Que Sera

“It’s a tall order to ask you to be in love with me when I’m married to someone else,” I say. “When you are married, too,” I continue. “Even if you’re not ‘together.’ But that is, I believe, what’s required here, for the sex to be good.”

I stand against the sink, arms slightly behind me, fingers gripping the countertop from below. I swallow with some difficulty and nod to affirm my supposition, to agree with myself, even though I know the inevitable result of sharing this particular truth at this particular time.

“In love?” he asks, screwing up his face, the way he does when he’s perplexed by my verbiage. X is standing on the other side of the island but I can almost feel the weight of him against me, on top of me, pressing down.

In it, yes. We have to be in it to get into it, I think. 

This is our game. We’ve ended it...how many times? We’d say it’s not working, we should just go back to being friends. But then we’d see each other and the rational reasoning would be lost. 

It would be easy to go to him now, to unbutton his shirt slowly and pull it back from his broad shoulders, off the creamy brown skin covering the protruding clavicles. It would be easy to slip to my knees and undo his belt, pull the fabric of his jeans away from the button and unzip the zipper. As easy as it was that first time, in the back seat of his sleek, newly leased Lexus, front seats pulled forward to offer more room for our sweaty summer bodies, for me to take the mass of him I’d marveled at into my mouth and suck hungrily. How I’d clung and clawed at him that first time as he flung me first on my back and entered me, angled against the door so I could see the whole length of him pushing so far into me, then as he flipped me to my stomach to take me hard from behind, my thighs pressed against the leather seats, the wetness of my pussy sloshing around his cock as it came and went with such force I thought I’d rip the door handle right off.

I shake the image out of my head. Please. God. Give me the strength to resist that which does not serve me…

Do. Not. Fuck. A. Man. Who. Isn’t. In. Love. With. You.

I feel used somehow if a man doesn’t love me, like some sort of vessel or sieve. Maybe it was my mother’s old-fashioned advice in my mind to hold back going all the way because men might abandon you once they had what they wanted.  “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” she’d say. The whole notion, of being bought, of being a cow, of being used for milk...none of it was apropos and yet it stuck. I didn’t want to feel a man was just using my body—even if I wanted it, too. I needed some sort of promise, some sort of potential future, something that might spring up from the union. Maybe I’d read too many romance novels, watched too many soap operas. Even though I had many paramours, I needed something more than just a corporeal body—I needed some soul connection, some raison d’etre.

I have been here before so many times; in college in the late 80s with schoolboys, who came in their pants before they came in me, and many times since with men who couldn’t find any love even as they entered me. Vacant eyes, closed eyes—present in body but not in mind. It could be me or someone else, it didn’t matter to them. But it matters to me. When their eyes are open and they take me in, and there is love there, even a momentary feeling of it, conjured up from somewhere real...Jesus. Yes. We are in it together, then. We are there, present, pressed, and it is mutual and beautiful and connected, if only brief. 

I want that connection with X, I want him to be able to conjure it for me, with me. But it seems he doesn’t want emotions. Just sex. Or he would want more, from someone else, from someone single, and available, who can do his dishes and organize his life. Maybe he wants more from me but doesn’t think he can get it. And I...I don’t know what I want from him, either. 

All I know is that he isn’t really in it, we aren’t, that despite our grasping, groping tangles, as hard as we’ve pushed ourselves against each other, how he’s filled me up—in his way—there was an emptiness to it, a lonely singularity. Maybe I am kidding myself to expect more.

I’d been with Tom 30 years, through ‘thick and thin’ as they say, through my love affairs and his tuning in more to his movies and puzzles for gratification. At the beginning, of course, there were long nights of lovemaking, doing it on desks and standing up in the bathroom, hours and hours of petting and panting and full-on focused attention. But...that doesn’t last. Through child-rearing and job stress, talk of bills and how to build a nest egg, it became hard to lose ourselves in the throes of love. 

So I’d begun to seek love elsewhere, hoping I could focus more, thinking if I didn’t share all the terrible, tedious tasks of life with someone, maybe I could find the sexual side of myself again, the girl who could throw herself in full on for hours. Tom had been shocked at first, when I fell for a sexy guitarist and made it obvious. But somehow we talked through it, fought through it, and realized the near inevitability of such a thing happening, as both of us were readers of great literature. During a session with a marriage counselor, the idea of my “addiction” was raised and I suddenly saw the comparison between Tom’s drinking habit and my pleasure in other men: maybe we were both addicts?! We could either both go cold turkey and suffer or...try to understand and tolerate one another’s various penchants. We agreed on tolerance.

Still, though, even while I’d been given a free pass, it was a challenge to find love and connection that fulfilled me. 

To wit, the man in my kitchen, X. I close my eyes, as if by doing so he might disappear and I won’t have to say goodbye and good luck, au revoir, that I won’t have to muster the strength to let him leave, as he should because he doesn’t really care enough to stay.

But I know I must do something, take some action. Ending things once and for all is up to me. I nod and pull one hand away from its tight grip on the solid surface to wave, fingers folding down one after the other, repeatedly.

“Adios,” I say, eyes still closed against him.

I open my eyes and he is still there, staring at me with that wanton look, desire moistening the whites of his eyes. He, like me, wants what he can’t have, what he shouldn’t have. I smile. Ugh. Here we are again, both dripping wet with desire.

