Ron Taylor
WIFE IN THE MIDDLE
CHAPTER ONE
There had been times when Caron actually wondered if she’d be able to make it. She felt like one of those Vietnam POWs, returned home after years in a prison cage, faced with a totally new world that had been created during her absence.
Or was that being a little extreme? I do have a tendency toward dramatics, she thought reprovingly. And I haven’t been away. I’ve been here all the time. Just trying to cope. Well, the trying is over.
She looked out the window. Paul’s car was pulling into the driveway. Caron smiled, reached under the bar for a bottle. When he came through the front door she had his drink already prepared, just the way he liked it—lots of bourbon and a few drops of water, poured over two ice cubes. Beside it, her own campari and soda.
“Hi,” she said, “you did want a drink, didn’t you?” And then she moved around the bar and glided into his arms and for a long time neither of them even thought about a cool drink. His tongue was in her mouth and he held her by the smooth rounded cheeks of her ass, pulling her body tightly against his own, so tightly she could feel every pulsation of excitement as it began to stiffen his prick inside his pants. Caron sighed and wrapped one leg around him. She was wearing a beach robe, with her favorite string bikini underneath, and the fabric was tight across her high set crotch. Each time she moved against Paul, his pecker stiffened a little more and exerted a sweet prodding stimulation against her crotch. We may, she told herself, forget about the drinks altogether. She peeled back his coat as she kissed him, rubbed her hands up and down his ribs. He had a good body, but why shouldn’t he? He was only a child—twenty-five, in his first year of law practice. She’d be thirty next August and she felt delightfully like the older woman in a Colette novel, bringing the joys of sensuality to a blossoming youth. It wasn’t exactly the case, but she liked to imagine that it was. Every little delight helped.
Paul was fully hard when she peeled her mouth loose and stepped back. She licked her lips, as if she were savoring the taste of him, and then her eyes dropped down to his bulging hard-on. “Mmmmmm,” she said, “that looks a lot tastier than the drink I fixed myself.” Her hand moved in, covered his straining erection, and she squeezed him happily. He covered her hand with his own, helped her squeeze. She liked him.
“Let’s go out on the patio,” Caron suggested.
She’d been born Karen, married Karen, but her name seemed so plain and ordinary. When she opened the antique shop and gallery, she told the sign painter to try it as “Caron”, and she liked it. Someday soon she’d change it legally. No great difficulty in that. But since she’d been married is Karen, she had to be divorced as Karen too. The complexities! She picked up the drinks and her open robe flapping, she led Paul through the living room, into the den, out onto the patio. The smell of salt water was sweet to her nostrils and to constant inrush of waves made a pleasant dreamy sound down the beach. She liked to sit down here and she liked to sit out here with Paul.
They took chairs. “Where’s Sheila?” he asked, swilling the liquor in his glass.
Caron smiled. “She went out painting after lunch, said she wouldn’t be home till near sundown. Something about the light at the cove?” She leaned over, put her hand on Paul’s knee. His finger straightened out, began to walk up the inside of his thigh. The front of his pants was still distended from the mass and weight of his erection. When he got hard, he didn’t go soft until he’d had his pleasure. And I mine, she added mentally. That was the nicest part of it. “So,” Caron added, “if you’d like to do something naughty to me, I guess there won’t be anyone around to rescue me from your vile little demands. In other words, the coast is dear, darling.”
“To us,” he smiled, lifting his glass. Caron clinked with him and they sipped, eyeing one another over the rims. The aroma of his mouth was still strong on her lips. She was hardly aware of die liquor or of the ice cube that kissed her tongue. She looked across the table, and the soft warm breeze floated in from the sea, moist and fresh and salty. Gulls were singing as they floated low over the incoming waves, splashing in and out of the highest whitecaps.
