Tom — Rosemary Cummings

Writing to you is a bad idea. It may even be criminal.

No, the writing itself isn't criminal, but what we did might be. If it is, this letter incriminates me. But I have to write to you, even if I shred these pages when I’m through. It's this thing I'm doing: every lover gets a letter.

Not that I expect you to understand. Many years and many lovers stand between you and that future where fucking reveals itself to be essentially recursive, an endless slide through a wet tunnel that returns you always to yourself. You can pass through with your eyes closed, many people do, or you might devise a way to open them. My way is these letters. Every one—even those unsent, like this one—is a line cast out.

You wouldn’t get that, but let me say something you would: STOP DRIVING LIKE A FUCKING MANIAC. Really, Tom, you must have been doing 75 that first time I saw you, and you're probably hauling ass down the hill as I write this. From one lead foot to another, you can’t drive like that on these mountain roads. It's only a matter of time before someone gets hurt. When you shot past me on that sharp curve yesterday, your slipstream nearly toppled me in the dirt of the shoulder. Even once I reached my car by the trailhead, I was still trembling, shot through with adrenaline, fear distilled into anger.

I cooled down on the drive back, but when I saw that same smoke-colored Audi parked in the driveway of the cabin across from mine, I felt my dander rise again. It’s not really mine, of course, just on loan till Monday. The place belongs to my boss’s uncle, who is, I gather, the owner of several infrequently used vacation houses. Most of the towels in the linen closet still have tags on them, and the pristine woodsy decor has all the warmth of a museum tableau.

Not that I’m complaining. I’m glad to get out of town. Use of the cabin is part-reward, part-peace offering. The mid-week lunch server had been out for two weeks on a backpacking trip, and then the guy covering her suffered some strange accident that landed him in the hospital with three cracked ribs and a broken foot. He won’t say what happened. Not that it matters. The part that matters is that I worked seven straight days, double-shifts all but one. At the start of the run I thought the non-stop work would be good for me. I’d been restless for a few weeks, mostly solitary when I wasn’t at the restaurant. Working around the clock would put cash in my pocket and keep me too exhausted to indulge my loneliness. But by the end of the stretch, I was a wreck—butterfingered, bumbling, brusque with customers.

My boss and I had it out on day six—big screaming match in the office in the middle of dinner rush. Our nerves were shot. We’d never fought before and didn’t know how. He got personal, a baby viper emptying his venom sac. It shook me, and he could tell. After close, we patched things up over a bottle of wine and a shared American Spirit. Then he got my next couple of shifts covered and called in a favor—use of his uncle’s cabin for the weekend.

Not that I expect you to care, Tom. I guess I’m just trying to explain why my temper was so short, why you got to me the way you did. I thought I was beyond this kind of pettiness. But I wasn't yesterday. I saw your car and heard the stuttering synths of some terrible trap beat from inside your condo, and I spurned you with gusto. All the fury that had welled up in me during the week flowed freely at last toward a righteous terminal. You, who I sussed out immediately—some cocky kid with a massive sense of entitlement, plus the keys to Daddy's sports car and ski cabin. You scared me back on the road, and now here you were, to violate my solitude and ruin my little retreat.

It didn’t help that the two cabins faced each other across the gravel driveway. At first I loved the wraparound floor-to-ceiling windows, the spacious pine deck that looked out over the treetops to the craggy white-peaked mountains in the north and the shimmering bowl of blue lake in the west. I scarcely noticed your cabin then, the dark and silent twin.

But yesterday, I cursed those windows. There’d be no privacy. No seclusion. I wanted to throw open the sliding door to the crisp mountain air, but there was the dumb, relentless drum machine thuddudda-THWAK-thuddudda-THWAK. I wanted to take my book out on the deck, but there you were, uncovering the hot tub on yours. (And why does mine have no tub, Tom? These twins must be fraternal, with yours the better looking one.)

