He was thinking about that rickety set of wooden stairs going up the side of the house. Rickety house. Rickety love. Then the train banked at speed and Bill listed sideways into a much bigger, dark-skinned man sitting a space away. The man hardly budged. Bill was sure he was the only one in the entire car who swayed as far as the train. He mumbled a garbled apology and righted himself again, thumbing his glasses back at the top of his nose. The man nodded without looking.

Diagonally across the car was a blonde in a black business suit and stockings. Heels up to wherever heels go. They made the muscles in her calves look hard and sleek. Bill looked at her without turning his head, hoping she hadn’t seen him fall over, wishing he could rub his cheek over her stockings. With her legs inside them.

She was thumb typing on the face of her phone. He was sure she hadn’t seen him fall. Sure she hadn’t seen him come, go or exist in between.

Fine.

He could look at her from there within the dark shadow of his own nothingness and watch lifetimes of passionate happiness spiral out from the aura surrounding her fine, corn silk hair.

Fine. She was the type who belonged in a taxi instead of the subway.

The train squealed into the next stop and Bill grabbed the seat before he listed into the guy sitting next to him again. A blustery pair of street toughs got on with a few more late commuters. They grabbed a pole and rode standing up even though there were plenty of empty seats.

Bill looked at the floor. Then he set his eyes on the blonde’s legs and heels again. Sitting down, her skirt rode high. He wondered what her skin would smell like through her nylons. He wondered if she had a spectacular yet lonely heart, and if she were going home to lie in alone in a hot bath with a glass of wine nearby while she daydreamed of being loved by a man with a perfect soul.

But no.

Dreams were just those flashes of bright color in the tiny spaces between days and nights of riding back and forth from one mediocre world to another. There was home. There was the office. They might as well have been the same place, except for having to lead a different life in each one. For having to be a different person. Different…

No. Nothing was different. He was the same old car parked in a different garage. Running on fumes.

Then there were Thursdays and Penelope. Rickety stairs. Rickety house. Rickety love.

Never once on a Tuesday. Or a Sunday. Thursday was their routine. It was dependable. Easy. They never went out, as Penelope always complained about her body and not feeling right in the kind of clothes a woman had to wear to go someplace with a man.

Bill never minded sitting on the couch holding hands, eating popcorn out of the same bowl, watching romances on Netflix.

One of the street toughs started flirting with the blonde. One way all the way. Not getting a response, he finally grabbed the crotch of his baggy jeans and said something about the way his dick was going to blow her emotional circuit board and pop her lights out. His friend laughed like the one, hysterical sounding gut laugh that always stands out in a sitcom laugh track.

Bill cringed. He wanted to stand up and grab the maladjusted little fuck by the scruff of the neck and smack his empty skull against the pole until he understood concept of manners.

No. He wanted to get off the train and walk up Penelope’s rickety stairs without anything happening that anyone would remember longer than a few seconds. He wanted to disseminate molecules and slip through the cracks in the doors and windows into the dank air the subway tunnel.

The blonde rolled her eyes without letting them land on the rudeboys. She pulled a canister of pepper spray out of her purse and clutched it while she went on thumbing texts with one hand.

“Awww, baby, don’t be like that,” the alpha poodle crooned.

“Yeah. Don’t be like that,” his poodle shadow refrained.

The train started to bank and slow down. The next stop was less than a bad moment away. The toughs started to move toward the door. Bill looked back down at the floor, but it was too late. They caught him looking. Big sneakers crowed his peripheral vision, but he kept looking down. He wasn’t in this. He was going to see Penelope. They were going to do things together that had nothing to do with anything else. With none of this.

Suddenly, one of the toughs yelled “BOO!” next to Bill’s ear and he flinched. Hard. Hitting the back of his head on the window behind him.

The rudeboys stood there laughing while the train pulled into its stop. The bigger guy he’d fallen against before glanced at them like something he’d just as soon wipe off the bottom of his shoe. He didn’t look at Bill. Neither did the blonde. A few commuters looked over and watched the idiots laugh. They were practically their own, entire laugh track by now.

Bill’s pulse was racing and his ears felt like they were on fire. The train felt like it was taking all week to come to a stop, but it finally did. The rudeboys were still laughing when they got off.

There were two more stops to Penelope’s neighborhood. Bill grabbed the pole he was sitting beside and held on. He wasn’t going to list again. He didn’t look at the dark skinned man and he didn’t look at the blonde. There was only his reflection in the window on the other side of train, and a cold, cement wall blasting by behind the veil of his face.

