Rediscovering Rebecca

An adult stories – Rediscovering Rebecca by RoyceFHouton,RoyceFHouton This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance by any character or situation to any actual person or event is purely coincidental. All characters presented in this narrative are over the age of 18.

Rediscovering Rebecca

By Royce F. Houton

► INCOGNITO AT THE SNOOTY FOX

This is crazy. I’m a grown-ass man. A retired, grown-ass man. Well, semi-retired anyway. Skulking around like this is something a 25-year-old would do, not a guy who’s Medicare-eligible.

I parked my Range Rover in a parking spot a good 200 feet from the Snooty Fox so that if anyone recognized my vehicle in this town that can feel awfully small at times would think I was going into the a storefront insurance agency, not a well-known purveyor of sex toys and adult gifts.

I pulled my blue University of Virginia baseball cap low over my brow. My wrap-around shades and the raised collar of my windbreaker, I hoped, would render me unidentifiable on any of the security cameras that proliferate inside and outside any public market in the 2020s. I walked briskly across the parking lot and ducked inside. Only one car was parked in front of the sex shop, which I took as a good sign that the place might be virtually deserted at 2:30 on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-March.

The last thing I wanted was for a former law partner or the mom of a kid I had coached in Little League to spot me perusing the wide selection of neoprene “lifelike” fake-vagina toys and varied intimate lube products in the Snooty Fox.

Look cool, I told myself. Act like you belong, like you know exactly what you’re looking for. But whatever you do, try to keep yourself facing the wall or at least a tall store shelf.

A bored, well-tattooed twentysomething woman with two nose rings perched behind the cash register reading Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” barely looked up from her paperback as I entered the store. I was just fine with that, too.

Don’t rush right over to the section where the Fleshlight and other men’s masturbatory aids are displayed, I cautioned myself, still glancing furtively around the store. I mean… that would just scream “loser!” “pervert!” “dirty old jack-off!” and somehow, I wildly imagined, put me on a path that would one day land me on some sex offender registry. I had pondered ordering such a device online, but you don’t get to see for yourself what the thing is and you have to use a credit card and create an indelible digital record of what you bought and when. No thank you.

The sole reason I was there in the first place was to find a new, reliable way to rub one out since I had undergone a significant dry spell since Denise and I had gone our separate ways more than a year earlier.

▼▼▼

I knew deep down that no overpriced dick-toy doohickey would accomplish anything on its own. Unless I could get in the mood, nothing I could buy off any shelf was likely to produce the desired results. But my primary care doc, during my last physical, wasn’t liking what he found in one of those dreaded prostate exams, the one where a latex-gloved hand jams a finger up to the third knuckle up a dude’s asshole and probes around to assess the dimensions and the health of this distinctively male internal gland.

“Rick, tell me about your sex life,” Dr. Sujit Pasadar said afterward.

“Pardon?” I replied.

“Well, your prostate isn’t what I’d call enlarged, but it’s feeling a little bigger than it has, and that’s something men your age have to be mindful about. Enlarged prostate is not something we can always control, but it does tend to happen more and happen faster to men after age 50 who don’t put it to use regularly,” he said.

“Put it to use?”

“Regular ejaculations,” Dr. Sujit said.

“So you’re asking if I’m getting any?” I said. “Well, I was doing all right for about five years, but my girlfriend and I broke up during the course of the pandemic and went our own ways about 14 months ago. The sex was pretty good up until about two and a half years ago, and… I guess we both just sort of gave up. I’ve been in dry dock since about the start of 2021.”

“Do you self-stimulate or ejaculate any other way?” he asked.

“You mean do I beat off?” I said, unable not to chuckle. “Doc, if I can’t get excited, I can’t get it up and if I can’t get it up, I can’t get it off. Dirty movies and dirty pics and dirty literature don’t move the needle for me; hasn’t since I’m like… 17. Sometimes if I am having an erotic dream, I wake up with a boner, but as soon as my conscious mind takes over and I lose the track of the dream, it’s gone and nothing I can do can bring ol’ Foghorn back to attention.”

“Fog-horn?” the doctor asked.

“Oh, that’s my nickname for my junk. After the Looney Toons rooster, Foghorn Leghorn — had that booming Texas accent, strutted around the barnyard going, ‘Ah say, boy!'” I said. Clearly, there was no connection for this thirtysomething immigrant from India with a 60-year-old American animated series that remains a pop culture milepost for kids, now of a certain age, who grew up in the United States from the 1950s through the ’60s. “Get it?… rooster?… cock?… Never mind.”

So Sujit moved on, recommending that I try some toys that might inject novelty into my “self-love” regimen, which I knew in advance was a non-starter, but told him I’d try. In the alternative, he suggested, I could sign up for one of those online hook-up sites like Tinder. I was shocked that a doctor would recommend some kind of online meat market where users not only risk something penicillin can’t fix but being blackmailed as well.

Memo to self: Check health plan for a new in-network doc.

▼▼▼

So here I am, trying to be incognito as I browse the wares in this upscale Norfolk, Virginia, sex toy shop in hopes that I would spot something that might induce me to occasionally blow my load and keep my man glands from withering… or swelling from the size of a walnut to that of a baseball, as was the instant case. That’s when I detected movement on my periphery to the left. I instinctively pivoted to my right and walked around a head-high rack of videos. I didn’t get much to go on. It didn’t appear to be another guy, but I was not interested in finding out.

How quaint, dirty DVDs, I mused to myself. What? No VHS or 8-millimeter films? I thought streaming and high-speed internet had made old-tech media like this obsolete, but here they were. Then I reasoned that what these have that streaming doesn’t is privacy. Rather than enter a credit card number into the shadiest of web portals to have an hour of staged, high-definition fellatio, cunnilingus and copulation delivered to your unique and traceable IP address, someone could come here, pay cash and replay this on a low-tech DVD player without ever leaving footprints on the dark web.

I’m checking out the jacket for a DVD titled “Cum Fly With Me” when the gray-coated figure I had just glimpsed out the corner of my eye a few minutes earlier walked down an aisle near me and turned the opposite direction, toward racks containing lingerie and provocative costumes as varied as neck-to-toe fishnet body stockings, bustiers, crotchless and even edible panties, and naughty nurse and schoolgirl outfits. I could see silvery hair spill from beneath a Totes rain hat, over the collar of her coat.

So I edged around the rack of videos and into another aisle, dipping out of the woman’s immediate view once more. I turned to the right, and on the shelves before me was what I came in the store to buy: the Fleshlight. The device interior was made of squishy, highly pliable rubber designed to give way to an invading erection and, when lubricated, simulate the feel of a vagina. It was all encased in a metal cylinder resembling a flashlight (hence the pun of a name) and is available in various sizes to accommodate boners ranging from the most modestly hung of gents to something approaching an aroused Clydesdale.

“Good grief…,” I muttered t0 myself, shaking my head.

But, at a sticker price of $59.95 excluding sales tax, I decided to give it a try. I mean it was something my doctor recommended and it was less expensive than a urologist visit and it was less risky than a hooker or some Tinder skank. I slipped it back into the cardboard box and pivoted to retrace my steps. As I rounded the corner by the head-high video display case, I literally bumped into the person I had spotted and tried to avoid earlier.

“Oh! So sorry,” I said instinctively, backing up a step.

“That’s perfectly fine, no prob…” she said before looking upward at me and freezing. “Rick?”

I could feel my mouth move but it was making no sound, which was probably for the best, in retrospect. I was caught pink-handed in a sex shop, holding a Fleshlight, totally busted. But by whom?

“Uhhh… uhhh yes,” I stammered, trying to focus on the woman’s face, which looked familiar but not quite discernible because she, too, was wearing a hat, an overcoat and oversized sunglasses… indoors… while in a sex shop holding a naughty French maid costume. “I… I…”

She glanced left and right around the store and, seeing no one besides the bored attendant at the cash register, removed her shades.

“It’s me — Becky,” she said.

My eyes widened behind my sunglasses and my mouth fell open, dumbstruck for a moment.

Whether it was the expression on my face or just the awkwardness of the moment, Becky started giggling and couldn’t stop.

Becky tried to keep it as muffled as she could, but I remember from the more than two years when we had dated occasionally a decade or so earlier that she was prone to laughing fits when she was tickled that could go on and on and on. And every time she looked up at my flummoxed face, she laughed that much harder.

Finally, I had the presence of mind to remove my shades and look at her squarely, my apoplexy slowly giving way to a resigned and patient smile. Her laughter — surely at my expense — was contagious, and before long, I was laughing with her. I mean, I was a pretty ridiculous sight standing there looking like some third-rate gumshoe holding a fake-pussy toy, a moment fit for one of the “Seinfeld” episodes on which she was an authority.

“Rebecca Parsons… good to see you, even if we did run into each other under these compromising circumstances,” I said in a hushed voice one might use in a library, extending my arms as she extended hers for our first hug since 2012.

“I would ask ‘What brings you here?’ but,… well… I guess,” she said, nodding at the explicitly packaged merchandise in my hand and rekindling her giggling in the process. “Gag gift for a friend?”

“Uhhh…,” I stammered, “sure, let’s go with that.”

She nodded, a smirk on her face. “Understood. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…”

Her remark, predictably, was from one of her favorite “Seinfeld” episodes titled “The Outing,” which, if pressed, she would accurately note was from the fourth season of the series, the 17th episode.

“Your Seinfeld repertoire is still as encyclopedic as ever,” I said. “And I see you’re diversifying your wardrobe,” I said, nodding at the slutty maid costume she was holding.

“Um… yeah,” she said, blushing slightly. “What you said.”

“I would ask you how you’ve been and so forth but…” I said, gesturing at our surroundings, “… it’s not the most conducive environment for casual, normal conversation.”

She nodded and looked me in the eye. “You got time for coffee? There’s a Dunkin’ just across Ocean View.”

“Sure. Let’s get out of here and meet over there?”

Becky gave me a thumbs-up. She strode confidently to the cash register and handed the attendant her credit card, asked her to put the merchandise in one of the store’s pink, branded shopping bags, got in the car she had parked directly in front and drove off. After a respectable interval, I approached the register and paid cash for my Fleshlight. The cashier rung up my purchase, designed solely for male self-pleasuring, with the detached disinterest that a supermarket clerk would handle a box of pasta, handed me my merchandise and my change, then returned to Ayn Rand without so much as a “Thank you.”

Crossing West Ocean View Avenue to get to the more retail-oriented development across the street that included Dunkin’ took nearly 10 minutes, even on an uneventful Tuesday afternoon. I was afraid Becky would give up and head home. I was relieved to see the new, gray Volvo she had just driven away from the Snooty Fox still parked there. Inside, she had gambled that I retained my weakness for crullers and dark roast with two packets of sugar, and she had already ordered it for me. She was right.

She had removed her coat and was seated at a corner table, as far from the entrance and the counter as one could get. She rose and extended her arms wide as I approached, appearing as lean and athletic as I remembered her to be, though her dark brown hair was now an alluring, silvery shade of gray.

“Proper hug,” she said. A warm embrace — firm and tight as one would expect of old friends — yet searching, with hands ranging up and down each other’s backs, as one would expect from those who were more than friends.

“So you never saw me and I never saw you in the Snooty Fox, right?” she said as we took our seats across the small tabletop facing each other. She eyed me mirthfully over her reading glasses that rode low midway down the bridge of her nose, a wry grin curling upward on the left side of her mouth.

