Episodes in a Life (closed)

[qerasija]

1 January 1996

He watched her sleep. She lay on her back, one arm folded across her chest like a broken wing. Her breasts raised and descended in the equal rhythms of her breathing. The areolae were dark. A crown of small bumps circled each nipple.

His gaze stepped down the ribs to her stomach and traversed the flat expanse. The squinting navel was a sideways echo of the pussy below. He followed the abdomen down and stared contentedly at her mound, its little tuft of pubis, the stiffened hair like a scattering of reeds. Her legs, the skin smooth as water, curled together, serpentine. Below her knees, the legs tangled in the sheets and disappeared. She looked like a mermaid at grace with the sea.

Her face was beautiful, not a child's, not innocent or ingenuous or virginal, but young and generous and guileless all the same. In her slumber, subtle lines of complexity furrowed her brow. The lips softly pouted.

Those lips had given him the last kiss of the Old Year and the first of the New. In last night's revelry, those lips had kissed his penis and poured lovemaking into his ear.

He had been to Edinburgh once before, for a conference during his first post-doc. He had seen the city in summer, in its many hues of grey, the clouds above always warning rain, sometimes making good on this threat. That July had been colder than by rights it should have been.

She had invited him home for Christmas, to meet her parents and her protective brothers. She made the invitation in mid-October when they had been dating only a month -- she was surer of their permanence than he was. He thought it early in the relationship, but he had accepted.

It was a perilous undertaking, to meet a lover's family for the first time. One walks lightly, testing the surface as though treading on a pond of ice, always careful not to offend, and therefore perpetually on edge. Elizabeth, who loved her parents and brothers, was excitement at the prospect, all energy and happiness and hope, while he exemplified nervousness, trepidation, a cold fear. She clutched his sweaty hands and whispered reassuring words as they waited at the airport with their luggage for her parents to arrive with the car. He needn't have worried. The Havilands were welcoming and generous people. Elizabeth's mother gave him a quick hug and a peck on the cheek; her father extended a warm handshake, an appraising look, a clap on the shoulder, a smile. He was a year and three years older than her brothers. They took him to a pub on his first night in the city, got him drunk on scotch. The alcohol made him garrulous. Reassured that he loved their sister, they declared him an all right bloke, and it was with this imprimatur that the three of them caroused till late.

In daytime, Elizabeth introduced him to her friends in the city and showed him the parts of Edinburgh he had not before seen. The city, like all the great cities in the world -- his New York most of all -- belonged to the people who lived there. Elizabeth was English, not Scottish, not entitled to tartan and bagpipes, but a native nonetheless. She had a way of fitting in that vouched for his presence despite the American accent he wore.

Dinnertime was mostly a family affair. Though she lived away from home as an undergraduate, Elizabeth had gone to university in Edinburgh itself. Aside from trips to the continent, holidays in France and Italy, Scandinavia with its long summer days, her journey to Canada was the first time she had been an ocean away, and for so long. They had missed her, as she had missed them. Her parents were senior academics at the university, a reader and a professor. Universities everywhere are distinguished by their labyrinths of bureaucracy, by the peculiarity of their politics. They are insular communities with a dialect spoken nowhere else. Students, post-docs, pigeons, squirrels are tourists passing through. The faculty inhabit the place. He was an assistant professor now. His tenure clock had started ticking -- after the sixth year he would be judged. Elizabeth's parents were full of advice for him. It affected their daughter, true, but he thought also that the Havilands approved of him on the merits.

Nighttime was charged. Elizabeth's parents had settled the two of them in the guest bedroom, the one that used to belong to her youngest brother, who would split his time this year between Edinburgh on Christmas Eve and his fiancée in Glasgow on Christmas and boxing day. Her father had said there was no sense in them not doing what he knew they did over there. He had blushed, and Elizabeth had giggled at him. They made love every night, and not always quietly. The ceiling was thin enough that they sometimes heard Elizabeth's parents in the master bedroom just above. Her parents' lovemaking set Elizabeth's ingenuity to kindle. He and Elizabeth were profane when they fucked. The grunts and groans and muttered imprecations and shouted exclamations bespoke their love. In the morning, over tea and breakfast -- or in his case, a vat of coffee -- they were teased about the volume and frequency of their nocturnal exertions. Elizabeth's oldest brother suggested that she should give his girlfriend some pointers in bed. Elizabeth quipped that she had.

He was deliriously happy in this house.

On New Year's Eve, he and Elizabeth had dinner at a French restaurant. While they dined, the snow started to fall in enormous flakes that floated to the ground like feathers. Fortified by the wine and whiskey, they walked the city with its misting of otherworldly whiteness. Passing through the crowds, they crossed the bridge and climbed the hill and made a circuit of the castle from behind and from there walked the Royal Mile to St Giles. He learned from Elizabeth that John Knox had preached the Scottish Reformation there. They threaded their way to the Scott Monument, with its garish gothic spires and unmistakable black soot. Finally, they joined the city's multitudes gathered at Tron Kirk. Her brother and parents were also somewhere in the vast crowd.

Hogmanay. He couldn't pronounce the word with the right stress. Nor Ne'erday either. But he belted Auld Lang Syne once the calendar turned. The song concluded with a kiss. The tips of their tongues danced round and round. He held her in the embrace of his arms when the fireworks started. Each time he saw the colour blue lance the sky, he tapped her jeans in the middle space above the juncture of her legs. It set her to squirming against his groin.

They went for drinks afterwards, met up with her friends, returning to a dark house just before four in the morning. They stripped, fell into bed, had the first sex of the New Year. They tried to be quiet because the hour was late; the silence, unnatural to them both, set them to laughter. She finished astride his hips and rolled over and nestled close.

The alarm woke her after noon. She sat up, noticed his eyes, arched an eyebrow. She spread her thighs, and he moved between them, his head lowering.

