Then we came to a photo of Sophia in a tattered T-shirt and yellow bikini bottom, her hair wet, matted, spread like tendrils on her shoulders, the glint in her blue eyes a match for the topaz sea behind her. It was Puerto Rico, she explained, ‘After Caz and I’s third getting-back-together.’
When Caz’s mother removed the photo from under the plastic sheeting and ran her finger along the image, over Sophia’s tits, her legs, her feet, I was so aroused that I downed my glass of wine in a gulp. My lips tingled. I licked them, tasting Sophia’s lipstick from earlier in the evening.
Sophia flipped through the album and re-crossed her legs, causing Caz’s mother to slide over on the coffee table to make room for that beautiful leg, and when Caz’s mother complimented the strappy leather shoes, I felt my cock surge and stiffen so awkwardly that I almost laughed at my visible hard-on.
As we left, woozy from cheap wine and the long dizzy trip on memory lane, Caz’s mother lay her hands on our shoulders like she was granting a benediction. Her eyes were wet. ‘Something else, I tell you, having you both in my house, at the same time,’ Caz’s mother said. ‘You were the closest to him, in your separate ways, and between the two of you, my God, in my living room, I felt he was with us.’
As her door closed behind us, I thought of the word ‘nostalgia’: how an instructor in college explained that it is formed from two Greek words meaning “homecoming” and “ache” and when I looked at Sophia she was sobbing.
I let her cry and regain her composure. She recovered, sniffling and dabbing her mascara, she apologized. I told her emotions were nothing to feel sorry for. I put my arms on her hips.
We were barely around the corner before we stopped and fell into another hug. Then, unrestrained, we kissed, pressed up against an apartment building. From a window above our heads somebody shouted, ‘Get a room!’ Without looking to see who was complaining, Sophia chuckled. She seemed at home, or at peace, with me, now.
She poked her tongue out as she unknotted my tie, draping it around my neck like a scarf. Her fingers slid through my shirt, her nails scratching my chest. I traced the lilac scent up her neck, gliding my finger along her fine-boned jaw line. Her thin figure felt like the taut body of a twenty-year old as we fumbled about with the awkwardness of virgins. We agreed we had no patience for Thai food or even for a restaurant.
Hand in hand, we headed westbound, practically running, down a sloping sidewalk, past shuttered storefronts, through a desolate industrial zone, stopping at each Don’t Walk sign and kissing, hurrying on again until we were safely inside Astoria Park.
We found a bench. Sophia rested her head on my shoulder, slipping her hand snugly inside my pant leg.
Above our heads, we were protected by a ceiling of dark branches. The park air was wafted by the salt scent of the East River. The river’s black waves reflected the white lights of the Triboro Bridge. Across the river, Manhattan high-rises glimmered. The Chrysler Building’s bullet-shaped crown towered over the other skyscrapers and gave off a white light so intense and so immediate that it seemed we could reach out and touch the building itself.
For a little while, we discussed Caz’s mother, the streets of Astoria, growing up in New York City as a teenager. At one point, I asked Sophia if she felt herself, as I did, feeling lighter, lighter on the inside. ‘Like a frozen chunk of grief is melting,’ I said, ‘Like it’s been melting since you first reached out to me online.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I need that chunk melted, gone. I know I don’t want it in me, in my life, any more.’ The delicate rise of her cheeks was partly revealed by the glow of the park lamp. I told her it had been a long time carrying this ice inside and that nothing since the day of Caz’s cremation had made that iciness go away. ‘It didn’t help,’ I said, ‘That no one who came to the funeral could relate. Everyone was sad, hurt, all that. But it wasn’t till your e-mails that I knew you got it at the same level I did. Your message started this melting sensation.’
‘Well, I relate. I relate to how you put it,’ she said. ‘Melting.’
We sat there speechless for a long while. Then we kissed, taking languid turns cupping each other’s face. She seemed drowsy so I folded my jacket into a makeshift pillow for her head and invited her to lay down, fixing her long legs across my lap, but soon after she was at ease, she pulled me down to her, till we were face to face. She ran her fingers through my hair. I snaked my arm around her.
