Читать книгу The Scarlet Letter Society - Mary T. McCarthy - Страница 5

“It’s throat-numbing spray,” she grinned mischievously. “For blowjobs.”

Eva Bradley, a petite woman in her early forties with neatly bobbed black hair, wore her standard issue corporate attorney Ann Taylor black pantsuit and brightly colored scarf du jour. She’d taken a small box from her Coach purse, removed a brown bottle, and placed it in the middle of the coffee shop’s table with a dramatic, near jazz-hands-level flourish.

The small glass bottle landed—thonk—in the middle of the monthly invitation, accidentally hitting a bullseye on the standard giant red letter “A” watermarked on the page.

“But he knows where she’s goin’ as she’s leavin’

She’s headed for the cheatin’ side of town.“

-“Lyin’ Eyes,” The Eagles

Monthly meeting of the Scarlet Letter Society

Zoomdweebies Café

Friday, April 6, 2012

5:30 a.m.

“The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread.”

-The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

Lisa always printed out the invite, which featured the same book quote at the bottom and a different song lyric each month. Scarlet Letter Society membership was exclusive, right now limited to only three women: Eva, Maggie and Lisa. The club bore the name of the literary bible of adultery: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

Glancing at the mysterious bottle, Maggie laughed. Next to her Lisa gaped, widening her chocolate-brown eyes; wrinkles instantly rippled like the international symbol for ‘bacon’ across her bewildered forehead.

Maggie Hanson, who owned the vintage clothing shop next door to the café where the women met, picked up the box. “Comfortably Numb,” she read in her thick Boston accent, still smirking. “Well, that’s a good a name as any for a blow job spray. Says here, ‘the refreshing spritz contains a mild numbing element to coat the back of the throat, suppressing gag reflex during oral sex.’”

Eva picked up the bottle, adding in a sing-songy ad-jingle voice, “Discreet enough to take with you wherever you go! Doubles as a breath freshener!”

“Where the heck are you going?” said local bakery owner Lisa Swain, looking completely stupefied as she glanced at the flavor on the package: Chocolate Mint.

“It comes in flavors?” she asked, her usually pale face beet red against her light blonde hair.

Eva smiled. “Of course. Like at the dentist!”

Maggie raised her eyebrows at Lisa and told her, “You know, this stuff works better when guys use it.”

Eva rolled her eyes. “Is that what all your gay best friends tell you?”

Maggie replied, “No, smarty pants. I mean if you spray it on your man’s fundangles, it takes him longer to come. Also, his junk is now a chocolate mint lollipop. Everyone’s a winner.”

“I planned on using it for an upcoming meeting in DC,” said Eva sheepishly, a sexy twinkle in her eye.

Maggie nodded knowingly. “Hopefully not during the meeting, ya big whore. Let me guess,” she said. “Late night meeting with your intern, Ron?”

Lisa chimed in, “Honestly, Eva, I can’t believe you’re sleeping with someone who was born in the 1980s. He was named after Ronald Reagan, for the love of God! And you were in high school then!”

“Technically, I was only in 8th grade when he was born.” Eva blushed. “I mean, it’s not like I’m old enough to be his mom or anything.”

Maggie added, “Yeah, unless you were one hell of a slutty 8th grader. Did they have chocolate mint blow job spray back then, Mrs. Robinson?”

All three ladies laughed. Lisa took a sip of her iced coffee drink and pointed out,

“I picked a really awkward day for a mint mocha latte.”

“Good morning, Tara,” said Zarina Harandi. Zarina owned Zoomdweebies, a popular indie bookshop café in Keytown, Maryland, the state’s second-largest city.

“So happy to be here.” said Tara. “I was looking for a copy of the new Stephen King book, and then, of course, the Baltimore Sun.”

“Of course,” said Zarina, walking across the worn wood floors. The shop was painted in 80s classic bright yellow to match its vintage pride and joy, a Ms. Pac Man arcade game.

