Afternoon Delight

by Anne Calhoun

  Simone rang her up and provided a small plastic bag to hold Sarah’s discarded undies. She signed the credit card slip without a hint of regret, then checked her watch. She’d planned to walk to the intersection Tim had specified, but she was running short on time, so she hurried to the A C E line and caught the train to 14th Street.

  A light drizzle misted the air when she emerged from underground to find him waiting for her at the intersection of 14th and Eighth. He lifted an arm in silent greeting, a move that made her smile. He was the tallest person in any room not filled with basketball players, but he took that and his astonishing good looks for granted. He wore jeans, a dark blue T-shirt, and a blue cotton canvas utility jacket.

  “Hi,” she said when she crossed the intersection.

  “It’s raining,” he said.

  “Maybe you New Yorkers think it’s raining, but to those of us from San Francisco, this is a bit of mist.”

  “It might keep the crowds away,” he mused. “As long as you’re not cold.”

  “I’m not cold,” she said, touched by his concern.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see,” he said.

  They set off through the rain/mist/fog. “What have you been up to?”

  “A little sightseeing, a little shopping,” she said. “Cleansing my palate.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Not that palate,” she said. “My mental palate. I needed to set the sauce problem aside for a few hours. It’s reached the point of diminishing returns.”

  He didn’t say anything to that. They had almost reached Tenth Avenue when he steered them toward a set of stairs leading up to a black metal overpass.

  “An elevated train?” Sarah hazarded as she leaned back and peered up, but grasses and trees spilled through the tracks overhead and over the black-painted railings.

  “You’ll see,” he said, and guided her up the stairs.

  The sign attached to the iron girder supporting the tracks read THE HIGH LINE. They climbed the stairs and walked into an elevated world. The leaves of the budding trees fairly glowed against the pale gray sky, and flowers bloomed extravagantly between tapered concrete planks that formed the pathways.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  “The trains used to run at street level, but so many people died in accidents that city officials decided to elevate the tracks. They were designed to run right through the buildings to make it easier to unload freight. Once Eisenhower built the interstates, trucks took over a lot of the freight delivery. In the eighties the trains stopped running and the tracks were abandoned. They became a vacant lot, lots of homeless, lots of sex workers. People wanted to dismantle the tracks, but another group got together and lobbied to have it included in the Rails-to-Trails program.”

  “It’s really cleverly designed,” Sarah said as they set off. Tim was consciously slowing his pace to match hers. The park didn’t run in a straight line, but rather zigged inward to provide space for a thicket of small trees, then zagged back outward again, opening into a seating area with views of the Hudson. Ahead she could see where the planks split to either side of a green space, the tracks still visible among the grasses. “Part promenade, part garden. I like it.”

  “Want to see more of it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Her T-shirt and skirt were beginning to cling to her abdomen and thighs, which caught his eye. She looked down at herself, and sure enough, the lace on her new bra was visible under her shirt, not the color but the texture. Her denim jacket wasn’t yet soaked, but the button placket gapped, revealing the deep V of her T-shirt and her breasts pushing against the edges.

  They strolled along the increasingly empty promenade until they came to a wider spot. Lining the east side of the pathway were lounges made of wood, big enough for two, facing west and the Hudson. “That’s Chelsea Market,” Tim said. “We can get a coffee or something at one of the vendors.”

  Transfixed by the design elements, Sarah shook her head. “Are those the original tracks?”

  Tim gave one of the big wooden chaises a shove with his booted foot. It rolled a foot to the left.

  “That’s just neat,” Sarah said.

  Disregarding the damp, he sprawled out on one of the chaises. “I’ve been coming here a lot lately,” he said. The words had the tone of a confession, although Sarah didn’t see why that was necessary.

  She lay down beside him and propped her head on the bulge of his biceps. From this angle, Manhattan’s horizon of skyscrapers parted to expose a thin ribbon of industrial New Jersey sandwiched between a swath of spectacular sky and the Hudson. “It’s easy to see why,” she said. “If I lived here, I’ll come here as often as I could. What do you like about it?”

