“I want to see you in a dress,” Puck said when we solidified plans for a Saturday night date. “Something really feminine.”
“I can do a dress.”
I’d had the ultimate LBD hanging in my closet for two years but never had occasion to wear it. Luckily, the black sheath still fit. I cut off the price tags and added a handmade black-and-pink heart necklace and shoulder-skimming earrings to complete the ensemble. I twirled before my mirror, my chiseled calves enhanced with the help of high heels. I looked so hot, I wanted to fuck myself.
As I pulled up to Puck’s apartment, I saw a sleek Audi TT speed past.
“I’m here,” I said when I called him from the parking lot.
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “I just have to make a quick stop at the store.”
If I were Puck, I wouldn’t have left me alone, in that dress, in the lobby of his apartment building—a.k.a. Single Man Central. In ten minutes time, a slew of
If Puck doesn’t show, I thought, I’ll hit someone else up for a date.
Just as I was about to start handing out my number to passer-bys, the elevator dinged and Puck stepped out. He was wearing a gray cotton t-shirt, soccer shorts, and flip-flops.
“That’s not exactly date attire,” I said as I breezed past him.
“We’ve got time,” he said and pushed the button.
We stood in silence on opposite sides of the elevator; I tapped my heels to an uneven tune as we rattled up floor by floor.
“Don’t look at me,” I said, bowing my head. “I hate the lighting in these things.”
“Okay,” he said, shifting his weight between his feet, preparing to pounce. “I won’t look.”
Puck lunged across the elevator with an open mouth and mauled me. His pelvis ground against mine and he dampened my face with misplaced kisses.
The door dinged open and Puck transformed into a laidback bachelor again.
“I brought you something,” Puck said as he unloaded a grocery cart at his front door. He carefully constructed a mountain on the countertop with a box of Wheaties, a pair of
“That’s so sweet!” I exclaimed.
“I got you some oranges, too,” he said.
Knock me over with citrus fruit. Puck remembered that oranges were my obligatory pre-run snack; if I’d be spending the night, I’d need one before leaving his place in the morning.
“Wow,” I said.
“What?”
“You thought of me while grocery shopping,” I said. It must be love.
“Eh,” Puck said with a shrug.
“Can I help you put this stuff away?” I asked.
“Sure.”
I hadn’t gotten an up-close-and-personal peek at Puck’s fridge yet, but what I found was far from revealing. If you are what you eat, Puck was short on substance. All he had in stock was a bucket of chopped melon, two flavors of popsicles, a pair of frozen lobsters and a door packed with condiments.
“Do you have a system?” I asked as I eyed the shelves.
“A system?”
“I dated a guy once who was on The Zone diet. He had specific places for his protein, carbs, and fat.”
“Who are these guys you’ve been going out with?”
“Freaks, apparently.”
I reached into the fridge and pulled out a Parkers Farms container.
“Hey! You have my favorite brand of peanut butter!” I said too enthusiastically. “But I always buy the kind with honey.”
Puck didn’t seem to appreciate that we were a match made in peanut butter heaven. He popped open the dishwasher; the top rack was filled with wine glasses.
“I really need to clean up,” he said with a sigh. He turned and his gaze bore into my body. “But I really want to have sex with you first.”
After a quickie and cat nap, we re-dressed.
“You haven’t commented on my outfit,” I said.
“Haven’t I?” Puck tapped my hips and I gave him a supermodel twirl. “Sorry. I was in a hurry to get you naked.”
Apparently, my dress was meant to impress Puck’s friends, whom we were meeting at a nearby French bistro.
“I want a ride in your car,” I said when we stepped into the garage. “It’s so sexy.”
I slunk down into the black leather bucket seat of Puck’s Audi TT. The sports car hummed to life and crawled out into the sleepy streets of Linden Hills. The sleek coupe was so low and so fast, I felt like I was riding inside a bullet.
“I feel like I’m in a Dick Tracy movie,” I said, assuming Puck would follow my cinematic metaphor to its logical conclusion: that he was Warren Beatty and I was Madonna in a skin-tight pink dress.
“Dick who?” he asked.
“Dick Tracy,” I said. “You know, from the comic strip.”
Puck shook his head and gave me a look I’d come to know and hate: the “who-knows-what-planet-you’re from” eyebrow raise with a smart-aleck scowl on the side.
I ignored the pop culture reference gaffe; maybe Dick Tracy didn’t fight crime in
“There’s your ride,” Puck said as he slammed the gear shift into park three blocks later.
