Running Riot

Well, "sole employee" other than his secretary, who was kind enough to work pro bono. Business wasn't exactly booming. Still, it occurred to this Alex from time to time that aside from his physique, most of his friends from the old days would never have recognized him now. He had the look, if not the bank account, of a respectable professional. And if not quite an "old" man, certainly a seasoned one.

The woman across from him, by contrast, seemed not have aged a day since the last time he'd seen her more than ten years earlier. In fact she never seemed to have aged a day, anytime he saw her. If people like Connie Wilder could patent whatever it was that kept them so agelessly beautiful, he had thought when he'd arrived and seen her rising to greet him, they'd make a fortune.

Connie's creamy skin was as smooth as ever, her oval-shaped patrician features nearly as flawless as they'd been back in the early-to-mid Nineties when she and "Lex" had run in the same circles. Her light brown hair was styled in the same short sixties Julie Driscoll cut she'd always worn, which worked just as well for a divorce lawyer and mom as it ever had for one of the coolest 'byrds in the burg. The figure under her sleek dark pinstripe pantsuit had if anything gotten sexier: she'd been slender and tomboyish in her youth, but now at what had to be almost forty years of age, her hips and breasts filled out her clothing in ways that he had to admit to himself fired his imagination.

You had to look close to see the laugh lines around her big blue eyes... and much more recent, the little worry lines around her mouth. Connie was a success in just about every way, but it wasn't happiness that had brought her looking for Lex. And right now those eyes were shining with unshed tears as she gripped his hand and pleaded with him.

"You know me, Connie," he reassured her. "I'll help in any way I can. But you have to understand, she's not a minor any more. I can't force her to come back to you."

"I know that." Connie looked down, sadly. "And I know she has... a hard time trusting. She lived through two bastard husbands with me, had to watch me go through things that... she shouldn't have. But I think you can get through to her. Even just enough to let her know there are people back home who love her, who are thinking about her."

"I appreciate the confidence." He didn't feel so sure, but held that remark back, saying instead: "But I have to ask... why now? Didn't she... well, take off a while ago?"

"Three months and six days." From the way she said it, she could have cited the hours and minutes if she wanted to. "The night of her eighteenth birthday. Thumbed her way clear across the country, and I don't need you to find her, I've had investigators on her trail since practically the moment I knew she was missing. I've known just where she is for a month, and for all that time I've been trying to... to work up the courage to reach out to her, but... but I..."

Her voice broke. Alex felt his heart swell with sympathy for his old friend. He squeezed her hand, reached up and stroked away the single tear that stole its way down her cheek. Connie turned her face gratefully into his rough palm for a moment, even gave it a kiss -- but quickly regathered herself. Maybe it was the wedding band on his finger that had that effect. Shaking herself, she apologized.

"You've got nothing to apologize for," he told her instantly. "You've had a rough ride. And now something must have happened that makes you think you've run out of time, yeah?"

"Could be," she nodded miserably. "You've seen on the news, about the shooting out in L.A.?"

His eyebrows rose. "Yeah. Tito Valentine. Video's already viral, it's bad. Is that where she is?"

"Maywood Beach. Same suburb, even." Her grip tightened on his almost painfully. "I'm just scared shitless, Lex. What if -- well, what if there's a --" She couldn't bring herself to say the word riot.

"I don't think anyone in the City of Angels is anxious to relive '92," he said. But it came out with a telling lack of conviction. "Still, getting her out of there would be a good... precaution. If I can."

"Well, I have an idea about that." Connie pulled her hand away for a moment, rummaging in the purse hanging from her chair. She pulled out a smartphone and said: "I've got a few pictures of her, here. See if you can tell what I'm thinking."

She cued up the photos, and handed the phone over. He felt a curious twinge of trepidation as he took it. His relationship to little Jonette... well, not that they'd ever had a relationship, she probably didn't even know who he was, but their sort-of connection was a bit weird for him. Connie's hand found his again as he started to scroll through the pictures; he felt like a squicky mixture of voyeur and long-lost uncle.

