Retrieval

Designed for seamless transitions from slumber into wakefulness, the Zen alarm clock chimed pleasantly on cue at 5:30 a.m., awakening Marcos. He turned over to shut it off. Still groggy from the short night's sleep, he mumbled, "You awake?"

"Just barely," she muttered into her pillow.

He snuggled against Maria's back, put his right arm around her waist and slid his hand beneath her forearm so it rested against her bare breasts. She pressed her buttocks into him.

"What should I make you for lunch today, Babe?"

"Bacon, cheese, and avocado on wheat," came her reply.

They lay together quietly, Marcos listening to her breathing, fighting the urge to retrieve the events of the night before. He extracted his hand from its cozy warmth to run his fingers through his wife's dense black hair, finding himself unable to keep his brain from making the comparison with Cassie's.

"Mmmm," Maria exhaled.

"Me gusta eso," Cassie had affirmed last evening.

Marcos looked over his shoulder at the clock. "Time to get going," he reminded her, as he kissed the tangled hair and rolled himself to a seated position, his enlarged phallus staring up at him, having swelled from the close contact as well as his intruding recollections. He dressed in his jogging sweats and went downstairs to fill Maria's lunch order.

Marcos put two slices of whole wheat bread into the toaster and three strips of bacon into the microwave. With the sound of the shower running, he let himself drift back to the previous night. Cassie's eyelids tightly closed, her cheeks flushed, lips parted, panting, "Sí Señor. Sí. Sí. Sí." He loved how a woman entirely of English stock could lapse into Spanish when she got so aroused.

A clunk sounded and the cascading of water abruptly stopped. He hefted a ripe avocado. "Tara's shape," he appraised under his breath, and continued silently, was she ever sensational last night. Without her help--why did she ever agree in the first place?--it wouldn't have been possible! Did it really happen? Did I only dream that it did?

As he cut open the soft avocado, and drew his knife in long slices through the yellow-green flesh, he recalled the conversation he had had with his modeling comrade, Tara, on a day a couple of months ago, when she had posed for him. She was a lesbian and a trustworthy confidante who listened to his marital problems and endured his wistful fantasies of love affairs without the conflicts of being a potential lover herself. To have some fun with Cassie, they had laughingly concocted an elaborate modeling ruse, paused, looked at each other, and then laughed again, with the realization that it was, just possibly, absurd enough to work.

So Marcos had started the events in motion the next time he modeled for Cassie's drawing group by suggesting that they consider sketching a pair of models during one of their upcoming sessions. Tara and he would do it, he had offered, and to make sure they had interesting poses for everyone to draw (and that the group was thoroughly satisfied and would want them back again and again), they had enlisted Cassie's "help" with critiquing their practice poses prior to going live.

He chuckled out loud to recall it: their staged clumsiness during rehearsal last night that provoked Cassie into shedding her robe and "demonstrating" the poses she wanted for them. Oh, Cassie! His heart lifted up higher into his chest, with the weightlessness of new love. But with the clomping of clogs on the stair treads, his stomach twisted with guilt.

Maria ate her cereal. Marcos packed her lunch. They kissed goodbye. She exited through the back door, got into her Subaru, and departed the driveway on her way to the hospital for her 7:00 a.m. shift as head nurse in the ICU.

Marcos turned to clean up the kitchen, squeezed out the dish detergent, and inhaled a sink-full of citrus. He sighed. Cassie's scent. What was it that wafted up whenever he hugged her? Was it from her hair--her shampoo? Her laundry soap? A signature perfume? Whatever it was, his cock responded when the note of that fragrance was sounded--even when it was only suggested to have sounded. He leaned into the countertop to compress his now hardening penis against the bull nose tile. "Her soft hand pulling on me, from base to tip, base to tip," he reminisced.

He rinsed the sponge, turned off the water, and dried his hands. "Time for a jog," he said to the silence. He peered out at the thermometer and shivered at the reading--minus ten.

Walking into the living room, he opened the glass front of the wood stove and poked around for any embers he could rekindle the fire with and restore the warmth of the former flames. Otherwise, he would need to start the fire anew--like love, he mused, smiling at his metaphor.

Several minutes later, in front of a raging blaze, he stripped, prior to donning his Under Armour. Playfully, he struck a pose, turning his shoulders to the right and extending a leg straight out behind him. Last evening, he remembered putting his left arm around Cassie's bared waist. She was straddling his right knee, her petite frame taut, calf bulging as she balanced on the ball of her foot. And under his nose, her hair, the color of a prairie fire, crackling with static electricity and lighting up his olfactory lobes.

