Hannah picked up the envelope that she had left on the hall table the night before. Within were two letters but one had set her thoughts racing more than the other.
She already knew that her housekeepers for the holiday home that she owned on the northern coast of Spain, west of San Sebastian, were leaving. The agents that managed the property and dealt with holiday lettings of parts of the rambling house had told her so and that they had found someone that they could recommend to replace loyal servants.
The script of Helena was only too familiar. To receive a letter was not, but the woman wished to say goodbye and to express some pleasure for having lived in a small, detached house set within the grounds of ‘Quinta Virgia’ for nearly four years. They were moving on to be nearer their daughter, and also to where their son Manolo was based. His career in the Spanish Army seemed to be flourishing – ‘iba muy bien’ was how she had written it.
She believed every word that she had seen written about Manolo, his over-familiarity when she had first met him soon becoming the actions of a lustful and accomplished lover, his appetite for her, a woman many years older, seemingly unquenchable. He had called her ‘mi Inglesa’ and ‘mi belleza’ and his words and ways of loving had taken her out of her only too guarded world. Now, as then, she felt that her life would never be the same again.
The envelope and its letters were taken into the kitchen where she would eat a light breakfast and read again what Manolo had scrawled on paper similar to that used by Helena. She shivered as she recalled the intensity of their affair. Manolo was a young man of few words but what had been said to seduce her, what he had done, had not provoked her into seeking an explanation, not a single word, although he had offered it soon enough. She had sought closure to times of torment following Tom’s death and she had found it in Manolo’s arms and the words that he had used to seduce her concession to him.
She wondered if Helena knew that he too had written to her before the envelope was sealed. And now, to see and read his letter brought to mind all that she had shared with him during one night in particular.
Amante, it is not easy to realise that I may never see you again and be so close to you. I carry so many memories of our times together and that I will not know of with anyone else. That is what our loving times have come to mean for me. I hope you will keep a place for those memories of us in your mind and heart too. From Manolo, ‘my special one’ as you used to tell me.
♥
She was there too, now, possessed by memories of the young man who had become her lover. She read the letter over and over again and only a few of his words took hold in her.
I carry so many memories of our times together and that I will not know of with anyone else.
He had claimed the body and attention of a woman much older than he was; she had succumbed to a young man’s advances and evident lust for her. The mayhem in her life following Tom’s death had taken its toll on her. She was slimmer than before that moment in her life and over the following months, which turned into a year and then two, she had managed her weight.
Now, she was slimmer and shapelier; her face with angular beauty, some said, and it was long and high-cheeked. It had not changed and was still framed by her ash-blonde hair, parted in the middle and falling down each side of her face. Her tummy was flatter and had its creases but that had not put Manolo off; just as her slender hips and long legs leant her a grace of movement that Tom had been so fond of seeing. And then it was how her breasts shaped the sun tops that she chose to wear on her days at Quinta Virgia and when the weather allowed it. On such days she would stand at her easel and paint and not be disturbed.
It was on such a day, when she was painting the view from the orchard and out over the town’s rooftops below her vantage point, that Manolo had first claimed her, the sight of her wearing a figure-hugging blouse, the tails knotted at her tummy and worn with a short hemmed and frilly edged skirt, the sight of which had drawn him to her.
She had deliberately chosen not to know better and surrender to his advances, her willingness to do so and what they had then pursued through the remaining days of her holiday soon confirmed that she was ready to move on.
Of all that she had pursued with Manolo she never spoke, but the memories of those times and others that followed on a short break some months later had set a pattern that she had finally resolved to break. There had been no future in it but that did not prevent her from missing what she had discovered with him.
The letter, brief as it was, brought those times flooding back into her only too receptive mind.
♥
“I am interrupting you in your work, señora,” he said even as Manolo stood close by her side and admired the painting that was nearing completion and was of the view that they both knew so well.
She had said farewell to members of her family who had holidayed in the house before here arrival, some days ago, but now she was alone and could paint. She had caught a glimpse of the young man over the days since her arrival and remained disconcerted that the young man had turned her head on first sight. It had only gotten worse, the feelings of uncommon lust that had welled up inside of her when the grandchildren had played a prank on him and pushed Manolo into the pool.
