Waiting for Aphrodite

Rick realized that he hadn't been talking, just working his lips a little. Megan was beginning to shuffle away, perhaps worrying that she had mistaken a stranger for him. So Rick tried to swallow the strange spiky thing that was in his throat and nodded his head. "Meg!"

"It is you!" She rushed him and caught him up in a hug that was entirely too stiff and powerful for someone of her size and body mass. Rick revelled in her warmth, feeling his heart speed up in his chest. His head felt hot, like he had been in the sun too much and was sure to wake up the next morning with red burns peeling off his cheeks. "God, for a minute there, I was worried that I had just been shouting at some random person."

"No, it was me," he said stupidly. "God, you look gorgeous." Why hadn't he been able to say that to her in high school, when he had brooded constantly in her shadow, feeling as though he would melt in the radiance rolling off her in waves? Of course, now it didn't matter, now it just felt like a pleasantry more than anything.

Megan looked him up and down. "You aged pretty well yourself. It's so weird that we would run into each other here."

"Yeah." Rick felt himself sweating. He should have showered before this. Why hadn't he showered?

"So how have you been this past decade or so?" They had made promises to keep in touch after high school, but never had. Rick had pressed the issue, sending countless instant messages in the first year of college, but Megan's responses eventually died away, with her much more successful college social life taking up all her time.

"Oh, you know... hanging on." Rick stared at the strange pattern of flecked dots on the bank floor. "Doing some programming work. What about you?"

The details spilled out of Megan like he had unplugged a stopper: her life, in an incoherent jumble. Rick was able to pick out that she had just got out of law school and was interning at a firm in town, and that she was very excited about all of this. She had been there at the bank to take out a lone for her new house.

"It's great that you're back in town," said Rick. "We should, er, get together some time." That was, he was sure, the way adults talked. He had seen it on TV.

"Yeah!" Megan beamed. "Man, remember when we would get together in my basement and watch the Terminator movies like, every other weekend? Those tapes were completely wrecked by the time we graduated. We should do that again. There are like, two whole more Terminator movies by now."

"Eh, they weren't very good."

"So I heard. But we should do it anyway. Add me on Facebook and we'll make some plans."

Rick tried to look up at Megan's face, but it was like some super-gravitational force was pulling his head down. The end result of the struggle was that his eyes were stuck in the middle, staring down her revealing red blouse. "I don't have Facebook."

He managed to get his head up just in time to see an expression of complete puzzlement on Megan's face, as though he had said he didn't breathe oxygen. "Um, okay. Here, give me your cell. I'll text you."

Rick hastily scribbled down the number. All the while he felt vaguely disturbed. This perky, conventionally hot, social networking young professional didn't seem like the grungy outcast Megan he had known in high school. To be honest, she seemed interchangeable with any of the vapid young girls whose eyes passed right over him and filled him with a rage he didn't quite understand. It felt a bit like he was being deceived. He had heard once about a mental disorder where the person believed that everyone around them had been replaced by perfect imposters, and that seemed like what he was feeling -- except that this bubbly Megan was about as bad an imposter as you could get while still being the right gender.

This new Megan's fingers moved in a flicker over her phone's number pad, presumably entering him into a database of hundreds of fascinating people. "Got it. Man, it's been great running into you, but I've got to be on the other side of town in half an hour. See you later!"

Rick stood in a daze after he had gone. The security guards gave him funny looks, but he was too wrapped up in that strange and most rare bliss -- a pleasant surprise.

--

Rick stood in front of the door covered in flaking green paint. He knew that he shouldn't be intimidated by that door, as it looked the same as his and indeed every other one in the building. Indeed, the paint even seemed to fall away in the same clumps, forming identical constellations of hard metal underneath. But he couldn't bring himself to knock, especially when he heard the occasional enthusiastic bellow from beyond the door. His fists felt like lead weights.

He was caught lingering in front of the floor party by the next partygoer, holding a two-four to his chest with both hands. "Hey man. Can you get the door for me?"

