boyfriends before, but not with her face an inch away from mine. And this wasn’t just any random boyfriend—this was Arthur Watson, whom I rather detested. And whose wife I very much loved. But whose wife was right now quite likely having sex with my boyfriend—and if Anthony were using his talented mouth right now, doing to Edna what he could do to me . . .
I couldn’t bear it.
I felt a sob rising in my throat. I pulled my mouth away from Arthur’s to catch my breath, and in the next instant, Celia’s lips were on mine.
“Now you’re getting the idea,” Arthur said.
In all my months of sensual adventures, I’d never yet kissed a girl—nor had I thought to. You’d think by this point in my journey I would have stopped being so easily surprised by the twists and vagaries of life—but Celia’s kiss astonished me. Then it kept on astonishing me, as she dug in only deeper.
My first impression was that kissing Celia felt like such a frightful extravagance. There was so much to her. So much softness. So much in the way of lips. So much in the way of heat. Everything about her was pillowy and absorbing. Between Celia’s enormously soft mouth, and the abundance of her breasts, and the familiar flowery smell of her—I felt subsumed by it all. It was nothing like kissing a man—not even like kissing Anthony, who knew how to kiss with rare tenderness. Even the gentlest kiss from a man would be rough compared to this experience with Celia’s lips. This was velvet quicksand. I could not pull myself away from this. Who in their right mind would want to?
For a dreamy thousand years or so, I stood there under that streetlamp, letting her kiss me, and kissing her back. Gazing into each other’s oh-so-beautiful and oh-so-similar eyes, kissing each other’s oh-so-lovely and oh-so-similar lips, Celia Ray and I had finally reached the absolute zenith of our complete and mutual narcissism.
Then Arthur broke the trance.
“All right girls, I hate to interrupt, but it’s time for us to nip on out of here and head to a nice hotel I know,” he said.
He was grinning like a man who’d just won the trifecta, which I suppose he had done.
It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, Angela.
I know that this would be a fantasy for many women—to find yourself in a big bed in a fancy hotel room with both a handsome man and a beautiful girl available for your enjoyment. But from a matter of sheer logistics, I quickly discovered that three people engaging in sexual exploits at the same time can be both a problematic and arduous situation. One never quite knows where to put one’s attention, you see. There are so many limbs to organize! There can be a great deal of: Oh, pardon me, I didn’t see you there. And just when you’re getting settled into something nice, somebody new shows up to interrupt you. One also never quite knows when it is over. Just when you think you’re done with your pleasure, you find that somebody out there isn’t yet done with theirs, and back you go, into the fray.
Then again, maybe this triad would have been more satisfying if the man in question hadn’t been Arthur Watson. He was practiced and vigorous in the sport of copulation, to be sure, but he was exactly as off-putting in bed as he was in the world—and for the same reasons. He was always looking at or thinking about himself, which was irritating. My sense was that Arthur had a deep and penetrating appreciation for his own physique, and thus he liked to arrange himself into tableaux that brought maximum attention to his own musculature and handsomeness. Never once did I get the feeling that he had stopped posing for us or admiring himself. (And imagine that ridiculousness, if you would! Imagine being in bed with the likes of Celia Ray and a twenty-year-old version of me—and not paying attention to anything but your own body! What a dumb man!)
As for Celia, I didn’t know what to do with her. She was too much for me to manage—volcanic in her raptures, and labyrinthine in the secrets of her needs. She was forked lightning. I felt like I’d never met her before. Yes, I’d been sleeping and cuddling with Celia in the same bed for almost a year—but this was a very different kind of bed, and a very