it was understood that she was just playing. She knew how I lived, and I think she and Larry sort of envied me, but they also had it made, in their own way, with their little awning business.

"Let me show you what's what," Larry said. "Here's your room." He opened a door at the end of the hall, to show me a small room with a bed and a dresser. It was tidy, the bed was made neatly, no frills. There was a window high on the wall, open to allow a breeze and the lovely sounds of the ocean and the countryside, screened to stop the bugs. Several doors opened onto the hall, and Larry showed me an empty bedroom, the bathroom, then their room, which was "lived in," clothes on the floor, covers kicked off in a tangle, junk on the dressers. That door was shut when we got to it and he shut it when we moved on, with the implication that I would stay out of there. There was another bedroom across the hall, too. "I don't know why," he laughed. "We don't need all this, but that's just how it came. The last owners even left beds in them." There was a big living room with high ceilings and a small grand piano, an actual dining room, and the kitchen was something Amy had had remodeled, so it was nice. It was sunny and had plenty of cupboards, sparkling clean utensils hanging from well-organized racks.

Larry showed me how to feed the bird, who was named Charlie. "Fuckin' bird is ten years old," Larry said. "But I know he's going to outlive me. He'll wake you up in the morning, noisy fucker." Obviously they loved their bird. Charlie didn't stay in his cage, they usually let him fly around the house. He mainly hung out on the back of the couch but had a couple of favorite perches around the dining room and living room. I liked Charlie and looked forward to hanging out with him. He did not speak while we were there, but only screeched a little and clucked in a satisfied tone.

There were no surprising quirks about the house. I had never owned a house, of course, I stayed where I could afford the rent, and got what I could get. So their attitude seemed kind of extravagant to me. I felt a short moment of jealousy when I realized I could live like that if I wanted, just get a straight gig and, you know, a haircut. Quit the band, wake up in the morning and go to work, get a paycheck by direct deposit. It wasn't worth it.

Larry and Amy took off a little after three. I had some books in the car and I set up shop on the deck, kicking back with The Theory and Ritual of Ceremonial Magic. I had an original copy from 1869, found in a dusty shop in town. Extra bonus: it had little news clippings from the 1800s tucked between the pages.

For dinner I heated up a TV dinner -- they had an actual microwave, unlike me -- and popped open a beer, moved my reading to the living room. The bird was quiet, all was good.

About nine o'clock I heard a motor approaching, then stopping, A car door thudded shut, and the living room doorknob turned. I was more curious than alarmed, figured there must have been something they didn't tell me, or a friend of theirs stopping by. It is not my nature to expect the worst, and so far my nature has always been proven correct.

The door opened without a knock and their friend Elizabeth walked in. "Oh, hi, sorry," she said. "You watching the house while they're gone?"

"Yeah." Elizabeth had worked with them in their awning business, sewing and painting, and was part of the extended family, in a way. We had met a bunch of times, well Larry and Amy's was a kind of social headquarters for hanging out, but we didn't really know each other.

"I'm having a little, I guess, problem with my boyfriend, and Larry and Amy said I could crash here. I stay here about half the time anyway," she said.

"Oh, okay," I said. "They didn't say anything about that. Just don't steal anything or kill the bird and we're good."

She laughed and got a beer out of the refrigerator, sat opposite me at the kitchen table, and sipped it. She looked at Charlie and said, "Pretty boy pretty boy," a few times. To me: "Have you heard Charlie talk?"

"No, he's been quiet."

"You'll hear him," she said. "Wait till morning. You can't shut him up once he gets going."

Elizabeth's appearance is salient. She was not a normal-looking beach chick. I assumed she was Filipina, but she could have been some other flavor of Asian or Pacific Island background. She had straight hair, about down to her shoulders, and remarkable almond-shaped eyes, dark and calm with a hint of laughter. But the funny thing was, unlike a lot of petite, slender Asian women, Elizabeth was tall, probably five-ten, and stacked. There was no getting around it, when she was in the room everybody was very fucking aware of her. She tended to wear the light peasant blouses that were standard beach apparel, thin translucent cotton fabric with a little embroidery, and also like a lot of the women on the beach, at least the locals, she rarely wore a bra. Which usually isn't noticeable or worth mentioning, but in Elizabeth's case, though she didn't seem to realize this, people stopped breathing when she moved. Hearts stopped beating. Her peasant blouse would do a little dance, flowing with the reverberations of gravity working on a pair of heavy, bounteous breasts, and you would stop talking, you would drop what you were holding, you would forget what you were doing.