 

[Lady_Mornington]

May 2001

The house was everything she'd ever dreamt of. Their own home, hers and Richard's. It had been such a long wait, filled with economic calculations, anxiety, the inevitable fights and the likewise inevitable reconciliation.

They had moved in on May 1, Richard calling it Labour day, whereas she had insisted it was Wellington's birthday. They had been renting a van to shift their furniture, most of it seemingly consisting from their combined libraries, history and astronomy intersperesed with both prose and poetry. Samuel had helped them, "good old Sam", Richard's oldest friend and for want of a better word, his family. She knew they shared something, a spece that she was being invited to for brief moments, but which she would never occupy herself. Still his help had been most appreciated.

Both Richard and herself had been too exhausted to set up the furniture properly, and the first night in their new home was spent on a matress in the livingroom. His hands had roamed her back, fondling her bottom as she kissed his neck. Their arousal spurred equally by relief as well as the attraction their bodies still held. She had kissed his chest, her tongue tracing the contours of his abdomen until she found his manhood. Taking him into her mouth, ministrating, before straddling him. Her slender body astride his, eyes closed as she experienced the waves of pleasure running through her body. She had ceased taking the pill, her tenure secure as was his, and they both wanted children. God knew they had tried, following every advice availible but to no avail.

His trusts growing harder and she responded in kind, hoping that their climax would yield something more than the spending of their lusts. She whispered in his ear, her voice hoarse telling him she loved him, that she would always love him, her words prompting his discharge. His face a mask as the ripples ran through his body his grip of her growing tighter, and as she felt his seed erupt inside her she came. An almost animal sound coming from her lips, conveying every single feeling she harboured for him.

They collapsed, their bodies still entwined, none of them wanting to break their embrace. He had kissed her nose, as he was wont to after coitus. Telling her the sweet nothings that lovers share. She had smiled as his eyes grew heavier, slowly drifting off into sleep. Leaning closer once again whispering, telling him the name she had chosen for the child they'd conceived.

 

[qerasija]

September 2020

'Thank you, sir,' he said accepting his passport, Elizabeth's, and his son's. He passed them over to his wife, and with a wave, detached from the trailing snake and accelerated into the space ahead. Provincial Route 402 became I-69 West. He and Elizabeth had smuggled their hope into the United States.

As he brought the car into self-pilot mode, he noticed in the mirror that his son was sleeping in the back seat. Tristan was eighteen, going to the University of Chicago, which was some distance from home. That it was necessary, that they wanted him to experience new things, acquire an education, make the friends he would have for a lifetime, possibly meet the right girl and fall in love -- all this did not make the separation any easier. There was much he wanted to tell his son. The last conversation between the father and his charge was one that he had been rehearsing for months, but he let him sleep. He was conscious of the trust that allowed Tristan to do so. It wasn't the absolute childlike trust of the two-year old, but still it was a gift.

Elizabeth squeezed his thigh. She leaned across and kissed his cheek. He took a long blink and gave her a smile. The silence among them held. Elizabeth was thinking her own thoughts, he his. Tristan was dreaming.

He should have been happy, and he was.

Tristan! Geliebter!

 

[qerasija]

A Late Afternoon, March 2034

He walked across the commons -- he was going to the history department -- and the college kids, they were out in droves and multitudes, because this was one of those perfect afternoons early in the spring when the sky was unclouded and the weather was warm and the days were lengthening, and the undergraduates, some of whom he recognised from the classes he taught, they were out playing football, a kick launching across the pitch, which was marked out by t-shirts white and blue, and the foot speed of the boy who received it was a blur to his eye, but the defender opposite him, he wasn't fooled, this match was a contest, and he would have liked to loiter to see which one of them won, but his eye focused a few metres to the side on the girl who leapt to arrest an orange frisbee in its whirling flight, and she landed and pivoted and threw, the practised movements precise and fluid and serene, even balletic, and he smiled as he watched her, and he knew he wasn't the only one, for the boys and girls, and also some girls and girls and boys and boys, were paired on the fresh mowed grass, or sitting on benches in the shade of the trees that lined the broad colonnade, and they were holding hands and talking, lips pressed to an ear, and he felt in his core that he shouldn't look, and he bent his head slightly and stared straight ahead at the swish of the skirt in front of him (short) and although he couldn't make out every word, she was chattering to her friend about an exam in chemistry and their plans for the evening and because he didn't wish to eavesdrop any further, he listened instead to the fountain, which whispered its own contentments to the burbling pool below and the shimmering of the sunlight in the water and the blue of the blue sky and the green of the green grass and the soft and hesitant breeze made him suddenly feel very young, though this was an illusion, and he was old.

 

[Lady_Mornington]

August 14, 2005

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light
I have loved the stars to fondly to be fearful of the night.

The Old Astroner to his Pupil, the poem Elizabeth had recited for Richard on one of their first dates. He had smiled, perhaps a bit embaressed, his tastes a tad more refined than Sarah Williams. She persisted in quoting the line from time to time and it had become her way of describing her husband.

Richard and herself were seated on the hill by the observatory, looking at the clear summer sky. Her parents were visiting, and gladly volunteering to look after Tristan and Ffion. Knowing their children would be in the safest of hands but still finding herself worrying.

Leaning back, her head resting on his shoulder as they watched the sky. Richard pointing out the constellations and retold her the stories behind the Greek names. Elizabeth knew most of them by now but she let him tell her anyway. His first story had been of Perseus and Andromeda, and she asked him to retell it. As it draw to a close they lay side by side, their hands intertwined and she had kissed him. They had made love there, on the hill under the stars, she'd straddled him, his hands placed on her breasts, as she rocked against him. It all felt very new to her, the sounds, the feel of his body, the scents as well as the pleasures of their climax.

She had teased him afterwards, wondering what his students would have said had they seen Professor Stapleton in such a private an act, her taunts precipitated by the proxemity to the observatory. Richard had almost blushed at the thought, and made a rather feeble come-back what her own students would say had they seen Dr.Haviland-Stapleton. Elizabeth had laughted, kissing him and saying that since she had been on top even her most feminist students would have approved.

