Page 2 Queen of King

                                                     THE QUEEN OF KING OF PRUSSIA.

                                                                      ROY GARDE

           My cousin, Audrey, didn’t go back to work for two months after her husband, Ed Manning, died. She told me later that it would have been difficult for her to do anything productive in her office because she couldn’t stop crying for all of that time because every happy person around her seemed to be reminding her that she was alone in the world, again.

          We had both been born and brought up in Manhattan – she had been effectively orphaned early in her life and so she’d lived with us from the age of around six until she got married when she was twenty-one – and she’d loved living in the city as much as I still do so she certainly hadn’t wanted to move to Pennsylvania at all much less to a town with the unlikely, and unwieldly, name of ‘King Of Prussia’ but her husband had been offered a good job in Philadelphia and so she’d capitulated and agreed to go and have their babies in his home town.

          She’d often told my mother that they’d ‘tried and tried’ to have children but they’d never succeeded and her husband wouldn’t so much as listen to her pleas about adopting one.

          I went to the funeral, of course, but Audrey was so distraught that she hardly knew if anybody else at all, except for the preacher and the pallbearers I guess, was there with her.

          In the years that followed she elevated the status of her dead husband into near sainthood although we all knew that he’d come up very short indeed of even approaching that standard. No disparaging words were ever actually spoken about him, of course – and especially not within her hearing – but he really hadn’t been a nice guy at all and none of the rest of our family had much liked him. He was one of those guys who always wear short-sleeved shirts to show off their bulging bi-ceps and he would talk for hours, if given the chance, about his weight lifting prowess and his strenuous health club routines.

         I’m around seven years from retiring now and I haven’t done much field work for a long time but my company found itself to be short-handed recently and so I was asked to go to Philly to do an evaluation of the work in progress on a big engineering project of ours.

         I called Audrey and asked her if I could stay at her house for three nights and she said of course and that she’d welcome some company. She told me that she was seriously considering a move back into the city but she liked her big house so much that she found it difficult to initiate the move.

         I drove down to Philly on a Wednesday morning and I went to the site and did some preliminary get-acquainted on-site work and then I went over to her house and I got there at around seven o’clock.

         She was a little plumper than I remembered her at the funeral but there, aren’t we all?

         I’d already told her that I wanted to take her out to dinner but she’d have none of that – she told me that we were going to have dinner right there and that it would be ready in a half hour – and so I took a shower and then put on some casual clothes.

         She had already poured two glasses of vodka when I went into the kitchen and we both had two stiff drinks before sitting down to eat. She brought out a carafe of merlot and she took it away to re-fill it at regular intervals throughout the meal. I figured that it was because she needed a lot of lubrication for her throat seeing that she was doing most of the talking. And perhaps not.

         She got me all caught up with family affairs, and with her job and her life as a widow, and I realized that she’d not had a chance for a good, long talk with someone from our side of her family for sometime. When we went into the living room she produced a bottle of good brandy and, before we knew it, it got to be midnight.

          I think that I fell asleep as soon as I’d pulled the covers up and over me.

          In the morning, after breakfast and when I was going back to the site, I insisted that I be allowed to take her out to dinner that night and she told me ‘all right’ and added that she couldn’t remember the last time that she’d eaten in a ‘proper’ restaurant.

          The day passed productively and when the time came to go out that night we got in the car and drove to a place that I’d found in the local paper. When we’d been seated she started right in again with gossip about her fellow workers and it became obvious that she had by no means talked herself out the night before.

         The brandy came out again when we got home and I had no trouble getting to sleep that night either.

          I finished my job at around lunchtime the next day, which was a Friday, and I ate a leisurely expense-account lunch in a Japanese sushi bar where the bill came to over one hundred and forty dollars for me alone! My company is good about approving our expense accounts if the work is going smoothly but if I hadn’t had good things to put in my report, the first draft of which I wrote out while nearly squatting at the low table, I’d have had to make do with a sandwich in a diner somewhere.

           I got back to Audrey’s place at around four o’clock and she was out somewhere so I took a nap to clear away the sake fumes.

          When she got home she made dinner for us again and she at last ran out of things to say and so there were several long but companionable silences at the table. I’d refused her offer of vodka earlier and I drank only two glasses of wine with dinner because enough is enough and I like to limit my hangovers to two per week. Audrey followed my lead perhaps because she had just one vodka and tonic as an aperitif and then just one glass of wine with the meal.

          The next day was a Saturday and I’d finished my job so neither of us had to get up early so we sat in the living room with coffee after brunch and the conversation necessarily got to be much more wildly ranging although we took care to stay away from politics because her husband had been very conservative and they’d both been registered members of the Republican party. She and I had both lived in the same apartment for more than twelve years and so I know her mental make up and I figure that she’d shifted it to keep the peace at home early on in her marriage. It seems to have ‘taken’ because she often forgot herself and dropped hints about her satisfaction with the outcome of the two last elections which had, incredibly as far as I was concerned, seen to it that ‘W’ got to ‘lead’ us for two full terms. For myself, only recently, with the welcome turn of events, have I been able to throw off the very real depression that those eight, long years had put me in.

