Car Keys

Gail was close to achieving her first stage of panic when she glanced at the large-faced clock that hung on the kitchen wall. The minute hand had clicked past twelve already.

“Dammit!” she exclaimed aloud, “Where the fuck are my Goddamn Keys?”

If there was anything that irritated her more than seeing that expression on her daughter Cynthia’s face, when she was late picking her up from school, she didn’t know what it was.

Think, dammit! Where did I have them last?

She stepped into the dining room and sat down on the dining room chair, which spent far more time facing the computer desk than at the dinner table. She tried to think.

I went to the store… I drove home, I unlocked the front door, and then I went back out to the car. I opened the trunk and started carrying in the groceries. RIGHT… the trunk of the car. That’s got to be it.

Relieved, she headed towards the front door but before she reached it, she remembered setting them on the kitchen counter after bringing in her first load of groceries.

Shit! I had them in the kitchen.

She turned and looked, but she could see from where she stood. The counter top was empty.

“Dammit!”

She sat down in the chair by the computer to refocus her thoughts once again. She leaned slightly to gaze at the clock once more, but she couldn’t quite see it from where she sat. She glanced down at the bottom right corner of the computer screen to see how late it was getting.

Eight minutes past… “Cynthia, don’t you say a damn word to me about being late!”

She took a deep breath, settling herself enough to try remembering where she might have laid the keys. A flash of activity on the monitor caught her eye and she turned to glance at the screen. Someone was sending her a chat request.

I don’t have time for this, dammit!

Talking online to strangers was a recent addiction of Gail’s. She knew she shouldn’t, but she considered it deliciously fun and innocent, at least, mostly. Chatting was just something to pass the time once she’d finished her housework and dinner cooking on the stove.

It was her friend Toni’s fault. Gail preferred having someone to blame for her vices as well as her virtues. Assigning responsibilities to others sufficed as her way to rationalize the world around her and her place within it.

Toni hadn’t suggested the idea or claimed any personal knowledge about such sites, but the subject had come up one afternoon during lunch downtown at Luigi’s Deli. She’d said just enough to trigger Gail’s curiosity. Toni claimed her knowledge had come from a friend, but Gail was convinced Toni had firsthand knowledge.

Toni called it flirting and joked about signing up on a site her friend had been using. Gail became hooked on chatting with strange men the first time, after someone calling himself HotCock69 invited her to go-private.

With a screen name like HotCock69, Gail knew what she was getting into. Nevertheless, she’d agreed to enter into a one-on-one dialogue with him. Almost immediately, HotCock69 launched into words describing the size of his cock.

Deliciously fun and innocent, at least, mostly…

She’d selected BoredHousewife35 as her online screen name. Why she’d chosen that was something she couldn’t explain at first. Later, she decided that expressing herself as BoredHousewife35 explained why she was online. Her husband Rob was a good friend, a lover, and a companion. Her life with him was anything but boring. She was just there to pass a little time.

The name was suggestive of possibilities, not that she had any interest in exploring them. She felt her choice of avatar name was tame compared to what some people used. Her first day on the site, she’d seen screen names such as BlowJobHottie, HotCunt, and FuckMeHard. Why a woman would degrade herself that way escaped her.

The world of online chatting reminded her of when she’d kept a diary during her teenaged years. Each night before turning out the lights in her bedroom, she would tell Dear Diary things she would never say to people in the real world. Dear Diary was her confidant. Her writings tended to take the form of one-way dialogues. In the chat room, Dear Diary spoke back.

Just after her sixteenth birthday, her Mother had stumbled on Dear Diary and read it. Disturbing was the word her Mother had used that day. For nearly a year afterwards, Gail suffered through weekly counseling sessions with Doctor Beenak.

Those sessions with the psychiatrist were helpful, at least that’s what her Mother, and Doctor Beenak seemed to believe. For Gail, it was a period of learning where she developed ways to conceal her emotions.

That first time she agreed to go-private with HotCock69, her first thoughts on receiving a message about the size of his cock was to consider what she would do to her husband Rob, if she ever caught him online chatting with some strange woman. Her second thought, when she looked at her response to HotCock69 was, Oh, my God. She’d replied with the word, “Nice!”

She certainly didn’t have time to waste on HotCock69, PussyPounder, or Steve1985 today, although out of curiosity, she moved closer to the screen to see who was contacting her. The screen name was Clementine. She wondered, who the hell is this?

One thing Gail figured out immediately, the person behind the messages she received might be anything except whom they represented themselves to be. She guessed Clementine, despite the feminine name, was most likely some guy pretending to be a woman. After nearly six months online, she felt she could tell when the words from the other end were total bullshit.

