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First Time She Strayed
by Cesca Janece Waterfield She decided, and dialed the number. Silence filled the early seconds after Lon answered that January morning. Small liberty burst forth inside stillness, hampered by a history of guilt. Making the call, she had anticipated conflict; had weighed the price of captivity against the cost of continuing to react to the stilted poses of a man who entertained her in the worst way. Slumped on a couch beneath a window in a Robinson Street coffeehouse, to her former flame she said, "If this is what has found me… " He was a Haitian viola player. He was a lover. Over a cab horn blast, they set a date. On a weekend he didn't have his son, they met in Portsmouth. An afternoon of music, of cocktails; absent of platitudes or pretense, they ate dinner, then returned to her friend's apartment to watch a documentary of an Atlanta performance artist. She poured Grey Goose – compliments of her friend, who'd smiled devilishly, before offering to spend the night out. Lon had been one man who'd held her closely, who'd bitten her in slant sun bedrooms on Hampton Boulevard, who'd bent with her over bills they couldn't possibly pay, but did somehow, together and apart. What a difference, she gloomed. In the second floor bedroom in Temple Crest, she often thought of Lon, eyes open. In the large mirror adjacent the bed, she watched a man of fifty move inside her, as he said: "A Mirror? For sex? No, I hadn't considered that. How erotic." For years, Lon lifted her leg to bite her calf at noon, to caress it at dusk. Early in the delusion, he often called while she stood around Temple Crest, enamored of the man living there. One night, she offered her apology to Lon into the small cell phone: "I'm with my friend." As she and her lover of years hung up, the song, "Got Me a New Man," came on iTunes, iTunes. Tex reached over to cuff her ass – the same he told her drunkenly was "not there" – and quipped, "New Man… Guess that's the theme of the night." She fucked him against his wishes, he said. Often for longer than he could, he didn't. Is this what you've been waiting for, oh, my cock? he whispered sternly as she took him in. What he couldn't know were the memories that returned to her like smoke as she looked down at him in rapture. New Man... Guess that's the theme of the night, he'd said, before slapping her ass. Maybe last night's, too, she thought, moving above him. Oh, maybe.
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