PART IV - MASTER BEDROOMS

         “Is the Baked Ziti any good?”
         “I don’t know, I’ve never tried it. I am not in love with their gravy, or as you say up your way, tomato sauce, but it is an individual thing.”
         “Why did you come to this seminar, Bobby? And don’t give me that tourist season bit. It must be a thousand miles away.”
         “1,075 to be precise. Wanted to say hello again, wish you ‘Happy Birthday’, and update you on what happened to all those dead and live people who put some faith in us.”
         “I am so sorry, but those people have you to blame too.”
         “I know.”
         “You remembered my birthday.”
         “Sure, it was the eighteenth. You and Brad must have had quite a blow-out for number forty-six.”
         “Stop it, Bobby. For someone so sweet you can get such a sarcastic tone. Let’s enjoy our meal. Afterwards you can tell me more.”

         The eyes always had it. They were so soft and gentle. Lying there in bed with him, she looked at them. She could feel his hand pushing under the elastic of her panties. Here she was, the partner in a prestigious law firm in Stamford, in only her white cotton panties in his bed. Soon she felt his amazingly soft supple fingers in the triangle between her legs. She felt his palm rub her stubble of pubic hair and touch the little button that she used to turn herself on. Where had this been in her life?

         His eyes shone as he said goodbye to her that first night in the parking lot of that ridiculously expensive restaurant. She suspected he expected her to follow him to his house, but when she told him she had to go home, his face had not dropped. Too many commitments had been made inside that restaurant, and while most were about business, she knew she would have to come back. Wait a minute! Not ‘would have to’ but rather she ‘wanted’ to come back.

         It took her all of eight days to be on the Parkway again, but this time she went on to Pine Plains/Red Hook. She remembered sitting on a couch in his office on the lower level of the bi-level. The fire in the wood stove drove off the twenty-degree cold outside. He sat at this desk, making small talk and every so often handing her a file or some papers. They went through the motions of talking business. He stood up to put another piece of wood in the fire. She felt the warmth as the fire door opened. He put on fireproof gloves and reached in with the wood and then he closed the door, took off the gloves and sat down next to her. Did it take twenty seconds, thirty seconds, or a minute before they began to embrace?

         Alabaster, who had been sleeping on the floor, looked up, yawned, and left the room. Julie saw her out of the corner of her eye and said something about the dog not approving of what they were doing.

         “Then she will just have to get used to it.”

         Stored electricity that Julie had been saving for years jumped from every inch of her skin. Arms around her, he nudged her backward onto the couch and lay atop her, avidly kissing her lips. She nudged back and soon was on top of him. His leg ground into her crotch. She could feel his arousal against her pelvis. She felt for his waistline, pulled out his shirt and put her hand under his tee shirt and against his chest.

         Chatting on line he had told her that he was covered by body hair. It felt so warm and good. She let her hand slide down his chest and began to unbutton his pants and then she slid his zipper down carefully. She pulled the pants back and gave a yank and slid them down his ass. He was wearing boxers. She reached in and felt and was impressed enough to want to go on. She gave a tug and his shorts followed his pants and rested in the middle of his thighs.

         She could feel his hand inside her jeans, on top of her panties and rubbing her bottom. He pushed up a little and then his hand dove farther between her legs. For some reason, Bobby’s disclosures brought out private details from her that she would have never admitted to others. She had told him that crucial spots on her were shaved. Now his hand was learning that she had told him the truth. She reached back and pulled his arm out of her pants.

         “Hey, I’m the big shot lawyer here. You are just a flunky. You wait your turn.”

         She rolled off him and tugged his pants and shorts off. She wore stretch jeans that had only an elastic waist. She spread his legs and put her knees between them and lay forward over him, feeling him pressing against her body. His hands found the elastic of her waist and stretched it out. She felt the elastic slide over her bottom and down to her knees. His tried to pull them the rest of the way with his legs but was not successful until she gave him a hand. While she was doing this, he had unbuttoned her shirt and had pulled it back. His fingers were playing with the clips on her bra. She scrambled out of both, laying there on top of him, the wood stove heating her bare flesh, clad only in her panties.

         He felt so warm pressed against her. Just holding Bobby and having him hold her was a revelation. It had to be five years since Brad and she had tried, if she did not count the times she had gotten on her knees and put his member in her mouth to try to arouse him. It was not a position becoming to an important lawyer, and she was not fond of performing the service, which had never been successful.

         His hands roved over her body. She rubbed herself back and forth against him. His fingers slid inside her panties and down the crack of her ass. Where did he get those fingers? It was his ex-wife who was the violin player, not him. Another minute of this and she would be on the ceiling. He broke the mood but heightened it.

