Chapter 1: Surprise is Speed
I don't know if she was waiting for me to come home or snuck in the patio while I was going through my mail in the kitchen, but she was in the house, somewhere. I had just gotten home from work, the chef coat still crumpled on the floor next to my boots inside the back door and at the top of the basement stairs. The heat of the line that night was still rising off my shoulders while I glanced over a handful of catalogs that piled up daily on the big butcher's block. It's as close as I'll ever get to a kitchen table in my own home. Most of my uniform was either discarded as soon as I hit the door or left in my truck from the drive home, leaving me only a pair of black drawstring cargo pants and a grey wife beater. The stink of burning oil and hot garlic were light that night. The weather finally got warmer and the fat guy in the salad station took the brunt of tonight's action. Otherwise I probably would have missed the smell. A trace of cigarette smoke.
Nobody ever smoked in my house. It was a rule. When I had parties, the detached garage was big enough to fit two dozen people, always had plenty of ashtrays, and was even heated for those cold bitch winters. This was so faint it was impossible not to think of it on someone's clothes or in a girl's hair after waiting for a while and smoking two just to steel your nerves for what you were about to do.
I almost smiled when I heard the latch on the closet door let loose. She was trying to be a little ninja and she was about as graceful as a funniest home video of someone almost doing a back-flip. I was wrong. She exploded out of the tiny closet less than two steps away and hit me full in the back with all 110 pounds. There was plenty of time to reflect on my miscalculation as my head was driven deep into the hanging rack of heavy sauté pans over the butcher block. There was no purchase as my hands slid out on the stacked catalogs glossy paper. By the time I stopped falling forward her milk white hand snaked forward and hooked one of the straps on my tank top and pulled it tight across my throat in the opposite direction, choking me with my own clothes and giving her a secure handle when the other small forearm locked behind my head.
There was nothing to do for it. She had gotten the drop on me. I went still, not wasting energy fighting what was already done and conserving what little air was allowed my while considering my options. To my right was the doorway I came through, unsure footing on my clothes and boots lying at the top of the basement stairs. Would it still be considered a victory if we were both found heaped together at the foot of those stairs with broken necks? On my left was the big stainless refrigerator then two steps to the small island wet bar that separated the kitchen from the blackness of the living room. Three steps behind was the granite topped L of the countertops and the deep sink I'd emptied of a solitary cereal bowl and a big green incredible hulk coffee cup that morning.
She pulled herself up by clamping her thighs on my lower back. It was impossible to tell if the heat between her legs was real or just me losing consciousness. I was still taller than her by almost a head so she had to use her improvised garrote to pull her mouth close to my ear. She whispered soft but challenging, the way you'd expect more from someone trying to seduce you than someone choking you. "Surprise is speed." The strap twisted deeper, "Speed is power." Her breath was hot on the side of my face. In the stubble on the side of my head I could feel a lump growing when the words passed over. "Thinking is slow, slow is weak." She lurched forward and bit my ear hard. The thin cartilage crunched between her teeth just before the warm line trickled on my cheek. Losing was one thing, but this was getting a little to close to assassination.
I stood up, fast, wedging my feet between the legs of the 400 pound block and clenching every muscle between my spine and sternum in both directions so hard that if I lost at least I wouldn't suffer through whatever pain tearing those muscles would feel like tomorrow. She missed any of the pans the first time through. My head drove a wedge that saved her. This time I could hear the thick melon sound something made then it struck my cast iron skillet. Her grip on both my throat and ear lessened but those strong thighs still held tight. I let the momentum carry us across the kitchen as the rack finally gave way. The crash of Teflon, stainless, and brass pans all striking each other sounded like Armageddon in kitchen wares. We collided with the sink. It's a thick two compartment set into an inch of granite and deep enough to drench my elbow when I unplug the drain at the bottom. Her head snapped back hard enough I was afraid she'd shatter the window above the sink but she caught her spine on the faucet instead. She twisted away from it like it was on fire as I stepped away, pulling her legs out with me.
Cooks love big sinks. We're spoiled with them at work and we put them in our homes when we can. I'm no different. I could now say with certainty that I could fit a woman's head and shoulders in this one. Spinning within the confines of the hard cords of muscle in those milky white thighs, I brought myself closer, arching her back and stealing any leverage she had to move. Her arms flailed to grab any purchase, trying to ease the pressure on her slim neck canted to one side in the sink she'd swear was still too small. "Fucker," she seethed. She wasn't having fun anymore and it was my fault.
I slapped the faucet on cold and full bore. Bright red hair started pooling at the bottom of the sink. It looked like Chinese fireworks against the stainless steel basin. The fine lines of her soft, round cheeks were flushed with rage and exertion and there was more than a little crazy flecked in the eyes the same color as the sky over the lake before the rain screams towards shore in the fall. Her name was Roxanne, or Roxie. She lived down the street from me, went to the college a bike ride away, and asked me to show her how to throw a punch at the heavy bag that hangs in my garage. She was nineteen or twenty and had just started to shed the baby fat that got her teased in high school. I knew her dad was one of the old time Irish that ran the local fire department and I always saw her mom's long dark hair and sharp lined features in the "ethnic" food aisle at the market. She favored them both in the best possible ways, the sharp features from her mother and the kind of kinky coloring from her father that kids spend a hundred a month at Hot Topic trying to copy.
She was wearing a black sports bra that did more to hide the swells of white than the low cut tops and push up bras I saw more often. The small concave of her belly was exposed, smooth but not quite as flat as she'd wanted it. As hard as she took to working it, it would be soon enough. Slung low was a small pair of boxing shorts that she was very proud of. Bought off e bay, direct from Thailand, a pair of bright gold Muy Thai trunks with flaming crimson lettering in a language she would never learn. No drawstring but cinched tight by the wide elastic band a hands width below her belly button. The wide, short legs made it look almost like a flared mini skirt on her proportions. She was more leg than torso, more hip than ass, naturally trim waist, then more tit than shoulder. She wasn't thin or frail, just so perfectly proportioned that all of the things that made a girl a woman stood out more than it would have on any other woman with the same measurements.
The water was up to her ears when she started kicking. Grabbing a taut calf in each hand I lifted until all her weight was supported on her shoulders. Upside down, her ass was by my face when the billowing shorts fell towards the floor and left me with a glimpse of tender pinkish skin too far in to be thigh but not enough for slit. Even more it should have had at least the signs of the wispy red hairs I always imagined covered her soft mound, but there was just another wave of the heat I could have imagined at my back, only now it was right before my face and accompanied by a musk that every teenage boy scores touchdowns or survives foreign wars for.