We're naked in the morning light, exposed to the air, to the leaves, to the gazing trees.
A black crow jumps around a paper bark tree, pulling bugs out its flaking grooves in a morning light that has barely picked over the suburban fences. I watch the crow from my kitchen window as I wait. Its elegant, measured movements contrast sharply with the nerves ripping through my stomach.
My husband and the boys are asleep. Since you haven’t texted this morning, I’m in a raspberry-coloured nightie when you appear at my back door in a bike top and shorts that cling cleanly to your body.
“Give me a minute.”
When I emerge out of the house a few minutes later dressed, I find you pumping my bike tyres.
“I thought we could start on the Anniversary Trail and head to the place I told you about,” you say, looking up at me, as you tense your bicep with every pumping stroke.
“Have you slept well?” I ask, as we set off towards the bike trail.
“I slept very well. I told Red that this is a training session to prep you for the Triathlon next week.” You refer to your wife, April, as Red when you want to emotionally distance yourself from her. Red might be referencing her hair colour, or temperament, or all that you resent about your wife.
“Do you remember the large oval next to the track we go past when we ride?” you ask.
“What about it?”
“I’ll tell Red that we had put our bikes on the edge of it, then practiced transitioning from bike riding to running as prep for the Triathlon. That’s why we took so long. Otherwise, I should be back home in less than an hour. If she asks you, you should know which oval we were at.”
“I don’t pay attention to the many ovals we pass.”
“Di… it’s important we have our story straight …”
“Yes, Jamie. I know.”
The morning is veiled in a soft misty rain. The air is wet, helping to hide the act that is about to unfold behind a grey curtain. There aren’t many people around, which makes the riding easier and faster. You lead us along the most direct route, using all the shortcuts you know and even though we’re in a hurry, you don’t miss an opportunity to instruct.
‘Don’t let your legs stop pedalling. Press into the paddles as hard as you can. Change to a high gear for the last two hundred metres, it will help with the dismount and transition to running.’
I don’t listen to you. I’m busy concentrating on pressing the bike peddles up and down the hills, as we ride through parks, gardens, overpasses, golf courses and sport ovals. When we stop to drink water, you watch me, savouring every drop dripping into my mouth, imagining it’s you swirling inside me. As I pass the bottle to you, our fingers touch and just like that you’re cheating on your wife with your eyes and skin. But your face is still fixed in disapproval for making you want me. As if it’s my fault you want to throw me to the ground and fuck me right here on a grassy knoll.’
“It’s not too late, you know.”
“Not too late for what?”
“To not cross the lines.”
“The lines have been crossed a long ago, Diana. Now, it’s all about getting away with it.”
Just past a bridge that arches its spine over the slow churning brown river, you signal for me to swerve onto a gravel path.
“This is the place. It’s not far from the main track but it’s very private. No one ever goes here, except for council workers sometimes spraying the undergrowth.”
We walk our bikes between the thin trees, sprawling ferns and dry undergrowth of crunchy twigs and spindly grasses, which jump at my feet. The bikes negotiate an undefined path you seem to know well, leading us to a small clearing. I don’t question any of it, just follow like a puppet strung along on curiosity and the pulsating need in my groin. A burning need that is disrupted by worrying about the sweat patches under my armpits. I’m annoyed for wearing a white singlet that highlights my flabby pink flesh, speckled with freckles and skin tags, and other scars of a forty-year-long life.
“Yesterday, you texted me NKNF. What does that mean?” I ask.
“No Kissing, No Fucking.” you say in a matter-of-fact tone. “I don’t have to be back until ten. My first client is at eleven, which means we have sixty minutes,” you say unemotionally, busy mapping out what you’re about to do. Busy justifying it to yourself because you have been so good for so long. But you want it again, no matter the little projects your wife lines up to keep your distorted behaviours at bay.
I watch you move about the clearing as if you were in a trance, re-enacting your last crime here, with automated strokes. You’re not here with me, but with your previous lover. You don’t see me, you see her. Same words, same actions, with which you plunge me into the habit of counting minutes because affairs run on a clock. They run on carefully devised plans, as well as on impulsive opportunities. Affairs are calculated and spontaneous all at the same time. Without asking me explicitly if I want to, you lead me into that world.
Into the world of counting minutes.
