Dirty Old Men [And Other Stories] (Zane Presents) (29 page)

In fact, no one came to get him after the second day. But that hardly meant that Henry would put his guard down. He figured he would remain prepared for whatever would happen to him.

Detective Troy Patterson had promised he would contact him again once he got down to the bottom of things, and Henry now believed him. He had no other choice. So when the detective finally caught back up with him after the third day of work, Henry was poised and ready for the verdict.

The detective pulled him over on the side of the road again, but this time he didn’t bother to put handcuffs on him when they sat again inside of his unmarked car. That still didn’t mean that Henry wasn’t nervous though. Any man would remain nervous in
his
position. So he waited anxiously for the detective to give him the bitter or sweet news.

The detective nodded to him and remained stoic. “Well, it looks like you’ve dodged a bullet, Henry. But let this be a serious wake-up call for you in the future.”

Henry exhaled without a word.

The detective continued, “I did some further research on the girl, talked to her mother, a few of her teachers at school, and some of her girlfriends. And at the end of the day, the girl refused to go along with pressing charges against you. Based on the facts that I’ve gathered on her, she wouldn’t have stood up in court no way.”

Henry asked him, “Did she tell you she lied to me?” That’s all he wanted to know. Her initial lie to him held up his whole moral argument.

The detective took a breath. “Henry, the young woman is
full
of lies. And with all of the things she’s gotten herself involved in lately, she has no
choice
but to lie.”

Henry nodded and grinned, feeling vindicated.

The detective eyed him sternly. “Her lie still don’t make your actions
right,
Henry. Now think about this for a second. If I would have skipped over your paperwork and passed it on to someone else, instead of taking it myself…You catch my drift?”

Henry nodded and understood him perfectly. The detective had gone out of his way to save him from a giagantic mess.

“Thanks,” Henry muttered.

The detective leveled with him. He looked Henry square in his eyes and said, “Between me and you, you had some very fortunate timing, my friend. My oldest daughter had just put my wife and me in a similar situation. We found out she had been having conversations with a much older football player. She had told this man she was twenty-one. She had a fake ID and everything. So imagine how hurt and embarrassed
I was
to find this out about my own daughter, while I’m walking around investigating other cases.”

Henry looked into the man’s brown eyes and could now empathize with him.

The detective exhaled also. “But, no matter
what,
Henry, grown men have to stop
looking
to get involved with young women in the first place, because we all
know
that they’re young. And
nineteen
is only
six
years away from
thirteen.
But you’re nearly
fifty,
Henry. And
fifty
to
nineteen
is still a
blowout.
”

He then pointed at Henry and warned, “So the next time this happens to you, I hope you have the reserve to walk away. Because you may not have another man on the case who can personally understand it. You hear me?”

“Yeah,” Henry mumbled. How could he
not
hear the detective? He
felt
for the man. He felt for them
both.
They were both getting older while the women got younger. So the “blowouts” were more likely to happen now.

The detective repeated, “Well, I hope you do. And you can consider this your first forgiveness. But I can’t promise you that you’ll get another.”

“I don’t plan to need another one. I know exactly what I’m up against now. So you don’t have to worry about me at all. And thanks again.”

Henry Morgan drove away a free man that night in more ways than one. All of his recent thoughts about divorcing his wife for good and moving on to another city had stuck with him. He could easily transfer his knowledge and skills as a newspaper ad salesman to another paper in a different town. That’s what the true go-getters did. They moved around for new opportunities, experiences and higher-paying jobs.

The next month, Henry found himself four hours north of Richmond in the state of Delaware, where he checked out the housing and employment opportunities. He liked everything he saw.

“Yeah, I can go for this town,” he told himself cheerfully. “Everything is wide open here.
And
it’s no taxes on the shopping.”

He stopped to check out Christiana Mall off of Interstate 95. In the middle of his walk throughout the mall, an attractive mother and daughter walked out of a shoe store right in front of him and caught his undivided attention.

The mother looked in her early forties, with the full curves and maturity of her age. She walked like a stately woman of dignity and tact. Henry was immediately impressed with her, admiring her from behind. But then her daughter stopped and turned to their left, a few feet in front of him, causing her mother to stop along with her.

The daughter pointed with her index finger, right past Henry.

“Let’s go to Macy’s first,” she suggested.

Henry looked the younger woman in her face and was stunned. The teenaged
daughter had the dark, slanted eyes of an Egyptian, a face as smooth as an advertisement for cocoa butter lotion, titties like a double scoop of coffee ice cream, and a perfectly rounded ass in her blue jeans.

SHIT!
Henry thought to himself. Just when he thought he was impressed with a woman closer to his age, her daughter made her look like an old leather bag. The mother was still attractive, but her curves were not as pronounced as her daughter’s. The mother’s skin was not as smooth. Her eyes were not as sharp. And her aura was no where near as explosive as her offspring’s.

Well, you can’t compare a mother to her daughter in most situations,
Henry reasoned. There was no competition physically. An older woman was an older woman.
But it’s the mentality part that really counts,
he insisted.
And these young women are dangerous and unstable.

Nevertheless, he gave the daughter a second look as they walked by him. Before they disappeared from his sight to enter Macy’s, he gave the daughter a third look. He couldn’t help himself.

