Hubb and Spoeker

"Where do you work, again?" Rita asked on the phone.

"I'm at this dive on Hubb and Spoeker."

"I knew you were around here somewhere. I'm at...." her voice trailed off. A girl appeared on the corner out the window, looking at the street signs. "I'm at Hubb and Spoeker."

"I'm right behind you, hon."

"This place? Oh, there you are!"

Rita's one of those girls who screams when she sees you and runs across the room for a hug. I'd forgotten about this. Luckily, it was dead. Otherwise my clientele would never let me forget it.

"Aaaaaaahhhhhhh! Rose!" Rita wailed and ran the length of the bar to meet me at the end. I'd forgotten her smell, but, of course, it brings you right back. We were immediately seated on the floor of her apartment, watching ER. Making fun of it. A good show, a great show, but Mystery Science Theater did it to us all.

"Come on, I'll get you a drink," I said.

"Oh, I can't believe you work right across the street from me. I'm going to become an alcoholic."

"Good," I said, smiling genuinely. I had really missed her, though I couldn't imagine what we would talk about anymore. "What should I push you down the slippery slope with?"

"Oh, um. Rum and Coke? Rum and diet."

I stared at her.

"Peach Martini?"

I continued to stare. She gave up.

"Whatever you want to give me."

"Ah," I said, and started to put together a Maker's Old Fashioned. She watched me for a while, then when she saw the length of the bourbon pour, raised an eyebrow and changed the subject.

"Have you been here long?"

"Couple of hours."

"No," she said, "have you been working here long?"

"Oh, about three years."

"Seeing anyone?"

"I've got my outlets. You?"

"Just broken up."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Oh, God, don't be. He was good for show and good in bed, but an asshole in the real world."

We both reached for cigarettes at the same time.

"When did you start smoking?" we asked at once.

"About five years ago," I answered.

"Me too."

"And when did you start enjoying sex?" I asked.

She blushed. "I always enjoyed it. I just didn't talk about it."

"Right."

"No, right! I was just. I felt like if I talked about it, it would ruin it. Like it's better sacred. But that was dumb, huh?"

"No, I see your point." I pushed the drink by the tips of my fingers, as if it were dangerous, to her. "I just love talking about it."

The door opened and that guy came in. I'd been hoping. I straightened my shirt, wiped under my eyes in case there was any spare makeup and walked to him. "Hey, Rose."

"Usual?"

"Yeah."

His eyes, green in some lights, grey in others, sparkled in a grin. My balance, my state of cool, my mojo, was torn out from me and his eyes played keep away with it. I gave him a Fat Tire Ale and walked back to Rita, who had the same look in her eye.

"He comes in here?" Rita said.

"Yeah, you know him?"

"We used to work together." She leaned over the bar. "We used to flirt like mad, but I was still with Billy."

"That's the asshole, Billy?"

"Yeah. Haven't seen him in like a year...." She looked the guy up and down.

I leaned forward. "What's his name? He told me the first time I met him, and I didn't catch it, but now he comes in every day and I have no idea what it is."

"Robin."

"Why don't you call him over?" I asked, because Robin and I had been flirting too.

"Later," she said, carefully lifting the birdbath glass. "I need this first." She took a sip. "God, talk about talking about sex. That's all we ever did."

"Really?"

"Yeah, I used to call him the Twisted Ass Freak."

I choked on my cigarette. Hearing this from Rita was absolutely the last thing I could take.

"Why?"

"He was just obssessed."

"Taking or giving?"

"Both."

"Hmm," I said. The contents of my bag rattled in my head.

"Yeah, he was the guy who talked me into it."

"You said you were with asshole Billy."

"I was," she said, taking another cautious sip before balancing her glass back down. "I didn't say I did it with him. He just kept talking about it all the time until I felt like I was some sort of freak for not wanting it. I never even considered it before him."

"He just charmed you into it, then?"

"No, more like bullied me."

"Ah."

"So," she looked at me finally, as if just noticing that I'd known her as a completely different person, smiling in a blush, "Billy had been asking me to, so I thought what the hell. Robin told me what to do."

"Um, bend over."

"No, like what to think and what to try first and how I'm going to react. It took like six months, but I finally got really into it." The contents of my bag screamed. "Now, it's everything."

"Bad girl."

"Well, Billy liked it."

"But you say he took too?"

"Yeah, he had this girl with a strap-on that he saw all the time. I want to say her name was Alice? Doesn't matter. Twisted Ass Freak Robin, bent over his chair at work, showing me the angle. How we weren't fired, I'll never know. Oh wait, he was."

I laughed. "For that?"

"Probably. Never found out why."

Rita sipped her drink and stared intermittently between Robin and me. I waited for her to ask me something, anything, but she didn't. I took the initiative.

"I'm going to show you something in my bag," I said.

