She'd had some difficulty separating this one from the herd, and now that she had him, she wasn't completely convinced it had been worth the effort. He was certainly young, muscular, handsome enough, but sitting across from the table away from his friends at the bar he seemed more boorish and incoherent than boisterous and funny.

Still, he would do. Gagged and blindfolded, he would do just fine, but that required getting him out of the bar and he wasn't quite getting the point of her bare foot against his leg under the table. He was definitely experiencing some agitation, but she couldn't tell it was due to sexual arousal, beer, or panic. He was obviously hard, but he kept glancing over his shoulder at his friends, who were giving him encouraging thumbs up gestures that made her smile in spite of herself. She knew she was a fine catch, especially for a drunken young man not used to the attention of refined, young-looking older women, but the reinforcement never hurt.

Emboldened, and needy, she leaned forward across the table and grasped his hands firmly. "I want to go home." she said.

That seemed to do it. He nodded dumbly, which she strongly suspected was the only kind of nod he had, and rose to follow, leaving more than enough on the table to pay for their two drinks, the first real mental or emotional positive sign she'd gotten since dragging him there. She let go of his hand as little as possible as they put their coats on against the pre-Christmas chill. She had him now, and had no interest in losing him.

A few steps and they were out, and free. She was starting to flush with excitement already, letting her mid wander ahead as she pushed open the heavy red wood door and stepped out into the very cold. Threading her arm through his she turned to cross the street to walk the block to the house to take him, to use him, to ride him, to come.

But something was not right. Someone was shouting his name. It was all going wrong very quickly. The handsome young man on her arm turned to answer. His friends, too rushed to put on coats, stood outside the side entrance, beckoning urgently for him to come back, the good will implied in their earlier gestures gone completely from their worried faces. Inwardly she cursed. Clearly the friends were smarter and more observant than her catch, smarter than she had originally supposed. They had seen something, or someone, that set them off, probably her husband, who stood quietly now beside them, rising from his own table, putting on his trench coat and following them out the door.

There they stood. Five people outside a bar in the middle of a quiet old neighborhood, a young man on the arm of an at-first-glance young woman, an older gentleman in a trench coat behind them and off to the side, two more drunken young men, perhaps twenty feet away, the three young drunks yelling back and forth, the woman pleading "I want to go home," the older gentleman just watching with the bemused air of someone who likes to watch.

We will never know how the story would have turned out if a curious stranger walking fast down the sidewalk after a long day at work had not wandered into the middle of their little scene, slowing down slightly to observe, record, and interpret the events unfolding around him. Whatever might have happened, the sudden addition of a new character broke the tension. The captured young man, torn between his libido and the obvious concern of his friends, broke free and staggered down the sidewalk shouting "I'm gonna punch you guys in the face" while the woman and the older man linked arms with each other and walked away in the opposite direction, to the warmth and satfey of the their own home, knowing there would be other nights, other bars, and other drunken young men for her to hunt.