Looking Back Ch 08

In Chapter one our heroine, Kate, a successful businesswoman turning 60, has asked herself a troubling question. Is she a slut? Thus began a series of chapters in which she describes to her husband Henry (her fourth husband) her life beginning with her late teen years and her sexual activities at each stage. The portion in italics in each story is her recollection of some memorable sexual experience from her past. In this chapter Kate tells her husband of a night of debauchery that marked the beginning of her affair with the CEO and owner of her publishing company and his wife.

It was a Tuesday afternoon. I had just returned from work and, after making myself a gin and tonic, I was changing out of my work clothes into something more relaxed. I was standing naked in my bedroom holding the finished drink when the doorbell rang. I grabbed an apron as I walked through my kitchen, threw it loosely around me, and walked to the front door, wondering who it might be. Setting my drink on the front hall table, I looked through the security window to see my husband Henry standing before me, a bottle of wine in each hand.

"Henry! What are you doing here?" I said loudly as I threw open the door. Before he could take a step forward I threw myself at him, starting a long passionate kiss.

Then, breaking the kiss, I turned and yelled over my shoulder, "Simon, it's my husband. You'll have to leave. Use the back door and hurry!" There was no Simon, of course. I was just pulling Henry's chain.

"No need to leave Simon. Just pull your boxers back on, and I'll cook for you, too," Henry yelled, calling my bluff.

We laughed at our little charade, and he handed me the two bottles of wine, excellent premier cru Burgundies, I noted. His taste in wine had improved in the years since we married. Then he turned and picked up a box of fresh foodstuffs that he had set on porch step before ringing. He had come equipped to cook me one of his gourmet meals. As I leaned forward to inspect the food box in Henry's arms, the apron, which I had loosely tied behind my neck, fell off so I was standing naked on my front porch holding a bottle of wine in each hand.

"Oh, so we are dressing formally for dinner?" Henry said.

Kicking the apron out of the way, I took a step back so he could see me in full and did a little pirouette, still holding a bottle of wine in each hand. "I wouldn't have it any other way," I said.

"But, by the way, what are you doing here? Last time we talked you were doing your spy stuff on the Costa Brava."

"Well, I was in the neighborhood, and I thought I would drop in and cook you dinner."

"The neighborhood?"

"Langley. It seems that the Cousins at Langley were more interested in the information I acquired on the Costa Brava than my friends in London were, so I had to make a quick trip to D.C. It's much quicker to fly from Dulles to San Francisco than to London, so I picked up a few things, and here I am. Besides, you promised to tell me how you met your second husband, and I thought I would like to hear it in person.

"I'll be happy to, but would you prefer to wait until after dinner so I can tell you the story in bed?"

"No need to wait. But perhaps we should move off your front porch before your rather stuffy neighbors file a public nudity report with the police."

"This is San Francisco dear, not London. Public nudity hardly merits a police report. I'm not sure it's even a crime."

'That's the price you pay for living in the center of decadence."

"What price?" I asked, unable to figure out what he was talking about.

"You see, in London if you nip out onto your front porch in the buff to greet your lover, you feel like you are really doing something wicked. Here your only concern is that you not become hypothermic."

I laughed at him, pointing out that it had been almost 90 degrees today, a heat wave by San Francisco standards.

We walked toward my kitchen, closing the front door behind us. Henry, following along behind me carrying the box of food, said, "Just uncork that bottle in your left hand and pour us each a glass. Yes, that one, the Morey Saint Denis. We can save the Chambolle-Musigny for later." After a pause he continued, "My god you have a lovely ass, woman." My gin on the front hall table was forgotten.

I did as instructed and, after handing him a glass, took a seat at the kitchen table, still naked, and sat sipping the wine, watching as he laid out the cooking tools and food stuffs needed to prepare dinner.

After a bit he spoke up. "Woman, are you just going to sit there naked, or are you going to tell me a dirty story about your second husband? It's not that I don't like to see you naked, but I've been wanting to hear this story for a couple of weeks now."