Sodden, he had hoisted himself out of the pool and she had felt a shiver of longing course through her tummy. She had seen how his clothes clung to a lean and muscled physique. With that came the disquieting intensity of his unflinching gaze upon her and what she soon knew lay behind it.
He wanted her.
She had carried the image of Manolo’s glistening skin and the wonder of him for every hour that passed and now she was alone with him in the orchard and wondering how to meet his overtly appraising and wondering g stare upon her. Just how was she to deal with a sudden, palpable, sense of bewilderment that she felt and aroused by a look upon her that belonged in her past?
“I thought so then,” she muttered. That look of his upon her had been disquieting, but she had also felt uncommonly flattered to know what lay behind it, a young man’s longing for a woman of her age and with the years slowly taking their toll on a curvy, not voluptuous, figure. “You loved those doubts away and now, here I am, thinking of you.”
The dogs had been the first to announce his arrival, growling then barking as Manolo had drawn near. The young man had been seen wearing a pair of shorts and a T-shirt that he seemed to have outgrown, or his military regime had made too tight for his toned physique. Maybe that was all a part of the game…to have her look at him and wonder…what next?
Manolo had come to stand decidedly close and admired her work, glancing at it but not as intently as he had done in taking her in. ‘Is that the hombre that you see, señora?’
She had nodded, feeling unsettled by his closeness and the brush of his arm to her bare skin as she held the picture up for him to look at. “I have drawn the man I see…good looking…a little arrogant in his ways…but I suppose that there are women…or your girlfriends…who like that in you?’
‘But you don’t?’
‘I didn’t say that, Manolo.’
She now drifted into a daydream as the memories rushed in quickly…
‘That is something…a start,’ he murmurs, his breath warm on her cheek.
‘Yes, a start, “ she answers with a sigh, moving to brush down the hem of her skirt as the warm breeze catches it. She feels she’s made a mistake in choosing what to wear for what she had thought to be an entirely unremarkable afternoon of being out in the sun and painting; the hours to be spent getting accustomed to being alone, again, here in her ‘home away from home’.
She closed the folder and put it down on the artist’s chair. She then pulled free the scarf that held her straw hat in place and pushed it back over her shock of short blonde hair, already bleached fairer by the sun when she lazed by the pool or from her walks with the dogs. She tanned easily, the faintest outline of her bikini to be seen on her body when she showered.
“What do you mean by that, it is a start?” he breathes out slowly, standing closer, still, until their shoulders touched. She sought to move away from him, but Manolo’s arm encircled her waist and caressed the soft roll of flesh at her waist. She shivered, seeking to stop its progress but, with their fingers entwined, he drew them to her breast and cupped it. “Could it be this…what we need from each other now, you beautiful woman?”
She felt the cramps of longing in her belly that his impetuous touches had aroused in her. She slowed him in his arousing claims for only a moment, the brazen novelty of it, out here in the orchard and his slow caresses soon easing away her restraint and inflaming the rush of conflicting emotions; the worst of them that of denying the wish to be taken out of herself and satisfying the nagging hunger for a man. Such feelings could no longer go unrequited.
The possibilities were endless. She would show him, perhaps, how she wished for it to be, instead of simply accepting what was being offered. Manolo had made no secret of what he sought of her, and she wondered if it had begun the very moment she had stopped to talk to him and his father upon her arrival at Quinta Virgia.
“Don’t…don’t do that. I am not ready for your attention or anyone else’s on me. It is too soon!” she still tells him, yet her body is possessed by the charge of excitement that his caresses have aroused.
“I know that is not true, señora.”
Hannah moved his hand, only to the skin of her waist once more. She sought to deny the shivers of longing that his continued touches upon her aroused and words of denial ignored. Manolo’s youthful vitality is in contrast with all that has gone before in her life and that she had not sought with anyone else in these impetuous ways. It had, truth be told, not been sought of her as it was being sought of her now; her dismay being eased away by soft words and the only too certain caresses of a lustful and purposeful young man.
Hannah stilled the growls of the dogs on seeing him, a comparative stranger, so close to their mistress. They flopped down again in the little shade that could be found, panting slowly, rhythmically.
