by Violet Blue
The old woman upstairs continued to hoot over and over like an exotic, tropical bird, “Fräulein!”
An elderly man emerged from the old folk’s home with two blue parakeets in a white cage. Then another man, about forty-five, strolled across my view of the gentleman with the birds. A little white and brown dog trotted along next to him. They looked pleased on this cool afternoon, taking their time on their walk. The man looked up into the trees with his hands in the pockets of his khaki shorts as the dog familiarized himself with scents along the ground.
Only in the last few years had my attention been directed to older men. Call it a daddy complex, maturity, or aggravation with the inattentiveness and lack of appreciation of the men in my own generation. Older men seem to respect the value of youth, especially that of women. I studied him closely.
I liked his gray hair, slightly grown out and mussed, his slow casual pace, his shape that was big, but solid. I watched his progress through the park and to the street where an automobile from Holland pulled up to the sidewalk and inquired for directions. He threw his hands up in apologetic ignorance.
“I am a tourist,” he said in German with an accent I couldn’t place.
The car drove off and he continued down the cobblestone sidewalk. Just as another son of the African woman toppled from a bike on which he’d been circling around the park, I rose and brushed the sand off the back of my skirt. The little boy’s mother hurried to him in a sweep of bright fabrics. I left her attending to him crying on the ground from a scraped knee. The cling and clang of ceramic dishware at the Café Einstein followed me out of the park.
I’d been reading my new book by Anaïs Nin, recently stocked in the English section at the local bookstore, so I was feeling adventurous and silly. I was also already warm between my legs from her story of a Hungarian baron playing with two girls in the bed of his hotel room. Playing hide and seek with his hard penis under the bedsheets and gazing under their flowing skirts during their roughhousing.
I decided I would follow the man with the dog.
I kept a safe distance down Lindenplatz, then stopped and pretended to dig for something in my bag when the man paused to admire a fountain on the edge of the marketplace. The dog braced himself against the bronze sculpture with his front paws and lapped at the falling water with a flicking, pink tongue.
At the entrance to the marketplace, I again slowed when he stopped to look through the window of a wine shop. I followed him all the way to Dom Keller, one of my favorite student bars. We took seats outside at separate but nearby tables underneath Bitburger umbrellas.
I opened my book flat against the table, hiding the title. I didn’t read it, but kept my attention on the man sipping a glass of beer and asking the waiter for water for his dog. I wondered what his story was; why he was alone, why he was in the city, and how I could make contact with him.
I imagined he could see under my table from where he sat, just a few feet away. I had a wild urge to spread my legs and show him how excited I was. I felt that just his eyes resting on me would somehow release the unbearable pressure building up with no outlet.
Germans by nature are a reserved people. Rarely was I aware of men looking at me. If they did, they hid it well. It wasn’t like in America where the stares were hungry and uninhibited. There I always knew I had been seen, knew I was alive. It had been so long. I wasn’t sure what it was about him that gave me the idea he could change this, but my craving was nearly intolerable. The ice cubes in my water shifted and clinked as they melted in the glass.
Just before I was about to pull my old “my lighter doesn’t work” scheme and ask him for his, a group of five university students arrived at the bar and scanned for a free place to sit. It was midday and every table was occupied. The man and I were the only ones alone at tables for four or five people.
Before I could speak up, he did.
The dog stood up when he offered his table to the group and I pretended to be immersed in my book. I feigned surprise when he arrived at my table with the beer in his hand, his dog at his feet, and asked if he could join me.
With an over-enthusiasm characteristic of Americans, I invited him to sit down. He did with a sigh and the dog crawled under the table at my feet to sniff my toes with his cold nose. I giggled and blushed when he licked them. The man looked under the table and scolded the dog teasingly until he complied and plopped down on his belly with his chin between his front paws.
I asked in shaky German what the dog was called.
He said he’d named the dog Thompson.
I asked him what he was called.
He said his parents had named him Horst.
My own accent had been a curse during much of my time in Germany. This time it was a blessing. Rather than starting a discussion of all the things he hated about America, he asked where I was from, why I was there, then finally, what I was reading.
I picked up the book and displayed the title for him. He nodded knowingly with a smile and asked if I had read anything by Henry Miller. The yellowed pages were falling out of an old copy of Tropic of Cancer sitting on my bookshelf at home. Horst said he preferred Ms. Nin for her softer, more sensual approach. He then informed me that although he understood English, he’d only read their work in German.
Just as I was about ready to ask questions to satisfy my curiosity beyond his name, that of his dog, and his interest in erotic literature, he asked me if I would read to him from the book.
Embarrassed, but compelled, I did. He leaned back in his chair, his hands playing with the base of his beer glass. I looked at him occasionally between passages and he was staring at me intently. My skin prickled under his attention as the words flowed from my lips and stirred excitement in my belly.
The crotch of my panties had been wet since I’d read the story of the baron and I spread my legs a little under the table. The air hit the moisture and cooled the throbbing bloom between them. I imagined that Horst had an erection, but I didn’t look to confirm it.
