Martine’s Awakening Ch. 02: The Spa

Previously: Martine, sixty, divorced from a dull husband, met Gérard, a widower, whom she married in the spring, and who can only get hard when he talks to her about other men. Through low-cut dresses and stolen glances at the market, at a restaurant or in a fitting room, Martine discovered that she loved showing herself. At the tea dance in the village hall, she danced with Romain, a twenty-seven-year-old partner. That same night, at home, in front of Gérard, she gave herself to him.

* * *

The first week, I thought I was going to die of shame.

Not right away. On Monday, I'd put the dance card away under the towels feeling like the queen of the world. On Tuesday, I sang while I vacuumed. On Wednesday morning, stepping out of the shower, I caught sight of my back in the bathroom mirror, my buttocks still marked with little bruises where Romain had squeezed, and I heard Jacques's voice. Not what he would have said; he wouldn't have said anything, he would have looked away. I heard his silence. Thirty-two years of silence. And I wondered what a woman like me, a grandmother, a former town hall secretary who used to sing in the parish choir, was turning into.

I cried a little, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, the towel around my shoulders.

Then I thought again of Romain's badge, lying on the coffee table. Of his voice when he'd said, "Your husband's going to end up jealous." Of Gérard's face in the armchair, his look of a little boy on Christmas morning. And the desire came back, from low in my belly, without asking my permission.

I dried myself off. I put on the red dress to go to the post office.

On Thursday, going down to get the mail, I ran into Madame Vergnaud by the mailboxes. She was sorting her flyers, her glasses on the end of her nose.

"You get visitors on Sundays now," she said without looking up.

"A friend of Gérard's."

"He's very young, Gérard's friend."

She folded a pizzeria leaflet into four, very carefully, and went back upstairs without waiting for an answer. I couldn't tell if she was shocked, jealous or just curious. My cheeks burned all morning.

In bed, Gérard didn't need to make things up anymore. No more stranger in the elevator, no more imaginary cheese seller. There was Romain.

"Tell me about when he licked you."

I told him. The snaps of the bodysuit, click, click, click. His clumsy tongue, then not clumsy at all. Gérard got hard listening to me, and he took me while making me repeat the same details over and over, like a child asking for the same story every night. Most of all he wanted to hear the moment I told Romain his cock was bigger than his. I told him again. It made him come every time.

On Saturday, Gérard's phone buzzed on the kitchen table while we were eating. He read the message and handed it to me without a word. He had given Romain his number on the landing, that Sunday night.

Hello Gérard, it's Romain. I wanted to know if you're coming to the tea dance a week from Sunday. It would be a pleasure to see madame again. Have a good day.

A pleasure to see madame again. I read the sentence three times. He'd put a period at the end, the way they'd taught him at school.

"What are you going to answer?" Gérard asked.

"I don't know."

It was true. I wanted to see him again, and at the same time I was scared. Scared of what, I couldn't have said. Maybe the second time would be less good than the first. Maybe we'd get used to it, become an old threesome with our little Sunday habits. Maybe, too, that boy would end up mattering. I didn't have the words for all that yet.

Gérard took his phone back. He didn't answer either.

The following Monday, he came home from the doctor's with a prescription for a spa cure. Three weeks, for his knee, at a thermal resort in the mountains, six hours' drive away. National health insurance covered almost everything, and he had booked a small furnished apartment two steps from the baths.

"It'll be a change of air," he said.

I looked at him. He had his eyes on his plate and a tiny gleam at the corner of his mouth.

The baths at Saint-Aurèle looked like an old luxury hotel turned into a hospital. A big building from the thirties, with a glass dome, columns, mosaics on the floor, and everywhere the smell of sulfur that stuck in your hair and never came out, even after three shampoos. On the first day, I thought I'd never get used to it. By the third, I didn't smell it anymore.

At reception you were given a white robe, a towel, a pair of plastic flip-flops and a treatment schedule. Gérard had bubble baths, hot mud packs on his knee, the rehabilitation pool. I was there as his companion. I could book whatever I wanted with a "wellness" package: massages under the water jets, a relaxation pool, the hammam, the sauna.

Almost all the patients were over seventy. They shuffled their flip-flops along the tiled corridors, robes pulled tight up to the neck, telling each other about their hip operations. A lady from Alsace explained her knee replacement to me in detail on the very first morning. A gentleman with a walker whistled Brassens all day long.

In the middle of all that, for the first time in a long time, I felt young.

