Clara

My mind wandered as I looked into the eyes of the attractive, exotic young man above me. It was a strange time to be thinking about other things. His tanned skin and exotic eyes alone should have been enough to keep my interest, but it somehow wasn't the case. As his sweat dripped down onto me and my body finally began to respond, I was imagining another face.

I stifled a laugh and Stephen thought that it had something to do with what we were doing. Alone in my own little world, I zoned out on the other face in my mind. The laugh had come from the irony of the situation. I must be the only woman in the world who, while being fucked by a twenty four year old medical student from India, imagines the face of her own forty five year old husband.

"Oh, shit," Stephen moaned. His voice was high pitched and with the stress of him attempting to stave off and intensify his pleasure, it sounded almost feminine.

My own body was beginning to signal its own impending climax. I felt a tingle in my vaginal area. At my age, and with the amount of experience I'd gathered over the years, I knew that it wouldn't be a very big one.

Yet, any orgasm at all was better than none. Stephen was getting close to the point of no return. His face lost a lot of its attractiveness with his features scrunched together with his attempts not to cum before I did.

Again, through all of his grunting and slamming his pelvis into mine, I was distracted. I kept thinking back to those frenzied first days of my courtship with my husband, when we would have sex, whenever and wherever we could.

We did it in cars, bathrooms, darkened theaters and wherever we could have even a few moments of at least semi-privacy.

I smiled as my mind went back to those times before my daughter was born. She's old enough that I'm sure she's doing this with someone herself, I thought. Then I laughed again thinking about that. I may have carried her in my womb, but she was Blake's daughter through and through.

There, I'd done it. I'd gone and ruined everything. Just my mental mentioning of my husband's name and the guilt over what I was doing, threatened to overwhelm me. That guilt that I'd thought I had long since banished, manifested itself as a lump in my throat and a sudden darkening of my features that Stephen misread as even more lust.

Even months into our relationship, surprisingly, Stephen had no idea of what motivated me or how I actually felt about anything. But realistically, there was, no matter how I tried to spin it, no emotional connection between us.

I guess I wanted to imagine myself as a timeless beauty that had enthralled him to the point where he'd do anything for me. I wanted to believe that our love would span the decades between our ages and our differences wouldn't matter. But it was hard to do when I didn't love him and I was sure he didn't love me.

In reality, he probably thought that I was just some old woman who let him fuck her. I was also rich enough that I could help to subsidize a starving medical student without it causing me any financial strain.

The guilt came back as I realized that even the money I gave him wasn't something I earned. My husband provided a very good standard of living for his family. So, in actuality, he was paying for this young man to fuck me. I felt bad about that.

It was a terrible thing to do to a man who loved me so much. But I didn't feel bad enough to stop doing it. Stephen was probably my third or fourth of these summer flings. They didn't really mean anything to me. They were really just a way for me to pass the time.

Stephen was winding down. It wasn't that he lacked in aerobic fitness. After all, he'd been humping away at me for over thirty minutes. I guess it probably could have been decent sex if I'd actually let myself get into it.

The problem was, that as good as it could have been; it was only sex. For all of Stephen's youthful exuberance, our connection was only physical. The more important emotional link just wasn't there. Surprisingly, I could only feel that type of connection with the man who owned me body and soul.

Blake had earned the right to do anything he wanted with any part of my body. He had loved me and lived with me before the man plunging his dick into my pussy had even been born. His sperm had knocked me up before Stephen could walk or talk.

Blake had cared for me when I was sick and been with me through thick and thin for over twenty years. I love Blake, he's everything to me. Unfortunately, Blake is so concerned with his career that he doesn't understand that we've been drifting apart.

In fact, it's been more than a year since he made love to me. That was what I was thinking about as Stephen jumped and pumped away atop me. Blake, though very gentle with me, got deeper inside of both my body and my mind. It was as if my entire body was aroused instead of just my pussy.

Everything I did with Blake was purely involuntary. I could always feel myself just opening up to accept his seed. My pussy pulsed and fluttered when he came inside me. My breasts expanded and pulsed and my nipples got so much longer and fatter that they hurt.

Thinking about Blake even now sped up my heart beat and started my hips to moving. Naturally, Stephen thought he'd done it. "That's it baby. Throw that pussy at me," he growled. "I'm gonna make you cum so hard."

I looked at my watch and realized that I needed to hurry up or I'd be late for lunch.

I wrapped my legs around Stephen's waist and started rubbing his back. "Oh fuck baby," he said. "That feels so fucking good."

Stephen clutched at my large breasts and started sucking on them as he pumped his semen into me. He started moaning uncontrollably as he shot.

