The Conference Call

I stirred early on Friday morning. The sun was trying to break through the heavy curtains in our bedroom, bathing everything in a dimly spectral half light. I turned into Sarah's warm, soft, body beside me and luxuriated in that animal bliss that sleeping with a woman can give you. I was definitely entertaining thoughts of expanding this warm, comfortable, embrace into some lazy morning sex. My wife was still fast asleep, her curly blonde hair messed over her eyes and her mouth slightly open as she breathed slowly and rhythmically.

I kissed her shoulder above the pipe-strap of the silk night dress I bought for her last year. I love how it clings tight around her bust and how the hemline only goes mid-thigh. It's champagne coloured, and she never wears panties with it, which drives me wild. Just as I was about to awaken her with kisses, my phone started ringing and buzzing around on the dresser. In the early morning silence the vibrating racket was intense. I fumbled for it and frantically tried to swipe it to answer. Sarah stirred beside me, rubbing her eyes and yawning.

- Hello

- Hi. It's me.

Corinna Watson's low and breathy voice filled my ear, instantly shooting a barb of ice into my stomach. Corinna was my colleague on the Artson Project. We had worked shoulder-to-shoulder for months through that gruelling contract. Late nights, tense showdowns with the client, ultimatums and deadlines. We were a great team, the best Architects in the Shumann-Massey Firm.

I also had an affair with her.

They say Karma has a way of catching up with you...

It happened by accident. She had flirted with me for months, but I laughed it off. I didn't think a woman that beautiful could be interested in me. Then, one late evening, when Artson made yet another of their calls threatening to cancel, we became so stressed-out we lost our minds. We were arguing and shouting when something snapped, and, before I knew it, we started tearing into each other. Soon I was nailing her on my desk, her skirt around her waist, and my trousers bunched at my ankles. .

Yes, I'm a douche. I shouldn't have done that. Nor should I have banged her in the supply closet during lunch hour;the next day. Or, in my car later that week. Or, in the motel room we hired. Or, maybe not the five times we did it during the two-day conference in London. Damn, we had a hard time explaining why neither of us had any notes from that trip.

Corinna was so physically unlike Sarah that it was a huge turn-on. She had a sultry Italian look about her. Athletic rather than curvy with long legs and deep-dark hair. A sharp contrast to my wife's buxom-blonde sexuality. Being with Corinna energised me sexually. Even Sarah was benefiting (somewhat) as I over-compensated for my infidelity by having sex with her more often, and with new inventiveness. I was like a teenager, with endless erections and endless capability. One week I had sex with both women for five days straight, like a ping-pong ball bouncing between them. On any given day I might jump Sarah in the morning and screw her to the mattress before she got out of bed. Later, I'd take my desensitised cock and work-over Corinna's lithe body with the endurance of a long-distance runner. On another day, I would fuck my co-worker, hard and dirty, wherever we could get privacy, before going home and making long, slow, love to my wife for hours. Massaging her, patiently eating her out, changing positions constantly, until she found her way to a deep orgasm.

For twenty weeks life was perfect. It was wrong, but it was perfect, and I never wanted it to end. The excitement of keeping my affair hidden was both thrilling and dangerous to me. I'd had close calls. Like times when Sarah called my desk phone and Corinna answered. Times when they almost met. I had to keep my wits sharp. Skirting conversations when each woman asked suspicious questions about the other. Corinna was like a drug to me; I couldn't get enough. She was bewildering in her craziness - deeply creative, deeply unpredictable, and she wanted me just as much as I did her. I did realise that, for her, there was a deeper need in our affair than just sex. Being with me brought out her creativity, her genius. Every time we did something wild, something dangerous, she produced the most outstanding designs, working in feverish spurts, as if she was "cumming" mentally. Every time we crashed together physically she became more creative, more innovative. I delighted to feed this fire. When she was like this, nothing could stop her.

