Fourplay

by Jane Moore

  He started kissing her tenderly at first, then building up the pressure until Jo lost her balance and fell back against the sofa cushions. The idea of stopping their passionate embrace right then crossed her mind, but the bad fairy perched on her shoulder and whispered, “Why the hell not?” After that, unstoppable feelings of pure lust blocked out all rational thought and she gave in.

  His hand reached through the armhole of her halter top and pulled it to one side to expose her breast. She let out an involuntary gasp as his tongue flicked the aroused nipple and his left hand caressed the other through the flimsy material. The double breast stroke had always been a winner for Jo, and within seconds they were tearing at each other’s clothes in a drink-induced frenzy. Anxious not to break the sexual spell, they continued to kiss mercilessly. As Jo made the final tug on Sean’s Calvins, his penis sprang out in an admirably erect state.

  “Gosh, he does look cross,” she giggled, unable to take her eyes off it.

  “He’s bloody furious,” murmured Sean, guiding her hand to the base of the shaft.

  As she slowly ran her hand up and down, Jo couldn’t help comparing it to Jeff’s. It felt so strange to have a different penis in her hand after so many years of the same old one.

  “That’s why I’m not sure if I could be faithful for years on end,” Rosie had said once. “It would be like eating in the same restaurant every night. You always know what you’re going to get.”

  But the special on offer tonight suited Jo very nicely. It was long, but not too long, with an admirable width. She sat up and started to lean her face toward his penis, but Sean gently pushed her back and slowly removed her pants. She closed her eyes, then opened them as she heard a rustling noise. It was Sean opening a condom.

  “Are you small, medium, or liar?” she smiled, reaching forward to assist. As she continued to caress him, he started to push two fingers inside her while using his thumb to gently stimulate her clitoris. She closed her eyes again as a small wave of sheer, unadulterated ecstasy rippled through her body.

  Just when she thought it couldn’t get any better, she felt Sean’s hair brush the soft underskin of her thighs. He planted dozens of small kisses between her legs, avoiding the clitoris until she thought she might die from the expectation.

  “Is that good?” he murmured, as his tongue finally made contact.

  “Really good,” she whispered.

  His tongue got to work and his fingers slid their way in and out. Jo abandoned any sense of dignity and began to moan loudly. Within two minutes she felt the familiar surge of warmth begin, followed by a sheer rush of ecstasy to all her nerve endings. She came in glorious shudders, her own fingers pressing her clitoris as Sean’s mouth moved away. Spreadeagled on the sofa with him knelt in front of her, she finally opened her eyes. Staring straight at him, she said, “Now fuck me.”

  As Sean lowered himself into position, she grabbed his penis and guided it toward her. She buried her head into the side of his neck and inhaled the musky smell of new masculine sweat. There was nothing like it.

  Straightening his muscular arms, Sean studied her face as he slowly pushed himself into her. As he started to move in and out, Jo let out a small gasp of pleasure. God, she’d missed this.

  His thrusts becoming more urgent, he moved his head down to her neck again and began to murmur quietly in her ear. “Is that good? Do you feel wet? Tell me how it feels . . .”

  “It . . . feels . . . great.” She’d never been very good at talking dirty. If there were night classes in it, she vowed to sign up the next day.

  “Tell me how wet you are.”

  “I’m really wet,” she whispered.

  “Tell me what you want.”

  “I want you to fuck me harder,” she said, and he duly obliged until he came in a tense, blissfully silent shudder.

  “Can you stay the night?” he murmured in her ear.

  “Not all of it, but some,” she said.

  She woke up with a start at 4 A.M. in a strange room with an unidentified arm thrown across her chest. A wave of nausea swept through her body. For once, it had nothing to do with the amount of alcohol she’d consumed, and everything to do with the fact she’d had sex with a virtual stranger who had all but ram-raided her car to get a date. It doesn’t get much lower than this, she thought. Desperate to extricate herself from Sean’s arms, she wanted to escape, to gather her thoughts over a cup of coffee at home. But would he wake up?

