Come Early Come Often

COME EARLY, COME OFTEN

Daphne's secret formula

We'd been circling around each other for months. At the coffee machine, ours were the hands that would sometimes touch, reaching for the grinder or the coffee beans, or positioning a cup under the espresso outlet. I didn't need to turn around when he walked into a room to know that he was there. When we worked on a project together, as senior partner he had the knack of listening to my hesitant suggestions and turning them into perfectly crafted sentences. It got to the point where I hardly knew what I meant until I had heard him say it. His presence lightened my mood.

Then came the day, a Friday as I recall, when he took me to lunch to celebrate my promotion. After a few drinks, he started talking about his father. It seemed pointed, somehow.

"I was already in my first year at college, and not much interested in church anymore, but I agreed to go with my dad to the church picnic. He started chatting to the minister's wife, Colette. Good-looking woman, quite a bit younger than him. They seemed to have a lot to talk about. I wasn't paying much attention, but then, all of a sudden, she bent down to pick up a leaflet on the grass. Everything she had was on display." He glanced up at me to gauge my reaction. I must have looked encouraging, because he went on, "It was nice. Really really nice. I wondered whether my father was having an affair with her. Or perhaps I wished I could."

Why was Philip telling me this story? He was a shy, married man in his early fifties, with two small children. He shouldn't have been talking to a junior colleague about what he saw that stirred him as a young man. Maybe he felt safe with me. He'd probably nursed this memory for years, and wanted someone to share it with. I became very conscious of my own breasts, and of his eyes on them. Later, I gave him a lift home. As he got ready to get out of the car, he turned to me, put his hand on my shoulder and kissed me lightly, on the mouth. It took me the rest of my ride home to stop shaking.

I didn't see him again until the Monday following, but we flirted a little by email. Flirting isn't necessarily a prelude to sex. It's more a way of making the other person feel desirable, and it raises the spirits. So I knew it was probably a mistake, but I let myself get keyed up. By Monday morning I was ready to put on my best bra, perfume and panties, and await developments.

We passed each other in the corridor several times during the day, exchanging glances. By five o'clock my nerves were ready to give in. So, with as much

savoir faire

as I could muster, I strolled into his corner office and sat down on an easy chair, while he spoke on the phone for a minute or two longer. I sensed he was watching me, looking right through my clothes. My nipples stiffened, reaching out to him through my favourite bra, through my thin blouse.

He came over to the sitting area.

"Daphne!" It was a cheery greeting to cover up his own nervousness.

"That was such a nice lunch on Friday, Philip. Just wanted to say thank you. I feel as if I have a real friend in the firm." I hesitated. "Don't you think we've gotten quite close over the past few weeks?" I didn't say anything about the kiss, or how hollow my stomach felt. That wasn't friendship, or even intimacy. It was lust.

"I feel that, too." He poured drinks and replaced the whisky bottle with deliberation. "So, what kind of relationship do you want with me, Daphne?" he asked, at length. "Father-daughter?" He was more or less my father's age. I was thirty-one.

"I'm sexually attracted to you," I blurted out. Much too soon, but I was on edge, and didn't know how else to say it.

He stumbled back into a chair. "Thank you very much," he stammered, trying to hold on to his dignity. "No-one's ever said that to me before."

Surely this couldn't be true? He'd been married for twenty years, the children born late. Did his wife not find him sexually attractive? Had she never told him so?

There was only one thing to do. He might have been older than I, but I was the one with experience. I got up and kissed him -- as he sat there in his office, surprised and a little embarrassed. It couldn't be a long kiss, in case anyone was passing, but I smothered his face and neck, the passion racing in my blood. He simply sat there, flabbergasted.

From that moment on, we both knew we would be going to bed together. Not right then, not that night, but as soon as it could be arranged. I jealously guarded a delicious keen feeling inside, being quite sure that this man, the man I longed for, was going to give himself to me. He was going to possess me. That feeling put impatience to sleep, lust even. For the time was coming, with certainty, when his hands would unbutton my blouse and I would discard my redundant panties and take his manhood inside me.

The business trip is the received way to arrange such liaisons. You're in a strange city, you have adjoining hotel suites. When the day is over you linger over a drink at a pavement cafe, you find a cosy restaurant for a meal shot through with anticipation, and then you spend the night together. Of course, he has had to do some negotiation to make sure you're the one to accompany him, so your colleagues are not slow to divine the truth. If someone has a grudge against either of you, the wife gets to know, or is given reason for suspicion. Consequences follow. It's the old old story and I'm not going to repeat it now. Because it didn't happen that way.

