32 comments/ 31938 views/ 8 favorites It Ain't Easy By: jack_straw The steady beep-beep-beep of the heart monitor was somehow soothing, sort of like elevator music, something that's always there, but which you don't notice unless it's not there. I knew that as long as I heard that constant noise, things were all right. I was sitting in a chair in the intensive-care unit next to the prostrate form of my husband, who was just an hour or so out of open-heart surgery. At that moment, my emotions were just about wrung out. I had cried, I had prayed, I had raged at my helplessness. I like to stay busy, which is why I still work as a teacher even though Ricky makes a very good living as a lawyer, and I like to be in control of my life. And I could do nothing but sit there in the quiet riot of the ICU, with midnight approaching, and wait for my husband to come out from under the anesthetics -- the little death that allows surgeons to do the things they do -- so we could begin the long process of recovery. The surgeon, the cardiologist and the attending nurses had all said the procedure was a success, that Ricky would make a full recovery, but I knew I'd have to see it to believe it. The crisis that had led us to that point had come on us suddenly, just six days earlier. It was a Sunday in early August, and hot like it can only get way down South. Because it was so hot, we'd spent the day indoors doing laundry, with a baseball game on in the background. I teach English at the local high school, and had started back to work the previous week. We still had another week to go before the kids started their year, and I had a few odds and ends to get pulled together that day, so I'd be ready the next day. He got this funny look on his face, and I noticed he was making an effort to belch, without success. After a few minutes, though, he seemed to relax and the moment passed. A few hours later, I'd gone on to bed while he'd gotten on the computer to do some preliminary research so he'd be a little ahead when he went to work the next day. He is a general practice lawyer here in the small Southern town where he grew up, and he's the best at what he does. About 12 years ago, he traded in the rat race as a high-profile corporate attorney in Philadelphia, where I grew up, for the much slower pace of having his own firm in a smaller town. I sleep with the light on until he comes to bed, so I wasn't totally out of it when he came in looking pale and slightly disoriented. "Beth?" he said softly, and I could hear a slight bit of panic in his voice, which brought me out of the light sleep into which I'd fallen. "Ricky? What's wrong?" I said in a voice still thick with slumber. "Something's not right," he said. "I can't get comfortable, and I've got this ... weird feeling in my chest, like I've got a hard ball in my esophagus, and a tingling feeling down my left arm." He sat down heavily on the chair in our bedroom, and that's when I got up and looked him over. I was alarmed at what I saw. He didn't appear to have a fever, but his skin was clammy and his face was covered in a cool sweat. He also seemed to be having a little trouble breathing "Go lie down on the couch in the den," I said. "I'm calling 911." "You don't have to do that," he said as he stood up on legs that looked shaky. "I'm fine." "You are not fine," I said, a little more crossly than I intended. "I'm not having you drop dead on me. Something's wrong and we're getting an ambulance out here. Now!" Just then I noticed a grimace cross his face, and he didn't argue with me, but went right into the den and laid down on the couch. Less than 10 minutes later, the ambulance was pulling in the driveway and the EMTs were starting to work. The first thing they observed after checking his blood pressure and pulse rate gave me a little bit of comfort. "It doesn't appear that he's having a heart attack," one of them said. "But something is going on, so we'll get a nitro drip going as soon as we get him in the truck and we'll let the hot-shots take a look at him." Ricky seemed to relax once it became clear that we were going to the hospital. He was alert and even a little jovial, although he was still clearly in a fair amount of discomfort. Once they had him secured, they hustled him out to the ambulance while I threw some clothes on, then our 16-year-old daughter and I got in the car and followed them to the emergency room. That began the six-day whirlwind that led me to the ICU and a nearly-comatose husband lying on the bed. It turned out that Ricky had had an angina attack, not quite the same as a full-blown heart attack, but still nothing to ignore. Once they got the pain abated and his condition stabilized, they sent him on to the large general hospital in the city nearest our hometown, where our two sons live, and began the battery of tests to find the source of the problem. It didn't take them long to find it. We were stunned to learn that Ricky had already had a heart attack. We have no clue as to when he had it, but the evidence was clear as day when we looked at the picture they got from the heart catheter. He had one artery on the back of his heart that was almost completely blocked and two others that were more than 50 percent