BF4Ever

by George Matheos

  “This is my blood,” she would murmur with every sip of red Bordeaux, “drink of it to sooth your sorrows away into a happier life,” and another tall glass of red would slowly take a dive to sooth Sharon’s sorrows, her red lips wet with the wisdom of all ages.

  She is so beautiful, all her friends thought; her face is like a Bernini statue, its beauty way beyond the words it utters.

  And everything that she so prettily spoke, the best friends were only too glad to gulp down in jolly red unison and recognition of its divine origin, because it did come from Sharon’s perfectly sculptured lips whose scented perfumes kept the best friends enviously breathless.

  Actually, nobody cared about what Sharon had to say; but it was an irresistible treat even for lifetime friends, to want to stare into her biteable flawless baby pink face.

  Nor was it only the face and lips that held sway among the friends, or any crowd in any presence, but also the magic light that darted from her bluest eyes when she would celebrate the Lord’s words, and at the same time, touch each of their lonely hands on the holy altar of various restaurants and bistro bars throughout LA. Yes, the joy of communion, the joy of sisterhood and friendship, made the girls want to plunge recklessly into Sharon’s gorgeous halo and drink of her soul. Like a prophet’s out of the wilderness spellbinding sermons, the girls would tirelessly listen to the words coming out of her bloody rich mouth, and pleasingly get lost in her miraculous face.

  Everyone, that is, except Myrna, who at some unrealized past moment, had fallen in love with Sharon. Physically in love; she dreamily fantasized lying next to Sharon, the two of them naked. Two beautiful, glamorous, best friends fucking each other; just the two of them. It was weird. When she didn’t have to listen to her, when she only looked at her in silence, when she would mute her out, Myrna couldn’t help but physically desire Sharon. In Myrna’s imagination, it wasn’t the spiritual Jesus love that she wanted from Sharon but unbounded sexual intercourse fucking, and not the silly fairy fantasies she was sharing with her friends. This physical sopping appetite became especially powerful after Myrna’s husband had left her. Quietly she would tune out Sharon’s words and stare into her face feeling the excitement of her astounding illusions. When near Sharon, she would breathe out slowly, nervously hiding her secret desire, so that others might not pick up on her mind’s telepathy. There were breezy guilt feelings associated with the fantasies, but the illusions were too, too dreamy, and difficult to deny. And sometimes, she would fantasize the threesome: Sharon with her husband Hank, and herself.

  The girls were killing time, enjoying the view from an outdoor chic café on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. It was early afternoon, a little after one pm. The lunch crowd had given way to the window shopping and café strolling crowds, mostly easy going, rich-local, long-shiny-haired blondes, and hip-skinny tourists from Japan enjoying the out of nowhere spontaneous Indian piping music by real natives from the mountains of Peru, and other jazzy cultural ragged groups up and down the promenade.

  “You sure are spiritual at times,” Robin lovingly smiled at Sharon.

  “She should be; she’s glowing full of Bordeaux,” said Kitty.

  “Drink for this is my blood,” Sharon reverently raised her red to her lips.

  “Sharon, Honey, this isn’t the Last Supper,” Kitty tried to keep her friend in tune with the New World music from Peru.

  Don’t listen to her; just look into her lovely face, Myrna smiled.

  “You know, guys, time harms and eventually kills all things,” said Myrna.

  “Myrna, I think you’ve been listening to pea-brain Sharon for too long,” said Robin. “Stick to hugs; she needs hugs more than existential bullshit.”

  “They work so hard,” an elderly lady was commenting on the street’s musicians, to an equally wealthy old friend, as they elegantly strolled by the friends’ table. They were showing off their ten carat emerald rings from Columbia, solidly mounted on globs of twenty one carat gold. Probably widows who had inherited tons of money, the Promenade would have guessed.

  “All I know, Robin, is that if time heals all things it also spoils all things including friendship,” said Myrna, insisting past the courteous widows of Santa Monica.

  “I have a feeling this is going to be a long afternoon,” laughed Kitty.

  Kitty was a genius who could have easily done commentary, on all topics, better than any CNN, and other chit-chat media reporters. She could be wicked.

