‘’That's nice! Good girls!” Max cooed. After a while he separated us, penetrated me and, with his thumb and forefinger caressing Elita's nipple, rode me until I came. Climbing on top of her he soon reached orgasm with a groan.
We took Elita to the beach every day for the rest of our stay in Grenada. I had a wonderful time and never saw Max happier. Even our sex together improved. It was as though the presence of a third person had brought us even closer.
Max and I continued seeing each other through the following summer and into the next fall. There seemed to be no end to the desire we felt for each other, but I knew our affair couldn't last. We stayed together for two years—longer, Max said, than he had ever been with anyone.
Oddly enough, the end came not after a quarrel or because of another woman. One typical night, after I had sucked his cock and licked his balls for a long time while a jazz recording played softly on the stereo, Max lifted my face to his and said, “I love you.” He had never uttered those words before. I told him that I loved him, too. But I understood that love was not something Max could live with for very long.
Several months later he began seeing other women. Although he told me they meant nothing to him, I knew it was time for our friendship to end. I stopped answering his calls, walked around in a daze and didn't feel normal again for over a year.
I have remarried and gone on to live a happy life. I love my husband. We are close in ways I never could have been with Max, and the sex we have is fine, varied and often thrilling. I try not to think about Max. Sometimes I succeed.
SWAN SONG SEX
By Sandy Broca
It was early on a Sunday morning. More asleep than awake, I instinctively reached for Alan beside me. My hand grazed the hairs on his chest, then traveled down, lingering over his flat stomach and coming to rest on his penis. Soft, fat, shrivelled, vulnerable, it elicited the tenderest of feelings—and a challenge to make it harden.
With my fingertips, I began to perform a familiar erotic dance— teasing, gentle pulling, a squeeze, the rhythmic knead. The expected reaction occurred. With pride and pleasure, I twisted in bed so that I could take his erection in my mouth.
He groaned, cleared his throat. And then, in a voice still clotted with sleep, asked, “Should we be doing this?”
Stunned, suddenly made ashamed of my own innocent and natural sexual impulses, I stopped and let his shrinking cock tumble from my mouth. In the four years Alan and I lived together, we had made love more than a thousand times. Never before had he questioned the propriety of priapic pleasure. Then again, never before had we decided to break up—as we had yesterday—with only the logistics of who got to keep what and when to schedule the moving men's arrival to be worked out.
I touched his shoulder to answer him, then withdrew my hand. Overnight, the rules had changed—but we hadn't clarified just what the new rules were. He had told me it would be a month before friends moving to Denver would vacate their apartment so Alan could move in. It made no financial sense for him to leave my apartment to stay at a hotel or with other friends in the interim. Besides, I didn't want him to go, and he was still my best friend.
Last night we had cried together, mourning our relationship that lacked the mutual mandate to continue. In four years there had been countless good times, some admittedly terrible times, much laughter and the kind of warm feelings that couldn't dissipate overnight.
The problems that caused us to break up were not sexual in nature. In fact, we had been compatible and easy-going lovers. Until this morning, sex had been an unquestioned source of pleasure, somewhat routine, but always satisfying. Our forays into erotic variations had delivered less satisfaction. What can you say about a man you seduce in the bath and who, upon leaving the tub, steps on and breaks his glasses? Only that he's sweet and clumsy and your heart goes out to him in a sentimental way that he doesn't always appreciate.
And that, I suppose, was the crux of our problem. After years of bending over thick textbooks, stifled by the poverty of graduate student life, Alan now held a well-paying job where people looked up to him. He wore expensive suits. He didn't want to be a sweet and clumsy puppy anymore. Lean and mean, the Lothario of the Eastern seaboard was more the fantasy image he gravitated toward. No more Mr. Monogamy (yet the ethos was there to the end—an open relationship would not suffice, a break-up was the license required for philandering to ensue). Suddenly Alan had become a freedom fighter in his private war against commitment, hurling his first Molotov cocktail last night. And the smoke had not yet cleared.
Looking at him in the early morning light, I felt a reprise of last evening's tears coming on, but I fought the impulse. My woman's tears had nearly drowned him, he'd shouted at me yesterday. So be it—no tears. Compassion and understanding weren't welcome guests at this moment, either. Toughness, decisiveness—those were the operative emotions in this new lexicon of leaving.
