by Falls, K. C.
I didn't know what to do. I wanted to move against him, but I didn't want to hurt his face or worse, turn him off. I gave a couple of tentative pushes against his mouth and he growled encouragement into my groin. The vibrations of his sounds sent shock waves into my core. I began to move harder and faster on his face and every time I did he would murmur "uhm huh" to egg me on. His vocalizations were saying "Yes, yes, fuck my face. Come on me. I want you to."
I passed the point of caring. I just wanted to feel it so bad. I wanted to know what it was like to explode into a caring man's mouth. A man who wanted me there, wanted to feel my body yield to its desire, its passion, its every urge. When I climaxed it was unlike any orgasm I had had. It was as intense and acute as if I had brought myself off with a vibrator but because it was this man bringing me such pleasure so unselfishly it felt like so much more.
As the waves of rapture washed over me I felt tears at the corners of my eyes and some small cries caught in my throat. I pushed his face away from my now too sensitive clit and he noticed my chest racking with the snubbing of my little sobs.
"Did I hurt you?" he asked as he raised his body up level with mine. His face was dripping wet from…me.
"No, not at all. It's just so much emotion, it's more than I can hold. I guess it's spilling out of me in tears of…ecstasy?" I kissed his dear worried face and tasted my salt sea on his lips. "It's wonderful. Simply and perfectly wonderful."
Chapter Five
We were nearly inseparable in the months that followed. The more I got to know Reggie, the more certain I became that he was right for me in so many ways. Apart from the mind-blowing sex, we discovered that we shared a common vision for my business. Reggie and Acme could easily provide the investment I needed to expand my fleet and fine tune my marketing. After Reggie scoured my books with a well-trained eye, he agreed that the return on Acme's investment would be more than justified.
But I remembered another perfect match with a man I had so much in common with and I held part of myself back. It wasn’t conscious, really. It was self preservation. At times it felt as if the better we were together, the more fearful I became.
One night he confronted me about it.
"You know, it’s really not fair to me."
"What’s not fair to you?"
"I can feel you keep part of you all to yourself. We’ve known each other for months. We’re very close to becoming functional partners. Is that what the problem is? Are you afraid of working together and sleeping together?"
"No." It was the truth. The business part of it seemed easy compared to the emotional part.
"But you are afraid of something."
"Yes, I am."
"Okay, I’ll respect that. I trust that when you’re ready you’ll tell me."
I guess we'd been seeing each other, pretty much constantly, when I finally told him the whole story of Sal and my divorce. I told him about the humiliation and total piece- of-shit worthlessness it had made me feel as a woman. I told him how I felt I couldn’t trust my own judgment.
He was sweet and sympathetic but he just couldn't resist getting in a crack about the drag queen.
"After the sight of your Italian Stallion sucking off the soul pole of that tranny it's a wonder you ever let another guy near you." I didn’t know whether to slap him or hug him.
"Trust me," I teased back, "I had my thoughts about you. But then I considered the military background and your . . . finesse with the equipment—very fine equipment I might add—I figured the drag queens were safe with you." It felt good to be able to actually make light of something that was so painful at the time. I felt I was finally and truly healing just by getting it off my chest.
We talked a lot. I mean a lot. He told me all about his experiences in the military. He took great pride in serving his country and his comrades in arms were like brothers to him. But the horror of war was something that had scarred him not just physically, but emotionally as well. When I began spending nights at his apartment in Manhattan, I witnessed more than one nightmare. He confessed that it was the nightmares that made him avoid getting close to a woman.
"A man should be able to get over it, you know?
"You can’t mean that. Do you think a woman would think less of you for it?"
"Actually, yes."
"Then she wouldn’t really be a woman worth having, would she?" I asked.
Reggie hugged me close. "You’re absolutely right. Maybe I was just waiting for a woman worth having."
It made me feel useful, in a very human way, to be there for him when he woke up screaming in the night. I wanted to hold him when the demons chased him in the dark. I wanted to mop the cold sweat from his brow and hold him as the fear subsided. But at first he wouldn't let me. That took a little time.
When trust begins to build, a relationship evolves onto a whole different plane. It’s an exciting time for a couple. And we were definitely a couple. We might have had self-doubts but I have to say that for both of us, doubts about being right for each other were nowhere to be found.
We both had rejection devils we were grappling with. I guess everybody does. Somehow we indulge ourselves and believe that our situation is the first time anyone anywhere has ever felt this way. I’m sure other women have had husbands who betrayed them as thoroughly as Sal betrayed me. And, sadly, Reggie won’t be the last man to suffer after going to war. Nothing new under the sun. It just feels new when it’s you.
***
Reggie introduced me to his father, Raymond, shortly after we met. We were quickly ironing out the remainder of our deal to merge the two services—Acme and Ferreti—into a limited partnership. And he was anxious to get his father on board and move the deal forward. Although Raymond was semi-retired, he still took part in much of the decision-making in the role of elder statesman. Structuring this kind of merger was very much within Raymond’s skill set and, frankly, we needed the older man’s wisdom.
