He reached up to cover her hands. "I want to be inside you."
She took a shaky breath. "Yes."
God, say my name again. "I've got a condom in my front pocket. Take it out."
She rose up on her knees, her skirt falling over him, but he missed the sweet warm contact. Moving back, she fished it out. "You put it on. I don't know how to."
He was losing her, losing her fast. A flush had blossomed on her cheeks. Christ, she was freaking embarrassed. His heart pounded and his hands shook as he tore open the package.
Don't leave me yet. Please don't leave me.
He almost told her he'd show her how, but the quicker he was inside her the better. She pulled off to kneel beside him as he struggled to get his pants over his hips. In his panic, he was terrified he'd lose his erection like a nervous teenager.
What had he said? Christ, what had he done wrong?
The job done, he took her hand and wrapped her fingers around his penis. "Feel how much I want you."
She squeezed but didn't stroke him the way he wanted. Maybe she was afraid of dislodging the condom.
"Come here." He cupped her nape, pulling her down for a kiss. Licking her lips, he stole inside for a touch of her tongue. "You taste so damn sweet."
She trailed a finger down his cheek; then kissed him with a light caress. "You don't have to keep complimenting me. I'm going to fuck you anyway."
Everything inside him went dead. He didn't want to cry; yet the pain sat on the back his eyeballs. He put his forehead to hers. "Then please fuck me because I can't stand this anymore."
Couldn't stand the fear, the doubt, the need. Couldn't stand her pain anymore than he could his own. The whispered words hurt his throat.
Putting her arms around him, she pulled him over. "Get on top of me. I haven't felt a man's weight in more years than I can count. I want you on me."
He moved between her legs, bracing himself on one elbow as he slid a hand beneath her skirt and found her warmth.
"Get inside me. Then I want you on me, all of you. Don't hold anything back."
He wasn't gentle or tender. He wasn't the way he wanted to be, but he gave her what she asked for. She was wet, and when he plunged inside her, her body took him much more easily than the first time. Pulling her legs to his hips, she locked her feet behind him.
"Now, Stephen. All your weight. Please."
God, finally. What's in a name, just a name? It meant everything. He settled down on her, forcing the air from her lungs. Her breath ruffled his hair like a sigh. "Is that what you want?"
"Yes." She closed her eyes, wrapped her arms around his neck and clung to him. "That ... feels ... so ... good."
He couldn't stay that way for long. Even now, her chest heaving against him, she struggled for breath. He could give her a moment more. A moment of pure bliss; a moment to enjoy the rapture on her face.
Then he put a forearm on the grass, reached down to grab her butt, and went as deep as he could. Talk about bliss. So tight, she felt like a warm hand milking him. She lifted her hips, angling higher for his next thrust.
Stroking himself with her body, he took her face in his hands. "Look at me. I want to see your eyes. I want you to see me."
She opened her eyes, giving him what he wanted. The window into her soul. He found a rhythm, not so fast that he came before he was ready but enough to start her on that sweet climb to oblivion. She bit her bottom lip. A soft moan slipped from her.
"Look at me when you come. Don't close your eyes."
"I won't." She took a breath. "I promise." Wriggling beneath him, she clutched his butt, trying to force him to a faster pace. Instead, he circled his hips, rubbing her clitoris with his body as his cock hit high and deep.
She started to pant. "Oh God, Stephen. I never came like this. Not this way. With someone inside me." She tossed her head. "Oh God, don't stop. Please don't stop."
He held her in place, forcing her to look at him. "I won't ever stop, I swear it." Never stop wanting her, never stop loving her. No matter what happened after tonight.
With a strong, hard, steady pump, he stoked her fire. He could keep up the rhythm until she flew apart. Her hands roamed from his hair to his arms to his back. Her heels dug into his butt. He wanted her crazy. He wanted her to remember how he felt inside her, to dream about him at night. A moan welled up from deep inside her. She shuddered. Her pussy pulsated around him; sucked him deeper. She bit her lip; then opened her mouth on a long, low cry. She quaked in his arms, gulping air.
She never broke eye contact.
When she cried out his name, he came with a long, blinding, star-studded release.
* * * *
It was four o'clock in the morning. Her clothes were grass-stained, her heels covered with dirt, and she smelled like come.
But she wouldn't wash his scent off. Instead, she threw everything into the back of the closet, crawled into bed beside her husband, and thought about Stephen.
"You're pretty late."
"I was a little drunk. We stopped at a coffee shop until I felt like I could drive."
"You should have called. I was worried."
"I'm sorry."
She should have felt something about all that. Shame. Guilt. Fear. Wonder that he let her get away with the lie. Something. "Well, goodnight."
"Do you want me to let you sleep in?"
"Yeah. I'll do the laundry when I get up."
"Okay. Goodnight."
The only indication that anything bothered him was the length of time before he started snoring. She clocked it at fifteen minutes. He usually fell asleep right away.
She knew she was heading toward a bad end. Adulterers always did. She didn't care. She had never experienced more passion or romance. Her fantasies had all come to life. No man had ever wanted her the way Stephen did, with his intensity, his pure need.
