It was Neema’s skin that really attracted me to her. I had met her years before and she seemed nice enough, but as she was a colleague of my ex-wife, I hadn’t lingered over any thoughts about her. Then one day, I helped her as she struggled to get out of our very small car and I felt her upper arms. She was Guyanese, with fabulously dark skin that had a sort of sheen to it and felt like silk. And her upper arms were soft and nicely upholstered.

She was what might be called “formidable” and her body matched her personality: you wouldn’t mess with her for fear of getting a tongue-lashing, and she was solidly built, so she had a sort of imposing physical presence too. Not every man’s cup of tea, I know, but I find certain women of that type unaccountably sexy. Maybe it’s the fact that they seem able to look after themselves. Of course, there is a lot to be said for the waif-like, vulnerable little woman that men have been protecting and impressing for centuries, sweeping them off their feet and fucking them because those are the standard roles. But look at the female tennis players. Maybe some men would be intimidated by the sheer power of Serena Williams, but I would love to grapple with her in bed, and if she wanted to impose herself by sitting on my face, rubbing her crotch and her ass over me, I wouldn’t complain.

Neema wasn’t Serena, though. She was like Serena’s sedentary, slightly overweight older auntie. And now she had come into focus in my life after the departure of my wife, who had had a better offer from a friend of the family and left me to run the import business in Georgetown. Neema, meanwhile, had left the company.

Georgetown was a scary place to be for a white man. We were resented both for being foreigners and for the colour of our skin. I found the women very friendly and in general very sexy, but a nice atmosphere that had been cooking between me and one of them would be rudely shattered when one of their men arrived. I had made a couple of friends through the cricket club, because Guyana is on the Caribbean coast of South America and its players are eligible for the West Indies. And sport is a great breaker of boundaries, an environment where friendships are made through mutual respect for physical skill and instinct.

That was where Neema came back into my life, as it happens. I was playing for a club in the local league and she turned up one day to watch her brother play. With the brother as a kind of chaperon, I had been able to stand and talk to her for half an hour without the six-foot-plus hunks giving me the evil eye. We exchanged phone numbers and I sent her a message as soon as I got home. We arranged that she would come to the office after work the next day. I wasn’t even sure it was an actual date, but we could chat and take it from there.

As it turned out, there was definitely something in the air as we sat in office chairs and drank tea. It was the way we stuck to formalities and chatted about innocent, everyday matters. I was itching to make it less formal, more sociable, and I could tell she was too. Eventually, we agreed to meet the following evening at a business hotel nearby, the kind of place where odd couples could be found, thrown together by the demands of commerce. There were no intimate corner tables, no candles, and no cocktail piano tinkling in the background. Just a tidy, sterile room and a menu of bland hotel food.

We played it straight, too, relaxing a little but still rather stilted. Then I dropped the bombshell.

“I’m staying here, actually. My place is being treated for termites and I can’t stand all those chemicals, so I booked in here for a few days."

“Very nice,” Neema said, sensing a change in the agenda. “How’s your room?"

“Hotel-y," I replied. “Have you ever thought about the emotions hanging in the air in hotel rooms? A lot of loneliness, I imagine.”

“Fun too,” she countered. “People stay in hotels on holiday."

“Not this one,” I said. “It’s all business. Look at these people." I gestured to the rest of the room, where people sat in ones and twos and there was quiet conversation rather than animated chat. “It’s depressing,” I said in conclusion.

“My, you’re in a bad mood,” Neema said, patting my hand. “I thought you said you’d got over the separation.”

“I have,” I said. “That’s not an issue.”

“Girlfriends?” she asked. I shook my head.

“I don’t know if there’s anyone in Georgetown looking for someone like me,” I said, trying to sound cheerful but failing.

“If this place depresses you, come and stay at mine,” Neema offered. I looked at her doubtfully. “I’ve got room,” she said. “The girls are both gone to uni. You can stay the night and I’ll work on your psyche.”

“You a shrink?” I asked.

“Amateur psychologist,” she said with a smile. “You have to be when you have teenagers. Seriously. You need some TLC. I won’t force myself on you.”