“You never have to worry about the battery dying on a book,” said Tara.

“True,” said Zarina. Her mother Kate had opened this shop after her dad, an Iranian immigrant, died six years before. Kate founded the shop because, she said, “Women need a place to circle their wagons— even if their wagons come in the form of minivans.” Kate was an 80s girl to the max, thus the inspiration for the shop name, Zoomdweebies, a reference to the Judd-Nelson-as-John-Bender character from the 1985 John Hughes film The Breakfast Club.

“And not surprisingly, I’ll have my usual,” said Tara, smiling. Zarina knew that was a double shot espresso iced latte with skim milk and a shot of vanilla.

“Coming right up,” said Zarina.

“What would this town do without your shop?” said Tara. “I don’t want to live in a world where you can’t still walk somewhere to buy a book, coffee and a paper.”

“Me either,” said Zarina. She’d finished college the year before, returning home to run the coffee shop when her mom began working as a professor at the local university. Not knowing what she wanted to do with her Journalism degree, she figured running Zoomdweebies was as good an idea as any for the moment.

Besides, she liked it here. Her seemingly quiet personality allowed her to fade into the background to a point where people forgot she was there. But huddled over a laptop at a small desk in the corner of the shop behind the counter in-between making avocado and Brie wraps and nonfat chai lattes? Like the janitor in The Breakfast Club, she heard and saw everything.

Tara thanked Zarina for the coffee and settled into a cozy, worn red velvet chair to read her paper. Zarina knew Tara only had a short time before she had to go pick up her preschooler.

Next to Tara, Pretty in Pink played silently on a vintage TV and VHS player. “Wonder whatever happened to Jake Ryan after that movie?” Tara pondered when she saw it playing. “Bet he’s still hot.” The shop played an endless series of 80s movies on VHS: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Sixteen Candles, Caddyshack, and the stacks went on and on. Kate found the entire VH1 series of “I Love the 80s” and had it converted backwards from digital into VHS tapes by some local hipster geek who told her, “Excellent choice in formats, dude.”

Tara and the shop’s other regular customers loved the movies playing in the background, often turning up the volume to watch a scene or two. It was always the cool people who gathered around to watch the Carl Spackler “Cinderella story” scene from Caddyshack and asked to turn the volume up. Those were the customers Zarina wanted as regulars, not the uptight, pantyhose-wearing mothers who demanded Airplane be turned off when Captain Oveur asks Joey if he’s ever seen a grown man naked.

Those bitches can go to Starbucks, Zarina had thought.

All kinds of people came into the café. As a journalist, Zarina kept a notebook to write character sketches for future stories. There was a husband and wife who stopped by every Tuesday morning and ordered exactly the same thing. Only they’re on their way to marriage counseling, thought Zarina. There was a teenage boy who came in at the same time after school every day, buying only a bag of Mystery flavor Air Heads. He’s only here because he hopes the blonde lacrosse player will come in with her friends to giggle over skim mochaccinos.

And there were the moms. Although occasionally there was the lone mom like Tara, who came in to actually read a book and get some peace and quiet while her child was at school, most of the moms travelled in gaggles, like geese. There were PTA moms (the most annoying; the way they yammered on about cookie dough fundraisers and teacher appreciation donuts made Zarina’s head spin), save-the-planet moms (cloth diapers, raw organic homemade baby food), and brand new moms (dark circles and sweatpants) just trying to have human contact with someone other than a newborn.

Thinking of the early morning visit of the adulteresses, Zarina smiled at the thought of someone like Tara overhearing a conversation about blowjob spray.

“’Adultresses’ seems like an outrageously old-fashioned word to use,” Zarina thought, as she cleaned the espresso maker, “but what else is there to call them? The Women Who Cheat on Their Husbands? MILFs?” Some would say ‘sluts’ or ‘whores’ in a more serious way than the club members, who used the terms jokingly. “Maybe it’s best to just call them what they call themselves, in honor of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous novel,” Zarina decided. They’re simply known as “The Scarlet Letter Society.”

