"Baby! What are you trying to do to me? The guys are outside waiting! Jude will soon come in to see what I've got up to!" the man groaned.
"So? He'll see that you're with your wife, Mason!"
"I know, baby. But he might want what I have, and you know that I don't like to share," the man wheedled.
His wife laughed mirthlessly. She had heard this kind of thing many times before, just before her husband left her on her own for the day to be with his friends. She knew that some of these friends were women. There had been a clique into which she had never managed to break when she married Mason.
"I have to go," he sounded annoyed. 'I have to go!" He pushed her away from him, and she fell.
"Christ! I'm sorry Carole!" he exclaimed.
He helped her up and helped her to a chair. An ice pack later, he and her marriage were gone. Carole had had enough.
*****
That was eight months ago. Carole had separated from Mason and was well on the way to having her divorce finalised. She had taken on a new lease on life, bought a new two-bedroom apartment in New Kingston out of the very generous allowance that her husband had always given her, and started over. She knew that she wanted a change. Being a youth worker was even less satisfying than it had been two years ago when she first realised how empty her life was. She knew that what she was doing was important, but the feeling of having given too much during her earlier life lingered. She felt that it was time to pack it up before her resentment at her situation of finding herself approaching middle age without a family of her own, and without the exciting career about which she had dreamed, overwhelmed her.
Carole prepared for the day's Expo at the youth centre. She had invited several business persons from the community to come in and serve as well-needed role models for the young men and women whom the Children's Services Department had deemed to be in danger of going off the rails. Everyone whom she had invited had agreed. Carole wondered if there would ever come a time when she could just come in and give an hour of her time and be an inspiration to anyone. She and her little taskforce of helpers had set out the chairs, fixed the displays on the tables and pinned up the posters that the visitors had sent ahead for them. They were ready in time to have a quick cup of coffee before the first of the visitors arrived.
*****
Ralston Anthony was the first to arrive. He had been the first person to arrive last year and the year before that as well. He was the former owner of a fine carpet and drape store in cool, Mandeville. He had set up the business over thirty years before, and had done very well through having received the long-term contract to carpet and maintain the floors and drapery of three fine hotel chains across the Caribbean. He had done so well in fact that he was able to take an early retirement, after his wife had died, and so he planned to spend the rest of his life on one long, well-deserved holiday.
Ralston decided that it would be a good thing to donate some time to the community. He felt that he had lived a boringly ordinary, if successful life and he was ready for adventure. It was for this reason that Ralston Anthony decided that he could best serve his fellow man (and woman) by teaching some basic entrepreneurship classes in a delinquency prevention programme to the young men and women who did not appreciate how lucky they really were.
Visiting the youth centre, and delivering his little speech, was something of an annual event for Ralston. He smiled at the director of the centre. She was an extremely attractive young woman. He had fantasized about her since the day that he had first met her, two years ago. She was married, but Ralston had seen the lonely look in her eye. He was struck by it, because it was the same sort of look that he had seen in the eyes of many of the single women nearer his own age. She was far younger and prettier than the sort that he had come to expect to have haunted eyes and so she piqued his interest.
He had delivered his speech and answered the mostly inane questions of the youngsters fairly smoothly. The young woman had watched the whole thing with a quiet expression on her face, but for some reason Ralston thought that she was paying attention to the proceedings. It was not just the usual do-this-and-tick-the-box-on-to-the-next-project for her.
She had smiled, clearly flattered when he had invited her for a drink, but told him that she was married; and his casual glance at the third finger on her left hand had seemed to confirm this. They had shaken hands on parting, but, as is the way of Fate, they began bumping into each other quite frequently after that, at the supermarket, in the high street shops when he accompanied his sisters, and at the Strawberry Hill Resort, high in the Blue Mountains, where coincidentally, his family and her husband held long-term leases on two luxury cottages. It was funny that they did not seem to have noticed each other before, because when they spoke later they realised that they had been doing these things all along, but just around each other, instead of side-by-side as they seemed to be doing now. Carole had seized the opportunity to seduce the older man one weekend when he was alone at the lodge and she had managed to slip away from her husband. She went to his cottage and rapped at the door after dressing herself in a tube top and hot pants and pasting her most becoming smile on her face.
Poor Ralston didn't stand a chance. The tube top told him that she wore no bra and the hot pants that she hadn't bothered with knickers either. He stood to attention to let her in in more than one sense of the phrase.
"Hello Mr. Anthony," she said in the sultry voice that had set Ralston's blood boiling when he had passed her cottage and heard her making love to her husband, an apparently rare event, since he was far more likely to hear them arguing.
"H- hello..." he stammered slightly.
"I'm not sure that you remember me," she lied smoothly. "I'm Carole Stoddart. I live near you and you spoke at the youth centre where I work a few weeks ago. You'd offered me a drink, but I couldn't come at the time. May I have it now?' She grinned at him, her smile something out of a toothpaste commercial. "In fact, I'm thinking about a career in interior decorating because of you. I've been bored with being a youth worker and I need a change. You were very persuasive... May I come in?" She smiled again.
Ralston stood aside to let her in, glancing subconsciously to see if anyone had noticed that she had come to his cottage dressed as she was.
"Yes, I do remember you, of course. How may I help you, Carole?" he asked politely.
"I won't be long, but may I have a seat?" she asked, and turned around to bend over and pick up some magazines from a small chair even before Ralston could respond. Ralston's erection became undisputedly painful at the sight of her naked buttocks as the scrap of cloth covering them disappeared into the crevasse between the twin bubbles of her pillows. He simply stared at her and so she tossed her hair sexily and asked,
"Aren't you going to offer me that drink, Ralston?"
