It was the day before her forty-ninth birthday. We had been having sex all afternoon and enjoying it as ever, but there was an undercurrent and in the breaks between she was wistful and quiet. In the end I asked her
'What's wrong?'
'Hmmmm!' she said; 'I was trying to hide it.'
'You're not doing very well. What is it?'
'How long have we been doing this now?' she asked.
'About a year and a half.'
'That makes it my longest affair,' she said, even more wistful.
'Is that good or bad?' I asked her.
'Good, of course!' She looked at me archly, as though I had said something wrong, but it was not one of the looks she gave me when she thought I was going to tell her I loved her. We had taken care of that long ago. No melodramatic displays of feeling; no demands. Just fun and sex.
'Tomorrow is my birthday.'
'I know,' I said.
'Forty-nine; one more year and I'll be fifty.'
'I know how to make you feel better: I'll help you to forget.'
I made my way slowly down, licking and kissing her breasts, pausing to kiss her stomach and lick her navel for a little while and then finally on down to her pussy. Its scent made my cock harden more. I heard the sound of her leg slipping over the material of the sofa and I felt her foot caressing my cock. She often stroked me with her foot when I was going down on her. She was very skilled at it and she would grip my shaft between her big toe and her second and slowly wank me. I often came as she did it, and she always joked that my tongue went into her more deeply than my cock when I came over her foot. She liked to feel, she said, the warm, oily sperm on her toes.
'You still want me, even though I'm old?' she said.
'You're not old; you're gorgeous, and even when you are old, I'll still want you. I'll still be fucking you when you're seventy.'
I really believed I would.
'Don't listen to me,' she said, 'I'm just being stupid and sentimental. Come on fuck me really nice and deep. That'll cure me.'
'Do you want it in your arse, darling?'
'I always want it in my arse, my naughty boy!'
Oh yes! Fuck Auntie Yvonne's bum, fuck her up her arse.'
She loved to be crude and I loved it when she was too. Sex is better when it's dirty, she would say.
Time had proved her right. A year and a half and we still burned for each other and when we were together, we had all of the natural power of two bodies that knew each other and the fire of newness. I would never have believed that it was possible keep that fire burning the way we did.
My cure seemed to work. She was in a good mood for the rest of the time I was with her that day.
Before I left I asked her what she was doing for her birthday.
'Derek's taking me out for dinner.'
They would play the happily married couple. I wished I could take her out, but I couldn't, and I knew the rules, and if I could take her out on her birthday, I would be the one in her husband's position, getting the crumbs that didn't fall off the table, while someone else was getting to eat all the cake hidden away in some corner.
I had become accustomed to how things had to be between us. And I had learned that they were advantages to the relationship we had. Lose the desire for possession and the flames of desire continue to burn strongly for longer. Possession quenches them. I had remarked upon it once and she laughed and said
'See, I told you.'
'You didn't tell me that.'
'I wanted to save a few pleasant surprises for you.'
What I couldn't understand was her anxiety about her age, but then I was still only 25. I thought that being desired by a younger man of twenty-five should have been enough to show her how she still had it; which only proves how little I knew.
I sometimes wondered if there were others. Soon after we had begun, she asked me if I had ever had a black woman, and said that she wanted a black man; or two together. Then, she had stopped talking about it, and I thought that perhaps she had found it and put out that fire.
Occasionally she asked me about other women. I answered very generally; that was permissible in her rules. There was one who was around for a few months. I had given her a first taste of anal sex. When I told Yvonne she grinned and said
'That woman would thank me if she knew! If I hadn't shown you how, that poor girl would probably still not be able to sit down.'
She had the look of a teacher whose star pupil had just got into the best college.
I was in love with her, of course, and our meetings once a week; and occasionally twice, were the fulfilling of a need. If the were taken away, I could not imagine what I would find to replace them. It was unthinkable, so I never thought about it. And I was sure too that I had come to be something similar to her. She never said so, but there was something sometimes in something she would say or a look in her eye. It was enough for me to believe what I wanted to believe and to be able to believe that it was true. And she was not a faker. In the middle of the web of illusion and deceit she had had to spin around herself, she was honest with me. I think it must her been her way of ensuring that she did not lose herself to her appetites and desires completely.
She was not the only one who was feeling nostalgic. On the day of her birthday I got out the photographs we had taken together. They were pornographic. We kept them at my flat because I lived alone. She could not risk keeping them at her house with her husband there. One afternoon she had been sitting in the chair with her legs apart and her just fucked pussy exposed and looking deliciously alive with the sensations of sex and I had said to her that I would love to photograph her in that pose, right then. Her face lit up at the idea and she said
'You've found something I've never done!'
'And you want to?'
'Yes I would,' she said; 'and why didn't we think of it sooner? You like photography; I remember you told me.'
The next time I went to see her I took my camera with me. It was oneo f the best afternoons we ever had.
She was dressed even more sexily than usual; as ever in black. Her bra and panties were sheer nylon that revealed every detail of her tits and her pussy, and I saw that her gusset was already damp. She wanted to start taking photographs straight away.