Chapter Two

 

 

 

“Attention! Kelly Blake, please report to the stockroom. Kelly Blake, report to the stockroom, please.”

Why the hell would anyone be calling Kelly to the stockroom in Eddie’s Supermarket? She hardly ever shopped here. She’d only stopped in to pick up a can of pears in heavy syrup for her friend, Myrna, who was planning some silly treat for her kids from a recipe she’d found in the back of some women’s magazine. Myrna was the queen of women’s magazines. She read them all and tried everything in them. Most of the time the result was a disaster, but how much harm could she do with a can of pears?

“Kelly Blake, please report to the stockroom. Kelly Blake, to the stock room, please.”

She resisted the urge to shout at the speaker that she was coming already. She’d never been called over the loud speaker for anything before, and she blushed hard, hunched her shoulders and hurried through the cereal aisle toward the back. As her name was called yet again, she couldn’t help feeling like she was a kid being called to the principal’s office for some secret crime—so secret, in fact, that she had no idea what it might be.

The voice sounded oddly familiar, slightly nervous. Well, loud speakers would do that to a person, she supposed. Though it was such an anonymous thing, still having your voice booming out there for the whole world to hear might be almost as intimidating as being the one summoned. Clutching her tin of pears to her chest, Kelly made her way to the back, intrigued by the prospect of seeing just what really was behind the swinging double doors with their metallic sheen and their round windows that made her think of submarines or space ships. Still, the loudspeaker referred to it as the stockroom. That wasn’t very glamorous, was it? But then again, who knew what might go on between the rows and rows of canned goods and soft drinks? A murder? Perhaps a clandestine rendezvous? Perhaps it was a time portal, and she was about to step back into the Middle Ages. Maybe it was a wormhole and she’d end up in another dimension or on another planet, or perhaps she’d parked the Subaru in a no-parking zone and the supermarket police were waiting to punish her according to her crime. As she cautiously shoved her way through the double doors, and found herself in a maze of laundry detergent boxes, canned dog food and wooden pallets piled high with shrink-wrapped paper towels, toilet paper and napkins, the one thing she had not expected to find beyond the open back door, where the smokers were all banished when they lit up, was Andy Matthews. He stood shifting nervously from foot to foot under a battered green awning that protected the smokers from sun and rain alike. Andy didn’t smoke. Hell, she knew for a fact Andy was just barely old enough to drink legally.

When he looked up and saw her, he reminded her of a frightened rabbit about to make a run for it. In spite of his ripe old age of twenty-one, startled as he was, he could have passed for fifteen, standing there with his face redder than the Eddie’s smock he wore, which was at least two sizes too big for him.

“Andy? What’s going on? Is everything all right?” she asked.

“I know what you do,” he blurted without so much as a greeting. For a moment, she was afraid he was going to hyperventilate. “I mean, besides writing romance. I figured it out,” he said, his voice cracking on the last word.

“Oh?” She leaned against the doorframe, wondering whether to murder him and drag the body back into the maze of merchandise, or to turn him over her knee and spank his skinny ass.

“Oh, it’s not blackmail or anything,” he said, shaking his head so hard that his neck popped. “It’s just that…” He bit his lip, and, for a moment, she was afraid he might cry, but that was just the way the shadows fell across his jaw. “Well, I need your help—with a girl.”

“I figured it wasn’t a guy. Though I have no problem one way or the other,” she said, stepping outside onto the cement slab. It startled poor Andy so much that he backed up tight against the metal railing. Perhaps he did think she would do him bodily harm. “What I do have a problem with is being paged over the loudspeaker to come to the back of Eddie’s Supermarket. Most of my clients make an appointment with my secretary and she sends them an invoice.”

He shook his head. “Oh, I couldn’t do that. I…” The blush that had never quite left his cheeks flashed with a vengeance. “An invoice?” His voice cracked again. She knew he was paying for his own education and working several jobs to do it.

“What exactly do you need, Andy?” she asked, glancing down at her watch. She had another client clear across town in two hours. This was supposed to be just a pop-in, pop-out stop.

“There’s this girl. I really like her. A lot.” He stepped away from the railing, as if speaking of her made him suddenly lose his fear in his enthusiasm for love. “We’ve had six dates and I want to…you know…but I never have before and I want to know…you know?” The poor guy was going to self-combust if he got any redder. He seemed to have suddenly lost the power of speech. He sputtered twice, gave a couple of fish gasps then nodded, unable to meet her gaze.

