Waiting for Aphrodite

"I should go," he said.

"You can stay if you like."

Rick stood up, still a little dizzy. He had a hard time discerning his clothes, in scattered jumbles on the floor. "No. I have... things to do."

"Well, all right. But... come over again. We should talk."

"Yeah. Definitely." She didn't believe him -- even he could see that -- but she let him leave anyway.

Rick had thought that this would be a moment of glory for him, that he would finally become a man. But he felt more like a boy than ever.

--

Jackie spent entirely too long in the shower afterwards. Rick's cum had long since dribbled out of her and been washed away by the flow of warm water. She was trying to sort her thoughts, but the second she put two thoughts together they tumbled apart with a distinct clatter. There was a strange elemental uncertainty filling her, and she didn't like it.

So Rick hadn't lived up to her fantasy. He had, in fact, been the polar reverse of the man she had fantasized about. In bed he had been clumsy and quick, and while she expected someone young enough to teach a few tricks, she hadn't wanted to have to show him the whole game.

She shouldn't have done it. Was that the type of thing she did, fuck some loser just because he asked her for it? Was she that kind of woman?

Jackie got out of the shower, as she was starting to prune from the steam. She didn't really feel cleansed at all. She had planned a dozen harsh things to say to Rick the next time she saw him, things she should have said tonight. She mouthed them angrily as she put on her clothes. But still, she wondered if it was all right to be anticipating seeing him again so much.

--

Rick had spent most of the next day in a strange haze. He couldn't pay attention to any of his usual websites, much less the code for a game he had been making as a distraction. He went down to the movie theatre, because that always was good at establishing itself as a self-enclosed universe where all that mattered was that video flickering in the dark. But he couldn't pay attention to the movie either.

He traced the route home automatically, not thinking about anything but the jumbled-up memories of the previous night. It took him a moment to realize that there was a hesitation in his journey -- his key wasn't fitting into his door. Frowning, he tried to jam it in further, thinking it had to be a problem of technique.

The door opened and Jackie was behind it, looking irritated. "Yes?"

Rick stepped back, startled. "What are you doing here?"

"I live here." And sure enough, it was her apartment in side. Not even thinking about it, Rick had been trying to enter the wrong place.

He flushed. "Sorry. I was kind of on autopilot and, uh, well."

"Sure, just come right in. Start propositioning me like I'm some kind of sex vending machine that you don't have to pay attention to until you get hungry."

Rick glanced around. She was talking awfully loud. That was all he could think about -- the volume. His brain couldn't handle the content of the accusations right now. "We should, uh, we shouldn't do this out here."

Jackie spread her arms wide. "Why not? You hate all these people anyway. Why do you care what they think of you?"

"Jackie..." He tried to step in towards her, maybe into her apartment so they could argue in private. She shoved him back. The physical force startled him. It finally awoke something in him that broke through the clouds of confusion: hot anger."

"Don't touch me," he said, bordering on a yell. "What the fuck is your problem? You chase after me for weeks, and when I give in you hate me for it?"

"Well maybe I was expecting a bit more from you."

Rick hissed, wounded. "Well, you should take what you can get. Look in the mirror sometimes, why don't you."

She was crying. He was crying. Both of them suddenly realized how public they were making their sordid affairs and turned away, retreating back into their apartments.

Rick felt hot shame. She had gone for the low blow first, but he had responded in kind. God, why did he do these things? Fall over himself for someone like Megan who didn't really give a damn, and then treat someone who actually appeared to have affection for him like trash. No, that wasn't right. It wasn't a question of disproportion, or misattributed wrath. He shouldn't have yelled those things at anyone, regardless of whether or not they would have sex with them.

Rick sat down on his living room floor. His computer, its screen full of irrelevant crap, stared blankly at him. He hated Jackie. He hated Megan. He hated himself for resorting to Jackie, a middle-aged woman whose best days were behind her, and he hated himself for hating her. What had she done do to deserve it? She wasn't the right girl: she wasn't Megan. But no, it wasn't Megan, because even Megan wasn't Megan. It was that glowing, ethereal image of girlhood, that lovely creature whose love would validate him completely.

