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Memory

By: patricia51



Have you ever had one of those nagging thoughts that you can't quite recall something? Something you're sure is important but simply won't come to mind? Well, next time you do pay attention to that thought and sit down till you remember what is was. Had I done that I would have saved myself a great deal of trouble.

My husband of 18 years was having an affair. I couldn't believe it but I knew it was true. All these years and two beautiful teenaged daughters and the whole thing was coming apart. I should have seen it before tonight but I didn't want to believe it. The furtive phone calls and the sneaking out of the house at different times with only lame excuses as to where he was going. They were covering for him at work too, telling me he was in "meetings" when I knew he wasn't. He had never had that many meetings. I was even more upset because his boss is a woman. You would think she wouldn't act like this, aiding and abetting him like that.

I had wondered who it was. Early that same day I had picked up the phone to make a call and caught them. He was talking to Kay. Kay? I just couldn't accept it. Kay and I had been friends for years. And besides, with all due modesty I knew doggone well I was better looking than she was. Kay was sweet but she and her husband both were overweight from running their bakery. Good lord, I wondered if Stan knew what was going on. My husband and his wife. I still wanted to doubt, but I had heard them both so clearly.

"Has she any suspicions at all?" I had heard Kay ask my husband.

"None, she's completely in the dark and I want to keep her that way. I'll be over there at 8 and we'll have plenty of time. She always works late on Tuesday," that son-of-a-bitch I was married to answered.

I gently hung the phone up. Must have been the Tuesday working late I was trying to recall, I decided. Well, I knew exactly how to get even with him. I had briefly thought about confronting them, or going to Stan, but decided the best revenge was to find some young stud who would appreciate me and show me a good time. I knew just where to find one and I knew just what bait to use. 

I smiled sweetly at my husband later that morning as I headed out to work. He kissed me and it was all I could do not to slap the smile off his cheating face. However I behaved, knowing I would get even and more than even.

Work never seemed to pass so slow. Near quitting time my boss Lorrie came in with a sad look on her face. I braced myself for the lie.

"Karen, I hate to do this but we just got this in. Could you look over it tonight? It should only take a couple of hours."

I managed to control myself. "Why sure I will Lorrie. Let me call John and tell him I'll be a little late." I did and then waited. When all the others had left the building and cleared the parking lot I left too. I was going to give him another chance before I paid him back. I drove carefully to Kay's house. Sure enough, there was John's truck in the driveway. I parked around the corner and slipped through the backyards to the house. The blinds were drawn but I could hear murmured conversation.

"Oh Kay, that's so beautiful." I heard John say.

"You really think so? I wanted it to be perfect. An evening to remember." Kay replied.

I turned and stifled a sob as I saw their shadows on the blinds come together That did it. An evening to remember? I'd make it an evening to remember alright. Only what WAS it I was supposed to remember anyway? I didn't know and I didn't care. I slipped back to my car.

I opened the trunk and took a small suitcase out. I got in the passenger's side and looked around. No one was out. I kicked off my shoes and pulled my slacks down. Under them I had worn only a thong. It had driven me crazy all day long. I'm sure the average sex goddess loves them and looks fantastic wearing one but I'm a middle-aged woman and not used to them. I struggled into a short black skirt and exchanged my high collared blouse for one with a deep vee to expose the modest amount of cleavage I have. I put on a pair of heels, tossed the other clothes in the back seat and took off.

I arrived at my destination only about 15 minutes later. It was a bar I knew of from listening to some of my single coworkers talk about. Not too high scale but not a dive either. I parked my car, got out and took a deep breath. I banish forming feelings of guilt and vague thoughts about remembering unimportant things and then nearly fell as I started for the door. I don't usually wear heels, they hurt my feet and I'm out of practice walking in them.

The bar was what I had expected. It was fairly dark, not too smoky and the band wasn't too loud. It was Ladies' Night so I didn't owe any cover. I made my way to the bar stools and ordered a drink. I sipped it and found that I was even enjoying the music. I had crossed my legs and my foot was rocking in the air in time to the beat. That's when the first guy asked me to dance.

He was the first but he certainly wasn't the last. I had a fantastic time dancing with a number of different guys. They were mostly younger than me. I found out in brief snatches of conversation the bar was frequented by the local college crowd. Then I met Robert.

Oh my. A six foot one and darkly handsome 21 year old male. Thank goodness for the mystique of the older woman. When I was his age I would never have had a shot at him but now that I was 15 (okay, 20 I reminded myself) years older he was quite taken with me. We found a table to sit at and had a drink together as we caught our breath. Every time I looked him over though I found I was having a hard time keeping my breath.

One more dance with him. This time it was a slow dance and he held me tight. His hands settled on my ass, cupping the cheeks and squeezing them. I pushed my mid section against him and felt his cock growing hard. I whispered a suggestion we go somewhere. He apologized, telling me he had come with a friend and lived in the dorm. I grinned and took his hand. Pulling him towards the door, I handed him the keys and told him directions to my house. I ignored loud the comments from his friends. Another time they would have embarrassed me. Tonight I reveled in them.

I let Robert drive my car as I rubbed myself against him. As hot as I was, I kept my mind on him, because the moment I stopped my thoughts wandered to my husband and my daughters. I crushed those thought back, I was not the one who had started this but I would finish it. My children would never know. Indeed the only sad part about my revenge was that my husband would never know either. In another way though, that made the affair seem even more delicious. 

I dropped one hand between his legs and began to stroke him through his jeans. He was already rock hard. I got my head down under his arms and pulled his zipper down. He moaned and used one hand to push my head down. I needed no encouragement as his cock sprang out almost into my mouth. In one deep slurp I took practically his whole hard cock into my mouth and began to suck it. My head bobbed up and down faster and faster, the head hitting the back of my throat, my nose hitting his groin.

I reached blindly up under my skirt and lifted my hips to drag my thong down. I had to discard my heels to get them off but I managed. While I continued to suck his throbbing hardon I began to finger myself. I was already wet and my fingers slide right inside myself. I pumped them in and out of my wet pussy in time to my lips sliding up and down on his shaft. I suddenly felt him stiffen and one hand come off the wheel and shove my head down onto his cock. He uttered a deep moan and a sudden spurt of hot cum hit my throat as his hips bucked up forcing his cock deeper in my mouth. I drove my fingers up into me and ground the heel of my hand against my clit. As he filled my mouth I swallowed almost involuntarily as my own orgasm overtook me.

Amazingly Robert was still hard. He grinned at me and reached over to touch me where my skirt had ridden up. Well that was the advantage of picking up a younger man. I realized we were almost to my home and told him to slow down till we got in the house. He grinned even wider and told me he'd be fucking me the second we got in the door so I better be ready.

We parked all the way up the driveway and jumped out of the car. I left my heels and thong in the car and raced barefoot to the front door with only the key in my hand. Robert had stuffed himself back in his jeans and was right with me. The door swung open and I pulled him inside and against me.

I freed his hard cock again as the door closed behind us. I didn't even try to turn on the lights. As angry as I was at that cheating husband of mine, I was also feeling a tremble of guilt at fucking this complete stranger in my own house. I wanted it in the dark. I clasped my arms around his neck and with the help of his hands on my naked ass I lifted myself up and plunged down, driving his cock into me. He leaned me against the wall and I wrapped my legs around him and began to ride up and down on him. I knew it would be only seconds before I reached my first orgasm when suddenly we were both blinded by the lights snapping on throughout the house.

"SURPRISE!" Rang out a full chorus of familiar voices. There was a complete moment of silence followed by John's very familiar voice, "Oh my God."

I twisted my head to look over the crowd that had been hiding behind the furniture and in the doorways. There's my boss and my husband's boss and their spouses. I think that's my mother collapsing in my father's arms in a dead faint. I see my brother and his family came all the way from Florida. Lots of coworkers and friends from the neighborhood and isn't that my pastor in the corner?

I'm still completely unable to move. My blouse is pulled open and my skirt is around my waist. My lipstick is smeared and I suddenly don't want to think about how that happened. I think Robert's pants are still up. A detached voice in me says this is good because I don't want my two daughters who are flanking my husband to see what I'm doing. Perhaps "was doing" is a better choice. Robert is exhibiting the symptoms of a male plunged into a tub of ice water as his cock shrinks to basically non-existence. Speaking of my husband, I wonder if Robert knows any place I could sleep tonight, because judging from the look coming over my husband's face I'm not sure I will ever get to spend the night under this roof again.

And there is Kay. Kay the tramp, Kay the seducer of my husband, Kay the slut ... Kay the baker with a lovely cake with white icing and blazing candles in her hands. The cake that my husband has been sneaking over to her house to get made. It really looks delicious but I think I'm not going to get to enjoy it. Over all their heads is a nice computer generated banner emblazoned "HAPPY BIRTHDAY KAREN!" That was what I had been trying to remember all week long, why, today's my 40th birthday.

Still unable to move I manage to open my mouth. Before the tumult starts that will signal the probable end of my marriage, my job, my friends, my reputation and my whole family I do say something. It is trite and very commonplace in these circumstances. In this case though I really, Really, REALLY mean it.

"You really didn't have to do all this."

                                   (The End)

(Yes I realize that my sense of humor is getting profoundly warped as I get older and I probably need serious therapy. No, I've never done this or known any poor soul, male or female, who has been caught in this situation. I forget my car keys and my glasses all the time and don't dare set my pocketbook down and wander off unless I tell at least three people where I put it. Actually if this happened to me I'd probably be all right because I wouldn't remember how to get home anyway. Please let me know if you liked this)

Memory



The July afternoon was hot and brilliant, the sun beating down from a cloudless sky as she stood in the doorway, looking out into her backyard. She was alone with her thoughts, which were now just so much kindling for the summer weather that always made her feel lusty.

Holding a cold, sweating glass of lemonade, she was on her way out to sit in a lounge chair when he crossed her mind and she felt her legs get a little weak. Only the day before, on an almost identical afternoon, she had come in from working in the garden. She'd been out there most of the day and a shower felt like a wonderful idea as she had not yet taken one that day. But as she stood at the refrigerator, filling a glass with ice, he had come up behind her and kissed her neck, his hands gently cupping her shoulders.

"Hi," he said in that way that let her know there was something on his mind.

He was her newest lover, a dangerously forbidden fruit she had taken home from a local bar late one night. She was divorced. He was married. He said it was one of those deals where all sex had stopped years ago. She didn't believe him, but there was something in his eyes, and the way he gazed at her during the breaks in their conversation, that made her want him immediately. 

They'd gone back to her place and fucked. He was voracious in the way he removed her clothing and feasted on her body while he remained fully dressed. Eventually, he pulled down his jeans, took off his shirt and offered her his erect cock tto suck. After that, she was hooked. 

Their relationship was almost entirely sexual as he declined to reveal much about himself, but it quickly deepened until it took on an unexpected dimension. It turned out to be deeply erotic in a way she'd never dreamed. Totally comfortable with each other, they began to explore each other's most intimate desires.

As she stood in the doorway and thought about what he'd done that previous day, she was filled with the urge to take her shorts off and go outside nude from the waist down. Should she? she wondered. The thought became irresistable. She often spent hours naked, just lounging about the house, but before long she would inevitably begin to pleaure herself. He knew so well how to turn her on and leave her with sexual memories that kept giving, consuming her thoughts, barging into her consciousness at all hours of the day and night, making her want to release her almost volcanic excitement in the most sensual ways possible. 

On that last occasion, she'd felt him slowly sinking behind her, his hands drifting down her arms to her wide hips, where they lingered. Her heart quickened when she felt him tug at her shorts, and the shorts give way....

Putting her lemonade down, she unfastened the clasp at her waist and let her khaki shorts fall around her ankles. Stepping gingerly out of them, she felt herself getting wetter by the moment. She was now wearing only a black tank top, black panties and white sneakers, her thick chestnut hair in a ponytail. 

She glanced out the door and considered the risk. A neighbor in the right place at the right time would surely see her, but the hot afterroon was so inviting and she loved the feeling of sun and breezes on her naked body. Inserting her thumbs into the waist of her panties, she tried to recreate the feeling of them coming down as he knelt behind her, his warm breath on her plump, naked buttocks.

"Mmmm," he'd purred, his lips against her bubble butt, as he lovingly called it. "The taste of your ass makes me so hard..."

Pulling her panties down slowly and letting them fall, she thought about the sensation of his tongue on her anus. The thought of him tasting the most intimate part of her body had once been unimaginable, but now it always left her on the verge of orgasm. She often came as he slowly and insistently worked his tongue deep inside her puckered rear opening, the one he said was so erotic for the ring of tan skin that encircled it. This time had been even better, more naughty, more forbidden...

"Mmmm," he'd sighed, licking more insistently as she'd bent forward to allow him inside her more deeply. She'd reached back to cup his head and pull him into her... 

A breeze through the door cooled the wetness between her legs as she picked up her lemonade. Her hand was trembling. She was nude from the waist down now, her black t-shirt reaching only to the top of her hips. Running her hand up her creamy wide thigh, she softly caressed the patch of reddish brown pubic hair she'd cropped close to heighten the sensation of his tongue and his hard, thick penis.

Stepping outside now, her mind drifted back to her orgasm as he'd buried his tongue deep in her anus after saying, "Oh, baby, your hot ass tastes so good.." Her ride on that wave of ecstasy seemed to last forever. It was an almost paralyzing pleasure. Somewhere within it was the sensation of is tongue moving inside her. Once the wave receded, she wanted to suck him, to taste every inch of him...

She slowly walked out across the lawn to the lounge chair, consciously moving her ass in as sexy a way as possible and then she glanced at her neighbor's house before she sat down in the shade. The sight lines were pretty obscured. He'd have to make a real effort to look over the fence, but any concern she had was pushed aside by her arousal. 

Sipping her lemonade and setting it down, she thought of how she loved the muskiness of his crotch, the taste and feeling of his penis as it swelled in her mouth, and how she loved to suck his cock from relative softness to throbbing hardness. On that prior afternoon, he was sweaty and his moist penis tasted salty, its flavor sending an electric bolt of excitement to her pussy and making her suck and lick his sex in an almost frenzied way. His sounds of pleasure had lifted her to new heights of desire...

As she lay back on the lounge chair, her hand found her sex and idly played at her clit while she thought of his moans, his big pink cockhead against her lips and in her mouth. She'd sucked intently, also moaning as she tasted his precum. Giving oral pleasure turned her on almost as much as having her pussy and ass licked, especially by him...

Rubbing her clit more firmly, she wanted to know what he had tasted on that hot afternoon. So her finger roamed down to her warm anus, so soft and slick with her perspiration. The sensation of her fingertip on her moist pucker made her gasp. Switching to her middle finger, she ran it all around her tight little asshole and then brought it to her mouth. The scent was erotically musky, the taste tangy, and it made another wave or intense excitement wash over her and seize her open, sopping cunt. Licking at her finger, she wanted to know more...

She had wanted to make him come. She loved the sensation of his cock pulsing in her mouth, and the ensuing flood of his blandly salty cream. She knew how much he got off on her tasting him. And as she'd sucked and licked his stiff, excited penis toward a peak of pleasure, she'd wanted to taste all of him....

Her middle finger was now gently probing into the tight smoothness of her anus as she reclined on the chair. The wind wss washing over her and placing a cool breath on her swollen, wet pussy. She rubbed her anus and licked her finger, then rubbed and licked again while thinking of how she'd turned him around. His surrprise and wonder at what she'd wanted -- and how she'd run her tongue over his hairless cheeks -- had made her almost come. She'd never licked a man's anus before, but she was consumed by the intense, undeniable desire to know him as he knew her. When her hands parted his buttocks, his sigh of "Oh, yeah" boosted the intense excitement between her legs. She then licked at the sweat in the cleft of his ass, his scent sending her into a cloud of lust. Placing her trembling hand on his stone-hard erection, she'd licked at his sweaty anus, at first tentatively and then with increasing desire as she tasted...

Her finger wss now up to the second knuckle in her own hot asshole, and she worked it slowly and intently before pulling it out and bringing it to her lips. The taste of his anus had been almost yeasty, yet it made her want to devour him. She'd clutched at his hips, pulling him back against her face... 

Pulling her top up to expose her hardened pink nipples, she swirled her tongue over the bitterness on her fingers, the taste of her anus that he loved so much. She was on the verge of orgasm now. She thought of how she'd worked her tongue into him while she stroked his erection until he'd gasped, "Gonna come". She'd turned him around quickly and taken his penis in her mouth. His head rocked back as he moaned and his throbbing spurt began..

It was here, in this part of her memory, that her lust took her on a flight to the unexpected. She fantasized about sucking his cock after he pulled out of her ass. They'd had anal sex on several occasions, and he'd always come inside her, but now the taste of her own anus was making her incredibly horny. The intensely kinky thought of sucking his erection after it had been buried deep inside her rear made her moan as she lay back in the lounge chair. Continuing to suck on her finger while her other hand worked at her pussy, she imagined his cock in her mouth and how it would taste. Her legs were spread wide, the memory of his hot semen and the taste of his ass colliding with her lust and the hope that her neighbor was watching her finger her anus. And then she came -- long and hard, gasping and shuddering -- nude from the waist down on that chair in her back yard.

Once the waves of ecstatic release subsided, she lay quietly for a few moments, feeling the breeze on her pussy and bare legs and listening to the birds as her heart pounded. Standing up, she briskly went into the house, feeling a little surprised at what she had done and what she had wanted, but not by what had inspired her.



Memory and Loss Pt. 01



This story spreads across nine years.

Part One starts at the beginning, the first time. The second time takes place nine years later, and is told in Part Four. 

Parts Two and Three? Well, it seems they had to be written, to get to Part Four. It makes sense, I hope, in a roundabout sort of way.

I warn readers, those who are willing to be patient with me, that this story unravels slowly, wafts its weave gently, sews its threads together carefully, and all this takes time. You'll need to be patient with me, because it all takes time. If that's not why you're here, best stop reading now. I won't mind - but you won't meet the girl with the most beautiful smile in the world.

I waited nine years, nine unexpected years. But it was worth the wait, for me at least. My readers (you) will make their own minds up whether it was worth their time.

-- ooo OOO ooo --

I lived on the south side of town, up over the brow of a steep hill. She lived on the north side, across the creek and up a longer hill, along the road to the pine forest. The main street, where we all met every Saturday morning in the mall, was a mile from her place and a mile from mine. We were all so fit back then, in my last year of high school, because we walked everywhere. 

Few of us had cars. Pamela was rare, she got her license early and her parents allowed her to drive their big white Fairlane, sometimes. I remember that car, because we had some moments in it, Pam and I, and I remember them. I wonder if Pamela does? We're older now.

In August of that year, we both turned eighteen, two weeks apart. Leo the lion, me, with my long blonde hair and pale skin, cold from the long winter. I never saw Pamela as my lioness though - she was always too pale and ethereal, her long wave of thick brown hair falling near to her waist. Almost black when twisted into a thick, long plait. 

She was a dancer, with her slender body, her lean muscled legs, her small waist and delicate bum. Her breasts were slight, just a soft crescent of curved pale skin and no cleavage. But rich, dark budding nipples, thick and erect when I finally saw them and kissed my lips around them, in wonder. She cradled my head as I took them into my mouth. We were both so young, but we were young together.

Following the August term break and our birthdays like book ends around that last fortnight before the last term of the year, we started a long countdown to a departure, for I had won a place at the university in a southern city. I knew I was leaving, and we both knew she was not. Loss began early, that spring and summer. We were both so young, but we were young together.

That last term of school - lunch time turned into a quick walk to my house, which was only ten minutes from school, thirty minutes in my room and slowly undressing. A little bit more each week because Pamela was so shy and I was so eager, but eventually her blouse was undone, every button slipped through those tight loops of cloth and a white cotton bra covering her slight breasts, those dark nipples a round shadow under the white cloth. 

Another day and, oh bliss for my eyes, her white panties finally peeled down her slim legs, and I gazed with wonder at her dark, hidden slit, and her triangle patch of black, curled hair. She was so afraid, so that day I just rested my hand on her blackness, my palm a soft weight, my fingers trailing on her belly. Her belly was flat, the mound of her mons slightly raised, but I did not dare put my fingers between her legs, not yet, not that day.

After some weeks we got to the point where I would be naked on the bed beside her, she would be clothed, or her blouse undone, or her panties down, but never all at once, not those days, not those lunch times. She was brave enough one day to hold my erection in her slim hands, and it was just a caress and a hot wonder between her fingers and in between the palms of her hands. 

With Pamela I learned all about slowness with a girl, and I lost myself in her dark, scared eyes, her pupils wide with her fright, for sex was something forbidden or for later in her family. She was a religious, church-going girl, but I never believed, not in her God, at least. But her innocence, I believed in her sacred innocence, and could not rush her out of that, not ever, however much I wanted to. 

I learned my patience with this sweet girl and I have a photograph, one of only a few, where we sit beside each other on a bench. Pamela's delicate, oval face is tilted and her eyes gaze up at my face, and her long thick plait falls straight down to her lap, and her hand is small in mine. I am laughing and pointing at something, and her smile is gentle. She loved me. 

And I was willing to wait, as I spun a slow seduction. With Pamela I learned to be slow, and I was still young when I learned that girls and later women are slower than boys and men to heat their passion. It was a lesson well learned and never forgotten, and has served me well, down these long years. I wait.

I waited for Pamela. One weekend, her parents were out of town and her entire family gone from the house. Finally, she could relax, and during the afternoon of the second day we found ourselves in her sister's room at the back of the house, and the mid afternoon sun streamed in the open window. The back garden could not be overlooked, and we were at the rear of the house, all hidden from the street.

She loved to kiss me, her gentle fingers wandering over my face, and sometimes she would just stop and hold me still, gazing at me from her dark, dark brown eyes. Pamela was very serious, and she would look at me intensely. Women scrutinise men, often, and Pamela was the first to subject me to her deep intensity.

We lay together on the small bed, fully clothed at first, warm in the sun, no covers needed. Somehow, and I don't think we spoke, we silently agreed that we would each take off one article of clothing at the same time. 

She was brave, and she undid the buttons of my shirt. Or perhaps it was because she was scared, and couldn't bring herself to undo the buttons of her blouse with her own fingers, and needed that decision to be made by me. Pamela peeled the shirt down my arms and dropped it to the floor, and my body, tanned now from the summer sun and my hair bleached blond from the chlorine of the town pool, my chest was hairless and young.

