Mary Elizabeth Nelson

"You can't imagine how long I've dreamt of this."

I could.

She was on her back as I stood. I walked to the foot of the bed. Her eyes were watching my every move. My hands spread her legs a bit. She spread them more. There is hunger. And there was this. I could see her glisten through her hair. It was the most erotic thing I had ever seen. She knew what I was about to do and I knew what I was about to do. I knelt on the bed and bent down. With a lick I tasted her. Her head collapsed to the pillow and her hands grabbed my head and pulled me into her. The details of what happened next are lost to me. All I know is that I was licking and kissing and lightly nibbling on her as her stomach started rolling in rhythm with me.

"In me." It was half-plea, half-demand. I made my tongue into a circle and poked inside her cunt as far as I could. Her shaking increased as her ass started bounding off the sheet.

"Fingers. Fuck me with your fingers." It was all plea. I leaned back so I could look at her. Her cunt. Her tits. Her face. I didn't need to lubricate. Nature saw to that. I placed first one then two fingers into her. Staring at her face, where her eyes were slammed shut and her mouth bubbling, I starting fucking her.

"More." Betty was losing control. Over her body. Over me. "MORE." And I added two fingers and in-and-out. "Bite me, Mary, Bite me." My face dropped to her and my mouth encircled her engorged clit. I licked it. She could barely say anything but she said, "BITE ME." My teeth gently bit into her clit and that set her off. For a minute she shook as her orgasm crested over her, my fingers still moving, my teeth still nipping until I heard "STOP STOP STOP."

I did and quickly drew my body to her left side, my left hand lightly rubbing against her slight tummy as I watched her again try to catch her breath. Sweat was pouring from her as she slowly found herself calming down.

"If you never did that to me again I would die a happy woman."

"What if I did that to you again."

"I'll be dead. But I'll be happy." She turned to me and smiled.

I will not get into details of what she did to me that afternoon. Suffice it to say that were I hit by a bolt of lightning as I walked her to her car, I would be a happy woman. While I sometimes wondered whether I'd set the bar too high, I find that over the years we keep raising it.

But I did walk her to her car a few blocks away and she drove back to Yonkers. It didn't matter. She'd be back. In some ways, from that consummation, she's never left.

I fear I went a bit overboard there. It is so seared into me that I couldn't resist writing about it. I, um, enjoyed writing about that afternoon. If you're wondering, we left a nice tip.

Gerry

There is awkward and there was this. About two-and-a-half weeks after our brunch, Betty met me as I got off the train in Bronxville. About a mile from where she and Peter and the kids lived. I was coming to meet her husband. I had seen him once or twice with Betty in her NYU days. That was long ago. We walked the short distance to the restaurant, which was across from the hospital. As we walked—we had no physical contact—she tried to buck me up, saying he, Gerry, understood and they agreed it was for the best.

"Relax." She said it several times. Her saying it meant me doing it became harder.

It was a Tuesday night and only a few other tables were occupied. Betty led me to a table about halfway down the right wall. Peter, who I did not recognize, got up. It's-been-a-while-nice-to-see-you, nice-to-see-you-too, have-a-seat. Beyond awkward.

Luckily the waitress came to fill our water glasses and take our drinks order. I don't recall what I got, but I remember it was stronger than my usual. I needed bolstering. The place was nice and bright. Quiet with only the slight murmurings of other diners.

"I thought the three of us should meet." Betty. She and Gerry had agreed about the divorce and the boys. It was "amicable" as they say, by which was meant not as acrimonious as it could have been. Each was largely independent already. It was all about the boys.

I liked him. Despite my better judgment I liked him. He loved Betty. She loved him. That much was clear. But given who Betty was it was not, and could not be, the intimate love that she and I had. It never had been. It never would be. That fundamental element was absent from their marriage. Gerry regretted but recognized that. So it was as non-acrimonious as these things can be.

I can't say that the awkwardness vanished. That would take years. By dessert I found myself comfortable with the husband on whom my lover had cheated with me. Not physically; that had been in the open. Emotionally. I think it took him a lot longer.

