As You Like
A Fictional Story by GretaLarkin.
The first line says MEN: FULLY NUDE BEYOND THIS POINT. NO EXCEPTIONS.
The second line says WOMEN: AS YOU LIKE.
I stood in front of that sign with my sunglasses pushed up in my hair and my beach bag cutting into my shoulder, and then I laughed for the first time since June.
* * *
Here is why I had not laughed since June.
My husband had been seeing a woman from his office for over a year, and I found out the way everybody finds out: I was not looking for it. I was in a drawer looking for the receipt for a snowblower.
His name is Randall. Not Randy. He has been correcting people about that since before we were married, and we were married the summer I turned twenty, in my mother’s backyard, six months gone with his daughter.
Now, I am going to say some things in the next few pages that I would not say at church, and I want to apologize in advance to anybody who knows me, because I am not a woman who talks like this. Ask anyone. I taught fourth grade for nineteen years. I say shoot. I have said shoot in a hospital parking lot.
But there is exactly one subject that takes it out of me, and this is it, and I have decided at fifty-five that I am allowed one.
So.
I gave that man my entire adult life, and he spent it making me smaller by about a quarter inch a year, so slowly that I never once caught him at it.
He had opinions about what I ate. Not mean ones. Helpful ones. He would look at my plate without saying anything, and I would put it back.
He corrected me in front of people. Little things, always factual, always right, always in company. It was Tuesday, not Wednesday. It was her sister, not her cousin. It was the Olds, not the Buick. A lifetime of being gently fact-checked at dinner parties by a man who wanted everybody to know he was paying attention.
He told me once, in the car, that I was at a lot of parties. I did not have a drink at a party again for four years.
He had a system for the thermostat, and I was not permitted to touch it.
He never once put his mouth on me. Not in the whole marriage. I asked early on, twice, in the nicest way a young woman knows how to ask, and both times he made a face like I had suggested something unsanitary, and I never asked again.
So I finished myself in the shower afterward, with the water running so he would not hear it, then came out, got into bed, and told him he had worn me out.
I did that for most of my life. I got good at it. I could do it in the time it takes to condition your hair.
And the whole time, the entire time, he was fucking a woman from his office twice a month at a Marriott by the airport.
There it is. That is the word, and it is the right one, and I am not taking it back.
She was forty-one. I looked her up the same night, the way you do, and I sat on the floor of my own closet with my phone, scrolling through her whole life at two in the morning, and she was fine. She was perfectly fine. She was not better looking than me, and I am not being generous to myself; I am being accurate.
That was somehow the worst part. He did not leave me for something better.
He left me for something available.
And when I finally got it out of him, standing in our own kitchen with that snowblower receipt still crumpled in my fist because I had never put it down, that son of a bitch looked at the floor and said, “It was just easy with her.”
Easy.
A whole life, and I was hard, and she was easy.
* * *
So my daughter organized a girls’ trip.
Kendra is thirty-five, and she is Randall’s, which means I have never in my adult life been a person who was not somebody’s mother and never once been a woman on her own. She got three of her friends and a rental on Sandpiper Key for a week in September when the rates drop, and she called me but didn’t ask.
“We’re going. It’s booked. Bring a hat.”
“Kendra.”
“Mom, it’s booked. It’s nonrefundable. You are going to sit on a beach and drink something with fruit in it, and you are going to be around people who like you.”
I did not want to go, and that matters, because of everything that happened later. I did not want to go, and I said no twice, and I packed a suitcase full of clothes that cover everything.
The three friends came with her, and I have known all of them since they were in the fifth grade.
Bailey has never once had a thought she did not immediately say out loud, and she has been that way since grade school, and she is the reason any of this happened.
Courtney is the one with the spreadsheet. Courtney books the thing, prints the thing, and knows the thing, and she had read the entire Sandpiper Key website the way other people read a contract.
Megan is quiet until about the third drink, and then she is the funniest person in whatever building she is in.
They are all thirty-five. They all still call me Miss Rhonda, which they have done since middle school and will never stop, and I would be lying if I said I minded.
* * *
We got in on a Saturday, and Courtney gave us the briefing at the kitchen island before anybody had even unpacked.
“Okay. The beach. There are rules, and you all have to know them because I am not getting anybody thrown off a beach.”
“There are rules?” said Megan.
