Andrew Shaw - Sin Hellcat

I wonder now what that sigh meant. Was she being fatalistic about Will, or about herself, or about me? Or all of us, equally though divergently doomed.

At any rate, she told me to come on up, and the door buzzed. I pushed, it opened, and Will plodded docilely if unsteadily to the elevator. Up seven flights we groaned, and down the hall to where she stood waiting for us.

I remember her clearly. Not because she was stunningly beautiful, for she wasn’t. And not because she was startlingly ugly, for she wasn’t that either. I remember her because she was so fantastically ordinary. She wore a housewife sort of dress, and old bedroom slippers, and no stockings. She had no make-up on, and her features were regular and plain to the point of invisibility. That slightly idealized housewife in the washing machine ads was this woman, without the idealization. Hair black and neither short nor long, done in a style of total anonymity. You have seen this woman a thousand times, usually in supermarkets, and you see that she was probably a striking teenager, but marriage and cookery had made her sexless. She still has the slender body and the good breasts and the clear unblemished features, but domesticity has leeched her blood, the fire is out. Or so you think. You look at her and feel none of the stirrings aroused by palpitating femininity in bikinis on the beaches. No spark shoots out from her, and so no answering spark is ignited in you, and you glance at her and that is all, you walk on.

Trepidation, I’m afraid, was the order of my day as I steered the lurching Will down the hall toward home and wife. Not only was she my drinking companion’s wife, not only had she never even met me before, she was a housewife! Do you get it? A housewife! You don’t lay housewives, for Pete’s sake.

Will providentially afforded a diversion by passing out again, across his own threshold. Mrs. Brockheimer and I had to drag him into the living room. When she bent beside me to grab his arm, the loose neck of her dress fell open a bit, enough to show me the first swelling of a breast hung for the hand, strong yet yielding, full and desirable. And beneath that housewife disguise, she wore no bra!

Get thee behind me, trepidation! Housewives wear bras!

Mrs. Brockheimer, of course, had had plenty of experience of putting her husband to bed unconscious, and so she directed me in assisting her. We half-carried and half-dragged his hulk down the hall into the bedroom, rolled it onto the bed, and stripped it. I was for leaving the poor man whatever dignity can be afforded by a pair of boxer shorts, but the woman stripped him naked, and thus bare and sodden he lay before us on the bed.

She tweaked a portion of his anatomy with a contemptuous linger. “Look at that thing!” she said, her voice low with controlled anger and disgust. “What good is it? I ought to cut it off him.”

“The amount he drinks,” I said, “he still does need it for something.”

She looked at me unsmiling. “You want some coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

I followed her back to the living room, where she unexpectedly turned around and said, “Do you really want coffee?”

Perhaps brutal honesty was what this woman wanted. “No,” I said. “It isn’t coffee I want.”

“What’s your name?”

“Harvey.”

“Sit down here on the sofa with me, Harvey. Tell me about yourself.”

We sat down, and neither of us said a word. She leaned forward, as though listening attentively, and once again the front of her dress hung away from her body. I reached out and slipped my hand inside and cupped her left breast, feeling the tip hard against my palm, the swelling slopes soft against my fingers. She smiled, then, a smile of cynicism and animal pleasure, and quickly opened my trousers. Then her face slipped down out of my vision, and her mouth was warm.

The dress was all she wore. My hand slid up her leg, beneath the dress, to equatorial climes, and busy fingers spoke in sign language. She lay half prone now on the sofa, her head in my lap, and down the slope of my side her hips twisted and writhed. With my free hand I stroked the upper rise of hip, feeling the muscles moving beneath dress and flesh.

Then she sat up, all at once, and pushed my hands away, and harshly whispered, “Take your shoes off. Take them off.” And leaped up to pull the dress over her head, wriggling her body energetically as she did so.

The housewife, with the dress, was gone. Beneath was a panther, a leopard, a cheetah. A female animal demanding the male. A musk rose from her, the scent of carnal battle. As I stood up to strip away my trousers and shorts, leaving shirt and T-shirt on — having removed my tie already and tucked it in my jacket pocket several bars ago — she dove back onto the sofa, twisting around onto her back, knees up-thrust at outward angles, belly hot and quivering, hips alive and vibrant, demanding their fulfillment. “Come on,” she whispered, harshly, urgently, straining fingers reaching up for me. “Come on, come on.”

I came on.

It has always been my technique to tease with small nibbles, finding this works wonders in increasing the receptivity of the female, but this woman would have none of such dandification. I lowered slowly between her shaking impatient knees, pointing at my target, and she lunged upward to grab me in her hands and yank me down atop her. The legs shot out straight, then in-curved, met above my back, and locked, squeezing me down and in and under. Her arms embraced me, her mouth was hot on mine, and it seemed that she wanted to absorb me, to assimilate me entirely to pull all of me down inside her skin and make us one body.

A driving female like that destroys her own purpose, of course. Hardly had we begun when I for one was done. But that mattered not to her at all. She pulsated on, thrusting and squeezing and clamping me tight, and lo and behold I was begun again.

And a teeny tiny voice from far away across the room said, “Mommy.”

I was off her like a shot, staring madly around in all directions, and seeing a teeny tiny girl-child, no more than three or four, garbed in cotton pajamas with feet rubbing her little eyes in the doorway to the bedroom.

The woman disentangled herself from me, and hurried across the room, her flanks gleaming in the dim light of the room, her half-crouch as she ran, breasts hanging, feral and magnificent. I heard the girl-child murmur sleepily, “What are you doing, Mommy?” and then the mother had removed her, and I was alone in the room.

When she came back, to tell me that the child had been put back to bed and was now definitely asleep for the night, I was smoking a cigarette and seriously studying my trousers. Though my second beginning had not yet had its finis, I too seemed to be definitely asleep for the night.

She would have none of it. She snatched the cigarette from my hand and stubbed it angrily in a tray, then knelt before me, cajoling, threatening, stroking, pleading, kissing, urging, mouthing her need, until I found myself — despite myself — coming awake again. And we finished what we had begun. I got no enjoyment from that, but we finished anyway. Because she wanted to, and what she wanted in that line of things she surely got.

Though she assured me I would always be welcome, I never returned to Mrs. Brockheimer. Nor did I ever manage to feel comfortable around Will Brockheimer after that. It was guilt, of course, at least partially. Guilt and embarrassment at what I had done to Will. But it was also embarrassed humiliation at what Will’s wife — you know, I never learned her name? — had done to me, emasculating me, unmanning me in the very act of proving my manhood.

And the child. I hadn’t known they had a child. And I had come in stealth by night to copulate upon the child’s mother, and she the child had seen me and wondered what her Mommy was doing. There was a guilt and an embarrassment in that that transcended all else.