Ageless Erotica Read online

  “So you haven’t realized I bumped you on purpose? The best man in the car? You thought I simply couldn’t walk a straight line?”

  I couldn’t respond. I was that stunned. Before I recovered, she went on.

  “No. I don’t miss him. I got tired of him. All his rules. David had an opinion on everything and about how anything should be done. I gradually quit sharing daily events because I didn’t want to hear his pronouncements. He could be generous. Very generous. And quite gracious in social situations. But at home . . . An opinionated prig. Is that too harsh?”

  “Probably,” I said, unable to squelch my laugh.

  “Are you a prig?”

  That caught me completely off guard. I had to think for a moment. A whig was a . . . an ancient politician? Something like that, and a prig was . . . well, I wasn’t sure. Someone too straight-laced for his own good or anybody else’s? Smug?

  “God, I hope not,” I said, laughing. “But I suppose a prig would say the same thing.”

  “There’s nothing worse than a surreptitious prig,” she said, narrowing her eyes, teasing.

  “How about a man who’s old enough to know better but foolish enough to remain amorous, and senile enough to believe he can still cut the mustard?”

  “Are you referring to my mustard?” she asked, her eyes now positively merry.

  “Metaphorically, I believe I am,” I said, making sure I didn’t look away.

  “Well,” she said, bringing her napkin from her lap and setting it next to her coffee, “perhaps we should walk to the vista car and make a metaphorical sandwich.”

  I led the way, relieved that she couldn’t see my face. I swear I could feel my blood chilling, and I was getting cold feet. That brought an unwilling smile that, even if she saw, she’d misinterpret, because my feet were the least of my problems. I was shriveling, damn it, and I could imagine the nerves in my groin flipping switches, turning out the lights, and getting ready to move energy toward my legs which would quickly need a power surge to start running.

  What was the matter with me? What happened? She’d agreed too quickly and that started red lights flashing. So as I walked, I searched my emotional database. If she was agreeable, I might have to perform. I’m hearing Don Meredith sing, “Turn out the lights, the party’s over.” Relax! I can perform. Done it hundreds of times. But lately? Huh uh. If you want something done right, you better do it yourself. I’d done that in spades. But this woman was smart, funny, attractive. Rising to the occasion shouldn’t be impossible.

  What else? I could hardly let the thought surface. Could she be a man? I didn’t for the life of me remember her throat or her wrists. Weren’t they both delicate? But men were easy . . . do this kind of pickup thing in the drop of an eyelash. Do cross-dressers age like she has? Hard to imagine. And if he was an actual sex change, who the hell cares? One foot in the grave, shut your mouth. But that’s ridiculous. So, what else? From my approach and flirting, what if she’s expecting something I can’t deliver. A big dong. The lasting power of a machine. No. No way. She’s older, experienced. She’s not a Dallas cheer queen hoping to get schtupped by the goddamn quarterback.

  So really, what was it? The answer arrived, and I was embarrassed. My thrill had been in the chase, such as it was. I wanted her to want me. A fucking confirmation. I don’t mean that. A validation. Reassurance. If I had a tail it would be dragging so far between my legs she’d step on it. Pathetic. It damped me that she had set this rendezvous in motion. She wasn’t after me. She was after it.

  “Give me your hand,” she said, narrowing the distance between us. “Lead me.”

  It wasn’t as submissive as it sounded. We were getting ready to go between cars during a particularly rough area of track, and I had already begun tensing, preparatory to opening the door. The briefcase was a cumbersome mistake, and I tucked it under my arm before I reached back. Her warm fingers clasped mine. Delicate! If she was watching the back of my neck redden, I hoped she put it down to passion.

  We jostled, I felt her breast brush my back while I widened my stance, navigated the short passage, and opened the vista-dome door. We had an immediate opportunity to climb stairs to the upper level. I took it. At least we would get a way from casual foot traffic.

  Halfway up she said, “Just a minute,” got a firm grasp on my shirt sleeve, and lifted one shoe and then the other, removing a wisp of silk and slipping it in my pocket.

