We kissed and caressed for a few moments before he slowly undressed me, neatly placing my items of clothing across a chair. From a tote bag he removed a beautiful garment: sheer, lavender. I could smell the warmth of the silk in the close closed-in summer heat of the room.
Standing naked in front of this stranger, my body felt electrified by the way he admired me. With my nose up against the collar of his dusty T-shirt, I could feel the rhythm of his blood beating in his tanned neck. My fantasies lined up in my mind as I absorbed Rain’s essence.
His lips brushed my blushing cheek as he slipped the gown over my head and stretched its formfitting shape along my curves. The fabric hid nothing, accentuating the rise of my rose-colored nipples, clinging to the cleft of my mound.
He sat me in the other chair and removed a blindfold from his jeans pocket. “May I?”
My brain whirled through everything Marcy had told me about him, scanning for the mention of any red flags. Rain rated in the eightieth percentile on Marcy’s spreadsheet of sexual conquests. The word she used was burned in my brain: perfunctory. They’d had sex twice, to finish off the evening, then he went home. She joked that he wasn’t quite “wham, bam, thank you, ma’am” but he wasn’t far from it, and she wrote off his disinterest as brooding artist’s temperament.
“Why me?” I asked Rain. “Why this, why not her?”
“This connection between us, call it what you want, but you feel it, too. It’s amazing, and I need more.”
“I don’t want an affair—I’m not that kind of woman.”
Rain looked down at me, wrapped in his gossamer gown, and sighed. “Jess, your body seems to remember what kind of woman you are, what kind of woman you want to be again.”
With that, he kissed my mouth, once, for far too brief a moment. Then he placed the blindfold over my eyes, cloaking my sight and unleashing my mind.
Seconds later, the sting of cool leather snapped against my thighs, making me jump. I grabbed his arms, feeling their wiry muscles and the slickness of his sweat.
Rain whispered, “Stay in that chair or I’ll tie you to it,” as he caressed me with what felt like a riding crop, pressing the silky fabric of the dress into the wetness between my legs. “For these moments, you are mine.”
The tip of his leathery implement continued its exploratory path, setting my nerve endings afire. My body and mind moaned a response that said,
Yes, yes, yes…but who are you? The man that Marcy can’t see, or the one that I can’t forget?
From behind, he hooked his arm around my neck, forcing my chin up and thrusting his tongue into my mouth, consuming my lips with a hunger I echoed in my veins. Rain had nothing to lose; he was an interlude in our lives. I was placing my relationship with my best friend on the line. Marcy was the girl who went through school with me, who’d helped me obtain all my clichés: the right college and Mr. Right. She still told me her secrets and knew mine. Until now.
This affair could jeopardize, destroy, implode my enviable marriage. My address in the best school district for our childless household. The ideal husband. A man who tells me he loves me
at all the right places in the conversation. A man who has never fucked me until I held onto consciousness with only the thinnest thread. Satiating sex was something I gave up: For marriage. For stability, opportunity, upward mobility. Because I thought that’s how it worked in the world. Until Rain.
Rain released his forearm from my throat and captured both of my nipples in his hands. He suckled the gossamer fabric that clung to my breasts, the hot wetness pulling me deeper into the abyss where only need resides.
His thumb opened my mouth but then left my lips hungry as he unzipped his jeans. The velvety tip of his cock entered my mouth in one thrust, scraping against my teeth and catching me by surprise. The taste of him was an extension of the animal electricity that he exuded. I salivated, unashamed, each drop igniting a path of awareness as it slid down my face and dripped onto my body.
For an eternity, I was untethered from this place and time; he fucked my face. My eyes were unseeing, my mind numbed to everything but the sensation of his cock sliding in and out of my mouth. The diaphanous dress was damp everywhere from my juices, my sweat. The room was pulsing with our carnal energy.
The sound he made when he came was primal and I swallowed it, echoed it, deep in my cells.
