Chapter 1: The Early Morning Maintenance Surprise
The doorbell rang at half past eight, an hour before Claudine had expected anyone, and she padded down the stairs with her coffee still in one hand and her dressing gown knotted loosely at the waist. The silk was too thin for modesty in this heat. It clung along her stomach, and the morning sun through the landing window had already found every seam of it.
She opened the door on the chain first. Then she unhooked it.
"Sergio? You're not due till Thursday."
He stood on the step with a toolbox in one hand, tee shirt already dark at the collar with sweat, and he did not look away from her. He never did, not entirely, but today there was nothing sidelong about it. His eyes went from her face down to the V of the gown where it crossed her breasts, and stayed there a moment longer than courtesy allowed, then came back up as if nothing had happened.
"Job got cancelled on the other site," he said. "Thought I'd get ahead. It's going to be thirty degrees by noon."
"It's going to be thirty degrees now." She held the door wider without quite meaning to. The heat came in with him, thick and dry. "I wasn't expecting you. My husband's away, you know. I wasn't expecting anyone at all."
"Three months, isn't it? You mentioned it last time." He shifted the toolbox to his other hand. The muscle in his forearm rolled under the brown skin. "I can come back Thursday, if it's a bad time."
"It's not, it's just." She touched her hair, which was unbrushed. "Give me twenty minutes. I'll get dressed and put the kettle on."
"Take your time," Sergio said. "I've got all day."
She closed the door and stood with her back against it for a second, listening to him set the toolbox down on the step rather than carrying it round the side as he usually did. She told herself it was nothing. He was a workman. They looked, all of them looked, and at sixty a woman noticed it more than she admitted to, and filed it away with other small warm things she didn't tell her husband.
Upstairs the bedroom held the sun like a bowl. Golden light lay across the floorboards in long planks, and the duvet was thrown back from the night, and the room smelled faintly of her own skin and of the coffee climbing the stairs behind her thoughts. The window was open an inch. A lawn mower started somewhere down the street and settled into its drone.
She dropped the dressing gown on the chair and stood a moment in her knickers, deciding, and that was when she saw it.
The vibrator lay on the bed where she had left it three nights ago, purple and gleaming, close enough to the pillow that the shape of her sleeping had curved around it. Heat went up her throat and into her face. She crossed the room in two steps and picked it up, and her thumb brushed the switch as she did, out of pure habit, and it shuddered against her palm, still half charged, and she pressed it off and stood holding it like something caught.
That was when the floorboard outside the door creaked.
Not the settling kind of creak. A creak with weight in it, slow, deliberate, the board by the landing's third stair that she herself avoided because of the noise. Then another, closer to the bedroom doorway, and the quiet came back so completely she could hear the lawn mower and the blood in her ears and nothing else.
"Sergio?" Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. She wrapped the dressing gown back around herself, though she had been alone upstairs, though she had been about to dress, and her fingers fumbled the knot. "Is that you?"
The doorway was behind her. The room's one mirror faced the window, so she could not see him, and that was surely why he had chosen to stop there. She heard cloth move. She heard the low rasp of his breathing, unhurried, closer than a workman had any business standing, and the lavender air freshener on the sill ticked in a thread of breeze and went still.
"You said twenty minutes," Sergio said from the doorway. "You didn't say I couldn't come up and ask about the bathroom taps. That's where the leak is, isn't it?"
"The taps are through there, yes." She did not turn around. Her knuckles were white around the vibrator, which she had not put down, and she could not put it down now without him seeing exactly what it was. "There's a panel under the basin."
"Right."
He did not go toward the bathroom. The floorboards said so. His weight crossed the doorway instead, into the bedroom proper, one step, two, and the sunlight took him, and she saw him at last in the long mirror, filling it, tee shirt stretched over his chest, eyes fixed on her back with the same unblinking steadiness he had shown at the door.
"You spooked me," she said. "Creeping up like that."
"I wasn't creeping. The stairs just talk." He set the toolbox down on the carpet without looking at it, and the sound of it was very final, like a door closing in a room with no door. "I saw your dress on the chair through the gap. I called out. Twice."
She had heard nothing. The mower, she thought. The mower had covered it, or he had never called out at all, and she did not know which of the two was worse.
"You should wait downstairs," she said. "I'll be down in a minute, I only need to..."
"Dress?" His mouth moved in something that was not quite a smile. He took one more step, and the sunlight left his face and then found it again, and his voice stayed level and warm and unhurried, a man with nowhere else in the world to be. "Go on, then. I'll just stand here."
Claudine looked at him in the mirror, and he held her gaze through the glass without blinking, and her hand, the one holding the switched-off vibrator, had not moved an inch.
She watched his hand come up in the mirror before she felt anything at all. It was a big hand, sun-browned, and it moved slowly, the way he had crossed the room, giving her time to stop it. She did not stop it. Her mouth opened and nothing came out of it but breath.
"What are you doing?"
"You know what I'm doing." His fingers found the loose knot at her waist. "You heard me on the stairs and you didn't tell me to go down. You tied this back on and stood here with that thing in your hand."
