THE AMOROUS ADVENTURES OF JULIANA L., PART 4 by Anna_Roid

There’s nothing that can be done to personally experience either, let alone both, of these things, but I decided to try the next best thing. I asked one of my recent lovers to write down his experience of sex with me in his words, while I did the same in mine. Rashomon in erotica, if you will.A couple of things before I begin:

First, my lover isn’t a native English speaker, though he handles the language excellently. I have corrected some grammatical and punctuation errors which might cause confusion, but left minor ones alone. And of course his memories of what happened don’t match mine exactly. As any barrister will inform you, if two witnesses agree on every detail, you’re listening to a fabricated testimony.

Secondly, I’ve no patience with people who claim there are 29345 genders and anyone can choose what pronoun to be called by. I’m a she, I’ve always been a she, I’m in no way ashamed of being a she, and my lover is a he. I don’t ask people what their “preferred pronoun” is. If that makes you uncomfortable you might as well stop reading now.

I don’t have a quarantine story because where I live there wasn’t much of a lockdown, and I went to my office fairly regularly except when there were total closures of work for brief periods. However, just before the start of the pandemic, back in late March, we’d had a meeting of representatives from overseas branches of our office, and one of them had stayed back for additional liaison purposes when international travel had come to a crashing halt – not to speak of his home country in total and absolute lockdown – and he’d been stuck in our city.

I’ll call him Yuri. This is obviously not his real name. I remember the day when the lockdown in his country was announced and I saw him in the office, standing between the espresso machine – something that I’d had installed, and don’t ask about the fight I’d had about the cost and the budget – and a large potted rubber plant we call Wells (after HG’s The Flowering Of The Strange Orchid, because it looks as though it could suddenly drag someone to itself and eat him). I’d met him before, of course, but he looked lost and lonely, and while going to get myself a coffee I stopped and smiled at him.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

Yuri shook his head. “Not really. No. It’s just…I cannot go back to ____________ (his country). All flights have been cancelled. I was calling my embassy.”

“And what did they say?” Close up he was really very handsome. Early thirties, a few years younger than me, wavy black hair, and eyes a curious shade of brownish-green I have never seen elsewhere except for coloured contact lenses. And he didn’t have “designer stubble”. I hate that. Either grow a proper beard or shave, damn it. I was so busy admiring his looks – including a thin scar that began at the corner of his jaw and disappeared under his collar, and wondering how far it went and how he’d got it – that I almost missed his answer.

“They say emergency evacuation of citizens to be arrange next week. Date they have not decided yet.” He shrugged. “I finish my work today. After that I do not know what to do. Also –“ he grimaced a little with embarrassment. “I had not been expect to stay away so long.”

I’m not always the sharpest on the uptake, but I could recognise loneliness and near-desperation when I saw them. I have been there too many times myself not to know the signs. Besides, I was not currently sharing my life with anyone, so had nothing better to do anyway. “Hey,” I said. “Why don’t you come to dinner with me this evening? You could do with some company and so could I.”

I thought he was about to refuse, and then he shrugged slightly and sighed. “All right,” he said.

So that evening, after work, we went to eat. Restaurants were still open then, though most of them were closed down soon afterwards. Over pork fried rice and dry white wine we talked, and I got to know him better.

He’d been a soldier, con***********ed in his country’s army and sent to fight a war against separatist rebels in a mountainous corner of his homeland. I’m not going to say where, but those of you familiar with the history of Eurasia in the mid 1990s to early 2000s should be able to guess it easily enough. By the time he’d got there the war was almost over, so he’d been spared most of the hard fighting. In fact, he said, he’d not even seen a single rebel fighter during his entire combat tour. But that hadn’t stopped him from getting injured by a landmine that had exploded near his patrol.

“It blowed…blew?…” he looked at me. “Blew. Blew up too soon, or else I would not be here now.” He’d still spent several weeks in hospital, and they’d had to, he said, sew most of his right shoulder back on. After being discharged he’d gone to college, got a business administration degree because that had seemed to be a good idea at the time, and after that he’d…struggled. The corporate world, he admitted, was not for him. He had always loved painting, and wished he’d been born a hundred years ago when he still might have made a living as a painter. But he hardly even got the chance to sketch now, let alone paint.

