It was almost 4:25, and many of my co-workers were already under Starters' Orders, terminals getting switched off and file bundles tied up to be put into locked drawers, and my phone rang with the brrrt-brrrt-brrt-brrt that even in the tower block offices of a public utility meant "outside call".
"Good afternoon" I said, picking it up and cradling the earpiece against my shoulder as I pulled a notepad out of my top drawer. "You've reached Engineering Division, Communications Planning, this is...
"Ted!" sobbed a familiar voice "I've had enough, and I've gone back to Mum's place, and oh, I'm so unhappy what do I do?"
"Hold on, Bonnie" I said "what do you mean, 'you've had enough and you've gone home'? Had you moved in with your fella?" Bonnie was my first proper can-I-put-my-hands-in-your-panties, oh-my-god-you've-touched-my-dick girlfriend, and while it didn't work out, we'd kept in touch. Enough that she knew my work number, anyway. "Last time we spoke, you were seeing some guy you met at work, and now it's gone sour?"
"Oh, really sour. I can't stand the interference from his family, he won't stick up for me, he won't protect me from them, he won't..." I let her run on for a little while, to get it out of her system. "I want to see you, if you don't mind" she eventually said.
"Sure" I said. "We haven't met in person for, what, 5 years now? It'd be nice to catch up, but I could wish you weren't quite so upset. Still - what good would I be if I let you flail around like that after a break-up. You were there for me, even if only over the phone"
"I'd appreciate it, mister" she said. "I'm not ready to talk to Mum about it, not the worst bits of it all." She audibly shuddered. "How can I find you? I don't know what your address is anymore." The office was emptying. It was Friday, and a lot of technical debriefing would be going on in the King's Head downstairs, so that was out. Fuck it! I thought - either I can trust her not to move in on the rebound, or I didn't know her as well as I thought I did. I told her to meet me outside the office, that being the easiest with connections and such - she'd be only a few minutes away anyway. She hung up, and I was left wondering what was going to happen next.
I tidied up some more of the failure statistics I was working through when she'd called, and after 45 minutes or so, packed up and headed downstairs. As I guessed, she was just coming up the escalators from Museum Station when I got out of the lift. I waved at her through the glass walls of the foyer that looked soooo fashionable in the 70's and now just meant the security guard on the front desk cooked in the three hours of Sydney daylight saving sunlight that were left to endure after the building HVAC shut down.
She almost didn't wait for the doors to close behind me as she ran to me, dropping her handbag at our feet so she could throw her arms around my neck and hug me tight, tight, tight, pressing her body, her belly, her mound against me almost as tightly as she pressed her face into my shirt. She sobbed, once, deeply, and stepped back. "I'm sorry" she said, catching her breath.
I said it was OK, and I meant it. I looked up and down at my old friend. Her figure was still awesome, but her hair wasn't the wavy, glossy black waterfall I remembered. It was obvious she hadn't had a decent hairdo in a while and she'd been using cheap shampoo. Yes, it was hot, but she was only wearing a cheap strappy sun dress, which looked out of place in the middle of Sydney after 5:00 on a Friday afternoon. She was wearing sneakers that had seen better days, her handbag wasn't new, the cardigan she had tossed over the top of it didn't really go with her dress - whoever she'd been living with, he'd been tight with the money. Maybe he'd been drinking her wages as well as his own. It happens. Her self-esteem had gone, too - years back, even as a teenager she'd never dress like that to 'go to town'.
"Yeah - I know" she said, catching my gaze. "Him."
"I gathered." I replied. No make-up, not even foundation. Fresh worry lines around her eyes and the corners of her mouth that didn't really belong on a woman in her late 20's.
"I'll talk more later. I don't feel like hanging around in here. Fuck him. Fuck her. Fuck them. Take me to your place, will you?" I didn't ask who her or them were...I figured I'd find out. The train was crowded, as they can be after 5:30 on a Friday, so she stood close to me. So close the mound of her pussy was pressed against my thigh and one of her erect nipples kept brushing against my chest. She maintained a constant stream of chatter the whole time, talking about the blue-collar jobs she'd had since school, and following my unspectacular amateur boxing career in the sports pages, and what was my sister up to, the one that married a minister, and how did my father like retirement. All the time with the warmth of her pussy against my leg, in a crowded train. Briefcase in one hand, hold on to the train with the other there was nothing I could do about it, and I didn't want to, but God only knows if any other passengers noticed and if they did, what they thought of it.
We got off at my stop, and she dawdled along towards the stairs, still chattering away, stopping to peer into the shelter that worked as a waiting room on that platform while other commuters streamed passed us. "This is the one we 'christened' that day, wasn't it?" she said.