“The what? When? What are you’re talking about?” I said.

“Exactly,” she said.

“So where does one start to catch up on 11 years? Tell me about yourself, or at least the parts I don’t see on Facebook,” I said.

We had been friends on the social media platform since we were introduced in 2010. I could see that she had become a grandmom four times over since I last saw her in mid-2012. Her cat, Agatha, had died and a new one, Christie, had taken her place. Becky had marked herself as “In a relationship” from late 2013 until the dawn of the pandemic when she returned her status to “single.” I asked her what happened.

“He’s from the Maryland Eastern Shore. We first met about 14 years ago. I went out with him a few times until a few months after you and I began seeing each other, a sort of on-and-off thing,” she said. “His name was Philip and he was an insurance broker, owns a chain of agencies mostly in small towns up to Baltimore and Annapolis. He had a house in a fairly secluded area near the water on the Bay side. Had a ski boat and a swimming pool, and we’d hang out there. Very high-end, very chill and relaxing.”

She stared out the window at something far away.

“He gave me a key and I’d go stay there sometimes for a week or so when he was traveling with his job — he did a lot of that before he retired and made a killing selling his agency — and I’d just sort of look after things. When he did retire, he wanted me to move up there, but I had told him over and over I wasn’t leaving Ghent, that I wanted to stay near my daughters and, by that point, the grandkids. I had made all that clear to him at the start of the relationship along with the fact that I wasn’t going to remarry or anything like it,” she said. “I guess he didn’t hear me or couldn’t accept that. So just before the holidays in 2019 he went silent until one day he texted me and asked me to return my key. I drove up there the week they declared the pandemic to hand it to him, return some of his stuff, and get a few odds and ends of mine that were there, and some gal half his age with huge fake tits came to the door.”

She sipped her coffee and shrugged. “That was that.”

▼▼▼

Becky had been divorced from Morey Parsons for nearly four years when we were introduced in 2010 at a party at the home of Soraya Brenham, a Hampton Roads society doyenne and mutual friend, in Virginia Beach. I had represented her late husband’s shipping company in several maritime law disputes.

I was separated and in the process of finalizing a divorce with Theresa, my wife of 28 years. When I learned Theresa was fucking a guy in my law firm who was nearly 10 years her junior, I fired him and kicked her out of the house.

“You should totally ask Becky out, she really likes you,” Soraya told me the day after her party. “You two got along great yesterday. Y’all would be perfect for each other.”

She and Becky had been friends for years, having first met when Soraya’s youngest daughter was born prematurely and Becky was working in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. It was Soraya, with her extensive connections, who first encouraged Becky to inquire about the insurance agency executive-level job she later got and arranged to have us both at the party so she could indulge in her favorite sport: matchmaking.

“I don’t know, Soraya… this divorce is not final yet and I just don’t think I am ready to be dating,” I told her. “Besides, the kids are on my side now, given what their mom was caught doing, and I don’t want to jade them toward me by getting involved with someone else this soon.”

“Nobody’s talking about anything ‘involved’ or even ‘dating,'” she said, using her fingers to bracket two words in air quotes. “I know Becky isn’t interested in that. You both just need a friend you can talk to, somebody to go watch UVA basketball or Tides baseball games with, and she’s a huuuge sports fan,” she said. “I think you two are a perfect fit that way.”

So Becky and I started seeing each other, and it was as Soraya said, at least in the early going. We were very compatible and became close friends. We both loved to drive to the Blue Ridge Mountains to hike. She was always up for a road trip to a college football or basketball game wherever Virginia or her alma mater, North Carolina State University, was playing. Quite the athlete herself, she was perfectly content to play golf from the white (men’s) tees and beat me more times than not. You were begging for humiliation by challenging her to a game of tennis. Becky knew the best out-of-the-way bars and eateries all over Eastern Virginia and the North Carolina Outer Banks like a travelogue with legs. Long, beautiful legs.

It was one afternoon in the late summer of 2011 as we took a break in a hike along the Appalachian Trail in Nelson County, Virginia, when the platonic took a turn toward the romantic. We sat on a bench at a scenic overlook that afforded a magnificent view westward across the Shenandoah Valley and the hazy outline of the Appalachians rising miles beyond in the distance. We had covered just under six miles of steep terrain but were much more exhausted than we would have been walking six miles along the beach back home. Becky leaned against me, and I draped my arm lazily around her as a cool wind blew into our faces.

“Now this is pretty near perfection,” she said.

“No question. Beautiful day. Beautiful view of the most beautiful part of Virginia. And my arm around a very beautiful, wonderful girl,” I said, rubbing my hand along her shoulder and upper arm.

Her head tilted upward toward mine as her right hand gently guided our lips together. It wasn’t our first kiss. There had been chaste, friend-zone pecks at the end of an evening and that sort of thing. But this was the first time we had kissed as lovers might, with our lips parted and, for the first time, our tongues engaging in those delicious first explorations.

Nothing was quite the same afterward. We still enjoyed the same activities and did them together, but the unresolved prospect of sex and our mutual reluctance toward romance or commitment hovered over everything. Both of us knew, as a condition from the outset of our relationship, that neither of us were looking for anything serious. We’d both done the “death-do-us-part” thing and were still cleaning up the debris after it had crashed and burned for both of us. It was maddening, trying to stay in a self-imposed friend zone even though we both cared deeply for the other and harbored a palpable but unspoken desire to undress and ravish each other. The tension could be unbearable at times.

We arrived at a tentative shared understanding that we could be amorous but always standing, never horizontal, preferably in the broad daylight where we could go only so far without risking jail. So afternoon walks on a deserted strand of beach along Ocean View, where Norfolk abuts the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, or a secluded pathway near the Jamestown Settlement near Williamsburg would involve some fairly assertive mutual groping, albeit fully clothed and with one eye open for those approaching us. Once, as we ambled back to my beachfront house along Ocean View Avenue from a standing make-out session during a late afternoon stroll on the shoreline, the bulging erection tenting my swim trunks would have been evident to anyone approaching within 20 feet. Becky laughed hysterically about it all the way home. It was only after we got back inside that I spotted the conspicuous wet spot in the gusset of her bathing suit bottoms. I never mentioned it and I have kicked myself many times for not peeling the garment off her right then and making mad love to her. Stupidly, I settled for one more kiss and allowed her to drive off, back to Ghent.

▼▼▼

“So tell me about you,” Becky said as she nibbled on a lemon poppyseed muffin, still her favorite.

“Not much to tell,” I said, tracing my finger around the lip of my paper cup. “I had met Denise when I was in Washington in 2013 taking depositions in an antitrust lawsuit against a huge global shipping company. She was a paralegal in the D.C. office of a large national firm that served as our co-counsel. After we wrapped up for that day, the legal team all went out to dinner at this ritzy bistro on DuPont Circle and then to a bar nearby. Things progressed pretty fast from there.”

Becky nodded. She looked down at the table.

“I ignored my own rule about not getting wrapped up to that extent in something new. She was nine years younger, was renting a house in Fredericksburg and commuted to D.C. and back every day.”

“In 2015, we decided she’d move in here with me and give that a try. I arranged for her to go to work for another firm in Norfolk because there were rules at my firm against hiring people you’re involved with.”

I suspect the regret in my voice over the time I wasted with Denise was discernible to Becky. I pressed on.

“Things were fine up to that point. That’s when the zip, the novelty plateaued. The physical part was OK, but we no longer approached it with the vigor and anticipation we had earlier. As that got stale, it was more and more evident that we had very little in common. She liked going out on the town, but didn’t enjoy being around my friends, didn’t care for hiking, had no interest in going to ballgames. She didn’t like Norfolk. She liked the big city. So when the pandemic hit and suddenly we were quarantining, working from home and around each other twenty-four/seven, well…,” I said. “At no point during the process did we ever become friends, so there wasn’t a foundation.”

I wasn’t about to say it, but my relationship with Denise was the inverse of what my relationship with Becky had been. But I don’t think I had to say it. Becky is a very perceptive woman.

“Was it nasty? The breakup?” Becky said, looking intently at me.

“Nah. It was remarkably passionless, very matter of fact. Almost businesslike. We were both a little disappointed, but I don’t think either of us were ever sad about it. More like we were relieved. Neither of us wanted it to linger. She moved back to Fredericksburg. I get a text from her every now and then telling me she found something of mine in the stuff she packed up. I just tell her to keep it or toss it,” I said.

“And now?” she said.

I shrugged. “I pretty much live a monastic existence. Haven’t had any desire to get… out there. Seems like too much work. The pandemic taught me how to be a homebody, I guess.”

“And that ‘monastic existence’ is why you wound up in the Snooty Fox this afternoon?” she said, an impish grin creasing her face.

I filled her in on what Dr. Sujit had told me about the need to engage my reproductive equipment from time to time to keep my prostate active and healthy. She shook her head and reprised the Elaine Benes line from “Seinfeld” (season five, episode 21): “I don’t know how you guys walk around with those things.”

I shifted the topic, asking her about her grandkids, a prospect that brightened her. She showed me dozens of photos of them on her iPhone, giving me a rundown on each (three girls and a boy). Both of her daughters were still in the region and they still came over one Saturday every month, just as I remembered.

I showed her photos of my one grandchild, Cooper, the son of my son, Temple. I also showed her photos of the wedding the previous May of my daughter, Sarah and her husband, Mike.

“Hoping that Sarah and Mike will get busy and give me a granddaughter,” I said. “Or another grandson. Either is good. I’d be grateful for either.”

Our cups were now empty, our pastries long since eaten. A lull set in on the conversation.

“I still think about that night, you know. I still wonder how that changed the trajectory of both our lives. How things might have been different had I taken the freeway,” I said.

Becky nodded silently, a wistful, almost pensive look passing over her. Her hand clasped and squeezed mine.

▼▼▼

Nothing’s as boring as a CLE conference.

That stands for “continuing legal education,” and it is required on regular intervals for lawyers to keep their bar admission in good standing. This one was being held Friday through Saturday in a Hilton Hotel on the far western suburbs of Richmond, a neighborhood known by the unlikely name of Short Pump. It has a large mall, lots of shops and, conveniently for us, a drive-in movie theater several miles to the west in neighboring Goochland County.

Becky had been in her job as an executive-level risk consultant to a major health care services chain on nursing and rehabilitative care management issues for about a year, and most of that time on an introductory-probationary status. Leaving active nursing at Norfolk’s largest hospital was not an easy decision for her, but the administrative, executive-level position not only meant nearly doubling her pay, it also — eventually — gave her guaranteed weekends off. But during the probationary period, she was subject to all sorts of disruptive assignments, including attendance and sometimes presentations at seminars, traveling the East Coast to meet with top hospital administrators and writing reports. Loads and loads of reports. It was like being an associate at a major national law firm. But after she passed the nine-month probationary period with flying colors, Becky’s schedule and pace settled down into a Monday-through-Friday routine with rare exceptions.

My CLE seminar happened to fall on the first totally free weekend she’d had after probation, precluding a more celebratory getaway. So I offered: “Hey, come with me to this CLE conference I have in Richmond. It ain’t a night on Broadway, but there is a drive-in movie nearby and we’ve both talked about how much we enjoyed going to the drive-in as kids and how we would love to do it again sometime.”

She nodded thoughtfully as she mulled it over.