She looked up at him and knew, from the time she had spent sketching Manolo, that it was fanciful to feel that there could be anything in it…anything between them. It would no more than something to boast of to his army chums; that he’d humped her and that he would be unaware that she craved a diversion from her gnawing feelings of grief and that she would welcome the attentions of a man to her body, an emotional bond of secondary importance.
Stephen had been an accomplished and attentive lover, sublime in his demands on her body, fleshier as the years passed, and all that he did to satisfy her needs. They had always been true partners in the act.
She had yet to fully accept that her bed would be empty and that an enduring relationship with a man, and lover, might never be known of in those ways again. She had at least to try and rediscover such ways, fleeting as they would be with Manolo and her while she was at Quinta Virgia.
Would her life now amount, in that respect, to an opportunistic liaison, no matter how satisfying it turned out to be and whenever, and however, it was to be found? She was sanguine enough to know that she was not the possessor of a defining beauty, the bob-cut of her blonde hair only too practical, her fleshy arms and legs, the heavy swell of her breasts, those of a voluptuous woman yet one still so alive in spirit.
“Be with me?” he asked, his breaths wafting softly across her lips as Manolo spoke out his wishes. “We are together…in special ways…to each of us.”
Hannah met a kiss. She felt Manolo’s fingers press and stroke in time with the flickering press and thrust of his tongue as he found his way into her mouth and to share in gasping kisses.
“How can I do this and out here?’ she gasped, clinging to him and overwhelmed by her longing, but mindful of where they stood.
“Know how it is for me, Belleza, go on!”
Manolo’s insistent call to her was accompanied by the slow rhythmic press of his body against her and by the fierce clamps of his hands to her hips. He pursued wanton claims that would let her know what he would bring to her and how it was for him.
“This is crazy!” she groaned, tearing her mouth away from his deepening and seducing kisses, the probe of his tongue deep in her mouth, Manolo’s caresses shattering any remaining control that she clung to. “It’s so crazy what you’re asking of me!’
“That I want from you…and that I want to share!”
The lustful young man flattered her with his ardour; what she would know of him feeling only too hard and impressive. She had felt the first moist rushes of longing in her pussy and clamped his hands to the swell of her breasts as she leaned back against him to meet every touch upon her quivering body. She had to satisfy the churn of animalistic longing in her belly where he now put his hands and agile fingers as he lifted the hem of her skirt and brushed his fingers over her mound, the curve covered by thin cotton panties. All of these claims were guided by her.
Manolo eased in his claims and loosened the knot of her thin blouse before he touched her bare skin, moving to pinch her achingly hard nipples before he cupped the heavy tumble of her breasts. She had forsaken a bra and now he simply held and gloried in them, cupped heavy flesh, and squeezed fingers around each nipple.
“You are so beautiful…so…full and beautiful,” Manolo gasped as he now felt her reach back and wantonly clamp the swell in his shorts. “How…how can it be wrong for me to want you? You are a beautiful…wonderfully beautiful and passionate woman. Don’t be afraid, señora, to let go and do that with me. Go on…yes, go on …do that!”
She heard the urgent seducing words.
She turned to meet his hungering look before she met a deep kiss and felt his fingers move below the stretchy waistband of her skirt; to slowly move down over her mound and press her wet panties in a slow questing rhythm. She gasped and squirmed as his caresses brought her on and she felt the rushes of longing that his touches aroused in her. She looked frantically about the olive orchard.
“No one will see us, I hope,” she said, her eager, rhythmic crushing grips on his prick making him gasp. “Bring it to me…show it to me…fill me with it…you wonderfully crazy and impetuous man!”
She had given voice to her wildest imaginings and had spoken out on how her loneliness would be ended. Hannah trembled. She was a big woman, fleshy and buxom; strong limbed, and capable, but the sight of him aroused an uncommon fear in her.
She unfastened her short skirt and let it fall to the stony ground; watched as he undid his shorts and belt. She found him. Stephen had been blessed, but what she now saw of Manolo exceeded all that she had hitherto experienced with a man. Was she doing this, caressing and holding a man’s penis in her hands and that wasn’t her husband’s, and doing so wantonly out in the orchard of her holiday home, a refuge until now?
