Vanilla Erotica
"There is a Season," a holiday sex story by Anthony Beal
Jordana was playing chess again. She was calculating her every hip swivel, timing and modulating her every peal of plastic laughter, every moistening of her lips or stroke of Roderick's chest, to coincide with Felix’s sight upon her, that their significance should not be lost on him or those she would call her enemies. That she stood friendless amidst the revelers rocking the dance floor of the lavishly decked ballroom was untrue, although to say that her supporters numbered few and were held in as little of the collective's esteem as Jordana herself, would tell no lies. Roderick, convicted by association with her, commanded no greater benevolence, but at least held the distinction of still numbering among the paid employees enjoying tonight's holiday festivities. Though deemed opportunistic in the eyes of many, Jordana's having departed for greener remunerative pastures she’d found with a rival enterprise remained the lesser of the deeds still compensating her with limitless scorn.
Felix Sandoval tipped the merciful bartending matron who'd spent the evening keeping his glass brimming with Jack on the rocks. Despite his best efforts, he found his gaze kept returning to that site most damning, categorizing every physical difference that had ensued in the space between his being engaged to Jordana and her having left him for Roderick. Hair highlights and chaotic makeup application were the least of these. Her style of dress had graduated from flirtatious to shameless. Felix hadn't approached them all night, had in fact kept to whatever side of the room lay opposite the happy couple, yet misery compelled his eyes to continued analyses of how many times Jordana looked in his direction, the way her recently purchased breasts hitched whenever she laughed a little too hard at things Roderick whispered in her ear. For all their posturing at being oblivious to public opinion, Jordana was overplaying her role. Her laughter looked as exaggerated as it sounded, seeming to spill forth arbitrarily, rather than in concord with any conversational cues to warrant it. Most telling was that each time she returned her cup of long island iced tea to her lips, she made certain to look away from Roderick, to covertly locate and make mocking eye contact with Felix over its rim.
Felix swallowed ninety-proof anesthetic and sighed, rejoicing privately that having retained his ability to read her might reduce the sins still shaming him for ever having loved her.
“Hi, Felix,” he heard.
“Hey. Happy Holidays,” he replied to Pamela where she stood behind him, joining him in eyeing the dance floor. Pamela worked IT along with a handful of other employees whom Felix generally ignored. The cocktail plate of half-eaten hors d’oeuvres in her hands was the same color as Jordana’s dress.
“Having fun yet? There’s still time to sit on Santa’s lap,” Pamela told Felix with a wink.
Felix almost smiled as his eyes found the poor bastard behind the fake beard seated upon a high-backed resin throne across the room. “Giving lap dances to aging drunkards in rented furs isn’t my idea of a fun time.”
“Let’s not pretend he wouldn’t be into it, though,” Pamela joked.
This time, Felix did smile as he asked, “What about you? Managed to uncover mystery and intrigue amidst all this free-flowing liquor?”
“Dodging mistletoe like a woman possessed. Swear I’m gonna file a shiv out of one of these plastic forks and stick the next mofo that tries to maneuver me under that shit.”
Felix swallowed liquor and told her, “Maybe Santa will bring them each a lump of coal for Christmas for being naughty.”
“Hell, he needs to bring me a lump, so I can put it in a sock and use it to beat the crap out of some of these idiots. You know I got kissed on the neck at last year’s party? Some guy in accounts receivable, old enough to have changed my granddad’s diapers.” Pamela’s facial expression revolted against the memory.
“Sure it wasn’t the guy playing Santa?”
Pamela pretended to consider the possibility. “An hour ago, I’d have said no,” she answered, as Jordana took her place upon Santa’s lap and began to grind her pelvis against him, “but now I’m not so sure.” Felix’s gaze followed Pamela’s to the spectacle.
“If he doesn’t stick a dollar bill in her cleavage before letting her off his lap, I’ll eat my hat,” Felix joked.
An announcement to which neither Felix nor Pamela paid any attention thundered through the loudspeakers at the corners of the room.
“I think they’re about to announce the raffle winners or play a game or something,” Pamela told him, “Interested?”
