Weekend away

With Alex still living with Natasha and with both of our long working hours and my lack of transport it was difficult to see one another, but we continued to get to know each other better and better as we still spoke on the phone every day, and often many times a day. As far as either of us was willing to admit on the surface, the relationship was still a mere friendship with casual sex, but the way we acted and talked did not support such labeling.

On Friday the 10th of August I was all set for a weekend at the snow with my rover crew and a couple of other rover crews. Before I left, Alex asked me if I was going to have sex with someone else while I was away. I replied that it wasn’t likely as I was fairly sure of all the guys that would be attending and I wasn’t attracted to any of them. After some conversation, Alex admitted that he wouldn’t like it if I had sex with anyone else.I was pleased and flattered by his admission but as I was still trying to be immune to feelings for him I teasingly said that I would do what I like and if the opportunity arose then I wouldn’t say no. He had left me with a warm glow though, and in a sense given my feelings the permission they wanted to exist. I decided to email him through his website.

Name: Lily
Email Address: lily.lane.blog@gmail.com
Phone Number:
Message: Surprise!

I'm just about to go to the snow. I don't know if I'll have phone reception there but if not feel free to leave me a sexy message!The session time for the film premiere is 6:45pm next Thursday. I hope you can make it but please don't worry if you can't; I'm not so ridiculous as to take it personally.
I just wanted to let you know that I'm not going to have sex with anyone else at the snow, or even kiss them for that matter (unless they are female in which case I will go right ahead because I know you will love to hear about it). Please don't have sex with anyone else this weekend either?
Have an awesome weekend, but don't forget about me :-)
See you,
love Lily xx

Once I knew from his text that Alex had received my email I felt safe to go back to teasing and let him know that there were some new guys I hadn’t met before staying in our chalet. Like his “hot sex” text message that I had received at the train station, my message found Alex at the wrong time. I don’t remember his reply but it was negative enough that I called him straight away on my mobile to apologise and make sure he was okay. It was a Saturday night and he was drunk and depressed at home with a friend over, and Ben upstairs in bed after a long night of yet more abuse from Natasha.
I did my best to cheer him up on the phone and when the call was over I paused for a moment on the bunk bed I was lying on, overwhelmed by some feeling that had no name.The text message I sent was,
“nxt time the whole world is against u just call me ok? I will cheer u up, I promise! I’m crazy about u! (in a non-scary way)”
The reply was,
“Thanku for being crazy, I’m crazy too, just for you.”
And then one hour later,
“Just so there’s no confusion, I think you’re beautiful. Xxx”
The unnamed feeling did not go away. For the rest of the time at the snow (only another twenty-four hours) I was as full of thoughts of Alex as usual, but more full of feelings for him than ever. It seemed clear that the sentiment was mutual, though all was conveyed by text message. I still tried to hold my cards close to my chest, terrified of scaring him away with my feelings but it became harder as he became more open. When I asked him on Sunday morning what his plans for the day were his response was the very confusing,
“Ikea! Gym, arguing with Natasha and buying heaps of steak! This is for you xox!! And a happy ending. I can’t wait to keep trying.”
When I questioned what on earth he meant his response was,
“Sorry I’m not very bright. As soon as you get back I’m going to strip you naked, give you an all over body massage, kiss you from head to toe with special consideration given to certain areas! You’re hot!!”
The secretive smile I couldn’t help but carry constantly that afternoon as we packed away our things and cleaned the chalet was remarked on by more than one person.
[Note: The visit to Ikea and purchases of steak were the result of Alex's plans to move out on the Tuesday of that week. He had finally resorted to temporarily taking a room in the flat of a good friend of his. “I can’t wait to keep trying” refers to the fact that I had never had an orgasm in my life; a problem he was determined to fix.]