They didn't go straight home, walking instead to an all-night café and spending most of the night there. Talking, bestowing small caresses, taking back some of the things that had gone missing...

 

[qerasija]

May 1997

She was a study in clumsy grace. Her legs hooked over the armrest of the chair, one knee perched atop the other, carelessly lissom. An ink-stained pocket peeked from below the ragged edge of her cut-off jeans, and her white top hugged her chest fiercely. Bra straps painted thin stripes across her shoulders. She bit her bottom lip as she gazed, intent upon the book in her lap. She read, not because she needed to for a class, but because the words were lovely and compelling and were meant to be read.

Sprawled on the carpet before her, he studiously ignored the pile of research articles he had intended to plod through that afternoon, preferring instead to research the topography of her legs. His glance traversed the smooth contour of shin, scaled the step of knee, and dawdled over her thighs, following the shadowed valley beneath until it was subsumed by a sea of denim. He gazed intently upon the ghostly indentation that a trick of the light said was there between her legs.

The legs uncrossed. As she stretched her arms and yawned, her shirt lifted to expose her hollow navel. Her shoulders rippled.

'What are you looking at?'

Only the truth would do. 'You.'

'So I surmised. Do you like what you see?'

'Always.'

She descended to sit cross-legged on the floor beside him. He lay on his side, chin propped on his hand, staring back at her. When she leaned forward to kiss the tip of his nose, her hair, reflecting the sun with a tremulous light, soft as silk the miller's daughter had spun, brushed his cheek. He drew her to him, and she toppled on top obligingly. From out of the speakers in the corners of the room, Walther von Stolzing presented his Prize Song to the assembled multitudes.

Removing his glasses and setting them carefully on the table and then her own beside them, she stuck out her tongue and offered it to his greedy mouth. His hands, themselves insatiate, slid down the small of her back and slipped inside her underwear.

'Let's fuck,' she whispered.

'Let's.'

 

[Lady_Mornington]

February 2006

"Thus the military families from the Celtic fringes of Britain helped shaping the process of state formation in Europe. From Sweden in the north to Spain in the sout, the Scots and Irish made their imprint and it lasts even to this day."

Applause followed her finishing sentence. The conference paper she'd given clearly appealing to the crowd. Elizabeth was jaded enough by now, knowing well the difference between the honest and hearfell response of a positive auditorium from the polite ones of the indifferent.

Unable to hide the blush as she graciously accepted the thank-yous from the moderator and being escorted off the stage. She ought to get on the phone, giving Richard a call and having a word with Tristan and Ffion. It was early morning in Canada now and late afternoon in London. It felt good though, being away if even for this short period. Her research having merited her invitation to the conference, and it just proved that she was doing something right. They'd had had some bumps in their relation, Ffion's heart condition having brought about a lot of stress, as had Richard's insistence that she'd spend more time at home. She'd budged from the idea, and consequently ended up with the lingering guilty conscience. But it all had changed now, Richard and herself had worked out their problems, and he hadn't pressed the issue of her sacrificing her career.

She was interrupted in her reveries, feeling a pat on her shoulder. Turning around she saw a vaguely familiar person.

"Good God isn't it Elizabeth?" The man who'd addressed her was in his sixties, grey temples and immaculately dressed. Handsome features and intelligent eyes that met hers.

"Mr Lindsay? Charlotte's dad?" Charlotte, her best friend from Edinburgh university, the inseparable duo, Liz and Charlie as their flatmates referred to them.

"It's actually Sir Henry these days, got myself knighted it appears."

She had agreed to have dinner with him, not that she knew him, but it was still a familiar face. He was working with the MoD, having been lifted from the barracks to what he described as pen-pushing. They talked about her studies and subsequent research, about Charlotte, mother of one but sadly divorced. Colin, her brother now commanding an armoured company in Afghanistan. Elizabeth learned that he'd become a widower only last year. Margareth Lindsay having died peacefully at home.

It was appealing, and Elizabeth realised just how much she had missed this. She was very much a child of the Old World with it's traditions and rigid structures and Sir Henry Lindsay was the very embodiment of that. She also understood, by the time they took their coffee that she'd sleep with him. Perhaps it was immoral, almost verging on incestuous, yet she had no intention to stop it.

They took a cab to his flat, a spacious one in Chelsea, drinks in the sitting-room and lovemaking on the floor. She left early in the morning, the rain masking any tears she might have cried.

 

[qerasija]

October 2014

'How many lectures have you given with the taste of semen in your mouth?' he asked. His lips kissed hers. He licked the little spot of white that escaped the corner of her mouth and dripped along her chin. The scent of the sea filled his nostrils.

She held his arse as they rocked together. 'I want my come dripping out of your cunt and filling your knickers as you tell about the Women's Rights Movement,' he continued. 'I want your students to call you Professor while the wetness is still on your thighs.'

Elizabeth moaned. She bit her lip to keep from shouting. Her fingers clutched the roots of his hair as she tilted his head back and forced her tongue inside his mouth. He caught it between his teeth and tasted his salt as she pulled it free.

His prior reconnaissance had bunched her dress beneath her. Their upper bodies were still clothed, but their lower bodies were naked. Her thighs slapped against his on their descent. He observed that the perspiration on their skin was a luminous gloss in the fluorescent light.

She compressed his length and brought her lips to his ear. Her tongue touched the lobe, and she murmured her suggestion. She smiled broadly as she squeezed him again. Her eyes glinted.

He shook his head in mirth, and she knew that he had consented.

Elizabeth had a mirror on the back of her office door. They stood in front of it twenty minutes later and made themselves presentable. Getting themselves shevelled, they called it. He reminded her that it was her turn to pick up Ffion from piano practice and get Tristan from Chess Club. She reminded him that it was therefore his turn to cook. He suspected that she had the easier task, but marriage was compromise.

