by Reid, India
“You don’t just get to write off the universe because it’s ending,” I said, and it took me a moment to realize who I was paraphrasing. Karen. Karen, who had supported me even in the beginning, when my income was nonexistent and my paintings hadn’t been worth the canvas I’d painted them on.
“Ugh,” Tammy sighed, slipping between me and the easel. “I hate when you get like this. Shut up and kiss me.”
And then her lips were on mine, hard and hungry, but when her tongue slipped into my mouth I didn’t feel passion, or romance, or desire. Her tongue was slippery, foreign. She’d started smoking again. I could taste the ash on her.
It made me feel sick.
“God, what is wrong with you today?” Tammy asked, pulling back and looking at me like I’d just called her fat. “Please at least tell me that Karen’s gone because you told her it’s over.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I haven’t gotten a chance yet. She’ll be back any minute now.”
It was a lie-- of course it was a lie. Tammy probably even know I was lying-- I wasn’t a very good liar. But I said it anyway, hoping that she would go home, desperate to do anything just to get her to leave. I didn’t want Tammy. I wanted to paint.
I wanted to hold Karen again.
“Today sucks,” Tammy pouted, strolling through my studio like she had a claim to the place. “You know I ran out of moisturizer this morning? Called my Avon lady and she just laughed at me-- Who would deliver it? she said. Then I tried everywhere in town-- Walmart, the drug stores, everywhere. Looters had already ransacked everything, wiped out the whole beauty section-- can you imagine?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her open a jar of modge podge, sniff it, and recoil dramatically. “It’s like, what would anyone do with a whole town’s supply of moisturizer? Makes me sick, thinking of all of those welfare mommas and crack whores using it up on their nasty skin while I dry out and shrivel up over here.”
It was true, for what it was worth. Tammy’s tanning habits had left her skin a lovely shade of light brown, but at a cost. I had no idea what kind of expensive moisturizers Tammy used to keep her skin looking nice, but without them, she was truly beginning to look her age.
She put the jar back on the shelf, uncapped. “Do you think that Karen would have anything?”
“Probably not,” I answered honestly. “She doesn’t really use anything, as far as I can tell.”
In truth, I didn’t really know either way-- but if Karen did have a jar or two up in the closet, then they were Karen’s, not Tammy’s.
Tammy had me. She wasn’t going to take anything else that belonged to my wife. I would have to be enough.
“Shame,” Tammy said. She was walking toward me again, swinging her hips wide and licking her lips like she was trying to be sexy. “I didn’t just come over here to nag you though, you know.”
“Hmm?” I said. She was between me and the easel again-- and I felt like I was so close to properly visualizing my intended end result, too.
“Yeah,” Tammy said, breathy and slow. “I thought maybe, if saying goodbye is becoming hard for you, I’d try to, you know, make things a little easier.” She dropped to her knees before me and hooked her fingers into the waistband of my sweats. “Or a little harder, depending on your perspective.”
Her mouth found my cock effortlessly-- how could it not? I was a man, a man whose upper brain had little to no control over the lower one, and a man whose cock hadn’t seen a woman’s mouth for a long time. When I’d stopped being interested in Karen, she hadn’t pushed the matter, and apart from the fumbled flirtations with Tammy, I had been too noble-- or too scared-- to seek pleasure elsewhere. Tammy’s technique was fantastic, flawless even…
But my mind wasn’t on the big fake pout working up and down my shaft. My mind was on my work, my worries… on my wife, who it seemed I had only just begun to rediscover, who I suddenly missed very, very much.
“Tammy… no. Not now. Not like this.” Maybe not ever, I added silently, pushing her away.
I tucked the erection into my waistband and backed away from her, palms flashing in surrender to my higher morals. Even as I did it, I could see her temper start to boil over.
“Bobby, what the fuck,” she said, her volume rising with every word.
“Look, Tammy, I’m sorry. I just--”
“You just what?!” she shrieked. “I’m down on my knees with my mouth on your dick and you push me away? What’s wrong with you?”
