An Anniversary Waltz story

She stopped him just as the hotel doors swooshed open in front of them.

"You didn't tip him, honey," Paula said.

Steve Oldham rolled his eyes. "We paid for the ride, didn't we?" But she opened her eyes wide as the full moon and he surrendered.

He told her to go ahead and check in, but she was waiting for him just inside the doors; she hadn't even gotten in line. "I couldn't ask for Mr. and Mrs. Oldham's room," she said. "I can't believe I'm Mrs. Oldham yet!"

Well, he couldn't get angry about that, could he? He couldn't really get angry about anything. It was their wedding night. And, if the clerk ever got off the phone and got their key, it would soon be the end of his longest dry spell since he was 16.

Of course, the dry spell was Paula's fault, so -- no. He had agreed, he reminded himself as he finished signing the forms. He was so anxious, he even offered to schlep the bags up the elevator, but Paula insisted they let the bellman do it. That meant more waiting in the room for the luggage trolley to come up the service elevator. And another tip.

At last, they were alone. Steve rushed to Paula as soon as the lock clicked behind the bellman. He swept her up, crushed her in his arms. But she squirmed out, insisting she needed to "freshen up." Steve told her she was as fresh as he could ask. Paula smiled but demurred.

"I want everything to be perfect," she said, taking a small suitcase and a cosmetics bag with her into the bathroom. "After all, we've waited so long for this."

"I know how long --" Steve stopped short as the bathroom door closed. Sitting on the bed -- carefully, to avoid bending his hard-on -- he began to remove his clothes. As he emptied his pockets, he pulled out the Palm handheld that would tell him exactly how long it had been.

"Our first vow," Paula had called it. In the glow he felt after she'd accepted his proposal, that sounded very romantic. And since she hadn't hesitated to say yes, not even when he'd pulled out the ring and explained about saving on the stone so they could go someplace really nice for their honeymoon, he couldn't quibble when she said they should stay chaste from then until their wedding -- without even one last fling.

In the days that followed, it did begin to sound odd to him. Paula had been as eager as him to jump into bed when they started dating, and just the night before his proposal she'd produced a position that didn't seem physically possible, simply "because," she had said, "I saw it in a movie once."

Where that Paula had gone was a mystery. The new Paula looked the same. Short enough to have to stand on tiptoe to kiss him standing up, though somehow the geometry worked out much better lying down. Golden California beach girl skin, which she came by honestly if a bit indolently; Daddy's money made work a sometime thing. Hair the color of the sun, hair she always wore pulled back so everyone could see she was blonde to her roots. Her face and her body? They went with the package.

Steve was no slouch himself, though long days and longer nights in the city had robbed him of a tan. Though his faithful morning workout left him in good shape, his features were so nondescript that his friends would just tell people to watch for the handsome, dark-haired guy with a vacant stare.

The stare was a relatively recent development, which they ascribed to his nervousness since the engagement. That was unfair. He looked forward to being married. It was the period of born-again virginity in between that distracted him.

He had managed to keep their pact a secret from his friends, a bunch of other very junior executives. Or, he had, until the week before.

The bachelor party had been in a smoky strip joint where the dim lighting allowed the owner not only to save on his electricity bills but also to economize on strippers. No reason to hire the best when the customers can only see tits and ass.

But at that point, Steve wasn't too picky. It had been -- he consulted his handheld -- eight months, twenty-nine days, twenty-three hours and fourteen minutes since he'd last had sex. Not that he was not fully committed to Paula's plan or anything. It was just that he liked to be organized.

And neat, which is why it was such an annoyance when the woman in the gold Spandex bikini reached down and loosened his tie. He'd pull it back, she'd yank it loose. His buddies thought it was such a hoot that they brought her along when the group moved to a private room.

In the slightly brighter lights there, the golden girl's blue eyeshadow and ruby lips were somewhat overdone. But her body was everything it had appeared, and certainly more than Mother Nature had provided. As Steve could see plainly when she jiggled her chest in his face.

The guys had paid for a lap dance. That's what they told him. The girl was certainly giving them their money's worth. She'd started in her bikini, straddling him so close he could see the pale stretch marks on her stomach. As she danced, her top had disappeared somehow -- the margaritas, though watery, had played tricks with his memory.

