The house was quiet; not silent but very quiet. Outside her bedroom window she could hear the subdued thrum of traffic like a calm sea rippling on a distant shore. The sounds had diminished as the evening had dwindled into night.
Still the telephone beside her didn’t ring.
What to do? She was not allowed to call him: it was against the rules. She would have liked to touch herself, to relieve the tension that had been building for too long. That, too. was against the rules.
She thought of her previous lover, how inconsiderate he had been, Not for him the slow burn of anticipation, the subtlety of foreplay, the variations of touch and tempo that could delay the inevitable over an exquisite hour or more of give and take. When the mood took him he would finger her until she was wet not as a means of welcoming her to the game of desire bur merely to facilitate his entry. She had learned how to move against him, meeting thrust with thrust, fantasising at the same time, and sometimes that would bring on her orgasm; often she was left unsatisfied. When he was finished, he would sleep, leaving her to masturbate or to find solace in sleep herself. The relationship was doomed but still he seemed surprised when she ended it.
So where was she now? Had she gone from extreme to extreme? Was this better? Yes, much, much better. At the age of twenty-seven, she knew her own body and mind, how they could be made to work together. This was what she needed.
But the phone remained silent.
Thinking about it, she remained certain he would call. Once the arrangement was made, he never let her down. Exactly when it would be he never told her. She could only guess what delayed him but she knew the waiting had the same effect on him as it did on her. She was sure of that.
When at last the phone sounded it startled her so much that she almost picked it up. But that was against the rules. It rang three times and stopped. The signal. It was him. Otherwise she might have answered and found herself unable to get her mother off the line at just the moment he was trying to get through. Now, after a brief pause, it rang again and she could pick up the receiver.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes.” God, was she ready!
“Tell me, then.”
“What?”
“Everything.”
“I want you to fuck me.”
“Go on.”
“Hard”
He said nothing.
“But make it last.”
“Go on.”
“What do you want?”
“Tell me.”
In her impatience she had almost forgotten what came next. “Oh, yes, the blue. Panties and bra, the ones you like. And stockings, hold-ups. That’s all.”
“No suspender belt?”
“Oh. No.”
“Next time. You must remember.”
