The next day I saw Connie from the Human Resources department wandering along the corridor with a big dreamy smile on her face and, I swear, candy pink varnish on her toes. I’d never seen her before without the really thick American Tan pantyhose she wore all year round.
Mariella came and sat with me in the cafeteria. “So?” she asked.
“So what?” I replied.
“You didn’t do it!” Her face fell like somebody’d called the lottery numbers and hers had come up the one week she hadn’t bought a ticket. “You missed your date!”
I shrugged. She might be trying to cheer me up but I thought it was pretty cruel of her to pretend Peachy was any kind of a catch, even if I had proved myself to be a complete moron with Rafe. Then she started looking round the room, like she was trying to catch somebody’s eye.
“I wonder who it was then … have you seen anybody looking really happy this morning?”
I remembered Connie and the toenails and told Mariella.
“Oh, what a shame it wasn’t you!” She sounded really put out. Her attitude was making me as mad as spit on a griddle, and I told her so.
“Really, Kath, I’m disappointed in you.” She turned away from me and started to stir her iced tea so fast it slopped all over the edge of the glass. “Have I ever given you bad advice before?”
I thought about it for a second. Apart from the time she said I looked good in that pair of red hipsters that actually made my butt resemble two beef tomatoes wrapped in cellophane, the time that she suggested I consult a tarot reader who gave me nightmares by telling me I was going to have a career in the air when I have a flying phobia, and the time she persuaded me that five tequila slammers were the perfect preparation for Karaoke at the staff Christmas party, I had to admit that she’d never really given me bad advice.
“I’m sorry, Mariella,” I said. “Just put it down to the whole Rafe thing. But you can’t really expect me to dance for joy because Peachy asked me on a date?”
She leaned towards me. “Kath, you might not dance for joy beforehand, but believe me, you’ll be dancing afterwards. Look at Connie.”
She wouldn’t say any more. It really bugged me. And when I saw Connie later in the day she was running her fingers over the top of the photocopier in a suggestive fashion that I’d never imagined of her.
So yeah, when Peachy asked me for a date a few days later, I said yes.
We went out for dinner, to a place with a deck that overlooked the beach. It wasn’t romantic exactly, and nor was Peachy. I did my best to look at him with new eyes as we ate, but he was still Peachy, a really nice guy, but a short guy, a scrawny guy, a guy with clean fingernails and a natural line of conversation, Peachy whom everybody liked to talk to, because he was polite and good tempered, but he was no heart-throb.
He asked me to come back to his apartment for coffee. That was the first big surprise, because he didn’t seem the least bit nervous about the invitation, in fact his pale blue eyes were sparkling with total confidence that I’d say yes. And, remembering Mariella’s cryptic hints, I did say yes.
The second big surprise was Peachy’s home. It was clean and bare and very attractive. He had Indian blankets on the wall, and lots of books and plants, and the whole place felt just as neat and wholesome as Peachy himself. But around his bed were gauzy curtains in warm shades and when he pulled back those curtains, I saw the biggest bed my eyes had ever set on.
Man, did he ever need it.
The third surprise was Peachy’s first kiss. He placed his index finger under my chin and kissed me so damn thoroughly that without his finger there to remind me that I needed to stay standing up, I think I would have melted to the floor right there. I don’t think any man every kissed me with such attention to detail. He was tender and penetrating and his lips were supple and his teeth nibbled on my bottom lip in a way that made me wetter than the Mississippi in a flood and his tongue insinuated its way into my mouth with a kind of certainty that suggested this man knew exactly when, and exactly how and exactly where to do all the things no other man had known.
About twenty minutes later I could have been examining just how clean Peachy’s bedroom ceiling was, if I hadn’t been yelling my head off in the throes of orgasm. About ten minutes after that, I could have been counting Peachy’s C.D. collection as I hung halfway off his big bed, with my head nearly on the floor and my feet locked around his neck as I more or less sat on his lap. He lifted my hips with his hands and thrust himself into me so perfectly that I orgasmed again. Then we had a short break where I remembered how to breathe more slowly and Peachy stroked my hair, and then, maybe an hour and a half after I first set foot in Peachy’s apartment, I had my third orgasm with my face pressed hard into his pillowcases and my ass in the air, while Peachy knelt behind me and finally, amazingly, we came together.