The spa robe was too small for me. The XL barely closed over my chest, and the terry-cloth belt came undone on its own at every step. On the second day, coming out of the changing room, I noticed the robe was gaping open over my swimsuit down to my navel. I went to close it. Gérard put his hand on my arm.

"Leave it."

I left it. In the treatment corridor, a physiotherapist in his fifties pushing a cart of towels stopped to let us pass, and his eyes fell into my cleavage. He said "good morning, madame" a beat too late.

I had bought the swimsuit specially for the cure, in a sports store by the highway, in a panic. A black one-piece, the only one they had in my size. It was cut high on the hips, much higher than I'd have liked, and plunged to the middle of my chest. In the fitting room mirror, I'd thought I looked vulgar. I bought it anyway.

At the rehabilitation pool, when I climbed out of the water by the ladder, the wet fabric clung to everything. You could see the shape of my nipples, the fold of my belly, the crack of my buttocks. I climbed the ladder without hurrying. A lifeguard in his thirties, sitting on his high chair, watched me climb. I knew it without needing to turn around.

I wondered if it showed on me, what I had become. If the other patients, the seventy-five-year-old ladies in their flowered bathing caps, could sense that the fat lady in the black swimsuit wasn't just there to keep her husband company. I had no idea. But I walked differently in the corridors. More slowly, swaying my hips a little. Like someone who knows she's being watched.

On the Wednesday of the first week, I had my first massage under the water jets. You lay on your stomach, naked, on a plastic table, under a rail of hot water jets, while a masseuse kneaded your back with the water streaming down. The cabin was at the end of a corridor, closed by a swinging door with a porthole.

The masseuse was a small, hurried brunette who didn't talk. She'd left me a towel to cover my buttocks and started with my shoulders. After five minutes, she went out to fetch a bottle of oil, and the swinging door didn't close all the way. It stayed ajar, caught on the hose of a jet.

I was lying there, naked under the hot water, the towel slipping askew, and through the gap in the door I could see the corridor. Patients went by. An old man in a robe. A lady with her schedule in her hand. A younger man in a spa T-shirt, an employee probably, who slowed down as he passed the door.

I could have got up and closed it. I didn't move. I even spread my legs a little under the water, just a little, to see. The employee went on his way. The masseuse came back, kicked the door shut without a word, and went back to my shoulders as if nothing had happened.

That evening, in the furnished apartment, I told Gérard everything. He took me on the creaking sofa bed, making me repeat the moment I'd spread my legs.

"Did you do it on purpose?"

"Yes."

"Did he see?"

"I don't know."

I didn't know. I would never know.

The hammam was in the basement, at the bottom of a spiral staircase that smelled of eucalyptus. A small vaulted room, tiled in blue and green mosaics, with stone benches on two levels and steam so thick you couldn't see the opposite wall. The door was frosted glass, permanently fogged. A yellow night-light in the ceiling made a kind of golden mist.

We went in the evening, Gérard and I, to the last session, from seven to eight. At that hour the old patients were already at dinner, in the resort's restaurants where the evening set menu cost nineteen euros. There was almost nobody. Sometimes a Swiss couple, sometimes a woman on her own who left after ten minutes.

On the Thursday of the second week, when we went in, there was a man.

He was sitting on the upper bench, facing the door, his forearms resting on his knees. I didn't see him at first because of the steam. First I made out his legs, hairy and powerful, then the white towel tied around his waist, then his chest. Forty-something, maybe a bit more. Dark-haired, graying at the temples, three days' stubble, a wedding ring that shone in the yellow mist. A long white scar ran across his left knee. A patient, probably. He nodded when he saw us come in.

"Good evening."

"Good evening."

We sat down opposite him, on the lower bench. Gérard on my left, against the wall. I had kept my towel knotted under my arms, over my swimsuit. In the hammam, most people came in swimsuits. Some, the younger ones, in just a towel.

For ten minutes, nothing happened. Steam hissed in puffs from a vent at floor level. We sweated. The man had closed his eyes, his head leaning against the mosaic. Gérard had laid his hand on my thigh, flat, not moving.

Then Gérard said, in a low voice, without looking at me:

"It's hot, huh. You should take off your swimsuit. You've got your towel."

I looked at him. In the steam, I could hardly see his eyes. But I knew that voice, his evening voice, in the dark, when he talked about another man.

The man opposite had opened his eyes again.

