Estelle

By then we were both pretty damn spent so we lay beside each other in that wonderfully relaxed state you find only after truly good sex. There was a lassitude to my muscles, and I could barely lift my arm enough to lay my hand on her hip. I noticed she seemed to struggle a bit too, to mirror my movement. It was one of those moments you experience a few times in your life, if you're lucky, when no words are necessary. I knew what she was thinking, and she knew what I was thinking.

I kissed her, a light brush of lips, and she made a soft humming sound in reply.

She kissed me, a light brush of lips, and I made a soft humming sound in reply.

"Tell me this is real, David," she said softly, and I heard a little catch in her voice.

I leaned back enough to focus on her eyes and saw that she was crying. Well, she wasn't sobbing--more like weeping.

And she was so damn cute, now about 12 years old, that I couldn't resist kissing her, a sticky, snotty kiss.

"I'm here and I'm real," I said, smiling.

I ran my hand slowly down her side, across her waist to lie on the soft roundness of her hip.

"This is real," I said, and kissed her.

"Stop," she said, covering my hand with hers and meeting my eyes.

"David," she said, all seriousness now, "I'll be 70 years old next month. If this is just a quick fling, that's okay, but my calendar is coming up on December and I don't have a lot of time for fucking around."

She giggled and blushed at her own language, and I leaned back, focusing on her eyes, and said, "Do you kiss your boyfriend with that mouth?"

Suddenly, she was crying in earnest. Not weeping now, she was bawling as she buried her face in my chest. My hand went to her back, comforting her, and I wondered what I had said wrong.

The storm passed, as it always must, and she pushed me away.

She was a mess now. No cute little girl or attractive mature woman. She was an old woman with red eyes, a swollen red nose, and a mass of wrinkles. As she opened red eyes to meet mine, I couldn't avoid the mess of her face or the thick strings of clear snot and saliva that connected her mouth and nose to my chest, where she had been pressed against me.

"Am I?" she asked, and when she spoke, her voice was thick, almost bubbly. My chest was suddenly wet when the thick rope connecting her face to it broke when she spoke. Her face was red, and I tried to figure out why she seemed to be angry.

"AM I?" she asked again, her voice louder now, clearer.

"ARE YOU WHAT??!" I asked, my surprise and wonder shading into anger.

"AM I YOUR GIRLFRIEND? ISN'T THAT WHAT YOU JUST CALLED ME?!" she yelled.

And I understood. It all came clear, one of those "Eureaka" moments that you might experience twice in your life if you're very lucky.

This lovely woman, bright, witty, intelligent, and someone with whom I was completely smitten, was a bundle of insecurity. She was angry, hell, she was MAD because of her insecurity. It wasn't something I said or did. It was all in her head.

All of those hours in martial arts training paid off. I used my understanding of leverage and momentum and rolled her onto her back.

She was struggling weakly, still obviously angry but overmatched by my size and skill.

I captured her hands in mine, laced our fingers together, and pinned her hands beside her head. I lifted myself on my arms, smiled, and broke into my best Elvis Presley imitation, which, okay, I'll admit, isn't all that good.

"Won't you wear my ring?" I sang.

Pause.

"Up around your neck."

Pause.

"To show the world,"

Pause

"I'm yours by heck."

She giggled then and started to speak, but I kept singing over her.

"And let them see,"

Pause.

"Your love for me,"

Pause.

"Let them see by my ring around your neck."

By then, she was giggling in earnest.

"Honey," she said, her eyes an interesting mixture of smile wrinkles and red-eyed tears, "THAT song was old before you were born."

I talked past that.

"Will you go steady with me?" I asked, pulling a term from my love of old movies.

She started to speak, but I stopped her with a kiss and went on.

"Will you be my Best Girl?" I asked, that one from, I seemed to recall, an old Mickey Rooney movie.

I stopped her reply with another kiss.

"Say you're mine, make me the happiest man in the world," from, God, any of a dozen different movies I had seen.

She was crying again, tears, snot, and thick saliva and mucus showing when she opened her mouth, but these were tears of happiness. She was smiling as she wrapped those big, soft arms around my neck and pulled me down for a slippery kiss.

It wasn't the best kiss I ever experienced, but it was perhaps the most intimate. Her concentration was complete, and in that moment, as lips touched and tongues explored, we were the only two people in the world, hell, we were the only two people in the goddam UNIVERSE.

