A Memoir in the Third Person

Chapter 1

Getting There

Karen sped down the ramp onto the Eisenhower westbound. She thought: if people at the office called me a bitch right now, they'd mean something completely different. Then she stopped thinking on purpose and drove out toward Oakbrook like any commuter, refusing to feel a thing. She didn't start shaking until she turned onto the access road around the mall. She could see the Marriott opposite the giant parking lots, a stupid gaudy-shabby tower with the usual big sign, pretending to be cheerful and fun but actually pretty cheap. The shaking got worse. Her hands felt wobbly on the steering wheel and her stomach was a pit, as if she really might throw up. She started to think again and it was all dark -- not adventure and aliveness, only fear and crazy disgust. She thought: am I out of my fucking mind, am I fucking stupid? She was aware of the lingerie under her business clothes, like a hidden clown suit yelling at her: pathetic middle-aged fool!

She parked and made it through the Marriott's lobby, clickety-clack, clickety-clack, as if she belonged. She even remembered to check his text on her cell and to push the elevator button for seven. Then it was just a matter of finding the room number, confirming it on her cell, and thinking: if I left now I could be home in forty-five minutes and none of this would ever have happened. But he was opening the door already and she was in the room and he was locking the door behind her and she was there, there, there.

Beginning (1)

Mr. Anonymous was Ken something-or-other, a good ten years younger, already in shirtsleeves with his tie loosened. She barely recognized him. No surprise, since she'd only met him twice, weeks before, both times for half an hour of nervous conversation over coffee at Starbucks. Her thought was: what am I doing what am I doing what am I doing what am I doing? She felt numb and stupid. She stood there saying nothing, hideously aware of the king bed almost filling the room.

He said, "Karen," as if her name were a complete sentence, a statement of fact. He was already unbuttoning her blouse when he said it. She tried to stand very straight and very still with her shoulders thrown back like a brave soldier at attention. But she was trembling, obviously trembling, and she could feel her stomach fluttering in and out. When he finished with the buttons, he pulled her blouse open and off in one simple movement. Even though she knew it was coming, the exposure surprised her, shamed her. How ridiculous was she standing there bare-chested in that sleazy black quarter bra?

"Those nipples," he said. "Those good big forty-seven-year-old nipples." Again, the words were a kind of statement, a matter of fact. She made the mistake of looking down briefly to see what he saw. She hadn't thought she was aroused at all, only afraid. But her nipples were fully erect and wrinkled around the base. Suddenly she was wet too.

She hadn't known how it would start. There was a lot she didn't know, deliberately. She remembered all the insistent conversations online: I don't want to know who you are, just your first name; I don't want you to know who I am, just my first name; I don't want to know where we're going to meet until you tell me the day before; I don't want to know what's going to happen; I don't want to know what you're going to do to me; I don't want to know what you want; I don't want you to explain anything; I don't want you to care about me. What she had forgotten was that she didn't know, couldn't know, how deeply all of that would excite her.

Beginning (2)

There were things she could and couldn't remember. Some were like dreams you knew you had but couldn't bring to mind. Some were memories that popped up whenever they wanted to, vivid as hell, real as daylight.

She didn't remember how he took off her skirt and bra and panties while she stood there, sweating and flushed, facing him. She didn't remember how he rolled her nipples between his fingers and tugged them out from her chest. She didn't remember how she moved her feet apart and braced herself, legs wider. She didn't remember how one of his hands kneaded her buttocks, how the other hand slid down her belly and between her thighs. She didn't remember how she flinched and groaned when his fingers found her, slipping between her lips and sliding over her clit and then -- one finger only -- entering, entering, entering, entering. She didn't remember the feel of it, straight up inside her, impaling her on its insistent wiggly length. She didn't remember how her hips moved, how she groaned again, how she went blind, went insane. She didn't remember standing there in front of him, braced widely, groaning loudly, when he made it two fingers instead of one, both of them thrusting upward and spiraling in her.

But she remembered, and couldn't help remembering, how she cried out to him at the last moment. Those were her very first words in the Marriott, uttered with rise in her voice, as if she were asking a question.

"Ken? Ken?"

He answered with a statement: "You're going to come, Karen." And then an order: "Come hard."