blocked. The cardiologist didn't hesitate. He recommended immediate bypass surgery. "Frankly, I'm amazed that he's just now showing signs of trouble," he said. I consulted some people in the medical field in this area that I trusted and got the name of the heart surgeon they considered the best, and said that was who we wanted. He was put on the schedule for the following Friday to have the procedure done. We were completely baffled as to why he'd developed heart trouble. He had no family history of heart trouble, he was only 51 years old, he'd always been healthy and kept himself in good physical condition. The only thing we could come up with was his 20-some years of smoking cigarettes. He'd taken up the habit in college, but had quit nearly 10 years earlier. Whatever had caused it was irrelevant. It was a problem that had to be dealt with, and Ricky didn't look back for a second once the decision was made to have surgery. I'll be honest, though; we were scared. Up to that point, our lives had been a fairy tale, and now suddenly we were confronted with a mortal crisis that could take my Ricky away from me. I've never felt more alone in my life -- notwithstanding all of the family, friends and clergy that were surrounding me -- than in that moment when they wheeled him into the operating room. I was absolutely lost, and that's when I finally cracked. I just buried my face in my father's shoulder and sobbed uncontrollably. Now, as I sat by Ricky's bedside, I thought back over the 27 years of our marriage, plus the three years of courtship before that, and the life we'd made together. ^ ^ ^ ^ You would be hard-pressed to find two people from more diverse backgrounds than ours, and I've always been convinced that we were fated to be together, because it took a peculiar set of circumstances for us to meet. I'm the middle child from a family that was a fixture on the Main Line of Philadelphia. We're talking old -- very old -- money. If you've ever seen the movie, "Trading Places," with Dan Ackroyd and Eddie Murphy, you have a fair idea of the kind of life I came from. My father was a financier, much like in the movie, and my brother, Allan, three years my senior, followed eagerly in his footsteps. My sister, a year-and-a-half younger than me, also followed the pattern. She was always gorgeous, always flirty, always popular, and she did the debutante thing with gusto. For a long time, we also hated each other's guts, because she was everything I was not. I was pretty enough, just not in Lisa's class, and I was a little taller than average and a little gangly as a kid. I was also a bit of a rebel. I preferred being alone, preferred the sanctuary of books to the company of others and I absolutely abhorred the society dos that were so much a part of my mother's and my sister's lives. I wasn't so much of a rebel, though, that I could defy my folks on where I went to school. So I dutifully trotted off to an exclusive prep school, where I did pretty well, just not well enough to get much attention in the uber-competitive academic environment the school fostered. So when my mom insisted that I follow her footsteps and attend Bryn Mawr -- and, oh by the way, join the same sorority she'd been a member of -- and hinting that she and Dad wouldn't pay for me to go anywhere else, I was stuck. It was the worst two years of my life. The only halfway decent thing I got out of it was that I learned a little bit about sex. I started to fill out during my senior year of high school, and I was somewhat amazed to find that I could attract guys. Unfortunately, the guys I met when I was at Bryn Mawr were the same kind of simpering idiots like my brother, snobs who thought their shit didn't stink. After my fourth abortive relationship with some moneyed clown, I'd had enough. I informed my parents that I was transferring, and I'd wait tables if I had to in order to pay for it. I'd poured myself into my studies, so I had the grades, and I chose to go to Penn. My parents was taken aback at my determination and acquiesced. Being an Ivy League school, Penn isn't exactly like Penn State or Michigan or some other such state university, but it was a whole different world from Bryn Mawr. I actually met real people for the first time in my life, and I threw myself into campus activities. I even dated some, but after my earlier experiences I had made a vow that I would not have sex with just anyone, and I kept that vow. Right up to the day I ran into Ricky Smithers at a campus event. I was helping organize the event, some speaker whose name I've forgotten, and I saw this sandy-haired guy across the auditorium. He wasn't real big, but he seemed to move with a sense of grace and confidence that intrigued me. I asked one of the girls helping set up who he was, and she kind of gave a little sneer and told me who he was, and walked off with a little disdain in her step. I was puzzled at her attitude, so I walked over to him and introduced myself. I'd never done anything like that before, but, like I said, I was fascinated. As soon as he opened his mouth, I sort of understood the girl's attitude. Despite all the years he spent in Philly, Ricky never got the South out of his mouth. He had -- still has -- a soft, slow drawl that was all magnolias and cane syrup. Ricky is about as country as they come, other than the fact that he loves rock-and-roll music. While my roots are deep in the Main Line, his are just as deep in the red-clay soil of the Deep South. His parents, Roland and Virgie, ran a hardware store in the downtown area of a small town in southern Georgia, until it got too much for them as they got older. For some reason that's never been adequately explained, it took them awhile to have children, so they only had two. Ricky was the oldest and his sister Julie was a couple of years younger. They grew up in a small house out in the country, where their parents still live and still keep a rather extensive garden. They've never been very well-off, but they are rich in the kind of things you can't put a price tag on. They always worked hard at their store, which still operates under the ownership of a friend to whom they sold it a few years ago. They pay their bills on time, tend their garden and attend services at the First Methodist Church every single Sunday, rain or shine. They are good, good people. Unlike me and my siblings, Ricky and Julie have always been close, and I can't tell you how much I owe Julie for her help in getting me adjusted when we moved back here 12 years ago. I can honestly say she's my best friend, and I leaned on her something fierce when Ricky had his heart trouble. It didn't take me long to learn that Ricky was a legend in the town. He'd been the first student at the high school there to make a perfect 36 on his ACT, he was valedictorian, class president and voted Most Likely to Succeed. He'd always been ambitious, and wanted to attend college in a completely different environment from his hometown, so he chose Penn from the many scholarship offers he received. He seemed so confident and self-assured when I first met him that I was shocked when he told me how many times he almost left and went back home his freshman year. He was considered a hick by the Ivy Leaguers he'd encountered and had developed few friends and had no love life. His father is a gentle man, and soft-spoken, but Ricky said that Roland put his foot down and told Ricky he wouldn't let him back in the house if he quit school at Penn. With his family's encouragement, he'd gotten through that first year and started showing the kind of results everyone expected. Even by the time I met him, though, midway through our junior year, he was still something of a social outcast, although his academic record had earned him plenty of respect. I asked him about it, and he just shrugged. "It ain't easy," he said. "But that's life." I would soon come to find out that was his stock phrase for explaining the unexplainable. He said it was the refrain from a song by David Bowie, but it wasn't a song I was familiar with. "It ain't easy," he'd say, and he'd always say it with a shrug. I guess it was his philosophy for dealing with the ups and downs that life had thrown at him. I couldn't understand the attitude of the other girls at school, though, because from the very first Ricky Smithers set my pulse racing. There was just something about him that turned me into a quivering mass of Jell-O whenever I was around him. In fact, he still does. After the event that night, he invited me to join him for a beer at an on-campus pub and we talked about our lives. I kept my cards kind of close to the vest, because I didn't want him to think I was bragging about my background (not that I would anyway). He was a perfect gentleman that night, and I was stunned that I was actually disappointed. I'd never been around a man that I so much wanted to ravage me only a few hours after I'd met him. But he didn't even kiss me. He did, however, get my phone number from me, and he called me the next day. We were off and running, and it didn't take us long to fall madly in love. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, to find out why no one had snapped this guy up. He was everything I could have wanted in a boyfriend -- polite, easy-going, an interesting conversationalist and a wonderful kisser. I wanted him from the very first, but I took it slow because I wanted to be sure of my feelings, but by our fifth date, we knew we were ready to take our relationship to the next level. To this day, I remember every detail of the first time we made love. He took me to dinner that night, and we were unusually keyed up. It was early spring, a really gorgeous Saturday, and we'd spent the day at the park. We'd ostensibly been studying, but we'd spent more time on the blanket making out than cracking the books. I think we knew where we were headed that night, and I was excited. We had gone downtown for cheese steaks, a local treat he'd come to appreciate. That's one thing about our relationship; we've always found ways to enjoy the guilty pleasures of each other's local tradition. He came to enjoy things like scrapple, and I've learned to love stuff like grits and turnip greens (although I'm still not too sure about okra). Afterward, we rode the bus back to my apartment, and I invited him in for coffee. When we had our cups, we sat together on the sofa and chatted aimlessly, about nothing in particular. When