by Vivi King
Instead of being liberating, my four days of freedom had been terrible and I was less than half way through Pete’s absence – if he came back to me at all.
Right then my husband did not want me and my lover had abandoned me.
Had I already lost them both? I had to know! I had to find out if it was all too late.
***
It was seven-thirty in the evening when I parked my SUV around the corner from Julie’s house. I didn’t want to pull up outside the house and give her time either to make up a story or to hide, pretending she wasn’t there. I had no idea what I was going to say but I knew I had to be there, if nothing else to look into her eyes and see what was now there.
It was absurd; Julie had told me openly that she wanted to get back with her husband and as far as I knew she did not know about our affair so why did I feel so angry and betrayed? If I had cause for anger, surely it was with Tony or even myself.
As I rounded the corner on foot, I saw her car in the driveway. She must be home. Checking my make-up and hair in the rear view mirror, I took a deep breath, climbed out of the car, walked up to the front door and, after a long pause to gather my courage, pressed the bell.
Nothing happened. I pressed it again, longer and harder.
“Darren!” I exclaimed.
The door was opened by a tall, very fit, very attractive man in his late twenties; a man I recognised immediately as Darren, a Personal Trainer from the Sports Club to which we had all once belonged. He had instructed me on a handful of occasions; certainly often enough to recognise me after only a moment’s hesitation.
He was also Julie’s supposedly former live-in lover. He looked surprised to see me; surprised and embarrassed to see anyone in fact.
“Hi Penny,” he said awkwardly.
“Hi,” I replied, for a moment taken off guard. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”
He shrugged sulkily, “I’m picking up a few things.”
So it was true; Julie and he had indeed parted ways. I had suspected my friend was trying to keep her lover on a string so she wouldn’t be left without male company if her husband wouldn’t have her back. It seemed I had been wronged.
“Is Jules in?” I asked. He shook his head.
“She went out ten minutes ago.”
”And left you to pack your bags?” I asked.
It was an unnecessarily nasty thing to have said but I blamed him for having seduced my friend and broken up their marriage. The fact that this had left Tony free to have an affair with me did not soften my attitude but then hypocrisy is a flaw in most of us.
When I saw the almost childlike look of hurt on his face I was taken aback immediately regretted it. That was more the look of an injured child than cold, hard womaniser.
“Sorry,” I apologised. “That was bitchy of me.”
“It’s okay,” he smiled sheepishly. “The truth is I waited round the corner in my car until she left before going in to get my stuff. I still have my key.”
“Are things between you that bad?” I asked, beginning to feel sorry for the boy despite the mayhem e had caused.
“Not really,” he replied. “But she was dressed up really nice and had some guy with her. I thought I should keep a low profile, know what I mean?”
This was a disappointment. Given what I had seen the previous night, my first thought was that she had somehow managed to persuade Tony to talk about the reconciliation she seemed so to want so much. I felt bad again; she had asked me to help and I had done nothing.
But Darren had called the man ‘some guy’. If Julie had been with her husband he most certainly would not have used such a vague description. Intrigued, I asked if he knew who the man was.
“I’ve seen him before at the Club. I don’t know his name,” he told me. “They went off in his car; dark green Nine - Eleven. Very nice.”
I stood stunned. The only man I knew who drove a dark green Porsche was my own husband. But in a city the size of ours there must be lots of green Porsches. Still, a feeling of unease passed through me.
“Are you okay?” Darren asked solicitously.
“What? Yes of course. I haven’t eaten today, that’s all,” I told him, hoping that was the only reason I had to feel that way.
“Do you want to come in?” he asked.
I most certainly did; that house had been my friend’s love nest for the past year. I was very keen to see whether there were any signs of her very public infidelity. But I couldn’t let her former lover see my nosiness so I just shrugged and followed him into the house.
Apart from the absence of Tony’s coat on the rack and his boots on the mat, it felt exactly the same but far from being reassuring, that seemed to make it oddly spooky. Before their split, Pete and I had been in Julie and Tony’s house on almost a weekly basis, with and without our kids. Since Tony had walked out, I had been there only a handful of times and my husband not at all. It felt as if I was walking into a past that could never be re-visited.
“Coffee?” Darren asked politely, leading me past the large lounge, study and into the designer kitchen they had installed only a few years ago.
“Please,” I replied, wishing there was something stronger.
With the current broken state of their marriage and the precarious position of my own, the happy memories brought a lump to my throat and a tear to my eye.
“So how are you?” I asked, forcing myself to be cheerful on the outside, however I felt inside. “Not working tonight?”
He shook his head, a frown on his rather handsome face as he made the hot drinks.
“I’ve got the evening off.”
“Seeing Debbie later?” I asked nosily, referring to the young female trainer who was rumoured to be his recently acquired bed partner.
“She’s booked up till ten,” he smiled, thereby confirming the truth of the first rumour. “It’s good money for her but... you know. She’ll be too tired when she gets home and...” he began then stopped abruptly when he realised what he was about to say.
