Will Work For Shoes

On the ground floor of the Galleria Mall in Houston, Gavin Taulbe leaned against the parapet that surrounded the ice rink, watching two of his grandkids ice skating. His daughter-in-law, Graciela, stood next to him, tracking the kids' progress across the ice. One of the kids was hers; the other belonged to his daughter Geneva. Graciela had invited her because she knew Angelica loved ice skating, and said she could also spend the night.

Both Gavin and Graciela had come up in coastal Texas. Gavin came from blue-collar, redneck origins, and Graciela from a middle class Hispanic family, but if they had any common ground, besides the love each bore for his son Branden, who was stationed in the Middle East, it was that both were mystified by the appeal of ice skating. That they were there at all was a labor of love.

"I don't care if the ice rink does have its own hours," Graciela said. "When the stores close, it will be time to go home. Corbin will just have to deal; Angelica, too."

"I agree with you," Gavin said. "Whenever my wife catches up with us, we're out of here." He looked at his watch. "That shouldn't be long. They're starting to close up the stores already." All up and down the wide corridors of the mall, the employees of the various shops were shooing out customers, totaling out registers, and pulling displays back. Iron security gates were clanging down like portcullises everywhere.

However, at 9:30, they were still waiting. "What can possibly be keeping her?" said Graciela. "Where can she be? There's nothing open but the restaurants and the movie theatres—and here. What do we do?"

Gavin pulled a cell phone out of the pocket of his khakis and punched in a code. "That's strange," he said. "Her phone's not on. Tell you what, if I don't hear from her in the next ten minutes, I'll call security. Maybe she went to one of her favorite places and managed to get herself locked up in the store. Hey, it happens. Get Genny to tell you about the time she got locked up in Waldenbooks, and that was on purpose. She'd always fantasized about getting herself locked up in a bookstore and so one night she hid while the employees locked the store."

"Did she have as good a time as she hoped?"

"No," said Gavin. "She got cold and lonely. Especially cold. They set the thermostat low overnight."

Ten minutes later, the adults were ready to pull the kids off the ice and go to the security office, when Gavin's pocket chirped. He answered his phone.

"Where the hell have you been? Oh, yeah? You what? You're what? You want me to do what? All right. I'll be there." He snapped the phone shut and put it back in his pocket.

"What happened?" asked Graciela.

"Pretty much what I thought. She stayed too long in Neiman-Marcus, and had a hard time getting out. Graci, I need you to do me a favor. Sidonie wants me to come ahead of you all and meet her in the parking garage—says she has something special to tell me. Will you be OK by yourself to get the kids off the ice, and can you give me about ten minutes?"

"I guess so," Graciela said.

"Thanks!" Gavin gave his daughter-in-law a smile which made Graciela forget that some people considered him a homely man, and took off in the direction of the parking garages without a backward glance. He was a short, powerfully built man with faded brown hair that he kept in the same military cut he'd had since the sixties, and sharp, golden-brown eyes like a hawk's. He did not look particularly grandfatherly. He kept himself fit through working out and his day job, which was repairing cable for one of the local cable companies. His black polo shirt strained over his broad shoulders and biceps. He steered clear of the baggy-pants look the young guys were sporting. For a middle aged white man, he had not much gut and had not lost too much ass. He covered the distance to the parking garage entrance in the ground-eating pace of the infantryman he had been a long time ago.

He got to the van first. He heard the staccato click of heels on a concrete floor and saw, coming from a different direction, his wife Sidonie. She was wearing a black-and-white geometrically patterned dress made of some kind of flowy material, probably rayon, that fastened with a lot of little black buttons; it had a deep V neck, and correspondingly, the kind of hemline in front—there was a name for it, but he didn't remember what it was—that formed an asymmetrical, inverted V and revealed an interesting amount of long, well-shaped, muscular leg. As she bore down on him at a rapid pace, he enjoyed watching the knitting motion of those legs. In her youth she had done a little modeling and she remembered how to walk. And get a load of those shoes! She hadn't been wearing those when they'd come into the mall. Four-inch heels they had, and they fastened around her slender ankles with silver chains. The strap over her classically proportioned toes was another silver chain. He figured the shoes had come from Neiman-Marcus, and he didn't even want to think of the figure that would turn up on one of their next credit card statements.