“You want to know how to please a girl, and you expect me to give you the lecture and the hand-outs on your fifteen-minute break out behind Eddie’s Supermarket, assuming, of course, that no one else decides to take a break and have a smoke.”

“They won’t,” he said breathlessly. He shot a look over Kelly’s shoulder back into the bowels of the stockroom, just in case. “I always time my break so I can have the place to myself.”

Kelly couldn’t help it, with the topic being what it was, she gave his crotch a surreptitious glance, and he reddened still further and tugged his baggy smock down over the telltale areas. “Not for that!” he said. “I… I like to read, and I don’t like to have to breathe other people’s smoke while I do it.”

“Fair enough.” Kelly did her own little glance back into the stockroom, then took pity on the guy. God, she was such a sucker. “What have you done so far on those dates?”

Damn! She had hoped that the fact that she’d agreed to help would ease the poor kid’s discomfort, but his face went from red to purple and he was suddenly gasping for words. “I, that is we, we, we, we, we kissed. With tongue. She liked that okay. We both did. We liked it a lot.” The color in his cheeks softened and the distant look in his eyes told Kelly that he was remembering just how much they had liked it. “And I touched her…” He nodded to Kelly’s chest.

“Clothed or skin to skin?” Kelly wondered if the poor guy had asthma as he struggled to breathe.

“Clothed.”

“Anything below the waist?”

“I, I, I, I touched her…down there. But only through her jeans.” He dropped his gaze and shifted from foot to foot.

“Did she like it?”

If the poor kid could have managed it, Kelly was pretty convinced he’d have disappeared through the ground. “She put my hand down there, then she touched…” He nodded down to where his fist still held the wadded front of the Eddie’s smock protectively in front of his crotch.

“Sounds like you were on the right path. Then what happened?”

When he didn’t answer, Kelly shoved a hand against her hip and swallowed back the impatient curse just waiting to darken the air between them. “Look, do you want my help or not? Because I have other clients who do.”

The realization that she was going to help him lit his face like neon and he dropped his hands to his side, squared his shoulders and met her gaze. “I told her I didn’t want to rush. I told her I wanted it to be really good for both of us when we finally did it, then, well, I ran like a scared kid.” He shrugged, once again unable to meet her gaze. “I figured she’d never talk to me again. I figured it was over, but then I got this.” He shoved his iPhone at Kelly with a text from ‘Jenny’ that read—

 

Last night was the best thing that’s ever happened to me. It will be good, Andy. So, so good! Free tomorrow night?

 

“That was last night,” he managed as she returned his phone. “I have six hours.”

“All right.” Kelly couldn’t help it. She loved a good challenge. She looked down at the can of pears. “I need a can opener and a roll of paper towels, or maybe some wet wipes. This is going to get messy.”

He disappeared like a shot into the stockroom and returned way faster than Kelly would have thought possible with all three. On the plastic garden table, she wiped a clean spot with a paper towel, then opened the can of pears. He watched wide-eyed. “Pull up a chair next to mine. As close as you can get.” With some effort, she pulled one slippery pear half out of the can and laid it on a wad of paper towels with the open side up, making sure there was just enough of the heavy syrup coating it that it was slick down through the middle. She figured, by that point, the guy would see where she was going with this little exercise, but he only stared at her blankly.

“Have you ever seen a woman’s—?”

“No! Not a real one, I mean only in porn.” He shot her crotch a quick glance, then his face lost all color. For a second, she feared he’d pass out completely.

“Oh, don’t worry, I’m not showing you mine, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

“Oh, I’m sure yours is nice, really cool and all, but Jenny—”

“Jenny’s is the one you want to see, and touch. And kiss. I get it.” Carefully, she picked up the pear on its cushion of paper towel and, holding it palm up in her left hand, began to stroke the hollow of it with the middle and index finger of her right and, if it were possible, the kid’s eyes got even bigger. The way he shifted in the plastic garden chair told her he got it at last. “This is cooler than she’ll be when you touch her and not quite as soft and giving as she’ll be when you open her with your two fingers. That’ll be a little different too. She may be already open and ready for you. If not, you’ll have to gently finger your way in between the folds of her flesh to the soft, warm center, and you’ll be surprised at just how warm she is.” She rubbed her fingers together, now coated generously with the heavy syrup, and he drew a tight breath. “She’ll feel less syrupy, more creamy. And when you feel her, when you feel how warm and creamy she is, believe me, you’ll want to taste her, just as she’ll want to taste you. The taste of a lover, and the scent… Well, put the two together and there’s nothing in the world more delicious, more magical. You try it.”

