Anna failed to recognise the number on the screen. At least it had not been ‘withheld’.
‘Hello?’ she answered cautiously, but in a friendly tone. It could so easily be a business call.
‘Anna?’ a male’s voice said brightly. There was the low rumble of traffic noise in the background.
‘Yes…who is it please?’
She heard a moment’s pause; the traffic noise all the louder. Maybe she was mistaken to hear a slow intake of breath.
‘It’s Tomas…Tomas Mayer,’ he was heard to say cautiously. ‘I’m sorry to shock you…by calling.’
Anna felt a tightening in her throat; a sudden light-headedness overcame her on hearing that it was him; she felt a rush of emotions that hearing his voice again aroused in her so quickly; the flood of memories of all that they had shared in an hour or so of lovemaking on the day that she had last seen him.
‘It was wonderful…it was madness,’ she soon told him.
‘And I couldn’t forget you…and all that we did…all that we shared.’
‘Did you try?’ she whispered.
Anna stood by the window looking over the garden; in the very place where she had stood and watched him leave her the last time.
‘Yes…I knew that I’d been selfish. But my feelings went deeper than that. I should have called you but I knew of your situation…then.’
‘And now?’ she prompted, but not in a harsher tone. ‘I never thought you were selfish, by the way. It was quite the opposite, in fact.’
She couldn’t help but remember all that they had done together and ; the physical and emotional tumult aroused in her by their tryst. She had known of emotional havoc and pleasure that he had brought to her and, then, the wrecking consequences of having her eyes opened to all that prevailed in her life with Dan. A decision had been reached, not long after, to end her marriage. She had confronted her fears of the future and the doubts that she might live that out alone, or until someone was met and with whom she could pick up the pieces. She wanted to move on and in time discover love again and to be loved. It would be a time that would be so very different from all that had prevailed before and that Tomas had shone a light upon.
He had even told her of what was there for others to see.
‘And now…’ he said on a sigh of acknowledgment, ‘and now I have reached the point of wanting to speak to you…to know how you are and to hear your voice again.’
She did not think of herself as a needy woman. She wanted certainty. Was that too much to expect after the tumult of her shattered marriage?
‘Where are you?’ she interrupted. ‘Can you talk in this way…now?’
‘I’ve left the office…to get a coffee and some breakfast. My days start so goddamn early…and always in a rush,’ he laughed in that captivating way that she remembered so well. The phone trembled in her hand as Anna listened to him; she carried such vivid images of the young man who now engaged her. She did so all over again. ‘I wanted to call you so long ago…should have done that so long ago.’
‘Don’t keep on apologising. I understood it all…then.’
‘And now, Anna; do you understand why I’m doing this now?’ Tomas asked so very directly.
‘No, not quite,’ she said trying to make it sound as if she was in control. ‘But I’m glad that you have. You changed me…what we had changed me. It was our secret. I kept it all hidden away, but…but I couldn’t help but remember.’
‘You…you’ve put my mind at rest, Anna…lovely Anna…the woman with her blonde flaxen hair…the beads at your throat…the softness of your skin.’
‘Don’t…please don’t, Tomas.’ His flattering words aroused every nerve; brought the memory of them being together back into vivid clarity.
‘I want to tell you this all over again. I want to see you. I hope that I may see you…somehow?’
Anna had heard the doubts in his voice; that he had spoken out of hope rather than in certainty of her reply.
‘Did it mean so much to you, then? We each lived for the moment…and…we gave everything to each other for that.’
Seeing him leave her that afternoon had made all that they shared so much harder to bear. She had even thought of it as being like, ‘ships that pass in the night’. She had soon swept all such thoughts away; she had clung ferociously to what she had known of him, a tender and gifted lover of her and the woman she was or felt herself to be.
‘And you don’t want me to spoil that…the memories you have by meeting me again?’ Tomas spoke slowly but in that direct way of his. The man, the young man was honest and she remembered him always being that way.
How could she be upset, or even angry, that his call should be answered and that they were now talking of something that had mean ta great deal to her at the time of it happening, they had each thought at the time.
‘I have something to tell you,’ she chose to say. ‘I’m alone now. The business and the house you stayed in have been sold. The place where…where we…’
‘Where we loved…’
‘Yes. Did it mean that to you…Tomas?’
‘I felt that the moment I drove away in that taxi to the station. You changed things in me too…crazy as it may sound. The young Tomas…meets and then loves a beautiful and passionate older woman. They’ll say they each came to it with what they think are open eyes…only what happened changes them. It…it was like that for me, Anna.’
She listened to him. Tomas was giving voice to what she had kept hidden so very deep. Irreconcilable differences with Dan; her sudden loss of commitment to him and their business, had taken its toll upon her; all of it brought into sharp relief as a consequence of meeting Tomas, being engaged by his ways and then for the time spent in his bed. His taking of her body had aroused more than a shattering fulfilment of her claims upon him. She had felt that she had been delivered from a life that no longer held any appeal; a life of drudgery, but one that had served her well, and Dan, in financial ways alone.
Her marriage had run out of road, or whatever cliché suited her circumstances.
‘I couldn’t call you, Tomas…’
‘It’s not done…’
‘I’m too conventional, you mean?’ she prompted, teasing him on a soft laugh. ‘I…I thought that you found me to be different and that the label didn’t quite apply to me…after all that we did?’
