Podcasts about Pendergast

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins sits down with author Frank Hayde to explore his latest book, Hoffa's Connection. Hayde, a Kansas City native and noted mob historian, brings forward a largely overlooked figure in organized crime history—Sylvia Pagano. The conversation centers on Pagano's rise from Kansas City to Detroit, where she operated at the intersection of organized crime and labor unions under Jimmy Hoffa. Known for her effectiveness as a union organizer, Pagano infiltrated workplaces, signed up members, and quietly maintained ties to powerful mob figures. Her ability to navigate both worlds made her a key behind-the-scenes operator during a volatile era in American labor history. Hayde details Pagano's role in helping broker alliances between the Mafia and the Teamsters during a turbulent strike, marking a turning point in the relationship between organized crime and labor. Drawing from FBI wiretaps, he reveals candid conversations that shed light on her relationships with influential mob leaders like Tony Giacalone and Moe Dalitz, emphasizing her strategic importance across multiple crime families. The episode also explores the life of Chucky O’Brien, who grew up surrounded by Hoffa and organized crime figures. Through Hayde's research and interviews, listeners gain insight into the generational impact of mob ties, as well as the strict code of silence that governed both mother and son. Beyond individual stories, the discussion expands to the broader national network connecting crime families and labor unions. Pagano's reach extended well beyond regional boundaries, illustrating how organized crime leveraged union influence across the country. This episode offers a fresh perspective on the enduring mystery surrounding Hoffa's disappearance by examining the deeper historical context—and the overlooked players like Sylvia Pagano who helped shape it. It's a detailed look at power, loyalty, and survival within the American Mafia. The book is Hoffa’s Connections:The Story of Sylvia Pagano: the Kansas City Girl at the Center of the Mafia’s Alliance with the Teamsters Union  xxx [0:00] Hey, all you wiretappers out there, good to be back here in the studio of Gangland [0:03] Wire. This is Gary Jenkins. I’m a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective, later sergeant. I have this podcast, Gangland Wire. I’ve got a website. If you want to go check my website out, I’ve got a few things for sale on there. And you can go rent the documentaries I’ve done about the Kansas City mob on Amazon. Just search my name. I’m all over the internet. Just search my name and mafia and you’ll find more you ever wanted to know about me and the mob and what I’ve done. And today I have a really a former Kansas City boy, a Kansas City native who has done several books on the mob, particularly the Kansas City mob. And he’s got a most recent one that I find just really fascinating. It’s a little known story that will help shed the light on Jimmy Hoffa, a little bit more light than most of you ever knew. There’s some questions that I had myself that’s not really in the in the popular culture about Jimmy Hoffa. It’s Frank Hayde. Welcome, Frank. Thanks, Gary. Great to be with you again. All right, Frank. We’ve done Mafia Dreams and Mafia and the Machine. So tell the guys a little bit about yourself and your books. [1:13] I grew up in Kansas City. My family stretches way back in Kansas City, and they were involved in the political machine under Pendergast, and so I heard a lot of stories about those days growing up. Later in my career with the National Park Service, I worked a short stint at the Harry Truman National Historic Site, where I learned more about local history, more about the political machine and the mob in Kansas City. So that’s where my interest started. [1:39] And then many years later, I wrote The Mafia and the Machine, and then followed that up with some of these other books, including this most recent one, Hoffa’s Connection, the story of Sylvia Pagano, the Kansas City girl at the center of the Mafia’s alliance with the Teamsters. You know, that’s the mouthful, I know. You know how it is with the subtitle. You can try to get the, summarize the entire book in your subtitle. So, that’s what that is. Yeah. When you look up a book or you see it online or whatever, you want to know quickly what it’s about. So I see that title, Hoffa. Oh, that’s interesting. I thought everything was done about Hoffa. Then you got this subtitle in here and you say, oh, that’s interesting. I didn’t know about this. And I didn’t myself, this Sylvia Pagano. And the story starts in Kansas City. It’s a fascinating story, guys. I want to tell you, it is a fascinating story. [2:31] But before we get started, Frank was a park ranger, a law enforcement park ranger for the National Park Service for 20 years. And he has a really interesting mob interaction when he was in, I believe you run a temporary assignment out in California. Tell the guys about your mafia interaction as a law enforcement officer. [2:53] Yeah. So I was actually at the park service 32 years. 20 of those were law enforcement and just retired. But in the summer of 2024, I got to go out to Redwood National Park on what we call a detail, which is a temporary assignment. They were shorthanded and needed a little extra help. And I knew the place pretty well because I had worked there earlier in my career. So I went out there and it’s a beautiful place. And I was on patrol and I came upon a campsite and there was some violations going on. Nothing major, just the typical stuff that we see as park rangers. And I contacted the occupants of this campsite and I got their licenses and I was back in my vehicle running the licenses. There was a male and a female and the female, I noticed it was a New York license and Brooklyn address and last name is Scarpa. I said, no, that can’t be. That’d be too much of a coincidence. And ran the information, recontacted the subject. And I asked the female, I said, by any chance, are you related to Greg Scarpa? She said, oh, yeah, that was my grandfather. And Greg Jr. was my father. [4:02] And I guess I had to laugh. And by then, I had already written a ticket or two, I think, for just petty offenses. And so I handed her ticket and then asked her if she’d take a picture with me. But she was real nice. She understood that people don’t mind, and she was great. She took a picture with me, and she was more than happy to talk about her father and her grandfather. And it was all very interesting and just quite the coincidence. Yeah, really. That was quite a coincidence. Not only the main coincidence was that you knew her. And then a lot of people might know the name. You really knew the name. Yeah, no. And you had this whole interest in it to talk about. Yeah, I can tell you that 99% of park rangers, you have no idea. Now, if you’re a Brooklyn cop, that’s different. But I was probably the only park ranger alive that would have made that connection because of my interest in the topic. I’ve been trying to get Greg Scarlett Jr. to come on. He’s made some intimations to somebody else. He followed my Facebook group, and I followed his. And so I don’t know. I reached out indirectly. I don’t know exactly how to get a hold of him. Maybe I’ll package this little story up and I’ll send that to him. Maybe that’ll get him to come on the show. Except you wrote the tickets, damn it. That’s the problem. I hope he won’t come after me to write in his daughter’s tickets. Yeah. [5:25] All right, Frank. So let’s go in this most recent book, Hoffa’s Connection. How did you, Sylvia Pagano, how did you even get onto that name other than, did you start, she’s Chucky O’Brien’s mother, who most guys know if you’re really into Hoffa at all, or even on the little bit, Chucky O’Brien was, everybody thought he was like his illegitimate son a lot of times or his surrogate son. And he was really close to Hoffa and drove him around. I was going through your book. He was a guy that Hoffa could send around to other mob people because he was half Italian himself and both sides trusted him to carry messages and do meetings and things like that. So how did you get onto this originally? So I got a call from Jack Goldsmith, who’s a very interesting man because he is the learned hand professor of law at Harvard University, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, former assistant attorney general under President Bush. But for me, the most interesting thing about him was that he is Chucky O’Brien’s stepson. [6:29] And he was working on his book, Inhofe’s Shadow, when he contacted me. It’s a great book. I would recommend it to all the wiretappers. But it’s about Chucky. And he wanted to know if I had come across any information on Chucky O’Brien in my research for the Mafia and the Machine, because Chucky was from Kansas City. I said, what? Chucky O’Brien was from Kansas City? Because I knew all about Chucky O’Brien, but I had no idea he was from Kansas City. So that shocked me. And I don’t think very few people knew that. His Kansas City roots were scarcely known. Everybody just thought of Chucky as a Detroit guy. But when I finally read Goldsmith’s book, it’s about Chucky, but he touches on Sylvia. And I found what he wrote about Sylvia to be completely fascinating, especially because she was Kansas City. And so I thought, shoot, she’s in my wheelhouse. I thought, wow, she would make a great subject for a book. But I balked at it because she was so secretive that she left hardly anything information, hardly any documents exist about Sylvia. It’s just she wasn’t like the men that she associated with who were so extensively documented. There was just very little known about her, not even very many photographs in existence. [7:44] But fortunately, I got together with Pat Faisal in Kansas City. He’s a terrific researcher. You’ve worked with him a lot, Gary. You’ve had him on your show, I think. I think he’s written a couple of really important books on local history, and he had come across her independently of me, and through his own research, he had stumbled on just a brief mention or two of Sylvia Pagano in various FBI documents. [8:09] And so we decided to put our heads together, and Pat helped me with the research, did the lion’s share of the research, fed it to me, and then I would write the story. And that’s how it came together. [8:21] Interesting. And Frank, one of the coolest things, the research that Pat found was those wiretaps or bugs that the illegal bugs the FBI had in her house. And so they got a lot of really great conversations and they’re all transcribed and out there for somebody to find. So to me, that was fascinating. [8:45] Yes, that was probably our best source are these transcripts from the illegal microphones that the FBI placed in homes and businesses of organized crime associates all over the country back in the 60s. Got some great information from those. Sylvia talking freely in her apartment. Candidly, because she doesn’t know anybody’s list. And they had him in Tony Giacalone’s home juice company in Detroit also. And Sylvia was often a topic of conversation over there as well. By the way, Tony Giacalone was Sylvia’s paramour for many years. They had a long affair. People who think that Sylvia had an affair with Hoffa that produced Chucky O’Brien, [9:28] And that is not accurate. Chucky, we know who Chucky’s father was. He was a criminal out of St. Louis from the time he was a boy and went to prison when he was a young guy, was recruited from prison to come to Kansas City and work as a driver, for none other than Charlie Banagio. And so that put him right at the center of the action. [9:53] And Sylvia, having married the young man that put her right, she was already at the center of the action because she knew all the movers and shakers in the North End at that time already from the time she was a girl. But they became very much a part of Banagio’s network. And this was one fact that really blew me away that I didn’t know. And I don’t think you know it or Owsley or O’Malley or really anybody in Kansas City that Charlie Banagio was Chuckie O’Brien’s godfather. Yeah, I didn’t know that. Yeah. That is interesting. So Sylvia Pagano, she lives down there in the North End, what we call the North End folks, which is our little Italy. There’s a big church that anchors that neighborhood. And that’s where all the people came from Southern Italy and Sicily, moved into Kansas City and were associated with the church down there. After them, the Vietnamese came in and the church sponsored a lot of the Vietnamese and settled in that same neighborhood as it became a shifting neighborhood. So she’s down over there in Little Italy or the North End. And she meets a guy named Michael. Was it Three Fingers? [11:03] Oh, yeah. Frankie. Frankie Three Fingers. Coppola. Coppola, yeah. So tell us about that relationship. Yeah, that’s really interesting because Frankie Three Fingers… Hasn’t really been chronicled much as part of the Kansas City family. Because he was a roving guy, he had a lot of clout in both Italy and the U.S., and he had memberships in multiple families, and he was a high-ranking status too. So wherever he went, whether it was Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Louis, New York, New Orleans, he was all over the place, and he was well-respected wherever he went. But he was in Kansas City for quite a long time. He was strongly associated with Padagio. And it appears from all the evidence, as well as testimony from organized crime experts in Detroit, that Frankie Three Fingers escorted Sylvia to Detroit after her marriage with Charles O’Brien ended in about 1941 in Kansas City. [12:13] So Sylvia arrives in Detroit on the arm of Frank Coppola, and that put her on the fast track to getting to know the upper echelon of the Detroit family and mobsters, top mobsters beyond Detroit. Coppola was associated with Costello in his slot machine racket down in New Orleans. [12:36] And later, after he got deported back to Italy, He worked with Lucky Luciano to put together the whole narcotics syndicate network that included the French Connection. So tremendously influential as a mobster. Sylvia could really not have picked a more influential and well-connected guy as a boyfriend. That really put her on the fast track to getting to know a lot of the most powerful guys in the country. Really interesting guy. Frank Copeland. I’ll just say it and maybe someone else can run with it. I don’t know if it’ll be me or not, but he would make a great subject for a book. Yeah, he’s not very well known. And the mob used to have this guy, Nikolai Gentile. He traveled around to different families and brokered different deals. I think back before communication was so fast and you didn’t fly from one city to the other, you had to take a train. That’s a whole day on the train to get one city to the other. Telephone communication wasn’t that good. You didn’t hardly make long distance phone calls back there in the 20s and 30s. I don’t think they were hard. So you have guys like this that then travel around and take messages that are trusted by the different cities. And so he had to be one of those guys. [13:52] You’re exactly right. In fact, he knew Nicola Gentile. [13:58] Gentile is also, I speak about him in this book also. He plays a role, a pretty important one, and he describes some events that are really fascinating. This story actually doesn’t begin in Kansas City. It begins in Pueblo, Colorado. There’s three geographic areas that are really emphasized in this story. Pueblo, Colorado, Kansas City, and Detroit. But Nicola Gentili and Frank Coppola knew each other in the United States, and they knew each other in Italy. And you’re exactly right, they had a similar role as traveling diplomats within the mafia. Very interesting. Not too many other guys, especially later on. They had Johnny Roselli, who was really well-traveled, and some others. But in those early days, a couple of these guys, Coppola, Gentile, I don’t know if there was any others or not, but that was what they did. They were all over the place, and they were so well-connected, and they really had memberships in multiple families. And that seems to have faded away later. You didn’t hear too much about guys that had more than one member. So occasionally somebody would switch families, but yeah, they were really interesting, [15:11] real, what you would call international mystery men, I think. Interesting. So she had an affair with him, and he brought her up to Detroit and started making connections in Detroit, if I remember the story right, with the Jackalones. And so what. [15:27] Take us on from there. How does she then move in with Hoffa? And she’s like in the middle between the Peckerwood truck drivers and the Italian mob, which they both needed each other and they worked well together for a long time. So how does she end up in the center of that? Yeah, she’s still quite young when she gets to Detroit. She’s just early 20s, maybe mid 20s at that point. But and here she is she’s immediately meeting all of the wise guys but she was still she needed a job she needed work i’m sure coppola helped her out to some extent but he had his own wife he had his own he probably had another mistress or two as well i mean she needed to make a she needed to make a living and raise her son chucky and um she got a job with the teamsters at that time in In Detroit, unions were strong. There was a lot of unions, and it was the capital of industrial unionism at that time. And so that just became a natural choice. She ended up meeting Burke Brennan initially, actually, even before Hoffa. Brennan was Hoffa’s right-hand guy. [16:36] And he gave her a job with the Teamsters as a salter. She was an organizer, and a good one, and a legit organizer. But her specialty was salting. Now, what’s that? So she was a union representative, and she would get a job in a factory or a warehouse, just an ordinary job. And she would go to work, just like everybody else, punch the clock. But while she was there, her real objective was signing other people up to join the union. So she’s like a secret agent in a way, buried into the normal workforce, but with a real different agenda. And she was real good at it. And the union guys noticed that she worked really hard and she was loyal and that she would keep her mouth shut. And so those were the same qualities that the mob guys admired. So this was at the time, though, and this is very important, when most of the unions and the mob were still at odds with each other. Back then, the gangsters were getting hired by companies to break strikes and to oppose unions. [17:47] And there was a particularly bad strike going on. It lasted a long time. The Teamsters were striking the Detroit Lumber Company. This was at about 42. And it was violent. And Hoffa could see the writing on the wall that the Teamsters were losing the battle. It went on and on. It was violent. And that’s where Sylvia Pagano stepped in. Burt Brennan told Jimmy Hoffa he should talk to Facci. Facci was Italian for face. And that was Sylvia’s nickname that she got when she was young back in Kansas City. Had a very pretty face. And so they called her the face. So Hoffa talked to Fauci and she set up a basically like a summit meeting peace conference, more or less. And they brokered a deal where the mob switched sides and became allies with the Teamsters against the Detroit Lumber Company. So that was really the moment that changed history, brought the mafia into the Teamsters orbit and vice versa. And that’s all traceable right back to Sylvia Pagano. [18:55] Wow. That’s interesting. I always wondered what the genesis of that was with Hoffa and the mob. And of course, we can see how it developed, but what that actual birth of that was. I think you’ve stumbled across the birth of it. You also… [19:11] We’re able to stumble across the birth of the Eastern families and New York families connection to Hoffa, which that that gets even bigger. Tell us a little bit about that. She was involved in that, believe it or not, guys. And just like in Detroit, back in New York, there’s Johnny Dio. He was busting up labor union strikes for the companies. Yeah, I think that to some degree in New York, New Jersey, that some Teamsters locals had already been infiltrated by the mafia independently and maybe unbeknownst to Hoffa in Detroit. But it really became a big thing with Hoffa and with Sylvia’s brokering that alliance. Little isolated examples of mob infiltration, I think, were already happening in Detroit. But once again, as Hoffa’s progressing in his career, moving up the ranks, he always had his eye on the top job. He wanted to be the president of the IBT. And of course, he knew he needed help in the Northeast for that, to realize that goal. And so with Sylvia helped set up meetings with Tony Ducks Corral Johnny Diagordi Tony Provenzano and Sylvia had gotten to know Provenzano in Detroit because he had strong connections to Detroit let’s see his cousin was married to. [20:39] Tony Giacalone’s cousin was married to Tony Pro, I believe, or vice versa. That’s your book. Yeah. I’d have to go back and read my own book. Yeah, it’s hard to keep up. Hard to remember all the details. All these players. Giacalone’s cousin was married to Provenzano. And so Sylvia had already met Provenzano in Detroit. And Chucky, her son, had already started calling him Uncle Tony. And so she had this great connection to Provenzano. And so she helped facilitate the Teamsters Mob Alliance in New York and New Jersey, just as she had in Detroit. And then it goes on from there. Then she later, we’re moving forward now, but she would later become the link between Hoffa and his closest contact in Cleveland, which was Moe Daylitz. She became the link between Hoffa and Alan Dorfman in Chicago. And she became the link between Hoffa and the Sevilla brothers in Kansas City. So she really was, and this is all, they taught, there’s a, from those FBI tapes, those illegal FBI tapes, we have Tony Zarelli and Nick Sevilla in Florida speaking about Sylvia Pagano and her relationship as a liaison between the Detroit family and between the Kansas City family. Like, there’s your proof right there. Not that you need it. She was really… [22:09] The guys, a lot of them really liked, adored her in the sense of she did have an affair with a couple of them, and she was a good-looking woman. A lot of them had, Moe Dalitz was known to have a crush on Sylvia, possibly an affair with Sylvia. But she was more than your mob mole, right? She was a dealmaker. She was an advisor. She was a liaison. She brought money to the table. She did deals with the guys. She helped broker some pension fund loans, all these things. So what I like to say about Sylvia is that we all know that the mob never inducted women into their ranks. But if they had, Sylvia Pagana would have been their first choice because she worked hard. She was loyal. [22:56] She kept her mouth shut. And she really lived truer to the code than some of the men did. She was 100% omerta. She really was. and she learned that in the north end of Kansas City, where Umerta was extremely strong even up into this century after it wasn’t so strong in other places and so she passed that on to Chucky O’Brien. He was also a real strong adherent to the code of silence. Yeah, I think we have to remember Chucky O’Brien was half Italian. His father was Italian. No. [23:33] So his mother, Sylvia, was the Italian. Mother, Sylvia, yeah. Yeah, his dad was Irish. Yeah, I got that mixed up. Exactly, asked backwards. But yeah, he was half Italian. And so he really talked the talk, and he moved right in. All these guys were like his uncle, Uncle Nick, Uncle Quirk, and that kind of thing. So he came back to Kansas City. Tell a little bit about Chuckie O’Brien and Kansas City. Yeah, so in 1950, he’d been in Detroit for about nine years by that point. 