Coming Together: At Last, Volume One

by Alessia Brio, L. A. Banks, Lisabet Sarai

  "Danny! Ayúdame!"

  "Caridad?” Holy shit. The small woman was walking apace with the float, reaching her arms up. “Guys, help her up!"

  "Who is she, Danny?” The kids peered at Caridad, resplendent in a white suit and headscarf and bedecked with strand after stand of bright glass beads.

  Danny grinned as he hugged Caridad. He knew just what to say. “Kiddoes, she's our babalú. She's gonna teach us to worship the queerest gods of them all.” His phalanx of makeshift warriors cheered and hollered for what they thought was a newcomer to the party.

  "You muchachos listen to me,” she shouted as soon as her feet touched the flatbed. She flung her surfeit of beads at them, and they hurried to add them to their costumes. “Say what I say."

  The drums had overtaken the trumpets, booming. Calyx had stopped marching and walked in rhythm. He looked back at Danny and Caridad, and nodded again. He's going to lead our way, Danny thought to himself, a wild joy fizzing along his limbs and towards his spine to pool right at his core. He followed his lover's measured steps, mesmerized.

  Danny jumped when he heard Caridad's ululating shout. She flung her hands wide toward the gay-lanx and they tried to take it up, with varying success.

  "Iyawóóóóóó!" Her voice carried over the drums.

  "Iyawó!" The kids cried.

  Danny watched Calyx. A ripple seemed to shimmer along his muscles as the cry went up. Then, to the accompaniment of a single trumpet, he started to dance.

  Caridad sang: "Que viva Changó," and the kids called it back to her ecstatically, over and over again.

  Calyx kicked and snapped his hips, spun and stretched his arms and neck up as if he would capture and swallow the sun.

  "What's he doing?" The kids had asked. Answers had backed up in Danny's throat. Watching Calyx dance, he thought of all the things he could have said, about reclaiming lost passions, self-affirmation, choosing to live rather than merely to exist. But these kids didn't need to hear those answers. They were screaming and swaying in response to Caridad's call and Calyx's dance. With pride, Danny realized his kids were ready for this lesson because of his work with them. They were sublime and ridiculous, and fiercely beautiful.

  He let everything else fall away, his entire awareness tunneling down to Calyx. They'd be okay, he knew it. They'd be Calyx and Danny, stepping differently, but marching together.

  And they were definitely keeping those white leather pants.

  The float trundled forward at Calyx's pace, and Danny watched, mouth open and prick hard, as his lover owned the parade route.

  * * * *

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  Francine's Kid

  © Jeremy Edwards

  Even though I was twenty years old and living on my own, almost everyone at Spoonbill's Department Store still referred to me, affectionately, as “Francine's kid.” A lot of the clerks and managers had been there for decades, and they remembered me tagging along with Mom on some of her shifts—Teddy, the little blond boy who liked to straighten everything on the shelves. When I was five, the big joke had been that I ought to be enlisted to help them take inventory, as I'd probably do a more accurate job than the regular employees.

  When I was little, it was convenient for Mom to bring me along to Spoonbill's sometimes—and she knew I had fun there—but she told me later that she'd also been thinking of my education. She didn't like the fact that I only saw other white people out in the suburbs where we lived. And the most natural way for her to address that concern was to make sure I spent plenty of quality time among her second family, the diverse community of this urban department store.

  Now, it was the summer between my sophomore and junior years at the local university, and I was working at Spoonbill's—and Mom wasn't. She'd finally become a full-time travel agent. But though she hadn't collected a paycheck from Spoonbill's in three or four years, she was in and out more often than old Spoonbill himself. She still had more close friends there than she did in our tract, and she'd just as soon think up a reason to drop in at Spoonbill's on a Saturday as attend some suburban barbecue.

  What was hilarious to me was that even employees my own age and younger would talk about me as “Francine's kid.” Some of these young clerks had been at Spoonbill's only a week, but they'd picked up the lingo from the senior staff.

  Patty wasn't quite that young—twenty-six that summer, I think—but she was new to the Spoonbill's world. “You're Francine's kid, aren't you?” she said when I brought over some empty shoe boxes that my manager in men's furnishings had borrowed for a display.

