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.