Full Moon, Mulberry Inn

La Quinta -- in Spanish, it means "the fifth." To Matt, it meant a sad breakfast of pale bagels, bitter coffee, and tiny boxes of cereal he wouldn't look at twice in a grocery store. It meant light switches perpetually too far away from the bed and the cheapest shower curtains you'd ever see that weren't wrapped around a body on the lead story of the local news. Was it his fifth stay La Quinta this year? Was it the fifth La Quinta he'd booked in the Bay Area? He didn't know, he didn't care, and all he could really hold against the La Quinta at this point was that it didn't have a bar.

Matt hung his suit for tomorrow in the closet, and put his shirt on a hanger. He brought it into the bathroom and turned the shower on at full heat. If he could steam some of the travel wrinkles out of the pale cotton while he cleaned up, he might not have to wrestle with his room's dubious ironing board in the morning. Under the water, he flinched when the hot drops first lanced into his skin but endured because he knew it would loosen his plane-stiffened shoulders. Flying coach wasn't meant for people over six feet tall, and his travel budget had been too tight this month to spring for business class. He unwrapped the paper from the little block of soap. No matter where he went, East Coast, West Coast, Middle America, Deep South, one thing was constant: all hotel soap smelled the same. He scrubbed at his chest and arms, then his long thighs and calves. Turning away from the spray, he lathered his cock and balls with generous hands and stroked himself hard as water ran through his dark hair and down his back.

This was his game when his flight got in early enough. He teased his cock close to the point of release, then stopped and finished his shower, letting himself slowly drop back to soft. He loved the tension it put in him, the feeling of vibrating wire strung from hipbone to hipbone. It was that feeling he liked to take out to a bar to watch people and the tension that he liked to hold while deciding if he thought women across a dark room were attractive while twisting his wedding ring around and around on his finger. He toweled off, decided not to shave around his goatee until the morning then dressed in fresh khakis, a blue button-down, and a jacket against the San Francisco fog.

Matt always booked himself a rental car on business trips. Room service and hotel restaurants wore out their welcome with him in the first year of heavy travel. Now when he had the time, he spent his wait in the airport before boarding scrolling through online reviews to find places the locals liked that were far enough away from his hotel that he'd get to see some of the city. Then, if he was lucky, there was a decent bar nearby for some additional people watching - the same old basic cable crap and late night softcore porn got old about six months after hotel menus for him. Tonight, he had good fortune on both accounts: the fresh noodles, stretched between the fingers of an old Chinese lady with machine precision before being dropped into boiling broth, were worth the trip and down the block he spotted the red sign of the Mulberry Inn, bright in the light of the full moon.

Chinatown was for tourists, he'd been to the Bay enough to know that, but along the fringes was where you found the really interesting things, the family restaurants that had been operating for a hundred years but didn't make a big deal about it, the bodegas that were a thin veneer over all-night mah jong games in the back store room. The Mulberry Inn was exactly what he'd been looking for. The brick hotel was only six stories tall and lacked the glazed tiles and other Chinese-y architectural schtick of many of the buildings around it. It might have been built in the 1920s or 1930s, by his best guess. Matt knew hotels -- and he knew instinctively this one would have a bar.

Just off the lobby, he found exactly what he'd hoped. The Mulberry Inn had been grand and discreet at one point, the kind of place a black-and-white movie starlet may have escaped with a married lover for a weekend or reporters in the Woodward and Bernstein mold might have met a source to get confidential information on City Hall while putting back boilermakers and watching through the ferns for eavesdroppers. Now, its glory had faded but not fully departed the wood-paneled walls, brass rails, and framed botanical prints. A half dozen people nursed drinks against the foggy October night. Matt's preferred seat at any bar, the far right corner, was even open.

The bartender was young and eager-faced, Hispanic or maybe half-Chinese. It was hard to tell in the dark bar and San Francisco was such a melting pot Matt hardly thought it mattered. His jet hair was cut short on the sides, long and full across the top, a kid haircut. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbow showing tattoos of thickly-outlined stars, roses, and skulls that, like this whole hotel, seemed to be a half-step out of modern. A few faded Chinese characters on the bartender's forearm, obviously put on earlier than the Sailor Jerry ink, made Matt think it was less likely the kid was Asian since he'd only seen people who didn't speak Chinese stamp themselves with it. Matt ordered a vodka martini, dirty, and did his first detailed sweep of the room.