My eyes continued to bounce over the words that my mind and body absorbed. I felt feminine in my skirt, desirable with his attention and hungry with need. The need to be taken, directed, without his asking. I wanted someone—him—to read this instinctually. To pick up the signals I felt I was flashing like high beams.
I figured he thought I was just some nice American girl, reading politely from literature she found poetic, not that it made me wet, my nipples hard, my body aching to be touched, admired, treasured.
I finished the story and took a drink of my water. He thanked me and said it was lovely. He enjoyed being read to and it didn’t happen so often now that his wife was gone.
He had a wife?
She died.
I was sorry.
It was a long time ago.
I told him I was married.
I told him the marriage was dead.
I told him it had always been dead.
Funny how easy it is to be completely honest with a total stranger.
He lived alone with Thompson in Heidelberg, but grew up in southern Germany. Now I knew the source of the accent. It had a melody to it, unlike the monotonous drawl of northern Germans. His semester as a university professor was over and he and Thompson were on a little road trip through their country. This was the first city on their tour. They were off to a good start.
I asked him what made him say that. I was tired of the city, thought it ugly and boring. Most of it had been rebuilt cheaply and quickly after the war. The only redeeming features were the ancient cathedral and courthouse in the very center that had been spared by bombs.
He said it was the company of the people he met that he was enjoying most.
I said the people in this city were known to be very friendly.
He said especially beautiful, young expatriates with good taste in perfume.
I blushed and, usually loud and obnoxious, found myself speechless.
The waiter came by and asked if we would like an
ything else. Horst said no, we’d be paying, and my heart skipped a beat. He gave the man his colorful bills with a generous tip. I remained still and passive, unsure of what was happening and what I should do next.
Horst decided for me. He stood up and offered me his hand. Thompson scurried out from under the table and beat the air with his tail. I accepted the invitation and stood up, grabbing my book and bag with its perfume. He asked if he could buy me dinner and told me his hotel had excellent room service.
I said yes.
I was so willing, so eager to please and be pleased; Horst was just the first to detect it and act on it. He was hungry, like me, and the invisible pull of attraction toward one another was overwhelming.
I caught our reflection in shop windows along the sloped pedestrian zone on the way to his hotel and imagined what we would look like if I could step outside of my body and watch from afar. I saw a handsome man with his hand on the lower back of a much younger woman.
She was looking over her shoulder to perhaps see if she recognized anyone in the area. If she did, she didn’t care enough to stop. Maybe she didn’t think it mattered. No one knew the person she was at that moment anyway.
I could hear his deep voice in her ear, telling her how long it had been. If I’d been able to look through her skin and all the way to her heart, I knew I’d have seen it pumping hard and fast.
Now that I was exactly where I wanted to be, I began to get nervous. I’d never taken a lover before, not since I’d married. I swirled in a flurry of guilt, excitement, anticipation, and worry. Not only had I never had an affair, I had never been with an older man. What if I didn’t meet his expectations? What if he didn’t meet mine?
I figured once we were through the door to his room, there would be a flood of activity, clothes dropped to the floor, frantic groping, a serious pounding with a quick ending, and I’d go home, dissatisfaction a familiar acquaintance.
Horst offered me a seat in the armchair in front of the window before calling room service for a bottle of wine and two glasses. It was going to be the other extreme: instead of pouncing on me, he was going to romance me. I thought I might as well enjoy a little bit of attention and fed Thompson a dog biscuit from a bag on the nightstand.
Horst took a seat at the table across from me and again told me he thought I was very beautiful. Without asking, he retrieved my bag and took the book out. He slid it across the table just as a knock at the door announced the arrival of our wine.
While I sat with a glass of wine, a lit cigarette, and the book in my hands, Horst lay on the bed and asked me to read to him again. A few pages into the next story, my anxiety had subsided—until I heard him shuffling. My eyes darted up in time to see him reach for the top buttons of his shirt.
My eyelids fluttered and I sucked in a breath I found impossible to expel.
“Keep reading,” he said in English, and I obeyed. Finding my place again, I continued, and my reading accompanied the rustling of his clothing as it was slowly removed and dropped to the floor.
I struggled to keep my place, to pronounce the words, but it became harder and harder as he lay naked on the bed, just feet from me. I kept my legs crossed and squeezed my thighs together.
At last reaching the end of the story, I looked up at him.
He was staring at me with the same intensity as he had back at our table at Dom Keller. I wondered what he must have been thinking then, if the thoughts had made him hard then like they were now. The pressure in the shaft pulled back the foreskin to expose a plump, spongy tip. It extended up his belly through wispy salt and pepper hair that ran all the way up to his chest.
It was a strange dichotomy: this stranger lying naked so close, and me, still completely dressed and reading to him as if this was a bedtime story. I guess it sort of was.
“One more, please.” He grabbed his penis with his hand and began stroking. The wineglass quaked in my hand as I raised it to my lips.
This time, as Anaïs spoke of priests with erections under their robes, Horst slid off the bed and onto the floor. He narrowed the short space between us on all fours. Sitting at my feet, he took one calf, then the other, gently into his hands and removed my shoes. He kissed the arch of my foot and I momentarily lost focus on the print in front of me.