Pamela lay there in her plain white bra, her small breasts rising quickly with her fast breath, and her slim torso shivered in the air, even though it was warm. Her skin was pale, and the indents of her ribs were ripples of shadow and light. Her slim waist curved into her blue jeans, and she was young and pale, the thin strap of her bra sliding off her shoulder. 

Her breasts were small, but with full nipples, firm and long. She did not really need a bra, her pale curves had no weight, her nipples almost the biggest part. But Pamela was a conservative girl, and only the daring girls, the dope smoking hippy girls, only those girls went braless.

But that afternoon, in the streaming sun, dust motes spiralling, her pale skin warmed and she let me undo the clip at her back. I tenderly slipped the little white cups of cloth from her breasts and the straps down her arms, she hid her breasts from my sight. 

And then forgot that she did so, as her slim arms went about my neck. She pulled the weight of my body onto hers and held me close, and the next time we rolled to our sides, her breasts were bare and her body exposed. Pam was quietly proud of herself, for showing me her beauty.

Pamela lay on her side, her head on her arm and her other arm stretched high on the pillow, slim body all stretched out. Her chest was like a boy's, but her tiny waist was a girl's, and her hair was long and all uncoiled from its plait, a long thick dark wave around her. 

In the warming sun, her pale beauty was fragile and delicate. Her waist was so small, sometimes I feared she might break. But she liked my weight upon her, and wrapped her arms around my back. Her eyes were dark, big and dark.

She let me undo the button and zip on her tight blue jeans, and I did the same to mine. She had become used to my naked body beside her from those lunch times during the last days of term, and would shyly hold my erection, the dark hair at the base of my belly my only darkness, and even then her small hand pleased my ego. 

I rolled to the edge of the bed, and peeled my jeans and jocks down my legs together, and my cock bounced high and hard, up against my belly. Pamela's dark eyes widened, and her lips opened, a deeper breath. Her fingers gripped the loose sheet. 

I stood before her and carefully peeled her jeans down her slender legs, and she raised her bum to let me pull them from her slim hips. She lay still before me, her white panties unadorned. A tiny thin strip of darkness was between her legs - I didn't know if she even knew she was wet. She may have been scared and nervous, but her heart was beating faster and her body was running ahead of her mind. 

My God, I had never seen her with such a tiny shred of cloth covering her skin, ever before. This was all new for me now. We would fumble together, two young virgins, lying in the warming sun. I knew enough to stop, not to peel that last hiding cloth from her body. 

I lay beside her, my hardness against her thigh, and she let me press there. She would roll away her panties in her own time. I sensed it was best not to hurry her. Pamela was becoming braver, lying under the sun, and I could wait.

She surprised me then, by sitting up, her slight breasts a gentle curve on her slim body, her long hair a veil, sitting up and peeling her own panties down her legs. For the first time, she was completely naked before me, and the moment seared itself into my memory. 

The first time I had ever seen a girl, completely undressed, completely nude before me. My eyes, I'm sure, were wide, and my usual confidence humbled and stilled.

I could do nothing else but gaze at dear Pamela's slender, nude body, small and tentative on the bed. She reached out her hand, and slowly pulled me down onto her, as if she could handle my weight on her body, but could no longer bear the weight of my eyes. She was like that, sometimes, my look would be too intense, and easier to close her eyes and feel my skin instead.

But we were naked together, for the first time, and the sun was warm through the window, and her hair was sprawled out like a black fan on the bed; and our fingers and lips began to wander. Both of us were slow and in wonder, and because neither of us had ever done this before, we didn't know what to do. 

Our fingers were a murmur, accompanied by our voices, soft whispers on our skin as we discovered our trails and paths. Both of us gasped in a deep breath as fingers touched the edge of our bellies, just above the hip. 

Our voices murmured gentle lullabies and endearments and gentle urgings to each other:

"Oh, so sensitive there, that's too sensitive."

"Don't, not there, that tickles."

"Ah, more, more, that's right. Just a little firmer."

"Softer and slower, oh God, that's lovely. More. Please, oh more, there."

Slowly we learned little trails over each other's skin, finding little hollows and little peaks, smooth long curves of skin and smaller places. Places to nuzzle, and places that felt the flicker of our eyelashes like tiny butterflies. Pamela's kisses became braver and further down, and I discovered that her little teeth and a tiny bite felt wonderful. 

Gradually I found myself between her legs, and my eyes feasted on that place, and I knew I could lie for hours, for days, between a woman's legs. Pamela was the first. 

I was surprised that she did not mind my fingers gently exploring her lips and folds and her wetness, and when I tentatively put my tongue to her honey dew, she touched my hair as if to keep me there, her first boy between her legs. 

Mine might even have been the first fingers between her legs, even before her own. I don't know - she was such a straight girl, and sometimes, I think, surprised herself that she was with me. But she taught me, yes, even in her scared innocence, she taught me.

"Can I?" I asked, for I had come prepared.

"I don't know. I think so, but I don't know. Oh God..." 

But it wasn't a prayer, or if it was, not for a blessing but for strength.

"I'll be so slow, and if it hurts, I'll stop."

Neither of us knew what we were doing.

I peeled the foil away and pinched the rubber teat in my fingers and spread the rolled sheath over the top of my cock. Pamela watched closely.

"It won't break, will it?"

We were both nervous about that.

"They're always tested," I said, confident that the condoms I had bought were a good brand. 

They must be OK, or the woman in the chemist who sold them to me wouldn't have smiled as she asked, "What size would you like?"

At first I thought she meant the size of my cock. Did I even know that, relatively speaking? Luckily, she was kind and rescued me.

"A pack of three or twelve?"

I suspect she smiled at me some more as I walked away, my modest pack of three in my pocket.

I rolled the sheath all the way down my erection, and was immediately numbed and slowed. Probably a good thing, because Pam was nervous, her arms straight by her sides, and she wasn't relaxed. But she spread her slim thighs apart and her dark sex beckoned. She was wet for me as I took all of my weight onto my elbows and slowly placed the head of my cock between her lips, her bright wetness slick as I moved my cock gently into her.

We managed not to be too clumsy together, as I experienced that first incredible heat of a girl's body around my shaft, that wonder of being inside a girl's hot heat, that miracle of a first togetherness. I was spellbound, and did not know how deep I was within her, for I was gazing deep into her dark, dark eyes, her pupils big and black, her face pale, her beautiful hair a wreath or a veil around her head.

"God, Pam, is this OK? I'm not hurting you?"

"No, no, stay there, I'm all right, it's a bit tight."

But then, it wasn't, and I slid deep and for the first time, found myself home in a girl becoming a woman. Pamela wrapped her arms around my back and eased her legs further apart, and took me inside her, sweet and wanting, and her eyes were wide with the wonder of this first time. 

"Put your weight on me," she whispered, "I like your weight on me."

I eased myself forward, and wrapped one arm under her neck and we kissed. Oh goodness, it was our first time, and we kissed, our tongues touching, and our breath quick. I could feel her heart fluttering in her chest, my nipples erect, perhaps the first time I noticed they did that. Pam arched her throat back, and her hand went to my waist, and she pulled me tighter to herself.

I was beginning to move inside her now, that deep richness building from deep in my spine, my balls rising with their heat. I had no idea how to tell her pleasure, but I could feel my own pleasure building quickly, quickly, rising up inside me, and starting to thrust my shaft into her deeper, deeper. At the same time, though, holding back because I was terrified of hurting her. I didn't yet know, and neither did Pam, that our bodies would automatically know what to do. Not yet.

So that first time, it wasn't spectacular, the world didn't stop turning, it wasn't the best. But it was Pam and I together, in love, and making love in our own sweet beginners' way. And the sheets were soft and the sun was warm, and there was the lightest breeze through the open window, and the lightest angel's hands caressed our skin, and I came inside Pamela, my first, a slow gentle spill for I could not stop myself. I came inside my Pam, and she held me close to her, her arms wrapped around me, and I was special. And she was mine, that summer afternoon.

Later, because it was still warm, we went through to the kitchen, and now she was familiar with herself, and brave, and there was my Pam, making tea completely naked, her long hair a fall to her waist, her hand twisting it together to get it out of the way. I too was naked, my soft cock swinging at my thigh, and we were free and young and for the first time, uninhibited together. 

We played at being a couple forever, even though we knew we were not, because I was going to the southern city in a couple of months, and she was not. Parting started early, that year.

But today, our first day together, completely together, was full of joy and innocence, sweetness. Pam always had one sugar in her tea, I had none. She was my sugar and my honey, my sweetness. 

Soon, we became aware of our bodies once again, and now she sat on my lap and swung her arms around my neck, and clung for her life.

Her taut little bum pushed back off my thigh, and my fingers went to the wetness between her tight cheeks, and she was wet and hot on my lap. She let me put two fingers right up inside her and pushed herself tight onto them, gently moving within her. 

One of her hands crept to a breast. She did not pull or twist on her nipple, but pressed her palm to her small breast, and pressed it hard. Her heart beat quickly under her hand, a quick pulse that my fingers could also feel deep inside her.

"Do you have another rubber?"

She wanted more than fingers inside her, and she was so wet now, that the slide inside her would be easier this time. And it was. Pamela wanted me inside her, whereas before she didn't know what she wanted. And before, it was my first time and I had no control, but now it was a second time, and I was already slower and able to sense my rise. We were able, this time, to make sweet love, not just a clumsy fumble.

Pamela too was listening to her body, and this time she wrapped her slender legs about my waist and pulled me hard and deep into her, deep into her, filling her sex with my heat, and feeling my body over hers, and arching her back in pleasure. She cried out, ohh ohh, and didn't know if it was pleasure or pain, and then knew it was pleasure, a hot cock deep inside her.

I don't know if she came, that second time with me, for I was too inexperienced to know, and once the rise was upon me, it was all about my own coming. But this time it was a loving time, and after I came deep inside her, Pamela wrapped her arms and legs around me and held my head to her breast, and kept me there. I wriggled lower to slide my softening cock from her body, and to remove the rubber, then I wrapped my legs about hers, and we were entwined together.

So for the first time I fell asleep in a girl's arms, my head on her breast, my hearing filled with her heartbeat and her breathing, her smaller fingers entwined through mine.

I didn't stay that night, though, for her family was returning the next day and I could not be there. Just before I left her, she raised her arms to pull on a white gown, and the drop of the white cloth and the fall of her long dark hair hid the black triangle at the base of her belly, falling down her pale skin like water. 

That image seared itself into my memory as I left her, and has never left me. 

Pamela was slender and pale and scared, and she was my first.

-- ooo OOO ooo --

It was the end of February, and I arrived in the southern city by train, travelling earlier than most other students because of the overnight train and its connection to the city. I got there on the Friday - most others would arrive at the college on the Sunday.

The taxi dropped me and my suitcase at the front steps of the college, a sculptured fountain spurting there in the loop of the driveway. The long avenue stretched down to the heart of the campus. There I was, eighteen and a half, and look at me, I'm going to university! I checked into the front office, and collected my keys, found the mail room and the main dining room. 




Memory and Loss Pt. 01



The mail room would be a lifeline, letters sent and read and re-read, keeping connections back home and later, as people moved to other states, keeping contact as the distances became longer. The dining room fed two hundred fifty of us, first years through to post-grads. A privileged, isolated community, a little microcosm of a bigger world, small enough to be intimate, but still big enough to meet strangers down through the years.

I lugged my bag through the doors to a courtyard, surrounded on all four sides by two storey buildings: East and West Wings, South Wing, and the dining room on the north side. My room was on the second floor of East Wing, looking down the long line of poplars, the Avenue. 

Split by a central corridor, rooms on each side - the blocks were for both sexes, all years together. When the college was first built, sexes were segregated floor by floor, but now, all mixed. Free for some, freedom for all of us.

Each room was basic - a single bed to the left or right of the door, a built-in cupboard to the ceiling, a small sink with shelves and a mirror, a single window opposite the door, a desk and chair, and a simple lounge chair. Comfortable though, and centrally heated against the cold winters with sub-zero winds blowing in over the snow covered mountains.

It was dinner time, and I made my way to the servery and then through to the dining room with my tray. Only a handful of people were in the room, the early arrivers, like me. A guy with long curly hair gestured to me, hi, and I sat with him and an Asian girl. 

Introductions were made, and it turned out that Steve was in third year, Chun starting her second year. That was handy, they offered to show me a quick tour of the campus and the city, so I would know the place a little by Sunday, when the rest of the first years arrived. That would give me a head start.

Steve's brother Dave was starting his first year too, arriving on the Saturday, doing the same subjects as me. He had a mate staying with him for the first week, dossing down on the floor, a pair of heads from the west. Good, I had some northern weed, the remains of a last deal done in my home town, so had found some smokers already. That would ease things, as I didn't really like big groups of people. I was from a small town.

The next day Steve and Chun showed me around the city centre and the campus, and we shared a joint down by the lake. This early familiarity with the place gave me more confidence, and meant that I would be established in the hall by the Sunday. Cool.

Dave and his mate Ken turned up, and I clicked with Dave straight away, but found Ken to be an arrogant prick, cocky and full of himself. He'd gone to a private school with daddy's money paying the bills, and looked down at state school kids like me with scorn. What a prick, glad he's not coming here. But I smoked his dope, so maybe he wasn't so bad. Naah, he was still a tosser.

Then, on the Sunday, the hall started to fill, with new people to meet, new cliques forming with a dance of personalities and types, weaving and wandering. Because of the extra few days I had been here, I was established in the hall, and if not the expert, I at least knew my way around. People thought I was in second year.

It turned out that the hall had a new enrolment policy that year, and a much higher percentage of the first years were girls, to get the numbers of women in the college up. Of the hundred new students, seventy or so were girls. I was in paradise. 

Dave and I started to scope out who was around, and he laid eyes on a pretty brown haired girl from a little town in a southern state. Easy on the eye but, Christ, couldn't she just shut her mouth and stop talking? Fuck, I had never heard such drivel.

But then, the next day, she introduced us to her friend from the same town, Clio. Her girlfriend wasn't staying in hall but was sleeping on a floor so she could be closer to things going on during the orientation week - O week. 

Clio was quiet, but with a dark, sultry sexuality about her. She was about about five four, five five, a slim build with dark brown, almost black hair, cut shoulder length. Her skin deeply tanned at the end of summer, one of those girls who go a deep olive brown in the sun. 

I later discovered that she was half Italian, hence her dark beauty. Her eyes were dark and huge, sculpted cheek bones and big full lips. 

When she smiled, fuck, I died and went to heaven, right there. And I don't even believe in that place. Clio was fucking gorgeous. A beautiful smile.

She was wearing a plain tee top, her breasts nippled and softly swinging under it. She wasn't big, but her breasts were a gorgeous shape. She didn't need a bra, and was comfortable without one. Her waist was slender, her belly flat, and her legs were sprayed into a pair of jeans that clung to her ass and thighs. She was one of those girls with a space at the top of her thighs, may be an inch wide. I looked, I'll admit that.

She looked up at me and her smile was radiant. "Hi, I'm Clio."

"Hey, I'm Alex, good to meet you." 

We continued chatting, and I discovered that she was doing a couple of subjects the same as me, which meant lectures together at least twice a week.

"If we get our act together, we could get ourselves in the same tutes, we should get our names down on the board." 

Course work started the next week, so there would be admin stuff to get done.

Meanwhile, we established that we both liked a bit of a smoke, and then started shitting on about favourite bands and movies. She was easy to talk to, and I've always preferred one-on-ones rather than being part of a big group making small talk. I'm a loner, really, and so was she. 

We were both from rural towns, and not yet used to the bigger flow of people in a city. Her town was way smaller than mine, so she was even more out of place with lots of people. Plus she was about six months younger than me, only just turned eighteen. So younger than most around her.

But we hit it off, fair to say.

"Will you be here for the party they've organised for tomorrow night?" I wasn't sure where she was staying that night.

"Wasn't going to go, coz Sheree and Dave are going somewhere and I don't really know anyone else. But hey, if you're going to be there, that'd be good."

"OK, so I'll see you then, yeah?"

That was good, Clio was good to talk to, and knowing she would be there meant it was OK for me to rock up, whatever time. I never liked being first to any kind of gathering, my preference was always to give it some time to get going, and I could make a judgement call whether to stay or go. I wasn't a social butterfly. I preferred to land on a beautiful flower and stay for a while.

In the event, a couple of my tapes became the sound track for the party, which was held in a small room at the junction of two corridors. I reckon Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" must have played twenty or thirty times that night. 

People who didn't even go to the party came down to the dining room the next morning going, "doo de doo, doo de doo doo, coloured girls go..." like some kind of spaced out zombies.

I got there around nine, and thirty or so people were drunk and stoned, loud voices bouncing around the room, people crapping on about this and that, saving the world, that kind of thing. But Clio was sitting with her head in her hands, alone in a chair in the corner of the room.

"Is she OK?" I asked someone who knew her.

"I think she's having a bad stone, she was off her face when she got here, and she's had another number to herself since."

Fuck, that wasn't good. I needed to get her out of there, get her to a quiet place and talk her down from her stone.

"Clio, can you hear me? It's Alex. I've come to look after you."

I touched her gently on the shoulder, not wanting to startle her. 

Clio looked up at me from behind her hands, her cheeks pale and her eyes bloodshot.

"Alex?"

"Yes, come on, let me help you. I think you need to be somewhere quiet, not here."

I was worried for her. I didn't know how much she had smoked. A lot, from what I could see, and I was uneasy for her. I didn't want her freaking out.

"Can you stand up?"

She could, just, and she leaned on my arm. I steered her to the door and down the corridor.

"I need the toilet," she croaked, and I helped her to the women's door, half way down the hall.

"I'll wait for you outside."

Clio was a couple of minutes inside, and then the door banged and she was leaning against the wall.

"Fuck, I'm ripped," she said, her voice small.

Down the end of the corridor, in the dark, I knew that someone had dragged a small couch from somewhere, and I figured she needed to lie down as soon as she could. I helped her to it, and sat down at one end, and she crept on to the cushions and lay her head in my lap. I gently stroked her hair and started to talk softly to her. 

I have no idea now what I said, but it didn't matter. Clio just needed to hear a calming voice and to know that she was being looked after. She was slight and pale and small there. Every now and then she would open her big brown bloodshot eyes and gaze up at me, her lids heavy, and then they would drop.

Clio reached down and found my other hand, and brought it up to her chest and clutched it between both her hands, clinging on, her smaller hands gripping mine. I continued to stroke her hair, gently, and massaged her temples, and she clung to my hand at her breast.

"I think I had too much tonight." Her voice was quiet, a whisper. "I smoke too much, sometimes, I need to slow down."

"It's OK, you've got someone to look out for you now."

"I've not had that before. Thank you."

We must have sat on that couch a couple of hours, Clio and I, as she slowly came down from her high. At one stage she slept and her face became peaceful. It was dark, and her features were blurred, but she was peaceful. A number of people came past.

"How is she?"

"Yeah, she's better, she'll be OK."

All was still, and Clio looked up at me with her stoned, stoned eyes. And arrived in my life. Clio, the stoned girl. I told her she had a beautiful smile, and there it was, sleepy, her smile, just for me. I touched my finger to her lips, and she kissed it.

"Thanks for looking after me, thanks so much. I don't deserve it." 

Oh yes, Clio, you do.

Later, I took her for a walk around the courtyard, to get some fresh air into her lungs, and to shake the dope driven cobwebs from her head. I wanted to get her to a bed and sleep, now that I knew she was down from her stone and feeling more together. 

But the do-gooders, those who had left her to herself earlier in the evening, decided that they knew best now, and insisted that Clio go back to Sheree's room, and crash on the floor. I was too tired to argue - it had been hard enough looking after her all that time, and I thought it best just to let her go.

The next morning, though, Clio came to find me, to thank me once again for looking after her. We spent the morning sitting under the shade of a tree, just liking being together. She told me some more about herself, and I was disappointed to hear that she had a boyfriend back in her home town, an older guy she had been with almost the whole year. So it seemed pretty much hopeless for me.

As the term started up and course work began, Clio and I did get ourselves into the same tutorial group, and met twice a week for lectures. After two weeks it was always me she sat with in the lecture halls, and we spent more time together. But we remained within the boundaries set by her loyalty to her guy back home, and for several weeks, nothing happened between us.

Clio didn't live on campus, and was house-sitting in a suburb on the other side of the mountain. She had access to a car, which gave her more flexibility, and she would drive to the hall and spend time with me, and after a time I gave her the spare key to my room, so she could stay on campus if she had a couple of hours between lectures. But still nothing happened, even though I would wait for hours, sometimes, but would still miss her.

Slowly, I think my heart started to break. Clio was going, even before she had really arrived.

Then, one day, I had finished the long walk up the avenue and was just about to cross the road to the hall, when a blue car pulled up beside me.

"Hey Alex, get in, come out with me."

Clio leaned across and unlocked the car door, and I climbed in.

"That was good timing, I hoped I'd find you. The others are away from the house today, so I've got the car."

She was a fast driver, and in five or six minutes we were speeding up the freeway around the back of the mountain, heading to the tree lined streets of her suburb, roads curving loops up the slopes of the hill. She almost got us killed, accelerating fast in front of on-coming cars as she turned into the long, curved road that was the main artery of the suburb.

"Jesus, Clee, could you cut it a bit closer, next time? Fucking hell, that was close."

I think her heart rate had shot up - just as well the car was responsive. 

She pulled into the drive of the place she was staying in, and invited me in. But even here, there was still a reserve about her, and when she showed me her room and the spectacular view over the hills, nothing happened. There was a sense that she was edging closer to something. But still the boyfriend was there between us, distant yet there. I'm not sure she really knew why she had brought me back to this place.

Later in the term Clio moved into some communal student accommodation on the other side of the city centre, maybe half an hour or so from the hall where I was staying. We would spend a lot of our time together, but still nothing further was happening between us, and I was reconciling myself to just keeping Clio as a close friend, even a confidant, but nothing more. 

And maybe best that way, as I was finding out that she had a lot of mixed up stuff going on in her young life, and maybe I just wasn't old enough to manage it all. I could see that she valued my friendship, though, and maybe she was keeping herself from becoming too close. I don't know, and I don't think Clio did, either. I was lost with her, really, and lost without her.