  A faint smile crossed her lips as she remembered Tim telling her and Rosie about a disastrous one-night stand he’d had.

  “I had the bloody beer goggles on,” he said. “I left the bar with Cindy Crawford and woke up with Michael Crawford. It was a real dingo gnaw, I can tell you.”

  “A what?” Jo frowned.

  “A dingo gnaw. When dingos get caught in traps in the wild, they sometimes eat through their own leg to escape. That’s what us chaps call it when you wake up next to some ugly bird and your arm is trapped under her. You’d rather eat through it to escape than risk waking her up.”

  Now here was Jo experiencing her very own dingo gnaw, except the creature involved was far from unattractive. But she knew he’d be dangerous to wake up.

  Slowly rolling over onto her side, she waited for his arm to drop onto the bed. Her heart thumping against her chest wall, she lay motionless as the gentle snoring stopped and he started to make rapid breathing noises. As she waited for him to start snoring again, she studied the room she had paid so little attention to four hours previously. After getting into bed, they’d had slow but passionate sex again, then cuddled up and fallen asleep.

  The bedroom was most definitely minimalist again, with cream walls, beige carpet and slim, fitted ash wardrobes along one wall. The king-size bed dominated the room, flanked by two bedside cabinets that housed just one office-style lamp each. There was a small alarm clock on Sean’s side of the bed and a copy of last month’s GQ magazine.

  It seemed an eternity, but after a few minutes, his breathing became deeper again and she decided to risk an exit maneuver. Grabbing a toweling gown from the back of the door, she tiptoed out of the room and went in search of her clothes that were scattered all over the living room floor. After a panicked search, she found her newly bought knickers tucked down the back of the same sofa on which she’d been willingly ravaged just hours before.

  She looked around for some paper, but there wasn’t a scrap to be found nor any sign of a pen. She was reluctant to start opening drawers in case he woke up and thought she was snooping. Rummaging in her handbag, she tore a piece from the bottom of an old school newsletter and found a pen nestled among the old toffee wrappers and tissues.

  She wrote, “It’s 4 A.M. and I have to sneak back to my own bed before the children wake up. Thanks for a lovely evening. Jo xx.” She sat staring at the note for a moment, then hastily added, “P.S. Give me a call soon.”

  Leaving it on the coffee table, she picked up her shoes and tiptoed along the wood-floored hallway to the front door, closing it gently behind her. In the corridor, she put on her shoes and sprinted down the stairs and out of the communal door. It was still dark. Someone must be looking out for me, she thought, as a vacant black cab suddenly came into view. The driver looked at her suspiciously, and it crossed her mind he might think she was a prostitute, sneaking out of a client’s house at such an unearthly hour. But she didn’t care. It was a safe lift home, the place she wanted to be more than anywhere else in the world right now.

  Creeping up the stairs to bed, she paused only to look in on Thomas’s and Sophie’s rooms to check they were fast asleep. If you knew what Mummy had been up to, you’d be horrified, she thought.

  By the time she’d folded her clothes and laid her head on the pillow, it was 5 A.M. and a particularly persistent bird was starting to sing noisily outside her bedroom window. Jo drifted off into a deep, pleasant sleep, her head full of thoughts about her reacquaintance with passion.

  22

  Jo s
tood in the large bay window of the living room, watching the road outside with a look of apprehension. Jeff was due back with the children any minute and she was looking forward to seeing them for the first time in a week.

  He and Candy had taken them to an apartment in Ten-erife on the previous Thurs-day and, for the first time since becoming a mother, Jo had enjoyed a blissful week of pleasing herself. She’d toyed with the idea of escaping somewhere with Sean, but in the end he’d been unable to get away from work. So instead, they’d spent the weekend at Forest Mere health farm in Hampshire, being pampered with massages, mud wraps and Thalasso water therapy. They were also going out this evening, something she felt an acute pang of guilt about, not having seen the children for a week.

