11 comments/  48740 views/  4 favorites

Speak to Me Ch. 01

By: RMRedfall



[Author's Note: This is the first part of a fairly long project. This chapter is quite lengthy in itself, on account of the thorough development of the characters. Future installments will be considerably shorter and more to the point, but I believe that this lengthy first installment does its job in every way by the time you reach the end.

My work is geared more toward couples reading together than toward individuals, so I recommend it more in that capacity. Individuals seeking something fast and exciting may be less interested in all the introductory material, although I have done my best to engage the reader with sexuality at a fairly steady pace from the start. Ideally, this will develop into a series of those shorter, more immediate pulse-pounders that individuals may prefer as well once the characters are well established, so I would not necessarily discourage such readers from taking the time to get familiar with this chapter. Ultimately, however, I write with a vision of men and women sharing these words together.

As with all my work, this story champions faithful marriage and healthy sexual expression. And as with all my work, your comments and suggestions are what I look forward to the most. If you read it, do me the honor of letting me know what you think.]

*

1.

I once had the bright idea to try talking to my wife. I'm not sure where it started, or what ever made me think it was the brilliant plan I believed it to be, but one day in our eighth year of marriage the thought struck me, and I latched onto it. In fact, I spent several days deliberating on it -- trying to determine the right things to say, the very best words I could think of to express my thoughts, the time to bring it up, the way to bring it up, the things I shouldn't say, the words I shouldn't use, the expectations I ought to bring to the conversation, the things I should not expect...

I put forth such an effort of forethought and planning that I had myself utterly convinced of the outcome before I had even begun. I would approach her with such honesty, such simplicity, such a banquet of words that she would melt in my hands, and suddenly we would have evolved into some new, greater mode of spiritual existence; our marriage would all at once have its inner walls torn down and there would never again be any need for a barrier of any kind between us.

But for all my planning over the course of the week, there was a detail I had forgotten to account for. You see, I had the bright idea to talk to my wife of eight years. I did not have the bright idea to listen. This unfortunate lapse in my judgment caused no small amount of discord, and even seemed at first to have done more harm than good. However, the moral of the story, which we'll be getting to in due time, turns out to be one worth sharing, and I'm inclined to think that a number of the events leading up to it might make for an interesting read as well -- in the proper setting.

This is an intimate story. It's not a love story; it's not an advice column; it's not a social commentary. This is a story straight from the pages of my own personal sex life, complete with examples, and its purpose is no more nor any less than to encourage an intimate evening among all you other happily married men and women out there. If you happen to learn the same lesson that I did along the way, then I'll be happy to have imparted a bit of my wife's good sense to you, but for all intents and purposes you can do yourselves a favor when you're done reading this: keep your mouths shut and just make love to each other.




2.

Now obviously, having been married for eight years and having a five-year-old son, there was a lot going on in our lives that wasn't necessarily sexy. Amanda and I are not exactly the sexual crusaders that everyone else our age seems to have become since the onslaught of the internet in the late 90's; we keep most of our relations in the bedroom where we both generally feel they belong, and we keep the natural relationship between cock and vagina as the centerpiece of our interactions. We rarely get so heated that we lose our heads in a fit of passion and go to any particular extreme -- I think prior to the events of this tale the wildest we'd ever gotten was a quick and unplanned fuck at the computer desk while our son was asleep on the couch, and even that was not entirely spontaneous. We have had an arrangement for years -- since the birth of our son, in fact -- that Saturday nights were 'our night'; the steamy session at our desk happened around naptime on Saturday, and was thus only 'unplanned' by virtue of a couple of hours.

We occasionally treat each other to a very fair, turn-oriented system of oral sex, and we both quite like it -- it falls safely within our comfort zones -- but neither of us prefers it to simple traditional sex, and I have never comprehended the seemingly common claim of men who would rather get head than have sex. I've never put my cock into any orifice other than my wife's mouth or vagina, and I can't imagine any reason one or the other would ever fall short of the goal. On a few occasions, almost always on account of convenience, we have satisfied each other with nothing but our hands in each other's pants. This is generally our resort when privacy is an issue and going without satisfaction is not an option -- both of which circumstances have been decidedly rare.

