Sex and the Stranger

When it’s done I realise that I really did sob. When I reach up and touch my face, my cheeks are wet with tears that I don’t remember crying.

* * *

The second time it happens I’m prepared. Or at least I think I am. I’m in the garden, fully dressed, so it’s hard to really expect something like his hands on my breasts, through my shirt.

And he does it abruptly, too, like before. One second everything is normal: we’re talking about the gardenias and the old elm we’re stood by. Then the next he’s undoing my shirt right out in the open, fingers fumbling with the buttons, alternating between getting the material off me and fondling my bare breasts.

Because of course I’m bare under the shirt. Maybe that’s what caught his notice – the shape of me beneath the thin cotton. The stiffness of my nipples in the cold, February air. It had started to mist a bit, so maybe the material had grown a little see-through.

Now it’s completely see-through because he’s parted the two sides like wings, and before I can say or do anything he’s kissing me there. He’s kissing my breasts with that same hot, hungry mouth he had before.

I don’t mind admitting that it feels good. I might have clung to some notion of restraint, before. Some remnant of what’s proper and right, in these circumstances – with everything that’s happened, you know – but I can’t any longer.

He isn’t holding back. He licks over my nipples in the rudest way a person can, and I can’t help it. I have to bury my hands in his curly hair and hold tight to him as he does this to me. This thing, this thing – oh God, what is it again?

I don’t know, but I moan to feel it.

I moan to feel him shoving my skirt up, hands too desperate again. Everything about this is rough and jagged, like the feel of the tree bark pressing into my back. He’s going to take me against it, I think, but I don’t fully understand that concept until he does it.

There’s too much to process. The way his cock feels, thrusting deeply inside me. His hair still in my hands and the smell of him when I press my face to the side of his neck, like soap and some distant memory I don’t want to unearth.

I come embarrassingly quickly this time. So quickly I don’t even have a chance to think about it. The whole thing just swells up inside me and pours right out of my mouth in a way I didn’t let it before.

‘Oh just like that, yeah, like that, baby, do it, do it,’ I tell him. And then there is a whole host of pleasure sounds. Moans and groans and gasps of delight, as I do my best to work the last of it out on his still-solid cock.

Of course he slows, as soon as I’m done. And then after a brief second to catch his breath he steps away from me. Buttons his trousers around his erection, tidies himself as though nothing happened. Like before, when I came around from the tears and the trembling to discover that he hadn’t finished but had left the scene of the crime anyway.

Though it’s obvious why, I wish it wasn’t. I wish, I wish, I wish.

But it remains so, all the same.

* * *

I don’t give him the chance this time. To surprise me, I mean. I strip off all my clothes, instead, and rather than waiting with my back turned I stand in the bedroom completely naked. I face him when he walks through the door.

He looks surprised, the way I have felt surprised. Though I don’t think the two feelings are the same thing. One stems from the sight of me, so freely bared. The other is from the sense of some awakening, some pleasure I never thought I’d experience again.

‘Rebecca,’ he says, and his voice sounds so old and rusty. I think it’s because I can’t recall the last time he said my name. I’d started to think he’d forgotten it, but I can forgive him because I had forgotten his too.

I remember it now. It’s hard to go to him and kiss him the way I used to. We used to tumble on to any available surface, tearing at each other’s clothes, hands so full of each other it felt like greed. But now I’m just so broken apart, I’m that ice, melted and shattered and torn up. And though the heat is back there’s still a flood of pain, too, when I kiss him.

I take off his clothes, one item at a time. He lets me do it in the exact same way I let him do those things for me, only this time I won’t let it be detached, closed off, like a separate part of ourselves. I make him look me in the eye. I make him kiss me even though I can taste salt in his mouth and he’s shaking.

He’s shaking the way I was, when he kissed my back and made me take that pleasure. He made me. I want to make him.

‘Rebecca, I –’ he starts, but I put a hand over his mouth. I tell him don’t, the way I probably should have by the window. But I didn’t, and now we’re almost back to life. We’re almost there.

I don’t regret it. I can’t feel bad about wanting him. And I don’t think he feels bad, not exactly. He only holds out for a moment or two and then suddenly he’s pulling at his own clothes. His arms go around my middle and our naked bodies touch all the way down from chest to ankles, legs tangling briefly. The bed is waiting for us to spread ourselves all over it.

I can feel how hard he is against my belly but it’s more than that. His teeth sink into my shoulder, his hands make bruises on my hips. And in return I give him as many marks, biting in places where I know it will show, then licking over every little sore spot I make.

He used to love that. He loves it still. Before I’ve even gotten halfway down his body he’s moaning my name, hands in my mess of hair, hips rocking up against nothing. Just as he’s at that perfectly lost place, gaze untroubled, brow unrumpled, I take his thick cock into my mouth and suck so hard.

Hard enough to make him gasp in a way that almost seems pained. Hard enough to make him thrust up and beg for more.

‘Like this?’ I ask. I drag my teeth over the length of his prick, before ending on the most lascivious lick I can manage.

His head goes back against the pillow. He’s so close that I could tug him over the edge with just a little more. Clearly he hasn’t allowed himself to do anything beyond the things he’s done to me. He hasn’t given himself up to it, the way I did. And though I want him to there’s something I need a little more.