The Stars Are Ours Tonight

"Reception to Tom, over."

The radio on his belt squawked softly, and his friend Gina's voice beckoned to him from his reverie.

"This is Tom. Go ahead, Gina, over."

"Tom, I have a guest request for an unusual repair, over."

"What do I need to bring up, Gina? Over."

"I don't really know, Tom. Can you come to the front, please? Over."

That was unusual for Gina; she's a great communicator, so it must have been something "Personal" that the guest needed. Working maintenance at a 4 star hotel usually brought a different class of guests, but not necessarily better ones. Rich people tended to be assholes, in his experience.

"I'll be up in ten, Gina. Tom out."

He normally would have gotten a clue about the problem from Gina, and could have gone by his little shop in the basement to gather some tools, but it looked like he was going into this blind. Tom walked into the desk area from behind and caught Gina's attention. When she finished with her front desk guest, she came to the office where he was waiting and have him a hug and a soft kiss on the lips. They were 'friends with benefits', and it was a great relationship for them.

"Hey Tom, I have a guest in 1714 who is having an unusual problem. She's here with a part-time caregiver, who has the next couple of days off to hike the Kalalau trail. The lady is an amputee, and apparently one of her hooks is broken. Would you mind helping her out if you can, Tom? She sounds pretty desperate. Please?" Gina looked up at him from her diminutive five foot viewpoint and pouted. Her Polynesian face was glorious, and her nicely augmented 28 D's weren't bad, either.

"I'm helpless when you do that, you know, sweetness?"

"I know. I also know some other things that I do that leave you helpless, but that's for another day."

"Now you're just teasing me. I'll get right over there, Gina. Have a great morning. By the way, how far over 80 is this guest?"

"She's about 38, if I had to guess, and not bad looking, if you don't count the hooks and stuff." She blew him a kiss.

A cleverly placed clipboard prevented Gina seeing the erection that surged into being when she mentioned guest 1714's status as an amputee. Tom had a thing for amputees, but it's not something he'd share with many people.

Suddenly his day looked even brighter, and that's hard to imagine for someone who'd retired at 36, with fee-simple property in Kauai, doing a job for fun. He strode off toward room 1714 with a light heart and a throbbing cock.

Unit 1, seventh floor, room 14 is an end condo in a time-share complex. It is a two bedroom unit with a couple of flat screen TV's, a King bed and a very quiet woman. When Tom knocked, she said softly, "Come in, please, the door's open."

He pushed the door open and entered the kitchen. The guest was in the bedroom adjoining the kitchen/living room area, sitting on the bed in near darkness. Tom called out, "Hello, my name is Tom and I'm here to see if I can help you with your prosthetic devices if I can."

"Thank you very much, Tom. Please forgive me if I don't come out. I'm shy, and I'm not comfortable being seen without his arms, if that's okay with you. The arms are on the coffee table near the window. Do you have experience with prosthetics?"

"Not specifically, Ma'am, but there's not much I can't fix. What seems to be the problem?"

"The terminal devices are both broken and I can't open them. I guess you'd call them the hooks. One broke on the plane and the other one broke a few minutes ago. I can manage without one, but to be without both is nearly impossible. I've been told that the cables should last for years, but these are only about 18 months old; that's how long I've had them anyway."

A quick scan of the operating cables showed that they had not worn out. Aircraft grade stainless steel cable is really, really tough, and these had both been severed about two inches behind the hooks, just before they entered the cable sheaths that guide them. They appeared to have been cut nearly through with the type of pliers that are meant specifically to cut them, called 'parrot beak' cutters. This looked like sabotage to him, but he didn't want to tell her that for fear of scaring her to death.

Tom was trying to decide what to tell her when she spoke up from the shadows. "It wouldn't surprise me if my ex-fiancé had messed with them. This was supposed to be our honeymoon trip, but we called it off. I decided to come by myself along with my friend Melissa. Can you fix them, Tom?"

"That depends on whether I can round up some cable here on the island. If you are okay, I'm going to go to town and see if anyone is open who might have this stuff. Can I do anything for you before I go?"

"No, Tom, you go ahead, I'm just peachy here. I'll be waiting for you."