Betty's divorce was finalized in 2007. She remained in the house in Yonkers with the kids after Gerry moved into the City, to a one bedroom on the Upper East Side. Financially, things were getting tight for them. Betty had a good psychotherapy practice and Gerry was an architect.

The logical solution. I would move to Yonkers. Betty cleared it with Gerry and I got along well enough with the boys. I met them about a week after that dinner with Gerry. Betty, me, and the two boys. It was tough on all of us but we survived it. They didn't hate me. They resented me. Years later, though, each admitted that he knew his parents were unhappy before I showed up and were happy afterwards.

Betty later told me that many, many evenings were ruined when whatever she and the boys were talking about descended into shouting about me. I'm afraid that Betty and I had more than a few shouting matches as she delayed my moving in with her again and again. Especially after I questioned her abilities as a therapist since she couldn't "even get your children to accept me." It was the one time in my life when I was cruel to her. She was giving up so much for me and I was a bitch to her. It took me a while to accept that she forgave me: "You shouted because you wanted to be with me. How can I not forgive you for that?" She was right. I was frustrated about delaying just being with her. Sleeping with her. Getting groceries with her and sitting outside on a summer evening talking about ourselves and the boys and the future.

Finally, though, the date was set. My lease was expiring and I hadn't renewed. It was September 1, 2005. I'd be there when the boys began school. I didn't have much stuff to take. I left my furniture. The photos were gone, mixed in with something and probably lost forever, but I had my Austen and I had Elmer. When I moved to Yonkers, they were the only things I had from Mill Valley. They still are.

To give Gerry his due, he moved a few years later to Baltimore. He met and married Cathy Betts there. While they were still in school, each of the boys spent a summer month there. Now, both adults, they alternate holidays between their mother's and their father's.

I was not lost in Yonkers. (I've been waiting to say that.) It's true. I settled into domestic bliss. I missed being in the City. Doing things like walking to work or wandering in the Park. A cab to a Broadway show. Being able to go for after-work drinks with colleagues.

Still, it was bliss. The house had four bedrooms. Betty and I turned one into my den, where I worked on my writing. I was assigned duties: the laundry, grocery shopping, vacuuming, occasional cooking. The boys were increasingly comfortable with me just being around and dinners lost their edge.

I knew about suburbs. I lived in one for my first twenty years. I became reacquainted with a driving-culture. We could walk into Bronxville to shop or eat or for the train. For everything else, though, you need a car. I got used to it.

The sex? I am the only woman with whom Betty has slept. She was—is—an eager student. Now we can get stuff on-line but back then we'd drive down to Rivington Street near the Bowery and get "things." I had to slow her attempts to put twenty years of missed time into twenty days.

One other Sunday afternoon stands out. Fall 2009. Peter at Georgetown, and Michael spending the weekend with his father. I was washing off the pans from our late breakfast. The radio—WNYC—lightly in the background. I felt her hand around my waist.

"I have a cock and he's very hard and he wants to be inside you."

I could see our backyard and a neighbor's house through the window above the sink. I didn't care. I needed to be taken right there and right then.

"I want him inside me."

With that I felt her pull my shorts and panties down in one swipe. I steeped out of them and spread my feet. Her finger ran through me and sparks followed. I don't know whether I ever got so wet so fast, that April Sunday after-brunch excepted.

Once again instinct took over. The instinct to have her inside me, to impale herself in me. She, too, was an animal.

"You've denied me for too long. Now you pay."

With that she pulled her fingers away, and lifted them, dripping, to my mouth and I suckled on them like a cub on a lion's teat. While the taste was still on my tongue both her hands were on my waist and she shoved her cock inside me in one horrible, fantastic motion. To the hilt. She held it there for days although it was only seconds.

"Beg."

"Please." A chorus of "please"s. Nothing but "please"s until I could not speak. As she felt me getting close she pulled almost all the way out. We both caught our breaths.

"Beg."

She'd never been like this. I liked it.

"Beg." She screamed and I couldn't catch my breath, resorting to pushing my ass to her. My hair crossing my eyes and sweat starting to drip from my forehead. For a moment I wished she could explode inside me and fill me with herself. For a moment. Then it didn't matter as she plunged in and out in time to my guttural moans. Finally, after edging me three or four times she let me cross. I gripped the faucets on the sink as everything overwhelmed me.

