Copyright 1999 Del Edwards (a nom de plume)
He loved to watch her muscular thighs move with an easy rhythm as she almost danced down the trail toward him. He was used to seeing her in athletic shoes, shorts and a tank top or blouse with a bra under it. More than a few times he had stopped, turned and watched her move smoothly up the mountain trail, waiting for her shorts to gape open at the outside of her hip and show the white satin of her panties and the full beauty of those smooth, muscled thighs and calves working to perfection.
Over a period of several years they had hundreds of short conversations when they met on the hiking trail in one of the city's mountain parks. The compliments and acknowledgement of admiration and love for the other went between them. She once volunteered that he fascinated her and that she had had fantasies about him. He responded by telling her that he had dreamed about her as well as had fantasies about her being his woman. He told her he wished they had met many years ago so she would be the mother of his children. She once told him he was the most sensitive, kind and supportive man she had ever met. Over coffee he had told her she was the only woman he had met since his divorce ten years ago that he would consider marrying.
She was a wholesome woman, quite conservative and conventional as well as complex. She had spoken of her other life a few times and then skittishly retreated into reality with talk of her work and her children. One day, figuring he had nothing to lose but his obsession of wanting her to be his woman, his lover, his companion, he commented to her that if he had his way he would glue her tennies to the floor, put a hot cup of coffee in her hands and instruct her, "Tell me everything about you, leave nothing out, I want to know it all."
Her response was, "You're an attractive man, and if things were a little different..."
'Go ahead woman, drive me into further flights of fantasy' his soul screamed but he did not give voice to his thought.
In full makeup she was shockingly beautiful. Her lips were redder, her cheekbones blushed and even higher, the elegantly casual blond hair even more complimentary as it softly framed her face. At the same time she looked 'overdone' - painted and primped and a little too perfect. He had seen her in street clothes and makeup several times when they met for coffee or lunch. Their first coffee meeting had nearly blown him away. She was elegantly dressed and her hair, her makeup and her nails were perfect. She knew how to be beautiful.
He was prepared for the encounter because he had checked the license plates of several hundred white Honda Accords in the last few months. All the numbers and all the letters of the license plate were in the correct order. She was in the store.
He had parked and locked his vehicle carefully in the lot of the sex store. His heart thundered as he pulled at the door and entered the coolness of the shop from the noisy, hot sidewalk. A quick circuit of the ground floor established that she was not there. He exited the front door and urged his legs to move him quickly to the second floor where the merchandise was more explicit and the videos were for sale, not for rent. There had been chance meetings with her before, in the parking lot of a shopping mall, on a quiet residential street she was out for a walk on a beautiful spring evening and he was on his way to a meeting. He believed and tried to convince her that the gods were causing their paths to cross. She was dubious. Maybe she even thinks I am stalking her, he mused once or twice. That would certainly frighten her. How could I prove to her that I wasn't stalking her he wondered. Well, I'll deal with that if it comes up but it's really the gods who are at work here, he had thought to himself.
He encountered her at a distance; she was close to a man he had never seen before. They were two thirds of the way down an aisle of videos; she was laughing and bent toward him in humor.
