My Mother's Mosquito Net

My Mother's Mosquito Net

I

Sunday, half past eight, and the light coming through the curtains was the flat white kind that makes everything look older than it is. I was doing arithmetic in my head, the way you do before you're properly awake.

Forty-five. So thirty years back. No -- twenty-two. I'd been twenty-three, and she'd have been forty-seven. I got it wrong twice before I got it right, which tells you something about how I'd been carrying it: not as a date, but as a place. A house, a heat, a smell of chlorine and hot stone.

I'd read a story the night before. On one of those sites, the way you do, clicking without much intention and then reading to the end anyway. The man writing it was older than I am now, and he'd spent a page and a half on his mother's body. The particulars of it. The things a son shouldn't know and a writer can't resist describing.

I'd thought, at the time: well, he's got a better memory than me.

Then I woke up and found I had an erection I hadn't noticed arriving, and that the tip of it was wet.

That's the thing about a body. It doesn't wait for permission. I lay there and did the sum again -- twenty-three, and her forty-seven -- and my cock did not care about the arithmetic at all. It had made its own assessment of the situation, and the assessment was this: the wetness was there to make something possible. I knew exactly what it was for. I'd known since I was fourteen.

Then I opened my laptop and searched for that specific old film I knew I had among many others featuring my mother -- digitised years ago, grainy, silent, the colour gone slightly pink at the edges.

II

Found it! She was slender in a way women aren't anymore, or aren't encouraged to be -- the seventies and early eighties made a particular shape and she had it. Short dark hair, she was sitting nude on a canvas deck chair.

She was sprawled in the reclining chair, half sitting, half lying, her hips slipped forward and her back resting against the canvas. One leg stretched out loosely in front of her, while the other was bent, its knee raised and fallen casually to one side..

Which meant she was open. Not posed open. Not arranged. Just the geometry of a woman who had stopped holding her legs together, and the chair doing the rest.

Then the camera came in. Slowly, the way a zoom did on that old equipment, until there was nothing in the frame but the dark hair and the folds of her. And then it just held, drifting a little, the way an arm does when it's been up too long.

I stopped the film and sat looking at the frame for a while.

I'm not going to pretend I watched it the way a son watches a film of his mother. I watched the way a man watches.

The films thinned out after that. There were fewer of her, and then there were none -- my father was travelling more by then, Asia mostly, and the camera went with him and pointed at other things... Things I saw once as a boy and didn't look at again.

So the last clear record of my mother's nude body is from 1975.

III

Here's what I'd have told you at twenty-three: that nothing happened. That my mother looked at me once in a bathroom and I was embarrassed, and a few months later she asked me to come to Corsica, and I went, and it was a holiday.

Here's what I'd tell you now.

That bathroom was long -- a corridor of a room, tub on the left, the two sinks, the toilet right at the far end. I was at the end of it with my back to the door and a problem I couldn't solve, and I heard the handle turn.

She could have closed it. She didn't. She came in, and she walked. Past the tub. Past the sinks. I could hear her shoes on the tile and there was nothing I could do but stand there with my hand on myself and wait.

She stopped behind me, close enough that I felt her at my shoulder, and she looked down, and she stayed looking. I was hard -- properly hard, the kind you can't do anything about once it's started -- and she looked at it for five seconds. I counted. I don't know why I counted, but I did, and I got to five before she turned and left and pulled the door to behind her.

I felt really embarrassed. That's what I remember most clearly -- not arousal. I was twenty-three and I'd been caught in a rather undignified moment and she had walked the length of a room to look at it properly.

IV

The invitation came a few months later.

What I do know is that my father normally went. It was their holiday house, their fortnight, their thing. That year he didn't, and the reason given was work, and it was a perfectly good reason, and I have never once in twenty-two years been able to leave it alone.

She asked me. I said yes and felt a bit stupid about it -- a twenty-three-year-old man going on holiday with his mother. I remember being faintly embarrassed telling people.

And I remember the house. The heat of it. The way she moved around it in that bikini as though the temperature required it, which it did, and as though there were nobody there to see, which there wasn't.

I'd like to tell you I was a gentleman about it. I was not a gentleman. I was a young man who had been raised well and had opinions about his mother, and some of those opinions came out at night, alone, in a room down the corridor from hers, reluctantly. Very reluctantly. The way you do something you've decided not to think about while you're doing it.

At the time I closed the book on all of it. I was twenty-three. I had a life to get on with, and my mother was forty-seven, and the sensible thing was to turn the page.

V

The house was white and low and set back far from the road in the middle of two hectares of land, a Corsican Two-hundred-years old farmhouse, renovated, with fig trees and lemon trees that dropped fruit on the terrace and a pool that was too warm by the afternoon. There were only two bedrooms made up. I noticed that on the first night and then spent a fortnight not thinking about it.

