There are conflicting concepts of every issue: such as the morality of capitol punishment, assisted suicide, abortion, cloning, atrocities of war, and .....

There is a moral ambiguity about passion .

(especially ambiguous is the kind of passion you feel on a couch with martinis and red light bulbs and an unavailable man's hands on your thighs blotting your martini soaked skirt)

Lust and desire are natural human urges. In this case there was something that clouded those natural desires.

There exists the philosphical question about whether or not it is always wrong to hide the truth? Are there times when to tell the unvarnished truth would be to cause others more harm than good? I am not advocating duplicity, but sometimes in life there are partial truths told to preserve some one's dignity, or information withheld to spare some one's feelings.

Within the complexities of human interraction, there are different versions of "doing the right thing".There is the current modern belief in women's magazines and the Dr. Phil show that if a relationship is not working, you have to be "honest" for the good of everyone involved. That is not always the right thing to do.

There are times in life when a person is apathetically present, in an alliance with someone . They share a history and a family . No matter what happens, if he is a gentleman, he will always'love' that person. But the form will have drastically and irrevocably changed. The vital parts of the relationship have long ago disintegrated. The best parts of it do not even exist anymore.

Somewhere outside the periphery of that faded relationship, which is now held together only by a sense of responsibility and shared family traditions, each person lives their own parallel life.

Then someone reaches out to another and acts upon an attraction, because they forgot what it feels like to be desired, and they longed to be touched again. However understandable, it is kept discreet ,for the common good. Some will call it "wrong". There is a hierarchy of "wrong", and it is subject to interpretation.

However ironic, a surreptitious relationship could actually act as an adhesive that makes it easier to hold the old relationship together without further conflict.

All parties involved are ,in a way, blameless and yet all are also complicit.

What is my motivation here? If I am going to risk getting closer to a man, why wouldn't I prefer him to be a man who is available to be with me all the time? I'll tell you why: That man could be prey for Stepmother J's critique and intrusion. Do I want to risk getting all emotionally invested in someone , and involve my kids in the relationship, only to one day hear the words again "It's your family or me."?

I don't want to want to watch helplessly while it all blows up in my face .

I am not interested in meeting my future ex husband.

There was a certain appealling aspect to this. There was a built-in firewall, a risklessness in this relationship.

HIS UNNACCOUNTABLE EFFECT

That night we left the bar arm in arm, laughing and talking as we walked to the parking lot. We arrived at the cars in the shadow of the Monument. He touched my face with both hands and leaned towards me to kiss me. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do. Our arms around each other and the full body contact seemed like the most natural thing too. It WAS. It was the first time in almost a decade that I felt a man's (sexually aroused) body pressed against me. Not counting that pervert in the subway last week .

My God, this felt good !

I can't remeber being kissed like that. I was innundated with sexual desire. It didn't seem like a lack of discriminating taste when ,after a long lovely time like that in the parking lot, I pulled him into the front seat of my car .

I could see that illuminated Monument above us. The gratuitous erotic metaphor was ludicrous. We were oblivious of people getting in and out of cars in the adjacent spots in the parking lot.

His hands were all over my body, something that had been in short supply in the last ...lifetime.

It was obvious that he was not one of those men who would need Yahoo maps to find a G-spot . That notwithstanding, I knew that I better NOT let things get to the point where the location of G- spot was brought into question. He was attentive and uninhibited and handsome as a soap opera star, in the shadows cast by the street lights. He was nearly impossible to resist.

I did something that I had been dying to do for months: I unbuttoned his shirt slowly, one by one, from the top to the bottom, touching and kissing each newly revealed portion of skin on his chest. He was beautiful, like a modern-day version of James Dean, or Ryan O'Neil or JFK. When I reached the last button, I slowly ran my hands up and down the length of his chest, and then continued down a little lower, until my fingers were hooked on his belt and my thumbs slid lower into the crease of each thigh.

I don't remember ever lusting after a man. I was always the "lust-ee" and my former partners were the "lust-or". I could barely breath , I was so excited. Maybe it had to do with the length of time it had been since I had any physical contact with a man.

Content and busy with raising my kids, I had managed to decline all those tempting offers from underemployed men in expensive flashy clothes , pretending to have money, and dull insipid men in sturdy practical clothes , pretending to have brains..

You can fake blond. You can fake tan. You can even fake sexy�for a while. What you can't fake is the real and unmistakable scent and feel of someone who actually loves sex. I don't know where all this passion came from, but it was there and unmistakable.

There we were in the car, full of urgent desire, our hands all over each other. We hesitated and looked right into each other's eyes, for a moment, amidst this sexual tension..wondering what was going to happen next.

Before "the moment" stretched out any further he said "Nice view of The Monument". said "Oh yes, it is. " We laughed, breaking the tension, enough for him to gracefully exit my car and get into his own.