"Well, I met him at a wedding, but there was nothing dirty about it. I just met him, and then he called me for a date a few days later. Eventually we wound up in a very dull marriage that lasted ten years, which was at least eleven years longer than it should have. It's really hard to come up with a dirty story about my second husband. Sex just wasn't his thing. Thank god for the institution of the extra marital affair. I would have gone nuts without it. I guess I have to confess, marrying him was a mistake."

"So, let me get this straight: Your first marriage was an accident, the product of your personal version of

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

. . ."

"Right," I interrupted.

"And your second marriage was a mistake?" He continued.

"Right again."

"Wow. You weren't very good at this marriage thing, were you? It's a miracle you weren't killed on your third try."

"Oh, the third marriage was great. He was the one who was killed, not me. He loved to fuck, had a really twisted imagination, left me boatloads of money when he died, and he was just such fun to be around. I really was in love with him. I'll tell you all about it some day."

"Okay, but we're focusing on how you met your second husband tonight."

"I just told you all there was to tell. We met at a wedding. I think my boss' wife introduced us, but I'm not sure, given what went on during the rest of the evening. He called up and asked me out the next week, and we were married six months later. It was all really a big mistake on my part, and his too, now that I think about it. A guy with little or no sex drive should not marry a slut, and vice-versa."

"Really, no wedding sex with your spouse-to-be the evening you met? Nothing? That doesn't sound like you."

"You're right. It should have been a warning about how dull the relationship would turn out to be, but it was a signal I missed."

I swirled my finger in my wine and then slid it into my mouth, sucking it lasciviously as I thought back to the wedding in question. "Well, I didn't say there wasn't any wedding sex that night. It just didn't happen to involve my husband-to-be. Oh, what I did that night was so nasty. I get horny just thinking about it all these years later."

Henry stood holding a ten-inch chef's knife in the air. "Aha, I knew you had a good story, so tell it to me." As he spoke, he began energetically reducing an onion to the tiny bits he needed for his recipe.

I refilled my wine glass and began my tale:

It was one of those weddings that you dread from the moment you open the invitation. The kind being thrown by your boss for his really plain, unimaginative daughter who has somehow snagged herself a man, or something that approximates a man. He really was very nerdy looking, skinny and gangly, too—the groom, not my boss. (My boss was short, fat, and unimaginative). You know you'll have to dedicate one of your precious Saturdays to the event, because after all, the bride's father is your boss, and you also know that the only people you will know there will be the same boring people you work with every day.

At this point in my career, I was still buying the "don't fuck your co-workers" line, so I wasn't expecting to have a lot of fun at this event. To make matters worse, it meant that I was going to miss one of Chloe's orgies. I had become more or less a regular at her parties by this time, and each one seemed an effort to outdo the last for debauchery. But duty calls, and I went to the wedding.

I was so wrong about this wedding. I mean, yes, it was a dull affair, the ceremony in San Francisco's biggest Episcopalian cathedral, and the reception in a ballroom at the Mark Hopkins. Must have cost a fortune. And yes, my co-workers were just as dull at the wedding and reception as they were at work, but . . . and this is a big but, there was one couple I met there who didn't fit the mold.

I was sitting by myself, dressed in a conservative beige suit that pretty successfully hid any feature of my body that a man (or a woman) might find of interest, nearing the bottom of my third or fourth glass of Champagne, when this tall, handsome, silver-haired gentleman in what was obviously a very expensive Italian suit slid into the seat next to me. He had an open bottle of Champagne in his hand, in addition to the flute the waiters were handing out and, before speaking a word, he leaned over and filled my nearly empty glass. As he did so, I felt that lightest touch of his upper arm against my breast.

Assuming he was a bit drunk and his grope was unintentional, I said, "Thank you. I was about to go in search of a waiter. They seem to be getting scarce all of a sudden. I was afraid we were running out of Champagne, but you seem to have found a source."

"I have over the years found that to be an essential wedding skill. Know where the source of the booze is and make sure you have access to it."

I laughed and turned my head to look more closely at him. He really was handsome and looked vaguely familiar.

"You sound like you have a good deal of experience with weddings?"

"Unfortunately so," he said as he refilled his own glass. "I mean I have nothing against marriage. Been married myself, several times. In fact I'm even married now."