          However, I saw that she was somewhat conflicted about her position – probably through not having her husband around to fend off her growing doubts – because, for instance, when I mentioned in passing that I thought that the ribbons that had ‘Support Our Troops’ on them should have, ‘By Bringing Them Home, Now.’ added to every one of them I saw turmoil in her face as she tried to stay loyal to her party, and to ‘My Ed’, and at the same time was struggling to subdue the fact that she fervently wished that the war had never been started in the first place and there was only one possible culprit for that.

          I politely declined her offer to take me on a tour of her town so she went to visit some friends of hers and I dozed off in a chair as I was reading the local paper.

          She got home at around six and I took her out for dinner again and when we got back we found that we’d run out of news and gossip and what we’d do to solve about various world events so she switched on the TV and we watched a part of a movie and then the eleven o’clock news and we both went to bed when it got to be time for the like-it-or-loathe-it SNL to come on.

          I usually try to avoid taking naps and I shouldn’t have taken one that afternoon because I was still awake that night when the illuminated clock face across the room let me know that it was one o’clock and then that it was two o’clock. I have the ability to make my mind refuse to register unpleasant memories and to accept only nice thoughts for dwelling on so staying awake doesn’t bother me much although mental reviews of what I’d written in my report kept coming up, along with elegant turns of phrases for it, and that was annoying. However, because of those mental revisions it eventually got to be the most polished report that I’ve ever written.

         Audrey had advised me to leave my bedroom door open to let the warm air from the main body of the house come into the room, as did she. She told me that she has a hot air system because she likes air-conditioning in the summer more than she needs a lot of heat in the winter and on cold nights, like the ones we had when I was staying there, as soon as the warm air from the furnace stopped blowing the cold crept back into our bedrooms because they both had wide bow windows and the thermostat is located in the living room.

         Seeing that our two rooms were in the front of the house – evidently one of the two spare bedrooms at the rear had long ago been turned into ‘My Ed’s’ study and the other one had succumbed to becoming only a large walk-in closet for her clothes – our open doors were necessarily close together and so when she got up to use the bathroom, at precisely two-seventeen a.m., I heard her get out of bed and then I could follow her footsteps as she moved along the hallway and then I heard the bathroom door open and close and then the thump when she lifted the toilet cover and I got a strong twinge in my guts and my blood raced when I heard, faintly and then only because I strained to hear it, the tinkle of her urine and a picture – no, not so much a picture as an almost tangible presence – presented itself to me as to where the stream of it was coming from. It was coming from THERE and it was issuing forth from THERE then and there and NOW and stirring lust must have made a schoolboy of me again because the weird thought occurred to me that it was strange that the fluid ceased to have any value as soon as it was voided even though it had just passed close to the entranceway to the most wondrous passageway known to man. Even so, lust aside, it’s strange that it’s simply discarded even though they save mare’s piss for some reason, right? Or is that just more schoolboy conjecturing or is it a straight-out myth?

         She didn’t flush the toilet, I guess so as to avoid the possibility of waking me, and when she had gotten back into bed, and the mattress had stopped complaining, an irresistible impulse of primitive origin made me get up and pull my robe on – I always sleep in the nude – and then I went along to the bathroom.

          I got a strange feeling – the kind of yearning that had been very familiar to me in my youth – as my urine joined and mingled with hers and I made no attempt to try to muffle the sound because the libidinous feeling kept increasing and it drove away all commonplace considerations even as it was steadily making the act of voiding more and more difficult.

          What I was experiencing of course was an amalgamation of a primitive territorial marking procedure – the leaving of spoor as a warning to other males and as an advert for, and notice to, all-and-sundry of the presence of a male who urgently wants to do some serious rutting.

           I let myself dwell on how Audrey’s center would still be a little wet – my wife always uses some toilet paper to dab herself dry and there was none floating in the unflushed bowl – and could visualize how the lower strands of her pubic hair were loosely clinging together because of that fact and was doing so at that very moment. I felt bitter at the wastefulness of her being in one bed, and keeping all of the wonder of womanhood to herself, and me, bereft, in another one that was less than twenty feet away.

           I followed her example as in the adage, ‘If it’s yellow let it mellow. If it’s brown flush it down.’ and as I made my way back along the hallway I hoped fervently, like an eighteen year old, that she’d say something to break the ice.

           She did!

           She asked, “Are you warm enough? Would you like another blanket? You know that there’s an electric heater in your room, don’t you? It only needs switching on.”

           Well, I knew that if I merely said, “I’m fine thanks.” that would be that and she’d likely turn onto her side and go back to sleep so I said, “Leaving our doors open was a good idea of yours. Does it often get cold enough here to have to do this?”