“I didn’t--” I stammered, but her fuse was already lit.
“Look, Bobby. David is already gone. He left this morning. There’s nothing left for me here-- nothing but you, and I’m beginning to even question that much.” She wiped her mouth and rose to her feet. “I’m leaving tomorrow, with or without you. Either you come to me tonight, or I’m gone.”
I was left speechless as she walked away, out of my house and maybe even out of my life, and she didn’t wait for me to come up with a comeback.
♦♦♦
I started packing my suitcase.
I didn’t love Tammy. I knew I didn’t love her. If loving Tammy was the problem, then leaving Karen would have been simple, like closing a boring novel halfway through because you stopped caring whether the characters lived or died. But I hadn’t packed all of my shirts and pants, socks and boxers into a bag because I loved Tammy. I did it because I had no other choice.
The real reason I was leaving was that Karen deserved better. A real man doesn’t cheat on his wife-- doesn’t even think about doing it. I could still feel where Tammy’s hands had touched me earlier, and even though I had showered, I still didn’t feel clean. I wasn’t a man, I was a coward.
I had fucked up. I had fucked up bad.
I had just reached the top of the stairs when Karen came home.
The sound of dogs barking filled the house as the door slammed shut.
“Bobby?” Karen called. I could hear her on the landing, trying to wrangle the dogs and hang her purse on the coat hooks by the door. “Some people abandoned their dogs at the office, so I figured I’d--”
It was then that she saw me standing there at the top of the stairs, my suitcase in one hand and my car keys in the other. I hadn’t packed any of the things that really mattered to me-- my paints, my camera, my hoard of hardcovers or my italian espresso machine-- just the bare necessities, the things that I had to bring with me to make it until the comet rained fire and brimstone upon the ragged, worthless thing that my life had become.
We stood there for a while, just staring at each other, me at the top of the stairs, her there on the landing. I kept trying to gauge the expression on her face. Was she angry? Surprised? Hurt? I had finally settled on an answer-- probably all three-- when she spoke to me.
“So you finally grew the balls to do it,” she said. Her voice was calm, collected, clear-- all of the things that I had always trusted Karen to be, and none of the things I had expected.
“You… you knew?” I stammered. I might have had the high ground, but Karen definitely had the upper hand. This whole time, the hiding, the secrecy, the elaborate lengths I’d gone to keep it from her… and she’d known all along.
I was even more fucked than I had previously imagined.
“A woman always knows,” she said simply.
I watched her sink to the floor slowly, lower herself down onto the bottom step like she’d just finished running a very long race and now it was finally over. I was so sure that she was broken then, sobbing with her face in her hands as the dogs, a golden retriever, a bulldog and a black lab, all frenzied around her.
And then she proved me wrong again. When she lifted her head up and looked back at me, there was a smile on her face. The noises I had mistaken for pathetic sobbing were laughter.
What a fucking woman.
“You didn’t think I knew?” she asked, and then she was coming up the stairs at me with a look in her eyes that was half mad half hysterical. “Bobby, you’re the most obvious man I hav
e ever met-- how could you possibly think I didn’t know?”
When she reached the top of the stairs, she stood level with me, uncomfortably close and looking me dead in the eyes. I’d forgotten how tall she was.
I’d forgotten the golden tones that flickered like wild flames in her eyes.
“So, who’s idea was it?” she asked.
How was she so collected, even as I stood there with my suitcase in hand, ready to walk out the door?
“Tammy’s, I’ll take it,” she continued. “What kind of ultimatum did she give you? ‘Leave your wife or else I won’t suck you off anymore’?”
“She didn’t-- we never--”
“God, Bobby,” Karen sighed. I watched her breasts heave beneath the thin, worn fabric of her concert t-shirt-- Ozzy Osbourne, 1996. “You weren’t even fucking her? I knew you were cheating on me, but I thought you were at least enjoying it…”
She looked so goddamn alive like that, caught between anger and exasperation but filtering it all through her firecracker sense of humor and personal brand of zen. She was better off without me. I had to keep reminding myself of that. It was just so damn hard to go, with her standing there looking at me like she didn’t know whether to slit my throat or laugh in my face, but I knew I had to. I didn’t deserve a woman like that. I never had.
