After getting my morning cup of java, I visited the ladies’ rest room. For days now, there has been a red button scotch taped to one of the stalls. Someone must have found it on the floor and thought this was a good way to return it to its owner. The button has been fascinating me to no end. The owner must have seen it by now. There are only two stalls in the ladies’ room for Pete’s sake, and I’ve never seen a man wear a red sweater to work, not even at Christmas.
Unable to take it any longer, I finally pushed the button to see if something would happen, sort of like in a panic button type of way. Nothing happened. How anticlimactic, I thought. Disappointed, I flushed the toilet and washed my hands, thinking the episode was over, but I still couldn’t get the button out of my mind! It had to be there for a reason. That was when I decided it was a sign from above that I should do something important, and it had to do with something the color red.
The only thing that had stood out recently in the red department was the socks on whom I like to call ABM, Alan Brandon Michaels and/or Aloof Business Man. He was an executive in upper management. I spotted his red wool ankles under a table in a conference room when I was breezing by the doorway. It’s not that red socks were a big deal, but for someone who was so impeccably dressed in expensive suits everyday, his shirts superbly ironed, it was.
When I first met him, I thought he was charming and attractive like everyone else. He was in his thirties, and he was tall and broad shouldered with raven hair and a sly smile. Then I realized his moods could be like night or day. You never had a clue what you were going to get. I’d watched him many a time reduce a female coworker to tears in a manner of seconds.
I always wondered what his deal was. I mean, where did he get off? To me, he had everything: a high power job, a Lexus, an apartment in Birmingham, a different beautiful woman clinging to his arm at every after-work function. He had nothing to be an asshole about.
After Easter, I must have caught him on one of his good days because we actually had an interaction. I had been carefully ageing three yellow marshmallow Peeps on my desk for the last two weeks. I’d even named them. I was coming back from the copy room and I saw him steal one.
Furious, I confronted him in his office.
“You stole one of my Peeps,” I said.
Like a little kid, he quickly swallowed and looked innocently at me. “I did?”
“Yes. You did. I saw you.”
“Do you have any proof?” he asked.
If I’d known him better, I would have walked over to him, pinched open his mouth and looked for tell tale signs of marshmallow between his teeth, but I didn’t.
“I would just like to say that Frank didn’t appreciate being Peep napped,” I said. “He was looking forward to his timely demise in my mouth.”
“Who is Frank?” he asked, looking confused.
“The Peep you just murdered.”
Mortified by his lack of concern, I turned away and went back to my desk.
The next morning, I found my remaining peeps, Penelope and Oscar, having sex on my desk and a pieces of a cut up pink one behind them. ABM came strolling over to my desk the moment he saw me. Mischief twinkled in his eyes.
“What is this?” I asked.
“They had babies,” he said.
From behind him, he pulled out an opened package of pink Peeps with one missing. He gave me his sly smile and handed it to me. How could I stay mad at him? I handed him Oscar. I took Penelope and we ate them. We split the babies between us.
“That was the best sex I’ve had in months,” he said, brushing off his hands.
That was when I realized what his problem was.
Therefore, because of the red button and his comment, I passed him a note that read “YNBPF”, which stood for “You’ve never been properly fucked.”
Later when I went to the bathroom, I found the red button was gone. I realized that I should have kept it. I could have started a “signs that changed my life” box or a “new romance with ABM” box. I’ve always been one for collecting things in boxes, even when I was little. I liked imposing organization on my part of the universe. When I was ten, I used to collect rocks. Mostly they were from the playground at school, but I also used to look for them in yards, gardens and parking lots. I loved stuffing pink quartzite and light gray limestone in my pockets and feeling the weight of them. At home, I stored them under my bed in a shoebox.
At twelve years old, I collected bees in cola bottles. This was more of a semi permanent collection. I’d run around the back yard, trapping the poor bees on dandelions and I’d wait to see if they could fly out of the bottles.
At twenty-two years old, I was collecting interesting autumn leaves from our acre-long back yard that bordered on a woods flaring with red and yellow colors. I thought the leaves were pretty, and they should be preserved like little skeletons of times gone by.
Once again, I was using a shoebox, the only difference being this wasn’t a Buster Brown shoebox. This was a shoebox from my “come and fuck me” 4-inch black patent leather pumps.
Today, I thought I was looking quite the rustic girl in my faded blue jeans and red plaid flannel shirt with my shoulder-length auburn hair tied back as I worked on my collection when I came across Justin, my neighbor, who was having a smoke behind an oak tree.
Justin was my age, but he had dropped out of college and he went to live with his Dad in California for a while. Now he was back home living with his mom. When we were seven years old, we once had a session of doctor in an abandoned car in a field. During high school, I fooled around with him in my bedroom a couple times in an “I’m bored and you’re in the vicinity” type of thing.
