Wild Country

Chapter Nineteen

Feeling slightly raffish in his new finery, the young man found the Al Fresco Cafe in the western outskirts of SanTone Ringcity in time for a late lunch on Saturday. Al Fresco, with its outdoor canopied tables and a view of the new high rises, managed to combine TexMex and Creole trappings without being pricey or pretentious. He admired the available women as he ate a single crepe; noted that one or two of them made the admiration mutual; ordered a Dos Equis and waited for something better.

Something very much better arrived within the hour. He needed a double take, but with his second glance came an instant erection. Her fine straight hair was gathered loosely over her bare right shoulder in a cascade of reddish gold with auburn highlights, her flowered Mexican peasant blouse tucked into a wide belt decorated with flashy conchos. She carried a big cheap shoulder bag. Her skirt, a pleated black lace affair, showed off exquisitely modeled calves, her ankles accentuated by colorful needle heels. He had never seen anything in his life that looked more like instant nookie — and at a modest price.

She sat near the entrance, gripping her bag as though fearing it would wander off. He shouldered his first impulse aside — it would have been a blunt frontal approach — and waited, sampling her with his gaze. He wasn't the only one.

The waiter seemed to regard her as special new talent and leaned over her chair in a frank assay of her cleavage, his grin insolent and knowing. When she had to wave the waiter on his way, the watcher broke into a smile, which she discovered by some kind of personal radar. She looked away quickly, a blush mounting from her bare shoulders, and he found his erection throbbing at this lapse from her commercial appearance.

Presently, while studying a new arrival, he saw that the honey-blonde was staring at him with new interest. When the waiter appeared with her drink, a bulky gentleman wearing expensive rings, who had never let his eyes stray from her since she arrived, tried to pay. She seemed to consider the offer but refused it with a winning smile. The young man across the patio relaxed; this time, his impulse had been to weave himself a penholder using a few of the man's ring fingers.

Now the blonde's appraisal of the young man involved something between a glare and a leer. He let her look, gripping his beer to show the cords in his forearms, the open collar of his yellow shirt revealing sinew at his throat when he smiled. Then he came to an internal decision and stood up slowly, running a hand through his freshly barbered black thatch, shoving his chair back with a careful thrust of a sharkskin boot that matched the color of his hair. In those new western boots he stood tall and knew it.

Neither of them had any doubt about his intentions from the very first. "Waiting for anyone special?" He wondered if she suspected why he was holding his Stetson over the bulge at his crotch.

She must have known, for she studied the hat before meeting his gaze. "I could be. Are you anyone special?"

"I'm Sam Coulter from Monahans, ma'am, and that's special enough for most folks."

"I'll just bet it is," she said, and took his hat. Her smile was wide and innocent, but the hand that brushed his fly was deliciously guilty. "Sit, Sam Coulter from Monahans — if you can, in those tight britches."

He sat down as if poleaxed. "My Gawd, you're really something," he said, laughing.

She nodded, studying his face. "Those big brown eyes of yours affected my judgment," she murmured. "Buy me a drink?"

His turn to nod. He gestured to the waiter, pointed to her drink, made a two-finger V. "What do I call you?"

She drained her glass, licked her lips carefully before answering. "Margarita. Like it?"

"A blond Margarita; why not?" Suddenly, with an intensity he could not mask, he was leaning forward, gripping his elbows with opposite hands: "Let me tell you something for your own good, Margarita. You're lookin' at a man who's been hungry a lo-o-ong time. If you're not careful, I just might make a crepe out of you right here in front of all these people. Consider yourself warned."

She found his knee with hers. As the waiter set down their drinks, she spoke as if they were alone. "What flavor?"

"Hm?"

"I mean, will I be your main course, covered with cream cheese and spice, or more like a light dessert crepe?"

The waiter, wearing a freshly-goosed expression, wheeled away only after a pointed stare from both of them. Then the young man nodded at her, picked up his drink, sipped, nodded again. His aspect was friendly but determined. "You're gonna pay for that, Margarita. Wait and see."

She grinned, a bright, salacious challenge, and said, "It's you who's supposed to pay, cowboy. Didn't they teach you that in Monahans?"

Helplessly amused, he let the drink dilute his excitement. The drinks did not last them long. "We sure don't have anything like you in Monahans," he said finally. "No professionals, anyhow."

"Actually," she said, purring it, "I'm only a gifted amateur."

He leaned back and guffawed, then wiped his eyes and, after a glance around, said, "There's not a man in this cafe who couldn't make a list of those gifts from memory, twenty years from now."

"That was the idea," she said, and emptied her glass. "Now that you've won my heart with sweet talk, I wonder what else you can win. No, don't get up yet," she said, rising, probing in her bag. She swept around the table, bent down, cupped his head between her hands. The kiss she gave him was enough to raise the local humidity. The twenty dollars, clinking from her fingertips to the table, broke a silence maintained by a dozen envious idlers.

She crooked a finger to bring her young man up from his chair, linked arms with him, then glanced at their audience. "This one," she said to them all, "will be on me." She noted with joy that her companion was too flustered to hold his hat down where he really needed it.

