Rediscovering Rebecca

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance by any character or situation to any actual person or event is purely coincidental. All characters presented in this narrative are over the age of 18.

Rediscovering Rebecca

By Royce F. Houton

► INCOGNITO AT THE SNOOTY FOX

This is crazy. I'm a grown-ass man. A retired, grown-ass man. Well, semi-retired anyway. Skulking around like this is something a 25-year-old would do, not a guy who's Medicare-eligible.

I parked my Range Rover in a parking spot a good 200 feet from the Snooty Fox so that if anyone recognized my vehicle in this town that can feel awfully small at times would think I was going into the a storefront insurance agency, not a well-known purveyor of sex toys and adult gifts.

I pulled my blue University of Virginia baseball cap low over my brow. My wrap-around shades and the raised collar of my windbreaker, I hoped, would render me unidentifiable on any of the security cameras that proliferate inside and outside any public market in the 2020s. I walked briskly across the parking lot and ducked inside. Only one car was parked in front of the sex shop, which I took as a good sign that the place might be virtually deserted at 2:30 on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-March.

The last thing I wanted was for a former law partner or the mom of a kid I had coached in Little League to spot me perusing the wide selection of neoprene "lifelike" fake-vagina toys and varied intimate lube products in the Snooty Fox.

Look cool, I told myself. Act like you belong, like you know exactly what you're looking for. But whatever you do, try to keep yourself facing the wall or at least a tall store shelf.

A bored, well-tattooed twentysomething woman with two nose rings perched behind the cash register reading Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" barely looked up from her paperback as I entered the store. I was just fine with that, too.

Don't rush right over to the section where the Fleshlight and other men's masturbatory aids are displayed, I cautioned myself, still glancing furtively around the store. I mean... that would just scream "loser!" "pervert!" "dirty old jack-off!" and somehow, I wildly imagined, put me on a path that would one day land me on some sex offender registry. I had pondered ordering such a device online, but you don't get to see for yourself what the thing is and you have to use a credit card and create an indelible digital record of what you bought and when. No thank you.

The sole reason I was there in the first place was to find a new, reliable way to rub one out since I had undergone a significant dry spell since Denise and I had gone our separate ways more than a year earlier.

▼▼▼

I knew deep down that no overpriced dick-toy doohickey would accomplish anything on its own. Unless I could get in the mood, nothing I could buy off any shelf was likely to produce the desired results. But my primary care doc, during my last physical, wasn't liking what he found in one of those dreaded prostate exams, the one where a latex-gloved hand jams a finger up to the third knuckle up a dude's asshole and probes around to assess the dimensions and the health of this distinctively male internal gland.

"Rick, tell me about your sex life," Dr. Sujit Pasadar said afterward.

"Pardon?" I replied.

"Well, your prostate isn't what I'd call enlarged, but it's feeling a little bigger than it has, and that's something men your age have to be mindful about. Enlarged prostate is not something we can always control, but it does tend to happen more and happen faster to men after age 50 who don't put it to use regularly," he said.

"Put it to use?"

"Regular ejaculations," Dr. Sujit said.

"So you're asking if I'm getting any?" I said. "Well, I was doing all right for about five years, but my girlfriend and I broke up during the course of the pandemic and went our own ways about 14 months ago. The sex was pretty good up until about two and a half years ago, and... I guess we both just sort of gave up. I've been in dry dock since about the start of 2021."

"Do you self-stimulate or ejaculate any other way?" he asked.

"You mean do I beat off?" I said, unable not to chuckle. "Doc, if I can't get excited, I can't get it up and if I can't get it up, I can't get it off. Dirty movies and dirty pics and dirty literature don't move the needle for me; hasn't since I'm like... 17. Sometimes if I am having an erotic dream, I wake up with a boner, but as soon as my conscious mind takes over and I lose the track of the dream, it's gone and nothing I can do can bring ol' Foghorn back to attention."

"Fog-horn?" the doctor asked.

"Oh, that's my nickname for my junk. After the Looney Toons rooster, Foghorn Leghorn -- had that booming Texas accent, strutted around the barnyard going, 'Ah say, boy!'" I said. Clearly, there was no connection for this thirtysomething immigrant from India with a 60-year-old American animated series that remains a pop culture milepost for kids, now of a certain age, who grew up in the United States from the 1950s through the '60s. "Get it?... rooster?... cock?... Never mind."