1950, he’s getting into high school age, and Sylvia sent him back to Kansas City to live on Independence Avenue with his grandparents, and he went to Cardinal Glennon High School. [24:13] And became a good athlete, started dating a gal from the old neighborhood who was a lot like Sylvia. I think that’s really interesting because Chucky really idolized his mother, but he never really, when he was young at least, got to spend as much time with her as he wanted. He spent a lot of time back in Kansas City. He spent a lot of time at his uncle’s house in Detroit because Sylvia was so busy with Hoffa and with the mob. So here’s Chucky in Kansas City. He meets a gal from Sylvia’s old neighborhood who has other things in common with Sylvia and who even looks, in my opinion, quite a lot like Sylvia. And he would eventually take her back to Detroit and marry her and have a family together. But his main objective, it really in Kansas City wasn’t so much going to school. It was becoming a truck driver. He wanted to become a truck driver so that he could put himself on the path to becoming a union organizer like his hero and surrogate father, Jimmy Hoffa. And according to Chucky, Uncle Nick and Uncle Cork got him his first job as a driver and got him his first union card with local 541. [25:23] And this was right at the time when Local 541 was becoming ground zero for labor strife and union corruption in the United States. And Gary, you said a key word earlier, which was Peckerwood. And that’s who was running the Kansas City Teamsters at the time. It was dominated by Peckerwood guys, country boys, basically, and like Hoffa. And these guys were just as bad as the Italian gangsters who were more famous. They ran those locals with intimidation and terror, and they were violent, and they were very ambitious. They had political power. [26:08] Make a long story short, in 1953 in Kansas City, we had an inter-union labor war. And it was the Teamsters versus almost every other union in town. And Teamsters were trying to dominate a lot of these other unions is what it was. And so you had a complete paralysis of the entire construction industry for three months. Imagine just all construction stopping for three months in any metro area and how devastating that is to the economy. 23,000 Kansas Citians were out of work. The Teamsters were refusing to pick up or deliver supplies. And that eventually morphed into violence and sabotage. You had guys going into battle at construction sites. People were getting badly injured. People were getting kidnapped. It was, and then furthermore, we had four military defense projects centered in the Kansas City area, and this is right at the height of the Korean War. So these military installations were suffering work stoppages also. So this was unacceptable in Washington. And Congress swooped in with hearings and an investigation. [27:17] And they called this, basically, it was, I think the exact language was something like the most forbidding chapter in the history of American unions, something like that. It was a big deal. This history has been mostly forgotten. But Kansas City was [27:32] completely paralyzed for about three months. And that was the union that was the local mainly primarily local 541 which chucky was a young member of he was too young at that time to get drawn into the politics of the union i don’t believe that he was on the front lines of these these battles and violence that was happening he was just a brand new truck driver at the time but he was part of that in the sense that he was a local a member of the local at the time this stuff was happening so yeah that’s that’s what happened when Chucky came back to Kansas City. [28:07] Interesting. And that must have been the time when Roy Williams started moving up the ladder and the mob was moving in and they moved this auto ring and some of his people out. And Roy Lee Williams must have, with the support of Nick Civella and the local mob, must have moved right on in. Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. The main guy behind all the strife and violence I was just talking about was Orville Ring, classic quintessential Peckerwood guy and then after all this happened Hoffa swooped in and helped negotiate an end to these conflicts in 1953 and, And Nick Civella and his crime family, they were all watching all this from the wings, planning and scheming. Wow, there’s a lot going on here. How can we capitalize on this? [28:50] So in the aftermath of it all, the Savellas basically intimidated Orville Ring out of the Union. He went back to his farm. Later, he was killed in an accident on his farm, which a lot of people thought was the mob, that the mob did it. But it looked probably just an accident. And I think a tractor rolled over on him or something like that. But yeah, Roy Williams. So at this time, just basically the Italians were taken over from the Peckerwoods. There were still some useful Peckerwoods, and they worked together. And Roy Williams was the key guy there. This is when Nick Civella and he started working together to take over the Teamsters in Kansas City. You’re exactly right. And the rest is history. Really? really. Roy Williams is an interesting guy. He was a war hero from World War II. He had several bronze stars and he was a huge war hero, but he knew which side of the bread got the butter. And so he went with that and he went with Nick Civella. And he did, he bucked up to him a few times, but Nick Civella, actually in a famous scene, Nick Civella had him picked up and driven somewhere and shined a bright light in his eyes and said, you will go along with this scheme. [30:05] So it’s, but he kept going along to almost, he almost, he did become the president of the union for a short period of time, almost right there at the end of his life and when everybody was going to jail. But he was Nick Civella’s protege and Nick Civella’s puppet for his whole life and the whole Teamsters union was. [30:24] Yeah and that story you mentioned with the white spotlight shining in his eyes they kidnapped him and took him into this empty warehouse and i always point to that as just one of those. [30:34] Terrifying stories about how the mob used to work and yeah man and that wasn’t the only time that they intimidated roy williams in that manner so he like you said he was this tough guy war hero He was a big guy, and yet even a guy like that can get intimidated into doing whatever these guys tell him to do because his tactics that they used were just terrifying. Yeah. I read one thing where he later on, he claimed when he turned and gave evidence and talked to the Bureau that he claimed that they also threatened his wife and children during one of these sit downs with him. I mean, they did the same thing to Alan Glick out in Las Vegas. Tuffy DeLuna was out there, and he read off Alan Glick’s name of his wife and his children. He said, you may find yourself expendable, but I don’t think you’re going to find your family expendable and read off their names. So there’s two good examples of them. Say that Bob never messes with your family. There’s two good examples of them using the family and family as threats. Yeah. [31:40] It’s very tough. Yeah, it is. I heard knowing Mo Dalitz, to me, that was key because he was such a mover and an operator. Talk a little more about that. He had been in Cleveland. He had to set her up with Bill Presser. And that was primarily Jewish mobsters in Cleveland, seemed to me like. And then he also had all those connections to Chicago to get to Red Dorfman, his son, Alan Dorfman. Talk a little more about that relationship with Mo Dalitz. In Mo Dalitz’s biography, I can’t think of the name of the author at the moment, but that author states that Sylvia was one of Mo Dalitz’s lovers. I’m not sure if that’s true or not. I do think that Mo Dalitz, at the very least, had a crush on Sylvia, but also respected her very much. And she, just as she had with the Detroit family before, she brokered an alliance with Daylitz. What happened was Daylitz had a laundry empire, was a rum runner and a racketeer and a leader in the Jewish mob. But he also had a lot of legitimate businesses, including a laundry empire in Detroit and Cleveland. [32:53] And while he was still in Detroit, before he really made his move to Cleveland, his permanent move to Cleveland, his laundries, along with other laundry owners, they bonded together in an association. And they were very anti-union. And they were basically at odds with the Teamsters. And until Sylvia swooped in. And Sylvia had her own connections by now to the Laundry Workers Union also. So she’s working for the Teamsters, and she’s very close to Hoffa, but she then married a guy named John Paris, who was the head of the Laundry Workers Union. [33:32] So Sylvia knows Hoffa, and she knows the head of the Laundry Workers Union very closely, and she knows Dalitz. So she’s the one who’s positioned to bring these people together, sit them down at the same table, and start working together, start negotiating. And that’s what she did with Daylitz. And so that led to Daylitz paying off Hoffa, basically, to settle this contract on terms that were favorable to Daylitz and the other laundry owners. [34:07] But you could say that Hoffa, in that case, sold out his members, at least at that time. Now, I do want to make it clear that most rank-and-file teamsters for many decades loved Hoffa because he definitely did negotiate some great contracts that brought truck drivers into the middle class, got them very good pay and benefits. And it’s only fair, it’s only right to give him credit because as somebody once said about Hoffa. [34:33] He was always a criminal, but also always a teamster. And he worked very hard for his membership. He never stopped working. And it was sincere, I do believe. But there were times when he, the ends justified the means and he did whatever he had to do to keep the union alive, but also to serve himself and enrich himself. And that was one of those cases where the membership lost out a little bit when Hoffa and Daylitz formed their alliance with the initiation and the help of Sylvia Pagano. Interesting. So let’s go back to Chucky O’Brien for a minute. He goes back up from Kansas City. He ends up back up in Detroit and working very closely with Jimmy Hoffa. And you talked to his son. Yeah. And to make that, and he was probably a huge help and some insight into what his father was like. So talk about Chucky O’Brien when he got back with Hoffa. Yeah, so he goes back to Detroit. [35:31] And he steps right back into the Hoffa family circle because Sylvia became part of the Hoffa family. She was Josephine Hoffa’s best friend. Jimmy Hoffa relied on her not only for important work in the union and for important connections to the mob, but he also relied on her heavily as Josephine’s personal assistant and caretaker. Sylvia worked extremely hard serving other people. And she was an excellent caretaker to Josephine who needed a lot of care, had very poor health, made worse by severe alcoholism. And Sylvia was a wonderful caretaker. But Chucky stepped right back into that family orbit. Later, when his own kids were small, Chucky and his wife and his kids moved into the Hoffa house. They’d all lived under the same roof for quite a few years. But Sylvia was really the glue that kept it all together and Chucky’s son who’s also named Chuck O’Brien he was a young boy at this time so his memories of his grandmother. [36:42] And Jimmy Hoffa started when he was a young boy and continued up until Sylvia died when he was in his late teens, but he was a great source for the book helped out a lot I really appreciate him And it was interesting to have direct access to someone who actually lived under the same roof with Jimmy Hoffa. So he was not privy, young Chuck was not privy to any inside information or any mob dealings or anything like that. But he later moved to Kansas City and went to work in the River Key for his uncle at the Godfather Lounge, which just a couple of years later was torched in the River Key War. And then young Chuck had worked in professional hockey for a while. And then he became a truck driver and joined Local 41. And so all this history just comes full circle and repeats itself. And I was a little fascinated by these Sylvia’s grandkids who were born and raised in Detroit. They both ended up back in Kansas City in the land of their parents and their grandparents. And they ended up in the same neighborhoods that Sylvia had been born in many years before. [37:57] Interesting. And Chucky O’Brien, then he’s kind of Hoffa’s driver sometimes. And Aaron Renner on up to the end of Hoffa’s life was even implicated at the very end. Some people claim that he helped set Hoffa up because he was the one person that Hoffa trusted. And that one movie, The Irishman or whatever, really threw a lot of shade on Chucky O’Brien. So how did you deal with that. [38:21] Yeah, I think Chucky got a real bad rap, and as I used to study Hoffa and read all the Hoffa books, I always thought, I always had a very low opinion of Chucky O’Brien, and he became the butt of a joke, and he was portrayed as this blundering, not-too-bright guy who either helped kill his surrogate father or was duped into giving him a ride to where he was killed without knowing what was going on and without being able to, realize it to the point where he could have maybe helped Hoffa. I think Jack Goldsmith put all that to rest. He really changed my opinion of Chucky in his book, but I realized that Chucky had been misunderstood in many ways. Was he involved in Hoffa’s disappearance or not? I think Goldsmith basically vindicates Chucky. [39:15] However, I do believe that there’s still some evidence that could strongly suggest that even in light of what Goldsmith wrote, that Chucky could still have known more than he let on. But he was so committed to Emerita that he took a lot of secrets to his grave, I believe. What’s interesting is some of the other co-conspirators in the Hoffa thing ended up dead, like Sally Buggs, and got killed in Little Italy a few years later, and the prevailing wisdom, at least, was to, keep him quiet about the Hoffa case. And they would have probably done the same thing to Chucky if Chucky could have pointed the finger at anybody or implicated anybody. And I’m sure he could have. I’m sure he knew some things about that. He was so close to Giacalone. Chucky was very close to Tony Giacalone and to Tony Provenzano. [40:07] And I think that Chucky survived because Giacalone trusted him 100% just as Sylvia Pagano’s son. Giacalone’s trust in Chucky to not give anybody up was just so rock solid. And he loved Chucky. And I think that he was also honoring Sylvia by allowing Chucky to stay alive. So I know I’m straying from your initial question, Gary. There’s so much going on with the whole Chuck O’Brien thing and his involvement. It gets very interesting. You have to get really down in the weeds with it to understand all of it. But I think that Goldsmith’s book is a great read for anybody who’s interested in Hoffa and the whole case. I definitely would recommend it. So it may come down to Chuck O’Brien. And was he more loyal to the mob, to the mafia and their code? Or more loyal to Hoffa and the Teamsters? as Hoffa as an individual, not to the teams or his union, but Hoffa as an individual. Was he more loyal to Hoffa or more loyal to the union or more loyal to the mob? And giving up those guys, he has to turn his back on everything. [41:21] The union and the mob. And so I can see where he, whatever he knew, [41:25] he was not going to say a word. It would be to his advantage. He has no, they didn’t have a hammer on him. Wasn’t a criminal. They didn’t have a life sentence hanging over his head for anything. They did have, they did prosecute Chucky on a federal case. It was a small time thing. He took some, maybe took some gifts from a, from an employer in his role as a union guy, some small gifts. And then he had also got caught up in a cargo theft case, which is all documented in the book, Office of Connection. But the law enforcement did have a couple of cases that they could apply pressure onto Chucky. But he didn’t say a word, and he just went to prison and served his time. He didn’t have to serve too much time. He was only in for about a year, I think. It was a low-level felony. But he just, he’d never thought once about turning state’s witness. He just went and served his time and got back out and went on with his life. [42:25] Yeah. It’s those 50 and 75-year sentences that’ll make the right attorneys. You get even, I used to say, when they came up, those sentencing guidelines for cocaine dealers, you could make a guy talk about his mother when he’s looking. He’s 40 years old and he’s looking at a 50, 75-year sentence. Yeah. I do have to say, though, if there’s one guy that might, and there was a few of them who went and served a hard time. Yeah, a long time until they’re old. Rather than give anybody else up. And I think Chucky would have been one of those guys. I do. Yeah. [42:57] Having been raised by sylvia pagano he was just so committed to that culture and those traditions and that way of life and and omerta yeah sylvia even had almost a kind of a halfway making ceremony for chucky she arranged for the top guys in detroit when he came back to detroit from kansas city in the early 50s tony giacalone put together a little event where chucky walked into the back room of grecian gardens restaurant in detroit and all the top guys were sitting around a table and he made a pledge of loyalty to them at that time and then he sat down and broke bread with them and he didn’t prick his finger and burn a card and he wasn’t made into the family but it was all halfway a little bit and they did that for sylvia and because they just valued her so much they respected her and they needed her they she was the connection to their most valuable asset, which was Jimmy Hoffa. So that tells you a little bit about how much respect they had for Sylvia and also for Chucky’s unique role. Here he is. [44:05] He’s he’s the son of charlie banagio’s low-level chauffeur yeah and yet he’s sitting down with guys like meyer lansky in florida he’s sitting down with all the top guys in detroit chicago inu acardo rica rosanova all these top guys in chicago then he would sit down with them on behalf of jimmy hoff he was he probably i say in the book that he probably had more chucky o’brien the son of, Banagio’s chauffeur probably had more sit-downs with high-level mobsters than Nick Civella did. As Hoffa’s representative, that was the life. And he knew how to handle that kind of thing because he was raised by Sylvia. So he knew how to say, what not to say, how to behave himself in those types of meetings. So that came naturally to him. And he was Hoffa’s gopher. He drove in places. He took Hoffa’s wife to her medical appointments. He did low-level stuff like that, but he also did more important work, more sensitive stuff, like sitting down with mob bosses and relaying information back and forth, just like as Sylvia had taught him to do. [45:16] That’s fascinating. I tell you what, guys, Frank Hayde, Hoffa’s Connection, the story of Sylvia Pagano, the Ken City girl at the center of the mafia’s alliance with the Teamsters Union. I might have links in here. You better get this book. This is untrod territory. Unplowed ground, as we used to say on the farm. This is fresh stuff that you’ve read. There’s so many books out there about Hoffa and his disappearance that they just want to, come on, we can’t do this. I can’t do this again, Hoffa’s disappearance. You’re never going to find his body. You’re never going to figure out exactly who killed him. Nobody’s going to talk, and anybody that could is dead. But this unearthed some really fresh, interesting information about Hoffa and his connection with the Italian La Cosa Nostra in the United States, the entire United States, really. Yes. Thank you, Gary. That was a very nice little summary of it. And I really appreciate you. You’ve had me on your show before, my other books, and I listened to your podcast. Can’t get enough of it. You do terrific work. All us wire trappers love you, man. And we all appreciate you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Are you still doing the, are we still buying you cups of coffee and that kind of stuff? Yeah, you can always buy me a cup of coffee and hit the donate button. [46:29] I forget about doing that. I’ve been doing this so long and I got a few guys that hit it regularly and some never do. I do this for the pure joy of it anyhow, but it helps to have a little extra money coming in now and then. When you were selling books yesterday, you love writing this book. You love all that research and putting it together and educating people, but it’s nice to get paid for it too. [46:50] It’s a small-time racket, but hey. It’s a small-time racket. Another interesting thing, Frank, we were talking about people doing time, getting so much time, and trying to force them to talk. Yesterday, Frank had a program at the library, and we had a local guy who was a subject of his last book, Mafia Dreams, who was a mob hanger-on guy when he was a young guy. And he got caught up in a murder, an accidental murder in a way. That it’s a long story and you have to get mafia dreams to learn about it. The next generation of the wannabe. [47:25] Italian mafia guys in kansas city and so that guy was there he did 25 years 25 years for what we call felony murder another guy he transported a friend of his to a drug by only the guy killed the man was selling the or tried to kill the man that was selling the drugs and the fbi had it set up and ran in and shot and killed the kid who almanese had carried up to the drug ripoff and And so they charged this driver with felony murder, and he did 25 years, just got out about four or five years ago. He could have talked. He had enough to buy him a lot of grace on that 25-year sentence, and he did every minute of it. He never said a word, and it was hard time. It was state time here in Missouri. Yeah, I think that’s true. I think he is representative of Kansas City in a way, because I do believe that in Kansas City, the Code of Emerita persisted longer than most places. And yeah, when you’re 24 years old, I think he was 24 at the time that he was sentenced. Maybe he was 25 and you get sentenced to 25 and a half years. [48:38] And you have the chance to whittle that down by giving up information on your friends. And you don’t take it, and you choose to do the 25 and a half years, that’s hardcore. And he did, and those are the best years of his life that he’ll never get back. But he is out now, and he’s making a legitimate living and keeping his nose clean and just trying to make up for a lot of lost time. Yeah, he is. 25 years will straighten your mind out, won’t it? Yeah. Man. All right, Frank. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Hey, thanks again, Gary. Don’t forget to donate Bob the Bob Gary cup of coffee, y’all. Thank you. Okay, Gary. Okay, Frank. That was great. Talk to you later.

