Dedicated to Dacia

The only difference between the white haired men with blank stares and me was a single song lyric. I had been riding the train into the city for eighteen months and five days to do a job that was just a job. I was a technical consultant, pimped out by a staffing firm over three to six month contracts to companies needing an extra pair of hands. The city was where I was in demand, so I got used to catching a 6:30am train, being at work exactly 8 1/2 hours and catching the 4:27pm train to what I called home.

An old man with white fringe crowning his head, showed me how to do the commute. He had a blank stare that saw nothing even while I fidgeted in front of his eyes; he was in snooze mode. On that eighth trip into the city I spent the hour subtly trying to fill some of the emptiness in him. He was thoroughly programmed however and it did not work. The next morning I looked into the eyes of other passengers separating those with years of experience and those with something else. Some people rode the train with sleep in their eyes while others had the excitement of ambition working on them like an amphetamine giving them a false look of wakefulness. The old man rode it with only the awareness necessary to hit snooze.

6:00 am get out of bed, hit snooze.

6:12 am start the car, hit snooze.

6:27 am get on the train, hit snooze.

6:35 am put the train pass away, hit snooze.

7:19 am get off the train, hit snooze.

7:26 am wake up at the sound of the one-serving coffee machine.

From that day on, I spent the hour and a half to my cup of coffee trying to push aside a song lyric that desperately held on to something else.

I hated the Barry Manilow mornings. It would have been better if it were the whole song that played in my head during the commute. Life does not like train riders that much though.

I do not know many times I sang: 'And I need you today, oh Mandy" in an hour. It was more than 'I write the songs that make the young girls cry'. The worst was "Copacabana", an hour of 'But just who shot who?' or 'She would meringue and do the cha-cha' was mind numbing. Even for "Copa" there were layers of worse and worser; the master of evil mornings was 'Her name was Lola'. Not even a complete lyric, it made the hour seem endless and had me wishing to be an old white haired man that disliked work holidays because it separated him from the comfort of routine.

On the fifth morning of the nineteenth month, I had a master "Copacabana" morning; I had introduced Lola several hundred times when the train made the next to last stop. I noticed it, hoping it would stop me from joining Lola as she lost her mind. Healthy, happy women entered the train car; I needed someone other than Lola to be real for a few seconds so I watched them from the corner of my eye.

It did not work and as the train pulled away Barry worked his magic on my mind.

"Her name was Lola"

"Her name was Lola"

"Her name was Lola"

"Her name was Lola"

"She was a showgirl"

"With yellow feathers in her hair,"

"And a dress cut down to there."

Something was different but my mind was too somnolent to stop.

"She would meringue"

"And do the cha-cha"

It was the cha-cha that broke through the drill that was as mindless as the one that got the old men to work. I did not say cha-cha like that. The word had been sung with the heaviness of the beat of two hard thrusts into a woman. Her perfume poured in through my nose, much stronger than the coffee smell that stopped the song lyric every morning. It felt like my soul had been dropped from the top of a skyscraper sailing, falling, and impacting on my corpse lying on the sidewalk.

"AAAARRRGGHH!!"

It was the fear of waking up from a falling dream; the other passengers did not hear it but I did as the two parts of me slammed together.

I turned my head.

She drowned me in the embrace. The force of her kiss helped reconcile my soul with my body. Even as my hand went up to grab her hair, I knew her ass was swaying, tempting even the old men to taste her youth by giving it the pat it had been made for.

I was waking up rapidly but not fast enough to catch her as she pulled away.

"Now that was something I missed while I was out trying to be a star," she said.

She gave me the smile that I had hoped was only mine. She brought her lips back to me. It was a soft kiss less than the ones she once woke me with, but more than any we had ever shared.

She smiled at me again before she joined the flock of healthy, happy women. I heard the questions they asked her about me. I was a nobody who rode the 6:30 am train waiting to be an old man with a blank stare.

"... because he fucked like an unbroken stallion!" she said loud enough to make everyone on the train take notice of me. "And he had the cock to do it with. Plus, if you hear him on his guitar, you'll know you've arrived."

The old woman across from me smiled at the faint memory of being young.

"They were young and they had each other, who could ask for more?" I whispered.

That was Dacia.

I was on the next to last week of a four month assignment to help a company do a full desktop and domain rollover. It had taken a month to get off the ground because they had not thought things through nor had they done the proper testing. I helped enormously during the early growing pains and my two co-consultants thought an offer of permanency was coming.