To me this moment feels like an out-of-body experience. Like I’m swaying in the leaves above, a thinly veiled awareness, stoned on the sticky essence of the eucalyptus trees, watching two marionettes shimmering below. I’m not in control of my words or motions, but sharply aware that while we both need saving, this will not be my crime, it will be yours.
You lay the yoga mat on the ground, in this place of natural innocence, within which you hope to plug the emotional and physical gaps of your marriage with deep convulsive thrusts. Hoping to inhale the musky scents that emanate from fleshy, sticky caverns, while praying for salvation from each impatient piston like stroke. I can tell the euphoria and pain connected with your last affair consternate you, but your thinly pursed lips suggest you are committed to wedging yourself again between eagerly parted lips and slippery passages. You wish to hide in the warm folds of someone else’s body from the spectre of your marriage that rejects who you are.
I sit on the mat and watch in silence as you fold your clothes into a neat pile at the side of the clearing. I’m not sure what ‘No Kissing, No Fucking’ sex involves, but I realise that you believe it’s less of a betrayal. That it will be easier to deny if your wife asks you the direct question. Has your cock been in her cunt? An art of asking she must have honed to perfection when unpacking your previous affair. Knowing what to ask is important because the truth can be easily circumvented by the perversity of language.
But right now, I’m not thinking about your wife. Instead, I’m thinking about the sky that is painting everything in this secret yet open space in dizzying blues. The bush closes its eyes, like an old spirit, calm, silent, unmoved by what’s about to unfold at its feet. The trees open, letting the grey mist in, letting its parched floor drink it.
You kneel in front of me, in all your naked glory: unabashed you let me take in the sight of you. Your perfect physique that you sculpt every day with unwavering commitment to training. You’re an ensemble of spectacularly proportioned muscles that undulate over your arms, chest, stomach, thighs. Except for your blue eyes, everything about you is bronze, coloured by endless hours of swimming, riding, running. Your cock is slightly lighter, it’s the colour of milk coffee, its current state of hardness making it bounce in the air.
I’m nervous but am not sure who is more vulnerable. Maybe we both are, maybe that’s why this works. You gently place your hands on my shoulders, then glide them down my arms, like an organ player meticulously preparing his instrument. You explore my skin and I hold still. I don’t expect this sex to be romantic. We both know it’s a transactional step. Something we need to do on the way to the spiritual rejuvenation that we hope eventuates from connecting with someone other than a spouse. Someone who sees us for more than a clog in the hamster wheel of a middle class, privileged life. But having sex with someone for the first time is always awkward, so we are going through its motions, trying not to overthink.
You take my singlet off and glide your hands past my tightening breasts, down towards my soft stomach, kissing my neck with long, hungry kisses, which makes me realise that when you said ‘no kissing’ you meant not on the mouth. I stand up and you slide my shorts to the ground, pressing your face into my underwear, breathing in its scent, sucking the wetness through the fabric.
When you look up, your gaze ignites me. It burns every bit of my skin. Your eyes fill with tears, like an animal remorseful for what it is about to do but unable to stop. Unable to disobey instinct. The clear emotional agony that guilt is wringing you with disarms me and I stop caring about how transactional this feels. You press your face into my stomach, sinking your fingers into me, deeper than you did the other day in my bathroom, while our kids played outside, and our spouses sipped wine under the shade of the garden.
My hands veer between forcing you harder into me, and pulling you away by your hair, away from my savage need. I part my legs as wide as I can standing up and lift my leg over your shoulder to pull you in closer as you plunge your fingers into my cunt. With my underwear pulled to the side, the sensations of your tongue between my folds makes me lose balance and fall to the ground. It’s when you tear into my pink flesh with your mouth, as if it was a piece of meat.
There is nowhere to hide now. There is no turning back. The lines have been demolished. There will be emotional bloodletting.
We’re naked in the morning light, exposed to the air, to the leaves, to the gazing trees. Our human attributes on show, skin, cuts, wrinkles, folds, the blue veins of your erect cock, the stiffened points of my brown nipples. I watch your body rise in front of me, humming with need, as you bounce with bounds of blood rushing through you and your cock asking to be loved. I come up onto my knees and put my lips over you for the first time. I take time to savour your curvature, letting the first taste of you flood my mouth and your hardness fill my throat to the full. You groan, holding onto me by my shoulders, letting me explore the delicacy of the grooves between your round shiny pink head and shaft as I realise, you’re the first circumcised cock I’ve ever had.
