A girl tries to seduce a young
man into opening his boss's
package.

What’s in the Box?

My second day on the job at Milburn’s Insurance in Waukegan, my boss sent me to pick up a package at the post office. He’d been cursing because they’d sent him one of those little yellow slips with “postage due” on it instead of just delivering the package to the office.
When I got there, the clerk gave me this package that must’ve weighed at least twenty pounds, perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but if I’d known it was going to be that heavy I would have brought along a push cart or something.
I hoisted it up on my shoulder and was off on my quarter mile journey back, stopping every few blocks to put it down and rub my shoulder. On the way, I began to wonder what could possibly weigh so much. Probably a ton of those boring forms they make everybody fill out. But no, you only needed one of those these days, because of copy machines, computers and such. What the hell could it be? I was kind of curious but if I opened it, I’d get fired.
When I stopped again, a pretty girl in a red convertible drove by, giving me the eye when she stopped at the light at the end of the block. “You look like you need a ride,” she hollered back.
I’m a fairly decent looking guy, if I do say so myself. Curly brown hair and brown eyes to match, and I’ve been pumping a bit of iron, you know, to meet the women who frequent those gyms. Even though I only had another couple of blocks to go, I couldn’t resist.
“What’s in the box?” she said, when I set it down on the floor of the front seat.
“Darned if I know,” I said. “I’m just a gopher, only the second day on the job.”
The light turned green and she put her foot down on the accelerator, doing about ten miles over the speed limit. Before I could say anything, she drove by the office.
“What’s your name?” she said.
“Jim,” I said. “What’s yours?”
“Charlotte. Don’t you hate it? I keep thinking of that story, Charlotte’s Web. I don’t know how my mother could’ve done such a thing to me. Let’s open the package, Jim. I’ll bet there’s money in it.”
“I really doubt it,” I said. “I work for an insurance agency. They get paid by check or the money’s wired to the bank direct.” She stopped at another light a couple of blocks from where I was supposed to be. “You drove by my stop,” I said. She really wasn’t that good looking. One of her front teeth overlapped the other, and her nose was a bit too big for her face.
“You don’t look like the type to work in an insurance company,” she said. “That must be the most boring job in the world. What do you do all day?”
A car to the rear honked and she noticed the light had changed. One again she accelerated and a block later she turned on to the Interstate.
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” I said. “I never graduated college. What do you do?”
She smiled. “I’m an expensive call girl. Let’s look in the box. I’m thinking your boss is trying to pull one over on somebody. Don’t they usually get their stuff sent Federal Express?”
“How should I know? Like I said, this is only my second day. Are you really a prostitute?”
“Why, don’t you think I’m pretty enough?”
“I think you look like Jennifer Aniston.”
“Wow, never heard that one before. Have you ever been to a prostitute?”
“Once when I was in the service. Didn’t like it much because she wouldn’t let me kiss her.”
“When you get paid a thousand dollars a night, you let them kiss you. We going to open that package, Jim?”
“Nah, it’s not worth the risk. It took me six months to get this job. What if the John is a fat bastard with body odor and a wart on his nose?”
“I just close my eyes and imagine he’s Brad Pitt. I don’t think you really want to go back to the office, Jim. If you did, you wouldn’t have taken me up on my offer of a ride. Why don’t you and I hook up? We could go to Vegas and see some shows. After we open the box, that is.”
“We’re not opening the box.”
She turned into the passing lane and put the pedal to the medal. She was doing a good ninety miles an hour, and I was getting farther and farther away from the office. We were well on our way to Milwaukee. “I just have a feeling there’s something really valuable in that box. Don’t you ever do anything spontaneous, Jim?”
“I got in the car, didn’t I?”
“You married, Jim?”
“Thinking about it. That’s why I need to keep this job. You better let me out if you’re not going to take me back. I can hitchhike back.”
“Believe me, Jim. You don’t want to get out. You got a picture of your fiancee?”
I opened my wallet and flipped through the picture section looking for Gracie’s high school graduation photo, found it, and handed it to Charlotte.”
She made a face. “No wonder she’s letting you work in an insurance office. What a sourpuss.”
I’d always thought that Gracie was as attractive as the next girl, but she was right. She wasn’t smiling in the photo. As a matter of fact, she looked rather like one of those women you see on the wanted posters on the post office bulletin board.
We were approaching a rest stop with a kind of mini-mall attached. There was a restaurant next to the gas station. She took the exit and parked. “You hungry, Jim? I’m famished. We’ll have a bit to eat, and we’ll talk about opening the box.”
