Enter Ben
I fell in love with the Refurbishment Man. He supervised a costly refurbishment of my house (a listed monument) that I had contracted out to the building company he works for, or owns, whatever. He has a classic movie star’s face. He is married. He has children. But we fell in love, regardless. His holding me, his wiping away my tears when I collapsed in his arms, his kissing me, his pressing me against him, crushing my bones, his wonderful voice speaking, then whispering to me – if it had been all, it would have been enough.
Let’s call him Ben.
Ben and Olga
He was so charming and handsome. The refurbishment works had been dragging on for over a year; a year, that is, from the moment they should have been completed in the first place. Never mind; I could call him anytime when something was the matter. He would come and sort it out.
I had an issue with one of the electronic devices – for reasons unknown to me going by the name of Olga – which they had installed to have the temperatures in the house respond more accurately and swiftly to the temperature outside. Olga was to be supplemented in due time with another device, called Marvin. Marvin would improve Olga’s performance. But for the time being, I was stuck with just Olga. And it looked as if Olga could not quite handle things all by herself.
I called Ben. It was past 8 in the evening. Having had Ben around many times for a variety of problems which I did not care to apply myself to or consider how to deal with, I had gotten used to sounding helpless, dependent, petite, whenever I spoke to him over the phone.
“Ben, I hate to disturb you like this, God, forgive me, Ben, but there’s just this thing with Olga … It’s like it has lost its mind or something; can a machine lose its mind? The dining room is so cold, I had a mind to put on my coat when sitting down to eat; but the kitchen’s floor heating … Ben … I had to put on shoes to keep my feet from burning! The kitchen is like one huge oven! I just thought I should tell you this, Ben. Nothing that cannot be handled some other time of course; it’s just that I thought I should let you know, so that … eh, well, you know …. so that you know.” I felt this was sufficiently incoherent.
“I am going to be right with you.” I heard his little girl say something to him, in her little girl’s voice. I cringed, my senses woken up to the girl’s love of her father.
“Ben, please don’t, it’s nothing that cannot be fixed during working hours. Call me tomorrow, if you will. We can make an appointment.”
“There’s a couple of things I have to explain to you about Olga. I have to do it now. I have to come down to your place to show you what is happening. If I don’t do it now, the situation will have changed again and I cannot show you what you have to know about Olga when a thing like this happens.” That, too, sounded pretty incoherent to me. But he did not wait for me to discuss this any further; he disconnected. Women do that when they lose an argument. Men do it because they have made a decision, hardly aware there was an argument in the first place.
Twenty minutes later, Ben showed up at my front door, his handsome face standing out like the moon under the porch light. I let him in. He was wearing a camouflage green coat, lined with lamb’s wool that showed on the outside at the collar and the cuffs, mid-thigh length, comfortable, heavy, a man’s coat. He unbuttoned then unzipped it. He let it slide down his back and arms. I intervened and took it from him. I invited him to make himself comfortable in the dining room, where I use to sit down with guests on any informal occasion. He knew the way.
I brought the coat up to my face. I sniffed it, like a dog. Instinct took over. I took the coat in my left hand. I lifted my skirt, slit my right hand down my pantyhose, down my panties. I rubbed my vagina, entered it with my index and middle finger. I withdrew my hand, skirt falling back in place. I slowly stroked the lamb’s wool lining of the collar the coat with my right hand, maintaining pressure while stroking. I snuffed up the vague smell that is my vagina’s – a bitch in heat. I hung the coat on a hanger, zipped it up. I pulled the zipper all the way up the collar.
That was the night when we got down to sex for the first time; great sex; heavy sex; no probing of limits; much like, when you’re starving and the plate is finally put in front of you, you cannot eat slowly because you crave for the relief of every next spoonful of the food.
The refurbishment works went on and on. And on… If there was to be an end to it, it was nowhere in sight.
