Late Summer on Ellen's Porch

The third date was supposed to be a museum, but you'd both agreed the traffic wasn't worth it, so instead you found yourself on Ellen's back porch with a bowl of cherries between you, spitting pits into the flowerbeds like a couple of teenagers ditching study hall.

"Best three out of five," she said, and launched a pit that cleared the hydrangeas entirely.

"You cheated. You've clearly done this before."

"Lawrence, I grew up on a farm in Michigan. I've been spitting pits since before you owned a tie."

You liked her. That was the simple, startling truth of it. Two months of messaging on Match, three dates, and you liked her in a way that felt almost indecent at your age—as if you were supposed to have outgrown the flutter, the way you'd outgrown your hairline and your knee cartilage. She was sharp-witted, competitive, built like she still did her own yard work, and she'd told you on date two, over a plate of oysters, that her late husband had been a good man who hadn't been a particularly adventurous one.

"He mowed the lawn beautifully," she'd said, deadpan, and you'd laughed until your ribs ached.

Now it was early evening, the cherries were down to stems, and she was looking at you the way a woman looks at a man when she's deciding something. You'd kissed her at her front door after date one—a warm, unhurried kiss that neither of you rushed—and after date two she'd pulled back at the threshold and said, "Not yet, cowboy," with a smile that kept you up past midnight.

Tonight, when you leaned in on the porch swing, she let the kiss linger. Her hand came to rest on your chest, and she held it there, feeling something she could apparently feel even through your shirt.

"Okay," she said quietly.

"Okay what?"

"Come inside."

---

Inside, her house smelled like rosemary and old books. She poured two fingers of bourbon each, and you sat on her couch with your knee touching hers, and she told you the thing she'd been circling for weeks.

"I need to tell you something, and you're going to be kind about it, or I'll throw you out."

"I'm incapable of kindness. Go on."

That earned a laugh, but it faded fast. She turned the glass in her hands.

"I was married for forty-one years. Before that, one serious boyfriend in college. And in all of that—" she exhaled "—no man has ever gone down on me. Gerald thought it was undignified. The college boy tried once, got distracted by a Frisbee, and that was the end of my experience with the genre."

You didn't laugh. You set your glass down.

"I'm not telling you this to ask for anything," she said. "I'm telling you because if this keeps going where I think it's going, I don't want to be surprised by my own face."

"Ellen."

"Don't do the sympathetic voice."

"I'm not. I'm doing the incredulous voice. Forty-one years. The man mowed the lawn beautifully and never once—"

"Lawrence."

"—applied himself to the flowerbeds."

She laughed so hard she had to set her bourbon down, and then she looked at you with her eyes bright and said, "You're impossible," and you kissed her, and the kissing went on for a long time on that couch, her hand eventually finding the back of your neck, your hand eventually finding the curve of her waist, and both of you eventually breathing like it mattered.

---

That night you went home alone. She wanted it that way—"I need to think, and I can't think when you're doing that thing with your thumb"—and you respected it, though you lay awake most of the night imagining things you were too much of a gentleman to text her.

The next two weeks were a study in slow torment. You met for coffee and she wore a green sweater that should have been illegal. You walked the reservoir trail and she took your hand on the downhill stretch and didn't give it back. At your condo she inspected your bookshelves, pulled down a novel, read a single page aloud in a smoky voice that had no business existing at a Sunday afternoon visit, and then closed the book and said, "I should go," and left you standing in your own kitchen like a man struck by weather.

"I'm getting even," she told you on the phone that night. "For all the times you've looked at me like that."

"Like what?"

"You know exactly like what."

When she finally invited you to dinner at her place on a Friday—dinner, her emphasis suspiciously light—you brought wine and a serious intention to be patient, and she opened the door in a dress the color of dark honey and said, "I made lasagna. I also made a decision."

The lasagna was excellent. You barely tasted it.

