by Marco Vassi
“So you don't want to be friends,” he grinned.
“No,” I said, “I really don't.”
“Then why don't you come over here?” he urged. I kicked off my shoes and lay down beside him on the sofa. His hands remained clasped behind his head with that same detached attitude that had first excited me on the beach. I kissed him and he turned to me and with perfect control slowly explored my mouth with his tongue. He reached down and unbuckled his pants and opened the zipper. Then he stood up. “Show me what you can do,” he demanded.
I thought about all the times I had refused him, and I knew he was going to make me pay for those rejections. But I had learned a lot in Europe, and I was going to enjoy making good the debt.
Kneeling before him I took down his pants. I kissed the insides of his thighs and licked his balls. Then, after sucking gently on the tip of his cock, I took him deep into my throat. “That's a good girl,” he groaned, cupping my head in his hands and thrusting deeper and deeper. I ran my hands up and down his legs, moaning, twisting and whimpering with excitement. I was still dressed and I began to unbutton my blouse. “Wait,” he commanded. I writhed until he finished with my mouth and withdrew.
“All right,” he said. “Get up.”
In the bedroom, although I wanted to rip my clothes off, he forced me to undress slowly. When I was fully nude he ordered me to lie down and spread my legs. I did. “Wider,” he insisted. I did so and he sat down beside me and parted my lips with his fingers. He rubbed me deftly, stopping each time I was on the verge of orgasm.
“Oh please,” I moaned.
“Not yet,” he replied sternly.
He turned me over, positioned me on a pillow and came into me from behind, manipulating my clitoris with his hand and stopping each time just as I was about to come. Finally I screamed, thrashed onto my back and guided his hips into mine. He laughed and began to move rhythmically in tandem with me. His control was perfect. When I came, he began to groan and pound at me until he too came with a violent shudder. We lay drenched together and then fell asleep.
Max Perry and I began seeing each other several times a week. All of my sexual experimentation in Europe culminated in our affair. The depersonalized attitude he brought to our lovemaking turned me on in ways I never would have believed possible before my European trip.
When summer came we went to Fire Island, where we had first met. With my son in camp we spent long weeks at the beach. It was there that our most powerful and erotic sex took place. I wore few clothes (never more than a bikini bottom in the house) which Max felt free to pull off whenever he pleased—sometimes when I was cooking or doing the laundry.
Once he bent me over a corner of the dining room table and entered me from the rear and then, just as I found the pressure unbearable, he pulled out, sat up on the table, pushed me to my knees and, holding my face in his hands, guided his cock into my mouth, where he came. Seeing my dismayed expression he ordered me to stand up and play with myself in front of him. I did so, my head bent with shame at my excitement. Just as I was about to come he removed my fingers, pulled me up on the table and gently licked me to orgasm with his tongue.
In the mornings we rose before dawn and went out to the beach. In a depression surrounded by dunes Max would take off his bathing trunks, sit down on a blanket and lean back. I would lie on my stomach, my head between his legs, my tongue busy.
Occasionally he would guide my head with his hands, pulling at my ears to direct his motions. I found this way of directing me unbearably exciting, and before we even began I was usually moist and groaning with anticipation. Although I was primed to come at a touch, Max never let me. When he was ready he would turn me toward him and tease me, sometimes with his fingers, more usually with his tongue or his cock. When he finally allowed me to come it was always explosive. One of my most vivid memories is of watching the sun rise out of the ocean with Max's body pounding on top of me.
That winter, with no local beaches available, Max and I went to Grenada, a Caribbean paradise with a number of deserted beaches, where we made love for hours. One night, in the bar of our hotel, Max met a beautiful, dusky-skinned local woman named Elita and invited her to join us at the beach the following day.
“I want you to see me with another woman,” he explained. Just the tone of his voice excited me. Elita sat between us in the car the next day as we drove to the beach. While driving, Max parted her legs and ran his hand along the inside of her thighs. I grew wet watching him, half mad with jealousy.
