The Affair That Almost Wasn't

Well, there we were, ready to consummate our afternoon together. We were both naked and breathing hard. I knew she was ready - the ease with which I had been sliding my middle finger in and out of her pussy attested to her wetness and her willingness. I was eager to explore her with my cock the way I had been doing with my finger. Her contours were new to me, of course, since I'd only met her a few hours earlier. The topology of her innermost walls was somehow lumpier and more varied than that of my wife's. Lumpy - bumpy - rolling hills of plush, velvety goodness - how do I put into words what I had been tracing blindly with my fingertip as it pumped in and out of her? So much variation in these things - one of the great beauties of this sort of extramarital experience.

Indeed, all systems were go and I was cleared for takeoff except - GASP - I had suddenly completely lost my erection. The uncannily empathic Karen had not failed to notice this potentially tragic state of affairs. I looked in uncomprehending horror at the state of my dick, safely armored in its latex cocoon but otherwise flaccid and useless. "We lost you there a little, huh?" she said not unkindly, displaying something between a half-smile and a smirk.

My lips writhed, trying to form words that my brain was struggling to conceive. "This never happens. Really. Honest." How could an iconoclast like me ever utter such a cliché? The fact that it was absolutely true - indeed, never in my life had I failed to produce an erection at the key moment - only made it more unpalatable to voice this plaintive excuse. My heart raced. Fresh beads of sweat broke out on my forehead, much colder than the steamy sheen that my lust for Karen had birthed over the entirety of my body over the last half hour or so. I heard my pulse hammering away inside my ears. Was this what it would come to? I had spent a decade of marriage in faithful monogamy, during which I had earned my wife's trust to the point she had given me a hall pass to have an affair. Well, faithful monogamy except for some canoodling with my wife's best friend, but that doesn't count if my wife is watching, does it? Anyway, more on that another day. The more pressing problem was my inexplicable inability to perform and the foundering of my maiden voyage into sanctioned infidelity that would result if I couldn't get it up - stat! In some clinically detached corner of my mind, it occurred to me that the more I panicked, the more cause I would have to panic. Well. Relaxing in cases like this is easier said than done.

I at least had the good sense to lie back down next to her, vacating the spot on which I had been kneeling between her parted legs, preparing - fruitlessly, as it turned out - to enter her. I took her in my arms once again as I had during the unhurried moments of stroking, caressing, and kissing that had comprised our foreplay. She immediately began stroking my soft member. I noticed that she did it tenderly, not trying to coerce or even coax it into action but just...stroking idly. She knew somehow that the problem wasn't physical - it was mental. As she did this, my anxiety melted away, replaced by serene calm. At some level it probably was physical - I was physically exhausted after a hard day of work that had begun before sunrise, and emotionally drained after the dance of seduction we had performed together for nearly 4 hours before we had decided to adjourn to the Holiday Inn Express to shed our inhibitions and clothes and unleash our shared passion. Had I convinced her? Or her me? A shared decision? Or had it been ordained by the whim of fate, leaving us powerless to resists its inexorable pull toward this carnal nexus?

And that's when I realized that I was no longer worried about what would happen if there was to be no nexus, no penetration, no thrusting, no moaning, no grunting. I was just content to lie there with her lightly running her fingertips up and down the essence of my manhood. To be sure, it was not nearly so electric a sensation through the condom as it had been when she had done it on my bare skin moments earlier. Still, those wispy tendrils of connection she traced were something I knew I would demonstrate to my wife (and her best friend, of course) at my earliest convenience. I wanted a repeat performance of this technique - of that, I was sure!

Karen began telling me an erotic story from her own past, again appealing to my largest sex organ - my mind. So lost was I in reverie, in the delightful tension between lust and utter relaxation, that the details of it failed to imprint on my memory. It had something to do with her and a threesome she had in college. Or was it more recently? I can't remember. I hope she will retell the story - maybe write it here! - but, for that moment, it was just what I needed. My desire coalesced into heat, and that heat began to suffuse throughout my groin. Millimeter my millimeter, then inch by inch, the tip of my manhood rose above my mons. The latex sheath drew taut, and I knew it was time.

I cut her off mid-story. My haste was divided in three equal parts: lust for her, a desire to consummate this journey into infidelity, and the desire not to lose my stiffness a second time. I kneeled again between her thighs, stroked my erection twice (all right, it was only about 80% hard, but I knew I could achieve penetration with what I had and as we moved together, it would blossom into iron fullness), and rammed myself home. I extended my legs straight behind me, and settled my torso onto hers, leaning down for a kiss. I would like to say that decades of sexual repression and frustration melted away at that instant or that I was swallowed in lust, passion, excitement, whatever. That wouldn't be the truth, though. My thoughts were consumed with the mechanics of it all. Such is the burden of the topmost partner, especially the first time with someone whose movements and responses are unfamiliar. Am I in? Check. Condom in place? Check. Her legs? Here, let me move her feet up the bed a few inches, flexing her knees, angling her pelvis fractionally upward to meet with my angle of alignment. Ahhhh. Just so.