Betty needed to hold me up and then she helped me collapse to the floor, my back to the doors below the sink. Her thick, long cock obscenely in front of my face. She knew I couldn't do anything as I continued to shake and quickly took it off. She didn't want me to feel I disappointed her by not cleaning it with my mouth. I so much wanted to and to then kiss her so she could taste my juices but I was physically incapable of doing anything. Lewdly lying with my legs spread and t-shirt against the doors and my hair crossing my face.

She sat to my right. I felt her arms encircle me. Staring ahead, I tapped her leg. "I owe you one." She kissed my right cheek. In my ear she whispered, "You don't owe me anything. I owe you everything." It was the last thing I heard before, somehow, I fell into a deep sleep. Leaning against her and sitting half-naked on the kitchen floor.

Thanksgiving 2010

That may be a good way to end a chapter but it did not end the day. According to Betty, after I was out she somehow led me up to our bed and put me there and tucked me in. She then returned to the kitchen and grabbed the dildo. She came back to our room, and after putting a towel on a side chair, she watched me as she licked the dildo clean. With me asleep, she confessed, she let herself go. She took off her pants and panties then threw one leg over an arm of the chair. Again, according to her, she proceeded to shove the dildo inside her cunt, which was so drenched that it flowed easily in. After shoving—her word—it in as far as it would go she held it there till she couldn't take it. She started fucking herself with it. Again and again until she quietly came, afraid of waking me.

She left it on the towel and crawled in next to me.

Three things made that afternoon memorable. Its spontaneity. Its animal brutality. And that it was a woman to whom I had long ago surrendered myself. I wish I could say it was repeated. We came close a few times but that first is special. We had a good sex life, especially for a couple of old broads—MILF wasn't a thing then I don't think—and it kept getting better. But that was the third of the four of our sessions that I can touch. We'll get to the last.

And our lives continued. Betty was working in White Plains, affiliated with the hospital there but also with her private practice. I was writing my stories, using the fourth bedroom, and full-time for Time. That meant a fair amount of travelling, especially in election season. I now tolerated it, saved only by the reception I got from Betty when I got home from the airport. When I wasn't travelling, I was taking the train to my office at the Time-Life Building on Sixth Avenue. That gave me a shot of midtown adrenalin, as did trips that Betty and I made regularly into the City, usually driving in. We found a place for holidays in Berkshire County, the part of Massachusetts that borders New York and Connecticut. The boys usually came with us.

The Next Generation

As to them, in 2009 Peter graduated from high school and went to Georgetown and after Georgetown he stayed in DC and began working for a lobbying firm, often spending weekends with Gerry and his wife in Baltimore. Michael went off to Boston College in 2013.

I'm not sure what I was to them. Betty and Gerry were active and generous with them. In a sense I, and after he remarried Gerry's second wife, were stepmothers lite. We both deferred to their parents but we were more than just friends. Again, I don't know what to label it. But it worked, and both Betty and I were amused that one or the other of them would complain to me, who they only called "Mary," about her. They knew enough not to try to use me to get around her veto of something. I was proud of both. Betty and Gerry did well by them.

Little did I know that I would acquire yet another group of next-generationers. It began in October 2010 with a letter for me mailed to Time. "William & Kathleen Nelson" with a Mill Valley address was on the return label. I never received, well, anything from them. Not even notice of the births of their two children. I found out about Suzanne and Eric only in one of my periodic trips to the morgue, easier now via computers.

Dear Mary Elizabeth,

We would be pleased if you could join us for Thanksgiving dinner at our home at * * *, Mill Valley, California on November 25, 2010 at 2:00 p.m. local time. Please RSVP by November 11, 2010 so that appropriate arrangements may be made. We regret that we cannot make accommodations available to you, but there are a number of nearby hotels and bed & breakfasts where you can stay.

We look forward to seeing you on the 25th.

Sincerely,

William and Kathleen Nelson

To be clear, I, too, thought this was the most bizarre communication that I had ever seen. Except for my father's "notice" when I was at Berkeley. I imagined that they spent hours crafting the words. The bottom line, though, was that for the first time since I left Mill Valley in 1983. I was asked to return. I wrote a letter to Billy at his law firm at one point, but got no response. Until this invitation.

