I met Sandra one Saturday in early spring. Phyllis and I had gone to the park for a run and were sitting in a coffee shop getting ready to go home for our weekly private afternoon when she waved suddenly. I looked over my shoulder at a very tall muscular black man and somewhat shorter black woman coming our way—though that still made her my height, give or take an inch. Phyllis said, “Dave, hi!” I shook hands with the man and she introduced us, “Dave, this is my boyfriend Cal. Dave is in my American lit class. He’s the TA I’ll be teaching with this summer.” “Ah, so you’re the fellow,” I said as we shook hands. “Indeed, I’m quite the fellow,” he joked, and we all laughed. “This is my girlfriend Sandra.” “Are you also in English?” I asked. She smiled as Dave and Phyllis laughed and said, “Oh, hell no, thank goodness.” Dave said proudly, “She’s in physics.” I looked at her more closely and said, “It is a pleasure to meet you then. Pleasant surprise.” In puzzlement and with a trace of suspicion, she asked, “Why is that?” “Because I’m sick as hell of listening to talk about a bunch of dead authors.” She smiled openly and happily and I continued, “And physicists, at least the ones I’ve known, are able to talk about subjects besides physics.” Phyllis invited them to sit down and we chatted for an hour. While Sandra was an attractive woman, I didn’t take much notice of her at the time; later that day I would have been able to recognize her on the street but could only say she had medium dark skin, shoulder-length hair that was lightly curled, and an appealing body for men more interested in comfortable padding than I was. Her company was pleasant enough, however, and we soon found ourselves talking with each other as Phyllis and Dave continued a standing argument over Hawthorne’s novels. We sounded each other out on our tastes in books and music between occasional attempts Dave and Phyllis made to include us in their conversation—always soon defeated by the two launching off on another literary tangent—and at the time we made only slight impressions on each other. Eventually Dave and Sandra said they had to leave for a movie, and Phyllis said we had plans of our own. After we got home, Phyllis and I quickly undressed and retired to the bedroom for our regular Saturday afternoon recreation. We had only short opportunities during the week for sex, so we saved up and splurged on Saturday afternoons doing whatever we felt like doing to each other. By this point it had settled into an unvarying routine. We kissed, if not passionately at least eagerly, until I was hard and she was wet. Her body was close to my ideal of the time: She was an inch or so taller than me and well-toned from running as much as I did, and she had smallish firm breasts with light pink aureoles, wide hips, and long taut legs. Her hair was a bit darker and oranger than strawberry blonde and fell down around a thin face and wiry neck to just below her shoulder blades. She spread her thighs for me to let me see the ever-fascinating sight of her body, which always struck me as being like a dessert: The off-white of creamy vanilla ice cream with light brown freckles here and there (I teased her once that her vanilla contained peanut s prinkle s) , and lower down a thick tuft of orange hair almost the color of orange sherbet above a pink gash the color of strawberry sherbet. I stroked myself as she rubbed herself, and when we got close she said, “My turn, right?” “Yes. How do you want it?” “The usual.” I crouched above her breasts and let her stroke me as she stared hungrily at my cock. I reached behind me to insert two fingers inside her, and as she thrust up against gaziantep escort me she stroked me vigorously. She moaned and tightened around my fingers, and she came at the same time my orgasm seized me. She moaned, “Yes, yes,” as my cum shot onto her face and into her hair, and she smiled up at me with dribbles of cum running down the sides of her face. We alternated hors d’oeuvres on Saturday, as we called our first bout of sex, and her usual choice was to make me cum all over her face as I rubbed her off; next Saturday I would probably drain myself on or between her tits as she rubbed off. While neither of us quite got the thrill the other did from doing pretty much the same thing we liked three to six inches away from where we liked it, we had early on found it added the necessary spice to keep things hot. I once asked her why she got off on facials: “Because I’m supposed to hate being degraded by it,” she replied. In turn, she was convinced I had been weaned much too soon, which made sense enough to me. We immediately launched into the first course. She sucked me until I was semi-hard and welcomed me inside her. I thrust happily until I was fully hard and settled down to slow and steady work in her tunnel. She watched my face with her shining blue eyes as I aimed my