This was one of those kisses that made time stop. Hell, maybe the whole world stopped. I felt her body under mine moving in that way only a woman can move, that soft pink skin pressing against me in waves.

As we held that kiss, and it was "we," I used the leverage and slowly pulled her hands straight up over her head, the changing angles allowing our bodies to touch even more completely. It wasn't sex, I wasn't hard enough for that, but in many ways our bodies were merged more completely than if it had been sex.

Eventually, minutes? Hours? Hell, days? later, we ended the kiss. I won't say we "broke" the kiss, it was far too gentle for that. But we ended the kiss, relaxing, allowing our bodies to just touch.

"Yes," she breathed, her lips brushing my ear.

"Yes," she said again, "I'll be your steady."

"Yes," she said softly, "I'll be proud to wear your ring around my neck with several windings of Angora to make it fit my finger."

It was her turn to talk over me as I started to say something.

"Yes," she said, "I'll be your best girl."

Again, she went on, talking over me.

"Yes," she said, "I am yours, yes, yes, YES, David, yes to it all. I will never say 'no' to you."

As she was saying her vows, and that's what they felt like, I was surprised to find myself getting hard again. As she finished her final, "I will never say 'no' to you," I moved just slightly and slipped inside of her.

"Yesssssssssss," she sighed.

I don't really know how long we lay like that, joined, merged. There was no urgency, no need to climax. This was two bodies, as a poet might have put it, "two bodies making one perfect whole where two imperfect halves had been." Okay, not good poetry, but you understand.

It wasn't sex seeking release. It was intimacy to be savored and cherished.

And we both savored and cherished it.

Our kisses were gentle and loving.

Our whispered "I love you" was a simple declaration. A simple truth.

She was crying again and, incongruously enough to make me chuckle, she whispered, "Oh, God, I'm not a crier."

I kissed her, one of those very wet kisses, slick and snotty, and breathed into her ear, "The evidence is otherwise."

I felt her body under mine, well, all around mine too in a way, starting to seek her release. She squeezed a little. Her hips rocked a little. Her heels pressed on the backs of my thighs a little.

This was a second time for me, so I didn't have to struggle for control.

But I didn't want her to hold anything back.

"Go ahead," I whispered.

"I don't want this to end," she responded, surprising me.

"Go ahead," I whispered again, nuzzling her neck and nipping at her earlobe.

I felt her body respond even as her words were, again, "I don't want this to end."

"Go ahead," I said again, my tongue tracing the arch of the shell of her ear, "I'll still be here."

"Oh, God," she said in the breathy voice of a fully excited woman.

I felt her squeezing me. I felt the change in her nectar, starting to flow thin and very hot, wetting us both. I felt her breath catch.

"Go ahead," I breathed into her ear.

Her body went rigid with her release. I felt her stop breathing under me. Her legs locked on mine, holding us as a single unit, a single perfect being. That climax of her passion passed slowly, but the tension in her legs remained, holding us together.

"I guess," I said softly, "I'll have to see if I can find a class ring. I never bought one."

She giggled at that, but her legs kept their tension.

"I won't settle for less," she said and pulled me down for a kiss.

"Of course not," I said, relaxing, making her carry my weight.

She accepted my weight, her arms wrapping around me, pulling me down onto her.

I don't know how long we lay like that. I suppose it couldn't have been an hour, but it was certainly some minutes. Eventually, though, things ended.

"Baby, I can't breathe," she said after that perfect timeless time, so I lifted myself, smiled, pulled free, and rolled onto my back.

"Feed me," I said to the ceiling, "and then I'm due to meet with my team to finish my project on monopolies."

She smiled. "Well, I'd tell you how it was under Standard Oil, but I'm not THAT old."

"Hey," I said, grinning, "Rockefeller was a good guy."

She giggled when I kissed her as she sat to pee, and again when I slapped her hand when she started to put on a robe. I enjoyed watching her cook, naked, and then watching her eat, something she did with gusto. Well, I did too. We expended a lot of energy during the past twelve hours.

She giggled again when I didn't let her put on any clothes while I got dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. She looked like exactly what she was, a big, plump woman leaning hard on 70, standing in the doorway, naked, giggling, as she waved me away. I wondered if she'd still be naked when I got home, and I

was

thinking of it as "home" by then.

