Noon, Sunday, June 9th, 2024
For Penny’s birthday, Lyrou agreed to bring her and five friends to an indoor water park for a couple of hours before drying off and taking them to a pizza party on a trampoline, dodgeball, traceur course, tug-o-war, and battle-beam facility. Coming out of the locker rooms in their one-piece boylegs and goggles, Penny and the girls did a tip-toe short-step run not to slip, going altogether like a gaggle of geese to the splash pad and spray ground. Penny shouted out in ecstatic joy at the niñita leading the charge, “Carla! Wait!” and they were off to their own devices under the scanning eyes of the lifeguards.
Lyrou emerged from the changing rooms shortly after, intent on doing laps in the long, deep pool. She kept her hair tied back and wore a white, stringy two-piece wireless soft-cup bralette top and a triangle-cut bottom tied at the hip with a bow, its brightness contrasting beautifully with her yellow-brown skin tone at its summertime darkest.
On her delicate backhands, little extensor tendons and veins articulated as she plucked her bikini-bottom strings up with a snap on her swaying hips; on slender arms, soft, browned pleating at the cubital folds as they came up and out to adjust her top, trying-but-failing to cover protruding underboob pouring and sideboob spillage. Her long legs nearly crossed in the effort of balance, popliteal hollow drawing close behind patella, her adductors tightening on the wet floor, the faint beginnings of capillary tracing around the malleoli of her ankles as they locked and held. Already, and without an announcement, she had earned the attention of other pool-goers.
As she walked, her magnetic movement began at her shoulders, her dark, coiled hair bouncing against and brushing them, where her deltopectoral grooves softened and deepened with each gentle swing of her arms, her anterior axillary folds briefly tightening, then releasing. Above them, her clavicular hollows caught sunlight when her shoulders rolled back, a shallow geometry of breath. Below, her inframammary folds held steady beneath the bikini top, anchoring the weight and nuanced sway of her chest, between gleaming, voluminous breasts rocking so slightly with each planting of her heels, her intermammary cleft opening and narrowing as her posture shifted right-left, step-by-step. And with each step, she collected more looks.
Her ribcage flowed into her abdomen along her costal margin contours, a tender outward arc that flattened as she exhaled. At her center, her epigastric hollow appeared and disappeared with her stride, giving way to the faint vertical line of her linea alba, which guided many curious eyes downward to her lickable umbilical depression; this small, natural indentation that folded softly as her torso twisted so. On either side, her semilunar lines surfaced as quiet curves, like curly braces bracketing her firm, feminine abdomen. That scrumptious belly of hers bared to the hungry-all.
Lower, her wide iliac crest contours defined her thick hips beneath her bikini seam, the musical bone lent her matron-aura. Mother Nature made her to carry a baby. From there, her inguinal furrows traced inward, step-by-step. Her medial thigh fullness moved with a soft, delayed rhythm, and just above her knees, her vastus medialis mounds rose and fell subtly, rounding the line of her legs as they carried her onward; she went cutting through several fields of view and stealing them.
Almost physically, she saw herself through all their eyes as they found and set on her. She kept her head high and checked her right; in the hot tub, a man pretending to listen to his woman as she spoke… but looked past his other half to watch Lyrou stroll near-nakedly by. Lyrou turned her head left; three teenage boys who had gathered at the bottom of a diving board ladder and were elbowing one another, pointing under their arms to ‘check her out’, then acting cool and scattering their gazes as she saw them.
As she crossed the pool deck in her bikini, her movement clarified the shape of her thighs. Who knew they made women like this? Her trochanteric depressions surfaced just below her hips and softened again as she stepped, while her fascial tethering dimples appeared and vanished along her upper thighs with the swing of her legs. At the top of each stride, her inguinal creases formed diagonal hinges where her thighs met her pelvis, easing open to reveal her femoral triangle contours beside them. Unspoken but evident in their unblinking fix upon her, men saw all this body of hers and coveted more, involuntarily envisioning her bottomless.