In between our Saturdays, our lives are as straightforward and pleasant as you could imagine. We work. Neither my wife nor I feel any strong hatred for our job, though we would both readily agree that they are jobs, and not careers. After work we eat dinner at the table -- another of our traditionalist 'quirks' I suppose -- and then sit with our son and watch television for an hour or so. Toward the end of an average day, we tend to split off and amuse ourselves with our individual interests: Amanda sits with a book; our son Seth plays his Playstation games; I retire to the computer room and stare at a blank computer screen thinking someday I might write something on it and make a bit of money while I'm at it.

I can't imagine any other way to live -- there is no sense of dullness or boredom in our lives, but that simple feeling of contentment that seems to have disappeared from the family environment these days, and is the result of genuine love for the people with whom you live. We are happy, healthy, and very much in love, all of which would make for a rather boring story, I'm sure.

Let none of this, however, convince you that we were in need of any particular 'spice'. My wife is, to put it succinctly, a fabulous lover. I have never been any less than completely satisfied after any sexual encounter, of any length or variety, and there has never been a single thing I wanted to try so badly I couldn't go without it, that she was not willing to do with me. There are quite a number of exciting things that a man and his wife might do behind their own bedroom door, without putting anything anywhere it doesn't belong, and I can happily say that Amanda and I have given most of them a hell of a go. In fairness, I would have to say her inhibitions are generally stronger and more rigidly fixed than mine, but our preferences have always been similar enough to make us both happy.

We neither overinflate nor underappreciate the importance of sexual satisfaction in a healthy marriage; we have quite openly come to agreeable terms in that regard, and my wife has an uncanny knack for making love to me when we need to make love, and begging me to fuck her as hard as I can when we need to fuck. What she is able to do to me -- the heights to which she has taken me during our marriage -- is nothing short of astounding. She does what she does without ever sacrificing the innocence and pure class of a well-bred soccer mom, but when the time is right, she can sink her teeth in my shoulder and cry, "Oh God, I'm coming!" with the best of them. If every man could have such a wife, I'm fairly sure the drastic rise in divorce rates would quickly reverse. For my part, I will never give up mine -- that should tell you something.

Amanda's beauty at thirty is that very classic kind that has never been properly represented in the world of sexual discussion. If one wished to place her in a category, one would be hard put: she is beyond the early twenties which for some reason gets the improper name of 'teen' in the world of adult material; neither is she quite 'mature'. In the most technical sense, one can put her with the 'milfs', but she hasn't the sluttiness that goes with it; she is most certainly no 'cheating housewife'; she is of no particularly sought-after nationality such as 'Asian', and is in fact pure white American, descended of Europeans like most of us but bearing no resemblance to any European ethnic group in particular; she has wonderfully full breasts but falls a bit short of the 'busty' label as it's usually perceived in adult entertainment; the only thing I can do for you in the way of 'marketing' her particular brand of sex appeal is to propose an entirely new category, and we'll see if there's an audience for it: let's place her squarely into the newly created 'affectionate wife' category, and in that context, let me tell you all about her.

My 'affectionate wife' Amanda is blessed with the body of a mother. I have discovered in the years since we used to have to spoon to make love, while both of our hands lay clasped protectively on the large round swell of her pregnant belly and her tender breasts went all but ignored throughout the act, that the post-childbirth body of a woman is actually the shape that pleases me most.

Throughout her pregnancy and after giving birth, it seemed that some hidden reserve of hormones was being wrung from inside her: her breasts suddenly blossomed and never went away; she became so sensitive in her nipples and crotch that at the slightest tickle of contact I would suddenly find her body fastened passionately to mine and she would be heaving with orgasm in minutes; for the first time in our intimate history together I could make her come twice in one session -- sometimes with almost ridiculous ease! She confessed to me (in her roundabout way) that as often as not, she simply had to have an orgasm every day in the latter stages of her pregnancy, and just because there were frequent days she was not getting one from me did not mean she was not getting one -- the most straightforward admission she had ever made up to that point that she was familiar with the art of masturbation. 

