Max Collins - Ask Not

“You are feeling better,” she said. Then her expression grew serious. “Listen. I know you’re hurting. We don’t have to do anything. I’m pretty tired myself. But if you do feel like it...”

I reached my hand out, like the Frankenstein monster about to learn that fire is hot.

She batted that away, too, and gave me as impish a smile as she had in her. “Wait. I want to get your opinion on something. Just wait there.”

I nodded, my bruised body throbbing, but at least some of the throbbing was pleasant.

She went over to a dresser that looked like it had been salvaged from a shipwreck, and bent over, showing me the heart-shaped behind that had made her infamous, and which suddenly made me understand the meaning of cupid’s arrow imagery. She grabbed some things out, and almost ran back into the bathroom, where the steam had dissipated, and closed the door.

It didn’t take her long to come back out, leaving the door open to provide some backlighting. She was wearing a little nurse’s cap and a very short-skirted white nurse’s uniform.

“What do you think?” she asked, arms spread, palms up turned, in ta-da fashion. “It’s for the act.”

I said nothing. My mouth had dropped open and didn’t seem to be able to function for anything but sucking in air.

“It’s a little different,” she said thoughtfully, and she strutted a few steps, then shook her head, dissatisfied, saying, “Without music, without heels, it’s not the same.”

I curled my finger and she came over dutifully. I threw the sheet off. She placed a hand gently around me and stroked. “Are you sure you’re up for it? Well, I mean that’s obvious ... I could use my hand like this... or my mouth like...”

As she leaned over the bed, her hair flopped over and hid her as her head descended upon my lap and she suckled me, gently, tentatively, then began a slow up-and-down motion that was hypnotic as she went gradually, so gradually, deeper and deeper, until she had all but engulfed me. At the perilous moment, I gently entwined my fingers in that red mane and eased her off.

“I don’t mind,” she said, with a smile both loving and nasty, tongue flicking, invisible eyebrows raising.

“Get on. Ride me. Ride me, cowgirl.”

“Can’t you see I’m a nurse?”

“I have a good imagination. Just... take it a little easy.”

“I’ll be gentle. I’ll be ever so gentle...”

I swallowed, gestured to the nightstand. “I have something in my wallet...”

She shook her head and the hair was a red shimmery smear around her lovely face. “It’s a safe time. Don’t worry.”

This was a notorious stripper who got around. Some might call her a slut. She could have twelve kinds of diseases. Using a rubber was an absolute must. It would be insanity otherwise. She tugged the white skirt up over the red triangle and I let her climb on. A bareback cowgirl nurse, sucking me up into the wet tight warmth that the men she danced for could only dream of.

Her intentions of being gentle were reflected in her easy, loving cadence. Which lasted almost thirty seconds before the bump-and-grind she was so famous for began, that frantic, jungle-beat gyration accompanied by long hair hanging over me and whipping me, whipping me, whipping me, as she ground into me with a hunger that expressed itself in crazy swivels, working herself into my lap like she wanted to tear me off and take me with her. She was jungle-beast noisy, too, squeals and screams, seemingly lost in the throes of orgasm throughout, and when she finally did come, the noise fell off into a whimpering.

Meanwhile my ribs were screaming — all the Demerol in the world could not have stopped it — and I was in such exquisite pain when I came that if I had died at that moment, I wouldn’t have minded.

“Next time,” she whispered, and gave me a peck of a kiss, “we’ll let it all hang out.”

She climbed off like a little girl getting off a carousel pony and padded into the bathroom, the twin globes of her fabulous behind jiggling like Grandma’s Jell-O salad under the pulled-up short white skirt. I lay back, wilted and worn, but the hurt seemed to have subsided, the hurt of my ribs that is. Because she rode me raw.

That night I woke up once, to use the john and take some more Demerol, and when I climbed in bed next to her, I was out like a switch had been thrown.

Now it was Thursday and I was feeling much better, sitting by the pool and being a letch behind my Ray-Bans. I was temporarily shacking it with a female who could make any heterosexual male’s wildest, dirtiest dreams come true, and yet I was still watching young stewardesses swim and frolic. Being a man is such a humiliating task.

Janet turned over and sat up and had me close the snap on the back of her bikini top. “You look chipper,” she said. “Is that a gun under your towel, or are you glad to see me?”

“It’s a gun. Also, I’m glad to see you.”

“Little ol’ me? I should feel honored, with all this prime cooze on the looze. So — you want to stay with me, till the end of my Dallas run? We could have a good time, Nate.”

“I know we could. Not sure I could survive it, but I do know.” I stretched. Actually stretched. “I think I’d like to go to the club with you tonight.”

She smirked. “In the mood for some more quality entertainment — like those shitty comics of ours?”

“Well,” I said, and my hand around the nine millimeter grip tightened, “I am in the mood for entertainment. Has Mac Wallace been back around?”

“He was in his favorite booth last night. Why?”

She didn’t know it was Wallace who cracked my ribs. I’d told her I was mugged. She had thought that was funny, since I was a guy with a gun and yet some asshole had gotten the best of me. I thought it was a riot myself.

“Just wondering,” I said.

The bill hadn’t changed — same bad comics, same stacked strippers, from lackadaisical Peggy Steele to busty Chris Colt to gyrating Jada. The difference was that tonight I watched from the wings. This new position gave me some refreshing angles on the peelers, but also a more inconspicuous sideways view on the audience.

As promised, Wallace was in that same back booth, again pouring brown-bagged bourbon into glasses of ice, getting quietly if not noticeably sloshed. During the show’s second half, he rose and went off toward the men’s room.

I took the backstage steps to come out a door to one side of the elevated platform and cut along the side of the club. The mostly male audience — the house was about two-thirds full — saw nothing from their wide eyes but the near-naked girl onstage, a short, curvy number with a taffy-colored bouffant. Her gimmick was that pieces of her fringed outfit seemed to drop off of their own free will as she did the Twist to Bill Peck and his Peckers playing “Irresistible You.”

When I reached the men’s-room door, I taped on a hand-lettered sign (which I’d fashioned at Janet’s apartment) that said CLOSED FOR CLEANING. This was necessary because there was no lock on the door of the good-sized restroom, with its half a dozen urinals and four stalls.

Within the dreary but fairly clean yellow-walled john, one guy was washing up, another was just coming out of a stall, and Wallace was pissing at a urinal. I washed my hands, watching Wallace in the mirror while the first guy left and the guy who’d exited a shitter came over and washed his hands beside me. Both were gone when Wallace did the little dance men do to coax out those last few droplets, and he didn’t recognize me until he was washing up. I was standing nearby using a paper towel.

“Something I can do for you?” Wallace asked blandly. As before, his handsome oblong face with its baby-face plumpness was smudgy with beard, the eyes cold and dark behind the black-rimmed glasses. He was again in a black suit, though his necktie was red tonight.