“It is a private key. It has been private since the seventies. There is a woman who owned the whole spit of land, and she wrote the rules in nineteen seventy-four, and nobody has changed one word of them since she died.”
“Get to it, Court.”
“Men have to be fully nude.” Courtney looked up from her phone. “All of them. All the way. On the sand, on the boardwalk, at the bar, in the water. There is no bathing suit, there is no towel around the waist, there is no nothing. If a man is on that beach, he is naked.”
Nobody said anything for a second.
“And women?” said Kendra.
“Women can wear whatever they want.”
Bailey put her drink down.
“Say that part again.”
“Women. Can. Wear. Whatever. They. Want.” Courtney was reading it straight off the page. “Suit, bottoms, nothing, a parka. Nobody cares. It says, and I am quoting, female guests who do not wish to disrobe are under no obligation whatsoever.”
“That is not fair,” said Megan.
“It is not.”
“That is wildly unfair.”
“It really is.”
And then all four of them started laughing at the same time, and I heard myself join in, and it went on long enough that Bailey had to hold onto the counter.
“Oh, that is evil,” Bailey said, wiping her eyes. “That is so evil, and I love it so much.”
“Do we feel bad?” said Kendra.
“About men? About men specifically?”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Men have had it too easy since the beginning of recorded time,” Bailey said, “and I am going to sit on that beach with my top off and a cold drink, and I am not going to think about it for one single second.”
* * *
I want to describe myself here, because it matters later and because I would rather do it myself than have somebody else do it for me.
I am fifty-five. I keep my hair short and black, and it is black out of a bottle now, and anybody who has looked at a woman my age knows that, and I do not care.
I am tan because I am outside constantly, average height, and I have got an ass on me that has been the best thing I own since I was nineteen years old. My middle is my middle. It is a fifty-five-year-old middle that had a baby in it, and it is fine.
And I have small breasts. I always have. A-cup on a good day.
I spent about fifteen years being unhappy about that, and then I quit, for a reason I am going to get to.
* * *
Sunday was our first beach day. I wore a cover-up over a one-piece and kept both on.
The girls did not.
Kendra and Courtney went bottoms only about as soon as the umbrella was up, which they have both done at every beach that allows it since their twenties, and there are not many. Bailey went all the way, immediately, with the enthusiasm of a woman who has been waiting for permission her whole life. Megan kept her whole suit on until about two in the afternoon, then took the top off without a word, did not acknowledge it, and nobody said anything, because we are grown.
And me in a cover-up in ninety-one degrees, sweating, with my knees together.
“Mom.”
“I’m comfortable.”
“You are visibly not comfortable.”
“I am comfortable in my soul, Kendra.”
* * *
Now I am going to tell you about the men, because that is the entire point of that beach and it took me about an hour to stop looking.
There were maybe forty people down that stretch of sand that morning and about half of them were men, and every single one of them was naked. Not artfully naked. Not draped. Naked, the way you are naked in your own bathroom, walking around in the sun carrying a cooler.
And here is the thing nobody tells you.
They were all so different.
I had been married to the same man since I was twenty, and before that there were three others and one of them barely counted, so my entire working knowledge of what a man looks like came from a sample of about four. And I sat under that umbrella and watched forty of them walk past me in the space of an hour, and I got an education.
Long ones and short ones. Thick ones, thin ones, and one that I genuinely thought at first was a trick of the light. Men who hung heavy and men who had nothing to speak of, and both kinds walking around in the sun carrying a cooler like it was a Tuesday.
Balls, too, which is a thing nobody prepares you for. Everybody talks about cocks. Nobody tells you that a man’s balls are as different from the next man’s as his hands are, and that you will notice, and that you will have opinions.
You could tell the first-timers instantly—every single time. A man who has been coming to that beach for thirty years walks like he is at a hardware store. A man on his first morning walks as if his hands have been taken from him.
You could tell the new ones instantly. Every single time. They walk differently.
“You’re staring, Miss Rhonda,” said Bailey, without opening her eyes.
“I am observing.”
“You are staring.”
“There is a lot of information out here, Bailey.”
* * *
Now I have to tell you about the girls, because they got about ninety minutes into that first beach day and completely came off the rails. I sat there under that umbrella and listened to four women I have known since elementary school talk like longshoremen.
Bailey started it. Bailey starts everything.
“Okay, I’m going to say the thing.”
