How wonderful it was – wonderful and surprising – to be attracted to a guy, to want sex. Diane found, once she was naked with him, that there were things she really liked in his performance, including, foremost, that he was relentlessly, acutely, even obsessively servile. It was fine with Ed to spend a half-hour massaging her feet and squeezing her ankles, followed by nearly equal devoted caressing of her shins and calves; next, moving up, he gave substantial attention to her knees and thighs, and when, in her massage trance, she hoped and believed that his hands would surely go where they would do the most good, Ed didn't go there, he flipped her over instead and massaged, kneaded, stretched, rubbed, pinched, flicked, feathered, licked, kissed, and gently bit her shoulders, neck, back, and butt. Again she believed that he was on the verge of getting a hand between her legs, especially when, while massaging the small of her back, he found the tip of her tailbone. How long was he going to go on with the erotic massage and general body worship without getting to her quim? Would he please just go ahead and do something not frustrating? But she knew, before long, what he had to be waiting for. He was waiting for a display of need. So she took him by the wrist and moved the base of his hand into her pubic hair until his middle fingertip settled on the no-man's-land between her 'front parlor' and 'back door' (those were the quaint, prudish terms of her girlhood), she got him on the node between neighbouring needs (both of which had been explored by johns who almost never tarried). She gave him this particular sign, this clear permission, and he began a careful prodding of her perineum, which was as good a starting place as any for Diane, because it instigated those processes of memory her sexuality required. It triggered memories with the uncanny force of déjà vu, and what she thought of, as Ed slaved away, was a boy from her village who had fingered her adroitly in a greenhouse thick with green tomatoes.

[…]

The boy in the greenhouse was flawlessly adolescent and shockingly beautiful, and in his innocent way, he'd made her come resoundingly – Apollo with his modest marble membrum virile, otherwise known, in her village, as a skin flute. This memory sparkled as Ed intently suckled. They were both on their left sides now, Ed behind, where he'd pried her right shoulder back while deeply inserted and twisted his head so he could suckle away madly. He freed himself from her nipple after a long attachment so as to kiss her on the mouth at length – as if seeking to set the world record for kiss duration – and she smelled her breast on his breath, which was otherwise piquant with saliva, a little tart, a little bitter, and humid with the churning underworld – the raw metabolism and generative heat – beneath the flawless exterior. Jim Long's odor had been a little like Naugahyde, and his mouth, lips, and tongue had often tasted metallic (or, just as often, steeped in vermouth), whereas Ed smelled vulnerably digestive, warm-blooded, moist, and, just now, breast-fed. He smelled great, and she began to think, the way he was going at it now, that this was how he wanted to come– in her from behind, on one hip and elbow, contorted to kiss and with a hand between her legs. She was fine with that, would have welcomed it and joined him with a considerable bang, but what happened instead was that he pulled out at the last moment and, after turning her on her back, began yet another eternity of regional body worship, this one built around working his lips, tongue, and teeth down her rib cage and belly with that servility of his that was the flip side of masochism. To get Ed to burrow headfirst into her quim, Diane had to put her hands in his hair and, acknowledging her pressing need, press.

And here was another thing she really liked. The will to power that made him slavish in his attentions, dedicated to exploration, and responsive to response, also made him so lingual and labial that it spilled over to his nose, chin, and jaws; half of his face, nearly, was activated for her pleasure, and got slicked to a rough shine by his efforts. But – enough already. How much do we need? Or almost enough. Because it ought to be said that, at the moment of their mutual climax, Ed made sure Diane was on top, deliriously doing all the work.

These sorts of gyrations and five-sense choreographies, with variations on Ed's main themes, played out episodically between 10 p.m. and 10 a.m., when Diane said, 'Let's shower.'

In the shower, Ed stood with his hands at the back of his head, like someone just arrested, while she abused him with a bar of soap. After a while he shut his eyes, and Diane, wielding her fingernails now and starting at his face, helped him out with two practiced hands, one squeezing the family jewels, the other vigorous with the soap-and-warm-water treatment. It didn't take long for the beautiful and perfect Ed King to ejaculate for the fifth time in twelve hours, while looking like Roman public-bath statuary. Then they rinsed, dried, dressed, and went to an expensive restaurant for lunch.