The offices near mine were, unusually, empty. He walked in, saw his opportunity, grasped me tight, and kissed me. At first, the embrace might have been mistaken for the enthusiastic reunion of old friends, vigorous and warm. But as the seconds ticked by, and we were still locked together, I could feel him hardening. I pressed closer. I wanted him to know how ready I was, how much my body liked his body. My vagina lifted itself to him. I laid my head on his chest. Leaning down, he kissed me again, more tenderly this time, but with his tongue in my ear. Sensation coursed through me. My knees buckled and I came, right there and then.

That evening the phone rang, at about eight. Philip's father, the church deacon, was visiting from upstate. He had buried his wife a year or so back, and wanted company. Philip's wife Deirdre was a great favourite of his. There was nothing sexual about it; it was just that they spoke the same language. Her parents lived near him, and attended the same church. I wouldn't call Deirdre cold and formal, but on the few occasions I'd met her, I was struck by her ladylike manner. She was a spectacularly handsome woman: men liked her a lot and gravitated towards her, because she wasn't a flirt and had absolutely no sex appeal. She made them feel safe, free of tease or the fear of rejection.

So, Martin was staying for a few days. After Deirdre had put the kids to bed, they settled down to a companionable conversation, with the TV in the background.

"I was superfluous to requirements," Philip said later, with a smile that told me all I needed to know about his home life. "They encouraged me to take myself out for the evening, for a change. I'm a good family man, as you know, and I hardly ever go out on my own at night."

He showed up at the door of my apartment wearing a sports shirt and slacks. I'd just had time, between his phone call and his arrival, to take a quick shower and make myself presentable. Underneath, I wore the same wine-coloured bra and panties as before. They were freshly laundered and fragrant with lavender. I know, because I buried my face in them and kissed them before I put them on.

Neither of us doubted that we would soon be down to our underwear and beyond. There was conversation, there was wine, there was a little music, and then we migrated to my bedroom, narrowly avoiding awkwardness. By that stage my blouse was open. I was proud of my bra: intricate in detail, sensuous of texture, it made my 34B figure statuesque in an understated, elegant way. I confess I often admired the effect in the mirror.

The first tentative touch of his fingers brought my nipples up, and the lace of my panties also began to feel the pressure of my desire.

I sat down on the bed, shoes off and (as I say) blouse unfastened, hair loose. He took a seat on the bedroom chair facing me and leaned forward, with his hands clasped. "If I make love to you, can I still love Deirdre and my children?" he asked. For someone in his fifties, this was a naive question. A man who strays may fall in love or he might just have a casual fling. He may even fool himself that he is being faithful to his wife, in his heart. But once he has tasted the sweetness of another woman's body and blended his spirit with hers in a moment of ecstasy, things have changed. Perhaps he loved Deirdre and his children even more, afterwards. I don't know, I may be wrong, I can't say. But this I do know: after that night, I was never the same again.

It wasn't the kind of question that needed a reply. He just needed to say it out loud. To me, Philip was a mysterious combination of innocence and experience, a man who had never before been told he was sexually attractive, and hardly knew what to do with the information. Fortunately, he did know what to do with what nature had given him. When I prised it out of his pants, it looked like the biggest I'd ever seen. Probably there was nothing out of the ordinary about it, but it emerged full and proud with the plenitude of his desire for me. Every vein, every ridge stood out in relief. It was beautiful, and (for the moment) it was mine.

You might be expecting me to give a blow-by-blow account of our love-making: stroke by stroke, thrust by thrust: what I did to him with my lips, how he pleasured me and went down on me with expert tongue. All this you can find in the women's magazines and in sex manuals and in pornography. I may have done all this; he may have done all that: or we may not. All I will say, is that when he entered me, I came in an instant, more powerfully than ever before or since, and I kept on coming, over and over again, until he could hold back his own climax no longer. For a man with a wife like that, his technique was good and his staying power even better. I straddled him, he steadied me and found his rhythm. I massaged my breasts, moulding and shaping them with my fingers and palms for his pleasure as he gripped my waist and looked into my eyes to watch my pupils dilate with each coming. We lost count.

Come early, come often. Deep called to deep. All the pent-up passion and desperate need of a man who had never known what it's all about went into his fucking, and all the strength of a woman longing to give herself utterly, went into mine.

It was one man, one woman, one flesh, one fuck -- once. It never happened again. There were no offspring of our union, no consequences at all, so far as I can tell, and no repeats. Only a memory, and these words I write now, and something clicking into place in this broken world.

The secret? Technique? Size? Or the right dick, in the right place, at the right time, meeting passion in the pussy from deep within.