Saving the World

This was in the late 1990s, a personal tale from the days of the politically correct uptight 1990s.

One night I was making love to my then-fiancée––I’ll call her X.

We were fucking near the long bedroom mirror below our dresser. Seeking a visual flourish to enhance our foreplay, I asked X whether she might put on that men’s hat—her fedora–– like she used to back when we first met.  My question didn’t sit well. She pushed off me and then she grilled me about the request, as if I’d just asked her to get on all fours or give me a rim job. I mean, a hat––a goddamned hat fetish is hardly even a kink.

My X challenged me with a cold gaze. “I guess I’m not good enough to make love to unadorned, naked?”

I told her that went without saying.

“Then why’d you ask me to put on that ratty old hat?” X asked.

I told her to just forget it. “Forget the fucking hat.”

***

Enter Lilah.

Lilah was a work friend of X’s at one of those save-the-world non-profit foundations and I was first introduced to Lilah the night after the hat-skirmish with X.  It was the foundation’s Christmas party.

I am sure that Lilah and I spoke a good deal at that first meeting. But all I remember is shaking her hand and studying her long straight dark hair, her dark eyes, her little black dress, her black choker with its pearly cameo, her black teardrop earrings. Her lovely ass almost visible against the pleats of her black skirt. I remember thinking that I’d bet big money that Lilah probably would wear a hat when she made love. I also remember, later in that party, Lilah and I reached out to grab the last brownie on the dessert tray. We laughed awkwardly, one of those impromptu fits of laughter know you’ll remember sharing even if you don’t know exactly why. I was a gentleman. I let her have the last brownie. Oddly, some part of me wanted to hang around her and hover, watch her eat it.

But I left her alone to enjoy it, wandering back toward X, X who was too busy proselytizing about one of the foundation’s pet causes to even think about dessert.

X, I realized, was losing her sweet tooth.

***

X and I saw Lilah socially now and then. Each time between the next get together with her seemed, for me, longer than the next.

Then one evening during dinner, X told me Lilah had quit the foundation. The news punched me in the gut.  I realized my crush had taken me over, full-tilt.

“Why’d she quit?” I asked, as if just knowing why Lilah had quit I’d be able to intervene and get her back working at my fiancée’s office.

“I have no idea why she quit. She’s materialistic, she’s shallow,” X said, her tone like a high school principal. “She’d rather leave the office at five to go shopping at Saks than stay a little longer to go the extra mile for our charities.”

X’s self-righteousness irked me; I wanted to defend Lilah as if she were my lover.

I knew that Lilah wasn’t shallow. Materialistic? Who the hell isn’t materialistic?

“So she likes expensive handbags,” I told X. “That doesn’t make a person shallow.”  I didn’t convince X, who took up our plates, shaking her head with the kind of patronizing disapproval that I associate with nuns.

***

Often, when Lilah phoned our place, X wasn’t home. “She’s out saving the world,” I once said.

“Well, I got out of that racket,” Lilah said, gleefully.

These fortuitous calls happened a lot. I kept the conversations casual, and mildly flirtatious. Besides, I sensed Lilah didn’t go there with unavailable men. I sensed a woman who enjoyed her single life, her small studio, her unattached, personal freedom. Still, from the phone calls, she and I graduated to email.  Back then you graduated to email from the phone: I was new to email then and very few people I knew had it at home, so it felt like Lilah and I were in our own little world exchanging messages. And our phone conversations had a teenage innocence. They were almost always about pleasure. Simple, simply pleasure. Music. Movies. Even candy. We both liked Butterfingers candy bars. Once, on the phone, we were discussing what ingredients made that chocolate bar so sweet to the tongue and as we were talking, a call from X came through. I apologized to Lilah that I had to take the call.

“No worries,” she said, “we’ll solve the mystery of the Butterfinger another time.”

***

One winter night, X and I were supposed to meet Lilah in the city to go see a new singer-songwriter at a Manhattan club. X bowed out at the last minute. She had a save-the-world type speech to write for her Ethnic Studies course.

“You go,” X. told me, “Go. And tell Lilah I am sorry.”

