#hi....

table of contents

may 28, 1998

A constrained exhale. Then, the sound of her bare feet gliding along the sheets. Her thighs clenched around the hand delved between them—her own.

"Fuck," Sabrina panted. In her focus, she dragged along the k to a high-pitched point. She was so close.

Her left hand groped at her chest, rolling her ever-hardening nipple between her middle and index fingers while she squeezed. She'd gotten quite good at pleasing herself in the last few months. The vibrator she'd been too scared to test sat idly on her end table...charged and ready.

As her hips raised off the surface of the squeaky bed, Sabrina forced herself to relax her body, knowing the end result would be much greater if she was at ease. She gave her clitoris a rest for a moment, her fingers migrating to her entrance, where she was so wet she nearly dripped onto the sheets.

Sabrina wasn't difficult to excite, even when she was seeking her own self-pleasure. Her ability to become soaked at the first sign of pleasure probably had something to do with her biological clock....in need of some biological cock, she supposed.

Her fingers plunged in, soon finding the spot that made her walls tighten around her fingers. She'd raised her hips for leverage, and somehow it felt just as wonderful as being fingered by someone else; though this time she held all the control. Curling her fingers into herself, Sabrina nearly screamed, quickening her pace until she felt the familiar rush of blood through her system.

Through the bush of her pubic hair, Sabrina found her clitoris again with her opposite hand, using both to work as a team in bringing her impending orgasm. Sabrina used her breaths strategically and worked fast on her body, her eyes shut so tight she was sure her eyes would explode inside their sockets if she wasn't careful.

Sabrina concocted the mental image of being fingered by the man of her dreams—or any man willing to fuck her, really—and began mewling to herself as she hit the exact right spot over and over and over and—

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckkkkkk," Sabrina nearly screamed. Her hips shook, walls pulsated as if milking her own fingers for the seed of life, and her toes gripped her sheets with an unmatched death grip. The world around her became nonexistent for a moment as all she could focus on was getting the most of her designated personal time.

Her chest heaved, the tepid air in the room becoming less noticed by her nipples as they adjusted back to their usual state of rest. Sabrina's fingers remained where they were as her bum met the surface of her bed once again. Her heart rate began to slow and her fingers circled her clit slowly in search of any aftershocks she could experience.

Inadvertently she gasped twice, then a third time until she managed to pull her fingers away. She pulled her right hand from her dripping center, more than tempted to suck her own fluids off her fingers and doing so with little critical thought about it.

Sabrina's drying hands caressed her thighs and moved up the length of her bare body to her chest, taking hold of her breasts. She wished her hands were larger in order to successfully hold their whole mass in her hands. She wanted to be groped by someone other than herself, someone who could make her feel excited about sex again. Someone like...

Someone like Jimmy.

Sabrina paused, then allowed herself the thought, if not for only just a split second. Large, expansive hands taking her easily; delicate lips sucking right where she felt the beautiful mix of pleasure and pain. What his moans would sound like right beside her ear, what his cock would feel like inside of her, what his gut would feel like pressed up against her as he fucked her. She didn’t let her mind dwell on it too long. Thinking of being so close, so personal with Jimmy made something inside her flutter with desire.

With a breath, Sabrina opened her eyes and stared at the warped ceiling above her. She was actually quite tired now, but a nap so close to noon would put her sleep schedule way out of wack.

Before she could settle back into her sheets for too long, Sabrina got up and started for the shower.

☽

Wind blew back Sabrina’s long brown hair, drawing it out well past her frame as she stood outside the Underground station at Paddington waiting for Zachary.

He'd called shortly after Sabrina had showered that morning to tell her that while he was going into London for school, a gas leak had shut down the campus and he hadn’t wanted to waste a trip into the city. Sabrina opened her day to her little brother, taking advantage of the opportunity to tell him about recent goings on in her own life.

Sabrina spotted Zachary before he could spot her, tucking his train ticket into his wallet and contorting his body awkwardly as he put his wallet into the back pocket of his baggy jeans. With a grimace she watched as he stumbled out of the station and into the sunshine. Upon spotting his fresh frosted tips, Sabrina grimaced only slightly.

"Alright, then?" Sabrina asked with a laugh. She held her hands out to keep her brother from stumbling into her.

"Amelia's got me these jeans that are giant, but the pockets are teeny!" Zachary complained. The dark blue denim actually looked nice on him in conjunction with the rest of his outfit. It was cohesive. But the pockets did look crudely made.

