Ten Thousand Spoons

Abstract: Nadia, a lonely Jamaican-Canadian attorney in Manhattan, is unsure of where things are going with her lover, Rad, an older British investment banker with a wife and kids in Park Slope. Meanwhile, Nadia's secretary's nephew, Jared, gets a high-school internship working for her, and they bond in the midst of their shared loneliness.

Author's Note: Hi, Vix here *waves*. This story is a little romance about two lonely people finding each other in the midst of the gloomy craziness that New York City can be. It’s inspired by Oggbashan's works on Literotica—most specifically, his stories "Mantrap Dress" and "Long Holiday", and it is a submission for the Pastiches de Oggbashan story event. If you enjoy this story, I hope you'll check out Ogg's stories on Literotica, as well as updates about his personal journey and health concerns.

As always, thank you for reading and I hope you'll enjoy!

This is a work of fiction. All characters in sex scenes are over eighteen. All rights are reserved.

—"Best I Ever Had"
by Aubrey Drake Graham

Ten Thousand Spoons
by Vix Giovanni

"They've been married almost twenty years," Trina told Nadia, "How could he do this to her?"

Trina's sister's husband, a successful exporter, had left Tuesday out of JFK airport for a business trip to Kingston. His wife had expected him home Friday. Instead, he called on Thursday evening to explain that he was not coming home to her and their sons. That he had fallen in love with another woman some while ago and was going off with her.

He didn't say how long the affair had been going on or when he planned to return home. He floated the idea that he'd return sooner or later, but his general tone pressed his wife to accept that his adultery was their family's new normal. The call had come the week before, and Trina's sister hadn't left her house in Kew Gardens, or more specifically, her bed, since.

"And who could blame her for it?" Trina asked as she stirred two spoonfuls of whole milk into her Lipton black tea. Nadia watched the spoon twirl, remembering that her mother used to take her mint tea the same way. As a child, she always thought it looked watery and unappealing. Why not just make the tea from heated milk?

"I can't believe this is happening to my sister. To our whole family. We weren't raised this way, where a man has a wife and a mistress and everyone just acts like everything's okay!"

Trina was only five or six years older than Nadia, but having joined their small downtown insurance defense firm right out of high school as a legal secretary, the older woman had more than a decade of experience in the industry whereas Nadia was a new associate, fresh out of law school. Trina was already—proudly—married, and kept wallet-sized school photos of not only her own elementary-school aged children but also her sister's teenagers haphazardly tacked to the inside of her cubicle. Floating among the children's school photos were a couple of photos of her parents and her sister, and to the left of them all was a large framed photo of herself and her husband on the white sands of Pinney's Beach.

It was that photo taken in Trina's home parish of St. Thomas, Nevis that prompted conversations between the two women about their shared British-Caribbean heritage, and to which Nadia explained that her mother was half-Jamaican and her father Scottish-Canadian. “Oh,” Trina drawled at the explanation as if it was a scientific anomaly, “So you’re a Meghan Markle-type.” And then, Trina had giggled and touched Nadia's arm like they were pals and confidantes as she confessed her initial assumption that Nadia was just some stuck-up white girl with Long Island roots.

But over time, Trina's friendly, playful attitude towards Nadia had cooled and become, if not condescending, at minimum, dismissive. Nadia was Caribbean, but Jamaican and mixed; educated, but not an Ivy-leaguer; and most importantly, not a mother herself and therefore incapable in Trina's eyes of understanding or contributing any insight on the multitude of domestic concerns that the older woman brought to work each day. Nadia felt a stab of resentfulness that Trina had no qualms about treating her sometimes like a girlfriend who should be understanding and sympathetic and at other times, like a child who could be overlooked and ignored. But she pushed her feelings aside, as she was wont to do as a young supervisor still cutting her teeth as the newest attorney in the office.

