Thursday’s New Sheets

I bought the sheets on Tuesday.

Not at the nice department store where Harold and I had registered fifty-three years ago, back when brides picked out linens with their mothers and thought about thread counts the way normal people think about weather. No. I went to Target, stood in the bedding aisle for twenty minutes like a woman trying to choose a casket, and eventually grabbed a set of white cotton sheets with a thread count that would have made my mother faint. They were practical. They were washable. They were sheets I could bring to another man's condo without feeling like I was decorating for a sin I was already planning to commit.

The woman at checkout asked if I wanted a gift receipt. I almost laughed in her face.

Thursday came the way Thursdays always do—slowly, then all at once. The community center meeting ran long because Robert had opinions about the new parking ordinance, and Robert always had opinions about everything. I sat in my usual chair, third row from the front, and tried to listen. But Lawrence was two seats to my left, and every time he shifted in his chair, I remembered what his thigh felt like pressed against mine. Every time he spoke, I remembered the sound of his voice when he'd said *I'm going to come on your chest*.

My underwear was damp before the meeting was half over. I crossed my legs and uncrossed them and crossed them again, and at one point Lawrence glanced over at me with that knowing look—the one that said he could read every filthy thought running through my seventy-eight-year-old brain—and I felt my face go hot.

After the meeting, people milled around. Robert cornered me about the zoning petition. I nodded and murmured agreement while watching Lawrence over Robert's shoulder. He was talking to Marietta, some woman from the second row who always wore too much perfume and laughed too loud at things that weren't funny. He was smiling at her. Not the way he smiled at me—that sharp, predatory thing—but a polite smile. A public smile.

Still. I didn't like it.

Robert finally stopped talking, and I gathered my things. Lawrence caught up with me at the door.

"Thursday," he said, low enough that only I could hear.

"I brought the sheets," I said, and then immediately wanted to swallow the words. We were standing in a church basement, for God's sake. There was a cross on the wall. A *cross*.

"Good girl," he said, and walked out ahead of me.

My knees nearly buckled. Two words. Two stupid words, and I was back in his bed, pinned and gasping, sucking the taste of him out of my own mouth. I gripped my purse strap and followed him out into the evening air.

The walk to his condo took seven minutes. I knew because I'd counted every step the last two times. We didn't walk together—that would look suspicious in a neighborhood where everyone's business became everyone else's business by noon the next day. He walked ahead, and I followed at a distance, my heart hammering against my ribs like it was trying to escape.

I was seventy-eight years old. I had osteoporosis in my left hip and a prescription for blood pressure medication and a husband who was probably asleep in his recliner right now, mouth open, snoring at a volume that could be heard from the street. I was not a woman who followed men to their condos. Except I was. Except I had become one. Except the moment Lawrence had pinned my wrists to the mattress and told me to stay, something inside me had cracked open like a geode, and inside was nothing I recognized.

He held the building door for me. I stepped inside. The lobby smelled like floor cleaner and someone's microwave dinner. We didn't speak in the elevator. He pressed the button for the fourth floor and stood close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off his arm through his shirt. I stared at the numbers counting up and thought about the sheets in my bag and how absurd it was that I'd laundered them twice before bringing them, as if cleanliness could sanctify what we were about to do.

The elevator opened. He walked. I followed.

Inside his condo, he took the bag from my hand and set it on the counter. Then he turned to me, and I saw it—that shift in his expression from civil to something else entirely. His eyes dropped to my mouth, then lower, tracing the line of my body the way he always did, like he was reading a map he'd already memorized but couldn't stop studying.

"Take off your shirt," he said.

Not a request. Never a request with him.

My fingers went to the buttons. I'd worn a blouse I hadn't worn in years—something with a neckline that dipped lower than anything in my closet, something I'd bought on impulse three months ago and hung in the back of the closet where Harold wouldn't see it. My hands were shaking. They always shook at the start, before he touched me, before I remembered that I didn't have to be afraid of what came next.

The blouse came off. I stood in his kitchen in my bra and slacks, and he looked at me with that expression I was beginning to crave—the one that made me feel like I was the only woman in the world, even though I knew I probably wasn't.

"The bra."

I reached behind my back. The clasp came apart, and I let it slide down my arms. My breasts weren't what they'd been at thirty or forty or even sixty. They were the breasts of a woman who'd lived in them for nearly eight decades, and I fought the urge to cover myself.