Then there was one spellbound Saturday morning, around eleven, when she knocked on my door at the hall. The sun was streaming in, warm, the rays reaching over to the bed, and the day was slow and still. I made Clee a mug of coffee, sweet with two sugars, and then, and to this day I don't know how, we ended up on the bed together, just kissing.

And then it wasn't just kissing, for her fingers were at the buttons of my shirt and she was peeling the sleeves from my body and my chest was warm in the sun and her dark hair a fan as she rested her head against my shoulder.

"Alex, your heart beat is so strong and steady, mine's always fluttering and changing its speed. God, your's is like a wave breaking on a beach, it's so regular. It's soothing."

And her fingers were at the buttons and fly of my jeans and she peeled them down. Clio sat on the edge of the bed, and just looked at my nude body lying there. The sun light was warm against my naked skin, and her huge brown eyes were deep and dark. She had decided something, clearly, for she was taking a lead here.

"We can't make love, because I've got my period, but I want you close to me."

Hindsight is an exact science, and looking back now I see that her timing was quite deliberate. She wanted intimacy, but needed a reason, an excuse, for not being able to let herself, or me, betray her loyalty to her man back home. Or she just wasn't ready for me. Or herself.

I don't know if I was able to rationalise that at the time, but to be honest, I didn't much care, for Clio turned away from me and pulled her tee shirt over her head. Her bare back was dark skinned and slender, the ridges of her ribs and the bumps of her backbone a pattern under her dark skin. 

I reached my fingers to touch her, but she stood, still facing away from me, and peeled her own jeans and panties down together, in one smooth movement, bending at the waist and revealing the small curves of her ass.

"Don't look, I'm shy," she said, as she lay beside me, with one hand covering her pubes and the other her small breasts.

Don't look? Fuck, Clee, I've been aching to see you naked for weeks, and you say don't look? So I solved the immediate problem by gazing at her face, losing myself into the darkness of her eyes and the radiance of her smile.

"Just hold me close, let me feel you against me. I don't know what's happening here." 

Clio was small and confused, and confusing. But the heat of the sun was glorious upon us, and slowly she relaxed onto the bed and against me, my hardness hot against her side. I realised that she was a ball of tension, and even in my heated, ignorant youth, I had the sense to realise that Clio was lost in herself, and so young. 

I was also too young to know what to do: hell, Pam and I had only been together three times, and this was my first time naked with a girl since then. And I was way out of my depth with Clio's complexities, her moods. We were both so young.

Clio was more experienced though, having lost her virginity a couple of years earlier; but as we talked, and I have no idea what we really talked about, she revealed that she didn't think she had ever had an orgasm. Jesus, I was no help there, then, because I had no idea yet how to pleasure a girl. But I suppose her revealing that to me, was something of a sharing and a trust, a reaching out. But I didn't know what to do. I certainly didn't know how to make her come.

Slowly though, she let me gaze on more of her. Her breasts were small and conical, with full areola dark and round, peaked up to long nipples. She had four or five glossy black hairs around each nipple, each may be an inch long, and as I ran my fingers around the rippling peaks of flesh, she whispered,

"I'm embarrassed about those hairs."

"Don't be, they're you, they're real."

"I love the gap at the top of your legs," I told her, and cupped my hand between her thighs, her thick black pubic hair a cushion to the palm of my hand.

"You don't mind that I'm bleeding?" she asked, and I don't think she knew just how intimate and sharing that was. 

Or maybe she did, but it was still her protection. Again, I think back, and wonder if Clio offered me something precious, something special, a gift, her blood.

She parted her legs, and let me smooth back the dark hair from her lips with my fingers, and there was the white string of her tampon a contrast against her black curls. She was so still, and one hand lay upon one of her breasts, and the other slightly held the length of my cock, not moving on my flesh, just holding me, as I touched my own lips to the lips of her sex, and tasted the tang of her blood.

I licked over the slick wetness of her clit, but she didn't want me to stay there. Perhaps it was then she said she had never had an orgasm, and was afraid to experience that feeling, but she wanted my lips kissing her own, our tongues tentative.

That small moment on the sun soaked bed was, for me, the centre of that time with Clio, my Clio for just a moment. Time spiralled into that time as, without a stroke or a clench, I silently came on her belly, the white cream of my semen a contrast to the darkness of Clio's flesh, the pulse of my cock held silently between her palm and her fingers, her eyes a darkness pulling my soul into her being as my cream spilled onto her skin. 

I did not know it then, but our time spiralled away from that moment, outwards and away, and it was fragmentary and our innocence was lost. Sweet God, her smile, her beautiful smile.

But we were too young, and at that time there was nothing to replace that innocence. We didn't know how, back then, but it took me a long, long time to see that.




Memory and Loss Pt. 01



Clio never came to that room again, and started smoking more and more, and our loss began. I wanted, but she did not, not enough for me, anyway.

Two weeks later, maybe three, I went down to the place where she lived and knocked on the door of her room, as I had done many times before. I heard movement within, as I had heard many times before, and Clio would welcome me into her room. I turned the knob of the door, as I had done many times before, and Clio would welcome me in. I pushed open the door, as I had done many times before, and Clio...

But this time, I did not cross the threshold and I did not see Clio's smile. I did see her dark eyes, open and wide, ah fuck, open and wide.

I silently closed the door, and never returned to that room.

I left the building, and turned a direction I had never gone before. I walked fast, in a direction I had never gone before, until I could walk fast no longer. I punched a tree to take the pain away, but in the last fraction of a second, I pulled that punch because even then, my rational mind said there is no point damaging your hand. You hurt enough, already.

Two, perhaps three hours later I arrived back at my hall, exhausted. Fuck, I was shattered. 

Somebody asked, "A, are you all right?"

"No, I'm not. My heart is ice, now, I think it will crack."

Two, perhaps three weeks later it was the end of term, and I stood on the other side of a road and watched Clio board a bus, to return to her home town. She turned her face up and he kissed her on her lips, and she left.

That night I wrote a simple poem:

I saw her board the Greyhound bus,

The road is long and cold.

Will she stop and think

Before I grow too old?

I returned to my own home town and wrote her some letters. I don't know what I wrote, but I still have her replies. I was angry, clearly, because her replies were righteous, defensive. I never realised the significance that she at least replied. I was too young to realise how important that was. Clio was even younger, we just never knew. 

Half way through the next term, we were working on a student drama production together. I was doing lights, I think, and Clio was stage manager. As I stood watching a rehearsal, I became aware of a silent figure by my side. Clio had come up to me, and she put her arm through mine, tentatively.

"How's the walk-through going?" she asked.

"It's going well, it'll be a good production."

"How are you going?" she asked, quietly.

Without looking at her, I took her hand in mine and held it, my hand bigger than her small one.

"Not so good. I need more time, I think."

"OK. I'm sorry, I am so sorry."

I squeezed her hand to acknowledge her desire for forgiveness, but I couldn't say anything.

I was too young, and my heart was too shattered, and I couldn't forgive Clio. Not then.

Two years later, Clio came up to the hall recruiting for student politics. After she had gone, a good friend said to me,

"A, you must have really loved that girl."

"Why? How do you know? What was I doing?"

"Mate, you couldn't take your eyes off her, not once."

It was only six weeks, and it lasted forever. 

Sometimes, I see a girl with Clio's smile, sort of. 

But it's never really Clio's smile, because it's not for me. 

And the other girl's smile is never as beautiful as Clio's smile. 

Never. Not the most beautiful smile in the world.



Memory and Loss Pt. 02



Every now and then during my life things have happened that I cannot explain, at least not in any rational way. Some may call them coincidence, but I am not so sure. Certainly the events that I am about to recount fit into a category that I can only call "strange". 

In this case it was a matter of minutes, long seconds at most, that determined that, yes, I have a story to tell. A minute different, either earlier or later, and there would be no words here, no strangeness, no memory. A minute sooner or a minute later, not even sixty seconds, possibly, and there would be no forgiveness, no redemption, and my life would not be the same.

My life would be almost as rich, I am sure, but not quite so rich. I would have a book of poems, I am sure, but a page in that book would not be folded back as a permanence, a proof. I would see smiles, I am sure, but never smiles quite like hers, never quite so beautiful. I would dream dreams, I am sure, but not of her, hauntingly and repeatedly down through the nights. 

The tale I am about to tell pivots around an irrational set of events, an unbelievable set of circumstances, a moment that simply should not have happened, a coincidence beyond all coincidences. For me this pivot, and what followed, has become a defining thing, a sustaining thing, a heartbreaking thing. It is my mystery, and the reason I know strange things do happen. Fiction is strange, but truth is stranger. 

Why this pivot happened is the unknown thing. How it happened? Perhaps "coincidence" is the only word, but if it is, a hell of a lot of them converged on that simple suburban shopping square that day. A whole truck load of coincidence. So many unexpected events fell into place that day, that I sometimes wonder if someone was driving that truck. It might have been a random sequence of events - if so, random works in mysterious ways.

I have written somewhere that most of the tales I have posted on this website have a tiny glimmer of truth at their heart, and I have taken that grain and written of pearls and sea, and dark hair falling and fair hair blowing in the wind, and birds that shift shapes as they fly. I have written of women who do exist and I have written of women who never existed. 

I have written songs of sirens and siren songs, and sometimes I the author have pushed my narrator aside for a paragraph or two, and taken his voice, taken his place, taken his women and got my own women back for another moment.

I have written of my unreliable narrators, and I have woven tales back and forth in time and place. My narrators cannot be trusted, I know that, and I expect my readers to suspend their belief as they read my weave. Or follow their disbelief, at least. I am never sure which is which, who is who, or when is when. Not any more.

But my close readers - and I hope that I have some readers who have threaded their way alongside me (more correctly, trailing behind me following Hansel's trail into the forest) through more than one of my tales - I hope some readers have wondered about a character, or a moment, and pondered - is that true? Did that really happen? Was she real? Did he actually do that? 

In some cases, clearly not; but in other moments, perhaps? Life is a collection of moments, joined by the long spaces in between. These stories are like that, a collection of moments, recollected.

This is a recount of some of my most precious moments, which just happened to string together into coherence and wonder, and the magic held itself together for a week or two. Which makes it strong magic indeed, to bind two people together like that, when all it would take to break the spell was to walk another way, or to walk slower, or to walk faster, or not even to walk at all. 

The spell could only hold because both of us did what we did, when we did it. Perhaps magic is like the tango. It takes two to do it.

In this story, as in its Part One and all its parts, all I can say is, these events actually happened as I have written them. Astute readers may be able to figure out the geography and the place, and perhaps even the time, because I have not been able to alter those things. 

--ooo OOO ooo --

Here I insert a quick editorial note: based on what I have written so far in Part One and now Parts Two and Three - two unexpected new Parts, as two women ghosted themselves into this story, each demanding equal time (and who am I to deny them that?). Because of their presence, however, I won't get to the vital heart of this story until Part Four. 

What do magicians call it? The reveal? I don't know, I'm not a magician. I got caught in someone else's spell, I don't conjure my own.

-- ooo OOO ooo --

There are only two people on this planet who would recognise every moment in the fourth part of this story. 

One of them is me, A, the other is the woman who is the centre of this telling, B. She is not called B in the story. But it is her. Oh yes, it is B. It couldn't be anyone else.

A few people know fragments of B from my point of view - but I have no idea if she ever told any of her friends about us. She might have - women talk more to women than men ever talk to men. I have only told a few women about her, because I trust women (most women, anyway). I find men too unreliable, like my narrators, like me.

I have since discovered (the internet is a wonderful thing) that B has a far longer tell of stories from her people than I ever knew at the time. Perhaps it is her weave that explains all this, perhaps it is her tale, not mine. 

But of course, it is our tale. I have remembered it, I wonder every day if she does too. I would like to think so, but I don't know if she does. She is in my heart and in my head, but she is not with me now.

I wrote, once, that I didn't know if she was my fallen angel or a devil rising. I think she may be both. If it is her spell, then B is my witch and I am Merlin, trapped in her tree.

But this is possibly the longest preamble on Lit, and I will have lost already those who do not wonder. Probably best that way, for there is no wham bam, thank you ma'am here. Just a gentle eroticism, I hope. My hope. Wondrous things happen slowly, I have found, and sometimes it just takes time to get there. I have to wait.

I have all the time in the world now - the rest of my life. That should be enough. Things happen, and things happen strangely.

If I have made you wonder, please, take your time reading this. I hope my conjure is enough to show that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. It's my truth, anyway - you will have to decide for yourself what you think - and if you like, let me know what you decide. It will not matter to me - I know my truths.

Welcome to my wonder. It's a simple one, really, because it's about a man and a woman.

-- ooo OOO ooo --

The thing about an extraordinary coincidence is that you have to consider all of the events leading up to that particular moment in time, and you have to wonder about all of the "what ifs" that might surround those events. 

You have to pause and think, what if some tiny detail changed? Would the next series of events in that person's life happen in the same way, or in such a similar way that there was no substantive difference in the outcome? 

If tiny things changed, and there were enough of them, would you get to the same place at the same time? It's pretty unlikely, I should think.

And if the coincidence involved two people converging on that same moment, you have to consider what might have happened, or not happened, or happened differently, in that other person's life as well. So the chances of two people (who were once connected) being in the same place at the same time, nine years on, are even less likely? I would think so.

You somehow have to work out the odds of this or that happening, the likelihood of events occurring or not occurring, and do the maths. I think you come up with astronomically huge numbers very quickly, numbers which represent the likelihood (or not) of a particular sequence of events occurring. Generally speaking, I think the odds would be against you. Put it this way, if you were a betting man or woman, you wouldn't bet on it.

If there are two people involved, those astronomically huge numbers at least double. And if there are a number of years between a first event and the second, coincidental event, then it seems to me that the likelihood of that particular thing happening, where those two people coincide, would become even more remote every day that passes. The maths is simply stacked against you. 

And if you take your time factor down to the smallest increment of time required for the particular event to take place - let's say the amount of time needed to walk across a small square in the middle of a suburban shopping centre, and then turn left or right such that you can no longer be seen from the other side of the square - the maths gives you even larger numbers. The odds are stacking really high against your coincidence, now. 

Let's say thirty seconds, forty-five at most, if you are walking slowly and window shopping. It's not a big square, and there aren't many shops on each side. It's quite crowded with people though, so it's not easy to see clearly to the other side of the square.

And if the second person in this coincidental moment is walking straight towards you from the opposite side of the square, then it is clear that the smallest time increment is half what you previously thought, because your closing speed is now twice what it was. She is walking too.

So we are considering the likelihood of two people being on opposite sides of the same small suburban shopping centre, within the same fifteen - twenty second period in their lives, after a gap of nine years. 

By my maths, even if you take the simplest equation available for this scenario, which is the likelihood of being in the same twenty second period within a longer nine year period, that likelihood is one in 14,319,840. Give or take several tens of thousands, because the starting point could be anywhere in a six week period nine years ago, and the end time could be any day at all. It could be yesterday, it could be tomorrow.

It's not going to happen, is it?

-- ooo OOO ooo --

After I finished my three years at university, I stayed in the same city. I had grown to like it, it was big enough for me. I had no desire for a bigger place.

I rented a house out in the suburbs, and in the first year lived there with my girlfriend and a friend from uni. They were both two years below me. She was a girl with pre-Raphaelite hair, lustrous long and brown, thick waves cascading to her waist. He was an academic son, like me. 

He is mentioned in this telling only because he brought a big "what if" into the thread that is building here. Let's say the first but by no means the last.

What if he had not betrayed me by taking Rosemary from under my nose, and I did not know until I discovered them later? Even then, I did not believe it. At first. Then I did, because she confessed. Anything like that is a big life changer, wouldn't you say? Not a tiny thing, a betrayal. You might leave town, after a betrayal.

But this isn't about those two, so he gets no further mention. Except to say that he was a good friend but a friendship that ended badly, but I don't blame him or hold a grudge now. What's the point of that? Besides, he contributed to the mathematics of my coincidence, so I cannot do without him, not really.

But Rosemary deserves a further mention, because in the end I was with her for just over seven years, so a significant other in any person's life. By rights (by writes) she really deserves her own story or stories. She does appear "In The Library" several times in one shape or another, but it's not quite the same. I should do her the honour, one day. Maybe.

But Rosemary's "what ifs" are important for this story. Essential, even.

What if she was not on a long holiday of her own for a month or two, and had not let Cathy stay in the house for a while? That's two big life changers, right there. This coincidence is getting less and less likely, every sentence I write, n'est ce pas?

Rosemary had known me at school (the world is a very small place, I keep finding) and I remember seeing her and her skinny friend with equally long hair, out on the asphalt. Always together. I didn't know either of them, not then, but it turned out Rosemary knew me, and had touched my hand once, as a dare. Did she follow me to that college hall? I don't know. Possibly, maybe; but without doubt, her choices are very much a part of my tapestry.

I think I will pause in my tale for Rosie, because just over seven years is a long time, and a lot of it was good, very good, and my memory is kind. 

Besides, I'm a writer on Lit, and you've been a very patient reader so far. You've indulged me too much, and will need to indulge me again, I'm sure. So here's a little vignette for you, in payment for your kindness, your patience, and your curiosity.  

Here's a taste of Rosie.

-- ooo OOO ooo --

Taste her. Scent her. 

We are in a small college room, mine or hers, it doesn't matter, they both have identical layouts. It's morning and I always wake before Rosie, rolling out of the single bed so as not to disturb her sleeping.

I wrap a towel around my waist, pressing my piss hard-on to my side and wrapping it tight. This is a necessary art in the hall, as the amenities are in the middle of each block with a ten metre scurry down the corridor. The towels are too small, really, and tall girls can never wrap their bodies safely. Small girls can, but often there is a lovely flash of bum cheek curved and pale, a darkness flickering between quick thighs.

After my morning piss my cock is still full, not hard but a satisfying heft. Rosie likes my morning cock, and we have a wake-up routine that is enticing. I climb back into the bed and wrap my body behind hers, my cock filling and firming in the crack of her ass, and I slip one arm under her neck and take one of her outstretched hands in my hand, stretching her arm out and linking my fingers through hers.

My other hand curls over her waist and finds itself on a soft breast, and takes the weight of that breast in its palm. Rosie is about five seven, a curvy girl, and her torso is long and her breasts full and heavy. I never know what inches and cup sizes ever mean, but when I hold both her breasts in my hands they are a satisfying weight, and Rosie likes it when I take their weight. She would prefer smaller breasts, Rosie, because she doesn't really like bras, but always needs one during the day.

In the mornings, when she is still sleepy, Rosie likes me to press her breasts hard against her chest, as it relieves the ache from their weight. I don't mind the fullness of her breasts - they enclose my erect cock nicely when she presses her tits around my shaft.

Our morning routine, though, is a simple one. I tweak and pull on her nipple until it hardens and tightens, and then I know Rosie is awake. But she doesn't open her eyes or show that she is awake, not just yet. 

It is our conceit that she pretends to be asleep still, but her nipple betrays the pretense, and I only pretend to gently twist and tug on it, so it stands high and full against the soft mound of her breast. She pretends to be asleep, and I pretend to wake her. I might still be dreaming.

I slowly move my hand between her legs, caressing the palm of my hand over the mound of her triangle and running my fingers down between the spreading lips of her sex. Rosie still pretends to be asleep, and she must be dreaming, for she slowly moves her thighs wider, making an easier opening for my fingers into the outer petals of her cunt.

Now my cock is hard against the crack of her ass, and the shaft is shifting between her opening thighs, and then she rolls just a little and my shaft is trapped between her soft thighs and our heat is together. I feel her fingers grip my outstretched hand, and she stretches like a cat. Rosie has a way of stretching her whole body, just like a waking cat, and her thighs clench around my heated shaft.

"Good morning, Rosemary, how are you this morning?"

It's always a formality and a game, in this first year when we are fresh and young. 

"I am well, dear Alex," she returns the formality, "but there is a strange heat between my legs."

"Best we cool it, then."

And with a sudden movement, she is on her back and her knees high and her thighs wide, and I am between her legs, my cock resting on her belly, the hair of my balls mingling with the hair around her cunt lips, the slight coolness of my swollen sacs pressing against her wettening slippery slit. 

Rosie likes to see me with my weight on my elbows, my chest high above hers so that she can reach up her hand and splay her fingers wide over my heart, and our eyes sink into each other's souls. I fall into Rosie's speckled green eyes, ringed with gold.

With her other hand Rosie always tingles the end of her fore-finger over the rise of her clitoris, and scoops a slick of her juice up over her small shaft. She always gasps, a high intake of her breath, and then her fingers run down into the dark tangle of hair around her cunt, and she spreads herself, wet and wide.

Her fingers curl around my cock, and she presses the purpling head of my shaft between her lips, and places me poised there, ready to bear down into her in a single glide. Rosie's morning fuck, her first morning fuck, is quick and efficient. She just wants my weight and length into herself, quickly, and in the mornings her cunt is already wet and grasping and foreplay is not really needed.

"Fuck me Alex, just fuck me, slide into me now."

So I do. Rosie is so wet I slide straight and deep into her, the heat of my cock throbbing into her deepening cunt, and I press my weight onto her. One arm wraps around under her neck and I keep the weight of my chest off her breasts with my other arm, my elbow on the sheets. 

This way, I look down onto her face, still puffy and red cheeked from her sleeping, and I delight as her eyes widen with each thrust. Her eyes always do it, they widen with each thrust, as if each deepening shaft is a surprise, something new. Rosie licks her lips, her red tongue a small tip between her lips, and her tongue is the same colour red as her clit when it rises between her cunt lips.

As my hips lengthen their thrust into her wide thighed groin, our tongues fuck into each other's mouths, fiercely. Morning is no time to be gentle, we have found, and our first fuck is fast and quickly rising, and both of us grunt faster with our exertion.

"Unghhh," my deeper voice is echoed by her higher cry, "ahh uh oh, oh oh," and we thrust and grunt like primal animals. There is no subtlety or grace here, both of us just want a quick, fierce, morning come. Rosie clenches my ass cheeks in her hands, and our tongues fuck fast into our mouths, and my first spasm is met by a tight clench of her hot cunt.

"Oh fuck yes, Alex, fuck your hot come into me now, push that long cock into my cunt, oh fuck, yes, yes, yes, oh fuck yes, ahh, now."

