Kick it up a Notch

Thursday evening, Ann said in a coy tone, "John and I went out for lunch again today. We made out a little, but nothing like yesterday. We both had to get back to work for a meeting too, so didn't have much time."

I didn't push for any details and Ann didn't volunteer any others, so I had to take it at face value that that was as far as they'd gone. After the discussion had moved on to other topics, I had to examine my own thoughts about how much detail I wanted to know about what she did with John. For now, I didn't change anything.

I carried my angst right up to Friday evening when John and Carol came over for dinner. I even managed to get home earlier than usual, but they were all there having a glass of wine by the time I got home. It was clear they'd all bonded; I felt a bit like an outsider working to weave myself into the 'in' group. The kids were parked in front of the television happily eating their own early dinners and ignoring the adults.

John acted bubbly, and I guessed that it might have something to do with the idea that he was going to fuck my wife in the near future - or maybe he was ebullient because he already had. Despite all the reasons I could have not liked him, he was a nice guy and full of enthusiasm for life. In some ways I thought of him like a floppy puppy dog that wanted to be everyone's friend.

Carol was a short, stocky, busty girl with long brunette hair. She had a pleasant face, and was also a computer systems analyst of some kind for a company I hadn't heard of. She was likeable, and I went out of my way to make her feel welcome and included since John already apparently felt that way thanks to Ann. She had a laissez-faire attitude about life, the kind of mindset that doesn't respond too much in either direction. Despite my efforts, Carol was quiet, and I guessed she was evaluating me as a sex partner much the way I was doing the same about her.

I tried to see if I could find some chemistry with Carol, but in truth I found only a minimum, and I think that was jaded because I was evaluating her as a fuck buddy. All my chemistry was with Ann, and that was all the chemistry I wanted too. I wanted Ann to have chemistry with me and no one else. I felt real jealousy, an emotion I didn't like, particularly this close to home. Further and after watching them interact, I wasn't sure that Carol had any chemistry with John either, but the two of us pretended that we found some and so had some nice conversations. Carol could be reserved.

In the midst of the evening, I found myself alone with Ann in the kitchen at one point. I whispered, "Did you do anything at lunch with John?"

Ann leaned in and kissed me. She smiled and said, "Same as Wednesday. I need you later." She kissed me again and whispered, "I'm horny."

I felt ecstatic that she was picking me for the evening's sexual activities. Even if she fantasized about another man, I would be the guy making love to her.

We ate, I took the two kids upstairs and read them a couple of stories, tucked them into bed, changed into casual clothes, and then rejoined Ann, John, and Carol downstairs.

By the time I got there, they'd already decided that we'd get together the following Friday night. I felt the intervening week would be fraught with more of the anxiety building inside me, plus I wondered what else John and Ann would do over their lunch hours.

My older daughter made a couple of visits down to the living room with a number of requests: a glass of water, another story, a wish to stay up later, concern for a friend who was moving away, and enough other interruptions that any chance of anything further happening that night was blown away.

The fact that the kids were restless caused Ann to announce that the following Friday she'd see if she could farm them out to their grandparents who didn't live too far away. I thought that was a good idea if we were going to do something; I sure didn't want either kid walking in on a group sex orgy.

As John and Carol reached the door to leave I watched Ann wrap herself around John and give him a kiss the likes of which I hadn't received from her since we got back from our honeymoon.

Before I could react, Carol tried to engage me in a similar make out session by the front door. I hadn't kissed another woman other than Ann in fourteen years, so I was a little shocked by how different and arousing kissing a new partner could be. I did respond to Carol, and found myself getting heated from the physical interaction. Later, I wondered how much of my reaction was natural hormones and how much was an actual attraction to Carol. Maybe there was chemistry there.

John and Carol left, and I went around the room collecting the dishes from our pizza dinner and wine, and took them to the kitchen. The activity was really a stalling tactic of my overloaded brain.