"Don't," he said, reading me again. "Don't you dare."

I dropped my arms to my sides. He stepped closer. His hand came up and cupped my left breast, his thumb brushing across my nipple, and I made a sound—something small and involuntary, like air escaping a tire.

"Every time," he murmured. "Every time you make that sound, I want to put my mouth on you."

"Then do it," I said, and the boldness of it shocked us both.

He smiled. Not the public smile. The other one. The one that made my stomach drop.

"Not yet." He stepped back. "Pants."

I unbuttoned my slacks and pushed them down. Stepped out of them. Stood in his kitchen in nothing but my underwear—plain, white, practical underwear that I'd bought in a three-pack and that suddenly felt like the most embarrassing thing I'd ever worn. I should have bought something pretty. Something lacy. Something that said *I planned this* instead of *I gave up on lingerie during the Ford administration*.

Lawrence looked at my underwear and laughed. Not cruelly. Warmly. Like I'd said something charming.

"You're perfect," he said, and I wanted to cry.

He led me to the bedroom. The bed was unmade—sheets bunched and twisted from what I assumed was his own sleeping, though a small, possessive part of me wondered if someone else had been in it. I pushed the thought away. I didn't have the right to that kind of jealousy. I was the other woman. I was the affair. I didn't get to be jealous.

"New sheets," he said, nodding toward the bag I'd brought.

"After," I said. "We can put them on after."

"Practical woman."

"I've been called worse."

He crossed the room in two strides and grabbed me. His hands gripped my hips, and he lifted me—not roughly, but with a certainty that made my breath catch—and tossed me onto the bed. I bounced once, my hair fanning out across the pillow, and before I could orient myself, he was pulling my underwear down my legs and off.

"I've been thinking about this for four days," he said, kneeling between my thighs.

"Four days?"

"Since Thursday. Since the last time. Since you screamed into my pillow and I had to muffle you with my hand."

I remembered. I remembered the feel of his palm pressed against my mouth, the way my own moans vibrated against his skin, the way being silenced had made me come harder than I'd ever come in my life.

"Your husband ever go down on you?" he asked, his breath warm against my inner thigh.

"You know he didn't."

"Tell me anyway."

I swallowed. "Harold doesn't—that's not something we—"

"Say it."

"Harold never put his mouth on me. Not once in fifty-three years."

He pressed his lips to the crease where my thigh met my body, and I jerked like I'd been shocked. "And before Harold?"

"No one. I was a virgin when I married him."

He looked up at me, and something in his expression shifted—not pity, not exactly, but a kind of wonder. "Seventy-eight years," he said. "And no one's ever tasted you."

"That's—"

"Tragic. And also my good fortune." He dragged his tongue along the same crease, slower this time, and I let out a long, shuddering breath. "I'm going to make up for lost time."

He started with my thighs, the way he had before—kissing, nibbling, tracing lines with his tongue that made my skin prickle and my hips twitch. I grabbed the sheets on either side of me and tried to hold still, but it was impossible. Every touch sent electricity through nerve endings I hadn't known existed three months ago.

When his mouth finally reached me—when his tongue finally parted me and pressed against my clit—I cried out and grabbed his head. Not to push him away. To pull him closer. To hold him there. My fingers tangled in his gray hair, and my hips rose off the bed, and I heard myself saying things—*yes, there, don't stop, please, please*—in a voice I didn't recognize.

He pulled back. "Hands down."

I whimpered.

"Hands down, Delia. By your sides. Now."

I obeyed. I pressed my palms flat against the mattress on either side of my hips, and the act of holding myself open and still while he worked his mouth over me was almost unbearable. His tongue was everywhere—tracing, circling, dipping inside me, then dragging back up to my clit with a precision that felt surgical. I was shaking. My thighs were trembling against the sides of his head. I was climbing toward something enormous, and I couldn't move, couldn't grab him, couldn't do anything except lie there and take it.

Then his hands closed around my wrists. Both of them. He pinned them to my sides, pressing them into the mattress, and the sensation of being trapped—of being held down and eaten out and utterly, completely powerless—sent me over the edge so fast that I didn't even have time to warn him.

The orgasm ripped through me. My back arched, my legs clamped around his head, and I screamed—loudly, shamelessly, loud enough that his neighbor probably heard. He didn't stop. His tongue kept moving, drawing it out, milking every wave and aftershock until I was sobbing and twitching and trying to close my legs because the pleasure had tipped over into something almost painful.

