'Blind Date (Part 1)'--a short story by TAS

Blind Date (Part 1)

“Hey there, gorgeous! Ever been on a blind date?” It is Zane’s favorite ice-breaker, even after all these years.

I’ve brought my girlfriend to meet him this Sunday, up to the sixteenth floor and the tiny Section 8 efficiency with its stinging odor of institutional soap, and the glorious view of the city skyline that my best friend cannot appreciate.

Ginny giggles politely at the compliment as Zane ushers us through the stark cinderblock entryway. The long narrow main room is a three-sided fish tank, already uncomfortably warm in the mid-afternoon sun despite the lumbering A.C. and the dusty drapes that are seldom closed; a grotty kitchenette at one end, a lumpy twin mattress crammed between the window and a shelf of stereo components at the other. Zane puts a Music from the Hearts of Space compilation in the CD player and sits on the bed. I take the ratty antique La-Z-Boy that hasn’t reclined in decades. Ginny kicks off her sandals and settles on the carpet in front of me, nestling contentedly against my knees.

Zane and I have been friends for more than thirty years. Ginny and I have been sneaking around behind our respective significant others’ backs for about six months. We’ve stolen this weekend together, she and I, telling such lies as were necessary to escape, desperate for a few hours in each other’s arms. We’ve been living incognito for a couple nights now, shacked up like a pair of newlyweds in one of the less-than-grand hotels downtown. Zane’s building is within walking distance and this is our borrowed holiday’s last hurrah.

Ginny practically glows, her flesh abloom, still subtly flushed after our last round of love-making. I breathe in the scent of her hair, the faint metallic hint of rose and orange blossom her ineffaceable signature. She rolls her head back, gazing worshipfully up at me, vibrant brown pupils afloat in glistening white pools, wide with salacious wonder. Her smile is irresistible, even upside down, and its meaning just as clear; she would be kissed—now, this very instant. Her flimsy voile top is loose around her shoulders, the light, gauzy fabric crinkly under my roving fingers as I lean forward, and I am granted a magnificent view of her braless breasts as we make out.

Zane is saying something about the music—I don’t quite catch the words.

“What’s that, buddy?”

“I really like what he does here.” He puts the CD on fast-reverse, back to the part he’s anxious for us to hear.

“Oh yeah! That is pretty neat.” I’ve slipped a hand into Ginny’s top. Her skin is taut yet subtly yielding, though my sense of touch is momentarily confused as to whether it is cool, or warm, or merely moist with nervous perspiration. She makes an effort to keep her breathing steady.

“So, how long you guys in town for?” Zane rocks nervously back and forth, tossing his head like a davener in a synagogue.

“Gotta head out pretty soon,” I say. “Ginny has to be back this evening. I’ll stick around a while, catch the bus at 9.”

“Too bad there isn’t more time,” Zane says. “It’d be fun to go out, get crazy like back in the day—remember, Hank?”

“Sure! How could I forget? Like that time we got smashed on your birthday?” I flick at one of Ginny’s nipples, teasing it to stiff attention.

“Or that time at school, with the go-carts—”

“—when I was driving us around that old dirt track.”

“What happened?” Ginny asks.

“I was trying to take the thing around the turns, and we kept wiping out—”

“And Hank here keeps hollering ‘Lean! Dammit! Lean!’” Zane can hardly contain his amusement.

“Which was a pretty scandalous thing to say, at least according to Miss Fotzenberg.”

“Oh God! That bitch!” Zane snorts.

“Where was this?” I can feel Ginny tensing slightly as I lay the flat of my palm over her breast. “Where’d you guys meet?”

“State school for the blind,” Zane and I reply in unison.

“I was there for the summer session,” I explain. “I always attended public schools—I guess they call it mainstreaming nowadays—basically because I’m not totally blind like Zane, and have always been able to use the sight I have to get around, more or less—though you should see this guy navigate downtown at night! Man! I’d be lost inside of ten seconds—”

“It’s pretty easy once you’ve had the mobility training,” Zane says.

“So anyway, going to the state school for a few weeks that summer was a way for me to kind of expand my horizons, encounter other visually-impaired kids, really for the first time in my life. And, of course, who’s the first guy I meet there? This dude!”

“Can you believe it was 1973, right before we started high school?”

“I was a year old,” Ginny says.

“Bet you were cute even back then.” My best friend is a shameless flirt.

“You’d like her,” I tell him. “She’s amazing.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Oh yeah! About 5’4” barefoot, which, by the way, she is right now. Drop-dead beautiful—we’re talking incredibly hot—”

“He’s exaggerating, Zane.” Ginny is actually blushing as she protests.

