Freshly Laundered Intentions

She arrived at my condo on Tuesday carrying a bag.

"What's in the bag?" I asked.

"Clean sheets. You said you needed new sheets. I brought clean sheets."

"That's either very practical or very presumptuous."

"It's both. That's the luxury of being my age. You can be practical and presumptuous simultaneously and no one can stop you."

She walked past me into the condo with the confidence of a woman who had, exactly one week ago, discovered she had a G-spot and had apparently decided to treat the information as a mandate. She was wearing a sundress — pale blue, thin straps, the kind of dress that suggested she'd thought about what she wanted to happen to it and had selected accordingly. Her ankles were bare. I noticed this because I had a newly discovered fondness for her ankles.

"Did you bring the letter to Richard?" I asked.

"First draft is complete. I'm refining it. I added a footnote about the clitoris. He was an accountant — he'll appreciate thorough documentation."

She set the bag down by the bedroom door and turned to face me. There was something different in her posture. Last time, there'd been a nervousness underneath the bravado — a woman stepping into unfamiliar territory and trying to act like she belonged there. Today the nervousness was gone. In its place was something hungrier. She looked at me the way someone looks at a menu when they've already decided what they want but are still enjoying the anticipation of ordering it.

"Tuesday," she said. "You said Tuesday."

"I said Tuesday."

"And you said you wanted to go slow. I said I wanted to see what happens when you go fast. So which is it?"

"Both. I'm going to go slow and then I'm going to go fast and then, if you're lucky, I'm going to do something you're not expecting at all."

Her eyebrows went up. "I wasn't expecting the G-spot. I wasn't expecting any of last Tuesday. My capacity for being surprised by you has been significantly expanded."

"You have no idea."

I kissed her. Not gently — I kissed her the way I'd been thinking about kissing her for seven days, which was to say with my hands already in her hair and my hips already pressed against hers and my tongue already doing the thing that made her knees buckle. She grabbed the back of my neck and pulled me harder into it, her mouth opening under mine, a low sound in her throat that I recognized from last week — the sound she made right before her body started doing things her mind hadn't authorized.

"The dress," I said against her mouth. "Lose it."

She stepped back and pulled it over her head in one motion. Nothing underneath. She'd dressed for the occasion the way a soldier packs for battle — nothing unnecessary, nothing that would slow things down. She stood in my living room in nothing but afternoon light, and I took a moment to look at her because looking at her was one of the great pleasures of my life. She was seventy years old and she looked like seventy years old and that was exactly right. The body that had lived forty-one years with an accountant who'd had sex on a schedule was standing in my condo with nothing on, offering itself to a man who wanted to open every door she'd never opened.

"Bedroom," I said.

"I thought you'd never ask."

I led her to the bedroom and she saw the quilt — the same quilt, which had survived last Tuesday and was now, in my mind, a veteran — and she laughed. "We should get that quilt framed."

"It's earned its keep."

She sat on the edge of the bed and I knelt in front of her. "What are you doing?" she asked, and there it was — a flicker of last week's nervousness, just a trace, quickly buried.

"Something I've been thinking about since last Tuesday."

"Is it the G-spot again? Because I'm not sure I can survive the G-spot again. I'm still having flashbacks. I was in the grocery store yesterday and I thought about your fingers and I had to hold onto the endcap of the cereal aisle."

"Not the G-spot. Something else."

"There's something else?"

"There's quite a lot else. Your husband was an accountant and apparently also a cartographer, because he only mapped about ten percent of your body and the rest is uncharted territory."

I started with her ankles. The same ankles I'd started with last time, because they were perfect — the bones prominent, the skin soft, the tendons visible in a way that made them look delicate and strong at the same time. I kissed the inside of her left ankle and she made a sound that was halfway between a sigh and a whimper.

"You have a thing for my ankles," she said.

"I have a thing for every part of you. I'm starting with the ankles because they're the beginning."

"The beginning of what?"

"The beginning of everything."

I worked my way up. Slowly. Agonizingly slowly. I kissed the inside of her calf, the soft skin behind her knee, the lower thigh. I could feel the muscle in her leg tense as I moved higher, her body anticipating, her breathing changing. By the time I reached the crease where her thigh met her hip, she was trembling.

"You're teasing me," she said.

"I'm warming you up."

"I'm already warm. I've been warm since last Tuesday. I'm a walking furnace. Get on with it."

"In my own time."

"Your own time is infuriating."

"Good."

I blew on her. A soft breath, warm and then cool, right against the outside of her cunt, and her entire body jerked like she'd been touched with a live wire. "Jesus," she said. "What was that?"

"Air."

"Air. You're killing me with air. This is how I die. Death by air."

I kissed around her — the crease of her thigh, the soft skin beside her outer lips, the mound above — without ever touching her directly. She was already slick. I could see it, the shine of her, the way her outer lips were swelling and parting on their own, her body making its own preparations regardless of what her mouth was saying. I kissed her outer lips, gentle and closed-mouth, and she groaned and her hips tilted toward me.

"More," she said. "Please don't stop."