But that’s not why Peachy Talbot has a fan club. It’s what happens afterwards that makes Peachy into the phenomenon he is. And for me, it went like this.
“I’m so happy you’re here,” he said, fitting himself into a spoon shape behind me and tracking patterns on my shoulder blades with his warm, soft fingers. “I’ve always thought you have the loveliest skin: it’s like amber, as if it’s lit from within. You know, on days when it’s raining and you come into the office, when I see the raindrops on your face, it doesn’t look like rain, it looks like honey, golden sweetness, on your skin.”
Okay, it sounds a bit schmaltzy. But he went on, to talk about my burgundy Nubuck shoes and how they made my insteps look kissable, and my diamond and garnet earrings that I inherited from my grandmother and only wore on special occasions like office parties. I mean, the man had noticed! I’d never met a man before who even knew what a garnet was, let alone who could have noticed a pair of earrings worn probably twice in his view. And he talked about the scar on my ankle I got when I fell over in fifth grade, and the time I had my hair cut really short and he could see how it made mahogany coloured ringlets in the nape of my neck and so on. It was like all the times I’d ever wanted a man to notice something hadn’t been wasted: Peachy had just been storing up all those moments to give back to me.
So I thought I ought to do something for him. Which meant making sure he was up to it, and so it was something of a surprise when I reached behind me to find he was more than ready, and, in fact, when I took a good look at my instrument of passion, I discovered that while the rest of Peachy might be pale and on the small side, his cock was a large and rosy shaft, throbbing slightly and absolutely ready for me. And so I climbed on top of Peachy and my last coherent thought was that it was a long time since I’d felt comfortable enough with a man to stop thinking about my imperfections and inadequacies and just get on with getting it on.
But it didn’t quite work out how I’d planned. I had another chance to inspect the ceiling, but I was too busy coming to really notice it. Then somehow we’d rolled over and our legs were tangled together as Peachy grinned at me with his perfect white teeth and slammed into me with his perfect tackle until I came again. And finally there was a long slow, comfortable half hour or so where I seemed to drift in and out of sleep and every time I came round I could feel Peachy sliding into me and out of me as gently as the tide, until I came, I swear to whatever gods there are, in slow motion. It was great. It was wonderful. It was incredible beyond compare. And despite my good intentions, I had the strong feeling that Peachy had just done for me what I’d been planning to do for him.
Still, I thought to myself, as I fell asleep for real. There was always next time.
Peachy woke me at one in the morning with green tea and a huge, clean, warm towel in which he wrapped me before leading me to the bathroom, where he had run a bath with rose and geranium bath oils. He washed me. Oh boy, how inadequate it is to say he washed me! His small, warm fingers covered every inch of my body in the warm water until I couldn’t stop myself begging him to bring me off again, which he did, under the water, his eyes fixed on mine and mine on his. Mind
-blowing was how it was, right down to the rose-scented water lapping at the sides of the bath with every thrust of his fingers and the way my slippery wet legs rose higher and higher out of the bath until I thought I’d either gone to heaven or learnt to breathe underwater.
Then he dried me, dressed me, drove me home, walked me to my door, kissed me and asked if he could call me again. Call me? He could have tattooed his number across my chest in fluorescent ink!
I slept like a baby. It was the first night I hadn’t woken up reaching for Rafe, and the next morning I dressed carefully, putting on the burgundy Nubucks and the diamond and garnet earrings. I felt like a million dollars.
Melissa smiled at me. She smiled at me over the top of my cubicle before I’d even sat down. She smiled a great big ‘cat that got the cream and the smoked salmon too’ smile and asked me a question.
“Why do you think he’s called Peachy?” she asked.