  All four friends had spectacular legs, and they knew it. They were displaying them in the best possible crossed-legs exposure for all passers-by to sideways glance and enjoy. The sun was reflecting bright off of their sexy shinny shins and their revealing knees below their short skirts, catching all eyes, and the girls were feeling good. All beautiful women love to display their beauty; it’s called vanity and the friends were proudly very vain. They were rich and vain.

  “Rare, if any, are the lifetime friendships, especially those of long time high school friends, like us,” said Myrna, vainly trying to add substance to their afternoon.

  “I don’t agree,” said Sharon who lately seemed ill at ease around Myrna. “Friendship like ours has been nurtured by all of us, from our grammar school days. It’s real and has love at its very core. It’s the love within our friendship that binds us together. Without love, friendships are of temporary ties; they are mostly binds of convenience, really; invariably they exhaust themselves as quickly as they are formed.”

  It all sounded very wealthy but it didn’t matter because airhead Sharon had said it.

  “‘Love is forever.’ Anything without love is nothing,” said Sharon.

  “How did you get to be like this, Sharon,” said Robin ironically appreciating Sharon’s observation on love, an uncomfortable topic for all the friends, who naturally assumed its validity without the need of particular attention or argument.

  “Well, there are friendships and friendships,” said Myrna, looking at Sharon and dismissing Robin, and she crossed her legs on the opposite direction from Sharon’s. “There are those friendships that last, and those that mentally, or most often, physically distance themselves. You know, people move away from each other, while others seem to fondly keep the heart humming, but on closer examination, friendships are rarely more than comforting affectations, a kind of crutches.”

  Everybody was surprised at Myrna’s unexpected harsh elucidations on the character of friendship. It was a first time any of them had thrown enlightenment on the nature of friendship, particularly their own, and Myrna’s words smacked of suspicion. Was she referring to their friendship? If so, Myrna was way off the mark with her comments, and in unison they all criss-crossed their legs in the opposite direction from hers. It was odd they thought that Myrna never mentioned love in her comment on friendship.

  “This is especially true of adolescent friendships, something close to our bosoms, a condition most always forgotten, but familiar to most friends,” she continued. “Different needs, at different times, ravage the simplistic ties of youthful friendship. Other people, like lovers at first sight, interfere to steal the glow of friendship from the best of friends. But worst of all, is the sudden inexplicable love, coup de foudre, as they say, the lightning bolt that strikes out of nowhere from strangers, the hormonal mutilators of friendship, who rip your heart out, make you lose your mind, and heartlessly drive you to impulsive choices that you invariably regret, leaving the adolescent friendship sprawling on the sidewalk of memory.”

  There it was, a lowly flow of pitiable love sprawled out on the extensive sidewalk of the Promenade. Too incontestable for an afternoon’s martini run on Santa Monica’s Promenade. For sure, Myrna was beginning to be a drag.

  “Myrna, you’re beginning to sound like Sharon,” said Kitty who always found a polite way to hit the nail on the head and knew what to say. “To me friendship is a great big hug that gives pleas
ure as long as it’s good to hug. You lose the hug and all is gone.”

  “Thank you, Kitty,” said Robin.

  “You’re right, Kitty,” said Sharon who for some time now had begun to feel removed and unsympathetic to her friends, almost indifferent to what they might have to say, which she knew to be more of the same. “But, as Myrna just reminded us, the warmth of friendship more often than not depletes over time. It cools off the summer heat of youth, slowly giving way to fall and winter blues, until the good-time memories fade and slowly disappear. Sadly, friendship all too often dies of exhaustion, and incomprehensibly gives way to sneaky, not easy to admit loneliness. Without friendship there is no love; yet without love, friendship is a tepid trip. Life, existence, is that interaction between friendship and love in men and women, and in any combination of these. Even in loneliness, there are the many memories of life’s loves, and the many varied friendships. But time has no pity, and old loves, and old friendships, regardless of their old fire, do give way to hoary age. Such is the deceit of friendship that even the best of friends do not realize it’s waning, until it’s over. But for those lucky few that find it, true love lasts forever.”

  Beautiful words coming out of beautifully articulating lips. To Myrna Sharon’s lips were more humming than articulating; such sexy lips.