We used a windowless room by the wiring cabinet and freight elevator as our workspace. We had developed a system to get the work done efficiently. The first two days of the week were for building the machines, installing software, and moving people that only needed to be pointed to the new domain. The next two days were spent stroking the time out of the people we needed away from their desks. Fridays were reserved for massaging people over the fear of change that came from losing the comfort of habit.

I was 35 minutes early every morning but on Fridays I usually had nothing to do. I did not need coffee or want to read my mail that morning so my co-workers were surprised that I had started the first set of automated builds for our last week. I got the seating map out and looked to pin down where the last people we would be pointing to the new domain sat.

One of our guys followed me out to the office space. They were computer geeks, so to speak, and were not used to working in a place where more than half the population was female. Since this contract was with a music conglomerate, it made it even more different than usual.

These people were hip.

They all listened to different music with the only commonality seeming to be that there was no mainstream/pop music. We would go from an office with African drums, to one with hard rap, to another with jazz cooling the room. Most of the people wanted to spend the five minutes it took to retrieve the information we needed from their desktop getting to know us. The women seemed to enjoy the small beads of sweat they could produce from the guys' brows with even the mildest of flirtations.

The guys fostered an air of aloofness towards me reserved for middle and upper level managers and maintained a distance from me while with the company employees; this was done to insulate them from the real managers. I had worked with both of them before so we worked out a standing agreement regarding our tenure. They went out to lunch while I dealt with the socially uncomfortable situations; talking to the managers, finessing the rude employees, and communicating with the painfully pretty ones.

The smaller departments had been left for the end of our contracted stay so the last two weeks were moving slowly. The guys had a desperate air of wanting to take advantage of working with the type of women who in high school never gave them the time of day. They wanted to spend their money on something other than a car, like a woman. The boys never stopped wishing that they had been the chick-magnet type guys in high school as opposed to being the geek with another new computer part for the techie-pissing contest. I did my part by revisiting two of the women who had taken an interest in them; it took only a couple of nudges before both guys asked their ladies out to a luncheon foursome.

We sat in our closet trying to solve some of the loose ends that had to be tied up that morning until the ladies came by to be fed. The ladies and I smiled as the guys broke out into fretful nervousness. The ladies had done well with what they had in the office to look good for an unexpected opportunity. The guys noticed them only at a visceral level and were just too inexperienced to hide their reaction. The ladies liked the widening of the eyes, the catch in their breathing, the heated excitement, and even their erect posture. I waved goodbye knowing both guys were in good hands.

I had gone to the deli across the street for a salad earlier and eaten it while working. Being left alone was a necessary part of my day, I usually only had a half-hour but I knew the ladies would do me the favor of keeping the guys out a little later. With the taste of Dacia lingering, I needed the extra time.

I went into the phone closet where the company tech had allowed me to store my trunk the first day. I stored two of my guitars there; of the two, I required my father's guitar after my unplanned reunion with Dacia. I closed the door to the closet and set my timer for forty-five minutes of recovering.

The first words I ever spoke were "Mi guitarra!" My mother was trying to put me in my crib without my miniature guitar, which my father had made for me. He had been taught by his father but rarely practiced the art. The birth of his first son and the pain of being told my mother would not have another child drove him to find solace. He built two child's guitars to fit my small hands in childhood and my youth as I grew and three for when I was an adult. I kept one of my guitars in protected storage, one in my bedroom, and one at work for my lunch practice. My middle guitar had been destroyed in the car crash that killed my parents and Dacia had borrowed my baby guitar and not returned it.

I had not asked for it back because I was connected to it.

I needed the timer to tell me when to stop. I had never been able to do it on my own. I scared my mother once when I was eight. She tried to punish me when I got lost in my guitar by taking it away from me. My two days of not eating or drinking scared her more. My mother tried to drive me to other things; martial arts, singing lessons, piano lessons, and anything else that might break the hold my guitar had over me.

Nothing ever replaced my guitar.

I got up early to practice for a half-hour before I hit snooze as an old man for the first time each day. I practiced in lieu of lunch. At night, I practiced for an hour before my martial arts class, took a shower, and practiced until it was time to join the old men in their empty sleep. Practice only required a quiet room, my guitar, the music that filled us and a timer that allowed me to let go. For the first time in over eighteen months, Dacia danced among us.

I met Dacia in college.

I was scheduled to start school earlier than I did but the death of my parents delayed it. The trucking company allowed a driver waiting for his day in court on a second DUI charge to get behind the wheel and kill my parents. I sued them. It took a third arrest for DUI, this time without a driver's license before my lawyers could show the employer the error of their ways. They pushed me to settle and after some delay I agreed to it. The money was there for me to go to college but the distractions of their deaths and the aftermath gave me an excuse to do what I really wanted, travel with my guitar. There was no reason for me not to go to college but I managed it for three years nonetheless.

