The Cougar Book Read online

  The Cougar

  Book

  Edited by Jolie du Pré

  ISBN: 978-1905091-57-7

  Digital (eBook) version

  Published by Logical-Lust Publications © 2010

  Cover image by Helen E. H. Madden, pixelarcana.com

  © Logical-Lust Publications 2010

  Additional editing by Zetta Brown

  eBook layout and conversion by jimandzetta.com

  The Cougar Book is a collection of works of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents are entirely the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this or any copyrighted work is illegal. File sharing is an International crime, prosecuted by the enforcement agencies of the United States, UK, and the European Union, in partnership with Interpol. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is punishable to the full extent of the law in the country of the offence.

  “It's cool to date an older woman today.”

  -- Valerie Gibson

  Introduction

  Cougars and sex. It’s as perfect and natural a combination as, say, coffee and cream and just as delicious.

  People may ask (and they do) what it is that makes cougars so attractive to younger men and, apart from the long list that includes independence, sophistication, intelligence, experience of life and being a free spirit, one of the most exciting and attractive assets, not only to younger men but all men, is that cougars love sex.

  Perhaps most important, they’re skilled—and creative—in the sexual arts . . .

  They love to make love and enjoy it for what it is—a joyful, satisfying, energizing, and life-enhancing activity that keeps you youthful and vital. What’s more, it’s fun!

  It’s a rare and precious attribute for any woman, but when it comes with enthusiasm and few strings attached? Priceless!

  No wonder the cougar trend, which I set in motion at the beginning of the millennium, is now being spearheaded, so to speak, by the younger men who are in hot pursuit of sexy cougars all over the world.

  And the women who embrace “cougardom” openly without fear or reservation, are, in fact, pioneering a new social phenomenon—prime women not only acknowledging their continuing sensuality and sexuality, but embracing it wholeheartedly.

  It may have taken centuries, but their time has certainly come!

  VALERIE GIBSON

  Relationships expert, writer, television host and author of Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men

  www.valeriegibson.com

  Contents

  Boston. Breasts. Bohemian.

  What Pretty Girls Do

  Whisky Spread

  Spring Training

  Labeled

  Adrian’s Lover

  Comfort Food

  Illicit Desires

  Too Many Buffalo

  Get Up, Stand Up!

  Sally Jean, the Dishroom Queen

  A Taste of Ginger

  Illicit Intentions

  Shelly’s Mom

  Cruising for C-men

  A Great Commute

  Sherry

  Mine for the Night

  To Make It That Way

  Her Apolonio Smile

  You Just Might Get It

  Inter-Office Men-O

  Deep Waters

  About the Authors

  About the Editor

  Acknowledgments

  Other books by Logical-Lust

  Boston. Breasts. Bohemian.

  Jeremy Edwards

  I was an aesthete, not a power seeker. Why did so many people rush to assume that a successful female entrepreneur was in it for the power? Sure, I didn’t want to be held back . . . but I hungered to express my talents and make a more beautiful world, not to warm a throne with my ass and give orders.

  Likewise with my young men—my bohemians. People saw a polished, well-turned-out businesswoman in her forties with sweet, shaggy boys hardly out of college, and they assumed it was a power thing, or a status thing. Hell, no. It was an aesthetic thing with me. They were just so pretty—not only their baby-faced faces and their silly hair, but also their personalities, all wrapped up in the awkwardness of make-believe sophistication, or brightly bare in their un-self-conscious charisma.

  I was never taken with the ambitious ones. Even if they were nice . . . even if I judged that their interest in bedding me had nothing to do with their career aspirations . . . I simply didn’t respond to their suits, their calculating punctuality, and their disconcertingly smooth adaptation to the yuppie milieu of 1980s Back Bay Boston. Damn it, a twenty-two-year-old—male or female—should not look totally natural with a briefcase, I thought.