There were times when she would come to me without a word and simply implore me with her eyes to come to bed with her; I would gingerly help her lie down, and no sooner would I place a kiss on the side of her neck and press my hand around the hot swell of her mound than she would gasp and shiver and cry, "Oh God, yes! Thank you!" then suddenly take my stiff cock in one of her soft little hands and stroke it rapidly to ejaculation with a look of utter bliss in her eyes. Her appetite during the final three months was so great that it was sometimes daunting. I can only imagine how much more intimidated I might have been, had she not been discreetly taking care of more than half of it herself. In the years that have followed, the appetite has of course slowed considerably, but I have been quite pleased to find that her tendency to orgasm easily has remained. She has never been particularly hungry for more than one, but she rarely goes without her one, and seems to enjoy it mightily when she gets it.

After Seth's arrival, there were several months of healing, and several more of such obvious exhaustion that I would not have burdened her with my sexual requirements even if I thought my balls would explode. For the better part of Seth's first year, I took care of my own needs without much complaint, though not always privately (she offered me the very matter-of-fact suggestion that there was no reason I should have to run off and hide because of it, and my intrigue was such that I conceded her point for a while and enjoyed myself in bed beside her while she lay apologetically drifting off to sleep).

But as that year wore on, and my desire for the real thing grew steadily less bearable, I studied my wife's naked body and found her possessed of a new, fuller, more curvaceous figure that was awe-inspiring. Her hips had visibly widened and spread; her breasts, though we bottle-fed our son from the beginning, remained voluptuous and dangled low under their new weight; her whole body had fleshed out and grown softer and rounder. I even noted that her intimate anatomy, where it had been snipped by the delivering doctor, now hung partly exposed like a naughty invitation -- two small pink bundles of that glorious flesh inside her were always visible beneath the thick mat of hair between her thighs.

For five years now I've listened to my wife complain endlessly about never losing all of the baby weight, and I laugh at her. Every soft inch of her is glorious to me -- I wouldn't trade the motherly figure of my Amanda for any three flat-bellied, narrow-hipped, high-breasted little 'teens'.

Even aside from the lovely fullness of her shape, she really is a beautiful woman in every way. She has the most luscious waves of dark chocolate hair I've ever seen; it glistens like chocolate syrup when she combs it through with spray gel and teases it into a full-bodied cascade of curls around her neck. She keeps it long and clean and smelling of coconut. When she tosses her head, you can spot the gleaming silver and gold of some ornate pair of earrings buried in the dark brown depths of her hair, and she is almost never without one of her three favorite pendants dangling down into the very upper portion of the recess between her breasts.

She has large, moist eyes of the same rich brown color as her hair, and if you asked me to choose the single most beautiful thing about her, I would have to say it's the way she speaks with those eyes. There's no clearer way of explaining it; she simply speaks with them. She can tell me things with those sparkling brown gems that there just aren't words for. They engage me without a sound and glow with unabashed, immeasurable love; when they darken with anger it wrenches my heart; when they glisten with tears they can -- and sometimes do -- cause me to cry myself; when mischief glitters in them I would follow her to the ends of the earth to see what she's up to. She's learned how to adorn them with just the right touch of eyeliner and a hint of shadow, and she knows how to use them.

She is perfectly aware, and will sometimes boast, that she has the best pair of doe eyes in the world; she levels them on me with a tiny pout in her plump lips and convinces me to sign my soul over to her nearly every day. In fact, she used them to great effect on the day nearly nine years ago when, after a shopping expedition with her best friend of those days, she informed me that she had picked out the engagement ring she wanted when I finally decided to ask her to marry me. She was wearing that very ring the next weekend.