“I don’t know what I’d do if Ron and Charles found out about each other,” whispered Eva after the gathering at the coffee shop. “Not to mention if my husband found out about my two lovers. Ugh.”

The worn oval sign reading Wings Vintage Clothing creaked on its iron hinges as the women entered Maggie’s downtown shop, its name chosen as a tribute to her favorite piece of literature, Erica Jong’s revolutionary 1973 book Fear of Flying. Maggie had even gone so far as to name her first daughter Erica (her other daughter’s name, Lilith, also reflected a healthy sense of feminism.)

“Well it’s plenty to worry about, hussy,” laughed Maggie. She tossed her unruly reddish-brown curls, always bordering on disheveled and frizzy, over her shoulders. The two had been friends for years and shared the comfortable conversation style reserved for sisterhood and rare relationships between women.

Eva absentmindedly dusted the top of a vintage frame containing a piece of antique handmade needlework that served as another nod to the shop name: “My child, I wish you two things. To give you roots, and to give you wings.”

“I need advice,” declared Eva. “Everything is just so complicated, and I honestly feel like my life is spinning way out of control. Have you ever felt that way?”

Maggie smiled, a glint in her green eyes. “Yeah, once upon a time, I guess I did.”

Eva replied, “Well, what did you do? I feel like my whole life is a circus, and I’m a terrible ringleader.”

Maggie turned to face Eva. “You just gotta learn how to keep all the balls in the air.”

“There are just so many balls!” said Eva. Both women laughed. “Now help me pick out something vintage and fabulous to wear to my meeting next week.”

Maggie picked out a few vintage 40s dresses and sent Eva into a dressing room. Eva modeled; everything always looked amazing on her. Maggie rang up the purchase, sending Eva on her way with a hug, some reassurance to take one day at a time, and an A-line navy dress that looked stunning on her petite frame.

As she put the dress into a bag, a certain smell triggered a long ago memory. After Eva left the shop, Maggie sat in a trance-like state, remembering.

Frost formed on the insides of the two-room efficiency apartment window. Maggie was locked inside alone on one of many nights when her mother, a waitress at a nearby bar, couldn’t afford a sitter. Maggie didn’t even remember her own mother’s name, only that she’d run home to check on her only child during fifteen-minute breaks, smelling of stale cigarettes and beer. Like a choppy scene from a horror movie, the images flickering and jerky and too quick, then too slow, then too quick, Maggie thought of nights where her mother tucked her into bed, leaving a flashlight on the nightstand in case she had to use the bathroom. The electric bill hadn’t been paid. The smell. That familiar smell, from the hourglass-shaped glass bottle with the gold bow. Her mother would spray that Estee Lauder (a gift, somehow Maggie knew it had been a gift... but from who?) on her to hide the bar smells before she climbed into bed with Maggie; they’d slept in the same bed to stay warm.

The jingle of the shop door’s bell jolted Maggie back into the moment, her face flushed and hands sweaty. Her heart was beating faster and her head was pounding as she reached for the pills in her purse.

“Daymares?”

It was Dave, Maggie’s first husband, who knew she called her daytime trances “daymares” since they reminded her of nightmares.

Maggie’s face softened when she saw Dave: bearded, tall, corduroy and flannel-clad. He walked over and hugged her.

Eva couldn’t get the lyrics to “Lyin’ Eyes” out of her head ever since Maggie had sent the invite to that month’s Scarlet Letter Society meeting. The line “she’s so far gone, she feels just like a fool” played in her head after she left Maggie’s shop and headed over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge toward her mother’s Matthew’s Island cottage on what James Michener called “the calmer waters of the Eastern Shore” of Maryland.

Her phone rang as she finished crossing the bridge, and “Call from Ron” appeared on her car dashboard screen. She answered it on the steering wheel of her Mars Red Mercedes SLK 350 Roadster.