So Sujit moved on, recommending that I try some toys that might inject novelty into my "self-love" regimen, which I knew in advance was a non-starter, but told him I'd try. In the alternative, he suggested, I could sign up for one of those online hook-up sites like Tinder. I was shocked that a doctor would recommend some kind of online meat market where users not only risk something penicillin can't fix but being blackmailed as well.

Memo to self: Check health plan for a new in-network doc.

▼▼▼

So here I am, trying to be incognito as I browse the wares in this upscale Norfolk, Virginia, sex toy shop in hopes that I would spot something that might induce me to occasionally blow my load and keep my man glands from withering... or swelling from the size of a walnut to that of a baseball, as was the instant case. That's when I detected movement on my periphery to the left. I instinctively pivoted to my right and walked around a head-high rack of videos. I didn't get much to go on. It didn't appear to be another guy, but I was not interested in finding out.

How quaint, dirty DVDs, I mused to myself. What? No VHS or 8-millimeter films? I thought streaming and high-speed internet had made old-tech media like this obsolete, but here they were. Then I reasoned that what these have that streaming doesn't is privacy. Rather than enter a credit card number into the shadiest of web portals to have an hour of staged, high-definition fellatio, cunnilingus and copulation delivered to your unique and traceable IP address, someone could come here, pay cash and replay this on a low-tech DVD player without ever leaving footprints on the dark web.

I'm checking out the jacket for a DVD titled "Cum Fly With Me" when the gray-coated figure I had just glimpsed out the corner of my eye a few minutes earlier walked down an aisle near me and turned the opposite direction, toward racks containing lingerie and provocative costumes as varied as neck-to-toe fishnet body stockings, bustiers, crotchless and even edible panties, and naughty nurse and schoolgirl outfits. I could see silvery hair spill from beneath a Totes rain hat, over the collar of her coat.

So I edged around the rack of videos and into another aisle, dipping out of the woman's immediate view once more. I turned to the right, and on the shelves before me was what I came in the store to buy: the Fleshlight. The device interior was made of squishy, highly pliable rubber designed to give way to an invading erection and, when lubricated, simulate the feel of a vagina. It was all encased in a metal cylinder resembling a flashlight (hence the pun of a name) and is available in various sizes to accommodate boners ranging from the most modestly hung of gents to something approaching an aroused Clydesdale.

"Good grief...," I muttered t0 myself, shaking my head.

But, at a sticker price of $59.95 excluding sales tax, I decided to give it a try. I mean it was something my doctor recommended and it was less expensive than a urologist visit and it was less risky than a hooker or some Tinder skank. I slipped it back into the cardboard box and pivoted to retrace my steps. As I rounded the corner by the head-high video display case, I literally bumped into the person I had spotted and tried to avoid earlier.

"Oh! So sorry," I said instinctively, backing up a step.

"That's perfectly fine, no prob..." she said before looking upward at me and freezing. "Rick?"

I could feel my mouth move but it was making no sound, which was probably for the best, in retrospect. I was caught pink-handed in a sex shop, holding a Fleshlight, totally busted. But by whom?

"Uhhh... uhhh yes," I stammered, trying to focus on the woman's face, which looked familiar but not quite discernible because she, too, was wearing a hat, an overcoat and oversized sunglasses... indoors... while in a sex shop holding a naughty French maid costume. "I... I..."

She glanced left and right around the store and, seeing no one besides the bored attendant at the cash register, removed her shades.

"It's me -- Becky," she said.

My eyes widened behind my sunglasses and my mouth fell open, dumbstruck for a moment.

Whether it was the expression on my face or just the awkwardness of the moment, Becky started giggling and couldn't stop.

Becky tried to keep it as muffled as she could, but I remember from the more than two years when we had dated occasionally a decade or so earlier that she was prone to laughing fits when she was tickled that could go on and on and on. And every time she looked up at my flummoxed face, she laughed that much harder.

