Conception
December 21, 2008
Finals are over. I’m exhausted and emotional and I want to talk. Weeks of distance and travel due to my grad school studies have kept Jameson and me farther apart than we’d like.
I’ve been lying here in bed, reading, thinking, listening to the wind outside my window, my right hand dropping behind me to gently twirl the little silver heart that dangles from the slender chain around my right ankle.
Something’s been playing on the outer edges of my mind the past few months. I hear him walk into the bedroom and stop. I’m facing away from him, lying on my stomach. “God, I’m glad you’re home” I half-whisper as I roll over, and sitting up, clasp my arms around my knees. We just look at each other. I’m never sure whether I should smile reassuringly or just let my face go slack. After years of marriage, little things like that still make me uncertain, but I no longer think it matters that much. Details are sometimes less important than the big picture.
“Something’s on your mind,” he notices.
“Mm-hm.”
I rest my chin on my knees and look up at him. Suddenly it erupts out of me, and I’m not sure if I’ve decided to say it or it’s simply fluttered out of my mouth like something from Pandora’s box: “Our children are beautiful.”
Surprise maybe flickers over his eyes, but he is quiet and grave. He is listening.
My head pops up, my eyes widen and my words all come out in a rush. “It’s crazy, I know, but Jamie, lately I keep remembering when we conceived Evan and I want to do it again.”
I feel excited and nervous. Some part of me knows this is not rational and therefore I shouldn’t be doing this. But I want to say it. I know I can and he’ll hear me.
I’ve been scared he’d tell me it was the inevitable result of going back to school. That he’d analyze me and find that I was susceptible to the blush of youth and fertility of the brilliant, intelligent twenty-somethings that surround me now.
“It’s more than school, you know.” I hate it when I get defensive like this, especially when he’s not even provoked it: there’s no reason for it except my pride. “And please God, don’t say it’s a midlife crisis.” I can tell my face has that red, angry look that it gets when we fight.
But he isn’t fighting.
He’s leaning against the closet door, looking at me, waiting on me to say more and he’s looking so goddamned intent, and maybe even pleased, that I fall back onto the bed so I can say this thing without looking at him. “Do you know how sexy it was? The night we conceived Evan?”
And that seems stupid. I’m talking to this man that I know and love and who was with me, and I feel color begin to rise in my cheeks. “J. You came to me, and you touched me, and you took me, and you filled me with our child.”
Saying it makes me feel for an instant like I’m falling. Then it makes me wet.
I close my eyes. I am remembering. I am thinking of all the years of sex, all the pleasure, the talk and laughter and tears, remembering his body and mine.
And yet, there was something in this act of procreation, his gift of semen and sperm and himself, the fertile warmth of my own body radiating out and drawing him in, our orgasm together as he filled me, that made me his. (I am almost disturbed by how powerful this image is, like we are two primitive humans in a tribe and he chose me, made me his and filled me with his children, taking me night after night, suckling my breast to remind me that my breasts too are for the nourishment of our children, and leaving his scent on me and his semen, glistening on my body, his mark. It is rough, primal, patriarchal bullshit and very silly. It is also more powerful than I can say, and I am breathlessly wet.)
He crawls onto the bed (”like a predator,” I think), his hand skimming my legs and coming to rest beside my body.
I turn my head to face him. I feel an intense desire within me. (The cavegirl in me, I think absurdly, wants him to choose her, her body makes her ready, sends out her pheromones to call him.)
He doesn’t say anything at first. His eyes are just searching my face, making sure I’ve said it all. His hands are strong and firm and they know how to hold me here. His body is over me. I can’t get away, I think irrationally. There’s no way to escape. Why does this turn me on?
But with an effort I swallow down my desire. There’s one more thing to say. My tentativeness is gone.
I put my hands on his chest, push him on to his back.
I slide a leg over his body and straddle him, taking my tee off then leaning down until my hair touches his face. He loves this, the curtain my hair makes around us, shutting out the room. I am seducing him, making him want to fill me with our child. I feel a thrill when I feel his hard cock against my ass. The feminist professor I had in college sits in the back of my head as she often does, scolding me for what I am doing, for what I am about to say. But I am wiser than she ever was: I know myself. I know not only what I can be but what I am.
And I tell him who I am. My voice is calm and sure now, and, as turned on as I am, I am more clear-headed than I’ve felt in weeks.
“My pussy was meant for your cock. But my womb was meant for you, also. You were meant for many things, beautiful things. But the most beautiful thing you do is hold me hard on your cock until your cock in me is a miracle, and you give me life. You always tell me I am beautiful: what you mean is, my body is fertile for you in a way nobody else’s could ever be. The highest thing we do…”
He stops my mouth with a kiss. I’m not finished speaking. I try to pull away, but he holds my hair in his hands now. My breasts are against his chest, he can feel me wet against his thighs, and he is holding me too tightly to move, holds my ass and my hair, and I am lost.
He breaks the kiss. Beneath me he is breathing rapidly. I know he’s only kissed me and I already look freshly fucked. I can feel heat, energy, light almost, rising in my body.
I’m not sure if I’m lost in a fantasy or some mystical awareness of this moment, what it means to be joined to my husband in this fertile, intense instant.
When his cock slips into me, it isn’t like it usually happens. Normally I am ready to ride him and come immediately. Now, I suddenly rise above him. He has taken me: now he is mine. I feel my orgasm radiating from my uterus, a gathering of light that will grow as he nears his own.
It is thirty minutes later, maybe, when I finally lower my head to his, and he takes me in his arms, and, for the moment, I am sated. I can feel the silk of his semen in my body, I can feel the gathering force of life.
And it occurs to me, as I sleepily milk his cock with the muscles that nature gave me for this purpose, that all sexual pleasure is a shadow of this moment, a cry of life to be given form.
For this reason, we fuck. For this reason, I fall in love again five times before morning.
The Importance of Anklets
December 14, 2008
Jupiter and Venus are doing a pas de deux in the night sky, and they’re far and away the most sad and joyful things up there.
They get close, they seem as though they want to kiss each other, then they are forced off into their separate orbits, Jupiter swinging out so far away, Venus speeding along close to the sun.
Reminds me of me and Hope right now.
It’s the end of term, and the irony right now is that I’m the one who should be swamped with work, but she’s the one who never seems to have any time. My stuff is easy to rearrange: I can shuffle the end-of-term papers around, handle students through email (they’re not on campus anyway). There’s a lot to do, but it’s just a matter of pacing.
Hope, though… well, she’s got a schedule too, and hers is killing her.
I can always tell: it’s a tone of voice with her. She gets a little more ironic, a little more focused, a lot less easy to distract. She hates to be knocked off her rhythm when she’s managing her schedule.
That includes sex: I can send her a suggestive text, and I can tell by her reply that she’s not saying “No,” but “Not now.” It’s not a rejection of me, and (thankfully) it’s not what I’ve seen in some spouses, that horrible defensive declaration that “You’re not the boss of me.” We’re a little beyond that.
No, it’s more like the best that anybody could do: confronted with an amorous spouse, she smiles sweetly and turns back to what she’s up to. I could take it personally. But I think I shan’t.
We have a code.
It’s her silver anklet.
The one that I can feel against my cheek when her ankles are on my shoulders and I’m fucking my beautiful wife to orgasm. The one that shines in the dark when we make love and when her slender creamy legs wrap themselves around my body and draw me into her.
When she hasn’t time just now, or is noticeably short with me, she clips on the silver anklet that she knows turns me on no end. It’s her way of saying, “I haven’t forgotten you: but I can’t allow myself to be drawn into sex right now.” It gives us both some dignity. It keeps her from having to explain herself. It keeps me from guessing whether the schedule is an excuse.
It means, “As soon as may be.”