I sneaked a glance at his penis. It was semi-erect, making me think that even though he had one foot out the door emotionally, desire still lived at this address. Action was called for.
With a courage that was enacted rather than genuinely felt, I assumed a familiar position, my head resting on Alan's shoulder, a thigh sidled between his legs, my hand cupping that twin-sacced, hormone-pumping station that was the probable cause of our problems. I gave his cock an affectionate squeeze. It hardened perceptibly; he shot me an uncertain look.
“Yes, we
should
be doing this,” I informed him.
He wavered. In his mind, I imagined, were all the logical reasons why we should institute a hands-off policy for the coming month. As of last night, we'd “officially” broken up; we needed this time to get accustomed to the idea of no longer being a couple; after making love for more than four years, there was something seedy about simply fucking for physical release; he wanted out—and the biological imperative of the act would send him off in the opposite direction.
A moment's more indecision, and
I
would be ready to hurl my belongings out into the street. “Aw, c'mon,” I coaxed, my thigh hugging his, “I won't tell, if you won't.” A smile curled his lips and his arms moved and encircled me. “All right. You talked me into it. Just make sure you don't get me pregnant,” he warned, imitating the uncertain tone of a teenage girl in the back seat of a car.
The love we made that morning started out tender and familiar. Always the gentleman, Alan made sure I had an orgasm first by placing his hand between my legs and assigning each finger a specific task. His thick thumb located my clitoris and began pressing and circling it. His next three fingers made their way inside my vagina, and his pinky grazed my anus. It was a pleasant routine with no surprises, yet it always yielded the most delicious erotic sensations I had ever experienced.
After I climaxed, I started to reciprocate by giving Alan an all-over massage, starting at his chest and working my way down. When he was good and hard, I straddled his hips and lowered myself onto his waiting cock.
He captured a breast in each hand and began squeezing and plucking at my nipples. However, they were oversensitive from my recent orgasm and I wanted him to stop. Flattening my body over his, I then got him to roll over so that we were in ye olde missionary position. It felt good and right and comfortable and sane; and the thought passed that if one had to be frozen in time, this wouldn't be a bad everlasting position to be in.
I cupped Alan's buttocks in my hands as he thrust and strained. Although I rarely climaxed when he was atop me, I still adored the special contact it afforded. I reveled in the firmness of his thrusts, the sounds and feel and smell of his warm skin on mine.
Suddenly his movements changed from rhythmic to more frenzied and intense. Thinking he was about to come, I insinuated a finger between his cheeks to stimulate him anally. It was the cherry atop the sundae, the action that invariably took him over the edge.
“No!” he practically barked. “Don't do that.”
I retracted my finger and tried to concentrate on moving with him. But he was fucking at a pace I couldn't follow. Frantic, erratic, so deep it hurt. Pounding away at my body I could feel my insides becoming sore, and my enjoyment dissipated.
“Will you come soon?” I asked politely.
If he heard me, he didn't show it. Rather, his thrusts got deeper, harder. I felt like screaming. I wondered if this was what it felt like to be raped. “Alan, please.”
The hell with you, I thought. I brought my finger back to his anal opening and practically stabbed him with it. He moaned, pushed into me cruelly a few more times, shuddered and came to a halt.
When he opened his eyes, he found me glaring at him angrily, “What was that all about?” I demanded.
He seemed not to understand. Then, abashedly, “I guess I just really got into it. Why do we have to do it the same way every single time, anyway?”
Hurt, I looked away from him. I'd never insisted we had to make love the same way every time, but I didn't relish being bruised either. He hadn't just made love to me; he'd acted out some sort of revenge fantasy. “Fuck you,” I said and turned over. It seemed redundant.
As a freelance writer, one of the few professional perks I have is collecting free advice under the guise of doing research. So I phoned Dr. C. A. Tripp after Alan left for work on Monday. Dr. Tripp is the author of
The Homosexual Matrix,
which presents a theory of sexual “resistance” based on the idea that the obstacles to intimacy (such as anger or fear of losing one's partner) heighten our excitement in bed and make sex so piquant.