But when I moved to brush past her, she caught my arm.
“You can leave,” she said like a Queen talking down to a peasant. “I won’t stop you. But first, I need you to do something for me.”
“What?” I asked. God, I was on the verge of tears. She was better off without me. Whatever she wanted, I would do it, if it meant that I could just give her back what little time she had left.
“You’re going to fuck me,” she said, and I swear in that moment my heart damn near stopped. “You’re going to fuck me-- not just make love, not take to bed, but really truly fuck me-- one last time. And then you can leave. I won’t ask anything more of you. Your conscience can be clear.”
She didn’t understand at all. It wasn’t my conscience that was keeping me from leaving, it was my conscience driving me away.
Then, she kissed me, before I could tell her that I didn’t deserve the taste of her lips.
It had been so long since I’d kissed Karen properly, I’d almost forgotten how it felt, but as her mouth pressed against mine, it all came flooding back to me like juice from crushed berries rolling over my tongue.
It all came back to me, and as it did, everything else-- Karen, my own worthlessness, even the trio of rescue dogs barking and sniffing at our feet-- all but the lovely pressure of her lips against mine faded away.
Holding her against me again felt like coming home.
And then she came at me like a hurricane, the urgency of her need stripping me down and leaving me bare and restless beneath.
We slammed against the wall to hard that the framed photo of the two of us cutting the cake at our wedding crashed to the floor. The impact nearly knocking the wind out of me as she kissed me, harder and harder, only pausing for the brief moments that it took to pull our shirts over our heads. Her nails, so natural and modest compared to Tammy’s acrylic talons, dug into the skin of my chest and left deep red marks in their wake. Then, she wrapped a leg around my waist, still as flexible as ever, and suddenly I was hoisting her upward, holding her against me like we were horny twenty-somethings again instead of the parents of three twenty-somethings ourselves.
I carried her into the bedroom, stumbling clumsily and tripping over my own feet. We crashed into every obstacle in our paths along the way, the door frame, the dresser. And then finally, with the assistance of the golden retriever beneath my feet, we tumbled downward onto the bed, Tammy beneath me and my face against her breasts.
And in that moment, suddenly something clicked inside of me. The breasts that had nourished our children no longer seemed ruined, unattractive, imperfect. A wrinkle here, a stretch mark there, they were both goddesses in their own rights, asymmetrical and lovely just the same. Her nipples bloomed at the peak of each pale mountain, rosy and hard and begging to be sucked. I lashed out at one, and then the other with my tongue and she moaned so beautifully, so deep that I did it again. My fingers worked the one on the left while I used my mouth on the right. Lips, tongue, teeth all paying homage to her in rhythmic unison until I had had my fill.
God, why had I ever tried to stray?
I moved my hands downward, unbuttoning her jeans and sliding them off her legs. When I slid my hand back, caressing over the cellulite just as I had the virgin skin, I dipped my fingers past the soft patch of hair between them, then took the same fingers into my mouth when they came out wet. She tasted amazing, subtle and sweet and tart all at once like the juice of an apple against my tongue. I moved to her lips, pressing my own against them as I leveled my cock against the her dripping pussy. I wanted to prove to her how much I loved her, to show her how good she tasted while I took her over and over again.
But she pulled away, put a palm on either side of my cheek, and turned my head downward.
I could take a hint.