Not with his other faculties, though. The stripper's dance had gone straight to his deprived groin. As she danced lower, he rose higher, until the inevitable contact occurred.

The next thing he could remember was his buddies stuffing the girl's panties with cash before she doffed them. Then a naked woman in his lap, grinding into his erection. Hands unbuttoning his shirt, opening his belt. Big, solid breasts with pointy nipples poking into his bare chest. The sound of a zipper. Someone fumbling at his crotch. Stroking his turgid cock. Hoots from his pals. The feel of a wet pussy slithering across the tip of his dick.

And then his hand pushing her away. Her misinterpreting his gesture, getting to her knees, pressing her lips to his cock. Swallowing him, going down, cheeks hollowed. He surrendered to the feeling, closing his eyes, imagining it was his wedding night at last.

But when he opened them, it wasn't Paula. Steve pushed the stripper away again, tried to get up. With his pants around his ankles, he stumbled drunkenly, crashed backwards, landing on the bad shoulder he told people was a football injury.

Dimly he remembered telling everyone about the vow. The guys laughed. The stripper said she thought it was sweet. She asked if she could at least give him a handjob. When Steve sadly said no, she shrugged and gave all the other guys blowjobs to work off the money.

Over lunch the next workday, he'd been grilled about the pact. No sex? None. But he and Paula still kissed, right? And if one thing led to another? Ah, but it didn't. Paula was scrupulous. He could kiss and touch, but only so far. The point? He was a bit vague on that, but it was evidently very important to her, so he'd given up trying to get around the rules. Not even a little five-finger tango on his own? He dodged the question. Truth was, he'd sworn off even that in the month before the wedding, just in case Paula could somehow tell.

By that time he'd gotten used to the celibate life. Not enjoying it, not even close, but with the grim satisfaction of an ex-smoker watching some stranger puff and thinking, "wimp." Steve had this thing licked. He could make it to the wedding night on cruise control. He didn't need masturbation. He had self-control.

The bachelor party was the first sign that he'd been wrong. Painfully wrong. He wanted that woman. He wanted his cock up her cunt and pounding away. Rejecting her took every ounce of willpower he had. He told the guys about the pact mostly so they'd make him live up to it. He had to live up to it. For Paula.

The music was so loud that conversations were reduced to bare essentials. "Gee, Paula, this is a great bachelorette party" became "Party!" with a thumbs-up and a big smile.

It was Bobbi Jo's idea to have the party at Ladies Only, the male strip club. It had been Teri's idea to demand a table down front. But Paula thought up all on her own the bit about writing her cell-phone number on the twenty she tucked into the dancer's pouch.

Teri couldn't believe Paula would be so bold. Bobbi Jo didn't think the guy would call. But Paula said she wanted to cut loose one last time.

"What," Teri asked, "about The Pact?"

"That's why," Paula said. And she explained, in one-syllable words and hilariously blunt gestures, that Steve had stopped pestering her about breaking the rules, so she knew he was getting something on the side. Plus he was going to a strip club for his bachelor party, and you knew what those places are like. "So," she concluded, "fair is fair."

She wasn't sure whether she actually expected the stripper to call her. But he was cute, and it had been so long -- like nine months or something. She was beginning to worry that Steve was altogether too good at abstinence. The Pact was just supposed to test his seriousness; she never expected him to give in so easily, for so long. So very, very long.

Paula's cell buzzed just after the last guy left the stage and the music faded. Teri and Bobbi Jo egged her on as she agreed to a private show. Lucy, the quiet one, surprised them all by volunteering her apartment.

It started out just like at the club, with the women, in their prim business suits with the not-so-prim slits in the skirts, lounging on couch and chairs while Rod -- just saying it made Paula laugh -- danced in front of them.

But then Rod, stripped to his pouch, muscles bulging, danced over to Paula.

"Give her a special treat," Teri said. "This is her last week of freedom."

The guy's cock sprang free and wobbled right in her face, all thick and hard and purple. And it had been such a very, very long time.

Paula couldn't take it all in her mouth, but Rod didn't seem to mind. Especially not when Lucy -- Lucy! Of all people! -- got on her knees and joined in. While Paula sucked greedily on the fat tip, Lucy licked his shaft and balls. Paula ran her hands up and down his rippling chest. Yeah, that was what she'd been missing. The Pact had been a really dumb idea.

