New Hope For Small Men: Chapter 5

The night the girl who sounded like she had black hair and red lips had called, Robert had gone home and thought of her in his bed. He had imagined her looking the way she sounded: with black hair and red lips and perhaps a few stray freckles on the bridge of her nose and three earrings in each ear. He had imagined kissing her neck. He had imagined kissing the points of her breasts, the swell of her stomach, the backs of her knees. He had actually done that: skipped from the swell of her stomach to the backs of her knees, jumping over all the more obvious bits that he would, in fact, get around to later. At her knees he became further distracted. He knew where she lived. It had been listed on his screen as he talked to her — as it always is, along with other information about current services and employment but nothing about hair color. For a moment, his image of kissing the backs of her knees was frozen — it was paused while he considered the possibility of standing outside of her house. He would not stand in the bushes, which he knew would be wrong and creepy and possibly a felony, but instead respectfully across the street without binoculars or anything, just wanting to see her come home from work or the grocery store, to see that she was real and that she had carried on with her life.

But then she was saying: “I love it when you kiss the backs of my knees, Robert. Please don’t stop. Please kiss all of me. Please kiss every part of me…”

And before long he found himself once again shuffling over to the sink and running the water and washing the end product of his latest dream down the drain.