Heartbalm

by Malachi Stone

  “Something like that.”

  “Blind man can see why. Drey, she a helluva woman. But you already know that. You and half a East St. Louis.”

  “Don’t forget Cahokia and Centreville,” Drey added. “And while you’re at it, don’t let the door beads hit you in your high tapered ass on the way out.”

  “Aw girl, don’ be that way. Two men and one woman make for some fascinatin’ combinations and permutations. And the tiny red light means you steady got the camera rollin.’”

  “Oh shit, how do I shut this thing off again, Ricky?”

  “Leave it run,” Tyranno said, unbuttoning his lavender silk shirt. “Ain’t none of us camera shy.”

  Tyranno was right: there certainly were some fascinating permutations and combinations, and the three of us tried most of them on for size as the drinks flowed and the tape rolled. By the time Drey let me video her taking both our cocks in her mouth at the same time—no easy feat—three of the little blue pills had gone down my gullet. I was living a porno movie and loving every minute of it until one particular lull in the action, when Tyranno, legs apart while Drey bestowed polishing motions to the tip of his penis, said, “Ready for some man to man, lawyer man?”

  “Hoo wee! I’ll drink to that!” Drey hollered. I realized she’d been getting steadily ripped all afternoon. “I’ll run the camera,” she volunteered. “I’m good at it by now.”

  “I dunno,” I faltered. “I’m kinda sore down there. Not to mention very drunk. I don’t know if I can perform, you know?”

  Tyranno’s expression changed to contempt. His eyelids lowered and the hint of a sneer crossed his lips. “You wasn’t sore a minute ago when she was steady chicken-headin’ your damn dick for you.”

  “That was then, this is now.”

  “I hear you. Guess that’s my answer, then.”

  “I tell you what, Ricky,” Drey said, “this ain’t no time to be turnin’ racist. Like I said, what the hell’s the difference what color a man’s skin is? Black, white, blue—even polka dot. We’re all of us alike on the inside.”

  “You talkin’ to that wall over there. Dude draw the line at touchin’ a black man, thass what it is.”

  “It’s not a race thing,” I protested. “I’m just not bi.”

  “We all bi,” Tyranno said. “Some’s born bi, some’s made bi, but we all go bi by and by.”

  “Did you just make that up, Tyranno?”

  “This very instant, girl. Lotta different shit come outta me extemporaneous.”

  “I want to have that saying silk-screened on a t-shirt,” Drey said. “Think it’d all fit?”

  “On you? All that and the pledge of allegiance.”

  “So you don’t mind if I use it?”

  “Help yourself, Drey. Plenty more where that came from.” He turned to me and asked, “So what’s it gonna be, attorney lawyer man? You and me gonna finish the movie or we gonna take it up outside?”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  He broke into an easy smile. “No, man. I’m just fuckin’ with ya. Shit, what kind a lawyer are you? Can’t you tell when somebody fuckin’ with ya?”

  “Yeah, Ricky, can’t you tell when somebody’s fuckin’ with ya?” Drey chimed in. I drained my last drink, exhaled and looked at the two of them. “Guess not,” I said.

  Drey shut Pepper on the back screened-in porch while I switched to a fresh tape. She brought us each another drink and I dived right into mine. Tyranno and I stood side-by-side facing her living-room couch, which she had covered in protective plastic. She did the eeny meenie miney moe thing, kneeled in front of me and then lay back on the seat of the couch. Tyranno trained the camera on her. The red light came on.

  “We rollin’. First I want to pull back for an establishment shot,” Tyranno explained. “You know what that is? Show you both full length, faces and all.”

  Peering directly at the camera, Drey said, “Ready whenever you are, C. D.”

  “Good. Now remember to keep that loud voice a yours down low, Drey, ‘cause the microphone’s gonna wind up about a foot away from your mouth. And don’t forget to signal when you’re fittin to cum, Mister Ricky, so’s I can move in close in time to feature Drey here catchin’ the money shot in that big loud open pie hole a hers.”

  “How will I know when?” Drey asked, ignoring the insult.

  “You’ll know. Ready, Mistuh Lawyer Ricky Galeer?”

  “Bring it on.”