  “Listen, they’ve had a great holiday and probably barely given you a thought, so don’t worry about it. Enjoy yourself,” said Rosie, when Jo had mentioned it.

  That’s easy for you to say, Jo thought, you don’t have children. She couldn’t remember the guilt-free, selfish days of no offspring, and wished she could be more like some aristocratic women who palm their children off to boarding school at six, allowing them to occasionally visit home until they are eighteen, at which point they go off to university. Unfortunately, she had inherited her mother’s worry gene when it came to parenting. She fretted about absolutely everything, more so now that the children no longer had the traditional set-up of Mummy and Daddy under the same roof. She had been dating Sean for just over four months, and had only recently introduced him to Thomas and Sophie. And even then she’d worried herself sick that it was too soon.

  “The trouble is,” she told Rosie, “you find yourself having to categorize new relationships very quickly when you already have children. All that playing it cool stuff goes out of the window, because you need to know whether it’s just going to be a fling or turn into something more meaningful.”

  Spontaneity was also a thing of the past, with every night out having to be planned with military precision.

  She thought back to the beginning of her relationship with Sean, when it would have been so much easier if she had simply introduced him to the children. But she wasn’t sure of the longevity of the relationship and didn’t want them to meet every passing fancy in her life, so she had taken the harder option of having to see Sean away from the house and organizing babysitters.

  As ever, Rosie had been a godsend. But recently, she’d started seeing a man she met in her local health food shop which, although Jo was thrilled for her, had buggered up a lot of her social plans.

  Tim was babysitting tonight. He said he had lines to learn for the soap opera he’d started performing in three months earlier, and that he may as well memorize them here as there.

  Jo looked up as she heard the familiar hum of Jeff’s car and saw him reversing into a space across the street. She took a step back from the window, so he and Candy wouldn’t think that she was watching them. She was intrigued to know how Candy had coped with someone else’s kids for a whole week in such an enclosed space, and knew Thomas would tell her every delicious detail of any holiday tensions that might have arisen. He was her little fly on the wall. Sophie got on very well with Candy, but a mutual interest in gaudy makeup and big hair had a lot to do with that. Thomas was less impressed.

  “She puts on this stupid baby voice when she talks to Dad,” he said in disgust one day. “And she’s always wearing ridiculous shoes that hurt her whenever we walk anywhere.”

  Nine months ago, Jo would have been thrilled to hear all this. But after a while she found herself feeling quite sorry for Candy. It must be tough dealing with someone else’s kids when you’re that young. She remembered feeling anxious about Sean meeting the children, particularly as he didn’t have any of his own. The days when dating was simply about whether two adults liked each other had long gone. Now she had to worry about whether he liked her children, and whether they in turn liked him. It was a minefield.

  “It’s a lot to take on,” she’d said to Rosie.

  “Not really,” Rosie replied. “He knows the deal. If he wants you, the children are part of that package.”

  Rosie had made it clear to Jo on a couple of occasions that she wasn’t too keen on Sean. “He’s too smooth for you, and there’s something rather insincere about him,” she’d said, wrinkling her nose. But Jo had put it down to a touch of the personal jealousy that often creeps into female friendships when one has a boyfriend and the other doesn’t.

  The first meeting between Sean and the children had been coffee followed by a walk in Battersea Park at 9:30 one morning.

  “Where are we going?” said a sullen Thomas, furious at being torn away from his PlayStation.

  “We’re going to meet a friend of mine in the park, where we’re all going to get some fresh air,” said Jo, wrestling him into his puffa jacket.

  “What friend?” he said suspiciously.

  “You don’t know him.”

  “Well he can’t be much of a friend then, can he?” Thomas was in a phase of testing every boundary and was often incredibly rude to her. So much so, she had recently administered a couple of sharp smacks to the back of his legs.

  But today she decided to ignore it, because she didn’t want to meet Sean with a red-faced, weeping child in tow, who then proceeded to sulk for two hours.