“Please don’t,” said Kendra.
“Blue cooler. Two o’clock. Do not all look at once.”
Everybody looked at once.
“Bailey.”
“That is the biggest cock I have ever seen in person, and I would like that acknowledged by this group.”
“He’s got to be sixty.”
“I did not ask his age, Courtney; I asked for an acknowledgment.”
“It is acknowledged,” said Megan.
“Thank you.”
Courtney, meanwhile, had gotten out her phone, and I want to be clear that Courtney was not taking pictures. Courtney was taking notes.
“Court.”
“I’m counting.”
“Counting what?”
“Cut versus uncut.” She did not look up. “Because I have a theory about this beach and I want data before I say it out loud.”
“You are the most disturbing person I have ever met,” said Bailey, with total love.
“Sixteen to five so far.”
“Sixteen to five?”
“There’s a demographic thing happening here, and I’m going to figure out what it is by Thursday.”
Megan had not said anything for about twenty minutes, which is the tell. Megan goes quiet, then detonates.
“The thing nobody’s saying,” Megan said, to the sky, “is that they all know. Every single one of them. They know exactly what they’ve got and where they land, because they’ve been walking around out here comparing since they got here, and that is a thing that has never once happened to a man in the history of the world.”
Nobody said anything.
“They’re finding out what we find out at twelve,” said Megan.
“Oh,” said Kendra.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, that is dark.”
“I have had three drinks.”
“That was two drinks’ worth of insight,” said Bailey, “and I need you to keep going.”
* * *
I will say one more thing about that afternoon, and then I will move on.
At about four o’clock, a man came out of the water about thirty feet from us and stood there, wringing out nothing, because there was nothing to wring out, and he was maybe sixty-five and built like a mailbox, and he had absolutely nothing going for him below the waist.
And he did not care. He stood there in the sun with his hands on his hips and had a whole conversation with a woman in a straw hat, then walked back up the beach, got a beer from a cooler, and sat down.
“Now that,” said Bailey, “is a man who has made peace.”
“That is a man who has never once thought about it,” said Courtney.
“Same thing.”
“It is not remotely the same thing, and the difference is the entire reason we’re all divorced.”
“I’m not divorced,” said Megan.
“You’re forty percent divorced.”
“That’s fair.”
* * *
And that is when I gave the speech, and I did not plan to give it, and it came out of me the way a thing comes out of you when it has been sitting in your chest all summer.
Megan had said something about her own chest. I do not remember exactly what. Something small and self-deprecating and completely routine, the thing women say about themselves so that nobody else has to.
And I said, “Do not do that.”
She looked over at me.
“I am serious, honey. Do not do that, and I am going to tell you why, and then I am going to have another drink and shut up about it.”
I sat up on my elbows.
“I have got small tits. I have had small tits my whole life. I spent from about nineteen to thirty-five genuinely unhappy about it, and then I quit, and here is what made me quit.
“It does not matter. It has never mattered one single time. Not once in thirty-five years has a man had my shirt off and been disappointed. It does not happen. You could have anything at all up here, and a man will still go stupid and get hard and knock a lamp over trying to get his mouth on you. I have watched a grown man walk into a doorframe. They do not care. They have never cared. The whole thing is a story we got told, and it is a lie.”
“Okay,” said Megan.
“But.” I pointed down the beach with my drink, at all of it. “It does not run the other way, and I am going to say so out loud on this beach today, and then I am going to have another drink.
“Size matters on a man. It absolutely does. Not for everything and not for everybody, but it matters, and every woman who says it does not is being polite.
“I was polite my entire married life.”
Nobody said anything.
“All of it,” I said. “And he had a small cock. There it is. I have never said that sentence out loud in my life, and I have been thinking it since Kendra was in middle school.
“And I never told him. Not once, not in a fight, not drunk, not the night I found out. I told that man he was fine, and I meant it kindly, and I let him believe it, and for three decades I got myself there afterward, in the shower with my own hand, and told him he had worn me out.
“And he still cheated on me.”
I finished my drink.
“So he got a woman who thought he was fine, and a woman who lied to him about it her whole life, and a woman at the Marriott by the airport.”
I finished my drink.
“And I got a shower. Every single time. A whole life of standing in there afterward with the water going so he could not hear me finishing the job myself, and then coming out and getting into bed and telling that man he had worn me out.”
Nobody said one word.