"A few pictures" was putting it mildly. The photo archive didn't quite go back to baby pictures, but it came alarmingly close. Jonette's life laid itself out for him in snapshots, from adorable little gap-toothed moppet, to grinning knock-kneed girl practically glowing from the inside out with promise -- she made her first appearance on the top of the podium at a tae kwon do championship at the age of ten, a scene that repeated itself regularly thereafter -- and from there into early adolescence.

It was there, about four years before the present, that the first picture appeared of her wearing a Chelsea. He stopped at that one. Looked over at Connie.

"Yeah," she said ruefully. "I never talked to her about our crazy old times in the scene, but I think she found out somehow, from someone. That was taken when I was in the first year of my marriage with Todd... the worst of them. She was looking for something to hold on to."

"Damn." He shook his head. "Didn't know there was much left in the way of a scene to even join, these days."

"It's been coming back for a few years now. She was already sneaking out to gigs by this point."

"Not a bonehead or anything, is she?" He didn't like the way the question sounded almost like fatherly concern or something, but he couldn't hold it back.

"No, nothing like that. Jesus, I'm not that awful as a mom, thanks Lex." Connie gave him a playful punch on the shoulder as he apologized with a rueful grin.

The pictures made him feel even more uncomfortably voyeuristic now as he watched Jonette the radiant girl blossom into Jonni the ravishing young skinbyrd, looking more stylish -- and more sullen and distant -- in almost every shot. Her style grew crisper even as her perky breasts grew more and more unmistakable underneath her Perry polos and Lonsdale tees. By the time she hit sweet sixteen, she already clearly had filled out and had it together enough that she could've been bluffing her way into bars. ("That was just before the first time she ran away," Connie said of one of those pictures. "She spent three months in a squat with some SHARPs on the South Side before she came back.") Her ink started appearing a year after that, sparing and tastefully done.

By the time the pictures hit the day of her eighteenth birthday she'd acquired a platinum-blonde dye-job and a killer presence that seemed to reach right through the camera and grab a viewer by the tenders. She would have been dynamite on the scene if she'd been around in our day, he found himself thinking, but then clamped down on the light of thought, saying simply: "Wow. She's a beautiful young woman, Connie."

"Yes, she is." Her voice trembled. "And way more naive than she looks. She needs our help."

Suddenly it came clear to him. "You don't want Alex Coleman the private dick to make contact with her, do you? You're looking for Lex the skinhead to do it."

Connie smiled now. He suddenly noticed that the thumb of the hand holding his was gently stroking the space between his thumb and forefinger. "You've still got that magic about you, you know," she said. "Back in the day you could have sold snow to Eskimos if you'd wanted to. If you'd been a fisherman you could have talked trout onto the hook. You'd be everything legendary about the scene she wants so badly to be part of, I know she'd listen to you."

There was more than just friendship in that stroking thumb. But then there were plenty of times they'd been more than just friends. Lex -- Alex -- realized that Connie had come prepared to persuade him in any way she needed to. I should pull my hand away, he thought, picturing his lovely wife and secretary back at the office, his partner in all things. His heart rate was accelerating. He didn't pull his hand away. Said a bit lamely: "I, uh, don't even know if I'd fit into my old clothes, you know."

"Your muscles are as rock hard under that suit as they were the day I met you." There was the heat of memory in her eyes. "I could tell that the moment you walked in. You know damn well you can still rock the look. And I know for a fact you haven't thrown out all your old boots and braces, have you?"

"No," he admitted, feeling a stir at the crotch of his pants suddenly. "Put them in storage seven years ago. When I married Gracie." He could feel the familiar momentum of a certain something building, here. He made a last attempt to head it off: "She wouldn't approve of my going back on the scene, though. Not even for a job. That was one of the conditions of our getting together."

"Then I guess you can't tell her." Connie had that wicked gleam in her eye now that she'd had back when she was an eighteen-year-old girl: she'd always been perfectly capable of deciding to do the naughty thing and committing to it. That had never changed through all their time on the scene together, through any of their occasional reunions thereafter, and clearly today was no exception. "Except to tell her that it's an urgent job. I could have you on a plane tonight. Expenses, overhead, triple your usual fee... I'll do anything."