I stood up. I untied the towel and put it down on the bench. I stayed standing in my swimsuit long enough to slide the straps off my shoulders. My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it over the hiss of the steam. The wet swimsuit stuck to my skin; I had to roll it down, peel it off my breasts, my belly, my hips. I did it without turning around. Facing him.

I was thinking: you're mad, Martine. Someone could come in. The attendant could come down. He could call reception, complain, call you a disgusting old woman.

The swimsuit fell to my ankles. I stepped out of it. I was naked, standing in the middle of the hammam, with my big belly, my breasts hanging down onto it, the sweat running between them. I didn't pick up the towel right away. I left it on the stone, long enough for him to look at me.

The man didn't look away.

I sat back down next to Gérard. I laid the towel across my knees without tying it. It just covered the tops of my thighs. My breasts and my belly were bare.

Nobody spoke for a long while. The man was looking at me. I watched him watching me. Under his towel, between his thighs, the fabric had risen. He made no attempt to hide it.

Gérard started stroking my thigh again, higher, under the towel. I opened my legs. The towel slid off to one side. I didn't hold it back.

"She's beautiful, huh?" said Gérard.

He said it to the man. Simply, in a low voice, the way you'd talk about the weather. The man took a moment to answer.

"Very beautiful."

His voice was deeper than I'd expected. A light southern accent that rolled its r's a little.

"You can come closer if you want," said Gérard. "She likes being looked at up close."

I wanted to elbow him. I didn't. I looked at the man, and I nodded, once. I was the one who did it.

The man stood up. He was tall, taller than I'd thought when he was sitting. He came down from the upper bench and sat beside me, on my right, close enough that our thighs touched. His skin was burning, soaked with sweat. He smelled of eucalyptus and of the spa soap, the lavender one from the showers.

For a while he did nothing. He looked at my breasts, eight inches from his face. Then he raised his hand. He hesitated, his hand in the air. He looked at Gérard.

"Go ahead," said Gérard.

He put his hand on my breast. He lifted it, gently, in his broad, callused palm, and ran his thumb over my nipple. I closed my eyes. He had the hands of a man who works, not office hands. I wondered what he did for a living. I wondered what his wife's name was.

He took the other breast. He was kneading them both now, with full hands, squeezing them together, lifting them, letting them fall. The sweat made my skin slippery under his fingers. He leaned down and took a nipple in his mouth. I moaned, far too loudly for a hammam.

On my left, Gérard had undone his towel. He was hard. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, his cock standing up stiff, which he held in his hand without stroking it.

The man's hand moved down onto my belly, over the folds of my belly, then lower. He pushed the towel aside. I opened my thighs for him. His fingers found my sex, and he gave a little grunt of surprise at how wet I was. It wasn't the steam. He knew it. He slid two fingers into me, all at once, deep, and I had to bite my hand so as not to cry out.

That was when we heard the door to the staircase.

Not the hammam door. The one upstairs, the metal door at the top of the spiral stairs. It banged, and we heard footsteps coming down, plastic flip-flops on the stone steps. The man pulled his hand away at once. Gérard flipped his towel back over himself. I stayed frozen, naked, thighs open, unable to move.

The footsteps stopped in front of the frosted glass door. A shadow behind the fog. A white shape, a robe. It stayed there five seconds, ten. Then the voice of the attendant, a big local woman who handed out towels at reception:

"Closing in twenty minutes, ladies and gentlemen!"

She didn't open the door. The flip-flops went back up. The metal door banged again, upstairs.

Nobody moved for a moment. Then I burst out laughing. A nervous, silly laugh I couldn't stop, my hand over my mouth, tears in my eyes. The man laughed too, more quietly. Gérard shook his head.

"Twenty minutes," said the man.

I looked at him. He still had the towel around his waist, and he was still hard under it. The fright hadn't taken anything away from him. Nor from me. My belly was trembling, and it wasn't from laughing anymore.

I got up from the bench. I knelt in front of him, on the warm wet tiles, between his legs. I untied his towel myself.

He had a thick cock, curving slightly to the left, with a big blue vein along the side. He smelled of lavender and sweat. I took him in my hand and looked at it. Then I looked at him, as I took him into my mouth.

He tipped his head back against the mosaic with a long groan.

I sucked him taking my time, despite the twenty minutes. All the way down, then just the tip, with the tip of my tongue, then all the way down again. With Romain, I'd been clumsy, too eager to do it right. Here, I knew. I knew what I wanted to do to him. The steam hissed in puffs and put drops all over my eyelashes. My knees hurt on the tiles, and I didn't care.