  No, I liked the guys with the ratty knapsacks. The guys who weren’t sure when or when not to drink at lunchtime; who didn’t see that as cool as their thrift-store vintage jackets looked on the hanger, they didn’t fit right; who still believed, thank goodness, that it was their art or writing or music that mattered, and not getting to the “day job” five minutes early—and who would say so out loud in their cubicles, being too naïve to realize I listened from my open-door office around the corner. They figured I disapproved of their chronic tardiness and forgave them; but in reality I loved them for it. It made me want to fuck them. It aroused what had never died in me, no matter how many meetings I had to take with marketing people and accountants and lawyers: my passion for beauty. And my passion for young men who really, really cared about something—who weren’t, for instance, too occupied or tired or lazy to go see some incredibly important underground band I’d never heard of on a Wednesday night, even if it meant they had to walk home afterward and get shortchanged on sleep. I had no intention of listening to the latest “amazing” album, but I wanted to know my bohemians bought it the day it came out.

  And I would have set my alarm and driven to Kenmore Square to pick any one of these boys up after a concert, at 2 a.m. on any Wednesday he liked. But then, I suppose, he would have been even more shortchanged on sleep.

  For the ones who wanted me as much as I wanted them, I tried to project what they desired in me. Self-assurance. Stability. Poise. Savoir-faire. I tried to give them the complete grown-up woman—a soft, fleshy rock of adulthood, sculpted into a svelte hourglass.

  It’s odd to recall that Ned did not seem especially pretty to me that first morning when he showed up for work at my art-book publishing house. He’d been hired by my editor as one of the three all-purpose proofreaders/rights researchers/caption writers he always kept on hand—our version of an entry-level position. I was comfortable letting Bill do his own hiring, so I never met his assistants until they were already on the payroll.

  Shaggy was great, but Ned’s straw-blond hair verged on unkempt. And since his eyes refused to meet mine while I was doling out his paperwork, and his head refused to orient itself away from the sight line to his shoes after I’d collected the completed forms, the hair was practically all I got—that, and a thin, cute ass in nondescript jeans, as observed when I followed him out of my office.

  The first thing Ned did when he’d been assigned a cubicle was put a cartoon up on the wall. I winced—tape marks!—but when I read it over his shoulder and he volunteered that he’d created it himself, I got a squishy sensation in my belly. The cartoon showed a woman declining, as I inferred from the bubbles, champagne (served in what Ned presumably didn’t realize was the wrong kind of glass), and saying to her male companion, “Yes, Frank, I know that was a good year. It’s just that I’m not ready to relive it yet.” Frank. If I’d encountered this in the New Yorker, I might not even have lingered to bemoan the
ir sagging standards. But standing almost on top of the boy who’d taken the trouble to draw this slim idea—smelling the youthful, citrusy essence of this kid who’d risked ruining a cubicle wall his first day on the job in order to display his work—all I could feel was admiration. Admiration and a warm tingling between my legs. Suddenly, I was very interested in Ned.

  “Sorry about the breasts,” he said nervously, stepping to the side so he could face me. I took a peek at the cartoon lady’s cleavage, which I hadn’t noticed before. “I didn’t mean to draw them so large. I don’t want people to decide I’m one of those guys who thinks a woman amounts to a set of breasts.”

  I felt a flush in my own, relatively generous, chest. “It’s okay, Ned. Hey, women have breasts. And breasts are nice, right?” I laughed, more self-consciously than I was used to in my workplace. In my time, a parade of seasoned men, my peers, had tried to flirt and banter and grope me into losing my cool at the office—had tried to make the always-in-control goddess blush or stammer or run off to change her panties. They had all failed. But poor Ned was nearly succeeding, without even intending to. The sincere way he both cared and didn’t care about the size of his cartoon character’s bust seemed to tug at my nipples and tickle my clit.

  “Some of us have larger ones than others,” I continued, masking my flutteriness with a reassuring, didactically matriarchal tone, and trusting that my injection of self-referential language wouldn’t completely give away my agenda—yet. “You happened to draw one such woman.”