  A minute or two of silence passed, then Thomas said with a tone of undisguised disgust, “He’s your boyfriend, isn’t he?”

  “Don’t be silly, darling.” Jo felt well and truly skewered by her young son.

  “Why are we going to meet him on a Saturday then? We never go to the park on a Saturday because you always say it’s too crowded.”

  He was absolutely right and Jo wished he’d just shut up about the subject and return to being the blissfully ignorant toddler he once was. He was getting too mature and astute for his own good. Mind you, so was Sophie who, the week before, had suddenly said, “Mummy, do you know what gay means?”

  Jo had always vowed that whenever her children showed an interest in the subject of sex, she would always talk to them about it. So she took a deep breath and started to tell Sophie that being “gay” was when two members of the same sex loved each other.

  Her daughter raised her eyes heavenward. “I know that Mummy. I just wanted to check that you knew.”

  Arriving at the park, Jo maneuvered the car into one of the hundreds of empty spaces. “Here we are,” she said with false brightness, turning round to look at her sullen children.

  “Where are we meeting your friend?” said Thomas, the last word dripping with sarcasm.

  “In the little café by the boating lake,” she said, setting off briskly in that direction with Kevin the teenager and Perry—as she and Rosie had recently named them—trailing behind her. Sophie had wanted to watch Britney Spears on MTV, so she too was less than pleased about having her hair ferociously brushed and being forced out of the house.

  They arrived at the café ten minutes later, but there was no sign of Sean yet, for which Jo felt grateful. Like all desperate parents, she hoped she could buy a better mood out of them by settling them down with a drink and an ice cream first. Her mother would have balked at such blatant bribery, but she didn’t care. Needs must.

  They found a bench table outside in the watery sunshine and watched listlessly as one of the café staff hosed down the tarmac. There were only two customers at this painfully early hour; an old man sipping a cup of tea and reading The Racing Post, and a surly middle-aged woman having a cigarette while her long-haired greyhound crapped and peed its way around all the tables.

  Another ten minutes passed. Still no sign of Sean.

  “Does your friend have a watch?” said Thomas.

  The combination of his sarcasm and her general stress about Sean’s impending arrival finally made Jo snap.

  “Look, you little shit. If you can be nice to the little bimbo your father left us for, you can damn well lift your attitude and be nice to my friend for five bl
oody minutes,” she hissed, scowling at him.

  Thomas looked startled at first, then his bottom lip jutted out and he started to blink back tears before storming off inside the café and sitting alone in a far corner.

  Jo felt awful for having sworn at him, and particularly for being nasty about Candy. She’d always vowed she wouldn’t do that in front of the children. But she stopped herself from following Thomas because she didn’t want to pander to his truculent moods.

  Another five minutes passed with her and Sophie sitting in silence, watching the Canada geese squabbling greedily over the fragments of bread being thrown their way by an elderly woman who’d arrived with a bag full of stale offerings. Where the hell is he? thought Jo, glancing anxiously at her watch for the umpteenth time. As this was such an important occasion, the least he could do was arrive on time. A hand touched her shoulder from behind and she spun round with palpable relief on her face. It was Thomas.

  “I’m sorry, Mummy,” he sobbed, wrapping his arms around her neck.

  “That’s alright, sweetie,” she murmured, pulling him close to her. “Mummy’s sorry too. It’s all forgotten now.”

  Mollified, Thomas sat back down at the bench and started to play I-spy with Sophie. Once “geese,” “pond,” “café” and “bird poop” had been dispensed with, it was 10:15 and Jo had given up all hope of Sean materializing.

  “Come on, you two. My friend has obviously got caught up somewhere else. Let’s go home.” Silently livid, she stood up and started to walk back toward the parking lot.

  “Mummy, look!” said Sophie, pointing back the other way. In the distance, a man was running toward them and waving his hands in the air. It was Sean.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,” he puffed as he drew near. Bending over and placing his hands on his knees, he stood still for a few seconds trying to regain his composure.