We began the relationship slowly, cautiously. Larissa had been divorced for two and a half years, myself for nine months. She had been with one other man in that time; I had been with myself. We each had kids. We each were busy, very busy. We each bore scars.
We met at our daughter's soccer games in South Pasadena, a very contented upper middle class town on the edge of Los Angeles. I was the coach; she helped out with the practices and with the phone calls. My attraction to her was quick. I love ex-tom-boys, and I knew she was one: she had the walk, the bounce in her step, and the grace. When I met her for the first time, my eyes zoomed quickly from her face to her hand, pulse quickening, looking for a ring. She had no jewelry on her hands at all, not even a watch, and just a beaded ankle bracelet and little hooped gold earrings. I like them. They were cool. Earrings for me were iconic. I had my code: the more it dangled, the more she entangled. I also stayed away from anything resembling fruit in the ear, art work, and more than two piercings. She definitely did not look like South Pasadena: no make-up, no fake blonde streaks to lighten her hair, no Volvo station wagon. I fell in like immediately. I drove home from practice talking to my daughter about the team but imagining Larissa first at the beach with me, bodysurfing in the the waves, and then in my bedroom.
My quick crush then began to turn into a a real, substantial like. She had a great manner about her as a parent and the right attitude about sports: it's a game--let the kids enjoy it. Unlike so many parents, she stuck mostly to adjectives on the sidelines, avoiding verbs. She was encouraging--not critical, not demanding, not a CEO. No "kick it" or "run harder" or "go after it" or "shoot"--just "good play," "nice ball," "ok," "yes!" My real like began to deepen into something more complicated the morning of our first playoff game. The game time was 8:00 a.m. in the middle of November: too early for the girls and too cold. Larissa came to the game with a tape for the warm ups: the opening of the Beatles' "Good Morning," next Randy Newman's "I Love L.A.," followed by Jimmy Buffet's "You Can Get It If You Really Want" and Hendrix's "Fire" and concluding with Steppenwolf's "Born to be Wild." Our team won the game in an upset over a better team 3-1. We scored in the first few minutes, and I stayed cool--we were fortunate, and we still had most of the game to play But when we scored the second goal near the end of the first half, I jumped in her arms, exhilarated, pumped up. "It's the music," I told her. "It did it."
At the end of the game, I thanked her, and I said I owed her a celebratory beer or two. She accepted. I had waited until the end of the season to make a move, fearing all the time she would show up to some morning game with a man next to her who had been with her all night. I hesitated to ask her out earlier: I felt a coach-parent relationship should no more be broken by lust than than a professor-student relationship.
When the season was over we did go out: first for the perfunctory dinner at a nice restaurant with jazz music, second for an international soccer match at the Coliseum, and third for a drive around Los Angeles visiting used bookstores, her favorites and mine, and we ended up at one I had never been to before: a large used bookstore near the ocean in Long Beach called "Acres of Books," where I found a copy of a book I had to hide from her sight when I bought it: Gael Greene's "Delicious Sex," which included the recipe for "Chocolate Wickedness," which I had lost. (When I had fixed it for my wife after the first Saturday night after she had come home from a long business trip, she took one bite and remarked, "This is dangerous. I'll need great sex after this just to cool down.") And I bought her a copy of Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God." When she called me up the next night to tell me how she had loved the novel, I was hooked deeply, maybe too deeply.
An old saying went through my head: measure a relationship after the fifth date. We had done nothing more than kiss up until that point, and it took almost three months to fit in five dates around our work and around our responsibilities for our kids. But we were emailing after the first date. The fourth date was horse back riding: one of her passions. I had not been on a horse in 35 years, so we went slow, around a track. She was a great coach, as encouraging towards me as she was with her daughter playing soccer. We finished the ride in Griffith Park, and then returned to the track, where she finished riding by herself at different paces, not needing caution anymore. I grew profoundly jealous of the horse: she was having so much fun on it; she had such control of it. I wanted to get back on my horse, let it run away with me, and let her rescue me.
The fifth date was dinner at my house: five courses. We began at 7:30 p.m. and were still eating and finishing our bottle of wine at 10:30 p.m. Dessert came in two courses: first fruit--strawberries, kiwi, raspberries, mango. Then chocolate wickedness. When she took her first bite, there were no words: just a look--savoring, lingering, luxuriating in the taste, then another spoonful, savored more slowly, then the spoon tongued and caught between the lips, then removed slowly, and then tongued some more. Amazingly, we finished the dessert, then the bottle of wine. The candles were almost burnt out. We were starting to burn up. We each knew the ending, and we each knew that we each knew the ending, but like good readers, we did not skim to get to the ending. We stared each other down, waiting for the other to rise, to make a motion that it would take us to the bedroom, and I blinked first.