Like I say, I knew Elizabeth but I had never really talked to her one on one, never mind show any interest in her. She was almost too obvious. Any guy in his right mind would want to make a move on her, but I had my hands full already and was not the type for standing in line for a shot at some hottie. Elizabeth did not seem to think of herself as unusually attractive or anything, was not a tease or self-centered, but I had never even considered hitting on her. It will sound vain, but I felt like we were in the same boat, in a way, we were both the center of attention most of the time. We were trophies. The big difference was that I could be had pretty easily, where Elizabeth was something unreachable to desire. Every guy took his shot but at the end of the day only her one undeserving boyfriend ever got to taste that fruit. As we socialized with our extended circle of friends I felt a connection with her but it would not have been right for either one of us to fawn over the other.

"Problem with your boyfriend, huh?" I prompted. "He's not going to show up here and cause trouble, is he?"

"Oh, no, he's not like that. He's just an asshole sometimes, that's all. I'll give him a couple of days to get over it."

"I see," I said. "Well Larry and Amy are gone till Wednesday evening. There's an extra room. A couple of them. I guess you know."

"Yeah, I talked to them. I think they gave you my usual room, but it doesn't matter. This place is full of 'em."

"It doesn't matter to me," I said. "You want that room, I can take a different one."

"Naw," she said. "Variety is the spice of life." I told myself that this saying was not significant. We ended up hanging out in the living room, Elizabeth spread out on the couch with her head propped up at the end, and I brought my book to a recliner, where I stretched out my legs and read while she watched TV, aimlessly clicking through the channels.

Most nights I would stay up till three or so in the morning. Well figure if I had a gig I'd quit playing at one, hang out for a little while, get home about two, and fuck for an hour or so. Then sleep, usually, till noon. Fuck some more, live my life, maybe a nap, and back to the gig. But this evening was throwing me off, being in a different place, and having this stunning woman sitting a few steps away, watching talk shows and laughing occasionally. At about eleven she turned off the TV and announced she was going to bed and I realized I was done for the day, too.

I walked with her down the hall. She poked open the various bedroom doors, skipping Larry and Amy's and also the end room that I had been given. Two of them seemed tiny and claustrophobic, with no windows, small, and she ended up in the one next to mine, which had a nice window and even a ceiling fan, not that she needed that.

I said good night and peed and went to my room. Her door was shut, and I closed mine, and in that silence I could hear her moving. I stood still in the middle of my room, my ears tuned to the rustling. I could imagine her pulling off her blouse, could picture those breasts swinging free. I imagined her scratching a little or lifting them to air the undersides with a sigh of relief. I imagined her thumbs pushing down a pair of cotton panties, and the thin bush of pubic hair that seemed appropriate for her. In my imagination those legs were long and smooth, her ass was copious but tight and smooth, and in my imagination her nakedness made her feel things. Made her miss her boyfriend a little, made her think about how nice some good fucking would be right now, made her think about me in the next room.

I had the good start of a hard-on as I undressed, flipped out the light, and flopped on the bed. I ran my fingers over it, tugging on it, but I was not in the mood for jerking off. The window on the opposite wall gave me a framed view, like a painting, of clusters of stars against a black sky. We were pretty far up the hill, in a neighborhood that had not yet been developed to the point of crowding, with few lights. Sounds came from the ocean, foghorns and the distant white noise backdrop of waves, very faint, really just drawing attention to the peaceful stillness that makes the ocean so precious to people. I stroked my penis out of habit, got it nice and stiff, and then let it go. I had a can of beer on the bed-table and took a sip from it.

