Afternoon Friday, May 23rd, 2025

Garin was waiting by the Turtle Pond in Central Park for Amina. He’d rarely come through the park, but in their texts he’d agreed to take her on a tour of ancient Egyptian artifacts and to do that he’d have the best selection at the Met. She was a little late, but he was a little early, and he took a moment, under a 102 decibel canopy of tree-bug chorus, to browse through his phone while strolling around the pond’s edge, spotting red-eared sliders.

Garin got a couple voice mail notifications and thought it might be Amina. And then Amina appeared in tight blue jeans and a thin green cold-shoulder rib-knit long sleeve that left her acromion process beautifully displayed. She was walking down the path from a distance. Garin waved and signaled at her to stop where she was; she was closer to the entrance than he was. Walking toward her, they embraced by a weather-worn obelisk. Straight to the point, she tapped him on the chest. “Are you ready for your first question? If you don’t get it, our date is cancelled.”

Garin stiffened up as a student at a spelling bee. “Ask.”

Giving him a side-eye and then looking to the obelis., “When was this grand phallic relic stolen?”

“It takes a phallic relic to know one.” Garin shook his head. “It’s a trick question. It wasn’t stolen at all, but was given to New York as a gift from the autonomous Ottoman Khedive of Egypt, Ismail Pasha the Magnificent. Well… its gold capstone pyramidion was stolen by foreign invaders, but those were the Persians under Cambyses II.”

Amina pressed her wrists together and did a quick silent clap for him. “I didn’t know that. I thought it was all pilfered.”

Garin walked with Amina into the Met and took her straight for the Egyptian wing. “Between a fifth and a half of Egyptian artifacts currently outside the country were removed without government permission. Egypt was handing out pieces of its priceless heritage like candy, though. When you hold out the sweets bowl, the colonizer kids are going to grab as much as they can, and the weird ones are going to eat your mummies.”

“Oh? I don’t want to know how mummies taste. I’m going to imagine they tasted like pork rinds, though.” Amina gave a thumbs up. “I’m good with that.” She nodded emphatically. Garin chuckled, passing through admission with her close behind.

Amina and Garin’s footsteps echoed as they came to several exhibits. For an hour she prompted him with her questions before the Temple of Dendur, the funerary mask of Hatnefer, the painted limestone stela of the Steward Amenemhat, the statue of Hatshepsut, an extensive collection of coffins and sarcophagi, the Tomb of Perneb, Amarna Period art, a relief of Nefertiti, several odd granite statues, the stela of the Singer of Amun, Egyptian jewelry of gold, silver, lapis lazuli, faience, carnelian, agate, onyx, jasper, shells, ivory, glass, amber, turquoise, the funerary cone of the Lady of the House, Sheshonq, the fragmentary statue of Ramesses II as a standard bearer, scarabs, ankhs, the Eye of Horus, miniatures of pyramids mid-construction, and animal-headed deities. There wasn’t too much there Egyptologists could explain to her that he couldn’t.

They came to a 1:1 scale waxen modern depiction of Tutankhamun in his boyhood as he’d have appeared in person. Amina bent in to look closely. “He bore deformities?”

Garin sighed. “To wit, his parents were consanguineous, blue-blooded royalty; clubfoot, cleft palate, scoliosis and other heritable defects. His pharaoh father was gone very early, making him the boy king. His mother and stepmother took care of him, and he looked to his various court advisors as fill-in dads.”

Amina looked sullen under the dim lighting of the exhibits. “You say that with such sympathy. You would make a good dad. I think.”

Garin turned and stood facing her, his voice echoing through the hall. “I know I would, because I am. Amina, I have two kids.”

Amina rested her hand on the stanchion post that kept visitors from touching the boy king. “You do? Two?”

Garin nodded. “A boy and girl. Are you cool with it?”

Amina clasped her hands under her chin. “I don’t know. I wish you told me that sooner. Maybe. Is it cool if I have time to think about it?”

Garin held out his hand, unblinking. “You have five cool seconds to think.”

In the first second she understood she’d given him a light ultimatum, in the second she understood that to respond in kind with his own ultimatum was the only thing a good father would do and she liked that, in the third she wondered if she was cut out for a man who had kids from a previous relationship, in the fourth she decided, and in the fifth her hand landed in his. “Yes. Yes. What’re their names? Am I able to meet them? I mean... eventually?”

Garin nodded. “Of course. They’re my Prince Alan and Princess Penny. The boy… minor allergies. The girl… funny teeth. Both a touch deformed.”

Amina’s face quirked. “They aren’t deformed. I’m going to put you in a tomb and leave you in it for 3,000 years.”

