You Wandered Down the Lane

She'd also filled me in on Lily's life a bit. Divorced for 14 years, Lily was a loan officer at Fulton Bank. Her daughter Rose was a freshman at Carnegie Mellon, still undecided about a degree but favoring computer science. Imagine that, following in her mother's first boyfriend's footsteps. I was tickled pink and had to stifle another chuckle.

She was still in her work clothes: silk blouse, pencil skirt, hose and heels. I wondered if she'd had time to change, or decided to leave them on for my benefit. "Well, are you going to come in or just stand out there hyperventilating?" She shot a hip, put a hand on it, and grinned.

For the second time in as many days, I regressed to a hapless teenager. I couldn't think of anything clever to reply, so I just shuffled in and closed the door.

"I'm glad to see you, Luke, really, really glad. It's been way too many years."

The tongue-tied teenager finally found his voice, if not his brain. "Uh, thanks Lily...uh, it's good to...uh, see you, too." Wow! I'll bet that just dazzled hell out of her. I forced myself to calm down and think about why I was here. I also tried to ignore the amusement in her eyes. "Could we...um, talk for a while?" I thought um sounded a little less dopey than uh.

She actually giggled. "Naah, let's just pretend like we're 16 again and make out." She dropped the giggle and turned serious immediately she saw my shocked look,. "Sorry, Luke, I've still got that inappropriate sense of humor. Let's start over.

"Hi, Luke, it's really nice to see you again. It's been a long time."

I'd managed to gather a few of my remaining wits about me. "It sure has, Lily, been too long. A lot has happened, and I'm really looking forward to sharing with you." Sharing? Jeez! Not great, but better.

"Me too. Would you like something to drink? I've got Diet Coke, wine, and more Diet Coke. No beer, I'm afraid, but there's plenty of Diet Coke." She started to look sad, then brightened a bit. "Oh, and tequila, half a bottle of vodka, and some—" She walked over and opened a kitchen cabinet... "Glenmorangie."

"Diet Coke would be fine." I risked a joke. "If you've got one, that is." She laughed, thank God. "That's a pretty eclectic selection of drinks." I was willing to bet she didn't need to check the brand of whisky, but was trying hard to make me feel at ease. It was working.

She got a couple of cans of Diet Coke and we sat at the kitchen table, further convincing me that all important family discussions—and Lily definitely felt like family—took place at a kitchen table. I was actually beginning to relax. Her expression turned from amused to concerned.

"Mom told me what's happened to you. How do you feel?"

"How do you think?" I choked back a chuckle when the phrase "shit at and hit" popped into my head. I'd never say anything like that to any woman, let alone Lily.

She grinned wickedly, something women seemed to learn shortly after birth. "Something like 'shit at and hit'?" then laughed uproariously at my expression. "I knew it! You taught me that our junior year when I asked you how you felt about the journalism teacher not giving you the outstanding reporter award."

I was laughing too hard to be embarrassed. "How else could I have felt? Miss Crawford gave it to Susie 'The Suckup' Thornton, who couldn't write a decent paragraph if her life depended on it. She sure was good at kissing Miss Crawford's ass, though." We both laughed until we were teary. It wasn't that funny, but it was a tremendous tension reliever.

We sat and grinned at each other, then I had to ruin the mood by asking the question that had bothered me for so long. "What happened that summer, Lily? Why did you break us up? What did I do wrong?"

She shook her head sadly. "You didn't do anything wrong, Luke, I did." She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "We were amazingly close. I thought of you all the time. Music, movies, cars, couples, you name it, everything I saw or heard made me think of you. No, made me think of us.

"Everything reminded me of us. Everything. I would wonder when and how you'd propose, where we'd live, what our children would look like. It... it scared me. We were too young to dedicate ourselves to just one person. I didn't know whether we would always be good for each other. I can't believe I was so unsure of myself, of us, but I was." She closed her eyes for a moment.

"I couldn't leave it alone. The longer I thought about it the more frightened I got, until you finally asked me what was wrong." Some events have such a powerful effect, you can remember every detail for the rest of your life. I remembered that night, when I asked her why she'd been so quiet and sad-looking and she brought my world crashing down.

