Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [51]
It did, however, do a marvelous job of showing off the stately Ms. Waboombas. She really was a magnificent specimen of womanhood who obviously worked out with actual weights. Had I not spent the previous night wanking myself dry, little Corky would have been thumping out Morse code against the underside of the table.
“Wanna touch it?” she asked with steam.
“I wouldn’t want to smudge the delicate line work,” I said.
“I have touch-up paint.”
“Oh, come on!” Morgan said, fidgeting angrily.
“Really…” I said, “…it’s probably best if I don’t.”
“Says you,” she responded with obvious disappointment.
“He’s getting married!” Morgan repeated.
“I just wanted to see how well the paint holds up,” she said defensively. “It’s gonna get a lot of contact at the convention, so it’s important to know.”
“Contact? The convention?” I asked, getting worried. “You’re going to…to the comic book convention?”
“Yeah,” Morgan said enthusiastically. “She’ll be riding down with us.”
“She will? With us? Oh, really?” I said, feeling as if I had been strapped into an electric chair and was currently having electrodes and damp sponges applied to my bare skin.
“Well. How marvelous. That should make for a much more…em…pleasant drive,” I lied.
“Probably,” she said, still disappointed at being untouched by human hands. “Sooo . . . you wanna see my book?”
“Book? What book?”
“My comic book.”
“You have a comic book?”
“You think I’m dressing this way for fun?”
I did, yes. But shook my head ‘no’ because her tone made me fear doing otherwise.
“It’s just to help me sell my books,” she said.
‘Books’ is shortened slang for ‘comic books’ within the superhero comic book community. It didn’t mean actual books with words in them. In Ms. Waboombas case, I imagined very few words would have been necessary. Or helpful. And from my past knowledge of comics conventions and the men who attend them, I determined that—dressed as she was—she could likely make vast wads of dough selling blank pages. Or even just the promise of them.
“So, you wanna see it?”
“See what?” I said, confused due to having become lost again in Ms. Waboombas costume. It was hard to imagine there was something I wasn’t seeing.
“My book!” she said, getting annoyed.
“Oh! Right! Sure! Absolutely!” I said, genuinely interested, but not for the reasons she supposed. Her smile brightened and for the first time seemed sincere. She sat down again, smearing body paint deeper into the woodwork of my Louis the 14th chair, and reached under the table to pull a copy of her comic from one of several in a canvas bag at her feet. She handed it to me gingerly, as if it were spun from the finest gold.
“I printed it myself,” she said proudly. “Place in Hong Kong. They speak English there, sometimes. I think it looks nice.” She smiled again, and—handoff complete—returned to shoveling food in her mouth. The woman had an appetite. But then she had two hungry breasts to feed.
I set her comic on the table, and she immediately began to spasm at her end. Food, and milk spluttered out of her mouth, spilling across lips, chin, and breasts. It took a moment to realize she wasn’t having a seizure—she was just concerned about where I was placing her comic.
“There’s milk!” she finally managed to shout, spewing more food—pretty much everywhere.
I jerked her masterpiece off the table as if it were a small child reaching for a hot stove and saw that there were, indeed, a few small drops of milk on the surface before me, likely having been spat there by Ms. Waboombas herself.
Seeing that her baby was now safe, she calmed and returned to eating, and talking through her food. “You want it to stay mint. Could be worth money someday.”
As opposed to not being worth money today? I thought, and thankfully had the sense not to say out loud. Instead, I smiled insincerely and turned my attention down to the thing in my hands.
It was a typical ‘independent comic’ with superhero contents that were pretty much the same as the two major companies—Marvel or DC—but with more violence,