A Bestiary of Unnatural Women (21 page)

Pink, strappy, open-toed shoes with
three-inch stilettos completed her hooker outfit. If those shoes
didn’t shout, “fuck me!” to the entire world then nothing
would.

She could not return home and risk running
into Walt prematurely, so she checked into a cheap motel and spent
the next hour sitting in the crumby room, working on the miniskirt.
She had brought a pair of tailor scissors with her and immediately
began cutting at the pen mark that she had made in the change room
in the store. After chopping a good three inches of material from
the bottom, she used a black thread and a needle to re-hem it by
hand.

After her alteration, she looked at the skirt
in her hands and wondered if she had cut off too much. Would this
scrap of material even cover her crotch? She hoped to hell that she
had marked the skirt properly in the store because she was going to
wear it in public this evening, no matter what kind of tailoring
mistakes she might have made.

She would not get dressed until the last
minute for fear that, if she had time to think about what she
looked like after seeing herself, she would lose her nerve and flee
home in shame. Failing to keep her promise would be the worst
humiliation possible. So unthinkable, that she simply refused to
think about it.

Her stomach was already twisted into knots
too tight to eat and her mind was too distressed to follow even a
simple television program. She did nothing but sit quietly as the
sun sank lower in the sky and let her multitude of fears torture
her while the minutes ticked away.

She hoped that Walt understood and
appreciated the hell that she was putting herself through just to
give him a bit of excitement.

There was no way he would ever call her
mundane again.

The more Walt thought about his wife’s email,
the angrier he grew. He was sick and tired of dancing to her tune.
For the sake of the kids, he had put up with her sniping and
bitching for a long, long time. But Samantha would be starting
university in two months and David had already been living in a
dorm for two years; they did not need him at home any longer. This
summer, he had barely seen either one of them – they were out with
friends every night until all hours. Since Sam’s birth, he had been
counting down the years of their childhood like a convict marking
off a twenty-year sentence. Now it was time for him to be paroled.
God knows, he’d earned a little time off for good behavior.

The only question was whether he should take
his freedom today or tomorrow or next week. There was no question
that he would be gone by Thanksgiving. He might be celebrating
alone, but it would be the first Thanksgiving in memory when he
would truly be thankful rather than just maintaining a
pretense.

Hillary’s email promised that she was going
to be out of the house at 9:00 tonight and she always kept her
promises. He could drop by the house, pack a bag, and be gone
before she got back.

As for her little “adventure” in some bar,
she could do whatever the hell she wanted. Blow every barfly in the
place for all he cared. Or get smart, walk out unscathed, and keep
her prissy little mouth virginal forever. She was an adult, for
Christ’s sake. She wanted to be the one to make every decision?
Well, this was her decision. She was welcome to it and she would
damn well have to live with the result.

After Hillary parked, she pulled the visor
down and took a last look at her face in the fading summer sunset.
The sky-blue eye shadow looked like it had been applied with a
shovel; thick black eyeliner outlined her lids in a crude imitation
of the ‘60s mod style; and her lashes hung so heavy with mascara
that they looked false. Her lips were painted full with the
brightest scarlet she could find – a hue that begged to be left in
perfect ring around the root of someone’s – Walter’s – cock. The
rest of her face was naked – no foundation, no concealer, not even
a touch of rouge to hide behind. A man could grab it, hold it, rub
his cock across it, spray his cum over it, without any fear of
smudging or smearing her.

She was only a single step away from a busy
downtown street and seeing the whore’s face staring back from the
mirror made her heart pound harder than ever.

The automobile clock read 8:59. The hour of
truth had arrived. She grabbed the little black purse that
contained a single twenty-dollar bill, her keys, and nothing else.
Taking a deep breath, she opened her car door.

There was no way to step out without
spreading her legs and flashing that lipstick-colored thong to
anyone who was driving past. Broadway was a busy street in the
evening; no time would be any better than right now. Just as she
put her left foot on the asphalt, she glanced up and saw wide eyes
peering from a passing car window.

