Pushing the Envelope · Part 1

Pushing the Envelope · Part 1 (1/2)
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Here's something for rec.arts.erotica. It is, alas, part of a projected longer work, but I think it stands reasonably well on its own. I'm not certain that it can be called "erotica" at this point but it does contain sex.

Chapter One: A Question of Etiquette

Murdock was drunk, and I was listening patiently as he berated himself for going to a strip club. "Kim wouldn' understand, y'know? She was pure when I married her. I mean, we were *both* virgins, but…. She's a hell of a woman, Kim is, a hell of a woman. Takin' care of the kids, y'know, and the home." He looked around at the bored factory workers and the equally bored stripper, then leaned forward conspiratorially. The effect was ruined when he nearly fell over. "Only woman I've ever, y'know." He got his elbow on the table to support himself. "I mean, you've probably been around, but me, I'm, well, I'm a small town guy. Y'know."

I nodded.

"I've never cheated on her, but…well, all I'm saying is, sometimes a guy gets the urge to look. Kim wouldn' look. I'm the only man she's ever…y'know?" He sat there, blinking. He looked like he was about to weep from the beauty of his wife's purity.

"Why don't we go?" I suggested.

"One more drink," he insisted. "It's a big deal. This' firs' time Murdock signed with an outta-state comp'ny."

"Why don't we have that drink at home?" I suggested.

"Good idea! Y'meet Kim. Meet the little woman. She's salt of the earth. Y'r salt of the earth." I flagged down our waitress before everyone in the bar became salt of the earth. Murdock tried to pay, but I waved him off. He was the client, and I didn't mind. It wasn't my money.

We'd come to the bar in his car, and I drove, handling the big Cutlass clumsily at first. Murdock fell asleep giving me directions, but I found his home without much trouble.

When I woke him, he made me promise not to tell his wife where we'd been. He actually refused to get out of the car until I promised; I wanted to spit twice and cross my heart. I helped him stumble across the lawn with only a minor mishap–he whacked his toe on a sprinkler head–and I rang the doorbell. He kept repeating, "Sh! Shhh!" while he sorted through his keys, leaning against the door.

He pitched forward when his wife opened the door, and I wasn't quick enough to grab him. He looked up glassily from the floor and said, "Kim, this's Gil Freeman. Gil, it's my wife, Kim."

She sighed and then she looked up at me and the sigh caught in her throat. "Hello," she said carefully.

I felt the weight of twenty years, but all I said was, "Hello." Miss Manners, what should I do when I meet a former lover this way?

Back in the seventies, during that time after the gas crisis and before AIDS, there had been a group of us–Meyer, Apple Brown Betty, the Swordfish, and me–sprinting around the edges of society in Meyer's beat-up microbus. It was our own portable commune, our shelter against the Me Decade. Meyer was the philosophizer and the glue, Betty was the perception, the Swordfish was the driving ambition, and I was the teddy bear. We travelled place to place, setting up for a few months while Meyer and Betty created sexual performance art in their own ways, and the Swordfish and I hung around for reasons of our own.

I remember we were in a park the first time I saw Kim. The Swordfish's appetite for carnal matters was legendary, and his taste ran to women built on the Playboy model, like Kim: large-breasted, cute, corn-fed. The only reason I noticed Kim before the Swordfish was because he had a woman on his lap who had just discovered that his fly was not closed. (The Swordfish liked to do it in public places.)

I thought of Kim as a girl when I saw her, since I pegged her age at eighteen or nineteen (I was all of twenty-one, legal wherever they could sell you booze)–and she was walking an Irish setter. I like Irish setters. I left the Swordfish to his tumblebunny and made the dog's acquaintance. The girl told me his name was Zeke and hers was Kim. I told her mine and we chatted.

Kim was eighteen then, fresh from a small city in Iowa, I don't remember the name, but she was just starting whatever the local college was. She was seething with hormones, a sexual cornucopia waiting to happen. I brought her back to meet everyone else, and we waited to see how she'd get along with Betty. Betty approved, and Kim stayed with us (or we stayed near Kim) for five or six months, until we were forced onward by the February blahs and the Swordfish's quest to fuck a woman whose middle name started with Q (he'd already run the alphabet through first and last names).

It took both of us to get Murdock upstairs and stripped for bed. He was charmingly shy when it came time to remove his trousers, and refused to let either of us watch. Finally he was asleep and we were downstairs in the kitchen drinking instant coffee.

"Well," Kim said.

"Well," I replied.

"It's been a long time," she said.

"Almost twenty years."

We sat silently, and I compared her with the lithe teenager I'd known twenty years earlier. A little thicker and graying, yes. Still pretty damned attractive. She'd changed her hair to a walnut brown; I rememembered it as chestnut. She wore it short; that looked nicer on her than the standard-issue Farrah-Fawcett-do of the mid-seventies.

"Do you still talk to them? I mean, how are Meyer and the Swordfish and Betty, and all of them?"

I shrugged and smiled. "Older. Meyer's still Meyer. Betty got everything lifted and went to Cancun to live the professional Club Med life. The Swordfish finally got married, six–no, seven years ago."