         “This couch limits the possibilities. There’s a wonderful king-sized bed upstairs.”
         “Oh god, by all means.”

         He left his clothes in the basement and walked naked with the senior lawyer of the firm. For her part, her panties gave her a certain amount of modesty. She was past the age of bikini briefs, but even with regular cotton panties, her stomach hung over the elastic. He didn’t seem to mind one bit, keeping his hand inside the back of them and against her bottom. She thought to herself that her compact butt contrasted well to her overlarge tummy.

         The bedroom looked surprisingly soft and feminine in the late afternoon sunlight that filtered through the patterned half curtains. A flowered quilt covered the large bed. She pulled back the quilt and blanket under it to reveal blue paisley sheets. The top sheet was lifted and she crawled in. He withdrew his hand and got in next to her.

***

Weary bloooo-ooooo-ooooes from waiting,
Lord I’ve been waiting so lah-ah-ong
These blues have got me cry-yan
Oh sweet mama, pleeeze come home.

         “Bobby, turn it off, I don’t think that’ll do.”
         “You said you needed voices to go to sleep to, that at home you put on Letterman and fell asleep to him.”
         “That’s not quite Letterman.”
         “It’s better, but maybe not 12:15 music. At least you got a lot of pillows.”
         “Thanks, glad you remembered.”
         “Barb always had lots of pillows.”
         “She decorate this room?”
         “She was long gone before I moved here, but I just kept everything the same from Pennsylvania. I’m not much on domestication. Alabaster and I would live in a pig sty.”
         “You might, I think Alabaster is smarter than that. The animal welfare people would be on your case in about two hours.”
         “Maybe I’ll ask Alabaster to sleep here next to you Lisa. She makes enough noise slurping and licking herself all night. Put you right to sleep.”
         “I think I prefer the current company, sweet prince.”
         “We didn’t quite do what we had in mind, did we. Rather I didn’t do quite what you expected.”
         “It was our first time, and my large body may have turned you off.”
         “Don’t think so; you have all the right equipment and in the right places and you are pretty spry for a fifty-year old. Maybe this old fart is wearing out and needs the magic elixir, the wonder pill.”
         “Your fingers and tongue were still wonderful. I’d drive from Pittsfield any night for such luxury.”
         “Well thank you ma’am.”
         “I think we just built it up too much cybering on line; no one could have been the superman and wonder woman we described. My other two steadies right now have the same problems, no, wait a minute, I don’t want to call it a problem, more a condition. I think next time we will be fine.”
         “I still have the ad printed up. Funny I remember Nisse saying a person can find anything they want on line.”
         “Who’s Nisse, where are you going?”
         “To find the print out. Nisse was my secretary.”
         “Here?”
         “No, back in Pennsylvania. Here it is:

FUN AND FROLIC AT YOUR PLACE PITTSFIELD/50

         Overweight White Professional Female Medical Technician, with two teenage boys at home seeks fun and play on in your bed. No commitments, just some wholesome fun and games. No married men please, and please be over age 45. Open to adventure and new things. Email me at [e-mail].

         “You were damn truthful, except you didn’t tell me you had a harem.”
         “I implied it, but ever since you emailed that photo, it is the only one I have on my desk. I think it is because I like Alabaster licking you. She is such a cute dog. It’s amazing, we kept missing each other on line until I caught you at two a.m. that night in April. Now we finally meet, June second. At the rate we are going, it might be one of our funerals the next time we get together.”
         “You have Tuesday evenings off. You can come every week if you can put up with me. I do remember that night. I was trying to finish both Fiduciary and Income Tax returns. I remember thinking that I should give you a stiff kick in the butt for that.”
         “And mar this lovely ass?”
         “Stand up and bend over, let me have a better view.”
         “I am too old for this dog and pony show, there, like the view. You are funny; should I touch my ankles.”
         “No, get back into bed next to me and cuddle up and maybe we will go to sleep. I will say, Lisa, that I am sorry but at fifty, condoms are a hassle. As soon as I tried to get it on, I felt desire slipping away.”
         “It’s not to protect me, Bobby, but you. I work in hospitals. God knows what I might have picked up.”
         “If you’ll let me, we’ll try again.”
         “I wouldn’t miss those magic fingers for the return of Elvis.”
         “Thank you my sweet, now good night.”
         “Good night, Sweet Prince.”

