Yvonne

PRELUDE

'It must be ten years,' she said.

'Yes,' I said. It was eleven. That I knew.

'You still look good,' I said to her.

She looked at me and said

'You wouldn't have been brave enough to say that back then.'

'I was young then,' I replied.

She raised her eyebrows and said 'If you're not young anymore, then where does that leave me?' and she smiled. She looked older of course, but she still had it. I expect she knew.

'I'm 36.'

'Yes, you must be, you are the same age as Neil. And I'm older than that.'

She laughed.

Neil is her son and he was my closest friend at school, but we had lost touch years before.

'Do you have time?' I asked.

She thought for a moment and then said 'yes.'

'Let's go to the café on the corner,' she said, 'it's quite nice there.

So we walked together the short distance to the café on the corner. It was nice. I had never been before, and I had probably thought, if I had thought about it at all, that it could not possibly be good if it was in this town. Or that's what I would have thought twenty years ago, but no I had got over my loathing of the place. I had never come back after university, and it didn't matter anymore. I only come back now to visit my mother. I had become someone else. I wondered if she had also become someone else, or if she was still who she had been back then. You see, something had once happened between us.

We found a table, ordered coffees and waited for the waiter to bring them. When they came, and he had gone, we started to talk. We chatted about what I had done and what her children were doing, and how was my mother, but she did not say much about herself. So I asked her.

She answered with a question.

'How do I seem?'

'Fine. You look great.'

She raised her eyebrows again. I looked carefully at her. She had not gained weight, as so many people do with age. She had never been slim either, at least not when I had known her before, when she would have been in her early forties. She had been shapely, a little voluptuous even. And she had never been a great beauty; not the kind of woman to turn many heads on the street; but there was nothing motherly or housewifely about her either. And mother and housewife were two of the things she had been. She was attractive, but that not mean anything definite. She was very, very sexy, and in a way that was not contrived. That was why she had been so sexy. And she still had it, and the years had not been too unkind. Her face was lined of course, but not too much, and her skin was still good too. She had wide, hazel eyes and her hair had been dark brown, but now it was half grey. It was like her not to have coloured it. It went with her natural ness. That was it; if there was a word to describe her attractiveness, her sexiness, it was earthy.

It was as if she saw what was going through my mind.

'Have I still got it?' she asked.

I did not answer for a moment, and then I told her, 'yes, you have.'

She didn't smile. She just continued to look at me. Then she said

'Do you have time?'

'Yes. I will have to make a quick call, but I have time.'

'Then let's go somewhere else. We can't talk here. I wouldn't want to be overheard.'

'Ok, 'I said, and we asked for our bill, paid and left.

'My car is in the car park over the road,' she said.

As we were heading out of town on the main road, I asked her where we were going.

'There's a place down by the river where I go sometimes, to get away. It's quiet and I like it. It's my place. Hardly anyone is ever there.'

For the rest of the drive neither of us spoke, but it was a comfortable silence. And it was in her car once, long ago, that something had happened.

We walked from the car into the trees and towards the river side and it struck me that among the catching up questions she had asked me, she had not asked me if I was married. Then, as we sat down on a fallen tree trunk by the water's edge, she asked.

'Yes, I am,' I said, 'for five years now.'

'Happily?' she asked.

'Yes,' I said.

She didn't speak for a little while and then she said

'I'm still married to Derek and I love him,' and then she added, 'in my way.'

She offered me a cigarette and I took it.

'You still smoke,' she said, as she lit it for me and then lit her own. 'I thought it had gone out of fashion.' 'You still smoke too,' I said.

Even though she had alluded to the incident in the car, we had not talked about it, not yet. But it was not as though we were skirting around issues either. There was a tension in the air, and like before, I was sure that it was not just me that was feeling it, but the conversation had flowed along and there was no sense of things being evaded. I had known her well enough to know that she was frank about herself and that she trusted me and that she felt comfortable talking to me about herself. We had talked after that moment in the car, soon afterwards, and then again a few years later.

'I was never any good at giving things up, 'she sighed; 'pleasurable things.' She looked distractedly away, out over the river. Then she said, 'Being in the car with me just now. Did it make you remember?'

'I don't need to be in a car with you to remember that; but of course, yes it did.'

Now we were talking again and it was as if only a few days had passed, rather than so many years.

PART ONE

Eighteen years before on a warm late afternoon in September, the something had happened; half of my life ago. I was eighteen and she would have been forty-two. She had taken me and Neil, her son, to a football match in London, and during the game she had gone to visit a friend, and she came to meet us after the game. I went to the right place, the place she had told us, but Neil and I had got separated in the crowd, and he never remembered things like where he was supposed to meet someone, so he had got lost. She had phoned home and he had phoned home and that way they had solved the problem and he knew where to come, but it was going to take him a half hour or so to come from where he was to where we were, so we sat and waited in the car. Neither of us spoke, but the sexual tension in that car that late afternoon was palpable, and I knew that I was not the only one who was feeling it.

