[Author's note: This is the first story I've managed to complete. Of course it turned out longer than I'd expected, but I hope you'll find it's as long as it needed to be. Thank you for reading!]
Lisa smiled that smile that always meant trouble, and stood up from the table. In a single motion, she unzipped her jeans and pulled everything down to her ankles. Whoa -- when had she shaved herself? In all our years of marriage she'd rarely bothered with more than a trim. I loved her wiry dark bush, but this was novel, and I couldn't wait to taste her, or plunge my dick into her without even a tickle of hair. All these years and she was still the hottest woman I could ever imagine.
What she wanted was clear enough. She turned and bent over, bracing herself against the wall. I tripped out of my own pants, my dick harder than I could ever remember. She'd been insane ever since we'd decided to have a baby, but this particularly direct gambit was a first. It felt unreal. I glided over to her in a daze, my dick feeling twice its usual size. She was impossibly wet, so tight. We both groaned as I entered her in a single deep thrust, and grabbed her hips to give her the fucking of her life.
I stared in awe at my dick vanishing into her shaved slit. Her ass was rounded so perfectly. I reached up to fondle her breasts, moaning her name.
"Shh!" she said. "Don't wake the baby."
What? No, that wasn't right. We were going to make that baby, tonight. I could feel it. My vision wavered. Lisa was crying out, but she was too far away. She was ...
I opened my eyes and the gray light of morning settled upon me. The coffee maker gurgled.
There wasn't any baby. That was the unsettling detail this time, the one I wouldn't really shake all day. The rest was just pain, so familiar it was its own sort of comfort.
I rolled over and turned off my alarm, two minutes before it would have gone off. Feet in slippers, off to the bathroom. A familiar routine. Hardly changed in the five years since cancer had taken Lisa from me.
I stared at myself in the mirror. A few graying hairs, maybe. All my aging had happened in those few short months, before time had frozen. Sometimes people didn't believe I was nearing forty, and congratulated me on my youth. Maybe I was an immortal, doomed to drift along while others lived and died.
Damn. This one had really gotten to me.
The sex I was used to. I would probably have dream sex with Lisa until the heat death of the universe, and that would be all right. But the baby. That was a future that didn't exist. That broke the deal I had with the part of me that would never heal properly.
I shook my head. I'd get through the day. Repeat anything enough and it acquires the force of physical law. I'd been getting through days for a long time. Time to feed the cat.
I checked my email on the train. As usual, nothing urgent. Just as well since the day wasn't looking to be very productive. No one really noticed my occasional days like this, anyway. I was competent, efficient, easy-going. Not ambitious, but reliable. People I'd worked with longer knew I didn't talk about my personal life, though it was generally known I'd moved here shortly after losing my wife.
A new start, I'd thought at the time. It was that, and I needed the distance. It turned out to be a mistake to move away from everyone I knew, but it was a mistake I'd grown used to. I was financially well off, my job was unstressful, and I had plenty of time to read. Lisa had been a voracious reader, and her books filled the walls of my study. Though I'd long since read all of them, the full shelves still comforted me: the only things of hers that had come with me. Aside from Santa Claws. Without him I don't think I would have survived the first few months. In the way of cats, he adapted well enough to the change in house and loss of a caretaker once he realized how much attention he would command.
Polite greetings from the security guard, and some smiles from the poor code monkeys jammed in cubicles. Beth was as cute as always. She was over ten years younger than me, a bundle of sarcastic energy who'd befriended me over a fantasy book I'd been absorbed in at lunchtime. Age difference or not, she'd obviously liked me, and that detached part of my brain had tried to imagine what it would be like with her. Black hair, a tattoo on her upper arm, maybe more where I couldn't see. A wicked smile not so different from Lisa's.
But nothing. Oh, the physical parts of my body still worked, and I could truly admire the way her shirt stretched across her chest. She clearly wanted me to notice. I liked her, even had a few nice fantasies about her, but something wasn't connected right. She sensed it soon enough, and joined the ranks of everyone else I'd met here: friendly. From a distance.
My position rated me an office, modest as it might be. I settled in to work, less distracted than I'd expected. I left the door open as usual, though no one was likely to visit.
Sometime later I looked up. Lunchtime. I was in a some pain: I'd stupidly forgotten to take my usual breaks. Distracted after all. I stretched, grabbed my book and my lunch, and headed out.
I might not look like I was aging, but my body was starting to feel it. My dad had looked young, too, and then he'd died of a heart attack at fifty-five. I'd finally started to make good on my intentions to add some more exercise. There was a surprisingly wild-feeling park tucked along the river a short distance from our building, and it made for a lovely walk. I didn't think I'd have trouble keeping up the habit.
