He sat alone at the coffee shop, occasionally hitting a key on his laptop to keep the screen from going dark, and all of his thoughts bent to her. He couldn’t even write; he couldn’t even write to her — how could he continue their conversation without confessing to his weakness, to his absolute inability to think of her without those thoughts moving forward to undressing her and learning every inch of her nakedness, not only through sight but touch, even taste?

It wasn’t that he didn’t care about her emotionally — that would have made things easier. He did care, deeply, about the state of her psyche and whether she’d had a good day and what music she cared to listen to (even though he felt even older when she sent him a selection); but these things he had always felt free to express, whereas the depths of his lust were secured behind a seal he’d sworn not to breach, and there the pressure built day to day until he felt something within him, some physical valve or muscle, would simply burst.

My dear girl, he typed into an email message, and then fell still, fingers poised over the home keys until they began to cramp. In another window, he pulled up the only photo he had of her, and again allowed his eyes to trace the easy curve of her seductive smile, to trace the curve of her cheek down to the line of her throat, to be captured by her eyes and thus held until all of time seemed to stand still; when he did finally blink and look around, he honestly expected the room to have frozen, espresso stopped mid-drip, a woman in a power suit stuck halfway through reciting the twenty-seven instructions for her perfect latte. He was surprised to find that life and time could move blithely along while his soul had been captured so completely.

At the least, he expected, with a hint of guilt in the thought — he expected someone to be looking in his direction with disapproval. But even if someone’s eyes did glide over his face while looking for another, apparently his desire and adoration and base lustful need for her weren’t written as boldly as he felt they must be, for he never found the disgust or even distaste that he was certain most men and women would feel (or at the least, feign) should they know of his besotted state, and the one who was its cause.

He erased the three words he’d already written and began again, sighing with the exquisite ache of unsettled longing, and this time he moved forward a slight bit further: My sweet one, I can’t tell you how your words have touched me. But there he found himself stuck again. That was the whole problem, wasn’t it? He couldn’t tell her. He shouldn’t tell her. Not only through any sense of moral responsibility (at this point, nearing his fortieth year, he had admitted to himself that his sense of morals was a bit different than those society advertises as the ‘norm’), but also because it would simply be foolish. Was there really any chance that her reaction would contain anything but derision at the best, pity at the worst?

Shutting down the computer without saving, he examined his reflection in the black of the screen. It was not as if she could possibly find an attraction to him. Not truly. Looking at himself honestly — a fat man with glasses, white hairs in his moustache, a mouth that turned down at the corners — how could he ever believe differently? Certainly, she was still in the spring of her seasons, when green and fresh and new is what attracts one, the vivid patterns of life calling to one another as surely as freshly-opened blossoms to the honeybee. He was definitely past even the summer of his lifetime, and while the leaves had not yet fallen, there was definitely a chill in the air and the promise of forthcoming winter.

Closing his laptop and tossing away his long-emptied paper cup, he walked the twenty blocks home with his canlı bahis şirketleri head down, lost in anything but thought. It was a gloomy October afternoon, and a faint mist fell as he walked, droplets of water beading on his sweater that only soaked into the cloth when he tried to wipe them off, somehow leaving both the garment sodden and his palms dripping when he dug into his pocket for his keys upon arrival.

The shadows were long in his apartment when he opened the door, but he didn’t touch the light switch. He’d forgotten that his wife wouldn’t be home that evening, but it seemed to add to the overall gloom. He loved his wife deeply — he’d learned long ago that loving one person doesn’t truly mean there’s no room for another — and more than that, he truly enjoyed spending time with her. An evening of dinner and conversation, perhaps a DVD or an early evening to bed with the promise of some intimate time alone together, and his thoughts might not have wandered for hours. But to sit there alone, eating alone, reading alone, no sound in the apartment save the rustling of the pages or the faint clicking of his keyboard, his thoughts would quite certainly continue along their current path. Like lemmings rushing toward the sea, he thought wearily as he walked into the kitchen and turned on the light.