"I wasn't ready for that question, Luke. I didn't know why I had these troubling thoughts, so I panicked and said that maybe it wasn't good for us to spend so much time together. I could tell that you were shocked." She hugged herself, looking like that uncertain girl of so many years ago.

My response that night had led us to a huge mistake. "What are you saying, Lily? That we should separate? Is that what you want?" I'd been terrified, but the intensity of my emotions made me sound angry. Her response had made it even worse.

"No! Well, maybe yes, just for a while... oh, I don't know what I want, Luke! But we're too young, I'm afraid that that we'll make too many mistakes, that we don't know whether we're right for each other or not."

Then she had pushed me over the edge. "I'm just not happy right now, and I don't know what to do about it."

Explaining her younger self was hard on Lily; she looked tired and wan. "You took it much harder than I intended, and I didn't know how to make it better. I wanted to tell you to forget what I said, but I was worried that we'd come to depend on each other too much. I finally just shut my eyes and cried."

My memory of that night was as clear as if it had been yesterday. When she had started to cry, I'd thought it meant she wanted us to break up because I was making her unhappy. I loved her so much I couldn't stand that idea. We'd been sitting on her porch, so I just quietly got up and walked away, brokenhearted.

She shivered in her own recollection. "When I opened my eyes, you were gone. It was almost as if I'd had a bad dream, but I knew it was real. I thought you'd agreed with me, that we shouldn't stay together. I sat there for another half hour wishing I were dead, then just went upstairs to bed without talking to anyone."

We'd made a horrendous mistake. For a while we hadn't spoken, each afraid the other had fallen out of love, neither wanting to keep making the other unhappy. Our lives changed forever that night because we both made wrong assumptions.

"And then you went out with Joey Gentile." I couldn't help making it sound accusatory.

She responded in kind. "And you hooked up with Shelly."

I grimaced as I relived those awful times. "And the rest is history."

She burst into tears. I hesitated, then just as her mother had done to me earlier, rushed around the table, knelt beside her, and wrapped her in my arms. She buried her head in my neck, then squeezed me so hard it hurt. "Oh Luke, I never stopped loving you. That whole stupid, rotten thing was my fault. I cost us 20 years!"

"No, it was mine too, Lily, it was our fault. I should have told you then that you were wrong, that I loved you enough to know that we'd be okay, that we were meant to be together forever. That's always what I'd thought would happen until—"

"Until I fucked everything up." When I flinched, she pulled her head back and fixed me with a look that pleaded for understanding. "Fuck isn't always a bad word, Luke, and it's by far the best word to describe what I did to us. I fucked everything up and wish desperately that I hadn't."

I'd still flinched a little, but realized she was right: fuck wasn't always a bad word.

SUDDENLY SHE WAS kissing me and I was kissing her back. It felt so right. Lily and Luke were together again, and this time there wasn't going to be any stopping. Without breaking our kiss, we stood and pressed our bodies against each other, grabbed the other's butt and tried to merge.

It was as if those 20 years had never happened. It didn't take long for our passion to carry us past the limits of our youth. She led me to her bed, then hissed her impatience when I started to undress her slowly. "We've waited too long for this, Luke. We're not going to wait any longer than we have to."

With that, she got out of her clothes before I could even finish unbuttoning my shirt, then took over and stripped me almost as quickly. Neither of us had time—or enough blood in our big brain—to worry that we were on a sure path to adultery. The love we both had denied for two decades soon swelled into a consuming lust. If, as my high school compadres had insisted, a stiff prick has no conscience, neither do engorged labia.

Enough light spilled through her open bedroom door for me to see that Lily's body was still the stuff of wet dreams. Her breasts were firm, just a bit too big to fit in my hands, her nipples still wrinkled up hard as an eraser on a pencil. She didn't have a gym rat's hard body, but she would have been the perfect model for those ancient Greek and Roman sculptors. Her soft tummy and hips were made for languorous loving.

When she traced her hand down past my belly, it wasn't the first time she'd grasped me, nor would it have been the first time she brought me to completion like that. But when I tried to stop her lowering head, she just swatted my hand off and proceeded to give me her inaugural blow job. It was wonderful, but much too short because I went APE—Acute Premature Ejaculation.