"I'll be back whether or not I can find the cable. If I can't find anything, I may be able to find a splice that I can use. How long are you here?"

"I have the room for two weeks from yesterday, why?"

"Well ma'am, it's Hawaii, specifically Kauai, and we will probably have to order these parts from one of the prosthetic shops in Honolulu."

"I understand. Thank you for your help. You're a lifesaver."

As he walked out to his pickup, Tom had the most amazing feeling that he somehow had heard this woman's voice before. There was something going on, but he didn't know what it was, at least not yet.

Back at the hotel, Cassandra Elliot knew exactly what 'it' was. As Tom Samuelson left the room, she sank to the edge of the bed, shaking like a leaf. As she sat in the dim light of her bedroom, she looked into the mirror on the wall and sighed. 'Just when I thought nothing else could possibly go wrong', she thought to herself.

In a few moments, the shaking had subsided, except for the typical random jerking of her arm stumps. It wasn't so much the fact that her arms were mostly gone that embarrassed her in public; she actually much preferred not wearing her nearly useless prosthetic arms. What she found unsettling was the incessant twitching that she found so difficult to control. Her right stump was the worst of the two; only about four inches long, it had a mind of its own, twitching and flapping like a tiny wing nearly all the time. Mostly, it merely quivered and jumped a little, but sometimes she would look over and it would be apparently straining to reach the ceiling, and she had to mentally force it down. Her left stump was somewhat longer, retaining about two inches of forearm, just enough to make her prosthetic arm bend, but not enough to give it any real strength. It, too, seemed electrified and twitchy at times, sometimes becoming unusable for short periods of time.

Dangling out of the bottom of her shapeless Hawaiian dress were the remnants of her feet, both modified into Symes amputations. Her forefeet were gone completely, and her ankles were fused permanently, so that she walked on her heels. It was better than using prosthetics by a long shot, and after the initial healing, walking was relatively painless, although far from graceful. Unless she took tiny steps, she tended to stomp as the weight of her body transferred to her rigid heels. She missed wearing shoes, and she missed her shapely calves, made hard and sleek by years of rigorous exercise. Atrophy had withered her lower legs to the point where she could nearly encircle them with one hand from top to bottom. When she first began to attempt walking, it was not the amputations which gave her the most problem, but rather the balance issues due to the removal of most of her feet compounded with the jerking of her arm stumps.

With the passage of time comes practice and acceptance, and her balance was much improved now, although she still was unable to stand still for long, since her stilt-like legs needed to shuffle about to keep her upright. She'd actually taken an Aikido class for a while, which taught her to fall without hurting herself. It also helped her self-confidence a lot, and if it hadn't been for her fiancé holding her back by insisting that she stay at home for a year, she wouldn't feel as nervous as she felt at this moment.

As their last fight proved, he was both disgusted by her amputations and embarrassed to be seen with her. She had called off the wedding and thrown him out, and he had gone nicely which surprised her. She'd found out later that he had tried to cash in their tickets and cancel the hotel reservations, but had been unable to since they were in her name. Cass had no doubt that he had damaged her hooks, and couldn't decide whether to be angry or just feel pity for him.

Right now she was feeling something, but it was for the man who'd just left her room to attempt to salvage her vacation. She'd recognized him immediately as the man she had loved from the time she'd known what love was. Tom and she had grown up on the same street, gone through school together, and been best friends their whole lives until she'd screwed it up when she was 19 and a freshman in the same college as Tom. She'd not only stood him up for an important social event; in a drunken moment, she'd mocked him in front of his friends and embarrassed him so badly that they'd never spoken again.

She'd been mortified when she'd realized what she had done, but by that time he'd dropped out of school and moved away. She'd actually hired a private investigator to try to locate him, but had finally resigned herself to the sad reality that she'd lost her best friend forever. She'd moved on eventually, but most days found her wondering about him, even after 15 years.

"I'm a freak of nature now," Cass said out loud. "Even if I hadn't broken his heart 15 years ago, why would he have anything to do with me now? He's even more handsome than I remembered, and besides, I saw the ring. Of course he'd be married, he's amazing. I've fucked myself again." Even as the words left her lips, she thought, 'Even fucking myself would be pretty good, I guess. These fucking stubs are too short to even do that.' She looked down as she pawed at herself with her left stump. It missed the rigid bump of her left nipple by three inches, just making her pendulous breast mock her by swinging in a languid arc.