He removed the blindfold and kissed my unseeing eyes as the lids fluttered open in their newfound freedom. “I want you to wait to come until we meet again. I’ll tell you when,” he whispered in my ear, then gave my ass a squeeze as we went to clean up in the bathroom.
I had to pry myself away, the need to be quenched was so enormous. Giving him one last lingering kiss, I stashed the dress in my briefcase and returned to the office for the remainder of
the day. All the things that normally irritated me slipped off my skin as I floated through the next few hours on a cloud.
My husband’s voice carries into our tastefully decorated master bathroom, “Don’t sit in that hot water too long, you know how it flares up your skin.”
I should answer that I want him to come in here and do things to me that he would be too ashamed to even think of. Things I’ve hinted at, things I’ve asked for. Things he says he’s done to other women: When he was young. When he was “experimenting.” But his cock will never bury itself in my ass. His nails have never raised lines down my back. He says he believes in forever and the sanctity of holy matrimony, the shining band of gold. Somehow marriage to him is incongruous with the kind of sex that is fucking. Making love is what we do. Making love in a marriage that has lost love—
that
seems incongruous to me.
Could he fathom that a stranger had gnawed into my soul? The man he’s met a few casual times? The one he immediately assessed as his inferior?
Rain has forged a path through the barbed wire of my mind.
I had upheld our marital monogamy, even though my husband had his dalliance, once—supposedly. Early on.
But, of course, it meant nothing, and we did the obligatory therapy, counseling.
Experts predict your marriage will be stronger if you can weather an affair. We weathered. I withered even with the weekly bouquet of flowers that adorns our table. Whether or not they are spent, he throws them out and brings home a new bunch, bearing them with a smile, a symbol of his supposed fidelity, adopted after the affair and kept up all these years. To show his fidelity to the wife he knows only as faithful, the woman he expects will bear him children once her career is in
the right place, once we have advanced into the next income bracket.
But I keep taking the Pill.
And now, do I choose to throw my world away? Like my husband will toss out the half-spent roses when the bouquet on the table merely begins to fade, before petals wither, fall, touching the tablecloth with their dying imperfections.
My dalliance will contort the pastel-colored rooms of his mind.
Rain. This unknown man I’ve known mere moments, what will happen after he quenches the passion that rages silently within? Will my smoldering soul be extinguished, or will this essential part of me reignite?
How can I even think to say good-bye to my husband when, in the past twelve years, when was
I
ever really here? The person he slept beside and lived with was what he expected, what he neglected. His perfect wife.
His perfect wife is perfectly perverse.
I waited for Rain to tell me that I could get off. But he said everything except that, teasing me when I asked him if I could do it while we were on the phone together. Days passed as I burned slowly with this pent-up ecstasy. The only thing I could think about was release. And Rain.
Seeing him the following Friday with Marcy, hearing about him—it was almost beyond what I could bear; segments of my days were lost. I read Marcy’s emails, listened to her on the phone, watched her face. She was the same—disinterested, even. How could she be Rain’s lover and feel nothing?
When he finally beckoned me, it was not with a call, a text, an email. The four of us grabbed a quick Saturday lunch, on a sunny day, at a trendy place. At the end of the meal, Rain picked
up the check and counted out some bills while we were still at the table. As we rose to make our way to the cash register, he paused and casually asked if I would mind paying while he used the facilities. Before I could answer, he placed the money in my hand, and left.
The three of us went to the register together, with Marcy talking on about her new client who promised big sales. The corner of a piece of paper was visible below the bills. I slipped the note into my purse before paying the cashier.
I didn’t look then but paid and excused myself to the bathroom as well, hoping Marcy would not follow. Passing Rain, I shot him a flustered look; his eyes didn’t meet mine, but I could see a smile playing at the edges of his lips.
In the bathroom, I went into the open handicapped stall and stood there, reading his note. It said, “Make an excuse so we can be alone five minutes from now.”
No way. My mind reeled. No way in hell. We were headed back to our respective cars and parting ways. There was no way I could hook up with him now.
