Chapter 13: Degeneracy

Diane decided to wear only her robe in to the bedroom that night.

“You are really very good for her,” Eric said. He might be talking about his daughter, but he still had his glasses on for watching her undress. She hung up the robe and slipped into bed. She didn’t pose for him, but she made no effort to hide anything, either.

He kissed her and stroked up her torso from her thigh to her breast. He stroked down over her abdomen. He rested his hand on her mons. Everywhere his hand went, the heat followed it. His tongue was arousing her until he broke the kiss.

“You talk one way,” she said, “but you kiss another. Those kisses aren’t for the guest in your house who talks to your daughter.”

“Totally, wrong. I’m not greedy; I’m lustful. I lust after your body, and after your spirit, and after your mind.” He kissed in a spiral around her right breast. Her nipple engorged so much that it hurt in anticipation of his mouth, but it drew closer without touching yet. His hand cupped her vulva, and a finger parted her labia.

“Well,” she said, “I’m glad you’re going after my body. My mind is about to shut down.” He laughed against her breast. The breath from that laughter warmed her nipple the more. Then his mouth finally found the nipple just before his finger found her clitoris. In the waves of heat, her mind did shut down. It was just pleasure and desire until his mouth replaced his hand on her vulva.

Then she felt every lick of his tongue as the heat built. At first, she grabbed his hair to pull him harder against her. Then she dropped her hands to her sides and gripped the sheets as the heat surged to the top of her head and then pooled in her pelvis. She pushed her groin up into his mouth, wanting more of these sensations.

Then the heat turned to roaring flame, and the flame consumed her, but she was still on fire. She writhed helplessly, writhed forever.

Only when she collapsed, did he relent. He rested his cheek on her mons and made soothing sounds as she caught her breath. He rolled his head to kiss the top of her left thigh. When he drew the backs of his fingernails up the inside of that thigh, she decided she wanted more than that tickling.

“You,” she said. Eric got up on all fours and crawled above her. He kissed her right nipple and licked her left one. She pulled him up her body by his armpits, and then reached for a more responsive handle. She spread her labia with her left hand while holding his penis with her right. She guided him where she wanted him to go, and he was obviously happy with the direction. His glans pressed between her labia, spreading them even more. Then he was driving slowly but firmly into her, bringing the heat with him.

“Diane,” he said. He rolled so that his weight was all on her left side and her right breast was in his hand. He rolled back, and her left breast was in his hand. He stroked in and out, rubbing her nipples in time with his strokes. She closed her eyes to give more room for the sense of touch. The heat grew with every stroke, and she felt herself tense.

“Beloved,” he said. He must have felt the tension, too. His pace quickened, and she started pushing up when he pushed down. Then, she felt the flames gather. She tensed for one second to hold them back until he was poised above her.

Then the flames burst free. She convulsed, and she felt him driving into her through her contractions. He pinned her to the mattress, and she felt him pulsing in her depths. He collapsed on her, and she felt her last contraction push his penis out.

Some time later, he moved off her to lie by her side. He pulled her into his arms, and she was conscious of nothing else.

“Relax, beloved,” he said when the radio came on, “that is not for you.” She felt him get up and then his kiss on her temple. An indefinite time later, her bladder woke her. She got up, dressed in her robe, and stumbled into the bathroom.

During her shower, she woke up. She was in Eric’s house. It was Sunday, and she didn’t need to do anything today. She didn’t even need to do anything tomorrow. Eric would make love to her tonight, even though he had the night before. He would use his mouth, and she took a douche when she got out of the shower. She used the bidet afterwards. Dry, she dressed in the same jeans and another top. She went downstairs to see what was happening.

“Mister is taking Val to Sunday school,” Mrs. Grant told her. “He’ll be back soon, and I’ll be leaving soon after. Do you want waffles for breakfast?”

“Please.” The clock showed after ten. She must have had twelve hours of sleep or more. “I don’t know how long I slept.”

“Well, you left Val about eight. What you did afterwards is none of my business.” Since Mrs. Grant made the bed, she probably would have a very good idea fairly soon. “Mister thought you might want to go back to bed.”

“Well, this is one of my lazy days,” she said, “but not that lazy.” For that matter, when Eric thought of her going back to bed, he might not have intended her to go back to sleep. Well, this was going to be one of her lascivious days, but not that lascivious, or, at least, not lascivious that soon. “Do you think he’d mind me looking over his library?”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t. What he has on the computer that he considers private is password-protected. Even then, he would probably give you his password if you asked.”