“You know, I will. I know you’ll be buried in those classes all day, but all I really want to do is sleep, sit by a pool, read a book and just vege,” she said.

I picked her up at 9 o’clock Friday morning, giving us time to get lunch in downtown Richmond, check in at the hotel and for me to be in my seat for the first CLE class by 1 o’clock. Still at least preserving the pretense of not crossing the threshold into total physical intimacy, I booked a two-bedroom suite.

Becky did exactly as she said she would. On Friday afternoon, she lounged by the pool devouring “Wish You Well,” a David Baldacci suspense novel that had languished on her must-read pile for a year. Friday night, as I slogged through Sequence Two of the four-part seminar, she uncorked the bottle of pinot grigio we had brought with us, ordered a room-service dinner and drowsily watched a pay-per-view movie. She was sound asleep and the flick was still playing when I returned to the room at 9:30. I turned the TV off, pulled the covers over her, turned off the bedside lamp and retired to my room to study the material I was given in the afternoon and evening classes.

On Saturday morning, I was already in class downstairs before Becky woke and went for a brisk walk around the massive mall half a mile from the hotel. Her pedometer said she covered four miles in 36 minutes, a torrid pace for a walk. That afternoon, as I finished the fourth and final sequence of the seminar that included an exam at its conclusion, she alternated between dips in the pool and wrapping up the Baldacci book.

I returned to the room around 4, and she was in the shower. I tapped on the bathroom door, cracked it open and said, “I’m home. Just so you don’t come bounding out of there buck naked.”

“Oh, you wish…,” she said. And I did.

After she dressed and I changed into jeans and a sweatshirt, we decided to head to a nearby Vietnamese restaurant a friend highly recommended before heading to the Goochland Drive-In. There were two screens, and we were so interested in the experience that we hadn’t even bothered to check out what was playing before deciding to go. Our choices were pretty much polar opposites. On Screen 1, the feature was “Rio,” an animated children’s film. On Screen 2 was a movie whose title seemed too close for comfort: “Friends with Benefits” starring Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake. We looked at each other apprehensively.

“I’m not sitting through a cartoon,” Becky said. So Screen 2 it was.

The movie wasn’t porn, but there was plenty of non-explicit adult situations between the protagonists, each fresh off of breakups, who — as the title implies — arranged to become outlets for their mutual carnal needs. But, as the classic rom-com formula dictates, what started out as a strictly transactional arrangement wound up being much deeper.

The benefit of having a large SUV is that rather than park facing the screen, I can back into the slot with the rear of the vehicle facing the screen, let down the back seats, open the rear gate and recline on pillows to watch the movie. That’s what we did.

One steamy scene early on got Becky’s full attention. “Oh, now that’s hot,” she commented.

“You’re not getting all hot-and-bothered on me, are you?” I said in a teasing voice.

“So what if I am?” she said, a mischievous grin on her face. “You telling me you aren’t?”

“So what if I am?” I replied as I pulled her to me and our lips met.

She draped her right leg over my legs, her loose-fitting, midcalf-length dress riding up to her hips as she did. My hand ranged along her flank, from her chest to her narrow waist to the graceful flair of her bottom and back. After making the circuit several times, Becky grabbed my hand and placed it over her covered breast, and when I kneaded it, she moaned and pushed her pubic mound into my hipbone.

My hardness was becoming crimped in the unyielding denim of my jeans, so I took my free hand and adjusted Foghorn into a less painful alignment. Aware of what I was doing, Becky went even farther, stroking my erection, now pointing at my belly button, over the tight denim that covered it.

I sensed the urgency that had built quickly within her. She climbed astraddle me and was grinding her mound against my covered member. I aided her by grasping the hem of her dress with my free hand and pulling it up until her white panties were in full view. That heightened her hunger.

The damp crotch of her panties was positioned directly over my imprisoned erection, and she settled into a rhythm, pressing her covered slit into it purposefully.

“Ohhhhh yes,” she said, her eyes becoming unfocused as her tempo built. “That’s it. So… good.”

Aware that there was no bra beneath her loose cotton sheath, I dropped the two shoulder straps over her arms and freed her breasts. Backlit against the illuminated screen about 70 yards in front of us, I could see the tight, pink buds of her nipples swaying from her firm, pear-shaped breasts. I took each in one hand and twirled them before taking one into my mouth.

At that point, Becky’s movements became ragged and irregular. She moaned loudly and her movements momentarily froze, her torso clenched powerfully.

She held herself against my chest and I felt her hot breath against my ear and neck as her climax washed over her in waves, making her hips sporadically shudder. Finally, her body relaxed against mine and she kissed my neck, nibbled my ear lobe and giggled.

“Wow. I guess I was worked up,” she said languidly, smiling down at me, her face mere inches from mine, framed by her dark brown hair as it spilled around her. I had no words, so I kissed her.

“That was beautiful, Becky,” I said. “You are beautiful.”

She kissed me again.

“I hate not to get our money’s worth, but I don’t think we need to hang around here ’til the credits roll. What do you say we take this back to more private quarters and turn in?” she said, leering at me. “And yes, I am worked up.”

No argument from me.

I missed the turn onto the entry ramp for eastbound Interstate 64. Rather than turn around, I kept going. Having attended three years of law school at the University of Richmond, I knew the roads hereabouts. Because U.S. 250 generally parallels the Interstate and becomes Broad Street in Short Pump once it enters Henrico County, I knew we could reach the hotel about as fast using this two-lane route.

We had gone about two miles on the highway and topped a hill when I saw lights in the ravine off the right side of the road. A white school bus was overturned and resting against a tree halfway down the right of way embankment.

“Dear God,” Becky shrieked. “Pull over. Dial pound 7-7 and 9-1-1.”

I did as she said. She leapt out and sprinted to the overturned bus, instinctively running toward human suffering to alleviate it in keeping with her many years as a nurse. I parked the car and turned on its emergency flashers on the highway shoulder at the crest of the hill we had topped when we saw the wreck. Then I hit #77, also as Becky had directed, unsure of who would answer. It was the Virginia State Police and I provided the coordinates of the accident. I also said: “Send ambulances! Lots of them!”

I ran down to the overturned bus where Becky had climbed inside through the rear emergency door and was helping people out of it. She saw me from inside the wrecked vehicle. Her face was ashen.

“Rick, do you have a flashlight in your car?” she asked.

“I do,” I said. It was in a bag of emergency supplies I kept under the passenger side seat.

“Take it out and stand at the top of that rise flagging down traffic until the police get here,” she said. “With people coming over it and no time to stop, more people are going to get hurt.”

For five minutes, I was waving a flashlight at approaching cars to stop them. By the time the first blue lights appeared over the horizon, there were 10 to 12 cars pulled over with their flashers on, many motorists offering assistance.

Becky had taken charge preliminarily, at least from a medical attention standpoint. She had begun triage, identifying and separating out the children who suffered only cuts and bruises and asked them to sit on the grass away from the blacktop but still illuminated by the headlights of my SUV. She asked the volunteers to help remove those with broken bones and more serious but not life-threatening injuries and carry them to safety in another area. That left the unconscious and more gravely injured still inside the bus where Becky was doing all she could with just her two hands.

On the other side of the highway, a disoriented man stumbled about, cursing about his Honda, its hood now accordioned against a tree. His nose was bloodied from the impact of the air bag that likely saved his life but he seemed fine otherwise. Whether he was drunk or not was a matter for the cops to sort out.

“Rick!” I could hear Becky shout from within the unsteady, upside-down bus.

“Yes, Becky, what is it?”

“In that bag of yours, do you have any rope?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Do you have anything that I can tie? Maybe jumper cables?” she yelled.

I had those and I sprinted to the SUV, found the cables and ran them back to Becky. When she reached her hand out the emergency door to take them for use as torniquets, I could see her hand dripping with blood and a look of fear in her face.

The first trooper on the scene put his car crossways in the middle of the highway, his blue strobes flashing, to form a traffic blockade. Another cruiser approaching from the east on U.S. 250 would do the same seconds later.

Both troopers ran to the bus looking for people to carry to safety, only to see that most of that work had already been organized by Becky and carried out by good Samaritans under her guidance. Inside, they found Becky tending to two critically injured boys. The driver — lifeless and dangling upside-down, secured to his driver’s seat by his seatbelt — was still behind the steering wheel, or where the steering wheel should have been.

Now flashing lights converged fast from both directions. The wail of fire engines mingled with the electronic yelping of ambulances and police cruisers in a hellish symphony. Soon, the scene was lighted and people with badges were swarming. One officer was talking to the injured occupants, members of a Richmond private school’s track team, who were stunned but mostly uninjured sitting near my Tahoe. The trooper was asking them what they recalled about the accident. Another was administering a field sobriety test to the Honda driver. Later, the man was handcuffed and seated in the back of a State Police cruiser.

In the second group of boys Becky had arrayed some distance away, emergency medical technicians examined and provided emergency aid for fractured limbs, deep cuts needing sutures and other visible serious injuries, carefully loading them onto gurneys and wheeling them to ambulances idling nearby and ready for the trip to emergency rooms already placed on standby.

EMTs equipped for the work joined Becky inside the bus. One leaned out the open emergency door and shouted at techs on the ground, “Get me two backboards and stabilizing gear fast!” Blood was sprayed on his white shirt.

It took nearly two hours to get the injured accounted for and either dispatched to hospitals or treated at the scene and released to parents who were called there.

As the last of the ambulances was departing, Becky sat on the ground beside my SUV. She was covered in blood, softly weeping and shivering. I draped a blanket I kept in my vehicle — part of the emergency kit — around her shoulders, helped her up and held her to me.

Lieutenant Ordoñez, the state trooper in charge of the accident response and investigative teams, came over to us and asked Becky how she was doing and whether she needed medical help.

“No, I’ll be OK. I’m a nurse, so…,” she stammered. “But when it’s kids…,” she said as she began weeping again and hid her blood-streaked face against my chest.

“Ma’am, let me tell you, I can’t begin to say how grateful I am that you were here tonight. There’s two boys we just sent to the hospital in critical condition that the medical people say would be dead right now if it wasn’t for you,” Lieutenant Ordoñez said. “You were their guardian angel tonight, ma’am. Please remember that and accept our thanks.”

It was nearly midnight by the time we returned to the Hilton. The lobby was empty but for the desk clerk who was aghast to see Becky enter covered with blood. With one arm around her, I raised my other toward the clerk to calm him as he started to rush over toward us. “It’s OK.”

When we reached the suite, Becky showered for an hour. I could hear her crying as she scrubbed herself raw in water as hot as she could stand, trying to remove not just the blood but the memory of it from her face, her limbs, her hair. She stuffed the blood-soaked dress she wore into a plastic laundry bag she found in the hotel closet and instructed me to immediately take it outside and throw it into the nearest dumpster. She could not bear seeing it again, much less cleaning or wearing it regardless of whether the stains could be removed.

She put on gym shorts and a sweatshirt and sat on the edge of the bed in her room, her arms clutching her knees against her chest, almost in a fetal tuck, weeping. She stayed like that for nearly two hours. I sat in a chair nearby to keep her company. When fatigue ultimately prevailed and she slipped into a fitful sleep sometime around 3 a.m., I arranged her into a more comfortable sleeping posture, covered her, kissed her forehead and turned off the lights, mercifully without waking her, before retiring to my bedroom across the suite.