  He shrugged, a movement she felt in the shift of muscles and joints. “I don’t know. It’s . . .”

  His voice trailed off. She resisted the urge to fill in his silence with her own words. It’s a park, and yet unlike any other park in the world, because it’s filled with native plants, steeped in New York’s history. Someone did this right, and slowly. They stopped ignoring something ugly and resisted the urge to tear down, pave over, or turn it into high-rises for billionaires. They put careful attention into every single detail, the tracks and the planks and the plants and the trees. They immersed in life, dragged function out of form, saw beauty and possibility where everyone else saw blight.

  “There’s something similar in Paris, called the Promenade Plantée,” she said.

  Air huffed from his lungs, disappearing into the steady rain. “I figured as much. There’s nothing new under the sun.”

  “That’s true,” she said. “We make it new.”

  He didn’t respond for a long moment, just watched the rain patter against the Hudson. “Did you know this is one of the city’s best hot spots for public sex?”

  “Says who?” she asked as she curled around to look up at him. Raindrops clung to the bristle of his beard, dotted his eyelashes. “Says you?”

  He grinned. “Actually, no. Want to be my first, darlin’?”

  She all but rolled her eyes. “I doubt very much I could be your first at anything,” she said, but she placed her hand on his abdomen, right above his belt buckle, as she spoke.

  They were alone on the promenade, but apartment buildings towered to their right and left. Not even the steadily increasing rain would hide the most discreet sex act, and six feet, five inches of man having sex was anything but discreet.

  “What do you suggest?”

  His gaze flicked over her, then he sat up, jackknifed upright, rock-hard abdominals flexing enviably under her hand. He shrugged out of his blue jacket, then lifted it. She ducked under to allow him to spread it over their upper bodies. She snuggled into the juncture of his shoulder and chest and smiled.

  “Sneaky,” she said. Like this, his jacket covered him to the tops of his thighs. To an outside observer he’d look like a real gentleman, making sure his girlfriend was better protected from the rain.

  “You know it,” he said.

  She squeezed his cock through his jeans, and he jumped. “Be nice,” she said sweetly.

  “Magnanimous,” he said. “I am the picture of magnanimity.”

  “Is that a word?”

  “Unzip me and I’ll show you.”

  He had both hands under the jacket, one wrapped around her waist, the other covering her hand as she unfastened his belt and zipper. “This is going to be less noticeable if you’ve got one hand outside your jacket.”

  “Now who’s sneaky?”

  “Not my first time at this rodeo,” she said.

  He huffed out a laugh, but withdrew his hand from under the lightweight jacket and rested it alongside his thigh.

  “Now,” she said, “if you’re really going for an Oscar, keep that hand relaxed. Lift a little.”

  He lifted his buttocks, she tugged his jeans just low enough to release his cock, and then he eased back onto the chaise. She curled around his
body and let her gaze go distant, staring into the rain. Close up she could see individual drops, then streaks, then over the Hudson the drops coalesced into flat sheets that speckled and lashed the Hudson.

  “We’re going to be soaked,” she said, and started to stroke him. She kept her touch gentle until she felt slick drops of precome ease her way.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Faster.”

  She shook her head. “My hands are pretty rough. I don’t want you to get raw.”

  At that he lifted his head and looked at her. “Are you kidding me?”

  She laughed. Soaked to her skin, curled up in the driving rain, jerking off a man in New York’s newest park, she laughed out loud from sheer delight. “A little, but not really. But it’s a shame to rush this.”

  “Most people, when having sex in public, want to get it over with as quickly as possible to avoid getting caught.”

  “News flash,” she said. “Cops don’t get out of their cars in the rain unless they have to. So unless you start to flail around in ecstasy and make a huge production out of this, and someone sees and calls 911, we’re pretty safe.” She looked from left to right. The promenade was totally empty. “And I’m not most people.”

