Vi shook off this self-pitying monologue like a wet dog shakes its fur and reassured herself that of course they’d all be together as soon as she herself returned, that any wounds were imagined, on her part of course. Today’s bitter words by then long forgotten to be replaced by the ardor of absence. This reunion in three weeks’ time would be as achingly sweet, explosive and intense as all previous ones had been. She was being silly and hormonal to imagine otherwise.
Packing: Why is this so difficult? Impossible to order her luggage or thoughts. Riccardo and Sofi would return from their cross-country shoots to occupy this apartment while she was away. But if Europe was “away” did that make New York “home”? Cruel eternal Roma had always been home but Marco had made her feel like an outcast in her own country. Here, a life as scattered as the clothes on her bed. Zia Maria tanning her wrinkles in San Tropez with her even more ancient first cousin. Gia, in boarding school in Switzerland. Marco? He could winter in hell as far as she’s concerned. Laughing Stella in Bermuda, so sick, terminal in fact, yet stubbornly refusing to step over death’s threshold.
Itinerary: Duties to discharge in Rome, documents to sign, transfers of title related to sales of d’Este estate properties, then off as quickly as possible to Switzerland to snatch what little time she could over the school holiday with her daughter, then off to Etienne in London. London had sure felt like home during her schooldays, those happiest times in her life, before Riccardo. Could any of these places be called home? She laughed bitterly, enjoying the cruelness of the joke on herself.
“Al diavolo con i pensieri tristi!”
Again with grim determination she shrugged off her black thoughts and her mood did lift a bit and all it took were a few minutes of concerted attention to finish packing. She sat on her suitcase to close it and from the feel of it beneath her, immediately realized that her favorite leather jacket was not within. A frantic search through two closets confirmed what she already knew, that it was in Riccardo’s locked office. She swore loudly and vividly. There is no language better than Italian for that. Nobody, not even Melchiore would be there now. She wanted to throw things, to rage through the entire apartment, but as soon as she caught her breath, she became hyper-aware of the sound of her own fast breathing. Spooky and brooding and way too quiet—hard to hear even the electric hum of the street through the windows. Vi switched on music to fill the vacuum. Determined one way or another to improve her mood, she remembered something from the kitchen, one of Ricardo’s special little cigarettes buried in the oregano jar. She lit it, took a couple of tentative puffs, then let it burn out.
“Aspeta. You don’t need much,” she cautioned.The cable R&B music channel plays Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ I Miss You. It was enough to snare the familiar catch in her heart. Tonight, alone, there was only one part of the apartment she felt she could stand to be in. Slowly, painfully, she takes off her dress and with his little cigarette in hand, passes through the old lady part of Zia Maria’s apartamente, to the bathroom, past the shower large enough for a poker game, to the cauldron tub now appointed with some personal touches from the last time three lovers had used it. House palms and rubber plants lent livelier form to the space. Fat unlit candles stood between the plants and a tray of bath and body oil bottles beckoned from the far corner. Thoughts of her missing lover as she sits on the lip of the tub encourage her to conjure his touch with her own.
Lately, he’d been so unavailable, either on shoots or holed up in planning meetings or editing. His PBS documentary, ‘already overdue,’ he’d claimed. She knew he wasn’t making it up. They’d worked round the clock with extra crews and three editors. Now he was off to Chicago for something he called pick-ups.
“We keep missing each other,” he teased.
“Maybe on purpose, si?” she insinuated, then her voice caught and broke, the tears choking it before she could stop them.
“No. I will see you when you return,” his voice consoled, “Why cry? You know I miss you.”
That warm smile in his voice always made her want to run to him and kiss him all over. Instead, stupid woman, she’d argued with him. It had been a sad, one-way goodbye.
“I cry because I miss you and am desperate for you.
That’s what I meant to say.”
Water gushed from the faucets as Vi poured scents and soaps under the frothing jets. She unhooked her bra, but left on the pretty little purple and black lace thong which she imagined him pulling aside to slip his erect member wherever he wanted. Would he like it, this pretty little notion, it’s purpose certainly not coverage, but provocation? It accentuated her girlish hips, pressed into her neatly trimmed delta and her special hole, making them all the more enticing and accessible. It was hard to get him to notice her panties. He was always in such a hurry to pull them off.
Bella. Scents of floral and musk filled the room. The tub lapped and foamed away as she slid in and spread out, immersing herself until the frothy water lapped up against her throbbing breasts and their poor hardened nipples that ached for the more insistent touch of her man’s firm fingers and greedy, thirsty lips.
“Ricardo? Sofi? What are you doing in Chicago without me?
Così ingiusto!”
Vi’s punished herself by conjuring Sofi splayed provocatively across a large bed, strong, muscled legs parted, black sexy lace panties dangling barely about one ankle while he rubbed her luscious butt and made it shine.
