Michelle

In the dark, cramped control room James sat transfixed. His eyes were not on the extravagant stage show visible just through the window in the auditorium. Instead they were captivated by Michelle as she rocked back in forth in her high stool, talking to herself and hovering like a spider over the control panel.

“Yes … Yes … Yes … and, and, and … now. And now! And NOW! … okay, okay, okay, easyeasyeasy … slowly, slowly … andsneakitup andup andup…” Her words were all running together and James couldn’t even decipher some of them – it was as if Michelle was in a trance or on some drug as she punched buttons, flipped toggle switches and slid slide-switches up and down, always moving, rocking to the heavy beat of the music that was leaking into the control room from the show outside.

It was all having its effect. Magical things were happening in the auditorium outside. And Michelle was making them happen. Music, laser beams, projected images and strobe lights. It was like a great rock-and-roll concert show, though in fact it was the finale of the opening night event of a computer company sales conference. James had seen the show at least a dozen times the previous two days during rehearsals from outside so he knew exactly what was going on. But even if he hadn’t seen it, Michelle’s show in the control room still would have won the competition for his attention. He was embarrassed to note that watching her gyrations and thrusting hips had even given him a bit of an erection.

Finally the music and the show reached its wild crescendoed conclusion and Michelle flicked the final switches that turned spotlights on the CEO and the band at the side of the stage and she slumped forward. Her arms were splayed out supporting her as she leaned just over the board with her head hanging down almost touching the control panel. She was breathing heavily and she just stayed there like that for a few seconds listening to the audience cheering the show.

And then she raised her head a bit and turned it sideways to James. She was looking in his direction, but her eyes seemed unfocused.

“Was that a great show, or what?!”

“Yes, it was. Great,” James answered wondering if she knew which show he had been watching.

“Thanks. I don’t mean for the compliment – thanks for the help. Houselights.”

“What?”

“Houselights. Turn on the houselights. Just slide them up slowly. Yeah, like that. Good. Now we’ll give these people a chance to clear out of the place, then we’ll clear out and get ready for cocktails and dinner. Will you be my date? I mean after I take a shower – God, look at me.” Michelle held out the sides of the loose white tee-shirt she was wearing. The words “Go for it!” were on the front and were taut against her bra, the outline of which James could see as Michelle pulled the sides tight.

“I am dripping.”

* * *

James had been working for Michelle for almost a month now and he had been impressed with how good she was as a producer for the Shows and Exhibits division of the communications company where he worked. He had joined the company out of college and was in the midst of a training program that had him serving several months in each of about six different departments during his first year.

He had to admit that of the three departments he had been in so far this was by far the most interesting. He also had to admit he had never seen Michelle like he had in that control room. In the time he had worked with her she had seemed very organized, controlled and buttoned-down. And until a half hour ago he never would have begun to think of her in a sexual way. Not that she wasn’t attractive, she was. She had a slim, athletic body and a very pretty freckled face with short-cropped reddish-blonde hair. But she was twenty-some years older than he was. And at six feet, she was also taller by an inch. Even more, when she wore heels like she was this evening.

At dinner, Michelle and James sat together at a table with a few musicians and other members of the crew. Michelle accepted congratulations on the success of the show and passed out compliments and thanks. And even though she reminded everyone that they still had the big closing meeting in three days and not to get complacent, it was clear that she regarded the success of today’s show as worthy of a little celebrating if only for tonight.

When the dinner was breaking up she asked James if he could help her with a bunch of video tapes and equipment that had to be picked up at the auditorium and taken to the storage trailer. “Bring along a couple of coffee cups too.”

James looked at her questioningly. Looking around to see that no one was watching, she opened her shoulder bag for James to see that she had requisitioned a bottle of red wine. James smiled and picked up a couple of cups.

“Mind if I stop by my room on the way there?” he asked as they were walking down the path to the auditorium building.

“Sure. Why?”

“I thought I might get something to smoke.”

“I didn’t know you smoked, James.”

“Um, this isn’t tobacco. Is that okay?”

Michelle laughed. “I haven’t had pot in probably ten years. Go get it, it’ll be fun.”

At the auditorium, Michelle, who was the slightest bit tipsy, had difficulty getting the door to unlock. Finally James handled it for her. They went inside and gathered up what they had to take back to the trailer and stacked it by the door. Then they went to the stage where they had put the bottle of wine and the coffee cups. Michelle handed James a corkscrew. “Will you do the honors, James?”