I don't generally like team sports. In school, I had been more of a Chess Club and backgammon guy than a member of a basketball or football team. Even in the Air Force, my job as an intelligence analyst had been pretty solitary. In school again, I found that my younger "teammates" tended to rely on me to do the work. And that was what happened this morning.

I laid out the work I had done. My little Google Chromebook stayed busy showing the data, then the spreadsheets, then the graphics. My three "partners" watched and nodded. After an hour, we had worked out the PowerPoint presentation we would be making, assigned Tom, the graphics design major who was taking this economics course because he had to have an economics course to meet his "core" requirements, to make it all look pretty. Tina, all three hundred pounds of her, agreed to work up a narrative script. Ron said he'd handle the final edit and proofreading. And we adjourned.

After they left, I started on the real reason I wanted to get out of the house for a while. The Student Union had a strong wifi connection, and I started with a Google search for "Class of 2022 class rings, Joliet Township West High School, for sale."

Nothing came up.

I tried variations on the search. "Joliet Township High School, West Campus." Nothing. "JTHS 2022." Nothing.

I tried

eBay

.

Nothing came up.

I tried every version of a marketplace I could find.

Nothing.

But I wasn't surprised. So I just walked down the strip off campus and started working my way through the pawn shops. There were three of them, but I only needed one.

The counterman was about what you'd expect in a pawn shop off campus. He wasn't a big, heavily tattooed bouncer. He would have gone unnoticed in an insurance office. When I asked him about class rings, he pulled out a tray that must have had a hundred rings displayed in those little slots of the ring organizer that kept the settings showing. There were small girls' rings and large boys' rings. There were red stones, blue stones, and one had a turquoise stone. They all had some version of "XXX High School 20XX" inscribed around the stone.

I thought a blue stone would show up better against Estelle's pink skin and tried on several until I found one that fit the ring finger of my right hand.

The inscription was "Mt. Pleasant High School 1998," adding a few years to my age and making me chuckle. I wondered, briefly, where Mt. Pleasant might be.

He started at one hundred dollars. I laughed and offered twenty-five. We settled on sixty-five, and he threw in a very fine gold chain with a nice box.

When I got home, Estelle wasn't naked. Hell, she was the exact opposite of naked. She was wearing a white blouse that wasn't "sheer," but it WAS sheer enough that I could see the red bra under it. Her skirt, knee-length of a soft material, moved in an almost hypnotic way with her every motion. She had on nylons with a ruler-straight seam, and moderately high heels, although with the wider heels, not spikes, that would save wear and tear on her ankles.

Mostly, though, it was her face. Her makeup was perfect. I wondered how long she spent in front of a mirror to get that look down. She didn't try to hide her age with makeup, she made the best of it. Careful shading didn't make her jowly cheeks less obvious, then enhanced the look, turning it into an attractive part of her face. Her lips were a bright scarlet, making her mouth the part of her face that drew the eye. Her eye makeup gave her a slightly exotic look. And her strawberry blonde hair had been brushed and fluffed until it made a soft pink halo around her head.

"My Steady is taking me out tonight," she said, smiling.

I kissed her, very lightly, not wanting to smear the lipstick, reached into my pocket, eased to my knee in that proposal position you've seen a thousand times, and offered the open box to her.

"Will you wear my ring around your neck?" I asked, holding her eyes.

I thought she might cry and have to redo her makeup, but instead her face broke into one of those smiles that had captured my heart in the first place.

"Only if you put it on me," she said.

I stood, pulled the ring from the box, opened the clasp on the chain, reached around her, and put it on. It worked out that the chain was the perfect length, purely luck, and the ring nestled right where the cleavage of her breasts rose from her chest.

I laughed.

"As if you needed something else to draw attention to your boobs," I said.

She smiled and said, "Well, they are my best feature."

"No," I said, "your pretty face is your best feature."

After a slight pause I added, "But they are nice tits, toots," making her giggle.

She had reservations at one of the nicer restaurants in town, and as I handed her into the car, she handed me her credit card.

"I don't want you to break your bank," she said. I accepted it. My bank WAS getting pretty thin.

