Fixer-Upper

Katherine stumbled out onto the uneven back stoop, audibly groaning under the weight of the heavy-duty trash bag. It was full of crumbled plaster and strips of wooden lathe and swung ponderously, threatening to pull her over with each uncertain step. As her foot slipped on the sloping stone slab she overcompensated and was forced to let the bag drop with a heavy crunch. Catching herself with a sideways grab at the door frame, she slammed backwards into the peeling paint of the old wood siding.

When she looked over to her left she saw the two college boys next door watching her with bemused faces.

"What the hell have I gotten myself into," she said over the fence with a degree of humor she wasn't actually feeling. She knew if she let herself acknowledge her discouragement she'd just start crying again.

"Spring cleaning day?" asked cute blond one with a smile. His firm jaw was covered with peach-fuzz stubble and tilted slightly as he flashed a half-smile.

There was a time when Katherine would have died rather than let a boy like that see her as she was now; her body hidden under baggy, faded red sweats; her light brown hair bunched up under an old baseball cap; her face without makeup and her body covered from head to toe in plaster dust. But the circumstances of her recent divorce had left a scar on her self confidence and she had no illusions that some hot young stud like that had any interest in a thirty four year old package of damaged goods like her. Not that she wouldn't jump at the chance, the kid was fine.

"Every year I tell myself I'm going to dust more frequently, then I find myself like this," she quipped as he batted the plaster dust from her arms and torso; raising a cloud that drifted away in the afternoon sun.

"Yeah, put off your work all year and you find yourself struggling to catch up at the last minute," said the other boy, arching an eyebrow up into his dark bangs and raising the textbook he was reading.

"Finals, huh?"

"Yeah," they replied together.

"I don't miss those days. Maybe the partying, but not the coursework," she said.

She cringed inwardly at her lie. She had been a very late bloomer. The truth was that she was a dork in college who lived off campus with her aunt. In those days she was a scrawny poetry nerd and a frumpy dresser. She had never gotten invited to any good parties. She wondered why she was casually falsifying her history to these kids.

"Yeah partying is great until you find yourself trying to learn statistics in an afternoon," said the dark haired one, reaching up to brush his shaggy mop out of his eyes.

"I don't envy you guys," replied Katherine. She pushed herself off the wall and positioned her feet on either side of the bag of debris, bracing herself to lift it again. "But then, I'm not envying myself either."

"How's it coming in there?" asked the blond one before she had a chance to grab the bag and break off the conversation. He had ambled over to the old chain-link fence and was leaning on it. His sinewy arms stretched out from his sleeveless "Rutgers Lacrosse" tee-shirt.

"Slowly. It's going too damn slowly. I'm starting to think it might have been a mistake to kick out my ex-husband just because he was diddling the sophomores," said Katherine, trying to be funny, but instantly regretting it.

She saw the dark haired kid look away in sudden embarrassment for her. That made it worse. The blond asked guilelessly, "You were married to Dr. Morris?"

"Yes," she sighed.

Katherine could feel herself blushing. She was annoyed for still feeling uncomfortable about her breakup with Jack. It wasn't her fault that her husband couldn't keep his dick out of the student body. She had done everything she could to keep him at home. She had gone to the gym five times a week; had started to dress a little sexier; had let Jack experiment with sticking his prick in her "alternate orifices" as he so romantically put it. But just because she drew the line at letting some slut in the bed with them, he was suddenly accusing her of "becoming an old prude". Then one day her doctor told her she had mysteriously contracted the clap and the whole thing just fell apart.

It wouldn't have been so bad if there hadn't been a public scandal with articles in the school and local papers and a couple of stories on the TV news. So, of course these kids knew about it; this had all happened only a semester ago. It would take a few years before this cohort got flushed out of the university system and her wrecked personal life could be considered ancient history.

"My ex-girlfriend was one of the girls he..."

"Jesus Eric, get a fucking clue. She doesn't want to talk about this," said the dark haired boy.

Eric blushed at his faux pas and mumbled out an apology. Katherine could feel her eyes go red and a tear leak out to wash a path through the white dust on her face. Using every scrap of her self control she willed herself not to break down crying. A few more tears escaped her, but she avoided a blubbering scene.

"I better get back to work," she choked out and reached down to grab hold of the bag at her feet.

