I have written my share of smut here at Literotica, but this is different. It is a true story, a love story (although a very dirty one.) It may not be the best stroke material, because it involves poetry, revelations, dizzying heights of happiness, and bitter disappointments. But go ahead, read it. You only go around once.
Prelude
Something remarkable happened on my 62nd birthday. I promise to convey it to you as truthfully as possible, while unavoidably changing some names and dates in the interest of discretion.
I had been around the block a few times. I had lived an unusual life, foregoing creature comforts in order to pursue my interests in music and poetry. But I was beginning to feel old, beginning to wonder what I had missed in my life, what opportunities might have passed me by when I was younger. I was comfortably married, but I was lonely.
My body was changing, or perhaps it was my mind. This had a bearing on my sex life. When we speak of sex, which, dear reader, we often will, it is a rather psychosomatic business. In fact, it may have more than a little in with baseball, which as Yogi Berra sagely pointed out, is “ninety percent mental and the other half is physical.” Entering my sixth decade, a change was underway, and I don’t know whether it was my body or mind that was leading the way.
Sex had been important to me throughout my life. I got an early start with it, although it wasn’t always easy. When I was a lad, women seemed unattainable, and they inspired in me a combination of desire and fear. I was preoccupied with the mystery of how men and women relate to each other, and I gradually came to understand it in fits and starts. As my life progressed, I had my fair share of lovers, and became more and more comfortable with the dance that men and women do as a prelude to what happens in bed. But along the way, I also grew weary of the anxieties and uncertainties of it, and made up my mind to find a stable relationship and settle down, which I managed to do shortly before I turned 40.
More than 20 years of monogamy went by pleasantly enough, but it eventually became clear that my sex life was dying down to a flicker. I did not suffer from the dreaded Erectile Dysfunction, but it had become increasingly difficult for me to reach a climax during sex with my wife. I was beginning to think that it was time to hang up my spurs, figuratively speaking, although as my body seemed to lose interest, sex was very much on my mind.
During this time frame, the internet had emerged as a social phenomenon, and I got interested in it early on. And, like so many other nerdy types that were early denizens of cyberspace, I soon saw the potential for online sexual encounters.
I had been spending some time on Literotica, a website that caters to writers and readers of erotica, and I became both. Literotica attracts men and women from all over the world who are interested in both writing and sex, to varying degrees. The website is popular because it offers free porn in abundance. But some of those who contribute stories and poems are serious writers who are simply trying to reach a wider audience, and the sexual nature of the material ensures that the readers will be there.
At Literotica, aspiring writers can benefit from feedback left by readers, either in the form of public comments or in private messages. I occasionally left, and received, such feedback. Many people who frequented the site also took advantage of the feedback system to flirt with people who intrigued them; this I had done as well, anonymously, with some women who contributed stories or poems to the site.
Simona: “I had been on LIt off and on for about a year and a half, and had come back from an absence of several months after some recent personal difficulties. I had no clear goal other than to assuage some vague feelings of loneliness by writing stories as an exercise in exorcising demons. I was used to having very little feedback, so I was gratified by the occasional comment from those who looked like they genuinely liked any of my contributions. One reader had recently written a fairly extensive comment on one of my stories, and I kept track of more comments. Then another gentleman (I assumed, given the name) commented on the same story, also via the private feedback feature, and invited me to read his own pieces. I generally did not respond to such invitations (or if I did, rarely, it was with a rather obnoxious and dismissive comment) but he had been very polite and had included a link to his author’s page and I was curious, so I looked. They seemed to be pretty racy strokers but literate and set in interesting locales, both unusual for the majority of Lit fare I had sampled. His profile picture was a male nude from the back, presumably himself, which seemed like a rather forward invitation to passing female readers. I filed that away somewhat dismissively (an invitation of this sort was the last thing I was interested in), but I read one of his submissions, Wet Panties, and left a tongue-in-cheek comment at the end--I told him mine were indeed wet after reading his story. He responded quite promptly, telling me he was glad the story had worked as he’d intended. I looked at more of his work. Unlike most authors, he had also posted poetry. One of his poems had an intriguing title, Freudian Rap. It seemed to imply that his politics were quite hard left, as he suggested that Obama was right wing. I left a polite and friendly comment, and let it go at that. Until he commented on another of my stories.”
On that day, my birthday, I read some poems by a woman who went by the screen name of “Seascapes”. I sent her a message in which I provided a sober and serious critique of her poems. To my surprise, she quickly sent a response. She appreciated my critique, and she was curious about some of my views with respect to poetry in general. However, she concluded her message with the following sober admonition:
Finally - just to avoid embarrassment: I'm happy to talk "shop" about writing. Other stuff - please, no - I'm happily attached and have no plans to stray. Sorry if this seems rude and may be farthest from your mind, but prevention and all that... Thanks in advance for your understanding.
I replied that I did not find her admonition inappropriate at all, and that “we can continue to talk chastely about smut for as long as you like.” I answered her questions, which prompted another round of discussion. The emails began to fly back and forth between us, and they continued throughout the day, and the day that followed.
With each exchange, I saw qualities in Seascapes that drew me to her more and more -- she was very bright and articulate; ideas were important to her; she enjoyed being challenged, but if she felt she was in the right, she would defend her position fiercely; her sense of humor meshed well with my own; and it became clear, soon enough, that her libido was exceptionally powerful. Yet these attractive qualities in and of themselves cannot explain what was happening between us. There was a quality in our interactions that I could only describe as aesthetically beautiful, a sort of instinctive rapport, as my warm and fragile heart recognized its twin in hers.
By the third day we had revealed to each other that our real-life names were Andre and Simona. We joked about the loss of our “mystique”, but Simona slyly joked that it was just as well that we dispense with it, because her “imagination was too… imaginative.” On that day we ventured into an internet chat session for the first time, and began to get to know each other at an accelerated pace, describing our lives, our jobs, our cultural interests, and our respective marriages. Simona was ten years my junior, and born in Czechoslovakia. Her family had emigrated to the US after the failure of the Prague Spring. Now she was a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oregon in Eugene, only a few hours away from my home in Portland. I was a professional jazz musician. We both loved classical music and jazz, but Simona was partial to certain kinds of hard rock that I disdained. My political views seemed radical to Simona. We both loved espionage novels. The combination of similarities and dissimilarities was intriguing and bewitching.
I was married to Ella, a black woman from Barbados who worked for a Non-Governmental Organization that campaigned against violations of human rights. Simona was married to Herb, a successful software engineer who worked in the private sector and traveled often for his job. They had a 9-year old son, Alistair, who I gathered was precocious and sounded adorable. We agreed early on that it would be best not to let our spouses know about our budding friendship, not that we had done anything improper, just yet.
But our e-mail exchanges, despite Simona’s admonition, had grown increasingly flirtatious, and once we were in that chat room, the flirting reached escape velocity. By late afternoon, we were beginning to describe our sexual fantasies about each other, and after about 15 hot and heavy minutes of that, we agreed to make a date for cyber-sex. I was dumbfounded that she had retreated so quickly from her prohibition of sexual interaction. Cautiously, I asked when she might be ready to do it. To my surprise and delight, she typed, “How about tomorrow?” Then we went on typing some ardent and deliciously raunchy exchanges. Our nominal commitment to propriety had fallen by the wayside.