  He gave me a sensitive, tentative-looking smile, and that’s when I understood that his face was capable of more complexity than silently framing the question, “What time is lunch?” I was about to ask him—I don’t know—about his life, what he’d liked best in college, about his family . . . but he spoke again before the words formed.

  “What time is lunch?”

  In fact, it was my policy to take a new hire out to lunch on his or her first day—just the two of us. These kids worked closely with Bill day in and day out, with a healthy share of collegial staff lunches sprinkled over their tenure; but I wasn’t involved in any of that. I welcomed them in and had little directly to do with them thereafter—unless I chose to offer extracurricular attention, and they chose to accept it.

  Spending an hour alone in a quasi-social situation with a publishing-world rookie could be anything from a cougar’s wet dream to a nightmare of stifling silences. But whether it proved, from case to case, to be drudgery or delight, it was a non-negotiable duty that I’d long ago assigned myself.

  This morning, I was so eager for “lunch” that I couldn’t focus on the contracts I was supposed to be reviewing. Fifteen minutes before I was due to meet Ned in the foyer, I finally stopped trying to concentrate. I gave myself a booster shot of perfume in front of the mirror in my private bathroom, and I went to bother Bill with interoffice chitchat, merely as a diversion.

  It had long been my philosophy that if I was going to come on to an employee, I should do it at the outset. Things are less complicated when your young man hasn’t yet breathed much of the company air—when you’re still more an intriguing older woman than a familiar edifice looming on the skyline, engraved with the gray legend BOSS.

  I knew how to broach the matter, having done it many times—sometimes in this very restaurant. Step One—ascertaining that he was single in the real-world sense, and not only in the IRS-form sense, had been taken even before the server brought our water.

  I let the conversation wander naturally as we awaited our meals. Once they’d arrived and we’d begun eating, I proceeded.

  “I’m so glad to have a chance to get to know you a little, Ned, before you get immersed in the hectic routine with Bill and the gang.”

  “Uh,” said Ned, nodding graciously.

  “I’m usually in a whirlwind of my own. You’ll be happy to learn that you won’t see a lot of me after today.”

  I gave him my seductive stage-chuckle. Then I gave him my standard three-beat pause, before continuing.

  “Unless we get together outside the office, of course.”

  No pause this time—momentum was key here. “This has nothing to do with your job, and there’s no wrong answer . . . but I was wondering if you might like to join me at my place for dinner some night soon. I’ve been in the mood to cook lately.” I winked. Subtlety was not the way to go with these boys. It was important to be unambiguously bold, and to refuse to be daunted by the possibility of a brush-off.

  He stared at me as if sizing me up for the first time. “Ms. Bruxelle, you’re my employer,” he said slowly. I’d certainly heard that before, at this stage of the proceedings—though it wasn’t articulated as often as you might think. One had a tendency to catch on that at Bruxelle Art Books, we didn’t stand on ceremony.

  “So what?” I said, calling into service my most laissez-faire body language—the devil-may-care cock of the head, the flirtatious, mock-dismissive wave of the hand. “I’ve frequently—mm . . . socialized—with my employees.”

  He ate a bit of his omelet. “I don’t know whether that should make me more or less concerned.”

  He wasn’t attempting to be witty—he meant it. Damn, I adored men who didn’t always know what to think right away. They let you breathe.

  It was part of my ethos to be assertive, but never aggressive. “Anyway—for what it’s worth—I’m not really your boss. Bill is really your boss.” I tossed this dubious technicality his way as a peripheral remark, and then changed the subject temporarily to take the pressure off. “How’s your omelet?” Fuck, I was wet. The kid wasn’t doing anything, but that in itself was doing everything to my insides.

