Aftermath

I sit amidst the rumpled Egyptian cotton sheets, my back against the polished Royal York Hotel headboard, watching as she rolls on her black nylon stockings. Left, then right; the elegant reversal of the work I'd done so willingly little more than three hours before. There's an ache inside me as I watch her, a hint of bitterness in my mouth, because the fact that she's getting dressed means that our time is over for at least another week; she's about to return to her life while I slip back into my own.

She stands up from the chair and stretches.

"Where are my shoes?" she asks absently as she walks around the foot of the bed. I'm too busy looking at her to offer any sort of constructive suggestion. The stockings accentuate her nakedness so deliciously that I'm becoming hard again, in spite of the two highly satisfying orgasms I've already poured into her.

"You're no use," she pouts after a few seconds of fruitless searching.

"Maybe you shouldn't dress like that."

"This is a pair of stockings. I don't know what you're talking about."

"You shouldn't wear that body."

She smiles, but she says nothing as she continues to scout for her stilettos.

Ignoring her nakedness and my erection is not easy, not even for a few seconds. "Try under the bed."

She looks at me quizzically, and then her eyes gleam as she remembers how her shoes got there.

"You're a very bad man," she chides softly.

"I know."

She retrieves her shoes from beneath the bed, slips them on and then walks into the bathroom. The three-inch heels raise her ass invitingly, but before I can compliment her on the view, the door closes between us. I shut my eyes and listen to the sound of water filling the wash basin. She never showers after we fuck, preferring to stand at the sink so that she can freshen her face, hands and armpits. She once told me that her husband was more likely to suspect something was amiss if she went home smelling like she'd stepped out of a shower in the last hour.

"Is that the only reason?" I'd enquired, instinctively knowing there was something more.

Her face coloured, and then she confessed in her little girl, "I want" voice that she liked to smell me on her when she went to bed after our liaisons.

"Isn't that a little risky?"

"No. He doesn't touch me the nights after we're together. I won't let him."

I hear the toilet flush, and then the washbasin taps are turned off. I smile. She always pees under the cover of running water. There isn't a place on her body I haven't stroked, kissed, licked, sucked or fucked -- all with her wanton complicity and sometimes earthy encouragement -- and yet she refuses to allow me to hear her urinating.

I suppose some things are too intimate for strangers to share.

She walks back into the room. Miraculously, her dress lies semi-folded across the one of the two club chairs. The rest of her lingerie is still on the floor where it fell amidst the debris of my own unveiling. She picks out her bra from beneath my shirt and slips it over her arms with practiced grace. Unconsciously, she turns to face me as she reaches behind herself to refasten the clasp. The brassiere's lace cups are almost totally diaphanous, and the russet circles of her areola are easily discernible, even in the half-light of our clandestine sanctuary.

There's something so brazenly sexual about a woman dressed in bra, stockings and heels, and no panties. I have to fight the urge to slowly stroke my cock.

"Why are you looking so smug?" she asks, though I can see from her expression that she already knows the answer.

"I'm just enjoying the dazzling scenery."

She shakes her head, though I can't recall when she's ever said 'no' to me. "You're such a lecher."

"I prefer libertine. Or rake."

"Oh yes, much more grandiose." She puts an expensively manicured finger to her lips as she ponders my choices. Her eyes sparkle, eureka-style. "From now on, whenever I email you I'll call you 'Rakish Male'."

I laugh. "I love it. In fact, I'm going to create it as an email address when I get home."

A shadow flits across her smile; a solitary cloud passing between us and the sun. She half-turns away and scoops up her minuscule panties. She steps into them perfunctorily, pulling them up her slender thighs with an almost unseemly haste.

I watch attentively as she draws the thin waistband into shallow arcs over both hips. "You look good enough to eat," I tell her.

She says nothing, not looking at me, staring straight ahead towards the windows as she continues to adjust her attire. A sliver of real world is visible through the gap in the floor-to-ceiling drapes; outside, the cyan shade of the mid-afternoon sky has given way to navy blue. The streetlights are on, the faces of the buildings opposite the hotel becoming defined by the squares of fluorescence they contain.

Night is almost upon us.

I try lifting the mood back to where it had been. "I thought you enjoyed my compliments."

She shrugs as she walks to the window. She holds onto the drapes, widening the gap so that she has a wider view of the twilight cityscape.

"I love this time of day," she says, sotto voce. "I can feel it in the air; the potential that only comes with nightfall. All the wonderful possibilities that can only exist when the darkness comes. I look out across all those brilliant points of light, and I see the opportunities waiting for me, waiting expectantly for me to choose one of them. I look out across the night and I can taste them."

I slip from beneath the sheets. It's late, and we should be getting ready to leave, getting ready to force our way along the damp streets, through the throngs of despairing souls that fill the pavements and platforms between us and the places we live, the brick shells to which we've assigned the label 'home'. But none of that matters to me right now. Her soliloquy has found my heart, caressed my spirit. I know precisely what she means, know exactly what she's feeling right now. I feel it every time I look out across the city when the sky is sheathed in obsidian.

I brush her hair aside from the nape of her slender neck and press my lips to her warm skin. She smells the Chanel she knows I adore. I gather her breasts in my hands, relishing the hardness of her nipples against my palms. She arches her lithe body against mine, and I press my erection against the welcoming familiarity of her ass.

"Fuck me," she whispers.

My first thought is to guide her back to the bed.

"No, here. Fuck me so that the world and all its possibilities can see."

