Max Collins - Target Lancer

She patted my arm. “Were we really that young?”

“You look young to me right now.”

“How much have you had to drink, Nate?”

“Not that much.”

I kissed her. It was lingering, trying to make up for lost time. We weren’t finished when she pulled away.

“I must taste like coffee,” she said.

“I like coffee. Who doesn’t like coffee?”

“But also cigarettes. I smoke too much.”

She smoked at Chances R and at Second City, too, pretty much nonstop. And right now she was lighting up a cigarette with a silver Zippo from her purse, from the coffee table.

“When I started,” she said, waving out the match, “the ads said it was good for you. Relaxing.”

“Helen, do you need my help?”

The blue-gray eyes flashed. “You mean financially? No. I’m okay. I’m not flush, but … the setback I had, it was more career than financial.”

“Career setbacks are financial.”

She let out smoke, then said, “Hasn’t caught up to me yet. But it did … I admit this particular setback hurt my confidence.”

“You’re still a very beautiful woman, Helen.”

She gave me a sly look. “I saw your picture in Playboy .”

“The one where I was covering myself with a towel?”

She slapped my shoulder playfully. “No. You weren’t identified. You’re not famous enough. But you were at some party, hobnobbing at the … what does he call it?”

She meant Hef, obviously.

“His mansion,” I said.

“You and all those young girls. Walking around half naked.”

“I swear I was fully clothed.”

“Do you date them, these overdeveloped children?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

Truth was, for the last several years, Bunnies from the Playboy Club downtown and Playmates in town for their photo shoots and young actresses who flowed through the mansion and the club had been just about the only women I’d dated. One of them, Krista, had been with me six months and would have broken my heart if it hadn’t been misplaced some time ago. She was out in Hollywood now, engaged to a producer of Saturday-morning kiddie shows.

“Do they have staples in their tummies, Nate?”

“Why, yes they do. And they’re airbrushed all over.”

That made her laugh. She drew in more smoke, let it out. “How much work do you do for that guy, anyway?”

Again, she meant Hef.

“The A-1 is on yearly retainer with his company. They get threatened by all kinds of suits and blackmail schemes. We handle it.”

“And you two are pals?”

“Nobody’s Hefner’s pal. He’s very self-contained. But we’re friendly. Like you saw in the magazine, I go to his parties now and then.”

She gestured vaguely around my little world. “And are you happy, Nate?”

“No, I’m miserable. Can’t you tell?”

“You might be at that. You’re like me-you’ve been on a hamster wheel of a career forever, and all we’ve got to show for it is busted marriages.”

“Only one busted marriage for me, Helen, and I have a son.”

“Yeah, so do I, and a mother to support, looking after him.” Her tone softened. “You get to see Sam often?”

“School breaks, including most of the summer. He’s coming in a few weeks for Thanksgiving vacation.”

“In high school, like my boy, right?”

I nodded.

“So, Nate … what is your life like, really?”

“It’s not bad. I work hard … not much investigating anymore, but I’m the face of the agency, and really am kind of famous, Helen. So the clients always want to meet with me first, before I delegate whatever it is they’ve brought me.”

“No more true detective stuff, huh?”

“Now and then. A couple of criminal lawyers locally like having me handle things personally. And they pay for the privilege. But mostly … I’m just another executive.”

“With a fuck-bunny pad.”

That made me laugh.

“Yeah,” I admitted. “With a fuck-bunny pad.”

I was used to hearing her talk that way-she could make a stevedore blush. But not me.

Her eyes were traveling. “They are some digs.”

“They are.”

“I bet you get more tail than Sinatra.”

“I bet I don’t.”

“Has there ever been a naked woman in this place over thirty?”

I thought about it. “Not over thirty-five.”

“Would you like to see one?”

I didn’t have to think about that. I stood and held my hand out to her.

I said, “I haven’t shown you my round bed, have I?”

The lighting upstairs was suitably dim for a pair of lovers in their fifties. Sally Rand had never been a stripper-she was a dancer, who with balletic grace gave glimpses of heaven from behind huge ostrich feathers or that diaphanous balloon she bounced around.

So there was no striptease to it, at all. She just pulled that too-young jumper over her head, then the turtleneck, kicked out of her half-heels, and stood there with sheer panties worn over nylons and garter belt, in good Girl Scout be-prepared readiness. A push-up bra emphasized breasts that had gained prominence with the passage of time.

“So far so good?” she said, with a truck driver’s grin.

“So far so good,” I admitted, and got out of my trousers with as much grace as a guy my age with a raging hard-on could manage.

She slipped off the panties, leaving the nylons and garter belt on-her pubic triangle was trimmed and dyed blonde, for onstage purposes, but it worked just fine in private. The bra came away and the breasts did not droop at all. Her nipples were erect within aureoles as round and big as a lucky silver dollar.

For some reason, I’d got out of the loafers and trousers and underwear first, and I was standing there still in my blazer and shirt and tie with my dick sticking out between the front halves of my shirt like a coat-tree prong when she came over smiling wickedly and grabbed me, not by the hand, and led me over to the full-length mirror between closets. She did not have a fitting in mind. Or maybe she did.

She looked small, a curvaceous little thing, like the White Rock mineral water fairy, as she got on her knees on the off-white carpet, positioning herself before me. The blue-green eyes gleamed up at me.

“Go ahead and take off your coat and shirt. You look a little silly.”

I had no comment. Just did as I was told. I did still have my black socks on, which gave the tableau a stag-film ambiance.

She began to suck me.

I was feeling a little drunk, not from anything I’d imbibed, and would glance down at her, then at her reflection in the mirror, as her pretty face took the length of me in and out of her full, smiling mouth.

She would now and then pause for a remark between smooth, wet strokes. Once she said, “You like watching?”

I managed a nod.

“Even though I’m not a little fuck-bunny?”

She had me so damn close.…

I said, “Hell you aren’t,” and we didn’t make it to the round bed. I knelt worshipfully and buried my face in that moist muff till she moaned for the real thing. Then fucked her on the floor, on the carpet, where I could still glance over at our reflection where two lovers in their twenties or maybe thirties were humping like crazy, not a couple in their late fifties trying to recapture something, no, two lovers in their goddamn fucking prime.

Still, out of deference to our bones and lower backs-which did not entirely share our enthusiasm, at least at the postcoital stage-we did find our way to the round bed, after she’d made a stop at the bathroom, and got under the covers and she sat sheet-draped with her lovely breasts showing and pillows propped behind her and smoked a Lucky Strike. She’d brought them and the Zippo along, in anticipation of the postgame recap.