by Jorja Tabu
All images and text Copyright 2011. All rights reserved by the author. Unauthorized reproduction or works derived therein are impermissible under US Copyright law. Reprint part or all of text is only legally viable with author’s expressed permission.
WETTER
A CONTEMPORARY EROTIC ROMANCE
BY
JORJA TABU
Day One
The first time she saw him, he was leaning over the broken water sculpture Randall had insisted they buy for their ninth anniversary. It was shaped like the body of a woman, lean and athletic; her hair was twisted into the leaves of the laurel tree she clung to, a coy smile on her bronze mouth. “She looks like you, seducing me,” Randall had whispered, and although Lena had never agreed to this mixed sentiment, she’d nodded and smiled just the same. That was before he was tenured, and after she’d realized her poetry wasn’t good enough to publish; they lived off of next to nothing, but bigger things were always around the corner. It meant they weren’t able to take that train trip to San Francisco, but she’d always known Randall hadn’t wanted to go anyway.
And Randall usually got his way, somehow. Lena didn’t even mind, most of the time.
The boy was brown. Dark as walnut, or the lifeless bronze he was bent over, his body tidily tucked into a huge cotton t-shirt and some board shorts with just a sliver of skin showing where they parted company in back. He was brown, and massive.
“Wow,” Lena said. “How tall are you?”
He stood up and pushed his glasses back along his nose; they were boxy, unflattering, but couldn’t hide how lovely his eyes were. A lighter shade than the skin around them—almost gold. Long lashes. His lips were full, his cheekbones high. She couldn’t begin to guess what ethnicity might have all these features. Tongan-Iranian-Jewish. German-Hindi-Somali. Who knew. Randall would’ve laughed at her curiosity, her embarrassing lack of political correctness.
“Six four,” he said, and his voice was soft, so soft. He pushed his glasses up again. It wasn’t only his height that made his size so imposing, but she could hardly ask his weight; all the same, he must’ve been two-forty, and most of it solid muscle. He looked like a line-backer, except for his chunky glasses and slapped together surf bum clothes, not to mention the almost acute shyness that made him avoid her curious gaze. He was even bare foot. “I’m sorry,” he said after another moment, and stared down at the statue. “I was trying to set it up so it would run again.”
“It’s been broken since we got it,” Lena said, shrugging and walking towards him. He took two steps backwards, and she instinctually stopped moving; he was like a deer, she thought, ready to jump away at the first sign of danger. Why would she be dangerous? “Don’t worry about it. Unless you’ve got some deal worked out with Randall, about a discount in the rent or something?” He shook his head.
“No, he just gave me the key this morning. I saw it and…I thought it must have been really beautiful when it was working.” They weren’t almost gold--they were gold. She caught herself staring, and shook it off.
“Wouldn’t know,” Lena said, smiling. Everything about his manner and his voice screamed aloofness, but also gentleness. It seemed such a contradiction with his size. “It would be quite something to see out of your window, I guess.”
He was the new tenant; Randall was forever renting out the guest house behind the garden to new and interesting students and vagrants and whomever--the garden house, he called it, almost as if that would hide its first unfulfilled purpose. The boarders never stayed long, but were usually nice enough not to leave a mess; none had tried to fix the fountain before. He adjusted his posture so that he was now another foot from her, trying to seem polite while moving further away. She took a deep breath and another step towards him.
Randall would’ve laughed at that, too.
Lena couldn’t help herself. She was like that with wounded animals, lonely people. Everybody. “You’d try to give the abominable snowman hot chocolate, lady,” Randall said once when she’d brought home yet another stray cat. Lena just knew when things had been hurt, and when they needed help. And no matter how many steps this big kid took away from her, she could see it in his golden eyes.
He was scared of being near someone, because he’d been hurt. By whom, or how or why, she did not know, but she was sure he wasn’t going to get better by hiding in the guest house behind the broken fountain. “Let’s have lunch,” she said, surprising herself as well as the boy. “What’s your name? Do you like tuna fish?”
“Jordan,” he said quietly, “and I do like tuna, but I…”
“You don’t want to have lunch with your landlady,” Lena smiled, and then cocked her head. “But you’re obviously a student, so you probably don’t have a lot to eat…Why don’t you take a chance? I won’t even make you talk that much, promise.”
“It’s okay,” he said, smiling now too, and it was the goofy, cobbled together smile of someone who was amused but not used to showing it. “I’ll eat inside. I should finish unpacking anyway.”
“If you’re sure,” Lena said, and took another step back from him. He nodded, and she tried to smile in her most endearing way. “What’s your major?” She asked, as she quietly observed him. He looked up at her one more time with the same hesitant smile.
“It’s hard to explain,” he said, and pushed his glasses up on his nose. They weren’t able to hide how beautiful he was. “I study tears--well, I study oceanography, and the contents of the ocean...”
