Like everyone, I had my moments of temptation – not in terms of situations, but I noticed a lovely face or a shapely figure. But that was it – at times I even went so far as to look the other way if my wife pointed out a pretty woman, so as not to be tempted to look and comment.
That was then. Then came May 8 th .
Thursday. May 8 th . I drove for an hour and a half to get to my meeting, being held in a smaller town in one of those corporate boardroom rentals. A shared reception area, and several small offices for hire. My meeting was scheduled to take place in one of those offices.
I arrived early. That’s always my habit, afraid of traffic and delays on longer drives. The meeting was set to begin at 10:00 a.m., but I was there by 9:00 a.m. Too early to go into the office itself, so I waited in the reception area.
She was the administrator, and was sitting at reception, and also busying herself with making coffee, putting out cookies, re-arranging magazines and newspapers on the end tables.
We kept looking at each other, as I sat there patiently waiting, smiling when we made eye contact, but no real conversation to speak of. She was busy and I didn’t disturb her activities. I tried to look busy, reading my file.
In truth, I had read the file several times over the past few days. I was just trying to look like I was doing something other than watching her.
Yes, I noticed another woman.
She wasn’t the classic beauty of magazine covers, but in truth nobody is, and that isn’t a definition of beauty to which I subscribe. She was not very tall, standing about five feet, maybe even four foot eleven, and her figure was petite, though she was busty. She had a lovely and warm smile and her eyes simply pierced through me each time she looked in my direction. I could not look away.
Slowly the other people attending my meeting arrived and we filed into the office for our business. Throughout the day, we would take breaks, going to the men’s room or grabbing a coffee or some cookies. Over the lunch break, everyone else left to go to a restaurant across the street, but I stayed behind to make some notes on my file. She stayed behind too. Each time we would pass each other, we would look at one another with the same type of glance, casual yet purposeful. There was a sense of recognition in our looks.
And then the day came to a close. I had the largest pile of documents in my file, so it took me longer to pack up my briefcase, and by the time I was ready to go, everyone else had left.
Except for her.
She came into the office with a spray bottle of furniture polish (my best recollection, if it matters, is that it was Pledge), and some paper towels, and she began to wipe down the boardroom table. Coffee cups were cleared off first.
I offered to help clean up, and over dirty coffee cups and fingerprints and smudges on the table, we began to talk.
She was 44. I was 44. She was divorced with two children. I was married with one child. She was dating a man to whom she expected to become engaged. I was in a marriage that was far from ideal, lacking in intimacy and communication.
We were of two different ethnic backgrounds, two different faiths, and yet we shared many of the same basic values. We talked and I found out that she came from another country, a small rural area, and it happened that one of my closest friends also came from that same area.
Our conversation moved from the boardroom out to the reception area. It was only 4:00 p.m., and she still had to stay by the phones until 5:00 p.m. We continued talking and somehow we strayed onto the topic of sex. And then somehow we strayed onto the topic of seduction.
Our conversation was charged with sexual tension. In addition to that, there were these small but curious things that linked us, and perhaps made us feel a stronger connection. There was her place of birth and its link to my close friend. Then it turned out that I shared the same first name as her boyfriend, and more coincidentally, we shared the same birth date. We felt a connection and our discussions were free flowing and intimate.
And then seduction.
She sat at her desk and I stood up from my chair and walked closer to her. She was eating a fruit salad from a Tupperware container, and she offered me some. I took a strawberry. I took a piece of honeydew.
“If I were trying to seduce someone, what I could do is take a piece of fruit, like a strawberry, for instance, and do this,” I said, as I took a strawberry and placed it to her lips, as if to feed it to her.
She took the strawberry into her mouth, along with one of my fingers, which she proceeded to suck on briefly, savoring the sweet juices of the strawberry.
“You could,” she said, “if you were trying to seduce someone.”
“The whole idea,” I continued, “is to create that sense of intimacy, and transform ordinary acts, such as eating, into sensual acts, with suggestions of sexuality.”
“I see you have it all worked out,” she responded.