She had a way of occupying the place. Not doing anything -- just being in it, in that bikini, on the sunbed by the pool with a magazine face-down on her chest and one arm over her eyes. The bikini was small in the way bikinis were then, and she had the dark unruly hair that women had then, and the bikini did not contain it nearly enough. She'd shift on the sunbed, or turn over, or reach for her drink, and there'd be a dark curl escaping at the edge of the fabric, and she never once adjusted it.

I want to be clear that she wasn't doing it for me. That's the thing I've gone back and forth on for twenty-two years and I've finally settled it: she wasn't performing. She was forty-seven, she was on holiday, there was nobody there but her son, and she had decided -- reasonably -- that she could stop being careful. That's all it was.

Which is worse, in a way. Because it meant every glance I stole was a glance I'd chosen, and she'd given me nothing to blame her for. I was often sent for water. I'd bring it across the terrace with my eyes on her the whole way, and she'd take it without looking up from her magazine.

I'd sit on the other side of the pool with a book I wasn't reading. The cicadas would go and the water would lap at the tiles and she'd lie there with her arm over her eyes, and I'd look, and look away, and look again -- and the whole time some very calm part of me was making a note. Filing it. That one. Remember that one.

I did remember. Every night, in a room down the corridor with the shutters closed, I went through the day's collection. The way she'd rolled onto her front and the string had sat low.

Reluctantly. Always reluctantly. As though reluctance made any difference to what I was doing.

VI

She was a bit reckless, that's the word I'd use now. On the third and fourth day she fell asleep out there properly -- not dozing, asleep, mouth slightly open, book slid off onto the tiles. And she'd turned in her sleep, and the bikini bottom had shifted, and I could see more than I had any business seeing.

I got up and went inside and drank a glass of water at the sink and looked at myself in the window.

Here's what I thought, standing there: does she knows I'm looking?

I went back out and sat down and opened my book at the wrong page and read the same paragraph four times.

That night I didn't touch myself at all. I lay there and thought about how it was possible to be that close to something and have absolutely no idea what it was. Whether it was an invitation. Whether it was indifference. Whether I was inventing a whole summer out of a woman being comfortable in her own garden.

There was one thing that summer I couldn't stop looking at, her crotch, in the bikini, the shape of it.

She was slender but that particular area was not slim. There was a volume there that didn't match the rest of her, I know that now, a fullness, and when she lay back on the sunbed it was simply there, unmissable, this soft heavy shape under thin fabric.

I had an explanation at the time, and it was comfortable, and I'd carried it since I was fourteen. It's the hair, I told myself. She had all that lush dark brown hair, untrimmed, and it pushed the fabric of the bikini out, it made a small thing look like a large one. Grooming. The eighties. A woman who'd never got round to the modern habit of making herself neat.

It held for nine years. It didn't hold past the seventh day of that fortnight.

It wasn't only the hair. Underneath the hair there was that shape, not a delicate one. Those heavy folded lips, the kind that make a woman's body look like it's been designed for something. Which it had. That's not a small thing, and I don't know why we pretend it is.

When those old films surfaced, they put it back in front of me. Still, and close, and nobody moving.

VII

The pool house was a small white box at the end of the terrace -- a single bed, a toilet, a shower. It was for guests who didn't want to be in the main house, or for the afternoon, or for nothing in particular.

One afternoon she said she wanted to show me something in it, and there was nothing to show me. And then she said: lie down on the bed, see if it's comfortable.

I lay down. I remember the mattress being too soft and my feet hanging off the end, and I remember saying something stupid about the mattress, and I remember that she stood beside the bed and looked at me with an expression I couldn't read at all. Not affectionate. Not amused. Slightly distressed, if anything. Like someone standing in front of a door they've decided not to open.

It lasted maybe thirty seconds. Then she said something about the heat and went out to the pool, and I lay there a moment longer, and got up, and followed her, and neither of us ever mentioned it.

At the time I thought it was strange.

VIII

The evenings are what convinced me, in the end. Not the bathroom, not the sunbed, not the pool house. The kitchen table.

After dinner she'd pour wine and we'd sit. And this is the part I need you to understand about my mother: she was not a drinker. She was the woman who told me at nineteen that a glass of wine with dinner was plenty and that young men who drank too much became boring young men. She worried about me staying up late, for God's sake. At twenty-three. She'd still say don't be too late as though I had a curfew.

That fortnight, all of it went out of the window.

She'd pour, and I'd drink, and she'd pour again. Half a bottle, two thirds. She wasn't drunk -- I want to be fair to her, she was never drunk -- but she was loose in a way I'd never seen her. And she talked. About her life, about her marriage, about things I don't think she'd have said to me in daylight. And I sat there and listened, because what else was I going to do? I was twenty-three. I had nothing to offer. She'd had twenty-four more years of being a person than I had.

There was a story in the papers that fortnight -- a robbery, a disappearance -- and she came back to it. Night after night, in among everything else, she'd find a way to mention it. She'd read about it by the pool and she'd say something small and ordinary about it and then let it go.

