Chapter 6 – Kathy Kimbel

Where did this euphoria come from? How could I repress it? Should I even try to repress it? It just wasn't working with Mark. I had tried a whole new venue and he continued to drift away from me. Our families couldn't remain blind to it forever. Why should I continue being the martyr just to live our families' dream?

I was waiting for her on a bench in Pulaski Square, facing the Casimir Inn. I couldn't help it, I was trembling from the anticipation of the meeting. I didn't know where we'd go, but it had to be someplace private—just for the two of us. And it had to have a bed. But that was silly, a sofa, a chair, even the hard floor would do. She'd already shown me she could give me an orgasm standing up against the wall with her pressing her body to mine and making creative use of her fingers.

But there was nowhere here in the square. I briefly thought of the bushes—but then laughed, when I thought of Caleb Freeman finding us. He was always working on the flower beds and on trimming the bushes in the square. Wouldn't that be something? For that big, black stud to find Tracy and me rolling around in the bushes. He'd probably offer to do us both right there.

Especially as I'd already tried him out, having done so when I wondered if it was just Mark who I couldn't respond to satisfactorily in the world of men. He scared the shit out of me and I was sore for days.

I had known what I was trying out at the time. It was less than a week after Mark and I had moved to Savannah—a warm day in late February, after I'd settled into my new job at SCAD for the spring semester. As can happen in the fickle Savannah weather, it was warm enough that Caleb was in the square, raking leaves that had fallen from the trees since the fall cleanup and had his sweatshirt off. He was wearing an athletic T shirt, but that drooped so much in the arm holes and the neckline that his magnificent physique and bulging biceps were quite evident.

I had already heard that he'd screw any woman who took his fancy and that most of them would let him do it—and then would let him do it again. He was just what I needed to test the possibility that my incapability was just with Mark, not with men in general. Mark was handsome and in good form too—and left nothing to be desired with what he was working with in bed. His heart just wasn't in it. We both knew why. But Caleb was strikingly different in demeanor—cocky and aggressive and forceful—and, if what I heard was true, more than Mark in every department of malehood.

That was a basic problem between Mark and me. I already knew how Mark leaned. I'd known it before the arrest and the photos on the Internet. But I certainly had every reason to know it now. It not only diminished me—it also scared me concerning my own uncertainties of my sexuality.

I visited Caleb in the square the day Mark was doing his final evaluation interview for his own position at SCAD. I knew he'd be gone all day—even that the department head was taking Mark to dinner. And, truth be told, I knew Mark wouldn't be home that night. I knew that the textile department head was aggressively gay and was attracted to Mark's type. I'd already worked behind the scenes in getting Mark the job—despite what had happened in Richmond. That he got the job was probably because of what had been put on the Internet. The department head was beyond interested in that.

I was outrageously flirty with Caleb. He responded, dragged me into the bushes, and would have taken me there, I'm sure, if I hadn't told him I had a perfectly good—and empty—apartment across the square—that Mark was gone for the night. We had most of the night and it was only then afternoon.

He didn't take the night. He didn't take more than forty-five minutes from the time we headed over to the apartment until he'd showered and was gone.

He fucked me on the living room rug just inside the door, pushing me down to the carpet on my back, fumbling at my clothes, squeezing and sucking on my breasts when he'd freed them while a hand roughly worked in my maidenhead. He was rough and insistent, but he also was expert. And he was so damn big and thick. When he thrust inside me, causing me to cry out, arch my back, and claw at his bulbous buttocks, I was open to him as no man had ever made me—certainly not in such a short period of time.

He was longer and thicker than I'd ever had before—my first black stud. The classic cliché, I know. But so true in this case. He fucked me fast, hard, and deep, without mercy. Within fifteen minutes of deep, hard stroking, he'd come, bounced up and away from me, and was off toward the bathroom to shower.

When he passed me on the way out with the remark, "That was nice, darlin'. I'll be having you again," I was still lying there, moaning, unable to close my legs. I don't think so, I thought. I'd been plowed harder and wider than ever before, but I hadn't had an orgasm of my own. I hadn't even had a chance to fake one as I usually did with Mark. And Caleb had given me no reason to feel like I should fake one. Mark did. With Caleb, it was all his pleasure and his power. Even his foreplay obviously was only designed to open me enough for him to get inside me. I knew now that Mark at least tried to be an attentive lover.

