“Talking to you? About what?”
“Normal everyday shit,” he said. “We talked about the sessions we were doing and how we all wanted to kill the Nerdlys. We talked about the ocean and how much we liked it. Just a normal everyday conversation like we were normal everyday people.”
“That’s fuckin’ cool,” Caryn said.
“Yep,” Ted said. “And all the while, them fuckin’ titties of hers are bobbing up and down in the water as she shifts around. At one point I was even able to see some nipple bulge. It took every ounce of willpower I possessed not to fucking stare at them.”
“Yeah, staring is bad,” Caryn said. “You gotta do the whole quick glance and admire with the peripheral vision thing.”
“You would’ve been proud of me,” Ted assured her. “So, we sit out there long enough for her to drink a couple of glasses of wine and then she says she’s starting to get hot. She stands up and...”
“Hold on,” Caryn said, stopping him. “When she stood up, did ... did like the water go cascading down off of her?”
Ted gave her a nod. “It fuckin’ cascaded,” he said.
“Damn,” she whispered.
“Anyway, she walks across the bottom of the tub to the step that’s right next to me. As she climbs it, her calf kinda rubbed against the outside of my thigh, just for a second, totally accidental, you know, but...” He shook his head. “ ... her skin was so fuckin’ soft and smooth. It was sublime, dude. Absolutely fucking sublime.”
“That’s awesome, Ted,” she said, pondering the story. “You actually touched Celia Valdez!”
“I touched her,” he confirmed. “I had to sit in that fuckin’ hot tub for another twenty minutes before my shit deflated enough for me to go back in the house. And for months afterward, I wasn’t able to whack off to any other mental image.”
She smiled. “I bet you still pull that one out on occasion, huh?”
“That ain’t no shit,” he said.
On the radio, the guitar solo of Struggle was just winding down, leading to the final verse and the outro. They listened until the song ended and the DJ came on, telling them that they had just heard The Struggle, Celia Valdez’s title cut from her new solo album, which would be available in stores on Tuesday, July 14.
“You going to do any more drumming for them?” Caryn asked as the commercials started.
Ted shrugged. “If they ask me, I will,” he said. “It was an awesome gig. Paid well, I got credits on two albums as the drummer instead of just doing overdubs like they had me doing back in the day. I got to hang out with Jake Kingsley and Greg Oldfellow and I got to see Celia Valdez in a bikini. Fuck yeah, I’d do it again, but it’ll probably be awhile before they start putting together new material.”
“What about in the meantime? Are you gonna try to score a gig with someone else?”
He shrugged. “I thought about it,” he said. “And I got those reference letters from Jake and Celia and the Nerdlys, and Nerdly said he’d hook me up over at National if I want to do some sessions, but ... well ... I don’t really want to do that.”
“How come?”
“I don’t want to just do sessions,” he said. “It’s too unreliable, has too much variety. If I’m going to play, I want to play with the same people all the time and work toward a common goal.”
“You want to be in a band,” she said.
“Right,” he said. “That’s when drumming is fun instead of just a job. Until someone offers up a band position, I’ll just wait for Jake and Celia to call back.”
Little did Ted know, but someone was about to do just that. Coincidentally, Ben Ping heard The Struggle on the radio for the first time at exactly the same moment, on exactly the same station. Ben, however, was not at work, as it was summer break and he did not teach summer guitar classes. His wife, Lisa Ping, twenty-six years old and a former student in Ben’s class who had been knocking out an Art prerequisite, was also home as she was on summer break between semesters two and three of the four semester nursing program she was enrolled in. Aubrey, the five month old girl their union had produced, was taking her afternoon nap. Ben and Lisa were making good use of her slumber time.
Ben was on his back on their marital bed, naked, sweaty, laying atop two large beach towels that their experience with post-partum sex had taught them should be there. Lisa, equally naked, her large, milk-swollen breasts bouncing up and down with her rhythm, her own olive colored Italian skin shiny with her own sweat, was impaled upon his manhood and going for broke.
“Yeah, baby,” Ben grunted happily, his hands stroking her thighs. “Use my cock! Make yourself come!”
“I’m getting there,” she panted, thrusting and grinding herself upon him, shifting her body to get the exquisite contact she needed to push her over the edge. They had found long ago that this was the easiest way for her to have an orgasm during intercourse—when she could control the contact and the rhythm and the pressure. Not that Ben could not bring her to the peak otherwise—because he could—but when you lived with a baby, alone time was fleeting and precious and time was of the essence when coupling. You finished fast or there was a good chance you would not finish at all.
“Do it baby, do it!” Ben encouraged, thrusting upwards against her. “Make them things fire off!”
“All right,” she panted breathlessly, “I feel it! It’s coming, baby!”
“Come for me, baby! Come for me!”
She came for him, her body flushing and breaking out in gooseflesh, her pelvic thrusts becoming erratic. And then came the sure-fire sign that this was a genuine event and not a mere performance. Powered by the oxytocin flooding her bloodstream by the orgasm, her breasts began to expel milk out of the swollen nipples. It ran down her body, puddling on Ben’s stomach. It dripped down onto his chest. A few shots even hit him in the face, some of the pale white liquid dribbling into his mouth. The first time this had happened, four and a half weeks after Aubrey’s birth (they had been told to wait six weeks post-partum before ‘engaging in vaginal copulation’, as her OB/GYN put it, but hadn’t been able to hold off that long), it had startled him. Now it was just part of getting it on. In truth, he actually thought it was kind of hot.
“Fuck yeah,” he groaned, letting his hands go to those mammaries. He squeezed and stroked them, encouraging even more milk to expel. He even attached his mouth to one nipple and gave a little suck, getting a good mouthful of the slightly sweet liquid.
“That’s so fuckin’ hot when you do that,” Lisa breathed. “Do it some more!”
He did it some more, switching to the other nipple and going for broke. Lisa, meanwhile, reached between them and started playing with his testicles. This made short work of him and soon he was pouring himself out into her body.
When it was over, she collapsed atop him, both of them messy with milk, sweat, and sex secretions, both of them feeling quite satisfied.
“That was awesome,” Lisa said, rolling over onto her back so she was lying next to him.
“Hell to the yeah,” Ben breathed, his hand stroking her bare leg.
“Why do you always say that?” she asked him.
“I don’t really know,” he had to admit.
The clock radio was playing next to the bed, tuned to KPID, the pop station that Lisa was a fan of. Tears In Heaven, Eric Clapton’s tribute to his son Conor, who had died tragically a year and a half before, was just wrapping up. Ben was just about to get up and head for the shower to start the obligatory cleanup when the familiar melody of Struggle began.
“That’s one of your songs!” Lisa said excitedly. She had been given cassette copies of the masters that had been sent to Ben and had been listening to them a lot of late. Jake Kingsley’s music was slowly starting to grow on her—especially Insignificance and Hit the Highway—but she had absolutely loved Celia Valdez’s work from the very first listen.