First date

I am away from home on business. Never mind exactly where, just suffice it to say that Wife and the kids are in a different time zone. This morning, as I left my hotel room for work, D left the same room to travel 700 miles back to her home and her job, from which she had taken a couple of "personal days". This evening, after spending a scant 10 hours apart, she called me on the telephone and we talked for two hours, making me wonder whether we had not perhaps been magically transformed back into high school students when I wasn't looking.

How on earth did we get here?

All month, it seems, I have been promising a post analyzing my current situation with D, unpacking my motivations, trying to understand what is going on. That post is not this one. I still mean to write it -- heck, D wants to read it too, or at any rate she wants answers to the same questions. But tonight I am going to write narrative, while it is still fresh in my mind. As too often in real life, analysis and understanding will have to wait till later ....

Ever since the end of last month, I have known that I had a date with D for the first couple nights of this week. In the ensuing weeks we worked out the logistics, although obstacles seemed to manifest out of thin air. It didn't help that D was still talking on the phone with Wife every afternoon, and Wife would liven up her litany of complaints about her life with aimless comments to the effect that I drink too much (not true) and snore like a freight train (no idea if this is true or not). This led D to e-mail me in a hurry asking how much alcohol she should expect me to drink each night (answer: none -- I really had an entirely different vice on my mind!) and when I was planning to tell her about the snoring because she is such a light sleeper. It is almost as if Wife suspected D's interest, and was trying to scare her off. (Maybe that's even true.) In any event, we finally sorted through all the arrangements, and I got on the plane Sunday morning for the city where I am now.

By remarkable good luck, D flies on the same carrier as I do, and lands at the same terminal; this means that she doesn't have to cross the security check and is sitting at my gate waiting for me when I get off the plane. She looks up and sees me, smiles, puts down her book, stands up ... and the next thing I remember is that we are kissing. Really kissing. The most we had ever exchanged before was a friendly hug and a light peck on the cheek, ... but this is Very Serious Kissing. When we break for air (and to go get my luggage), D is breathing hard and looks like a drowning woman who has just been pulled ashore. So we collect my suitcase, hail the airport shuttle, and rent a car; and we punctuate each stop along the way with ... another kiss.

Arrive at hotel. Check in. Find room. Once in the room, I call home as always: "Hi sweetheart, just letting you know I got here safely. Hope you're all doing fine. Did Son 1 win his game? Oh, that's too bad. Is he doing his homework now? I see. Well, it was a long flight, so I'm going to unpack and maybe find some dinner. I love you too; give my love to the boys. Bye." Click.

And now, where where we? Oh right, ... kissing.

D and I are standing, embracing, kissing. She runs her fingers through my hair; I caress her back through her sweater. When she starts to unbutton my shirt, I move my hands around to do likewise ... and she giggles nervously. "Oh well, I guess you have to see me," she says. For all the desperate "hunger" she has articulated so eloquently in her e-mails, D is embarrassed at the prospect of my seeing her undressed. Now, at one level I understand this: D is in her mid-fifties; she has the better part of a decade on me in age. But it's not so easy to fuck with your clothes on. So she finally, a little ruefully, parts with her sweater, her shirt, her very plain and functional bra, her pants .... And my God, if ever there were a woman with nothing to be embarrassed about! D is beautiful. Her skin is soft and smooth and delicate. Her breasts are perfectly shaped -- you would never know they fed two children, except perhaps by how delectable her nipples look. The hair on her head is mostly grey by now; but her pubic hair is thick and rich and there is not a grey hair in sight. I am in awe.

There is no way I can keep this a straight, chronological narrative, because from here the exact sequence gets all confused. We never get dinner that night. We never even order room service. From the time we undress until we finally turn out the light is easily four hours, maybe closer to five. But a couple of details stand out.

At one point D cradles me in her arms, and she says "I am learning so much about you that I never knew."

"Like what?"

"I'm learning that you are desperately shy. Hosea, I've known you for almost twenty years, and I never knew that before! But I can feel it all through your body, as I run my hands over you."

Well, of course she is right. It's hard to see it, because I do my best not to act shy -- ironically, it's generally the people who "know me best" who have the hardest time seeing this. But I talk about it a little bit in this post, and I discuss it with Jane in the comments afterwards. And there is no mask you can wear when you are naked in bed with somebody.

Actually, I suppose it was pretty easy for her to tell. D is as sexy as any woman I can imagine; to hold her and caress her is sheer glory. But something -- and I agree with her diagnosis of shyness -- crippled me in the most embarrassing possible way for a guy in bed. [Three cheers for the anonymity of blogs!] If D herself had not been so loving, I would have been truly humiliated. But she said she knew it was shyness and nothing else -- that she could feel it through my skin, and that it was obvious from how I held her.

One positive consequence of this unexpected disability is that it gave me a lot of time to focus all over D's body -- to kiss, to lick, to suckle, to stroke, to caress, to rub. And she enjoyed every bit of the attention -- ecstatically, abundantly, and over and over and over again! After years of Wife's depressingly permanent anorgasmia, I found D's endless enthusiasm to be a deep joy and profoundly gratifying.

Besides, the "crippling effect" did not last forever. Way, way, way too long by my lights ... but not forever.

What more can I say? We finally turn out the lights -- way too late, considering I have to work in the morning. We sleep. D says I don't snore (at least, not that night). Monday morning I get ready for work, while D gazes at me adoringly. And Monday evening, when I get back to the hotel, it is more or less the same again. Dazzling. Exciting. And hours long.

OK, Monday evening we actually do interrupt to get a shower and order room service. And we punctuate the sex with conversation. We even talk about Wife, although D is feeling increasingly conflicted about her dual relationship as my lover and Wife's confidante. But the gist of the evening is the same, and we still turn out the lights far too late.

And Tuesday morning -- with sore regrets for the unimaginative limitations imposed by the real world -- we go our separate ways. I spend the day missing her, only paying half attention at work. And in the evening, just before our two-hour phone call, I get an e-mail from her.

When I had first landed at the airport, I gave D a book of poems by Constantine Cavafy, a poet whose work I love, and of whom she had never heard. In her e-mail to me, she wrote:

I spent the flight reading Cavafy...truly lovely poetry and remarkably easy to read. Looking out the window, all I could see was your face and eyes...my sense of wonder and delight is much better expressed by this Cavafy poem:

...I saw a beautiful body
that Eros must have fashioned with his boundless skill,
designing with delight the symmetrical limbs,
moulding the tall, sculpted frame,
tenderly drawing the face,
and bestowing, with a touch of his hand,
a feeling on the brow, in the eyes and on the lips.
.