But the sight of you there—well, I won’t deny it. It stopped me in my tracks. I saw your back first, broad and brown, each muscle carved with the precision of an artist or anatomist: meaty mirror triangles of trapezius reflected across your spine, twin bulges below the armpits like little lemons slung in stockings, thick “V” at low back punctuated on either side by two dimples just above the waistband of your shorts. Muscle and sinew flexed-stretched-shifted in concert as you bent for the cover, lifted it. Like a lesson in kinesiology that showed precisely how muscles move the torso. I thought of some cunningly-made piece of machinery, like the elegant inside of a Swiss watch. The body is a machine that winds up itself.

How to describe you without waxing lyrical? My reaction, perhaps? My eyes went to your body like an urge. I don’t mean simply that I had an urge to look at you. This was atavistic, elemental, as if the eyeballs themselves had renounced seeing and given themselves over to enacting the definition of the word “urge.” (So much for not waxing lyrical.) Before I realized it, my lips were parting, corners lifting. Alert, hungry mouth. Predator’s eyes. Mine was the face of the cat stalking birds in the courtyard. I felt like an animal.

You turned: a strong-jawed, dark-haired boy, your front every bit as hewn as your back. My mouth kept stretching wide, involuntary smile shading toward chagrin. I snapped away before our eyes could meet but not before I saw your expression—suavely arrogant. Thank god for that. It returned me to hating you. You looked exactly like the rich punk I’d pegged you for.

Maybe you noticed that I left then. I went to the market in town. I planned to get provisions for the next few days, something special to cook for dinner, but I arrived at the market suddenly ravenous. I ordered a tri-tip sandwich from the deli counter, bought a can of beer, and sat at a table out back, shivering in the icy shade of the mountain pines.

I was alone until a couple emerged from inside with their own late lunch. They seemed to be about my age, the woman flushed and puffing the thin air. The man was tall, with light hair and eyes, handsome but gone a little soft. Not that that bothers me. He had a spreading, ready smile, many for his companion, just one for me by way of polite acknowledgement. I thought that if he were alone, I probably would have looked in his eyes, showed teeth when I returned the smile. We might have exchanged a few words then, feeling out any flicker of connection, stoking it through repartee. Perhaps we would have come to desire.

Most attraction works this way, by parlay. It’s a kind of collaboration, an achievement of mutual effort and inquiry. It develops gradually and without violence, giving you time to track it, name it, consider uses for it. It’s slow chemistry, a little sweetness between two people fermenting finally into intoxication.

But when I saw you on the deck, the desire I fell under was something else entirely, a sensation that seized me through no effort of my own, in spite of me even. That desire was the quick chemistry of combustion—the greedy, instant combining of particles that destroys self and awareness with it. Everything else burned away, it was only your body and that urge.

What inspires this kind of desire? I’ve come under its scorch only a handful of times in my three decades. A few come flooding back to me now: a samba guitar player with dusky skin shining against his turquoise t-shirt, the girl standing opposite my seat on a crowded bus whose arm reaching for the handrail released a surprising soap-and-water musk and exposed a slice of abdomen crossed by a trail of fine hair. Is it the bodies and their chemistry? Those wily pheromones, which in your case must have flown over the deck rail on the mountain breeze along with the trap beat?

You weren’t alone when I returned: rowdy laughter, shouts heard over the music, and a soft-top Jeep parked next to your car in the driveway. It embarrasses me to admit this, but once inside my cabin, some impulse stilled my fingers on the light switch. I could hear your voices, smell the burning coals of a grill as I unloaded my groceries in the dark. I opened another beer and sat on the sofa.

There was nothing to do but listen to you and your buddies razz each other and bullshit about girls. I counted four of you out there, in and out of the hot tub, drinking beers, manning the grill. The others were as young and lean as you are, but none was as beautiful. The talk turned to how you, Tom, bold and insouciant, cut class to get up to the cabin early. How Coach was livid but covered for you so you could still participate in the meet tomorrow. My smug little smile spread in the shadows. I’d been so right about you—the rich bad boy big man on campus, star swimmer poised to break the state record in the 200 meter fly.