At his heels, the cats wove back and forth anxiously, looking up at him with eyes almost all pupils; and he first opened a can of food for them and set it on the floor. However, as almost always happened in this situation, the odour of the mashed meat and meal drove all thoughts of eating from his mind, so, wrinkling his nose, he selected a bottle of water from the door of the refrigerator and went upstairs to his computer.

Not only was there no email from her (not so surprising, as it was his turn to write); there was no email waiting for him at all, save for a few messages in the bulk folder offering to point him toward penile enlargement creams and sources of free money. Idly, he wandered through his other habitual websites, reading updates to people’s profiles, movie reviews, arts event listings — until he signed into the social networking site, ostensibly to check on someone’s profile he’d known back in the hoary days of high school, where he had first met her — and, inevitably, clicked on the link for her profile.

He was only able to see her name, her photograph, and a few lines of text — while the age difference wasn’t absolutely illegal, it would definitely have raised eyebrows and caused questions were she to credit him with even the relatively benign status of a ‘friend’. But even the little he was able to contemplate here, added to the burden of loneliness in a house all alone, was enough that he couldn’t have turned his mind from fantasies of her if he’d felt the need to.

He lingered over every letter in her name, over the line of text purported to be her current status — is awake far too late re-reading poetry for an exam — and the links to those she was able to accept as friends. Jealously, he glared at the icons representing them in her profile, and wondered if she were out with one of them, if her thoughts turned to one of them when she was sitting idly in class of an afternoon, if perhaps the highest ranked friend — JoeArtoo — might be a boyfriend, or a potential boyfriend. (Not, of course, that he could — or had any right to — be jealous of any boyfriend she might have, but it wasn’t exclusivity that bred his contempt but pure envy of anyone who might legitimately have the right and reason to be holding her hand, pressing his lips to hers, crooning words of love in between kisses …)

Pushing these grudging thoughts to the back of his mind, he forced himself to compose at least a slight, short email to her, lest she not think of him that evening canlı kaçak iddaa at all. Dear one, he typed and then paused, closing his eyes as if to bridge the gap between them mentally, as if he could sense her presence in the world and focus in on her as the muse for his words of adoration. If I were to tell you how many times I thought of you today, I fear you would be left either shocked or dismayed.

He looked over the first sentence, his left hand poised to press ‘Delete’ and begin again — but after a time he agreed with the tone of his words and continued. Of course, suggesting either emotion might be overstepping my place, and overestimating the time I spend in any of your thoughts. He paused again, but eventually nodded to himself, deciding that it did not go too far, and hopefully would elicit some sort of response.

I trust that your day has been a good one, and your classes were only slightly tedious, instead of bordering on the suicidal. When he stopped here, it wasn’t because of any choice to proceed or to backspace; it was because the very mention of school in combination with his thoughts of her led to fantasies that, while probably the most predictable of any he lingered over, held great totemic power nevertheless. He’d worked as an instructor in the past, which only made his visualizations more vivid as he saw her standing there, reciting in front of him, the tip of her pink tongue darting over her lips when she paused for breath, arms crossed over her belly, just below the rise of her young breasts beneath a thin cotton sweater …

As he shifted in the chair, contemplating this vision, it became obvious that he had become erect, and he decided to change into his evening clothes, a pair of loose terrycloth jogging shorts, before continuing to write. He rose from the chair, reaching down to pull his pants away from the rise of his cock beneath (not that anyone was there to see), and walked stiffly down the hall to the bedroom. With each step, the smooth curved head, trapped, slid back and forth against his underwear in a manner that wasn’t completely unpleasant.

In the bedroom, he didn’t bother turning on the lights to undress. Everything was in the same place it had been for the past thirteen years, and if he truly needed to see he could move back into the hallway, where light was reflected from the doorway to his office. He undressed down to his socks; a bit unusual, but the floor was cold and he couldn’t switch to his slippers until he’d dressed again, to the point he was planning to dress again. So he sat on the edge of the bed, his bare buttocks clenching slightly as he touched the sheets, and pulled first one sock off, then the other, tossing them in the direction of the shadow that he knew was the laundry hamper across the room.

