Along Came a Spider

Tom Olbert

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright©
2012
Tom Olbert

Editor:
Michael LaRocca

Proofreader: Nicole Kurtz

Cover Artist:
Nancy Grayson Donahue

Published by Mocha Memoirs Press, LLC

All rights reserv
ed. No part of this book may be
used or reproduced electronically or in print
without written permission, except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Due to
copyright laws you cannot trade, sell or give any
e-books away.

by

Tom Olbert

Long Haul

This is a work of fiction and may contain descriptions of adult situations, explicit language, and
scenarios
.
This story is for adults only.
Please keep this out of the hands of peopl
e under the age of 18 years old.

What would you say if I told you I’d gotten a second chance at life?  If skeptical, you’d be right.  Because there are no second chances, no re-takes; life isn’t a stage play.  In fact, it’s even less real than that.  Less tangible.  Less predictable.  Life is a dream.  It melts like snow and rides the currents of time like the rapids of a wild river.  And, it offers sweet nectars to those who learn to navigate its twisting course.  Me…I had help.

It began…or, rather, ended…on a miserably cold, wet, sleety night in
Harvard Square
.  The cobblestones were slick and shining in the lamplight, the wind harsh and bitter.  Turning the collar of my overcoat against the icy shards pelting my cheeks, I took refuge in a small coffee shop called
Mocha Memories
.  Oddly, I couldn’t remember ever having seen it before.  No surprise, really, the way small businesses are constantly coming and going in
Harvard Square
.  The University is constantly expanding, swallowing or crushing everything in its path like some ravenous beast in a feeding frenzy.

I sat at a corner table and sighed, rubbing my eyes in weariness.  Seeing my lined, gray-haired reflection in the plate glass window, I shook my head and stared into the dull, milky swirl of my coffee. It had been another frustrating week of trying to find the fiery rhetoric to inspire dull-spirited, hedonistic college students and groaning with disgust over my desk, grading term papers that read more like Internet-processed generic pap than anything remotely resembling socio-political commentary.  I felt like I’d hit rock bottom.  I’d earned tenure only to grind out a generation of simpering conformists and corporate stooges.  I saw an impotent old man looking back at me from the mirror and realized I’d bluffed my way past life’s hurdles, only to have it slip by me and leave me at a dead end.

Then, I saw her.  Alluring and beautiful as the exotic tropical lands and sun-drenched
Caribbean
beaches I’d visited in my youth but never found the courage to truly explore.  Her raven hair fell in flowing tresses across her soft shoulders as she tossed her head and smiled, her teeth like sparkling pearls.  Her dark eyes reminded me of a starry, moonlit night.  Her sun-bronzed flesh reminded me of warm, sweet mocha.  A form-hugging red dress accentuated every sensuous curve of her lithe, athletic form.  I had to struggle to keep my gaze from sliding headfirst into the fathomless ravine of her cleavage, her full bosom fighting to escape the confines of her dress.  As she uncrossed her long, shapely brown legs, my heart pounded against my chest, blood surging though my temples.

I thought I was dreaming as she slid off her counter stool and seemed to float to my table.  “This seat taken?” she asked, in an accent I couldn’t identify.

Well, I’d never figured heaven as my final destination, so of course I figured her for a pro.  But, I decided to milk every moment of it anyway, even though I obviously couldn’t afford her.

“No.  Please, be my guest.”

A warmth radiated from her that made me think of summer skies and blue waters.  “Mocha,” she said, forming the word slowly, her tongue rolling over her teeth, her full red lips seemingly caressing the word.

“Uh…yes, of course, I’ll order you one.  Waitress…”

She laughed.  “No, silly; that’s my name.  Mocha.”

My face flamed hot as I lowered my eyes.  “So sorry.  I just assumed…”

“Do you have a name?”

I looked up into her piercing eyes.  “Kyle,” I managed to get out.

Her smile sent shivers down my spine.  “Well, Kyle…let me buy you one.  They serve the best here, you know.”

The flow of conversation after that was as irrelevant as it was unconscious.  Like trying to remember lines in a book while dreaming.  Thoughts and facts and words melted into the flow of sensual emotions that energized my tired blood.  It all seemed to fade into a dream I was terrified of waking from.  The smell of rich, dark chocolate overpowered my senses as two steaming cups were placed before us.

Mocha smiled as she delicately sprinkled a soft rain of chocolaty powder onto two frothy heads of steamed milk.  “A very special blend,” she remarked, topping off the delicate artistry with a sprinkling of chocolate shavings.  She pushed one cup toward me.

As I lifted it towards my trembling lips, steam moistening my beard, my brain was drowned in sweet cocoa, cinnamon and fragrant spices that made me think of warm trade winds laced with the fragrance of hibiscus.  My memories seemed to fade into swirling clouds of mocha.

I started to blow gently on the steaming brew, and her eyes flared in irritation.  “Caution is like bits of death,” she whispered sternly.

The power behind those dark eyes driving me, I gulped and swallowed.  The hot liquid seared my lips and burned like fire going down my throat, burning like molten iron in my chest.  I took a deep breath, my flesh prickling with heat, the ice clinging to my coat seeming to melt and turn to rising steam, as if my blood were an inferno.

“Good,” she said with a wry smile, stroking my hand, as if rewarding me.  As my blood raced, I felt a part of my very being bleeding into her through our interlocking fingers, as though she had pulled a thread, a tapestry unraveling.  I glanced up, then gasped in disbelief.  My reflection in the window was subtly but undeniably changing.  The lines in my face were fading, my hair streaking darker even as my heart rate accelerated.