The next morning, Becky was up before 7, using the in-room coffee maker to brew herself a cup. Her bags were already packed and waiting near the door. She had not intended to wake me but the aroma of coffee always does.

On the drive back to Norfolk, she sat expressionless and stared straight ahead almost the whole way, saying little, almost as if in a trance. I tried to engage her.

“Beck, remember that two people are alive this morning because of you,” I said.

She shook her head. “You think you see it all as a nurse when accident victims arrive in the ER, but you don’t see where it happened and how it happened, the gruesome and inhuman conditions that allowed their bodies to get so mangled and broken. By the time they get to us, medics have already extracted them from that, stopped the spurting blood, administered sedatives that ease the pain and stop the fear and screaming by the time they get to us. I learned today that first-responders are real heroes, and somehow they do it… every day.”

“I won’t ever be able to get what I saw last night out of my head,” she said. “This changed me, Rick, and not for the better. I know that.”

I nodded in support and sympathy, hoping for all the world that it would pass. But it didn’t. Not for months. Actually, not for years.

Word of her heroism didn’t stay quiet. A few weeks after the accident, she received a call at her office of the governor. Virginia’s secretary of public safety told Becky that Lieutenant Ordoñez had nominated her and she had been unanimously selected as one of about a dozen everyday Virginians to receive the Governor’s Volunteerism and Community Service Award at a ceremony in the Executive Mansion in Richmond in October. She graciously declined but was recognized in absentia anyway. Even though she declined every reporter’s attempt to write a story about her actions that night, her award from the governor the first thing that comes up when Googles her name.

She went into a shell that year, haunted by what she saw in that crushed, upside-down bus in an accident that killed its driver. She was reminded often that the death toll most likely would have been three if not for her, but she couldn’t put it behind her and come out of her self-imposed exile. Not before I met Denise.

My adventurous best friend and almost-lover was gone. In her place was a tormented, withdrawn person I scarcely recognized. Eventually, it became clear that there was no prospect of reviving our budding romance or the physical intimacy we were developing. Worse, we found it impossible to enjoy the trips and the walks and the conversations we had.

Still, I will always wish I had tried harder. She was worth it.

▼▼▼

“It took me a long time and a lot of therapy to learn to live with that. I can’t say that I put it behind me because it will never fully be behind me. But I don’t have nightmares the way I did, and I have come to believe that for whatever reason, we were supposed to be there, in that place at that time, and that it changed the courses of a lot of lives. I have come to accept that yes, I had some role in keeping those two boys alive,” Becky said.

“A couple of years ago, one of those boys — his name was Rob and he ran the 400-meters for that track team — looked me up and sent me an invitation to his wedding. In the invitation was a handwritten note. Rob wrote that he was one of the two boys most critically injured that I attended that night and told me he would be honored if I could attend so he could introduce me to his bride. He wanted me to meet her, he said, because without me, he would not have survived to marry her,” she said. “I went. It was very moving… very healing.”

My hand squeezed hers as a smile returned to her face.

“You know, Beck, that’s the first time that I’ve seen you say anything about that night that didn’t make you tremble or grimace or even cry,” I said, lapsing into my long-ago pet name for her.

She nodded her acknowledgement of my point, then looked me in the eyes.

“I wonder all the time, too, what would have happened… with us… had we taken I-64 that night,” she said. “I wanted you so badly when we left the drive-in. Where would things have gone had we made an uneventful drive and returned to the hotel, to our room? Had we made love?” she said.

Now her clasp on my hand tightened.

“We just never got there, did we? And we couldn’t find our way back. I hated that. Still hate it. Even as the thing with Denise caught fire and burned bright and hot, I hated it,” I told Becky in a moment of searing candor that I never dreamed I was capable of.

“I wondered often over those years if I should call you, check on you, come see you. But, crazy as this sounds, I didn’t… know how. But more truthfully, I think I was a coward. On one hand, I let myself think it would have been disloyal to Denise, and on the other hand, I felt like it would have been exploitative and crass toward you,” I said. “But I think the actual truth is I was scared.”

Becky stared at the tabletop, inhaled deeply and sighed as she exhaled.

“I was in no condition to deal with that back then, Rick, so you probably did the right thing. But I missed you so. I missed my friend Rick, even though I knew I had no claim on you because I had walled myself off… from you, from everyone,” she said.

“A couple of years after that, Philip came along and we had a lot in common — both of us were in the health care industry, him in sales and me in administration — and we knew a lot of the same people. We had been acquaintances for several years.”

“It was a comfortable relationship, but never really passionate. He is a kind, sweet, easygoing and generous man. He didn’t demand anything of me really. Sex wasn’t a big thing for us, and that was OK. I was content, but he…,” Becky put both of her hands on mine, “… he couldn’t make the world fun the way it once was for us. He couldn’t make me laugh.”

We let a long interval of silence lapse. We had just told each other so much. There was nothing untoward about letting it all sink in. We took comfort in sitting there, two old friends, two almost-lovers, now 11 years removed, holding hands and speaking truths we had both bottled up far too long.

Her iPhone buzzed. She pressed her finger to the button to unlock the device and read the text.

“Oh, that’s Alyssa,” she said, referring to her eldest daughter. “Asking me if I am still OK picking Dylan from tee ball tryouts this afternoon. So I better be shoving off.”

I held her gray coat and helped her put it on. “May I walk you out?”

She grabbed my hand. “I’d be honored.”

So there we stood by her Volvo, that awkward moment of parting after our impromptu first meeting in a dozen years.

“Ninety minutes,” she said. “We were in this doughnut shop for an hour and a half and it feels like just five minutes. How is that possible?”

“Time always seemed too short when I was with you, Beck,” I said. “So let’s make a promise right here: let’s never slip out of each other’s lives again, let’s be intentional about staying in touch. OK?”

Her smile had a momentary faltering quality to it. She blinked her eyes and swallowed hard. Then she nodded.

“You bet your sweet ass, Richard Talbert Ailey,” she said.

“Then let’s seal it with a hug, Rebecca Irene Parsons,” I said.

Instantly we were in each other’s tight embrace again, and we stayed that way far longer than a casual parting hug should take. Neither wanted to be the first to let go. Again.

As the embrace broke, what came next seemed instinctive. We kissed — a chaste, between-friends peck like those at the dawn of our relationship 13 years earlier — and then just looked at each other, smiling.

“My cell is the same number as it was then. Yours?” I asked.

“Same. Use it, will ya?” she replied.

“Deal,” I said.

I watched her Volvo disappear down Ocean View Avenue and I checked the contacts on my phone. Sure enough, there it was: “BECK.” And beneath it the designation “Mobile.”

Having her back in my life, even for a fleeting few moments in a sex toy store and 90 minutes in a doughnut shop, felt right. It felt as though fate or the universe or divine design — whatever you want to call it — had decided to make up for what it did to us along that dark stretch of Highway 250 one April night in 2012.

► SATURDAY AT NANA’S

I was as nervous as a 14-year-old boy calling the cutest girl in ninth grade for the first time to ask her out. My thumb was actually shaking as it pressed the call button on Becky’s phone number, something I had not done in a decade.

“Rick, good to see your number pop up on my phone again,” she said.

“Good to hear you answering again,” I replied.

“What’s up?”

“Guess who’s got two tickets to the March Madness second-round games in Greensboro on Saturday. I was hoping maybe you could join me,” I said.

“Damn. Wish I could. Alyssa and Doug are going to this bougie spa resort somewhere in western North Carolina around Asheville for their 12th anniversary so Dylan and Margaret are staying with Nana Friday through Sunday.”

I apologized for the short notice but explained that a former law firm colleague of mine — an alumnus of Kansas State, which would be one of the teams in the tournament — found out a client had an emergency hearing in Washington on Monday and has to spend the weekend preparing.

“Maybe next time?” she said. “But you should go. It would be fun!”

“Nah. A solo trip like that might be something I’d do if UVA was playing, but they’re not. I’ll give the tickets to my former law firm practice assistant. Her grown sons are huge college hoops fans,” I said.

“Well what are you doing a week from Saturday? Could you join us for our monthly Saturday at Nana’s? My girls, their husbands and all four grandkids come over, they play til they’re exhausted and then we dial up a flick or watch a ballgame that night. You’ve never met the grands, but the girls remember you fondly. I think they’d love to see you again,” she said.

“I don’t know. Seems it might be sort of awkward after a decadelong absence, like I’d be intruding,” I said.

“Not at all. Same as they were back then. You know the drill. Very laid back,” she said. “We order pizza or grill something. Have a few beers. Come over for the whole thing or just part of it. Whatever’s comfortable.”

“Can I think about it and get back to you tomorrow?”

“Sure. No pressure, but it would be lovely to have you there,” she said.

It seemed awfully daunting to me. After 11 years apart, such a full immersion so soon seemed… weird. Back in the day, her oldest daughter had been married for a couple of years and the youngest had just graduated from Old Dominion University and recently gotten engaged. They would bring their husbands/fiancés over in the late afternoon, they’d relax, eat and drink. Sometimes we’d gab into the night, and other times they’d excuse themselves early for other pursuits. The new wrinkle was the grands.

I tossed and turned that night unable to sleep until I heeded my heart. The next morning, I called Becky back and accepted her offer.

“Oh, Rick, wait’ll I tell the girls. They’ll be over the moon. They never stopped talking about you, kept pushing me to reconnect with you. They saw you as my fun friend, the guy who made me laugh, made mom less cranky,” she said.

“That’s sweet, and I appreciate your telling me. It’s going to be nice to see them again after all this time,” I said. “And meeting the grands, too!”

I got increasingly nervous over the next nine days as “Saturday at Becky’s” (now rebranded as “Saturday at Nana’s”) drew nearer. By the time I parked on the curb near her house in one of Norfolk’s toniest neighborhoods, I had butterflies the size of frying pans fluttering in my stomach and my sweaty hands were visibly shaking. My legs felt a bit unsteady as I walked up her driveway with a gift bag in one hand on the gusty early spring afternoon.

Through a front window opened to let the clean ocean breeze blow through, I heard someone exclaim, “Alyssa, look! It’s Rick!” My guess was it’s Nina, Becky’s younger daughter. Seconds later, the front door burst open and the two sisters bounded out and approached me with arms outstretched. They are excellent huggers, just like their mother.

“Rick, it’s so great to see you again. We had concluded that we’d seen the last of you and we missed you,” Nina said.

“Mom did, too,” Alyssa added.

I think they could see by the joy on my face that seeing them again had delighted me, recharged my batteries and relieved any apprehension I might have had about joining this Parsons family gathering. It was almost as though time had reset itself to 2010 or 2011.

“You two are even more lovely than I remember. I missed you, and now I realize how much,” I said.

Nina turned back toward me and smiled. “Come on in,” she said, grabbing the hand that wasn’t carrying the gift bag containing a chilled bottle of pinot grigio I brought for Becky.

“Mom, look who we found out on the lawn…,” Nina called toward the kitchen.

And there she was. Becky rounded a corner in her extensively renovated and upgraded midcentury Craftsman-style home, her silvery hair in a bun and an apron covering the front of her N.C. State Wolfpack sweatshirt. Not a hint of makeup but as naturally, unpretentiously gorgeous as I can remember.

“Welcome back, stranger,” she said as she walked into her roomy den. “I would hug you but I’ve had my hands in chicken wings and barbecue sauce.”

