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“I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem like such a big deal to me.”
I was stunned. When I had told Taya about the conversation I’d had with my mother earlier in the week, she had been as thrown as I was by the news that our parents were plotting out our future together behind our backs. Her family must have gotten to her, I thought.
“Who talked to you? Your mom? Your dad?”
Taya ignored me. She continued in the same light, breezy tone while looking at the pool where little boys and girls were playing with inflatable toys, shrieking with laughter.
“We already get on well, our families like each other. Seems like it could work.”
“Except for one small matter,” I said pointedly.
Taya glanced briefly at me, a calculating glint in her eyes.
She knew what I meant.
“Come on,” she said, in a low voice. “That’s hardly a deal breaker.”
I saw her put on a big smile and go towards Kristina, Eric Dalton’s current wife who was filling up the snacks on the table near the pool. Tottering around on impossibly high heels, I was sure she would slip and fall on the wet tiles surrounding the pool. I recalled she was from somewhere in Eastern Europe, perhaps Poland, and was at least forty years younger than her husband. I watched as Taya made conversation with the woman, the two of them laughing and getting on effortlessly. I knew Taya had a lot of good qualities, but she was so controlled, so cool. And then there was another thing.
Sex.
She said it was hardly a deal breaker.
Except for me, it was.
I had once found the vibrator in her bedroom cabinet and confronted her about it. She was not embarrassed about it at all. She simply didn’t enjoy sex with men, she said. She’d tried it once when she was younger, but the encounter had disgusted her. The closeness of another man, lying sweating and grunting on top of her, touching her in ways she found invasive and annoying. Being pawed at, she said, her lips curling contemptuously.
She preferred not to, thank you very much.
Whenever we spent the night together, which was not often, I had observed the intricate rituals she went through before she went to bed. The way she cleansed her skin and treated it with various potions, how she removed hair and treated the smallest blemish with expensive creams and lotions. Before she went out every morning there was another routine of doing her hair, examining her wardrobe, measuring her body to see where she was bloating or retaining water. Once, during a weekend away in Napa, she had insisted on doing a juice cleanse because her skin tone was worrying her. She wouldn’t go to dinner even though we’d been invited by friends. I had to say she was ill when really, she was sipping lemon water upstairs in the hotel room and googling some ancient leech therapy that someone had said helped melt away fat. What fat, I wanted to ask. Taya’s body was barely human.
Lauren’s body, on the other hand, was all woman.
I couldn’t help myself; my thoughts wouldn’t stop going back to our encounter in my office. The most thrilling Friday afternoon I’d ever had. I thought of all the salespeople who’d sat on that couch where we had torn off our clothes, overcome by lust.
I thought of how she had come striding into my office, ready to pick a fight with me over work. Her flushed cheeks and angry lift of the chin as she was getting ready to take me on. It was adorable. Then, when we’d had sex, she’d been completely unselfconscious about her body and about giving me pleasure. I went hard just thinking about her mouth on my cock, the way her tongue had teased me. With Lauren, there was no issue about the physical nature of sex. She liked her body, and she knew how to use it. She couldn’t have been more different from Taya. More human, more fun to be with.
And the sex in my office, well, it had been fantastic.
All that talking about the past and how we used to be together, recalling the connection we’d once had and maybe, still had. The incident that had led to us breaking up at the party at the lake house had somehow vanished. For a moment, we forgot all about that. It was so long ago; it was almost as if it didn’t matter at all. But it did matter. A lot. And of course, Lauren was lying to me, just like she was lying back then.
“Penny for your thoughts?” It was my mother, coming to talk to me.
I smiled at her.
No way was I going to share what was going on in my mind.
“Nice party,” I said.
She nodded, “I think I’ll head over to our place soon.”
I wasn’t surprised to hear it. My mother never stayed long at events like this, showing her face, exchanging a bit of conversation before fading into the background.
“Mother?” I suddenly asked.
“Yes?” She turned around.
“I was wondering… about you and Father?”