Like on the evening of 9th July. Sixteen weeks into the project, twelve weeks into our affair, Artson finally cancelled. They called us into their plush mahogany-and-leather board-room and crushed us. Apparently, we didn't have the "inspiration" for their "flagship" office building. As I filed out behind our CEO and the Artson execs I saw Corinna catch the elbow of Henry Wineman, Artson's president, and say something to him. We were already in the lobby when we noticed she was missing and we had a confusing wait as Artson security delayed our taxi's and Artson execs made sheepish, embarrassed, small-talk with the guys they had just mercilessly canned. Then the elevator doors pinged and Corinna stepped out.

We had 24 hours.

Later that night, the whole Shumann-Massey building was black except for our lone office. Corinna and I worked like slaves, but we couldn't get it, couldn't crack it. I was frustrated, deeply stressed, and, something else was bothering me. How did we get another 24 hours after such a devastating shut-out? How did we get that stay of execution? What did she say that could possibly change his mind? Over a coffee break in the neutral zone between our desks I asked her. And listened in horror when she told me. She said that, when the boardroom door closed behind us, she got down on her knees in front of Henry Wineman and begged for another 24 hours to come up with the design. Begged him. She told me that, watching her pleading from her knees gave the dirty old bastard a big bulge in his trousers and, when she saw it, she opened his zipper and started begging a completely different way. Minutes later, she got her 24-hours. I was disgusted, livid, raging that my woman, (one of my women), could be degraded like that. That she wouldbetrayme like that. Let that happen to her. She got angry too. She said she did what she had to do to save our asses. I didn't own her anyway. Who did I think I was. We were shouting again. Pushing. Grabbing. Kissing. Bending her over her desk. Skirt yanked up, panties yanked down. Kicking her ankles apart. Panting. Pushing inside. Her hands, flat on the desk. Gasping. Her head down. Looking back between her legs. Fucking.

After a few minutes I noticed something strange as Corinna picked up her technical pen and started to draw even as I fucked her. I looked over her shoulder as she sketched, holding herself up with her left hand and her face almost on top of what she was drawing. She gasped and panted onto her creation, lost in it. I slowed my hips and stopped buffeting her body so hard. Now she could balance better and keep a steady hand. And how her hand was steady! The lines flowed and curved on the paper as she worked. Straight when I pushed in, and curved when I pulled out. I put my hands on the desk to take my body weight off her, my fingers intertwining with her support hand and my chin on her shoulder, watching her create as my cock moved inside her. I fucked her slowly as she panted and made soft female noises at the paper.

This is how we worked for the next hour, with me fitting my body into the rhythm of her creativity. No groping, no pulling and dragging, just moving my length in and out of her slippery-damp tunnel. Letting her feel it. Every now and then she would buck her ass, looking for more stimulation, and I would give it to her a little harder. As the drawing progressed she demanded more and more until we were at a point not so different from our normal passionate lovemaking. I came inside her. She kept drawing. Desperately, I kept up my thrusting pace, willing my cock to stay hard. She was rushing the last parts, trying to finish before an orgasm took her. The effort was intense. Suddenly she dropped the pen and slapped her palm on the desk. She was holding her breath but, her shoulders were shaking. She was coming. She quivered in silence for minutes, a sheet of paper unconsciously crumpled in one hand, and her pussy clenching and unclenching on my tool. Eventually she laid a trembling cheek on her creation and closed her eyes.

I was exhausted, barely able to hang on to her as I looked to see the results.

She had sketched out the window arrangement for the Artson building's gigantic atrium. It was a masterpiece, artistic and functional, modern and timeless. Light would scatter through it into the space below. She had created a huge, building-tall, lattice of window openings all with the same motif, a "lemniscate", endlessly repeated, interlocked, and overlaid. The lemniscate is the symbol denoting infinity, a figure-eight turned on its side, with no beginning and no end. Hers was not a perfectly rendered mathematical symbol, as that would not translate well into the concrete and steel of a corporate headquarters. Instead it was something she had modified, something she had drawn from her imagination. The loops of the eight were stretched and thin to allow interlocking, and the crossover was thick to give structural support. It confounded me; I had seen it before. It was somewhere in the edge of my mind. Where had I seen it? When I stepped back everything was revealed. A lemniscate. Stretched and distorted into a new shape. A shape exactly like that a woman's panties might take if they were stretched between her knees. Stretched between her knees exactly the way they might be if she found herself suddenly getting fucked from behind.