Well, in this episode we dig into our Kansas City Roots.  We go to Kansas City in the 1920's where under 'Boss' Pendergast the city was a machine that kept clubs open all night and the liquor flowing.  It was a town famous for being a little naive, jazz, good barbecue and something called the Kansas City Stomp.  Kansas City had heard rumors of Prohibition and wanted no truck with it.  It was into this world that a young man named Charlie Parker, a man who would be nicknamed 'Bird' began to play an alto sax and he would get humiliated and come back stronger.  He became a good musician, and then he was in a car accident that broke his ribs and twisted his spine.  He was given morphine for the pain and this would start a second addiction, the first was to music.  He studied and practiced all he could in recovery and when he emerged he was a different player, he took the town by storm and he would go on to become one of the greats of Jazz and he'd become a big part of a muisc called bebop.  So come listen to a local tale of Kansas City and learn how a man became a myth and musical legend in this magical, mythical and musical episode of the Family Plot PodcastBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/family-plot--4670465/support.

John & Heidi share funny stories of people doing weird things... plus we continue our segment #AsSeenOnTV as John chats with Emily Pendergast- Corporate RetreatLearn more about our radio program, podcast & blog at www.JohnAndHeidiShow.com

Burnt shares the details of some neighborhood drama, Joan explores the spectrum of kink reactions, and Doug is in his happy place. Later, they welcome Barbara (Emily Pendergast) from the NeighborhApp, a young neighbor who explains herself recently getting caught on a Nest Cam.Go to cbbworld.com and sign up for the Maximus plan to unlock this episode and ALL seasons of The Neighborhood Listen ad-free, as well as full length exclusive BONUS ROOM episodes adventuring deeper into Dignity Falls!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Peanut Butter & Biscuits brings you a special one-on-one interview as Craig sits down with Emily Pendergast, who stars as Amy in Jury Duty: Company Retreat.Emily talks about her journey through comedy, including her time performing with the legendary The Groundlings, and how that background helped shape her performance style and prepare her for the unique world of Jury Duty. She shares her love of comedy, what draws her to character-driven humor, and how improvisation continues to influence her work on screen.The conversation also highlights her past roles, including playing Beth Ryan on Veep, and how those experiences have helped her grow as a performer. It's a fun, insightful chat that will surely connect with fans of Ted Lasso and Shrinking.FEATURING: Craig McFarland Named the best Ted Lasso Podcast:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://podcast.feedspot.com/ted_lasso_podcasts/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Email the show at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠frontrowlasso@gmail.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join the Facebook group at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/groups/3161086474176010

Join us this week as we have the insanely talented actor, Emily Pendergast on! She pulls back the curtain on her new show Jury Duty: Company Retreat. We dive into the casting process, how the show actually gets made and how it really stretches you as an actor to always be on and making a family in this crazy environment. She shares fun anecdotes from the the making of the show and really gives us a behind the scenes look at how such an undertaking is to get accomplished!Grab your favorite cocktail and join us for a fun episode!Make sure to subscribe to our YOU TUBE channel for more fun video content!Resources:Emily's InstagramEmily's IMDB──────────────────────────⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Stay Tuned with Tipsy Casting on IG⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Watch the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tipsy Casting YouTube Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow Jessica ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow Jenn ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Learn More About ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jess ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠& ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jenn's⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Casting Journeys --  Thank you,Jess & Jenn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.TipsyCasting.com ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Check out our Podcast HERE!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

What happens when one person thinks everything is real… but everyone else is in on the joke? In this episode, Linda sits down with actress and writer Emily Pendergast, who stars as Amy in Jury Duty: Company Retreat—the hilarious, documentary-style comedy that turns a corporate retreat into a brilliantly orchestrated social experiment. Emily shares what it was like performing in a fully staged environment where one unsuspecting participant believes it's all real, how her improv background prepared her for the unpredictable moments, and why audiences are loving the mix of cringe, chaos, and comedy. From her roots in Ohio to her standout roles in Veep and beyond, Emily brings authenticity, humor, and heart to every scene—and this conversation is no different. Tune in for behind-the-scenes stories, unexpected moments, and a deeper look at one of the most unique shows on TV Emily Pendergast Links IMDb (Full Filmography) https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6119643/ Apple TV Profile (Watch / Credits) https://tv.apple.com/us/person/emily-pendergast/umc.cpc.47bc5tgmofs0f86eupnjhfa8w TV Guide Profile https://www.tvguide.com/celebrities/emily-pendergast/3000913132/ Rotten Tomatoes https://www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/emily_pendergast Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat Show Info / Cast Overview https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/tv-shows/jury-duty-season-2-company-retreat-cast/ Episode Listings / Credits https://www.tvmaze.com/people/231909/emily-pendergast

Owl Network Exclusive: Women's Lacrosse Aislinn Pendergast by Kennesaw State Athletics

#actors #AlexBonifer, #JerryHauck & #EmilyPendergast discuss their roles in the new #comedy #series #JuryDutyPresentsCompanyRetreat a #spinoff of #juryduty #Celebrity #interview #TonyToscano #ScreenChatter

A choice, a trap, and a necklace.By HectorBidon. Listen to the ►Podcast at Steamy Stories.The next morning’s sun found its way in through our porthole once again. We had sorted ourselves out somewhat during the night. I was on my side, tangled in a bit of sheet. She was on her side, tangled in a bit of blanket. I could just make out the pale tan lines on her bottom and her back.We’d become cabin buddies of a different order. At the Jack-and-Ciara level. That’s probably what most people would have assumed all along, but I certainly hadn’t, and I didn’t think that she had either.And yet, here we were.I waited a while for her to wake up, but she didn’t. So I finally got up myself.We’d just passed through the entrance in the seawall at Ensenada and were coming up to our docking site. The pilot, or maybe it was the captain himself, was standing on a little deck that jutted out from the side of the ship to joy-stick our massive vessel precisely up to the pier.Molly was still in bed when I got back. She smiled and went to the bathroom, a little embarrassed to be still naked while I was already dressed. Her pubic hair, I noticed, was trim and attractive.She came out wearing a towel and had her coffee. We checked the day’s schedule. She was delighted to discover that they’d transferred Mrs. Pendergast’s excursion ticket to me.A little later that morning we went ashore. It was a strange sensation, stepping off the gangway into a foreign country. Somehow I expected every little thing to be different and exotic, but the first thing we encountered, sprouting up through a crack in the pavement, was a little tuft of grass. Nothing exotic at all, just plain old grass.Our excursion van was heralded by a woman with a clipboard, a younger, more boisterous, Mexican Denise. There were three other couples in our group and a single unaccompanied woman about Ciara’s age. I took a seat next to the window with Molly beside me with the unaccompanied woman next to her. Her name was Meryl. This was her first real vacation since her divorce. She was really excited to be having such an adventure.We drove through the streets of Ensenada, our guide giving us a bit of local color in her prettily accented English. The scene was at once familiar and strange: traffic and lane markings and stop lights just exactly like at home, but unintelligible store signs in unlikely colors painted directly on pastel stucco walls. Beyond the city were dusty, cactus-strewn hills not unlike the Catalina hinterland.Our destination was a site called the Bufadora, a cleft in the rocky sea cliff where ocean waves sent up enormous geyser-like sprays. The sprays were so high that we got wet even at our vantage point fifty feet above the water.The path back from the observation point was lined with gaudy souvenir shops, like the midway of a county fair. Meryl had tagged along with Molly and me. We stopped at one of the taco stands for lunch.“So how did you guys meet?”Molly didn’t volunteer an answer. "Just here on the cruise, actually,“ I said."Really? See, aren’t cruises great?” Molly gushed.After lunch we went into one of the souvenir shops and Meryl asked our opinion about all the little nick-nacks she wanted to buy. When we got back to the van, I ended up sitting in the middle.“The nicest thing.” she said. “is that every day you make new friends.”We drove back through town, then out into the desert in a different direction to a picturesque winery. We sat around a table on a palm-shaded patio and sampled the different vintages. Meryl chatted on about Simi Valley and the cruise and her ex and the weather and the ship and the people she’d met. She got me to go into the little gift shop with her to help pick out a couple bottles.Molly was quiet at dinner. I had to remind her that we’d made plans to see the comedy show with Meryl.“I’ve got a bit of a headache,” she said. “I think I’ll go back to the room.”Meryl was waiting in the forward theatre. She was sorry to hear about Molly’s headache and put her hand on my arm to convey her concern. The show turned out to be pretty adult-rated, pretty raunchy in fact. Meryl yucked it upAfter the show she suggested we take a spin about the deck. The ship had set sail again and we were just passing the exposed wreck that lies up against the sea wall. Somehow Meryl managed to tuck herself inside my arm.“Wouldn’t you just love to go dancing?” she cooed.“I, uh,  Actually, I’ve kind of got to go now.”“But the night is still young. Meryl rebutted. Let’s at least stop by my room first.”“I’ve got to check on Molly.” I insisted“We can open one of the tequilas.”“Thanks, but,"It’s just that, I was kind of hoping to get lucky tonight.”Christ Almighty. A guy tries to be a gentleman. I didn’t need an etiquette book for this one. I finally managed to pry myself away,When I got back to the room, Molly was in her pajamas, watching TV.“Is your headache any better?” I asked.She didn’t look up from the screen.I sat on the chair and twisted around to see what she was watching. A travelogue of some sort.“You didn’t miss much,” I said. “The show was kind of,”But she leaned in closer to the screen to make it clear that I was interrupting her program. Something about the way the locals made their tortillas.OK. I got the message. She didn’t like the fact that I’d gone to the show with Meryl. I went into the bathroom to pee. I’d only been trying to be polite to a fellow cruise member. Was that a crime? Molly had been there when we’d made the plans. I thought that she’d been trying to be friendly too. That we’d sort of taken Meryl under our wing.I came out of the bathroom a minute later, and sat down on the chair again. The secret to the tortillas, apparently, had something to do with lime juice.“I didn’t expect to see you back here tonight,” Molly said. In a sarcastic tone of voice. As if my presence was an imposition. As if she was sorry she’d ever offered to share the room in the first place.I didn’t even bother to answer. I got undressed, then crawled up onto my side of the bed. Where else was I supposed to go? I got under the blanket and turned toward the bulkhead. A guy tries to be a gentleman. And this is what he gets.I woke up first again, the next morning. I went up on deck. Did she really think that I’d found Meryl even the least bit attractive? She was a fellow shipmate, nothing more. I’d thought that we’d both been trying to be polite to her. Was that a crime?I brought back coffee and a croissant, but Molly was still asleep. Or pretending to be. I banged around a little, but she didn’t budge. Finally I got fed up and left.So here I was again, back to my usual routine, wandering down empty corridors, drifting up little-used gangways, poking around lonely corners where nobody else much ever cared to go. Doing what I probably would have been doing if I’d gotten my single in the first place.I came back to the room around lunch time, but Molly wasn’t there. I wandered up to the pool. Denise was there, chatting with some people. She waved. Meryl was there, stalking about, but I managed to slip away before she saw me. But no Molly.It was a long day. The ship had parked itself out in the middle of the ocean somewhere. Or maybe the rest of the world really had blown itself up and they just hadn’t told us. I eventually ended up back in the little coffee shop at the tail end of the ship. The sky seemed a lot flatter though, the seagulls a lot more listless, my algorithms a lot less interesting. Finally I got up again and trudged back down into the labyrinth.The casino was practically empty. The lower piano bar was closed. The little art gallery was still showing the same old photographs.The gift shop was open. The same lady was behind the counter. What was it that Molly had asked to see? A necklace. It must have been, that one. The lady brought it out. A pair of crystalline dolphins on a slender silver chain. They sparkled in the light.Molly still wasn’t in the room when I got back. This time our towel had been folded into a seal, sunning itself on the bedspread. I moved it a little closer to her pillow and arranged the necklace around its neck.There were still a couple hours until dinner. I thought it might be better if I wasn’t there when she got back.I got to dinner right on time. It was our last night on board, and the dining room was even more boisterous than usual.“Where’s Molly?” asked Ciara.“She had a little headache. She might not be joining us.”Valentin our waiter was really joshing it up, angling for a big end-of-trip tip. He was just taking the drink orders when Molly appeared. She was wearing a pink skirt, a whitish blouse,,  and the necklace. Her eye caught mine as she made her way around the table, but quickly shot away again.Ciara asked her how she was doing. The couple on my other side were there for once. Tom and somebody. He was in air conditioning and gave me the full rundown. It was too noisy for Molly and me to talk, but every time I looked, she was still wearing the necklace.It being our last night, the waiters were going to put on a little show. Just after they passed out the dessert plates they went into a huddle near the service entrance. Molly leaned over.“Do you want to go back to the room?”We got up.“Oh, are you guys going to the revue?” asked Ciara.Molly replied in the louder voice you had to use to make yourself heard. But the room was beginning to quiet down in a hush, as the waiters were taking their places, and so the whole table heard what she said.“Make-up sex.”The table burst into laughter. Molly continued her way out of the room, and I just followed sheepishly behind her.“Can you forgive me?” she asked as we got out into the hallway.“For letting everybody know where we’re going?”“For last night. I’m so sorry for the way I acted. It was my fault. It was all my fault.”“The worst part is, we wasted a whole day,” I remorsed.“We still have tonight.” She tried to assure me.“Yeah. We still have tonight.” I agreed.As soon as we got into the room we fell into each other’s arms.“I love the necklace,” she murmured.“It looks really nice on you.”We kissed and shuffled toward the bed.But my blood was pumping. I was thinking about our wasted day.“Let’s do something first, want to? I pleaded. It’s our last night. Let’s get our money’s worth. Let’s go to the show! Let’s go dancing! Let’s shoot for that royal flush! The bed will still be here when we get back. But let’s make up for some of the things we didn’t do today. Let’s paint the ship red. Okay? Want to? C'mon! Hup hup!”Jack and Ciara were surprised to see us at the theatre.“That was quick,” Ciara said with a look of astonishment.Molly blushed. I put my arm around her and pulled her tight. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”The review was Motown classics, the Supremes, the Four Tops. “You can’t hurry love, no you’ll just have to wait, The whole auditorium was singing along. The girls pulled Jack and me up from our seats to dance in the aisle. "Sugar pie, honeybunch, you know that I love you,Afterwards, the night was balmy, perfect for a stroll on deck. We could see lights off in the distance, the rest of the world was still there after all! We ran into Meryl, wrapped in the arm of a dapper, middle-aged gentleman whose smile was just as smug as hers was. We exchanged pleasantries. She gave us both a little wink.Molly, perhaps I m clueless. Did you have any idea that Meryl was going to try to hit on me? I had to ask.Oh, my God! Molly stared at me. All day long, she was angling for you. I thought you were trying for a threesome, and my fake headache was me forcing you to choose one or the other.What? I thought you and I were just trying to be hospitable; you know, so she d have some friends to socialize with.Well, Molly confessed. I finally figured out that you were completely innocent, but it took me until late afternoon to dispel my worst presumptions.I went to the show, because we told her we d both join her, there. I explained. When you were bedridden with a headache, I assumed it fell on me to go alone, even though I really didn t want to be away from you.Ah, really? That s so sweet! Molly gushed. She gave me a deep kiss right there on the mezzanine. I assumed you went because you wanted another notch on your belt.  I m so, so sorry.Well, when the performance ended, I said I had to head back to you. She did try every diversion. I passed on all of them. Then she flatly told me she was hoping to get lucky with me. I told her I definitely could not accommodate that, and I walked straight back to our room.Oh, I was awful to you! Molly lamented. But I was also right about that slut s intentions, wasn t I? Molly paused, then added; When I finally got over my inner rage, I realized that you didn t come back smelling like cunt. Hell, you didn t even have lipstick smeared on your face.  This afternoon, I finally left my hiding spot, and saw you were heading to dinner, I went to the cabin and saw this beautiful necklace.  I literally cried. I don t deserve you. You don t deserve my juvenile drama. I d planned to skip the dinner, but when I saw the dolphin necklace, I had to come and grovel your forgiveness.You know, Molly I paused. Perhaps I was too clueless, yesterday. Perhaps you were too presuming? Do you think we can both help to balance each other?Oh, I love that! Yes, let s balance each other.The nightclubs were hopping. We wound our way from one to the other, dancing one dance in each. But then we decided to forgo the casino and just head back to the cabin. And sure enough, the bed was still there, right where we’d left it.We kissed. I ran my hands up along her sides, up inside her blouse. She undid my buttons and pulled open my shirt. I fiddled with her skirt and managed to slip it down over the swell of her hips. She unfastened my belt buckle and my button and my zipper. I slid my hands down inside her panties. She slid hers down inside my underpants. We pawed and shucked and kicked off everything that remained. And then she took off the very last thing that she was wearing, the crystalline necklace, and placed it carefully on the nightstand.I backed her down onto the bed. I kissed the pretty spot where the necklace had been, and the spot next to that, and the spot next to that. She lay back and closed her eyes and let herself be kissed.I settled myself down on top of her, stroking her full lovely body with my own, savoring her softness and her excitement, trying to fuse our unfortunate separateness into something more fulfilling. And somehow, in the midst of our kissing and our stroking, my penis must have slid up at just the right angle, and her hips must have been open to just the right degree, and we coupled, as adroitly as if that had been our conscious intention, as naturally as if we were two jungle cats whose lithe jungle bodies just instinctively knew how to fuck.And somewhere in the midst of our coupling we sweetly came, but it was not so much a climax as just a sweet vista point along the way. For just as we hadn’t consciously willed our engagement, neither did we ever willfully disengage, but just eventually nestled more comfortably down beside each other, still caressing, still softly kissing, still sweetly fused.The loudspeaker blasted us awake early the next morning. Our luggage needed to be out in the hallway for pickup by eight o'clock sharp!Molly wriggled a bit deeper under the blanket. "Uh,” she groaned. “Just five more minutes.”I remembered the look on her face, when had it been? just four days ago, when we first learned we might have to share the cabin together. She’d been just as uncertain as I had. But now it was hard to imagine any other arrangement. Her lying in bed beside me, trying to squeeze in a few more minutes of sleep, leaving it up to me to keep track of the time, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.We hadn’t begun to pack yet, but we’d kept things fairly organized. I gave her a generous five minutes, and then I gave her a little nudge. “C'mon, sleepyhead. Up and at um.”She groaned, but she dragged herself out of bed. We were both still naked. I slipped on a pair of boxers, and she put on a T-shirt. It rode up in back, though, so that her pretty bottom kept peeking out as she went around collecting her things and tucking them into her suitcase.“Do you kinda wish that the rest of the world really had blown itself up?” I asked.She was folding one of her bras. “Oh, I don’t know. We’d probably get tired of eating cheesecake eventually.”“They’d run out. Then we’d have to eat whatever it is that Valentin eats.”“He gets cheesecake sometimes, don’t you think? When they have some left over?”“I don’t know. He’s pretty skinny.”“I wonder why Meryl didn’t think of him.”“Yeah. Good question. Wrong table, I suppose.”“I suppose.”I crammed my sports coat in between my shirts and my underwear bag. She gave the zipper of her suitcase a final tug. “Besides,” she said. “Your algorithms would miss you.”I slipped on my trousers and rolled the bags out into the corridor. There were a surprising number of people walking by, and every single one of them gawked into the room as they passed. Nothing is more titillating to a person walking down a stateroom corridor than an open doorway.When I got the door closed again, Molly was sitting up on the bed with the sheet pulled up in front of her and a rather indignant look on her face. What a lot of nerve some people had!I couldn’t help but smile. “I wonder what they thought you were hiding back there.”She rolled her eyebrows.But I was feeling a little playful. The final day’s schedule was lying on the floor. I picked it up and pretended it was an official form.“Customs inspection, Miss, May I see what you’ve got behind that sheet?”She wasn’t so sure she wanted to show me. She coyly raised the sheet a little higher.“That shirt you’re wearing, Miss. Did you purchase it abroad?”She looked down behind the sheet. This old thing?.“Regulations, Miss; It may contain contraband fibers.” I held out my hand. “May I see it please?”She huffed. Bureaucrats! Without letting go of the sheet she wriggled one arm out of its sleeve and then the ot