With a grunt of satisfaction, I settled between her thighs. I’d almost forgotten how much I’d always enjoyed eating Karen out, but that didn’t mean that I’d forgotten how. I kissed down the tender skin of her thighs from her knobby, bruised knees to her softness of her pussy lips. As I spread her folds with my fingers and licked her from bottom to top, the silken hair of her muff tickled my nose and brushed against my lips. I knew that Tammy waxed-- she never seemed to shut up about it, in fact-- but I never had the heart to tell her that I really loved a woman with an unshaven pussy. There was something so incredibly sexy about the look of it, the dark womanly curls against the narrowing V of Karen’s pale skin. A bare pussy would have looked unappetizing, childlike in comparison.
I sucked her clit into my mouth, held it there gently between my teeth and worked it over with my tongue until she was was moaning like she had on our wedding night.
And then, and only then, as I looked up at her with her juices shining off of my lips and chin, did she invite me inside of her, and I came almost instantly.
“Okay,” she said softly, curled up in my arms afterward. Her body burned hot against my skin, and I couldn’t seem to get enough of her warmth. “You can go now,” she told me.
And there it was. The last time I would ever hold her. The last time I would ever feel her skin against mine. The last time I would ever smell her hair, her breath, her neck, take in the sweetness of her lips or look into the chocolate depths of her eyes.
“I… I don’t want to,” I said slowly. “I don’t know that I can.”
She bit her bottom lip. In that moment, I was certain she was going to kick me out of the bed and out of her life.
But instead, she only pulled me closer, nuzzling against me and holding me tight.
“Then Tammy can go fuck herself,” she murmured sleepily. “You’re mine.”
That was it. That was all it took. The battle was over.
My soul was saved.
♦♦♦
Sunlight flowed through the lace curtains of my studio, casting networks of shadows and diamonds of light across the floor. Outside, Karen was playing with the dogs, her hair whipping around her in the wind. She was laughing. I could see it on her face.
I stepped back from my easel and tucked my brush behind my ear. After months of struggle and confusion and uncertainty, I was amazed that I had finally sorted it out. It was finished, thick with reds and blues, yellows and greens. At first glance, it might have looked a little simple-- just a picture of a woman, pretty but not terribly profound-- but the longer I stared at it, the more it spoke to me. A wrinkle here, an age spot there… I’d started it with such muddled intentions that I was still a little amazed that I’d managed to shape it into something with meaning.
“Didn’t know I modeling for you,” Karen said from the doorway.
I hadn’t heard her come in. Her cloth
es were filthy, mud splattered in all the places that weren’t already marred by paint stains. The dogs rushed past her and flooded inside to greet me, licking and sniffing and barking. She’d named the bulldog Patton, after the general, and the lab Poe, after the author, but the golden retriever was going by Coconut, and I was too charmed by her strange sense of appropriate dog names to question it any further.
“I don’t think I realized either,” I said. “Looks good though, doesn’t it?”
“Hmm,” she hummed. I loved the way her hips swayed as she came closer, wrapping her arms around my waist and laying a kiss on my cheek. “I don’t know-- do I really have that many wrinkles?”
I grinned. “Absolutely. But at least they’re all laugh lines.”
“They had to be. Too scared of needles-- I could never do botox. Speaking of which,” she said, tracing the letters of my Iron Maiden t-shirt, “I think Tammy must’ve taken out our mailbox this morning when she left.”
“Shame. That’s a federal offense, you know.”
We laughed. It wasn’t like we were getting mail anymore anyway.
It was a strange sensation, like coming home after a long trip away, but with every passing minute I felt like I was falling more and more in love with my wife. Her hair, dark tones broken up by streaks of silver lightning; her skin, warm and rich beneath my hands; her smell, like pine trees and salt waves and wind.
“I don’t deserve you,” I murmured, kissing her hair and breathing her in.
“You never did,” she laughed. “But I loved you anyway. What a lucky man you are, huh?”
A lucky man. I had saved my marriage with a few meager months left to enjoy it. Still, Karen was there in my arms, staying by my side, loving me like she always had...
All things considered, I was inclined to agree.
INDIA REID is a sci-fi lover, bourbon enthusiast, cerebral tart and longtime lover of all things erotic. To read more Reid, visit www.indiareid.wordpress.com.