In return, without warning I pulled her upright, buried my face in her lap for the first time, then pushed her over on her back. When my lips touched her labia, she sucked in a quick breath and spread her legs wide to give me max headroom. When my tongue made a quick trip up to her clitoris and back, she grabbed the back of my head and tried to bury it in her lady bits.

That was all the encouragement I needed to enthusiastically apply fingers and thumb and lips and tongue in and all over those lady bits. To her credit, she lasted longer than I had before shuddering to her own climax. That made two firsts for the evening, with clear signs that more would come.

When I raised my head, she leaned down and kissed me despite the smears on my lips and chin. "Mmm..." She licked her lips. "You're going to find this hard to believe, but that's the first time I've tasted myself." She giggled as she corrected herself. "On someone else's face, that is. I think I like it." She plastered a wide-open kiss on me, then licked my lips while either purring or growling softly. "In fact, I know I do." Whatever that sound was she'd made, it'd been sexy as hell.

"Okay, Luke, even though your name comes from the wrong story line, it's time for us to go where no man has gone before... " She giggled again. "Oops, that's not quite right. I should have said where you've never gone before."

She'd called her sense of humor inappropriate, but somehow, lightheartedness fit our first experience making love. Even though we'd had to wait two decades for consummation, we both felt equal parts passion and joy when I entered her for the first time.

Thanks to the passion, I sank to the hilt past her lubricious lips without restriction. Thanks to the joy, it was a transcendent experience. It was also a tight fit, which enhanced the pleasure as I slowly moved in and out. Passion soon took the reins, though, and we started thrusting faster and harder.

"Oh my God, Jake, why did we have to miss 20 years of this!" She was crying, but that didn't keep her from locking her legs around me. When her whole body started vibrating like a guitar string, it didn't take long for me to feel the start of an enormous eruption. I didn't think we could have kept this up for 20 years.

Despite panting like I'd run back-to-back marathons, I managed to wheeze a warning. "Lily, I'm about to—"

"Do it! My Depo-Provera is current!" Her vibrations moved up a few hundred cycles, and soon I couldn't hold back any longer. With a force that hurt my dick as it ejected, a stream burst into her vagina so powerfully I expected her to cry out in pain. Instead, the tsunami triggered her own climax, and together we disturbed the space-time continuum throughout eastern Pennsylvania, western New Jersey, and New York's Southern Tier.

I hated to pull out of what had quickly become my favorite parking slot, but worried that I would smother her. Her sigh when I rolled off told me she wasn't happy about it, either. She half rolled to me, put a leg over mine and an arm across my chest; after mutual declarations of eternal love, we soon fell asleep.

We woke an hour later and made love again, then repeated the process a couple of hours after that. I don't think I could have gotten it up again no matter how hard my body tried to rearrange my blood supply. After that third go-round, Lily murmured a question.

"Luke?"

"Hmm?"

"Please don't take this badly, but how does it feel to be a cheater?"

What? I had no desire to ponder that, let alone discuss it, so I just put my arm around her and squeezed gently.

"Wonderful. Let's sleep on it."

By the following morning I'd forgotten her question.

I HAD A GREAT vacation in York the next few days. During the day I visited with Mrs. Q or roamed around York, at night I snogged, shagged, and slept with Lily. A wonderful escape from cares, but I had to face reality, to resolve my family crisis. Did that mean divorcing Shelly? What about Lily? Should I move back to York?

It was time to go home, face the music, and make important decisions.

The morning I told Lily over coffee that I would probably divorce Shelly, she didn't react the way I expected. "That's... quite a step. Now that you're as guilty of adultery as she is—or maybe she just might be guilty—are you sure? Does that make a difference?"

Then I remembered her question the previous night, and I was thrown for a loop. I'd thought we both felt the same way about us, but after she'd asked that twice I didn't know what to think. Mrs. Q rescued me from saying something stupid by calling Lily's phone and inviting us down for breakfast.

After a quiet, somewhat strained breakfast, the kitchen table once again was the scene of an important conversation. Mrs. Q led off. "Okay you two, what's wrong? You're not acting like the lovebirds that've been twittering around here the past few days." Lily and I looked at each other, trying to decide who should answer.

After a pregnant pause, Mrs. Q took charge. "Never mind. Lucas, what happened?"