When we make love, she keeps those wonderfully expressive eyes closed most of the time, her pretty face awash with relaxation, far away and distracted by some elusive secret she seems quite intent on learning. Every so often there's an urgent moan from her slightly parted lips, and then her eyes flutter open to take me in, so radiant with adoration that they seem to be alive and in love with me in their own right. When she comes they squeeze tightly shut, her whole face takes on an expression similar to confusion and even pain, and then she lets out a soft cry that almost has words in it like, "Oh God!" or, "Oh yes!" or even, "Oh fuck!" but they're never all the way there. When the greatest shudders of her orgasm subside, her eyes pop open wide, and as I start to thrust and slowly swim inside her again she beams me a look of such happiness and gratitude that I would give anything to be able to go back to the beginning and do it to her again.

When we fuck -- and this has not been often, because it hasn't needed to be -- her eyes are alive with fire, and she levels them on me with her intentions blazing. They say in their silent language, "I know exactly what I'm doing." They watch me for any sign of pleasure, and when they spot it she pounces; I can see the omnipotent sense of triumph flood her being when she finds my weak point and grinds it mercilessly to an explosion between us. I don't know how she does it but she watches, she waits, and when she knows it's time, she comes around me while I'm coming into her, and we both cling together gasping for our lives. Then her eyes regard me with pure self-satisfaction, and they silently ask me, "What do you think of that?"

In between these episodes of passion, there is of course no shortage of non-sexual life going on. To hear me tell it, you might have been inclined to think that we have a lot of sex -- that it's nearly all we've thought about since we married. There is a great deal more of the ordinary in our lives that needn't be dwelled upon in these pages than there is of the excitement I've set out to share with you.

We are neither of us what I'd call exceptionally sexual; I'd be inclined to call my own sex drive a healthy if unflattering 'average'; Amanda is, if I'm to be honest, much less sexual than she might thus far appear to be here, and has more than once confided to me the exact words, "I'm not a very sexual person." This doesn't quite do her justice, though, as words can be so pronounced as to change their meaning simply based on where you place the emphasis. I will hope, going forward, that you understand my wife of eight years to be, in fact, a healthily sexual woman, but place the emphasis in her confession precisely where it belongs: she is not a VERY sexual person.

I have come to understand the difference between her drive and mine to be a subtle one: for Amanda, having sex seems to be a physical manifestation (we could, for perfect accuracy, give this the less colorful term 'side-effect') of two people being in love; for myself, it is not an effect created by love, but perhaps the most meaningful, the deepest possible way to express it. I may be representing this poorly -- words sometimes fail me, as I've recently learned -- but let's try to understand that Amanda is simply more able to express her love without having sex; she is more inclined to view sex as a shared benefit of being in love, to be enjoyed when one so desires like a reward; she is, perhaps, more likely to consider sex a purely physical craving one should be able to control, and into which one must intentionally add all the emotional resonance one wishes to be there. 

On the other hand, I myself cannot feel that words, hugs, or meaningful glances fully say all that I long to say to the woman I love -- I must sometimes melt into her and make everything else disappear in order to successfully express my love to her; I view sex not as a benefit so much as a requirement of love, to be fulfilled every so often in order to complete the circle; I am quite as compelled to the physical cravings of sex as she has ever been, but I am also frequently drawn to the emotional resonance as well, which to me is innately there. If there were a way, short of making love, to feel my love for her as deeply as I do when we make love, then perhaps I could survive on much less of it. Until such a discovery comes along, I will want my wife in bed as often as I can have her there, and it will most of the time be my heart -- not my cock -- that is craving her.

Although it's not entirely unheard of, we don't often have fully intimate relations together outside our Saturday night arrangement. When I say "fully intimate", I'm mainly referring to intercourse; it occasionally happens that, to fulfill the purely physical side of our longings we might fool around during the middle of the week and touch each other to rather satisfying but not particularly intense orgasms. 


Speak to Me Ch. 02



[Author's Note: This second installment is a bit shorter than the first, but in the same tradition. The beginning is more an advancement of the situation - or "plot" - than a buildup toward the erotic conclusion. Readers looking for instant immersion in erotica will not find the initial sections very satisfying.