"And is your wife here?" I asked in a tone intended to convey to him my hopes that she was at least a thousand miles away. I was really finding this man sexy. It's amazing how you can have that kind of reaction to a person in just a moment or two after meeting him or her.

"Oh yes, that's her just over there chatting up the father of the bride," he said, indicating an attractive woman perhaps ten years younger than him. Like me, she wore a conservative and unflattering dress, maybe as bad or worse than mine, I thought. It looked like it probably cost a lot more than mine though.

"He's also my boss," I said. "She looks very pretty," I continued, returning to the unfortunate topic of the presence of his wife.

"Oh, she is, not that you can tell from that dress," he responded.

"Well, that 's a social requirement for these kinds of affairs," I said. "The first rule is never upstage the bride or the mother of the bride. It's their day and they must be the center of attention. The rest of us are just here to drink their booze and, if we can stomach it, ooh and awe about how gorgeous they look." I wanted to add, "and perhaps get laid by some handsome prematurely gray stranger we meet," but I thought that might be pushing it less than five minutes after meeting him.

"Yes, yes, I understand. But just imagine," and he leaned toward me for a conspiratorial whisper, "Wouldn't it be so much more fun if we were all naked?" It was the kind of thing you could say out loud in a group and no one would think anything of it, other than perhaps it was a bit silly, but when said to a woman in a manner obviously intended to be private, for her ears only, it was tantamount to a proposition.

I looked sideways at him, thinking, with a few more years he is going to make a really good dirty old man.

"Actually, I went to one once," I said.

"One what?"

"A naked wedding."

"Really. Tell me more."

It was all bullshit, but he was fun to play, so I began to spin out a story of a naked wedding. Before I could get any further into it than telling him it had been at a Point Reyes hippy commune, and the bride wore white flowers in her hair and nothing else, he said, "Wait, wait, my wife will want to hear this."

He jumped up, topped off both glasses of Champagne, and strode over to his wife, who was still chatting up my boss. He interrupted them, saying who knows what as he pointed to me. He then trotted off to the back of the ballroom carrying his empty Champagne bottle, hopefully in search of a full replacement. His wife exchanged a few more pleasantries with my boss and then excused herself, walked slowly over to my table, and eased herself into the chair next to me formerly occupied by her husband.

"Hi, I'm Sandy, Sandy Worthington. My husband Jim told me I just had to come over here and meet you. He told me you had a story I had to hear. Something about a naked wedding? Usually when Jim is that excited about something, it must involve sex."

Oh Shit, I thought! Jim Worthington is the CEO of our publishing company. He's come out from New York for this wedding, and now he expects me to tell him and his wife about a nude wedding. He's the dean of the publishing industry and his picture is in damn near every industry trade rag I pick up. Why didn't I recognize him? A few phone calls from him can get me fired, and blackballed from the industry for life. How dumb can I be to start flirting with the CEO without knowing who he is! My god, what did he tell my boss about me?

"Ahh . . . Hi, I'm Kate O'Riley. I guess I work for your husband, somewhat indirectly. He's the CEO of Robards isn't he?"

"Oh, yes indeedy he is, and that gets us the privilege of attending more of these exciting affairs than I can count," she said with mild sarcasm, her elbow on the table, her chin resting in her hand. I couldn't tell if she was really that bored, a little drunk, or both.

I laughed. "Well, that was my boss you were talking to, and as I'm sure you know, father of the bride. I'm a senior editor here in our San Francisco office."

Just then Jim arrived bearing two more uncorked bottles of Champagne. "Darling," Sandy said, "This is Kate O'Riley. It turns out she works for you. She's a senior editor, here in San Francisco. Did you know that?"

"Well, I kind of suspected something like that when she told me that the old geezer you were chatting up was her boss, but we won't hold it against her." He leaned in front of me to refill Sandy's glass, once again giving my boob a rub with his shoulder, much firmer this time. Sandy was watching and winked at me. "Actually," he continued, "I recognize the name. This young lady is one of our rising stars. I have been trying to attract her back to New York, but I'm told that she is committed to San Francisco. Is that right Ms. O'Riley?"

