It All Started With A Payback

Twenty-two: Hand in the Cookie Jar

Tori was bent over as she went through the contents of Louie's fridge. She heard a woman's voice behind her. Her head bumped the fridge in her haste to stand upright.

"Holy shit!" Her hand flew to her chest, her heart thumping wildly against her sternum. As soon as her heart returned to beating sixty times a minute, her hand rubbed the dull ache at the back of her head.

Surprise turned to embarrassment when she fully turned her attention to the old woman openly studying her.

She closed her eyes briefly and cringed at how she must have looked like: her hair in a 'just got fucked' do, the tips of her breasts protruding like two pebbles underneath a tautly stretched canvas, her neck and some portions of her thighs sporting red spots making it known to anyone who was looking at them how it got there and the 'caught with her hand in the cookie jar look' on her face.

Did she mention she had given the old woman a front row seat with an unobstructed view of her ass?

When Louie had asked her to spend the night, she initially said no since she didn't bring clothes with her. Louie's reply, accompanied by a shameless grin had been, "What do you need them for? It will save us some time if I don't have to take them off of you."

And so she stood there with just Louie's white shirt barely covering the lower half of her thighs. It would have been less mortifying had she been wearing at least her panties, now she learned her lesson the hard way that it's better to use the dryer even if there were only a few pieces of clothing to dry, than let some poor old lady be scarred for the rest of her life.

Louie had given her assurance they would be alone, that Nanny Maria who had been with the family since time immemorial wouldn't be there, that the old woman would be at her relatives' house just as she always was during weekends.

After they had left Uncle Ben's house they had gone straight to Louie's house and she had waited for him to finish taking a shower. She had promised him a backrub after he had whined like a baby how his muscles ached from having to prove himself to her cousins.

The backrub had lasted for five minutes before she had ended up lying on her back, getting a lot of front rub on all the right places with her legs tightly wrapped around Louie's waist.

For someone who had complained incessantly that he could barely move a muscle, he had certainly made use of all his muscle groups as though training for the olympics.

They had stayed up late on the pretense of watching a movie, neither one of them knew what the movie was about or even who were in it.

She had woken up earlier than he did. After taking a shower and planting a soft kiss on Louie's forehead, she had finally been able to study his room.

She had been surprised and touched that her colored pencil sketch of Santa Monica beach: with the sky a romantic shade of purple as the night welcomed dusk like a man waiting for the return of his lover and with the sun slowly sinking below the horizon, leaving some parts of the sky the color of embers refusing to die, hung on the wall beside his bed. It was right in the middle of several framed photographs and paintings.

The memory of that day had been one of the hardest she had tried to get rid of when she had put an end to their relationship.

He had woken up and stood behind her, enveloping her in an embrace. "You kept it," she had said in a small unbelieving voice.

"I didn't understand back then, why I couldn't let it go," he had kissed her temple, his arms tightening even more around her midsection, "Now I know why, maybe a part of me knew that not keeping that reminder meant forgetting what we had and letting go of what we could have in the future."