Nooner
June was wrapping up quite nicely.
It was a week after Claire’s date with Icky and Carl’s trip to Quaker County. Claire didn’t tell Carl about Icky because it didn’t mean anything, nothing happened, and what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Things were going too well between the two of them to risk ruining it by telling him about some silly date.
Carl didn’t tell Claire about his trip to Quaker County because, he reasoned, he wasn’t 100 percent sure he found what he was looking for.
June was wrapping up quite nicely.
Claire was sitting at work and she was on the phone with Carl and he was talking like Charles Boyer again.
“I want to smother you een keeses.”
“Me too…it’s been too long…I can’t wait for the weekend.”
“Why wait,” he said. “Come over my place for lunch, we’ll have a nooner…”
“I couldn’t do that.”
“Come on, be impulsive for once.”
“I can’t…”
“Come on…I want to kees your neck, I want to kees your belly, I want to kees your thighs.”
“Stop it,” she whispered.
“If you don’t come here I’ll go over there and ravage you right there on your desk. Won’t that cause a commotion.”
“Not in this newsroom.”
Then there was silence as she thought it over, she just needed a little push.
“Come on…you know you want it…”
And she did. “I’ll be over in 15 minutes,” she said.
“I’ll be naked and waiting.” he offered.
Claire hung up and walked into the editor’s office. “John, I’m going to take a long lunch because I’m covering candidates night tonight at the JCC.”
He wasn’t even paying attention to her, and waved her on.
Cool, he didn’t suspect. So she hopped in her Escort and sped down the boulevard, she was getting excited. She never had a nooner before. She had so very few secrets from mom, this could be one of them.
She pulled into the lot of his apartment and climbed the steps. Before she could knock on the door, Carl opened it, and he was dressed. A weird smell drifted out of the apartment, she looked over his shoulder to see sheets over his furniture and men in overalls painting his ceiling.
Carl joined Claire in the hall and closed the door behind him. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, as soon as I hung up the phone these guys showed up, I tried calling you back but you had left by then.”
“Shit,” she said.
“Yeah I know, picture me naked and waiting, and fat guys with paint brushes show up, that’s not my idea of a nooner.”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
He wrapped his arms around her and started kissing her neck, “Here, in the hall!”
She bent for a few seconds, (figuratively and literally) then said, “No, no, my place, hang on for a few minutes.”
They ran down the steps hand in hand and got in her Escort, vroom, they raced off to her house. The whole way Carl was fondling her. Claire never realized how hard it is to drive when a maniac is playing with her breasts.
They pulled into her driveway to be greeted by Mari’s Hyundai. “Shit,” she said. “My mom’s having lunch.”
Carl moved in closer to lick her ear. “Maybe she’s having a nooner, we’ll join her.”
“No, no, tomorrow, we have to do it tomorrow.”
He got serious. “I don’t know about you, I’m going to explode in about 10 minutes.”
She felt her bra getting tight. “Yeah, me too.”
“Here, in the driveway; on the gravel.”
“No, no,” she said, “a hotel…”
He stopped kissing her suddenly, and looked at her with wide eyes, as if to say, “How’d such an innocent girl like you get ideas like that?” Instead he said, “Let’s go.”
Vroom, they took off back down the boulevard, to the mythical Blue Lantern Hotel, way up on Route 1. It had the reputation for such rendezvous, and furthermore, it was across the street from a drive-in adult movie theater, what more could you ask?
They jumped out of the cars and made a dash for the lobby. Carl quickly checked in for a couple hours, signed the register Mr. and Mrs. John Smith, took Claire’s hand and they let themselves into their room.
He picked her up, threw her on the bed, tore off her clothes, and they made mad monkey love with their socks on for the next two hours.
Afterward Claire felt cheap, but in a good way.
After they got dressed Claire waited in the car as Carl checked them out. She knew it would be hard to stay focused when she got back to work.
Then something weird happened. The door of the room next to the room they stayed at opened. This was about 30 yards from where she was parked, she saw a woman exit the room and scamper across the lot to a car. Behind her, a man old enough to be the woman’s father stepped out of the room, but he didn’t follow her across the lot, he was walking back to the lobby to check out, she assumed, and as he came closer to the lobby, he began to look familiar, tall, black, graying hair, fortyish-- Claire ducked down under the dash board before he walked past the hood of her car.
She emerged in time to see Carl pass the guy, then open the car door. “We have to do this more often,” he said, smiling, starting up the car.
“Did you see who you just walked by?”
“No…my high school principal?” he joked.
“No, Richard Atkinson…”
His expression didn’t change.
“The guy my mom’s been seeing!”
“Did you see who he checked in with?”
“No.”
“Do you think it was your mom?”
“No.”
“Yikes…makes you wonder…what kind of person checks into the Blue Lantern at noon?”
