Another deep breath. God, she was
magnificent. “Look, Robbie, I'm sorry it didn't…”
“Hold up,” I interrupted. “This is not a
play for you. We work together, and I asked you out because I liked
you. Still do.” I started fiddling with a napkin, suddenly awkward.
It felt like I was about to violate some sacred guy law by talking
about feelings, but what the hell. I could always go punch
something later. “I know I screwed up, but I don't want it hanging
between us for years and years until you glare at me across the
hall in the rest home. I'd like to be friends. You're a good
person, and you're funny when you let yourself relax. There, that'
s everything I practiced. You can yell at me now. G'head, yell at
me, I dare you. I double dare you. Do it and I'll scream
rape!”
Her lips were twisting again, but I
recognized this one - this was the way she looked when she was
trying desperately not to laugh, so I pressed my advantage. “Tell
you what, you can make a caveman lunge at me and then we'll be
even. Here, I'll close my eyes and you can…”
“All right!” she said, giggling but still
wary, if that makes sense. “Okay, you can stay. Be good. You're on
probation.” I thanked her and set my drink down to go get my own
food. When I looked back she was still there, watching me leave.
She hadn't made a move towards her steak knife yet, that was a good
sign.
Maggie Seger was easily the
most beautiful woman in our office. Short, slender, curvy body,
dark curly hair that I suspected was very, very soft. And skin so
clear and smooth it looked like spun glass. She had told me her
parents were mixed races, and obviously they had mixed very well
indeed. Unfortunately I didn't get to hear much more about her life
because by then I had made my stupid, fumbling move at her and our
first date was over before the first bite of the main course.
Thinking back I still can't believe that I misjudged her so badly.
I'm usually pretty good at telling if a woman was interested in me
or not (hint: vomiting is a sure giveaway) and I coulda sworn she
had the “kiss me” look right before she hit me with her broccoli
quiche and stormed out of the restaurant. I mean, I don't just
seize women for my own immoral purposes. I honestly
like
the people I date,
and I love the slow, romantic process of getting to know them
inside and out.
Then
I seize them.
I had to give her credit though, the next
day at work it was like nothing had happened. I feared spiteful
office gossip (at best) or an inquest from Human Resources (at
worst), but I never heard anything from anybody about it.
Especially from Maggie, who seemed to look right through me on
those times when she couldn't avoid me outright. Come to think of
it, it was kind of unusual to see her on one of our Friday office
lunches; she usually avoided those too. I had the impression she
wasn't a real people person, you know? But there she was, watching
the cook flip the strips of red meat over and over.
Every Friday our office, in a fit of manic
executive board anti-disgruntlement appeasement, would venture out
for a long lunch. It was supposed to be a way of blowing off steam
and binding us all together into a family. Unfortunately it worked,
and now we spent every Friday afternoon bickering, arguing,
gossiping, yelling, and entering into vast and complicated
alliances and feuds between departments before finally ganging up
on Sales. This Friday we were trying a new place - Mongolian Steak
and Grill, over on Hamilton, where the sushi bar used to be. It was
too dark inside to get a good look at the food but it sure smelled
good, and our crowd was having a great time watching the cook toss
onions and peppers into the air like popcorn. I grabbed my salad,
picked out some ingredients for my stir-fry and left them waiting
for the cook's attention. Just then he was intent on spinning a
spice jar on the edge of his knife, so I headed back to wait.
Maggie was watching him, fascinated. “I
didn't know you liked Mongolian,” I said. “I should have brought
you here instead.”
“Never been here before, but after Sherri
described it to me I just had to come. It's great, huh? Smell
that!” She inhaled deeply, which caused her silk blouse to expand
and test her button strength. With a coy smile she looked back at
me. “I would have been really mad at you if you made me walk out on
you here. Oh, look!”
The cook finished spinning his cutlery and
tossed some strips of meat into the stainless steel wok in front of
him. A loud hissing came out of it, and a powerful scent of
sizzling beef filled the room as he continued to pitch vegetables
into the mix. It was like watching a master juggler or a man with
three girlfriends; his arms never stopped moving. I started to say
“Wonder if he does chainsaws too,” but then I got a good look at
Maggie's face.
