Carmen

Carmen Sorrento wanted me to fuck her. Naturally, I wanted the same thing. We sealed the deal on my purple futon. Sold to me by a fellow with an uncanny resemblance to the fucker who successfully coveted my wife Monica, both men shared the same olive complexion, busy moustaches and wavy black hair. Unfortunately, lots of hard looking and edgy men, men of a certain coloring and churlish character appealed to my soon to be ex-wife. On that day several weeks after the break up of my marriage, I wanted the bastard in hell but first I wanted to torture him. My personal favorite was the idea of cramming him in a fifty gallon drum punctured with tiny holes, tossing the barrel into the drink, watching it bob about in the water and then inexorably sinking, this fellow's screams loud and clear until silenced by the cold water as it rose high enough inside the barrel, flooded his mouth, filled his nostrils. As the cylinder disappeared under the waves, drops of water looking like dollops of mercury first on the sealed lid and then total dunking under the water my final glimpse of the fucker's death trap. No, I needed two drums: one for good old Mark and one for dear sweet Monica.

Looking at the doppelganger of Monica's lover made me squeeze my left fist until its knuckles turned white. Fortunately, I restrained the impulse to punch the guy. I purchased the futon with as little conversation as the transaction allowed. I knew on an intellectual level this man had no responsibility for my wife's adultery. Or maybe he did, Monica was free with her favors and maybe she had fucked this guy like she had fornicated with all her other dark men. What made me squeeze my left fist bleach its knuckles white, to imagine his battered body sprawled in a wreckage of futon pads and the splinters of broken wooden frames came from that dark place in every man's soul where such things as reason, common sense and compassion are dispatched in the manner of snow flakes landing on a camp fire.

I had adored my wife and during our eight year marriage I never cheated on Monica. Unfortunately Monica could not make the same claim as I found out in late July of 2001 when my fishing trip floating down Oregon's Rogue River came to a bust. My buddy Max Schmeling, the claims adjustor not the heavyweight boxer, got word his father had just died of a heart attack and he had to fly to Denver. That left Joe Murphy and me to fish for steelhead. Then Joe broke his left arm and the fishing trip we planned for nearly a year ended four days early. That evening shortly after 8 p.m., my marriage ended early too. After a six hour drive home, I left my fishing gear in the trunk and still attired in my fishing togs, I carried one grande decaf lattes and one tall decaf Café Americano from Starbucks into my secluded house. I heard the grandfather clock ticking in the entry way and the much louder sounds of moans from the direction of the master bedroom. Was my little blue eyed, red haired vixen watching a porno while I fished? I smiled anticipating making love to my lovely wife.

At the bedroom door, I squatted down, gently placed the two cups of coffee on the carpet. I pushed back on the bedroom door and my eyes saw what my ears already had heard. Still squatting I could see Monica in the middle of our queen sized bed astride a beefy man covered with lots of black hair on his head, under his flaring nose and thatched across his chest, legs and no doubt his back. His skin, the color of brown gravy, made Monica's freckled flesh all the whiter.

Monica bounced up and down on the man. Pleated blue curtains draped the window to the left of the bed. Four candles I had purchased in a store at the mall, never to be used by me and my woman were in use now. Flame levitated on each candle, the oval shaped cylinders shined brightly as they melted away under the dollops of fire. Residual light danced about the vaulted ceiling, cast a buttery glow on my wife and her lover and painted shadows on the globes of Monica's ass and shoulder blades. Occasionally, I could see the man's pubic hair, a cloud of black, before Monica's haunches smashed down on it and his prick battered deep into her. She leaned forward; the man sucked the nipples of her large firm breasts. Monica gripped the top of the bed's headboard and bucked up and down on the man's swollen cock. "Fuck me with that nice sweet cock," Monica said.

Bolero, barely audible, played on the compact disc player.

"What the fuck," I said. Monica and her lover finally realized they had an audience. Monica squealed and broke her connection with the man under her.

I had kicked over the two coffees as I stood up and stepped into the bedroom.

