While Gary B.B. Coleman was singing about the sky crying, I was inside staring vacantly at my armoire, wondering what the fuck I was going to wear. A glass of red was in my right hand, to calm my nerves, but so far it hadn’t done anything, other than make me feel a little tipsy. I hadn’t eaten much at all that day, aside from the odd nibble of some seaweed crackers and a few cherries. The alcohol was going straight to my head.

I turned down the stereo until Gary’s voice was no more than a low, bluesy soulful croon, and turned my attention back to my closet. I had an armoire full of expensive designer labels, yet looking at it, I felt totally uninspired. I used to go to lots of events with Richard, I had genuinely enjoyed dressing up and going to his annual company charity auctions or to the black-tie events, despite the fact that Richard had always been critical of what I wore. “No, don’t wear that shade of red, you’re my wife not a whore I’ve hired for the night.” or, “Why are you wearing that necklace? Put the choker on instead, it’s more expensive and I want people to notice.”

I took a deep swig of wine and stared at myself in the mirror. Dressed in nothing but my black lace bra and panties, I had to admit I cut an appealing figure. My no smoking regime had put a bit of meat back on my frame, but in a way that filled me out nicely. For the first time ever I had a plump little ass, and a curvy frame, instead of a pancake butt and a chest as flat as a surfboard.

I drained my wine glass; the Tuscan cabernet sauvignon went down extra nicely knowing it was one of Richard’s special wines he’d left in the house when he ran off with that bitch Deanna Peterson. His expensive drinks cabinet was a small reward, but drinking them for him was a sacrifice I was more than willing to make.

Sighing angrily while I looked at myself in the mirror, I quickly went back to the closet and grabbed the first thing I saw, throwing it on before I could change my mind again and go back to standing in just my underwear.

By the time I descended the stairs into the lobby, I was a few minutes late, but I didn’t care at that stage. A second glass of red had calmed me even more and loosened any nerves I had. It had loosened me so much that at first, I didn’t notice Stephen waiting, stoney faced and arms crossed impatiently over his chest. As I came down and stood in front of him, I could see him giving me the once over, looking at me up and down. I had chosen a dress that was conservative yet sexy; a floor-length black dress, a large split that ran almost to the top of my right thigh, a lace bodice and sleeves. “That’ll do I suppose,” Stephen said. If I hadn’t drained those two glasses of wine, I would have been dejected, but the red had given me confidence, and I knew well enough Stephen’s game by now.

‘Vivaldi: Symphonies and Concertos collection,’ the flyers read, in fancy, cursive writing. “I love Vivaldi,” I told Stephen as we entered the theatre and were given flyers and programs by the staff.

“I’m more of a Beethoven man myself, but I wasn’t going to turn down free tickets.”

“How did you get the tickets?” I asked.

“Just some guy I know through his work,” he answered, being vague. The foyer was filled with crowds of people chit-chatting and sipping glasses of wine. I looked underfoot at the faded red carpet with its hideously busy mosaic-like pattern; worn and near threadbare in several spots, trampled by no doubt thousands of feet before mine.

I imagined well-to-do ladies dressed in all their finery coming here to catch the opera and the latest gossip. I imagined men in tuxedos and black bow ties attending the ballet or perhaps to catch the performance of Handel's 'Messiah'. I could almost see the theatre kids and drama students erupting with excitement for the latest plays and musicals, and families lining up to see matinee performances of Agatha Christie’s ‘Mousetrap.’

“Come on,” Stephen said, looking at me oddly and trying to pull me along through the throngs of babbling bodies. He led me up a small, tight spiral staircase and into a box above the rest of the seats. The same ugly Christmas sweater carpeting was in the box, yet here the color was intensified and vibrant. Loudly and sickeningly strong, untrampled by the dress shoes and patent leather heels of every theatre going man, woman, and child.

“Champers?” Stephen asked, pulling the champagne bottle from the bucket of ice behind the chairs. Two drips of condensation raced each other down the length of the dark green glass bottle, finally falling to the ugly floor.

“Please,” I replied, sitting down and smiling. Stephen poured two generous flutes of bubbles, handed one to me and then sat down. The lights dimmed ever so slightly and the first melodic notes of the 'concerto for two violins in A minor' were played, hitting all of my five senses in such a way I’d never experienced before.

