While the people, places, and events found herein are all based on actual people, places, and events, I have changed them all so significantly so as to protect the innocent (and the guilty) that they don't really resemble reality. These are basically real-life inspired works of fiction.
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Let's talk about Penelope Warren.
Everybody calls her Penny. As she puts it, the only people who have ever called her Penelope are her grandparents and one of her law professors at the University of North Carolina, a man who she described as being old enough to have lived through the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.
Penny is First Baptist's operations director and general counsel. She graduated from UNC Law in May of 2006, at the same time I graduated from Duke Divinity, passed the North Carolina Bar Exam, and was hired by First Baptist about three months after I was. She and I have a friendly, if sometimes contentious, working relationship.
You see, as operations director, she is in charge of anything to do with the church property, and as the associate pastor who leads youth programming, I have ideas about what should be done with the church property. Needless to say, these views do not always dovetail with one another. There has been more than one board meeting wherein we have had a rather testy exchange of words in front of the rest of the board. But no matter how up in arms we may get during the board meeting, we always resolve our differences over a beer at the Irish pub that is exactly 501 feet away from the church (by law, it cannot be within 500 feet, and the owner decided to push that law as hard as he could).
Above and beyond being a good person to share a drink with, I've always been willing to give Penny a bit of a pass on our disagreements because she is, simply put, quite easy on the eyes. A mix of African-American, Cherokee, and Scottish heritage came together to create a stunning woman. Skin the color of a latte, straight black hair, green eyes, and a killer physique all made for a drool-worthy look, with her unbelievably athletic body accentuated by perky, not-too-big, not-too-small tits, and an ass that while not quite in Sir Mix-a-Lot territory would nonetheless make the average man with any inclination toward women, a heartbeat, and working eyes sit up and pay attention.
Did I mention that Penny found her way into my spank bank about six days after I met her? She came to a pool party that we had for the youth to kick off the school year, and even though she wore a relatively modest one piece bathing suit, it was more than enough to wind up my very active imagination. My apologies if that's too much information, but I cannot overstate her attractiveness.
Well, at the December board meeting, as she and I were both coming up on our first Christmas on staff at the church, we got into what, throughout the tenure of our professional working relationship, would remain the most caustic of spats we ever had, this one over the church bus.
The church bus was a giant piece of shit. It was a 1970 GMC H-series 26 passenger bus that had been retired from the service of Buncombe County Public Schools some time during the Reagan administration (the old district name was still faintly visible through the sloppy paint job slapped on some twenty years prior). Its diesel engine had already broken down twice in the seven months I had been there. A week before, while taking a group of older members on a day trip out to Asheville to see Christmas at the Biltmore, I found myself barely able to keep the bus at 25 mph at some points on the climb up to Asheville out of Hickory. The bus needed to find itself a new home, preferably in a junk yard.
Of course the church's operations director/lawyer saw things differently. VERY differently. Fortunately, the board moderator intervened before things got too out of hand. After that, though, unless we absolutely had to speak to one another, Penny and I did not interact for several days.
That, of course, did not stop me from going home and flogging the bishop while thinking about her, although at this juncture, the thoughts were about hate-fucking her until she couldn't walk.
Almost two weeks after the board meeting, on the Wednesday before Christmas, there was a knock on my office door. "Got a minute?" Penny asked, walking into my office in a way that implied it didn't matter whether I had a minute or not.
"Yeah, I guess," I sighed. "What's up?"
"Take a walk with me," she replied, turning to walk out of my office. As she did so, her butt bounced a little bit, and I swear to God she was doing it on purpose, just to get a rise out of me.
She was getting a rise out of me, alright, just probably not in the way she expected.
Shaking my head, I got up from behind my desk, adjusted the half-chub that Penny's ass had provoked, and followed her out of my office. I had better things to do with my time, dammit, but her blood was clearly up and I didn't feel like getting in an argument with her.
She stalked out of the office, out of the administration building, across the parking lot, and to the bus. "Oh, for Christ's sake," I muttered to myself. Just what I wanted to do today, argue about the bus.
Unlocking it, she climbed up inside, and then turned to look back down at me. "So, explain to me again what's wrong with this bus?"