Leaving the museum, they continued on to lunch at a deli, from where Garin accompanied her on a walk into the Main Branch library. She only had to gather a few medical journals in early preparation for a surgical malpractice defense case, but it took time. She set to work on a stack of them, reading through and then making scans of needed pages. She insisted he not stay just because of her, but he remained seated reading an autobiographical work he’d pried off the shelf, showing her in it a black-and-white photo of a man in a bucket hat and tinted glasses smoking a luxury cigarette filter holder. “... He pioneered gonzo journalism.”

Though they didn’t say much, she appreciated his company. Noticing that she was returning journals, he ordered a rideshare before she asked, and because it was dark, he rode back to her building with her. Exchanging a parting kiss at the door to her condominium tower, she hooked his fingers in hers. “We’ll meet soon.”

⚜

Evening Thursday, May 29th, 2025

Garin gave a little tap on Alan's door, then turned with a few steps and tapped on Penny's door. The door cracked; Alan appeared, and then Penny. Garin could see Penny had her friend Carla in her room, and Alan, with his headphones around his neck, was in the middle of a live computer game match.

Garin leaned against the iron guardrail and regarded its decorative balusters. Alan and Penny stepped out from their doors, waiting for him to say something, and then he did. "Joey's mom died this morning."

Penny straightened up. "How?"

Alan huffed. "She had cancer, Pen."

Garin gently corrected him. "She did, but it probably wasn't that. Anyway, I'm taking you two with me over to Joey's place. He'd feel a bit better seeing you, you know."

Penny wanted to object; instead she put it in polite question form. "But what will Carla do while we're gone?"

Garin turned to go back downstairs. "It's going on 6 in the evening; I'll drop her off at her house on the way. Get ready, Alan. Turn off the game; all three of you be down in five minutes."

Alan obediently said, "Alright, Dad, I'm already ready and right behind you."

And Penny rushed into her room to help Carla gather her backpack together. "I'm going to a funeral."

Alan, overhearing and with Garin downstairs, pounced with the big brotherly retort, "She just passed this morning; the funeral won't be tonight."

Penny turned, fists clenched. "I knew that! I mean in a few days!"

Ignoring her and proceeding down the stairs, Alan called back, "No, you didn't."

Penny popped her head out her door. "I did!"

⚜

Evening Thursday, May 29th, 2025

Lyrou lingered alone in her hot, soapy bathtub. She’d heard Garin in the hallway talking to Penny and Alan. Now Garin had left with the kids. She closed her eyes and wondered if she could remote view Amina. Right, Lyrou imagined leaving her body there in the tub, zipping into the night sky, and then coming back down on Amina’s location. Aha! Her mind posited that Amina was in her bathtub right now, precisely as Lyrou was. Voilà! Look at her! Une péri sarrasine! Or une néréide de la Méditerranée, bathing like a naïade, slender as a sylphide, but with des formes junoniennes, also? Garin wasn’t exaggerating; Amina looked amazing in Lyrou’s spirit-eye. Lo! Amina’s eyes opened, and she looked about and shivered; she could sense she was being watched. Enough of this eerie sense, Amina felt, and she pulled the drain plug. Lyrou went down the pipe and into the vast sanitation system of the city. She floated out to the Hudson and then rediscovered her home in Edgewater. Flying back through her window, she found her own body in the bathtub and re-entered it.

Lyrou opened her eyes. Right, if real-Amina looked that sexy, naked and wet, then she might as well give Garin a final farewell kiss and flush this marriage goodbye.

Lyrou scooched her butt across the bathtub closer to the drain, pulled the plug and let the soap layer lower and condense, and then she turned the bath faucet on, test-adjusting it for warmth and pressure. When it was just right, she slid her soggy, wrinkled toes and soles up the tile past the knob, higher still, ankles up, up, up and lay back with her hair resting in the carpet of suds at the shallow end. Pivoting her hips ever so slightly, she aligned her clit with the falling, streaming gobs of hot H2O... and with the rising steam she let out a gasp, "Comme ça... comme ça."

With her eyes closed, the sensation of the hot water beating her clit to a rhythm was enough to release the tension through all her extremities. Her knees bent, and she hung her legs over the tub rim, feet dangling outside. She gyrated her hips to let the water run a ring around her pussy hole, burbling down over her perineum and asshole. If she were a stone under this drip for a thousand years, the steady pit-pat would wear a phreatic karst conduit, a vadose canyon, and run through her, flowing out her mouth agape. She rubbed at her clit, retracting her hood, exposing and pressing it upward into the stream. She clenched her teeth at the pleasure it delivered, almost too much to continue, but she persisted, and she felt the paraurethral urgency… just before she had in her mind flash images of Garin's perfect ass working into a woman it had rendered a moment earlier, imagined-Amina's legs wrapped around his back, her feet hooked together and bobbing with his thrusts. Lyrou’s knees came clacking together like magnets as she climaxed; her hands went flying, one grabbing hold of the bathtub to brace her body and the other seizing the faucet head with appreciation like it were a polished-chrome-plated brass dick.

