Girl's Night In

The accommodations offered by the slouching three-story occupying that corner of the Bronx where Southern Boulevard met Simpson Street would never win any hotel industry awards. Photos of its façade would never grace the cover of any publication intended to capture pictorial America, nor would its name ever share a sentence with words like “buzzworthy” or “illustrious”. But the place charged hourly rates kept low by its closeness to the elevated interborough subway tracks that roared past the upstairs windows on its Eastward-facing side at ten-minute intervals. In its lifetime, the address had housed a school for the blind, an armory, and like nearly every other establishment with which it shared the neighborhood had at one time or another, low-rent apartments. In its current incarnation, it had flooded from top to bottom twice, had seen countless handcuffed politicians and authority figures removed from its premises at various hours of the night on various charges, and survived seventeen room fires.

Dacia noted as she stepped through the tempered glass doors separating the hole in the wall that served as the establishment’s front desk from that part of her life she always abandoned on nights when she came to this place, that a sign advertising the availability of new “fantasy rooms” had been posted above the check-in window. These ‘whirpool-and-waterbed’ suites boasted floor-to-ceiling mirrors, in-room movies, and could be enjoyed for a flat and affordable rate for four-hours at a time. No surprise then, was the establishment’s policy of dealing only in cash. One needed only to consider the implications of its slogan, “Your privacy is our concern,” to recognize this place as being no stranger to having illicit activities conducted beneath its eaves.

Dacia scribbled a false name and home address onto a guest registration card bearing a raised black cursive font and embossed borders, chuckling inwardly as always at its design, which seemed almost absurdly elegant amidst an otherwise pedestrian atmosphere. She pushed it through the slot between the black wear-resistant laminate writing ledge and the bottom edge of the plate glass pane between her and the front desk clerk. When she asked him whether Room 392 on the third floor was available, the pear-shaped gentleman with more hair jutting from his ears than was present on his head immediately slid the comely Latina the card key that would admit her to the requested suite.

“You’ve come back to see me again, chula. How I get so lucky, eh?” he joked with her as his attempt not to leer fell flat on its face as it always did. And as always, Dacia offered him a smile in exchange for the amenity.

The subtle nod that accompanied his wish for her to enjoy her “stay” seemed conspiratorial; the barely-there wink of a man knowing more than his clients might suppose he should, a man contented enough in that knowledge to remain trustworthy beyond reproach, so long as their patronage continued to bring him along for the ride. If secrets were currency in this place, then a king was the quiet man standing behind the “Armando” nametag, watching Dacia ascend the stairs leading to her suite like a goddess going home to take her rightful place in the heavens.

*****

“You know, you’re never going to lose weight if you don’t make some lifestyle adjustments,” he would say, his tone so reproachful that an eavesdropper would have thought him to be addressing an incontinent dog circling upon an heirloom rug.

She never felt quite so unattractive as she did whenever Elias was in the room with her. Feeling beautiful the remainder of the time counted for little when the font from which her perceived ugliness sprang and her live-in lover were one and the same. Not only did such an arrangement dictate that rarely should they not find themselves sharing the same room of a one-bedroom loft, but it seemed lately, to call forth the worst there was to be suffered in each of them.

“Aren’t you always telling me you love me just the way I am?” Dacia would inevitably retort, as wounded as ever that he’d again exhumed the topic, and angry with herself for the enduring thinness of her skin. Even now, over a year down this relationship’s road, she remained naked against this line of conversation.

Admitting to no one that he sat pleased by her acceptance of the bait he had cast, Elias would bite back, “Aren’t you the one always going on about how hard it is to find clothes that fit you the way you want them to?” He would speak the words with the righteous fervor of a soldier watching an enemy’s fortress tumble to dust.

Reopening the all too familiar argument was Elias’ means of exacting emotional restitution from Dacia following any act of hers by which he felt somehow slighted. She knew this as surely as she knew her own name, but knowing brought her little by way of comfort whenever he resorted to this form of verbal ambush because it was an argument that could not be won from her vantagepoint. Elias’s assertions might rival brass knuckles when it came to doling out trauma, but nothing about them rang untrue. Dacia knew deep down that she could be exercising more and eating more healthily than she had been doing. If, Elias would reiterate time and again, she were serious about slimming down. But no amount of effort on her part ever seemed to satisfy her fiancé, who made his living as a nutritionist and spa trainer. Any sacrifice she sought to make was too small, any exercise regimen she began, too irrelevant to matter. His criticism was a cancer that time and again had set fire to her resolve so that every attempt at dieting that she’d made during their relationship had died a-borning.

“Fine. I’ll stop eating as soon as you admit to me that you don’t love me just the way I am. I want you to admit that it’s a lie you tell to spare me the truth. To spare yourself the truth.”

