intensely alive, as if years have been stripped from your body. Feeling engorged between your legs, plumped, softened, filled up. Smiling into the impatient dusk and flitting your fingers to your nose at the cocktail of smell, at the stamp of two bodies upon them.
Feeling as exhilarated as a teenager who’s just finished the last of her exams, and the glorious stretch of the summer holiday is ahead of her.
But that night you’re awake, vastly awake as Cole presses his trusting warmth into you. His hand rests on your hip and your eyes are owl-wide with this appetite for something else unleashed, it’s all violent and terrible and exhilarating within you. Did Theo ever feel like this? Did she have guilt? Would she now happily resume her life? For you’d dreamt not so long ago of one transgression, just one, stemming the tide of marital disintegration and flushing you out, so you could begin, afresh, your married life; and never look back.
Your teeth nibble at a stubborn flap of skin on your lip, they nibble until there’s a warm rush of blood in your mouth.
it is everyone’s duty to be kind to and help her fellows as much as possible
So it begins.
A weekday afternoon. Once a week. Always Gabriel’s flat.
You’re a good teacher, you always have been, and now after years of being the good teacher you don’t want to just give, you want something back. There’s one condition, you make it clear from the start: this arrangement must not, in any way, intrude upon your regular life. It’s the only way you can make it work. When the lessons come to their end you will both disappear back into your worlds so that in the future, if you ever pass by chance on the street, you will not acknowledge each other or what you have done during these weekday afternoons in his flat. This will free you to explore exactly what you want. There’ll be no photographs, no letters, nothing concrete about any of it, nothing to seize as proof. Memory is all that either of you will be allowed to keep. The rules come quickly and clearly, and make it easier to justify what you’re doing.
Once a week. It’s the only time you meet. For the rest of your waking hours you feast on the memory of what you’ve done.
The throb of that.
He opens the door in his suit, always, as if he’s just come from work. The air in his flat smells of inner London, of too much traffic standing still and the taste of iron is in your mouth. Business people walk by his ground-floor window, chatting on their mobiles, in their clattering heels and brisk shoes. It makes the lessons seem more wilful, childish, indulgent, like a sunny afternoon stolen from work, spent, secretly, at a film. But worse, much worse.
So, week by week. Slowly, you do not hurry. You feel you have all the time in the world to savour each other, having rushed in with that first, miraculous fuck: it was just a start. There’s so much to learn, now. For both of you, for as you teach him you’ll be teaching yourself although he doesn’t have to know that.
A rough agenda is set.
One, the removal of clothes. You learn his skin, inch by inch. He, yours.
Two, the touching, the licking. Exactly where you want. The lobe of your ear, the tip of his tongue on your upper mouth. The skin below the vagina, it’s tender rim, your clit. You tell him exactly where you want him, you guide him, instructing him to slow down or not stop or don’t move or stay on track. And with that, finally, as he listens intently and does precisely what you want you have your first orgasm and a whole new world is opened up: your eyes are clenched with the warm flooding wet and you scissor on the bed and arch your back, trying to squeeze the last shudders out or prolong them, you know not what, and still the implosions shoot through your belly and then soften and stop, and you can’t move, you’re drained, all you can do is lie on the bed and laugh, in shock. Gabriel looks at you. My God, he says, my God he repeats. You sit up. Run your hands through your hair. You have to concentrate: this can’t be just about your pleasure, it’s Gabriel’s turn. With him giving you so much you want to present him with a flooding of delight back: you have a goal, for the very first time in your life, to see a man completely laid waste.
By your hands, lips, tongue. If you can.
So, the licking, where he wants: most of all, the flattened front of the tip of his cock and then its underside, he can hardly bear your mouth on it and yet can’t get it enough and while you’re doing it you squeeze the base of him tight. You discover it all together, you’re both learning so much and you look up, to his eyes: astounded, delighted, both of you. Then the rim of his asshole. His balls, the firmness beneath and it’s his turn to tell you not to stop.
Three, the clandestine public kiss, fully clothed. The bedroom kiss, unclothed, the places for it.
Four, a candlestick. The handle of a hairbrush. The neck of a champagne bottle, and how thrillingly gentle you both have to be. Why is it that inanimate objects can excite you more than a penis ever does?
Five, the vibrator. Teasing your clit and hard in you. Under the head of his cock and in his ass and you savour the clench in his face as he comes.
Six, porn magazines. He has to buy them, it’s his task. You want the letters pages, nothing else; you’re not interested in what he does with the rest. You revel in saying all the words that’ve never slipped comfortably from your tongue: cunt, fuck, ass. You’re the housewife with the angel face and a sudden grit in her talk and it’s as if your outside and insides no longer match. Fuck me, you tell him, come on, fuck my cunt and you’re appalled and aroused by the words slipping from your mouth.
Seven, wrists bound to the bed posts. Disabled, blindfolded, tied up.
Eight, the shower, rammed against the tiles.
Nine, sleep. Curled around his back, your body his blanket, your palm on his heart because sometimes, you tell him, that’s all a woman wants.
Ten, the fuck. The first time didn’t count, there was nothing to be learnt, it just had to be done. You need time for it now, to get it right; you’re determined, finally, to make it work. He’s too jerky, grating, mechanical, you knew it would be like this, there’s no music to what he’s doing and he comes too quickly, of course. You’d always wanted it quick with Cole; but this is different, you have to find the exquisiteness you know exists. You’d been hoping for something different with Gabriel but the fucking, for you, is still not catching alight. You make an heroic effort not to show him your disappointment, not to turn away in frustration, sulk.
You take a deep breath.
Tell him, gently, that you both need some practice at this. Tell him he needs to slow down a little, look at you, not lock himself into his own little world. Tell him you’re not, actually, getting a thing out it. He snaps his head away from you, he’s so annoyed, feels he’s come so far, it’s hard to tell him it’s just not far enough. He gets off you. Leaves a sticky mess. You grab at him, tenderly, in apology, but he storms to the bathroom and tells you he’s had enough.
You don’t contact him for a week.
Ring the morning of the next session and he answers, too quick.
Can
