MARRIED LIFE
Charlotte Stein
I’m so horny I could fuck anything. That guy with the weird hair and the nervous hands—I could fuck him. I could fuck his peach-haired girlfriend, too. And is that his mother with them?
Throw her in while you’re at it.
It’s not my fault, however. You’d want to have sex with strangers, too, if you were prickling all over like me and your husband never wanted to do you. They say girls don’t really want it like guys do—in sitcoms it’s always the wife with the headache, or the wife grousing about her “duties” or the wife being some awful harpy that I’m sure wives rarely are.
But they’re all wrong, because I’m a girl, and a wife, and I do want it. I want it so much that I’m melting. I melt into the floor of the train and dissolve through the metal and plastic and find my way through the tracks to the ground, to the soil, to the water in the soil and then far away, to somewhere else where I give and get pleasure.
Where I am pleasure, and nothing more.
I think it’s mainly because of all the fantasies I used to have before we were married and into the missionary position. My husband is oddly handsome and as big as a tree, and I’d spend hours imagining what it would be like to climb him.
Back when he wasn’t quite mine, we used to all sit together, this big fun group of friends, talking and laughing while I squirmed on my chair and thought about poking my tongue into his ear, scaling him like a city wall, catching him in the magnificent nude.
He’s not muscular, exactly, but he’s so heavy looking, as though he could weigh you down just by removing his shirt. He makes a person want to be consumed by him, pressed on by his great hairy body. There’s so much of him to hold on to—why doesn’t he want me to hold on?
Instead we have sex once a month, and it’s awkward and silent and barely moving, as though if he jostles me too hard I’ll collapse. I want to collapse. I’m already collapsing, with lust.
He’s such a bear, that’s the thing. I thought he’d be like one. I mean, he can really snarl at assholes who rub him the wrong way. It’s not like he’s soft or simpering. And those few times we had sex before we got married were good. They were nice.
They just weren’t my fantasies, and they never became them. I thought marriage was about sharing all those things you were afraid to before, but he seems even more afraid and I never got off the starting blocks. I never said: I want us to tie each other up, I want to fuck in fun places, I want to have sex every day and so hard and furious that it rocks me.
But he just doesn’t seem to need anything.
So I’m left remembering when I thought things would be amazing, mired in that teetering-on-the-brink place of long, open-mouthed kisses, his big hands covering my tits and the idea of him being daring enough to play. I ache thinking of those caresses now.
I ache just looking at him, sitting across the table from me. He’s engrossed in the newspaper, almost ready to go to work. I could just lean over and undo that tie, slide his jacket off his big bear shoulders, get down on my knees and swallow his cock to the root until he shows me he has needs.
He must have needs, right?
He kisses me on the forehead before he heads off to work. That tiny nothing will have to last me the rest of the day.
It isn’t that we’re not happy. We are. We have everything in common and he’s not closed off in any other area. We talk. We flirt and banter as though we’ve just started dating and I want to kill him—I want to kill him with my sex. All the chitter chatter is a constant prelude, conversational foreplay that never gets to the actual play.
I have to wonder if he’s gay.
I mean, he likes show tunes. And when he sings I want to have sex with the sounds coming out of him. He’s also very tidy and a snappy dresser, and all of his tidiness needs to be messed up along with those expensive suits I often ball up in my fists.
Once, I masturbated in a mound of his clothes. I used the handle of his hairbrush—because of course he has one. His hair is thick and luxurious and almost like a lion’s mane, though darker; it’s a warm, rough color, like rabbit fur.
I’d make a coat out of his hair, if I could. I’d rub a strip of it wet between my thighs.
I’m wet now, wandering around the apartment in my pajamas, pretending I don’t want to do myself. There’s that new filthy book that I won’t need and several entertaining little toys I could use that he doesn’t know I have.
I’ve always imagined the conversation we would get into upon his discovery of my little plastic menagerie, but it only descends into hot punishing sex—rather than what it would really descend into: his probable amusement.
He finds things funny. We have a funny life together. It’s even funnier when I pick the lock on his filing cabinet in order to uncover his secret homosexuality, and find instead all the secret dirty things he’s been reading.
There are pages of the stuff! Piles of it! Great jumbles of scrawled-on scraps and typed chunks and words, words, words that he likes.
Words that it takes me ten minutes to realize he writes.
I stop for a million years, twists of paper clutched in my hands. I need the million years just to take the first idea in—that he’s been secretly reading weird loose pages of porn. The second idea—that he might actually be writing this stuff—cannot be processed.
But there are handwritten notes in the margins, in Bobby’s scrawl. Things like move this here and swap with page twelve. Why would he want to swap this and move that on somebody else’s work? He’s an accountant. He accounts things. He does not edit erotica.