"You need some help with that? You're just taking that bag around to the dumpster in front, right?" asked the blond kid, Eric. He seemed eager to wash away his awkward slip with honest labor.

"No, you have studying to do," Katherine demurred. She didn't feel like accepting help from any man right now. Once again, Jack's sins were infecting the whole opposite sex in her eyes. "I can take care of this myself."

"How many of those bags you have in there?" asked the kid with the mop of black hair. He had got up from the table and was moving to join Eric at the fence. He was about five foot nine, maybe half a foot shorter than Eric, but built thicker; well muscled with a wide chest and shoulders that strained at the fabric of his old "Pixies" tee-shirt.

"I dunno, maybe a dozen more," she said, letting herself be convinced.

The two boys looked at each other and shrugged a no-big-deal shrug. "We can clear that stuff out for you, no prob," said Pixies shirt guy.

"We could use a study break. Be easier than a trip to the gym," said Eric.

Katherine considered it. Lifting one of these bags would be pretty easy for the beefy Pixies fan and, although Eric wasn't bulky like his friend, he seemed lithe and fit.

"At least let me pay you for your time."

"How about you pick us up a twelve pack of Heineken next time you're out?" said Eric.

Katherine looked the boys over through narrowed eyes, "Hmmmm, are you boys legal?"

"We're legal for most things," answered Eric with a big wolfy smile.

Pixies Fan punched Eric in the arm, "Don't be such a douche, dude."

"Fuck Matt, that hurt."

Katherine took mental note that Pixies Fan was named Matt. "OK, I'll get you your beer, but only this once. I don't want to end up being your go-to for under aged party planning."

"That's cool," said Matt.

"Alright, let's get this done," said Eric, and from a standing position leapt over the fence in a bound. Matt swung over after Eric, vaulting the sagging, swaying metal bar with surprising grace for a kid of his bulk.

They walked up to her. Katherine, at five foot four, felt a primal thrill as the two strong boys loomed up over her, confronting her with a wall of young muscle that could, if they wanted, sweep her away with the least bit of effort. She could smell their shampoo and the peculiar musky smell young men give off when they don't cover it up in cologne or scented deodorant. She found herself seized by a brief fantasy of the two boys grabbing her roughly, right there in her weedy, muddy back yard and ravishing her willing body; taking her over and over again with the tirelessness of boys barely turned men.

It had been too long since she had last gotten laid, she told herself. She needed to get a hold of her libido.

"I'm Katherine by the way," she said, extending her had to Eric.

"Eric."

"I'm Matt. Pleased to meet you."

"I guess I'll show you where the rest of the bags are," said Katherine. "Please excuse the mess, I only started working on it again yesterday morning."

Katherine had given up on the house shortly after the divorce and had been living in Brooklyn with Neal, her old high school friend. However, ever since Neal had found Caesar, his new Puerto Rican boy-toy, she had felt like a third wheel around there. She hated to admit that she was jealous of Neal's happiness, but lately she found the relationships of others to be intolerable. Besides, she was horny as hell and laying awake all night listing to their epic love-making sessions didn't help. When she had admitted as much to Neal he asked her if she wanted to join in. But after all these years as friends, it would have been just too weird to go down that road. Besides, she didn't find twinks very sexually appealing and no one would ever call those two anything approximating butch. Neal seemed relieved when she turned him down.

She finally decided to get back to the decrepit old four-square style house in the student slums around Rutgers University that she and Jack had bought as a fix-up project the previous summer. She worked just across campus at the Johnson & Johnson headquarters and it was stupid to continue to commute to and from Brooklyn and central Jersey every day. This was especially true after she got her promotion and the longer hours made the lengthy round trip especially dreary. She decided it was time to have another try at fixing up this place.

Now with two weeks of personal leave stretching ahead of her she was determined to make some serious progress on this one hundred year old fire hazard. And things were already looking promising, she thought, as she escorted Eric and Matt into the dim and dusty first floor.

"Watch your step. This level hasn't been rewired yet. There's no lights and not a whole lot of sun gets in with the windows boarded up. Oh, and don't go up front. Most the floorboards are missing up there."

"No offense, but this place is in worse place that I thought," said Eric as they marched in single file up the groaning, creaking stairs.

