"Count backward from 100," he said, an old joke.
"99," I said and went to sleep.
I woke slowly and stretched, resenting, as I almost always did, the weird changes in my body that hit about the time I got my Medicare card and had me waking, reliably, at 4:30 in the morning. I stretched, being careful not to wake...
Now that's odd.
I lived with this woman for almost six months and now, for some reason, I can't think...
Oh, there it is.
I stretched, being careful not to wake Marie.
I watched her sleep for a while, glad I had been lucky enough to find her. My tastes had always run to, you know, more mature women, but when my own personal calendar marked off my first two-thirds of a century, it became more and more difficult to find one.
Oh, I understood the statistics. Women outlive men. At my age, 66 as I woke this morning, while there were plenty of single women older than me, most of them, in my experience at least, had passed the interest in sex.
I, on the other hand, seemed to be more obsessed with sex and more willing to indulge my little peccadillos, call them fetishes if you will, than ever.
So, it had been a treat to meet the lovely Marie who, as I watched, slept the sleep of the satisfied. In her relaxation at least two decades had been stripped from her face, making her appear possibly a bit younger than my age. The lines around her eyes, the jowls at her cheeks, and the way the skin under her chin sagged so dramatically made her body SO much more interesting than some young girl's I was, as often, amazed at how so many men could even find young women attractive.
Here was a woman, not a girl, and the marks of a life well lived were obvious. Her breasts were soft and sagged dramatically, appropriate for the eight children she had borne and breastfed. Her areolas were very big, covering almost a quarter of her breast, and her nipples were like inch-long hot dogs, drooping from their own weight. She carried the soft weight of age and pregnancy, her waist a distant memory, and her hips very big, "A gift from my children" she told me once. The soft skin and layer of fat of her pot belly was covered with deep stretch marks and her
Mons Veneris
, that beautiful Mound of Venus that marks every woman's sex, was covered with very coarse, almost wiry hair, grey since it was not dyed like the hair on her head.
She was, all in all, a very attractive woman.
But none of that interested me in a sexual way.
Once, three wives ago, I went to a psychiatrist about my, well, my "interests." For twelve consecutive Thursdays, promptly at three o'clock in the afternoon, we had talked at length and I held nothing back. What the hell, I was trying to save a marriage and, honestly, I don't think I have anything worth hiding. I told him of an alcoholic mother and yes, that I recognized that I had the syndrome that went with it, a condition so common it had its own acronym, ACoA for Adult Children of Alcoholics. I told him of being a mascot and, well, a sex toy for Mom's group.
It was easy enough to get to the core, the "root cause" to use his term, of my fetish. I told him of the woman who rescued me one night when Mom was in full rage and her current boyfriend was egging her on. How she took me home and comforted me, and then asked for a foot rub. How rubbing her feet and feeling her respond got to me. How she used her feet to, as she put it later as we held each other, "give me what I needed," making it the first time I ejaculated with anything but my good right hand.
In the end, his diagnosis could be summed up as - - "You're no more fucked up than anyone else, and as far as sex, well, different strokes for different folks as they said in the 1960s."
And now, here I was, laying beside a lovely woman, 80 years old, squirming around so I could get to the good parts.
Her feet were gorgeous.
As I looked at them, not touching yet, just admiring, I got hard.