At the beach Max spread a blanket and lay Elita down on it. She pulled off her skirt and wriggled out of her bikini. Max motioned that I was to take my clothes off as well while I watched them. “Sit there,” he ordered, settling me alongside them. Then, after fondling Elita's firm breasts and spreading her legs with the same efficient and impersonal attitude he used with me, he played with her clitoris until she began to squirm with desire. “Isn't she pretty?” he asked me. I nodded dumbly, my body burning with excitement.
“Keep watching,” Max commanded as he thrust into her over and over again in the hot sun. Finally, when I thought I could bear it no longer, he gestured for me to lie down alongside Elita, dismounted and shoved her toward me. We embraced, pressing our bodies together. Then she hovered over me, her clitoris pressed to my mouth, her tongue between my legs.
‘’That's nice! Good girls!” Max cooed. After a while he separated us, penetrated me and, with his thumb and forefinger caressing Elita's nipple, rode me until I came. Climbing on top of her he soon reached orgasm with a groan.
We took Elita to the beach every day for the rest of our stay in Grenada. I had a wonderful time and never saw Max happier. Even our sex together improved. It was as though the presence of a third person had brought us even closer.
Max and I continued seeing each other through the following summer and into the next fall. There seemed to be no end to the desire we felt for each other, but I knew our affair couldn't last. We stayed together for two years—longer, Max said, than he had ever been with anyone.
Oddly enough, the end came not after a quarrel or because of another woman. One typical night, after I had sucked his cock and licked his balls for a long time while a jazz recording played softly on the stereo, Max lifted my face to his and said, “I love you.” He had never uttered those words before. I told him that I loved him, too. But I understood that love was not something Max could live with for very long.
Several months later he began seeing other women. Although he told me they meant nothing to him, I knew it was time for our friendship to end. I stopped answering his calls, walked around in a daze and didn't feel normal again for over a year.
I have remarried and gone on to live a happy life. I love my husband. We are close in ways I never could have been with Max, and the sex we have is fine, varied and often thrilling. I try not to think about Max. Sometimes I succeed.
SWAN SONG SEX
By Sandy Broca
It was early on a Sunday morning. More asleep than awake, I instinctively reached for Alan beside me. My hand grazed the hairs on his chest, then traveled down, lingering over his flat stomach and coming to rest on his penis. Soft, fat, shrivelled, vulnerable, it elicited the tenderest of feelings—and a challenge to make it harden.
With my fingertips, I began to perform a familiar erotic dance— teasing, gentle pulling, a squeeze, the rhythmic knead. The expected reaction occurred. With pride and pleasure, I twisted in bed so that I could take his erection in my mouth.
He groaned, cleared his throat. And then, in a voice still clotted with sleep, asked, “Should we be doing this?”
Stunned, suddenly made ashamed of my own innocent and natural sexual impulses, I stopped and let his shrinking cock tumble from my mouth. In the four years Alan and I lived together, we had made love more than a thousand times. Never before had he questioned the propriety of priapic pleasure. Then again, never before had we decided to break up—as we had yesterday—with only the logistic
s of who got to keep what and when to schedule the moving men's arrival to be worked out.
I touched his shoulder to answer him, then withdrew my hand. Overnight, the rules had changed—but we hadn't clarified just what the new rules were. He had told me it would be a month before friends moving to Denver would vacate their apartment so Alan could move in. It made no financial sense for him to leave my apartment to stay at a hotel or with other friends in the interim. Besides, I didn't want him to go, and he was still my best friend.
Last night we had cried together, mourning our relationship that lacked the mutual mandate to continue. In four years there had been countless good times, some admittedly terrible times, much laughter and the kind of warm feelings that couldn't dissipate overnight.
The problems that caused us to break up were not sexual in nature. In fact, we had been compatible and easy-going lovers. Until this morning, sex had been an unquestioned source of pleasure, somewhat routine, but always satisfying. Our forays into erotic variations had delivered less satisfaction. What can you say about a man you seduce in the bath and who, upon leaving the tub, steps on and breaks his glasses? Only that he's sweet and clumsy and your heart goes out to him in a sentimental way that he doesn't always appreciate.
