Mike told his friends all about Maria. But, for various reasons, he never mentioned what she told him about Frank Sinatra.
He knew his friends wouldn’t have been interested in stuff like that. They wanted dirt, and no-one told sex stories better than Mike. They listened mutely, hard-ons hidden by crossed legs, to his descriptions, no explicit detail skipped. His stories about Maria were something else, and they were made more special for something Mike never said: that all the while he was seeing her that summer, all the while he was fucking her brains out, he was living with his pregnant fiancée. So a silent tension held every story taut. Imagine having the balls to do what Mike did.
It helped that the guys had seen Maria – they had all been at the barbecue where Mike and Maria had met. It wasn’t that they would have doubted him otherwise. It was more that when Mike talked about her legs, or the crease of her arse cheeks as she walked, or even the careless noises that came from her mouth when she sucked his cock, it didn’t take much imagination to picture it. With Mike’s words as the backdrop, it was as if a film was playing in front of them.
The story Mike told most often was the one about how he and Maria had met. The guys loved it. It went like this: Mike had left them in the garden to dive into the kitchen for beers, and there, alone, was Maria, backside against the stove-top, sipping a tumbler of water. She was tall and slim and tanned and her long dark hair drew the gaze down to a scallop-edged black vest and cropped jeans. She watched Mike approach, and as he opened the fridge door she spoke.
Mike mimicked her voice; its low register, pouring like cream.
“Will you take me home?” she said.
Whenever Mike recounted this scene he paused at this point; some of the guys would surely shake their heads. Not to signal disbelief; more to acknowledge only Mike could be this lucky. The day his girlfriend feels too sick to make the barbecue, he meets Maria.
Maria was an animal who needed satisfaction, that’s all, Mike said. And only Mike, or more specifically Mike’s cock, could give it. His friends imagined her gaze, her sullen eyebrows, her dark pupils absorbing the light of the kitchen, focussing on his crotch. Her words – take me home. Had sexual appetite ever been so blatant?
So he and Maria got out of there, Mike said. Out of the kitchen. Out of the house, into Mike’s car where he smelled her perfume and it reminded him of honeysuckle and then made him wonder if it would hang around. He made his way in lazy zig-zags in the direction of the part of town where Maria said was staying. After a while she said she wasn’t fussed about going home. She was sick of the same four walls – did he ever get like that?
Mike nodded and adjusted himself in his seat because he’d grown a boner the size of a tree branch.
He couldn’t take her back to his own flat, so he circled a little longer. He visited a filling station, pretending he needed to fill up, buying time. Back in the car, Maria told him her name; and that she was from Spain. Her English was fantastic, though. She was here for the summer, a cousin of someone at the barbecue. She pulled strands of her hair as Mike drove along. She didn’t like her cousin much, she said. He was bad-tempered.
Eventually Mike turned into a lay-by he’d used before and, under the halo of a street light, he parked and killed the engine. Maria didn’t question it. The silence was like a frontier between them and the longer it was silent the harder it was to breach. But you could smell her need, Mike said. Eventually Maria reached to turn the radio on, fiddled with the tuning. An old Sinatra song was just starting – Three Coins in the Fountain. Sinatra was all over the radio back then; he’d died that week.
From the tuning dial, Maria’s fingers went straight for Mike’s kneecap, clawing it in a spidery movements. Upwards they went from there, along the seam of his jeans, high enough to discover the shape of his erection.
Above the song she said,“Parece que te alegras de verme.” I think you’re pleased to see me.
Mike looked dead ahead, through the windscreen, as Maria leaned closer. Her lips – soft and slightly sticky – tickled his ear. Her fingers and thumb worked between his legs, harrying at his zip until he felt the pressure ease and fingers around his dick levering it out of his jeans. Maria moved her hand up and down it, quickly, all the time strumming his earlobe with her tongue. Then it turned slow – the hand strokes and the tongue together – the movements of a lover.