  She looked at me like I was something entertaining, or something appetizing, or maybe something entertaining and appetizing. For my part, I was torn between letting my gaze linger on her friendly, mirthful eyes and on her playful, gentle mouth.

  "Yes,” I answered cheerfully. “I'm Ted. And you, evidently, are Patty.” I nodded toward the name tag that embellished her chest—a chest, however, that needed no embellishing. Now I had yet another place to wish I could let my gaze linger. “You're new here, right?” This was a no-brainer. There was no way, if she'd been here the day before or the previous week, that I could have failed to notice.

  "Yeah,” she said with a light laugh. “I hit a little snag at the restaurant I was working at."

  "A snag?"

  "They went out of business."

  "Ah,” I said.

  "So I thought I'd try retail for a change."

  "I think you'll like it here,” I said sincerely. “It's really a nice place."

  "Oh, don't worry, I like it,” she said zestfully, doing a subtly flirtatious thing with her eyelashes for about a quarter second.

  As I walked back to my department, I wondered idly if Patty designated herself Hispanic, African-American, or both. But it was, as I said, an idle thought. Though I believed in the importance of identity and pride, I also knew that race and ethnicity didn't have to be treated like a big deal; they didn't have to be the first things you asked someone about.

  What was a big deal was the hard-on I'd obtained just by talking to Patty. Rarely had a woman's charisma and beauty impressed me so instantly. The joy in that smile. The mischief in those eyes.

  The bulge in my jeans.

  When our lunch breaks happened to coincide later that day, I would gladly have joined her at her table in the cafeteria. Alas, it was full. So I settled for waving hello from across the room. I sat alone with a novel, lifting my eyes every so often to sneak a look at her. Each time her face shifted in my direction, I'd quickly turn my head, as if reading the menu on the wall. I must have read the menu fifteen times that day. I noticed there was some kind of special hamburger listed, called a “patty melt.” Personally, I didn't eat meat; but the words gave me food for thought, and I spent much of that lunch break thinking of ways to make Patty melt.

  "I'm going to have to get along without you this a.m.,” Larry said when I arrived the next morning. “Shoes are doing some type of stockroom project today,” he explained, referring to the neighboring department as if the shoes themselves did all the work. “I've been persuaded to loan you over for a couple of hours.” My boss was a nice guy—and he was, on top of that, particularly fond of Jocelyn, who managed the shoe department. Larry liked having me around so that he could get his desk work done, but it had probably only taken three seconds for him to be “persuaded” by pie-sweet Jocelyn to give me up.

  "Hi, Teddy,” said Jocelyn. Even when the grammatical second person prevented the old-timers from calling me “Francine's kid,” they usually resorted to the diminutive form of my name. I didn't mind—it made me feel loved. “You'll be helping Patty in the back. I'm stuck out here meeting with merch reps today, so I'll be able to cover the counter."

  "Okay,” I said. Yes! I thought. I didn't yet know that I'd be groping Patty among the mountains of empty shoe boxes before the morning was out. But I knew a shift working side by side with her could only be g
ood.

  Patty laughed instead of saying hello, as if it both pleased and amused her to see that I was her designated helper. “Uh-oh,” she teased, “they've sent me Francine's kid."

  "You better believe it,” I retorted with a bratty smirk.

  "Here,” she said, throwing an armful of empty shoe boxes at me. I managed to catch one of them, while the rest made a muted cardboard clatter on the floor. Again, Patty laughed.

  "Did you really expect me to catch five shoe boxes at once?” I had adopted a tone of mock indignation, making it clear that I was actually delighted by her spontaneous goofiness.

  "No,” she chirped. “I expected you to let most of them land on the floor."

  "Well, I did."

  "Yeah,” Patty snickered. “Good job, kid. Now start organizing them by size."

  "You guys organize the empty ones by size?"

  She shrugged. “Don't look at me. I only started working here yesterday."

  She had a point. Nonetheless, “Don't look at me” was not a mandate I had any intention of complying with.