Diane was frightened by the idea. Somehow, that would be further encroachment by Eric. If he’d asked for her password, she would have regarded that as encroachment. Why was the idea of his giving her his password also encroachment. Mrs. Grant finished cleaning up the kitchen, hung up her apron, and left. Diane noticed that she was wearing church clothes. She heard the garage door open and close. She was alone in the house.

The library was an aspect of Eric that she hadn’t really examined before. You could tell a lot about somebody from their library. The first thing that this library told about Eric was that he had no pretensions, not that she hadn’t seen this before. More than half the books were paperbacks, and only an encyclopedia and a set of math books looked like matched sets. He did have the Kama Sutra; it was on a top shelf along with several marriage manuals. The shelf directly below held books on pregnancy, childbirth, breast feeding, the first year of life, and the second. Presumably, those had been Laura’s books. At least there was nothing about the years after the second. At that point Eric came into the library.

“Oh,” he said, “there you are. I looked upstairs first.”

“Mrs. Grant is too neat a housekeeper. If I’d had breakfast in the apartment, you’d have seen the dishes in the sink. Is this all your books?”

“Most of them. I have some in the office and a few upstairs. All Laura’s cookbooks are in the kitchen. One of yours, for that matter.”

“I want to know about you,” she said. Her frankness surprised her a bit.

“Well, this is the place to learn. One thing you should know about me is that I’m going back to church in about fifteen minutes, dressed in a suit. This is just my chauffeur outfit. Want to go with?”

“No.”

“Well,” Eric said, “If you have any questions, I’ll answer them later.” He kissed her. His hands explored her body while his tongue explored her mouth. If he hadn’t said he was leaving soon, she would have thought he was preparing to take her to bed.

“Is asking about Laura too intrusive?” she asked after the kiss. He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders.

“No. What do you want to know?” Which meant that it was intrusive, but he’d allow it.

“Those books, the top shelf there.” She pointed to the marriage-manual shelf. “Were they yours or hers?”

“Both,” he said. “All three. “Kama Sutra and Perfumed Garden I owned before we met. I had the two oldest marriage manuals, too. She had Our Bodies Our Selves and the two books on sex for teens on the far right. The rest were ours in a way even most of the books we bought after the marriage weren’t. We bought them for us. Does that tell you something about me?”

“You think about sex and marriage together.” This sounded obvious. Didn’t everybody? The sex books were called ‘marriage manuals.’ But Ted had thought of sex apart from marriage, and so did others.

“Yeah. Look, I have to go.” Then he kissed her again, stroking her breasts and then down to her groin. He turned abruptly and walked out the door. She went back to the books. A shelf dealt only with programming. Another two held history books. Then she went back to the shelf on childbirth and children. He thought of sex and marriage together. He thought of sex and children as related. They were, of course. Still, how many men would have shelved those two collections as one on top of the other. They weren’t forced together. There were empty shelves in that column below the top two and empty shelves to each side.

She wanted to understand Eric, and he was willing to cooperate. He was disarmingly frank. That didn’t mean that she was close to understanding him. She suddenly understood one thing. Eric was a private man. The doors in his house, a house which had few visitors and was accessed with a specially-complicated key, had locks of their own. He’d opened his life to her. He’d done so because he wanted her for his wife. He was willing to discuss his first wife with her because he saw her as Laura’s successor.

He hadn’t given up. What was her minimum for reconsidering his proposal? Well, he had to convince her that he would leave her breathing room. She was far from convinced, but that he was easing back from his control of Valerie showed that there was a possibility that she hadn’t imagined before.

And that would be wonderful. The idea of living without him kept looking more and more dismal. If living with him could be bearable, it would be much more fun. She went upstairs to sort out the clothes that she had been wearing that should go in the wash. She’d be back Friday, and she would get a totally clean wardrobe. When that was done, she returned to bed, lying with the bedroom door open to hear Eric’s and Valerie’s return. While she still had leverage with Eric, she would repair a little of his relationship with his daughter. Then, too, if he could be less possessive with Valerie, that might show that he could be less possessive with Diane. The difference lay around the word, ‘could.’ Valerie was stuck with Eric; a possibly less possessive Eric was an advantage. Diane wasn’t stuck with Eric; she needed guarantees. But, really, was she sure that she wasn’t stuck with Eric?

Valerie was easy to hear. Diane closed the bedroom door and appeared at the dressing room door in time to see Valerie rush past. “Let me look at you,” she said. Valerie stopped, turned around slowly, and went on to her room. Diane went down to get another kiss from Eric. They parted before Valerie got very far down the stairs. Some day, the girl would walk quietly for some reason and catch them. At Eric’s request, Valerie showed them both what she had done for homework. Diane took her list of spelling words and quizzed her on them.