“Te gusta eso?” You like that?
Mike’s answer caught in his throat, because at that moment he came, her grip so constricting that he ejaculated in tight spurts. His eyes shut and when he re-opened them his cock lay lifeless, bloated and white in her hand. His cum trailed in diverging slug-like tracks over her knuckles. She leaned down to kiss the weeping tip of his penis, her tongue poking its tiny drowned hole. Then she drew herself back up and sighed.
Three Coins in the Fountain was still playing.
“It’s funny,” she said. “This song.”
“Why?” Mike asked. He began to tuck himself in. The whole car smelled shamefullly of semen.
“You knew his son was kidnapped?”
“Sinatra’s?”
Maria nodded. She was rubbing Mike’s cum into her skin, giving the back of her hand a plastic sheen. “He had to negotiate with the kidnappers.”
“And?”
Maria’s gaze drifted up to consider the grammar of her sentences. “The kidnappers told him to call from different payphones each time. For security. It went on for weeks. Frank called every night, negotiating, negotiating. And then he thought – what if I run out of coins for the phone, right? So he kept some in his pocket, even when his son returned. From then on, Frank never left home without a handful of coins. Stayed that way the rest of his life. Today they buried him with some in his pocket.”
“Huh,” Mike said. “I didn’t know.”
“So now I hear this song, I picture Frank in a fountain, trying to get back his coins for the phone box.” She smiled, a thin gap between her front teeth. “So sad, huh?”
“Crazy,” he said. A crazy, sad story to be thinking of right after she’d wanked him off. Crazy sad, too, he worked out later, that the song only lasted three minutes. That wasn’t a detail he’d share with the guys.
-x-
They arranged to see each other the following evening. Mike was late picking Maria up outside her flat; it had been difficult to get away from his girlfriend. The guys liked details, so Mike told them what Maria was wearing: a mauve linen shirt dress, buttoned to the hemline. As Mike drove them to the same layby as the night before he was thinking how easy it would be to remove. It was a warm night. The thick heat inside the car glued his shirt to his seat. Maria’s collar-bone glowed. They parked in the same spot as the night before and began kissing as soon as he’d pulled up the handbrake. She tasted of coffee and smoke and he wondered how long she’d been waiting for him. Already the car’s windows were clouding; other parked cars nearby were a blur. Maria briefly lifted her mouth off his and said, “I want to fuck.”
Mike swore Maria said it as simply as this. She was that hot for it.
Her tongue returned, restless, to his mouth. After a few seconds she broke away again, sat back in her seat and began to unbutton her dress deliberately, without looking at what she was doing. She was watching Mike instead, concentrating on his expression as she pulled the sides of her dress open to expose her tits.
One of the guys asked Mike what they were like. Her tits. Bigger than you’d think, Mike said. But he was playing to an audience; in truth he’d been disappointed. In the gloom of the car her breasts were discernible by her nipples: round and dark, delicate as doilies.
She wore no bra. She never did, he found out later. He said to the guys that on that night the gap between her tits looked varnished. The guys visualised the perspiration. Mike told them that Maria hesitated, to let him take in the view, then gave him more. She lifted her hips off the car seat, hooked her thumbs inside the waistband of her panties, and drew them down to her knees. Maria took his hand and turned it so its palm faced her. She placed it flat on her skin, above her navel, a little black hole in her body. Her skin was cool and damp and Mike’s hand slid easily down through her black pubes, slick as a lawn at dawn, Mike said. One finger worked its way inside her, a second followed.
Maria sucked in her breath and pushed up against his hand. Her legs swung open, her panties stretched thin as wire between her knees and her arms slung back so her hands met behind her headrest. With her eyes closed, she lifted herself off the seat as Mike’s fingers went in and out and she whimpered to the rhythm of the palm of his hand slapping against her.
The first time he heard this story, one of Mike’s friends asked, “Are all Spanish girls this easy?”