I remembered your kind from my own high school days. It’s not that I ever begrudged the jocks their athleticism or even their popularity. Everyone, myself included, expected and excused the aggro caricature of masculinity that is the male high school athlete’s right of passage. It was the lack of appreciation for the carte blanche you’d been given that pissed me off. Back then I was bookish and sensitive, without the years of experience that scrubbed me of most of my shyness and uncertainty. But I carried the secret of constant, desperate horniness. Other girls had discovered sex as social currency, which they used cunningly for advancement, but I was certain I couldn’t manage this kind of calculation. My lust was too outsized, unpredictable. It made demands of me like a chemical addiction or a demon. It had me sweating out my sheets at night and sitting spread eagle under the bathtub faucet for hours while my brother pounded on the bathroom door. It wasn’t until I was a senior and an older man made me cum with his mouth for the first time that I began to see my sexuality as something other than a liability.

But that’s a story for another letter, Tom. I realize as I write this that the reason that I hated the jocks was because I envied their freedom. They were the only ones then who could fuck with impunity, following the roving aim of their lust without a thought for the implications of indulging it. I see from your conversation last night that little has changed in this regard. Lexi’s mouth, Ashley's ass, Megan’s tits—all were reviewed in detail, ranked and rated with the prosaic appraisal of a Yelp review. I rolled my eyes in the dark, but in truth I was also a little amused—all the more so when the stocky one of your friends complained about how fucking horny he’d been all week and how he couldn’t wait until the meet was over so he could finally get his balls sucked.

I laughed along with you at that. But what you said next surprised me: “Coach is so full of shit.” You were so snide, leaning against the railing on one elbow like a little aristocrat. I watched your friends glance at one another, trying to figure how to play this. Did you enjoy their discomfort as much as you seemed to? He of the lonely balls was clearly angry but could not bring himself to challenge you outright. The ruddy-faced one was more diplomatic, pointing out that lots of serious athletes refrain from cuming before a big event to maintain focus and energy. You cracked another beer and said, “Yeah, and I still think it’s bullshit.”

Lonely balls couldn’t resist now. I was rapt. “All the rest of us are doing it. Why the fuck wouldn’t you just try it, if it could make you even just a little better tomorrow?”

“Hey, Kransky,” you said, “why don’t you worry about your event and let me worry about mine.” You spoke through a sneering smile, plainly meant to enrage him. He was out of the hot tub, sputtering.

“Always this shit with you, dude. It’s why you’re not team captain, you—” Before he could go on, the ruddy boy stilled him with an arm around his shoulders and made the peace. You all have your roles, don’t you? Ruddy lead Kransky inside, leaving you alone on the deck with the sandy-haired boy who’d been silent through this whole confrontation. He came to stand beside you and spoke so quietly I could not hear what he said. What did he say to draw out that smile with no hint of mockery? It was the first time I’d seen such an expression on your face, and it made you look kind and so very, very young. When I saw that little boy look, I felt suddenly ashamed. Here I was, sitting in a dark room, spying on a couple of high school kids, passing judgement to hide my patent fascination. It was prurient, pervy, pathetic. I was sorry then and slunk to the bedroom, feeling like a dirty old lady.

I woke early this morning, packed a backpack, and left to hike the long loop at the ridge. I’d planned to do it all along, but the effort of the climb took on a welcome flavor of penance after last night. I hiked until I’d mostly forgotten you, until I’d sweated out the shame. When I reached the summit, the view of the valley below made my petty voyeurism seem altogether insignificant.

I returned to a flurry of activity at the cabins. You and the other boys were yelling to one another and loading the cars—heading out to your meet, I assumed. I didn’t look at you but walked from my car up to the mudroom stairs with what I hoped passed for dignity. A momentary lull in your chatter told me that you’d seen me, and I imagined you and the others conveying your assessment by look and gesture. That’s when I understood that I’d passed last night in darkness and resentment because I was afraid of the unkindness of your judgement or, worse, that I wouldn’t merit a ranking at all. What a strange thing, Tom—to fear disregard as much as the gaze itself.