“—an incredible body,” I insist. “Everything’s perfectly proportioned and just the right size—”

“Shut up!” Ginny laughs.

“—beautiful big brown eyes, and really pretty reddish-brown hair down to her shoulders—”

“Mmmmm!” Zane is imagining it.

“Here, wanna see?” I reach over and guide his hand to Ginny’s hair. Breath catches quietly in her throat as he touches her, shyly running his long sensitive fingers through the luxuriant glossy strands. “How ‘bout that, big guy?”

“Wow!” he sighs, reluctantly withdrawing. “That’s really nice.”

“Thanks, honey,” I tell her.

“Yes! Thank you, Ginny.” Zane is genuinely appreciative.

We sit quietly for a while, pretending to listen as the music drones on. A raucous parade of emergency vehicles roars down the avenue far below, their Dopplering sirens like thunder echoing off the high-rise rim of the deep concrete canyons. My mind is all on Ginny. I am nuzzling her neck, debating with myself whether to give her a hickey before she has to leave, the soft bruise a lurid, if quickly fading, memento of our time together.

“This is really turning me on,” she confesses in a throaty sotto voce, nodding in Zane’s direction. It is the idea of being invisible that excites her, of being naughty without being seen; of ‘getting away’ with something crazy and subversive and utterly outrageous right under this strange man’s unseeing eyes, though I have little doubt my friend knows exactly what’s going on between us.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” My voice is a soft rumble translated through my nose, tucked up gently under Ginny’s ear.

“Mm?” She stretches like a contented cat.

“Maybe we could... do something nice for him—if you were up for it—”

“What’s that?” Zane’s ears perk up.

“—I mean, if you’d be comfortable. You know I’d never ask you to do anything—”

“No, it’s alright,” she murmurs. “I wouldn’t mind.”

“What do you think, buddy?” I inquire aloud. “I assume you’ve been following the conversation?”

“Yeah, I pretty much got the gist,” he says. “So, what did you guys have in mind?”

“Some fun, if you’re up for it,” I reply. “Ginny here would kind of like to give you a present before she has to leave.”

“Seriously? You guys aren’t playing with me now, are you?”

“Seriously, Zane.” She puts a reassuring hand on his knee. “That is, if you’re cool with it—”

He takes a long moment to consider.

“Yeah, I’m cool—”

I get to my feet, swiftly bringing Ginny up with me. She raises her arms without a word of question or command, and I pull the flimsy blouse off over her head, loving the way her hair falls so charmingly back into place in the wake of the garment’s removal.

“—so how do I—?” Zane is still uncertain. “How do we—”

“Shhhh.” Ginny seals his lips with a pair of outstretched fingers. He is abruptly still, sitting bolt upright, davening no more.

She stands in front of him, takes his hand, draws him to his feet. He seems to tower over her and I am weirdly aroused by the sight of them together, the odd physical disparity, not merely in height, but in every aspect of this fleshly-surreal juxtaposition. Her skin is peaches and cream to his swarthy russet tones. Her youthful body is lithe, smooth and fair, subtly athletic, a diminutive Belle to this big middle-aged man’s jovial, beer-gutted Beast.

“Mind if I?” He reaches down to touch her face, bashfully at first before finding his confidence, exploring deliberately, thoroughly, memorizing her features one by one. There is an intimacy in this ritual that the sighted seldom know.

“Like what you see?” She has already gotten the hang of this counterintuitive idiom, and I am proud of her.

“Oh yeah,” he sighs. “Hank was right.”

“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” She steers his hands to her breasts.

“Oh... wow!” He draws the words out on a long, tremulous breath, his mouth a gaping rictus of surprise, as if stunned by the sudden touch of ice.

I stand close behind them, watching over her shoulder. Zane’s huge hands hover above her breasts, barely making contact until she leans in, pressing them firmly into his palms.

I draw the curtain of her hair aside, lean over and gently kiss the back of her neck.

“Mmm,” she sighs. “You’re really cute, you know that, Zane?”

“Thanks. You too, Ginny.”

“So... why don’t I help you take off your shirt?”

“That’d be OK, I guess.”

She takes her time undoing the pin-striped button-front, starting at the top and moving steadily down, placing a soft kiss wherever the fabric is parted, until it hangs open and loose like flaps of skin around a wound. Zane moans softly as she slides it off over his shoulders. His chest and belly is a tangled thicket of coarse dark wires.

Now she looks up into his smile—an open book of wonder—puts her arms around his shoulders, crushing her breasts against his torso, bear hugging, topless, skin to skin. He binds her to him with hairy, hard-muscled forearms, tight around her naked middle, though I notice that both of them are holding back, shyly avoiding contact below the waist.