The walls, I guess, were thin, and after a few minutes I realized that the rustling of the ocean waves was augmented by a nearer rustling, coming from the other bedroom. My ears focused on it, amplifying the sh-sh that was different from the long comings and goings of waves, which my ears selectively faded into the background.

What was she doing in there? She had brought a bag into the room with her, and I believed without evidence that she had brought a nightgown, and was not probably sleeping naked, like me. I pictured a flannel thing, throat to knees, with some kind of decorative lace collar maybe, sleeves down to her elbows -- a nightgown that you would wear in a house with strangers. There would be cotton panties, Wal-Mart style, not like a grandma, not up to her belly-button, but modestly covering her hips and not showing off her bottom or her long legs.

But what was that sound? Of course my deductive skill immediately realized it could only be one thing. She had to be playing with herself. A nice orgasm to help her fall asleep, it was a technique I had been known to use myself, back when we only played weekends. She was in her room, in the dark with a window full of these same stars, running her fingertip up and down the sopping slit of her pussy. She was teasing herself, rubbing her labia, sometimes fucking herself with a fingertip. She was avoiding her clitoris, working up a good vivid fantasy while she squeezed her outer labia together and released them, smeared her lubrication from her vagina to the crease between her labia, staying away from that clitoris.

And what was she thinking about? I knew her boyfriend a little bit, forgot his name but I had been around him, and I understood his type. He was the kind of guy who gets his appeal from his intense ordinariness. He was a normal guy with a job and a moderately-priced sedan and an apartment downtown. Normal fuckin' haircut, normal department-store clothes. Normal jokes and political beliefs. A perfectly presentable guy who would not embarrass her in front of her friends. I didn't understand his appeal but it didn't matter; they were arguing about something, and I concluded that he was not the subject of her masturbatory fantasies this evening.

I thought I could hear her pussy sloshing as she rubbed it, knowing at the time that I was probably partly hallucinating. Having eliminated the boyfriend as a fantasy, what was left? Obviously, me. She knew I had experience with women, that I was in a band (though she had never come to hear us), and all that that implied. She must have inferred that I was naked in my room, could probably correctly picture me lying naked in that lonely bed, up there on the hillside, with my dick stiff as a pipe. She was probably picturing herself pulling off her panties and tiptoeing to my room, impaling herself on my hard-on, allowing me to drive it into her with a heavy and hard-hitting rhythm until she was shattered with emotion and was overtaken with the devastating waves of orgasm, again and again. Maybe she was imagining getting revenge on her boyfriend by sucking my dick until I pumped a load of semen all over her face, and all over her tits. I guessed that she considered, in her fantasy, taking out her phone and texting her asshole boyfriend a middle-of-the-night photograph of herself covered with cum. Or maybe she would get a kind of implicit revenge by blowing me and swallowing every drop, licking me clean as my erection cranked itself down. The boyfriend would not be able to see it, but she would know that she never swallowed his load; no matter how he tried to hold her head in place in those last seconds, she would not give him that, and he had to accept it. And so her revenge would be to fuck me with her lips until I lost control and then to take my gushing semen in her mouth, where she could taste it, swishing it around before she swallowed it.

I heard a sound like a squeak, which I figured must be Elizabeth reaching her orgasm, trying to be quiet with me in the next room. Her eyes would be crossed, her fingers shaking wildly over her sensitive flesh. She was picturing my explosion of sweet cum into her eager mouth and my satisfaction with her skill and oral tenderness, and her fantasy plus the intensity of her fingers on herself brought her to the edge, where she made herself wait for a few more seconds, and then hurtling off the cliff to the free-fall glory of a near-lethal orgasm.

At about this point I gave out a little grunt myself and splashed cum all over my thighs and stomach. I hoped she didn't hear it, and my eyes closed. I was asleep before midnight, for once.

The bird woke up me. The sun was shining in my eyes and I heard a voice yelling "Shut up, you fucking bird!" Then I heard it again. Realizing my sleep was ended for the day, I sat up on the bed and rubbed my eyes. My jeans were on the floor, I pulled them on in a gesture of decency, without a shirt or shoes, and went out into the hall.