“Eva Bradley,” she crooned in a fake professional tone as she answered the phone.

“Ms. Bradley, this is your intern Ron. I’m calling to let you know that your meeting next Thursday morning meeting needs to be rescheduled due to a conflict with the client.”

“Ron, you’re my only intern at the moment. You don’t have to introduce yourself. You can call and tell that particular client to gargle my balls, because this is the third time she’s canceled.”

A moment’s pause. “Er, Ms. Bradley, I’m not sure the phrase ‘gargle my balls’ is one that the madam Fortune 500 executive is used to hearing…”

Eva laughed. “I’ve been hanging around Maggie too much. Well, I’ll leave it to you to phrase that in a more diplomatic way, then, Ron. In the meantime, I demand to know why your body is not underneath mine right now.”

“Ms. Bradley, are you driving?”

“Yes, Ron, I am.”

“Well then, the answer is that I wouldn’t want to wreck a perfectly gorgeous piece of German machinery. I will, however, be happy to fill your empty appointment slot on Thursday morning since your client canceled.”

“In that case,” replied Eva, blushing slightly despite herself and snickering, “you can thank that bitch of a client for me.”

Eva hung up the phone, smiling at the way her body tingled just hearing her young lover’s voice. He made her happy. Her husband Joe, a department head physician at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, worked virtually 24-7. Her twin boys Calvin and Graham were fourteen, started high school this year, and were hormonal and smelly and awful. She loved her family like crazy, but escaping from them seemed to be all she ever wanted to do—which of course brought on guilt, because she was raised Catholic, and if anyone could send you on an all-expenses paid mom-guilt trip to the moon and back any day of the week, it was the Catholics.

She had somehow managed to position herself to be a forty-one-year-old woman who was cheating on both her forty-five-year-old husband and her fifty-three-year-old lover with her twenty-eight-year-old intern. Her sex drive aside, it was Eva’s workaholism that really drove her. Her career as a corporate attorney was both successful and demanding, and she often wondered if all the steam she put into the corporate machine during her long workweeks was exactly the steam she was blowing off with her various creative sexual outlets.

Suddenly the phone rang again.

Without looking at the dashboard, Eva purred, “How may I help you?” in a seductive voice.

“EEE-vah?” asked her husband, Joe. Her name was pronounced “ee-vah” though people often mispronounced it “Ay-va.” When Joe thundered the word, the first half sounded like it was being shouted in a capital letter: EEE-vah.

Eva was snapped back into her reality like a branch in a thunderstorm. She unknowingly shifted her driving position. Where she had been reclining back into her leather seats, sunroof open, hair blowing in the wind, she now sat upright, straightened and stiffened. “Hey Joe,” Eva replied, trying to sound casual. “What’s up?”

“What’s up is that your sons just got busted behind the school football field bleachers drinking beers.”

Eva winced at the way Joe referred to their sons when they were in trouble, as “your sons.” When they made state championship teams in lacrosse, he called them “my boys.”

Joe continued. “Apparently you didn’t answer your cell phone, so the Vice Principal Ken Tracey called me to let me know they were suspended for three days. And that was after I spent fifteen minutes convincing him that they shouldn’t be expelled. So fortunately, they will make it through at least their first year of high school.”

Eva cringed. Dreaded, ever-present mommy guilt immediately flared up. Somehow, it was her fault. She traveled too much and the boys were acting out in rebellion. Now they would do terribly in high school and then not get into good colleges. And all of that was because their mother was a wine drinking, career-obsessed sex freak and their father worked all the time.

Eva cleared her head, and her throat, and responded, “What should we do about OUR sons?” She hated how she sounded. She couldn’t understand how she could ruin entire corporations in the courtroom without batting an eyelash, but when it came to dealing with her husband, she turned into a handkerchief-gripping 1950s housewife, complete with red and white checked apron.

Joe replied, “Destroy their lives as they know them?”