           “Only occasionally in the winter proper. My Ed always complained about the cold so we got wired up for supplemental heating at the same time that we got central air. Hot weather didn’t bother him much until he found how nice it is to be cool in July and August. However, he always did a lot of cussing when he saw the electricity bills in those months.”

          “Yeah. I see his point. Uh, and yours.”

          I knew that I had to put in a plea right then or forget about getting any sleep at all that night. Like all men, once I get the urge to mate it takes over my thinking – in fact, my whole being – and it won’t quit until the deed gets done or the opportunity has slipped away.

          “Uh, listen, Audrey,” I said, trying to keep urgency out of my voice, “the truth of it is that it was the cold that woke me up and that was because I’d somehow pushed the comforter to one side and my arms were outside the other covers and so now they’re freezing. Uh, well, uh, listen to me please, we’re adults now – aren’t we? – so be a darling and let me come into your bed for a while. We’ll both be warmer and we can do some friendly cuddling. That’s all – just cuddling. And uh, besides that, I really want to hold a woman right now and you’re a splendid example of one so be nice to me. Please?”

          I braced myself for the fury that had to come and for the disgust and the disdain and even the cruel rejection, but there – nothing ventured – – –

          “My God! What are you asking? I don’t believe it. No-you-can-not. My God. What next?”

          “Well, it looks as if I’m the only adult here,” I said in a pained voice. “It’s for the warmth and the comforting, that’s all. A friendly gesture. My arms feel frozen and also I want to hold a woman and what exactly is wrong with that? Have you no compassion? What could happen, for crisake? At our age ‘cuddling’ means just that. I simply thought that maybe you could use some of it too. It soothes the soul.”

          “Really! Is that what it does? ‘Soothes the soul’ is it? Ha! I’ve never heard such a ridiculous thing in my life! Puh-lease! ‘Just a friendly bit of cuddling,’ he says! Spare me.”

          “Ah. Come on Audrey, be nice. – – – –  Well then, how about ‘a little tenderness?’ Be a darling.”

          I waited and I knew that if there was no apparent softening of her position in her next words then I’d not only have to suffer all night long alone in my own bed but I’d have to do some serious apologizing in the morning and would feel extremely awkward in her presence for ever more.

          In my heart I couldn’t believe that she’d stay cold and cruel because through all of our formative years I’d felt closer to her than to the rest of my siblings and it was also true that we two had played ‘doctor’ regularly for a time when we were around nine or ten years old so her pussy was the first one that I ever got to see. That has to count for something, surely?

          “Just listen to yourself. Pleading like a schoolboy who wants candy. You men are all the same. You think of only one thing. None of you ever grow up. My God! The nerve of some people.”

          She stopped talking then but because I hadn’t heard an outright refusal in her words and because I’d heard her voice change into being kind of throaty as she’d said, “The nerve of some people” and because I’m ever hopeful, I chose to believe that her silence was only a pause and so I kept silent but I stayed on tenterhooks because the position-softening words or phrase had to come from her right then or it never would.

         And then –

         “Uh. Well. Listen. Are you saying that you really do need to get warm in my bed and that an electric heater wouldn’t do it?”

         My whole body flooded with relief and I could start in on breathing again but it wasn’t quite over yet so I didn’t move foot or tongue so as to give her time to think up a modesty preserving excuse for inviting me to join her.

         “Well – I am your hostess here am I not, so I guess that I do have a kind of obligation. I don’t want you to be cold in my house. Wow, come to think about it’ll be fun because I haven’t been held close by a man for a long, long time, so – all right then, if you really want to and must. But listen, keep in mind that it’s only for a minute or two, right? Until you get warm again. And listen to this too, there’s to be no funny stuff. You hear me?”

         I tried not to break into a run and as I moved towards her I decided against telling her that under my robe I was naked. I didn’t see the point of introducing deal-busting details at that stage of the game.

         I could see her face clearly by the streetlight that was coming in through the windows and so that meant that she could see me too so, to avoid shocking her into instant rejection, I pulled back the covers on ‘my’ side of the bed and held them up as I slipped my robe off and then I got next to her on the mattress in one fluid motion so that by the time that she realized that I didn’t have pajamas on, or anything else, I was already lying down next to her.

        “Turn away from me,” I said quickly so as to talk through her about-to-be-mouthed objections, “I’d like to cuddle up to you in the spoon position, please.”

        She did as she’d been told – whether it was due to confusion through the rushing of blood away from her brain or to the now uneven playing field as it always is when a man and a woman find themselves in the same bed, I don’t know, or much care – and a second later I was snuggling up to her and I was using her uppermost breast, the left one, for purchasing power like a rock-climber who has latched on to a secure handhold that had been left there by a previous climber.