She held the pear half palm up, at about the level of a woman’s crotch, about in the place she would imagine Andy’s Jenny to be if he were kissing and fondling her, then Kelly reached across him and pulled his hand down to the waiting pear half.

“Don’t be nervous. Relax. Have fun with it. You’re both new to each other and being a little awkward is part of the pleasure of the first time together. Laugh about it, enjoy it, ask her to tell you if you’re not sure what she likes. How can you know if she doesn’t say? Lovers, good lovers, talk to each other. They’re lovers, not mind readers. Now. You touch the pear, like it’s Jenny, talk to me, like I’m her. That’s it, start from the bottom just like you’re opening her folds. That’s it, that’s good. You might be kissing her, caressing her breasts, she might be stroking your erection. It’s okay for you to tell her what you like too, you know? What woman doesn’t want to pleasure her man? Or you might want to look at each other’s body. The body of your lover is a feast for your eyes.”

Andy got the hang of it quickly enough, but it rapidly became clear to Kelly that his imagination was about to get the best of him. “Is that your Coke?” she asked, motioning to the can on the table.

He managed a nod.

“Good. Take a deep breath, take a drink, then take another deep breath. Big lesson, Andy. This is not a foot race. Jenny won’t thank you for hurrying things up, unless it’s a quickie, then that’s another lesson for another time. This is getting to know you, sex. This is discovering your lover’s responses to sex. It’s not meant to be hurried. Now, give me your hand.” She guided it back into the pear and drizzled a bit of juice over his fingers. “Trust me, you want it wet and slick. Now, if the pear were a woman, there would be a little pearl-like node right about…there.”

“Her clitoris,” he whispered in awe.

“That’s right. Wait just a second.” Kelly wiped her sticky fingers and fumbled in her purse, until she found the box of Tic Tac Candy. In her awkward effort to shake one free and still hold the pear-half in position, she shook half of them out on the ground before she managed to get one between thumb and forefinger and push it into the soft flesh of the pear-half right at its apex. “Not quite anatomically correct, but closer. Now, use your thumb right there.” She guided him to the protruding end of the Tic Tac. He made a little sound at the back of his throat at the contact and began to circle it with his thumb. “Good, that’s good.”

Suddenly Andy was rocking in his chair. “Jenny,” he whispered, as though Kelly were no longer there. “Show me what you like. Show me what you want.”

Kelly’s pulse accelerated to a gallop as she guided Andy, shifting his thumb just slightly to one side. “Sometimes direct contact is too intense,” she instructed.

“What about tongue?” He sounded like he’d been running hard rather than fondling a damn pear-half.

“Never known a woman who didn’t like a little tongue on her Tic Tac.”

The words were barely out of her mouth before he grabbed her by the wrist and brought hand paper towels, and pear—complete with its Tic Tac clitoris—to his mouth, licking from the bottom end of the pear up through the center and circling the mint before settling his lips around it in a juicy suck and lick of a kiss.

“That’s right. That’s it. You got it.”

“Do you like that, Jenny? Is it good?” he whispered against the pear’s slippery opening.

And damn if Kelly wasn’t shifting in her seat. Most of the time she talked people through their doubts and problems, most of the time it was more theory and communication than anything else when she tutored people. But this! Well, sometimes object lessons were the best.

In fact, sometimes they might be just a little bit too good. Andy gave a soft grunt and shuddered in his seat, and her phone pinged a message warning her if she were going to make it to her session with the Hammersmiths on time, she needed to leave now.

“Gotta go,” she said. “Good luck with Jenny. It’ll be fine. You’ll see. Oh, and keep the pears.” She fled back through the stockroom and left Eddie’s Supermarket without any pears in heavy syrup for Myrna’s women’s mag treat.