He kissed her as he left. The three little syllables he spoke still had the power to set his heart to floating. The answering echo was all that connected him to this world.

As he and Elizabeth hadn't gone for lunch as they had intended, he stopped at the Middle Eastern truck and got an order of falafel and hummus that he took back to his office. That day, he felt remarkably naked. No one said anything, but of course, no one would. He hoped no one noticed, not his colleagues at the committee meeting for a junior hire, not his graduate student Bea, who had some data analysis of dark matter distributions to show him, not Ffion at the dinner table. (Tristan could be counted on to be oblivious.) He kept his hand in his pocket and had a perpetual hard-on.

That night, he used his tongue and teeth to extract his wedding band from where Elizabeth had kept it that afternoon and evening. It was the first time in their marriage that he had removed the ring from his hand, and it felt good to have its solidity resting in his palm again. Elizabeth sucked his finger into her mouth and placed the ring there as she had fourteen years before.

 

[Lady_Mornington]

August 2021

"Don't cry dear."

He was dying, and she couldn't do anything to soothe him, Elizabeth had been crying since she arrived in Edinburgh the previous night. Her father's health had deteriorated rapidly. He'd kept his illness secret, only telling her mother as he didn't want her to worry or making sacrifices for his sake. The young doctor had been very kind but had stressed that it was a matter of hours rather than days now.

She sat by his side, holding his hand. Tristan and Ffion had been in attendence but Robert had thought it better if they and their cousin Julia had been spared their Grandfather's passing.

The entire Haviland-clan had been gathered, offering what ever solaces they could as George drifted in and out of conciousness, his pains alleviated somewhat by the morphine. Anne had kept constant vigil by his side, as had Elizabeth. Ashley and Jane and Robert and Sophia had taken turns there. The only person missing was Richard.

Elizabeth had dozed of, her hand still clutching that of her father's as he drew his final breath. The transition was gentle, no pain or tears involved. At least not on his part.

It was her that seemed most affected, she had blamed herself for not having been there, for not having offering what help she could. The rest of the family had busied themselves, making the arrangements with the undertaker and the church. Everyone careful not to upset her. She had taken to go on walks, desperately needing the solitude, although Tristan accompanied her at times. He usually didn't say much, both of them knowing that no words would be sufficient at that moment. Even so, his gentle humour had managed to coax her from her misery, a joke or a witty observation, spoken in the most British of accents. Both her children modelled their English depending on whom they addressed. With Richard it was the English of the Americas, more Canadian than American and with her the language that bespoke Home Counties.

It was a few days before the funeral and she had and Tristan was having tea at the Caledonian Hotel. He had made her retell the stories of the Resurrection Men as they had passed Princess Street Gardens, out of no other reason than to take her mind of the things to come. The topic perhaps ill chosen but she had humoured him nonetheless. As the her tale drew to a close she realised that she'd had an audience. A man in his forties sitting by the table next to theirs. Colin Lindsay.

Introducing him as well as Tristan and learning that he was now an aide to King William, his father's knighthood having been a great leverage. He expressed his condolances, and on a spur it seemed, offered them to attend the Royal Adress to the Scottish Parliament. She had accepted, much to Tristan's excitement. Her son did not share his father's republican sentiments and the two of them had had rather the heated arguments over the issue.

As they left the Caledonian he had proffered his arm to her in a very chivalrous manner and giving her a conspiratorical wink "I'm quite sure that Colonel Lindsay fancies you Mum." She had blushed trying to deny such but Tristan had been adamant telling her that she ought to enjoy it. "As long as you do remember the sacred vows of marriage."

She had promised him that, and found herself compelled to retell a more personal story, the one of a New Years Eve more than twenty years ago.

 

[qerasija]

28 April 2012

Ffion's eighth birthday was spent in hospital. That morning, Ffion had woken early, and as she ran downstairs, she tripped on the basketball that Tristan had left on the landing and tumbled down and down. His daughter's heart had been a persistent worry that would, inevitably, require operation. That morning she also had difficulty breathing.

While Elizabeth drove Ffion to the emergency room, it became his job to deposit Tristan, who was still asleep when the incident happened, to the care of a friend, and break the news to him as gently as he could. He knew that Elizabeth's tact would have been greater than his, but he also knew that Elizabeth would have been nowhere else in the world but with Ffion that morning.

If one ever asked her, or even if one never did, Anne-Marie Taschen would tell anything and everything that anyone knew about two-dimensional electron gases. Such conversations were soliloquies. But Anne-Marie, who had been hired by the Physics and Astronomy department the same year that he had been, and her wife Alix were two of his favourite people in the world. He had called Anne-Marie, appraised her of what had happened that morning, and asked if he could leave Tristan in their care for a time. Anne-Marie and Alix and their daughter Theresa had plans for the day, but they readily agreed to take Tristan on board. It helped, of course, and amused both sets of parents, at a time when amusement was the more appropriate response, that Tristan and Theresa had a crush on each other, plainly evident, though each thought it thoroughly concealed from everyone else.

As he drove to Anne-Marie's house, he told Tristan what had transpired that morning. So that no blame attached, he also told Tristan that he had seen the basketball the night before and thought to move it, but didn't. He hadn't, in fact, seen the ball, but he should have, and decided both that the small lie supported a greater good and that the responsibility for the accident was his, and not his son's. He cautioned Tristan to be more careful and hoped the lesson was absorbed. Anyway, he told himself he couldn't expend the energy in glowering when there was Ffion to worry about.

Once Tristan was safely with Anne-Marie and Alix, he raced to the hospital, cursing a steady string of expletives at the traffic lights that unanimously conspired against his progress. He tried ringing Elizabeth's mobile on the way, but either it was switched off or she had forgotten it -- the former, he decided, when he walked into the emergency room reception at last and saw the big red sign at the entrance and switched off his own telephone.