It’d been the same back when I was in high school but much worse because there was so much about looking that I didn’t understand. I’m older now, which I thought might place me beyond the pale of your consideration, but I’ve also glimpsed the diversity of desire and discovered how I, too, am possessed of a gaze, one that looks and sees. One that hungers, as it did when I saw you for the first time yesterday.

These are complicated concepts, Tom, and I wanted to be free of them. I rinsed them away with the trail dust, relieved to hear the hum of engines, the crunch of tires on gravel, and the retreating throb of bass when I turned off the water in the shower. When I saw that your cabin was still and silent, I dropped my towel there in the great room. I stretched a little in the nude, rubbed some lotion on my skin. Then I took my book outside, ready to resume the private weekend I’d planned for myself.

How long did I lay there? I read a chapter, maybe two. Birds were chirping. My eyelids grew heavy in the sun. The muscles of my legs felt pleasantly dense from the two days of hiking, like the memory of effort was coiled there. (Is that lactic acid? I figure a jock should know.) My body sunk into the green cushion of the lounge chair, the book dropped to my belly. I dozed.

I opened my eyes on a dream—searing brightness, blinding white shading to yellow. And you, Tom, standing at the railing of your deck. You are staring at me with an intensity I cannot figure. Your eyes are focused but your face is expressionless—no sneer or smirk, your mouth is nearly slack. I feel no danger in the look.

Slowly, moving like someone in a trance, you tug off your t-shirt. As it comes up over your head I read the words S— High School Swim on the front. Your tan torso, hewn as a sculpture, stirs me. A flutter begins in my belly. My skin comes alive to the air, it reads the texture of the linen cushion along my backside. My nipples stiffen. My body tells me I’m not dreaming at all.

You knew to take your shirt off, Tom, to invite my looking. But how? How did you know it would affect me? I pushed myself up in my seat to see you better. My book tumbled to the deck. My eyes rode the ripples of your abdomen along the little path of hair. My fingertips, eager to touch, dented the cushion.

Your jaw pulsed, the muscles of your chest and arms flexed as you gripped the railing. I moved you, too. But what was it— the sight of my naked body or my seeing yours? You wanted me to see, it seemed, because you stepped back from the railing and slid your shorts down over your narrow hips. Your freed cock bobbed up hard and pink from a thicket of dark hair banded on either side the paler skin that your speedo always shields from the sun.

I couldn't touch you, so I touched myself instead. I used my eager fingers to split my thighs for you. You squeezed your hand around the base of your erection, then drew the fist slowly up the shaft. My mouth envied that hand, Tom. You repeated the gesture, so I fed my mouth two fingers. You shuddered when I did it, you understood. I reached those fingers between my legs and, with the wet V inverted, spread the lips of my pussy for you. Your face contorted with desire but your eyes stayed wide, fixed on my cunt—you wanted to see.

Your strokes grew quicker, shorter up and down your cock. There was nothing to do but follow your lead, pet the soft lips, spread the slick arousal out from my wet center. I squeezed my breasts, cupping from below as if to offer them to you, and you mirrored this movement, fingering your square pecs with their little brown nipples. Until that moment I had delayed the gratification of touching my clitoris directly, but the sweetness of your instinctive mimicry, the dancing muscles in your working arm brought my fingers to the swollen nub.

The birds were still twittering in the treetops when you started panting. I sensed you getting ahead of me, Tom, so I released my breasts and slipped two fingers inside the wet tunnel of my pussy. Again I imagined my fingers to be your cock, and I welcomed them with a squeeze of those deep internal muscles. The contraction advanced my pleasure but not quick enough. Your fist moved so fast, the sight of me penetrating myself pushed you over the edge. You came beautifully, Tom, even if it was before I was ready. The strong muscles of your stomach tensed and trembled, and you let out a bark of release as the first spurt of cum arced high and splashed the deck. Your eyes squeezed shut as the semen drained from you in spasms.