She swirled the drink in her glass and listened to the ice cube tinkle against the sides. “It seems as if I’ve been waiting forever,” she said wistfully. “In fact, I think I have. Why does it have to take such a long time, anyway? Seven years? Maybe that was okay in the days when you needed three months to cross the Atlantic, when getting from New York to San Francisco took the better part of a year in a covered wagon, but my God, this is 1977! The son of a bitch walked out on me seven years ago and it seems to me that I should have been able to tie a coffin around his neck long before this.”
“It’s a hallowed tradition in Anglo-American jurisprudence. With no concrete evidence, no corpus delicti, you can’t have a person declared legally dead for seven years. You could have gotten a divorce after two years, on grounds of desertion, but…”
“Oh, let’s not talk about him! Anyway, if I’d just gotten the divorce and gone my merry way five years ago, I’d never have met you, would I?”
“Sometimes the hallowed traditions pay off,” Paul said, putting down his glass. He held out his hand and Caron stood up. Her body was aflame with desire and her fingers trembled. She wanted to touch him. Everywhere. To draw his body into her embrace and never let go.
She dropped the beach robe as she moved toward him. Her body was golden, clad only in the string bikini that bared her almost completely and left her tantalizingly half-revealed. She had the shape for string bikinis. A riders body, slim and lissome, firm and taut from exercise and swimming, bronzed by the sun. All her parts were in good working order. Small high breasts whose nipples were hard and obvious, straining against the tiny triangles of cloth which covered their pointy ends. A narrow waist encircled by a tiny gold chain, 24 karat but a mockery beside the gold sheen of her flesh. Tight high ass whose cheeks were almost completely bared by the skimpiness of her bikini bottom. Long slinky legs and, between them, at the apex of her thighs, a fleshy prominent puff of cunt vividly modeled in the tight clinging nylon. Most women never look this good in their entire lives, Caron reminded herself, and I’m almost thirty years old. I’m not getting older. I’m getting better.
And how much of that was due to Paul? Well, a lot. She’d really flowered since meeting him. Before Paul she’d been in imminent danger of turning into a boozy, flabby woman, but he’d brought in the sunshine, reminded her that she still had a life to live. Caron Archer slinked her long hot body against Paul’s and she wrapped her arms around him in a death grip, lifting her face for the kiss they had only dress-rehearsed in the house.
His mouth came down on hers hot, wet irresistible. She played it coy for a moment, keeping her lips tightly sealed despite the urge of his prodding tongue, but her skin crawled with lust she couldn’t pretend for another moment. Caron opened her mouth and his tongue thrust inside her. She began to suck passionately, as his hands slid down her back and came to rest on the half naked cheeks of her ass.
Rest? That wasn’t the word. He couldn’t keep his fingers still when they were touching her, and right now his fingers were just as hot as her skin. He squeezed her, he pawed her, toyed with her firm buttocks, and she rocked about on her itchy feet, grinding him with her crotch. She worked on him impatiently, shedding the jacket from his shoulders, Paul letting go of her ass long enough for the coat to drop. And then he was caressing her again, stroking, feeling.
His cock stiffened even more inside his pants. Caron mouthed his tongue eagerly, sucking hard, and it seemed that each time she sucked, his pecker twitched against her dancing body. “Mmmmm, yeah,” she purred huskily, and then her tongue was in his mouth, plunging.
How many men had there been in the last seven years? She couldn’t begin to remember. There had been none at all the first eight or ten months. She hadn’t even felt the urge. Sex had not been the high point of her marriage. She hadn’t enjoyed it, had accepted it only because it was expected of her. But then, Lou didn’t seem to have much of a libido either. He was clumsy and fast and if he found her unresponsive, he never bothered to mention it. Of course, he had also packed a bag and walked out the door one night while she was asleep, and he’d never come back. But she had remained faithful, no matter how cruelly he had abandoned her.
But with all those months and not a phone call, not even a fucking postcard, her anger had begun to simmer and boil inside Caron. She celebrated the first anniversary of his desertion by aging to a bar. She got drunk that night, really drunk, for the first time in her life, and she went to a motel with a man whose name she’d never learned, whose face was a dim alcoholic blur in her memory. The next morning she awoke, alone in the motel room,