The knot gave. Silk slid off her shoulders in one warm rush, catching on her elbows, and the sunlight took her bare skin, the softness of her stomach, her large tits hanging heavy and full with the weight of her years, nipples dark and already tightening in the moving air. She clutched the vibrator to her chest with both hands as if it could cover anything.
"Sergio. My husband."
"Is in another country." He stepped in close behind her, and his chest touched her bare back through the cotton of his shirt, and the heat of him was worse than the weather. "For three months. You told me yourself, on the doorstep, standing there in this exact gown with nothing under it. I could see the shape of you before you opened the door. You knew that."
She had known it. That was the shame of it, arriving now, late, in the pit of her stomach. She had known the silk was see-through and she had opened the door anyway.
"This isn't right." Her voice came out thin. "I'm old enough to be your mother."
"And you've got the best tits I've seen in years." His hands came round her and closed over them, both of them, lifting their weight in his palms, thumbs dragging slow across her nipples until her breath broke in the middle. "Look at you. Look in the mirror."
She looked. It was the mirror that undid her, seeing his dark hands on her pale skin, seeing her own face flushed and frightened and excited all at once, seeing the enormous shape of him pressing against the back of her thigh through his shorts, thick and half hard and growing. Her fingers trembled around the vibrator.
He felt the tremble go through her and made a low sound, almost a laugh. "You're shaking."
"I'm sixty years old and a stranger is in my bedroom."
"I'm not a stranger. I've fixed your gate. I've carried your shopping." He rolled her nipples between his fingers, harder now, and she heard herself make a sound she had not made in front of a man for years. "And I've thought about this every time. Three jobs, three summers. Waiting for him to leave."
"Is that why you came early?"
"That's why I came at all." One hand left her breast and slid down over her belly, over the soft curve of it, slower the lower it went, and she gripped his wrist with her free hand and held it and could not summon the strength or the will to push it away. "Tell me to stop. Properly, once, and I'll pick up my toolbox and go."
She said nothing. The lawn mower droned on down the street, indifferent, and her hand stayed on his wrist, gripping it, while his fingers reached the curls between her legs and found her already wet. He made the sound again, longer this time.
"Christ. You're soaked."
"That doesn't mean..."
"It means exactly what it means." His fingers parted her and slid through the wet heat of her, one thick finger working into her cunt, unhurried, curling, and her head fell back against his shoulder before she could stop it. The vibrator slipped from her other hand and landed on the duvet with a soft thud, exactly where it had been three nights ago. He looked down at it, at the purple gleam of it, and then at the mirror. "That what you use while he's gone?"
"Yes." It came out of her before she could swallow it. Her hips had begun to move, small, betraying her, riding his hand.
"How often?"
"Every night. Every night since he left." Her face was burning. "Are you happy now?"
"Very." He added a second finger, stretching her, the girth of his hand alone wider than she remembered her husband being, and worked them slow and deep while his thumb pressed her clit, and her knees actually buckled, and his other arm took her weight around the waist like it was nothing. "I've watched you hang washing in that thin dress all summer. I've thought about this cunt every night on my own bed."
"You shouldn't say things like that."
"I should have said them a year ago." He pulled his fingers out of her, wet to the knuckle, and she whimpered at the loss, actually whimpered, and heard him breathe out hard through his nose behind her. His hands went to his shorts. "On the bed. Face down."
"I can't. I've never. Not with anyone but him, not in this house."
"Then it's time." The zip came down and the fabric dropped, and in the mirror she saw it and her breath stopped entirely. He was enormous. Thick beyond anything she had imagined, veins standing along the shaft, the head already dark and flushed, and his hand barely closed around his own girth as he stroked it once, twice, watching her face in the glass watch it. "You've seen it now. You knew it was there, didn't you. You've been looking at my shorts for months."
She had. She said nothing, and her silence was the last door, and he closed it gently with his hand on her shoulder, turning her, walking her the two steps to the bed. The duvet was warm where the sun had lain on it. She went down onto her elbows with her knees at the edge, her hairy cunt open to the room and to him, and she buried her face partly in her arms, partly in the pillow that smelled of her own nights alone.
"Last chance, Claudine."
She lifted her head and looked back at him over her shoulder, at the thick length of him in his fist, at his steady unblinking eyes, and her voice came out steadier than anything else in her body.
"Then do it. But be careful with it. You'll split me."
"No, you won't." He pressed the head against her, spreading her open around him, and her whole body clenched at the sheer width of it. "You're made for it. You just haven't been given enough for years."
He pushed. Slow, relentless, millimetre by millimetre, the thick girth of him forcing her open wider than she had ever been, and she cried out into her forearm, a long helpless sound, half pain and half something far older than pain, and he kept going until she felt his hips against her backside and realized with a kind of shock that she had taken all of him.
"Christ," she gasped. "Christ, it's enormous."
"And you've got every inch." He drew back slow and drove in again, and the bed creaked its own answer to the lawn mower's drone, and her hand slid across the duvet and closed around the vibrator where it lay, not to use it, only to hold something.