Manolo had waited and watched as her hands brushed the skin of his belly. Her touches had made him squirm as she tugged at the mat of hair covering his groin before she found him; saw how his straining prick sprung free from his briefs; his soft expectant gasps of longing as she fingered its length and; stroked the tip as she squeezed on his sac. They would become lovers.
“Hannah…Hannah!” he groaned in that deep voice of his, pleasure and dismay to be heard as the Englishwoman went down on him, the moist warmth of her lips and mouth soon enveloping him, her fingers squeezing his sac as she did so. “No…not all of that here! No!”
He saw her look up at him and kissed her deeply even as they stumbled against a tree, and he tore aside her panties and fingered her lustfully. “Here…like this! We do it here and like this, now!”
Hannah did not deny that it had to be so.
“Go on…go on! Find me with what you have for me!” she urged; her gasps sharp in his ears and shivering with longing. She was all but naked in the orchard and being claimed by her servant’s son.
She met his deepening kisses; did not object as he parted her legs and Manolo lifted her against him, his touches encouraging her to wrap them around his waist as his fingers parted moist silken skin. She gasped on feeling the slow purposeful slide of him as Manolo entered her body and she stifled her cries with snorted kisses as their efforts to sustain any rhythm took their toll.
“Don’t hold back…don’t…don’t hold back!” she yelped, clawing at Manolo’s skin as he found her. He shifted their weight until she could bear it no longer. “Fill me…let it all go in me! Please! Please!”
“No condom…no condom,” she heard him grunt as his penis slipped and probed into her and she squeezed on that wonderfully invasive flesh.
“Oh, it’s too late. Go on!”
Manolo feels the fierce grip of her hands on his neck as he bends his head and captures one of her nipples in his hungry mouth, tugging on it, sucking and circling it with his tongue.
She shudders and pulls herself up until only the head of his penis is left inside her before she slumps down, her movements and the claims of his mouth on her nipple exciting them to move quickly. She’s lost and feels herself gush in the frenzy of their rut as she rises and settles on him, awkwardly.
“I can’t go on for much longer!” she calls out to him, the sharp press of the tree bark against her back too much to endure. She has become acutely aware of the deepening sense of completion that now overwhelms her.
“Ai…aieee…you wonder!” Manolo gasped, his hold upon her tightening and his movements, in pegging her, quickening. “It has to be now, okay?”
“Yes, just go on!” she urged on halting breaths, her lips pressed to his throat as they rutted like wild beasts Here was a man she had met less than a week ago, and now he was in her, deep inside her aging body, and claiming her with wild and frenzied desire, her body impaled on him and Manolo bearing her weight and controlling their rut.
It felt glorious!
Manolo flooded her and he found her on shivering spurts of release that had her gasping out his name and in rediscovered pleasure. Her cries and gasps were stifled by a flurry of kisses, by her snorts of pleasure matched by his halting breaths.
“You…you are a wonderful, wild, and passionate woman!”
He crushed his mouth against her parted lips, kissing her deeply as she clung to him. His claims, and her concession to them, had passed in a maelstrom of conflicting emotions and any sense of time passing.
She nodded feeling a sudden, abject misery overwhelm her. She had wanted to know of him; to deny it was futile; her time of mourning had only just ended, a time of mourning that she had sought and needed to come to terms with her loss and a looming time of unknown loneliness.
The young man who embraced her had brought it all to a sudden and crashing end, her body lustfully claimed, and her mind possessed by every thought other than her loss. She had wanted a man to desire her, and she had been.
“You wonder…you are a wonder,” he murmured, bending down awkwardly to kiss her nipples and to press his face between her breasts. Manolo felt her hands tug at his hair, for only a moment, to keep his attention upon them.
She shivered in continued longing for him and that his claims had aroused in her. She ached to live for the moment, every one of them, degrading as it had become but sublimely pleasurable.
“Leave me and let me accept what has happened, please?’ she whispered, finally, and on meeting another slow and wondering kiss. “Let me know of it again…only differently…later…in the house, please?”
She met a considerate look upon her, evident delight in what was exposed to his gaze to be seen in his eyes.