At one table, two plump, pink blondes about thirty years apart, were drinking mai tais. Matt made them for mother and daughter, which was always an interesting interaction to watch in a bar. He was too far away to hear their conversation, but daughter seemed to be enthusiastically explaining something to Mom. Mom puzzled. Here on vacation, Matt thought, Daughter's trying to get her to go to the Museum of Modern Art tomorrow.

At the bar with him was an older man drinking scotch who had hair as black as the kid behind the bar's, but a white moustache. A younger man sat between Matt and the old guy, a few seats away, draining a beer. Matt clocked him as a fellow business traveler. It was the familiarity of the guy's shoes -- when you first started traveling, you packed all these different shoes for flying, for work, for going out, for running on your hotel's wheezing treadmill. When you got more seasoned, you realized what a pain it was to pack that much and found a pair of shoes that looked nice enough for work, were comfortable enough you didn't mind wearing them out after, and slipped off for airport security. They weren't any good on the treadmill, but at that point most everyone had given up fighting against the caloric creep of room service. Matt hadn't. He ran every morning to keep trim and burn off some of the sexual energy he built up overnight in an empty bed.

Three men at one of the tables were sharing a pitcher of beer, laughing and doing imitations of someone. It wasn't a celebrity, so Matt guessed it was an officious co-worker. None of them seemed too pissed off, and it had the air of a well-worn joke among them when blowing off steam at the end of the day.

In the darkest back corner of the bar, at a high table by herself, was the woman he couldn't believe he hadn't noticed first when he walked in the door. Her honey blonde hair was parted deep on the left and nearly covered her right eye. Her skin was pale, even in the low light of the bar, and her eyes were rimmed in smoky makeup. If he hadn't seen her pick up the glass of dark wine in front of her and touch it to her glossy, carmine lips, he might have taken her for a mannequin set in the corner for further retro effect. She wore a simple black satin dress with enough of a plunge in the front that he could see the generous swells of her breasts and the deep shadow between them. She was easily the most attractive woman he'd seen in a bar this year, maybe in five years.

What made Matt's mouth go dry around his martini, though, were her stockings. She wore real silk stockings -- not pantyhose, not nylon thigh-highs. He couldn't see the backs of her legs, but he knew the light brown seams would be there, running from her heels to her garters. Most people wouldn't have been able to tell the difference, especially not across a dark bar, but Matt had a particular affinity for real silk stockings. Like a diehard Led Zeppelin fan can pick out one of their songs from just the opening chord, Matt was attuned enough to silk stockings that he could instantly find them on his peripheral vision just from the way they caught the light. His cock lunged, already primed from the shower and as surprised to see her shapely silks as the more rational parts of Matt. He shifted in his seat to hide his growing erection but still take her in without staring.

After he finished his martini, Matt ordered another and put a ten dollar tip on the bar for the kid.

"You see the blonde in the corner there?" Matt asked, casually. "You know if she's waiting here for someone?" The idea that a pretty woman in rare lingerie drinking alone in a tatty hotel bar was a working girl was foremost in his mind.

"Oh, uh," the bartender looked over his shoulder casually enough not to be noticed. "No, I don't think so. She comes in here every once in a while, likes to sit alone and have a few glasses of wine. Charges it to a room, so I guess she stays upstairs sometimes. I've never seen her with anybody." The ten disappeared into his pocket. "She likes Malbec and always dresses like that."

"Like what?"

"Like old-fashioned, but not like a costume. It's just her style, I guess. Probably why she likes staying here. I dig it. You dig it, too?"

"Yeah, I do," Matt admitted. In ten years of watching people in bars, joining conversations, telling pretty girls what they already knew, he'd never done anything but talk and buy a drink here or there. He'd never even set his hand on a woman's leg on his bar jaunts. He could barely think straight now for how intensely he wanted to walk across the bar, kneel in front of her, part her thighs and rub his cheeks along their silk covering until she let him bury his tongue inside her.

