The Door Prize

The hand on his hip gave him a reassuring pat and her smile broadened. “Go on,” she said softly. “Tell me what you were going to say.”

“It’s a little bit embarrassing.”

“Ooh, I like the sound of it. Go ahead, you can tell me anything.”

“I woke up this morning and I looked at you. You were just standing there by the bench, looking very pretty in this kimono you’re wearing, and I remember thinking that you were the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. What we did last night was amazing, and I just wanted to thank you for sharing yourself with me.”

Stephanie’s eyes went misty and the warmest smile he had ever seen was displayed to him. The Looney Tunes mug she was gripping, which featured Elmer Fudd holding a shotgun to Bugs Bunny’s head, was instantly transported to the bedside table and she climbed onto the bed.

Her body moved with such fluid grace that it appeared she was trapped in a weightless environment, as if gravity was somehow unable to grasp Stephanie in its evil clutches. Awestruck by his imagination running amuck, Michael was purely a bystander as she moved into his arms and snuggled up to him.

“You are so sweet,” she whispered. “I think I’m going to enjoy getting to know you.”

“The feeling is definitely mutual.”

They brushed their lips together and kissed softly. Every lustful bone in their bodies had been purged by last night’s exploits, leaving an air of romance blanketing them as their tongues caressed gently.

“I have to go,” she whispered.

He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her body firmly to his. “But I want you to stay,” he countered.

“I want to stay, but I have to work this morning. Even though I have the money from being the door prize, I still have to maintain my current job status. It sucks, but life’s more enjoyable aspects wouldn’t be as great if we didn’t have a yard stick to measure them by.”

“Okay,” he said, loosening his grip.

Her moist lips found his again and they shared another kiss, although this one was tinged with the sadness of having to say goodbye to each other.

As soon as she jumped off the bed the red kimono was sliding down her shoulders and it drifted to the floor before she made it half way to the bathroom. For a few minutes Michael laid in bed with his eyes closed, listening to Stephanie humming the tune of a song as she got dressed. The song she was humming, he realized after racking his brain, was called ‘Hello, I Love You’, and it was sung by a band called The Doors.

“How do I look?” she asked as she walked out of the bathroom. Her body was covered in the simple blue jeans and white t-shirt combo which, seen on Stephanie, looked more fashionable than one would consider on almost anyone else.

“You look glorious.”

Stephanie grinned at him and shook her head. “You know, this constant flattery is doing wonders for my ego.”

“Would you like me to stop?”

“Hell no,” she said. “Would any girl?”

Before she left for work she came over to the bed again and sat on its precipice. She kissed him again and flicked her tongue against his lips, licking them. Before she pulled away she sniffed him a couple of times and subsequently wrinkled her nose like Samantha from Bewitched.

“What?” he asked. “Do I have an unpleasant odor?”

“I’d have a shower before I left if I were you. You smell like you’ve been fucking someone all night.”

He grabbed at her ass and squeezed it playfully, eliciting a giggle from Stephanie. “I have been fucking someone all night, or don’t you remember?”

“Hey buster, I happen to have a vivid recollection of the great sex we had.”

“So you were just stating the obvious, then?”

“I…” She trailed off, unable to respond with a witty comeback of her own.

The palm of his hand cupped the side of her face and he was unable to resist the temptation of kissing her for the umpteenth time that morning. Michael loved the taste of her mouth and was obsessed with sampling it again and again.

“Concede defeat?” he asked.

“Never.”

“Then it looks like we’ll have to argue about this over dinner.”

“I think you’re absolutely right.”

“Pick you up at six?”

“I’ll be ready and waiting,” she replied.

They kissed one last time and he watched mournfully as she picked herself up off the bed and made her way to the door. As she turned the doorknob she looked back at him, smiled and blew him a kiss.

“What’s your address?” he blurted suddenly. Such was her overwhelming effect on him that simple things such as this managed to slip his mind.

“It’s on the bench,” she answered. “I included my phone number, just in case you wanted that, too. I’ll see you later on tonight, Mr. Kirby.”

“Alright, Miss Sullivan, I’ll be at your house at six o’clock on the dot. Don’t be too naughty.”

Stephanie shrugged her shoulders and winked at him. The door fell shut and, as if she’d never existed at all, the delectable girl who had stolen his heart disappeared from his sight.

The room went eerily quiet. There were no windows, which led him to believe that this room was situated somewhere in the middle of Eric Stone’s mansion. The house must have easily set Eric back a couple of million dollars, considering the enormity of it and where it was located.

Still feeling a little like Alice in Wonderland, he slipped out from under the sheets and went over to where Stephanie had shucked off her kimono. After a lengthy inspection of the fearsome dragon drawn on the back and, to a lesser extent, the Japanese numbers painted on the front, Michael shrugged his nude frame into it and tied the sash.

It was still slightly damp from when it had covered Stephanie’s wet body, and, like a ouija board, the silk fabric seemed to summon a portion of her spirit, which somewhat quelled the onset of loneliness since Stephanie’s departure.

The details of her address and phone number were on the bench where she had instructed, however, it was what they were written on which made Michael grin like an idiot. Scrawled across a crisp, brand new one hundred dollar bill in a black marker was her address, phone number and this message: “Hey sweetie, I told you that I wasn’t a whore.”

“No, you certainly aren’t,” he murmured.

A familiar beep sounded and was followed by a loud metallic snick that, from what Michael could gather, came from the general direction of the door that Stephanie had just passed through. Moments later the very same door swung inward and in strode Eric Stone, looking as sprightly as a teenager who had just gotten laid for the first time.

“Sleep well?” Eric asked, giving Michael a strange look as he eyed the kimono.

“Uh…not really.”

“Stephanie kept you up to all hours, did she?”