  Modest in a certain way, but unmistakable, and maybe the sexiest move I’d ever seen in public. Who was this woman?

  I stumbled on the next step and cursed myself silently until we were seated in a cozy nook right at the top of the stairs—the only two seats facing toward the muted afternoon sun—I definitely wanted to hear a warning if we were going to have company. Well, we did have company: a younger couple, holding hands, examining the mountain scenery and whispering twenty feet from us in the out-facing middle section, and three people looking like they were in consultation perhaps fifty feet away at the head of the car. If she noticed them, and I believed she did, they were no deterrent.

  Hip to hip, we angled and faced each other.

  “You don’t want to, do you?” she said, looking through my iris, past my cortex, and into my limbic system. “No grind for my bump? I’m disappointed.”

  Ouch. I heard the command “full speed ahead,” but had no idea how to put it in play. “Of course I do. You’re lovely. But I’m very . . . my arousal depends a little on uh, seeing.”

  Before I could savor my incredibly brilliant save, there was a flittering in my peripheral vision. I turned my head to find her holding a small lacy bra. She must have undone it while I was hypnotized.

  She tucked it into a tiny purse and put that at her feet. “Girl scouts are prepared, too. I think our motto is ‘when opportunity knocks, answer the door in your negligee.’” As she spoke, she was carefully opening more of her dress. When I noticed the buttons went all the way to the hem and realized that in a moment she would be practically naked, I could not smother a laugh.

  That earned a knitted brow and features descending toward outrage.

  I raised both hands to stop the slide. “I’m not laughing at you,” I said, “really. Never. You are absolutely beautiful.”

  Her mouth had become thin, her cheeks hollowed.

  “No. Please. I’ll tell you exactly what I was thinking.” I put my hand over my heart as if pledging honesty. “It hit me like a missile. I’ve wished for this particular moment my entire life. Most men have. I was thinking, ‘I’ve gone to heaven,’ and I don’t even believe in heaven. It’s one of those this-can’t-be-happening things. Rachel, it’s true. I don’t deserve you, and I don’t think you really want me. We shouldn’t be doing this.”

  She leaned away until our hips no longer touched, her eyes still nailed into mine.

  “That said, how about a little kiss?” I raised my eyebrows and gave her my best smile.

  The ensuing silence brought an end to time. I could have driven to Chicago or read War and Peace. During the next seven or eight seconds, I understood relativity.

  When her features almost imperceptibly softened, I gravitated forward with the stealth of a mime and, without hands, kissed her so lightly on the lips that I could feel molecules bonding. Later, at some point, the tip of her tongue ushered my thoughts quietly out the huge windows to the snowy mountains and farther to the line of dark clouds on the northern horizon, farther to Montana and the majorettes who set me on fire and burned through my belt and my jeans and my skin until they finally melted my spine and I was nothing but jelly moving slowly back and forth until I was nothing at all.

  AT THE WANE OF THE MOON

  Bill Noble

  When just the sliver of a moon was climbing through the oaks, Beth came home with a story to tell. She shed her thick crocheted sweater, slipped out of the old flowered dress, and draped her clothes helter-skelter over the bedside chair. She slid under the covers, pale as a wraith, to breathe a single wor
d: “Tom.”

  The eighty-two-year-old man turned his face toward the slanting moonlight with an affectionate murmur. He kissed her papery fingers.

  “Tom.” She brushed his temple with her cool lips.

  He opened his eyes suddenly. “Is everything all right?”

  “Oh, yes,” she whispered. “Oh, indeed yes.”

  She kissed his eyes shut again and pressed herself against his frailness. She slipped a hand over his belly to cup the bony crest of his hip. “I came down the canyon from my evening walk. It’s such a warm night. I came down by Jason’s. I . . . I watched Jason and Bianca make love. I sat on the hill for a long time, watching them.”

  “The kids who just moved in down at the corner?” His eyes fluttered wide again.

  “The curtains were open. I came down through the woods past their house. I could see candles burning, and then Bianca walked in front of the window, just shining. You know, her breasts were so lovely in the candle glow, and Jason snatched her up from behind and kissed her.”