So, I went. As agreed, Lilah met me under the clock in the center of Grand Central Station. She stood out from the crowd––and then some. For one thing, she was in a long black Italian coat, like she’d stepped out of the film of a smoke-filled 1940s movie set.  She wasn’t rushing hither and thither like the swarm of middle-class commuters. Instead she seemed part of the Beaux-Arts elegance of Grand Central Station itself, her right hand with red-painted fingernails resting delicately on the marble ledge of the kiosk. Her tiny, square-shaped handbag was slung gracefully off her shoulder, and she had one boot-shod leg coolly crossed over the other. I almost had to slap myself in my face to make me realize that woman is waiting for me. For all my eager admiration, I was overcome by shyness as we greeted each other. But Lilah was so unguarded that it forced me to “man up” and shed the shy sixteen year old bullshit. I directed us to the taxi stand outside where snow was starting to fall. The midtown winds were blowing the flakes in topsy-turvy plumes as our cab headed south.

Lilah smelled of jasmine perfume, a fragrance so strong that the whole cab was filled with it. Both of our hands were pressed into the cab seat, almost touching, while our other hands held on to the straps near the back windows. We made inane comments about the passing shops and streets. Her velvet skirt rode up her left leg and unveiled her luminous skin beneath her black stockings. I caught her looking at my loafers and the piping of my black jacket. For most of the ride, we talked about X––a safe topic––and we agreed it took more discipline than either of us had to stay in on a Saturday night to write a paper. As we discussed the noble charities which the foundation sponsored, my eyes wandered to the diamonds on Lilah’s handbag and for a while it seemed those jewels were the only light in our dark taxi.

***

Downtown at the club, the burly bouncers said the show had been cancelled because the singer couldn’t fly in due to the snowstorm.

“Snow storm?” we asked.

“Try blizzard,” the bouncer told us.

Lilah and I laughed at our failure to watch the weather reports. I suggested we retreat to a bar before I “head back to the ‘burbs,” and then I remembered that Lilah didn’t drink.

“Feel a sweet tooth?” she asked me. She knew a cafe nearby where we could get dessert and we found a small candlelit table in a place called Dessert Isle. She helped me parse the menu options, her finger gliding across my menu. I ordered a profiterole and a dessert wine and she had a crème brulee and mint tea.

I admitted it had been  “a lot of years” since I’d gone out just for dessert.  We joked about how we’d fought over the brownie at that Christmas party. She told me about an ex-boyfriend from college––who didn’t eat dessert.

“Sugar-free diet,” she said, in a tone that was at once disbelieving and dismissive. She delicately spooned her crème brulee and held the spoon in her mouth. Then she took it out and dug in for another spoonful. “Hence the ex in ex boyfriend,” she said and her smile turned me on.

Under the small table, our feet grazed each other’s and on the tabletop our fingers brushed more than once.

Instead of announcing that I ought to head back to the train before the storm got worse, I ordered myself a Sambuca.

The longer we talked, the more it was obvious we were trying to avoid the very thing that was a happening: something like a date arranged by some force other than ourselves.  We shifted our chairs so that we could face the pane glass window and watch the snow piling up. I put my hand around the back of her chair careful not to touch her shoulder. The waiter said they were expecting a foot within the next three hours and we stared at the falling snow.

***

Lilah insisted on coming back to Grand Central just to be sure my train was running. Ice had formed on the sidewalks so she had to hold on to my arm. Our hips bumped as we battled the wind. The lapels of our coats flapped upwards and wet snow pelted our reddened faces. My heart sank when we saw that the trains were listed as “On Time.” The anxious crowds wandering around others who were squatted on the ground indicated something different. Then, as if the gods had intervened, the station’s PA announced a twenty-minute delay “on all trains into and out of Grand Central.”

To kill time, Lilah and I wandered around the newsstands where she pointed out her favorite magazine––Vogue’s fat spring issue, some 500 pages thick.

“I have skipped on groceries to be able to buy their fashion issue,” she said, as she purchased the copy.

I held up a Greenpeace magazine with a photo of an oil-slicked turtle. “As a former world-saving foundation person, shouldn’t you reading this instead of Vogue?”

“Don’t go there,” she warned, and as she waved her Vogue at me I wanted to snatch it out of her hands and kiss her.