At the gala opening of the Artson building a string quartet played for the politicians and company luminaries while they sipped champagne and chattered like magpies in the huge lattice-work atrium at the building's centre. All of the men were wearing tuxedos and the women were almost as uniform in their little black numbers and evening gowns. From afar it could have been a funeral not a celebration of the country's 31st tallest building. I came out of the Venetian marble bathroom feeling pretty happy with myself and stopped to see Corinna and Sarah deep in conversation by the fountain. I froze in fear. They were standing square on, holding their glasses like weapons, and sizing each other up as they talked. I was too far away to hear anything said but I could tell it wasn't a vacuous chat about the weather. This was the very thing I dreaded most. I shot forward and hustled my wife over to the company directors, babbling at her all the while. As she made bewildered small-talk with those dusty old bastards I chanced a glance over my shoulder and back towards the fountain. Corinna was still standing in the same place, conspicuous in her deep red cocktail dress among all that black, conspicuous in being the only person in the room standing alone. I didn't have to try to catch her eye, she was staring directly at me, her glare murderous.

When our second project kicked off, we stayed late the first night, fighting over the torsional strength of steel cable on a suspension bridge. When Corinna pushed her tongue into my mouth to find her muse I was cold inside. The atrium drawing had changed me. I had realised that I wasn't a lover to Corinna, I was a thing for her. Part of her career. She was using me. A stimulant.

It didn't stop me making love to her again. She could switch my body on at will

The final straw came days later when she decided she wanted to do it in the board room before we had a meeting. I was panicking as she grabbed at my crotch and coaxed me. Her eyes were glittering, her face manic. I had only managed to shove her back a yard when the CEO walked into the room. He stopped and stared at us suspiciously through narrowed eyes. He knew something had been going on. My heart was hammering. I tried to keep calm but couldn't help thinking that if she had got her way then he would have walked in on us. We would have been fired. I was within seconds of losing my career. All I could hear was Corinna's heavy breathing as she smiled at him, daring him with her eyes to say something.

I ended it with her the next day. Mumbling. Refusing to meet her eyes. She refused to believe it, refused to allow it, but I persisted. I couldn't sustain it any longer. There were no tears from Corinna, just cold fury. The company gossips went ballistic when the firm's hottest team asked for separate offices, and to be assigned to separate projects. As I worked in my new office with my new partner all I could think of was her last words echoing in my mind.

"This isn't over Peter. No matter what you think. It's not over until I say it is."

Life went on and life without Corinna was pretty good. I started to feel that I could put our affair behind us. I told myself I didn't need the high-octane. Things at home compensated for the loss, as my wife suddenly gained a new found interest in our love life. I was home a lot more and could notice the changes. Sarah took up yoga three times a week. Before long she was losing weight and getting into shape. Soon her body was as spectacular as it was when she was twenty. She had dangerous curves and a desire to do damage with them. She became more aggressive in bed, initiating sex more often. She was losing inhibitions, gaining techniques. It wasn't like Sarah to join me in the shower, or to want to be on top. Not like her to whisper bad language into my ear as I worked inside her. I couldn't explain this sudden change of character. Perhaps my guilt-driven increase of sexual interest in my wife had sparked something inside her. Weeks after I thought life had returned to normal with Sarah I was facing a bewildering and unexplained sexual explosion.

And I loved it.

I loved it the day she decided, on a whim, to take a razor to her pussy and shave it completely bare. She bounced out of the bathroom and started flashing me before running away squealing until I pinned her down on the floor of the living room for some extremely strenuous, loud, sex. I loved it the morning she followed me into the kitchen - naked as the day she was born - and proceeded to give me a blow-job while I held a slice of toast half way to my mouth. She moaned like she had erogenous zones in her mouth and her tonsils were a second clitoris. Like a dutiful husband I told her I was about to come so she could get ready. Instead of swallowing or letting me go in her hand as normal she just rubbed the underside of my cock with her nose and let rivers of sticky warm cum drizzle down her face like a fucking porn star. I was speechless with shock, she had never done that before. I loved it the night I groped her backside when she was on top of me and found her hand already there, index finger buried to the knuckle in her own ass. She did the same to me with the other hand and we came harder than we had ever done together.