“If the room has a bedside mirror like our bedroom, you can see how you look while fucking, watch your own face contort while he does that slow torture that drives us so crazy. Che cosa picoletta? Are you naked, except perhaps for those strappy little suede and leather sandals, the ones with the turquoise clasps that you wear everywhere?
I bought those for you, remember.
Are your toenails painted red? Little eye candies. Candy apple red. His warm, hairy body so close, so good now as he embraces you. Something hard pokes at your back right now. I ache at the mere thought of his fingers owning the curves of your sweet peach, rolling you over, placing your hands on the crown of your hips. Vi touched herself where the hurt was the most urgent.
The sandalwood oil that I gave you—warmed. Or perhaps the cocoa butter. We know which he likes better, but I’m not sure. The oil feels more natural. The cocoa butter allows more play. After he makes your cheeks glow, he’ll press a finger in the pink rosebud between them. Such a little miss tight-ass at first, you’re not anymore, no coaxing needed to accept his probing, or mine for that matter, anticipating its entry makes you warm all over, makes you quiver as it slides deeper preparing your sweet jellied hole for larger things.
‘God you whispered to me afterwards,
it’s like discovering a new sex organ!’
Don’t tell me, little girl. I know how that finger makes you jump in its anticipation but soon you slip far, far away, buoyant, floating on a incandescent sea of salt. I saw the last time he buried himself in you, always so gentle with you baby girl, I no longer require such tender mercies, but you clamped one hand to the bedsheets, the other to your crotch and rubbed as if you’d ignite. So powerful, the hot fast explosion tears through you, back to front, the waves that rock you deep inside as he pumps and pumps, that soft machine that ‘warms your behind.’ So lovely, that expression, ‘warms your behind.’ Little girl, you have finally discovered why I call it my “special hole” and why I want him to fill me now, so I can whisper, through tears, over and over, harder and harder, my darling, I’m sorry for the cruel stupid things I said, I didn’t mean it, take me, it’s yours, my special hole is yours, my special love.
Sometimes after coming he shivers against me like a frightened child pressing against its mother’s bottom, but if he’s still hard, don’t let him leave you, push up against him, trap him deep inside your silky bowel. Tell him he can’t leave and show him why. If you do it right, if he’s not too tired from his long day, you can keep him firm inside you. Whisper sweet, your soft whimpers, tell him how much you need his cock in your babygirl ass, how much you’d crave him if he were gone. Say you’ll die if he leaves. That you treasure everything about him. You know how much he loves this. If he comes again or not, there’s no more better way for your body to express what you feel in your soul. This is how, and here I conclude my lesson, a woman commands her own and her lover’s pleasures in her special hole. Just remember that you learned it all from me.
Riccardo, my darling, are you the love I‘ve waited my whole life for, or just the cruelest imitation yet?
I could cry for the hollow thing I am now.
Vi’s finger toyed insistently with her own “special hole.” Music, like a chastened pet, circles warily at a distance as Vi attends urgently to her throbbing rosebud with one hand, pulling at her right nipple with the other. Eyes pressed together she conjures him all to herself, sees him disappearing from the rumpled hotel bed of his younger lover, sees him rising opposite her through the water and steam, eyes, lips, only for her, stroking himself to readiness, he comes only for her.
“Neither one of us … wants to be the first to say goodbye” Gladys Knight’s wail fills the tub like the hot water gushing from the faucet.
“It’s my fault we didn’t have a proper goodbye.” Vi informed the empty space where he’d be, no longer holding back the inevitable tears, the wave she knew was coming. Though her heart settles like an lump of cold lead in her chest, her body won’t abandon the fantasy made so vivid by her desperate hunger. Her hips wriggled under the water like they no longer belonged to her, her flushed breasts rose from the scented water, dripping, tipped by the flicker of the scented candles and sparks more incandescent than candles faster and faster she spent herself with a cry that echoes from every tile in the cavernous bathroom. This was the first night of too many lonely nights to come, clinging to the insubstantial promise that their time apart would be but a short prelude to the nights and days ahead.
Violetta lingered in the water’s last warmth thinking more prosaic thoughts about her role in initiating the younger woman. Last Friday, when Riccardo had excused himself from dinner to take a call, Vi had confessed to Sofi, with sly giggles and whispers, watching for his return, how the first time watching her with him had brought her to three powerful successive orgasms. Sofi, so wide-eyed, so eager, but not so missy-innocent anymore, was more impressed by her as of late. Oh, she’d acted so shocked at first, then aroused, then ultimately was won over by Vi’s dualities – the very proper lady and the very craven slut, the fierce intellect and fiercer libido, body and spirit, these sides, three and a half decades at civil war with each other, now restlessly cohabiting in the same compact form.
“God, girls these days have it so much easier.”
Half a continent away, Sofi sees similar forces emerging in herself but she’s too young to be troubled by them. How could a young girl ever understand that even if she and Vi have arrived at the same destination; that they’d traveled from the opposite ends of the earth to do so?
Copyright 2010. This story may not be reprinted or linked without express, written permission of the author.
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