“What truth is that?” he’d ask, knowing the answer all too well. So well, in fact, that it would spring to his mind with a speed that would exceed hers by a fraction of a second.

“That you don’t see me the way you used to. That you stopped seeing the woman you fell in love with when you look at me a long time ago.”

“Damn, you’ve really thought about this, haven’t you?” he’d ask, acting astounded and hurt, “Sounds like you’ve already connected all the dots, regardless of what I say. Well, love, you seem to have all the answers, so what do you gain by hearing me say it?”

“Admit it,” she would tell him, holding her ground, having prepared herself long ago for the day when he finally would admit it. Should today be that day, then she would be devastated, she would weep, she would scream, she would curse Elias’s name and his father’s. She would hurt. But she would live on.

“Whatever,” Elias would say, offering his typical indication that he would discuss a matter no further. Then as always, the issue would die unresolved, interred in the silence that would scream between them for the remainder of that evening. And there it would remain until the next time Elias saw fit to unearth it.

*****

Dacia stepped into the low-ceilinged third-floor room, flipped the light switch on, and closed the door behind her. Two swing-arm wall lamps flanking the bed swept away the shadows, aided by a tabletop torchiere with a tiffany-styled glass shade that stood upon a dresser against the opposite wall. Besides a single-sized bed and dresser, Room 392 could boast a private bathroom, a leaning circular table that the hotel’s brochures doubtless marketed as a “writing desk”, and two tired-looking kitchen chairs with cigarette burns that resembled herpes wounds marring their cushions. Even from across the room, she could read plainly the obscenities that someone obviously thinking himself a fabulous wit had carved into the tabletop. The plastic drawrods that enabled one to close the heavier of the two rows of drapery protecting the room’s only window had been shattered but not replaced, so all that hung from them were a pair of jagged shards. Dacia locked the door behind her, and breathed deeply, unoffended by the space’s musty odor. She was home at last, and it was beautiful to be home.

Beyond the sheer curtains concealed behind their more durable counterparts, a Number Two subway train on its way to Manhattan squealed past the building like an angry child. Despite the cautious crawl to which trains always reduced their speed as they took the curve passing Room 392’s windows, the act never spared all within earshot of that grating scream of metal wheels against aged tracks. From where Dacia stood, its whine would have sounded all the more excruciating to any other person than her. Such was the closeness between her window and the train windows hobbling past that Dacia could almost have leaned out to stroke the cold hide of the iron beast rounding the corner of Southern Boulevard and Simpson Street. She’d grown so accustomed to the sound however, that its absence would have felt far more discomfiting than the noise itself, which was as much a part of the home she’d fashioned for herself here as were the walls. She considered this and grew moist at remembrance of past states of jubilation she’d enjoyed here.

Opening the duffel bag she’d brought along, Dacia withdrew from it the roll of square red silk scarves that always accompanied her on trips such as this. She draped one square over each lampshade in the room, softening the harshness of the fluorescent bulbs that this establishment insisted on using. The rose-pink illumination that overtook the room had always set a perfect stage for what Dacia was planning.

Dacia switched on the air-conditioner installed below the windowsill. The unit seemed to clear its throat before snarling to life, but immediate was the result of her adjusting its temperature to the coldest setting. The frigid rush of air that spewed forth to bathe her felt good on such a muggy evening. She pushed the heavy draperies as far apart as they could go and let cold air wriggle between the fibers of her linen sundress, let it play over her face and neck and arms. She held her head high and relished a brand of happiness that money could buy, gazing out her window at a night and city over which her bronze-toned goddess in white linen had come to reclaim her reign.

She thought of Elias and decided it was time to get down to the business that had brought her here six times in as many months. Dacia pushed apart the sheer curtains, removing the final barrier between her and the train tracks beyond the windows. The approach of another downtown Number Two train reached out from the distance to kiss her ear and Dacia’s pulse began to race. She slipped one lithe, sepia-hued arm out of her dress as mounting heat dampening her womanhood demanded introduction to her fingertips.

The Number Two train rounded the corner as Dacia lifted her left breast out of her sundress like a divinity to be adored, and gave it the most affectionate and tender of squeezes.

*****

Today had been a long one and Kenichi had been on the verge of nodding off when he noticed her. Kenichi hardly ever slept during his daily subway commutes, but having to spread his attention and presence over four of the five boroughs as he’d done today, thanks to recent staff reductions that had forced everyone at his firm to take up a certain amount of slack, was another thing that he rarely did, and it had taken a tremendous lot out of him. The Bronx having been the last stop in today’s gauntlet meant that his ride home to Chelsea would take at least another hour, and having awoken at 4:30 this morning, Kenichi simply hadn’t had another hour of consciousness in him.