Rick froze, trying not to panic. This guy looked a bit like the kids who had beat him up decades ago -- the ones who were not so much strong or muscular as just big, with more than a bit of fat around their bellies. Maybe he had been one of those kids, and having to share a hallway with him was purgatory for them both. He realized that at this point not opening the door would lead to greater awkwardness, and put his hand on the cold doorknob.

"Head on in. Don't worry, the party's swinging, nobody's gonna chase you out. You from this floor?"

"Y-yeah."

"Awesome. I thought I had seen you around."

Rick pushed the door open. Inside was a cacophony of sights, sounds, and smell -- too many sensations for Rick to handle at one time. Radio rock clashed with the jocular commentary from the football game on the TV and what sounded like at least five different people. There were so many people that Rick's eyes could decide on one person or group to focus upon and instead flitted around the room like a manic squirrel. The corner of the box of beer nudged at his back, and he stumbled forward into the living room.

"Hey!" It was Jackie, already a little red-faced from drink, sitting on a far couch. "I knew you would come. Everyone, this is Rick. He's the hermit from 807."

A general roar of greeting went up, and Rick managed to move his hand in a sideways motion that vaguely resembled a wave. He was stock still, not sure where to go -- social death seemed to await at every corner. No, that was ridiculous. This was just a stupid party. No need to act like a spaz about everything.

He walked over to Jackie, making tremendous effort to use a casual enough gait. She had an indulgent smile on her face. "So this is it?"

"Yeah. It's fun to let loose and hang out with friends every once in a while, isn't it?"

"I don't know any of these people."

She tsk-tsked, sounding disappointed. "Well, let's solve that." This was followed by a round of introductions, each one more forgettable than the last. The people seemed shockingly frail and unimpressive up close, far from the booming thunder he had heard from the hallway. Some were balding, others walked with slight limps, while still others had speech impediments or accents (it was hard to tell which was which sometimes) that made everything they say sound like a bad sketch comedy bit. The floor party included people of all ages and ways of life, including a few people younger even than Rick, college kids crouched in a bohemian circle. It was a singularly unimpressive cross-section of humanity.

Jackie kept her position near Rick, like some kind of personal assistant. She inserted him into conversations like some kind of power tool, constantly fed him leading questions, and smiled at all his hesitant attempts at jokes.

One time he had went to go to the bathroom and Jackie followed him without thinking. He turned and cast her the dirtiest look he could muster up. "I'm not a special ed kid, you know," he said, whispering cruelly enough that it could reasonably be described as a hiss. "I don't need a helper."

"Of course not" said Jackie. Now it was her turn to stare at the floor. "Sorry, I didn't realize, I was..."

"Whatever." Rick went to storm off to the bathroom, but it was currently occupied. So he just stood there awkwardly and stared at Jackie until she backed off into the crowd, doing all of the storming for him.

After that Rick turned into his usual jellyfish mode, floating on the tides of banal conversation, nodding, sitting in corners, never drawing much attention. He quietly excused himself an hour or two later, telling Jeff (the one host he could find) that he had work to do. Nobody really noticed as he slipped away. Even Jackie was on a couch talking to a couple women he didn't know. They looked like representatives of the council of moms he had seen during the fire alarm.

It hadn't been that bad, he thought on the short walk back to his apartment. The people were nice, if kind of boring. It certainly wasn't the most painful social occasion he had been to. But it had been resolutely dull. Most of all, these just weren't his people. He had tried to tell an Internet-derived joke at one point and gotten nothing but blank stares. These were the peoples who got up early every morning, went to work, came home in the evening, said hello to their kids, had supper, watched sports, kissed the spouse goodnight, and then started it all over again. That lifestyle was unfathomable to Rick.

Then again, it wasn't like he had a lot of friends in the geek crowd either. But... Megan.

It hit him like an electrical shock. Megan. How had he forgotten about her, even for a moment? She had been so pretty, and so friendly.. and she wanted to get to know him again. To reconnect. She had asked for his number. Jesus Christ, that had to be a sign.