For those readers who are able to follow the storyline as much for what is happening in the marriage as for the erotic scene at the end, this chapter contains a few clues as to the nature of that inner woman the narrator seeks in his wife, as well as a few subtle hints as to how much is actually hidden in there.

The next chapter will reveal a few secrets that aim to surprise - and mind you this is not "Saw"; don't expect your heart to stop - in preparation for the finale. The final chapter of the "core" story will be chapter four, in which the couple make an interesting deal with each other. That deal has been the point of the storyline all along, and will open up a vast hallway of possibilities for further chapters, all of which would be the more pulse-pounding variety of erotica most people seem to prefer.

Those readers who find themselves interested in the very straightforward and ordinary marriage of the couple in this story will be the most pleased, the most surprised, and the most enlightened when those more extraordinary chapters come along.]





1.

It was over the course of the next few days, gradually and by degrees, that the rush of my wife's unusually amorous mood became overshadowed again by the bitter feeling that I had done something wrong in my approach.

I had too much time to think; I was working at a regional shipyard, sandblasting paint from the hulls of three enormous ships, and the work was very steady and physical but not mentally engaging at all. I spent ten to eleven hours a day slowly carving rectangle patterns out of the layers of paint, my mind almost continually wandering back to the high hopes I had maintained of having that deep, honest, vulnerable conversation with my wife, and the reality which I had run up against instead.

It must have seemed like nothing but a lot of bedroom talk that I wanted. If I was a little grateful that I had apparently succeeded at such talk, it was nothing compared to my disappointment with being misinterpreted – in my heart I felt that what I wanted to share with Amanda could bring us closer together and make us more appreciative of each other than any man and wife who had ever lived. If I had merely wanted bedroom talk, then I would have been thoroughly pleased with myself after Saturday night and Sunday morning, but the concept of honesty – my real target – had never even shown its face.

I pondered a number of issues in regards to all of this. Ten hours in what is essentially a full suit of armor, strong-arming a hose full of sand and massive air pressure, begin to make you feel somewhat insulated from the outside world over time. Even your air comes from a small hose hooked to the back of your hood – the world around you is a distant, silent memory. It didn't bother me to be examining my sex life on the job – I had all the time and privacy in the world for thinking my thoughts.

Among the many things that occupied my brain from Monday through Wednesday, I wondered what in the world had gotten Amanda so fired up – I could not accept at face value that she was just plain horny. I replayed the beginning of Saturday night and pieced together what I knew of it now. I hadn't noticed any sign that she had been exceptionally eager to make love prior to putting Seth to bed – in fact, I had sensed the very opposite. She seemed almost to be avoiding me for several hours, not wanting to be overly affectionate, and I have always taken this as a sign – rare though it is – that she was not enough in the mood; that she might even ask if we could forego any intimacy for the night. I would have expected her to cancel, in fact, if not for her specific mention more than once on Saturday that we would be having sex later.

I understood now that she had been changing her underwear in the bathroom, which I was satisfied could account for most of her time in there – there was still absolutely the possibility that her own fingers had been involved in her burning readiness, but it was no longer the only possibility I could conceive.

Even after she had come out of the bathroom, though, I seemed to recall her taking rather more time downstairs than she should have needed. I couldn't recall hearing a single sound that explained it – no refrigerator opening, no dishes and cups clattering, no rattle of cat food in the cat's dish, no beeping from the phone to suggest she had been checking the messages. It had been utterly silent during those long minutes – what could she have been doing?

Somehow my mind could not compute any possibility other than that she must have been standing in the kitchen masturbating herself to readiness. My pride was stung as it occurred to me that this would have to mean she was having concerns about her own arousal, and had needed a head start on the evening because she didn't think I would be up to the task. Putting that together with the fact that she had been more or less deflecting my advances all Saturday afternoon as if she weren't interested, I was discouraged at how neatly the pieces fit together.

