Best Laid Plans

Jamira was grateful for the cackle of her senior sisters behind her on the pharmacy line. At the same time, she hoped that 20 years from now, she would not succumb to gossiping about dentures, toupees and impotence. When the pharmacist called "Next," Jamira tapped her index and middle fingers on the white counter and said in a timid voice, "I would like Plan B." She stepped back a bit as if giving the pharmacist permission to eye-scan her head to toe before the latter said, "I suppose I don't need to ask you for I.D."

After the lingering embarrassment had passed, Jamira took the fastest route home. It was a Saturday morning, and she decided to start the spring cleaning with her sizable study. Placing the pharmacy bag on her desk, she reflected on how she had met Guy. She found herself rubbing her ring finger as if doing so would produce a blinding rock, the kind she had spied fleetingly in a window display in the Diamond District, as Guy warned her they needed to find the latest in a series of rendezvous. She kept caressing her finger and drifted into a daydream.

Jamira had met Guy through a friend of a friend, as often happens on the island of Manhattan. What her friend failed to tell her was that he was attached, but they both failed to notice that he was also married. In seven months, the pair became accustomed to a clandestine routine made all the easier by Guy's wife working nights at a municipal hospital to put him through grad school. With New York City being a small world, they had a limited number of the kinds of places to have their meetings -- from culinary dives and midnight showings of B movies to jam sessions at small, unpopular music venues. And as characteristically happens with affairs between married men and single women, they wound up at her apartment.

Their forbidden kiss an hour into the second set at Treble & Bass, had eclipsed their plans to take in a late-night movie in midtown at the Kipps Bay Theater. Night had descended upon the West Village, bringing with it torrential rain. They fled the jazz club sharing his monogrammed umbrella, and ducked into a hellhole off Varick Street that doubled as a subway station. A pas de deux of glances and kisses between them blocked out the underground nocturnal scene of libidinous psychotics and, worse, sotted businessmen enjoying a urination competition in the middle of the subway car. Exiting the station, they splashed their way up the grimy steps in the downpour. Three flights up, they sought refuge at Jamira's place and in each other's arms. Few words were spoken between them. Every time she tried to speak, to ask Guy whether he had made the choice between "the other woman" and her, his tongue probing deep in her mouth pushed the thought further away from her mind. Once his hands found the generous tips of her breasts, her rival was a distant memory.

Jamira felt the hot air from his flared nostrils on her trembling neck and cooed in rhythm with the smooth jazz flowing off a cable music channel. Her eyes were closed; his spied the hour hand on his watch. However, time has a tendency to stand still when lovers' desire comes to a boil. When Jamira's hand reached the final button on Guy's perspiration-drenched shirt, his wood brushed her knuckles. She could feel blood rush from her brain to her cheeks, then speed toward her vulva and clit. Their hands were all over one another, feeling every bump, wrinkle, fold and membrane. He snapped her damp panties against her waxed mound and vulva, then circled his digits to make a froth on her pink and brown petals. His question "Is it good to you?" went unanswered there on the sofa in the dimly lighted living room. All she could hear were the echoes of her sighs and the sound of her natural juices. He asked her again, and seeing as she could not get past "I," he delivered sweet torture unto her by slipping one finger, then two, then three, in and out of her membranous opening until she whimpered for mercy.

Caught up in the rhythm of his fingering, he forgot where he was for a moment and envisioned his wife squirming in front of him. "I love you," he heard himself say as if it were another person. It was too late. The most feared three words of the commitment phobic -- among married couples and singletons -- had leaped from this mouth. Jamira reflexively said, "Me, too," then smiled in a horny, crooked way. She kissed him hard on his mouth and did not waste time slinking down his chest and belly to turn up his body heat. Just as Fourplay's version of The Isley Brothers' "Between the Sheets" slithered from the television's speakers. Jamira steadied herself on her knees on the parquet floor, shrugging off any apprehension about suffering from arthritis the next day. Like the ravenous vixen that, long ago, her parents had warned her not to become, she tongued like a savage at Guy's unzipped fly until his penis nearly poked her in her eye. He thrust his pelvis forward again and again, urging her with, "Yeah, right there!" "Oh, slurp on that thing, girl." Each time her lover thrusted, she marveled silently at how his dick protruded at an odd angle, resembling a maple tree's thick branch. Watching her suck out his oozing sap, he knew the stakes were high. They usually needed two or three sessions with an interlude of sleep at Guy's weary insistence.

