This is a Halloween contest story. Too many readers don't vote. Please vote. I need the support of your vote.
Witches love full moons, especially during Halloween, when a wicked witch has her wicked way with a 40-year-old virgin.
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Johnny sat at a bar minding his own business with his only friend, a cold beer, keeping him company. A regular, he came to Al's place for a frosty, cold draft and some sports banter with the bartender every night after work. Never having more than two beers, a precision tool and die maker, holding the cold glass in his big, swollen hands felt good, after handling hot tools all day.
He had big, strong hands, hands like a professional baseball catcher, calloused and thick skinned. Every mark, every smashed knuckle and split fingernail, every scratch, cut, and scar, saved a work related story to tell. Other than sports, with not much of a social life, work was all that he talked about. Other than to watch a baseball or a football game on TV, watch the news, or read about the outside world in the newspaper, work is all he did.
Alone with his thoughts, without his friend, Mike, the regular bartender there to keep his lips moving and his thoughts off other things, mainly his job, he stared down at his glass in silence. Reminding him of a little lagoon, located off of a white sandy beach, that he saw in a magazine at the barber shop, he traced the line of condensation that ran down his glass to collect in a little pool of water on the bar. Never having been anywhere and done anything, he's never even been on a plane.
Yet, he's always dreamt of traveling and he'd travel somewhere, anywhere, if only he had someone to share the experience. Always alone, it would be no fun traveling alone, too, without having someone to share in his excitement. Having lived his whole life here, all he knows is this small town, his house, and his job at the machine shop.
It was Halloween night, the night he should be out trick or treating with his kids, but he didn't have any children. The regular bartender, his friend, Mike, was home with his family, and left the bar to Joe, the fill-in bartender. Still living in the house his father built and left to him, when his parents died, his life has always been the mundane same. Somehow, with working overtime and double shifts, life has passed him by and now twenty years later, he was a middle-aged, tired, and depressed man. Somehow, fortunately or unfortunately, he skipped what so many others have done and aspire to do again, dating, marriage, children, cheating, divorce, second marriage, cheating, and divorce, before becoming tired of the merry-go-round of women and empty relationships and deciding to live alone with their bad selves.
His friends were attending a Swingers' Halloween Masquerade Ball with their wives, but he didn't have a wife. Even if he did have a wife, he'd never expose her to one of those disgusting sex orgies. Truth be told, never having had a special someone in his life, he didn't even have a girlfriend. Truth be told, a 40-year-old virgin, even with the prostitute his friends hired to service him on his 40th birthday last month, he respectfully declined her offer of passionless sex. He's never been with a woman in that way, naked, humping, and sweating and surely, he didn't want his first experience to be with a prostitute. He didn't understand how anyone could do that, have meaningless sex with a stranger, without being married and in love.
Knowing that he was a virgin, his swinging friends offered him their wives, but he politely declined their offer of empty sex, too. Even though their wives were desirable and more woman than he ever hoped to be with, not wanting them to know, he tried not to show that their offer of him bedding their wives disgusted him and, in his eyes, disgraced them. Wrong on so many different levels, against his morals, and not even tempted, he'd never have sex with the wife of another man. No matter how they tried to justify their swinging lifestyle to him, it was just wrong. It was just nasty.
How could they do that, offer their woman to him, another man? How could they share their woman with another? If he had a woman, he'd hurt any man, who disrespected him and/or his woman by flirting with her and trying to get with her. After his friends offered him a prostitute for his birthday and then offered him their wives, when he declined to have sex with the prostitute and politely declined their offer of having sex with their wives, he regretted telling his friends that he was a virgin. Information that was too personal, they'd somehow use that against him to judge him for the man they think he is. Now, because of how they perceived him, as if there was something wrong with someone abstaining from sex and maybe there was, he now kept his friends at arm's distance.
A big man. A good man. A kind man. An honest man. A loyal and generous man, he'd never put the hurt to someone that didn't deserve to be hurt. One never known to throw the first blow, he's always the last man standing to throw the last one.
He never understood his friends' need to share their wives' intimate secrets with others. Shame on them. He'd never be able to kiss his wife's lips again with the thoughts that she had sex with another man and had another man's penis in her hand, her pussy, and in her mouth. How they could break their holy vows of matrimony by having sexual relations with others and still stay married was a mystery to him.
If he had a woman, what she did before she came into his life was her business, but after she came into his life and they committed to one another in marriage, she was his and no one else's. 'Til death do you part, a lifelong commitment, free sex never made any sense to him, when there's so much more to life and to marriage than just random and passionless sex with a stranger. Besides, with all the diseases and STD's out there, he never understood his friends' need and desire to have sex with the planet's population. Not one to lust over anyone's women, he only wanted to have sex with one special lady, his very own.
Just as he missed the whole point of the swinging lifestyle, Johnny believed that they missed the whole point of love, marriage, morals, and respect. If they weren't going to honor one another by being true to each other, he never understood why they married each another in the first place. If he had a wife, if he went through all the time, the effort, and the expense to romance her and then to take the vows of holy matrimony to love, to honor, to respect, and to cherish her, he'd stay faithful to that one woman for the rest of his life.
Yet, alone with his high and seemingly unrealistic morals and lonely without a good woman in his life to love and to cherish, just as Johnny wasn't very lucky with women, he wasn't such a good looking man. Actually, a monstrous man that looked like a cross between Rubeus Hagrid of Harry Potter fame, albeit a much bigger version, and Luca Brasi, Don Corleone's hit man, in Mario Puzo's, The Godfather 1, he was a scary looking man to those who didn't know him. Hailing from a long line of ugly people, his Dad was even homelier that he was at his 40-year-old age. He'd be relieved, with the homely man his Dad was, to realize that even his Dad found someone to love with his plain looks, that is, had his Dad not married his fraternal twin sister.
Gross, shocking, and nasty, he couldn't believe it, when his parents sat him down to tell him their deep, dark, incestuous secret. A forbidden love between brother and sister, no one knew that he was their love child. He never understood what may have happened in their lives that twisted them enough to not only fall in love with one another but also to marry and have a baby? Is there any wonder why, at 40-years-old, Johnny is still alone, lonely, and unmarried?
Doomed never to win a beauty contest, his Dad's sister, his mother, was just as homely as he was, which explains his homely looking puss. With his Mom the one that should have been his aunt or his Dad the one that should have been his uncle, he started his life confused, unhappy, embarrassed, and always living with the horrible shame of their incestuous secret. Glad that they did, he sometimes wished they had never told him. Didn't they think of the long-term repercussions? Didn't they think of him, before they had a baby?
Tired of being rejected, when asking a woman out for a date, all the women he was attracted to were unable to get by his physical appearance to discover his hidden heart of gold and the good, kind, honest, loving, and loyal man that resided deep inside him. All the women he was attracted to, if interested in him at all, were only interested in him because he had a good job, a nice house, a new car, and, since he had never been married and didn't have children, obviously, he had money. All the women he was attracted to weren't attracted to him, at all. If they were anything at all, they were afraid of him.
Doing their best to take advantage of him by offering him sex, all the women he was attracted to weren't very nice to him. Only, their tempting him with sex in exchange for him lavishing them with money, didn't work with him. Not interested in sex, he was no one's sucker for love. They didn't know that he wouldn't have sex with anyone, until he was married and on his Honeymoon. They didn't see what a good man he was. Truth be known, they'd be the lucky ones to have someone as good as he was in their lives. Truth be told, loving him would make them a better person.