He put his hand on my head. He didn't push. He followed.

Beside us, on the bench, Gérard had moved closer. His eyes were fixed on my mouth, on that stranger's cock sliding in and out of my mouth, and he was stroking himself now, slowly, through clenched teeth. I looked at him while I sucked the other man. I wanted him to see me looking at him. I wanted him to see that I knew what it did to him.

"She's good at sucking, huh?" he murmured.

The man didn't answer. He just tightened his fingers in my hair.

After a while, he lifted me by the shoulders. He turned me around, gently, to face the wall. I put one knee on the bench, my hands flat on the mosaic, my chest against the warm, slippery tiles. He stood behind me. I arched my back.

He entered me in one deep movement, and I cried out against the wall. The sound echoed under the vault, and I bit my lip. I thought of the attendant upstairs, behind her towel counter. Of the metal door. Of what she would say if she came down now and opened the glass door.

He took me hard, both hands on my hips, and with every thrust my breasts were crushed against the mosaic. Our skin slapped, soaking wet, and the sound rose into the steam. He said nothing. He grunted, that was all. I didn't know his name; all I knew of his voice was a few words. Just his cock inside me, his hands on my hips, his wedding ring rubbing against my skin.

Gérard was standing now. He had moved to the side, against the wall, a foot and a half from my face. He was watching me get taken by a stranger in a spa hammam, and he was jerking off without hiding it anymore.

"Look at me," he said.

I looked at him. I couldn't keep my eyes open. The pleasure was rising in waves, closer and closer together, and I no longer knew if it was the heat, the fear, or that cock filling me all the way with every thrust.

"Harder," I said. I didn't even know if I was saying it to the man or to my husband.

The man obeyed. He pulled me back by the hips against him and started taking me with all his strength. I was holding on to the wall with my nails. My breasts rubbed against the tiles. Sweat ran into my eyes.

I came like that, against the wall, my knees buckling. The pleasure mowed me down all at once, and the man had to hold me by the waist so I wouldn't fall. I cried out. I didn't hold back this time. The cry filled the vault.

The man didn't stop. He held me against him, his arm around my belly, and kept moving in and out of me while I was still coming. Then he went rigid. He pressed his forehead against the back of my neck. I felt him empty himself inside me, in spurts, with a groan muffled against my skin.

He stayed like that for a moment, inside me, his forehead against my neck. We were both breathing like horses after a race.

Then he pulled out. He picked up his towel from the bench and tied it around his waist. He looked at Gérard, who was still hard, standing against the wall, his hand on his cock. He looked at me, leaning against the mosaic, his cum running down my thighs.

"Enjoy the rest of your cure, madame," he said.

He pushed open the frosted glass door. His flip-flops climbed the spiral staircase. The metal door banged, upstairs.

I let myself drop onto the bench. Gérard sat down beside me. He didn't touch me. He looked at me, his mouth open, unable to find his words. I couldn't find mine either.

"Closing in five minutes!" the attendant shouted from upstairs, through the door.

In the furnished apartment, Gérard didn't let me shower. He pushed me onto the sofa bed as soon as the door was shut, robe still on, hair still wet, the smell of eucalyptus and sulfur still on my skin. He tore off the terry-cloth belt. He was harder than I had ever seen him, even with Romain.

"Spread your thighs. I want to see."

I spread my thighs. He knelt at the edge of the sofa bed and looked, for a long time, in the light of the bedside lamp.

"He filled you up," he said. "It's still running out. Do you see what you are, Martine? An hour before, you didn't even know that guy existed. And he filled you up like a whore."

He ran two fingers over my sex, over what was running out. He looked at them, glistening, then put them in my mouth.

"Taste. That's him."

I sucked them. I don't know what came over me. It tasted of salt and lavender, and I moaned around his fingers.

"You're a slut," he said very quietly. "A real slut. Say it."

"I'm a slut."

"Louder."

"I'm a slut."

He thrust into me in one go. Into another man's cum. I gasped, not from disgust, from surprise, and he started taking me in big strokes, and the sofa bed creaked under us like an old cart.

"You love cock, don't you? All cock. Mine, little Romain's, some stranger's in a hammam. You don't care whose it is, as long as someone's putting it in you."

"Yes."

"Yes what?"

"I love cock."