  As I helped Patty reorganize the entire shoe stockroom, our kidding was interspersed with substantive conversation. I learned that Patty was an opera fiend; that she was plugging away at a master's in psychology; that she'd been a nationally ranked table tennis player in high school; that she identified herself as African-American; and that she was single and unattached. She, in turn, heard about my obsession with Monty Python; my math team trophies; and my interest in my Scottish heritage despite Mom's insistence that only a fraction of my ancestry was actually Scottish—a point she had a tendency to reiterate whenever she tired of hearing my sorry attempts to master the bagpipes. Patty also learned of my status as a totally anal biology student with plans to go into taxonomy. And she guffawed when I told her about sorting the Spoonbill's merchandise at age five. She guffawed and slapped me playfully on the shoulder, in fact.

  "You're definitely the right man for this job, then,” she said. She gestured at the chaos that largely still surrounded us, as we sat on the concrete floor sifting through rolls of price stickers.

  "I think so,” I agreed, briefly making eye contact.

  "So how come we haven't finished yet, hotshot?” she joked.

  I half-lowered my eyelids, in a caricature of conceitedness. “Oh, of course I could have had the whole thing straightened out in twenty minutes. But I didn't want to make you feel bad by leaving you in the dust."

  She lunged at me and pushed me backward onto a huge plush puppy that was kept on hand for back-to-school season. She tickled me a bit and called me a smartass.

  I welcomed this trend toward ever-increasing physical contact—clearly, we had already established a comfortable rapport. Still, it was probably a little weird that I grabbed her and kissed her, having met her only the day before.

  "Ted, we just met,” she said, echoing my thoughts, after she'd taken her time in breaking the kiss. “What are you doing?"

  "I'm doing this,” I explained. And I kissed her again, demonstrating.

  "Is Jocelyn likely to come back here?” I asked.

  Patty smiled by way of reply, and initiated the next kiss herself, putting her arms around my neck to give it more oomph.

  At twenty, I thought of myself as a mature adult and a conscientious employee, and it seemed crazy to be making out in the stockroom like a nineteen-year-old when I was supposed to be helping workplace tasks get accomplished. I'd never done anything like this before while on the clock at Spoonbill's. But that was exactly how I rationalized it: I'd earned my chance to mess around.

  Nevertheless, Patty, on her second day of employment, had presumably not yet earned such privileges. So I judged we could neck for another minute or two, but had better not push our luck. I didn't want her to hit a “snag” by getting fired—for her sake, and for mine.

  "Mm. I like you, Patty,” I said.

  "Well, duh.” She reached between me and the stuffed puppy to squeeze my butt. My cock was getting so long it had poked through the leg of my briefs. The tip was warm against my thigh, and this ultra-tangible manifestation of my arousal made me even more aroused.

  "But I don't want you to get in trouble,” I continued. “I could probably talk my way out of it—these folks are my family—but I don't want you to take a chance. We should get back to work."

  "Okay.” She stroked my erection, as a quick sign of her ultimate intent. I reciprocated by sliding my hand down the back of her jeans, titillating the downy skin for an instant.

  "Sunday,” she said. “My place. There's a swimming pool at the complex that no one else ever uses."

  * * * *

  "Oh, Teddy,” Patty tittered. “Didn't Francine ever tell you it's not polite to point?"

  She was alluding to the fact that my swim trunks didn't do much to hide the erection I'd arrived with. But since, as she'd promised, we had the pool area to ourselves, it didn't bother me. And, from the hungry grin on her face, I was pretty sure it wasn't bothering her, either.

  All this was good; because the way Patty was sparkling in her deck chair, my hard-on wasn't going anywhere. Well, anywhere except—if I was lucky—a certain warm, wet place. And not the swimming pool.

  Her ivory bikini looked like it had been custom-designed to complement her deep, luscious skin tone. It also emphasized the sensuality of her breasts, especially where ghostly hints of her nipples pushed against the damp fabric. Her thighs, strong and smooth, converged into the ivory triangle like proverbial roads leading to proverbial Rome. A few dark, clinging wisps of hair snuck out at the triangle's hem to entice me.