The disappointment on his face at the prospect of her being too tired for sex was almost comical. I laughed; he really was still young inside however many birthdays he had had. I was revising my
image of him as the big bad seducer very rapidly.
“And I suppose your other girlfriends are with their husbands,” I said blandly, emboldened by this revelation and wanting to test the other rumour; that he had moved onto another older, married woman already.
“Right,” he nodded without thinking then realised what he had done and immediately tried to back- track. “I mean they both...” he stopped abruptly.
I burst out laughing.
“Don’t worry, Darren. I’m Jules’ oldest friend, remember? I’m unshockable.”
This last statement was not entirely true. Apart from being shocked at Julie’s apparent sexual appetite and preference for anal sex, Darren had just let slip that he had more than one married woman on the go. This was news indeed. In normal circumstance I would have shared this gossip with Julie immediately but circumstances had not been normal for a long time.
“So what did this bloke look like,” I asked.
For the next twenty minutes, I tried surreptitiously to grill Darren about the man with whom my friend had driven off. The boy seemed uninterested and hadn’t noticed much but I heard nothing to suggest it wasn’t my husband and his car.
What I did hear was the conversation of a rather straightforward, fairly guileless young man who worked hard – admittedly mostly on his own body about which he was apparently obsessed. His conversation was shallow but relaxed and it want long before a second coffee had been made and I was able to direct the flow towards the subject I was really interested in – my best friend and her husband.
Darren appeared to have no scruples at all about sleeping with married women or having more than one girlfriend at the same time. He seemed bemused but delighted that so many women of all ages found him attractive enough to sleep
with – he wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth - and tried his best to accommodate them.
Julie had been no exception; when he suggested innocently that she had almost forced herself on him I found it hard to disbelieve him. Although in no way indiscreet, from the way he talked it also seemed that although Julie had not been his sole bed partner during their affair, she had been the least well concealed. In fact, Darren had once wondered whether she had deliberately made sure that
people knew she was sleeping with him.
Before I realised it an hour had passed and my tummy was rumbling loudly, must to my embarrassment.
“Sorry,” I blushed. “I haven’t eaten today.”
He seemed shocked.
“You really should look after your blood sugar,” he scolded. “You can’t reach peak performance without it.”
I smiled. The idea of my amateur gym sessions requiring maximum nutrition was laughable.
“What do you suggest?” I asked
“There’s a pub down the road,” Darren replied. “You could get a tuna salad or something.”
Why not? I thought. There was no chance of talking to Julie that evening now. Every meal I had eaten since Pete left had been on my own. It would make a very nice change to have some company.
“Only if you come too!” I grinned cheekily. “My treat!”
Half an hour later we were sitting in a pleasant but down market pub ten minutes’ drive from Julie’s house. It was clean but a bit shabby; the risk of bumping into any of my sophisticated, middle-class friends was very low indeed but I felt relaxed and safe. We had chosen our food from the menu, ordered at the bar then taken our drinks to a corner table away from the growing crowd of drinkers to carry on our chat.
It was, I realised, the first normal conversation of more than two minutes I had had with anyone at all since Pete had walked out.
The white wine was barely drinkable but my standards have never been too high and I persevered, asking plenty of questions to keep the chat going while we waited for our food to arrive. Darren was good company and talked in a light, entertaining way as long as the subject was exercise, sport or himself.
The subject of me arose seldom but this suited me well; I wanted to forget about my currently disastrous relationships for a while, not share them with a boy I hardly knew, however pleasant the
evening undeniably had become.
By the time he had eagerly told me his life plans - to reach Assistant Manager at the Sports Club then open his own dedicated body building gym – both his pint glass and my wine glass were empty. I slipped him a twenty pound note and, like a gentleman, Darren went to the bar for refills.
As he returned, so our food arrived too. I was very pleased at this; the large glass of wine I had drunk on an empty stomach was making me light headed already.
The food was at best average but at the prices they charged I couldn’t complain. In the presence of a gym coach as young and attractive as Darren, I had felt obliged to go for the healthy option of a rather flavourless tuna salad instead of the fish and chips I really wanted. Darren had ordered a large steak, medium rare, claiming that his exercise regime demanded a constant stream of high quality protein.
I teased him about this, feeling more comfortable as the second glass of wine came to an end and the third arrived, asking if he needed steak so badly when he was paying for his own food. He looked at me, hurt. For a moment I wondered whether I had really injured his pride but then I noticed the twinkle in his eye.
I laughed and prodded him in the ribs. This resulted in him prodding me back. A rather childish and giggly game of touch-touch ensued during which I got to feel the impressively firm muscles of his six pack stomach and he discovered the full extent of my tiny boobs.
Thank God we were in a concealed corner of the bar.
When the silly game was over I noticed his hand remained on my thigh. I didn’t move it away and for a while we chatted about other things Darren enjoyed; cars, football and of course, girls. He was surprisingly discreet about the latter; having tricked him into revealing he was sleeping with two married women as well as his girlfriend, he was wary about revealing anything further so on that front I remained frustratingly ignorant.
