May day.
Bea was waiting for Bill in the storeroom. The moment he stepped inside she closed the door behind him and dead-bolted it so no one could come in. Bill could see she had quickly gathered all the things she needed taken upstairs in one corner and had left them there for him. He could see she’d set a trap for him.
“Been waiting,” she said.
“What’s up?”
“You done come a long way in the time you been here. Now you starting to get too big for your britches.”
“What you mean?” Bill was taken aback by her words, by her attitude. She stepped away from him and plopped her big butt on a stack of crushed-tomato cases.
“You know what I mean. Starting to really think you’re something, huh?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Bill.
He’d heard those words before. Those were the words Jim, that dishwasher, had used when Bill refused to give him alcohol.
“You know exactly what I mean,” said Bea. “Time for you to cut the shit out and go back to being number two.”
“We all want the same thing,” Bill said. He stepped up to Bea as she sat there, real close. He leaned in and whispered in her ear. “And some of us want more than just that the same thing.”
He kissed her ear softly. Then he bit her ear lobe. As he did so, he stepped even closer and slipped his hand under her dress up between her legs. For a moment he thought about telling her how Mary had told him to take care of her. But thinking about it, he decided that might piss her off even more, so he stayed quiet. With his free hand he turned her face so he could kiss her. He did so, at first a probing, soft kiss on the lips then a deeper, longer kiss, one meant to begin whatever was about to follow. His hand was getting busy.
Bea kissed back, not because she wanted to, but because he was being forceful and didn’t leave her room to say anything more. Every time she tried to formulate words, his tongue pressed hers and made it dance with him. As they kissed, he used his free hand to began unbuttoning her dress from the top.
Then came the moment when Bea stopped fighting and concentrated on getting what she wanted, which was two-fold. First, she was horny. Second, she wanted to make a point and she used her being horny to accomplish making her point.
“I want something too,” Bill said. He stopped kissing her for a moment, resumed after he said the words. He kissed down her throat to her bosom but her bra was in the way so he stepped back a scooch, reached inside the now-opened dress to unclasp it from the back.
“What you want, white boy?”
“Peace and quiet.”
He pushed her bra aside, helped himself to a generous and unabashed fondling of her. First he used his hand and then he used his lips.
“You know I’m not going to be here much longer,” he said. “Graduation is coming up. Later this month, in fact. My fiancé and I are already talking about what we’re going to do and where we’re going to be moving to after she gets her degree. So I don’t need to fight with you and you don’t need to fight with me. It’s not a pissing contest.”
But it was a pissing contest in Bea’s eyes. Bill knew that even as he said the words. Bill knew, even as he ministered to her, that there was no changing things from her perspective.
She leaned back against the items stacked behind the crushed-tomato cases, reached inside her fully-opened dress and removed her bra. She tossed it on the cases stacked nearby. Bill stepped away and watched her as she lifted up the dress from the bottom and drew down her panties.
He wondered for how long she might be appeased.
