Part 3a: Kate's Story
Feedback most welcome.
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It was Friday, June 27, and Mark and I were out on our weekly "date night." We had completely spaced the opening night of the Blues Brothers movie last week having instead fixed a nice pasta dinner and stayed in drinking wine, watching TV and making out on the sofa. Everyone was raving about the new movie so we went to see it a week after it opened, at the Christown Mall Cinema, and we were not disappointed. It was a great, fun movie with awesome music and wonderful cameos. Had we been in aisle seats, we would have been dancing. We had originally planned on Chinese food, but after watching Aretha Franklin belt out Franklin and White's "THINK," it had to be soul food or nothing. After the movie we rode the escalator down into the mall, found a pay phone with a Yellow Pages and located a soul food restaurant just up the road on Thomas where we feasted on a delicious meal of barbecued chicken, corn bread, candied yams and potato salad.
Cheerful and stated, we drove back to Mark's house. Happily Shane and Jeff were both out, so we went onto the back porch, undressed each other and went for a romantic late night skinny dip in the pool. An erotic shower, a bottle of wine and some energetic lovemaking rounded out a perfect evening. It was almost midnight and I had no intention of going back to my house tonight, but to spare myself a lecture I played one of my oldest phone tricks on my parents. I slipped on one of Mark's T-shirts and padded out to the kitchen phone. I dialed my home number then waited for my dad to pick up the bedside phone.
"I've got it dad! It's for me! I've got it!" I said impatiently, when he picked up.
"Kate, how many times have I told you," my dad grumbled sleepily, "to tell your friends not to call so late!"
The line went dead and I hung up the phone with a satisfied smirk on my face, as I headed into the kitchen to get a glass of water. As I pulled a plastic cup from the cupboard I heard keys scraping in the lock of the front door and a familiar voice. It was Jeff, and a new girl I didn't recognize. We met in the hallway as they were headed for the den.
Jeff was an imposing figure, standing at 6'5" with broad shoulders, short spiky dark hair and tattoos on his arms. He was dressed in his usual attire, black leather vest, concert T-shirt, torn jeans and black biker boots. The "bad boy" of the band, he played rhythm guitar, rode a motorcycle and had deplorable taste in women. He was also a real sweetheart once you got to know him.
His date tonight was a tall busty blonde with thin hips and long legs. She was dressed in a black Led Zeppelin T-shirt, a short, tight denim shorts and black boots. Her straight blonde hair was parted down the middle and hung down to her shoulders, and her rather long nose and full lips made me think of Janice, lead guitarist of the Electric Mayhem band on the Muppet show.
"Oh, hey Red!" Jeff said, "This is Claire. Claire, this is Kate, our bass player I was telling you about."
"Oh wow, awesome!" Claire said with the groggy enthusiasm of someone well and truly stoned. "Jeff was playing me some tapes... of your band! Yeah! You guys are really good!" She said, swaying slightly.
"Thanks!" I said. "Nice to have met you, but I was just heading to bed."
"Wait!" Claire said, grabbing my arm. "Stay up and party with us! It'll be fun!"
"Thanks, but I'm all partied out tonight." I said as I gently disentangled my arm from her. "But you two have fun. Mark and I went skinny dipping earlier, and its perfect weather for it now."
"Skinny-dipping? Really?" Claire said, her eyes wide with excitement.
"Oh yeah." I said to her. "The water feels so good against your naked skin this time of night. The pool's just out back through those sliding glass doors." I said pointing to the other end of the Den.
"Skinny dipping!" Claire squealed to Jeff, as if she had just discovered the greatest plan in the history of plans. "That sounds so awesome! Let's go!" She giggled, as she ran to the pool, leaving a trail of discarded clothing in her wake.
Jeff stood and watched Claire run off across the patio then turned to face me, a huge grin on his face as he raised his right hand and cocked it back.
"How about that Jeff?" I said grinning smugly "I just got your date's cloths off in under a minute, using only my tongue!"
I held up my right hand to collect the high-five I so richly deserved as Jeff slapped down at my palm.
"You rock, Red!" Jeff laughed, as he blushed.
Getting Jeff, the tattooed "bad boy" of the band to blush was quite an accomplishment, and I was extremely pleased with myself as I turned to the hall and headed to Mark's room.
"Oh yeah, I just remembered something." Jeff said, as he stripped off his shirt. "Your mom called earlier and said some lady called Jenny... Swanson? Swenson? Whatever -she called about a babysitting job or something. I wrote her number on the pad by the Yellow Pages."
"Oh thanks." I said, trying to hide my excitement.
Jeff slipped through and closed the sliding glass doors as he went out to join his date in the pool.
I glanced at the notepad. It was Jenny's number all right. My heart beat a little faster as I walked back to Mark's room. He was already asleep and I crawled into bed after I placed the glass of water on the bedside table. As I lay there, tired yet unable to find sleep, I played through the events of last weekend in my head yet again.
It had been a wild emotional ride, but I was very pleased with the way things were working out. Mark, true to his word, offered no objection to me seeing Jenny, but cautioned me to be careful lest her husband discover our secret. Mark's honesty and his trust in me warmed my heart. Jenny's acceptance of her feelings for me also involved a huge investment of trust on her part. I felt incredibly special and lucky; I really did seem to have the best of both worlds.
Which was not to say that I wasn't terribly nervous. Never in my wildest dreams had I ever consider the possibility of having an affair with an older, married woman, and I really had no idea what to expect from our little fling. All of my previous lesbian relationships had been with girls my own age, and all strictly monogamous although very different in nature. My affair with Allison was the result of young love, with Yolanda it was rebound, and with Betty it was a combination of things; loneliness, flattery at her dogged attention, and a curiosity about the lesbian lifestyle. Betty, a softball player I met in the 8th grade, was the closest thing to an out and out lesbian as I had ever seen. Lean, athletic and with short dark hair, she seduced me with her boyish charms, persistent advances and her precocious sexual skills.
Betty had lived with her divorced mother in a trailer park on the proverbial "wrong side of the tracks" ever since her father, a semi-professional baseball player, had abandoned them 2 years earlier. It was a scruffy, run down place and I can still remember my shock when she first took me there after school. Her mother was an exotic dancer at a "gentleman's club" over by Grand Avenue, and she was quite open about her lesbian lifestyle at home. She often had half naked, tattooed girlfriends lounging about in the living room, smoking and drinking at all hours. Betty's relationship with her mother was strained, to say the least, and I always felt uncomfortable in their home, never knowing when a profanity laden screaming match was about to break out between them. Their house was always filthy and dark, and I remember it smelling of stale cigarettes and cheap booze. It was about as different from my own white bread, suburban, middle-class home life as I could possibly imagine, but it was the only place where Betty and I could be alone together. It wasn't so bad at night when her mother was working, and we had many fun and memorable evenings there together in her room.