Stephen leaned over and spoke in a low whisper. “You look exquisite tonight, by the way. I like your hair down, you should wear it that way more often, you look like a woman from a pre-raphaelite painting with those curls.”

“I thought my appearance was just so-so? You told me ‘that’ll do’ in the lobby.”

Smugly, Stephen shrugged. “I didn’t want to give you cause to be vain or add to your already over-inflated pride and ego,” he mocked.

“Over-inflated pride and ego?” I hissed, louder than I had intended. From down below, people looked up at us angrily. Arrogantly, I thought of them as plebes in the cheap seats.

“Sssshhhhh,” Stephen said, smiling to himself, having accomplished his task of riling me up and getting a reaction out of me. “That dress will look even better hitched around your middle, my cock buried deep inside you.” In the dark, I blushed a deep shade of crimson, thankful that no one could clearly make out my face or features, the energetic sounds of the violin concerto entertaining the masses.

------------------------------

As the final strings of Vivaldi’s 'Winter' completed the night, everyone in the theatre stood and clapped as the final curtain drew and the evening came to a close. I stood up and wobbled on my feet slightly, feeling the full effects of two glasses of red wine and an additional three flutes of champagne on an empty stomach. Trudging tipsy down that small set of stairs and back into the foyer was not my finest moment, but I found the alcohol had the added benefits of rendering me indifferent to the stares of hundreds of eyes.

Checking his wristwatch, Stephen said, “The night is still young, shall we go somewhere for a glass of wine?”

“No,” I said, the thought of more alcohol making me feel like my stomach somersaulted.

“Hungry?” he asked me.

“Starving,” I answered.

“Come on then,” he said, swiftly taking my hand and leading me outside into the cool air of the night. The crisp, cool air on my face was a welcome sensation after the stuffiness of the theatre and I felt slightly more sober outside than I had in.

Stephen hailed a taxi and said something to the driver that I didn’t quite catch. The middle-aged driver, his beard thick and white, a suitably unfashionable flat cap on his head and a jacket that had been patched over and over was intently listening to a boxing match on the radio. Stephen leaned forward in his seat and asked the driver who was fighting.

Enthusiastically, and talking fast in a thick Boston accent, he answered, “Charlie ‘killer’ Cross and Luca ‘the dancer’ Rossi.”

“My money’s on Luca,” Stephen replied. “Young man’s got talent. It looks like he pisses around in that ring, but actually, he’s light footed and well balanced. ‘The dancer’ is an innocuous nickname.”

The driver laughed. “Yeah, but Charlie is near undefeated. Luca’s only a newbie.”

“Plenty of newbies have unseated champions,” observed Stephen. He settled back down into his seat and stared out the window, the late-night city whizzing past in a blur of lights. While Stephen was watching the scene outside the window, I was doing my best not to take any notice of it. The rattling and rumbling of the taxi was shaking my stomach, and looking out the window at the hazy lights was making me feel nauseous. Silently, I prayed that I wouldn’t vomit.

It felt like it took an eternity to reach our destination, wherever it was. Mercifully, the taxi came to a slow stop, rolling up to the curb, the engine quietly ticking over. Quickly, I got out of the car and swallowed several deep breaths of air, willing myself to keep the contents of my stomach down. Stephen came around the back of the taxi and stood next to me on the pavement, giving me an odd look, yet not asking me if I was okay.

I was unfamiliar with my surroundings, having never been this far East of the city. Quizzically, I looked at Stephen, silently questioning him, but he remained confident and chipper, taking me by the hand yet again and leading me. Much to my displeasure, I could feel it starting to rain.

Being downtown, in the late of night was a stark contrast from where we’d been earlier. The theatre and Vivaldi and the champagne felt like a completely different world as we passed a twenty-four-hour laundromat and a dark and almost dungeon-looking bar, a well-dressed woman in a crisp white shirt, leading a man to the alley around the corner, no doubt for some quick, late-night fun.

Even in my tipsy state, I protested when we stopped in front of a grungy looking shed of a place, the vendor being every stereotype imaginable about a fast food shack worker.

“What?” Stephen asked. “You don’t like Greek food?”

“I love it,” I told him. “But I’d rather mine didn’t come with a side of food poisoning.”

