William Kitcher

Stroke Of Genius

I wanted to perch at the bar so I could more clearly drag my eyes over gorgeous Annie, the newish bartender, but it was infested with a lot of the usual late-afternoon drinkers rattling on about internal medical conditions, mythical/epic children and grandchildren, and deflated golf scores, so I hovered past them, took a sharp right to the front empty area of the bar, and ensconced myself into the dingy corner overlooking the street.

Annie brought me a beer, spilling (accidentally, or maybe not) some in my lap. She said, “Did you think about me today?”

Odd question, I thought, and while I struggled to discern the meaning, Annie said, “Well, did you?

I was confused although I inkled.

She stood there, strangely too long in my opinion, but I’m not the most reliable narrator of my own life. She said, “So, what I said… Did you think about me today?”

“Well, uh…”

“About 10:30.”

Damn. She’d nailed it. I’d jerked off thinking about Annie, but… what the fuck? The best I could come up with was another “Uh…”

“Coz,” she continued, “I had an orgasm behind the bar at 10:30, nothing I was doing, and your face popped into my brain. You were wanking, thinking about me, right?”

I was more than slightly confused. The universe seemed to be opening up to me.

Annie said, “How do you do that?”

“Uh, uh, uh, I don’t know… I had no idea I could do that.”

“It’s OK,” she said. “Just don’t do it all the time. Especially not when I’m working.”

Annie left, and I started to get hard just thinking about my morning…

OK. This wouldn’t do. I had to distract myself, and soon. Decay. Death. Mutilation. Suffering animals. Abattoir. Slaughterhouse. Slaughterhouse-Five. Movie. Valerie Perrine, half-naked, smiling, gorgeous, sexy. Damn. I was back in the same place, my jeans tightening.

I took a slug of beer, looked out the window, and concentrated on the traffic fumes, the street garbage, the ugly humanity. All was back to normal.

And then… And then… A young woman passed by and stopped in front of my window, her back turned toward me. She took her phone out of her purse and stared at it. She had long brown slightly curly hair that waved in the breeze, hair that flowed over her swimmer’s shoulders, ending at her hourglass waist, just above the most beautiful shorts-covering ass I’d ever seen. Black t-shirt. White shorts. A stark contrast in color, a perfect complement in beauty. And I…

And then… And then… She turned around. She stared at her phone as intently as I was staring at her. Jesus. Her front put her beautiful back to shame. Her eyes were a brown-black that looked like eternity. The smile that emerged from crimson lips that seemed to pulsate sparkled and exploded into a supernova of the whitest light not seen ever. Her cheekbones ascended to the sky. Her chin quivered slightly, her neck throbbed, the skin above the t-shirt line flushed. Jesus.

And then… There were her breasts. Jesus again. Not huge, not small, but absolutely perfect. She wasn’t wearing a bra but that made no difference to their solidity. I thought I saw one of her nipples rising. I looked up at her face. Her eyes were rolling, and her mouth hung open, and she seemed to be panting.

I realized I was completely hard and had been stroking myself for a while.

I looked over at the bar, and saw Annie nowhere, and the day drinkers had moved on to discussing bowel movements. I unzipped.

I slowed my motion, and looked back at my sidewalk woman. She put out a hand to steady herself against the window and I heard her moans. She rocked back and forth, and I delayed as long as I could.

There were no napkins at my table, only coasters and a discarded receipt from the night before, so I made do with those.

I was startled by the woman outside banging her hand on the window a few times, turned to the increasingly loud sounds, and caught her eye.

She smiled at me, and then a look of confusion crossed her face. And then I read her lips. She said, “That was you! I saw your face!”

All I could do was attempt the universal indication of bafflement: I shrugged my shoulders, extended my arms palms up, and turned my face into bemused befuddlement. I mouthed the words, “I don’t know how I do that.”

I had no idea if she knew what I said or meant because she went away forever.

I leaned back on the decaying pseudo-leather sticky bench as Annie brought me another beer. She said, “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing at all,” I said.

“Oh, man,” said Annie, you didn’t…”, looking at the wadded-up paper in my hand. She was being ironic; of course I did. She shook her head and backed away carefully.

As I sipped my beer languidly, my mind wandered back and forth until it settled on an incident from five years previously. I was living in Vancouver at the time, waiting for a bus. There was a woman waiting there as well. The bus never came. We looked at each other, said nothing, then moved together as one into the park next to the bus stop. We carefully removed each other’s clothes and fucked at least three times. By the time we dressed, and I got back to the street, she was gone.

I wonder how she feels having multiple orgasms every day for the past five years.