Slow Hand Read Online Free

later that evening as they lay in bed together.
    “You think everything is like orgasms,” said Paul, who had only been half listening to her account of the raspberry patch. He had been smooching around her body, planting sweet, silly kisses on her elbow, her wrist, licking the place where her waist lowered itself onto her hips.
    “I always think if I wait a minute there’ll be a better one. Sometimes I don’t want to come.”
    “We all think that,” said Paul complacently. “Prolonging the pleasure. It’s why eighteen-year-old boys aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”
    Paul was fifty-two. Much better than an eighteen-year-old, Mary agreed. Although now that she thought about it …
    “I’ve never been to bed with an eighteen-year-old,” she said. “By the time I lost my virginity I was too old for someone eighteen. What were you like then?”
    “Fast,” said Paul. “It didn’t occur to me to try to please a woman. It was me who was pleased just to have one; I didn’t dare take any time for fear she might get away. Hop on, vrooom, hop off. Poor woman.”
    “Poor woman,” Mary agreed, feeling the pleasure of his weight as he slid on top of her, rubbing himself against her inner thigh before pressing inside of her and beginning to move slowly back and forth, finishing at last what had started their day.
    • • •
    Obsessed was too strong a word, but Mary admitted she had spent a lot of time the last few days adding names to her erotic memoir. Partly it was because Paul had fastened on it. Whenever he saw her writing, he tried to look over her shoulder, pretending to believe it was a shopping list. All his insecurities had snugged down into her past. She rather liked the past he gave her, all glamor and carelessness. The real one had been much more painful.
    She, in her turn, had no fear of his past. She shied at his future. She kept herself ready for the day he would announce that being together had become more difficult than being apart.
    She knew that for both of them, these were protection myths, like the Indian legends of creation. You were ready with a cover, a story which would explain how strange and terrible things that could not happen sometimes did.
    “Tim.”
    Her first lover. She had been devastated at his loss. It had never occurred to her that one would go to bed with a man and
not
marry him and live happily ever after. She had. They had not. It had been sex, but had it been erotic? She was too full of trying to please him, her mind poking itself into everything, wondering if it was all right to do this. And what he would think of her if she did that. Never in the few years they were together had she relaxed in bed and listened to him with her skin. But the first man you ever fucked, surely he had to be in your erotic memoir.
    Erotic was not just a hand on your body, or she would have been swept away by the strange man who came up to her at a dinner party, gave an enchanting smile, and reached out and cupped his hands around her breasts. The Masons’ secret handshake, or was he Mr. Magoo? It had been as erotic as watching a nurse plump up a pillow. Erotic wasn’t the motion, or the mechanics, it was what had gone before, even if before was only a brief connection. It was the connection that counted. The mind knew not to be wary and allowed the flesh to have its say.
    • • •
    The phone. It was Paul.
    “Are you busy, or would you like to go on a picnic?” he asked.
    She met him at the town wharf, passing him the picnic basket and taking his hand. She rocked for a moment on the edge of the dock, so that she could say before she stepped into the boat, “If you were the kind of man who looked up a woman’s skirt, you’d notice I don’t have on underpants.”
    She jumped lightly into the boat, dropping safely down amid the piles of slickers, sweaters, boots, and lines.
    “Aha!” he gave her a quick grin, but he was coiling the painter as he talked and she knew better than to