---

Afterward, the dishes sat in the sink because neither of you was willing to be the one who left the table first. Her foot had found yours under the table during the salad course and stayed there. When she finally stood and took your hand without a word, your heart was going like a man twenty years younger's, and not gracefully.

Her bedroom was soft-lit and warm, and she turned to face you by the bed with her chin up, defiant, the way she'd looked launching cherry pits.

"I'm nervous," she announced, as if reporting a weather condition.

"I know."

"It's not that I don't want to. I want to. I've been wanting to since the porch. I just—no one's ever looked at me there. Closely. Gerald was a lights-off, under-the-covers man."

"Then we'll start with the lights low and your dress on, and see how you feel."

She blinked. "That's not how I expected this to go."

"You've known me three months, Ellen. I'm a strategist."

You kissed her neck, and she made a small sound that went straight through you. You undressed her slowly, and she undressed you slower, both of you laughing once when your cufflink defeated you both, and then she was standing there in the lamplight, sixty-some years of beautiful, unashamed except for the way she crossed her arms, and you uncrossed them gently and kissed the inside of her wrist.

"Get on the bed," you said. "Face up. Pillow under your hips. And Ellen—everything we do, you can stop with one word."

"I know," she said. "That's why I'm here."

---

She lay back, and you did not go where she expected. You started at her feet.

"What are you doing?" she asked, half-laughing, as you kneaded her arch and pressed a kiss to her ankle.

"Going down on you. I said I was going down on you. I never said when."

She groaned. "You're going to be a menace about this."

"I've been a menace about everything else."

You worked upward with agonizing patience. Calves, the backs of her knees—she twitched there, sensitive, and you filed that away. Thighs, kneading them, kissing them, letting your breath ghost across her skin without touching anything she was waiting for you to touch. You could feel the tension gathering in her, the way her hips shifted in small, involuntary increments, seeking.

You kissed a slow line up the inside of her right thigh, then switched to the left without warning, and she made a sound of pure outrage.

"You're doing that on purpose."

"I am doing that entirely on purpose."

You laid yourself between her legs, and you did nothing but breathe. A long, warm stream of air over her cunt, and she gasped like you'd touched her with a live wire.

"Oh—Lawrence—"

"Just breathing," you murmured. "Getting to know you."

"You are the most infuriating—"

You kissed her thigh again, close now, so close, and she jumped when your lips grazed the crease where leg meets hip. Her whole body went taut. You looked up the length of her and she was staring down at you, wild-eyed, chest rising fast.

"Has anyone ever told you that you're beautiful from this angle?" you asked.

"Nobody's ever had this angle."

"Then I'm the authority now." You let your breath warm her again, and she shivered visibly. "You're beautiful. You smell like a woman who wants something. And you're soaked."

She made an embarrassed sound and moved to close her legs, and you put your hands gently on her knees.

"No," you said. "None of that."

"Lawrence, it's been—if you're going to do it, just—"

"I'll do it when you ask me."

"I'm not going to ask."

"Then we'll be here a while." You kissed her thigh. "I've got nowhere to be."

Silence. Then, in a voice gone low and rough: "Please."

"Please what, Ellen?"

"Please—" she swallowed "—put your mouth on me."

You didn't make her wait another second after that.

---

The first slow lick was gentle, exploratory, and she jumped so hard the headboard knocked the wall. Her hand flew down and gripped your hair, and she made a sound she immediately tried to muffle with her other hand, and you reached up and pulled that hand away.

"No muffling. I want to hear you."

"You can't just—" and then you slid your tongue into her, soft and deep, and whatever sentence she'd started died in her throat. Her whole body seized in a way that had nothing to do with fear—every muscle going taut and sweet, her hips lifting off the pillow, a cry torn out of her that she didn't even try to muffle this time.

"Oh my God. Oh my—do that again."

