A Bestiary of Unnatural Women

by Ashley Zacharias

  There was no way he would ever call her mundane again.

  The more Walt thought about his wife’s email, the angrier he grew. He was sick and tired of dancing to her tune. For the sake of the kids, he had put up with her sniping and bitching for a long, long time. But Samantha would be starting university in two months and David had already been living in a dorm for two years; they did not need him at home any longer. This summer, he had barely seen either one of them – they were out with friends every night until all hours. Since Sam’s birth, he had been counting down the years of their childhood like a convict marking off a twenty-year sentence. Now it was time for him to be paroled. God knows, he’d earned a little time off for good behavior.

  The only question was whether he should take his freedom today or tomorrow or next week. There was no question that he would be gone by Thanksgiving. He might be celebrating alone, but it would be the first Thanksgiving in memory when he would truly be thankful rather than just maintaining a pretense.

  Hillary’s email promised that she was going to be out of the house at 9:00 tonight and she always kept her promises. He could drop by the house, pack a bag, and be gone before she got back.

  As for her little “adventure” in some bar, she could do whatever the hell she wanted. Blow every barfly in the place for all he cared. Or get smart, walk out unscathed, and keep her prissy little mouth virginal forever. She was an adult, for Christ’s sake. She wanted to be the one to make every decision? Well, this was her decision. She was welcome to it and she would damn well have to live with the result.

  After Hillary parked, she pulled the visor down and took a last look at her face in the fading summer sunset. The sky-blue eye shadow looked like it had been applied with a shovel; thick black eyeliner outlined her lids in a crude imitation of the ‘60s mod style; and her lashes hung so heavy with mascara that they looked false. Her lips were painted full with the brightest scarlet she could find – a hue that begged to be left in perfect ring around the root of someone’s – Walter’s – cock. The rest of her face was naked – no foundation, no concealer, not even a touch of rouge to hide behind. A man could grab it, hold it, rub his cock across it, spray his cum over it, without any fear of smudging or smearing her.

  She was only a single step away from a busy downtown street and seeing the whore’s face staring back from the mirror made her heart pound harder than ever.

  The automobile clock read 8:59. The hour of truth had arrived. She grabbed the little black purse that contained a single twenty-dollar bill, her keys, and nothing else. Taking a deep breath, she opened her car door.

  There was no way to step out without spreading her legs and flashing that lipstick-colored thong to anyone who was driving past. Broadway was a busy street in the evening; no time would be any better than right now. Just as she put her left foot on the asphalt, she glanced up and saw wide eyes peering from a passing car window.

  That teenage boy would soon be having a wet dream about a woman old enough to be his mother.

  She hated to think that she was contributing to the delinquency of minors, so, before any more cars zipped by, she slid her second leg out as quickly as possible, stood up, and pulled the hem of the miniskirt as far down as she could. It did not pull down very far. As she had suspected, it could not hide the snaps that clipped the top of the stockings to the garter belt. If that wasn’t whorish enough for Walter, nothing would be.

  As she walked the block and a half to the bar, she glanced at herself in the darkened store windows. She saw glimpses of the same slut that she had seen in the motel mirror – breasts bouncing like two excited puppies, threatening to jump out of the too-tight tube top at every step; a wide slice of bare white thigh visible every time the miniskirt hem flicked sideways as the too-high heels forced her hips to swivel from one side to the other; and two squirming ass cheeks, unmarked by any visible panty line, bulging and working inside the too-tight skirt like bread dough being kneaded by an invisible baker’s fists.

  She felt the cooling evening air blowing around her bare thighs all the way up to her naked ass, making her feel as though she were nude all the way up to her crotch despite the visual confirmation that the miniskirt did indeed cover her almost down to the tops of the stockings.

  She had to fight the urge to reach up and hike the tube top higher. She was sure that it was slipping further off her boobs with every step. More than once, she could not resist glancing down at her chest to make sure that she was not revealing the rosy edge of her areolas above the hot pink fabric. Not yet, at least.

  She felt unreasonable relief when she finally reached the door of the bar. Intellectually, she knew that, at this threshold, she was truly stepping from the frying pan into the fire.

  She had never been inside O’Reilly’s before, but had walked past a few times last week and had even parked for a while to watch patrons entering and leaving, so she had a good idea about what to expect. It was a working man’s bar. Not antiseptic, not even very clean, but not a scum hole, either. The kind of place where some men came to drink a few beers with their buddies once a week, mostly for no purpose but to escape from the wife and kids for a couple of hours. Other men would stop by after a shift on the assembly line to try to wash the taste of the factory out of their mouth. It was a place where neither wives nor girlfriends were welcome. The occasional hooker would stop by, but the trade was too slim to support one full time. Sluts were tolerated as long as they were willing to pay for most of their own drinks and didn’t demand too much attention.

  It was a bar where she would be neither welcomed nor driven off, but tolerated for as long as she wished to stay.

