Here she was, naked in the dark.
Cool but not cold.
Her breathing shallow, her body motionless.
Hearing distant sounds, and waiting.
Eyes staring into the lightless black. Skin tingling.
Anticipating the touch. The touch of a hand.
**
As soon as he saw the girls running the ticket booth, Jeffrey decided that maybe this wouldn't be such a bad way to spend Halloween after all.
The one on the right was dressed in a harem outfit, all sequined bra and gauzy pants and slippers with the curled-up toes. The one on the left had gone for the 'naughty nurse' look and kept fingering her thermometer in a way that made
his
mercury rise. Or something, anyway. Both costumes were decent enough to keep the parents from protesting, but revealing enough to show off their fabulous bodies.
"Hey, all right," Bill said, giving Jeffrey a wink and an elbow. "And you thought this was a dumb idea."
Stretched above the gymnasium door was a banner welcoming kids and their families to the "Dark Hollow Community College Halloween Spook-Tacular." Games, bake sale, raffle, costume contest. Sponsored by various local businesses, all proceeds to benefit the new Children's Wing at the hospital, yadda-yadda.
What mattered to Jeffrey was that most of the volunteers were shapely DHCC co-eds. College girls. The kind of girls Jeffrey didn't see at Dark Hollow High, where he was a senior. It was amazing, the difference a year or two made. They all looked so much more mature, so sophisticated. Worldly. Experienced. As if they had learned things that he, at eighteen, could only dream.
"You didn't tell me about them," Jeffrey said. "I thought we were getting stuck with brat detail. I didn't know there would be perks."
Brat detail – Bill, who lived in a one-room apartment above his mom's garage, had two younger brothers and a younger sis at home. When Mrs. Jensen had gotten called in to work an extra shift at the diner, she'd nagged Bill into taking the kids to the Halloween carnival. Bill had phoned Jeffrey to tell him that their usual plans – to see if they could score a case of beer from someone with a legit I.D., and then maybe cruise Lakeside Drive scoping the chicks – were off. With nothing better to do than sit around his house with his mom and dad, and hand out fun-size candy bars to the neighborhood rugrats, Jeffrey had grudgingly elected to go along.
"She can rub my lamp any old time," Bill said, ogling the cleavage of the girl in the harem outfit.
They waited in line, bought their tickets. The nurse smiled at them and touched the tip of her tongue to her upper lip, and Jeffrey had to will himself not to get a boner right then and there. Her smile widened, as if she knew exactly what was running through his mind. As they passed, Jeffrey glanced back and saw her lean over to the harem girl. They whispered, giggled.
"Man," Jeffrey said. "I mean ... whew!"
"Don't know about you," Bill said, waggling his eyebrows, "but I'm re-thinking community college."
This, of course, was a joke. Bill was a year older than Jeffrey, but had dropped out of high school his sophomore year. He worked at his uncle's gas station and had about as much chance of getting into even a rinky-dink community college as he had of landing a full scholarship to Harvard. Or flapping his arms and flying to the moon.
"Thought you had a new girlfriend," Jeffrey said.
"Yeah, but you know it never hurts to look."
Bill, who was good-looking in a husky Brad Pitt sort of way, had no trouble getting girls despite his lack of a cool car. Jeffrey might have been jealous of his success, except that these fleeting relationships never lasted more than a few dates.
Hell, who was he kidding? He
was
jealous.
"So how come you're not with her tonight instead of me?" Jeffrey asked.
"She was busy. And I told you, I got stuck with brat detail. Hey, though, look on the bright side. Maybe we can find you some action."
Bill's sibs dashed ahead into the gym to join a throng of hyperactive grade-schoolers. Right away, Jeffrey saw that he and Bill were the only their-age guys in attendance. All the others, and there weren't many of them, were thirtyish henpecked fathers and the occasional grandpa.
"Action. Me. Yeah, right."
The large room had been divided into rows of booths with different chintzy games and activities. There was also a stand selling hot dogs and soda pop, a seating area, and a puppet-show stage. Music issued from the speakers, a collection of spooky tunes from horror movie soundtracks blended with silly numbers like "The Monster Mash" and "One-Eyed, One-Horned Flying Purple People Eater."
But what captured Jeffrey's immediate attention, and Bill's as well as evidenced by his low appreciative whistle, were the girls.
At one booth, a babe in a shimmery green mermaid-tail skirt and seashell cups over small but perky tits helped kids dangle fishing rods with magnets instead of hooks over a partition. Behind the partition, someone else stuck cheap toys to the magnets, and the kids reeled these in with squeals of delight.
Another had slanted sheets of plywood painted with comical clown faces, with holes cut through where the eyes, nose, and mouth should be. A girl in a spangly circus outfit gave kids bean bags and invited them to toss them through the holes. Each winner got a miniature Tootsie-Pop.
At the face-painting booth, a short but curvy brunette in a hobo costume painted flowers and dragons and Harry Potter lightning bolts onto cheeks and foreheads. Next to her was a tall, slim girl in a form-fitting black velvet catsuit complete with ears and tail, helping kids make masks out of paper plates, pipe cleaners, and Popsicle sticks.
The girl at the bobbing-for-apples booth
did
generate some parent protest, because she had come dressed as Eve, with a skin-tone leotard, a long blonde wig, and a stuffed snake curled strategically around her body.
Kids ran everywhere, wired on sugar from cotton candy, candy corn, candied apples, caramel popcorn balls, and punch. Their shrill voices rang to the gym's rafters, which had been strung with crepe paper, that fake spider web stuff, orange and black balloons, and construction paper bats and spiders twirling idly on long strings.
Bill and Jeffrey roamed the booths, much more interested in the sexy costumes than in trying to guess the weight of a prize pumpkin, or buying raffle tickets that could win a year's free car washes at the Spiffy-Kleen, or even throwing aluminum pie pans filled with whipped cream and chocolate sauce at local bankers and politicians.
At the back of the gym stood a girl with a generous figure packed into a tight black dress with a deep vee neckline. She had fishnet stockings, high black button-up shoes, spider-shaped earrings, black lipstick and a pointy witch's hat perched atop a mass of gorgeous auburn curls.
To Jeffrey, she looked like an older and more sophisticated version of Tessa Laine, whom he'd had a crush on since kindergarten but never mustered the courage to ask out. Bill liked to razz him about it. "You and Charlie Brown, all in love with your little red-headed girls!"
This stunning witch was presiding over curtain-draped table supporting a long box with cloth-covered holes cut in the sides.. The box, which looked big enough to have originally contained a new refrigerator, was spray-painted matte black and up on a table. One by one, she took kids down the line and had them put their hands through the holes.
