Author's Note: This story is fiction, but it is based loosely on real events in my life. The names have been changed, of course. This story is the way I've chosen to remember those events, even though they didn't really happen in exactly this way.
* * * * *
According to the signs we passed on I-95, we were passing New Haven. We still had at least two more hours of this trip to go. The van belonged to Harry, my ex, so of course he was driving. Our son Steve was riding up front beside him. I think they were talking about what Steve could expect when we got to Providence, but their conversation was almost drowned out by the van's CD player which was pounding out something by one of Steve's favorite bands.
I was sitting in the van's shorter second row seat. The full bench seat at the back had been lowered into the van's floor to make room for the considerable amount of stuff we had to carry. I was completely surrounded by that stuff. There were suitcases, cartons, bags, lamps, a guitar case, three hockey sticks, and some items I couldn't even identify and didn't remember ever seeing at home. We were carrying everything that Steve considered essential for his first year at college. I suspected that if we got into a collision I might be found in the wreckage fatally impaled on the nasty end of a ski pole, or smothered by green garbage bags stuffed with blankets and towels.
I'd had lots of time in the previous two years to think about what went wrong in my marriage to Harry, but I still couldn't make sense of it all. We had had our differences, some of them intensely fought, but I really had no idea what caused us to simply drift apart and to stop loving each other. The divorce had been the right thing for both of us. I knew that at the time. But despite the fact that the split was amicable and enabled us to remain good friends, it saddened me to think of all that we had lost in the process.
One thing that I had lost out on was years and years of truly great sex.
Harry was the best lover I've ever had. He was probably the best lover I could ever imagine having. I'd had a number of partners before him, and some of them seemed quite good at the time, but Harry was the first one who made it his personal mission to show me how to enjoy sex to the fullest. He brought out in me a need I hadn't even known I possessed, the need to immerse myself in the pleasures that my body could find in physical love. He found that need in me and presented it to me like the precious gift that it was.
Harry had that strange sort of lust that allows men (I've always thought of this as a guy thing) to throw themselves into sex without questioning, even for a moment, the motives behind their rampant desires. Sometimes Harry would make love to me with a level of passionate intensity that stunned me with its beauty, not to mention its level of sheer athleticism (ah, the energy of youth!) and carnal daring (ah, the thrills of exploration and discovery!), and I would strongly suspect that he was reliving a moment earlier in the day when I had caught him enjoying the hint of a smile in the eyes of an attractive female stranger.
It never concerned me that he might be imagining me to be another woman while he was fucking me. I was absolutely confident that he loved me and desired me as much as he could love and desire anyone. I don't think he ever cheated on me during our marriage, at least not in the flesh, but his sexually oriented mind probably brought him numerous other fantasy partners and imagined stolen pleasures that I would never know about. And that bothered me not one bit. In fact, I was secretly grateful that his fleeting mental images of being with some other woman would bring out the best in his already awesome cocksmanship when he was fucking me. As complex and sophisticated as Harry's sexual techniques were, his real sexual needs were simple. He just needed to have good sex with reasonable frequency. No wife with a normal need for sex could ask for more, and I knew that many wives settled for far less.
Even toward the end of our life together, as Harry and I were gradually falling out of love for each other, the sex we occasionally shared was still very good. We both seemed able to set aside our differences, if only for brief periods, and enjoy the pleasures of the moment without the emotional burdens of discarded vows and commitments. Maybe at such moments he thought of me as an attractive stranger (which I suppose in a sense I was), but that possibility was never of any concern to me.
Harry and I had done a pretty good job, first together and then separately but still working as a team, of preparing our son for this milestone in his young life so that he could approach it with appropriate measures of eager enthusiasm and confidence. But we were now in the act of setting him adrift in an almost-adult world over which we would have very little control. We held the purse-strings, but that was about the limit of our clout. And it was going to be very quiet at home without Steve there. I didn't know if I should be crying in joy for Steve or crying in loneliness for myself. Well, I wasn't really crying just then, but I was sure that tears would be part of my day before it was over.
Our van passed a cluster of motels, gathered like predators in ambush around one of the highway's access cloverleafs. The sight of them jolted me from the bittersweet realities of my present life because they brought to mind a vivid memory of an unplanned and unforgettable night Harry and I had spent in a motel room some 19 years ago. I remembered it very well.
* * * * *
In near-blizzard conditions on that night in rural Ontario our car had skidded out of control and then slowly, almost majestically, parked itself more or less permanently in a snowdrift left by the plows on the shoulder of the road. We still had a long way to go to our destination, but apparently our car felt that it had had quite enough for this night. Luckily, we weren't in the middle of nowhere. We were, in fact, less than a hundred yards from the optimistic sign of a motel whose Owner didn't seem to know that cottaging season had ended months before. We bundled ourselves up, trudged down the middle of the deserted road, and woke up the motel Owner who could hardly believe his good luck in getting the business of some crazy city folks who didn't even have the smarts to stay home in weather like this.
Checking into a motel takes no time at all when you have no luggage. And no car. Within minutes we had fallen onto a gorgeously comfortable bed in our underwear. The adrenaline rush of our near-accident was probably still in our veins, and we went for each other as if the motel's sign had read "Last Chance To Fuck Before North Bay" (which would have been tasteless but accurate). Harry had me up against the headboard of the bed right away, ramming into me from behind as if he'd been waiting all day for this chance to relieve a painful erection. At the moment of Harry's triumphant and noisy climax I felt so filled, so overpowered by our mutual lust, that I honestly felt for an instant that we might have just started the process of creating new life within me.