He started opening the bottle. “It did go well, didn’t it,” said Michelle looking around the stage where it had all taken place.

“Yeah, it was fabulous. And you could tell the crowd was into it. But I have to admit, I was watching you during the whole last five minutes or so. That was quite a show too.”

Michelle looked at him sideways. They were sitting side by side on the lip of the stage with the wine bottle between them. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean you really get, I don’t know … into it, I guess. I mean you were really rockin’.”

Michelle laughed. “Yeah, I guess I do get sort of very focused. When it gets to the finale, well, you know, it’s all about timing and at the end it gets … intense.”

“I’ll say. It’s like you’re one of those holy rollers in some kind of religious trance. That’s not quite right. I know it’s like you’re having—” He stopped his thought, paused and then changed gears, “Well, it’s … well, like you said, pretty intense.”

“Wait a minute, James. You don’t get off that easy. What was it you were going to say? Come on, out with it.”

James was silent for a moment and then looked at Michelle, kind of sheepishly. “I was going to say that it was kind of like you were having sex and really trying to get yourself off.”

“That’s what I thought you were going to say.” Michelle laughed and added, “And you know, there are a lot of similarities.”

“Yeah, right,” said James dismissing the notion.

“No really.” Michelle twisted to face James. She hiked her skirt up and sat cross-legged on the stage, giving James a flashing glimpse of pantyhose and inner thigh. But he consciously kept his eyes on her face.

“When I start a project,” she said, “there’s this gradually-building sense of pace that starts during the planning and the preparations. Then as it gets closer to the show, there’s a steady build up of pressure and tension. When you actually get to the show, the tension builds and builds and builds almost unbearably. And when you finally pull it off, it’s like you go over the top. Then I get this big body-shaking release – an overwhelming outpouring of relief and triumph. I’m totally, totally drained and blissful.”

“Wow,” said James under his breath.

“Now, I don’t pretend to know what sex is like for a twenty-year old boy—”

“Twenty-two.”

“Right – twenty-two. But the point is, I don’t know what it’s like for you, but, for me, what I just described sounds very much like sex.”

James didn’t know what to say. He thought he’d sound callow or inexperienced or, even worse (because it was true), turned on by Michelle’s description. He averted his eyes, looking down. This only complicated matters. The way Michelle was sitting on the stage, he could see almost all the way up her long legs. Up to the darker-meshed panty part of her pantyhose. He could see a darker patch at her crotch and realized Michelle wasn’t wearing any underpants beneath the pantyhose. He quickly averted his eyes out toward the audience seating. Michelle looked down at her skirt and she realized the sight she must have presented. She pushed the skirt down to cover the crotch. She could feel herself blushing, but she sensed that James was even more embarrassed than she. She tried to change the subject.

“C’mon, James, isn’t it about time to light up that joint?”

James quickly took the off-ramp from the sexual conversation and started busying himself with preparations for smoking. After taking a first toke himself, he handing the joint to Michelle. She took it and a bit tentatively inhaled.

“Wow,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve inhaled anything but air for the better part of a decade. I’m not sure if it’s the dope or just the inhaling that’s making me light-headed.”

“Probably both.”

For a few minutes they were quiet, passing the joint back and forth and letting the waves wash through their heads.

“This is wild,” James said.

“What?”

“Smoking dope with my boss.” He giggled while trying to hold in a lungful of smoke.

“What’s so funny?” she asked, though now she was giggling too.

“I don’t know, it’s like an authority thing. A taboo somehow. Like smoking dope with my mother. Someone you just can’t picture sharing a joint with.”

“Oh, thanks for the comparison with your mother.”

“No, no, it wasn’t a comparison, believe me. You are way un-mom. Way, way un-mom.”

“Okay, well then, how old is your mother?”

“Well, she’s older than you.”

“Right. How much older?”

“She’s forty-eight. I was born when she was twenty-six.”

“Great. So she’s two years older than I am.”

“Well she seems a lot older. I mean you obviously work out. You look young. You’re smoking dope for Christ’s sake.”

“Doesn’t your mom work out?”

