She wasn't really this easy, but she was jittery about the concert she was going to the next night—especially with why she was going to the concert—and she had zeroed in on the strawberry blond hair and hazel eyes of the young man as soon as he had swirled into the outdoor café in Roanoke, Virginia's, Market Place Center with a group of other, boisterous young men. The late summer air was heavy with lingering southern sundown heat and humidity. Ceiling fans under the roof over the tables were whomp, whomping, but were doing little to move the air.
He had zeroed in on her too immediately and had gone quiet while his companions were still bantering about with each other and struggling for position in the seating. He took a chair facing her table. Cindy assumed that his interest was because her hair, which she kept in a curly mane, was the same unusual color and her eyes also were hazel. His hair, which was tied back in a ponytail, would come down to his shoulders when loosened. Normally she didn't like men with long hair, but she liked everything she saw about this young man. He was sensual beauty on two size-twelve feet. She wondered about what they said about a man's shoe size. It certainly had worked out that way with her Tim.
She'd had finished nursing her coffee with nowhere to go other than her room backing on the Roanoke rail yards at the small, seedy hotel on Salem Avenue. There was nothing to do between now and the next evening except fidget and wonder if she should have driven over from Lynchburg a day early. It wouldn't have been any better to drive over just for the concert, as she still would be jittery no matter where she was. And she really needed to have a room here after the concert because she knew she'd be too much of a basket case, no matter how the concert worked out, to be driving back to Lynchburg tomorrow night.
When the waiter came with the check, she found herself ordering another cup of coffee—although God knew she didn't need any more caffeine. The young man kept looking over at her and smiling, and she just couldn't bring herself to leave. She knew that look. He was interested in her. Was
this
that kind of café—one where single women came to perch as a matter of business? Did she care if it was and if he was getting the wrong impression? He couldn't be more than twenty, so she was old enough to be his mother. But, at a year short of forty, she knew she still looked good—and younger. Great genes, she thought, immediately stressing from her mother's side—nothing good had come from her father's side—other than her hair and eye color.
Thinking of her daddy—of him on top of her, holding her wrists, groaning his need of her, both of them panting as he entered her and, to her shame, she began to move with him—had her feeling flushed. It must have been the sound coming from fans overhead that had brought her father to mind. She looked up, immediately embarrassed because she had let a hand move to her lower belly and she suddenly realized that the young man was standing on the other side of the glass-topped table and was looking down at her with a smile. His companions at the other table were huddled together in a lively discussion, showing no concern that he'd broken from the herd.
"Excuse me? Are you alone? Do you want to be?"
She looked up into his hazel eyes and melted.
They were lying in her hotel bed, he spooned behind her, one arm embracing her closely to him, his hand languidly working the nipples of her ample breasts and cupping, weighing, and squeezing her breasts to hear her intake of breath and small gasps. The other arm was draped over her hips, with the fingers of that hand playing in her folds, rubbing her clit and the root of his own cock, which was buried inside her. He had gone flaccid from the first, frenzied fuck, but, thanks to the virility of youth, he was going turgid again.
The window was open, and Cindy watched the gauzy curtains move in the late summer breeze and concentrated on the sensations of the young, hard body encasing her and doing delicious things to her breasts and between her thighs as his lips pressed into the hollow of her neck. The steamy heat in the unairconditioned room, with a ceiling fan whomp, whomping ineffectively overhead, only added to the sweaty sensuality of the sex. The roar and flashing light of a train moving through the rail yard had been matched with the young man's strong, prolonged, jerky ejaculation deep inside her, and she was holding her breath in anticipation of the next train—and the next ejaculation. She had been sent over the edge several times. It had been some time since she'd had a young stud between her legs.
He was moving their position, turning her on her back, suspending himself over her, taking most of his weight on his knees and elbows. He had wedged two pillows from the bed under the small of her back. She spread her legs, and raising her knees and digging the soles of her feet into the lumpy mattress for leverage, positioned herself to take him as deep as possible. God, he was a beautiful young man—a lithe, yet well-muscled body. The shoe size legend had panned out too. A handsome face, as handsome as her own father's, who also had been a strawberry blond with hazel eyes. Her father having come to mind because he had taken her in this position often also.