       Naturally, she felt that she had to do some protesting but her voice had little resolve in it as she said, “Who said that you could put your hand there? What a nerve! And listen, you shouldn’t have come in here naked and don’t think for a minute that I’m going to take my clothes off for you so don’t even bother to ask, you hear me?”

       I didn’t bother to answer either because it would have been pointless seeing that my hand had already sneaked into her top and had passed the last barrier and had sought out, and was weighing appreciatively, that same breast of hers but now it was skin on delectably soft skin. As that was going on my other hand had slipped under her waist and was pulling at her belly to bring her bottom hard back against me. I then kissed the back of her neck and worked my way around and across to be able to nibble on her ear.

       She responded nicely to my combined efforts, by staying stock still instead of pushing me away, but then something else came into play and it tipped the balance entirely into my favor.

        I had gotten to be more than half-hard again the moment that she’d said that I could come to her bed but when I got to hold a naked tit in my hand I got fully erect and – somehow! – it sought out a home for itself. It had to fit in somewhere – correct? – so why not straight ahead and that meant in between her pajama-bottomed legs?

        As soon as she felt it bull its way between her thighs she went kind of slack with lust, or just longing maybe, and a moment later she reached a hand down and back to verify that it was indeed what she thought it was and the instant that she touched it – not that it’s any bigger than your average – she let out a cry of surprise to beat the band and as her grasp matriculated into being a caress, an exploring caress, she exclaimed, “Wow! It’s so big. It’s huge! But how can that be? My Ed – – – ” and then her sense of loyalty must have kicked in because her voice trailed off and she withdrew her hand.

       She took a moment to subdue her inner turmoil and then she sensibly rallied in response to her needs and so she reached her hand over again and when she’d tentatively explored the length and thickness of it she then reached farther down to check out its accoutrements – ever so carefully and reverently as befits them and as, in my experience, all women do, even young and inexperienced ones – and then she summoned up some inner resources in order to get things to advance properly and she let go of me and then eased her hips away so as to not hurt the rude intruder and then, tellingly, she undid three of the buttons on her pajama top so that she could turn onto her back without forcing my hand to let go of its prize. From that I realized that the unevenness of the playing field had tipped so far in my favor that as soon as I so much as set the ball moving it would inevitably and unerringly find its way to goal.

        When she was lying on her back she turned to me a little and reached one hand down to find me again and she used the other one to pull at my head so that our mouths got to be pressed together and when I slipped her a little tongue she moaned around it for a while and then made another effort and succeeded in pulling away from me and she got out of bed and took both pieces of her pajamas off and threw them in the general direction of a chair and then she slipped her panties down to her knees and then sat on the bed and slipped them all of the way off and let them fall to the floor. Then she rejoined me and she pulled at me until I was on top of her as she moaned/pleaded/ begged/entreated/ordered me to, “Give it to me. Give it to me now.”

        As more words began to come out of her mouth I thought she was going to use the tired but sensible cliché, ‘Please be gentle with me.’ but I was wrong. What she said was, “Please don’t be gentle with me.”

        There’s nothing like being in bed with a woman who hasn’t had any loving for years and whose body demands to be allowed to try to catch up PDQ and if I’d been twenty years younger I would have simply entered her and got on with giving her what she wanted – knowing that at that age in fifteen minutes, or so, I’d have raised the wherewithal to go at it again and that the next time, and all succeeding times, would proceed at my preferred pace – but I’m not in my thirties anymore and – without the aid of Viagra that is – once every three nights is about as good as I can expect to manage nowadays and if I’d – uh – shot my bolt right there and then she would have been one badly disappointed woman for the rest of the night because, as every man who is not desperate knows, having an erection is the principle motivator for going exploring and giving pleasure knowing that you’re going to eventually receive it back ten fold.

         I decided on a compromise in which I’d enter her all the way, as she so clearly needed, but as soon as I was all the way in and had achieved full domination I’d pull out again and ignore her dismay as I was going down on her which would effectively cut-off her protests.

        When I was younger immediate possession was always uppermost in my mind every time that I got into bed with a woman for the first time – I guess it was because I knew that you never can tell what might happen to thwart you if you delay for as little as a minute or two after the initial offer is made – but now I always use strategic planning.

       However, it turned out that my enter-and-withdraw strategy wasn’t much needed because the aimed-for-happy-result was provided by Mother Nature.

       I’d fully expected, and hoped, that it would be difficult for me to enter her due to her being un-used for so long but what I found in there was entirely unexpected.

       I slid in nicely for about two inches and because there was then no longer any danger of it falling out she let go and she put her hands on the small of my back and she said things like, “Yes. There. Yes. Oh, thank the good Lord. Yes. There. At last. Oh, you darling man.”

       I girded my loins for the push but I then found that I couldn’t get any further into her!

       Beyond those first few inches she was as tight as a virgin and if I’d been brutal it would have probably hurt us both so I stopped pushing and I told her to put her ankles up onto my hips and then I let gravity dictate the pace and I slowly gained ground, maybe an eighth of an inch at a time, and every tiny bit of gain gave me a wonderfully exquisite feeling.

