Four Women and an Architect

By Philip van Wijck

Phil is an accomplished architect who takes early retirement for personal reasons and moves to a secluded beach cottage on the mountainous Cape peninsula. While existing there as no more than a beach-bum, he struggles to deal with the classic male mid-life anxieties such as depression, sexual insecurity and self-doubt. In an attempt to shake the shackles of self-imposed exile, he moves to the city and takes up an offer for a six month contract as project architect for the design and documentation of an upmarket holiday resort. During this time in the office, he meets four young woman, each to have a specific impact in his life.
The first, Kirsty, is a vivacious yet defiantly self-centred young woman who does not deal well with the fact that her advances are shunned. She aggressively chases him and visits his apartment one stormy evening where the vigour of their eventual sexual encounter is only equalled by the ferocious howling of the wind of the storm outside. Her naked sexual hunger and the bristling hostility that marks their copulation leaves him, if sexually satisfied, emotionally drained and even more depressed. However, this encounter triggers a chain of events that leads to a second and a third encounter which was to change his life forever.
Kelly visits him, on advice from Kirsty, one rainy Sunday afternoon. Young and innocent, she is locked in a passionless relationship with her school sweetheart and is due to marry him shortly. With no sexual experience outside this narrow relationship, she naively believes that by seducing this older man, wise to the ways of the world, she will be sexually liberated enough to ensure her future marital bliss. Begging him to help her widening her sexual horizons by making passionate love to her so that she could guide her future husband after they are married, he refuses. However, his free spirit is not able to withstand the temptation as she stands before him, totally naked in the light of the flickering fire. Throughout the afternoon he guides her tenderly and passionately through the act of lovemaking. Their copulation awakens within her dark desires which were to echo deep into her future.
Andrea, the office manager, a beautiful, elegant and reserved lesbian of distant Indonesian descent, overhears the bathroom discussion of the other two about his sexual prowess and comes to him for her own sexual deliverance. Torn between her deep love for her partner, Jessica, and her yearning for male sexual attention, she convinces Jessica to come with her to the office late one Friday afternoon towards the end of his contract. There, they blatantly ask him to have sex with both of them. While for Jessica it is about the excitement and adventure, for Andrea, it turns out to be a dire need. The lustful sex becomes so passionate that it borders on the darker side of reason. Yet, once the passion was spent, he finds within the ambit of their stable relationship emotional space for himself. And so beings a triangular love relationship that develops over time into a stable and deeply satisfying bond that was to ensure his happiness well into the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip van Wijck
• Release date: Jan 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310085321

Philip van Wijck

As an architect with many years experience, I have worked on many projects in a variety of offices around the country. During this time I have met and worked with many interesting people, men as well as women. I am a keen observer of human nature and have had many rich experiences over the years. These experiences form the basis for my books, some serious, some more lighthearted. Some true, some pure fiction. I currently live in Cape Town.

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FOUR WOMEN AND AN ARCHITECT

PHIL VAN WIJCK

Copyright 2015 by the Author

All characters are over the age of 18

Smashwords Edition

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Notes by Author:

English is my second language. Because of the subject matter, it was not possible for me to ask my usual editor to review the text. Although I have done my very best to eliminate as many grammatical errors as possible, I am sure quite a few remained. Please excuse any verb tense confusion or any other grammatical errors and enjoy the contents for what it is, some erotic fun delivered with equal measures of sadness and joy

******

Table of Contents

One: Phil

Two: Kirsty

Three: Kelly

Four: Andrea and Jessica

Five: And So It Goes

CHAPTER ONE

PHIL

It happened during the winter of 2005. Four young women touched my life and changed it forever. A disenchanting encounter with the first led to a journey of discovery with the second, which, in turn, triggered a chain of events that led to the start of a long-term liaison which was to have a profound impact on my later life. Before that winter, if anybody cared to ask, I would have responded that I was done with relationships, with sex and with woman, for that matter. I thought I was condemned to a steady decline along the slippery slope of old age. Yet, I could not have been more mistaken. What happened during that winter changed the emotional landscape of my life from a barren desert to the equivalent of a tropical paradise.

That winter was particularly cold. In haunting refrain storms were swept in from the South Atlantic over Cape Town, chased by high arctic winds which whipped the bay into a cauldron of angry water and carried the salty sea spray deep into the city streets. Dark clouds continuously tumbled down the crags of Table Mountain onto the flimsy manmade structures of the city below, as if to obliterate them forever. It was only the memory of the extraordinary beauty of the summer landscape and the promise of its recurrence that made the winter tolerable for those who lived and toiled at the foot of the looming mountain. During those oppressive winter months, the city was a dark and gloomy place.

And such was my state of mind. It was at a joyless period of my life, with the winter weather acutely contributing to my sombre mood. The nagging memories of failed relationships and lost opportunities caused the black dog of depression to incessantly snap at my heels. Although I would most certainly not have admitted it at the time, at forty-seven my life was laden with all of those classic midlife anxieties. I was dogged by a profound sense of self-doubt and an acute awareness of the loss of my youth and the imminence of old age.

It goes without saying that quite a large proportion of these misgivings were of a sexual nature, as was to be expected from a man of my age. Every billboard with a picture of a beautiful young woman represented a threat. The swelling of a silk cradled breast, the friendly smile of an attractive shop assistant or the curve of a shapely female butt in tight jeans were unwelcome reminders of the inevitability of old age and the emotional wasteland of my life. In response, I actively suppressed those feelings and to every attractive woman, in fact every female, I presented a defensive and aloof exterior, implying a total lack of interest.