"You want to send her a drink? She's almost done with her first glass of wine."

"Definitely. Yes. Do you have some paper?" The bartender dug around next to the cash register and produced a pen and a pad of the hotel's printed stationery. Right under the red slashes of "The Mulberry Inn," Matt wrote:

We have something in common. Can you guess what it is?

He folded the sheet and handed it to the bartender, who took it over to the blonde with a fresh glass of wine. Her red lips quirked up at the corners when she read the note and she stopped the bartender from leaving her table with a light touch on his arm. She pulled a pen from her purse and wrote something on the folded note, then handed it back to him. The bartender ferried the note to Matt without unfolding it. In looping, feminine script it read:

Thank you for the drink. Is what we have in common that we're both staying alone at this hotel?

Matt swallowed hard and self-consciously dropped his left hand to his lap so she couldn't see his wedding band from where she was sitting. Had she seen it already? By writing back she was staying alone, she either hadn't seen or didn't care. He looked at her without bothering to hide it. She brushed blonde hair out of her eyes and smiled at him with smooth teeth, raising her glass a few inches in salute. He handed the folded note back to the bartender after writing:

We're not alone anymore if we're in good company. A good guess, but that's not it. We share a certain appreciation.

She sent back to him:

For fine old hotels gone to seed? I love all the dark corners in this place. Puts ideas in my head. How about you?

Matt made what he hoped was a deft maneuver and pulled his wedding band off with his right hand and slipped it into his billfold in his jacket pocket. He wrote:

That's not it, but I'm always interested in ideas, Why don't you come over and sit next to me and tell me some?

She smiled brilliantly and even blushed a little when she read it, delighted by their game. She didn't make a move to come over, but wrote:

I don't suppose it's my silk stockings? I LOVE the way they feel against my legs but I love rubbing them against someone else's legs even more.

Their flirting had stiffened his cock completely and it was straining at the leg of his khakis. He wrote:

You got it. And I would like to feel them on my legs -- and under my hands, and against my face, and wrapped around my back...

The bartender grinned at each of them whenever he delivered a note. Though he couldn't see what they said, the arc of sexual energy between them was palpable. No one else in the bar seemed to notice, wrapped up in their own conversations and thoughts. She wrote:

I was hoping that was it. I'm going to finish this glass of wine and go upstairs to Room 417. The door will be unlocked.

Matt's vision shaded red when he read this. He looked across the room at her and she held his eyes with hers, then confidently swallowed the last of her wine, collected her purse, and turned back to the lobby. Walking away, he could see how her dress hugged her slim waist and full ass and of course the silk seams up the backs of her shapely legs. It took most of his self-control not to just stand up and follow right after her. His mind flooded with images pressing her back against the wall of the slow old elevator and yanking her dress up over the tops of her stocking so he could see them in all their glory. Instead, he busied his hands with closing out his tab and handsomely tipping the bartender. Am I really going to do this? Can I? Matt thought of his wife at home, of the gentle, dry, uncomplicated companionship they had developed that made him traveling forty weeks a year easy for both of them. They had not had sex since his birthday, three months ago, but he had never done more than flirt with another woman since they were married.

He weighed his options. The chances that he was ever going to have an opportunity like this one ever again were low. The blonde was very attractive, even without the stockings, but the thought of being with someone who enjoyed wearing them for sex as much as he enjoyed her doing so was what had turned his cock into a compass point, seeking her out. The risk was very low. He wasn't staying here, he wasn't from California and she was a traveler, too. They didn't even know each other's names, and she seemed to want to keep it that way. He had a condom in his wallet. Why not? Some harmless fun then everyone could go back to their real lives. Matt walked out to the lobby and took the elevator to the fourth floor.

The door to Room 417 was shut but unlocked, just as she said it would be. The Mulberry Inn hadn't installed a keycard system and the thick walls and surprisingly luxurious carpet muffled the sound of him opening the door. What it did not dampen was the short pants of pleasure coming from the bed. While he had been deliberating, she had stripped out of her dress, bra, and panties and spread out on top of the lone bed in nothing but her silk stocking and black garter belt. She was pinching one hard pink nipple with her left hand and rubbing her clit with the index and middle finger of her right, arching her pelvis against them. When he walked to the edge of the bed, she smiled at him invitingly and gestured for him to join her with fingers already slick with her wetness.