  Tyranno focused on my cock and Drey letting her lips and tongue play leisurely over the tip. Even though by now my skin there was, given the afternoon’s activities, tender as that of a safecracker’s sandpapered fingertips, I felt myself getting hard.

  Drey took her time; remember, both of us had already climaxed multiple times that afternoon. Tyranno himself quickly grew fully erect watching the action. “C’mon Baby, suck it,” he urged under his breath.

  “C’mon, Baby, suck it,” I echoed.

  I heard Tyranno say, “Listen to your lawyer’s advice, Drey; maybe you’ll learn suffin’.”

  “Shut up,” Drey said playfully, coming up for air. “I ain’t heard nobody bitch yet.”

  “That’s ‘cause everybody’s mouth allays been too full to complain.”

  Drey looked up into my eyes and murmured, “Like what I’m doing?” Then plunged in again. In charge of everything, a truly liberated sexual sophisticate pleasuring her man, about to make him lose total control, while Tyranno captured it all on tape.

  “Oh, Baby,” I moaned, “don’t stop; I’m gonna cum.” Tyranno moved in close, mere inches from Drey’s face, repeating, “Show me it’s real, Lawyer Ricky, show me it’s real.” To Drey he said, “Smile pretty for the camera, now. Here it comes. Mistah Ricky Galeer’s fittin’ to get him a nut in your mouth. Pose for it now.”

  With the first overwhelming urgency I abruptly withdrew; Drey surprised me by bracing for it with eyes tightly closed and mouth clamped shut, expanding her cheeks with air, face red. What happened next was over all too soon, although for her it probably seemed to go on forever. Then Tyranno got into the act, soon depositing his load on her face as well, videorecording the action all the while.

  “Hoo wee!” Drey marveled when it was all over. “That sure is a load a cum!”

  “That’s a muthafuckin’ disgrace,” Tyranno said, slapping her lightly back and forth in the face with his cock as if to clear the bore and compound the insult. “Looka that shit.”

  “Is this here a world-class facial or what? I feel like a baked potato,” Drey crowed, modeling it for the camera. She looked like after a pie fight in a Hal Roach movie.

  “You ain’t lyin,” Tyranno said.

  “What I’m a’ hankerin’ after right about now,” Drey confided, eyes still closed, “is a wet towel, Mister Ricky Galeer. Whyn’t you be the perfect gentleman and go fetch me one?”

  I ran warm water over a towel in the bathroom, returned and sponged her face until she could open her eyes. The entire time, there was Tyranno training the camera at me for a medium close-up.

  “I got me another idea; wanna hear it?” Drey chirped.

  “What’s that?”

  “Like I said, all of a sudden I got me a wild hair,” she said nodding eagerly, eyes almost too wide with excitement. “I think you’re gonna like this one, Ricky. Whyn’t I go ahead and let you fuck me in the ass barecocked? Tyranno here’ll be the cameraman. How’s that sound, Baby? Huh?”

  “Got any Vaseline?” I said.

  “Does a duck have flat feet? This gal comes prepared. Got me some k-y too. And plenty a extra virgin olive oil for them that likes a little ham on their salad. Take your pick.”

  “K-y sounds fine.” We retreated to her bedroom. Tyranno positioned the camera behind me. Drey on all fours centered herself on the mattress and then scrunched down, cradled her head in her crossed arms and poked her ass up in the air. Her ass looked more beautiful and inviting than ever with her cheeks spread and the hairless dumpling of her pussy sh
owing underneath.

  “Now you get behind her, lawyer man. That’s right. Perfect. Drey, reach back and play with him. That’s it; rub the k-y in real good ‘til Mistah Ricky Galeer gets hard again. Jes’ one more time, Mistah Ricky. One more time for the camera, you can do it.” I heard Tyranno’s voice going on and on as he hovered behind us, giving stage directions from every angle, keeping up the play-by-play. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Now you got the rhythm goin’. Hit that thing. That’s fire. Give it to her good. Fuck her asshole.” Finally I managed to tune him out and focus on what I was doing with Drey.

  She yelped and groaned in rhythm to my thrusts. We carried on for what seemed like several minutes, until I said, “Tyranno, you better zoom in, man. I’m getting close.”

  No response. No sound other than the box springs squeaking, Pepper yapping and Drey’s suddenly intensified moanings.