Dinner was surf and turf for me and the

petit filet

for her. We talked easily. She laughed as I described my "team" and their basic incompetence. I listened to her story of her first car and how hard it had been for her dad to teach her how to operate a standard transmission. It was as if we had been dating for years and didn't need to fill every second with sound, but always seemed to have something to say.

As we finished, I asked, "Would you like to stop by

The Office

, or can I take you someplace new?"

She smiled.

"I trust you, David," she said, "surprise me."

I paid, well, I signed the slip when they brought the credit card receipt, and held her hand as we walked out to the car.

In the car, she was smiling enough that I asked, "What?"

She turned and faced me.

"I feel like a girl again. I feel like I'm in high school. And I like it," she said.

I grinned and started moving.

The

Second Chance

is one of those bars that's a "college bar," but caters to the older students. There was a bank of electronic games, a pool table, a wall of dart boards, a foosball table, and a raised stage at the far end of the back room. But it wasn't loud in the way that the bars that cater to undergraduates with their fake IDs is. The music tended to be ballads and soft rock, played at a level that allowed conversation.

I noticed a mixed group, a half dozen men and women, that I knew in that casual way you know people you share a class and some time in a bar with. I made a point of stopping at their table and introducing Estelle, deliberately using the phrase "my girlfriend," and liking the way she smiled at that.

I found us a table, went to the bar for a pitcher of beer, and when I got back to the table, I set the pitcher and mugs on the table and held out my hand.

"Dance with me," I said.

There was that flash of deer-in-the-headlights panic, but then she smiled, stood, and we walked, hand-in-hand, to the dance floor.

Some country singer was doing some song asking, "who are you when I'm not lookin'," as near as I could tell. But she was soft and warm in my arms, and we danced well, a simple box step. I was happy to see that we had broken the ice, and soon, two other couples were dancing.

When I saw Tom, one of the guys at that table to whom I had introduced Estelle, head for the bathroom, I excused myself politely and followed him.

"Hey," I said, moving to the urinal next to his, "do me a favor."

"What's that?" he asked.

"Ask Estelle to dance," I said.

"Seriously?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said, "her ego could use a boost."

He laughed. "Well, I don't have a granny thing going, but what the hell."

Back at the table, I took Estelle to the floor again. This was our fourth dance of the evening, and she had both of her arms around my neck, like we were teenagers at the prom or something.

"You know what would be nice?" I asked.

"What's that?" she asked.

"If, after this dance, you were to go into the bathroom and, when you came out, you gave me your bra," I said.

I was watching her face, and her eyes got big.

"David," she said.

"You don't HAVE to," I said, grinning, "but it WOULD be nice."

She held my eyes for a long five count, smiled, said, "I can't believe this," and walked away, leaving me on the dance floor, heading for the bathroom.

I went back to the table and sat, watching the pool game, thinking I could probably make some money on those maladroits.

I watched her come out of the hall that led to the bathrooms and approach me. Her breasts swayed in interesting ways, and her hard nipples made distinct dots that moved under the material of her blouse.

"Is everyone

really

looking at me, or does it just feel that way?" she asked, handing me her bra. She didn't make a production out of it, but I was proud to see that she didn't try to hide it either.

I smiled and said, "Well, there's a guy over there in the corner who might be passed out. I don't think he's looking at you," as I accepted the bra and put it in my pocket.

She sat, took a long pull at her beer, reached across the table to cover my hands, and said, "Take me home, David, before I explode."

I was about to say something like, "After we finish the pitcher," when Tom laid a hand lightly on her shoulder and said, "Care to dance, Good Lookin'?"

Her eyes got big, and she met mine.

"Go ahead," I said, leaning back and lifting the mug to my lips.

Another country singer was telling his girl she was "smooth as Tennessee whisky."

Tom and Estelle stopped for a moment, facing each other, the way you do the first time you dance with someone. Sizing each other up. Literally sizing. Figuring out where hands go.

Estelle met my eyes and flashed me that grin that made me think, "Uh oh," before she stepped closer to Tom and put both arms around his neck like a teenager at the prom. He met my eyes around her head, eyebrows raised, asking the question. I nodded, and his hands settled low on her back.

They danced as if it was a prom. Their feet were shuffling rather than moving in any choreographed dance. I wondered if he was getting hard. I know I would have been. She had done that thing and was molded to him.