As we lay stretched out on the bench, we read the shapes of animals in the patterns of white clouds in the night sky, and deciphered letters of the alphabet from the curved branches and leaves veined in the moonlight. I embraced her protectively. As I snuggled closer, the rapping of my belt buckle against the bench made us chuckle and added a note of playfulness. I pulled my belt off and we took turns rapping its buckle against the back of the bench.
I caressed her breasts through the raw silk of her blouse, teasingly, until she was writhing and grinning and so aroused that she bit my chin and tugged at my shirt collar. She plunged her tongue into my ear. The flicks of her tongue against my ear roused me. Keeping my arm locked around her, I reached under her skirt, I slowly drew down her panties. She gracefully wiggled free of them, kicking them off herself, her foot dropping the panties onto the dark pavement near our feet.
Grabbing hold of my left wrist, she positioned my left hand just-so under her skirt. Then she moved my hand over her sex, instructively, showing me exactly how and where I should touch her.
When she let go of my hand, I touched her as she’d shown me, touching between her legs, cautiously, grazing her pussy with my forefinger. Gently, with wilful tenderness, I pressed my finger into the folds of her pussy. Her legs tightened around my arm so that I was just barely able to pleasure her, fingering upwards and downwards, slowly, on her clit, kissing her on the mouth as I did, and she returned my kisses, gripping my hair so tightly it stung.
I worked my finger busily between her legs, up, and slowly down, and then quickly up, in circles, in, around, and up again, sliding, warmly, and then hotly, burning, melting, as the river’s brisk wind blew over us.
I wanted her to cum, out here, in this park; I got up off the bench and knelt on the hard concrete.
She shifted around and faced me, placing her spike-heeled feet on my shoulders.
I lowered my face underneath her skirt, letting my tongue probe and lap the fleshy nub of her snatch. Her sex swelled against my tongue. She dug her heels into my shoulders, writhing, pressing herself into me, and, using my shoulders for footing, she stretched and quivered, quivered against my licking lips and bucked, madly, bucking as I kept on licking. I held her hips firmly and my tongue-tip worked an easy, wet up-and-down tempo on her clit, and as she moaned loudly my free hand reached up to find her hand, until, as I licked and lapped and salved her swollen pussy, her cries pierced the quiet, sounding deep into Astoria Park.
When I woke, freezing cold, Sophia was snoring into my chest. I thought we were in some forest, in a dream, of hers or of mine I couldn’t quite tell. Rap music blared through the trees behind us – music – as cars passed along the side roads that bordered the park. I roused Sophia and we got off the bench, weary, contented, self-conscious. She retrieved her panties from the ground as we walked, and she fisted them and pressed them to her chest, giggling, before tossing them into a garbage bin.
We strolled the park’s promenade. She pointed out the decrepit wall near the water and narrated how she and Caz and their gang used to sit out there on nights in hot summers, their stereos plugged into the base of the park’s many black lamps.
We pointed across the river to Manhattan and reminisced about clubs and bars and restaurants from the late eighties. As it grew colder, she pulled my sports jacket more tightly over her thin shoulders. Shivering, she suggested we head over to the house of her cousin who was moving. ‘They’re gone to the new house. I have their keys.’
The walk was quick, but seemed to go on for ever; one of those walks in the company of someone whom we never expected to walk with; a slow walk in which fate punctuates our lives and urges us to pay attention, so much so that we feel the moment slipping from our lives even as we unfold within its magic.
I wanted to ask Sophia if she felt this way but the words weren’t there.
The side guest room in her cousin’s house was the only one furnished: a queen-sized bed with a worn, red duvet. We raided their fridge and opened up beers and kicked off our shoes, noshing on chips. She propped up pillows on the bed and reclined, her lean elbows poking out. I massaged her feet, and we fell, again, hand in hand, into that mostly wordless space we’d been immersed in. I wanted to ask her about her first marriage, her kids, her divorce, her new husband, and I wanted her to ask me about my marriage, my divorce, my single life. Yet those parts of our pasts, which had nothing to do with Caz, would have seemed like unwelcome guests so we let the silence absorb us.