  It was funny to think that in Ned’s eyes, I probably appeared cool as a cucumber—as I intended to. He probably assumed I could do this in my sleep. After all, why would it ever occur to him that a self-actualized, experienced woman at the top of her erotic game got butterflies—that she sometimes had an impulse to run to her room and hide her head beneath pillows, crying with embarrassment even while furiously masturbating off her screaming sexual tension? I never ran, but that didn’t mean I never thought about it.

  Ned kept eating. He began to speak—and then hesitated—wiping his mouth with the napkin an extra, unnecessary, time before breaking the silence. “I don’t know, Ms. Bruxelle.” It was obvious he wasn’t addressing the “how are your eggs?” issue.

  “Claudia.” That part wasn’t seduction—nobody called me Ms. Bruxelle, except people trying to sell us advertising.

  “I guess it’s not the boss thing.” He looked at me with uncompromising innocence, his gaze steady and clear. “But . . . seriously? You want me to . . . y’know, come over to your house?”

  “I wouldn’t have invited you if I didn’t.”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “Can I think it over?”

  Of course he could. And that night, while Ned presumably thought it over, “Ms. Bruxelle” gave herself seven fantastic orgasms, riding a vibrator and visualizing the face of this man who was too casual to have recited the “it’s not that I don’t find you attractive” speech.

  But something told me that it really wasn’t that he didn’t find me attractive—that despite the layers of surprise and wariness, Ned had been looking at me with a three-dimensional appetite idling portentously in the background. That steady gaze. It bore into me, in absentia, in my bedroom, as my cunt danced contractions over hot sheets and I banged my ankles together, whimpering my lust.

  The company’s tenth-anniversary party happened to be scheduled for the weekend right after Ned started. And when I brought this up the day following our lunch, I was afraid he might inform me that he already had plans. But one of the things I treasured about my bohemians was that they almost never had firm plans for anything. As was typical of these boys, Ned had “a few” parties he was thinking of attending that Saturday, but nothing definite on his agenda.

  “Well,” I assured him, successfully keeping the college-girl longing
out of my voice, “you’re not obligated to attend. But I’ll be delighted if you can.” After throwing the singular pronoun his way—I rather than we—I allowed my eyes to flash him for an instant. Don’t forget: Sex here, my bohemian boy—if you want it.

  As I skated back into my office, I wondered if he had been as wakeful and auto-erotically engaged as I had the night before. Had he dreamed cartoonishly of my breasts? In any event, I’d been with enough young artists to accept that “Maybe I’ll be there” was the closest I was going to get to an R.S.V.P., and I forced myself to assume optimistically that Ned would be at my disposal on Saturday evening—and perhaps, if I was lucky, on Saturday night.

  A party like this was a whopping expenditure. But in the circles I traveled, we understood that additional business would result from the friendly bookstore-chain buyers we plied with friendly drinks, as well as the difficult-to-court customers who couldn’t resist a free, classy affair and who were bound to find things they liked once our catalogs were shoved under their noses.

  As the charismatic, impassioned, but business-shrewd CEO, I was center stage most of the evening. Ned had arrived soon after the affair had begun—looking even more rumpled in his “nice” clothes than his clumsy-vintage duds—but it was hours before I was able to break away from the latest round of schmoozing, grab a plate of food, and casually float him toward the back rooms in the “rent for your function” Victorian we’d taken over for our celebration. I was, ostensibly, giving him a tour.

  We nearly walked in on Bill and his fiancée. I halted myself—and Ned—in the doorway of the sprawling back parlor, just in time to keep them from realizing they’d been interrupted.

  Only they hadn’t, in fact, been interrupted—because, deep in the parlor and oblivious to our presence, they proceeded with their business. Good old Bill had Felicia’s long, elegant skirt up at the back, and he was lazily fondling her mauve panties, just massaging her ass in there . . . showing her how private he wished to be with her, how intimate, despite the call of the festivities. Felicia, serene and content, was holding her drink right below her lips, and mouthing involuntary kisses toward a mirror. And, involuntarily, I felt my lips yearning to imitate those quiet kisses, and my ass yearning for a roaming hand.