And then Rick saw himself, as though from a distance. He was a bundle of hatred and condescension, held together only by a few failing stitches of social inhibitions. He saw his wrath pouring out to drown the world, begrudging everyone for not being some godlike creature that only existed in the world of screens.

If anyone was worthy of hate, of the kind of things they had been yelling just a moment ago, it was him. But, in that moment of lucidity, he saw that nobody was.

--

The bus seemed to be moving especially slowly today. Jackie considered that it was just in her mind, but she didn't think she was hallucinating the old cars speeding past the hulking lump of public steel. Then again, work had seemed to go on forever today too. It was a slow day, and there were no distractions to rescue her from the turmoil in her mind.

She kept replaying the argument with Rick over in her mind, and every time his words grew more eloquent and more vicious. He shouldn't have said it, she thought, but it was true. She was getting old and ugly. Jackie had spent this morning accidentally obeying Rick's last edict: she had looked in the mirror, for what had to have been an hour, picking out each individual flaw -- each unfortunate facial line, each ounce of fat she could pinch, and the sag of her tired-looking breasts. Sure, Rick had seemed enchanted with her body a couple days before, but who was he to judge? And he had changed his tune soon enough.

How pathetic -- a virgin in his late twenties (he had never actually told her his age), a miserable loner, and here she had been lusting after him. How pathetic.

Maybe she should have treated him better, not let her disappointment show so much. She imagined herself comforting him and telling him that he had done fine. But you could only baby a person for so long. Why bother trying to drag someone kicking and screaming into adulthood when they would only insult you for it and treat you like a whore?

The distraction had shown at work. Her subordinates had had to repeat things several times before they got through to her, and when she had been dragged out to deal with an angry customer she had almost let him browbeat her into relenting. The other employees had whispered behind their back. She wanted to snap at them, but being the manager of a tiny mall clothing store didn't really command all that much respect, and she didn't want to press it, to turn into the middle-aged tyrant they all expected of her.

So it was in an entirely tired and frustrated mood that Jackie arrived at her apartment to find Rick sitting in front of her door, knees tucked up to his chest.

"Move," she said.

"I just wanted to say I'm sorry," he said. It all came out in one long breath, like air escaping from a punctured balloon. "I shouldn't have treated you that way, and I definitely shouldn't have said those things to you. I... I'm an asshole. And I'm sorry about it."

"Okay." Rick was still there. He was waiting for something more from her, and she wasn't sure she wanted to give it.

"I mean, you've been nicer to me than anyone has been in years. So... I want to start over."

"We can't start over. What's happened has happened." Jackie felt oddly detached from what she was saying.

"Then can we try to recover from it?" He looked up at her hopefully, desperately, like a kid begging for his favourite toy but knowing he probably wasn't going to get it.

Jackie sighed. She was inclined to give Rick a second chance, or let him give her a second chance -- she couldn't figure out which. She wasn't sure where that inclination came from. Maybe it was something about his skinny body, or his bright freckled face, that appealed to her interior sense of aesthetics.

"Get up," she said. "And come inside."

Inside her apartment, Rick nervously sat down on the couch. "You want a drink?" Jackie asked.

"Uh, yeah."

She retrieved a half-full bottle of scotch from the recesses of her cupboard, a present from a former suitor. It felt like the occasion for scotch. "Have you drank before? It's okay if you haven't."

"Of course. I mean, not a lot... I'm mostly a pop kind of guy."

Jackie chuckled and delivered the drinks to the table. Rick immediately took a long sip from the small glass, and screwed his face up in shock at its sourness. Jackie managed to resist the urge to laugh. He could be cute, sometimes.

"You have a lizard."

"It's an iguana. Dante."

"That's cool."

More silence, as they both focused hard on not saying anything in particular.

"So, what do you want from me, Rick?"

"Want from you?"

"Like, are we gonna be just friends, or is this a romantic thing? Or maybe something in between?"

Rick took a long time to compose his answer. "I want whatever you want. Whatever you're willing to give me."

"Aw, bullshit!" Jackie slammed her glass down on the table for emphasis. "You know what you want, you're just scared of offending me. You know, there is a middle ground between being an asshole and being a jellyfish."