“Tut-tut, Blondie,” he said mockingly. “You know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.”

I knew I shouldn’t, but it was hard not to when the man behind the counter was large, hairy and sweating over the food, a cigarette dangling from his lips, the ash just about to fall into the food too. Thankfully, what Stephen ordered us came from the kitchen behind him. Inwardly, I prayed that whoever worked the kitchens was cleaner than the host.

In a thick Greek accent, the man asked, “There is anything else I can get you?”

“Yes,” replied Stephen. “Two cups of coffee, this morning’s paper and could you tell me who won the boxing match?”

The Greek grunted and then shuffled off.

I watched the rainfall outside as we sat in silence, feeling very self-conscious of my overdressed and over-done state, weary of the filthy looks of a young couple. This wasn’t my world, and they knew it. Stephen made himself comfortable on the bench, reclining back as if he had not a worry or a care in the world, casually tapping his fingers on the table to the Greek music. I found the music annoying at first, and as the tempo increased, I felt the need to stay with it, and I could feel myself getting frantic as the music did, but after a few minutes, I found myself enjoying it, as well as the traditional artwork on the walls. The smell of spiced meats and vegetables wafting from the kitchen helped in easing me too.

“Here is your coffee, and here is newspaper,” said the large, hairy man as he placed two cups in front of us and handed Stephen the paper. “Mr Luca won the boxing.”

“Excellent, thank you,” Stephen beamed. When the man had left, he leaned in closer to me, as if it were a secret and said, “I knew he could do it, he’s a talented boxer. Next time I know who to put my money on.”

“I didn’t know you gambled.”

Stephen half-heartedly waved me off. “Bah, I don’t, not really anyway, but I have my own bookie that I contact from time to time.”

“That’s illegal,” I replied.

Again, he tried to wave me off. “He’s in Nevada, it’s fine there.”

“How do you collect the money then?” I asked.

“Full of questions tonight, aren’t we, Blondie? He wires me the money. People have their ways. I can bet on sporting matches outside of the country if I want. There’s always a way to get money to people.”

For all of my ex-husband’s shitty attributes, he abhorred pseudo-legal pastimes such as gambling and betting. He also claimed to hate secretive business dealings. I remember his impassioned rant to me of a businessman who got caught on a number of charges; light treason being one of the many. Nevermind that Richard had his own tax-haven somewhere in Asia and that he’d run off with his daughter’s best friend’s mother. He utterly condemned those practices in others, yet for himself, it was a different story.

We ate mostly in silence once our food had arrived. Ravenous, it felt like I finished my meal in record time, whereas Stephen mostly picked at his, more interested in his newspaper and coffee. When I finished eating and sat back in my chair, dabbing a napkin at my mouth, I found Stephen’s eyes on me, an odd expression on his face.

He chuckled as he said, “Good thing I like a woman who likes her food.” Feeling another sarcastic or teasing remark coming on, I buried myself in my coffee cup, and polished that off too. He leaned forward and ran a warm hand up the split in my dress. “You look absolutely ravishing, my dear,” he said in a husky voice.

I let out a long breath and felt a pang of life in the pit of my stomach, desire welling up within me. He scraped his chair across the cheap linoleum floor closer to my side of the small table, his fingers climbing higher and higher up my thigh. I almost dropped the coffee cup on the faded floor when he reached my pussy, pushing my panties to the side and running a daring finger up and down my slit.

My left hand gripped the edge of the table harder, my knuckles blenching white. I couldn’t believe the boldness of the man, to do such intimate things in public, yet it excited me. As scared as I was of being caught, I was excited and aroused.

Perhaps sensing that the middle of a Greek restaurant was not the best place to have me, he stood and practically dragged me back out. The smell of the rain damp earth invaded my nostrils as soon as we were outside. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, loving the smell after it rains.

Stephen was on a mission, and when his eyes alighted on a small park area, he pulled me along quickly, wasting no time.

“A park?” I asked, the fat, wet raindrops plopping on my hair. “I’m not the type of girl to bend over and take it in the woods,” I stated, wholly unimpressed with where he was taking me.

From in front of me, I heard Stephen laugh. “Oh you will be one day, my dear, trust me.” We stopped at the edge of the park, standing on the threshold, the green, damp grass at our feet, an open world of sex right there for the taking. “There’s a bandstand over there. Does that meet Your Grace’s requirements?”

