Chapter 5: How Dan Met Marion

Dan worked steadily on the whiskey labels all morning and hardly felt the time passing until his phone buzzed with a reminder: 12 Noon - Lunch with Mac.

As he was leaving the house Dan had a call from his FWB Marion.

“Can we meet this afternoon?” she asked.

Dan thought for a moment. Lunch would take about an hour, allow 15 minutes each way for travel... “Sure, would 1:30 pm suit?”

“Pick me up outside Emmy’s Bar then.”

As he got into the car, he called Whitney and asked her to bring Anita back to her house for a few hours after school. He would collect her at 5. He had often done the same for LaShonda, when Whitney had to work later than usual, and Whitney was always glad to spend time with Anita, hoping to enlist her as an ally for the ensnarement of Dan.

Driving to the restaurant for his lunch with Mac, Dan remembered when he had met Marion first. It was about two years before at the opening of an exhibition of his work in Mac’s gallery. He was trying to feign interest in a potential buyer’s long rambling account of his attempts to buy a particular brand of fishing rod, when he noticed a woman he did not recognize, and was sure had not been invited, take one of the plastic cups of cheap wine, take a long drink from it, and then pour the contents of two others into it until it was full to the brim. The angler finished his tale at last, and left without buying anything. The woman walked over to him. She looked to be in her mid-twenties and was short, plump, had very short red hair, glasses, and a sleeve tattoo on each arm. A T-shirt reading “I’M THE SHE WHO SAID THAT,” daisy dukes, and sandals completed the ensemble.

“Hi,” she said. “You don’t look like the arty type. It’s all ugly crap, isn’t it? I’m Marion.”

“I’m Dan,” he replied. “I’m the artist, in fact, so I have to disagree.”

“Whoops, many embarrass. Still, do people really give you money for this stuff?”

“I hope so, otherwise my landlord will be very cross with me.”

“You have a cute accent. You’re Irish, aren’t you? I’m Irish too. My grandfather came from Longford County. He says ‘cross’ when he means ‘angry’, too.”

Like most Americans, she applied a one drop rule to Irishness. Dan knew they were just being friendly and usually found it amusing, but sometimes annoying because he regarded it as claiming a privilege to which they were not entitled. Combined with her non-appreciation of his art, Dan was finding himself getting irritated. So thinking it was the quickest way of getting rid of her he said,

“Well, sweet-tits, we’ll be winding up here in half an hour. Why don’t you wait till then and I will take you home and fuck you silly.”

“Sure, good idea.”

And so it went on from there; Dan could hardly back out, not that he wanted to. Anita was at a sleepover in LaShonda’s house with some other friends from kindergarten. No sooner were Dan and Marion in the door of his house than she clasped him with her arms around his neck and shoved her tongue into his mouth. She was much shorter so stood on his toecaps to make it easier. He walked her into his bedroom, still balanced on his feet, and they stripped each other, throwing their clothes anywhere. She bent to kiss the tip of his hardening penis, and then did something he had never experienced or even heard of before. Her plump belly made her navel deeper than most women’s, and she took his penis in her hand and shoved it in, moving it around and running her hand up and down the shaft. It was deep enough to take the whole of the glans, and Dan found the sensation pleasant, though rather weird.

“No-one has ever done that to me before,” he said. “I like it, though.”