In Grand Central, the schedule-boards had changed. Trains were Cancelled. A collective groan rose from the waiting crowds. I was ecstatic; Lilah raised her eyebrows and shrugged and then she smiled. Before the crowd could converge on the pay phones, I called X to tell her what was up. She barely heard me. She had just read some article for her paper and she was going on about an atrocity in some distant country. As she babbled on, I saw from the corner of my eye, Lilah holding a piece of paper. In her neat red handwriting it the note said,  “You can use my couch!”  The operator was asking for another quarter; I made sure to ask X if she was okay with my “borrowing Lilah’s couch.”

“What’d she say?” Lilah asked.

“She said fine and went back to ranting about war and orphans.”

Lilah and I shrugged, our eyes glittering like liberated kids whose parents were so wrapped up with their own activities that they couldn’t be bothered enforcing curfew.

***

At a deli near Lilah’s place we stocked up on Butterfingers candy bars and expensive English tea.

Her apartment was spacious for a studio, with high ceilings, lofty windows, tall, fancy Japanese screens that set her bed off from the living room, and bookcases and shelves filled with CDs, art books, books on fashion.

“My old Vogues,” she said, pointing to rows of magazines on the colorful shelf near the window.

As we watched boring TV new reports about the blizzard, I admired her high-heeled boots that were still glazed with melting snow.  We talked shopping–about buying patiently to get quality versus settling for shit. “If you are patient shopper you can nab designer clothes on a shoestring budget,” she said. “And still keep a politically correct carbon footprint.” I told her that I admired her nuanced approach to values.

She asked me would I mind if she thumbed through her copy of Vogue?

“As long as you don’t think me less a man if I peruse it with you,” I said.

She patted the couch and I sat comfortably next to her as she held the magazine on her black-stocking lap. She flipped patiently through the magazine, occasionally pausing at certain images: a leggy blonde leaping over a puddle in a Burberrys. Or a supermodel in a micromini slouched in the backseat of a Porsche donning a Tiffany’s bracelet. She was pleasantly surprised that I could tell Chanel from Versace, couture from kitsch. The magazine’s special feature was a lingerie spread filled with models in teddies, in hooded terrycloth robes, in cat suits, in stilettos and hot pants.  I told her what X. had said to me recently, that lingerie was invented by men to “corset and bind,” women.

“Well I must be pretty oppressed,” she said, “I’ve been obsessively collecting this stuff since I was eighteen.” As Lilah pointed out an Estée Lauder ad, she explained the Egyptian origins of make-up and glamour, and I recalled the stupid argument X and I had that night, about the fedora.  Poles apart, I thought. It felt like a cosmic joke being played on me. Marrying the wrong chick, sucker.

Lilah tossed Vogue aside with a thump. She got up and went behind the screen and rummaged in a closet. As if on a dare, she emerged with hangers filled with lacy, frilly items and spread them on the couch with a collector’s contagious self-satisfaction. Pale blues. Ivory whites. Midnight blacks. Blood reds. I felt sure I was in an insanely erotic dream and would wake up with X at my side, but the sharp scent of perfume and the loud crackles of heat her apartment’s pipes were all too real.

Together, like factory line workers, we inspected the stitching and fabric and the labels of each item, turning them inside out.  I put my hand into a green stocking and made a talking puppet of my hand. “Save the frogs of the rain forest,” I said and we both laughed.

As she kneeled on the couch, her knee brushed my crotch and I boldly put my hand on her leg to encourage her to keep the pressure there between my legs. As she did, she coyly asked me whether X wears lingerie now and then, “I mean, despite how ‘oppressive’ it is.”

I explained that she had quite frequently when we first met but that she didn’t any longer, not now that she thought it was “patriarchal and controlling.”  Plus, I added, “when you’re saving the world you’re not allowed to have fun,” I said.

“Who says?” Lilah asked, stretching the fabric of a baby blue lace bra.

“Not I,” I said. “Definitely not I.”