I had a couple of eggs, toast, and sausages. She had pancakes. “I’ll pay you a hundred dollars if you’ll open the box, Jim,” she said.
“What good is a hundred dollars going to do me if I lose my job?”
“Tell you what, you can have it rewrapped if it’s something boring like insurance forms. Or we could just rip open one side, enough to see what’s inside, and you could say the box was like that when you picked it up.”
“I can’t take the chance.”
She took a bite of pancake, chewing carefully, giving me a good once over. “What if I let you sleep with me for nothing. There’s a motel back there about a half mile. I’ll bet you and Miss Sourpuss have never actually done it, have you?”
We hadn’t, but I’m a guy, so I find it hard to admit. “We do it all the time. We’re like an old married couple.”
“Old married couples sleep in separate beds.” Charlotte did have an incredible body and she was wearing a red dress with one of those slits, showing her cleavage. I was beginning to develop a boner of mammoth proportions. That was when she put her foot between my legs. “Ooh, I see you’re interested. What about it?”
“We open the box after we have sex, right?”
“Right.”
#
“Why does her mouth look like that?” Charlotte said. We’d gone to bed all right, and I’d actually gotten all the way to third base before she started crying, admitting finally that she was not a professional escort and that she was afraid I’d put my thing up her bung hole if she let me go any further.
“I won’t put my thing up your bung hole, unless you want me to,” I argued.
“I don’t know you well enough to have sex with you, but I still expect to be paid for what I did let you do.”
“I barely touched you,” I said.
“Let’s open the box, Jim. I have to see what’s in there.”
It was one of those rubber women that guys have sex with who can’t get women. They sell for something like eighty bucks on the Internet. I’d been tempted a time or two to buy one, but I didn’t want to take the chance my mother, or worse yet, my girlfriend would find it. This one’s name was Candy and instead of lips she had an o-shaped orifice where you put your thing when you want to have oral sex with her.
“I don’t know how to put this without grossing you out,” I said.
“Oh my God!” she said. “You don’t mean it!”
“I’m afraid so. Some guys are awfully desperate.”
“I wonder how they clean her when they’re finished.”
“I think her mouth pops out.”
She gave me a look. “You sure know an awful lot about this Candy person.”
“The last time I looked she was a doll, and I’m only using common sense.”
“Whatever. Tell you what, Jim. See this manifest? It’s addressed to Mr. Brent Wilson, which means he can’t lie about not knowing what he ordered. Let’s make some money off this dude. Diddling a rubber woman is almost as bad as doing it with another woman. He won’t want that to get around.”
“Absolutely not.”
“If you don’t, I will.”
“No you won’t. I won’t let you.”
She gave me a “from what planet are you?” look. “I think he’s good for at least five hundred dollars.”
“It’s been fun, Charlotte, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“You’re going to get fired anyway. It’s eleven thirty and you’ve been gone for at least three hours. He’s going to want to know where you’ve been. Besides, you won’t be able to rap the box and make it look as good as new without me to help you. Guys don’t know how to wrap presents.”
“I used to work at JC Penney’s over Christmas. I can wrap like a motherfucker.”
“You certainly do have a potty mouth on you.”
“You should talk. I think you’re the devil.”
“Did I tell you I’m only sixteen?”
“Oh my God! My life is over!” We sat there looking at each other. For a second, I thought about doing it to her anyway, since I was going to go to jail for statutory rape and hadn‘t even gotten any sex, but it was just a second since I’m not that kind of guy. Lisa, y girlfriend before Gracie, used to make fun of me for stopping when she said no instead of sweet-talking her into doing it like the other guys did, then she told everybody at school about the whole incident and I was a laughing stock.
We stopped at Hardware Hank’s to buy some clear tape and I wrapped the box back up as good as new, then I went back to the office and delivered the box to Mr. Wilson without telling him I’d looked inside. He fired me for showing up three hours and a half hours after I’d left for the post office.
When I got back outside, Charlotte was waiting for me in her car smiling.
“I didn’t do it,” I said. “You’re going to have to blackmail him yourself.”
“Well you passed the test,” she said. “I wouldn’t want a guy around who’d agree to blackmail somebody over a thing like that.”
“And I wouldn’t want a girl around who’d even think of asking me to blackmail somebody,” I said, and walked down the street toward O’Grady’s bar where I got so shit-faced the bartender had to call a cab to take me home.