Very, very interesting, he thought. A day in the life of a pimp and prostitute. Flood dialed for real, found no messages in wait, then left.
Now he got to thinking. How many of the beautiful women here were really call-girls? Everywhere he looked, they sat, walked, or waited. Why should I care? he asked himself. Whether they’re hookers or not, I can’t do anything with them anyway. He kept mental blinders on walking through the resort’s pool area, ignoring side-glimpses of more, more, more drop-dead-gorgeous women in the sparsest bikinis, all sprawled out on lounge chairs like things on deliberate display. You’d think I’d be used to this by now, cauterized. When did learned behavior sink into the psyche permanently? After three years? Flood wished it were so, wished that all desire would just die.
The hotel’s beach bar was just as bad, preeminent breasts maximized by so many women sitting at tables, leaning over fruity drinks. The bar was sufficient but too busy. Flood wanted to find a remote place, where he could think…
He embarked to the beach, clunky Seattle sandals sinking in sugar-white sand. The nearly wave-free Gulf of Mexico looked more like a vast and very tranquil lagoon. This is better… Tone down, relax. Get your mind off things…. Like—
Last night…
What had come over him? He’d chosen a sexual self-indulgence over a typical civic duty, as if his orgasm was more important than a woman being beaten. Get off it! he suddenly yelped at himself.
Oh, no, he thought next.
The mental blinders weren’t working out here. Lines of them: women with faces and bodies worthy of swimwear calendars. God in heaven! Stop!
The woman seemed to drift rather than walk down the beach; it seemed as though she were an entity coming out of the sun. Flood’s heart shimmied even at the initial distance, eyes blooming at this virtual paragon bereft of defect. Waist-length hair the color of the same sun-lit sand she walked on danced in the faint breeze coming off the Gulf. Zero body fat but every contour full, even exploited for the visual effect. Breasts the size and undoubted firmness of fresh grapefruits. A harder cardiac shimmy when he noted in detail her appareclass="underline" a white fishnet bikini, each “box” of which was one inch square, and through these boxes everything was flaunted. Beer-can-top-sized areolae, darkly puckered, and nipple-ends sticking out as hard and crisply delineated as bullet cartridges: perfect cylinders of pink flesh. His gaze trembled to the pubic region, where the large fishnet squares made no secret of the fact that she dealt with an expert electrolysist, the vaginal furrow and mystical folds simply right there, for all to see, burgeoning against the threads.
God’s really kicking my ass today—showing me THIS, Flood thought. His groin seemed to cringe. The woman appeared to be in a hurry, looking over her shoulder. Flood just stood there; he didn’t even bother trying to pretend he wasn’t staring overtly at her body.
She walked right up, stopped; she seemed perturbed but cheerily greeted him. “Hi.”
“Huh-hi,” Flood said.
She kept looking behind her. A gust of wind lifted her white-blond hair. Flood was staring at the nipples showing through the net squares but managed to be coherent enough to ask, “Is something wrong?”
“Well, yeah. Some filthy old drunk guy is following me…”
It pained him, but he took his eyes off her body and looked down the beach. In the distance, he saw a guy with glasses staring back but he wasn’t moving. He was just standing there staring as no doubt many, many men stared at her with regularity. Dressed like this—if one could call a few ounces of threads “dress”—she must be used to it.
“No, not him. That guy.”
Flood’s eyes flicked. The glare of sun provided a momentary camouflage…then, from its glow a man emerged. You gotta be kidding me, Flood thought. It was one of those beach denizens, who was probably forty-five but looked sixty-five. Raggy shorts and flip-flops, skin scorched by decades in the sun, skinny but with a belly sticking out from chronic liver damage.
“Does this guy even have teeth?” Flood remarked. “He looks like Captain Salty on the skids.”
The girl laughed but was still addled. “He’s been following me for a half mile, saying the dirtiest things, stuff like because of my bikini I’m asking for it.”
“Yeah, well, I think all this guy’s gonna be asking for real soon is a liver transplant. Look at him. He’s a wreck.”
The man staggered closer. Tufts of matted hair sprouted around the rim of a crooked Orioles cap stained nearly white with sweat-salt. The gray-blond beard looked like fungus-encrusted Brillo. “Hey, there, brother,” he cragged, “what say let’s double-team that honey? You see the tits and box on that?”
Flood snapped, very unlike him, and stuck his face right in the old man’s, shouting, “What the FUCK is your problem, you wasted geezer? I mean besides the obvious alcohol problem? What are you doing harassing that woman?”
Captain Salty didn’t back down. “Don’t’cha be messin’ with me, brother, unless ya want more’n ya can handle. Get out my way so’s I can make me some time with that piece’a splittail—”
Flood clouted the man once on the forehead, so hard his fist came away aching. That was it for Captain Salty. He was out cold, flat on his back.
“That’s so great!” the girl squealed.
Flood was shocked at himself. Several couples sitting on beach towels applauded.
“Well…I guess he had it coming,” Flood said.
“It’s about time somebody cleaned that guy’s clock,” a man in a fold up chair said, and a beautiful woman next to him, in a raving pink thong, added, “He’s out here every day, running his gutter-mouth, and staring at people.”
The remarks made Flood feel better for his violence. The girl in the fishnet took his arm. “Come on. Let me buy you a drink.”
“No, really, that’s not necessary—”
“Come on,” she insisted.
Now he felt self-conscious, ludicrous even in his parrot-green trucks and stark-white skin.
“Thank you,” she said. “That guy was creeping me out.”
“I can imagine. I’m not a violent person but sometimes—I don’t know—I have no tolerance for sloppy, dirty, loud-mouthed drunks.”
“This is usually a nice, low-key beach. People come out here to mind their own business and have a nice time, but every now and then you’ll run into some guy like that who ruins things for everyone.” Her right arm clasped Flood’s left, while her fingers smoothed over his forearm. It almost seemed affectionate, and that titillated him since he’d had no genuine affection for a very long time, or…perhaps not ever. Even during his marriage, when it seemed stable, he knew now that Felicity’s affection had been a play-act. Her only real affection she’d saved for the men she was seeing behind his back.
Nevertheless, this…was nice.
In his swim trunks he could feel his cock filling with desire and blood. Butterflies fluttered in his stomach.
“Well, I’m just really grateful for what you did,” she was going on. “I work this beach sometimes twice a month, and I’m always running into that guy.”
Flood was distracted. Impulse kept dragging his eyes to catch glimpses of the net-covered breasts, the bare nipples extruding . Oh, Jesus, this is crazy… But what had she said? “Maybe that guy learned his lesson, that if he’s gonna act like an ass, sometimes he’s gonna get decked. But what did you mean when you said—”