Only one bad moment marred the memory. When he'd asked her to touch herself. She'd thought of Virginia having her last fling. She'd thought of her husband out on the couch while she screamed in climax. Alone. All those lonely nights behind her. All the lonely nights ahead.
Stephen's lust wouldn't last forever. No man's ever did.
Still, he was hers for now. She put a hand to her face and smelled him. His scent settled like a blanket, soft, warm, and gentle. She could still feel his weight, his hardness inside. Her body throbbed with the memory.
She'd given herself this one night as a gift. Now she knew she'd have to go back. Again and again.
Until he tired of her.
* * * *
He would never tire of her. After last night, she was in his blood. He knew she would never be able to carry on an affair, not for long. She'd leave him sooner rather than later, and with a wound that would never heal as if a knife had sliced his heart cleanly in two. He would have to bear the guilt of having caused her anguish and pain.
But he'd never regret his own pain. For a night, he'd had heaven. Any torment the future offered was worth that one night with her in his arms.
CHAPTER TEN
Debbie slept until ten o'clock, an unheard of hour even for a Saturday morning. Her shower had erased all trace of Stephen's scent, but a slight tenderness, a pleasant reminder, remained between her legs.
Her husband had vacated the house in favor of the garage, the intermittent churn of the air compressor disturbing the morning quiet. In perpetual rebuild mode, his sports car might be ready for the road sometime in the next decade. She couldn't begrudge him the time, or the expense. His joy in that car was almost as great as her joy when surrounded with the pattern for a new piece of glass.
She could have joined him in the garage, he at his car, she at her glass table. But she couldn't. Not right now. Not after what she'd done last night. Strangely, sharing the same workspace seemed infinitely worse than being in the same bed.
Instead, she headed down the hall to her little office. She had to email the real Stephen. Somehow, the simple act of giving her mystery lover
that name morphed them into the same person in her mind. Stephen's caring and kindness matched with a lover's fire and passion.
Her fingers trembled as she tapped off a brief answer to his inquiry about the project she planned to work next.
He came back quickly. "Hope you had a good evening."
He couldn't possibly know how special and different last night had been. How good. How exhilarating. How terrifying. If she could, she'd do everything all over again tonight. "It was nice, thanks. And yours?"
"I enjoyed my evening very much. Thanks for asking."
They sounded as polite as she and her husband. She wanted to type as if he were the man she'd held inside her body last night. She had the need to talk, to feel, to experience the sensations all over again with words and memories. She ached to share, but knew that would be the biggest mistake of her life. All she gave him was an innocuous, "I'm glad to hear that."
"What did you do?"
Her breath stilled. Changed my life. Took an irreversible step. "Nothing much." She almost hit send; then deleted the line and stared at his question on the screen. "I did something very important. It made me feel like a new woman."
She stared at that awhile. Then deleted the two lines.
Saying anything at all was like opening up to your best friend. You plan on telling them one small thing, no details. Then once you've opened your mouth and let the first drop out, the rest gushed like a flood.
Except that with email, you could always think before you sent. You could pour your heart out; then hit close and don't save. She couldn't count the number of times she'd done that with Stephen over the past several months. Delete, delete, delete. Then dash off a two or three word reply that didn't say anything at all. If he'd actually read everything she wrote to him, he'd know every teeny-tiny intimate detail of her life.
What did she really want to tell him?
I want to change my life. I want the Stephen of last night and the Stephen of today to be the same man.
They weren't the same man, could never be the same man.
She laid her head on her arms. What did she really want? The answer was so easy. A best friend and a passionate lover in the same man.
Her husband had been her best friend for the last twenty years. Until the TV remote and her neediness had created a gulf neither of them could cross. And her lover of last night? She knew his body and his passion, but everything else about him was a mystery. Even his name. To label him her lover was a misnomer. They weren't in love. They didn't know a thing of importance about each other. It would take twenty years for him to know her as her husband did.
Her husband or her lover? Stephen was somehow the gap between them both. Respectively, they were reality, fantasy and sanity.
She had to talk to someone.
She chose sanity.
* * * *
Stephen held his head in his hands waiting for the beep announcing her next email.
His temples throbbed when it came, and his cock jumped to life. Pain and joy. Hell and heaven.
"What are you passionate about, Stephen?"
Her. Right now, that was the only answer he could find. She consumed his waking thoughts, his fantasies, his dreams, and his nightmares.
Yet he wrote the only other thing he could point a finger to. "My work."
He wasn't an architect. He didn't design homes. He merely executed someone else's vision. Still, he brought the lines and angles on a piece of paper, even a three-dimensional CAD, to life. He made a dispassionate model into a home, a refuge, a place where the cares of the world could fall away, even down to the streams of sunlight that fell through the trees onto a back deck or patio. The tile design in a lady's bathroom. The functional placement of cabinets in a cook's kitchen. He didn't do malls or office building or apartments. He specialized in home remodels.
They'd discussed his work at length, especially as to how her windows fit into the finished picture in his mind. He'd never described what he did in terms of passion.
