Rush

Less than four hours remained until his dinner date with his ex-wife, Katrina, at her favorite Manhattan restaurant: Sardi's. In less than five minutes his mistress would emerge from the ladies' restroom with freshly scrubbed hands, ready to pry open a three-pound lobster across from him at a ramshackle diner. As the wisecracking waitress Janine approached their table, adjusting her apron and popping open one button too close to her mountainous cleavage, adman Antoine wondered aloud, "How in hell did I wind up in this predicament, needing to take out a secured loan to wine and dine a girl who can only be a side dish and an ex who'll always be a snide bitch?"

"Hi, hon'," Janine greeted, snapping a stick of gum and sending spearmint spittle into a glass of water likely sourced from the polluted East River.

"Heya, Janine. Say, don'tchu work daytime shifts only?" asked Antoine.

"Well, since my last boyfriend absconded with my fourteen-karat gold vibrator that a previous lover had got me from Sand Trapeze or somewhere in the South of France ... " her story trailed off in some tawdry universe while he reminisced the previous night with his lover, Inez.

The night following the day of their last lunch date at Intermission Diner, he had placed a booty call to Inez by cellie, leaning forward against a stucco wall outside her fourth-floor apartment in an attempt to hide his hard-on from passing tenants. Pleading wasn't working, as she kept cursing him out for procrastinating on consummating their reunion. Finally he earned her sympathy when a would-be mugger limped his way from the creaky elevator, his hand half-buried in a pants pocket bulging with more length than Antoine's boner. Cryptically Antoine whispered, "Stranger danger" into the phone. It took a minute, since Inez couldn't understand why her lover would switch from begging for sex to complaining about dandruff.

When he insisted that he was located out in her hallway, she had the gall to ask, "How do I know to trust you, since we're sexually estranged? If Mr. Mugger's gun is bigger than yours, how do I know you'll be able to hit it?"

"Woman, this ain't the time for one-a-yo size queen moments and jokes. My man's 'bout to riddle me with bullets right outside your door."

"Yeah, I guess I'd better let ya in rather than listen to you die within earshot."

"Yo, enough, Inez."

Once inside No. 4-L, he was only several admonishments from getting inside Inez. "Sacred pussy my ass," he cursed into her flushed ear while yanking a handful of braids away from it and, with his other hand, pulling her pelvis harder against him so she could feel all seven inches of raw heat. The space in her Bushwick studio apartment was so tiny that two people trying to walk past each other ended up fucking anyway. "That's right, baby. Fuck this! Fuck it, fuuuuuck ..."

"Like that, boy," she taunted, veering to the right as she backed up, else risk flipping out her pad's only window. "At least let me strip off my nightgown and panties. You're gonna sprain your fingers with my panties coiled around them like that."

"Shushhh ... Let me take care of everything, honey," he assured *Rip!* went Inez's wet white panties, which dropped to her ankles. "Oooh, baby!" he squealed at the sight of her Esmeralda Spaulding afro-inspired bush, which despite its thickness couldn't stop her copious juices from oozing down her thighs and onto Antoine's serpentine flicking tongue. After he slurped up a mouthful, he gave her head, sucking her clit harder every time she protested that neighbors walking down the hallway might hear their sexmaking. And when he paused to realignment his Maxwell-like jaws, still kneeling before her trembling, fuzzy brown legs, he spotted new cum landing on his Kenneth Cole shoes. Watching a tiny pool form on the hardwood floor around him made him a bit dizzy as blood was directed away from his brain to his penis. "Dayum, girl! You sure keep the cream coming for yo man!"

Doffing her pink nightgown, and its mixed scents of their perspiration and musk, she ordered him to "finish what you started down there."

"Nah, I'm full now, but I'm ready to fill you with cock once more." Unzipped, his trousers slid to his ankles. A swift Astairesque kick later, his slacks landed in a wire trashbasket.

"What? Only once?" she teased, twisting erect ebony nipples beneath a sexy, crooked smile.

"No more questions," he said upon resumption of deep thrusts into a pussy as tight as a Blacksummers' Night groove. He was spreading her thick thighs with a brawny leg; pinning her rear to sheetrock that threatened to shatter down to the powder.

"Unh-hunh, like that. Yeah, girl. Break it off! Unhhhhh ... unhhhhh ... unhhhhh ... yeahhhhh ... Inezzzzz ... UNHHHHH!"

"Unh, boy, shoot cho stuff ... aaahhhhh ..."

*********************

"Uhhh, Earth to Antoine," chirped Inez. Embarrassed that she had intruded upon his randy recollection, he cleared his throat.

