So Close yet so Far

It was a Saturday morning, and the sky half-glimpsed through the window of his hotel room held the clarity of a fresh idea. He had no appointments until that afternoon, so after a moment losing himself in the blue, he sat down at the small writing desk, wearing only his boxers, and flipped his laptop open.

Outside, in the city streets, he could hear the sound of a band playing somewhere. He wondered for the slightest moment if it were a parade, or a fair, or an outdoor concert – but he was not seduced away. Nor could the scent of breakfast, wafting up from the restaurant below, entice him: he had a greater hunger.

He logged in through the hotel's abominably expensive internet service and opened his browser. He knew she wouldn't be online; he was rarely that lucky, and never on a Saturday morning. But he could hope she had left an email to bring her closer to his thoughts. And, of course, to prove that he had been in hers.

They had never met. There was little chance they ever would meet. Nevertheless, their affair had raged for well over a year now, each stealing their secret moments away, each feeling things they dared not say, saying things they could never bring to true fruition. But in this place, this alternate hidden half-life between screens, they could never get enough of one another.

There was an email waiting. The simple sight of her name set a delicious shiver running through his body. He leaned forward slightly, shaping the syllables without speaking, imagining her lips pressed to his own. A drop of sweat trickled down his bare back, soaking into the fabric of the chair as, trapped between his thighs, his cock began to stir. And then, he opened the message itself.

She had only written a few lines. He was the verbose one, the creator, the one who spun their conversations into the whole cloth of fantasy; she was the muse, the primal spark that had been their beginning. But even a few hastily-typed sentences, a clumsy but deliciously naughty reference to her desire for him, more than erased any thought of imbalance. If anything, he felt the need to spend hundreds, thousands of words in reply to even compare.

After he'd re-read her words three times, he thought to scroll down further. Attached to the message, she had sent him a photo. His fingers trembled on the touchpad, causing the pointer to jitter and skip. Slowly, he let his free hand drop into his lap. His fingertips traced lightly along his thigh until they reached his hardness, now slipping beyond the boxers' control, and barely grazed electrically against the shaft.

He knew she wasn't taking photos for him exclusively. It made no difference. He had his own other admirers as well, first and foremost being his wife. But there was no denying their connection, their attraction, their desire – every time he saw her, he searched the photograph for hidden messages, for slight, seductive details that only he would notice, and he liked to think she was expecting him to find them. As his eyes lingered at each pixel of the new photograph, he stroked himself into arousal at these discovered secrets and how they brought his heart closer to hers, as much as for the shapely curves of her smooth, youthful body.

His lips parted slightly, his tongue darting across their boundary and back, as he examined the photo. In it, she was turned away from the camera, kneeling hands and knees on the bed, skirt pulled high, revealing her panties and a geometric perfection of calves and thighs. Her feet were folded, one over the other, big toes extending beyond the bottom of the frame. At first, even the obvious things excited him – the ruffle of the skirt over the curve of her bottom, the way the fabric of her panties clung to the forbidden delights within. His pulse sped up, and his fingers encircled the shaft of his cock fully, finding a rhythm, the crook of his index finger brushing against the underside of the head with each stroke, droplets of precome seeping down between, the whole shaft pulsing and pressing forward against the next hint of motion.

But as he continued, a low moan escaping from his lips that became her name, he found the smaller details. The curve of her toes, the angle of a pillow revealing the angle at which she had her forearms pressed against the mattress, the barely-visible creases of white across her thighs where her bottom kept sunbathing from being fully effective; and each one only made him more excited, made him want her more intensely, rolling his hips, thrusting against the confinement of his hand, feeling the rise of something related to laughter but far more intense suffusing his body.

In the next room, a child raised his voice in argument with a parent over whether or not a shower should be taken; the sound penetrated to his desk, but he never noticed. Outside a cloud obscured the blue, in passing; he never looked up. He was looking deeper, tracing the slightest curve of each inner thigh, calculating the texture of her hair, were she close enough to bury his face in it as he took her from behind, pulling those panties gently to one side, slipping so deep inside her that their bodies became truly one a timeless moment, the heat flowing through him and filling her until they would always be together –

And all at once he came, guiltily allowing himself to spray across the carpet beneath the desk, and he cried out her name until his head fell to the desk beside the laptop, his shoulders heaving. When he raised his face to the mirror behind the desk, he could see tears across his cheeks.

His hands shaking, he hit a button to reply to the email. As urgent as the need that had overtaken him in the moments before was the necessity to write to her, to let her know just how close she had come to him without even trying, and how close he wanted to be for her.