Images of my affectionate wife ardently engaged in a self-obsessed fit of masturbation have been the stuff of my fantasies so many times I could never recount them all. But the thought that she might ever do it not merely as a convenient vehicle to a pleasing orgasm by herself, but actually as a replacement for some deficiency in our coupled relations was a slap across the face. For some reason, the more I felt it sting, the more convinced I became that it was true.

Irritated by that, I was suddenly flooded with suspicion about everything else. Where had all the dirty talk come from? Why had she been discussing her sex life with a girl from work? What, after ten years of making love only to me, had inspired her to scratch her nails down my back or reach out to grip the headboard when she had never done either before?

After these long, troubled days of thinking about what could be going on in her mind, I would go home and try to gauge her moods, her thoughts, her behavior, and her attitude. I made occasional remarks off the cuff about what a dirty woman she was turning into, and she would give me her cute, scrunched-up smiles that meant, "I hear you, but we can't talk about this." Her eyes seemed not to be speaking to me. It was as if her mind were blank on the matter – or guarded.

By Wednesday night, I couldn't bear it anymore. I had tortured myself throughout the first half of the week with such possible scenarios as were almost stupid, ranging from an affair with a more sexually exciting man to an affair with Jamie from work; from complaining endlessly to her girlfriends at work about her drab sex life to having fallen under the influence of some outrageous whore who was convincing her that she should start trying nasty things, things unthinkable to the Amanda I knew. I had even registered in my mind a number of possible responses in case the day came that she suddenly confessed she had always wanted to try anal. I was mortified that some unseen influence might be pulling my affectionate wife away from me, and replacing her with some rabid sex goddess. I could imagine no other possibility.

Lying in bed with her that night, I could no longer keep everything inside.

"Is everything okay?" I asked her.

"...yeah. Why?"

"I feel like something isn't."

"Like?"

"Like... I don't know. Are you happy?"

"Of course I am!" she insisted immediately. The words felt sincere and even passionate. "What... are you thinking?"

Her hand found mine under the covers and softly slipped inside it.

"Saturday," I said.

"What is it about that that's got you so traumatized? Did we not have fun that night?"

"More fun than usual," I conceded. "Which makes me feel kind of weird."

"You're still not accepting the simple fact that I really wanted you?"

"You did things. New things. Not typical Amanda Redfall things, either. I just want to understand where it came from."

"Name something and I'll tell you," she offered simply.

"How about all the dirty talk?"

"You started that!" she cried. "That was your thing!"

"No," I contested her, and then had to stop. "I mean- yeah, I started it... but what I was doing wasn't just dirty talk."

"Then what was it?"

So I confided everything. I told her every thought I had been thinking prior to Saturday night. I told her I wanted to know her – I wanted to see her naked. I told her I loved her beyond words, and I wanted to feel like she trusted me with her most intimate secrets. I told her I had come to the conclusion that secrets were things that prevented the two of us from ever really becoming one – as long as we didn't know each other completely we would always be two separate entities. I begged her to believe that I was not merely after the cheap thrill of hearing her describe her masturbation habits – I wanted to get to know the woman who masturbated, because she too was my wife, and I had never really met her.

"Maybe it all sounds stupid to you, but- it's serious to me," I told her. "I want us to know each other as well as possible. I want to know that you love me as a complete being, not just the 'acceptable' parts. And I want to love you like that, too."

"None of that sounds stupid," she whispered against my face. "I wish I had known it. I wish you would tell me what you're thinking instead of just assuming I know."

"Now you know," I said.

"It's not so easy for me to talk about that part of me, honey. I need you to understand that. But I'll try to share it with you when I can."

"Then tell me where all the dirty talk came from."

"From you," she said again. "You did it. I thought you wanted me to do it. Now I know that's not what you were looking for, so I'm sorry. Did it bother you?"

"Not knowing why you did it bothered me. The fact that you did was hot as hell, babe."

She planted a firm, dry kiss on my lips. "Good. You seemed to enjoy it at the time."