Eva sighed. “Have you spoken to them? What’s the rest of the story? Some older kid must’ve given them the beer. This is the first time they’ve done anything like this. We should sit down as a family and discuss it.”

Joe bellowed, “The rest of the story? There is no rest of the story. I sent them to their rooms for the weekend. I don’t want to see their faces.”

“So you didn’t talk to them?” inquired Eva, marveling at the fact that all her husband, a pediatric oncologist at one of the top medical institutions in the country, could muster up when the first sign of teen angst acting out appeared was a big time out chair.

“There is nothing to say,” said Joe. “You can come home and deal with them.”

Eva had already been debating doing a U-turn on Kent Island to head back to the Western Shore of Maryland. But this was her weekend. She hadn’t been to the island in a month, had promised her mother a visit, and she couldn’t travel there again for at least another month. Her mother honestly needed her.

“I’ll just spend one night with Mom,” said Eva, compromising. “Tomorrow when I get home, I will speak with the boys, and I’ll text them tonight.”

Joe laughed.

“Why would you think they would still have phones?” He hung up.

Eva winced and began the inevitable beating-herself-up routine. Although their father was emotionally vacant from their boys’ lives, preferring to lose himself in his work than to take his own sons to an Orioles game, Eva still blamed herself when there was a low grade on a test or a small altercation on the lacrosse field.

Eva pulled her car over to get an iced coffee; she’d need it to get through this drive. She opened the Facebook application on her iPhone. Her husband wouldn’t realize it, but she knew the boys were fully technologically functioning without the phones. The spoiled brats each had MacBooks and iPads in their rooms, and even Internet through the Wiis on their bedroom TVs.

She wanted to cyberstalk them a tiny bit, just a quick check of Facebook pages, to be sure they weren’t bragging about their exploits. She private messaged both of them in the same message on Facebook.

Dear Graham and Calvin,

Nice job, boys. Dad’s pissed and I can’t exactly say I’m a proud mom. Do not use your Facebook accounts. If I see any use on them, I’ll disable them. The last thing you need is to mess up your college chances by bragging about your little escapades. I will be home tomorrow and we can discuss this. In the meantime, be productive. Do homework! Clean your rooms! Do dishes! Don’t leave the house. Spend time thinking about how stupid of a decision you just made and how incredibly crappy your summer is going to be because of it.

Hugs,

Mom

Eva sipped her coffee and pulled back onto Rt. 50. A quick visit to the island was just what she needed. Watching the sun set over the bay would help recharge her batteries for having to deal with the boys tomorrow.

Motherhood really sucks sometimes, she thought. Hollywood’s version—all fluffy blankets and cute messy banana-eating baby faces and angelic three-year-old handprint molds—comprised about 10% of being a mother. The other 90% was temper tantrums and math homework you couldn’t understand and dealing with bickering and nagging about messy rooms and piles and piles of laundry that went on forever, because it didn’t ever end. The. Laundry. Never. Ends.

Eva wanted to send out a public service announcement for women who, like Lisa, were struggling with infertility:

Hey, gals! Don’t feel bad about being childless! Wanna know a huge secret that moms never talk about, because it would make us realize how miserable we really are a lot of the time? IT SUCKS! Your life is OVER! Forget sleep! Stay home with them and you’re broke! Go back to work and feel guilty, PLUS spend a fortune on childcare! You can’t take a shower for more than three consecutive minutes over the next eighteen years! You’re going to eat crap because kids eat macaroni and cheese and chicken nuggets, not shrimp scampi and filet mignon! Time for you to go to the gym or read a book? Forget it. Your sex life? OVER! With your husbands, anyway…

Boy, that would be a popular article, wouldn’t it?

She shook her head and headed southeast.

Early Scarlet Letter Society meeting times worked well for Lisa, because she could attend the gatherings before she opened her bakery. Her husband Jim was a real estate developer in DC, and his long commute made for lonely mornings to kill in their suburban subdivision.

