Naked Came the Stranger - By Penelope Ashe Page 0,27

could do nothing to conquer it.)

"Man." Dexter was staring at him, glassy-eyed as usual.

"I have just had me one real-life experience."

"Yeah?"

"There am I, buzzin' through this supermarket you got here, lookin' to cop a salami, somethin'. [Dexter knew that if he wanted something to eat, he'd have to bring his own provender. Brown rice and nuts filled the refrigerator, and that was not Dexter's idea of soul food.] All of a sudden what do I see but this chick who is the most fly chick I have seen in my life ever. This one I say, this one, baby, is a trip and a half, only she is crying there.

"So right away I ease myself up to her and say why is she cryin'. She is sayin' a friend of hers has checked out. So then I tell her I'm from SNAC. And she says, very cool, 'a breakfast cereal representative?' And I say I mean SNCC, you know, baby, civil rights, you know, integration and like that. And by this time she is laughing. Hooowee and a half, baby, she is something else."

Arthur drew his buddy into the house. Never in his three-year friendship with Dexter had he heard him communicate so long, so enthusiastically and so coherently. However, his sense of hospitality had not deserted him altogether.

"Wanna smoke some grass?" he said.

Dexter nodded almost imperceptibly and Arthur reached for the Christmas hall on the mantelpiece, cracked it open and offered his friend some marijuana. The two of them sat there for a while, smiling at the wall, until Arthur broke the silence.

"You get her name, Dexter?"

"Gilli-Anne, brother, Gilli-Anne Blake."

The rest of the story came from Dexter in barely coherent fragments. She was tall, blonde and slim. Her breasts were full without being maternal. Dexter had, of course, propositioned her. She claimed to understand the meaning but the phrasing troubled her. At any event, she had turned him down, but charmingly. Dexter took no offense. Living in New York as he did, his sexual experience had been rather severely limited to one type of girl – fleshy, Jewish, painfully liberal and painfully frustrated. It even pained Dexter to think of the last one, a flabby-thighed, snaggie-toothed young lady named Minna who had clutched him to her pendulous bosom and offered him corned beef sandwiches and sympathy after he had done his best to devastate her. He had sensed that her basic goal in life was to feed, mother and talk him to death, and he wasn't having any of it. This Gilli-Anne was much more his type.

Arthur assembled the fragments, and came up with a reasonably accurate reflection of Dexter's meaning. He allowed that he had seen the woman in question, had spoken to her three times, once at a party and twice on the street. And that it was too bad it didn't work out so that Dexter could ball her because that would be something else.

"Yeah, but baby," Dexter said, "when I tell her I know you, she say you her type."

"Her type?"

"She say she want you, baby."

The meaning of this was unmistakable. And, while Arthur in no way trusted Dexter's recollection of the conversation, he fully trusted Dexter's instincts. If Dexter believed that Mrs. Gillian Blake wanted him, well then, in all probability, she did. And if Dexter wigged out like that over her, he probably sensed that she would be wilder in bed than a female rhinoceros. Rhinoceros, hmmmm.

"Time for a little bike ride," Arthur said. Dexter blinked, meaning yes.

Arthur stepped into a pair of white levis, snapped on the big white helmet, the jacket and the boots. The two of them strolled out to the garage where Big Momma, Arthur's Harley-Davidson 1200, rested in all its multi-geared splendor. And fifteen cursing neighbors later, the machine was idling in the Blake driveway.

It was easy. Dexter banged on the door. Gillian had opened it and smiled. The smile was her mistake. Dexter lifted her off her feet, hoisted her over his right shoulder and carried her onto the waiting motorcycle. Within five minutes they were cruising back to Arthur's house, Gillian slung across the center of the motorcycle. Gillian had complained, then pleaded, but her cries were drowned out by Big Momma. She decided to take it slowly and did everything in her power not to smile. In a nutty kind of way it was almost romantic. Not candlelight and champagne romantic, but nutty romantic. Nothing like this had happened since college, since the time her