It was the last summer that I still saw myself as a kid, the summer that I had to decide to shit or get off the pot. Twisting wrenches was a decent hobby, but I was quickly outgrowing the group of uninspired, racist fucks that were my gearhead contemporaries. High school would never end for most of these guys. I'd seen what had become of their older brothers, and fathers, for that matter. Most of them wound up in dead end jobs, pouring money into rustbuckets until they knocked up some neighborhood girl. After that, all they'd ever talk about was their "glory days" while drinking themselves to death. Not a path I was willing to take, especially with a sweet offer to study engineering back east.
I'd rented an excellent shop in a rough part of town, and since it was way bigger than I needed, I decided to sublet most of it to a few guys I knew from the neighborhood, covering the entire cost of renting the place, plus putting a few bucks in my own pocket. Between that, what I'd been charging local guys for doing work on their cars, and whatever cash I made grudge racing at the local drag strip, I was making some serious cash for a young guy, all tax free.
There was this one dude that rented a corner of the shop, Dale. Not really a bad guy when he was sober, but a fucking idiot as soon as he had a few beers in him. I didn't give a shit; he paid his share of the rent on time and had his own tools. And, an absolute stone fox of a girlfriend, Lorelei.
Lorelei would usually show up at the shop late in the evening, after she got off work at a local movie theater. I could never quite figure out what she saw in Dale, but I knew enough guys who'd taken on "projects"; heaps of junk that they'd seen through rose colored glasses, to surmise that there were women that would take on similar boyfriend projects. She'd show up with a case of beer or some weed, and was very personable, loving the attention she'd get from the guys that would be hanging out around the shop.
A few weeks after she started hanging around, I overheard a couple of other guys talking about her. Seems that one of them knew Lorelei from back in their hometown down south, and she had quite a reputation. I didn't give it much thought; I'd heard enough beer fuelled bullshit by then to realise that most of the time there was nothing to it other than some phony machismo. Nevertheless, I started paying a bit more attention to her body language when she'd show up. Being a bit shy, it was easy for me to appear aloof, which was a good way to approach the whole situation.
One night, and it was late, well after midnite, Lorelei showed up. Dale wasn't there, and hadn't been all night. She looked particularly juicy, wearing a skin tight pair of Levis and a sheer, low cut top. She must have known that Dale wasn't around, as she came right over to my workbench and pulled up a stool.
"So, Dale seems to think that you're 'the man' around here, Mike. All these other guys seem to think so too. That right?" She looked me right in the eye, as I noticed for the first time that her eyes were two different colors; the right one hazel, the left, Liz Taylor indigo.
"I never really thought of it, I guess I know enough that guys are willing to pay me to fix their cars. Truth is, more often than not, I'm just fixing what they've fucked up through lack of common sense." I leaned back against the workbench, doing my best to ignore the fact that she was checking me out. There was little in the way of subtlety as far as her body language went at this point, her knees falling open as she leaned forward enough to offer a clear view of her firm little tits.
"So I scored some killer weed earlier, Mike, gotta magazine or something I could twist one up on?"
"Yeah, in that drawer right beside you there. The one on the top is brand new, I'm sure you don't want to get your hands all greasy, do you?"
She got this look on her face, and raised an eyebrow, purring, "Well, that depends..."
I turned back to the workbench, doing a final check on the gear contact pattern of the differential I was finishing up. Lorelei opened the drawer, pulling out the whole stack of magazines that were in there. Looking at the newest copy of "Hot Rod" that sat on the top of the pile, she glanced over at me with a slightly disappointed look on her face.
"Wow. I kind of expected something a little more, y'know, 'adult'."
I looked at her and decided that she was not easily offended.
"Well, dig down to the bottom of the pile then. There's some stuff left here by the previous occupant of this dump. But you should probably roll that joint first, there's some stuff in there that's pretty fucking......distracting."
She twisted up a fat doob and sparked it up in record time as I wiped the grease off of my hands and dug a roachclip out of my toolbox. She took a monster hit and passed it to me, diving into the pile as soon as her hands were free. By the time she was halfway through it, she looked up at me with shock and astonishment on her face.
"Where the FUCK did you get this shit from?!"
"I told you, it was here when I moved in. Some old German guy used to fix Volkswagens and Porsches out of this place. When he kicked off, the landlord sold his tools, but left everything else. Those magazines were right where you found them." As she looked at the greasy covers, I could see her squirming on the stool.
"Fuck, I can't believe this shit!" She held up a magazine with a German title, and a picture of of a woman with some guy pissing in her mouth. Then an ancient black and white hardcore S+M mag. Then some with subject matter forbidden even to mention on Literotica. She was dumbfounded, oblivious to everything except the pile of well used filth in front of her. Her right hand moved to her crotch. Maybe the rumors of her reputation were closer to the truth than I'd thought....
Suddenly she slipped the pile of magazines back into the drawer, and reached for the joint that I'd been bogarting while she was perusing the nasty old smut. Seconds later, Dale and a couple of his buddies walked in, loud and hammered. He looked over and saw Lorelei sitting at my workbench, and got that drunken moron look on his face. I didn't need any of his shit, but I had nothing to hide, and continued to clean and put away my tools. He started lumbering over toward us, when Lorelei laced into him.
"Where the FUCK were you all night? YOU told me YESTERDAY that you were taking me to the ball game TONIGHT..'yeah, pick you up at six, babe'...nine thirty, still not even a fucking phone call. So I got in the car and came out here to see if you didn't have that fucking piece of shit fall on you and kill you or something!!!"
He stopped dead in his tracks, a deer in the headlights. He'd start to open his mouth and Lorelei would just tell him to shut the fuck up. She told him she was going home, and turned and thanked me for letting her hang out and wait for him while I had better things to do. The look on her face made her reputation a certainty.
She stormed past him, the sound of her heels clicking across the floor and the door slamming shut behind her deafening in the silence of the old shop. Dale stood there with an oddly blank look on his face; he was no brain surgeon, but he actually looked dumber in a way that had nothing to do with the booze he'd consumed. Not only that, but his acne was worse than it was when we were in junior high. Glancing over at his buddies, I recognized them both as a couple of gym rats I'd seen hanging out at a local bar. Looking back at Dale, it suddenly made sense; he was starting to look pretty ripped for a pudgy dude. The fucker was on the juice. I told him the differential for his car was done, what he owed me, and to lock up when he left.