Tara recommended more of an arch to his back, and he used his free arm on Cassie's freckled thigh for balance. That touch got his cock to fill, and, with the recollection, Marcos was pleasantly aware of that filling sensation now. He settled back into his memory.

Another hand--Tara's--wrapped around his back, and this position packed the three really closely together. They were getting silly; everyone shouting moves to try--Cassie's hand over Tara's shoulder, Tara's foot on his anklebone, his chest against Cassie's ear.

He remarked about the heat--Cassie's wood stove was really cranking and they were flushed from the wine--and all those tactile sensations. It was like the mattress room into where he and Maria had once gone at Plato's Retreat in the City, with hands from a myriad of people reaching over, touching and rubbing one another to the brink of climax.

Aware of the heat from his own wood stove, Marcos let one hand drift over his thick chest hair and the other move along his buttock. He directed his right hand to continue up his neck to his goatee, up over his nose, onto his forehead, and to circle his balding head, which was lightly perspiring now. He crouched to let the fingers of his left track along the back of his thigh to his calf, ankle, and instep before returning up the front, slowly, to his groin, where he paused to pull on a curl of pubic hair until sharp pings flooded his pubis. He repeated the tugs in other locales until his erection pulsed and started to rumble.

Abruptly, he stopped and began to study the purple engorged vein exiting his ruddy glans and knotting along its violet shaft, reciting the colors he would use if he were to paint his rigidity: "Cad red light, burnt sienna with yellow ochre, Prussian blue, zinc white with sap green, alizarin crimson, and cad yellow medium." He couldn't come now, he reminded himself. The replay was just beginning.

Marcos stood up and exhaled deeply, relieved that he had stepped back from the edge. He was close last night, too, he remembered, and was surprised by that. But even more startling was that Cassie seemed so willing to play along with Tara and him. Her breasts, full and flushed, with stiff nipples, each a solitary raspberry on a pink saucer, like a tiny doll's tea set. He felt the turgidity of one of them brush against his cheek as he tried to step around Tara's leg, and it nearly catapulted him into an orgasm. He had to dam his raging river to slow the trio's tempo, so he toppled their formation, like a stack of blocks, onto the futon.

Marcos flopped himself onto his leather couch, reached to the floor to retrieve a sofa pillow, and pressed it onto his erection.

Last night, Cassie had landed on top of him, her back against his chest, leaving his hands free. Spreading his fingers, he combed her delicate hair, twirling it, lifting it, tugging on it gently as he brought his fingers through the softness. As he repeated this with one hand, the other circled her ear and explored the cartilaginous ridges and valleys before moving on to her forehead. Sliding down her nose, descending into the little groove to her mouth, riding the pliant ridges of her lips to her chin, and then down her neck to that little hollow at the base. In figures of eights, he slalomed her mammary slopes, nudging her nipples on every turn.

Tara pulled on her toes and the force caused Cassie to slide off him; Marcos recalled the jerk on his erection as she slipped off, which he simulated now with the pillow roughly raking across his hardness, making it twitch with anticipation.

He was then freed up to bend over and kiss her. To kiss her. He had longed to do this. Deeply.

In their previous early dinner evenings together, he had kissed her like the Europeans did in greeting; nuzzled her hair during a waltz; pecked her cheek to say goodbye. As they had spent more time together, they had begun to kiss each other on the lips. But quickly. Tight mouthed. Not lingering.

Over time, they had grown closer, shared more intimate secrets, become more familiar with each other, and her initial resistance to him being married had seemed to soften. Sometimes they held hands in the darkness of his Toyota. Sometimes they hugged longingly before saying goodbye for the week. Sometimes she allowed him to run his fingers through the flames of her scalp, lifting the locks of hair, separating them with his sensitive digits, before letting the strands fall back against her skull. And sometimes, if their meal had been sensational, dancing delightful, conversation connected, and the stars aligned just right, she would return his kiss of the forehead, nose, and chin with a kiss on the lips, mouth slightly open, pressing against his, not once, but twice or three times.

