There’s no harm in it, so I tell her I’ll be by in a few minutes, I need to go to my room first. Joan tells me her room number, and I agree to be over in five.
Letting myself into my room, I pee, wash my hands and face, and dampen my hair with the excess water still on my hands. I regard myself in the mirror, as I run a comb through my hair.
This is all very innocent, I think to my reflected face in the mirror. She just wants to chat, I just want to kill some time, and besides, I instruct myself, I can always just leave if it becomes something else. My reflection agrees with me, as I turn to leave the room.
“This is very nice,” I say, admiring the two club chairs facing each other in the corner of her room. A bottle of Absolute, two ice filled glasses, and an ice bucket wait for us on the little table in between.
She fixes two drinks, as I plunk myself down in the comfortable club chair, my back to the corner.
“Cheers” she says, lifting a glass. “Salud,” I respond.
Joan starts telling me about herself. She has had a failed marriage early on, “No kids, thank God,” she adds. She’s dating a cop in New York, a police detective.
Great, I think, this is going to be fine. We spend about an hour swapping personal stories, some airline jokes, and start a second drink.
Joan grows quiet, as we lapse into a comfortable silence.
She leans slightly forward as she says, “Why don’t you just get into that bed and let me fuck your brains out all night?”
“You don’t understand, I’ve done all that shit. The coke, the ‘Plato’s Retreat,’ the threesomes and moresomes.”
“So have I,” she challenges. “Last week, on a flight from Denver to Honolulu, we passed right over my ex-husbands house, it was my fucking house, that creep was banging my girlfriends in my bed. Well, fuck him! I took my panties off, pulled out the flight engineer’s dick, had the Captain and co-pilot take turns fucking my cunt and ass, while I sucked off the engineer. Right over the top of my old man’s house, felt great getting even with him, that bastard.”
“Shit Joan, I was a prick, just like your ex-husband. I used to fuck women in my ex-wife’s bed… crazy shit. One woman, Teri Herrin, we finish and I’m driving her home. She says her gold wristwatch is missing. We drive all the way back to my place. I leave her in the car, and run back upstairs into my bedroom. I had remade the bed before we left, everything nice and neat. We had this white goatskin shag carpet in the bedroom. I’m down on my hands and knees, my fingers going through this rug, all the way around the bed. No watch. Not in the bathroom, not on any dressers or tables, no watch. I try under the bed, and all the way around on the carpet again, no watch.
I don’t know what made me do it, but I lift up my wife’s pillow, and there it is. Dead center under that pillow, perfectly positioned to be found.
I hand Teri back her watch, tell her where I found it, and ask her what the deal is? She says that she wants me, she wanted Ilsa to find the watch, Jesus Christ!” I take a drink.
Joan giggles now, she liked that story, as I continue:
“I’m different now, older, done that shit, and I love Geri. She took a real chance marrying me, knowing what a slut I had always been. But when I fell in love with her, I never wanted anyone else again. I feel guilty just thinking of the shit I’ve done, before we were married. I don’t even think about sex or anything with any other woman. I’m just glad I don’t have to hide anything, lie or cover up anything, I couldn’t handle that kind of crap anymore. Thank God, I got all that out of my system before marrying Geri. Our relationship’s never been about sex, anyway, more like we’re brother and sister.”
“So, what are you saying, that you guys don’t sleep with each other, don’t have sex with each other?” She’s becoming more genuinely interested now.
“No, we still fool around occasionally, not too often, that’s true, but whenever we do, it’s great…we always say ‘why don’t we do this more often?”
She’s up pouring us another drink now, getting another pack of cigarettes from a carton in her suitcase. “Pardon me for a minute,” she says, heading for the bathroom.
I start to think back on Geri and me and sex….. times we shared my mattress in Stigo’s apartment… he would come in and catch us all the time, always laughing and pretending to be covering up his eyes, looking through his open fingers, the way kids do… “excuse me people,” he would announce, going slowly by, getting a good, honest look. We would laugh along with him, not caring, it was only Stigo, and we were in love.
One morning, after Stigo pulled that routine of his and headed for the shower, Geri and I quickly decided to get even with him. “Let’s see if he can handle it.” We both got completely naked, snuck into the bathroom, pulled back the shower curtains and casually stepped inside with Stigo. “You don’t mind, do you” we asked, both of us starting to lather up.
That fuckin’ Norwegian freaked, I’ll never forget the look on his face, and how he blushed… I laugh to myself, thinking how we blew him away…
Then, that one time in Honolulu, it was Geri’s birthday… I told her to get into her tuxedo, I got into mine, and I surprised her with the Limo for the evening. Up at the top of Tantalus, standing through the open sunroof, watching the sunset, we started fucking around. I was eating her out while she stood there, the Limo heading for the nightclub now. For the thirty-minute ride back to downtown Honolulu, I’m pounding into her from behind, both of us trying to see if the driver can tell what we’re up to, through the partition’s smoked glass, neither of us really giving a shit if he could…. man, we were hot and that Limo reeked of sex, I tipped him bigtime as we got out, barely back into our clothes…..
Joan’s frowning now, as she lights another cigarette, easing into the seat across from me again. “You’re going to sit there and tell me that you don’t find other women sexually desirable? A woman like me, for instance… I’m opening my legs a little, like this, and you don’t feel anything?”
“No, I honestly don’t.”
“What about now,” she gathers her skirt up around her waist, knees wide open, bringing her legs over the arms of her chair. “What do you feel now… you’re watching me. You’re watching me slide my fingers into my pussy. It’s pretty, isn’t it? I shave just the lips,” holding them open with the fingers of one hand now. “I sometimes sit on the floor in front of the mirrored closet doors in these hotels, watching myself slide these fingers in and out of my pussy… don’t you like to watch?”
I am watching, unable to look away… “You are beautiful, you are sexy, and it is fascinating to watch you play with yourself like that, but I’m not going to get involved.”
“You’re not going to get involved? You are involved! What’s sex? Do you think it’s only sex if these were your hands? Your tongue?” She brings the slick moisture down to her rectum now, arching her hips up for easier access.
God, I am mesmerized, watching her wet finger travel between her pink, splayed pussy, and her asshole. She’s teasing her own ass now, slowly sliding a fingertip in, twisting it. Removing her hands, she does this little trick with her asshole, puckering and unpuckering it. I watch as a film of her moisture stretches across the open rim, and I think she’s about to create a bubble, it looks so like the rainbow pattern on a kid’s bubble pipe, just before the pursed lips blow…
“No,” I finally answer through my dry throat. “It’s not sex for me… I could be looking at a penthouse magazine, or even playing with myself reading the Penthouse letters and looking at the pictures, and that wouldn’t be cheating on my wife. I would just be getting myself off, relieving the tension, but I wouldn’t call it sex.”