Read it to me.
Yuck. I don't even like to proofread my emails.
Please...
It's embarrassing.
More than wearing my panties that time?
No.
So read it.
As you wish...
I think I surprised my wife when she threatened divorce and I agreed. I'm not sure exactly what she was expecting but it wasn't for me to simply agree with her that it was over and that we were better off on our own. The split was anything but amicable even though I didn't try to fight her on anything. She refused arbitration and we ended up spending a fortune on attorneys to simply sell everything and split the proceeds.
If there had been any sign that it was time it was where we moved. She found a trailer in the small town she grew up. I bought a boat. Other than to discuss our son's college career we didn't speak and at times it felt as though the twenty years had never happened.
From talking with other lonely mid-forties divorced men I think I reacted about the same as most of them although perhaps a bit more successfully. For the first few months I enjoyed my new freedom with a series of divorced moms who were willing to trade sex for false promise of intimacy. The promise was never explicitly made nor implied, it was simply inferred and after two weeks of dating and rolling about in the bed below decks or more often back at their small house it would end with a shrug and a frown.
After the deluge came the drought when I simply was tired of the game. The drought ended with a younger woman from work with a broad smile. Her son was away for the summer with his dad and she enjoyed the boat, taking off for the weekend to sail around the gulf in circles. Tanya liked lying in the sun nude and I liked that she did. This time I was the one that believed us to be more than we were. When her son returned from his summer break she reasonably asked that we keep our relationship to ourselves. Finding an afternoon to sneak away for a quick romp became meeting for lunch and then nothing more than unsatisfying phone calls during which I would tell her I missed her and she would lie and say she missed me too.
Late September found me passing my free time polishing, sanding, staining and painting Ms. Anne Thrope, my 43 foot French made sloop and dipping a glass of wine with a tuna salad sandwich when the sun finally went down and it cooled off.
Robert and Laura were my neighbors. They had been gone a month having taken their big diesel powered boat south to Cozumel. It was a surprisingly pleasant afternoon when I returned from doing a little business to find their slip filled with the tall wide craft and Laura doddering around on deck. It was good to see her. She seemed pleased to see me again. There wasn't any sort of agenda with Laura. She and Robert were happily married. I found the platonic nature of my relationship to the red head relaxing. I helped her for a moment pass boxes and plastic bags willed with trash off board then begged my leave to change.
That's too much exposition.
Is it?
It's a dirty story, get dirty.
I'm setting it up.
You are trying to justify it. Just move on, they don't really care. You were lonely, bored and stoned. I was hot and you wanted me.
Okay.
There were a few aspects to living aboard a boat I hadn't expected. First, I lost a lot of weight. There was no real allure to sitting below deck and staring at a small TV for hours. I spent most of my spare time working on the boat. There isn't enough storage for a bunch of food so I tended to buy just what I wanted to eat on any given day and if I wasn't motivated enough to go to the store I made due with a tuna salad sandwich or BLT.
The second thing you learn quickly is that you need to get along with your Neighbors. There is no six foot block wall separating you from them. On warm quiet nights you can hear what they are watching on television or listen in to their conversations. You hear other things as well. During the month they were gone he had forgotten. That first night they were back he remembered. As they made love less than twenty feet away with the small windows open to the light breeze that stirred the rigging he heard the soft moans she made as they began to make love and the passionate cries she let loose at the moment of climax. It left him lonely and aroused. A call to his girlfriend went unanswered and the speed at which he found himself sent to voicemail left him certain she had silenced his call rather than take it. He fantasized about the married woman in the next slip before allowing the sway of the boat to press him into sleep.
The other thing he hadn't expected but probably could have anticipated was the ever-present aroma of Marijuana. Texas was a strange place. He had quickly come to understand that it isn't as conservative as it is libertarian. Unlike the Bible belt, Texas has an equal appreciation for your right to ogle boobies on Saturday night and your right to praise Jesus the next morning. As much as they are willing to string up a drug dealer for selling weed out of the back of a '86 Buick regal, they really don't give a shit if you light up a joint in the privacy of your own home. In the Marina the weed came from "Ger-mo." Guillermo was the dockhand at the Shell station where we bought our marine Diesel and he carried a broad selection of imported and domestic strains. Friday had gone well. Two orders, months in the making, both came in. I tried to get Tanya to go to dinner but the conversation was cool and distant and I got the message. Rather than steaks I bought pre-rolled joints manufactured in Oregon and spun up a little Steely Dan and opened an expensive Pinot I had been holding onto for too long.
