Hooked: A snippet with finger sucking

Well now it was 1975—three whole years since she’d danced around in her underwear in the empty house singing along with Helen Reddy to I am Woman at the top of her lungs. And now it was really was time to roar.

She couldn’t find the silly dustpan. She broke a piece of cardboard off one of the packing boxes and used it to sweep the glass into a heap. She was picking up the bigger pieces when a sound in the hallway startled her. A piece of the broken plate stabbed her finger and she winced and straightened up.

There was a man standing in her kitchen. He wore a Tiger Beer cap. He was enormous and the cap fitted just right.  “Hey, you’ve cut yourself.”

Gayle looked down at her hands. Blood streamed down her finger and dripped on the floor. It was so thick and red, and there was no air, and the floor started shifting, and she was very hot, and who was this man?

“Hooh.” She put her other hand out to hold onto the sink. The room was spinning and her knees had gone funny.

Big arms wrapped around her and she leaned on a warm wall of man. “I’ve got you.”  Who was he? He smelled like chocolate topping and leather warmed in the sun. “Don’t faint on me. I’d rather have you lying at my feet for other reasons than blood loss.”

Gayle shook her head. “What?”

The man released her but kept hold of her hand. “There’s a little bit of…let me.” He opened her palm and pinched a shard of glass from her finger. “There.”

“Oh.” The blood flowed freer now, it got on his t-shirt and the buzzing in her head started up again. Oh no, she couldn’t faint—there was a strange man in her kitchen, and Dean was outside and she didn’t know anyone here, and Max would come and find her like this and hate her more and take Dean away. I’m not woman. I’m a puddle of nothing.

“Moving day ‘eh. Hard work. I’m Steve.”

She looked at his handsome face and said her name and then all the air left her body as Steve took hold of her hand, put her finger in his mouth, and sucked. “Oh!”
He grinned around her hand, then sucked again, his lips, his tongue folding, flickering wet and firm on her finger, his moustache bristling. He looked down at her with a wicked glint in his eye, but when she pulled her hand away he let her.

“That’s…” Oh, she didn’t know what that was apart from disturbing, unhygienic and vaguely like something out of a Jackie Collins’ novel. She felt nauseous and kind of slutty. A stranger had just sucked her finger in the mess of her rented kitchen. And she looked like a complete dag in her terry towelling shorts and a tank top that’d shrunk in the wash. She was pretty sure her bra straps were showing. This was humiliating.

And then it became downright pornographic. He took off his shirt and wrapped it around her hand. “Field surgery. But don’t worry, I’m not Bela Lugosi. I just came to see if you needed anything.”

Gayle looked at her hand, now in a wad of t-shirt. She didn’t look at him. But even without looking at him she knew he was like something that’d just walked out of a Cleo centrefold. “You, I…” If this was The Stud, he’d have her stripped naked and bent over the table before she got her wits about her.