Paean to L & S: or a Love Supreme

We began the relationship slowly, cautiously. Larissa had been divorced for two and a half years, myself for nine months. She had been with one other man in that time; I had been with myself. We each had kids. We each were busy, very busy. We each bore scars.

We met at our daughter's soccer games in South Pasadena, a very contented upper middle class town on the edge of Los Angeles. I was the coach; she helped out with the practices and with the phone calls. My attraction to her was quick. I love ex-tom-boys, and I knew she was one: she had the walk, the bounce in her step, and the grace. When I met her for the first time, my eyes zoomed quickly from her face to her hand, pulse quickening, looking for a ring. She had no jewelry on her hands at all, not even a watch, and just a beaded ankle bracelet and little hooped gold earrings. I like them. They were cool. Earrings for me were iconic. I had my code: the more it dangled, the more she entangled. I also stayed away from anything resembling fruit in the ear, art work, and more than two piercings. She definitely did not look like South Pasadena: no make-up, no fake blonde streaks to lighten her hair, no Volvo station wagon. I fell in like immediately. I drove home from practice talking to my daughter about the team but imagining Larissa first at the beach with me, bodysurfing in the the waves, and then in my bedroom.

My quick crush then began to turn into a a real, substantial like. She had a great manner about her as a parent and the right attitude about sports: it's a game--let the kids enjoy it. Unlike so many parents, she stuck mostly to adjectives on the sidelines, avoiding verbs. She was encouraging--not critical, not demanding, not a CEO. No "kick it" or "run harder" or "go after it" or "shoot"--just "good play," "nice ball," "ok," "yes!" My real like began to deepen into something more complicated the morning of our first playoff game. The game time was 8:00 a.m. in the middle of November: too early for the girls and too cold. Larissa came to the game with a tape for the warm ups: the opening of the Beatles' "Good Morning," next Randy Newman's "I Love L.A.," followed by Jimmy Buffet's "You Can Get It If You Really Want" and Hendrix's "Fire" and concluding with Steppenwolf's "Born to be Wild." Our team won the game in an upset over a better team 3-1. We scored in the first few minutes, and I stayed cool--we were fortunate, and we still had most of the game to play But when we scored the second goal near the end of the first half, I jumped in her arms, exhilarated, pumped up. "It's the music," I told her. "It did it."

At the end of the game, I thanked her, and I said I owed her a celebratory beer or two. She accepted. I had waited until the end of the season to make a move, fearing all the time she would show up to some morning game with a man next to her who had been with her all night. I hesitated to ask her out earlier: I felt a coach-parent relationship should no more be broken by lust than than a professor-student relationship.

When the season was over we did go out: first for the perfunctory dinner at a nice restaurant with jazz music, second for an international soccer match at the Coliseum, and third for a drive around Los Angeles visiting used bookstores, her favorites and mine, and we ended up at one I had never been to before: a large used bookstore near the ocean in Long Beach called "Acres of Books," where I found a copy of a book I had to hide from her sight when I bought it: Gael Greene's "Delicious Sex," which included the recipe for "Chocolate Wickedness," which I had lost. (When I had fixed it for my wife after the first Saturday night after she had come home from a long business trip, she took one bite and remarked, "This is dangerous. I'll need great sex after this just to cool down.") And I bought her a copy of Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God." When she called me up the next night to tell me how she had loved the novel, I was hooked deeply, maybe too deeply.

An old saying went through my head: measure a relationship after the fifth date. We had done nothing more than kiss up until that point, and it took almost three months to fit in five dates around our work and around our responsibilities for our kids. But we were emailing after the first date. The fourth date was horse back riding: one of her passions. I had not been on a horse in 35 years, so we went slow, around a track. She was a great coach, as encouraging towards me as she was with her daughter playing soccer. We finished the ride in Griffith Park, and then returned to the track, where she finished riding by herself at different paces, not needing caution anymore. I grew profoundly jealous of the horse: she was having so much fun on it; she had such control of it. I wanted to get back on my horse, let it run away with me, and let her rescue me.