She couldn't help remembering her slightly off-the-wall reply: "I'm going to. So make me. Make me." She couldn't help remembering that she had grunted then, viscerally, as if punched in the stomach. She couldn't help remembering that she ended up on the floor, still coming.

She asked him later to tell her how it happened - and to tell her frankly, with no adornment or prettification. His email said: "With a lot of women, there's a cunt squeeze just before they climax, maybe 3-5 seconds before the O really hits. That's when they talk like mad, or hold their breath and tense up, or pump harder until they come. You're one of those women. I felt your cunt squeeze tight when you said my name, and I knew you were going to orgasm. Your tits were jiggling and so were the insides of your thighs. I was impressed that you were still standing up. Then you gave that grunt of yours, and your whole body started jerking. Your knees couldn't hold and you went to the floor."

Beginning (3)

His cock was magnificent: not yet fully erect but heavily swollen, darkly veined, richly purple at the head. It hung between his legs with an easy, authoritative weight. She imagined the hardening of it -- the lengthening, the thickening, the throbbing, the gleam of fluid at the tip. He'll fill me, she thought. He'll kill me.

While she lay curled on the floor, catching her breath, he'd stripped and sat at the edge of the bed to wait. Now she rolled onto her hands and knees and crawled the three feet to him. "It's beautiful," she said. It had been almost a lifetime -- twenty-two long years! -- since she'd seen or touched or felt an unfamiliar cock. She had all but forgotten the time during college, and just after, when she was more casually "experienced," as she and her friends used to say. The unfamiliar wasn't familiar any longer. It frightened her and excited her enormously.

"I told you it's big."

"It's bigger than I thought."

"That turns you on."

"God."

"Say it turns you on."

"It turns me on. You know it does."

She licked it. It leapt up, as if rising into her mouth, as if it knew her mouth would open exactly then. She smelled it. She felt it surge between her lips, between her teeth, between her tongue and palate. It was more alive than anything she'd felt in nearly forever: as hard as the root of a tree, but hot and vibrant. She sucked. It surged. She gagged and sucked again, kept on sucking. She thought: the totem of a god is coming to life in my throat. She thought: I can feel his faraway heart beating. She sucked.

Then he fucked her. She couldn't remember any transition at all. She was on the bed, on her back, with her legs propped on his shoulders. The head of his cock was poised right there, there, there, there. He was looking her in the eyes, saying, "I'm going to fuck your fucking middle aged married cunt. And she was saying, "Good, then do it, just do it, do it, do it."

She cried out when he entered. Soon she was fucking too, curling her hips upward to meet him, clawing at his shoulders. There were words between them. Her voice sounded strange to her: she couldn't recognize who was speaking or why she was saying these stupid, crazy, dirty things.

Suddenly she knew she was going to climax. She could feel it, a deep "click" inside her as the orgasm became inevitable, just seconds away. He felt it too. "You're going to," he said, grinning at her. "You can't stop now." He thrust harder. "Fuck," she said. He said, "Fuck you," and thrust even harder. She said more, maybe, and then she was gone.

Later, she asked him what he remembered. His email said: "You were so wet when I pulled your legs up that your juice ran down over your asshole and made a wet spot on the sheets. Your cunt had a sort of raw look, the way older, used cunts do. Your lips were fat and dark, and I could see how your clit was pushing up under the hood, lifting it right up. You were surprised when I knew you were going to come -- I must have felt it as soon as you did, maybe just before you did, when your cunt squeezed. Your eyes got sooooooooooooooooo wide and your tits were bouncing like mad, with your nipples sticking up at me like little pink/brown fingertips. Then you gave that big grunt of yours, louder, when the O hit. I wonder if you even know how spastic you are during those ten seconds?"

She hated him.

Beginning (4)

Karen hadn't fucked in twenty years. She made love or sometimes had sex. But now she was fucking and she knew it -- still fucking strongly, without a break. She was on her knees and elbows, braced there, flexing her back like a whippet, arching up and down, up and down, shoving her buttocks against his pounding belly, hearing the wet slap! slap! slap! slap! Her body jolted every time and he stabbed into her so deeply that the head of his cock seemed to reach all the way to her waist.

"You know I'm looking right at your asshole," he said. "It's twitching like mad."