A choice, a trap, and a necklace.By HectorBidon. Listen to the ►Podcast at Steamy Stories.The next morning’s sun found its way in through our porthole once again. We had sorted ourselves out somewhat during the night. I was on my side, tangled in a bit of sheet. She was on her side, tangled in a bit of blanket. I could just make out the pale tan lines on her bottom and her back.We’d become cabin buddies of a different order. At the Jack-and-Ciara level. That’s probably what most people would have assumed all along, but I certainly hadn’t, and I didn’t think that she had either.And yet, here we were.I waited a while for her to wake up, but she didn’t. So I finally got up myself.We’d just passed through the entrance in the seawall at Ensenada and were coming up to our docking site. The pilot, or maybe it was the captain himself, was standing on a little deck that jutted out from the side of the ship to joy-stick our massive vessel precisely up to the pier.Molly was still in bed when I got back. She smiled and went to the bathroom, a little embarrassed to be still naked while I was already dressed. Her pubic hair, I noticed, was trim and attractive.She came out wearing a towel and had her coffee. We checked the day’s schedule. She was delighted to discover that they’d transferred Mrs. Pendergast’s excursion ticket to me.A little later that morning we went ashore. It was a strange sensation, stepping off the gangway into a foreign country. Somehow I expected every little thing to be different and exotic, but the first thing we encountered, sprouting up through a crack in the pavement, was a little tuft of grass. Nothing exotic at all, just plain old grass.Our excursion van was heralded by a woman with a clipboard, a younger, more boisterous, Mexican Denise. There were three other couples in our group and a single unaccompanied woman about Ciara’s age. I took a seat next to the window with Molly beside me with the unaccompanied woman next to her. Her name was Meryl. This was her first real vacation since her divorce. She was really excited to be having such an adventure.We drove through the streets of Ensenada, our guide giving us a bit of local color in her prettily accented English. The scene was at once familiar and strange: traffic and lane markings and stop lights just exactly like at home, but unintelligible store signs in unlikely colors painted directly on pastel stucco walls. Beyond the city were dusty, cactus-strewn hills not unlike the Catalina hinterland.Our destination was a site called the Bufadora, a cleft in the rocky sea cliff where ocean waves sent up enormous geyser-like sprays. The sprays were so high that we got wet even at our vantage point fifty feet above the water.The path back from the observation point was lined with gaudy souvenir shops, like the midway of a county fair. Meryl had tagged along with Molly and me. We stopped at one of the taco stands for lunch.“So how did you guys meet?”Molly didn’t volunteer an answer. "Just here on the cruise, actually,“ I said."Really? See, aren’t cruises great?” Molly gushed.After lunch we went into one of the souvenir shops and Meryl asked our opinion about all the little nick-nacks she wanted to buy. When we got back to the van, I ended up sitting in the middle.“The nicest thing.” she said. “is that every day you make new friends.”We drove back through town, then out into the desert in a different direction to a picturesque winery. We sat around a table on a palm-shaded patio and sampled the different vintages. Meryl chatted on about Simi Valley and the cruise and her ex and the weather and the ship and the people she’d met. She got me to go into the little gift shop with her to help pick out a couple bottles.Molly was quiet at dinner. I had to remind her that we’d made plans to see the comedy show with Meryl.“I’ve got a bit of a headache,” she said. “I think I’ll go back to the room.”Meryl was waiting in the forward theatre. She was sorry to hear about Molly’s headache and put her hand on my arm to convey her concern. The show turned out to be pretty adult-rated, pretty raunchy in fact. Meryl yucked it upAfter the show she suggested we take a spin about the deck. The ship had set sail again and we were just passing the exposed wreck that lies up against the sea wall. Somehow Meryl managed to tuck herself inside my arm.“Wouldn’t you just love to go dancing?” she cooed.“I, uh,  Actually, I’ve kind of got to go now.”“But the night is still young. Meryl rebutted. Let’s at least stop by my room first.”“I’ve got to check on Molly.” I insisted“We can open one of the tequilas.”“Thanks, but,"It’s just that, I was kind of hoping to get lucky tonight.”Christ Almighty. A guy tries to be a gentleman. I didn’t need an etiquette book for this one. I finally managed to pry myself away,When I got back to the room, Molly was in her pajamas, watching TV.“Is your headache any better?” I asked.She didn’t look up from the screen.I sat on the chair and twisted around to see what she was watching. A travelogue of some sort.“You didn’t miss much,” I said. “The show was kind of,”But she leaned in closer to the screen to make it clear that I was interrupting her program. Something about the way the locals made their tortillas.OK. I got the message. She didn’t like the fact that I’d gone to the show with Meryl. I went into the bathroom to pee. I’d only been trying to be polite to a fellow cruise member. Was that a crime? Molly had been there when we’d made the plans. I thought that she’d been trying to be friendly too. That we’d sort of taken Meryl under our wing.I came out of the bathroom a minute later, and sat down on the chair again. The secret to the tortillas, apparently, had something to do with lime juice.“I didn’t expect to see you back here tonight,” Molly said. In a sarcastic tone of voice. As if my presence was an imposition. As if she was sorry she’d ever offered to share the room in the first place.I didn’t even bother to answer. I got undressed, then crawled up onto my side of the bed. Where else was I supposed to go? I got under the blanket and turned toward the bulkhead. A guy tries to be a gentleman. And this is what he gets.I woke up first again, the next morning. I went up on deck. Did she really think that I’d found Meryl even the least bit attractive? She was a fellow shipmate, nothing more. I’d thought that we’d both been trying to be polite to her. Was that a crime?I brought back coffee and a croissant, but Molly was still asleep. Or pretending to be. I banged around a little, but she didn’t budge. Finally I got fed up and left.So here I was again, back to my usual routine, wandering down empty corridors, drifting up little-used gangways, poking around lonely corners where nobody else much ever cared to go. Doing what I probably would have been doing if I’d gotten my single in the first place.I came back to the room around lunch time, but Molly wasn’t there. I wandered up to the pool. Denise was there, chatting with some people. She waved. Meryl was there, stalking about, but I managed to slip away before she saw me. But no Molly.It was a long day. The ship had parked itself out in the middle of the ocean somewhere. Or maybe the rest of the world really had blown itself up and they just hadn’t told us. I eventually ended up back in the little coffee shop at the tail end of the ship. The sky seemed a lot flatter though, the seagulls a lot more listless, my algorithms a lot less interesting. Finally I got up again and trudged back down into the labyrinth.The casino was practically empty. The lower piano bar was closed. The little art gallery was still showing the same old photographs.The gift shop was open. The same lady was behind the counter. What was it that Molly had asked to see? A necklace. It must have been, that one. The lady brought it out. A pair of crystalline dolphins on a slender silver chain. They sparkled in the light.Molly still wasn’t in the room when I got back. This time our towel had been folded into a seal, sunning itself on the bedspread. I moved it a little closer to her pillow and arranged the necklace around its neck.There were still a couple hours until dinner. I thought it might be better if I wasn’t there when she got back.I got to dinner right on time. It was our last night on board, and the dining room was even more boisterous than usual.“Where’s Molly?” asked Ciara.“She had a little headache. She might not be joining us.”Valentin our waiter was really joshing it up, angling for a big end-of-trip tip. He was just taking the drink orders when Molly appeared. She was wearing a pink skirt, a whitish blouse,,  and the necklace. Her eye caught mine as she made her way around the table, but quickly shot away again.Ciara asked her how she was doing. The couple on my other side were there for once. Tom and somebody. He was in air conditioning and gave me the full rundown. It was too noisy for Molly and me to talk, but every time I looked, she was still wearing the necklace.It being our last night, the waiters were going to put on a little show. Just after they passed out the dessert plates they went into a huddle near the service entrance. Molly leaned over.“Do you want to go back to the room?”We got up.“Oh, are you guys going to the revue?” asked Ciara.Molly replied in the louder voice you had to use to make yourself heard. But the room was beginning to quiet down in a hush, as the waiters were taking their places, and so the whole table heard what she said.“Make-up sex.”The table burst into laughter. Molly continued her way out of the room, and I just followed sheepishly behind her.“Can you forgive me?” she asked as we got out into the hallway.“For letting everybody know where we’re going?”“For last night. I’m so sorry for the way I acted. It was my fault. It was all my fault.”“The worst part is, we wasted a whole day,” I remorsed.“We still have tonight.” She tried to assure me.“Yeah. We still have tonight.” I agreed.As soon as we got into the room we fell into each other’s arms.“I love the necklace,” she murmured.“It looks really nice on you.”We kissed and shuffled toward the bed.But my blood was pumping. I was thinking about our wasted day.“Let’s do something first, want to? I pleaded. It’s our last night. Let’s get our money’s worth. Let’s go to the show! Let’s go dancing! Let’s shoot for that royal flush! The bed will still be here when we get back. But let’s make up for some of the things we didn’t do today. Let’s paint the ship red. Okay? Want to? C'mon! Hup hup!”Jack and Ciara were surprised to see us at the theatre.“That was quick,” Ciara said with a look of astonishment.Molly blushed. I put my arm around her and pulled her tight. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”The review was Motown classics, the Supremes, the Four Tops. “You can’t hurry love, no you’ll just have to wait, The whole auditorium was singing along. The girls pulled Jack and me up from our seats to dance in the aisle. "Sugar pie, honeybunch, you know that I love you,Afterwards, the night was balmy, perfect for a stroll on deck. We could see lights off in the distance, the rest of the world was still there after all! We ran into Meryl, wrapped in the arm of a dapper, middle-aged gentleman whose smile was just as smug as hers was. We exchanged pleasantries. She gave us both a little wink.Molly, perhaps I m clueless. Did you have any idea that Meryl was going to try to hit on me? I had to ask.Oh, my God! Molly stared at me. All day long, she was angling for you. I thought you were trying for a threesome, and my fake headache was me forcing you to choose one or the other.What? I thought you and I were just trying to be hospitable; you know, so she d have some friends to socialize with.Well, Molly confessed. I finally figured out that you were completely innocent, but it took me until late afternoon to dispel my worst presumptions.I went to the show, because we told her we d both join her, there. I explained. When you were bedridden with a headache, I assumed it fell on me to go alone, even though I really didn t want to be away from you.Ah, really? That s so sweet! Molly gushed. She gave me a deep kiss right there on the mezzanine. I assumed you went because you wanted another notch on your belt.  I m so, so sorry.Well, when the performance ended, I said I had to head back to you. She did try every diversion. I passed on all of them. Then she flatly told me she was hoping to get lucky with me. I told her I definitely could not accommodate that, and I walked straight back to our room.Oh, I was awful to you! Molly lamented. But I was also right about that slut s intentions, wasn t I? Molly paused, then added; When I finally got over my inner rage, I realized that you didn t come back smelling like cunt. Hell, you didn t even have lipstick smeared on your face.  This afternoon, I finally left my hiding spot, and saw you were heading to dinner, I went to the cabin and saw this beautiful necklace.  I literally cried. I don t deserve you. You don t deserve my juvenile drama. I d planned to skip the dinner, but when I saw the dolphin necklace, I had to come and grovel your forgiveness.You know, Molly I paused. Perhaps I was too clueless, yesterday. Perhaps you were too presuming? Do you think we can both help to balance each other?Oh, I love that! Yes, let s balance each other.The nightclubs were hopping. We wound our way from one to the other, dancing one dance in each. But then we decided to forgo the casino and just head back to the cabin. And sure enough, the bed was still there, right where we’d left it.We kissed. I ran my hands up along her sides, up inside her blouse. She undid my buttons and pulled open my shirt. I fiddled with her skirt and managed to slip it down over the swell of her hips. She unfastened my belt buckle and my button and my zipper. I slid my hands down inside her panties. She slid hers down inside my underpants. We pawed and shucked and kicked off everything that remained. And then she took off the very last thing that she was wearing, the crystalline necklace, and placed it carefully on the nightstand.I backed her down onto the bed. I kissed the pretty spot where the necklace had been, and the spot next to that, and the spot next to that. She lay back and closed her eyes and let herself be kissed.I settled myself down on top of her, stroking her full lovely body with my own, savoring her softness and her excitement, trying to fuse our unfortunate separateness into something more fulfilling. And somehow, in the midst of our kissing and our stroking, my penis must have slid up at just the right angle, and her hips must have been open to just the right degree, and we coupled, as adroitly as if that had been our conscious intention, as naturally as if we were two jungle cats whose lithe jungle bodies just instinctively knew how to fuck.And somewhere in the midst of our coupling we sweetly came, but it was not so much a climax as just a sweet vista point along the way. For just as we hadn’t consciously willed our engagement, neither did we ever willfully disengage, but just eventually nestled more comfortably down beside each other, still caressing, still softly kissing, still sweetly fused.The loudspeaker blasted us awake early the next morning. Our luggage needed to be out in the hallway for pickup by eight o'clock sharp!Molly wriggled a bit deeper under the blanket. "Uh,” she groaned. “Just five more minutes.”I remembered the look on her face, when had it been? just four days ago, when we first learned we might have to share the cabin together. She’d been just as uncertain as I had. But now it was hard to imagine any other arrangement. Her lying in bed beside me, trying to squeeze in a few more minutes of sleep, leaving it up to me to keep track of the time, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.We hadn’t begun to pack yet, but we’d kept things fairly organized. I gave her a generous five minutes, and then I gave her a little nudge. “C'mon, sleepyhead. Up and at um.”She groaned, but she dragged herself out of bed. We were both still naked. I slipped on a pair of boxers, and she put on a T-shirt. It rode up in back, though, so that her pretty bottom kept peeking out as she went around collecting her things and tucking them into her suitcase.“Do you kinda wish that the rest of the world really had blown itself up?” I asked.She was folding one of her bras. “Oh, I don’t know. We’d probably get tired of eating cheesecake eventually.”“They’d run out. Then we’d have to eat whatever it is that Valentin eats.”“He gets cheesecake sometimes, don’t you think? When they have some left over?”“I don’t know. He’s pretty skinny.”“I wonder why Meryl didn’t think of him.”“Yeah. Good question. Wrong table, I suppose.”“I suppose.”I crammed my sports coat in between my shirts and my underwear bag. She gave the zipper of her suitcase a final tug. “Besides,” she said. “Your algorithms would miss you.”I slipped on my trousers and rolled the bags out into the corridor. There were a surprising number of people walking by, and every single one of them gawked into the room as they passed. Nothing is more titillating to a person walking down a stateroom corridor than an open doorway.When I got the door closed again, Molly was sitting up on the bed with the sheet pulled up in front of her and a rather indignant look on her face. What a lot of nerve some people had!I couldn’t help but smile. “I wonder what they thought you were hiding back there.”She rolled her eyebrows.But I was feeling a little playful. The final day’s schedule was lying on the floor. I picked it up and pretended it was an official form.“Customs inspection, Miss, May I see what you’ve got behind that sheet?”She wasn’t so sure she wanted to show me. She coyly raised the sheet a little higher.“That shirt you’re wearing, Miss. Did you purchase it abroad?”She looked down behind the sheet. This old thing?.“Regulations, Miss; It may contain contraband fibers.” I held out my hand. “May I see it please?”She huffed. Bureaucrats! Without letting go of the sheet she wriggled one arm out of its sleeve and then the ot