Mike’s car wasn’t big. Sometimes, after the affair with Maria was over, he would be driving the guys along and he would begin to tell them about what he and Maria had done in it and the guys would look around in wonder.
That was the thing about her, Mike said. She was so flexible; she could climb anywhere. He would mime some of their positions for the guys, but it was impossible to replicate without her because she was the limber one. I think she did yoga or something, Mike said, but in any case you should have been there that night.
After Mike had fingered her, she shrugged off her dress, pulled her panties over her boots and climbed over to the driver’s seat. She briefly sat on his lap, with her back against him, before lifting herself fractionally to allow him to unbuckle himself. She licked his neck as she rose further, making a bridge of herself, with her left boot pressed into the recess of the car door; her right on the central console. Her hands gripped his thighs, either side. She was remarkably strong.
When she had risen fully she whispered, “Do you have a condom?”
“No,” Mike said, and hesitated. But he did not stop adjusting his cock and urging himself upwards until he was inside her and she was making a strange, insistent moaning sound until her voice broke and she pleaded with him to cum.
“Pleaded? Jesus,” one friend said.
“She was unbelievable,” Mike said.
-x-
Over the six weeks of that summer Mike and Maria saw each other countless times. It was almost impossible to believe his girlfriend did not suspect, especially when he skipped a couple of ante-natal classes, but nothing was said. Maria and Mike spent a lot of time in his car, finding laybys off remote roads where Maria would pull him out and give him blow-jobs as he stood with his back against the car door. Sometimes she swallowed him; other times he pulled out and came on her neck or her hair. He loved the way she looked up at him when he did that. More than once they fucked against the bonnet of his car, slowing down if traffic approached. They found fields, or parks where they could have sex, half-dressed and oblivious.
They slept together properly only once. That was the evening Maria invited him round to her flat because her cousin was away. She was making Mike tapas – proper tapas. He watched her at the hob. She was happy then, chatting and singing. She wore a plain white t-shirt and a pair of bright green running shorts edged with white piping. The shorts sheathed her legs so perfectly Mike wondered if they had been tailored. Her legs – a radiant brown – looked more solid and more athletic than he’d thought. He wanted to pull those shorts down and bend her over the worktop, and spank –
Maria looked round at that moment, as if she was reading his thoughts, and asked him to stay the night.
There was no question he wouldn’t. He borrowed 20p from Maria and ran out to call his girlfriend from a phone box. He told her he was staying over with one of the guys.
When he returned, the tapas had been abandoned. Maria was already in her narrow bed, naked. She called to him and Mike entered her bedroom. He took off his clothes by the bed, suddenly self-conscious because of the way she looked at his obvious excitement, and squeezed in behind her. He cuddled her and simultaneously felt the coolness of her bottom against his groin and the stomp of her rushing heartbeat through his forearms.
They fucked in slow motion, spooning, her leg lifting up, his cock prodding and poking until it slid deliciously into her. He pulled the covers down so he could watch himself moving in and out of her. He warned her he was coming but they carried on rocking against each other until he was empty.
They dozed this way for an hour or so, until one of them stirred and they began to fuck again, not talking, hardly thinking about it. After the second time, Mike felt sore, but the urge to be inside her body, to feel himself enveloped, never receded.
In the early hours, with the room black, he was excited again.
“Why are you always so hard,” Maria said. The words came out as a long sigh, but even as she was saying it she was pushing back and up against him, making him harder still.
He found his way inside her automatically, but after he had made a few thrusts, Maria reached behind her to pull his painful, rigid cock and out of her and move it until its tip rested against the base of her spine. Then she adjusted herself, stretched upwards until, like a peg slotting into position, his cock pressed against her arsehole. She held him there and began to push against him. Neither of them said anything; it was as if they were embarrassed about this intimacy, but suddenly, and painfully, he was inside her bottom. He could only press in a little bit before he felt himself at the door of another orgasm. He did not pull out.
“The Spanish love it up the arse,” one of Mike’s friends said, later. “What was it like?”
