F2: 7:48 PM Wednesday

FAWC 2: 7:48 P.M., Wednesday

(Author's note: This story is a submission to the second Friendly Anonymous Writing Challenge (FAWC). The true author of this story is kept anonymous, but will be revealed on August 16th, 2013, in the comments section following this story. Each story in this challenge is centered on a random determination of four "mystery ingredients." There are no prizes given in this challenge; this is simply a friendly competition.)

(The mystery ingredients for this story were arrogant, time of day, energetic, and art.)

* * * *

There she was, at 7:48 p.m., on the dot. Just like clockwork, every Wednesday evening for two months now. You could certainly count on Claire. She taught an 8:00 p.m. art class across the hall from Jesse's exercise class, which supposedly started at 7:30, but the women who came to the exercise class were worse than a flock of sheep—and they'd all be angling to get in Jesse's shorts until he settled them down. Nathan often barely had time to get them all checked in in time to make it across the hall for the art class with Claire.

Nathan didn't know when he'd gotten in the habit to look up at 7.48 on the dot to catch a glimpse of Claire looking in the window. But she always was there, having bustled straight from her job as a real estate agent—and after the art class she'd usually go on to her evening stint in the hospital gift shop. Claire always seemed to be bouncing around from one thing to another. Nathan didn't know where she got the energy from. In class once, when asked about being so energetic, she had laughed and said, "I'm afraid to stand still lest I discovered I died last year when I was twenty-eight."

Nathan thought the woman was brilliant, as the line was guaranteed to get a laugh and she could pick and choose what part any given person was laughing about.

Well, one thing was sure, Nathan thought. As much as Claire bustled around, she sure didn't need Jesse's class. She appeared to be in great shape—for a woman of twenty-nine inside the body of a sixty-year old. Her striking resemblance to Susan Hayward, the dear-departed sultry movie actress, no doubt was cultivated by her, even though no one had told her that only sentimental and sensitive folks like Nathan watched Susan Hayward movies anymore. Not to mention that few in Claire's targeted contemporary set even remembered who Susan Hayward was. The resemblance and connection to the movie screen was accentuated in Nathan's connective memory when Claire's fluffy red hair was framed in the window in the exercise room door.

A glimpse of Claire in that window always gave Nathan a little lift in emotions that he couldn't quite figure out. It wasn't what he was being groomed to be aroused by. Jesse was working on convincing Nathan that he preferred men, although Nathan hadn't gone beyond his own right hand to prefer anything sexually yet, so the sensations Nathan got when he looked at Claire were a bit of a reversal on the program.

As for Jesse, he'd take anyone for a spin, female or male, who was under fifty and good looking and who he thought properly assessed the glory that was Jesse. "Any port in a storm" deserved the privilege of him, was Jesse's mantra. Having picked Nathan out of a Broadway play dance line and making quick, if presumptuous assumptions, Jesse was close to selling the idea that the emotions of Nathan—young, cute, and naïve, not necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer, but in a very nice, cuddly way, of course—were only lifted by other men. By Jesse, in particular, who hadn't actually made any moves on Nathan—yet—but who had moved Nathan into his apartment. Here he let Nathan valet, cook, and wash for the future anticipation of Jesse using his magnificent beauty and precisely cut body to do some unspecified wonderful things with Nathan, which Jesse went to great odds to let Nathan know would be the ultimate blessing and experience of his life.

This living arrangement did have its up and downs. There were short periods when a young, giggly woman appeared in Jesse's apartment for more than a night and took on some of the domestic chores Nathan normally performed. But as obviously awed the young women were that Jesse deigned to look their way when they first materialized in the life of the apartment, it wasn't long until each became fried by the intensity of the sunlight that was known as Jesse and then it would be just the two of the young me again. On occasion, another young man, walking gingerly, would pop out of Jesse's bedroom door in the morning. But said guy invariably always was gone—forever—after nothing more than a cup of coffee and a growl.

