A Letter to Richard

She showed up at my door on Thursday with a bottle of wine and a look on her face that I can only describe as determined. Not nervous, like last time. Not tentative. She had the expression of a woman who'd spent the last seven days thinking about one thing and had finally arrived at the place where that thing was going to happen again.

"I brought wine," she said.

"I can see that."

"I also brought a change of clothes. I'm not leaving here in a taxi with my underwear in my purse again. That was humiliating."

"You seemed fine with it at the time."

"I was high on endorphins. The walk of shame hit me around 72nd Street."

She came inside and set the wine on the kitchen counter. She was wearing a dress — not the same one from last time, a different one, navy blue, with buttons down the front. I noticed the buttons. I noticed them because they were the kind of buttons that unbuttoned, and I was already thinking about them, and she caught me looking.

"My eyes are up here, Lawrence."

"I know where your eyes are. I'm looking at your buttons."

"Subtle."

"I'm seventy. I've earned the right to be unsubtle."

She smiled, and the smile had edges — sharp, knowing, the smile of a woman who had been thoroughly fucked six days ago and was back for more. She poured two glasses of wine without asking if I wanted one and handed me a glass. We stood in my kitchen, drinking, the city doing its usual thing outside the window. I watched her throat move when she swallowed. She caught me watching that too.

"You're staring," she said.

"I'm admiring."

"You're staring at my neck."

"Your neck is part of the admiring."

She set her glass down and unbuttoned the top button of her dress. Just one. Then she looked at me, one eyebrow raised, and I understood that this was a negotiation. She unbuttoned the second. I set my glass down. She unbuttoned the third, and the fabric parted enough to show the upper curve of her breasts — no bra, I realized, which meant she'd planned this, which meant the buttons were not an accident.

"Should we move this somewhere more comfortable?" I asked.

"I was thinking the kitchen counter."

I stared at her.

"I'm joking," she said. "Kind of. I've never had sex on a kitchen counter. Richard thought sex was something that happened in bed, in the dark, on Tuesdays and Saturdays."

"Tuesdays and Saturdays?"

"He had a schedule. I'm not making that up. It was on the fridge."

"Richard was a lunatic."

"Richard was an accountant. Same thing."

She unbuttoned the rest of the dress — slowly, one button at a time, her eyes on me the whole time — and let it fall open. Her body was exactly as I remembered it, which is to say it was the body of a seventy-year-old woman who had spent forty-one years being inadequately touched and was now standing in my kitchen with her dress hanging open and nothing underneath it. Her breasts were full, heavy, the nipples already tight. Her stomach was soft. There was a faint tremor in her hands that she was trying to hide by keeping them at her sides.

"Come here," I said.

She came to me. I took her face in my hands and kissed her — properly this time, not the tentative, exploratory kisses from last week. I kissed her with intent, my mouth open, my tongue finding hers, and she made a sound into the kiss that vibrated through both of us. Her hands came up and gripped my shirt. I walked her backward toward the bedroom, our mouths still together, her dress still open and flapping against my body like a sail with no wind.

The back of her knees hit the bed and she sat down. I pulled back and looked at her — sitting on the edge of my bed, the dress pooled around her, her body bare from the waist up, her eyes slightly glazed.

"I want to come down on you again," I said.

"I was hoping you'd say that."

"Last time I went fast. This time I want to go slow."

"How slow?"

"Slow enough that you think I'm doing it wrong."

She laughed, and the laugh was nervous, and the nervousness was genuine, and it was the most attractive thing about her — this woman who had discovered something new about her own body at seventy and was still slightly terrified by it.

"Lie back," I said.

She did. I took the dress off completely, and her underwear — small, black, practical — and she was naked. I didn't undress. Not yet. I wanted her to feel exposed while I was clothed, wanted the asymmetry of it, the way it would make her aware of every part of her body that I could see.

I started at her ankles.

I kissed her left ankle, the bone that jutted out on the side, the thin skin over it. She twitched. I kissed her right ankle. Then I worked up — slow, deliberate, kissing her calves, the curve of muscle that still had tone from what I suspected was a lifetime of walking, the soft backs of her knees where the skin was impossibly smooth. I kissed the inside of her left knee, and her legs shifted apart, just slightly, an involuntary opening that she probably wasn't aware of.

I moved higher. Her thighs. The skin here was different — softer, warmer, the kind of skin that had been hidden from the sun for decades and had kept a youthfulness that the rest of her body had surrendered to time. I kissed the inside of her left thigh, then her right, working in alternating patterns that moved upward with each kiss but never reached the place she was already tensing for.

"You're teasing me," she said.

