Unforgettable cruise

Chapter 8 - (actual chapter 4 concludes…)

* *
Her long, meandering path led her back to the happening scene up on the Sky deck at Club Troposphere. Tonight’s DJ Alien Groove looked weird in their scaled-too-large alien head, complete with slanty alien eyes. Looks aside, Alien Groove’s ungrooved grooves were as solid as Swash Buckle’s the night before, even if far more tightly focused on EDM than spanning the decades of recorded musical history.

With slight difficulty, she pushed herself out of her wary, aloof comfort zone, easing onto the dance floor and letting her body move to Groove’s current groove. Once she let her mind and its {Why must I be so rhythm-challenged?} nagging go, her in-the-present-moment instincts did her well.


It came as less of a surprise to her having surveyed the other nighttime entertainment alternatives to again see Clark in the distance on the Club Troposphere under-the-stars open-air dance floor, where in some ways the sky truly did seem to be the limit, given what she’d seen of the other venue options. Completely not understanding why she cared even slightly, she felt a very brief surge of upset course through her upon seeing him dancing with the doe-eyed huge-boobed blonde BBW with the oversized rounded nose. After that momentary feels surge, her focused attention on them returned to her usual analytical self, even if not wholly detached.

The music did not lend itself to contact dancing, and indeed she saw no contact between them. The glittery, affectionate smiles they were sharing—obvious to her over the distance—triggered feelings of jealousy.

A generously wrinkly man of limited head hair who had been and continued to dance right in front of her caught Leigh’s attention the moment she looked away from her voyeuristic targets. His friendly, urbane smile drew out her own friendly smile, as well as giving her a much nicer, nearby, and immediate visual focus. She’d not likely want to date him and would never bed him, but in this moment he did make an excellent, friendly non-contact dance partner.


The only further notice Leigh took of Clark was about 1/3 hour later when he and Boobacious Bulb-Nose exited the dance floor together, holding hands. {Looks like he’s laid out his lay for the night} she briefly thought with a sigh wholly inaudible even to her over the beat-heavy dance music. She returned her attention to her dance partner, who was in the process of easing away so another younger and less wrinkled gent could ease in.

This one didn’t stay dancing with her all that long, but long enough for her to completely forget about Clark.


* *
“Fun as it is, Club Troposphere doesn’t lend itself to even brief conversation” Clark smiled towards the lovely busty BBW/edge of SSBBW with whom he was currently walking, still holding hands.

“No it does not. I didn’t even clearly get your name.”

“Clark Barr. B-A-R-R.”

“Thanks for the clarification. Otherwise I would’ve been expecting a peanut butter and spun taffy core, ideally with caramel, coated in milk chocolate, if I ever wound up eating you.”

“*Daah!* Woah ho ho!” he laughed, her to-him heavily flirty comment taking him by surprise.

“Hee hee!” she laughed along with him at the same time. “I’m Rebecca Davidson, eyeing the couch seating in that lounge area over there as being a good place to sit and continue the introductions we couldn’t make to each other earlier.”

“*Delighted* to officially meet you, Rebecca, and I concur on your peaceful sitting and resting thoughts.


There was sufficient space on the 2m long mustard gold velour fabric couch for Clark and Rebecca to sit angled facing near one another without being in contact, a comfortably socially-polite distance between them.

{Eyes up eyes up eyes up to mine or I’m leaving. There ya go, just in time.} “How far are you on the cruise loop?” she asked.

“Just starting. I got on yesterday in L.A. You?”

“Me too.”

“You live in metropolitan Los Angeles?!”

“Yes. That surprises you for some reason?”

“Hopefully no offense, but you sound like you’re from the east. Maybe New York?”

“Yeaaaah, I guess my accent’s still that obvious. Nice Jewish girl originally from Bed-Stuy.”

“Sorry, where?”

“You don’t know New York City, do you?”

“Hardly. Whenever I get into a book or movie or whatever where they’re name-dropping 42nd. Street or Hell’s Kitchen or whatever like everyone on the planet’s supposed to know what those are and what they’re all about, I tend to lose interest. With all due respect to NYC as a vibrant place able to produce amazing people such as yourself and more, it’s not the center of the universe.”

Her eyebrows went up.

“At least not to a California native such as myself.”

“Huh! There are actual natives here? I mean, other than the indigenous actual natives.”