"That's your excuse for breaking your back to look in your pocket, then?"

"Slag," Zachary teased.

"Wanker," Sabrina shot back, butting his chin with her fist.

They started to the street and made the automatic walk to their preferred lunch spot: the Italian restaurant two blocks down from the station. Zachary always ordered the pizza while Sabrina stuck with her trusty spaghetti bolognese.

Outside, the restaurant’s tables were dense with people, conversation, and food; dashing the siblings’ hopes of sitting out in the late May air. They waited for a table inside, stuffed into a corner in the restaurant’s lobby. The wait was never a long one.

“Your hair looks stupid,” Sabrina remarked, taking the final slurp of a spaghetti noodle into her mouth.

Zachary furrowed his brow, the remnants of the Italian roll he ate powdering his lips. While Sabrina hadn’t been lying, she smiled smugly at her little brother. He swallowed with a gulp, “What’s it to you?” he asked through bread spittle.

“You look like Lance Bass,” she laughed, taking another critical look at Zachary’s frosted tips. With a grimace she sipped the prosecco which sat before her.

“I didn’t make fun of you when you got a perm ten years ago,” he retorted.

Sabrina cringed for a moment, then, the recollection of arriving home after she’d gotten her six-month curl stint hitting her like a load of bricks. The high-pitched words “poodle head” echoed loudly in her mind, being shouted by Zachary as soon as she’d stepped foot back into the house.

“Yes you did, that’s why I never got another one! You called me a poodle head, you ass.”

He rolled his eyes, conceding, “I was eleven. I’m a grown man now. I’d call you a beautiful poodle head if you did it now.”

“‘m gonna have Amelia get a perm and see what you say.”

The color about drained from Zachary’s face, “Sab, you wouldn’t.”

She stared back at him devilishly, coiling more pasta around her fork using her spoon. She figured she should at least practice her etiquitte before going out with Jimmy. They’d likely go someplace leagues nicer than Bizzarro in Paddington. “We’ll see about that,” she answered.

While she chewed her pasta, she avoided eye contact with her brother, contemplating her highly anticipated date. Well, highly anticipated for Jimmy. Sabrina was ready pull Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak over her head and die that way. Though she was anxious for her chance with Jimmy, Sabrina wondered what their first date would bring her.

She only hoped she wouldn’t get tossed to the curb when he learned that she wouldn’t put out on the first date. Plus he’s old. Old age was the biggest danger point in their situation....ship—bigger than the fact that he was one of the most famous rock and roll guitarists of all time. Fame was something Sabrina didn’t care for, but if Jimmy croaked before she even reached 65, she’d be pretty upset.

Then again, Jimmy would be in his nineties when she reached her mid-60s, so how upset could she get?

“Pensive….” Zachary trailed off.

“I have a date,” Sabrina blurted out, squeezing her eyes shut in regret as soon as the words left her mouth.

“Who with?!” he asked, seeming to already know the answer to his own question.

“Jimmy…” she replied, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“How?” Zachary exclaimed, “We have to talk about it!”

“No, no, no, no, no, Zach. I swear I’ll spill my guts after tomorrow, but I can’t—I don’t want to think about it.” Sabrina shoved more pasta into her mouth haphazardly. She was sure there was now an orange splatter stain on her white jumper. With a short inhale, she was over it. The sweater would go into the wash as soon as she got back to her flat.

"Oh come on, Sab. You can't just drop that news on me and not tell me anything else." Zachary said, almost annoyed at his sister's reticence.

"I just want it to happen so I don't have to be nervous anymore."

"Just think of it as a free dinner. No biggie," he joked.

"Yeah, right," Sabrina took a large swig of her prosecco. "A free dinner with one of the most famous guitarists ever."

"What do you care he's a guitar god? You hardly know the first thing about his career."

"That's not the point, Zach. My point is that he's not just a normal person. He's a famous person.....who wants to go out with me!"

"Eh, I suppose that's fair. You haven't got much anything exciting happening."

Sabrina's foot nudged his beneath the table, "Rude."

"Okay so tell me the story, then. I'm more curious than I should be about his methodology in asking you out."

Sabrina swallowed, "Well. It was rather unexpected. It was the other day, when it was raining something awful. I called him earlier in the day to tell him the suits I was altering for him were ready. I suppose we flirted a little," a smile spread cheekily across her face, "Then I don't know. I was closing up the store that evening and he came and just told me how he felt."

