Apartment Stories Ch. 02

I leaned on my cane. I must have looked senile -- mouth open, eyes wide and washed out, befuddled.

A young woman approached.

She was a dead ringer for Viv. Astral twins separated by half a century. The number of years and the volume of water under the bridge unnerved me.

The young woman wore a light summer dress. I remembered a dress like it on Viv. The vague outlines of it, rather than the specific color or pattern. The way the fabric flowed in places and stretched in others, both the flowing and the stretching beguiling in their own ways. On the young woman, the dress looked retro and maybe a little trendy. On Viv, it was just the way women dressed in the summer in those days. The young woman wore white Chuck Taylor All Stars, no socks. Viv might have done the same, but I couldn't remember.

A dark haired Marilyn. An hourglass figure. A dress that hypnotized in its movements. Zaftig, my Yiddish friends would say of the girl. I didn't even speak the language but the word captured her essence better than any in my mother tongue. Juicy and succulent indeed.

My daughter, almost as old as my memories of the original dress, waited for me, finger poised on the elevator's call button. I moved slowly at the best of times these days, but had stopped at the sound of soft footfalls behind me. The sight of Viv's twin had robbed me of locomotion -- either the will or the ability.

"Dad," called my daughter impatiently.

I ignored her. She would blame it on my dodgy hearing, never considering anything else.

The young woman, Viv's twin, approached, dress swaying to her movements like a snake that has been charmed. Or maybe it was me, the charmed one.

It sucked to be a large fraction of a century old. At another, earlier time, I would have felt something more than mere nostalgia at the sight of an attractive woman. Comes a time when nostalgia is all that remains.

The girl slowed, not sure what to do about the addled old man in her way.

She wore more makeup than Viv ever had. Dark raccoon eyes, lipstick the color of arterial blood. Still, it worked. Maybe Viv would have done the same at the same age, fifty years on.

"I'm sorry," I said as I shuffled to the side.

The woman moved past. "For what?" she asked over her shoulder. She smiled and I was gut-punched, unable to breath for a moment. The smile would stay with me like a tattoo.

The woman took the stairs. I shuffled for the elevator.

"Would you mind driving past the old house?" I asked after we'd done my weekly shopping.

"Oh, Dad. Are you sure?"

"Yes."

Jo was worried, rightly so, that visiting the old house would make me maudlin and depressed. I was more susceptible to the ebb and flow of moods. Stupidly giddy one moment, on the verge of unexplained tears the next.

The house was where Viv and I had started. It had been our first house, where newly married we had played at being adults. Where that playing had eventually produced Jo because play often had consequences.

Jo drove, following roads that I knew by name, but no longer by sight. Cattle used to watch these roads. Now houses did, and strip malls.

Suburbia ended as though held back by a spell and we drove on into scenery that I remembered. Jo knew the way and turned this way and that until we neared the house.

"Can you park please?"

"I thought you wanted to drive by."

"I changed my mind. Park please."

We turned right and crunched along the gravel driveway that led to the house. It seemed shorter now than it used to, closer to the road. Jo stopped the car next to the house and before the barn. The sound of absolutely nothing embraced us.

At length I got out of the car, my legs and my back whining at the indignity of movement. I stood, placed my cane carefully, and looked at the house. Painted plywood covered the windows like eye patches. The deck sagged. The occasional railing spindle had been kicked out by teenagers because teenagers were the default perpetrators of mindless vandalism and acts I no longer understood.

The house looked sad and forlorn. I longed to go inside but knew that the house had been buttoned up securely to avoid liability. Teenagers would be kept out. Ghosts would be kept in.

The margins of the town had encroached over the decades and the house was now designated as expendable in the face of progress, of urban sprawl. It would soon be demolished, its foundation dug up. Where would the ghosts live then, I wondered. The trees that stood sentinel would be removed unless protected by the town out of respect for their age. A declining number of residents would remember the farmhouse that once stood here and the fields that once grew produce. Ludicrously-sized homes would sprout up instead.