She’s on the living room floor right now, in a pajama shirt and black panties, her work spread out on the carpet in front of her.
Her legs are tucked up under her, her face a strange mixture of concentration and bemusement. I love that look, the intelligence and wit shining from her eyes, her red hair scattering the light from the lamp.
Beneath her, I catch a glint of silver.
We’ve gotten into vid-chat, Hope and I.
I’ve been mulling over why it’s been so moving to us both.
I think I know.
In the middle of the day, or when one of us is traveling, we pull up Skype and there we are. I go full-screen.
There’s her face. She’s a little pixelated, colors maybe a little distorted by bandwidth issues sometimes.
But it’s her face, and I think after the last chat, I’m able to say why it effects me this way.
“Hey, baby. You look good.”
“You too. It’s good to see you.” We saw each other a few hours ago. We’re pathetic.
There’s silence. We’re just kind of looking at each other. I love that she’s not very self-conscious. She’s wearing a black jersey, jeans. We make a few passes at conversation.
“What’s going down today?”
She wrinkles her nose, smiles. “Your son’s been a good kid. He brought home a girl. To do some dumb social studies project.”
I raise my eyebrows. I don’t want to speak for some reason. I just want to look.
“Yeah,” she says, interpreting my silence as a question. “Cutie, too. Name of Andrea. They collared the library all day.” The library is our living room, all hardwood floors and bookshelves and couch and desk. It smells of books.
“And you?” I ask. She’s always so damned cheerful. I love that.
“Oh, me… well, I’m good. Missed you terribly at eleven thirty.” We know what she means. She wanted me, wanted sex, yes, but a talk, to be held, to play, wanted her best friend, and bowed to the terrible necessity of work and The Real World.
Suddenly I know what it is I want to say.
“Do you know how you look to me? You look to me just as you do when we’re lying in bed.”
She looks a little surprised. She doesn’t smile, but her eyes tell me to go on.
So I do.
“You look like you do when we’re side by side, and you’re wearing nothing but your shirt and your panties and we’re just talking, and you reach down and you hold my cock while we just lie face to face. This is what I see: this red-golden hair falling around our eyes, wrapping us up in this curtain. Nobody else can see us. Nobody else can hear us. Your hand on me. My fingers between your thighs, this slow talk and tease we do so well.”
There’s silence. We’re just staring again.
A loud crash comes through the computer speakers.
“Oh, shit,” she says. She looks at me lingeringly for a moment. “Need to go. Don’t be late, okay?”
At dinner, she is wearing the black jersey, a plaid skirt. She looks like a New England Episcopalian housewife who loves sex and likes money. We chatter with the kids, tell jokes. Her legs are just visible to the right of the table. I love her legs. We exchange happy looks. This is us, at home, happy.
After dinner, she stands with her back to the bedroom door. The skirt, unbuttoned, falls to the floor, and she comes to my arms. We kiss.
On the bed, her legs enfold me, her tongue is warm in my mouth, and her pussy is damp in her black thong. We are face to face, eye to eye.
“Like this,” she breathes.
“Oh, Jesus, yes. Like this.”
We are side by side. When I enter her, she closes her perfect, bright eyes for a second, opens them, and then touches her lips to mine, and says, “Just like this.”
Forget / Remember: French Kiss
August 19, 2008
You’re not supposed to forget things when you’re married, when you’re in love.
The sacred little things, the conversations that first wrapped you together in a veil of mystery and confidence, shared memories, the exchange of hopes.
Of course you do forget. Small details.
The hard part maybe is that you start to forget the things you shared. You tell your lover things, and she becomes the guardian of these memories and images and hopes and fears that were once your private property. So you don’t have to remember obsessively, or even competently.
Hope lost her diary.
She sat at the kitchen table, and if she were the crying sort her tears would have been a torrent instead of the quiet diamonds glistening on her cheek.
“That book contained so much memory.” She was staring at the table, green eyes washed out, empty as she turned inwards to find what might have been there. I just listened, poured tea, stirred in lemon and sugar, passed it across to her. When you know somebody the little acts of love become something as unconscious as gravity. You’d miss it if it weren’t there. You don’t think about it when it is.
“Walking home in the rain, my jeans wet. Doug’s friend, walking next to me.” She smiles, almost shyly. “My first French kiss.” She ducks her head, laughs, wipes a tear from her nose. She blushes.
My wife blushes. My wife who loves sex, who can unselfconsciously have a conversation about literature while gracefully stroking my cock, who kisses me with the paced hunger of a true lover. Blushes.
I feel a little catch in my own throat, in love suddenly.
“I know. I’m blushing.” Then, irrelevantly, “I was twelve.”
I ask her, “Tell me about it. Each detail.” I want to hold this memory with her, to know what little girl was suddenly reawakened there at our breakfast table, what little girl is threading her way through those blushing memories as timidly as a newborn colt finding her way through a pasture of flowers.
She blushes more furiously. Her face is nearly as red as her hair.
“I can’t. Oh, god. Why can’t I say it?”
I know, but I know she doesn’t yet. Maybe there is some small privacy in our long life together, some small area where you have to admit, “We have built this life together. But there are things not even you can share with me.” In those hot blushes I see that there is a furnace near the core of this woman that I never quite will touch, because I wasn’t there in the rain with her, was not there when she had her first French kiss. But there, in the lost diary, was the truth of the matter, scrawled in the handwriting of a twelve year old girl, the importance of the thing, something nobody now will ever know.
We’ve talked about that kiss, of course: but it was a story: “His name was _____. It was at _____. It was…. nice.” Now I see that even in our intimacy, she, perhaps like me, held something back, some hint that she is mine and yet always her self.
So I ask, quietly, “What did your diary say?”
She looks dreamy, far away, her eyes still glistening with tears that are joy and grief, memory and the glittering innocence of a twelve year old girl.
Her voice is barely a whisper. She is my wife. She is twelve years old. I am a ghost, barely there.
“I love the French.”
Just that.
And I am imagining that somewhere that book lies on the side of a road, or in a ditch, washed with mud-black drain-water.
And I imagine that some boy will pick it up, wipe the rain from his glasses, turn over the pages, and fall in love with a girl that I may never know, but who grew up to be known by me. And I say a little prayer for him, that he can stand the ache of knowing so beautiful an ember that would catch flame in Hope’s blushes.
I Wish
August 3, 2008
I couldn’t sleep tonight, so I began turning digital pages. I came across something you’d written a while back. It wasn’t anything terribly important; actually I find now I can’t even remember what precisely it was — something for the discussion board — but Jamie. It turned me on. The way you talk to me, and for me, and with me — so fucking hot.
I began turning more digital pages. I saw pieces where we’d bared our souls and laughed and loved and goddamn I wanted to wake you and press my naked body against yours and whisper “Make love to me — Speak the language of the body with me.” But you were so peaceful tonight. And beautiful. And I didn’t.
I wish I had touched your face, stroked your cheek, touched the places on your body that I love so well; kissed you softly but with all the intensity gathering in my body — kisses that are my attempt to breathe you in and telegraph “I love you” and “I want to be with you forever.” But tonight it seemed right to let you dream, as dreams have been so lately absent.
Be at peace, Jameson: know that I love you and want you.
Tonight and always.
Your own
Creamy Skin & Black Panties
July 29, 2008
Hope doesn’t like to hang out in the sun. (That whooshing sound is the closing of windows from guys who like their erotic writing poolside. Sorry. We have to tell the truth, insofar as we write anything…)
She’s got fair, white skin that bruises easily and burns within minutes.
She’s determined that skin will last her into old age, too, and decided long ago that the brown but leathery skin that can manage to look good on men (with a little care) isn’t for her.
Fair enough.
So all that white skin and red hair?
Well, she looks really amazing in a loose black sweater and black panties.
And nothing else.
Which is how she looks now.