And somewhere around eleven o'clock it stopped feeling like a mother and her son. I couldn't have named it at the time. I can name it now. She had stopped doing any of the things that made her my mother, and what was left was a woman in a thin dress, drinking wine, being interesting at me.

IX

Midnight. The bottle nearly done. She was still talking, still filling my glass, and I remember thinking with total clarity: she is never going to stop.

And then the sentence arrived in my head, fully formed, the way sentences do.

Shall we go to bed now?

I meant it the way you'd mean it. Not shall we retire. Not I'm tired. I meant: the two of us, now, up the stairs, together, and whatever that meant.

It never got anywhere near my mouth. I've thought about the gap between having that thought and not saying it more than almost anything else in my life. Because there was nothing stopping me. She had spent a fortnight removing every obstacle, and I sat there with a full glass and a hard cock and said goodnight and went to bed.

She stayed at the table. I heard her glass on the marble from a distance.

I lay in my room and felt the thing I'd been feeling all summer, which I'd been calling awkwardness: inadequate. The same feeling I got around the pretty woman who cleaned for us, who was thirty-eight and had a way of looking at me as though I were a nice boy who hadn't worked out yet what he was for. I was twenty-three and I had no idea how to be a man in a room with a woman who wanted one.

X

The house was all on one floor, the way those old houses are -- thick walls, small windows, everything cool and dark inside while the world outside went white with heat.

My room was off to one side, past the kitchen. Hers was six metres the other way. Two doors between us, if you counted the one at the end of the passage, which I've decided over the years doesn't count.

Her bed was an old wooden thing, huge, with a mattress like a board. She used to say she liked them hard -- good for her back. I never thought about that sentence again for twenty-two years. Now I think about it constantly, and I notice that a hard mattress is also, incidentally, a very good mattress for other things.

Our days had a shape. Mornings I'd snorkel in one of those small rocky coves, the water so clear it looked shallow when it wasn't -- and on the way back I'd stop at the grocery for whatever she'd put on the list. There was always a tabloid on it. She'd write "et le journal" at the bottom in her small handwriting, and I'd bring it back, and it would have the robber in it again.

He'd been in the papers for five years by then. A young man who robbed banks and was never violent about it, and was good-looking in a way the papers couldn't resist, and had just done the thing that made him famous: taken a cashier out of a branch in Marseille and disappeared with her. She was forty-four. She had three children. "Toujours introuvables", the headline said, over a photograph of the two of them.

XI

Eight in the evening, she switches on the TV for the news, war in the middle east, crude oil prices going up, then that bank robbery story again, a short "proof of life" film, the face of the hostage appearing, my mother reacting..."Well, she doesn't look overly bothered by the situation"

The news finished and we didn't get up, her still bringing up that tabloid story, sharing her opinions about it several times, the way she always did when a subject had got hold of her.

One in the morning, and she was still talking, and I was loose now, properly loose.

The kitchen is dim, the shutters open, a warm wind coming through. She refills my glass and says something about her marriage that I'll remember for the rest of my life and won't repeat.

And I say it.

Shall we go to bed now?

She stops pouring. The bottle's still tilted and she stops, and looks at me. And what I see on her face is not the answer I've built a thousand times since. It's distress, real distress.

She puts the bottle down. She says, quite quietly: François...

Nothing else. Just my name... and the way she said it.

Then she gets up and goes to her room and closes the door, and I sit there with the wine going warm in my glass.

I didn't sleep. Not properly. I lay there and listened to the fan and replayed the way she'd said my name, and somewhere around four in the morning I decided I'd ruined everything, and somewhere around five I decided I hadn't.

XII

The next day she was different.

That's the thing I've come back to most often. Not the night -- the day between. Because if she'd been avoiding me, or brisk, or motherly, I'd have noticed. Instead she seemed more... relaxed.

She was on the sunbed by two with her magazine and her sunglasses, and her legs were more apart than usual. Then one knee dropped out to the side.

I brought her a glass of water because it was thirty-four degrees and she'd finished the last one.

I walked over with it in my trunks, and I was hard -- the kind you can't hide, the kind that swings against your leg when you walk. And wet at the tip, which was not something that would happen to me like that. She watched me come. Not my face. She watched me come the whole way.

She said: "Thank you, darling."

And then, barely audible, not looking up: "You look good."

And she turned the page.

I went and sat down on the other side of the pool with my hard on and my heart going like a bird in a box.

XIII

That evening she made one of her usual call to Catherine, her old friend, I could faintly hear Catherine's cheerful feminine voice... the usual "hello to you from Catherine" bringing a smile to my face as Catherine would never ignore a male presence, at least my presence.

I heard them talking about that "hostage story", the laughs..

She hung up and stood there a moment with her hand still on the phone, shaking her head. "Ah, Catherine!"..."She thinks half the women of France wish they were the hostage".

