Dear Violet

Dear Violet,

Sex with Michael started as we walked to visit the potbellied pig, and everybody knew. “What are you still doing here, mommy?” said my eldest from atop her training wheels, sequined helmet bobbing left and right, the 18-month-old squinting and smiling from a bunched Mexican blanket in the red wagon. “We’re just coming to see Ophelia with you, and then we’re going to go out, and then I’ll be back tomorrow, lovey.” 

I needed an interlude, a measured trombone slide, a transition less jarring than stepping from a house strewn with tired parenthood into an 18-hour date with an old lover. My husband pulled one child and pushed the other; we floated on a raft of small talk until Ophelia’s fence came into view. She trotted up, grunting a hundred pound greeting and squealing as we shoved tortillas through the chain link into her muddy pink snout. Goodbye kisses all around, and I tried with my eyes to convey to my husband the depth of my need and gratitude for this grand escapade.

Michael and I sauntered back down the block, slipped into his car after a hasty house tour. I was briefly ashamed of our sprawling chaos and ready to be compacted into an adult space. We hadn’t talked face to face in five years, hadn’t had sex in nearly seven, hadn’t ever conversed this long in the eighteen years of our friendship. For weeks I wasn’t sure how it was going to feel, and then, like every part of our physical connection later in the hotel, the memory of being with Michael re-emerged with a feathery familiarity.

Talking with him, at a bar, in a restaurant, with the imminent promise of a bed - it is enveloping. Violet, you and all Michael’s lovers must know what I mean. It is a slow, sexy, layered descent. It is stepping down a wide spiral staircase in glasses and a gown, teetering on sparkling heels. Surveying each unfolding idea like so many eager party guests coming into view, crowded together in some vast, many-windowed vestibule. I tried and failed to convey this feeling to Michael, how exquisitely long that staircase feels, how grounding it is to make it down there and mingle, feeling gorgeous and observed.

We sipped bitter virgin concoctions and bubbled with months and years, births and deaths, unborn embryos, drug trips, and the tiny triumphs of everyday. You were there, Violet, wandering in and out of the decadent courses, the sex we’d had together, with others, and inside our minds. The conversation weaved towards my life; I explained how I was in a place of happiness; of resilience, of energy. The subtext was please - please tell me what to do to you, how to give it to you tonight, while I can. I felt giddy and desperate and as self-conscious and confident as the 19-year-old I’d been when we met. You have read that poem, Violet - lasers of vicious yearning.

Whatever we’d covered in that grand ballroom of an evening was fading, but the surreality of escaping with a lover only deepened as we entered the pristine oasis of a hotel room. The white bed a reminder that I was simultaneously wet with want - and bleeding heavily. Michael and I were kissing within seconds, floating again in a vague familiarity of scratchy beard and soft lips and the eye-to-eye clink of two nerds diving into each other. Holding the camera, trying sloppily to show you the meeting of our tongues and hands. You wanted him to worship me, Violet, though you know submission is my default. What I felt at first was the impatience of needing to be naked and trapped under his body.

It had been years since I’d been part of a true makeout, what felt like hours of it, a slow build, my lips raw, hands gliding over skin and creeping under seams. I was thinking about your body, Violet - how it would look and feel to have you between us, your soft lips, your freckles, your smooth round haunches. Michael whispering about your delicious moans. That beautiful erection warm and close, but not mine yet. Maybe, like me, he was riding the sensation of feeling pleasantly borrowed. Underwear straining, he suggested I kneel; I took the tentative command, open and eager, and he started filming for you again as I kissed downward from his stomach, wetting the dark cotton, looking alternately into his eyes and at the future you in the camera, absorbing his soft groans.

I let it spring out, then, and he gave a little gasp, and I smiled, and looked, and tasted. Me and cocks, oh. Any cock, but fuck, your lover’s cock is a diamond, achingly hard and somehow faceted, and it spoke to me to put it on. I hope you laugh, Violet, at how ridiculous that sounds. But truly, beautiful dicks make me act possessive in a bodily way, like an animal meeting a mate, sidling up and smelling and rubbing ears and eyes and all parts within reach.

I resisted that urge, but there was his lovely cock, and me with my lovely fetish, and I remembered suddenly and thrillingly just when I’d last seen and felt its leftward curve, lived a flashback in that tiny hotel room, open-mouthed, pussy dripping, moaning into Michael’s crotch over that vestibule with the suitcase robots, filming for you on an old camera. I knew again, just like that, how slow and still I could be, how to wet my hand and cup him and kiss.

I turned my head and licked up the side, pressed the bottom of his shaft between slicked fingers, opened my throat to him and reveled in gagging gently, explored up and down with my mouth and hands and looked up from time to time to see his face in a gorgeous state of pleasure, and maybe disbelief. Again I resisted some deep animal urge to drag my whole body along his dick, and also lamented this resistance, knowing time was short and long. At what perfect frequency of meeting could we calibrate sexy for comfort and for novelty? Not seven years, Violet.