The house where Penelope lived was a ten minute walk from the subway stop. The neighborhood didn’t look like the city anymore, even though technically it was. When Bill came up the stairs onto the sidewalk, he set his briefcase down and zipped his coat up to his neck. It was almost cold enough to snow, but that meant the streets would be mercifully quiet.

He picked up his brief case and jammed his balled up left fist into his coat pocket. The part inside him that felt scraped out tonight felt raw enough he didn’t know how he could look at Penelope. The last thing he could do was tell her the only thing he could really think or feel or believe right now: baby, I just fell off a shelf and broke all apart and I need you…jesus, fuck, baby I need you…to heal me all back up with your sweet little pudgy hands and those lips outta paradise.

It would almost be better to turn around, get back on the train and go home. But it was Thursday. Their day. Everything would feel out of place, and if he got back on the train now it would only feel like he never got off. At least if he waited until morning, as usual, it would feel like the scene of somebody else’s crime.

The Pentecostal church on the corner of Elmhurst and Woodlawn was lit up and bursting with sound. It was usually quiet on Thursdays, but tonight it was full of aching believers. As he passed by the front, Bill caught a flash of a man’s voice singing something about not letting the devil drive your car.

Sure, I ride the fuckin’ subway, he thought. But the sound was strong even as it was slightly muffled by the church walls and it felt like the man’s voice was penetrating his blood.

Bill walked up the steps and found a clear spot in the stained glass window where he could peer inside. There was a full band spread across the front of the pulpit, and the singer was standing in front of them. The man was huge, wearing a mustard yellow suit that draped him like a boat sail. He was sweating with the strain of conviction, eyes closed and gripping a wireless mic. He had to be close to three hundred pounds and was using his body to help push out the words, as if maybe he could fire them closer to god that way.

The pews were packed full of people. Heads were bobbing, leaning back, dropping forward. Hands were raised in the air. An ancient woman with a midnight dark complexion in a turquoise dress was on her feet, leaning on a walker and singing along.

Bill turned away and sat on the steps. Listening. Except for the icy cement against his ass, he almost felt warm. He almost wanted to go inside, but he couldn’t. He would cease being a ghost. And anyway, there was no devil. Just a thousand tiny little ones that chip away at whatever they can reach in a thousand tiny little ways.

Erosion. The devil wasn’t some monster car crash. It was one day after another of the kind of soul-sucking mediocrity you never see coming.

He sat and listened until an elegantly dressed couple was suddenly there, walking up the steps. He got up and headed for the sidewalk, giving them a nod as they passed. They called at him to come inside, but he just waved without looking back. It would have been too much like getting back on the subway.

A couple blocks down he spotted the orange and silver chimi truck that was always parked for business on the other side of the street. For the first time in three years of Thursdays, Bill crossed the street and decided to see the truck from the other side.

There were a couple of people at the window ordering something in Spanish. There was a squat, almost stocky man standing up inside the truck looking bored as he turned to fill whatever the pair had just ordered. Bill read the menu. He didn’t know what most of it meant, but the smell of the food was getting to him.

After the couple in front of him took their order away, he stepped up to the window and asked for papitas, not knowing exactly what they were. Two or three more people gathered behind him while he waited. He ended up with a brown paper bag full of French fries. They had some kind of red powder on them, and he hoped they wouldn’t be too spicy.

There was a bench only a couple of yards away from the truck on a diagonal from the window. He set his briefcase down and sat to eat his fries. They were only a little spicy. His fingers got salty and a little bit greasy, but the fries were hot and good.

Two men and a woman stepped up to the truck. They were laughing and speaking rapid fire Spanish. They even got the man in the truck to crack a slight smile. The men were both robust and a little bit paunchy. The woman’s ass looked too big for the rest of her body. It was packed into jeans tight as paint. Bill wondered what it would be like to sidle up behind her and press his body against her ass, touch her shoulder, pull her raven with henna streaked hair away from her neck and be able to tell her things in Spanish that would make her soften and lean back against him.

He kept eating his papitas, every so often wiping his fingers on his pants. He wondered how long any of the people standing beside the truck had been here. Even in the cold, they seemed more at home than he felt. One of the men casually touched the woman’s ass while they waited for their order.

Looking away, he laid his attention into his bag of papitas. He knew he wasn’t going to finish them, but they were good and he’d already decided to come back and get some more when he came this way again next Thursday. Maybe he’d try those cut up bananas that looked like they had some kind of syrup on them.

