Closet Prude

(continued)

By Wayne Scheer

She changed the CD's. Now she switched to soft jazz, Wynton Marsalis and Al Jarreau.

She brought out what was left of the wine. In the old days, she and Linda would finish off the bottle after dinner while I switched to coffee. She placed our wine glasses on the coffee table and filled hers while I blew on my coffee to cool it off.

"I want to be your fuck buddy," she said.

After staring at her face to make sure she wasn't joking, I put down my coffee cup and poured the rest of the wine into my glass. I sipped, trying not to dribble the wine down my shirt.

"You know I always found you attractive," she continued. "And we're friends. We'd make great fuck buddies."

It's not that I was surprised. The evening obviously had been leading towards this moment. But it was like when an elderly relative dies. You may not be surprised, but the shock is still real.

"Aren't you going to say something," she said. "Like 'yahoo, let's get it on!' or 'yuck'?"

"Definitely not yuck," I said, moving closer to her on the couch and realizing for the first time how dark and deep her eyes were.

Soon, we moved to the bedroom. It was awkward at first. I hadn't been with another woman since I met Linda, and the few females I had known before that, mainly high school and college girls, were clearly not in Gina's sexual league. Nor was I. Linda and I were compatible lovers. We satisfied each other's needs at the moment, but Gina created new needs.

Linda tended to get herself comfortable after a little foreplay and let me take it from there. I would bring her to orgasm, usually, and then she would satisfy me. Our lovemaking had become a carefully choreographed dance. What it lacked in originality, it made up for in technical competence.

Gina, however, was much more adventurous. She maneuvered me into positions I hadn't realized were possible. And when some turned out, in fact, to be impossible, she just laughed and tried something else. Linda and I would have become frustrated and immediately returned to a tried and true position. I even found myself trying things I had only before seen in porn films.

When Gina found a position that worked, she moaned. "Don't stop. God, don't stop." And she burst into short, intense spasms. Instead of resting afterwards, she'd get a second or third wind and concentrate on arousing me until we were both at it again.

I surprised myself by lasting much longer than I suspected I was capable of. When I finally reached orgasm, I exploded with an intensity I thought, rather proudly, would have made a porn star jealous.

That's when I realized the porn analogy played all too real. As exciting as the sex was, I was working at demonstrating to myself and maybe to Linda that I was spontaneous enough to fuck my wife's friend. I wasn't trying to satisfy Gina, I was trying to prove I could.

Gina felt it, too. When we finally exhausted ourselves, she rolled over, kissed me softly and said, "I've wanted to do that for a long time, you know. It was good."

I held her in my arms, unable to speak.

After a while, she said, "But you're not the fuck buddy type, are you?"

"No, I guess I'm not." I started to apologize, fearing it was my performance she was commenting on.

"You're a strange man, Frank. A closet prude. In a way, you're just like Linda. You need to be in love."

I knew she was right, but I was shocked to think that Linda and I might be compatible after all.

"There aren't very many of you," she said.

I laughed. "A lot more than you realize."

"Then why can't I find them?"

I held her for a while. Then I got out of bed and dressed. She didn't try to stop me.

And that's where things are right now. Gina tells me about her male
friends, as if I were one of her girlfriends, and Linda has finally told Clyde she no longer needs his bony ass. She called me a few days after kicking him out.

"I'm afraid of being alone," she said.

"I know. It's not easy." I told her about a woman at work I'd been dating. We talked about how difficult it is to start over. "It's so strange not having history with a person."

"Did we make a mistake, Frank? Should we ...?"

I didn't let her finish her question. "I need to be uncomfortable right now, Lin." I added, "You probably do, too."

"You sound like Gina," she said. She asked me if I've kept in touch with Gina and I told her we had dinner a while back. Judging from her silence, I suspected Gina might have spoken with her. "You know Gina's answer to all problems."

I laughed.

"Maybe we should become fuck buddies," Linda said.

The words shocked and aroused me. It made such good sense. We were, after all, good friends. We spoke more intimately since our divorce than we had for the last half of our marriage.

"No," I heard myself say. "I'm not ready for that. Not yet, anyway."