Sexy pants

Soon Alex invited me to come and have breakfast with him in the restaurant at the range. He begged me to wear ‘the pants’. ‘The pants’ were the pair of soft black pants I sometimes wear to work and were the first pants Alex ever saw and admired my arse in. The night before our breakfast date I text messaged him to tell him I couldn’t wait to show him a surprise.
We had breakfast at the restaurant and Alex introduced me to Bill. He asked Bill how old he thought I was; Bill answered “about nineteen” and once again Alex repeated his surprise. While we waited for our breakfasts Alex got up to get juices for us and when he sat back down, told me quietly what Bill had just said in admiration of my figure. Alex did things like that all the time. He complimented me so often that I was forced to learn to take compliments purely by the fact that he’d flood me with them. He was never insincere or grand about it, he’d just constantly slip in comments to make me feel good. When I was talking to Alex or when I was around him I would always be totally convinced that I was the sexiest, smartest girl around.
After breakfast we slipped into the teaching shed.
“We’re not allowed to have sex today though”, I said.
“Why’s that?”
“Because the last couple of times freaked me out too much, I’m terrified of getting pregnant. So because we obviously can’t be trusted the rulethat we’re not allowed to have sex until I get that contraceptive shot in my arm.”
He agreed. So I showed him my surprise. I took his hand in mine and slipped it inside ‘the pants’ so that he could feel the silky smooth skin between my legs; I’d had my first Brazilian ever the day before. is now
Before long I was slouched on a chair, legs spread, while he used his tongue to send shuddering waves of heat through my body. When eventually I said breathlessly, “Hey Alex? Let’s just do it”, he didn’t need telling twice.

Hesitations

Alex was very picky about where he lived. He had to live in Elsternwick. “I just really like that area” and “you have to understand how lazy Natasha is. If I’m more than five minutes away she just won’t bother”. He had to have a modern, spacious house with central heating. And most importantly, the house had to be close to a park for Ben. “I just want to get a place that Ben will like.”
A couple of times he said that he was considering moving into a house that he and Natasha and Ben had once lived in that was now up for rent. He knew it would be a good house for Ben. Eventually he applied for it.
“I got the house but I’m not moving in there.”
“What? Why not? It’s taken you ages to get house! You’ve been trying to move out for months!”
“I couldn’t do it Lily-pily. I just kept thinking of Ben and all the good times we had there. I can’t do it Lil. I can’t leave little Ben.”

Natasha and Ben

Sometimes I asked Alex about Natasha. He had told me a few times, “I swore I’d never live a loveless life”. Natasha was a career woman; the best-known and most successful publicist in Melbourne according to Alex. She also had a short temper and had thrown a bottle at Alex in his sleep once - he had sent a complimentary text message to a young female student of his as she was an unattractive girl and very down on herself.
Natasha would talk over Alex.
“She’s one of those people who always has to talk over the top of you. There’s nothing I hate more than people who talk over the top of other people. Don’t you hate that? When people talk over the top of you?”
I wanted to know why Alex had stayed with her for so long.
“I can remember years ago, lying in bed and thinking, ‘I’ll just give her Christmas. I’ll stay until Christmas’ and then next thing you know, Natasha was pregnant with Ben.”
Every time Alex talked about Ben his eyes would light up. He would tell me what it was like “having your own little person”, about how cute or “hot” Ben was, and about the way Ben would crawl into Alex's bed downstairs in the morning and wriggle up next to him and ask, innocent as anything, “Go to Bonkers?”

Not exactly make up sex.

