by Scott Andrew Smith
(01/06/10)

The first thing she'd noticed about him was his driveway. The slope of it, the patient ease with which it angled toward the street, slow and deliberate. Even before he and his wife moved in she had noticed it, had marveled at how perfect it looked, how it followed a similar pitch to the street as hers, lining up perfectly with her parents' driveway, resembling the canoe-shaped dish her mother used to line up apples and pears, how if she pulled one from the center the others would softly, kindly tumble into one another like passengers on a bus which had braked just a touch too firmly.

They moved in on a Sunday. She watched as the movers unloaded boxes from the back of a trailer, hefting them into their broad chests and carrying them, like fallen-asleep children, up the driveway's delicate incline and through the back door. She watched the couple moving around inside the house, separating, arms full, and then coming together again for kisses, their bodies erasing, in their converging, a sliver of light coming through the sliding glass door at the back of the house, the sun falling and the day's end leaning into darkness and the house lit up from the inside like a jack-o-lantern with a fresh candle.

They kept to themselves, mostly. Both worked, driving away every morning in separate cars and then returning, always within an hour of one another, leaving the cars headed toward but not into the garage, the cars just sitting there, left out even at night, parked midway up the driveway as if floating there on the pavement.

She knew his wife was the first to go to bed. Always. Knew this because she could see her walking the second floor hallway and saw him sitting in the front room of the house, directly below the bedroom. She kneeled at her bedroom window and watched him read, watched him hold the book in his lap and turn the pages with long, broad fingers, pulling back the page until it began to fold beneath his touch, like a wave, arching, cresting away from the unread pages beneath it.

She began to imagine, after noticing that he frequently left their garage door open until nearly midnight each evening, that a ball rolled from her garage might follow the slope of her drive, cross the street with ever-increasing speed and then, with enough momentum, roll up his and his wife's drive, bouncing against the cement steps that led to their house. She thought of doing that on hot summer afternoons, wondering what he would do should he find a ball resting against the back step. She imagined sneaking out to her garage, checking to be sure he or his wife were not looking, bending down and rolling the ball out her back door, racing back inside, running up to her room and peering out the window to watch as it came to rest against the back step, glancing round the curtains to wait for the moment when he would emerge and, seeing the ball, wonder. She imagined his hand, strong against the ball's surface, its thin red rubber giving under the pressure of his grasp, like flesh. There were nights when she played this scenario out in her mind, from the rolling of the ball to the sneaking up to her window and the stolen watching, to his hand crowning itself atop the ball. And when she did, when she would lay down into her bed and imagine this, her hand always found the delicate knoll of a thigh, squeezing her skin and muscle, flushing herself to a chill at the thought of his hand, there, letting her body give under her, under his, grasp.

By her eighteenth birthday she had barely seen the man since he and his wife had moved into the allotment. She would catch him handing out trick-or-treat candy on Halloween or catch the exact moment when he would come home from work (it was never the same, thus making her luck at this feel like the luck of stray quarters found on the sidewalk) and see him emerge from his car to walk the few steps to the cement step in the garage, the step leading, she assumed, to his wife, to their end-of-the-day life together. He did come out for the paper. Did attend the occasional block party. But other than this he was another of the silent, unseen members of a neighborhood full of working people glad to retreat to their privacy at day's end.

That summer, her eighteenth, he finally, fully put himself into view. She had graduated from high school, was packing her things for college, folding underwear she had bought on secret trips to the mall, delicate white panties and more daring red and pink pairs that she hoped might one day be lowered from her hips by a tender, sensitive boy so unlike the anxious, thick-desired boys she'd tried -- too often unsuccessfully -- to experiment with in high school. She remembers finding lace bras and running her fingers along their soft edges in the back corner of the lingerie department, wondering what it might feel like to have a boy, maybe a senior, running his intelligent fingers along the edge like that, peeling it back so that he might kiss her breast, take her nipple into his mouth and bite at it gently for minutes on end without insisting on anything else. She second-guessed the daydream but bought the underwear just in case, just because it felt good in her hands, just because the fantasy felt like lace in her mind. She was folding these things when he emerged completely from the back door, walking down the driveway as his wife backed the car into the street and put it in gear, driving off to leave him standing in the sudden shadow of the garage, crying. He stood there for several minutes, she at the window the entire time, staring, a pink pair folded neatly in her hands, held close against her stomach, which ached.

That night she would open her suitcase and remove this pair, pull it past her knees and up to her hips and sling it around her bare waist, lowering her fingers to its top edge, moving her own touch down, beneath the material, just as she once had slunk down into a sleeping bag, trying to hide from her mother's call for breakfast. Her knuckles grazed the slight scratch of lace, the tips of her fingers finding a groove slicked hours ago, first working the crease and then the tip of her desire, bucking her hips into her hand and thinking of his hand on the ball, his eyes, moist with tears.

