Midnight Lunch: An Erotic Story about Microwave Omelets Read Free

and restart the radio. I think the
lights are drying out my skin. They’re too bright.
    I stand behind the counter in a fog. Now that
she’s gone, I call up her memory and join her in a daydream. I
undress her. The hoodie falls right off her shoulders and onto the
floor. She’s curvy alright. Thin tank top, two bras, full breasts.
Her skin is a pale brown; I think she’s Latina. It’s darker around
her wrists and elbows. I take off her tank top with both hands. No
tattoos that I can see. No piercings. Not on a girl like this.
She’s perfect, not the kind of girl you can puncture.
    I daydream and my hand bleeds. I put another
band aid on top of the first one. By the end of my shift I’ve
Scotch-taped gauze over the whole mess and still, there’s red
leaching through. I put a five dollar bill from my wallet in the
register for the band aids and gauze.
    Parteek sends me home as soon as he arrives,
about half an hour before my shift ends. My hand looks a lot worse
than it is, covered with three layers of red and brown
bandages.
    When I get home, I shower with my hand
resting on the glass door, up and out of the water’s spray. I clean
it in my sink, careful not to break open the skin. Paper cuts are
the worst because they have to scab all the way up inside the
slice. It takes forever for that deeper stuff to heal.
    I dream of her in my sheets. I keep calling
up her face, so I’ll remember it. But it’s an uneven landscape. Her
eyebrows are crystal clear, but I didn’t see her ears. I try to
focus in on that blurry part and know I’m just seeing whatever my
mind wants to put there. There’s no memory to draw on. It doesn’t
really matter though, what her ears look like, when what I want to
know is how they feel against my lips.
    But just for a hook up—something sour in my
throat reminds me—just for the night. Just sex. Just once.
    —————
    The next day I’m tired like the first day I
worked the night shift. My body doesn’t believe me; we should still
be asleep. I get dressed and eat breakfast in the dark, so I won’t
bother my roommates. With every step, I feel like I’m stumbling
off-balance, like my brain is stubbornly refusing to wake up my
inner ear for this shit.
    The old butch comes around again. I think her
schedule is four days on, three days off. She buys a medium coffee,
I charge her for a small, and she tips me too much. I tell her it’s
all going into savings and she laughs. I fold her bills up and
slide them into my phone pocket. I really am saving it all, nearly
$150 now.
    The beautiful girl came in around 2 am last
time. I’m biding my time, counting the minutes I need to pass
before I can start watching the door. My eyes are on the clock when
she comes in.
    I see her, forget the time with my relief,
and look up at the clock again. 11:23 pm.
    Whatever the opposite of a ‘my heart stopped’
is, that’s what it feels like. The inside of me pops larger than my
skin for a second. I don't know if I truly wasn’t expecting her to
show up again, or if I’m flimsy and so easily tied to beautiful,
new things.
    I can’t look at her while I’m losing my cool.
By the time I get my eyes off the counter, she’s looking at the
packaged hardboiled eggs in the refrigerators. She stays longer
this time and I spend every second trying to think of something to
say to her.
    I slip between tongue-tied with attraction
and distracted by the sight of her. She has on a tight jacket
today. Her arms are thinner than I thought, but her hips are just
as round as my lust-swamped mind imagined. The zipper is pulled
down to her navel, so the edges of the jacket flare around her
breasts. When she walks up the chip aisle, I can see her nipples
through her shirt.
    She’s not wearing a bra. I feel the first
real lick of arousal race through me. It’s dangerously strong. Oh
my god, her breasts look that good with no bra? How can that be? I
stare at her chest. They’re so full, stretching delicious