And her orgasm peaks and pulls and sucks mine into her, and with my back arched above her the seed from deep in my spine shoots its wet heat into her, pulsing and pumping into her wetness and heat, and I collapse my weight onto her, a slick of sweat hot on my chest.

"Ah me, I like that first hot prick of the day, oh yes. God, that was hot, your cock inside me, so fucking hot. What a way to wake up."

Yes indeed, what a lovely wake up fuck. And because I am young, Priapus, it is not long before I am hard and wanting to come again. 

And now there is so much wetness dripping from her cunt, with my cream and her juice, that I have another delight for Rosie, which she loves every three or four weeks or so, oh yes. 




Memory and Loss Pt. 02



I discovered this a few months before, when Rosemary was on all fours before me, her long back stretched out and the high mounds of her ass risen up before my eyes. 

I love looking down onto my cock as it slides deep into her drenched cunt, disappearing into her heat, and seeing the darker centre of her asshole there, the dark crease between the full cheeks of her full round bum, raunched and straining back, pushing her cunt onto my prick. 

That day I slid the end of my thumb a little firmer than usual down that dark crease and over her sphincter. As I passed over the hot swell of her dark hole the pad of my thumb pressed into her just a bit, and I felt her push back onto my thumb.

She'd not done that before, maybe I'd not done it before, but I stopped and held my thumb in place against her hot darkness, and pressed a little firmer. The pad of my thumb sunk into her ass just a fraction, and Rosemary pushed her bum back some more, this time with a low moan.

"More," she moaned again, and this time she bucked back against me and the first joint of my thumb sank into her asshole and was gripped there, tight as fucking tight could be. Now I was curious, and stilled the movement of my thick prick into her pulsing cunt, and concentrated on this new place, this new, hot, tighter than tight place.

Back then, anything anal was taboo and filthy, a forbidden thing. And here was Rosemary, pushing her pulsing asshole onto my thumb, and then the short length that was in her reached that place where it was past the first tight ring, and her body sucked my thumb right in. 

Fuck, this was new, and forbidden. My thumb was in her shit hole, and Miss Rosemary was no longer the prim librarian's daughter, but some fully sexed up slut with a thumb in her ass.

"Fuck my cunt, Alex, but don't take your thumb out of there."

And her asshole clenched around my thumb. Christ, that was tight. The sight of my cock deep in her cunt and now my thumb deep in her asshole, and even more so, the whole idea of what I was doing playing in her shit place; that twitched a whole new set of fucking buttons and switches in my head. Fuck, this was a new heat, and I surged my prick into her, at the same time probing her taboo hole.

I exploded semen deep into her cunt and she pushed back onto my thumb with her ass channel, and I felt the deep clench of her orgasm around my thumb. Oh fuck yes, here is a whole new playground for me.

Later, Rosie asked, "how did you know to put your finger in my bum, how did you know I'd like it?"

"I didn't know," I replied, "I just thought it looked soft and hot to touch, and I think your movement was a clue. Was it nice for you?"

Rosie revealed that, when she was a younger girl, she used to play with small, smooth sticks and stick them not only into her little cunt, but also up into her pink bum hole. She knew it was wrong and dirty, but she loved doing it.

"I put my finger in my bum, sometimes." 

Fuck, fuck, fuck, my mind is boggling at this. And of course, my curiosity got the better of me.

"Do you think you might like my cock in your hole, maybe?"

I was tentative with the idea of it. I'd read about anal in Penthouse mags and the Forum journal, but had never met any girl who would even talk about it. 

You gotta remember, this was all a while ago, when a taboo really was a taboo. Nowadays, fuck, you can count the girls on the bus who have had cock in their ass; but back then you'd need a whole train load to find one girl who was into her asshole. Turns out Rosemary was the girl on the train. And I was collecting tickets!

So now, this morning, there is so much wetness dripping from her cunt, what with my cream and her juice, that I have another delight for Rosie. 

Rosie always likes me from behind - she likes the heavy sway of her big, full breasts hanging below her body, and the deeper feel of my length into her womb. I watch her sway her breasts just over the sheets, and she brushes her nipples so that they thicken and tighten with the soft friction of the cloth. When I fuck into her, her body rocks back and forth, her thighs clenching.

I like to see my prick get swallowed up inside her, and the slick wetness as it shafts in and out of her. I love to look down on her long body when we fuck, it's primal and like a beast, and sometimes that's enough. Especially in the mornings when I'm a stud and she's my slutty girl, just good fucking sex and horny screwing. 

Evenings is time for slow and loving, or warm sunny afternoons. I've always had a thing for warm sunny afternoons for slow loving, ever since Pamela at the end of high school, and Clio, in my first term of Uni.

With Rosie, I was still young, and we'd screw four times a day, twice in the morning and twice later in the evening. Seems I was always hard and she was always wet, and come was dripping everywhere.

We had a silent short-hand between us. If in the morning I woke up wondering whether Rosie might like a little play with her asshole, and after we had our first fast fuck, our code goes something like this:

Rosie turns onto her front and places herself on the bed, doggie style, her dark wet crotch before my eyes, a slither of white come sliding down the inside of her thigh, her dark hair traced with shine like morning gossamer dew, light glinting on her dark snatch. I trace my fingers over the full flesh of her rump and run a single touch all the way up her spine.

If Rosie wants another straight fuck, her clasping cunt around my thrusting prick, she remains with her arms straight and her body high. That is her sign that she wants me to reach under her body and take the weight of her big, hanging breasts into the palms of my hands, to hold their heaviness and to tease out those long nipples. 

These days, and it is most days, that is her sign that she wants a deep fucking with the angle just right, and her fingers on her clit as she comes.

For me, this is the glorious visual thrill of her long pale body and the great rippling wave of dark brown, sometimes russet red hair sweeping down her back, my prick disappearing into her wet sex.

But if Rosemary wants a different weight in her guts, maybe having had a satisfying big shit the night before to remind her of the pleasurable feel of a long thick hot thing pushing firm through her rim, and all empty in the morning; then she drops her shoulders to the pillow and pushes her globes higher in the air.

This is my proper and polite Rosemary, her name like a librarian's badge and her finger to her lips, sshhh, we're in a quiet place, be quiet. This is Rosemary the shocking daughter who wants to rebel against everything her parents taught her, and who wants her lover's cock in her asshole, all forbidden and deep and dark and wicked. 

Taboos are there because it is wrong to break them. Anuses are to push out, not to take in. Everything is reversed, and pleasure becomes pain and pain becomes pleasure.

This is the Rosemary whose face is down on the white pillow, her hair thick around her shoulders, this is the Rosemary who slowly turns her head towards me, her eyes huge and black and a serious look on her face, and she says,

"Slowly, Alex, slowly," and turns her face away. 

Her two hands slowly go backwards to the wide splay of her ass cheeks, and she pulls those round, soft cheeks wide, one at a time, revealing the dark puckered brown of her hole, one cheek wide and my hand takes the plump firmness from her like an offering; and then the other cheek is wide, and my other hand takes the other cheek like a sacrifice.

Rosemary's hands drop back to the sheets above her head, and she grips the bed head, locking her arms in position so that her body cannot move further forward. Rosemary needs to do all of the movement now, because my prick is long and thick and her hole is tight and small, and she has to control every inch.

My task is to stand rigid behind her, to give her slowly opening hole a solidity onto which her asshole can spread itself. I am going to be deep into her body, deep into her guts, and this is her trust in me. If a taboo is to be broken, then Rosemary has to trust me with another sanctity. For us, she and me, this is now a sacred thing, to be done slowly.

I place my fingers into her cunt which drips with the earlier cream and juice and it's all hot and wet. I scoop a big slop of wetness over the red thick helmet of my cock, and a wetter cream onto the puckered star of her hole. An exploratory push of my finger and it is gripped down to the first knuckle, quickly.

Rosemary is silent, her fingers a clench on the head of the bed. I watch as her fingers relax their grip, and this is the sign to place the heat of my rock hard cock against her hole. I pause now, and fascinated, watch the rim of her sphincter slowly adjust itself to this thick presence, a slow opening up.

Rosemary's fingers clench on the sheet, and her asshole pushes back onto my shaft a half slow inch and she stops there. Her fingers relax, and she shudders in a deep breath.

Silence in the room, and her fingers clench once more on the sheets. This time, oh fuck, the sight is glorious, her muscle squeezes tight around my head and it is inside her, gripped so fucking tight, so tight. The long shaft of my cock is connected to her, my flesh gripped by her flesh, and a tiny quiver of her dark brown rim.

I reach into her dripping cunt once again and pull up more wetness, slicking it around the shaft where it enters her body, lubricating this slow, awesome movement.

As Rosemary's fingers alternately grip and relax, she pushes her asshole back onto my shaft, slow half inch by slow half inch until four inches of me is gone. The tightness of her shaft is the strongest grip my cock has ever felt, the tightest grip. Even if I wanted to plunge my thickness into her, I couldn't, as Rosemary's tunnel is tight and blocking.

If she doesn't want me here, I can go no further, her grip is the final say. But Rosemary's push back is faster now, her hands clenching and releasing faster, and her breath is deeper, each intake a rebirth. 

"Push now, slowly."

I need to help her now, Rosemary needs me to finish this slow connection, I need to sway my slow weight into her tightest shaft. 

She exhales which each slow movement of my thrust, tangling the growing pleasure of my fullness inside her with the threads of the lessening pain, which is pleasure too, as her anus opens wide and grips my shaft like a vice. Fuck, she is tight, the tightest hold I have ever felt. No fingers can hold this tight.

And then she is just a great heat around my shaft, as Rosemary finds that last pulse pushing back, and suddenly the push becomes a pull, and she sucks the last inches into her guts, and the base of my belly is against the two softening cheeks of her ass, and I am as far as I can be up inside Rosemary's ass channel, as deep as I can ever be. Her ass tight hole turns me inside out.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, she is tight, and when she grips me, fuck, I'm not going anywhere. It's not my cock any more, it's hers. It's a part of her body now, as I can feel every pulse and clench and grip inside her.

"Fuck me slowly, now, do me deep. Ahh yes, your heat burns me, oh fuck." 

Rosemary utters the deepest most primal grunt as I am deep in her guts, a low keen, a long sigh of her breath, yet there is a high hiss, a sibilance over the top.

"Yesssss, oh fuck, my ass is full and hot, deeper in me now, fill me up, oh fuck, yes."

My movements, gripped so tight, are slow at first as her tunnel is still clutching my deep shaft as tight as anything I have ever felt. Slowly, and with each long thrust, Rosemary's ass begins to loosen and my shaft moves more freely in her bowel, and I look down and see two then three inches of my long cock slide back and forth, in and out of her body, in and out.

Her whole body is shuddering now as my prick swathes into and out of her passage, white cream lubricating slick and shiny. I look down and see four then five inches pumping in and out of her ass. On each outwards stroke my cock pulls a redness of sphincter muscle out, and then my inwards thrust pushes the colour back into her.

She is breathing hard and deep now, and a low guttural sound moans from her throat with each push. She cannot speak, because each thrust pushes the breath from her lungs, and she moans.

Rosemary's hot gripping ass tunnel is so tight around my cock, the grip almost hurts. Almost hurts, but each movement back and forth eases the tightness. A sheen of sweat builds on both our bodies and her haunches becoming slippery to hold. Her ass grips my cock tight into her, and my balls are tight and high, and now I am beginning to build my surge, my rising spasm.

My cock thickens as I reach into her deepest depths and the roil of come builds from deep within my own ass, deep in my own body, and my thrust is long and smooth into her slippery, sliding shute. Her body is motionless now, all of the movement is in my hips and I deliver long, hard thrusts into her hot gripping dark place.

"Oh. Fuck. Fuck. Your asshole. Is so tight. Miss Rosemary. I'm. Going. To come."

Her tightness is one last, twisting grip on my cock, and with her clench, tighter than any hand I've ever known, her asshole squeezes and pulls the ejaculation from me, and I thrust and spurt three huge times, shuddering, and a fourth time, into her dark, black, forbidden place. The exquisite clench of her ass is a divine corruption, and I break another taboo as I come into her asshole.

I have taken Rosemary in her ass, and part of the wickedness, the right wrongness, is to use the whole name her mother gave her. Rosemary. 

Rosemary likes my cock in her ass, and when she walks to the dining room later, her ass is still filled with my dribbling semen and I know she thrills at the hot trickle into her panties throughout the rest of the day. She has to ease herself down onto every chair, as her hole is tender and she is aware of every press upon it.

Every three or four, four or five weeks, Rosemary wants me to fuck her ass. It is a special thing for both of us, and it's a sacrament. Nobody else knows that I fuck Rosemary in her back channel, and it is my holy fuck and she my dark bride. She trusts me not to hurt her.

In later years, I fucked her ass less and less, and finally, no more. I think she lost her trust in me over time, as her betrayal of me began. So perhaps that explains it, as it ended years later - she no longer trusted me not to hurt her, as her own guilt mounted. 

Sad Rosie, I really did love her ass, and would never hurt her there. Not there.

I look back on Rosie now, and still see her dark star and her long back before my eyes, and my long prick sheathed in her ass. Her hair was a glorious mane of rich, dark waves, and the cheeks of her ass were high and firm. Her breasts were soft, her waist was wide.

Fucking women, they leave their hooks right in, long after they've gone, don't they? 

I still love to suck a sweet, musky asshole, sweeter than honey. I can't forget Rosie, her's was my first sweet ass. She dabbed it with honey, one day, and that taste...

Well, that's just a taste of Rosie.

-- ooo OOO ooo --



Memory and Loss Pt. 03



There's not so much sex in this chapter (it's towards the end, if you can wait that long), mostly angst and emotion. But this woman is important to me, because she paid me the biggest compliment I have ever received from a woman, from anyone, in my life. So she is a permanence, even though she was transitory.

--- ooo OOO ooo ---

"Alex, is it OK if Cathy stays for a couple of weeks, while she finds a new place?"

It is many years later. I'm in the same house, and Rosie has moved in and out several times as she finished her degree and started work herself. We've had a couple of different people move into the house for a term here and a term there, but it's mostly been just me and Rosie, sometimes Rosemary and me.

I wandered a little, sweet kisses with other girls at the bottom of the stair-well or in a car, in a bar, or down by the lake. An occasional finger inside tight panties with the top button of her jeans undone, and a palm of my hand inside her soft bra, bodies turned sideways. But never another open, bare sex, legs spread wide. Incredibly loyal, me, incredibly loyal, even when Rosie was not.

I had a growing collection of Penthouse magazines, a monthly visit to various newsagents. Rosie loved the Forum magazine, also monthly and easy for her to read, pages turned with one hand, lips stroked with the other, clitoris peaked on my tongue with the book thrown to the floor. 

When she was away, I had a series of favourite centerfolds spread on the bed around me, a stroke for each girl on each turned page. The cat would lick come from my belly. That cat had a beautiful, glossy coat. 

Bob Guccione, I thank you for your taste in women - usually larger breasted than mine on the whole, but fuck, that hair and those lips hidden away in their deep mysteries. Ah yes, hair. I'm waiting for it to come back. Perhaps I should move to France.

I must have been fairly content, though, or surely I would have gone. Perhaps I had a contentment elsewhere in my life, I don't know. Or perhaps I was waiting for something to happen. 

Maybe, looking back on that time now, maybe it takes a lot of energy to conjure up a spell, a whole truck load of energy, and that all takes time. Maybe magicians are slow and have to wait, because real magic takes time.

Now though, Rosie had a friend from her workplace who was coming out of a bad marriage and had finally made the decision to leave. She was on another couch these last few nights, just a suitcase full of her clothes. We had a spare room and could offer Cathy the comfort of a strange house.

They were both arty women, Rosie and Cathy, and had that in common through their work. I did not know Cathy at all, had never met her, but it's so easy to be kind. All you have to do is have a heart, and say yes.

"Yes, of course she can. As long as she needs. What are her plans, do you know?"

"Just a couple of weeks, probably. I think she's got a flat lined up and is waiting for the keys. She'll be company for you while I'm away."

Rosie was going overseas for a couple of months, travelling alone mostly but meeting up with him in Cairo. Her choices coincided with his, game changers both, but by this time I no longer cared. I just couldn't be bothered with the emotional hassle of their relationship. I was in a rut and knew it, and by this stage I was just waiting for it all to end. But seven years was a long time with Rosie, and endings of long times don't come quickly. 

Cathy arrived on a Thursday night, tired and drawn. Her decay of a marriage had been going on for some time, I thought - she was thin, with big dark circles under her eyes, and pale washed out skin. She looked emotionally shattered, exhausted.

Rosie gave her a big hug, holding her close. Cathy couldn't help herself - as she was held, a simple human comfort, she rested her head on Rosie's shoulder and her own shoulders heaved with a sob. With tears on her cheeks she turned to me with a sad smile.

"God, I'm sorry, that's no way to greet two kind people who are taking me in off the streets."

"Cathy, look, don't be embarrassed. You're welcome here. Rosie has told me the basics and that's all I need to know. Come on, give me your bag and we'll show you your room."

I touched her gently on the arm as a welcome. She gave me a small smile in return; so that was worth it, seeing a sad girl smile. 

Later, we sat around a table sharing a meal, talking of this and that, small talk, to take her mind off herself. The cat came and made a fuss, wrapping himself around Cathy's legs, his glossy coat soft against her bare skin.

"His fur, it's so soft, and look at his eyes, staring into mine."

The little cat knew lots about people, better than they did themselves.

It was a work day the next day, so Rosie and I would leave Cathy on her own. Rosie and I followed our usual nightly ritual - we would each go to our own bedrooms, one shared wall. I would lie, listening to her undress, taking off her make-up (naked in her room, it's a warm night). The sequence of her undressing, one article of clothing at a time, would bring a stiffening to my prick, naked under the sheets. I would hear the tinkle of her piss, the flush of the toilet, the running of water, the spit of toothpaste.

This night, there was a pause before my door opened. Rosie was checking on Cathy, making sure she was warm in her bed with a glass of water and the cat curled beside her. And girl talk, the things only women know. I would wait ten - fifteen minutes for Rosie, tonight. Cathy was more important right now, because she was hurting. 

I was numb. But hard. I could wait fifteen minutes for Rosie, as she slowly left me.

Half way through the next week, Rosie left, driven to the airport in my new red car.

"Look after Cathy while she's with you, remember she's fragile. But you'll be good for her, I know that. Be good to yourself, as well."

With a tender kiss (even leaving can be tender, if you want it to be) Rosie was through the exit gates and gone. Her contribution to the mathematics of an unlikely coincidence was done and delivered, although I did not know that, not yet.

Returning home, I wasn't sure how Cathy would be, now that Rosie was gone. We didn't know each other, and I was a man and she had just left her man of five or six years. She might not like men, right now. 

I did not need to be concerned. As a gesture of thanks for giving her space, time, and a place to stay, Cathy had cooked me a meal, with a bottle of wine, and the table set. I liked the formality of the table setting, she had made that extra little effort, and it was noticed. 

The cat curled around her legs, and later she curled up on the couch, her legs tucked up under a big, baggy jumper. She looked comfortable and warm, a whole lot better than she looked when she arrived, a week ago. A thin girl, weight lost as she lost her marriage, but no longer gaunt.

That night, my evening routine was different, because Rosie wasn't there. Tomorrow being a work day, I bid Cathy goodnight at my usual time. She touched my arm as a thank you gesture, but there was a sadness in her little smile. The cat curled in her lap.

"Could you give him a feed, before you go to bed?"

I could see she needed to just sit with her own thoughts for a while.

Later, as I lay in my room I heard Cathy get ready for bed. Although her room was diagonally across the entry hall from mine, I could still hear faint movements. And despite myself, I found myself listening to her movements the same way I listened to Rosie's, with expectation. I heard the rustle of cloth as Cathy took off her jumper, or a blouse (I couldn't tell which), and then the soft glide of soft cloth against skin. 

I imagined black panties sliding down Cathy's thin legs and her pale bum turning, and then I heard another slide of cloth and thought, oh she wears a nightdress. Rosie is always naked under her dressing gown, and she slides it off as she comes through my door, revealing the sexy sway of her full breasts. Cathy had no breasts at all, she was so thin.

I found myself listening for the same trickle of pee, and look at that, my prick is rising. That's rather nice, but rather wrong, since Cathy was nothing to do with me. No matter, I took my shaft in my hand and just held it as I drifted into a fast sleep, a nice heat in my hand.

Waking from my first deep sleep phase, I was dreaming of the cat crying, or thought I was. But it wasn't a dream and it wasn't the cat. It's poor Cathy, weeping. I crept out of bed and threw my dressing gown on, and knocked gently on her door.

"Cathy, are you OK, can I get you anything?"

I heard sniffles from inside, and a tiny voice.

"Yes, come in. God, I don't know what came over me."

"I do, you're grieving. It's tough."

My dad had died suddenly, that Christmas. I knew what grief was. A game changer, is what it was. More impossible maths, right there, a million bad sums rolled into one.

She was sitting up in bed, tears wet on her cheeks, sadness deep in her eyes, and I could only imagine what was in her heart. I reached for some tissues from the table, and she blew her nose, wiped her eyes.

"Fuck, it's hard, it's really hard."

"Yes, it is, it really is."

I knew enough about grief to know that you don't fuck about and pretend it doesn't happen, that it isn't there. It does, it is, and most times people want you to acknowledge that it's real, that it doesn't go away, and for God's sake, just stop pretending it's not there. It's fucking there, all right, and it's hard to get through. A damn sight fucking harder if people pretend it's just a phase, and look the other way.

I touched her shoulder and left my hand there as a gesture of solidarity. She took my hand in hers, and put it to her lips, softly.

"Thank you so much. Rosie said you were a kind man, and she's dead right. You're so kind."

"Hey, thanks. It's simple really, you just have to feel outside yourself. Other people are just as important."

I sensed that she wanted some closeness, just for me to be there, so I gently pulled her head to my shoulder, and cradled her hair in my hand. She rested her head there for a couple of minutes, her tissue clutched in her hand, her other hand just touching my neck.

"I can feel your pulse. It's so slow and steady, and so... peaceful. That's what your heartbeat is, steady and peaceful. Fuck, why can't more men be like you?"

"I dunno. All I know is how to be me. I don't have a clue how other men tick. Never did, probably never will."

Cathy seemed more peaceful.

"You OK, now?"