This, however, was before he’d chanced to glance out the window that he sat facing, and before he’d realized that outside in what looked to be the topmost floor window of an apartment or hotel so close that he could almost touch it, a woman stood touching herself and disrobing between opened curtains.

The announcement that came over the intercom speakers had snatched the weights from his eyelids, had delivered him from slumber’s embrace a scant second before it would have taken him. The message was one that probably got issued upwards of a hundred times daily. It didn’t matter what train one rode, or in which borough one boarded. Any frequent New York City Transit rider knew that delays of the sort being announced simply came with the territory, and precious little recompense was to be earned by complaining.

“Ladies and gentleman, at this time we have a train ahead of us. We will be moving shortly,” the train’s motorman said, sounding even more fed up with saying the words than his riders no doubt felt with hearing them. The unexpected voice booming through the subway car he shared with only three other passengers had startled Kenichi back to consciousness. That was when he saw her, the full-figured Latina undressing in the room across the way. And Kenichi’s desire for sleep died unnoticed and unmourned as he sat up for a better view of a sight proving not to be the sleep deprivation-induced mirage for which he’d first taken it.

Unmistakable, that expressive jibe delivered in her eyes, the barely-there smile frolicking at the corners of her mouth. Of no consequence was Kenichi, nor anyone else watching her. “Look away if you can,” her expression declared, “Enjoy if you wish, but what I do now, I do for my benefit, not yours.”

*****

Dacia arched her spine, placed her palms beneath her heavy breasts to tilt them heavenward as if awaiting starlight’s kiss. She slipped her other arm free of the white linen dress and allowed the garment to fall where it pleased. It hugged her around her middle for an instant before creeping lower. She drew a cathartic breath as her fingernails traced the cocoa-colored circles of her areolas. Her dress fell a few inches lower, swaddling her hips the way Elias’s arms had used to before she and he had grown to dislike one another.

The fact that she still had yet to speak the words out loud didn’t change anything. She’d never been capable of lying to herself with conviction. The truth, the one that could not touch her when she was here, was that while a degree of affection might always exist between her and Elias, their feelings toward one another had died so many deaths that there was no recovering them. Exacerbating matters was that neither could claim to like the person they became in the presence of the other. But life and living were different here. Here, Dacia loved the person she was. Here in front of these hotel windows, everything about her that Elias had first fallen in love with returned to her, rode her every breath, wafted forth from her every pore, from every glittering wind of her hips. She was sensual femininity as limitless as thought, and as desirable as any woman ever to be born.

She and Elias might well claim to be experts at pushing one another’s buttons, however the other edge of that sword was that over time they’d succeeded in pushing each other to places from which their true selves would never return. It seemed to Dacia the worst kind of naivety, the belief that love and loathing should forever remain exclusive of one another as far as relationships went. She knew better than that. She’d learned better than that.

And so here she stood reclaiming what ground she’d lost to Elias and his arguments, her every exhalation tasting of him and his infectious spirit.

Dacia pushed the white dress down over the curvature of her buttocks. She rolled her hips and laughed genuinely for the first time in weeks.

Unfettered.

Dacia stood celebrating her resurrection for several minutes, a sanguine empress of caramel-hued arcs and coffee-brown medallions, before surrendering the briefest of sustained eye contact to the handsome Asian gentleman seated aboard the idling train outside her window. His gaze, an amphetamine, seemed to pile unspoken praise upon her nudeness, to drape her in carnality as coveted, as prized, as refined as the most regal raiment of any monarch ever crowned. He wanted Dacia.

He didn’t want her forty pounds lighter.

He didn’t want her to include a low-carb diet among her “lifestyle adjustments”.

He didn’t want her to make “lifestyle adjustments”.

He just wanted her.

He wanted her any way that he could have her. And if her current spectacle was indeed his only means of possessing some evanescent crumb of her mystique, then this man’s attentions he surrendered gladly and utterly to her.

The needful fascination in his eyes delivered a pheromone that she could taste, a warm and dripping mouth working each of Dacia’s nipples in worship of Venus where she stood framed by that top floor window like a masterpiece born. That look in a man’s eyes always carried the same effect when she performed her ritual in this room. She drew the kind of ragged breath that usually signified to a lover Dacia’s lubrication and readiness for sex.

With her pulse quickening by the second, Dacia’s hand crept to the slick cleft of her vulva.

*****

“May I have your attention, passengers: the next stop on this train will be One Hundred Forty-ninth Street, Third Avenue.”