“So no,” I said. “I do not think I owe men one more polite thing as long as I live.”
Kendra reached over, put her hand on my ankle, and left it there.
* * *
Colby Nettles came down the beach the next morning with a stack of chairs on his shoulder and nothing else in the world on him.
I did not recognize him at first. I recognized the walk, if that makes any sense, before anything else, because I have been watching that boy walk across my back yard since he was nine years old.
“Oh my God,” said Kendra.
“Is that–”
“That is Colby Nettles.”
“That is not Colby Nettles.”
“Bailey.”
“That is absolutely not Colby Nettles because Colby Nettles threw up on my shoes at prom.”
He got about twenty feet away before he clocked us, and I watched it happen on his face, and then he grinned like an absolute idiot and said, “No. No.”
And then four grown women shrieked at once on a public beach.
* * *
Here is what I need you to understand about the next ten minutes.
He hugged all of them. He set the chairs down in the sand and hugged every one of those girls, one at a time, completely naked, in the sun, and not one person on that beach looked up.
Because that is the rule, that is what the rule does. He had been working that sand since May, and he had been naked the entire time, and it had stopped being a thing to him somewhere around the second week, and so he stood there catching up with four women he went to high school with about somebody’s divorce and somebody’s kid and the guy who bought the hardware store.
And I sat in my chair in my cover-up, and I could not hear one word of it.
Because Colby Nettles is thirty-five years old now, and he is six foot one, and he has been carrying chairs and umbrellas up and down a beach for five months, and he has got the arms and the back and the stomach that come with that, and none of that is what I was looking at.
I was looking at his cock.
I could not stop. I have decided I am done being anything but honest, so here it is: I sat in a beach chair with a drink going warm in my hand, and I looked at that young man’s cock for what had to be four straight minutes while he talked to my daughter about a hardware store.
It hung heavy and long and thick down the front of him, soft, swinging a little every time he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and his balls sat up under it full and heavy in the heat, and it was, I am sorry, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.
And I do mean soft. That is the part I kept coming back to that night. He was not doing anything. He was standing in the sun, in conversation about somebody’s septic system, with his hands on his hips, completely at ease, and it hung there off him like it had nothing to prove to anybody.
My whole adult life, and I had never once had anything like that within a hundred feet of me.
I thought about it in the shower that night, and I am going to tell you that part too, because I am fifty-five and I have earned the right to say what I get up to in my own shower. I stood under that water with my hand between my legs and thought about Colby Nettles standing in the sand talking about a septic system. It took me about ninety seconds, and I had not gotten myself off thinking about a specific living person since I was in my thirties.
“Miss Rhonda.”
I said, “Mm.”
“Miss Rhonda, he asked you a question.”
* * *
I got my eyes up, and Colby was looking right at me, smiling, and had absolutely caught me, and he was not going to say so.
“Sorry, honey. I was somewhere else.”
“I said it’s really good to see you.” He crouched down in the sand next to my chair so he was not standing over me, which I noticed and have thought about a great deal since. “I had no idea in the world you all were down here. I about dropped these chairs.”
“That’s all right.”
“It isn’t, but okay.”
And I laughed. Out loud. Twice in three days, after a whole summer of nothing.
“You want an umbrella further out? You’re going to cook there after two.”
“I would love an umbrella further out.”
“Yes ma’am.”
He got up and went to get it, and I watched him walk away from me, and Bailey leaned over and said, directly into my ear, at a volume that was not a whisper:
“Miss Rhonda, you are going to have a stroke.”
* * *
They worked on it for a day and a half, and they weren’t subtle; they didn’t intend to be.
Courtney found out his schedule. Bailey found out he was single, which took her about ninety seconds and one question. Megan started calling him over for drinks nobody wanted. Kendra, my own daughter, sat down next to me on Tuesday night with a glass of wine and said:
“So. Colby.”
“Do not.”
“He’s thirty-five, Mom.”
“I am aware of how old he is. I fed him.”
“You fed him a hot dog at a swim meet, Mom; that is not a legal impediment.”
“Kendra.”
“Mom.” She put the glass down. “You have not laughed in three months. You laughed at that boy twice in one morning. And he was looking at you the whole time, and you didn’t notice.”
“He was not.”
“He set that umbrella up four feet further out than he had to,” said Kendra, “so he would have a reason to be standing in front of you for an extra minute, and every one of us saw him do it except you.”
