Over the years Wilford had honed his observational skills to an expert level, if not to perfection, and could ogle a girl to his heart’s content without her ever realizing it. Now, after dropping in unannounced on his older brother’s widow, he found himself seated on her couch opposite a female classmate of her eighteen-year-old son. The teenage girl sat quietly collected in her armchair with her hands holding a book in her lap and her ankles demurely crossed with her nearly closed knees angled to the side while his sister-in-law was elsewhere in the house advising her boy that he, too, had a surprise visitor. Until five minutes before, when they both parked their cars at the curb and coincidentally walked up to Colleen Womack’s bungalow together, the two guests had never met.
Maximizing the moment’s serendipity, Wilford slumped into the pillow against the sofa’s armrest. His casual posture had a two-fold purpose. Not only did it serve to put his quarry at ease in his presence, it also substantially improved his line of sight to her modestly posed body. He now had a straight-on view to include the mysterious triangle where her sheer navy tights closed the gap between her minimally spread patellae.
Eighteen-year-old Suzanne Pomeroy neither knew, nor cared, that the reclined old guy across the coffee table was objectifying her. She was a veteran cheerleader at Theodore Roosevelt High School. After three years of shaking her boobs and doing splits in mid-air, she was inured to the leers she got from guys in the bleachers at the gym or in the grandstand at the football field. In fact, if she thought about it at all, she enjoyed the attention and was glad that she was cute enough to be eyeballed in that way.
Suzie’s mom had told her, when she first began to blossom long ago, “It’s nature, sweetie. You’ll never be able to completely hide your feminine features, so you might as well accept them. It’s simply a fact that boys, and later, men, will look. The secret is balance… you don’t want to look trashy, but there’s no reason you can’t package yourself to your advantage.”
While they stood side-by-side on the Womack front porch waiting for Colleen to come to the door, Wilford had accurately gauged Suzanne’s height to be five-foot-six and her weight at about a buck twenty-eight, or so. He further estimated that, within her champagne long-sleeve stretch-knit sweater and cornflower-blue pleated linen skirt, her lithe hourglass figure was probably 34-23-34 with pert B-cup tits. Now, as he lounged with his right arm bent behind his head and his eyelids half-closed as if he were bored out of his mind, he played his favorite girl-watching game. Surreptitiously scrutinizing her mid-section from her mock turtleneck to the edge of darkness as high up her thighs as he could see under her skirt’s hem, he pretended he had X-ray vision and made educated guesses about the unknown.
After Colleen returned with Charlie, then disappeared again to her bedroom to change clothes to go out to dinner with Wilford, Suzie left with Charlie for the kitchen. Alone in the living room, Wilford tuned the ancient Magnavox twenty-six-inch color television to the local news and then lay back down on the couch to chill. The kids’ noises, as they put together the spaghetti supper that Colleen had previously planned to serve herself and Charlie, worked with the newscaster’s monotonous voice like a sedative. The next thing he knew, he was being shaken from a dream in which Suzie happily drooled around his pink-lipstick-stained cock while she frantically gulped his never-ending fresh hot semen explosions.
Colleen called softly, as she jostled her dozing brother-in-law, “Hey! Ford! Do you still want to go out for dinner? Or do you want to finish your nap, while I throw more pasta in the pot?” She laughed lightly, then said, “Charlie and his friend wolfed their spaghetti and bread like they hadn’t eaten for days. Now they’re in his room discussing Mark Twain.”
Wilford shook out his cobwebs and asked, “Uh, what time is it, Collie?”
Colleen glanced at the china mantle-clock over the electric fireplace and answered, “Ten ’til seven.”
Ford sat up on the sofa and said, “Okay. Let’s go, then. The reservation was for seven-thirty… they usually run a little behind schedule on Friday nights anyway. We’ll probably have time to have a drink at the bar while we wait for our table to open up.”
As Ford prepared to pull his red fourteen-year-old Monte Carlo away from the curb, Colleen buckled in and asked, as delicately as she could manage, “We’re going ‘Dutch’, like in-laws, not like we’re dating, right?”
Ford put the coupe back in park and gave Colleen a hard-to-read quizzical look, then replied, “Sure, if that makes you feel more comfortable. But I had an evening planned and my credit card has lots of room. I’m okay with picking up the tab, the same as if my date hadn’t texted me that she was suddenly stricken with flu and couldn’t make it.” He paused as he glanced obliquely at the seatbelt dividing her full chest just above her ivory broadcloth blouse’s deep V-neck. “By the way, you look terrific. All the other sisters-in-law at the restaurant are going to hate you!”
Colleen blushed involuntarily. “Um, thank you,” she murmured, barely above a whisper. Then, in full voice, she added confidently, “Alright then, Mr. Warbucks, I mean, Mr. Womack, go ahead and spend your hard-earned money. I’ll consider it a Mother’s Day gift, even though, of course, I’m not your mother!” They both laughed aloud as Ford put the Chevy back in drive and goosed a throaty rumble from its motor.
At the same time that Colleen shut her front door to follow Wilford out to his car, Suzanne shut ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ and leaned forward to toss the volume onto the maple study-desk in Charlie’s bedroom. There was only one straight chair in the room and Charlie was in it while she sat nearby on his standard-size bed. Her movement pushed a tidal wave of strawberry-scented shampoo from her Swedish-blonde pony-tail hair to his nostrils and erotic-response center. Embarrassed by his feelings and afraid that his dick would stiffen, just like it did in seventh-period English class when she sat in her desk in front of him, he pushed back his chair as he choked, “Uh-h, you want a Coke, or something? I’m kinda thirsty.”
Suzie asked, “Sure, you got any Diet?”
“Yeah, that’s, like, all Mom’ll drink,” Charlie replied. Quickly turning his back, he hustled from the room, saying over his shoulder, “Bring your book.”