XOXO Read online

  He swayed so slightly toward her.

  She held her ground.

  He glanced away, shifted is body, turned one eye to her. “But all his friends, even he himself, pronounce it Castillo.” Again the American double LL. He was close enough to her ear to whisper.

  “For shame,” she said.

  Conversation paused. They stood where they stood, not moving. The business of the encounter was over. A door, a small window had opened but he knew that the moment was passing - all but gone, even as he felt the pressure of the shutters closing while the seconds ticked by. How to keep this open?

  “You’ll find him in room 31a under C.”

  He looked at her, at the board, back at her. She was still there, her head cocked inquisitively to one side. He must say something or lose the chance.

  The moment rose like wind around a corner of the eves. “Tell me your name,” he said.

  She glanced at the assistant’s desk, then back at him. When her eyes returned he could see the wisp of a blush rising in her cheeks.

  She looked down and twisted her body slightly like a young girl, suddenly shy. It’s Jackie, Jackie O.”

  “As in Onassis.”

  He regretted his response.

  “My bad,” he said, beating her to the punch.

  She placed her hands on her hips in mock disgust but he saw buried in this gesture a glimpse of forgiveness, partly by the fact she didn’t turn away. And, oh yes, there was a little playfulness, perhaps.

  Even so, it thrust a caesura into the roiling center of their thermal cloud.

  He eyed her suspiciously. “I’m going to need your number,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He raised an eyebrow, then turned down the hall.

  “Don’t you dare not answer me,” she said.

  He turned, ten steps away. “For lunch, of course.”

  A smile forced its way into her expression. He was just glad to see no explosion of shock. . . or worse, rejection.

  “Will you be here when I get back?”

  “If you’re lucky.”

  By that he knew she would be, either there or nearby.

  And she was.

  He leaned over the desk with no words in mind, having cracked the shell he needed no plan.

  She stared at him as if sucking all his past into her porous, eager mind.

  He said nothing.

  Finally she reached up and took his hand, forcing a small piece of paper into his palm.

  “Thursday. Noon sharp,” she said and turned away.

  Turkey Swiss on rye, cut along the diagonal. White plate. Lettuce. Tomato. Honey mustard on the side. Lemonade in a skinny glass.

  No conversation. They ate. He puzzled their location on the scale of things. A lot had been skipped over, bypassed. None of the preliminaries - no dancing around issues, none of the mandatory text messaging. Just hello and lunch.

  “I love the shape of a spoon,” she said.

  He studied her. Looked down at his spoon and back at her, down at the spoon again this time he picked it up, turning it in his hands. He held it vertically between them so their combined vision made a straight line, eye to eye, crossing over spoon. He focused on her, on the spoon, her.

  He turned it horizontal, bulge of the bulbous end facing her, then flat, as if to dip into soup.

  He watched her response. She was mesmerized.

  Her lips drifted.

  He leaned in and off to the side and brought the spoon to her mouth, just touching her lower lip.

  She quivered.

  He stroked her lip with the beveled tip. The spoon drug the lip along with it in little staccato jumps. She sucked in a short breath

  He removed the spoon, held it between them an instant, then placed it fully in his mouth, licking it as he withdrew.

  She blinked and when her eyes opened they did so half-mast.

  He placed it in her mouth. She closed her teeth around it then opened and closed her jaw on the spoon sucking and licking it.

  She made mewling sounds.

  He took it away.

  A look of puzzlement laced with disappointment crossed her face. She almost cried. That’s when he said it.

  “Let’s see how sexy a spoon can be.”

  She was wearing a light, semitransparent blouse, buttoned only to the lip of her bra, her breathing evident through the V of her lapel. Her dark hair fell in cascades along the side of her face to her shoulders, springing on its natural wave when she moved.

  He licked the spoon and placed the back of it against her cheek, rubbing a small circle. He licked it again and repeated the motion, wetting her skin. He moved the spoon to her mouth, scooping some of the watery flotsam from the surface of her tongue and smearing it on the other side of her face, turning the spoon around to the backside to rub the same little circles he’d started on the other side.

  He watched her.

  Her eyes closed. Her mouth moved as if speaking, though no words came. Her eyelids drifted between closed and half-closed. She was seeing nothing, hearing nothing, apprehending only what she felt from his workings on the surface of her body.

  He stopped.

  Her eyes opened to his.

  She licked her lip.