  “Sharon, you’re crazy, girl. Where did you get all that shit from,” said Robin. “If you’re pretending, it’s ok; but if you’re for real, we’re going to take you to the looney bin.”

  “Well, what’s your definition of friendship Robin,” Kitty asked?

  “She doesn’t know what friendship is, Kitty,” said Myrna.

  “I don’t know and I don’t give a shit,” said an angry Robin who felt that her afternoon had been pissed on by Myrna and Sharon.

  “I think, Myrna, that you’re probably the one who doesn’t know what friendship is,” said Sharon. “What the hell, who cares! That’s about all she rode, isn’t it, Myrna my beloved, my beloved, Myrna?”

  It was a slap in the face and only Myrna suspected where all the resentment was coming from. Robin and Kitty looked at each other and wondered about the recent antipathy persisting between Myrna and Sharon. Whatever it was, it stank of bad blood between friends. To be best friends forever is no easy task; it’s a full time job and it cannot be subordinated to any one’s ill feelings. Myrna had become a bit too abrasive for the long time best friends.

  “Listen Myrna and Sharon: cut out your little scratching. It’s ok to be crazy, just don’t get goofy!”

  *

  Communication between the friends had thus broken down into two camps: Myrna on the one side and Sharon, Robin, and Kitty on the other. The split was not a seismic fault caused by a moral weakness on her part, Myrna had judged, now whistling in her mind of her afternoon rendezvous with hung Hank. It was Sharon who was to be blamed for Hollywood Hank’s infidelities. For sure it was Sharon’s fault that Hank had stopped fucking her. Of this, Myrna was sure. A man fucks around only when his wife ain’t putting out, as everyone knows. In spite of her dalliance with Hank, whom she now recognized as the jerk he had always been, and who would never love her, in her heart there would always be a warm spot for Sharon.

  She had often wondered if the others knew of her involvement with Hank. She didn’t care. It was just a stupid little coquettish affair, a hangover from high school days.

  Stupid Sharon! Still hung up on the high school quarterback, she thought. Why the hell doesn’t she divorce him, like Kitty did to her husband? Or like I’m about to do to Phil, my homo monk husband? We’re all hung up on the meaningless high school quarterback, but we don’t want to admit it. The guy is a hopeless prick, and we’re all hung up on him.

  She wondered if it was ever true, that for most women, no matter how much they might deny it, a prick, and not a brain, is still the biggest sex organ on a man. They certainly flaunted that way.

  Though she continued to pretend there was room in her heart for Sharon, Myrna slowly withdrew into a world less loving towards her best friends. Tormented by her loneliness and need to be with Hank, she sometimes regretted her weakness at betraying her friends. She realized that the desire to be with Hank had been there for a long time, undoubtedly from high school, for shame on stupid her. But what was she supposed to think of her three friends who had never grown up, and as if underprivileged, were incapable of comprehending the world beyond their roka salads, the dear hearts. Worse than hers, their immaturity was also still loitering in their high school days of feel good hugs, their desires now to be fucking like big girls quenched by vodka and wine consumption.

  They are still virgins, Myrna thought about her friends who, she was sure, were stuck on the addictive wine. Wine and vodka simply hid their repressed desire to have high school sex preferably with the quarterback. What woman has ever wished and thought of fucking the valedictorian in preference to the quarterback? For the friends, just like it happens in make-believe movies, sex with the quarterback sometimes became a reality, otherwise the wine would have tasted horrible. It was all Sharon’s fault who didn’t want to share, that they all had to keep it a secret. No doubt about it, Sharon was non-fucking goofy; no wonder Hank had stopped fucking her.

