This story was written in collaboration with a certain "bitsie", who is the most unusual muse that I could imagine:
Duet
Him:
Hal dragged the last suitcase out of the back of the van and over to the curb, where the porter was waiting with the rest of the luggage. "That's the last of them," he grunted as he dropped the heavy bag. He dug into his wallet and handed the porter five dollars – one for each suitcase.
Dena gave her mother a final hug. Her father turned to Hal and said, "Thanks for giving us a ride to the airport. Take care of our little girl now."
"Stop that, Dad," Dena burst out. "I told you, he's just a good friend! Can't a guy do your daughter a favor without getting the second degree every time?"
Her father just shrugged. Hal noticed Dena's mother giving him an appraising look. "Don't mind her father, Hal – he just wants to marry her off already."
Dena stifled a squeal as her mother took her father by the arm and turned to enter the airport terminal. Dena rolled her eyes as she looked at Hal, but when she saw him grinning she knew that he was OK with it. "C'mon, let's get out of here."
Dena was quiet on the way back into town, and Hal decided to leave her alone with her thoughts. He had hardly seen her all week while her parents were visiting. Dena had called him up the night before to ask him if she could use his van to drive them to the airport, because they had a lot of luggage. Hal volunteered to do it himself - he wasn't thrilled about getting up so early on a Sunday morning, but he was glad to have the opportunity to spend some time with her again.
Hal and Dena lived in the same two-story apartment building – she had moved there from the West Coast six months earlier. She was a legal assistant for one of the large law firms downtown, and he was a financial analyst for a brokerage company. At first they just smiled politely at each other as they passed in the parking lot of their building. However, when they found out that they worked downtown in adjacent offices, he started giving her a ride to work sometimes, whenever their schedules matched up.
The rides turned into an occasional lunch, and they soon became good friends. Hal's taste in women tended to the blonde long-legged type, as opposed to Dena's short, busty brunette figure. He found out right away that the feeling was mutual on Dena's part, which was actually a relief for both of them. There was no sexual tension to mess up their budding friendship. They particularly enjoyed regaling each other with the latest stories of their various ongoing dating disasters – it got so Hal would start composing his anticipated "report" to Dena even before his date was over.
Hal knew the exact minute when all that changed for him. He was at the Laundromat with Dena, feeding quarters into the machines and just hanging out together while the loads ran when he committed the cardinal sin – he let a pair of his new red basketball shorts get into the wrong washing machine. They didn't realize it until Dena went to change her loads, and found that her whites had all turned pink.
Dena's face turned purple, and Hal closed his eyes and braced himself for a blistering tirade. But he opened them in surprise, as the laugh that Dena was stifling burst out. His face broke out in a sheepish grin, which made Dena laugh even harder.
"Oh, you should see your face!" giggled Dena, as she held up her now-pink panties. They spent the next hour bleaching her clothes back to their original white, with Dena giggling the whole time. Hal was so relieved that he didn't even mind his punishment, which was to fold both of their laundry. But as he lay in bed that night, he suddenly realized that he wanted to hear Dena's laugh every day. And night.
No doubt about it – Hal was smitten. But their unwritten code of friendship didn't leave him any room to express it. He was afraid that even the slightest hint of any romantic interest on his part would ruin their relationship.
The next few weeks were a kind of torture for him, as his heart and his head wrestled for domination. He was almost relieved when Dena's parents had flown in to visit, leaving her no time for their usual meetings. But that was over, and Hal wasn't any closer to solving his problem than he had been before they came.
"Earth to Hal!" Hal woke out of his reverie – he had been driving on autopilot.
"We're almost home," said Dena. "Do you want to come up for a cup of coffee?"
Hal realized that he had driven all the way home while sunken in his own thoughts. "Sure, why not?" he stammered.
He parked the van out front, and the two of them went inside. Hal climbed the stairs to her apartment, noticing the cute wiggle of Dena's tush inside her pants as he followed her up the steps. "That pretty much sums up my situation," he thought to himself. "So near and yet so far!"
As he reached the top of the steps and saw her turning the key in the lock, another thought flicked randomly through his head: "But she doesn't even drink coffee….."
Her:
Okay, so she'd always thought he was cute. Not her type, but cute. She could see fixing him up with a friend… but all her friends were still in San Francisco.
He seemed kind of cool, and remote. Dena liked dark men, real Latin lovers, a type that was plentiful in San Francisco. Not here. Why did she agree to come to Chicago again? Oh yeah, the job. Every time she looked at Hal, she had to kind of crane her neck. He was from good Norwegian stock, well over six feet tall and blond. She was, like her parents, short.
But then she got to know Hal. Since they both realized they worked downtown, he'd become friendlier, and she'd started to feel more at home. It made her realize the advantages of knowing someone in a really big city. In San Fran, it didn't matter because she'd lived there so long. But here… well, it had been really nice to have a big, strapping friend more than once.
But then something had happened. She kind of fell for him. She knew exactly when it had happened.
Just a few weeks ago, she'd been getting ready for bed in the sweltering Chicago summer, windows open, when she'd seen something scuttle in the moonlit dark. She'd cautiously turned on the light and screamed at the sight of a huge wood spider dashing for the safety of darkness under her bed. She'd called Hal.
He'd come upstairs immediately in a pair of boxers, and she'd greeted him with hysteria in the panties and camisole she'd worn to bed that night. She'd told her story just waiting for him to laugh at her and leave her alone with that – that creature. He'd just smiled gently and asked what she wanted him to do.
"Do?" she'd asked, incredulous. "Kill it, get rid of it, get it away from my bed!"
Hal had nodded and asked for a broom, a dustpan, and an empty shoebox. She'd brought him the stuff without thinking, and when he'd caught the spider and taken it gently downstairs, setting it free not next to the building but down the road about a half a block, in a small stand of birch trees, she'd been amazed.
"Why did you do that?" she'd asked.
"Do what?"