I moan slightly, and throw back my head. He knows I am weak, that I won’t stand by my own made-up moral convictions in the face of…

He has begun to undress himself as he stares at me, his eyes beseeching but resigned. 

Unwittingly, my back arches away from the cabinet, my chest thrusts forward and I feel the pressure mount down below. I cross my legs, as if that might help.

He’s naked now, completely, just standing there, and I drink him in, the entirety of him. I groan, loudly, a guttural noise that comes from deep within me. His body…

Maybe nothing else matters. Maybe I made too much of things. 

I’d promised him that I could be glib and light, smooth and easy like a Frank Sinatra song, glossing over anything that might reside more deeply, hidden beneath layer after layer of my more painful lovelorn moments, my neediness.

Jesus, I want to try. Look at him. Physically, he is very nearly perfect. His muscled arms by his side, his tight core that leads to a slight soft bit of belly all but covered by the now rock hard cock that’s risen in greeting once let loose from his blue boxer briefs. His legs are long and lean and sturdy, I’ve felt just how strong when he’s lifted me—still attached to him—from the couch on occasion. I love to run my hands up the length of him, smooth and supple, to take his small hard nipples into my mouth and suck, to give him a preview of what would come next…

I loosen my grip on the countertop and come around the island to him. I look up as I draw myself down in front of him and take him in my mouth.

I suck hard on him as he reaches down through my blouse to touch my breasts, smiling as usual at my bralessness, like at my jangling bracelets. They’ve gotten huge, my breasts, round and full but still firm. He moans as he touches them, glories in them. I can feel my big ass protruding behind me, resting on the back of my calves. He loves my ass, too. He appreciates my body, if not my soul.

“Mmmm,” he moans, then orders: “Get naked.” 

I stand and pull off my blouse and kaftan, then shimmy out of my jeans, flinging my panties off somewhere behind me. I pull off my many bracelets and set them on the counter. I leave my heart pendant on, decorated with a peace symbol. It hangs between my breasts.

If he’s not in love with me, at least my hippie habits amuse him. Maybe that’s all we can ask for, some mirth and joy, moments, mere moments.

I stand against him then, feeling the hardness of him, gripping his back as he grips mine, finally feeling like nothing else matters.

Another old singer comes to mind, the sappy, silly 50s crooner, Doris Day.

In the movies my mother loved, Doris would twirl around, skirts billowing, blonde hair so perfectly coiffed not a single hair would sway, and she’d belt out with a smile the impossibility of it all.

“QUE SERA SERA, WHATEVER WILL BE, WILL BE, THE FUTURE’S NOT OURS TO SEE, QUE SERA SERA!!!”

He grabs me by the wrists and pulls me with him into the living room, onto the swing bed that serves as my couch. He lays down and I mount him slowly, pulling up and pushing down until he is completely inside. I push my hips forward and grind down against him, moving around and around so as to feel him, full force, against the deepest part of me.

God, he can make me come so quickly. And I do. Loudly and wildly, and yet still I want more.

I’m gushing with wetness as the whole mass of him fills me, the sound of it like suction as his cock enters in and pulls out. He thrusts then, so hard into me, I scream out. My scream buoys him and he thrusts again, pushing, over and over and over, nearly ripping me apart. 

To feel something, someone…maybe that was just the point, the only thing. And I feel him. I definitely feel him, all of him, my pussy walls fitted tight around his hard cock, pulsing in a rhythmic pattern together, like a beating heart.

Maybe being in love is just an illusion, a construct. Maybe all that matters is conjoined bodies, humans pushing into one another to try in some way to connect. Maybe this is the saving life force necessary for all else to continue on. 

Thinking, thinking. I wanted to stop thinking for a few minutes.

“Take me, from behind,” I whisper, as I dismount from him and stand beside him. He moves gracefully to stand next to me and I climb onto the firm mattress on all fours.

It seems like an eternity before he’s in me again, before he grips me hard by my hips and slips into my wet pussy; it’s glistening, I know it. I can feel my own juices mixing with his dripping down my leg.

“Mmmmmm…” Head down, I moan loudly, letting the noise fill my mind.

From behind, he reaches a place I’ve never been touched. It scares me. It hurts and I writhe around a bit to adjust to the feeling, foreign but interesting. There’s so little in life nowadays that feels new…

As he thrusts into me, harder and harder, I grip on to the edges of the swing mattress. I know what’s coming, the force of it, the power. I know to hold on, to prepare in my mind and body. I clench around him, as if to hold him there, in my grip—support him in his journey. 

And it is a journey. He goes somewhere else, he’s so deep in his pleasure. His thrusts increase in strength and speed and the sounds of our bodies pounding together creates audible slaps. 

I want to feel him grow wild against me, to lose all control.

And he does. The pounding gives way to a circular rhythm, mesmerizing in its intensity. And then…he shoves against me so hard that I feel suspended in time, frozen until his next movement.

He always pulls out. We’ve never talked about it, why, whether or not he needed to. 

There is only so much we can share.

I like to see him spent after, to lie next to him without any of the stress or strain of other times. There is nothing to be done, no performance to be mastered, no one’s needs to be met. And so…

That was it. Thoughts of love replaced by lust and desire for a bit, a succumbing, a giving over. And for those feelings I am grateful.

Whatever will be, will be.

Photo by Rosa Gattuso