"Yes, I needed that. Thank you. Thanks for just being you, here for me."

She tucked herself down into the bed, her hand clutching the covers, small like a child. I bent down and gently kissed her on the forehead, just like my mother always did with me when I was a child, and stroked her hair. She reached to my hand and again, touched my fingertips to her lips. Then she reached up her hand and placed it around my neck, and pulled me down till my lips touched hers, a kiss.

"Goodnight, you lovely man, my kind man."

And her eyes were deep and serious, dark and intense, a steady gaze.

"I'll see you in the morning, yeah? Have a good sleep now, Cathy. Look, here's the cat."

"Yes, the cat with the lovely soft coat. Goodnight, A."

Goodnight Cathy, sad woman, brave woman.

In the morning I went through my usual routine of shave, shower, breakfast, and a quick cup of tea before I left for work. Since the kettle was boiled, I squeezed an extra tea bag into a cup for Cathy, who had one more day off work before the weekend. 

She could wake slowly, and warm herself inside before facing the day. She was still sleeping a lot, getting back her strength and her will. Being asleep was also her way of stopping the hurting thoughts.

"Good morning, Cathy, here's a cup of tea, a treat for a sleeping princess in a bed."

Not sure that tea is a drink for princesses, not the traditional one anyway, but the gentle smile in her eyes revealed that she didn't mind being charmed, just a little. What girl doesn't mind a bit of harmless attention?

"I've gotta go now before the traffic starts, I'll see you this evening, yeah?"

"Stay. Stay just a moment."

Her eyes were dark and intense, deep and serious, a steady gaze. She was a sleepy thing, her hair wild about her head and a wave over her pillow, a rich darkness. One thin hand was outside the covers, reaching tentatively for my hand. Cathy clearly wanted company, not wanting to be alone. Scared, most likely, at the thought of making her own way, on her own, for a while.

I was used to it by now, Rosie had come and gone several times from this house over the years.

I sat on the bed, and started to stroke her hair, like you would a sick child. I figured Cathy needed soothing, before she needed anything else. I was right, she wanted a presence in the room, with nothing special to say. It also showed how bone tired she really was, because five minutes later I crept out of the room as quietly as ever I could, because she had fallen back to sleep, my hand in her hair, soothing.

"Cat, be there when she wakes up again," and scratched his ears. 

A little chirrup was given in response, the cat's way of saying, of course, who do you think I am?

That evening Cathy was quiet, and we shared a simple meal, watched some crap on TV, and then went through our nightly ritual, separate rooms, separate beds, separate lives. Except I still found myself listening for the sounds of her. I had left my door a cat width open so he could come and go during the night - he's fickle, and will go where the bed is warmest.

Again, I heard the sound of Cathy getting herself ready for bed, this time her sequence was different. This time I heard her trickle of pee first, followed by the pull of her jeans over her thin legs. I heard a throw of denim on the bed. My cock shifted at the sound. She is standing there just in her panties and a tee shirt? Thin legs.

Then I heard the bathroom door close, and water running, and I imagined her brief panties under the black tee, cleaning her teeth, brushing her hair, stretching her skinny body as she reached her arms high to brush the longest sway of her hair. Or maybe she planted her feet wider for balance, and leaned forward, her hair dropping in front of her face, and brushing it that way, her hair a falling cascade. My cock was shifting along my thigh now.

The bathroom door opened, closed.

"Goodnight Alex, thanks again for everything." A soft voice, followed by her door closing. And then opening.

"Hello cat, what are you doing. Who do you want to go with tonight?"

Cat gives his little chirrup, talking back to her.

"OK, you little monster, come in with me then, you can burrow in under the covers like you did this morning." 

Her voice had a gentleness to it, communing with this little creature who would give his undivided attention to anyone who gave it back, but only when he chose to, and only on his terms.

Lucky cat, looks like he's been in Cathy's bed. Good for him. Good for her.

The house fell quiet, and my cock softened. I heard a stretch of bed covers faintly from the other room, and a little grate of the bed springs. She must have rolled to her side, her arm up around cat's softness, maybe. I smiled to myself, and it was somehow nice that there was a little gap in both our doors, just open a cat's head width, to allow him to be our communion in the night. Sleep well, Cathy.

Then I heard, like a tiny drift of a ghost in the night, I heard a slow, rhythmic shifting of cloth, of movement, of air, a slight shift of sound, and then I realised what it was, what that tiny ripple of sound must be. 

Her breath was faint through the space between us, but I could now clearly hear (the black night was so silent) the faint intake of Cathy's breath, rising with a catch at the end of each breath, each sigh a little quicker, and she was trying to be so quiet with each gasp of breath.

I imagined her long thin fingers running down the flesh of her sunken belly, she was so thin, and then sliding down between her legs, a gap between them, she was so thin, and into the slide between her lips. I wondered if her lips were smooth or fluted, a petal opening or a fine slit dividing, and for no reason at all I imagined a pair of dark petals, the colour of a bruise hiding the redness of her inner flesh.

Oh fuck, my cock has risen with the idea of her fingers gliding over her clitoris, assured of a result because they were her own fingers in her cunt knowing exactly what to do. But then I thought she is missing her man who would have known the rise and fall of his wife's flesh, even if he had failed to follow her mind and soul.

And then I thought, does she know that I am listening to the faintest sound of her rising pleasure, or was it just release, and does that excite her? Oh fuck, my cock has risen and my hand is upon it, and now I too am hushing my breath and suppressing my movement so that I too make no sound, but my own intake of breath must carry through the thin silence. Are her ears straining or doesn't she care?

In the still night surely she knows that both doors are open just a hand breadth and the sound of her silence carries just as the sound of mine must, and we have both used the cat as our reason. Of course it was the cat who could come and go, not our own desires. I'm sure we both knew that, of course we did.

With a small sigh, and a long exhalation of breath, the movement from Cathy's room stopped, and I imagined her fingers still between her legs, or perhaps cupping a long nipple in the palm of her hand. There was a pause of silence in the dark house, then with a final twist of my hand, I too finished what she had started, my come a silent spill on my belly.

The cat was with Cathy, so his coat was not so glossy, that night.

The next morning I was up at my usual time, a quick run down to the newsagent to get the Saturday paper, then back to the house. Cathy surprised me, getting up while I was gone, and was standing in the kitchen with a black silk gown wrapped around her thin shoulders and belted at the waist. She was so thin, standing there, her hand resting on the bench as if the act of standing was tiring.

"You've been inside all week, do you want get out this weekend, today maybe, go for a drive or something?"

She looked at me for a moment, me without a motive, but perhaps she was remembering a whisper in the house the night before and her own silence.

"Yes, I think that would be nice. Where were you thinking of going?"

"There's a road goes right down the west side of the city, about ten kilometres past the boundary, so it's in the bush. Then it loops south and crosses the river. On the way back we could stop at a gallery with a lovely cafe. It'd be a couple of hours and a bit. It's the right weather for it."

A slow drizzle, so the mountains and trees would be shiny with the wet, misty and spectral, and my red car would shine, glistening in the wet.

So we drove south, and crossed the border, left the chaos and disorder. No, wait, that was the soundtrack to this little road trip, Morrison's thickening rasp my constant companion, his Pamela not like mine at all, except that she too was an ethereal beauty. 

Strangely, Rosie had shown me a photo of a bunch of her colleagues at a works do. It was uncanny, but Cathy with her hair dropped about her face and a slump to her shoulders, in that photo, reminded me of Jim. Very strange that a thin woman with careless hair could look so like one of my all time favourite singers. Weird scenes indeed, but no gold there.

But clearing skies, and an opportunity to climb through a fence and sit in a paddock, looking down over the antennas of the tracking station, sheep and magpies in the field. We sat together on a rug pulled from the boot of the car, and Cathy lay her head on my shoulder, my hand in her long, thin fingers, cold fingers. 




Memory and Loss Pt. 03



I don't remember what we talked about, not much probably, just quietness together. No mention of the night before, some mention of her loss, and some idle curiosity from her about Rosie.

"You don't mind that she's overseas and meeting up with someone else?"

"Not really, he's been the someone else for a while now, and I've worked through it. Not sure I can really figure it out though."

Cathy looked at me with her pale blue eyes.

"She's fucking stupid to lose you, I'd have thought. You're a good man. I could do with a good man, mine turned out to be not so good."

She gripped my hand in hers, her cold hand. I touched her cheek, and her lips with my finger tip, but no more than that. Her cheek was cool, her lips hot. Oh fuck, here I go. Stop, now, she's coming out of a marriage, don't get in the way of that train wreck! But her lips are hot. Fuck.

"Look at that, the rain's coming up the hill towards us. We're going to get soaked. Come on, we gotta run."

So we ran for the car, laughing in the rain, both of us huddling under the rug thrown over our heads.

"Fuck it's cold, quick, let's get going so we can get the heater on."

The little gallery and its tea rooms were about half an hour away. As I drove I registered that Cathy had lightly placed her hand on my leg, not a word said. My red car is a manual, and the road windy and hills, and every time I shifted gear the light pressure of her hand came and went. But she didn't remove her hand from my thigh, just rested it there.

Cathy was a good artist, so the work on the walls of the gallery captured her attention. I love to watch someone come alive talking about and looking at things they love, things they are passionate about. Watching Cathy in that place, I could see a woman that many men could easily fall in love with, and there I was, falling in love just a little with this thin, heartbroken woman. 

Is that what Rosie meant, when she told me to be kind to myself, too?

Rosie knew me, and knew my kindness, and perhaps knew that Cathy might find a bit of it too. Fucking women, looking out for each other in their sisterhood. We men just don't know how that all works, which is to our disadvantage. I knew that I didn't know, at least.

That afternoon though, sitting at a small table, a plate of scones and jam, two hot coffees steaming, I learned something about myself that I had not known before. I learned why I got on well with women, and why I found it easy to talk to them.

"You know what it is about you that's different to other men? I've just realised what it is."

"No, haven't got a clue. I'm just me, being me. I never measure myself against other men. What's the point? Generally there's not much to measure against..."

"See the waitress, what do you think of her?"

"She's a pretty girl, with a lovely smile. I'd come to this tea shop again, just for her smile."

"Yes, you would." Her eyes darkened. "I don't blame you, I would too. 

"But you know what it is about you? Even though she's a pretty girl, and there's a sexy sway to her hips as she walks around, you don't notice that. Most men, my husband included, most men would be following her with their eyes even as they were talking to me.

"But you, you're here talking to me, and you're giving me your undivided attention. Your eyes aren't looking all over the room, they're not gazing at the pretty girl, they're not looking out the window. You're paying attention to me, giving me your undivided attention. Your gaze. It's just for me.

"And fuck, I love that. Men don't do that, not at all, you're the first man I've ever known to do it. You talk to me like a woman does. That's how women talk to each other."

So Cathy was the first woman to introduce me to the notion of "undivided attention". I was intrigued, but didn't think so much about it, not then. It was not until later, when some other women used exactly the same expression, that I realised that it was an unusual thing, in a man. Can't do anything about it though, because it's just me. 

Later, I found myself watching women talk to each other, out in public, in the cafe, on the bus. And I realised that women talk together so differently to how men talk. That was it - women talk together, while men talk apart. So that's why women are a mystery to men - we men just don't pay enough attention, usually.

But Cathy. It seems that I was paying her more attention than I had at first realised, just by being myself. Was that a slow seduction, explaining her hand on my thigh as I drove, or was it her seducing me? I'm easy to seduce, I think, if a woman wants to do it. It takes longer the other way around.

Driving home through the southern part of the city, away from the mountains, her hand remained on my thigh, passive but possessive. Cathy was claiming me for this little moment, and I didn't mind. I hadn't expected it, but said nothing, for fear that I did not know where she might go, for fear that she might not go there.

As we got nearer home, waves of cloud and rain gusted over the car, bands of weather in quick succession. The skies opened and threw water at the earth. Even on the short run to the front door, and a fumble with the lock, we are both drenched, laughing and shivering in the cold. And the house was cold, an icebox.

"Quick, get yourself under the shower to warm up, I'll get the heater going."

"What a great idea, I'm freezing."

"I'm not surprised, you've got no flesh on your bones."

Cathy pouted, and then laughed. "You're right, there's not much of me at the moment. I really need to put on some weight." And laughed again. "That's not something you'll hear often, from a woman!"

She went straight to the bathroom, and I heard the slide of her wet jeans onto the floor, before I turned to the lounge and fussed with the old oil heater, a fast heat, thank God. Then through to the kitchen to put the kettle on for a coffee. As I waited for the kettle to boil, I heard the shower turn off, and imagined Cathy drying her skinny body, her long hair wet.

"Alex, come and have your shower, I'll finish making the coffee."

She had come from the bathroom, wrapped in a big, thick towel, another on her head, a turban around her hair. Even in the thick towel wrapped around nearly twice, she was so thin. But she had a warm smile, so today had been good for her.

I went into the bathroom and ran the shower as hot as I could bear it on my skin, giving myself a good soak. As I always do when it's cold, I finished with a thirty second blast of cold water, to close the pores in my skin. Fuck that's a shock. I threw another thick towel around me, drying myself quickly, and then wrapped the towel around my waist. 

I banged open the door of the bathroom and took the three steps to my room, starting to unwrap the towel as I reached the door, so I could grab dry clothes.

"Fuck, you startled me," and I automatically said the dumbest thing, "what are you doing in my bed?"

Cathy saved me from my own stupidity.

"I'm so so cold, I just can't get warm. So what's better than another person? Nothing else though, it can't be anything else. Not now, not yet."

Astonished, I had dropped the towel from my waist when her presence startled me, so stood naked before her. Cathy was sitting up in bed, her towel still wrapped around her head, and her typical black tee covering her thin shoulders.

"Come on, I've got the coffee, we can snuggle up under the doona together."

I wasn't quite sure what was going on here, so I went for practicality.

"OK, didn't expect this. But yes, I'm always a warm body, and you're right, you're bloody freezing."

As I got to the bed she unwrapped the towel from her head, and snuggled down the bed, her back to me. I climbed in behind her, and wrapped my bigger, longer body around her. I could feel the knubs of her spine against my chest and belly, and her bony ass against my groin and the tops of my thighs.

"You're so warm against my back. God, that is nice. My own heater."

And, despite the idea of a semi-naked woman in my bed, I was able to wrap Cathy in my warmth and give her that simple human comfort, another body, without my prick gathering and getting in the way. It was as if my body, which normally would be in automatic and fully rigid by now, had actually paid attention to what was going on emotionally with this woman.

And we lay there, my warmth slowly working through to her frail bones, the ice slowly fading from her limbs, for maybe thirty, forty-five minutes. The coffees were forgotten about, and for a while it was just my warm chest and belly and thighs spooning her cold back and bum and legs, my arms around her neck and waist, her hands holding mine to the top of her chest. For a long while it wasn't sexual at all, just two people giving and finding comfort in each other.

Both of us were coming out of decaying relationships, she fast, me slow; and we both knew that this was just a tiny little healing moment, a comfort stop.

Cathy began to tell me of her man, and that was the strangest thing, wrapping this woman, this thin, wrecked woman in my arms while she spoke of another man. And then, and I sensed it from her movements before she did herself, she started to compare me to that other man, or to contrast me, or to remind herself what a man's body felt like.

Her fingers started an exploratory trail over my fingers. My hands were holding one of hers, palm to palm, palm to back, and the fingers of her free hand began to trail and circle, slowly, over the back of my hand. One finger tip lazily stroked down each one of my fingers, over each knuckle, as if sizing my hand and learning its span, learning the length of my fingers.

Then the fingers of her wandering hand moved to my forearm and traced her own patterns there, and it was slow. I remembered that Cathy was an artist, a painter, and it was as if her finger tips were drawing her memories onto my arm, remembering. And in so doing, drawing this memory onto my arm where it lingered and stayed, and is here today.

Buy yesterday, on that still, cold afternoon, two people in a bed slowly awoke. Her hand went from mine, and I could feel movement and a stretch of the cloth that was about her body and she must have been running her own hand over her own belly or breast, I could not tell.

And then her two hands went to the bottom of the tee, and pulled it shorter up her body, its cloth gathering, and she pulled it over her head and cast it to the floor, and her naked back, warm now, was against mine.

Cathy still lay facing away from me, her legs pulling up as if she was sitting sideways on a chair, and mine followed, so the backs of her thighs, her long thin thighs, were still warmed by the fronts of mine. She pushed her ass back into the cupped hollow of my groin, pushing back to find my heat, filling now but still soft.

She took one of my hands in hers, and placed it on her breast, my palm over a hard, tight nipple, and that's all there was, her breast was gone and I could feel the ribs of her chest. She held my palm on her hard nub, her palm pressing the back of my hand to keep the pressure hard, her fingers threading between mine.

"Oh fuck, press me hard there, remind me. My breast, it has forgotten."

She took my other hand and brought it up to her mouth, and made my fingers wander on her lips, and they were dry; and on her cheek, and it was wet; and down her neck, and it was long; and through her hair, and it was soft.

"I've forgotten gentleness. He wasn't gentle, not in the end."

She still lay facing away from me, my hands and fingers now on her skin and reminding her that a man can be gentle, doesn't always need to be hard. She kept her hand on mine against her breast, what tiny bit there was of it, and her other hand moved down her body. I could tell from the shift in her legs that her fingers were sliding between her thighs and without a word said, I knew she needed to go there by herself, to find herself again.

All I could do was hold hold her safe, a man's body at her back, just warmth and heat and strength. She trusted me, this broken woman, she trusted me to let her find herself. 

And I held her in my arms, my palm held firm to her breast, my fingers on the wetness of her cheek, as she slowly brought herself to a slow, solitary peak, her fingers slow and then faster in her centre, reminding herself of her own pleasure. Except I do not think it was pleasure, that sad day, it was release.

For as she came, her own finger sliding wet, she was weeping, weeping for her grief, her loss, her man she had left. This thin, frail woman came in my arms but she was alone, all alone in herself, and I cried for her too.

She lay still for five minutes, facing away from me still. Then she rolled towards me, and we each smoothed the wet tears from our cheeks, and she held my face in her two hands, her eyes searching and questioning, and I don't know what she saw, but I can remember what she said. 

"Ah, that moves me," the dark one said.

She kissed me, hard, her hand clutching the back of my head and pulling me onto her mouth.

My cock was hard against her belly, and she wriggled down to nestle her sex onto it, and I must have been an inch inside her when she pulled herself off me, and she pressed her body to mine, my cock to her belly.

"Oh fuck, sorry, I'm so sorry. I can't do that, I'm not on the pill, fuck, we've got no contraception. I can't take the risk. Fuck, I'm sorry, I shouldn't be here, in your bed."

"Cathy, Cathy, hey, it's OK. It doesn't matter. What's more important is you, right now. I mean, I can wait. Just come here, you're shattered, you don't know what you're thinking."

So I wrapped her in my arms once again, and held her tight, her hands one on my chest, one on my throat so she could feel the beat of my heart, and both of my hands wide and firm on her back. I could count all her ribs, but I could also touch the flesh between.

"You'll be all right, given time. But hey, right now what you need is sleep. So my shoulder, right, is to be your pillow, and my warm body is to be your bed. That's all you need, right now."

She trailed one last finger to my lips. I had convinced her, or she had just exhausted herself, that a man and a woman could actually give each other the comfort of strangers, and sometimes, that's all that is needed.

"Rosie said you were kind. But I don't think she'll ever know just how kind you really are." Her voice was quiet, just a whisper. "Fucking silly bitch, losing you..."

Cathy slept, and on the Sunday was subdued, and on the Monday, packed her bag and left for her new apartment, the keys finally available. When I got home from work, the spare keys were on the kitchen table, and there was a note:

Thanks so much for the care and attention, I don't know if I will ever be able to thank you. Thanks, kind man. Look in the bottom of the wardrobe, in my room.

And she had left me a drawing of the cat, curled asleep on the bed, her bed. She had even drawn the pattern on the quilt, so I knew it was cat, on her bed. 

It's a shame, but when I finally left Rosie, she kept the drawing of cat and destroyed it, as a punishment, I think. Even though she was the one who betrayed me, I was the one who finally left, so I was the one who lost those bits and pieces.

So that was Cathy, except it wasn't, not quite.

Later that week, and of course, it was on a Thursday - Cathy arrived on a Thursday night and her final gift was that Thursday night - so she became my woman on a Thursday night.

It was dark, and I was settling down after a take-away dinner to watch more crap on TV, when there was a knock on the door. I wasn't expecting anyone and I answered the door to no-one I expected.

Cathy came in, dark and intense, dressed all in black.

"I wanted to see you, one last time. I won't see you again, it's too complicated, and you've been too kind to me. But it wasn't fair, what happened on Saturday. So I've come to make amends."

Frankly she was a whirlwind, and I had no idea what she was talking about. But clearly, she did. 

Without much preamble, "thanks, I'm OK for food, I ate before I came here, but yes, a glass of wine would be nice," she dropped her coat from her shoulders. She coiled her long hair back in a twist around her neck and down over her breast, her flat breast, and she came to me, placed her hands on my back, and pulled me to her.

"Just kiss me, before your kindness kills me."

And I was taken by the surge of her passion, this thin woman dressed all in black with the palest blue eyes, she took my face in her hands and kissed me hotly, her hands in my hair, pulling my head to hers.

"Jesus, fuck, I don't know what I'm doing here. Come on, get to bed, I need to feel your skin against mine. Fuck, this is twisted. I've just left my husband, for God's sake, I don't need another man, not yet."

But she wasn't listening to herself, as she took my hand and led me to the bedroom. Once there, she pulled at the buttons of my shirt and peeled it from my back, and her lips and teeth and tongue sucked tight on my nipples. A small bite, and I gasped at the sharpness of it. 

Cathy twisted from my arms and lifted the black tee from her body. Her torso was thin, ribs showing, and there was only the slightest shadow of flesh on her chest. No breasts at all, but her nipples weren't those of a boy, fuck no, they were long and eraser hard, thick dark nubs like the end of a little finger, sticking half an inch clear of her skin.

She gripped my head and pulled my mouth to those tight, rigid nipples, a rich dark brown colour. I flickered the long tightness of them with my tongue, nipping them in return.

"Yes, fuck, suck on them hard, eat my tits into your mouth."