Felix drained his glass, and felt the pressure building inside him relax a bit, an improvement owed not entirely to the liquor. “Figure I’ve got enough wine baskets and spa coupons.”
“Scrooge,” Pamela teased.
Felix tipped his glass to his lips, found it empty, and sighed. “I’ve just never understood these damn holiday things. Don’t know why I even came. I mean, the number of real friends I have in this room could be counted on one hand, with plenty fingers left over to scratch my nose. There are people here who I just plain don’t like, and if you asked them how they feel about me, they’d tell you the feeling was mutual. There are others whose names I couldn’t tell you if the lives of all my future generations depended on it; people who’ve probably worked here for years, yet if you told me that they’d wandered in here off the street, I couldn’t tell you any different. And here I am hanging out with them. I fuckin’ dressed up to come here to pretend we’re this fuckin’ family. I don’t get it, y’know?”
He stopped talking when he realized that Pamela was staring at him. Pity and faint amusement mingled upon her face, as if she stood watching someone fall down stairs.
“Forgive the outburst,” Felix muttered, “Just not feeling the holidays this year.”
Pamela nodded, commiserating. “Nothing like forced socializing to temper those interpersonal bonds that drive employee excellence, right? Not twenty-four hours ago, Lawrence and Nin had a screaming match in the break room that nearly brought down the ceiling. I also heard that Harry stole an account right out from under Lisa and spent all day yesterday crowing around the office about it. Tonight, though, we’re eating cake and dancing badly together as friends. Just for this evening, we’re all gonna pretend we all like each other.”
“Don’t try telling me that’s not the worst one-night stand ever,” Felix said, allowing them to share another laugh.
Another announcement, unintelligible for being far too loud, boomed through the room. Felix decided that he’d endured enough of his fellow office-mates’ company. He needed to get elsewhere fast.
“I don’t know about you,” he told Pamela, “but I think I’ve had enough holiday fun for one evening. Thinking about taking off.”
“Too bad,” Pamela replied, “Standing here talking to you has been the best part of my whole night.”
Felix shrugged. “You’re welcome to come along, if you want. Don’t know where I’m headed, but anywhere that isn’t here will be an improvement.”
“Race you to the parking lot,” Pamela said.
*****
“You live near here, don’t you?” Pamela asked Felix as they left the hotel and entered the outdoor lot where they’d parked their respective cars. He nodded.
“Good. Can we swing by your place so I can change out of this dress? I brought some casual clothes along because I was supposed to hook up with friends later, but that plan tanked. Changing at your place will save me the trouble of doing it in a public restroom.”
Felix nodded. “That’s cool. I’m only a few blocks from here. Just follow me in your car.”
Climbing into the ash-black used VW he’d driven for the past seven years, Felix backed out of his parking space and left the detestable party behind, with Pamela in her red Suburban following closely.
Felix’s apartment overlooked the Sandia Mountains. A pregnant moon hung above their peaks. Throughout Albuquerque, backyard chimineas flavored the night winds with mesquite. In his rearview mirror, he watched Pamela follow his course, and considered not for the first time that she looked pretty fine this evening. Given his preference, he wouldn’t have minded her spending the remainder of their evening together in that cocktail dress.
Or, for that matter, out of it.
