Met My Old Lover In A Grocery Store

look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east:
Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.
- Romeo: Act 3, Scene 5

* * *

The water slid from the tap, down between her toes and across her instep, striving against gravity to run its way up her outstretched leg, raising gooseflesh as it lapped at her knee. The tub filled with oiled water as the room filled with scented steam, and tiny, candlelit rills of condensation coursed the wine glass she had set close enough to reach without opening an eye. The bathroom door was locked, her son away, the house empty save the dog downstairs, no doubt alert and anxious to announce any intruder. A wet snow streaked past the high-set windows. She was warm and safe and, finally, alone.

She bent up to turn the faucet off, reached out to turn the handle, and felt it just as her weight shifted from ass to thigh, that familiar little tingle skipping from nipple to groin which told her that sexual release had again become a necessity. She leaned back and sank neck-deep into the slick water, thinking of how much she had missed ready access to sex since the divorce, sliding both hands up her torso, cupping her breasts, and then deciding quickly to think of anything but the divorce, as her thumbs made lazy circles around each nipple.

She brought her heels together and her knees apart, trying to consciously flex every muscle from toe to ass in slow succession. Her folds opened to the water as one hand wandered down her centerline, from nape, between breasts and over navel, into her sparse, auburn bush, pushing down firmly as it slid over mons, sprouting two careful fingertips as it skirted her clit and parted her lips. She felt the beading wetness on her forehead as the barely too-hot water stung her openings exquisitely, and as she dipped a fingertip into her own slick wetness she knew she would think of him. Yes, she thought, he would be enough.

She had met him at work, had pursued him there in a manner, she feared, that was all too obvious, had asked him to dinner and been surprised when he had accepted. He was just too eerily right for her: the right physique (solid, not too handsome), the right job (stable, low-risk, well-paid), the right attitude (respectful, honest, attentive), even the right little smile marks around his eyes. She recalled their first real embrace and how a seeming split-second later they were naked and kissing and he held her tightly as they fell through time and space, fell down through jobs and houses and families, through insecurity and regret and ennui. She was in love long before they hit the enormous carnal cushion at the bottom.

He said goodbye, four weeks after the fall, with a note and a single white rose, the color of sadness. The note was the standard chicken-shit article replete with vague references to the standard male chicken-shit insecurities, but the rose was a nice touch. He had an indisputably nice touch.

The last time he had touched her had been both the worst and the best. She had lost control in so many ways, but it had become her favorite fantasy nonetheless.

She pushes her supermarket cart around the aisle-end and there he is, a month since their breakup, still far too right, fondling the melons. He looks up and

she remarks on his fondling and he laughs and says something about abstinence but she is no longer listening. He moves to hug her and trips up over the wheel of his cart, careening into her with much more force than either had anticipated. God, he smells so good, she thinks. He whispers something naughty about cucumbers into her ear. Her knees weaken and she hugs back too firmly, her heart races and she knows now that it has taken this man about fifteen seconds to make her wet and yielding, as it always had.

She reaches out behind her to grab her nearby cart and steady herself as she backs away. Then, steady, straightens the side seems of her dress as she smiles demurely, says pleasantries, and then goodbye. She pushes her cart and looks down at her list and knows that she is as red as the radishes she now passes. One aisle over she pauses to breath in and out and then in and out and to peer quickly into her compact. Two aisles over he is there again, and in theatrically exaggerated absent-mindedness has left his cart blocking her path. As she pauses, smiles, waits, he sidles up next to her, almost touching, a bottle of honey in his left hand, the enormous nipple pointing skyward, and asks her about one of the three ingredients listed. His right hand finds its way down her back and around her waist, coming to rest above the swell of her right hip. She giggles, says that it is pronounced "hunnee," and pushes on, smiling.

Two aisles over he is there again, puzzling over which roll of paper towel will best meet his absorbency expectations. He consults her, reaching down to make his selection as she glides to a stop, and when he comes back up he is behind her, holding the rolls at arm's length to each side of her head, cradling her shoulders with his upper arms and breathing in her perfume. She goes a little limp, tilting her head into his shoulder and exposing the curve of her neck. He bows his head and kisses her there, as she presses her backside into his groin, feeling his striving cock through the fabric.

She turns, looks at him and says, flatly and with a slight widening of her eyes, "I have to pee," and steers her cart toward the single restroom at the far side of the store. He follows, watching the hem of her sunflower-yellow sundress twitch and sway as she walks. There is a queue, as there usually is in this giant market with but one restroom-with but one bowl and one basin and one lock-and the service hall is crowded with people, coming, going, waiting. She leaves her cart on the adjacent aisle and joins the line of three or four backed up against one wall of the hall. He joins her, leans near her against a closed door across from the restroom, and as she turns to face him she leans in and kisses him full on the lips, hard at first, his teeth clicking hers in surprise, and then softly, her lips parting his, her tongue searching. He looses both his sense of decorum and his equilibrium, pulling her in and slumping against the door behind them. The kiss lingers, and it is so sweet, so missed, so good, that she is conscious only of his probing tongue and a familiar sensation of falling.

She almost came, right then, as his tongue grazed the tip of hers in that florescent hallway, her middle finger brushing slowly, deliberately over her pulsing clit below the scented surface of the water. She feels her thighs quiver involuntarily and hears through the grocery store musak that subtle clicking noise her teeth always make as she grinds them down toward orgasm. She likes to work her clit slowly, to strum it with all four fingers in quick succession, overloading the synapses in an instant, bump-bump-bump-bump, and then pause on the edge until the nerve endings are practically begging her fingertips for the next contact. It is the anticipation that does it for her.