She expressed surprise at his Lectrabout, an obvious rental but still expensive for a West Texas saddle-slapper. Was he, perhaps, a foreman? No, he said, not even a cowpoke; he was one of the lucky ones who'd taken a chance with a wildcatter outside Odessa and hit a pocket of natural gas. And by the way, it was almost siesta time. Before doing the town, would Margarita care to see his motel room and catch a few winks?

She agreed with a single wink, the only one that counted, and played the ticklish tease while he drove as she let his free hand wander. In ten minutes and after one near collision he navigated them to the underground parking at his motel.

Like many new motor lodges, this one offered maximum privacy by placing the whole complex into insulating earth, with one glass wall of each room facing a sunken private sundeck. This man who called himself Sam Coulter, she mused, may have carried a heavy need out of Wild Country, but he wasn't too antsy to put careful planning into a private conquest.

Once inside the room, she took her shoulder bag into the dressing alcove and prepared her tawdry magics. When she strode out, he was still standing by the sunlit deck, hat in hand. Her forthrightness had a devastating effect.

He turned and saw that her skirt and blouse were gone, the gold-auburn hair parted so that it flanked her throat, hiding her nipples while permitting a view of the undercup bra, itself an architectural marvel. Under the skirt she had worn — still wore — a black lace apron no larger than a doily, with a similar tiny tapestry over her ample behind. And she still wore the stylish needle heels, hardly more than stiletto-tipped sheaths, cemented lightly to the soles of her feet.

He watched her approach, scanning every centimeter of her, and his Adam's apple bobbed convulsively. Then: "I just discovered there's such a thing as too much," he said with an idiot grin, and put his Stetson on. She saw that he had intended a modest surprise of his own, protruding through his open fly. It was now a limp surprise.

A series of unspoken responses wafted across her face, and the one she kept was with narrowed eyelids, hands on her hips, one seminude foot tapping in pornographic satire of a vexed schoolmarm. "I told you and told you, don't touch it 'til I get there," she said.

"What? No, I — uh, dammit, I didn't! I said you'd be sorry," he said, palms out at pocket height.

"No you didn't, lover," she replied, near enough for him to feel the heat of her body. She took the hat from his head, her smile full of warmth and promise and without the faintest hint of smugness. "You said I'd pay for it." Her brows asked for endorsement; he nodded. "And as it happens, I will love paying for it," she said, tossing the hat into a corner. "Get over on that bed, mister; your first payment's going to be a massage."

By the time she got his boots off, he was already functional. When she pulled his synthosuede briefs down, he met her with a salute of sorts. "No you don't. Mister Coulter," she said, even though she was brushing it with her hair as she continued, "it's your shoulders that I massage first. Just stay there on your back, buckaroo."

Of course he had taken a room with mirrors on the closet, and she caught him watching as she kneaded the muscles across his shoulders; and the sight of herself astride him, his erection fully vertical and only a hand's span behind her buttocks as she rubbed the bronzed shoulders, made her gasp with desire.

Now their glances locked in the mirror and held as she moved back, still massaging, pretending to ignore the probe between her thighs, and even when he slid into her she did not abandon her attention to his upper torso.

His arms had been flung wide, but as she began to utter soft moans to pace him, he reached up and separated the bra, titillating her breasts with feather touches. She wanted to look directly at him but remained fascinated by the sight of herself, somehow not herself, ravishing a man in ways both familiar and strange; plunging on him, turning to favor one nipple or the other for his attention, controlling and dominating him through raw sex. And with his wholehearted assent.

When she felt the warm climactic flood spread through her body, she urged him to accompany her; felt him thrust more slowly but more deeply, too, and when they began to cry out, the name each of them called was not the name the other had given. And this was somehow an added ecstasy.

She collapsed on him eventually, and now it was he who gave the massage, progressing to her buttocks, clasping her, rolling her over. She lay with lips parted, her face partially masked by masses of honey hair with those strange auburn highlights he had never seen before, an addition to his joy.

He never withdrew but came to his knees, his blunt nails running gently down her legs until he gripped her feet, now holding her legs up, using those lascivious heels as handles. "A very, very gifted amateur," he teased as she reached down to tickle him.

"I watched a holoporn cassette," she said in bogus innocence. "Can you really come again?"

"I faked it," he said, burying himself in her. "You're not through paying yet, Margarita."

"You bastard," she said, more blessing than curse. Then she reached up and grasped her feet in glorious abandon. "Fake it again. Mister Coulter."

"Never trust an oilman," he began, and ended, "from Mon — a — hans," and this time there was no question of fakery.

They lay together for a long while, exchanging kisses, caressing one another as though afterplay were foreplay. Presently she disengaged, showered, and dressed while he showered. Then, before emerging into the sunset for dinner and dancing, they enjoyed a second engagement featuring broad variations on oral and manual themes.

Sometime before midnight, after touring half the ringcity, they sat through a short double feature "living presence" holoshow, the first feature a broad farce, the second rated X, and Y, and Z, and just as comic in its own way. Later, they found that they could not copy every position they had seen — but it was not for lack of trying.

On Sunday they went to church together. Neither of them found anything odd in that. In parting, they agreed to repeat their liaison "sometime soon," but they were cheerfully vague about details.