My voice was shaking. Never in my life had I said that word out loud. It burned my mouth, and I wanted to say it again straight away.

"I love cock, Gérard. I love being fucked in front of you."

He growled. He lifted my legs and pushed in deeper.

"He took you against the wall like a bitch. I saw you. You were pushing your ass back at him. You were screaming so loud the whole resort must have heard you. And his wife waiting for him at the restaurant while you had his cock in your mouth."

"Stop..."

"Why? It makes you wet. I can feel it. You've never been this wet."

It was true. The sofa bed was making a hell of a noise, the neighbors downstairs, a retired couple from Lyon, must have heard everything, and I thought of Madame Vergnaud and her broom handle, and it made me laugh and moan at the same time.

"Tell me. What was his cock like?"

"Thick. A bit curved. With a big vein down the side."

"Bigger than mine?"

"Yes."

He let out a groan. He was pounding me now, his face red, sweat running down his forehead and dripping onto my breasts.

"And next time, there'll be two. You hear me? Two cocks just for you. One in your mouth, one in your pussy. And I'll watch. Do you want that?"

"Yes."

"Say it."

"I want two cocks. I want you to watch."

He put his hand on my throat, without squeezing, just resting there, and looked me in the eyes.

"He had a wedding ring. He'll go back to his wife tonight. He'll kiss her. With your juices still on him. And you'll never know his name."

I thought of that woman, somewhere in the resort, waiting for her husband for dinner and knowing nothing. He had come into my body and left it again by the spiral staircase, in flip-flops, a towel around his waist.

I came screaming, my legs locked around Gérard's back, my nails in his skin.

"That's it," he growled. "Come, you slut. Come with his cum inside you."

He followed almost at once, driving into me with all his strength, with a cry I had never heard come out of him. He collapsed on top of me, heavy, out of breath, his head in my neck.

We stayed like that for a good while. The electric heater ticked. Out in the street, a car went by now and then over the wet cobblestones.

"Do you regret it?" he asked after a while.

"No."

He raised his head. He looked at me. He had his everyday voice again, a little embarrassed, almost shy.

"Me neither."

He looked as if he wanted to add something else. He didn't. He just kissed me on the forehead, the way you kiss a woman you love.

We didn't see him again at the hammam. Not on Friday, not the following week. The evenings we went down, there were only the Swiss couple, or the woman on her own who left after ten minutes. I looked out for his face in the corridors, at the pool, in the dining hall where the patients had their ten o'clock coffee. Nothing. In the end I told myself he'd left, that his own cure was over.

In the last week, I went back to my little displays, the gaping robe, the swimsuit clinging as I climbed the ladder. The lifeguard said good morning to me now, with a funny little look. The physiotherapist with the towel cart too. But it wasn't the same anymore. I knew what there was at the end of it now, and looks weren't quite enough for me anymore.

On the last morning, while Gérard was collecting his end-of-cure certificate from the medical office, I waited for him in the reception hall, sitting on a red velvet bench, my suitcase beside me.

And I saw him.

He was at the counter, in jeans and a leather jacket, a wheeled suitcase in his hand. He was handing his last robe back to the big attendant. Beside him, a blonde woman in her forties, slim, elegant, in a beige coat, was looking at her phone. His wife. She wore a wedding ring that matched his.

He turned around. He saw me, on my velvet bench. Our eyes met for a second.

He gave nothing away. Not a flicker. He looked right through me, the way you'd look at a piece of furniture in a hotel lobby, and he took his wife's arm. They went out together through the big glass door, under the dome, and I watched them get into a gray car in the parking lot.

I stayed sitting there. I should have felt humiliated, I think. I didn't. I wanted to laugh.

On the reception counter, next to the hiking leaflets and the menus of the resort's restaurants, there was a plastic stand with brochures for organized tours. Coach tours for retirees. Tuscany in eight days. The châteaux of the Loire. Andalusia, half board, departing from the big cities in the region.

I took one, without quite knowing why. I slipped it into my handbag, next to Romain's badge, which I had never taken out of there.

My phone buzzed in my bag. It was Gérard, telling me he'd be another ten minutes with the doctor.

I opened my messages. Below, there was Romain's message, forwarded by Gérard almost a month earlier. It would be a pleasure to see madame again. Still unanswered.

I read the sentence again. I started typing a reply. I deleted it.

I put the phone away, and I waited for Gérard under the dome, watching the rain fall on the parking lot.