“I needed you and I needed to show you that it can be well, even if you love another.” Emboldened, on seeing her nod, he went on. “I understand, ‘annah…but share moments with me, please and to make a new life for yourself?’
She nodded again, did so dumbly in offering an answer to what he had said. She knew the right words for what had happened between them only too well.
“I deserve all of that, do I?’ she now said, raising her hands to sweep back her hair, her movements only exciting him again as he saw the sway of her pendulous breasts, her open blouse no longer concealing them from his sight or touch. She sought his renewed attention to them and clamped his head to her as Manolo kissed her enervated skin. All restraint had been forsaken; an impetuous and blissful rut had been pursued, and she sought to prolong these moments despite what she had said. How he had found her!
“You are a passionate and beautiful woman. You enchant me.’’
“If you say so…’” His compliment sounded so much better in Spanish. She did not recognise the woman Manolo found her to be.
They kissed and caressed enervated skin and they did so without let or hindrance. They shared in it under the trees of the orchard. Their passion faded, but they exchanged knowing looks for all that had passed between them.
“Go…go now,” she whispered, finally and resolutely. “Please go, Manolo…you darling man. You will only make me cry with your soft words and how you are with me. Go… please go away, now!”
Hannah met his wondering smile as Manolo dressed hastily. She met a moment’s sliding caress to her body before he left her without a backward glance. The young man had claimed her and had done so with breath-taking and accomplished ardour. Her ageing body ached; the skin of her thighs was sticky from all that he had brought and expelled into her. She would have him wear a condom next time…whenever they were together, and she took him to her. She would go only so far with him.
What a time she had had of it and with a young man who had become her unlikely lover!
She retied the knot of her blouse and shifted the fabric over her aching breasts before she picked up her skirt. Her panties lay at her feet, torn and pushed there by his urgent need to know of her and before his tongue found her and entered her body in wondering, delectable, and swirling touches, probes, and licks; each flicker sending a tremble through her only too willing and receptive body.
“Just who are you?”
There might be time to draw him, either if Manolo sat for her or from memory, but there would be no need for an artistic licence or to conceal what the young man…her ardent lover had brought to her; a woman of fifty-five; a woman who painted using colour pens and brushes, all of them held in her long-fingered and wrinkled hands. She had begun to feel the cramps of arthritis, a condition that had yet to wreak its full effects upon her. She would age more quickly; her face, swell of her breasts and belly, would bear the signs of that unstoppable process.
And yet, through it all, Manolo had wanted her, and she had never known, or seen, anything like it on a man before. She spoke out the words after all, alien as they were to be on her lips.
“I want to be fucked…in a bed…until there is nothing left to give to each other. How I need that! I need to move on but never forget. I have my own life to live and not have it spoken of by others.”
She could love again and grieve. She would never forget the man who had been in her life for so long and had been taken from her.
Gathering up all of her art materials, she called to Tessa and Milly, and, pleasurably tired, her thighs sore and sticky from what had issued from them both, she walked wearily up to what she knew would be a silent, echoing house. It was not the place to be alone with your thoughts, or for too long.
She believed an answer to that had been passionately discovered in the shade of the trees in the orchard; in an act that she hoped could be pursued, discreetly but with uncommon ardour while she and Manolo were in this place, together.
What she wanted was physical release, not intellectual engagement with Manolo. Quinta Virgia would again become her place of love and comfort. Moments of fevered loving with a young man were to be the antidote for all that could so easily, and unannounced well up inside of her as she thought of the loss that had brought her life to this point.
She knew that they would each have their way of passing the days and nights together.
♥
She had remained seated at her kitchen table as the memories, and images, of that passionate tryst, the beginnings of a tempestuous affair, had spooled through her mind or had drifted before her eyes as she daydreamed.
The letter was read one last time.
Images of the man who had written it were on her iPhone and she would keep one or two and no more.
She had all that she needed to remind herself of what she had shared and bestowed on her Spanish lover. More she did not need for there would be no going back to share again with him all that she had been seduced into knowing of him.
Manolo’s letter was torn into many pieces and the scraps were thrown into the pedal bin. Helena’s letter would get a reply and that would be it.
♥