He pulled back and looked up at me, his chin wet, his eyes dark. "You're loud tonight."

"I can't—"

"You can. And you will." He crawled up my body, his weight settling over me, and I could feel his cock hard against my thigh through his trousers. "I'm going to come on you again."

I nodded. I'd liked it last time—the heat of it, the intimacy, the way it made me feel claimed in a way I couldn't articulate.

He knelt over me, unzipped, freed himself. He was thick and flushed, already leaking at the tip, and he stroked himself with one hand while looking down at my body—my breasts, my stomach, the mess of me between my thighs.

"Touch yourself," he said.

"What?"

"Your hand. Between your legs. I want to watch."

I hesitated. In fifty-three years of marriage, I had never let Harold watch me touch myself. I'd done it—of course I'd done it, in the dark, under covers, with the door locked—but never with an audience. The thought of it made my face burn.

"I can't—"

"You can." His hand moved faster on his cock. "Show me how you make yourself feel good when no one's watching."

I slid my right hand down my stomach. Down between my legs. I was soaked—obscenely wet, the slickness coating my fingers before I'd even reached my clit. I found it—that swollen bundle of nerves that Lawrence had just been torturing with his mouth—and I pressed two fingers against it and started to circle.

I closed my eyes.

"Look at me."

I opened them. He was staring down at my hand, watching my fingers move, and his breathing had gone ragged. The sight of him watching me—of this seventy-year-old man kneeling over me, jerking himself while I masturbated for his entertainment—was so filthy and so thrilling that I felt another orgasm building already.

"Keep going," he said. "Don't stop."

I didn't. I rubbed myself while he watched, my hips rolling, my free hand gripping the sheet, and when he groaned and came—hot pulses across my chest, my neck, my stomach—I was right behind him, my second orgasm crashing through me as I felt his cum splatter on my skin.

He stayed there for a moment, breathing hard, looking down at what he'd done. Then that slow smile. That terrible, wonderful smile.

"Clean me up," he said. "Use your mouth."

The words hit me like a slap. I remembered the last time—the shock of it, the taste, the way he'd held my head and pushed into my mouth and told me I was a good girl. I'd told myself I wouldn't do it again. I'd told myself that was a line I wouldn't cross twice.

"No," I said.

He didn't argue. He reached down, gathered a handful of my hair at the nape of my neck, and pulled. Not hard enough to hurt—not really—but hard enough to guide my head up, to bring my face level with his cock, which was still half-hard and glistening with his own cum.

"I said, clean me up."

My mouth was already open. I don't know when that happened—whether he'd pulled my head up and my jaw had dropped in response, or whether some part of me had already decided before my brain caught up. He pushed inside, and the taste hit me: salty, bitter, thick, and so intimate that my whole body flushed with shame and heat at once.

I gagged. He held me there, his hand firm in my hair, and after a moment the gagging eased and I started to move my tongue. I licked the slick from his shaft, the head, the sensitive underside where the skin was thinnest. He groaned above me, and I felt him growing hard again in my mouth—felt the flesh filling and lengthening against my tongue—and the power of it, the raw animal power of turning him on with something I'd never done before three months ago, made my thighs clench together.

"Good girl," he murmured, and the praise did what it always did—it undid me.

I sucked harder. Took him deeper. Saliva pooled at the corners of my mouth and dripped down my chin, and I didn't care. I was beyond caring. I was a woman on her back in another man's bed, cleaning his cock with her tongue, and she was so wet she could feel it pooling on the sheet beneath her.

He pulled me off with a wet sound and pushed me back. My head hit the pillow, and before I could catch my breath, he was between my legs—not his mouth this time, but his cock, pressing against my entrance, pushing in.

I gasped. The fullness of it, the stretch, the sensation of being entered after everything else—the orgasms, the cum on my chest, the taste of him still coating my tongue—was almost too much. My body shuddered around him.

"Look at me," he said.

I opened my eyes. His face was inches from mine, his jaw set, his eyes locked on mine with an intensity that made me want to look away and also never look away from anything ever again.

He started to move. Slow at first, then faster, each thrust pushing me into the mattress. I wrapped my legs around his waist and my arms around his neck, and I held on.

"You're coming back," he said, his voice rough.

