My Billionaire Astronaut Fireman
“Could I trouble you for a quarter?” he asked with that glint in his eye that I would come to know so well.
“Sure,” I replied meekly as I handed it to him. I could feel the electricity as my finger brushed against his upon the exchange. He acted as if I didn’t recognize him, which was as sweet as it was impossible to believe. Dirkland McDander had been a local sensation ever since he rid the town of the infamous Baby Seal Clubbing Ring that was terrorizing the citizens of Thatch Creek.
“Thanks,” he said with a soft, sweet, muscular smile as he took the quarter and gave it to the wheelchair-bound child at the next table. He didn’t even stop to notice the smile on the kid’s face as he turned back to me and sat down. “So you must be Ms. Pureblossom.”
“Please, call me Virginia,” I said as I shook his rough, tan, manicured, muscular hand.
He smiled at me again sheepishly but with a hint of brute confidence, “Okay Virginia. Kale said that you were cute, but he never prepared me for this.”
His muscular compliment touched me deep inside. I tried to hide how deep, but I could tell by the look on his face that he had noticed. I quickly changed the subject, “So, tell me about yourself.”
“What do you want to know?” He was right. I already knew everything about him. From the exact shade of his dark brown, leafy, muscular hair to the exact shade of clear polish he uses on his perfectly-manicured, muscular toes.
I knew I had to ask him something I already knew the answer to, I just had to figure out which question would be the most believable. No, not the personal stuff first, I needed to start small: “So, how do you find time in your busy astronaut schedule to fit in being a volunteer fireman?”
His confident, muscular nod told me everything. Still, I tried my best to pay attention to the words coming out of his steely mouth: “Yeah, it’s tough, and it definitely doesn’t leave a lot of time for a personal life, but it’s worth it when I see the looks on the faces of the kids I save. And their parents. And the cats in trees. And the stars and galaxies.”
It took every bone in my body working in unison for me to resist ripping my shirt off right there, but I knew I had to keep up appearances. Also, I knew that Dirkland McDander had a dark side – a dark side that I wasn’t sure if I could handle.
As a baby Dirkland had been repeatedly used as a piñata by his crack-dealing parents until he couldn’t take it anymore and he killed them both with the sharp end of his stroller umbrella. He was then put in foster care, having to grow up with the terrible knowledge that he was the one who had made himself an orphan. His head knew it wasn’t his fault, that he was acting in rugged self-defense, but his heart couldn’t lift the weight of being the first ever McDander to commit both matricide and patricide.
Then to make matters worse, somehow the gangsters who employed his parents found him and burned down the orphanage in retaliation. He made it out safely, saving the lives of all of his orphan friends as well, only to be doomed to a life on the streets. On his fifth birthday, somehow the gangsters found him again and burned down the street that he lived on. Dirkland once again made it out safely, but this time he was only able to save eleven of his twelve homeless friends.
Now, growing up on a different street, he proceeded to fall into a downward spiral of guilt and shame that he never fully recovered from and wears as an emotional scar upon his dripping, sweaty, muscular chest to this very day. He knows that one day those gangsters will find him again, but this time he swears to himself that he’ll be ready. And he’s gonna massacre every one of those motherfuckers. Slowly.
“… I also find time once a week to tutor wayward teens in astrophysics,” Dirkland continued as I realized I had spaced out and missed a good chunk of his answer. It turns out it didn’t matter though, because that’s when I noticed that he may have been talking about wayward teens, but he was staring right at my perky, innocent, pure, virginal, blossoming chest.
No more words needed to be spoken. Dirkland brushed the table clean with one swoop of his pulsating, throbbing, muscular arm as I impatiently tore my clothes in half and hopped on him like a voracious, sweaty bear. I swooned as his cavernous, soup-bowl hands took me closer to him and he peppered me with butterfly kisses like an Eskimo who knew what a butterfly kiss was. “Keep it together, Virginia,” I thought to myself as he gently laid me across the table, buffet-style. But it was no use, I lost myself in his sweaty embrace as he proceeded to do that thing that my grandma had always warned me about.
It was ecstasy.
He continued on and on, his passion and desire only getting stronger as the days and nights wore on. I fed on the crumbs of the fleeing patrons to sustain myself and periodically took naps to regain my strength, and when I awoke I would inevitably see him still going at it as if he’d just started. After what felt like an eternity, he gently caressed my cheek and lay beside me, finally sated. I turned to him to tell him how much I loved him and that I would kill myself if he didn’t marry me this instant, and that’s when I saw the sight that changed me forever: a single tear residing on Dirkland McDander’s muscular cheek. I realized that something was still bothering him. This was going to be harder than I thought.
