Oscar Night by Jennifer Brock Last time, we saw how novelist/screenwriter David Fine spent his Christmas holiday alone, as his girlfriend fashion model Maritza Delgado was back in Venezuela visiting her family. In this installment, we follow Maritza on her first full day back in town, as she prepares a surprise for David. (There's not a lot of TG in this one, and it's a little shorter than usual.)

Part 8

Maritza woke up cuddling her pretty boyfriend, and snuck a hand over and gently stroked his baby-smooth behind. He was so sexy in her panties! It was too bad that she’d brought back his boxers, but she was ready to wear her own underwear again. His were just too loose and bulky to work under some of her clothes. And if she was going to be wearing her own panties again, it was only fair to return his. But his little butt just looked so cute in satin and lace!

She’d spent two whole weeks away from him, and she really missed being with him. She’d been so worn out from her flight that all they’d did her first night back was sleep, and that just had not been enough. She slipped out of bed and went to brush her teeth.

Peeling off her boxers, she decided to wake David with a kiss, hoping the lingering taste of toothpaste in her mouth would counter his morning breath. She rolled him onto his back and brought her lips to his. He squirmed a little, but didn’t wake up completely. It would take something more to bring him around. She licked her fingers and started playing with his nipples.

He groaned a little, which seemed like a good sign. She moved her right hand down to stroke the front of his panties, but there was no bulge there — he was totally flat like a real girl! Further investigation was required. She tugged the panties down off his hips, and found the hidden treasure, where it had been pushed down and away. When sprung free, she lightly kissed him and then tickled him with a quick puff of air.

He started showing more signs of life, so she gave him a little more attention. She took him into her mouth and sucked gently, slurping her tongue along his most tender area. Feeling it stiffen inside her mouth was a major turn-on, and she had to let her left hand drift down to take the edge off her growing desire.

When he’d reached his full size, she moved her mouth to the side and ran her tongue along every surface of his shaft. David was making little sounds by that point, so she figured he was awake enough. She crawled up and kneeled straddling his hips, and then lined everything up before slowly lowering herself onto him.

It was wonderful to feel him inside her again after so long! It was as though she hadn’t truly come home from her trip until that moment. She bounced upon the man she loved, and noticed that he was flexing in response to her. He was clearly more awake than he looked. She increased her speed and intensity, and made sure that he was hitting all the right spots.

He waited until after she’d been satisfied to let his juices flow, so he must have been mostly awake. She leaned down and whispered, “I love you, Baby,” and gave him a deep kiss.

After cleaning herself off somewhat in the bathroom, she went into her incredible new closet to get dressed. It was the best present anyone had ever gotten her. With a space that was customized just for her, it felt less like she was living in David’s place and more like a space for both of them.

Wearing his boxer shorts for two weeks had been sexy fun, but it had also meant two weeks of visible panty lines. It was refreshing to get back into a lacy little black thong. After popping on a pair of nude knee-highs, she slid her legs into her favorite ultra-tight jeans. She picked out a seamless tan t-shirt bra and a tight sleeveless red top. Her ensemble was completed with her distressed chocolate brown leather jacket and matching ankle boots. She loved the way all her shoes were organized in their own little spaces!

Before coming out of the closet, she got out her gym stuff and threw it in her bag. All her purses and totes were hanging on special hooks — it was soo cool!

She gave David another kiss on her way out, and grabbed her purse and sunglasses. Even in December, in L.A. you never leave the house without your shades. She took her keys and went to the garage to see how much her other Baby missed her. It wasn’t quite warm enough to leave the top down, particularly after having spent a couple weeks in the equatorial warmth of Venezuela.

She got in and turned the ignition, then let the motor warm up for a bit before taking it out. Mama needs to treat Baby gentle when she first wakes up. When the sound of the engine let her know it was ready, she put it in gear and pulled out of the garage.

She went for a cruise on the freeway just for fun. Her sister didn’t let Maritza drive her car, even though she was the one who’d paid for it, so she really missed driving. Lucia would probably get along well with David; they were both scared of the way she drove.

Eventually, she made it to her gym. She showed her ID and checked the schedule. There was a cardio class available, but she had a little time to kill first. After changing into her blue and white bra top and yoga pants, a nice pair of thick white socks and her cross trainers, she found a free treadmill and started it up for a light warm-up.