       She well knew that something special was happening to her and she had enough sense to keep still for me and I knew from her moans and groans that she was enjoying it as much as I was. As how not? It had to be similar to when she’d given up her virginity but without any pain this time.

       When she spoke, her words confirmed the amount of pleasure that she was getting, “Ay, yes. Slowly, just like that. Oh, you darling, darling man. Oh! That’s so good. Slowly, slowly. Yes. Don’t you dare stop. Keep it coming – – – slowly – – – slowly. Oh, that’s so good . . . . . ”

        I kept on sinking into her and when I got to be all the way in it only took a few strokes before she climaxed and went limp.

        I waited until she came back down to earth, and had quickly realized that I was not only still on top of her but was still filling her up, and she said, “More? You want to do it again already? My God, my Ed always pulled out and fell asleep immediately after – uh – the first time.” Clearly she figured that seeing that she’d had an orgasm it followed that I’d had one too.

        It was child’s play for me to see to it that she had a whole series of them then because I only had to give her some very loving kisses and then a little strategic pumping before she’d start in again with increasingly loud groans and shouts and then – “Arrrrrgh!”

        After a half dozen of them I started giving her more time between bouts and in one of the quiet times she told me that far from meeting her needs, like I was doing, “My Ed” never seemed to even register the fact that his selfishness always left her feeling bereft and perplexed. And so, because of that, after cleaning herself up, when she laid down beside his already snoring body and was trying to compose herself for sleep it never came for hours because her blood kept churning.

        I promised that that would never happen for us because if I ever finished before she did I was going to keep on giving her orgasms orally until she cried ‘uncle.’ She didn’t believe me. “With your tongue! But that’s impossible! Well, no. I’ve read about it but I don’t believe it can be done because when my Ed went – uh – down there, he only ever gave it, and my belly, a few little kisses and then he always – – – – -” she stopped at that because she thought she was being disloyal again to his memory. “Although,” she went on, “it’s true that he did like to kiss my bottom a lot and it was nice for me too. Is that what you meant?”

        My long time near contempt for her husband strengthened into outright contempt when I heard that because it meant that she didn’t know that women can have orally administered orgasms that satisfy them just as much as the vaginal ones do. In my book that is criminal negligence. The two of them were married for thirty odd years and here she was telling me that all that he’d ever done for her, ‘down there’ as she called it, was to spread a few kisses around ‘down there’ before getting on with it.

        ‘No variations nor substitutions, please.’

        After having a few more climaxes she asked me when was it going to end and she sighed happily when I told her that it would be when the doing of it would take her over the edge and into total and complete satiation.

        And so it proved.

        While I was taking a shower the next morning she poured her heart into putting together a ‘Full Irish Breakfast’ for us that must have emptied her refrigerator. It certainly made the table groan.

        For some strange reason I got a strong urge to touch her again when she was washing dishes at the sink and I closed with her and I undid the belt of her robe and she surprised me again by immediately stopping what she was doing and she moved her robe so that it was draped sideways across her hips and then she stayed still for me. After some appreciative moaning in response to my expert handling of her most prized parts she pushed her head back at me and she said, “Ha! This is why I didn’t put my panties on. I knew that you were going to do this. You men are all the same. My Ed wouldn’t let me wear panties in the house ever and he always wanted to feel me up like this when I was washing dishes or preparing something or ironing clothes. Same as when we were watching TV together, or anything else. Besides that, he wanted to be able to get at me easily at all other times too and so he made me wear French knickers in the car and at the movies so that he could get his hand inside them easily. Ah. Poor, dear Ed. He was a real macho man and he couldn’t get enough of touching my body.”

          I was hurt. She was comparing me with that dolt! I’d just given her around ten more orgasms than he had ever given her at one time and she was saying that he’d been a regular fucking Casanova just because he’d liked to grope her all the time. And why? It seemed to be a bit obsessive to me. Was it simply because he knew that he could feel a woman up as well as any man alive could?

          I took my hands away from her and went and sat down with a newspaper but a few minutes later I realized that although my eyes had followed the print of an article down its entire column length I hadn’t absorbed a word of it because it had struck me that what Audrey had said about his need to touch her so much meant that he had to have had a very strong libido and so, thinking about how that didn’t sit properly with what I’d already worked out for myself about him, I just had to know the full story.

          I went back to her at the sink and she opened up her robe immediately and then took up her stance. I obliged her for a while and then I asked her to come and sit next to me and finish the dishes later.

          I kissed the side of her face and I said, “Audrey, ‘lil darling, don’t think that I’m prying but I’m interested in Ed’s and your life together. Can I ask you some questions?”

         “Of course,”

         “Well. Let’s start at the beginning. Where did you meet?”