His warm sperm coating my insides reminded me again of Blake and depressed me even more. All of my desire faded. To avoid a nasty scene and hours of recrimination that I had no time for, I moaned loudly and let my legs flail for a moment. I looked into Stephen's beautiful eyes and sighed as I noticed that they were mere pools of vacant darkness.

I felt another pang of guilt as I realized that even though he had spent himself in my body, there was truly no love written there. Even as he prepared to speak, I wondered how much longer we could sustain this pretense that our relationship meant anything.

To him, again, I was just some older woman he fucked for occasional monetary gifts. To be truthful, it wasn't always money. I'd sometimes paid for books, tuition, food and even a stethoscope. I think he liked it better when I bought him something he needed instead of just giving him cash. I think giving him money made him feel like he was a whore.

On my part, he was just a living vibrator. I used him to provide the pleasure I wasn't getting from Blake. I guess using him was a form of cowardice. Instead of confronting Blake and getting him to talk about the problems in our marriage, it was easier to get at least some semblance of what I needed from Stephen.

Stephen rolled off of me and lay down beside me. He reached out a hand onto my tummy. It was a lover's gesture. I thought it was nice until I remembered where it had come from. I'd placed his hand there after he'd had me the first few times. I smiled as I thought about it and mentally compare him to training a puppy. He wasn't doing it because he wanted to. It was a conditioned response. He wanted something from me and he thought that touching my expanding waist would make me happy.

I'd gotten the gesture from Blake. He always loved touching me all over when we were done. He continued doing it until he was ready to have me again. Every part of my body meant something to him. He would spoon against me and rub or stroke every part of me until I cried out for him and begged him to take me again.

Stephen, on the other hand, was simply reaching out from across the bed and touching my tummy. It was almost like since he'd gotten some pussy, he was sick of me and wanted to be away from me until he wanted some more. On the other hand, he needed to be nice to me to make sure he got something and also to make sure he would be back for a return visit. We were both pathetic.

Now was the awkward stage that, with my husband, would have been the best part. Right now Blake and I would be basking in the afterglow and thinking about how much we loved each other. Instead of that, I smiled as I watched Stephen squirm. An old joke says that eternity is the time between when a man cums and the woman leaves. Stephen was suffering for an eternity at that moment. And to be truthful, a part of me enjoyed watching him suffer.

The part of me wanting to see him suffer was my guilt. Through all of my little flings or affairs, I'd always felt guilty and felt like a whore when the sex was over. But Stephen, who sat there waiting for me to offer him something, yet not wanting to have to ask, was far more the whore than I'd ever be.

I broke my marriage vows because of loneliness and boredom. Stephen put out for a woman old enough to be his mother for mere money.

I decided to rattle his cage a bit. "Are you coming to lunch in the restaurant downstairs with my friends and me, Stephen?" I asked cheerfully. His dark skin paled at least a couple of shades.

"That would be wonderful," he smiled. His accent made even that common phrase seem romantic and special. "Unfortunately, I must be at the hospital soon."

His expression spoke of his deep regret. If he regretted spending any time in public with me so badly, I wondered why he had never taken me up on any offer I'd ever made him. I decided to end the farce.

"I thought about you before I got here, honey," I said, smiling. "I left you an envelope on the table by my purse,"

His flurry of activity surprised even me. He looked at his watch and pretended he hadn't been aware of the time. He dressed without even taking a shower. Wherever he was going, he'd be taking the smell of my pussy and our sex with him. He grabbed his belongings without ever looking at the envelope. We both knew what it contained. He kissed me on the cheek and snatched the rest of his things including the envelope so quickly that there was a draft created in the room as he closed the door behind him.

As if it was an afterthought, he shouted through the locked door, "Call me later, my love."

Get the fuck out of here, I thought. At that moment, I was more disgusted with him than I was with myself. But I knew I'd call him again. I still wanted to use his dick even if I had no use for the rest of him.

I showered and dressed, taking time to make sure my makeup was perfect as usual. My next audience was far more particular about the way I looked than Stephen had ever been. Mention the devil and he appears, I thought as Stephen came back into the room. "I'm sorry, my love," he said. "I forgot my car keys. You look wonderful. I haven't displeased you have I?"

"Why would you ask me something so silly, Stephen?" I asked.

"It's just that you have made yourself so beautiful and..." he hesitated. "Perhaps before, when we were in bed you seemed to be ... somewhere else."

"Oh my," said a shock filled voice. I looked out through the door that Stephen had left open and into the eyes of one of the ladies I was supposed to be having lunch with in a few moments.

