The MILF Files: Volume 3

Chapter 2: Take This Job

Chapter 2: Take This Job

“You’re late, Kroger.”

By five minutes. “Yes, sir,” Michael said. “Sorry. I was working on a paper for school.”

Jim Phillips, owner and manager of Phillips’ Grain and Feed, gave him an acknowledging nod. The grizzled, gray-haired man had been a friend of his grandfather’s before the old man died, and cut him more slack than a lot of other people around town would. “Yeah, kid, I know.” A hint of a smile crossed his leathery features. “You’re trying to make something of yourself. God knows it’s hard enough around here, even leaving your daddy aside.” He jerked his head at the loading dock. “Go on, then. Clock in and get to work.”

Michael’s lips had thinned at the mention of his father, who he barely saw anymore. And even those brief meetings were too much. He raised his hand to his temple in a gesture that was half-salute, and hurried to the loading dock.

“About freaking time,” Myron Burke griped at him, pointing to the line of farm trucks waiting. “Get your ass in gear, kid. We got work to do.”

Michael nodded shortly and slung the first bag of pig feed over his shoulder, letting it fall into the back of a beat-up Ford farm truck. The other men on the loading dock followed, and he returned to the pile, picking up another one in a rhythm that had been ingrained into his bones over the last two years. Eventually the truck pulled away, and another took its place, and he repeated the process again.

And again.

And again.

Michael hated it. He hated all of it. He hated the feed store, which left him with chaff and bits of hay and straw and wheat dust sticking to his hair and skin and clothes until he thought he would go mad with the itching and he tasted the stuff in his sleep. He hated the stink, a combination of dank, cold river air and animal manure and gas fumes. He hated the freezing wind which all but froze the sweat to his skin. He hated the town, full of mouth-breathing rednecks who couldn’t be bothered to make anything of themselves and thought that being ignorant was actually a virtue.

And most of all, he hated his w*********h father, who had left his mother when he was only three years old, dooming them to a life that was barely one step up from poverty. For years, his mother had worked two and three jobs at a time, hardly ever having a day off, just to keep the wolf away from the door, while his father hung around Haven like a cancerous pustule – sometimes working, usually not, mostly drunk.

I’m never going to be like that, he swore for the dozenth time, slamming a bag of feed into the bed of yet another truck. Someday, I’ll come back here, whip my d**k out, and take a piss right in the middle of Main Street. And when I’m done, I’m going to take Mom away from here. And she’ll have everything that she gave up for me.

“Hey there!” A loud, boisterous voice broke his oft-practiced litany. One of his few friends stood at the edge of the loading dock, his hands braced on his hips. “Easy on the truck there, Kroger! We just got those shocks replaced!”

“Oh, go f**k yourself, Bobby,” he retorted cheerfully, drawn out of his foul mood. “Did your dad have a stroke? Why’d he let you out of the house? Don’t you usually need a babysitter?”

“Mom and Dad went to Peoria for the weekend,” Bobby said. His grin was wide and white under his mop of reddish-brown hair. “They’re going to go to the casino on the riverboat. And Tyler got some beer. Come on out to the farm after work, why don’t you?” His eyebrows waggled lewdly. “There might even be some girls out there.”

Michael’s answer was interrupted as a throat loudly cleared itself from his left. He looked, seeing the seamed face of Jim Phillips.

“I’ll call you, okay?” Myron heaved the last bag of feed into the bed of the truck, and Michael slammed the tailgate shut. “When I’m done here,” he added.

He turned back to the loading dock as the next truck – mercifully, the last in line – pulled up. But Jim Phillips beckoned him over to the side of the dock with a jerk of his head.

“Mr. Phillips, I’m sorry-” he began, but the older man cut him off with a wave of his hand.

“This isn’t prison, Mike. You’re a good kid. And you work hard. No one’s saying you can’t talk to people. Relax, okay?”

Michael nodded warily.

“Reason I called you over is that Virgil Schabe’s kid is in the hospital. Broke his arm trying to do a stunt on his motorcycle, or some fool thing like that. So I was wondering if you wanted to pick up his shifts here at the dock over the weekend.” He stared out into the murky evening, chewing the toothpick that seemed to be a permanent resident in the corner of his mouth. “You’d probably get up over forty hours for the week, too. Feel like picking up some time and a half?”

Michael nodded again, then found his voice. “Yes, sir. Thanks for thinking of me.”

Jim’s leathery features creased in the barest hint of a smile. “I’m not doing you any favors, son. But I’ll say one thing for sure. You got a whole lot of your grand-dad in you.”

