“Which dress do you feel sexiest in, after the red one?” I asked Charlotte.
“The green one,” she said.
Her green dress is satin-y. It’s short. It flatters her curves deliciously, and shows off her thighs and her legs spectacularly. Before she arrived, I had ordered us appetizers (smoked trout and a platter of shellfish – shrimp, mussels, oysters, clams – on ice). And drinks – a scotch for me, a glass of Sauvignon Blanc for her.
She walked in just moments before the food arrived. SHE looked good enough to eat.
Sitting at the next table over? A group of four – three boys and a girl – eating and drinking. I joked, probably not incorrectly, “If we added their ages together, they would add up to less than the sum of our ages.”
We ate. We caught up. We discussed our days. I ordered horseradish-encrusted salmon and a blackened mahi mahi. We ate some more. We drank some more.
Charlotte went to the bathroom at one point and, when she came back, reported that there was a “hand chair” in the waiting room for the restrooms. “You’ll come in that chair,” I said. She also reported, somewhat dejected, that she had started her period. “You know I don’t care,” I said.
She did know that.
Before we left, I had her sit in the chair. I took a few pictures. I like them, and wish I could share them, but Charlotte doesn’t like them.
“Now make yourself come,” I said.
She was a little skittish. This room had three doors entering into it – one from the restaurant, directly behind her, and to her left. One, from the men’s room, in front of her and to her left. And one, from the women’s room, directly to her right.
She lowered her hand between her thighs, and began rubbing. “I don’t think I can,” she said.
“Try,” I said.
She did try. For real. But it was taking her longer than her usual thirty seconds – and, after not too long, a guy came out of the men’s room. We hustled off, giggling. “That was soo obvious,” she said.
It was.
We made our way to the street, and we smoked a cigarette. “Do you know where we’re going next?”
I did have a plan. But I called an audible. And then a second. The place I had planned to go was lovely, but not interesting. And I prefer interesting to lovely. So we tried first one super-fancy super-interesting place just across the street, but it was closed. Then, we walked about seven minutes to my second interesting possibility.
We waded through a sea of boring, unattractive investment bankers and sat in the back of the club-by, dark room. The place is interesting; the clientele wasn’t.
I ordered a Charlotte a Negroni; I ordered me a penicillin. My drink was a bit sweet. I’m not, honestly, a cocktail guy. (Why fuck up perfectly good scotch with all that sweet syrup?!?). Again, I tried to have Charlotte come for me. “Take out your pink vibrator and put it on your clit,” I suggested. Moments after the vibrations had begun – vibrations I could feel through the long bench we shared – a woman sat at the neighboring table. On the same shared bench.
“She’ll know about the vibrator!” Charlotte protested.
“No she won’t!” I pointed out. “The vibration will be there from the moment she sits down. She won’t realize where it’s coming from.”
She didn’t.
We objectified the crowd. Or tried. (They weren’t very objectify-able.) We commented on the ridiculous sweater worn by a guy at a table near us. It was black, with a sort of floral gold-leaf pattern across his chest. The table sat four – him, a woman about his age, and a couple who clearly were the parents of one or both of them. The parents seemed far cooler than the kids.
“Give me a dare,” Charlotte said, as we drank our second drink, contemplating our departure.
“Pick a woman. Approach her. Give her your number.”
“I can’t do that!”
“You could if I said to do it to a guy.”
We talked some more.
“Ok,” I said. “Pick a post of mine about you that you like. Write the URL down. And give it to someone. A woman. Or, if you want to give it to a man, give one to a man and one to a woman.”
She chose “Charlotte makes me sweat.” We spent some time trying to simplify the URL, and finally, it occurred to me, I could just make a QR code. Which I did.
I texted the QR code to Charlotte. We paid the check. Identified her targets. First, a pair of good-enough-but-boring-looking guys in suits, and then, that same group of four whose ages added up to less than hours, who somehow had migrated to this bar a ten-minute walk from the restaurant in which we’d first seen them. As I awkwardly waited (I’m good one-on-one; I’m awkward in a bar filled with people), Charlotte – seemingly effortlessly – approached first one crowd and then the next, saying that she was here with a guy who wrote a sex blog, and that she wanted them to read about her. The guys were defensive (“I’m married!” said one). The young’uns were, well, young’uns: “Buy us a drink!” they said to her.
I was impressed. Charlotte’s got some serious balls.
We left and, finally, were headed to a more private setting.
End of part 1