Gwen's eyes were still closed, and she was breathing evenly and deeply, as though she were asleep. But her hand was moving slowly up and down my hard cock, almost absent-mindedly. She knew she could hold me at this level for a long, long time, and she knew how, with only a minor variation, she could make me come in a minute. I wiggled my hips, trying to convince her to give me that release, but she said, "Tell me more. Tell me about when you slept together."
I didn't want to, but I did.
* * *
We stand at the doorways to new lives every day, and sometimes we go in, and sometimes we don't. I don't know what you'd call them: epiphanies, or cusps, perhaps. You have to be ready or ripe when you reach one of those cusps, or you won't enter. Both Merle and I had been at one of those cusps the day I mended the nightshirt, and we crossed that doorway together.
But togetherness is tough work, and there's a new cusp every day, and finally I was -- metaphorically -- alone in the house. The signs were small ones, and if I'd been good enough at reading those signs of ripeness as I was at reading the signs of departure, I might have gone with her. That's the best explanation I can find for the fact that after six months, we had a very decent conversation, and a lot of tears.
"It's not you," she said. "It's me."
"No," I told her, "it's me." We cried a bit.
"I'll always love you, you know," she said. "But I'm not in love with you."
"But I am in love with you," I told her.
"It won't work," she told me.
"Why not?"
"Because of me," she told me. "It's not you, it's me."
And finally, after we'd gone around that a few more times, she asked me if we could still be friends, and because I was young I said yes.
And she took me up on it. We had lunch every week. She told me her problems over salad and entree. I told her about my life, making it up over dessert.
My heart ached when I saw her, though I was trying to be friends, and I tried hard to be sympathetic to her problems, even though I desperately wanted her to leave the thirty-two-year-old advertising account executive who suffered from premature ejaculation. I once told her that if she needed someone to finish her off, I would come over. I was young, and she had the grace to laugh. Perhaps she didn't realize how desperately I meant it.
The lunch dates became monthly and then bimonthly and then it was a year since she'd left me. I took stock and realized that I'd been insane in a clinical sense and started dating other people, drab boring people as it turned out. Then it was a year and a half since she'd left me, and I realized I'd been insane six months ago but I was far better now.
I had just finished a nightly ritual -- punishing exercise followed by a leisurely soak in a bubble bath (yes, that's when I started doing that) -- when someone let him or herself into my apartment. About a dozen people had keys. I wrapped myself in a big terrycloth robe and padded out to the living room to see which of the dozen it was.
Merle was standing there, dripping rain onto my welcome mat. "Hi," she said sadly. "Mind if I come in?"
My heart was in my throat. I suddenly realized that, so far as Merle was concerned, I was asymptotic to sanity. "Not at all," I told her.
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