Monica gripped the blue sheets and dragged them up to her chin. At that moment I wished I was returning from a hunting trip instead of a fishing trip. With a rifle or a shotgun I could have plugged them both. My fly rod still in the car offered not much utility in the way of homicide."Jack, don't do anything stupid," Monica said.

"God damn it did you have to use the fucking candles," I said. I turned on my heel, squished through the coffee pooling on the floor and fled from the house. Before backing out of the driveway, I paused to pond my fists on the steering wheel. Tears bigger then the drops of flame on the candles rolled down my cheeks and I screamed in rage.

In the weeks that followed we separated and divorced as quickly as Monica unlinked from her lover. I learned my marriage was a sham from nearly the beginning. Monica had a kept a series of lovers throughout our marriage. She had fucked them numerous times in our bed, in our cloistered backyard, seedy motels and wherever else she deemed appropriate. The guy I caught her with was only her latest paramour.

My grandfather, the man with my greatest respect, when he heard about the breakup, did not say "I told you so" but I knew he was thinking it.

When I had announced my plans to marry Monica, my grandfather had said, "Son, that woman may be too much for you to handle."

My grandfather, a veteran of the 101st Airborne in World War II, a trooper who slugged his way from a beach in Normandy, France on D-Day to Bastogne in Belgium where he was severely wounded was the wisest of men and I should have listened to his sage advice.

Not me, I knew better. I loved Monica and she loved me and that was all that mattered.

Jason Finlander, my grandfather, was his own man. No one had a memory of him ever losing an argument. He could be loud, obnoxious, and contrary and his word was his bond. Anything he did, he did his best and he expected the same standard of conduct from his family and his employees.

Shortly after the war he opened an auto parts store. Sixty years later he owned 67 Finlander Auto Parts stores in California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. He was worth 38 million dollars and at 82 he was still a mover and shaker. Some day I expected to inherit the bulk of his estate and for now I managed a store after being an assistant manager and a tool boy.

My father was president of the company and grandfather was Chairman. Actually, he was retired living in a sumptuous home in Palm Springs half the year and the other half in Kauai. Ever since spending the bulk of December 1945 being hammered by German 88s, the enemy doing their dandiest to kill him while the elements worked in conjunction with his foe to freeze him to death, he swore never to spend as little time as possible anywhere it might drop below freezing or dump the smallest snow flak on his furrowed forehead.

Grandfather was a three time loser at marriage. Now, he lived with a mistress 45 years his junior. At the age of 83 his head was still capped by mane of unruly white hair.

Square jawed, his green eyes still twinkled. Tall, thin, bony kneed, he often said his narrow profile had saved his life multiple times during the war. I resembled him except I had black hair and a heavier girth.

Last year at his home in Palm Springs, Grandfather and I set near his Olympic sized swimming pool drinking lemonade out of frosty tumblers and eating shortbread cookies. We watched Gwen, his mistress returning to the house after delivering our lemonade and cookies on a silver platter purchased in Vienna during grandfather's second honeymoon. We both watched her hips sway in the tiniest patch of yellow bikini bottoms as she moved away from us on high heels sandals. Gwen, an actress, actually a bit player who starred in several teleplays on the Playboy channel after her stint as a centerfold, resembled Ava Gardner in her prime. When she leaned down to set the drinks on the table, her tits nearly sprang out of her top. All of Jason's wives and mistresses were buxom as well as insatiable and wicked to the nth degree.

When Monica and I divorced, she had expected to net millions but after a private conversation with grandfather she walked away for half a million and some change.

"Jack, I hope you live to be 85 and you can sit on the side of your pool and get blown by a woman half your age." Grandfather said as Gwen stepped into the house.

After the divorce I did not bounce back quickly. Monica may have been a gold digging slut but I still loved the gold digging slut. Like a man trying to quit smoking who craved one puff on a cigarette, I found myself wanting to bed my faithless ex-wife one more time. I resisted. Once a millisecond before hitting the send button on the phone to call Monica, I retained the presence of mind to fling the Nokia into the wall, a pitch which proved disastrous to the phone. Another time I typed a lengthy and pathetically maudlin email to Monica and then smacked down on the delete button. I drank too much. Chivas Regal scotch was so tasty and such a phenomenal palliative for my pain. A eunuch showed more of a sex drive then I did. I focused on work. My parents worried about me. My mother looked at me as though I suffered from a terminal illness. My best friend, Paul Pister ceaseless refrain to me: "Get your head out of your ass Jack and move on. Forget the fucking whore."

