elisabeth

WOMEN 64
I was part of a crew of three she hired to help do a one-mile move to her new home in Brooklyn. The energy was pleasant, and i liked her immediately. At one point she and i were getting ready to take apart her son's yellow plastic car-bed. She was way too big for it, but laid back with a sigh, smiling at me. Attraction literally jolted me. During lunch break, she and i ate alone at her old apartment. We sat on the kitchen floor, our extremities brushing. At the end of the move, one of the other guys asked her out. He was a bit of a jerk, so i let him have his failed moment. When the others were gone, i offered to help her get settled. After fifteen minutes or so, she wanted to walk to a park. It was a beautiful spring day, and the first two parks we found (neighborhood gardens, really) were locked. We decided to climb the ten-foot wall of the second one. Once inside, we explored and found a spot to lie down. My head was against her side, and for the next couple hours, lazing in the sun, we talked and let our hands absent-mindedly wander. So sweetly beautiful. When we were finally interrupted by a group who had a key, we strolled back to her place. With the setting sun streaming through the living room blinds, she lay down on her stomach on a bare mattress, her contented eyes closed. I undressed her and ran my long hair slowly up and down her, then gently blew on her skin everywhere, and placed lingering baby kisses all over her back and flanks. She had such soft skin, with one of the most kissable tuchuses i'd ever encountered. Darkness now around us, i took off my clothes and lay down. We slowly intertwined, gently kissing. She was slender, shorter than average, with thin, very fine hair and a beautiful non-athletic body. Her breasts had obviously gone through motherhood (i recalled a comedienne's joke about post-weaning breasts looking like empty socks). It was my first adult experience with such breasts. Would i have preferred the non-droopy version? Sure. But i quickly forgot about it. With her son at his dad's, she invited me to stay the night. I wanted to shower, but the water wasn’t connected. We had sweated together during the day, and our unwashed bodies clung together through the night. Looking over at one point, she asked me to stay perfectly still. She said i looked like an angel. In the morning as we awoke, i gently placed her hand on my erection. She grasped me and began kissing my chest, then lay her head on my stomach. I expected her to just look at me, but after one or two light kisses, her mouth started to envelop me. For a few microseconds as i realized things might be going too quickly (and also remembering how overdue for a shower i was), i thought of stopping her. But the beauty of our togetherness had me in its spell, and her exquisite mouth took me in. She lovingly pleasured me…i was confident i wouldn’t come, and after a few minutes she came up for some deep kissing. She was soon off to school (she was a therapist working on an advanced degree). At her place a couple nights later, i told her about Vanessa, and that it might be wise to slow things down. We spent a sweet night together, with underwear and just a little kissing. Over the next month, i realized that i hadn’t been fully aware of how in love with Vanessa i was. My affection and respect for Elisabeth grew. She had survived a lot. Not only a ridiculously malicious divorce, but a debilitating illness that had wasted away at her for a year. But i sensed that her affections weren’t about to displace Vanessa (sadly realizing that my awareness of how long a round trip to her took, faintly paralleled Vanessa's no longer wanting to deal with visiting me in JC). Eventually Elisabeth broke contact, saying that she didn’t want to be the newest link in a chain of unbalanced love. She reappeared a few months later. I told her that Vanessa and i had broken off our half-romance, but that i was still very much in love. Elisabeth and i began sharing romance again. After a month or so, she cut it off again when i told her i wasn’t thinking about a future with her. This couldn’t have been much of a revelation, but something in my frankness must have broken something in her, despite her earlier protests of only wanting whatever i had to offer. In that month, there was one night that captured the beauty of our first afternoon. The first and only time she came to visit me in Jersey, she arrived at the door uncharacteristically wearing makeup. I was a little turned off, but she was in such good spirits i didn’t mention it. We came together that night in slow, profound embraces. I was still careful to stop just short of penetration. So many moments i held my rigid self against her warm, yielding sex…it was so mind-blowing that i can’t be sure there wasn’t even a little shallow penetration. During one of these moments, i was above her and looked down…and words will fail to describe how intensely she radiated beauty and openness. In that moment, i knew that there had never been a more beautiful human being. She later told me that every minutest physical movement i made that night was profound and perfect. In the weeks and months to come, i faintly regretted not penetrating her that night. I don't doubt that she would have received me with mindless happiness. We stayed in contact after our second romantic break, and had some nice moments together, particularly one afternoon when we chatted as i bathed in her tub while eating Chinese. I greeted her that day with a long embrace, during which my lips brushed against the base of her neck, and my head swam. My desire for her had only grown with time, so i knew that we needed to take another break from each other, as i wasn’t going to stop wanting her anytime soon. We stayed in distant contact for about a year. During that time, she sent me a photo of herself one day, naked with a big red "A" painted on her stomach. She'd had an abortion. I felt miserable for her, and for myself, that she had been in the arms of some idiot when she should have been with me. A couple months later, i wrote to her in a moment of loneliness. She told me to come to her. We spent the night together. I intended no sexuality, but that intent didn't survive her soft kisses. On that sad, lonely night, her loving made me a little more human. But soon after, she complained about the inconsistency of my behavior. I retreated again. Months later we had another sexual encounter, unexpected and less inhibited, pleasuring each other orally on her kitchen counter, the first such contact since our very first night. That night, she probably pleasured me longer orally than any woman ever had. It was so wonderful, and i wanted more, but a part of me knew i probably could never be what she wanted, and i died inside at the thought of being destructive with her. I read with her a play i'd written, in which one of the characters was based on her. It was a beautiful experience, and we held each other afterward. I always had hope that she would figure out how to use my love in her life, but when she finally got engaged to be re-married, i offered to leave her life for good. I hadn't been able to bring myself to tell her that deep down, i felt that anything was possible…that even though it had been my intuition that we weren’t meant to be any kind of life partners, as time wore on i became less sure of that. Years later, she told me that on our first night she felt she had found her "ever-after", the man who would be all the things her husband had failed to be. I found her words both moving and heart-rending (cue Dylan's "It Ain't Me, Babe"?). Because she was a single mother, i was always less impulsive with her than i otherwise would have been (something she was aware of and didn't like). I wanted to be a loving part of her life forever, but we just couldn’t figure out how to make it work.