After four fruitless efforts at a completed novel, a publisher had taken my fifth and turned it into a modest success. The rewards were mixed. A mandatory book tour had left me limp. Home after a month on the road, the challenge of proving the first success was not a flash in the pan had me in a funk.
Lulled by the notion I might not be a starving writer forever, I nurtured thoughts of improving my circumstances, as the Victorian novelists were fond of saying. While pondering what to do about my abysmal apartment, I considered looking for a relationship.
At thirty-one, there were exactly three love affairs for me to remember. A remembrance that bore echoes of the Proustian novel from a French literature class in college. In my memory, Amy, Helen and Marie flitted about, sometimes with clothes and sometimes without. Encounters that led to romance were so frequent in school that one had difficulty afterwards recalling what had brought the two of you together. More frequently, it was the breakup that was sharply memorable.
I didn't need a wife, or a female on a mission, although my age suggested the opposite, and my convictions were suspect.
When the fourth relationship started, Suzanne struck me as an uncomplicated woman with enough drawing and painting talent to chase a career in art and be my lover at the same time.
But the uncomplicated part didn't happen. As months went by, my relationship with her became more tangled. Just the opposite of what I thought I wanted.
One morning, I was staring at the text on the screen in front of me when she opened the door to her studio and came across the corridor.
"Olivier called. He's angling for an invitation to visit this weekend."
I turned and raised my eyebrows at her. "Our friends know this is a country place where we come to work."
"Yes. He apologized and said Irene had moved out without a word and turned off her mobile."
We stared at each other, thinking about how our being together started.
She had been Olivier's girlfriend for a time. Two years ago, when she was seeing him and I still had the loft in Manhattan, she appeared one weekend morning and removed her clothes in the front room before I was able to finish preparing coffee.
Calmly retrieving a towel from the bathroom, she placed it on the precious leather sofa, a gift from my parents. Then arranged herself with legs crossed and everything showing.
"I have a confession to make. At the party last week, I copied your new novel to a flash drive. It's very good. You write well and you put imagination on top of that. We could be good for each other. I have talent, but I don't have any spark. I'm still stuck in college art class, doing stupid derivative things as though I was a draftsman."
I said nothing, and walked the few steps to the kitchen to pour coffee. She followed and carefully worked me out of my clothes. Her nipples were stiff. When she rubbed them on my back, my erection became equally stiff. Her fingers explored what she came to join with.
I took a deep breath and said, "You can't be seeing Olivier and me at the same time. There is a defect in my personality that doesn't permit sharing. I know that sounds dumb in this day and age, but there it is."
A hand in the small of my back nudged us a short distance to the unmade bed. "Get there in the middle so I can sit on you."
She was hard to resist. Minute after minute, orders were issued to apply hands to the long, lean body. Her strong fingers entertained my maleness. Gently, so as to prevent an accident. She said, "You are not to come until I say. If my experiment works, we will come together and it will be good. Very good."
We seduced each other until I felt her clamping on my cock and let loose. After six months of abstinence, the fountain spurting into her was hot and generous. She leaned her head on my shoulder and made small noises. I pounded her ass. Her tongue probed mine and she asked, "What is the matter?"
I held her tight and let the silence develop. "Nothing. You were right. It was good."
She lifted my shirt from the floor and stuffed it between her legs. "You can lick me if you want."
She didn't get my tongue, she got my hand on her behind a few more times.
"I deserve a sore ass for breaking in and hitting on you, don't I?"
"We are not doing that again unless you tell Olivier it is over between you."
When I finished changing the bed and picking up some of my mess, she was gone.
The next day, my poor brain, wracked with unaccustomed emotions, was busy churning out text when a soft voice behind me said, "I did it. I'm yours now."
She came to the rear of my chair, her hands covering my eyes and forcing me to listen. "It is really over, Andrew. I told you yesterday I needed some of your spark. You've given it to me, and he never had any to begin with."
After a passage of two years, it seemed as though we were playing the same record over. Suzanne standing behind my chair talking about Olivier.
"Tell me about your feelings for him. Does he have some special hold? Don't women try to put old love affairs behind them like men do?"
She leaned over, letting her hair fall in my face. "The only man who has a hold on me is you."
She paused and continued, speaking quietly, "He seemed a bit helpless. You knew him too, before we were together. He is interesting to talk to, with all that gossip about art and artists his family firm is involved with. Would it work if I suggested a day at the beach and dinner after? We could go to Nantucket. No sleepover."
I turned around and gathered her to me. In the summer, she painted with just a smock over her body. Through the thin material, my fingers rubbed a breast with a firm protrusion at the tip. I wasn't jealous, at least I didn't think I was. But talk of Olivier energized some deep feelings, a surge of aggression that felt good. One of the characters in my book was overwhelmed by sexual aggression and suffered greatly as a result.
Her tongue sought mine. "I can feel you stiff as a board. Ready to fight for me, are you?"
The sparkle in her eyes was bright. The smock was a pullover, or my fingers would be doing more than rubbing her breast.
She squirmed in my arms and said, "God, Andrew, this is making me wet. If I ditch the smock, will you take me to the railing?"
The ancient farmhouse we were renting had a back porch, with old fashioned furniture, including a swing. We liked to sit out there in nice weather, sipping wine and talking after a day of work. It also had a hand crafted railing that we had carefully refinished, and took pride in. One afternoon when we were irritated with each other over something silly, I had snatched her underwear down, bent her over the fine railing, and jammed myself into her without any preliminaries. She screamed and cursed me, but I kept on, losing my anger and finding a lusty experience that Suzanne reciprocated with a bucking, wailing orgasm that continued for a long time. After that, whenever we were hot over something, the railing was where tension was dissipated. It was our version of not going to bed mad.
As we proceeded through the house, she giggled like a school girl, twisting in my arms.
"Honey, before the railing, you get the bar!"
This was another bit of entertainment we both appreciated. Oral sex was high on Suzanne's list of happy things to do. She only discovered my talents in that direction after we moved in together. Curled up with her on the swing one evening, I noticed that there was a good place for a pullup bar. And room above for a higher bar that a woman could cling to while her nether parts were being massaged by a lover's tongue as she rode his shoulders.
Neither of us could count the number of times Suzanne had cried out her climax holding to the bar with her thighs around my neck and my mouth buried in her sex. This morning, conversation about Olivier's girlfriend troubles had wrecked our work concentration. The prospect of an hour of sex before lunch swiftly hardened me up, but the whole thing was so ridiculous that I smiled and took my time. I placed her on the porch deck beneath the bar and slowly removed the smock. The July sun was hot and I told her to stand still while I applied sunscreen, taking special care with breasts and buttocks and the back of her legs. She growled wordlessly, trying to convince me it was a complaint.
I lifted under her arms and she reached for the bar, swinging back and forth slowly. Suzanne wasn't an athlete, but had a slim body with alluring feminine curves. Gazing at her hanging in the sun, all of my male instincts came to the surface, including the erection that was going to have to wait a bit.
