A senator from Georgia lies in a wide hammock with a man half her age, she lying supine with her hands clasped behind her head, he with his hands clasped around her, hugging her tight, resting his head on her chest and closing his eyes and listening to her explain how the world operates behind the curtain, what higher offices await her after this one, and which of her bald colleagues are puppets. Instead of the details, he listens to the tone of her voice, straining to hear beyond the words, hoping to find traces of her true feelings in the melody. They’re in a glade on her property in Blue Ridge, just twenty yards up the mountain from her family’s cabin, in the living room of which her husband is shaving the accumulated wax off of their dining table candles so they are again flush cylinders, cursing her as he does it because he’s asked her twice already to shave them back to health herself after her candlelit cards nights, if she insists on lighting cards nights by candle, and she knows he has a thing about uneven shapes with a particular sensitivity to bulbous ones. It’s fall, but still hot and humid. They sweat so much in the hammock they stick to each other, skin-to-skin. She—unclothed—and the younger man—also unclothed—lie adhered together in plain view of her husband, if he looks out the kitchen window. Her career and her custody of her two daughters and her marriage are just one glance away from dissolution, and so she feels something.
He interrupts her. He’s never interrupted her before. He interrupts to ask does she love him? In the following silence he cannot help but wonder why there is a silence, why this question takes time to answer, what she has left to consider, how it is that she hasn’t made up her mind but he has and did a long time ago and maybe this was delusional, this whole thing, expecting anything more from her than short-notice summons. The silence seems to dilate to make room for his anxious thought. He peels his head off of her chest and looks up at her. Whenever he looks in her nostrils, there is something in them that he can’t understand how she doesn’t notice. If he’s got something blocking his nostril, he notices the change in air flow right away. But she is beautiful when he chooses to see it. In moments of insecurity, when he fears she is drifting away from him, like this one, he stops choosing to see her beauty. He starts to think maybe her diatribes on the laws power, her over-sure and fantastical ambitions, and her stories in which her colleagues behave in inexplicable ways, culpable in whole for whatever went wrong, maybe everything she says is bullshit. Maybe it’s time to pack up and move on and find a woman his age who isn’t married. A cool breeze blows and chills him as it passes between his body and hers. He can’t wait any longer. He says, “You have to say yes.”
She squints at him. He is crossing a line she didn’t think she needed to draw. It should be obvious. Even when he is inside of her, she does not take off her wedding ring. It is on her finger now. He does not understand that he is a toy for playing with and discarding. The novelty of his body and the way he uses it to please her is the beginning and end of his value. It is improper to love an object.
Down the hill in the kitchen of the house, her husband’s eye catches motion in the hammock. He’s standing at the window with his foot on the trash can pedal, the candle shavings in his hand and not yet thrown away, aligning the hammock in the top third of his trifocals for a better look. He’s out the door and marching up the hill before he realizes he’s moved at all. His vision drops frames and he hikes toward his wife at a vehicular pace.
Her concubine, who having not received his demanded reassurance is now souring on her, tells her she can defuse this situation herself, and starts trying to crawl over her to get out of the hammock and grab his clothes hanging on the tree branch overhead. He’s just about had it with this woman. But then she touches his shoulder and looks him in the eye with this expression—all her facial muscles relaxed, her eyes wide open, her irises green and fractal-like in complexity, more urgency and passion emanating from her face than he believed she could even feel—and she says, “I do love you.” There is a desperation in it, a thirst. She is losing one of them, and she is choosing who to keep. He again sees her beauty, her overwhelming and arousing beauty. A gratefulness emerges from the center of and expands to colonize his chest, and then torso, and then his whole body, and he needs to communicate it.
As her husband closes in and enters the proximity within which he has to decide whether to yell or employ violence, her lover moves down the hammock so he is lower than her, wraps his arms around her thighs and pulls them apart, and begins licking and biting and kissing the inside of her thighs with ravenous affect. He wets his lips and then kisses hers, takes her vulva in his mouth, gently and lovingly sucks on it, then tongues her clit, and repeats. Her heart crashes around in her rib cage like a shoe in a dryer that’s been put inside another, larger dryer, and both the dryers are on. In front of her husband, she feels naked for the first time in years. He had stopped seeing her and she wanted to be seen. Now he is seeing her, her body and her twisted character, and she is ashamed. The shame catalyzes the pleasure. Her husband’s disgust and betrayal are like kerosene on the fire smoldering between her legs. By watching, her husband drives her to forget to herself, to let slip her inhibitions, and fall into a writhing, singing ecstasy.
When her husband stops short of them and begins to cry, falls to his knees with his face in his hands, struggling to enunciate self-loathing questions about why and where did he fail her and how could she do this to their daughters, she crosses a threshold where her young lover’s slow pace only frustrates. By his hair she holds him in place and drives her pelvis into his mouth on an anxious rhythm. A sharp, stinging knot of pleasure builds and pressurizes and threatens to explode if he will lick her just a minute longer.
He stops. He pulls away and presses his palm on her pussy, just holds it there and applies pressure. The continued contact and the momentum of his licking her and the deep shame of this reckoning carry her forward to a disappointing, frustrating orgasm. It is not like the other times he has taken her over the edge, where she used him to reach it and had to will herself to reach it, him just a prop in the act. Instead this time he sends her there alone, just winds her up and lets her go, watching his results.
As she quivers and hugs herself to bear the waves of pleasure, she realizes she has lost them both. Her young lover will never fear her again.
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Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/p277jb/politician_her_concubine_mmfcheating