Dirty Old Men [And Other Stories] (Zane Presents) (54 page)

“You like it?” she asked from down below.

Melanie looked down into her eyes and mumbled, “
Mmm-hmmm.
”

The woman climbed up to her chest and pushed her T-shirt and bra up to lick and suck her titties now, while placing her knee into Melanie’s wet crotch.

“Take this off. I wanna see your beautiful body,” she stated, referring to Melanie’s bra and T-shirt. Before she knew it, the woman had Melanie naked and squirming in ecstasy inside of a foreign bedroom.

Brian Belgium soon peeked through the door and loved what he saw. It
was like an erotic, black-and-white Benneton ad. Their contrasting white and black skin became hypnotizing, as Brian continued to watch them from the cracked doorway.

Wow! I wish I had a camera to record this,
he mused with a smile.
I’ve never fuckin’ seen a body so perfect. I have to fuck her myself!
he thought of Melanie.
It’ll be like, going back to Mother Africa.

So he quietly slipped into the room and closed the door behind him. But that immediately sent Melanie into a panic when she saw him standing there.

“Oh my
God!
” she snapped, covering herself up on the bed. She was embarrassed as well as fearful. What did he have planned for her in there?

“Hey, hey, it’s just me,” Brian told her with his palms raised in surrender. “Remember, this is all our inner circle. It’s all right.”

Inner circle or not, his presence in the room had startled her. She had forgotten that there were other people in the house. But when Brian barged into the room like that,
uninvited,
Melanie remembered that there were
tons
of people at his house with them.

I gotta get dressed!
she panicked.
Oh my God! Deborah’s still here! What if she’s looking for me?

Her concerns all rushed out at once, as swiftly as she moved to grab her things.

Shit!
Brian responded.
Look what I’ve done now. She’s all fuckin’ paranoid!

“Hey, calm down and relax,” he told her. “I’m leaving.”

Melanie ignored him and continued to collect her things to get dressed in a hurry, while her new friend attempted to calm her nerves as well.

“It’s okay, sweetheart, he was just being a
guy.
Brian is totally
harmless.
He’s a real
doll,
” she explained.

Brian quickly backed out of the room like he said he would, but it was too late. All that Melanie could think about was what
Deborah
would think of her.

What did she put in that drink?
she finally asked herself of the woman. Her body remained hot and disoriented as she redressed.

Once she was dressed and ready, she ignored the woman’s final pleas and walked back to the closed door, pausing there behind it.

“No one even
cares
what we do in here, sweatheart,” the blonde-haired woman pleaded. “It’s all the inner
circle.
”

Melanie ignored her again. She thought,
Now how do I get out of here without people seeing? And how was I so stupid!
she blasted herself.

Behind her in the room, her horny friend was getting dressed herself.

“Are you gonna call me, Melanie?”

Melanie couldn’t even concentrate on her. It was all an aberration, as far as
she
was concerned. She was hoping never to see the woman again.

Then she made her move and strutted out the room, looking carefully for Deborah. When she failed to spot her before reaching the hallway bathroom, she felt good about it. Then she found that the bathroom door was locked when she tried to get in.

Darn it! But at least I made it out of there,
she told herself. So she stood by the bathroom and waited, while thinking up lies for where she had been. She didn’t even know how long they had been inside the room.

While she was waiting there, she spotted a few of Deborah’s friends down the hallway from her. They saw her and stretched their eyes wide in panic. Melanie noticed it and wondered what it was all about.

Did they see me walk out of the room?
she panicked again.

She looked back to see if her blonde
stalker
was there. But she wasn’t.

Okay, at least she didn’t follow behind me. But why are they looking at me like that?
she continued to ponder of Deborah’s girls. From the looks of their stares, she could tell that something was amiss. Or maybe she was still feeling the effects from the crazy drinks she’d had.

But after awhile, she had been standing next to the bathroom for five minutes. That’s when one of Deborah’s girls began to head in her direction.

“I think someone’s in there,” she stated.

Right as she said it, Deborah Gilford barged out of the bathroom. With Melanie standing there waiting to get in, they surprised each other.

“Oh, Melanie,” Deborah responded nervously. “Where were
you?
”

However, Melanie was too close to the bathroom for Deborah to get away with her secret mission. And when she spotted the rock star, Michael Dekker, inside the bathroom, she immediately understood why Deborah’s friends had been staring at her with concern. Their girl had been
busted.

Okay, now I don’t have to worry about what I did,
Melanie told herself. She almost felt like smiling. But she held it in.

“Umm, I didn’t see anything,” she lied. “It’s all in the inner circle in here.”

Deborah looked at her and then toward her friends before she nervously laughed it off. “Ahh, yeah, right, the inner circle.”

Michael walked out of the bathroom with a smirk, and the temperature inside of the bathroom told their story.

“Well, I’ll be out in a minute,” Melanie announced as she walked inside and locked the door back behind her. Then she took a deep breath and stared at herself inside the sweaty mirror. She felt dirty and couldn’t take a shower yet.

“What was I
thinking?
” she stressed to herself.

I’ve been very bad tonight,
she mused.
It must have been something else in that drink that made me all loose like that!

Nevertheless, she felt that no one had to know what had happened to her. She would keep it all to herself.

At nearly three o’clock in the morning, Deborah drove Melanie back home to Inglewood in dead silence. They were both worn out from the evening, with another work day ahead of them in six hours. And they were both embarrassed by their actions.

