Lying sprawled out and naked on the bed I am talking to Norman on the phone. At least I’m trying to talk to Norman on the phone. My new friend Max doesn’t like Norman. And Max hasn’t even met him yet. He breaks off from what he is doing to scowl at the phone as soon as he realises who is calling, but he doesn’t break off for long.
Max likes doing what he’s doing, very much likes what he’s doing, and isn’t going to stop what he’s doing on my ex-husband’s account. And I just love what Max is doing, totally love what he’s doing, but it’s no way to talk on the phone, and the best way to talk on the phone – with your lover lapping your clit.
Jesus, I just said clit. When the fuck did I last say clit? Hell on earth! When did I last say fuck? And I’ve said them both now in one sentence.
“What was that, Norman?” I’m trying to focus on what Norman’s saying, though I don’t know why I am trying to focus on what he is saying—I found it hard enough when we were married—and I know what this call is, that it really does not matter, and I know that that tongue down there does matter, that it’s doing things to me that I have never, ever felt before; sending ripples through me, sending shivers through me, warming me and wetting me, tonguing me for fuck’s sake, and Norman is burbling-on as usual.
I nod to the phone—and that’s stupid, he can’t see me—and I try to make the usual non-committal noises but that’s hard when I’m wanting to make noises that I can’t.
Okay, Norman, you can fuck off now. Only I can’t say that to a pillock of the church— sorry pillar of the church—who is fumbling now, mid-platitude, pretending he still cares, trying to ease his conscience.
I don’t need you, Norman, now. Hell I can’t say that one either, for if I said it, when I said it, he would want to know just why I said it, and for reasons of my own I cannot tell him yet. I’d love to, though: ‘Sorry I can’t talk right now, Norman, there’s this lovely man in my bed you see and he’s putting his lovely warm wet tongue right where your sad little pink prod used to go, and he’s doing things to me, to my body, heart, my mind and soul, you see, that you never came anywhere near.
“How’s Norma?” Polite instead, whilst squirming, Max looking up at me grinning an evil little grin, licking his lips and diving back in again, making me want to squeal.
I cover the mouthpiece and threaten to smack him on that lovely bare arse at the foot of my bed and he raises an eyebrow and smirks, so I know he’d quite like that and I try not to laugh as I hear Norman burbling alone with his wife out at work.
“Jesus!” “What?” “Nothing, Norman.” I didn’t mean you to hear that! Max’s got fingers inside me, sliding and swirling, or is that me sliding and swirling inside? I hardly now know, but I must put this phone down, say something closing, hang-up, and I do.
“That was very naughty, Max!” I tell him mock-severely, and it has to be mock-severely because I love the devil so. “But you liked it?” Oh yes, I liked it. Thing about stories like mine is that they’re all about girls with long, long legs, long shiny hair, tits as firm as pears and asses round and sweet as peaches. But that’s not me. I’ve got three kids with homes of their own, two of them have started families, and like the rest I’ve got the scars to prove it. Stretch marks silver on my skin trace a pattern like lightning, except that lightning never curved round folds like that. It’s not that I’m not curvaceous, just that I’ve more curves than your average heroine.
Older too, and wiser, or was till Max arrived.
I’ve known Norman from when we were kids together, one of those things that always seemed meant to be. We went to youth club together, then to church together, groped in parlours and on park benches and fucked on his mother’s sofa. No we didn’t. We made love. That’s what everyone called it then, when kids like us thought contraception was something you had to do when married, and making love we made a baby, forged an accidental bond of flesh.
Accidental? I loved the s.o.b., or thought I did, and went on doing it, thinking it, even in years when I lay in bed wondering if this anxious prodding was all there was and he lay wondering how to get to spend more time with her.
God knows what he saw in her, except maybe she was younger, and willing to be ‘the other woman’, someone to be fled to with pathetic excitement, grown-up Postman’s Knock. But you should see her. She smiles like she’s afraid her face will break and she rides a bloody bike. Nothing wrong with that? You haven’t seen her arse; cheeks big enough for tail lights all their own, heavy traffic turning slowly, a hazard to the driver’s vision.
He cheated on me, the stupid sod, when he might’ve negotiated all the freedom he needed because I loved him and am not stupid, would have done a lot, sacrificed a lot, to keep my home and family together. But his cheating broke me for a while, sending me fleeing from the train-wreck of familiar walls to an ill-considered flat, a womb without a view where I could curl up with a hefty bottle and contemplate oblivion.
That mistake I did not make, though the contact ads in my local paper soon threatened to be another.
It was Mabel’s suggestion, a woman as un-like me as could be, a worshipper of the mighty cock who could not get enough even when she strung along a half-dozen lovers at the same time. Mable, so desperate for her fairy-tale prince that she’d blow any frog as soon as kiss it.