         I had to sit and listen to a whole lot of boring and mundane details like – “And then he asked me if I’d like to go to another movie or to a dance hall . . . ” and so on but my patience paid off because she soon got into nostalgia solidly and I was eventually told that she was pleased that he never did anything ‘worse’ than try to feel up her breasts until they got engaged and then she told me that although she’d have willingly let him take her to bed when she had his ring on her finger he only progressed to groping her properly, “mostly at the movies and on the sofa in the front room of our house.”

        When she’d described her wedding plans – I was spared details about the wedding itself because, of course, I’d been there for it – I was persistent about her giving me all of the details about their honeymoon hotel and their first night together there and I made her work up slowly to the minute that she saw what he had between his legs. As she spoke I saw the struggle that was going on inside her due to her being forced to compare what he had with what I had while still wanting to be loyal to him.

        I wouldn’t let her skip anything and I eventually got to hear about how his dick, when at rest, was about as big as her little finger and when it was erect it got to be as long as her thumb but a bit thicker. Also, his balls were as small as marbles. She also told me, after my insisting on it, that when he mounted her the first time there’d been plenty of pain, just like her friends had told there would be so she had no reason to think that he was inadequate in any way and, for confirmation of that, she always felt him transfer fluids into her when he’d stopped driving into her like a mad man. She added that at first it seemed a bit strange to her that his semen seemed to run back out of her as soon as he got small again.

       Next, with more cajoling from me, she told me that although his libido kept him wanting to get at her body day and night as she’d already told me, even on their honeymoon he only pushed it into her “perhaps once every night and after the honeymoon maybe – uh – twice every week.” I suspected that that last bit may well have been another attempt by her to be loyal to his memory.

       So, that was the answer to it all. That’s where those massive, always on display, bi-ceps of his had come from! He must have been scarfing down steroids long before they’d become known about by anybody besides dedicated body builders like him.

       Poor, stupid bastard! The question was – why had he gotten married at all? Did he merely hope that perhaps his bride wouldn’t notice that something of his was on the unacceptably light side? Well, in Audrey’s case she hadn’t known enough to complain but very few women remained as naïve as she was for all those years.

       The irony of his being blessed with a strong libido and then nearly destroying what could have appeased it almost moved me to tears for his stupidity but that was countered with anger because I care a whole lot more about Audrey than about him and she had been cheated royally for all of the years that she’d been with him.

       When we’d first moved to the sofa, and she’d just gotten started with her story, to comfort her a little, and to get her to feel secure for when my hard questions came up, I had put my arm around her shoulders and she’d put her head onto mine and when she’d gotten to the end of her story she suddenly sat up and said, “You know, I’ve only seen two men’s penises in my entire life, yours and my Ed’s.

       “Ha! Do you remember those doctor sessions that we used to have? You were always so nice to me for hours before asking me to go behind the shed with you. Remember? Giving me little gifts, and all.

       “Uh, well now, what was I saying? Ah, yes. Sizes. Well, I got to see your penis when we were ten – and eleven was it? – and I saw his when we were on our honeymoon and do you know what? They were the same size! How was I to know that they grow to be big on some men? Also, all the ones that I saw on statues and in pictures in museums were about the same size, so, because being – uh – penetrated by him did very little for me I always wondered why did women in movies and on TV drool about the fact that a guy had, or was soon going to, take her to bed? . . . .

       “Come to think on it,” she went on, “look at all the other things that I didn’t know about until last night and that I should have been well aware of and experiencing for all those years.”

       She went into a kind of reverie and then she burst out with, “Please tell me that you’ll come back to see me again, and often? I don’t think that I could cope with life if what you’ve brought into my life is taken away again for ever.”

       I told her that of course I’d be coming back to see her and regularly too and I went on to say that she was an attractive woman and that I very much wanted to be with her often and that I had already amended my report – although only in my head up to then – so that I would be coming back to Philly every Friday of every month.

       “Can you do that?” she asked in disbelief and I explained to her that it was company policy that when one of us is given a project it becomes his responsibility alone until it gets to be finished and we’re all given carte blanche to deal with it in anyway that we want to.

       I don’t like driving on the Turnpike at night, especially that southern part where there are only two lanes and lots of huge trucks that do seventy five miles an hour and better, no matter what, and there are always cowboys riding cars with powerful engines playing dodgems with them, and so, because it was two o’clock already, I disentangled myself from Audrey and I went and washed my hands and then got dressed.

       When I carried my bag into the living room – I saw that she’d done up her robe – she came to the front door with me and she insisted on our having a ‘nice long kissing session’ with her leaning back onto it before she’d let me go and I saw tears in her eyes so, after I’d opened the door and was walking out, I told that I’d be back before she knew it.

       I was glad to know that I’d spoken the truth about coming back to see her because after a few days back at work I found that I was thinkwas thinking about her, and her comely body, often and so I fixed it with the office so that I’d be allowed to visit the Philly site every Friday unFriday until it was finished.

