Falling Hard

I didn't tell my friends where I was going in such a hurry after school on Monday (my parents weren't home and wouldn't have cared, anyway). The back door of the café was locked, but a quiet knock brought Sylvia with that warm smile to let me and my bike inside.

I'd worn a shirt to school, of course, and had pondered during the day if I should take it off before reporting to work. I decided to keep it on for the ride over, and also decided against removing it after Sylvia had seen me wearing it; too vain, or something. Such are the confused thoughts of a teenager falling hard for his first love.

Anyway, she'd been right; there really were a million things to do around the café. We started by painting the back wall. Painting gave me perfect excuse to remove my shirt, but I still felt self-conscious about doing so and elected to just be really careful about getting splattered on.

We fell into a nice conversation while working. We didn't talk about deep stuff; we just discussed the high school and the town and how they'd changed since she'd left. As it turned out, neither had changed much at all, which didn't surprise me in the least. I actually had a couple of her old teachers, and they were just as boring as they'd been when she'd sat in the same classrooms. We both liked the freshman science teacher, tho, since he'd already been a crazed pyromaniac when he'd taught her some 15 years before.

I was back to work on Tuesday (shirt still deployed) and was amazed at how comfortable I already felt in Sylvia's company. As a typical teenager, I usually felt that adults were talking down to me, sneering behind their words because they thought I was still "just a kid". But to borrow a term from Holden Caulfield, Sylvia wasn't "phony" at all. She didn't talk to my age or to my image; she talked to me. That was a first, and it was very refreshing.

If you'll recall, I'd been dying to know about Sylvia's past; why she'd left, where she went, why she'd decided to come back. But after getting to know her, I discovered that Sylvia the person was even more interesting than Sylvia the mystery. As the busy afternoons went by, I kept my nosey questions to myself, knowing that the topic would probably come up at some point. And if it didn't, it honestly didn't matter so much anymore.

Our relationship took a sudden turn exactly one week after we'd first met. We'd made a great team and had gotten so much work done that Sylvia was no longer worried about having the place ready in time for the delivery of the equipment and such. And that sunny Friday in early June was not only the first day of my new $10 / hour pay rate; it was also the last day of the school year. So I arrived full of energy, ready to do the handyman thing and hang out with my new favorite person.

I slowed down when I opened the back door; it felt like I had walked into an oven. Sylvia was up on a ladder in the front, screwing a light bracket to the ceiling. "Hot enough for you?" she grinned.

"Yeah, did the A/C break?" I was already starting to sweat.

"Nope. Had to turn the power off so the electrician could replace the old electrical panel. He was supposed to install the lights and fans, too, but I told him we could handle that job ourselves. The dude charges more per hour than a corporate lawyer."

"Sooo, can't we turn the power back on now and crank up the air?" I inquired hopefully.

"Hell no," she retorted. "I'm not getting either one of us electrocuted just because I'm cheap. Now hand me that flathead over there, please." I got her the tool with a sigh.

There were a dozen light fixtures and ceiling fans to install and only one ladder. We alternated doing the installing while the other sipped from a water bottle and handed up tools and parts. I'd worn jeans to school, making it feel even hotter in there. By the time I finished my second turn, my t-shirt was soaked.

"Why don't you take off that shirt and dry off?" Sylvia asked as I came down. I looked for a smile or a mischievous glint in her eye, but she seemed serious and sincere. Still, I hesitated, remembering the way she'd been admiring my shirtless self the previous week.

Then that expected glint made an appearance. "Oh, look who's shy all of a sudden. You'll ride around town half-naked, but now you're too modest to take off your shirt in front of me. I see how it is."

"No, it's not that, it's just that ... uh..." What could I say? I obviously couldn't admit that I had a crush on her, or that I'd "fantasized" in private about our first encounter a couple of times already.

"Tell you what," she offered, "To be fair, I'll take off my shirt, too. Deal?" She was wearing that ever-present overalls-with-shirt combo. Seeing how much of her shirt was showing, I knew the view without it would be very interesting.

"Ok, deal," I responded, calling her bluff and trying to fake the bravado I didn't really feel. I thought she'd been kidding, but she smiled and headed for the kitchen.

"Be right ba-aack," she sang on her merry way. I took off my shirt and draped it over a chair. There was a sudden pressure in the front of my jeans, and I adjusted myself quickly before she returned.

I thought I'd fall over when she breezed back through the swinging door, t-shirt in hand. The amount of female skin on display was way less that you'd see every day at the beaches down the road. But in this context, with this female, it was breathtaking.

Sylvia's overalls consisted of a tall denim panel in the front and a shorter panel in the back. The panels where connected and held in place by wide straps over each shoulder, and the bottoms were basically knee-length jean shorts.

So with her t-shirt removed, I could see both sides of Sylvia's torso almost down to her waist, her shoulder blades exposed in the back. Most eye-catching to me, tho, was her front, where her breasts were squished tight by the front panel and spilled out a bit around the sides. Like I said, she wasn't fake porn-star boob-job perfect, but Sylvia was definitely a very beautiful lady. I had the urge to readjust myself again, but dared not for fear she'd spot me.