by Rachel Torrent

Earl Ray was in the back of the store, looking for some inventory stats in his office. He wasn’t concentrating much on his task, though. He couldn’t get his mind off his wife.

In their bed the night before, she’d turned over to him and laid her cheek on the right side of his chest. He always slept shirtless, so she’d kissed his chest and traced circles in his chest hair. Then she’d lightly brushed his left nipple with her palm. She’d moved her fingers down the line of hair to his groin, stopping at his boxer shorts.

All the while, he was playing with her hair and caressing her neck. He knew she wanted this foreplay to stretch into love-making. And usually it did. But on this night, he’d been distracted and not as interested. And now he couldn’t remember why.

When she’d slipped her index finger under the elastic of his shorts to continue tracing the trail of hair she claimed to love so much, he’d stopped her with, “Sweetheart, please don’t. I ain’t exactly up for it tonight.” He didn’t want her to discover that he was barely interested.

So she had stopped and rested her hand on his flat stomach as she still kissed his chest. He then put both arms around her and pulled her closer to him. “Okay. I like the snuggling part too,” she said into his chest. They both fell asleep that way.

Why, he asked himself now in his office, didn’t I just let her have her way with me? He knew she would have gladly done whatever it took to please him.

“ER!” Jason, the sales associate (as he preferred to be called), yelled at him from the front. “There’s someone here to see you.” Jason, who was young, thought himself clever for calling his boss “ER.”

“Damn,” Earl Ray whispered. He had worn jeans today with a black T-shirt. The protruding bulge he now had in front would be obvious. “Be right out,” he yelled back.

He listened to Jason chatting with his visitor and recognized the voice as Lonnie’s, that girl who worked over at the Matthews’ wilderness store. She looked like a Swedish beauty queen who’d never in her life done a damaging thing to her perfect body. She didn’t always play with a full deck, though, he thought. But who beds a woman’s brain anyway?

He smiled to himself at this. He’d never bed Lonnie, he knew. No need to with what he had waiting for him at home. Julie was a typhoon in bed, sometimes animalistic. He was always learning something new with her.

And he smiled again when he thought of Julie and Lonnie at the same time. As ferocious as Julie could be in the bedroom, she was twice as much when it came to being jealous over him. He almost never got her calmed down that night he’d spontaneously taken an old female friend out to dinner while Julie had gone out with Sahndra. He’d brought the old friend back to their house to meet Julie, but Julie saw it as a date or as him showing too much interest in another woman, and she’d gone ballistic. It took him two good hours to talk her down from that one.

When he went out into the store, Jason was shamelessly flirting with Lonnie.

“Hello, Lonnie. How’s every little thing today?” He asked her as he walked behind the counter.

“Oh, hi there, Mr. Michaels! Things are dandy! How’s Julie?”

He laughed out loud before he could stop himself. “She’s wonderful.”

“Glad to hear it. I just stopped by to get that knife you special-ordered for me. Eric’s birthday is Thursday.” She was a little too bubbly for his taste. But she looked good.

“Oh, yeah. It’s over there, Jason,” he said, pointing under the counter.

“Mr. Michaels, I swear you look a lot like Mr. Matthews. Y’all could be brothers.”

“Yeah, well, we get that a bunch.”

While Jason finished the sale, he hurried back to his office, closed the door, and called his wife at her restaurant.

“Can you break away for lunch?” he asked her.

“Oh, honey….I’ve got the seafood vendor here, and somebody spilled something and it’s a mess, and—”

“Please, darling. I’m hurting for you.”

She paused, and he could hear the chaotic atmosphere in the background. “Earl Ray, it’s not a good time—”

“Sweetheart, if you want me to beg, then you got it. I’m begging. I can’t wait ‘til tonight to see you.”

She paused again. “You want to meet at home?”

“Unless you want to come over here. I can lock the office door.”

“Oh, I get it,” she said. “You just wanna screw me without even buying me lunch.” She was shrewd.

“Honey, I’ll buy you the goddamn Eiffel Tower if that’s what you want. Now name me another husband who’d do that AND beg his wife to come home at lunch just so he can make love to her?”

“All right, Earl Ray. Just this once. It’ll take me about an hour, though, to get away from here.”

“See ya then. Oh, and Julie?”

“What now?”

“I love you.”

He went by the deli and picked up some sandwiches and some chilled champagne. At home, he found their champagne bucket and filled it up with ice and stuck the bottle in it. He put that in the bedroom. Then he spread a tablecloth on the bed.

Everything was set when she finally arrived. He ushered her into their bedroom where she saw the little picnic spread with sandwiches on paper plates and champagne in plastic glasses. He came around in front of her, slowly. Then, slightly smiling, he said, “Lunch is ready.”

She began to smile too. She hadn’t expected this. “Earl Ray, you’re such a romantic.”

“I always figure I’m not romantic enough. I don’t always know how to do it right.”

“Well, honey, you’ve done fine today……..except you’re still dressed.”

“What?” He looked really puzzled.

“We can’t have a picnic in bed wearing clothes.”

So they undressed quickly in front of each other. She settled onto the bed while he poured champagne. When he sat down too, they ate their lunch and sipped champagne without saying much at all. He hoped she realized that he was feeding her first. Before screwing her.

She didn’t finish all of her sandwich and put the plate on the floor. As she drank more champagne, she said, “What got you so worked up?”

“Thinking about making love to you.”

She leaned over and poured a stream of champagne out of her cup onto his chest. He was reclining back on one elbow, so the liquid dribbled down through his chest hair, on down to his groin.

He was a little startled but didn’t move. He knew her. “You spilled some,” he said with a grin. “Are you gonna clean it up?”

“Yes, I am. Right now.” She poured some more on him and bent over him. She proceeded to clean the champagne off him with her hungry mouth, providing delicious pleasure for both of them.

The picnic lunch evolved into an afternoon of love-making, both of them fulfilling the other’s most intimate and erotic desires. Their mutual passion filled their bed.

Afterwards, they both felt satiated and exhausted. They lay against each other, very much in love.

“Thanks for lunch,” she told him.

“You’re quite welcome, ma’am,” he said back to her in his best low bedroom voice.