That teenage boy would soon be having a wet
dream about a woman old enough to be his mother.

She hated to think that she was contributing
to the delinquency of minors, so, before any more cars zipped by,
she slid her second leg out as quickly as possible, stood up, and
pulled the hem of the miniskirt as far down as she could. It did
not pull down very far. As she had suspected, it could not hide the
snaps that clipped the top of the stockings to the garter belt. If
that wasn’t whorish enough for Walter, nothing would be.

As she walked the block and a half to the
bar, she glanced at herself in the darkened store windows. She saw
glimpses of the same slut that she had seen in the motel mirror –
breasts bouncing like two excited puppies, threatening to jump out
of the too-tight tube top at every step; a wide slice of bare white
thigh visible every time the miniskirt hem flicked sideways as the
too-high heels forced her hips to swivel from one side to the
other; and two squirming ass cheeks, unmarked by any visible panty
line, bulging and working inside the too-tight skirt like bread
dough being kneaded by an invisible baker’s fists.

She felt the cooling evening air blowing
around her bare thighs all the way up to her naked ass, making her
feel as though she were nude all the way up to her crotch despite
the visual confirmation that the miniskirt did indeed cover her
almost down to the tops of the stockings.

She had to fight the urge to reach up and
hike the tube top higher. She was sure that it was slipping further
off her boobs with every step. More than once, she could not resist
glancing down at her chest to make sure that she was not revealing
the rosy edge of her areolas above the hot pink fabric. Not yet, at
least.

She felt unreasonable relief when she finally
reached the door of the bar. Intellectually, she knew that, at this
threshold, she was truly stepping from the frying pan into the
fire.

She had never been inside O’Reilly’s before,
but had walked past a few times last week and had even parked for a
while to watch patrons entering and leaving, so she had a good idea
about what to expect. It was a working man’s bar. Not antiseptic,
not even very clean, but not a scum hole, either. The kind of place
where some men came to drink a few beers with their buddies once a
week, mostly for no purpose but to escape from the wife and kids
for a couple of hours. Other men would stop by after a shift on the
assembly line to try to wash the taste of the factory out of their
mouth. It was a place where neither wives nor girlfriends were
welcome. The occasional hooker would stop by, but the trade was too
slim to support one full time. Sluts were tolerated as long as they
were willing to pay for most of their own drinks and didn’t demand
too much attention.

It was a bar where she would be neither
welcomed nor driven off, but tolerated for as long as she wished to
stay.

As her too-high heels forced her to sashay to
the bar, she surveyed the room. Every eye in the place looked back
at her. And every one of those eyes was male – on Monday evenings
business was too slow for real hookers and the sluts were still
sleeping off their weekend debaucheries.

There were no booths, just a handful of small
tables and a row of stools at the bar. There were a dozen customers
drinking at three of the tables and another five men seated on the
barstools.

Certain that she had missed him, she surveyed
the room again with growing dismay. Walter was nowhere in the
bar.

Her heart sank.

She chose the stool that was furthest from
any other customers – it happened to be close to the centre of the
bar because the other customers were clustered at the ends – and
sat down.

As her legs bent, she could feel the
way-too-short skirt hike up past her stocking tops so that her bare
thighs and a good piece of her ass stuck to the brown fake leather.
The chrome edge of the seat drew a cold line across the naked backs
of her upper legs.

The men in the room were not looking at her
face; their eyes were focused on her legs, ass, and tits. She felt
herself blush. As a modest woman wearing an outfit this indecent,
she had no need for rouge.

She did not impress the fiftyish bartender
one way or the other. He had seen it all and couldn’t care less. He
left her sitting for a good five minutes while he pulled a pitcher
for one of the regulars and chatted about the game yesterday. When
it was convenient for him, he sauntered down to her and asked,
“What can I get ya, miss?”

