The Subterraneans
Chapter 1
In malls, Pedro had long ago noticed, the food and drink stores were almost always on the first floor and the specialty fashion stores on the second or third. He thought maybe this was psychological. Maybe store designers subconsciously tended to lower the eateries since eating was more basic, more elemental, than shopping for your image.
Here at Almeida mall, where Pedro worked as head janitor, females outnumbered men by a large margin, because of what was happening. The mall was a real woolfest, in fact; tool sections in the Sears and Roebuck’s were hard to find these days, while fashion outlets like the Papayas proliferated.
An exception to the rule about fashion shops, the Papayas was not only on the first floor but next to the spare corridor that led to the janitor’s closet and, beyond it, the loading dock. Despite its less than ideal location, the Papayas was popular and as Pedro made his frequent trips to the closet, he saw a steady stream of maidenly striplings who passed in and out of the Papayas all day long.
When he got in one of his moods Pedro loved more than anything to stand around the Papayas and stalk the dewy debutantes who shopped there. Transfixed with lust and curiosity, he made up a daughter one day, and stepped in, pretending to be shopping for her birthday. The girls were aware of him, wearing sunglasses indoors, staring at their backsides as he stood behind them around the circular racks of clothes. But nothing happened. There were no consequences.
Emboldened, he started doing it regularly, for hours sometimes, particularly when it was summer as it was now and the Papayas blossomed with maidenly young teenflesh, girls in scanty outfits that left most of their smooth and sunbronzed skin bare.
He loved standing around in the Papayas.
He acted casual and took his stray chances to eyeball the spritely late-teen nieces and cousinnes as they ranged through the store’s selection, plainly thinking of this as their domain and oblivious that a man might be watching them even as he stood in plain sight. They did girlish things as though at a slumber party. They held bras over their chests coyly and giggled, or one might have lifted a pair of shorts up to another’s lap and studied it, shaking her head disapprovingly. Sometimes they would notice him. They would glare angrily and clam up or even gather their things and leave, grossed out.
He wondered when the clerks would wise up and ban him but they never did. In fact, it struck him one day that they actually seemed oddly languid in general, never smiling and bright like the clerks at other stores but sour, almost frowning, with the vacant demeanor he associated with haughty fashion models. He’d once idly imagined a dirty sci-fi movie that might’ve had characters like the Papaya girls in it. The Stepford Co-Eds, it would have been called.
The clerks didn’t seem to mind even when, deranged with lust, Pedro started sneaking into the dressing rooms, brazenly picking through the leftover clothes where he sometimes found little nuggets—a powderpuff-white liquid bra, for instance, that he’d stolen away with, back to his trailer. A cute blonde, never noticing she was being followed, had tried it on, found it not to her liking, and left it in the changing room.
When Pedro got the bra home he smelled it carefully: mostly its odor was of new clothes and showrooms but he could tease out a shade of female flesh, the salty scent of the blonde’s jiggling biscuits. When he masturbated into the bra he used a condom and a surgical glove; he wanted to save that smell as long as he could.
From then on, on his Papayas panty raids, he went through the motions of being sneaky. Waiting until no one was looking to steal into a dressing room; peeking past the the lip of the door before he left to avoid being seen. But sometimes—and this was incredible to him—the clerks would catch him anyway. They’d look right at him, stepping out of a changing room for girls, and just make him blankly and look away.
This made Pedro even more uneasy than if they’d just busted him. It also steeled him, though. The next night, brave with lust, he used his janitor’s key to plant a camera in the Papayas’ inside dressing room. He was good at that sort of thing. Its signal went out over the store’s wireless Internet, which left Pedro at some risk of getting caught, but there was no other way to fuse the uplink. Anyway, he wasn’t that concerned. If someone at the company’s IT department noticed the bandwidth the uplink was consuming—which, to be fair, was a lot; the camera got a good, clear image—they still wouldn’t know anything unless they somehow deduced the URL and password Pedro’d set up. Anyone with that kind of notice could turn him in. Of course, they could also use their browser to watch the goings on when the luscious teen lassies stripped. So even if his spying rig were ever discovered, maybe, if that seduced them, his secret would stay safe.
Pedro mostly peeped on his delicate gooselings from his trailer in the mall parking lot now, because this allowed him to fantasize more fully. This time of year he liked turning up the window AC and checking out the HD picture on his 42-inch, as the girls shopped for shorts and panties in lighter fabric to keep their punky asscracks and sapling fruitpies free from perspiration even on sweaty L.A. days in August. He liked how they played with belts of plastic seashells looped through frilled denim miniskirts. But mostly, he liked Trina.
Today Pedro had once again snuck into the Papayas dressing room. He was looking at his portable, battery-operated monitor past the thin wall into the next room. Through the camera mounted there he watched Trina, his obsession, try on clothes as he slowly masturbated into a pair of bikini bottoms she’d just tried on. He thought about the girl he’d seen discard them. Trina. He’d seen her duck into the changing area with them and leave without them, and stole after her to retrieve them. She’d come back to find her previous room was now occupied and took the other, allowing Pedro to supervise her as he pleasured himself on her discarded underthings in the next room. If perverted onanist voyeurism were an Olympic event, this feat would have been a difficulty of perfect ten. Yet here they were.