I hesitated, unsure of what to say. To drive the point home, he pulled me in for a kiss, one hand on my chin, the other in the small of my back. His lips were wet from the rain, and his mouth tasted of tzatziki. He took me over the imaginary threshold and through the park, quickly dashing as the rain grew heavier.

“This is madness,” I said, laughing, slightly out of breath from running. “What if we get found out? What if someone sees us?”

“Let them see us,” he replied, completely unfazed.

Once under the cover of the bandstand, the rain hitting the roof hard, we kissed once more. We must have been quite a sight, standing in the middle of a park at night on the Eastside, disheveled from the rain, our good clothes crumpled and crushed while we made out and practically dry-humped in public, as romantic as that was.

I could still hear the orchestra from earlier in my head as we kissed and grinded ourselves against each other, desperate for the bodily contact and the touch of the other. I rubbed his thickening cock in his dress pants, giving it a friendly squeeze. Playfully he nibbled at my neck. “You make me cum in my pants and I’ll be leaving you with the dry cleaners bill,” he vaguely threatened. Smiling, I made good work unbuckling his trousers and setting him free.

His fingers on my clit and my hand on his cock, we stood locked together, getting each other off. Pushing two fingers in my clit and then offering them to me, he smiled when I accepted and sucked them, tasting my own juices. “Come here,” he whispered, almost stumbling backward until he was sitting on the wooden bench seat.

It was quite a sight to see a well-dressed man in a suit with his cock out, standing straight to attention in the cool night air, the backdrop of the city behind us. Knowing exactly what he wanted, I quickly pulled my panties down my leg, shifted my dress out of the way and mounted him, feeling the exquisite hardness of a cock buried deep inside me once more.

I took him halfway down on the first thrust and then all the way on the second, his thickness delightfully stretching me so I could accommodate him. “Jesus Christ,” he whispered. I moaned.

In the tangle of material that made my dress, he found my ass cheeks and dug his nails in. Gripping my ass, he tried to move me up and down faster on him, the mutual yet silent agreement between us that this was a quickie, and that this was about getting off as quickly as possible. I watched his face as I purposely clenched the walls of my pussy tighter on his cock. He closed his eyes and made a face of pure ecstasy.

“You ever have a threesome?’ Stephen asked.

I tried to study his face, wondering why he had asked me this, but his face was too contoured in pleasure for me to get a good reading from him, and I couldn’t gauge whether he was shit stirring or trying to get a confession from me.

“Yeah,” I answered slowly.

“With Richard?”

“Yeah.” I fucked him a bit harder.

“With who and when?” he asked. The rain beat down harder and heavier still, I strained to hear his question.

“A friend of Richard’s from work, a guy named Troy.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“Yeah,” I answered. I then moaned.

“Would you do it again?”

“I could frame my mind towards it, yes.”

He lasted five more strokes after that. Perhaps the thought of me with two cocks got to him, but when he let go and came inside me, I felt it, every little twitch and spasm of his cock as he emptied himself inside me. I closed my eyes in bliss and waited for his cock to stop twitching and for his breathing to regulate.

We both stood and adjusted ourselves in silence, quickly pulling clothes back to how they were meant to be and re-buckling belts. Stephen seemed brooding, there was something off about him. I wondered about answering his questions so honestly and if he was judging me.

Stephen left the bandstand, walked a few short paces and then held out a hand to me. Smiling, he said, “come here.”

“It’s raining, we’ll get wet,” I replied.

“So, who cares?”

“Stephen…..” I said. I bit my lip, unsure of what to do.

“Come on,” he repeated.

Nearly slipping down the rain-drenched wooden steps, I stood in front of him and took his hand. He slid one arm around my waist, and slowly started moving in time to something that was lost on me.

“Stephen?” I asked.

He shushed me. “Dance with me,” he said. I put my hand on his shoulder and we slowly danced in the rain, getting wetter by the minute. He shushed me a second time when I went to ask again, why. By the time the dance finished to the imaginary concerto, we were soaking wet and laughing. “I don’t think I will have a threesome with you.”

I gave him a questioning look. “You’re mine,” he said.