my cup was drained, I set it on the coffee table and we sort of melted together. I was nervous, because I really wanted this to go well. I had feelings for him like I'd never had for any of my four previous lovers, and I so wanted it to be good. Ricky's hands caressed my body as we kissed with ever-increasing ardor, our tongues slashing together as the passion mounted between us. He moved subtly on the sofa to where he was slightly on top of me, and I could feel his hardness gently burrowing into my crotch area. "God, Ricky, please," I panted. "I want you. Please, love me?" He just smiled and whispered to me. "I want you too, Beth," he said. "You are so beautiful. You're the woman I've dreamed about all my life." Then we kissed again, passionately, wantonly, now that we knew what we wanted. As we kissed, Ricky's hands started exploring, unbuttoning my blouse with one hand while the other was gently massaging my crotch through my tight jeans. I could feel my lust starting to soar, and I responded by reaching up to find Ricky's cock. I didn't have to search much. He was hard as a rock under his Levi's, and he groaned as I softly caressed his cock. At length, I rolled him over and stood up. I'm sure I looked a sight with my soft brown hair tousled and my face flushed with lust. My blouse was hanging off my arms and I quickly discarded it. That got a smile from Ricky, who had looked at me with some concern when I stood up, thinking he'd done something wrong. I reached back and unhooked my bra and threw it on the floor on top of my blouse. I swayed lustfully as I played with my naked breasts, my nipples hard as rocks. "You have the most beautiful titties," he whispered, and that sent my arousal spiking to hear that from the man I was falling in love with. Trust me, my breasts are nothing special. They're kind of smallish, with quarter-sized areolas and perky little nips. I've always been sensitive about my bust size, because Lisa is fairly well-endowed, and don't think she didn't let me know it when we were teenagers. In fact, I'd broken up with my last boyfriend, months earlier, after he suggested that I'd be a lot sexier if I had a boob job. Asshole. But Ricky said they were beautiful. Of course, I didn't believe him at first. "You're just saying that because you want to get in my pants," I teased. "No, really," he said as he stood up to gather me in his arms. "Well, I do want to get in your pants. But, seriously, anything more than a handful's a waste. No, you have gorgeous titties. They're perfect for your body." And to demonstrate, he bent down and captured one of my nipples with his lips and began to softly suckle me, lightly running his tongue over my hard little tip. I could feel crackles of real passion exploding through my body as Ricky nursed me, moving easily from one to the other. I was on fire from his mouth, as I knew deep down he'd be good, seeing as how he was such a great kisser. I finally had to pull him away from my chest, because I was already close to a climax, and it had been my experience that once I came I had a hard time staying in the mood for sex. Little did I know. "I want you, baby, so bad," I panted. We hustled to my bedroom, where we finished removing our clothes. Ricky naked was everything I had fantasized about. He's not real big, about the same height as me, but he was well-built and trim, and his cock appeared to be perfect, not too big and not too small. And that cock was standing straight and tall, already weeping with desire for me. I figured he'd just lay me down and fuck me, and, honestly, that's what I wanted. But the man was going to be full of surprises. I managed to pull the covers down as he was laying me back. But instead of climbing into the saddle, he pounced on my breasts again, licking and sucking my throbbing nipples like a man on his last meal. After feasting on my tits for what seemed like a long time, long enough to bring me right to the edge of a climax, he started slithering his tongue down my stomach to my abdomen. It Ain't Easy I could feel this hot ball forming in my hard core, because I knew what was coming. I'd only had one man go down on me before; the others had turned their noses up at the idea. He hadn't been all that good at it, and I wondered what the fuss was about it. I was about to find out. Ricky got his face right in between my legs, but instead of taking the plunge, he started blowing softly on my super-hot pussy. I squealed in surprise and delight as feelings welled through my body I'd never felt before. He kept blowing soft breezes right on my wet sex, until suddenly I felt the tip of his tongue just teasing my clit. Slowly, ever so slowly, he licked over my throbbing flesh as I writhed on the bed in the grip of a building explosion like nothing I'd ever experienced before. It took me a few seconds to realize that he was steadily increasing the speed and force of his tongue on my pliant pussy. Unconsciously, my hands glommed onto my tits as I squeezed and pinched my nipples. I was lost in the ozone of lust from Ricky's mouth, and I think I screamed his name as my orgasm exploded through my body in a white-hot flash of passion. I vaguely remember being a little disappointed. I had never