Rolling my eyes, I climbed the steps, but she did not move, leaving me standing a step below her, my eyes level with her outstanding boobs. For the moment that I was on eye level with them, I couldn't help but notice that she was wearing a top that day that showed off a lot of cleavage, and even appeared to have added a touch of glitter to her decolletage. Not a lot of glitter, but enough that it would catch the light and attract the eye's attention. It was almost as if she WANTED me to look at her boobs.
But this was neither the time nor the place. I had a point to make. "May I?" I asked, forcing a note of sarcasm into my voice as I indicated the driver's seat.
With a shrug and a shake of her head as if to say, "Whatever," she stepped aside. "Please go look out the back window," I requested.
As she stepped toward the back of the bus, I sat down and inserted the key into the ignition. I turned it, and the engine coughed, coughed some more, whined, coughed again, farted like an incontinent rhinoceros, and finally wheezed its way to life. I depressed the gas pedal, and as I expected, an enormous cloud of black smoke came billowing out the end of the bus.
Stepping up from the driver's seat, I left the bus running, its engine creating a racket on par with Capuchin monkeys playing Nickelback, and walked back to Penny. "Do you see what I mean?" I asked her. "The engine has had major maintenance done on it twice just since I've been here and this is STILL what we're working with."
"It's completely normal for a diesel engine to put out smoke and sound rough when it's started cold," she shot back.
"It's fifty-three degrees outside right now," I replied. "The engine should be fine, and it sure as hell shouldn't look like we're rolling coal."
"It gets people from point A to point B, doesn't it?"
"Oh, sure, if by 'getting' you mean moving at the same speed as a turtle on Ritalin."
"It's perfectly safe!"
"It's not safe! It's a joke! It's got welds coming apart all over the body! This bus is unsafe at any speed!"
Penny's eyes looked like they were about to bug out of her head. A vein was popping out in the center of her forehead, and her face was turning red. "This bus was a gift to the church from the Baptist Women's Ministry!" she screamed. "Do you have any idea the kind of shit I will have to endure if I even breathe a hint of a suggestion that we get rid of it?!"
That was about all I could take. "I don't give a good goddamn if this bus was a gift from Roger Williams himself!" I shouted back. "If the Baptist Women's Ministry is so attached to this rolling turd, they can go to the junkyard with it!"
And with that, the engine rattled, coughed, belched out a cloud of disturbingly blue smoke, and died. Penny and I stood there in the middle of that rattletrap bus, staring at one another, both breathing heavily, clearly pissed off at one another. I thought things were about to get very ugly.
So suffice it to say I was not at all prepared for her to step forward, grab the sides of my face, pull me to her, and kiss me.
Now, you might think that this is the part of the movie where I react to the pretty girl kissing me by passionately embracing her and ratcheting up the heat quotient, but that is pretty much the opposite of what I did. In fact, I think the most accurate way to describe my reaction would be "eyes wide open, staring straight ahead in shock, not responding in any way to the kiss."
Penny pulled back. "Oh... um..." She clearly thought she had fucked up, big time. "I'm sorry... I didn't... oh, shit."
Pushing past me, Penny started down the stairs. "Wait..." I croaked, my throat dry.
She paused and looked back up at me. "Yes?"
"There's something... uh, something you need to see in the back of the bus."
Without looking back, I started toward the end of the bus. I had not come to work that day expecting to get laid, but now the universe was offering me a chance. Yes, it was a chance that would take place on a filthy, stinky old diesel bus, but there was no way I was going to pass up a chance to have sex with Penny Warren, even if it was on the bus.
Also, this way, the next time I saw ancient old Mrs. McKinley, the subtly racist matriarch of the Baptist Women's Ministry, I could stand there with a cocky grin on my face, thinking to myself about how I fucked a black woman on her precious piece of crap bus. Immature? Oh yes. But no less amusing.
Penny climbed back up into the bus behind me, and pulled the door shut behind her. As I turned around and looked at her, she began unbuttoning her shirt as though her life depended on it. By the time she reached me, it and her jacket were cast aside, landing haphazardly on one of the seats.
Pulling her to me, I kissed her. She kissed back, hungrily, almost desperately. It felt almost as though we had both seen it going this way for a while, and were now finally acknowledging it. I pressed her against me, my hands behind her back, fumbling with the clasp on her bra...
And fumbling with it...