       The next weekend with her went by very pleasantly indeed seeing that we were both inclined to make it that way but I had to use Viagra oft Viagara often because we had three days and two nights to go at it and I’m not superman. She fathomed out for herself what the pills did for m were doing for me – the half hour détente was a clue seeing that every living person in the entire nation must know about that little fact, along wit and about the ‘four hour’ warning bit – and she fully approved.

        On the Sunday afternoon, after brunch and just before I had to leave, she asked me to sit with her in the living room because she wanted t wanted to tell me something that was important.

       “Well, here we go,” she said when we were sitting next to each other, “I want to tell you about a plan that I’ve worked on. Well, what I’m going I really want is to I’ll tell you the first part which is what I want us to do next Sunday but I won’t tell you why until we’ve done it, OK?”

       “Ooooh, a mystery! But sure, after this wonderful weekend together I’ll do anything you want.”

       “Good. Oh, and I enjoyed every minute of it too. Well, when we wake up in the morning next Sunday I want you to take one of your blue pills  blue pills and then – uh – do it to me and that way you won’t – uh – get big again at the crucial time. So then, when we’ve eaten brunch wearing  and are still wearing only our robes, I want us both to come in here and, one at a time, sit in the chaise langue that I’ll have put just there and then and I’ll shave your pubic hair off and then I’ll shave my own, or if you want, you can do that for me. Ha! I thought that you’d want to. My Ed made Ed used to make me sit in that chair often and one month he shape my hair down there into a heart and the next month into a triangle or a rectanga rectangle or, well, lot’s of other shapes too. He got a real kick out of doing it.

      “Well, after that’s done, I want us both to go upstairs where we can get dressed in the clothes that I’ll have laid out on the bed.

      “When I come back down I’ll be wearing bobby-socks and Mary Jane shoes and I’ll have a white blouse and a plaid skirt on and I’ll have donhave done up my hair into two plaits at the sides and underneath my skirt I’ll be wearing gray wool panties that have elastic in both legs and at th and at the waist and I’ll have a sports bra on to flatten my breasts and I want you to fix it in your mind that I don’t have any at all.

      “You’ll come down wearing khaki shorts and a T shirt with a dragon or some such on it – I haven’t bought it yet – and you’ll be wearing   wearing a Yankee hat, or do you prefer a Mets one? Well, it doesn’t really matter. Oh! You’ll also have tennis shoes on and knee length socks to socks to go with them but no elastic to hold them up.

      “Then, I want us to go into the kitchen and play cards or Monopoly or Dominos or some such and you have to remember to call me ‘Audy’ at “Audy’ at all times like you used to back then and I’ll call you ‘Pudgy.’ Yes?

      “OK then. Well, after a while you are to start playing footsie with me under the table and then you’ll put your hand up my skirt, as high up a far as you can reach, and whisper something like, ‘I’m really bored. Can we go behind the shed and play doctors? Please?’

      “Uh, are you getting the drift of this?”

      “I’m getting there.”

      “Good. Well tell me something, please? I know that you remember the tool shed that your Dad kept his tools in, right? – it was your favorite p favorite pl ace to do it because it was the nearest and you were always so impatient to get started – well, do you also remember that copse of copse of bushes in the park? Ha! Yes. That was my favorite place because I felt so safe.”

      “Yeah, and the grass in there was long and soft. I also remember the California Red Beech tree with the branches that came right down to t down to the ground and that was my favorite place until the time that we found all those seniors in there drinking beer and smoking. Remem   Do you remember that?”

      “I sure do, they all laughed at us when they saw us and shouted those nasty things that I didn’t understand. Although the truth of it is that I wis that I was relieved afterwards because I didn’t much like going there anyway because of all the empty beer bottles and the piles of fast food  fast-food cartons and the floor that was just bare dirt.

       “But, to get back to next Sunday – I’ll say yes to going with you but first I’ll make you wash your hands and scrub your finger nails, like back like I did back then, and then we’ll sneak out of the front door but we’ll simply go around the house and then come in through the back one becadoor because it’s too cold out there, and then we’ll sit on the carpet right here. I’ll put all my potted plants in a circle and we’ll sit in the middle anmiddle of it and then you have to say, “Can I be doctor first, please?” and I’ll reluctantly agree.

       “Do you remember how it goes? No! Well, it’s important for me that we get it right so listen to what I’m going to say. You ask me what my where my problem is and I’ll tell you that my belly hurts and then you put your hand on it and ask me if that is where it hurts and I say, ‘No, it’s f “No, it’s further down, Doctor.’ ”

       ‘Here?’

       ‘No further down.’

       ‘Oh,’ you say, ‘in that case you’ll have to lie down and let me take a look at you.’

       “Then, when I’m lying down, you lift up my skirt and then pull my panties down to my knees and you feel me up and – well, you remembedo remember the rest, right?