"Yes."

"Every week."

"Yes."

"Say it."

"Every week. I'll come back every week. I'll let you do whatever you want."

He fucked me harder. The sound of it—skin on skin, the wet slap of our bodies—filled the room. I was climbing again, a third peak I didn't think my body could reach, but he shifted his angle slightly and the head of his cock dragged against something inside me that made my vision blur.

"Oh God," I said. "Oh God, oh God—"

"Come for me."

I did. The orgasm was different from the others—deeper, longer, rolling through me in waves instead of crashing. I clenched around him, and he groaned and thrust deep and held still, and I felt him pulsing inside me, filling me, his cum hot against my inner walls.

We lay there. His weight on me, both of us breathing like we'd sprinted a mile. The ceiling fan turned lazily overhead. Somewhere outside, a car alarm went off and stopped.

"I need to shower," I said eventually.

"Mm."

"I have cum in my hair."

"I know. I put it there."

I laughed—really laughed, the way I always seemed to laugh with him, surprised and bright. "You're a terrible man."

"You love it."

I didn't answer, because the truth was too enormous to say out loud. Instead, I pushed at his chest until he rolled off me, and I sat up and surveyed the damage. The sheets were ruined. My body was a map of the evening—cum on my chest, my stomach, my thighs, drying in my hair. I looked like a woman who'd been thoroughly, comprehensively fucked, and the thought made me smile.

"New sheets," I said, reaching for the bag on the floor.

"You're putting them on now?"

"I'm not sleeping in wet spots."

"You're not sleeping here at all. Harold will notice."

I paused. Harold. Right. Harold, who went to bed at nine and slept like the dead and hadn't asked me a question about my Thursday evenings in months.

"Help me with the fitted sheet," I said.

He sighed and got up, and we stood on opposite sides of the bed and wrestled the new sheets on like two people who'd been doing this together for years instead of weeks. The domesticity of it was absurd—both of us naked, me still sticky, him with his cock swinging while he tucked corners—and I was grinning by the time we finished.

"What?" he said.

"Nothing. I'm just thinking about what my mother would say if she could see me right now."

"She'd say you missed a corner."

I looked down. I had, in fact, missed a corner.

"Your mother sounds like a smart woman," I said.

"She was." He smoothed the sheet down and looked at me, and for a moment his expression was something other than hungry—something softer, almost careful. "Same time next week?"

"Same time next week." I gathered my clothes and started dressing. "I'll bring a second set of sheets. Just in case."

"Planning ahead. I like that in a woman."

I buttoned my blouse and checked my reflection in his bathroom mirror. My hair was a wreck. I did what I could with water and my fingers, but there was no hiding the swollen lips or the flush across my chest or the particular looseness in the way I stood.

"I look like I've been—"

"You look like you've been well-fucked. Which you have."

I shook my head and grabbed my purse. At the door, I turned back. He was standing in the hallway, still naked, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed.

"Thursday," I said.

"Thursday."

I walked home through streets that smelled like someone's barbecue and someone else's jasmine, and I thought about sheets and cum and the way he'd said *good girl*, and I thought about Harold snoring in his recliner, and I thought about the woman I was becoming—a woman who brought clean sheets to her lover's condo and put them on the bed afterward like it was the most natural thing in the world.

My phone buzzed in my purse. A text from Lawrence.

*Next week bring a scarf. I want to tie your wrists to the headboard.*

I stood on the sidewalk under a streetlight and typed back: *What color?*

His reply came in seconds: *Doesn't matter. It's coming off with my teeth.*

I put the phone away and walked faster, because my thighs were wet again and I still had six blocks to go and Harold would definitely notice if I walked in the door looking like this.

I let myself in through the garage. The house was dark. Harold was, as predicted, unconscious in his recliner, the television casting blue shadows across his face. I stood there for a moment, looking at my husband of fifty-three years, and felt—nothing. Not guilt. Not regret. Just a kind of quiet clarity, like waking up from a dream you'd been having for decades.

I went upstairs, showered, and got into bed. The sheets on my side were cool and clean and smelled like our detergent, and I lay there in the dark and thought about scarves and teeth and the way Lawrence's hands felt around my wrists, and I touched myself one more time, silently, biting my pillow, coming with my husband's snoring drifting up through the floor vents.

Thursday was five days away.

I could make it.

Probably.