An Evening with Tom with Someone Else on Her Mind

**This excerpt from Song of the Balalika is intended for readers 18 and over**

“The peanut sauce is good. I wish I had another spring roll.” Cilla put down the food and licked sauce from her fingertips before picking up another sheet to place in a separate stack on the dining room table. Tom lounged on the couch a few feet away, flipping from one channel to the next, only his brown hair streaked with gray visible to her while she worked.

“Did you get your reviews done?” she asked him as she put down the final sheet to be sorted, picked up the container of food and made her way to the couch.

“All but one. I spent most of the day on my responses to the papers the other panel members submitted for me to discuss. Why don’t you blow off your classes and come with me to New Mexico?”

“I’ve got class presentations scheduled. And on Friday I’ve got a meeting with Rosalind Ayala at the art museum in Houston. We’re working on my consulting contract for next year. And there’s my deadline to submit my tenure materials—” Cilla felt Tom’s hand inching up her knit top to the clasp of her bra just as she sat down beside him.

“I hate being away from you for so long,” he cooed in her ear. “It gets really lonely in those conference hotel rooms.”

Cilla stifled a laugh while he buried his face in her neck. “You’ll survive. It’s only for a few days. And besides, in every hotel there’s pay-per-view.”

He sat up and continued to plant kisses on her neck, shifting his hand around her back and latching it onto her other breast and massaging it. “Speaking of, are you ready for the movie?”

“Sure.” Cilla tried hard to sound enthusiastic. She liked a good erotic movie as well as Tom but didn’t share the same definition of what that meant.
“What’s this one about?”

Tom took his hand from under her blouse, picked up the DVD and removed it from its packaging. He looked at the blurb on the back while the front cover showed two overly endowed women and one man in a hospital gown on a bed between them. Tom chuckled. “Naughty nurses, I think. You don’t mind a health care theme, do you?”

Cilla stifled a groan. “That sounds particularly sexy.”

“The pickings were slim in the video store. I guess the rain has everybody doing what we’re doing tonight.”
“You could go on-line…”

He grinned. “More fun to look through them in person.”

Cilla returned his smile. “Whatever turns you on, honey.”

Soon after Tom slipped the disc in and moved from in front of the television screen, the action had started. While a topless nurse performed oral sex on a man in bandages, Cilla removed her shirt and her unhooked bra, took her cue from the movie that didn’t do anything to stimulate her libido. Tom leaned back and helped her ease the zipper down on his jeans; Cilla pulled out his penis and took it into her mouth while his hand reached down to lightly stroke her breast.

At first, all she could think about was finishing up with Tom so that she could get back to work. Before she realized it, her mind wandered from the tasks pressing in on her to the stranger who looked at her through her window that afternoon. She wondered what his skin would taste like on her tongue, her lips grazing the head of his penis, her hand massaging his testicles. His long thin fingers. His lips on her lips…

At that moment, Tom let out a moan and his body stiffened. His hand had moved from her breast to her hair and he pressed the back of her head closer to him. “So good, baby,” he said as he took a last few deep breaths before relaxing back on the sofa.

“That was all right?” Cilla knew the answer without him having to reveal it to her. She sipped her wine and placed the glass back on the table.

“The best,” he told her, his breathing still shallow and swift. Cilla studied the face of the man who’d been her lover for three years, the man she’d gotten used to having in her home most nights. His closed eyes gave her the impression that he was sleeping.

Tom finally opened his eyes again and pulled her up from where her cheek rested against his chest to kiss her on the forehead. He slipped his hand under her skirt, under the tights she wore, and between her legs. “So juicy,” he purred in her ears. “All for me?”

Cilla worked to dislodge the image of the stranger from her mind. As she did, all she could answer was, “Ummmm.”