I walked into the bedroom a few minutes ago, and she was reading. Knees up, red hair hanging around her face, glasses perched adorably on the end of her nose. (Can I say I’m one of those guys who likes coming on glasses? Okay then. If you like smart girls (or at least smart-looking girls), you get it without further explanation.)
She looked over the top of her novel. She smiled at me and turned back to it.
I’ve been sitting here, writing about her, my cock hard, but my heart soft as wax sitting in the sun.
God, I want her. Reading is sacred around here: not even sex is allowed to interfere, technically. (It often does.) Now and again, she peeks up at me and catches me staring. She smiles. Is it my imagination that she parts her long legs?
Is she saying, “Hey, best friend. I know that little rush of sex in your blood makes you feel more alive. And you know what? I’m here for ya. I’m here to make you feel a little more alive”?
I’m posting this.
Then I’m asking her a question.
“Hey, lady… would you much mind if I kissed you?”
Maybe I won’t say where.
Marital Text
July 28, 2008
Hope is driving with our son, somewhere between Texarkana and St. Louis, coming back from visiting relatives.
Our texts are flying back and forth. She’s on her cell. I’m on email, which gives me the advantage.
We do this because we miss each other. We’re hungry for each other and we don’t want to say so, not quite directly. We touch one another, we sniff one another for the scent of self-disclosure, waiting until it comes.
Hope: Want you to check bit-torrents for [x}, do you mind?
Jamie: Done. Anything else?
Hope: That's it. Few hours outta Texark. Stopping for dinner soon.
Jamie: How's the drive with Evan? I swear, girl. He's a little Freudian.
Hope: LOL Maybe a little. U jealous?
Jamie: Not at all. Well, yes, that he's in the seat next to you.
Hope: Grin. He's sleeping. I'm listening to Rape of Nanking.
Jamie: Some kind of rape, surely...
Hope: Ah. We're on the same wavelength. Off and on. Variable mood.
Jamie: Same. Could go either way.
Hope: You choose. I'm driving.
Jamie: Mere matter of curiosity. If I were your driving partner, would you want my tongue or fingers on your pussy?
Hope: Okay. I'm wet now. Nice work, Doc.
Jamie: What're you wearing, angel?
Hope: Black capris. Off the shoulder sweater. I'm such a disappointment.
Jamie: Are you? When does the disappointment begin?
Hope: Fingers, then?
Jamie. Oh, yes. Fingers. In your capris. While you drive.
Hope: Fuck. I like you.
Jamie: We do seem to work well like this, yeah?
Hope: We do. Have I mentioned I want you in [A]?
Jamie: Strange town to choose. Why?
Hope: Just passed through [D]. Keep thinking about it.
Jamie: Hotel?
Hope: Jesus, Jamie. Anywhere. Do you know how much I LOVE sex with you?
Jamie: Yes. I’m in the mood to finger you while you drive for a hundred miles.
Hope: Damn you.
Jamie: And then to fuck you all night.
Hope: Better.
Jamie: I love you. You make me hard just by texting, you know that?
Hope: I’d hoped. I miss you.
Jamie: I’m hard for you. I’m keeping it for you.
Hope: Soon?
Jamie: As soon as you bring that hot perfect body within the circle of my arms.
Hope: Jamie.
Jamie: Hope?
Hope: Can I just say I like it when you say “fuck”?
Jamie: Yes, you can say that. Can I say I like it when you say, “fuck me”?
Hope: Hell. Damn. Fuck. Fuck me. Yes.
Jamie: Hey. Come home soon, huh?
Hope: As fast as this car will go. Good night, my Jamie.
Jamie: Good night, sweet love.
Odds are good that by the time you read this, Hope will be home. She doesn’t forget these conversations. She’ll have been thinking about it… for a hundred and fifty miles. That’s one reason no woman ever holds my attention for long, except Hope. She remembers. She holds on.
And I’ll bet she’ll whisper to me, “Fuck me.”
Most of all, she’ll mean it.
Meantime, angel: damn you for not being in my arms.
Damn you for not filling the space around us with the halo of your red hair and the scent of your perfume.
Damn you for not enclosing me in the circle of your legs, the magic circle that erases time.
Fuck you for not riding me right now and letting me see that transluscent erasure of time that renders you 17 years old again, fresh, almost virginal, while you ride my cock.
Bless you for coming home as fast as six cylinders will carry you.
Stay wet.
Stay ready.
Expect me.
I’m ready for you.
Days Off in England / On Not Swinging,
July 5, 2008
We haven’t talked about the spanking, really, except in light jokes about the difficulty Hope is having sitting down. Maybe it was a passing fancy of Hope’s. Maybe her (rather sore) bottom has objected to that particular kink. She’ll let me know.
In the meantime, the college library is closed for the weekend. The librarian (I’ll call her Allison) is a wonderful girl from somewhere in Yorkshire whose accent can still be detected under her carefully scrubbed speech. I reminded her yesterday that that’s almost two thousand years’ worth of history in that accent: Celts of various sorts, Angles, Saxons, Danes, all mixed and marinated by Normans. She smiles this melting smile.
She likes me and Hope, and we like her back. She offered to open the library for us on Saturday, but we told her we’d like to spend the weekend in the Midlands. We asked her to come meet us at the Perch, our favorite pub in a building that predates the European colonization of the New World, a short walk across a meadow in Binsey. She gave us the alarming news that the roof had burned off the place last May, that it was still finding its feet, and offered to meet us back at another spot to toast the Fourth of July (”But you mustn’t tell…” and then in a coy English country-girl accent, “I’m a good English girl”).
So the evening of the Fourth of July found us at a fresh pub (again, walking distance) in a light rain that threatened, came and went. The English daylight lasts longer than we’re used to, so it felt like drinking in the afternoon.
Allie was there already, young and fresh in a red sweater and pleated black skirt. (Generally speaking, English girls don’t have legs as nice as Americans, but Allie’s are, as Hope noted when she met her, “carefully designed to ensnare visiting professors.”)
She brought her brother, Evan (coincidentally the name Hope chose for our son), a good-looking, witty, and intelligent man of 25 who reads everything.
The four of us sat in a covered garden (Hope delicate on the wooden benches). A few American students were gently getting drunk on English beer in honor of American independence from England.
We were soon talking animatedly about politics, both English and American. Whether Evan collared Hope’s attention or she collared his, I couldn’t say, but I was happy to just feel the energy radiating from her that I can always feel when she’s resting her eyes on a new man, doing the complicated dance she does with her own desires, his, keeping it honest, keeping intelligence and kindness and sensuality all as close to a boil as she can.
For my part, I was more than happy to engage the brilliant and attractive young Allie and have her talk all to myself.
Hope and I don’t swing. We definitely understand the impulse: we have never been shy about talking to one another about who in our circle turns us on. But swinging takes a kind of carelessness. We could probably handle hearing, “S/he was amazing in bed,” but neither I nor Hope particularly want to fuck somebody we don’t genuinely care about. And to hear, “I really do love him / her, and am falling in love with him / her” is more than we ask our relationship to carry. We are partners, and we protect that jealously.
But Hope knows when I’m turned on by somebody else, and she tolerates it with an amused boys-will-be-boys attitude that isn’t condescension. She understands it herself, really, and she knows that to be turned on by a person is to make a connection with them, one that might enrich us as individuals, and so as a couple. And so, sitting next to her as she leaned forward towards Evan, her thigh against mine, I knew she felt it when Allie and I made our connection.
Allie’s eyes are hazel, deep and glittering. Her hair is light, and Princess-Di short. She was leaning towards me as if I had been the only man who had ever really understood her. I was listening, talking, laughing with her, and we looked into one another’s eyes a little too long, and I felt my stomach drop.