You did it again. And again. Slow, deliberate, reading her like weather. Every pass of your tongue made her jump like you'd touched her with something electric, her thighs trembling against your ears, her breath coming in ragged, astonished bursts. She was a woman discovering a room in her own house she'd never known existed.

"Lawrence—Lawrence, I can't—everything's—"

"You can. Breathe. Let it happen."

You built her up slowly, then backed off. Built her up again, and felt her get close, and eased down to lazy, maddening kisses along her outer lips while she cursed at you with a fluency that would have shocked her book club. Then you went back in, tongue circling, dipping inside her from time to time, and each time you did she tensed and jumped like the first time, like it never got ordinary, and God, that was its own reward—to be with a woman for whom all of this was brand new.

Her hips were moving without her permission now, grinding up against your mouth in small desperate circles, and she was saying your name like a prayer and a complaint at once.

"I need—" she gasped.

"I know what you need."

You slid your hands up and took her wrists, and pressed them down and back, pinning her arms at her sides, holding her open and still beneath your mouth, and then you stopped being patient.

You went at her.

Full, relentless, your mouth and tongue working her with a focused hunger that made her scream—a real scream, and then a babbling stream of words that weren't quite words. Pinned as she was, she couldn't arch away or chase the feeling; she could only take it, and taking it was undoing her completely. Her heels drummed the mattress. Her head thrashed side to side. She was on fire and telling you so.

"Lawrence—fuck—don't stop—don't you dare—"

You didn't dare. You held her wrists and devoured her, and when her thighs started shaking in a way you recognized, you released her arms and slid your hands beneath her, gripping her hips, lifting her.

"Bring it to me," you growled against her. "Fuck my mouth."

She obeyed. She rose up on her elbows, wild-eyed, and pushed her cunt up to your mouth, and you sealed yourself over her and worked her clit with your tongue, and she rode your face with an abandon that forty-one years of someone else's timidity had left completely untouched.

"You're mine," you told her, lifting your mouth for one second, your voice ragged. "This is mine. Say it."

"I'm yours," she gasped. "I'm yours, I'm—oh God, I'm—"

She melted. That was the only word for it. Every hard line of her went soft and liquid at once, and she came with a long, high, broken cry, her hips grinding against your mouth, and she came again before the first one finished, and then a third time when you gentled your tongue and gave her one more slow, deliberate stroke. She was shaking all over, her hands in your hair again, holding you to her, then pushing you away, then pulling you back, riding out wave after wave until she finally collapsed flat to the mattress, one arm flung over her eyes, breathing like she'd run a mile.

You kissed the inside of her thigh one last time and rested your cheek against it, waiting.

---

It took her a while.

"Lawrence."

"Yes, Ellen."

"I'm going to need a minute. Possibly a calendar year."

"Take two. I'm comfortable."

She lifted her arm and looked down at you, and her expression was something between devotion and murderous intent. "Forty-one years," she said. "Forty-one years, Lawrence. I want you to understand the magnitude of what you've just compensated for."

"I take my work seriously."

"You're going to have to do that again. I need you to know that up front. This isn't a one-time performance review."

"Noted."

"And I'm told there are things I could—" she propped herself up on an elbow, and there was a gleam in her eye you hadn't seen before, hungry and new "—reciprocate."

"Whenever you're ready. There's no schedule."

She looked at you for a long moment. Then she sat up, pushed you gently onto your back, and said, "Gerald was a lights-off, under-the-covers man, and I have spent forty-one years being polite. Move over."

You moved over.

Later—much later, after she'd proved that boldness was not a young woman's monopoly and you'd told her so, twice, incoherently—she lay with her head on your chest, her finger tracing idle circles, and said:

"I'm going to leave you a five-star review on Match."

"You can't do that."

"Watch me. 'Attentive. Patient. Thorough.' " She grinned up at you. " 'Excellent with flowerbeds.' "

You laughed until the bed shook, and she laughed with you, and outside her window the summer night went on being ordinary while inside it, nothing was.