He just writes it, apparently, instead.
Of course, at first I don’t dare read it. I see words like cock and clit and decide it’s better for my sanity that I don’t. What if it’s hotter than I’ve been imagining? What if it’s so hot that I can’t take it?
He must be jerking off if he’s writing stuff like this. Doesn’t it turn him on to do it? It turns me on just thinking about it.
I rifle through the pages at first, skimming, then progressing to something that isn’t quite skimming. Occasionally I hide behind a cushion, though I don’t think it’s because the material embarrasses me. My cheeks are hot and red, but that’s for an entirely different reason.
One that gets more pronounced when I read the words: Sweat beaded on his great arched back.
I mean, it doesn’t seem like much. But despite its seeming smallness, the words trail through my mind on a permanent loop. They caress the insides of my eyelids: his great arched back.
I picture something slablike, honey-golden, thick and meaty: my husband’s back, as he heaves a huge axe, and cleaves heavy knots of wood in two.
Of course he has never actually done anything like that in real life, but I’m sinking into the syrupiness of the image, anyway.
I fear what the rest of his words will do to me. I’ve already jammed my back up against the wall below the window, crouched like something feral, face too hot to bear, pussy too hot to bear, too. It swells and presses tight against the material of my pajama bottoms, humming and waiting for me to continue.
So I do. I read the words: As she towered over him…
She? Towering? And there’s more: Her boots gleamed so that he was certain he might see his face in them, though he did not dare look. Looking would mean that he had raised his gaze, and that was not permitted. Not here, in their secret and most private place.
I try to stop it, but it comes on anyway: jealousy, over the use of the word their. I mean, I don’t think he’s cheating on me. I don’t think he’d ever cheat on me, though of course he could be cheating on me.
But somehow the words read like a fantasy, rather than a thing that’s really happened. These are my husband’s secret fantasies, and they are the farthest thing from what I could have imagined. In one of them, a naughty little minx in leather teases and torments her lover for what seems like hours.
It seems like hours reading it. First I have to slog up this hill: He twisted his body up, reaching for her mouth with his painfully taut cock. But she would not allow it. Her crimson lips, slippery with spit and his own juices, twisted into a tormenting smile.
And then I have to contend with this: She knelt before him, twisting and pinching her own nipples. Each little motion seemed to run right to the core of her, making her shiver before his fevered gaze. It was almost as much a relief to him as it seemed to her, to see her slide her fingers between the pouting red lips of her streaming cunt.
I don’t get to the end of it. I see other things, many other sexy scenarios and all of them stranger and less like Bobby than the last, but I don’t make it to the ends of any of them. Instead, I press one finger to my well-oiled clit, and come, and come, and come.
He seems like an alien to me when he comes home, I’ll admit. I think I look at him like that, too. Like he’s suddenly grown a new skin over his old skin, and this was the real him all along. I mentally catalogue all of the things he’s never told me he likes: Watching girls masturbate while tied up. Being made to kiss the shoes of a well-booted dominatrix. Having his arsehole licked. Licking someone else’s arsehole. Having his nipples pinched—sometimes with things that are not fingers.
And I know that it could be that he doesn’t like these things at all. Maybe he just writes what some publisher wants, having fallen into the whole thing quite by mistake.
Though somehow I doubt it.
They felt like fantasies. They were written with a strange kind of restraint, as though the writer was almost afraid of what he was saying or thinking. If the stories had been bubbly and fun and silly, I would have known he didn’t mean it.
But restraint says he does. And I’m just dying to ask: Why? Why do you feel you have to be restrained? Don’t be restrained. Oh, god—don’t be. Don’t be restrained all over me and under me and inside me. I have to get ahold of myself when he kisses me on the cheek, because I almost grab him by his tie and swallow his mouth with my own.
The earlier orgasms have done nothing to take the edge off. My nipples are suddenly stiff beneath my T-shirt. I walk with my legs tight together, so that the seam of my jeans presses against the seam of my pussy. After a second of that, I’m almost moaning.
And then he takes off his suit jacket!
I think of the story with the businessman tied to a chair, his solid sweaty chest revealed to some nasty tease’s gaze, his suit jacket spread like wings. Give me a chance, Bobby. Be daring. I won’t let you down. I’ll step up to the plate. I will. I hardly think I can do it, but I know I could do it for him. I need to do it and not just for him. I need sex and I don’t mind how he wants it.
As long as it’s me he wants to wield the whip. To crawl on the floor. To tie myself up and tie him up and Bobby, don’t you understand that it doesn’t matter?
