The Bonk Squad (2 page)

She grinned to herself. It
was second only to thrusting. Thrusting was
excellent
.

Enjoying those legs almost caused her
to miss stopping at the Spots Off to collect her dry-cleaning.
She’d vowed to make more of an effort with her appearance from now
on, and planned to wear her good black trousers and the new taupe
cotton jersey with the plunging V-neck tomorrow. Helpful for
diminishing a generous bosom—or so Trinny and Susannah insisted.
And Meg’s bosom was undeniably generous these days. Her hips were
trying to balance the bosom up, unfortunately. She didn’t mind the
boobs but she rather resented the hips.

“
It’s much harder to lose
that weight after forty,” her disciplined and stringy mother had
warned her. Still, Meg knew she’d rather be a rounded thirty-nine
than a skinny sixty-seven. And only rounded—not fat, you
understand…

The Toyota chugged on in a cloud of
music and exhaust smoke. The small commercial buildings started to
thin out toward the end of Heretaunga Street. The old converted
church stood aloofly on its corner, spire covered in lichen. A tall
privet hedge burst with feathery full-sneeze white bloom. An
over-optimistic Cambodian café had tried and failed; the signage
lived on but the chef had long gone.

Meg trundled around a corner into
middle class suburbia—past pastel colored timber houses with
gardens where dogs barked behind gates, trees hung over walls, and
impatiens and petunias ran riot in terracotta pots beside barbecues
as big as bullocks.

She steered the car into her driveway
and just about collected the side fence with surprise. The cyclist
had obviously kept his sinewy tanned thighs pumping with great
efficiency while she’d been waiting at the Spots Off, because he
was knocking on her red front door. One long arm supported his
racing cycle.

He turned as she lurched to a rather
undignified halt. The late sun lit his dark hair with warm chestnut
highlights. A most satisfactory bulge filled the front of his tight
black bike pants. Curly hair burst from the neckline of his
stretchy shirt. And he inspected her with arrogant eyes. Or
possibly piercing eyes? Eyes as dark and watchful as a jungle
predator? Jolly nice brown ones, anyway.

The door swung open. Ben ushered him
in. To Meg’s amazement he took the bike inside with him. One of
Ben’s friends? He’d looked quite a bit older than that.

She grabbed her handbag and the
dry-cleaning, and forgot to lock the Toyota in her haste to catch
up with them.

Sunshine drenched the house next
morning.

God— ten o’clock
already.

Meg stretched until her bones popped,
no longer able to ignore the bright light at the faded edges of the
floral curtains, or the accusing green numbers on the bedside
clock.

Orlando and Bella sprang up from the
foot of the bed, quite used to dry kitty-nibbles on Saturday
mornings—but maybe their luck was in today?

Meg heaved herself out of bed, and the
two sleek cats bounded ahead of her.

“
Not yet, you two,” she
called after them as they skittered down the stairs.

First she needed headache pills.
Plural. She’d not had that much to drink for years. And never with
a man with such a body.

Alan.

‘
Call-me-Al’.

Father of Ben’s friend Michael.
Computer expert, and owner of the pumping thighs.

She flinched as the pills hit the
water and made a terrible noise. Once the fizzing had finished she
gulped the mixture down, grimacing at the taste.

Two
bottles of Chardonnay. One glass each for seventeen-year-old
Ben and Michael, and all the rest for the adults.

Who’d been acting like stupid kids,
she had to concede.

With some ancient Drambuie to follow,
just to make really sure she’d be hung-over.

No housework done. No progress with
Carlo the widowed Italian billionaire and his pretty nanny who had
to get her underwear on display somehow. No flowers in the powder
room. The powder room—what a penny-pinching cop-out! Why hadn’t the
builder squeezed in a shower box and put a pedestal basin instead
of the over-large, wall hung vanity unit beside the toilet? A
complete second bathroom would have been heaven.

