13thWR

BUTTERFLIES

by

Robert Layden

"Oh yeah, oh, yesss, do it now - and like that."

She sat on the left edge of my cluttered mahogany desk, and I hoped that the walls of my office and the stout oak door would contain her feigned ecstasy so the rest of the staff didn't hear. Friday afternoons were quiet times at my law firm. In successful weeks, which weren't numerous, we were too tired to celebrate. In disastrous ones, we analyzed our failures. Defeat sometimes produced high drama, but never quite like this conversation, which had begun predictably with a discussion of the costly civil suit that went against our client earlier.

"Let me tell you about the butterflies. See - "

"Lisa, we just lost a big one, do I need butterflies at this moment?"

"Yes, we both do, because things really aren't always what they seem."

She swung her legs out from the desk. I had noticed them, of course, particularly in court. She sometimes was my second chair in difficult cases, always wearing tailored suits in darker blue colors. They looked professional, but didn't quite conceal her exotic shape and sinuous movements as she crossed the room or walked from our table toward the witness. Occasionally she seemed to distract male jury members from weaknesses in our strategy.

She crossed her right leg over the left at the knees. The definition of the calves was exquisite and the dusky skin on her thighs beneath the sheer, colorless hose brought to my mind tanned, alluring women in slight bikinis on summer beaches. I looked down rather than up. One midnight blue, high-heeled shoe was lying on the floor; the other dangled from the raised toe of her right foot. I shoved my chair back from the desk to remove her legs from the sight line and meet her eyes.

"Okay, tell me about them."

"I was in college, kind of romantic and inexperienced."

"Even the Pope must have been young for an instant."

"Sure, so this guy and I went on a picnic. I packed a nice lunch, a bottle of wine, and we found an isolated field. It was right out of a movie. Apple trees surrounded it, the grass was lush and green, and a stream flowed off to the right. There were even butterflies floating in the air.

"So we spread out the blanket and got down. Things were getting a little heavy there. We were young, you know, got hot quickly. Hands were going places."

"Spring, no doubt."

"Yeah, as we fondled, the butterflies started to swoop around our heads. That was nice at first, but then they came in pairs, and flew closer to our faces. He started to swat at them."

"This isn't out of 'Saturday Night Live," is it?"

"Nobody I've told it to believes it, but this really happened. They started to bang into our faces, two or three at a time. It was becoming pretty vicious. Then I saw their leader. He was black and yellow, similar to some of the others, but his colors were kind of warrior-like, and I noticed a chunk missing from one wing."

"Stephen King is here."

"No kidding. And do you know, we had to leave. All because of the butterflies. When we got back to the car, they were cruising over the field, just a beautiful picture of nature. So you see, things aren't always what they appear to be."

"I suppose you and this stud then made the beast with two backs in the car."

"No, he took me back to the dorm. We were both kind of jangled. I wanted to, but he never called me again."

I recalled the New Year's party I threw the previous year shortly after I hired her. In the function room on the floor below, a four-piece band played for my staff and some local attorney friends, and we all drank too much champagne. Toward the end, the band played a sultry "Auld Lang Syne," and Lisa and I were dancing, as if by accident. She was wearing a pale violet dress, very different from her trial outfits, with a delicately ruffled V in the front, which displayed her dusky pillar of neck and upper chest. The purple lilacs on the material seemed to generate her perfume. I'm not much of a dancer, but her body folded into mine as if we were practiced partners. Her sensuous electricity became my primary focus. Perhaps some men really are suckers for beautiful Asian women. That any man would fail to call her back was beyond my comprehension.

"Probably the guy just wasn't a nature lover, anyway."

"You know, Tommy, I never told anybody the rest of it. Don't know why I'm telling you. It doesn't make me proud."

"A sure way to make me ask. What happened, Lisa?"

"You'll laugh, but don't think badly of me. I had a real crush on this guy. For weeks I couldn't get him out of my mind. Then I did something I never did before."

"Can't wait."

"Tommy, you know I am a principled woman, right? Tell me you do."

"I do, Lis."

"Well, I went out and had sex with another guy I didn't even care for to see if it would get this fellow out of my mind. It was awful."

"The sex or the using it?"

"Both."

She was caught up. She stared at the floor, but her mind was back there.

"I saw all the films, knew what a woman is supposed to sound and act like, so I faked it."

She imitated her sounds.

"We were going at it. I was moaning and breathing heavily. He had his hands on my breasts, and I was rubbing his dick. Then I started to cry."

Her eyes were misting at the memory. I looked into them mostly when we discussed legal matters. The ebony pupils were almost indistinguishable from the irises, which were dark brown, like a deep mahogany flecked with tiny black tinges. The old cliché that Chinese are inscrutable came to mind, but her relived emotional agitation was easy to read. I became uncomfortable, and tried to sound dry and rational like a respectable attorney.

"Perhaps he thought you were overcome with passion."

"No, it broke the mood completely, and I couldn't act anymore. He was really pissed. Called me a cock-teaser - you know. See, I cried because I was using sex, which I believed was so intimate and holy, just to get the other fellow out of my system. It was so ugly."

"Was it therapeutic?"

"Yeah, it worked. I didn't want to see him or get laid, for a good...two weeks."

We laughed.

"You realize that I'll never be able to think of picnics as innocent outings again, Lisa. Actually, I'll probably be aroused by them."

"I wouldn't have it any other way."

She smiled, sitting up straight and smoothing wrinkles from her skirt. She removed her jacket and tossed it to the side on the floor. The movement caused the pendant shoe to drop from her foot with a muffled bump. She pushed herself from the desk's edge and stood before me. Then she reached behind her head with both hands, further emphasizing her breasts, which were already prominent absent the jacket, and removed the golden dragon clasp from her glossy, raven hair. Freed from the austere style she favored, it swished with a silken freedom around her shoulders.

With the grace of a prima ballerina, she dropped to her knees before me. Hands on my knees, she parted my legs and edged forward.. As she unzipped my fly and slid my trousers and underwear down, I remembered a stuffy professor I had in law school. When asked about very minor breaches in legal protocol, he would shake his head gravely and admonish, "Well, it's just not done, bad form, you know."

Lisa seemed pleased with the form of penis, hard and erect. She eased her warm, moist lips over the upper portion of the shaft, then slid them down lightly to the purplish ridge. After repeating the motion three times gently and slowly, she looked up, not entirely inscrutable this time.

"I promise I won't tell a story about this."

She reapplied her mouth with increasing rapidity and force further up and down my cock. The sensation was certainly one that I had experienced before, but the setting and the primitively animated manner of her performance, as if she were really enjoying this more than I, made the experience unique. All thought ceased as my eyes closed and my concentration focused entirely on her mouth caressing my prick with intensifying friction and suction. In too brief a time, I felt the muscles begin to pulse and throb, then contract and release repeatedly. Even as the ejaculation neared it conclusion, the complete draining of muscular tension throughout my body caused me to slump back in the executive chair. No other activity or artificial agent induces such a totally satisfactory release. Alcohol and drugs are pale failures by comparison. This is an entire physical cleansing, as if the muscles are bathed from the inside toward the surface by a cool, intensely fine spray of pure water.

After, my mind is empty, even of thoughts of the woman near me. The orgasmic catharsis for me is solitary and maybe selfish. However, in my imagination, idyllic butterflies floated blithely.