Hope felt it too, I think. But she is never judgmental. She kept Evan in her sights, this attractive younger man who, I seriously do suspect, was falling for her a little bit (because men just often do).
If Allie and I savored our emotional connection with a low-grade smoldering mutual desire just a little longer than the conversation lasted, on our way out to the car-park to put them in their little blue compact, so did Hope and Evan.
Hope and I held hands on the walk home. We didn’t have to say anything, really.
In an English accent laced with a tiny tart edge of the Yorkshire countryside, Hope said, “I think she rather fancies you, Jamie.”
In the same accent, but deeper, I said, “Aye, and I think he fancies you, Hope. P’raps foreign is jus’ sexy.”
In an accent that was, that is, pure educated American South, she said, “What is it about youth, Jamie? Why is it such a turn-on?” We walked in silence a bit, our feet making that odd wet-asphalt sound that you hear in movies. She answered her own question: “I suppose I feel age a little bit. Maybe we cannibalize them for their energy, their delight in life. Maybe we ache to give our wisdom to somebody who can handle it.”
“Would you like to take Evan under your wing? Let him cannibalize your wisdom while you cannibalize his energy?”
She grinned at me. “You know I would. And I wouldn’t. I don’t even have to ask about you and Allie.” We’ve had this conversation: I teach undergraduate women. Yes: I would love to take Allie under my wing, protect her, give her sex that’s good, that only comes from wisdom and age, and…
And gradually watch her restlessly tire of it, I suppose.
Sex is unpredictable, a strange thing.
Time though. It teaches you things.
I put my arm around her. I drew her to me.
I suppose she was doing what I was doing: balancing desire with truth.
I took the beautiful image of Allie with her skirt around her waist, panties (knickers, to you Brits) dangling from one ankle, in the locked and darkened library (why are most of my fantasies, and some of my best memories, in libraries?), seated on a research table where that very day I pored over a manuscript, legs locked around my waist, eyes closed as I fuck her, and her voice with its sexy northern accent in my ear, “Jamie… It’s so good. It’s never been so good.” Her eyes fly open in my imagination, those intense, brilliant hazel eyes, and we are connecting, Allie and I, in love. I am her mentor, her demonic lover, and she is my secret, my soror mystica, the channel for all my wisdom, the cup that receives my energies and serves them back to me enriched.
I let the image sit in my breathless mind for a few seconds with all its ego and fantastic illusion.
God, it would be good.
And then I do something I do a lot.
I open the fist of my imagination, and I let the fantasy dissipate like so much mist, smiling at it as it goes, that alarmingly possible impossibility. Hopefully, I’m a decent guy, a good lover. But I’m just Jamie. I’m nobody’s salvation.
Hope gives me my space, though I feel her body pressing against mine, familiar, kind, maybe a little wrapped in her own private thoughts of Evan turning her face to the pillow and taking her from behind.
Letting it enrich her for a few moments, letting it give her life.
Letting it go.
Later in bed, her legs locked around me as I rode her for the third time, Hope whispered to me in a voice that seemed a little ragged, “There are some things youth can’t make up for.”
Thank you, Allie. Thank you, Evan. We love you.
Something New For Hope… and Jameson
July 5, 2008
Oxford, 5:30 AM
Still jet-lagged and struggling to get my head on straight. It takes a little time for the soul to catch up to the body when you fly so far. I fell asleep too early, got up too early. Now I’m naked except for the blanket I’ve wrapped around me.
A fine rain is falling on the streets of Oxford. The guest-house we are in is quiet. Hope’s body is stretched out, practically comatose with exhaustion.
She is naked. Sheets curl around her body like a woman in a painting, clinging, shapes of typhoons in cloth.
And she said last night as she was falling asleep, “Tell them. Write it when you can.”
Alright, then.
I can write it now.
In another hour and a half I’ll shake off the sleep, get myself to the library, paw through some manuscripts. I love my work. Hope will still be here.
And her perfect, smooth ass will be hot, reddened underneath the white, cool sheets.
I’d better explain.
On the plane, we were like a couple of teenagers. We were out of New York at 6:10, night falling over the Atlantic. Planes make us both hot. She likes wearing dresses on long flights: a casual, loose sun-dress that falls just below her knees, a navy blazer. Very sexy, very chic, very casual. Very much without panties, at least after she came back from the bathroom at midnight when the lights were out and we began to kiss on the plane.
I’m sure some of our readers have snuck into the bathroom together on flights: we have not. But the blankets over our legs hid a great deal of touching, and it was after I had caressed her hair with fingers still wet from her pussy, after her second orgasm of the flight, that she leaned her head contentedly against my shoulder.
“Is it good?” I whispered to her.
She nodded and smiled the smile of a contented animal, warm and sentient and barely awake. Already the exhaustion was creeping in.
Her voice was hypnotic, sleepy.
“I like it when you take me.”
I caressed her cheek.
“You like it gentle.”
Silence.
Her next words floored me.
“Mostly.” Then another silence. Then barely audible: “Mostly.”
It was the silence before the “Mostly” that told me what she was really saying.
We’ve been together seventeen years. This was new, this hesitation over gentleness. She loves me gentle. She loves me a little rough.
I felt like I was entering a new world, and there was one thing I really had to know.
“Is this a new thing you’re up to?”
She hesitated, her eyes closed, sleepy.
She nodded ever so slightly. “New,” she murmured into my shoulder. “And old.” Another long silence. The hum of the airplane engines made it tough to hear her. I bent my ear to her lips. She nipped my earlobe, sleepily.
“Sometimes, you need to just take it a little further. Not all the time.”
“More… more forceful?”
“If you like.”
I whispered in her ear: “If you like. I love you.”
She nodded. Her eyes were closed, still, but her smile was quiet, sphinx-like, deep.
“Yeah. You do. So take care of me, will you?”
My hand was between her thighs beneath the blanket. She was warm and wet and tight.
“Hope… you know I’ll do whatever you want, if I can. But I just need to be clear…”
“I want you to spank me,” she whispered back without hesitation.
This was new. Indeed.
The travel from Heathrow to Oxford was not, as you might expect, a simmering hotbed of sexual energy.
It involved a lot of haggling over fares, a hell of a lot of fighting back sleep.
But underneath it all was this odd, strange new thing that my wife sprang on me.
We got to the University at five, were greeted by the Burser and the Warden, and installed in a little cottage that the college owns for researchers like myself. It was quiet. The door closed at seven. Hope was in my arms, shedding her blazer, her shoes kicked into the corner, barefoot, barelegged, her hands hiking up her dress, her breasts against my chest.
“I’m fuckin’ tired, Doc,” she said. “But you promised.”
“And I will,” I said, kissing her on the lips, the neck, the cheek. She likes it forceful: my hands were in her hair, holding her head still. My right hand dropped to her perfect ass. “Just one question, though, my heart… why?”
She kissed me back, her tongue slippery, hot, wet, her pelvis grinding against mine.
“I’ve just always wondered, I guess. I’m not really sure why it’s never come up before. But right now, I want it. I want to feel like you’re making me be good. Good for you. I want to be… I dunno, Doc.” Then she had her dress around her waist, and her smooth wet pussy was in my hands. “Whip my ass, Doc.”
And she was bent over the bed, and for the first time in our seventeen year marriage, I spanked her.
At first I held back. I’d read of such things, and honestly, it had never turned me on that much. But as I held my wife over my knees and the light little slaps turned into hard thwacks, and those turned into rough, burning spanking, she was wet, and she came.
She shuddered in my arms, sobbing, tears in her eyes. “D-d-d-don’t stop…” I wanted to, really. I’m not a fool, and I know the psychological labyrinth we were starting down was a strange one.
This is going to change things.
“D-d-d-d-do you have a belt?” she shuddered, her orgasm coming from nothing more than the spanking I was giving her.