Raymond was as charming as his son and I couldn't help but be happy that Reggie would age well even if that was a bit premature on my part. The father was a very distinguished looking man who held himself ramrod straight and shared the same deep basso voice as his son.
It was his patience and almost unbelievable dedication to making sure Acme and Ferreti got a fair deal that endeared him to me the most. I could very well imagine coming to rely on Raymond Lewis in years to come. He made me miss my Dad. But in a good way.
Reggie told me after our first lunch with his father, Raymond's first question had been: "So, how long have you two been sleeping together?"
We had really tried to be professional and keep the personal away from his dad at the beginning. I was shocked. "We were that obvious? Reggie, how could he know?"
"Don't worry about it, Sugar. Dad just said he knew you were perfect for me and that if I wasn't sleeping with you, I should be."
I put off taking him home to my mother as long as I could. She knew something was up when I started calling her most nights to say I was staying with a 'friend'. She didn't question me. She knew better. She might have been living in kind of a fugue state since her husband’s passing, but my underneath, my mother was still there somewhere. She was both old-fashioned enough to disapprove of me having an affair and sophisticated enough to know there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it. An argument was pointless.
It wasn't that I was ashamed of either one of them and I knew Mom wouldn’t make a stink about the ancient ‘out of wedlock’ thing, but I was really tense about my mother's reaction to me dating a non-Italian, non-Catholic man. I thought she'd freak out. Mom had a very strong sense that a woman had a better chance of making it work if she 'stuck to her own kind'. Hell, I remember in high school when I went out with Jimmy Ponadopolous my parents had a fit. All he was was Greek.
Of course, Mom didn’t know the dirty details of how ‘my own kind’ had dealt with me. It’s fair to say that my experience with Sal taught me that was the kind of thinking that led to severe
rose-colored glasses. I could have seen all those red flags without the blindness induced by those glasses. My own kind indeed. That was not a mating strategy that had served me well.
Time and widowhood have a funny way of mellowing a person. My mother hardly raised an eyebrow when I told her about Reggie. She had seen the misery I went through with Sal. Even though I had been able to spare her the sordid details, she knew her only baby was suffering and it killed her. She told me that the world was a changing place. She still felt her way was the best way, but she admitted it wasn't the only way. Then she said what mother's should always say to their children, even if it isn't the whole truth: "I just want you to do what makes you happy."
I had warned Reggie about my traditional mother. He went out of his way to woo and charm her when he came to our house for the first time. He brought her a big bouquet and a huge box of Godiva chocolates. I'm not sure she got appreciated that it was a hundred dollar box of candy—she's more the Whitman Sampler type—but I could tell she liked the gesture. After she watched him consume her lasagna with the gusto of a hungry hound, she softened even more.
After dinner that night, we told Mama that we were going to check on things down at the office and maybe grab an espresso down the street. Mama waved us on and told us she wouldn't wait up.
It was a beautiful night for a walk. Crisp and cold. Most of the time when I walk the few blocks home at night, I'm careful to stay in the middle of the sidewalk and be on the alert. By big city standards, ours is a very safe neighborhood but it was still New York. A woman has to stay alert on the streets. With Reggie, I could relax. I hooked my arm through his elbow and we strolled slowly through my neighborhood.
He looked up at the sky. "Bad weather coming. I've always hated that kind of moon."
"Why? It's really full and bright."
"Too easy to see."
I was going to say "But I like being able to see!" until I heard—or maybe just felt—the reason he didn't want to be seen. He rarely ever talked about his time in the field when he was with the Black Stallions. He'd talk about his buddies or the weather or the food occasionally but not much else. His experiences in places I'd only read about fascinated me and what he would tell me utterly captivated me.
I had never been any further south than Washington D.C. or further west than Pennsylvania and the city was the only home I’d ever known. I wondered how experiences in faraway places like the Middle East changed a person’s outlook. I mean, apart from the war aspect of it. He'd been so many places, but the one that seemed the most foreign had to have been Saudi Arabia. I don't think he did any fighting there because he was willing to tell me more about his time in the desert kingdom than any other place.
"What was it like?" I asked Reggie. "What did the land look like and the cities?" We hadn't really moved past the ‘I don’t want to talk about it phase’. I still waited for some cue from him. Frankly, I was slightly afraid to ask him questions. It was the nightmares. Curious though I was, I didn't want to pull the kind of memories to the surface that could cause that kind of terror. I've never heard screams like his.
The first couple of times it scared me so badly that I cried. Fortunately, Reggie didn't know it. The intensity of his horror sort of took him out for a minute or two after he came out of it. Then, more often than not he'd get up and go read or watch TV. Several times I woke to find him asleep on the couch with the lights on.
But other times, and more frequently as we spent more nights together than apart, he little-spooned me close to him and just held on. He never spoke a word about it. Not when it happened and not the next day.
But there were a few 'safe areas' and I figured geography was one of them.
"The land looked like I imagine the surface of the moon. There’s probably a stark beauty there, but in my circumstances I sure couldn’t see it." He shook his head at the recollection. "And the cities? Beige. Beige with a chance of tan. The cities were just as colorless as the landscape."