The knife through the heart I'd felt since the previous weekend when I'd started thinking about what Ann's proposal had meant was nothing compared to the major detonations of artillery going off in my head, particularly after watching Ann and John kiss goodnight, their tongues waggling in each other's mouths in a sexy way as they pulled apart. In an equally intimate gesture, one of John's hands had cupped Ann's breasts too.

After John and Carol had left, Ann asked me if I thought I would like to have a 'relationship' with Carol. The implication was clear. While Ann and John were going to do whatever they were going to do, Carol and I could do whatever we wanted.

My mind decided if Ann and John were going to have intercourse, I'd at least have a partner with Carol so I could do the same. Did I really want that? Maybe it'd be fun, but what would I be losing when Ann started in with John? Beyond that I just didn't know where things would go. I was in denial and didn't want to think about it. I remember rationalizing that it was probably too late to stop the runaway train now anyway.

We'd gotten married quite young; Ann had been a mature nineteen and I'd been twenty-three. Both of us were inexperienced about sex then, since however, we had read widely and watched some stimulating porn to broaden our horizons over those years. None of that was a substitute for the real thing, but we sure liked watching and reading about it, and then practicing.

Over the twelve years of our marriage, including having kids, we'd gotten in the rut where our sex had become pretty mundane - a couple of times a week. I thought we were pretty comfortable in our relationship, and there didn't seem any major dissatisfactions that I'd been aware of. With her 'kick it up a notch' statement, I looked everywhere to see where I'd been negligent, ignorant, or where I'd fucked up in some major way. There must be something I was missing - something major I was missing; something major enough to mandate her starting up something with another man.

Just after we married, I started on my Master's degree and Ann continued into her last two years of college. I went on after that and got a Ph.D. in engineering while she worked doing computer programming. My technical degrees made me a full-fledged nerd, and left me with the belief that careful analysis can solve any problem. I was also pretty conservative.

I really couldn't think straight. Every time I tried to take a logical approach to analyzing the emerging problem of Ann and John, the options, and various solution schemes, I'd hit some immediate sore point and almost break out crying. I started to lose sleep: I'd go to bed, catch about an hour of sleep and then lie awake most of the night just stewing in the entire situation. Sometimes I'd get up, got to my man cave, breakout my porn magazines and jerk off looking at pictures of group sex.

The intervening week, I was extremely nervous - on several counts. First, I was really concerned about what Ann having a second relationship was going to mean to our twelve-year marriage. Was it too late? I worried about divorce, but knew I'd not be the instigator of anything like that. I loved Ann so much, but, oh God, what was she doing to us?

I equated sex with love, and love with marriage. Marriage involved fidelity and faithfulness. Ergo, I reasoned that sex and fidelity went together. If you had sex outside the marriage you were no longer faithful to the relationship. But in some of the books we'd read, that link didn't exist. There were relationships based on the premise of an 'Open Marriage.' Someone could have sex with multiple partners, even love multiple partners, and still be in a successful and growing marriage with yet another partner. Given how I felt over the week I wondered if the other people in those kinds of relationships ever felt the same way I did. I doubted it because the books on the subject never mentioned the dark feelings I had - feelings that started to consume me.

One evening at home I broke out some of the books we'd read and scanned them for key passages about group or polyamorous relationships. The over riding themes to be consenting adults could do whatever they wanted about sex, so long as no one got hurt; and you could love more than one person at a time, and that statement was meant to include all the intimacies associated with a marriage. I tried to get my head around those principles.

My second concern was that I was so nervous and worked up over the coming evening that I wouldn't be able to perform like the sex god I could be. I couldn't do much about this, except I did resolve to moderate my drinking which often had an adverse affect on my staying and recovery power. Right at that moment, however, I was thinking that an entire bottle of bourbon four times a day was just what I needed to calm my nerves. I wanted to zone out on this entire situation - just forget it and go back to the way we were before Ann's 'kick it up a notch' statement. Of course, we could never go back; the horse was already out of the barn and running.