I did have a belt. I refused. Her ass, so creamy and perfectly shaped, such a beautiful ass, was already red. I suspected (I suspect) when daylight comes it will show welts.
I wasn’t ready to give her more than this.
“Not this time,” I whispered, and I planted a final brutal smack across her ass before I smothered it in kisses, tonguing her hole, making her come again and again. She sobbed herself to sleep, clinging to my body, whispering, “Perfect.”
I don’t really understand yet.
She’ll tell me: she tells me everything. But her last words were, “Tell them. Write it when you can.”
So I watch her sleep there as the sun, or what we can find of the sun through the grey misty rain, lightens the world, wrapped in dreams that I have yet to hear.
But she wants you to know. I don’t know any more than you do: maybe she means to explain herself, and then maybe I’ll understand a little better. Maybe this was an experiment. Maybe it was a long-deferred confession of something she needed to say to me (and for how long?). I just don’t know.
Yet.
But I know that before night, I will be both tender and tough with her.
She promised me, as I spanked her, that she would be a good girl and suck my cock, a promise that she has yet to fulfill here in Oxford.
Missing Connections
July 2, 2008
“I don’t want to.”
My eyes flew open. I’d just been on top of him, my hands in my hair, my back arched, his hands on my hips when I was hit by a wave of emotion. It was strong and intense. I leaned forward and placed my hands on either side of him. I saw in his eyes that he was struggling too. The feeling was something old and familiar and not entirely welcome. I rolled to one side.
I felt alone. Normally I prefer to work out this emotion together because being in his arms felt a damned sight better than here beside him, feeling separated by a thousand miles.
“Will you come here?” I indicated that I wanted him to come to me, on top of me.
“I don’t want to. I’m balancing my emotions and yours and it’s too much.” Him. He said that. He’s the guy. Yes.
The sense of isolation was overwhelming. My temper flared. I sat up on the edge of our bed. “It’d be SO nice if we could coordinate our individual needs,” I began in a fit of pique.
“We have been coordinated,” he said, mostly gently yet somewhat disturbed by my tone, and he brought up a few moments from earlier in the week, coordinated moments, moments when we were, yes, emotionally together, and yet, there was Now, this moment, and it seemed to say about each one of them, “That was a disaster waiting for an excuse to happen.”
It was happening. Not looking at him, I flung myself down on the bed facing my body away from him.
Being naked in moments like that can feel like a mockery.
Then I stopped myself. This never moves us forward.
“I know. I just needed to know – feel – you loved me. I’m doing my Girl Thing.”
“I know,” he whispered.
I turned over to face him.
“I put my arm out to you a moment ago,” he said.
“I didn’t see that,” I answered as he lifted his right arm so I could fit myself to his body.
“I know.”
He began to stroke my right shoulder and arm and we talked.
Being naked in moments like that feels like being wrapped in a warm quilt.
We have long realized that we will not always be exactly what the other wants and / or needs and there are even limits to what we can do at any particular moment, given the reserves of our emotional wells. We give and give and then give out. Just like any couple.
And there we were. Loving. It seems so easy when I write about it. It seemed so easy the moment we were doing it. Thirty seconds before it seemed like it was a universe away, like I would never feel like his best friend.
We lay talking for thirty minutes. He shifted in the bed and leaned down to kiss me. His kisses felt more intimate. We’ve opened ourselves and talked about what mattered to us. He kissed me in a way that I wish every human could learn, kisses that said “We do not have to be moving towards sex to be wrapped in our sexuality. If we do not have sex tonight, I will still kiss you like this.” It was a restrained passion, restrained because we were talking, and he was listening.
And he talked back to me, and I listened.
He feels warmer in these moments. I don’t think of him as “hot” then, though my hand falls quite naturally to his cock, where it stays, where I hold him and gently keep him hard, not to tease, but because he likes it, likes being hard while I am in his arms, my pussy wet, ready, open, but not so open as my spirit. Talking. Listening. Crying.
When he entered me after that, the world just dissolved.
Connecting
June 30, 2008
Girlydigs writes about my Postcard to Hope:
“I love the way you are connected to her.”
She gives me reasons to stay that way. So many reasons it’s ridiculous.
She keeps her pussy smooth for me.
She keeps her mind alert and witty.
She keeps her legs trim and strong.
She teases me.
She keeps her sense of humor.
She loses her breath when I fuck her.
She never tells me “No.” Only “Or we can…”
Let me tell you, we were in a chat yesterday and it was absolutely disastrous: every married man or woman knows the sort of thing. We’re talking, barely communicating, half-wanting to break away, half-wanting to break through into some region of the spirit where we’re open and sure and alive to one another.
We gave up somewhere.
But as soon as she was gone, I was thinking, “God, Hope, if I had you here, it would be like two months ago when we fought, and I don’t even remember what it was about, but I remember you didn’t tuck it under the carpet of your silence and force me to guess; and you came to bed and you slipped off your skirt, and you slipped off your panties, and your body was hot against mine as I held you in the weird heat of argument where we both feel shame, guilt, and recrimination rising up in us, two bodies defenseless and naked.
Somewhere, we found the magic path, the road that leads through it, and all the things got said and your (very few) tears were hot on my chest, and I held you tight, and I gently pulled your hair until your lips were touching mine, and we just breathed on one another’s lips.
I took you face to face, and you opened up like a flower and took my cock in your pussy.
One way or another, we’ll always find our way back there, so long as you keep believing it’s worth it, so long as the alternative remains unthinkable, to live a life where lying down together is wrapped in a silence to which we both submit, and we dry up like a dead pool and a rotting tree.
That’s not us: we don’t choose that.
That’s why we fuck like a god and a goddess together.
That’s why you’ll come home to me.
That’s why, when you do, you’ll find me hard and ready for my best friend.
Postcard to Hope
June 29, 2008
She’s out of town.
We chatted this morning, and technical difficulties and schedules and moods just didn’t mesh.
I wish she were next to me, and her clothes were idly coming off under my fingers.
Come home soon, Hope.
Love,
J
Jealousy
June 27, 2008
“Are you jealous?” my colleague asks me. She is sitting in my office, her light brown hair and rectangular glasses both glittering in the light from the window. (New office. Corner. Fourth floor. Lots of light. Who da man.)
I look at her over a stack of summer course essays and books and things.
“No!” I tell her. “Well, not in a bad way.”
We’d been talking about Hope’s almost weird gift of drawing men to her.
“What’s that mean?” asks Sheryl, leaning forward with an amused look in her eye. She’s a Victorianist. They like these conversations. They like psychoanalyzing sexual emotion. I humor her.
“Hope’s just… Well, let’s be frank. She’s got it.“
“That she does. I might as well say, I’m jealous.”
This can probably be taken a lot of different ways, so I let it sit out there a minute before she says, “I mean, she’s just really noticeable. I’d like to have her gift for drawing men’s attention.”
I’ve worked with Sheryl for almost six years, and for some reason I’d always thought she was a lesbian. Maybe she is.
“I’d like to walk into a room like that and just have everybody’s eyes on me. Though I think she does annoy some of the other women.” We are thinking of a recent party, one of those cocktail parties that departments throw at the end of the semester before everybody scatters for the summer. They sometimes are a total frost. The last one was a huge success, not least because Hope found herself able to come at the last minute, looking summery and lovely and somehow conveying to each person she talked to (and that surely must’ve been everybody) that they were the most important person in the world.
“Well, I guess I understand that. But Hope’s just… well, she’s gotten to the point where she knows who she is. If that pisses off women, she’ll deal with it, or cry to me. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why I’m not jealous.”
Sheryl gives me a quick smile. “I can see that. What would you say if I told you Hope wants you to be jealous? Anybody can see that’s why she flirts with other men.”
I laugh. “She flirts because she loves them. That’s why they love her back.”
