Chapter 4

Sasha smiled. “No problem-o.” She opened a cabinet, revealing bottles and glasses. She bent and wrote something on a notepad, then turned to say, “I rented the place furnished, including the booze. When they come back from their round-the-world cruise, I want to have everything exactly as they left it -- right down to the last drop of liquor. So I keep track. Your choice?”

Emma was thinking that her choice would have been Sasha, but simply said, “How about one of your wines?”

Sasha beamed. “I’m always looking for someone to experiment on. Any preferences? I have some lovely ports.”

Emma couldn’t believe Sasha had said that, but pretended not to catch the double-entendre -- for a moment. “I bet you hear that a lot from the guys.”

Sasha’s response was something more than a giggle, something less than a chuckle. Emma thought of it as a tinkling. “You wouldn’t believe!”

“Try me.”

Sasha selected a bottle and uncorked it as she replied: “A lot of the buyers in the smaller stores in the city are ... well, they aren’t educated, formally. A lot of them come from blue-collar backgrounds and haven’t really...”

“‘Evolved’?”

“Exactly.” Two glasses appeared and Sasha poured two fingers of the port into each. The fragrance was almost intoxicating -- rich and heavy. “So there’s this kind of required tradition that every guy make some comment or pass, just to prove he’s one of the boys.”

Emma took the proferred glass. “With the emphasis on ‘boys.’”

“You know the type, I bet. C’mon.” She motioned for Emma to precede her into the living room. The furnishings looked like they’d been coordinated by the store decorator at Levitz. The leather sofabed and loveseat, the occasional tables, the lamps, the drapes -- even the paintings -- could have been purchased as a set on the showroom floor. Everything worked, but without personality.

Emma sat on the loveseat and Sasha flumped down on the sofa, at a right angle to Emma. She held up the glass and swirled the port gracefully in the glass, examining the rivulets that settled back to the bottom.

“Hmmmm, good legs.”

“You should talk.”

Both laughed and sipped. “Where was I?” Sasha asked.

“‘Boys.’”

“Oh, right -- Well, once word got around that I was separated, and happy to be, I couldn’t go into an office without someone hitting on me. Some less subtly than others. I had a guy today -- I still can’t believe it.” She drank more of her port.

“Don’t leave me in suspense,” Emma pleaded.

“Guy’s about fifty years old, got a paunch that looks like a basketball sitting on his belt and enough nose hair to sweep the storeroom.”

Emma laughed loud and hard, and knew that her appreciation was partly the exaggerated effect of the mouthful of port. Since meeting Jake, she seldom drank -- he was a recovering alcoholic -- and it didn’t take much to get her buzzed.

Her laughter set Sasha to chuckling, too. “So we’re in the storeroom and I’m inventorying his stock on a couple of my lines and I have to kind of bend over some boxes. I’m wearing this denim skirt, about knee-length and a little snug and I feel it creeping up. And he’s gotten very quiet, when usually he’s motor-mouth on overdrive. So I look back and see him standing there with his mouth open, staring at my ass through the tight, short skirt and rubbing his -- his --”

“Dick.”

“-- right, his dick, through his pants!”

“What’d you do -- smack him?” Emma drank some more port.

“First thing I did was try to get calm. This is a big account. The next thing I did was curse my luck.”

“Huh?”

Sasha drained her glass, noted the condition of Emma’s and refilled it and her own. “He had a dick about the size I always fantasized about. Damn thing seemed to go a third of the way to his knee and it was so thick I could see it throbbing through his pants leg! But this is a creepy slob and -- well, hell, if it had been someone I could respect, I would’ve ... Ah, the hell with it. How do you like the port?”

“It’s nice, kind of nutty, but awfully strong.”

“Yeah -- but so what?” she teased. She sipped again, then turned and curled her legs. She sat in a semi-lotus position facing Emma, then glanced down at her crotch. “Sorry,” she muttered, seeing the damp spot between her legs. She stood. “Excuse me; I’ll be right back.”

Emma watched the ripe, full cheeks of Sasha’s ass twitch through her dancing uniform as she strode quickly into another room. She was trying to restrain her fantasies. She started pawing through the pile of magazines on the coffee table. Most were wine publications or magazines that might be expected to have columns on the subject -- like Cuisine -- but there were a few general interest periodicals...