Elizabeth and Ffion were with the doctor, and the woman at the desk insisted that he couldn't join them and wouldn't tell him anything more. Elizabeth had filled out the paperwork already. There was nothing for him to do but wait.

He didn't wait easily, not when it was like this, not with his daughter's condition an unknown. He paced. He fumed. He drank too much of the complimentary burnt coffee and coped with a too full bladder because he was scared to go into the washroom lest he was needed in the interim.

It was two hours before Elizabeth came out into the waiting room. Ffion would be fine, but the doctor wanted to keep her under observation for a night. The relief washed over him. He trembled as he clutched Elizabeth. His vision became blurry.

Once he was assured that Ffion was all right, once he had seen his daughter and received the affirmation of sight and touch, he and Elizabeth conferred on what to do. They coaxed the doctor into allowing the birthday girl a birthday cupcake. Elizabeth made a run home to retrieve Ffion's presents.

The big present Ffion received that year was a telescope. The big present he received was the chance to show her the moon and its craters, the transit of the satellites of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, the Great Nebula in Orion, Beta Cygni with its colours, the thick sword of the Milky Way that cleaved the night in two. Ever after could take care of itself. This was now.

 

[Lady_Mornington]

April 29 2026

They were seated in a restaurant in the shadow of the Great Cathedral in Uppsala. Elizabeth, Richard, Tristan and that horrible girl.

It was her son's first semester at the Ph D program in history, having followed in her footsteps, an immense source of pride obviously. The fact that he was the son of Professor Haviland-Stapleton being a mixed blessing though. She was after all one of the authorities in her field, and she had had long discussions with Tristan, trying to make him aware of the scrutiny he'd be under if he decided to follow through his plans. He'd dismissed her worries, telling her how he'd be her most fierce critic should he succeed in his ventures. And it seemed he had, securing a place with the formost department for Early Modern studies in Europe and already having a few articles published. Truth to tell he had chosen to style himself Stapleton rather than Haviland-Stapleton but she could live with that.

And now she and Richard was visiting, in time for the great student festival of April the 30:th. The occassion coinciding with the abdication of King Charles in favour of Crown Princess Victoria, lending some extra shine to the festival. Elizabeth, however, was not feeling particularly pleased and the reason was the horrible girl sitting next to her son. It was not that Tristan hadn't had girlfriends before, but somethng about Joanna grated at her nerves. She had tried to be civil but as the dinner progressed she found herself more and more hostile towards her. They had left shortly after the dessert was served.

"Are we experiencing a bit of dear old Jocasta?" Richard had taunted her, clearly seeing her reaction to their son's choice of girlfriend.

"She's not good enough for him." She heard how it sounded as soon as she'd spoken the words. Chiding herself for being...jealous?

"Oh dear, I'm sure Tristan will be able to handle this, he's our son after all." Richard had smiled and kissed her in full view of a group of students who responded with cat-calls and whistles to his blatant display of affection.

They had taken drinks in their room and then to her surprise, and secret enjoyment, Richard had pulled up her skirt, placing her across his lap giving her a spanking for as a 'punishment' for her awful behaviour. His fingers running across her buttocks, down between her thighs, penetrating her as he shifted her, allowing for her to take his cock into her mouth. He had called her names, pulled her hair, and then pushed her down on the bed taking her rather roughly. It happened from time to time that they indulged in the darker fantasies, playing on dominance and submission, and Elizabeth found herself enjoying it. They were both over fifty and still able to experiment. Surely not every couple were so fortunate. He had fallen asleep shortly after he'd spent his seed inside her, resting her head on his chest. And her thougts went to her son. Wondering if he would find happiness with that horrible girl.

 

[qerasija]

March 2005

He hated himself for being there. In a cheap motel in the mid-afternoon, north of the city, off the highway, the reason for the visit was transparent. Every week, when he made his payment in cash and accepted the room key, the attendant nodded familiarly and bestowed a knowing smirk. Every week, as he returned the key to check-out of the room, he told himself he would never go there again. But every Tuesday morning that semester, he sent Caroline an e-mail and arrived punctually at the same motel at three fifteen, which provided him exactly one hour and twenty minutes for the tryst.

Caroline Humboldt was not a current student of his. He had enough ethics, or more strictly speaking, he admitted to himself, he had enough fear, not to bed the young women who took his classes. If discovered, this was one of the few acts for which tenure was no protection at all. The case of Jonathan Schaum two years before was but the latest proof.

Caroline Humboldt was a former student. When she had been in his class, she had needed an inordinate amount of help in his office hours. She was pretty and not above using her allure to her advantage. She gave him glimpses of what she possessed. She made suggestions for what more she was willing to offer. The proposal was never made explicit, but he was not a fool. It was, however, with his thoroughly professional help that Caroline managed to squeak by in the first physics class that she needed. The second class she was required to take was not one that he lectured. She made generous use of his office hours though, and he let her understand that his time was given in return for hers. Teaching held little interest for him in the end, but he was good enough at it one-on-one. Caroline would get her grade. He would get her sex.

The problem with what he had with Elizabeth was that although the sex was never anything short of outstanding, it had become conventional. Early in their relationship, they had experimented with their sexuality. He had been the dominant partner; he had been the submissive one. They had played with blindfolds, with toys, with ropes and restraints, with wax and ice, and once with a stone dildo heated in the microwave. He had fucked her pussy whilst a vibrator purred in her ass. He had washed her anus with his tongue and received anilingus (his favourite) in turn.

In marriage, they had settled into rhythms, and with young children, there was less lovemaking than before. The sex consisted of a diet of cunnilingus, a spot of fellatio, and the elemental fuck in its basic permutations. He loved all that they did. There was nothing in the universe so beautiful as her face in its rictus of triumph, nothing so thrilling as her voice, unashamed, the things that she said. The love that she gave him brought him to completion.

