coming-of-age. She plants her saucy eyes on mine. ‘I tell you Jill, he’s wild in bed.’
‘Is he?’ I try to sound giddy like she looks, like she feels, like I want to feel for her, but I thought all that business about Nick was a joke. This is not what I expected, or wanted to hear.
‘Oh I can’t begin to tell you.’
I accidentally put my wine glass down so hard it nearly cracks the table. My eyes keep going to the hem of her skirt, torn between wanting details and being embarrassed to listen to them. I’m fascinated by the topic of people being good lovers. Having only ever had one, you do sometimes wonder how they compare. ‘Why, what’s so great about him?’ I casually pick up my drink again.
She crosses one leg over the other and I glimpse her white panties. ‘Well, for starters we just connect. You know what it’s like when there’s that instant heat? It’s like a tornado that rushes through you when you look at them, and then you just collide in passion.’
I feel like colliding my brains with the Intercity 125.
She shuts her eyes for seconds, bites her bottom lip, the afternoon still very much alive in her. ‘The fact that we both have partners, that we’re doing something wrong, it’s the forbidden fruit. It just seems to turn the temperature up seven hundred degrees.’ Phew, she whistles. ‘And Jill he’s got so much stamina. In the space of an hour we did it three times! I’ve been with men who are purely animal in the sack, but with him…’ Her green eyes softly twinkle. ‘He’s got a tender side Jill. He’s lovely. I don’t ever remember enjoying the feeling of a man’s sexual, urgent body like this. Something as simple and basic as pure lust. His sweat. The scent of him. He’s just this big hunk of incredible, undeniable male flesh.’
My eyes fix on my cold, limp chips.
When I look up, she is studying me. ‘You think it’s bad of me,’ she says, some invisible truth being erected between us.
I shake my head, too enthusiastically. ‘No. I just didn’t think you’d do it.’ I feel awful for Lawrence and Molly. Did our giggly afternoon put her up to this? Part of me wishes she hadn’t told me, yet my heart is still pounding from what she said he did behind that door.
‘Well, d’you want to hear the rest or not?’ she asks, with friendly blackmail.
‘Just don’t tell me you did it in his wife’s bed.’
She huddles in the corner of the comfy chair, looking gloatingly post-coital. ‘No, I made him take me into the spare room. Funny though,’ she smiles. ‘He wanted to.’
Yuck. I hate him. I feel personally offended. As though it were my bed it happened in.
‘We did it on the stairs first. I’ve still got carpet burn.’
The stairs? That film springs to mind, The Thomas Crown Affair, with the ever sensual Rene Russo; she and Pierce Brosnan tumbling nakedly all over the house, to that raw, erotic music.
‘He took me into the bathroom. Got me on the counter top—’ She shudders like she’s having an orgasm in the chair. Then she looks at me squarely, leans forward, whispers. ‘Jill it was as though my life and my marriage and everything didn’t exist. All the stresses just left me and I was young again. I was just me. Only… it was better. Because this time I was there for the right reasons. I was doing it because I wanted to. Not because I thought it was something THEY wanted.’ She becomes distant, lost in reliving it again. ‘Then it was really weird. He… well he did this thing.’ She sends herself back in the chair again, looks a bit hesitant. ‘In the bath.’ She gives a saucy smile. ‘Oh I shouldn’t tell you. Maybe this is too much detail for you.’
I roll my eyes, wanting to say, yes it is, so stop. But I don’t say anything, so she continues. ‘Well, he made me straddle the side of the tub so my lower body was, well you know—’
‘—Not really.’ My heart hammers while we hold gazes.
She grins that grin again.
Darrah Glass
Emily Prior
Debra Anastasia
Elizabeth Moon
Alasdair C. Shaw
JL Redington
Jennie Jones
Brett Halliday
Loralee Abercrombie
Shelley Shepard Gray