         “This is such a pretty room. I can’t get over how you have made it look so feminine.”
         “I didn’t do anything. It’s the same bedroom we had in Pennsylvania. Barb decorated the walls there and I just put up the same things.”
         “But a make-up table?"
         “A place to throw clothes. If we hadn’t stripped downstairs, I’d have thrown them on there. Needed something to fill that spot.”
         “Well, buy something, silly. All that money you have?”
         “Have no desire to do so, but I don’t think I’m a skinflint or miser.”
         “No, I saw the tip you gave last week. It was almost thirty percent of that horrendous bill.”
         “They worked hard.”
         “I was happy you did what you did. Ummmm, Bobby, do you think I might need a little more stimulation?”
         “You didn’t get enough?”
         “I don’t think I will ever get enough of those fingers, and that thick thing you have there either. Oh baby, did that fill me up. It had been so long, don’t know if you could tell, but I felt you expanding me.”
         “Just talent, lawyer boss.”
         “By the way, you are hairy, but Zippy you are not.”
         “When did I tell you that nickname? Never mind. Thanks for the compliment.”
         “Don’t mention it. I love the rug. Only I don’t know how to say this, but I got carried away I wanted you so bad. Maybe once every three to four months my period pays a visit. I don’t take any birth control pills or the like. Haven’t needed any with old can’t get it up Brad. And I hate the feel of condoms. I guess I’ll have to see about the pill, and lord, I hope I don’t have to wait three months for my visitor. I won’t be able to get off the pot; that’s my way of dealing with nervousness. Wonder I don’t lose weight.”
         “Funny, my friend Lisa, the medical technician, insists I use them. They turn me off and I can’t stay stiff enough for her to even get one on.”
         “How did you and your wife do birth control? She take the pill?”
         “No, she was set on her music. She had her tubes tied even before we married. She said if we wanted a child bad enough, we could adopt. You see the result, the four-legged baby who wandered in here when you were shouting words of encouragement to me.”
         “You mean, ‘do me please, god, do me, put that thing in me, I want you in me’.”
         “You were more profane than that.”
         “I don’t use the “F” word.”
         “No, but ‘screw me’ is close to it and you certainly were shouting that in my ear.”
         “Your friend Lisa and the two others you told me about from the web.”
         “You mean Colleen and Gina?”
         “Yes, you remember the ad? What it said? Commitment to the future? I shouldn’t have even been here tonight and I certainly shouldn’t be in this bed. You told me on line that you wanted to commit but here you talk of them and then three days ago you mentioned an email from one of them. I am a one man woman and I want a one woman man.”
         “I told you I am willing. I can’t see Lisa not being a friend. All my life my best friends have been women, all platonic until now. I know there were people who wondered who the father of Nisse’s baby was, but it was definitely not me. Lisa is not monogamous, she does not need me as a lover, but we like each other as friends. It’s been several months since our last meeting. She has already asked what you are like, and has told me I need a permanent person. I think you would like her.”
         “We will have to play that one by ear. Honesty is very important with me.”
         “As for Gina, I have never even met her. She lives near Albany and will be checking into a rehab facility. She has a lot of problems and she is thirty-five, so I think she is a highly unlikely candidate. As for Colleen, let me tell you about Colleen.
         “Colleen and I met on line last June, the same time I met Lisa for the first time. Our last interlude was in October. I always had to drive to her apartment in New Rochelle. She let me bring Alabaster. We would sit and talk and listen to Irish tenors and lounge singers from the fifties and sixties like Jack Jones and Tony Bennett. The stereo would blast through the apartment whether we sat on the couch or finally got into the bed.”
         “Well, after hearing some of your music, it must have been a blessing to you.”
         “You’re funny. She was about your height, wasn’t as, as, as…’
         “Fat”
         “No, I would say heavy. You have a shape.”
         “Right, round.”
         “She was more of a blob. And she had one peculiar trait. She was very anal oriented. I think we made love vaginally once and I was there seven times, overnight each time and doing it as many times as we could during the night while Jack or Frank or Tony sang ‘One for my baby.’ When we would stop and talk, it was like walking through a minefield. I mentioned our current Democratic candidate for the Senate once accidentally.”
         “You mean Mrs. Clinton.”
         “Yes.”
         “By the way, I am pretty anal oriented too and hope you liked it. Not sure that thick thing of yours will go in without lots of preparation, but I can’t wait to find out.”
         “I have no problem with going in the back door. But let me finish about her. She leaped out of bed and started into a vehement anti-Hillary rant while walking the floor around the bed. You had to see it. Her face got red. She had a dark patch of hair where you are shaved and large breasts that unfortunately for her were pushed to the side. She would slap herself as she talked, run her fingers through the patch of hair and her breasts would bobble. I must tell you, she had absolutely no erotic feeling in her breasts. She hated them, but that is off the point. She would get wound up like this for fifteen minutes or so, and then collapse back into bed and present her butt again for play, not just sex but my golden fingers as you called them. And of course, I would be afraid to say anything for fear she would get up on her soapbox. I remember it was the Mets and Yankees another night. She loved the former and hated the latter.”
         “So you haven’t been there lately. Do you still write?”
         “You are Miss Cross Examination, aren’t you? She emailed in early December to say she would be going to Ireland in January and hoped to find work there. I haven’t heard from her since, and really don’t want to hear. You aren’t going to jump out of bed and start ranting about the Generation Skipping Tax, are you?”
         “I don’t think so. And I need those fingers now. Hearing about Colleen almost made me jealous. I can be a jealous woman, I must warn you. I also usually get what I want.”