When she left early the next morning for college, staring out of the back window of the station wagon, she saw him in the driveway, watched as he straightened from picking up the newspaper, their eyes meeting and she going moist as he held the gaze. This time his eyes were not tearful but awake, dangerous, almost hungry, almost desperate.

She returned home for winter breaks, spending the summer traveling in Italy and Spain, Portugal and France. She rarely saw him but when she did she went wet with looking, her desire crying quietly within the downy-veiled crease between her thighs. Each time she would retreat to her bedroom and move her fingers to her hips, to the separating she so wished someone like him would do, spreading her and severing, for good, some half of her from the one that still believed in wayward rubber balls and marriages that lasted and boys who took their time.

The summer after her graduation she spent at home, three months to visit friends before going away to work overseas, three months to think about the boys she'd known that year in college, the ones with fumbling, beer-sticky hands and cocks that seemed to harden at even the thought of a touch. She had almost forgotten about the man across the street, her fantasy life long ago yielding to the reality of college sex, her panties worn for boys that noticed them only because they were in their way. She had just about forgotten him, hadn't looked out the window since early last summer, though his garage door was still open every night of the week, still open until nearly midnight.

And then she saw him, his car parked in the street and his garage door open, at work over what looked to be a large, wooden tub, a sort of weathered, wooden bucket. She watched, her bedroom door open behind her and her parents away for the weekend, as he lowered, carefully, a silver drum, of smaller size but similar shape, into the bucket. He fastened it to the bottom of the bucket and then disappeared into the house, returning with a large Tupperware container filled with what looked to be fresh, white, thick milk, pouring the contents into the silver cylinder, lowering a lid atop it, and then fastening a sort of hand crank to the top, returning to the kitchen and then coming back out to sit in a chair and work the handle around in circles, endlessly.

He was barefoot, wearing worn khakis and a snug white tank top of the sort worn by men in '30s gangster films. She watched as he turned the crank arm, his wrist and hand working the motion, watched as small beads of sweat formed on his forehead, bloomed beneath his eyes, watched so long and with such recklessness that she hardly noticed when he lifted his gaze to hers, catching her there in the window, freezing her in position, his arm muscling the mixing with relentless, slow, steady force, turning milk and sugar to chilled, thick ice cream. He returned his gaze to the work for half an hour or so, eventually stopping and removing the crank and covering both drum and bucket with a thick blanket and walking inside. Within the hour neighbors began to appear in his driveway and, then, in his garage -- greedy children with bowls and spoons, mothers urging patience and politeness in the face of all that creamy sugar, men standing around with bottles of beer in their hands, summer sweat beading on the glass. She watched this all, watched from her bedroom in the cool air conditioning, watched as the others found their way to the bucket that he sat at, his legs spread on either side, spooning out gorgeous, abundantly splendid scoops of homemade ice cream and, occasionally, looking up and across the street, his eyes meeting hers.

She considered, briefly, walking down the stairs, rooting out a bowl and spoon, making her way, nervous, across the street like an urchin begging a second bowl of broth. But she decided against it, settling instead for the ice cream to be found in her own freezer, the store-bought brand that she spooned without satisfaction into her mouth, letting the cold metal stay on her tongue a bit longer than she ever remembered needing to when she was a little girl.

Evening came and she tried to watch television, tried to read, but thought of him, thought of the broad, deep spoon in his fingers, his hand disappearing into the drum, the spoon coming out with ice cream cradled in its curve, the way the spoon went slick and glistening once the contents had been gently eased into someone's waiting bowl. She walked upstairs to her room, a second bowl of ice cream in hand, and paused in the doorway, her attention caught by the light teasing the glass of the window in a darkened bedroom -- a hesitant, soft glow, the sort created by a lover awaking in a one-room apartment, shawling the lamp so that he can watch you there, wrapped against waking in the bed sheets. She wanted to go near the glass, wanted to take a look to see if, as she suspected, the light was coming from the open garage across the street. She wanted to see if he might be there, cleaning up from the party, or if she might catch him closing the back door.

She stepped to the window, slowly, placing a long-abandoned child-size chair by the window and sitting there, her long legs kneeing their way up to her chest and shoulders as she leaned toward the window with the bowl of ice cream cold against her thighs. Within moments he appeared, stepping out the back door, sitting down in the chair he'd sat in earlier, wrapping his legs on either side of the bucket, staring at the drum's silver cover for a moment, just a moment, before raising his eyes to find her there, in the window, caught sliding a huge spoonful of ice cream into her barely-open mouth.

She stood, turned on her heels, left the bowl of ice cream on the chair as if she'd practiced this a thousand times, walking to the top of the stairs and calmly, collectedly descending to the first floor and out her back door and across the garage floor, her feet bare on the driveway and her eyes ignoring the look-both-ways admonitions of parents wired long ago into her body, staring straight across the street and walking there, past the threshold of the garage, turning her back to him for a moment and touching the button which brought the door to closing. She turned back to him, wordless, as he spooned out a small scoop of the ice cream into an extra bowl sitting on the work table beside him, handing it to her along with a small spoon, she taking the seat he'd risen from to offer her.