“Are you a philosophy major or something?” Lena stayed where she was, fascinated.
“No, I studied marine science before I came here...Now I study chemistry.” He shrugged. “It can be very hard to explain,” he said again, and she nodded.
“What kinds of papers do you write?” She couldn’t help herself; she didn’t want to stop talking to him. And in spite of what he said, he didn’t actually appear in a hurry to walk away. “How many tears are in the ocean?”
“That would be a beautiful title,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe one day.” They stood for a minute, neither of them wanting to leave, and neither of them knowing what to say. Finally, he waved and walked towards the garden house, as if he really were going to unpack, and she went back into the house, careful not to look over her shoulder.
Two hours later, he was still out there, tinkering with the fountain. She watched him from behind the curtain in the kitchen for another one, marking the slow movement of his muscle beneath the cotton shirt, and shook her head at herself.
That night she dreamed about him. They were under water, the eerie blue rushing around them as he stepped confidently forward and reached out to take her hand. He was naked, his massive body showered with scattered light from above, his golden eyes beaming down at her. “Come with me,” he said, the water carrying his gentle voice strait to her ears, the bubbles floating away above them bursting into prisms under the sun. She reached out and took his hand.
And that was when she knew she had to have The Talk with Randall. That was when she knew she had to have him.
Day Two
“Really?” Randall made a cloudy face, like he always did when he thought Lena wanted something stupid, or irresponsible, or childish. “With that boy? That boy?”
“Shut up, Randall,” Lena sighed, immediately embarrassed. “Never mind.”
“No, not never mind,” Randall said, putting his papers down and looking at her over the top of his glasses. “You really think this is what you want? I mean, we’ve got about a hundred horny undergrads wanting in your panties every semester, why the hell do you want this boy? This boy, of all potentials, after ten years?”
Lena knew what he was really asking. He was really asking how he couldn’t
have known what Lena wanted, after all this time. He felt deceived, tricked; some aspect of his lover had gotten away from his constant, loving but insidious control.
“I don’t know,” Lena said, trying to concentrate on the vegetables she was chopping up. “Why do you fuck the girls you do? I don’t know.”
“I fuck them because it’s fun. Because they’re fun--because they can carry on a conversation, and they aren’t built like a mountain range—they’re soft and small and sweet and excited. They’re girls, though. That’s the thing.” Randall was always careful to preserve that distinction; his wife, Lena, was a woman. His conquests, which she’d so graciously acquiesced to his having many years ago, were just trifles, mere girls.
Like Lena had been, when they’d first met in a poetry seminar, seventeen years ago.
A mere trifle. Just another girl.
“Well, you’ve always said when I wanted to follow your stellar example, the door was open.” She met his eyes. “And after your myriad affairs, it’s about time I had one of my own, right?”
“I guess I’d been waiting for you to find someone you wanted to fuck but…I’ve been saying this for what, ten years, and that…that great big nerd? That guy?”
“You are such a snob, Randy,” Lena snapped. “Isn’t that what you called me, too, when you first wanted to start this whole polyamourous, whatever-it-is thing you’ve got going on with Sarah and Ling? You called me a nerd because I wanted monogamy. And now here we are, and it’s the same insult you’re throwing at this poor kid.”
“Holy shit. Is this some kind of elaborate pity fuck? Because really, honey, that is not a good reason to put a dick in you.”
“Holy shit yourself, Randall.” Lena put down the knife and met his smug gaze. “Do you think I’m still the cuddly little twenty two year old you made cool? Do you think I‘m that pathetic--I need to find a way to feel good about myself?”
“Sometimes,” Randall said coldly. He always got like this when they disagreed; Lena knew the drill. It was so fake--how much he said he valued freedom, and then deprived her of it. “And then sometimes I just think you’re always going to be a thwarted poet, and you will occasionally want to do ridiculous shit because I held you back from your true love.”
“You’re a real asshole sometimes, you know that?” Lena watched him, but put the knife down. She knew it. She’d always known it was all talk, when it came down to it.
It’s no big deal Lena, when you find someone you like you can be with them, too.
You make everything so serious. Don’t you know how much I love you?
Just because I have sex with someone else, doesn’t mean I don’t love you, Lena.
“Yes,” Randy said, relenting a little bit. “But I just…I just can’t believe what I’m hearing. Really? That big dorky kid? He’s the lucky winner?”
“Well, maybe he doesn’t think so,” Lena said carefully, remembering him backing away from her. Nothing about him said he wanted a lover of any kind, let alone a thirty eight year old married landlady. But who can tell?
“Are you crazy?” Randy sized her up. “No one could refuse you.” Flattery, then sex. And then, suddenly, Lena would find she didn’t want that trip to San Francisco after all. Or her Master’s. Or children.
It was always this way. She squinted at her husband’s handsome face.
Her libido had always been her downfall, really.