"What about scratching my back?"

I felt her body expand next to mine as she filled her lungs with air, and then she gusted a tremendous sigh. "I read it."

"You... read it?"

"Mmm hmm."

"In a sexy story?"

"Yup."

I couldn't even think of what to say – or rather, I could think of too many things, and couldn't decide which of them to go with. Lying beside her in the dark of night, suddenly on the brink of the conversation I had been craving and with all of my cards on the table about it, I was seized with panic that I might open my mouth and destroy her confidence with the wrong words.

As the silence grew in length, she spoke up: "Are there other things you were worried about?"

"I... wondered about it when you grabbed the headboard, too. Did you read that?"

"Same story," she confessed.

"So was this pretty recent?"

She paused long enough for another deep sigh, and then she rolled over on her belly beside me, snuggled into the crook of my arm, draped her own arm across my chest, and drew her knee up my groin to let it rest on my pubic bone. Kissing my neck lightly, she said, "I read two stories last... Thursday I think. When I was on the computer, and you and Seth were up here playing in his room."

Immediately I could feel my cock stir in my boxers, and there was no way, with her thigh practically on top of it, that she couldn't have felt it as well. But I kept my mouth shut again, and waited to see what she might volunteer.

"I didn't do anything very exciting," she said. "I read some stories and touched myself when I got the feeling. It was like a five minute thing. I don't know what... kind of stuff you want to know."

"You did it all the way? You had an orgasm?"

"Yup."

"...wow."

I squirmed beneath the weight of her thigh, and my cock pressed firmly into it. Her hand stroked my bare chest cautiously, but I had been sharing a bed with her for nine years, and when her hand stopped short and lay still on my body, I knew that it meant she wasn't feeling intimate. I was not unhappy with her for it – we don't generally make love in the middle of the week anyway, and even if it might have been exciting to jump outside the box a little, it would not have excited me in the least if she were not eager for it – if she were simply performing a service because she knew I wanted it.

"Can we do this a different day?" she whispered. "I understand you now, I promise. But it's kind of late tonight."

It was ten thirty; she is generally sound asleep by nine o'clock.

"That's fine, honey. I feel like I got a huge weight off my back. I had all these nightmare visions that you were unhappy with us. Now I'm comfortable with where you're coming from, I think."

"You make me happier than anyone else ever could," she promised, kissing my cheek. Her hand slipped down past her own thigh to rest on my hard shaft. "I didn't mean to get you all excited and then just say goodnight. Do you... want me to help you out?"

"No," I told her. "You're right, it's late for us. Four thirty comes early."

"Are you going to, um, 'be okay'?"

I laughed a little. "I've had them come up and go away on their own once or twice before," I assured her. "I get one every morning that I don't usually do anything with."

"'Usually', huh?"

"That's what I said."

But the playing was done, and we talked for a few more minutes about simple matters of being, then said our goodnights and I love yous, rolled off into our respective positions, and went to sleep. I finally felt that I had gotten through, and I was able to sleep well.




2.

Then, suddenly, I was wide awake.

It was still dark – I couldn't even have guessed at the time. From the blackest depths of sleep, I was simply wide awake in an instant.

There's no perfect way to reproduce what happened to me. There's no word for what I must be content to call the thunderous shock that assaulted me before I had even gotten my bearings. Here is an experience I wholeheartedly wish I could accurately share with any man who's ever married a good woman, but no mere collection of words could possibly pass on the feeling.

I could hear her in the darkness, her breath short, hard, fast; it was blasting furiously from her nostrils as she tried to keep it quiet. What to compare it to? She was breathing with the tremendous, rhythmic power of a locomotive, and I literally could not believe what I was hearing. There had to be any explanation for it but the one that first crossed my mind! My Amanda had never, would never, could never be so daringly brazen!

But could it have been anything else? She sounded more than simply urgent – more than even desperate; the way she seemed to struggle to contain the sound as the wind burst in and out of her lungs through her nose was positively frantic – it seemed that at any moment the air might blast from her body in a scream of terror.