As undeniable as Pamela’s good looks were, she was doubly attractive, not only for being beautifully full and feminine in physical dimension, but also for being cool as shit. Apart from her being an avid gamer and comic book enthusiast, he knew her to be able to hold her liquor, and to have won her share of bar bets. She was as uncomplicated as Jordana was volatile, as genuine as Jordana was manufactured, and remained the only person in Felix’s office whose company had never wearied him. Pamela bore the unique distinction among all their co-workers of being someone whom he was always happy to see for her never having initiated nor joined any of the interpersonal dramatics that consumed portions far too substantial of far too many workdays. Like Felix, Pamela showed up, did her work and come quitting time, got the hell out of there and returned to where real life awaited. Felix respected the hell out of her, a reality upon which thinking of her in a sexual context wrought no small havoc.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t desirable, nor that he was made of wood; he’d wondered more than once how she fucked. It was that allowing his mind to tread upon considerations of just how sweetly fuckable she was, dared their relationship to weather the fallout of sleeping together. Too easily destroyed was that state of grace he so enjoyed, if he dared pursue her. Had there ever existed a surer demolisher of friendships than sex, Felix knew nothing of it. For reasons as well noble as selfish, Felix had always maintained respectful distance from Pamela and done his best to ignore what overt sexuality hung about her. Because she sat with her back to the entrance of her cubicle, any purpose bringing him to that space scarcely large enough for her desk forced Felix to approach her from an angle that offered him hallowed glimpses of cleavage whenever she wore low-cut necklines. But whereas his nobility respected Pamela far too much to be their friendship’s assassin and saboteur, it was the selfish part of him that held his attractions at bay. That part of him whose interests were for his sole benefit, knew that he needed at least one untainted, uncompromised workplace relationship.
If his dalliance with Jordana had taught Felix anything of value, it was that pursuing such diversions with well-liked co-workers could make the bitterest enemies of the dearest friends. To find himself at odds with Pamela was nothing to which Felix aspired. Like him, she remained one of few non-Caucasian faces at the Albuquerque branch; it made her seem beneficial to know, and to have in his corner. It made him reticent about fucking things up with her by trying to sleep with her. That reticence, however, distracted not at all from those qualities of hers that continued to turn heads and rouse aging actuaries to risk life and limb by kissing her on the neck. Indeed, it was difficult to imagine by what heterosexual male beholder she could ever be thought unattractive.
Eyelashes as full and black, and stretching as far away into other, darker worlds as ravens’ wings. A hair upon her head for every heart ever consumed to ashes with desire for meaningful stature in her eyes. A radiant fusion of Latin-Korean genetics, Pamela’s body moved as if delighted with itself. The confident pendulum that lived in her hips and hint of a swagger that massaged itself into her shoulders with her every step bespoke of a child splashing through puddles of fresh rain. Tonight, Felix wanted to be her rain puddle.
This was one reason of many that the thought of bringing her to his place terrified Felix.
*****
At his apartment, Felix showed her into his bedroom with its adjoining washroom, and closed the door behind him on his way out. Stepping into his living room, he pondered how to greet her when she emerged; whether to invite her to hang out for a bit, or offer to accompany her wherever she and her friends had intended to go. He decided to wait until she left his bedroom, and gauge the situation then. Taking a seat upon his sofa, Felix sat and enjoyed not three minutes of solitude before Pamela’s voice roused him.
“Felix,” he heard her call through his ever-so-slightly opened bedroom door, “You’ve got to come see this.”
“That a good idea?” he responded. His heart and mind dueled for dominance, revisiting every excuse he’d ever composed for not pursuing Pamela beyond platonic friendship.
“This is not to be missed. Riveting performance going on in a window across your courtyard,” she told him. Felix entered the room, ignoring Pamela’s unzipped dress and bared back as they peered out his window together.
Framed in a bedroom window across the courtyard, large brown hands kneaded slight breasts. Modest cinnamon-filled b-cups hitched in syncopation with kinetic pelvic levering. Soft-looking hips clutched bucking masculine musculature with an equestrian’s focus. The couple loved with a familiarity affirming that they were enjoying no one-night stand. These were practiced partners, tandem acrobats performing Risleys they knew well enough to effect in their sleep. The strap of a blindfold disheveled a tousled dark chocolate bob.
“Holy-” Felix said, gaping.
“So, is this your alternative to paying for cable?” Pamela asked.
“It soon could be,” Felix remarked, “I don’t get out enough as it is.”
That any such performances were regularly exhibited was news to Felix. He wondered how often they had gone unnoticed in the past because he rarely looked out that window. For the second time that evening, he and Pamela found themselves in the unexpected presence of a spectacle that dared them to look away. The difference this time was that here in his bedroom, no one would see what Felix and Pamela did next.
