Drew Smith - Arcade

After a while, he was fucking her hard enough that she stopped sucking my dick to focus on taking his. So I moved to the back and watched his cock going in and out of her. It never got boring. The wife was moaning louder and louder.

I could hear men gathered outside. They kept trying the door.

I couldn’t resist. I reached down and wrapped my hand around the base of his dick. He tensed up when I did it, but he didn’t stop me. He kept fucking her. I couldn’t even come close to encircling it with my hand. It was as fat as a beer can.

The wife looked over her shoulder and saw what I was doing. “You’re scaring my husband,” she said. “I like that.”

“You’re the one who should be scared,” I wanted to say to her.

“Wish I could be in there too,” I said instead.

“You kiddin’? There ain’t even room for him,” she said.

She was moaning and laughing and squealing, making more noise than I’d ever heard anyone make at the arcade. I touched her husband, feeling his dick and balls and his chest. With my other hand I rubbed his wife, sliding my fingers in when he pulled out.

Her moaning grew louder until finally she came at the top of her lungs. Then her husband came inside of her. Then, with my hand still around his dick, I came on the floor.

We started getting dressed. The husband had a handkerchief in the pocket of his shorts, and he handed it to his wife who cleaned up between her legs.

“You want this back, or toss it?” she said.

“You can toss it, hun,” he said. She dropped it in the trashcan before pulling her dress over her head.

“Boy,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

“Thank you ,” he said. “That was fun. Maybe we’ll run into one another again sometime.”

“I hope so.”

The three of us left at the same time. In the hallway, a few men were gathered. I’d heard them knocking and trying the door, but greeting them that way was strange and surprising. They looked like a crazed reception line of zombies.

We exited to the parking lot together and all said “goodnight” one last time. On the highway, we rode alongside one another for a mile or two, them in a big white pickup. Before we separated at last, the wife rolled down her window and lowered the top of her dress so I could get a final look at her breasts. I could see her husband in the driver’s seat craning his neck to see my reaction, having the time of his life.

A DARK CLOUD FORMED OVER THE COP’S HOUSE. HEstarted taking my calls again as everything began to go wrong for him and the kid. I thought maybe my crying and obsessing and praying had finally roused God like a sleepy old man waking from a nap to finally join the fight.

The first thing He did was kill the cat. The cop and the kid had been worrying about it lately. It had been vomiting, and then it stopped wanting to jump up onto the furniture. They took him to the vet who said they could take the little guy home for one last night and bring him in first thing in the morning to be put to sleep. They cried together and stayed up all night telling the cat how much they loved it, thanking it for being such a good friend. Then it was dead and they were in sorrow together. I sympathized, but also worried about the potential for them to be further bonded by the loss of their pet. At least I could stop getting allergy shots twice a week.

They were still grieving when the next ordeal struck. The kid awoke in pain, and had to be taken to the ER where an emergency appendectomy was performed. That wasn’t so bad really, except for the expense and the way the incision fucked up one of his already-horrible tattoos. In a sense, crisis had been averted. But just a week later, he had to return to the hospital, this time with a painful, unidentified skin infection. The cop had it too, on his hands and shoulders.

The appearance of the first sores marked the beginning of a weeks-long fight against a persistent staph infection that passed between them, to all different parts of their bodies. It was painful and upsetting, and they started freaking out because no matter how careful they were, new spots kept appearing. Something as minor as sharing a towel could lead to another agonizing infection on a new and unexpected location. Sex was out of the question.

Then the kid was in a car accident. His car totaled, he wore a neck brace for a week. They took photos in case of a lawsuit. Frowning and wearing the collar, I almost felt bad for the kid. He even had a black eye. When he took a few days away from work to get things sorted out, there was a misunderstanding about who was covering his shifts, and he lost his job at the movie theater.

It was an ugly scene. The sores and the dying cat especially recalled a modern Job story recast with gay guys in present-day small-town Texas.

ONE OF THE GIRLS WHO WORKED THE FRONT DESK IN THEmornings spoke with Mr. Grate and Bench while he was checking out. I’d made the mistake of complaining to her about paying for his missed reservation. Naturally, I hadn’t mentioned anything about the possibility of becoming employed by him, so it made no sense to her that I should have paid for his room because of a simple mistake.

“I asked if he knew he missed a reservation,” she said, “and you know what? He said he did know. He said it slipped his mind after one of his trips got rescheduled. Then he didn’t bother calling because he said you knew he’d be back soon.”

“You didn’t mention the money thing, did you?” I said.

“I hope that’s okay. I just said that it was between the two of you, but that I thought he should know that you had to pay for his room yourself because you had trusted him enough to take his reservation without getting a credit card number.”

“What did he say?”

“He just said that it hardly seems fair. And I said that I thought it was unfair too, because us clerks don’t make that much money that we can afford to pay for other people’s rooms whenever they forget to cancel their reservations.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“No, just thanks for telling him. I hope it’s alright that I said something. You never said not to.”

I was anxious in advance of his next reservation. I hoped he’d take a money clip from his pocket and insist, insist that I take the money.

“Please!” he could have said. “Are you kidding me? Take the money! It was my mistake!”

I would have taken it. I decided in advance that I would. The truth was that I needed it.

He was polite and affable at check-in. I gave him an iron and miniature ironing board to take to his room like always. But he didn’t say anything about the missed reservation or the money. He didn’t say anything about his pregnant employee or the job either. I called his room later that evening.

“Hey, it’s me at the front desk. Sorry to bother you, but is your TV working okay?”

“Seems fine to me.”

“Okay, good. One of your neighbors is having a problem with the cable, and I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t the whole building.”

“Nope. All clear here. Still wish you got ESPN2 though.”

“Yeah, I mentioned that to the owner. I think they’re working on it.”

“Sounds good.”

Either his guilt would make him want to hire me as compensation, or his guilt would prevent him from hiring me, or he felt no guilt at all.

“THIS GUY SOUNDS LIKE AN ASSHOLE,” MALCOLM SAID, WHEN Itold him the story of Mr. Grate and Bench. “You should never have paid for the room in the first place, but at least now you know. You definitely don’t want to work for someone like that. Just look for a job like a normal person if you want something else.”