While he wrestled his T-shirt back on, Kirby heard the front door being opened and Amy saying, “Hey, babe!” He stepped into the dining room and saw the very tall woman bent down, with Amy’s arms wrapped around her neck. They were kissing heatedly. The tall woman, Mutt, opened her eyes, saw Kirby, and straightened, breaking the kiss.

“Mr. Kirby,” she said. “When Amy said we’d meet at her friend’s house, I didn’t realize she meant you.”

He smiled and shrugged. “It’s a bit of a surprise for me, too. Welcome to chez Kirby. Make yourself at home. Amy, close the door; it’s hot out and I don’t feel like sweating today. Who needs a drink?”

“Me, me, me!” Amy waved her hand in the air, like a hyperactive fourth grader.

“Fine, Dr. Lau,” he said. “I’ll fetch yours from the kitchen. And you, Coach Ditka?”

“Don’t call me that ever again,” she said sternly, before breaking into a smile. “Call me Mutt. I hated being a coach—and I hated being called ‘Coach Ditka’. Some of the denser male coaches even called me ‘Iron Mike’ for a while. That year I coached wasn’t a good year for me. I don’t miss it at all.”

“What was worse,” he asked, “the coaches calling you ‘Iron Mike’, or the kids calling you ‘the Hun’?”

“Kids have been calling me ‘Matilda the Hun’ since I was in middle school—although seldom to my face—so I’m used to it. Also, what do you have to drink?”

“Amy brought vodka and tonic. So, I have vodka and tonic, plus orange juice and a couple of bottles of Guinness. Sorry, but I try not to drink when I’m alone—and I don’t entertain much.”

“Could I persuade you to part with one of those bottles of Guinness?”

“Coming right up.” He headed for the kitchen, relieved that he had somehow not yet fucked things up. Beautiful women caused him to fuck everything up. Without a bit of alcohol in his system, he felt an overwhelming sort of self-conscious pressure in their presence, a pressure in his brain that made him say stupid things and make asinine decisions. His brain worked at half speed. Alcohol, of course, did not help him say more intelligent things or make better decisions. Neither did it help his brain work any faster, but it did remove the pain of the horrific self-consciousness that tortured him in the presence of beautiful women—and that was something.

When he returned with the women’s drinks and a triple-strength screwdriver he had poured for himself, he found them seated on the couch, talking quietly and holding hands. Even seated, his new guest towered over Amy. Handing them the drinks, he mostly succeeded in not ogling the creamy flesh of Mutt’s long, elegant legs emerging from her skirt, but he definitely noticed them. He noticed, too, Amy’s slender tanned thighs, displayed to great effect by her too-short khaki shorts, but the effect on him was not the same. Amy and her legs were very attractive by almost anyone’s definition, but it was far less of a struggle to resist the ogle. Is it so much easier to overcome my base male ogling instincts because I’ve already friend-zoned Amy? Or is it because I know she’s gay? Or is it because she’s sitting next to Mutt?

Kirby sat in the armchair and took a long pull of his very strong drink. He saw Amy looking at him, but he felt Mutt’s gaze and, with it, that pressure of self-consciousness from the beauty of her face. He took another big sip. “So, I’ll ask the cliché question: How did you two meet?”

Mutt was matter-of-fact in her reply. “Amy was stalking me. She was my stalker.”

“Don’t tell him that!”

“Why not? You weren’t stalking me?”

“Well, sort of,” Amy conceded. “But there were extenuating circumstances.”

“So, you’re dating your stalker?” Kirby asked Mutt.

“More or less.”

“How did that happen? Did you just go up to her like, ‘I know you’ve been stalking me, but you’re kinda cute’?”

Amy corrected him. “Watch it, buster. I’m not ‘kinda’ cute. I’m extremely cute.”

“Very, extremely cute,” agreed Mutt, kissing her on the top of her head.

The little gesture of affection make Kirby feel a bit hollow. His life had been empty of such things for so long. “So, you said ‘I know you’ve been stalking me, but you’re very, extremely cute’?”

“If you must know—” began Mutt.

He grinned. “I’m afraid I must.”

“I had popped into that big Asian grocery store, the one with the banners and columns, and Amy showed up, stalking me through the store.”

“Literally following you through the store?”

“Kind of,” Amy said, “but I was being very sneaky.”

“That’s true,” admitted Mutt. “After I first noticed her, I tried to ignore her. Suddenly, in the seafood section, a fat little woman started screaming at Amy in Chinese.”

“Cantonese,” Amy clarified.

Mutt continued. “Screaming in Cantonese. She slapped Amy three or four times. Then, this fat little Chinese woman grabbed a fish from one of the coolers with the ice and hit Amy in the head with it. Twice.”

“With a fish,” he asked, surprised by the turn the story had taken, “like in the Monty Python sketch?” The women gave him puzzled looks. “Forget it. It’s on YouTube; watch it later. What happened next?”

Amy leaned her head against Mutt’s shoulder and looked up at her with exaggerated adoration. “She rescued me. Mutt came to my rescue.”