Finally, I had the presence of mind to remove my shades and look at her squarely, my apoplexy slowly giving way to a resigned and patient smile. Her laughter -- surely at my expense -- was contagious, and before long, I was laughing with her. I mean, I was a pretty ridiculous sight standing there looking like some third-rate gumshoe holding a fake-pussy toy, a moment fit for one of the "Seinfeld" episodes on which she was an authority.

"Rebecca Parsons... good to see you, even if we did run into each other under these compromising circumstances," I said in a hushed voice one might use in a library, extending my arms as she extended hers for our first hug since 2012.

"I would ask 'What brings you here?' but,... well... I guess," she said, nodding at the explicitly packaged merchandise in my hand and rekindling her giggling in the process. "Gag gift for a friend?"

"Uhhh...," I stammered, "sure, let's go with that."

She nodded, a smirk on her face. "Understood. Not that there's anything wrong with that..."

Her remark, predictably, was from one of her favorite "Seinfeld" episodes titled "The Outing," which, if pressed, she would accurately note was from the fourth season of the series, the 17th episode.

"Your Seinfeld repertoire is still as encyclopedic as ever," I said. "And I see you're diversifying your wardrobe," I said, nodding at the slutty maid costume she was holding.

"Um... yeah," she said, blushing slightly. "What you said."

"I would ask you how you've been and so forth but..." I said, gesturing at our surroundings, "... it's not the most conducive environment for casual, normal conversation."

She nodded and looked me in the eye. "You got time for coffee? There's a Dunkin' just across Ocean View."

"Sure. Let's get out of here and meet over there?"

Becky gave me a thumbs-up. She strode confidently to the cash register and handed the attendant her credit card, asked her to put the merchandise in one of the store's pink, branded shopping bags, got in the car she had parked directly in front and drove off. After a respectable interval, I approached the register and paid cash for my Fleshlight. The cashier rung up my purchase, designed solely for male self-pleasuring, with the detached disinterest that a supermarket clerk would handle a box of pasta, handed me my merchandise and my change, then returned to Ayn Rand without so much as a "Thank you."

Crossing West Ocean View Avenue to get to the more retail-oriented development across the street that included Dunkin' took nearly 10 minutes, even on an uneventful Tuesday afternoon. I was afraid Becky would give up and head home. I was relieved to see the new, gray Volvo she had just driven away from the Snooty Fox still parked there. Inside, she had gambled that I retained my weakness for crullers and dark roast with two packets of sugar, and she had already ordered it for me. She was right.

She had removed her coat and was seated at a corner table, as far from the entrance and the counter as one could get. She rose and extended her arms wide as I approached, appearing as lean and athletic as I remembered her to be, though her dark brown hair was now an alluring, silvery shade of gray.

"Proper hug," she said. A warm embrace -- firm and tight as one would expect of old friends -- yet searching, with hands ranging up and down each other's backs, as one would expect from those who were more than friends.

"So you never saw me and I never saw you in the Snooty Fox, right?" she said as we took our seats across the small tabletop facing each other. She eyed me mirthfully over her reading glasses that rode low midway down the bridge of her nose, a wry grin curling upward on the left side of her mouth.

"The what? When? What are you're talking about?" I said.

"Exactly," she said.

"So where does one start to catch up on 11 years? Tell me about yourself, or at least the parts I don't see on Facebook," I said.

We had been friends on the social media platform since we were introduced in 2010. I could see that she had become a grandmom four times over since I last saw her in mid-2012. Her cat, Agatha, had died and a new one, Christie, had taken her place. Becky had marked herself as "In a relationship" from late 2013 until the dawn of the pandemic when she returned her status to "single." I asked her what happened.

"He's from the Maryland Eastern Shore. We first met about 14 years ago. I went out with him a few times until a few months after you and I began seeing each other, a sort of on-and-off thing," she said. "His name was Philip and he was an insurance broker, owns a chain of agencies mostly in small towns up to Baltimore and Annapolis. He had a house in a fairly secluded area near the water on the Bay side. Had a ski boat and a swimming pool, and we'd hang out there. Very high-end, very chill and relaxing."

She stared out the window at something far away.

