KathrynLocksley
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Preview: Firsts and Lasts at the Mall
🕑 Added 2024-06-30 18:53:52 +0000 UTCJust a little proof that I'm not dead, and a taste of what's to come :)
***
“I wish I were going with you,” I complained, while I watched Dara put on her makeup for an afternoon shift at the Angel Room club.
I was lying on the couch of her apartment, wrapped in a knitted blanket, trying to preserve the warmth she had left behind in the cushions for a few minutes longer. The TV was dark, the obscure rom-com she’d shared with me this morning long finished.
“Can you imagine?” Dara giggled, pausing halfway through adhering a false eyelash. “We’d make all the customers so jealous, sneaking off to the Little Heavens together to give each other a million orgasms.”
It was nice to hear her joke that way about bringing me back to the club — sharing a fantasy, not making a sales pitch. When we’d first met, I would have taken it for a pitch anyway, no matter how clear she made herself, but I was learning to accept her affection for the genuine article. Dara was an excellent teacher, when it came to accepting what bits of niceness the world had to offer.
Not that I didn’t wish for more.
“Stupid bank account, telling me I have to bring money in instead of out today,” I grumbled.
“Yeah, let me know if you ever figure out a fix for that,” said Dara, finishing her second eyelash.
“I just wish I could spend all day with you,” I said. “Or even that my job was a little more like yours.”
“More like mine how?” Dara asked, looking up from the self-lighting vanity in her living room.
I shrugged. “Glamorous. Creative. Edgy. Exciting?”
The last word became a question, as I tried to guess what her job must feel like to do every day. I was sure there’d been some point in my life when working in a mall food court must have seemed mysterious and exotic, before I’d known anything about what work was like.
Dara didn’t argue or laugh at me. She set down her lipstick and returned to the couch, perching on the arm in front of me.
“Sounds like you need a little bad girl assignment.”
I glanced down at Dara’s lacy purple thong and licked my lips. “I don’t know if we have time, but I can try.”
Dara put her palm to my forehead and turned my face upward.
“Not here,” she said indulgently. “At work. While we’re both at work today, I dare you…”
She examined my face for a long moment, summing up everything she knew of me, either from experience or from reading whatever telling creases she found there.
“I dare you to call one customer ‘babe,’” she finished.
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end at the thought, and my chest tightened.
“I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable,” I hesitated.
“Of course not,” said Dara. “That’s why you’re going to pick someone who won’t be uncomfortable. Someone who’ll get a kick out of it.”
“How would I know that about them?” I asked.
“By being the gorgeous, empathetic soul that you are,” Dara said with perfect confidence, brushing my cheek with her thumb. “And by getting out of your own head.”
She pulled a dress over her lingerie for the drive.
“Oh, and I don’t want any half-assed, mumbling ‘babes,’” she said. “No slipping it in casually, like you call everyone ‘babe’ instead of ‘dude.’ When you see that person standing in line, the one who’s day you’re about to make by calling them ‘babe,’ you’re going to lean across the counter like a luscious dance move,” she leaned down with one hand on the armrest, “show them those knockout tits,” she cupped one of my breasts and rubbed a finger over the nipple with effortless precision, “look them right in the eye,” her eyes hooked their way irresistibly into mine, “and say it like you mean it.”
I laughed, because it was the only reasonable reaction to the image of myself doing that.
“Okay, suppose someone does happen to come in who’s just dying to have me flirt with them, and I do get some kind of psychic vision telling me so, and I do it,” I said. “What if they take me seriously? What if they want it to, you know, keep going? What then?”
“That’s up to you,” Dara winked.
The pressure in my chest spread down toward my stomach. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, if it feels fun, keep going. If not, stop,” said Dara. “It’s not like you’re married to someone just because you called them ‘babe’ when you brought them their iced tea.”
I doubted Dara intended for this to have any ominous double meanings, but my mind could instill enough possible meanings for the both of us.
“What about you?” I asked, kneeling up on the couch and gripping the backrest to face her, urgently preparing myself for a momentous conversation that probably shouldn’t be happening in the last few minutes before work.
“Me?” asked Dara.
I collected the words as fast as I could. “Look, I know we haven’t really put a label on this, but I’m taking it seriously. And I kind of thought you were too. I wouldn’t want to do anything that… someone who’s serious about someone shouldn’t be doing. I don’t want to do anything to mess up—”
Dara hurried across the room in her high heels and kissed me.
“I am serious,” she said, holding my head in both hands. “I want you to be my one.”
“I want you to be my one,” I sniffled back at her, when the relief brought tears to my eyes.
“But I’m going to keep doing my job,” said Dara.
“Of course!” I said. “I’m not asking you not to.”
“And you know the kinds of things I’m going to be doing with other people at the club.”
“That’s for work,” I said. “It’s different.”
“You’re sweet,” said Dara. “But the thing is, I like my job. And I’m not expecting you to avoid doing things that you might like too, just because of this.”
She clasped my hand as she said, this.
I squeezed her hand back, as tight as I dared.
“But then, what makes us each other’s ‘one’?” I asked. “What makes this different from anything we might do with anyone else?”
“Doesn’t it feel different to you?” asked Dara, squeezing even tighter.
A smile crept up on me. “Yeah. But how I feel….”
“…Hasn’t mattered much in the past?” Dara guessed.
I shrugged, since nodding at this felt a little too pathetic.
Dara released my hand and rubbed my shoulders patiently.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I do have a few expectations.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like, whatever we do, we keep it safe and clean,” she said. “We don’t lie or keep secrets from each other, unless we’re planning a surprise. We make each other a priority, always. And when we see each other, we treat it like coming home. How does that sound to you?”
I traced these lines in my head, pleasantly surprised by how well they covered everything. “That… sounds like a plan.”
Dara kissed my lips. “Great. Then it’s a plan. I really do have to go, though.”
“Right, of course,” I said. “So, run me through it one more time. While I’m at work today, I have to…”
“You don’t have to do anything,” said Dara, opening the door and peering back at me around the side of it. “But if adding a naughty little challenge to your day makes it more interesting, you have one.”