While we awaited the other half of our double-date on the patio, Puck gave me the
“I met them at the gym.
While the couple’s bodies were impressive—Grant was as built and buff as Puck and
“I’m all for couture,”
“I’ll admit it,” Puck said. “I just bought one.”
“You didn’t!”
“It’s a nice shirt,” he said. “It’s black with an Asian dragon design on the front.”
The shirt sounded familiar.
“The one you wore…the other night?” I asked.
“Yeah, that one,” Puck said.
My breath caught in my throat—Puck had dropped $50 on a t-shirt for our first date! I smiled inside; clearly, Puck was smitten with this kitten.
“We test drove cars today,” Grant said, peering back at his shiny SUV, as big and bad-ass as a tank.
“Getting rid of the drug-dealer mobile?” Puck asked.
Grant shrugged, still unconvinced. “We’ll see.”
The ultra-fit trio debated the merits of Hummers, Beamers, and Porsches.
“What do you drive, Erica?”
“Not a Porsche,” I said.
“It doesn’t have to be,” Puck said. “You have a nice car.”
I blushed; a few days before, Puck had eyed my Saturn VUE and said, “Your windows are so dirty…like…dogs or something.”
I didn’t have dogs, but I did have two daughters…a detail I still hadn’t disclosed to my fantasy man.
“So how’s the chow at this place?” Grant asked.
Puck winked at me from across the table.
I hid my giggle behind the menu. I’d never eaten at a French bistro before; even if I’d recognized the names of the dishes, I couldn’t pronounce them. What was a tasting menu? And what were the rules about fork usage? The meal hadn’t even begun and already I felt out of place. When the waiter arrived, I ordered the only thing I could pronounce: rotisserie chicken with steamed vegetables.
Though the conversation with Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dumb was blander than white bread, there was more than enough food to keep my mouth busy.
“You two will never eat all that,” Grant said when the waiter set down my chicken dish, a big bowl of gazpacho, a platter of paella, and a bacon cheeseburger with fries. Puck and I dove in, reaching across the table and eating off of one another’s plates like the seasoned couple I wished we were.
Grant ate like a woman—cutting each piece of his chicken into triangles and nibbling the poultry delicately.
Grant chauffeured us to Chino Latino, a haunt so hip it didn’t even post its name on the building. At the entrance was a shimmering, glittering, panel of crystals.
Inside, one wall was covered with red votive candles; another with mirrors. The patio opened onto
“Why are you so quiet?” Puck asked, sidling up to me.
“This isn’t my scene,” I said as a man with bright blue hair bumped into me, knocking me toward the table.
“What is your scene?” Puck asked.
I wanted to say, “Reruns of Sex and the City in my mom’s basement”, but I didn’t want to come off as the isolated loser I was.
“I don’t drink,” I said. “So I don’t go to bars.”
Had I been drunk, I might have enjoyed the details of a dirty e-mail that Grant shared with us.
“There were these two monkeys,” he said as he plucked the monkey stir sticks from everyone’s drinks. “One of them sticks his finger in the other monkey’s ass and the first monkey’s eyes totally bug out of his head!”
Grant erected a finger and mimed shoving it up his own ass, eyes popping out as big as golf balls from the sockets.
“It was funny as hell!”
Grant, Tracy, and Puck burst into inebriated fits of laughter—until they saw my unimpressed expression. The four of us half-stood, half-sat, staring at one another. Maybe Puck was right; maybe I was being antisocial.
I said the only thing I could think of.
“I just read this article in the Strib,” I shouted across the table. I was met with three pairs of eyebrows lazily creeping upward; it was unclear if my comrades couldn’t hear me or if I was boring them already. “About the five best bathrooms in Minnesotan restaurants.”
“Oh yeah?” Grant asked as he mounted one plastic monkey onto another. “Like, for gay sex?”
“Err, uh, I’m not sure,” I stammered. “But Chino Latino was named as one of them.”
The colored monkeys climaxed and collapsed into their corresponding cocktails.
“Speaking of bathrooms,” Puck said, punching Grant in the arm. “We’ll be right back.”
After the two buff boys staggered off, I turned to
“So…where do you work?”
“Hmm…huh?”
“The snack chip company?” I gawked. From the looks of her toothpick limbs,
“Information management.”
“What does that involve?” I asked.
“I make sure stores like Target have enough of the right kinds of products.”
Translation: a glorified stock girl.
“So how did you meet Grant?”