"It doesn’t sound too pretty."
"You’ve seen pictures of tropical places where all the houses are painted bright colors?"
"You mean like the Caribbean?"
"Yeah. Well you’d think the natives would have wanted to bring some color to the dessert, but no. Just a monochromatic place of sand and more sand. And, to top it off, all the men are dressed in white and the women are in black."
"I think I'd get claustrophobic in it. Plus, it would bother my face to be covered up like that."
"The Saudi women don't all wear veils, you know. But the ones that do . . . Wow, it is one very weird society."
"Did you ever talk to any of the women? The ones in veils?"
"Hell no. From the back they look like a bunch of penguins. And it is one of the most hilarious sights I've ever seen to watch a woman eat and ice cream cone with a veil on. Lift, lick, lift, lick." He mimicked the motions in an exaggerated feminine fashion that made me laugh out loud.
"How about the ones not in veils? Did you ever have any conversations with them?"
"Very rarely. You see, the rule is that they aren't supposed to be fraternizing with men who aren't husbands, brothers or fathers. That's out on the street, of course. Like the non-royalty ordinary person."
"Royalty was a different story all together," Reggie went on. "I went to some wild-ass parties in the Magic Kingdom. Inside their palaces there are whole discos and full bars. The women still dress 'classy conservative' with rare exceptions but they bring in belly dancers for the parties and provide whores for after."
"Did you . . .?"
He cut me off. "I had one princess tell me that she went out all the time with the full penguin thing on. She said it was very liberating. No one could recognize her. She felt safe behind the veil."
Nice deflection. Not that it mattered what he'd done in the past but . . .well, who wouldn't want to know if your guy'd had a hooker? Okay, we'll let that one pass.
"I’m glad I don’t have to wear that get up." I looked down at my chic leather coat and my sexy boots and said a little prayer of thanks for being born where I had been.
"I’m glad, too. Plus, I look silly in a nightgown. It’s not that I’m such a clothes horse, but can you imagine wearing the same exact outfit every single day?"
Reggie spent the rest of the walk explaining how both men and women spent an extraordinary amount of time on their headdresses. He laughed when he said his buddies and he had called the constant tucking of scarves by the women and rearranging of red or black checked gutras by the men the national pastime. Then he reached up and ran his hand down the back of my head. "It would be a real sin to cover this head of hair."
The lights in the backroom of the office were on. I knew that Mario had a gig around ten. He was probably relaxing for a few minutes before he took off for it. There’d be no taking advantage of my cozy lounge and bunk with company around.
I gave a sly smile to Reggie. "How would you like to experience the luxury of the White Filly's interior?" I asked as I pointed to the newest shiny addition to our fleet.
Reggie just grinned at the double entendre and followed me to the limo.
It wasn't the first time we had taken advantage of the roomy, padded sanctuaries our limos provided. It wasn’t a hardship to have to use one of our vehicles to get it on. After all, both of us had shut the barrier between driver and passengers at a customer's request many times. We knew what went on in the backs of our limos! We had talked about how it felt to drive people around while they were having sex. And then we laughed about pretending not to know a thing when you reached their destination. Who, exactly did they think they were fooling?
There's plenty of room, even for a big man like Reggie, to get creative in the back of one of the large, ultra equipped models. Reggie's creativity and passion was all very new to me and it seemed there would never be enough of him for me. As the months went by, I appreciated him more and more as a lover. It was almost as if I had to learn about sex for the first time.
His approach to my body--to our bodies together--was such a celebration. Each touch was a gift to be appreciated and cherished.
I learned to crave his mouth against my pussy. My embarrassment faded real fast. It was hard to feel like he was doing me a favor when he so clearly enjoyed devouring my sex. His tongue learned exactly how to play on my needy clit and he began to bring me to a crashing orgasm quicker and quicker. This night was no different.
After our prelude, we lay back on the soft leather seats together and cuddled.
"Thank you for letting me meet your mother."
"I think she liked you. And she should. You were perfect tonight."
"You're perfect every night, Trina." He tilted my head toward his and kissed me. His warm lips never failed to make me gasp a little when they first meet mine. "I feel like we passed a milestone tonight," he said as he nuzzled my neck. "I know you were kind of freaking out about your mother."
"She couldn't have made any difference in the way I feel about you. I hope you know that."
He looked into my eyes and tugged down into the farthest reaches. "Nothing can make any difference in the way I feel about you. Before I met you, I believe I loved you. I had a vision of who would complete me, and now I've found her. I don't care if it sounds corny. If I didn't believe in destiny before, I do now."
Oh God. I wasn't ready to say it. He almost said it and I wanted to scream "No, it's too soon!" My heart was beating out of my chest and my hands got clammy. All I could do was look at him with an expression that was trying to tell him what words could not.
I took his face in my hands and kissed him, hoping that the emotion would be enough. That he could feel what I couldn't bring myself to say. 'I think I love you' only works in songs.