Fred's Night Out

The night of December twenty-fourth is a busy night so far.

It's about 8, Carol tells me that her work just called. She's got to go Cleveland tonight and she won't be back til late. Great, says I, rolling the covers off and watching her stride around in a towel, with another one on her head. No nookie tonight, another night at home watching porn and beating myself into a sticky stupor, like most other nights anymore. I could see Carol walking in on a pile of beer bottles and her husband passed out in a puddle of jizz (for some reason I see her naked, with a Santa hat) and laughing at him, and I cross that right off the list.

Carol was saying something about gas while my mind wandered. I contemplated the possibilities--I could go bowling with Brad or maybe play pool, we could go to the bar, or strip club...

That last gem appeared to be shiniest. I must have been smiling because Carol smacked me in the head with a shoe. "Are you listening to me?"

"Uh, huh?" I managed as I rubbed my head and protected it from further blows.

"Hmh." Oh, man. She always does that when she's mad.

"I'm sorry, baby, I was just thinking about what I'll be missing tonight." I reached over to grab at her but she eluded me, slipping around the bed with a dancer's grace.

"Shit, you never listen! You only think about sex!" she yells, snatching up clothing, and retreated to the security of a locked bathroom. She's right, and I tell her so through the door.

"But it's not because I don't love or respect you, it's because I'm stupid."

"You got the last part right!" she screams through the door, and I know better than to hang around her when she's this mad.

So, I get out of bed and run clear of the battlefield into the kitchen. My eye falls on a copy of the local magazine and there's this cute girl in a leather miniskirt with a feather duster in her hand, an ad claiming she's a massage therapist. My ass. She must've thought 'massage therapist' meant 'wielder of hu-uuu-uge breasts'. God, I need to get laid, and Carol just doesn't.

I get a cup of coffee and sit down with the paper for a minute, and I get about half a paragraph read before Carol's Exit March begins.

The bathroom sink goes on and off several times, making the pipes boom in the walls (I'd cautioned her about that), and she emerges from the bathroom in a cloud of perfume and well-dressed good taste. She looks stunning.

"Baby, you are absolutely stunning," I told her.

"Get out of the way, you fuck," she says to me, "I have nothing to say to you." And then she does the Exit March, ass cheeks clenched together, head high, nostrils flared, eyes glaring, briefcase making arcs from her wide-swung arms, and out the door she goes, slam, and I can hear her stomping all the way to the elevator.

"Bitch," I mutter under my breath. I would never call her that, despite the whackjob she is, just as I would never tell her that I'm relieved when she's gone.

I rummage in the kitchen for something to eat, settling on a ham sandwich with mustard and pickle, and I sit down to call my friend.

"Tony?"

"Hey man, somethin' wrong? You never call me..."

"Sure I do, I call you--"

"Asshole," we finish, it's an old joke.

"Whatcha up to?"

"Nothing serious, do you want to go to the track tonight?"

"No dough, bro."

"Eh, how about Gennie's?" Gennie's is the local strip joint, the only one in town.

"I'd love to. But that still doesn't happen without cash."

"Okay, maybe next time," I tell him, sighing.

"Count on it."

"Hey, Brad."

"Fred! What's up."

"Nothing, I'm just going up to Gennie's, you wanna go?"

"Gennie's is closed, bud," he responds. "Christmas."

My heart sank.

"How about the racetrack?"

"Eh, no thanks, I'm home with the wife."

"You can get away for a few."

"I'm home. With the wife."

"Ohh." Home with the wife getting it on. "Okay then. Call me tomorrow."

"Will do."

"Mark!"

"Who's this?"

"Fred."

"Oh, Fred Duncan! How the hell are ya!"

"Not too bad, Marky. You busy tonight?"

"Yeah, my parents are over for the holiday, what's up?"

"Can you sneak away for a frame or two?"

"Aw, no can do. Not tonight, I gotta mediate between momma and missus. How 'bout tomorrow?"

"Call me tomorrow and find out."

"Kay, I'll do that."

Three strikes. Three friends I'm gonna return gifts for. Well, that seriously limits my options. No friends to play a game with, no strip club...wait.

The strip club's closed...where are the strippers? I think about a minute, the phone still in my hand. Where would I go if I were a stripper whose work was closed for the day?

Probably the same place I'd go if my work was closed for the day. At the bar.

So, I drive down to the bar. I could've walked, but it's cold out, and all the lights shining on the snow is really pretty. I go inside, and there's two old guys at one end of the bar with their heads together, talking about something. The jukebox is silent, the barmaid is the woman in the place, and the air in here feels dead.