I did not say anything.
“That’s all,” she said. “I’m going to bed. He works the north end tomorrow.”
I sat out on that balcony by myself for a while after she went in.
Here is something I know at fifty-five that I did not know at forty, and I would give a good deal to have known it sooner.
The thing that ends a marriage is rarely the thing that ends the marriage. It was not the woman at the Marriott. That was just the part with a date on it. What ended it was a thousand afternoons of putting my plate back, and a thermostat, and a man who said it was Tuesday, not Wednesday, across a dinner table for thirty-five years. Every single one of those was small enough on its own that I would have felt ridiculous making anything of it.
And not one of those afternoons would have survived being said out loud. That is the whole trick of it. Any one of them, brought up on its own, would have made me the unreasonable one, and I knew that, so I never brought up any of them, and that is how a woman gets to be fifty-five and cannot say what happened to her.
* * *
I went down to the north end by myself on Wednesday morning.
I told them I wanted a walk. Nobody believed me. Bailey actually applauded, which I have not forgiven.
And I want to say what I was wearing, because it was the first real decision I made that week: the cover-up stayed on the chair.
I went down that beach in a black bikini bottom and nothing else. Fifty-five years old, small tits out in the sun, an ass I have been proud of since before Kendra was born, and my sunglasses on so nobody could see where I was looking.
And here is the other thing I know now, which cost me a summer and a marriage to learn: a woman my age is not invisible. She has been told she is invisible, which is a different thing and a much cheaper one, and it works because we keep our eyes down and never check.
I checked. I checked that sand for four days.
Two men got hard.
Not at me exactly. At the general fact of a woman walking down a beach with her top off, which on that sand is nothing at all and happens every hour of every day. But I was the woman walking, and I watched it happen on one of them out of the corner of my eye: a man about my age, up near the second stand, who was reading a paperback and then was not reading a paperback.
He got up and went into the water, which is what they do, and it was the single most flattering thing that has ever happened to me in my life.
And there was a younger one further down who did not have the manners to go in the water and did not have anywhere to hide it either, and who went the color of a stop sign when I looked over at him, and I smiled at him, and there was not one thing in the world he could do about it.
I walked the rest of that beach like I owned the sand.
I felt it go somewhere around the second lifeguard stand, and I have not entirely gotten it back since.
* * *
He was raking seaweed at the north end, and he saw me coming from about a hundred yards out, and he stopped raking.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
Neither one of us said anything for a second.
“You want a chair?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
“Colby.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“I am going to say something, and I would like to get all the way through it.”
He put the rake down in the sand, stood there, and gave me his whole attention, naked in the sun at nine in the morning.
“I am fifty-five years old,” I said. “I have been married since before you could ride a bike. My husband has been sleeping with somebody else for a year and a half, and I found out in June, and I have not been able to feel one thing since.
“And on Monday I sat in that chair and looked at you for four minutes and felt something, and it is the only thing I have felt since June, and I have thought about it every night this week.”
He did not say anything.
“You can say no,” I said. “You should probably say no. I am your friend’s mother, and I am twenty years older than you, and I have got nothing to offer here but a week.”
“Miss Rhonda.”
“You can call me Rhonda.”
“Rhonda,” said Colby Nettles. “I get off at one.”
* * *
He came to the condo at ten past one, and we did not make it out of the kitchen.
I had a whole plan. I want to be clear that I had a plan. I was going to offer him a drink, and we were going to sit on the balcony like adults, talk for a while, and let it go where it was going.
He came through the door in a pair of shorts he had put on to walk up from the beach. I shut the door behind him, then turned around, put both my hands flat on his chest, and backed him into the counter.
“Okay,” he said.
“Is this okay?”
“Rhonda.” He got both hands on the counter behind him like he needed something to hold. “I need to say a thing, and then you can do whatever you want to me.”
“All right.”
“It is not since Monday.”
I stopped with my hands flat on his chest.
“Say that again.”
“It is not since Monday. I moved back home when I was thirty, and I have been coming down here to work the season ever since.” He was going red and saying it anyway, which is something I have rarely seen a man do. “The first summer I was back. Fourth of July, at the Doyles’. I was a grown man standing in a backyard with a beer, and you were wearing a yellow dress, and you were arguing with somebody about the school board, and you were winning, and you laughed at something and put your hand on the back of your neck.