Yeah right. I wallowed in self pity, my liver worked overtime to consume the surfeit of alcohol in my system. I often sat around in my tattered bathrobe and house shoes, the right one having a hole in the toe and supped on a regular diet of scotch and ham and mustard sandwiches.

I moved into a tiny studio condo my grandfather hooked me up with. It looked down on courtyard filled with winding brick pathways, fragrant flowering bushes, walled in declivities for barbecuing, and a tennis court. Back in the 60s, the stucco building shaped like a donut was a swinging singles place. It had a portico jutting from above the front door and day and night fast cars roared in under that portico now long gone. Piloted by sexy young men in sunglasses and stylish garments, these chariots were covered in shiny chrome and squeaky clean bright colors. As they gunned their engines, sex goddesses in high heels, mini skirts and décolleté aplenty climbed in and were carried off to be wined and dined and then fucked either back here or in some other comfortable locale.

The courtyard was filled with foliage planted in such a way to provide multiple locales for buff young men in Speedos and buxom young women in tiny bikinis to fuck to their hearts content. In the past such imagery would have given me a hard on but not now, not in my state.

Now, a more sedate crowd populated the Chateau Vista. The apartments now condominiums housing retired postal workers, widows living off the fat pensions left to them by their late spouses and young families with small children who filled the place with noise and other families with nubile young daughters and teenage sons who hankered after the nubile maidens.

From the debris of my broken marriage I extracted nothing more the futon, my cream colored rocker recliner, books, personal computer, its work station and comfortable chair. In the early months of my post marriage to Monica my hatred of all Arabs quickly dissipated. Now, I contained my hatred to suicide bombers and terrorists who killed children. If my wife had not run off with this dude it would have been someone else. I pictured Monica like Sally Field in the movie where she spent a good deal of time as the chattel for an Arabic man before she managed to escape his less then tender mercies. Not Monica though, let her be forever wrapped in a chador.

On a Saturday afternoon in July, the bright sunlight and cloudless blue sky inspired me. I shaved the infestation of black stubble covering the lower portion of my face, showered in a surfeit of soap, shed my bathrobe, dressed in denim and dock siders and drove to the Barnes and Noble on the other side of town. Maybe a bit of book browsing would temporarily lift my spirits. It had worked before.

Standing at the new book table directly in front of the store's front doors, I picked one book up, thumbed through it, placed it back on the table and picked up another book. As I picked up the third book and read the verbiage on the back of the dust jacket, a woman I had seen several times before entered the store and took up a position at the same table I browsed. I had seen her in the neighborhood walking a white poodle. I was 33 years old and I estimated her to be double my age. Her hair the color of pewter was gathered into a bun on the back of her head and secured with a yellow ribbon. The several times I had seen her she was walking her small white fur ball and she wore tight blue jeans, a shirt or blouse with a wide v in its front giving maximum exposure to her large breasts. High heels, not the closed toed black pumps favored by my mother but the cum fuck me pumps my ex-wife favored. One time transparent hoods covered the front of her feet showed off her stubby toes and painted nails, while the bottom of her feet climbed sharply on heels made of beige colored wood. The second time I saw her she once more wore the tight jeans, a low cut shirt and black high heels held on her feet with the thinnest straps.

In my youth prior to my marriage I had bedded several delectable older women. Some of these ladies exuded the same in your face sexual heat as this woman did and several others, while more demure in their demeanor where just as delightful in bed.

Standing within a few feet of each other I felt my cock stirring for the first time in several months. I noticed a diamond the size of Pluto on the woman's right hand. No poodle in sight she wore the same constrictive blue jeans. I imagined her lying on her bedroom floor to get better traction as she tugged, pulled and pushed her wide hips into them. Her white shirt, a yellow smiley face on its front tightly adhered to her chest and accentuated her breasts as they thrust forward. High heel sandals covered her feet and a pale blue ribbon secured her hair into a flattened bun the size of Danish.