Ben’s post-op attitude
Ben was huge, I mean in a certain area, under certain circumstances. When Ben entered me I hurt. Traumatic birth-giving had occasioned vaginal scarring. I decided to undergo surgery to loosen up the entrance. It’s a not a big deal, a z-plasty graft. Any gynecologist can perform it. Mine said he could do it. It’s an outpatient procedure, local anesthetics. To have this performed on me to be better accessible to Ben had a certain erotic appeal. But once on the operating table, legs up in the stirrups, I was just scared. If I hadn’t been with Ben, I would not have had it done. The surgery went well.
Abstention to allow the operating wounds to heal ought not to be going to be an issue, given that the occasions at which Ben and I had sex where infrequent anyway due to Ben’s family situation. But Ben considered backdoor access was still in play. Fortunately, he took my word for it that that kind of sex would not be tremendously beneficial to a quick recovery either. It is surprising to what extent the female genital area remains a mystery to men considering the amount of porn they consume and their preoccupation with sex in general.
My mouth was the only orifice I had on offer for Ben. It made me swallow a few times. But that was all.
A Ben fantasy
It was early in the afternoon. I was in my bed, trying to steal a little nap, having slept just four hours last night. I started to masturbate. I focused on sex in a general way. It didn’t work. I focused on Ben and the way he likes to have sex with me. Then I imagined Ben and Joshua – it doesn’t matter who Joshua is, believe me – having arranged a prize fight in my bedroom. I was on the bed, face down, not allowed to look, mere stake.
My fantasy had Ben win – he’s the handsomer of the two (which is just one reason why Joshua is immaterial to this recount). The men had agreed that the one losing the fight would have to stay in the room, at a distance from the bed, and suffer watching the winner having his way with me. Ben climbed onto the bed behind me. Motionless, face down, Ben’s knees spread wide on either side of my legs, I felt his penis (not a shred of a doubt it was his!), fully erect, heavy and rock hard, brush the back of my thighs. My vagina felt like it ballooned. That was the easier part of having to fantasize all this occurring. Ben placed his hands under my pelvis, yanked me up on my knees and, my buttocks made begging for it, spanked me hard. Spreading my legs Ben repositioned himself between them. He took his penis in his left hand and guided it into me, his right hand and, once he was in me, both hands, pressing hard between my shoulder blades to keep the upper half of my body down. He cupped my shoulders and started to fuck me, three or four times with precision, care, slowly, then at full force but in a steady rhythm, precise, measured. My face was turned towards Joshua. Even in my fantasy I couldn’t have him look half-interested. He faded from the scene. I imagined Ben coming hard. I came; I wasn’t imagining that.
I slept little under an hour.
Body-balance with Ben
I had a new job, a high-paid job. “I’m keeping the house”, I said to Ben.
“What do you mean?” Ben asked.
“I mean, I’m not going to sell. I will be able to pay the mortgage. And I will get a new car. I can spend up to sixty grand on a car. I’m going to buy a convertible, it’s sexy; I think I´ll buy the Peugeot 308 convertible. Someone mentioned it to me. I looked it up on the internet. It’s cute and comfortable, and fast. I think I’ll have it in pearl white, all leather upholstery and dashboard, antique brown. I did the configurator. I ticked all the option boxes; it’s still nowhere near sixty. I just couldn’t configure one in excess of fifty.”
“Well”, Ben said, that sounds all fantastic. What about me?”
“What do you mean, what about me”?
“How do I fit in?”
“Oh, it’s big enough for the two of us. I could even take my dog in the back, if the ride’s not too long.”
“You know what I mean.”
“If I would approve of your motives for asking, yes. But I don’t.”
“What are my motives?”
“What would you say they are? Here’s what I think. I think that, now that I’m financially secure, you are afraid that you’ll lose me, that I will no longer need you, that you no longer fit my size. That is horrible if you realize what it says about what you were thinking when you first decided you wanted a relationship with me.”
“I want to fuck you”, Ben said.
“I think I need a good spanking first”, I answered, in tacit agreement that pulling another script from the drawer would spare us the discomfort of digging deeper than where our relationship rooted in the first place, which was in the flesh.
“I wasn’t going to let you ask me for it. Now, go upstairs, down dog position.” Ben had been paying attention when I had told him about my body balance class.
Philosophizing with Ben
“I’m so happy I have a cunt”, I said to Ben.