I walked through the tall weeds to the back yard. I would have burrs on my trousers and Jo would tsk as she would later have to pluck them off. My cane rustled through the undergrowth like the most harmless of scythes.

Jo let me walk unaccompanied, perhaps sensing my mood, perhaps more interested in whatever she was looking at on her phone.

At the back of the house, I sat on a bench that looked as old and worn out and rickety as I felt. I leaned against the bricks behind me and allowed their warmth to seep into my shoulders.

Before me lay fields and beyond that a woodlot, unchanged in the decades since we lived here. The deck used to hold our patio furniture and a charcoal barbecue. It was also where the clothesline extended to a pole in the yard. The pole in the yard still stood, as did the pole on the deck with the pulley that was always too high for Viv.

I should have lowered this end of the clothesline as she'd asked me to do many times, but then I would have deprived myself of the view. Viv on her toes, reaching up to peg a shirt on the line.

Viv on her toes. Her heels -- the ones she scraped, sanded, and lotioned obsessively -- raised up off the wood of the deck. I followed the lines upwards. From heels to tendons that flared into calf muscles, bunched into shapely knots. I'd always been a sucker for calves. Then the covered bits -- the thighs hazily outlined through the fabric of her dress by the sun. The hips, full, and the waist narrow. Tanned arms reaching up to fasten a peg to the clothesline. The muscles of her shoulders.

Her dress, tight in spots and loose in others. A thin sheath that her body operated within. It fluttered at her knees in the light breeze.

"You really could lower the line a bit you know."

"You could use a step stool."

I never lowered the line and she never used a stool, at least not when I was around. Viv on her toes, heels off the ground, calves bunched. She humored me as I'd once admitted to admiring the view, how this vision of her made me weak.

"Doing chores?" she'd asked.

"No. Being bewitching."

On the few times I'd been around on laundry day, I watched this part of it. She always declined my offers to help. I think she enjoyed displaying herself for me, recognized the weird domestic kink that I had for her doing mundane things in a summer dress. Especially this.

Today though, the image of her invited others. A cascade of possibilities, of opportunities that I would later regret not pursuing. Other opportunities I did pursue, as did she.

We were young, alone, and free.

No other ingredients needed. Life was simpler then.

I got up and she looked over her shoulder at me and smiled. "Good. You can reach better than I can."

I placed my hands on her waist and pulled her to me, pressing my erection against her ass. "That's not why I'm here."

"Darn."

"Here," I said, pressing against her more firmly, running my hands to her lower abdomen, down the crease formed by her thighs and mound. "Now."

"We can't," she said.

"We can."

"We shouldn't."

"Why not?"

"We have a perfectly good bedroom with a perfectly good mattress. With perfect curtains and complete privacy."

"The world is our bedroom," I said. "According to Shakespeare."

"Oyster," she laughed.

"No one's around."

She cast her glance into the corners of our little world and beyond. "Hmm."

It wasn't much, but it was something. It wasn't no. I could work with it.

"I need to hang laundry still," she said.

"So hang laundry. I'll help."

She reached into the basket for a t-shirt bearing the logo of a marathon I hadn't run, sponsored by a bar I never frequented. I reached beneath her dress for her panties. The hem of the dress went up. The panties went down. She kicked them away.

I stroked her hips and she paused in the hanging of a shirt. My hands moved up her waist and then to her breasts, taking the fabric of the dress with them, exposing her to the sunshine.

Her fingers wrapped around the clothesline in an attitude of self-bondage.

I moved before her and knelt, lifting the hem of the dress over my head. Within the tent of her dress, I smelled her summer-kissed skin and a hint of arousal. It was warm and heady in there. Sunlight strained through the fabric, dappling her skin, rendering this cocoon warm and intimate. Before me downy tufts of pubic hair hid a promise I never grew tired of. With my thumbs I spread her lips. With my tongue I touched her nub. From her lips, a sigh.

All the while, she stood there on the balls of her feet, her legs now spread to accommodate me. I imagined her hands still grasping the clothes line.