‘True,’ he said before pausing. ‘Meet me, Anna? Please meet me. I want that…want to see your face…to see your smile…and…I want to know of your touch and your kisses. You made me feel like that…and that there could be more. It sounds a little crazy, perhaps…no more than an infatuation…but these last few weeks have made me think and hope that it could be more. That we try for so much more between us.’
She didn’t take them to be the words of some feckless man who had taken a fancy to her and wanted to bed her again. She’d passed through that field of emotions the first time and had known it to be so very different. Now, his call confounded her once more. His words had the same effect upon her.
Anna moved to sit down in the window seat.
All that remained of her possessions were boxed up and on the floor around her. Things had moved with bewildering speed but the place would be left to its new owners. She was no longer a transitional manager of it for them.
One door, as another cliché would have it, was closing. Another, and with Tomas and his passionately attentive ways, had suddenly been opened to her.
‘Anna…Anna?’
‘Yes, Tomas…I’m here…I’m here for you.’ She wouldn’t put a timescale on it; nor would she dare to raise her expectations too far. She would step out onto a new road and one of restoration and discovery. It was a road, or path, that she had learnt of when she had lain naked in his arms and shared in the heat of their bodies and known that there would be no way back from it. ‘We…we weren’t ships that passed in the night, after all, Tomas.’
‘No, and I couldn’t think of it in that way either, crazy as it sounds now and after being with you for such a short time.’
Anna chose to tell him what she had truly thought then and again now.
‘It’s not crazy, Tomas. It’s wonderful. What we shared was wonderful…’
♥
She heard Tomas gasp in response to her slow, rhythmic clamping on his swollen length; as she continued to rise and fall on him as quickly as he sought it of her.
‘Tomas, you…you darling!’ she gasped, digging slender fingers into his shoulders and moving to kiss him; to have her breasts sway and tease the skin of his chest, beguiling him once more, and all the while moving to tamp and clamp on him in a rousing, wrenching, rhythm. ‘You…how you fill me, you darling!’
‘And you’ve become someone else.’ A sound between a laugh, a moan and a growl, escaped over Tomas’s lips.
Her claims upon him increased in their demanding intensity and tempo; her bed rocked and tapped the wall in time with the mesmerising rhythm that had been set.
‘You must have wanted this as much as I did.’
Before she could answer, he felt him tense before Tomas’s sinuous, questing, movements claimed her once more. Anna could only expel piercing yelps; wrenched on him in response as the reality of loving with Tomas became so much better than her wayward fantasies of doing so
‘Maybe…maybe I did.’
She moved to meet Tomas’s hands as they slid up her clammy body, over hips and her gently curved stomach, to cup her breasts; to squeeze on her nipples. The feel of his hands on her body was different and hungrier than those she had to endure with her husband. His loving ways inflamed her senses; drove her to move quickly against him; rocking her hips, forward and back, in smooth motions, starting slow, so slow, just getting accustomed to his slip and settlement, the plunging rhythm of his cock within her.
‘You…you wonderful woman!’ he gasped, before he brought his mouth to her breasts, wrapping lips around each nipple in turn.
She shuddered; felt deliriously wanton as she kept him in her. She pushed him back down on the bed and was lost; gazed up at the ceiling and feverishly pinched the skin of his chest; rose and fell harder and faster. She clenched on him with muscles unaccustomed to such a fevered rut, her body holding him fast each time Tomas plumbed her.
‘Tomas…Tomas! I can’t stop this!’ Her quickening clamps upon him were matched by gasping kisses as he too reached fulfilment. ‘Share…we share!’
His hands pinched her breasts as if he would tear them from her body. She screamed out in her pleasure and pain as they shared in the chase of their rapture until it consumed their minds and bodies; the frenzied rock and tamp of her body on him too much to withstand.
‘Anna! Anna! Should I….?’
‘Yes…yes…yes, all of it…in me!’ Anna cried out, her voice hoarse and raw. ‘Hold on for as long as you can, my darling!’
All of that was now dispensed with as she claimed him for herself; would not think that these ways of it between them would ever be ended; her head was thrown back as bliss rushed through her body in drugging waves. Tomas claimed her so very deep; his hands on her waist tightening so that she could no longer control all that would follow. He set the pace of their rut that now defied all reason; how she had been stretched and then found until she shivered and felt Tomas shudder before she was flooded in searing, spurting rushes of his release.
‘Anna…you wonder!’ he called out; the ferocious pinch of his fingers to her thighs and hips, if she had not stilled them, so easily bruising her.
‘Only with you, like this…only you with you,’ she groaned in her ebbing pleasure; the act prolonged for as long as they could each bear it.
She knew that it should not happen again between them. She was certain that it would; all that she had shared and bestowed, or received, feeling incredible; any intruding sense of worry or restraint soon dispelled.
She ached from pleasure and pain.
♥
Anna roused herself from a moment’s daydream on hearing his soft and engaging laugh. She knew that she would have to see him again to believe in all that was now happening to her…to both of them.
‘So, you don’t mind me calling you?’
‘I’ll show you just how much I mind when I see you, Tomas. You’ll have my answer then in the only true way that I know.’
She had been touched like never before.
♥