And then, as though correcting herself "I mean she is almost twice his age".

"Then what?" I uttered.

She looked at me. And then she went and got the bottle.

That night I drank at her pace.

I just didn't sip. When she filled my glass I drank it, and she filled it again, and the third went down easier than the second, and by the fourth the kitchen had gone soft at the edges and the warm wind through the shutters felt like something.

She kept looking at her glass, and once she started a sentence and didn't finish it. She was restless in a way I hadn't seen before -- not unhappy, just not settled.

She poured herself yet another glass and settled the empty bottle down and looked at me, and this time her face wasn't distressed.

I'd stopped being able to stop myself, I said it with a faint smile: "I feel like a bank robber tonight."

She didn't say anything for a long moment. And then she smiled -- a small one, almost shy.

Then she said, in a low, soft voice: "The mosquito net's come loose in my room, would you come and look at it?"

And she walked out of the kitchen.

XIV

I followed her.

Six metres down the passage and I could hear my own pulse in my ears, and my cock was half hard -- not properly, because the adrenaline had got there first and taken the blood it needed. That's the thing nobody describes. It isn't desire that walks you down a corridor like that. It's fear, and the desire has to wait its turn.

She was already in the room. She'd left the door open, and she'd got onto the bed -- not sitting on the edge of it, but half lying, with the big headboard pillows against her back. One knee was up, the other dropped out to the side, and her short dress had ridden up in the heat of the evening to somewhere around her hips.

She was still dressed underneath. That's what I saw first, and it's what I'd have told you if you'd asked me that night: my mother on her bed in her underwear, because it was thirty degrees and the net was broken.

The knickers were white and thin and they'd gone wrong. They'd got themselves centred -- pulled too far in at the front, the way they do when you've been sitting and moving and the fabric has migrated -- so that the gusset sat narrow over the middle of her, and the sides had come out from under it. Dark hair escaping at the edges, thick and unruly, more of it on one side than the other. And the shape underneath, that heaviness I'd been staring at through a bikini for several days and had told myself a comfortable lie about, sitting there in thin white cotton like something the fabric had no intention of containing.

She said: there -- look. It's come off the hook at the top.

I went to the window.

And that's how it happened, in the end. Not with her looking at me. With my back to her, my arms up, and the two of us talking about a mosquito net.

Higher. No -- the other side. It needs to go over the hook, not under it.

I got it over the hook. It came off again. She said something in French under her breath, in a soft slow tone of voice, giving me directions, patient, while I was in no state to be given directions..

All the while I was stealing looks.

Every time she spoke I turned my head to answer her, and every time I turned my head there it was. The white cotton, the hair escaping at the sides, the weight of her underneath it.

Her eyes were on mine. It seemed she had slipped further down on the bed, she was now more lying than sitting, her legs seemed to have spread a bit further apart. Then she looked down at my cock, and stayed there, and I stood in front of her and let her look.

Then she looked back up at my face.

And she didn't say anything. She put her hand down between her legs -- casually, the way you'd straighten a strap or push your hair back, not looking at me, not looking at what she was doing -- and passed one finger along the edge of the gusset.

The fabric slid across and stayed there, pulled aside and hooked on her thigh, and she took her hand away and left it.

Her thick lips were now out in the open.

Dusky, heavy, folded, with the hair around them and the shine of her on it, and the cotton sitting to the side doing nothing at all.

I stood there with the net half in my hand and looked at her, and she let me, and nobody said anything at all. The pool light was moving on the ceiling. Somewhere outside a cicada was still going.

Then I put the net down.

I crossed the two metres and sat down beside her on the bed and put my hand on her thigh.

She was warm. Warm from the day and from the wine, and the skin of her inner thigh was softer than I'd imagined in a fortnight of imagining.

I kissed it. Just there, halfway up from her knee, and I felt her draw breath. Then higher, and higher, working my way up the inside of her thigh with my mouth, she let her legs come further apart to make room for me. She closed her eyes.

And then, as my mouth came up, almost brushing against her there, her hand came down flat on my forehead and resisted.

Then her hand let go, and she lay fully back.

I got the gusset of her panties fully aside with my thumb and put my mouth on her, and she made a sound and her hips slightly lifted.

The first thing was the smell.

Not perfume. She'd showered that afternoon and there was still salt in her from the sea and sun on her skin, but underneath all of that, in the hair, was her -- a warm, close, musky smell, the smell of her there was so more animal than I expected, so much less polite, that I actually stopped for a second with my nose in it and just breathed.

That's the thing that comes back to me first now, so many years later, before the taste or the texture or her hands in my hair. The smell of her, dark and warm and faintly sour, sitting in all that untrimmed hair like it had been waiting there all day.

And then I went lower, and found the opening itself.