It might have been that she was in the throes of some horrible nightmare, about to wake with a strangled cry of fear – but this was not the image I saw in my mind. In my mind I saw her with her hand between her legs, rubbing at her clit with all the passion of her being, as fast and as hard as her hand could physically go. She sounded so close to an orgasm she had simply lost her mind and started going at it with everything she had, barely able to keep the breath from gasping out of her mouth. Positively stricken dumb, I lay as still as death and listened for any sign that I was either right or wrong.

Suddenly I couldn't breathe. My heart started pounding so hard in my chest that she might have been able to feel it in the mattress, and it actually hurt. My body trembled from one end to the other in the most profound nervousness I've felt in all my thirty years. My throat constricted so tightly that I swallowed involuntarily every six or eight seconds against what felt like a lump of round steel – it was so audible that she could not have failed to hear it if she were awake, regardless of how lost she might have been in the feeling. I tried with all my might to stop, but every few seconds the lump threatened to close off my airway completely if I didn't swallow it down again.

I was paralyzed with the fear that it was real, my wife was masturbating with an almost panicked ferocity beside me in our bed, and I might ruin it for her by moving, making a sound, or otherwise proving I could hear what she was doing. I tried to pretend I was still asleep, but my body conspired against me by shaking, pounding, swallowing, and becoming so fiercely aroused that the muscles in my cock would not stop convulsing, lifting the blanket from my body with nearly the same regularity as the lump I kept swallowing in my throat.

Why the strong reaction? I could never explain. You would have to be the man who'd known her for ten years. You would have to understand how impossible – how utterly inconceivable – it was that such a woman would intentionally make herself so vulnerable where anyone might witness it – even myself. You would have to spend five years hearing her say, "That's inappropriate," every time you touched her breast in the kitchen. You would have to see how she averted her eyes whenever she referred to her "woman issues" every month. You would have to know that she's not a thrill-seeker in any capacity: she's never smoked, done drugs, or even been drunk in her life. You would have to see how naturally she could assume the role of a child to answer the silly questions of a five-year-old boy who wants to know why he can't marry her when he grows up. You would have to see the professionalism in her appearance every day when she walked through the front door after work. You would have to know that most of the time she couldn't even bear to admit that masturbation habits of any kind existed in her private life, and then you might appreciate how unlikely it is that she would ever do it out in the open... even if she believed I were still asleep.

But most of all, you would have to be the man who had become fascinated over the course of two weeks with the existence of an unknown woman within his wife; you would have to have asked your wife to tell you about her most private secrets; you would have to feel the disappointment and shame of having been denied a glimpse of them after baring your own soul in the process of asking. You would have to be the man who lay next to a woman he believed could never let her guard down enough for such a pure glimpse of her inner being. And then you would have to be the man who suddenly woke in the dead of night to hear what sounded like his wife covertly rubbing herself off beside him, tearing through the home stretch in a blind frenzy of pleasure, unaware that her husband could hear her about to orgasm when she thought she was hiding it from him, panting furiously and trying to be quiet about it.

I could never say why I thought of that first. The way she seemed to be struggling for air in her panic, she might as easily have been suffering some night terror in a dream, just at the worst part of it, trying not to scream and about to wake up screaming. If I were to be honest, this is perhaps a hundred times the more believable possibility. For such a frenzy as she seemed to be in, I should have felt the bed moving at least a little, but there was nothing other than the tremors running through my own body.

But if I continued to be honest, I've seen more than one video of a woman engaged in self-pleasuring, and the sound of my wife stifling her breath through her nostrils reminded me very much of those videos in the last few moments, when the woman seemed to be rubbing so hard you would think it would hurt, and every one of her breaths sounded like only half a breath, cut short to make room for the next one as she approached her climax while she played rough with herself because she knew how to do it and do it hard enough to get there. For no reason I could consciously understand, my body – with no help at all from my mind – seized upon the less likely of the possibilities and reacted to it dramatically.