Behind her, Katherine heard Matt slap Eric. She smiled to herself at the thought of Matt trying to protect her feelings from the frequently clueless Eric. She said, "Yeah it's a disaster alright."

Things were a little less grim on the second floor. At least the dusty windows let in the afternoon sunlight. But aside from the bathroom, which she and Jack had fixed up and got working last summer, this level was a disaster as well. The front half was gutted and floorboards were missing from the east room, leaving a two story fall to the basement if one happened to come stumbling in blindly. Her project yesterday and this morning had been to strip the last of the plaster and lathe from the back rooms and shovel it into a pyramid of yellow, construction grade trash bags which sat waiting to be carried to the dumpster.

"Where do you live?" asked Eric incredulously.

"When we got started on this place we fixed up the big attic room into a little apartment to serve as our command center while we worked on the rest of the house. It's actually kind of nice up there."

Matt had been drifting around the floor, inspecting the situation. "Have you thought of bringing the bags to the front of the house and just chucking them into the dumpster from the roof of the porch?"

"I wouldn't trust that porch if I were you," she answered, all too truthfully.

Eric lifted his first bag with ease. "Let's get'er done," he said and started down the stairs. Half way down he turned and yelled back up at Matt, in a southern drawl, "Get 'er done!"

Matt looked at Katherine and rolled his eyes. He turned around and lifted two bags at once. Katherine watched as his back and ass rippled with the effort. She went instantly wet. God, she was horny.

There were sixteen bags, not a dozen as she had estimated, but it only took the boys twenty minutes to cart the whole load to the dumpster out front. When they saw Katherine struggling down the stairs with a bag they insisted she stop and let them do it. She gladly complied, choosing watch from the bottom of the stairs as their young flesh paraded by.

"Anything else you need?" asked Matt when they had finished. She wished she was the kind of woman who could have peeled off her clothes and commanded them to take her here, take her now; but she was definitely not. Besides she hadn't bathed since the previous morning and she felt dusty and gross. Instead, she bid them a good afternoon, promised to bring them their Heineken and watched as they hopped the fence back over to their rented one story house like kids playing at being super heroes.

Katherine had budgeted the rest of the day for cleaning up her mess and the boys had left her with an unexpected surplus of time. However, she felt surprisingly depressed and pent up. She could understand now how middle-aged men felt when they ogled teenage girls in tight dresses. It was as if she longed for a meal of ripe fruit that she had barely enjoyed when it was in season. And now the time had passed and she could only lick her lips thinking about a flavor she barely remembered.

As she leaned over the tub to turn on the faucet, more dust and bits of plaster debris rained from her hair and clothes onto the worn enamel. She realized that a bath in her present state would be more of a marinade in grit than a cleaning. She decided she needed to move the installation of a working shower further up in her construction schedule. But for now, she had an idea.

Ten minutes later she was standing on the front porch of the house next door; still filthy, with a bundle under her arm.

Eric answered the door. "Yo, Kathy, what's up?" he said. Katherine smiled. She hated being called Kathy but she liked hearing Eric say it.

"I was going to ask you guys for one last favor," she said, giving him a clenched tooth smile as she shrugged her head down into her shoulders. These kids made her feel like her old nerdy self and she uncontrollably drifting back into her dorky mannerisms.

"Yeah?"

"Can I use your shower? I only have a bathtub and..." she waved a hand down her body, indicating her gritty condition.

"Yeah, sure, um, come on in," he said and stepped back to let her pass. "Our place is a little messy right now."

"That's OK. I'll really appreciate the shower. I'll clean it out and everything when I'm done."

"Oh, well, it ain't too clean now so don't knock yourself out trying to separate your dirt from ours."

Katherine laughed. She heard Matt's voice yell from the back of the house, "Who's at the door?"

"Kathy from next door, she wants to use our shower," Eric yelled back. He looked back at Katherine and waved for her to follow him as he started walking towards the hall, "It's back here."

Katherine swept the place with her eyes as she moved through the living room. The place was definitely a couple of college dude's rental house; carpet worn down the weave; badly patched drywall; grimy smears around the light switches; a pyramid made of beer cans; a T.V. and an Xbox surrounded by several discs and plastic cases; dirty dishes, sports equipment and miscellaneous trash scattered everywhere. She purposely didn't peek into the kitchen as they passed it. She didn't want to know what horrors it had to show.