Zachary stared back at her awestruck.

"What?" Sabrina asked.

"You've got to be living in a movie or something."

"Or something..." Sabrina rolled her eyes.

☽

“How’s this?” Sabrina asked, pulling a long, white maxi dress from the rack that she had been rifiling through. The shape wasn’t the most flattering for her shorter stance, but had she been three inches taller and about weighed about a stone less, she would have been content with the piece. After years of being dragged along shopping with Sabrina and her mother, Zachary seemed to have known this without having to hear any further interrogation from Sabrina. He merely shook his head.

“You’re right,” she trailed off, eyeing the dress once again. Lost cause. “If I find a dress I like that needs fixing, would you mind heading to Clarence’s with me to do a quick alteration?”

“I’m cool.”

“We can get takeaway tonight if you want,” Sabrina said, pulling a black piece and adding it to the small pile of clothes forming on her arm.

“I can stay the night?”

“If I’m by myself tonight I might die of an anxiety attack,” she said, “I can’t stop thinking of Jimmy.”

Zachary smirked, but dared not say anything further.

“Where’s he taking you?” he asked.

“Dunno yet. I think some Italian food…” Sabrina replied and turned towards the fitting room. “I’ll be back.”

All of the pieces she chose turned out to be black ones. Sabrina knew her mother would have had something to say about her color choice; something about how black flattened fat, tummy rolls, cellulite, and the like. She shoved the thought from her mind and peeled the second dress off her body. Her mother was right after all. She was using the color as a tool in addition to its simplicity. There was a deep breath after she’d been released from the confines of the tight and overtly ruffled dress. Her lungs expanded in her rib cage and she didn’t look long at her bare chest before reaching for the fourth dress.

Instead, she peered down at her toes. The flaking red nail polish from a pedicure many moons past forced a grimace to form on her face. I need to fix that.

The beginning notes of the Spice Girls’ “Spice Up Your Life” crooned through the store speakers. She began to hum as her eyes surveyed the looser fitting dresses that still had some shape to it. Her only gripe was that it may be a snag too long for her figure. But that would be an easy fix, she decided. A quick hem would only take about ten minutes.

Sabrina smoothed out the final dress she had pulled out over her curved figure. “This one,” she whispered to herself, rotating slightly to see how the dress curved around her butt. She smirked, letting her left hand fall further down to just pinch herself. Her smirk became a smile and she scanned the garment for imperfections. It was, indeed, a bit long. Putting the thought aside, Sabrina examined her dead flat hair. She pulled two large pieces from the sides of her face and pulled them back, allowing her right hand to act as a claw clip. After an affirmative hum, Sabrina let her hair down and began to unzip the dress.

She couldn’t help but imagine two hands that weren’t her own unzipping it for her. Sabrina let out a dreamy sigh and reveled in the short fantasy for a moment, her thoughts guiding her back to that morning’s pleasing activities. While lost in her thoughts, she about melted into a puddle. She couldn’t believe she was going on a date with a man twice her age—and one that she found sexy, at that.

Sabrina carefully pulled the dress off and laid it beside her purse. Once she’d collected herself, she exited the booth and hung her unwanted items on the overflowing rack just a few feet away. Zachary was leaned against a wall waiting for her. He had been examining something beneath his nails that he had begun mindlessly digging at.

“Let’s go?”

Zachary’s gaze snapped up to his sister and he nodded. “Yeah, let’s go. You find the one?” He asked rather mockingly.

“I did, thankfully. We’ve just got to stop at Clarence’s so I can give it a quick hem if you don’t mind going a bit out of the way.”

He shrugged, his nails clicking faintly as he continued fiddling with them even outside of her line of sight.

☽

The familiar ring of the bell above the entrance of Clarence’s triggered Sabrina's Pavlovian response to smile upon hearing it. She shook it away and gave the store a quick once-over—was Jimmy there?—and made a bee-line straight for her area on the second floor of the store where she could quickly add a new hem to her new dress.

She plopped her purse and belongings onto her desk. Zachary took a seat at Daniel's desk beside hers and began to fiddle with a rubbery stress ball.

"Do you think he needs this to deal with you?" Zachary teased.