A choice, a trap, and a necklace.By HectorBidon. Listen to the ►Podcast at Steamy Stories.The next morning’s sun found its way in through our porthole once again. We had sorted ourselves out somewhat during the night. I was on my side, tangled in a bit of sheet. She was on her side, tangled in a bit of blanket. I could just make out the pale tan lines on her bottom and her back.We’d become cabin buddies of a different order. At the Jack-and-Ciara level. That’s probably what most people would have assumed all along, but I certainly hadn’t, and I didn’t think that she had either.And yet, here we were.I waited a while for her to wake up, but she didn’t. So I finally got up myself.We’d just passed through the entrance in the seawall at Ensenada and were coming up to our docking site. The pilot, or maybe it was the captain himself, was standing on a little deck that jutted out from the side of the ship to joy-stick our massive vessel precisely up to the pier.Molly was still in bed when I got back. She smiled and went to the bathroom, a little embarrassed to be still naked while I was already dressed. Her pubic hair, I noticed, was trim and attractive.She came out wearing a towel and had her coffee. We checked the day’s schedule. She was delighted to discover that they’d transferred Mrs. Pendergast’s excursion ticket to me.A little later that morning we went ashore. It was a strange sensation, stepping off the gangway into a foreign country. Somehow I expected every little thing to be different and exotic, but the first thing we encountered, sprouting up through a crack in the pavement, was a little tuft of grass. Nothing exotic at all, just plain old grass.Our excursion van was heralded by a woman with a clipboard, a younger, more boisterous, Mexican Denise. There were three other couples in our group and a single unaccompanied woman about Ciara’s age. I took a seat next to the window with Molly beside me with the unaccompanied woman next to her. Her name was Meryl. This was her first real vacation since her divorce. She was really excited to be having such an adventure.We drove through the streets of Ensenada, our guide giving us a bit of local color in her prettily accented English. The scene was at once familiar and strange: traffic and lane markings and stop lights just exactly like at home, but unintelligible store signs in unlikely colors painted directly on pastel stucco walls. Beyond the city were dusty, cactus-strewn hills not unlike the Catalina hinterland.Our destination was a site called the Bufadora, a cleft in the rocky sea cliff where ocean waves sent up enormous geyser-like sprays. The sprays were so high that we got wet even at our vantage point fifty feet above the water.The path back from the observation point was lined with gaudy souvenir shops, like the midway of a county fair. Meryl had tagged along with Molly and me. We stopped at one of the taco stands for lunch.“So how did you guys meet?”Molly didn’t volunteer an answer. "Just here on the cruise, actually,“ I said."Really? See, aren’t cruises great?” Molly gushed.After lunch we went into one of the souvenir shops and Meryl asked our opinion about all the little nick-nacks she wanted to buy. When we got back to the van, I ended up sitting in the middle.“The nicest thing.” she said. “is that every day you make new friends.”We drove back through town, then out into the desert in a different direction to a picturesque winery. We sat around a table on a palm-shaded patio and sampled the different vintages. Meryl chatted on about Simi Valley and the cruise and her ex and the weather and the ship and the people she’d met. She got me to go into the little gift shop with her to help pick out a couple bottles.Molly was quiet at dinner. I had to remind her that we’d made plans to see the comedy show with Meryl.“I’ve got a bit of a headache,” she said. “I think I’ll go back to the room.”Meryl was waiting in the forward theatre. She was sorry to hear about Molly’s headache and put her hand on my arm to convey her concern. The show turned out to be pretty adult-rated, pretty raunchy in fact. Meryl yucked it upAfter the show she suggested we take a spin about the deck. The ship had set sail again and we were just passing the exposed wreck that lies up against the sea wall. Somehow Meryl managed to tuck herself inside my arm.“Wouldn’t you just love to go dancing?” she cooed.“I, uh,  Actually, I’ve kind of got to go now.”“But the night is still young. Meryl rebutted. Let’s at least stop by my room first.”“I’ve got to check on Molly.” I insisted“We can open one of the tequilas.”“Thanks, but,"It’s just that, I was kind of hoping to get lucky tonight.”Christ Almighty. A guy tries to be a gentleman. I didn’t need an etiquette book for this one. I finally managed to pry myself away,When I got back to the room, Molly was in her pajamas, watching TV.“Is your headache any better?” I asked.She didn’t look up from the screen.I sat on the chair and twisted around to see what she was watching. A travelogue of some sort.“You didn’t miss much,” I said. “The show was kind of,”But she leaned in closer to the screen to make it clear that I was interrupting her program. Something about the way the locals made their tortillas.OK. I got the message. She didn’t like the fact that I’d gone to the show with Meryl. I went into the bathroom to pee. I’d only been trying to be polite to a fellow cruise member. Was that a crime? Molly had been there when we’d made the plans. I thought that she’d been trying to be friendly too. That we’d sort of taken Meryl under our wing.I came out of the bathroom a minute later, and sat down on the chair again. The secret to the tortillas, apparently, had something to do with lime juice.“I didn’t expect to see you back here tonight,” Molly said. In a sarcastic tone of voice. As if my presence was an imposition. As if she was sorry she’d ever offered to share the room in the first place.I didn’t even bother to answer. I got undressed, then crawled up onto my side of the bed. Where else was I supposed to go? I got under the blanket and turned toward the bulkhead. A guy tries to be a gentleman. And this is what he gets.I woke up first again, the next morning. I went up on deck. Did she really think that I’d found Meryl even the least bit attractive? She was a fellow shipmate, nothing more. I’d thought that we’d both been trying to be polite to her. Was that a crime?I brought back coffee and a croissant, but Molly was still asleep. Or pretending to be. I banged around a little, but she didn’t budge. Finally I got fed up and left.So here I was again, back to my usual routine, wandering down empty corridors, drifting up little-used gangways, poking around lonely corners where nobody else much ever cared to go. Doing what I probably would have been doing if I’d gotten my single in the first place.I came back to the room around lunch time, but Molly wasn’t there. I wandered up to the pool. Denise was there, chatting with some people. She waved. Meryl was there, stalking about, but I managed to slip away before she saw me. But no Molly.It was a long day. The ship had parked itself out in the middle of the ocean somewhere. Or maybe the rest of the world really had blown itself up and they just hadn’t told us. I eventually ended up back in the little coffee shop at the tail end of the ship. The sky seemed a lot flatter though, the seagulls a lot more listless, my algorithms a lot less interesting. Finally I got up again and trudged back down into the labyrinth.The casino was practically empty. The lower piano bar was closed. The little art gallery was still showing the same old photographs.The gift shop was open. The same lady was behind the counter. What was it that Molly had asked to see? A necklace. It must have been, that one. The lady brought it out. A pair of crystalline dolphins on a slender silver chain. They sparkled in the light.Molly still wasn’t in the room when I got back. This time our towel had been folded into a seal, sunning itself on the bedspread. I moved it a little closer to her pillow and arranged the necklace around its neck.There were still a couple hours until dinner. I thought it might be better if I wasn’t there when she got back.I got to dinner right on time. It was our last night on board, and the dining room was even more boisterous than usual.“Where’s Molly?” asked Ciara.“She had a little headache. She might not be joining us.”Valentin our waiter was really joshing it up, angling for a big end-of-trip tip. He was just taking the drink orders when Molly appeared. She was wearing a pink skirt, a whitish blouse,,  and the necklace. Her eye caught mine as she made her way around the table, but quickly shot away again.Ciara asked her how she was doing. The couple on my other side were there for once. Tom and somebody. He was in air conditioning and gave me the full rundown. It was too noisy for Molly and me to talk, but every time I looked, she was still wearing the necklace.It being our last night, the waiters were going to put on a little show. Just after they passed out the dessert plates they went into a huddle near the service entrance. Molly leaned over.“Do you want to go back to the room?”We got up.“Oh, are you guys going to the revue?” asked Ciara.Molly replied in the louder voice you had to use to make yourself heard. But the room was beginning to quiet down in a hush, as the waiters were taking their places, and so the whole table heard what she said.“Make-up sex.”The table burst into laughter. Molly continued her way out of the room, and I just followed sheepishly behind her.“Can you forgive me?” she asked as we got out into the hallway.“For letting everybody know where we’re going?”“For last night. I’m so sorry for the way I acted. It was my fault. It was all my fault.”“The worst part is, we wasted a whole day,” I remorsed.“We still have tonight.” She tried to assure me.“Yeah. We still have tonight.” I agreed.As soon as we got into the room we fell into each other’s arms.“I love the necklace,” she murmured.“It looks really nice on you.”We kissed and shuffled toward the bed.But my blood was pumping. I was thinking about our wasted day.“Let’s do something first, want to? I pleaded. It’s our last night. Let’s get our money’s worth. Let’s go to the show! Let’s go dancing! Let’s shoot for that royal flush! The bed will still be here when we get back. But let’s make up for some of the things we didn’t do today. Let’s paint the ship red. Okay? Want to? C'mon! Hup hup!”Jack and Ciara were surprised to see us at the theatre.“That was quick,” Ciara said with a look of astonishment.Molly blushed. I put my arm around her and pulled her tight. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”The review was Motown classics, the Supremes, the Four Tops. “You can’t hurry love, no you’ll just have to wait, The whole auditorium was singing along. The girls pulled Jack and me up from our seats to dance in the aisle. "Sugar pie, honeybunch, you know that I love you,Afterwards, the night was balmy, perfect for a stroll on deck. We could see lights off in the distance, the rest of the world was still there after all! We ran into Meryl, wrapped in the arm of a dapper, middle-aged gentleman whose smile was just as smug as hers was. We exchanged pleasantries. She gave us both a little wink.Molly, perhaps I m clueless. Did you have any idea that Meryl was going to try to hit on me? I had to ask.Oh, my God! Molly stared at me. All day long, she was angling for you. I thought you were trying for a threesome, and my fake headache was me forcing you to choose one or the other.What? I thought you and I were just trying to be hospitable; you know, so she d have some friends to socialize with.Well, Molly confessed. I finally figured out that you were completely innocent, but it took me until late afternoon to dispel my worst presumptions.I went to the show, because we told her we d both join her, there. I explained. When you were bedridden with a headache, I assumed it fell on me to go alone, even though I really didn t want to be away from you.Ah, really? That s so sweet! Molly gushed. She gave me a deep kiss right there on the mezzanine. I assumed you went because you wanted another notch on your belt.  I m so, so sorry.Well, when the performance ended, I said I had to head back to you. She did try every diversion. I passed on all of them. Then she flatly told me she was hoping to get lucky with me. I told her I definitely could not accommodate that, and I walked straight back to our room.Oh, I was awful to you! Molly lamented. But I was also right about that slut s intentions, wasn t I? Molly paused, then added; When I finally got over my inner rage, I realized that you didn t come back smelling like cunt. Hell, you didn t even have lipstick smeared on your face.  This afternoon, I finally left my hiding spot, and saw you were heading to dinner, I went to the cabin and saw this beautiful necklace.  I literally cried. I don t deserve you. You don t deserve my juvenile drama. I d planned to skip the dinner, but when I saw the dolphin necklace, I had to come and grovel your forgiveness.You know, Molly I paused. Perhaps I was too clueless, yesterday. Perhaps you were too presuming? Do you think we can both help to balance each other?Oh, I love that! Yes, let s balance each other.The nightclubs were hopping. We wound our way from one to the other, dancing one dance in each. But then we decided to forgo the casino and just head back to the cabin. And sure enough, the bed was still there, right where we’d left it.We kissed. I ran my hands up along her sides, up inside her blouse. She undid my buttons and pulled open my shirt. I fiddled with her skirt and managed to slip it down over the swell of her hips. She unfastened my belt buckle and my button and my zipper. I slid my hands down inside her panties. She slid hers down inside my underpants. We pawed and shucked and kicked off everything that remained. And then she took off the very last thing that she was wearing, the crystalline necklace, and placed it carefully on the nightstand.I backed her down onto the bed. I kissed the pretty spot where the necklace had been, and the spot next to that, and the spot next to that. She lay back and closed her eyes and let herself be kissed.I settled myself down on top of her, stroking her full lovely body with my own, savoring her softness and her excitement, trying to fuse our unfortunate separateness into something more fulfilling. And somehow, in the midst of our kissing and our stroking, my penis must have slid up at just the right angle, and her hips must have been open to just the right degree, and we coupled, as adroitly as if that had been our conscious intention, as naturally as if we were two jungle cats whose lithe jungle bodies just instinctively knew how to fuck.And somewhere in the midst of our coupling we sweetly came, but it was not so much a climax as just a sweet vista point along the way. For just as we hadn’t consciously willed our engagement, neither did we ever willfully disengage, but just eventually nestled more comfortably down beside each other, still caressing, still softly kissing, still sweetly fused.The loudspeaker blasted us awake early the next morning. Our luggage needed to be out in the hallway for pickup by eight o'clock sharp!Molly wriggled a bit deeper under the blanket. "Uh,” she groaned. “Just five more minutes.”I remembered the look on her face, when had it been? just four days ago, when we first learned we might have to share the cabin together. She’d been just as uncertain as I had. But now it was hard to imagine any other arrangement. Her lying in bed beside me, trying to squeeze in a few more minutes of sleep, leaving it up to me to keep track of the time, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.We hadn’t begun to pack yet, but we’d kept things fairly organized. I gave her a generous five minutes, and then I gave her a little nudge. “C'mon, sleepyhead. Up and at um.”She groaned, but she dragged herself out of bed. We were both still naked. I slipped on a pair of boxers, and she put on a T-shirt. It rode up in back, though, so that her pretty bottom kept peeking out as she went around collecting her things and tucking them into her suitcase.“Do you kinda wish that the rest of the world really had blown itself up?” I asked.She was folding one of her bras. “Oh, I don’t know. We’d probably get tired of eating cheesecake eventually.”“They’d run out. Then we’d have to eat whatever it is that Valentin eats.”“He gets cheesecake sometimes, don’t you think? When they have some left over?”“I don’t know. He’s pretty skinny.”“I wonder why Meryl didn’t think of him.”“Yeah. Good question. Wrong table, I suppose.”“I suppose.”I crammed my sports coat in between my shirts and my underwear bag. She gave the zipper of her suitcase a final tug. “Besides,” she said. “Your algorithms would miss you.”I slipped on my trousers and rolled the bags out into the corridor. There were a surprising number of people walking by, and every single one of them gawked into the room as they passed. Nothing is more titillating to a person walking down a stateroom corridor than an open doorway.When I got the door closed again, Molly was sitting up on the bed with the sheet pulled up in front of her and a rather indignant look on her face. What a lot of nerve some people had!I couldn’t help but smile. “I wonder what they thought you were hiding back there.”She rolled her eyebrows.But I was feeling a little playful. The final day’s schedule was lying on the floor. I picked it up and pretended it was an official form.“Customs inspection, Miss, May I see what you’ve got behind that sheet?”She wasn’t so sure she wanted to show me. She coyly raised the sheet a little higher.“That shirt you’re wearing, Miss. Did you purchase it abroad?”She looked down behind the sheet. This old thing?.“Regulations, Miss; It may contain contraband fibers.” I held out my hand. “May I see it please?”She huffed. Bureaucrats! Without letting go of the sheet she wriggled one arm out of its sleeve and then the ot