That was different. That was not skin and it was not hair. That was a texture I had no reference for -- soft in a way that was almost slick, folding and unfolding against my mouth, and the wetness there wasn't like spit or like water. It was thicker. Slimier. It tasted of salt and something faintly metallic and something else underneath it that I've never found a word for, and it was abundant.

I understood, with my mouth on her, something I hadn't understood from three weeks of looking: she was ready. Not tolerating me. Not being patient with a boy. Ready, and had been for a while, and the evidence of it was all over my face.

That's the thing that undid me. Not the sight of her. The knowledge -- arriving through my mouth rather than my eyes -- that this was a woman who wanted it and had wanted it and had been waiting for me to work it out.

Her hands came into my hair then. Not pushing. Just holding, the way you hold something you don't want to lose.

And then I got my lips on those thick folds, and I sucked. Gently at first, then properly, drawing one between my lips and pulling, letting it slip free, then the other. A slow little dance between what I could see and what I could feel -- because I'd look up and there it was, and then I'd be back down with my mouth on it, and it went on and on and she let it.

She said there when I found the right place, and slower when I got excited, and once, quietly, good boy -- which did something to me I'm not going to try to explain.

She was so tense. Her hips lifted and her hand contracted against my hair, hard, once -- and she made no sound at all except her breathing going ragged. I went at her for a long time, frantic, and I never knew whether she came. I still don't know

Then she pulled me up by the hair and said: now.

XV

I got the rest of her panties off in one rather brisk movement -- down and off and onto the floor -- and she let me. She was like a rag doll by then, half undone, her arms above her head, and she didn't lift a finger to help or hinder. I put my face back between her legs and

Then she pulled me up by the hair again, she got the hem of my T-shirt and took it off me, dropped it somewhere.

She then reached between us before I could.

She undid my belt and swiftly opened my zip and got hold of me, no looking up, just her hand around it, and a small sound in her throat that wasn't quite a word.

Then her thumb found the tip and slid through what was there, for a long moment... feeling it, and I heard her pull a breath in through her teeth.

Then she guided me down. I felt the head of me settle against her opening and I stopped and waited.

She kept her hand where it was, stroking the length of me once, twice, then she drew me along herself, up and down, a few times, and I could feel how wet she was...

I felt her mouth plant soft kisses against my neck...

And then I went forward, and it was easy.

That's what I remember most about that first time -- how easy it was, after all that. She was wet from my mouth and I was so wet it was running, and I slid into her the way you slide into something that's been waiting, and she took all of it and breathed out hard against my ear.

It started tender. I'd thought about it for so long that the first stroke was almost careful -- slow, deep, both of us breathing hard with the shock of it actually happening.

And then something in me changed. She felt it change. She didn't stop me.

I wasn't rough. I want to be honest about that, because it matters: I wasn't rough. But I was there to possess her. That's the only word. My hands were on her and my mouth was on her neck and I was driving into her with everything I had, and the old wooden bed was complaining -- properly complaining, knocking against the wall, the headboard groaning.

And she had that worried look on her face. The one from the pool house, only now it was permanent. Her eyes were closed and there was a storm going on behind her face, because she was a woman of forty-seven being fucked by her own son, energetically, on a hard mattress, and she was feeling her orgasm coming and she couldn't stop any of it.

That same cock. The one she'd walked the length of a bathroom to look at, shamelessly, five seconds, months ago. That one. Inside her now, and not standing still.

It was disastrous. I knew it while it was happening -- the bed, the wet squishy noise of it, the two of us so wet it sounded obscene, her hands gripping my back and her mouth starting saying things she'd never say in daylight.

She came with her hand over her own mouth. The bed knocked twice more and then she went rigid and let out a sound through her fingers that I'll hear until I die, and I came a moment later, enormous, everything I had, and she held me there with her legs locked around me.

XVI

We didn't get up. I don't think either of us could have.

I lay with my head on her stomach and she had one hand in my hair and we stayed like that for a long time, not talking, the sheet somewhere on the floor. I remember her breathing slowing down and then evening out, and I remember thinking she'd fallen asleep and being glad of it.

Later in the night, I don't remember exactly how it started again.

I just remember my mouth on her tits. Her small tits, the way she was -- one nipple at a time, and I sucked at her the way I'd wanted to for since the day we arrived, and she arched up off the mattress with a sound that came from somewhere low in her chest. I put my hand between her legs and found her still wet, still open, and I got my cock in between those thick lips I'd had my mouth on a few hours before -- just there, again sliding in her wetness, along them, not in. She lifted her hips, trying to take me in.

I was half asleep when I did it. That's the truth of it -- I was drifting, warm, half gone, and the body did it without asking me, and I pushed into her and woke up properly with the first stroke.

Then it was different. The first time had been a flood and a storm and a bed complaining. This one was slower and I was entirely awake for it and I gave her everything I had, all of it.

She got her mouth on my neck. Her tongue, flat against my throat, and then my ear, and I felt her breath there and it undid me more than anything she'd done all night.