"Anything." And so there it was, in so many words. His heart was pounding in earnest now. Somehow it was if the whole thing were already a foregone conclusion, that he'd signed a contract without even realizing it, just by coming here. But then, he should have known. She'd always had this effect on him. He found himself saying: "Well... uh, I'd better get my hair cut then, hadn't I? Maybe there's a barber's uptown..."

"No need." Connie smiled, and her other hand was on his knee under the table. "I can clean you up. My place is just around the corner."

The tender trap was well and truly sprung. Lex had smiled wryly as he admitted defeat. "Well then," he said. "I guess we'd better get going."

The thing was that ever since he'd first met her back in ninety-three, Connie always had a way of going right through his defences.

The very first words she'd ever spoken to him -- when he'd seen the sexy young thing watching him from across the room at a party and walked across to kick a little game -- were a reply to an offer he'd made to take her out for dinner sometime. The exact quote was: "I don't wanna have dinner with you, man. I just wanna fuck you."

Something about the intense honesty of her eyes as she'd said it, about the flush of desire rising in her skin, and something he'd never been quite able to define about the scent of her -- it had been like he was under a spell. He'd pulled her up out of her chair and the next thing he knew they were in his buddy's bathroom, ripping off each others' clothes and ferociously swapping spit, and she was pulling his big, solid prick free of his boxers and sliding to her knees and giving him his first sampling of her special brand of wet, sloppy head: an erotic skill in which he'd found over the years that very few women could match her and none he'd encountered yet could excel her.

She'd been a sexual virago, biting him and digging her fingernails deep when he'd thrown her splay-legged on the bathroom counter and packed her greedy little pussy with hard cock. They'd fucked like maniacs, her moaning and squealing and whispering in his ear the whole time about what a nasty, horny little bitch she was and how amazing his cock felt and how she wanted it, needed it, harder, deeper, faster, "fuck I love your big black fucking dick, make me your fucking bitch, please, please, please, oh please, harder, harder, HARDER, please FUCK me," her dripping cunt exploding all over him again and again, clutching and creaming and milking him for the spunk churning in his balls until she'd finally driven him over the edge and he'd pulled out and pumped his white-hot jism all over her pretty face. And she'd licked up and swallowed as much of it as she could, then kissed him on the cheek and was gone, leaving him reeling in the wake of quite possibly the best sex of his life to that point.

It had gotten them in trouble, of course, which would become something of a pattern with them. She'd had a boyfriend en route to the party who couldn't help hearing about the hubbub they'd caused when he arrived, and Lex had found himself in a fistfight practically the moment he came out of the bathroom. But back then fistfights hadn't been a big deal to him -- he usually won, which helped, and that night was no exception -- and so it was worth it.

Over the next couple of years, his and Connie's relationship had developed from being strictly occasional fuck-buddies into being actual friends. They never were boyfriend and girlfriend... but that initial, explosive erotic connection had never gone away. And there was always the danger -- or the promise, or the hope, it got hard to tell the difference -- of its reigniting any time life brought them back together, whether it meant infidelity or not. Consistently, they were each others' forbidden fruit and dirty little secret.

Of course their mutual hunger was sometimes inconvenient, to put it mildly. The wild parking-lot fuck session that had marked their reunion at a Sister Nancy show in ought-six had probably played a significant role in turning the separation of her second marriage into a divorce. Other times it just had awkward consequences, like the time she'd gone as his date to his tenth anniversary high-school reunion in ninety-eight. They'd run into his old friend Dane there, and far too many beers later the three of them had wound up back at his place, in a torrid threesome which had seen both guys use every one of Connie's hot little holes and finishing with her getting double-fucked in her pussy and ass as she caterwauled loud enough to wake up the neighbours and bring a noise complaint down on them.

"Jonni was an inch away from being your daughter instead of Dane's," Connie sometimes joked with him thereafter -- a reliable way of making him blush, which was no easy feat, because what this literally meant was that the way positions and bodily wrigglings had sorted themselves out, Lex had been blowing his load deep in her ass when Dane's sperm had been pumping into her orgasmic cunny and invading her fertile womb as she moaned and writhed and begged. He had no illusions: one different moment, one different twist or turn in the heat of passion, and it really could just as easily have been him with whom she'd conceived. In fact sometimes he got the impression that that had been what she'd really been hoping for, that night.

