I hope you like this entry in the
Summer Lovin' Story Contest 2023
. Thank you for reading and please vote for it if you like it.
The big difference between the sweltering summer heat in Las Vegas and the Florida Panhandle is the brutal humidity on the Gulf Coast and the fierce afternoon storms. Katie told everyone she would die of suffocation if she ever had to go back home. Her makeup would melt and run in the swampy thick air. At least Las Vegas had air-conditioning.
Katie left the small shrimping town when she was seventeen to find out what the real world she saw on television and movies was all about. She wanted to find a man who didn't smell like a fish monger with the breath of stale beer. She headed to the glamor world of Hollywood, hoping to find success and wealth in the dream world that she would find was an illusion.
At first, she thought she could make it on her looks, a southern beauty with a body that turned men's heads. Long strawberry blonde hair, sexy eyes, large natural breasts and slinky long legs were her calling card. She found out soon enough, after too many advances from squirrelly married men and swallowing mouthfuls of cum, that rejections came as fast as the men she sucked in hopes of getting a break.
Two years of going nowhere and living in dressed up poverty, led her to try making money in Las Vegas, working in the casinos where the cash flowed like the mighty Mississippi River. Katie made great tips as a cocktail waitress off her vivacious and suggestive manner. She wouldn't, however, turn tricks, which was the men with the most cash wanted.
"You could easily make a thousand bucks an hour," one of Katie's co-workers declared. But Katie said she wasn't raised that way and was saving her vagina for love.
"As the song goes, love doesn't have anything to do with it," she was chided for what was seen as prudish behavior.
"You mean, you ain't never had a dick in you?" asked another disbelieving co-worker.
"Just once with a boy, when I was just a girl, but it didn't mean nothin', we were just kids playing around," Katie lied. What she didn't tell was how she was sexually abused as a child by her uncle, who had raped her repeatedly. Katie wasn't sure she could ever love anyone or even allow anyone to touch her pussy.
Damaged .in body and spirit, Katie tried to cope and hoped one day she would outgrow the shame and pain in her soul. She knew all men were not cruel and heartlessly evil like her uncle. She prayed for forgiveness the day he died, drunk and out of his mind, fighting with one of the local fishermen who had a long-lasting grudge against him. She prayed, not for God to forgive him; he deserved it. When her uncle pulled out his handgun, he was too drunk to handle it and shot himself fatally.
"One of these days, some guy is going to offer you lots of money to have a piece of your hot ass," Katie's co-worker told her as if it were a certainty that every woman had her threshold for wealth.
Katie had a rented room in a run-down motel outside of the glitzy Strip. She worked every shift she could to stash away for her dream. She wanted to find a small house, a cabin, somewhere in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, surrounded by tall pine trees and optimally by a small stream. She figured hard work would get her there.
That summer was unusually hot. June and July set a record for the most three-digit temperature days in a row. And it was dry. Nights didn't cool down for some relief. The wall air-conditioning unit in her room worked when it wanted, leaving Katie to suffer through until she could get inside the cool, smoke-filled floor at the casino.
Katie brought a customer his drink at the slot table, where he appeared frustrated as he shoved tokens into the machine without success. He took his drink and gave Katie a tip, sliding a five-dollar bill down her skimpy top, copping a feel of her bouncy large breast.
When she went to turn around to get an order from another customer, she felt a calloused hand reach up her short skirt and into her panties. Katie turned around and slapped the man hard across his face. "Don't ever fucking try that again," she screamed at him.
Katie's manager saw the incident and pulled Katie aside to rebuke her. He didn't quite understand her attitude.
"So, touching your tits is alright but when he tried to feel you up your skirt, it's suddenly an assault?" the floor manager tried to ascertain.
"Yes. That's how it is for me," Katie told him without a bit of remorse for hitting the customer.
"I can't have you slapping customers on the floor," he told her. "You're fired."
Katie didn't cry. She went to the back and collected her belongings from her locker and changed into her street clothes. One of the other cocktail waitresses who observed the scene approached her.
"You know, this is going to get around and you'll be black-balled," she told Katie.
"Yea, I guess so. Time to move on," Kate responded.
Katie didn't look back as she got on the bus to take her back to her sometimes cool, but most times sweltering room. Walking a few blocks from the bus stop into the parking lot of the motel, she noticed a man buried under the hood of his older model pick-up truck. It reminded her of back home where everyone milked whatever miles they could out of their older vehicles, not being able to afford a newer one.
Katie knew about motors. She had fixed a few broken-down shrimp boats and trucks as a teenager. She figured she should be neighborly and offer some help to the older man trying to get his old pick-up going.
"What seems to be the problem?" she asked as she approached.
"Can't seem to get the motor running," the man told her.
Taking the flashlight from him, Katie looked around the motor looking for something that might be an obvious cause of the breakdown.
'Looks like you have a busted timing belt," Katie told him pointing the flashlight behind the other belts so he could see the problem.
"Shit. That's going to cost a fortune," he sighed. "Money, I don't have."
Katie didn't know what to say. She threw out a quick remark," At least it's an older model so it wouldn't screw up your motor."
"You seem to know a lot about motors," the man said. "My name is Carl," he said, introducing himself.
"I'm Katie," she responded shaking his hand. "And I've worked on a few back home," she explained.
There was an awkward moment when Carl and Katie weren't sure what to say next. Katie felt some empathy, having been in tough situations like that before.
"I know getting your truck towed to a garage and getting it fixed is going to cost you a fortune," she said. "I can help you take the front off and replace the belt. We'll need to rent a couple tools, like a torque wrench, but we can probably do the job for a couple of hundred instead of a thousand it would cost to get it done."
"Thanks for offering, but I don't have a couple of hundred right now," Carl told her. "I needed to get to California to work. I have a job waiting for me," he explained.