“Second-generation metro Angeleno here, meaning second generation born in the county and region, not necessarily the City of Los Angeles, which neither of my parents nor myself were. Which isn’t even on the same scale as descendants of the Tongva, nor those whose Mexican ancestry hails to the pre-U.S. statehood rancho era, possibly earlier. Still, in comparison to so many who came later and continue to move into the area, grandparents who immigrated to California in the early 20th. century is a comparatively long history.”

“Yeah” she slightly sighed. “And here I thought my 20 years in L.A. made me a de-facto Cali girl. What’s the statute of limitations on that?”

“There is none. Welcome” he smiled, easing into her for a brief sitting hug she seemed eager to end.

“Thanks. So whereabouts in or around L.A. do you live?”

“I don’t, in any recent years. My mother still does in the South Bay where I grew up. Knew I wanted to do this cruise and would be visiting her anyway, so ticketed to board there and get back off in SuhFrisco on the way back south.”

“Where?”

“SuhFrisco is my weak attempt to abbreviate San Francisco in a manner possibly less annoying to those who live there who chafe at Frisco, which is a city or town in Texas anyway. Closest port to where I’ve been living and working in recent years, in Silicon Valley.”

“You’re in tech?”

“Yeah. Engineer at a small package design slash fabrication firm, which operates on a consulting and/or prototype outsourcing basis, mostly.”

“Mechanical?”

“That ’s my degree, though almost everything in modern times seems to lead to virtualization and coding, so I sometimes do bits of that. More coding for production line fabrication systems, not anything an end-user would ever encounter.”

“OK, so I won’t bug you about the latest annoyance I’m having with iOS.”

“Oh don’t get me started on that! Apple torques me, Microsoft torques me, Google torques me.”

“What do you run?”

“At work, whatever I have to run, which all too often is Winblows. At least XP SP 3 is decent and stable, as long as it’s nowhere near the public Internet, which the manufacturing and design systems I have to use are not. Officially getting near the grampy generation by chronological age, I’m acting that way in terms of my tech: I prefer keeping my venerable Dells going with Slackware Linux and spending my quality time there. Much as I hate the whole handtech realm, Apple sucks less than Google, so I carry an iPhone of necessity.”

“*Now* you’re talking a language I understand.” She briefly pulled her iPhone 11 Pro Max out of her bra enough for him to see it before putting it back, unknowingly over-exciting him as she did so. “I don’t even know of Linux—too geeky for this girl! All those different kinds with the different names, like yours and, what?, Cinnamon Swirl?”

“Mint Cinnamon.”

“See?” she laughed. “Much as Apple ruins my day far too often, this girl needs someone looking out for my security, making things I can turn on and *use* without getting my geek-I-don’t-have on.”

“What do you choose to do in life, for work, pleasure, or otherwise?”

“Script writer, on shows you’ve never heard of and get cancelled” she replied with an obvious tone of bitterness “is what I do for work.”

He nodded, interested.

“Occasional costume work, leveraging off years of sewing my own clothes, so I have decent things to wear which actually fit and flatter rather than flummox.”

He couldn’t help momentarily snickering at her flummox comment. “What you’ve got on now is dazzling, as well as you yourself inside it of course.”

{Eyes off the orbs. Back up here, back up here} her mind attempted to telepath to him as he continued speaking.

Fortunately he did resume direct eye contact as he finished, “Did you make it?”

“Not this one. This is from a small-output designer named Minerva Pyle, who’s a big girl herself and focuses on the underserved market of large sizes. She custom-tailors, which is why it shows off all my curves so well.”

“*Ohhh* yeah!” he lecherously agreed with a knowing nod. “So” he clapped his hands loudly, “What next? Your stateroom or mine, perhaps?”

The waves of rage rapidly emanating from Rebecca as she stiffened, sat more upright, and pulled back were palpable. “I don’t know what the hell you’re about, dude, but I am a woman of worth who is **not** desperate and is **not** an easy lay!” she rebuked him in no uncertain terms as she stood up.

“Rebecca–”


Too late: she was already walking away at a decent tight-dress-induced short-stride clip, not looking back.


Staring at her ever-more-distant wobbly ass as he remained seated he thought, {At least you can’t keep me from getting off to visualizing you in the privacy of my stateroom}.


* *
All of Rebecca, Clark, and Leigh turned in to their individual staterooms alone for the night, 2 of the 3 of them being wholly good with this situation, the other passably good with it.