She reaches up to touch his face. Zane’s head is large, with a longish, thoughtful brow, caught in that homely fortysomething limbo, not balding, precisely, though his perpetually-thinning hair has receded to a rusty halo. He has the sort of ordinary everyday mien average people usually refer to as... average. His plainness does not disturb or dissuade her. On the contrary, she is excited by the fact that he cannot perceive or judge her own imagined flaws—cannot be turned off by what he cannot see. His face is a mirror reflecting only beauty.

“So, Zane...” Ginny’s voice is sultry and thick “... would you like to kiss me, now?”

“If... if it’s OK with Hank.”

“She doesn’t need my permission—”

“Damn straight!” She laughs.

“—neither do you, buddy. Go for it.”

I massage Ginny’s shoulders as she and Zane begin to make out. I do it as much to deepen my own shameless enjoyment of the moment as to encourage her. The encounter has unlocked emotions long walled-up within me, just as I imagine it has awakened something dark and wild inside both of them, a sweltering perplexity of unfamiliar urges—things we never knew we wanted until this very moment, but cannot now imagine living without. I am curious to see how these mischievous, intoxicating new endorphins will affect us, each in our own way—how far, ultimately, we’ll be willing to go if things, already hot, quickly become heavy.

Ginny holds nothing back with Zane, does not feign shyness or pretend to be coy. Her kisses are the kind that linger for seconds on end, passionate, full-lipped, slow-simmering, wet. She brings her tongue into play, and Zane makes a sound in the back of his throat like a hungry animal.

My friend is not completely inexperienced. Zane’s been with women before and knows what to do. But he is twice-shy, having been burned more than once too often, taken advantage of by vile, self-loathing users who saw him only as a convenient fuck-stick, an easy mark they could pick up for a drunken one-off when no other self-respecting male would give them so much as a look of disgust.

He has fallen, not altogether unwillingly, into these traps, lured by loneliness and the unrelieved urges of a healthy libido. Zane can be gullible and, sometimes, pathetically easy to influence. Predators perceive his gentleness as weakness, his trusting nature as malleability. They get what they want from him and sneak out in the morning without so much as a “call me.” They leave nothing behind but the indelible stench of their own embarrassment, cheap perfume and drunken sweat on the pillow, dollar-store shampoo in a chain-smoker’s hair, and the stale redolence of red sex lingering on the sheets, the memory like a hangover of shame and regret that never goes away.

And am I taking advantage of my best friend at this moment? Pimping out Ginny for my own perverse amusement? True, she is not like the other women he’s been with. She is genuinely attractive and he knows it. She is sober and willing, and this alone is a gift. Zane is not some overgrown man-child. He is not so naïve as to believe that being with Ginny is anything other than a glorious one-time adventure that will be fun while it lasts, but over when it’s over, and nobody is pretending otherwise. No one is trying to deceive or humiliate anyone here.

I hook a pair of fingers through the belt loops on either side of Ginny’s jeans. She is in the moment with Zane and barely notices as I begin to pull them down around her ample hips. She’s not wearing panties—much to my surprise. But her snow-white bottom is abundantly fleshy, well-toned, and pertly curvaceous, and I think my friend will appreciate it immensely. A simple whispered suggestion in her ear is all it takes. Ginny grabs his hands, planting them decisively on her cheeks as they continue to neck.

“Niiiiiice!”

I know what I’m doing. I am fully aware that this will kick things into a higher gear, setting wheels in motion that will be much harder to put the brakes on later. But then, it occurs to me that I have become both director and stage manager of this little production, as well as its unwitting captive audience—and why should I be shocked if the actors choose to improvise?

Ginny reaches for his belt. The work of a second brings his cock out into the open. She gazes down at it with the blossoming expression of an impish brat imagining some new way of getting into trouble. Takes it in her hand with an appreciative sigh, impressed by Zane’s unselfconscious girth. Strokes the shaft a time or two until it wakes, then, casually, without warning, lays the still-half-flaccid thing like a slab of thawing meat against her naked cunt.

My mind races to one of those risqué Japanese ‘spring pictures’ where the lovers’ genitalia are so grotesquely exaggerated as to become, in effect, the erotic center of the world. It’s not a difficult connection to make. Zane’s cock is big, bigger than mine for sure, bigger even than most. It seems positively huge against Ginny’s daintily sculpted pubis.

“My God! It’s—” She is lost for the obvious. “What do you feed it with?” Ginny shoves him, gently, into his original sitting position on the edge of the bed. “Shall we find out?”

She helps him off with his jeans before shimmying out of her own. I search through a zippered pocket in my duffle bag and hand her a line of foil-sealed condoms. She waves off the bottle of lube I offer, and there is nothing left for me to do. I take a step back from the scene.