before had multiple orgasms, and I was always one and done. Oh, I'd still let Ricky fuck me, I thought, but I wanted to come with him, and I thought I wouldn't be able to come back from such a gut-wrenching climax. But my man was full of surprises. Instead of letting me be, he kept at it, sliding a couple of fingers into my gooey pie and lightly nipping at my clit. I was amazed to realize that I was climbing back on the express train of lust. "G-g-g-g-god!" I cried. "Fuck me, Ricky. F-f-f-f-f-uuuuccckkk meeeee!" I was surprised at my language in that moment, because the f-word was just not part of the vocabulary for a proper Main Line girl like me. But I didn't care at that moment. I wanted Ricky to consume me. And he didn't ... at least not right then. He looked up at me with a gleam in his eyes and an evil grin, and went right back to working me over with his mouth. In that moment, I surrendered. I gave up every bit of myself to that man right then. Somewhere in my psyche, I made the decision that I was going to let him do whatever he wanted to me, for the rest of my life. And that's never changed. I closed my eyes and let the passion take me on a flight to paradise. Ricky's mouth was a dervish as he sucked, licked, kissed and probed by boiling flesh, and it wasn't long before I arched my back and shuddered from head to toe with an absolutely unbelievable orgasm. As I floated down to earth, I sensed, more than saw, Ricky lift his head up and look at me with a sense of satisfaction. But there was something else, too. Animal passion. I've never forgotten the look on his face as he climbed up on his knees between my widespread legs and pressed his impossibly-hard cock to my eager hole. Everything that has come in all the years since has flowed from that one moment, when he put the head of his cock to my waiting pussy and slid into me for the first time. Incredibly, I felt yet another climax building as he began to slowly, but steadily, fuck me with long, even strokes. As he began to find his rhythm, he reached down, gathered my sweat-covered body in his arms and we kissed. Oh God, did we kiss. Wildly, passionately, our lust flowing from our lips through our tongues as we cemented our partnership right then and there. We were one, forever and always, and we knew it. All I could feel was the tumbling of our emotions together as we fucked each other with runaway lust. After everything that had come before, we couldn't make it last, but, man, what a ride while it lasted. Ricky was growling and grunting as he pounded me with long, hard strokes, and I was keening, moaning and crying out his name as I worked my body to meet him with everything I had. And, yet, as far gone as we were, Ricky had the presence of mind to ask where I wanted him to come. Neither one of us had said anything about birth control, and he was thinking ahead. "In me!" I cried. "I'm on the pill! Fuck me, baby, fuck me and shoot that stuff deep inside me! Oh God, dooooooooo iiiiiiiiitttttttt!" And he did. I could feel his body tense, just at the moment that my third orgasm of the night crashed through my body. I felt his cock swell, seconds before he shot a barrage of hot cream deep in my hungry pussy. I milked him of everything he had, and kept on even after the initial rush had passed. At long last, we relaxed, and as we stared at each other, we both began to laugh, giddy at what we'd just shared. We knew in that moment that we'd found our soul mate, and we were never going to let each other go. We spent the rest of the night, and all the next day, making love, and while it didn't quite have the intensity as our first time, it was still great. During a break in the action, I asked him where he learned to please a woman like that. He got a smile on his face and a faraway look in his eyes. He told me he'd had a fling the summer after his freshman year of college with a divorcee who worked at the diner down the street from his folk's store, and that she'd taught him all the little tricks about sex. He said it was the most important period of his life, because it gave him an enormous sense of self-confidence that served him well when he went back to college. My folks, of course, were mortified the first time I brought Ricky home with me, although that didn't stop my sister from flirting with him. They all thought he was an uncivilized redneck. Still do, in fact. Well, let me back up a little. My father eventually figured out that behind Ricky's easy-going country demeanor beats the heart of a shark. It isn't that Ricky -- Richard to the professional world -- isn't a genuinely nice person inside. It's just that there is a spine of steel and a quick, well-ordered mind behind his aw-shucks façade. I can't tell you how many hot-shot Philadelphia lawyers he eviscerated during his career as a corporate lawyer because they completely underestimated him. In fact, I've heard him called Matlock by those he's left him shambles. So Dad, and, to a lesser extent, Allan, came to grudgingly accept Ricky as a peer, but my Mom and my sister never have. Oh, Lisa tried her best to seduce him, but Ricky just laughed at her. I, on the other hand, told my darling little sis that if she ever tried anything with my man