Getting up from the bench, Bill took the chance of scanning the woman’s ass again as he tossed his half eaten bag of papitas in the trash barrel. The man’s hand was still cupping her extravagant cheek. Penelope had an ass like that, but she wouldn’t be caught dead in anything that tight. He found himself wishing they were the couple standing in front of the window of the truck, waiting for their order with his hand on her back pocket, but she’d probably have a heart attack if he ever touched her ass in front of anyone.

Perfectly at home. On the street. In their skin.

Bill kept going.

He felt the distance between himself and the subway increasing. The church. The singer and the lady with a walker. The chimi truck. The woman with the ass too big for the rest of her. As he drew closer to Penelope’s, he wondered how many more years of his life he would live as a ghost before his time came to become some other kind of ghost. He wondered if sometime he’d even start to like feeling scraped out all the time.

Two blocks out from Penelope, he began to feel her scent already in his nostrils. She’d be wearing sweatpants and an overshirt that would cover the exaggerated body she claimed to hate living in. Her hair would have that rosy scent of the same shampoo she’d been using since they met.

At the foot of her steps, Bill stopped and wondered what she’d do if he didn’t show up. What if he waited until Saturday? Next Tuesday. What if he weren’t there for their traditional Thursday snuggle on her threadbare couch eating popcorn and watching some chick flick that always seemed worse than the one they’d watched the week before. Then, under the covers in her bedroom. Pale glow of the streetlights from the odd angle of her window. Table scraps of illumination as he saddled his tautly slender body into the space between her full, rolling thighs and….

What would either of them do?

In the span of moments it took Bill to climb her stairs, he realized she’d feel as disoriented and lost as he would. His heart started pumping like a fist opening and closing. He suddenly felt as if he were absorbing everything, as if the smarmy little subway toughs had jumped inside him…the big, dark man he’d fallen into…the singer in the church…the man with his hand on the woman with the monolithic ass.

By the time he reached the top of those rickety stairs, some kind of quiet, indefinable rage had started to blossom inside him.

Nothing was the same as everything. Nobody was everybody. The blonde in the stockings on the subway was a classic piece of Aryan stinginess. Deprivation of the body. Deprivation of the spirit.

His fist felt heavy and immense when he banged on her door.

“Billy?” she called from inside. “Whatcha knockin’ for, honey? Just come in like always.”

The door was open. He stepped inside feeling like half of him was in a trance, but he remembered to turn and lock the dead bolt.

It was an attic efficiency with pitched ceilings, kitchen and living room all in one open space. Penelope was at the counter popping popcorn. Tonight it was the blue sweatpants that said kitten across the ass. The letters were stretched slightly out of shape across the rounded fullness of her body. Pale pink T shirt instead of the button down with tank top underneath the way she usually wore in the winter.

“Must Love Dogs is on Netflix,” she announced.

He took off his coat and hung it on a peg by the door. When he went to give her his usual, perfunctory kiss hello, he paused and studied her curious face. He pushed her glasses back up to the top of her nose and brushed her long, dark hair away from her neck on one side. Then he pressed his lips against her neck, lingering to inhale the low rent sweetness of her shampoo.

He shoved her back against the edge of the counter and leaned hard into her pneumatic curves. He pushed his leg between her thighs. Hers were thicker than his. Even through her sweats they felt supple and firm. He felt as if he’d walked in out of the cold into a blast of heat and mashed himself against her ungainly breasts as he devoured her throat.

“Billy…geeze…it’s not even movie time yet.” Half purr, half twang.

“Jesus, fuck, baby I missed you like fuck.” He lingered another moment at her neck and then kissed her mouth. More slowly, much more slowly than usual. Her breath went deep as his tongue swept through her mouth and quickly broke off.

“Uhhh…geeze,” she said. “I like when you miss me. But you’re talking funny. Are you feeling okay, honey?”

“Did you miss me, too?” he asked, turning away to stalk the small space. His blood was pumping and he was beginning to get hard, but he somehow felt possessed within a sphere of calm.

“Of course, honey. I always do. Thursday’s my bestest day of the week.” She flashed a smile on him that was positively tropical, dimpling her apple shaped cheeks just before turning back to the popcorn popper. For a moment, he wasn’t sure if he should rip down her sweats and fuck her from behind right up against the counter or go out and buy her a new set of Tupperware.

“Yeah. Thursdays.” He laughed too hard for the moment, then pinched his bottom lip pensively and stared at the floor. “Just like clockwork, eh pretty baby?”