Then, a thought, and up she comes out of the tub. She will draw this out, reach the climax of her fantasy slowly, languidly, and she knows what has served before. First, the heat lamp in the bathroom, then her favorite toy from its hiding place in the adjacent bedroom, applying lube to it as she returns to the bathroom and places it on the tub ledge, then back into the water on hands and knees, draining the water level to just below her pussy and adjusting the dangling shower-wand temperature far into the blue end of the scale. Now, where was she?

The sensation of falling she feels as their kiss ripens is a bit too complex. She feels it in her heart because she had once loved this man, but she feels it in her head because she is, in fact, falling. The hallway door that she is pressing him against is not locked. It isn't even latched, and swings open under their weight. They tumble, eyes closed, consumed by passion, through it and into what they come to realize is an un-peopled, picture-windowed office, an observation booth really, with counter-style desks which jut from the base of the windows, with lumpy office machines on the counter desks and armless task chairs strewn around the room. He realizes instantly that the glass is one-way; she does not. The door swings closed behind them.

He smiles a little smile at her. She returns it. He comes closer and reaches between her arm and waist and clicks the lock button in the center of the door handle home. She makes protest with her eyes and thumbs toward the glass. He pulls her close and blows the word "one-way" into her ear. She shivers and narrows her eyes, and brings her hands up behind him to squeeze his cheeks. He leans back and removes the thin strap of her purse from across her neck, letting it drop to the floor, then undoes the top button of her dress, then the next and the next, exposing her pale yellow bra, her nipples straining against satin.

She reaches down and finds the cool steel of his belt buckle, then the zipper, then the tang. He reaches down below the hem of her dress and slowly drags his fingertips up the back of her thighs, expecting the line of her panties and finding only gooseflesh as a low moan escapes his throat. She has him free now, and drops down to one knee to pull trousers and boxers over knees and ankles and away. She rises slowly, running her nails lightly up the back of his legs and across his cheeks, then holds his cock back against his stomach as she licks from base to tip along the underside. It pulses and jumps and before she can engulf the mushroom head with her mouth he has her upright and spun about, his thumbs inside the waistband of her lacy, yellow thong, the waistband dropping slowly across cheeks and mons and thighs and knees, over ankles and he is spreading her legs about shoulder-width apart. The flat of his hot, wet tongue is working its way up the inside of her leg. Her breathing quickens, she braces herself against the desk in front of them, and bends to allow him to tongue her deeply.

The heat lamps and the steam have done their work. Sweat drips from her forehead as she supports herself with one arm and holds the shower wand in the small of her back with the other. She dips her sex into the tub, warming the folds and valleys and openings, and then dribbles cold water from the wand down between her cheeks, over puckered anus and swollen labia and engorged clitoris. She repeats, and repeats and repeats, and the forth such repetition finds her mouth wide open and her breath coming in short huffs as she drops the wand and quickly grasps her favorite-a translucently pink, double-ended jelly dong, fat and cock-headed on one end and tapered on the other-and guides it back between her thighs and into position. She nudges her clit, and teases her hole, spreading lube over all, then spreads herself with its girth. It fits her discretely, fills her sucking carnal void, and she moves it in and out slowly, creating a lewd popping sound with each withdrawal, bumping her screaming clit with each insertion. The tapered end sits, patiently, sticking out behind her, and she is close, but knows to leave it there for now.

He is biting her moisture-matted, auburn haired lips, sucking her clit, probing her vagina, oh god... he's circling her asshole, then pushing her dress far enough up to lick the hollow at the small of her back. She straightens and spins, pushes him back into a chair, his cock sticking straight up like a purple-veined flagpole, hot and enormous, and she is on him, groping, knees hugging his waist, guiding him into her, arching as he drives home, then rocking, pumping, bouncing, her fingers twined behind his neck. He slowly spins the chair they are in, and the movement compliments the twirling in her brain as she nears her climax, but that's not it. He wants her to see what he sees. He turns her and the picture windows behind come into full view. She is fucking this man, taking his body into her own, in full view of at least twenty strangers, if not for the one, millimeters-thin, layer of reflective film.

"Oh, Yess! Yeeessss! Ooh, God, YES!" The tub is almost drained now and the side of her face rests against the oily residue at the bottom. She works with both hands now, frigs her clit rapidly with two fingers of the left while the right slips the tapered end of the dong into her tight puckered asshole. "YEEEESSSSSS," she rasps as she clamps down on the fat end with all her strength as the rude, pink snake widens her sphincter and the gods of pleasure deign finally to bless her shell-shocked clit with the kiss of release.

"I'm coming!" she says, quickly, and then again, "I'm...c...commmming!" And she is rising, rising with the first spasm as it gathers strength in all her far-flung erogenous zones-from nipples, from neck, from knee pits and soles-and bears down upon her cock-full clit. "YES, YES, YES,...YEEEESSSSSS!" And then, "NO, NO,...OH, NO!" as she feels something else, an enormous pressure she has felt before, one she knows the onrushing spasm will render unbearable. It is too late, and a final high-pitched "YEESSS" escapes her throat as the spasm crashes into her, the exquisitely nasty pressure too much now and she is coming and pissing and coming and pissing and coming as her gasps the briny-sweet smell of urine fill the room.

He is smiling, as he pants beneath her, has bunched the hem of her dress up into his hand and is holding it in the small of her back, clear of the deluge, happy to know her so well.

The tub has been wiped dry; the candles put out. She is downstairs browning hamburger on the range top and still thinking about a man who was too right. If only he had given it more time. If only he could have controlled his fear, allowed himself to know her well, even, well enough.

The dog barks, a car door slams in the driveway, her son is home for dinner, the snow turns into rain.

The End