“I just stopped her from hitting you with the fish again.” Mutt turned back to Kirby. “The crazy fish lady screamed ‘pervert whore’ at Amy a few times and stormed out of the store. I helped Amy up and the rest is history.”

“History schmistory! What was up with the crazy fish lady? Who was she, Amy?”

“That lovely individual was my mother. Here’s to mom!” Amy raised her glass in a toast and gulped the remainder of her drink before anyone else could respond. She choked, then coughed a chunk of ice back into her glass. “Fucking ice cube.”

“You okay?” Kirby leaned over to pat her on the shoulder. She nodded and coughed a few more times. “Good,” he said, “because you can’t leave me at the what-the-fuck point. Keep talking.”

“Leave you at the what?” said Mutt.

“Leave me at the what-the-fuck point. It’s the point of the story where something makes you go ‘what the fuck?’ If the story doesn’t help you understand what the fuck just happened, or if the explanation is shit, then it’s a pretty shitty story.”

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

“Get me another drink, bartender,” Amy said, pushing her empty glass toward him, “and I’ll tell you a tale. Make it a double and I’ll include the dirty parts.”

He took the glass to the kitchen and returned with her drink, a double. “Alright, I thought about it in the kitchen. You don’t have to share your family dysfunction with me because of my morbid curiosity, or even because I brought you another drink. It’s not my business. I’ll admit to wondering about it ever since you told me your mom kicked you out of the house when you were fifteen, but you don’t have to tell me if you’re not comfortable.”

“Everything that happened is part of who I am today. I’m not ashamed about any of the things that had to happen to make me me.”

“I wish I could say that and mean it. Sometimes all I remember is the guilt, the shame, and the embarrassment.”

“Amen,” said Mutt, whose expression seemed wistful.

“Well, this is my story, bitches.” Amy smiled and took a sip of her drink. “Anyway, the fact that I smoked pot really surprised my mom,” she said. “So did the fact that I was sexually active—and the fact that I was gay. The fact that she found all three things out when she came home early one day and found fourteen-year-old me with my girlfriend, reclining on my bed, naked, sharing a joint and fingering each other was a leeeeeetle,” she illustrated the size by squinting at the space between her thumb and forefinger, which she held mere nanometers apart, “too much for her. She fucking freaked out. Big time! Mom slapped the shit out of me, while my girlfriend grabbed her clothes and ran for it. She called me a ‘pervert whore’, among other things. And she swore that if I didn’t become ‘normal,’ or if I smoked any more weed, or if I did anything else that crossed her line from right into wrong, she would kick me out.”

“What about your dad?”

“By that time, he was almost ten years gone. He’d lived in the states since he was a kid and he met mom when she was in her early twenties, fresh off the boat from Hong Kong. He fucked off back to China after my kid sister was born and mom raised us by herself.

Mutt put her bottle on the table, and it made that empty sound bartenders for miles in every direction could probably hear. “Can I get you another one?” Kirby asked, out of mixological reflex.

She stood up and he craned his neck upward, to see past her breasts to her face. “I can get it, if you can direct me to the bathroom.”

He did and when she had left the room, he leaned over and whispered to Amy. “She looks to me like she’s still very into you. She doesn’t seem distant or stand-offish or whatever.”

“Well, she’s not doing it now,” came Amy’s whispered reply. “Duh!” she added.

“I’m just not good at seeing these things,” he said. And before she could say it, he added, “Yeah, I know: ‘duh’.”

She smiled and sipped her vodka tonic. They heard the toilet flush and soon Mutt returned, fresh Guinness in hand. “Y’all are quiet,” she observed. “Been talking about me?”

“No,” Kirby said rather too quickly.

“Of course,” said Amy at the same time.

Mutt laughed and returned to the couch and Kirby found his eyes following her figure as she did. He saw Amy watching him watch Mutt before she rolled her eyes and stuck her tongue out at him.

He continued their earlier conversation. “So, you were a troubled youth, huh? I guess I pictured you, the Asian anesthesiologist, as a straight-arrow National Honor Society-type in high school.”

“Geez, stereotype much, dude?”

“Touché.” He bowed low in his chair to concede her point. “So, if that happened when you were fourteen, and you got kicked out at fifteen, what did you do to get the boot?”

Both her eyes and her smile widened. “What didn’t I fucking do? I was rebellious as fuck, but I was scared of getting kicked out. I got grounded like you wouldn’t fucking believe. For, like, seven months it was straight home from school, couldn’t use the phone, homework, extra work, clean the apartment spotless, no life, no fun, no nothing. Finally, mom thought I had ‘learned my lesson’. She relaxed. Sophomore year of high school I was allowed to join the chess club and my mom made me sign up to be one of the trainers for the football team, fetching water and towels and all that shit.”

Kirby wondered aloud. “Was she trying to make sure you were surrounded by men, both the nerds and the jocks, to reduce your temptation in the feminine direction?”