The white wine must have gone to my head, because I spoke without thinking. “You can paint me if you want. I’ve always wanted to be painted.”

He’d looked at me. “I would like that. Is lonely for my hands without painting, my fingers feel itching inside until I can paint. But I have no paint or brushes.”

“I can get some,” I said. “Tell me what you want and I’ll get it.” So he did – acrylic paints, brushes, art paper, and I wrote it all down. And then we talked about other things.

“No wife.” I’d already known he wasn’t married, of course, a glance at his fingers had shown no ring or sign he had ever worn one. “As for girlfriend…” He shrugged and looked down at his wine. “No girlfriend, not now.” I didn’t press him about it, but he told me about his girlfriends, and especially the latest one, who seemed to have been one of those hyper-possessive and insanely jealous ones who make the lives of their men such total hell that their boyfriends are eventually forced into the arms of other women just to escape.

“When I came here,” he said, “she said I was not, how do you say it in English, really coming for work, but to…” he’d actually blushed. “To fuck the girls here. Tall blond ones with long hair and model figure, she said.”

“Well, I’m not tall or blond and I don’t have long hair and obviously no model figure, so you’re safe.” He blushed an even brighter shade of crimson, but I noticed his eyes straying to the bulge of my breasts. He noticed me noticing and looked away quickly.

“Makes no difference, she said not to see her anymore. Better, really, she caused me much pain.”

“You said your work’s finished tomorrow?” I said, to change the subject. “Then you can paint me tomorrow evening, if you want.”

“But where?” he asked. “No space in office, no space in hotel room. And hotel may not permit anyway.”

“That’s not a problem. You can come over to my place. I’ve lots of space, and you can paint me all you want.”

It was all quite silly and harmless at the time, but on the way home – after dropping him off at his hotel, which was rather expensive, but the company was paying – I stopped off at the only art shop I knew. It was in the act of closing, but the owner, a woman with hair so black it could not possibly have been natural, pulled the shutter back up when she saw me getting out of my car. “Thank goodness,” she said. “You’re the first customer I’ve had all day.”

“That bad, is it?” She was in her late forties, still very good looking, and someday soon I am going to seduce her, if she is even slightly bi-curious. She has that effect on a certain spot between my legs, like an itch that can’t be scratched unless she does it herself. But it’s not happened yet.

“You have no idea. Everyone seems to imagine the virus spreads through canvas and oil, or something.” She looked at my list. “Well, that’s not amateur stuff,” she said. “I didn’t know you painted.”

“I don’t. Someone wants to paint me.”

She grinned. “Looks like fun. I wish someone would paint me” She fished out the things, put them in a brown paper packet, and handed them to me. “Just for saving the day from being a total washout, I’ll give you a discount.”

It was quite a discount. Going by the price tags on the stuff she must have sold them to me for almost cost price. Maybe she is bi-curious, or just flat out interested in me. We will find out one day and if it works out I will write about it here.

Anyway, I went home and fed the goldfishes, and as usual slipped naked between the sheets and masturbated before I fell asleep. And then I had a rather peculiar dream.

I dreamt that I was on a forested mountainside, overlooking a trail along which a column of soldiers in mottled green uniforms were approaching. I was lying on my front, almost buried in damp soil and leaf litter, pressed into it so hard that earth was pressing against my lips and every breath filled my nostrils with the smell of wet ground. I knew that they were the enemy, and that behind me, uphill, were others of my team, and that I was supposed to wait until they were even with my position. Then I was supposed to press the switch on the plastic box in my hand, and the huge landmine buried near the track would go off and blow the soldiers to pieces. Any that survived would be shot down by my team with their rifles and machine guns. It was my duty, it was killed or be killed. I knew all this, but the soldiers were only boys, and when I took a good look at the first one, at the thin face under the oversized helmet, I knew who he was. I knew he was lonely and scared, that he didn’t want to be where he was, and that in any case it would make no difference at all. And I pressed the switch too early, the earth erupting in dirt and stone chips and metal that fell like malevolent rain, but rain that failed to do what it had been intended to, to flay skin and flesh from bone and turn boys to mangled corpses. And then I woke up, my hands pressed between my thighs, sweat on my breasts, trembling.