By Carrie Esposito
Nobody would’ve guessed at the café where we ate lunch every day the things we did at night. There at Lulu’s with its plastic tablecloths covered in peaches, or were they tomatoes?
Just call him Regular Rob, me Decaf Diane. I made the same joke every time Lulu brought the coffee around.
She, god bless her, chuckled on cue, then poured into my mug from the coffee pot with the orange handle, her blue shirt shifting a bit to show the freckle on her right breast. We’d talked about Lulu but idly. We weren’t sure she’d be into it. On Fridays we savored her homemade blueberry scones. Fridays were also the nights for rendezvous, though really they could happen any day of the week depending on who was available.
We’d been in the lifestyle for a while by then, fifteen years, and okay, so what we lacked in youth and beauty, we made up for in experience.
Rob liked to open his messages with telling the man I liked to suck c— and that I would lick his wife from head to toe. That and the blurry pictures of my p—-, some with a strap-on about to enter, were usually intriguing enough to get us a meeting.
Rob grinned and flashed me his phone. The couple we were meeting later had sent a picture of the woman. They were apparently doing some kind of photo shoot. Virgins, who’d never done this before—our specialty. She wore thigh high boots, a garter, a pretty lacy black bra with a tiny pink bow. Our eyes met, our mouths watering in sync.
She’d be a challenge, we were sure of that, possibly both of them, because someone like her had likely chosen an attractive, selective mate. Why not? Rob and I though, we never showed up as anyone other than ourselves, dressed how we always dressed, me, white blouse, jeans, a red bustier showing underneath, Rob, also jeans, black sweater. We had what we had to offer. I’d even learned to do prostate massages after Rob told me how he’d get them from Russian masseuses during his first marriage before his wife died. He always said he never cheated, just you know, came on a table in a forgotten building in a forgotten hallway deep in Queens. To each his own, I wasn’t about to judge. Before my divorce, I’d been a good girl, following the rules. First night out with Rob, I’d walked straight up to a man in a sex club, asked if I could blow him, and I did it, right there. I felt powerful, alive, like when we met that twenty-one year old stripper in Vegas who came back to the hotel pool and then the room with us. Everyone looking at us thought we must be famous with a woman like that doing body shots off my stomach, her name a continent. Either that or they thought we were paying, which we were, but who needed to know the details?
That night, at a neon lit dance club in Jersey flanked by a Taco Bell and a closed down Blockbuster, we saw them before they saw us. We liked it better that way, less chance they’d turn and walk back out. Rob, with his bald head, crooked teeth, short by anyone’s standards, and me, older, with the hair I’d let go white, tall and not exactly chunky, maybe stocky, both of us with our share of wrinkles.
It was early, the dance floor empty except for the blue and pink lights sweeping across the shadows. The husband, Zak, a fake name like the new ones always used, had said she, Delphine, a romantic for sure with that choice, liked to dance. That was fine by me. I could feel her up a bit, give her a taste. I just hoped it wouldn’t take too long to get them back to the motel room they’d rented around the corner. They were certainly the optimistic types. Us too, but more because we couldn’t afford not to be.
We walked over and Rob did his standard: I think I know who you’re looking for.
They looked, as many of the young ones did, stricken, and we smiled benignly into that pause. If Rob felt hurt by it, I never knew. If I felt hurt by it, I never knew that either.
She wore a skin tight hot pink halter, a short black skirt, those boots, a costume for her, but not a disguise. I ached to touch every smooth inch of her skin. She was not looking at me like she wanted to do the same. In fact, she seemed to be trying very hard not to look at me at all.
I swallowed and reached out my hand, took hers, swayed to the background music. The DJ didn’t come on until ten. She didn’t drop my hand, rather looked at it strangely, as if asking how she’d gotten there.
I wanted to tell her the only answers I had. That sometimes you married a man in a church in a white dress stiff with lace and carried a bouquet and something borrowed and something blue and you went home and made children and pot roasts and birthday parties and stacks of folded towels and little piles of dust you swept away. And then all of the things you made asked to be released by their creator, or maybe you just didn’t want to make them anymore.
So you leave all of that behind and you find yourself in motel rooms off of highways with starchy orange blankets, your finger up a stranger’s ass, eyes shut tight so he doesn’t have to see you, or sucking on a woman’s toes, while she kisses her husband, willfully not looking down at the woman surrendering pleasure at her feet.
Carrie Esposito was thrilled to be a 2023 Bread Loaf Fiction Scholar. Her stories have been published in The Georgia Review, Ruminate Magazine, The Forge Literary Magazine, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. Carrie is a Fiction Editor at The Weight Journal, an Educational Consultant in NYC schools and a professor of Global Humanities. You can find her online @carriebesposito.
Taco Bell Quarterly 