Kenichi’s stomach seemed to slide down his legs and into his shoes as the conductor’s message bleated over the loudspeakers an instant before the sound of the train’s brakes releasing followed. The train was preparing to move, readying to tear his observation away from a wonder that deserved to be withheld by only the most appreciative of eyes. It would carry him away into the night and without benefit of any exchange between he and the woman beyond what fleeting eye contact they’d shared, that would be that. It would be as if they’d never existed in mutual time and space. Their brief dalliance and the opportunity that it had presented for something greater would be forgotten, rendered as impotent as the mirage for which he initially taken her.

In all his thirty-six-year existence, no more objectionable notion than this had ever confronted Kenichi.

*****

Dacia’s fingertips traversed the bouquet of her labial folds with the practiced precision of a tightrope walker’s footsteps, teased each petal with the educated prestige of a virtuoso. Each stroke was a breath delivered unto the white-hot coals of arousal smoldering between her thighs. She urged a couple of fingers deeper, slipping them inside herself to fan flames in which she could happily burn forever if forever promised her a new life beyond Elias’s assassinations of her worth. The pads of her fingertips scrubbed her clitoris in that way that Elias’ tongue, good for little these days except verbal scourgings, had never mastered. Viscosity coating her anarchic digits like liquid gold, Dacia released a rasping moan as they licked her in places that always amplified her pulse into a maelstrom that jarred her frame with every beat of her heart. Low in her throat, she could feel starlight building, demanding that she lift her voice and fire it back into the sky.

*****

Passive observance of her voluptuous queen would do no longer; he needed to engage her. Simply believing her to be aware of him no longer contented Kenichi; he had to know that his admiration would not escape her notice. Retrieving a Sharpie from his briefcase, he scrambled toward the train windows opposite him. Kenichi used the permanent marker to scrawl a message for her upon the glass.

He took care to fashion his letter backwards so that when viewed from her vantagepoint, they would display correctly. When he finished, Kenichi stood back to allow her an uncomplicated view of his communiqué.

“SAME TiME ToMorroW?” it begged. His eyes, his stance, his white-knuckled grip on the Sharpie he still held; all of these implored in a fashion that she could faintly taste.

*****

Dacia read the scrawled message and felt her skin ignite, and reveled in the fires that consumed her as her onrushing orgasm broke, reducing her lover’s denigrations, rightfully, to ashes.

Propping an arm against the wall to steady herself on quavering legs, Dacia let her facial fixture answer for her before she threw back her head and with her eyes squeezed shut, returned starlight to the heavens until hoarseness strained her voice.

*****

She replied with an arched eyebrow as the first swell of euphoria crashed upon her shores and told Kenichi that she’d made herself come. The smile she flashed him, a gorgeous obscenity coy yet lecherous, was a shooting star as the train crept forward to pull Kenichi beyond view of the nude siren in the window.

Kenichi made a wish upon it as he took his cell phone in hand.

*****

Some time after Kenichi’s train pulled away, Dacia answered a knock upon her room door to find Armando standing at its threshold. With him, he’d brought a bottle of champagne, one glass flute, and a folded slip of hotel stationery upon one of the circular vinyl trays that were used to deliver room service here.

“Good evening, Miss. You appear to have an admirer. Is not first time, eh?” he smiled in that knowing way that characterized so many of his activities here. “This is for you, compliments of nice gentleman who phoned our lounge little while ago.”

The establishment might offer little by way of hotel amenities, but no expense had its owner spared in furnishing the lounge located on its ground level. In addition to a kitchen offering room service until three a.m., it could also boast a bar dominated by top shelf liquors and surprisingly expensive champagnes. Dacia accepted the bottle of Laurent-Perrier Grande Siècle and thanked Armando.

The grin that Armando returned to Dacia, revealed tobacco stains accumulated over a lifetime of smoking. “He wanted I give this to you also. You can read my handwriting, eh?” he said as she took the folded note from his tray, “I write it down just way he tell me over phone.”

Dacia closed the door and poured the flute half full of champagne. She opened Kenichi’s note and read his phone number where Armando had printed it near the bottom of the page. Insuppressible was Dacia’s grin as the sound of an approaching train summoned her nudeness to the window.

Sipping appreciatively as the next train rounded the corner to drag sight of her voluptuousness across the stunned eyes of all its passengers, Dacia contemplated credible excuses for going out that she could offer Elias tomorrow night when she returned to Room 392. Additional intoxicants lie in the attention bestowed by the constellation of wanting eyes appraising her from the train outside. Dacia’s fingernails trailed feather caresses down her abdomen to capture the imaginations of men likely riding that train home to wives and girlfriends. Her palms tested the weight of her breasts. Dacia felt as if she were made of stars.

For a fleeting moment, one might have believed, based upon the lust burning in those awestruck gazes, that truly their eyes had fallen upon a living goddess.

Scintillating, original erotica...to find out more about this exciting author, head to the Official Web Presence of Horror Erotica Writer Anthony Beal