those hips of hers thrusting upward, taking me with her own measured strokes. I’m not moving, just holding my position, trying not to come, struggling not to go insane. We have breathless kisses, devour and bite each other, so gone, and I’m somewhere else, someone else.
Time stops.
My senses are focused on her.
I lose control of myself.
There is no fear. There is no guilt.
She loses her breath, tenses up, back arches, and she sings my name in three octaves.
She comes. She comes. She comes.
Then we rest. Sweat dripping from our flesh, we fall away from each other and we rest. Minutes pass before I can collect my breath and move. I can barely turn my head to look at her.
She moans. “I think I just had an out-of-body experience.”
We look at each other’s worn expression; then we laugh.
She asks, “Ready to go again?”
“You’re insatiable.”
“I’ve never been like this with anyone.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
She puts her face in my lap, hums, then sings part of a love song I don’t recognize.
She whispers, her voice sounding disturbed, “God, what have you done to me?”
I don’t answer. I could ask her the same, and my question would go unanswered as well.
“You make me tingle.” Her voice remains a song. “Make me horny. Think of you and I get wet. You’re very intense. The way a lover should be. I find you damn sexy and tender.”
Her hand traces my flesh; then I feel her tongue on my skin, licking my sweat. She takes me in her mouth again, does that like she owns me. In her mind I am hers. She nurtures me. I arch, I jerk, get the jitters, but flaccidity remains. That doesn’t discourage her, doesn’t wane her madness. She is determined to raise the dead, determined for this not to end.
My phone vibrates again.
Her cellular sings again. Usher, still confessing.
She is not mine.
She is my wife’s sister.
This is our affair.
2
How does an affair begin?
I think that mine, like most, started unintentionally. I’m not malicious; that is not in my nature—hurting someone I love, that is.
My wife. Genevieve.
She is thirty-two. Has been turning thirty-two over and over for the last five years.
Her name has been Genevieve since she turned twenty-one, the day she marched to court and rid herself of the name her mother had given her. In her eyes her birth name was too urban. Too Alabama. A reminder that her ancestors had been slaves and that her family still lived in chains, some physically, some metaphorically, some in the psychological sense.
She is not one of them. Not cut from the cloth of people who name their children after cars and perfumes and possessions they cannot afford, or have a home filled with bastard children, each of those bastard children named after drugs the parents were addicted to at the time. She is not one of the people who took a simple name and bastardized its simplistic spelling to the point that it looked ridiculous on paper and sounded ludicrous as it rolled off the tongue, then pretended the name was that of an unknown king or queen, its origin rooted in Mother Africa.
She is Genevieve.
Genevieve.
She loves her name because to her ear, when spoken correctly, Genevieve sounds intellectual. Not Gen. Not Vee. Not any other variation. She will only respond to her name in total, Genevieve. And she is particular about that. She frowns on the Americanized pronunciation, “JEH-neh-veev.” She prefers the elegant-in-tone French version, “ZHAWN-vee-EHV.” She will answer to both, but only the French version is accompanied with a smile.
She is a precise woman. She is not five-foot-one; she is five-foot-one-and-one-quarter. I suppose, to a woman, a quarter of an inch could be the difference between pleasure and a night of frustration.
She has come up from poverty and, once again I state, has declared herself an intellectual. Not one that has stumbled out of the womb and continues to stumble through life without meaning or purpose. Not one of the problem children Bill Cosby rants about. She has endless goals. My wife is a planner. A degreed woman who knows what she will be doing for the next twenty years. She has it mapped out, literally.
She says that when she was a teenager, she mapped her escape from a small town called Odenville, from her past, drew a road to her future.
She did that the day her father murdered her mother. Cut her throat. She told me that her mother was a woman who had many lovers. Her father was a man who