“Easy, easy,” she warns. He’s gentle, but persistent, a man knocking lightly at a locked door, determined to wake his lover and not her maid. Wetting his fingers with spit, he reaches down and strokes her lightly with his fingertips. She arches her spine first toward him, then away, and lifting her pelvis, she opens like a flower to him. Again, he drops down and moves to enter, but again he finds himself ejected.
“Wait, wait. Kiss me. Please kiss me.”
He kisses her, starting at her face and ears, tangling his fingers in her dense hair, then down along her neck to her breasts, where he feathers her large, erect nipples lightly with his tongue, while she twists beneath him and coos with evident pleasure. Moving his mouth off her breasts to her belly, he draws his hands to her breasts and strokes her nipples with precise care, drifting with tongue, teeth and lips downward, over her hips, along the inside of her thighs, and when she spreads her thighs, he moves his mouth quickly against her cunt, prods and probes it with his tongue, until he knows its shapes, and begins licking hungrily, noisily, with gentle precision, his heavy arms laid across her belly, his fingertips fluttering over her breasts. She has brought her naked feet together, sole against sole, and when he starts to run his prick slowly against her feet, she moves them away, as if frightened. A third time, lifting his weight onto his elbows, he attempts to enter her. A third time, he fails.
“I want to make love to you, Marguerite.”
“You are. You are. Do what you were doing. Do that.”
He lowers his mouth to her breasts and moves quickly down her body. Soon she is quivering beneath him, and after a few moments, she lifts her pelvis against him, shudders and says, “Ah-h-h!” In seconds, she has drawn him up and forward, has turned him onto his back and has buried her face in his groin, licking and sucking on his penis. Almost before he knows it is happening, it has already happened, and she leaves him for the bathroom, where he hears from behind the closed door the sound of water running.
By the time she returns, he has got under the covers of the bed. She joins him there, and wrapping her long arms around his body, she snuggles against him and says, “That was wonderful. Real nice.”
“Yeah,” he says. “No, it really was.”
“I’m sorry. I guess … I guess I’m sort of nervous and all. You know?”
“Oh, yeah, well, I didn’t even notice. I mean, that’s okay. It was really great. No kidding. You’ve got a beautiful body,” he says softly, though he hasn’t actually seen it yet, except for a glimpse as she flicked on the bathroom light and quickly closed the door behind her, a flash of brown buttock and back.
“Thanks. You’re not so bad yourself.”
A half hour later they leave the motel and drive back to Oleander Park, chatting about the Boston Red Sox, promising each other that next spring they’ll have to go to some of the exhibition games together, since, to their mutual surprise and pleasure, they both happen to be Boston fans, or so they insist.
They kiss goodbye passionately, and she says, “I love you.” Bob steps from her car and, once outside, says, “Me too.”
But when she has gone, and he has got into his own car and has started the motor, he drops into deep confusion. What happened? What did he expect to happen? What did he want? What did he get? What did he give? As he asks the questions, one by one, he realizes that he can’t answer any of them, not a one, and consequently he does not know how he should feel now. Happy? Sated? Disappointed? Ashamed? Angry? Proud?
The only thing he does know, he tells himself, is that he loves her. Yes, he, Bob Dubois of Catamount, New Hampshire, has fallen in love with Marguerite Dill of Auburndale, Florida, by way of Macon, Georgia, where she was a Southern black woman married to a Southern black man. This means, of course, that he no longer is in love with his wife Elaine. Or so he insists.
When he moves the gearshift lever, it jams, refuses to slide into reverse. He jiggles it, wrenches it, sneaks up on it and flips it, but nothing works. He checks his watch. Ten forty-five. The only way he can get the car into gear now is to have someone sit inside the car and jiggle the shift lever while he jumps up and down on the front bumper. The highway is deserted and dark, and across the street at the housing project, everyone’s inside watching TV.