I chuckled and said yes. Naughty teenagers mucking around in shelters and leaving condom wrappers in unexpected places. That was a while back. Such thoughtless littering!!
She paused, lost in thought for a moment. She looked over my shoulder at the other platform, then stepped inside the room, so she'd be shielded from outside by the doorway but I could still see her. Quickly, she lifted her skirts up, smoothly grabbing the waistband of her panties at the same time to snug them tight against her bottom and turned away from me to show her lovely arse me, sticking her tongue out over her shoulder at the same time. She laughed that throaty laugh I remembered, smoothed her clothes out and took my arm, smiling at my shocked expression as we walked to the station stairs and out on the street.
"I'm still cheeky" she said playfully.
"You sure are" I said "and I think you haven't been able to for a while now."
The spring left her step. "Sex was fucking, cuddles were for babies, kisses were for birthdays, and makeup was for whores" she growled "...and women did as they were told, except his mother." The venom in the last word startled me. We walked down to street level in silence.
"He didn't get handy, did he?" I said after mulling it over. I stopped on the concrete footpath and turned her to face me. "Bonnie - tell me he didn't hit you"
"No, Ted. You'd break him in half" she said eventually. "I don't want you to do anything. I know you want to, and I'm happy for that, but leave it. Please." I scowled. She went on. "Yes, we had some fights, but they usually weren't too bad, even if he'd been drinking. Just shouting most of the time. It's just - his mother interfered with us All! The! Time!" She spat the last three words. "That was what got me down. She'd get on his back about something and that would get him mad and..." she broke off and started crying again. I put my arm around her shoulders, letting her sob into my shirt. This time, no pressure from her body. It was just grief. She took a tissue from her bag to dry her eyes, and held it balled up in her fist as she settled herself down. We walked, me guiding her to my flat and let her choose the pace. She talked about meeting him, going out together, being at first unsure of how much makeup to wear and how to dress, liking that he wasn't fussed about either, and going to the races. The dogs at Wentworth Park. The trots at Harold Park. If you got a good pay, some overtime, it was on the train to Randwick and the big times!
I let her talk.
I didn't judge - I grew up with an ex-serviceman who managed PTSD with beer and loved playing euchre. He'd tried to teach the rest of us how to play. Mum hated it and refused to learn, but my sister took to it. He'd get home pretty late most nights, but at least in a euchre tournament at the Golden Sheaf it was hard to blow the rent on a sure thing - it sounded like Bonnie had woken up one morning and realised what her future was likely to be.
We got to my place, and I held the street doors open for her. "This is it" I said. "Second floor. No. 7"
"Lucky 7" she said. She looked around the foyer of the block of units my flat was in. Kind of Art Deco, but it hadn't been looked after. I didn't mind. The metalwork was all in good condition and it had been built when blocks of flats were meant to manage without much maintenance, so it was cool in the summer heat with double-brick construction. The ground floor was shops with a big apartment that had been swanky in its day and now had the noisy family of the guy who owned all five of the tiny bed-sit apartments on the first floor. I had the two-bedroom south-facing unit of the three on the second floor, and my balcony was a haven from Sydney summers on these long Daylight Saving summer afternoons. Cold as charity in winter, though! The top floor was apparently intended for warehousing for the shops, but I think an artist community had taken it over. They burned incense at strange times, and there were always cute women hanging around, but they were pretty cool.
She was a little out of breath when we got to my front door. I apologised for going up the stairs too fast as I opened the door to my place. I hadn't had a fight for over a year and didn't want another one, but I liked the discipline and I was still a regular at the gym. I shut the door behind us, and almost in one motion she dropped her handbag, threw her arms around my neck again and with one hand on the back of my neck she proceeded to snog the living daylights out of me, pressing the mound of her pussy hard against my thigh and her own thigh and hip against my crotch, and I mean leaving space between her belly and me to get more leverage! She buried her face into my neck and inhaled, as if she needed the smell of my summer-afternoon-sweat shirt like a drug and ground herself against me for a few moments longer. "Oh, how I needed that!" she said at last. "You've got no idea how much I've missed plain physical contact with a sober man, and there you were with that body and those arms and those hands my God it's a wonder I didn't race you off in the train! You still smell as good as you did when we were dating."
I laughed at that one, holding her and watching the life come back into her deep brown eyes. She used to like to tell me "it was hot" and "aren't you hot?" and "Mum, isn't it hot today - don't you think Ted might want to take his shirt off" and I would, and she'd grab it and run away with it and take a big, deep sniff of my sweaty shirt like a guilty secret. Her mother would smile and shake her head and wink at me and go and make us cordial and we'd sit on the balcony, me with my shirt off, her with her shoulder or her forearm or some part of her touching the skin of my bare chest.