My voice quaked as his hands urged me to rise a little off the chair so he could remove my skirt and panties. I began reading faster, skipping words toward the end. I wanted to finish so I could set the book aside and watch his face in my lap.
His shoulders held my legs apart, his fingers the lips of my sex. Soft, wet slurping sounds emerged from his activity. A blend of my juices and his saliva trickled between the cheeks of my ass and onto the material of the chair. My head dropped back, the book was lost to the floor, my fingers grasped the hair on his head.
He must have sensed my urgency, the feeling that this was too good to last, it has to happen now. His hand was warm against my trembling abdomen. It pressed against me, held me steady in the chair as if to say, There is no rush, no need to hurry, there is plenty more where this came from.
And I believed him.
I sunk into his mouth, his touch, where there was more of everything: wrinkles, grayness, years, experience, confidence. I was being carried. He just knew what to do.
I easily yielded to his pull toward the bed. There he laid me down, spread me out, and slipped inside. Horst was such a big man, full and heavy. I was covered by him, engulfed, my body vibrating with the rumbling moans from his chest. I hadn’t come yet, nor had he when he pulled out. I looked down at his penis, glistening in the sunlight coming through the windows. Mouth dropped open, a woman starving, I pulled on his shoulders.
“Ich will—lass mich—” My German was broken, faltering in my dizziness. I wanted, needed, to feast on him. “Bitte.”
He just smiled and slid back down between my legs, escalating my pleasure by denying his own. For the first time ever with a man, I came first.
I found out that day, several times, that an orgasm given without the aid of mechanical devices, my own hand, or the showerhead brought tears to my eyes.
Each climax was different, but I cried through each of them. Horst stayed hard for a long time, long enough to roll me onto my stomach, spread my legs wide and kiss where I’d never been kissed before while working his hand between my mound and the mattress. He held back long enough to pull me on top and guide my hips to grind against him. He finally came when he rolled back on top and rocked his pelvis against mine. I watched his ass thrusting in the mirror until I could no longer keep my eyes open. He kissed my mouth as his body froze against mine.
I woke up next to him at dusk. Thompson was sitting in my chair, looking at me with his head cocked in interest. He lowered his nose to the material on the seat.
When I stood up, I had to hold my hand between my legs to catch all that he had pulled from me and had left behind. It was dribbling out and coating my thighs, making them stick together on my way to the bathroom. I wiped myself with a towel and got dressed in the dark.
Horst was still asleep as I slipped Thompson another biscuit and the book and bottle of Chanel into a side pocket of his travel bag.
I took a route home that passed our table at the bar, now filled with another small group of people laughing and talking.
I walked through the park off the marketplace where I’d first seen Horst strolling with his dog. The women and their children were gone. The windows to the Altenheim were closed against the air that had cooled even further with darkness. Those shadows that had danced at my feet had fanned out and blackened the entire park.
At the pavement in front of my apartment, I looked up to the windows framing the light from inside. I knew my husband was up there.
I took my key out, opened the door with it, and went inside.
THE UPPER HAND
Saskia Walker
Thwack. Lucinda inhaled sharply and counted to ten while she resisted the urge to stand bolt upright. Heat fl
ared through her flesh where the missile had hit her left buttock. She bit her lip and continued to tend her flowerbeds.
“Bloody kids, you’ll be sorry,” she muttered to herself.
Her neighbor probably had her sister’s children over. There’d been laughter and shuffling from over Diana’s fence earlier and the missile, whatever the hell it was, had definitely come from that direction. She moved along the flowerbed with her buttock on fire, and then eased upright as gracefully as she could. She wasn’t about to let them know they’d hit home, oh no. With kids you couldn’t let them get the better of you. Besides, hopping from foot to foot would provide them with no end of amusement.
She collected her gardening basket, pulled her halter bikini top straight, and headed indoors. Once inside, she gave her buttock a quick rub and ran upstairs to the back bedroom, where she had a good view of next door’s garden and could spot the little blighters for later public identification. Easing the venetian blinds open a crack, she peeped out.
“I’ll be damned…” It wasn’t kids at all. Instead it was two rather attractive young men that she spied over the fence. One of them was sprawled in a deck chair looking like a reject from a metal band. Wolf-lean, shades on, with baggy shorts and T-shirt complete with offensive slogan, he had straggly hair to his shoulders and a stack of empty beer cans at his side. The other was on his knees, foraging through the undergrowth to spy through a gap in the fence.
“Checking out your target, hmmm,” Lucinda murmured, “well, I caught you red handed, you naughty boy.”
Because he was bent over in the bushes, she couldn’t see too well what he looked like overall, but his rear end was looking pretty good from this angle. Sensing fun, she smiled, her hand going to the exposed part of her buttock, where she’d been hit on a tender spot beneath her high-riding, frayed denim shorts. With a brisk rub of her hand she freed a frisson of sexual pleasure while she took time to observe the view. When the kneeling figure emerged to report to his buddy a moment later, she let her eyes roam over his naked torso. This one was built and built solid. His hair was shaved close to his head, a zigzag pattern delineating the shape of his skull.