Meg sashed her dark blue robe, picked
up a suitable looking bottle of body lotion, and regarded herself
blearily in the all too bright bathroom mirror. Lord! She shook her
head at her rumpled reflection and staggered down the stairs,
running her fingers through her tangled fair hair.

She decided the top of the vanity unit
looked quite clean enough, placed the body lotion on it for
decoration, and snaffled the crumpled lime green towel for the
wash.

Grabbed a small glass vase and filled
it with water, wrenched a strongly-fragrant white lily off the
bunch on the sideboard, and set her floral highlight beside the
body lotion.

Found a good thick cream towel with a
band of useless scratchy embroidery, and hung it with exaggerated
care on the towel rail.

Pulled the powder room door shut,
closed her eyes, and leaned on the wall for strength. Right—one
room finished.

The living area would take a bit
longer. It looked and smelled like a neglected Italian café,
decorated with empty pizza boxes and sticky glasses. Coffee mugs
and pages from last night’s newspaper were strewn about. And
something that looked like a puddle of congealed custard clung to
the top of the dining table. Meg was surprised the cats hadn’t
cleaned that up.

Or maybe they’d produced it?
Eeuw!

She stepped cautiously closer, and
relaxed. Definitely custard. Vague memories now of making custard
in the microwave oven to pour over Watties tinned peaches. Over the
table, too, it seemed.

“
Here cats!” she called,
wincing at the sound of her own voice. Orlando sailed up and began
investigating the tasty offering. She gave him an affectionate
stroke and turned to make coffee. Strong coffee. She collected
plates, glasses and mugs, and dumped them all in the dishwasher;
squirted some air freshener around, and collapsed into her favorite
armchair, trying to remember exactly what had happened.

Okay, the man had disappeared into her
house wheeling his mean looking bicycle. Fine. She’d followed.
Found it leaning against the wall in the front entrance. Ben and
Muscles had been stroking it and muttering things like ‘carbon
fiber’ and ‘nine grand’.

(For a
bike
??? She could get a good
secondhand car for that.)

Muscles had thrust his hand toward her
in a very hearty and confident manner.

“
Alan Sabatini. Call-me-Al.
Good to meet you at last, Meg.”

She must have looked less than
enlightened because Ben added, “Michael’s Dad. He’s helping me sort
out the computer.”

She’d shaken handsome Call-me-Al’s
hand and tried not to look like a gulping goldfish. “That’s very
kind of you,” she’d managed.

Call-me-Al seemed not the least bit
embarrassed his genitals were displayed in snug detail by the tight
Lycra shorts. Or that his long muscular legs had been completely
and beautifully shaved—rather better than Meg’s own were by the end
of a busy week.

She’d gone upstairs to stow her
dry-cleaning so she could recover for a moment. He was overpowering
up close. A lot taller than her. And wafting the twin intoxicating
scents of fresh perspiration and expensive cologne around her home.
She’d squirted on some of last Christmas’s Opium to level the
stakes, and taken a book downstairs so she could stay within
earshot.

“
Bloody machine!” she heard
Al exclaim.

“
What’s wrong?” she
called.

“
Your computer’s not
co-operating.”

“
Now there’s a surprise.
Ben can make it behave, but not me. Do you two want
coffee?”

Angry mutters continued to reach her
after coffees were provided.

Time slid by. Ben’s cell-phone did its
duck-quacking noise and there was a brief conversation. Soon
afterward, someone knocked on the front door.

She put down her book. “I’ll go,” she
said, feeling pretty sure no-one else would.

“
Hi, Mrs Josephs—is Dad
still here?”

It was Michael to see what had become
of his father. So Meg took a few moments to review the contents of
the fridge and decided there wasn’t enough of anything to feed
four. She leaned around the doorframe to Ben’s bedroom. By now
there were three annoyed males to glare back at her.

“
How about I go for pizza?”
she suggested.