⚜

Afternoon Friday, May 30th, 2025

Garin sat on Amina's white leather couch, elbow propped on the armrest, as Amina moved around her Fort Lee apartment to the soft tune of a classical playlist; Mozart, Bach, Beethoven. The space was small but inviting, no pretensions, just cozy corners filled with personal items that held a lot of meaning. 

Amina, humming lightly to herself, was busy in the kitchen, her back to him as she fiddled with something on the stove. He smelled some meat cooking. Garin’s eyes drifted across the room. The glass coffee table in front of him was cluttered with books, most of them well-read with dog-eared pages and colorful sticky notes popping out. A pile of legal journals sat neatly beside a framed photograph of a younger Amina and her big family laughing, Arab cousins’ faces squished together in a moment of unguarded joy. 

His eyes swept the room again, taking in the thoughtful arrangement of the space. Near the corner, a tall bookshelf stood crammed with a mix of legal literature, medical texts, and a few biographies of renowned doctors and surgeons who'd pioneered or invented various techniques and devices. But what caught his eye more were the photographs and mementos scattered throughout. A wedding portrait of Amina’s parents stood framed on a small side table, the colors and resolution typical of cameras in the late 80s. Her mother, youthful and radiant in a traditional white dress, stood beside her father, a tall man with a strong jaw and an easy smile. They looked like they'd stepped out of a memory long past, frozen in a fleeting moment of happiness before "making a living" on the Hudson would pull them into its busy currents. 

There were more photographs of Amina’s extensive Maronite family; weddings, reunions, vacations, and gatherings that spanned generations. His eye lingered on one particular shot: a crowded table at a family celebration, the women in brightly colored dresses, the men in suits, all gathered around a table laden with food. It was easy to hear the loud, boisterous energy of that meal, the way laughter and conversation would have spilled over into the night. In another frame, a picture of Beirut from what looked like the 60s, its limestone-street labyrinth, narrow and bustling, the skyline unmarred by the ugly scars of war. It was a snapshot of a time and place that Amina had never known but must've been connected to.

As his eyes moved down the bookshelf, they landed on something else, an elegant piece of Arabic calligraphy, framed and hanging above a tall stack of books. The flowing script was familiar, but he’d no hope of reading it. Beneath it sat a gorgeously embossed Arabic Bible, its cover intricate and delicate, placed with quiet reverence. He respected these small glimpses into her heritage, intimate and unspoken.

He continued to turn his head and body to view around the room, taking it all in, not wanting to intrude but feeling himself drawn deeper into her world. Near the window, a shelf of succulents sat, each plant cared for. Garin leaned closer to one of them, a cactus in a cracked pot. A tiny name tag poked from the soil: Pokey. He smiled.

He stood and lingered over by the bookshelf: ‘The Prosecutor in Medical Negligence’, ‘The Scalpel & the Gavel: The Greatest Courtroom Upsets in Surgical Law’, and ‘Incurable: Hospitals Bankrupted in Court’. His fingers brushed the edge of a well-worn book, ‘Post-Operative Complications in Cardiovascular Corrective Surgery and Implants’, its cover faded with time. He imagined her bent over it late at night, dissecting medical jargon and working it into her defense cases and settlements. 

His thoughts were interrupted as Amina stirred something in the kitchen, humming louder now, lost in her task. Garin returned to the couch, settling in again. This was different from their usual dynamic, no need for witty remarks, no rush for the night to go anywhere. It seemed too easy. Why not ask a possibly gauche question and see how she reacts? "Do you cook goats and sheep?" he asked, his voice loud. 

Amina turned, a slight grin. "Not really. But I like to, sometimes. Like right now." She leaned onto the counter, elbows straight, and Garin noticed the feminine posterior line of her upper arms, the soft outward mound of fullness that held its shape under load. “Literally like right now.” She raised her dark eyebrows.

"Yeah?" Garin leaned back against the couch, crossing his arms loosely. "You're making that for me?"

Amina hummed happily, "Yes! Lamb Riz bi Ouzi." And turned back into the kitchen.

In a moment she reappeared with a tray and set it on the table, two plates of meat, rice, nuts, and more he really had to lean in and get a whiff of. She disappeared back into her kitchen and returned with two tall glasses of iced juice. "Pomegranate... is that OK?"

