The Cougar Book

by Jolie Du Prè

  If you were here, Sam, you would dress me up in heeled boots and the green cocktail dress you bought at Saks, pull me down to your special table at Sur, force-feed me tiny, fat morsels—gourmet cheeses, half-cooked slivers of steak from the end of your knife, bites of torte and crème fresh. You would tie me to the bed after, wrists bound in the impossible figure eight of your favorite leather belt, bringing me to near-orgasm again and again while you left me there, immobile but for the rise and fall of my hips and breath. You would have said something perfect and laughable, like, “I can see the curves of your ass growing. They’re beautiful,” even as you fingered the tight clench between the globes of my skin, slid in to the knuckle, farther. And I would have come, finally, mouth clenched over the pillow, those curves you loved pushing upward off the sheets into the swat of your fine hand.

  Sam, gods I miss you. How you would have loved to see me eyeing this boy, my desire coming finally, to surface, after all those desolate months of dry. So dry that spit and lube and tears weren’t enough to keep me going. How my hand would ache, caught between the press of my thighs, trying, trying. And nothing but a dry trench, wetted with a few drops of rain. If you were here, Sam, oh the things you’d do to me to make me well. But you’re not here, are you? And so I stretch my too-tight, too-long legs out on the side of the boat and I watch the boy work the motor through my big dark sunglasses.

  As though he feels me watching, he turns away from his scan of the horizon. The sunglasses keep his eyes hidden but a pale upper tooth slides forward and catches over the side of his big bottom lip. It’s a gesture of both blatant desire and of shyness. The combination forces my breath away in the wind, and my fingers tighten hard against the side of the boat.

  “Hold on!” he says, and in that moment, he’s all boy. All speed and desire as he revs the engine, zooming us through the water with only a single hand on the motor. The waves pick up, a solid thud-thud against the boat that makes me shiver, and he turns us inward slightly, toward the land, which rises somehow both lush and sharp. The softened shores and weathered rocks contrasting to the razor leaves, the jagged rise of mountains. We ride in silence, letting the motor and the water talk to each other in soft growls and slaps.

  It’s a long way from the town to the hidden cove where he’s taking me, and I wonder about other women who come here alone, if any do. It’s dangerous, I suppose, going out in a simple boat like this, no lifejackets in view, with a strange man . . . boy. Grief rides with me in this boat, too, don’t think it doesn’t, Sam. You’re in every drop of water that touches my arm or face or lips.

  Despite the grief that washes through me, I feel a sense of gladness for this sudden desire, to feel again. The slap of the boat seat against my ass as it settles over a hard wave. The drops of water that spray along my sun-stroked arm. The Boy, with his invisible eyes and his mop of damp hair, the way the sea beads off his skin and runs down tiny rivulets that would taste of salt and life on my tongue. The tiny nibble of desire that’s starting somewhere beneath my breastbone and rolling down into my stomach.

  The boat slows, stops. My body doesn’t do either. It’s a live, humming thing caught between wind and water, salt and sun. I feel off-kilter, my balance off so that I have to clutch the boat sides with both hands, suddenly afraid I’m going to topple over the edge.

  “There,” he says. And there is an unhidden delight woven in the single word, in the way his hand guides my eyes across the water. I don’t see anything, but my pulse jumps just because I can hear how his has done the same, as though he doesn’t do this or see this every day. He cuts the motor and settles his lean hip against the side of the boat. The word for that part of the boat escapes me, although I think I knew it once. I’ll have to ask him later. But for now I keep my eyes trained on the path of his pointing finger.

  “Can we go to them?” All my breath has been torn away by wind or want, and I sound high-pitched, excited.