         It was the perfect job for her. He needed her thirty hours a week during his busy time in March and April, while the rest of the year he had her come in for twelve to eighteen hours a week. On top of her alimony, it helped her live a life of a little more than genteel poverty. She could buy small gifts for her granddaughter and treat her unmarried son to a pizza once a week.

         Bobby paid better than the testing lab where it seemed everyone in northern Dutchess County had worked at one time or another, and he was a better boss. He was only a few years younger than she was; his eyes always seemed to be sparkling and he loved to kid her. He was happy to give her the time so that she would be there when busy season came around next year.

         She always asked him what he had for dinner the night before, and where he had taken Alabaster for her walk. He called her Linda Holmes, though her last name was Slaughter.

         “Are you writing a book, Linda?”
         “And if I am?”
         “Then leave that chapter out.”

         Linda was stunned when she learned of Barb and Brian. She stumbled on the story when she became curious why he had decorated the house in such a feminine way. Bobby told him of Barb. She stared at him and he went on and told her of her flight with Brian to the West Coast. He said it so matter of fact, but she could tell it had taken something out of his life.

         ‘Been there, done that’, she thought. Only Bobby had been lucky in one way. She could never remember the woman’s name, was it Sherri or Susie, but she could never forget the sight of her round bottom as she entered her bedroom that day and saw her naked, riding Frank, hunched over like a jockey, her butt defiantly smiling in her face. She had so wanted to run downstairs and grab a poker and shove it in the most logical place presented to her.

         She had never told Bobby of that day. She had never been highly sexed, and she assumed that Frank had lost his desire in middle age. She found a take-no-prisoners attorney and now banked her alimony check each month. Every so often she would see Sherri/Susie. It was usually when she drove to a store she liked in Millerton. No matter how the woman was dressed, she could only think of her that day, climbing off Frank and looking over the floor and chairs for her clothes. Once out of the saddle, her taut bottom turned out to be flabby, jiggling when she walked, but she could not help but see that her thick pubic hair under her pot bellied stomach was damp and whitened by his juices. When the woman bent to look under the bed for her panties, the temptation was too great. Linda landed a firm boot in the middle of her ugly butt, causing a pig-like squeal to fill the air.

         He lay there on the bed, his penis shriveling. She tried to remember the last time she had seen him aroused. The woman never did find her panties. She dressed the best she could and fled the scene. Linda wanted to say something about him wanting a woman with some weight on her. Linda was thin, wiry and all angles. When she did speak, it was to order him out of the house. She didn’t care where he went, but she did not want him there. After he had gone, she stripped the bed and burned the sheets. She did not think that washing would ever get the odor of that moment out of them.

         Linda met Lisa several times. She thought her nice and had hopes, but Bobby quickly let her know that Lisa enjoyed playing the role of a woman of mercy. Linda never even knew of Colleen, although Bobby and Lisa had many laughs role playing Colleen and Bobby. In the games, Lisa played Bobby while Bobby stomped around the bed. Alabaster really enjoyed watching this game.

         Bobby was subject to a barrage of questions about Julie. Linda was not too fond of a woman who was married and being unfaithful, no matter how bad a husband Brad was. She suggested he not burn his bridges with Lisa, and to keep looking, but Bobby told her of Julie’s desire for commitment.

         “Don’t do it. She will end up back with her husband. If she has put up with him this long, she will put up with him forever.”

         What well she drank from to get this wisdom was not known. Some suspected her of wanting Bobby to be part of her life, but that would excuse Frank from the alimony payment. Her desire to extract blood in the form of money from the man who had brought her to that ugly scene was more important than any chance for her future.

         Linda remembered her words the day she saw the moving truck disappear into the rainy mist of that May day. ‘He is taking those gentle eyes with him into the north. We won’t see them again.’

"PART V - JULIE'S SECRETS"