I cupped her right foot and felt myself stirring. She slipped her foot from my grip and sat up and knelt on the bed, waddling on her knees across the mattress as she held out her beer. I took her beer from her and she unbuttoned my shirt. We undressed in slow motion, like we were showing ourselves how we could fool time, pausing now and then and laying back down and kissing, half-dressed, half-naked, as if with each touch a healing, the melting, was lightening the weight of our bodies.
I kissed her shoulders. She licked my Adam’s apple.
I straightened her bra. She playfully snapped the elastic band of my briefs.
I unzipped her skirt and folded it playfully over my arm, like a waiter. She slipped my grey socks over her own feet and kept them both on like that, baggy men’s socks on her slender feminine feet, wiggling her toes under the oversized fabric.
She tucked her hand under my undershirt, running her open palms in speedy circles until my nipples burned and hardened.
‘F-O-C,’ she whispered, cryptically, and we grabbed our beers and toasted, ‘The lightness.’
As if to shake off any creeping sadness, she stood up on the mattress and kicked her right leg into the air before tumbling forward in laughter. She sneezed out beer suds. We toasted. ‘A Rockette impression?’ I asked, catching her. ‘You have the legs for it.’
‘Help me. A Rockette cannot tumble off her stage.’
I stood next to her on the bed and couldn’t not laugh at the sight of my baggy socks drooping on her feet.
As she leaned into me, she kicked up one leg, then kicked the other, swaying with verve as I egged her on, and on, and she alternately swung her lovely tanned legs, right, left, right again, each flesh-coloured blur streaking up into the dark air in front of us, her kicks like a kind of defiant joy, and I thought of the word euphoria and its Greek origins in ecstasy, in fertility, in aliveness. I remarked how amazing it is to be alive.
‘I was thirty-three and didn’t realize I was alive. Alive,’ she said. ‘Until I got that phone call that Caz had passed.’ She swallowed hard and bit into my shoulder and licked my skin and then bit me again. We hugged. We curled onto the mattress, in a spoon position, and lay clamped in a tense hug, silent, as if we wanted to let the natural noise of our breathing speak for how alive we felt.
I woke to a sensation of wet tickles below my waist. I saw Sophia’s blue eyes in the dark. Her knuckles grazed my belly; she suckled the crown of my cock.
I flinched and I sat up. My lips found her breasts. I tongued her nipples until she writhed, my stiffened cock slipping from her mouth as she squealed.
Barely touching her skin, I ran my hand up and down her legs, my forefingers grazing her pubic hair, tracing letters on her skin while she reached back and drew her arm around my hip, squeezing my bottom, poking her forefinger straight into the snug cleft in my ass, and deeper, causing a wicked clench which sent spasms of pleasure down my back, into my balls and up the shaft of my cock. She tugged at my hardened cock and then sucked it again with a greedy tenderness, lapping and salving me.
Her hot glissando puckered over my engorged crown and the more clearly I heard that repeated pocking sound from her wet mouth, the harder I became. This gliding of her tongue on my shaft alternated so sweetly with the sound of her breaths that just as I thought I was getting a grip on my pleasure, I came, ejaculating in thick jets. She fisted my cock, her blue eyes staring directly up into mine; a gaze like a command, an impatient intimacy, and as she pumped and I emptied all I had, we sank down onto the mattress.
I closed my eyes, my face pressed into her backside, as my vague half-dreams were perfumed by the sheer surprise of her presence; this warm odour of her sweaty skin against mine.
When I woke, I gathered her blonde hair off her neck and ran a thousand kisses up and down her neck, onto her shoulder, down her arm. We shifted into a missionary position.
Her eyes were so bright blue in the dark that she looked like a pagan goddess in a jewelled fresco. Our legs coiled around each other and my cock burrowed, slipping into her pussy and blooming like a flower of fire.
We fucked with an athletic insistent speed that surprised us so much that we barely caught our breath. ‘This is the melting,’ she said, kissing me, biting my chin. ‘Like puddles.’