  “Elizabeth,” he said. He always called her that when he disapproved. She laid a finger across his lips to shush him.

  “Thomas,” she teased. “They were beautiful, and it stirred me, so I watched. At my age I can watch if I want.” He knew better than to argue.

  She kissed along his collarbone, then let her mouth rest for a while over the pulse at the side of his neck. He sighed, and she began to stroke his chest and belly, tenderly and slowly. “We have such a sturdy neighbor,” she said. “He’s such a wonderful father and such a dear of a husband. I knew when they moved in they were a good pair.” She traced fingertip circles around Tom’s nipples until he sighed again and shifted closer against her. “I have to say, when he picked her up like that—oh, the way she looked at him after they kissed, Tom! But when he stood there with her in his arms like that, so strong and easy, and her perfect round bottom—well, I have to admit, I blushed a little. I almost looked away when his penis was bobbing around right under her . . .”

  “Elizabeth,” he said again, but she bent forward and put her lips over his nipple. Then she raised her head to look him in the eye. She gave him a peculiar little twinkle, kissed him on the nose, and disappeared under the covers. He sighed. “Beth, it must be terribly late. We need to sleep.”

  “Can you hear me all right down here?”

  “Yes, Beth, but . . .”

  “Then just listen. I want to tell you about it.”

  “Beth, I don’t think . . .”

  She began to brush her cheek and lips gently against his penis. “Well, he just stood there with her in his arms, right beside the bed. They kissed a bunch more—oh, for a long time—and then he began to lick her breast—you know, great, long strokes with the whole of his tongue, just the way I used to like you to lick my breasts. And his penis jumped every time he licked her. You know, it’s curved up as if it was trying to look around. But, oh, Tom, she has the loveliest breasts. Were mine ever so beautiful, do you think, when I was twenty-eight?”

  He began to stroke her back with his fingertips. He reached a hand to cradle the furrowed scar on her chest. A tear trailed down his cheek onto the pillow.

  “Bianca grabbed hold of Jason and started to stroke him. Like this.” She began a slow up-and-down with Tom’s still-sleeping penis. “You should have seen the way his legs locked up and his butt clenched! He’s a real stallion, Tom Maynard.

  “Anyhow, Jason dumped her right on the bed. Then he threw her legs up over those big shoulders of his and just buried his face in her. She made the most amazing noise—I wouldn’t know what to call it. Right through those double-paned windows and all.”

  “Beth, really . . .”

  “Well, really, your proper self! You remember the things we used to do? Remember the time you took me skinny-dipping way up Slater Brook, and by the time we were through we could only find enough clothes lying around for one of us to get home with? I had to go in your pants and fetch you back another pair. Or the time we spent the weekend at the Brenners’ and never got up till noon—oh, I’m sure we must have been forty then—and Dewey and Jill blushed all the way through lunch, and hardly spoke? Oh, Tom, we were a pair, weren’t we?” She slipped her lips over the head of his penis and began to waltz little circles with her tongue. After a few minutes of silence, she took her mouth away to ask, “Does this still feel as good as you always used to tell me it did?”

  “You’re such a wanton woman. My penis thought it had already answered that question.” A muffled chuckle came back from under the covers, and for some reason it was the chuckle that seemed to set him stiffening. He was torn between surprise and a sudden onset of delight.

  Beth began to slurp and suck, waggling her face, clowning over him. Another laugh welled up, and he felt Beth’s stomach begin to shake in silent accompaniment. He grew fully erect.

  Beth wet her hands and stroked him vigorously. “Should I tell you what Bianca’s climax was like?” He started to say something, but she continued, “It didn’t take her long. Tom Maynard, you’re as hard as a prize salami. I believe you’re enjoying this!

  “Anyhow, she just kept making those noises, but she started to shake, bouncing around on the bed. Jason had to wrap his arms round both her legs to hold her in place. I was afraid the poor boy was going to break a tooth trying to keep his mouth on her!” Tom reached between Beth’s legs to pet her. She squealed a girlish little squeal and then lifted one leg to straddle him. He caught her rich, familiar scent and felt the fullness and heat of her engorgement. She stroked him hard and fast, then slowed to an almost painful delicacy. He felt the warmth of her lips on him again for a moment before she reverted to full hard stroking with her hands.