I stuttered and stammered a bit, but finally managed to get out my version of the conversation between Lily and me that morning. Lily's version was pretty much the same. We agreed that our lovemaking was adultery, the offense that caused me to threaten Shelly with divorce.

Our mediatrix didn't pull any punches. "I have to confess, Lucas, that I'm surprised, and a bit disappointed. Why should you consider punishing Shelly for something you turned around and did yourself? Is it fair for you to judge your children by the same moral standards you were taught even though they grow up in a different world?"

She shifted her attention. "And you, dear daughter, how would you feel if Rose behaved the same way you have these past few days? Would you accept it, or express your disapproval?"

It got very quiet at the kitchen table. I hoped that Mrs. Q was deliberately overstating her case, playing devil's advocate. Lily told me later that she had hoped the same. I had to admit, there was an uncomfortable feeling of truth in her words.

I finally broke the awkward silence. "I guess you might be right about some of that, Mrs. Q. I know that Shelly and our kids would agree. But it isn't easy to challenge your sense of right and wrong, and I'm not convinced that it's always the right thing to do. Who decides?"

"Ay, there's the rub, Lucas. Who, indeed? Your children don't like it that you judge them and their mother. Who would you want to judge you, or judge Lily? If your answer is no one, shouldn't that give you a clue about whether you should judge someone else? If it's okay for you and Lily to make love, why is it wrong for Shelly to fuck someone else?" She noted my wince at her language.

"Oh, did I said it backwards? Why is it wrong for Shelly to make love to someone else if it's okay for you and Lily to fuck,?" Lily gasped and I started to stand.

"Sit down, Lucas!" I'd never heard Mrs. Q bark like a drill instructor, to me or anyone else. I sat down.

"I didn't mean to make you angry, Lucas, but I did want you to look at how you wield your judgment as a weapon, because that's the effect whether you intend it or not. Your opinion matters, especially to people who care for you or look up to you. Yet you seem to think it matters only to you, so sometimes you wind up bludgeoning people with it."

Lily couldn't hold it any longer. "But Mom, Shelly hurt Luke so much she drove him away. Wasn't that wrong?"

"How did she hurt him?"

The question caught Lily by surprise; she thought her mom would simply recognize that Shelly was wrong. "By... by being unfaithful, by flaunting it and telling Luke he had to live with it."

"But she wasn't unfaithful, not in the strictest sense of sexual intercourse outside her marriage. She may have done some things that she wouldn't have done in front of Lucas or her children, but she made it clear that as yet there'd been no penetrative sex. You and Lucas, on the other hand, wasted no time in fucking."

She even put a little emphasis on the last word. It had occurred to me that Mrs. Q could have been a great trial lawyer. Once again, she'd succeeded in shocking both Lily and me into silence. This time Lily spoke up, with an edge in her voice.

"What are you saying, Mom? That Luke and I are sinners?" She put the same little emphasis on the last word as her mother had.

"No darling, that's not at all what I meant." There was no hint of sarcasm in the endearment. "But I do want both of you to look closely at what's happened here before Lucas goes home. You've both made it clear that what you did wasn't wrong because you're recapturing a lost love." She waved off both of us as we started to object.

"But you two thinking it isn't wrong doesn't make it right. Even though your love predates Lucas dating Shelly, what you did isn't any more right than what Shelly threatened to do because she wasn't happy or fulfilled. Did I get her motives right?"

Whoa! Mrs. Q was really laying it on the line. I just nodded. She wasn't through.

"Lucas, you've got to decide what you're going to do about your marriage, how you're going to reconnect with your children, what's to become of you and Lily. Any one of those is a tough decision. Put together, they're a Herculean task."

Nobody could argue with that. The conversation trailed off not long after, and Lily and I went back up to her apartment.

I had left home confused about how to deal with my marriage and afraid of making a poor decision. The following morning I left York confused about how to deal with my marriage and afraid of making a poor decision.

Sure didn't seem like I'd learned much in two weeks and nearly 1500 miles.

IT'S AN EASY three-hour drive from York to Woodbridge, so I got there before Shelly came home from work. I clicked open the garage door, even though I knew it'd be full of clutter, because I wanted to surprise her. To my own surprise, I didn't have to clear out a space for my pickup, somebody'd beat me to it. I closed the garage door and lugged my suitcase into the kitchen.