Legislation against false advertising, one notes, doesn’t cover prospective dates.
I met unmemorable men, life-defeated, so unaware of what had cost them their previous relationships that they told their women’s truths with lips that could not read them, sounded self-justifications to my ears that never sounded pathetic in their own but were. Un-ironed shirts and body odour, little boys, their mummies lost, stuck with a hunger between their legs they barely understood, and nothing keeping in the oven.
Genuine, Caring men proved both too often, genuine arseholes caring for themselves, and 5′ 11″ and medium build as often referred to waist and brain size in their turn. What the sizes of their cocks were I never tried to learn. I was looking for love.
Then I saw Max’s ad: “Distinguished, gentle, gentleman, caring and safe, not looking for a wife or mother, just friendship, no-strings fun.”
I guess it seemed honest, apart from anything else—honest enough (in the terms they would publish) about wanting warm, fun sex, so I gave his service a call.
It was honest.
This guy climbs out of this ugly Russian box of a car and he’s six feet tall like he told me, and he’s slim and dark like he told me, and he’s dressed in black, just some gold on his tie, no medallion in chest-hair, no fucking gold bracelet, and he’s smiling and it’s like the sun’s come out, and the smile goes on forever and dances in his grey blue eyes and in his voice.
A warm, brown, voice, and gentle, that tells me I look gorgeous, and a warm-brown manner, too, courteous and friendly. And he’s got this photo in an envelope with his name and contact details on it, so that I can post it to a friend as my security, but I don’t need it. He asks permission to hold my hand.
We convoy to my house, his Russian box behind my coupe, and we are warm with coffee and conversation. Can this man really fancy me? I’m not sure I believe it. “Of course I do, lovely lady, I’ve a massive hard-on already.”
A what? Bloody hell. His frankness then and now astounds me, nothing hidden, nothing false. He even tells me he’s a gifted liar, a natural actor who could convince me of the truth of anything that he tells me, and I believe him. Lies kept him safe and sane once, when the world represented danger, but he doesn’t need them now, won’t use them unless it’s to save a lady’s face.
He’s had other women too, and of course he would have, and he’s honest about them, laughingly confides how the rules about false advertising might have saved him some pain too. He reflects on bedding one lady he wanted not to hurt, a ‘sexy, petite’ lady as round as she was tall, her body a railway map of scars, failed reductive surgery. He lied then, and fluently; convinced her his inert cock was the product of recent stresses and tongued her till she came.
I knew I wanted him, but I had to go, had pulled night-duty on the ward, and there he is, this stranger-friend in transition of minutes, and I do not want to lose him. He will see me off, he tells me, and I run up, get changed, knowing he’s downstairs, flutterings and mutterings in bodily places I did not know I had, feeling vulnerable at his nearness, already aching with the loneliness of parting.
He tells me he’ll return but he’s not there after my shift and I guess it’s another ‘Don’t call me’ situation, only then he’s at the door and I am ready for bed, and so is he.
Sweet Jesus. Hands as soft as his voice caress me like remembered dreams, ever so smooth, ever so light, and he’s reassuring, gentling. I’m to tell him if anything hurts me, say no to anything I’m not sure of, and down there is his lovely cock, flushed and veined and throbbing and the one thing I’m really sure of is I want it. But he has problems still and cannot yet sustain it, part of him battered almost senseless by the woman who used to be his, the stupid bitch. That’s how I first find out about that tongue, first feel it slicking and licking and tilting, flickering on her I only used to know the name of, moistening and rolling my lips, slipping softly inside me, giving way now to his hands, those long fingers so slender and mobile, tongue teasingly still on my clit.
Cunnilingus, it’s called, but I did not then know it and had never felt it, had never felt anything like this. And his poor chap’s still wanting, hard-soft with his sadness, so I coax and invert him alongside of me, take the long lovely fellow hard-soft in my lips and feel him grow harder and filling and God!
My man softly pauses, wants to know if I’m sure; do I know how far I want to take it, and oh yes I do, yes I wonderfully do, I can’t get enough of this magical monster and just want to eat him, and do. A taste never tasted, so strange and so sweet, and the heat in my loins is still surging and lifting and oh!
Two firsts in a day in a sweet sixty-nine and suddenly a memory, a very old memory, the dust shaken from it, a feeling I felt years ago, an urging and roiling, a rippling and seething, an in-body writhing making all of me squirm as the dam breaks within me, its old concrete shattered and the soul of me surging wet over its walls.
We’ve been lovers some time, now, and yes I do love him, and yes—oh boy yes—fully functioning again, a gift to my mouth, cunt—and ass if I want it—and so very lovely and loving and good. He said he would find me and teach me to love me, show me what love was about. And he has. And I love it. And it’s mine, now. Fuck you, Norman.
© 2004 Richard V Raiment. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.