I kissed her again, the same way — lips against the outer folds, warm pressure but no entry, no tongue, just the suggestion of what could happen. She was panting now, her fingers gripping the quilt, her head thrown back. She thought this was it. She thought this was what I'd meant when I'd asked if I could come down on her. This gentle, external kissing. This polite, circumnavigated approach. Richard probably would have considered this more than sufficient. Richard probably would have considered it generous.

I opened my mouth.

I spread her with my thumbs and licked one slow, flat stroke upward, and the sound she made was not human. It was the sound of a woman discovering that the thing she thought was the whole meal was actually just the appetizer menu. Her hips bucked and I held her down with my hands on her thighs and licked again — slower this time, letting her feel the texture of my tongue, the width of it, the way it dragged across her with deliberate, wet pressure.

"Oh my god," she said. "Oh my god. That's — you're —"

I flicked at her then. Quick, light strokes of my tongue against her clit, which was already swollen and rigid under my mouth. She gasped and her thighs clenched around my head and I kept going, flicking and then retreating, kissing the outside of her and then entering again, building a rhythm that kept her right on the edge of predictability. She never knew if the next touch was going to be a soft kiss or a hard stroke, and the uncertainty was making her crazy. Her cunt was clenching on nothing, her body grinding against my face, and I could feel the engorged mass of tissue that led up to her clit — firm and swollen under my tongue, a ridge of pure sensation that I traced with the tip of my tongue in slow, firm circles.

"Don't stop don't stop don't stop," she said, and I could feel her getting close, the tension building in her thighs, the way her breathing had gone ragged and shallow.

I reached up and found her right breast. I took the nipple between my thumb and forefinger and pinched — not gently, not a suggestion, but a real pinch that pulled and twisted — and she screamed. A full, raw scream that came from somewhere deep in her chest, and her body arched off the bed, her cunt grinding against my mouth, her nipple hard and hot between my fingers. I kept my tongue on her clit, kept circling that swollen ridge, kept the pressure steady and relentless while she shook and swore and made sounds that Richard had certainly never heard.

I saved the left breast. I knew what it would do. I waited until she was right at the peak — until her screams had merged into one continuous, keening sound and her body was rigid and trembling — and then I took her left nipple in my other hand and pinched both at the same time, pulling and twisting in opposite directions, and the orgasm that hit her was violent. Her thighs clamped around my head so hard I saw stars. Her cunt pulsed against my mouth in rhythmic, desperate contractions. She made a sound that was beyond language — a raw, animal noise that came from the base of her throat — and her whole body convulsed, once, twice, three times, each wave rolling through her with enough force to make the bed frame groan.

I held on. I kept my mouth on her, gentle now, barely touching, letting the aftershocks play out against my tongue. She was sobbing — actual tears, running down her temples into her hair — and her hands were in my hair, pulling me against her, pushing me away, pulling me back, her body unable to decide what it wanted because it wanted everything at once.

"Stop," she whispered. "No. Don't stop. I can't. I need. Please."

I eased off slowly, pressing soft kisses against her inner thighs as I withdrew, letting her come down in stages. She was shaking. Her whole body was shaking, a fine tremor that ran from her fingers to her toes, and when I looked up at her face, she was crying and laughing at the same time, a wrecked, stunned expression that I recognized from last Tuesday but that was somehow more profound this time.

"That," she said. "That was. I don't have words. I had words last time. I had a whole letter to Richard. I have nothing now. You've broken my vocabulary."

I moved up beside her and she grabbed my face and kissed me, hard, tasting herself on my mouth, and the groan she made when she did it was one of the most erotic sounds I'd ever heard. She pulled back and looked at me with those wrecked, wondering eyes.

"What did you mean," she said, "when you said you were going to do something I wasn't expecting?"

"That wasn't it."

Her eyes widened. "There's more?"

"Turn over."

She stared at me. I could see the gears turning — the accountant's wife trying to calculate what came next, running through her limited dataset, coming up empty. She turned over. Slowly, onto her stomach, her body still trembling with residual aftershocks. I looked at her — the long line of her back, the curve of her waist, the fullness of her ass — and I felt the same hunger I'd felt last Tuesday, that primal, possessive need to claim parts of her that no one had ever claimed.

"I'm going to do something now," I said, and I put my hands on her ass and spread her open.

"What are you —"

I leaned down and licked her. One slow stroke, my tongue flat and wet, from the bottom of her cunt up over her perineum and across her asshole, and the sound she made was not a scream. It was something beyond screaming. It was a sound that didn't have a name, a sound that came from a place in the body that had never been accessed before. Her entire body went rigid and then boneless and then rigid again, and her face pressed into the quilt and she made a muffled, broken noise that was part moan and part shriek and part something that sounded like a woman's entire sexual history being rewritten in a single second.

"Oh my fucking god," she said into the quilt. "You just — that's my — nobody has ever —"

"I know."

"That's dirty."

"Yes."

"That's the dirtiest thing anyone has ever —"

"I know."

"Do it again."

