Ten Years Gone — An Erotic Reunion by Sean Gerard Leah

 
    T E N   Y E A R S   G O N E
    Part One
     
    I lay on my bed in the hotel at noon, indifferently watching soft-core porn on pay-per-view as I reflected that ten years was far too quick to have gotten stuck in this sorry state. Single. Alone. My dick in my hand as I jacked off and eventually shot with an empty groan onto the towel I’d draped across my stomach.
    I was twenty-eight. I thought about the past a lot. I thought about high school a lot. I thought about how different my life was supposed to be.
    I thought about Mareta. More than I could ever admit.
     
    It must have been May, a month before grad. We were in the storeroom downstairs, just off the student lounge and the parking lot corridor where Mareta and I had been three lockers apart all year. We skipped last class that day, probably physics, because neither of us ever needed an excuse to skip physics. We were in the storeroom to dig through and organize four-dozen boxes of books donated for a grad rummage sale the following week.
    I can’t remember if we volunteered or were drafted by the grad committee for this particular job. Which is to say, I can’t remember whether Mareta volunteered or was drafted. But I was there because I went anywhere Mareta went, as a matter of course.
     
    Mareta was supposed to be the one. Only I never got around to telling her that. Because something happened in between the moment in sophomore year that I first set eyes on her and felt my heart and my hard-on tell me this was the most beautiful, the most engaging girl I’d ever know, and the moment in senior year that I said goodbye to her for the last time. Something really fucking annoying cropped up to get in the way of the intimacy that I felt she and I were destined for, with all my heart and soul.
    Sometime in junior year, Mareta and I became friends. And the most beautiful, most engaging girl I’d ever known went off the menu, leaving me with just my memories. My dreams.
    More than anything else in my life, I remember these dreams. Not the images of things that happened, but of things that could have happened. The memories of the life that should have been.
    When I jacked off at the hotel, it was the memory of all those other memories, not the hotel porn, that got me hard.
    Like they had for the past ten years, it was the memories of everything that could have been that got me off. It was the memories that had kept me going.
     
    In reality, in the truth of what we were, we spent that last period alone in a high-school storeroom talking about nothing, and laughing about nothing. And then it was done, and Mareta said, “Thanks.”
    In the dream, in the fantasy, in the moment of a life unlived that I desperately wish I could go back to, she says, “Thanks.” And then I lean in and kiss her.
    I go gently at first, because I have no expectations. I feel the sense of surprise at her lips, opened as if to say something, but I’m swallowing the words before she has a chance to make them. Then I feel her tongue testing me, answering the passion that tears through me like a shockwave. Then both our tongues are touching, our bodies locked to each other. My hands are at her back, her neck, her incredible ass, anywhere that they can touch down to feel the softness of her.
    “ Check the door,” she whispers, and I stumble away to do so. I shut both locks tight, no chance for anyone to get in. By the time I turn back, she’s pulling her shirt off, shaking out the mahogany tresses of her hair. She presses her hands to her firm tits, packed into a black lace bra. She lifts them, holds them out for me. I’m on my knees in front of her, licking between her breasts, licking her belly as I fumble her bra down. Then I take both her perfect tits in my mouth, one stiffening nipple at a time.
     
    I almost junked the email when it first came in. The Class of 1991!!! — 10th Reunion Celebration!!! complete with all six exclamation marks. Those ten years had been fairly empty ones