cock the way I had learned to best stimulate her, and as my cum on her face dried her pussy wettened and drained onto the bed. She had two small climaxes in short order, and as she worked to a large one I began gasping in pleasure. Soon she cried out incoherently as her body went wild and taut underneath me, and I pushed hard into her and held still as the clenching of her pussy drained me as expertly as any fist. I collapsed beside her and we lay side by side gasping for air. Soon she kissed me as she groped for my cock, and despite the earlier exertions she soon had me hard. She settled herself above me and shoved her pussy in my face as she took me fully into her mouth. We went at each other with a clinical precision for each other’s needs borne of two years of constant practice and perhaps a little too soon treated each other to a simultaneous orgasm. We rested after the second course for fifteen minutes and finally worked up the energy for a shower, where we habitually had dessert. However, this Saturday I found myself uninterested in taking her from behind in the shower, and she didn’t seem disappointed. While we had been lovers from the week we met and cared for each other very much, our relationship had felt off and rote to me for several months, and though our sex was as good as ever, it had started leaving me feeling a bit empty. As we washed off the dried sweat from our run and the other dried fluids we had drenched each other in, I looked down and admired Phyllis’s body, which was flawless, and noticed my admiration was mostly esthetic. My mood passed with dinner—a more commonplace Saturday dinner of chicken and dumplings—and when we sat down to read together in the living room that passed as our study, I felt content. Over the next month and a half we became close friends with Dave and Sandra. We ran into each other the next day and had coffee together again. For the first half-hour Dave and Phyllis made an honest and successful effort to keep all four of us on the same topic, and as Sandra and I had no overriding desire to steer the conversation elsewhere talk eventually drifted to American literature of the 1920s and 1930s. After Dave and Phyllis finished taking out their frustrations on poor Sinclair Lewis’s corpse, Phyllis asked, “Who was that fellow Sloan mentioned? Thorne Smith?” “That sounds right,” Dave answered uncertainly. “Oh, he’s fun!” Sandra interjected. I looked at her in surprise and said, “Yes, yes he is.” Dave and Phyllis looked at us silently for several seconds, then Dave asked, “What did he write?” “Silly fantasy novels with lots of drinking described in great detail and a fair amount of sex that he only hinted at. Oh, and policeman-beating. He really liked the idea of beating up policemen.” Sandra added, “And whales on dry land. Don’t forget the whales.” “His characters could never forget the whales, so how could we?” “We could if we drank as much as they did.” I looked at Dave and Phyllis and said, “Topper. That’s his most famous novel. Hard-drinking ghosts, got made into movies and a TV show. My parents loved the show as kids, so they got me the book when I got old enough to drink. Whether that was encouragement or a serious warning, I’m not really sure.” “But The Night Life of the Gods is the best,” Sandra added, “though Rain in the Doorway has its moments.” “Sales ladies in lingerie selling dictionaries of obscenities is great. Two chapters making fun of the Kiwanis is very much not great.” “Was it the Kiwanis? I thought it was the Rotarians.” “It was all of the above and then some.” “God, it must have been awful to live in a country where that crap was funny.” “Yeah, it was so awful even he forgot to be funny about it.” “Well, if I had to sit through a Rotarians meeting for three or four hours, I’d probably think making duck noises and setting beards on fire was funny too.” Dave and Phyllis watched us in a bit of bewilderment as we did our teasing best to bewilder them, and then Phyllis said, “So anyway, Sloan said something about him and Mencken.” Sandra replied, “That sounds like something a freshman would dream up who doesn’t know much about the twenties.” I replied, “Yeah, they were both iconoclasts and hated the same Babbitts, but they didn’t really have much else in common.” With that Dave and Phyllis effectively threw up their hands and turned to Edith Wharton, while Sandra and I continued chatting. Mencken led immediately to George Schuyler, pleasing Sandra immensely that I had read him, and from him to the Harlem Renaissance. We soon discovered books we both enjoyed, and as we talked about Plum-Bun we had become friends. Remembering I liked classical music, she asked me if I had heard William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony. “Why, yes,” I replied. “It’s quite good. I like it a lot. It might be the only piece of classical music I’ve ever heard with a banjo