For the first time, I noticed the contrast between Justin and ABM. It was striking. Justin was perpetually unkempt. He always wore ancient jeans and an army jacket. His T-shirt logos were always ten years behind the times, mostly pot leaves and heavy metal bands. You could just see the bong collection and black light posters in his room. The only jobs he’d ever kept for more than a week were pizza delivery boy and video rental store clerk.
A few weeks ago, we had a brief grope session at a garage sale. It’s not something I was proud of. It happened during a moment of weakness. My motives for being at the garage sale were not pure either. I wasn’t there because I was looking for a funky seventies burnt orange colored sofa or the last piece of bone china for my mother’s plate collection. I was being nosy because I had never liked these neighbors and I wanted to see what crap they were selling.
Justin showed up almost the same time I did. I hoped he wasn’t following me. He appeared to be fascinated by the tools while I checked out the board games. Eventually, he came over by me.
“So why are you back here?” I asked. “Did you fall out with your Dad?”
“Nothing like that,” he said. “I was missing shit.”
“They don’t have shit in California.”
He shrugged.
“There is shit anywhere you go,” I said.
Justin sighed.
“My dad said I could come back anytime,” he said.
I moved away, looking at a table of partially undressed and rejected Barbie dolls. I rather liked the way their limbs were all clacked together.
Justin held up a pair of granny panties.
“Is this your style?” he asked me.
“No.”
“So what is?” he asked.
“None of your business,” I said.
To get away from him, I ducked behind a clothes rack, but he followed me. Without permission, he grabbed my ass and slid his hands down my jeans, apparently to find out what kind of underwear I was wearing. The only thing I was wearing was a tiny thong. His fingers hit bare skin. The protest I was about to launch died in my throat. His fingers inched along my skin, his breath in my ear.
Part of me wanted to yell at him, “get your freakin hands out of my pants.” The other part of me wanted to tell him to move on down to my crack. Suddenly, an old lady y
anked open the clothes to get a better look at a blue floral print house-dress.
We scurried out of there like mice.
I hadn’t seen him since. Glancing at him now, I wondered how he could look even scruffier.
“You wouldn’t be wearing that thong again?” he asked.
“What about it?”
“It was interesting.”
“Interesting how?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“Are you wearing it?” he asked.
I nodded.
He stepped in closer. I felt a weird flip flop in my stomach. Like he was unveiling an important painting, he lifted up the corner of my flannel shirt, unzipped my jeans an inch and brushed his fingers along the skin of my hip.
Gooseflesh tickled my skin. Suddenly, this stomach churning desire tormented me. I yanked down my pants the rest of the way and, turning my butt so it faced him, grabbed the tree for support.
Gone was the clumsy teenager who I had to show which hole was which. It felt as if he knew my body as if he had the owner’s manual. It astounded me. Whom had he been fucking? That blowjob with zit boy in the parking lot seemed like nothing compared to this.
A few molar-rattling minutes later, it was over. I turned around, zipping up my pants, dizzy with my lingering orgasm, when I caught his expression. He looked all detached, like Joe Cool, as if he’d done me a big favor. Then he lit up and flicked his match.
It fell in my leaf box. Whoosh! It went up in a ball of flame. It never had a chance. I stared in horror at my newly incinerated collection.
“You can fuck me from behind,” I cried out, storming back to my house. “But you better not burn my leaves.”
Since my leaf collection was gone and the garage sales gave me an idea, I’ve now decided to collect naked fashion dolls, not exclusively Barbie either. And, as an added bonus, I’m rubber banding them together in sexual positions. As I child, I never did like playing with their hair or constructing elaborate dramas, but now I sort of liked the idea of their naked limbs entwined together in sexual parodies.
When I’m finished, maybe I’ll submit my collection to an art gallery, or I’ll take photos of them for a coffee table book or I might just give them to my little brother.
After dinner, on my way outside to take out the trash, I found an envelope on my car. I opened it. Justin had made me an artistic rendering of a leaf in charcoal. Basically, he traced a leaf as if a five-year-old might in kindergarten. Then he burnt the edges of the paper with his lighter. How original. At the bottom, he wrote, “I want to fuck you again.” I added mommy to the end of the sentence, put it back inside the envelope, addressed it to his mother and left it in their mailbox.
Just in case this came back to bite me in the ass, I found my mother in the den watching TV. I told her I was having problems with Justin.
“Why are you hanging out with that loser?” she asked. “Find a nice boy. One of my interns met a lovely guy. They had a lovely wedding reception in the basement of the church. They served lemonade and cookies.”
“If I want lemonade and cookies, I’ll go back to grade school,” I said and left the room.
The doll collection wasn’t coming along as well as I thought it should, so I decided I needed more fashion dolls. I went garage sailing far away from home and Justin, where I found what I needed. After I paid for them, I started stripping them in the driveway. I didn’t need the clothes. Onto the pavement dropped a green spandex disco outfit, a pink tutu and a mermaid skirt. A little girl came up to me and asked me why I was taking off their clothes.
“I don’t need them,” I said.
“Why?” she asked, her eyes big.