Her eyes, which were a pale gray with a tinge of yellow—some called them wolf's eyes—blazed when she saw him. Her mouth, a lush surprise in her rather severe, angular face, had been open a little as if the lips were too swollen to close it properly. But she could close it, which she did, long enough to swallow; and then she broke out into a skewed grin that promised a world of carnal pleasure. Gavin felt his cock twitch and start to thicken and fill at the sight of it.

He opened the door of the van, which was parked next to a stanchion. When Sidonie came up to him he took the shopping bag and her handbag and tossed them inside; then, leaning against the side of the van, he caught her by her waist and a handful of her chestnut hair and pulled her close to him, between the van and the pillar. Her mouth fastened on his in a voracious kiss; she clutched at his shoulders and molded the front of her body to his. He slid one of his thighs between hers, and she rode it, gripping it hard. She was strong; she could press her weight and then some. He let go her hair and slid his hand down her back to her ass. Under the soft material of her dress, she wore nothing. When had that happened?

Most of the blood in his brain rushed south into his cock as he realized that there were only a couple of layers of material, easily breached, between them. There were advantages to having a slightly-taller wife, and she had every damn one of them; all it would need would be for him to unzip and her to hike her dress up a bit and with those tall shoes she'd hardly even have to cant her hips to have that hot, slick sheath of hers covering him right down to the root. What a shame it was that they were here in this garage and the kids or somebody else would be along any second plus Sid had this tendency not to keep her voice down unless they were in a tent and sometimes not even then, and just think of it with these acoustics, plus there was probably a security camera trained on them somewhere as it was—

—He slid his hand into the V opening of her dress and grasped her right breast. It wasn't as firm as it had been when she was a girl, but the nipple was as hard as a pebble. He squeezed it between his fingers, and Sidonie groaned into his mouth, biting at his lips and sucking on his tongue. Her hands gripped his shoulders hard enough to leave marks. He could hear her accelerated breathing, and could feel it too, coming through her nostrils. She continued to thrust against his thigh and his now-erect cock; under his hand, her butt muscles flexed spasmodically.

She released his mouth and buried her face in his neck, continuing to lean on him while she recovered a little. Only a little; when she pushed away from him, still breathing hard, he could see that she was still revved up. Her eyes were bright and hot, with that smudged look they had when she had just gotten off. She looked down at his groin, and trained that lecher's smile on him again. His cock was so hard, it almost hurt. His balls already did.

"Let me fix that," she said.

"Later."

"You look like you need it now." She licked her lips and swallowed, as if her mouth was just watering for a taste of his cock, which he knew it was. There were times when all she had to do was give him that look, and he would be hard for her at once; when they had been younger, he would not only be hard, but would also be ripping his pants open, in such dire need of that hot mouth and her tongue twisting its way around his head and shaft that he didn't give a damn if people were looking at them.

"No time," he said.

"Damn," Sidonie sighed. Gavin adjusted his cock in his pants to where he hoped that the bad light in the garage and the van would conceal its condition until it had a chance to deflate. The squeak of rubber-soled shoes on cement, and a burst of treble voices chattering in English and Spanglish helped with that. Graciela had corralled her daughter and niece and they had caught up.

"We were beginning to think you fell in," said Graciela. "Did you find everything you wanted?"

"Not quite," Sidonie said. She made a production of helping Graciela to hand Corbin and Angelica into the van, making sure their seat belts were fastened and stowing the packages where they wouldn't shift all over the floor.

Graciela's eyes lit upon the bag from Neiman-Marcus. "What'd you get at Needless Markup?"

"These," Sidonie replied. She extended her left leg backward so that Graciela, who had settled in the seat behind her, could see one of the shoes.

"Wow!" breathed Graciela. "¡Ay, caramba! Those are Manolos! Did one of you guys get a bonus or something?"

"Not that I know of," Gavin said. Graciela heaved the van door shut. Gavin started it up and backed out of the parking space. They made their way through the nasty Galleria traffic and got on 610. Even before they had cleared the parking garage, Gavin had rolled down the window on his side. He was almost sure he could smell the heat that was still radiating from his wife's pussy, and while he didn't mind it much, except that it was driving him crazy, he wasn't sure Graciela and the kids needed to smell it too. Maybe he only thought he still smelled it, because he knew it was there.