"I'm savoring you."

"You're teasing me. Same thing."

I blew on her. Not on her pussy — not yet — but on the crease where her thigh met her body, that sensitive junction of skin that I'd discovered last week was a secondary trigger point for her. She inhaled sharply, her stomach tightening, her legs falling open wider. I blew again, closer this time, and I could see the effect — the lips of her pussy were already swollen, already parted, the wetness visible in the light from the bedside lamp.

I kissed around her. The crease on the left, the crease on the right, the soft patch of hair above — trimmed, I noticed, neater than last week, which meant she'd prepared, which meant she'd thought about this. I kissed the place where her hip bone pressed against the skin, and she groaned, and the groan was frustration.

"Lawrence."

"Mm."

"More."

I let my lips touch the outer lips of her pussy. Just touch — no pressure, no parting, just the contact of my mouth against the surface. She gasped, and her hips lifted, trying to push herself into my face, but I pulled back. I kissed the outer lip again, on the left side, a closed-mouth kiss that was barely more than a breath. Then the right side. Then the left again, slightly harder, my lips parting just enough to create a gentle suction on the skin.

"Oh god," she said. "Oh god, please don't stop."

She thought this was it. She thought this was what coming down on her meant — these soft, external kisses, this gentle attention to the surface. And it was good, I could tell it was good, her breathing was ragged and her hands were gripping the sheets, but she hadn't felt anything yet.

I parted her with my tongue. Just slightly — just enough to find the inner lips, the wet, swollen tissue that was nothing like the outer surface. I licked upward, a single, slow stroke that started at the opening and traveled the full length of her, and her whole body seized.

"Fuck," she said.

I did it again. Slower. My tongue flat, broad, pressing against her with a firm, wet heat that made her hips buck. Then I pulled back and kissed the outer lips again — the contrast was the point, the shift between the deep, wet contact and the soft, dry kiss, and she was writhing, her head turning side to side on the pillow.

"Please," she said. "Please, more, please don't stop."

I entered her with my tongue. Not deeply — just the tip, just enough to feel the muscles inside her clench around me. I fucked her with my tongue, shallow strokes that were more tease than penetration, and she was so wet that my chin was slick, that the sounds were obscene, wet and sloppy and loud.

Then I found her clit.

It was engorged — there was no other word for it. The bony mass of tissue that surrounded it was swollen and firm, and when I pressed my tongue against it, she screamed. Not the sustained scream from last time — this was a sharp, bitten-off sound, almost a yelp, and her hand came down on the back of my head and pushed me into her.

I worked her clit with my tongue. Circles first, slow and steady, feeling the shape of it, the way it hardened under the attention. Then I switched to direct pressure, my tongue flat against it, and I felt the surrounding tissue respond — the engorgement increasing, the whole area becoming a rigid, pulsing mass that I could feel against my mouth like a second heartbeat.

My right hand found her breast — the right one — and I shaped my palm to its weight, then caught the nipple between my fingers. I pinched it in rhythm with my mouth: tongue pressing, nipple twisting, the two sensations locked together so that every pulse on her clit sent a matching jolt through her chest. She arched hard, spine bowing off the mattress.

"Yes," she said. "Yes, like that, don't stop, don't —"

I didn't stop. My mouth worked her clit in a rhythm that matched the pinching — tongue pressing, nipple twisting, tongue pressing, nipple twisting — and she was making sounds that had stopped being words. Her hips were grinding against my face, her pussy sliding over my mouth, her wetness covering me from chin to nose.

She was close. I could feel it — the tension in her thighs, the way her breathing had become shallow and rapid, the way her nipple had somehow gotten harder under my fingers. Her hand was on the back of my head, pushing me into her with a pressure that was becoming painful, and her body was rigid, every muscle locked, the orgasm building like water behind a dam.

"Pinch them," she said. "Both. Please, both, I need —"

This was the moment. The moment from the instructions I'd given myself before she arrived. Instead of reaching for her left nipple, I slid my hand down from her right breast, down her ribs, down her stomach, and between her legs. My mouth never left her clit — I kept the rhythm, the pressure, the steady, relentless attention — but my fingers found the entrance to her pussy, and I slid two inside.

She made a sound of confusion. Her hips stuttered, the rhythm breaking, and I could feel her thinking — what is he doing, he was supposed to pinch, why is his hand —

I curled my fingers. Upward, toward the front wall of her vagina, and I found it. The patch of tissue that felt different from everything around it — rougher, slightly swollen, distinct in the same way her clit was distinct. I pressed against it. Gently at first, then with more pressure, a slow, deliberate massage that was completely different from the rhythm of my tongue.