Tom was driving down highway 51 toward a marine supplier in Nawiliwili, and his mind was buzzing with disjointed thoughts, from the excitement of working with prosthetics, to the nagging voice in his head that was trying desperately to connect distant memories to the events of the last hour. "Peachy! She said 'peachy'! Holy shit, it's Cassy!" Tom yelled out loud, hurting his own ears a little in the cramped confines of his little Toyota pickup. He drove into a parking lot and turned around, the tires on the little truck squealing their protest as he flew out the driveway. It took him about ten minutes to return to the condo, and he stood bouncing in the elevator as it made its ponderous progress up the shaft.

Tom ran down the hallway and almost slid to a stop at the door. A crack of light showed that it was not closed. He burst into the empty kitchen just in time to see Cassandra starting to climb over the railing of the lanai. She was going to jump!

Before he'd had a chance to think it through, he bellowed "Cassandra Elizabeth Elliot! You get your ass back on this side of that railing right now!"

To his astonishment and relief, she did exactly that. By the time he reached her, Cassy was beginning to sag, her face a rictus of anguish. Tom took her in his arms and carried her back to the couch and sat, cradling her in his arms. The enormous, racking breath she'd taken as they crossed the room came out as a moaning sob, and she began to weep in earnest. Tom held her head to his chest and patted her, soothing with his hands and his voice as she wept. Her short stump quivered and jumped against his chest, and she clung to his arm with the other.

After perhaps 20 minutes, she calmed. Tom continued to cradle her in his arms, and soon she looked up and said, "I couldn't even kill myself right. I was scared of what you'd say, but I was more scared to die, Tommy."

He looked down at her, and the tears in his eyes began to fall onto her face. His voice was hoarse with emotion as he said, "The only way you're going over that rail is if I go with you, Cassy. I just found you again. To lose you would surely kill me."

"What chance do I have with you, Tommy? I broke your heart with stupidity, and I'm a monster."

"NO!!" He roared. "You are NOT a monster, Cassandra!" He said fiercely. "You are damaged, through no fault of your own, but you will survive this, I guarantee it. It will be my pleasure to see to it that you are cared for and loved for the rest of your life."

"But you're married now, Tom!"

No, I'm not, Cass."

"But, the ring...?"

He took a deep breath and appeared to try to compose himself. "I was married, Cassy, to a wonderful woman named Josie. The last time I cried was when I held her as she died from breast cancer 5 years ago. She was a wonderful friend and lover, and I miss her very much, but she could never be my very best friend. Only you can be that person. Whatever happened is past, and forgiven. I never stopped loving you. "

Cassy's eyes were impossibly wide, and she began to cry again. "You still love me?"

"Never stopped, silly girl; I believe I mentioned that."

"But my hands, my feet? How could you still love me?"

Tom slid out from under Cassy and turned to kneel before her on the couch. He took her scarred feet in his hands and brought them to his mouth. He kissed the length of the scars on each foot, and then went over the tops and around the bottoms, bending her legs gently as she stared at him openmouthed. His hands went to her knees and caressed down the length of each withered calf, rubbing the soft skin against his face. Smoothly moving to sit beside her, he took her long stump and held it to his face, caressing himself with it, then kissed the tip and the scars lovingly. With only a little hesitation, Cassy leaned forward and offered her short stump to Tom. He leaned toward her and she stroked his face with the soft saggy tip where the bone didn't quite reach the end.

"I'm sorry this, all of this, happened to you, Cass, but in a way, I'm also overjoyed because the fates used it to bring you to me when I needed you the most. I was finding less and less enjoyment in life, and I was seriously considering suicide myself. A part of me was injured that night so long ago, in fact I thought it was dead, but it seems to be back and very healthy right now. Maybe it's naïve to believe that we can pick up where we left off, but I'm enough of an optimist to imagine that it can happen."

"I guess I'm a believer too, then, Tommy, because I can't see anything other than my handicaps standing between us, and for some wondrous reason, it seems that you don't mind a defective girlfriend. So let's take this as it comes and see what happens, okay? Your first test is coming up very shortly though, because I have to pee like a racehorse."