When they approached Melanie’s apartment complex, Deborah finally said, “Well, I guess you
know
where I was over at Brian’s. But where were
you
?”

She had been waiting to ask that question all night, especially since she had been caught in the act. She wanted them both to go down in infamy together. But Melanie refused to play the game with her.

“I was just watching movie footage in one of the rooms. They had a big flat-screen TV in there, and I was still a little woozy from the drink, so I didn’t want to be around a lot of people like that,” she fibbed.

Deborah heard her out and nodded. “Yeah, I understand.” Then she perked, “Oh well, at least I scored VIP tickets to the next Iron Nails concert.”

She attempted to laugh it off.

Melanie understood her embarrassment. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Deborah. It’s just Hollywood. Anything can happen here, right?”

“Yeah, you can say
that
again.” She searched Melanie’s eyes for more information. “But where did you get that ‘inner circle’ line from?”

“Are you kidding me? They were using that line all night. I guess that’s what they say to get people to go along with them. So they kept repeating it until it was in my head like a played-out song,” she stated. Then she laughed at it.

Deborah chuckled at it herself as they pulled up to Melanie’s apartment building.

“Okay, well…what happened tonight
is
in the inner
circle,
right?”

She wanted Melanie’s confirmation that she would remain silent about it. She had a reputation to protect to keep her job at the agency.

Melanie squeezed her hand for sincerity. She said, “Of course. I said it earlier and I
meant
it.”

Deborah exhaled and smiled weakly. “Thank you.”

When Melanie climbed out of the car to end her very long night, she told herself,
I can’t even begin to judge anyone now. Hollywood got the best of both of us tonight.
And she couldn’t wait to give herself a long, hot shower in her bathtub…even though it would never wash away the sexual reality of her evening.

I guess Hollywood is not all make-believe after all. And now I know.

Brian Culpepper stood in front of the judge inside the New York County divorce courtroom and managed to keep his composure. He had lost possession of his five-bedroom home in Harlem, his dark-blue Denali SUV, his condominium in the Hamptons, and custody of his son and daughter. He had been ordered to pay $20,000 a month in alimony and child support to his wife for the next fifteen years, and until his six-year-old daughter had turned twenty-one to set up scholarship trust funds to mature when they turned eighteen. The total package of the divorce was estimated at nearly six million dollars.

Jesus Christ!
his lawyer thought to himself as he stood there beside him.
He’s getting hit with everything.

Brian barely cared anymore. He was ready to wipe his hands clean from all of it. A lucrative and generous stock investor at a young age, the fast life had gotten the best of those around him; his wife, his family, his friends,
and
his business associates. And when the man had finally found an oasis to get away from it all, into the awaiting bed of a woman who he thought had loved him, he found that she was just as deceitful as everyone else around him.

Brokenhearted by her betrayal, Brian refused to agree to the woman’s dollar amount in her attempt to blackmail him. That’s when she followed through on her threat to confess their affair to his wife. And she told her
everything.
Not only that, but she supplied addresses, dates, pictures, receipts, gifts and stacks of telephone records. With a wife who had been less than warm, overly skeptical, and calculating to begin with, Brian never had a chance. So he bent over inside the courtroom and took his fucking like a bitch at a breeding kennel.

“Do you have anything you want to say?” his lawyer asked him hesitantly.
He had no idea what was on Brian’s mind at the moment. He only hoped and prayed the man wasn’t thinking about killing himself.

But Brian shrugged in his impeccable dark-blue suit and bold, colorful tie. He forced himself to appear as if he were a perfect picture of poise over adversity. So he shook his head and answered firmly, “No.”

His ex-wife attempted to read his eyes from her side of the courtroom to gauge how he was taking the final verdict, but he never even looked in her direction. He didn’t want to give his ex-wife the satisfaction of his emotions.

“Let’s settle everything up inside the car,” he told his lawyer as he turned to walk out of the courtroom.

Seeing that the man was impenetrable, his mother-in-law commented loudly from the countroom’s benches, where she sat with her grandchildren, “Well, you can at
least
acknowledge your
kids
!”

Her outburst got to him. Brian wanted to acknowledge his son and daughter, and hug them and kiss them inside of the courtroom like any other father would. Yet he understood that it was all another form of their many exploits. Why would they even bring the kids to such a hostile, adult environment? So he fought his urge to give in to the shameful manipulation.

He’s turning into a bitter and hard man,
his lawyer assessed of him as he followed his client out of the courtroom.

As they walked toward the awaiting limousine outside of the courthouse, Brian told his attorney, “I want you to set up a power of attorney for the Culpepper trusts and accounts, where I don’t have to be involved with any of it.”

The attorney nodded. “No problem. I can prepare the paperwork immediately.”

Brian nodded to him. “Good. And I want you to call up her attorneys and let them know that we’ll deposit the full six million dollars within two years time, and be done with the whole thing.”

The attorney looked at him and was startled. “Ahhh, Brian, you might not want to
do that,
even if you had all of the money
tomorrow.
I mean, that’s only gonna make them skeptical of how much you really have.”

Brian looked back and said, “The judge just gave us the settlement terms, right? So take it right back to the judge and tell him your client does not trust the level of stress that a prolonged settlement would endure, and that
he would rather be a normal father to his kids without any bickering over money. And I’m sure that the judge would understand that and order her lawyers to accept our terms without attempting to question where the money’s coming from. And you just tell them that I’d rather go
broke
paying them off, and have to start my company all over again, than to be forced to have to deal with that woman for the next fifteen years of my life. Because I’m not doing it.”