Perhaps my extra-curricular activities with casual contacts anticipated a more sustained illicit relationship – even made it more likely – since I had already crossed the Rubicon and found some answers to my needs on the other side. But nothing could have prepared me for the experience of falling head over heels for B……
It started with a kiss. Of course it did – I'll bet it often does. A kiss which started as that permissible peck on the cheek, a brush of the lips, an affectionate little hug between new-found friends; but instead became something more intense, something lingering and desiring…… We’d met at a restaurant – a meal with mutual friends – and perhaps it had started there, really, with some flirtatious exchange between us; with an accumulation, during the evening, of complicit looks and smiles. And it was always on the cards, once she’d accepted my impulsive invitation for another drink, on our own, before the walk home….. In any event, that kiss, when it came, had the inevitability of falling in a dream: we seemed to be leaning towards one another for ever; our lips tentative, then passionate; her quick, slick little tongue a surprise, its strangeness a delight.
There are times when you can get away with an illicit kiss – New Year, for example, the office Christmas do, weddings, boozy parties – and it may not mean too much. But this was on a quiet late-night street, when I’d nearly got her home. (Yes, we must both have known what was going to happen, or we’d have got closer before parting). It was an ordinary weekday evening: we didn’t have the excuse of any special celebration, neither of us was drunk, and we wouldn’t be able to shrug it off the next day. She must have been aware of her partner, blind to the betrayal which had begun just a hundred yards away, watching late night sport while he waited for her return. And I knew mine would be slumbering peacefully back at our place; even while my heart was thumping with excitement in the darkness, while I was snogging in the shadows like a teenager. And I suppose, if it was only going to be a kiss – just a hint of something that might have been, just another tempting path you’d never take - then she shouldn’t have pressed her hot, firm little body so tightly against mine, like a promise.
We did the decent thing - we ummed and ahhed for a few days afterwards, when we met to deliberate and explore the options – and then we did the indecent thing. Well, we were never going to leave it there, were we? - I was always going to fuck her. I was going to fuck her from the moment she slyly slipped her tongue into my mouth; from the moment those thin, shapely, girlish legs straddled mine, while I leant back against a wall and wrapped my hands around her cute little rear. Once you’ve had someone’s thigh between your legs, pressing against your crotch, it’s surely only a matter of time before the rest is going to follow…..
For weeks, I was walking on air, giddy with a kind of joy I don’t believe I’d never known, even when I was young. To be loved, to be wanted, again! Not loved in a tolerant, accepting, tender way – by someone who remembered you full of promise, when you’d first attracted them, twenty years’ before – but fiercely, eagerly, urgently; now, for the person you’d become, despite all the wounds time might have inflicted on you. It was intoxicating. Soon I was living for her calls, for the feel of her hot skin against mine, igniting every nerve. It was heaven to be alive once more; to have that sweet, half-forgotten hymn singing in your blood!
Parallel to this wildly seesawing euphoria, I suppose the over-riding feeling was fear. Not fear of discovery: because, astonishingly, it seemed worth the risk of jeopardising my marriage from the very start. No, I think it was the awareness that this wasn’t like contact sex, where you use and are used in turn; instead, profound feelings were involved: people could get hurt. I hadn’t feared for a man who’d wanted to watch me fuck his wife, but I did fear for B’s partner, who hadn’t elected to share her – and for her children, who might suffer from a break-up. And of course, she was one of those people who might get hurt, too. I was another. (In the event, our partners haven’t been hurt as yet; though sure enough, I think we’ve both put each other through terrible heartbreak on several occasions since those first heady days). This fear was prophetic. Why on earth should a brief, casual liaison, only days old, have caused such worries? People strayed, things sometimes went too far – but B’s partner and mine could get over a little lapse like that, surely - as we’d get over it in their case? (That is, in the very unlikely event it ever came out.) But then, I think I already understood that this wouldn’t be brief or casual. It began to feel as if that one tiny gesture, that single moment when our lips had met, had shifted everything in my life around – and nothing would be quite the same again….
The second overwhelming feeling was revelation. If the sex hadn’t really worked, I suppose it would have petered out and that would have been that, no harm done. But it did work: she could make me come with all my clothes still on and I found I could get her to the brink without touching her. I’d experienced other bodies, other women’s sexualities; but they couldn’t have prepared me for desiring, for being myself desired, so avidly.