  “I know,” he said. “Trust me, I know that.”

  He was holding his head up off the back of the chaise as he spoke. The hand on her waist flexed, and his blue eyes were surprisingly serious for Tim the jovial jokester. Keeping her gaze locked with his, she bent her head and kissed his pectoral through his T-shirt. “Lie back and think of the city,” she said.

  He did, stretching up until he was comfortable. The view was spectacular, his throat exposed to her, his lips and cheeks flushed despite the cooling temperature. Rain collected in his eyelashes and beard, trickled over his Adam’s apple to pool in the hollow of his throat. She stroked slowly up from the root, swirled her palm over the tip to spread the slick, then back down again. A muscle in his jaw jumped.

  She took her time, kept her grip loose, her stroke steady and slow, until his major muscle groups tensed and released. His hand tightened on her waist, that grabby impulse that changed the game in their first challenge allowed free rein. Her nipples peaked in sympathetic response to the flush moving down his throat, and the damp lace scraped over them.

  “Want you to ride me,” he growled.

  His shaft was iron in her palm. She tightened her grip and swirled her thumb over the head. “I want that, too,” she said.

  “Would you do it?”

  She risked a quick glance at the buildings to either side of them. No one in the windows, but there was a limit to the risks she’d take in pursuit of pleasure. “Not here,” she said. “Someone could be watching.”

  The thought didn’t seem to frighten him, but then again, not much did. It did, however, seem to turn him on. His cock pulsed in her hand. “I could be sleeping.”

  She looked at him again. Sex rose from his skin like steam, the tight jaw under flushed skin, the way his legs sprawled, his fingers fisted in his jacket, slowly pulling it from her shoulders. She wanted to straddle him, bite his lips, lick her way down his throat. Her nipples throbbed, and fresh heat spread between her legs. “There is no way someone watching us thinks you’re sleeping,” she said, and stroked him again, root to tip.

  Would he finish this here? If he were going for speed, for the flash in the pan of immediate gratification, he would. Or would the promise of them together, skin to skin, in the privacy of his apartment, sharing a rainy afternoon delight, tempt him to wait?

  He was close. His shaft swelled and throbbed in her encircling grip as he tipped his chin back. Aching and slick, she nipped at the transition from beard to vulnerable skin made visible by his exposed throat.

  “Fuck. Stop. Stop now.”

  He trembled in frustration as she stopped. A flush spread up his throat. The wind was picking up, sending the rain gusting and billowing over them. “We finish this at my place. Now.”

  She held the jacket away from his skin so he could button up. He tugged his shirt down to meet his belt buckle, then stood up and stretched both arms to the sky. His spine slotted back into alignment with a series of rapid pops. She counted one one thousand, two one thousand in her head. By the time she got to five, his T-shirt was as saturated with rainwater as if he’d dived into the Hudson. He turned to look at her. “I dragged you out in the rain for nothing. I did some research before I met you here. I knew about the place in Paris. I was out of ideas.”

  “So you knew I’d probably seen something similar in Paris before we even climbed the stairs.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why do it?”

  “Because I knew you’d like it anyway. And I like watching you see new things,” he said. “When you see something new, you’re . . . delighted. Hell, when you see something old and loved, you’re delighted. I like watching you be delighted. Even though you’d seen it before, I wanted . . . I wanted to delight you.”

  The rain pattered over his words, washing them into the slits between the planking along the deck. Sarah’s T-shirt and skirt clung to her hips and shoulders. She slicked rain back from her face, twisted her hair to wring it out. Heat thumped low in her abdomen. Cotton sagged when it got wet, but satin and lace clung, hitched into the crease of her thigh, into her sex, damp from more than the rain.

  “Do you need a challenge to do that?”

  The rain drowned out her words. They walked east for ten minutes before they found a cab depositing a woman in front of her gym. Tim held the door for her, then gave the driver his cross streets as he folded his long body into the back of the car and closed the door.