She swayed gently to waves of what I hoped was arousal, goading my tongue in its dance. From above, I heard her breath alternately hitch and gasp. We'd been together long enough for me to have learned the language of her body, but not so long that I'd grown indifferent to it. The Goldilocks zone of any relationship.

I eased my hands behind her to cup her buttocks and kneaded their smooth firmness with my fingers.

She came quietly. She'd never been overly vocal, but the setting probably muted her release even more than usual.

Her hands alit on my head, still covered by her dress. She whispered, "You done good."

She took a step back and I emerged from my cocoon. The wind cooled the moisture on my face. She held out a hand and helped me to my feet. She led me to the bench from which I'd admired her before and fumbled around with the button of my shorts. Soon I was naked from the hips down.

She pushed me onto the bench and, facing me, straddled my legs. She held my cock in her hands. "Is this what you wanted?"

"Yes."

"Me too. I just hadn't realized it."

She rose then, positioned me just so, and then sank down upon my cock.

"Just stay like that," I whispered. "For a little while."

She leaned her forearms on my shoulders and touched her forehead to mine. Outwardly, she hardly moved. Inwardly, her muscles clenched around me.

"You're a witch," I gasped.

"What?" she said, all innocence.

Subtle movements played over me, enough to keep me at cruel attention, not enough to grant release. It was something Viv excelled at. Benevolent torture.

I reached my hands beneath her dress and caressed her breasts. It wasn't enough; I wanted to see her naked, see her familiar body exposed in an unfamiliar setting. She didn't complain. We were hidden behind the house and exposed only to the fields that were leased to farmers we knew only in passing. We shared this place with only the insects and the birds that preyed on them.

I pulled the dress over her head. No complaint.

My eyes must have widened. Some quality of the light revealed her to me anew, this playground of flesh that she had given me permission to explore. I hardly deserved it.

Viv knew me well. I was about to say something obvious, something possibly stupid. She shushed me by placing her lips to mine and rotated her hips. Her breasts swayed slightly to the movement, nipples grazing my chest.

My hands rested on her hips and she slowly rose and fell. A slow strobe of sensation. Her embracing warmth followed by the touch of a cooler breeze when we separated.

She leaned back, hands laced behind my neck, affording me a better view of our joining. My flesh in hers. For a moment, I felt dissociated from the picture and the sensation as though it could hardly be me nestled in this most private of spaces. How had I been deemed worthy enough to enjoy a union that was both incomprehensible and natural? A joining of the flesh so pleasurable that I'd often wonder why we hadn't done it earlier or more of it later.

Dad.

She rose and fell upon me. At some point, conscious movement always surrenders to physical imperatives. She quickened her pace, punctuating her movements with occasional mewls and gasps. I watched as her muscles moved and undulated beneath her skin, a body focussed on climax. Her hips swivelled and swayed, releasing me and claiming me anew.

I closed my eyes and concentrated.

Dad!

And then the rush, the out-of-body moment of release. My hands were around her waist, holding her in place, impaled.

She exhaled long and slow.

Then she wrapped her arms around my head and pressed it to her breast.

"Dad? Are you okay?"

I started guiltily. A second ago I'd been young again and fucking, though that was hardly something to feel guilty about. Now I was back, an old man, a husk whose vitality had long evaporated. I was still here and Viv lived only in memories such as these.

"I'm fine," I said.

My cane had fallen from my hands and I bent to pick it up, almost tipping over from the bench in the process.

My daughter gave me a look normally reserved for naughty children.

Such was my life now.

Jo had been right. I would become depressed and maudlin, more so because I didn't know anymore whether I'd relived a memory or had engaged in fantasy. My mind had gotten so unreliable of late. I smiled in spite of it.

"Thanks for bringing me, Jo. It was nice to have it back for a moment."

She never asked what it was.

After we returned to my apartment and had enjoyed a coffee and a slice of cake, I walked Jo to the elevator.

The doors slid open and out stepped a man I suspected of slipping religious literature under my door as though my diet of bereavement needed a side of God. He was a religious guy. A deacon of some sort. I disliked the man intensely though we'd shared only a few words over the years. It worked this way sometimes.

I nodded at the man and he returned the gesture.