Guy awakened with an almost world record-setting case of morning wood. They had moved to Jamira's bed sometime between the second and third bottle of Merlot. Lifting the bed sheet to ogle his lover's bare behind as she slept on her side, he palmed his large, throbbing head as if he were shining a doorknob. He snatched the bed sheet off his lover's body, threw her legs over his shoulder and humped her torso until his beasty balls smacked her clenching cheeks. His shaft was as rigid as Moses' staff. He had fucked Jamira out of a nightmare only to impale her at dawn. Her eyes flashed open violently like blinds raised by a firm yank on a string. His lusty gaze met her shocked expression. She could still taste his briny seed and begged him: "Take my tongue into your mouth, baby boy, so you can taste your cum." That was her way of reclaiming her goddess power, but his sexual energy was greater than hers.

Jamira hated Guy a little now. Still panting from a dream world pursuit from which he had rescued her with the upward thrusting of his huge helmeted dick, she sought an escape of a different kind. She wanted out of her body and into the moment that landed her here, pinned to a dial-a-deal mattress. Listening to his blithering phrases assaulting her ears, Jamira felt conflicted -- repulsed by Guy's shallow treatment of her yet thrilled by how deeply he could bury his pride.

Several long fingers briefly replaced his staff, stroking her front wall while the other hand squeezed her fluid that trickled down to the cleft of her buttocks. He did not spare her other ear, whispering encouragements intended to make her surrender to her unbridled alter-ego. As her heart seemed to palpitate out of her chest, she was more afraid of him than she had been of all the vampires and zombies in recurring nightmares experienced since her deflowering in an unfamiliar meadow.

For her, in this moment, on a refurbished bed, no one but they existed on earth. That sensation instilled in her being both fear and contentment. Their intimate space was sacred. It was where their breasts and pelvises smacked together, but also where their dilated pupils sought out each other's soul. It also was where he wanted to conquer her belief in love with his well-endowed symbol of masculinity. In the light of day, the only element in the room that remained the same was the smooth jazz playing on the music cable channel. She regretted that she found his morning wood hard to resist, and that she had succumbed to her own wine-warped memory of the evening before mingled with sour tongues and fermented desire. And now he had his fingers lodged in her most private places.

Guy brought her back to the present, commanding Jamira to "be here, with me." In case she did not understand the intensity of his desire, he pumped his fingers harder into her orifices until her clit disappeared beneath its fleshy sheath. Jamira hated losing control, but her nerves gave way. Her hands flew from the top edge of the headboard, and her hands twitched as if signing the language of erotic gods. Her legs felt loosened from her spine, and her feet went numb. The more she screamed, the wider he smiled. A eye-bulging -- and for him, dick-popping -- series of involuntary seizures later, she was spent. Her body was left rocking like an abandoned rowboat on gentle ocean waves. While her pussy swam in her natural lube, he brought his dick back to life by slapping it alternately against her slick mound and thighs. Drunk with lust, he cursed like a sailor on leave as he sniffed in her primal scent mixed with his.

Her entire bedroom smelled of the wonderful aroma of their sex. He let out a groan and flipped his woman onto her tummy, pressing her bulging tits into the 350-thread count Egyptian sheets. They tried as many positions illustrated in the Kama Sutra until he had penetrated her more than once in every wet spot they had created through the night. Despite the "lite jazz" floating in from the living room, they thrashed together on the big beg like heavy-metal rockers in pheromone-induced madness.

Still panting a half-hour later as Guy slept, Jamira massaged her sore vulva, to which her nylon panties had clung to her waxed folds the prior night, when he had kissed new life into her. What a fool I was, she mused, regretting that she had believed he wanted to romance her. I still haven't learned my lesson. He's married and can never be mine. With morning came the scars and the realization that she had bruised her dignity by allowing him to use her as a side dish from the philanderer's menu of mind-fucking. As soon as he leaves, I will shower away his touches, his scent, she thought, but what she needed was not soap and water. Rather, she needed the elusive key that unlocks a fantastic lover's spiritual, invisible hold on one's being.

Incendiary passion, like a welder working overtime, fused their two smoldering bodies into twisted metal sculpture. For this loving pair, the melding created an illuminated work of art. Lust united them in the guise of love, and their desire distorted their primal attraction into earnest intentions of future commitment.

Seated in her study an hour after swallowing the bitter pill with a glass of water, Jamira yanked a tissue from a dainty pink box and blotted her tears. This is the right thing to do, she convinced herself. She knew she preferred the playground of casual sex, not of snotty-nosed children who would call her "mommy." Then she unlocked a drawer and removed a journal she had begun at the beginning of their relationship seven months ago. A flurry of receipts fell to the floor. Shuddering, she picked up the papers and rubbed her fingers over the numbers and words as if she were blind and the characters were printed in Braille. She had saved all of the receipts from her purchases of Plan B. Despite the writing on the wall, the only image she could see on the semigloss surface was Guy's sly smile. Her tears began to flow again, now, and turning to a new page in her journal, she wrote: "Not even a rainy day can put out the fire of the best laid plan."