"No." She said it instantly, as a kind of blanket denial. No, she didn't know. No, he wasn't looking. No, she certainly wasn't twitching.

He touched her there. She said, "No, don't," and meant it. But both of them kept fucking.

His finger pushed enormously inside, and there was a bright moment of revulsion and pain. She caught her breath and made an embarrassing whiny squealing noise. The finger moved, stirred. Both of them kept fucking. Out of the blue, he said, "You're already there. You're coming." She thought: not a chance, huh-uh, no way, not like this, not now.

But he was right. It took her by surprise, suddenly and impossibly overwhelming her. "God!" she cried out. "Oh God!" Then she was gone.

His later explanation went like this: "It was my thumb, not my finger. That's why you really felt it when I popped your ring." She had never heard the expression "to pop someone's ring." The words disgusted her right off, since she guessed what they meant. They disgusted her more when she did a web search for the idiom. It was revolting. But none of that made a difference to what she felt.

Beginning (5)

He said: "I wanted to unload in your mouth and watch you swallow because I wanted to picture you back at home, kissing your husband and your daughter goodnight."

He said: "I fingered you off that last time because your hips were still jutting after I came and you were obviously out of your mind. Did you even know I got three fingers in, good and deep, and could have gone for four?"

Chapter 2

Deferred Memories

There were a lot of things Karen refused to remember. She refused to remember them during the months she when she was seeing Ken every week and she refused to remember them for months after it was over. Not that she called it "refusal" at the time. She told herself a different story: a lot of details didn't stick, or couldn't be recalled except as a blur, because she was so far gone in passionate arousal. How could she remember exactly what happened, or what she did and said, when she was so blindly carried away by the experience itself? It was a good story and a convincing one. She told it to herself over and over. The only drawback was that she knew better, or anyhow she had a constant inkling that the story was cover for something else. In her head, there was a howling flock of memories that emerged, from time to time, just far enough to make her stop whatever she was doing, or to break into a sweat, or to feel of a wave nausea or hideous fear. These emergencies of memory never congealed into solid form, never got close to staging a rebellious full-fledged story of their own. But Karen knew they could, and perhaps someday would, and she absolutely refused to remember them, refused as hard as she could. That effort lasted for nearly half a year during which she told herself her life was back to normal. But then refusal somehow weakened, or else desire strengthened, and all the things she thought she had forgotten turned slowly into genuine memories of her own. At that point she even permitted herself to read some of his old emails again, including the ones she had opened and then instantly closed after just the first line or two.

Deferred Memory (1)

She was a sweaty mess after coming twice. He paused for only a few seconds to let her catch her breath, then began moving in her again with shallow steady strokes and smooth swiveling turns. She moaned and stared at him speechlessly, perfectly aware of his awareness that he had already begun pushing her toward another orgasm.

"It'll be different this time," he said. "It'll be harder and a lot stronger."

She didn't know what he meant and she didn't really believe him. She thought she was hearing promisory sex talk meant to arouse her without actually referring to anything new or different. But then he folded her legs higher and higher until her knees touched her shoulders and her hips curled up off the bed. Even his shallow strokes and swivelings felt deeper then, and she moaned more insistently while staring up at his attentive face. He pushed harder, widening her legs, moving her knees off her shoulders and past them, curling her hips more steeply upward. "Here, you hold them," he said. She tried wrapping her arms around her legs, but he stopped her. "No. Arms between your legs. Bend your elbows out to the sides. Then just pull back, pull down." She did it. She amazed herself by doing it, but she did it. The posture was so deliberately obscene that it embarrassed her. Even so, she did it.

He thrust. She felt a thump of aching pleasure deep inside, a pained ecstatic slow explosion at the very center of her. It was somehow like the pleasure of her deepest orgasms, only not repeating, not automatic, simply a response to him. He thrust again. She felt it again and groaned.

"I'm fucking you where your daughter was born." He thrust. She groaned.

"I'm hitting your cervix every time." He thrust. She groaned.

"The uterus contracts when I hit it." He thrust. She groaned and said, "It hurts."

"You love it. Like a mini-climax." He thrust. She groaned.

"It hurts," she said, then added, surprisingly, "Do it harder."