***

Sometime between slicing up the Butterfingers chocolate bars and carrying tea into her living room, Lilah and I kissed. It was a sloppy but a long kiss sweetened by our hesitancy and guilt. When we let go and stood close enough that our chests were touching, I could feel her rapid breathing. My eyes wandered the run of her pale neck. I smelled that jasmine again. I clenched my jaw and closed my eyes to calm down. Feeling like I had to say something, I wondered whether it was a wise idea for me to stay over. “I hear you,” Lilah said. “It sort of feels like we’re lighting a fuse here.”

We went to the window and inspected the snowfall, she pointed out the cars half buried in snow. “We have no choice,” she said and then we both laughed. On the couch, we snacked on Butterfingers and she read from the wrapper and the litany of weird ingredients pronounced in her cute falsetto was enough to make me hard. “Confectioner’s Corn Flakes…Nonfat Milk….Salt… Lactic Acid Esters, Soy Lecithin… Soybean Oil.” Her voice seemed to be singing in a pitch far above the banal list of ingredient.

I took the wrapper from her and asked her why she was so into lingerie from such an early age. “Did you want to be a designer?”

She explained how she used to go out a lot with friends but that chasing boys seemed less fun sometimes than staying home listening to music and copying from fashion magazines and drawing plans for cocktail dresses, wedding dresses. She used to dress her little sister in her mother’s costume jewelry. Between summers at college, she got sales jobs at boutiques, but her talent for managing egos and for fund raising led her into charity, non-profit.  Listening to her story, I offered how I’d always disagreed with so-called sex experts who say men are more visual than women when it comes to desire because, to me, it was obvious women were visual as well––“Just look at who reads Vogue,” I said.

She agreed with me. “Entirely.”

By now it was one a.m. and the sugar high and the tea were still coursing through us. She wondered aloud whether our visual tastes were the same as our taste in dessert.

We decided to play a game––a dangerous one, but a game nevertheless.

She’d model four  lingerie ensembles from her vast collection. In turn, I would be a judge and I’d rate each of them, “like an Olympic judge, on a scale from one to ten.”

Then after I judged each outfit, she’d let me know how she ranked each one too and by comparing scores, we’d see if we have the same taste.

“And as added bonus,” she said, “I’ll take the one that you chose as the best one and I’ll sell it at the neighborhood boutique on consignment. Then we send the profits to a charity.”  She winked when she said “charity,” and I hopped onto the couch and steeled myself to be a discriminating––and lucky––judge.

***

Her first outfit was a white bustier with a sheer white satin garter belt centered by a pink rose.  It was called “Maiden at the Maypole.”

She strolled, smiling, “A walk on the blushing bridal side,” she said, adjusting the white stockings at the garter clasp. At first I couldn’t get over how the white lingerie contrasted with her dark eyes and dark hair and how her legs looked especially long in the white hosiery. She had drawn her hair back into a prim bun and she posed near the window holding the curtain over her white legs. She lowered her head and pretended to blush and then she turned around to reveal that the back of the panties sported a pink bow. I scribbled a “7.5” into my notepad. As she got to me on the couch, she picked up my hand and I held her and said, “With this hand, I thee–”

“You thee what?” she asked, grinning. “you’re spoken for, you rascal!”

I stood up and held her hips and pressed my lips onto her shoulder and even kissed the satin bra strap. “This outfit gives the lie to ‘an innocent bride’,” I said.

She tapped my nose. “And I’ll probably never wear this in its intended context,” she said, giggling. “No offense. But marriage and lingerie seem incompatible.”

***

Her second ensemble was a jet-black kimono with white peonies painted on its sleeves. “Peony Kimono.” The liquid effect of the kimono’s fabric made it seem that Lilah was robed in a black water that shined in spots as if from the reflecting sun. As she walked, she held something behind her back.  When she got to the center of the room, she opened the robe with one hand to reveal the silken yellow lining. Then she let the kimono fall to her feet. “I gave up two summers of vacation pay to buy this kimono,” she said.

She wore those expensive hold-up European stockings––the ones with the five-inch lace tops, tops that extend all the way to the top of the leg––and a matching demi-style black bra that barely covered her breasts. Her neckline was jeweled by a coral red necklace. She’d brushed her hair so that her long hair draped down to the left of her face, feathering like a painter’s inky brush against her pale breast. Her stockings were semi-opaque. The mules she wore were high-heeled but she moved effortlessly in them.