Testify -- the word is derived from testes. A man's oath was once taken whilst his balls were held. He would testify that there was no sensation he had ever felt that exceeded the pleasure he derived from Elizabeth's pleasure. The fact of her orgasm, how it came to pass through his agency, this generated an euphoria more profound than his own gratification.

Yet they had arrived at a comfortable status quo before he had reached the end of his explorations. They had talked -- usually in bed -- about this, about what they had in each other and what they still wanted, about what their screwing meant. After such a conversation, for some weeks, the sex would become freer before the old patterns of lovemaking were restored. It was only two or three times in a year that he was invited to take her ass.

There was a girl he met the summer after he finished high school when he first saw Europe. He was not a virgin when he met Annie from Seattle in that hostel in Paris. When he saw Annie for the last time that summer in West Berlin, just before he left for Berkeley, he was no longer in any sense an innocent. Some of the things he had done with Annie, he could never ask of Elizabeth. He loved her and respected her too much. Such things would degrade her, he believed.

Caroline did not matter to him. He would not hurt the girl, but neither was he obliged to restrain himself. What she did not object to, he would do. The last time, he had fisted her pussy. It had taken an hour, a latex glove, and plentiful lubrication for his hand to muscle past her opening, but he had managed it and unballed his fingers within her body. The time before, he had placed a collar around her neck and tugged on the leash as he penetrated her from behind.

He had not brought props with him that afternoon. As he lay on the bed waiting impatiently for the girl to arrive, and although the sensible part of his brain knew that that night when he went to sleep beside Elizabeth, he would hate himself for the things he would do, he pondered the infinity of possibilities that nevertheless remained open to him.

 

[Lady_Mornington]

June 2022

"You ought to divorce him Mum."

Ffion was negotiating the traffic on the highway. The stereo blaring, perhaps a bit loud for Elizabeth's taste but she didn't raise the issue. Her mind to preoccupied with the issue of Richard.

"You mustn't speak that way about your father Hon." Elizabeth had tried her best to mediate, she didn't want neither Tristan nor Ffion to take sides in the conflict. Especially not Ffion.

"He's a bloody wanker that's what he is Mum and I told him as much!" She slapped her hands against the wheel, swearing at the driver of another car.

"Ffion please."

"Oh do be quiet Mum, you know I'm right and you probably want to tell him yourself. For all the talk about women's rights you're awfully conventional."
She had stared at the traffic not inviting further conversation.

Elizabeth had found out about Richard's affair after a regular check-up with her physician. A blood sample had determined that she had chlamydia. Her GP having asked her about sexual contacts and when she could only state her husband he had shaken his head. Not saying anymore. The silence speaking volumes. She had confronted him the same day, and he had confessed outright. He couldn't give her an explanation to his actions and she had asked him to leave. He'd done so without a word, packing a few things in the battered old suitcase and leaving.

She had promised not to involve neither Tristan nor Ffion but somehow they had found out. Tristan had called from Chicago offering to come up and stay with her but she'd declined. Ffion was going to McGill in Montreal and hearing about it had showed up on her doorstep. Telling her that she couldn't sit around pining and deciding that she ought to come back with her.

Perhaps it was the fact that Ffion and Richard had been as close as they were that had merited her daughter's reaction. The betrayal striking at the root of Ffion's perception of him.

They had decided to go out for dinner, both of them too weary to face shopping and the subsequent cooking. They had settled for a reasonable Italian restaurant a few blocks down from Ffion's flat. Sitting in silence as they awaited the entré to be served.

"Did he explain why Mum?" Ffion had asked in a rather a belligerent tone. Her cheeks flush as she took yet another sip of wine.

"No he didn't." She had felt uncomfortable discussing these issues with Ffion but her daughter had pressed the issue.

"I would kill him if I were you." Draining the glass and refilling it, disguising her sorrow with anger. Her features the perfect blend of Elizabeth's and Richard's.

"Please Ffion, don't talk like that. It doesn't befit you at all." Elizabeth had reached out, taking her hand, squeezing it for what ever reassurance she could offer.

"I don't care Mum, he's a wanker and and I hate him."

"He is still your father and what transpired between the two of us don't concern your relation does if? I can see that you're outraged but I won't hear you use those words about him."

They had left shortly afterwards, Ffion claiming she had a headache didn't for a second fool Elizabeth. She had seen the tears in her daughter's eyes but she decided not to say anything. They had walked in silence, each of them minding their own.

She woke up hearing the sobs from the next room, maternal instincts taking over the pretence of leaving Ffion to deal with the issues herself. She lay curled up on her bed, wordlessly reaching out to Elizabeth. She had held her, like she had done so many times before. Staying with her even until the first grey light of dawn shone in through the curtains.

"He destroyed everything Mum and I hate him."

 

[qerasija]

January 2002

He kissed the inner surfaces of her thighs, the edge of her sex, the perineum below, her dark swollen labia. The sounds his mouth made on her skin were squishy and wet. The slickness was warm, its taste sharp. The seasons turned by days, by hours. Every time he licked her, the texture was different, the smell and touch.

He placed his hands on her rounded belly, the flat of his palms on the two sides. He cocked his head laterally and brought his ear down, and he listened to the rumblings within. She was replete, and never so beautiful.

'Here,' said Elizabeth. 'Feel this.' She tapped below her navel, with two fingers. The equilibrium in her womb shifted. The baby kicked back. Their child was stirring.

He touched experimentally along her contours, the curves and cambers of her abdomen. The skin stretched beneath his fingers, elongated, becoming somehow smoother. His hands found her breasts, the fullness of the nipples, their ripeness. The teats had acquired a deeper colour, a rich brown replacing what had once been a radiant pink. The skin was more sensitive than he remembered, also heavier. The hardness of her arousal, as before, was in evidence on top, but now there was a malleable softness as well, a thickness ringing the peaks, radiating all around. He kissed her tummy where it sloped down, his mouth dropping to her pelvis, then crossing to the meeting point of her legs.