So, now I knew. It was just men in general I didn't respond to.

Not like I had responded to Tracy that day after we'd all met at the café and she'd engaged me so deeply in conversation. The day I saw the rich novelist from the west end of the square, Terrence Rowland, eyeing Mark, and Mark eyeing him back. Seeing that might have been what made me give up all pretense too—what had thrown me into Tracy's arms.

I knew then that moving to Savannah wasn't going to change what Mark had been in Richmond. For some reason it left me euphoric rather than frustrated and angry.

It left me vulnerable too, so that when Tracy visited me in my SCAD office the next day, closed and locked the door behind her, and gave me the look she did—spoke to me of her desire as she did—I let her lead me to the studio couch in the corner of my office, shielded from the door, which was locked anyway, by a metal bookcase stuffed with books. I let her lower me to my back on the couch, undo my blouse and lay her hands on my breasts. Touching them and then squeezing them. Putting her lips to the nipples and sucking them, laughing musically at the deep moaning that brought out of me. I shuddered as she unzipped my skirt and pulled it down my legs, and then, while still working my breasts with her lips, set her fingers dancing inside my folds, pleasuring me as a woman knows far better to do than any man.

I had my first orgasm even before she'd disrobed and covered my body with hers and writhed on top of me as I writhed under her, her lips possessing mine, one of her hands still between us, still working my cunt and clit . . . to another orgasm.

And here I was, on a bench, in the center of Pulaski Square, facing the Casmir Inn, waiting for Tracy. Already wet inside my panties. Waiting for her to take me somewhere private and to do with me what she'd done three times since that first afternoon in my office—what I wanted her to keep doing to me forever. What I was gradually learning to do for her too.

But as fate would have it, just as Kathy arrived, all rosy cheeked and smiles—now having a hairstyle that matched mine in style and color—so also arrived an ambulance, its siren screeching and its lights flashing.

It stopped in front of the Casimir Inn. Two EMTs rushed into the hotel, leaving another one to open the back of the ambulance and pull out a mobile gurney, which the EMT rolled up the handicapped ramp to the hotel's front door and then inside.

Kathy and I clutched at each other, transfixed, holding our breaths for the brief moments it took for the gurney to reappear. The young black hotel porter, Jaivon Johnson, was walking beside it. The hotel manager, Martin Lewis, was standing in the hotel doorway, looking worried and at a loss as to what to do next.

"It's Muriel Roberts," Kathy said. "I knew it would come to this. I think I need to go with them."

"Muriel Roberts?" I repeated, dumbfounded, lost. "You need to go with the ambulance?"

"Yes. It's her kidneys. I'm a registered nurse. Worked in ERs before deciding I wanted to be a photographer and enrolling at SCAD. Muriel didn't want others to know. But she knows I'm a nurse. I've been doing what I can."

Kathy turned and looked at me. "Could we . . . later?"

"Of course," I answered. "If they let you go with her, do so, by all means. If nothing else, you'll have answers to questions they'll have. And she'll be comforted that you're there."

"You sure?"

"Go, go. Now."

"You're a doll. But then I already knew that. I know every square inch of you."

Chills of pleasure ran up my spine as I watched her hustle across the square and to the ambulance. The stretcher already was inside and Jaivon had climbed into the back of the ambulance as well. Martin Lewis was still standing at the hotel door, stunned and wringing his hands. Kathy talked with the EMTs briefly and then, with a look back at me and—I was stunned too—with an air kiss, she was in the ambulance and it was pulling away, its siren once more screaming across the square.

To no one in particular, I said in a small voice, "Yes, go. Do what you can, Kathy. We have eternity, and who knows how long Mrs. Roberts has?"

It struck me then that I'd crossed the river, made my decision. I wouldn't make other living arrangements immediately, but my arrangements with Mark had to change. I felt a flood of relief. If I'd read the glances that had gone between Mark and Terrence Rowland in the café the other day, I'd have to say that Mark was at the same place I was.

Good. That made what was to come all the more bearable—for both of us. I did love Mark—just not in the way our families wanted me to.