"Baby, you're back so soon!" he exclaimed, rushing to pull out her chair.

Intermission was filled to capacity, and his late arrival had made obtaining a booth impossible. Zilch on a restroom fuck, too. Seeing Inez's knitted brows now, he realized that he still had no chance starring as her Olivier Martínez in Unfaithful.

"Ap-par-ent-ly, I haven't returned to our table quickly enough," she said, "since I walked in on Miss Janine chattering about her ex's intimate theft -- and her testimonial about the endurance of The Versailles Company's Sun Goddess Vibrator with its 'guaranteed "d'or-gasms."' Inez was too angry to chuckle, but not to send the saggy-bosomed server her walking papers.

Antoine tried kissing an apology onto the back of her hand, but Inez whipped out a medium ballpoint blue pen and on his napkin drew a prominent buttcheek accompanied by an arrow, sans Cupid. Suddenly, the door to the establishment flew open as a group of pre-theater diners exited, but the chill between Antoine and Inez had no connection to lower temps of an early-October evening.

Antoine spied his cellphone for the time. Being late for a date with his mistress was excusable, he thought, but not for Katrina's fortieth-birthday dinner six blocks away at Sardi's. In his mind he fumbled for the words to inform his girlfriend that she indeed would become his mistress once he and Katrina remarried. He hoped that Inez would understand that, with a baby son on the way, remarriage would be more practical than paying child support for more than twenty years and, worse, having to deal with some dude raise his son and possibly turn him against him. Of less concern was accepting the future boyfriend tongue-kissing the woman he loved like a priceless objet d'art and drilling his name into her pussy until his name is obliterated upon each uterine contraction.

*****************

By the time their new waitress, Gertrude, had set their steaming-hot plates -- each heaped with a fire engine red, three-pound lobster -- beneath their bibs and drooling smiles, Antoine had managed to lighten his lady's mood. Serendipity intervened when he had spotted, at an adjacent table, a pair of gay men locking lips over a gigantic chocolate-frosted cupcake with the words, "Will, won't you marry my ass?" written in lavender icing. That's when Antoine recalled Inez's love for the entire Cole Porter oeuvre, and he commenced his substandard medley with "You Do Something to Me."

"Away, don'tcha sound sweet. Now, please pass the butter sauce, baby," she said as eagerly as on their last intimate connection, when his desire to go anal had won out over her plea for sixty-nine. In the absence of KY and Vaseline, he had reached for Bertoluccian inspiration, grabbing a stick of butter from a saucer between their half-eaten croissants and rolling Inez over the way Brando's "Paul" ravaged Schneider's "Jeanne" on a polished hardwood floor in a seedy Paris edifice. Although Inez was never impressed by Method acting, she inflated Antoine's head when she expressed -- once her anus had recovered -- that "you deserve a Golden Globe." He recalled countering her quip with, "Don'tchu mean 'Golden Globes,' honey?"

Glowing across the table from him, she seemed to be reminiscing too, until she remarked, "Mmmm, this is some dayum delish lobster! Check out all the sweet meat in this claw, right?"

"Sweetie, I love to see you so happy. And with your mouth full." Then he tasted a forkful of linguine from his enticing lobster entrée.

"So you got jokes, hunh," she replied, trying to laugh. Her face was beginning to turn as red as the lobster shell she was clutching.

"No, no. Don't talk with your mouth full," he said, pushing out his chair with his muscular rear end and rushing to lend her assistance. He immediately felt guilty for joking about fellatio minutes earlier.

Not only was Inez choking; her lips and neck were starting to swell. She had crushed what remained of the lobster claw as she struggled to breathe. Patrons' conversations staggered to silent pockets while the overhead music -- Alicia Keys' "Unthinkable" -- filled the grim void that remained. Antoine attempted the Heimlich maneuver on his girlfriend, but the hives had begun to possess her flesh. Like an alien invasion, perfectly circular welts spread all over her face, ears, neck and arms, and within minutes her flesh was turning blue. Asphyxiated, she slumped over a plate of tortured. shellfish, mangled linguine and vomit.

Flinging his heavy body over her back, he inadvertently knocked his cellphone off the table, which should have sent it shattering like a meteor upon entering Earth's atmosphere. Instead, the device landed face-up, and not a second after Alicia's ballad faded away, Mrs. St. Jacques' first name -- Katrina -- lighted up cerulean to the ringtone of Erykah Badu swinging with the Robert Glasper Experiment on Mongo Santamaría's "Afro Blue."