Max Collins - Majic Man

She seemed oddly troubled by the silly tale, and began hugging her arms again. “That’s so bizarre…. ”

“You’re cold-I’ll feed the fire.”

Thinking that this girl had run into more bizarre occurrences in her time than a stupid ghost story, I went over and put a few more logs on, got some heat and glow going, then returned to the couch, where she was sitting, now; she’d left room for me, and I took the liberty of putting my arm around her.

“We’ll warm you up,” I said, and she snuggled close. “I don’t mean to be fresh….”

But she lifted her face up and her dreamy expression, and her parted lips, gave me permission to get a little fresh, anyway; specifically, to kiss her.

It was a soft, warm, sweet, almost chaste kiss. Almost.

She drew away from me, gazed at me earnestly. Her voice was husky as she said, “It’s so strange … I came down here because I thought … I thought I sensed something in that room up there. A presence. Maybe an …” She cut herself off, laughed ruefully. “Now you will think I’m crazy.”

“What?”

“… I thought maybe it was an … evil presence.”

“I think Rebecca’s supposed to be a friendly ghost.”

She shuddered. “Well, I don’t want to sleep up there.”

“You want the couch? I’ll go risk the bed …”

“No!” She hugged me tight. “Stay down here, Nathan. Stay with me-all night.”

“Well …”

“Maybe it was dredging up all those … awful memories, maybe that’s what’s got me spooked. But the one thing I know for sure is, I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

“All right. You take the couch.” I gestured toward the easy chair by the fireplace. “I’ll pull a couple of chairs together and …”

She patted the couch. “There’s room for us both, don’t you think? I’m not very big.”

Some places she was.

“Okay,” I said, and I lay on my side, against the back cushions, and she lay next to me, her back to me, and we were like spoons, as she nestled her bottom into my favorite place, and I looped an arm around her waist, held her next to me and she snuggled; oh how she snuggled.

“Funny,” she said. Whispering. Maybe she didn’t want Rebecca to overhear. “When I first saw you, I thought you were a ghost.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“Whose ghost?”

She didn’t say anything. Then I realized she was crying again. Not bawling like before, no racking heaving sobs; just quietly weeping.

Gently I turned her around to face me. “What is it, Maria?”

Emotion tugged at her face. “You look so much like him.”

“Who?”

“… Steve.”

Her husband. Late husband.

Then she was crawling on top of me, kissing me with an urgency that was contagious, and I was on my back as she writhed around on me, the curves of her molding, pressing themselves to me, my hands moving across the back of her, over her rounded bottom, up the curve of her spine, to the buttons.

“Undo me,” she whispered.

With far less fumbling than you’d imagine, I unbuttoned the dress, and she sat atop me and peeled it off the upper part of her, the garment gathering at her tiny waist, revealing a formidable white bra into which considerable engineering had gone, and she asked me to undo that as well, and I did, and none of that engineering had been necessary because the full breasts were capable of standing up for themselves, large nipples dark against the pale rounded flesh, puffy soft nipples that got crinkly and hard under my kisses. I kissed her and kissed her, her salty face, her lips, her neck, her shoulders, and she let me do most of the kissing, as if basking in the affection; then she eased herself off me, and the couch, onto the floor, and stepped out of the dress, a pool of powder blue at her feet. She wore no nylons, no garter belt, no girdle, simply sheer panties, the pubic triangle vividly dark beneath the fabric.

I managed to say, “I’ll … I’ll get something.”

She shook her head. “No. It’s a safe time. It’s safe …”

Maybe she was a Catholic at that, though the nun part was starting to sound doubtful.

Then she tugged down the panties, and the blackness of the untamed tuft between her legs against the creamy flesh was startling. She was a stunning woman, petite but with that Botticelli body, and she stood there with the reflection of flames and shadows flickering crazily on her flesh, a campfire dancing around her.

“Now you,” she said.

I stood and yanked off my T-shirt, got out of my trousers, stepped out of my drawers. I started to take my socks off but she stopped me.

“Leave them on,” she said, with a new wickedness. “It’s dirtier that way.”

This nun concept was definitely flawed.

We did it on the carpet, near the fire, with me on top, with her on top, and then she stuck that heart-shaped bottom in the air and had me finish her from behind, me saying “Oh God,” again and again, her saying “Yes” over and over, building from a whisper to a scream.

And that was just the first time.

“You were wonderful,” she said, as we lay on the couch; she was back in her bra and panties, and I was in my skivvies.

“You … you’re not so … bad … yourself.” I was pretty winded; we won’t go into our respective ages.

“Of course, I don’t have much to go on,” she said, suddenly pixieish.

“Oh? You seemed to know what you were doing.”

“Really? Gee whiz. You’re only the second man I was ever with.”

Then, having kicked me thusly in the head, or somewhere, she fell asleep, leaving me to ponder whether it bothered me or not, playing substitute for that late fighter pilot husband of hers. Had I taken advantage of her, in her distraught state? Gee whiz-was I the evil presence she sensed in the room?

Had she mistaken my natural lechery for friendliness?

“Naw,” I said to myself, and fell asleep with her in my arms.

If Norman Rockwell were looking for a classic American small town to represent the Southwest for his next Saturday Evening Post cover, he could do worse than Roswell. Under cotton-candy clouds and ball-of-butter sun in a sky so clearly blue that Hollywood simply had to be involved, Roswell and its thirteen or so thousand inhabitants (mostly white, maybe ten percent Mexican and Indian) nestled in a setting of sprawling desert and majestic mountains.

Right down to the manure-rich aroma wafting in from surrounding ranchlands, this was a typical farm community, though distinctly modern, with wide paved streets and flourishing industry (meat-packing plant, flour mill, creameries), and oddly similar to the District of Columbia in its preponderance of shade trees, handsome public buildings and flower-filled parks. Of course in Roswell, it was not granite, but adobe; not cherry trees, but cottonwoods; not memorials, but playgrounds. There was even a Pennsylvania Avenue, with a few Federal-style houses, though mingled with Queen Anne, Tudor, Prairie and more.

In fact, Maria her-Selff (who this morning I had dropped off at her car parked at the recreation area of Bottomless Lake) lived on Pennsylvania Avenue. But I had orders not to come around her place unless it was after dark and she knew I was coming and I left my car parked at least four blocks away and slipped in back. I knew an invitation when I heard one, and-what the hell-it wasn’t like this was the first time I was a back-door man.

Right now, however, the sun was high and hot, the air still and dry, and I had people to see, starting with the sheriff of Chaves County. A risky proposition, walking right up to the local law and introducing myself; wasn’t this the sort of tumbleweed town where they didn’t cotton to my kind around these here parts? Where the man with the badge gave prying strangers a choice between the noon outbound stage or a one-way ticket to Boot Hill? The only proposition riskier would be not seeing the sheriff, first.