Gratitude and pride warmed him. “Thanks.”

“No problem, son. Now, be here at six, got it? Morning shift starts early.”

“Yes sir,” he nodded stoically, while inside him, his heart fell into his belly.

No party for me tonight, it looks like.

It was after ten when Michael arrived home, parking his car in the tiny gravel lot beside his mother’s old Toyota. He opened the door of the trailer quietly, hoping that she might have had a short shift at the diner and would be catching up on her sleep.

“Mikey.” The figure in the easy chair opened one eye. “You’re home.”

“Hi, Mom.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “How was work?”

“It was okay.” Natalie Kroger twitched her shoulder in the general direction of the tiny kitchen. “I brought some leftovers back from the diner. They made too much chicken for the evening rush. It was either take it home or watch them throw it out.”

“Thanks, Mom.” He went into the kitchen and loaded a plate. Leftover chicken from the diner, some mashed potatoes and gravy on the side, and a slice of leftover apple pie. “I’m picking up some extra shifts out at work over the weekend.” He explained the situation, and his mother’s lips curled up in a tired smile.

“Jim Phillips is a good man. He’s always tried to look out for me. And you.”

Michael nodded as he ate, plowing through the food methodically, and gave his mother a covert look from under his lashes.

Natalie Kroger had been an attractive woman when she was younger, and even in the unflattering waitress’ uniform, he could still see signs of that beauty, like a dried flower pressed between pages in a book. But what she mostly looked was tired, the sort of weariness brought on by jobs where she was always on her feet, working fifty and sixty hours a week just to care for herself and her child. Michael had never known a time when there hadn’t been a stack of bills on top of the microwave, demanding p*****t. His father was supposed to be paying child support, but you couldn’t get money that wasn’t there. Walter Kolchak had been sucking on the government tit for so long, his mother had once observed sourly, that he didn’t even know how to look for work anymore.

“I’ll be picking up some overtime,” he offered hesitantly, already knowing what the response would be. “My paycheck next week will be a lot bigger than I’d planned on. Maybe we can use it to get ahead on a few things.”

His mother struggled upright, her brown eyes glaring at him. “Not on your life, mister! You put that money in your savings account! You’ll be happy to have it when you leave for college in August.”

Acceding to the truth of that, Michael sat back on the couch with a grunt. The acceptance letters had come in earlier in the month. All three in the same week, as a matter of fact, like dominos. Western Illinois, then Illinois State, then Southern Illinois. He was still debating in his mind which one to attend, though right now he was leaning towards SIU in Edwardsville. They had the best College of Business of the three, and Michael was determined that he and his mother weren’t going to spend the rest of their lives living from paycheck to paycheck. He would have dearly loved to go to the University of Illinois. But even with the money he had saved over the last two years, and with the school offering a tuition waver to incoming students whose families earned below a certain amount of money, the cost was just too much. And, his guidance counselor had shrewdly advised him when he was trying to decide which schools to apply to, in the end it was more about the student than the school.

“Right.” Natalie interpreted his grunt effortlessly. “Now, if you’re done eating, go and clean up and stop dripping corn chaff all over the place.” A hint of a tired smile turned up the corners of her mouth. “I try to keep this place clean, you know.”

An hour later, Michael was in his bedroom. Outside, he could hear the faint sounds of his mother washing the dishes before she went to bed. It was strange, but it was her one ironclad rule. You might be poor. You might be just scraping by. You might have a stack of bills to choke a pig and be so exhausted all you wanted to do was sit down and cry. But when you did, it would be on a clean floor, with clean clothes, and not seeing a three-day heap of dirty dishes in the sink. She had, she had once observed to her son, seen enough filth when she was married to his father to cure her of the need for any more.

He set his alarm, then pulled the book he had checked out of the school library out of his backpack.

God, that had been a close one. He had just been looking for something interesting to read when the lurid red cover had leaped out of the bookcase and smacked him between the eyes. He had snickered at the blurb on the inside cover, barely believing that an erotic novel had made it into the school library. Miss Martin hardly seemed to be the sort of woman who allowed that sort of smut into her domain.

And then the book had practically fallen open to a well-thumbed section, and he had gaped in astonishment. In his wildest imaginings he had never thought that someone would actually publish a book that described s****l activity in such stark terms. Sure, he knew about the internet, and when he was able to escape to a friend’s house for an afternoon, he was more than willing to look at nude photos on the web. But to see it in print was something else altogether.