The third stroke was faster than the second. The fourth faster than that. Somewhere in the next half minute the slowness went out of him entirely, and what replaced it was a heavy deliberate pounding, hips slapping against her backside, the headboard knocking the wall in a rhythm she would have found embarrassing if she had been able to think about embarrassment at all.
"Oh God. Oh God, Sergio."
"There it is." His hands closed on her hips, thumbs pressed into the soft flesh above her cheeks, and he pulled her back onto him to meet each thrust. "That's what I wanted to hear. Been imagining that sound for two years."
The girth of him was no longer something she endured. On every backstroke her body clenched around the emptiness and tried to keep him, and her cunt had gone so wet she could hear it, an obscene wet slap under the slapping of his hips. Sweat ran down her spine and pooled in the small of her back. Her arms shook where they held her up, and the vibrator sat crushed under her fist on the duvet, buzzing faintly once when her knuckle dragged its switch, and she didn't even notice.
"Harder," she heard herself say.
He stopped. One beat, buried to the hilt, his chest lowering over her back so his mouth was at her ear.
"Say it again."
"Harder. Fuck me harder." Her face burned against the pillow. "I can't believe I said that."
"Believe it." He rose off her, hooked one arm under her thigh and tilted her, changing the angle so the thick head of him dragged along the front wall of her with every stroke, and then he gave her exactly what she'd asked for. The bed frame cracked against the wall hard enough to knock the lavender air freshener off the sill. Neither of them turned a hair.
She was making sounds now, continuous, low animal sounds she hadn't made since her forties, face buried in the pillow, one hand fisted in the sheet and the other still clutching the vibrator like a talisman. His balls swung against her clit on every downstroke, heavy and slick, and it was that, stupidly, that started to finish her.
"Sergio. I'm going to, I'm actually going to."
"Do it. Come on my cock. I want to feel it."
The orgasm took her from the inside out, her whole cunt clamping down around his girth in wave after wave, her thighs quaking against his, her cries going high and shameless and muffled in the pillow. He didn't slow down through it. He rode her through it, grunting at the grip of her, driving through the clench of her climax until she collapsed flat onto the duvet with her cheek against the sheet and her breath tearing in and out.
"Christ." Her voice was wrecked. "I've never. Not like that. Not ever like that."
"You have now." He pulled out of her slowly and she felt the whole enormous length of it leaving, felt open and hollow and soaked, and she turned over onto her back without meaning to, tits spread and heaving, hairy cunt flushed and glistening, and looked up at him standing over her at the edge of the bed stroking his shaft with one fist, eyes on all of her, unblinking.
"You didn't finish."
"No." He knelt on the bed between her thighs. "I'm not finished."
He lifted her legs and pushed back into her, and this time she was loose enough that he sank in to the hilt in one long thrust, and her back arched off the bed and she grabbed his forearms. From above he could get deeper. She felt the blunt head of him nudging somewhere no one had reached in years, and her eyes went wide and she dug her nails into his skin.
"You're so deep. God, you're so deep in me."
"Look at yourself." His voice had gone rougher now, the first crack in the unhurried calm, his breathing heavier, sweat dripping from his jaw onto her collarbone. "Look down."
She looked. She watched his thick shaft sliding in and out of her between her spread thighs, gleaming with her wetness, her lips stretched dark and taut around the girth of him, and something about the sheer visual of it started building the second one low in her belly, quicker than the first, shocking her.
"Again," she whispered. "Oh God, again."
"Greedy." He grinned, actually grinned, and lowered himself onto his forearms so his chest crushed her tits and his mouth found her throat, her ear, her open mouth. She kissed him back, open-mouthed and filthy, first kiss either of them had given, her tongue in his mouth while he fucked her through it. "That's it. Second one's always better."
It was. It crested quicker and harder, her whole body rigid under his, her heels digging into his backside to pull him deeper, and she screamed his name into the side of his neck and he groaned long and low against her ear as her climax milked at him.
"Where do you want it?" His voice was gravel now, strokes going ragged, losing their rhythm. "Tell me. Quickly."
"Inside." Her hands were on his backside, pulling. "I'm sixty, Sergio, it doesn't matter, I want to feel it."
He buried himself one last time and came, and she felt it, hot pulses deep inside her, jet after jet, his whole body shuddering over hers and his breath breaking apart against her neck. He groaned something in Spanish, low, and she held him through it with her legs locked around him and her hands flat on his heaving back, feeling every pulse of him inside her.
They lay like that while the sun crawled another inch across the floorboards. The lawn mower down the street had stopped. Neither of them had heard it stop. His weight was heavy on her, his cock still thick inside her, softening by degrees, and she could feel their mixed wetness starting to seep down between her cheeks.
"My husband's birthday is in three weeks," she said, into his shoulder.
"Is it?"
"He calls every Sunday. Eight o'clock." Her fingers traced the ridge of muscle along his spine. "You should fix the gate Thursday. And the taps. Properly this time."
He lifted his head and looked at her, and she looked back, and whatever was in her face he read it without asking.
"Thursday," he said. "Early."
"Not too early." She felt him laugh against her chest, deep in his ribs. "Well. Perhaps a little early."