“Sex has an awful lot of stuff close to fighting in it, naturally,” Dr. Tripp said. “Sex also carries a charge of affection.” And it's the combination, the volatility that makes sex at the end of a relationship so different from all that went before.
“When you're together, you struggle for closeness,” Dr. Tripp went on. “Succeeding violates all kinds of desires. So a couple back off, and the more they do that, the more they're attracted again. What very often happens is that once a couple agree to separate, they keep up sex.”
The good doctor had something there. On Monday night, when I was deliberately cool to Alan during dinner and TV, he couldn't keep his hands away from me. While I was washing the dishes he came from behind, gently taking my breasts in his hands and hugging me until I felt his hardness against my back.
When we got to bed we made the sweetest love ever. Soft, tender, patient, and so filled with emotion that I thought my heart would break because he'd soon be gone.
In two days' time I'd had it rough and I'd had it tender. In the month that followed I came to realize there was no one definition of how a couple make their final sexual peace together, but some patterns did emerge before Alan shook my hand (yes, shook my hand!) and left with his suitcase.
As commitment lessens, so do efforts to please. In retrospect, I can now honestly admit that Alan was not the best lover I'd ever had. Before the break-up, we'd had numerous middle-of-the-night heart-to-hearts when I tried to explain my quite normal sexual desires to him. Cunnilingus, for example. I craved it; he avoided it. So I'd try to talk to him about why he didn't enjoy performing the act. He would deny disliking it, and for about a week we'd have oral sex every time we made love. And then he'd stop, seemingly having forgotten the discussion.
After we broke up, but were still living together, we didn't have cunnilingus again. I can't be sure whether it was spite, aversion or plain denseness that prevented it, but it became apparent that he wasn't terribly interested in pleasing me that way.
Good sex won't keep a partner from leaving. I'll admit it, I tried playing Scheherezade. We were more sexually active in our last month together than previously. Usually, it was at my instigation. I wanted Alan to know he was foregoing a good thing, and I wanted to leave him with plenty of memories. And, even more foolishly, I wanted to “store up” sex for the drought I anticipated.
So instead of doing my work when Alan left in the morning, I busied myself writing involved sexual adventures with a hero and heroine who carried our names. At night we'd hurry to bed and take turns reading the tales aloud and enacting the fantasies that appealed to us most, whenever possible.
It was fun and diverting. Yet, ultimately, it made life sadder. When I asked him after one multi-orgasmic, exhausting session, “Are you sure you really want to move out?” he said yes, and went to sleep on the couch. I spent the rest of the night feeling humiliated and impotent. Moral: If there is an optimal time to enjoy sex for sex's sake, it is at the end. Second moral: If someone is going to change his mind about breaking up, he will doubtless let you know, so don't ask.
Bittersweet sex is better than no sex at all. It's painful and difficult to end an intimate relationship, and sex
can
ease the transition. At least it did in my case. Granted, Alan and I would soon no longer be a couple, but it was reassuring to know I was still desirable to him on a sexual level. And when someone's leaving you, you question your desirability on every level. By remaining sexually active with your partner-not-to-be, you think: He wants me—but he doesn't want me. Confusion and ambivalence are fine buffers against flat-out rejection.
So it seems that end-of-the-road sex can be many things: It's terrible and terrific, sometimes both in the same evening. It's a way to communicate when other channels are closed. And, finally, it's a message that reads “I love you”—but not necessarily happily ever after.
SEX DURING DIVORCE
By Nick Edmunds
I felt skittish and scared and very much like a virgin as my wife led me by the hand to the bedroom of her new apartment. This was our first time together since our marriage had fallen apart seven months ago. And it had been years since either of us had enjoyed any of our lovemaking sessions.
Earlier in the evening, my new girlfriend, Roxanne, had kissed me goodbye and said, “It's okay if you go to bed with your wife. I know you want to.” Her intuition proved correct. Up until now I was not sure whether I wanted to risk making love to my wife— to take the chance of being rejected as a lover as she had rejected the eleven years of our marriage. I was even more afraid to discover what new ways of lovemaking she had learned from new men.