by Dave Edelman
( page 2 )
by Dave Edelman
( page 2 )
They were brought together by a cliched series of accidents that skirted dangerously close to the non-existent. Shelly, spilling box of stale popcorn on his lap as she passed, then the usually reticent Lawrence inviting her to sit and chat. Her reaching to brush a stray popped kernel from his lap and feeling, oddly, grotesquely, his unexpected excitement.
But then it didn't seem so grotesque. The planets had shifted, the astral ebb and flow had somehow come into line to make the impossible momentarily plausible, even desirable. Suddenly, from nowhere the couple had a history, a shared consciousness woven out of an accidental touch; the concept of "they" had come irreversibly into being. Before the coming attractions had even run their course, Lawrence and Shelly had vacated their twelfth row center seats for a more snug, private pair towards the rear. Halfway through the film, the blunt object of her original curiosity had become a comfortable fixture in her hand while her panties sat winsomely on the adjoining seat, temporarily vacant. When he shuddered in warm, liquidy orgasm, the film literally erupted into color.
Shelly and Lawrence vowed that this would not happen again, if indeed it had really happened the first time. They nevertheless exchanged phone numbers in the lobby, with his exhortation to "call anytime if you just want to talk" and hers with the prohibition of never leaving messages on the machine or calling after six on weekdays. Shelly could hardly see him, her eyes reacting to the sudden shift from the womb-like darkness of the theater to the piercing artificial light in the lobby. Her only lasting impression of him was a mild feeling of huskiness and quiet, manly confidence. In her mental gallery, Lawrence had all the clarity of a Monet.
Teddy hadn't left the kitchen, he was tugging at her sleeve and waving a Jello pudding popsicle in her face, already bitten, claiming that since he had already started one, Shelly should let him finish it. "So what do you remember about me?" asked Shelly coyly. She heard Lawrence chuckle at their resumption of an old game.
"You were -- what's the word? -- Cat-like. Cattish. Feline. You knew what you wanted and you came and got it."
"No, I mean literally. Physically."
"Wonderful breasts," he sighed. "Thighs firm and comfortable. Your cunt was wet as honey." She imagined Lawrence skimming a computer magazine as he talked, basking in the glow of a space age halogen lamp. He once told her that he had the ability, oft admired by his colleagues, to size up hardware components in the background of his daily life, devoting free niches of thought to the task like a CPU allocating spare memory. Was he doing this now she wondered? Was he really thinking "tomorrow will be a bad day for Intel stock"?
"You know," Shelly sighed, "what it does to me when you use that word.
"Which word?"
"You know which one."
"If we have to stop to explain everything to each other," said Lawrence, "we're going to miss our rendezvous on the bus."
Since their last big silence and dual promise not to talk to each other anymore, which had been about three months past, their calls had been honed down to a ritual. First a hesitant dance around the topic at hand, then a tentative tiptoe over the borderline, and suddenly, the crude Anglo-Saxon finality of that
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