"He gave me a key and I'd go stay there sometimes for a week or so when he was traveling with his job -- he did a lot of that before he retired and made a killing selling his agency -- and I'd just sort of look after things. When he did retire, he wanted me to move up there, but I had told him over and over I wasn't leaving Ghent, that I wanted to stay near my daughters and, by that point, the grandkids. I had made all that clear to him at the start of the relationship along with the fact that I wasn't going to remarry or anything like it," she said. "I guess he didn't hear me or couldn't accept that. So just before the holidays in 2019 he went silent until one day he texted me and asked me to return my key. I drove up there the week they declared the pandemic to hand it to him, return some of his stuff, and get a few odds and ends of mine that were there, and some gal half his age with huge fake tits came to the door."

She sipped her coffee and shrugged. "That was that."

▼▼▼

Becky had been divorced from Morey Parsons for nearly four years when we were introduced in 2010 at a party at the home of Soraya Brenham, a Hampton Roads society doyenne and mutual friend, in Virginia Beach. I had represented her late husband's shipping company in several maritime law disputes.

I was separated and in the process of finalizing a divorce with Theresa, my wife of 28 years. When I learned Theresa was fucking a guy in my law firm who was nearly 10 years her junior, I fired him and kicked her out of the house.

"You should totally ask Becky out, she really likes you," Soraya told me the day after her party. "You two got along great yesterday. Y'all would be perfect for each other."

She and Becky had been friends for years, having first met when Soraya's youngest daughter was born prematurely and Becky was working in the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit. It was Soraya, with her extensive connections, who first encouraged Becky to inquire about the insurance agency executive-level job she later got and arranged to have us both at the party so she could indulge in her favorite sport: matchmaking.

"I don't know, Soraya... this divorce is not final yet and I just don't think I am ready to be dating," I told her. "Besides, the kids are on my side now, given what their mom was caught doing, and I don't want to jade them toward me by getting involved with someone else this soon."

"Nobody's talking about anything 'involved' or even 'dating,'" she said, using her fingers to bracket two words in air quotes. "I know Becky isn't interested in that. You both just need a friend you can talk to, somebody to go watch UVA basketball or Tides baseball games with, and she's a huuuge sports fan," she said. "I think you two are a perfect fit that way."

So Becky and I started seeing each other, and it was as Soraya said, at least in the early going. We were very compatible and became close friends. We both loved to drive to the Blue Ridge Mountains to hike. She was always up for a road trip to a college football or basketball game wherever Virginia or her alma mater, North Carolina State University, was playing. Quite the athlete herself, she was perfectly content to play golf from the white (men's) tees and beat me more times than not. You were begging for humiliation by challenging her to a game of tennis. Becky knew the best out-of-the-way bars and eateries all over Eastern Virginia and the North Carolina Outer Banks like a travelogue with legs. Long, beautiful legs.

It was one afternoon in the late summer of 2011 as we took a break in a hike along the Appalachian Trail in Nelson County, Virginia, when the platonic took a turn toward the romantic. We sat on a bench at a scenic overlook that afforded a magnificent view westward across the Shenandoah Valley and the hazy outline of the Appalachians rising miles beyond in the distance. We had covered just under six miles of steep terrain but were much more exhausted than we would have been walking six miles along the beach back home. Becky leaned against me, and I draped my arm lazily around her as a cool wind blew into our faces.

"Now this is pretty near perfection," she said.

"No question. Beautiful day. Beautiful view of the most beautiful part of Virginia. And my arm around a very beautiful, wonderful girl," I said, rubbing my hand along her shoulder and upper arm.

Her head tilted upward toward mine as her right hand gently guided our lips together. It wasn't our first kiss. There had been chaste, friend-zone pecks at the end of an evening and that sort of thing. But this was the first time we had kissed as lovers might, with our lips parted and, for the first time, our tongues engaging in those delicious first explorations.

Nothing was quite the same afterward. We still enjoyed the same activities and did them together, but the unresolved prospect of sex and our mutual reluctance toward romance or commitment hovered over everything. Both of us knew, as a condition from the outset of our relationship, that neither of us were looking for anything serious. We'd both done the "death-do-us-part" thing and were still cleaning up the debris after it had crashed and burned for both of us. It was maddening, trying to stay in a self-imposed friend zone even though we both cared deeply for the other and harbored a palpable but unspoken desire to undress and ravish each other. The tension could be unbearable at times.