Lisa flipped open her laptop.

Her email contained the usual junk mail, two pie orders, and the one she was looking for—a note from her graphic designer and crush, Ben. She blushed in anticipation and shame.

from:	Ben bnidale@starfishdesign.com
to:	Lisa lswain@blackbirdspie.com
date:	Monday, April 9, 2012, 5:36 AM
subject:	Good morning Good morning, lovely baker. I hope your day is awesome. Your email came just as I was thinking about you. See you Friday for pie meeting…if not before. Ben

Lisa grinned.

Blackbirds Pie was a few blocks away from the coffee shop. She had met Ben when she hired his downtown advertising agency to design a new logo and he was assigned to be her graphic designer. At thirty-seven and wanting a baby, she hadn’t been out looking to complicate her life with an affair.

It was that simple, she thought now, warding off thoughts of how complicated it was. We just really like each other and we have fun together. Lisa could hear the replay in her head as she told the other women her story at the meeting a few months back.

“So what’s your story, newbie?” Maggie had demanded, by way of welcoming the new member to the club.

“Well,” Lisa had begun, awkwardly. “Ben is just so sweet and attentive. One day we were having a lunch meeting and drank too much wine and we just ended up totally going at it on the Pier One Imports wicker couch in the back office of my bakery.”

Eva and Maggie had laughed, so Lisa, grabbing at the skin of her neck absentmindedly with one hand, continued.

“Ben threw me up against the small walk-in freezer,” she embellished. “We had our tongues halfway down each other’s throats and we couldn’t get our clothes off fast enough.” She paused. “Don’t ask me why, but he grabbed a jar of cherries off the shelf as we made our way to my office. We fed each other maraschino cherries while we made out. Cherry juice dripped everywhere.”

She finished the story by reporting that she had already replaced the old couch, which had been both uncomfortable and irreversibly stained with cherry juice.

Recalling it, Lisa’s smile fell. Only she knew that the story was all a lie, a complete and utter fabrication.

The fictionalized account seemed realistic enough. Lisa didn’t know what to do to stop her unrelenting crush on Ben, and wasn’t sure she wanted it to stop. It had only been a few short months since they met. But they hadn’t so much as kissed, much less drowned each other in any kind of juices.

Lisa had lied her way in to the Scarlet Letter Society.

If the women in the club knew she hadn’t actually cheated on her husband, she would have been disinvited from her membership. She felt awful deceiving them, but when Maggie and Eva had visited her bakery one day and she overheard their discussion, she was overcome with curiosity about how they got away with their affairs. The two women had mentioned their third club member moving away, and Lisa had swallowed down her shyness and asked if she could join them for coffee.

Her five-year marriage hadn’t been particularly miserable, and she loved her husband. Something was just…missing.

Better Out Than In, she’d written on page one of her current journal—she’d kept one all her life. The worn leather journal, tucked away in its floral Vera Bradley case, knew that her marriage’s main frustration centered on the couple’s inability to get pregnant. But running a business was exhausting and lonely. While she and Ben had started out in a professional relationship that grew into a friendship, the mutual flirtation seemed to grow stronger each day.

She glanced at the current (and original) Pottery Barn couch, warming at the memory of the last day she’d seen Ben as she hit “reply”:

from:	Lisa lswain@blackbirdspie.com
to:	Ben bnidale@starfishdesign.com
date:	Monday, April 9, 2012 at 1:10 PM
subject:	Earlybird You were up early sending email, mister! Busy day, just getting to my inbox. Yes. Friday. Pie. Can’t wait. Will have your favorite flavor ready. :) L

Lisa wasn’t sure she knew exactly how she’d become such a flirt. From an early age, she had always been reserved. She was prettier than average, though not beautiful; tall, thin, her dark brown eyes exuding inner strength despite uncertainty. She usually dashed on some quick foundation powder, mascara and lip gloss, but only on shop days.