Maybe, Nathan thought, that little bump inside him when he saw Claire framed in the window that made his throat constrict and, if he didn't blush at thinking about it, gave rise to another little jolt between his belt buckle and his knees, stemmed from a little flash of jealousy. When Claire looked through that little window in the door at 7:48 p.m. on Wednesday evenings, she was looking past Nathan sitting at the reception desk and checking stragglers into Jesse's class. Her eyes were glued on Jesse, looking oh-so godlike in his skimpy shorts and tight T-shirt, admiring himself and his blow-dried hair in the mirrors on three walls in the exercise classroom and in the eyes of the admiring women who he deigned to flirt with just enough less than they fawned over him so that everyone in the room knew who was the pretty one.

This particular Wednesday evening at 7:48 p.m. started off no differently from any of the seven that had preceded it in this semester of community night classes. Nathan sensed the mop of red, curly hair appear in the exercise room door window and looked up midstream of checking in Mrs. Lederstrum and listening to her praise for the eighth time how marvelously that Jesse hunk led the class. Seemingly motivated by the same awareness of Claire's appearance in the window, Jesse puffed up his pecs and managed to gaze at himself and pose for mirrors on three different walls while patting Mrs. Jackson on the well-rounded rump. Rounding that out and showing that a hot flash is possible while melting, Claire looked into the room and past Nathan, and directly, worshipfully at Jesse.

At 7:49 and a half, without fail, Nathan was in the hallway between to the two classes, with Claire standing in the doorway to her class, greeting arriving students and, yet again, verifying that Nathan lived with Jesse and checking on this and that of the domestic likes and dislikes of that god.

It was only for a couple of minutes each night, but what Claire had managed to worm out of Nathan about Jesse's private life just in the first half of the semester of classes had been quite impressive. Equally impressive was how she was able to do it without looking Nathan fully in the face but still with her eyes trained on the wall to the exercise class, now running at a high decibel rating, as if she could see the object of her desire with X-ray eyesight.

Not being remotely aware that his natural crush was on Claire rather than on the dangled promise of delights in the embrace of Jesse at some future date when enough grocery shopping and ironing had been done to satisfy what Jesse deserved in service, Nathan blindly only told Claire what would enhance the image of Jesse. Not that anything existed that would tarnish Jesse's image, of course. He was the world's perfect man. He could tell you that himself—and often did.

On this, the eighth night of the exercise and art classes, the persistent and clever grilling by Claire of Nathan about his housemate, Jesse, was confined to those two minutes between classes. However, somehow in a very private discussion at Nathan's easel later in the art class, without Claire even looking at what Nathan was painting in response to a "paint the loveliest image you can think of assignment," Clair had managed to move the extremely nice-looking but not fully brilliant young art student through an artful maze of Jesse topics. These moved from what darkness did to vibrant colors on canvas to the titillating "aha!" tidbit of knowledge that Jesse slept in the nude rather than worrying about what color of sleeping shorts to wear. In the process, Nathan had revealed that he also slept in the nude, but this somehow hadn't registered on Claire's interest scale.

Nathan was actually surprised that Claire was showing additional interest in Jesse on this eighth meeting night considering that even he had seen that Jesse had rebuffed Claire on the seventh evening.

On that evening, Jesse's exercise class went longer than Clair's art class went, and somehow Claire had managed to keep Nathan late so that when members of both classes had dispersed, it was just Claire and Nathan arriving in the hallway between the two classrooms at the same time as Jesse, still in shorts and T belabored by the well-cut muscles below, emerged from his classroom.

It became a natural opportunity for Nathan to be maneuvered to introduce Claire to Jesse and for Claire to manage to drop some reference to something she knew Jesse was interested in because she had wheedled the information out of Nathan several class nights previously.

She selected well, as that something had to do with the Olympic gymnastics trials Jesse had once been invited to. She knew he could be counted on now to boast on how close he came to making the team if it hadn't been for the favoritism of a few coaches. Gymnasts were selected that these men had coached at lesser universities to the one Jesse had attended, excelling in everything from academics to athletics to having won the body beautiful contest at a college neighborhood bar after a homecoming football game.

Once she got Jesse going, she turned to Nathan during one of the golden boy's pauses for breath in his monologue to ask, "Nathan, would you be good enough to take these art supplies to my car for me. It's the white Mustang parked under the light at the far end of the lot."