“At the gym,” she said. Her eyes roamed over my shoulder as though she were scouting out more promising conversational prospects.
“Lifetime Fitness is quite the social hot spot, isn’t it?” I asked. “Are the classes good?”
“I don’t do group exercise,” she said, sticking her mousy nose in the air.
When the boys rejoined us at the table, Puck’s hand slid across my leg and kneaded my thigh, trigger-point style.
“Is that therapeutic?” I whispered.
“Oh no,” he said. “Purely sexual.”
“I thought you weren’t into PDA.”
“I don’t feel the need to grab your bum in public, if that’s what you mean.”
I smiled and Puck followed my gaze to a couple making out voraciously at the bar.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he asked.
“Yeah…” I said.
On our way back to the car, Puck slid a hand up my skirt and gave my bare butt cheek a squeeze. A schoolgirl grin spread across my face.
“That turns you on?” he asked incredulously. I nodded. “My mother would not approve.”
“Then I’m glad your mother lives in
Puck grabbed my ass at every red light thereafter.
“Look!” Puck said, holding up his post-coital popsicle later that night. “A Christmas tree!”
“Mine’s more of a shrub,” I said, eyeing my misshapen lump-on-a-stick.
“So how do you like it?”
“The popsicle?” I asked. I considered the coconut flavor. “It’s not too sweet.”
“Like me.”
“Oh no,” I said, swallowing down the frozen fruit bar. “You’re very sweet.”
Puck cued up a CD on the stereo.
“Sometime,” I said. “You’re going to tell me how such a successful, sexy, athletic man gets to be thirty-five years old without being married.”
“Who are we talking about?” Puck asked with a coy smile. He bit off the last few branches of his Christmas tree. “Bedtime?”
“Anytime.”
Puck scooped me up off the couch.
“Whoa!” I yelped as he flung my calves across his forearms.
“Come on,” Puck said as he carried me into the boudoir. “Don’t act as if you haven’t been picked up lately.”
Puck tossed me onto the blood red bed and dove in beside me. He reached into his bedside table—for motorcycle catalogs, not condoms. Puck spread the glossy pages across his lap and eyed the bikes like teenage boys ogled breasts in Playboy. He was in his element, a satisfied smile on his face as he flipped from page to page, explaining the virtues of sport bikes versus cruisers to me.
“Now these are noisy bikes,” he said, pointing to a Harley. “They’re the ones that go pop-pop-pop-pop.”
I giggled like a preschooler.
Puck turned his head and lifted an eyebrow. “You like that?” he asked.
I nodded like an eager puppy. “Do it again!”
He did and the laughter escaped my mouth like chewing gum bubbles. No one had made me laugh like that in a long time.
Puck dropped the catalogs on the floor and lay back. Akimbo, his arms almost reached either edge of the bed. I couldn’t refrain from giving Puck googly eyes; I was amazed that someone so attractive would give me the time of day, much less invite me to spend the night with him.
“Are you a snuggler?” I asked.
In response, Puck patted the space next to him.
I snuggled into the warm crook between his armpit and shoulder as though I’d done it a thousand times before.
“You’re so quiet,” he said.
I lifted my head and examined his eyes.
“I’m worried you’re too good to be true.”
“I’m not,” Puck sighed and pulled me in closer. “I’ll think up a flaw so you feel better, ok?”
I pressed my cheek against Puck’s bare chest. His breath settled into a deep, steady rhythm and the muffled beat of his heart echoed in my ears. As I replayed the sound of his motorcycle impersonations in my mind, a private smile escaped me.
“Let me know when you want your arm back,” I whispered.
When Puck didn’t answer, I turned my eyes upward; he was already asleep.
Post-Coital Coconut Popsicles
Ingredients
2 ounces cream cheese
½ tablespoon sugar
¼ cup milk
4 ounces Cool Whip, thawed
½ cup shredded coconut
¼ teaspoon vanilla
Directions
· Combine cream cheese and sugar in large bowl; beat with electric mixer until smooth.
· Add milk gradually; beat again.
· Fold in Cool Whip, shredded coconut, and vanilla; stir until creamy.
· Spoon mixture into 4-count popsicle molds.
· Freeze at least 4 hours; meanwhile, fuck your brains out.
· For easy removal, let popsicles stand at room temperature for 5-10 minutes before serving.
· There’s no wrong way to eat this Popsicle. How you proceed is personal preference—but make sure to swallow.
· Enjoy sugar rush concurrently with afterglow.
June 2007
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