The Lift

As I stormed out of his condo and slammed the door behind me I shouted back at him those two little words which so often signal the end of a relationship: FUCK YOU! That discharged about one zillionth of my anger as I stomped past the broken express elevator in the office building/condo.

I pressed the down button on the "local" with fragments of his words reverberating inside my brain: Wife . . . Reconciliation . . . Mistake. I had worn my sexiest outfit and had arrived feeling horny. What was supposed to be a passionate night ended in the first five minutes.

I stepped into the elevator and, in a desperate attempt to find solace in the familiar, stared hard at the numbers as it began to descend. The elevator stopped and someone got on. I did not even glance at whoever it was, but stayed fixed on the numbers as they counted down the wrenching end of a chapter in my life.

It started again and the numbers read 43, 42, 41, 40 and then, suddenly, the elevator jolted to a halt and all the lights went out. I was too angry to be scared and blurted out "this fucking elevator is all I need."

A soft woman's voice said, very quietly, "we would say this fucking lift."

With all my inner turmoil that didn't register at all. I said "pardon?"

She said "I'm from England. We call this a lift. I was trying to make a joke."

I was certainly in no mood for word games. The elevator, which was supposed to be putting distance between me and Mr. Richfuck, had entombed me in his building with nothing but my anger and my thoughts. Nothing was said for a few minutes and I kept waiting for my eyes to get accustomed to the darkness. They never did. There was not a speck of light anywhere. I was stuck in a place as dark as the bottom pit of Hell. The sheer appropriateness of the metaphor put the flicker of an invisible smile on my face.

"My name is Karen," I said into the darkness.

"Mine's Rachel," she replied in a lilting British accent which charmed me despite my current lack of inclination to be charmed by anyone or anything.

The conversational coast was now clear and we probed for things to talk about while we waited for rescue from this forced acquaintanceship. I told her about the broad details of my life -- job, apartment, pets, hobbies. I left out Mr. Richfuck. She filled me in on her particulars. She was in the building receiving training at her company's head office and would be flying out of Kennedy the next morning. "If I ever get out of here," she said with a smile that I could hear but not see.

We chitchatted for a while longer neither probing nor exposing. We expected the lights to come back on any minute and to spend very little additional time with each other.

Suddenly we stopped talking as we heard a man's voice from what seemed like far away. Although the voice was faint we could tell that he was shouting.

"We know that you are stuck between 39 and 40. You are safe. Don't worry. There is no chance that the elevator will fall. There has been a failure in one of the transformers feeding power to the building. It is very old and it will be necessary to fly in replacement parts from Detroit. I'm sorry, but we estimate it will take at least three hours. If you can hear me bang on the side of the cab."

Each of us banged on the nearest wall as hard as we could.

"Good," the voice said, "I could here that. Just sit tight. We are sorry and will get you out of there as quick as we can."

We voiced relief to each other and then suddenly the reality set in. Three more hours in the darkest loneliest place either of us had ever been.

"I'm sitting down," she said and I felt a gentle bump as she sat. "Me too," I said. I gave a moment's thought to the effect of three hours of sitting on my outfit and then laughed at myself. For whom, exactly, did I need to look good?

There was silence for a while longer and then, involuntarily, my mind turned back to Mr. Richfuck. I went from white hot anger to despair and suddenly dissolved into loud keening sobs.

"What's wrong?" asked Rachel with obvious concern. I only sobbed louder and felt the stinging tears pouring from my eyes. I heard a gentle rustling sound and then she was holding me in her arms and rocking me like a little child as I cried and cried and cried.

After a while the crying stopped and she let go of me but I could feel that she was near. The whole sordid tale poured out of me. The meeting. The courtship. The sex. And finally the betrayal. I concluded my tirade with the formula of words that women have used since time immemorial to bring such a story to its conclusion: "you know how men are."

"Actually I don't," she said.

The central processing unit in my brain sent out a big error message. Her answer wouldn't compute.

"You don't?" I said.

"I'm a lesbian," she replied.

That computed just fine, but my brain had no idea what to do with that startling piece of information. The best I could come up with at that moment was "a lesbian?"

"Yes," she said.

That certainly launched the conversation in a different direction. Mercifully, it completely pushed Mr. Richfuck from my mind as we talked and talked and talked about her life. She told me about her lover and the seven years they had been together. She opened up to me completely about her needs and her passions and her fears. I asked her about their lovemaking and she told me how she and her lover would lie together and oh so slowly arouse each other in a hundred different ways and then make love as if there were no time or space.

As she talked I noticed I was getting wet between my legs. My mind tried to block that out. But the warmth soon became a throbbing and my entire body became enveloped in what was clearly sexual arousal.

She reached the end of her story and we sat silent. My mind was in turmoil. I began to remember women I had known and the powerful feelings they had stirred in me which were at this instant beginning to take on a new meaning. I thought about naked girls in the locker room in high school and their tits and pubic hair. I thought about the women in my office with their sleek bodies and their black hose and high heels. I thought of the x-rated films I had watched with boyfriends and suddenly realized that I had looked only at the bodies of the women.

Then something happened inside my brain. Some switch was thrown and electricity which had flowed in one direction suddenly reversed itself. All those women flashed before me again and now the throbbing between my legs became an ache. I could sense Rachel nearby and smell her perfume and hear the sound of her breathing.

