“Andre, Andre, Andre,” Emily murmured. She raised and moved an arm around my neck and turned my face to hers for a kiss. I was holding her, face down, underneath me, with an arm wrapped around her belly, holding her up off the surface of the bed. I was still working her clit with the fingers of the other hand. She was trembling and jerking under me and I was tensing and releasing, tensing and releasing, deep inside her, making sure she was getting every drop of the cum inside her.

We were trying for another one, although I had no fucking idea why—other than it was what Emily wanted. We already had a baby girl, Edith, which had ended my athletic scholarship college two years short of graduation, which I was trying to make up for at night. But Emily wanted another one to keep Edith company, and she wanted them both to have the same father so there wouldn’t be any relationship issues down the road. So, we were fucking up another one. And, no, we weren’t married, nor did we live together. After I’d knocked her up by accident, she decided that I was good enough to be the father of her kids, but not her husband.

My cellphone, sitting on the nightstand beside Emily’s bed, started buzzing, the sound enough to wake Edit up in the crib on Emily’s side of the bed, and Emily was rolling out from underneath me and going to the crib with a muttered, “Shit.” She picked the baby up and took her out of the bedroom while I put the cellphone up to my ear.

“Yeah, Tony, what’s up?” I almost laughed. I was still up myself. I didn’t have any trouble in that department. Maybe if I hadn’t kept it up, in more than one mode, during my college days, I’d be graduating next year and going on to a masters in landscape architecture.

“Have you given thought to what I said you could do to make a lot more?”

Tony had been in college with me, a couple of years ahead of me. We’d partied together. He knew what I’d do. Or what I’d do before I’d tried settling down and remaking my life with a family. I was working on Emily to try to make a go of it together. I wanted the kids she insisted on having to have normalcy. I’d done what I could to convince her. I’d restricted the mode of partying, and that hadn’t been easy. Emily continually said it wasn’t necessary, either—that I was what I was and that didn’t matter much to her.

“Yeah, but I don’t know,” I answered Tony.

“It’s a lot more money. You could use more money, couldn’t you?”

“Who couldn’t?” I asked. “I have a kid to support now, though. I have to try to be a father.”

“You have a kid because you couldn’t keep it in your pants with women. Because basically you don’t want to keep it in your pants no matter who you are puppy dogging around.”

“I said I’d think about it, Tony. I will.”

“We’re working in Inglecress today. You’ll be able to make it on time, won’t you?”

“I’ve got plenty of time,” I answered. “Someone called me out of bed really fucking early this morning.”

“Ha, ha,” he said. “Bring a rake. You’re on rake duty and I don’t have one in the truck.”

“Yeah sure. I’m clicking off now, Tony.”

Emily was standing in the doorway to the bedroom, naked and with the body of a goddess. I remembered now how and why I’d wound up in this one-bedroom apartment in subsidized housing that wasn’t even where I bedded down most nights. If only I could limit my desires—either way. I’d been more organized in life if I’d known there would be a woman like Emily and that I’d pursue the pussy. What I’d been working on would have made everything so much easier. Did I regret it? Sometimes yes. Today, this morning, viewing the naked, young, ripe mother of my daughter standing in the doorway, cuddling a thankfully sleeping baby? No, not at all.

“You’re hard again I see,” she said.

“I’m always hard for you, Emily.”

“It’s an optimum time, Andre. The best time of the month for me.”

“Put the baby back in the crib. Try to keep her sleeping.”

I was on my knees, hovering over Emily, who was under me, my arm encircling her waist, holding her pelvis off the bed, her torso reclining to the mattress. I was dipping with her, my free hand resting on her brow, the fingers worked into her blonde curls, holding her head to the bed, while I kissed her on the lips and the nipples and fucked her deep in a missionary, working her hard, breeding her, working on another baby.

Another baby I had to worry about affording. But a baby Emily wanted, for what admittedly were practical reasons, with the same father, no matter how unsuitable he was for more permanence. She did admit, though, that I had good-looking genes.

As she liked to do to start, Emily reached down and grasped my cock in both hands, positioned it, rubbed it against her clit and panted, and then moved it down and thrust up into it, impaling herself. Once saddled I took over the thrusts.

“Oh, baby! Yes, yes. Right there. Just like that. You’re such a stud.”

Why, yes, I am. I can be, with women.

Both of us concentrated, moaning and whispering terms of endearment and what was satisfying and what was more satisfying to each other as the shaft worked its magic and the thrusts became urgent.

“Andre, Andre, Andre,” Emily moaned as I tensed, jerked, and released; tensed, jerked, and released; tensed...

Maybe I’d be late for work out in Inglecress this morning after all.

“Wake up Andre.” I came out of my daydream with Tony pulling on my arm. “He’s in the window, looking at us. Everyone needs to look like they are working flat out. No, don’t look. He’ll know we’re talking about him.”

“Look, don’t look. Which one? Which window?” I said. I was irritated that Tony had caught me thinking about my troubles and zoned out. I was the rake guy of Tony’s seasonal leaf-removal business. The other guys were on the blowers and I was working the stubborn areas with a rake. We were working on the wooded lot of a high-end house in the Inglecress enclave. The house belonged to Neal Barringer, owner of a string of power gyms in this and surrounding towns. Presumably he was the one in the window, watching us work.

What I’d been thinking of were two intersecting issues. Before I’d left Emily’s apartment that morning after a rare night in her bed because, according to her, she needed another kid from me and I owed her one and before Emily took off to the sitters and her job at a nursing home, she’d asked me to stop at Goodwill on the way home from work today and see if they had any fake Christmas trees I could get for her. She said she didn’t have the time or money to decorate for Christmas, just under four weeks off now.