“Because they are naked performance artists,” I said.
I gave her the clothes and got out of there before she asked her mother what naked performance artists were.
When I got home, I arranged my dolls in order of what I would to do to ABM if he ever decoded the note. Mostly the dolls were blonds and brunettes. I’d been unsuccessful in finding a red head like me. At first, I thought about combing their tangled, disheveled hair, but then I decided to leave them in their natural state.
The girl dolls far outnumbered the boy dolls, so the boys were just going to have to work that much harder. After I arranged them, it looked very impressive. Very horny stuff indeed.
Once I had my collection arranged, I turned my attention to a cardboard box in the corner of my room. My mother, unbeknownst to me, had been cleaning out the attic. She had brought down a box of my childhood stuffed animals. Extracting them, I realized I must have had sex with them all. So many of them had bald spots. Was I that horny of a kid? No wonder little girls liked unicorns so much. Several of mine were my early dildo collection.
I pulled out a particularly sad looking stuffed tiger. He had lost his tail in a tragic accident, or so I had told my friends. Actually, I had been sticking it up inside me to see how far it would go. Its tail was reinforced with a wire so it was quite stiff. Surprisingly enough, with my youthful zeal, I lost my virginity with it. Then I couldn’t get the blood off the tail, so I gave my tiger an operation and buried the tail in the backyard.
Now, I felt so bad about what I’d done to my tiger. Was that how you treated your best friend who listened to all your secrets at night? If only I could put things right, but I didn’t know how.
Having had enough nostalgia for the day, I put the stuffed animals back in the box, and I went downstairs to do a load of laundry where I made a life altering decision in front of the washing machine.
I’ve decided to move out. This was the last time my little pervert of a brother will steal my clothes, whack off on them and leave them in the washing machine. In an effort to curb his activities until I can get my own place, I left him a handful of my old granny panties with a note that said if he touched anything else, I’d break his fingers.
Before I moved out though, I realized I needed to find my tiger tail and restore it to my childhood best friend. Taking a shovel from the back yard, I tried to retrace my devirginized steps from all those years ago, but, finding myself unsuccessful, I just started digging holes in frustration.
Justin showed up. If he didn’t watch out, he was going to get a smack in the face with my shovel because of his self-satisfied smirk.
“What on earth are you doing now?” he asked.
“I’m going to cut up the people who annoy me and bury the pieces in the backyard,” I said.
“You know, if you weren’t pretending to be a bad ass all the time, you might be tolerable to hang around with,” he said.
“Screw you.”
He paused.
“I have,” he said. “Screwed you. And that little note trick did not work with my mom. I already told her you were a psycho.”
“I’m not a psycho. You are.”
“Who is digging holes in her backyard?” he said.
“I’m looking for something.”
“Well, let me know when you find it.”
He flicked his cigarette butt at me and left.
“Arson,” I called out after him.
Once he was gone, I put down my shovel. I felt like crying. This was intolerable. I did have to move out, but the only way I can afford it is to get a raise. To do that, I must move up in the corporate world. I must transform myself from a slacker to a polished, productive and professional employee.
During the next week at work, to improve my standing with the corporation, I volunteered to be a part of the Diversity Committee, offered to type up the last team meeting notes, and let my supervisor know I was up for any special projects. I even changed the type of clothes I wore. Instead of wearing Polo shirts, Dockers and loafers, I chose A-line skirts, twin sets and mules.
Sitting at my desk, feeling very uncomfortable in my panty hose, I got a phone call. I thought it might be my supervisor congratulating me on my new attitude, but it was a man’s voice I didn’t recognize.
“Who is this?” I asked.
; “This note,” he said. “What does it mean?”
My heart fluttered. ABM. I glanced around the room. No one was within earshot.
“Figure it out,” I said. “You’re the one with the private office and huge salary. You should be able to figure out a simple note.”
“This doesn’t have to do with the Peeps,” he said. “Because I made restitutions.”
“This is an entirely different issue,” I said.
“Give me a clue.”
“It’s one of your biggest problems,” I said.
He paused. I could hear him drumming his fingers on his desk.
“Why did you give it to me?” he asked.
“A red button told me to,” I said and hung up.
The next day, I was trying to decide on what was the most corporate looking snack in the vending machine, pretzels or chips, when ABM came into in the lunchroom. He was looking very good, I might add.
“I figured out your note,” he said. “And you’re mistaken.”
“What did it say?”
He raised an eyebrow.
“You’ve never been properly fucked,” he said. “But you’re wrong.”
I looked him up and down.
“Why are you still so aloof and uptight, then?” I asked.
“To keep the underlings in their place,” he said.
“Do you consider me an underling?”
He bought a package of miniature jawbreakers.
“Of course,” he said. “But a very cute one who likes the same snack foods as me.”
Opening the package, he offered me some. I let him pour the hard little balls in my hand.
“Why the note?” he asked.
“I thought it might help you,” I said.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 5 Page 43