Her cry wasn't actually surprise. It was meant to let me know that she'd seen and heard the exchange between Stephen and me. She nodded at me and quickly hurried away before I could even begin to formulate some sort of lie or cover story.

Twenty minutes later, after Stephen had headed for his car and I'd ridden the elevator down to the restaurant level, I joined a group of my oldest and deadliest friends at the same table we always met at to gossip and plan out a party or gathering for some charity or other. After all, that is what bored, rich women were supposed to do wasn't it?

As I scanned the table, I could see that Lisa Caldwell, the woman who had inadvertently seen me in the room a few moments earlier, had a disproportionately satisfied smirk on her face.

I was sure the situation with Lisa would turn out in one of two ways. Either she'd bring up what she'd seen earlier, during our lunch as a way to embarrass me publicly, or she'd wait until we were alone. If she waited until we were alone, it meant that she wanted something from me and it might be something that I might not be willing to give. My stomach was doing flips through the whole lunch. The fact that this situation had been caused by Stephen's stupidity wasn't lost on me. Who walks into a hotel room and just leaves the door open?

Throughout the luncheon, we talked about a lot of things, none of which I remember very well. For the life of me, I couldn't even remember which charity we decided to give the proceeds of our huge fall gala that we'd been in the process of planning.

For the most part, I thought about Stephen. I didn't think about him in that school girl, "can't get him off my mind" way. I mostly wondered why there was a Stephen in the first place. I wondered why there'd been a Mario before him and a James before him. There had also been another man that I'd had sex with a few times but I didn't really consider him a full-fledged summer fling.

True, he had been instrumental in developing my summer flings, but as the first, I'd made a lot of mistakes with him. He'd been part of the reason that I'd established hard and fast rules for my summer flings. The rules were established to assure that both parties understood that ours was a temporary arrangement and that the most important thing in my life was my husband and my marriage. Still, I found myself wondering that morning why I was having the flings in the first place.

It wasn't like I was in love with any of them. And I had no illusions over whether or not they loved me.

When I first started, it was about attention more than anything else. But this last one with Stephen had also become about sex. I wondered about that too. Blake had always had a very healthy sex drive. Last summer even, it had been difficult a couple of times for me to make it into the house and clean myself out before he threw me on the bed after I'd been with poor Mario.

But sometime between now and then, our sex-life had simply stopped. It had also stopped very abruptly and as far as I could tell there'd been no medical reason for it. If Blake wasn't Blake, I'd have suspected that he was screwing some secretary or co-worker. Somehow, just the thought of Blake between some other woman's legs hurt me and infuriated me. The thought of him making slow and passionate love to her, while all I got was some young pretty man, devoid of experience and technique, pounding on me like a fucking blow-up doll, made me want to kill whoever she was.

"Clara Livingston, " said Lisa, smiling at me. "You haven't touched your food at all. And now you're twisting your poor napkin unmercifully like you're trying to strangle it. Are you okay? Is everything alright at home?" She had a shark's smile on her face.

I knew from the way she was looking at me that Lisa and I would bump heads and very soon. The bitch thought she had some kind of advantage over me because of what she'd seen. But I was really not the kind of woman that Lisa wanted to mess with. She was divorced and existed on the generous alimony provided by her husband, a world famous orthopedic surgeon. He was on his third wife now and made enough money to simply pay the old ones off when he wanted a new model. That man went through wives like the average guy goes through cars. As soon as the one he was driving had a few too many miles on her, he'd trade her in for a newer model with more options and a faster motor. He was in his late fifties and his current wife was twenty three. At the rate he was going, his next wife might be jail bait and would give him a heart attack. He'd probably need to hire a sitter to watch her when he went to work each day.

As I got up to leave, Lisa put her gloved hand on top of mind. Here it comes, I thought. The shark will reveal her teeth. I wondered what she wanted. Maybe she wanted me to get one of her brats into a more exclusive school or get her a membership in a better country club. Whatever she wanted, I was going to have to do to avoid the fallout from what she'd seen.

Surprisingly, she didn't ask to follow me out or ask me to call her. She just looked into my eyes and told me to take it easy.

Athena

Morning rehearsal was over. I wondered why they even bothered to call it morning rehearsal. We didn't get started until eleven a.m. and we rehearsed until after one. "Don't forget Thena, tonight is the party at the club downtown. Wear something hot. There will be plenty of guys there," said Brenda Jamison.

Brenda is my best friend slash mother hen. She's been trying to hook me up with someone for longer than I can remember. She'd probably even bother me about it during rehearsal if she didn't sit in the woodwinds section with me all the way across the orchestra in strings.

"Bren, I'm just not sure I'm really up to that," I said.