I shrugged, but I couldn’t stop my own smile, a great big ‘cat that got the cream, the smoked salmon and the lobster tails’ smile.
She winked at me. “How do you feel this morning? Do you feel, maybe … peachy?”
I started to giggle. So did she. Eventually she laughed so much she fell off her chair and hit her chin on the cubicle wall and I had to run round to her side and hold ice in a napkin to her face so it didn’t swell up.
So that was my first date with Peachy Talbot. And that set the pattern for all the others. There were things to get used to, of course. Like the fact that you never got to see Peachy more than once every three weeks or so, as he had a lot of dates. Like knowing that half the women in the firm were also on Peachy’s list. Like however good he was in bed, and he was good, Peachy wasn’t the kind of man you could tell a smutty joke to. He wasn’t a prude, don’t get me wrong, but he didn’t have a dirty mind. That was part of his charm, in a way – his generous nature and his decency meant that you didn’t ever wonder if he was talking about you behind your back, or making comparisons. Peachy was just … peachy, and any woman who’d spent a night with him would have trusted him with her life. Well, more than her life. Imagine if you had influenza, and hives, and a spot on your nose, your roots were growing out and you hadn’t waxed your legs for two weeks, your robe was ratty, the sink was full of dishes and your only houseplant had died. There’s only one man I’d open the door to if I were in that state – Peachy Talbot.
And so we carried on for about a year. When Rafe reappeared, about four months after he’d dumped me and left a pile of debts for me to pay, he expected to sweep me into bed and sweep himself back into my bank account. But I took one long look at him, and thought of all the things he’d never noticed and never done, and how one little man with a love of women had made me feel like a princess when Rafe had never made me feel like more than a sucker and I kicked him so hard in his underperforming equipment that he was still on the ground, rolled up and wheezing, when I opened the door several minutes later to throw out the old football trophies that he’d left behind when he rabbited.
Peachy was a sex machine that I shared with who knows how many other women, except I knew about Mariella, and Connie, and a couple of others in the firm who were friends. But we never talked about it. It was like he infected us with his own good manners and reticence. If you’d had a ‘peachy’ night, you just smiled at your friends and they knew … damn, did they ever know!
Sometimes, when I looked round the cafeteria, I’d get to wondering. What about Mrs Hanrahan, the Managing Director’s Personal Assistant, who wore dresses with lace collars and had a gold rinse to cover up her grey – could she be one of us? What about Libuela Creula, the cafeteria manager from Cuba who was reputed to be a Santiera practitioner? Did she get to visit Peachy’s big wonderful bed? But it was just idle curiosity until the day that Mariella called a meeting in the Ladies Restroom.
I saw the notice when I went in to brush my hair before starting work. ‘RELOCATION PROPOSAL’ it read: ‘There is a plan to relocate the seismological survey team to the Colorado office. Any woman who feels she may be affected by this proposal should come to a meeting in the Cafeteria after work this evening – which will remain open for this purpose.’
And then it hit me. Peachy was a seismologist.
That night there were eleven of us in the cafeteria. Libuela sat glowering at the floor – so at least one of my questions was answered. Mariella took the chair.
“We are all met here for one reason, but just to be sure we’re all in the same boat, I’m going to ask you to write down two letters on the paper in front of you, fold it up and hand it up to the front. If the letters are the right ones, we’ll proceed, if they’re not, I’ll ask that person to leave before we continue. The letters I’m looking for are the initials of a certain person who is the reason for our concern.”
We all scribbled on our papers. Mariella opened them up and nodded briskly at each one until, “H.T.?” she queried.
We all looked around and our eyes were caught by Connie’s scarlet face. “Hugo Talbot,” she muttered.
Mariella nodded magisterially but I had to giggle: I’d never stopped to wonder what Peachy’s real name was. Libuela transferred her glare from the floor to me and I stopped chuckling – I didn’t want some Santiera curse imposed on me.
“I take it we’re agreed that this can’t be allowed to happen?” Mariella asked.