It tasted better than she expected: rich and deep, cold and strangely thick, a bizarrely soft surprise of flavor that is new without being shocking, different but somehow expected. She'd never been a fan of vanilla, preferring richer, denser varieties -- rum raisin, triple fudge stripe, things dark and profusely sugared, almost too sweet, the kind of chocolate that overwhelms. But this was a different sensation altogether -- slower, patient, the vanilla settling onto her tongue and pausing there before the ice cream turned to a thin liquid that slid down her throat and chilled her from her shoulder blades to the backs of her knees, from the top to the base of that lovely crevice that she found herself squirming on with each slowly-taken spoonful.

She asked if he was having any. No, he said, he'd never had any. He explained that his wife -- he corrected himself to say "ex" wife -- had bought him the ice cream maker but that he could never stand to look at it, the last gift she'd given him, joking about how they would one day make batches for their kids, for the neighbors in the backyard. In fact, he said, today had been its trial run. But that he'd not even tried the result.

She smiled, slyly.

"What?"

She blushed, worked her spoon underneath a small mound of vanilla ice cream, pulling the spoon towards her mouth, opening her lips slightly, teasingly, and, turning the spoon away from her mouth at the last moment, moving it toward him as if feeding a child and he leaning toward her, the ice cream already soft in the curve of metal, sliding, by way of her thin hand, into his mouth.

She eased it past his open lips onto his tongue, turning the spoon over so that he could get the full rush of flavor, pushing the cold metal into his mouth, further, harder, her legs shaking as she stood and stepped forward to meet him, his arms wrapping themselves around her waist and his hands settling into that spoon-like curve at the small of her back.

She removed the spoon and replaced it with her lips, her tongue, leaning in, kissing into all that liquid vanilla pooling in the warmth of their open mouths. He pulled away to unbutton her blouse, revealing milky-white skin and breasts soft as the clouds which had not appeared for days during this heat. He took the spoon from her hand, raised it to her chest, grazed it along a nipple, guiding its still-cool surface toward her stomach, to the top of her jeans. He looked up, paused, and pulled away, the garage colder, suddenly, for the lightest of moments.

She nodded, unbuttoning and hip-thumbing the jeans free of her waist, her ass, kicking the jeans off in a final, "it's-okay" yes as he lowered her to the chair, the surface cool against her ass, her pussy now as moist as the final scoops of ice cream, uncovered, melting in the heat of the garage. He looked in her eyes, at her skin, at her body, now presented for him, the shirt still clinging to the loveliest shoulders he'd seen in his life, her raven black hair standing out stark against all that creamy, young skin. He took the spoon and lowered it to the freezer, turning it a few times. Then, removing it without ice cream, he guided it to her stomach, which fluttered against the convex edge, then to her waist and, then, to her clit -- a sudden, cold, lovely surprise, the kind you want to run out into like a cool rain on a squelching summer day, the drops glorious respite from heat that had threatened to overwhelm you.

He worked the spoon up and down, chilling her at the same time that it brought her warmer, wetter, the slick surface of her pussy moist with desire, with an idea, an invitation, an urgent request.

She arched her back, moving her ass closer to the chair's edge as hot air from the garage rushed into her. She steadied the balls of her bare feet into the cool garage floor as though she were about to dance. Her eyes closed, then opened, closed again, he still dressed, though his cock was clearly visible through his pants, its length and breadth anxious.

She cooed. He was silent, staring at her closed eyes as he worked the spoon one last, long time against her clit, moving it down, turning it sideways and, with the softest of touches, his kind eyes staring at her closed ones, easing the spoon into her cunt, turning it so that the round edge pressed into the top of her, that hidden spot none of the boys in college could ever find, if they'd even tried to, the spot she happened upon one night that summer, joying to the orgasm which felt like a brand new flavor she'd never known but was always there, waiting.

Her eyes opened, looked into his, watched as he worked the spoon free of her pussy and placed it back into the bowl, watched as he undid his pants in a sort of familiarly hurried way, working free his penis, tucking his underwear beneath his balls and, putting both hands on the chair, one on either side of her shoulders, easing her back, the chair on two legs, bringing her crotch to the level of his and, then, in one, sudden, swift, impatient moment, plunging his aching, tired-of-waiting cock into all that wet, fragrant, ripe flesh opening to take him.

He worked the chair in his hands, worked her back to him and then away again, never letting his cock leave her cunt, fucking her with the cool cement floor warring against the close heat of a summer garage, the spoon moist with the ice cream surrounding it, the spoon inching farther in, sinking down into the ice cream, slowly, slowly.

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