It took a few minutes for Nathan to jog out to the car and back. He returned only in time to hear the tail end of the conversation.

"I'm hardly dressed for the bar. And there aren't any around here I'd be seen dead in," Jesse was saying as Nathan entered the building.

"There's always my place," Claire said. "I don't have to show up at the hospital gift shop this evening, and I have—"

"I rather think not," Jesse had responded, looking down his aquiline nose at the deflated art teacher.

The conversation had ended pretty abruptly at that point, with Nathan, thinking at the back of his mind, without being aware why, that he wouldn't have minded having that drink with Claire. She always made him laugh and feel a little warm inside. When Jesse drove Nathan home in Jesse's Hummer H3 Alpha, Nathan mentioned how nice it would be to go for a drink with the art teacher, but all he got back was a tight-lipped reference to teachers in the night classes being able to see the résumés of the other teachers, including their date of birth.

And yet, despite a rebuff that even Nathan was able to pick up on, here, in the eighth class night, Claire was still showing interest in Jesse. This class represented a breakthrough in some other direction, though. While Claire was standing at Nathan's easel and pumping Nathan for luscious tidbits on Jesse's likes and triumphs, Claire, by habit, did her art teacher thing. She looked at what Nathan was painting in response to the "loveliest image you can think of" assignment.

What Nathan was painting, quite unmistakingly and flatteringly, was the face of the movie star Susan Heyward at the height of her sensuality.

"Why that's Susan Heyward," Claire exclaimed.

Nathan blushed. "I was trying to paint you." The blush wasn't only because he'd been caught painting the art teacher. It was because until this very minute he hadn't realized himself that he'd been painting the art teacher.

Clever woman that she was, Claire instantly realized she'd been looking at her fishing trip all wrong. She'd been trying to land a whale when there was a very nice trout flopping around on the ground right in front of her.

* * * *

They fucked after class, not at Claire's place, where Nathan had assumed they were going, but at Nathan and Jesse's apartment. Not that he had assumed they were going to Claire's place because he knew he was going to get lucky. Jesse had him believing that being with a woman wasn't lucky. But Claire was a take charge sort of woman; she ran circles around him, and he was wrapped in her web without even fully knowing what was going to happen other than that drink he'd been thinking about having with her.

Claire hadn't been any more clear about where they were going to do what than Nathan was. Until almost the very last minute, when she saw Nathan—saw him, really for the first time—and took in how young and virile and handsome he was in the nude, Claire had thought this getting into Nathan and Jesse's apartment was a ploy to get ever closer to the world of Jesse. But there, in Nathan's bedroom, in light of the worship and awe in the young man's eyes when Claire had disrobed, she was lost in the moment—and to any other man being in the world than this young, innocent hunk named Nathan.

It quickly became obvious that Nathan had not had sex with anyone but himself before. To a mature cougar like Claire this was like squirting gasoline on a bonfire. She went at him like a female form of the Energizer Bunny.

Nathan was immediately captured by the revelation that Claire was when she knelt between his open thighs as he sat on the bed and made his engorging cock—the size and thickness of which she praised to his blushing joy—disappear and then reappear in the cleavage of her breasts as he felt the hardness of her nipples press into the folds where his abdomen met his thighs on either side.

Her kisses as her swaying breasts infolded his manhood were sweet, running from tender to ravenous and setting him ablaze—in ways Jesse had caused him to imagine their coupling someday would be.

Claire was almost frenetic in her lovemaking—keeping ahead of any thought of position or activity that the novice Nathan might have had by moving from one inventive, inflaming, and athletic position to the next. Nathan didn't know what would come next—only that she was taking him to heights of lust and consuming desire that he had no idea existed.

When Jesse entered the apartment and, hearing the groaning, approached the half-open door to Nathan's bedroom, Nathan was on his back, gripping the headboard over his head with white-knuckled fists, as Claire, crouched over his thighs, lowered her lips over his cock.