  “They’ll come for us,” he says. I wonder how he can be so sure. So certain. And I wonder why his saying that sends another whispered slide of desire up my back. Then I realize it’s because the way he said it makes me think of you. He sounds like you. You’ll come for me. Oh, you’ll come. How many times did you whisper that? Until I would come, sometimes, just from hearing you say it. My body trained to ripple and crash at your very words. You didn’t even have to dip a finger beneath my wet surface. How many conferences did you go to, when you would call? “What are you doing?” you’d ask. And I’d answer, as I always did, “Just fucking some stranger.” Our private joke, pulled out of an article by some pseudo-reporter who’d called me a “treasure whore without a map.” That laugh of yours—I craved it almost as much as I craved the throaty growl that meant you were close to coming. “What will you be doing later?” you’d ask. “I’ll be coming,” I’d answer, a hand already sliding between my thighs, surprised as always at how wet you could make me with just a word. “Good girl,” in that low voice. “You will come for me. Oh, yes.”

  I realize The Boy is watching me, and I wonder just how much of my thoughts are obvious. Or if I’ve made a noise. I find myself doing that sometimes, Sam, in a way that would make you proud—stepping into the bathroom where you so often fucked me, bent over the sink, my hands flat against the mirror, and I’d discover I was moaning low in my throat. Or find myself saying your name aloud in the store, the sound rising up from my lips, unbidden.

  As The Boy watches me, his smile is sweet, so sweet that I want to nibble along his lips, taste his skin and salt. His head tilts toward the side of the boat. I follow his gaze and realize the dolphins have come, as he said they would. I swallow back whatever noise I was making and lean over the side, gaping, my mouth open to the seawater and the splash of their fins. The dolphins are big and sleek and faster than I could have imagined, only slowing as they softly bump the boat. Their skin shines with water, a blue-green-grey that reminds me of wet suits and seaweed and, for some reason, the wet and salted heat of tears. They’re gorgeous and playful, jostling each other. Creatures utterly foreign and yet I feel that I know them. I hesitate to say that I feel kin—so presumptuous—and yet, it feels as if I could be. They’re alien too, unknown and unknowable.

  But then, it seems, aren’t we all? Even you, Sam, so see-through in some ways. So untouchable in others. The parts of you hidden away by your need to control. The businesses. Your movements. Your wife. Your body. Even your death.

  “So,” The Boy says after we’ve floated in silence for a while, watching the dolphins play and seemingly grow bored, moving out toward other parts of the water, and then coming back to nose at the boat. “In we go.”

  “Here?” I am momentarily shamed by the fear that slides up through my breastbone and knocks me in the throat. In this dark water, with dolphins and who knows what all, so far from shore? I try to swallow the panic away. What was I expecting? A closed-off kiddy pool somewhere near the shore? Yes, actually.

  He doesn’t answer, merely points to the snorkel gear that rests at my feet. “Trust me?” he asks. There’s a hint of cocky teenager in his voice, but mostly it’s overridden by a simple confidence.

  Trust him? I don’t, but I do.

  Still, I want in. I want to be surrounded by that playful banter, come whatever costs may rise. He settles the boat, steps across it to my end and kneels in front of me. His attention is on the gear at my feet. The curve of his neck arches, delicate, before me. The soft hairs that curl at the back. The chain swings against his neck and I can see now that it isn’t a crest at all, but a locket. Oddly dainty, with a few filigrees across it. It’s old, you can tell just by looking at it. So out of place with all of this young masculinity. Its silver curves beckon my fingers, but I force myself still.

  Without seeming to notice, the boy turns and dips the flippers into the water. Then he picks up one of my feet, running his palm along the arch of my foot, sliding the flipper over the toes and heel. It’s a practiced movement, one of those ones where som
eone knows their tools, and watching him do it floods the space between my thighs. He’s so close to me there, head bent, fingers occupied with my other foot, I’m afraid he can smell my desire. I have a sudden fear that he’s going to lift his head, and nose against the damp space between my thighs like a dolphin.

  There is something in his smile as he finally lifts his head, a sharpened curve to his thick lips that makes me wary, but he just lets the smile widen and hands me my mask.

  “This one goes like this,” he says, settling the mask against my face, nose and mouth covered, the tips of his fingers drawing the elastic over my hair, tucking it around me ears. My head swims, full of vertigo and the momentary feeling of seeing everything, especially his face, through a broken mask. I blink at him, suddenly feeling like I’m the young one, and he’s impossibly old. Then the real world slides back in, and he’s just a boy, a boy with his fingers lingering in my hair for one moment too long before he stands and motions me overboard with a single movement of his lean and muscled arm.