My third concern was longer term. All our talking and thinking had been short term, on the order of days. I worried about what a longer-term relationship with John would look like, and what role if any I would continue to have in Ann's life. Given Carol's personality and how little she stimulated any romantic interest in me, I was sure that any relationship with her would be short-lived.

What would be the relationship between Ann and John after their Friday fuck? Would they keep doing erotic lunch hours? Since, by then, they would have fucked for sure, would that activity now take place every day? My brain wandered, and I wondered if this coming evening was all for show and to cover their tracks; they could have already fucked their brains out many times, and this was only to get me involved in a way that gave them permission to continue and removed some guilt from Ann's life.

Ann repeatedly told me she loved me, but as she got increasingly into the relationship with John, I easily imagined that changing until I was the stranger and the outsider, and eventually until I was no longer loved or wanted. I thought about how painful the separation would be, and the struggles with the kids and finding a new partner.

I think I realized too that the anxiety I was now feeling would never go away. I would have to carry the pain of Ann's words and actions the rest of my life, whether we stayed together or not. When that realization hit me in the middle of the night, I got up, went to my den, and cried for an hour until I was out of tears. The pain was that 'things would never be the same again.'

Fourth, I worried about the kids. Despite their young ages, they would soon figure out that Mommy had a deep, loving interest in another man other than Daddy. Would I lose their affection? Would they adopt John as a stepfather or some sort? For a subsidiary issue, the kids might raise that relationship to either set of grandparents when they were with them, but for another I worried that the situation would confuse them.

Lastly, I worried about how much time in the future I would get to be with Ann. Already, because of my new job, I'd lost a chunk of time because the new job required I be in earlier and leave later than I had in the old one. The first Friday when John and Carol came to dinner, John had alluded to various 'weekend dates' he could go on with Ann, and the implication was clear that I wasn't invited. I'd be home with the kids and working on the house as I usually did on weekends.

One of the dates John suggested involved hunting. Both Ann and I were against hunting for a number of reasons based on the values we were raised with. John wanted to take Ann bow hunting. I don't know where along the road she changed, but suddenly she was wildly enthused about finding a deer or turkey, and getting off just the right shot to down the animal. The value shift was so sudden; I had to shake my head to be sure I even heard her correctly.

Because of that planned date I started to see a not so subtle shift of personal values on her part, values that had originally cemented us together in many ways were eroding away or tossed aside in favor of whatever John suggested. A couple of those values were monogamy, fidelity and trust.

* * * * *

Ann shared with me about her lunchtime trysts with John. I guessed she wanted me to bless her activities so that she wouldn't feel guilty about not involving me. Monday, she said she would keep her lunchtimes where they'd matured to the previous week until we saw what happened Friday evening when we were all together again. Nice idea, but she didn't stick to what she said. Also, my imagination ran wild and I pictured them doing far more than she said they did. I believed her and I didn't in the same breath.

I felt good about that, until Tuesday night when she admitted that she'd let him feel some bare breast and even suck on her nipples a little. That information gave me a hard-on but made me fret wishing I'd been the one making out with her. I told her that, and she promised that after the kids were in bed, we'd have sex. We did.

Every time she updated me on her alone time with John I got aroused and my brain went into a tizzy because I didn't know how to process what was going on. If I stopped this runaway train with John, Ann would obviously be pissed at me, and given her thinking about John and her recent streak of independence, she'd probably carry on a secret affair with him and I'd be shut out of any meaningful information about what they were doing together. I got to thinking I was damned if I did, and damned if I didn't. Again, I wondered if they hadn't already started enjoying more physical pleasures than they told me about.

I also realized that Ann had turned her focus and intensity onto something new - John, and when she did that there was no swaying her or moving her from continuing to pursue what she wanted. There was nothing I could say or do that would change the course she was on short of threatening divorce or murder, and neither of those options appealed to me.