And that, I suppose, was the crux of our problem. After years of bending over thick textbooks, stifled by the poverty of graduate student life, Alan now held a well-paying job where people looked up to him. He wore expensive suits. He didn't want to be a sweet and clumsy puppy anymore. Lean and mean, the Lothario of the Eastern seaboard was more the fantasy image he gravitated toward. No more Mr. Monogamy (yet the ethos was there to the end—an open relationship would not suffice, a break-up was the license required for philandering to ensue). Suddenly Alan had become a freedom fighter in his private war against commitment, hurling his first Molotov cocktail last night. And the smoke had not yet cleared.
Looking at him in the early morning light, I felt a reprise of last evening's tears coming on, but I fought the impulse. My woman's tears had nearly drowned him, he'd shouted at me yesterday. So be it—no tears. Compassion and understanding weren't welcome guests at this moment, either. Toughness, decisiveness—those were the operative emotions in this new lexicon of leaving.
I sneaked a glance at his penis. It was semi-erect, making me think that even though he had one foot out the door emotionally, desire still lived at this address. Action was called for.
With a courage that was enacted rather than genuinely felt, I assumed a familiar position, my head resting on Alan's shoulder, a thigh sidled between his legs, my hand cupping that twin-sacced, hormone-pumping station that was the probable cause of our problems. I gave his cock an affectionate squeeze. It hardened perceptibly; he shot me an uncertain look.
“Yes, we should be doing this,” I informed him.
He wavered. In his mind, I imagined, were all the logical reasons why we should institute a hands-off policy for the coming month. As of last night, we'd “officially” broken up; we needed this time to get accustomed to the idea of no longer being a couple; after making love for more than four years, there was something seedy about simply fucking for physical release; he wanted out—and the biological imperative of the act would send him off in the opposite direction.
A moment's more indecision, and I would be ready to hurl my belongings out into the street. “Aw, c'mon,” I coaxed, my thigh hugging his, “I won't tell, if you won't.” A smile curled his lips and his arms moved and encircled me. “All right. You talked me into it. Just make sure you don't get me pregnant,” he warned, imitating the uncertain tone of a teenage girl in the back seat of a car.
The love we made that morning started out tender and familiar. Always the gentleman, Alan made sure I had an orgasm first by placing his hand between my legs and assigning each finger a specific task. His thick thumb located my clitoris and began pressing and circling it. His next three fingers made their way inside my vagina, and his pinky grazed my anus. It was a pleasant routine with no surprises, yet it always yielded the most delicious erotic sensations I had ever experienced.
After I climaxed, I started to reciprocate by giving Alan an all-over massage, starting at his chest and working my way down. When he was good and hard, I straddled his hips and lowered myself onto his waiting cock.
He captured a breast in each hand and began squeezing and plucking at my nipples. However, they were oversensitive from my recent orgasm and I wanted him to stop. Flattening my body over his, I then got him to roll over so that we were in ye olde missionary position. It felt good and right and comfortable and sane; and the thought passed that if one had to be frozen in time, this wouldn't be a bad everlasting position to be in.
I cupped Alan's buttocks in my hands as he thrust and strained. Although I rarely climaxed when he was atop me, I still adored the special contact it afforded. I reveled in the firmness of his thrusts, the sounds and feel and smell of his warm skin on mine.
Suddenly his movements changed from rhythmic to more frenzied and intense. Thinking he was about to come, I insinuated a finger between his cheeks to stimulate him anally. It was the cherry atop the sundae, the action that invariably took him over the edge.
“No!” he practically barked. “Don't do that.”
I retracted my finger and tried to concentrate on moving with him. But he was fucking at a pace I couldn't follow. Frantic, erratic, so deep it hurt. Pounding away at my body I could feel my insides becoming sore, and my enjoyment dissipated.
“Will you come soon?” I asked politely.
If he heard me, he didn't show it. Rather, his thrusts got deeper, harder. I felt like screaming. I wondered if this was what it felt like to be raped. “Alan, please.”
The hell with you, I thought. I brought my finger back to his anal opening and practically stabbed him with it. He moaned, pushed into me cruelly a few more times, shuddered and came to a halt.