He typed another line before he hit send. "I'm passionate about giving people the perfect sanctuary in which to recharge their batteries after life has beaten the hell out of them."
She replied in little more than a series of heartbeats. "That's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard."
And something that very few people would ever understand. Her perceptiveness awed him, though somehow he'd known all along that she felt the same way. "What are you passionate about?"
"I'm passionate about ... passion. In everything I do, everything I want, everything I think, everything I feel."
Last night, she'd taken him with that level of passion. Right down to the full weight of his body pressing the very air from her lungs.
Before he had a chance to reply, she sent him another message. "I want passion, Stephen, I want it so badly it hurts. I want it more than one time in my life. I want it over and over."
Once again, he felt her pain as she'd whispered that her husband didn't want her anymore. Her anguish ate at him then; it consumed him now. He'd wanted to hold her, love her, and take the hurt away. In the space of a few seconds between messages, she'd taken the discussion from the abstract to the deeply personal. She couldn't know what she did to him. He had the terrifying thought she might actually tell him about last night, and he didn't know what the hell he'd say. He'd never considered that she'd turn him into her confidante. She never had before, except inadvertently.
Yet a part of him wanted to know every detail, every thought, what she'd felt in his arms, what she wanted, what she needed. Last night, he'd felt her passion, but he'd also felt her indecision, her fear. Felt being the operative word.
If he gave her the slightest urging, would she tell him the truth?
What if she wanted to keep "Stephen" as her secret once-a-week lover? What if she said she'd never leave her husband? He couldn't stand emailing her as if he were a girlfriend like Stacy; then fucking her on weekends, and knowing all the while that she slept every night beside her husband.
Christ, on second thought, and third, he didn't want to know what she was thinking.
He wasn't sure he could survive the knowledge. Or the aftermath when she finally realized exactly who she'd made love with last night.
His fingers trembled over the words he typed. "I'm sure you'll have that more than once in a lifetime, Debbie."
He waited, heart pounding, eyes aching. Don't tell me about your husband, don't tell me about your lover. Don't make me advise you when I have too much stake in the choice you make. He felt like he'd waited forever when the beep finally came.
"You're right. Sorry for dumping on you."
He read her regret, knew she'd changed her mind, and God forgive him for his relief. "You didn't dump on me." He bent his head, closed his eyes a moment, and after a deep breath, resumed his typing. "I've another client interested in some glass work. She's got a panel of three windows in a hallway that overlooks her atrium. Got any ideas?"
With her reply of, "Let me meditate on it, Stephen," he knew the intimate moment was lost.
He could only hope he hadn't committed a royal fuck-up.
* * * *
This time, she was waiting for the invitation. Praying for it, actually.
It came on Monday, as if he'd mailed it first thing Saturday morning. Her husband had left the envelope lying on the kitchen table, separate from the bills and grocery store flyers.
"Another broker invite?" He popped the seal on a vacuum-packed bottle of roasted peanuts; then dribbled a few into his mouth.
What if she told him the envelope in her hand was an invitation from her lover? Would he ask her not to go or would he cover his ears like one of those monkeys? Hear no evil, see no evil. She'd crawled into the house at four o'clock in the morning smelling of another man's come, and he hadn't even gotten mad. Was that denial or lack of caring? Just how long had he been doing that, denying that something had died in their marriage, died in him? She could fill a dumpster with the n
umber of times she'd asked him what was bothering him and he'd answered with the same word: nothing. She'd asked for marriage counseling. He'd refused. She'd asked him to see someone. He'd said he didn't need a shrink. How could you help a man who wouldn't even admit there was a problem?
Her stomach tightened; then churned with helplessness. She'd run out of ideas a long time ago, exhausted all the options. She didn't know how to fix things between them. She suspected they'd gone past the ability to repair their marriage.
What she'd done on Friday night was proof of that. So was the fact that she knew she'd go back again. And again.
She turned the envelope over in her hand. Her skin tingled as if an electric current raced from her head to her toes. "Yeah. Probably another broker invitation."
He didn't ask why she was taking it to her office as she walked away.
See no evil, hear no evil.
"I'm going to check my emails before I start dinner," she called out as she headed down the hall. In her office, she booted up; then dialed in, knowing her husband would expect the tell-tale sound of the connection.
Trembling all over, she ripped the envelope sideways. The invitation slid out onto her desk. Raising it, she drew a deep breath. His aftershave still lingered. On the inside, he'd written "Friday" in capital letters. The wait would kill her. She wanted him now, tonight. Of course, she had to be up early for work the next day.
Friday would actually be perfect. Stacy could do her nails, and she could make an appointment at the salon. She could even pick up something new to wear. New lingerie. Something incredibly daring, like crotchless panties. Or the edible kind.
She glanced at the screen as the download finished. Stephen had sent her a note.
Stephen. She'd almost told him everything. She'd been so close. Last night, she'd had the email all written out, everything she'd felt and done, even down to the fact that she'd fantasized about him, too, that she'd named her mystery lover after him. She'd experienced the catharsis of having bared her soul. Then the relief of hitting the delete key.
The Sex Club Page 8