again, I'd cut her heart out and stuff it up her well-used twat. She gave me what I interpreted at the time as an evil smile, but looking back on it, I think was more a look of astonishment, with an element of awareness that I really had found a man who could love me. I'm sure she didn't think I had it in me to attract a man like Ricky until that moment and it was the first step toward us having a more cordial relationship. We're still not close, and we probably won't ever be, but we aren't enemies and we don't hate each other any more. Ricky and I waited until we graduated a year later to move in together. Ricky went on to law school and I got a job teaching at a public school not far from campus. My father tried to pull some strings to get me a job in the suburbs, but I shot that idea down. I wanted to work with real kids from the city. It was actually a pretty good school, and I enjoyed the time I spent there. After Ricky's second year of law school we got married. It was a little bigger deal than I wanted, but it wasn't the elaborate production my mother wanted, so I guess we compromised. By then, I'd been to Georgia to meet Ricky's family, and that just reinforced my initial impression of him as the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. They welcomed me with a lot more grace than my family welcomed him, and that has always shamed me a little. We did move to the suburbs when Ricky finished law school, graduating near the top of his class. His Southern drawl notwithstanding, he had no trouble getting on with a very good firm right out of school. We waited five years before starting our family, and I'm glad we did. We had a chance to enjoy each other before children started becoming a concern. We had two sons two years apart, then our daughter came along four years later. Not long before she was scheduled to start school, around age 4, Ricky started talking about moving back to Georgia. He missed being close to his family, and he was getting tired of the often-cutthroat world of corporate law. I was a little reluctant at first. I had never lived anywhere else but Philly, and I was a city girl through and through. But the more I analyzed it, the more I came around to his way of thinking. For one thing, I was ready for him to make a change of some kind. I could see that his years of swimming with the sharks in the legal profession in Philly had left their mark on my Ricky. He'd developed a hard shell that was at odds with the open, personable man I'd fallen in love with. It was nothing overt, but I could tell. For another, the idea of raising children in the more relaxed atmosphere of southern Georgia, rather than the frantic urban atmosphere of Philadelphia, had a great deal of appeal. My parents, of course, were aghast that I would even consider leaving Philly, and my mom even insisted that I, "put my foot down," and demand that we stay. My answer to that was that my place was alongside my husband, and I would go wherever he went, and go cheerfully. He finally decided that he wanted to make the change, so we moved. We haven't regretted it. Our sex life has stayed pretty hot, although we've mellowed some since that fiery beginning. But we still have our moments. There was the night in Las Vegas when I got pretty inebriated and danced with a succession of men, as Ricky watched bemused, watched because he had a cast on his leg and couldn't dance with me. That's probably the closest we've ever come to having another person enter our sex life, but we just couldn't pull the trigger on it, and I'm glad we didn't. The fantasy has always been intriguing, but I've been afraid of what would happen in reality, after the fact. Another memorable moment came on our 25th anniversary just a couple of years ago. We went to Puerto Rico and took a day hike into the rain forest. We took a blanket and made love near a waterfall, and didn't even stop when a couple of old ladies happened upon us. ^ ^ ^ ^ All of that, and more, flowed through my mind as I watched my husband on that bed. My vision was blurred with tears as I thought about our life together, and what the future might bring. I almost missed the moment when he first started coming around, but when the nurse came into the room there at the ICU and started talking to him, I knew he was starting to awaken. It took awhile, and it wasn't until mid-morning the next day before he woke up enough to finally talk, other than the gibberish from the anesthesia. By then, the breathing tube had been removed, and he seemed to be more at peace than he had been the previous night. "You were here all night, weren't you," he said weakly. "You need to rest." "Where else would I be?" I said. "My place is always with you. I'll rest when they get you down to the floor." "It ain't easy, you know," he said, after a period of silence. "No, it ain't," I answered back "But we'll get through it." He smiled as he closed his eyes. "I love you," he whispered before drifting off to sleep, holding his heart pillow close to his chest. "I love you, too," I answered, as grateful tears rolled down my cheeks. I knew then that we were going to be all right. We had a long road of recovery ahead, but together we would make it, the way we always had.