I had retired seven years previously. At forty I had accumulated enough money to last me the rest of my life and then some. After my second marriage disintegrated, the latest of a string of failed relationships, I came to the conclusion that I would be doing society in general a favour if I retired, not only from my profession, but also from ordinary life. In all of my previous relationships, including both marriages, I was the one who was directly responsible for its failure. I have always been better at providing material things than emotional support. Philandering was easier than devotion.

I purchased a little cottage on the beach, more like a shack really, in one of the more remote sea-side villages along the mountainous coastline of the Cape Peninsula. There I lived alone (and still do). During my professional career I had published a few technical manuals on design and building construction, some of which were widely used at a number of universities throughout the country. This provided me with a handsome passive income. I have also been known to contribute to international publications on architecture, and from time to time wrote architectural reviews for national newspapers and magazines. From all this I distanced myself.

For seven years I was no more than a beach bum. My sun-bleached hair grew long and my face became deeply tanned. My naturally lean frame was made even stringier from hours of surfing, jogging and hiking in the mountains. For all intents and purposes, I was happy, or rather, convinced myself I was. I allowed very few demands on my intellectual capacity and only worked when I wanted to. I was done with mainstream society. Whatever sexual needs I had were satisfied by means of an occasional meaningless encounter with an oversexed female holiday maker during high season. True to myself, any emotional needs were simply ignored.

Then, in the autumn of 2005 came an offer that was simply too good to be ignored. In addition to the fact that it was extremely lucrative, it presented a professional challenge that could not be refused. In a moment of frank reflection, I recognized that it was time to once again step outside the boundaries of my self-imposed banishment. In the final analysis, the secluded life was not good for me. I had to make a change. As it was, my future held nothing more exciting than the size of the surf in the morning. What little work I did present no challenge. No meaningful relationships of a private or professional nature existed to satisfy my social needs, scant as they were in any case.

In the capacity of project architect, I was invited to lead the design and documentation team for a new high-end coastal resort, complete with marina, clubhouse and 250 luxury living units. I had previously worked with the same architectural firm in a similar capacity and did not like them very much. They were one of those ‘flavour of the month’ type of design offices, run by three young architects along with about fifteen even younger, talented, bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed designers with some brilliant and progressive design ideas. However, in my opinion, there was little real substance to their work. Everyone was merrily designing away with little interest in the mundane realities of practical building construction. To them, the beauty of the drawing was the end product, not the beauty of the building.

The staff were of all colours and creeds, more females than males. However, they all had in common a youthful passion for design and architecture. What they also had in common was that, for the most part, they all were very attractive representatives of the human species. Amongst this lot were the young women that were destined to change my life. There was Kirsty, a graphic designer. She was tall, athletic, sexually aggressive and very confident. Working with her in the graphic design team was Kelly, short, curvy, artistic and diffident. Then there was Andrea, the office manager and administrative director, reserved and aloof with a very correct and formal manner. Rumour in the office had it that she was lesbian. Today I can vouch for the truth of that rumour because before I left, I had the pleasure of meeting Jessica, her life-partner.

Sadly, lacking in the office was the depth of experience in the more practical matters of putting a complicated building together. It was the unfortunate truth that their projects more frequently than not, came in way over budget and months behind programme. For this reason, the commission for the design of the resort was conditional upon the appointment of an independent and experienced architect as manager of the design and documentation programme. Hence their offer to me. This was something I was really good at. This was a process I understood well.

However, the downside was that in order to be close to the office for the duration of the contract, I had to relocate to the city, sixty kilometres from my shack on the beach. That was something I was really reluctant to do.

As I write this now, ten years later, sitting in my cottage with the raw heavy smell of the sea in my nostrils, the big South-Atlantic rollers crashing monotonously on the beach in the gathering dusk outside, while the barking of baboons echoed against the cliffs as the troops settled in for the night, I cannot but smile sadly at the memory of the anguish I had experienced during that phase of my life. With the advantage of twenty-twenty vision provided by hindsight, it is easy to see that I was not yet ready to retire. Only now do I realize how much I still needed to prove myself, of the dreams of achievement I still secretly harboured, of the desire for professional recognition and acknowledgement I still craved.

How true the words of Dylan Thomas rang for me?

‘Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.’

Penning these thoughts, it is easy to comprehend how, at that time, I also subconsciously craved some kind of emotional attachment to another being to sustain me, shall we say, through my declining years. The unfortunate fact that the time-space continuum had never align for me to have a permanent mental, emotional, and physical attraction to another person was beginning to gain on me. Growing old alone was something too ghastly to contemplate. Yet I have failed in too many relationships for another attempt at satisfying the social imperative of attaching myself to a single mate. Was there perhaps some other unorthodox formula of emotional bonding that could work for me? Some kind of less demanding connection that will beget new meaning to my life and still allow my nonconformist free spirit the space it requires to function.

There was indeed. And I have stumbled upon it. Today I am truly happy. After those tumultuous months ten years ago, I returned to my life in this piece of paradise carrying delightful memories of soft female bodies and nights of breathless passion. Of needs and deep desires, of shared moments of sexual aggression and sweet tenderness. And of promises of more to come. This provided me with me enough social references to remain somewhat aloof from mainstream society, yet not to be totally isolated. I have