  I slip carefully over the side until I’m in the water, buoyed by salt and surf. As soon as I’m submerged, my hearing seems to come back, full force. I can hear nothing and everything; the waves that crash through my fingers and against my thighs, the roll of stones and shells beneath, the play of the dolphins turning. They’ve scattered some, but not disappeared. My own heart, echoed and driving, against my ears. The splash of The Boy as he slides into the water beside me.

  For a moment, I watch his lean body sliding through the pale blue, and watch the muscles of his legs and shoulders. I can’t tell if it’s want I feel for him, this wet press between my thighs, or if it’s just the ocean, caressing me with her wavy tongue.

  He slides off, toward somewhere else, and I turn my attention downward. Everything beneath is black and white and blue-grey and electric orange. Fish slicker by, striped and wiggling. Coral of all colors line tiny hills like trees.

  I close my eyes and float, amazed at how everything washes away. I feel part of something bigger than myself, an unimportant cog in a huge machine. As though nothing I do or say matters. Not to anyone. In fact, for a moment, there is nothing else. Sensory depravation of sorts. Is this what you came for, Sam? This washed-away nothingness? This thing you couldn’t find anywhere else, not even with me? I choke, thinking my snorkel is filled with sea water, but it’s just tears, washing down my mouth.

  I don’t know how long I spend under there. The Boy stays away, as though perhaps he knows what the water can do to someone. It’s like all the mourners who stood on the other side of the grave, not wanting or willing to include me. Not willing to accept my grief as anything more than running mascara to hide behind until the will was read.

  What feels like hours later, I pull myself against the boat, dripping and panting. The Boy is already there, still wet himself, his arms reaching down to grasp me by the elbows and help me up. His head brushes my shoulder as I’m lifted, long wet strands of hair graze and sting like jellyfish. I feel bruised and battered, exhausted, as though I’ve been beaten back to health by a masseuse with too-big hands and a careful understanding of my weak points. I also feel grateful, and alive. My skin is washed clean, my hunger for new tastes and journeys honed by all that time in the quiet depths.

  I nod my thanks and practically flop into the boat. He kneels down, pulling off my flippers for me. “You’ve got a small cut, you know,” he says. When I look down, I see the blood sliding down over my knee. It’s a slow dribble of color. I never even felt it. “Looks like a clean cut, nothing to worry about.”

  He grins, those big lips slipping into a slow curl. “Be glad there’s not sharks. They’d have eaten you up.”

  A quiet moment of silence rests between us, heavy as a stone. For a moment, I imagine him saying something out of a movie, like “I’d have eaten you up,” and I imagine what I’ll do if he says it. Laugh? Groan and pull his mouth to mine? Lift my hips toward him in a silent plea?

  He does none of these things. He dries my legs with a dark towel and then presses the fabric to the cut with a hard press of his palm. “It’ll stop in a second. It tends to bleed a lot, because of the water.”

  “Where did you learn that?” I ask.

  “I’ve learned a lot of things.” And this is the moment, right here, that could be so fucking cliché, Sam. Like you would have laughed if you were here to see it. But it isn’t that way at all, the way this boy slides his sunglasses back into his wet hair, and then drags his gilded gaze right up me, making my skin sizzle and pop. The way he leans in and brushes his lips, very softly, sideways across mine, it isn’t a kiss. It’s something else.

  I want him with a sudden fierceness that makes my soaked skin feel too dry. I want him to slide his tongue between my lips. To feel that sharp press that young boys have, the impossible hardness of his cock nudging between my legs. I ache to throw my legs around his thin hips, to drive him back against the floor of this boat, to ride him and the waves and water until we are both coming. Until I can stop talking to my dead husband in my head. Until I cannot hear him answering.

  The boy brushes his lips down the length of my neck. In response, my body, such a traitor, such a horrible, horrible wild creature, arcs up off the seat, presses into the downward curve of his hips as he leans against me. He is as I imagined, all hard-on, throbbing and raging inside the cage of his shorts. Groaning against me, rubbing into me like a creature past curiosity, past anything but want, and I’m opening my hips against his desire, the material of my swimsuit doing nothing to hide my want.