A little warm from the exercise, I sat on a shaded bench to eat my lunch. An urban squirrel tried to look cute but I wasn't fooled, and kept my food close. I started reading my book, another of a long list of space operas I'd been devouring. My mind kept drifting. When I'd finished my food, I watched the river's slow current, the bugs skimming the surface, the squabbling of ducks. And I watched people drifting slowly along the path on the hot day.
An older woman and her daughter, comfortably arguing in Russian. A young mother and her stroller. Two teenagers in hoodies, that mixture of arrogance and furtiveness. Probably skipping school. I saluted them mentally. Two women probably from the local college, laughing. Far too young, but incredibly cute. All hail summer, and yoga pants. I watched appreciatively as the two shapely butts retreated.
A thin man walking much faster than everyone else. No, wait -- a tall, thin woman. Her legs ate up the ground with easy, loping strides. God, she was really tall. I couldn't remember ever knowing a woman that tall. Except --
"Alexa?!" I blurted it out as she got nearer. She stopped and looked over to me on the bench. No question now. As she walked towards me, she squinted a little in confusion, until I saw a hint of recognition.
"... Kevin?" she asked. I nodded and stood up to greet her.
I was pretty average height for a guy, maybe 5'11. She was easily six inches taller than me. Just as she'd been in high school, though she slouched then, creeping around the edges of things, never seeming convinced she belonged wherever it was she found herself. I hadn't seen her since graduation. We shook hands awkwardly and I motioned her to join me on the bench. After some hesitation, she sat.
"Wow, it's -- good to see you," she said. "Trying to wrap my head around the coincidence."
"Yeah," I said. High school had meant a quiet suburb. Across the country.
We hadn't known each other well, but Alexa had always seemed nice enough. I think the most time we'd spent together had been during a week of chemistry lab partnering. She was obviously smart, but so quiet. She seemed insecure about everything, not least the way she towered over nearly everyone in school.
She looked great, really. It was there in the way she walked. She was comfortable in her body now, and it made me happy. She looked back with a small smile as we struggled to come up with things to say.
She'd never been pretty. There was something slightly off with her face - eyes too far apart, and something asymmetric. I'd always found it interesting. Her blond hair was still cropped short, her face and arms covered with freckles. It looked like she spent a lot of time outdoors these days. She had new lines in her face, but of course so did I. She was as flat-chested as ever, legs almost too long even for her height, only the slightest hint of curves really. But she looked stronger. Tough.
She was a fragment of my life from -- before. High school had been happy enough. She stuck into my current life at an uncomfortable angle. I liked sitting by her on the bench, thinking about those times. I didn't like the thought of trying to summarize my life since then.
I realized I hadn't said anything. Even for me, this interaction was leaving something to be desired. I steeled myself to give the shortest version, just what I was up to now.
But Alexa looked perfectly relaxed. She'd turned from me to settle and watch the river, and I did the same.
Eventually she spoke. "Usually when I'm in town I'm too interested in getting done what I need to do. But there's a natural pulse to everything, even here."
I nodded and then started trying to say something deep about the river, the flies, the people. The feeling of content from sitting there. I got about half of it out and gave up. But she nodded as though it all made sense.
Another minute or two passed in silence. Eventually she turned to look apologetically. "I have to get back to a meeting. But I walk here a lot when I'm at the office. I'll be by a little earlier tomorrow, and probably most days this week."
I nodded. "Alexa," I said. "It's really great to see you." I meant it.
"It made my day, Kevin." She flashed a toothy grin at me and then was up and disappearing before I knew it, a water-strider flicking among and around the slower pedestrians.
Eventually I joined the slow pedestrians and headed back to the office. I nodded at Beth on the way in, holding my current book up. She smiled and gave a thumbs up. For the book, I thought. She liked this author. I still liked it when she smiled at me.
On the train home, I looked out the window, thinking of Alexa. The older I got, the more beautiful everyone looked to me. Still, there was something arresting about her, something not part of those scattered memories from half a lifetime ago. A steadiness, a beauty of solidity. As though everything else wasn't quite real in comparison.
I didn't know what she was doing with herself, what her life had been in all these years. And she hadn't asked me, had seemed almost instinctively to understand that was the last thing I wanted to talk about. Or maybe she just never learned to do small talk the way other people did. Back then we'd hardly talked tried to talk about anything except our lab procedures.