“Well, let’s make do with this,” I said, bending forward and pecking her on the cheek. “And this,” as I pulling the bottle from the bag for her to see.

“Oh my, Rick. Santa Margherita. I’ve been to the mountains in northern Italy where this is imported from. That’s really, really good,” she said. The girl knew her white wines. “You shouldn’t have.”

“Yes, I should have. May I uncork it and pour you a glass?”

Becky smiled, not so much that I had spent nearly $200 on a housewarming bottle of wine but that I had remembered something she enjoyed immensely. She nodded and said, “Yes, my dear, you may.”

I met the grands who were either running about the house or napping. Becky took me out onto the deck where I reconnected with Alyssa’s husband, Doug, and Nina introduced me to her husband of seven years now, Mark. Becky’s two sons-in-law were trying to figure out how to ignite the gas grill she had last used in the fall.

With all the introductions complete, I saw myself back into the kitchen where Alyssa had gotten the wings ready if the outdoor grill would ever come to life (or the oven all set if Plan B was needed).

“You’ve dropped a good bit of equity into renovations in the last few years,” I told Becky. “It’s beautiful.”

“I had a designer come in about five years ago, just sort of do a total gut job, kind of like you see on ‘Property Brothers’ or ‘Fixer Upper,'” she said. “I stayed at Philip’s place when he was away or bunked occasionally with the girls for about two weeks when the house was unlivable. The stuff I could never do on a nurse’s pay I was determined to do while I was bringing home insurance company paychecks.”

Just then, Doug opened the French door to the deck and said in his booming voice, “OK, Mama B, we got it going. Give it about three minutes to heat up.”

I had forgotten how accepting and laid back Becky’s Saturday gatherings could be. An unflappable host, she seemed to relish the chaos and the mess and the noise of a house full of kids. An errant Nerf toy Dylan had thrown toppled and broke a vase filled with fresh-picked daffodils that Mark had brought her: she cleaned it up and shrugged it off. One of the kids had overfilled the toilet before flushing, and Becky coolly used a plunger to narrowly overt an overflow. When the grands got more of the chicken wings sauce and the nacho salad on the floor and the wall than in their mouths, she was unfazed. Nothing a few seconds and Clorox wipes can’t handle.

After Becky’s daughters and their families had bade farewell and headed home, Becky and I stood in the house that was suddenly quiet for the first time in hours.

“Well… can I offer to help you with the cleanup?” I said.

She nodded. “I’d like that. Just like old times.”

With her washing and me drying and wiping down the counters, we were done in 10 minutes.

“Now what?” I said.

“Let me show you what else I did with the renovation,” she said, leading me outside to the deck. She flipped a switch on the post by the steps that led down to the lawn and strings of incandescent lights strung over her landscaped lawn came to life, casting a soft amber glow over it. She led me across the grass to an area in the farthest right quadrant of the backyard with a large wooden pergola. A plaza made of smooth stone pavers and pea gravel in between them formed the floor beneath the pergola with a rectangular, stainless steel fire pit as its centerpiece. From two sturdy crossbeams on opposite sides of the pergola, porch swings facing each other across the fire pit were suspended by brass chains.

“This is sweet,” I said. “Can’t remember what used to be here.”

“A shed filled with lawn and gardening crap. It was on its last legs so after a huge branch from the big oak that used to be over there smashed it during a really bad thunderstorm, I had it removed and had the contractor add this when they did the reno,” she said. “Here, let’s try it out.”

She opened the face plate to a control panel on one of the Pergola’s four sturdy six-by-six cypress support columns. Speakers hidden along the perimeter hedge crackled to life. Seconds later, after a few taps on her iPhone, Aretha Franklin’s “A Natural Woman” poured from them. She removed the cover of the fire pit, twisted a nob on one side of it, pressed a button and a natural gas flame leapt to life, taking some of the edge off the late-March evening chill. She sat on one of the two porch swings as I warmed myself over the fire for a few moments before joining her on the swing.

“So… you’re doing OK. Better than OK, by many appearances,” I said.

“By many appearances, yeah. I’m financially secure. I’ve learned to love the job I do for the insurance company, and the money’s not bad. When I saw the girls had established themselves in good careers and both got happily married to great guys who are excellent providers, I decided I didn’t have to pinch pennies and hoard dollars for them the way I used to, so I paid off the mortgage and put more equity into the house. I splurged on some of the creature comforts I used to deny myself. Nicer car. Nicer golf clubs. Over the years it took to make peace with the accident that night, I decided to be nicer to myself.”

Her gaze was lost in the gas flames licking at the ceramic logs in the pit, and she seemed to speak from a distance. My gaze was locked on her, studying her face, her mood, trying to intuit what she left unspoken, just beneath the surface. I let several long, silent seconds pass.

“But?” I said. She flashed me a faint smile.

“But… in spite of all this, in spite of Philip, in spite of the grandkids, there’s a piece of me that I left back in 2012, before that night in April, something I keep trying to get back but is just out of reach. What I want back is the me who was less afraid, who laughed easier, worried less, slept better,” she said.

“I can’t even identify what it is that I am looking for or that I’d know it if I saw it. So much turbulence in my life then with leaving the only profession I knew, our relationship as it was developing at that time, that nightmare of a night, then our…” she paused, looked downward and exhaled, “… me driving you away.”

I gently took her hand.

“Becky, do not blame yourself,” I said. When her head raised and she looked at me, I could see tears clouding her eyes. “I had your phone number and I could have and should have been more persistent in seeing about you. Before I knew it, the time and the silence and the distance took on a life of its own and it seemed… too late. A horrible event that altered so many lives changed ours.

She kept looking at me even though she wanted to hide the tears that had begun to spill down her face. Her jaw began to quiver as her resolve to control her emotions in front of me crumbled and then collapsed. She pressed her face into my gray, flannel shirt and the blue poplin windbreaker I wore over it and sobbed openly, just as she had in our hotel suite after she had scrubbed her skin raw in the scalding shower after the crash. I put both arms around her and pulled her tight to me. With one hand, I slowly caressed the silky, silvery hair that spilled over her shoulders and across my chest. I planted soft kisses on the top of her scalp.

“I’m so sorry, Rick,” she sputtered between sobs.

“Beck, I’m sorry too. Have been for many years,” I said, emotion now clutching at my words as I spoke. “Not a day passed over these last 11 years when, in some way, I don’t think of you… of what we had and what might have been had I shown more guts and perseverance.”

We kept our seat on the pergola porch swing for nearly an hour, saying nothing. Scarcely moving. Softly crying in each other’s embrace for most of that time, releasing a decade of mutual sorrow and absence and disappointment. We momentarily fell asleep together before my head drooped and my chin brushed her forehead.

We woke in the deepening nighttime chill, making its bite known despite the radiant fire a few feet away and the shared warmth where Becky’s recumbent form rested against mine.

“Oh my, how long have we been asleep?” she said.

I shifted my left arm to see my watch. “Says here it’s 10 o’clock,” I said.

“I guess we better shut this down for the night, huh?” Becky said, stretching as she sat upright, her legs still curled beneath her.

“Yeah, but it’s a shame. Except for the temperatures reminding us it’s not really spring yet, this is pretty close to perfect,” I said.

The phrase evoked a pleasant memory in both of us as soon as I uttered it. Becky flashed a grin.

“Wasn’t that my line?” she said. We both recalled that she said words almost identical one afternoon as we sat on a bench at a mountain overlook with a view of the Shenandoah Valley during a hike along the Appalachian Trail many years earlier. It led to our first romantic kiss.

“I believe it was,” I said. “And I believe, if I may reinterpret what I said, ‘a beautiful evening, beautiful surroundings and my arm around the most beautiful, wonderful girl.'”

“Close enough,” she whispered as we pulled each other closer and our lips slowly, tentatively brushed together before we fell into a tender, searching, lingering kiss that carried the pent-up energy of 11 lost years. She held me tightly to her as my arms pressed her lithe body against mine.

The emotional yield of this kiss was stunning in its power, but it shouldn’t have come as any surprise. As I had just told her, every day — even during the most torrid phase of my protracted tryst with Denise –my thoughts wandered back to Becky.

Whatever Becky and I had never went away: Not during the emotional and psychological torment she endured from that hellish night in the gruesome charnel house of an overturned bus; not during my uncertainty, fear and spinelessness that paralyzed what should have been an unflagging outreach to her. Whatever it was — a once-in-a-lifetime friendship? unspoken love? — never died, never left us. It had been hibernating. Now, it was awakened and it was hungry.

I could feel it burning in my core and radiating through every corner of my being, this unequivocal and unquenchable need to integrate this missing and rediscovered essential person, this complementary part of my spirit, back into my life. So I clutched her as desperately as a drowning person would a buoy.

“God in heaven, I missed you so much, Becky,” I said in a moment we took to breathe. “Whatever should challenge us, I swear to you here and now that I will never again part from you.”

“And I will never ever give up on us,” she said, kissing my chin lightly.

Then she fixed her eyes on mine. “That’s a promise. I wanted to look you in the eyes when I said it. I want you to see for yourself I mean it.”

I saw it. But I already knew it. It was a commitment our hearts had communicated wordlessly in the moments when our energies were focused on this remarkable, redemptive, restorative kiss. That truth burned within us.

▼▼▼

As passionate and transcendent as the porch swing moment by the fire pit had been as well as another sweet, lingering kiss at her front door as I bade goodnight, it didn’t strike me as odd that it didn’t turn erotic until I was back home. The first romantic, physical contact I’d had with a woman in more than two years, and not even a chubby. There was no pawing at breasts or furtive caress of a soft thigh.

Is something wrong with me? I wondered. Have my carnal desires succumbed to age? Will I ever satisfy a lover — Becky? — going forward?

Forming those thoughts into questions left me feeling guilty. I knew that this night was about a deep yearning of the soul and the soul’s jubilation at the restoration of something dear that it feared was lost, even as the soul kept its longing secret from the conscious mind. Or maybe it was a truth incompatible with and banished from the conscious, waking mind until it grows too big and powerful the way floodwaters overtop and breach a levee.

What had happened Saturday between Becky and me on that porch swing was closer to worship than something carnal and libidinous. Yet now, alone in my bed as sleep tugged at me in Sunday’s wee hours, I was left to wonder when our physical needs would assert themselves and, when they did, whether I would be emotionally or physiologically equal to the moment.

The answer came in a dream, which is rare because I can seldom recall the plays my subconscious performs in my sleeping brain. In it, Becky and I were strolling again along the beach near my house as we had the night an impromptu groping session as we stood in shallow water had inspired a conspicuous protrusion in my swim trunks. In the dream, however, neither of us were clothed. We saw an empty sailboat that had was waiting nearby on the shore and we climbed in. And as the winds guided us out into the Bay beneath a bright full moon and we reclined on the deck of the vessel, she climbed astride me and, for the first time, I was within her. We began rocking in the slow, comfortable tempo of the waves during a moment of sublime unity. And then I was awake, but rather than vanishing into the darkness, the images remained vivid.

Inside the baggy basketball shorts I favored for sleep, I sensed heavy arousal and the stiffest erection I had known in years. I closed my eyes to keep the dream image of Becky alive and touched the head of my straining dick. It had not softened, and the clear, viscous fluid that was beading at its opening had already left a trail in my shorts.

