A Beautiful Woman

Earlier that month I had seen my own face for the very first time: softer than it once was, subtly painted and accentuated, draped with long wavy tresses cascading alongside and beyond my jawline... I didn't know I could be lovely but it turns out I was. It was a new experience to compliment myself during a gaze in the mirror. But now I had a face, my real face.

As I gazed affectionately down at and along my legs, sitting and sprawling as I was in a broad window sill lit by cloudy-day sunlight, I saw the contours of my calf muscles, my inner thighs, my arches, my toes. I developed in my mind a new sensual narrative about the shape of me. Taking care not to shame myself or any other body type, I still revelled in this new feeling of exuberant self-acceptance: in my emerging awakened psyche, I wasn't lumpy, I was curvy. The thin and unfathomably soft fabric hugging my legs showed off every angle, every nook and cranny, vanishing any fuzziness, and making every curve loud with an unignorable purple.

Scientists describe that magenta doesn't exist; it's a mixing of two opposites on the colour spectrum between blue and red, and equidistant between them is right where green should be, and so it should be green, except for how human brains process it. The brain constructs a colour that can't be real, a point both red and blue at the same time, all in very human defiance of the neutrality of green. Magenta is fake, but because we are human this impossible but wonderful colour exists. Because of what we perceive and identify in ourselves we make it real. I fell even more in love with purple in that moment when I first fell in love with my own body.

My first foray into a bona fide "blouse" was white with fuchsia accents in swirls of colour and musical notes dancing about five swirling lines, with a dippity but high collar and a waist that was higher in the front and the back. It was just loose enough to flutter about as I moved, though it was snug in some bashful places too.

In this stage of my journey I was beginning to re-examine my childhood love of capes as a longing for cascading fabrics (or possibly for extremely long hair), though I also loved the idea of snug shapeliness. Should I wrap something around me double-breasted to suggestively bisect my chest, or drape something even softer downwards along my body, in billowy curtains of colour and light?

Feminine energy was waxing within me. Stereotypical though the expression of gender I was sliding into may be, I was absolutely beaming with cat-like energy, suggestively grinning, curling my legs effortlessly around each other and then under my bum (like a French braid of hair then further curled into a knot). Everything around me was feeding this feeling: even the bergamot smell of my abandoned tea fed my archetype of cozy bookwormy romantic. My men's socks, with an argyle pattern of forest green and royal blue, were pulled taught over and up my leggings, turned into something cute and sensual in spite of their boring men's-business-casual theme. I was apparently the very kind of girl I had crushes on.

I reminded myself that there was far more to this than sexuality, but I also reminded myself that I was allowed to pursue this however I needed, and this is how it was manifesting right now. I again repositioned my cute legs, experimentally, until I was slightly crouched back in the window sill, one leg closest to the window arched up at the knee, one curled beneath the other and slithering playfully out the other end.

I was so lost in thought, so carefully examining the shape of one of the closer clouds beneath the omnipresent cumulus blanket of grey above the city, that the gentle grace of four curled fingers along my left inner thigh surprised and electrified me. An unfamiliar indulgent swoon came from my own lips as I reacted to the touch, and to the next (the balls of the four fingers grazed again along the thigh, towards the centre, so gently). When my eyes opened, I looked in the broad direction of where the fingers' owner must be, standing beside the window sill.

Despite the brilliant grey-white after-image of the window ruining my eye-view, I still just barely saw my wife's face, her eyes shining at me, her mouth serious but affectionate. She watched me indulge in the moment of pleasure, and then watched her own hand choose its next spot along my purple leg. The feminine shape of me rapidly became accented with a solid emerging cylinder between my expressive legs, and Jill briefly showed her love for me there as well, cupping the testicles softly with her fingers in that gentle way that always made me feel completely safe, held, and accepted. Only she was romantic enough to make such a sexual touch a sentimental thing... I could blissfully enter deep sleep being held by her like that, or race to orgasm. Staring into me, she softly bit her lower lip, that adorable bunny expression that made me giggle unless I stopped myself, and I always stopped myself from giggling, because she was deathly serious about our love life when she nibbled her lip in my direction.