Slowly I turned toward her and groped in the pitch darkness to find her. I put my arms around her and pulled her toward me and tried to kiss her. She gently stopped me.

"I can't," she said. "You are sweet and heavenly and I feel very deeply for what you have gone through, but my lover and I have pledged to be faithful to each other and I must live by that pledge."

I leaned back from her and tried to control myself. She had confided in me completely and I needed to use all of my will to force myself to respect her relationship.

In a rather formal sounding voice I said "please accept my apology. I don't know what came over me." She could not see the tears streaming down my cheeks.

"It's O.K." she said in a tiny voice. "I know you meant no harm."

We sat apart for several more minutes in the pitch blackness and my brain retraced more slowly the ground it had touched on before. The naked girls in the locker room. Their pendulous breasts, their pink nipples, the curve of their hips and their triangle of public hair. I realized that the feelings I was having at that moment were now forever a part of me. The beauty and the power and the lushness of women's bodies flooded over me. I felt an excitement and a longing that I had never felt before.

Then, imperceptibly, I sensed a movement. Suddenly her arms were around me and she hungrily put her mouth on mine. Electricity shot through me and I could feel my body responding. She kissed my ears, my eyes, my neck and then my mouth again. We explored each other hungrily with our tongues.

I pulled my dress over my head. We then kissed deeply again and nuzzled each others ears and necks. I was utterly defenseless. Nothing in the world existed except my powerful sexual hunger.

She reached around and unhooked my bra. She told me to lie down on the carpeted elevator floor. She was gone for a moment and I could hear a small popping sound as she pulled out the emergency stop on the control panel. "We won't want to be interrupted" she said with another smile in her voice.

She came back and groped until she found my legs. She sucked on my toes through my stockings and then ran her tongue up my ankle to my calf. She then shifted her body to find my breasts and licked and sucked my nipples as I moaned with arousal and pleasure.

She moved down again and I opened my legs wide. She put her tongue above my knee and then began to give me little kisses as she moved toward my pussy. Then her mouth met skin and she let out a squeal of delight. I had worn a garter belt and my cunt was open, waiting and dripping wet.

She gently moved up to my pussy lips and licked them. Then she moved to my pubic hair and kissed it and rubbed her face in it. I was now crazy with desire and unthinkingly reached down and took her head in my hands and pushed her face into my cunt.

She knew that I desperately needed to come and moved to my clit. She licked it gently and then harder and then gently again. I was starting to thrust my hips toward her involuntarily and she put her hands under my rear to steady me. Then she began to lick my clit in earnest and I could feel everything between my legs beginning to dissolve toward a climax. Sensing that, she slid her fingers into my hot wet swollen cunt and started to fuck me.

That pushed me over the brink and I started to come. It was a huge shuddering orgasm far more powerful and sustained than anything I had ever felt in my life. Waves of pleasure washed over me again and again as she continued her licking and hard thrusting. Then it started to subside and she stopped, but left her hand deliciously inside me and let me enjoy the feeling of fullness and connection.

I lay back and my entire body tingled with utter satisfaction. Then I slowly became conscious of where I was and felt her lying beside me. I reached over to make love to her, but she said "I have already betrayed my lover and must not make it worse. I can't begin to tell you how badly I want you, but I must not let you touch me. Please understand."

I told her I understood. Soon I heard new sounds and could tell that she was masturbating. She started to moan and I could tell that making love to me had aroused her to a fever pitch. It was a new and thrilling experience for me to hear the sound of a woman making love to herself in the pitch darkness and total silence.

Her moans became louder and louder and her breaths rushed in and out of her. I could hear the wet sounds she made as her hand rubbed her cunt faster and faster. Then she started to come and whimpered as the tension between her legs erupted into waves and waves of pleasure. I listened with joy in my heart as the excitement of being with me made her come again and again. Soon the only sound was her hard breathing and tiny moans of pleasure.

We lay there for a while, but soon reality began to intrude and we realized that we had lost any sense of time. We giggled like schoolgirls as we hunted around in the dark for our clothes and tried to put everything on right side up. When we felt more or less reassembled Rachel pushed the emergency stop back in with another pop.

We lay beside each other in each others arms and talked about my new feelings and the promise of my new life. Then suddenly the lights came back on blinding us. We stood up and the elevator began to descend. I finally got to see what she looked like and she was as beautiful as I ever could have imagined with freckles, laughing green eyes and sandy hair.

When the elevator doors opened on the ground floor the waiting emergency personnel were greeted by the sight of the two of us hugging each other hard and crying on each other's shoulders. I am sure they thought that we were crying because they had rescued us, but we were crying because Rachel had rescued me.

We exchanged addresses and went our separate ways. We became faithful correspondents and I told her all about the women in my life and my wonderful discoveries about making love. She offered me encouragement when I needed it and solace when a relationship was not going well.

About a year later I received a letter from her in which she said that she was heartbroken because her lover had decided to leave her. She told me that she was thinking about asking for a transfer to her company's New York office and wondered what I thought of that. I wrote and told her I was thrilled at the idea. And if they couldn't find a way to send her to me I would find a way to go to her. And I couldn't resist adding that the two of us definitely needed a lift.