Trina stirred her tea and said, without embarrassment or hesitation and in a slightly affected, accented tone, "Well, it's not normal in our culture. I suppose I could hardly believe it if he weren't Jamaican." She sighed and continued before Nadia had a chance to work up any ire at Trina's offensive dig or to defend her own family's history of monogamy, and that her Jamaican grandfather was always a faithful, caring husband to her French-Canadian grandmother until the day he died. "I've been on the phone all morning till now, trying to calm her down."

The law firm office was an open door environment, and so Nadia, in her windowless interior office, could hear Trina clearly throughout the day, her sentences peppered occasionally with some Kitts Creole turn of phrase, distinctly accented and while not exactly British, unique from Jamaican patois and Canadian colloquialism. Trina's phone conversations—which, during good times, were frequent with check-ins with her children as they went from school to their extracurriculars, and to her sister and mother as the three women found ways to emote within the humdrum of their work days, and to her husband in the afternoon about what to cook for dinner—were a daily misuse of time in Nadia's opinion, and an irritating distraction as she typed up reports to managing adjusters.

"I feel the worst for Jared, my oldest nephew," Trina added. "He's been at home for days with his mum. He claims he's coming down with something, but it's so obvious that he's worried about her."

"It sounds awful," Nadia said.

"Oh, a few days at home won't hurt that boy! Fall sports have ended; he looks like he plays American football with his size, but he's actually a very accomplished fencer." Nadia watched Trina add at least five packets of sugar to her watery milk tea and then close the office's communal tin of miscellaneous sweeteners and put it back in the cupboard. "The boy's an old soul. And a genius, too. Even smarter than my children, I must admit. He's a senior at Stuyvesant and probably will be salutatorian and has already been accepted to his first choice colleges. All but Harvard, but the admission notice should be coming any day soon…."

And with that, Nadia stopped listening as Trina went on. The mention of Harvard delightedly sparked thoughts of Rad: because, admittedly, were never far from the forefront of her thoughts anyways.

He was a Harvard Business School alum. With a lopsided grin, he'd given her a dog-eared issue of Bloomberg Markets with an article he'd written as a graduate student. He'd brought the magazine specially to her Hamilton Heights apartment, tapped her playfully on the head with it as she opened her door and with a wink and explanation of why he couldn't stay, said he'd come back by for it when she'd tired of reading it.

He'd smirked, and lied that he was in the neighborhood when she asked why he didn't just email her a link to the article online, and then laughed genuinely when she told him to ready himself for a call that evening that she was already bored. And though she rolled her eyes at him as she closed her door, still holding the magazine, she rushed to her bedroom window, the one with the best view of Convent Avenue, to see him saunter down the street and get in his sportscar to make the thirty minute drive back to his brownstone in Park Slope where he lived with his wife and two daughters.

She'd laid in her bed, the unwashed sheets still rumpled and musky from their lovemaking days before, and caressed her lips and breasts and thighs as she read Rad's article and marveled that he'd driven all the way uptown just to see her for a few minutes. The article was more than a decade old and written during the Recession, and peppered with banking regulation terms she didn't know or understand. LIBOR. Basel III. Notionals. Vanilla swap rates.

She'd turned the page, hoping for and not finding a photograph of young Rad to accompany the biographical blurb at the end of the article, and when there wasn't any, she'd kissed the page and closed the magazine, woke the screen on her phone and opened the, bookmarked, LinkedIn page with Rad's professional profile: the single photo of him she'd found online. She'd stared at his profile picture as she slid her middle and ring fingers between the folds of her nether regions and relived the slick heat of his skin pressed against hers and the tremors of him moving in and out of her as he'd bitten her earlobe and whispered that he couldn't get enough of fucking her.

She'd met Rad two weeks before that, at the Saks Fifth Avenue in Brookfield Place. She'd lucked out that morning with a co-counsel unable to appear for the calendar call, and thus had a few free hours to browse the second floor sales racks for designer clothes that she nonetheless couldn't afford to buy. Though Nadia had never bought anything in Saks other than a lipstick, she liked walking through the round layout of the downtown store. She liked watching the casually wealthy stay-at-home moms of the Financial District wander through in Lululemon activewear and Patagonia jackets while absently pushing along jogging strollers of children in parkas that resembled little puffins and looked old enough to walk for themselves. She wondered what such women did with their days and imagined their homes always smelled like eucalyptus and lavender.