  “He’ll take you back to Brooklyn. If you want.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  He stared out the window. His clothes clung to him, outlining his knees, his ridged abdomen, and water droplets beaded in the fine hairs on the backs of his hands. Finally, he turned to look at her. “No.”

  Chapter Eight

  They passed the rest of the ride to his apartment in a silence broken only by the splash of tires through puddles and the slap-slap of the cab’s windshield wipers. Tim paid the driver, then followed Sarah into the pouring rain. Her hair, normally so wild, lay flat against her head and face. Without the distracting flyaway curls, her eyes were huge in her pale face. It was a vulnerability he’d never seen in her before, hidden as it was behind her zest for life, her delight in simply being alive.

  “The city sucks in the rain.”

  “It’s not so bad,” she said.

  “Can you find the silver lining in any cloud?”

  There was a long pause. “I guess I can. Ovarian cancer is one of the hardest cancers to diagnose. Aunt Joan was sick off and on for a couple of years before they caught it, but by then, it was really too late. We move so fast through our lives that it’s easy to think we’re in control, but it’s really an illusion. I try not to forget that now.”

  Something snicked into place in his head as he unlocked the building door. They left trails of droplets as they climbed the stairs. Tim shucked his jacket on his way up. Sarah followed suit and left her denim jacket on the hallway floor outside his door, then stepped out of her clogs.

  He paused and listened. No sound from upstairs or across the hall, so he unlocked the apartment door, then stripped his wet T-shirt over his head right in the hall. Sarah didn’t bat an eyelash, just pulled off her own T-shirt.

  Tim froze. Her breasts, her lush, gorgeous, heavy breasts, spilled over the top of black lace cups as she twisted to find the button on the side of her skirt.

  “What?” she asked as she unfastened the button.

  “Uh,” he said stupidly, and nodded at her breasts.

  “Oh, these?” She unzipped her skirt and let it fall. “I bought these for you.”

  Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all the saints in heaven. She was standing in his building’s hallway, dripping rainwater, skin glowing, wearing underwear straight out of his lingerie model dreams. H
er adorable little belly pooched over the top of the panties just a little, and it was so Sarah, so perfectly, rightly Sarah, life just spilling out every goddamn direction, that he nearly went to his knees to worship her. In that moment he understood the male instinct to worship the rounded, ripe female body. It was life, alive, so fucking alive.

  He went from half-hard to fully erect in a couple of racing heartbeats, like he was sixteen years old and invincible, not thirty-two, not tired and old and worn out from carrying a superhero’s armor.

  “When?” he managed.

  “Earlier today.” She gathered her hair and twisted it into a rope. Water coursed down her arms to stream from her elbows onto the floor.

  “You had . . . You wore that . . .” He reached out and trailed his finger from the hollow in her throat to her navel. “While we were on the High Line?”

  Goose bumps rippled up her arms, and she shivered as she nodded.

  He’d almost missed it. He’d almost sent her home and missed the way her pale skin glowed against the black lace and nude fabric. He gathered up her clothes and his, shoved open the door, and tossed the whole soaked mass into the kitchen sink. “Inside.”

  They left puddles on the way to the bathroom, where he turned on the shower. “Leave that on,” he said when she reached behind her to unfasten the bra.

  She cocked an eyebrow at him.

  “You can’t get any wetter,” he pointed out, testing the water temperature.

  He shucked his own soaked boxers and kicked them into the corner, then pulled back the shower curtain. She stepped past him into the narrow, tiled rectangle.

  “Oh,” she sighed. “That’s good. I didn’t realize how cold I was. That’s very, very good.”

  He crowded into her, backing her under the spray, using the water and his own body heat to warm her. Quickly her skin went from pale to pink, probably from the warm water beating on it, but possibly from the pressure of his thumb against her nipple. The lace provided an interesting, irresistible contrast in texture.