We parted to talk again, paused to shower through tremors of arousal, makeup running, the giggling logistics of navigating aging and blood. Hopping easily from mode to mode, erection to erection, and then swiftly back in bed atop towels. More hands and tongues, a finger slowly stroking my clit until I ground it upwards into his hand, panting for more, not knowing what to ask for next. “How would you feel if I kissed it?” Michael said, cautiously, but clearly out of genuine desire, and so I gave my assent, though for me the answer has almost always been no.

It was the best yes in recent memory. His tongue and thumb alternated in slow conversation on my clit; he read my reactions and shifted licks accordingly til I forgot to be self conscious about moaning, then shaking. Laying back and taking has never come easily to me; I told Michael so, and he countered easily with real enjoyment and with neck kisses and whispers of fucking me with his tongue in my ear.

So we got there, the condom and the gasp of entry, slow, as slow as I remembered, tip to base, exquisitely full, a little too wet with blood and arousal, lifting my pelvis to meet him as smooth and sharp as I wished, to feel the crushing pleasure of fucking hard. Instinctively raising my arms to be pinned and Michael playing the part. His command to keep kissing - it gave me a little thrill of submission. Does he still ask you, Violet? I got on top, riding too fast for him, gazing down at his smooth scalp, not knowing if his eyes were closed, or tuned on my body, conscious of how much I perceive it to have changed through the growing and feeding of two people.

He said he wanted to come in my mouth; I dismounted excitedly for another shower; we laughed at, then rinsed the red patterns from our bodies. Damp and on the couch now, he laid back, and I started at his neck and ear, kissed downwards to where he was still soft, draped prettily across one thigh, waiting for my next move. Soon he was filming again. “Hi, Violet,” I said, resisting yet another urge - to thank you, for lending me such a lovely man and his body.

I love the build of bringing a soft cock to stand and then to orgasm in one rising and descending arc. Using my lips and tongue, at first, then realizing that I could just hold Michael in the cave of my mouth and hint at movement until he grew enough to grip with one hand, then a second. My left palm circling his balls, fingers pushing a V in the space between his thighs, my right hand a tight, wet extension of my mouth, up and down and up again. Slick, rhythmic moans, until he tensed and spilled into my lips and I swallowed, and milked, and swallowed again. Fuck, Violet, it made me tingle to see him let go like that, to hear his soft yesses and ohs swell and peak and descend into hard breathing, and again that look that bordered on disbelief.

“How are you feeling?” Michael asked, and I would have been utterly satisfied to lay there all night unfinished, knowing I’d been the source of that look. “I’m pretty turned on,” I said, and soon I was straddling his leg and rising to my own peak, pleading to come, falling over the edge with the sound of his lips on my neck and his yes, now. He held me through unsteady breaths, heart drumming.

The morning felt like a compressed version of the night, more calm and focused, despite the desperation of our time reaching its end. All through breakfast, as Michael slid odd facts about timepieces into my sleep-deprived brain, I couldn’t stop thinking about having his mouth on me, wound up those thoughts into the beginning of a story about a D/s scene where a woman forces her lover to spout facts about wristwatches between licks of her pussy. Maybe that’s you, Violet, with your Tuesday lover, another one you could share with me. I shook my head and shoveled blue corn pancakes and bacon into a dry mouth, wondering what my children were feeding Ophelia.

I did ask for and revel in his tongue again that morning, but what will stick with me, Violet, through the months or years until next time, is when I got back on top, and you were near to us in our words and minds. Michael wetly, noisily fucking my ear with tongue kisses, slowly pushing all the way up into me and pulling all the way out, waiting, again, and again, moaning thoughts about you. Making love in friendship, and goodbye, and invitation. Both of us sharp-edged with want and nostalgia, but languid, present, nowhere near coming, just standing at the edge of some gorgeous unseen vista together with no expectation of stepping over or away.

He started describing you as a spectator then, Violet, watching his cock filling me up over and over. I went along with him, imagining out loud you pleasuring yourself, your nipples in my mouth, then sitting naked over his face, squirming as he drew slow circles on your clit with tongue and soft thumb, just as he’d done to me. And my own hands slick with spit, circling under his balls and up the shaft of his cock, sliding into my lips and throat, til he tenses and whispers into your pussy, I’m coming, and fills my mouth.

In the midst of that fantasy, when he asked me for both hands around him, and came for real, he arrived hard. I held it all on my tongue a moment, let it drip back down onto his shaft and stomach, then lapped it up. He invited me, shakily, to get on top of him again, told me with words and licks how much he loves my ears, asked me to be useful when we next meet, to clean up his come from inside you. I rubbed myself on him, pleaded and roared and shook, listening to him imagine aloud the three of us together. Afterwards, we were both unsteady on our feet, and I didn’t want to brush my teeth, so I could taste and feel him all day.

Then it was time to re-enter reality. I don’t know what we said to each other on the drive home, but I was surveying things from some great height, feeling pleasantly resonant, like a grand old bell. I sipped on bright flashes of those 18 hours as I made art and jumped on the trampoline with my children, peacefully weathered tantrums and bedtime. 

I am still basking in sleepy gratitude that delighting in sex and conversation with your lover, my old friend, can resume its place in my life.

Hi, Violet. Thank you. Thank you.

Until next time,

Elle

Photo by Maria Orlova