And there she was even now, just aligning into place a scooped red underwire bra and a demislip of a brief with a broad waistband logoed “Super Star.” He’d seen the outfit in one of the many hundreds of Victoria’s Secret catalogs he had hoarded back at the trailer.
He frigged himself slowly but deliberately, wanting to wait, to ride this wave of perverted pleasure even as its intensity threatened to overwhelm him. He was standing, the screen inches from his eyes on a tiny corner shelf at shoulder level for laying aside keys and other pocket goodies as one changed. Trina’s room had a shelf too. She’d put her piffling drugstore purse on it. Pedro looked at the crisp image of the purse on the screen and just a moment later a jangling ringtone sounded. She fished her cellphone out.
Had he known that was coming?
“’Lo?”
A pause. He could only hear half the conversation. She turned about, presenting her luscious ass in her Super Star panties. They made her look like a savory sample of buttercake.
“Yes, I remember that,” said she, into the phone. The camera had no sound connection but he could hear through the thin-wooded dressing room walls. “I’m in your store right now.”
She turned and put her finger over her other ear.
“Eighteen,” she said. “I just turned eighteen.” She listened a moment, then giggled. “Well, I’m actually in the changer. I know no one can see me but still,” she looked around, sharing a joke with herself, “it feels a little funny!”
She had trouble hearing and bent to steady the phone against her ear, turning her bottom to her admirer. Spanking his smelly cock, Pedro felt himself rising to his peak prematurely, and, fighting down the temptation to go ahead and cream himself, left off his self-pleasure. The sight of Trina’s plump pattycakes was too bone-shakingly exciting to bear.
“My… password?”
She sneezed.
Her buttocks jiggled again but this time it was of a different character. The rifle that shuddered through her in the wake of her sneeze seemed almost like a curious pantomime or the fragment of a robotic break-dancing step. Pedro regretted leaving off his wank, because this would have been a sweet moment to climax. Something delicious about it.
“I understand.” She stood upright, holding the phone rigidly to her ear and aligning her other arm with her hip. She was at fixed attention. The phone hung off her like a gray earlobe. “My code name is ‘Flinch Nymph.’ The password to access me is ‘Minx.’”
She dropped her phone arm so that it rocked parallel to her other idle hand. Then she shook out her lustrous hair, casting a dreamscape out of her.
Visibly confused, Trina gathered her effects and left. Pedro followed not long after. Sure enough the inattentive clerks were nowhere to be seen, as far as Pedro could tell. But as he passed the counter he saw a cell phone on it, black with a shimmering computer-generated image of a matching black screw on the screen at the reverse of the flip panel. He absently shoplifted it.
Back at the trailer he tuned in the Raiders game and opened up the cell phone curiously.
There was the familiar AT&T ring, and then a woman’s voice.
“PapayaNet. Enter code name.”
He said “Flinch Nymph” aloud and immediately felt stupid. When after a second nothing happened, he keyed in the numbers corresponding to the password’s letters. There was a satisfying click.
“Password.”
He did the same. M-I-N-X.
There was another click. A pair of rings.
“Hello?” It was Trina. Shit. Pedro hadn’t expected this.
“Do you…” he stumbled. “Do you know your password?”
“Yes? Hello?”
“It’s… It’s ‘Flinch Nymph.’”
A pause. Trina trilled her tongue. “Yes. ‘flinch nymph.”
“And… ‘Minx.’”
She sneezed, openly, right into the phone. Pedro could hear that it’d come on so fast she’d not even had a chance to cover her mouth.
“I know your password.”
“You’d have to to be able to call me on this phone.”
“What does this mean, that you have a password? I’ve never heard of people having passwords. On the phone you said something someone said about it being a password to ‘access you.’ What does that mean?”
She signed impatiently. The first few words came out forced, as through she were fighting to get them out, or to keep them in.
“It means anyone who boots into me on the private network can boss me around and snap, I have to do. Like I’ve’ze no choice, z’something takes over.”
Pedro made a not-quite-conscious association with the languid girls who worked in the Papayas and smiled to himself, catching on fast. Whatever hypnotic effect had been effected on them, something similar was at work on poor subjugated Trina.
“You didn’t want to tell me that just now,” he surmised, “did you?”
“No.”
“But you had to because I asked.”
“Yes.”
“And if I told you to do something else you’d have to do that too?”
“I think so.”
“No matter what?”
She paused. “Pretty much.”
He steeled himself. “What if I told you to come over here and suck me off while I finished watching the Raiders game?”
She cleared her throat and for a clammy second Pedro wondered if maybe he’d gone too far.
“Are you really telling me to do that? Because if you are I have to do it. But I’m a Christian girl so I’m not sure how good I’d be at…” she quailed. “…’zsucking you off.’ Anyway, no one’s supposed to put anything in my mouth or in my holes yet.”
“No, no,” said Pedro. He tried to think but the heat of excitement in the pit of his belly and flush in his face scarcely let him think clearly. He lifted the phone to his ear. “Meet me at the bench in front of the Papayas right now,” he bossed, hanging up before she even answered.