The fifth date was dinner at my house: five courses. We began at 7:30 p.m. and were still eating and finishing our bottle of wine at 10:30 p.m. Dessert came in two courses: first fruit--strawberries, kiwi, raspberries, mango. Then chocolate wickedness. When she took her first bite, there were no words: just a look--savoring, lingering, luxuriating in the taste, then another spoonful, savored more slowly, then the spoon tongued and caught between the lips, then removed slowly, and then tongued some more. Amazingly, we finished the dessert, then the bottle of wine. The candles were almost burnt out. We were starting to burn up. We each knew the ending, and we each knew that we each knew the ending, but like good readers, we did not skim to get to the ending. We stared each other down, waiting for the other to rise, to make a motion that it would take us to the bedroom, and I blinked first.

"Would you like anything else to drink? A liquer? A cup of coffee? Espresso?"

Her reply simply stunned me. "Do you have tequila?"

"Yes," I answered, a bit confused. "Would you like a margarita?"

"No. I want a shot or two of it with lemon."

I love tequila. I love lemon. I love the ritual of drinking straight tequila: you make an O with thumb and forefinger, wet the circle with your tongue, deposit some salt in the crotch of the thumb, lick it up, shoot down the tequila, and follow with lemon. The suffusing warmth, the glow, the inner fire can only be matched for my taste by Laphroaig single malt scotch whiskey or by.....XXX.

She went first. Then she started the ritual for me: licking my thumb, circling my fingers, slowly, with her tongue, measuring the salt out carefully, and holding the lemon for me to bite into, which I did, several times, wanting to suck out every bit of lemon juice. The sharp rush, the gold fire glow from the tequila, flooding downwards was met by a another rush, a flush of excitement, circling in my loins and ascending. We repeated the ritual: this time I wet her fingers, even more slowly then she did mine, and I held the lemon for her, which she sucked on five or six or seven times. I went back to her hand: sucking the space where the salt had been, the V between thumb and forefinger, lingering, teasing, tonguing until she shivered a little, as if she had bit into a very tart lemon. We then took turns licking and sucking fingers, one after the other, more deliberately than a cat cleaning fur: each of us, doing all ten fingers, doing each one more lustfully, more laciviously than the one before: Larissa concentrating on each fingertip, while I focused on the v between each finger, as if, of course, I was between her legs.

We never said a word except with our eyes and our smiles. Nothing else needed to be said. When we finished my whole body was throbbing, pulsing: we had been on the edges of our seats forever. We rose from the seats, and embraced, tightly, holding the position, and then like paper clips tangling together on a magnet, we were drawn to the bedroom.

Outside the door, she stopped and whispered to me, "Two rules in there: safe sex and no talk about ex-spouses." The first rule was easy to follow. For the second, I needed a condom on my tongue.

We made love and talked until the sun rose, mostly talking. The lovemaking was less awkward than I expected: not a performance, just the joy of being in each other's arms, with the sex an exclamation point, a way to sign the love letter we each had been composing in our minds, in our imaginations, in our hearts. She took me inside her delightfully, welcoming me, making me feel at home, making me feel very wanted, like a newcomer by the best neighbor, holding me still each time I entered her anew, forestalling my thrusting as she adjusted herself to my length, to my thickness, swiveling a bit to get the fit right, like adjusting the seat and mirror on a sports car for a taller driver with the engine on but not in gear.

We drove slowly that first night, sticking to surface streets and backroads, avoiding the fastlane: it was a drive in the country on the first day of spring, taking the ascent slowly, pulling off the road at times just to admire the sights: we would stop almost all our motions just to talk, and Larissa would seem to forget at times that I was still hard. I would gently remind her, and she would refocus, almost apologizing, picking up the pace--but then she would remember something else, or have something more to say, or think of something new she just had to tell me, associating freely, and we would stop, or slow down, and then she would just squeeze me inside to start me up again. Or if we got too distracted, if she started to switch to a new topic while we were near motionless, I would withdraw, almost all the way out, poised to let her talk without my interference or poised to plunge, and then she would pull me into her tight and giddyap me with her hands on my butt, making it a drum for sending me the signals, orchestrating the percussion, synchronizing ourselves for the crescendo.

I came quickly, too quickly, the first time, but the more we made love, the more power I had: my cock was mostly under my control and it felt great, very great. But Larissa could not yet surrender: she would be close, panting in short breaths, and even while I was on top, she had free rein: holding myself still, while she cantered and galloped below me, but then she would hand the reins over to me, inviting me to come, requesting me to come, demanding that I come, insisting that I come even if she was left behind, and when I did come, she, amazingly, looked even happier than I did: so joyful that I thought she was ready to cry, and the last time, as dawn broke, there was a tear or two, which I kissed and wanted to suck in as if it was some elixir, some magic potion, some protection, strangely enough, against sadness.