Lucy and Paula took turns sucking Rod off, and Paula was swinging his cock over to her mouth when he started to lose it. The first glob of gooey cum splashed onto her cheek before she could get him inside her mouth and pump him dry.

She never had liked the taste. She'd only swallowed because she knew it turned guys on. Especially Steve. But something about taking Rod -- maybe just the months without it -- revved her like crazy.

Still, if Rod hadn't been able to encore, she would have survived. But Lucy fluffed him back to life and, well, he was just to good to pass up.

Paula stripped to her Hermes scarf and spread out on the cream leather couch. She'd never do this if it was her furniture, but luckily Lucy seemed too involved to notice. By the time the mousy girl did, it was too late.

Rod lived up to his name. His hard cock sliding smoothly into Paula's cunt felt like the very first time, except without the pain and the fumbling and the 30-second disappointment. Nothing like the first time, then, but for that wonderful sense of "at last!"

Nothing about Rod was short. His lovely long cock plunged into her hungry pussy again and again. His tempo was just right to bring Paula slowly, slowly to a warm orgasm that reawakened feelings too long missing -- well, aside from those brought by her black plastic vibrator, and those really didn't count.

Steve grabbed the box of clam shells for the appetizers in one hand and the bag of cocktail franks in the other and walked up to Paula's house. Her mom answered the door and ushered him in, explaining as she did that Paula and Mr. Noonan were out and not expected back for hours.

Mrs. Noonan could have passed for Paula's elder sister, and Steve noticed she was looking particularly fetching that day in a peach-colored man's shirt tied in a floppy bow above her taut midriff and tight white shorts cut to reveal as much as possible of her long, tanned legs.

"Nervous about the big day?" Mrs. Noonan had him put the supplies with the other things for the rehearsal dinner. "Just 24 more hours!"

Steve made room between the doughnuts and cream-filled eclairs, pushing the raw oysters and stubby candles out of the way. "Yeah. I mean, yes, one more day. But I'm not nervous, Mrs. Noonan."

"Oh, Steve, just call me Faye," she said. "You don't need the Noonan."

"OK, Mrs. -- I mean, Faye. Do you need anything else?"

"No, sweetie, I think I see everything I need. But what about you?"

Steve shrugged. "I'm cool."

"Cool? I'd guess you must be positively hot by now. It's my daughter who's cool. Ice cold, in fact."

"Mrs. Noonan --"

"Faye."

"Faye. Faye, I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, OK, I do, but I don't think we should be talking about this. I'm feeling kind of uncomfortable."

The light in the room had dimmed, somehow, and Paula's mom had switched on the stereo to some soft classical music. "Don't be silly, Steve," she purred, sitting on a bar stool and hoisting one impossibly long leg onto another. "Paula told me all about it, and I think it was horrid of her to impose like that. Especially on such a strong, virile, handsome man like you."

"Mrs. Noonan -- sorry, Faye -- are you trying to seduce me?"

"Do you want me to seduce you, Steve? Is that why you came over today? To get some relief from what my cruel, cruel daughter put you through?"

"I'm not very comfortable with this conversation, Mrs. Noonan."

"Ah, ah! Faye."

"No, Mrs. Noonan. I think you should remember, I'm your daughter's fiance. I think this discussion is wrong."

"Do you, Steve? Perhaps you're right. No more talking."

Faye advanced on Steve, backing him into a corner next to the half-size replica of Michelangelo's David. He felt quite warm, and put his hands up to loosen his tie. Mrs. Noonan dove for his crotch and quickly pantsed him. Her lips, a fuller version of Paula's, closed around his shaft. Her hands, with their glossy red nail polish, rubbed his dick vigorously while she licked the tip.

Before he even knew what had happened, they were in the bedroom, naked on the white duvet under the white canopy in a swamp of white pillows. Mrs. Noonan's body was as beautiful as her daughter's and more so, with an impressive rack that showed no signs of age and very few of the surgeon's touch.

She pushed him onto his back and mounted him in one smooth motion, his cock sinking into her. They rutted with abandon, at warp speed until he could take it no more and had to roll over on top of her to regain control. There he slowed the pace, sweeping out of her cunt before stroking down, down, grinding in until they were fully engaged, pulling up and out to do it again.