It had happened before; some jerk afraid a woman wouldn’t talk to someone named Bob. Sometimes, it would be a man simply expressing his feminine self and she’d learned that those men were actually fun to chat with now and then. Sometimes, they had great tips to share on keeping her home the way she liked it.

Honesty online was something she neither expected nor provided herself. Now, she delighted in pretending to make plans to rendezvous for sex, always stopping just short of agreeing on a time and place. She did have some scruples.

She assumed most all of the men, or women, were just as full of shit as she was, and that was part of the fun. As someone had once observed, the best liar is the one who speaks last.

Now and then, she would become suspicious of the person sending the messages and she’d hope she wasn’t chatting with a puberty-level teenaged boy. Chatting was just innocent fun, a diversion, and better use of her time than spending hours with pulp-romance stories.

Her friend Kathy across the street read junk like that constantly; worse, she wanted to talk for hours about them. The last time Kathy had stopped by; she’d brought her latest read and insisted that Gail listen to a passage from it.

“In the brief light of the early morning dawn, the stranger entered her bedroom and stood before her, naked from the waist up. Marla sensed his arrival, her body reacting in ways she could not control. She opened her eyes and stared into his. She knew she was helpless to resist him.”

Kathy had paused reading from her paperback for a moment to remark about how she loved seduction scenes, where the heroine was unable to resist her desires to be taken by a lover rife with masculine energy.

Gail blurted out, “Bullshit! If some half-naked man came into my bedroom in the middle of the night, I’d have reached over to the drawer in the nightstand and pulled out my gun… and shot his dick off.”  

That hadn’t been exactly the way Kathy had envisioned the story scene and she’d left shortly afterwards much to Gail’s relief. It hadn’t been her comment about shooting the stranger’s dick off; it was her additional comment on how romance stories such as that one played on a woman’s rape fantasies.

“Is that what turns you on? To have some maniac creep into your bedroom in the middle of the night and fuck you?”

Despite being already late and partly out of exasperation with herself for not remembering where she’d lost her car keys, she clicked on the link and agreed to a chat with Clementine. A fast typist, she quickly typed in an initial message.

BoredHousewife35:  Hi… who’s this?

She waited for a few moments for a response back but none came and she started to return to the more important task of locating her keys. Just then, the message window indicated the person on the other end of the connection was typing something. Gail sighed because she was upset with herself for starting something when she had other important things on her mind.

Clementine:  Hello, bored housewife 35! What are you doing?

Gail assumed the person on the other end of the conversation was hoping she would respond with an enticing message, such as, “Just sitting at the computer, naked, and playing with herself.”

Dammit, I don’t have time to play bullshit games!

She reached for the mouse to hit the logoff button but at the last minute, she let go of the mouse and typed in another message.

BoredHousewife35:  Can’t really chat now, I’m late to pick someone up… can’t find my fucking car keys

A reply appeared on screen almost instantly.

Clementine:  That sucks, BH35

Another messaged followed almost immediately.

Clementine:  Tell me the last time you remembered having them

Gail glanced down at the time once more and sighed. Oh, what the hell…

BoredHousewife35:  Earlier today, when I was putting up the groceries

After hitting the SEND button, she added,

BoredHousewife35:  I laid them on the kitchen counter

Clementine:  Have you looked in the pantry?

Pantry? The idea hadn’t occurred to her. Surely not… She responded.

BoredHousewife35:  No… let me check

Gail Slammed her thumb down on the ENTER key.  She knew her car keys couldn’t be in any of the kitchen cabinets but then, it was just about the only place she hadn’t checked. She headed into the kitchen and began opening doors.

Not there, not there either.

Just as she was about to give up, she saw them setting next to a box of brown sugar. A memory flashed into her mind of how she’d picked them up and moved them to set a bag on the counter top.

Oh, my fucking God!

She snatched them up and crammed them into her jean’s pocket. Her mouth was agape as she headed back over to the computer and sat down. She began typing.

BoredHousewife35:  I can’t believe it… how did you know?

Clementine:  Well, I didn’t know… just a lucky guess, BH. It’s the kind of stupid thing I do myself all the time. Well, I have to run also. Have a nice day… Clementine.

Gail saw her helpful new friend had logged off. She reached down to her side to pat her palm against her keys to assure herself she hadn’t just imagined finding them.

Holy fucking Christ! That was weird…

She also logged off and rushed out the door to pick up Cynthia.

She thought, “Don’t you say a damn word to me about being late!”