Fixing her sight forward, she saw, nearing her from straight ahead, a true strapping short king with a strut, his eyes slid up and down her head-to-toe, taking in the spectacle of her. Passing one another, she briefly rotated at her waist to match his head-turn, furrowing at her oblique. Once passed, he turned to look again for her backside. He took in sight of her nearly bare rear, her rounded posterior deltoid curves, and the back caps of her shoulders rolled as her arms swung, a bikini-top lace compression grooved through her smooth skin, swept by her hair, beneath which her scapular contours surfaced and receded in sequence, each shoulder blade briefly legible before smoothing away in repetition. Between them ran her faint interscapular groove, a shallow channel catching the rippling, refractive water-caustic light off the pool’s surface as her posture shifted. Down the center of her back, her soft spinal furrow traced the line of her vertebrae, on either side quiet paraspinal lines that answered her stride in parallel. A gift to see.
As she continued toward the pool, this admiring homme bien charpenté twisted his neck-and-torso around. He neglected to watch where he was walking as his stubborn eyes followed lower to her feminine lumbar hollow, her lordotic curve, and to her magnificent dimples of Venus. Below them, her upper sacral cleft peeked forbidden over the line of her bikini bottom, nested deep between her prominent gluteal slope so distinctly African, and his pupils dilated and darted over the vast upper plane of her buttocks. Under her expansive, pouring, voluptuously plump bottom, her subgluteal creases marked the transition from hip to leg, momentarily deepening as her weight shifted forward. Now several meters between them, he still turned to spy her. She had, frankly, the ultimate late-30’s mommy body.
Stepping down into the pool, now better concealed below the neck, she gave her mind over to memories of swimming in Paris, in lycée at sixteen, and started her laps. She’d a coach then who broke it to her, ‘You’ll never be a pro-swimmer, whether you’d started training at birth or took performance-enhancing drugs.’ Lyrou had been insulted then; did Madame Roland mean to say Lyrou didn’t have the discipline or the competitive spirit or the sports ethic? Did her coach put stock in a racist stereotype? Did her coach just not like her? Non. As her entraîneur put it, ‘Your torso isn’t long enough, your legs are stilts, and you don’t have the hydrodynamic body a great swimmer must.’ Lyrou had given her coach a puzzled expression, to which she asked, ‘Ma fille, look at the best swimmers I have here. The question isn’t what do they have that you don’t, but what do you have that they don’t.’ Looking at them and then down at herself, it was as if the ugly duckling finally grasped that it was a swan and should stop trying to quack with the quackers. But like ducks, swans still wish to swim.
Lyrou completed her laps and climbed up the ladder. The water running out of her hair and off her body gave her a sleek shine that couldn’t be regarded as other than anatomical art. Her senses so honed, she felt precisely where she was being watched from and put her sights on it, as if an invisible tether linked them. It was the talkative wife from the hot tub, now standing in the shallowest end of the wave pool, minding a splish-splashing toddler. Even as Lyrou stood erect and made her way around the pool edge, this woman didn’t look away, rather they kept their sights locked. She gave Lyrou a nasty scowl of contempt. Lyrou gave the slightest lip pucker, winked, and walked on with herself.
⚜
Morning, Monday, June 10th, 2024
Garin found, by a simple search of his name, that Tom had a jiu-jitsu academy. He planned to meet him there as he opened.
Tom spotted Garin as they both approached the entrance, that cool summer coastal New Jersey morning air fogging his breath as he continued forward unflinching, “Can’t you shoot me at high noon, cowboy? At least then I’ll be awake for my demise.”
Garin pointed both index fingers at Tom, elbows bent at the waist, an expression of steely-eyed determination as he neared, “Awake? Blam blam.. bite bullets bully.. that’ll put you back to sleep for good homewrecker.”
Tom did a slow-motion sway, rotating his arms as if he dodged both bullets in an action movie. “Come inside.” Tom unlocked and held the door for Garin.
Garin entered silently. Tom followed behind and watched as his guest looked about the gym. “Here to sublimate your aggression like every other guy in a tie daydreaming he’s a hard-punching, shin-striking, arm-barring, head-locking titleholder? Are you an aspiring fighter, Garin?”