When Darren returned to his seat with coffees for us both, the sides of our legs were touching. I seemed to have slid along the seat a little so there was less room for him. I was pleased to feel his hand slip back into its previous place on my thigh. By the time the coffees had been finished, his fingers had raised the hem of my skirt and weren’t far from touching my knickers under the table.
I didn’t stop him.
After three glasses of wine for me and three pints of lager for Darren, driving home was out of the
question. Indeed for me, walking in a straight line had become surprisingly problematic as I discovered when paying the bill and swaying my way back from the Ladies’ Room.
I was even less stable when we left the pub and the cool outside air hit me in the face. Fortunately for us a taxi pulled into the car park just as we passed through the pub’s flaking red-painted door. Its two passengers hopped out and began to pay so Darren and I jumped into the back before it could pull away, both of us giggling.
“Where to?” the driver asked cheerfully.
I looked at Darren who returned my rather misty but meaningful gaze with a smile and raised eyebrows
“My place?” he asked.
My tummy filled with butterflies. Even in my slightly inebriated state, I could tell that an unexpected watershed had just been reached. I knew full well what would inevitably happen if I said yes and went back to Darren’s shared house with him. I looked at myself; at my sensible work clothes, at my middle aged reflection in the car’s window. How could he possibly fancy a woman old enough to be his mother?
But then I looked at the pale band on my third finger where my wedding ring used to be and knew equally well that I was going to let it happen; that I wanted it to happen; perhaps even needed it to happen. If Darren wanted to have me, he could have me!
I took a deep breath and nodded.
“Mercer Road,” Darren told the driver.
As the taxi sped through the dark streets, my tummy buzzed with excitement as, hidden from view, Darren’s hand worked its way up my thigh and under my skirt, lifting the hem until the dark upper parts of my tights were exposed and his fingers brushed against the nylon-covered gusset of my boring work knickers.
It was madness again; Penny Parker PhD, a fifty-one year-old mother of three and an internationally renowned scientist was being groped and fondled in the back of a cheap mini-cab on her way to the shared house of a twenty-nine year old boy.
And she was loving it.
The cab pulled into a road of terraced houses and, on Darren’s instructions, pulled to a halt outside the end property. The street was as down market as the pub but at least there was no litter or broken down cars. Darren helped me rather unsteadily from the back seat. I paid the driver then, my hand in his, led me through the front door and into the house he had told me he shared with two other young men.
My mind knew this was a bad idea but right then my body was in charge.
Darren led me into the low lit hallway in which a racing bike leaned against the wall. The door to a fairly new fitted kitchen stood open on my right and the half-open entrance to a bright, warm lounge was on the left.
“Only me!” he shouted, presumably to his friends.
I silently prayed that I wouldn’t have to meet his two housemates but it was okay; there was no reply. Darren kept hold of my hand and immediately led me up the narrow stairs to a small landing off which three doors opened. The middle of these stood half open revealing a surprisingly bright and clean bathroom which made me feel a little happier. Then Darren opened the door on the left.
“In here,” he said proudly. “Welcome to my place.”
With a little trepidation and a lot of excited anticipation, I walked through the door
and into the young man’ lair. Despite my tipsiness, my middle aged, maternal eyes couldn’t help noticing the unmade bed, the dirty gym clothes strewn randomly around the floor and my nose couldn’t miss the stale smell of ageing damp sports towels. It was an aroma I had known in my own sons’ bedrooms for many years.
For a moment the squalid reality of the situation hit me. For a moment I wanted to escape; to run away to the safety of my home, but then I remembered what was waiting for me there.
Nothing. And no-one.
Then all such thoughts simply disappeared. I heard Darren closing the door behind me and heard the click of the lock. My chest went tight in anticipation. Then I felt the first touch of his youthful hands on my middle-aged body and the touch of his lips on mine...
The world went into a spin as my work clothes were clumsily but effectively stripped away, the young man’s hands making short work of their buttons and zips, consigning them to the floor where they
joined the tangle all around us.
Our mouths melted into each other, tongues deep in each other’s mouths, kissing with a passion that took me back to my teens. Within moments my shirt was gone; my skirt was around my ankles, and the clasp of my bra had been unfastened, leaving my tiny boobs free for the touch of his hands.
Darren’s strong fingers kneaded and twisted my pale globes more firmly than I had known for years; making me wince in surprise. It had hurt but I had loved the pain. Suddenly I knew what I wanted; to be fucked and fucked hard; without love; without sensitivity; nothing that might remind me of my broken relationships. I wanted pure, unadulterated sex, unclouded by any emotion but lust.
Driven by this lust I began to strip him in return, pulling his polo shirt up and over his head. With his height this was tricky but with a little untangling and giggling I managed to free his arms. Darren finished the job quickly, tearing the rest of the shirt from his shoulders and pulling his jeans off leaving him only in boxer shorts and, ludicrously, pale white socks.