The Secret Lives of Emma: Beginnings

by Walker, Natasha

  He took a deep breath.

  ‘Baby!’ whispered Emma. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Do you like it?’ he asked, staring up at her.

  ‘Do you want the truth?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I’m in a dream world. Kiss them. Kiss them more,’ she whispered, looking at him and, for that moment, loving him. She had played so many games, had been so many people and so many Emmas that this time, when she really wanted to convey to her lover the truth, she doubted her ability to. She heard the words and knew their truth but worried nonetheless.

  She needn’t have, Jason’s critical faculty was not even switched on, these words filled him to the brim. He leaped forward, not in space but in confidence. Jason looked from her face to her breasts and took one in each hand. Emma’s hands joined his, she placed hers on the back of his and directed and was led as together they caressed her breasts.

  Emma was drifting in and out of that curious new state. She tried to keep herself in it, she tried to remain the new lover, but Jason was behaving differently. He kissed her breast and then bit her nipple. A kind of madness had crept up on him. He saw and hungered for her breasts and felt that Emma had given him permission to do as he pleased. He assumed that he was being a good and impassioned lover. He squeezed her nipple.

  ‘Gently,’ she whispered. She had let him go for a bit, she was half enjoying the artlessness of his attack, but that bite had hurt and his movements were becoming faster and harder. He took her nipple into his mouth while rubbing and squeezing her breast and his hunger directed him to bite again.

  ‘Hey, that hurt!’ she said, pushing him away. ‘Don’t do that!’

  Jason stared at her, uncomprehending. She saw that he was stupefied. She was a little amazed at her own behaviour. There had been lovers before who had been rough and there would be rough lovers to come. But somehow Jason wasn’t allowed to be that way. His roughness should have been a turn on – wasn’t it why she was with a young, inexperienced lover? It might have been. But things change. Emma was changing. The situation wasn’t as it had been.

  When she had masturbated while showering she had thought of Jason as something of a plaything. She had plotted and schemed. But now she wanted to share the experiences of young love. She wanted Jason to love her as though she were eighteen too – to be cautious and fearful and careful. She knew that Jason was reacting to Emma the older woman, the woman who was experienced and who had seduced him. She suddenly wanted to cry. She was confused and seeing Jason’s young face staring at her like that made her feel awful. She felt the consequences of her behaviour rolling towards her like a freak wave. To dabble so casually in something as important as someone’s adolescence! To take pleasure in another’s inexperience. Men have done it. She had been the willing recipient of a number of men’s efforts to educate her, to lead her, mould her. Wasn’t Jason reaching out to her? Wasn’t he a willing participant too? She doubted this. She knew how to manipulate men. She found it easy. It was easy. Jason was eighteen.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked, after an awkward few moments.

  ‘I’m fine. I just thought you were getting a bit rough. I’m sorry I pushed you away. You’ve made me a bit crazy today. You’re just too damn cute and I am too damn …’ She leant forward and placed her palm against his cheek and then kissed him. He left the kiss.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘I give in to my desires too easily. No, that isn’t right. I place my desires before … Yes that’s it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Am I a bad person?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Kiss me again.’

  He kissed her, and kept his hands by his side. Her kiss was possessive. He understood that she still liked him. He was warmed and relieved by this kiss. But he was also still bursting at the seams. If she had decided then and there to undo his jeans she would have caused him to come by the mere presence of her hand. His balls ached and his hard-on demanded release. He still wanted to eat her. He would have carved her up and eaten her raw and he would have been sated. Yes, to have her! That was the theme of his new novel, possession. He wanted to have her. He didn’t know how. But he wanted it now.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. You make me crazy,’ she said, and she brought him close and hugged him. He was very aware that her naked breasts were pressed against him but he restrained himself from acting upon the many impetuous directives his cock was sending him.

  ‘Well?’ she asked after a while.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘I think you should go,’ she said. ‘No. That sounded bad. Don’t worry. We went a bit far. But I want to have my cake and eat it too. I’m sorry. I should have stopped. But when I saw your face I felt so, mmm, and then you touched my nipple and … you know.’ She made to laugh and then just sighed. ‘You’re so damn cute, Jason. I should have more restraint. You’re young, you have much to learn and I have much to teach. I had plans for you, Jason. I was going to teach you everything.’ She turned his head so that she could plant little kisses on his lips. ‘And you’re a good kisser and you’re beautiful and I want to do things to you.’ She kissed him properly. He was eager and she held him tightly.

  ‘Now go and leave me in peace. I’m a mess.’

  Jason left with barely a word. She heard him go down the stairs. But then she thought of something. She ran to the stairs leaving the towel behind. She called after him. He turned from the back door and came to the bottom of the stairs. She hid behind the corner and looked down on him. He gazed up at her smiling.

  ‘Don’t you rush off home and pull off. I want you to promise me you won’t,’ she said.

  Jason’s face reddened.

  ‘Come on, I know you were. Why else would you leave a half-naked slut like me so fast, with barely a goodbye?’