She glanced involuntarily at her bare ring
finger – her one and only concession to good taste was to leave her
wedding ring at home – and said, “Coke. No ice, please.”

“Costs the same as if you get some rum in
it.”

“No thanks. Just Coke. No ice.” She had
decided early in the afternoon that she would not be drinking
tonight – she wanted to keep her head crystal clear to ensure that
she felt every iota of humiliation as sharply as possible. And it
was working. Nothing had really happened yet and she already felt
more deeply humiliated than at any other time in her entire life.
And that was saying something. High school had not been kind to
Hillary.

While the bartender was drawing her Coke, she
kept her eyes down, staring at the scarred wood, and wondering
where Walter was and what he was doing. She had given him the
option of leaving her here alone and forcing her to give a blowjob
to a stranger – she had been explicit about that in her email – but
she had never imagined that he would take her up on that offer.

“Four-fifty,” the barkeep said as he pushed
the glass toward her.

It would have been a cheap rum and coke, but
it was a damned expensive glass of pop. She passed him the twenty
from her purse and he went to fetch her change.

The thought occurred to her that Walter might
have failed to receive her email, or failed to read it, but she
dismissed that out of hand. She knew that she had the right address
because it had not bounced back and she knew for a fact that he
never left the office until he had read everything in his inbox. He
conducted too much critical business by email to be lax about
that.

That was a pity because, right now, she
wanted nothing more in the world than to have an excuse to get up
and leave this bar while she was still unsullied.

But lacking the excuse of failed
communication, there were two other, far more likely,
possibilities. Either he wanted her to suck off a stranger in the
Men’s room of some seedy bar – maybe he even had had fantasies
about it – or he thought that she wanted to do it and did not care
enough, or cared too much, to interfere. It seemed unlikely that he
thought she wanted to blow a stranger because she said explicitly
in her email that she hoped that he would be the one to purchase
her services tonight.

That left only the first possibility – that
she would soon be on her knees in the Men’s room with a strange
cock in her mouth because that was exactly what her husband wanted
her to do. Well, she was determined to give him exactly what he
wanted, no matter how perverse. Her head turned about of its own
accord and her eyes stared for a long time at the dirty little sign
that read “Restrooms” over the alcove at the far side of the
bar.

For the first time, it occurred to her that
she could have specified the Lady’s room. Until now, she had only
thought about the Men’s because that was the more degrading option
by a slight measure.

Now another thought occurred to her. If
Walter wanted her to suck off a stranger, was he going to require
that, when she got home, she tell him about the whole experience in
excruciating detail? Was that the thrill that he craved? Recalling
the act for his amusement would be even more degrading than
performing the act itself. And if she confessed every detail of her
act, was he going to bring it up again and again every time they
had some little spat for the rest of their lives? Every time he got
angry, would he remind her once again that she had once been an
unfaithful slut?

That thought incited a twinge of anger that
fortified her a little for the night ahead. If he started holding
this against her, she could always remind him that her perfidy was
a result of his choices: first to accuse her of being sexually
boring and mundane; and second, not to rescue her from her
self-assigned fate.

Two could play the blame game.

Walter threw the suitcase in the trunk of his
car, came around to the driver’s side, hopped in and started the
engine.

For the first time since his twenties, he
felt like a free man. He could go anywhere he wanted, do anything
he wanted. And what he wanted was to make his escape before Hillary
showed up. If she had come to her senses and given up her silly
game before she even got to the bar, then she would be pulling
around the corner at any minute. Or she could have blown some guy
in her first five minutes and still be pulling around the corner at
any minute. He knew one sure thing from his years of experience:
sex with Hillary was always a quick business. And he knew that he
did not want to have to spend the rest of the night explaining why
he was leaving. He had not even written a note – she would have
ample time to figure it out during the coming years. Not being able
to rag on him constantly would give her endless free time.