This is a real surprise for Sheryl.
“Well… that, and she’s just hot,” I add, a little overly conscious of a question in my mind about whether calling one’s wife “hot” in the presence of an academic feminist is quite the right thing to do. In fact this whole conversation is skirting the boundaries of bad judgment, but Sheryl and I have gotten over worse things. She can be trusted.
“Damned hot,” Sheryl laughingly agrees. “What would you say if I were to tell you that love is jealous?”
“Oh, I’d totally agree. Whenever Hope is talking with another man, I wish it were me she was looking at like that. But if you let fear push you around, you soon find you have nothing interesting left in you, just little voices that keep repeating, ‘Mine… mine… She’s mine.’” Sheryl nods thoughtfully.
“So you are jealous?”
I think back to that party, Hope leaning forward with a serious expression and staring deep into the eyes of a young, very good looking graduate assistant. I’d be a fool not to know what that look of hers makes a man feel like: it makes him feel like, “This beautiful woman and I have a secret… we want each other, and nobody knows it. We are together in a way she never will be with anybody else.”
Hope doesn’t mean to do this. Sometimes when I tell her that that’s how she makes men feel, I don’t think she believes it.
Maybe Sheryl is right, that love is jealousy. If I were to find that Hope felt about that man as he felt about her, yes, I guess I would find myself alone at a bar late at night. I know what jealousy feels like. I know even more what it’s like to feel like you’re just losing the one you love, the one you adore, to time, to her own reflections on life.
Sheryl smiles sympathetically as she watches this thought work its way inward. I give her a friendly smile in return that says, I hope, “Well, it’s only life. Blink and you miss it.”
“Need to get going,” says Sheryl. “Have a good time in London.”
“Thanks,” I say. “Good summer.”
She’s gone. I pack up my things, put them in the battered leather briefcase as well as the nylon shoulder-bag that I infinitely prefer. One last check of the email.
It’s from Hope, one of the little flowers she drops in my path, undemandingly, unselfishly, throughout her day.
“I love you, boy,” says the note. It goes on:
And if I can just tell you this, our lives are way too short. There’s not enough days to feel you next to me, my best friend, my gentle, rough lover. I’m writing this note, and my fingers are a little shaky remembering what it was like yesterday. My favorite part had to be your look while I kissed you and rode you, the look on your face as you came. I know we do this often, but if it sometimes feels a little like old hat, I’m discovering what it means to know that it’s always new, always a new instant, a new moment.
On my way out, I tap at Sheryl’s door.
“Hey… been thinking about the love and jealousy thing.”
“Yes?”
“It’s quite possible you’re right. Jealousy is this current that has a dark energy to it, I guess. But on the whole… You’re full of it.”
She laughs. “Go.”
Hope is waiting.
I do.
We’re Going On Tour…
June 27, 2008
Just a heads-up to our friends online. Hope and I are going to the UK for a couple of weeks, starting next week.
We decided not to make a rule about blogging from there but rather just to go with the flow. But we may be a little less prolific for a bit. Hang with us: we’ll miss you, but…
Hey, who am I kidding?
I just wanted to gloat about going to the UK. If work allows, I’m hoping to do some good walks up in Scotland where I hung out a bit when I was in college.
Let you know if we come up with any good adventures or other material.
Know what turns Hope on?
Finding out that she’s going to Europe. She set a land-speed record from the bed to the chair where I was sitting.
Between kisses: “Is there enough money for the kids to come?” A worried expression on her face.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Oh, thank God. Rape me.”
Strip Temper
June 25, 2008
“Cocksucker!”
Jameson’s face remained totally impassive.
“Mother-fucking, cunt-licking, shit-kicking bastard!”
He gave a bored sigh.
I was starting to get annoyed.
“Nun-seducer!”
He raised an eyebrow at me, but turned back to his paper.
I was getting desperate.
“Husband of a whore!” I hissed (and it’s nonsense to say you can’t hiss the word “whore”.. I did it).
He grinned at me.
I was breathless, and my hair was a windswept mess. My blouse and bra were gone, and I was wearing only my khaki walking shorts and panties.
“Now you’re just turning me on,” he said. He ran his fingers through his thick hair. His eyes were maddeningly calm. God, I hated him.
“Goddamn it, you fucking bastard! You cunt-licking miserable small-dicked slice of fuckmeat!”
He looked stunned. Finally.
“Who’s small-dicked?” he demanded.
“HA!” I shouted. “Shirt!”
He sighed and started to pull off the t-shirt, a black silk-screened memento of an alternative concert we’d been to. The Teeth, I think, or some such band that his students are always introducing us to. I love his chest. But it was the power of the thing that was turning me on.
“Well, fuck,” he said, and his look of desolation made me wet.
We looked at each other. My face was red, but I was glowing with triumph. “You’re gonna lose this time.” He had been lying on the bed, but sat up, cross-legged.
He leaned forward, looked into my eyes with a steely, hard gaze, and said quietly, “Shopaholic.”
“Bullshit!” I exploded. “I always keep in budget!”
He smiled quietly.
“Aw, fuck,” I said. “Call it.”
“Shorts,” he said. “Off.”
I always lose this game.
Always.
Hope In The Morning
June 25, 2008
I like it when she sleeps naked.
On the best mornings, the sun comes in and lights up her hair, and I can feel her warm body, her soft breasts against my chest as she snuggles closer, half-sleeping, a soft smile on her face.
I can feel her smooth skin pressing easily against my thigh as she wakes and feels me there and just idly enjoys the pleasure of my body. Sometimes it makes her a little wet, and she’ll sleepily slide a leg over my body and gently rub herself against me. There’s no hair on her body except the long red hair that falls around our faces and makes a little curtain through which the sunlight comes as her eyes open lazily and she kisses me.
“Good morning,” she says, and her mouth turns up at the edges as my cock hardens against her thigh. My arms are around her, and she settles in against my chest, eyes closed again, kissing my neck and nipples with that morning laziness that I love so much. Jesus, I think, her body is so warm.
Sometimes I don’t know how it happens, how I find that one or the other of us has shifted almost imperceptibly towards this union that after all these years of marriage feels as casual and momentous as anything in the universe, but there it is again: the slight contraction of my body, her slight raising of her leg, and she is wet, and how did I get here again? But I’m there, and she smiles again, sighs, and ducks her head almost in shyness as I enter her. We aren’t really moving, just a tiny rotation of the hips so we can feel one another’s flesh: her around me, me inside her. My cock rests casually against her g-spot, and she gently eases her hips so that the friction of this very slow morning dance presses against it.
Oh, we love to fuck.
We love to make love.
We love.
And there is this quiet unspoken happiness in the room. The handmade quilt we bought on a road trip through Tennessee rests easily on us.
“I love you,” I whisper in her ear.
“I know,” she says in a low, half-sleepy and half-aroused voice. “Thank God you do.”
We feel no urge to speed things up. It’s just a long, slow, easy thing, incredibly wet, incredibly hot, incredibly tight.
Incredibly not alone. It’s Julie, our daughter.
She has flounced in: no other word for it.
“You guys are still in bed?”
I am fairly sure that if she wants to, she can persuade herself that we are snuggling, all tangled up in one another’s naked bodies, beneath the quilt.
“Mm-hmm,” smiles Hope, eyes still closed, her arms around my neck, one hand gently playing with my hair. “We’re still in bed. You comin’ in here to give us a reason to get out?”
Her smooth pussy gently squeezes my cock, a little wink with her flesh.
“I have lazy parents,” says Julie. She has her mother’s eyes. Her hair is a less flaming red, brown really with a vague suggestion of red that turns more pronounced in the sunlight. She lies down across the foot of the bed with that dramatic exhaustion that might be persuasive one day, but isn’t today.
