sliding to stroke his balls and thighs, to probe and tickle and pinch. Now and then one of my nipples would rub against his thigh, bounce off muscle and wiry hair and send an unmistakable signal to my clit—get ready for takeoff—but all I could do was wriggle and rub myself against the roughness of the sofa upholstery.
I pulled free. Now. We were so attuned to each other that I didn’t have to say it, but Hugh, in a brilliantly executed choreography of lust, lunged for his pants on the floor and pulled a condom from his wallet.
A series of reactions rushed through my mind as he ripped it open.
He brought a condom.
What the hell, I want him to fuck me.
But he came prepared.
Very sensible, given the stick insect.
Or does he always have them in his wallet?
Oh, look at him slide it over himself. So sexy to see him handle his cock. I should have asked him to do it for me more often.
Did he always have condoms, even when he was living with me?
But he came here meaning to fuck me. Or fuck someone sometime—
“Hugh,” I said, and he took it as an invitation, which in a way it was—an invitation to stop me thinking.
The Santa panties hit the floor and Hugh reared over and in me, my butt on the edge of the sofa, legs over his shoulders.
“Nice?” he panted. “Nice for the little lady?”
“Oh, yes. Nice.” The little lady was being serviced, no question, fucked and screwed and impaled and penetrated and all the rest of it.
So good, so familiar, so very rude, in the middle of the afternoon with the front door open and me still wearing my socks (actually a pair of Hugh’s but I didn’t think he’d want to claim these fraying relics with a hole in one heel).
He bent his head to suckle one breast and then the other, sending me a notch higher. And higher, so that I stopped thinking about socks and DVDs and random condoms, everything except Hugh’s mouth and cock and his fingers on my clit.
And I was there, torqued up to the breaking point and then breaking and flooding as I came, while Hugh kept me there as long as he could. Then he gathered himself and plunged away in his familiar oh-my-God-I’m-going-to-come home run, short staccato stabs that—other than postorgasm—didn’t do a thing for me. He collapsed with a groan on top of me, folding me up like a pretzel.
“Nice?” I stroked his shoulder, damp with sweat.
He gave a primeval grunt.
“Uh, I can see this isn’t a good time. Would you like me to come back later?”
At the sound of the unfamiliar Irish lilt, we both froze.
Then Hugh leaped to his feet. “Who the fuck are you? What the hell are you doing here?”
I grabbed Hugh’s shirt to cover myself as I remembered, too late, the appointment I’d made. “Patrick … someone?”
Patrick someone, standing at the front door, smirked and blinked behind steel-rimmed glasses.
“Ah, I’ll leave you to it, then,” Patrick said. He glanced at my panties on the floor. “Merry Christmas.”
“Jesus Christ!” Hugh spluttered.
I tried to restrain a giggle at Hugh, standing outraged, cock deflating and wobbly; a giggle did escape as the condom dropped to the floor with a splat.
“Who was that—that leprechaun?”
“He can’t help being Irish. He was here to look at the apartment.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t carry the mortgage on my own.”
For an economist, Hugh was sometimes pretty stupid.
“But—but, you won’t be on your own. I’m moving back in.” He paused. “Aren’t I? I mean, after … this.”
“Hugh, you came to get your skis and DVDs. A fuck doesn’t give you permission to move back in.” I retrieved panties, T-shirt and jeans, and dressed.
Hugh, apparently realizing nakedness gave him no advantage, grabbed his clothes. “Jo, at least we should talk about it. I mean, we love each other. I’m sorry about … you know. Everything.”
“No.”
Brady, tail aloft, trotted into the living room and sniffed at the condom on the floor as though discovering some delicious edible.
“You fucking cat,” Hugh said as Brady wound around his ankles, purring. Early on, Brady had decided that Hugh was his best friend and answered to fucking cat as an alternative to his real name.
“Who are you going to get to empty the mousetraps?” Hugh said with despicable cunning.
“I’ll handle it. I’ve been handling it for the past three weeks.”
I picked up the pile of DVDs and handed them to him. “I’ll pack the rest of your stuff and let you know when you can come get it. I have to go to work now, Hugh.”
“We need to talk about this,” Hugh said, looking obstinate and ruffled in a way that pre-stick insect would have melted my heart.
“No, we don’t. But Hugh, one thing. When did you start carrying condoms around? I mean, do you let them fall out of your wallet at faculty meetings to impress the Chair or something?”
I could just imagine the Economics Department snickering and high-fiving—You get lucky this weekend, Hugh? You da man, Hugh!—under the benign gaze of the Chair, a dead ringer for Alan Greenspan, horn-rimmed eyeglasses, wrinkles and all.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Hugh picked up the condom from the floor and headed out of the room.
“Not in the toilet. You’ll block it.”
He stopped and turned to me, suspicion on his face. “How do you know that?”
“I just do.” Virtually anything blocked up the downstairs toilet. It was strictly off-limits to males and menstruating women.
“You bitch,” he said, and to my surprise he looked really upset. He flung the condom into the wastebasket in the corner of the room and flung himself and his DVDs out the front door. The effect was spoiled by his having to stomp inside the house again to get his skis. I sat on the couch, Brady kneading my legs, and listened to his car start and reverse out of the driveway and the sound die away with an awful sort of finality.
I cried a bit, then, thinking how tired I was of crying, but that you couldn’t let three years of your life go without some grieving. Brady purred and allowed himself to be hugged with a friendly tolerance that implied an empty food dish.
The bright fall day was fading now, but before I could go to work there was something I had to do. I went into the kitchen and armed myself. Knife, peanut butter, barbecue tongs (Hugh’s, and I might just forget to wash them afterward), rubber gloves, flashlight. Pants tucked into socks, in case anything was alive, and (aargh) panicked.
I didn’t need a man for this. Or for anything much else in my life.
“You sound just like the lady on the radio,” the woman in the store said. “We’ve got a new brand of organic peanut butter in. Would you like to try a sample? It’s really good.”
I am the lady on the radio. “No, this will do fine. Thanks.”
Sometimes, if I’m feeling sociable, I’ll admit to it, but then what usually follows is a disbelieving look, and a strange comment. I thought you were taller … older … younger … blonde. I hate your fundraising drives. Why do you play so much Tchaikovsky? Why don’t you