This is my fisrt submission to the Nifty archive. If you like my story, I'd love to hear from you at tabhunter101@hotmail.com.
'Stranger things have happened'
Working on weekends was starting to get me down. What had begun as a way to earn a little money, which I needed to run the car and buy some magazines, had turned into social death. We closed at four on Saturdays, by which time I was tired enough to plead off any invitations - not that there were many - and spend the night educating myself in the history of cinema courtesy of the local Blockbuster. I had worked my way through Woody Allen, dabbled in a little Bergman, but was happiest renting anything that flashed a little arse. Even musicals would do, so long as the pants were tightly drawn across some firm cheeks, hinting at the cleft beneath.
I worked at a bookshop in a small town selling paperbacks to people who only read on their annual holiday, and even then they preferred bodice-rippers and military thrillers where the name of the author was printed larger than the title on the cover. I got to order in the books I wanted, though, and it was easy work for the money, so I had stayed on for another year after finishing my studies. And I got to know the locals, of course.
There were some characters in the town. A lady who walked through the shop, every weekend, dressed in a pink overcoat regardless of the weather outside. There was another lady who was a tragic derelict and claimed a different and more glamorous past every time we struck up a conversation. The last time I saw her she was telling me about her time in the Russian ballet and the dancers she'd fucked. 'They're such stupid men,' she said, 'But their legs, oh, their legs are something else.' Her mind wandered off then, and soon she did too, but she had spoken of the prowess of those dancers with such conviction that I was still imagining the exact cut and feel of a thigh through the rest of the afternoon. There were no customers in the store, and my boss was away on a buying trip, so I was alone in the place. At times like this I'd lose myself in the travel section, flicking through the books on far away places. That afternoon I'd forgone my usual favourite - Florence - in favour of a book on Moscow. I was seriously considering running away to join the ballet, keeping my mind on anything but the tingling in my groin. And that's when he crept up on me.
To this day I don't know how he came into the store without ringing the little bell above the door. One minute I was flicking past pictures of Lenin's tomb, and suddenly he was there, coughing a little to catch my attention. I looked up with a start.
'What's a guy got to do to get a little service around here?'
He had a voice like rolled oats drizzled in honey. But his eyes were something else altogether. They weren't exactly grey or quite green enough to be green, hovering somewhere in between and piercing me to the spot. Usually I've got a sarcastic rejoinder ready on the tip of my tongue for when a customer came in with an attitude, but then I couldn't even form a word. And his tone hadn't been rude. He was smiling too, a soft smile that hinted at something but wouldn't give it away without a tussle.
'What's up,' he said, 'Cat got your tongue?'
I laughed nervously. 'I've never gone in for fur myself,' I said, 'It gets stuck at the back of your mouth.'
'So you're a dog person?'
'Dogs are ok. I like the big ones - retrievers, shepherds, wolfhounds.' What was I talking about? Babble came out of my mouth as I took in his well-toned arms beneath a white oxford shirt, opened to the first button and framing the nape of his neck beneath a chin straight out a Gillette ad. His nose was long and crooked, and I imagined it had been broken when he was a boy and stayed that way. He was taller than me by a few inches so I had to look up to meet his face. His smile grew a little and I realised my lack of subtlety. 'Can I help you look for something?'
'Depends,' he said, taking a step closer. 'While you were nose deep in...' - he reached across and lifted my hand with the book in it - 'Russian lit, I took a scan of your shelves in fiction over there.' As he touched my hand I started slightly as though a current passed between us. All the time he was looking into my eyes. 'I was looking for something other than a Mills and Boon or Tom Clancy. I'm new to town and as I haven't made a lot of friends yet, I was hoping to find some old friends in print to keep me company over the weekend.'
My mind was racing with an overload of information - his voice, his face, the aftertouch of his hand. 'Old friends?' I was reduced to short utterances, couldn't manage anything longer than one syllable.
'Yeah - you know, the authors I like. Mann, White, McCarthy.'
I nodded as though I knew each of them intimately. I did in fact know the books he was talking about, except for White, and had read McCarthy so many times that I romanticized my lonesome existence as if I were a cowboy in one of his stories. And suddenly, on a dusty Sunday afternoon, in had ridden the Marlborough Man.
'I'm sorry. We don't get much call for those guys around here. I could order them in for you, though, if you liked.' I had regained control of my voice now, and knew full well there was a pleading tone underneath it that offered something other than the usual customer service. 'Can I take your name and number?'
'Well,' he said, pausing like he was considering something, 'That would be a way to do it, I suppose. But there's still the little matter of keeping myself occupied this weekend, and next, assuming they're gone take a little while to get here. What will I do with myself in the meantime?'
'I could suggest something,' I offered. I was kidding, partly. But he looked at me seriously all of a sudden, and I realised the stakes had changed.
'When do you get off?' he asked.
