The summer heat was intolerable. Lisa, returning home from a long workday, was stripping off her top almost before the apartment door closed behind her. She was tired, hungry, and just plain uncomfortable: the heat and humidity were bad enough, but on a day like today they were compounded, reflected, and magnified by a thousand other bodies waiting, for too long, on a sweltering subway platform.

Lisa turned on the taps in the tub, drawing a bath against the hot day and the sticky August night. She dropped her clothes in the hamper and slipped into the cool water, feeling herself relax in a wave: it started at her feet and rose up her length as she slid it, slowly and deliberately, below the waterline. She closed her eyes, pulled the water over her face with her cupped hands, and rubbed at her makeup. She knew she was making an awful mess, but it didn’t matter: she was in for the night, she’d wash it all off when she got out of the tub. She opened her eyes and looked down the length of her body, floating just beneath the shimmering surface so that it seemed, just for a moment, to be shimmering on its own. She touched her breasts, watched them wiggle and wave, and slowly moved her hands, palms flat against herself, as far as they could reach. She stretched, ran her left hand across her taught belly and back, and then up again to her puckered nipple. Her right, she stretched southward and between her legs, touching herself lightly at first, the way a new lover might delicately explore before plunging ahead.

She closed her eyes, imagining that the hands touching her belonged, not to her, but to another: the thumb and forefinger clamped on her nipple; the hand closing over her breast; the fingers that pushed at her sex, gently and then with increasing vigor. She slid a finger in, and then two; convinced, with her eyes closed, that she was not alone. Her breathing changed, became more ragged, changing pace frequently as she focused on different areas of pleasure. She wanted it to last; she wanted to come, in wave after wave, the spasms overlapping like the wake from a passing boat. She focused her mind on her nipple, now sore with pleasure, and imagined his mouth pulling at it: warm lips, a tongue, the gentle-sharp press of teeth. The bite bore harder now, the pleasure sliding into pain and then back, and Lisa felt something fire between her breast and her pussy, as if the two were not separated by eighteen inches of flesh and bone, of blood and nerve, of adipose and organs. At this realization, her fingers closed harder, though she hadn’t thought it possible, and she felt the pressure build again. Another squeeze, and twist, and she felt the dam begin to burst, a flood of sensation that nearly overwhelmed her.

Gasping for air, Lisa shuddered and went slack in the tub, the cool water suddenly cold and
uncomfortable. She reached weakly for the faucet, turned the water to hot and stood, unsteadily, under the steaming shower. Slowly, life returned to her limbs; she could still feel her heart pounding, could remember vividly every sensation of this latest encounter with the man of her imagination, of her dreams, of her coffee-break reveries. She washed her hair, slipped out of the shower and into her robe, rubbing herself dry a little too harshly to restimulate her overstimulated areolae. She rushed to her computer, checked her email to see if there were any answers to her latest ad.

A few, but none seemed suitable. She would have to wait a little longer, though the wait, like the summer heat, was at times unbearable.