During my senior year I lived on the same dormitory floor as Dacia. We did not get to know each other until the last couple of months in school. A couple of her friends were pursuing music majors and they participated in one of the formal practice sessions for our senior presentations. She mistook me for a spectator and started talking about the performers. Since I was also a computer major it was easy to foster the illusion that I was just there to observe. I was taking a surprising degree of pleasure from listening to her make fun of the people around us when they called my name. Her eyes widened and her face colored beautifully as she was alarmed that she may have made an offensive comment about one of my friends.

The silence of desire around the auditorium assured her that no one there was my friend.

I used my father's guitar for my senior presentation; it was the first time I had ever I presented with it in public. The piece was written by grandfather in honor of my grandmother; he never finished it. I had spent years trying to complete it but it still felt unfinished. However, I thought it was appropriate since my grandmother never got to hear it.

My fellow majors and the professors sat quietly to listen. My grandfather lacked the talent for the piece but he was inspired by love to write it. I lacked the love but had talent enough to fill the room with the desire of my rivals to be an equal. College had nothing to teach me about my guitar or the music but I went through the motions so I could fulfill my mother's last attempt to break the hold.

I smiled as I aimed the notes that sang of my grandmother at Dacia. The music was for her and the piece was somehow less incomplete.

"You did that for me!" she said running up as I walked out of the building.

I turned to look at her. I nodded as I looked into warm brown/green eyes.

"Doesn't that mean I should do something for you?"

"You don't have to," I replied smiling.

"How about I make you a meal in the dorm's kitchen?"

"Can you cook?"

She posed for me by putting her hands on her hips and pushing her dramatically sized bosom at me.

"What do you think?"

"I like breasts."

I was more surprised than she was that I had said it. I blushed and she broke out into laughter. She put her arm through mine and dragged me towards the bus stop.

We fucked all night.

That was Dacia and I.

I was a half-hour from clocking out when I noticed the buzz coming from the guys was different than the usual Friday afternoon excitement. I turned around to find the room filling with healthy, happy women lead by Dacia.

"Hey baby, I thought you'd like to go out," she said to me.

The girls were dressed up to fulfill every male's fantasy of women wanting an evening of romance. They had taken the time to remove excess makeup but were still wearing the clothes from their modeling shoot. The guys were staring and I observed several of the company's employees attempting to be discrete as they passed our door trying to figure out why models were walking into the geek closet.

A blonde with waist length hair was measuring me carefully. I stared back at her and raised an eyebrow. She smiled smugly to let me know I had not been found wanting. Dacia looked from the blonde to me and smiled at both of us. Dacia was basically straight but liked the occasional female to add spice to her love life. The other women were too busy teasing the nearly quivering guys to notice the tri-play.

"What do you want to do?" I asked. I did not bother asking how she knew where I would be; Dacia got her way and other people got out of it.

"The photographer invited us to this little place and I figured you and the boys wouldn't mind being our dates."

Dacia was up to something but I had never been able to control her from our first night together. I would not even try now.

"The guys don't get off until six."

"That's kind of early to get off isn't it?" Dacia asked with mischief blazing out of her eyes. The guys blushed bright red especially when model hands began to touch their arms and chest in seemingly innocent, friendly pats. The invitation in the touches was not lost on the boys.

"We can wait in the bar across the street," the blonde with eyes for me suggested. The women nodded and started to walk out of the room with more than the necessary sway in their hips to give the guys one last zinger.

"Bring your guitar," Dacia said as she walked out with a sway that put the others to shame.

It took fifteen minutes for the guys to recover. Michael went out on the floor and returned with an unhappy look on his face. John was smiling ear to ear and looked like he was going to be useless for the rest of our time at work.

"David, I don't think I can go to this thing," Michael said quietly.

John and I spun our chairs to face him.

"Dude, swimsuit models asked us to take them out and you're not going? Are you fucking nuts?" John exclaimed.

Michael shrugged his shoulders.

"Ask Lydia to come with us," I suggested.

Lydia was the Latin curveball in Michael's life. She was five feet of plump curves and something in her smile affected Michael deeply. Neither realized there was more to her smile when he was around. Michael could be a prototype for a spy novel hero five foot nine, sandy brown hair, non-descript blue eyes, and facial features that blended together into plainness. The only time he ever seemed more than normal was when Lydia smiled at him.

I smiled at him.

"She'll like that you turned down the chance to hang out with some hot, California swimsuit sluts to be with her."