"Good Lord woman, I'm not expecting you to meet the love of your life in a dance club. I just want you to come out and have some God damned fun," she was practically yelling and everyone around us turned to listen to her.

"Sorry," she said lowering her voice. "Thena, you're twenty five years old. You're a third of the way through your life but you've never lived. Your whole life is wrapped up in music. And it's not even your own music; it's dead people's music. I don't want my best friend to go through her entire fucking life and then sometime near the end to realize that she had never really lived."

"I'm fine," I said. "What is going to a dance club going to do for me? With my luck, I'll either sit there all alone the whole night while all of the guys go after women in short, tiny skirts, or get picked up by some guy who only wants to fuck me and then borrow cab fare from me, never to be seen again."

"And even if that did happen," she hissed. "You'd have some fun and stop being so bitchy all the God damned time. And that first part is up to you. Thena, you have the body to rock one of those tiny assed skirts yourself. I'd die to have your tits and your legs. You've got it girl, let somebody see it. And as for the second part; maybe that's why ... excuse me Thena, I love you ... but you've been acting like such a biotch. YOU ... NEED ... TO ... GET ... LAID, in the worst way."

"Is that my cue?" asked David K. Johnston. David was a trumpeter and a very good one. He was also the biggest pussy hound in the entire symphony orchestra.

"Yeah David K," Brenda hissed. "If she hooked up with you, that's exactly what would happen. She'd get laid in the worst way. The worst way fucking possible."

"Well, keep me in mind," he said, as he walked away smiling.

Most of the musicians and the sound people had heard our exchange and knew that Brenda and David K didn't like each other very much. Last year, they'd had a very tempestuous fling during the fall and winter months. Brenda thought she was in love. She went all out. She told her parents, back in Great Neck about David K and had visions of a wedding. Right after Christmas, he'd given her the speech.

David K, no one ever called him anything other than David K, was bored. With the orchestra doing a mini tour of several South American cities, David K wanted to be free and unencumbered. When she'd told him about her hopes for their future, he'd crushed her hopes even further in an embarrassing scene when he explained to her that he had never even thought about marrying a "bigger" girl.

"Fuck him," spat Brenda. "But if you are interested in finding yourself a man, you've got to get out there. And for God's sake, Thena show a little cleavage. Let all of that fucking hair down. You look like a librarian and not the sexy kind."

"What makes you even think that I want a man?" I asked.

"We all do," she said sadly. "Don't you want to have something to wrap those long legs around at night?"

"I have my cello for that," I smiled.

"Is that thing going to keep you warm?" she asked.

"Shit, it's late spring," I quipped. "It's going to be warmer every night until summer anyway. Then we'll all be whining about it being too hot."

"When was the last time you were in love?" she asked.

"When I got my..." I began, but stopped abruptly with a withering look from her as she secured her flute in its case.

"If you say one more word about that fucking cello..." she warned. "Seriously when was it?"

"I guess grade school," I confessed. Her mouth dropped open and her eyes grew to the size of saucers.

"It's been that long?" she asked, incredulously. "You're a God damned nun. No wonder you're not trying to get laid like the rest of us. We need to do something to ease you back into life. I think we have to find you a man. No no, that wouldn't be good," she said. Her eyes narrowed as she began to plan.

"We need to get you a practice guy first," she said looking at me. "We don't want you to fuck up the love of your life by not knowing what to do. You need to have a..."

"A what?" I asked.

She smiled at me. "Honey you need to have a summer fling. Just spend the next few months with a guy learning the ins and outs of the whole relationship dance. Learn all of the good things and the bad things and what you like and don't like in a guy. Then, when summer ends and life goes back to normal, just let him down easy and go on with your life. In the fall, you'll be up to speed with the rest of the world and you can start looking for the real thing."

"But..." I began.

"But, my fat ass," she snapped. "We're doing this. What kind of guys do you like?" Even as she asked me the question, we were walking towards the elevator. As I thought about it, the doors to the elevator opened and we stepped forward. As clumsy as ever, I tripped over the ledge between the elevator and the floor. Truthfully, I was not totally to blame as the floor of the elevator was about an inch higher than the floor.

The only thought running through my mind as the floor came up was my cello. Even in its padded protective case a bad fall could damage the expensive instrument. Strangely, I didn't worry about injuring myself. But I didn't need to worry about either because out of nowhere, a briefcase dropped to the floor and two arms shot out. One grabbed me and the other cradled my cello.

Even as the strength in those arms halted my downwards progress, our eyes made contact and locked. It was probably less than a second, but in my mind, that second stretched out for an hour. Like two flies trapped in amber, we held our position looking into each other's eyes and in that second, I knew my life had changed forever.