She was horny. I mean, total lust-filled
craziness. Her usual demure, shy, “Little House on the Prairie”
expression had burned away and underneath it was a wildcat in heat.
I forced myself to sit back and relax. I mean, this was exactly
what had happened before. We were talking, she got that “fuck me
right now, goddamit” look in her eye like someone snuck up and
flipped her switch over to “Nympho”, and the next thing I knew I
was digging melted cheese out of my ear. So obviously it wasn't me
she wanted.
The cook? Didn't peg her for the type to
like sweaty old Asian men, but she wasn't looking at anybody else.
Wrong angle for her to be checking out any of our co-workers. And
how did that explain our date? Did she spot a Pat Morita look-alike
behind me that night and I just misunderstood? Not enough answers,
so best to shut the hell up and keep watching.
Just then the cook whirled and, with a
flourish, slid a mass of steaming food onto a large plate and held
it up towards her. Before she could get up I was already halfway
there, waving her back down. I grabbed her plate, piled high with
thick folds of beef and a token smattering of veggies, and turned
back to see if I could catch her staring and figure out her
interest. Ha! Bond, James Bond! Cleverly disguised as a waiter, I
shall discover your secrets, my dear!
But Maggie wasn't looking at the cook
anymore. She was looking at me. To be specific, she was looking
right at my crotch, and there was no disguising the hungry look she
was giving it. She looked like she wanted to eat me alive, right
then and there, and was willing to swallow my change and car keys
to get to me. A quick mental check - nope, nothing especially hard
down there right now, although I could tell it was on its way.
Halfway back I surreptitiously raised the plate a bit so I could
check myself out for an open zipper or suspicious stain.
And like a cat waiting for scraps, her eyes
followed the plate. I moved the plate down, and she was looking at
my crotch again. I slid the plate to the side; her eyes tracked it
perfectly. Totally confused now, I set the plate in front of her
and dropped back into my chair.
Instantly I disappeared from her
consciousness, along with everybody else in the world. She was too
busy trying to swallow fast enough so she wouldn't drool, and only
years of good manners kept her from digging in with her hands. Stab
went the fork into a huge piece of beef and, instead of cutting it,
she rolled it until there was a handball-sized wad of meat on the
end. She raised it slowly to her lips, closed her eyes, and worked
it inside, moaning and letting her lips rest on it for a moment
before forcing herself farther. It looked exactly like she was
choking down the biggest dick in the world, and if I wasn't hard
before I sure as hell was now. Jesus God, what the fuck was up with
this woman?
She chewed the chunk slowly and sensually,
but it wasn't for my benefit. I could have been gone, or naked, or
on fire, for all she cared just then. She had her perfect lover and
she was swallowing him alive while his juices ran down her chin.
She sucked and nibbled on the end of it until she had worked a bit
free, and, never removing her mouth from the ball, she swallowed
and eased her lips forward to work on the next load.
I had never in my life wanted so badly to be
a forkful of food.
What the hell was going on? And how could I
get some of it? I looked down at her plate. It looked tasty, sure,
but what the fuck? What the hell did we order before? Let's see,
she had the shrimp scampi, and I had filet mignon. Blood rare, as
God intended. I had just sliced into it and… she got that look
again. Son of a bitch, that was it. Maggie wasn't hot for me that
night; she wanted my meat! Well, you know what I mean. She was a
meat freak! A beef fetishist. A steakophile. A… I had to keep
thinking stupid thoughts like this, because just watching her
wriggle while she deep-throated her stir-fry was causing me to
almost lose it right there under the table. I honestly think that
if she hadn't been wearing panty hose that fork would have
disappeared under the table in a heartbeat.
I couldn't let this slide past me. When God
hands you something like this, you have to grab it and say thank
you! But did I really want to get into this kind of kink? I mean,
this was one I hadn't heard of, and I used to live near Times
Square. Meat? Where would I take her for a romantic evening, the
slaughterhouse? Is high cholesterol sexually transmittable? Would I
come home one day to catch her masturbating to “Iron Chef” videos?