"Abuelo, can't you turn on the air conditioner?" asked Corbin. "It's hot back here."

"What's the matter, you don't like fresh air?"

"It doesn't come all the way back here," said Angelica.

"We're in traffic. If I run the air conditioner right now it'll use too much gas. I'll hit the air conditioner as soon as we're on the freeway."

Sidonie was half turned around in her seat, talking with Graciela, while they inspected each other's loot. Graciela leaned forward and whispered something into Sidonie's ear.

"Graci, you're bad!" Sidonie exclaimed. "Nobody! Lord, what a question!" The two women laughed. Gavin turned the radio on to KIKK and upped the volume until the kids complained. He got onto the Interstate, turned the radio back down, rolled up the window, and switched on the air conditioning.

The ride back to Glendene took less time than he'd feared. He and Sidonie chatted with Graciela and the little girls. Occasionally he glanced sideways at the strong profile of his wife, with its long, straight nose and full mouth; most of the time, when she wasn't swiveled around to direct a comment to her daughter-in-law or the grandkids, she looked at the traffic with an inward, secretive gaze like a cat's, except when she threw a tender, heavy-lidded look his way.

They got to the subdivision where Branden's house was and he pulled up into the driveway.

"Thanks for taking the kids ice-skating," Graciela said as she opened the van door and let them out. "Personally, I could have done my shopping in the Glendene mall, but it doesn't have an ice rink!"

Nor a Neiman-Marcus either. "No problem," he said. "I'm glad they had fun." Gavin waited in the driveway until he had seen Graciela open the door, turn on the porch light and the foyer light, and wave to let him know that she and the children had gotten into the house OK.

He and Sidonie were relatively silent on the drive to their house. Sidonie sighed, and shifted in her seat, and he was pretty sure he knew what she was thinking: she was regretting the exigencies of affluence and family life that had them in this van instead of in their car, because if they were in the car she would be close enough to have her hand on his dick. There had been a few times when, on the very dark stretch of road between Glendene proper and their subdivision, she'd leaned over and taken it in her mouth, just to see how well he could drive under those conditions, but after they saw The World According to Garp she never did that again.

When they got home they fed the cat, set the coffeemaker up to go in the morning, and went into the bedroom.

Without any preamble, Gavin said, "Ok, Sidonie, this is going to be good. I can't wait to hear what happened in Neiman-Marcus that got you so damn worked up you had to hump my leg practically in front of our grandchildren in a parking garage. And about those shoes: like Graci said, who did you have to fuck to be able to afford them?"

One of the things they liked best about their house was that the master bedroom was big enough so their furniture didn't have to consist of the bed with the dresser and the bureaus crowded around it. About six feet away from their bed was a padded chaise, a charming replica of an antique fainting couch, which he had found in an estate sale on Westheimer and purchased for the sole purpose of painting her while she lay naked, with one leg bent and the other foot touching the floor, her left arm flung casually over her head and her right hand resting casually between her thighs.

She lay down on the chaise in a similar pose, although she kept her clothing on.

"Nobody!" she said, grinning.

"How much did you pay for them anyway?"

"Nothing!" Sidonie replied, still grinning.

Gavin snorted, logged on to the computer that lived in the far corner of the bedroom and got onto the Internet. He hated like hell that he had to have a day job, but he'd learned a while back that every time he tried to depend on his art alone for money, something happened that threw their finances into disarray, and he couldn't. Still, working for a cable company; if he had to have a regular job, this was the one to have, with Internet access for next to nothing and no slow-as-molasses dial-up connection.

Nothing indeed.

"If I am not mistaken, what you've got on your feet is the 'Purisca' style, which retails for $530. Hey, you don't have to tell me if you don't want to; I just wanted to be able to plan what accounts we'd have to let slide to pay on whichever one you used."

"None of 'em, I tell you! I got these shoes for nothing."

Gavin stopped and considered where he was going to go next. It was not exactly that he did not trust Sidonie—he'd had her heart practically ever since they'd been kids, and she had never, never become emotionally involved with another man. But she liked sex the way he'd always heard, growing up, men did and women were not supposed to, and sometimes she saw it as challenge and sport, the way men did. And when she combined this attitude with that terrifying expediency with which some women adjusted to living in what was still very much a man's world, it sometimes led to situations that an outsider could…misunderstand. Hell, sometimes he misunderstood them.