She realized she’d forgotten her music when a Gym Jerk who seemed to have taken the machine next to hers so he could keep staring at her ass tried to start up a conversation. Normally she could just tune that stuff out, but this guy was getting on her nerves. She decided to challenge him to a race. They zeroed out their counters, and the first one to hit five miles would win. Their machines were too far apart for him to see her readout, so she just continued at her usual pace, and lied every so often about how far she’d gone.

The big, sweaty meathead won the race of course, but he wore himself out by trying too long a sprint at the end, and he still hadn’t caught his breath when she had to leave to go get to class. She flagged down a trainer and pointed her in his direction before she went to cardio.

The instructor for the class was one she’d had before. Lyle was a little guy, probably not more than five feet tall, but he knew how to push people into giving their all. It was a good workout. She finished up with a little bit of weight training, and then hit the showers.

She put her street clothes back on and called David. “Hi, Sweetie! Have you gotten out of bed yet?”

“Yes, I did. And thanks for this morning. You can be my alarm clock any day.”

“I just wanted to let you know I won’t be home for lunch. I’m in the middle of a bunch of errands that will take me a while to get through.”

“Ok, I’ll just have to do something special for your first dinner back.”

“No, don’t!”

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry, that came out sharper than I wanted it to. Don’t make any plans for dinner. I’ll take care of it.”

“It’s our first meal together in a long time, and you’d rather have something from an impersonal restaurant than from a loving kitchen, that’s your decision. Our first big home-cooked meal will just be tomorrow, then.”

“Ok, then. I’ve got to go. Love you!”

“I love you, too.”

She closed her phone and returned it to her purse. She really hoped her plan didn’t fall apart. It all started when her mother had been giving her the third degree about David, and what she saw in him. Maritza had casually mentioned that he was an excellent cook, and her mother just lost it. A man cooking for his woman was so distasteful to her, that she spent six days training Maritza to cook a meal for her man instead.

She thought it might be kind of nice to cook something for David, for a change. The meal she’d been taught was pabellá³n criollo, Venezuela’s national dish, which involved cooking four different things at the same time, so she really hoped she wasn’t reaching too far beyond her ability.

To get authentic ingredients, she’d have to drive over to East L.A., which was always a pain. Any time she had to speak Spanish, her accent made her sound like the poor uneducated girl she used to be and not the cosmopolitan world traveler she’d become. But she put up with it since it would also be easier shopping in Spanish than trying to translate her mother’s recipe into English and then looking through the kitchen to figure out whether they already had any of the spices and things. On the bright side, there were plenty of decent places where she could grab some lunch.

It took her a few hours to get her shopping done, mainly because she wanted to find a market where she’d feel safe parking her Baby. Sure, she had an alarm and a LoJack, but she was afraid that some Mexican lowrider could take her to a chop shop and have her gutted for parts faster than it would take the cops to show up. She should have taken David’s car.

It worried her a little that being afraid of Mexicans made her some kind of racist hypocrite, but she managed to convince herself that it wasn’t all the Mexicans she was worried about. The sweet old ladies that were also out doing their shopping were decent people. It was the guys that were probably in gangs that scared her, and being afraid of criminals was reasonable. That made sense.

A little more freeway therapy and she got in a good mood again. The gas prices seemed to have gotten much worse while she was gone, or maybe it was just that the prices were so much lower in Venezuela that they seemed too high back in the US. But with David covering all the bills, she had plenty of money for gas, so she could handle the massive rates.

When she got home, she dropped her shopping bags and shooed David out of the kitchen, explaining that she’d be the one cooking dinner for them. He tried to stick around to help her out, but she said that it was important for her to do this all by herself.

She put her meat in the fridge, and then checked her mother’s recipe, adding up all the cooking times to figure out when she needed to get started. It looked like she had to kill some time first or they’d be eating way too early.

She tracked down David in his new office. It was a little smaller, but it looked pretty cool. She thanked him again for her incredible new closet, and feared that she might not be able to something as nice for him. She told him all about how her mother had insisted that she should be able to cook a meal for her man, and she went along with it. But that meant she’d have to make dinner for him at least once; otherwise she would have lied to her mother, and she just couldn’t do that.

David told her not to worry. He was certain that he’d love anything she made. And her devotion to her family made her soul seem even lovelier than he’d ever imagined. He gave her a big kiss offered again to give her a hand in the kitchen, like maybe she wouldn’t know where he kept everything. She waggled a finger at him and told him to stay away; if she couldn’t figure out where something was she’d call him, but otherwise he was to keep away.

