Odile found it by accident, scrolling through her phone for a recipe.
It was in a folder called Drafts, dated three winters ago. It was nine lines long and addressed to a man named Marek. She had met him once at a pottery class and thought about him a good deal since.
She had written it one night after a glass of wine, and she had never sent it. She read it standing in her kitchen, in her old gray robe. The kettle was starting to hum.
It was shameless. It was funny. It said, in plain and tender words, exactly what she wanted to do to him with her mouth, and exactly how slowly.
Her face went hot. Her belly went warm. She laughed once, a small, startled sound, and stood very still.
It was ten at night, and she was forty-six years old. The woman who had written that message had been braver than she had been in years.
She carried the phone to bed. She turned off the lamp and left the little lantern on. She slid under the sheet in her thin black slip and lay back against the pillows.
She read the message again, slowly, one line at a time, as if a stranger had sent it. Then she pressed send.
The little whoosh seemed very loud. She put the phone face down on her chest and breathed.
It buzzed in less than a minute.
“Odile,” Marek had written. “I have been waiting three years for you to say something like that. Where are you right now?”
Her heart went off like a drum. She typed with one thumb. “In bed.
In a black slip. Alone.”
“What are you doing with your other hand?”
She looked at it. It was lying on her belly. She had not even noticed it sliding lower. She wrote, “Nothing yet.”
“Yet,” he wrote. A moment later: “Tell me where it is.”
She told him. Her fingers had found the hem of her slip and the warm, bare skin of her thigh. She felt each word she typed ripple through her like a plucked string.
“On my thigh. Moving up.”
“Slowly,” he wrote.
“Very slowly.”
She slid her hand beneath the silk. Her kitty was already slick and swollen, and she gasped, softly, in the dark. Her button was hot and eager under her fingertip. She circled it, slow and wet.
With her other thumb she typed, “You would not believe how ready I am.”
His answer made her whole body clench. It was short and filthy and kind. It told her exactly what he would do if he were there. She read it with her hips lifting off the sheet.
“Tell me what you feel,” he wrote.
She wrote, between breaths, in half sentences. Heat. Slick.
Slow circles. The way her thighs trembled when she pressed. The edge of the sheet, damp under her.
She did not stop to fix a single word. Every one of them poured out of her honest and bright.
His replies came faster, shorter, ragged at the edges. He was touching himself too. He told her so, in plain words.
She thought of him across town in a dark room, his hand moving and his eyes on a glowing screen. The thought tipped her right to the brink.
“Do not stop,” he wrote.
“I am not going to.”
She dropped the phone onto the pillow beside her face and read the last line out loud, in a whisper, to the ceiling. Her fingers quickened. Her free hand found her breast through the silk.
The tug came, low and deep. She held herself right there, a breath, another, trembling. The lantern threw gold across the wall.
Then she broke. It rolled through her in wave after thick, shuddering wave. She cried out, loud and unashamed, into the empty room. Her heels dug into the mattress and her whole body arched up off the bed.
The phone buzzed against her cheek again and again. She laughed in the middle of it, helplessly, with tears in her eyes.
It eased at last. She lay boneless, listening to her own breath slow down.
The phone buzzed once more. She lifted it above her face and squinted at the glare.
“Same time tomorrow?” Marek had written. And then, a second later: “Or I could just come over.”
Odile smiled up at the dark.
“Tomorrow,” she wrote. “Bring the pottery.”