I did it again, slower, my tongue tracing deliberate, wet circles around that tight ring of muscle until it fluttered against my mouth. The sound she made was not human — a raw, keening sob that ripped out of her throat and hung in the air like smoke, and her whole body convulsed so violently the headboard slammed against the wall, a sharp crack of wood on plaster. Her fists twisted in the quilt, knuckles bone-white, and the noises kept coming, shapeless and guttural, words that fractured into gasps, syllables that dissolved into animal cries, her entire nervous system unspooling on a pleasure so foreign and immense she couldn’t contain it, her legs shaking, her spine arching, her breath a series of ragged, desperate hitches as I worked her with a patience that was almost cruel. Then I grabbed her arms, pinned her wrists to the small of her back, and held her there — completely still, completely mine — and she bucked once, twice, and shattered with a scream that was pure surrender.

I licked her in firm, slow circles, and then I pointed my tongue and pressed in, just slightly, and she came. Not the way she'd come before — not the rolling, full-body waves — but a sharp, sudden convulsion that was almost violent in its intensity, her ass pushing back against my face, her cunt clenching on nothing, a spray of wetness against my chin that I hadn't expected. She was squirting. Not a gush, not a flood, but a definite, unmistakable release of fluid that hit my neck and ran down onto the sheets.

"Did I just —" She lifted her head. "What is that? What happened? Did I just —"

"Yes."

"That's never happened. That has never happened in my entire life. What did you do to me?"

"I licked your ass."

"You licked my ass and I — I didn't even know that was possible. I didn't know that was a thing. I thought that was — I thought that was porn. I thought that was something they made up."

"They didn't make it up."

"Apparently not. I need to lie down. I'm already lying down. I need to lie down more. I need to lie down in a different dimension."

I moved up beside her and she turned her head to look at me. Her face was a mess — tears and mascara and the raw, stripped expression of a woman who had been taken apart and put back together in a configuration she didn't recognize. She kissed me again, and this time she didn't flinch at the taste, didn't hesitate. She kissed me like she was trying to consume the experience directly from my mouth.

"You said you wanted me to know that you owned all of me," she said.

"I said that?"

"You didn't say it. You did it. You just — you went somewhere that no one has ever gone, and you made me come from it, and now I think you might actually own all of me. Which is inconvenient, because I had plans for the rest of my life."

"What kind of plans?"

"Boring ones. Gardening. Book club. A gentle correspondence with Richard about his inadequate sexual cartography. Now I'm going to have to revise everything."

I drew the quilt up over us—that soft, fraying veteran of a blanket, a silent witness that had now weathered two Tuesdays and was beginning to map our every act in its worn threads, a topography of sweat and surrender—and she melted against my side with the boneless, wrecked contentment of a woman whose body had been dismantled piece by trembling piece and then, with agonizing care, rebuilt into something she had never been allowed to imagine.

I came in behind her as we curled, my chest against her back, my arm draped over her hip, and she was already arching into me with a low, throaty moan, her body so slick and so hungry that I barely had to guide myself before she was taking me in, and we were coming together in a rush of heat, her scream muffled by the pillow as I buried my face in the curve of her neck, let the last of my control unravel, and growled into her ear that she was mine, that every part of her belonged to me now, the words spilling hot and ragged against her skin until she shattered all over again, a second detonation that ripped through her with a sound I’d never heard a woman make.

"I need to add a postscript to the letter," she said.

"To Richard?"

"Dear Richard. Postscript: I have recently been informed that my body contains additional features beyond those previously documented, including but not limited to a region that you never once considered visiting, from which I experienced an orgasm so intense that I produced a fluid I did not know my body was capable of producing. This occurred on a Tuesday, which was not on your schedule. I am told there are additional features to be discovered. I will keep you informed. Warm regards."

"You're going to give that man a heart attack."

"He deserves it. Forty-one years and he never once — not once —"

"He was an idiot."

"He was an accountant. They don't do exploration. They do what's on the ledger." She pressed her face into my neck. "What's on the ledger for next Tuesday?"

"I haven't decided yet."

"Good. Don't tell me. I want to be surprised. I want to walk into next Tuesday not knowing what part of my body you're going to turn into a theme park."

"Your whole body is a theme park."

"That's the most romantic thing anyone's ever said to me while lying on sheets that are soaked through."

I looked at the sheets. She was right. We'd destroyed another set. The clean sheets she'd brought were still in the bag by the door, untouched, and I thought about the economics of this — the cost of sheet replacement versus the value of what was happening on them — and decided it was the best investment I'd ever made.

"Next Tuesday," she said.

"Next Tuesday."

"And I'm bringing more sheets."

"Bring two sets."

"Two sets. God. You're going to kill me."

"What a way to go."

She was already half-asleep, her body spent in ways she hadn't known were possible, her breath warm against my neck. I thought about the letter to Richard, which was becoming a multi-volume document. I thought about the uncharted territory, and how much of it was left. I thought about the fact that this woman had lived seventy years on ten percent of a map and was now discovering the rest of the continent one Tuesday at a time.

I was going to need more sheets. And a better mattress. And possibly a cardiologist on retainer, because if she kept reacting the way she was reacting, one of us was going to need medical attention.

The quilt, for its part, said nothing. It had been through enough.