I spent the whole of Friday morning thinking about what I was sure was the strangest blowjob I'd ever had. It didn't help that I was off from my university job Fridays, and so was doing demo, alone, in the shell of the house upstairs. Plenty of time with my thoughts.
I tried hard to focus, to not dissect what had happened. Partly I was behind schedule on ripping out insulation - I needed badly to hurry if I was going to get the new insulation installed for the April heat. Mainly, though, I really didn't WANT anything to have happened. Things with Sara were going so well. If I had triggered some trauma or something even weirder was going on, that was sure to put damper on the progress I felt I'd made with the relationship. Sexually, sure, but more than that it had taken Sara nearly a year to open up to me, even the smallest bit - to talk about her past, her feelings. Last night's episode seemed like it might endanger that.
Finally, after scraping my hand on a rusty nail, I realized I needed to get my thoughts out or I was liable to kill myself out of sheer distractedness. I pulled open the notes app on my tablet and started compiling a list of possible explanations.
- Traumatic Flashback?
- Drug Reaction?
I paused. I had no idea how to compare these options. The first seemed... possible, at least. Sara was fairly conservative about sex, and really didn't like to talk about her youth or life before she came to Pittsburgh for school. Maybe she was working through something still? Or had repressed it? At the same time, that was a big leap to make. Similarly, I had no idea if Sara was on any medication at all. I frowned, and kept writing.
- Allergic to Bedspread?
- Allergic to Underwear?
- Allergic to Semen?
Frankly each of these seemed kind of zany. But, perhaps it was a promising train of thought. People were allergic to all sorts of things, each weirder than the last. I'd never heard of an allergic reaction causing the sort of space-out, or the repeating, I'd seen last night, but it did seem as if whatever had happened had happened right after I'd cum. I circled my last bullet point. I'd do a bing search later, when I wouldn't bleed all over my tablet.
--
After patching up my hand, I was able to get back to work, less distracted now that I had captured my thoughts. The afternoon, punctuated by a short lunch at the Sheetz down the road, was productive - I managed to get the old fiber insulation out of the first and second floors. I would have to do the third floor next week as the recycling people were liable to stop coming if I tried to give them all of it in one fell swoop. I was dragging bundles of the cloying pink wool out to the curb when I heard a familiar voice.
"Hi there! I see you're ahead of me!"
I turned to see Kate, my next-door neighbor. She'd been resettled to Pittsburgh a year before me and was by far my chattiest neighbor. I tried to avoid her out of fear of getting dragooned into to one of her many political causes.
"Maybe you could... come over and help me out sometime? I'm sure I could find some way to repay you" She continued.
OK, OK, the real reason I avoided her was she was constantly flirting with me. Not subtly either. Which is fine, of course, but with Kate it was always unclear if it was serious interest, or a personality quirk. If the former, I was a taken man. If the latter - well, I had no idea how to respond.
The real REAL reason, though, is that she was incredibly attractive. I didn't want to get myself into a silly situation where I made a dumb decision. Monogamy was new to me, and Sara was certainly worth putting a little risk-management in.
"I'm not doing so great - I haven't started on the electrical yet. You finished that, right?" I responded, leaning against the fence that divided our driveways.
"Reclamation people signed off last week. What happened to your hand?" She asked, suddenly turning quite businesslike.
"I scraped myself on a nail" I admitted sheepishly.
Her eyes furrowed in a scowl. "How long ago? It's not treated."
"Couple of hours" I replied.
Kate's scowl grew deeper, and she grabbed me by the wrist, inspecting the gash. "Stay here. I've got a first aid kit inside."
---
I had a surprisingly fun half hour - pain from disinfectant aside - with Kate as she bandaged my hand and told me about her childhood in New Orleans and how she wound up in Pittsburgh - she'd originally been a nurse, but after she'd had to move north, she'd been serving as an EMT.
She kept flirting with me a bit throughout the story - a wink here, a pursing of the lips there. Where that had made me uncomfortable before in passing, I found that once I was actually having a conversation with her, it was more of a bright, energetic, personality sort of thing - not cheesy one-liners like she'd been throwing at me for a while now. I departed regretting slightly that I hadn't ventured out of my comfort zone to befriend her earlier.
Now well behind schedule, I deposited the last of the old insulation on the curb before rushing back inside to start on the electrical removal. Yet an hour of puzzling over the FEMA guide book - as well as several youtube videos - had me feeling highly intimidated by the task. It seemed like there were about a thousand ways to set your house on fire. I was about to throw my hands up in despair - or worse, begin looking for contractors - when I heard the huge oak doors downstairs on the first floor creak open.
"Hello? You in here? You weren't downstairs". It was Sara!
I rushed to the landing, realizing only as I came into view that I was not exactly clean or fully dressed. Sara's eyes opened in surprise, and she buckled over laughing.
"You look some sort of flamboyant Sasquatch!"
I looked down at myself - I was indeed rather furry. I'd worked up quite a sweat in the late March air without the benefit of air conditioning, and my bare chest had become covered in loose fibers from the pink insulation which had stuck to the perspiration. Tufts covered my legs as well. God - had I been trailing this everywhere? Hopefully, I thought, not down to the corner where I'd gotten lunch. Or with Kate.
"Good lord, I had no idea. I should shower. What are you doing here? I figured you'd be packing." I asked, a little puzzled, if happy to see her. It wasn't like Sara to just drop by - she always scheduled our dates on several days notice.
"I dunno - I'm about to be out in Arizona for a week and a half, I want to get in as much time with you as I can. I know we're going out tomorrow, but I thought I'd just pop in tonight as well. I have.." She pulled a bottle of wine out of the corner of her tote. "I was thinking we could go up on the roof?"
I smiled. "That's a great idea. A wonderful reward after a full day of work. I should probably clean up first, though." I chuckled, making efforts to scrape the pink gunk off my chest.
We trundled down to the basement after I used some junk mail to scrape off the worst of the insulation fuzz in the yard. I was stripping in the door to the bathroom when Sara, who had been looking at me with a strange look from the bed, sniffed her shoulder awkwardly.
"I might need a shower too - I biked over here and it's getting a little warm for that."
"No problem - I have an extra towel in the drier. I'll be out in a minute or two" I responded.