"They're not sluts," Michael said angrily. John and I looked at each other and smiled widely. Michael was already in Lydia's panties.

"She likes you, Michael. They're sluts," I said before I turned back to my monitor.

Fifteen minutes and Dacia had me getting involved.

We fucked all night.

She was leaving in the morning having decided California was where she could make her dreams come true. She had it all mapped out; swimsuit, fitness model for a few years, B-movie actress, B-movie director, B-movie maker, and finally owning her own B-movie studio.

I asked her again as she lay wriggling on top of me what was the point of dreaming about making straight to tape movies or late night cable skin flicks.

She moved down my body and lapped at my dick. It was sticky with our combined juices. She savored the taste of our mingled essence. Dacia took her time moving me around with her hand to make sure she licked me clean. She moved lower to lick my balls clean also. The woman took each into her mouth to suck the last touch of flavor from them. She moved to the area around my genitals hunting for more of what we had given each other.

Dacia moved back to my dick and took the head into her mouth. She sucked on it while her tongue stimulated the tip. She took me completely inside her mouth and pulled back sucking life into it. She took me completely inside her mouth again. I grew and she adjusted so I would go down her throat. Dacia massaged me with her mouth, tongue, and throat; even though it was the third time that night I hardened. It ached but she coated me with saliva soothing some of the rawness away. I was too thick and long for her to take comfortably but she tried until I was at my full growth.

"God! I love your cock!" she exclaimed as she pulled my dick out of her mouth, lay it down, and licked the length of it on the underside.

She kept licking upwards until she could kiss me. The vision reached between her legs and settled herself on me. She wriggled her hips to seat me deeper, pulled up a few inches and pounded herself down to get the right fit.

Her eyes were unfocused as she looked at me. She took my face in her hands and whispered to me.

"Not everybody can be great, David. It's going to be enough for me to be the masturbation fantasy of a handful of pubescent boys."

She moved up my length and then slowly back down.

"I don't have it in me to be more than that."

Dacia moved up my length and slammed down. She moved her hips in a way made for me to cum inside her. I did not want it to end fast though; my balls ached from the pressure of wanting to spray more of myself inside of her. I turned us over and captured her legs underneath her knees with my arms. I rested my full weight on her. She grabbed the back of my head and pulled me down for a kiss to drown both of us in her passion. I lost control like I always did when she kissed me liked that.

I was not an unbroken stallion, but there is only one way to fuck a wild mare in heat.

The club, the photographer had invited the girls to, was a small amateur jazz joint where people could get on stage to jam if they wanted to. I saw a lot of instruments in the audience and recognized many of the dreams that had not been forgotten. I looked at Dacia as someone got on the microphone to announce that he was happy to see so many had brought their guitars because there was going to be a friendly competition tonight. I looked around the room; the majority of the people had brought electric like the one I carried.

Dacia walked to a little stand beside the stage to talk to a woman taking down names on a notebook. They talked to each other and as was Dacia's way the woman gained a new best friend while writing down my name. I watched Dacia as she walked back to me. The blonde with the hair and eyes stood next to me ready to referee the argument she thought was about to happen. I did not bother arguing with Dacia, she either won or I lost because I would have to walk away from her if I took it to the end.

The group that came with us, Lydia, her friends, the models, and my co-workers, looked curiously at Dacia. Lydia asked her how good I was. They were trying to tease me but Dacia told them I was the best. They first looked at her and then at me.

"If you're lucky you might hear one person better in your lifetime, but on my soul you won't hear two," I told them as the first set of players got on stage.

"Why aren't you in the business then?" Lydia asked. My explicit answer made her angry because it sounded like bragging.

She was challenging me.

"I haven't been discovered yet," I replied looking to the stage, dismissing her.

I waited my turn knowing how it had to end. No one else here had known their guitar before they could speak. This was fun for them, a way to show off, maybe get laid.

No one talked to me, and then it was my time.

I sat on stage waiting for the others in my group to finish; I was empty in a way even the old men would envy. They touched their guitars beside me but the music did not reach me. They were weekend warriors who said 'I have been playing for eight years' as their introduction. I did not remember a day before I was 25 that I had not practiced more hours than I slept.

It was my turn.

They moved the microphone in front of me and I saw Dacia moving through the audience to stand in front of the stage. They would get know her for what she was.

The Dealmaker's Devil-woman.

"So I guess I should start with my name like everyone else has," I said into the mike. My voice was flat; my soul removing itself from the places it was not needed.