“Oh, please,” I said, teasing myself further as I imagined intimacy with Becky. My mind flashed to the night in the Goochland Drive-In when I lay on my back and she mounted me, grinding the increasingly wet crotch panel of her panties into the lump my fully erect dick had made in my blue jeans. The climax that resulted for her was the only one either of us has experienced since our introduction 13 years ago.

I ran my palm, slick with my own precum, over the underside of my penis pressed against my lower abdomen, emulating both the pressure and tempo I recalled from that night, but my mind’s eye was doing all it could to see the abandon in her face as lust overcame her and pushed her toward orgasm, and the beauty of her breasts and their tight, pink nipples as they hardened and swayed in time with her heaving hips. That’s when I recognized I had passed the point of no return, and that the orgasm that had eluded me for nearly two years, since intimacy with Denise ended, was now imminent.

In my memory, I could see Becky as she crested and her hips drove her covered mound into me. I felt the tingling, hot pressure gathering in my loins and ready now for a long-overdue release. My hips lurched upward as wet warmth spewed across my navel, onto my stomach and as far as the sparse hair of my chest. Again and again, with surprising force, my semen streamed onto me, some of it pooling and the rest cascading off my sides onto the bedsheets, until at last my swollen glans was too sensitive for any further contact.

A 65-year-old man had just brought himself to orgasm… and was proud of it. For one thing, it developed organically, from a dream and treasured memories of actual past joys, without the need for disgusting videos or the artifice of a Fleshlight. For another, it provided at least momentary assurance that I was still capable of a robust sexual response in the right context, something essential to the fragile male ego. Finally, it assured me that my poor prostate need not be in straits as dire as Dr. Sujit implied.

A sense of immense relief and languor washed over me, so much that I decided not to trudge to the bathroom and towel off my copious ejaculate. These sheets are overdue for a change anyway, and I’ll just shower the crust off tomorrow, I told myself. And then I’m calling Becky.

► Over Par at Sleepy Hole

Becky answered the call on the hands-free, Bluetooth system in her Volvo on a cloudless Sunday morning.

“I’m driving to church right now. Where are you?” she said.

“Home. Sipping coffee. Wondering what plans you had for the day,” I said.

“Well, I had a 2:30 tee time at Sleepy Hole, but one of the girls dropped out of the foursome Friday, so I’m debating whether to play with just Sheryl and Amy or bag it altogether,” Becky said.

Sleepy Hole in Suffolk, about 20 miles to the west of Norfolk, was one perhaps the top-rated public golf course in Hampton Roads. But still in the first quarter of the year and not fully free of winter’s grasp, the lush Bermuda grass that would cover it later in the year would be thin and the course would play fast.

“Well, if you could find a fourth but the fourth was a guy, do you think that would work?” I asked.

“Depends on the guy,” she said.

“Well, it’s somebody who’s definitely not going to embarrass you and the two other ladies. You should know that because you used to kick his ass regularly, even on that same course, and sometimes by a half-dozen strokes or more,” I said.

“I don’t know, you might have worked on your skills over the past decade. How do I know I’m not getting hustled by a ringer?” she said, evoking outright laughter on my part.

“Becky, I haven’t picked up a club in more than a year other than to go to the driving range a time or two. If you’ve been playing any golf at all, you’ll humiliate me. Again,” I said.

“OK, I’m in the church parking lot now. I’ll text Sheryl and Amy and see if they’re OK with it and circle back after the service.”

Not two minutes after noon, she called. The other ladies, both with handicaps as low as Becky’s, agreed to allow a guy to play “as long as I assured them he wasn’t like a PGA professional.”

She reminded me I had met Sheryl with her long-ago former boyfriend at a Norfolk Tides baseball game many years ago at Harbor Park, one of minor league baseball’s more scenic venues. Amy was a come-here from Connecticut who took over as the CPA in charge of the Virginia Beach office of a national accounting firm. I agreed to meet them at the course, giving me enough time to toss my clubs in the Range Rover and get there early enough to hit a bucket of practice balls before they arrived.

The problem with a Sunday afternoon tee time at a public course is there’s no time to tarry and socialize. Serious golfers who would tee off 10 minutes later would be bearing down on poky foursomes and, if they were guys, felt no need to be nice about it, even (especially?) with ladies.

I started out en fuego, parring the first hole, coming tantalizingly close to an birdie before settling for par on the second, then sticking an eagle on 3. Sheryl and Amy trailed by three strokes at that point, and Becky was two strokes back. They were giving me and even Becky the stink-eye as we reached the fourth tee. That’s when Amy hit a towering drive directly down the fairway for 150 yards and Sheryl did much the same, beating Amy’s drive by what appeared to be an additional 50 feet. Becky addressed the ball and made good contact with her 2-wood, but it took a low trajectory and barely cleared 100 yards.

Golf is a humbling sport, one that can quickly punish the prideful. I strutted to the tee box, ripped a couple of practice swings and flexed as I addressed the ball. Having just holed an eagle, I was feeling pretty good about continuing to teach the ladies a lesson on this par 4 hole with a green that wore a U-shaped sand trap on three sides like an open collar. I made good contact and the ball, out-distanced Sheryl’s by perhaps 30 yards, but it took on a leftward draw as it reached its zenith and its descent and it wound up in the rough.

The women made conservative shots that left them with an easy approach from the one direction in which the bunkers were not a threat. My ball, though closer, had a much higher angle of difficulty because of the location of the bunker and the depth of the grass at my lie. That’s OK, I reasoned, I’d been in worse situations and gotten out of them because of my skill with the 5-iron, my favorite club.

And that’s where I learned that testosterone is not your friend on the golf course. Makes you think you’re better than you are, take unwise risks and cause things to go south in a hurry.

I got too much power and too little loft on my second shot and the ball skittered right across the green and imbedded itself in the sand on the far, downward slope of the bunker well beyond the pin, the worst possible location from which to wedge the ball back onto the green.

The women, meanwhile, were on the green in three strokes. Amy sank a 14-foot putt for par. Becky and Sheryl both carded a bogey. It took me two more shots just to get on the green and I finished with a humiliating triple bogey.

It was bad enough that I could hear Sheryl and Amy snickering as they walked back to their cart. What really emasculated me was hearing Becky give up trying to restrain her laughter and chortle freely as she drove our cart to the fifth tee.

Frustration turned into self-consciousness and the wheels came off my game. The leader at the turn was Amy at seven over par. Becky and Sheryl were tied for second, two strokes behind her. I was bringing up the rear, 14 over par, six strokes behind Becky and Sheryl heading into the final nine.

I popped my second beer of the day after shanking my tee shot on 10 into the pines to the right of the fairway.

“What the hell. I’m just going to enjoy this beautiful day and being part of it with you,” I said. “Just a game anyway.”

She glanced my way with a mock pout on her face as she guided the cart down the asphalt path. “Poor baby. Tough on a boy’s ego having these mean ol’ girls beat you.”

Becky had a point and knew it, but the humor she found in the situation made me laugh. I nodded. “Yep. I had that comin’,” I said.

From that point, however, my game rebounded a bit. By letting all the pretense go, I relaxed and my swing and long game came back, though I remained a gorilla on the greens. By the time we finished 18, I remained in last place, but I had pulled to within two strokes of Becky, the third-place finisher. Sheryl took home the honors, finishing nine over par after a strong back nine. As we turned in the carts, the sun was just hiding itself behind the pines, its rays momentarily creating beautiful orange streaks that contended with the shadows to create a magical tiger-stripe effect on the still-dormant grass of the 18th fairway.

“This was fun. Thanks for letting me crash your foursome,” I told Becky as we walked to our cars.

“Good having you here, though I think Amy, who’s single, was eyeing you, thinking about hitting on you,” she said.

“I’m sure she’s nice, but no thanks. Not interested,” I said. “What I am interested in some food. Did you have time to eat after church and before getting here?”

“A banana. That’s it,” she said.

“Ever been to the Twisted Pig in Portsmouth? It’s on Highway 58 right on the way. Decent barbecue. I’m buying,” I said.

“See you there,” she said.

We chose a booth in a corner by a window looking out onto the asphalt parking lot and the highway beyond it. I demolished a plate of pork ribs while she tore into a barbecued chicken leg, coleslaw and beans. We both washed it down with a cold Coors.

“Becky, I don’t want this to sound weird or anything, but I have been so at peace since reconnecting with you,” I said. “The world feels right again.”

She exhaled, smiled and nodded. “Me too, Rick.”

“Is this our second chance? Is this the rare opportunity life gives us to get it right?” I said.

Becky was silent for longer than I would have wished as she assembled her thoughts exactly as she wanted to speak them.

“Rick, I am skeptical about close relationships. Maybe because so many have disintegrated: my marriage, Philip,” she said, pausing again. “This is different. Life-changing external factors intervened and blew up what we had. The decision wasn’t really ours. I hate that we drifted apart, but we weren’t parted by what one or the other of us did.”

She leaned forward and we clasped each other’s hands.

“I don’t think this is a do-over, Rick. I don’t want to think of it that way. I think the answer was in our kiss last night. I’ve never felt anything that powerful and moving. But I’ve thought about it and I want to think of this as a resumption — a resumption of something that fate delayed far too long,” she said.

I kissed her hand.

“That kiss told the truth. That kiss realigned my life. I realized that I never again want to be without you.”

I paused.

“OK, you haven’t run away, so I guess you’re not totally opposed,” I said.

Her lips trembled. Her eyes searched mine.

“Oh, Rick. You see the truth is I… I love you,” she said as a teardrop spilled from her cheek. She shrugged. “I love you.”

I stood, scooted into the booth beside her, held her face gently in my hands and our eyes locked on each other’s for a long moment. “Let me respond with this truth,” I said.

I kissed her with all that my soul, at its highest purpose, could command — slowly, deeply, in a way that let her know that she is the only thing in my universe. That I love her.

When our kiss broke, she smiled.

“You said it yourself: the kiss speaks the truth. You know what I was saying with that kiss, don’t you.”

She nodded. “I do.”

“But just to restate the obvious, I love you, Becky. I love you, I love you, I love you, and I never want you to doubt that.”

We kissed again, oblivious to our surroundings, including the server who quietly left the check on the corner of our table without disturbing us.

I peeled off two twenties and a ten to cover the $42 tab and left it on the table.

“Let’s go home,” Becky said in a husky voice, “… together.”

► HOME.

Becky had already pulled into her detached garage and was lowering its door by the time I parked on the curb in front of her house and walked down the driveway to where she was standing.

“Should we crank up the fire pit again?” I asked.

“Don’t think so,” she said. “Follow me.”

We climbed the side steps to her deck and she keyed in the pass code to her home security system, opened the French doors and we walked I followed her into the kitchen.

“There are a few Yuenglings in the fridge that Doug and Mark didn’t finish yesterday if you like, and…,” she said, then turned toward me to point out something else when I put my hands on her waist, stopping her midsentence.

“You are… beautiful. You are… perfect,” I told her. “And I love you.”

As I pulled her toward me, she wrapped her arms around my neck, pulling our mouths together. Again, the kiss was electric — unhurried and languid, but simmering in its intensity.

