Sticks and Stones 10

I went straight back to the hotel and watched unimaginably dull television programs until midnight. I couldn’t write. All I could do was smoke to get me out of my head, which I knew was impossible.
On Thursday morning, I called Suzie to see if I could pick Clara up from her new nursery school, but she was at home with a temperature. I felt wholly responsible for her fever, which I immediately diagnosed as yet another psychosomatic episode induced by parents who should know better.

‘You could look after her this afternoon if you like,’ she offered. ‘I have to see Maddy’s teacher at three and it’ll be difficult if Clara’s there.’

It sure would. Clara’s a livewire at the best of times, so talking about matters of delicacy such as the untrue rumour that had spread around Maddy’s class were best dealt with alone.

‘You could come into Lavaur early and take the jacket back, if you want,’ I replied. ‘You need time to yourself, Suze.’

I went over at lunchtime and Suzie went off with a smile on her face. She deserved it, and had time to get a shopping load in between her meeting and picking up Griff.

Clara and I played with Maddy, who seemed altogether more at home with me.
For a start, she could just about look at me without turning away as if she’d seen a ghost. After I apologised for saying what I’d said the night before, her demeanour changed all the more for the better.

Griff and Suzie returned after collecting a pizza from the van at the roundabout.
She was contented and revived, and as I watched her with a semi hard-on while she lugged the heavy-duty bags of supermarket shopping into the kitchen with Clara and Griff running around her like mice, I could see how I’d failed her. She needed freedom to go out, but I had never really given it to her.
I stayed until six-thirty, sensing that it was perhaps best for me to disappear. They needed to talk together and define their feelings, now that the dust had settled from Alan’s early flight back.
Just by being with the family, my temper had evaporated.

I remember trying to tame my need to have sex with Suzie before I left. I knew that a kiss would suffice, that we could hold fire quite easily.
When I announced my departure, there in the kitchen with her, alone for a second, I reached for her and kissed her goodbye. It was our first kiss for a while, and we lingered on it.
She held me to her and gave me her tongue, a snaky, delicious kiss full of sex.
I lingered further, and felt the bottom of her back’s skin with my hands.
We rested upon each other’s shoulders in ecstatic glory and sighed together without self-consciousness.
At this time, I said something that just came out. I have always held off from emotional pampering in a verbal sense with Suzie, but this was an important moment, and she deserved it. This was her moment.

‘I still have feelings for you,’ I whispered to her, as if I’d been in denial for months.

Only the night before, we’d talked on the phone after I’d left in a huff, and decided that we’d help everyone if we lived apart so that the children’s needs were answered sensibly on a daily basis.

‘Just let’s not show any feelings for each other,’ I’d said, trying to sound like John Wayne.
I knew that, by the size of my erection, the opposite was the case.
We knew that, tomorrow, we would fuck each other’s brains out, and go back on everything we’d said to each other over the last three or four days. We are only as resolute in spirit as we are weak of mind.

‘Dave, you know Dave,’ I said, referring to a very good old friend who had recently become disillusioned with me or himself or our past together in Paris, as I had. ‘He always called me Late and I never asked why until it was too late.’
Suzie, somewhere, knew where I was going. ‘And what did he mean?’ she asked for enlightenment, knowing the answer already.

‘Well, when I was doing the parties, everyone knew, towards the end, that the scene was over. They all moved to London but I stayed and kept doing the party thing in Paris.’ I sighed. ‘The police closed us down, the club mafia moved me on, the crowd rebelled against me, but I didn’t see it. Well, maybe I saw it but I just kept on going. It was like a crusade. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I’ve always been late in understanding things that most people take for granted, like friendship, and Alan has seriously fucked me here, in amongst my own family.’
I could hear renovation in Suzie’s voice as she spoke quietly.

‘I had a really good friend at university,’ she said. You could hear the emotion rise in her voice as she spoke. ‘We were inseparable for two and a half years, and then another girl who was close to us told me that my friend had said something behind my back, and I believed her,’ she shuddered to herself, starting to cry. ‘I believed her and it was a pack of lies, but I only found out a year later.
If you’re late, I’m later,’ she said, laughing out loud.

This had taken immense weight from Suzie’s shoulders.

‘Alan has done what your lying friend did, Suze, and you allowed him to,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she sobbed, finally resigning her senses as if an ancient maladie had been lifted from her forever.

‘You could always call her up, you know,’ I said. ‘She’s probably been hoping you’d get back in touch for years.’

That did it!
Suzie sobbed to her heart’s content, and, for a moment, we clicked in that lifelong-partner way that surfaces when it needs to.