Between lunch and supper, Valerie entertained herself. For two of those hours, that meant watching her videos. Diane and Eric escaped to the bedroom. They lay down on the made bed. At first, they kissed. Then she had more questions.

“Mrs. Grant said that you wouldn’t mind my poking around in the library,” she said. “She says that anything you want to keep secret, you keep password-protected on the computer.”

“Most of it. I have locked drawers in my dressing room, and I have a locked drawer in the computer room. The flash drives in the drawer are password-protected, too. The library was intended to be a public room. We entertained at one time, and all the downstairs rooms were more-or-less open.”

“She said that you might give me the password if I asked.”

“Well,” Eric said, “they are passwords, plural. Are you asking?”

“God, no. You wouldn’t want my password, would you?”

“No. Except to advise you whether it looked sufficiently secure. I really think that you need more than one. Maybe I’m projecting. I do need to share passwords with other people, and each different pairing calls for another password. Probably your life is simpler. If you go into a medical partnership, you might want to think up a password for you and your partner rather than giving him the one you use in other situations.”

“Well,” she said, “I would regard your either asking me for my password or your giving me yours as a major violation of boundaries.”

“Now wait a second. Asking you for your password, okay. I can see that as an intrusion into your life. Still, asking leaves you the option of saying no. Even so, you have already said no; I won’t ask again, or -- rather -- I won’t ask a first time. Passwords don’t bother me, really.

“What bothers me,” he continued, “is that you list this one thing I shouldn’t do. What else will lead to war? What if I toss you my car keys, and you leave me over that? For God’s sake, I gave you a house key. It’s not precisely the same thing, but how do I tell which is critical?”

“I don’t know.” She could see that he had a real point. What was non-threatening in his giving her the house key, giving it through a messenger, at that? What would be threatening in his giving her a password? “I really don’t know.”

“Well, that makes two of us. Look, if you tell me that something is your territory and you don’t want me interfering in it, then my trying to go back there would be nagging. You have a perfect right to punish me for nagging. If it’s something new, then simply tell me. Don’t punish me for not being able to read your mind. Okay?” Well, he was totally misunderstanding her actions. She hadn’t punished him.

“I never want to punish you, Eric,” she said. “I sometimes want to escape you. I’ll try to remember that when you try to push into a section of my space for the first time it’s just your being obtuse, not your being intrusive.” He chuckled.

“That’s me. Eric the obtuse.” She kissed him for that. It was different with her leaning over him and his lying flat. He started back up, and she thought he was going to pin her. Then he lay back down to remain passive. She could tell the effort that took. While this was fun, him on top wasn’t the sort of domination that she feared.

Still, she had him at her mercy. When she broke the kiss to breathe, she kissed all over his face, which was scratchy. She’d kissed other scratchy faces, but his always felt newly shaven. She turned his face with her hand to kiss his ear, and then turned it back to kiss his other ear. She was finding that the tip of his nose was a remarkably unromantic place to kiss when she heard a ring tone she had never heard before. Eric answered it.

“Dinner time,” he told her. “Leave through the dressing room, will you?” When Valerie was ahead of them on the stairs, though, she took his hand.

“Honestly,” she said when Valerie was far enough ahead. “I don’t mind you on top. It’s just that that was fun.”

“For me, too. I still have tonight, though, don’t I?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” Then they were on the first floor and catching up to Valerie.

Dinner was roast beef with all the trimmings. If the Barnes household didn’t have Sunday dinner at noon, they still had a rather traditional Sunday dinner. A lot was left. After dinner, Valerie, Eric, and she played Uno.

“Does Valerie have a nightie?” Diane asked Mrs. Grant when she came in.

“Yes,” Mrs. Grant said.

“Do you want to shower with me, Valerie?” she asked.

“Oh, please.”

Eric suspected that he was beaming as the two females he loved went off to bond closer. There was no downside to this at all. Diane wanted to mother Sparky, and it was sort of a package deal; she’d have to take him with his daughter. Meanwhile, he wanted what was best for Sparky, and Diane certainly was.

When they were gone, he discovered the downside. He knew that Diane was taking a shower, and probably shampooing her hair. He liked to imagine that, but Sparky was in there with her. He didn’t want erotic imaginings with Sparky in them.

“My daughter is a young woman,” he said when they came out. “Can you pretend to be a little girl for a ride down the hall?” Valerie thought about this and nodded. When he picked her up, she nestled into the crook of his neck. Diane followed them until Eric laid Valerie in her bed.