  She observed his face with amusement; he was actually shocked by her words.

  ‘Promise me you won’t,’ she repeated.

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ he said. ‘You’re crazy, Emma.’

  ‘Don’t do it! Go home now. But be good!’

  THIRTEEN

  Emma was making dinner for David and herself, but nothing was going quite to plan. She couldn’t keep her mind on the task at hand and she kept stopping mid-action. Her mind was filled with thoughts of Jason.

  David was late and dinner was turning into an unmitigated disaster. Frustrated with her efforts she abandoned the attempt and glanced out the kitchen window across the side passage towards the blackened window of Simon and Anne’s large rumpus room. As she did so someone switched the light on. She moved back from her window and picked up the abandoned mushrooms and started chopping them. But she knew that if you stood in the right spot, her kitchen window afforded a fairly good view of the rumpus room. This knowledge would not let her be. She had to know if Jason had turned on the light. She wanted to look at him. To talk with him. She needed to see him.

  She turned off the light and leaned over the counter to peer across the way. Jason was sitting on the couch with the phone to his ear. He was facing away from her. The TV was on. Emma wanted desperately to go over to him but she expected David home at any moment. She hadn’t rung Jason before for fear of alerting his parents to their mismatch of a friendship. But she took a chance, counting on them to have Call Waiting.

  Jason answered.

  ‘I can see you, cutie,’ she said, and watched him turn around and look in her direction.

  ‘I can’t see you,’ he said, and she saw him trying to.

  ‘Good,’ she answered. ‘Who are you speaking to?’

  ‘Jess.’

  Emma felt a pang of jealousy and then laughed at herself.

  ‘Your girlfriend?’ she teased.

  ‘No … no.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. I want you to come here at … um … come at twelve. I’ll leave the back door open.’

  ‘I can’t, Emma.’

  ‘Why can’t you? Are
you meeting Jess?’

  ‘No. I can’t get out of here. Mum and Dad will hear.’

  ‘Can’t you move quietly? I want you here at twelve,’ she demanded. ‘I need you,’ she added.

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘You better come, or I’ll come and find you.’

  ‘OK, OK.’

  ‘Bye.’

  ‘Bye.’

  She hung up and then she smiled mischievously and dialled again.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Did you pull off?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Did you want to?’

  There was a pause. She listened to his breathing.

  ‘Tell me. Jess is waiting,’ she urged.

  ‘Yes,’ he sighed.

  ‘Can you hold on till tonight?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK, bye.’

  ‘Bye.’

  ‘Wait! Jason, are you there?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I didn’t wait,’ she revealed and hung up.

  Jason was lying in his bed in his parents’ house. He was dozing. Dreams seduced him from consciousness. In his hand he held his alarm clock. His finger was still on the button to silence it when it went off. Now he slept. It was ten-thirty, the alarm was set for twelve.

  In his dreams he overslept his appointed time. He slept badly and tossed and turned, rolling onto the alarm clock as he did so. Now his dreams were made worse by the uncomfortable presence of the small square of plastic and metal beneath his lower back. He dreamt of being stabbed. He woke up.

  Seeing nothing in the dark room he reached up to switch on the light. He felt the pain of the lost clock in his back and he pulled it out and looked at it. He still had an hour or so to wait. He turned off the light and clutched the clock to him. He felt aroused. His cock was rigid in his pyjamas. No dreamed stabbing could calm his body tonight. He was anxious and edgy. Since that day he jumped over Emma’s fence he seemed to spend his life on edge. She made him so hot.

  He was constantly thinking about her. The way she talked to him, the way she touched him, the way she let him touch her and how she looked and felt.

  He was full of her.

  He couldn’t concentrate at school.

  He couldn’t concentrate at home.

  He was beginning to realise the enormity of what they were doing. His mind was a pendulum of indecision. Everything she said was new. It was as if she saw life from a completely different perspective to his. And he had to admit that he preferred her perspective. He had always been so abrupt in his thinking and she was softening the lines which bound every one of his ideas.

  He lay in the darkness thinking about her. He was unable to sleep. His mind had charged his body once again. All it took these days was a single thought. Jason had become obsessed with certain parts of his lover’s body. He loved thinking that she was his lover. He thought of her stomach, the lovely shape of her belly. Her feet. Her fingers. Lips. The weight of her against him, her body pressed, jammed against his.

  In his bed that night, holding the alarm, he wished the time would tick faster on to twelve. He had an erection and under the bed covers he was stroking his cock. Emma had warned him not to masturbate that night but the thought of her watching him kiss her stomach and the pleasure he was able to give her while kissing her breasts that very afternoon had made his cock throb painfully for release.

  He had been thinking of Emma in an entirely different way. Before today he hadn’t been in any hurry to see her nude. The few times when they had been together he had loved what she had given him to love. The actual speed of progress taken was in Emma’s hands. But this afternoon had changed that. He had moved things along. He had taken her breasts in his hands and she had let him. Now he wanted more.