And then we were off. I thrust into her, slowly at first and then picking up speed, probing deeply, feeling my erection grow its last inch as I plumbed her depths. She was pleasantly tight around me, causing the condom to shift just fractionally every few strokes. It wasn't going anywhere - just shimmying around as I pistoned in and out.

And now the emotion, the fleshly intoxication of it all, began to crescendo. Not in the out-of-control, runaway sense that would throw me over the edge into blissful but altogether premature climax. No, this was a steady, building heat that gave way to a quivering but not frantic buzz of pleasure. That was a relief. Again, considering the nuts and bolts of it all, after hours of intensely personal conversation and nearly an hour of cavorting with her naked body before I even entered her, the huge pent-up reservoir of sexual desire I felt for her was a constant menace, threatening to burst forth and overcome my will, my self-control, my PC muscle. But crash into her silky seashore again and again I did, careful not to let my waves of pleasure explode into her just yet.

I slowly lost track of time. I lost my anxiety altogether. The anxiety over my lack of an erection short-circuiting the whole thing. That wasn't happening - I was too turned on. The anxiety over the potential for an embarrassing early loss of control. Not happening. I was in control, feeling more self-assured. The anxiety over whether she found me attractive enough, sexy enough, cool enough, experienced enough - after all, she had welcomed me willingly into her body, hadn't she? Could I not put all those doubts to rest? It turns out I could. Perhaps her empathic talents had reached inside my very mind and quenched those fiery darts of uncertainty and disquiet. Perhaps I was just moving forward all on my own, into a space of quiet serenity. And I just moved with her, into her, out again. My tongue probed her mouth, and hers returned the favor. Sometimes in time with what our nether regions did, sometimes lazily, relishing moments of languid asynchronicity.

Presently, I became aware of the slick layer of sweat that lubricated the interface of our torsos. It bothered me not at all - I'm not afraid of sweat even when not locked in a carnal embrace. At that current moment - well, it was just evidence of our ardor. I suspected she felt the same.

It probably augurs well for our sexual bond that I find specifics hard to recall. Did I talk to her? Call her name? Did I moan? Did she? Were my eyes closed? Open? These are details a writer of fiction would no doubt take great pains to invent. As a reteller of history, my own memories of the minutiae are woefully inadequate because of the haze of passion that lay thick over our coupling. The time we passed together, literally joined at the waist save a thin sheet of latex, would be described by the ancient Greeks as kairos, not chronos. That is, it was measured by heartbeats, not the tick of a clock.

And then, I knew it was coming to an end. Should I delay, change the tempo of my ministrations, regain control over my natural response? No, not now. The moment for me was near at hand. She had had me on the edge for hours, even as we swapped secrets, jokes, and tongues in my car, pretending the teenaged drive-thru barista was oblivious to us making out as if we were hormone-drunk teenagers ourselves. I reflected on the events of the day - our meeting for coffee after we had connected and corresponded online for some days; our extended cup of coffee and amiable conversation that trailed off into hours sitting together in my car, beginning to explore each other's bodies, pressing the limits of our self-control and the state's public indecency laws. Our shared adjournment to the hotel, and now our coupling. Our lovemaking. Our rutting. Our fucking. It had been all of those, and I moaned into her ear, "You've had me on the edge all afternoon. I'm going to cum in you." A statement of fact. Her prowess, my lust, her body, my body, the years and hours and minutes of waiting telescoped into NOW, and the pulsating waves of pleasure that touched off my orgasm overwhelmed me. In those few seconds of ecstasy, the same clinically detached corner of my brain that had earlier suggested I calm down now idly noted that the waves of my seed that erupted from my swollen glans were utterly wasted - they neither gushed into her, filling her aching void; nor shot out through the air, demonstrating with each milky spurt arcing - over her belly, her alabaster tits, her coquettishly freckled décolletage - the tremendous desire for her that I was unleashing.

Restrained by my rubber prison, my essence totally spent, I withdrew. I bizarrely remembered, as the fog of my climax lifted, my 10th grade health teacher telling us we should pull out as soon as we were done ejaculating - otherwise, the rapidly deflating penis could allow some of that trapped semen to ooze out, defeating the purpose of the condom altogether. So I pinched the base of the condom against the base of my cock and pulled out, mumbling inanely, "Just as the Surgeon General ordered," grinning to myself at my health teacher's imagined approval of my conscientiousness. Really, the stuff I come up with sometimes.

And that was it. We cuddled, I showered (because of my disdain for the scent of latex on my body), we cuddled some more. I would have loved to repeat our act, but I was so utterly drained - literally, and in all ways figuratively - that I could not even begin to imagine it. We kissed, we talked shop. She asked my advice about an engineering matter at work. Yeah, we're compatible like that, too. And then we left. We drove together back to her car, but the whole parting of the ways happened under such a blanket of endorphins that I scarcely recall it. I felt fulfilled, warm, complete. It was an amazing beginning - but would it also represent an end? What would our future hold? Or did it exist at all?

Maybe I just imagined that the woman at the Wendy's drive-thru smiled seductively at me as I paused for a late-night repast after Karen had gone. Did she detect something in my aura? My pheromones? Karen's? An indicator that I had been there, done that? Perhaps I was just projecting, imagining where my future sexual course lay, and whether Karen would be there to travel a portion of it alongside me.