“And to think,” says Hope. “I was afraid I might fall asleep again.” Her hips are still turning the most imperceptible circles that are slowly working my cock deeper into her sweet warm body.
“There’s almost nothing,” I say with the lightest irony I can find, “that isn’t made better by the presence of one’s children.”
Julie rolls over and looks at us. Her green eyes are penetrating. There is a long silence while I look back at my daughter. Hope’s eyes are still closed, her cheek resting lightly on my chest.
“I think I better go,” says Julie with a wry grin.
“What a lovely idea,” hums Hope, her tongue giving my nipple the merest flick.
Julie is halfway to the door. She says over her shoulder, “I still think I have the most lazy parents in the universe.” The door closes behind her.
“She does,” murmurs my wife. “Will you fuck me, you lazy beautiful bastard?”
I will.
So Your Wife Won’t Let You Do Her In The Ass?
June 23, 2008
We’re writing this post together because we feel pretty strongly about this topic. Apologies in advance, but this post will be a little pedantic.
We get a lot of mail hitting on Hope, which is to be expected. But we get even more (and this is encouraging) asking how to improve the relationships people are already in. Two most common questions from men are variations on, “How can I get my wife / lover to enjoy going down on me?” and “How can I get her to let me do her in the ass?”
First things first: ass-fucking can be kind of frightening. (Guys, how many of you would want to get your sphincter reamed? Not too many, we guess. Exactly.) Hope’s pretty adventuresome, but she came to anal sex fairly late in the game.
And it’s probably incredibly important that Jameson never asked her for anal sex. Not once. It was her idea.
“Super,” you might say. “My wife is never gonna come to that point.”
Maybe not. The first requirement (and this is, we think, a requirement) is that you have to be willing to live without it. Nothing destroys sexual relationships like a loss of trust, and nothing destroys trust like the feeling that you’re maneuvering your partner.
Guys, let’s be really honest: a woman’s mouth, pussy, ass are holes. They exert a certain amount of pressure, tease your body into thinking you’re dominating and impregnating her, and bring you to orgasm. That’s all. Your hand is less messy, more compact, and demands less attention.
Unless you want a relationship, intimacy, and love. If you do, then you really do have to get over the idea that any of those things are enhanced because she lets you do this to her.
Some women really get no pleasure out of it at all. Some get a ton. Some would rather eat bottles than have anal sex, and making them feel like you hold it against them is really a bad idea.
Anyway, back to Hope: she figured this out almost by accident when Jameson took her from behind. She was pressed into the mattress, and his body was rubbing her ass as he moved, and just something in the angle or pressure told her, “There’s something going on back there with that little ring of muscle.” But much more than that, she began to understand a relationship between anal sex and the unspeakable relational dynamics that make good sex good.
She had long understood that she liked being taken by Jameson, and that was something totally related to trust. She knew that when Jameson took her, she wouldn’t have to endure anything she didn’t want. And she knew that she could ask for or signal whatever she liked and get it from him.
Which means, in short, that Jameson was a good enough lover that she could trust that when she finally said, “I want you to finger my ass,” that he would finger it and not rape it.
If you’re that kind of guy, then you stand a lot better chance than if you’re the sort that says, “Hey, have you ever thought about ass-fucking? I’d like to do your bum.”
So Jameson believed her pleasure mattered more than his, and gently, with a couple of scary missteps, brought her more and more pleasure through her ass. Well… to put it bluntly, she found she really, really liked it. A different kind of stimulation, a different kind of psychological approach to sex… it’s a differently-balanced mixture of feeling full, feeling “taken,” feeling stimulation of the sphincter (and if you’re really good, the clit too, or, Great God In Heaven, the g-spot, which is our Holy Grail of lovemaking).
She didn’t ask him to rim her, but he did. It’s a good bet that two years prior, even Hope would’ve freaked out and shut down, but (and we hate to labor the point) Jameson listens to Hope. He likes her, and he wants her pleasure, and what we’re really saying is, it was two years or so of slow foreplay. So he had a good idea it was time.
That tongue-rimming pretty much did it. Hope was sold, and ready, and the lubricant went on, and the cock slipped in (and he was slow and gentle until we found our rhythm), and, really, Hope can’t get enough of that kind of mind-blowing orgasm. The fact that Jameson gets “crazy-ready to come” during anal sex, and tells her so, increases Hope’s pleasure exponentially. And sometimes it really is a major decision how she wants Jameson… assuming he has no immediate preferences of his own. It’s a matter of mood, and a matter of bearing with one another, and also, sometimes, a matter of saying, “We’ve got a lot of time tonight… does this have to be either / or? Can it be both / and?”
So don’t try to get us to tell your woman how good it is: some women hate it, and we totally get that. It’s an odd mixture of sensations. For some girls, it almost ruins them for vaginal sex, at least for some purposes. Don’t think, guys, that you’ve been short-changed if you got the other sort, the kind who wants you face to face: she’s paying you a different kind of compliment to look you in the eye while she takes your cock into her body.
In short, it’s all about the relationship. It’s all about the eyes, the pacing, the conversation. If you want to change your sex life forever, make up your mind that you really like your partner. Let her see it. You’ll never be the same. Maybe one day you too can sit next to your lover on a bus or stand next to her at a party and feel with amazing pride, “She was just begging for it this afternoon, and I satisfied her.”
Gals: just a tip. Keep clean back there. Just in case. I know you’d think this goes without saying, but we’ve heard some sordid tales.
How It Feels To Me
June 23, 2008
True, wearing white does something to me.
I noted my reflection in the bathroom’s full length mirror as I clasped the silver and diamond sandle-shaped necklace and was pleased with the effect: crisp, clean, sensual. [Slipping my feet into low-heeled sandals, I noted that the filigreed anklet was not right; a casual, yet feminine anklet, was called for. When your husband pays as much attention to your legs as mine, details matter.]
Grabbing my purse and keys, I stopped into the family room to say I’d be back soon. Seeing Jameson playing Lord of the Rings on the Wii with our son made me grin. He barely noticed me, so caught up with our son and the battle was he. I didn’t mind, and wow, he turned me on: laughing, competitive, casual — barefoot, in khaki shorts and a tee. What is it about a man who knows who he is that just gets to me?
As I backed out of the garage, the iPod in my car began my latest playlist. I began to quietly sing along:
In a room full of people, Everything else disappears … After all of these lifetimes, You still take my breath away.
A fresh, clear desire washed over me. Perhaps it’s because I can’t wear white without being aware of the effect on Jameson (and I might as well say it, it turns me on to be wanted), perhaps it’s because I was just filled with love seeing him with our son, or maybe it’s because he turns me on — but I began to get aroused.
I remembered how he tastes.
There’s so much bad erotica that makes out how girls love sucking cock. You can tell when it’s written by men for whom the fantasy is to have a warm mouth around them.
Let me tell you how it feels to me, and why I get so wet thinking about Jameson’s cock in my mouth.
So much of sex is “us” — mutual energy, love, and desire. We delight in one another’s pleasure, but I often think of going down on Jameson as something I do for me. Oh God, he loves it. The way he leans his head back against our headboard, closes his eyes and murmurs, “You are amazing at that,” all tell me he loves the way my mouth adores his body.
But I love it more, I think. I love making him mine, bringing him to a full erection, responsive to, if not entrapped by, the pleasure I offer. I smile and run my finger over my lips at the stoplight as I remember sliding down his body, teasing his nipples, kissing his chest, his thighs, sucking the spot on his hip that drives him to distraction, then looking up mischievously and asking, “Can I touch you?” He nods and tells me that his body is mine, which is all I wanted to know.