  Since he had left her house he had been thinking of her breasts, he had been thinking of her skin and of her head rubbing up against his cock. He had gone to the bathroom twice to pull off before his mother had come home. He couldn’t shake the hard-on. Every thought he had strengthened its resolve to stay about. He couldn’t hang around his mother. He put on a longer t-shirt and when he heard her come home he tucked his erection under the elastic of his boxers and tried to think of anything but Emma. His mum didn’t notice and he was safe, but the hard-on remained and his balls still ached.

  He wasn’t thinking very sensibly. His mother asked him if he was worried about anything. He managed another lie and went off to watch TV. On the way he stopped at the bathroom, went in and locked the door. He undid his jeans. He touched the shaft and it jumped. He was staring at himself in the mirror. He knew that two or three strokes would do it. He looked at himself, eyeball to eyeball.

  ‘Do it!’ he said. He stroked it once and the pleasure was intense. He felt the orgasm begin. He stopped. He looked at his thick cock, which was longer and harder than it had been before. It throbbed. His was a hard, sensitive cock, bursting to blow. He stroked it again and his left knee wobbled, the orgasm rushed in and then just as quickly receded as he let go.

  The pleasure was painful. He moaned and then buckled himself up and left the bathroom for the safety of the backroom where he turned on the TV. Every once in a while he slyly rubbed his cock through the thin cotton of his jeans pocket.

  Saying that he could ‘hold on’ was one thing. Lying in bed for a few hours drifting in and out of erotic dreams, lying awake with erotic thoughts, well, this was something else altogether. Not reaching climax was his point of honour. But it was sending his mind into curious patterns of thought.

  He mused over the changes taking place in him without being critical, which is to say that the thoughts came and went without mental comment. He knew that he felt virile and manly, he knew that he could charge ahead in battle, he knew that he had a beautiful woman waiting for him, he knew the situation was implausible but he also knew he was capable of taking what she offered.

  He lay there thinking and feeling all these thoughts and never thinking one of them without another crashing into it, so that not one sensation, not one thought was highlighted or isolated, all were merged and knotted. Power was the overall effect. He felt, but did not express, this power.

  Emma was awake. David had come home in a rotten mood. They had talked for a whole ten minutes in the two hours that he was home before he took himself off to bed. He apologised to her as he went. He said he was being unfair to her but he couldn’t shake the mood so it was better to go to sleep and try again tomorrow.

  Emma was not an unreasonable person, she knew that sometimes the world was too big, too cruel and too hard, but she also knew that she wasn’t all those things to her husband. David could have talked to her. She had tried to draw him out. She had tried to get the lid off his bottled feelings, to at least discover the cause of his mood. But he had shaken off these efforts. He put the TV between Emma and himself. And then he went alone to bed.

  Only once David was gone did Emma regret phoning Jason. She found the regret disquieting. She began to wonder whether she had in fact been the cause of her husband’s mood. She had been so preoccupied with Jason.

  Emma switched off the TV. The room fell silent. She dragged herself from the couch and walked into the kitchen where she found that David had taken the trouble to stack the dishwasher and wipe the benches before he went off to bed. When he had announced that he was going to bed Emma had said ‘Goodnight’ without looking away from the TV and without searching for a kiss. She, too, was fed up by this stage. A sulky husband is no fun whatsoever.

  He had gone and she had continued to watch a depressing documentary on biological warfare. This fits my mood perfectly, she thought. When the documentary ended her life felt a little lighter by comparison. She had seen footage of a dirty fridge in an unsecured lab in Russia which contained enough of a superbug in old jars to wipe out the whole world. Her sulky husband problems now seemed laughable in the face of the total annihilation of life on earth.

  Thankfully, for most of us, the great issues of this world are
easily shelved while we deal with the smaller issues of our daily existence. Sometimes these weighty issues are completely forgotten moments after they have been reported to us by an earnest and well-meaning journalist simply because the phone rings. Emma found that this sudden exposure to the terrors of Russia’s bankrupt biological warfare department had bumped her out of her specific ‘My husband’s a pig’ mood into a general ‘The world is an evil place’ mood which only has a shelf life of approximately two and a half minutes in the average optimist’s mind. If Emma was anything she was an optimist.

  So by the time she reached the kitchen and discovered that her husband had cleaned up, which she greedily took as a sign that he at least liked her, her mood had bounced back and she was once again herself. That is, her natural life-loving and thoughtful self who always believed that the pleasures in this life were hers simply because she looked for them in earnest.

  Emma began to make herself a cup of tea and glanced at the wall clock to see that it was half past ten. The time had made her feel weary. That same weariness a person might experience when they realise they have to wait an hour for the next bus.

  FOURTEEN

  Emma sat at the kitchen table with her head resting on her hands. She was asleep. All of the kitchen lights were on so that the room was brilliantly lit. To Jason, standing in the half-light outside the window, the scene was oppressive. Emma’s still, silent form in that room of daily productivity made him think of murder, of the unnatural, for she did look unnatural sitting as she was, where she was, at the prearranged time of their rendezvous.