Two days later, a Sunday, I was sitting in the cold collecting money from market parking to raise money to replace the roof of the Dingley Scout Hall. Alex called to find out what I was doing and would I like to come and see him as he had some time free at the range that afternoon. There was none of the tension in his words and voice that I had been expecting; Friday night’s text messages were never referred to. Clearly they had not had the same impact on him as they had had on me.
I rushed as quickly as I could from Dingley to the range, prepared to only have half an hour with him as I had volunteered to take some friends home from Dingley. As you’d expect, as soon as I arrived we wanted to finish what we’d begun in the doorway of my house the last time we'd seen each other. When we tried again though I found that it hurt me too much as he was penetrating me quite deeply, and that I was too nervous as neither of us had protection (and I’m an idiot who needs to learn to say no). I told him the problems and stopped him, pulled my pants back on and knelt down to give him head instead. After I had been going at it for a short while though he grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me to my feet, yanked my pants down, spun me round, bent me over, fucked me briefly and then finished on my lower back. A funny scene followed as he realized that he hadn’t planned for this moment and searched the office for something to clean me up with while I remained bent over and exposed, calling “don’t you dare leave me like this Alex!”
Even though it hurt again when he penetrated me the second time I didn’t mind at the time, but I have still never dared analyse the scene for fear of hating what I find.

Messy things

The more time I spent talking to Alex the more I liked him. This scared me to begin with as prior to Alex I had been very comfortable with the attitude that I did not need or want to have feelings for a man. Due to the our difficult circumstances (i.e. age difference, Alex living with his ex-girlfriend and having two year old son and me wanting to move to New Zealand) I had been confident that we had stumbled on a great formula for a casual sexual relationship and friendship. There was now no question though that I seriously enjoyed his company and conversation and was becoming attached. I explored these feelings and fortunately came to the conclusion that yes, I did have feelings for him but they were not strong enough to cause me trouble and furthermore that had he asked me to be his girlfriend I would certainly have refused.

The presence of these feelings though meant that I found I had a defensive reaction to Alex's teasing about wanting to use him for sex. Any time he jokingly suggested that my attraction to him was purely physical I would contradict him and tell him that I liked him for his personality too. I had actually told him this from the beginning but he would ignore it and the more attached to him I became the more important to me it was that I made him understand this.

One freezing cold Friday evening after a long day working on the film I accidentally caught a Cranbourne train instead of a Frankston train and found myself in Murrumbeena before I realized my mistake. Frustrated, cold and tired I text messaged Alex to complain about what had happened, quietly hoping that he would offer to come and pick me up though knowing full-well that it was highly unlikely that he could. He didn’t offer. After some minutes of boredom while waiting for another train to take me back to Caulfield I text messaged him again, asking him to tell me something good, to help keep me warm. He responded, “I want to have lots of hot sex with you!” Under ordinary circumstances this would have made me blush and smile and start daydreaming but it was the wrong time for it. As can so often happen with a text conversation, a series of misinterpretations followed in which I tried to explain my feelings and desires in foolishly complicated ways. Confusion built until Alex said bluntly that he hated games. Terrified that I had somehow managed to screw up our entire friendship (or relationship?) for absolutely no reason at all I took my time to carefully spell out a long message that I hoped would make things go back to normal. I received no response and no phone call the following day.

Priorities

One day, not long after we had discovered our mutual attraction, we arranged that I would come and visit Alex at the range. When I arrived Alex was finishing with Dave. I don’t know whether it was my own paranoia or if I genuinely read subtle suspicion in Dave's eyes as ALex introduced me. Alex asked Dave how old he thought I was and when told “about nineteen or twenty” voiced his disbelief that anyone could tell that as he had been sure I was twenty-six. When Dave wished me a good lesson Alex responded that actually we were going for a drive today and led me away.
In the car Alex teased me about my sex drive as usual, showing obvious delight in my blushing admissions. We were headed to Elsternwick to see an apartment Alex was considering. In the car though, Alex checked his text messages and found that Natasha was in a bad mood, telling him he had to get out by the end of the week and demanding that he forfeit his entire share of the house they owned together to her, plus continue the mortgage repayments on it as child support. She would, of course, be keeping Ben. We arrived at the apartment before the real estate agent and sat in the car. Alex wouldn’t let me kiss him in case the real estate agent saw and it somehow got back to Natasha who would make things worse for him. I got out and used a swing in the park while he phoned her.
Yet again the apartment did not meet Alex's standards and he took a detour on the way back to the range to show me one of the houses he and Natasha had once lived in. We got stuck in a traffic jam caused by faulty boom gates along the Frankston train line and by the time he had dropped me home he had only fifteen minutes until his next lesson, which would take ten minutes to drive to. He was busting for the toilet so badly though that he jumped out of the car at my house to go. I had to wrestle and pull him away from seeing my highly embarrassing bedroom. We paused in the doorway of my house for a quick kiss goodbye before he was to dash for his lesson. Too quickly though we were pressed against the wall, kissing passionately, and soon his hand was inside my pants for the first time. I quickly changed from, “no, you have to go” to a whispered “stay, please stay”. In the next moment our pants were around our knees, my palms against the wall and with the door still open he was inside me. I closed the door so that the neighbours wouldn’t be subjected to my moaning and then, as fast as we had begun, he pulled out again, yanked his pants on, kissed me and backed out of the door saying “I’m sorry Lily, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life”, and was gone.

