Notes: I am apparently incapable of writing a short story. I went into this thinking I'd write a quick-hitter set during the pandemic... maybe 3-4 pages tops... yeah, it's more than that. A lot of it is dialogue, so it does read fairly quickly. I just got very into these characters and their backstories, and I hope you do, too. There's a lot of sex, but it's not for a few pages. I've weaved a fair amount of character development into the sex scenes, so skim at your own risk.
My long-time readers know all my stories are written in what I call the Road Trip universe. The hero of this story first appeared in Ch. 10 of Brad's Road Trip, as did a couple of the other characters who are mentioned. You don't need to read that chapter to understand this one (though you should) but it tells the event in question from another angle, which you might find interesting.
One caveat: there is some light anal play. Just fingers involved, but I know some folks hate anything to do with the part of the ass that goes between the cheeks. So, fair warning.
Thanks to AnInsatiableReader and samuraisan for their invaluable editing and beta-reading contributions. There are a few things in this story that wouldn't be if not for them.. and there'd be a metric asston more of this story if not for them, too. Any errors that still slipped through are all me.
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"Did you want your milk in the bag?" the girl bagging the groceries asked me. The sound was a bit muffled through the God-awful Ohio State Buckeyes bandana she was using as a face covering, but I understood her just fine.
"Nah, that's ok," I said loudly, trying to fight through the surgical mask I wore. I grabbed the milk and stuck it in the hole I'd left for it in the back of the cart. I reached up to the counter to grab the last two 12-packs of soda, but she put my double pack of paper towels on top of them at the last second, and our hands brushed together briefly.
"Sorry," she said sheepishly, blushing as she pulled her hands away. Her deep blue eyes made contact with mine for a few moments before she looked back to the groceries.
"No problem," I said, grinning slightly, though she couldn't see it. The sodas went in the cart first, followed by the paper towels and a few other bags she'd finished.
"Same thing with your laundry soap?" she asked. "No bag?"
"Yes, ma'am," I answered, taking the Tide directly from her and stashing it on the bottom of the cart. The cashier, a kind lady who had to be pushing 70, finished ringing me up.
"That'll be $62.32," she said. I punched a few buttons on the keypad, grabbing some cash out for the kids who cut my grass in the process. Lawn care was something I usually enjoyed, but work had been cutting into my free time lately, and besides, the neighbor kids needed a way to make some summer cash.
"You have a nice day, sir," the bag girl said. I couldn't see it, but her eyes told me she was smiling under that disgusting mask. I returned her well wishes, as well as her invisible smile, and pushed my cart toward the door. I was still holding not only my wallet, but also my debit card and the three $20 bills the cashier had handed me, so I moved out of the traffic flow to get everything put away.
As I was stuffing the cash into the billfold, I noticed two guys leave the self-checkout lanes and head toward my intended exit. They appeared to be in their mid-20s, though it was a little hard to tell, since neither seemed to know where the shaving products were located at this particular Kroger. Both wore yellow utility vests on top of slightly dingy white T-shirts, but to my dismay, neither wore a mask. I was ready to look back into my wallet, but I noticed they were both staring at me.
I thought to say something, but then I realized they weren't actually looking at me. I followed their stares over my shoulder, and landed back on the cute bag girl from the lane I'd just left. There weren't a ton of people in the store on a Tuesday mid-afternoon, so she didn't have more groceries to pack up just yet. She was talking to the elderly cashier, but her eyes cut toward the two men before quickly looking away.
Both guys were grinning, looking back and forth between each other and the girl. They spent at least another 30 seconds leering at her, to the point where it started to make
me
uncomfortable. I couldn't hear all of what was said, but I picked up "tag that ass," "titties," and "call me daddy."
I didn't want to start anything in the store, but... what the actual fuck?
They lingered a few more seconds before finally leaving the store, and I turned around to look back at the girl in question. She was rolling her eyes and chatting with the cashier, pointing in the general direction the two guys had just left. Now that I took the time to actually look at her, I could see what interested them. Her long, jet black hair hung in a loose ponytail more than halfway down her back, reaching toward an ass that was pretty impressive, at least from this distance. Her dark blue apron rested on top of a baggy T-shirt, but she couldn't completely hide what had to be fairly large breasts.
She was also really young, though without seeing her entire face I couldn't tell for sure. I was pretty sure she wasn't a minor, but it was a close thing. I guessed 18, maybe 19 at most.
The things I could do to that body
, my mind idly speculated...
Yeah, and what will you talk about before and after? The latest Tik Tok trends?
I just chuckled at the humorous inner monologue. I'd been looking for a few seconds, and realized I might be encroaching on the other guys' level of creepiness. Before I could turn back, though, the cashier pointed in my direction, and the girl turned and looked at me. Her face turned slightly pink, but she still managed to give me a small wave before she looked away, and I felt a grin creep onto my face under my mask.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm a good-looking guy, and I'm well aware of that. I'm 6-foot-4 and weigh anywhere between 250 and 260 pounds, depending on how clean I'm eating at any given moment. I run 5 miles every other day and I spend 50-60 hours a week working at construction sites, so I'm in as good of shape as I was in my Army days. I've been told I'm "ruggedly handsome," and though I have no idea what the hell that means, I've never had any complaints on my looks.
