Starfire(60)

“You saw the photos in my wine cellar,” Dalton said.

“Yes.” I had seen the vintage framed Polaroids of his LA home’s former owner. The woman wasn’t your average housewife. From the pictures, she was always naked at parties, and had an appetite for everything good in life, from cake to multiple lovers. Dalton had hung her pictures in his basement wine cellar, in a display that was somewhere between a shrine and a joke.

“I like those photos,” he said plainly.

“You don’t bring people down there to laugh at her?”

“Well, you do have to laugh at the clothes and the hairstyles. The giant beehives? Come on.”

Still on my side, I pulled my feet up into the robe and tugged the sleeves down over my hands.

“You’re a chubby chaser,” I said, my voice flat.

“We never talked about my childhood best friend, did we? Yours was Shayla. You two went swimming in the lake when it was full of tadpoles, and you were inseparable. If you met a girl tomorrow who reminded you of Shayla, you’d instantly feel something, wouldn’t you?”

“There’s nobody like Shayla. She’s one of a kind.”

“But you know what I mean, right?”

I stared up at the ceiling. In the dim light, with just a few lamps on, it was hard to tell if the ceiling was white, or painted a color. Trying to figure out the color of the ceiling was a good distraction from having to think about what Dalton was saying.

“My neighbor’s name was Chelsea,” he said. “She was a year older than me, and I followed her around like an adoring puppy. Her parents must have felt sorry for me, the kid whose parents were always having grown-ups-only parties and kicking me out of the house. I spent so much time at Chelsea’s house, I had my own spot at the table and chores written in a list on the fridge.”

“They sound like nice people,” I said.

“They were,” he said, and he went on to describe the dinners they made, the mother chopping onions with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth because she claimed the smoke prevented the onion gas from causing tears. When she fried chicken with another cigarette in her mouth, she claimed the smoke infused the meat with a barbecue flavor that was a gourmet thing.

Dalton described the family so well, I could see the striped wallpaper in the dining room, and see the father as he pushed the dinner plates aside and taught the kids how to play poker, all of them placing bets with stacks of Ritz crackers instead of money.

“Chelsea was like a sister to you,” I said. “Was she a plump girl?”

“There was no shortage of food and love in her house.”

“Oh.”

He chuckled. “She was not always sisterly, though. We would play these crazy games that she designed.”

“Doctor games? Shayla and I grew up with a ton of boy cousins, but none of us got the memo about doctor games. We didn’t do body examinations at all. Mostly we would mix together a bunch of gross things, like toothpaste and Kool-Aid, and we’d make each other drink the medicine.”

“We did that, too. Not the mixing, but we loved to play with those Alka Seltzer tablets and mix them with other fizzy things to try to make bombs.”

“That’s not how you make bombs.”

“Which is a good thing!” He shuffled around, changing his position so he was curled up facing my back, spooning me. “She and her family moved away just when things were getting interesting. Most of her new games involved her lying on top of me. My favorite was with her piling all the couch cushions and blankets on top of me, then she climbed on top of everything, and I had to escape the avalanche.”

I giggled. “That sounds fun.”

“I got my first major boners trying to squirm out from under that avalanche.”

“Oh my.”

“When Chelsea saw the bulge in my jeans, she would…” He trailed off.

“You’re killing me with suspense! What? What did she do?”

“She’d punch me in the stomach and chest. Not really hard, to hurt me, but it did distract me enough sometimes to make the erection disappear.”

I’d started giggling, and now I laughed even harder. “Chelsea sounds awesome,” I said.

“She’s probably working as a dominatrix or something. Her parents moved to Colorado, and we were just kids, so we didn’t stay in touch.”

“And she was a chubby blonde?”

“Actually, she had brown hair.”

I let this new information wash over me. There was no shortage of love or food at Chelsea’s house. Dalton had all these pleasant memories of having a big girl on top of him, so who was I to deny him this pleasure as an adult?