All a Loan

"OK," I agreed.

"Good," Lillie smiled. "How about after tomorrow's Milonga?"

A single candle burned in the window, flickering in the soft summer breeze that sifted through the screen. I had pushed the sofa toward the wall, cleared away the dining room table and chairs, and rolled up the area rug.

Although the Tango has certain more traditional music to dance to, I chose an album of more modern Tango, one with expressive vocals, driving rhythms, and dramatic pauses, and queued it up on my iPhone with a nearby speaker turned on.

I kept on my sheer black dress, held up by thin shoulder straps, but removed my underwear so the lacy perforations on the sides would reveal, in the candle glow, the un-interrupted flow of skin from my calves up to my torso. Finally, I put on a pair of low heels.

Headlights flashed down the drive. I poured us each a Malbec, held one in each hand, and when he rapped twice and walked in, I offered him a glass. We toasted Lillie.

We sipped as we reflected on the milonga we had just left, maybe a little nervously, then drained our glasses, and set them aside.

I touched the play arrow. Seamus offered me his left hand, I took it with my right, then, nestled into a close embrace, we danced. With measured abandon, fluidly, as if we were extracting from every note the infinity of the moment, we moved purposely around the little living room space. His hand rested lightly along my back, leading me with his chest with such assurance that I could close my eyes and experience this dance kinesthetically.

My head was light. My nose filled with the fragrance of arousal migrating through the fabric of his shirt. His breathing became quicker, as his lead matched the tempo of the music all the way to the song's end.

I felt his hand now searching for my zipper, then running it down my back with a soft "Zzzzt," audible during the break between songs. I leaned back and unbuttoned his shirt, the color of rose madder, to expose those well-formed chest muscles, appearing just as I had expected, and yanked the shirt tails out of his pants, and freed him from it.

He lifted my straps, slipping them over my shoulders, easing my dress to my feet. Completely naked except for my shoes, I stepped out of the glistening-black pool, which he scooped up and tossed onto the back of a chair.The next song began, and we pressed into each other, our liberated chests making an even closer connection.

We never finished the song--at least, never finished dancing upright to it. My mouth was too hungry, my nether lips too wanting to delay something I had been denied for more than two whole years.

I undid his zipper, unfastened the hook, and, not elegantly, but still in time to the music, we shuffled down the hallway, banged lightly into my bedroom door jam, and fell onto the red sateen sheets, gasping at the relative coolness greeting our hot skin.

Somehow our shoes and the rest of his clothes were peeled off, and to the successive songs coming down the hallway, we rolled each other over and over and back again on my queen.

My hands touched a man in ways I had been learning about from my BWE literature review: fingering his nipples with my nails, slapping him on the buttocks, tonguing his axillary strands, and finally surrounding his hefty erection with my palm.

With fingers stiffly spread, he forked my short hair along the temple and dragged them through my wet tangles, the traction from the moisture making my scalp tingle. With pain sweetly lavished, he squeezed my nipples between his finger and thumb, driving me into a frenzy.

I released my grip on the object of my desire, inviting him to enter me just as his tongue eased its way into my mouth. I moaned with a high-pitched sigh as his erection split my labia and stretched my well-lubricated vagina.

He didn't plunge deeply, but as a distant violin plucked in a staccato beat, he similarly punctuated his penetrations.

Wrapping my arms around him, I squeezed him hard.

"Do it. Do it!" I implored.

And he did, a strong bandoneon phrasing providing the impetus for a deep plunge, and another and another. The tempo changed, and so did Seamus, easing himself out of my vagina and into my mouth.

On our sides, I licked myself off him as he did the same for me, holding my thigh up and bringing his tongue into my cleft, then sucking my womanhood until I cried out that I was coming.

The last song on the album had been building with force, but its driving rhythm abruptly ceased, as if teasing the dancers. Seamus obliged, dancing ever faithfully to the music, and released his lips' hold on my bursting clit. To the lightly strumming guitars, he kissed me all over my vulvar hair, blowing in little puffs, and telling me how much he liked my little crew cut down there.

I started laughing, and so did he, but with a thunder of ivories, he was back on top and inside me once again, pounding me as the song ended with a flourish.

I came again, squeezing my leader within me, like I was doing a gancho around his thigh, until he yelled aloud as well.

Breathing in great sighs, we kissed each other all over our faces, as I held tightly in our embrace below.

Silence fell. The moon, which had been rising as our evening began, now shone fully into the bedroom and onto me, the borrower, and onto my loan.

"I want you to go home to Lillie tonight," I told Seamus, as my index traced an erotic route along his chest, over a nipple and along his clavicle.

"Yes. I agree."

"She is a remarkable person, you know. And a friend like I've never known."

"She is," Seamus stated, with obvious admiration.

After a pause, he added, perhaps to assist in the transition back to our real lives, "You are some tanguera, Reynes."

"You are some tanguero, Seamus."

"Same time, next month, then?"

"I wouldn't miss it."

Another pause.

"Just remember," Seamus cautioned, and he slowly rose to sit on the side of my bed, "that this is all a loan--a sort of bridge loan, you know, until you find someone of your own."

"I know. Go shower. Just let me kiss you on the cheek when you leave. We can call it interest.

"Uh, maybe not," laughed Seamus, as he got up to go into the bathroom. "Besides, any interest is best paid to the lender."

Laying there, listening to the water patter against the shower wall, I realized just how right he was. Tomorrow I'm going to give her something big. Maybe an assortment of my garden's canned goods. Or no, even better, a whole case of Sancerre.

"Yes!"

I raised my hand with its imaginary glass, "To Lillie," I said aloud.

And to myself I whispered, " But, as for finding a new man, I think I'm going to take my time."