He came back to the chaise and sat down next to Sidonie. When he ran his hand up her firm thigh, the fluid material of her dress slid aside and he could see her trimmed pussy. When she was a wild young girl her hair had been shaved in a "Pi" shape, but with the passage of time, enough of the hair on her labia had become discouraged and gone away, that now she kept just a neat inverted triangle on her mons, the point just north of her slit. Her labia, outer and inner, were swollen; the inner flushed dusky-rose and glazed with the fresh marine-smelling nectar of arousal.

He put his hands on both her thighs and she parted her legs further. He slipped off the chaise, kneeling on the floor next to her; he kissed her belly, with its faint striations, and trailed the tip of his tongue from her navel to her slit. Her hips undulated beneath his hands, and he held her down, the muscles of his brawny forearms tensed. Sidonie giving pleasure could be gentle and subtle, knowing more things to do with hands and mouth, more about where a man liked to be touched, how soft and how hard, than most men could afford. Sidonie taking pleasure could be downright uncivilized and inconsiderate, not for the weak or unfit.

Her vagina nipped at his plunging tongue and he slid it out coated with fresh hot juice, bringing it up to flick over the hard ridge of her clit. Having the answer to his question, he permitted himself a soft luxurious wandering kiss on her hungry and perilous cunt. She was abundantly slick, warm and alive. Beneath his mouth, her pelvis undulated again, reminding him of the negligent and dangerous strength of some natural force. She put her hands on his head. He looked up, wiping the excess juice from his mouth on her thigh, and grinned. He had no intention of letting her come at this time.

She inhaled deeply through her nose, and her nostrils dilated.

"You just wouldn't take my word, would you? You just had to see for yourself, didn't you? Damn it, Gavin, if you're looking for a cream pie I'm sure I can make arrangements for it."

He shifted so that he could make another adjustment to his cock, which had just made another escape attempt, and gave her a brooding look. He hadn't tasted any man's spunk besides his own in thirty years, and she knew it.

"Come on, Sid, you've got a story to tell, and I'm all ears. I know how you get sometimes. I'll bet it's a damn good one."

"Ok. I'm warning you though, it's strange."

"Yeah?"

"As strange as they come. Strange as anything I've had happen to me, anyhow. Say, aren't you going to make yourself…more comfortable? I'm showing you mine…"

Gavin got up off the chaise and leaned against the bed, which was one of these antique tester beds that were so high that they came with a little set of steps so you could get up into them easier. Not that he was going to be caught dead using them when he knew Sidonie never did. He unbuckled his belt and unzipped, tugging his pants and his jocks down a bit and letting his cock spring out. A lot of men's were longer, but he'd seen few that were as thick. He took it in his hand, enjoying its hardness and its lively, twitching response to his own touch. A clear, thick drop of pre-cum like a crystal bead slid out of its pee-slit and clung there for a minute before he massaged it into the silky, sensitive head with his thumb. Sidonie stared at it and licked her lips. "What're you doing way over there, darlin'?"

"Keeping a safe distance from you, sweetheart!" Gavin said, doing a fair Bogey impression. "You aren't getting any of this until I get some story."

"Oh, all right." Sidonie sighed and sat up on the chaise, folding her long legs up to one side. The problematic shoes had remained on her elegant feet. "Have you ever had something in your possession that you absolutely did not know that anybody valued but yourself, or that anybody would want, and then all of a sudden someone came along and wanted to give you something for it?"

"I can't say as I have," he said, trying to remember, to think of an example. "What's that got to do with your story?"

"A bunch. Ok, I was in Neiman-Marcus, looking at these shoes. You can't blame me for being interested. I used to model the things, after all—none of them as pricy as these, of course. It still just boggles my mind to think that anybody would ask for five hundred and thirty dollars for a pair of shoes, let alone the twelve hundred I've seen them asking for some of the others in this line. It may date me, but damn, for that much they ought to be seven league boots. But I thought there wasn't any law against my trying a few of them on—hey, it wasn't like I was messing about with a Steuben glass thingy that I might be unlucky enough to drop and break.