'I close the shop in a few minutes, but on an afternoon like this one, I could shut a little early.'
Our words were innocent enough, but all the time our bodies were having another conversation. I moved a little closer to him, nervously passing the book from hand to hand. He grabbed it and put it back on the shelf.
'I think it's closing time,' he said.
I walked quickly to the front of the store, switched the sign to 'Closed' and pulled the shutters down. I turned around. He was gone. I looked behind the stack of shelves, then down the back behind the children's stand. Nothing. What was happening? I switched off the light in the main body of the store and walked through the door that led into the back room. Suddenly strong arms engulfed me from behind.
'Shit! You're a regular phantom - you know that! The Ghost who walks...'
But my words were cut off as he turned me around and covered my mouth with his. In between sucking my soul up through my head, he paused to say, 'Ghost who walks, ey? We'll have to do something about this whole vertical thing...'
I had a fair idea of what to do. I ran my hand across the cool fabric of his shirt. His chest was firm beneath it, hinting at muscles that were subtly defined. I slid a hand down the side of his trousers and lifted the shirt up, exposing his belly and up to his nipples, two dark moons on either side of his chest. I kissed one, grazing it with my teeth, and then the other. He moaned, quietly, deeply, so that I could feel the air leave his lungs. I worked my way lower, kissing his abdomen and then his belly, pausing at the button in anticipation of what was to come. There was a faint trail of hair leading down into his trousers. I grabbed at his belt buckle, fumbling a little in my excitement. He put his hand over mine and lifted my head with the other.
'Take it easy. We've got all the time in the room,' he said.
'In the room?'
'Well there's the floor, and that table, and that packing foam looks like it could be one for the books.'
There were some empty boxes in the corner, big ones, filled with those little beads they put in to protect the books. I looked over at them, caught his drift, and stood. He took my by the hand and led my over to the boxes. He lowered himself onto the topmost box, and I went down with him, dropping to my knees in front of his crotch.
'Now, where were we?'
The question was redundant. His cock strained against the fabric of his trousers. I nuzzled along the outline, catching the zip of his fly in my teeth. As I pulled them down, my chin brushed against the cotton of his briefs. His cock was well defined now, a dark length beneath the white cotton. The faint trail of his hair leading down from the belly button turned into a mass of black pubic hair that spilled over the top of his briefs. I kissed his hair, his cock, and slipped my fingers around the elastic band of his y-fronts. They slid down, catching a little as his dick was released, straightening up and out and pointing at my face. I took the head of it between my lips and flicked at the slit with my tongue. He groaned again and pushed himself a little deeper into the packing foam. The thought of his cheeks pushing deeper into the white foam sent me over the edge, and I plunged my mouth down upon his dick. The tip of it was pressing against the back of my throat and I smelled the nutty aroma of his black matt of hair. I ran my tongue along the underside as I pulled off again, down and up, moving my mouth to the base, licking around the base and then down to his balls, taking one and then the other into my mouth, lifting them with my hand to tongue at the skin beneath, hoping to catch a taste of the flesh around his hole. He pulled my head back with his hands and said, 'Time to finish what you started.' I took his dick in my mouth again. He kept his hands on either side of my head, tousling my hair and pulling it down across my neck. I loved the swell of his cock, the salty taste, as it pulsed in my mouth, thrilling at every touch of my hungry tongue. He was thrusting his hips forward now, plunging the hardness into my mouth. The tension increased, and I could tell by his moans and the shuddering in his cock that he was close. I pushed my head down, down, taking as much of it as I could, as though I could be one with him, joined at the crotch. Suddenly he came. I felt his hot fluid running down my throat, then flowing over into my mouth, and then I could taste the salt, the salt and the heat. His hips were thrust forward now, held there in ecstasy. His shoes had fallen off some time before, and now his toes curled round as he came. I took as much of his jism as I could, lapping it off the tip of his cock, swallowing what he had given, licking the flesh of his inner thigh. He dropped his hips again after what seemed like forever. He was panting a little. I kept up my licking, kissing and tasting his thighs, cleaning his balls, pushing again into the recess underneath.
'You really want to get under there, don't you?' he said, a statement more than a question. He stood then, and turned around. There was some packing foam pressed into the cheeks of his arse. I brushed these off, then kissed one cheek and then the other, moving closer to the dark cleft of his arse, down to the hole. I spread his cheeks with my hands, and licked down to my target. My mouth and nose were full of the smell, the warm nutty haze. He moaned again, but this time it was my cock that was twitching, close to the edge. As I tongued around the entrance to his hole, he said in a voice more a whisper than anything else.
'You got anything bigger to fill that with?'
My dick was thickening in my pants. I stood too, laying him down across the boxes and the foam. I pushed down my trousers and shorts, then took the plunge. In the excitement that followed, the packing beads flew into the air with each fucking thrust, so that when we came together, the air was full like snow.