I can’t even take his entire (can I just say huge?) beautiful cock in my mouth, but I’ll always try, sliding my lips over him, my tongue circling, and then slowly sucking my way back up to the tip. I do this for a long time. I don’t get tired of it, though sometimes my jaw begins to ache a little. I just ease up and lick, and listen to his breathing while he strokes my hair. I savor him. I savor the moment.
And then I take his cock and gently press it against his belly, the fingers of my left hand stroking him, as I open my mouth and surround the base of his cock, slowly working my way up, sucking while my tongue presses and dances on him.
I can’t help but moan as I do this, and I hear Jameson groan with pleasure. I once again try to take all of his cock in my mouth and I look up, teasing him with my tongue and sometimes, oh so delicately, my teeth. He smiles and his hands tangle up in my hair and he ever so carefully but firmly pushes his cock upward and deeper into my mouth. Just when I think he might come, his fingers tighten in my hair and he pulls me up to his mouth and our kisses are heavy with the need to be one: sharing the same breath, the same space, the same desire.
He pushes me onto my back and presses his body into mine. I wrap my legs around him. God damn: it makes me crazy how his voice is all husky and breathless when he asks, “Can I tell you that you are the best cocksucker ever without it sounding like that’s all you are?”
I smile, and he forgives maybe a slight lack of modesty on my part. “I know that’s not all I am and yes, you can and should…” I begin but my eyes fly open as he grabs a handful of my hair and thrusts deep inside me. I grab his ass and hold him there.
The thought of Jameson’s body stirs my own. We both are captivated by the possibilities of imagination and I often let my own run wild when I see him. I like noticing him when he casually walks naked from our bathroom to the bedroom nightstand when he’s forgotten his coffee or the book he wants to read in the bath. I don’t bother him then, usually, and I don’t think he knows, as I sit in our bed apparently lost in my own book, how often I’ve thought about stopping him dead in his tracks to quickly suck him to life before he sinks down into the hot bath he’s drawn.
I grin as I think about it, driving, singing softly, with the windows down and the rush of wind in the car as I turn for home. He’s in my skin. He’s in my memory. He’s in my mind.
And I want him in my mouth.
White On White
June 22, 2008
Hope wears the white sundress, the one that clings to her breasts and shows her shoulders and clean legs, her hair smelling vaguely of strawberries vibrant and flaming against it.
She sees me looking at her.
We are at a friend’s house, an early summer Sunday afternoon party. She looks back at me. A careful smile plays around her lips. She is talking with Andrea, her friend. She is talking to Andrea, but looking at me.
Her finger plays with her phone. I walk back into the house and pour another scotch.
The text message comes in.
Talk 2 me about white dresses.
My wife is flirting with me.
The second one comes in:
Do you like lusting after girls in white?
Yes, I text back. When they have sexy intelligence. And I’ve got a thing for legs.
(She tells me often that I miss the point of texting: brevity.)
A few minutes pass. I’m talking to a guy named Josh, one of the junior instructors from the University. Nice guy. Cute little blond wife keeps nuzzling his neck, and he’s trying to look like it doesn’t embarrass him. The phone vibrates in my hand. I try not to look like I’m ignoring Josh.
So, Doc. What are the semiotics of white?
I text without looking at the phone. Who am I kidding, I wonder through the scotch-haze. Josh is younger than I am. He’s seen it all when it comes to this business of treating the whole world like it’s a multitask.
Later, I will discover what I texted:
Inocence. Ur clean fresh vrgnal.
She is standing across the room with an amused expression on her face.
Want to fuck a virgin?
She’s a lot better at this than I am. She disappears. I don’t know where.
U want 2 turn a white-clad virgin into your luv bitch?
Where r u? I demand.
Behind u
She is. Smiling. She talks to Josh, phone in hand, dazzling him with her white dress, red hair, green eyes, that trick I can never get enough of of making him feel like she’s been waiting her whole life to see him. He is a little drunk on her attention. His wife nuzzles a little more closely, jealously. Hope long ago mastered this game: she flashes a brilliant smile at the girl, at Josh’s wife, conspiratorial, a smile that says, “Boys,” and the girl melts, suddenly Hope’s best friend. Hope’s thumb flicks a button. My phone vibrates. I feel her lean into me.
I want ur cock.
Later, as I wrap my arms around her, the dress white and bunched around her hips where she holds it for me, her sandals dark brown on her feet, she kisses me hungrily.
“Why can’t I ever get enough of you?” I wonder.
“I’m that good, I guess,” she says, grinning. “I feel all virginal.”
“Do you?”
“Uh-huh. Would you mind, sir, if this sweet virgin sucked your cock for a bit? I think I want to be dirty.”
Church
June 22, 2008
We don’t usually go to church anymore. We’re spiritual, but not religious. (Long story.)
This morning there was going to be a baptism for Jennifer and Ivan’s baby. So we were there.
Good morning, God.
This is a beautiful place, this building. I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful for the way the sun slips in and gets broken into a quarter-million variations of the spectrum. I’m grateful for how you put together the craftsman who had this great idea of stained glass, where each particle of glass is shaped and how the brain recognizes patterns and how the colors and shapes imprint themselves on the subconsciousness to evoke stories and the content of images. This is amazingly complex.
I’m grateful too for the water of baptism that carries so much brain-freight without a single word needing to be spoken, and for the Eucharist that converts concept to taste and smell and texture.
Nice work. I mean, really nice work.
And can I just tell you that I love the smell of Hope next to me? She smells all clean and fresh there, and there’s something under the current of my consciousness of her scent, maybe some pheromone or some animal-sense that I preserve in my skin that makes me so conscious of her legs as she crosses and recrosses them under her cream-colored skirt.
I can’t hide stuff from you, and wouldn’t want to try. I mean no disrespect. But seriously: I am grateful.
Her thighs are probably still sticky with my semen. You know that, because you were there.
She keeps looking at me with this sidelong look. We kneel there with the Episcopalians, and I keep thinking that not twenty five minutes ago I had her pressed up against the wall of our bedroom, because I couldn’t stand how hot she looked in her skirt and heels and that silky blouse. And I kissed her, long and deeply as she came out of the bathroom, and she whispered in my ear, “You know what, if you rumple my blouse or mess up my hair, I’ll kill you.” I kissed her neck and smelled her rich perfume, and I raised her skirt and felt how wet she was, and knelt before her while her back was against the wall, and her back arched and her leg lifted a little, and I can still taste your daughter Hope on my tongue.
When I stood up, she had my slacks open with a practiced ease that I can’t help admiring, and my cock was in her hand, and we didn’t even need to take off her thong, but she just pulled it to one side and I entered her there against the wall while you watched, your big yellow eye just above the windowsill, bathing us in love.
And I looked in her eyes, both our breathing ragged, and she pulled me to her for another kiss as though that look were too much, and I whispered, “Do you think at church that it’s wrong to imagine going down on your lover?” and she said, “Oh, God, I hope not, because I’m gonna be remembering this…” and then she arched her back, and my hand was under her ass, one finger pressing against her sphincter, lifting her, her legs circling my waist, and God, she was coming.
Tap tap tap. Julie. Our daughter, at the bedroom door.
“Mom? Dad? We’re gonna be late!”
Hope breathed quickly. Her nose was pressed against mine, her eyes millimeters from mine. “Okay, baby… Give us a couple of minutes. Almost ready.”
God, Hope was wet this morning. She came hard.
When I came, she looked me in the eye, reached between her thighs, gave a tiny wry grin, and smeared my semen on her thighs.
So the people all around are happy, and I imagine they all have their little secret happinesses, and I want to say thank you for them all, and I do hope they don’t feel guilty. Thanks for making us this way. Thanks for the fact that no poverty or oppression can take away the freedom of thought, the small secrecies.
Thank you that Hope just leaned against me so that her breast pressed against my elbow and whispered to me, “You’re mine this afternoon. I’m very wet.”
Amen.
Amen.