Ann and I were making love more frequently; we'd gone from twice a week to daily, and sometimes twice or more. I liked that, but I spoiled the afterglow for myself each time when I tried to evaluate whether something else had happened that she wasn't telling me. For instance, had John and Ann come back to the house over lunch hour and screwed like rabbits before going back to work. I tried to discount that activity by telling myself that they were planning on fucking on Friday night anyway, so it really didn't matter, except the thought hurt in my gut.

Not only was our frequency of having sex way up, but I'd decided to open up to Ann more about how anxious I felt about the possible damage to our marriage from the arc we were on. She'd calm me down, assure me that she loved me and would continue to love me, and then point out the benefits of developing some new intimate relationships - sex, deep friendships, sex, and a broader circle of people we were romantic with were at the top of her list. Did I mention sex? She wanted an open marriage, and she could cite the many benefits because we'd read the book a year or so earlier. If I'd suggested such a situation even a month or two earlier, I would have caught holy hell from her on all sorts of points. Now, it was her idea, and the object of her focus and intensity.

Ann told me Wednesday night that she'd let John have some more bare tit to play with. Thursday, things progressed a little further. When the kids were out of earshot, Ann said shyly, "I let John finger fuck me today. He brought me off. We were out by the reservoir again."

I nodded, and this time asked if she wanted to share any further details. The only other significant point was that she'd opened his pants and fondled his cock. One comforting thought: she thought we were the same size.

Ann called me in the office Friday over lunch hour. I'd already had visions of them fucking on the hood of her car at the reservoir. As it turned out, instead of going out with John, she was grocery shopping so she had something to serve for dinner that night, and she wanted my suggestions for that and other meals and items from the store. Knowing that she wasn't with him made me happier in one sense, but not so in another. Was he helping her shop? Would they go back to the house with the groceries and fuck the daylights out of each other? I kept having these visions and they vacillated between sexually exciting and being a nightmare.

In my erotic reading, I'd developed some understanding of the concept of a cuckold - a man who is complicit in their partner's infidelity and who derives sexual pleasure from it. I looked it up during the week and found it had a masochistic side to it. I appreciated that and the concept started to fit me to a tee; by not going on a rant or tear, I was being complicit in what would happen on Friday night, although I had raised my concerns to Ann every day. Humiliation was an option for cuckolds, and I wasn't too sure I wanted to get too deep into that; I was humiliated enough by what was already going on without adding more to it.

As I read, I realized to be a 'good' cuckold I had to be willing to allow the situation to develop. Yes, that fit. I'd had this huge approach-avoidance feeling when I watched John and Ann kiss, and when I heard about their lunch hours. Part of it was torture - my masochistic side, and part of it was arousal - the sexual pleasure side. That reasoning led me to think I was truly becoming schizophrenic. I certainly felt as though I were losing my mind about all of this. In my thirty-four years up to that point I'd never felt this mentally disturbed and unbalanced.

While all this was going on, I was immersed in my new job and under a tremendous amount of job pressure from all sides. One result was that in addition to the pressure from the Ann-John situation, I also had the mental load from work. I tried to push the Ann-John worries aside, but when I got in the car to drive home those feelings of change and uncertainty and angst would sweep over me, and the scenarios of what might have happened while I'd been at work started to play in my mind like a dirty movie.

Friday afternoon, I got away from work early - real early. I arrived home to an empty house, changed to my running togs, and did a hard and punishing ten-kilometer run to calm my nerves; it didn't entirely work. I shaved again, showered, and put on casual clothes. I put away some of the grocery items Ann had just left on the counter, obviously in a rush, and had just as I finished Ann arrived home.

"You're here. What a nice surprise," Ann said as she gave me a peck on the lips.

I said, "I'm nervous, plus my new boss was away today, so I could cut out early."

"Me too - nervous, I mean, but looking forward to whatever too." Ann paused and said, "Oh, the kids are over at their Nana's for the night. We're supposed to pick them up around lunch tomorrow. Patty has a birthday party in the afternoon. The morning soccer practice got canceled."