"Ha! I haven't heard that in years! Remember when we were kids, and we had the 'pee for distance' contest?"

"Of course I remember it. You cheated."

"I did not! It was fair and square!"

"Was not! You had a six inch advantage!" Cassy smiled.

"Well, I guess I'm still gonna win, because I was only eight years old then. I have a bigger advantage now," Tom said with a wink.

They both burst into laughter at that, although Cassy began to wonder how much of an advantage Tom actually had, and the thought made parts of her tingle that had not tingled in a long while.

"Have you had lunch yet, Cass?"

"Actually, I haven't had breakfast yet, Tommy. I was just starting it when my cable broke. By the way, did you even have a chance to look for cable?"

"I'm sorry, Cass, I didn't. I turned around and raced back here when I put two and two together. In fact the Kauai county sheriff is probably looking for the Wildman in the Toyota pickup as we speak. I can go after I fix you breakfast, though. Will you come with me?"

"Can I tell you something, Tommy? I really hate the damn hooks. I only got in the habit of wearing them to please others. They're hot, heavy and they don't really work very well. Would you mind if I took some time off from them?"

"As far as I'm concerned, we'll throw them in the truck and forget you ever had them, Cass. I prefer skin to skin contact anytime."

"You better watch talk like that, mister. I haven't had skin to skin contact for a couple of years. You don't want to start something neither of us can contain!"

Tom stood up and took Cass by the shoulders and helped her up. As her face came near his, he enveloped her in a kiss, which she eagerly returned. As they kissed, his hands found her arm stumps and caressed them both. Cass felt her large nipples jump to rigid attention, and for a moment, the old insecurity rose, and she fiercely pushed it away from her mind. Tom felt the grape sized bumps through his light shirt and looked down as he stepped back.

"Oh man, I don't remember those, Cassy!"

"I had forgotten them myself until just a few minutes ago, Tommy. Could you help me use the bathroom now?"

"Sure thing, Cass. Lead the way,"

As she walked to the bathroom, Cassandra concentrated not on just walking, but on attempting to make her awkward gait more appealing. She allowed her hips to drop from side to side as she stepped forward, and for the first time, she also noticed how her hard heel-strikes made her breasts jiggle, and the rubbing of her nipples against the soft fabric of her dress made her pussy pulse. She smiled to herself, and wondered how Tom found the view from behind.

Tom found the view from behind to be entrancing, to say the least. As she walked, Cassy's ass swung with a metronome- like rhythm that made his dick feel like exploding. He couldn't decide what to look at the most, he ass, her stumps, or her unfettered boobs trying to escape from the dress.

When they reached the toilet, Cass turned to face him and said, "Please lift my dress up Tommy. Oh, I've waited a long time to say that," She said with a crooked smile.

"And I've waited a long time to do it, sweetness," he replied. Tom reached out and took up her dress near her knees and began to slide it up her thighs. Cass stared at them, transfixed and slightly amused to see that they were plainly shaking. When they cleared her hips, tom found himself staring at a truly beautiful smoothly shaven pussy. In the center of the view was a long, fat clit, its pink head protruding half an inch out of a fleshy sheath. Beneath it hung two large brown wrinkled labia, just beginning to unfold with the increased blood flow of passion. Cass sat and the unmistakable hissing of long held urine filled the room. They both had to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. When she indicated that she was done, Tom wiped her carefully, front to back, and resisted the urge to continue wiping for about a week.

Tom washed his hands after he lowered Cass's dress, and giving her a soft kiss which threatened to become more. It was apparent that both of them wanted to prolong the lovemaking that they both felt was inevitable.

"Let's go to breakfast, okay? I'll buy and everything."

"I'd like that, but can you help me change? This thing feels like a sack, and I'd like to look nice for you."

"Point me to the closet, love, and we'll get you presentable to the crew at the diner down the street."

After looking through what Tom thought to himself was an exorbitant number of outfits, Cassy settled on an ankle length broom skirt and a linen top styled somewhat like a gypsy blouse. Cassy stood before Tom, shifting slightly from foot to foot to keep her balance and said, "I could probably manage this by myself, but I was hoping you might like to help me change?"