Garin took it happily as she sat beside him. "It's excellent. Thank you and thank you."

She noticed he hadn't turned on her TV as she’d expected him to. "What have you been doing in here? You were supposed to pick a series or a movie," she wondered as she took a bite.

Garin rubbed his belly. “I was too hungry to watch anything; if a commercial or scene came on of people eating, I’d lick the screen.”

A snicker as she gestured open-handed to his plate, “Please, eat everything. Lick the plate. Nobody told you that you need to be 7% adipose, did they? No.”

"I got an idea just now." Garin took hold of the remote and began navigating her subscription service, typing a title into the search. "It's a lawyer comedy; maybe you know it."

Amina read the screen as he typed. "I know it, but I haven't seen it."

Garin was chewing. "This is delicious. But good, you have to tell me to pause it whenever something is too fictional."

She was unsure. "Too fictional?"

"Whenever something happens or doesn't happen that’s too TV, unrealistic." Garin pressed play, and the series intro music started.

Amina accessed her phone to turn off the classical playing on her apartment speakers. "I get it, I'll be the 'Actually!' girl who ruins the show by pointing out that's not how it really goes in the true world of lawyering. Fun."

Garin smiled. "First question: besides you, are all the partners, clients, and interns as attractive as the actors?"

Amina watched the actors' faces credited in the intro. "Actually... there's a kind of joke in my office that we should've gone to LA to become stars. We're a photogenic firm. We can act and play roles."

Garin leaned back in acknowledgement. "Right! You’re better actors than professional actors too, with the practice you have."

Amina and Garin settled next to one another; eating, watching, commenting. Before long she was lying against his shoulder, and their conversations had soared over anything playing on the screen; their childhoods, their beliefs, their experiences, and much else. Then, on her asking, “Can I see your kids?”

Garin was prepared. “You can.” He screen-shared onto her TV a photo montage of his son and daughter, and Amina watched with glee. As the montage completed, Amina added, “They’re perfect, Garin. I want to meet them in person.”

Garin made a thoughtful face. “You’ll be away in Philadelphia. What about when you get back?”

Amina had no objection. “Of course, if they want to. Don’t make them meet me.”

Garin shook his head and came closer. “If they want to, then.” And he kissed her.

Kissing and talking, Amina said, “I want to be more serious with you when I get back. More intimate too.”

Garin knew what that meant; she was telling him she was on her period. “I can’t blame a uterus; I come from one.”

Amina felt at his bulge. “You’re not frustrated? I think you expected some play today.”

Garin unzipped himself. “I’m cool with no heels-over-head.”

Amina blushed. “Oh? You can show me your heels over your head. Right?”

Shaking his head, he said, “Please, I don’t want to be nipped in my butt.” Garin interlocked his fingers behind his neck, letting Amina behold his exposed manhood for the first time.

Amina pulled her hair back with a tie and lowered her face down into his lap, giving him a hand job and then taking him into her mouth as he reclined.

Amina let out such lovely murmurs as Garin's glans squeezed in against her tongue and pressed up into the back-end of the roof, greeting her molars and at its sides wedging between them as she tried speaking with her mouth full. As he pressed deeper, he blocked the air through her nasopharynx such that her murmurs became nasally. She tightened her lips around his shaft, and then pulled away with such a strong suction that when she reared up to regard his cock he was red, wet, and inflated to his max pressure. His dick veins bulged, running down the length of him, and she traced one with her fingertip before going back at her oral performance. Now she sucked faster, with zeal and energy. It was a sloppy suck Amina gave him, and she didn't stop those incomprehensible little comments and utterances; they only became more declarative in tone, more alarmed, more pleading, hotter and louder until at last, with his dick popping in and out of her mouth, she said something he could make out, "Do I let you?"

"Let me what?" Garin asked, petting her hair out of her face.

Amina stood and shed her top like a serpent. She undid her bra and let it drop off her arms, and then she knelt between Garin's knees. Pressing her tits together, she leaned onto his lap such that his dick was sandwiched in her cleavage. She began moving at her knees and hips, up-down-up, a tit fuck.

Garin pressed the dorsal side of his cock with his thumb, submerging it between Amina's breasts. His rod was so wet with her saliva that it slid between her breasts with such slippage and speed he hadn't experienced before. And the sight of her sizeable, jiggling, rippling tits taking his cock between them so deeply that much of it vanished from view, his tip poking out the top at low tide and sinking at high tide, was amazing. And how the undersides of her tits rested so warm and soft against him, the weight of them; she was bustier than he had recognized.

Her dark eyes flitted between his and downward to his dick she was swiping along her sternum. "Spill it on my tits, Garin. I want you to, please, please, spill it all over my tits."