“How about,” she asked, “you have Daddy read the story tonight? We’ve done enough together, and I still have things to do.” Valerie nodded. “Kiss then?” Valerie puckered up and spread her arms.

Diane bent down to give -- and receive -- that kiss. While Eric prepared to read the story, she went into the supply room and liberated another towel.

Back in ‘her’ rooms, she put all the clothes into the hamper except the shoes. She put Valerie’s shoes outside her door and her own where they belonged. She draped the wet towel over the hamper and used the hair dryer on her hair. Even so, she was in bed, naked, long before Eric came in.

Eric kissed Sparky good night and walked slowly back to his dressing room despite what he knew awaited him. He dropped his shirt and tee-shirt into the hamper and went into the bathroom. The last thing he did there was shave.

She was so good with Sparky. He wanted that. He wanted all of her, and he wasn’t going to get all of her. Well, he was used to that. He loved Sparky, who was growing up and growing out. He was proud, damned proud, of every step that Sparky made out of the nest. He wasn’t the least bit happy about any of them. He wanted to keep Sparky, but he’d walk her down the aisle and kiss her good bye in sixteen years or so. In less than twelve she’d be going to college, and he wouldn’t try to keep her close to home. He wanted Sparky, and he knew he could have only part of her and a decreasing part.

Well, he could have only part of Diane. A damned weird part, it was, too. If he shared his passwords with her, that was trespassing. On the other hand, he was about to stick part of him into the most private part of her, and she ‘wouldn’t miss it for the world.’ Well, he could have the sex. He could have the child-rearing; she didn’t offer to share that as a sacrifice; she thrust it on him. He could have some cuddling in bed, though only one night in four while she was a resident. That it wasn’t one night in two boded ill for later. Were the child-rearing, the sex, and the cuddling enough for a marriage?

Really, what he could have was more than enough. Her restrictions were mostly on what he could give. She had so much, beauty, her professional skills, her intelligence, that he couldn’t touch. Why did she resist his adding the baubles that he could? And, then, she had her sensuality. That was one thing that he wanted to more than touch, he wanted to share it. And, this night, she was willing to let him. His erection made his robe look ridiculous, but he went in to share her sensuality looking ridiculous or not.

From her smile, she, too, might have thought that he looked ridiculous. The smile was inviting, though, and she looked approving when he took off his robe. When he raised the sheet to get in, he saw her full glory from breasts to mid thigh. He took his glasses off and kissed her.

She tasted like toothpaste and like Diane. Her tongue played with his, and he put his hand on her stomach and moved it up to hold her breast. When he had to breathe, he left her mouth to kiss her forehead and then her nose tip.

“Why do you do that?” Diane asked. “I kissed your nose, and it didn’t do a thing for me.” He’d left the light too bright, and he took time to stroke the dial down to a more romantic level.

“Well, your nose is cuter than mine is.” And she was cute, too. She was an adult woman with more than her share of curves, but she was also cute in the way kittens were. He sensed that she wouldn’t appreciate the comparison.

“But still...” He ended the discussion the only way available. When her lips stopped trying to move, he pushed his tongue between them. Hers met his, and it was electric again. He stroked down from her breast to her pubic hair. When he squeezed her lower lips between thumb and forefinger, her moisture seeped out to greet him. He rubbed one lip against the other.

He had her agreement that he could bring her to as many orgasms as he wished. He knew that she would withdraw that permission at some time. What he wanted was to take her to that time.

He kissed down from her mouth to her cheek to her neck to her shoulder. When he reached her breast, he kissed an elaborate spiral around it and upwards. He sucked long on the nipple when he reached it. Then he leaned over to the peak of her far breast to lick and suck that nipple. Meanwhile, he kept lightly rubbing one of her outer lips against the other.

When she stiffened, he raised his head to watch her. She spread her legs even more and put her hands down to grip the sheets. Except for the side of one of her hands against his left thigh, they were only connected by his hand on her mound. She raised that mound off the bed into his palm and swayed slightly.

The smile was gone from her face. She looked worried, then in pain. As a look of agony crossed her face, she shuddered. He stilled his finger. She shuddered again, and he watched a ripple cross her stomach. When she relaxed, he looked at her face again. It was relaxed into a wide smile. The sex flush came out and spread down to the tops of her breasts.

“I love you,” he said. “You are so beautiful, so responsive, so magnificent.” When the puffiness of her areolas went down, he licked one nipple and then the other. He watched her face as awareness returned.