Pamela joked, “This kind of action could make a homebody out of me, too. Truth be told, I kinda want to go over and ask them if they do bachelorette parties.” Felix grinned at her. She returned his amused expression as they remembered simultaneously that she was only half-wearing her dress.
Felix stammered, “I should get out of here so you can change.”
“Your loss,” Pamela told him after a pause. Felix, nearly out of the room, froze. He felt confronted by her implication, doubly so for his mounting belief that her flirtation was not entirely insincere. Felix opened his mouth and finally stopped running.
“I won't insult you by lying that I've never thought about us in bed together,” he confessed without turning to face her, "I have wanted it, and wanted it badly."
Pamela approached him. “Beds are for sleeping. The afterward. For now, step outside like a good and lucky little boy and wait for me. I’ll slip into something comfortable. If you’re good, so will you.”
Felix turned around and countered, “I just don’t want to screw things up between us. You know how it is. Friends cross lines that shouldn’t be crossed, then when it doesn’t work out, they can never find their way back to where they were before it all fell down.”
Pamela replied, “I count that friendship poor, at best; a bauble, a mere bagatelle, that cannot stand so slight a test.”
”What?”
“Paul Lawrence Dunbar, ‘After the Quarrel.’ Good poem. You should check it out. Afterward.”
“Afterward?”
“Afterward. Now get out.”
*****
"Tell me why," Felix said to Pamela when she emerged from his bedroom turning off lights as she approached, "I'm not complaining, but I need to know. Why now? Why tonight?" His continued confusion threatened to burst him like a balloon if answers were not had.
Pamela came nude but for the panties and satin evening sandals she'd worn to the party. Her crossed arms obscured her nipples from view as Felix filled his eyes with her allure. He noted her hair freed from its upswept arrangement to flow over her shoulders, and the seductive shimmer that played across her skin even where light was scarce. She was fertility and sex and hunger that dallied not with romantic professions of love, but cannibalized their social etiquettes, baring animal urges like the bones of a carcass devoured.
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Pamela enjoyed a buoyancy of spirit tonight owed as much to Felix’s bewilderment as to the makers of Glenlivet. Inebriated anew on the moonshine she stood drinking from his gaze, Pamela laughed out loud, feeling earthy and wanton, seeming large and powerful and mythical to Felix, a Valkyrie come to decide his fate.
“I got tired of catching you red-handed staring at my tits whenever you came to my cubicle,” she answered. Her fingertips found his scrotal sac as Pamela went to her knees between his legs, her posture surrendering none of the dominance that compelled Felix's obedience. That she knelt had shifted no authority to him; it was still her show, and whether it went on or didn't was still entirely up to her.
Felix stiffened as she scratched, toyed, described circles through the hair furring the tightening skin. Her nails were assassins soldiering through concealing foliage; their sniper crosshairs trained on Felix’s capacity for restraint. Her touch played between consolatory, petting as one would a wounded creature in whom one desires to gain a trusting pet, and antagonistic, devouring as though with teeth, as though his rising stiffness confirmed Felix's complicity in what crimes they would commit against platonic friendship, thus deserving some punitive handling.
“That, and you didn’t deserve what Jordana did to you,” she added, “Always knew she was a twisted little brat.” It hadn’t been enough for Felix’s fiancée, following a venomous argument between the two, to abandon all discretion regarding her return to her ex-lover’s bed as coldest vengeance against Felix. The bitch had later emailed photos of Felix, ostensibly taken after assuring him that her eyes alone should ever appreciate them, to his supervisors. As much evidence of the existence of a benevolent divinity affectionate toward humankind lie in Felix’s having retained his job as in anything Pamela had ever witnessed.
“I–I wasn’t staring at–at your…I was appreciating you,” Felix stammered, his denial fooling neither of them.