“Or in the alternative,” I noted, “you could approach it more directly, in a more bold fashion, and do this…”
I took another strawberry and placed it between my lips, and leaned forward to feed it to her. She took the strawberry in her mouth, and allowed her lips to come up and meet mine, resulting in a sweet kiss, as I felt her gently and quickly chew the strawberry to swallow it, and free up her tongue.
Her tongue then probed outward from between her lips into my mouth, finding my tongue, and we kissed intently for several minutes. Our hands wandered toward each other and we pulled our bodies close together, with her still sitting in her chair behind the reception desk, and me leaning forward toward her.
As we broke off our kisses, my hands moved toward her breasts, and I lifted her blouse up, exposing her bra. I slipped her breasts out from within the cups and was face to face with her milky, white skin, with light pink nipples atop her breasts. They were ample and firm breasts, and I caressed them with both hands, playing with her nipples, and then allowing myself to lean forward even more and take her left nipple in my mouth.
I had been married at that time for about a decade and a half, and had known my wife for several years prior to getting married. All told, this was the first woman beside my wife whom I had kissed in nearly twenty years, and the first nipple I had sucked and licked in the same amount of time. Her breasts were delicious and I continued to enjoy the taste and textures of her nipples between my lips, as my tongue circled around and flicked the erect pink protuberances.
She wore black pants, with a slightly elasticized waist, but not stretchy enough to allow my hand to slip inside them. I undid the button on her pants and at the same time shifted my position, and picked her up from her chair into a standing position. I pushed the waist of her pants down until they rested, along with her panties, just below her sex, on her hips. She was shaved, and I reached down and began to finger her. There was no subtlety in what I did – I simply began to finger her with a view to making her climax. I reached behind her with one hand and braced her close to my body while my other hand worked feverishly on her wet slit, probing and exploring her deeply and touching and playing with her labia and her clit.
She came quickly, shaking in my grasp, and my hand and the whole room, in fact, smelled of her sweet fragrance. I am not the strongest man around, but she was quite petite, and I lifted her up and sat her down on the top of her desk, so that her pussy was closer to eye level for me. I leaned forward and began to lick her labia, savoring the juices that her climax had let loose, gently stroking her with my tongue. Kissing her and making love to her sex with my mouth.
“Ok, you have to stop,” she said, “I forgot to lock the door. Anyone could come in.”
“Wait right here,” I said, and I walked over to the front door and locked it from the inside.
In the brief time I was away from her, she had hopped down onto the ground and had pulled her pants back up.
“Your turn,” she said, as she walked over to me and put her hand directly onto my erect cock, feeling me through the fabric of my wool suit. She unzipped me and put her hand inside my pants and reached in to grab me, pulling my cock out through the fly of my boxers and then out into the open through the fly of my pants.
“Nice piece of equipment,” she purred.
As the Almighty is my witness, no woman had ever complimented me before on my equipment, nor had they ever even called it equipment. She knew exactly how to stroke a man’s ego.
She unbuttoned my pants, and then pulled my erection out from them completely as she pushed my pants and boxers down, leaving me completely exposed and in her hands. She stroked me hard for a moment, but then knelt down in front of me and took me in her mouth.
Just as it had been nearly twenty years since I had kissed another woman, so too had it been nearly twenty years since a woman had given me oral pleasure. My wife would not go down that road, and I had forgotten over those years just how intense a feeling it could be.
She sucked me hard and then she sucked me slow. Her tongue was actively pleasuring me inside her mouth, and she would, every so often, release me from her mouth and simply kiss the head of my hardness, licking me along my length, and then she would swallow me all over again.
I could barely keep myself steady. The sensations going through my cock and into my entire body were like an electric charge stimulating all of my senses, or at times like a strong wind threatening to knock me over.
I held onto her, placing my hands behind her head, pulling her closer and deeper onto me, as she continued to suck me. I felt my climax and I told her I was about to orgasm. She simply sucked me harder and latched onto my cock as it reached that moment of release, and she continued sucking me until she had taken all of my load into her mouth and swallowed it.
I stood there drained. Stunned. I had never felt anything so intense. I stood there as she knelt before me, kissing my spent cock, and then gently and with such tenderness, lifting my boxers and pants up and doing up the zipper and button, restoring me to the way I had been before this experience.