My new lover was receptive, rather than resistant, confident instead of hesitant, playful where my spouse was doleful, active instead of passive. My partner, I came to understand, habitually waited for my desire. Whether from lack of confidence or ambivalence, she was unsure whether she wanted it, or what she wanted to do with it, until presented with my need. As a result, she took no steps to elicit or prompt it; even on a good day (and we hadn’t had many of those for a couple of years). B, on the other hand, sought it out. She coveted my desire for her; she wanted to earn it, she yearned for it, she worked for it, she had to have it – and she fondled and frolicked and fucked and fished to find it - gratified, triumphant, ecstatic, when she gained her objective and her mouth or hand or cunt filled with my spunk.
Her own yielding, limber body permitted – or rather, it seemed to crave – unfamiliar liberties. It sought out pain, for one thing – whether just hair-pulling and shoulder-biting at the height of passion, or something more deliberate, anticipatory and lingering - as if only the intensity of pain could match the depth of her wanting. For her, giving pleasure seemed to be as thrilling as receiving it, and being teased and denied could bring as much excitement as being touched. She wanted to be tried and tested, as well as indulged; to be used and abused, as well as adored. B needed to be possessed, utterly; to be marked as mine with teeth and hands and semen. If I hadn’t realised it already, I soon came to see that she was in every way a handful: the kind of demanding, desiring, in-your-face sort of woman I’d split up with when I was younger – and thus the subject of much regret and heartache. However badly we were behaving, I wasn’t going to give her up and make that same mistake again.
What did I get up to with B? What didn’t we do? – if it was wicked, dirty and hot, we did it. We had lingering sex in borrowed rooms, urgent sex in the woods in lunch hours and furtive sex in the car after work. I'd go home with her smell on my fingers, she'd go home with my semen on her thighs. We masturbated on the telephone. We even managed the occasional, wonderful weekend away. While my spouse was absent for the night and the children sleeping, I’d slip her into my study, lick her out and then fuck her in the big leather office chair I’m using now to type this post. And though it pains me to confess it, we were spies in the house of love: exchanging the intimate details of our partners’ predilections and shortcomings; conferring, contrasting, advising, supporting.
I’d like to say that we behaved decently, played (away) by some sort of rules: kept away from marital beds, for example; or made it a principle never to speak disparagingly about our respective spouses. Sadly, there are no rules when you’re already beyond the pale. And anyway, our offence was breach of trust, breach of confidence, loving someone else. In the light of this emotional betrayal, your actions don't seem terribly important. Nowadays, we mostly meet in hotel rooms, but I have to admit I’ve given her plenty of cock in their bedroom and occasionally had her on her hands and knees in their lounge; I’ve spunked down her throat on our sofas and bent her over our kitchen worktops. And all the while, all the times we’ve been apart, we've kept the faith, by phone and text and email. So there’s always been an exchange of illicit messages; chatty, intimate, loving, filthy. (They're the main reason for the infrequency of my posts). I suppose they must run to hundreds, perhaps thousands, by now; backwards and forwards between the two of us: mostly late at night, when there’s the chance to be alone. It's meant that every kiss, every touch, every climax, has been anticipated and informed and re-lived in a constant stream of information about our needs and longings, our feelings and fantasies and desires…..
Is there an element of revenge in the things married lovers get up to behind their spouses backs? No question, in my view: there’s always going to be a bit of “you didn’t love me enough, and now look what you’ve made me do!” going on. Silly as it may sound, we feel let down, betrayed, hard done by – and the agony which loving someone else can bring seems like a pain the marriage has imposed. It’s a long time since I’ve felt shame or guilt or fear about sex with other people. But just sometimes - times when I’ve been distraught, heartbroken, strung-out by the vicissitudes of my love for B - then I’ve seen myself for a moment as my partner might see me, and felt a hot flush of embarrassment. Then, and only then, have I felt something akin to shame – wondering what my lovely and long-suffering spouse might think of my abjection and enthralment – reduced so easily to tears of despair, and raised again so easily to happiness, by the whims and stratagems of another woman’s love……