It was the only chance I would ever get and somehow I found the courage to take it. I wanted her so badly, I was not thinking clearly. I was not thinking at all. I was lost in an adolescent trance of lust that I probably imagined was love. How could anything really happen in a car, on a residential street in London, on which it had barely begun to get dark, and when her son, and my best friend was going to arrive within half an hour.

I knew that she was an adulteress, and I was certain that she desired me and in the middle of my trance in that car, I reached out and put my hand on her leg. She did not shudder or jump when I did it, and she did not move her leg, which was clad in a black skirt that finished just above her knee, and black stockings, and she did not move my hand away either. She looked around at me and she said

'I never thought you would have the courage.'

Then she learned towards me and we kissed.

Her legs parted and she said

'Touch me. Touch my pussy, go on.'

I felt my hand moving up her leg towards the gusset as we continued to kiss, and she kissed me harder as my hand neared her. Reaching the material of her panties between her legs, I found that it was damp. I felt her tongue forcing its way into my mouth and then her hand on the bulge of my cock, which was fully erect and straining against the inside of my jeans. I don't think I even realise that she was opening trousers and boxer shorts, but suddenly I felt cool air and her fingers on my cock, so it must have been sticking out through my opened fly. That realisation must have been what gave me the courage to lead my hand to the end of its journey and I pulled aside her gusset and touched her pussy. Her lips were very wet and that encouraged me. She really was turned on, and it was me that had turned her on. I was the source of her excitement, as she was of mine. I had come to myself again, and I was glad that I had had that moment of mad abandon in which I had dared to make a pass at her.

She began to masturbate me and I was filled with lust for her as she did it. At the same time, I was frightened that I would come too quickly and be a disappointment to her. I tried to think of something else, or to be business-like. What should I do next? My hand knew. It began to move over her pussy until I felt a shock at discovering that she had no hair down there.

I was not a virgin, but all of my experiences had been with girls of my own age, and none of the four girls I had slept with had shaved off their pussy hair. That must have been the moment that I realised that I was with a woman for the first time, and not a mere girl. And this was the late 1970s and our boring town. It was only in porn that you found hairless vaginas back then. At least, that was what I thought.

I continued to hold my fingers and my palm over her pussy and I felt her push herself into my hand. I took that as a cue and began to run my fingers up and down her lips until she opened and my middle finger could find her hole. She was so wet that my finger entered her easily and she gasped as I pushed it slowly into her. As if she knew that I might come too soon, she stopped moving her hand on my cock and just held it in her fist and pushed her vagina harder into my hand.

With my middle finger fully inserted in her, I searched for her clitoris with my forefinger. I found it and began to caress it gently.

She gasped again and sighed out

'You've done this before. You know what a woman likes.'

I knew something of what girls like.

I stroked her clitoris and moved my middle finger in and out of her pussy and she began to move in rhythm with the movements of my hand. We were still kissing and her fist was still clenched around my cock. Then she began to gasp more rapidly and more loudly, until suddenly her groin seemed to lock in place and she was perfectly still and she cried out softly and then let out a rapid succession of gasps, each a little louder and more forceful than the last. Then she relaxed again. He had stopped kissing me when that had begun. Then, after a moment she began to masturbate me again.

She looked at me as she did it and then she looked down at my cock and she said

'If I make you come like this, it will make a mess in the car.'

I thought that meant that she was going to stop, but suddenly her head was in my lap and my cock was in her mouth. This was ecstasy; this was pleasure, and I could barely believe it. Yvonne, Mrs Clark, my best friend's mother, 42 year old wife and mother of four, was performing oral sex on me, and I had just brought her to orgasm with my fingers.

She was not just Mrs Clark, wife and mother of four, though. Not to me, anyway. She was Yvonne, the object of every erotic fantasy I had indulged in my hitherto young life, for whom I don't know how many pints of sperm had been emitted in nocturnal masturbation in the years since I had known her. I wondered if she knew this, or if she guessed it. I think she did. Later, she told me that she had known for a long time that I had wanted her. And she remained, and remains, the woman against whom all others have been measured over the years, even though she is twenty four years older than me, and the mother of my best school friend. She has become part of my soul, and if that sounds like erotic obsession, then maybe it is.

None of this is to say that I have not grown up and gone on to have girlfriends and relationships and plenty of sex over the years, and in the end got married. I have, but the memory of her remains. And over those years, every now and then I have thought of her, at night, and I would masturbate and dream of her as I did it. The things we have done together, in the theatre of my mind. So, have I been in love with her all these years? That depends; what's lust? What's love?

Sitting there with her by the river and talking, the old desire returned, and it was strong, and I was ready to reach out for her leg again, and if I did, this time I would not be in a trance of lust, but in control and conscious of what was doing. She is sixty now, but she has aged well. You would describe her as well-preserved, and as I said before, she still had it, whatever it is. I wonder if I still have whatever it was I had for her. But I didn't reach out and put my hand on her thigh. We just sat and talked, and we had talked about what we were doing and how we felt about it.