Then, in a voice so faint I almost didn't catch it:

Baise-moi, François. Baise-moi!

She came a second time with her nails in my shoulder, and I followed her, and afterwards she held onto me and wouldn't let go and I could feel her heart going.

XVII

I woke up in the morning because of a sensation -- warm and wet and slow -- and it took me a moment to work out where I was and what was happening. Then I opened my eyes and looked down my own body and there was my mother's head between my legs.

She'd woken before me. She must have been at it for a while, because I was fully hard and there was already a wet mess of it, and she was going about it the way she did everything: carefully, thoroughly, without hurry.

She was sucking on the head of my cock. Just the head -- small, slow pulls, her tongue flat and working, the way you'd do something you intended to take a long time over. Then she came off it and ran her tongue the length of my shaft, several times, root to tip, unhurried. Then down to my balls, and she kissed them -- tenderly, the way you'd kiss someone's hand -- and massaged them with her tongue, and I made a noise I'm not proud of.

Then she found the frenulum. That little ridge underneath, and she worked at it with the tip of her tongue, small quick movements, over and over, and I felt the whole thing gather and start to rise and she didn't stop, didn't speed up, just kept at it with that same maddening patience until I came.

It was a lot. More than I'd have believed -- spurting up over my own belly, my stomach, my chest, and she stayed where she was, one hand on my hip, and let me finish.

Then she licked it off me.

Slowly. All of it. My belly, my stomach, the mess on my chest, working her way up with her tongue like she was cleaning a plate, and I lay there with my hands in the sheet and my heart going and watched my mother swallow what I'd just given her.

By the time she was finished, I was hard again. Of course I was. I was twenty-three and she'd just spent ten minutes on me, licking me clean.

She looked up at me, and her hair was a mess, and her face was satisfaction -- she'd wanted to do that since the bathroom, I understood, and had wanted to for months, and now she'd done it and it had gone exactly as she'd hoped.

Then she sat up, swung a leg over me, and sat on it.

Not slowly. She took the whole of me in one movement, and I heard her breath go out of her, and she put both hands flat on my chest and started to move

She ground on me slowly after that.

Not riding -- grinding. Her hands flat on my chest, her arms straight, sitting perfectly upright on me with her eyes closed, and moving her hips in slow circles that took all of me and gave it back. I lay there and let her, because there was nothing else in the world I could have done.

The bed didn't complain this time. It was too slow for that. Just the two of us breathing and the fan overhead and the sound of her, wet, moving on me.

I watched her face. That worried look was back, and I understood now that it wasn't worry about what she was doing. It was concentration. It was a woman getting herself there and not wanting to be interrupted.

I watched it come. Her breathing changed first, getting shorter, and her rhythm went slightly wrong, and then her hands pressed down harder on my chest. She sucked air in through her teeth. I felt her contract around me -- once, twice, a series of them, tight and rhythmic -- and then it let go, and she relaxed all at once, her shoulders dropping, her chin coming down.

And the worried look went away.

That was all. She didn't smile. She didn't say anything. She just sat there with her eyes closed and her hands on my chest, breathing, and her face was completely empty of everything it had been carrying, and it was the most beautiful I ever saw her.

The third time. I'm fairly sure it was the third.

XVIII

And then she didn't get off me.

I was still hard inside her -- she'd come, and I hadn't -- and she stayed where she was with her hands on my chest and her eyes closed and me filling her. Then she leaned forward, and put her head down against my neck, and I felt her mouth there, and then the whisper.

Baise-moi maintenant.

She lifted her hips and held them there, motionless, her arse above me and her weight on her knees, and left it to me. So I took her by the hips and lifted mine to meet her, and went at her from below.

She was so full of me. So wet. My cock slid in and out of her with no resistance at all -- shiny, effortless, and every time I came up she was waiting, and those thick lips of hers closed around my shaft with a snugness that was almost obscene, gripping me all the way in and all the way out.

And I made the strokes long. Unnecessarily long. Because I wanted to watch.

That's the thing I wasn't just fucking her -- I was watching us. I'd draw all the way back until only the tip of my glans was left between her lips, and hold it there, and look down at it: my cock, coated and shining with her, slowly disappearing into her, inch by inch, those heavy folds taking it and closing round it. And then all the way out again, and again, and again.

I was making a film. I was staging us. The pleasure came afterwards -- the pleasure was the fast part, and the fast part came when I'd got the shot I wanted.

She lay with her head on my neck and whispered, calm as anything:

C'est ça. C'est ça. Baise-moi. Je la sens bien. Continue.

Then the strokes got shorter and faster and less patient, and her voice changed with them. Oui. Oui. Oui. -- one for every time I bottomed out, my balls pressed up against those heavy lips, and she said it in my ear with a rising urgency each time.

I came again. Everything left in me, up into her, and she felt it and her whispers went slow and quiet and soothing: ouuuiiii... ouuuiii... -- drawn out, barely audible, her voice going soft the way a voice does when the body has already finished and the mind is catching up.