  As her too-high heels forced her to sashay to the bar, she surveyed the room. Every eye in the place looked back at her. And every one of those eyes was male – on Monday evenings business was too slow for real hookers and the sluts were still sleeping off their weekend debaucheries.

  There were no booths, just a handful of small tables and a row of stools at the bar. There were a dozen customers drinking at three of the tables and another five men seated on the barstools.

  Certain that she had missed him, she surveyed the room again with growing dismay. Walter was nowhere in the bar.

  Her heart sank.

  She chose the stool that was furthest from any other customers – it happened to be close to the centre of the bar because the other customers were clustered at the ends – and sat down.

  As her legs bent, she could feel the way-too-short skirt hike up past her stocking tops so that her bare thighs and a good piece of her ass stuck to the brown fake leather. The chrome edge of the seat drew a cold line across the naked backs of her upper legs.

  The men in the room were not looking at her face; their eyes were focused on her legs, ass, and tits. She felt herself blush. As a modest woman wearing an outfit this indecent, she had no need for rouge.

  She did not impress the fiftyish bartender one way or the other. He had seen it all and couldn’t care less. He left her sitting for a good five minutes while he pulled a pitcher for one of the regulars and chatted about the game yesterday. When it was convenient for him, he sauntered down to her and asked, “What can I get ya, miss?”

  She glanced involuntarily at her bare ring finger – her one and only concession to good taste was to leave her wedding ring at home – and said, “Coke. No ice, please.”

  “Costs the same as if you get some rum in it.”

  “No thanks. Just Coke. No ice.” She had decided early in the afternoon that she would not be drinking tonight – she wanted to keep her head crystal clear to ensure that she felt every iota of humiliation as sharply as possible. And it was working. Nothing had really happened yet and she already felt more deeply humiliated than at any other time in her entire life. And that was saying something. High school had not been kind to Hillary.

  While the bartender was drawing her Coke, she kept her eyes down, staring at the scarred wood, and wondering where Walter was and what h
e was doing. She had given him the option of leaving her here alone and forcing her to give a blowjob to a stranger – she had been explicit about that in her email – but she had never imagined that he would take her up on that offer.

  “Four-fifty,” the barkeep said as he pushed the glass toward her.

  It would have been a cheap rum and coke, but it was a damned expensive glass of pop. She passed him the twenty from her purse and he went to fetch her change.

  The thought occurred to her that Walter might have failed to receive her email, or failed to read it, but she dismissed that out of hand. She knew that she had the right address because it had not bounced back and she knew for a fact that he never left the office until he had read everything in his inbox. He conducted too much critical business by email to be lax about that.

  That was a pity because, right now, she wanted nothing more in the world than to have an excuse to get up and leave this bar while she was still unsullied.

  But lacking the excuse of failed communication, there were two other, far more likely, possibilities. Either he wanted her to suck off a stranger in the Men’s room of some seedy bar – maybe he even had had fantasies about it – or he thought that she wanted to do it and did not care enough, or cared too much, to interfere. It seemed unlikely that he thought she wanted to blow a stranger because she said explicitly in her email that she hoped that he would be the one to purchase her services tonight.

  That left only the first possibility – that she would soon be on her knees in the Men’s room with a strange cock in her mouth because that was exactly what her husband wanted her to do. Well, she was determined to give him exactly what he wanted, no matter how perverse. Her head turned about of its own accord and her eyes stared for a long time at the dirty little sign that read “Restrooms” over the alcove at the far side of the bar.

  For the first time, it occurred to her that she could have specified the Lady’s room. Until now, she had only thought about the Men’s because that was the more degrading option by a slight measure.

  Now another thought occurred to her. If Walter wanted her to suck off a stranger, was he going to require that, when she got home, she tell him about the whole experience in excruciating detail? Was that the thrill that he craved? Recalling the act for his amusement would be even more degrading than performing the act itself. And if she confessed every detail of her act, was he going to bring it up again and again every time they had some little spat for the rest of their lives? Every time he got angry, would he remind her once again that she had once been an unfaithful slut?

  That thought incited a twinge of anger that fortified her a little for the night ahead. If he started holding this against her, she could always remind him that her perfidy was a result of his choices: first to accuse her of being sexually boring and mundane; and second, not to rescue her from her self-assigned fate.

  Two could play the blame game.

  Walter threw the suitcase in the trunk of his car, came around to the driver’s side, hopped in and started the engine.

  For the first time since his twenties, he felt like a free man. He could go anywhere he wanted, do anything he wanted. And what he wanted was to make his escape before Hillary showed up. If she had come to her senses and given up her silly game before she even got to the bar, then she would be pulling around the corner at any minute. Or she could have blown some guy in her first five minutes and still be pulling around the corner at any minute. He knew one sure thing from his years of experience: sex with Hillary was always a quick business. And he knew that he did not want to have to spend the rest of the night explaining why he was leaving. He had not even written a note – she would have ample time to figure it out during the coming years. Not being able to rag on him constantly would give her endless free time.