"Gimme a Coors," I tell her, and she is back within a minute with a shell of beer.

"Here you go, Fred."

"Thanks, Emma." Emma's good-looking, but she's a barmaid, and they don't strip. Not even for tips. 'Is Gennie's open tonight?" I ask, looking around at the empty bar.

"No, it's Christmas Eve. Pervert." She gives me a smile and walks over to the two old men.

I catch a look at the news on the hanging TV in time to see a paragraph detailing the worst snowstorm in Cleveland's history, and that the city had been completely shut down since 3:00 this afternoon.

Wait. Carol tells me at 8:00 she's going to a city that has been snowbound since 3 pm. 2 pm, our time. She leaves dressed to the nines, with her good perfume on--probably on the insides of her ankles so you can smell it while they're on your shoulders--and starts a fight with me to ease her conscience. I'm dumbfounded and furious.

"Why aren't you home with your wife for Christmas, Fred?" Emma asks me, drying glasses with a towel with her knockout hips all canted to one side, the way girls do when their feet are sore or they want to turn you on.

I look into her eyes. "My wife," I say, "is on a business trip to Cleveland. She left maybe an hour ago."

"Cleveland is..." She looks at me and her eyes say she's sorry. "When did she say she would be back?"

"Later tonight," I tell her, and I can see her wince. But nobody is getting in or out of Cleveland tonight, and it appears my darling wife has stepped out on me." I can hear hate in my voice and I don't like the sound.

"Aw. Shit, Fred, I'm sorry." She turns away and draws another beer. "Buy you one."

"Thanks, Emma," I tell her, and kill my first one. She takes the glass. "I don't suppose you like bowling?"

"I'd kick your ass," she tells me. "Don't put yourself through the humiliation."

I eye her, interested. "Is that a challenge?"

"No, it's a warning," she says. "But if you insist, Jerry gets back at 10, and I can cut out then. Y'know, we close at 12, but Jerry wants to come in at 10 to hang more lights. Fred?"

I cock my head at her.

"Before I go anywhere with you, you understand I'm just going to bowl, right? This isn't like a date or anything."

"That didn't cross my mind," I tell her. What I don't say is 'But it is now, thanks'. "I thought you closed at 2."

"Christmas."

I take a pull of beer, and I starting feeling loose, when Jerry, the guy that owns the bar, comes in, and he starts hanging up lights. He sits next to me and I listen to Emma tell him she has a hot date with a 4-10 spare and she and I were leaving, and if she didn't show for work on the 26th he should come after me, and then she ran in the back.

"You're goin' bowling with Emma?" Jerry asks me, he looks at me like I'm crazy. "She's gonna kill you."

"Oh, I dunno," I say, feeling kind of insulted. Jerry laughs at me.

"You don't know Emma real well, do ya? She was professional."

I feel my jaw hit my chest, it's a weird feeling. "Well, thanks for telling me before I laid any money on it." Jerry laughed.

"You know Emma wanted to bowl your lane til she found out you had a wife..."

I look at Jerry, all interested. "Really?"

"Don't get any ideas, you got that pretty little wife at home."

"Probably not for long," I say, and I tell him about Cleveland. He gives me this look.

"I don't want to lose my best girl," he told me. "You knock her up, you're tendin' bar til she comes back to work."

"I don't know how to tend bar," I told him.

"Don't worry, neither does she." We laugh. "I'm serious, though. Don't hurt her, she's a nice girl."

"I don't intend to touch her," I tell him, looking into his tough, stringy old face.

"We'll see."

We take her car because it's been sitting in the cold since 2pm and she didn't want it to freeze up. I can see her sneaking little glances at me out of the corner of her eye and I feel a little uncomfortable. Emma has bigger tits than the wife, and she's a little curvier in the hips. Her hair is this red-blonde color instead of Carol's dark brown, and curly. Her lips are fuller, and she smiles all the time the way Carol never does anymore. I think smiling is work for Carol. But I can't help but imagine Emma on top of me, flashing me that smile and wriggling those hips while I slip my cock all the way up inside her.

"What are you thinking about?" Emma's voice, high and feminine, cuts into my fantasy.

"I'm thinking about--hey!" There it is, Carol's car--at the Shady Rest Motel. "Stop here!"

Emma pulls over and I jump out to check the license number. It's her. I walk slowly back to the car and get in. "Well, guess what. I just found Cleveland."

