**The Mirror**
As a woman in your early 20s, you are terribly bored. Guilt hangs over your head on a daily basis because you know that you’ve never fulfilled your potential. You look at yourself in the mirror. You’re worried that your hair is starting to thin out from the stress. You’re worried that your stomach is starting to push out too far under your tits. The black jeans you just put on are tighter than they were a few months ago.
You try to hide away from yourself the fact that you didn’t buy them that long ago and that you bought them because your previous pair was getting too tight. It’s hard to wait tables for nine or ten hours at a time with pants that feel like they’re cutting off the circulation to half of your body.
You take your dark brown hair up from where it hangs to the middle of your back and put it up in a mess on the back of your head with a large clip. You look at your makeup and feel the same disappointment that you always do before telling yourself, “Fuck it. It’s good enough for a reject Waffle House.”
You hear a cold winter rain starting to hit the roof over your head as you throw your keys in your pocket. You attach your name tag that reads “Leda” to your sweater before you head downstairs from your second-story apartment to the diner on the first floor.
**Cold Waves**
You clock in a minute late and roll your eyes at the thought of the assistant manager Mick chastising you for being late when he finds out. You saw him when you came in and purposefully walked around the opposite end of the counter to avoid going by him. He’s always got something nice to say, and you don’t need to hear it today.
You sometimes feel guilty for always turning him down. You do want attention from men; you just want it from men who aren’t like him. He’s nice, but he’s too nice, and he definitely couldn’t give you what you need.
You come out from the back room just as Mick is walking in. As he walks by, you see his glance at your tits, and a cold self-conscious wave hits you. They are the only things to get you attention from men, and you’re proud of them while simultaneously hating that you have them. You hate the attention that they bring because you feel like it’s the only thing that the men who visit the diner care about in you.
Your thoughts hit you like they always do: You do nothing but work, sit at home and make an occasional trip to Walmart. You aren’t sure what type of men you’re supposed to meet with a routine like that as you walk up to a table of a mother and her two young boys to take their order.
Handing the ticket off to the cook through the back window, you get the threesome their drinks and post up behind the counter. It’s dead in the diner, and you’re almost hypnotized by watching the rain starting the beat down outside of the huge glass window that lines the entire wall on each side of the front door opposite of you.
**Dragon in the Lake**
Out the window a little while later, you see a black Lincoln Continental pull up. You think back to the white one your dad used to have that everyone said made him look like a cop. Out of the driver’s seat is a very large man holding an umbrella. He walks around to the opposite rear door and hands the umbrella off to his passenger before getting back in the car and driving away.
You can’t make out the details of what’s going on because of the rain, but it stood out to you as the sort of thing that didn’t happen in front of your little diner every day.
The man with his umbrella proceed to walk up to the front door of the diner. Once he’s under the awning, you can see him a bit better. You see that he’s wearing a black topcoat and black pants as he shakes off his umbrella. When he turns to look through the diner window, he glances around before looking right at you. He locks with your eyes for a moment before looking back down at his umbrella as he wraps it up and latches it together.
Coming through the front door of the diner, you hear the little bell attached above the hinges give its little ring. You can’t take your eyes off of him as you wonder who he is. People dressed like him don’t come to your town, let alone your diner.
His white dress shirt has its first two buttons open under his black overcoat. That overcoat comes off and hangs on the back of a tall chair at the counter to expose his black suit jacket and broad shoulders. He has a seat in the same chair where he hung his coat and over at you.
Two things simultaneously hit you. First, you realize that he’s waiting on you to come take his order. Second, you’ve been staring at him for two beats too long. “Shit.” Visibly flustered, you quickly look down and away while you walk over and ask what he would like.
**Dancing With the Devil**
“Two BLTs on wheat, an order of fries and a Sprite, please.”
“Sure thing. It’ll be just a few minutes.”
You hand the ticket off to the cook through the back window in a motion so mechanical that it could have only been perfected through a thousand or two repetitions over the past few years that you’ve worked there since getting out of high school.
When you take the man at the counter his Sprite, you recite, “Let me know if you need anything,” with the same mechanical efficiency that comes with the same kind of practice. After getting caught staring, you decide to leave the man alone at his end of the counter while you post up on the far end behind the register and pull out your crossword puzzle, hiding it on the shelf just below the back of the register so that no one sees just how big of a dork you are.
You think back to high school, sitting with a crossword puzzle under your notebook in class. Your teachers would always try to get you to pay better attention, but you just couldn’t bring yourself to care. You made all A’s and were salutatorian of your class. But all of that seems so long ago. Now you’re here. Maybe this is what you deserve.
A few minutes pass before the cook lets out, “Order up!” You take the mother and her two boys a tray full of plates, and the boys need refills. As you walk past, you see the man at the counter walking down to the opposite end to enter the bathroom. Coming back to drop off the drinks for the boys, you see that he is working on his own crossword puzzle, out in the open for anyone to see.
**The Birth of Woman**
“Order up!”