With the presidential election two years away, I had to come up with an angle for my editor. Someone in California who might be flying under the radar as a challenger for the GOP nomination in 2012. When I identified him, I got my editor to sign off on a visit to his Congressional district, which was south of San Francisco. So I got my travel and hotel taken care of thanks to TimeWarner.

It was typical San Francisco weather. Low 50s, a bit cooler than in New York. I got in on Sunday night and did my district interviewing on Monday and Tuesday. The background story was pretty well done by the end of Wednesday. I was ready for the reunion. I had no idea who would be there. The invitation was so formal that I thought it might be hordes. It wasn't. It was my brother and his wife, his daughter, and his son.

I loved Suzanne immediately. After a formal shake of the hand from William and a brief hug from Kathleen—"Kate" as she insisted—I found myself in a deep hug with Suzanne Marie Nelson, my niece. And then with Eric Nelson, my nephew. But it was Suzanne, much older than her brother—Suzanne was 16 and Eric was just ten—that drew me in. She was tall and slim and so different from the Billy that I knew when he was her age.

Still, I was in my brother's house—he cringed when I referred to him as "Billy" which just led me to do it with some frequency—and order was observed. The turkey was properly prepared and the sides were properly prepared and the alcohol was properly allocated. Things were stiff before dinner as the five of us attempted to carry on a conversation in the large living room, with Kate jumping up periodically to check on "the bird," and Suzanne or Eric jumping up more frequently to check on something unspecified.

I finally found myself alone with my brother. Our conversation began with, "So, Billy, how are you? I heard you're now a big-deal partner in a big-deal firm."

"Yes, Mary. I am. And I've seen some of your work. Your fiction is, well, interesting but not my cup of tea."

I turned to my parents' death. They died in a car crash on the Pacific Coast Highway on April 14, 1998. I learned of it two weeks later when a colleague offered his condolences during a telephone call. I rushed to the morgue and pulled up the story, about the deaths and the existence of two children, Mary, "believed to live in New York City," and William Allen Nelson, living in Mill Valley, California, with one grandchild, Suzanne Marie Nelson, the daughter of William and Kathleen Nelson.

They were cold in the ground, perhaps as they were cold above it, but I still had the right to know. I had the right to decide how I was to handle it. It was not Billy's decision. And when I pointed this out to him in his living room in a calm, measured voice, he said, he decided—not "thought," "decided"—that it was for the best.

There was no point in pursuing it. Chit chat returned with Kate. I have not forgiven him.

Before dinner, the weather being nice, I said I was taking a short walk. I did have some happy memories of Mill Valley. Suzanne jumped up and joined. We walked in the middle of the quiet street where she lived. She asked me about myself and I told her about myself and I asked her about herself and she told me about herself. Then she said, "I'm sorry Aunt Mary for not contacting you."

We stopped and I looked at her.

"They never told me about you until a few years ago but I should have contacted you when I found out. I was a coward. I was afraid they'd find out."

There was no doubting who "they" were. She was just a kid and they were putting this on her.

"Suzanne. Baby. You've nothing to apologize for. What matters is what happens from now on. OK?"

And she said "OK" and we resumed the walk until we circled the block and it was time to go back into the house. As we reached the door, I told her that I'd like to meet her, one-on-one, the next day and we set the time and place to sit down in Mill Valley on Black Friday.

Billy and Kate looked tense when we entered the living room. What did they think we were doing? Kate jumped up and said dinner was ready and we helped her bring things out and sat down, said Grace, and ate. Suzanne, so somber earlier, was open and relaxed, asking me questions and teasing her brother and her mother and even her father.

When dinner was over and the table cleared I passed the kitchen where I overheard my brother and his wife. "I will not allow her to do to Suzanne what she did to herself," he said. "I'm not giving her another chance." His wife agreed, "I don't know why you thought it would be a good idea to ask that bitch here."

My disregard for my brother and my ignorance of my sister-in-law changed at that moment to hatred. To them, I was a subcreature bent on contaminating their daughter. I hoped that Suzanne had not heard, and I did not mention it to her for many years.