Piano Lessons

Cal's fault, technically. I want to establish.

I'd texted him *picking me up from Cambridge Road, yeah* because we had five-a-side at half six and I'd forgotten to say don't come to the door, and I'd forgotten because Miss Carver had her hand on mine at bar three and I'd stopped being able to operate a phone.

So.

---

We were at the piano. Thirty minutes of Clementi, then she'd said *that's enough of that* in a tone that wasn't about Clementi, and the sheet music went on the floor and she'd turned on the stool and looked at me the way she had a habit of looking at me, patient and faintly amused, like I was a problem she'd already worked out.

I kissed her first. She let me, and then took over, which was how it usually went.

She'd got my shirt untucked by the time I got her up on the piano, which took some doing because she didn't rush for me, she just allowed things in her own order. Her skirt was a pencil skirt, navy, and it didn't go easily and she didn't help and then it did go and her knickers came with it and she was sitting on top of the piano in her blouse and her stockings and her glasses and nothing else and I stood between her knees and thought, not for the first time: forty-five. Married. Has a daughter who started at sixth form the same year I did.

She reached forward and got my belt open in about four seconds.

'You've been thinking about this since bar two,' she said.

'Bar one.'

She smiled. The good one. Like she was giving you something she didn't give everyone.

She pulled the blouse over her head and dropped it and I just looked for a moment because she was worth looking at. Lovely tits, properly full and heavy in a way that moved when she moved, nipples already hard in the cool of the room, and below that the skirt rucked up around her hips and the stockings and a neat strip of grey where they stopped, trimmed close. She watched me look with that patient satisfied expression like she'd known exactly what my face would do.

I got my mouth on her. Her hand went into my hair and held me there. Not guiding. Just keeping me.

'Other one,' she said, after a while.

I moved across. She arched into it and made a sound she didn't usually make that early, something that wasn't quite controlled, and her hand tightened in my hair, and I stayed there until she told me to stop, which took a while.

The composure was losing the argument with the rest of her, the way it always eventually did. Her thighs came round my shoulders, soft and warm and completely insistent, and I thought: filing this. Wank bank, permanent residence.

When I finally got into her she was wet enough that the first push went all the way, and she drew a short breath and said, very quietly: 'there.' Not to me. Just confirming something to herself. I held still for a moment because the specific feeling of her was worth registering. She put her ankles round the back of my legs and her hands on my shoulders and her forehead against mine and I could feel how much she wanted it, the actual physical fact of it, which still surprised me every time because she was so controlled everywhere else. She moved first, then let me take over, and the room filled with her perfume and the sound of the piano against the wall and her breathing losing its shape. Every stroke pulled the same sound from her, bitten back, almost there, and she dug her fingers into my shoulders and said harder and I gave her harder and she stopped biting it back. I was so far into what was happening that I didn't hear the door.

---

Cal walked in wearing his full Riverside FC kit, shin pads, the lot, carrying a Lidl bag with his boots in, and stopped.

Miss Carver looked over my shoulder at him.

She did not stop what she was doing.

She looked at him the way you look at someone who's knocked on the wrong door, calm and slightly assessing, and then looked back at me. 'Friend of yours.'

'Yeah. Sorry.'

'Don't apologize.' She looked at Cal. 'Close the door.'

He closed it. He was still holding the Lidl bag. His face had gone completely blank in a way I'd never seen on Cal, all the usual settings, the grin, the angles, the confidence, temporarily suspended.

'We've got five-a-side,' I said. I don't know why I said this.

'I can see you're -- yeah,' Cal said. Then, after a pause that had a lot going on in it: 'Leave the stockings on.'

Miss Carver looked at him over my shoulder.

A beat. Two.

'Yes,' she said. Flat. Like confirming something she'd already suspected.

Something moved in her expression. No surprise, more like recalibration. The way she looked at a new piece when she'd already worked out what it needed.

'You can go,' she said, 'or you can stay. But if you stay, put the bag down.'

He put the bag down.

---

Cal's face.

I will keep that. The specific moment he understood she meant it. The grin is trying to come back and not quite making it, something more unguarded getting there first.

She got down off the piano, unhurried, and looked at us both.

'Well,' she said. 'Here we are.' She picked up the sheet music from the floor, set it back on the stand, and turned the page. 'Finn. Bar one.'

'Sorry?'

She sat on the second chair and crossed her legs. 'Play.'

I sat down and played. Bar one, bar two, bar three wrong as always. Cal stood behind me in his football kit with his shin pads on, trying to work out the rules of whatever this was and coming up empty.

She stood after bar four, came to me, put her hand on my shoulder. Looked at Cal.

'Come here.'

He came. She put him on the bench beside me, two of us shoulder to shoulder with our knees under the piano, and she stood in front of us with her arms folded and her glasses doing what they do.

