Carol. My youngest's cut two teeth that I haven't even seen yet."
"I could stay and help you go through the magazines," Carol said reluctantly.
"Oh, bugger off. Go and enjoy yourself. It's about time one of us did. What are you going to see?"
Carol pulled a face.
"It's a Saturday Special double bill - Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs."
Dave's laughter echoed in her ears all the way to the car.
The long howl seemed to come from the pit of his stomach. As his orgasm shuddered through him like a runaway train, Tony felt a glorious sense of release.
"Oh, God," he groaned. "Oh, yeah, yeah,"
Angelica gasped.
"I'm coming again, again, oh, Tony, Tony..." Her voice faded in a gulping sob.
Tony lay back on his bed, chest heaving, the smell of sweat and sex heavy around him. He felt as if he'd been suddenly detached from a burden he had been carrying for so long he had ceased to notice its weight. Was this what being cured felt like, this sense of light and colour, this sensation of having dumped the past like sacks of coal in a bunker? Was this how his patients felt when they'd unloaded their mess on him?
In his ear, he could hear the ragged sound of her breathing. After a few moments, she said.
Chapter 23
"Wow. Just wow. That was the best ever. I just love the way you love me."
"It was good for me, too," Tony said, meaning it for once. For the first time since they had started this strange combination of therapy and sexual game playing he'd had no trouble with his erection. Right from the start, he'd been hard as a rock. No fading, no wilting, no shame. Just the first problem-free sex he'd had for years. OK, so Angelica wasn't actually in the room with him, but it was a giant step in the right direction.
"We make the sweetest music," Angelica said.
"Nobody's ever turned me on like you do."
"Do you do this often?" Tony asked languidly.
Angelica chuckled, a husky, sexy gurgle of laughter. "You're not the first."
"I could tell that. You're far too much of an expert," Tony flattered, not entirely insincerely. She'd been the perfect therapist for him, that much was certainly true.
"I'm very choosy about the men I allow to share with me," Angelica said.
"It's not everyone who appreciates what I have to offer," she added.
"They'd have to be very strange not to enjoy it. I know I do."
"I'm glad, Anthony. You'll never know how glad. I have to go now,"
she said, her tone changing abruptly to the businesslike one Tony had come to associate with the end of their calls.
"Tonight has been really special. We'll talk soon."
The line went dead. Tony switched off the phone and stretched out.
Tonight, with Angelica, for the first time in his life. Tony had felt a protective care that succoured without smothering. His grandmother, he knew intellectually, had loved him and cared for him, but theirs had never been a demonstrative family, and her love had been brusque and practical, meeting her needs rather than his. The 'women he'd been involved with in the past had, he now realized, been her emotional doppelgangers. Thanks to Angelica, he dared hope the pattern had been broken. It had caused him enough pain over the years.
His sexual life had started later than most of his contemporaries, in part because his body had been reluctant to mature. Until his seventeenth year, he'd been by far the smallest boy in his class, condemned to dating the thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds who were even more scared of sex than he was. Then, suddenly, he'd shot up five inches in as many months. By the time he'd gone to university, he'd lost his virginity in a clumsy fumble on a single bed, the candlewick bedspread leaving him with uncomfortable friction burns for days afterwards. His girlfriend, relieved to be rid at last of the encumbrance of her virginity, had dumped him days later.
At university, he'd been too shy and hard-working to improve his experience by much. Then, when he'd started work on his doctorate, he'd fallen head over heels with a young philosophy tutor in his college. Because he was bright and interesting, he captured her interest. Patricia made no secret of the fact that she was a woman of the world, just as she made no secret of the fact that she had ended their relationship because of his lack lustre performance between the sheets.
"Face it, sweetheart,"
she'd told him, 'your brain might be