They are sitting up, facing each other on the edge of the bed now. She straddles his thighs, carefully adjusting her position before slipping down around him. They remain motionless for a moment, like a pair of classical lovers, captured forever in some exquisite terracotta vignette. Ginny gives him time to calm his breathing, and I know exactly what my friend is feeling: that heady sensation of at once filling and being surrounded, caressed and enveloped by soft, sucking flesh, the warm, moist closeness of infinite possibility.

She flexes her hips, just barely enough to induce a gentle friction where their genitals are joined, virtually fused at the thighs, and I remember our first time together, breathless, awkward, fumbling, the two of us coupled in this same precarious pose, sitting face to face on the rear bench seat of her husband’s tasteless conversion van...

I watch them from the La-Z-Boy, pants around my ankles as I touch myself through a condom. My greedy fingers play along the taut gamut of my shaft, my loose-clenched palm mirroring the motion of Ginny’s heaving pas touche, slip-sliding ever-so gently up and down over Zane’s impassive rod.

She is breathing hotly, straining and sweating, tossing her head back as she shoves her bosom forward. “Oh... my God!”

“What?” Zane is instantly concerned. “What is it?”

“It’s alright... You... you just made me come—”

“Really?”

“Yes... really... really—oh my God! Really!”

“Do I need to—”

“No! Don’t stop! Please... not for anything! Just... keep... going.”

She lunges at him and Zane falls backwards onto the bed. Ginny is with him all the way, sprawling on top, allowing him to feel the delicious weight of her body born down with all its prurient intention. His hands rove over her flesh like a sculptor working with wet clay, gradually discovering the hidden form within; her shoulders, her breasts, her sides—kneading, patting, shaping—her hips, her thighs, her bottom—teasing, caressing, stroking, admiring.

“Oh Jesus! Fuck me, Zane! Really fuck me!”

He pushes forward with a groan, taking the initiative, pushes again, still harder, and again, and again, building up a steady, driving rhythm inside her, encouraged by the sounds she makes, the high-pitched sighs and soft girlish grunts. They are rutting now, a pair of animals tearing at one another, discovering their true nature, sloughing off the old skin of civilized artifice, shame and all pretense of modesty. She shoves her pelvis backwards to meet his oncoming thrusts, projects her aching need at him, on him, around him; wanton—wanting—breathing, panting, looking, letching, seeking, searching, finding, feeling, fiddling, fucking, fucking, fucking, but never, never—ever—forgetting.

I rise from the chair to stand over them as I masturbate, inspired by the view of Ginny’s broad naked back, glistening with sweat, her beautiful hair disheveled around her shoulders, her writhing rump bobbing like a pair of pink floats on steady rolling waves. I am looking directly into my best friend’s face, and jerking off right here in front of him, and I, too, am turned on by the idea of my own unchastened wickedness, the liberating invisibility of this dark ménage.

It is over quickly. Zane throws his hands out to either side as if in search of something to keep him from falling. His whole body trembles. I can see his limbs jerking and juddering with the quickening force of climax. I know the feeling. A man’s orgasm is like a sudden plunge into freezing water, the terror and exhilaration of total immersion—skin touched everywhere at once, no place that is not vulnerable, no place that is not alive—the indiscriminate senses roaring in confusion.

We are climaxing simultaneously, the three of us. I fill the tip of my condom with white hot spunk, and cannot help but imagine Zane doing the same thing deep inside Ginny’s spasming channel. I have to remind myself that this is my friend’s moment, not mine, in spite of all the pleasure it has given me. I must not be the first to speak.

“That was amazing,” Ginny pants huskily, stretching forward to plant a sloppy kiss on his forehead. “You are a total stud, Zane!”

“You too—I mean, thanks, Ginny. Thanks for... everything. It was... it was... just—”

“I know, baby, I know. For me, too.”

The set is struck with impressive haste. Ginny steps into the bathroom to clean up. I help Zane find his clothes. No one pauses to comment on what has only just passed between us.

“I should walk Ginny down to the car,” I tell him. “Be back up in a few minutes. We can hang out for a while if you want, listen to music, maybe order a pizza?”

“Sounds good, Hank.”

Zane is shy again as Ginny enfolds him in a long farewell embrace. They kiss each other goodbye like old lovers, which, of course, is what they are now.

“Hey!” she laughs, “I finally know what it’s like to be on a blind date!”

“Oh... yeah!” He brightens at the reference.

“It was really fun,” she tells him—and I am convinced she means it. “Be seeing you around, Zane, maybe next time Hank and I are in town.”

“Can’t wait,” he says. “We’ll get crazy for sure.”

“I like the sound of that...”