XIX

I got up afterwards and went to the kitchen and made coffee. I was naked and there was nothing on me and the tiles were cool and I remember being surprised that the world was still there -- the fig tree, the cicadas, the light on the terrace.

When I came back she was sitting up in bed with the sheet around her waist. Her legs were apart. Not arranged. Just apart, the way they'd been on the sunbed, and between those thick lips there was a pool of white -- my semen, gathered and spilled, and her still slightly open, still gaping from being used all night.

She looked at me and said, bring me some paper.

I went back to the kitchen. I came back with a roll and she took it and wiped herself, unhurried, thorough, the way she did everything -- and then she took the paper and put it under her, folded, on top of the stain.

Then she took her coffee and sipped it.

And she said: François, that will need to be the most solid secret of our lives.

Not it'll be our secret. Not we were drunk. No door to walk through, no exit offered, no lightness. A statement of fact, delivered over coffee, by a woman sitting in her own bed with her legs apart and a wet paper under her.

I said yes.

She nodded once, and drank her coffee, and that was the end of it.

She sipped with her legs still open and looked at me over the rim, and my cock came up again -- of course it did, with that in front of me, the dark hair and the thick lips and my own semen still seeping out of her.

She saw it happen. She smiled -- properly smiled, the first time since we'd started -- and said: it's enough for the day.

XX

It was two days later, mid-afternoon, she was on the sunbed and I came out with two glasses and set them down and she looked up at me and said nothing at all, and I understood.

I got the bikini bottom down around her ankles and left it there -- she didn't help, she just lay back -- and put my mouth on her again, and she let me take my time with it, one hand in my hair and the other flat on the tiles.

Then I got my hands under her arse and lifted her to the edge of the sunbed and went into her. Her legs were over my arms, the bikini still hooked round one ankle, and she got one arm round my neck and her other hand moving on my back -- not gripping, caressing, slow and absent-minded, the way you'd touch something you loved -- while I went at her. Really went at her, out there in the sun, on a white plastic sunbed that slid a few centimetres across the tiles with every stroke.

She didn't make a sound the whole time except breathing. And when it was over she patted my back twice, the way you'd pat a horse.

I stayed where I was afterwards. Pulled out, and watched. Her opening gaped for a second, and then the white began to come -- slowly, gathering at the edge of those thick lips, and then running.

XXI

The other one was at night, after one of our long evenings, when the wine was done and the house was dark.

She stood up from the table and walked out across the terrace without a word, and went to the pool house. Shortly after, I followed her.

The pool house was dark inside, only the pool light coming through the window, moving on the walls. She sat down on the edge of the single bed and didn't say anything, so I stood in front of her and she brought my shorts down and took me in her mouth.

And she did that thing again. That motherly, thorough, competent thing -- slow, careful, no hurry, like she had all night and intended to use it. I stood there with my hand on the wall and let her.

Then she stopped, and stood up, and stepped out of her panties, and lay down on the bed on her hands and knees with her dress still on -- bunched up round her waist, her bare arse up in the air, her back curved -- and looked over her shoulder at me and said:

Viens François! Baise-moi!

I did. And that time she was loud.

She put both hands flat against the wall -- not the bed, the wall -- and braced herself, and I took her hips and went at her properly, and the old metal bed started up immediately. That thin, tinny, desperate creak of a cheap frame, faster and faster, and underneath it the wet noise of it, obscene and continuous, and her voice over the top of all of it.

She wasn't discreet in there. There was nobody to be discreet for. It was one long litany -- the creaking, the wet sounds, and her moaning, low and constant, and then when I got to the edge and drove in hard she said it, at volume, the way she'd never once said it in the house:

OUI! OUI! OUI!

And when I came -- when I flooded her, everything, up into her while she was still saying it -- she went long and loud and utterly shameless: OOOOOHHH! OOOOHHH! OOOHH! and then nothing at all.

She collapsed forward. Face down, her head inside the crook of her arm, her back rising and falling, and she didn't move or speak for several minutes.

I sat on the edge of the bed with my hand on her back and listened to her breathe and to the water lapping at the pool outside and to my own heart.

XXII

She had a proper one. Not the quiet contractions of the morning or the silent grinding -- a huge, rolling, whole-body thing that took her under and held her there. She went rigid first, then shook, then collapsed.

Here's what I think now, and I've thought about it for three years.

I think she knew.

Maybe somewhere in that fortnight she worked out what she needed in order to have it properly. It was a neutral place, but also a place nearest to where our highest sexual tension of the last days occurred.

That's why we walked out there. That's why she lay down there on all four with her dress still on.

She had chosen the place where she wanted to fully consume it, taking the whole of the thing, all of it, and fully letting it go through her, be properly be taken by me, like a woman, not like a mother.

The apotheosis. That's the word for it.

