Jamira was grateful for the cackle of her senior sisters behind her on the pharmacy line. At the same time, she hoped that 20 years from now, she would not succumb to gossiping about dentures, toupees and impotence. When the pharmacist called "Next," Jamira tapped her index and middle fingers on the white counter and said in a timid voice, "I would like Plan B." She stepped back a bit as if giving the pharmacist permission to eye-scan her head to toe before the latter said, "I suppose I don't need to ask you for I.D."
After the lingering embarrassment had passed, Jamira took the fastest route home. It was a Saturday morning, and she decided to start the spring cleaning with her sizable study. Placing the pharmacy bag on her desk, she reflected on how she had met Guy. She found herself rubbing her ring finger as if doing so would produce a blinding rock, the kind she had spied fleetingly in a window display in the Diamond District, as Guy warned her they needed to find the latest in a series of rendezvous. She kept caressing her finger and drifted into a daydream.
Jamira had met Guy through a friend of a friend, as often happens on the island of Manhattan. What her friend failed to tell her was that he was attached, but they both failed to notice that he was also married. In seven months, the pair became accustomed to a clandestine routine made all the easier by Guy's wife working nights at a municipal hospital to put him through grad school. With New York City being a small world, they had a limited number of the kinds of places to have their meetings -- from culinary dives and midnight showings of B movies to jam sessions at small, unpopular music venues. And as characteristically happens with affairs between married men and single women, they wound up at her apartment.
Their forbidden kiss an hour into the second set at Treble & Bass, had eclipsed their plans to take in a late-night movie in midtown at the Kipps Bay Theater. Night had descended upon the West Village, bringing with it torrential rain. They fled the jazz club sharing his monogrammed umbrella, and ducked into a hellhole off Varick Street that doubled as a subway station. A pas de deux of glances and kisses between them blocked out the underground nocturnal scene of libidinous psychotics and, worse, sotted businessmen enjoying a urination competition in the middle of the subway car. Exiting the station, they splashed their way up the grimy steps in the downpour. Three flights up, they sought refuge at Jamira's place and in each other's arms. Few words were spoken between them. Every time she tried to speak, to ask Guy whether he had made the choice between "the other woman" and her, his tongue probing deep in her mouth pushed the thought further away from her mind. Once his hands found the generous tips of her breasts, her rival was a distant memory.
Jamira felt the hot air from his flared nostrils on her trembling neck and cooed in rhythm with the smooth jazz flowing off a cable music channel. Her eyes were closed; his spied the hour hand on his watch. However, time has a tendency to stand still when lovers' desire comes to a boil. When Jamira's hand reached the final button on Guy's perspiration-drenched shirt, his wood brushed her knuckles. She could feel blood rush from her brain to her cheeks, then speed toward her vulva and clit. Their hands were all over one another, feeling every bump, wrinkle, fold and membrane. He snapped her damp panties against her waxed mound and vulva, then circled his digits to make a froth on her pink and brown petals. His question "Is it good to you?" went unanswered there on the sofa in the dimly lighted living room. All she could hear were the echoes of her sighs and the sound of her natural juices. He asked her again, and seeing as she could not get past "I," he delivered sweet torture unto her by slipping one finger, then two, then three, in and out of her membranous opening until she whimpered for mercy.