And as much as he wanted another minute of this, he couldn't stretch it a second longer. He grabbed her by her shoulders, pulled her in tight. She felt the length of his throbbing cock pressed against her beating heart, and he burst white across her chest, those heavy brown womanly breasts messed over with his cum.

⚜

Evening Friday, May 30th, 2025

Lyrou drove alone to Joseph's place in Bayonne, a little one-bedroom rental home, two floors but very narrow and in a neighborhood precarious by day and predatory after dark. She saw him walking down the sidewalk still in his work fatigues, navy blue overalls. She figured he must have parked around the corner on a side street. As he came closer to his front gate, Lyrou quickly checked her face and hair in the mirror and exited her car to approach him.

"Joseph," she called.

He turned and saw her crossing the street. "Lyrou? What’re you doing here?"

"I want to speak to you." Her shoes clacked the pavement as she neared.

"Where’s Garin?" Joseph squinted.

"In the car watching us,” Lyrou said flatly.

Joseph looked over her head to the car, believing it. “He’s...?”

Cocking her head in disbelief he’d believe that, she said, “Mon Dieu. Give me a break. He’s not with me." She gave him a side-eye.

Joseph exhaled and shook his head. "Come on."

"Come in?" Lyrou said with a twist of her head, putting her hand to her ear.

"I said come on, stop it. Why show up like this?" Joseph turned as if he might walk away and leave her on the curb.

"You heard me when I said I’m here to talk, and I heard you when you said come in. Let's go in." Lyrou followed close.

"You have shit in your ears, or do you just hear what you want?" Joseph's temper evident in his tone.

"Invite me in, Joseph," Lyrou gently commanded, in a soft voice.

Joseph unlocked his door, and wordlessly Lyrou followed him in. She looked around at his modest bachelor pad.

"This is your place? And no car?" She judged him.

"I have my service van. I make great money, but I invest it. I don't need a mortgage or a car payment." Joseph couldn't help but take her bait.

"Crypto?" she asked disparagingly.

"I buy metals too." Again confirming he cared what she thought of him.

"And guns?" She looked at a black rifle he had leaning against a corner in his kitchen by the back door.

"You own nothing if you can't keep it. And you keep nothing if you don’t own it. You can't stay here long," Joseph said in a voice that tried too hard.

"Alright. I can go," Lyrou offered at once.

"Good, yes." Joseph wasn't convincing.

Her brown eyes rolled. "You don't want to hear what I needed to ask?”

“Don’t ask about my ma or how I’m doing with her gone.” Joseph drew a line.

“But that’s the only thing I came here to ask about.” Lyrou pouted.

"This is way too uncomfortable. Ask it and go." Joseph was beginning to try and not look at Lyrou; it was a powerful sight, her in his place. So much woman in his place.

Lyrou sat on his couch and put her feet up; she curled her toes, creasing the bottoms of her feet into a half-dozen wavelike little folds. “When you died you saw nothing. Do you think your ma sees nothing right now?"

“Yeah, it’s not happening.” His mouth moved, but Joseph didn’t blink.

“Why not?” Lyrou asked with a pout, reclining into the armrest, her blouse rising and showing her navel, a vertical slit, and her lower ribs taut against her skin.

"It's criminal, your alterity. Not happening." Joseph raised his hand in a stop gesture and shook his head.

Lyrou reclined further, her miniskirt rising, revealing the full length of her outer thigh, a yummy iliotibial band line running along it. "Why not?" she repeated, unyielding.

Joseph's face turned indignant, and he took his turn to be judgmental. "If you wanted that life, why did you get married?"

"You mean being alone forever like you is preferable?" Lyrou undid her hair, and it fell over his couch armrest cushion in a dark rolling cascade. She looked about his unkempt private space and pointed to a stack of disheveled papers placed interpretive art-like in the corner of his living room, a rolled USB cable lying over it in place of a paperweight. “Is that your lone wolf manifesto? Can I read it before you publish it on the dark web and you go to a federal super-max?’

"I’m not alone," Joseph said defensively, soaking Lyrou in with his eyes.

"Chronic masturbator." She demeaned him.

Joseph's expression turned to self-pity. "I meet women." 

"Serial short-term disposables. So noble and meaningful." She closed her eyes and took in the smell of his single man apartment, his cedar-scented deodorant, and his rich pheromones.

Joseph stepped closer, his heavy step creaking the floorboards, standing over Lyrou as she lay still, her eyes closed. "You weren’t meant to be a wife. Why become one?" 

"Don't have children, like you? You’re getting old, your sperm quality is decreasing, your likelihood of being a father is diminishing." Lyrou opened her eyes, looking up at Joseph, her sharp cuspids bared.