“No. I’m an aspiring lover.” Garin viewed the rack of dumbbells, stray barbells, and motivational posters of famous jiu-jitsu champions.
“Then why come to a place where men contend with men?” Tom inquired, crossing his arms, elbows like sledgehammers, softball-sized deltoids popping in his form-fitting blue t-shirt.
“I’m a man contending with a man. You’re Lyrou’s favorite lover.” Garin toured Tom’s jiu-jitsu academy, unoccupied before opening time.
“Does that bother you?” Tom looked at the two of them walking in the tall form mirror along the whole length of the wall.
Garin nodded slowly, “Yes, it does.”
“Of course it does. But, so what?” Tom shrugged, his hands clasped behind his back.
“I want to be her favorite lover,” Garin said quickly.
“I don’t offer a class in that.” Tom frowned cordially.
“Do we need to earn color belts to learn why she’s especially into you?” Garin’s tone was demanding.
Tom did a slight, uncertain juggling gesture as they walked, stepping around and past a hanging punching bag, “Ask her.”
“Like catching a lizard’s tail that comes off in my hand.” Garin raised his hand, making a pinching motion. “Does she tell you anything illuminating about me?” Garin asked.
“Never, or if she mentioned you much, I forgot it.” Tom paced with Garin. “It needn’t be a puzzle. Think. What do I have that you don’t?” Tom looked at Garin, seeming to have some answers in mind. “What does she see when she looks at you, and then what does she see when she looks at me?” They briefly looked into the form mirror along the wall.
“Two innocuous fellas.” Garin played oblivious to what he saw, waiting for Tom’s take.
“Squint and perceive our juxtaposition with a housewife’s eyes. I’m a prickly-faced, long-haired, sleeves-busting, piercings and necklace, rough-n-reckless rogue sort of guy. I play guitar, well. I smoke mapacho laced with I don’t know what. You’re chasing the American Dream in dress socks smelling like a lawn and coffee.”
“Uncool… cool.” Garin held his hand up to himself, then rolled it over in a gesture to Tom.
“Verily. And there’s more, maybe I shouldn’t say.” Tom averted his gaze and continued walking on the gym mat.
“You’re a tough guy.” Garin guessed.
“Oh, I do beat a pussy up.” Tom nodded, his double-entendre clear.
“You’re talking about what nature gave you?” Garin shook his head, a slight laugh.
“So you noticed that night? It matters. Maybe she doesn’t say it, not to you, but her girlfriends are another story, and she feels the difference.” Tom’s tone was that of an expert in his field with a thick layer of bragging beneath it.
“Is it all about the stick?” Garin countered.
Stopping at the counter at the entrance to his jiu-jitsu gym, “No, but it’s nigh prerequisite for the particular role. As are a number of other items; I drive a roaring Bayerische convertible, you drive that sputtering Daehanmingook safety-mobile. I’m tattooed like a court-martialed sailor; you’re going to interview applicants or to share the good word. These small and not-so-small details add up to a big contrast.”
“Superficial. There’s something more psychological to it than that. There is her attraction to… an underlying quality you have… je ne sais quoi.” Garin became frustrated, feeling that he was close to understanding yet couldn’t, and now maybe Tom himself didn’t really grasp his own magnetism for Lyrou either.
Tom balled up his fist and lightly pounded it once on the counter, “Women are pressed into the role of attention-givers, but they’re attention-seekers. More than that, they want men to take and subjugate them.”
“Take them?” Garin smiled, amused.
“Steal them. A woman wants a reprobate to ambush her in the parking lot at night, throw her in the trunk, and drive away with her.” Tom became animated; he believed what he was saying. “Like Injuns or Vikings raiding the camp and riding off with the booty.”
“That’s extreme, a female fantasy on the covers of paperback smut.” Garin dismissed Tom’s idea.
“Yes. They turn those pages one-handed, and women are not fulfilled just to read about it; they want the extreme to happen to them, for the ink to come to life. But for the select tiny few, it doesn’t.” Tom almost sounded sorry to womankind.
