“Tell it to the Demerol,” I groaned. “That stuff put me out like Cassius Clay.”
She helped me out of the chair. She’d already hung up her cloth coat, and was in a red-and-brown plaid lumberjack shirt and jeans and sandals. Her flaming mane was pulled back in a ponytail with enough hair for a real pony’s tail. Even minus stripper wardrobe, she was a cartoon of a woman. But in a good, Al Capp — drawn kind of way.
Once I got up, I realized I was feeling better. But I didn’t argue when she led me into the bedroom and deposited me there, tucking me under a cool sheet.
“Get to sleep,” she said, turned off the light, and walked briskly into the adjacent bathroom, closing the door, leaving only a slash of bright light under it. Shortly the sound of the shower began. I could hear her singing in the echoing booth. Took me a minute, muffled as it was, but then I made it out: “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.”
That made me smile. Dino, hitting the charts, knocking the Beatles off their perch. Sorry, Sam.
Then she started singing “Love Me Do,” and maybe my son had the last laugh at that.
I propped myself up in bed with two pillows, working to find a position that didn’t strain my aching ribs. Well, they didn’t ache that much after the Demerol, anyway. There wasn’t much bruising showing, either, as mummy-like bands of adhesive tape covered the majority of my purple badges of honor.
The door opened and let steam out and she was poised there in the fog of it. She pulled a shower cap off and lots of red hair escaped, wild and undisciplined, and she began toweling off her curvy body. No pasties, no G-string. Just a woman with a classic hourglass figure, no skinny Vogue model this, more an escapee from Cabaret magazine. Her breasts rode her rib cage as if she was serving them up, like cupcakes on trays, and her pubic triangle was trimmed way back, the better to stay within the confines of her G-string onstage. That nether hair matched her head’s improbable flame color. If only her hairdresser knew for sure (as the TV ads speculated), he or she was doing double duty.
“Are you up?” she asked, still framed in the doorway. Light poured out, providing moody illumination in the otherwise dark bedroom.
“Are you kidding?”
She smiled, and padded over like a little girl, jiggling in all the big-girl places. She was giggling, too, which was cute as hell coming from such an experienced broad. She stood next to me where the sheet tent-poled and she batted playfully at it, making it wave hello at her, as she grinned and licked her lips.
“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.”