XXIII

She got up eventually. Turned over, sat on the edge of the bed, and pushed me back down onto it.

And then she put her mouth on me yet again, and it was different.... previous times had been thorough and competent. This was worship. She licked me clean -- her own wetness, my semen, all of it -- slowly, carefully, with her eyes closed, running her tongue along the length of me and then down and then back up, over and over, for a very long time. There was no hurry in it at all. There was no goal. It was a woman doing something with her whole attention, because she wanted to, and because she'd decided she was allowed.

I lay there on that creaking metal bed in the dark and let her, and I remember thinking -- twenty-three years old, in a pool house in Corsica -- that I had no idea what I'd done to deserve it, and that I would remember it forever, and that I was right about that.

XXIV

We came home at the end of the fortnight and she was my mother again. Completely. No slips, no looks across the table, nothing at all in front of my father. She asked about my work and told me to eat properly and it was as though a different woman had been on holiday.

But it hadn't stopped.

It went on for years. Far and few between -- months sometimes, and then a Sunday afternoon when I'd come for lunch and my father was at the golf club and she'd say something entirely ordinary and I'd understand. Very prudent. Very careful. There was never a risk taken, not once, and I understand now that the prudence was hers and it was absolute.

And it was intense. More intense than Corsica, in a way, because there was less of it. A long afternoon once or twice a year, in her house, with the door locked and the curtains drawn, and she would do that thing with her mouth -- the worship, the long careful attention -- and then let me have her, and afterwards she'd be brisk and practical and put the kettle on.

I could feel them coming. That's the odd thing about that period -- I'd know a week out, sometimes two, that an afternoon was going to happen, and I'd stop. Everything. No touching, no relief, nothing, for days at a time

XXV

The hotels were the good ones.

Not good hotels. The opposite -- the anonymous ones. A chain place out past the ring road, the kind with a car park and a lift and a corridor the colour of weak tea, where nobody looks at anybody and the receptionist is watching a screen. She'd drive herself and park at the far end, and come up the stairs rather than the lift, and there'd be a knock on a door that could have belonged to anyone.

She'd come in and stand just inside the door a moment with her handbag still over her arm, and she never once said anything romantic. She'd say something like the traffic was terrible, and put her bag down, and then look at me.

And then three hours.

That's the thing I want to get right, because it's the thing I've never managed to explain to anyone. Not the sex -- the duration. In Corsica it had been frantic, all of it, because we'd been climbing towards it for several days and there was a flood behind the barrier. This was the opposite. This was slow. This was a woman who had a whole afternoon in a room nobody knew she was in, and intended to use all of it.

She'd take her clothes off and get on the bed and lie there, and I'd get on top of her and go into her, and then I'd stop.

Not stop. Rock. That's the word. Gentle rocking, slow and steady, so slow it was almost nothing, my whole length inside her and my hips barely moving, sometimes in small circles, no strokes at all. Just the weight of me pressing and shifting and the two of us breathing. And she'd put her arms around my neck and her face against my ear and we'd stay like that for -- I don't know. Half an hour. Longer.

And she'd come. Not once. She'd come and go and come and go, and I'd feel it each time: the tightening, deep and rhythmic, gripping me all the way along, and then the release, and her breath going out of her in a long shudder against my neck, and then a minute or two of nothing and then it would start climbing again. She'd say things in French, very quietly. And her nails would move on my back. And the rocking would go on.

I was so hard. That's the thing about it -- I'd be so hard it ached, hard in a way that has nothing to do with wanting to finish, and the ache was the point. She'd get in and out of orgasms against a cock that wasn't going anywhere, and I'd hold myself there and feel her do it, and the whole thing went on for an hour or more before I ever moved properly.

Then eventually I'd move properly. And she'd be so wet by then, so full of it, that the sound changed entirely, and she'd get loud -- properly loud, in a hotel room with the television on for cover, saying it the way she said it in the pool house. Oui. Oui. Oui. And I'd give her everything I had, all of it, everything I'd saved, and it was a lot. It was always a lot. She'd said it in Corsica and she said it every time after: she'd never known a man produce so much.

And then the second time. And the third.

Three hours. She'd get up at the end and shower and dress and put her hair back and be entirely composed, and I'd lie there in a ruined bed and watch her, and she'd look at herself in the mirror and say something about the traffic again on the way home.

XXVII

There was one of those afternoons, in the fourth or fifth year of it, when she was on top of me and it had been going on a very long time and I was so hard it had gone past hardness into something else, and she was grinding slowly with her hands flat on my chest, and I watched her face.

That worried look. And then it went away.

She came down onto my chest afterwards, breathing hard, and put her mouth against my ear, and said -- not in French this time, in her ordinary voice, the one she used to ask whether I'd eaten:

I don't know what I'll do when I'm too old for this.

And then she laughed, once, into my shoulder, and I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing, and put my hand on the back of her head.