She took the escalator down to the main floor, where the backlit displays of cosmetics and perfume counters highlighted the products' unaffordability, and indulged in dreamily testing the scents of the display testers. A long time ago, her mother explained to her that smelling coffee beans between fragrances helps neutralize the undernotes of the scents. When she played dress-up at her mother's vanity, she would first go to the kitchen, stand on a stool and pull down a canister of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee to smell between sprays of perfume and squirts of lotion.

Her parents weren't wealthy but her mother had a slim, dignified collection of designer fragrances—Hermès Amazone, Anaïs Anaïs by Cacharel, Chanel No. 19, Chloe and J'ai Osé by Guy Laroche—most likely purchased from the sale counters of duty-free stores visited on her parents' overseas trips. Her mother never fussed at Nadia for misusing or wasting her treasured luxuries. Now that she was an adult, Nadia liked discussing fragrances at the luxury perfume counters of department stores and spraying cards with perfume to wave them in the air. Sometimes, she would find a card days afterward, folded in her coat pocket, and the rich aroma of expensive perfume, still faintly preserved, would make her feel distinctive on cold, wet mornings as she waited for the A-train at the 145th Street station.

That day, she was spraying Bond No. 9 Wall Street on a card, and noticed a man standing at the LaMer counter. The downtown Saks store only carried women's products, and so the man was clearly shopping for a woman. He leaned his tall frame against the counter and thumbed the screen of his iPhone before presenting it to the small, elderly saleswoman with wispy gray-yellow curls who adjusted her glasses as she took a look and then began to open drawers. The saleswoman produced a stack of light green boxes: a tiny box of hydrating mask, an oblong vial of cell renewal drops, and two cubed boxes of face cream. The man nodded, and the saleswoman began to ring the items up.

Nadia couldn't stop staring. The man was strikingly handsome. He had a healthy athletic glow and his auburn hair was styled in a trendy pompadour and he had a neatly shaped full beard of slightly redder hair. The same reddish brown hair also dusted his knuckles and the backs of his hands.

He wore a tapered, tailored three piece pinstripe suit but no tie and ombre patina leather brogues and a real watch rather than an Apple Watch. Though it was only about thirty degrees outside, he didn't have a coat. Neither did he have a wedding ring on his left hand or a band tan. He glanced up from his wallet, giving her only the briefest look, not even enough for a credible acknowledgment, as he handed the saleswoman his black credit card.

"You need any help over there, sweetie?" the grey-yellow haired saleswoman asked Nadia. She flushed, embarrassed, and shook her head vehemently. She felt herself lingering, desperate to say something. Screwing her courage to its sticking place, she moved closer from the Bond No. 9's display and stared at some bottles on the LaMer counter. She casually ran her finger over a squat crystalline sea-green jar with a gold spatula.

"Face cream," she blurted out, louder and blunter than she'd meant to say, "I'd like a jar of… this cream."

The saleswoman's eyes rounded in surprise and then narrowed questioningly. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-six."

The saleswoman frowned and shook her head. "Sweetie, it's your money to burn. But that jar's more than five-hundred dollars, okay, and you haven't got a single wrinkle on your face! You want my advice?" she asked as chucked her chin towards the first floor entry, "There's a Rite Aid down the hall. Grab a bottle of generic Oil of Olay and a bar of oil-free soap. That's all a girl like you needs."

Nadia flushed, unsure of whether to feel gratitude or offense, and yet sure that she was utterly mortified that the man stood there and watched her obviously amused. But before she could answer or turn to leave, his distinctly aristocratic baritone voice interjected, "Add it to my charge. She doesn't need it, but it's what she wants."

The man watched while the saleswoman opened the tester and dribbled a bit of cream on Nadia's wrist. "Now, if you're going to use this, kiddo, it's just as important you apply it correctly than you put it on at all." The cream was luxuriously thick, unlike normal lotion, and reminded Nadia of the scented lotions on her mother's vanity.