I'm also a month short of 40 years old, so while I got plenty of attention from more experienced women, the younger ones usually just thought of me as old. That was fine by me, because I generally wanted more from a woman than just sex appeal and the older I got, the more difficult I found it to connect with that age group. Still, young, hot women can generally have any man they want, and this one in particular hadn't exactly been subtle about checking me out. All inner voices aside, I was gonna shut up and take the win.
I returned her wave and offered up a sheepish "what-can-you-do" shrug as I turned and pushed my cart out of the store. Honestly, I wanted to go back and apologize for the boorish behavior of my fellow Y-chromosome owners, but I didn't see any way that wouldn't make me as creepy as them.
I spotted the two bright yellow vests walking across the parking lot, and I watched them carefully as I slowly walked to my F-250. They got into a white work truck a few rows away from me, and only then did I drop my guard and load up my groceries. I climbed up into the cab and started her up to get the AC rolling. I hung my mask on the rear-view mirror and grabbed the hand sanitizer from the center console. All that done, I pulled out my phone. I'd been texting back and forth with an ex-girlfriend for a few days now. We hadn't seen each other since we called it quits six months ago, just before Christmas. Neither of us were much for casual hookups or the friends-with-benefits thing, but the pandemic had limited our abilities to meet other people and move on, and we were both starting to get lonely. We had no plans to get all the way back together -- there was a reason we'd broken up, after all -- but I was pretty sure at least certain parts of us were going to get back together sometime soon.
I texted her some dirty joke that I was rather proud of and put my phone in the cup holder. I strapped my seat belt on and was just about to throw the truck in reverse when I caught something in the corner of my eye.
Two somethings, actually, and they were both yellow.
I'd stopped watching when they got in their truck, but apparently they hadn't actually left the parking lot, and now they were both walking back toward the store. My Spidey sense started tingling something fierce, and I shut the truck off and opened the door. Surely they weren't dumb enough to actually do anything in the middle of the day? Alas, I trusted my instincts a lot more than I did two guys who had already proven to be douchebags. Besides, if four decades on this planet had taught me anything, it was to never, ever, underestimate a person's innate ability to be stupid.
Mask in hand, I quickly headed back inside. Yeah, there were at least a few customers in the store, and I'm sure they had security somewhere in here. In this day and age, though, customers were just as likely to film shit on their phones instead of actually intervening, and supermarket rent-a-cops were far from reliable. Even if security realized there was a problem and managed to get there before the guys tried to get touchy-feely, she'd still have to deal with a couple of minutes of their bullshit, and she didn't deserve that.
When I got back into the store, my suspicions were confirmed. They stood on either side of her now, hitting her from both sides with what I was sure was high-level, intellectual conversation. Her lane had a customer in it, so she was trying to parry them off while also trying to do her job. She looked uncomfortable, but there were a large amount of groceries still on the belt, so I'm not sure the cashier even noticed.
I wasn't going to just charge headlong into a confrontation. I stopped a few feet away, listening in as close as I could over the noise of the store.
"C'mon, Kat," I heard the bigger one say. His beard was as scraggly as it was long, with random hairs flying every which way as it reached toward his chest. He definitely seemed to be the instigator of the two. "It'll be fun."
"You know I hate that damn name, Mike," she said, and for a fleeting second, I wondered if I had it all wrong. I thought it was just two dudes rudely hitting on a stranger. I didn't expect them to know each other's names. That thought went away pretty quickly, though, when he tried to get a handful of her ass. He made contact, but she squirmed away before he could do anything else and shot him a glare I could tell was deadly even with her bandana on.
"Don't you fucking touch me," she spat out, loud enough that he could hear it but not so loud that it would make a scene in front of other customers. Of course, she rolled right into the other guy, who while not the main catalyst of this whole thing, certainly wasn't shrinking away from it. His skin was darker; I guessed Hispanic, but it was hard to tell because his beard was even bushier than the first guy. He had several visible tattoos snaking up each arm and disappearing under a shirt I was fairly certain hadn't been washed in a couple days. He touched her arm just above the elbow and started sliding it toward her shoulder.
"What the fuck?" she whisper-shouted, spinning out of the new guy's grasp, but right back into Mike's. "Seriously guys, fuck off. I need to do my job."
"Aww," Mike said, feigning feeling hurt. "Are you asking us to leave, Kitty Kat?"
The customer was still loading her stuff onto the conveyor belt, and while Kat's progress had slowed some with the unwanted attention, it hadn't backed the process up enough to catch the cashier's eye yet. No one else seemed to be looking at the three of them.
Mike moved behind her and put one hand on her hips as he pressed into her. His other hand went around to her front, and that's when I stepped in.