"Oh no...what are you going to do?"

I take a deep breath. The pain starts somewhere under my breastbone and spreads from there. I'm not sure what to answer, so I say the first thing that comes to mind: "I'm going to take you bowling."

She drives to our antique local bowling alley, and we rent shoes, and get cheap black Ebonite house balls and beers and a lane. My first throw is a gutter. "Must have forgotten how," I tell Emma, kind of sheepish. I manage to spare it.

"Like this," she says, and throws a rock right down the right side of the deck, a strike. I applaud; I have to. She's really good, and I respect her.

"I'm glad I didn't bet," I told her.

"You don't know how glad you are," she says to me after I throw another gutter. She makes me nervous, like a kid on his first real date. I watch her strike again and I score it, then pick up my ball and make ready to throw. As I get ready, I feel a hand on my wrist.

"Here, turn," I hear her say, and she corrects my form with her body, turning my wrist and twisting my body. I feel her warm behind me; her tits are pressed into my back and I just freeze, I can't say anything. She lets me go, and I turn to her, and her eyes are wide, she felt it too. I open my mouth to speak but the words just go, and I close it again. Emma backs away a step; she didn't mean for this to happen.

So, safer to pretend it didn't. In a daze, I turn back to the lane, adjusting my body in the way she just showed me, and I bowl a strike. I turn around quickly and see her eyes focused low, then they snap up to mine, she was looking at my ass. She gave me a guilty smile. She was caught, and she knew it.

I find my dick is hard as steel. "Emma--" I start, but she's already getting her ball from the return.

"Right, my turn."

I guess that's the end of that, and my hardon starts to wilt out of disappointment. Then I take another lesson from her and I watch her ass, rounder and wider than Carol's. It flexes as she bowls, perfect, she is heart-stoppingly beautiful when she moves. She rolls a strike, and spins around to catch me.

"Caught ya!" she says with that smile. I just grin at her, and she shrugs, like, I'm allowed to ogle. How can I be drooling over her when my mouth is dry as dust? I roll and knock 2 pins over. I roll again and get 3.

"Oo, open frame! What happened?"

"Distracted," I tell her, and take a pull of my beer.

"By what?" Her smile is kind of playful now. Impish, you could say.

I look deep into her too-blue eyes and something in me cracks open and I realize that I care for Carol but she does not care for me, I realize that she is cheating on me at this very moment, and I realize that I could not care less. This woman in front of me, that before tonight only ever spoke to me over a bar, has become my sole desire. "I saw paradise a minute ago while you were throwing."

She fakes shock and awe. "Where?"

"Maybe I'll show you sometime," I tell her, knowing this is lame but I can't just tell her that I was staring at her ass, even though she knows.

"Fred? I think you'd bowl better if you took that piece of pipe out of your pants."

For a minute I can say nothing. It's like my mind was emptied of everything but kissing her all over, every inch of her, stopping at her pussy and making her come before traveling on to other parts. I wonder if her pubic hair is the same color as her hair. I bet myself no; no girl could be that lucky. I barely think of a suitable reply.

"If I take this piece of pipe out of my pants, they won't let us bowl here anymore."

She giggles, and her laugh is like wind chimes in a gentle breeze.

She throws a gutter. "Distracted. I saw the Hindenburg in a pair of pants." We laugh, and it's a little strained, there's tension between us now, there's a mutual desire that we both recognize but can't admit to because then it might erupt. The pain of Carol is still curiously absent, but if I were to make a move on Emma she might interpret it as using her for retaliation. Then I catch her looking at my cock again and I think she might not mind it.

I get my ball but instead of bowling I stand in front of her, my hardon prominent, and I look over her. With my peripheral vision I see her looking intently at it, with a look on her face that's like half fear and half hunger. Without looking down, I ask, "Like what you see?"

She doesn't look up from staring at my crotch. "Sometimes," she tells me. "I like Jaguars when I see them, and I like kittens, and leaves in the fall..." She trails off, and now her eyes meet mine and there's a hunger there that I recognize: that's the look of a horny, smitten woman.

I turn back to the lane and roll it right down the middle, a 7-10 split, both corner pins wobbling but staying upright. I hear her groan.

"That's hard to spare," Emma says to me. "I can't always do those myself."

