A cute little story I wrote many years ago...Enjoy.
...
‘O’ can be a very dirty little vowel, especially when a female voice is stringing a bunch of them together to the jackhammer of bed springs.
“Oh my God.” Georgette slapped her Woman’s World down onto her drawn-up knees under her special order Bed, Bath and Drapery down comforter. Those fine-lined eyebrows of hers under the tight draw of russet hair could make a perfect triangle point when she was really steamed, and they came together now like an angry arrow, directing attention to her pouty-lipped frown. “They’re at it again.”
Andrew kept his head on his pillow, faced away from her, and got real serious real quick. If he didn’t, the grin that twitched and stirred from sleep would throw its legs over the side and give a good morning stretch. If that happened, he might as well reach into his boxers and hand his manhood right over to her. “They’ll be done in a half-hour. You normally read for twenty minutes anyway.” The jackhammer slows to a steady country beat. Thirty minutes. Jesus. He and Georgette could maybe go thirty minutes over two weeks.
The glass cover on the ceiling light rattled. Back to the heavy metal double bass pedal thumping. Had to be at least a dozen ‘O’s strung like pearls on the string of that moan.
He turned his head her way. “Oh, come on. Let them have their fun. Maybe we should take notes.”
“Don’t be disgusting.”
He slipped a hand down around his crotch, ostensibly to scratch, but really just to remind himself that he did indeed have balls. “Well, if it bothers you, buy some earplugs.”
She turned and glared at him. “You’re calling management tomorrow morning, Andrew. I mean it. I’m sick of this.”
“I am not calling management. Play some music, or buy a white noise machine.”
The big sky blue eyes he had tripped over all those years ago back in college were storm dark and wide with willfulness. “If you don’t, I will.”
How she said it, the petulant cleaver chop of articulation, diced words sautéed in a sizzling frying pan ultimatum—point made with burning clarity. In other words, for her to make the call would be very, very bad for him.
He jerked himself upright, banging his back against the headboard. “So just what exactly do you want me to say? ‘Hello? Yes, I’d like to make a complaint about our upstairs neighbors. Their loud, passionate sex is interfering with my lack of it.”
There are moments, occasionally, when he will be minding his own business, just trying to get out of a conversation, finish it, seal it up and put it away, and then the most terribly wrong thing will spill from his mouth and make a dripping, sticky mess.
Georgette’s motionlessness, her gape-mouthed silence, made her look exactly like she had popped open a shook-up soda can. Yeah. This was one of those times.
“I’m joking. Kidding. Don’t—“
She was already rolling over, away from him, snatching covers in a tight fist that she wedged under her chin, peak of shoulder like a Himalayan snowstorm.
Above, the ‘O’ is swapped for an ‘A’, maybe just an improvisational whim, maybe a shift to a higher pleasure gear. Whining springs and banging headboard were rat-a-tatting like machine gun fire. And hunkered down in the cold trenches while the bullets whiz overhead—good ol’ Andy with his hard helmet and his dry rations in a tear-away bag, sitting in a puddle of mud.
“Georgie, don’t be like that. I didn’t mean anything by it, really.”
Cold monotone muffled by face-buried pillow. “Go to sleep.”
Good idea. Sleep. He had to get up early tomorrow, get the menu ready for the Saturday lunch banquet at the restaurant. Corporate suits having their corporate Christmas with all the pretension a Four-Star Golf Club restaurant can provide. But he’d get no sleep until he settled this with Georgette. She’d only twitch and jerk and fidget all night with what she wanted to say but wouldn’t.
The pounding and vocal fireworks had settled down again—energies recharging, breath caught, maybe a fondle or a cuddle or a kiss, a dirty word as warm breath on the ear.
He turned, moved closer to her, put his arm around her, stroked her arm. Nothing worse than caressing the rigor mortis of furious muscles. “Georgette. I’m sorry. Please. Don’t do this. At least talk to me. Call me an asshole.”
“Don’t touch me, Andrew. I don’t want to be touched right now.”
He pulled away, back up against the headboard, sulked for a bit. The racket over them, gaining percussive momentum again, completely ruined any chance for a good sulk. The low rumble of arousal above got under his skin and into his muscles and he felt squirmy and warm and frustrated and angry.
“I’m not going to sleep like this, you know. This is stupid. Would you please turn around and look at me?”
She did. A violent, thrashing spin that sent hair and covers everywhere and shook the bed and banged the headboard against the wall with a racket that was as loud as the noise above, but with vehement, not erotic, passion. “I’m sick of this apartment, Andrew. I want out. I want a house, I want my own walls and I don’t want to hear anyone above me anymore. I want to be able to make noise when I want to make noise, and I want silence when I need silence. I’m tired of the cramped quarters, I’m sick of having to wait my turn for the washer and dryer. I want to have friends over. Parties. We need to get out of here.”
His turn for that frozen, open-mouthed stare—the look of shock that he had no right to wear because he knew this had been bothering her. He had been noticing the constant frustration she slung over her arms with the blue plastic grocery bags as she fumbled for keys to the security door, the mailbox, the apartment door. He heard the low grunt of annoyance when the ceiling creaked from the upstairs neighbor’s floorboards, or when someone let the outside door slam shut instead of guiding it quietly into place with a courteous hand. Little things sent her into rages—grabbing a towel in the makeshift linen closet and having bedding tumble down onto her, or stubbing her toe on the couch frame as she tried to make her way through the narrow channel of navigable living room.
