The Alexandra Series (3 page)

We parked on the street a couple of blocks from the flashing neon where Jane directed me, and as we walked, I felt a curious tingling dart up my spine. I had the feeling that I’d walked this street before, but then again, I was sure I’d never been anywhere near the neighborhood. Still, some inner part of me seemed to recognize each cobblestone in the sidewalk, the noise from each cafe, the lettering on the windows, the taste of the air. When we reached the bar, a pink and green neon flamingo blinked against a painted wall, and in cursive script, ‘The Tropics’ flashed red.

“Oh my god!” I stood there stunned.

“Where’s the ghost?” Jane asked, seeing my startled expression.

“This place...I’ve seen it before.”

“Really?”

“In a fantasy.”

She laughed. “Your mind is playing tricks on you, Alex. Just relax and enjoy yourself.”

We entered with her looking back over her shoulder at me. “I should warn you this is not fashionably chic, but the patrons are less pretentious than what you’ll find uptown. That’s why I like it.”

I followed her inside the dim lit bar, seeing the same blinking flamingo as the one hanging on the wall in my fantasy. The same antique wood and polished brass, the same scuffed tables, and black and white checked floors, the same little dance floor and stage where I’d taken the pleasure of many men. Even in my fantasies, I’d had the same reason for coming here…less pretentious people.

I could hardly breathe, and it took some moments to shake off the immediate numbness. We sat at a table and ordered margaritas from a voluptuous redheaded waitress. I looked around nervously, then gazed at the bar where a couple of men were staring back at us, in particular, giving the lovely Jane a thorough inspection. She seemed oblivious to the attention, meanwhile my heart raced and my tummy was all atwitter. My hands were cold with sweat, and I had to stop myself from chewing on the pink straw in my margarita.

“You okay?” Jane asked. “You look a fright.”

“I don’t know, it’s just this place.”

She entertained a quizzical look.

“This is just so weird. I
know
this place and I know I’ve never been here.”

“Not so weird, there must be a dozen places like this in the city – the prototype of the trashy dive.”

“No, it’s not like that at all. This place is exactly like a bar I’ve imagined, down to the last detail.”

Her smile broadened. “My, you have powerful thoughts.”

I sat there primly not knowing what to say, while her eyes peered into me as if she knew exactly what was going on.

“Fantasy and reality blending into one. I’m not sure it’s all that strange.”

“For me it’s strange.”

She laughed lightly. “You’re a creature of unexpressed desire, and it’s all rising to the surface.”

She left me with little to say but, “You’re very insightful.”

“I’ve been around.”

We sat for several more moments looking into each other’s eyes. I wondered who would speak first. Finally, I shook my head, and stared off. I wasn’t sure I wanted her knowing me so intimately. After all, I didn’t really
know
her at all. I looked around, trying to make sense of the bar, and my fantasies, and why this unusual woman was taking such interest in me.

Jane just pressed on. “You’re a restless, discontented woman pretending to be someone I don’t think you really are.”

Oh did that hit home! I wanted to cry. All the tension that had held me together these past weeks seemed to crumble away in seconds. She was right, so terribly right. I was
so
tired of being two people and not liking either one.

“Hey, don’t look so serious, this isn’t the end of the world. We’re here to enjoy ourselves.”

I laughed nervously. “I guess I don’t really know how. Frankly, this place scares me.”

“Don’t sound so hopeless.”

I’m sure I looked as hopeless as I felt and Jane wouldn’t let up.

“Honestly, Jane, I’ve never really had a man.”

“Oh, men are just by-products,” she explained. “Whether you have one or not isn’t as important as who you are, and why you want one. If you want a man to fulfill you, you’ll never find any peace or contentment. No man can do that for you. You can love them, enjoy them, fuck them, but don’t expect them to make your dreams come true. You have to be happy with yourself and what you’re doing with your life. Men can’t do that for you.”

“Easy for you to say, you’ve obviously had a lot of experience. I’d just like to have had one, just one man, just to say that I’d made mad passionate love one time.”

“Well, I can assure you, you’re going to want to make love more than once,” she said with a grin. “And you sure as hell aren’t going to snag a guy by living in your dreams, locked inside your head the way you are at work, hardly talking to people,
thinking
all the time. You need to get out of your rut and make yourself available!”

There were several men at the bar, drinking beer, their cold mugs sweating in their hands, their conversation lively, their masculinity pouring from them, their deep voices spilling about the room. At that moment, I realized that I was not only dazed, but terribly frightened just being so close to all that testosterone. I think I would have run from the place if Jane hadn’t been there. Before I could reply to her last comment, she was out of her chair approaching the two men sitting closest to us.

“C’mon Jeff, Alex here needs to dance,” she said as she pulled the two men off their stools, and grabbed me from my chair almost in the same motion. She nearly pushed me onto the dance floor, and I practically stumbled over Jeff. He loomed above me like a giant, his tall lanky frame beginning to move easily with the music, some 90’s hit I remember hearing many times. He looked wonderful in his jeans and sweater. Casual, not too scruffy, clean shaven with distinct features that would make any woman look twice.

I blushed self-consciously, looking at the floor, afraid to face his comfortable grin. I felt silly and out of place. I didn’t know how to dance, how to be with a man, how to behave in a bar.
My God! It had been years since I’d done anything like this.

The handsome Jeff didn’t seem deterred. He moved closer, taking my hands in his and forcing my eyes to meet his. I trembled, feeling terribly awkward. “I’m really not much of a dancer.”