  “Stop,” I think I say. I mean to say. I’m panting, my tongue and teeth are finding the curve of his ear even as I beg him to go away, and my hand slides down inside the soaked material over his ass, finding the perfect, muscled curve, kneading it.

  “Okay,” he says, and I realize with sadness that I have said the word aloud. And that, unlike you Sam, he believes it and will abide by it. And somehow I know this is how it should be.

  I touch his unlined cheek with one hand, draw my thumb along the burnt, peeling top of his lip. “Just for now,” I said. And I realize that what I meant to say as comfort is actually true. That if I stay here long enough, I will have this boy. I will teach him the things you taught me, and I will begin, finally, slowly, painfully, to let you go.

  The boat rocks beneath us as he pulls back to his heels. Breathless. Panting. Both of us. Looking at each other, my hand still lingering on his lips.

  I shake my head. What am I shaking away? My spent desire? The desire that slides into me again, wanting, even though I’ve just had him? My sudden, hot shame? Myself? His request for my name and attention?

  He turns just slightly and bites my fingers, catching the tips between the edges of his teeth, his golden-brown eyes shy despite his action.

  “Oh, fuck.” It is all I can say, and it is enough to give us both permission. He leans in, and this time it is a kiss and it catches my still-bit fingers between our lips, his tongue glossing over my fingers and lips and teeth. He tastes of fish and salt water and sunshine, bits of earth and air.

  I pull my hands away as we kiss, return them to the muscular curves of his ass, and pull him against me until we are both sliding around on the bottom of the boat, wiggling and slippery as fish. I want to suck every bit of his skin into my mouth, to taste him until there is no taste left to him, until my tongue is crusted with salt.

  Tucking two fingers on either side of my hips, he slides down, planting his mouth over the fabric between my thighs. I can feel him through the swimsuit, but it’s muffled, and I buck my hips, wanting more, burying my fingers in his slippery hair.

  “Please.” I am groaning, and there is no shame in it. There is barely any noise in it either, only want and breath.

  Yet, somehow he hears. He slides the fabric to one side, holding it there as he sinks his mouth against me, a hard suckle over my clit that jolts my hips off the rocking boat. A second later, he’s sinking his fingers inside me—two, th
ree? I can’t tell—but they move in a slow scissor that opens me, almost painfully, and makes me ripple and shudder beneath him. My hands slide down his shoulders, some part of my mind noting the way the muscles roll and turn even as the other part of me thinks of how young he is, how firm on the bone. I want to ask him where he learned this thing, this thing that men my own age wouldn’t know, but his movements have stolen my words, turned them into slippery, uncatchable things.

  He pushes himself up over me, fumbling with his swim trunks and I try to help, but mostly our fingers just get tangled in laces and impatience and desire. And then he is free, the thin stalk of his cock rising and bobbing between us. I have to reach out a hand to touch it, the firm bone of it, the pale, golden skin of it.

  He grips the base of his cock with one hand, aims for my rising, hungry hips and slides the tip between my lips. I almost say “please” again, but I bite it back, pulling the insides of my cheeks in between my teeth. It is enough to raise my hips into him, to push myself over the long hardness of him, to feel him crack me open and fill me.

  We come together, hip-to-hip at first, and then chest-to-chest, and then mouth-to-mouth, his tongue searching for mine, suckling it hard into his mouth the same way he did my clit. His thrusts are slower than I expected, almost leisurely, but the rigid want in his body makes it clear that he wants to much more.

  I urge him on—I want to feel him drive hard into me, to send me against the bottom of the boat again and again with an urgency that will bruise me—and he responds without hesitation, arcing his hips down, hands settling to the boat on either side of my shoulder. We move together, thrusts that match the ocean, or create it. He is so silent, and I am so much noise. Grunts and pants and soft, wordless pleas. He slides a hand down between us, catching my clit between his fingers each time he pulls from me, a sharp tug that makes me cry out.