  “Tyranno?”

  No answer. I twisted to look behind me.

  There was no one else in the bedroom. No Tyranno, no camcorder and no tapes.

  CHAPTER FOUR - COLD CALLING

  I must have slept; it was dark outside Drey’s bedroom window when I awoke in her bed, shivering in a dry-mouthed panic, not knowing where I was. I whimpered like a child; Drey, lying beside me, cuddled me from behind.

  “That’s awright Baby,” she consoled. “Waren’t nothin’ more’n a bad ol’ dream.”

  “He took everything,” I moaned. “The tapes. The camera. Everything.”

  “That’s Tyranno for you. He’s got him some issues, that one. Ease right on in to somebody else’s house without asking and help himself to whatever ain’t nailed down. One a these days I oughta pack up and move and not tell anybody.”

  “But we have to get them back. Those tapes… what they show us doing—”

  “You let me handle Tyranno, Hon. Leave everything to Drey, you hear?”

  “I appreciate all you’ve done.”

  “Nice to be appreciated. I tell you what, most a the men I been with? Appreciation’s the farthest thing from their minds. You’re a nice guy Ricky. Anybody ever told you that?”

  “And you’re a nice woman, Drey.”

  “I don’t know as I’d go that far,” she said. “Nice women don’t make love to married men from their sex and love addiction twelve-step groups. Think this Saturday meeting me and you’ll both have to stand up in front a everybody and tell ‘em what we done?”

  “I won’t if you don’t,” I said. “You want my opinion I think we should keep it just between ourselves. We’ll start our own exclusive little twelve-step group instead. To join, you have to have made love to Ricky Galeer or Drey—hey, you wanna hear something embarrassing, Drey? I never did know your last name. Kendra M is all I ever heard.”

  “It’s Martin. And I got the sneakin’ suspicion a support group for all the people you and me’ve ever fucked would plum bust the doors outta that damn church basement. We’d need a bigger meetin’ place—the Edward Jones Dome, maybe, or the Saint Louie Convention Center.”

  We both laughed. She said, “I got my maiden name restated after my divorce. Don’t ask me why; I always hated my last name, ever since the kids in grade school used to follow me around and tease me. They’d say, “Martin, Martin, allays fartin’.” See, I was fat in grade school. That’s one reason I got the big tits now.”

  “Kids can be cruel.”

  “So can grownups sometimes.”

  “Boy howdy.” She hugged her breasts and said, “I guess the main reason I wanted my maiden name back was so’s my nickname still made sense: folks most generally took to callin’ me ‘K-Mart.’ Short for Kendra Martin, see? Kendra Martin, love addict.”

  Drey held me closer. I rolled over to face her and return her embrace. “Love addict,” I said. “I always notice the way you deliberately use that expression whenever you share with the group. You and I are quite a bit alike, aren’t we, Drey?”

  “How you figger?” she asked, drawing closer, snuggling against the hollow of my shoulder. I luxuriated in her embrace, in the warm womanly scent of her. I realized that with all we’d done that afternoon I had never kissed her.

  “We’re kind of like modern-day vampires in a way, always on the prowl for new blood and new victims, turning people out, trying to make them desire us, make them hungry like ourselves, desperate for love. Running on empty like the song says. We’re ravenous for someone who will fill us up, fill that emptiness inside at long last. Meantime we drain everyone around us dry with our need.”

  “Baby, you wrote our song with what you just said,” Drey agreed.

  “Or that other song, hungry like the wolf. You know why people like us crave oral sex so much? Because it’s a form of eating. We even call it that: eating a woman out; eat me; eat you; eat him; eat her. Eat me while I eat you. We’re forever trying to devour each other to fill that gnawing empty need. That’s what people who aren’t sex addicts themselves can’t understand. Oh, shit!”

  “What is it, Baby? What’s wrong?”

  “Diane. I shut off the Blackberry. She must be frantic.”

  “Go ahead and call her, then.” Drey sat up in bed, drew a deep breath and stared directly into my eyes. Hers were penetrating in the dim light of the clock radio. “Only I wanna say one thing first.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The way I see it, whatever goes on between you and her’s none a my damn business, and I ain’t fixin’ on meddlin’ in it,” she said. “But there’s somethin’ I want you to know before you go makin’ that call.”