All of it was running through his mind as Connie drove him back to her brownstone now, though he was still trying to pretend on the surface that the whole thing might be innocent, might not end with him cheating on his wife. But as he called Gracie and told her he had to go out of town on an emergency call, as he held back the details of the job from her probing questions, he knew was lying to himself. To her. To both of them. He felt like an absolute shit when she'd finally trusted what he was telling her and wished him luck... but not enough to get out of the car and walk away.

Connie's eyes smouldered as she went through the motions of showing him around the house. She took him into Jonni's bedroom -- plastered with posters of oi bands, British flags, football stars, famous rappers and sexy 'byrds -- and handed over a couple of glossy pictures of her that she thought might be of use, as if there was some chance of his forgetting the barely-legal beauty's gorgeous visage now.

Finally, she sat him down in her bathroom and took a set of clippers to him. The beard came off first, save for the narrow remnant of goatee she left him, an echo of his look from back when she'd first known him. The Afro came off next, save for a salt-and-pepper fuzz close to his scalp. She straddled him as she shaved the last of it, his prick stiffening against her as she went after every extraneous scrap of hair she could find. She was like a hairdressing Michelangelo, trimming away the spare marble to reveal the essence underneath, and as the last of that downy hair had fallen around him, she'd stroked her fingers across his scalp and looked deep into his eyes.

"There you are, Lex," she breathed. "There's my savage. My king. My master."

The spark had kindled then. One moment they were staring at each other, each one daring the other to make the first move, the throbbing pulse of his prick at the juncture of their crotches leaving no doubt about what was coming. Then, as one, they lunged for each other, the clippers clattering to the ground as their mouths clashed in sweet, erotic combat, each vying to consume the other as he felt the wet heat of her cunt rubbing his erection through her pantsuit.

For a while their mouths gloried in mutual exploration, the rediscovery of familiar territory made new by the passage of time. Then the moment of truth hit. He was snarling, surging, lifting her, carrying her to the nearest available bed as their hands tore frantically at each others' clothes. The ripping, the tearing, the sound of popping buttons hitting the walls as his mouth devoured her graceful neck, sucked and bit at her earlobe, both of them panting with urgency as they pulled free of the last vestiges of civilization, rendering themselves into a mutual combustion of naked, primal need.

His mouth attacked her breasts as he flung her bra into a corner, her nails raking at him with torrid, painfully delicious barbarism as he licked and sucked and savoured her beautiful tits, caught the stiff nubbins of her big pink nipples in his teeth, a hand burrowing down to grab the waistband of her panties, hauling with all the power he could muster to tear away the last flimsy defence of her wanton pink fuckhole and discarded the shredded fabric as she gasped, letting out a mewl that brought his already tumescent staff of man-meat to almost painful hardness. Taking her by the throat, he looked into her blue eyes as she whimpered: "Yes... yes... oh God it's been too long... fuck me, Lex..."

Words were beyond him by that point. He answered her with nothing but a guttural growl as the massive head of his blunt prick found the welcoming mouth of her hot, wet cunt, and a moment later he was hammering into her, his big black organ sheathing itself to the root in her bubblegum-pink folds.

"AHHHAUUUGHHHHH!" Connie cried out as he took her savagely, rutting into her clutching depths wtih long, hard strokes. "Oh yeahhh... ughhh-ughhh-ughhh-ughhh-UUUGHHHHH yeah-yeah-yeah-yeahhhh," she goaded him on. "Fuck that pussy fuck it fuck me like a fucking whore ughhh ughhhh ughhhh I can never get enough of your fucking dick oh God help me oh please oh fucking God FUCK ME deeper..."

She clawed at him furiously, bucking her hips up to meet his thrusts, her juices bursting out around his prick, her flushed and lovely body jolting and shuddering under the force of their explosive coupling. Gritting his teeth as he felt the moment coming at him, Lex swooped in and caught her mouth in another ravenous kiss before he pulled free of her quivering quim. She needed no prompting, was wriggling around on her belly practically the instant he pulled out, her soft and sexy ass in the air and her cute little brown-eye peeping at him as she presented her dripping gash.