She didn't react. An image of Robin and me, alone late in the evening, nothing to talk about, appeared in my head. The perfect icebreaker, this. I unzipped the backpack and showed Rita.

"Oh my God! It wasn't you?"

"No. I told you I didn't even know his name. This guy I'm kind of messing around with, Harold? He gave this to me last night. I haven't been home."

"First time?"

"Yeah."

"What'd you think?"

I didn't answer, but raised an eyebrow and inhaled meaningfully.

Rita fell back in her chair and laughed. "Look at us," she said. "Three Twisted Ass Freaks."

"Who knew?" I said, carefully zipping up the strap-on.

"Robin!" Rita yelped. I noticed that she had drained her drink somehow when I wasn't looking.

Robin turned around and squinted at her. "Rita? Wow! I was just thinking about you today!"

Robin, apparently used to Rita's ways, leapt out of his chair and ran to her, thankfully not yelling. They hugged a little bit longer than I was comfortable with, but I held fast.

"I missed you!" Rita said. "And this is my old friend Rose."

"No I know Rose," he said, batting his eyelashes at me. I batted back. "No way you two are friends! Wait, let me get my drink."

He got it and ran back. I picked up his drink mat and placed it next to Rita.

"Yeah, Rose and I used to hang out all the time and then... then what happened?"

"You got a boyfriend."

"Oh. Yeah. Sorry about that."

Robin, Rita and I lit cigarettes at the same time. Marlboro Lights. "We should have a shot," I recommended.

"Maker's," Robin said.

"Maker's for me," I said.

"Sure," Rita said.

Robin smiled disgustingly wide, flirting with both of us. We both smiled back, smitten.

"What a coincidence, huh?" Robin said. "I wasn't even going to come in tonight."

"I just moved in across the street!" Rita said.

"So, it was only a matter of time, then?"

"No, I was never going to come in here!" Rita looked at me and winced apologetically. "It's a little scary on the outside, hon," she nodded at me.

"It is."

"But then some part of me remembered Rose and I looked to see if I still had her number and I did. And she still lives here. So I asked her where she works and here we are."

"And I wasn't even going to come in, but then I saw Rose was working, and I've been trying to get into her pants for ages." Melt. But he turned to Rita. "You still with Asshole?"

"No, finally dropped that bastard."

They shared some silent time for a while, taking this in. I raised my shot glass.

"Ready?"

"To what?" Robin asked.

"Timing," I said, forgivingly.

"Coincidence," Robin corrected.

"Okay, coincidence!"

We clinked and drank.

Robin and I drank and dropped the glasses with ease. Rita grasped her throat. "How weird it is to see you!" she said to Robin and not me. "Robin Davids, Twisted Ass Freak."

Robin grinned proudly, owning it. "Wait, your last name is Davids?" I said to him.

"Yeah, why?"

"All three of us have got the same initials. Rose Dawes," I started, fingers on my chest.

"Rita Driehaus," said Rita, doing the same.

"Robin Davids. Hmm."

"Hmm," said Rita and I.

"So, Mr. Davids, you're a Twisted Ass Freak, huh?" I said, and bit my bottom lip.

"Um hum."

"Rose!" Rita said. "You've gotta show him what's in your bag!"

"What? No!"

"Why, what's in your bag?" Robin said, slowly and sweetly, as if asking for my ear to lick.

"Nothing!" I insisted.

"She's got something you wanna see," Rita said. So much for timing.

"Really?" I unzipped the bag slowly, opening it just as Robin said, "What, you got a strap-on in there or something?"

We sat for a moment and took this in.

"You're making this very difficult for me," Robin said finally, exhaling hard and twisting his cigarette out.

"What's difficult?" Rita said.

"Let's have another shot," I said.

Maker's. Maker's. Maker's. Meaningful looks Robin to me, Robin to Rita. Clink. Sunk. Rita clutching her throat, her face in a wince.

"You still corrupted?" Robin asked Rita.

"What? Oh, yeah. Though it's been a while."

"And you?" He looked at me.

"Just at the lip of the slippery slope."

Robin coughed.

"You want another one, hon?" I asked Rita. Robin seemed to have forgotten his entirely.

"Just a Coke, I think," she said. "Diet."

The gun was on the other end of the bar. I let them talk, scooped ice into a glass, shot diet into it. Their conversation stopped. I turned around and brought the diet back, placed it in front of them. They were staring at each other. As I leaned over to empty the ashtray, I saw Robin's hand high on Rita's thigh. The thumb moved. I shouldn't have looked, but I did.

"Look, it's 11:30 and no one's coming in. I'm going to close, okay?"

"That's weird, I was just going to ask you when you close," Rita said.

"I was just going to mention no one's here," Robin said.

"I was just going to kiss you," Rita said, staring at him.

"I was just going to kiss both of you," Robin said. He laughed a little. No one else did. My head went back. I still thought of Rita as squeamish. How could I not?