  “What’s that, Drey?”

  She reached under the sheets for my penis and tenderly caressed it as she spoke. She had my full and undivided attention. “I don’t know how to say this other’n to come right out with it, so here goes: I wanna be your fuck buddy, all right? We’ll keep it strictly between you and me, no strings attached like I said. No one else has to know our business. The way this’ll work, you’s to feel like you need a little somethin’ from me now and then, from here on out alls you gotta do is call. And vice versa. How’s that sound to you, Ricky?” Her eyes searched my face.

  Worried as I was about Diane, I have to admit it sounded pretty damn good.

  It was nearly six PM when I started the car and drove off. It was a convenient excuse for getting away from Drey to tell her I had to call from the car, that otherwise Pepper’s barking was bound to alert Diane to my deception. The cold engine didn’t begin putting out any heat until I had gone five miles north on I-255. That’s when I turned the Blackberry back on, called the house and braced myself for my little theater performance.

  Nick picked up on the second ring. “Hullo?”

  “Is Mom there?” The hangover had really started to kick in; the motion of the car nauseated me. I started munching breath mints for my inevitable confrontation with Diane.

  “Rickywherehaveyoubeen? I’ve been calling for hours, until I realized you must have shut the phone off for some reason known only to yourself.”

  “I’m sorry, Diane; I looked at it just now and realized for the first time I’d forgotten to turn the damn thing back on. See, I had to leave it in the car when I went to the courthouse because they don’t allow camera phones. I shut it off then and must have forgotten to turn it back on again. That’s the trouble with those damn things.”

  “Courthouse? What were you doing at the courthouse? I thought you didn’t have any court today.”

  So I told her about Kevin, embellishing the story and time-expanding it as much as possible. “And so I had to reschedule the auto client for four-thirty. He was royally pissed off about that, but fortunately I was able to schmooze him.”

  “Didn’t you have to turn your Blackberry back on to call the auto client?” My Diane was no slouch at cross-examination. Her skills attained particular focus and intensity when dealing with my husbandly wanderings, and I’d given her a lot of practice over the years.

  “No, I called him from the office. See, I’d left
the camcorder there.”

  Oops, shit. Wrong thing to mention. Diane instantly zeroed in on two fronts, in a deft pincer maneuver. “Don’t forget to bring Anna’s camcorder home; she’d die if you lost it. The videos of her homecoming dance are on that tape inside of it. You didn’t tape over them, did you?” And, “Office? You were at the office and didn’t return the recorded messages I left when I couldn’t get you on the Blackberry? What’s going on, Ricky?”

  “Well, as far as the camcorder, no problem. I used a new tape and replaced the old one.” Another lie. Goodbye, homecoming dance videos. “And I only opened the office for a minute to call the client. I used the phone out front because that’s where I had the client’s number written down. I didn’t think to check the answering machine in my office because I was in such a hurry by that time. Then after we’d video’d the accident scene we came back to the office where the client proceeded to wear me out with questions for at least an hour, not giving me a chance to look at the caller ID until he left. Satisfied?”

  “What kind of thing is that to say to your wife? ‘Satisfied?’ I think I have every right to know where my husband has been hiding himself incommunicado all afternoon and into the evening.”

  “Evening? It’s ten after six.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Coming home from the office; I have to get gas first.”

  “Don’t forget to bring the camcorder.”

  “I left it back at the office, Diane. Can’t it wait?”

  For no reason at all Diane was suspicious. “How far are you away from there?”

  “Five minutes maybe. Ten minutes.”

  “Do me a favor, Rick: turn around, go back and get it, will you? I don’t need any more trouble with Anna tonight.”

  “What do you mean, ‘more trouble?’”

  “I’ll explain when you get home. Hurry, okay?”

  So I did what any red-blooded American male would have done once he painted himself into this bad of a corner: I faked a break-in.

  First I shut out all the lights, went outside and locked the front door. Next I skulked down a gangway, kicking trash aside, and came out on the alley. Finding a loose brick, I looked both ways and then smashed the glass of the rear door. I reached in and turned the plunger on the joke knob lock. No deadbolts for my landlord, and no alarm system either. The door swung open.