  He touched the spoon to her tongue. Then to his. Then back to hers. He put a finger inside her mouth and scooped some water from her cheek and placed it in the spoon belly, turning it toward her, then dropping slowly to the V in her blouse. He tilted it so that the watery mucus ran out onto the valley between her breasts where he used the back of the spoon to spread it around, beginning in the small circles, growing wider and wider, ascending the side of the mound of one breast, then the other.

  Her breathing quickened.

  He turned the spoon over and forced it under her bra, as if peeling the shell from an egg, now toward her tip, imprinting itself against the tightness of her blouse, exaggerating and diminishing, appearing and fading with each quick breath. He could see the outline, the slight elevation of the areola, the pointy tip. . . would she let him go there?

  The spoon walked in baby steps inching its way until it came up to the margin of her nipple. Her eyes were fully shut. He could do anything he wanted. He pushed the spoon over the tip and jiggled it slightly, as if securing it to its prey, then drew the spoon and with it the tip toward him, toward the valley between, toward the cool air of the outside world.

  When it came fully forth she made no gesture to alter its position.

  He removed the spoon. She remained exposed.

  She opened her eyes and looked at herself and smiled.

  She made no effort to hide.

  He kissed her. As he drew back she followed him with her lips needing something more. He buried his hand in her bra and she opened her mouth to his.

  She broke from him, his hand still on her breast.

  She took a deep breath.

  She looked down at his hand on her and stroked him through her blouse. She laughed. And then unbuttoned three buttons on her blouse.

  “You do the rest,” she said.

  He bit her ear, kissed her neck, then finished the buttons on the blouse. He snapped open her bra and rubbed her nipples with his wetted thumb. She was watching him. He watched her watch him roll the nipples under his thumb, flicking them side to side, squeezing the breast down at its origins. . .

  He spied the spoon.

  He drifted her blouse and bra off her shoulders and let them fall around her hips. He reached for the spoon and applied it to her belly wall, pushing downward.

  She giggled and sucked in her belly. He dipped the spoon in the ice cold lemonade and returned it to her belly, now pursuing her more aggressively, roaming down to her panty line, teasing the elastic edge.
Then, suddenly, he turned the spoon around and buried the handle under the panties straight down to where he imagined her sex began.

  She swooned.

  He kissed her.

  She panted.

  He plunged his hand where the spoon tip was and rubbed her. She gasped and gushed her wetness into his hand. He slathered her folds, north to south, south to north.

  So excited he was that he lifted her up from her position on the chair and forced her down on the table. She braced herself on her elbows and turned to watch him raise her skirt over her butt and in one swift motion, drag her panties to her knees.

  He took himself out, rubbed against her folds from behind and entered her.

  Her head she let fall to the table overturning the lemonade glass. She spread her arms and grasped the table edge and moaned as he pumped her.

  He stroked five times and stopped.

  In the tension that rose in the pause felt like they were being lifted progressively off the ground. He pumped her ten times and stopped to keep himself from exploding.

  Like the cliff that invites you to jump he swayed over the fault line and back, over and back. He slowed the pumping but came dangerously close and stopped again. Starting, stopping. . . he could feel the tension rising in her, could see it in the way she arched her back, rolling her hips upward to receive him. . . he pushed in as far as he could go, lifting her from the table, then finally giving up, he thrust her thirty times and ruptured the barrier between them.

  In the dénouement he could feel her squeezing against him. He throbbed, she throbbed, he throbbed. In little echoes they spoke to each other in the decrescendo that had no sound.

  He squeezed her hips and exited from her.

  She abruptly stood and looked down at his member, still hard, bearing the slick of their two excitations. She smiled and kissed him on the cheek. Then she grabbed hold of his root and pulled him through the door. “This time in my bed,” she said.

  As he dressed she came up and hugged him from behind, laying her cheek between his wingblades.

  He marveled at how quickly they had come to this point. And how easily. How could that be? He laughed in his quiet semi-conscious, startled by the possibility Valentine’s day might have something to do with this. Was that really possible?

  He felt the arms of his new best intimate friend encircling his torso. He’d forgotten just how important it was to feel someone wrapped around him. He finished tying his tie. She stayed hugging him. Where was this was going? Could it last? Should it last? He turned around and held her face in his hands. “Is this just a one-lunch stand?”

  Her eyes misted. “I think that depends on you,” she said.

  As they drifted out of the room, cluttered now with the detritus of love-making, they held hands, still fresh in the newness of it all.

  At the door he stopped, looked back at the table where it all started - half eaten sandwiches left untended in the rush to a new a new and compelling pathway, plates, the tumped over glass of lemonade. He walked over, picked up the spoon, and put it in his pocket.

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