  “Bianca left big red welts all down his back. And she threw her head back so far I was afraid she was going to break her neck. I’m surprised you didn’t hear the commotion all the way over here. Her shaking just went on and on and on. You should have seen the way Jason was thrusting against the edge of the bed—but he never took his mouth off her. Shall I tell you what happened next, what Jason did?”

  “Wait, Beth, wait.”

  “You want me to stop?” She was prepared to be outraged.

  “No, no. Mercy, just for a minute. I want to do something.” He sat up on the edge of the bed, trying to catch his breath. Beth had emerged from the covers and was watching him quizzically. After a moment he turned on the little bedside lamp and hobbled to the dresser. He rummaged through the bottom drawer and returned to the bed.

  “What have you got, you mischievous man?”

  Deadpan, he handed her a tube of lubricant. She grinned up at him.

  “Tom Maynard, I believe I’ve had an effect on you! But what are you hiding behind your back?”

  He laid a faded photograph on the sheets. She took him in her hand and stroked him toward hardness again, turning to look at the picture. “Tom! I didn’t know you kept these!” The photo showed two strong young bodies coupling on a lawn next to a stately bed of iris. The picture was slightly askew. The tops of the couple’s heads were cut off. “Oh, Tom! Do you remember how the camera kept falling down every time the shutter went off? And how hard it was to run back round and try to get inside me again before the thing fired? Oh, I didn’t know you still had these! Do you remember,” she laughed, “we had to find an ad in some sleazy magazine and mail the film all the way to Chicago?”

  “You’re a beautiful woman, Elizabeth Ann Maynard.” He laid her down on the covers. He put a pillow on the floor to cushion his stiff knees and knelt between her legs. “It’s my turn.”

  She held the picture, gazing alternately at it and at the disheveled snowy hair and familiar old head that pleasured her. She couldn’t name the reason for the tears they brought. She tried to continue the story of Jason and Bianca, to give Tom something of the wonderful images that moved in her mind, of the run of muscle in Jason’s haunches and down the length of his candlelit back, but the words trailed away. Her sounds, whe
n she came to them, long after words had failed, told a story they both seemed to know well.

  He moistened her with great tenderness, inside and out, and she lubricated him and brought him quickly to erection again, smiling. He entered her with a long, moaning exhalation while she held his face between her hands like an unexpected prize. They kissed in lazy delirium, first one moving, then the other. They anticipated one another’s pleasure, knew when to give respite, when to take up the rhythm again. When he climaxed, her hands clutched his buttocks, pulling him deep into her. He held himself carefully inside long after they were through.

  After a time, Tom turned out the lamp. She helped him lie next to her, side by side, as the moon’s silver receded across the bedroom floor. Long after it had vanished, they turned and moved into one another’s arms, breath and pulse flowing together through the deepening night.

  A slightly different version of “At the Wane of the Moon” was the final story in the last issue of Paramour magazine in 1998, and was later republished online at Clean Sheets magazine.

  PEAS IN A POD

  Maryn Blackburn

  “I can’t just drop everything at work.” The double crease between Diane’s brows deepens, and her pursed lips accentuate the little lines he will soon kiss smooth. “I’m not some booty call.”

  “Of course not.” Russ takes her coat, his bare feet freshly appreciative of heated floors, the source of debate approaching argument during the renovation.

  The empty wooden hanger is his secret reminder that Diane will come again, will hand off her coat, will do things outside either of their marriage beds. The sight of the hanger coupled with faint traces of her perfume rising from the coat’s satin lining wakes his cock. “I only found out I had the place to myself a minute before I called.” He hangs her coat.

  “What happened?” She pours herself a scotch without offering him one.

  “Logan Airport is snowed in, no flights until morning at the earliest. Apparently getting a hotel room was quite the coup.”