Candy in the Sack by K. W. Jeter Page A

it’s overcast every other day, the streets are full of wet leaves, and everything in the garden is dead.” She reached into the bedroom closet and pulled out a pair of jeans. “Plus, if you’re a kid, your sorry little ass is back in school. What’s to like?”
    He watched her slipping on a pair of bikini panties from the dresser’s top drawer. “Hallowe’en,” he said.
    “What?” Sherri turned and looked at him in smiling amazement. “Hallowe’en? Are you kidding? That’s the big deal?” She frowned, looking upward as though checking some invisible calendar inside her head. “Is it the thirty-first already?”
    He nodded.
    “Jeez, you sure lose track of these things when you don’t have kids. But anyway, this is something big?”
    “For me, it is. Or it was.”
    “Why? Was going out trick-or-treating the highlight of your year or something, when you were a kid?”
    At the moment, he was torn between two options. Either he could continue the conversation — which didn’t seem to be going all that well for him — or he could do what he really felt like doing, which was stepping from the bedroom doorway, grabbing Sherri around her waist, and toppling with her onto the bed. He figured she wouldn’t mind that, either; there was plenty of time left before she actually had to pull her act together and have him drive her to the airport. Even if she had to take another shower after he got done with her, and her with him. She looked so enticing, standing there in front of him, with nothing on but the sheer blue panties, as if she had completely forgotten to put anything else on. That, to Bryan, was one of the main pleasures of married life: not just that there would be a naked woman, whom he loved and who loved him, standing in front of him a lot of the time, but that the nakedness was, in some ways, no big thing. It wasn’t a matter of stripping off her clothes as a matter of deliberate seduction, so that her nakedness was a matter of intent, something she had planned and carried out exactly because she knew the effect it would have on him. Not that he would have had any complaint about that being the case; he hadn’t complained about it before they got married, when they had first started sleeping together, and then living together. As far as he knew, no normal-type guy ever complained about a naked woman happening in front of him. But still, there was a charm to that unintended nakedness, that came about because women — and Sherri in particular — simply forgot how good they looked that way, and the effect it had on the guy looking at them. So that when it happened, even if it happened just about every day, it was like finding out that you were luckier than you had a right to be, like unexpectedly getting a present on a day that wasn’t even close to being your birthday.
    And if nothing else, putting a tackle move on Sherri and diving with her in a bear hug onto the bed would stop his mind from cranking on about what time of year this was. The rains could spatter against the windows, the winds could drive the yellowed leaves across the dying lawns, and neither one of them would notice. He would be too busy shushing her surprised gasp of laughter with a full-face, open-mouthed kiss, his tongue sliding across hers and tasting mint from fresh toothpaste while inhaling floral scents of soap and shampoo. Skin to skin, one deep breath was like stepping into a sun-warmed garden, eyes closed to make the mingled scents even more vivid.
    But not just that at the same time that he d be tasting her, pinned beneath him on the bed s rumpled sheets, he would let one hand draw lightly across her ribs and then settle upon her breast, its nipple rising and stiffening against the center of his palm. All her laughing would be over then, replaced by the silent eagerness of her mouth parting wider, her bare arms wrapping around his shoulders and pulling him closer against herself. His hand, trapped between their bodies,