If I bought her a Coney Island dog, would I have to worry about
where it would end up? But damn, she was gorgeous. Her nipples were
rock hard, plainly visible through her blouse, and there was a
maddening meaty scent that wasn't coming from the grill. I snuck a
peek under the tablecloth; her toes were curled.
Suddenly she dropped her fork and looked at
me, horrified. “Oh, god, I'm sorry,” she said, hiding her face in
her hands. It was only partially successful; the fact that her body
was still shuddering with desire kinda blew the effect. I started
to reach out and reassure her but she leaped from her chair and
ran, awkwardly, for the bathroom.
On the other side of the grill our
co-workers were watching, raptly, with big happy smiles that
quickly turned into expressions of concern when they noticed me
looking. So much for a gossip-free work environment. I decided that
friendship counted more than embarrassment and went to meet her
when she emerged, damp but presentable, moments later. She dropped
her eyes and tried to push past me.
“Please, don't say anything, I am so
embarrassed…”
“Why? I like a woman who enjoys a good
meal,” I said. She sort of snorted and sobbed at the same time and
tried to go around the other side; I moved again and lifted her
chin up. “It's okay. Really. C'mon, sit down and talk about it. Or
don't. Or I can leave you alone right now, but I'll still say hi in
the halls and I'll still send you Xerox copies of my butt on
holidays. But no matter what, I won't tell anybody anything you
choose to share with me. Deal?”
She sniffed a few times and then smiled.
“Only if you leave me off the butt list.”
“You're a hard woman.”
Back at the table she carefully pushed her
plate aside and put her clenched hands in front of her. “Look, I'm
not going to go into too many details, all right? My parents owned
a butcher's shop. I used to hate it, the smells and the carcasses
and… I was vegetarian as soon as I was old enough to know what that
was. One day dad hired an assistant and we fell in love, and my
first time was in the chopping room, because it was the only place
we had, and ever since then the smell and taste and feel of any
kind of meat takes me right back there.” Her eyes kept darting over
to the still-steaming plate. My own was ready and waiting for me
back at the counter, but Adam Sandler would win Best Actor before I
left this table.
“So why is this a problem,” I asked. “Find a
good-looking butcher and settle down. You're beautiful, you could
get anybody you wanted by wiggling a few times. Go cruise Winn
Dixie, they're the beef people.”
She was shaking her head
back and forth. “You don't understand,
I'm
still a vegetarian
. Do you know what it's
like to get aroused by something that disgusts you?”
“Yeah, my ex-girlfriend. The question is,
can you get aroused without it? Can you have meatless sex?”
Maggie looked me straight in the eyes and
poked around in there for a few minutes before answering. “I don't
know. I haven't had… I haven't done anything since George dumped
me.” Her blush brought her skin color up to match her
lipstick.
“Anything?”
“Stop it, this is hard enough. I've never
told anybody this, I knew they'd think I was a freak.”
“You told me.”
She smiled ruefully. “Yeah, well, you
already thought I was a freak. Besides, I smacked you with a
quiche, I figured I owed you an explanation.” We laughed together,
and I fell in love with her all over again for about the tenth
time. I'm sure that there were other people in the restaurant, but
all I could see was Maggie; her shining face, her luscious hair,
her magnificent hooters. Hey, it's not like I haven't had
girlfriends with strange diets before, right? So I took a
chance.
I straightened to my full height and
declared, “Maggie, I have the answer for you. Aversion
therapy.”
She jerked away from staring longingly at
her plate. “Excuse me?”
“You've been hiding from meat for years,
right? Of course it has a disproportionate effect on you! You need
to be exposed to more meat, um, I mean, you need to have more meat
hanging around you… damn. You won't get used it if you run away
from it. There, that's what I meant. I think.”
She seemed to be both amused and pissed,
which I interpreted favorably since it gave me a 50-50 chance. “And
this would happen…?”