Strangers forced to share a cabin on a cruise ship.By HectorBidon. Listen to the ►Podcast at Steamy Stories.The waiting area outside the Long Beach cruise terminal was abuzz with bright new outfits and happy chatter. It was enough to make even the most reserved introvert start to feel a bit of excitement.I was standing with Jack and Ciara, two regulars of the social group. Jack was tall and rugged, something to do with landscaping; Ciara tall and willowy, worked in an office of some sort. They weren’t an official couple, as far as I knew, but they seemed to have hooked up for the New Year s Pacific cruise. That was sort of the way the group worked. Thirty somethings, mostly divorced, intent on maintaining the hard playing lifestyle of their twenties, looking for like-minded dating partners to do it with.Jack was explaining the different cruise drink payment plans. I smiled politely and nodded, thinking how different from theirs my life would be when I got to be their age.Denise bustled up in a pretty pastel pantsuit with her clipboard in her hand. She was a travel agent and the mother hen of the group, forty-something and no longer trying so hard to pretend she was any younger. She d put together this group and made a nice extra income for her troubles.“Hector,” she said, ushering me a step aside, “I’m afraid there’s been a mix up with your reservation. Somehow your single cabin didn’t show up on the final printout.” She gave me a concerned look. “They’re working on it,,  but we may have to double you up with someone.”This came as a bit of a rude surprise. One of the only reasons I’d finally agreed to come on the cruise in the first place had been her assurance that I’d be able to have a single. It wasn’t that I was antisocial really, but I had my limits.“You know Mrs. Pendergast, don’t you?”Mrs. Pendergast was an older woman, well into her sixties. She wasn’t a regular member of the group, but it amused her sometimes to hang with a younger crowd. The group let her tag along to some of their events. I was going to have to share a room with Mrs. Pendergast?“Apparently she got sick and had to cancel at the last minute. So we have an opening. She was sharing a room with, ah;” she double checked her forms; “a Ms. Crenshaw. I don’t know her, but I’m sure she’s very nice. It’s a double room, and you know how it is on a cruise. You don’t spend that much time in your room anyway.”I didn’t even try to return her smile.“They’re still working on your single, of course. I just wanted to let you know the fallback plan.”Not only losing my single, but having to spend the cruise being polite to an old lady? In Denise’s mind, that was what the social group was all about.People were already starting to go into the terminal building when Denise came back, this time with an attractive young woman at her side. I wondered if it was Denise’s daughter, there to see us off.“Hector,” she said, peering at me over the top of her glasses, “this is Molly Crenshaw. I’ve been explaining our predicament.”The girl gave me a weak smile. She was pretty, with long brown hair swept back, wearing white shorts and a light blue top. She didn’t look like she could be a day over twenty-one. Not at all what I had pictured as a travelling companion for Mrs. Pendergast.“It’s a double room,” Denise was explaining. “I’m sure they’ll be able to rig up a partition if need be. But this will be the first cruise for both of you. It will be nice to have a buddy to help you find your way around. I’m sure the two of you will hit it off.”Molly was still looking at me rather uncertainly. This apparently wasn’t exactly what she had signed up for, either. She looked back at Denise. “Well, if his other room got cancelled,Denise was delighted. The registration mix-up had been solved in an efficient and social-group-positive way. I couldn’t believe she was being so cavalier about putting a guy and a girl who didn’t even know each other into the same room together."They’re still working on my single though, right?”“As far as I know. You’ll be able to check with the Bursar once we get on board.”Denise had more than enough smile for the three of us. They called our area for boarding.“See you on board,” she said, bustling off with her clipboard.Going up the gangway onto the ship itself kind of blew me away. You entered onto the mezzanine level of what looked like the fanciest mall I’d ever seen. There was an atrium that rose several stories high with glass elevators gliding up and down and fancy shops and glittering lights on every different level. On the floor below us a fellow in a tuxedo was playing a grand piano. All of this right in the middle of the ship. Molly’s eyes were as wide as mine.They’d told us to have lunch while the luggage was being brought on. Molly and I had come aboard with a bunch of other social groupers, but they’d all buzzed off one way or another leaving the two of us by ourselves. We found a little sandwich and salad buffet.“So, your first cruise?” I asked. I was pretty sure I’d be able to get the room situation straightened out, but there was no harm in being polite.She assembled a forkful of salad. “Yes, Mrs. Pendergast is a patient at the clinic where I work. She’s pretty chatty, you know. She kept talking about this fantastic cruise she was going on. But she needed a travelling companion to come along and sort of look after her.” She shrugged. “ Mrs. Pendergast offered to cover the cost, if I d come with. I don’t know, she has a way of getting what she wants.”“Is she all right?” I asked.“Denise says she’s afraid she might be coming down with something. She’s a bit of a hypochondriac. But the tickets are already paid for, and I’m already here, so Denise said I should just come along on the cruise without her.” She gave her little shrug again and took a sip of iced tea. “Your first cruise too?”“I’m not really a member of the social group, actually. I went on a nature hike with them one time and ended up on Denise’s list. So now she sends me emails every time she has some big event. She was kind of persistent this time. I think they needed to sign up a certain number of people in order to get a discount or something.”Molly nodded and stabbed a crouton. “Well, it is a cruise. It should be fun. And it’ll be nice not to have to keep tabs on Mrs. Pendergast all the time. There’s gambling, you know. When we get far enough out to sea.”“You gamble?”“Of course. Poker, black jack. Machines mostly, but sometimes at the tables. I have a system. It’s a lot of fun.”After lunch I asked my way up to the Bursar’s office. Molly came along to make sure that everything worked out. The Bursar looked me up in his computer. Apparently, when Mrs. Pendergast had cancelled, they’d looked to fill the vacancy with someone from our same group. I was the only one in a single, so they moved me in to fill her spot and gave my room to someone else. He double checked, but there weren’t any other singles available. He apologized for the inconvenience and gave me my key card.I was flabbergasted.“Well,” said Molly, “we might as well go check it out at least.”We found our way down to the deck where the cabin was located. The room itself was not much bigger than a walk-in closet. A chair, a little night stand, a mirror on the bathroom door, a bed against the wall. That was it. We looked at each other.“Kind of smaller than I would have thought,” I said.“Yeah,” she agreed.I corralled a passing steward.“Um, we were supposed to be getting a double room?” I showed him the printout.“Yes, yes,” he said in his helpful foreign accent. “Very nice double cabin.”“But there’s only one bed.” I said.“Double bed,” he explained. Then he gestured toward the porthole on the wall. “Ocean view!” He smiled, happy to have been of service, and went on about his way.Molly didn’t look altogether convinced.I sighed. “Let me go talk to the Bursar again,But she was sizing things up. Sunshine was streaming in through the porthole. Our two suitcases had been placed in a little niche beside the bathroom door, side by side."All the other rooms are probably just as small,” she said. “On this level anyway. And they seem to have already given your other room away.” She looked at me. “Do you snore?”It wasn’t a question I was expecting. “I don’t think so. No one’s ever complained.”“Well, Mrs. Pendergast does, apparently. That’s the one thing I’ve been dreading the most.” She looked back at the room. “I guess this is just what double rooms are like on cruise ships. Maybe it’s not so bad. At least you don’t snore. We’re kind of on an adventure anyway. Maybe we should just try and make the best of it.”She made it sound as if sharing a room with a complete stranger of the opposite sex was no bigger a deal than sharing a table with him at lunch. She sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up the schedule of the day’s activities as if the issue had already been decided.“Shuffleboard lessons at three o'clock,” she noted. “Bingo at four thirty.”I sat down on the chair. So instead of getting a room of my own I was going to have to share this one? Surely there must be some other alternative. What if,  what if I asked Denise to ask Ciara to move in here with Molly and let me bunk with Jack? Ugh! I cringed at the thought.“A magic show tonight in the forward theatre.” Molly announced; reading more literature.I looked around. How would it even work? The room was so tiny. There was only the one bed.Molly was studying a map of the ship. “What do you think we should do first?” She’d not only accepted the fact that we’d be rooming together, she was ready to head out and start exploring.“Um,  why don’t you just go ahead on your own? I’ve still got a couple things I need to take care of first.”I couldn’t tell if she was a bit hurt that I didn’t want to join her. But she shrugged it off. “Well, OK. Then I guess we can just meet back up here later.”I didn’t really have anything I needed to take care of, I just wanted a little time to sort things out. I was pretty bummed that they’d given away my single. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about Molly’s matter-of-fact-ness. Was she really so used to sharing rooms with random guys?Still, if I did have to share a room with someone, Molly was probably no more objectionable than Jack or Mrs. Pendergast. She was more my age. She was just out of college and I had a few years on her. She seemed pretty easy going. If we’d been thrown together as partners at a workshop breakout session, I wouldn’t have objected.But sharing insights at a breakout session wasn’t exactly the same as sharing a cabin on a cruise ship. I’d had to share rooms with strangers before, but they’d always been guys. What you did was you put on your blinders, you put up your shields, you went about your business, you let them go about theirs. You tried to be polite. At least that’s the way it worked with guys. Did it work that way with girls too?I guess I’d find out.The ship must have cast off soon after we came on board, but so smoothly that we hadn’t even noticed. By the time I found my way up on deck we’d already cleared the harbor and were quite a ways out from land. I stood at the railing and watched the waves roll by. I wondered whether I might get seasick, but the deck was as firm and steady as any sidewalk on the mainland.The ship turned out to be a whole little city unto itself. There was a miniature golf course at one end and a climbing wall at the other. The top deck held two full-sized swimming pools, each already surrounded by sun bathers glistening in cocoa butter. The lower decks held lounges and theaters and eateries and nightclubs. There were shops and kiosks on every level; a sports bar, a wine bar, two piano bars, a margarita bar (“Hi, Jack! Hi, Ciara!”); and any number of different ways to get from any one place to any other: by stairs, by elevator, by main passageway, by side passageway.Later in the afternoon I sat down at a little coffee shop toward the stern of the ship and nursed a cup of lapsang souchong. Seagulls were gliding along in our tailwind. I’d been making good progress on a couple algorithms at work, and I went over some of the key steps in my mind. It was nice being out of the cubicle for a change, sitting in the sunshine, daydreaming instead of coding, watching the seagulls hover and veer.My thoughts eventually wandered back to my room situation. I still couldn’t understand why Molly was being so agreeable about sharing the cabin. It dawned on me that maybe she didn’t think she had any other choice. Maybe she thought that since she was only here as Mrs. Pendergast’s guest, she had to do whatever Denise asked.And so maybe she wasn’t really all that used to sharing rooms with random guys either. Maybe she was just doing what she thought was expected. A fellow shipmate, a sort-of member of the same social group she was sort of a member of, needed a place to bunk. She had an empty spot. Didn’t shipboard etiquette kind of dictate that she offer to share? But then, by the same token, what did shipboard etiquette expect of me?I finished my tea and ambled back toward the front of the ship. A raucous game of volleyball was taking place in one of the pools. Someone called my name.“Are you going back to the room? I forgot my card.”It was Molly. She gave her little shrug. She was wearing a bright yellow bikini. It was fairly conservative, the kind she could wear to the gym, but it called your attention to her shapely legs and her slender tummy. We made our way down the labyrinth of passageways toward our lower deck. The people we passed would have naturally assumed that we were together.“I figured out about dinner,” she said. “Everybody has an assigned time and an assigned table. Ours is in about an hour. We can go together if you want.”After a couple of wrong turns we finally found our corridor and our little room. It hadn’t gotten any bigger in the time we’d been away. But there was a fresh bath towel sitting on the bed, folded into a sort of soft-origami swan.“Look how cute,” Molly said. “The housekeepers must have been in.”She put her things on the nightstand and fiddled in her suitcase for some clothes. “I’m just going to take a quick shower first.” She went into the bathroom, taking the swan along with her. I sat on the foot of the bed and took a look at the schedule. The walls were thin enough that I could hear the water splashing.She came out wrapped in the towel. “It’s too cramped to get dressed in there,” she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. She looked around the room, a bit awkwardly.So this was one of the guys-and-girls-sharing-a-cabin rules that I wasn’t really familiar with. What was I supposed to do while she got dressed? Step into the bathroom to give her some privacy? Or just ignore her, the way I would if I was sharing the room with a guy?She wasn’t completely sure how to play it either. She turned to face the mirror, but that only put her sideways to me. So she turned all the way around, facing the outer door. She tried to give the impression that changing clothes in front of a cabin mate wasn’t that big a deal. So I tried to follow her lead.I didn’t stare, and she had her back to me, but it was hard not to notice what she was doing. She started by putting on her bra, but as she was pulling it up, her towel slipped, revealing the two round, pretty cheeks of her bottom. She quickly pulled the towel back into place, and I quickly forced my eyes back to the schedule. So it was only with my peripheral vision that I was able to see her stepping into her panties and skirt and buttoning up her blouse.Finally she sat on the chair to fasten her sandals. Our eyes met again. She sighed, then admitted. “I work in a clinic. I often have to help clients get over themselves, when they have to disrobe for an exam, in front of someone they don t know. I think I have better empathy, now. Oh, Dinner is supposed to be smart casual.” she remarked.I took that to mean that my polo shirt didn’t quite cut it. I’d brought a couple button-down shirts, and so I went over and got one from my suitcase. She nodded approvingly and turned to the mirror, fiddling with her hair. I took off my polo shirt and put on the button one.The dining room was immense, with big round tables like in a reception hall. Molly and I were assigned to a table with some of the other people from our group. I let Molly sit next to Ciara. There was nobody on my other side, which was fine with me. Molly and Ciara found some girl stuff to talk about. The general conversation at the table seemed to be about motorcycles. Denise stopped by to see how everyone was doing.Molly had the chicken and I had the fish. We resisted the hard liquor, but we both had a glass of wine with our meal. Valentin, our engaging Bulgarian waiter, brought us the chit. We had both just assumed that wine was included in the meal, but he explained that it would be added to our room bill.“Will they charge it to Mrs. Pendergast?” Molly whispered, afraid they might.“We’ll figure it out,” I whispered back, signing for both of us.The magic show didn’t start until eight o'clock, so after dinner Molly suggested we just wander around. She showed me the little art gallery she’d discovered on deck six where it met the central atrium. Photographs of interesting doorways on old, rustic buildings. Just past the art gallery was a little gift shop. We went in, and Molly looked at the jewelry counter. She asked the lady to bring out a necklace that caught her eye. I leafed through the post cards, but I didn’t really have anyone to send one to.We still had forty-five minutes until the show, so I took Molly up to the miniature golf course. We didn’t bother keeping score. I made a couple lucky shots. Then, on the next-to-the-last hole, Molly’s shot went wild and bounced onto the next green over. It ricocheted off a bumper and coasted down, curving gently, right into the cup. A perfect hole in one into the wrong hole!“Whoa!” I said. “Remind me never to play you for money.”She raised her putter and blew on the end as if it were a smoking rifle barrel. “You should see me at pinball.”The mag