Up and down, she shifted her hips and sometimes paused, paused and held my cock deeply inside her as we kissed, her thin arms up over her head like she was floating on a pool.
Occasionally she pulled at my hair to make me quicken my pace. Then she squirmed free of me entirely and said we ought to go harder. ‘We have to go harder.’
She pulled a small tube from her pocketbook and leaped back on the bed. She tugged at my hair again, not so playfully. Her fixed expression had a determined, deliberate air. ‘I want to feel more,’ she said. ‘Feel all of it melt off me.’
As Sophia gripped the tube of lubricant, I watched. She turned away and wiggled into a comfortable doggy position, propping pillows under her stomach. Her shoulders hunched.
Her face quietly rested on a pillow, one flinty blue eye staring back up at me with a girlish, impatient anticipation. I took in the view of her ass. I brushed aside the impulse to make a joke about Greek love. She was grinning, though, as if she knew what I might be thinking.
‘It’s okay,’ she said, raising her ass. ‘Go.’
‘I have never –’ I said.
‘Go,’ she said. She reached back and squeezed a dollop of the lubricant into my hand, and reaching back further, she rubbed the excess cream onto my cock, her fine fingers stroking my engorged hard-on, her fingernails grazing my balls.
I lubed my hand. The tight sensation of my greasy finger in her snug hole, there, prying into the cleft of her ass, was so raw that my cock surged, spilling a thin thread of silvery pre-cum on the small of her back. I rubbed more of her lubricant on my hand and onto my cock before guiding my cock forward, pressing myself slowly and firmly into her ass.
Her sock-clad feet brushed my calves as we moved and rocked, thrusting and moaning in counterpoint, the burning smack of our flesh rippling regularly between our legs, building an aggressive fuck-fuck-fuck rhythm that almost dissolved the magnetic glow that had radiated between us all night. Sophia tightened her hold on the headboard. As her ass cheeks pulsed and clenched around my cock, the sensation felt like the pressure of balloons made of fine spun silk.
She pushed back insistently into me, onto me. I thrust myself harder, forward and forward, in and out again, in perfect synch, the headboard banging violently against the bare wall, knocking a stray nail out onto the pillow beside Sophia.
‘Hold on to my hair,’ she said, ‘Go.’ I clenched a fistful of her hair like a rein as we moved. She laughed approval, her head tugged backwards as I fucked into her, forward and back.
She reached back and slapped my thighs until they stung; stinging slaps on my thighs. My thighs felt as hard as concre
te; hard as my warmly greased cock drove into her soft ass, while her quick hand-slaps to my thighs insisted on more speed, more stamina, more go. I thought to hold my cock in there but her back and forth movements were too rapid.
My balls ached from the pressure and movement. I sped up. I let go of her hair, and, with my arms free, my lower back aching, I pumped in and out of her, reeling. Her blonde hair was mussed and swayed over her face and we beat time on a stranger’s bed in a Queens night I would never forget. And maybe, somehow, also never quite remember, at least not as vividly as the generous grip of her long hand around my cock, and that feeling of a teasingly trickling flame as she stroked me until I was even harder, burning, engorged to the point of bursting, and then, after stroking me, how she pulled my rigid, tingling cock nearer her ass, her concentrated face, her tousled hair, her nose – Sophia – profiled in the room’s dim light as we were melting into each other, slickly so, soaring, cruising, in tempo, and a warm necessary pleasure churning in my balls hitting a crescendo just as she quivered, quivered and buckled, hugging the pillow, her shoulders and tits shuddering violently as I came too, the heat of the flood melting ice inside and ice outside, leaving us in groans, shocked moans, desperate whimpering, like wounded animals, and the last dollops of cum dripped from me, into her, and over-spilled on the red duvet, my breathless panting drowned in the glassy cadence of her cries.
That was most of what I remember from our fucking.
Then I remember it wasn’t morning or night. Blue light was leaking through the blinds over the bed.
Sophia was showering; she had cleaned up our beers, thrown away the chips, folded the duvet. I dressed, easing my aching balls into my underwear. I sat in the bed and listened to the shower turning off. Sophia emerged and waved from a distance while I watched her dress.
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