part.” “So it’s unjustly forgotten then?” “No, it’s never been forgotten. There are several recordings, but nobody much listens to anything but the old warhorses or the latest fads any more. It’s not Barber, but it’s still far better than average.” “You mean Copland,” she grinned. “No, I mean Barber.” “So you think Barber’s greater than Copland then.” “Yes, but really, at that level of skill it’s just a matter of preference.” “Fair enough.” And so our conversation continued until it ended too soon. By the time we separated, I knew her face and figure quite well. Her face was round and expressive, with an average nose and full lips under shining brown eyes; her hair was lightly curled and, as I discovered, arranged in a wide variety of styles from one week to the next. Her neck was thick and fairly long, joining wide shoulders above swelling breasts, a thick waist curving into wide hips, and a belly that was well-rounded and firm but not actually fat. Up to that time I preferred my women athletic, wiry, firm-breasted, and thin-hipped, but Sandra soon impressed on me the great virtues of a full figure offering rounded flesh to attract the eyes and padding to soften a lover’s vigorous thrusts. We made arrangements to meet for dinner Tuesday following, and soon the four of us were meeting three or four times a week. Dave and Phyllis usually took the opportunity to spend most of their time discussing the upcoming class they were to help teach, leaving Sandra and me to chatter like jay birds about whatever bright and shiny trinkets came to mind. One evening about two weeks after our first meeting, we were having dinner at their apartment, take-out Indian food. Dave chuckled as he ate some murg saagwala, “You know, when you think about it, chicken and spinach—it’s really just Indian soul food.” We laughed and Sandra replied, “Except that it’s not pork and there are no grits and it’s not greasy. For all of which, thank God.” “Okay, the chicken makes it upscale soul food.” “So, let me guess,” she smiled, “the Egyptians created soul food in 75,000 BC and the Indians learned it from them?” The pair of them had a couple of rather radically cracked friends whom they often took jabs at in their absence. “Don’t you scoff, missy, they might well have.” We laughed and Dave continued, “But it is a heart-warming similarity. Africa and India, cousins under the skin.” I interjected, “Except that soul food’s really a great deal Indian at root. The other Indians, that is.” Sandra smiled and said, “I really do think you need to elaborate on that little piece of heresy.” I smiled back and said, “Seriously, the basics of Southern cooking came from the Indians in the Southeast.” Dave frowned, “How?” “Because in the early 1700s, in South Carolina probably a quarter of the slaves were Indians. The British were allied to the tribes near the coast, and those tribes made war on tribes further inland. They’d capture prisoners and sell them to the British, and most of them were women since they were less likely to run away to go home. So they married, well, not technically since slaves couldn’t marry, but they had families with African men, and taught what they knew about plants and animals to their children.” “So even our food’s not our food?” she smiled with an evil glint in her eye. I smiled back, “No, of course it’s your food. It has Indian roots, but there are African elements. Okra, for example. And the tradition itself is, oh, thoroughly a part of black culture.” And for the next few minutes I essentially recapitulated the basics of a course on Southern social history I had taken and continued reading about. At the end of it, Phyllis said, “See what I have to listen to all the time? Just don’t get him started on the Insular Cases.” We laughed and Sandra asked, “Why, are they boring?” Phyllis replied, “When he talks about them they’re fascinating. Afterwards you wonder how the hell that happened.” After dinner we split into our by-then habitual pairs, and as Phyllis and Dave sat at the table going over the choices of books for one of the papers in the class, Sandra and I sat in the living room and talked more about Southern history. By this point in our friendship we had become mildly flirtatious and completely at ease with each other, and finally she smiled and asked, “You’ve had a couple of black girlfriends, haven’t you?” I was puzzled and said, “No, never have. Why do you think so?” “Shame, you’d be a good match. You seem like you had. You’re completely normal about…what we’ve been talking about. Most of the white people who talk about it are not normal about it at all. Either they’re dismissive or they’re too curious, really creepy about it. Like they’re, oh, trying to be honorary blacks, you know. Or to show how super-enlightened they are sticking up for us unusual others.” “Hmm, do you get that a lot?” “No, but it really stands out when it happens.