“Well some. But it’s not like I’d say she was, you know, ‘hot.’ Besides, forget my mom. I was just using her as an example of someone I could never picture sharing a joint with. It’s as if I were smoking dope with … say, Bob McAlpine.” (McAlpine was the head of Corporate Services and was generally acknowledged to be about as spontaneous and crazy as Calvin Coolidge.)

Michelle giggled at the image. “Okay, I agree, that would be wild. That would be unbelievably wild. God, am I stoned. Do you have a pen and paper?”

“Yeah, sure, why?”

“Give ‘em to me. I have two questions to ask you and I know I’ll forget one if I ask the other.”

James produced the pen and went for a pad of paper from the stack of things they had gathered to take to the trailer. Michelle concentrated and wrote on the pad. Finally, she said, “Okay, number one. Am I hot?” She asked it with a bit of a brazen tint to her voice.

“What do you mean?”

“You said you wouldn’t describe your mother as ‘hot.’ How about me?”

James gave a little nervous laugh.

“C’mon, James, it’s an easy question. Am I hot?”

With that she lay back on the stage, closed her eyes and ran her hands slowly all the way up from her bare thighs over her stomach and her breasts along sides of her face and through her hair. The languorous move and the closed eyes had given James permission to look at her body. And though Michelle’s crotch was covered now, he found himself getting excited. “So?” she said, “Do I have a hot bod?”

James stared. “Yes,” he answered very truthfully, “you’re very hot.”

“Even with these small boobs?” Her hands went back to her breasts and rubbed them through her blouse and bra.

“Even,” said James. “Or maybe especially.”

“That’s nice of you to say. Thank you, James.” Her eyes were still closed and her voice sounded dreamy.

“Maybe it’s time we took all this stuff back to the trailer. You look like you’re going to fall asleep.”

“Nope, not until you answer the second question. Besides I’m not sleepy; I’m just very stoned. I’m in my own world. And I’m hot!” She giggled.

“Okay, what’s the second question?”

“I forget. But I wrote it down, remember? Read it.”

James picked up the pad that was lying face down by Michelle’s prone body and read it. “It says ‘Wildest thing?’ What does that mean?”

“Oh, yeah. The question is: what’s the wildest thing you’ve ever done in your life?”

“The wildest …” James took a sip of wine from his coffee cup and thought. Finally he sat up straight and said, “Okay. I guess it was my weekend of initiation.”

“Initiation into what?” Michelle was still lying back on the stage with her eyes closed.

“Alcohol and drugs. It was at our cottage and my parents were in town for the weekend. Some wedding they had to go to.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen.”

“And they left you alone for the weekend?”

“No. That’s the point. See I have a sister Jennifer. She’s five years older than I am. They left me in her care. Bad idea. You see she was going into her junior year in college and had gotten into alcohol and drugs. She had stashes of both at the cottage and she told me that she’d initiate me when mom and dad were away for the weekend. She liked me, you see, and she was always great to me. It wasn’t as if we confided in each other or even talked a lot. I mean we were five years apart. If we’d been closer in age, we probably would have driven each other nuts. But as it was, she saw me as the baby brother. She still does actually.

“Anyway, mom and dad were no sooner out the door on Saturday afternoon than Jen had a beer cracked open. They had let her start drinking at home the year before, so this was no big deal, but she also cracked one open for me.”

“You mean you had a beer!” Michelle said. “So far, James, I gotta say I’ve heard wilder things in Sunday school.”

“Okay. Anyway we kept drinking and I got a bit of a buzz. Jen sort of watched over my intake so I wouldn’t get real drunk. Later we made dinner and then after dark we took some blankets and some wine and Jen brought some joints and we canoed out to our swimming raft. We tied up the canoe and spread the blanket and lay on our backs and got totally stoned. Anyway, the next thing I knew was the sun coming up and the people from the next cottage approaching the raft in their canoe. I woke up fast and looked around – I was wrapped in the blanket by myself. Jen wasn’t there, but the three-quarter empty wine bottle was. I don’t know what the Bradleys thought. They were the people from the next cottage. I thought I was cooked. They must have mentioned it to my parents, but in the end Jen covered it up – said the wine was hers and she had left the raft not long before. Anyway it blew over.”

Michelle raised herself up on her elbow and looked at James. “Still sounds pretty tame. A sweet older sister treats baby brother to a beer and a joint? I thought your generation was wilder than mine.”