I dropped to my knees before her, my head tilted high so I could suckle those tits, and she swayed before me, bending her back to keep her tiny mounds in my mouth. Her hands caressed my hair, holding me there. I looked up, and her eyes were closed in the sudden onslaught, her tongue licking her lips, flickering like the snake in the garden.

There was a fury in her, and her fingers snapped to the button and zip of her jeans.

"Pull them down, get my clothes off me. I need to be naked for you."

I pulled the dark denim down, her foot lifted to help, then the other, and she stood before me, her thin legs planted a foot apart, the thin cotton of her panties hiding a dark triangle of hair.

"Whoa, Cathy, slow down, it's OK, it's OK."

It wasn't, because she was clearly driven and tormented, like a wild woman. I had to sooth something in this wildness, before it wrecked her. So I just held my cheek against her panting belly, and cradled the thin flesh of her ass in my hands, and started to stroke her skin gently, like you would a scared bird fallen from a tree.

And slowly, I calmed her, my hands caressing up and down her body in long, slow sweeps, my fingers gentle on her skin. I carefully peeled the tiny cotton panties down, and caressed my cheek to the darkness of her hair. I kissed her belly all over, my lips circling her navel, and slowly I trailed my tongue down the centre of her belly to the top of her pubic patch.

Gently now, her hands holding my head and this time steering me rather than trapping me, she let me turn and place her on the bed. I put my fingers to her lips, sshhh, be still, and then ran my mouth down her long neck, over each peaked nipple in turn, and then down to her sex.

Before I opened her thin thighs, I stood back and peeled the jeans from my own legs. In the half light I could see her half closed eyes watching me, and when I stood tall above her, her thin, long body spread before me, I saw her eyes drop down to my crotch, and then back to my face. My prick was high and proud against my gut, and her eyes widened at the sight of it.




Memory and Loss Pt. 03



"Fuck, that's nice. You're bigger than he is," she whispered, more to herself, I thought, perhaps to show him she could still get cock, that she was still a woman, but not his woman, and another man could be bigger than he was. 

"Ah, that moves me," the dark girl whispered. "Fuck, that's nice."

I leaned over her, and covered her body with mine, my cock a long heat against her belly. She wrapped her thighs to my waist, trapping me there, and again we kissed. She was slower now, the fury calming, and I could caress her thin bones, her ribbed skin. I ran my fingers down her long neck, and she arched her back up to let me hold her narrow sides, my hands a firm stretch down her skin.

I continued lower, gently widening her legs apart, and gazed on that clefted place before I placed my mouth between her legs, my open mouth a hot heat at her core. I sucked her sex into my mouth as hard as I could, so that the heat of me was upon her.

"Ah fuck, your mouth is so hot, so hot."

Her cunt was wet, so wet, and the taste of her was ever so slightly salty, like the salt of the tears on her cheeks the weekend before. I knelt on the bed before her open legs, and spread them apart in worship, the sacrament and gift of her core before me. I tunnelled my tongue inside her,and suckled first one lip into my mouth and heat, and then the other.

With the fingers of one hand I opened up her red centre and spread the lips apart, so that my tongue had a clear run up to her clit, and I sucked that rising nub into my mouth, and swirled it with my tongue.

With the fingers of my other hand I reached up her thinness until they found the long bud of nipple, and teased and pulled there, and it was a heat between my finger and my thumb.

"Eat me, eat me, eat me, God yes, lick me," her whisper was a supplication, and a thanks.

With one long slide of my tongue I licked from the musky tang of her asshole right up between the slick lips of her sex, and swirled my tongue once again over her clit. Now she started to push down on her belly with her hand, as if she were centering all of her blood at this clefted heart, this wide open cunt, this well of sweetness, the depths of her opening before me.

Cathy's legs were spread wide for me now, and I slowly brought her up to her peak, my hands and tongue and lips and heat all a long caress of her body. Whereas on the weekend in the cold room, her fingers between her legs had been a release, now my tongue and lips between her legs were rising up the pleasure in her. This time it was a woman sighing and keening up to the height of her ecstasy, and this time I wanted to bring her that pleasure.

For that would be my second reward. My first reward, of course, was Cathy returning to my house, to be with me. And for me to be her man, if just this once. Her payment for my kindness, even though no debt was due.

She came, gasping and her legs wrapping my head to her sex, trapping me there, my tongue a last full lick and then a probe into the heat of her cunt. I could feel her body shuddering with the aftershock of her orgasm, three surging spasms as the nerves in her clitoris let go of their tension, their peak. Her legs relaxed, and I moved up to lie on top of her frail body, the heat of her nipples penetrating my skin.

"Ah, fuck, that was wonderful. More?" It was a question, but I'm not sure if she was asking for herself, or for me.

I rolled beside her, and shifted us both up the bed and under the covers, and I wanted to take this lovely woman, this lovely thin thing into my arms, and wrap my heat around her. Cathy was always cold, she had no flesh on her bones, really, and needed to soak in my heat. We lay facing each other, the long heat of my shaft against her belly, her ribs and backbone bumps against my hands. But her skin was smooth and soft.

"Promise me you'll start eating properly," I said, touching my fingers to her lips.

"I promise, I'll be good. I'll try, anyway. But A, you've been good, these last few weeks, you've helped."

Cathy pushed me onto my back, and wrapped a blanket around herself, and straddled my thighs, kneeling above me. And for the next ten minutes, maybe twelve, she never took her eyes off mine. She never looked away, and I always looked back, as she gave me her undivided attention.

She reached for her bag on the table by the bed, and peeled the silver rip off a condom packet, and carefully, slowly, rolled the sheath down my shaft.

"There, we're safe now. No little sprogs from this lovely fuck."

My hands were slow over her body as she kneeled above me, as she slowly lowered herself onto my shaft. Oh fuck, she was wet and tight, her cunt a grip on my cock. 

She leaned forward, her tongue to my mouth, and her eyes never closed. She held my gaze, and commanded me to hold hers. We fell into each other's souls, my dark blue eyes, her pale blue eyes.

Wrapped in her blanket, which fell like a cloak from her shoulders, Cathy was slow and deliberate in her movements. She sat impaled on me, her hands now resting on my chest and idly playing with my nipples, which tightened under her fingers. Her thin body was high above mine, the two throbs of her nipples thick, brown and hard. 

I caressed them with the palms of my hands and they were points of heat. She gasped as I rolled those two nubs between my fingers, and the dark of her eyes grew darker.

Cathy's hips began a slow, steady rise, her grip easing up my shaft and tightening down, and she began a slow, steady fuck of my cock. My hands wandered up and down her sides, down her thighs, a single finger marking a line along the line of her muscle, and a shiver of flesh. I caressed the hollow flesh of her belly, and the thin line of her ribs.

There was a fascination with the skinny body of this woman, I had always known curves or slender limbs, and Cathy's thinness held a strange fascination. She had no breasts, yet her nipples were undeniably those of a woman, not a boy. Her waist was narrow, and the jut of her hips severe. Hers was a strange sexiness for me, not the type of girl I would follow with my eyes in the street. But clenched above me, her throat arching back with her own pleasure, I learned a new body.

Her fingers slowly centred on her clit, and as she rode me, enclosing my heat with the clench of her cunt, a blush started to rise on her chest, and the dark of her eyes became darker. Her breath paced faster, and her orgasm was rising, rising.

She tightened the grip of her cunt on my cock, and the cream started to coil and rise in me, and her eyes must have seen an intensity in my eyes, for her gaze gripped mine.

"Come with me, come together, ohh, oh fuck, yes, sweet boy, come with me now."

And we did, Cathy and I, we shuddered together into a moment of bliss, where for a small moment the whole world rotated around that bed in that room, and we came together. 

She fell forward into my arms, the long sweep of her hair around my face, and her hands caressing my cheeks, stroking my hair. And for a moment, I was adored by her and I loved her then, Cathy whose heart had been broken by another man, and who found a little kindness from me.

"I never guessed you would be so kind."

She kissed the fingers of my hands, and held them in front of her, together like a prayer.

"Your hands," she said, "your constant hands on my skin. You played my body, you played my body like a violin."

She kissed the fingers of those hands, and touched them to her face.

That was Cathy, the woman who arrived on a Thursday and who left on a Thursday, and who bestowed upon me the greatest compliment I have ever received.

"Your hands, your constant hands on my skin. You played my body, you played my body like a violin."



Memory and Loss Pt. 04



What's the triggering event for a set of circumstances that mathematically and rationally should never have taken place? But did take place. To describe a set of circumstances that did take place, mysteriously, mystically, magically, not just for one person but for two - where do I start?

At the beginning, is the logical place. But when was that? Nine years before, when something else ended? Three or four or five years later when some unknown, intermediate, causal event must have taken place? 

A strict, linear sequence of events must have been underway, to end up in a culminating event - a logical person might assume that? But how to know that event?

And if one tiny thing changed along the way, then it's pretty likely that the path of our times would have been different, and "never" would have been the outcome.

Rosie's parents dying within a year of each other, then she discovers they were never married, and she has a half sister twice her age? That's gotta be unpredictable, yeah? Or my dad, too young, dead on a beach? Fuck that, didn't see that one coming. Oh no. 

Rosie. Cathy. The other women who curved into and out of my life during those years. Any one of them could have said something different, and I could have said "yes" or "no" in a different order, and there's a life changing event, right there.

How the fuck did all of those people know what to do or say, at the exact time they did it or said it? I for one have no fucking idea. But they did, sure as day follows night. Or in my case, sure as night follows day.

I hope you get what I mean. I hope so. 

Where in time do I start to describe the nonsensical sequence of events that got us, her and me, to that nondescript suburban shopping square, at that particular time of day, and no other time would do. I don't remember the precise time of day, late morning, probably. 

But it has to far more precise than that, because I've already done some maths elsewhere that shows we only had a twenty or thirty second window of time to be where we were, on that day, in that place, for the defining event to actually "happen". So let's say, for the purposes of this narrative, that she and I had to be on the opposite sides of that shopping precinct at, I dunno, let's call it 11.23 on a Saturday morning in May, 19something. A while ago, now, but only yesterday.

--- ooo OOO ooo ---

Back then, all my yesterdays began tomorrow.

Tomorrow was Saturday. Rosie had been driven to the airport a month or so before, Cathy had come and gone in the meantime. I never saw her again, which is sad, and I wonder if she eventually ate properly. 

I never did learn to play a musical instrument, but it seems I didn't need to. Nowadays I prefer the cello, it is deeper and richer than a violin, a more sophisticated instrument but harder to play. It needs practice. But you know what they say... I'm still taking lessons.

Work was a steady beat during that time, and I had a job where I had some proper responsibility, and actually made a difference. It gave me stability, some good colleagues and a routine. Given that the emotional side of my life at that time was all over the place (death, Rosie, Cathy, all too complicated, really), routine was a handy way of passing the time. Numbing the time.

But that night, winds shifted and weirdness started. Must have. It was the next morning, that Saturday morning in May, that I can truly say, something happened that day. So let's start there. It's a point in time that I can reliably say, it happened this way, from here on in.

It will do, then, as a start.

That morning was a clear and sunny day. Autumn was advancing, nights were getting colder, leaves were turning, falling, gutters running with showers of rain. Weather forecaster stuff - there will be showers clearing by late afternoon, that kind of thing.

This day wasn't like that, though. On face value, just another Saturday in May. A clear and sunny day. Waking up was the same, feeding the cat and myself was the same. Even looking out the kitchen window and wondering if I would ever see a glimpse of my neighbour again, through her bedroom window, like that late night when I needed a glass of water before bed, but didn't turn the light on. Even that was the same.

My kitchen window was on the side of my house, on the high side of the hill, and looked out and over the fence between the houses. Her bedroom window looked the other way, looking onto the fence. Walking into the kitchen late one night, my eye caught a movement, and it was enough to stop my hand on the light switch. Her curtains were open, and there was a low light in a small room, illuminating the naked legs and the bending body of my neighbour.

A solitary woman, she was alone like me, and I watched the flickers of movement as she undressed and wrapped a robe around her body, unclear given the distance between the houses, unclear in the low light, and her movements were quick and efficient. But sufficient to keep me there, back in the dark, for five minutes.

Thoughts of her aside, that Saturday morning in May started like any other day. And progressed like any other day. Until it didn't. Somewhere a switch was thrown, and the day was different.

I decided to take a long walk to some distant shops, a bigger suburban shopping centre some two or three kilometres away. Why did I do that? 

Hindsight explains everything, but foresight, nothing at all. I'd not done this before, the idea had never entered my head. The local shops, a ten minute walk down the road, they would always do. 

Why did I need to go further, so much further (and then, not far enough)? It's simple, really. If I hadn't set out on that walk, it would always have been "never". I had no need to take this walk, and had never before taken it. But I did, I set out on a long, first time ever, walk. Strange. At the time, though, it was just a long walk to get some exercise, to exchange some boredom with another place. To pass the time.

I walked out the front door and locked it behind me, at a precise moment in time. It must have been a precise moment, because there was a precise period of time, a certain number of steps that had to be taken, to get me to that place on time. Don't have a clue what time it was though, because I never wear a watch on weekends, because time doesn't matter.

But that day, it did. Even seconds mattered, that day. Or it would have been "never". I couldn't bear that, not now, not since.

I'd driven this route many times before - there were cafes, a wide range of shops, including a bookshop. I was probably heading for the bookshop, if I had a particular destination in mind. 

It was a pleasant enough walk through wide streets in suburbia, planned streets every one, every house the same age. Nothing spectacular, nothing scenic. So sight-seeing wasn't a motive for this walk. Truth be told, at this point in the walk, there was no point to the walk.

Down the hill, along a long flat stretch, turn left then right, and I'm twenty minutes from home, and not sure how long before I arrive. That in itself is part of the oddity of this whole convergence. I'd never walked it before, so didn't know how long it would take to walk there, to my destination.

I didn't yet know, but I was getting closer to the time of the coincidence, the 11.23 point. And I suppose, by this time, she must have been rounding up her mum to get in the car, to drive there herself, find a parking spot, drive round the car park twice, who knows. Well, I don't know, but she knows what she did. I never asked her, though.

Coming to the main north-south arterial road, three lanes each way with a wide median strip, trees planted in twin rows down the centre. An avenue, like the one my university college room looked over, but this one for cars, not people.

Quick, let's run the intersection, there's a gap in the traffic. If I can beat the lights, I'll save a couple of minutes waiting for the next change. I don't know it, but waiting time, lost time, means "never".

I've had plenty of time to think into all of this. If you're still with me as a reader (indulging me, well and truly by this stage, because this chapter, so far, and even most of the last one, have been frisson free zones, I have to agree), but if you're still with me, maybe I can stop labouring the point that time, and the passing of time, is the key concept here. 

Imagine yourself, setting out on a two or three kilometre walk that you've not done before, and consider all of the things that might affect how long it takes you to get from your door to your unknown destination. I was walking towards the broad concept of a "shopping centre" and had no real idea that the little square even existed. 

So, imagine yourself walking towards somewhere you don't even know is there - what is the likelihood you'll get there at the beginning of a key fifteen second period of time? You've got it, zero chance. It isn't going to happen. It's just impossible, isn't it?

So, picture me on the other side of the main drag, and five minutes away from the shopping centre. At this point, anything could still happen. Another set of lights. A kid falling off a bike who needs help. An old lady who needs an arm to cross the road. Any fucking thing at all. But none of these things happened, so I kept walking at my steady pace, wondering by this stage where the first cafe might be. Hey, I've just walked two k - a coffee and the Saturday paper is looking good, right now.

I crossed a final road and there on my left was a row of shops, a sports store, an automotive accessories store on the corner, nothing to interest me. I spotted a little walkway through to the centre of the main plaza, and remembered that the inner precinct was a series of connected together squares, open spaces, each surrounded by four or five shops on each side of the open space.

The designer had won some town planning award, I think, and it was a very pleasant, traffic-free pedestrian thoroughfare. Quite a number of people strolling about, converging together in front of me, walking slowly, getting in my way. No hurry though, because I'm not going anywhere in particular, just the vague idea of an opportunistic cafe, hopefully. I slow down to a more casual stroll, and there are people here, so I fall back to my standard "let's watch some people" mode.

And then, and I do recall thinking it strange when it happened, there was a sudden clearing of people in front of me. Perhaps I sped up just a bit to get around that couple with the little girl swinging between them, or maybe that old guy with the walking stick moved aside to drop some rubbish in a bin. I don't know.

But I had a clear view maybe twenty metres across the square, maybe fifteen, and could see, coming towards me, two women. One was an older woman, in her fifties perhaps, long greying hair, dark skin, thick around the middle. Her neck was wrapped with a bright scarf, and she carried a fair sized bag at her side.

The other woman was younger, my age, slender, short dark hair. She walked towards me, her slim legs in tight black jeans. Fuck, the sway of those hips is damn sexy, familiar. My eyes are quickly travelling up and down her slim body, taking her all in. These two are walking towards me.

Familiar. She is wearing a plain shirt under a jacket, wrapped against the cold, collar turned up. Her hair is cut short, with a trendy, spiked cut surrounding her dark eyes. On her feet a pair of flat soled leather boots. She has dressed comfortably, practically, familiar. Do I know this woman? Still walking straight towards her, my eyes travel up legs to the sway of her crotch half hidden by her jacket. Something about the cut of her jeans tight around her hips, that gap between her thighs, right at the top of them. So familiar.

Five metres apart now and close enough to register the beauty of her face and those dark eyes, dark in black kohl, and those eyes are familiar. And then she catches my look, and I spot a quick grip of her hand on her mother's arm, for clearly these two are mother and daughter, out shopping.

And she smiles at me. Oh fuck, she smiles at me, the most beautiful smile in the world. And it's for me. I quickly turn my head and glance behind me, to make sure that the smile really is for me, and not for someone else and I've misjudged the direction of her glance. I turn back to her, and it is for me, it really is the most beautiful smile in the world and it really is for me. And my legs are automatically slowing, stopping.

And the seconds have converged and every event in the last nine years has locked into place, locked onto this moment, this precise moment in a small suburban shopping centre in a medium sized city in a big southern nation. Every thing I had ever said and done and not said and not done, ravelled and unravelled, every strange and nonsensical thing, every ordinary and stupid thing that had ever happened in a nine year period. Everything had funnelled down this fantastic gyre to this single moment in time, to this place, this gimbal.

At that precise moment in time, for a fraction of a second, my world stopped turning, that immense rotational rush through space, that silent spin around the sun, it stopped. The physicists are right, the theory is solid, the concept of a singularity into which everything pours and out of which everything spills is true. Because in that tiny fraction of a second my world stopped and then re-started, like a heartbeat.

Her smile, the most beautiful smile in the world, and it was for me.

"Clio?"

"Alex, it is you. I thought it was. I recognised the bounce in your walk, through all those people."

Our hands automatically grasped each other's.

"God, how long's it been? You stayed."

"Yes, I stayed here. I'm teaching now. Mum, this is Alex, we were at Uni together."

I greeted her mother, who stood gazing at her dark haired daughter smiling at this lanky blond man, radiant smiles both, and any mother would surely have seen a connection threading down those long years.

"We can't stop, we've got to get some things before Mum goes back home. She's been here this first week of the hols, and goes back tomorrow, so we're in a bit of a rush. Call me during the week, if you like. We're in the book. I'm married now."

And Clio told me her new surname, and the suburb she lived in, ten minutes down the road.

"The phone number's under N and C. We can do a Chinese or something, I'd love to catch up."

I was still getting over seeing Clio after all these years, and even in that two minutes, was thinking, what the fuck, how on earth did this timing happen?

"Call me. Come on, Mum."

"Lovely to meet you, Mrs P."

"You too, Alex, you have a good rest of the day now." 

Her eyes were deep and dark, a wisdom there, this was a woman who had lived a life. I remembered Clio saying she was half Italian. Must have been her father, then, because this woman didn't look Italian, even with her dark skin.

Have a good rest of the day! Bloody hell, I needed to find a cafe fast, to sit down and process what had just happened. My head was spinning. How the fuck did this just happen? 

I watched Clio and her mum finish their interrupted walk across the square. As she walked away, Clio raised two fingers horizontally from the hand by her thigh, not looking back but knowing that I would be watching. Just two fingers in a little wave, discrete and just for me. She had always done that when we were together, that short time, way back when. She always walked away and tagged her exit, just like that. Two fingers a horizontal flicker because she always knew I'd be looking. She knew me. Familiar.

My God, so familiar. I was stunned by what had just happened, even then knowing some deep strangeness had gone on. I had walked for the first time ever to this place, just so I could see Clio again? I did not, and could never have, expected that. Shit, I hadn't even known she'd stayed in this city. Like me, from a small town, this city was big enough.

But Clio married, fuck, wow. Far out, this was spinning my head. Jesus, strange shit going down, that's for sure. But how had I known to walk this walk, that's the bit that was freaking me out the most.

And Clio's smile. Fuck, she's beautiful. That smile. Damn.

I rang her on the Monday evening.

"Sorry, Clio's out tonight, doing something for school."

"When's a good time to catch her, do you think?"

"Try this time tomorrow, should be good. Who shall I say called?"

He wasn't her husband, but seemed to know what she was doing. Who was he?

I called again the next night, and this time she was in.

"Come and pick me up, we'll go somewhere for dinner, just you and me."

I drove to her house, no more than fifteen minutes away. Nine years has gone by and she's fifteen minutes away. That's not right, not fair. Fuck. Time is running strange, now. When I get there she invited me in, and I met the guy who answered the phone the night before. Clio was a bit awkward, and wanted to go quickly, get out of the house. It was as if she didn't want to explain who I was, or hadn't had time to think about it.

In my car, she explained that he was a friend of N's, staying with them and paying board. Her husband was down the coast, doing some work there for the next couple of weeks. She did not tell me much at all about him, indeed I can recall only his name. I don't think she ever told me what he did.

But Clio didn't want to talk about her marriage, she wanted to find out what I was doing with my life. We ended up at a new Vietnamese restaurant in the main city centre, upstairs in one of the old buildings, columns of white colonnades facing the street. We caught up with each other's lives, quick snap shots of passing lives. But it wasn't so much about our passing lives that we wanted to know, but our past life.

She told me about Peter, back when she was at school, the haunting that was always between us.

"Now that I'm a teacher, I realise that he should have known better. He was my teacher, he should have said no." 

Clio looked at me with her huge dark eyes, her mouth serious.

"I was too young, we were both so young back then." 