“Imagine pushing your cock into a vacuum tube,” Mike said.
After he had come, he rested his head into Maria’s neck and stayed in that position until morning when he woke and rose to make them coffee. She was still asleep when he returned, asleep in a childlike way that fascinated him: face up, arms above her head, as though she was surrendering. She had not shaved, and a delicate fuzz of dark pubic hair was gathered into half a dozen tiny dark peaks in each armpit.
The guys were horrified by this. But at the time, Mike got another erection.
When she woke, Maria said, “You know nothing about me.”
“So tell me,” Mike said, moving his head above hers. He kissed her.
She sat up a little as he placed her coffee on her bedside table. “My mother worries about me.”
“I’m not surprised.”
Maria laughed. “She says, marry a nice boy, stay close and have children and maybe think of a career after that. I hated that idea. Until now.”
“When do you go back?” Mike asked.
“One week.”
Maria sighed and again raised an arm above her head, that little surrender gesture that exposed her so, and aroused Mike again despite himself.
She said, “You know who you remind me of?”
“Who?”
“My father.”
Mike looked at her.
“Because I love you,” she said. “Is a compliment.”
They guys laughed when they heard Mike tell this final episode.
“The foreign ones are always fucked up,” one said. “And the hot ones are the worst.”
“Fucked up, maybe,” Mike said. “But fun.”
-x-
When Maria returned to Spain she wrote to Mike several times. Each letter began with the small talk of a diary entry. Intense frustrations – with her tutor, with her mother, with her little sister – decorated the first page of each letter. But by the second, her tone had changed. She said she missed Mike and wanted him still. Whatever sexual fulfilment she had had in her life had been with him.
In her first letter Maria explained how aroused she had been whenever she was alone with him; and how her inability to control her own emotions had scared her into silence. She was even wet writing this very letter and she wanted to masturbate but she would have to wait until she could lie in the bath with the tap running because otherwise her mother would hear her moans and would hear his name – Mike, Mike, Mike. Mike re-read those lines repeatedly to understand how she could think like this.
In her second letter Maria explained how she had known he was the one from the moment they met. She had argued with her cousin at the barbecue and asked Mike to take her home simply because there was no-one else and he looked trustworthy. She had a sixth sense about people. She had needed to talk to someone, and Mike had been so kind. It had embarrassed her when she’d started crying, and the way he’d driven around for ages listening to her and they’d ended up in the layby. Eventually she calmed down and when he had kissed her so gently (and she had no idea how that had happened), she knew he was the one she wanted to spend her life with. You just know, she wrote. She did not mention masturbating him, or the story about Sinatra. That must have been their second date.
In another letter Maria wrote that she had held the paper she was writing on and rubbed it against her pussy because it made her feel close to him. On the same page she described how she came with him the night he stayed and the trembling lost feeling that accompanies it. I want you to understand, she wrote. It is as if you are alone at sea and a warm cloud sweeps over the waves and lifts you somewhere new and you are helpless, but happy. You will think me silly for writing this, she wrote. But I had never come before you.
She wrote in the margin:
T
E
Q
U
I
E
R
O
Mike could not recall everything she wrote about, but he was all the more aroused because it allowed him to revisit those incidents anew. She described a field they picnicked in, the dandelions in seed, the cows in the next field and the crown of daisies he made for her as they lay on the blanket. Mike remembered that day, but his recollection was impressionist – small dots of erotic sensations that joined into a nebulous, flexible conviction about events. He remembered her glancing around and saying that only the cows were looking. And then the way she slipped her top over her head and her breasts moved with a rubbery vibration. How she turned to kneel in front of him; lowering her daisy-crowned head to the blanket, flicking up her dress so it gathered, crumpled, in the small of her back, and taking her thumbs into the waistband of her panties, tugging them down. Imprinted into his memory: the sudden, unexpected paleness of her bottom, goosefleshing in the breeze, the black cleft between them, the angry red line traversing her lower back that mapped where the elastic of her panties had been. Her hands clawing at her cheeks, presenting the most intimate, darkest part of her.