From behind her back she pulled an English-style bowler hat. She put the hat on her head and put a leg up on the couch. It was as if she had known about the fedora argument X and I had. Then I thought, no. This is who she is. It’s not about X.

I stared at Lilah’s leg, as if I were studying the geometry of the stocking’s weave. Really I was gazing through the fabric at her luminous skin. My eyes traveled upwards to her black panties. Red threads were woven into its black lace. Lilah saw me staring at the panties and, as if she knew I was seeing the red threads, she ran her finger on them to guide my eyes. I ran my finger along the border between her skin and the black fabric, then lightly over the soft mound of her sex, tickling the surface as she kept her leg on the couch and closed her eyes. She bit down on her lip as if trying to stifle whatever urge that my admiring eyes had stirred. When she lowered her leg from the couch and walked off, disappearing behind the Japanese screens to put on the next outfit, my cock was so hard that I could barely shift in my seat as I scribbled the number “10” in handwriting so sloppy you’d think I was drunk.

***

Lilah’s third ensemble was a navy blue body stocking.

“This is ‘Russian Cat Suit’” she said. She wore a dark blue thong and dark blue star-shaped pasties over her nipples. She strode into the living room barefoot, bouncing gingerly with each step, her hair in a bouncy gymnast’s pony tail. “Let me see if I can,” she said before raised her arms over head in a V and dashing forward, curling into a single somersault. She raised her hands like an Olympian and I applauded.

“Zee Amerikan Lilah has vowed dis crowd,” I said, mimicking a Russian accent. I gave the outfit a 7, mainly for its for spunkiness.

“More than spunky,” she said, sidling up to me, showing me the leaf-and-clover filigree stitched into the garment’s navy blue rayon. I put the pad down and told her she looked so much like a gymnast I wanted to see if I could lift her up.

“Hey, this is no bridal outfit,” she said as I cradled her, holding her bride-like in my arms. She kicked and swayed her feet and we kissed softly.

“We’re being very bad,” Lilah said.

“Yes,” I said, letting her down. “Judges can’t kiss the models.”

“Right, you must avoid bias,” she said as she tiptoed back behind the screen.

***

The final ensemble she called, “Parisian Peek-a-Boo,” crotch-less designer pantyhose with a frilly lace blouse that was long enough that it almost hid her sexy black panties. Lilah flipped a white beret onto her head and sashayed through the living room, poised on backless high heels, bending forward teasingly as if to pick something off the floor, the bright white skin of her ass positively glowing against the frilly hem of the blouse.

When she stood up straight she ran her finger along the scallop-shaped trim of the pantyhose, up her waist and across her tummy and down the inside of her fair-skinned thighs. I wrote a “9.5,” on the pad.

She came over and sat on the couch. I tossed the pad on to the floor, and we stretched out on opposite ends. She let her foot wander toward my crotch and rubbed up and down on the fly of my jeans while I caressed her calf, her knee, mildly tapping her thigh as she writhed.

She sat up so I could reach higher up, between her legs and as my hand slipped in there she closed her legs on it, like a vise, moving her right foot up and down so fast on my crotch that I told her if she kept that up we’d have an “accident,” on our hands.

“Better not,” she said, springing up from the couch, “I wouldn’t be able to give you a clean change of clothes. All my undies––as you see––are strictly women’s.”

***

Lilah called out to me from behind the screen and I went around. A mound of lingerie sat on the bed edge but she had changed back into the kimono outfit. Her hair was wild and spilled over her shoulders and the bowler sat on her lap. “This is my favorite of the four,” she said. “Which was your fav?”

I showed her all the scores on my pad, and she clapped when she say the “10” next to Peony Kimono. I added the phrase “with Bowler Hat” to the name.