Even though I had ended it with Corinna, and even though Sarah and I were on a sexual odyssey together, I was jealous when Corinna moved on. Jealous and suspicious. After a month of sulking and lolling lethargically in her office she started to produce designs again. Designs of astounding creativity and vision. It could only mean one thing, she had another lover. And, judging by the quality of her work, he was a stud. It shouldn't have meant anything to me, but it did. I started to obsess over her new relationship. I tried to catch them at it. I lurked and spied, burst into rooms unannounced, but I never could catch them. This lover was a ghost. Consumed by the green eyed monster, I could only conclude that he didn't work with us. Little things pointed to it, like when I would walk suddenly into her office and she would slam the phone down, her dreamy smile turning to a brief look of panic. We would stare each other out and talk business in clipped, polite tones. Then, a long uncomfortable silence before I was embarrassed into walking away. I was forced to conclude a horrifying thing.

I was still in love with her.

Karma has a way of catching up with you...

Here Corinna was now, phoning me at home. I knew nothing good could come from this call and I shivered with fear. It was going to end, and end badly.

I whispered down the line.

- It's 7am.

- I know. I needed to talk to you

Sarah had turned to face me with a quizzical expression and mouthed "Who is it?"

I was starting to panic. I needed to think quickly.

- It's work.

I could hear Corinna chuckle on the end of the line and could almost see her stretch sinuously as she talked.

- It's work all right. Are you in bed?

- Yes.

- Is that little blonde piece of ass with you?

- Em...yes... I suppose.

- Is she naked?

Sarah had rolled over to lie with her arms crossed on my stomach and looked up at me expectantly. I noticed she had propped her bust up on her crossed arms and one strap of her nightie had fallen off her shoulder. That dress showed a lot of cleavage at the best of times and my eyes were drawn into that deep valley. I gulped.

- No

- Too bad. I'm naked, you know that? I'm lying here in bed with no clothes on and wondering... I'm wondering if you fucked her last night. Did you do that Peter? Did you stick your cock into her? Get her all wet and make her work that tight ass until she came.

My eyes snapped back to Sarah's face as I fumbled with the volume rocker on the phone. If she overheard anything I was a dead man. She was beaming at me because she'd caught me staring at her tits. She has a beautiful smile.

- Eh, no. Not really.

- No? That's a shame. I'll bet you were going to fuck her this morning, though. Did I interrupt anything?

I was dumbstruck. She had nailed it exactly. I couldn't say anything, my mind was whirring

- Oh you naughty boy. You were going to fuck her just now, weren't you?

My confusion was turning to anger.

- Look, what do you want?

- Don't be rude. I just wanted to tell you about a dream I had last night.

Sarah was getting bored by the length of the phone conversation and the lack of explanation coming from me. She started to amuse herself by tracing lines along the muscles of my abs and thighs.

- Now's not the time. Why don't we handle this when I get into the office.

- But nowisthe time. It was such a lovely dream.

- Look, I'm hanging up now. We'll talk later.

- I wouldn't do that if I were you.

The sudden note of menace in her voice stopped me dead. I glanced at my wife quickly as she occupied herself with my belly button. She wasn't aware of what was happening. Corinna's slow drawl continued, like a dark molasses. Poisoned molasses.

- If you do, I'll call your house phone. Or maybe Sarah's work. I think she'd like to hear about my dream. I'm sure she'd like to hear about all my adventures.

- Ok. I get it. I get it. Let's not do that.

My chest was constricting, I had to think of something to say to Sarah. Something that wouldn't make her suspicious of such an unusual phone call. I put my hand over the mic and concocted the best lie I could.

- Honey, It's work. They have a conference call right now. I forgot all about it. It's, eh... with the Japan office, that's why it's so early. Mostly boring stuff, sales figures and all that. They don't even need me but I, kind of, have to listen in.

It sounded like the clunkiest line of bullshit to my tremulous ears but Sarah seemed to have bought it. She just shrugged and went back to tracing lines with her finger. I turned back to the phone.