I tore up the note and flushed it. Watching the pieces swirl down the bowl, it felt as if I was drowning the sin boiling in my skin.
The three of them were standing on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. My husband, impatient, gave me a glance that told me he was ready to get out of here. We had tickets for a matinee play and lunch service had taken longer than planned.
Marcy had her arm linked through Rain’s and they were stepping in the direction of their parked car. We all said good-bye and began walking in opposite directions. With each step my heart raced.
Five minutes,
his words said. I was counting the seconds, willing them to go by and be past.
My husband was walking at a good clip and didn’t notice at
first that I’d stopped. When he did, asking what was wrong, I told him lunch was not sitting well and that I needed to use the bathroom again. His face flushed with the beginning of anger, he said, “Do you want me to complain to the manager? Was it that fish?”
“No, no. I think it’s nerves from all the pressure at work this week. I’ll be fine. Meet me at the car, don’t stand around in this heat. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Without waiting for a reply, I walked as fast as my strappy sandals would allow, straight back into the bathroom. I was alone and stood there, looking at myself in the mirror of this poshly decorated room and admiring the burnished bronze fixtures and floating sink bowls.
What now?
I wondered as I paced the room. Our waitress entered; I forced a smile and went to the large, handicapped stall.
I sat down quietly on the edge of the toilet seat, listening to her noises a thin wall away. She was all business and finished in a minute. Feeling like a fool, I stood and the electric sensor flushed the empty toilet. As I began to exit the stall, I was startled as Rain rushed in through the door.
His beautiful eyes stood out in sharp contrast to the dark-chocolate color of his V-neck T-shirt. He laughed and pushed me back into the stall. Locking the door, he turned me so that I faced the far wall, my hands up against the tiles.
“Don’t say a word, just feel me, and let yourself come,” he whispered in my ear with a scratch of his stubble against my cheek.
As he knelt behind me, I could hear myself panting from the thrill of our riskiness. With his strong, tanned arms he roughly separated my legs, then gathered the thin fabric of my silk skirt in his hand and tucked it into the waistband to expose my damp
panties. My ears pricked as I heard a door open, but it was someone entering the men’s room next door.
Rain pulled my pink satin panties down, and I waited in tingling anticipation. A moment later I heard a click and a rip. I looked down between my legs and saw that he’d slit the crotch of my underwear open with his pocketknife.
He urgently pulled my panties back up and slid his tongue through the slit his knife had made. With his face pressed into me, there was no beginning to where we ended. I could feel every inch of his tongue as I clenched around him, my face against the cool tile wall. He fucked me with his mouth and I moaned with pleasure. My every nerve ending was awakened.
“Jess, shhhh.” His warm breath exhaled against my back. I had to quell my disappointment that his tongue was no longer inside of me, but he quickly filled me with several fingers. They slid into my wet, aching sex where they belonged.
Holding me against him for stability, he worked his fingers inside me, jacking me off as I tried to suppress the panting, wild ecstasy that filled me. His thumb fluttered my clit and sent me over the edge. I came fast and hard, a lightning bolt of pleasure, followed by reality as he pulled down my skirt.
I turned to face him, wanting more. My hands brushed through his unruly shoulder-length brown locks.
“Please fuck me, Rain,” I whispered, while stroking his hard-on.
“I will, but not now.”
“What, are you going to go home with Marcy and fuck her?” My feelings for my best friend turned to anger as I pictured Rain mounting her with his cock, the cock that I still had not even seen.
“No, Jess, I’m not.” Hurt flashed in his eyes. “Don’t go there. You’re not exactly sleeping alone at night. Let’s get out of here
before someone notices. There will be more, I promise.”
My question of “When?” went unanswered; pleasure and pain wrestled within me. He pushed me out the door of the stall and locked it behind me. In the mirror, a flushed, rumpled version of myself reflected the confusion I felt but there was no time now for this. I washed my hands and splashed some water on my face. The wrinkled skirt would have to stay that way.