In his apartment Rick found his way to his apartment and immediately collapsed onto his couch. In the stucco configurations of his ceiling he saw Megan's face. Megan, who he had nursed a silent crush on for all of high school. She was his idea of the perfect girl -- hot, in the casual-alternative-tomboy sort of way, smart, geeky, nice, and most of all willing to talk to him. He had never asked her out, of course. He didn't think she had any interest in him, and besides which, he didn't want to jeopardize their friendship. (Or at least that was the noble-sounding excuse he used for his cowardice). Most of all he treasured the chance to be close to her, to breathe the goddess's breath, and wouldn't risk giving that up in order to chase an impossible dream.

But he had lost her, and lost her through inertia instead of courage. This time he could do it. And she would be mature enough and smart enough to see his feelings for her, and consider him for more than his surface appearance. Maybe a break was what they had needed, to see each other in new contexts.

As he stared up at the ceiling, it all unfolded before him like a reel of film. Their relationship, the awkward first date, the slow flames of love, kissing, sex... Rick felt as though he was narrating it all to his future children. A strange feeling of wonder came over him. He was glad he hadn't thrown himself after the dumb girls from college, or changed himself trying to appeal to him. It had been a long wait, but his first time with Megan would be truly special.

He stayed on the couch for a good long while, caught up in the intoxicating dreams.

--

When she was a kid, Jackie had wanted to be a doctor. The power to help people -- no, not just help people, but repair them, save their lives and make them whole again -- it seemed like the ultimate goal, the only thing worth pursuing. She adopted menageries of abandoned or stray pets, often nursing injured ones back to health before releasing them into the wilds of suburbia. But she had no head for science, and was politely told by a high school guidance counsellor that her marks in the quantitative subject had more or less disqualified her from that dream. For a while she pursued being a social worker, but had flunked out of that program eventually as well.

By any account she should have outgrown her impulse to fix people, but it kept coming back. It was all that could account for a long string of sleazy boyfriends she had wanted to transform into model citizens. In her fantasies they would hug her close at nice middle-class barbecues and talk about how they owed everything to her. That was what romance was made of, after all. But it never ended up that way.

Rick was a different kind of project. She didn't have to tame him into domesticity -- if anything, she needed to induce a little wildness. At first she had thought that all he had needed was to get laid, but her attempts t that quick fix had just made him uncomfortable. And the floor party hadn't really worked either.

Jackie felt vaguely as though she was a spider carefully lying in wait for some innocent prey. Maybe this was where the whole "cougar" thing came from. It certainly felt nice to be the predator for once.

Still, how to track this most elusive of game...

She had managed to detach herself from the party fairly early. Not as early as the fleeing Rick, of course, but before the vague aura of regret settled over the night and everyone started talking really quietly. She made her way to her apartment, vaguely drunk, and considered dropping in on Rick. If she really tried, she could seduce him -- he didn't seem like the Puritan sort, after all. But that was a bit too blatant for her style.

In the hallway of her place she managed to kick off her shoes without falling down, which was always a risk after these sorts of parties. Dante stared back at her with those black, never-blinking eyes, hungry for food. Jackie managed to pour him some, although her shaking hand sent it spiralling all over his cage. Maybe she was more drunk than she thought.

It was past her usual bedtime, and she had another early morning, but she didn't feel like sleeping. Jackie collapsed on her bed. Rick was still hanging around the back of her mind. What a weirdo. Why couldn't she stop thinking about him?

Inspiration struck. Jackie fumbled around beneath her bed until she produced a familiar, innocuous looking shoebox. Inside, however, was a rainbow of plastic and silicon, all of it distinctly phallic. She had built up quite the selection over the years. In her lighter moments, Jackie liked to think of herself as a connoisseur of sex toys. In her darker moments she just thought that this box was tremendously depressing.

She chose her weapon of choice for tonight, a thick devil-red vibrator. She flipped the switch and felt it purr in her hands. Yep, this one definitely had enough battery power left.

Jackie tugged off her top and bra, and shimmied out of her skirt and panties. She left her clothes neatly folded right next to her nightstand. She liked to be organized, so there would be nothing interrupting her.