Strangers forced to share a cabin on a cruise ship.By HectorBidon. Listen to the ►Podcast at Steamy Stories.The waiting area outside the Long Beach cruise terminal was abuzz with bright new outfits and happy chatter. It was enough to make even the most reserved introvert start to feel a bit of excitement.I was standing with Jack and Ciara, two regulars of the social group. Jack was tall and rugged, something to do with landscaping; Ciara tall and willowy, worked in an office of some sort. They weren’t an official couple, as far as I knew, but they seemed to have hooked up for the New Year s Pacific cruise. That was sort of the way the group worked. Thirty somethings, mostly divorced, intent on maintaining the hard playing lifestyle of their twenties, looking for like-minded dating partners to do it with.Jack was explaining the different cruise drink payment plans. I smiled politely and nodded, thinking how different from theirs my life would be when I got to be their age.Denise bustled up in a pretty pastel pantsuit with her clipboard in her hand. She was a travel agent and the mother hen of the group, forty-something and no longer trying so hard to pretend she was any younger. She d put together this group and made a nice extra income for her troubles.“Hector,” she said, ushering me a step aside, “I’m afraid there’s been a mix up with your reservation. Somehow your single cabin didn’t show up on the final printout.” She gave me a concerned look. “They’re working on it,,  but we may have to double you up with someone.”This came as a bit of a rude surprise. One of the only reasons I’d finally agreed to come on the cruise in the first place had been her assurance that I’d be able to have a single. It wasn’t that I was antisocial really, but I had my limits.“You know Mrs. Pendergast, don’t you?”Mrs. Pendergast was an older woman, well into her sixties. She wasn’t a regular member of the group, but it amused her sometimes to hang with a younger crowd. The group let her tag along to some of their events. I was going to have to share a room with Mrs. Pendergast?“Apparently she got sick and had to cancel at the last minute. So we have an opening. She was sharing a room with, ah;” she double checked her forms; “a Ms. Crenshaw. I don’t know her, but I’m sure she’s very nice. It’s a double room, and you know how it is on a cruise. You don’t spend that much time in your room anyway.”I didn’t even try to return her smile.“They’re still working on your single, of course. I just wanted to let you know the fallback plan.”Not only losing my single, but having to spend the cruise being polite to an old lady? In Denise’s mind, that was what the social group was all about.People were already starting to go into the terminal building when Denise came back, this time with an attractive young woman at her side. I wondered if it was Denise’s daughter, there to see us off.“Hector,” she said, peering at me over the top of her glasses, “this is Molly Crenshaw. I’ve been explaining our predicament.”The girl gave me a weak smile. She was pretty, with long brown hair swept back, wearing white shorts and a light blue top. She didn’t look like she could be a day over twenty-one. Not at all what I had pictured as a travelling companion for Mrs. Pendergast.“It’s a double room,” Denise was explaining. “I’m sure they’ll be able to rig up a partition if need be. But this will be the first cruise for both of you. It will be nice to have a buddy to help you find your way around. I’m sure the two of you will hit it off.”Molly was still looking at me rather uncertainly. This apparently wasn’t exactly what she had signed up for, either. She looked back at Denise. “Well, if his other room got cancelled,Denise was delighted. The registration mix-up had been solved in an efficient and social-group-positive way. I couldn’t believe she was being so cavalier about putting a guy and a girl who didn’t even know each other into the same room together."They’re still working on my single though, right?”“As far as I know. You’ll be able to check with the Bursar once we get on board.”Denise had more than enough smile for the three of us. They called our area for boarding.“See you on board,” she said, bustling off with her clipboard.Going up the gangway onto the ship itself kind of blew me away. You entered onto the mezzanine level of what looked like the fanciest mall I’d ever seen. There was an atrium that rose several stories high with glass elevators gliding up and down and fancy shops and glittering lights on every different level. On the floor below us a fellow in a tuxedo was playing a grand piano. All of this right in the middle of the ship. Molly’s eyes were as wide as mine.They’d told us to have lunch while the luggage was being brought on. Molly and I had come aboard with a bunch of other social groupers, but they’d all buzzed off one way or another leaving the two of us by ourselves. We found a little sandwich and salad buffet.“So, your first cruise?” I asked. I was pretty sure I’d be able to get the room situation straightened out, but there was no harm in being polite.She assembled a forkful of salad. “Yes, Mrs. Pendergast is a patient at the clinic where I work. She’s pretty chatty, you know. She kept talking about this fantastic cruise she was going on. But she needed a travelling companion to come along and sort of look after her.” She shrugged. “ Mrs. Pendergast offered to cover the cost, if I d come with. I don’t know, she has a way of getting what she wants.”“Is she all right?” I asked.“Denise says she’s afraid she might be coming down with something. She’s a bit of a hypochondriac. But the tickets are already paid for, and I’m already here, so Denise said I should just come along on the cruise without her.” She gave her little shrug again and took a sip of iced tea. “Your first cruise too?”“I’m not really a member of the social group, actually. I went on a nature hike with them one time and ended up on Denise’s list. So now she sends me emails every time she has some big event. She was kind of persistent this time. I think they needed to sign up a certain number of people in order to get a discount or something.”Molly nodded and stabbed a crouton. “Well, it is a cruise. It should be fun. And it’ll be nice not to have to keep tabs on Mrs. Pendergast all the time. There’s gambling, you know. When we get far enough out to sea.”“You gamble?”“Of course. Poker, black jack. Machines mostly, but sometimes at the tables. I have a system. It’s a lot of fun.”After lunch I asked my way up to the Bursar’s office. Molly came along to make sure that everything worked out. The Bursar looked me up in his computer. Apparently, when Mrs. Pendergast had cancelled, they’d looked to fill the vacancy with someone from our same group. I was the only one in a single, so they moved me in to fill her spot and gave my room to someone else. He double checked, but there weren’t any other singles available. He apologized for the inconvenience and gave me my key card.I was flabbergasted.“Well,” said Molly, “we might as well go check it out at least.”We found our way down to the deck where the cabin was located. The room itself was not much bigger than a walk-in closet. A chair, a little night stand, a mirror on the bathroom door, a bed against the wall. That was it. We looked at each other.“Kind of smaller than I would have thought,” I said.“Yeah,” she agreed.I corralled a passing steward.“Um, we were supposed to be getting a double room?” I showed him the printout.“Yes, yes,” he said in his helpful foreign accent. “Very nice double cabin.”“But there’s only one bed.” I said.“Double bed,” he explained. Then he gestured toward the porthole on the wall. “Ocean view!” He smiled, happy to have been of service, and went on about his way.Molly didn’t look altogether convinced.I sighed. “Let me go talk to the Bursar again,But she was sizing things up. Sunshine was streaming in through the porthole. Our two suitcases had been placed in a little niche beside the bathroom door, side by side."All the other rooms are probably just as small,” she said. “On this level anyway. And they seem to have already given your other room away.” She looked at me. “Do you snore?”It wasn’t a question I was expecting. “I don’t think so. No one’s ever complained.”“Well, Mrs. Pendergast does, apparently. That’s the one thing I’ve been dreading the most.” She looked back at the room. “I guess this is just what double rooms are like on cruise ships. Maybe it’s not so bad. At least you don’t snore. We’re kind of on an adventure anyway. Maybe we should just try and make the best of it.”She made it sound as if sharing a room with a complete stranger of the opposite sex was no bigger a deal than sharing a table with him at lunch. She sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up the schedule of the day’s activities as if the issue had already been decided.“Shuffleboard lessons at three o'clock,” she noted. “Bingo at four thirty.”I sat down on the chair. So instead of getting a room of my own I was going to have to share this one? Surely there must be some other alternative. What if,  what if I asked Denise to ask Ciara to move in here with Molly and let me bunk with Jack? Ugh! I cringed at the thought.“A magic show tonight in the forward theatre.” Molly announced; reading more literature.I looked around. How would it even work? The room was so tiny. There was only the one bed.Molly was studying a map of the ship. “What do you think we should do first?” She’d not only accepted the fact that we’d be rooming together, she was ready to head out and start exploring.“Um,  why don’t you just go ahead on your own? I’ve still got a couple things I need to take care of first.”I couldn’t tell if she was a bit hurt that I didn’t want to join her. But she shrugged it off. “Well, OK. Then I guess we can just meet back up here later.”I didn’t really have anything I needed to take care of, I just wanted a little time to sort things out. I was pretty bummed that they’d given away my single. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about Molly’s matter-of-fact-ness. Was she really so used to sharing rooms with random guys?Still, if I did have to share a room with someone, Molly was probably no more objectionable than Jack or Mrs. Pendergast. She was more my age. She was just out of college and I had a few years on her. She seemed pretty easy going. If we’d been thrown together as partners at a workshop breakout session, I wouldn’t have objected.But sharing insights at a breakout session wasn’t exactly the same as sharing a cabin on a cruise ship. I’d had to share rooms with strangers before, but they’d always been guys. What you did was you put on your blinders, you put up your shields, you went about your business, you let them go about theirs. You tried to be polite. At least that’s the way it worked with guys. Did it work that way with girls too?I guess I’d find out.The ship must have cast off soon after we came on board, but so smoothly that we hadn’t even noticed. By the time I found my way up on deck we’d already cleared the harbor and were quite a ways out from land. I stood at the railing and watched the waves roll by. I wondered whether I might get seasick, but the deck was as firm and steady as any sidewalk on the mainland.The ship turned out to be a whole little city unto itself. There was a miniature golf course at one end and a climbing wall at the other. The top deck held two full-sized swimming pools, each already surrounded by sun bathers glistening in cocoa butter. The lower decks held lounges and theaters and eateries and nightclubs. There were shops and kiosks on every level; a sports bar, a wine bar, two piano bars, a margarita bar (“Hi, Jack! Hi, Ciara!”); and any number of different ways to get from any one place to any other: by stairs, by elevator, by main passageway, by side passageway.Later in the afternoon I sat down at a little coffee shop toward the stern of the ship and nursed a cup of lapsang souchong. Seagulls were gliding along in our tailwind. I’d been making good progress on a couple algorithms at work, and I went over some of the key steps in my mind. It was nice being out of the cubicle for a change, sitting in the sunshine, daydreaming instead of coding, watching the seagulls hover and veer.My thoughts eventually wandered back to my room situation. I still couldn’t understand why Molly was being so agreeable about sharing the cabin. It dawned on me that maybe she didn’t think she had any other choice. Maybe she thought that since she was only here as Mrs. Pendergast’s guest, she had to do whatever Denise asked.And so maybe she wasn’t really all that used to sharing rooms with random guys either. Maybe she was just doing what she thought was expected. A fellow shipmate, a sort-of member of the same social group she was sort of a member of, needed a place to bunk. She had an empty spot. Didn’t shipboard etiquette kind of dictate that she offer to share? But then, by the same token, what did shipboard etiquette expect of me?I finished my tea and ambled back toward the front of the ship. A raucous game of volleyball was taking place in one of the pools. Someone called my name.“Are you going back to the room? I forgot my card.”It was Molly. She gave her little shrug. She was wearing a bright yellow bikini. It was fairly conservative, the kind she could wear to the gym, but it called your attention to her shapely legs and her slender tummy. We made our way down the labyrinth of passageways toward our lower deck. The people we passed would have naturally assumed that we were together.“I figured out about dinner,” she said. “Everybody has an assigned time and an assigned table. Ours is in about an hour. We can go together if you want.”After a couple of wrong turns we finally found our corridor and our little room. It hadn’t gotten any bigger in the time we’d been away. But there was a fresh bath towel sitting on the bed, folded into a sort of soft-origami swan.“Look how cute,” Molly said. “The housekeepers must have been in.”She put her things on the nightstand and fiddled in her suitcase for some clothes. “I’m just going to take a quick shower first.” She went into the bathroom, taking the swan along with her. I sat on the foot of the bed and took a look at the schedule. The walls were thin enough that I could hear the water splashing.She came out wrapped in the towel. “It’s too cramped to get dressed in there,” she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. She looked around the room, a bit awkwardly.So this was one of the guys-and-girls-sharing-a-cabin rules that I wasn’t really familiar with. What was I supposed to do while she got dressed? Step into the bathroom to give her some privacy? Or just ignore her, the way I would if I was sharing the room with a guy?She wasn’t completely sure how to play it either. She turned to face the mirror, but that only put her sideways to me. So she turned all the way around, facing the outer door. She tried to give the impression that changing clothes in front of a cabin mate wasn’t that big a deal. So I tried to follow her lead.I didn’t stare, and she had her back to me, but it was hard not to notice what she was doing. She started by putting on her bra, but as she was pulling it up, her towel slipped, revealing the two round, pretty cheeks of her bottom. She quickly pulled the towel back into place, and I quickly forced my eyes back to the schedule. So it was only with my peripheral vision that I was able to see her stepping into her panties and skirt and buttoning up her blouse.Finally she sat on the chair to fasten her sandals. Our eyes met again. She sighed, then admitted. “I work in a clinic. I often have to help clients get over themselves, when they have to disrobe for an exam, in front of someone they don t know. I think I have better empathy, now. Oh, Dinner is supposed to be smart casual.” she remarked.I took that to mean that my polo shirt didn’t quite cut it. I’d brought a couple button-down shirts, and so I went over and got one from my suitcase. She nodded approvingly and turned to the mirror, fiddling with her hair. I took off my polo shirt and put on the button one.The dining room was immense, with big round tables like in a reception hall. Molly and I were assigned to a table with some of the other people from our group. I let Molly sit next to Ciara. There was nobody on my other side, which was fine with me. Molly and Ciara found some girl stuff to talk about. The general conversation at the table seemed to be about motorcycles. Denise stopped by to see how everyone was doing.Molly had the chicken and I had the fish. We resisted the hard liquor, but we both had a glass of wine with our meal. Valentin, our engaging Bulgarian waiter, brought us the chit. We had both just assumed that wine was included in the meal, but he explained that it would be added to our room bill.“Will they charge it to Mrs. Pendergast?” Molly whispered, afraid they might.“We’ll figure it out,” I whispered back, signing for both of us.The magic show didn’t start until eight o'clock, so after dinner Molly suggested we just wander around. She showed me the little art gallery she’d discovered on deck six where it met the central atrium. Photographs of interesting doorways on old, rustic buildings. Just past the art gallery was a little gift shop. We went in, and Molly looked at the jewelry counter. She asked the lady to bring out a necklace that caught her eye. I leafed through the post cards, but I didn’t really have anyone to send one to.We still had forty-five minutes until the show, so I took Molly up to the miniature golf course. We didn’t bother keeping score. I made a couple lucky shots. Then, on the next-to-the-last hole, Molly’s shot went wild and bounced onto the next green over. It ricocheted off a bumper and coasted down, curving gently, right into the cup. A perfect hole in one into the wrong hole!“Whoa!” I said. “Remind me never to play you for money.”She raised her putter and blew on the end as if it were a smoking rifle barrel. “You should see me at pinball.”The mag