Matt dropped his jacket, and almost broke the buttons off his shirt getting out of it. His pants, undershirt, and boxers followed. He wasn't usually a strip down immediately sort of guy, but he hadn't expected that kind of invitation in his wildest dreams and he didn't want anything coming between his skin and maximum contact with her stockings.

"You keep doing that," he nodded at her hand, which had gone back to her clit, "and I'll start at the bottom." He knelt on the bed and rubbed both his hands over her left foot, relishing the smoothness of the silk over her petite toes, his eyes feasting on her legs, her bare breasts, her pouting, hairless pussy. He lifted her foot to his mouth to kiss it. She didn't smell like sweat, or like the kind of floral perfume he thought a young woman who liked vintage lingerie might wear. She smelled clean, spicy, and green, almost like an autumn walk in the woods. It turned him on even more, and he rubbed his cheek against the sole of her foot while she moaned out her first orgasm.

Matt continued up her leg, brushing his dark goatee against the inside curve of her calf until he reached her knee. Bent low to the bed, he lifted her left leg and set it on his shoulder so he could more easily kiss the silk covering the back crook of her knee. She thrashed and gasped at the contact with sensitive skin.

"You like that, huh?" Matt asked, before burying his lips in the back of her knee again, playfully sucking on her skin through her stockings between kisses.

"Mmmmmmm," she reached for his left hand with both of hers and pulled it toward the radiant heat of her opening. Matt continued to rub his free hand and face against her stockings, but knew when he was needed. She spread her puffy outer lips so he could see the rich pink inside, her clit magenta and nearly the size of the tip of his thumb. His lips puckered at the thought of sucking it while her silk-clad legs drummed the tension and release of her orgasm out on the bed. He ran his index finger lightly between her folds, releasing milky moisture before sinking into her. Even with one finger, she closed tightly around him and he gently pushed in and withdrew, twisting around to feel all the textures of her slick walls.

The smell of her aroused sex was the same clean, woodsy smell as the rest of her skin, but with a pleasantly heavy musk. Matt continued slowly fingering her and licking the back of her knee as her hips rode up to meet his every thrust with increasing urgency. He opened her up with two fingers and pushed them into her up to the last knuckle, drawing a satisfied gasp. Unable to resist her sticky, pulsing folds any longer, Matt repositioned between her spread legs and ran his tongue around her open outer lips, stopping to lap her swollen clit as he passed it. His fingers drove slowly but deeply inside her as she squeezed them.

He closed his lips entirely over her clit and swirled his tongue around it. She wrapped her legs around his head and pulled him close. The silk-on-silk rasp of her crossing legs made his cock throb painfully against the bedspread. He increased the pace with tongue and fingers, forcing sharp gasps and inarticulate cries of pleasure out of her body with each push. She clenched down on him, harder than before, and let out a full-throated yelp as her legs shook and she soaked his black goatee with thicker juices than before. Matt slowly withdrew his fingers from her spasming channel.

She was temporarily satisfied, flushed with coming and panting lightly on the bed, but Matt's erection was insistent. He rose to his knees again and took one of her silk-covered ankles in each hand, then placed them against his left shoulder so her thighs were pressed together in front of him. He took his smooth, upward-curving shaft in his right hand and ran the head against the line where her legs met. She moaned and fondled her breasts.

"God that's so sexy. I want to come like this because I'm not sure how long I'll last at this point, then I'm going to open that tight pussy up when I'm ready to go again." She smiled with raised eyebrows and pushed her thighs back against his erection.

His head was already slick with the precum he'd been dripping since the moment he first saw her. He pushed his cock between her raised thighs just below her knees and started stroking between them. He had used a silk stocking to masturbate before, wearing it over his fist like a glove. It was absolutely nothing like the real thing. He couldn't control himself and pounded frantically against her, the rasp of the silk against his cock making each thrust more frenzied than the last until he groaned and shot three long strands across her belly. She swiped one finger across the biggest blob, gathering up his semen, then sucked it off her finger. She parted her thighs to release his cock and continued to scoop up and swallow his spend.