  Ill feelings that she now had for Sharon aside, Myrna’s love for her persisted. It’s not easy to just walk away from a true friend even though you’re fucking her husband. Recalling Sharon’s gorgeous eyes as she spoke her gospel, while Robin and Kitty giggly-gossiped aimlessly, Myrna at times regretted that she had succumbed to an adulterous affair with Hank. She had long known that Hank was the wrong man for Sharon. Confronted with the dilemma of whom she loved most, Sharon or Hank, Myrna could not make up her mind, a condition which definitely was a leftover from their high school days, when, even then, she thought she loved them both. And when she had that thought of shared love, she wanted to hug Sharon and kiss her on the mouth. Still, every time Sharon opened her mouth to talk religious crap, Myrna became more and more convinced that Sharon was definitely goofy and by default she felt Hank was hers. Sharon’s single-minded attention to the topic of love, always cloaked in religious shroud, was as absurd as baby-babble, and it simply didn’t jibe with her substantial tits. It was as if baby-faced Sharon secretly wished to revert back to being a virgin; that she was looking for a new start. Myrna recalled how Phil had told her that in mythology there were many stories of deflowered princesses and goddesses bathing in holy rivers and mountain springs and being renewed to their virginal intactness, many times throughout their debauched lives. Aware of her needs and desires, adulteress Myrna knew that Phil was no prince, and Sharon was definitely not a princess, and there were no magic springs nearby. Her annoying arguments, and not so subtle reminisces of loneliness, would unhappily remind Myrna of her estranged husband now cloistered in some damn monastery somewhere, probably trying, like Sharon, to find his own holy John the Baptist to cleanse him and regain his purity. Ridiculous, thought Myrna.

  “Totally incomprehensible,” she would say to herself and laugh at the sad-sack character of her ex-husband and of her still best friend.

  Maybe Sharon was still a virgin, metaphorically speaking, and was searching for a new man, perhaps one of those Greek semi-gods who bleeds onto the lap of lovely maids and transforms them into wild breathless anemones, pristine luscious flowers, swaying in the spring breezes. Or maybe she unconsciously desires a wild beast that rips you apart and sends you to your Hades; or maybe a visit from a mad bull to lip-nibble on your anemones, laughed Myrna fondly of her friend.

  “Sharon, you definitely need a bull,” Myrna had said to Sharon, one time after she had been with Hank.

  “She has Hank,” Kitty had set the record straight, she herself having known Hank’s bullying on several occasions in high school.

  It was no use; the get-togethers had lost their flavour for Myrna. Nasty images of silly Sharon trying to recover her virginity would no
w come to her every time she looked at her beautiful friend who might have been her daughter. Copulating images of Sharon with all sorts of super-human and mythical creatures, in ancient woods and vales, followed by scenes of Sharon scrubbing her pubic hair in magic streams would float before Myrna’s green eyes, and she would narcissistically smile into the mischievous projections of her mind, distancing herself from her long-time friends, who were beginning to think unkindly of her.

  No matter the arguments on love and friendship, Sharon still had those exquisite pointed breasts and Kitty and Robin, like Myrna herself, were definitely simply asides to Sharon’s stared at beauty. She was the magic that kept the group together, but with Phil’s unexpected and most awkward departure, not even Sharon could keep the magic of the foursome going. The cultivated mood of adolescent chatter was insufficient for Myrna. She had realized that with Phil gone there could never again be the best-friends-forever sisterhood of the four, regardless of Sharon’s upstanding tits. Fucking Phil had crushed her and she would no longer be an aside to anyone. She knew that the long friendship journey was coming to an end, and Sharon’s feeble attempts at holy renewals, and finding grace in Jesus, of her spastic attempts at some sort of delayed recovery of puberty, had no spiritual remittance. The best friends’ periodic get-togethers, like her pride in her marriage, had become exaggerated social bubbles that had irreparably burst.

  *

  But for Sharon, and Kitty, and Robin, the camaraderie of breaking bread together, of sharing a laugh and of maintaining the friendship, still held worth. It was still a delightful symposium to celebrate the natural human need to be in physical proximity with one another. The party was easy because the girls were at ease with each other. They got along very nicely because cheap familiarity had never set in. It was a friendship that had unfolded most casually at a young age, and it had never evolved into vulgar intimacy, though the girls had outgrown their pristine years. Even without Myrna, the lunches continued to warmly unite their otherwise disjointed urban lives. In a way Myrna continued to be with them for they always wondered about her metamorphosis, expected her to return to the fold, and never accepted her change as a rejection of them. Their door was always open to Myrna, for nothing as common as words could permanently separate good friends.