With zombie-like indifference, I inhaled the fumes from the bottle she was holding under my nose. The sharp smell made me jerk away, and the fog in my mind lifted. It was then that the fact that I was cold, stiff, and all tied up, became important to me.
“What the hell’s going on here?” I said.
It didn’t come out like that. It came out more like: “Wa ka kells gaging oa heer?”
That was the best I could do. My mouth was stretched wide open, and my tongue found two chunks of plastic clamped between my back molars. Even the slightest effort to close my mouth hurt my jaw like the dickens.
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On the ground floor of the Galleria Mall in Houston, Gavin Taulbe leaned against the parapet that surrounded the ice rink, watching two of his grandkids ice skating. His daughter-in-law, Graciela, stood next to him, tracking the kids’ progress across the ice. One of the kids was hers; the other belonged to his daughter Geneva. Graciela had invited her because she knew Angelica loved ice skating, and said she could also spend the night.
Both Gavin and Graciela had come up in coastal Texas. Gavin came from blue-collar, redneck origins, and Graciela from a middle class Hispanic family, but if they had any common ground, besides the love each bore for his son Branden, who was stationed in the Middle East, it was that both were mystified by the appeal of ice skating. That they were there at all was a labor of love.

“I don’t care if the ice rink does have its own hours,” Graciela said. “When the stores close, it will be time to go home. Corbin will just have to deal; Angelica, too.”

“I agree with you,” Gavin said. “Whenever my wife catches up with us, we’re out of here.” He looked at his watch. “That shouldn’t be long. They’re starting to close up the stores already.” All up and down the wide corridors of the mall, the employees of the various shops were shooing out customers, totaling out registers, and pulling displays back. Iron security gates were clanging down like portcullises everywhere.

However, at 9:30, they were still waiting. “What can possibly be keeping her?” said Graciela. “Where can she be? There’s nothing open but the restaurants and the movie theatres—and here. What do we do?”

Gavin pulled a cell phone out of the pocket of his khakis and punched in a code. “That’s strange,” he said. “Her phone’s not on. Tell you what, if I don’t hear from her in the next ten minutes, I’ll call security. Maybe she went to one of her favorite places and managed to get herself locked up in the store. Hey, it happens. Get Genny to tell you about the time she got locked up in Waldenbooks, and that was on purpose. She’d always fantasized about getting herself locked up in a bookstore and so one night she hid while the employees locked the store.”

“Did she have as good a time as she hoped?”

“No,” said Gavin. “She got cold and lonely. Especially cold. They set the thermostat low overnight.”

Ten minutes later, the adults were ready to pull the kids off the ice and go to the security office, when Gavin’s pocket chirped. He answered his phone.

“Where the hell have you been? Oh, yeah? You what? You’re what? You want me to do what? All right. I’ll be there.” He snapped the phone shut and put it back in his pocket.

“What happened?” asked Graciela.

“Pretty much what I thought. She stayed too long in Neiman-Marcus, and had a hard time getting out. Graci, I need you to do me a favor. Sidonie wants me to come ahead of you all and meet her in the parking garage—says she has something special to tell me. Will you be OK by yourself to get the kids off the ice, and can you give me about ten minutes?”

“I guess so,” Graciela said.

“Thanks!” Gavin gave his daughter-in-law a smile which made Graciela forget that some people considered him a homely man, and took off in the direction of the parking garages without a backward glance. He was a short, powerfully built man with faded brown hair that he kept in the same military cut he’d had since the sixties, and sharp, golden-brown eyes like a hawk’s. He did not look particularly grandfatherly. He kept himself fit through working out and his day job, which was repairing cable for one of the local cable companies. His black polo shirt strained over his broad shoulders and biceps. He steered clear of the baggy-pants look the young guys were sporting. For a middle aged white man, he had not much gut and had not lost too much ass. He covered the distance to the parking garage entrance in the ground-eating pace of the infantryman he had been a long time ago.

He got to the van first. He heard the staccato click of heels on a concrete floor and saw, coming from a different direction, his wife Sidonie. She was wearing a black-and-white geometrically patterned dress made of some kind of flowy material, probably rayon, that fastened with a lot of little black buttons; it had a deep V neck, and correspondingly, the kind of hemline in front—there was a name for it, but he didn’t remember what it was—that formed an asymmetrical, inverted V and revealed an interesting amount of long, well-shaped, muscular leg. As she bore down on him at a rapid pace, he enjoyed watching the knitting motion of those legs. In her youth she had done a little modeling and she remembered how to walk. And get a load of those shoes! She hadn’t been wearing those when they’d come into the mall. Four-inch heels they had, and they fastened around her slender ankles with silver chains. The strap over her classically proportioned toes was another silver chain. He figured the shoes had come from Neiman-Marcus, and he didn’t even want to think of the figure that would turn up on one of their next credit card statements.

Her eyes, which were a pale gray with a tinge of yellow—some called them wolf’s eyes—blazed when she saw him. Her mouth, a lush surprise in her rather severe, angular face, had been open a little as if the lips were too swollen to close it properly. But she could close it, which she did, long enough to swallow; and then she broke out into a skewed grin that promised a world of carnal pleasure. Gavin felt his cock twitch and start to thicken and fill at the sight of it.

He opened the door of the van, which was parked next to a stanchion. When Sidonie came up to him he took the shopping bag and her handbag and tossed them inside; then, leaning against the side of the van, he caught her by her waist and a handful of her chestnut hair and pulled her close to him, between the van and the pillar. Her mouth fastened on his in a voracious kiss; she clutched at his shoulders and molded the front of her body to his. He slid one of his thighs between hers, and she rode it, gripping it hard. She was strong; she could press her weight and then some. He let go her hair and slid his hand down her back to her ass. Under the soft material of her dress, she wore nothing. When had that happened?

Most of the blood in his brain rushed south into his cock as he realized that there were only a couple of layers of material, easily breached, between them. There were advantages to having a slightly-taller wife, and she had every damn one of them; all it would need would be for him to unzip and her to hike her dress up a bit and with those tall shoes she’d hardly even have to cant her hips to have that hot, slick sheath of hers covering him right down to the root. What a shame it was that they were here in this garage and the kids or somebody else would be along any second plus Sid had this tendency not to keep her voice down unless they were in a tent and sometimes not even then, and just think of it with these acoustics, plus there was probably a security camera trained on them somewhere as it wasâ

For a moment my muttering’s trailed off as my alcohol numbed mind registered the fact that someone had put their arm about my shoulders. It took a moment before my eyes focused, though somewhat blurringly, on the face of my old friend Frank.
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I walked into the room. It was smelly and sweaty and the air tasted like cigarettes and beer. There were two men in the room. One with a camera, and one with an opinion. The room was dimly lit and the bathtub was running. I proceeded to bathtub and began to remove my clothes. Jeans, t-shirt, bra, underwear, and I slipped off my sandals. I stepped into the warm inviting bubbles and stretched my legs out. There was plenty of room. I quickly clipped up my long blonde hair so it wouldn’t get wet.
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