"Ahh, . . . yes, my boss has asked if I wanted to go to New York several times, but I really do prefer San Francisco."

"Enough business. We want to hear about this nude wedding you started to tell me about. Was the reception an orgy?"

"Really, a nude wedding? And an orgy?" Sandy asked with a sparkle in her eye that had been missing a moment earlier as she sat with her chin in her hand. The idea of an orgy seemed to bring her back to life.

Oh shit, I thought. How did I get myself into this. It was going to take more Champagne than I had consumed so far to get comfortable telling our CEO and his wife about a wedding/orgy at Point Reyes, a lot more Champagne. I drained the full flute in front of me and reached in front of Sandy for the bottle Jim had left on the other side of her. As I did so, my shoulder inadvertently grazed her boob, just as Jim had done to me. I hadn't finished filling my glass with Champagne before I felt Sandy's hand on my thigh. She wasn't offended, just horny.

As I looked at her over my glass of Champagne, she said, "Well, I hope this story has a lot of sex in it."

"I agree," Jim added.

"Oh, it does, but I'm not sure that this is the best place to tell it." I could feel Sandy's hand stroking my thigh and working up it as I spoke.

"You know Jim, I think Kate's got a point. This may not be the best place for her to tell this story. Let's adjourn to that lovely apartment we have upstairs."

Sandy continued to stroke my thigh as I looked over my shoulder at Jim. He smiled and said, "Great idea. You girls take these two bottles and head on up while I say my goodbyes to the people who need them. There are several, but I'll be brief. It appears, Sandy, that you have just contracted a bit of indigestion or some such, so we're leaving a little early tonight. I should be up about ten minutes behind you. Don't start without me."

"It's amazing how often that happens at these dull affairs," she said, giving my thigh a last squeeze before she rose from her chair.

As we stood I was wondering if Jim meant don't start the story, or if he had something else in mind that he didn't want us to start. Oh well, I would find out soon enough. So much for my policy of not screwing the people I worked with (or in this case, for).

Sandy and I each grabbed a bottle of Champagne and gracefully exited the back of the ballroom. "Follow me. I know a back route to the elevators," she said. En route we came upon Jim's Champagne stash and grabbed another bottle each. A couple of the waiters gave us an odd look, but our escape was totally unnoticed by the hosts and the guests.

As soon as the door to the 21

st

floor apartment closed behind us, Sandy said, "Thank god were out of that party. I can't wait to get out of these clothes." As she spoke, she walked across the living room dropping garments until she was naked except for a very expensive string of pearls and her black pumps. Sandy was tall, maybe five-ten with a nice round ass and a pair of large soft tits that were beginning to sag just a bit, but would still attract most men. She had thick long dark hair and a lush, but neatly trimmed, bush that matched her hair color. Her eyes were a sparkling, almost icy, blue.

She walked away from me toward the kitchen, saying, "I'll get some glasses. Please take off the dreadfully conservative suit you are wearing. It looks as uncomfortable as mine was."

"What about Jim?" I asked.

"What about him?" she echoed from the kitchen. "He loves naked women. It's one of his better features."

"But I work for him."

Sandy looked over her shoulder and laughed, "So did I, until I showed him how much better I was at fucking than at being a secretary. He has rules for the company that don't always apply to him and, based on the way he was groping your tit with his shoulder earlier, I am sure they won't apply to you."

Normally it is reasonably easy to get me out of my clothes, but I felt uncertain about this situation. When Sandy came back out, I had gotten only as far as shedding my jacket.

"Come on dear. You can do more than that," she said as she set the glasses on a table and then walked over to me. She reached forward with her hands and, holding both sides of my head, kissed me—a long, wet, sloppy, forceful kiss. I felt a fire start in my pussy.

We continued kissing as Sandy slowly undressed me. She unbuttoned my blouse and reached inside the cups of my bra to fondle my tits. Oh so good! The kiss just kept on and on while she somehow managed to strip me until I was down to the rather sexy under garments I had chosen to wear—thigh high stockings, a garter belt, and a very flimsy bra that barely constrained my breasts. I had skipped panties for the evening.