The morning after a night of lovemaking with a new lover is a special magic. The sunrise is richer, deeper, more passionate as if the horizon itself was a pleasured erogenous zone--the aureole to the sun's nipple. The shower has the vigor and romance of a tropical waterfall. And the orange juice has the bite of tongues touching together--or the sweet tartness of the tongue taking its first taste of her sex. (No man should plot seduction without champagne in the refigerator for the late evening and fresh oranges to be squeezed, by hand, with a juicer, in the morning.)

The morning had to give way of course to the all the suspended priorities: kids to be picked up and transported; shopping and laundry to be done; dinners to be planned and homework monitored. We walked out to her car, unsteadily. Assuming the vertical position for an extended time was a challenge: the legs and hips felt better joined together for support, for extra strength. I began to kiss her goodbye and she flinched back, and then offered me a reverse approach, and I could see why. Her chin bore a small raspberry from the abrasions of an early morning beard: a little red badge of courage. Love had been a battlefield for both of us. We had run from the battle, and were afraid of the consequences. But now we were joined together, in the same fox hole, fighting the same enemy, dodging the same bullets: looking for peace and finding the courage to look again for love.

On Monday, when I checked my email after lunch, I received a message from Larissa. She had showed up for work dying in pain with a urinary infection and had gone straight to the women's room. On the way out of the stall, she ran into one of her best friends from work. The exchange was classic girltalk:

"Larissa. What's the matter?"

"A damn urinary infection."

"Hey, that's great. You've had too much fucking."

"You know, it sorta does feel good. I thought I was getting too old for this."

"You need to tell me the story. Let's go out in an hour. I'll treat for the cranberry juice."

For the next month, Larissa would not have to worry about cranberry juice. We talked on the phone, emailed eather other, and all that stuff, but we were almost never together. Finding a time when were free in evenings was a moonshot. We stayed in touch--but with car phones, emails, phone messages, etc. We got together, barely, for one dinner, a lunch, and two occasions of stealth sex (in the house after the kids were alseep and out before the morning paper arrived).

But then came the words that were a Bolero, a Coltrane's "Love Supreme," a Rodrigo's "Concierto De Aranjuez" to my ears. "Let us become Lotus eaters for Midsummer's night. I have booked us a place on Catalina Island for the June 21st weekend. You have no choice but to cancel everything else. Don't bring any books. Don't bring any pajamas. Pack your maypole. This weekend is pure l and s." Lust. Sensuality. Lassitude. Sex. Languour. Sleep. Lacviousness. Sin. Love. Satisfaction."

"Listen," Larissa said, as she slithered towards me in the bed soon after we had returned from dinner on Saturday night, a strap of lingerie sliding off her shoulder. "Please, this time, stay still. Promise me. Don't move. Let me take you. Let me do everything to you. I want to love and sex you like you are me and I am you."

She slides the other strap down, and lets the black lace fall. Larissa, so lissome and lithe, so sultry and playful, a slyfox, nude and in heat. I can not refuse her call. No way will I say no. She has lassoed my heart and tied me to the bed with her words.

"Yes, I'm yours for the night. Do we me what you will."

"Shush," she responds, placing her finger against my lips and then her lips. I nod assent.

She places its tip inside her lips, sliding it in slowly, wetting it. She sits alongside me, circling my nipple with the wet tip, watching me smile, smiling back. Her lips replace her finger and linger languourously....licentiously....lasciviously around my nipple, endlessly, in circles. Her fingers begin to rake along my legs, from shin to loin, lightly, like a monk tending a zen garden. Her tongue, snail-like, follows a downward path, leaving its little sticky mark, going down, and down further, from nape of the neck and nipples to behind the knees, lingering, then, reversing its direction, inside and along the loins, along my length, up and up, but in no hurry, relaxing and luxuriating after each small climb, taking in the view, appreciating the sights, admiring the peak.

But then swiftly, by surprise, she slides me in, all swollen and longing for the sucking, the swirling, the sensations of lust. She straddles me on top, and bends a bit, bosoms swaying, grazing nipple against nipple, like connecting positive and negative ends of a batteries, charging up the flashlight inside of us. We kiss forever, and then she begins her Siren song, testing me with temptation.