In-between bits

Even though when I first started writing this account of my involvement with Alex the idea was to torture Natasha with every detail of our emotional and sexual interactions it’s difficult to remember when everything took place. Firsts and lasts are always easy to remember, but in betweens get jumbled around so that events and conversations become blurred and broken.

Alex and I talked on the phone a lot and snatched moments with each other whenever we could. We would speak on the phone almost every day, often in rushed snatches and often many times in a day. If Alex didn’t have to rush away for his next lesson though, half an hour would often slip away undetected and I’d walk back into the cold office at Albert Park, where I was working on promotion for a new film, pink-faced as I realized how long I had been away for. We were so different but we got along famously. Alex had so many stories and I never tire of listening to a good story-teller. I’d ask questions and offer opinions or analyses and often Alex would pause a moment and then compliment my maturity. We would debate the value of money. Alex loved to tease me about my sex drive. I got used to him calling me Lily-pily, which I had never allowed anyone else to do, and then just when I’d gotten used to that he started calling me Lano sometimes too, which was even weirder sounding to my ears.

We have so many tiny stories that I never want to forget but am coming close to forgetting already. I can’t remember so much of the mood and context that transforms a series of events into a story. Nevertheless, a list of events is still worth preserving if it’s all you have.

In the week following our first kiss I fell sick with a cold. When I told Alex he offered to come around with medicine and flowers.“Do you like tulips? All girls like tulips.”He asked for my address but was detained that day and didn’t make it. He said he’d send the flowers. They slipped his mind and never arrived. I didn’t mind; they would have caused awkward questions from my family anyway and I had a warm glow purely from his enthusiasm.

Sunday

On Friday and Saturday we spoke on the phone and while I have no clue what we talked about, I remember that I was amazed at how easy it was. There was no awkwardness to our conversations and it was so obvious that neither of us was interested in playing games or manipulating each other, creating false expectations or images. We chatted easily and without nerves or tension. On Sunday he asked if I would come and visit him at the range for a while. With great difficulty I concocted an excuse to borrow my parents’ car and drive down to see him.
As expected, our established pattern of leaping on each other continued. Frustrated as I still had my period and wanting to take things a little further to ensure his continued interest and to maintain a trend of progress in our (for want of a better word) relationship, I decided to go down on him. [Note to self: Although it was fine with this man on this occasion, this is a TERRIBLE attitude towards sexual acts and will lead to you getting used.] He asked why I wouldn’t let him touch me and when I pressed my face into his shoulder in embarrassment he guessed that I had my period.
“You poor little bastard.”
He said that sentence so many times and with so much affection over the next few weeks.
That day he showed me more of the houses that he was looking at moving into, and told me of his dream to become a billionaire, and about his views on the value of money.
“Money is like air”, he said, “think about it, what would you do without money? You couldn’t live. You have to have money, it’s the most important thing.”
Our differences, not just in age and circumstances, but also in personality and values, started to show. I think it may also have been the first time he told me a little about Natasha, about his dyslexia, and briefly about his poor roots in Wangaratta.
At some point that afternoon Greg called Alex. Alex insisted that I speak to him so I took the phone awkwardly and apologized to Greg for the last time we had spoken while I was still working at the gym. I had called him and before I could get a word out had coughed in his ear as I had been very sick. As he had done on the phone once previously Greg again jokingly warned me to stay away from Alex as he was a sex maniac.