She stopped and stared at him. The popcorn was popping inside the big, plastic lid of the appliance now. “Billy? Are you okay?”

He’d never called her pet names before.

“I’m fine.”

The look on her face didn’t believe him. She turned back to the popper and he stalked another circle around the cramped space like a rat in a maze. He got behind her and slipped his hand up under the back of her T shirt, then fingered her bra clasp open.

“Billy! What’s gotten into you?”

The popcorn was popping hard now, forcing her to keep shaking the maker so the bottom wouldn’t scorch.

“I want you like this tonight. No bra. Just…geezus I just want to fucking touch you all the time.”

He slid his hands around her body and onto her breasts, hefting their opulent weight from beneath her loosened bra. She went mute as he kneaded her flesh and tweezed at her thickening nipples. His cock started to pound at his pants and he ground himself into her sweatpants’ kitten logo. He put his teeth against her neck. Strands of her hair caught under his mouth. As much as he wanted to just bite her flesh, he only nipped at her and followed it with a wet kiss.

She’d stopped shaking the machine and the smell of burning popcorn surrounded them.

“Billy….it’s not…even movie time yet.” Half the breath and all the twang had gone out of her voice.

“Let’s watch it tomorrow.” Her nipples were thick and hard, yet his fingers rolled and tweezed harder. His cock was a hard spine against her full, generous ass. She mewled weakly and ground back against him. The roll of her hips felt like the roll of a moon tide. Undulant. She always complained she was clumsy, and she was, and it was the most beautiful poetry he had ever seen in his life. She was a lumbering angel ripe with a vengeance who never seemed to know where the borders of her body ended and the air began.

“Billy.” Her voice was down to a stage whisper. “Tomorrow’s Friday. Friday.”

Squeezing one breast, he let the other hand slip down the front of her body and into the front of her sweatpants. He raked at her panties just to see what kind she was wearing, then skimmed his fingers inside them, feeling the smoothness of her puffed mound after her weekly shave.

“If I showed up tomorrow would you turn me away?”

His fingers raked firmly over the perfect texture of her pussy. He dug further down to rake at her lips, which were already beginning to swell and flush. Tendrils of smoke started to rise out of the popper. She pounded her fist down once on the counter and then scrabbled for the popcorn maker, groping to shut it off. After a moment, she finally yanked the cord out of the wall.

“What are you talking about?”

Her voice wasn’t much more than a hissing sound while his finger settled into the damp furrow between her pussy lips and dragged over her clit. He rubbed at her harder than he’d ever dared before. Ooze flushed his fingers and he could feel a tremor wobble through her thighs.

“I’m talking about the days of the fucking week,” he said, grinding his finger toward the mouth of her sheath. “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Whatever.” He let go of her breast and moved his left down into the back of her sweats, squeezing her full ass cheek while he kept rubbing her pussy with the right. “Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Waiting around six days for you is fucking torture.”

Penelope uttered something that sounded like a hiccough. Bill pulled both hands from her sweatpants and started to lift her shirt.

“Billy. Bill!” she protested. “We’re not even in the bedroom yet.”

“I want you here and I want you now.”

He lifted the shirt over her head and spun her around by the shoulders. Roughly the same height, they were looking directly into each other’s eyes while he slipped her bra down her arms and tossed it on the floor.

“The lights are on,” she said shyly. “We’re still wearing our glasses.”

“Exactly,” he said, taking her face in his hands. “How many times have I been inside you, Penny? Cum in you?”

Instead of giving her a chance to respond, he leaned forward and kissed her as deeply and hungrily as he ever had in the entire time they’d known each other. He gripped her breasts, kneading them hard as his tongue swirled hungrily around hers.

He almost felt sad, but the rage inside him buried it. What gnawed at him more than anything was the idea going another day cowering in fear of everything. But worst of all, in fear of that hot, dripping love that had been staring him in the face all along.

He suddenly broke the kiss and dragged her by the wrist to the other side of the couch. He led her to the space between the couch and the TV and then sat down, leaving her topless and more than a little confused. She crossed her arms over her breasts and stared at him with her thick, black glasses slipping back down her nose again.

“C’mon, pretty baby,” he said. “Slip off those sweats and panties and let me see how beautiful you are.”

“But you’re wearing your glasses.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“You’re not being fair. First you start getting me all hot and bothered…during our movie time. Then you want to humiliate me.”

“Penny,” he sat up straight and serious. “How could you think such a thing?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m too big to go around acting like a pole dancer or something.”

