Stagecoach drove into town the day after and found me. Raced me to the hospital in Santa Fe.
And that’s how Stinking Springs met its end.
“That’s also how a young whelp of eighteen learned what pleases women and gained his blessed longevity by regularly practicing what Hefty Jake Gentry had preached on main street,” said Kyle, his caring hands massaging his lovers’ open secrets.
Tiffany’s panties were sopping. She rose to remove them, unhooking and discarding her bra as she stood.
“Jake somehow straddled that whomp of flame. ’Twas almost as though his spirit rode straight into me. He gave me staying power, a pleasing technique (or so they tell me), and an abiding love for all womankind, for the mystery of them and for their magic. Your magic, my dear Tiffany. That’s right. You don’t need those panties anymore. They profane your sacred flesh.”
Tiffany felt the yield of tufted carpet beneath her feet as she walked to Kyle, stood before him, reached both hands beneath her belly and kneaded herself. “Do you like the way I look, Kyle?” From the adoration in his eyes and the way his manhood strained at its seams in triple blush, she already knew the answer. But she wanted to hear him say it in that rich baritone of his.
“I love the way you look, dear heart. I love you, Miss Tiffany Walker. I love the fuck out of you. And if you don’t spindle your lovely cunt on my ramrod of a cock this instant, you’re going to make dear old Kyle Hardwick a very miserable old man indeed.”
Tiffany spared him that fate.
CLAP IF YOU BELIEVE
I understand her parents’ wariness. A woman like my Tinkerbell is bound to attract the amorous attentions of the wrong sort now and again. So when they open the door and appraise me like a suspect gem, not smiling, not yet inviting me in, I understand and forbear. “Good evening,” I say, and let the silence float like untroubled webs of gossamer between us.
After a time, Mr. Jones turns to his wife and says, “What do you think?”
“The eyes look reasonably sane,” she replies, to his nod,
“though that’s not always an airtight indicator these days and there is a worrisome edge to them.”
I look down, stifling the urge to defend myself, and am gratified to hear Mr. Jones say, “Man with his hobbies and profession is bound to have sharp eyes. I say we give him the benefit and let him in.”
She sighs. “Oh, all right. Come in out of the heat, young man. Put your shoes there.” A serried rank of them faces the wall like naughty students: practical ones for Mr. and Mrs.
Jones, scuffed high-tops for twelve-year-old Melissa, and, looking more like shed leaves than footwear, Tinkerbell’s familiar green-felt slippers. I unknot and loosen my buffed black Florsheims and set them beside my beloved’s footwear, thinking what a marvel her tiny feet are and how delightful it is—ensconced alone in her cozy apartment after a date—to take her legs, right up to the thighs, into my mouth and lightly tongue those feet, her tiny soles, the barely perceptible curve of her insteps, the sheer white-corn delicacy of her ten tiny toes. How ecstatically my darling pixie writhes and wriggles in my hand, her silver-sheened wings fluttering against my palm!
“Hi, Alex.” I look up and there’s Melissa standing by an archway that leads to the dining room.
“Hi, Melissa,” I say, wiggling my fingers at her like Oliver Hardy fiddling with his tie. The zoo is only four blocks from their house and we’ve begun, Melissa and Tink and I, to make a regular thing of meeting there Saturday afternoons.
Once, over snow cones, Melissa told me that Tink had been miserable for a long time, “but now that you’ve come into her life, Alex,” this from a twelve-year-old, “she flits about like a host of hummingbirds when she drops in for Sunday dinner and makes loads of happy words twinkle in my head, in all of our heads.” Hearing Melissa say that made me glad, and I told her so.
Melissa giggles at my finger-waggling and says, “Come on in and sit down.”
I look a question at the Joneses. Mrs. Jones gives an unreadably flat lip-line to me. Mr. Jones, instead of seconding Melissa’s invitation, comes up like an old pal, leans in to me, and says, “You and me, after dinner, over cigars in my study.”
I’m not sure what he’s getting at, but I feel as if he’s somehow taken me into his confidence. I say, “That’s fine, sir,” and that seems to satisfy him because he steps back like film reversed and stands beside his wife.
A familiar trill rises in my brain. The others turn their heads, as do I, to the stairs, its sweeping mahogany banister soaring into the warm glow upstairs. And down flies my beloved Tinkerbell, trailing behind her a silent burst of stars. Her lovely face hovers before me, the tip of her wand describing figure-eights in the air. “Hello, Alex my lovely,” she hums into my head. Then she flits to my cheek, the perfect red bow of her lips burning cinnamon kisses there. Recalling the sear of those kisses on other parts of my anatomy, I feel a blush rising.
“Tinkerbell,” I say, using her full name, “perhaps we should—”
“Yes, daughter,” Mrs. Jones breaks in, clearly not at all amused, “your young man is correct. Dinner’s on the table.”
She glares at me and turns to lead the party into the dining room. Melissa comes and takes my hand, while Tink flits happily about my right shoulder, singing into my head her gladness at seeing me. When she holds still long enough for me to fix a discerning eye on her, I’m relieved to see that she’s not yet showing.
Once dinner is under way, the ice thins considerably and in fact Tink’s mother rushes past her more cautious husband to become my closest ally. Maybe her change of heart is brought on by my praise for her rainbow trout amandine—which praise I genuinely mean. Or maybe it’s brought on by the dinner conversation, which focuses on me half the time, on Tink the other half. Mrs. Jones asks surprisingly insightful questions about my practice as a microsurgeon, pleasantly coaxing me into more detail than the average non-medico cares to know about the handling of microsutures and the use of interchangeable oculars on a headborne surgical microscope. I’m happy to oblige as I watch Tinkerbell hover over her dinner, levitating bits of it with her wand—nothing flamboyant, merely functional— and bringing it home to her mouth.
After some perfunctory questions about my butterfly collection (I’ve sold it since meeting their daughter, as it disquiets her) and my basement full of miniature homes and the precisely detailed furniture that goes with them (I met Tinkerbell at a show for just such items), the talk turns to their daughter. It’s a little embarrassing, what with Melissa beaming at me, and Tinkerbell singing into me her bemusement at her mother, and her father looking ever more resigned, and his wife going on and on about her tiny daughter, giving me a mom’s-eye view of her life history as if Tinkerbell herself weren’t sitting at the table with us. Mrs. Jones is in the midst of telling how easy it was to give birth to a pixie and how hard to live with the fact thereafter when I suddenly laugh, quickly disguising it as a choke—water went down the wrong way, no problem, really I’m all right. Tink has made me a lewd and lovely proposition, one which has brought to mind the heartaching image of her as last I enjoyed her, looking so vulnerable with her glade-green costume and her slim wand set aside, arching back on her spun-silver wings, her perfect breasts thrust up like twin peaks on a relief map, her ultra-fine fingers kneading the ruddy pucker of her vulva, awaiting the tickle and swirl of my ultra-fine horsehair brush, the hot monstrosity of my tonguetip, and the perfect twin-kiss of my cock-slit, as we began our careful coitus.