  And then there was that face. Even with cool-ass sunglasses concealing her eyes, she projected a rambunctious vitality that grabbed me like warm fingers around the groin. Her dimples twitched at the edges of her mouth as her gaze—I assumed—remained on my crotch.

  "Coming in?” she finally said. She got out of the lounge chair and knelt by the pool, as if testing the water with her hand. It was obvious from her dripping swimsuit that she'd already been in, so she knew damn well how warm and how wet and how blue the water was. But her pose had the convenient effect of displaying her sleek, ivory-bathing-suit ass for me. Coincidence? I thought not.

  The proximity of the flyswatter, on the other hand, probably was a coincidence. I saw it there by the edge of the pool, so new that the white of the Spoonbill's price sticker still gleamed upon the rich purple plastic. This implement, as yet untouched by flies, gave me an idea. No, not an idea—an impulse.

  No sooner had I snatched up the flyswatter than I'd crouched behind Patty, clasping her cute tummy. She giggled, and I gently swatted her bottom with my new tool.

  Her head turned enough for her to see what I was holding, and she giggled harder. She wiggled her ass, inviting another fun swat. The plastic, through the sturdy fabric of her bikini, was perfect for giving her pats that had enough impact to stimulate but not enough to sting. Through the ambient aroma of chlorine, I could smell her getting intimately wet, and I wanted to fuck her then and there.

  And that's exactly what I did. After giving her a final thwack and setting down the swatter, I took advantage of one of the generous leg-holes in my trunks to get my rigid cock out into the humid July air. Patty's bikini, though more modest than a thong, was not much trouble to pull aside where it mattered. She reached back to help me penetrate her fragrant cunt lips without delay—the lascivious little love-smacks on her ass had been enough to open her and lubricate her expectantly, and her welcoming moans showed that she appreciated as much as I did how the position we were in lent itself to some instant doggie-style. Again, I clutched her delicious belly, and now I used my other hand to reach into her bikini top and delight her nipples. She squirmed against me, laughing in her heat, and her bottom teased my abdomen.

  "This is what I wanted to do to you in that stockroom yesterday,” I growled, pumping into her ripeness.

  "You don't say,” she panted. “Well, just see that keep you on doing
it, kid, thankyouverymuch."

  Her personality was as sassy as her cunt was juicy, and I felt like I was wallowing in the pure essence of summer as I frolicked inside her. She danced and squelched around me on the edge of ecstasy, and I moved my hand from her belly down inside the front of her moist bikini bottoms, finding her clit and nursing it. I felt my cock begin to beat and stammer in an arrhythmic capitulation to sensory overload, an organ unable to weather one more second of pleasure without bursting into release. Patty gasped and squealed, and the shiny tiles along the pool reverberated her orgasm back at her.

  * * * *

  On Monday morning, Patty and I greeted each other by the time clock with a couple of we-fucked-by-the-swimming-pool grins. I'd already been in men's for an hour; but I had glanced at the master schedule to find out when she was due.

  No one else was in this employee entrance foyer. As she clocked in, I squished up behind her and nibbled her ear.

  "Lunchtime so soon?” she said. Her voice was calm, but her bottom was wriggling.

  "I just figured that after that express-lane ride to paradise yesterday, you and I owed each other some foreplay."

  She laughed. “After-the-fact foreplay? Doesn't that violate a law of physics?"

  "No,” I asserted. “As long as the foreplay is eventually followed by some more ... uh, some more of what foreplay is usually followed by."

  "That's logical,” she agreed. “You know, that apartment of mine has a bed as well as a swimming pool."

  "How serendipitous,” I said. “Tonight?"

  "Mm,” said Patty. “Meanwhile, I still reserve the right to grab your hot ass if you come near my shoe department."

  "As a matter of fact,” I said, “I'm heading there now."

  Francine's kid liked working at Spoonbill's that summer.

  * * * *

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  The Pleasure Healing

  © Andrea Jackson

  "Claire? When did you get home?"

  Claire stood stock still in the doorway of the hospital room, staring at her friend on the narrow bed. Kenda's dark face gleamed with its usual health, her hair pulled up into an arrangement of twists on the top of her head. She wore a hospital gown and clung to the hand of the man perched beside her on the edge of the bed.