“
Get a couple of bottles of
wine, too,” Al insisted, producing warm banknotes from somewhere
mysterious inside his clothing, and insisting it was his shout. Meg
decided that was fair enough if he could afford to spend so much on
a bicycle. She’d provided the venue and would be stacking the
dishwasher, after all.

So she burbled off in the Toyota and
returned with ridiculous amounts of food, all of which disappeared
with incredible speed down the throats of two gangly teenagers and
one athletic father. And still they’d seemed hungry—hence the
impromptu dessert delight of canned peaches and hot runny
custard.

She sipped her coffee in the
mid-morning sunshine. She had the strong and worrying feeling that
while the boys had returned to Ben’s bedroom to surf the net, she
and Al had danced to one of her father’s old albums by Herb Alpert
and his Tijuana Brass. God, surely not. How drunk did you have to
be to dance with a man in bike pants?

She definitely recalled teasing him
about his shaved legs—and being told that racing cyclists all did
that because they got grazed in accidents if they slid along the
road surface. The scabs got full of hair (or the hair got full of
scabs) and that was a Bad Thing.

He’d shown her several very fetching
scars on assorted parts of his impressive body. She’d reciprocated
by hitching up her skirt and displaying the line from the operation
on her knee tendon. It was all she had, really. Well—there was the
appendicitis scar, but she was reasonably certain she’d not been
foolish enough to exhibit that...

And she suspected she’d shared a few
woozy kisses with him on the big old cream sofa. But nothing more,
for sure. Not with the boys in the next room.

She finished the coffee. The pills had
not kicked in with any enthusiasm.

Ohhhhhh God. She’d need a smaller
headache than this to drag the noisy, super-sucking, extra powerful
cleaner around the floors. Dusting was quiet. She’d do that
first.

“
Morning, Mom.”

Ben ambled, blinking, out into the
light of day. Tall and clumsy, and almost a man. He shuffled the
newspaper together and Meg flinched at the vicious rustling. At
least things looked more respectable now. They ate breakfast in
companionable silence until—

“
Hey, Mom, you know that
old tea trolley in the garage?”

“
Mmmmm?”

“
Can I have it in my
room?”

“
Mmmmm.”

“
Cool.”

What on earth is he up to
now?

She tidied away the breakfast things,
arranged plenty of mugs on the kitchen counter with the sugar
basin, the jar of instant coffee, the tea caddy, a milk jug and
some empty plates...spared the fluffy floor a guilty glance, and
hurried upstairs to shower and dress with all possible
speed.

She froze at her reflection in the
bathroom mirror. Al’s mouth had undeniably acquainted itself with
the slope of her left breast. She peered down at the all too
obvious mark. Would the low V-neck of the new taupe jersey hide
it?

Not really. She dabbed a bit of
foundation on it, thought that made it look more obvious, washed it
off again, and decided if anyone mentioned it she’d look
mysterious. Old Vi would miss the point, and maybe her cred would
go up a bit with naughty Liz, and thrice-published Romy, and Bobbie
who wrote erotica. Meg wasn’t quite certain what erotica was.
Somewhere midway between romance and pornography, she
suspected.

Eloise wouldn’t be shocked by the
evidence of Al’s advances. She was an actress—nothing shocked her,
ever. And Nurse Mandy had seen it all before. Ian would have to
take it or leave it.

But how had Al managed to burrow that
far under her blouse? It was her first love-bite in years, and
she’d missed the experience.

Oh Chardonnay! Oh Drambuie! Oh
damn...

Tigger trotted back to her old
childhood bedroom with yet another mug of coffee, pulled her long
legs in under the duvet, and settled back into her pile of pillows.
A small smile tweaked at the corners of her pretty mouth. This
holiday back home had been a great idea. Not only summer weather
but lots more time to write.

After several sips, she set
the mug down on her bedside table and opened her gleaming silver
Mac. She was
so
into this story! She’d decided to call it ‘Exploring Ryan’
because that’s exactly what would happen. Lots of exploring by a
girl who wanted to know more so she could self-publish her slightly
dodgy stories on Amazon.