I'll admit I was frustrated. And frustration is a very powerful emotion. Or rather, it's a very powerful manifestation of other emotions. In my case, the frustration was a buildup of undirected lust and boredom, and a feeling of being neglected and underappreciated. And it all came to a head on a Friday afternoon, when I was sitting alone in my big, empty kitchen.
I should mention that I love my kitchen. It's the one nice thing my husband Harold has done for me in the last few years. Probably he had it build for me out of feelings of guilt about his sexual neglect. Whatever. It's a glorious kitchen with lots of morning light, and a wood-burning fireplace I can turn on in the evening. On this particular day, I was actually using the fireplace, slowly roasting a chicken I had planned on serving for supper, along with some oven roasted vegetables and some flatbread, with a phyllo-pistachio layer-cake for dessert. And then Harold called, to say that he had to work late and wouldn't be home for dinner. And I pretended I was fine with it, but inside, I was fuming. As if it wasn't enough that my sexual prowess was being underutilized, it was a further, perhaps even a greater insult that my culinary expertise was being ignored. But no matter. There would still be, Ethan and Nancy when they got home from summer school, and Peter, who was home from university for the summer. But one by one, each one called. First Peter, saying that he was going to be out with some highschool friends, and then Ethan, who had a date--his first girlfriend, Giselle, who he had not yet introduced to us. Nancy called to say she was going to be over at her friend Tanya's for dinner. Tanya Menko, who's mother Edith always made the most bland casseroles from the recipes on the back of noodle packages. I was damned if I was going to let this meal go to waste, though. I called my close friend Olivia, who lived just across the street. Maybe she and Tony would want to come over for dinner. Olivia picked up after the seventh ring.
"Oh my god, Fiona. Look out your window right now." The excitement in her voice was obvious. I took the cordless phone and went to the front window, peaking through the drapes. Someone was just leaving Olivia's house. A young man.
"Okay," I said, not sure what I should be looking at. "Wait a minute, is that Kim?" It was Kim, a friend of Peter's. Kim grew up down the street, the son of a Korean couple. He had taken Kung Fu lessons, and was chiseled like no other guy I knew. I had seen this--his finely muscled torso--when he and Peter would play basketball out on the front driveway. But what was he doing at Olivia's. Then it sunk in.
"You didn't," I said.
"We did. We did continuously, for about two hours, and I don't think I touched the ground once."
I watched Kim look back over his shoulder, then walk down the winding suburban street toward his own home.
"It was so good. I did things I've never done before. Things I never thought I'd do. Like... anal." She whispered the last word.
"That's great," I said, not even attempting to sound enthused. Kim had been my sexual fantasy, my little taboo, and now that was gone. If Olivia had him, for me to have him would be cheap, a copy-cat gesture. Even the possibility of masturbating while thinking about Kim lost all of its taboo.
"Have you ever had sex with a guy with a shaved head? In the shower?" It was a rhetorical question. Olivia knew that my sexual history was extremely limited. "It's so hot. He was down on his knees, rubbing his head against my pussy, it was like I was going to take his whole body inside me."
"Sounds great."
"Wow. Anyway, enough about me. Why were you calling?"
The thought of having Olivia and her husband over for dinner had lost its appeal. Of course, it wasn't Olivia's fault. I had never told her that I had lusted after Kim for all these years. No doubt it had been a long festering lust inside Olivia, too. Someday, when I was feeling less depressed, I would ask her about it, how it happened, who initiated it.
"Nothing," I said. "Just calling to see how you were doing. Oh, sorry!" I added a level of surprise to my voice. "I've got something in the oven I need to go check on."
"Okay, bye."
"Bye."
I dropped the phone on the couch and wandered back to the kitchen, regarding the chicken rotating slowly over the fire. Stabbed through with a skewer, it seemed it was getting a better sex life than I was. Part of me wanted to take the bird out of the fire and just toss it into the garbage. But I couldn't bring myself to waste what was going to be such a fantastic meal. So I set about preparing the vegetables, coating them slickly with olive oil and cracked black pepper, then sliding them onto the stove.
I checked the cake in the oven, which was coming along nicely, so I poured myself a cocktail--vodka, lime and gingerale, and set the table for one, a setting for myself at the head of the large oak dining table. What the hell... I decided I'd dress up a little nice, too. If nobody else was going to appreciate me, I'd at least appreciate myself. I put on stockings, lacy black underwear, and a really form-fitting crimson dress that I generally used only for Christmas parties--it went really well with my pale complexion and dark hair. I looked fantastic.
I went back downstairs, took the chicken off the fire, cut myself off a big piece of breast meat and leg bone, served up a few vegetables, and went and sat down at the table.
