Chapter 39
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For long moments, we linger in the back seat. Our body heat has warmed the car’s interior—the air is thick with the intoxicating smell of sweat and sex, and neither of us is ready to call it a night just yet. When my limp cock finally slips out of Paul’s ass, the condom stays behind, soaking the front of my jeans with my own cum.
Paul laughs until he realizes his khakis also took a hit—that oily spot on the front thigh isn’t the only stain now. Snapping his briefs into place, he kicks the khakis into a ball on the floor of the car, then crawls between the front seats to plop down behind the wheel. “I’m driving home like this,” he announces.
Alone in the back seat, I stretch out and struggle to pull up my damp jeans. My tender dick doesn’t want to retreat into my briefs just yet, but I jam it down anyway. Without Paul back here with me, I’m not likely to see any more action this evening. “What if you get stopped by a cop?”
Between the seats, I watch Paul pull open the fly of his briefs, exposing himself. “How much do you think a quick flash will get me?”
“Five to ten years in the county jail,” I joke. “And a ticket, I’m sure. Speeding and soliciting an officer.”
Paul laughs. “The worst part would be the speeding ticket—I’ll lose my job if I get another.”
“Another?” I start to tug down my shirt before I realize it, too, is sticky with seed. Peeling it off, I toss it on the floor with Paul’s pants. “How many do you have?”
“Including the one tonight?” Paul holds up one hand and counts the fingers twice. “Eight.”
Crawling into the front of the car, I pull on my jacket as I sink into the passenger seat. “You didn’t get one tonight,” I point out.
The arched look he gives me says otherwise.
Now that I’m out of the back seat, I can feel the wintry night beyond the windows. Zipping up the coat against the cold, I ask, “You got a ticket before you picked me up?”
Paul runs a hand over his forehead, knocking off his baseball cap in the process. His freed hair falls into his eyes and I can’t resist reaching out to tuck it behind his ear. It feels just as soft as I thought it would. “Technically it was after I was off the clock,” he says, his voice low between us. When I start to pull my hand back, he takes it in his own and presses it to his lips. I feel him grin against my knuckles. “What can I say? I had something hot and ready I wanted to deliver to your door.”
As cheesy as that sounds, I melt to hear it. Without even realizing it, I make up my mind. “How about this? Come back to my place and I’ll run your uniform through the wash. It’ll be nice and clean by the time you head home. Tomorrow.”
“The shirt, too?” I nod. “Undies?”
“Everything.” The word sounds like a promise to my own ears, and my body trills at the suggestion beneath it.
Catching my drift, Paul leers. “What’ll I wear while you’re doing my laundry?”
I drop my hand from his and find my way to the front of his briefs again, where another erection has started to blossom. “Who says we have to wear anything at all?”
THE ENDQuintessential
Jerry Bennett didn’t know why the shipping company he worked for insisted on always having the latest and greatest electronics in the office. Last year, all the computers had been upgraded to the newest version of Windows, and for weeks afterward, nothing seemed to work right. Customer invoices weren’t sent, bills of lading disappeared, shipments hung up in loading bays waiting for authorization that never came. The moment they seemed to get all the kinks worked out of the system, the e-mail client they had switched to stopped working properly. Then their accounting program was updated and that, too, went kaplooey.
Some days he wondered if he wasn’t getting too old for this crap. He could remember when bills of lading were handwritten in triplicate. Sure, the pink copy on the bottom was sometimes too faded to read, but at least the document didn’t disappear into cyberspace. It remained in a file somewhere for all eternity.
Not any longer. All their old documents had been scanned or re-entered into the computer. He couldn’t go to the file cabinet, pull out a drawer, and root for an old invoice or waybill. They didn’t exist. Or rather, they did, but as bits of binary code on a hard drive somewhere, encrypted with a password that changed weekly, and even though he received an update via e-mail from IT each week, he never remembered the long combination of numbers and letters that would unlock their files
Was all that really necessary? Who could possibly want to steal shipping documents that were filed away and forgotten twenty years ago?
Then last week, it was announced that all the company computers would be upgraded again. Not even Windows this time—they were going Mac. Jerry wasn’t even sure what that meant, really, but the quick overview they were given of the new system hurt his brain. In some ways it looked similar, true, but the guys in the IT department had pressed the need to learn keyboard shortcuts and Jerry just couldn’t get it. What was wrong with using the mouse? “Too slow,” they told him. “Next question?”
Too slow, my ass,he thought. At forty-three, he liked to think he was still in the prime of his life. He was active after work—spent his evenings at the gym, and his weekends hiking or rafting. Whenever he went out with friends, his rugged good looks still drew attention. He never sat at home Friday or Saturday night. He dressed well and enjoyed his bachelor’s life. How many times had a restaurant server written her number—or his—on the bottom of Jerry’s receipt? Jerry fooled around with men and women, and none had managed to tie him down yet. So how could he be getting too old to figure out how to do his job?
When he came into work Monday morning, a brand new MacBook Pro sat on his desk. It looked so…so small. He tossed his briefcase into his chair and stared at the thin sliver of shiny aluminum. It looked insubstantial, and when he lifted it, it felt virtually weightless. How could they replace his hulking desktop computer, which used to sit under his desk so it wouldn’t take up too much space, with this thing? There were no cords connecting it to anything, no mouse, nothing. Did it even work?
Carefully, he set the MacBook aside and opened his briefcase. Inside was the thick, Windows-based laptop he used whenever he had to take work home. He pulled out the tangled cord and crawled under his desk to plug it into the power strip, then ran the cord up behind the desk before plugging it into the laptop. There was a small mouse in the briefcase, too, which he plugged into the laptop before turning it on. The MacBook sat to one side, neglected. He’d use this old thing until they pried it from his cold, dead hands.