Waiting for Anthony

By Kristina Wright

Anthony’s wife worships at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, two blocks from my condo in the city. They drive in from the suburbs because Sacred Heart is the only Catholic church in the area that still observes Latin mass. Anthony’s wife prefers the old-fashioned church services of her childhood to the contemporary version offered in the bland suburban church near their stylish five bedroom, three bathroom home. Each Sunday, Anthony dutifully drives his wife and their two little girls to church and drops them off at the curb in front of that imposing stone building. Then he drives a block to the coffee shop where he will get the Sunday Times and an extra hot double latte, killing time while his family attends services (and prays for his soul, presumably).

Or, he used to. That was before me.

We met at the Colley Café one particularly chilly autumn Sunday morning. I was nursing a nasty tequila hangover and sipping a heaven-sent chai latte when he strolled in, wearing grey chinos and a black sweater, looking like the suburban dad he is. I didn’t take much notice of him as he purchased his newspaper and latte and settled into the red overstuffed chair caddy corner to mine. He was a hairy Italian guy with a well-fed belly and an expensive gold watch on his wrist to match the gold band on his ring finger. Most definitely not my type.

Our eyes met over the top of his paper and he arched one thick, dark eyebrow at me as if I had said something of which he disapproved. He stared a fraction of an instant too long to be polite. My pick-up radar went off as I recognized the glimmer of interest in those dark, unreadable eyes. Even though I looked like Technicolor death in my pink and red flannel pajama pants and purple Stockley Gardens Art Festival sweatshirt, my dirty blond hair twisted in a knot on top of my head, the Italian guy thought I was hot. That spark of desire in his eyes felt like a physical touch and left me with a surprising ache between my thighs.

We started talking and discovered we had absolutely nothing in common. He is a financial advisor with a wife and two kids, a hefty mortgage and a time-share in Orlando. I’m a happily single artist who pays the bills waiting tables and teaching middle-aged women how to find their inner goddess through yoga and belly dancing. Anthony is only five years older than me, but he lives in a different world—a world of two-week vacations and minivans with screaming children and rigid rules of right and wrong. That first Sunday, Anthony told me he liked my laugh and my ladybug pajama pants. I liked his big, strong-looking hands and the way his dark eyes never wavered from mine when I told him I hadn’t had sex in nearly two months.

Three Sundays later we gave up on small talk and gave in to temptation. On the pretense that Anthony wanted to see some of my art, we walked the short distance from the coffee shop to my building. That familiar walk felt like the walk of shame before the deed is done. I was getting ready to take a married man to my bed and fuck him. I’m no angel—I’ve been with my share of guys who were supposedly already in a relationship, but though I had toyed with the committed and the affianced, Anthony was my first married hook-up. What surprised me was not the guilt, but the lack of it. I didn’t give it a thought. The only thing I could thing about was fucking him, feeling those big hands on my body and his cock—hopefully as big as his hands—moving inside me.

I was painfully aware of Anthony behind me, staring at my ass, as we climbed the stairs to the third floor of the brownstone where I lived. I kept waiting for him to touch me—wanting him to—but it never came. My hand trembled, jangling my keys loudly, as I let us into my condo and his deep laugh at my awkwardness eased my nerves. It felt as if we were moving in slow motion as we crossed the threshold and a tingle of restless anticipation danced along my rigid spine. Then he laid his big, warm hand across the back of my neck as the door closed behind us and my sigh was almost a moan.

I led him directly to the bedroom, feeling no need to play coy at this point. We both knew why we were here—and it wasn’t so Anthony could look at my watercolors and oils. Sunlight streamed through the drafty, hundred year old windows, illuminating the white sheets on my rumpled, unmade bed. For a fleeting moment, my thoughts went to his dutiful wife sitting in the church a few blocks away, sunlight streaming in through stained glass windows. The sun shone on both of us that day, the virtuous woman and the whore. My twinge of guilt fled before it could take hold when Anthony gently turned me toward him. His hands were warm and steady, soothing.

He cradled my face in those large hands and placed the sweetest, most chaste kiss on my lips as we stood beside my bed. I knew this was the point of no return. He was giving me the option to walk away. I could say no. I could be virtuous, too. Instead, I whimpered one word against his soft lips. “More.”

He gave it to me. He gave it all to me that first Sunday afternoon on my unmade bed. While his wife knelt in prayer two blocks away, he knelt between my thighs, thick and rigid, his cock all I had prayed for.

When he entered me that very first time, I cried out, over and over again, “Oh, God!”

For six months, with the exceptions of Christmas and Easter, when even bad Catholics make an appearance in church, Anthony has worshipped my body every Sunday as if it is the only cathedral he will ever need to enter. When I let myself think about it, which isn’t often, I feel the sharp edge of guilt knocking against the ache of desire. I push it aside because I want him so bad he makes me ache—and because being with him has opened up something inside me, unleashing a frenzy of creativity I’ve never experienced before.

I spend the nights between our meetings painting. I don’t go out with friends anymore, I don’t want to. I want to fuck Anthony—and if I can’t satisfy that desire, I want to be alone and paint. Canvases are lined against the walls and perched on window sills. The longer I am with him, the more… feral, for lack of a better word, my art has become. My art is darker, wilder, almost frightening. And in some of my work, I find myself painting Anthony. But not the Anthony I know, or at least not the suburban dad he appears to be. No, the creature in my paintings is the man who brings out this wildness in me in bed and in my art. The guilt of being with him never goes away completely, but it seems an small sacrifice for what Anthony gives me in return.

Anthony has no such guilt about being with me. I ask him, but the answer is always the same.

“She has her faith and I have mine,” he tells me, using his long fingers to part my plump labia. He opens me to his heavy-lidded gaze, hovering over me like a dark devil while his cock lies thick and hard against his thigh.

I moan, writhing in anticipation as I clutch the brass headboard. “What is your faith?”

“This,” he says, slowly pushing a thick finger inside of my wetness. “Desire is the closest we get to heaven in this life. Passion is sacred.”

I am intrigued even while I’m aroused. He slides a second finger in me and I nearly come off the bed. He knows how to touch me, this middle-aged, middle-class suburban husband and father. He knows what I need and he gives it to me like a gift.

“That sounds like sacrilege,” I gasp.

His laugh is fiendish as his fingers coax me into incoherence, gliding over the engorged bump of my G-spot like it was a worry stone. “I don’t believe anything is sacred,” he says. “But I believe in fucking you.”

I don’t know what I believe in, but at that moment it doesn’t seem to matter. All I know is his fingers are moving inside of me, stroking me in a way I’ve never experienced. An image of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam flits through my fevered brain—God reaching down to touch Adam, their fingers not quite touching. Anthony’s fingers inside of me are like the fingers of God, creating me from the inside out. Conjuring my soul into existence from the sheer will of his dark desire, making me in his image. And then making me come.

Excerpt from "In the Dark Woods" (Fairy Tale Lust: Erotic Fantasies for Women, Cleis Press 2010)