It might have been the fact I hadn't seen Tanya in more than a month. It might have been the chemically altered paths the little sparks in my brain were following. I can't say for certain. I don't think she meant to be alluring. She was dressed no differently than normal in short navy shorts and a small thin tank that stretched tight across her large mature breasts but I think for the first time I noticed her in that way. Her breasts bobbed and quaked as she walked. Her red hair, loose rather than tied back was blown by the wind and when she called out to me she shook her head in that perfect sort of way that tossed it out of her eyes.
"Oh my god, can I have one?" she called up to me. I didn't smoke as much as I used to but I still kept a pack around. Laura was known to mooch them when they wandered aboard for a cocktail or glass of wine.
"Um, sure." I said. I coughed, distracted I had taken far too long a drag.
She climbed aboard. Her breasts swayed and bobbed with every move she made and I sat enthralled. How had I not noticed. As she cleared away my tools I studied her ass. It was broad and soft and I found myself wanting it.
She took a cigarette out of the pack. She didn't necessarily make any acknowledgement that the cigarette in my hand wasn't a cigarette at all. She simply took it from me and took a couple of quick draws of it.
That was intentional.
Was it?
All of it. I could smell what you were doing. I took the trash out just as an excuse.
You're so bad
I know. I had to walk up to the cans three times before you noticed.
Did you?
You, my love, were baked.
Sorry.
Don't be. It's interesting to hear your point of view.
I'm not taking too long to get to the good parts?
Oh, no. You definitely are taking too long to get to the good parts.
Alright, I'll hurry.
No, it's fine. You can edit it down later.
Okay.
We alternated between tobacco and marijuana and the afternoon settled into evening. Relaxed and happy we didn't really talk. She asked me a couple of times about my girlfriend and I tried to wrap my head around Tanya and what had happened. It was a lot to try to process. I found myself confusing my lusty memories of nights on the boat with the younger brunette and the delightfully sensual red head with freckles and pink skin in front of me.
"Where's Robert?" I asked again not realizing it was about the third time we had discussed her husband and his supply run. Each time we did she pulled out her phone and asked him to pick up something else. This time it was Corn chips. I had to agree with her, I had never wanted Nacho flavored corn chips more.
"Where's your hammock?" she asked innocently.
It wasn't innocent.
No?
Nope.
As much of a pain as it was to go below, dig out the hammock, string it between the mizzen and main masts and then coordinate our drunken and stoned movements to get into it I found myself obsessed with having to get it done. The effort and concentration necessary to accomplish hanging it sobered me up but once we had settled into it, my head at one end, hers at the other, our bodies pressed together by the natural physics of it I found a degree of bliss I hadn't expected. The sun was setting and the sky was darkening. An orange glow was cast across everything my eyes took in. Laura's hand, wrapped around my thigh was uncomfortably exciting.
Then I noticed her hand.
I had been staring at her for what felt like hours but mostly I had been focused on her barely open eyes and the freckles scattered over her cheeks and shoulders. I moaned when I noticed her had cupping her large breast through the thin material of her tank.
I watched as her chest swelled with each breath and studied how she held each inhale a moment to stroke her clearly firm nipple with her thumbnail. It was hot and humid. It was too hot to be coupled together like we were and sweat made our flesh slick where it touched. I moved my leg just slightly to get comfortable and enjoyed too much the feel of her against me. She moved as well, only slightly. We wriggled against each other slowly, the moments slow, deliberate, and probably because of the pot and wine extremely sexual.
"Are you watching me?" she asked barely above a whisper. I wasn't sure she had actually said something or if I had imagined it.
"Yes." I replied.
She smiled.
Her hand moved to the buttons of her shorts. I watched it as intently as it fumbled and eventually released first one, and then a second. Her fingers disappeared. Her legs parted. She was nesteled in between my calves. She sighed a little. I found myself focused on her slightly parted lips and the way she gasped for breath and then exhaled slowly as if doing yoga.
Her smile contorted as if she was in pain. The world seemed to shake around me although it was just the quick movements of her hand inside of her pants moving more rapidly.
She bit her lower lip.