Jesse's interest and lust were immediately engaged. The woman had a voluptuous body—and she certainly knew how to use it. How old was she? he wondered. Had there been a typo on her résumé? But then suddenly that didn't matter. She was a siren—and a talented one at that. Having sucked Nathan to his first ejaculation, she had moved up his body; pressed her V into Nathan's face as he lay on his back, gripping the headboard rungs; and both instructed and guided him to where both of them could flip their pleasure up into the stratosphere.

Just her husky voice in giving instruction and moaning her pleasure as Nathan learned from her caused Jesse to unzip himself and start to join in the sensuality of the scene to the limited, frustrating extent he could.

If only that was him lying under the vixen, he thought. But then he shook his head. Wasn't she sixty? Well, if she was, he continued to think as his cock thickened and lengthened in his hand and started to leak, she had kept her body in much better condition than any of those middle-aged women in his class had.

Thinking of those women, though, brought a whole new line of contemplation into Jesse's mind. He had been concentrating on the young women in his class at the edge of the realm of the light his own glowing personality had radiated out into the world. All of the women his age and younger were emaciated models and thin exerciseaholics now that he thought of it. He had condescended to respond with favor to their obvious and usually openly expressed desires that he possess them, fuck them, let them worship his hard body and movie star looks. And yet had they satisfied him? Didn't most of them just lay there like lumps, letting him do what he wanted with them, but, in their own way, just taking, not giving? Hadn't the older women he'd let seduce him been better fucks? Wasn't their experience and easy openness to the coupling, their expertise in drawing his lust out, been more satisfying?

Why hadn't he thought of this before?

Watching this woman, this voluptuous siren, milking the young Nathan—straddling him now and riding his cock, bringing deeper moans from him than she was emitting, drawing a second ejaculation out of him—Jesse found himself fountaining his seed down his pant legs and onto the floor.

She was beautiful and supple. Why hadn't he noticed this before? Speaking of movie stars, she reminded him of one. Not one of the scarecrow types now popular but someone from an earlier, more sensual period of the movies. Who could it be? He had no idea.

He had been carried away by his thoughts. He looked up now to see that the woman had reversed herself on Nathan's cock, facing his feet now, her hands gripping his raised knees and rising and falling hard and fast on the cock as Nathan writhed under her and grunted his pleasure and complete capitulation to her control. The energy and joy with which she fucked the young man tore Jesse's heart out. He had to have some of this for himself.

He was shocked to see that she was looking at him, seeing him in the doorway, giving him a withering "what the hell are you looking at, little boy?" look. He turned and fled to his room, seeking out the mirror above his bureau, intent on regaining something he sensed he'd lost without having an inkling what that was.

He continued to feel the loss over the next week as, although Nathan was still in the apartment, he was no longer hanging on every word Jesse said. And when Jesse tossed his dirty socks on the living room floor, they were still there the next time he walked through the room. And when he showed up for a meal, he found Nathan already eating the single serving he had made.

Something had happened in Jesse's world. Something he didn't understand. Something he'd try to pretend hadn't happened.

* * * *

The ninth session of the Wednesday-night community activities classes didn't happen. Jesse was already in the exercise classroom when the thunderstorm outside reached a pitch that blacked the lights out. No students had arrived yet; they all were waiting out the storm before coming out on the roads.

At 7:48, however. Jesse heard a door out in the corridor open and he groped his way out into the half light of the hallway.

She was standing there, beautiful and voluptuous, her red hair cascading around her expertly painted face, an assured, pouting, highly sensual smile meeting his glazed "why am I only now seeing this?" gaze. She had just walked out of the door to the art class. Under her arm was an unframed canvas covered with a painting of a gorgeous redhead, the head of the woman painted framed as if in the window of a door, her eyes imploring yet all knowing.

He started to say something, but then the door to the street opened and Nathan stepped into the hallway. He was carrying a suitcase that obviously was heavy from the way he listed to the side as he hefted it. Jesse's eyes narrowed as he saw the sloppy, dopey grin on the young man's face.

"The storm knocked the electricity out," Jesse said, turning his face toward Claire and away from the rare personal defeat of what he saw in the besotted young man, having quickly figured out why his dirty socks were still on the living room floor.