“If’n that boy goes to Colorado – I go too,” Libuela stated. I had a strong mental picture of her sitting on his bed like an ebony goddess, and then I saw all of us, one after another, on his bed, naked, sprawled, laughing, full of excitement and loving the way he made us feel. I imagined each of us: hiding behind the curtains with pretend shyness, performing striptease acts, standing on his bed and glorying in our nakedness, lolling, laughing, prone, supine, begging, daring, screaming with pleasure, drowsing, rolling around … we couldn’t let him go.
“So what do we do?” I demanded.
“Unofficial action,” Connie replied. “We can’t do anything formal because …”
Well, we all know why not – a dozen women insisting that their pocket-sized love god shouldn’t be moved to the other end of the country was going to make national news – international news even. We’d be the laughing stock of the engineering community.
“We make it clear that if Peachy goes, this firm won’t be worth working in,” Mariella concurred.
Libuela smiled startlingly. “Oh yes,” she said. “That we can do!”
When I went to the powder room the next day, the notice had been changed. Now it said ‘The P.T. Fan club – remember: your actions can guarantee a happy ending.’
The food in the cafeteria became inedible. Human Resources failed to process any holiday requests. I sat on the expense claim forms until cash-starved engineers in hard hats and big boots began to turn up at the office; haranguing the receptionists and glaring at anybody with a briefcase as though such a person might be stealing out the expenses money from under their noses. The only person whose expenses went through, whose coffee was hot, whose holiday was agreed – was Peachy.
We met again, after a fortnight. The dissatisfaction in the firm was tangible. You could taste it in the lumpy macaroni, hear it in the bad-tempered growls of the staff, sense it in the prickly glances that senior managers shot at everybody they passed in the hall.
“We seem to be having an effect. But how do we translate it into the action we want?” Mariella asked.
“We could bring down a hex,” Libuela said. There was a short silence and then we all spoke at once to hide our own disquiet.
It was during this babble that I looked up and saw Peachy in the doorway. We fell quiet. I felt myself begin to blush. Then he held up the notice from the Ladies’ Room.
“Thank you all, I feel honoured,” he said. I can’t speak for anybody else, but I blushed worse than ever.
“We can’t let you go,” Mariella said.
Peachy took off his glasses and rubbed them on the h
em of his shirt. “Well, I don’t see how you can stop it,” he said. “The firm has to relocate the department, it makes economic sense.”
“Give us one more week,” Mariella replied. She sounded more confident than I felt.
When the invoices didn’t get paid, our stock started to slide a little, and there was a board meeting called to explore why the firm had become so inefficient all of a sudden. Although everybody was supposed to be at hard at work, the eleven of us naturally gravitated towards the cafeteria. Libuela served us black coffee with guava and cream cheese refugiados. After a short while Mariella wiped her mouth, sighed in satisfaction and said, “Ready to rumble?” We all nodded, although I don’t think anybody had the faintest idea what she was talking about.
She pulled out a mobile and punched a number. Two minutes later Mrs Hanrahan appeared in the doorway. She was wearing a navy blue shirtwaist with a crocheted collar and she held a sheaf of papers in her hand. Her face was puzzled. “This had better be as important as you claimed, Mariella, because I am meant to be taking minutes at the board meeting.”
Mariella smiled. “We can solve the problems the board is debating, Mrs H. The eleven women in this room can put the firm back on its feet in a week. There’s just one thing …”
And that’s how Peachy became Colorado Liaison. He spends three months of the year in Colorado, broken into six fortnightly sections. The Peachy Talbot Fan Club cleans his apartment and waters his plants while he’s away, and when he’s back, Peachy Talbot divides his nights between us as he always did.
As for the 49ers, if they appeared butt-naked in reception, I’d suggest they took lessons from Peachy. There’s only room for one sex god in my life – and that’s why I’m a fully paid up member of the Peachy Talbot Fan Club. And so is Mrs Hanrahan …
Paper Rose
by J.S. Black
South East London 1967
From his corner desk within the busy office, Detective Ray Morecambe observed the two women from over the rim of his steaming coffee cup with interest.
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