"You would know me as David. But my guitar and the music gave me another name a long time ago." I touched the strings and they sang agreement that David was not our name. Dacia's hips had been waiting for that first touch and swayed in counterpoint. The audience leaned forward as the Devil-woman called them. Their eyes watched her, but their souls opened for my guitar, the music, and me.

I pulled the timer out of my pocket, set it for fifteen minutes, and put it beside my foot. It was longer than everyone else had taken, but they would not stop me. No one ever had.

"I was in the bayou; still a teen, barely a man." The strings danced in memory of being younger. "I played a backwater club, a roadhouse built of smoke and blues. Hope had never been a part of that place, but on Friday nights the people wanted you to set them free."

It was my electric so we could wail the way we had that night even without the others as backup. Their desire to be freed set me loose among them and the clock ticked on. It was the first time in my life I ever put my guitar down without the timer.

"I went there to learn or maybe because the legend of the crossroads started there with them."

Dacia was moving, and their eyes followed her; male/female, it did not matter. She was desire made flesh, and they wanted her to set them free just like the hopeless ones that only had smoke and blues.

"An old woman came up to me afterwards and said 'Child, you done remade all my heartstrings, so you could break them yourself.'"

Dacia stopped so their conscious mind could hear what I was about to tell them.

"She sat with me that night and helped me write about her life. Some of you might have felt a small part of her pain or her happiness but nobody here will live it all. At least, God please, I hope you don't."

The words were barely a whisper but they had turned their eyes from Dacia to me.

"She did not come back the next night; her daughter, an old woman in her own right, said she did not need to anymore."

"I went down to the crossroads to meet the Dealmaker. I also met an old woman whose life gave my guitar and the music voice enough to name me."

My fingers stopped moving, a pause before the old woman spoke through us again.

"She named me Stringbreaker and I give you a taste of the old woman as a way to thank her."

Music is not well described in words, beautiful, rich, fulfilling, majestic. A picture is worth a thousand words means that a thousand words describe a picture. How many words would it take to describe a feeling? A song can make you feel it again.

We told them about the pain of a girl's first time, rape, and when he came, not believing how much she loved that child. How she was raped again when that son was lynched by the insecurities of white men, and the joy as a young swelling girl said he had been the father. A part of him lived in the eyes of her great-great grandchildren and she had to hold back tears every time the light touched them the right way.

Dacia danced, a Devil-woman keeping their eyes busy so their souls would remember an old woman who had suffered and touched happiness anyway.

Minutes of my touching the strings have been spent trying to find the unity among my guitar, the music, and who I am. Minutes of the touching are nothing among the three of us. Minutes of the touching are trying to hold on as we are sucked away from each other.

The timer went off and it broke through to all of us.

I put my guitar in its case and the timer in my pocket. There was anger in the eyes of one of the men on stage as I turned to leave.

"Have you ever been happy?" I asked him.

He looked confused but nodded his head.

"When?" I asked.

"The day I married, when my baby girl came, a lot of times," he replied.

"I gave up everything at the crossroads," I told him. "Would you?"

He shook his head and looked away.

"And you're angry: because you play your guitar and I became mine."

I walked away from all of them.

She did not need to ring the doorbell; she had not given back the key I gave her when she was with me. I was waiting for her, naked on my bed.

She smiled as she walked in and took off her clothes. She did it slowly; letting me enjoy the caresses her hands gave her body as the clothing fell.

Dacia had changed herself a little; there were teasers to suggest what was beneath. Her brown hair now had blonde highlights to make her tresses seem more like a halo. The sun loved the touches of blonde when her pictures were captured outside. I followed her career in the magazines and the websites. The pictures of her in the fading sun were my favorite. Her body had tightened to fill the mold of the fitness model rather than the form of the swimsuit vamp. I liked that change greatly.

She stood in a pose that she knew I hated. Photographers liked her with her mouth open from the start, even before she flew to California to work. Every time I saw a picture of her like that, I wanted to make her kneel in front of me and shove my hard cock into her mouth until I was in her throat with her breath warming my pubic hair. She smiled at me as her eyes dared me to do exactly that.

It had been too long for that dare to be ignored.

I surged from the bed and our lips met questing for control. She gave ground as she had intended in the face of my hunger. I put my hands on her shoulders and pushed down. She went willingly and I grabbed two handfuls of her hair. She held her mouth open for me as I moved forward with my hips. My dick knew where it had to go and it unerringly entered her mouth. I moved my hips towards her and she accepted me into her throat. It was not comfortable for her especially since I was harder than I had been for a long time. However, she took it as her due, my hardness, my need, and my fight for control to stop myself from fucking her mouth with no thought to her.