She laughed. "The Swordfish? My God, I thought he'd never get married."

"Neither did he. I was his best man, and he kept turning back to me while she walked up the aisle. He looked like he'd been gaffed." Kim laughed again. She still had that nice laugh, from deep in the throat.

"What do you do, now?"

"Sales, of all the damned things. Envelopes."

"Oh, God."

I spread my hands. "Everybody needs them. Everybody uses them. You can't kill people with an envelope." I shrugged. "It's a living."

She nodded. "And the bills have to be paid."

"It's shameful," I said, "but I like three squares a day. Not like it used to be."

"God, those were the days."

"Weren't they, though?"

I don't always remember the last time with someone, but I remembered the last time with Kim: She'd participated in one of Meyer's orchestrated orgies, and she was wrecked, exhausted. I think she'd just finished four essays or something; it was February. I rescued her when I discovered she'd fainted under two other girls and the man they were blowing. I carried her up to the loft where the bath and the sleeping bed were and I laid her in the tub. I tried to undo the nipple clamps, but they were too slippery with come. Finally I took the plastic showerhead for washing hair and hosed her down.

I unfastened all the clamps–nipples, labia, elbows, ears–and stripped off her rubber gloves and boots. I checked her for dildoes and other insertions, anal and vaginal, and filled the tub with warm water and bath oil. Threads of semen floated off her as the water rose.

After a half hour, she was just asleep. I woke her enough to dry her and put her in the big sleeping bed. The sleeping bed was my rule; I insisted that everyone had to have a place to go where there was no pressure to perform.

I tucked her in and she took hold of my arm. "Don't go," she murmured. I stripped to my underwear and lay beside her, and she moulded herself to me. We both fell asleep. I woke in the night to find that my shorts were gone and she was astride me, flopped forward against my chest, her head nuzzled against mine. Her hips moved up and down, riding me gently. I don't know how long we performed like that, but she slowed and shuddered several times. Downstairs, I could hear the susurrus of orgy.

At last Kim pushed herself upright and tossed back her head. She pumped up and down the full length of my cock, keeping me in only by my foreskin. Unlike every other time we'd had sex, she was silent; we made no sound except for the whispering of moist skin against skin. I was almost detached from what was going on, just the instrument of her pleasure; I watched her breasts move as she rode me. She gave a long sigh, and I thought we were finished when she lay down on me. Her nipples were cool and soft against my chest.

Instead, she tugged gently, and we both rolled over, keeping my cock inside her, and settled into the old-fashioned missionary position. "Hold me," she whispered. "Come inside me."

I didn't last very long; after only a couple of dozen strokes I came with surprising force.

We lay there for some time, listening to our heartbeats. Finally she kissed me and asked me to be a dear and fetch her clothes. She was still wobbly when she tried to dress, so I drove her back to her residence in her car.

Once there, I had no way home but to walk. Kim invited me to spend the night, but I sensed that her time with us had ended, and I'm no good with good-byes. I scratched Zeke behind the ears and walked back to the loft.

Betty noticed Kim was gone, but she said nothing. Betty knew when to be quiet.

"Thank you," Kim said. "For helping with George." She played with her coffee spoon. "He doesn't drink that much, normally. Only when he goes off to the strip clubs."

I smiled. "He doesn't think you know about that."

She shrugged. "You learn things about your husband, and one of the things you learn is which lies are important."

"Like your virginity," I said.

"What?"

"He said you were a virgin when you got married."

"Oh. I hoped–" She started again, explaining: "I didn't mean to lie. It just seemed so important to him, and it didn't matter to me–"

I held up my hands. "I wasn't criticising." I stood up. I had barely touched my coffee. "I should go. It's late, and I've got clients to see in the morning.

She seemed grateful, and nervous, and she walked me to the door. I stopped after I put on my jacket and asked her, "Whatever happened to Zeke, anyway?"

She laughed. "Zeke! Oh my God, I'd forgotten about Zeke!" Her hand went to her cheek. "He died in his sleep. He lived a long, good life. I miss him still sometimes."

"He was one of the good ones."

She said quietly, "So were you." I was embarrassed, I don't know why.

We looked at each other for a long time. A lot of things flashed into my mind: the solid rhythmic weight of Kim on my hips; Meyer's fussy voice as he directed someone; the sound of Kim's laugh; the musty smell of the tarps in the back of the microbus; all the time on the road and all the strangers, all the time; how Kim had said good-bye and I hadn't, and how cold it had been walking home; and her husband, sleeping upstairs. Part of me said, What the hell, so I leaned forward and kissed her good-bye.

She returned the kiss, staying with me when I pulled back, pressing her body against mine. We didn't break the kiss but stayed like that. Her tongue was urgent, forceful. I could taste coffee and Amaretto in her mouth. There was that stirring of my cock, that awareness, that hadn't been present for the strippers or (it seemed) for a long time. I wrapped my arms around her, the warm solid swee

Pushing the Envelope · Part 1 (1/2)
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