The ear-bone's connected to the clit-bone and the ....

Earlier this week Marie visited me for a couple of days. Like last time, she visited mid-week. (She works in retail so Tuesday and Wednesday are her weekend.) She cooked dinner for me two nights, which was a luxury. (Although she also broke my cut-glass butter dish. Oh well.) And we talked a fair bit when I was home from work. As always. But the biggest drama was in bed.

Marie no longer laughs her way through each orgasm. So I assume her laughter burbled up out of astonishment and relief after decades of believing herself incurably anorgasmic. And, like my uncontrollable laughter during my Second Date with D, she may have felt partly "Oh my God, this is really happening!" Anyway, her vocalizations are no longer restricted to laughter. But they are loud and gratifying all the same.

Marie's clitoris is neither large nor prominent, and it has a tendency to recede into the surrounding flesh. If I didn't know what I was feeling for, I could easily lose it. Could this explain part of her chronic anorgasmia and sexual dissatisfaction before now -- that her lovers were perhaps inexperienced and therefore clumsy? She tells me that -- before me -- she hadn't had sex in twenty years. That would have put her in her early thirties at the oldest. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that her other lovers were inexpert at their job, though she assures me they were always kind and gracious and considerate.

In any event, her appetite for sex these days is almost adolescent in its intensity. The night she arrived she warned me that she didn't want to do much more than cuddle: she had had a trying week at work and disturbing results from her most recent mammogram, so her libido (she went on) had flown straight out the window. Fair enough. Her flight got in about 11 o'clock at night. I met her at the airport, we drove to my apartment, I held her for a few minutes, and we went to bed. By that time she was already wet and fully aroused. So yes, we made love after all.

Marie never seems to tire of stimulation, of my giving her one more orgasm. Wife used to stop me pretty quickly because she said she got too sensitive after the first one and it hurt. Debbie got sensitive too, although she was more ready than Wife for a repeat. Even D would -- occasionally and after a while -- push my hand away and turn to kissing. Marie will pull me up to kiss her, if my attention has been too exclusively on her vulva. But if, as we kiss, my hand traces its way back down again, she's always willing. At one point she even told me, "I get to where I feel like I really need a breather; but then ... well, you start to distract me again and I forget all about it."

But what seems to have surprised her the most was the fantastic interconnectedness of her responses. I suckled her ear, running my tongue behind it and into all the little whorls; she came. Then it was her neck; then her shoulder. (She didn't come when I suckled her shoulder, but she enjoyed it.) Later on I suckled her toes, running my tongue between them intently. And she responded again. She was on a roll, and it didn't take much to push her from one peak to the next.

Later she told me about a book she had read, where the woman cuts her toe and the man has to bandage it; so to clean the toe first he licks it, and the woman "feels it between her legs." Marie said she had always scoffed at that line as impossible. But she's not scoffing any more.

By the end of Marie's visit the sheets were a bloody mess. Marie was puzzled: she was sure she had reached menopause by now ... hadn't she? I told her not to worry. I didn't add that the same thing happened to D when we first started fucking, though she too was sure she had hit menopause. It must have been a last hurrah by all the parts of her reproductive system: out of work, past their time, but called into action for one last glorious orgy. Not to drift gently into that dark night, but by God to go down fucking. As they should.

We didn't discuss her mammogram a lot, nor some other things that had been on her mind and that she e-mailed me about soon after. But it was a good visit.