He did, fucking her that way while she groaned and suffered and died inside. The deep bruisy ache stayed with her, like persistent cramping, only carrying with it an enormous clenching pleasure too.

After a bit he said, "Tell me when you know you're going to climax. I'll feel it anyway, but this time you'll tell me you feel it yourself." He thrust. She groaned.

After a bit longer, she felt it: the final tensing, the sudden helpless acceleration toward orgasm, the certainty, the inevitability, the agonized joy of the last seconds of consciousness before she was gone. "I feel it," she said. "God, it's coming, it's coming."

He told her later that she had grunted loudly and repeatedly as she orgasmed.

Deferred Memory (2)

At the very beginning she had told herself it was just a fling. After meeting with him a second time and then a third, she had to give up on that word and find a new way of putting it. She tried thinking of it as an affair, but that was too vague and too pristine. When she tried calling it a sexual affair, in contrast to a romantic one, that seemed weaseling, overly technical, evasive, lame. She ran out of words, and that galled her.

Not that he wasn't ready with new words for her to adopt along with all the other new habits she was learning. She preferred to forget how quickly that happened. It wasn't just shameful. It was frightening, as if her new second nature had been right there inside her all along. He wanted someone who spoke when he fucked her, and that is who she became, even before she knew it.

There was nothing ritual or formal or artificial about it, not once the habit took hold. She couldn't remember the stages by which that happened. All she knew was the habit itself, as if it were horribly natural to her.

"What am I?"

She asked that question often and urgently - as if it were not so much a question as a demand, as if she were insisting that he try to formulate the truth over and over, as if she couldn't and wouldn't believe it, whatever it was, for any longer than the craziness of passion lasted. Her own loss of words for what she was doing turned into an insistence on hearing his words, at the very least, since maybe that would help her triangulate her thoughts and feelings and finally come up with words of her own. Early on, after just the first few weeks, he wrote: "I knew I was going to dirty you up. What I didn't know was how dirty you'd get yourself. You could have been just another middle-aged married woman with a couple of fantasies and not much sex drive. But you're a lot dirtier than that. You've got the kind of drive people save up for years." Was that an assessment she could adopt and did it even begin to make sense of her own question about herself? Not really. She loathed its boiled-down simpleminded diagnostic thought. But then again, she wasn't prepared to deny it, only to reject it.

So she asked her question, "What am I?" She didn't ask it in reflective moments, since then -- obviously! - she would have thought it was none of his business. She asked it only during sex, and even then, only at moments when the intensity changed her mind or perhaps made her mindless. She remembered the first time she asked because the question seemed so very strange in her mouth and in her ears. It was in some sense her own question, but she didn't even understand it.

She was straddling him, impaled, riding. She discovered that if she leaned far back and braced herself with her arms behind her and her hands on his knees, then his cock would touch her cervix -- really, strike against it, hit it -- with almost every move she made. It killed her to feel that, either while riding up and down or while settling heavily against him and swiveling there, grinding there. She felt -- as she'd felt before -- that she was impaled on the totem of a god, that she was riding a godcock.

"What am I?"

"You're a cunt-driven middle-aged fuck with big nipples and a big clit." He said it right off, as if it were obvious. His hands slid up from her hips to squeeze her breasts. "You're a married fuckhole," he said and pulled on her nipples. "You're a motherfuck."

Her back arched like a bow and her hips rotated madly on the godcock. "Here I come," she said. "Oh God, here I come."

Deferred Memory (3)

"Remember how hard you came last week when I was fucking you doggy and stuck my thumb in your ass?"

Never in her entire life had Karen given so much as one moment's thought to anal play or anal sex. Her husband had less than zero interest himself, and that was part of the reason. But it ran deeper. Whenever the topic came up -- in a movie, say, or in a piece of fiction -- her brain shut down in a flood of revulsion and disgust. She experienced an instant overwhelming cognitive "Eeeeeeeewwwwwww!" that canceled thought. What's more, she knew that when Ken first touched her there a week before, she had immediately said "no" -- meaning don't, no way, not a chance, not me. But she also knew she had orgasmed when he did what he did -- and precisely because he did it. Worse, he now knew that about her. She felt a queasy vertigo as she spun in self-contradiction and sickening shame.