She caught her nude body in the mirror and took a moment to examine it. She was still a nice-looking woman, if she did say so herself. Her breasts were heavy and fully round, near perfect fleshy spheres that sagged just a little bit, with her dark red nipples pointing directly to the crotch of an invisible suitor. Her pussy, sitting coyly beneath a bushy black triangle, was bright pink and glistening, almost like a toy. Hell, Jackie thought, forget still. She looked better than she had twenty years ago -- different, but in her mind better.

Jackie sat back onto her soft bed and stretched out her limbs to her fullest extent, spreading herself eagle in order to really feel the full length of her body. She began with her breasts, running her fingers gently over their soft flesh, just barely brushing her areolae. She liked to imagine a lover hovering above her, touching and teasing her, gently kissing her neck and waiting until she begged him to take her. Sometimes it was a past lover, although few of those has been so gentle in bed. Sometimes it was a movie star, or someone she had seen on the street, or just a vague ur-male with whatever traits she found attractive that second.

This time, it was Rick. She could see him, naked above her, his slim muscular form pulsing with nervous energy. This time the halting softness of his touch was not due to teasing, but from the hesitancy of inexperience. She imagined gently guiding his thick, hard cock to her folds and feeling him push in, ever so slowly. It sent a shiver of excitement through Jackie, and her nipples suddenly felt tight and hard.

Her hands roamed her body, directed by only some vague subconscious will. They made intricate circles on her thighs and the undersides of her knees, caressed her belly and her flank, before rising up to grab her breasts, rougher again this time, kneading the flesh directly and flicking a thumb over her peaks. She pictured Rick getting bolder, discovering the delights of the female form, and a mature body and earthy sexuality that none of his younger girlfriends could have offered.

There was now an urgent feeling of need and hunger coming from her pussy, and Jackie never could resist temptation for very long. She ran her fingers along the slit, another form of the tease, and brushed the area around her clit. Carefully, as if mimicking the fantasy actions of her younger lover, she put a tentative thumb on the little bud of pleasure and slid her index finger into her thoroughly wet cunt.

She could bring herself off just like this, she knew, making circling rhythms with the thumb and curling her fingers up to reach her G-spot. In fact, she shuddered at some of the orgasms she had had, times when she had reduced herself to goo using only her fingers. And, as she fell into that steady rhythm, arcing her back to put herself fully into the cycle, that was a tempting thought. But her red vibrator still lay there on the bed patiently, and the second her eyes fell across it she knew that she needed it in her.

Jackie now imagined Rick, nude and perched at her entrance with his long hard cock, but still a little afraid. She would ask him if she thought he was disgusting and he would tell her she was so beautiful he was scared. She would kiss him and whisper something comforting in his ear and then, slowly, he would push his cock into her.

In the real world, she was too worked up for the slow approach. She thrust the red phallus into her all at once, and sat up at the shock of sudden fullness. This one usually felt a little uncomfortable at first, but once she got used to its girth she could well and truly fuck herself. Slowly she began working her wrist in a familiar circular motion, driving the toy up and inside of her. It wasn't quite the rhythm of fucking, but in some ways it was better.

As she was beginning to feel the little peaks of pleasure rippling through her, Jackie impulsively hit the switch. The vibrator came to life inside her, and she let out an involuntary cry. God, that felt great. She felt as though it was her that was vibrating, like there was some kind of spirit of raw joy inside her that was bursting against the walls trying to get out. She picked up her rhythm as she began strumming her clit with her spare hand, the rest of her body entirely enslaved to her pussy.

There was no longer one fantasy -- it was Rick thrusting between her legs, it was her boyfriend from college, it was George Clooney, it was a gaggle of handsome men all waiting their turn to fuck her, it was her being gang-banged, degraded and used, it was her as the glamorous sex-queen entertaining the offers of scores of men, it was a candlelight dinner, it was everything at once and it seemed silly to imagine that it wasn't somehow every man between her legs at that point, thrusting into her with all of their hard, hungry cocks.

She felt the orgasm coming on her and picked up the pace even more, practically shoving the buzzing vibrator into her hot cunt. Now there was no fantasy, because there was no time for conscious thought, just the waves of heat passing through her body. She felt the orgasm approaching, tensing in her body like a gun ready to fire, and frantically fucked herself towards that moment.