I burn those words into his back with mind powers I don’t have. He already has command of the cooker and is opening a jar of spaghetti sauce as he drawls away about his day. I love hearing about his day because he always puts funny and interesting spins on everything, as he cooks meals I could never. I can’t even boil a pan of spaghetti.
He’s a good man, my husband. I want to be good to him in return.
And I think I know how to go about it.
“You’re jumping like a bean today, Cal,” he says, as we scarf down the spaghetti. Or at least, I scarf down the spaghetti. He just watches me eat as fast as I can with his big, amused eyes.
It seems like ages before we make it to bed. After dinner, he had wanted to watch a little TV like we usually do, and then he wanted to take a shower, and I can see his book waiting for him on his bedside table. It’s going to be forever until he goes to sleep.
And I can’t do what I plan to do until he’s unconscious.
By the time he’s in bed and through one chapter of his book and leaning over me to say, “Night, Cal,” I’m fizzing and popping like I don’t know what. I can feel my clit all stiff and just begging me to touch it, but I resist. It’ll be better if I do.
Even when he’s finally asleep, I wait and wait and wait until I know he’s deep enough in for me to exact my plan—the belt from my dressing gown for his wrists, which are close enough to the headboard for me to secure them thoroughly. The little riding crop I bought for him to one day use on me is in my hand. It has feathers on one end of it for reasons that hardly become clear, until I trail them over his bare back. The sight alone—red on golden skin—is enough to make me weak with thoughts of his stories, of all the options in between teasing and torment and pleasure and pain that we’ve never explored together.
It pushes me to be quick, even as I force myself to be slow. Only a fine soft tickle to begin with. Even if he were awake, he’d probably struggle to feel it. But I imagine it’s seeping into his subconscious all the same.
Sure enough, when I stroke a little harder he jerks his shoulder back as though trying to nudge away a fly. He grunts with displeasure, and this odd freeing laughter bubbles up inside me.
I’m such a tease. I’m so naughty.
Now I’m playing the feathers right along the curve of his spine, pressing enough that anyone could feel it. The person in the apartment across the street could probably feel it, if he really wanted to.
But still he doesn’t wake up. He sighs, instead, as though something very satisfying has just happened. I test the feathers out on my own arm, just to see what that very satisfying thing might be—and then wish I hadn’t. I almost fall over.
Maybe after, he will run this thing all over me. Maybe.
First I’ve got to get through this.
When he doesn’t stir after an age of tickling, I give myself permission to be bolder. I hold my breath and snap the crop end hard against the meat of his thigh. Hard enough to wake the dead, I should think, but he’s still not stirring.
He only stirs when I sting its tip against the firm swell of his left buttock. Then he feels it, all right.
He jerks and twists on the bed, the shock of a swat like that barely given a chance to sink in before he finds himself unable to turn as easily as he’d like. I see him come up against the belt I’ve tied around his wrists, and then he looks to see what’s stopping him. The whole thing makes me shiver, and not just because the idea of him restrained is exciting.
I think of how cross he’ll be, on discovering what I’ve found out and done. Oh, yeah, I cream a little over that thought.
“What—have you—?” he starts to say, before he manages to twist himself around and look at me over one solid shoulder. His eyes are wide and one eyebrow is raised, but I force myself to stay serious and stern. Don’t waver now, Callie.
“I’ve tied you up,” I tell him. “I think it’s for your own good. You seem to have such trouble sharing things with me that I thought it’d be for the best if I were to slap and tickle it out of you.”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen my husband look dumbstruck and outraged and amused all at the same time before. He looks embarrassed, too, but I’m going to glide right over that. I’m going to glide over everything and get right to the good stuff.
“Don’t speak. If you speak I might have to whack you in a place that might leave a mark. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”
He goes to open his mouth, but then his eyes slide to one side. I can almost hear him puzzling out this particular conundrum.
“You’ve been hiding things from me, Bobby.”
Now his eyes snap back to mine. It’s a strange thing, to see him so mute and unsure. It makes me want to throw my arms around him—though I know that if I do, this will all be over and I’ll never figure out who he wants to be, with me.
Or at least who he wants to be in bed.
“And as punishment, I’m afraid I’m going to have to crop your bare ass until it’s stripy. But don’t worry. In between these stripes, I’m going to drive you mad with this little bunch of feathers, right here. Aren’t I considerate?”
I don’t think considerate is the word he’s thinking of right now. But I don’t think the word he is bandying about in his head has anything to do with aversion, either.
“Lie on your stomach,” I tell him.
When he does it, a heavy swell of arousal goes through me. I think because I expected him not to. There was definitely a moment of tension there. A pause, as though he was going to refuse. But now he’s on his stomach with his hands twisted above his head, so silent that I can hear every shift and shuffle he makes.