       “But, come to think about it, perhaps it’s best if I remind you of the rules. Please remember that the only things that are allowed are looking a looking and touching and maybe giving it a few little kisses. OK?

      “You know, I think that the only reason that we did it at all was for the aura that’s attached to our genitals, and partly because it was forbidden forbidden, and only barely for anything sexual so there’s no pushing your finger into me nor searching out my clitoris for special attention. attention, you hear? We didn’t even know it existed back then so please remember that because if what we do isn’t authentic in every detail my detail my plan probably won’t work.

      “Well now, where were we? Ah, yes. After a while I’ll say, ‘Thank you Doctor. The pain has gone away and then I’ll stand up and pull up m pull up my knickers and it’ll be my turn to be doctor. OK?

      “Well, I want to do that several times and when I think that it has been long enough to do the trick we’ll quit and you’ll go up and put your reg  your regular clothes on because it’ll be time for you to go if you want daylight all the way to the city. Agreed? Please say yes.”

      “I’ll agree if you insist but please tell me what’s it all about, now.”

     “No. I’ll tell you just before you leave here next Sunday. All right? Please?”

      Well, the next weekend went the way that the first two had – that is very pleasantly – until Sunday brunch and then she said that it was time was time to get started on her plan and she insisted that we sit on the chaise langue and shave each other. It was fun and when it was done she done she made me do the things that she’d outlined the week before – get dressed up like children and then play Dominoes in the kitchen a kitchen and then, after I’d felt her inner thigh and had asked the question, she scrubbed my finger nails and we went out of the front door and door and we came back in through the back door and I saw that there was a ring of potted plants forming a circle on the carpet and we sat down sat down in its center – and the doctor game began.

      I’d been making love to her for three days and two nights and so, on my turns as Doctor, it was easy for me to give her a

perfunctory examination, although I must admit that seeing her naked labia was nice and I kissed them rather more often than was probably  probably allowed, but when it was her turn she took her role very seriously and she examined every inch of my equipment carefully and thor  and thoroughly every time.

       When it was over, and I’d changed into my regular clothes and had packed my bag, I sat down in the living room and I indicated that itto h  to her that it was time for an explanation.

       She was still dressed in her baby-doll clothes and she smiled at me, clearly as pleased as punch with her cleverness, and she said, “O  said, “Well all right, here’s what it’s all about. When you left here to drive home after the first time that you stayed with me I realized that I was feeli was feeling wonderful and that I had a lot of energy and, in fact, I felt as if I was about twenty years old. It was marvelous and I couldn’t keep fro  stop myself from cooking a three course meal just for me and then doing a whole lot of chores that I’d been putting off.

       “And then, the day after that when I was at work, I still felt really good and I was able to do my regular work and clear out all of my in-files an in-trays and my e-mails and even organize my documents which was something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. All day long I felt as if I felt as if I was about thirty years of age.

        “And then, on Tuesday, I felt like I was about forty, which was all right too, and on Wednesday like I was fifty, still nice, and on Thursda until I was back to my real age which was very disappointing.

        “So, do you see now? No! Well, my goodness, you’ve surprised me. I would have thought that it was obvious.

        “Well, let me spell it out for you: After spending the last hour and a half playing doctor with you, as soon as you’ve gone I’ll go into the guest the spare bedroom where I’ve put out my collection of dolls and it’ll be easy for me to stay in the frame of mind of a ten year old and so, seeing th because there are only five days between Sundays and Fridays, there won’t be enough time for me to get to be much more than fifty agai  fifty because on Friday you’ll come to see me again and that alone will be a boost but, more than that, I’ll know that the years will get to be stripped  stripped away again PDQ. Ha! Am I the clever one or not?”

        I got all the way onto the NJ Turnpike before I could stop shaking my head in near- bewilderment.

       However, what stayed with me through the next few days was something that had happened after she’d shaved me that morning   morning  after brunch. She’d opted to use her own little can of shaving cream along with the safety razor that she used to shave under her arms her arms and, wherever, and when she’d finished the job it was her turn to be shorn and so she asked me if I’d like to do it for her and then,

after seeing my smirk, whether I was going to use her shaving cream and her razor like “My Ed did or do you want to use my Ed’s

electric razor which must be about thirty years old but it works as well as if it was brand new because he only had to shave once in a blue i in a blue moon? He loved it and took good care of it. Look, this is it. See, it has this attachment, so if you do this – – – see? I charged it up las    it u   last night.”

       HA! No contest.

       When I’d switched it on and was wielding it, ever so carefully, in and around all of her marvelous valleys and protuberances and was freel was frequently using my tongue to check that I’d left no stubble behind – now that’s something that is always very pleasurable, with or without a without a primary driving force – I don’t think that I dropped any years off my age but I sure did find it difficult to stop smiling as I conjured conjured up the look of horror that would be on “My Ed’s” face if he’d been able to see what I was using his prized razor for.

                                   ————————————————————————————————-