"Then a husband is a sperm donor, an indentured provider you keep around to give the kids dad talks? What a good deal for him." Joseph poised as if he might grab Lyrou up by her arm, pull her across his living room, and push her out his door.

"He’s a better man than you, Joseph," she said flatly.

"No argument." His temper was rising.

"Then what exactly is your problem?" Lyrou locked her legs together, seductively sliding one over the other.

“Why I haven’t eloped?” Joseph was confused.

“No, we’ve established that’s because you’re a loser. I mean, what’s your problem...” She pointed to him, then to herself, flipping her hair over her shoulder. “… With me?”

"He’s better than you and me, in our perfidy. You commit the worst fraud on him. He wanted a real wife, and you’re not one." Joseph bent and seized Lyrou by her arm, pulling her up only partially.

"You know nothing," she said, eye-to-eye with him.

Joseph whispered, his face now so close to hers, his hand seditiously in love with the skin of her arm, his pupils dilated as he took in the texture and color of her lips and skin, and then also caught her scent. "Your navigational hard-wiring is fried. You should’ve flown your path and let him fly his."

"My husband's path and my path are the same." She kissed him obstinately on his mouth. So began a quick exchange of fire and counter-fire.

"Tell him what you do. You have nothing to fear from him. He would blame himself for your transgressions. His path is a righteous one." Joseph quickly kissed her back, his big hand now on the back of her neck, sliding up to cradle her occiput, his fingers raking deep into her tight curls.

"Righteous?" And she returned another kiss, landing on his upper lip and philtrum.

"Right by the Gospel." And another kiss landing center of her mouth, incisors meeting.

"So juvenile." She landed a kiss on his lower lip, sliding onto his chin, her tongue very briefly tasting his stubble.

"Juvenile?" He pulled away, almost standing upright again, letting go of her arm.

"Providence is unconcerned with you." Her hand felt between his legs as he stood, and her fingers began to pinch the material of his overalls.

"You’re the one who knows nothing," Joseph said with authority.

Lyrou's hand had smoothly traveled up his leg to his hip. "Joseph, you want to do something."

Joseph couldn't speak.

"What do you want to do with me?" Lyrou dared him. He stood helpless as she groped about his lower half. "Which will you do; what you want or what you think is righteous?" Her hand came to rest on his hip, lightly pinching his overalls as if not to let him move away from her and this couch she meant to make deliberate use of.

Still, Joseph didn't move away.

"I do what I want." Lyrou reached and hooked Joseph's belt loop with two fingers, then with the other hand unzipped his jeans.

"I... can't." And yet Joseph didn't pull from her. 

Lyrou probed into his open zipper, and her fingertips met Joseph's erect shaft. Instantly he swelled and fully hardened. "You can't what?"

"I..." Joseph stood, surrendered, as Lyrou intently pulled his erection out from his fly, then began thumbing around his glans.

"You can't fuck me, or you can't resist fucking me?" She watched the skin of his shaft glide back and forth with each stroke she gave.

"I don't know." Joseph let out a gasp of exasperation, but also pleasure as Lyrou briefly took his glans between her lips and gave one strong suck.

Looking only at his rod, she said, "Repeat; I can't abide my conscience."

Joseph looked to his ceiling. "I can't abide my conscience."

"I'm a slave to my lust." Lyrou gave his glans another quick, loud suck.

"I'm a slave to you." He allowed himself to enjoy the sensation.

"Joseph, that’s only because I command your lust." Lyrou gave his shaft a slight possessive squeeze.

He turned his gaze downward, chin in his chest. "Then I'm a slave is the point?"

Lyrou smiled so much bigger and brighter than he’d seen her smile. "That's correct. Good student! But it's not the worst thing that can happen."

"No?" Joseph was hers for the moment.

"Non. Much pain and consternation stems from suppressing ourselves when following our passions, our instincts, our fantasies...” She paused to lick the underside of his shaft. “... Our fantasies would bring us bliss, fulfillment, life. You’re living fully now. You’re doing that with me." Lyrou took his erection deeper into her mouth.

He watched his length being consumed by Lyrou's full lips. “Fuuuck!”

Lyrou stopped only to speak, "What do you owe him?”

He gently pet Lyrou's hair at the top of her head as she sucked. "You’re his."

Her eyes inspected his face. "His what? I'm mine before I’m anyone's. I'm mine. I decide if I want you in my mouth." She eyed his member and was careful not to make him cum yet.

"We’re deceiving him." Joseph undid and dropped his overalls, then flipped off inside out the tank top he had on under it.