Down the hall, Matt stepped out of the bedroom. He was wearing red sweatpants and a weight belt that pulled the sweatpants up to perfectly display the contours of his healthy package. His hairy chest was bare and it glistened lightly with a layer of sweat. A generic tribal tattoo circled his upper arm.

"Let me clean up a little before you use our..." began Matt.

Katherine held up a hand to stop him. "Don't fret. You've seen my place. I won't pass judgment on yours. I just want to rinse my walls out of my hair," she said as she got to the bathroom door before him.

Matt opened his mouth to say something but he stalled on whatever he was trying to express. Katherine just chirped, "Thanks guys," and disappeared into the bathroom.

Yes, the bathroom was filthy; grime, mold, beard and pubic hairs everywhere. But she saw in an instant what Matt had wanted to "clean up" before she entered. On the tank of the toilet was a stack of old Playboy and Penthouse magazines, pages creased and smeared at the edges from frequent perusal.

Katherine gingerly sat her bundle of clean clothes on the countertop in the least filthy looking spot and walked over to the shower. Pulling back the curtain she could see the tub was a masterpiece in grime. She used a square of toilet paper to swab the hair from the drain and turned on the water. While sitting on the toilet and fiddling with the spigots to get the temperature of the water just right, her eyes kept roving over to the stack of magazines just to the right of her shoulder. She noticed that the second one down was opened to a pictorial and folded back on itself. The edge of the magazine peaked out from under the Playboy lying atop it and she could see hints of limbs, male and female.

After deciding the temperature was good enough, she flipped the toggle to direct the water to the showerhead and stood up to start undressing. Looking at the magazines again, curiosity got the better of her and she slid the open one out from under the Playboy to take a peek. It was a Penthouse and the pictorial was of a woman; thin, blond, with giant tits, big hair and lots of makeup; but no clothes or pubic hair. She was with two well muscled, big cocked men. The photos were very deliberately just short of hard core. They grabbed at the blond's tits and ass as she held cocks fractions of an inch from her open mouth and positioned their units next to her vagina and ass as if seconds from being penetrated. Her expression seemed to cycle randomly between surprised, disgusted, angry and hungry on six glossy pages of almost-sex.

It was all very stupid but for some reason she found herself very aroused. Which one of the boys had been looking at this fantasy of double-male manage a trois? And When?

Katherine reminded herself she was here to wash off, not discover the charms of soft-core pornography. She reached for the lock on the door, but let her hand drop, leaving it unlocked. She stripped off her dusty clothes, jamming them in the trash bag she had brought with her; all while watching the old glass doorknob; wanting it to start turning and the door to burst open.

She climbed into the shower, sticking her head under the flow of warm water, enjoying the feeling of the dirt being washed away. The burble of the water played tricks with her hearing. Did she hear the door open? Was that a footstep outside the shower curtain? Would the curtain pull back in a few seconds and strong hands reach in to caress her body? She fantasized about the boys stepping in with her, sandwiching her between them, their hard bodies rubbing against hers as they seized her, took her. Lips and tongues on private places. Wet friction as bodies discovered body. Her swollen pearl atop her damp cleft discovered. Fingers rubbing. Her breasts sliding along warm, firm flesh. Rubbing faster. Oh Matt. Oh Eric. Faster. Yes. Ohhhhhh.

Katherine felt a wave of shame at having just masturbated in her neighbor's shower. The hot water was running out already and sheepishly she reached down to turn it off.

She stepped out of the shower and stood in front of the foggy mirror. On the counter top the magazine still sat open. She looked the girl over. Was that what men really wanted? Huge tits, no ass? She wiped her towel down over the surface of the glass and regarded herself critically through her blue-gray eyes.

She wasn't bad looking. She had kept visiting the gym after the breakup. Her boobs were only b-cups, nothing close to magazine bimbo's quadruple Qs (or whatever the hell they were), but they were still firm and well shaped. They seemed like good boobs to her. Her body had filled out since she was a nerdy young woman, but she wasn't fat by any means. Her hips were a little wider and her breasts fuller. She thought it made her look sexier, softer, more womanly.