Strangers forced to share a cabin on a cruise ship.By HectorBidon. Listen to the ►Podcast at Steamy Stories.The waiting area outside the Long Beach cruise terminal was abuzz with bright new outfits and happy chatter. It was enough to make even the most reserved introvert start to feel a bit of excitement.I was standing with Jack and Ciara, two regulars of the social group. Jack was tall and rugged, something to do with landscaping; Ciara tall and willowy, worked in an office of some sort. They weren’t an official couple, as far as I knew, but they seemed to have hooked up for the New Year s Pacific cruise. That was sort of the way the group worked. Thirty somethings, mostly divorced, intent on maintaining the hard playing lifestyle of their twenties, looking for like-minded dating partners to do it with.Jack was explaining the different cruise drink payment plans. I smiled politely and nodded, thinking how different from theirs my life would be when I got to be their age.Denise bustled up in a pretty pastel pantsuit with her clipboard in her hand. She was a travel agent and the mother hen of the group, forty-something and no longer trying so hard to pretend she was any younger. She d put together this group and made a nice extra income for her troubles.“Hector,” she said, ushering me a step aside, “I’m afraid there’s been a mix up with your reservation. Somehow your single cabin didn’t show up on the final printout.” She gave me a concerned look. “They’re working on it,,  but we may have to double you up with someone.”This came as a bit of a rude surprise. One of the only reasons I’d finally agreed to come on the cruise in the first place had been her assurance that I’d be able to have a single. It wasn’t that I was antisocial really, but I had my limits.“You know Mrs. Pendergast, don’t you?”Mrs. Pendergast was an older woman, well into her sixties. She wasn’t a regular member of the group, but it amused her sometimes to hang with a younger crowd. The group let her tag along to some of their events. I was going to have to share a room with Mrs. Pendergast?“Apparently she got sick and had to cancel at the last minute. So we have an opening. She was sharing a room with, ah;” she double checked her forms; “a Ms. Crenshaw. I don’t know her, but I’m sure she’s very nice. It’s a double room, and you know how it is on a cruise. You don’t spend that much time in your room anyway.”I didn’t even try to return her smile.“They’re still working on your single, of course. I just wanted to let you know the fallback plan.”Not only losing my single, but having to spend the cruise being polite to an old lady? In Denise’s mind, that was what the social group was all about.People were already starting to go into the terminal building when Denise came back, this time with an attractive young woman at her side. I wondered if it was Denise’s daughter, there to see us off.“Hector,” she said, peering at me over the top of her glasses, “this is Molly Crenshaw. I’ve been explaining our predicament.”The girl gave me a weak smile. She was pretty, with long brown hair swept back, wearing white shorts and a light blue top. She didn’t look like she could be a day over twenty-one. Not at all what I had pictured as a travelling companion for Mrs. Pendergast.“It’s a double room,” Denise was explaining. “I’m sure they’ll be able to rig up a partition if need be. But this will be the first cruise for both of you. It will be nice to have a buddy to help you find your way around. I’m sure the two of you will hit it off.”Molly was still looking at me rather uncertainly. This apparently wasn’t exactly what she had signed up for, either. She looked back at Denise. “Well, if his other room got cancelled,Denise was delighted. The registration mix-up had been solved in an efficient and social-group-positive way. I couldn’t believe she was being so cavalier about putting a guy and a girl who didn’t even know each other into the same room together."They’re still working on my single though, right?”“As far as I know. You’ll be able to check with the Bursar once we get on board.”Denise had more than enough smile for the three of us. They called our area for boarding.“See you on board,” she said, bustling off with her clipboard.Going up the gangway onto the ship itself kind of blew me away. You entered onto the mezzanine level of what looked like the fanciest mall I’d ever seen. There was an atrium that rose several stories high with glass elevators gliding up and down and fancy shops and glittering lights on every different level. On the floor below us a fellow in a tuxedo was playing a grand piano. All of this right in the middle of the ship. Molly’s eyes were as wide as mine.They’d told us to have lunch while the luggage was being brought on. Molly and I had come aboard with a bunch of other social groupers, but they’d all buzzed off one way or another leaving the two of us by ourselves. We found a little sandwich and salad buffet.“So, your first cruise?” I asked. I was pretty sure I’d be able to get the room situation straightened out, but there was no harm in being polite.She assembled a forkful of salad. “Yes, Mrs. Pendergast is a patient at the clinic where I work. She’s pretty chatty, you know. She kept talking about this fantastic cruise she was going on. But she needed a travelling companion to come along and sort of look after her.” She shrugged. “ Mrs. Pendergast offered to cover the cost, if I d come with. I don’t know, she has a way of getting what she wants.”“Is she all right?” I asked.“Denise says she’s afraid she might be coming down with something. She’s a bit of a hypochondriac. But the tickets are already paid for, and I’m already here, so Denise said I should just come along on the cruise without her.” She gave her little shrug again and took a sip of iced tea. “Your first cruise too?”“I’m not really a member of the social group, actually. I went on a nature hike with them one time and ended up on Denise’s list. So now she sends me emails every time she has some big event. She was kind of persistent this time. I think they needed to sign up a certain number of people in order to get a discount or something.”Molly nodded and stabbed a crouton. “Well, it is a cruise. It should be fun. And it’ll be nice not to have to keep tabs on Mrs. Pendergast all the time. There’s gambling, you know. When we get far enough out to sea.”“You gamble?”“Of course. Poker, black jack. Machines mostly, but sometimes at the tables. I have a system. It’s a lot of fun.”After lunch I asked my way up to the Bursar’s office. Molly came along to make sure that everything worked out. The Bursar looked me up in his computer. Apparently, when Mrs. Pendergast had cancelled, they’d looked to fill the vacancy with someone from our same group. I was the only one in a single, so they moved me in to fill her spot and gave my room to someone else. He double checked, but there weren’t any other singles available. He apologized for the inconvenience and gave me my key card.I was flabbergasted.“Well,” said Molly, “we might as well go check it out at least.”We found our way down to the deck where the cabin was located. The room itself was not much bigger than a walk-in closet. A chair, a little night stand, a mirror on the bathroom door, a bed against the wall. That was it. We looked at each other.“Kind of smaller than I would have thought,” I said.“Yeah,” she agreed.I corralled a passing steward.“Um, we were supposed to be getting a double room?” I showed him the printout.“Yes, yes,” he said in his helpful foreign accent. “Very nice double cabin.”“But there’s only one bed.” I said.“Double bed,” he explained. Then he gestured toward the porthole on the wall. “Ocean view!” He smiled, happy to have been of service, and went on about his way.Molly didn’t look altogether convinced.I sighed. “Let me go talk to the Bursar again,But she was sizing things up. Sunshine was streaming in through the porthole. Our two suitcases had been placed in a little niche beside the bathroom door, side by side."All the other rooms are probably just as small,” she said. “On this level anyway. And they seem to have already given your other room away.” She looked at me. “Do you snore?”It wasn’t a question I was expecting. “I don’t think so. No one’s ever complained.”“Well, Mrs. Pendergast does, apparently. That’s the one thing I’ve been dreading the most.” She looked back at the room. “I guess this is just what double rooms are like on cruise ships. Maybe it’s not so bad. At least you don’t snore. We’re kind of on an adventure anyway. Maybe we should just try and make the best of it.”She made it sound as if sharing a room with a complete stranger of the opposite sex was no bigger a deal than sharing a table with him at lunch. She sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up the schedule of the day’s activities as if the issue had already been decided.“Shuffleboard lessons at three o'clock,” she noted. “Bingo at four thirty.”I sat down on the chair. So instead of getting a room of my own I was going to have to share this one? Surely there must be some other alternative. What if,  what if I asked Denise to ask Ciara to move in here with Molly and let me bunk with Jack? Ugh! I cringed at the thought.“A magic show tonight in the forward theatre.” Molly announced; reading more literature.I looked around. How would it even work? The room was so tiny. There was only the one bed.Molly was studying a map of the ship. “What do you think we should do first?” She’d not only accepted the fact that we’d be rooming together, she was ready to head out and start exploring.“Um,  why don’t you just go ahead on your own? I’ve still got a couple things I need to take care of first.”I couldn’t tell if she was a bit hurt that I didn’t want to join her. But she shrugged it off. “Well, OK. Then I guess we can just meet back up here later.”I didn’t really have anything I needed to take care of, I just wanted a little time to sort things out. I was pretty bummed that they’d given away my single. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about Molly’s matter-of-fact-ness. Was she really so used to sharing rooms with random guys?Still, if I did have to share a room with someone, Molly was probably no more objectionable than Jack or Mrs. Pendergast. She was more my age. She was just out of college and I had a few years on her. She seemed pretty easy going. If we’d been thrown together as partners at a workshop breakout session, I wouldn’t have objected.But sharing insights at a breakout session wasn’t exactly the same as sharing a cabin on a cruise ship. I’d had to share rooms with strangers before, but they’d always been guys. What you did was you put on your blinders, you put up your shields, you went about your business, you let them go about theirs. You tried to be polite. At least that’s the way it worked with guys. Did it work that way with girls too?I guess I’d find out.The ship must have cast off soon after we came on board, but so smoothly that we hadn’t even noticed. By the time I found my way up on deck we’d already cleared the harbor and were quite a ways out from land. I stood at the railing and watched the waves roll by. I wondered whether I might get seasick, but the deck was as firm and steady as any sidewalk on the mainland.The ship turned out to be a whole little city unto itself. There was a miniature golf course at one end and a climbing wall at the other. The top deck held two full-sized swimming pools, each already surrounded by sun bathers glistening in cocoa butter. The lower decks held lounges and theaters and eateries and nightclubs. There were shops and kiosks on every level; a sports bar, a wine bar, two piano bars, a margarita bar (“Hi, Jack! Hi, Ciara!”); and any number of different ways to get from any one place to any other: by stairs, by elevator, by main passageway, by side passageway.Later in the afternoon I sat down at a little coffee shop toward the stern of the ship and nursed a cup of lapsang souchong. Seagulls were gliding along in our tailwind. I’d been making good progress on a couple algorithms at work, and I went over some of the key steps in my mind. It was nice being out of the cubicle for a change, sitting in the sunshine, daydreaming instead of coding, watching the seagulls hover and veer.My thoughts eventually wandered back to my room situation. I still couldn’t understand why Molly was being so agreeable about sharing the cabin. It dawned on me that maybe she didn’t think she had any other choice. Maybe she thought that since she was only here as Mrs. Pendergast’s guest, she had to do whatever Denise asked.And so maybe she wasn’t really all that used to sharing rooms with random guys either. Maybe she was just doing what she thought was expected. A fellow shipmate, a sort-of member of the same social group she was sort of a member of, needed a place to bunk. She had an empty spot. Didn’t shipboard etiquette kind of dictate that she offer to share? But then, by the same token, what did shipboard etiquette expect of me?I finished my tea and ambled back toward the front of the ship. A raucous game of volleyball was taking place in one of the pools. Someone called my name.“Are you going back to the room? I forgot my card.”It was Molly. She gave her little shrug. She was wearing a bright yellow bikini. It was fairly conservative, the kind she could wear to the gym, but it called your attention to her shapely legs and her slender tummy. We made our way down the labyrinth of passageways toward our lower deck. The people we passed would have naturally assumed that we were together.“I figured out about dinner,” she said. “Everybody has an assigned time and an assigned table. Ours is in about an hour. We can go together if you want.”After a couple of wrong turns we finally found our corridor and our little room. It hadn’t gotten any bigger in the time we’d been away. But there was a fresh bath towel sitting on the bed, folded into a sort of soft-origami swan.“Look how cute,” Molly said. “The housekeepers must have been in.”She put her things on the nightstand and fiddled in her suitcase for some clothes. “I’m just going to take a quick shower first.” She went into the bathroom, taking the swan along with her. I sat on the foot of the bed and took a look at the schedule. The walls were thin enough that I could hear the water splashing.She came out wrapped in the towel. “It’s too cramped to get dressed in there,” she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. She looked around the room, a bit awkwardly.So this was one of the guys-and-girls-sharing-a-cabin rules that I wasn’t really familiar with. What was I supposed to do while she got dressed? Step into the bathroom to give her some privacy? Or just ignore her, the way I would if I was sharing the room with a guy?She wasn’t completely sure how to play it either. She turned to face the mirror, but that only put her sideways to me. So she turned all the way around, facing the outer door. She tried to give the impression that changing clothes in front of a cabin mate wasn’t that big a deal. So I tried to follow her lead.I didn’t stare, and she had her back to me, but it was hard not to notice what she was doing. She started by putting on her bra, but as she was pulling it up, her towel slipped, revealing the two round, pretty cheeks of her bottom. She quickly pulled the towel back into place, and I quickly forced my eyes back to the schedule. So it was only with my peripheral vision that I was able to see her stepping into her panties and skirt and buttoning up her blouse.Finally she sat on the chair to fasten her sandals. Our eyes met again. She sighed, then admitted. “I work in a clinic. I often have to help clients get over themselves, when they have to disrobe for an exam, in front of someone they don t know. I think I have better empathy, now. Oh, Dinner is supposed to be smart casual.” she remarked.I took that to mean that my polo shirt didn’t quite cut it. I’d brought a couple button-down shirts, and so I went over and got one from my suitcase. She nodded approvingly and turned to the mirror, fiddling with her hair. I took off my polo shirt and put on the button one.The dining room was immense, with big round tables like in a reception hall. Molly and I were assigned to a table with some of the other people from our group. I let Molly sit next to Ciara. There was nobody on my other side, which was fine with me. Molly and Ciara found some girl stuff to talk about. The general conversation at the table seemed to be about motorcycles. Denise stopped by to see how everyone was doing.Molly had the chicken and I had the fish. We resisted the hard liquor, but we both had a glass of wine with our meal. Valentin, our engaging Bulgarian waiter, brought us the chit. We had both just assumed that wine was included in the meal, but he explained that it would be added to our room bill.“Will they charge it to Mrs. Pendergast?” Molly whispered, afraid they might.“We’ll figure it out,” I whispered back, signing for both of us.The magic show didn’t start until eight o'clock, so after dinner Molly suggested we just wander around. She showed me the little art gallery she’d discovered on deck six where it met the central atrium. Photographs of interesting doorways on old, rustic buildings. Just past the art gallery was a little gift shop. We went in, and Molly looked at the jewelry counter. She asked the lady to bring out a necklace that caught her eye. I leafed through the post cards, but I didn’t really have anyone to send one to.We still had forty-five minutes until the show, so I took Molly up to the miniature golf course. We didn’t bother keeping score. I made a couple lucky shots. Then, on the next-to-the-last hole, Molly’s shot went wild and bounced onto the next green over. It ricocheted off a bumper and coasted down, curving gently, right into the cup. A perfect hole in one into the wrong hole!“Whoa!” I said. “Remind me never to play you for money.”She raised her putter and blew on the end as if it were a smoking rifle barrel. “You should see me at pinball.”The mag

Junior agent Pendergast krijgt de perfecte kans om zichzelf te bewijzen. Hét ontstaansverhaal van Pendergast. Uitgegeven door Luitingh Sijthoff Spreker: Yannick de Waal

Hour #1 THE DRIVE Radio Row Day #4 Wed.: Former NFL MVP Shaun Alexander Joins the Show + Payne/Pendergast Got HEATED this AM! full 2171 Thu, 05 Feb 2026 19:49:18 +0000 0m4Jeyw2A4S5CXKoE1tshLQVhTNPc66j nfl,mlb,nba,texans,astros,rockets,sports The Drive with Stoerner and Hughley nfl,mlb,nba,texans,astros,rockets,sports Hour #1 THE DRIVE Radio Row Day #4 Wed.: Former NFL MVP Shaun Alexander Joins the Show + Payne/Pendergast Got HEATED this AM! 2-6PM M-F © 2025 Audacy, Inc. Sports Fal

THE DRIVE Day #3 LIVE on Radio Row & Payne/Pendergast Almost Came to Blows! full 825 Wed, 04 Feb 2026 21:05:47 +0000 LbwaGg4Ob4I1DoKCcbzVdNe5Uqrng2aw nfl,super bowl,nfl news,radio row,nfl news notes,nfl super bowl,sports The Drive with Stoerner and Hughley nfl,super bowl,nfl news,radio row,nfl news notes,nfl super bowl,sports THE DRIVE Day #3 LIVE on Radio Row & Payne/Pendergast Almost Came to Blows! 2-6PM M-F © 2025 Audacy, Inc. Sports False https://player.am

Ted thinks the key for the Patriots to beat the Texans will be rattling C.J. Stroud early. Sean Pendergast of SportsRadio 610 in Houston joins to preview Sunday's game. Pendergast thinks Stroud will play better this week, and Houston's defense is the best unit in the Playoffs.

Sean Pendergast of SportsRadio 610 in Houston joins the show to preview Patriots vs. Texans. Pendergast thinks C.J. Stroud will play better than he did against the Steelers. He says the Texans defense is prone to give up Quarterback runs, which will be key for Drake Maye. The Texans are not overconfident heading into this game.

On today's edition of The Drive, Hart, Fitzy and Ted revisit Josh McDaniels' unique comparison of Patriots' QB Drake Maye and NBA legend Steph Curry, Mike Giardi's expectations for the Patriots' offensive game plan against the Texans, and Sean Pendergast's picks for the most underrated players on the Houston Texans.

The Patriots face their toughest test of the season as they host the hard-hitting Houston Texans in the Divisional Round on Sunday in Foxboro. Is Drake Maye ready for the moment in just his second career playoff start? Fitzy & Mego set the stage before welcoming Seth Payne of Payne & Pendergast on Sports Radio 610 Houston—and a former Texan himself—for a Behind Enemy Lines look at the matchup. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Seth Payne of Payne & Pendergast on Sports Radio 610 Houston, and a former Texan himself, joins Nick “Fitzy” Stevens and Meghan Ottolini for a Behind Enemy Lines look at Sunday's Patriots vs. Texans matchup. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sean Pendergast of SportsRadio 610 in Houston joins WEEI Afternoons with Andy Hart, Nick "Fitzy" Stevens, and Ted Johnson to preview Patriots vs. Texans. Pendergast explains why he thinks C.J. Stroud will play better than he did against the Steelers. He says the Texans' defense is prone to giving up Quarterback runs, which will be key for Drake Maye. The Texans are not overconfident heading into this game. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Payne and Pendergast discuss the big move the Astros made yesterday by signing Tatsuya Imai. The Astros don't normally make moves like this, what does it mean for the team moving forward?

Hour 3 - Payne and Pendergast discuss Micah Parsons comments that sparked up some drama, the five reasons to hate the Indianapolis Colts, and a "Welcome to the NFL" moment for Jaylin Noel!

Payne and Pendergast cover todays headlines which include an Ole Miss upset over Georgia, Alabama get dominated by Indiana, Texas Tech getting shut out by Oregon, Astros making a huge move, and MORE!

Payne and Pendergast discuss the Texans biggest concerns going into the postseason, Fernando Mendoza's postgame interview comments, and this week's Circle Of Swarm!

Payne and Pendergast discuss Liam Coen coming out and sharing the teams acronym "CLEATS" ... how do we feel about it? Is it better than SWARM!? They also discuss Lamar Jacksons response to the accusations that he's been lazy recently.

Payne and Pendergast discuss five reasons to hate the Indianapolis Colts as we head into the matchup this weekend!

Payne and Pendergast discuss the "Welcome To The NFL" moment Jaylin Noel had against the Chargers this past week and talk about "Welcome To The NFL" moments all time!

Payne and Pendergast do this weeks segment of Take-A-Mania which features some underrated quarterbacks? Find out who wins this week!

Payne and Pendergast preview the big NFL games coming up over the weekend! Later in the segment Payne and Pendergast are joined by Creighton and Partee in cross-talk!

Hour 4 - Payne and Pendergast do this weeks segment of Take-A-Mania, and preview this weekends match ups across the NFL!

Hour 2 - Payne and Pendergast discuss an article that list the biggest concerns about the Texans heading into the post season, Fernando Mendoza's postgame comments, the Jags team acronym, and MORE!

Hour 1 - Payne and Pendergast discuss the College Football playoffs games over the past couple days, the Astros big signing of Tatsuya Imai, and Texans vs Colts storylines!

Payne is joined by Bijani as he fills in for Pendergast. Payne and Bijani discuss Riley Leonard officially being announced as the starter for the Colts this weekend. How will Leonard look and should we be worried at all? Happy New Years!

Hour 1 - Payne is joined by Bijani as he fills in for Pendergast. Payne and Bijani discuss Riley Leonard being named the starter for the Colts and what that can mean for the game + How is the Texans injury report looking? + What does the national media think about the Texans?

Hour 3 - Payne and Pendergast discuss some of the biggest sports stories in Houston in 2025 + what does Kamari Lasssiter mean to the Texans + Chargers fans still crying?

Payne and Pendergast discuss todays headlines which include the NFL announcing the 15 finalist to the 2026 HOF class + A BAD day for the Diggs family + MORE!

Payne and Pendergast open todays show by discussing the Texans upcoming match up against the Colts. Now that it's official that Leonad will be starting over Rivers, is there a reason not to like him?

Hour 1 - Payne and Pendergast discuss the Texans upcoming match up against, what happened with the Diggs family yesterday, and more!

Hour 2 - Payne and Pendergast discuss the strange things to happen with the Texans this year + a possible apology coming from Kendrick Perkins coming soon for C.J. Stroud?

Payne and Pendergast discuss the seven most surreal things to happen with the Texans in 2025... which features topics like Davis Mills helping save the season + A Stroud high five? + CJGJ not working out + MORE!!!!!

Hour 4 - Payne and Pendergast wrap up the last hour of the last show of 2025! This hour includes the best TAKE-A-MANIA winners of 2025 + CFB and NFL Agents?

Payne and Pendergast wrap up there last show of the year along with B. Scott and Reggie Adetula!

Payne and Pendergast look back at the year of TAKE-A-MANIA and give there thoughts on some of the best winners of the year!

Payne and Pendergast react to DeMeco Ryans comments on Kamari Lassiter and discuss what he means to this team.

Payne and Pendergast dicuss the seven biggest stories in Houston sports in the year 2025!

Payne and Pendergast revisit the Perkins comments on Stroud and listen to his new comment on Stroud which could lead to an apology?