"So what?" Lyrou lay back on his couch and spread her legs; she hadn’t worn anything under her skirt.

Joseph's veins pumped thick with testosterone at the sight of her open womanhood and her inner thighs, demanding he enter for the first time. "If he knew he’d be so hurt."

"Then that’s on him, that he doesn't know and that he’d be hurt if he did." Lyrou's wedding ring glistened on her finger; she didn't look at it for a second. But she could see that despite all the work being put in by her right hand, Joseph's attention had begun to make short, frequent visits to her left hand.

"You’re perfect, I can’t believe how perfect you are." Joseph dropped his briefs and stood naked.

With no regard for the person, Lyrou could admire his form, though. Joseph had such beautiful workingman contours, a narrow waist and wide shoulders, and tan lines from the outdoor labor he did. She couldn’t look enough at an unclothed, sexy, masculine form. As Joseph allowed her to behold and listened to her, Lyrou argued what permit they had under nature. "If another cries because I behaved freely, then that person wishes me to be a captive... and so doesn’t love me... and so didn't merit my love and loyalty in the first place."

Joseph wasn’t impressed. "It’s circular amorphous gibberish. You can't talk your way into making this right."

"Then shut me up." Lyrou pulled off her blouse, now her body only in an undersized bra squeezing her breasts out over and under its confines.

Joseph planted his knee in the couch, then took her body in his hands to turn her over so that she was similarly one knee in the couch and one foot on the floor; he’d enter her from behind. "I should tell him."

"Tell him." She flicked her hair over one shoulder.

"You're full of shit." He unfastened her bra, and it slid down her arms.

"Tell him." She arched her back.

"He’d divorce you without looking back. He doesn't care if you steal half. He’d be back on his feet the next day." Joseph rubbed his glans along her hamstrings, leaving a trail of precum.

"Who can have me then? You?" With her right elbow bracing her on the armrest, she reached her left hand back to grope his ball sack. Not seeing where precisely she was reaching, the jewel of her wedding ring ever so slightly grazed his inner thigh.

"Temptress, I don't want you. A million might, not me." That her wedding ring was now touching him, his big, hairy nuts, made him angry and aroused at once.

"You don't want me?" She gave his balls a less-than-gentle squeeze.

"No." He took her narrow waist in his hands, taking in the sight and feel of her hourglass shape.

"No? What do you want?" She kept hold of his balls, not easing her grip.

"I.. I want this. I want this." Pulling her by her waist into him, Joseph's cock slid into her.

Lyrou was pleased by the angle of entry; it was a profound first thrust. "Oh, I see. You want... this." Lyrou pushed back, her ass loudly clapping into Joseph.

Joseph bucked forward as Lyrou reared into him. He was mesmerized by the size and form of her ass, the smooth cleft of her lower back, the ripples across her cheeks and thighs with each impact, the reddish bra marks in the skin of her back. "You came here for this." His fingers pressed her tailbone; he placed his thumb over her anus and felt its soft wrinkles.

"I came here for you. Oh!" she cried, a slight rasp in her voice. Lyrou reached between her legs and felt the underside of Joseph's shaft sliding in and out, and she rubbed her clit. Her full bottom clapped loudly against him, her cheeks slapping with corporeal violence.

The recoil of waves across her body with each impact awed him, his fingertips and eyes drawn to her dimples of Venus. In Joseph’s brain, there was incised in it, pitilessly branded into it with a searing ecstasy, a fact of this world; Lyrou was sex incarnate, as though she was not a proper human being but an embodiment, all that was carnal in one woman. Joseph’s orgasm approached; he didn't care to delay or prolong it. Enraptured by her, he let out a grunt, “Aaah-ah.”

"Are you cumming inside me? Joseph!?" Lyrou moaned and gyrated.

The magnificent-wrongness of shooting Lyrou full of his sperm, of giving part of himself deep inside where nobody would see, or at least no other man would see, his covert deposit where nobody might know, and have her carry stowaway for however long sperm plays passenger in a woman’s wet hold, in her sticky secret treasure chest, caused his chest and face to flush deep red in shame-rich arousal. Joseph bent forward and locked Lyrou's arms around her neck, submitting her to him. "You're going to take it."

His forearms and biceps locked tight around her neck and pinned her, his cock pulsating, and he pressed hard into her, releasing. "Give it now, give it all, put it deep, Joseph." Helped by the stimulation she gave her clit, she orgasmed, “Mmm-m-oooh” her eyes rolling up white.