I slept like a log that night and woke up on Thursday morning to the sound of my mobile moving across the laminate floorings.
It was Suzie. The children had all gone to their respective schools for the first time in what seemed like weeks.

‘So we can meet for coffee or you could come over here,’ she said, adding that she would be showering and making-up for the next hour or so.

She liked nothing more than having a good shower and then having my head down there in her sex with my tongue flitting around inside her, and she knew that I knew that, too.
We entertained ideas of coffee out but she suggested that I go over there.
I kissed her at the door and I kissed her as she asked if I wanted a coffee. She kissed me as she made it and I brushed against her and she kissed me as she guided me to the staircase with her hand on my tool ready for action.

‘Come upstairs,’ she said, and led the way.

It’s funny, but I appreciate sex with Suzie in a way that I never have before. She has let me be myself and I’ve enjoyed that, performing well for her, especially in the first two years.
But as time has passed, our fucking would become more and more restricted by the toing and froing of our relationship.
Generally, nowadays, we’d fuck when we’d given up slating each other in front of the children, shouting and screaming (Suzie), swearing and slurring (me), when we knew there was still a sexual and metaphysical respect, an underlying continuum that bound us together. Perhaps life wants us to be together for a reason that we’ll only find out later. Maybe one day we’ll be ready for true happiness.
We stripped down and cuddled. There was no rush. The children were at school. We talked tenderly together.

‘So much for the clean cut, huh,’ I whispered.

‘Maybe we’re still in love,’ she replied, stroking my forehead.

I looked into her eyes and felt at home. These are moments we live for, the little pockets of time that make routine worthwhile.

Straying slowly to her chest and then stomach, kissing with tenderness, I sighed as I caught sight of her sex; my love food.
I angled myself for a sixty-nine and nestled into my bowl of nourishment.

Suzie can give a good blow-job when she wants to, and we found ourselves hard at it within seconds.
Down there in the thick of it, I felt like one of a million snakes vying for supremacy in a pit of profound depth, licking at her like a dog with his nose in a jagged tin, searching for the meaty morsels at the bottom.
Usually, it’s just me that gets down. I like to have a starter and main course while she prefers to wait for the main. I like looking up at her with her head on three pillows when I’m down there, imagining myself to be a St Bernard licking the leg-wound of a lost hiker on a slope.
She will look down to me at this point, and smile, then she will roll her head back and moan. I still don’t know if she comes or not whilst I’m burrowing away. She has never told me. Women have a way with mystery and they know that men are quite happy to be in the dark on such matters.
On this occasion, though, I couldn’t even get past the starter. Suzie, with my cock firmly held in her mouth with her tongue in full flow, was moaning and fidgeting spasmodically. But I wouldn’t let go. She would come in my mouth if it was the last thing I drank in my life. I refused to pull away from her grip, to settle my thoughts onto the image of my grandmother kissing me, her smell. But my mind wondered back to Suzie and I paid dearly.
I felt the urgency of coming and shrugged my sex away from her mouth to go on her chest.
I continued with my starter as she adjusted to the realisation that I had come.
This starter was too good. I would lick the plate dry, knowing that it was too late for the main course.
She loves penetration but she would forgive me. This didn’t happen often.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘A man’s gotta go when a man’s gotta go.’

She laughed. ‘I loved every minute.’

I nuzzled up with her. ‘It’s weird, Suze, but I really wanted to come inside you this morning. I think I wanted to make you pregnant again.’

We looked into each other’s eyes. ‘I’d like that, too, Jim,’ she said, with fear in her voice.

I wriggled to gain better positioning with her arms.

‘Why do we do this?’ I asked.

‘What?’ she replied.

‘Every month, we fight for a week, we get on for a week, we do the do for a week, and we fight for a week. Then, as if all else will fail, something allows us to love each other immensely for the two or three extra days in the month. Is that enough to bring another nipper into the world?’

Suzie fell silent for a moment. ‘I don’t know, but I know what you mean,’ she said, stroking my chest and watching the contours of my body; happy, contented.

Perhaps people aren’t supposed to have it any better than this, but Suzie and I knew which tools we had to pick up to make the machine work with more harmony. We’d always known, only we’d thrown them down in disgust too often before.

‘I really wish I thought I could live here and be good for the children,’ I sighed.

‘So do I,’ she said. ‘But maybe this is the only way for the time being.’

I agreed. ‘I feel sane today. My writing’s coming along.’

‘That’s good,’ she said.

I later left on a cushion of air.