Read Online Four Erotic Tales by K. D. West - Free Book Online Page A

were also the women I spent the most time with, since I was working as an actor myself — first as a non-union semi-pro, then as a member of Equity. I actually tried to be anything but an actor, actually – stayed in college an extra year to pick up an MA in English, thinking that I’d apply to PhD programs, become Professor Ken. What a laugh.
    In any case, it was the summer between my senior and MA year that I met my next actress — and my only other Juliet.
    Love,
    Ken

    A vision keeps coming back to me: Veronica lying in my bed as the sun rises over my windowsill and onto her naked, love-marked body, lighting her tangled mass of hair on golden fire. I woke up beside her — beside other women — so many times, and yet that is the image that keeps occupying my mind’s eye. Why?
    The summer after I turned twenty-one, I played Tybalt in a local semi-professional production of Romeo and Juliet and was just recovering from the damage that my two-year relationship with Cindy had done to me. I was dating widely, but not very deeply — at some point during the run, I saw every available woman in the production, except the one I wanted most: Veronica, who played Juliet.
    She was six years older than I was — another actress, another older woman — but looked just out of high school. She had a heart-shaped face dusted with freckles, a halo of fine, flaxen hair, a tiny cupid’s-bow mouth, and a body that was soft and cute though she had the mouth and the strength of a dock worker. She inhabited that body fully. It was a pleasure just to watch her walk. To watch her dance. To watch her stretch on the floor of the greenroom.
    I couldn’t help wanting to inhabit it with her.
    We were performing in an outdoor theater-in-the-round, and I got to watch her during the famous balcony scene every night, because my next entrance came from directly across the way. I’d stand there, looking through curtains at that glowing face and think just how much I wanted to kiss it.
    One night, late in the run, Veronica threw an after-show party at her place, which was an hour’s drive away from the theater. I trooped on up with the rest of cast, including the lady I was dating at the time, Rose, who was playing Lady Capulet. (This made for great fun during my death scene: she would smoosh my supposedly dead body against her very lively one during the speech where she was screaming about how Romeo should be executed. My makeup would get smeared all over her bodice and across her cleavage; I had a hard time breathing, let alone keeping from getting a hard-on, knowing I would be sucking and fucking those tits as soon as the show was down – or, once even, right under the bleachers during the interminably slow scene with the Apothecary.)
    The young man who had been Veronica’s nearly constant companion during the run of the show, Michael, was there too, as was Jenny, a gay techie who had been pursuing Veronica mercilessly throughout the run (Veronica was very open about her bisexuality, but never showed any interest in poor Jenny). We all sat out in Veronica’s back yard, drinking beer and smoking weed, sharing theater stories and flirting like hell with anything that moved.
    At one point we ended up in a very intense conversation about some of the more personal aspects of theater, of being an artist and of having a life too. A bunch of us were talking to begin with, but pretty soon everyone had wandered inside to the kitchen, and it was just Veronica and me. The conversation got more and more passionate, until we suddenly looked up and realized that everyone had gone home, including Veronica’s and my respective sweeties.
    It was three or four in the morning and we had a matinee the next day. The prospect of hopping in my car seemed more than a little daunting after all that beer, pot and talk. Veronica started to walk me to the door, but then turned and said, “You know, you could spend the night here, and head back down in the