Last night was one of those times, as it seemed like Orion had joined the Glenn Miller Orchestra and Cassie was "in the mood." Her participation in the model ménage suggested it; her sighs and groans were confirmatory. As Tara tugged on her fiery pubes and pleasure moans bubbled up, Marcos reached over to kiss her, first on the cheek, then at each corner of her mouth. When she parted and moistened her lips, he placed his mouth against hers and felt that warm, slippery softness of fullness fitting into folds, form conforming to the formless. Then she stiffened, shook, and exclaimed, loudly down his throat, that pleasured satisfaction of her evening's first orgasm.

Sighing with the memory, Marcos licked his two fingers and rubbed them like a kiss over his wetted lips. His other hand reached up to his left nipple and he squeezed it, just hard enough to send a thousand pins into his breast, and make the blood-flow surge to his erection. He relaxed his fingers then transferred the same pressure to his right, feeling the rush of sexual energy to his groin again. "Why does that happen?" he wondered aloud, and made a mental note to ask Maria.

Last night, after Cassie came, Tara tapped him on the shoulder, and they changed places. Things were accelerating. He and Tara had just intended to play with Cassie during the posing, but with Cassie's responsiveness, Marcos was turned on way more than he had ever expected. Tara, too. And now, apparently, they couldn't stop themselves.

He watched Tara massaging Cassie's scalp and brow just above her closed eyelids. Needing to touch her again, Marcos stroked a finger up Cassie's inner thigh, to the crease of her groin, up over the top of her mound, then down the other side. His brain tug-o'-warred: enter her with his finger, his tongue, his cock, or--don't violate her trust.

Cassie relaxed her thighs. The scent of her arousal was potent. Her kinky red hair, moist; her vulva, slick, wanting.

For what seemed like eons his head swam. He stared at her face, the face of a person he had known only a scant few months--and reacted.

He slid his index finger inside her with ease. She squeezed him tightly, then released, as he began his search for her special spot, which he hoped by charming, would secure her love for him. He was quickly rewarded. She raised her knees and opened her thighs to allow him better access, inadvertently pressing her leg against his manhood, full to bursting.

Marcos pressed his left forearm against his penis to mimic the memory, rubbing it against his rock hardness, like Cassie's hip rocking was doing to him last night. He gasped, sucked in his pelvic muscles, and jerked his forearm away. "Too much. Not yet."

He maneuvered around to her side. She was tensing. Moaning. "Qué magnífica! Dios Mios!" He pressed on her clit, and she screamed in passion. Groaned with her second pleasure. He felt his own impending orgasm, but he had not anticipated coming. He shouldn't, he thought. But if he didn't, and then tried to model in front of her...? At breakneck speed, he performed the risk-benefit analysis, and with his obvious bias toward release--especially as Cassie now held his erection in her hand, stroking it delicately, he decided. He laid his head on her breast, watched her ladle elixir from her vaginal cask and, changing her caress, rub him with it from tip to base, tip to base. He capitulated. Completely.

Now, curling up on his running suit, left arm becoming Cassie's breast, he squeegeed sweat from his head and rubbed it roughly along the shank, the friction burning his cock, the traction stretching his meatus open, the base aching with every fantasized plunge into Cassie's tightness. Pressure built in his anus and spread to his sac, an earthquake rumbling in the groin, reverberating up his belly into his chest. When the temblor reached his crown, he roared, "Oh Cassie, Cassie!" as his penis spewed rich cream onto his royal blue Merino wool top.

"Cassie!" And the foundation he had known for decades with Maria began to crack.

"Cassie!" The landscape altering, perhaps forever. "Cassie!" he panted as he now turned his face toward the fire, seeing her dancing, her hair shaking playfully, her eyes staring intently into his, her laughing smile transforming into pursed lips. He inhaled and let his breath out slowly, relishing this moment, helping the memories become more indelibly etched into his mind. Her smell, her taste, her texture, her scream.

Over the months, she had become his muse. His reason to paint, to model, to dance, to cook, to clean, to endure a marriage that had, after twenty years and two children, been without inspiration for too, too long now.

Yet, he worried that last night's impromptu would eternally alter his relationship with his nymph, his goddess, his Terpsichore. Would it be for the better? Cassie had revealed to him that she was going to start saying, "Yes" to the world.

Or would it be for the worse? Too much, too fast. He was a married man, after all, and she had vowed not to get involved...

He always emailed her sometime during the day. She occasionally beat him to it. He would go for a run now. He was confident that the gods would see to it that she would be there, when he returned. And if not, then their new love would somehow find the way.