Free The Sensual Mirror by Marco Vassi

adolescent,” she said after a while, “but I need time to think about it.” She watched his face map out his feelings, going from expectancy to disappointment, and she relented at once.
    “Oh, that’s not true. It’s just that I want to savor it, to sip at it for a few days. And besides, if I say yes too quickly, you’ll think I’m easy.”
    Eliot leaned back against the couch. The cat curled up in his lap. It can’t be bad, he thought. I don’t really lose anything, and I gain an awful lot.
    But his self-congratulations were interrupted by Gail’s exclaiming, “Oh, won’t Julia be surprised!”
    That called Eliot back to the trigger which had detonated this entire train of events, the fact that just a few hours earlier Julia had whipped her panties off and thrown herself face down on her bed and rasped, “Come on, you prick, give it to me. Give it to me dirty, the way only you know how.”
    At the memory, his cock stirred. The cat became uncomfortable with the development and moved away to the other side of the couch. Eliot looked at Gail. She was a very attractive woman. And under that robe she was naked. And now he had not only her pussy, but her womb itself.
    He stood up.
    “How about another drink?” he asked.
    She glanced shyly at him. She knew exactly what he had in mind. Or so she thought. And so he thought. But it didn’t matter whether they did or not. Not that night. For passion was ascendant, and for them passion ruled.
    They burned the sheets until dawn, slept three hours, and then went off to their work, he to the office, she to the school. She called Julia and told her what had happened. “Let’s get together tonight,” she had gushed.
    Julia hesitated before she agreed. Gail was perplexed. They made a date for seven o’clock to talk about their lives.
    Robert and Martin ate at The Peacock, an Italianate Italian restaurant that featured home-cooked soup, pre-Raphaelite paintings, and a steady supply of Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Mozart and Mendelssohn. It was a perfect afternoon restaurant for bookish cruising, the women generally self-contained and remote. A perceptive man, however, that is to say, a man on the qui vive, might notice that as the mousy librarian type in the corner hung over her coffee cup and peered into her Proust, her chest might heave with a most unladylike sigh, or her nostrils widen with a tremor of quaveringly suppressed passion. Further inspection might reveal trim ankles, delicate fingers, and, when she noticed him perusing her and looked up to cross glances, four hundred pages of brown eyes complete with an index.
    But in the evenings it was taken over by couples. Single couples, couples of couples, tablesful of couples. Martin had gone there with Julia at least a dozen times and felt that mixture of resentment and reassurance that comes when we see ourselves so blatantly reflected in the social mirror. Each couple was precisely the same, down to the detail of viewing themselves as unique. Martin remembered one dinner hour spent gestalting each woman in the room and reminding himself that only the most outlandish quirks of fate resulted in his being with the woman he was with, that his feelings of love, desire, and even friendship were innate and might be attached to any object. Once that object had been chosen, however, there was a tendency to turn it into a fetish, to make it a prized possession, a there-is-no-one-in-the-world-quite-like-you bit of sentimentality. And yet, when he did not look back at Julia, he realized that he did love her, cherish her, and not any of the others, thet they all existed in alternate or parallel universes. The sensation of being sealed off in a plastic bubble with Julia, forever cut off from the rest of the world, overwhelmed him with such a rush of claustrophobia that he had to go to the men’s room and run cold water on his wrists.
    Now he sat with Robert, at the table right next to the one at which he had been with Julia.
    In a