You’re snapped out of your puzzle as you go into auto-pilot to pick up the plate. Two BLTs, no mayonnaise and fries. When you turn around to sit down the plate to the man at the counter, he’s looking directly into your eyes.
“Thank you.”
You glance down at his puzzle, and before you can catch yourself, you blurt out, “You like crossword puzzles?”
“Yeah.”
He’s still looking right at you. His eyes are a deep brown and match his tanned complexion. His face has neatly trimmed stubble, and his hair is almost as short, buzzed completely over.
“Well, if you need anything, I’ll be down at the register.”
“Alright.”
A self-conscious wave hits you. “You’re such an idiot,” you think to yourself as you post up behind the register and slide your crossword out from under it once again.
You space out into your own world seeing the words come together. You wonder what this man, dressed like this, is doing in the diner. You think back to your high school days as you put together the crossword clues in your head. You think about your friends back then and what they must be doing now in college. No wait, most of them are probably about to graduate. You would have been about to graduate.
**Cold Water**
“Excuse me.”
You look up to see the man standing with his ticket ready to pay. His overcoat is back on. Your thoughts flash to wonder how long he was standing there.
You take his credit card and steal a glance down at the name: Seth Cunningham. As you ring him up, you can feel your face getting hot. This man must think you’re a total idiot. Your self-loathing starts to peek its head out.
“Titan who lacked foresight.”
You’re snapped out of ringing up the man’s total.
“What?”
“Titan who lacked foresight. Ten letters. Sixth letter is T. Ends in an S.”
You look down and realize he’s holding his crossword. You’re stuck like a deer in headlights. A couple of seconds pass, but they feel like forever.
“Epimetheus. E-P-I-…,” pours out. The letters blow past your self-conscious walls as the man writes them across the margins of his puzzle. He looks at them for a moment, looks up at you and looks down again.
The tension of his pause makes you feel like you’re about to be torn apart as you feel judged in front of this man.
“I think that fits.”
When he writes those letters into the grid, it feels like a 100-pound weight is taken off of your chest. Something deep inside of you lights up. You recognize that feeling. You haven’t felt it in a long time. You did something right.
You hand him back his card and a receipt to sign. He signs it with his own pen and hands it back to you.
“Have a nice day, Leda.”
As the man walks out the door, you see him stand with his back to the window. The same black Lincoln Continental pulls up as before, and he enters the rear passenger door before it pulls off.
You’re savoring the feeling of validation this man’s crossword clue gave you before your bubble is popped by Mick’s whiny voice.
“Leda, I think we need to talk about you clocking in late again.”
**Release**
As you enter your apartment and walk through to your bedroom, the soreless in your legs and feet starts to set in. It’s less noticeable when you’re zoning out while you stare out the big diner window and have the counter to lean on, but once you have the option to sit down, it hits you like a brick wall.
You begin the same routine you always have. You kick off your shoes at the door and start taking off your black jeans. You wander into the bathroom and start taking off your makeup. On auto-pilot as you go through the same motions you’ve done five or six days a week for the past few years, your mind stays on what it’s been on all afternoon: Seth Cunningham and his crossword clue.
You replay what happened over and over in your mind as your hands go through the motions of their routine. You feel guilt wash over you from the validation you felt whenever you gave the answer to his clue, and you start to speak out to yourself, something that happens often in front of the mirror.
“You’re so fucking stupid. He probably thinks you’re a fucking idiot. Why can’t you just keep your fucking mouth sh–”
You stop yourself mid-speech. Your eyes are glued to your light blue in the mirror. You’re fixated on how absolutely soaked they are.
Then it hits you: In all of your self-loathing, it never occurred to you how ridiculously horny the entire interaction made you.
As you finish your routine in silence, you peel off your panties and throw them in the general direction of a hamper in the corner of your bedroom. Your body crashes onto the bed in exhaustion as it normally does. A quick glare at the clock reads 6:37 pm.
You make a joke to yourself about being an old lady who goes to bed so early, but you can think of nothing but sleep and the mess between your legs.
Your left hand darts straight to the opening between your pussy lips as you curl two fingers inside of you and pull up. Your right middle finger rolls over your clit under the palm of your left hand. You think of Seth Cunningham standing in front of you at the register. You think of the feeling you felt when he wrote those letters into his crossword puzzle.
A flash of how ridiculous this is comes and goes, overwhelmed by how turned on you are.
You want to give yourself to him. You want to give yourself to this gorgeous man who might as well be old enough to be your father. You want him to tell you that you were good and that you did something right.
You see yourself looking up at him from across the register.
“Good girl.”
Your left hand curls as your right hand furiously spasms. Your back arches violently as you kick up on your feet and then fall to your right side before rolling all the way over onto your stomach. Your entire body pulses and convulses. You are absolutely soaked. Every bit of your being is spent.
“Fuck.”
The last thing that crosses your mind before you collapse into sleep from exhaustion.
Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/ahz8dx/ledas_puzzle_01_mdomfemsubmast