I picked up a tome by a disgraced politician, its cover showering a man in a charcoal gray suit and fire engine red necktie looking plaintively at the camera. I stole another glance at this scrumptious woman. I dropped the book on the table, retrieved another book, a tome on the French and Indian War, and looked at her again, not furtively but in the manner you look at a painting in an art gallery. Wrinkles bracketed her blue eyes, the flesh on her throat, not as supple as it once was, sagged under the impress of gravity and maturity. Even with the polish on her long fingernails, the liver spots dotting the backs of hands hinted at her seniority. The rest of her body, the long legs pushing at the denim, the contour of her breasts, the sweep of her hips, the roundness of her ass were as firm and toned as any woman my age.

Our eyes met. We smiled at each other and in the quiet of the bookstore we connected like two simpatico fax machines.

"May I buy you a coffee?" I said.

"I would love a cup of coffee," she said.

We dropped our books on the table and headed toward the store's coffee bar. I followed her, watched the sway of her hips under the tight denim, her smooth glide in extremely high heels.

My God, my cock is stiff. If nothing else I was thankful to this woman for affecting me in this manner. My impotence had drifted away and it felt wonderful. Now, I needed camouflage for my erection. Passing a table filled with books suitable for covering coffee tables, I grabbed one filled with glossy photographs of celebrity homes, used it to shield my erection. No doubt this particular tome contained aerial photographs of my grandfather's palatial domicile in Palm Springs with the swimming pool in the shape of 1957 Chevy.

I pointed at a table, asked her what she wanted to drink, bellied up to the coffee bar and in no time I returned with my latte for me and her Café Americano. My hard on had subsided while ordering the drinks from a young lady with a diamond embedded in her left nostril and returned full force when I returned to the table and saw the rich contours of her breasts and the way she had her feet crossed under the table.

Sitting down at the green table I told her my name was Jack Finlander, I was 33 years old, I managed an auto parts store but not the part about me being the scion to a fortune. She found out I was divorced with no children. I worked out on a Nautilus machine, jogged several times a week; I was an eclectic reader, often listened to jazz and traveled when I had a mind to. I did not tell her about my ceaseless depression and chronic impotence. Her name was Carmen Sorrento and she freely admitted to being 63, a recent widow. In her youth she was a chorus girl in Las Vegas, taught aerobics for a time, modeled, and in the early 60s long before my introduction to the world she acted in several beach and bikini movies. Along the way she married several times, gave birth to several children, and was a grandmother several times over. She had owned and operated several designer boutiques, sold them and made a nice profit. Sunbathing, she liked to read. The image of this sexy woman lying on a chaise lounge in tiny yellow bikini, one leg straight out and the other forming an inverted v, bare feet pointing outward, made my cock rocket upward.

Youthful, this mature woman exuded sexuality with every breath. Her gray hair did not diminish her sexiness it enhanced it.

She took a sip of coffee through the tiny hole on the white cover of the paper cup. She sat the cup on the table next to the coffee table book, dabbed her pink painted lips with a napkin. She smiled at me in the same devilish way my mother did whenever she entered my room when dad was on a trip, lowered her nighty, climbed into bed with me and took my cock in her mouth.

Carmen leaned across the table, her mounds nearly tipping out of the blouse, licked her lips and whispered:

"I give the most fantastic head. Why don't we cut through the bull shit? You want to fuck me and I want to fuck you so why don't we go somewhere and do it?

I was so near to exploding in my pants I considered standing up and yelling "fire in the hole" at the top of my lungs to give everyone in the coffee nook time to dive for cover.

Briefly, I wondered about the logistics. Did she drive to the bookstore? Would she follow him to his place? Did she expect him to trail behind him to her home?

She hopped in my SUV after we departed the store. Ten minutes later Carmen walked through my front door after I unlocked it. Standing back, Carmen stepped into my tiny place and I followed.