David watched her leave the room and couldn’t stop smiling. How could you not love someone so amazing? If Claude didn’t have his mother’s ring, he’d have proposed right then and there. This was definitely the girl he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.

Maritza tried to start with the easy stuff first. Because she didn’t want to have to postpone her meal a day, she hadn’t gotten the dried black beans that needed to soak overnight. She’d bought canned beans, but she wasn’t sure if the liquid they were packed in needed to be drained, or if you were supposed to cook them in it. She decided to just empty the cans into the pan; it looked kind of like it was supposed to.

She started making the rice next, but her recipe was in metric, and David’s measuring cups weren’t. The glass pitcher thing for measuring the water had both measurements, but the little scoop cups for the dry stuff didn’t. So she used the lines on the glass thing to figure out how to approximate milliliters with cups, and felt pretty smart for solving her problem.

The meat dish was the most complicated. She had to start by chopping up onions and garlic cloves. At least this part didn’t need measuring. She found a knife, but couldn’t find a cutting board to chop on. She decided to get cute and called David on her cell phone to ask where the cutting board was. It turned out that she hadn’t found it because it wasn’t made of wood; it was a big slab of plastic. But also, it turns out that it was a good thing she asked because he had four of them that were color-coded based on what you were cutting. She got out the green one for her vegetables.

When she was learning to cook this, her mother had slapped her hands with a big spoon every time she started chopping the onions and tried to wipe her eyes. But this time she wasn’t there, and Maritza learned how much worse than just crying from the fumes it got if you rubbed your eyes with onion juice on your hands. It still stung like hell after splashing some water on her face, but she summoned all the skills that let her stand in a painful pose with a big smile on her face to keep from screaming.

While the onions were cooking, she chopped tomatoes and that went perfectly. When all the vegetables and spices were mixed together and doing nicely, she found a frying pan and got it ready for the meat. She browned it evenly on both sides, and then used her mother’s technique for shredding it in the pan with a knife and a fork. David’s pan wasn’t made out of the same kind of stuff as her mother’s, and she hoped the little scratches she was making would come out in the wash.

The meat went in with the vegetables, and then she could reuse the frying pan for the plantains that were her favorite part of the meal. The variety she’d found in the Mexican market didn’t look exactly the same as the kind she’d been practicing on in Venezuela, but she didn’t think there would be that much difference. They sliced down the middle just as easily.

Once everything was cooked, she called David down for dinner. She spooned the various elements out and arranged them on a plate as she’d been taught. The rice came out a little too dry, and some was stuck to the bottom of the pot. The beans were too wet, but she could fix that by switching to a slotted serving spoon and draining off some liquid before putting them on the plate. The plantains looked fine, and when she built the little wall on the plate they held the meat in just like they were supposed to.

She’d forgotten to set the table or put out water glasses or anything, but she saw that David was taking care of that for her. She set out the two plates on the placemats, and he held her chair for her. He was sweet like that. She just hoped he liked it.

He wished her a Merry Christmas, and she explained that even though this was the Venezuelan national dish and she was making this as part of their holiday celebration, it wasn’t actually the traditional Venezuelan Christmas meal. Her mother had wanted her to learn how to cook something for every day, and besides she wasn’t sure if American grocers would have plantain leaves, the key ingredient in making hallaca. He nodded appropriately and eagerly dove into his plate.

David smiled and told her it was delicious. But she knew it wasn’t. Her mother would not have been happy with her. The rice tasted faintly like smoke. The only flavor the beans had was a strong saltiness. The plantains weren’t cooked thoroughly enough; they must have been thicker than she was used to. The meat part did come out okay, and it was supposed to be the center of the meal, but she was still very disappointed with herself.

He could tell that she was feeling down and came over to give her a warm hug, and told her that it was the best meal he’d had since his grandmother died. She tried to point out all her mistakes but he silenced her protest with kisses. He said that it might have had minor flaws, but he could taste what was most important. This meal had been prepared with love, and that was the greatest ingredient of all.

That was a cheesy line, and coming from any other guy it would have been just too cornball, but she could feel his sincerity and it just made her melt in his arms. This was the first man she’d ever wanted to try to cook for, and she was sure he’d also be the last.

He told her it was the best Christmas present she could have gotten him. She told him that this was just something her mother had wanted her to do for him; his real present should be showing up in a week, and the only hint she’d give him was that it was vanilla-flavored.