Not that I had the time or money either, but I didn’t want Edith to start missing Christmas right off the bat, so I said I would. We couldn’t really afford a blade of grass between us, even with our three jobs—Emily’s as a nurse’s aide at the old folks’ home and me as a groundskeeper during the week at the university—the same one I was going to when my life got upturned—and then with Tony’s lawn care seasonal businesses on the weekends and holidays. Today was Saturday. I couldn’t see Goodwill having any trees left to sell after Thanksgiving and before Christmas, but I agreed to check.

What I really needed was some extra money coming in for Christmas. It wasn’t just a Christmas tree Emily and Edith needed. Thank God Edith wasn’t old enough to know she should be getting presents at Christmas.

And this need for extra money was where the separate thoughts that had me zonked out intersected. I was still mulling Tony’s offer of getting me extra money. He knew Emily and I were strapped at Christmas. And he also had known me in college before Emily and I had gotten into trouble and what I’d been into then. His seasonal businesses had a lucrative add-on service and he was offering to cut me in to that.

He was offering to cut me into that here, today, at Neal Barringer’s house. It was quite a decision to make, though, and I had to try to separate out what I wanted to do from what I should do. It didn’t help when I took the chance to look at the house and then at the man in the window, if he was still there. I’d never met Neal Barringer before. I had no idea what he looked like, although Tony told me that he did the TV ads for his gyms himself, so that told me something right there.

When I looked at the window, a huge wall of glass overlooking the wooded front lot, I saw that he—or at least a man—was still there and that he was looking at me. Tony had told me that the man had signed up for the extra service and that I could have the job if I wanted it—that Barringer had been shown the portfolio of the guys working for Tony and had picked me out as the Number One choice.

He was standing on the other side of the window just in long sleeping pants that looked like they might be for Christmas. They were a dark blue with large white snowflakes on them. He had a coffee cup in a raised hand, and he was looking right at me, and smiling. Just that was enough to made me tremble and start to stir below. I had no trouble seeing how he would be a winner in doing his own TV commercials. He was probably better at advertising his product, which was in honing and maintaining bodies beautiful, than any actor they could have found would be. Any guy looking at the commercial would be invited to think he could look like that at forty plus himself.

He wasn’t young, maybe forty or a little above, but not being a twenty-something athletic-cut stud was being set on its ear by being a forty-something athletic-cut stud. I don’t know for sure what color hair he had because he had a marine buzz cut and was smooth shaved everywhere I could see. He had the muscular, bulging biceps and pecs torso of a warrior god. The sleeping pants hung very low on his waist, accentuating how ripped he was and showing a line of pubic curls that seemed to be a reddish auburn as seen through the window glass.

I suppose my jaw had dropped in seeing how cut he was, because I saw him laugh and raise his coffee mug, seemingly to me. I thought I also saw a hand go down to frame his basket.

“Is that him? Neal Barringer?” I asked Tony out of the corner of my mouth.

“Yeah, that’s him. The gym king. Really something, right?”

“Yes, really something,” I said. “And he chose me out of your lineup?”

“Yep. And we both know what you like—or, rather, what you liked before you thought you wanted to go completely straight. So, are you on? You’ll go in to get the check for the service when we’re done?”

“I guess I can. No promises, though, beyond picking up the check.”

“Yeah, right,” Tony said, and laughed. He turned his blower back on and went back to work.

“I’ve written two checks here. I’ll give you one and tear up the other one. This one’s for $400 for the leaf removal, plus a tip for the crew. The other one’s for $700 for the leaf removal plus service Tony Finelli told me was available. Your name is Andre, right? It’s your pick on which check I give you. The extra service arrangement is fine with me. But maybe you’d like to come in and have some refreshments before you choose. If so, you can take your boots off here and come on in to the living room. Coffee’s OK? Or something stronger? A beer maybe?”

“A beer would be great, thanks,” I said, pulling my boots off and leaving them by the door. Although it was the fall leaf removal we were doing and it was after Thanksgiving already, the temperature had come up and I was in a T-shirt and athletic shorts.

Following Neal Barringer’s monologue, he’d padded off into the house, presumably to the kitchen to fetch a beer or two. He was still just in the navy-blue sleeping shorts that hung low on his hips. He was barefoot.

I drifted into the living room, which was two steps up from the lower foyer, where the entrance to the house was and an upper foyer, which doorways into various rooms and a staircase to an upper level were located. It was a really classy, expensive-looking house.

The living room was its own wing of the house. It had that nearly full-wall window out onto the wooded front yard, which showed a trimmed-out garden now that we’d spent much of the day removing the leaves. Azealia and rhododendron bushes provided a base of foliage under the trees. The land sloped down to the street, which was hidden from view by the bushes. It was like we were completely isolated in a wooded paradise when we actually were in a development just outside of town.

The loveliness of nature outside contrasted with the spare but lush Oriental-style furnishings in the living room. The front yard was terrific and the backyard, which was accessible on the opposite side of the living room through French doors was even more like a park, with Japanese maples added to the azaleas and boxwoods, a high ivy-covered wooden fence surrounding the yard, and stone and brick patios swirling around a swimming pool and koi pond. The living room was dominated in one corner by a baby grand piano and the opposing corner by a seven-foot decorated and lit Christmas tree. In the space between them, two sofas sat facing each other, set on a gigantic Oriental rug and with a large Chinese Chippendale-style rosewood-finished teak coffee table between the sofas. Barringer had placed the two checks on the coffee table, which was otherwise clear. Drink coasters were placed on the surface of side tables at each end of the sofas, so I assumed the coffee table was meant to be left bare.

“This is really a nice place,” I said as Barringer padded back into the living room. “You live here alone?”