I turn back toward the lane and roll one right on the edge of the gutter. I take out the 10, hoping to bank it back out of the pit and knock over the 7 with it, but it misses, flying behind. "Good try!" she says, without sarcasm. I bow to her, and I find my eyes drawn to her curly hair and the shape of her face, triangular, with a small nose the curved up a tiny bit at the tip, and her lipstick, and her rounded chin, and I realize I'm staring at her and redness is rising in her cheeks and on her forehead. She covers her face with one hand and peeps out at me between her fingers, smiling. I think I'm in love and I want Carol to disappear.

"What?" she asks, with embarrassed amusement in her voice.

I almost tell her that she's beautiful, but I realize she must have heard this a billion times in her life already. "I'm having fun, Emma. Thanks for coming out with me."

She gives me a look that's half thanks and half embarrassment. "Don't thank me. Nobody bowls with me."

"Because you kick everyone's ass?" I ask, and she nods. I sit next to her and sip my beer and plunge. "Lady, you can kick my ass all over town if I can just watch your ass swing when you roll that thing."

Silence hangs between us, I'm afraid to look at her and I feel hot blood in my face. There's a long moment of silence, and then I feel something light and warm on my leg. I look down and found Emma's hand resting on my thigh.

Emma's head is down and I can't see her face for all her hair, but when I cover her hand with mine she looks up. She opens her mouth and then closes it, and I give her some more time to speak.

"I...I'm glad you like it," she tells me, and I feel a little squeeze on my leg. Then she looks down again. "Fred...I don't know if this was such a good idea."

"Why?" I hold my breath.

"Because you have a wife," she says to me, and looks at me, and I see tears in her eyes, blue on blue.

"I have a wife shacked up in the Shady Rest with someone, you mean," I tell her, and I think once again that the name of the motel made it sound like a cemetery.

"But she's still your wife. And she's luckier than me." A tear finally overflows her right eye and drips onto her cheek, she wipes it away like she didn't really notice it.

"Luckier than you? How?" I smile at her. "You're a much better bowler than she is."

Emma is not smiling. "I wish I was married to a guy like you, Fred," she says. "You're nice, smart, funny, great bod, and I've got barflies hitting on me all the time but no-one to go home with."

"Emma, that's a load of crap," I tell her, and I know it's rude but it's out before I can stop it, but she only looks puzzled. "Any one of those barflies would go home with you." She chuckles and wipes her nose on the back of her hand. Charming. And now I've got to say it, for better or worse, as they say. "And I know a guy that's just like me that would go anywhere with you."

"She's still your wife, Fred," she tells me, and my heart sinks. It must show, because she's squeezing my thigh again.

"No. Not for long," I tell her, and it is like the snapping of a dry stick in my heart; I know that I have one question to ask Carol that will decide whether she stays or goes. I feel that squeeze on my thigh again, but this time it doesn't let up.

"If she was gone already, Fred," she tells me, "I would let you take me home. I'd let you take me any way you wanted to." My breath catches in my throat and in my heart I curse Carol for having married me.

"Well, what's your preference?" I don't expect an answer but Emma keeps surprising me.

"Well, I like oral a lot but I think doggy is my favorite--" She trails off and she looks shocked. "Oh my God, I can't believe I'm telling you this."

I squeeze her hand under mine. "I like that you're telling me this." She looks at me with those blue-blue eyes in that red-red face, and she just looks at me, and meanwhile Private Parts is rising from the field. "It excites me," I tell her, and I move her hand up to my crotch and I press it against my cock. She keeps looking at me, but now I see her eyes are glazed, and she suddenly starts squeezing it through my pants, rubbing up and down, and I'm thinking of her doing to me all the things she said she liked, and I'm rock-hard and she's all over it with her hand, stroking, and I'm lost in her eyes and in my fantasy of her.

She's about to make me come right here on the lane.

But instead she pulls her hand back. "Oh, Fred, if only." She gets up. "Let's finish out the game and then I guess I'd better take you to the bar." She rip off a chunk of the score sheet and scribbles on it. She holds it out to me, but as I reach to take it she pulls it out of my grasp. "If you're not free, don't you dare call me," she tells me, and there's a warning in there but it's not needed: I never wanted to displease Emma.

I realize she's right; I still have a question to ask my wife. "That might be tonight, Emma."

"Well, if so, call me. Otherwise, please don't bother, I can't share my man."

I take the paper from her fingers and put it in my pocket. "Emma--"

Those so-blue eyes focus on me, they're solemn. "Yes?"

"It's your turn."

We finish the game, and she kicks my ass, pretty much as bad as I expected. I'm glad she isn't holding back for me and I tell her so. She says I'm a graceful loser.