In this moment, with this touch, through this gaze, my life partner was at last, despite so much fear and embarrassment, showing me complete acceptance for who I am. Every hurtful giggle she had uttered in those tiny moments over the years when I came out of my shell and flourished across a room or danced-closed a fridge or tried to wear something beautiful... it all healed as she saw me arch my foot in epicene feline display, and arch my neck in overwhelmed pleasure.

"I see you." She hadn't said that for years, and she whispered it to me now. It was something she sometimes said, when she noticed I was tucking away an inconvenient feeling. She would say it early in our life together, every now and then when I sat stealthily in belligerent company, trying not to be seen by those around me, or sometimes while straddling me, holding my penis firmly and deeply within her as her eyes fell into mine and my callous persona dissolved into vulnerable adoration or doubt... My love sees me.

In recent years, sex had become something that I did to her, while she lay back and enjoyed it, smiling but absent, and the energy felt uncomfortably masculine, toxic and lonely. I checked each time, she wasn't checking out because she didn't want to be there, but because she wanted to enjoy the moment further. This is what so many mediocre men wanted, sex as something men did to passive women, and while she showed enjoyment I was alone. Here, however, was my wife right before me, seeing me and loving what she saw, and staying present. I was beginning to believe that my great secret was going to be neither the figment of imagination I once suspected nor the deal-breaker I had once feared, but a catalyst for a chemical reaction between myself and my Last Love. We were us again because I was me.

I came back to my senses, wanting to return the touch, the affection, though she and I both seemed to enjoy that I had gotten lost in my own body, and that, this time, the sensation wasn't something subtle but conspicuous. Unleashed, my body naturally performed what it felt, arching in display of my neck and chest and sighing vulnerably in intemperate request.

My nearest hand (which I had gradually painstakingly softened and cleansed of the last ten years of roughening and made into something soft again) found the wonderfully silky skin between her ear and cheek, and similarly grazed it with gentle love. I grazed along her neck and into her hair. Her smile showed she enjoyed it, but she patiently watched my body for each subsequent display of emotion as she inched closer to my best-known erogenous nexus, in no hurry to get there, just as a promise.

Jill breathed the word "beautiful" into my mouth as she began a full and luxurious kiss, lips untaught, mouth wide, only softly barely pushing into my face. Our lips butterfly-kissed each other, and she was apparently now as overwhelmed as I with sensation, as our tiny sighs from deep within vibrated our lips against each other. Deeply inhaling through our respective nostrils, we indulged in the familiar scents of each other's arousal, delighted in the open secret of how wet we had already made each other. For a long moment, we explored with our hands each other's dampened leggings, corroborating and enjoying what we detected from each other. I secretly promised myself I would thoroughly envelop my face in my wife's vulva before I became exhausted with orgasm.

As so often happened, she ran out of patience, suddenly replacing her slower touches with something more adamant, now tugging me a little to encourage me down off of my perch. I obliged her, gracefully cat-landing.

Once eye to eye, we tenderly began my favourite, sexiest way to kiss, standing and gently fondling each other. When lying down at least one hand is busy, and intentions looked to the immediate future, but here we could touch each other and stay in foreplay long enough to become desperate for more. I explored her large soft tummy and her increasingly sensitive breasts, remembering eventually she had grown to like a firmer grasp around them; and then we switched our arms around, mine around her neck and hers fondling the hypersensitive space on either side of my waist. I fell into a sort of trance as she begun to venture along my chest, circumnavigating the spaces beyond my areola. They too were changing how they liked to be touched, signalling often for direct attention and worshipping a feathery touch.

I opened my eyes and stared stunned at my wife.

She nibbled her lower lip again as she curled ten fingertips into my leggings at the bum, eased them lower, slid the fingers to the front, arched the fabric far forward to reach past my beyond-erect penis, and released them to fall. My part in the procedure was an opportunity for more sensual expression, and, smiling sheepishly, I brought one leg straight up and high until I had released my foot from the fabric, and Jill stole a touch as it came down, right where my thigh meets my bum.