“And I went and stood in that garage for ten minutes and had a talk with myself about it.”
“Colby.”
“I have thought about you every summer since, and I have never once said it because you were married and because you used to drive us to swim practice.”
“I am fifty-five years old.”
“I know exactly how old you are,” said Colby Nettles. “You look better right now than you did in that yellow dress, and I do not think there is one person in your life who has told you that.”
There was not.
A whole marriage, and there was not one.
* * *
I took care of the shirt myself because I wanted it done and didn’t want to be bothered about it.
He had already seen them. He had seen them an hour before, out on that sand in the sun, and had the decency and the sense not to make one single thing of it.
But a beach is a beach. A beach is forty feet and sunglasses and everybody looking at everybody. This was a rented kitchen in the middle of the afternoon with a man eighteen inches from me and nowhere at all for either one of us to put our eyes.
So I did the thing I have done my whole life: get out ahead of it.
“They’re small,” I said. “They have always been small. So if you’re–”
“Rhonda.”
“I am just saying it before you have to.”
He put a hand on the side of my ribs, under one of them, and lifted it a little on his palm, and looked at it like a man looking at something he had been told about and was now getting to see.
“They’re perfect.”
“Colby.”
“No, listen to me.” He would not let it go, and he would not look away from me. “They sit up. You are fifty-five, and they sit up on their own, and they point a little, and they have got the prettiest color on them I have ever seen in my life, and I have wanted my mouth on them since the Fourth of July when I was thirty years old.”
Then he put his mouth on them.
And I stood in that kitchen with both hands in a young man’s hair while he worked one and then the other, and he made a noise doing it, an actual noise, into me, and I felt every year of being polite about my own body go straight out the sliding door and into the Gulf.
Because I had been right, I had been right the whole time, and I had said it on that beach two days before with a drink in my hand, and here was the proof of it with his tongue on my nipple.
It does not matter. It has never mattered. Not once.
* * *
So I got the shorts off him right there against the kitchen counter with a bowl of somebody’s limes eighteen inches away.
And I got my first proper look at it hard, up close, with my hands on it, and I made a sound I have never made in my life.
“God,” I said.
“You okay?”
“Do not talk to me for a minute.”
* * *
I got down on that kitchen floor on my knees on the tile, and I took my time about it, because I had waited fifty-five years and I was not going to rush a thing.
I used both hands first. I had to. I got one around the base of him and could not close my fingers, and I put the other one above it, and there was still enough of him left over to matter, and I sat back on my heels and looked at what I was holding for a good long second and felt something come loose in my chest that had been welded shut since June.
“Colby.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know what you have got?”
“I mean.” He laughed, embarrassed for the first time all week. “Sort of.”
“You have got no idea,” I said. “You are thirty-five. You have got no idea what this is worth, and I am not going to be the one who tells you.”
Then I put my mouth on it.
I could not get much of it in, and I did not care one bit. I worked the head of him with my tongue and my lips and got a rhythm going with my fist underneath and let the rest of it be what it was, and I listened to every sound he made, and every time I got one I did that thing again until it stopped working.
He got a hand in my hair. Gentle. Not pushing, not steering, just resting there like he wanted to be touching me somewhere while I did it, and that nearly finished me off by itself.
“Rhonda.”
I came off him wet and looked up with my hand still going.
“Say it again.”
“Rhonda.”
“Again.”
“Rhonda.”
I went back down.
I got him leaking on my tongue inside of five minutes, and I came off and told him so, out loud, in a rented kitchen, with my chin shining and my hand still working him.
“You are wet in my mouth.”
“Oh, my God.”
“You have been wet in my mouth for two minutes, and you did not tell me.”
“Rhonda, you have got to stop.”
“No.”
“No, you have got to stop. I am about ten seconds out.”
So I stopped. I sat back on my heels on that kitchen tile, my hand around the base of him, and looked up at him, grinning like a woman half his age.
“Good,” I said.
“Rhonda.”
“We are here until Saturday, honey, and you get off at one every day of it. I am checking the equipment.”
* * *
He got me up on that counter next to the limes, took the bikini bottoms off me, and put my heels on his shoulders, and I found out something about myself in the next twenty minutes that I am still angry about.
I had never had that done properly. Not one time.