He entered, entered, entered her again—long, thick, throbbing—and began to slowly pump her, his lips and teeth going to her nipples, the pace of his thrusts matching the whomp, whomp, whomp of the ceiling fan overhead. With a sigh and a groan, she set her hips in a complementary rhythm. Slow, deep. Just the way she liked it. Just the way her daddy had done it once they had established that relationship. Remembering now the whomp, whomp of the ceiling fan in her room back in the hollow when her father fucked her; remembering how the cycling of the ceiling fan set the rhythm of the fuck then just as it had done here, helping her to fall so readily into the rhythm of this young stud's fuck—for both of them to achieve the sensation of being seasoned lovers.
To the heights and over the top and then higher and over that top as another train roared by on the rails on the other side of the open window and, shuddering, he fired off again and again and again.
* * * *
Cindy had entertained second, third, and fourth thoughts about coming this evening. So much so that nerves had brought her to Roanoke a day early. Things in the unusual events had been progressing, albeit slowly, to this point, but it hadn't been Timmy—no, she had to think of him as Keith now, although there'd been all those years of thinking of him as Tim Junior—who had asked for this. And up to this point she hadn't pressed on moving any faster than Keith had indicated he wanted—or taken the initiative at all, since she felt it wasn't her right to do so.
Madge and John were such friendly and bubbly people, taking all of this in their stride, or at least pretending to do so. It was almost as if maybe they were afraid to look at the situation seriously. There was every reason for them to feel threatened by what was going on. But they'd done everything they could to make her comfortable about this—at least to her face. They'd made all of the concert arrangements and would have booked a hotel room—surely a better one than she had gotten herself—for her and would have paid for the room. But there's no way she'd let them do that. She wasn't destitute. None of this was about her being poor—at least not now. Of course, there had been no indication that Madge and John were rolling in money themselves, or ever had been.
But it was damn sure they'd done what she hadn't.
She wasn't on welfare or anything. She had a good job as a receptionist in a dentist office over in Lynchburg. Her daddy had scrimped and saved to send her for two years to Virginia Southern University in Buena Vista. For some reason her daddy had wanted to keep her close to home even though he didn't pay much attention to her during her childhood while she was living there in the hollow in the shadow of the Blue Ridge. Buena Vista was up on top of the Blue Ridge above the western-slope Bennett's hollow her family lived in and had given their name to.
Yes, he'd given her a start with college. But then that was the rub. He wouldn't have done it if she'd done what she now knew she should have done. And he probably only did it anyway to keep her close by but also to get her out of the hollow itself where everyone knew everyone else's business. Certainly everyone had known what she and Tim had been up to.
She met up with Madge and John at the same Market Place Center café she'd sat at the night before, having arranged that meeting place before it now was a memory that made her nervous to think about. She wasn't really that easy. Yes, there had been men in the last twenty years, but not many of them. And none a casual pickup, let alone a young stud nearly half her age. But there had been something about him—that strawberry blond hair and those hazel eyes. She was afraid to relate that to her father, but it was hard for her to avoid doing so. She'd been a pushover for her father. Is that why she was so easy for the young man the night before?
She looked around, nervously, for the young man at the café, but he wasn't there, and Madge and John already were, Madge waving to Cindy and giving her a smile that seemed genuine no matter how often Cindy looked for something more judging or condescending in the look. They walked together over to the Kirk Avenue Music Hall on—not surprisingly—Kirk Avenue.
"There, see, Cindy. They've saved a table for us over there." Madge gently took hold of Cindy's arm and guided her toward the table, set among more than twenty others in a not-so-big, brick-walled room with a small, raised stage at the end away from the street front. The Kirk Avenue Music Hall was a small-venue space for comfort food and local artists and musician gigs on a side street near the Roanoke rail yards. Cindy walked to the table as if in a haze. John went over to a bar at the side to get them a round of drinks. Beer for him and Madge and a Coke for Cindy. She'd been through her too-much beer and booze phase but hadn't had a drop of it since the day she'd received that letter from . . . Keith. She had to keep reminding herself not to think of him as Timmy. Timmy Junior. In fact, it helped now not to think of him as Timmy Junior because it always brought up the image of Tim.
"He'll be right up there on stage, playing the drums," Madge said as she settled the two of them at the table.
"Does he know we are—I am—here and that we're sitting at this table?" Cindy asked, uncertainly. She was uncertain about so much of this.
"Yes, of course. He'll see John and me right off the bat. I'll bet that the first thing he'll do is pick us out. He's been so anxious about us coming down from Northern Virginia to hear his band play."