The story he told his friends was based on this. His story was about her hunger and her need to expose herself within sight of passers-by. Her version was more intimate, more erotic. I remember the way we fucked, she wrote. The way you mounted me with your cock, the way you pressed me down; we mated like animals in the field.
She declared in writing the promises they had spoken to one another. That she would return soon and it would be easier. Often, over the final pages of her letters she drew the rest of their lives together: their jobs, the children she had named. Three of them.
But then back to the rawness of her need. She described how it felt to fuck him that night in her bedroom. How their bodies touched everywhere and nowhere because they were lovers but strangers and she had never felt sure that this was the right thing. How could one person give themselves like that? The noise he made when he came – snorting like a stallion, she told him. She described how their bodies were varnished with sweat, and that expression made him remember her body and her movements. He would use that phrase when he told their story.
At the bottom of one page she wrote in writing so different it looked like an afterthought: I like your cock where you put it, in my unnatural place, in my dirty place, and if I was alone, if my mother was not in the room with me, I would come right now, just telling you this.
In every letter she noted the days until the next year when she might see him again. She had lost weight, she wrote, like a tree in winter. She masturbated about him every day; she used two fingers, then three when she needed to feel it was his cock in her.
Mike drank in her letters, re-reading them as soon as he’d finished. But he never replied, initially because he was scared by the depth of Maria’s feelings and a fear she might return, then that the correspondence might be discovered. Maria had written to him at his home so he got into the habit of rising early to check the post before his girlfriend woke. After he’d received three letters in one week he went so far as to throw them in the bin. Hours later he dug them back out. It was inexplicable.
Later he thought it out until it made sense. It was related to the way Maria described their time together. She knew that the moments between them were richer than his recollections. His memories were crude, scaffolded by suppositions and embellishments. Her letters offered the truer version of events. One that he hadn’t appreciated at the time, but could now be preserved forever, if he wished.
So he hid the letters in a zipped pocket of his jacket. Every so often he would leave the house on his own, solely to drive to their layby and re-read them and feel a painful arousal that he had to release.
Initially the letters were also a source for his stories about Maria. Her recollection and sexual observations were intimate and sensous and Mike borrowed her language to enrich his tales. But even as he told the guys those stories, he wished he could paint Maria more fully than those sexual sketches allowed. He wanted to quote from her descriptions of her mother and her sister; about her university pressures, about her declarations of love.
But the guys wanted the hot stuff only: what it felt like to take her up the arse repeatedly, the time she blew him and he came along the line of the parting of her hair. Who might have seen them fuck. His stories became the starting point for further speculation and suggested plot-lines. Maybe she was fucking her cousin too – did Mike ever think of that, could it have happened? She probably wanted to do both of them.
Each time Mike retold his own stories, they were slightly more diluted, so cluttered with her adjectives and sentiment that their perspective wavered. Her voice invaded his stories. He found himself describing his penis as she had seen it, how it flowered in her hand, as thick as her wrist. The thickest she’d seen, she’d written.
One of the guys looked at Mike and said: “What, thicker than her dad’s?” They laughed.
Inevitably the stories about Maria died out. Mike sensed that the guys were beginning to doubt what had happened with this Spanish girl; that their fantasies about her were no more absurd than his. They didn’t say his stories were bullshit, but only because they were friends.
That was the irony. It had happened. They’d seen her. Her letters proved it. But he could not bring them out now, with things in a delicate condition; the marriage approaching, the baby on the way. And what would it be worth? He and Maria knew the truth, did it matter if anyone else did? For the moment he would keep the letters hidden, and that was okay. It was all the comfort he needed: to be able to read them, to return to a world inhabited by Maria, to be reassured that the letters were there in his jacket, always within reach, never to be taken away, just in case.