Sabrina threw her brother an annoyed glance as she sorted through the plastic store bag with the dress. "He actually took it from me when I let him handle a consultation completely on his own," she giggled. Behind her desk was a shelf lined with color-coded bobbins to load the sewing machines with. She began to compare the thread on the dress's hem with her pre-loaded bobbins.

"How hard can it be to ask someone what they want for their suit?" he questioned.

"You've obviously never had to deal with a customer," Sabrina retorted, finding a matching thread color and plucking it from the shelf. "People are very particular about their threads and colors and materials, shapes, blah, blah, blah... I once had someone ask if we did terrycloth linings because of how much he sweat..." she shuddered.

"What's that?"

"That towel material. Like, how much can one sweat?"

"So did you do it?"

"After much insistence. And a hefty additional charge. But these rich farts don't care. They just want what they want," she sighed. "Alright I'm gonna try this on and pin it."

"Alright."

The third fitting booth was always Sabrina's preferred booth of choice seeing as it was the only booth with a functioning lock on it. The store was in dire need of an upgrade. Most of the fitting area still held remnants of the late '60s as was falling apart quite terribly. Customers didn't tend to complain about it due to the quality of the work Sabrina and the tailors who came before her in the two decades the store had been in operation. Tit for tat, she supposed.

Speaking of tit....the dress she'd purchased for her date with Jimmy did wonders for her bust. She felt her chest had begun to deflate a considerable amount in the decade since she'd actually tried to make them look presentable to others.

With her hands, she pulled them up again like she had in the shop and gave herself a light squeeze. No lumps, she notified herself.

In the main fitting area, she admired herself some more in the dress, amazed she found something so nice in such little time. Giving herself a few inches for posterity, Sabrina stood on her tip toes as she anticipated wearing heels to Jimmy's fancy Italian restaurant. From there she eyeballed how much she would take from the dress and dug a piece of chalk from the pencil cup to mark it.

Again, Sabrina returned to the fitting booth and peeled the beautiful dress from her body and changed back into her street wear.

In the office, Sabrina hoped to find her brother in the same position he had been sitting in when she had left him, but she knew that to be too good of an expectation to be true.

"What are you doing in my rolodex?" She asked, shooing him away so she could take a seat at her machine. She feared she already knew the answer to her question.

Zachary flopped back into Daniel's squeaky swivel chair and looked to his sister with a knowing look. Sabrina shot him back a look of disbelief.

"I couldn't find it, don't worry," Zachary said.

"Yeah, because I hid it. Prying eyes," Sabrina accused. She flipped the switch on her machine and the light flickered on, illuminating her entire desk. In fairness, she had hidden Jimmy's contact, but she could not recall just where she had hidden it. That would be a task for when she got back to her flat.

"How in the hell did you get a date with Jimmy Page, then?"

"Sheer luck, I suppose." Sabrina's foot searched in vain for the foot pedal attached to her sewing machine. Leaning back, her foot was completely off in its assumption of the pedal's placement. Repositioning it, she quickly got to work.

"Do you really like him?" Zachary asked. The words came out more sincere than the words would have made them out to be.

Sabrina stammered, focusing her eyes on where she wanted her new hem as she reached for her fabric scissors in the drawer beside her. "Zach, I—I dunno, I think so."

"I mean, there has to be a level of attraction. You can't just want him b'cos he's rich."

"I don't think you want to hear what my brain thinks about him—" she couldn't even get the period of her statement out before being interjected into by her brother.

"No, fuck no! Absolutely not I don't. I cannot allow myself to even think about thinking about you and Jimmy Page rolling around in the sheets together."

Sabrina shrugged to him. "There you have it."

"So what was it? An immediate thing?"

She took her time with her response. The scissors in her hand snipped away at the fabric just beneath with she marked it. Sabrina couldn't help her attraction to Jimmy. He was twice her age, yet there was something undeniable about him. She was still trepidatious about Jimmy as a whole, but her inner carnal thoughts seemed to take the driver's seat when imagining any sort of relations with Jimmy.

Her thoughts rewound to how exactly the air of attraction found itself to Jimmy in her mind. At some point in time where he was merely a speck of a thought, now the man took over her thoughts. Even the thought of their date coming up sent butterflies through her stomach.

"There's something about him," Sabrina trailed off. Carrying on with her pinking shears to trim her hem. "I hope I don't regret saying that later," she continued.

masterlist | playlist | em's album reviews