She was provoking him, she knew, and she wasn't really sure what reaction she wanted. So she wasn't sure if, when he calmly folded his hands and spoke softly, her bait had been successful or not.

"Okay, I'll be honest. I want to make love to you."

"You want to fuck me, you mean."

"That too. But mainly, I want too be your boyfriend. Wait, that sounds too high-school. Your lover, I guess. Your man. I don't know if I love you -- I mean, I don't know if I've ever loved anyone but myself -- but I want to try. And I know it's been rough, and I was lousy in bed, but we can work on it. We can keep trying until we get it right."

Rick's speech petered out on a note of faint desperation. He looked forlornly at the ground. Jackie got up, downed the last of her drink, and walked around the table to sit next to Rick. She put her arm around his shoulders. She had come over here with the intention of telling him that he was sweet and that one day he would make a girl very happy, then send him away with a tear in his eye. But instead she ended up kissing him.

Their kisses were soft and unhurried. It was just two people, uncomfortably close to each other, tentatively testing what their mouths felt like together. Rick's lips were so soft, Jackie thought. They were like butter. She felt like she subsist on them for days.

He reached up to hold her head, filtering his fingers through her black tresses. In the process he managed to elbow her in the shoulder, but Jackie didn't complain. It was almost endearing. She pressed forward closer into him, encouraging him to take control of more of her body -- to take her, if you wanted to get right down to it.

This upset Rick's balance, and he fell back, and they were soon vertical on the sofa. Jackie giggled as she adjusted to straddle him. "I-I don't know about this." She felt like she had reasons for uncertainty, reasons she wouldn't want to this cute young man underneath her, but she couldn't remember any of them just now. "But... I want to do this. I don't know about boyfriends or lovers, but let's just see where this goes. Okay?"

Rick nodded. She ruffled her hands through his short hair, just to feel the warmth from his skin. He felt so slight beneath her, like a gust of wind that just might slip away. She leaned down and kissed him, then kissed him again, then kissed him but not on the lips, more on the earlobe, so she could whisper to him as soft as she could manage.

"Lean back and enjoy it. I'll teach you everything you need to know."

She tugged at the hem of his shirt, and he dutifully helped in removing it, although in the process her shirt got tangled up in it, and since it was already halfway removed, she just decided to shuck it to the floor. Rick was staring straight at her breasts again, threatening to burst out from beneath her black bra. Jackie smirked. She loved the power that her breasts had, to reduce men to gibbering messes. Rick's goggle-eyed stare made her feel like some kind of idol of sexuality -- a starlet or maybe one of those fertility gods.

She flicked the soft pink flesh around his nipples and he jumped. Jackie chuckled. "I told you to relax. Remember -- it's not all about the penetration. Every part of the human body is an erogenous zone."

To demonstrate her lesson, Jackie left a trail of butterfly kisses down the neck to his collarbone, a subtle hardness almost as intriguing as the more obvious hardness poking through Rick's pants. Rick wasn't very muscular, but his lithe form had its own elements of attraction, like a smooth surface of pale skin she could rub her face against and lick, leaving long swathes of warm saliva on her man's body.

He almost jumped again when she moved up and flicked her tongue against his nipple. God, he was cute when he was startled. She swirled her tongue around it, quickly making his nipple into a hard red bud and earning strained groans of pleasure. While she was doing this Jackie kept slowly grating her body, shifting back and forth on Rick's crotch and keeping his cock rock hard inside his jeans. She loved being in control like this, performing her erotic art, showing Rick exactly what she could do.

After she had spent some time administering to both of his nipples, and a few other sensitive parts on his upper body, Jackie decided it was time to descend a bit more. Rick was more than eager to get his pants off, and even managed to do it without either kicking her or totally breaking the flow. She took a moment to look at him. He looked so vulnerably and innocent before her like this, ready for her ravishment. Of course, his big erection detracted a bit from the innocent look, but she liked it all the same.