She reached across the table and took my hand. 

"I'm so sorry for what I did. When I got out of that small town, it was too much freedom for me. I went mad. There was too much dope, and I couldn't say no to it."

She clutched my hand, hard.

"When you opened my door, that day, God, that was dreadful. I hated myself, and then I hated you. It was awful."

I didn't know what to say. Clio was apologising, and then she turned in on herself, as if remembering was hard. I think I had worked through what happened that day, but the loss of her was a sad thing. Yet here she was again.

"Come on, let's go for a walk around Civic, like we used to do."

Like we used to do. Yes, we would often walk this part of town, walking Clio back to her self catering residence, and then my long walk back up the avenue. Sometimes just walking. After the first few weeks, always holding hands, running in the rain.

"Shit, look at that, it's raining and the car's on the other side of the bloody car park. Let's stay here for a while, where it's dry."

Clio was slight and slender beside me, and just like we used to do, her hand found mine and was small and warm. She looked up at me with her darkest eyes, and her beautiful smile, oh God, her beautiful smile at that moment was just for me.

"Did I ever tell you that your smile is the most beautiful in the world?"

Clio gazed at me. "No, I don't think you ever did. Perhaps you should have."

And her smile was sad, and soft. "Is it, really?"

"For me, oh yes. Even after you were gone, your smile never left me. I loved you, Clio, if only for that short month, I really did."




Memory and Loss Pt. 04



"I think I knew that, and it scared me. It scares me still."

She reached her warm hand to my face, and around my neck, and pulled my head down to her lips. Her lips were warm, soft, and her eyes were closed. Clio. A car drove past, tyres rushing in the wet, and its horn sounded twice, the driver seeing us. Clio laughed, and flipped two fingers up after the car. And grabbed my hair and kissed me again.

Then pushed me away and started walking, her hand trailing out behind her, for me to catch up.

"You'd better take me home, I think. Can you cook?" She walked purposefully. "I'll come over to yours tomorrow. What time are you home from work? I'll buy some stuff, and we can cook."

The next day, Wednesday, was cold and raining. I had the old oil heater running and it was an orange flame tinged with blue, the flames flickering like Lucifer's wings as he fell from heaven, and Clio was following after, tumbling down, a fallen angel.

I heard a car door slam outside and could see the trace of red tail-lights on the glistening road, the white Taxi sign illuminated on the roof. Opening the door so she would not wait in the rain, I was rewarded by the slender wrapped bundle of Clio in a sensible warm coat, her spiked black hair beaded with raindrops caught in the run from the taxi, and her arms around me.

"Alex, I don't know what I'm doing here."

"You're here because you want to be, surely? Plus, you're hungry because we haven't eaten yet. We haven't cooked yet."

"You're right. If I do one thing at a time then that will be the right thing, and I can stop thinking about it all. I need to stop thinking."

Like me then, the whole idea of nine years channeling down to this moment, that was doing her head in as well. But I knew this could not last, she was married now. There was somebody else. Seems, in my life, there is always somebody else.

"Clio, maybe we should just be now, you and me, just now."

"You're right, it will probably break my heart, but you're right."

Two broken hearts, then, but mine was healing. This was a tiny second chance, even if her heart was breaking still.

The early part of the evening was spent domestically. We managed to coordinate ourselves in the small kitchen, chopping vegetables, cooking spaghetti, cooking up the mince, a glass of wine each for the cooks, and then a wait while it all came together.

We went to the lounge and set a small table, and there was a stub of a candle left from another time. Clio met cat, who coiled around her feet and nuzzled his nose to the smell of the leather boots, his tail erect. 

"Look at his eyes, he's got the most intense look."

Cat inspects her, and no doubt makes his mind up about her, but doesn't say a word. I'm sitting in a chair pulled near to the fire, and she is close by in her chair, and cat drapes himself around my neck. When I stand, cat is still around my neck and he drapes himself there. Clio's not seen a cat do that before, and is amazed.

I too am amazed, because Clio is here, with me.

We ate and we talked, but now I have no recollection of what we talked about. We must have filled in edited highlights of our finishing years at university and our beginning careers. I would have told her of the death of my father less than six months before, and tears would have been in my eyes, and they still are, and she would have held my head to her shoulder and held me gently. Women do that, they are kind, so beyond doubt, she would have done that.

Perhaps it started from there, from my most immediate grief, and perhaps that made it easier for her to make amends for that shut door so long ago, my first grief.

"Your bedroom door is open. Come with me and I'll take you through it."

And Clio took my hand and led me through the bedroom door, not looking back at me but with her hand stretched back, and my hand was stretched forward and our fingers felt the pull of our different speeds. Our different needs. Cat curled in the chair she had left, and watched us go.

Clio turned to me and was efficient. Her fingers were fast on the buttons of my shirt, and I equally so on pulling down my jeans to stand naked before her. She quickly flicked the piled covers down on the bed.

"Get in. It's cold. Don't look, I'm shy, don't look."

"Clio, the only time I ever saw you all undressed was that morning in my room, of course I'm going to look."

"Yes, I remember that, of course I do. I had my period, and you didn't mind." She touched her hand to mine on the covers. "OK, but I'll turn my back then. I can't see you watching me when I undress."

This woman was a mass of contradiction. She had determined, clearly she had, that she wanted something to happen with me, with this second amazing time that was beyond logic. She was here of her own accord, her own free will. She was seducing me, to be seduced herself. And at the same time she was innocent and young, still shy.

Don't look at me undress? This drifting, gossamer woman, she has to be kidding? Her being here is like a giant tree losing all of its leaves in a thunderous storm, and me being able to catch the single leaf that falls from the highest part of the tree, before it reaches the ground. I have to see every moment, every second, or none of it will be real.

She turns away and pulls the jumper over her head and there is one of her typical black tees, still being worn all these years later, clinging tight to her slim body. She grips the bottom of the cloth and twists it over her head, placing it over the back of the chair. Her naked back is dark skinned, slender, the ripple of her ribs shadowed ridges to her spine. She is not wearing a bra, and I know she still has the tight firm breasts she had as an eighteen year old.

She undoes the belt of her jeans, and then bends to remove her boots and socks. Still facing away from me she peels her jeans down her legs, each leg lifting slowly as she shucks the tight denim from her limbs. She is shaking. She straightens, and is still facing away from me. She wears a pair of dark panties, a simple pattern of lace around the waist. They are simple and unadorned.

"Don't look."

She knows I will not answer, for if I do it will be a lie. She bends her body and peels the small slide of cloth down her legs, revealing the pale curves of her ass. There is a clear bikini line, she goes so dark in the sun. Clio turns towards me, and at the same time takes the first of three steps towards the bed, towards me. I see her intense dark eyes, black, gazing at me, willing me not to look.

But I cannot not look. As she takes the second step towards me I see those breasts as I remember them, perhaps a little fuller, she is twenty-seven now, a woman, no longer a girl. Her nipples are tight, dark nubs pulling high on the conical shape of her breasts. There is no bounce.

As Clio takes her third and last step to the bed I see the dark triangle of hair at the base of her belly, and then she is pulling the covers over her body as she falls into my arms, her face hiding into my neck, one hand straight to the back of my head, holding me there. 

Her other hand is on my cheek, just holding me softly. Under the covers her legs wrap around mine, and my cock is hard against her belly. She is a hot creature, burrowing into my skin, into my soul.

We lie together, silent, wrapping each other as tight as we possibly can. We are clinging on for dear life, and we must both be making up for all those years of lost time, and banking it for the next time. 

We are a tragedy from the beginning, for she is married and I am not. 

Clio chose, or was chosen, and he is not me. So we cling, this bed a life raft in a spin of time. The world keeps turning, but for this moment, just for us, our time stops and we are timeless.

Slowly, we relax into each other and soften, and enjoy each other's warmth. We are like two animals curled around each other, and then we start to talk, to whisper. Time has gone, and I don't know what we talked about, but I think it must have been a step by step re-tell, each from the other's point of view, of that intense, dope-fuelled six weeks those nine years ago.

We were children then, adults now, but still full of wonder for each other. And slowly, as if our bodies were waiting for our minds to catch up, our bodies began to respond to each other. Here in my bed was a delectable, slender woman with the body of her eighteen year old self, but now Clio knew her body so much better. I too had learned to play a woman's body, like a violin.

"Remember that day, you told me you'd never had an orgasm?" I'm curious, does she know where her pleasure is, nowadays?

"I do, but I don't always come, even now."

I wonder if I know how to bring that joy for her. She'll decide, I think. It's a treasured moment then, her coming. I hope she'll come with me.

Our bodies take us past thoughts now, and our hands are a wonder of discovery, for we only shared our skin once completely, back then. Now, we have time, and this night there is no hurry. It is only mid evening, and we are alone, so we have some hours to stretch ahead, just as the years stretch impossibly behind us. Nine years is forgotten, and nine minutes is vital, now. And the next nine.

We are so slow and gentle and quiet with each other. There is no rage to cool our passion, and she seeks a quiet penance for the heartbreak that was behind that door. I accept her gift, with all my heart, for she was always my gift. Our hands drift over our skin, and we take turns in delighting the other.

First she kisses my neck and her mouth twists to my ear, and her soft sigh enthralled me. Her fingers run through my hair and my lips kiss the softness of her lashes, and they flutter like a moth, soft wings dusting pollen. Her lips are full and I suck them into my mouth, my teeth a gentle bite on her full bottom lip. Our tongues tangle, and it is all so slow and delicious.

My palm is upon the soft rise of her breast, and her nipple is hard, and fills further between my lips, and Clio arches her breast to my mouth. My finger traces circles on her belly and she shivers, a thrill racing through her body as I touch just the right place near her hip.

It is cold, so we keep the covers over us and wrapped warm, so our finger tips act as our eyes. I cannot see her slight beauty curled on the bed, so my fingers learn braille upon her skin. I learn the code of her spine, and when I turn her gently on to her side, she feels the long heat of my cock against her back, and loves the weight of me there. I want to feel her firm bum against the heat of my groin, and she presses herself back against me.

With her back to my front, my hands hold her small breasts hard, and she holds her hands to my hands, and then she places one hand on her belly, and I feel the quiver of her breath, her belly rising like a cat's deep intake of breath. My other hand caresses her throat, and her head reaches back and turns for a kiss.

She is fine and lithe in my arms and against my chest, and her hands flicker with a gentle movement against my hands, alternately holding them to her skin, and then tracing lines over my arms with her fingers, drawing her own patterns on my skin. We mark each other and draw patterns, dots and darts on our skin, as if marking out a trail, a tale to be told, some ancestral truth, traced on our flesh.

Clio's breath quickens and she turns within my arms so she faces me, and we cup our faces in each other's hands, an offering and we are each a grail for the other. We no longer need words, for our bodies guide us now, and her fingers glide to the moistness between her legs and her hand grasps my length and she places me to her wet lips. We are lying on our sides, and she raises a leg over my hip, opening herself, and settles herself down onto me.

She pushes me onto my back, and she is so wet that she can bear down straight on to me, half my length.

"Oh fuck, so hot, so full, ohhh, fuck, yes, deeper, more, fuck yes, yes," and her voice fades into low moans, almost sobs. 

She writhes on me, oh glorious fuck, and then I am deep inside her, all my length, and she is fucking me hard, pushing herself hard back onto my groin.

"Oh fuck yes, fill me, fill me, oh God, why did I wait so long, you beautiful man who waited. Ah me, fill me, fill me hard, fuck, yes."

She is writhing on my cock, and her movements are so frantic over me that I slide from her, and her fingers grapple between us, and I am placed inside her again by her hand, and it is as if she doesn't know whether to lie upon me or sit upon me, she wants me every way she can. But she is frantic.

"Clio, darling Clio, hush, hush, be still now, be still."

My hands hold her head and I stroke her hair, to sooth her, to sooth her. And slowly, like some trapped thing, she slows herself, and slowly she relaxes on to me, her hands grappling at mine. I link my fingers through hers and hold her hands firm.

"Be slow," I whisper to her, my lips close to her ear, and I hold her slim back firm in my hands, long caresses down her sides, soothing her like a cat. She curls her head to the top of my chest, and now she is still upon me, and she grips me, a clench along my cock. I respond with a slight thrust, and she answers with another grip. 

I feel the weight of her, her slight weight, for she is a delicate thing, slim waisted and lithe, she lies her body upon me, her legs on mine. This way, she holds her thighs together and traps my length within her.

My hands curve to the shape of her ass and her muscles are tight there, clenching as she grips me. We slide into a slow rhythm with each other and rock gently together for a minute or two or even maybe three, our pace is slow and seductive, easing our pleasure slowly.

Ah Clio, I came on your belly when I was young, and never dreamed I would have you all the way, and you me. We were so young then, we did not know what we did, so we didn't quite make it, then.

And now the impossible coincidence of our meeting in the square comes home to me.

"How did we meet again," I asked, sliding inside her, "why did I walk where I had never walked before? And how did you know to be there? This is impossible, you and me now."

"Don't," she whispered, "don't wonder. I was there for you, just like you were there for me, that day you cared. Your stoned girl, you cared. And I broke your heart, later. This is my redemption."

Clio healed me that night, healed me and made me whole. It is not often it takes nine years to consummate a love. Sometimes, I have to wait, it seems. But this tell is about Clio, too. She waited, and came to that square as well. But I don't know all of her story, only this part.

"Come into me, beautiful man, come into me now," she urged. "Love me the best way, deep."

And with a quickening of her grip upon me, and her kiss upon my lips, Clio urged up the seed from within me, a slow thickening of heat within me, and she looked upon my face with her dark, dark eyes, and whispered, "forgive me."

And my cock deep inside her felt her heat and her gentle slow grip, and she gripped tight upon my cock, and with a gentleness beyond words, she urged up my soul in a spill of semen, a long slow pulse within her, and I gasped with the sweet joy of it, and came inside Clio. Forgiven.

"This time, it's for you. Next time, it's my turn. Beautiful man, inside me."

She curled small upon me, and I held her there, upon me. Angels are not heavy, I know that now, even fallen ones on gossamer wings, like Clio.

We dozed, her dark hair, short though it was, falling over her eyes, needing my finger to brush it back from her eye so it didn't annoy. She rested her cheek on my chest so she could hear the slow beat of my heart.

"It's so steady, your heart, I could count seconds from it."

"It beats faster, sometimes."

"It beats for me now."

She put her hand over my heart and held it there. I traced her slim, dark fingers, her nails small crescents curved. Clio was gentle and quiet, and she would look up to my face, her dark dark eyes holding my gaze, and she would grip my hand, just one squeeze, and look down and close her eyes. Thinking, but I never knew those thoughts. Peaceful and still now, just her and me in a little moment all our own. A long time coming, and even longer to forget. 

Because our walks had coincided, that strange coincidence, it was no longer never, it was just us, again. It wasn't forever, but that moment has lasted a long time, a very long time. And it's not done yet.

That night, though, it was done. She stirred, and fell from the bed and straggled her clothes together, pulling them from the back of the chair. Clio sat on the side of the bed, pulling up her jeans and threading her boots, and before she slipped that black tee shirt and thick jumper over head, she turned to me, dipped her head to mine.

"Look at me now, A, look at me. I'm not shy with you, not any more."

The small drop of her breasts were a delight before my eyes, and I leaned forward in the bed to kiss her dark nipples. She smiled, slowly, the most beautiful smile in the world, and pulled the cloth over her head, hiding them.

"Stay in bed, it's warm. Where's your phone? I'll call a taxi." 

I protested, she insisted, she kissed me, she prevailed. A woman with a kiss will always convince me, whatever it is she wants.

In the hall, I heard the murmur of her voice, and the clunk of the phone in its cradle.

"Ten minutes, he reckons. It's not a busy night."

Clio curled herself on top of the covers, trapping me inside the bed. She looked down at me, a serious look in her eyes. She touched my lips.

"N is back on Friday. I've only got one more night before he's back." 

She paused, gazing at me unblinking, and tapped her finger on my lips once, deciding. Her eyes darkened, and she frowned, questioning herself.

"Pick me up from my house at six tomorrow. Don't come in, just be there. I don't want to explain you to anybody, just be there at six, and I'll be ready." Clio made her mind up. 

The next day at work passed in a dream, I couldn't wait for six o'clock to arrive, but then time was so limited. It seems that my story of Clio is all about time, tiny portions of it, time past, time now, time future, achingly small moments that stretch out in my eternity.

Before I went down to pick Clio up, I pulled a space heater from storage and turned it on low in my bedroom, to take the edge off the cold air. I thought we might want it, later. She was packing as much into these short nights as I was. I look back now, and she must have been as driven as I - indeed, more so, for she was making bigger decisions than I. She was married, I was not.

As soon as I pulled up outside her house, the front door opened and closed, and she was down the path to the car. Shutting the door quickly, she turned to me and ran her hand through my hair, a caress.

"Let's find a restaurant, I want you to take me out for dinner. I want to go where no-one knows us, but where we can be seen as a couple, just once. Would that work, do you think?"

As we drove towards the city we thought of places to go.

"I know, remember the suburb you lived in those few weeks when you first got here? There's a divine French restaurant there, I've read reviews, let's go there." I grinned. "I think I can get us off the main drag with more clearance than you did!"

"Yes, that was a bit close, wasn't it." Her eyes lit up with the memory of that tyre squealing acceleration.

The next hour and a half was a delight, the meal was superb, the waiter French and a charmer, flirting with Clio who was wearing a simple black dress, heels and stockings. She did not wear much make-up, but this night had darkened her dark eyes and reddened her lips, and was sultry, seducing me. But that wasn't hard to do. She enthralled me.




Memory and Loss Pt. 04



The waiter decided that we were in love, and must have spoken to the owner, for he came out of the kitchen, chef's trousers black checked and white, with a complimentary dessert "pour la belle femme avec les beaux yeux." Clio blessed him with her beautiful smile.

"Monsieur, vous etes un homme chanceux."

Yes, I was, for a little while.

"Take me home," she said.

At my house, Clio greeted cat, who chirruped at her, his little conversation welcoming this woman once again.

"I want..." she said, "oh fuck, I don't know what I want. I do, but I don't. Just take me to bed. I can't keep you, but I want to. Shit."

I knew how she felt. There was a sense of the unreal about us, neither of us wanting time to pass, and no time left for us. Life would get in the way, again.

Undressing was a slow reveal. Clio slipped off her heels, and was the slim slender girl who had to tilt her head up to my lips. Her hand caressed the back of my hair and held me to her lips, and her other hand touched my cheek, light fingers a delicate trace. I reached behind her, and found the long zipper down her back, and slid it down.

The black sheath of cloth fell from her shoulders to a dark puddle on the floor, and the darkness of her nipples thrust tight from her slight, conical breasts, firm and high. She wore a simple garter, clipped to black stockings, and a froth of lace was about her hips, sexy and black. Her olive skin was rich and dark, her belly a lovely small mound.

My hands fell to the curve of her ass, and held her close. She flung her arms around my neck and clutched me tight to her small body. And then pushed back from me and fell to the bed, pushing herself high onto the pillows, her dark hair touching the bed head.

"What are you doing with clothes on?" She smiled, "hurry, I'm getting cold, I need your heat on my skin."

Eager to oblige, I pulled my shirt over my head, no time for buttons, and swiftly dropped my trousers, tripping over the legs as I pulled socks from my feet.

"Look at you," she whispered, "but you've lost your long blond hair."

"Yes, three year's growth cut, the week before I started work. Mum hated the length it got the year they were overseas, coz I only cut it once that year."

"Yes, I do remember seeing you from a distance, that second year." 

Wistful and soft, seeing me from a distance, seeing me in the past.

I stood beside the bed and gazed down upon Clio, who lay there nude and naked for me, open and giving herself up to my eyes. This was her, Clio unadorned, a feast for my eyes. I drank her down, knowing even then this cup must last a lifetime. She was my grail and Guinevere combined, unobtainable and impossible, and in this moment, just for me. Just for her.

I find, looking back now, that I continue in wonder that this happened to me, that Clio was like a phoenix for me. But I always remember too, that she saw me as her beautiful boy. I don't know if I had the most beautiful smile in the world for her, but my solace from all of this, from what came first and what stopped later, is Clio did it too. She was there, with me, like I was with her.

She wanted me as much as I wanted her, is the conclusion I give myself, when I consider this. And God help me, every year, I do. It is always this time, creeping to winter when the last warmth is in the air but the first chill, too. Clio is my dark winter, and then spring comes.

Clio in my bed, her arms open for me, beckoning me to her flesh, to her lips, to her breasts, that little dark flick of hair by her eye that I would move from her lashes with my finger. The dark hollow in her throat where her pulse beat, a faint trail of veins under the skin upon her breast. A soft down of dark hairs on her forearm, fading to her wrist, that was small, encircled by my fingers.

A scar on her upper arm, some child's accident from a tree, falling, or from a tumble, running. Shadows and light on her ribs, tickled when I run my fingers slowly over them, in wonder at her skin, and her gasp of breath, my touch is too light. My lips are upon her navel, my tongue touching into the whorl, her lost connection to her mother's womb. 

My fingers tug at her nipple, which tightens firm and into my mouth, and I suck her breast, my tongue swirling that rippled length, and she holds her hand to my head and keeps me there, her fingers slowly combing through my hair to my skull, her nails digging as I lightly bite the bud of her breast, and she sighs.

Clio's heart beat is steady and quick when I rest my head on her chest, my fingers laced through hers, and I listen to the river of her blood. As I lie cradled on her breast, her fingers trail down my ribs and side, and to my hip, and she curls her hand nearer to my belly and grips the shaft of me.

Her hand is slow up and down my length, and I look up to her eyes and they are steady on mine, her pupils huge and black, and she lowers her head and kisses my forehead and touches fingers to my eyes, closing them.

"Your look, I can't bear your look, I get lost in your look."

Her voice is low, the words barely heard, and I wonder if they are for me, or for her.

Her hand leaves my cock, and I feel her thighs part, and her hand on my head pushes me down.

"Kiss me there, like you did that day and tasted my blood."

Her hand on my head is insistent, and she pushed me down her body, until I lie between her thighs and take her sweet succulent sex into my mouth, my tongue inside her and then I take one lip into my hot mouth and suck it. She gasps, and pushes her centre up to me so that her lips are between mine. My tongue is a long curl through her slickness, up over her clitoris, and she gasps.