A whole life and four men and I had never once had one get down there and stay. What I had was a man who went down for 90 seconds on my birthday like he was checking a box, then came up, looked at me, and asked how that was.
I did not know it was a thing that could happen. I built a whole adult life around not knowing.
Colby Nettles got his mouth on my cunt on a rented kitchen counter and stayed there for twenty minutes and did not come up once.
He went slow when I went quiet. He did not speed up when I got loud. He never once lifted his head to check how he was doing. When I got a fist in his hair and pulled hard enough to hurt, he did not stop, and when I said something that was probably the word no, he did not stop then either, because he knew, and I have thought a great deal since about how a thirty-five-year-old man knew that when a fifty-eight-year-old man never figured it out.
He got two fingers in me somewhere in the middle of it, and I heard myself say a word I have not said in front of another person since my twenties.
I came so hard I put my heel through a paper towel roll.
And then I did it again about four minutes later. That one went on so long and so far that I lost the thread of where I was and had to get a hand flat on the wall behind me, and when I got my eyes open he was still down there, still going, waiting to see whether I had anything else in me.
I had something else in me.
* * *
“Couch,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Colby. Couch.”
I got him down on that couch, got over him, and it took some doing.
And that was the whole point of it. I had to line him up with one hand and hold myself open with the other and go down slow, and I got about the head of him in and had to stop and breathe, and I have never in my life had to stop and breathe.
I sat there with my hands flat on his chest and about a third of him in me and laughed out loud at the ceiling.
“You okay?”
“I am wonderful. Do not move.”
I took the rest of it a little at a time. It went in in stages, and every stage was information, and by the time I was all the way down on him. Sitting on his hips with my thighs shaking, I understood exactly what I had been doing without my entire adult life, and I was not sad about it, and I was not angry either. I had used all that up on the beach.
I was just full. That is the only honest way to put it. I was fifty-five years old, and I was full for the first time.
Then I rode him.
I did it selfishly. I did it slow, at my speed, on my terms, and every single time he got his hands up and tried to take any of it over, I put a palm flat on his chest and pushed him back down into that couch.
“Stay there.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do not ma’am me right now.”
“Yes, Rhonda.”
I told him things while I did it. That surprised me more than anything else that afternoon, because I have never been a talker and my husband would not have known what to do with a woman who was. I told that boy exactly what he felt like. I told him what I had been thinking about in the chair on Monday for four minutes with a drink in my hand. I told him what I was going to do to him on Friday if he was free.
He said, “I’m free Friday,” in a completely wrecked voice, and I laughed so hard I had to stop moving.
I came on top of him with my hands braced on his shoulders and my whole body gone rigid and my head down, and the noise I made was going to be audible from the parking lot, and I did not care about that either.
Then I got my breath back and leaned down over him with my hair stuck to my forehead and my small tits against his chest and said it right into his face.
“Now you. In me. Do not make me ask you twice.”
“Rhonda–”
“Inside. I am fifty-five, honey; there is nothing on this earth to worry about, and I have wanted it since Monday.”
He got both hands on my hips and let go, and I stayed exactly where I was and felt every bit of it happen, and I kept moving on him the whole way through it because I wanted all of it and I was not going to leave any behind.
And then a long while after that I was still sitting on him, sweating, with my forehead down on his shoulder and his cum running back out of me onto his thigh, and neither one of us said anything for a good long while.
“Rhonda?”
“Mm.”
“I am going to need about fifteen minutes.”
I got my head up off his shoulder.
“For what?”
“Rhonda,” said Colby Nettles, “I am thirty-five.”
* * *
He took fourteen.
And when he came back he did not ask me anything, which was the whole of it.
Every single thing that had happened in that condo up to that point had happened because I decided it would. I walked down a beach, gave a speech, got a young man on a couch, and rode him at my own pace with a hand flat on his chest, telling him to stay put, and it was the best afternoon of my adult life, and I had run every minute of it.
And then he came back from the bathroom, put a hand around the back of my neck, turned me around, and bent me over the arm of that couch, and I let him.
I want to be honest about how fast I let him. There was no decision in it. There was a hand on the back of my neck, and I went over that couch arm like I had been waiting my whole life for somebody to put me there.
“Is this okay?”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“Yes, Colby.”
He got in behind me and went in slow, which I needed, and then he did not go slow anymore.