“I know. But, Hon, there’s no way around it right now. With you back in school for your interior decorating degree, we just can’t afford a house. We had discussed all of this. We knew the sacrifices. Just another year and things will be different. We’ll move, find a place in a bigger city. You can get a good job with your degree, and I can find a restaurant that’ll actually pay me what a chef should be paid.”
The anger was gone from her face, even though her expression hadn’t changed much. Maybe it had never been anger. Maybe it had always been this twist of desperate pleading. “I know what we talked about. I know what we’re doing. I understand all the damn logic of it, but that doesn’t make me feel any better right now.”
He risked a stroke of her arm. She allowed it. “I know. But I don’t know what else to tell you. I don’t know how to make you feel any better about it.”
She propped herself up on her elbow. Breasts, soft and swelled like warm risen dough, loosely overflowed her nightgown. “You don’t have to say anything. You don’t always have to try and make me feel better. Some things aren’t for fixing, you know. Sometimes I just need you to listen, not get defensive.”
“I’m not getting defensive.”
“Yes you are. Yes you do. Every time I complain or grumble about something, you seem to take it personally, like you’re somehow responsible or to blame. So you think you have to make it all better. Some things don’t get better, Andrew. Some things just are the way they are.”
“Well, you certainly seem to want me to fix this problem.” He glanced up at the knocking, creaking ceiling.
She was quiet to that, eyes dropping to his pillow. He kept his eyes on her. It was her turn to talk. He’d wait her out.
She met his eyes again, conciliatory, storm cloud eyes cracking with a glint of sunlight. “I’ll tell you what. You promise to just sympathize with me and not try to fix things, and I’ll promise not to react by making demands on you.”
“Okay.” He wasn’t sure if he was pissed or relieved. Maybe, more than anything, he was realizing for the first time how much he hated this apartment, this tiny, over packed life. It was fun at twenty, plummeting down a skydiving lifestyle, the exhilaration of where you’ll land next. At thirty-five, it was just falling. And that ground was hard and big and coming at him fast.
A grab bag of vowels from above, some short and stuttering, others stretched long and tight. The occasional seasoning of hard consonants to a more erratic, intense pumping. Andy’s eyes fell again to the plush seam of breasts slipping from Georgette’s nightie.
“How can they do that?” Georgette said. “I mean, they have to know that everyone can hear them.”
“Maybe they just don’t care, Georgette.”
“Obviously not.”
“Maybe they’re just doing what they can to get the most out of what they got, you know?” He reached out with a finger, ran a path down the soft, plump ravine of flesh. She shivered and covered herself with a hand.
“Stop that.”
“I remember when we could make a racket like that. Back in the day.”
“We never.”
He felt the heat of her blush in his groin. “We did. You were more of a grunter than a moaner, though.”
Her mouth twisted and aged her, but her giggle was eighteen years old. “I was not!”
He smiled and nodded. “Oh yes, you were. You and your vise-grip thighs. Sometimes I thought my eyeballs were going to pop out of my head. I loved that.”
She brushed a hand against his cheek. “Things have gotten a little stale, haven’t they?”
“Well, I don’t love you any less, but sometimes I feel like I could love you more, if you’d let me.”
Crescendo through the ceiling joists. Every vowel, one slip-sliding into the other, bed-creaking, floor-thumping humps like the final beats of a cardiac arrest. He felt her hand on the paunch of his stomach, caressing and slipping lower, slow and wandering, slinking under the elastic of his pajama bottoms. “Well, maybe it’s time I do some fixing.”
#
Morning on five hours of sleep and life tasted like his one hundred percent Arabica bean Colombian coffee with a little sugar and milk—dark and bold with that touch of sweetness and cream. The stupid grin wouldn’t leave his lips. Neither did the erection that woke up before he did, like he was sixteen again. He looked down the hall to see Georgie step naked from the bathroom to the bedroom, wet tussled hair free and flowing. She shook her cute, dimpled behind at him as she went.
Maybe he could be twenty minutes late to work. To hell with the suits. If their Austrian braised beef marinaded for a half hour less, so be it.
The phone rang. He decided to let the answering machine get it. No reason to spoil the afterglow of a perfect moment, or of the next moment to come. He took a last sip of coffee and sauntered into the bedroom, hoping to catch her before any clothes could defile her supple curves, or maybe hoping those clothes could be there for him to remove. Yeah, that would be even better.
He heard the phone pick up and Georgie say “Hello?” Everything after that was spoken with a startled-flat tone. “What?” “Oh.” “Yes.” “Fine.” “Of course.” “Goodbye.”
He stepped into the room. Georgette stood there in her bathrobe, phone receiver still dangling in her hand, an indecipherable look on her face. He moved closer, cautious, nervous to say anything, desperate to say something. “What is it?”
She slowly raised her head to him and stared. “That was the management. They called to say there were some complaints phoned in last night...about us.”
The silence in the bedroom lasted several seconds. The laughter went on for many minutes more.
Comments