There was an intimacy between us and it came naturally, and she spoke to me very openly about herself now that we were alone and no one would overhear us.

She sucked my cock slowly and deeply into her mouth, and her tongue ran around its shaft inside her mouth. I knew that she was going to take my come in her mouth, for she had said that, implicitly, when she had said that if she brought me to orgasm with her hand it would make a mess in the car. None of the girls who had done that to me had let me do that. They had always stopped when they knew I was about to come.

Her sucking got faster, as if she knew that time was running out, even though she had only been down on me for a minute or so, and I felt my excitement growing steadily. As I was getting close to coming, as hers had, my body seemed to lock and I could not move and the only movement was her head bobbing steadily up and down in my lap and my cock going in and out of her mouth. She would have known that my stopping moving meant that I was about to come and she sucked even faster and more greedily. It seemed to me that I was on the edge forever. I was there, but still my sperm did not come. Then I felt the muscular spasm, bucked, and began to empty my warm, oily cum into her mouth. She stopped moving and held her head still as it pumped into her mouth. When the spurts ended, she began to move her head up and down slowly again. Then she stopped. She came up again and smiled at me and said

'Put it away now, Neil will be here soon.'

We sat in warm and comfortable silence waiting for him, and she opened the window, as if to let the hot and tense air out of the car. The only other thing she said in the ten minutes that past before he arrived was

'I wanted you for a long time, and I think you wanted me for a long time too.'

She was right about me.

Neil arrived and we were both completely composed. He suspected nothing, even though he knew that his mother had had an affair. He could never imagine something between her and me. It was just not possible; not even imaginable. She had told him and he had told me; and not knowing how I desired his mother, he could not have known how that information fed my fantasies; turned them into hopes, perhaps. She was married, but she was available; to someone at least. It had made me desire her even more, if that were possible.

A few days after the car, I went to her house. I went to visit Neil. I could have called, and if she had not been alone, it would not have mattered. She would call me and it would have been as usual. I called him often. Or if he had, she might have said something or asked to come over and talk. As it was, I just went, maybe to take her by surprise. But she was not surprised. She was ready.

Neil was at home and so was his younger brother. His father and his older brother and sister were not yet home from work. We three boys sat in the living room and she was in the kitchen cooking. Then she came in and told her youngest, Robert, to go and get on with his homework, and she asked Neil to go to the shop around the corner to get some flour. It was a strategy of course.

We were alone. I don't know what I was expecting, but what she said first took me by surprise.

'Did you enjoy it?' she asked and smiled. She was flirty with me. It seemed she could not help herself.

'Yes, of course,' I said, and she looked pleased with herself.

Then she sat down and she became serious.

'You won't tell anyone, will you?' she asked and she looked concerned.

'No, of course not,' I said.

'Neil already knows some things about me,' she said, 'things I should not have told him.'

'I know,' I said.

She looked surprised and worried.

'We were drunk one day on holiday. I started out explaining to him why we had gone on holiday without his father; just me and him and Robert; and I was not telling the truth. Then I did tell the truth and I told him too much of it. And we were talking about sex and he told me.'

'So you knew that I had been unfaithful to my husband. That's over now, and well, nothing can happen between you and me.'

She saw the look of disappointment on my face. She went on

'I have a marriage that I don't want to lose. And I have four children. You are young and I am not. You are my son's friend. And there are many other reasons.' Then she started to sound like the seasoned adulteress that I later learned she had been; but had not been that yet, not then. That came later.

'You are just a boy, but I will speak to you as an equal, given what happened on Saturday. Where would we meet? How would I get away to meet you? Where would it go? How would it end? Would you be able to handle it? Whatever happened, we are not going to run way together and live happily ever after.'

I felt I was being patronised, but now I know that she was right. I was already in deeper than I knew and if we had had an affair, I would have been out of my depth completely.

So you regret what happened?' I asked her and there was accusation and spite in my voice.

'No,' I don't, but this is too risky and too complicated. Can't you see that I have thought about it? Why else would I have asked you the questions I asked you just now? They are the questions in my mind. None of them have answers that work.'

'You don't trust me?' I asked.

'It's not that. And I would not have let myself go in the car if I didn't trust you. I trust you to keep quiet, but could I trust you not to get too involved? Come on. We both know that there is a feeling between us. I don't think I could. And I am not sure that I could trust myself either. I really want you and that' why we can't. I'm sorry.'

I did not say anything and soon Neil came back.

Things returned to normal after that. I did not know whether I was in love or lust or in danger of falling in love or what, but I managed. I still went to see Neil. I still enjoyed being in her presence and I still fantasized about her. Every now and then, when I was at their house and when no one was looking, she would look at me significantly or flirt quite heavily. It was the way she was, and I think I took it to mean that she thought that things were back to normal and that there was no danger that I was going to do something stupid. But every time she looked at me and every time she flirted and touched my arm or showed a little more leg than was 'appropriate' when she came and sat down in the living room when I was alone in there, it fed my fantasises and sent me home to spend another night of masturbation and dreaming of fucking her. And of course she knew. That was why she did it.