I called him on the way home and said how tempting and how wonderful it was to be with him like that, but that we should not go any further. Like a complete fool, I unilaterally announced that we should set our "moral compass to that of one president Jimmy Carter , and only "lust in the heart", rather than act like Bill Clinton. .

"MORAL COMPASS??".

Did I just say that? It isn't every day that you get a chance to use that term. My response, be it clever or insipid, would be later re played over and over in my mind, imagining the clever sparkling repartee I SHOULD have said , for what I actually said.

'In flagrente delicto' is a romantic Latin term to describe a erotic rendezvous in a public place.

The next time we found ourselves in that same public place . After hours of sitting together on low couches, with dim red mood lights, drinking martinis and touching each other and kissing, and having a wonderful time, he walked to me car. We were "In flagrente delicto" once more.

I ignored every last word about Jimmy Carter that I had said, and I pulled him right back into the car . This time it was more like a Motel 6 on wheels than a transportation vehicle. At that moment I decided that Bill Clinton's ethics will do just fine.

What's so wrong with setting our "moral compass" with the lame semantical excuses of a man who does not even know the definition of "is"."

"If you don't like my standards, Hey! I've got others!"

He had left me gasping for breath, my face flushed and beading up with sweat , and feeling fabulous. There was my footprint on the windshield, which I needed t remember to wash off before the kids got in this car.

There was the most beautiful sexually appealing man in the world , leaning back in the passenger seat of my car, with his shirt unbuttoned his arms outstretched and his hands behind his head. A empty lap is the devil's playground.

Any remaining sane thoughts, moral fiber, all the reasons why I should not go further,

just evaporated,

and HE

was all that was left.

After a very hot steamy libidinous time spent in front of him in the front seat of the car, I had runs in the knees of my stockings, there was no visibility out of the steamy windshield and my thong was in the back seat. We smiled contentedly. Once again , I wished I had a Blackberry, so I could pull up a weather website and check to see if HELL HAD ACTUALLY FROZEN OVER.

If only we had been somewhere else besides a parked car for this experience. I had not anticipated how I was going to feel afterwards when he got out of the car slammed the door and said goodnight. I had always imagined that sexuality that you had to wait all this time for, should have been in a better setting. Driving home alone with my footprint on the window was NOT the ideal way to end an evening like this. I simply had not thought that far ahead.

I felt unsure of myself. I had no idea what he must be thinking of me.

I had entered that car in the spirit of a beautiful impulsive experience between two adults. I exited the car alone in a 'walk of shame' , into my house carrying my underwear. .

Damned libido, damned martinis! Why did I do that? It was as if Betty Friedan had never lived.

I was under the influence of the martinis, with a guilt float. I wrote him an e mail full of high drama that night. I told him that I had gotten caught up in the moment, and we should not have gone that far and we would be returning to a more innocent phase..

I was sincere at the moment.

Looking back on it, that statement is hillarious! It turned out that I only had a "passing aquaintancship" with guilt and the vow to return to "innocence" never happened. ..

I had lost all reason in the face of how I felt when we were together. That feeling was going to win out over righteousness every time.

It was October now. We had seen every property there was to see. We no longer needed a pretext of looking at property. We were just going out. The night air was too cold and we were getting too amorous to be 'spending quality time' in parking lots.

~~Once a cop told us to leave the parking lot immediately and that our behavior was bordering on lewdness. I promised to take my leg down from being wrapped around his waist, but the cop was already pissed off.

~~Another cop said he wished someone would kiss him like that.

~~A stranger yelled out of a passing car and told us to get a room. Then a second person yelled the same thing 15 minutes later.

~~The manager of the "less-than-elegant" "Waterfront Cafe" told us that people were complaining that we were too blatantly affectionate and it was "killing their buzz". A woman who had been sitting next to us said" I find you two to be bordering on inappropriatness. I said " I find stretch pants on that big butt of yours inappropriate too, but I am too much of a lady to say it." We can't go there anymore.

~~My niece's boyfriend said he was standing right next to us, and I didn't even see him , waiting for the valet parking. He said" She was too busy saying goodby to someone..or was it hello". Let's face it, We were not fit for the city-at-large. And that is why we crossed yet another line. I invited him to come to my house. Now it is a weekly event.

Though we are never going to win the "outstanding suburbanite of the year award" for good behavior, we have managed to avoid crossing the "ultimate line". Our R rated sexuality is like Latin: something obsolete that you might have used in high school, that has long since fallen out of use.

The arrangement had it's merits: it was completely unnecessary to go through the spectacle of two new dating partners trying to find a tactful way of asking the other if they have had any recent one night stands with an intravenous drug addicted, hemophiliac, bisexual Haitians before they rushed prematurely into bed.

I could imagine myself going on with him like this, totally content , having "pretend sex" (If only "pretend sex" was the same as real sex , but afterwards you would just "PRETEND you didn't". )

"I have standards! And if If you don't like my standards, I've got others." To Be Continued.