Jill and I had seen everything about each other, every nook and cranny, every secret, every unsexy act, had tried innumerable kinds of sex, and yet still after all this familiarity, as I flicked the snug purple fabric dangling on my toes completely off my other leg and glanced up, exposed from the waist down, I gazed bashfully at this huge-eyed woman. I sheepishly, beseechingly gave her a tiny look of shyness, hope, vulnerability, though all of it bursting with happiness. Jill elevator-eyed me, hungrily watching my swivelling shoulders, my bouncing erection, my never-still feet, my all-but-invisible left eye hidden behind soft tufts of hair.

I brought my hands to Jill's blouse to release some of her clothing, but I was too late, as she had moved on to her next touch, sliding her hands along my satiny blouse and moving her large lips around my cheek and neck. She had overwhelmed me with sensation again. I felt her body slowly walking to my left as her fingers searched for her favourite places. Then, from somewhere behind me, her right hand found my left cheek and she turned my face into an impatient kiss that belied her slow exploration. The other, unaccounted for hand had soon found my bum, sliding down one ass cheek and then up my crack with gentle fingertips. As I lost myself in the feathery touch on my ass she effortlessly lifted and discarded my blouse.

I lost my centre of gravity but she caught me, holding me up with her shoulder and then counterbalancing me with a sudden grip on the shaft of my penis. She had me.

As the love of my life tickled the raw opening to my ass and held my penis firm and steady, I desperately and joyously whimpered into her mouth. When that kiss finally stopped, one fingertip found the tip of my penis, gathered up all its first emergence of precum, and, keeping eye contact, tasted her finger. And returned. And gathered. And tasted. Staring at me as she harvested and slowly drank my own arousal.

"What do you want", she whispered.

"I need to taste you..." I groaned, in a feminine little lilt.

"Yes" she whispered. I found her hips and I released the fabric off of them. She slowly stepped out of them. Watching me. I gathered up the blouse and raised it gently over her raised arms. She was braless and she kept her arms up for a moment as I softly fondled her wonderful breasts, one of them just a little bigger than I could engulf in one palm, each of them enjoying a different kind of touch. As Jill's calves nudged the edge of our bed and leaned on it for some semblance of balance, I slid my palm against her right breast and slowly kneaded into her left breast. The complicated feeling of two approaches to pleasure made her shudder and moan. Jill's bum slowly bumped the air and I wished I was deep in her to feel the dance her pleasure made her dance, but I just had so much to do first.

I had a very specific craving to lift her legs and taste her vulva.

I would have loved to kneel beneath her, but she relaxes enough to cum when her legs aren't engaged. With my hands behind her neck and back, I nudged and eased her into a decline on our marriage bed, her bum hanging just a tiny bit off. And leaning into a kiss, my downy hair began falling into her face, and we both tossed our hair lackadaisically out of our way. We tasted each other's mouths one more time as my hands, circling around her broad thighs, grazed their undersides. As she sighed into my mouth and shuddered her pelvis, our privates actually found each other for a brief grazing touch. She had taken my precum but her slick labia grazing along the length of me was like a patient mouth kissing me.

I indulged myself in the moment, slowly slipping my penis along her inner labia, applying weight only for the instants my tip slipped along her clitoral hood, just enough to accelerate her breath.

Soon, I was exploring the curve of her smaller more sensitive breast, gingerly feathering my lips around its perimeter, spiralling slowly inward to circle her areola, loving her tiny sounds, and finally feeling her solid nipple in my mouth. Jill had her arms far above her head, opening her body to me as she grasped our long-suffering headboard, and her scent invigorated me. As I moved onto her larger breast, I began the harder touches she usually craved there, and her gasp and sigh was her Yes.

Lovemaking is really all about smell, it's the only time humans' other senses are trusted more than sight. I had come to love the scent Jill emitted from under her arms, probably since I breathed it most closely when tasting her breasts. As I approached upward again with kisses along her lower and then upper tummy, my fingers preceded me with soft little grazes. Jill loved the feather touches against her breasts, but I remembered what she had told me, in our earliest sexual check-ins: every part of her body she feels most vulnerable about wants the most and the gentlest touch. I lavished the perspiring folds of skin and tasted the unique taste of her body.