Michael grinned sheepishly. “You could say that,” he said. “What about you?”

“Sleep? Nah, don’t believe in it. Who wants to waste a third of their life by being unconscious?”

“You don’t sleep at all?”

“Nope, like I said, it’s a waste of my precious time. We aren’t here long, and I want to live every second that I can.”

It wasn’t until Eric was standing right next to him that Michael realized what the man was wearing – a tattered pair of faded jeans and an old, long-sleeve Adidas t-shirt. If you passed him in the street you would never suspect that he was worth millions and lived a life of luxury. There was no gold Rolex watch, his hands and neck lacked flashy jewelry, and his feet were covered in a pair of Nike shoes that almost any commoner could afford.

The only aspect of Eric Stone that bespoke of any kind of riches was his roughish good looks and the intelligence that sparkled in his eyes.

“I feel comfortable in these clothes,” Eric told him.

Michael felt his face glow crimson. “You don’t miss a beat, do you, Eric?” he asked.

“No, I don’t. And Michael, when no one else is around you can call me Ray.”

“Okay, Ray it is.”

They stood there looking at one another for a few moments, sharing a silence that was so profound that Michael, letting his imagination slip into a higher gear than Danny Richardson did with his silver Mercedes, could almost believe that two invisible plastic bubbles had descended from the ceiling, as happened quite often in the old television show Get Smart, and they were currently trapped in their own version of the Cone of Silence. The irony was that Michael and Eric, as did Maxwell Smart and the Chief of CONTROL, were talking about secrets that could never leave the room.

“Well, I don’t like using clichés but let’s get this show on the road,” Eric said.

“What show?”

“Our novel.”

“You’re kidding?”

Eric clapped him on the shoulder and grinned at him. “Michael, I seldom joke about my writing. You remember how to get to the library, don’t you?”

“Uh…yeah. I think I can manage,” Michael replied, blinking with shock.

He was going to write a novel with the famous author, Raymond Ponting. Last night, when Eric had confided in him that he wanted Michael to pen a book with him, it had seemed like a dream, some elaborate fantasy that his mind had conjured out of thin air like a magician retrieving a rabbit out of his empty hat.

“Take a shower, freshen up and meet me in the library. I’ll get Gretchen – that’s the head chef – to whip up some pancakes for breakfast and deliver them to the us.”

“Pancakes?” he asked, feeling infinitely worse than Alice ever had after stepping through the looking glass.

Now he felt more like Dorothy, suddenly plunged into a mystical world where a wizard, that being Eric Stone, could grant one’s inner-most wishes that their heart desires to come true. Only this wizard wasn’t a con-artist. He had already matched up Michael with his fantasy girl, now, possibly the one wish that he wanted realized more than to find his one true love, Eric was going to weave his magic a second time and write a book with him.

Eric laughed. “Yeah, pancakes. Those round things that you eat with syrup.”

“Right, yeah, pancakes. That sounds really good.”

Without further ado, Eric turned and made his way to the room’s exit.

“My life is never going to be the same, is it?” he called to Eric’s back.

Eric turned the knob and the door swung open, but he turned back to glance at Michael before venturing through. The expression on his face was as enigmatic as ever. Perhaps he wasn’t being cryptic at all; it could be that Michael’s intellect simply couldn’t match Eric’s and therefore couldn’t read what he was thinking.

“Everything has already changed, regardless of whether we write the book. You’ve met Stephanie and I know how you both feel about each other – it’s obvious. One door opens while another one closes, Michael. The door you’re about to step through will probably see you become as famous as I am. That’s a scary feeling, one which I face every day, only I’m smart enough to deal with the success on my own terms.”

Again, Eric attempted to remove himself from the boundaries of the room, except Michael had one last question for him. “What’s the book going to be about?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Eric answered with a grin. “I think the way in which we tackle this book should imitate life; we’ll just make it up as we go along.”

The door closed quietly, leaving Michael alone to ponder his thoughts in that eerie silence.

He took a steaming hot shower, imagining Stephanie doing likewise as the spray cascaded over his naked body. After he toweled himself dry he pulled on his dirty clothes from the night before, feeling a touch grimy despite having rubbed at every inch of his flesh with a bar of strawberry-scented soap.

Born with an overactive imagination and a flair for being melodramatic, Michael stood in front of the bedroom door with his hand clasping the metallic knob, gripped with an inability to turn it.

It wasn’t just a door. To Michael it was a portal that would transport him to another world.

At the moment, in this very room, he was hovering in limbo. It was his version of purgatory for the living, and when he passed through he had two options. Walk away and descend back down to the depths of hell, or proceed forward and enter the gates of heaven.

Eric Stone was the gatekeeper, sitting at the entrance to heaven with a key ring twirling around on his index finger, offering Michael the chance to unite with him and become an unstoppable unit.

“One door opens while another one closes,” he murmured. It was both literal and metaphorical in his case. The door he was opening led to a better life, whilst the door he was closing, which, in reality, happened to be the very same door, severed the ties he had to his previous existence.

Finally, after staring at the oak door for an indeterminable amount of time, he tore it open and leapt through the imaginary portal. He emerged on the other side, striding with purpose and a newfound focus that his life had lacked up until these past twelve hours.

Nothing is ever going to be the same again, he thought.

As it turned out, with Stephanie, Danny and Eric all playing major roles in his life, it wasn’t.

^ ^ ^ ^ ^

Hello everybody, I really hope that you enjoyed my story and had fun reading it. If you could take the time to vote or send feedback – good or bad, I don’t mind – it would be much appreciated. I’d just like to thank everyone for their response to my last story, The Last Nice Guy in Town, it was just overwhelming. For those who have asked for a sequel I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed, because it was never written with one intended.

Anyway, I really hope you had fun reading my story, and if you didn’t, maybe you could let me know why.