A Change of Needs by Nate Allen Read Free Book Online Page B

eye. To guys her age she was a late night booty call, a young woman with a questionable reputation, but to him she represented the innocence and glory of youth, and in the dim fluorescent light …a flickering reminder of his.
    Make no mistake about it, this was the exception to the rule, and he was more than a bit self-conscious of it. He was always flirting with younger women reflexively, in the bars, the cashier at the grocery store, the store clerk at the mall, etc., and while they often played along in amusing fashion, he had the expectation of success and futility of a greyhound chasing the elusive mechanical rabbit , it just didn’t happen. He saw this occasion for what it was, it couldn’t exist outside the bubble they were cohabitating at the moment for countless reasons. He was aided by the fact that she had known him, been a witness to the warmth that existed between the father and his young child, and she was in need of some tenderness for a change, to feel like the prize, and not the consolation, and the obvious desire was written all over Jake’s face.
    He felt characteristically nervous, she was as cool as the other side of the pillow, “Dear God please forgive me for I am about to be a bad man,” he thought to himself. She put her finger to his mouth to shush him as if she had heard something he hadn’t even said, and then she simultaneously unbuttoned the top of her blouse with her left hand while unbuttoning his jeans and sliding her right around his waist and down the back of his pants until pinching his ass and pulling him toward her with a smile. “ Bet’cha didn’t see this coming when you left the house tonight, ” she said, “ No ma’am, but I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t danced across my mind, ” he replied, in barely more than a whisper.
    She took him by the hand and led him through the hallways of his house to the bedroom as though he were the guest. The last time she had been there she had put his son to bed. He watched as she continued to undress, slowly revealing a large, tasteful tattoo of a vine, ivy of course, which grew out of the crease of her pelvis, twisting and turning up the right side of her body until arriving at, and half encircling her breast, the image unforgettable and ridiculously beautiful, recognizing he belonged in the picture about as much as a velvet Elvis among Rembrandts and Rubens, but not about to forfeit the opportunity.
    He had found in his life there were those rare moments that you don’t forget, the smell, the taste, the emotion, …the sensation of which all come flooding back to you as vivid as the moment in which they were lived, years, even decades later. Even rarer he had found was the awareness of such a moment when you were still in the midst of it, and he recognized this as such. He stalled, propped in the doorway committing every detail to memory, “ I’m in need of some affection.” she said, “come to bed …and leave that light on. ” He thought of what the woman he had met at Leon’s, Rae Anne, had written in her email, of gifts and moral dilemma, of affirmation, and while he would later want to print up t-shirts commemorating the experience on some juvenile “reptilian part of the brain” level, he would keep the details of the evening largely to himself, carefully tucked away in that lockbox in his mind that each of us has where we keep such things, and take the memory out on those occasions when perhaps he didn’t feel quite so good about his condition, because they were sure to arise. It was an experience that would have some significance for a number of reasons, none more important than the fact it would serve as a springboard for what was to follow, and the confidence it gave him would be very attractive and necessary.
    Chunk, having been the first to bed, was the first to wake. “ What the hell happened here last night Snake? ” “ Did you clean up the house after we got home? ” Not knowing what he meant, Jake got