"Tony, are you ready for our weekly meeting?" Alice asked business-like as I was talking to the mechanic about his progress on fixing the copy-machine.
Alice and I were colleagues working for an advertising agency, and we did have a weekly meeting to discuss various things, although the actual discussing of things tended to be a lot shorter than the duration of the meetings suggested.
However, we were also good, long-time friends outside of work, even though we did our best not to make that too obvious on the work floor to prevent making people think that it would influence the way we did our jobs.
Alice was a black woman, 30 years old and childless but married to Steve, a guy she met when she and I had already been friends for years. I was the one she trusted enough to confide in, which I was really proud of, being a guy myself. This way I knew that Steve was a nice enough guy, but not very generous in bed since they'd gotten married. He was busy with his career a lot ever since the day they had gotten married and it seemed to have its effect on their love life.
I guess at this point it would be wise to make clear what the point is in mentioning all of this. You see, since shortly after Alice and I had become friends, over 10 years ago, we've shared a very special and intimate thing, that we kind of stopped sharing when she got engaged. And that thing is that we used to masturbate in front each other to get rid of sexual tensions.
We never actually had sex, and as strange as it may seem we've never even seen each other's genitalia either. We didn't have sex because we both knew it might have ended up screwing with our friendship - we both had bad experiences in that department -, and we didn't show each other our genitalia to prevent losing control and ending up having sex anyway. We would masturbate in front of each other, and there would usually be something obstructing the view of the naughty bits. We would either have a jacket over our laps, or a blanket, or we would simply be obscured from view in other ways. Actually, this made the masturbation sessions more exciting somehow. We knew what the other was doing by everything but sight. It was something according to the oft-expressed 'wisdom' that sometimes what you don't see is more exciting than what you can see.
To some this keeping genitalia hidden from view for the reasons I mentioned might seem as some weak, maybe even ridiculous excuse of some kind, and maybe it was. But whatever the reasons may or may not have bee, it was the way it started out, and it was the way we kept it.
This all, and I mean the masturbation sessions, stopped once Alice got engaged to Steve as she saw it as unfair to him. She wanted to be faithful in every single way, including in her own fantasies. I tried explaining to her that there was nothing wrong with fantasizing about other things or other people even if you're married, but she told me she simply didn't 'feel' it that way. He gave her what she needed in the sex department and there was something inside of her that told her it was wrong to allow her mind to wander to other things.
Faithfulness in mind, body and soul, she regarded it to be.
However, this way of thinking seemed to stop about a year into their marriage, around the time that she told me that their sex life wasn't what it used to be. Rather than having sex at least five times a week, they were having sex about once a week, and even then it wasn't anything to write home about.
It was a few weeks after she told me this that she suggested that we could once do what we used to do, which was to masturbate in front of each other. It was not that she couldn't do that solo; it was that she needed to share her sexuality with someone else, and preferably more than she, at that time, did with her own husband. Alice wasn't a nymphomaniac per se, but she really loved sex and not by herself.
Nevertheless, the way we did it was the same way it was before she had gotten engaged to Steve. Meaning: there was no physical contact of any sort, and there was no actual nudity, or none that we could actually see anyway. This time, however, besides the reason of our masturbation session not turning into a full blown sexual affair, there was also the reason of faithfulness. In Alice's mind, masturbation sessions while being married were okay so long as there was no contact and no nudity, and only so long as her husband didn't provide her with a decent amount of attention in the sex department. She made that clear yet again, and I agreed to it. It may have been a convenient rationalization for her suggestion that we return to our mutual masturbation sessions, but I certainly didn't care about that. I love her as a person and as a friend and Steve was an idiot if he didn't make love enough to Alice to satisfy her. It certainly wasn't for lack of affection for him on her part. So I accepted her ground rules. We were best friends, and a promise was a promise. That's the way it has always been between her and me.
So we did it at my house once, when she came to visit me alone, rather than with Steve as she usually did. However, it was soon after that, that she told me she couldn't settle for that one time anymore. She wanted to make it a more regular thing, but realized she couldn't keep coming to my house without Steve, without her husband becoming suspicious. As far as what she and I were doing was concerned, she knew Steve would never accept it and so she knew he could never know anything about it.
It was because of all this that she suggested we do it in the office, once, by pretending we were in a meeting. She'd lock the door and tell her secretary that we didn't want to be disturbed for anything, and we did it late in the day so Alice could tell her secretary to go home early. Soon after that however, it became obvious that she wanted to do it more regularly, and I certainly didn't complain; I never wanted us to stop to begin with.
Alice was not only my best friend, but also an absolutely gorgeous black woman, and I've always had a thing for beautiful black women. Alice knew that and used to tease me with it, telling me I was sick and had perpetual "Jungle fever". I told her then that I couldn't help it. There was just something about a black woman's dark skin, the contrast of their pearly white teeth with the ebony face around it, the black nipples, basically everything about a hot black woman's body that turned me on to no end. I just found them looking so sexual, somehow; as if made for hot, steamy sex. If a black woman was good looking enough, I would just feel like licking them literally from head to toe, and I told Alice this. She'd giggle at it, but then she'd masturbate to it when I described such actions in more detail. I never knew if she thought my admission of my attraction to black women was an excuse to masquerade that I was simply sexually attracted to her, or whether she believed me that I really can get worked up over any good looking black woman in the heat of passion.
We had these sessions on a weekly basis now, usually on a Wednesday, marking the day exactly between the points where she would have sex with her husband, on Saturday nights.
And today was 4:12 pm on Wednesday.
One thing that was different in comparison to that first time when we used the office was that Alice had confided in her secretary, Joanne, what was going on. Alice trusted Joanne, and realized she would never tell anyone about it. For Joanne, it was like she paid Alice back for being there for her when she needed to confide in someone. Not all bosses would want to be a willing ear for their secretary's personal problems but Alice did, so she felt an immense sense of pride when Alice confided in her about what she and I did in her office. Joanne, a romantic at heart, quite frankly loved knowing what was happening in the office.