“I’m glad you have one”, he answered. What made you say it?”
What indeed! Perhaps it wasn’t the smartest thing to bring up while we were going over the accounts of the refurbishment works.
“Well, you know, I mean it´s just that my mind sometimes seems to be eddying around my cunt as if it were the center of my being. I become so aware of it, so completely blissfully aware. It makes me say things like this, sometimes. It isn’t a sexual thing. It’s a mind thing, an awareness thing; it´s about mindfulness, I guess.”
I was fibbing. Mindfulness… It’s not even a thing for women. There’s so much going on in multiple parts of our brain at the same time – being mindful puts us at risk of instant collapse. But the exclamation with which I had started the hogwash a given, I had to make a few statements to divert from the perils of sex during accounting.
“I don´t have that with my dick”, Ben said. “They say men run after their dicks. If that’s true you would expect men to be mindful of their dicks. But I’m not. Sex is terrific, but I think I would consider my dick as no more than a necessary instrument to have when I’m at it.”
The nice thing about Ben is, you can philosophize with him about almost everything. He may suddenly fall out, tell me to undress and wait for him, or wordlessly force me on all fours or bend me over a table, pull down or lift whatever I’m wearing waist down and fuck me. But that doesn´t compromise his fundamental willingness to extemporize on even the most awkward of subjects. It just makes it more attractive.
“It’s different for women, for me. My cunt is something on the inside of me. In a way it is, of course, physically. But I feel it as something warm and intimate inside of me emotionally; something my being wants to snug around. I mean sometimes, when I´m mindful.”
“My dick’s a thing I require to get by”, Ben said, “like a leg, not central, but instrumental, an essential body part.”
This is when he fell out of his contemplative mood, or his willingness to share in mine. This is when the attractive sequel started.
Exit Ben
The refurbishment works drawing to a close (which came as a shock, almost, because I had gotten so used to them) so did my relationship with the Refurbishment Man. Not with a bang, not even a whisper. It ended because the work ended, and neither of us would have staked greater sustenance on it. You could say we had had a working relationship.
Life after Ben
“Reality isn’t anything”, I said. “It’s a reassuring thought. “It is a thought I can fall asleep upon in the direst of moments of insomnia during the night.”
“I don’t want you to go through this”, he said. ”You have me now. Pay attention.”
Me, that was Wenceslas, Wenzo I called him. Wenzo is a partner. He’s in his early fifties. He has a limp and he’s divorced. His limp, or rather the way he tries to dissimulate it, gives his pace a thoroughly sexy nonchalance. He has a rugged beauty. That is what I think. I don´t think many women share this view; about the ruggedness, yes, not the beauty. He would be a bit too rugged to most women’s taste. I had no idea what he would be like in bed. I didn’t think much of his stamina. It turned out I was right about that. But apart from that, he was fine; he was what I needed. He was peremptory in the lines he drew, the marks he set, the points he made. Being with Ben, I willed him to be stronger than me. But he never was, really. Not much of my will was involved in Wenzo’s taking the lead over me. In fact, not much of his own was involved either. Taking the lead was his habitus.
“What I mean is that reality is almost the exact opposite of what we mean when we refer to it. We refer to it as the more reliable and therefore superior of truths. Reality is invoked to end an argument. But at any next moment I could live through an unlimited amount of different realities. Reality is a very relative thing, Wenzo! Reality isn’t what we generally think it is. Reality’s nothing. That’s a comfort to me.”
We were in Aberdeen for business, except that now, in our hotel room, Wenzo wasn’t doing much of anything and I was giving him head. When he had come and I hadn’t, I added: “I was speaking of reality, not facts. Reality is each individual’s experiencing of facts.”
He didn’t respond. After a few more minutes of silence and total relaxation he said, eyes still closed: “I know. Now, wash up and get dressed; business is waiting to be done out there.”
I complied. I knew he knew – he wasn’t being merely conversational. Wenzo hardly ever was.
Closing accounts with Ben
Wenzo saw to it that Ben’s company paid me back all that it had fraudulently charged me, plus interest.
Hard Nosed Women 