“Okay then, Miss Wild-ass, what’s the wildest thing you’ve ever done, huh?”

Michelle looked at James and started to say something but then stopped. “I can’t tell you – It’s that wild.”

“Uh-huh, sure. And isn’t that convenient.” He was teasing her.

“No, it’s just that it’s private, like a sex thing. Anyway, if I told you, you’d probably get the wrong idea about me.”

“Well, mine had a sexual part to it too. I just didn’t tell you that part.”

“You mean it wasn’t just your sister out there on that raft?”

“No, I don’t mean that.”

“You screwed your sister when you were fourteen!?!”

“No, it wasn’t like that at all.”

“Well then what was it? Come on.” Michelle very much wanted to know now.

“I’m not going to tell you. After all, you aren’t telling me what you did. If you tell me then I’ll tell you.”

“This is a little bit too much like ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’” She took a deep breath. She really was curious about what James had done at fourteen. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll tell you, but you’ve got to swear never—”

“I know, I know, never to mention it to a soul, etc. etc. on penalty of having my tongue torn out.”

Still looking at him, she said, “I’m very serious about this, James. I’ve never told this to anyone.”

“Don’t worry, you can trust me.”

And then Michelle lay back on the stage and let her eyes close again.

“Okay. Now are you familiar with the term ‘glory hole’? Do you know what it is?”

“Not really. Is it a woman’s cun— … you know, a woman’s vagina?”

“It’s okay to say ‘cunt’ with me James. I’ve heard the word before. It doesn’t bother me. But you’re wrong. No, a glory hole is a hole in a fairly thin wall that men stick their cocks through.”

“For what?”

“To get sucked off.”

“You mean, they just stand there pressed against one side of a wall with their cocks sticking through this hole and someone on the other side gives them a blow job.”

“You got it in one, James.”

“So it’s like an anonymous blow job?”

“That’s the excitement. I mean the woman doesn’t know whose cock she’s sucking. And the guy doesn’t know who’s doing the sucking. How does it sound?”

“But you mean you blew some guy like that?”

“You think I’m a slut? Well hang on, because it gets worse actually. You see I was maybe a year or two older than you are now and I was in LA as PA on a job. One night I went out to a bar with this other girl on the job. We had a few drinks and then this other girl met some guy and the two of them were going to take off to another place that the guy knew. I could have gone with them or back to the hotel, but I was having a good time so I stayed on my own at the bar. The place was kind of a college hangout in Westwood. And I had met these UCLA guys and some girls and I was sort of in the group. There were about a dozen guys and maybe six or seven girls. I felt very ready-for-anything because I was in a strange town with people I really didn’t know and would never see again. Plus, when I first introduced myself, I said my name, but it was noisy and the guy I was talking to heard it as ‘Shelley.’ So everyone was calling me that. I felt very anonymous.

“Anyway, when the bar was about to close there was this big push to go to some place called June’s Club. I asked one of the girls what it was and she said, ‘Don’t go.’ She said it was an after-hours place run by this woman named June. But it was kind of a sex club too. In the front they have a lounge with very expensive drinks and June’s girls try to get the guys to go to the back for paid sex. It was basically a whore house.

“Well I didn’t say this out loud, but I was kind of intrigued. I wanted to see this place. Still I never would have gone until I found out that two of the other girls – I can’t remember their names but call them Alice and Muffy – were going. So that sounded fairly safe. But then the thing that clinched it was that I found out that the club was just two doors from my hotel so if I didn’t like something I could always just walk out.

“When we got there it was pretty fun. It was loud and noisy, and the beers were ten bucks, but I was fascinated. In total there were probably about fifteen guys. Then there were four or five professional girls and the three of us that had come along with the guys in our crowd. The pros would flirt and fondle the guys’ cocks and a couple of times they even lured a guy away for some serious money.

“After a while – it must have been close to four in the morning by then – Jane clanged on a glass and announced that we should drink up because she was going to close. I guess it seemed pretty apparent to her that her girls weren’t going to turn any more tricks that night. There was kind of a general protest from all of us to keep the party going, so Jane finally says, ‘Tell you what. I’ll keep open if each guy here buys another drink for $30, and you all get to take a turn at the glory hole.’ Then looking at the three of us girls she added, ‘Girls drink free.’