“Whew,” Carlton said, coming out of the bathroom of their shared cabin after his shower. A towel was knotted firmly around his lean hips, but drops of water clung like jewels to his coal-black hair. “I’m beat.”

On her bed, Thera stretched lazily. “Don’t you mean ‘beating it,’ Mr. Hood?” she teased. She had shed her clothes, and her only covering was a white bathrobe. The belt was indifferently tied around her waist, allowing most of her legs to be seen, and a generous portion of her chest as well. “I heard the sounds coming from your room last night. Though I am glad to discover that you’re a fully functional adult male, with the requisite libido. It would be so disappointing if you were one of those sapless old sticks that I usually get saddled with when I’m on a research trip.” A fold of her robe fell open, exposing a ripe breast.

“That is hardly proper language for a scientist, Dr. Larimar.”

Thera shrugged. “For a scientist? Who knows? But for a woman…” she trailed off suggestively. “Are you telling me that your geyser isn’t about to erupt, Carlton? It’s not a good thing to let pressure build up too long. Trust me on that. I’m a volcanologist.” A finger reached up, tickling a n****e into turgid fullness. “And I have to tell you,” she added, looking at his well-muscled chest admiringly. “You’ve got a look that makes me want to shift my tectonic plates, if you know what I mean.”

Carlton vented a short laugh, but his c**k was tenting his towel – a fact that the sharp-eyed, lava-haired beauty didn’t miss. “That’s got to be the worst pick-up line I’ve ever heard.”

“Oh? Then here is a simpler one. You’re hot and I want to f**k you. And,” she added, a wicked twinkle in her emerald-green eyes, “I’m hot and you want to f**k me. It’s going to happen. Why wait?”

“Hmmmm.” Carlton let his towel drop to the floor, and Thera’s eyes widened in lustful appreciation. “I suppose I might as well give you what you’ve been begging for.”

“Beg?” Thera’s voice rose high in injured fury. “I’m not begging! And definitely not from some boring, button-down, black-tie, everything-by-the-rulebook federal ag-”

Carlton shut her up with a kiss.

This had been building for a long time, he thought, as he claimed her. Thera’s growls of protest, never convincing, soon took on a higher, keener pitch. He didn’t love her. He wasn’t even sure he liked her. But with two men mysteriously dead and his partner in the hospital, he’d had it up to his neck with the sexy scientist’s sly, sultry teasing. The advice of one of his old mentors came back to him, and he followed it.

“Best thing to do is just screw the girl, then keep on doing what you would have done anyway, kid. She’ll be so busy trying to figure out what she did wrong, she won’t have time to get pissed at you.”

And besides. Thera was supremely fuckable. At least, when she wasn’t insisting that she knew more about geology, volcanology, and Yellowstone Park than anyone else in the continental United States.

Carlton pinned her wrists over her head and took her mouth in a harsh kiss. The red-haired beauty resisted, but only for a second, and then melted into him, her pale-skinned body writhing against his in carnal abandon. He almost lost control as her molten core rubbed against his c**k, leaving a tail of wetness that felt as searing as the hot springs at the second murder scene. Kneeling above her, he cupped her breasts in his hands, kneading them slowly, teasing her with his skill. Her n*****s were small and pink and peaked beneath his fingers, and when he flicked the swollen tips, he was rewarded with a sultry moan.

“Oh, Carlton,” she sighed, spreading her legs in surrender. “Take me. Hard.”

He was hard. Hard as granite. With a twist of his hips, he was inside the angle of her thighs, his knee pushing her legs wide. He took his rod in his fist, rubbing the tip against her pink, swollen labia, then sheathed himself in a quick, brutal thrust. Thera’s eyes rolled back and-

And then Michael, his own c**k held in his urgently stroking hand, came like a firehose, catching his semen in a wad of tissue he had frantically ripped out of the box when he felt his o****m approaching like a wrecking ball. He bit his lip, almost hard enough to draw blood. Anything to keep the groan of release from escaping his mouth. The walls in the trailer were about as sound-proof as cardboard, and he had learned years ago that anything he didn’t want his mother to hear had to be kept as quiet as possible.

That lesson had been driven home with a vengeance about a year ago, when his mother had brought home her then-boyfriend for some private time, thinking he was at work.

Of course, he thought, cleaning himself up. I did learn a valuable lesson. No matter how much you hope you can die of embarrassment, it won’t happen.

Shit. He flopped back into his cold, narrow bed as he turned off the light. I’ve got be at work in six hours.

Fuck my life.