Garin nodded skeptically, “Decency and order see to that.”
Tom shook his head, “Right, such decency and order enough to make them sick with longing. So a woman chooses the men who look and act and are like if she were in the wilderness. He came upon her bathing naked in a stream. He’d run her down until she collapsed, tackle and nearly drown her, grab her up over his shoulder, and fuck the shit out of her in the bushes and under the trees, screaming and clawing.”
Garin shook his head, “Maybe some women have a phase.”
Tom grinned, “Some? A phase? No. Women break their hearts for and lose their minds to serial killers, the broke and vagrant, societal rejects, the worst men dapper folks look down on. Women don’t want to feel that a man can protect her, provide for her, and serve her. Maybe her rational mind does, of course, but not her vaginal-brain. Her self-destructive inner self wants to feel that a man can tie her up, take her by her neck, smack her into submission, ruin her life, burn her money, use her, throw her away. She wants a man who will leave her pregnant and then move on to repeat his game with several dozen other women yearning for the same, sowing his seed all about.” Tom had gone into a fiery speech mode.
“My stars. Is that what women want?” Garin feigned convinced.
“I apologize. I’m wrong. It isn’t what women want, but what they need. Maybe not consciously. By her raw instincts, by the power of her genes, she needs that.” Tom looked out the window and saw his martial arts students beginning to walk in, dropped off by their mothers.
“After any woman gets her wish upon a star wedding, after the first birth, her overwhelming basest drive is to diversify the genetic composition of her progeny. Her husband, if he prevents that, unwittingly by his presence or by his jealous surveillance and control, will become the object of her disdain, and he’ll be pushed away by some means: ceaseless nagging, petty insults, sexual aversion, incessant arguments, intolerable disrespect, and so forth. Divorce and affairs are beating at the door and will manifest. It will be one or the other.” Tom forecast.
“Evolutionary strategy. DNA propagation.” Garin put his finger to his lip.
“That’s right. Any woman is a reproductive organism.” Tom said so smugly.
“It’s a neat bro theory, but how does it apply to Lyrou? She chose you off an app like a cucumber off the produce display. You were the one taken, not her.” Garin countered.
“Garin, you’re the one mistaken. I met Lyrou for the first time in the flesh.” Tom looked him in the eyes to inform him.
“But… you did?” Garin understood then that Lyrou didn’t tell him the whole story.
“I met her when I was at a museum taking my students on a field trip, the science center on the Hudson, their reward for a good tournament showing. I also found my reward for being a good master. Lyrou was showing her two precious little kiddos the exhibits. She was quite an exhibit herself. Not being a vegetable, I made the move.”
“You approached her then in that setting? With them present?” Garin suppressed his anger, but it showed in his eyes.
“I did more than approach. You might’ve asked her how she met me, and her tail fell off. It went like this: I didn’t ask her anything, and her clothes fell off.” Tom extended and flexed his two fingers, “I didn’t meet her online, but things became digital. Are you seeing the difference between us two fellas?”
Garin paused to take that in. “You’re her favorite because you’re an asshole and a nut.”
“An asshole? A nut? A man who takes whatever he wants, especially women, by usufruct. You see this blond kid with the red ear pods getting dropped off.” Tom pointed with his elbow.
“You bagged his mom?” Garin stood cross-armed.
“Like groceries! You got it. She’s crazier and hotter than your Lyrou, I promise. Holy smokes. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I’m not throwing no shade, the whole polythetic, overly educated, high maintenance, Française caramel, hybrid vigor quadroonette, stay-at-home married MILF Jezebel presentation… wow, she’s a one-of-a-kind classic fine little number, and much to my forte. I like her laugh. But they’ve each got their own thang going on, and they’re ubiquitous. You might pluck them from any given tree, when you’re me, the sultan of suburbia, replete with a harem of cul-de-sac concubines.” Tom smiled broadly and abrasively.
“I love her laugh. And hey, don’t get me wrong, no shade, the whole jiu-jitsu gigolo presentation… wow, the mouch of MMA.” Garin mimicked Tom.
Tom paused, another big grin, “It has its female fans.”