I picked up my knife and forked, but then stopped. I'm not sure why, exactly, but I made the decision I was going to eat with my hands and fingers. I think I liked the contrast--juxtaposition, I think that's the right word--of being dressed up in my best dress and eating this greasy, juicy chicken with my fingers. and it was delicious. the skin was nice and crispy, and the flesh beneath was tender and moist, with the strong flavour of pepper. Some juice ran down my arm, and rather than wipe it off, I raised my arm up and licked it, a gesture that gave me shivers. I was feeling carnal. I was feeling like an animal. I was so ready to masturbate.
"Fuck." I remembered that Olivia had just fucked Kim. Who was I going to think about now? I tried to bring the image of Kim into my mind, try to forget that Olivia had already been with him. I remembered him when he was younger, playing basketball out front, his body lean and firm and glistening with sweat, his movements so elegant and catlike, his gaze pure and unfocused, like he was seeing everything without looking. But I couldn't do it, couldn't think about him that way anymore. I cursed Olivia under my breath. And then, across the basketball court in my mind, beyond Kim, I saw Peter, standing there bare-chested, his skill pale like mine, but hair red like his father's. He was built, too. A nice, lean body, not as muscular as Kim, but lean and nimble. I had a decision to make. Was I going to let myself think about him while I masturbated? If not, I needed to move on and find a different fantasy before my mood passed. I continued to eat the chicken with my left hand, my right hand now hiking up my dress and resting it against my inner thighs where my stockings came to an end.
Just this once, I told myself. I'd let myself think about my son while I masturbated this time, but it would be a one-time thing. I know it would seem like to great a taboo for most women just to entertain those thoughts. But when I was a girl, I had fantasies about my father, so I guess to taboo of incestuous thought had already been breached for me.
So I imagined Peter there with me, at the table. Him in his basketball shorts, barechested, still sweating from exertion, leaning back in his chair, and in thinking such, slipped a finger slick with olive oil and chicken grease beneath my panties, and gently touched my clit. It was a nice, tingly lubrication, as I let my fingers wander delicately over my pussy, imagining Peter now rising from his chair, pulling his shorts down, and taking his cock--which, of course, I imagined to be enormous and glistening--in his hand, as it slowly gained firmness and direction, pointed toward me.
I continued to eat as I masturbated. I'm not sure why, except that it seemed really hot, really taboo. I helped myself to some grilled red peppers, juicy and almost tongue-like in my mouth, and found it easy to imagine that as Peter's tongue with all the excitement and fear of a boy kissing his mother. Delicious. I stuffed my mouth too full and the juice ran down my chin, down my neck, and again it was easy to imagine this as his eager tongue. And then I came. Just like that. It was so shocking, so hard, the best orgasm I had experienced in at least ten years, and everything went black and signals hit me in the back of my spine. A few seconds later, I was standing, leaning forward on the table, legs spread. I don't remember standing, but there I was. I legs quivered under the tension of my body. I sunk back into the chair, noticing that the floor below me was wet. Had I ejaculated? If so, that was another thing I hadn't done in at least a decade.
But as much as my body was on a high from that fantastic orgasm, my mind was reeling a bit. Those seconds after an orgasm are clear moments, I find. And there's no moment as sobering as the waking seconds after masturbating about your first-born. Hell. I was going to hell for that. Not that I believed in hell. I went upstairs and changed out of my dress, putting on jeans and a t-shirt, and went back downstairs, cleaning up the mess on the chair and the floor. And I put away the food. Anything to keep my mind off what I had just done.
But eventually I had no choice but to think about what I had just done, and the bittersweet reality that I would do the same again, that, unlike Kim, nothing could take this taboo away from me. That Peter could fuck any girl, and number of girls, could even fuck Olivia across the street, and the fantasy would never grow old for me, because my pleasure was at the thought of the incestuous taboo.
Was Peter a virgin? I doubted it. He had been at college for a couple years, after all. But I had never seen him hanging out with a girl. And the more I thought about it, the more it crept into my mind that maybe Peter was gay. One of his friends was definitely a homosexual. Maybe Peter was, too. I began to convince myself of this. If Peter was gay, I decided, there was no way I could think about him sexually. In the back of my mind, I knew I was just trying to trick myself into losing interest in him. The least I could do was investigate, though. Maybe he had emails on his laptop to a gay lover. He had left it here, hadn't he? I went upstairs to Peter's room, sparsely decorated because he had taken so much stuff with him to college. His laptop was on the desk, and I flipped it open, waiting for the display to come to life. I entered the password 'ginger'. It was his first pet, and he used it as a password for everything.