"I can't believe you," spat Brenda. "You must be the luckiest bitch on the planet."

"You don't know the half of it," I said, still staring into my rescuer's steel blue eyes.

"I tripped and fell like that a couple of months ago," she continued. "I landed right on my fat fanny and my flute went flying. It bounced off the wall so hard it cracked my mouthpiece. The only person around to see me was one of those boring stodgy accountants that Anton always has trailing around after us. And that guy had his head so far up his own ass that he couldn't have saved me if his life depended on it. All, those guys do is work with numbers all day. What good is that?"

"Thanks," I said, as the man returned me to my feet.

"No problem," he said. He readjusted his glasses and headed towards Anton's office.

"Who are you?" I asked, ignoring Brenda's rant.

"I'm a senior account specialist from the bank that's financing the orchestra this season. I specialize in international taxes and finance. I guess you could say that I'm Anton's new boring stodgy accountant." He smiled and then walked away.

Brenda continued to drone on and on in the background. I watched the man until he turned the corner. "That's him," I said quietly.

"Who's him? Err ... That's who?" asked Brenda in puzzlement.

"I've decided to go through with your plan," I smiled.

"You did?" she smiled back. "What plan?"

"The one about me having a summer fling," I reminded her. "And you just met the man I intend to have my summer fling with."

"Uhm Thena, Honey," she said. "Shouldn't you pick someone a little bit closer to your age? At least pick someone from your same decade. The idea here is to get you out and enjoying life and doing things. Not someone who'll probably be as boring as you already are."

"If I'm doing this, and I do mean IF," I said. "He's the one. I can feel it in my bones."

"Thena, don't get too serious," she said slowly. "Remember he might not be interested in you. He might be married, even. Let's pick out a few guys just in case."

I just smiled at her and we got onto the elevator and headed for the parking lot. What I didn't tell Brenda was that she had very good and very valid reasons why this might not work, but I didn't care about any of them. If he wasn't interested in me, I'd make him interested. If he was married ... as much as I recognized and respected the sanctity of marriage, the way I felt when our eyes met was too strong to be denied. Heaven help me, I'd go after him even if he was married.

Blake

I'd met Anton Stravinsky on several occasions. I suppose that he's a great conductor and musician, but as a business director, he left a lot to be desired. His records were incomplete and sloppy. And he also failed to document some of his expenditures. That meant that by the end of each month his records for the amount of cash he actually had on hand and the money he'd put out didn't match.

The bank stood to make a tidy profit on this season and the tours for the orchestra, but that profit would be severely curtailed if we had no idea how much money we were actually working with. My job was to come in and wade through whatever jumble of records Anton had and bring them all up to date. Then, I would assign someone to maintain Anton's records for the remainder of the tour. I would also be taking a look, at Anton's request, at some problems he was having with his personal accounts and taxes. Anton made just slightly more than I did, so I knew first hand that if not managed well, he could have a seven figure salary and still end up broke.

I needed to work quickly because the orchestra was due to leave for Paris in a few days and I really didn't want to go with them. I'd been to Paris before. Several times, in fact, over the years and would rather stay home. Sure, it was everything that people said about it. It was a beautiful city, an old city with all of the romance and old world charm that it's reputed to have. The problem is, that those things are only great when you're young and in love. I'm no longer young and although I've been married for more than twenty years, I'm not sure that I'm still in love.

If you ask me about my daughter, I could tell you without hesitation that I love her more every time I see her. But when the question moves to my wife, I'm truly not sure any more what the answer is there.

I knocked on Anton's door before trying the knob. It didn't turn, so I sighed in frustration. I looked at my watch and walked down the hall to the next office. There was a young woman there who looked up as I stood in her doorway. "I'm here to see Anton," I said smiling in an attempt to seem friendly and less ... stodgy.

"Good luck," she said. "He usually takes a lunch right after rehearsal. If you're lucky he'll be back in an hour or so. Go across the street and have a cup of coffee. I'll have him call you if he comes back sooner. Who are you?"

"Blake Livingston from the Hunt Bank," I said. I left her one of my cards.

The coffee shop across the street was full of young artistic and musical types. Watching them was an eye opener. I think I acted far older than they behaved now, when I was younger than them. My life had always been one of doing the right thing. I'd always tried to do the things that would give me a long and successful career. I just hadn't had a lot of time for frivolity. At first, it was because I was so busy making a name for myself. Then, it became even more important when I got married and then when Selena came along. I wanted her to have everything that every little girl wanted. Nothing was too good or too expensive for my baby.