She felt the intensity of the man watching as she patted the moisturizer into the skin of her cheeks, forehead, nose and chin and then caressed it in swift upward strokes as directed by the saleswoman. She felt nervous under his unwavering gaze, but when he stopped watching to check his phone, she felt a sudden flash of jealousy at whatever had taken his attention away from her. "If you forget those steps, the directions are in the box and also there's a video on the website. You think you'll remember?"

Nadia nodded, glancing at her reflection in one of the angled mirrors that lined the counter. Her fair skin had a honey-toned glow it hadn't had that dry winter morning, although she wasn't convinced that any less expensive lotion mightn't have done the same trick. Nonetheless, the glow was flattering; against the contrast of her black hair's loose curls and the navy collar of her puffy commuter coat, her dewy skin brought out the trace of slate blue of her hazel eyes and the natural pink undertones of her cheeks and lips.

From the rim of the mirror, she could see the man grinning behind her as he said, "Stop worrying. It's my investment; I'll make sure she applies it correctly."

The woman wrapped the cream in several layers of tissue and placed it in a small shopping bag before tossing in a number of samples: LaMer serums and also a slim rollerball of Bond No. 9's The Hamptons. Nadia's hand was unsteady as she accepted the bag handle, and for the first time, she and the man looked directly at each other. "Why did you buy me this?"

His face spread into a handsome smile as he laughed easily and genuinely. Her father used to look like that sometimes when someone told a very good joke. Her heart burst.

"Because I hate indecisiveness and awkward silences. And, it was an icebreaker." He extended his hand and smiled at her. "Radnor Tovey." His blue eyes lit up when she told him her name. "Yours is an English last name, you know?" he asked delightedly, and smiled when she said yes, she did know, and that her father's family was Scottish-Canadian.

He went by Rad for short and was thirty-eight and a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs. "I'm headed that way," he said, nodding his head vaguely towards West Street at the understanding that they were ultimately going opposite directions. But first, he walked with her through LeDistrict where he bought her a cup of tea and a croissant and fussed lightly that she shouldn't go all morning without something to eat, and then through the Winter Garden where they leaned against a palm tree and made small talk. As he listened to her explain her job as a staff counsel attorney, he helped himself to a piece of flaky pastry dough from the croissant. His beard and moustache gave him the likeness of a Viking warrior on the cover of a romance novel.

"So, you have a real job. That's surprising. If I'd known girls that look like you become attorneys, I might have studied law."

She flushed at the backhanded compliment and bit her winter-chapped lip, subconsciously gearing herself for disappointment as her eyes fell to his shopping bag. "I guess those are for her?"

"For who, Counselor?"

"I don't know who. You're about to tell me."

Rad smiled softly at her candid, invasive question and held her gaze as he answered, "They're for my wife. She asked me to pick them up."

The blow Nadia was anticipating didn't come. Instead, it felt like Rad had shared an extra, and extremely personal, bit of information as if they were already close friends. Somehow, it didn't seem so wrong that Rad was married. And later that night, after their long workdays and quiet impromptu dinner in Brookfield Place behind the heavy doors of L'Appart accompanied by a bottle of 2005 Bereche Grand Cru Côte, they held hands as they walked across the plaza to the Conrad, and held each other as they stood toe to toe besides the bed in a suite with a partial view of the Hudson and kissed slowly. And the start of their affair all felt very right.

They undressed quickly and so she assumed that the sex would be rushed too; she'd never had an affair and thought the clandestine nature of adultery must mean that time was of the essence. That was okay with her; there was something about sex that always made her feel awkward and nervous and ready from the start for things to be over.

But once she stood bare before him, he treated it like they had the rest of their lives to make magic happen. He went to his knees, kissing a trail across her body as he went. He licked under her breasts and down her ribs and kissed her taut belly and nibbled at her hip before finally parting her legs to find the source of her womanhood.