We held each other as she stood up and came close to me, our arms around each other, in an embrace of comfort rather than of passion.
The room still had the faint scent of her arousal, and bringing my hand up to my face, I could still taste her upon my fingers.
It was now around 5:00 p.m., and we had spent more time than I had imagined holding each other, as I stroked her hair and told her that she was incredibly beautiful. Because she was.
We talked some more, as she closed up the office, switching the phones to night service and clearing up the coffee and cookies in the kitchen, turning on the dishwasher.
We talked as we walked down to the garage where we both were parked. I walked her to her car.
“You’re coming back tomorrow for the second part of your meeting?” she asked.
“Yes,” I answered, “I should be in by 9:00 again.”
“It’s Friday tomorrow. If you didn’t have to go back home, you could come with me tonight to my cottage. It’s about half an hour north of here. Actually it’s more of a trailer, but I call it my cottage. And then tomorrow you could stay for the weekend.”
“I wouldn’t trust myself alone with you,” I said.
“I wouldn’t expect to trust you. We could continue on from where we left off.”
“I’m married, as you may remember And you’ve got a boyfriend, almost a fiancé…This shouldn’t have happened.”
“I know. But it happened. It’s your first time straying. It’s mine too. I didn’t plan for this either. But there is something about today. About us. Something inevitable about it all. I’m not saying we are leaving our significant others because of this, but what is the harm if both of us have just a tiny bit of pleasure in our lives? One day. Two days. A weekend? Where is the harm?”
I thought about that question. Where was the harm? Nobody would ever know. Nobody would ever suspect.
Where was the harm?
We kissed and said our goodbyes, and I drove home, stopping along the way for a 7:00 p.m. meeting with some colleagues from another office. I sat there amongst them, wondering if any of them could see it on my face. Could they tell I had just had the most intense and unexpected encounter? Could they smell her fragrance upon me? Did they all know, but they just didn’t say anything?
They didn’t know. And then when I got home, my wife didn’t know. It was true, all those things I’d heard. The lies, the deceit, the double-lives of people who have affairs. It was easier than I thought it would be – not that I had ever planned it out, but it was surprisingly easy.
It was surprisingly easy to get changed and lay down in bed next to my wife, just hours after a woman whom I had never met before gave me a blowjob, just hours after kissing her, just hours after pleasing her and tasting her womanly nectar.
It was too easy, in fact.
That was the harm. The harm was in thinking I could get away with it, without any effects. The harm was in thinking a simple breath mint and a hand wash would make it seem as if it never happened.
I was no longer that good boy, playing by the rules. I had broken nearly every rule in the space of one afternoon. I could justify it all I wanted, by saying that my wife no longer communicated, that the intimacy was non-existent, that the marriage existed in name only. But the fact remained that I had broken the rules.
I lay in bed awake, as my wife slept next to me. My mind turned over dozens of scenarios, dozens of “what if” possibilities, and they all kept coming back to one recurring image.
I kept seeing her face. Her eyes closed as I brought my lips toward hers, with a strawberry in my mouth. I kept seeing our lips meeting, as if watching a slow-motion video of the event.
Eventually I fell asleep, and the next morning I arose, I showered and shaved and dressed and went on my way, back to that small town, back to that office on the third floor.
Back to her.
I made a stop along the way at a grocery store in my area. They opened early and I went straight to the produce section, and found what I was looking for.
Passion fruit. She had told me as we talked, before any of the words became actions, about her favorite fruit, and how she could never find it at the grocery stores in her town. Passion fruit. I had never eaten one myself and didn’t even know what they looked like.
But I found them and placed half a dozen in a bag, paid for them at the check-out, and continued on my drive. I would bring her some passion fruit.
What was the harm?
Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough to stop me from kissing her again on that Friday afternoon, although we did not repeat our more intimate encounter. Whatever the harm, it wasn’t enough for me to remain faithful after that day. Even to the present, nearly four years later.
What was the harm? Maybe it was an affirmation that the words of the Bible had some truth. A truth that hasn’t changed from the earliest days following Creation up to today. Maybe the harm was the loss of innocence. My innocence.
Only this time around it wasn’t a snake with an apple. This time it was a strawberry.