“Then what can a hubby do, if walking down the matrimonial aisle is a nice orderly permission, a square little contract, yet what she wants is to be violated and stolen?” Garin stood aside to make room for the students to begin entering.
“Nothing. I never got married. Domestication degenerates any organism, as it did wolves into dogs. It ruins the dynamic male these women crave, a beast, not a pet.” Tom said as if it were a no-brainer.
“And it would keep you from what you crave,” Garin added.
“The most delicious meal in the world is a steak and cheese lobster, with a sour cream baked potato, green beans, some grilled shrimp, sliced onions, green peppers, and a good strawberry lemonade. If you told me you’d serve me that dish today, my mouth would water. It already is. Tell me that’s the only meal I can have for the rest of my life every day, breakfast, lunch, dinner, forever until I die… then no way. Not for a hundred million bucks. It’s fun and deeply satisfying to have sex with a variety of women, to put my greedy hands on them, to feel them bare, to see them naked, to smell them close, to hear them with my ear pressed against their lungs, their one-of-a-kind lips. There are thousands of minute variances, and some not minute, between women in those throws. It’s an inimitable experience that stuffy matrimony deprives one of. A life the vow steals, ends. I need variety. Variety is vital. There are other edibles in this world. But we adopt this imposition in wedlock, though the hearts, minds, and bodies of other lovers are the greatest delicacy a person can consume.” Tom proclaimed, and so believed.
With the incoming students, Garin thought he ought to make his leave, “Man shall not live by bread alone. I should be going.”
Tom finger-whistled and gestured to two teenage boys, his students, to stop high-kicking each other full force, then turned back to Garin. “Will I see you again?”
“I intend to depose and obviate you in this arena. If I see you again, then I failed.” Garin looked serious.
“Will you come with a real gun then?” Tom assessed the threat unblinking.
“Do you think I would use it?” Garin stopped partway out the door.
Tom spoke low, eye-to-eye, “As a young buck in my first rut, my cougar sank her fangs and claws into me, tore me up, she cheated on me. I was so hurt and pissed off, I planned to go and kill her and him together. Then my big brother told me something; he said I dodged a bullet. I didn’t know what he meant. I was so enraged I couldn’t think clearly. My big brother said, ” Slow down, you weren’t married to her, you didn’t have kids with her, scrape her off and move on to the next woman. So, I did, and onto the next, and the next, and the next.”
Garin nodded, “… and the next until the next was my woman. Now, are you going to dodge a real bullet?”
Tom tried, “It’s not the same for you as it was for me, unless you want it to be. Just scrape her off.”
Garin interrupted, “I’ll take that into consideration. In the meantime, will you be taking into consideration if paramedics are going to scrape you up?”
Tom didn’t allow for a gap in their dialogue, “You’re a good dad. Ruining your kids’ lives isn’t worth whatever it is you’d get putting holes in some mouch.”
Garin leveled his arm up, pointing his imaginary pistol square at Tom’s forehead, “Do you think I might spare you on the hope that another jilted Jim or John will take one for team horns and do the dirty deed for the rest of us?”
Tom nodded, “One of them might, but you’re not in the top five likeliest culprits, the ones who might make me sit up at midnight and ask myself if their wives are worth the risk; pill habits, criminal backgrounds, pride.”
Garin cut him off, “Pride? Do I not have pride?”
Tom shook his head, “You have pride in your loyalty, but not pride in the loyalty you command in others. You’re not a leader, that’s why your wife didn’t follow you, that’s why you’d let another man get vengeance for you, and that’s why I’m going to fuck your wife again if you don’t shoot me. I mean, coming in here like this, this bluff with no bang, I have to do it.”
“Yawn. If obsoleting you is a matter of being more interesting than you, then it’ll be easy. I think you’re going to be safe.” Garin reholstered his invisible piece at his belt. “Besides, nothing worthwhile comes without risk of deathly peril, and I won’t make anything you’ve done with her worthwhile.”
“What candor you have. Good luck, Garin.” Tom gave a little Asiatic head bow as Garin turned to leave.
⚜
