The following short story represents a letter sent by the author to an online friend with whom he has enjoyed a long relationship without any physical contact. He has always kept her informed of any offline recreational activities he enjoys and she has reciprocated in kind. This letter was written as a report of one such offline meeting of which she had taken part in the planning. She was aware of a previous "accidental connection" at an earlier conference and knew that the author was planning to meet his "conference paramour" at this event.
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She was black. An incredible shade of black I was not accustomed to seeing in any social or business setting. Not chocolate. Not cafΓ© au lait. Not the mahogany of the professional models who grace the covers of Ebony or Elle or even Vogue, but a rich, deep, dark, ebony hue that this old man's eyes had never had the pleasure of appreciating in the flesh, so to speak.
As she paced back and forth in front of the assembled conference participants, cordless microphone in one hand, the lighting often cast her skin color into the blue-black indigo range of the spectrum. She was extraordinary in her carriage as well. She was not a tall woman; but she was a big woman, perhaps only 5' 5" tall and most likely 145-150 lbs. She was purposeful in her movements and let everyone in the assembled group know that she was a force to be reckoned with.
Her most incredibly attractive feature was her hair - long, inordinately long, jet black and brilliantly lustrous in the overhead lighting. Her entire face was set in an inky frame that solidified the idea in my mind that this was a hugely sexual being. A thin sheen of - of what? Perspiration? Natural skin oils? Whatever it actually was, it turned her skin into a shiny obsidian that reflected the light from the small spotlights in the ceiling directly back into my eyes and stunned me with a smothering effect.
I stiffened at my table as her eyes found mine, locked for a second, then moved on to another target around the room. Had there been a moment of recognition there? A moment of communication? I felt it; but I did not understand it.
My reason for being here in suburban Philadelphia at a conference of advisers and counselors from colleges and universities in the eastern part of the state was simple: I intended to get laid; again. Let me digress a bit here, dear reader. Approximately nine months ago I attended a similar conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania and met an incredible woman with whom I enjoyed an afternoon and an evening of truly romantic passion. For some reason, our goals at that very moment meshed so that both of us attributed the electric charge that surged through us when we were first introduced, as a sign that something else - something much more definitive - was about to take place in our commingled lives.
We learned about each other during a long, luncheon discussion. We learned that we were both married to partners who no longer cared for the physical side of a relationship and had supplanted that factor with other things - in my wife's case, the spiritual life of a fundamentalist church group, in her husband's case, an overwhelming vicarious experience in watching sports of any and all kinds. We looked at each other quite naively and expected that we would feel something and walk away from it at the end of the day. How wrong we were!
Our afternoon and evening were spent in a romantic hotel room with snacks and treats and an unbelievable marathon of sexual tenderness. She very quickly accepted the fact that at my age, actual intercourse was a sidelight to the big event and relaxed into a receiver's role to my repeated onslaughts of oral attention. This, for some odd reason, had become an honest-to-God fetish with me over the past ten years or so. I find that I much prefer to ravish a woman orally - repeatedly - than to engage in any form of genital copulation that would be less than satisfactory to her. After a few polite protests, she understood that I could be fulfilled emotionally by providing her repeated peaks and valleys of delicious orgasm with fingers, thumbs, lips, teeth and tongue. It became evident that she was enthralled with the idea that she could take all she wanted from the afternoon and not be fearful of having let her partner down in her part of the bargain.
What I have failed to mention to this point is, she was black -- my very first black woman of any consequence in a loving, physical relationship. And I learned very quickly in that long afternoon that black is, indeed, beautiful; and there is a taste and texture difference, which simply cannot be described by a mortal man with a limited vocabulary.