And I found out that afternoon at fifty-five years old that there is a thing that happens to a woman when she is not running it. I don’t have interest in defending it, and I won’t pretend it isn’t true. I had spent my whole adult life being the one who managed every single thing in that house except the thermostat I was not allowed to touch. I bent over the arm of a rented couch and let that young man do exactly what he wanted to me, and I went off like a bottle rocket almost immediately.
He had one hand in the middle of my back and the other on my hip, and he talked the entire time.
“You know how long I have thought about this?”
“Tell me.”
“Five years.”
“Tell me.”
So he told me. He told me what he had thought about in a garage on the Fourth of July when he was thirty. He told me what went through him when he came up that beach with a stack of chairs on his shoulder and worked out who was sitting under that umbrella. He told me what he thought about Monday afternoon after he walked away from my chair and got all the way to the north end before he could stand up straight.
And then he told me in detail what he was going to do to me on Friday, in a voice that had dropped about half an octave, and that was the one that finished me.
I came on that couch arm, with my face in the cushion and both hands in the upholstery, and I bit down on it, and I do not know how long it lasted.
“Rhonda.”
“Don’t you dare stop.”
“I’m not stopping.”
“Do not stop, do not slow down, do not–”
He did not.
* * *
He finished the second time on my back and my ass, standing up, with his hand still on the back of my neck, and I stayed exactly where he had put me until he was done.
Then I lay over that couch arm and laughed into the cushion until my ribs hurt.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“Rhonda.”
“I have got a thirty-five-year-old man’s cum on my back,” I said, into the couch, “at two in the afternoon on a Wednesday, and I have not thought about Randall one time in three hours, and I am fine, Colby. I have never been finer in my life.”
* * *
He cleaned me up with a dish towel that I am going to have to replace, and he did it carefully without making it a whole thing. That is a small item that I have probably thought about more than any of the others.
A whole marriage. Nobody ever cleaned me up.
“Rhonda?”
“Mm.”
“I have got to be back on the sand at three.”
“No, you do not.”
“I really do.”
“Colby,” I said into his neck, “I have not moved in four minutes because if I move it is over, and I would like one more minute of it not being over.”
He put a hand on my back and left it there.
“Yes ma’am,” he said.
I was buttoning my shirt when I heard them on the stairs.
Not coming in. On the stairs. Talking loudly. Talking extremely loudly, in the way people talk when they are announcing themselves on purpose, and I heard Bailey say “SO ANYWAY, THE THING ABOUT THAT RESTAURANT” at a volume that would carry to the mainland.
Colby was already at the sink rinsing a glass he had not used, which I thought was a nice touch.
They came in about ninety seconds later, and every one of them had a face on like a church usher.
“Oh,” said Kendra. “Hey.”
“Hey,” said Colby.
“You have got a lime on your foot,” said Megan.
He looked down. He did.
* * *
He got his shorts on, and he was easy about the whole thing, and that is the part I keep coming back to, because I have never once in my life met a man who could be easy about anything.
He hugged the girls again on the way out. He told Courtney he would move their umbrella in the morning because the tide was coming up on that spot. He stopped at the door.
“I’m on the south end tomorrow,” he said. “Ten to one.”
“All right.”
And then he took my phone right out of my hand, which no man has done to me in twenty years, put his number in it, handed it back, and said, “Text me tonight if you want. Or don’t. Either one is fine.”
“Colby.”
“Ma’am.”
He said it deliberately, with his hand on the door, looking right at me, because he had worked out in that kitchen exactly what the word did to me and he was not going to pretend otherwise.
“Get out of my condo,” I said.
He grinned, went out the door, and pulled it shut behind him.
* * *
Nobody said anything for about four seconds.
Then Bailey walked directly to the refrigerator, took out a bottle of wine, held it up over her head with both hands like a trophy, and said:
“MISS RHONDA.”
“Do not.”
“MISS RHONDA.”
“I am not going to talk about it.”
“You absolutely are going to talk about it,” said Kendra, getting the glasses down. “Sit.”
“Kendra.”
“Mom, we heard you from the elevator.”
I put my face in my hands.
Courtney sat down across from me and folded her hands on the table as if she were about to take a deposition. Megan poured. Bailey got up on the counter, on the exact spot, which nobody but me knew, and I decided not to say one word about it as long as I live.
“Okay,” said my daughter, sliding a glass across the table to her mother. “Spill it. All of it.”
So I did.
The End.
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