She was lying back, relaxed, but still breathing through her mouth. "Why did we do that?"
I let the silence last, then said, "Are you overthinking us again?"
More silence. "I was hard, you were wet. There was suspension of inhibition, and our bodies did the rest."
Another pause as we let the glow dissipate in the late afternoon sun.
"There's more to it than that."
She looked over, blue eyes pulling me in as they always did. Lips pursed in a pout, inviting love and violence. I wondered if I would ever tie her up and beat some of that passion into wild, screaming submission.
"We desire each other. There's no reason for it, we are as different as day and night, but we do."
"I spend weeks drowned in my work, but you appear in the lab, taking time from one of your trips, and I go a little mad until we have coupled, and thrashed, and come."
I took Natalie's fingers and kissed them. We'd grown up summers at adjoining Italian villas near Lucca. We had watched each other be kids, and adolescents, and finally, what passes for adults. Later, when we were lovers, neither of us could understand why our lust for each other never bloomed in those days. Perhaps, as the Jesuits suggest, busy minds keep sinful thoughts at bay.
Our familes were American academics with inherited money that underwrote the summers in Italy, with an interruption or two for conferences, whose importance was stressed in conversation with Italian friends invited to frequent and boozy parties on the olive tree terraces.
In September, back in Ithaca, everyone underwent moods of depression as we awkwardly fitted ourselves back into classes, research labs, unfinished manuscripts and other trivia of the academy and their necessary, middle class kids.
I was the older of two bright children. I should revise that to say I was the bright enough older brother of a brilliant sister whose talents covered music, athletics and mathematics. If Lisa was a comet, I was the dark asteriod in her wake.
Natalie had one of my fingers in her mouth, sucking with the pouty lips. I wondered if we would ever untangle love and lust. Her breast was pink, and its generous, stiff nipple an exotic rose shade that sent a shiver through me whenever I had an opportunity to view it, and occasionally to stroke it.
"How many hours do I get this time?"
I leaned forward and kissed the pouty lips. Soft, sweet, welcoming. How did I deserve that?
"When I leave you, I can hardly concentrate on my work, I am so guilty. I curse myself for the arrogant bastard I am. This isn't drop-in sex. It's more. I fear the day I come to your door and your eyes tell me it is over."
She turned away and I saw her shoulders shake. "I talked to my aunt the shrink recently about us." Her voice was low and husky. "She was tough. She said, 'Do you think you are the first two lovers to be star-crossed? Can you imagine a love between you that is not conventional? Not bound by a marriage vow, by a household, by children?' "
"She asked me, 'Why do you keeping seeing each other? Is it just sex, or is there more?' "
"I started crying. She held me. She said, 'Go home, make yourself a stiff drink, and look inside to see if you can go on having a relationship of visits. If you can't, then you must break it off.' "
I reached over and turned her. "Why didn't you tell me. We haven't had secrets, have we?"
"No, I've never hidden anything from you. I don't know that I could. But some terrible little voice said, 'Better not bring this up if you are not prepared to lose him.' "
She climbed into my arms, saying "There. I didn't mind the voice, and I have told you. You're free to send me away."
I stood up and walked us to the railing on her balcony, absorbing that. Her house was halfway up the first range of hills and had a magnificant view of the valley. If you were the right age to have Sartre pounded into you in school, the existential angst of such beauty was never far away.
"But that's not what she said. She said that if deep inside, you decided this wasn't fair, you should send me away. Am I supposed to be getting a signal with this conversation?"
What she was doing was pressing herself into me, and rubbing her wet crotch on my thigh, and thusting her hot tongue into my mouth. I was hard in an instant. I grasped her thighs, raising her entrance to the tip of my erection and sliding her down, down, down. Her legs went tight around me and her cunt squeezed me rhythmically.
She whispered in my ear, "I agree. I was overthinking us. Let's fuck."
Afterwards, we swam lazily in her pool. As she went down the lane freestyle, the taut globes of her ass flexed in the sun. When she returned in backstroke, the curls on her mount were a minature parade float on display.
I went to the edge and grabbed my drink, watching her go by. In the way of women, she was sending me a message by not sending a message. She wasn't taking her aunt's advice. She wasn't breaking off anything. She was pushing our mess out into the center of the room, like a smelly turd, and suggesting it was up to me to clean it up.
I knew the solution wasn't here, in the seductive hills of the Peninsula. It wasn't where she worked, and was respected and admired.
She swam over and sipped my drink, smiling. I gathered all of her wet, naked beauty into my arms and kissed her neck.
"I have to go after dinner. The flight to Singapore leaves at eleven."
I touched her forehead. "Your aunt is right. What we have is more than lust and we do have to do something."
She leaned back and took a large gulp of drink. The blue eyes were serious and unblinking.
"And?"
Ball still in my court. Damn.
"Do you suppose we could possibly arrange calendars to go somewhere for ten days? A neutral corner where we could review the bidding?"
She leaned in, kissed me and whispered in my ear, "Review the bidding. I like that." She rubbed herself on my front while she thought some more.
"What kind of somewhere? Alaska? Greenland? The Caucausus?"
We had hiked together with friends in the Dolomites as teenagers. She was strong and fit then, and looked like she still was.