Bill leaned back on the couch and undid his belt. A moment later, his pants were around his ankles and he was stroking his rigid cock in front of Penelope for the first time.

“Do you think I’m too big for that?”

Penelope didn’t say anything at first. He’d never done anything so overt in front of her before. It was the first time she’d seen his cock in a fully lit room…with her glasses on. For that matter, it was the first time he’d seen breasts the same way. She was taking his breath away, and he could’ve sat there stroking himself to oblivion just looking at her.

“Three years,” he muttered in disgust, fisting his cock with rapidly growing vigor. “Ever since we were both working at Flint Properties, having to pretend I never started visiting you cuz we were coworkers. Cowering from the rules. Three years of stupid routine. Thursday date night. What are we, Penelope? Holy fuck I feel good to be alive maybe for the first time and you’re the whole reason.”

“Um…Billy,” she finally said, seeming to not notice she’d finally lowered her arms. “That’s kind of…dirty.”

“Yeah, it is,” he grinned. “Know what would be even dirtier?”

She giggled and shook her head.

“You. Right down here on your knees sucking my horny cock.”

“Mr. Morrison,” she replied, “I never knew what a filthy man you are.”

“That makes two of us.”

Moving slowly, Penelope approached him and knelt on the floor. She got his shoes and pants all the way off while he loosened his tie and took off his shirt. She was tentative as she wrapped her hand around his cock.

“God, Billy. I never really….”

She just stroked him a while, and he lay back watching her, admiring her openly. Before long, she took a few tentative licks of his shaft, sending his pulse into the rafters. Her confidence seemed to increase along with his pleasure and the volume of his moans, and she was soon sucking and stroking him at the same time.

Before he knew what was happening, he was shooting bolt upright and pushing her off. He didn’t want to cum in her mouth. Yet.

He joined her on the floor, on his knees, and kissed her with tender hunger, letting his hands roam her sumptuous body. It went that way for some time, until he finally broke off their kissing and he started to shove her sweats down. Without a word, she quickly scrambled into position.

Kneeling behind her, Bill had never admired her this way, and he couldn’t stop running his hands over her thighs and ass. He massaged her flesh and fingered her until her moans were reaching a fever pitch. He needed to plunge his throbbing cock in her more than he ever needed anything, but this view of her was paralyzing.

“Baby,” he muttered breathlessly. “Your ass is a fucking monument.”

Then, before he knew what he was doing, he cocked back his arm and smacked Penelope’s ass cheek with a resounding swat. A river of filthy language poured out of his mouth as he spanked her ass again and again, until a rosy flush began to suffuse her mounded cheeks.

“Holy fuck!” he exclaimed when he realized what he was doing. “Baby, I’m sorry. I…I…don’t know what came over me. Oh my god….”

Suddenly a husky voice the like of which he’d never heard come out of her mouth was rising toward him from where her cheek was pressed to the carpet. “Billy. I swear if you stop now I’ll kick you right in the balls.”

“Ohhhh baby,” he groaned, slapping her ass once more before grinding his cock into her pussy.

The next few minutes became a frenzy of surreal desperation. Bill hammered his aching cock into her as if he’d never fucked before. Penelope growled into the carpet and ground her hips back against his thrusts. He grasped her hips and spanked her again. His left hand thrust forward and took up a fistful of her hair, pulling at her mane while he pumped his cock into her with deep, lunging gasps.

She nearly knocked him back on his ass when she started to cum with heaving shudders. She became a rippling force of heat inside and out, her pussy clenching down on his cock in a grip so voracious he never imagined was possible. He held on tighter, raised one hand and smacked her ass hard and fast with an open palm as he pumped himself into her core in a driving explosion of cum.

After, they spent a long time cuddling naked on the couch. Bill kept rehearsing in his mind how he was going to ask Penelope to move in with him. Or maybe he’d move in with her. That sounded better. There weren’t any chimi trucks in his neighborhood.

After a while, Penelope said she could clean out the popcorn popper and make a fresh batch that wouldn’t be all charred. They could even watch the movie and still have time for another go.

Bill didn’t realize how hungry he was until she brought up popcorn.

“Lets go out and get some papitas,” he said.

“What the hell are those?”

“They’re like French fries or something.”

So they got dressed and went out. He led her down the street toward the food truck, his hand stuck in the back pocket of her jeans as they walked. The movement of her ass beneath his hand made him think of the ocean. When they came within range of the truck and could smell what was cooking, he was overcome with a hunger the like of which he’d never known.