Jesus Christ!
he exclaimed.
What in the world has happened to me?

In his private thoughts, he had already begun to wonder what the daughter’s sweet, young pussy would taste like.

SHIT!
he cursed himself a second time.
I may need to see a psychiatrist now.

Could he actually slip into being a child molester after his experience in Richmond? The idea scared him. Adults were supposed to have the conscious restraint to say no.

“I can’t even look at them anymore,” he mumbled to as he continued to walk through the mall. But then another young woman walked out of a store in front of him, and then the next one, until Henry was quickly forced to modify his new rule.

Well, just because you look at them, doesn’t mean you have to touch them. Looking is normal,
he mused.
Or maybe I can’t go out to the malls anymore.

After further thought, he came to the conclusion that he would refrain from going to places where younger women would congregate, like malls, shopping centers or movie theaters.

But that sounds ridiculous,
he pondered.
I went to all of those places before. What’s the difference now?

Then he realized again that he had tasted the heavenly juices of youth,
and he could not deny it. The experience of a young woman had been wrong…and also invigorating.

SHIT!
Henry cursed himself a third time.
Maybe the detective was right.

He figured he would have to fight for the rest of his days to make sure he never ended up in the situation he had escaped in Richmond. But he was
damned
if it wouldn’t be hard;
real
hard!

He walked out of the mall and headed back to his car, terrified to even look at the young women who were coming and going from the parking lot.

Jason Polk positioned his expensive Hasselblad, German camera on a tripod at the perfect height and distance from the pine-wood, canopy-style bed inside of an elegant, candlelit bedroom. The soft candlelight that surrounded the room illuminated the red satin sheets atop the king-sized bed just right.

Perfect!
He double-checked the view and adjusted the lens of his camera. At twenty-eight years old, Jason was a rising star photographer with a director position at
The Higher End
magazine, a publication of wealth, splurges, expensive candy and grown people’s toys, including his assigned shoot at a hideaway resort in the northern suburbs of Detroit, Michigan.

“Are you ready for me yet?” a buttery-smooth voice asked him from his right.

“Ah, yeah, let’s ah, see how everything looks.”

He fiddled again with his camera and tossed his long dreadlocks out of his face to see clearly.

Gabrielle Kasey, his tempting model for the shoot, walked out from the bathroom, wearing only a golden, silk nightgown, and she was ready to obey his artistic tastes and orders. She glided through the room like a sexy, young tigress and climbed onto the red satin sheets gingerly. At twenty-one, she had been modeling for less than a year, and had not yet been trained how to pose. But her willingness to experiment made her artless efforts irresistible. And her beauty…was obvious.

Jason took a calming breath and flexed his toned biceps, preparing himself for another splendid job of execution. He began to snap her pictures immediately.

“Oh my God, you’re taking that? I’m not ready yet,” his subject complained.
“And I thought he wanted me to take it all off.” She was still dressed in the silk bathrobe.

Jason ignored her complaints and continued to shoot her natural movements. He had prepared himself to preserve her every antic. In his professional opinion, everything she did by accident could become flawless.

“We’re gonna shoot it all, step by step, to see what he likes the best,” he advised. They were shooting storyboard scenes for a romantic getaway at the Oasis Resort Hotel for the magazine’s December issue. And Gabrielle was the perfect getaway gift for any man.

She grabbed the silk robe above her cleavage with both hands and pulled it slightly open, just enough for a man to beg for more.

“I already
know
what he likes best,” she purred. Then she laughed and covered herself up with folded arms.

“Beautiful!” Jason told her. He snapped it all, every impeccable frame of her girlish tease.

“I didn’t even do anything yet.”

Jason snapped the pictures and shook his head.
She is so damn dramatic,
he noted.
She could be an actress. She makes this shit seem easy. I love working with her!

In her blatant inexperience, Gabrielle would effortlessly tell a story through her reactions, without photographers needing to tell her much of anything. She never hid herself from their views. She was always there, wide open for their lenses.

“Trust me, you’re doing everything you need to do,” he assured her. “Just keep being you.”

She looked straight into his camera with piercing dark eyes and shrugged. “Okay, if you say so. And umm…let me know when you want me to take it off.”

Dammit, she’s sexy!
Jason convinced himself. As he stared at her wild, unashamed and reckless beauty through his lens, her cinnamon-colored skin appeared as smooth as an infant’s ass rubbed down with baby oil. No makeup was needed to cover up anything. In fact, makeup would only ruin her perfection. All Gabrielle needed was a dry towel to pad away her shine, a touch of gloss to accentuate her pouting lips, and a hard bristled brush to straighten out her thick mane of long, wavy hair.

Jason nodded and began to imagine the next stage of his work—the naked scenes. And Gabrielle seemed eager to shoot them.

“Okay, well, I’m ready when you are,” he told her. “But take off the robe in stages. You know, one shoulder at a time; one side at a time, and give me angles while you do it, like a strip tease.”

“Okay, I can do that.”

Jason’s blue jeans tightened at his crotch, while he took pictures of her disrobing, piece by piece, shoulder by shoulder, breast by breast, and angle by seductive angle.

Man, I would love to jump up in that bed and join her,
he mused. But his professionalism demanded that he did not. She was only a subject; a model of seduction.