Thursday

Written 15/9/07.

A couple of months have somehow passed, so I’m not as clear on the details of everything that happened between us as I would have been had I continued to write about it after my first attempt on 18/8/07, but I think it is still worth writing down. Who knows what it can be used for one day? Perhaps not revenge and punishment as were my original intentions - hopefully I will never feel such anger and hate again. The whole situation has been so soap opera-like; perhaps I will create a television series one day.

After our first kiss – or rather kisses – I was on top of the world. For the first few minutes as they had been happening I was worried about Alex's involvement with Natasha. One of my determined sentiments in my initial personal battle about whether to go for the golf lesson after I phoned him for the first time was that I was absolutely not interested in being a home-wrecker. I didn’t want a broken relationship on my conscience and I wanted to combat a trend I had spotted in myself – a trend of having too much interest in men who were already very much attached. So, in the first few minutes I pulled away from Alex a couple of times, saying, “What about Natasha?”, and, “I can’t, you’re still involved!” His response to this was to ignore them and kiss me more; in fact when I reminded him a while later of my protestations he had completely forgotten them. The protestations didn’t last though. He had told me the relationship was over and I was more than happy to believe it and think that if it wasn’t then that was his concern and nothing to do with me.

The following day, a Thursday, we spoke on the phone briefly. He said he’d love to see me sooner rather than later. That afternoon I needed to pop into the gym to pick up some money from the staff to buy a going-away present for a girl who had resigned. While I was there I text messaged Alex to say that if he really meant sooner rather than later I could come down to the driving range and see him. He called me immediately to say that he had fifteen minutes spare between his last lesson and going out for dinner with a client. Without waiting for the invitation I knew was coming I said I’d see him in five minutes and dashed out of the gym with barely a word of goodbye.
A couple of minutes later I knocked nervously on the teaching shed door. Alex opened it immediately and instantly we wrapped around each other once more. We kissed like two people who had been daydreaming of exactly that all day long. Alex's hands roamed further over my body and we pulled each other around the room in frustration, wanting to take things further but recognizing the impropriety. I had my period and had to slap and push his hands away each time he tried to explore in more detail, but I offered no explanation other than a cheekily evasive smile. He could lift me so easily, wrap my legs around him and hold me there or push me up against the door. It turned me on so much, thinking of the things I wished we were doing. Every few minutes we’d force each other to stop so we could get out a quick sentence before pulling each other close again. “Alex, you have to go, you’re so late!”, or “Sorry buddy, I really gotta go”, or “I can’t believe you’re only nineteen, don’t you think I’m old?” After thirty-five minutes instead of the ten that we should have had, we finally made it out the door.
“I wish you could come with us to dinner but these people know Natasha.”
I couldn’t believe he would have been willing to introduce me to his friends, I had been sure he must be embarrassed about his involvement with a nineteen year old.
“Aren’t you two over though?”
“Yeah but she’s not really happy about it and if she knew about you she’d never let me see Ben again.”
Two meters later though we were around the corner of the teaching shed and locked together again. As I slapped his hand away yet again he said, “Hey Lily, you’re not a virgin are you?” I giggled and said no and “Why, do I act like one?”.
“Oh good, I was just making sure.”
When we finally parted and I was making my way down the grassy slope towards the car park I only just resisted the urge to dash up to the gap between the teaching shed and wind break and grab and kiss him as he walked past. As I looked at the gap his face appeared at it with his excited-little-boy grin on, waving to me.