In the summer, Elizabeth had shaved her pubis. They had walked the beach at Corfu, and after the Ionian sun had set, they had stepped into the water and made love in the still warm sea. Since then, Elizabeth had allowed the hair on her mons to grow back, not a thick crop, but enough for his lips to latch on and tug.

He crouched on the bed between her legs, which were bent at the knee and lifted to either side like mantis wings. He smiled at the dubious image. It was not yet time for her to swallow him, though that moment might also come. He licked the length of her cleft, lapping the wetness that had gathered there. Her scent was piquant and strong. He thought, absurdly, of a sommelier describing the taste on the middle palate that hit him an instant after the nose of her weeping skin.

He flattened himself on the bed and hid himself behind her belly. The sex was all surprise now. Pregnancy had darkened the colours here as well, changed the consistency of the flesh, its quality. He caught her lips in his and shook his head from side to side, like a dog toying with a meal. He kissed her below just as he would kiss her above, the tongue insinuating itself within the folds, teasing in circles, reaching. The heel of his thumb traced an arch over top, around the clitoris, a lone sentry, standing distended, proud. He kept her guessing, with agile fingers, lips and tongue, the points of teeth, the air he whistled over the clitoris, his working jaw.

Her breath came in gasps. He saw above him the linens balled in her fists, her fingertips white with the force of her grip. The muscles in her arms were taut, the edges in relief, like sculpted marble. The orgasm was close.

'I want you to fuck me,' she said, and raised herself to hands and knees. The words were enunciated carefully in the accented British that he found so sexy, but on the word fuck the voice assumed a slight and tremulous lilt.

Accommodating her desire, he entered Elizabeth smoothly from behind, the head penetrating in a stroke, her muscles embracing in familiar welcome, then relaxing their grasp. He ensconced himself within, sighing as he gave her the extent of his offering. His balls shuddered to a halt in the crease of her buttocks. The two of them held position, savouring the fullness, the sudden wash of warmth.

Elizabeth then brought her elbows down. She sunk her head onto the pillow and arced her back out. The hair tumbled over one shoulder. The sweat sluiced along the shoulder blades, her flank, the central curve of the spine. He kissed the trapezius muscle, tasted the salt on his lips. His palms were angled back to back, and he pressed them into the flesh of her buttocks. As he circled his hips, the friction of her walls abraded on the sides of his shaft. The compression on the circumference traversed his length. Elizabeth edged backward, opening herself out. The tip of his penis nudged her laden womb.

Elizabeth moaned from deep inside her throat as he started moving within and without. He covered her with his weight, the mass of his chest on her back, his arms reaching around. Her breasts hung like fruit. They swung on the branch of her sternum as though buffeted by wind. He gathered them in his grip, flattened them against her chest, and lifted her from the bed. He jerked her body hard onto his penis as his pelvis slammed impossibly hard the other way.

The great oak bedframe creaked at the momentum of their motion. The room resonated with echoes of groans and grunts and filthy words, the moist sounds of entry and excavation, the report of the scrotum on her skin, the slap, slap, slap refrain of flesh clapping against flesh.

He rode her like a rocking horse. His hands clutched her gravid midsection as he compelled her backward. The muscles in her thighs tensed to blunt the impact of his thrusts. Her skin rippled.

'I love you,' she said, just before she lost her capacity for speech.

Knowing that crisis was inevitable, his hand scrambled over the hump of her belly. He seized her pubis, closing his fingers on top when the orgasm detonated inside her.

His eyes squeezed tightly shut, he ignored the sting of perspiration and rode her climax out with his penis seated at the centre of her concussing muscles. Moving again within the clutch of her body, he was not able to hold out for much longer. He barked a series of staccato grunts to the tempo of his movement, and discharged, fulminating so powerfully that she clenched back at him in a second, sympathetic tremor.

Love was limb loosening. Once the orgasms had tapered into a warm dribble that dripped down her thighs, he raised Elizabeth up and held her. They kissed over her shoulder, a soft kiss without tongue. Jostled by the splash of semen, the baby rolled itself around in Elizabeth's womb.

 

[qerasija]

April 2013

He was a peaceable man. The things he hated comprised only a short list: idiot undergraduates, faculty meetings where colleagues who hadn't written a decent paper in over a decade felt compelled to talk and talk, grant applications, his lawn, the sidewalk and driveway following a snowstorm, the endless war, broccoli, and the New York Yankees. Of these, broccoli, he could avoid; his lawn, he would pay to mantain -- Tristan to do the mowing and the raking, a company to do the weeding and the planting. The last years, blizzards were blissfully infrequent. The tedium of teaching and administration were part of what paid his salary, and the grants justified his existence to the University: these were therefore unavoidable. Matters of war and peace were beyond his ken. So, too, were the damned Yankees.

He had grown up in the City, a third generation New Yorker and upper west side Manhattanite thanks to rent control. His family had been Giants fans from time immemorial; his favourite bedtime fable was the story of the Bobby Thompson home run -- the shot heard round the world, they called it. He lived in San Francisco as an undergraduate, but the magic had fled when the Giants departed New York. In his youth, he lived with the hapless Mets and, more often, died with them. In graduate school, his affections shifted somewhat to the Boston Red Sox -- but only because they were the Yankees' fiercest rivals. Like so many others before and after, he made the pilgrimage from Cambridge to holy Fenway.

Every year on the day that the first afternoon game at home fell on a weekday, Tristan would be 'ill', and as he would have to take care of his son, he would juggle his course responsibilities and reschedule his appointments. The cure for the miasma of winter was the scent of the ballpark, seeing the emerald grass, the blur of the ball, hearing the crack of the bat, and sharing this experience with fifty thousand others plus his son.

The Orioles were visiting that afternoon. They left the house at a leisurely ten o'clock hour. Playing hooky was a treat for him, as well as for his son. He listened to Tristan babble excitedly about the essay test in English class that he was skipping. They were reading Mark Twain, apparently. Like every male reader, Becky Thatcher, for whom Tom Sawyer had taken a whipping, had been his first crush.