“I want to pleasure you. I want this to be all about you!” you exclaim, and pull my mouth off your cock. “Nothing makes me happier than to know I’m the source of a woman’s pleasure.”
I lie naked on the mat, exposing all of me to your panting mouth, suddenly becoming self-conscious about shaving a few days ago, which I just realise has made my pubic mound a hostile angry zone ready to cut. The realisation fills me with dread, so I can’t relax into the rhythm of your tongue, which is making its way up and down my throbbing creases. But you take your time, you kiss inside of my thighs, you separate my folds one by one, patiently licking them all. You take me in between your teeth, and I squirm, tingling with blood that is making my clitoris pulse, begging for a release I haven’t felt in months. I give in to the pleasure that floods me, letting it convulse my insides, as you syphon my slimy juices into your throat.
Just as I feel the release coming, you pull yourself out from between my legs to rest your forearms on either side of me. Your face facing mine. Your eyes are so blue, they stand out against the swollen grey clouds that roll above us. I’m grateful for the warm drizzle that is falling on us, patting our skin with soft caresses. The forest is drowning in sweat and trickling fluids, sticking my buttock together, as you rub yourself up and down between my swelled vulva lips.
“I’m so sorry, I shaved at the wrong time.” I whisper.
“It’s ok, you’re so warm and wet… and delicious, it doesn’t matter.” You groan and send my insides into spasms that feel better than penetration.
The triumph of my teeming wetness, the loud smacking that consumes our bodies, are ready to make us implode. I look up at the grey sky prying on us from between the trees before I close my eyes to absorb you. To absorb the wave of your motions that take me away and swallow me whole. To connect with you, and the ground and life, and the yoga mat on the sparse undergrowth that smells like burnt hay. To fall in love with the silver leaves, and fine spiderweb silks and little flies that play ‘hide and seek’ above us. You bite my neck leaving indents in my flesh. The sensation is painful and freeing. An all I want now is to break, so I bite your lip waiting for the inevitable. You close your eyes. I feel you tense up and the warm liquid squirt in rapid waves onto my stomach.
“Oh God …” You groan in release and rest on me, unafraid of sticking to the mess. You let your head fall into my neck.
I guess it’s not fucking if there’s no penetration. You can still say No if asked.
We lie next to each other for a while, neither of us properly on the single yoga mat, our backs scraping dry sticks on the ground.
“You’re really pretty down there, did you know?”
“Really? … I never considered to think about those body parts as pretty.”
“I’d like to take a photo of it for you one day. If I could, I would paint a landscape of it.”
You seem calm.
“I didn’t expect you to be this pretty, considering you had kids and all.”
You smile in the disarming way that brought me here.
“I thought all women were pretty there.”
“No, they’re not. April isn’t, having kids tore her up.”
I wonder what qualifies it as ‘pretty’. But I just smile, proud that I’m worth of being painted. For a while we lie on our backs with arms touching, watching the clouds let the sun break through.
On the way home you don’t shut up. Your mind is in a euphoric overdrive of possibilities, dreams and hopes.
How next time April should come on the bike ride with us.
How this will work for us, the sex-buddy thing, that is. Or maybe April can join in, and it will be the most wonderful experience of our lives and your marriage.
But if it gets too intense… we will have to end it. Also, I will have to be discreet and exclusive with you, so as not to put the two of you at risk of diseases. You outline the rules as if it wasn’t an affair, but some sort of useful friendship. You’re constructing the narrative as we ride, because I’m still a figment of your imagination and needs. You don’t consider my life, my failed marriage, my children. We were together in the most intimate way, naked, vulnerable, but we are not yet connected. We are where love isn’t yet love. Right now, it’s lust. Fresh, mystical, tentative, metallic. You are drunk on denial, refusing to see this can only end one way.
“This will complete my marriage,” you say.
I don’t respond. I feel sorry for you, because you’re about to be taught a lesson in true colours of life and pain. That kind of pain that turns you insane. Makes you sick. Sadly, for you and your wife, you will end up doing more than just kissing and fucking. Much more. Because once you’ve dared to cross the lines, it is like drinking blood, or shooting up heroin.