  Besides, if he had left a note, one of the kids might have found it before she did. They weren’t likely to get back until after midnight, but who knew how long Hillary might have to spend trying to find some man who would actually want her frumpy forty-year-old body. She might not come home until the bar closed, and there was nothing that he would say in a note that he wanted his children to read.

  Without further contemplation, he hit the road.

  As she was getting to the bottom of her Coke, Hillary heard a burst of laughter behind her. She had spent the last twenty minutes nursing the drink as slowly as possible and had not dared to look around.

  She clung desperately to the hope that Walter would still show up to rescue her, and she was afraid of inadvertently encouraging some other man to approach her. In her fantasies, she had imagined that she would have been bolder from the outset. That if Walter were a no-show, she would have begun acting like a real hooker immediately, turning around and making eye contact with the customers, enticing likely johns with a coy smile, actively soliciting interest in the wares that she was putting on display, open to all offers.

  Instead, she was sitting here like a wallflower at a high school formal, too shy to meet a fella, knowing that she would go home again without having danced a single step.

  Which was exactly what she wanted. The only man she wanted to dance with was her husband – the man she loved.

  But she wasn’t going to get what she wanted. If Walter failed to show up damn soon, she’d be dancing on her knees with her lips around someone else’s cock, however much she hated the idea.

  She prayed with all her heart that Walter would walk through the door right now, whisk her off to the Men’s room for their exciting adventure, and then take her safely home where they would collapse in gales of laughter about their bold walk on the wild side.

  For a second, she thought that her dreams had come true; a bass voice mumbled in her ear, “Hey, babe, want to have some fun tonight?” exactly the way she expected Walt to come on to her when he entered into the spirit of the game.

  But, when she turned, she saw a grizzled man ten years younger than her with a five o’clock shadow and bloodshot eyes leering at her.

  Walt was MIA and it was time to complete the promise that she had made to him and to herself. She replied in what she hoped was a sultry voice, “You look like a fun guy. I’m ready if you are. What did you have in mind?”

  “Maybe let me buy you a drink and we can talk about it.”

  “No need for a drink. Let’s just talk about it now.” She licked her lips and leaned close, giving him a good shot of her cleavage. As though on a string, his head bobbed down, the better to enjoy the view.

  “Maybe you’d just like to get it on with me?” he said, boldly.

  She presumed that ‘get it on’ meant regular sex, so she countered with, “I think maybe I could make you happy with a nice big sloppy blowjob.” Her ears burned with shame as she said the crude words, but there it was, right out on the table. No misunderstanding possible.

  “Would you like that?” The young man raised his eyebrows.

  “I’d love that,” Hillary lied with a smile, drawing out the word, ‘love,’ as long and lasciviously as she could.

  “Okay,” he drawled the word the same way while his whole face broke into a broad smile.

  “I’ll need twenty dollars up front.”

  Now it was the man who turned red. “I don’t pay for it, lady. I don’t need to pay for it.”

  “Do you have a job?”

  “Of course I do. I have a good job down at the docks.”

  “Do you work for free?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Well, I don’t work for free, either. Twenty bucks isn’t much, but that’s what I charge.”

  “Twenty buck is more than your fat old ass is worth. I can get a lot of beer for twenty bucks and that much beer’ll make me feel a lot better than you can.”

  “Don’t be so sure about that, son. I can make you feel damn good.” But her words were wasted. The man was already heading back to his friends. After a minute, their laugher turned nasty and she heard the word, whore, being thrown about with abandon.

>   She had thought that having to suck off a strange man in a Men’s room would be the ultimate humiliation, but being told that she was too old and fat to be worth even a measly twenty dollars was an altogether more degrading experience.

  No matter. The word was out and someone would pay for her service soon enough.

  The moment she accepted some man’s money, she would no longer be playing whore. She would actually be one.

  Having no particular destination in mind, Walt drove toward downtown – it was natural – there was nothing happening in the suburbs that would interest a single man, footloose and carefree.

  It was only natural that his meandering would take him close to Broadway, but not entirely accidental that he turned left toward the seedier end of the street instead of right toward the centre of town.

  What was that place that she said she was going? O’Malley’s? O’Brian’s? Something Irish. O’Reilly’s! That was the place. Right there across the street! She could be in there right now, even as he was driving past.

  Walt slowed down as much as traffic permitted and tried to peer through the window, but he could see nothing but a dark blur. She probably wasn’t even there. It was already 9:30. Whatever she had decided, it had to be over by now.

  But a block further, he saw her gold-colored Honda parked by the curb. Damn, she must be still inside trying to find someone brave enough to let her wrap her vicious little mouth around his pecker.

  He whipped a U-turn, parked in the first empty spot, and walked back toward the bar. He did not kid himself about finding this place by accident, or about having some deep subconscious needs. He freely admitted to himself that he had become curious about what was happening. He wanted to know if she were really going through with her plan.

  And he was more than a little curious about the line in her email where she said that she would “dress in a way that would make her intentions obvious.” He wanted to see what his prissy little wife thought a fuck-me outfit looked like.