Joseph, his chest expanding with his finished labor, unhanded Lyrou and stood naked from the couch, his cock slick and creamed over from her. "Lyrou?" He began to pace naked in his living room as she lay equally naked on his couch. Why, why, why was she so artfully sculpted by God, he wondered. With such a body, face, aroma, and voice as she had been gifted from Heaven, she could do anything she wanted to him, the same or worse than anything she had done to Garin. The way her ass moved as she walked, the span of her hips, how her feet moved across his floor; why send such a being into the world, God, he wondered at her. Was it to ruin men and break their fraternal bonds, or was it to humble them in their pride, to remind them that the Lord is the greatest artist from the first day of creation to date? “Lyrou?”

"Oui?" Her voice was pinched with worry that now he’d overreact to what had just transpired.

"I didn't want to do that." He went to his refrigerator, popped the cap off a bottle, and began guzzling a beer.

"Come here, sit down," Lyrou asked, genuinely and uncharacteristically nice to him.

Joseph came back, holding his beer bottle, and sat on the couch next to her. She raised her hand, paused to think, and put it on his knee. "Say to yourself that I made you do this. I could make the Pope do this. I could make anybody do this. I made you. Don’t you see it that way?"

"But I wanted it." Joseph drank.

"Me too. More than you. And I often get what I want by this route or the other." Lyrou kissed his neck, and though he pulled away an inch, he allowed it.

"I... I don't know what to do now." Joseph drank his bottle empty.

"Same as if I never came here." It was too simple for Lyrou.

"Then nothing changed?" Joseph laughed resentfully.

"Oh, very much has changed, on the inside. A story has transpired on the inside. But on the outside you keep everything the same as if not so much as a breeze touched you." Lyrou blew softly on his neck and chest, causing his body hair to stand. “Put simply, don’t look so sad.”

“Then I mustn’t think how there’s only one of you on the Earth, that I could take the lesser and leave my friend with the better copy.” Joey looked off into that other world where it was so.

Lyrou gave a nod and an eyebrow raise, wondering at his meaning, then grasping it. “To hold anyone in such high regard that you’d want there to be two of them, it must be love.”

Joseph embraced Lyrou, their bodies sticking together, and they lay twisted together on the couch, not speaking. She lay there, relishing the vulnerability he oozed in his cuddle, until he fell asleep and his embrace slackened. Showering and dressing, she peeked out vigilantly to see that it was safe to walk the distance to her car, and then she was out the door.

⚜

Before Midnight Friday, May 30th, 2025

Lyrou drove 440 North onto Interstate 78 E home, Bayonne to Edgewater. She tapped lightly across the steering wheel, feeling the slight vibrations of the engine beneath her. The hum of tires, soothing, and a soft beat of new reggae played. She was high on her victory.

Cities stretched out before her, glittering lights. On her right, across the water, Manhattan’s towers gold and silver reflected onto the sparkling black Hudson. Headlights twinkled from the bridges, the traffic moving in pulses. She passed through Jersey City, as busy under the moon as in the day. Several floors in the office buildings were still lit by those hungry striver souls burning the oil, working late.

Lyrou rolled down the window. The cool air rushed in, crisp on her face. It whipped her hair back, brushing against her left ear as the wind brought the faintest scent of saltwater. She inhaled deeply, feeling the air in her lungs. This night was almost overwhelming in its perfection, the hum of the engine and the gentle whir of the tires on asphalt, and yes, another heavenly reggae tune.

The road curved slightly, and Lyrou leaned into the turn, feeling the controlled power of the car beneath her. She smiled, taking in the moment. The city lights flickered past in flashes of color. Coming off the ramp, she entered downtown, and a police cruiser rushed by, siren wailing. She took a random turn, and then another; the flâneuse had taken the steering wheel. Up ahead, stopped at a red light, she watched gloving, shuffling, and vaping through the crosswalk a pack of PLUR EDM ravers club-hopping; all in fluffy boas, light-up glasses, fanny packs, LED earrings, neon bandanas, rainbow eyeliner, face glitter, and glowing kandi bracelets laughing loudly. Farther ahead she watched a group of Han tourists exploring after midnight, then a public bus squealing to a stop and picking up a custodian on his way home or to his next job, and then on the corner a tall man in a leather jacket stood shouting into his phone, “Sweetheart! What’s the matter with you?” Using his free hand to emphasize each syllable as if the woman on the other end could see him. This night and this vast, open, insane world was hers, and she was completely alive.

She neared home, the streets residential and silent. She passed some houses she and Garin had toured with realtors when they first moved here, and she remembered how they looked inside. She passed several homes belonging to Penny and Alan’s friends’ parents, like Tatiana’s with the path lights through the front yard and the Victorian lamppost. She passed her kids’ school, and then she pulled into her driveway. Turning off the engine, she sat a moment, her head rolling back on the headrest. That was a nice drive.

⚜