“You’re a bad influence,” he chuckled, patting my shoulder.
I felt small and soft, emasculated standing closer before him as he accepted a healthy pour with a mischievous grin. He was a raw man, not unkind but quite unrefined, of the sort I rarely met in Manhattan. We met halfway between the living room and the kitchen, and my heart thumped faster in my chest with every step. John glanced back toward the bedroom, thinking for a moment before he shrugged, “Why not?” “It’s nearly midnight,” I remarked, picking up a half-empty bottle from the coffee table. I’d caught fleeting glances of him undressed in the hallway before, but never clearly enough to find myself dreaming of him bending me over the island counter. But above all, the hefty package in his snug boxer-briefs made my eyes widen. John was tall, looming over me at 5’6”, and burly as a bear. Just grabbing a glass of water,” He said, scratching at his bare hairy chest as he held up his empty glass.
I startled to my feet and blushed when I saw my stepfather smirking back at me. I thought of tasting fine champagne on Patrick’s lips, of feeling his strong hands gripping me as the ball dropped, and my own hand idly wandered down to the growing bulge in my pajamas. The crowd’s excitement rose on TV, drawing my attention. Even if he wasn’t likely to be my future husband, I could still dream. I had no illusions about the romantic potential of a man who’d bang his own student during office hours, but he had a big dick and a thrilling wit. Something enough that we’d planned an evening together, one he was now undoubtedly having with someone else. Patrick and I weren’t dating exactly, but we were something. I glanced at my phone again, but my messages were still unanswered. It was a good way to dull the somber evening. Even after two and a half years at NYU, I was still a lightweight when it came to alcohol, but tonight I didn’t mind at all. I shut my eyes and sank back into the deep sofa under a blanket, feeling the fizz of the wine on my tongue before letting it slide down and fuel the growing buzz in my head. Both my sister and John’s son, and their families, had dispersed in the days since Christmas, so it was just me left to celebrate alone in the big sleepy house. Mom and John had gone to sleep a little after ten. Holidays with the family weren’t so bad, and snowy Michigan was beautiful, but it would have been nice to start the new year with a raucous kiss instead of a quiet evening. I had the big show on the TV, but even if I wouldn’t be caught dead in Times Square, it just made me wish I were back home in New York as planned before my canceled flight. I popped the bottle early, and sat sipping from a glass of half-decent champagne on the couch as my stepdad’s grandfather clock ticked away the last minutes of the year. I forgot to post this here, but I wrote a New Year’s Eve story based on this micro story and photo I posted on Twitter. Hey, it was steady work and he paid well. Or I would suck him off, period, with no reciprocity. He was always on top, puffing on his cigar. He was steady and consistent but not creative. It was our mutual signal I was open for business. I would go up to him and offer him a light. If I saw him approaching the corner sucking an unlit cigar I knew it was time to spring into action. He needed to feel like a real man and I was ready to help him. He was one of my first and steady customer. Was he such a bad guy? Now his wife called him a chauvenist pig and wanted to be liberated, his daughter was shacking up with a black man and his son had longer hair than his sister and actually looked more ,like a girl than she did! Well, damn them all! He could still walk the streets proudly smoking his cigar and too bad for the person who was offended! All he was trying to do is eek out a iving to give his family some nice things the same way his father did. It was 1974 and Russ couldn’t believe how much the world had changed.