Since that afternoon on the Blue Ridge Mountain overlook, kissing Becky has been like an exquisitely performed ballet: intuitively, our lips, our tongues interact in perfect choreography, probing, teasing, inviting. This one lasted, it seemed, for more than a minute without the slightest break. And when it finally ended and she leaned her forehead against the hollow of my neck, we momentarily lacked words. My fingers gently brushed through her silvery hair and ran down her back to the swell of her bottom beneath the white, mid-thigh golf skirt she wore over a white, long-sleeved bodysuit and a yellow sweater vest.

“Make love to me, Rick,” she whispered.

I kissed her again and as we kissed, I felt her press her waist into mine. My hand went beneath her skirt to caress the fullness of her buttocks and trace the crease between its two globes beneath her bodysuit. She did likewise, allowing one of her hands to squeeze my ass before trailing it around to feel the growing hardness in my red, knit golf pants. She moaned into my mouth as she traced its dimensions.

“Let’s go,” she rasped.

We ascended the stairs to her bedroom suite.

My yellow polo shirt hit the floor first, and that was at the top of the stairs in the hallway leading to the bedroom. Next I unzipped her skirt and she discarded it midway down the hallway beside her sweater vest, leaving her only in her bodysuit except the slip-on sneakers she put on in place of her golf shoes after our match.

Once inside the bedroom, she closed the door, pinned me against it to kiss me as we surrendered fully to lust. She hooked her right leg behind my left leg to increase the friction her covered vulva could generate against my still-clothed thigh.

With a sense of urgency, her hand ranged over the zipper of my pants, stroking the raging boner underneath. She began to fumble with the snaps to the elastic waistband of my golf pants as my hands found her breasts and the firm nipples trapped beneath the stretchy Gore-Tex fabric of her bodysuit, causing her to moan into my mouth.

We momentarily broke our kiss.

“OK, no more stand-up makeouts,” I groaned to her as I swept her up in my arms and walked her over to the bed and laid her gently on it. I kicked off my Docksider deck shoes and undid the snaps and zipper of my golf pants before she pushed my hands out of the way and peeled them down, allowing me to step out of them. She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands still grasping my hips.

Finally, Becky tugged my boxer briefs down to my knees as my swollen penis bobbed free of its constraints. She ran her fingers down its shaft, almost reverently, seemingly marveling at it as she viewed it for the first time, then scooped a bead of clear fluid from its tip with her index finger. She grasped its shaft and tugged slowly several times before swirling her tongue around its head.

I ran my fingers along her cheek, and she released my throbbing hardness as she looked upward at me as I bent to kiss her again. As I did, she put her arms around my neck and lay backward, pulling me down onto the bed with her. I left my underwear on the floor as we scooted more fully onto the bed. When that was done, I kissed my way down her body — the delicate hollow of her throat, the slightly freckled slope of her chest and the nipples, now hard and raging against their stretch-knit restraints, the dip in the material over her navel, the leg holes of the bodysuit, and finally the hook-and-eye snaps directly over her moist pussy, rich with the clean, musky scent of her arousal. The contact there caused her pelvis to leap as if from an electrical shock.

My fingers grasped the top flap of her crotch closure and pulled it gently downward until I could feel the hooks pull free from the enclosures on the bottom flap. Now, Becky was whimpering, her hips beginning to undulate against the pressure of my fingers trying to free her pussy from the garment. When the last of the three closures was unclasped, I opened it up and got my first, long awaited glimpse of Becky’s naked, wet passionflower topped by a neat, wispy pubic patch, largely the same brunette shade as her hair once was with some gray strands intermingled.

“You are precious and perfect beyond words, Becky,” I said as my tongue dipped into her folds for my first intimate contact with her.

“Oh… oh… Rick,” she moaned as she threaded my hair through her fingers and pressed my face against her slit.

I explored her slowly, savoring every sensual centimeter, slowly running the tip of my tongue between her pink inner folds and he smooth outer labia, up one side of her pussy to her clitoris at its hooded apex, and then down the other, all the while inhaling her womanly bouquet. As control began slipping from Becky, I plowed my tongue between her glistening inner lips until I found her opening, and inserted it as deeply as I could, finding it almost drooling. With that, Becky reflexively pushed herself harder into my mouth as her breathing quickened.

Moments later, I felt her hands pulling my face away, even as her hips twisted and squirmed in lustful abandon. She pulled my face to hers and kissed me, for the first time tasting her arousal on my lips and tongue as she took my straining erection in her hand.

“Lie back, Rick,” she said.

In a single motion, I rolled onto my back and Becky rolled on top of me, positioning one knee on either side of my chest. She peeled away her unsnapped bodysuit and slung it off the bed, now gloriously naked and more beautiful than even my imagination could conceive. She pressed her chest against mine, her nipples now warm against my bare chest. Then, with my erection pressed between us, Becky positioned her wet folds against its underside and began slowly drawing it back and forth over its length.

With Foghorn now coated with her arousal, she paused and positioned me at her entrance. We stared into each other’s eyes as she fed my cock slowly, inch-by-inch into her depths until we were, at last, fully coupled.

Becky and I paused in awe of the moment. Her hands caressed my face. She smiled at me, a look of peace glowing from her.

“Dear Lord, Beck, I know now. This is what was meant to be, not just for the past 4,000 days but always. I have never felt this complete… ever, my beautiful girl.” I kissed her again. “Home is not a place. Home, for me, is you.”

She said nothing. Her hips remained still for a time as she savored the moment, continuing her exploration of my face with her fingers, tenderly tracing its creases and contours, its skin and its two-day razor stubble as though for the first time, recording it all in her memory, documenting as much as she could of this turning point for both of us.

At last her attention and her gaze returned to my eyes.

“Rick…,” she said. “Even before I met you, I hoped that I would find that missing part of me. I have that now, my love.”

With that, we kissed again — loving and lewd, warm and wanton — as her hips began drawing me in and out of her and grinding her mound against my pubic bone as nature and passion do what they do with a man and a woman.

She sat almost upright, now riding me without reservation, her eyelids heavy with lust and a look of abandon on her face, guiding my hands to her bouncing breasts, just as I recalled from the moments in the drive-in theater 11 years earlier just before her climax tore through her.

I sat up and took a nipple in my mouth while my hand kneaded and caressed the other as her hips increased their force and tempo, and she moaned in pleasure. I tried to divert my mind from the overpowering sensation her wet, tight womanhood exerted, driving me toward my crescendo, I feared, before Becky to lose herself in her orgasm. I bit down on the inside lining of my mouth, hoping to short-circuit the pleasure signals flooding my brain from my straining cock straining and luxuriating inside Becky’s sweet pussy as her frantic movements drove us both toward our peak.

“Cumming… I’m cumming, Rick… hold me,” she said, pressing herself hard against me and consuming my mouth with hers. I wrapped her tightly in my arms and pressed her to my bare, perspiring chest as I felt her hips clench and shudder for the first time. She cried out in ecstasy as the muscles of her lower abdomen began clutching around her vagina, creating what felt like a milking motion on my penis deep inside her and triggering my own release.

“Me too, baby…,” I bellowed.

Her breathing momentarily took on a hissing quality as she inhaled and exhaled through her teeth, clenched in the throes of her orgasm. “Yes… fill my pussy, Rick.”

I felt myself swell within her and, for the second time in less than 24 hours, semen streamed out of me, only now it wasn’t a dream, it was a dream come true. Becky hungrily kissed me again as her pussy drove itself onto me, pushing every available centimeter of my spurting manhood as far within her as possible. I groaned in passion, even with our open mouths locked together.

With my seed finally pooled inside Becky, our kiss broke and my burning abdominal muscled finally surrendered to fatigue and I collapsed backward onto her bed, my eyes focused on the beautiful woman now gathering her wits after the last tremors of her orgasm shook her. All that mattered in my world was whatever made her smile contentedly at me at this moment of sublime joy and contentment.

Neither of us spoke a word. We giggled. We kissed. We touched and snuggled and caressed. We kissed some more. We lost ourselves in each other’s gaze. We savored every sensation, every sound, every sight, including the point where we still remained intimately linked — neither of us wanting to end a pairing so loving, so profound, so overdue.

And that’s how it was as sleep overtook us on this first night of the rest of our lives together.

▼▼▼

Once more the smell of Becky making coffee awoke me.

She had already risen, showered, retrieved her copy of the Wall Street Journal from her driveway and made coffee for two, again remembering my partiality to dark roast. I was briefly disoriented waking up in her bed and her bedroom until I saw her bringing a fresh mug to me, her face radiant, her freshly shampooed hair still damp and cascading in silver rivulets onto the collar of her plush, pink terrycloth bathrobe.

“Good morning, gorgeous,” I said as I took the steaming cup from her.

“Morning yourself. I like seeing you there. You match up well with the linens and the surroundings,” she said.

“Good,” I said, taking a sip of the fresh, rich brew. “I like being here.”

She bent down and kissed me. Initially a peck, then a more leisurely, amorous kiss. Then she ran her hand lightly along my brow and cheek.

“You know, until last night the last time I had climaxed with a man was nearly 11 years ago,” she said, a half-smile on her face as she let me do the math.

“You mean…,” I said, and she was already nodding.

“Mmm hmm. That night. At the drive-in,” she said.

“All those years with… Philip?”

“I didn’t say it was the first time I’d had sex. I said it was the first time I had orgasmed… with a man,” she said. “It wasn’t a priority for him. I never felt cared for… like a full woman with him.”

Now, I sat up and leaned into Becky and kissed her deeply.

In this kiss-and-tell moment of incredible intimacy, I told Becky how I had ended my long run without an ejaculation two nights before because of a dream — a dream about her — that awoke me, and that it was my memories of us — of her — from that night at the drive-in that propelled me to completion.

I said that I was blessed enough for that dream to become reality one night later and that I was able to respond to her as ardently as I did was exclusively a tribute to her. And the Fleshlight — still in its shrink-wrapped box at the back of my sock drawer — would be returned to the Snooty Fox for a refund.

“Last night was the most special and loving and life-changing encounter of my life, Becky. I have never known passion and connection and tenderness and sharing the way we did right here, and I don’t ever want to be without you.”

Her chin quivered slightly as she nodded and smiled.

“In those early days and through our time together back then, I was determined not to form a serious relationship. One ruined marriage, I thought, was enough. I could have fun, be friends — maybe occasionally with benefits — back then, but…,” Becky said. “And your divorce was just going final, too. You didn’t know what you wanted.”

“I’m not that way anymore, Rick. Like you, there wasn’t a day during all that time, even with Philip, that I didn’t think of you… and wonder. I wondered if I’d ever find someone who could make me laugh and make life fun again the way you did. I even wondered if maybe one day we’d get another chance, and if we did…”

“And then, there you were bumping into me in the Snooty Fox,” she said. “So we got that chance. And here we are. Fate again? Fate come full circle?”

She leaned into me again, her eyes riveted onto mine.

“But I know this, Rick: I lost you once, and I’ll be damned if I let that happen again. I love you, my dearest friend and lover, and I’d be pleased for the rest of my life to have you think of me as home because I want you in my life,” she said.

My hands gently framed her sweet face in a caress. I brought my face toward hers for a kiss but stopped just short.

“Deal,” I said, proceeding with a fulsome, searching kiss.

Becky had already planned to work from home on Monday. Now holding a C-suite position with the insurance company, she had wide discretion on where she got her work done unless there was compelling reason to be on-site. With that in mind, I pushed the lapels of her bathrobe apart, exposing her breasts with their ruddy nipples already tightening in arousal beneath my fingers. She wasted no time either, reaching beneath the sheets for my already tumescent and fast-rising cock.