Jackie nestled against Rick's left leg, taking in his body heat as she kissed her way up his thigh. He squirmed under her, his red cock eager for attention, but she was taking her time. She kissed his pubic bone through his dark curls, then shifted down past his dick to take one of his balls in her mouth. She enjoyed the soft warmth of his most vulnerable part on her tongue, and the strange expressions that he made with every lick. For a moment she considered veering down to his ass, maybe sticking a finger or two in there, but she decided that was an advanced lesson for another day.

And then, finally, his cock itself, another thing that produced of his startled half-jumps that she was beginning to love. Jackie took Rick's cockhead in her mouth and thoughtfully whirled her tongue around it. It was, she decided, pretty good -- smooth and thick and, while of course not pleasant tasting, at least bearable. It was at least worth sampling a bit more of, and before she knew it, she was bobbing up and down on Rick's erection, in the midst of a full-on blowjob.

All was quiet in the apartment. For once there were no arguments or loud music coming through the walls, and no car alarms going off on the street outside. The only sounds, which sounded deafeningly loud, was Jackie slurping and sucking, and Rick letting out increasingly high gasps and moans.

"I'm... I'm gonna..." he said, obviously straining under the sheer pleasure.

"It's okay," she said, although she wasn't sure how well he could make it out with her mouth around his dick. Regardless, Rick seemed to have gotten the message, as a moment later she was feeling hot jets of his cum hitting the back of her mouth. She pulled him out of her mouth so that she wouldn't gag on it, and he shot another pair of streams, decorating her cheek and her black bra with his essence.

Jackie brushed Rick's cum off of her face, trying to do so as seductively as possible. "My, you're full of jizz." Men thought that was a compliment, right? That their amount of semen was a sign of their virility?

Rick looked dazed, like he had just been too close to a grenade. Jackie shifted up to straddle his chest and removed her bra. That snapped him back to reality.

She tried her best schoolteacher voice. "You liked that, didn't you?"

"Uh-huh."

"So why don't you return the favour?"

Not really giving Rick much of a choice about it, Jackie shifted forward to straddle his face, managing to twist off her panties on the way up. It was sink or swim time for him, she decided. She felt her dampness settle on the cleft of his chin. She realized that she was very wet, almost embarrassingly so, and that her body was positively humming with erotic anticipation. When had she gotten so horny?

Rick mumbled something into her bush that might have been "What do I do?"

She petted his head. "Just start licking, honey. You'll figure it out soon enough. You can breathe down there, right?" A nod that just barely avoided being a headbutt to her privates. "Well, what, are you waiting for?"

She felt the first soft wetness of his tongue settle upon her slippery pussy lips. Is was a nice, gentle sensation that at a different time she might find relaxing. But right now there was an inner beast in Jackie desperate to get at least one orgasm out of this whole affair. "You're gonna have to do it harder, Rick," she said, managing to keep her soft pedagogical voice even as she began to slowly hump his face.

And whatever his other faults, Rick was a good student. His tongue was soon pressing hard as it explored the length of her pussy. "Oooh, now just a bit further up... yeeeeees, that's it." She let out a long moan as he finally found her clit. "That, my young man, is a woman's clitoris. Lick it, touch it, squeeze it... do whatever you want to it, good things will happen."

But Rick had other places to explore. His tongue was soon squirming sideways and sliding past her nether lips into her tight channel. The feeling of his warmth on her inner walls sent shivers through Jackie. She kept up a low monologue of instructions, telling him where to arch his tongue and when to speed up. Those instructions quickly began to mix in with curses and moans, and were gradually overtaken by them. This boy, she suspected, was born to eat pussy.

Before long his individual motions were lost, transformed into a general haze of wet warm pleasure. Jackie muttered obscenities as she slid back and forth on his face, rubbing her clit against his nose as Rick tongued her. She felt as though she was being filled with some kind of warm liquid, a syrupy bliss that was overtaking her body. For a moment, she though she could live forever like this, in this state of near-nirvana. And then she burst, and it all flooded out of her in an orgasm that ran through her body and wrecked her mind.

Jackie almost fell off the edge of the couch in the aftermath of her massive release, but fortunately Rick had his arms around her waist and managed to keep her steady. She rolled to the side, struggling to find room on her small couch. Her whole body felt almost painfully hot, and she half expected to see burn marks on Rick's skin. "Phew. You, um, might have a talent for that."