This is the last in a series of chapters in which our heroine, Kate, tells of a few of her varied sexual escapades accumulated over a lifetime as a successful businesswoman and a sexually liberated woman. Kate began this series by asking herself whether she was a slut, but it no longer seems to be a question of concern and the reader is left to his or her own conclusions on the issue. Rest assured that at age 65 she has not given up sex.
*****
I leaned back in the hot tub on the back porch of my Pacific Heights home in San Francisco and took a sip of the delicious wine I had specially selected for my 65th birthday. It was a lovely Burgundy grown in one of the premier cru vineyards I inherited from my third husband, Yves. I looked across the hot tub at three good friends from my past who had joined me to celebrate my birthday—Halili, the tall Kenyan beauty I had first met in my college years in Berkeley; Sandy, the trophy wife of my former boss at Robards Publishing; and Mary Margaret, the former nun I had seduced when she was still living in a convent in northern Quebec.
It had been many years since I had seen any of them and, if you had asked me when I was celebrating my 60th birthday, I would have said it was unlikely that I would ever see any of them again. I had enjoyed marvelous sex with each of them at one time, but then our lives had moved on in different directions.
When I was 60 and started this series, I was happily married to my fourth husband, Henry, an Englishman who owned a book store in London and as near as I could tell dabbled in various forms of espionage for several Western intelligence agencies. It was his freelancing that had eventually gotten him killed—shot execution style, one night a year ago, in an alley in Marseille. When a spy is killed, he may not have the kind of send off most folks have. I got a phone call from the Sûreté, telling me he had been shot and his body cremated. There was no explanation of who did it or why, and I was encouraged not to enquire further. Eventually they sent me his remains along with a death certificate, which allowed me to wind up his affairs, or at least those that I could find out about. I also received several visits from gentlemen in dark suits presumably representing various other espionage agencies he dealt with, or at least some of them. They mostly wanted to know if I had any papers or other records he created and to remind me that I really shouldn't discuss anything I knew about him with anyone. Best just to forgive and forget, they said.
I never really knew what organizations his free-lance activities associated him with, beyond MI5 in Britain and the CIA in the US. There were likely others. Actually, given his lifestyle, it's not completely clear that he is actually dead. Who knows whose remains are in the urn I keep in my laundry room. I am sure the Sûreté is more than capable of whipping up a phony French death certificate and cremating the remains of some transient who died in a Marseille alley of a drug overdose. In any case, he is gone, and I'm single again and getting used to it.
So for my 65th, since there were no longer any men in my life, and after four husbands I wasn't seeking any more long term relationships with men, I decided to find the women who had been my most interesting lovers. Not my only female lovers by any means, but certainly the most interesting. It took a little work, but I had assembled them in San Francisco for the occasion and now, after a fine dinner out, we were sitting naked in my hot tub enjoying one of my winery's better Burgundies.
Halili was in her early seventies now, and while she had aged, of course, she would still have passed for a woman in her early fifties. Her skin was still the creamy pale chocolate I remembered from my introduction to lesbian sex with her at her then-husband's pool in Walnut Creek so many years ago. Her closely trimmed hair had gone to gray, but her body was still in great condition. She was still stunning. After the Professor died, she had never remarried. During her years teaching at a junior college in San Jose, she had gone from one lesbian relationship to another, with none lasting more than a year.
Sandy Worthington, now in her early fifties, still lived on the horse farm she and her husband Jim had bought after Jim's sale of Robards Publishing. Like Halili, she was a widow. Jim had been killed when a horse fell and rolled on him a couple of years after they bought the ranch. She also had a large home in Woodside, an upscale community just to the west of Palo Alto, where she kept additional horses. She basically looked like she had when I first met her and Jim in a debauched evening following a wedding in San Francisco. Maybe some minor crows feet around her eyes, but otherwise still the same glamorous woman.
Mary Margaret, now in her late-forties, was as beautiful as she had been when I first met her at the convent in Port Cartier, Quebec—perhaps more. When I met her in Quebec she was barely into her early twenties, and she had the kind of beauty that deepened and grew as she aged. Like the others, she was also widowed. Her doctor husband had died of cancer leaving her to finish raising two children as a single mother in Calgary. The children were now off to college, but she still lived in Calgary, alone in the big house she had shared with her husband and children. She told us that it had been long enough so that the pain of her loss was gone and although she occasionally had "a fling," as she put it, she had no desire to enter into a permanent relationship with a man or a woman.
My friends were chatting quietly among themselves when I spoke up. I raised my glass in a toast and said, "Here's to widowhood."
They all raised their glasses in response. After we were all widows. Then Sandy asked, "Is 'widowhood' really a word?"
"It is when you've had this much to drink," Mary Margaret said, "Besides, trust her, she's an editor. An editor with a golden tongue, I might add."
"Oh, so we're going there, are we?" said Halilli.
"Absolutely!" responded Mary Margaret. She raised her glass again and said, "Here's to Kate's golden tongue." We all knew she wasn't talking about my skills with the spoken English language.
The others laughed and raised their glasses. "To Kate's tongue," they said in a drunken unison. I laughed and stuck my tongue out as far as it would go and then lasciviously licked my lips.
"Oh girl, you are so bad," Hallili said.
"Hmm," I responded. "I don't remember you ever complaining about my tongue before. Have you become a Puritan?"
"Hardly," she laughed. "I agree, your tongue is one of the most talented I have ever been fucked by. And by the way," she added, "Widowhood is a word. Trust me, I'm an English teacher."
"She really does have a golden tongue," Sandy said, jumping into the conversation. "I remember the first time we met. She ate me to the most glorious climax I've ever had, before or since."
"Really," I said. "The first time was the best? I remember some other times that you seemed to seriously enjoy."
"Well, okay. You were always good. I so missed sex with you once that fool of a husband of mine sold the company and destroyed our relationship."
"Her golden tongue fucked me right out of my nunhood," Mary Margaret said slurring her words as she jumped back into the conversation.
"Whoa!" Sandy interjected. "I'll buy 'widowhood,' but 'nunhood.' That can't be a word."
We were all laughing hard now, even Mary Margaret. Once she recovered she said, "Okay, maybe it's not a word, but you all know what I mean. If it wasn't for what her golden tongue did to me that night in the Montreal Ritz-Carlton, I would be a dried up old crone scurrying around in my habit in St. Pauline's convent in the frozen north of Quebec."
"Oh, you naughty girl, Kate," Halili said. "You seduced a nun?"
I smiled and even chuckled a bit. "Yeah, I guess I did. I mean, I didn't set out to seduce her, but well, we both had a bit too much wine, and . . ."