I was only dimly aware of her paying the tab and leading me into an elevator that led to rooms upstairs.  I was helpless, and I didn’t care.  In my lusty youth, I’d never dared progress beyond a meaningless physical encounter.  Through the years as my youth had faded into ‘distinguished’ age, I’d never married, never dared become entangled with any woman I couldn’t dazzle or control.  Like the naïve student girls I could easily seduce with intellectual bluster that passed as wisdom and stories of far-flung travels.  Effortless, pretty little conquests that made me feel alive for a night or two.  I always had to be in control, like a researcher with his experiments.  The thought of surrendering myself to life’s wild rapids had always petrified me.  Until that night.

Words had always been my life.  But for once, I can joyously report that they fail me completely in describing what followed.  Tangy salt licks in flaming darkness, like the moon over the sea.  My tongue was a probing explorer in her dark, sweet nether regions, a taste like honey and mangos coating the throbbing walls…

She drew from me, my seed like sweet ambrosia on her tongue by the look of delight on her face.  The longer she drew, the longer and stronger I became.  She opened herself, coiling her legs around me, crushing me like a boa constrictor, her nails like claws digging into my back as I thrust deep, deep, deep to the center of the world.  She moaned.  Then, she turned with almost superhuman strength, gaining the dominant position and sliding down me as if I were a pole of sturdy oak.  Sweet, delicious agony filled me and I wanted it never to stop.  The bed seemed to turn to fire, blood-red flames against pitch blackness.  She was draining me, like a succubus.

And, the miracle beyond the dark miracle was that the more she took from me, the stronger I became.  I didn’t feel fatigued or emptied.  For you see…it wasn’t energy or virility she was leeching out of me.  It was time.  My age, my experiences…all those empty, wasted years…were flowing out of me and into her.

She changed before my terrified, awe-stricken eyes, her form as fluid as thought, her size and shape morphing as in a dream.  Against a shifting background of stars, nebulae and spiral galaxies, I saw immense, iridescent wings of multicolored, translucent tissues, filtering the light of exploding suns.  Multiple limbs with a hundred delicate feelers caressed my heaving pectorals.  Then, she changed again, into a mass of writhing tentacles, engulfing me, pulling me into a monstrous, heaving cavern of slurping tongues.  Then, she splintered into a gestalt organism of countless slithering, disc-like beings that enveloped me as the room around me turned into an alien planetary landscape of shifting continents and multiple moons.

She wasn’t human; at least not limited to that form, an ephemeral particle in the cosmic scheme of things like the rest of us mere mortals.  No, she was, as physicists would say…a quantum wave.  A wave that encompassed countless evolutionary paths wending their way across the time-space continuum, branching from countless planets and remote epochs.  Each such timeline was like a strand in her web.  And she, a cosmic spider weaving that web ever wider.  My life…my years…just one more strand she wove into her web.  I screamed in both horror and ecstasy, the miracle fading into dreamlike mist…

***

Warm sand beneath my fingers.  Soft, warm, moist breeze, the smell of the sea…the sound of the wind sighing through palm fronds and the cawing of sea birds.  I opened my eyes, a flaming orange sunrise washing over my sun-browned, muscular chest, my open shirt flapping softly in the breeze.  I was on a tropical beach.  And, I was young and strong again.  My hand touched something.  A bottle, with liquid sloshing inside.  My throat painfully parched, I put the spout to my lips, tipped the bottle, and drank.  Sweet Jamaican rum.

Sweet and potent as the scent of the young woman who moaned and awakened beside me.  “Kyle…” she muttered as she reached for the bottle.  I handed it to her, and she drank.  She was brown and lovely, the wind stirring her long, raven-black hair.  She was not Mocha, but I did recognize her, like a half-forgotten dream of a lifetime ago.

“Celeste?”

“You were expecting someone else?” She laughed as she lay across me, her hand finding its way playfully down my side and inside my pants.  I laughed as I rolled over on top of her and pressed my lips to her warm, throbbing mouth.  Celeste.  A dalliance of my youth that could have been so much more, if only I’d had the courage to pursue it.  “Enough play,” she said, a look of hard determination coming over her young, beautiful features as she pushed me off and came up on her knees.  “The others are waiting for us on the boat.  You ready to be a man, gringo?  Or, you want to go home to your campus, your term papers and sorority girls?”

I was back.  Back at the crossroads I’d passed before.  The answer I’d given her the first time through had led to an erudite life of idle theory and empty words.  My
life
, and I use the term loosely, had been nothing more than a memoir waiting to be written, and a poor one at that.  Now, it was time to actually live.  “I’m coming with you,
mi amour
.” I said, and smiled.

A wide smile crossed her face, the sunlight sparkling in her dark eyes.  She kissed me and held me close, her heart beating against mine.

A life I’d once only dreamed of carried me out to sea like a rising wave.  And so I live to this day, from port to port, along the isthmus and the South American coast…hauling medical supplies and guns for the rebels. 
Guatemala
,
El Salvador
,
Nicaragua
…Wherever juntas kill, rape or enslave and some find the courage to fight back.  My life may burn bright and short, but I wouldn’t trade it for my weight in gold if I had to go back to the life I’d lived before.  That life has faded like a gray, musty dream.  Was it no more than a dream, after all?  Or, is this the dream?

I care not.  This to me is the only reality.  The wind carries me over the pitching waves into the rising sun.  And, on the evening breeze with the first rising stars…always, the sweet scent of mocha.