Her husband’s dominant personality was one of the things that had first drawn her to him—she wanted someone else to be in charge of her life. After they’d met at a Chamber of Commerce event six years ago, Jim’s confidence had won her over and although she never really felt like she was head over heels in love with him, she’d made the thirty-two-year-old-ticking-biological-clock decision to marry him when he asked her, simply because he seemed to need her. A half decade in, and now that she was running a successful business, his domineering persona got on her nerves more than anything. That, and his goddamned obsessive foot fetish.

The foot fetish had been a favorite topic at Scarlet Letter Society meetings. And it was funny, sort of, except for the part that it was actually happening to her.

Should I or shouldn’t I? Lisa wrote, and closed the journal, tucking it away in its case inside her purse.

Her combination island/home discipline weekend behind her, Eva was back in New York. She woke up from a deep sleep to find a tongue inside her. An unshaven face with its perfect two-day growth gently scratched the insides of her thighs as she arched her back. She clutched the pillow beside her and whispered, “Good morning to you, too, sir.”

His smile touched the most intimate parts of her, and she laughed at the sensation of his chin stubble. He didn’t stray from his task, expertly holding down her upper thighs with his forearms, demanding that she relinquish control to him. It wasn’t something she was used to. In all other parts of her life, if she had nothing else, she had control. There was a reason her name was on the door of the law firm perched high in the Manhattan skyline. It was no accident she was at the top.

In fact, she recalled now, she preferred to be on top. She squeezed her toned inner thighs together, planning to flip this horny chef onto his back so she could have her own way with him.

He was having none of it. His hours at the gym weren’t spent there just so he could lift cast iron pans. He now incorporated his broad, strong legs to encircle her feet. She wasn’t going anywhere.

She knew from experience that she may as well prop a pillow under her head, relax every muscle in her body, and enjoy the ride. As he rotated his tongue, his thumb gently caressed her. In a matter of minutes, she exploded in a powerful, sweet orgasm that left her body quivering.

His dark, curly, grinning head appeared from under the sheet. He was completely naked, his erection rising to greet her. And then suddenly, the expression on his face turned to horror.

“Oh my gosh, madame,” the man uttered in his heavy French accent. “Je regrette! I am so sorry. I thought you were someone else. I must have the wrong hotel room. This is so embarrassing.”

He hopped out of bed, grabbing his pants and practically running in circles to collect his belongings.

Eva lay on the bed and laughed heartily, her hand over her mouth.

“Well, to be honest with you, monsieur, I’m not sure whose hotel room you’re supposed to be in, but I wish you would stay in this one.”

Charles tossed his clothes playfully into the air and plopped himself naked onto the bed.

“Well in that case, madame, I’m here to serve.”

Eva laughed again. She honestly believed that half the reason she was having this insane, delicious affair in the first place was Charles’s sense of humor. He could always make her laugh. Not just laugh, but laugh from the belly, when you can’t stop yourself no matter how hard you try. Such laughter was so rare in her life.

He was the head chef at The Plaza Hotel, where she stayed a few times a month on business at the firm. Her DC office was where she normally worked, but these visits to New York were her favorite part of the month.

Charles sat up in the bed, leaned down, cupped her face into his capable hands, and kissed her slowly, gently, passionately.

She kissed him back, the tingle in her spine working its way to every part of her being. Though she had already had an earth-shaking orgasm, her body was hungry for more. She wanted him inside her.

Eva felt Charles’ growing erection as it grazed her silk chemise. Her panties were already gone, apparently removed while she slept. She smiled at the thought. His hunger for her was insatiable.

She grabbed his strong shoulders, pulling him into her embrace, returning his eager kisses, a soft moan parting her lips as she anticipated what would follow. She reached down to stroke him as he made a motion to climb on top of her. His fingers gently but decisively found their mark between her legs.

“Not this time,” Eva whispered, rising up from the bed and in a single motion circling herself up and over onto all fours, straddling him. They both smiled. It was her turn to be in control.