Bullshit, sang her cocked eyebrow, the briefest silence as they met each others' eyes, the subtlest curl of her lips as she tilted her impressive breasts upward into his view. Pamela seized Felix by the knees and leaned forward, just shy of touching the tip of his nose with her own. She hung there just long enough for Felix to regret the lie before addressing him again. Rising from her knees as Felix mourned the blowjob that seconds ago had seemed an imminent certainty, Pamela pushed herself up into a seated posture upon the edge of his dining table. She crossed her legs and leered, a lusting maenad roused by his pheromone, driven ever madder by her mounting need to possess him. Tonight, they would wear no masks of safe distances politely kept, nor maintain the pretense of suppressing those erotic stirrings that gathered between them like pressurized steam destined to explode. If only for this evening, she wanted Felix, who was as much a best friend as Pamela could ever hope to someday have in a husband, to belong bodily, sexually, emotionally to her.
“The day I wore that black chenille V-neck to work, you almost ‘appreciated’ your eyes right out of their sockets. And whoever told you that standing behind a seated woman and talking to her so you can look down her blouse isn’t the weakest trick in the oldest book, was lying. At any rate, you obviously weren’t going to make a move, so I did.”
Convicted, Felix chuckled. “I was trying to be respectful. Sort of.”
“Hell with that. You want it, you better stop peeking down cleavage and get it while it’s hot.” Pamela sent the toes of her left foot to ground to march cadences across his tightening scrotum, up and over the climbing spire of his manhood.
“I want it,” Felix said, as Pamela reclined upon the tabletop and uncrossed her legs.
“Claim it, then,” Pamela invited, parting her femininity with a fingertip that came away shiny with the early spoils of war due any man of courage. Felix guided Pamela gently backward to lie flat upon the table. He raised her knees and leaned forward to taste the nectareous depth of her, his tongue a deep-sea diver questing after pink pearls. Pamela closed her eyes and listened to Felix sampling and tasting her. To Pamela, Felix revealed a level of skill that she had long suspected if only because Jordana seemed the sort of woman who would accept no less. Submerged chin to nose in her ocean, Felix lapped her up like a drought-parched wanderer discovering unexpected deliverance from dehydrated death. Pamela moaned as her body answered his appetite with trembling, with throes and panting that seized throughout her and incited Felix's passions like a lover's breath upon his neck.
Felix took his treasured friend, his dear, irresistible confidant Pamela in his arms and claimed it all.
They took each other, coiled eels rippling across one another, biting fever into one another. Felix pushed himself into Pamela, who met him with wringing tightness that coveted his motion inside her. Transformations like Christmas miracles unfolded by the light of streetlamps beyond his apartment windows. Their hands turned to eyes they would use to see each other more clearly than ever before. Their limbs wove them together into a shiny thing of perpetual motion.
Into his dining room chair she urged him, climbing astride the erection jutting from his lap like the stamen of an exotic floral aphrodisiac. Pamela moved like a serpent charmer, the Arabesques that informed her hips proving too much for Felix not to cry out each time his member found her depth. He pressed his face between her breasts, suckled perfume-sweetened nipples as if for sustenance. Felix's hands left no region of Pamela's skin unvisited, kneaded her body as if to sculpt himself anew, to mold from this union a braver, hardier Felix who acted and seized rather than imagined and considered, who dared pursue frightening uncertainties rather than balked at those opportunities. Pamela's nether lips ground their kiss against him as if to place his bravery and worth above reproach. Taking his face in her hands, she kissed Felix's lips and knew that she'd possessed him bodily, sexually, and emotionally.
“Merry Christmas,” she told him later as they spooned in his bed, watching for an encore performance from the couple across the courtyard.
“What?”
“Our department’s ‘Secret Santa’ thing. I drew your name. So given tonight’s circumstances, don’t expect me to get you anything.”
“Well…shit,” Felix laughed.
“What?
“I drew Gordon’s name. I'll be damned if I'm regifting this, though, I can tell you that.”
Felix laughed again, Pamela adding hers to his a moment later.
"We're still friends, right?" Pamela asked.
"Paul Lawrence Dunbar is a very wise man," Felix told her.
Pamela didn't bother telling him that the poem applied little to their situation. Instead, she enjoyed the sensation of her best friend's warmth enveloping her, until she fell asleep.
~
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Copyright May 2010, Anthony Beal
Published with permission from author on OystersandChocolate.com. Copying or reprinting this work in part or in whole without permission is illegal.