demands

My good woman comes over about nine. I’m actually working on the templates project. I employ her favourite three words: “Just a second,” I say. “I’ve got to finish this paragraph.” She lies on the couch, says nothing. I grapple with words and meaning for a few more minutes then consider her lying on the couch.

She wears a knee-length red skirt I’ve not seen before and a black singlet top. Her legs always get me, athletic and strong. Her torso is perhaps a little thick—she’d say that. She has what her children call her pillow, a soft padding on her stomach. She refers to my Buddha belly, something no amount of exercise, gym or Pilates eliminates on men beyond 60.

Anyway, she looks good. In the kitchen she perches on a tall chair at my island bench. She hoicks up her skirt, an innocent-seeming gesture, to allow me to walk in between her legs and kiss her. I do, but feel way less than innocent. She asks after my lower back, wraps her arms around it.

“You get sore in your lower back,” she says, “and I get it in the upper back,” referring to the tension ache she has between the shoulder blades. I offer to go to work on her ache, but first I slump across the bench and she inspects my back for unwanted guests: blackheads, pimples, melanomas.  Grooming, an intimacy I love her for.

She tells me she is inviting herself to have sex with me and I agree to her request. She knows her mind, and her body, and I’m not about to gainsay its demands. I have my own demands. She doesn’t know them yet. We need to talk. Maybe after sex the words I’ve tried to get right in my mind will come easier, more naturally, and won’t sound like demands.

I have no right to make demands her. I admire her more than any woman I ever met. She is a single parent since her divorce eight years ago. She works full-time as a clinical psychologist and supervises her team. She cooks every meal that is placed on her table; that’s about 15 meals a day for a 17 year-old son. She needs no further demands on her.

She came to Australia against her will—her husband, a pilot, wanted out of war-torn Serbia; she didn’t. She landed here with no money and no English, a one year-old and eight months pregnant. She worked in a servo on the till. She brought up her kids while her husband jetted around the world, living where his employer had its home base—Egypt, Japan, India. Eventually she bought a small house and kicked him out of it.

I have no right to make demands, but things about our relationship are on my mind and forming into something that cannot remain unsaid too much longer.

We lie perspiring and she asks the time: 10:57. I ask if she has to pick up her kids from the academic book warehouse where they are working the late afternoon shift packing boxes for the new school year. They finish at 11:30.

She puts on a navy blue bra with small white spots that that stirred my libido an hour before and pads to the bathroom. Five minutes later she is gone. The things I need to say remain with me.

Rock on.