I squeeze my thighs tight together, to stem that urgent ache. I just want to slide down what I’m sure will be his stiff cock, right now.
Instead I yank his pajama bottoms down and listen to him groan when I do it. He groans louder when I whack the crop against his bare ass, louder yet when I drag the things between his cheeks, as though I’m going to do dirtier, nastier things to him.
When he whimpers in a way I’ve never heard before, I stroke him with the feathers.
Unfortunately, that only seems to make him whimper all the more. I’ve never heard him be this vocal before—not even when we’re in the middle of sex. He gasps and groans and comes close to words that sound like begging sorts of things, as I slap and smack and then stroke. He strains against the belt I’ve surely not tied so well.
And better than all of this: he rocks against the mattress as though he just can’t help himself.
When I finally say to him that he can turn over now, I’m almost afraid of what I’m about to see. I can’t imagine what his expression is going to be—angry? Miserable? The groans and sighs and the humping of the mattress had seemed to suggest otherwise, but he’s kept all of this from me for so long. He must have a reason.
I’m not prepared for his burning-into-me gaze, the barely suppressed smile. He seems almost giddy in a way I’m sure a submissive shouldn’t be.
Not that I care.
“You took your punishment very well, slave,” I say, and he squirms against his bonds. His cock swings up to kiss his belly, as hard as I’ve ever seen it. Better than that—the head of his cock is slippery and glossy with precome, just begging me to clean him up. I want to stick my tongue out and reward him for getting this excited, but I don’t.
Instead, I rap the crop against his stiff prick. He jumps as though electrocuted but gets out the first word he’s managed since I started all of this: “Again.”
So I do. I rap him again and then snap one over his left nipple, too, just for good measure. He groans loudly and pumps his hips up at nothing.
“Suck me off,” he says, and my pussy flutters to hear him talk like that. It’s entirely the wrong sort of words for a slave, but I’ve never heard him ask for so much as a back rub, never mind a blow job.
I almost give in. Almost.
“I don’t think you get to give me orders, Bobby. No. Instead, you can lie there and be still while I take that big fat cock of yours into my slippery pussy. And if you move too much for my liking, or come before I tell you you can, I’m going to smack this crop across your neck and leave you with a stripe you can’t explain. What do you think of that?”
I don’t expect him to answer. But he does, all in a gleeful rush: “I think I love you more than I did the day I married you.”
“You’re going to love me even more when you see what I’ve got planned for you tomorrow,” I say, and his eyes drift closed as though tasting the most heavenly chocolate.
I give the tip of his cock one lick before I swing my leg over his body, my clit swelling and more wetness trickling from my already soaked pussy when I realize that I’ve never done this before. I’ve never fucked him like this.
It’s a whole new world opening up before us. He seems to think so, too, because he moans long and loud when I rub him through my slippery folds, coating him in all of my wetness before settling him at my greedy hole.
And then I just slide down, down, down, feeling him spread me open so completely, thrilling at the thickness of his stiff cock. I still have the crop in my hand and I tickle him under his jaw until he opens his eyes, the pleasure in them echoing my own, I’m sure.
He looks as though he’s desperate to get his hands free and grind my cunt down on him, but he resists what I know he could easily do. Getting free isn’t part of this game. Holding off his orgasm is, however.
When I slide myself up, keeping only the very tip of him in me, the strain shows on his face. But it gets worse when I ease myself back down again. By the time I’m rocking my hips and rutting that little bundle of nerves inside me against the heavy thickness of him, he’s biting his lip. When I start rubbing my stiff bud in time to my quickening up-and-down slides, I can see the muscles in his stomach tensing.
His cheeks flush. He groans beneath the pressure.
I’m sure he’s not going to make it, until I make it so suddenly it shocks me. I shout his name and go rigid, swamped by pleasure so intense I can hardly hold on to it.
He can’t hold on to it, either. He bellows like a wounded animal, hands suddenly free and on my hips so that he can clutch me to him as he comes. I feel his prick swell and spurt inside me in wrenching spasms, on and on and on until I’m worried for him.
Until I’m going to have bruises where he’s got hold of me.
I’m sure he’s going to collapse when he’s through, but he doesn’t. Instead, he wraps his arms tight around me and laughs; he laughs into my hair, loud and long. His hand goes to the back of my head and holds me so close to him, and then he presses kisses into the side of my face, my cheek, my mouth, everywhere.
“Oh, Callie,” he says. “Callie. Please say we can do that every night.”
I want to laugh with him then, though, maybe I’m crying at the same time.
“Of course we can,” I say. I think of my plastic menagerie. “What do you want to try out tomorrow?”