“Promise?” I joked, a smile of gratitude and relief squeezing onto my face. I was frantically trying to assess whether this was indeed an offer made out of friendship or if she was opening a door. And if I got it wrong, it could be awkward and spoil things for the future. On the other hand, as I said before, Neema could look after herself.

oOo

Half an hour later, we were sitting in her house on the outskirts of the city. It was an old wooden building, lounge and kitchen downstairs, two bedrooms and bathroom upstairs. Neema poured me a glass of white wine and I leaned back in the comfortable settee. She sat next to me.

“So, no women in your life,” she said in the way people do when they want to just switch you on and listen. There wasn’t much to say on this subject that I hadn’t told her already, so I just looked at her and my hand found its way onto her knee. She was wearing a knee-length dark blue dress in stretchy fabric which clung to her curves and also rode up a little when she sat. So my hand was on skin; that rich, ebony skin that had entranced me ever since I had first seen her. She smiled back at me and put her hand on mine. Then she did something that, I now realized, she had done before, but in public and with no explanation: she put her middle finger on the middle bone of my index finger and pressed firmly with a slight downward slide. I was reminded of a saying I had heard once in a song: nothing happens till it happens twice. I took that to be a theatrical insight, meaning that something could appear insignificant if it happens once. But when it happens again, you think, “Hang on, why is she doing that?”

The placing of a finger on another finger with some pressure but no erotic stroking suddenly demanded an explanation, but I didn’t know what it was. All I did know was that it was some kind of signal, some sort of statement of Neema’s frame of mind. And it was positive.

I found myself taking the finger she had used, making a circle with my right hand and slipping it on the finger.  I rubbed it up and down very gently and I swear she responded by moving the finger in and out - just a tiny movement.

“Oh, my God,” Neema said. “You know what’s happening, don’t you?” I put my arm around her and pulled her head in for a kiss. It was a soft, flat kiss, lips to lips, and we both drew back a little and looked into each other’s eyes.

“Let’s go upstairs,” she whispered. I followed her up and into her warm, girly bedroom, all pink and lacy and smelling of perfume. At that moment it was like heaven’s antechamber.

Without a word, Neema pulled the dress over her head and sat on the bed in her pretty, maroon underwear. I took off my shirt and trousers and we lay down together.

“You’re so beautiful,” I gushed. “I’ve always wanted you. Did you know that?”

“You were very discreet,” she replied. “But yes, I knew there was something there.” I was kissing her belly as we spoke, and thinking of going down into her magic valley, when she said, “Come up here.”

I gave her a quick kiss on her mound of Venus before moving up for the fabulous long, sensual kiss I knew awaited me. I pawed at her breasts and she arched her back to remove the bra and I was face to nipple with her beautiful breasts. I kissed them each in turn and sucked those large, chewy buttons.

“Harder,” she urged, so I sucked like a hungry infant. “Bite them,” she said with a sort of hiss. “Don’t be afraid.” When I did so, she moaned softly and her hand moved down to my underpants, feeling my erect cock. I slid my hand into her panties and over the little patch of coiled cotton into her slit. And then my middle finger was inside Neema and it was a milestone that had us both breathing out with satisfaction.

I slid down her body, pulled the panties down, and got my face between her legs. The number of times I had daydreamed about doing this, licking her vagina, smelling and tasting her essence. I parted her lips and poked my tongue as far as I could into her. She was salty and spicy, but there was something else, something almost like a savoury liqueur, intoxicating. I slurped at her juices.

Then Neema started to move and soon she was on top of me, her crotch over my face and her mouth sucking my cock into its tantalising depths. I held onto her buttocks and thighs as best I could, trying to lick her, but she was in control of that department and her channels slid over my face like some benign smotherer. She sat up straight to deliver an adult portion of her ass, rubbing it back and forth, before swiveling again and this time lying on her back.

“I want you inside me,” she said urgently, and I climbed over her left thigh to lie between her legs and slip inside her. As wonderful as that was, it was outclassed by the incredible feeling of my trunk against hers. She was so warm and welcoming that I could have pledged myself to her forever right there and then. We were both exceedingly turned on, not just by the events of the evening and particularly the last half hour, but by the years of secret longing.

After just a minute, we rose and fell and had our orgasms together, perfectly choreographed.

That night with Neema was one of the highlights of my life. We half-woke in the silence of the small hours and I rolled onto her and into her and we slithered together before pumping ourselves to orgasm. In the morning we made love quickly before we both had to leave the house for work.

Can that first idyllic encounter be repeated? I didn’t know, but we hastily made plans for the weekend -  a weekend of love and passion.