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.