Ten, twenty, thirty minutes flew by. Steve could barely support himself on his arms. Sweat poured off him. Still he fucked his mother-in-law-to-be through one orgasm, a second, a third, her pussy opening more to him each time until at last his loins caught fire and he approached his own climax, closer, closer...

So close that a bell went off in his head. A bell that transformed into a buzz that finally woke him up, grabbing blindly for the alarm clock. As he extricated himself from a mound of pillows, he remembered his vow with a groan. He tapped the handheld on his bedside table: Nine months, seven days, twelve hours and twenty-eight minutes.

But, it was almost over. And, unless dreams counted, he'd made it.

Paula awoke on the morning of her wedding in what she would have described, if she knew the word, as a swivet.

On top of the usual bridal jitters, which had her fumbling with her Pill dispenser and almost tossing a week's worth of security down the toilet, she felt some unfamiliar pangs that she suspected might be guilt. Some of Steve's recent comments had raised the concern that he had been even more serious about The Pact than she had thought. Might, in fact, have honored it to the letter.

She wasn't completely sure she felt guilty about her fling with the male stripper, though. That cold, heavy lump in her stomach might instead be worry about marrying a guy who could go all monk on her. Steve was a good-looking man, but, then, so was Richard Gere.

When the flutters and pangs continued into the morning, as her bridesmaids assembled, Bobbi Jo reminded Paula of her standing offer of a massage to calm her down. Bobbi Jo, a tall, lanky woman whose burst of red hair made her resemble a fiery dandelion ready to blow away, had taken two courses in massage therapy at the junior college to kill time during the winter months when the beaches thinned out.

At Bobbi Jo's direction, Paula took a hot shower, wrapped a towel around herself and stretched out face down on the frilly queen bed in her room. She looked around at the ballerina lamps, with their smooth pink curves; the pile of stuffed animals along the headboard; the packing boxes filled with her autumn shoes. She shivered at the thought of moving into Steve's brown, brown bedroom.

Bobbi Jo knocked then. "Are you ready?" Paula told her to come in.

As her friend's fingers, wrists and elbows dug into Paula's tight muscles, she did begin to relax, to daydream about married life: replacing those dark curtains with something nice, perhaps a chiffon. A light blue wallpaper to cover up that nasty brown paint.

Bobbi Jo folded the towel down to rub Paula's lower back. Lord, that felt good. She felt her tension oozing away like melted butter.

"Should I do the front now?" Bobbi Jo's question floated through a haze of pleasure. Paula rolled over, letting the towel slip away. She closed her eyes and let bliss wash over her as Bobbi Jo kneaded her arms and legs.

There was a warm, wet feeling on her stomach. "I'm going to use a little oil," Bobbi Jo said, flattening her hands and sweeping them across Paula's skin.

"That's nice," Paula said dreamily. "Mmm. That feels soooo good."

Bobbi Jo's hands spread the oil over Paula's stomach, along her sides. Up to her firm breasts, swirling around the erect nipples.

Paula opened her eyes. Bobbi Jo's face was inches above hers. She stared into her friend's eyes. Bobbi Jo's head lowered. They kissed.

Paula was surprised at how good it felt to have another pair of soft lips on her own. Bobbi Jo tasted like a Pep-o-Mint Lifesaver. Tentatively, Paula let her tongue move forward, into Bobbi Jo's mouth. Her friend's tongue met hers. Bobbi Jo's hands closed on Paula's breasts in a gentle massage.

Minutes later they were both naked. Bobbi Jo's long legs stretched out above Paula's head, which was buried within the taller girl's snatch. Bobbi Jo returned the favor at the other end.

Paula had never even considered the possibility before, but being wrapped in Bobbi Jo's femininity suddenly seemed like the best thing on Earth. She even enjoyed the taste of her friend's pussy as she slithered her tongue deep inside. And she reveled in the joy of Bobbi Jo's probing tongue in her own cunt.

They rolled around on the bed, their embrace growing tighter as they both neared climax. In the end they both had fingers rapidly drilling the other's cunt. Paula was overcome by waves of orange-red warmth and a flood of passion that burst through her whole body. At the same time she felt Bobbi Jo rocking through her own orgasm, all staccato twinges and heavy moans.