The hotel room has its own stereo sound system, and she puts in a special tape: "Light My Fire," "60 Minute Man," Barry White, Diana Ross, "Burning Love," "Great Balls of Fire," "Steam," Donna Summer, Bessie Smith, Big Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle, and Roll," Flamenco Guitar, Bolero. As the music plays, she tempts and teases and tortures with fingers, hands, mouth, pussy, keeping me up, keeping me on the verge, keeping me in the curl of the wave, the pipeline, not letting me crash, not allowing me to come. The more intense the music, the slower and softer Larissa became, lying beside me, entwined, nibbling my ear and neck as she allowed just one finger to stroke me slowly up and down, making me feel as if my cock was some 60s lava lamp and that I was stoned, blissed out, in a darkened room, mattress on the floor, incense burning, Ravi Shankar's sitar playing at Woodstock going through my mind, as currents of love circulated in and around me, moving up, separating, and joining back together with Larissa like the lava of the lamp.

Larissa then whispered in my ear: "I'm ready to come for you tonight. Tell me what it will be like. Tell me how I will come. Tell me how you want me to come. You can take me with the right metaphor. You can take me as many times as you like. You've got my pussy. Now take my heart and soul with your words."

To inspire my creative eros, Larissa took me inside her again, on top, sitting straight up, rocking gently in the saddle as I began inventing, and she began grading my responses with her gait.

"Liquid light."

"Coming out of a long dark tunnel into the noon sun."

"A tuning fork in the sky struck by a double rainbow."

"Popcorn popping inside you."

"Honey flowing up into the combs all over inside you.'

"1,000 butterflies fluttering."

"Your first taste of Chocolate Wickedness."

"Jimi Hendrix at Monterey Pop, 67'"

"Cognac on a cold night."

"Champagne at a wedding."

"Saxophone followed by flamenco guitar followed by lute music"

"Bodysurfing the perfect wave."

"The iridescent fire of the black opal."

"Shakespeare's Midsummer Nights Dream"

"The Song of Solomon"

With the last suggestion, Larissa stopped my lips, quieting me down, making me silent. She leaned down, kissed me deeply and whispered in my ear: "All of the above tonight, tomorrow, and for a long time after that. I'm falling in love with you, and I love it."

The words gave me a shiver, a deep thrill, a quickening, felt everywhere: in my head, down the spine, through my shaft, a feeling accentuated as she thrilled me more with her tongue and lips, pecking me along my neck, then a soul kiss: her tongue snaking past my parted lips and a deep thrust, darting in all the way, an offering, calling upon me to suck it in, to entwine it, mimicking our bodies, as she was rocking and slithering her lithe torso high up against mine, convincing me silently, through the forceful oratory of the body's vocabulary, that she loved it, she wanted it, and she wanted me: I was her chosen mount, her stallion, and she was ready to ride outside of the corral. I started to speak, but again, she silenced me, closing my mouth with hard, insistent, controlling my tongue with her thrusts, calling forth my own thrusts.

The most intense love, the best passion, is beyond the limits of language. No words can fathom it. And now to speak was superfluous: her body was an eloquent Cordelia. Goneril and Regan in the love trial tell King Lear what he wants to her: they give him rhetoric, pulp, pop music love lyrics. Cordelia remains silent. She can not heave her heart into her mouth. Her love, like our passion now, is wordless, speechless, ineffable: eyes and gestures say what no words can convey. Indeed, the body had its expressive syntax, its grammar: nipples erect, clit engorged, the body arched like a parentheses, the cock straining, throbbing, thrusting, all tensed up...hard, harder, hardest...a beautiful exclamation mark. This language is all L and S: Love and silence. Love and its inarticulate sounds. Moaning.... murmuring... sounds of joy... laughter... panting.

Larissa was now on the verge, climbing high, just needing a few more steps, like Eurydice on the way out of hell, an intrepid climber, almost ready to leave the tunnel, the darkness, and enter the spray of light, guided by my hand, prodded by my love: I wrapped her tight in my arms, and rolled her over quickly, by surprise, a wrestler's move, pinning her to the bed. I then entered her with my fingers, playing with her, strumming her chords with a quick guitar riff, shortening the strings, making her climb higher, winding her up, Hendrix-high, then, again, entering her, all four fingers, reaching inside her and back, giving her the come hither sign, thumbing her clit, and then it began, the arc of love: back bent, hips high off the ground, legs spread open, an altar of love, her cunt my gift, her orgasm our joy: her pussy opening up and then caving in, honeythick, her body crashing back down, then arching up again, wanting more, needing more, getting more.