Tristan was not the reader of fiction that he and Ffion were: his son prefered stories that were true. In the car, he quoted the same sentences to Tristan that he once quoted to Elizabeth Haviland when they were dating: I read history a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all -- it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.

'It isn't dull; it's interesting,' Tristan insisted. At the time Elizabeth had smiled that smile of hers that said she refused to be baited. He was her mother's son, he thought, and chuckled to himself at the latest proof of this old revelation.

In Toronto, the two of them had lunch at Terroni; he stopped by L'Atelier Grigorian, where he browsed the stacks for used records and CDs, while Tristan, at the HMV next door, took a forty hour data dump of the latest noise and newest rage into his music machine. They then sat on a park bench in fifteen degree weather with ice cream cones, a faintly ridiculous sight to anyone who cared to look. Tristan would become a self-conscious teen soon enough, he thought, and shrugged his own self-consciousness away.

They made it to the ballpark at two-thirty for a game that began at four, and took a long circuit of the stadium, watched batting practice, the pitchers warming up. Tristan was the only honest Toronto supporter in the family. Ffion was indifferent; Elizabeth was British. He didn't love the Blue Jays the way he had once loved his Mets or the Red Sox. He checked the box scores on the computer in the morning and again during the day mostly to ensure that he did not lose the grace of the ritual, so that the pixels on the screen would tell him that the Yankees had lost. The thrill of being in the stadium for a game hadn't changed, however. The green continent of grass was as superb and hopeful as he remembered; the noise of the crowds was a comforting cacaphony; the food tasted better there. As it had been when he was six, so it was when he was forty-six.

The score in the end was 6-5. Though Rodriguez got shelled and was pulled in the second inning, Toronto equalised on relief pitching and won on an error in the bottom of the ninth. Soares had hit a towering shot to right field in the fifth. Cotta made a spectacular diving catch in the sixth. He had cheered with his son.

 

[Lady_Mornington]

May 2010

"This is a very bad idea"

She held his gaze as she took yet another sip of the G&T he'd insisted on buying her.

"Why?"

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows at the question, hardly able to conceal the smile on her lips. He was persistent, that much had to be said about him, and he was not bad looking either.

"Because I'm married and besides I'm almost old enough to be your mother."

That she wasn't but the argument was compelling enough. The young man sitting opposite from her was barely out of his teens. At least Elizabeth thought as much. She had not asked him his age, nor his name although he had been ready enough to tell her everything.

She was attending a conference in Madrid, she was due to give a paper on the following day, and had decided that one drink wouldn't harm her. The young man had approached her as soon as she entered, he didn't look like the generic North Americans although he was indeed Canadian.

He'd been attentive, too attentive perhaps even though that was the prerogative of youth. She had humoured him up to a point, but when he had tried to take her hand she felt that it had progressed too far.

"But it's..."

He had tried to convince her and she had placed her finger to his lips. Smiling as she tried to soften the inevitable blow she was to deliver.

"You're kind and quite handsome. I'm sure the Spanish girls will find you irresistible. Besides keeping an old lady company is very chivalrous." She had kissed his cheek before leaving. Seeing how he gave her a small wave as she did.

In her room she made one phonecall, telling her husband she loved him and asked him to kiss her children good night.

 

[qerasija]

June 2012

He knew that he had certain failings. Even though he didn't like to teach his lectures, in conversation, he slipped frequently into didactic mode. Elizabeth always insisted that she found the personality quirk charming. He thought she was being kind, and annually on New Year's he resolved to reform his ways.

Astronomy, more than anything, inspired his ramblings. For a living, he analysed the distribution of matter in the universe, the things that shined: galaxies, stars, gas, dust; and the things that didn't. Tristan never showed much interest in his job, but Ffion was fascinated by the idea that there were other places in the sky, some of these populated with little girls looking down at her. Who knows? The universe is a vast place.

His own first telescope was a gift from his parents when he was about Ffion's age. The resolving power of Ffion's telescope was enough to make out the rings of Saturn as a bulge in the middle of the planetary disk. Venus showed her phases, Jupiter his striped bands, but no spot. As it happened, Ffion tired of planets quickly. Ffion liked the colours of stars, the scarlets and rubies and crimsons, fulvous yellows, bright ambers, the glowing blue of Sirius. He and Ffion even shared the same favourite star.

Altair, Vega, and Deneb form the three points of the Summer Triangle. The light they send left their suns 17, 25, and 3230 years ago. Seventeen years ago, he had only just met Elizabeth, at a college function he had almost decided to skip. Twenty-five years ago, he had been applying to graduate schools. Three thousand two hundred and thirty years ago, the pyramids were being built in Egypt. Looking out was looking back.

At the heart of the Summer Triangle there is a double star in the constellation Cygnus. When he first showed it to Ffion, her eyes turned misty; she just stared with a slack jaw. It was a beautiful, awestruck silence that blanketed them, followed by a heady excitement that he wished he could bottle up and keep forever. The rotation of the Earth meant that the star fell out of the field of view within minutes, but they tracked it together, for how long, he could never say.

Twinned by the compulsion of gravity, the two were matched, unalterably, forever. The brighter of the pair was a golden yellow. Its companion, only a little fainter, was a crystalline blue. The juxtaposition, the warmth, was one of the wonders of the night.

He told Ffion about the Apex of the Sun's Way. 'In our long orbit around the centre of the Milky Way, our Sun is travelling in the direction of that star, Albireo.' The name was Arabic. It curled off the tongue, foreign and weighty. Beautiful.

Ffion considered this a moment, her mind wrapping on the idea. 'I want to get there,' Ffion said.

Before she could say more, her mother called her inside because it was her responsibility to feed the dog. 'Put the telescope away, Dad,' she said. She gave him a kiss on the cheek and raced inside through the back door.

We are, all of us, perpetually falling into summer.