The sound she made was not a moan or a scream. It was something else — a sound of pure, unprocessed surprise, as if someone had touched a part of her body she didn't know existed. Her hips jerked, and for a moment I thought she was going to pull away, but then she did the opposite — she jammed herself against my hand, driving my fingers deeper, pressing that swollen patch harder against my fingertips.

"What —" she started, and then stopped, because I pressed again, and the word dissolved into something that wasn't language.

I worked her from both sides now. My tongue on her clit, my fingers inside her, and the dual sensation was doing something to her that I could feel in real time — her body was shaking, not the trembling from last week but a deeper vibration, something that came from her core, and the sounds she was making had gone from words to syllables to raw, open-mouthed noises that filled the room.

"Oh fuck," she said, and it was the first time I'd heard her swear, really swear, with the kind of emphasis that meant the word was the only adequate response. "Oh fuck, what is — what are you — oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck —"

I reached up with my free hand and took her left nipple between my thumb and forefinger, pinching it with the same brutal precision I’d used on the right moments before, twisting it in a slow, grinding torque that made her gasp and then hold the breath like a scream caught in her throat. My tongue stayed locked on her clit, a relentless, circling pressure, and my fingers stayed buried inside her, hooked against that swollen ridge and rocking in a steady rhythm that matched the pulse in my own ears. The three points of contact formed a circuit — mouth, hand, cunt — and I could feel the current complete itself the instant I tightened my grip, a live wire of pleasure and pain that made her whole body seize, her back bowing off the mattress as if she’d been struck by lightning.

She came. The scream this time was something I'd never heard from her — a low, guttural sound that came from her belly, and her pussy contracted around my fingers in waves that I counted without meaning to. Four, five, six, seven, each one weaker than the last but still strong enough to feel, still strong enough to grip. Her whole body was arched, her feet planted on the bed, her hips lifted entirely off the mattress, and she held that position for what must have been ten seconds before she collapsed.

"Don't move," she said. "Don't move your hand."

I didn't. I kept my fingers inside her, kept the pressure on that spot, gentle now, barely moving. Her pussy was still contracting, little aftershocks that squeezed my fingers in irregular pulses. She was breathing like she'd sprinted. Her eyes were closed. Her hands were still gripping my wrist.

"What did you do to me," she said. It wasn't a question. It was a statement of bewilderment.

"Something Richard didn't know about."

"Richard didn't know about anything. I didn't know about anything. What was that? That was — I felt that in my — it was everywhere. It was in my stomach. My teeth."

"The G-spot."

"That's real? I thought that was a myth. I literally thought that was something Cosmo invented to sell magazines."

"It's real."

"It's very real. It's extremely, aggressively real. I can still feel it. Your fingers are still on it and I can still feel it and if you move them I will —"

She didn't finish the sentence. I moved my fingers. Just slightly — a small, slow stroke across the spot — and her body convulsed, a full-body shudder that made the bed frame rattle.

"Don't," she said. "I mean do. I mean — I don't know what I mean. I need you inside me."

"Now?"

"Right now. I need to come again and I need it to be your cock this time. I need — last time, when you were inside me and I came, that was — I need that again. But different. I need everything at once."

I pulled my fingers out, and the sound they made was obscene — wet, slick, the sound of a woman who was more aroused than she'd been in her entire life. I stood up and took off my clothes while she watched, her eyes half-focused, her body still trembling with residual contractions.

I was hard. I'd been hard since I started kissing her ankles, and the last twenty minutes had not improved the situation. My cock was aching, the skin stretched tight, the head flushed dark. She looked at it with the expression of someone who had learned, very recently, that this particular object could do things to her that she'd previously considered impossible.

"Come here," she said.

I moved over her, letting her guide me down until I felt her fingers wrap around me, positioning the head right where she was slick and open. I pressed forward, sinking into her heat in one slow, deliberate motion.

The feeling was unreal. She was so slick that I slid in with almost no resistance, but the heat, the way her body gripped me, the way her inner walls rippled and squeezed—I had to freeze after the first inch, not for her but for me, because I was about to lose it. Then she arched up, caught my nipple in her mouth, and sucked hard, her tongue flicking, and the shock of it shot straight to my groin. I was right on the edge, trembling, certain I was going to break.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"Give me a second."

"You're close?"

"I've been going down on you for twenty minutes. I've been hard since your ankles. Give me a second or this is going to be very brief."