“I had a strong, strong premonition our taste would coincide,” she said, as she stretched her legs and wiggled her toes.  Her voice was spiked with a warm confessional spark. “I used to dress up when I young and my parents would go away,” she said. “This blizzard reminds me of  one weekend when they had gone away and were stuck upstate and I, well, how can I say this without blushing, I discovered, um, the pleasures of the flesh. I must have been fifteen or so. I dressed up in tights and underwear and costume jewelry and strutted in front of mirrors just like I was posing for you now.”  She told me  that was the first time she’d seen herself as if she were someone else—“almost like I wasn’t me. But I was me, and I loved how I looked. And that’s the night I–– “ Her hands ran over her own legs and her voice trailed off. My hand was still on top of hers. She reached down and closed her eyes, dragging her finger along the red embroidery in the black panties, her finger so strictly following the red filigree it was as if she knew every microscopic warp and weave of her panties without having to see.

***

I asked her why someone as in touch with her likes and dislikes hadn’t found the right man. “You answered your own question, maybe,” she said, tossing the hat onto the bed, shaking out her hair. “You know, it’s a bit sad but they say single girls have the best lingerie collections.”

“It’s not sad. I’m enjoying this––“ I said, and she repeated “this” like we both knew what we were sharing even if we couldn’t put a name on it.

We got to talking about relationships and  also about being happy alone. The pleasures of self-pleasure. She asked me whether men pleasure themselves a lot when they are alone. I answered that men didn’t discuss that subject with other men, any more than women did, but that I guessed it was quite common. “Especially among the married set,” I added, somewhat cynically, and we laughed.

“Girls are no different from guys on that score,” she said. Then she reached into the kimono and drew out a black dildo and held it out for me to see, as it were proof of something. She bit her lip and lowered her head, not blushing so much as avoiding eye contact. That dream-like sensation from earlier washed over me again. Her gleaming dildo matched the lacquer-black of her kimono and black of the sleek mules on the floor, shoes she was kicking nervously as we sat there in the deafening hush, suspended in a haze of kinky karma. She recalled the snow outside and wondered how much had fallen. I took her dildo from her as if to inspect it and I asked her. “Would it be cheating––if––“ I stopped myself. She told me finish my thought.

“If two friends were to––share. Share private pleasures in each other’s company?”

She raised her eyebrows and grinned and said she had no idea what the rules are for that.

“But it’s certainly not the same as sleeping together, is it?” she asked

We agreed it absolutely wasn’t like sleeping together, and I was so turned on by our budding conspiracy that I wanted to throw her back on the bed and peel off her clothes and admire her, like I were the guardian of this private nook of pleasure, here, surrounded by these Japanese screens, warm inside on a snowy night.

***

Lilah helped me out of shirt and my jeans. We sat on her bed facing each other as we had earlier in the evening on the couch. I could see the outline of her dark pubic hair under those black panties. Her skin beneath her stockings reminded me of the snow, the snow that we could not see except for the glowing whiteness that emanated from under the window blinds.

Without letting her fingers touch my skin, she helped me slip off my underwear and then she took off hers and we dropped them on top of each other on the floor by the bed.

“Touch yourself,” she said, the way kids often dare other kids in a playground. “And I’ll touch myself.”

It felt pre-adolescent, all this, awkward and yet exhilarating, like some strange experiment in closeness that really didn’t feel like I was cheating on my fiancée.

Once I’d stroked my cock till it was hard, Lilah squeezed a lubricant from a black tube, letting the fragrant oil pour over my knuckles and my fingers and onto my cock. The cool relief and fresh slickness on my cock almost made me erupt.

Then she lubed her black dildo with the oil, her dark eyes watching me jerk off all the while, “Play,” she said, and I licked my lips and repeated, “Play.”

She rubbed the shiny black toy against her labia, up her mons. Then she raised her hips off the mattress and shifted the dildo below, toward her snug little asshole, pressing her feet into the mattress to lift herself, her gorgeous legs arched at my sides. The tip of the dildo vanished into her butt and her moans almost sounded like laughter as she played with the black dildo like that.

I paused for a moment in my own pleasure. With my grease-less left hand I tossed the bowler hat towards her. She sat back down on the bed and put it on, letting it tilt forward till I could barely see her dark eyes. Then she leaned her head back and slid the dildo in and out of herself with such dexterity that I was awed by the balletic strokes of her hands. “A woman who knows her own pleasure,” I thought, “is the sexiest woman alive.”

