If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been regarded as fact.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Going off the reservation. Present participle.(Literally)to leave a reservation to which one was restricted…To engage in activity outside normal bounds.
— c/f Wiktionary
Chapter 4: Off the reservation
I was drinking alone in a bar Lenore and I frequented in her on-again off-again assault on my dubious virtue. But I knew she wouldn’t be there that day. The bar afforded a cross-street view of a motel to see if the redhead who said she was coming to town to see me actually checked in, and detect any putative spousal surveillance.
Advent of this woman into my life had freed me of a clinging, innervating depression. I had developed a carefully partitioned compartment in my brain for our affair, with no effort to rationalize or justify. I wanted this, so I would have it. Period. It was still daylight, the long days of midsummer. I was supposed to be miles away for a softball game. I had told the coach he’d probably have to find someone else to play third base.
Probably, because I never felt confident about any plan involving a woman. If she failed to show I could get there for the late innings. I loved playing ball, even the co-educational softball that supplanted competitive city-league play in another capital far away. But I was ready to skip a game for this woman. And confident Lenore would not find me here, since she played on our team.
The woman for whom I waited showed up as promised — she never failed — and went through check-in rituals briskly. Since we’d begun our “thing” it was one of my private pleasures to watch from a distance her no-nonsense stride and business-like demeanor, offering no hint of her smoldering sensuality. I wouldn’t even have to ask for her room number, since I saw her park and go in. I finished my drink and walked across.
No, she didn’t need anything to eat, she ate on the road. She didn’t need to rest from the long drive, or freshen up. She needed to be naked in my arms, now. She had been in anticipation all the way. I said I’ve been anticipating since last time. That too, smarty. She was on the Pill now, so the full cornucopia of delights was wide-open. Softball would do without me today.
After decades, one memory sears: at one point I straddled her as I did the first time we met in Seattle, slippery cock squeezed between her pale breasts. This time I felt her knees come into the small of my back, urging me forward into her mouth. God! It was electric. Her soft breasts enclosed my aching balls. Her knees kept me almost throat-deep as she bobbed her head. My cock strained and swelled and felt like it grew another couple inches.
Still new to my forties, I was proud of my staying power and already had come once. But I felt my orgasm boil up and tried to warn her. She concentrated on what she was doing and disregarded my words. Knees and lips and tongue told me it was okay. I surrendered. Came so hard it was almost painful.
She never relented until I was fully drained. My heart was hammering. I propped my fists on either side of her head to support a body gone boneless. She finally released me with a last lick, half the size I had been moments before, smiling up with glistening lips.
I said, “I wanted this that time in Seattle. When you licked the tip that once.”
“But you pulled back,” she said. “I didn’t know if you liked it. I thought about it our first time! This time I just went for it.”
I dismounted and held her as my heart slowed. “Like is an understatement. But I may be done for the night.”
“Maybe.” She grinned wickedly. “Maybe not. Doesn’t matter. Not with what you do with your hands and mouth.” A clear call to duty. My right hand cupped her Mons, still slippery from our opening round. Her breath caught. “We can take a breather…”
“Not what you said when I got here.” I nuzzled the closest nipple, still swollen.
“What did I say?” She groaned softly. “Did I say anything?”
I curled two fingers into her and rotated my thumb on her blood-suffused clitoris. After that there was no more talk for a while. Eventually we rested. Made slow lazy love again. Later we slept. Lost to memory is how long we slept and how long we didn’t. Whether we ever ate that night. Irrelevancies like that. Another day’s obligations intervened. Too soon she was on the road for her long drive home.
What happened next proved not only was I off the reservation, I was born a dog and will die a dog. At work Lenore was all over me, wanting to know what was so important I missed the ball game. I never had a poker face. And jealous feminine intuition is uncanny.
“A woman,” she said. “You fucked somebody while we played ball.”
At my age blushing should have been past me. It wasn’t. I had resisted Lenore’s advances a long time. Wondered if turgid sexual currents she roiled opened me to the melancholy spring hand job by the redhead that led to my actual affair. But dismissed it as a feeble excuse.
“You did!” she said. “You bastard!” Her quick perception unnerved me: fear of the wrath of a woman scorned. But how she reacted was not in any Venusian text I studied trying to understand women. After work she dragged me across the parking lot to the closest bar and demanded salacious details. I was shocked. She was adamant.
“I’ve told you all mine for a year. Which ones wanted blow jobs, which ones couldn’t keep it up or give me an orgasm. You owe me. Did you get a blow job? You did! I can see it on your face! Did you make her come?”
She was pushed up against me, clinging to my arm, eyes glittering. My god, she was aroused because I fucked somebody else. But the last question offended me. “Of course she came.”
“More than once I bet!”
I sought refuge in my drink.
“How many times? Tell me!” Her breathing was ragged.
“Well we had all night…”
“Oh God, you bastard! I saw you first. Wait — I did see you first, right?”
“Lenore…”
“You better kiss me, you bastard. Right here in public. Right now.” She hooked a leg over mine, skirt riding up.
Moral degenerate I proved myself to be I said, “No, outside. My car is outside.” She clung like a leech all the way to the car. Almost had to pry her loose to get her inside. Then somehow we were kissing. I heard that unmistakable groan of female need.
“Make me come!” she said. “Right here, right now. I need to!”
I twisted around and put my hand under her dress and found her Mons. She was drenched. For god’s sake, nothing in Venusian literature covered this. I fingered her soaking panties aside and penetrated. She grabbed my neck convulsively and went off like a firecracker. There was nothing for it but to keep strumming as she bucked and writhed. I lost count of what D.H. Lawrence called “a woman’s crisis.”
Finally she was satiated. I got out my pocket handkerchief to dry my wet hand. Every woman has a distinctive smell and I finally knew hers. She lolled slack-legged, heavy-lidded, head on my shoulder.
“I wish you’d done that a year ago,” she said softly.
It occurred to me to wonder if her tales of serial fucking over the year had been intended to inflame me. I wasn’t wired that way. But it appeared she was.
She finally drew herself together and asked, almost pro forma, if I would now take her home and fuck her properly. Didn’t seem surprised when I declined. She was off on her own planet somewhere. Venus maybe.