When he opened his eyes, he found me glaring at him angrily, “What was that all about?” I demanded.
He seemed not to understand. Then, abashedly, “I guess I just really got into it. Why do we have to do it the same way every single time, anyway?”
Hurt, I looked away from him. I'd never insisted we had to make love the same way every time, but I didn't relish being bruised either. He hadn't just made love to me; he'd acted out some sort of revenge fantasy. “Fuck you,” I said and turned over. It seemed redundant.
As a freelance writer, one of the few professional perks I have is collecting free advice under the guise of doing research. So I phoned Dr. C. A. Tripp after Alan left for work on Monday. Dr. Tripp is the author of The Homosexual Matrix, which presents a theory of sexual “resistance” based on the idea that the obstacles to intimacy (such as anger or fear of losing one's partner) heighten our excitement in bed and make sex so piquant.
“Sex has an awful lot of stuff close to fighting in it, naturally,” Dr. Tripp said. “Sex also carries a charge of affection.” And it's the combination, the volatility that makes sex at the end of a relationship so different from all that went before.
“When you're together, you struggle for closeness,” Dr. Tripp went on. “Succeeding violates all kinds of desires. So a couple back off, and the more they do that, the more they're attracted again. What very often happens is that once a couple agree to separate, they keep up sex.”
The good doctor had something there. On Monday night, when I was deliberately cool to Alan during dinner and TV, he couldn't keep his hands away from me. While I was washing the dishes he came from behind, gently taking my breasts in his hands and hugging me until I felt his hardness against my back.
When we got to bed we made the sweetest love ever. Soft, tender, patient, and so filled with emotion that I thought my heart would break because he'd soon be gone.
In two days' time I'd had it rough and I'd had it tender. In the month that followed I came to realize there was no one definition of how a couple make their final sexual peace together, but s
ome patterns did emerge before Alan shook my hand (yes, shook my hand!) and left with his suitcase.
As commitment lessens, so do efforts to please. In retrospect, I can now honestly admit that Alan was not the best lover I'd ever had. Before the break-up, we'd had numerous middle-of-the-night heart-to-hearts when I tried to explain my quite normal sexual desires to him. Cunnilingus, for example. I craved it; he avoided it. So I'd try to talk to him about why he didn't enjoy performing the act. He would deny disliking it, and for about a week we'd have oral sex every time we made love. And then he'd stop, seemingly having forgotten the discussion.
After we broke up, but were still living together, we didn't have cunnilingus again. I can't be sure whether it was spite, aversion or plain denseness that prevented it, but it became apparent that he wasn't terribly interested in pleasing me that way.
Good sex won't keep a partner from leaving. I'll admit it, I tried playing Scheherezade. We were more sexually active in our last month together than previously. Usually, it was at my instigation. I wanted Alan to know he was foregoing a good thing, and I wanted to leave him with plenty of memories. And, even more foolishly, I wanted to “store up” sex for the drought I anticipated.
So instead of doing my work when Alan left in the morning, I busied myself writing involved sexual adventures with a hero and heroine who carried our names. At night we'd hurry to bed and take turns reading the tales aloud and enacting the fantasies that appealed to us most, whenever possible.
It was fun and diverting. Yet, ultimately, it made life sadder. When I asked him after one multi-orgasmic, exhausting session, “Are you sure you really want to move out?” he said yes, and went to sleep on the couch. I spent the rest of the night feeling humiliated and impotent. Moral: If there is an optimal time to enjoy sex for sex's sake, it is at the end. Second moral: If someone is going to change his mind about breaking up, he will doubtless let you know, so don't ask.
Bittersweet sex is better than no sex at all. It's painful and difficult to end an intimate relationship, and sex can ease the transition. At least it did in my case. Granted, Alan and I would soon no longer be a couple, but it was reassuring to know I was still desirable to him on a sexual level. And when someone's leaving you, you question your desirability on every level. By remaining sexually active with your partner-not-to-be, you think: He wants me—but he doesn't want me. Confusion and ambivalence are fine buffers against flat-out rejection.