Lilah pleasured herself in and out so rapidly that I was amazed the bowler hat stayed on her head.  Watching her, feeling safe within the confines of this bedroom, I stroked my cock faster and faster, studying the slide of the red coral necklace on her breasts, admiring her close-eyed assurance as she fucked herself with that shiny black dildo, black against her pink sex. Her cheeks flushed and glowed. Her dark hair gave off an even darker sheen as it swayed behind her back. The hat seemed glued on her head. She moved the dildo between her legs as if it were a tiny clarinet––and as if her pink sex were its sacred music.

I stroked myself with more and more speed and from time to time she stared across the bed at my cock in my fist. Occasionally her legs brushed mine; and my eyes returned her stare as my balls filled and my foreskin burned with delight and Lilah shoved the dildo in and out of her pussy, rearing her head so far backwards that her bowler hat slipped backwards off her, tumbling off the edge of the bed and rolling along the floor, and as I stroked my cock, I followed the hat and recalling that fight with X, about wearing the fedora, I groaned and erupted, coming warm jets onto the bed sheets.

Lilah barely heard my guttural groans. She was busy, half-raised off the bed and lost in the ecstatic silence that rose from what she was doing for herself between her legs with that black dildo.

In my exhausted afterglow, I held her calves to give her better balance and I watched her with friendly, intimate encouragement. She smiled. She stretched her whole body out tightly and I could see her legs tense as her rasping moans punctured the hush of the room with increasing frequency, the slick dildo easing in and out, ever faster.

I took the tube of oil and squeezed a long trail of oil that slicked onto her hand and on to the dildo as she moved it in and out. She rubbed the excess oil onto her nipples and pinched them. Her eyes were closed and wondered who or what she was thinking of. The dildo’s slickness freed it to slip and slide along her wet clit more deftly, as she moved it in and out and in until she shuddered, thrusting her hips violently and then folding her legs around her shaking hand, her happy shouts booming off the ceiling as her legs flailed against mine before she let go, holding the dildo up like a magician triumphantly flourishing her wand.

***

The next day, when I got home to X, it was no lie that I had slept on Lilah’s couch.

X seemed indifferent; she was finishing her speech and ranting and raving about the sorry state of the world. I spent the afternoon swapping thankful emails with Lilah. Things went south pretty fast after that and X and I broke off our engagement a few months after that snowy night at Lilah’s.

Lilah, meanwhile, eventually moved out to the Far East for foundation work. She and I stayed in touch on email but between the vast distance and with my X out of the picture our former erotic tension—that forbidden quality of our connection––no longer spiced up our exchanges, and after a while my contact with Lilah faded.

***

Then one day, almost two years to the day of that snowy evening, I got a message from Lilah suggesting I go to a certain boutique in the Village and check out their window display.

I bundled up and took the train down. In the shop’s window, I saw that Hong Kong outfit, complete with the red coral necklace. Even her bowler hat and those lacquer-black mules were set in front of the outfit.

I went inside and asked how much the kimono outfit in the display window was, “I think I’d like to buy it for my girlfriend,” I lied, shoring up my lie by pretending to inspect the size. I asked the saleswoman to add the bowler hat and mules as well. “Are you sure these shoes will fit your girlfriend?”

I said I was sure they would fit. No question.

The ensemble was over two grand. I didn’t even wince as I handed over my Visa.

I took the outfit home and stored it safely in a garment bag in a cedar closet. I kept the bowler hat on a shelf above my work desk. I sent Lilah an email that her ensemble was there and that, coincidentally, it had sold to someone while I was in the shop.

Lilah answered two weeks later to say she’d received a handsome check from that Village boutique and that she had sent the proceeds from the boutique’s check to a worthwhile charity.

“Nice,” I answered, “That ensemble saved the world.”  Lilah said she appreciated my remark. But I also know that to this day, she doesn’t know the half of it.

© 2009 Thom Gautier

Thom Gautier lives and works in New York City. His stories have appeared in Oysters & Chocolate, Sliptongue and Clean Sheets. His previous story in Lucrezia Magazine, “The Bet,” appears in Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 2009, and he has a story in the forthcoming New York City volume from Mammoth’s Sex and the City book series. He is completing a collection of erotic short stories. http://thomgautier.blogspot.com