“You’re doing just fine,” he purred, as his lips came so close to my ear that I could feel his breath on my skin. My body seemed to come alive, but my tattered nerves begged me to flee. Still, Jeff’s easy confidence kept me steady, and though I was determined to sit down at the end of the first song, he kept me on my feet through the next song, and then a third, a slower one that had me pressed to his chest so tightly that I could feel the pulsing in his crotch. By the time he backed away, there was such a riot of activity in my body that I could barely keep my fears suppressed. It didn’t help that I couldn’t stop thinking of that fantasy bar where I’d so lewdly exposed myself. Fantasy was one thing – this was real, and the very attractive Jeff was a real, flesh and blood man, not some handsome hunk born in my imagination, who’d disappear as soon as I opened my eyes.

While I sweated through those tumultuous minutes, Jane danced next to me as if she’d been born in dancing shoes. She moved with ease, nestling up next to the hot young blond and pressing her body into his, wiggling her crotch against his thigh. His hands were all over her, on her ass, a tit, against her thigh. Their lips met for small, seductive kisses. I imagined she’d take him home to screw.

If only I could move like her, be like her, dance like her. So free, so uninhibited.

The curious heat that rose up deep inside me – was this desire, real desire?
What a silly question!
I knew exactly what it was. And as the desire grew, the images from my fantasies came back to me – how I’d stripped away my clothes and gave myself to men; how I’d shed inhibition and dove into sex as if I were as sexually free as Jane. For a moment, I felt a taste of that freedom. But when the music slowed again, Jeff pulled me close, his one hand on my ass and the other fishing through my blouse for bare skin. My head felt light, my hands went cold and in a sudden panic, I pushed away.

“I gotta sit down,” I gasped, and I stumbled to the table, Jeff closely on my heels.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, just a little dizzy.”

“How about a drink of water.”

“No, no thanks,” my words rushed from me as I shook my head. “I need to go home, tell Jane I’ll see her at work, will you?”

I found myself suddenly on my feet, purse in hand, running for the door. Within seconds, I was in my car, my foot to the floor, accelerating away from the bar and Jane and the best chance I’d had for sex in years, lost to the fear that drove my panic. By the time I was home, my body was raging with need. I stripped in seconds on the way to the bedroom, my imagination consumed with thoughts of the handsome Jeff, and his hands, and his cock sliding into me. I fell to the bed and began to masturbate, the only way I knew to get off, the only way I’d gotten off in years. It took just seconds, ruthless, wild orgasmic seconds for my body to come.

Finished, I lay back exhausted, the adrenalin rush slowly easing off.
Dammit. Damn you, Alex! You could have had him! You could have had him. He was yours and he wanted you. A real man…and look what you got!

I went to sleep trying to forget about that night, but the picture wouldn’t go away. I wanted to go back…to Jeff, to the bar, to Jane. I almost began to rub myself again, but I put on the brakes.
Alex, go to sleep!
I insisted until I finally did.

My head throbbed with a dull ache the next morning, and suddenly everything in my apartment reminded me of my mother. My behavior of the night before disgusted me. Dirty. Disgusting. Sleazy. Everything I was not! Or so I told myself until I was starting to believe it again.

I dressed for work in the most conservative thing I could find in my closet, a long grey skirt, high-necked blouse and bulky sweater.

Chapter Three

I went to work, furiously rehearsing in my head the excuses for my hasty exit. However, when I poured them out to Jane, they felt flat. She knew the truth and I was a terrible liar. I was frightened of my own feelings and my physical body, and sex, yes sex. I would never confess that in so many words and thankfully, she didn’t seem compelled to explore my motives.

“You’ll have to come with me again,” she stated simply, and the subject was closed. Yet in spite of her easy acceptance, I knew she was aware of my fears. I could hide nothing from her.

On the way home that evening I drove by the bar, seeing the blinking pink flamingo in the twilight hour, beckoning me inside. My body reacted as I knew it would, warming, pulsing as it had the night before. What was I doing, anyway? I’d never go back there. Never!

That night instead of fantasizing about the bar with neon and flamingos, I imagined myself in a seedy roadside tavern. The ‘Red Rose.’ There were burly men in leather and dirty jeans, playing pool, guzzling beer, smoking joints and fondling their women like toys.

I dressed myself in leather pants and a cut off t-shirt that stretched across my breasts revealing every nuance of my erect nipples. The men in the Red Rose didn’t make love, they fucked and screwed like hellions. They used their women hard, knowing the sluts would come back for more. My body ached to be taken over the nearest table, and fucked from behind, pawed at, used, demeaned.
Yes! Yes!
My body screamed back at me.

The gruff-voiced man ran his hands over my flesh, roughly squeezing my tits.

“C’mon, bitch!” he growled, pulling me out the door into the firecracker night. Lightning and thunder in the distance charged the air with electricity and fired the animal inside the brute who held me close to his side. He dragged me to the edge of the woods, where, barely hidden by the brush, he threw me down on hands and knees…

Writhing in my bed, it didn’t take long. Tonight, as I imagined the crude violation, my hands pulled and tugged at my pubic hair. I even slapped myself and pinched my nipples. Mad, angry thoughts pierced through all the pretty fantasy to these rough ones. I wanted rough. I wanted the Red Rose and its beastly men.

When the cumming was over, my shame was even greater, my outrageous thoughts deeply despised. Once the dream was just a fading memory, I completed my ritual, washing my hands and donning the pink nightgown that buttoned to my neck. I swore to myself that I’d
never
indulge myself that way again. All the while I knew I was lying to myself.

***

“Hey, girl, we’re going shopping tomorrow,” Jane said as we were headed toward the elevator at the end of the day. It wasn’t a question, or offer, but a stated fact.

“Okay, but—?”

“You need some clothes,” she cut me off, “ones that don’t hide that gorgeous body.” A wave of excitement swept through me as I understood her plan. No she wasn’t giving up on me after the debacle of our last fateful adventure.

“You have some place in mind?” I asked.

“There’s a boutique on 2nd Street, I think you’ll like it.”