"Would you like anything else to drink? A liquer? A cup of coffee? Espresso?"
Her reply simply stunned me. "Do you have tequila?"
"Yes," I answered, a bit confused. "Would you like a margarita?"
"No. I want a shot or two of it with lemon."
I love tequila. I love lemon. I love the ritual of drinking straight tequila: you make an O with thumb and forefinger, wet the circle with your tongue, deposit some salt in the crotch of the thumb, lick it up, shoot down the tequila, and follow with lemon. The suffusing warmth, the glow, the inner fire can only be matched for my taste by Laphroaig single malt scotch whiskey or by.....XXX.
She went first. Then she started the ritual for me: licking my thumb, circling my fingers, slowly, with her tongue, measuring the salt out carefully, and holding the lemon for me to bite into, which I did, several times, wanting to suck out every bit of lemon juice. The sharp rush, the gold fire glow from the tequila, flooding downwards was met by a another rush, a flush of excitement, circling in my loins and ascending. We repeated the ritual: this time I wet her fingers, even more slowly then she did mine, and I held the lemon for her, which she sucked on five or six or seven times. I went back to her hand: sucking the space where the salt had been, the V between thumb and forefinger, lingering, teasing, tonguing until she shivered a little, as if she had bit into a very tart lemon. We then took turns licking and sucking fingers, one after the other, more deliberately than a cat cleaning fur: each of us, doing all ten fingers, doing each one more lustfully, more laciviously than the one before: Larissa concentrating on each fingertip, while I focused on the v between each finger, as if, of course, I was between her legs.
We never said a word except with our eyes and our smiles. Nothing else needed to be said. When we finished my whole body was throbbing, pulsing: we had been on the edges of our seats forever. We rose from the seats, and embraced, tightly, holding the position, and then like paper clips tangling together on a magnet, we were drawn to the bedroom.
Outside the door, she stopped and whispered to me, "Two rules in there: safe sex and no talk about ex-spouses." The first rule was easy to follow. For the second, I needed a condom on my tongue.
We made love and talked until the sun rose, mostly talking. The lovemaking was less awkward than I expected: not a performance, just the joy of being in each other's arms, with the sex an exclamation point, a way to sign the love letter we each had been composing in our minds, in our imaginations, in our hearts. She took me inside her delightfully, welcoming me, making me feel at home, making me feel very wanted, like a newcomer by the best neighbor, holding me still each time I entered her anew, forestalling my thrusting as she adjusted herself to my length, to my thickness, swiveling a bit to get the fit right, like adjusting the seat and mirror on a sports car for a taller driver with the engine on but not in gear.
We drove slowly that first night, sticking to surface streets and backroads, avoiding the fastlane: it was a drive in the country on the first day of spring, taking the ascent slowly, pulling off the road at times just to admire the sights: we would stop almost all our motions just to talk, and Larissa would seem to forget at times that I was still hard. I would gently remind her, and she would refocus, almost apologizing, picking up the pace--but then she would remember something else, or have something more to say, or think of something new she just had to tell me, associating freely, and we would stop, or slow down, and then she would just squeeze me inside to start me up again. Or if we got too distracted, if she started to switch to a new topic while we were near motionless, I would withdraw, almost all the way out, poised to let her talk without my interference or poised to plunge, and then she would pull me into her tight and giddyap me with her hands on my butt, making it a drum for sending me the signals, orchestrating the percussion, synchronizing ourselves for the crescendo.
I came quickly, too quickly, the first time, but the more we made love, the more power I had: my cock was mostly under my control and it felt great, very great. But Larissa could not yet surrender: she would be close, panting in short breaths, and even while I was on top, she had free rein: holding myself still, while she cantered and galloped below me, but then she would hand the reins over to me, inviting me to come, requesting me to come, demanding that I come, insisting that I come even if she was left behind, and when I did come, she, amazingly, looked even happier than I did: so joyful that I thought she was ready to cry, and the last time, as dawn broke, there was a tear or two, which I kissed and wanted to suck in as if it was some elixir, some magic potion, some protection, strangely enough, against sadness.