Rita leaned into Robin and spread his lips slowly with hers. I came around the bar to start putting up chairs. Rita and Robin took my arm at the same time. Somehow, I'd been suddenly sure they would. Rita turned Robin's chin and we met there, the steam and sweet of his lips, unimaginable, in mine. My stomach dropped, the slopes, slippery enough, had been in my head all day. Howard's back under my hips. I'd dreamt of Robin before I came. His face had been in my mind for months now. Strangely too, I realized that I'd been wondering about Rita. Rita turned my chin then and kissed me, something clicking into place, the spokes all into the hub. Hubb and Spoeker. Never knew it. Robin took one of my hands to his jeans. Rita took the other to hers.

"Holy shit," Robin said.

Rita kissed him again, her hand moving mine in the heat between her legs. She stopped and pecked me again. "I missed you two so much."

"This is just weird," we all said. Then they said, "Lock the door," as I said, "I'm going to lock the door."

"I didn't want to say anything," Robin said as their heat radiated away from me in the air between them and the door, "but I'd been thinking about you, Rita, all day. You just kept coming up. And someone smelled like you too."

"Someone smelled like you!" she said, pointing at him.

"And Rose, this was weird, me thinking about Rita, because normally," and we both said together, "I'm thinking about you."

"Guys," Rita said, "I was working up some design for a non-profit today and their logo is a robin carrying a rose. They didn't have a good digital version, so I had to redraw it. It's all I did today."

I wanted to run screaming along the bar, but I simply walked hastily to the two of them, fell into them, and we were suddenly the same limbs, the same steam breath and the same skin. Robin's hands were swift, but we all seemed to know how each other's clothes worked, where the hidden buttons were, which was the easiest way to unhook Rita's bra, on what part of her neck she liked to be kissed. Robin's fingers trailed up and down my spine, nestled in just the right spots. I somehow knew that he needed to be touched just above his hip. He exhaled hard when I did. Rita and I kissed deeply before we moved Robin between us, my fingers finding her pussy around him, freshly shaved and sweet with wet. I admired Robin's back for a few moments, the points of his muscles around his shoulderblades. I kissed them. He gasped, then turned around. His lips sucked mine to him, fit them perfectly, locked them inside each other. Each little bit of friction was another thing that was right. His cock pressed into my stomach. My fingers turned around Rita, flipped and rubbed and teased. I could feel her skin, softer and yet the same as Robin's, at the ends of my arms.

"Get the thing," Robin said. "Go."

My body grinned, but once again cooled as I stepped away from them, strange to feel the wood floor of the bar barefoot. I leaned over and cinched up my bag, catching it on the lip of the bar, but finally releasing it. I turned to see them both standing on the pool table, staring at me.

"We're not in charge, are we?" I said.

"No," they said, and for the first time, no one laughed at the coincidence.

I pulled the gear out of the bag. "I don't know how to-" I started.

"I'll do it," Robin said. Of course.

They leaned over and hoisted me up. Robin strapped me in quickly, a quick once-over to know which kind he was dealing with. All lips were kissed, the lube bottle passed, a few tense moments, our skin vibrating on top of the pool table, and we each went to our knees, the clinking of my harness, the straps pulling and sliding into place under my buttocks. Rita turned and held Robin's head to her chest as I sorted things out. I'd only done this once before. He patiently took it, the dildo, and slid onto it. Rita and I watched it descend inside of him, watched his back make adjustments, and his knees on the felt and slate of the table. He was set and I tried moving a few times, to his quakes, to make sure the angle was right. Then Rita, with a kiss for me and a kiss for him, stood and turned around, dropped her knees to the outsides of Robin's and slid back slowly. I could feel it, could feel the response in Robin's ass to what was happening to his cock. I felt it pull on the dildo, on me. Robin's quakes were bigger, more definite under me.

"Okay?" Rita and I said at once.

"Go," Robin said.

Like a band that had been practicing for years, Rita and I knew how to start and at what rhythm. We see-sawed on and off of Robin, back and forth, back and forth. I thought I'd have trouble, as I did the night before, but this was seamless, perfect, a natural tone in space. My hands went to Robin's thighs, then Rita's, then mine. It was all the same anyway. We were all the same, even if just this moment, the same, a river of each other. Our cheeks bent into necks, our bodies lost our minds and we pumped, manual labor dissolving time and meaning, we pumped into each other.

A single glow grew between us, light and joy in the friction. Rita and I both knew, and she straightened one arm in front of her to lift the other. I found a small space between my thighs. We left us, our separate skin, and joined somewhere between us, only what mattered now, this build of unity in the world.

The three of us came together and melded together, on the pool table and not, and blurred the world of boundaries and difference, cell walls and the bounce of electron to electron. All of it is energy in the end. And when we were done, we knew better than to talk about it, simply fell apart and went back to Rita's apartment to sleep.