Peter pressed his knee into the backdoor, then his shoulder, then his hip before the warped jammed door gave way, opening to a musky mildew smell present ever since he'd rented the place nine months after his divorce. He'd come in from a vaporously hot starry August night, from a date, a first date with Celeste, who he'd met on a chat line a week before. As he'd said goodbye she leaned over from her passenger seat, kissed him on the cheek, reached between his legs and squeezed.
He'd flinched.
"I've been wanting to do that all night." She cooed. "Kiss me."
They kissed. And while her kiss was silky and slow, her hands were persistent and determined. She took him out, right there in the front seat, and started stroking. She stopped their kiss to watch herself with amused wonder; three fingers firmly wrapped around his swelling member, going up and down as if she were husking a piece of corn until, with a sharpe hoarse grunt, Peter spurted. She lifted her hand to her mouth and licked his cum from the back of her fingers.
"What a mess you made." she said, exhaling the words dramatically as she backed out of his car never losing eye contact. "See you soon."
Peter arrived home in a daze, his mood a sated blue but tinged with bright fluorescent pinks.
They met again on Monday evening. She'd been blonde on their first date, but had dyed her hair black before their second saying she wanted to "start fresh." He had no idea what she meant.
That night, after a brief dinner at a local diner, they returned to her small apartment and spent the rest of the night in her small bed making love.
Sex quieted Celeste. At dinner she had talked non-stop, giggled at her own jokes, told endless stories about her past, recalling specific details which triggered more memories and more details which poured out of her like a rush of water. Though he wasn't the quiet type, Peter hardly spoke.
When they kissed a sensuality inhabited Celeste, as if the energy of her words, surged into her fingers and pelvis, lifting her physically with a quiet, feminine urgency. She changed. Yet her body was frail, injured. She had a thick scar on the back of her neck, a slumping posture that coiled in upon her, almost as if she'd been whipped and a scar on her belly which Peter mistook as the result of a caesarean delivery.
Despite her wounds her pale skin had the freshness of a childs, a downy feel that was illuminated by a low electricity that disoriented Peter, took the logic from him. At one point that evening, after he'd rolled off of her, she rolled over and lifted her round pale bottom and turned to watch him as he watched her. Peter inhaled. His eyes lingered over her twin moons, mesmerized by the small slope that ran up from her lower back. He sensed experience in their slumberous stillness, a ripeness, that even at 40 sweetened her, lifted her femininity higher than it could have ever been in the bold hardness of her youth.
"Ah, what a beautiful ass you have Celeste." He said running the tips of his fingers between the hills.
Silent, she smiled at him.
Peter kissed her. She kissed with a patience that was reverential, holy, while the rest of her, in her fluorescent nakedness, slithered warmly against him as if maximum contact was true communion, as if she knew she could teach him how to love her with her hips, her breasts and her fingers.
That night, as they stood in the doorway before he departed he noticed Celeste's eyes for the first time. She had watery, pleading blue eyes and she made constant eye contact that left him uneasy. He looked away.
"Do you love me?" She asked.
"It's just our second date," he said looking up at her to find her eyes peering insistently into his.
He felt invaded as if she thought she find, on the surface of his retinas, the answer to her question. He looked away.
"I guess you'll never love me,' she said taking the door by the nob and with her other hand gently pushing him out the door. "You can't even look me in the eyes. You probably have ten other woman."
Peter cringed in disbelief. Aside from her avalanche of words at dinner their evening together had been glorious. How could she ruin such loveliness?
"I don't have other women." He said simply.
"We'll see," She responded sharply pushing him out the door and closing it quickly.
@@@@@
The first time Peter took her to meet his parents, as they stood at their front door, she got up on her toes and whispered in his ear "Don't tell your mother that I'm a nymphomaniac."
His mother frowned the whole evening and later in a phone conversation with Peter said, "I think she needs dental work and probably has several sailor tattoos. Not the kind of girl I imagine making you happy and you know, I'm your mother. I know these things." Since he was a teen, his mothers relationship with the "other," women in his life worked like this: The more Peter desired a woman the more his mother disliked her. He was convinced his mother had adored his first wife mostly because she knew Peter never really desired her. For Peters part, he could only "love" a women if he had no immense desire to fuck her, in such a way Peter was bound to marry women he couldn't have sex with and fuck woman he couldn't love.
He could fuck Celeste. She could illuminate his desire quicker than any woman he'd ever been with.
After a date not long after they'd met she'd squatted in front of his car headlights in her parking lot and pulled her shorts down mooning him, her pale white bottom shimmering like the moon on a still pond. She couldn't depart without a dramatic gesture.
Once, in a voicemail she left him at noon, she ordered him to go home, undress, get into bed and leave his front door unlocked.