“Who the fuck knows? It didn’t matter. I had found a new girlfriend a month after my old one broke up with me when my mom caught us. We were getting busy all we could in storage closets and bathrooms and wherever else we could find at school nearly every day before I’d have to go home to jail in the apartment.”

“You’re saying you were a very horny teenager and, unlike some of us—I mean me—you had had no problems finding, uh, romance in high school.”

Mutt ruffled Amy’s short hair. “That’s what I’m hearing.”.

“You’re both selling me short,” Amy corrected them. “I was a very, extremely horny teenager.”

“Then you haven’t changed—” Mutt giggled as Amy licked her long neck to emphasize the point. “That tickles,” she protested, but she did not seem to Kirby to mind very much at all.

He watched them for a moment, Mutt squirming and Amy leaving wet streaks on her throat with her tiny pink tongue. “Ahem.” He cleared his throat. “I’m not going to tell you two to ‘get a room’ because you’d probably just take mine, but I’d love to hear the end of the story.”

Mutt pushed Amy away from her neck and gave her a brief kiss on the lips. “Tell your story, babe. He’s quivering with antici…” and she trailed off coyly.

“Pation!” Amy supplied with gusto.

“Atta girl,” Mutt said, then leaned in to give her a slightly longer kiss. “Now, tell him the rest. I want to see his face.”

“Yeah. Fine. Okay,” Amy triply agreed. “Mom came home early again and found our married Mexican neighbor, Georgina, topless on the couch. My kid sister was with her and saw everything. There was a scene. I got thrown out of the house. I crashed at a bunch of different friends’ houses. I kept seeing the hot Mexican neighbor and, also, one of her friends, also married. Don’t judge me; I have a thing—I used to have a thing—for older women.” Amy’s correction included a glance and a wink at Mutt. “The friend of the neighbor was a bit of a bruja. She took me out dancing at the Coven of Bitches, and I could read the sign. I kept going back. Somehow, I came to the attention of Miss Adelaide. The rest is history.”

Kirby watched as she slowly drank about half of the remaining vodka tonic from her glass, then asked, “Umm, so your mom and sister walking in on you and your topless married neighbor was the straw the broke the camel’s back?”

“That about sums it up, dude.” Amy was having trouble talking as Mutt caressed her arms with long, sensual fingers. A silence grew and lingered.

He excused himself to go to the restroom and found them standing by the door when he returned, hands on each other’s waist, foreheads pressed together, staring into one another’s eyes, absorbed with one another in that way only lovers can be.

They turned and looked at him, heads still pressed together, their eyes still smoldering with their arousal. Kirby could remember when Tina used to have that look in her eyes for him.

Reality intruded. “We’ve got to go, dude.”

“Are you sure? They’re replaying the US Women’s game at five. You’re welcome to stay and watch.” He knew there was a less-than-zero chance that they would even consider the invitation.

“Well, I’m thinking that these US women have to attend their own game.” Amy looked up at her girlfriend. “Right babe?”

“Mmm-hmm,” Mutt agreed with a relaxed sensuality. It was, quite possibly, the sexiest sound Kirby had ever heard.

Amy tried to throw her arms around Mutt and pull her in for another kiss, but the extraordinarily tall woman resisted. “C’mon, babe,” Mutt told her before darting downward and planting a swift kiss on Amy’s cheek. “Let’s give Mr. Kirby some privacy.”

Kirby did not miss Amy’s hand dropping down to surreptitiously caress her girlfriend’s ass. “Okay,” said Mutt. “On that note, I guess we must be going.”

Kirby nodded, smiling, but his heart was jealous. He imagined what the soft, round cheeks of Mutt’s beautiful bottom might feel like as he wished the women goodbye. “Take care, you two.”

“See you on Tuesday,” Amy told him. “We’ll be here at about three.”

“Why are you assuming that I’m going to this party?”

“Oh, you’re going all right.”

“Bye, Mr. Kirby,” Mutt said.

“Bye, Mutt. Bye, little obnoxious one,” he said with a wink and a wave.

On the front porch of the bungalow, Mutt leaned down to deliver a kiss that seemed to make Amy’s knees weak. When they came up for air, she asked Amy, “So, that’s your new friend, huh?”

“Yeah. Kirby’s a good guy, I think. He’s pretty cool.”

“Good,” Mutt said. “The world needs more cool people.”

The space under the ceiling of the front porch, in combination with the concrete floor and brick wall, created an echo chamber effect. Kirby, if he paid attention, could hear every word they said through the crack in the door that Amy had left slightly ajar. He felt a little guilty, but kept his ears open. When he saw the vertically mismatched couple step off the porch and onto the walk, he widened the crack in the front door and continued to listen.

“I think he’s got a crush on you.”

“Who doesn’t?” said Mutt playfully. “Not that it matters, because I’ve got a crush on you.”

“Your place or mine tonight?”

“Your doctor’s pad is way nicer than my public school employee’s pad.”

“Sounds good, but you’re driving. I might be a little drunk.”

“That’ll work,” said Mutt.

Amy closed the front gate behind them.

Kirby closed the front door.