AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Nao Kao! No!” His hands moved under my shirt and across my stomach.
“Stop it, Nao Kao. Stop. You’re married. Married! What are you doing?” I clutched awkwardly at the covers as he groped at me with greater determination. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I realized with rising alarm that the pile next to the bed consisted of his clothes.Allof his clothes. Peeking out from the jeans I could just make out underwear, not boxer shorts, but tighty whities. Despite the circumstances I could not help thinking that there was a first time for everything.
“Liss, please. I want you. I need you. Please.” His voice had gone all husky, less silk and more gravel, his accent more pronounced. His hand slid up my torso, cupping my breast.
“Oh, Liss.” He opened his mouth against mine and began to kiss me. I pulled back, away from him.
“Nao Kao. Nao Kao! Stop! Think!”
Think, Liss. Think. I needed the advice as much as he did. For weeks I had sensed that we were on a collision course with this moment, the tension between us building until it could have been sliced with the proverbial knife. Yet, I had convinced myself it wouldn’t ultimately happen that way. Nao Kao and I were nothing more than good friends. He was married. He wassafe.Or at least that had been the plan. I hated it when life did not conform to my plans, and never more than now.
“I am thinking. About this. About you. About what I want to do with you. Please.”
Never before had I known my desires to be in such open warfare with who – or what – I believed myself to be. Or not. An adulteress, for example. I might be a flirt, but I was certainly not, definitely not, an adulteress. I twisted my shoulders sideways, seeking to buy myself time and space.
As my hips rotated in tandem with my shoulders, I felt Nao Kao’s fingers slide into my shorts, tugging them down over my hips, a movement that raised goosebumps from my toes to my temples.
“Nao Kao. STOP.”
For the first time he seemed to hear me. Without his glasses I hardly recognized him and even through my t-shirt, I could feel his heart racing, his chest warm against me. I started to trace a line down the center of it. Stopped. My mind spun. This was not okay. None of it. Unless it was. Which it could not be. This was adultery. A crime as old as time.
“Nao Kao,”
“Shhhh. La.” Gently he placed his finger across my lips. “Please.”
I felt him slide my shorts the rest of the way down my legs, past my ankles and toes, could almost see them puddled at the foot of the bed. An image of him on the soccer field came unbidden. I had never gone to watch the IM games in which he played, but I imagined now he must be very good.
“Nao Kao, do you even have a condom?”
It wasn’t purely a stall tactic on my part. Just as Nancy Reagan’s War on Drugs had hammered into my head the image of a frying egg as “this is your brain on drugs” in the 1980s, so had the safe sex campaigns of the 90s drilled into my head. No condom, no way.
“No.”
He didn’t even have the decency to sound sheepish.
In the dark he must have sensed rather than seen my alarm. He propped himself onto his elbows and began telling me how many tests he had undergone to secure his visa. He was, beyond a shadow of a doubt in his mind and in the view of the American government, free and clear of any and all STDs when he stepped foot in the country. In the year since, he had lived a monk’s life. He recounted all of this factually, yet urgently and with more than a hint of a plea in his voice. My brain whirred.
He began to stroke my hair, ever so softly, brushing it from my face as I drew a jagged breath. Under the covers his hand found mine and he laced our fingers together.
“Please, Liss.”
“No condom, no….” my voice trailed off as I felt his weight shift. Although I was thin, I was certain I outweighed Nao Kao, but there was surprising strength in that sinewy body of his. He began to move against me. This couldn’t be happening. Nao Kao was my friend. Only my friend, but also my friend, not some random date. Surely, I was to have a say –thesay – in what was about to happen.
I pressed hard into his hip bone, stilling him, buying myself more time to work through this predicament. If he weren’t married….but no, it didn’t work that way. The band of gold delineated a bright line, whether he was wearing it or not, and we were so far over the line I struggled to make it out in the distance.
He kissed my throat.This. was. not. happening. He. was. married. Married! Married!If I repeated that often enough, perhaps I could literally will this decision away.
“You take those pills, right? The ones in your bathroom.”
My mind flashed back to when I dropped a glass and cut my finger a couple of weeks ago, sending Nao Kao scurrying into my bathroom to rummage through the vanity for a band-aid. Evidently that wasn’t the only thing he found. I imagined him contemplating this since that day.
“But your wife –”
“Shhh. Liss. Enough. I want you. Please.”
Maybe it didn’t matter. After all, if he hadn’t been married, I had no doubt we would have done this months before. It might have been the friends with benefits route that simultaneously intrigued and appalled him, perhaps, or even a proper relationship. Either way, the end result would have been the same; still, my rationalizations stung – any way I sliced this, every fiber of my being knew what I was about to do was wrong.
Almost involuntarily, I felt my mouth open, felt myself begin to kiss him back, felt his warm fingers trail along my heaving ribs, further and further south. I had crossed my own personal Rubicon. I relaxed and let him pull my shirt over my head. Our bodies merged one into the other and for a brief, shining moment I allowed myself to forget how utterly wrong this was.