Then she leaned forward, hands on both our knees. 'Show me bar four.'

Neither of us played bar four.

She looked at Cal. 'Nervous?'

'No,' he said. Not convincingly.

She took his chin in her hand, tilted it up, and kissed him once, precisely, like a full stop. His hand went to her waist and she stepped back out of it.

'Hands on the keys,' she said.

Nobody moved. The three of us in that room with the sprinkler going outside and the sheet music on the stand and the only honest thing was that nobody was pretending anymore.

Then she looked at us both and that was that.

---

She had his shirt off first, standing in front of him, looking him over without embarrassment. Ran one hand flat down his chest. 'Well,' she said quietly, to herself. Then she looked at me. 'You. Behind me.'

I got behind her. She reached back, took my hand, put it on her breast. 'Stay there.'

She got Cal's shorts down, looked at what Riverside FC had going on, which turned out to be not bad at all, took his cock in hand and looked back at me over her shoulder. 'Don't just stand there.'

I wasn't just standing there.

I pushed into her from behind and she steadied herself against Cal's chest and made a low sound that had nothing polite in it. I felt her take a breath and then press back onto me, working out the angle, settling into it, and then she got her mouth on him and I felt the shift in her immediately, the way having both of us changed the quality of her attention, less patient, more urgent. She pushed back onto me with every stroke and I had her properly now, both hands on her hips, the full length going in every time, and the sounds she was making were not the sounds of a woman maintaining composure.

He looked at me over her head: are you also aware this is actually happening.

I was aware.

She came up off Cal and looked back at me, glasses askew. 'You feel good,' she said, in the same tone she'd use to confirm a correct fingering. 'Don't stop.' Then she looked at Cal. 'Deeper.'

He obliged.

She took it and pushed back onto me at the same time and said, mostly to herself: 'yes, that's it.' I had her tits in both hands and she was soaked around me, every stroke easy and deep, and she was working both of us with that focused efficiency she brought to everything, not frantic, not performing, just absolutely certain of what she wanted and going about getting it.

'Harder,' she said to me, over her shoulder. 'I want to feel it properly.'

I gave her harder.

'Good boy.'

She went back down on Cal and he pushed and she took the lot and her whole body moved with it, and I pushed too, and we had her properly between us. She managed it all with the same calm certainty she brought to everything. Not overwhelmed. In charge.

Then she sat back, off Cal, and lowered herself to the rug. I followed her down, still inside her, and she settled onto her side and extended one leg toward him. Pointed her foot at Cal, nylon toe first, and waited.

Cal took her foot in both hands. He has good hands, actually, I'd never clocked that before, the kind that look like they know what they're doing. Lifted it maybe ten inches off the rug and put his mouth on her toes through the stocking. The sound that came out of him was not something I was ready for.

She watched him over her glasses. Said nothing. Filed it.

I had her tits in my hands and she was pushing back onto me and Cal had moved from her toes to her arch, working it properly, and then he sat back slightly and gripped his cock toward the head. So he wasn't crashing into her foot on the down-stroke, I noticed. Which told you everything about how long he'd been thinking about this. He held her sole to the base of himself with the concentration of a man making his case.

I watched him for a moment and felt something I hadn't expected, which was not jealousy exactly but something adjacent to it. Like seeing a room in a house you thought you knew.

I lasted about four seconds before I said anything.

'That is genuinely so hot.'

Miss Carver: 'Mmmm.'

Which was not nothing, coming from her.

He was close. You could hear it in his breathing, feel the shift in the room. Then he looked up at her and his voice came out three notes lower:

'I'm gonna come.'

She curled her toes. That was all.

He soaked them. Warm, deliberate, each one landing where he'd aimed, and he looked at what he'd done with the expression of a man who has just publicly confirmed something about himself he'd previously kept quite private.

I made a sound I hadn't planned on.

Miss Carver glanced back at me.

'Your friend,' she said.

I pulled back. She turned, sat up, looked up at Cal over the glasses from the floor and took him in hand and he made something I will be keeping until I die.

---

The three of us sat on her good rug.

The dog down the street. Sprinkler going.

Cal looked at his shin pads. Looked at me.

'Five-a-side,' he said.

'Yeah, I know.'

'I can't play football. I haven't got any legs.'

'Kinky fuckery,' I said.

'That's the word.' He nodded slowly. 'That's exactly the word.'

Miss Carver stood up, smoothed her skirt, and picked up the sheet music from the floor. Set it back on the stand. Turned it to bar four.

'Same time next week,' she said. Not a question and not to either of us in particular.

Cal looked at me with the expression of a man who has found a religion he didn't know he was looking for.

'I'll learn the piano,' he said.