Clio holds me to her centre, and her thighs spread wide, then her knees are high above my head, and I suckle her sweet ass hole, and up again, my tongue slippering through her lips. My hand travels high to her breast and she presses it against her heart, and she sighs.

Her hand glides down over her belly, and her forefinger slides into her own wetness, circling the rising purple pearl at her own special pace. She gasps, "move up higher, come into me."

She places her hands up against the wall and pushes her body down onto my cock, and between her movement and my thrust I am deep inside her in one long, slow movement. Her thighs wrap around my waist and I am held tight. My sway into her is slow and steady, and I hold her hands tight together above her head, stretching her beneath me. She sighs, and we rise into our orgasm, together.

Her tightness clenches upon me, and she urges me inside her. I arch my head and neck back, and look down to her beautiful face, and her smile is the most beautiful smile in the world, ma belle femme. Her black, black eyes are huge and intense, and as I rise to my own orgasm she holds my look, and wills my eyes to remain open, falling into hers. I surge my come into her, pushing that svelte body up against the wall, and she pushes back so I am as deep inside her as is ever possible.

Our orgasms peak around each other's, and we come together, each a loud cry, and I pulse two, three, four times, and she clutches my back and digs her nails deep as she ripples into her own climax.

"Oh my God, I'm home, I've come home," she sobs into the air and I collapse onto her, our sweat cooling on our heated skin. 

We roll to our sides, and I stay inside her for five minutes, even after I have softened, and her legs are clenched tight around me, holding me inside her. We are silent, and our eyes lock and neither can look away. My emotions for this woman swirl and tangle, and I think oh my sweetness, after nine years she wants this, this impossible thing.

As our hearts drop and slow, we shift down into the bed and pull covers over ourselves and we are warm together. Clio eases herself off my softened cock, and she turns her back to my front and I spoon her smallness against my chest and thighs. She holds my hands like a prayer against her breast, and is still. 

"Thank you A, for wanting me, for waiting all this time. But I can't, I can't."

"Clio, darling Clio, I know. I know." I didn't want to know. But I did.

And she silently cried in my arms, her love for me spilling in silver threads down her cheeks, and all I could do was hold her tight to me, as our hearts broke, quietly. She slept, just a little, this confused and confusing woman. Ahh Christ, how I loved her then, and God help me, how I love her now.

But she went, that night. I insisted on driving her home in the cold and the whole way there her hand was threaded through my hair, holding me to the last. Seeing her shut that car door gently, and bending down to touch her fingers to the glass, and seeing her last sad smile, watching her go, my eyes blurred. Her two fingers flicked horizontal, riffling her coat. Always her farewell as she walked away. 

Clio, the girl with most beautiful smile in the world.

--- ooo OOO ooo ---

The next months for me were a turmoil. As is often the way, people tell me, one's life during grieving tends to turn upside down. That is certainly what happened in the six months after my father died, suddenly. In that time, Cathy and Clio spent their short times, for their own reasons, in my bed. 

After Clio left that night, a week or so later I took several weeks' leave and spent time in my home town with my mother, collecting together some of my dad's books and packing them in the car to be with me. When I returned to work there was a new girl there, lace stockings with her foot high on a desk, curvaceous and vivacious. She found out from the other women in the section what they knew about Rosie, who was still away. That was in the middle of June.

This girl turned up on my doorstep one night, the second night after I invited her home, with a few belongings in a wicker basket, and stayed for three weeks. Rosie returned, and the girl said, one day down by the lake, yes, I'm willing to be there for you.

So I left Rosie one night, my belongings in my car, and never saw cat again. I saw Rosie several times after I left, and she finally realised that I would not always be there for her, waiting. 

She made her own way, later, and I think is mostly happy. I hope so, because she was with me seven years, and that's a long time. My sister saw Rosie five years ago, and said she talked about me. But I don't know what she said. My sister can be frustratingly vague, sometimes.

Nine years was longer, though, and I needed to know if Clio would break her marriage for me. If she hadn't been married, I have no doubt my children would have a different mother.

I met her in a bar later that July, possibly early August. I told her about the girl, and asked her about N. She was still, subdued, and later I found out why. 

But she said, "no, I'm married. Go to her, you're a good man, you deserve something good. And N is a good man, too."

I moved away from that city a year later, and married the girl.

I came back to that city a year after that and asked a school girl if she knew Mrs C. The girl did, and delivered a note to Clio, who met me outside the school fence, on her lunchtime.

"I don't have long. Lucky you chose Amy as your messenger. She's a good kid."

We went to a small bistro situated in the small shopping centre just down the hill from my old house. We both tacitly agreed we could not go back to that larger place, where the people parted in the square that day, and we met.

"I'm a mother now," Clio revealed, "he's two this year. He's his father's son." She looked at me. "It's OK. He's not yours. He's not got blue eyes."

And her restlessness and unease the last time we had met, some three months after those two nights together, that tension hurtled into focus and her bravery shamed me. Clio was far stronger than I could ever be. I took her hand in mine and squeezed it tight.

"Fucking hell, Clio. Fuck. I don't know what to say." 

She had carried her first child, not knowing who the father was? That's braver than I'll ever be.

"I knew you had gone, too. I've a friend who knew of you at your work. I knew you'd gone away from this city."

"The job was too good not to take. But it solved my other problem too. I knew that if I stayed in this place, I'd destroy two marriages. I couldn't do that. Not to someone I loved."

I've not seen Clio since that day. As she walked from my car back into the school yard, two fingers tilted away from her hip, in a farewell. A quick flash of flesh against the fall of her coat, she always did it, walking away from me.

She walks in my dreams, regularly, the girl with the most beautiful smile in the world. Sometimes I see women in the street, and their smile reminds me of Clio, just a little. But nobody ever comes close.

--- ooo OOO ooo ---

Later, the internet became a miraculous thing, and every now and then I see what Clio is doing. And that is where I discovered something about her that explained a lot, a huge, huge amount, really. It explained a whole lot about her story. And why her story is perhaps more important than the little one I have recounted here.

One of the great shames of this great southern nation is what the "benevolent white man" did to the aboriginal people. We have a stolen generation who were removed from their parents, dispossessed and a diaspora. 

One of the dreadful consequences of this theft of children was a breakdown of marriage within the aboriginal people. Because the children had been removed from parents, they might never know who their kin might be. And this meant they could never take the risk of marrying another aboriginal person, for that person might be kin, and marrying within kin is the biggest taboo.

Their solution, this tragic generation, was to marry outside their people, marry into the white man. That way, they could never accidentally marry their kin, their cousin, their sister, their brother.

Clio had always said she was half Italian. It was her explanation for her darkness, her dark skin, her black eyes. She may have been half Italian, but I discovered later, so much later, that she has aboriginal blood in her. I don't know how much, she never ever told me, I never knew. 

Clio's story is so much more complicated than mine. Her parents were from the stolen generation, and her mother truly had lived a long and hard life, and maybe her husband was Italian. I don't know.

It is an indictment of this country, that even in the late seventies, a little koori girl from a small country town would be scared of the stigma of her race, and would never say who she really was. She never told me, I never knew. The girl with the most beautiful smile in the world.

--- ooo OOO ooo ---

In my father's testament to his family, he wrote of Osip Mandelstam, and through him I learned of the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova. I bought a translation of her poems by D.M.Thomas, a favourite writer of mine at that time. There is a poem in that volume, "In Imitatation of Annensky" which finish this story far better than I ever could. Akhmatova was a writer and a poet, I'm just a scribe. 

[Unfortunately, Lit's copyright respect rules prevent me reproducing the whole poem here. Since a fragment of a poem is not the poem, I have only shown a few essential phrases below.]

There is a scan of the page from that collection on my tumblr blog - same name as here on Lit. The faded yellow page is my proof to anyone who has read this story and doubts what they have read. You may see for yourself, if you choose. And if any reader has indulged me this far, and has got to this page, then I thank you. I thank you for your belief, or your disbelief. I thank you for your indulgence.

I do not really know why I have written this story of B (it was always about B, even if I gave her another name in this tale) and published it here. Perhaps it is because we remain apart, she and me, but as the impossible coincidence proves, we had a long way to go, way back then, and she follows me in dreams and I am haunted still. And perhaps we still have a long way to go.

I think of B the same time every year, and the haunting deepens. 

Perhaps by writing of it, and having others read it, it makes it real, it keeps it true. I cannot tell anyone near to me, for I remain married to that girl by the lake. I dare not go back to that city, for B is there still, and I dare not. Her name is in my daughter's name, and I dare not. I am my own tragedy, yet I know whose smile I shall see when I die.

I wait.

--- ooo OOO ooo ---

Imitation of Annensky

... first stanza not reproduced ...

Rise and set, the other faces,
Dear today, and tomorrow gone.
Why is it that at this page
Alone the corner is turned down?

... third stanza not reproduced ...

O, the heart is not made of stone
As I said, it's made of flame...
I'll never understand it, are you close
To me, or did you simply love me?

Anna Akhmatova
tr. D.M.Thomas



Memory Box Worthy



Waking up to a strange orange light brightly shone on my face, I notice that I am no longer in my warm bed or even my room. It's when I turn on my side that I notice the slumbering man beside me and the feeling of the sheets across my bare chest.

*I'm naked? How the HELL did I get naked?! And who is that? Where am I? Oh God! I know who that is! And by the looks of it, he's naked too! OH MY GOD! Calm down, calm down. Maybe I can slip out of here without disturbing him. Did we...oh whatever. I'm getting the hell out of here.*

I move my legs to the side, making sure I'm still covered, and begin to get up.

"Stay Right THERE!" an ominous voice bellows from the five speakers dispersed throughout the room.

The man beside me stirs and I hurriedly lie back down. His eyes open and sleepily turn to me. I look back at him worriedly, biting my lip. 

"Good. He's up. Alright. Here are the conditions. Follow them or die!" the voice booms. My eyes widen as do the eyes beside me. "No one knows where you are," the voice bellows, "so don't try to scream. It will only make me angry. Here are your conditions. You must have sex together." I blush and look away, staring at the ceiling as he continues. "Oh yes, Maggie. You will have sex with him...and WILL like it. Maggie, you must tell Jeff what it is that you do in your spare time...on quizilla. And Jeff, you must tell Maggie your secret lust. Do these things, or die!" he finishes.

I don't think I could ever turn this shade of red again. I turn away, my back facing the man beside me. I feel the bed shift as he edges closer to me.

"Maggie? I know you don't want to do this, but I really don't want to get killed, and you have so much more to live for." I hear him whisper to me. Memories flood my mind of my parents, my brother, my nephews. I turn around to face him and smile awkwardly. 

"Ok." I say.

"Ok," he replies, "So...what do you do on quizilla?" he says with a smile, and I blush furiously again.

"Ha. Well. You're going to call me a dork, but whatever. I have an account on quizilla, and I wrote a story on it and a couple of quizzes...all of them centering around Severus Snape. From Harry Potter. I've got a thing for the mean, evil, conniving potions master," I say with a smile.

"Are you serious?" he laughs. *His laugh is so adorable*

"Yep. I know it's weird but..." I say, looking away, my shyness creeping back.

"But you like the older guys," he finishes with a smile and a wink.

"Ha! Well now! I don't know about that *LIAR*, but...I guess it's more of the prohibited-ness of him*Ok, there's some truth*. Being a professor and all. Wanting what you can't have and all that."

"Really?" he says, eyebrows raised, a glint in his eye.

I blush furiously as he shifts to a different position, his elbow resting on the bed while his fist holds up his head. I blush furiously while looking at the man who, as of late, I have been dreaming about, lusting about. About kissing him in his classroom closet, in his car behind the school. Mr. Fox.

*I've never had feelings this strongly about anyone before in my life. It's not as if I've been sheltered for 18 years, but man! All I can think about is him, and his body, and his...*

"Nope. I lied," I say sarcastically, trying to brush it off, but I know I'm starting to get wet. *Let's change the subject shall we.* "So who's your 'secret lust'?" I asked, looking him in the eyes.

He shifts slightly then answers. "Oh, no one special really. A very talented senior of mine who I recently found out has a thing for teachers," he says, eyebrows raised. 

"Oh come on. Me? Give me a break. Who would want me?" I ask seriously. *My hair and eyes may kick ASS, but my body leaves little to be desired.*

"I do," he says reaching his arm out to caress my exposed shoulder. It sends shivers down my spine. I bite my lip and he smiles. I turn to face the wall, my back facing him once more. He moves so close behind me I can feel the heat emanating from him. His arm finds my hip and I freeze up. His mouth is right by my ear.

"I haven't had a boyfriend since 9th grade. We never even held hands, let alone kiss. I haven't even had my first kiss! I'm so...inexperienced. There's no way you could even pretend to enjoy yourself with me," I whisper.

"Oh? Well. I guess I'll have to...instruct...you then," he responds, and my breath catches in my chest. He notices and chuckles to himself. You see, "Instruct me!" has become the phrase of the year in our Statistics AP class, and every time he uses it, I can only think of the numerous times I have used that phrase to a naughty use in my Snape stories. I can feel the wetness begin to accumulate between my legs as he goes on. "I can smell you in class sometimes when you get aroused," he says, beginning to kiss my neck, his mustache tickling me. 

My breath quickens and I turn around to face him. I can see the lust in his eyes, and I'm sure he can see it in mine. 

"Kiss me," he says, his mouth mere millimeters from mine.

"I don't know how. Why don't you instruct me?" I reply, a smile visible in my eyes.

He smiles. "Just kiss me."

I reach my hand to his face and my smile broadens. Our foreheads touch.

"You're not going to go back and tell everyone in stats what a bad kisser I am, right?" I kid him.

"I wouldn't think of it," he whispers back.

I close the gap between our lips and he takes it from there. I can feel his tongue against my lips and know enough to part my lips. He tongue flickers against mine and I smile into the kiss.

"KISSING does not qualify as SEX!" boomed throughout the room. I jumped, but Fox...no...Jeff...no Fox, held me down. I laugh, and he continues to kiss me, his feet caressing mine as he holds me. He moves in order to reposition himself above me, his legs straddling mine, never breaking our kiss and *I can't believe this is happening. I can't believe this is happening* keeps running through my head. I can feel his building erection against my leg, and blush slightly, but he doesn't notice. Our kiss continues, and I can feel his hand begin to roam toward my breasts. He finally reaches his goal and begins to fondle them. I gasp into the kiss and he smiles. He breaks the kiss, and I wonder if I've done something wrong until he begins to kiss my neck. I watch as he kisses my neck, my collarbone, my shoulder, the valley between my breasts, and then kisses his way towards a nipple. He looks at me and smiles before blowing lightly on my nipple. He then flickers his tongue about its tip before claiming it within his warm, inviting mouth. 

*Oh my God! I can't believe he's doing this! Oh God! He's looking straight at me again! Oh! That feels...amazing!* I bite my lip, suppressing a moan as a tingling sensation runs through my entire body.

While one of his hands caresses my side, the other begins its roaming once more. It glides up to my breast, tweaking its tip, before sliding down my stomach to my warmth. His hand cups my heat and my eyes widen. *I've written and...read...about guys doing this...but having them actually do it. Oh gosh.*

"Are you alright with this Maggie?" he asks worriedly, obviously reading my expression wrongly.

"Oh no...it's not that...it's just...I'm worried you're not going to...you know...like me...like what you see." I say blushing.

"Maggie," he says as he moves back towards my face, kissing me passionately, "I've wanted to do this for so long. You are so amazing. I would never not like what I saw," he finishes, kissing me once more, his hand still cupping my warmth. "So you're alright with this?" he says smiling as he begins moving his hand up and down. I nod my head and reach up to kiss him once more. "Open your legs," he says to me in between kisses. I open them for him and his kiss deepens. I feel his fingers begin to explore. "You're so wet already," he says to me lustily.

"You make me that way all the time," I say in a haze of passion.

With that he plunges one finger into me. "Oh my god. You're so tight!" he says laughing. I laugh with him. 

"Well I am a virgin!"

"How am I going to fit in there!" he laughs again as he begins rocking his finger back and forth. He takes a second finger and pushes it with the first. His thumb begins to circle around my clit. 

"Oh god." I whisper. *That feels amazing!*

He stops. "Does it hurt?" he says worriedly.

I smile. "The furthest thing from it." 

He smirks. "Oh really? What about this?" And with that he begins to kiss down my neck, my breast, my stomach, my navel. He looks back at me; my jaw is wide open. He then begins to encircle my clit with his tongue as he pumps in and out of me with his fingers. I am overcome by the sensations and can feel my juices flowing freely. Suddenly, my walls clench around his fingers as a fire flows throughout my entire body in my first ever orgasm brought on by a man. Yes. He certainly was a man.

"Oh my god. I can't believe you just did that," I say breathlessly. His eyebrows rise as he moves back up towards my face and kisses me. I can taste myself in his mouth. 

"Want to reciprocate the favor?" He asks, kissing me once more before waiting for an answer. 

"Are you sure you want someone down there who has never...well...been down there before?" I ask with a laugh.

"Oh, I'm pretty positive that I do," he says with a smile. I kiss him and he moves off of me. The bed spread moves off of us and further down the bed of its own accord. I give Fox a questioning look.

"I definitely want to see this," the speakers announce.

"Oh...of course..." I say, rolling my eyes. *I had forgotten*

"How bout we do this," he says moving towards the edge of the bed, his legs dangling off the side, "come over here." 

I walk over towards his side of the bed and stand in front of him. I then smile and kneel in front of him. He edges closer to the side of the bed. I look up at him and lick my lips. He smiles and removes his hand from his erection. I move closer to the side of the bed and trace one hand up his foot, his leg, his thigh. Then I stop right before his shaft. I look to him for approval, and he nods his head. A envelop his erection in my hand and incline my head toward it. My eyes turn upward, my head still millimeters from its head. He is looking straight at me and I smile. I lick the tip of his shaft with my tongue and his eyes close as his head reclines backward in ecstasy. He looks back down at me as I envelop it fully within my mouth. It's a little awkward at first, but I soon begin to rock back and forth with the motions of my hand. 

"Are you sure you've never done this before?" Fox says breathlessly, clearly affected by my actions.

I stop sucking to flicker my tongue once again on its tip, spreading the precum, and I can hear his intake of breath. I smile and look up at him, "I'm a fast learner."

He laughs and entwines his fingers in my hair. I look up at him and his hand traces my jaw line; I bite my lip. I get up and stand between his legs. The kiss is so passionate, I feel as if my legs will turn to jelly. The lust is all but gone, replaced by unadulterated passion for each other.

We stop the kiss and catch our breaths. "Lie back down," he tells me, and I walk around the bed and lie down next to him as he turns to face me. "Are you ready for this?" he asks concerned.

"Absolutely. I know it will hurt, but I know you aren't trying to hurt me, so yes. I'm ready." I say reaching out to caress his shoulder as he had done to me earlier. 

He moves on top of me and kisses my forehead. I part my legs, and he finds my entrance easily, still wet from his attentions earlier. He kisses me to distract me as he enters me slowly. It hurts, but not as much as I expected. I make an effort to relax the muscles within me but can still feel them tense up every so often. He slowly begins to move back and forth within me. He closes his eyes, his head lolling back as he thrusts into me. *He is soooo enjoying this* I reach up to caress his face and he looks down at me and smiles. 

"This feels amazing, Maggie," he gasps as he continues his actions. I reach up and kiss him, my feelings reciprocated through the kiss. 

I begin to feel a slow building deep within my chest. My eyes roll in the back of my head due to the amazing feelings being thrust upon me. I can tell he is beginning to lose his resolve as his steady motions begin to become more erratic. I begin to meet his thrusts with my own and he smiles into my shoulder. "Yes," he breaths, "tell me how you feel. Tell me that this is affecting you the same way it is affecting me."

"Oh god. It feels so good. I've never felt like this before. Don't stop. Please, don't stop." I breath and that is all the motivation he needs to go faster and harder than ever before. "Oh!" I scream in bliss, the building tension rising to a fever pitch. His breathing is becoming quicker as is mine as our climax reaches its peak. A final thrust brings us both over the edge as my walls convulse around his erection. "Yes!" he screams, his head shooting back as I feel a spurting within me as he ejaculates. 

He thrust in a few more times to milk the rest of his cum from his shaft, leaving the two of us breathless. He pulls out of me and slides to my side. I kiss him passionately, entwining my hands within his hair, his mustache tickling my nose. He tweaks my breasts as we continue our assault on each others mouths. 

"That (kiss) was (kiss) amazing (kiss)," I mutter.

"Mmhmm," is all that he manages to say. "Let's do it again," he states kissing my neck.

"Right now?" I asked exhausted.

"Right now," he states as he kisses my breast and encircles a nipple.

"Oh gosh Fox, are you sure you're up to it?" I say with a smirk.

"I may be old, but I'm never too old for this," he says as he pushes a finger within me, much easier this time than the first I might add. "You're not bleeding," he states as he looks down at his hand. "I thought you said you were a virgin," he says accusingly, pulling away.

"I am a virgin, Fox, I just have gone to the OBGYN before. I've had an internal exam. It was one of the most painful and traumatizing experiences of my life. Be glad I'm not bleeding because I may have been screaming out of pain instead of pleasure before. Ok?" I say and he softens. Then a smirk begins to build on his face.

"'Screaming out of pain instead of pleasure' huh?" he states kissing me. 

I smile. "Yes. That was amazing."

"ENOUGH! I've had enough of this lovey-dovey stuff. Time to go," the voice bellows.

And with that, the room begins to fill with a strange smoke. 

"He must be putting us back to sleep," I say, hiding the worry in my voice.

"Let's hope. You're way to trusting, you know tha?" he says kissing me once more.

"At some point, I'm going to take you up on your offer," I say kissing him on the cheek.

"Oh? What offer?" 

"To do it again," I whisper in his ear. And after that, the room went black.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

"Damn alarm," I state, pushing the snooze button. Grabbing my glasses off the floor, I begin to walk towards the bathroom. I turn the lights on and walk towards the mirror. I stare at myself, gnashing my teeth, when I spot a singular hair on my shoulder. I pick it up and look at it. It's short and brown. *Fox* 

The memories flood back and I smile at the small hair. *This is definitely going in my memory box* I think, flying back towards my room to find the small box filled with the keepsakes held so dearly to my life. *Oh yes. This is certainly memory box worthy*