While I respectfully disagreed with many opinions regarding her gorgeous body, if I could heal anything within her with my touch, I'd touch her all day. It worked for my body too. No one else in the world had so convinced me I had a sexy body. Cute face, yes, nice penis, sure.... But I owed every happiness to the woman who taught me my ass, hips, and nipples were lovely.

I kept this up as my mouth moved to her neck, her collar, her tummy, until my (superbly flexible) body had reached its limit.

I began to kneel as my explorations reached beyond her lower tummy, pausing at each fold of her as some of her favourite places to be kissed, and, now raising her ankles with my hands, smooched in various borderline places, not quite leg and not quite ass, not quite thigh and not quite vulva, and, causing a violent moan from on the bed, not quite vulva and not quite ass. There I lingered longer, and lollipop-licked for a moment, before circumnavigating her vulva by way of her thighs, kissing all the way.

Wow, I thought, we really had it in for each other. Three minutes ago I was posing on a windowsill alone.

I had it all planned, that I would angel-kiss Jill's thighs, roaming my teases in circles around her vulva, eventually kiss along each outer labia, softly open her up with gentle fingers, and then feather-lick her clitoris with the softest possible application of my tongue, slowly and slightly, constantly inching her to ecstatic eruption. The first time I had gone down on her in just that way, in our old apartment and still in our early 20s, what came of it was one of my favourite of her orgasms in all our history. The kind that ends with questions about what just happened in her body and what I was even doing down there. I love those moments, vulnerable self-discovery and impish joviality.

Jill clumsily found a pillow and threw it under her head, folded, so she could watch from over her tummy at the woman with the Cheshire Cat smile torturing and worshipping the entire area between her legs. Grinning broadly was making it difficult to kiss her, so I centred myself with a very serious stare at my wife, before leaning my face forward into my first deep dive into her vagina. Right before contact I heard whimpers of anticipation and guttural sounds of gratification as my mouth nuzzled deep onto her lower vulva, my tongue curving up and in.

The sharp taste of my wife's arousal came all at once, as I had only teased until then; she smelled of pomegranate and tasted like lavender and liquid smoke, and my nose filled with the sense as it nudged her clitoris with every nuzzle deeper in. Jill released a baritone groan, the sound eager but unhurried. She apparently had nothing to rush toward, obviously not focused on some future result but on this specific moment of contentment

I knew my wife's vagina so well, as well as she knew my penis. It was uniquely spacious inside, and she sometimes enjoyed exploring the limits of how much of my hand could fill her. I had memorized the length of the first inches before Jill's vagina curved, and around a curve of flesh was hidden the smooth wall that sometimes brought her to exhausted pleasure with my come-here hooked fingers. So much of our story was in there, like the starkly changed shape of her vagina and preferred touch after our baby had come. That year -- okay, the year after, when we weren't so tired -- we rediscovered her orgasm and its precursor touches together.

There was always more to learn about my last lover, my partner, and I watched her for signals, to learn and to enjoy.

With that irresistible first moment satiated, I slowed and settled into my usual favourite touch, a tiny circling of my tonguetip around her exposed clitoris, only accidentally touching it during hasty curves in my circular movements. Jill whispered soft Uh sounds, and as I kept this up without a hint of acceleration or pause the whispers developed into her quietest singing voice, still with absentminded little utterances of Uh and Nnn.

Her slow crescendo reminded me of something. She had warned me not too long ago that while she loves these kinds of orgasms they usually make her too sensitive to continue and she often prefers for that not to happen, and rethinking it I left her clitoris and gave her labia lips another full and impassioned kiss, exploring inside with my tongue and often repositioning my face just as one does with a kiss.

I moved lower down to the opening of Jill's vagina, and my wife gave encouragement with distant Yeses in a far away voice. Her hand grasping the headboard tightened and pulled, and as I travelled around the inner labia and even her own perenium, I heard the familiar crackling of wood.... One happy day we were going to destroy another headboard, and I silently hoped it was from a gentle touch rather than an athletic pounding. I loved both but gently awakened pleasure was a lot more like romance to me.