“You’re not saying yes,” Lena said slowly, looking back at him. Randall’s fast tempo in arguments and temperament had never made sense to her. She still had goosebumps from their argument, her stomach was still churning. “You’re trying to change the subject.”
“If this is the lover you want, of all the lovers you could choose, so be it,” Randy said with an affected wave of the hand. “At least we don’t have to worry about getting him tested. You know he’s never had sex before.”
“You’re so cruel,” Lena said, staring at him.
“No,” Randy said, standing up and walking over to take her hands in his own. “I’ve just always been a bit more practical than you. I see things for what they really are.”
“You make things what you want them to be,” Lena said darkly. “It’s not the same thing.” She pulled her hands back and backed away from the dinner they’d been making; she needed a moment to rest in the bedroom, curled up with her thoughts.
“Don’t fuck him,” Randall said, dropping all pretense of compromise and meeting her eyes. “Please. Let me find you somebody who’s not going to sue us because they live on our property and we’re weirdo predators, or something--come on, you know this is not a good idea, right?” He lifted her chin to look at him, but she couldn’t. He sighed. “I’ll find you somebody, Lena. But...Don’t fuck the dork in the garden house, please. It’ll get messy.”
“If you say so,” she whispered, and wrapped her arms tighter around herself as she left the kitchen and lay down on the bed.
“I’m going to call the Merchants,” Randy called after her. Lena’d forgotten why they were bothering to make dinner in the first place; the next door neighbors were coming over this evening, bringing their son and “a few friends,” as Randall put it. She didn’t know what that meant, except to say that she wasn’t in the mood.
All the same, she knew Randy was probably right. She knew the boy had never been touched—willingly, at least—by someone else; there was just that tell-tale quirk to the way he held his head, the awkwardness. Just something. Whatever it was, she knew he wasn’t a likely candidate to lose his innocence with a woman so much older—and ruined, she thought, resignedly going over the likely events of the evening—than he.
What if he came to the party, after Randy brought out his typical professor act--complete with rants on how boring and archaic monogamy was, and how everyone should just fuck--ha ha ha, she thought dryly, the Merchants always got a big kick out of how often Randy said fuck...What if he saw Lena after she’d had too much to drink, and one of Randy’s insipid co-eds was nibbling on her toes again?
She shivered. Two years ago, Randy’d managed to arrange a regretful evening wherein Lena had been the drunken recipient of one of his girlfriend’s attentions.
It horrified her, the idea of the boy seeing something like that, so she tried not to think about it any more, and realized Randall was watching her from the doorway. “I love you,” he said, watching Lena return his gaze. “I hope you know that’s never going to change, no matter what else does.”
“I know,” Lena sighed. “Well, I know you still think you do, anyway.”
“Who’s cruel now?” Randy came and sat on the bed, looking in to her eyes with some genuine sadness. “I know this hasn’t always been easy, but…I do love you. And I think we belong together.”
“I love you too,” Lena said slowly. Randall reached over to run a finger along her jawline, letting his thumb sweep gently along her cheek. Lena knew what he would want now, and in spite of her anger, her reservations, and her ambivalence, her body stirred. It wanted it too.
“Let me, please?” Lena looked into Randy’s eyes, and saw the hunger there. She obediently began peeling her clothes off. Even though she was thirty eight, her body was lean and fit. Her breasts rode high on her ribcage, full but still perky, and her ass was exactly two perfect handfuls. She suspected this had as much to do with Randall’s continued infatuation with her as anything else. Lena saw nothing special about her figure, but she knew that others did. Randall was the only one who’d made her body hum with pleasure, however, and she had artfully mastered multiple orgasms under his careful tutelage. Her back began to arch as Randy’s hands slipped over the band of her jeans and began to pull them down over her hips. Her pussy lips swelled as she felt the hot breath of her husband tickle her ear, before sliding down her throat and working on her nipples.
When Lena opened her eyes again, she realized the windows were all wide open, and it was broad day light. Randy knew she hated that, but he was always pushing to be more adv
enturous…Leave the curtains open, let them stare if they wanted to…
And this time, of all times, there was someone there. Staring.
The boy was clearly just back from some last minute grocery shopping. He clutched the bag against his chest, his mouth open wide; he’d stopped in mid stride, halfway through the backyard before he’d seen them. Randy’s back was to him; he had no idea that his desired audience had finally arrived. Instead, he nuzzled the strip of pubic hair that lead down to Lena’s pussy and blew hot breath over her bare lips. Lena’s jeans were a puddle on the floor.
“Randy,” Lena protested weakly, wanting to protect both the boy and her husband. “Randy, don’t—“
“For Christ’s sake,” hissed Randy, impatient down below her, roughly sticking a finger inside as he nipped Lena’s thigh. “Just lay there and cum like my little wifey, okay? Just let me do what I want.”