The mattress seemed to exert an almost gravitational pull, and he let himself fall back, lying horizontally across the bed. He sighed, and at the same time the heater kicked in, hot air blowing from a vent in the corner of the room across his chest, over his thighs. He closed his eyes and savoured the sensation, almost a caress — and as his skin grew warm, he felt the shaft of his cock swelling involuntarily, pulsing as the blood rushed through, inflating it. Before he was even consciously aware he was thinking of her, he heard himself moan her name like a secret confession into the darkness.

While her smile, her eyes danced behind the closed lids of his own, he had to picture her bared body in his fantasy by imagination; but it was not an onerous task. He let his hand slide down his chest, over his stomach and down again, fingers already curling to the precise radius that he’d swollen to, ready to play their part in whatever manner he required; and his mind created her there.

She was beautiful, luminous there, naked above canlı kaçak bahis him, smiling when he cried her name again, before his fingers had done more than climbed a single time to the tip, undulating gently against the sensitive underside of the head, which was taut and rosy like just-ripened fruit. His free hand moved up and down his body as he imagined her crawling above him, slight breasts hanging just low enough to brush against his cheeks, nipples taut as she raised them to his greedy lips, one then the other, her hair falling back to sweep his chest as she arched her back, moaning in return as he suckled her, softly at first but harder, more savagely, that left hand curving in midair as if it were invading her sex, curling upward into her wetness, driving her mad with the desire that raged through his body.

For a moment, caught up in this imagination, he even let go his hardness and allowed his other hand to describe a curve that fit the sweep of her back from shoulders to hips, but then his fingers returned to the task of self-stimulation, and he let the rest of his senses build the phantom of her instead — ears resounding with the croon of her voice, nostrils full of the scent of her exquisitely aromatic arousal, lips and tongue tasting her kisses, deeper and deeper, until it seemed she was only not present in the room as a separate entity because the two of them had truly become one. He rolled his hips in time to meet his hand on the down stroke, shuddering as if she’d just climbed above him and slid wholly down to their perfect, delicious joining.

He tightened his grip and moved faster, the only sound in the room the sound of the mattress moving and his gasping for breath, his heart racing until it seemed it would burst from his chest, sweat trickling down the back of his neck, between his shoulder blades. She was there with him, then, as fully as any fevered imagination could create a desired love, conjured into existence by the sheer power of his need for her, her voice replying to his moans, her nails raking his shoulders, his back, rivulets of fire across his skin … and her heat, god her wonderful heat, rippling around him like the waves above a bonfire, filling him like the rise of mercury through a cartoon thermometer until he couldn’t hold back, not even another second, and he cried her name out loudly enough that certainly the neighbours must have heard —

— and he came then, his whole body seeming to contract and expand, flowing through his body to erupt from the tip of his cock, spurting great gleaming fountains of fluid desire that fell over him like silvered rain, splashing down against his chest, his stomach, his thighs, once, twice, three times before the sensation became simply too much to continue and he let himself go, hand falling back to the sheets slick with his essence, cock slowly dwindling in the silence as even the heater cut out and everything seemed to pulse with the rush of blood back and forth from his heart, walls and ceiling rising, falling, until finally the room returned to normal as did he, slowly losing his grasp on the vision of her, left with only that smile and her name on his exhausted lips, whispered again and again as he waited for the energy to gather that would allow him to rise again.

A soft thump and the shocking tickle of whiskers against his thigh were finally what stirred him from the verge of drifting into sleep; he stood, cleaning up and dressing himself as much as he would and, followed by the cat, making his way back to the desk where he’d been composing an email before. The window was still open, the few lines he’d already composed blinking subtly as the screen refreshed itself repeatedly.

With a few keystrokes, he deleted each word already there and began again. My love, he typed, then took a moment to stretch his back before continuing, my dearest love, my sweet forbidden desire.

He teetered there for a moment, fingers paused above the keys, listening to his heartbeat returning to normal. He let himself breathe. I have to tell you how badly I need you …