She laughed, and the sound rolled through her, a deep, throaty pulse that traveled down her belly and tightened around my cock in a sudden, milking clench. I choked out a groan, my hips bucking against my will, and her laughter fractured into a low, knowing hum—each breath she took seemed to pull me deeper, her inner muscles fluttering and gripping in a rhythm that had my vision blurring at the edges.

"You're doing this on purpose," I said.

"I'm not doing a thing," she whispered, and the purr of it traveled straight through me, a low, resonant hum that seemed to coil around my cock and squeeze. "Just lying here, feeling you tremble, every pulse of you telegraphing how close you are. It's heady—knowing I could tip you over with a single laugh, a single clench, and you'd come undone before you even began. Go on. Let go. I want to feel you break."

I pushed in the rest of the way. She gasped, and I groaned, and we stayed there for a moment, fully joined, both of us adjusting. I could feel her G-spot against the head of my cock — that swollen patch of tissue pressing against me, and I shifted my angle to make sure I was hitting it with each stroke.

I began to move—slow, deep strokes that pulled nearly all the way out before sinking home again, and she hooked her legs around me, dragging me deeper with every thrust. Her nails bit into my back, sharp little crescents of pain that tangled with the overwhelming pleasure of being inside her, and she arched up, pressing her chest toward my mouth in a silent, urgent offering. I ducked my head and took her breast between my lips, drawing it in with a hungry pull, and she cried out, her body clenching around me in a sudden, shuddering grip.

"Faster," she said.

Her mouth closed over my nipple, and the wet heat of it was a shock that lanced through me, a bright thread of sensation woven into the heavy drive of my hips. Her tongue flicked against the hardened point, and her teeth grazed me—just enough pressure to blur the line between pleasure and pain, sending a raw jolt straight to my cock. She sucked with a fierce, pulling rhythm, dragging a broken groan from my chest, and I slammed deeper, faster, the slick grip of her cunt clenching around me in wild, fluttering pulses. The room was a chaos of noise—the wet slap of our bodies, the groan of the mattress, her muffled, keening cries against my skin—and I felt the heat coiling low in my balls, that unbearable tightness winding tighter, ready to snap.

"I'm going to come," she said, and her voice was awed, like she couldn't believe it was happening again. "I'm going to come from this. From your cock. I'm — oh god, it's the same, it's the same as the fingers, it's —"

I felt it start. The contractions hit in waves, each one squeezing my cock, and I stopped thrusting and just held myself deep inside her while her orgasm rolled through her. The pulsing was too much — the rhythmic pressure, the heat, the sound she was making — and I came with a groan that I buried in her neck, my hips jerking, my cock pulsing inside her in time with her own contractions.

We lay tangled in the aftermath, my softening cock still sheathed inside her, every shallow breath we took pulling us deeper into a stunned, floating silence. The room was steeped in the raw perfume of our bodies—sweat and sex and something wilder, a primal scent that clung to the back of my throat—and when her fingers traced the wet hair at my temple, the gentleness of it cracked me open in a way the desperate, shattering pleasure never could: a silent, ruinous tenderness that leveled everything I thought I knew.

"Three times," she said.

"Three?"

"Three orgasms. Two from your mouth and fingers, one from your cock. In one evening. That's more than I had in the last decade of my marriage. Combined."

"Richard really was an idiot."

"Richard was an accountant who had sex on a schedule. I'm going to write him a letter."

"What?"

"I'm going to write him a letter and tell him what he missed. 'Dear Richard, I have recently discovered that my body contains a G-spot, a clitoris, and the capacity for multiple orgasms. I am writing to inform you that you could have accessed all of these features at any point during our forty-one years of marriage, but you were too busy with the Tuesday-Saturday rotation. Regards, your ex-wife.'"

"That's the most passive-aggressive thing I've ever heard."

"Thank you. I've been practicing."

I pulled out of her, and we both groaned at the separation. The mess was significant. The sheets were destroyed. I pulled the quilt over us — the same quilt, which was becoming a recurring character in our story — and she curled against my side.

"So," she said. "Tuesday?"

"Tuesday?"

"You said you wanted to go slow. I want to see what happens when you go fast."

"You're going to actually kill me."

"What a way to go."

I thought about the letter to Richard. I thought about the G-spot, and the clitoris, and the expression on her face when I'd found something inside her that she didn't know was there. I thought about all the rooms in her house, all the doors she'd never opened, and how many of them I was going to get to open with her.

Richard's loss was my gain, and my gain was a woman who was discovering herself at seventy with the enthusiasm of someone half her age and the vocabulary of someone who'd finally learned to swear.

I was going to need new sheets. And possibly a new mattress. And a letter to Richard, which I would dictate, because the man deserved to know what he'd missed.