And Sometimes I Wonder About You Read Online Free PDF Page A

she said on answering the third ring. “I was wondering when you’d call.”
    “How’d you know it was me?”
    “I told the front desk only to allow calls from you. It was getting so late that I thought maybe I’d have to wait until tomorrow.”
    It was 9:39 by my watch and tomorrow seemed very far away.
    “Are you calling about your money?” she asked when I was silent.
    “I guess that’s part of it.”
    “What else?”
    “I didn’t get my kiss on the cheek.”
    “Where are you?”
    “Across the street.”
    “Come on up,” she said, “room eight twenty-five. I’ll tell the front desk to let you by.”
    —
    There was a time when black men were not allowed to visit fancy hotel rooms unless they wore a service uniform and were delivering flowers or dinner on a tray. There was a time when dark-skinned women would not be allowed to stay in those rooms. But those days are long over. There’s still racism of course. People of color still struggle mightily against misconceptions that are half a millennium old. But these days I can take the elevator up to a femme fatale’s room and no one would bar my way—or warn me off.
    I knocked on her door and she answered—in the nude. The nude. She wore absolutely nothing. Her entire body was an even reddish brown, telling me that she spent a lot of time on unregulated beaches.
    Walking across the threshold, I closed the door with my left hand, went to my knees, and pressed my mouth into the nexus of her legs.
    “Oh,” she said.
    Working my head and neck to separate her thighs maybe four inches midway between the pelvis and the knee, I jabbed softly with my tongue.
    “Oh,” she said with a bit more feeling.
    But it was when I got the left thigh on my shoulder and stood straight up that I believe she was more shocked than I was to be received by a russet-skinned beauty at a door on the eighth floor of a room which, not all that long ago, excluded our ancestors.
    She grabbed onto my hairless head but she didn’t have to worry. I wouldn’t have let her fall. Between my shoulders, hands, and tongue she either had a powerful orgasm or did a very good job at pretending.
    “Let me down,” she said when the shudders subsided.
    I moved my shoulder and then my chest until I was holding her in the cradle of my arms.
    “You’re very strong,” she said and then kissed me for the first time.
    I rubbed my nose against her chin.
    “Lucky I don’t have an engagement ring in my pocket,” I replied.
    She hugged my head then with even more passion than she had shown before.
    “Lie down with me,” she commanded.
    And so there we lay: her completely naked and me fully dressed and fully erect.
    She touched the urgent bulge in my trousers and said, “We’ll take care of that in just a bit.”
    “We better,” I warned, “before it takes care of itself.”
    Marella laughed out loud, actually guffawed and punched my arm. She was a solidly built woman; in her thirties, as I’ve already said, but with the pampered body of a woman ten years younger.
    “Do you think you killed that guy?” she asked.
    “Naw,” I said dismissively.
    “How can you be so sure?”
    “I went back in the station after you left.”
    “You did? Wasn’t that rather reckless?”
    “Nobody saw us,” I said.
    I considered explaining my idea of the elevator-gladiator sport.
    She unzipped my blue trousers.
    “He saw us,” she said while fishing around for the flesh in my pants.
    “Um…he was still out.”
    “How do you know that?” She found what she was looking for. Her fingers were cold.
    “Oh,” I said. “He passed maybe twelve feet away from me on a wheeled gurney pushed by two women.”
    “Your turn,” she told me and we didn’t talk about anything for a while.
    —
    “I think I can safely say that I have never met a man like you,” Marella Herzog said at 1:51 by the lighted digital numerals on the clock next to her side of the bed. We were both naked by then, drinking honor-bar