This time, with the morning sunlight streaming through the blinds, I had my best view yet of her perfectly imperfect 58-year-old body as I pressed her onto her back and splayed her robe open. I started with a slow, sensual kiss before kissing my way down her neck to the hollow between her breasts before suckling and tonguing each nipple to full turgidity, causing her hips to undulate gently.

From there, my tongue traced a route down the center of her abdomen to the hollow of her navel and then plunged into it. Now her loins were rocking more intently, her thighs scissoring together to create sensation against her vulva, and her left hand venturing of its own volition into her downy patch of nether hair to tease the tender folds already peeking from her outer slit.

From there, my series of kisses continued southward, my nostrils filling with her womanly richness. I peppered kisses on the periphery of her mound, now pushing assertively toward me before I detoured down the front of her right thigh down to her knee, then lifted her leg for the return trip down the back of her thigh almost until it reached the crease of her buttock, lingering at the crease that separated her leg from her pussy and then making the same circuit on her left leg.

That’s when I brushed my lips gently across her flushed, dewy labia, causing her hips to jerk. I returned to her folds again, this time more insistent, kissing and nibbling them as I parted her legs wider and crept slowly, maddeningly toward her emerging clit. When my tongue at last made contact, her hips heaved into my face as Becky growled her yearning.

“Oh, don’t stop, Rick, for God’s sake,” Becky rasped.

I doubled my tongue’s ministrations up and down her pussy, from her opening to her shrouded jewel and back, over and over, then inserted my index finger just and inch or two into her vagina to massage its sensitive anterior wall, seeking her G-spot. When I found it, she whimpered. Moments later, the first wave of her orgasm hit and she cried out loudly, using both hands to hold my face against her sopping, spasming crotch.

In the minute or so it took for her to return to earth, I suspended suckling her clitoris or the tender folds, briefly too sensitive for stimulation. When I finally crawled upward to kiss her, she was still catching her breath.

“Rick, whatever you’re doing, you’re going to kill me,” she said, informing me that she had just achieved her first orgasm from oral sex. “But that’s understandable considering last night was the first time anyone had done that for me,” she said.

I kissed her, allowing Becky to savor her own tangy, viscous juices, still coating my lips, face and tongue, and that quickly restored her arousal.

“Mmmmm, gimme,” she said, sliding her hand down my belly to take my hardness in her hand and gently tug on it a few times. She wrapped her legs around my waist, freed the flanged head of my cock from its foreskin and swabbed it up and down her drenched slit before nestling it at her opening. I thrust slowly in.

“Oh, yesssss,” she hissed, thrusting her pussy upward to meet my invading cock. “Make a sticky mess of my little pussy, Rick.”

Not two weeks earlier, my doctor had me questioning whether I could ever achieve another erection. Now, I was rock-hard and racing headlong toward my third orgasm in 36 hours, and all three of them had everything to do with Becky Parsons.

Our first lovemaking in the missionary position put me in charge of tempo, and I began with long, slow strokes, burying myself at a deliberate pace to the hilt, then retreating almost fully from her before repeating the process. Clearly, she was warming to it, but heightened her own sensation by bracketing her clit between the first two fingers of her left hand and slowly rolling it in a circular motion.

Our motions quickly became more hurried and urgent, my strokes still deep but shorter, and her hips and mound bucking more forcefully into me. A dreamy look came over her face as she exhorted me with every other quickened breath to keep feeding my hardness into her exactly as I was.

“Oh yeah, baby,” she panted. “Right there… that’s it… keep going… that’s it… lose yourself in there…”

I felt her losing control and moments later, she stiffened and shuddered with her second climax of this young Monday morning. Her mound seemed to lunge into mine, her legs locked tightly behind me, grunting, fully indulging her carnal needs. I could feel a new, warm wetness at our juncture, coating her thighs and mine.

Having just released a copious load into her just eight hours earlier, I was able to time this orgasm better. I slowed my tempo as she came down from her crest, holding her gently.

“Honey, I think I did something when I came just then,… something… wet,” she said. “I don’t think I peed, but there’s something soggy down there.”

“Baby, whatever it is, I’m going to lick up every drop just as soon as I push you over the line again, this time with me,” I said.

Our mouths and tongues re-engaged in a lewd dance, something that could best be described as mouth-fucking. By now, we had given ourselves over to our animal responses, shamelessly rutting and intent only on satisfying nature’s essential desires.

“Rick, let’s try this,” Becky said. I withdrew for a moment, long enough for her to flip onto her tummy and raise her backside off the bed, her gaping vagina visible beneath the brown star of her anus and beckoning to me from between its pink folds. “From behind.”

On my knees, I positioned myself behind her and slipped easily back into her as she groaned in satisfaction. As before, she continued to roll her angry, erect and wet clitoral hood between her two fingers as my waist pounded into the lean globes of her rounded ass, driving my twitching erection slightly downward, stimulating anew the forward wall of her grotto and her G-spot. It didn’t take long for the combination to register with her.

She sought to slam herself back into me as my thrusts deepened and my tempo increased, but soon, I was pushing so far forward that her mound was pressed nearly into the mattress with her hand pinned underneath. That, it turned out, was the ideal angle for her yet.

Control was slipping from Becky fast. Her breathing was becoming ragged as were the movements of her hips. She began grunting instructions with every breath.

“Harder Rick… fuck me… harder… give me your cum, baby,” she said as I felt the muscles of her pelvic floor begin once more to contract and release as she wailed in orgasmic surrender. The clenching effect sent me over the top as I thrust as deeply as possible, releasing the first rope of semen into Becky’s spasming pussy.

We were both wailing in sexual bliss, our duet filling both floors of her house as climactic jolts coursed through our joined, naked bodies in a moment of utterly unguarded intimacy.

About five minutes later, when our respiration returned to normal in the afterglow of an extraordinary morning of lovemaking, we lay naked and still in each other’s embrace.

“I guess the least I can do is offer to strip the bed and change the sheets,” I said as I looked down at numerous wet patches left by our varied and intermingled secretions. “We’re messy. I like messy.”

“Deal. But maybe we shower and get dressed first. You don’t have much of a wardrobe to choose from. I guess those red golf britches will have to do for now,” she said.

We showered. Together. Soaping and rinsing and drying every inch of each other. And as aspirational as the notion of another round of lovemaking seemed, bodies need time to recycle.

Even after a breakfast of eggs and sausage and waffles, and even as I cranked my Range Rover to return to my beachfront house, Becky and I comforted ourselves in the knowledge that we would share intimacy again soon — hours, possibly days, but never again a matter of years.

► RESOLUTION

Neither of us have sold our houses. We both own them outright, we can afford the upkeep and we like the variety. So we keep them both. Because we can.

There are days when Becky and I take leisurely strolls along the beach at Ocean View, stopping occasionally to kiss, but returning to my house for the unrestricted, uninhabited lovemaking that we denied ourselves more than a decade previous. Sometimes, we stay there together for days.

Other times, we cohabit in her house in Ghent, relaxing on her deck, around her fire pit, drifting off on the sofa in the den in front of the television or making out there like teenagers before taking our sexual explorations upstairs.

And occasionally, when circumstances such as travel or visitors at one venue or another dictate, we spend a rare night apart in our own houses. The parting, even for a night or two, makes our catch-up sex that much more explosive when we are back together again.

The physical part, though, is not really the best of it. The best part is having my best friend back with me almost all the time. Yes, as she says, I make her laugh. But she does the same for me as no one else ever has. She knocks the barbed edges off a tough day, she’s my sunshine, even on the coldest, cloudiest days. She makes the ordinary adventurous, be it a trip to the grocery to a drive down the freeway.

In April, a month after we were reunited and quickly realized and professed our love for each other, we reprised our night at the Goochland Drive-In. This time, in the cargo area of the Range Rover, we fully consummated our sexual passions, and then drove to our room — in a funky, boutique, spa hotel downtown, not the Short Pump convention hotel — and this time made the sort of celebratory love fate denied us last time. How celebratory? The front desk called our room because of a noise complaint from the adjacent room.

We agreed that we should not wait long to tell our grown kids about our relationship. All four — her daughters, Alyssa and Nina, and my son, Cooper, and daughter, Sarah — greeted the news enthusiastically.

“Becky was your friend from a long time ago, wasn’t she?” Sarah said when I told her. “I remember you two used to go places and do things and you were always laughing like best friends when you were around each other. I wondered why it didn’t turn into more back then and why you quit hanging out.”

At the next Saturday at Nana’s, Alyssa pulled me off into a corner for “the talk.” I was a little worried at first.

“You and mom didn’t fool me for a minute. I could tell last time you were here that you both missed each other, wanted each other. A girl catches things like that about her mom,” Alyssa said. “I knew it a dozen years ago, too, and it broke my heart that you two drifted apart.”

“Mom’s always said she’s done with long-term relationships, certainly marriage. She may be telling you that now, too, but I don’t believe it and neither should you,” Alyssa said.

“This time she’s not saying that. Neither of us are,” I told Alyssa, watching her eyes widen at the revelation. “I’d sooner saw my leg off than lose her again.”

“Stay tuned,” I said, winking at Alyssa.

▼▼▼

It’s mid-June now.

I put a large diamond ring on the third finger of Becky’s left hand. We haven’t set a date. Maybe we will later. Maybe we never will. If the mood hits us, we’ll sneak off and do it. Because, by mutual preference, we are playing it by ear as to whether we ever intend to formalize things legally by marriage, I suppose you could argue we’re not actually engaged.

Bottom line: I didn’t like the idea of not having something on her hand to show her every waking moment that I love her and the world that I love her as much as any man ever loved his spouse.

Last month, we spent the day together at a concert on the beachfront in Virginia Beach — a day in May so uncharacteristically chilly that the sweatshirts we brought with us proved insufficient to the Atlantic breeze after the sun set. So we returned to my house and spent the night in a made-for-two sleeping bag amid the dunes on the approach from the shore to my deck.

A younger couple walking down the beach much closer to the houses than is prudent caught us in flagrante delicto.

“Jeez, grandpa, get a room,” the mouthy kid said.

“Don’t need one. I own this property and you’re trespassing,” I said. His girlfriend tugged him back toward the public access portion closer to the water line.

Every morning I wake up next to Becky is a blessing. Life is fun again — for both of us — because the world gave us a do-over, and we seized it and held on for dear life.

She’s got about seven more years before she retires, and when that happens, we plan to spend a whole year traveling the world together. Who knows how many years we still have: we’re in the autumn of our time and we’re slowing down. But we are finding mature love to be the most fulfilling, and that’s love of all kinds, not just physical. We take the time that twenty- and thirty-somethings can’t or won’t to savor each other, to listen to each other, to experience sunsets and birthdays and walks in the woods and game-saving triple plays and vinyl albums from the ’70s played on turntables from the same era and holding hands and our children and grandchildren and an evening at the movies… all of that.

The Lord willing, we’ve got lots more chapters to write: the loving, the fun, the erotic, the thrilling. Maybe I’ll come back here from time to time and share some of it with you.

Well, as much as Becky will allow, anyway.

▲▲▲

( This is an open-ended, occasional series following the mature life and love of Rick and Becky, told from Rick’s perspective. Check back periodically for updates.)