Three

I PARTED HER LIPS with my tongue and was flooded with the spicy flavor. She moaned as I dipped again, drawing the flavors with me as I swirled my tongue around her clit. Each touch, each breath was answered by her gasps and the ripples in her toned muscles.

I don’t make love to Lissa; I worship her. She is my goddess. Anything I can do to bring her pleasure, to make her life better, to show my love, I will do. I worship her on the coarse canvas. I worship her on the Egyptian cotton. I worship her beneath the shower and even on the hardwood. My reward and satisfaction are her smile and the sudden gasp and flood of juices on my tongue as she comes.

“Oh, my love!” she said. “You make me feel so wonderful. I want you beside me. Come to me, darling.”

She held out her arms to me and I found deep passionate kisses.

“Oh, I love you, Tony.” She started shivering and I pulled the blanket up around us, but I realized it was not shivers. Lissa was crying.

“Lissa, darling,” I cooed as I rocked her in my arms. “My goddess. Come back to me.”

“Oh, Tony. I felt so ... I don’t even have a word! I was overflowing with love. You take me places I never dreamed of. How is it possible? How do we fill each other completely and still have as much for our lovers?”

“You, my love, are Aphrodite,” I breathed in her ear. “Wherever you go, your beauty inspires love; your love inspires beauty.”

“Oh, but I’m not, darling. I’m no goddess. I’m a middle-aged mom with three unbelievable lovers and a couple of others who want in my panties. What kind of woman am I?” she complained.

“You? Middle aged? May the heavens hasten old-age.”

“I see it in the mirror,” she continued. “I was trained to look for these things. I see circles under my eyes, crow’s feet, smile lines. They come slowly. One day you’ll open your eyes and I’ll be old and you’ll wonder where the beauty went. Look at Melody and Kate. They could be misshapen and still be young and beautiful. Perfect skin. High firm tits. Mine are starting to sag. And Kate has never worn a bra!”

“Lissa,” I said and silenced her with a kiss, which she hungrily drank from my lips. “You never need to compare yourself with any of our lovers. We’re seven years apart, darling. I’ll be bald and potbellied before anyone can tell you’ve aged. They’ll be accusing me of having a bunch of trophy wives who are eternally young while I get old.”

“I want so much to believe you.”

“Lissa, look at me,” I said, turning her face toward me. “Some men could look at nothing but your tits unless you showed them your cunt.” I used harsh words that I seldom used. I was serious. “Even if you did, that’s all they’d see. In fifty years, they’d look at you and think how sad that your tits were sagging. They’re idiots. I’m not. Your beauty comes from inside you. Maybe that’s a cliché, but your beauty is in how you treat your sons and how they love you. It’s in how you care for me and for Melody and for Kate. It’s in your strength on the racquetball court competing, or teaching, or facing down an opponent. Your beauty is in the way you love us and manage so many things that we don’t have either the time or skill to do.”

I had her attention. Her eyes were fixed on mine and were wide open. A tiny tear escaped and ran down her cheek to her ear. I chuckled as I dried it with my finger.

“You are beautiful, Lissa. There’s no doubt about that. Point to any part of your body at all and I’ll worship it in any way you like. And I promise that will be true next year, in ten years, in fifty years. Because it’s you that’s beautiful, Lissa; not just your body. And I love you.”

The kiss we shared was tender and long. I kissed away all the tears from her face. I kissed down her chin. I kissed her nose and her forehead. I stroked her hair. I felt her hands on my arms and my back. I held her and rocked her and whispered, “I love you,” to her over and over again. And finally, we fell asleep in each other’s arms.

I woke up flat on my back and Lissa was just sliding onto my hard cock. She was watching for the first sign that I’d gone from dreaming to realizing it was real. Lissa seemed to want to do all the work, but I couldn’t help little twitches from my hips rising to meet her. She varied her strokes for depth, sometimes pausing to shift side to side or to rotate her hips. She kept up a long, agonizingly slow rhythm.

She arched her back, thrusting her breasts forward and by lifting my head slightly I was able to capture her nipple between my lips. It was long and hard and, judging from the noises she was making, very sensitive. I stroked her perfect breast with my palm. I caressed her hip and waist. It was a long build. Lissa was powerfully aroused, but seemed intent on my fulfillment, holding my eyes with hers even as her breathing became shallower and shorter.

“Lissa, I’m...” I tried to get the words out but she just nodded her head and caught the left edge of her lower lip between her teeth.

The first blast from my cock seemed to almost shock her as her body jolted upright. She sank fully down on me as I continued to shoot into her and her abs contracted with every spurt. The whispered, “Ohh,” that issued from her was drawn out as long as I continued my orgasm. It took so much out of me that I felt my body sinking into the bed, exhausted. Lissa slowly collapsed on top of me. We lay there drifting and hugging until I had to struggle up to go to class.

“Shower, darling,” Lissa said. “I’ll make coffee.”

It was the second morning in a row that a beautiful naked woman kissed me at my car door and then scampered back inside as the garage door began to rise. Only Lissa stayed in the open door of the house until I backed out of the garage and the door came down again.

I didn’t go home Wednesday night. I kissed Lissa at the gym after our practice and headed for the studio. I knew what I needed to paint. In fact, the image came at me so fast that I had to stay at the canvas. I sketched in two portraits in a smaller size than the big canvases I’d been working on lately. These were only sixteen by twenty inches. I worked hard to make sure they were identical. The flow started the same—in fact there was only one difference. From the fingers to the glass to the lamp, across the eyes to the book casting its shadow next to the navel that drew the eye along the long line to the stack of unopened mail beneath her foot. But with one change in the second drawing, the whole painting took on a different meaning and impact. From the fingers to the glass to the lamp, down to the eyes. At that point the eye was arrested. Everything else was secondary. Instead of continuing to follow down to the book, the eyes looked out at the artist.