There was so much cum, Tom. I wondered if you had been observing Coach's pre-game abstinence strategy after all. That abundance aroused me. I kept touching myself until we heard it—the unmistakable slam of a car door below. You turned an ear toward your cabin, listening. When you stepped into your shorts I scrambled to cover myself but I had left my towel inside and had nothing but a paperback to hide behind.

I stood, ready to bolt, but you halted me with your hand. Why was a boy's outstretched palm and a pleading look enough to stop me? I'm not sure. I'd lost my senses. What made you grin, Tom? Was it my compliance or my recklessness?

You stepped quickly inside and met the door just as it swung open—not on one of your teammates or your father like I'd feared—but on a girl. She barely had a foot on the threshold before you grabbed her and pulled her mouth to yours. She was an eager little thing who coiled her legs around your waist when you lifted her. You carried her with ease across the room and pressed her back against the window. I could see the strawberry blonde curling iron waves flattened against the glass. She writhed in your arms, you bit at her neck. And then you lifted your eyes to mine through the window.

You were a very dirty boy, Tom, peeling off her tank top, pushing her to her knees. When she pulled down your shorts—god love the young—your cock sprang up to meet her lips every bit as hard as it had been minutes before. As she worked you with her mouth, you watched me. You looked away only once, when the girl stopped sucking mid-shaft to gaze up at you with her mouth parted around your cock. You grabbed her roughly by the back of the head and dove your dick to the back of her throat, an assault she seemed to expect and handled expertly.

As you fucked her mouth and stared at me, I figured the situation. You hadn't been abstaining before the meet at all. You'd been saving your cum for one big, nerve-steadying release, which the girl had come to administer. Or, hell, maybe you hadn't saved anything and simply produced such copious volumes as a matter of course. In any case, you'd arranged to meet her here before you were to compete, but you’d lost control and spilled your semen early. For me. That’s when I realized that I knew what you wanted, Tom. I wanted it, too, and in that moment want edged out trepidation.

I reached for my wet pussy, and you shuddered with pleasure. When you let loose a moan, the girl glanced up again and nearly caught you looking at me. Clever Tom, you yanked her to her feet and bent her over the arm of your couch, pulling down her cut-offs, pressing her face against the leather. What a body that one had—small, pert tits, plump ass and thighs, all peaches and cream. I could see why you picked her. The last of her baby fat gave the impression of ripening fruit. Pneumatic, the word Huxley used for female bodies in Brave New World, a book you probably just finished reading in English class.

My body has lost that particular plushness, though I can remember the full-but-firm feel of young flesh. If I wasn’t so turned on by the look of you two and the fact that you continued to stare at me even as you plunged into her from behind, I might have been troubled by vanity and criminality both. But your eyes riveted me as I pressed my clit, and I lifted a leg up onto the lounge chair to show you. When I pushed my fingers inside my pussy this time, and I added a third digit for us both. You dug your fingernails into your partner’s round hips. I could feel your thrusts. The furious flexing of your pale buttocks hollowed that delicious divot on the side of the muscle and conducted me to come.

I nearly toppled over from the force of it, I know you saw. My orgasm unlocked yours. I watched your mouth wide, lips curling back, eyes finally shut in surrender. Your pink cock withdrew to jettison that first rope of cum across the girl’s arcing spine. But I couldn't linger. The sweat on my skin was already cooling. I knew that any second the girl would turn to look at you with some mixture of triumph and adoration. And when she did, she’d see me.

You couldn’t have been surprised to find me gone before it was all over. I don’t think she saw me, but I guess you’d know. When I think about that, and about how young you kids are (how old are you, Tom?) that shameful feeling swells in me again. But it does nothing to quiet the lust that's drawn my hand between my legs as I sit here writing. Even though I’m sure you’re still a punk, I can’t help but feel a tenderness toward you, too. I hope you had the the decency to make the redhead cum before you raced down the mountain to your meet. I hope you didn’t drive too fast. I hope you placed first in your event and broke the record like everyone predicted you would.

Mostly, though, I hope I remember every word of this letter long after I destroy it.

Your dirty old lady,