Exhibitionism has never featured in the carnal lexicon we've fashioned together. Quite the contrary: we've guarded our liaison with almost paranoid precision. We've had to: there's much to lose on both sides. And so the thought of fucking her as she's asking is both troubling and thrilling in seemingly equal measure.

The most delectable pleasures are those that come marinated in danger.

She widens her stance without needing to be asked. I don't even consider taking her panties off. I'm too aroused, too impatient to be inside her again. I slip a hand between her thighs, cupping her sex through the thin material. It's damp with her lust, warm with the radiance of her sex. I ease the flimsy gusset aside, then guide my cockhead towards the velvet slickness within her labia. There's no need for teasing, no desire to draw out our pleasure. We both want the same thing, want it now.

My length glides effortlessly inside her, as though my cock were fashioned from the very imprint of her cunt.

She hangs onto the drapes, pressing her ass back to meet my thrusts. I quickly release the clasp on her brassiere, slipping my greedy hands beneath the now-loose cups, moulding her full, soft flesh to my grasp. Each time I enter her to the hilt, she gasps with blissful fulfilment; each time I withdraw to the point where the corniced ridge of my glans pulls provocatively upon her labia, her sighs of pleasure sound bitter-sweet. I fuck her with long strokes, my lips and my teeth working upon the collection of delicate nerves where her neck becomes her shoulder. I hear the curtains straining in their tracks, and half-expect them to come crashing down. And through it all, she watches my reflection in the window as I watch hers, and beyond our transparent duplicates, the night watches us both.

I've come twice already so I ought to last for an age this time, should have to focus to summon forth my climax. The growing waves of pleasure in my loins belie that supposition.

"You're going to come, aren't you?" she gasps.

"Yes."

"So am I. Fuck!"

She grinds herself against me.

"Hard. Fuck me hard."

I piston into her, sinuous smoothness and control forsaken, abandoned. I drop my hands to her waist, yanking her back to meet me, and she releases her hold on the right-hand drape, cupping her sex instead so that her fingertips can feverishly work upon her clit.

"Oh fuck, yes!"

As I begin to come, myriad images flood my mind: I see myself pulling out of her, my cock jerking in my hand as my semen spurts against her ass and her buttocks and the backs of her thighs; I see her whirling around before me, dropping to her knees so that she can capture my seed in her mouth and across her breasts; I see her standing to one side, pumping my cock in her hand so that I ejaculate against the window, my semen running down the glass for all the night-time world to see.

In the end, none of these things come to pass. My cock quivers and pulses within the silken confines of her pussy, and I am grateful, privileged.

My third orgasm, and, in spite of all the pleasure and passion that proceeded it, my most intense.

I pull her tight against my body, my cock still immersed within her heat, futilely wishing that we could spin the clock's hands backwards and have our three hours again, and yet wondering how to tell her without causing hurt or offence that time is marching forwards regardless of our desires, that we need to go, now, if we're to safely resynchronise with our real lives.

Of course, I don't need to remind her of anything; she has just as much to lose as I do. She eases my softening flesh from hers, kisses me tenderly on the mouth, and then walks back to the bathroom without saying a word.

The door closes, and water begins to fill the wash basin.

I use a towel to dry my loins. I'll go for a hard run when I get home, and then I'll shower away all the scents of our union. I'll take her to bed with me tonight, but I'll carry her in my mind, not on my body. I'm not as brave as she is.

I'm almost dressed by the time she emerges from the bathroom. I tie my shoes as I watch her slipping back into her dress. She does everything with such unconscious grace and femininity. It's no wonder I find her so beguiling.

"Will you zip me up?" she asks.

"Of course."

I draw the zip up her back, fighting the temptation to kiss her neck again.

She checks herself in the tall, thin mirror on the wall. Satisfied, she picks up her handbag and walks to the door.

"Ready?"

I nod. I gather my briefcase and the key card for the door from the desk, scan the room one last time and follow her out into the quiet corridor.

The disappointment I feel as the door clicks shut behind us is as black as the night outside.

We ride the lift down to the ground floor in silence, a respectable distance between us. It's part of the process; disengaging from one life, reintegrating with the other. There's no alternative, for either of us.

The hotel's reception area is busy: businessmen and women returning from a long day of meetings and pitches; tourists fatigued from hours of sightseeing; couples embarking upon their own illicit liaisons. Some will want nothing more than the refuge of their rooms; others simply seek the opportunity for revitalisation, a precursor to venturing out once more, this time in search of the city's nocturnal distractions.

I wish I didn't have to go home. I wish that I could go out into the night in search of adventure, her hand clutched tightly in mine.

As hoped, no one pays us the slightest attention as we stroll across the expanse of marbled floor and slip out onto the hectic street.

We walk side-by-side to Union Station, from where the northern Line will carry her out of the city. For me, it's the Burlington-Hamilton Line, westbound.

As we ride the escalator down into the subterranean maze, she turns and looks up at me. The height difference, exacerbated by the escalator's steps, makes her seem achingly vulnerable.

"I want to spend a whole night with you," she says. "Soon."

"I know. I want that too."

Her eyes glisten brilliantly as she scrutinises my face. "I want to find out what possibilities are waiting for us in the dark. Do you?"

"More than anything."

Time to part. It's much too crowded for lingering goodbyes, far too public for us to risk anything but the most casual of separations.

"Soon", she says again, and then she turns and walks away. Within seconds, she's gone, swallowed whole by the rest of the world.

I watch the tunnel down which she disappeared for a few more seconds, and then I turn away, heading for the moving walkway which will propel me some of the way home.