Beastly

Marie Lafleur had a body built for sex. Even better, as far as Jim Maddox was concerned, was the fact that she was using that body for its designed purpose. At that moment, she was on her hands and knees with her butt elevated, and her ample breasts swinging like uncontrolled wrecking balls as Jim slapped in and out of her doggy-style. She had specifically asked to be fucked, not loved, so Jim was giving the lady what she wanted. He lost count of the number of orgasms she had because, at a certain point, they had just blended together.

He knew that he could not credit his own sexual prowess for this reaction. The truth was that she went off like a rocket with the right stimulation. He had stumbled onto the correct combination of actions by accident, after a lot of trying, and it was as if he had, in a sexual sense, opened Aladdin's cave of wonders. Seeing her lose control in such a way but remain focused entirely on him appealed to Jim's macho sensibilities.

After meeting her at a friend's party several months earlier, they had gone out a few times, winding up in bed by the third date. After that, they banged like bunnies for months, spending more and more time with each other. It was not long before they were living together. Often, when they were out together, other men hit on her, but she only had eyes for Jim.

Thus, eight months after they met, while dining at an Outback Steak House, after enjoying the Gold Coast Coconut Shrimp and Aussie Cheese Fries appetizers—or, Aussie-Tizers—followed by Victoria's Filet Mignons—8-ounce, medium-rare for him, 6-ounce, well-done for her—Jim decided to lock down the best thing that ever happened to him and proposed. Stunned at first, Marie had stammered that she did love him and wanted to spend the rest of her life loving him and having his children but hemmed and hawed about not wanting to deal with the nightmare of a big wedding. So, when Jim suggested that they just run down to the court house with a couple of friends as witnesses and do the deed, a big smile lit up her face, and she said yes. To seal the deal, they fed each other from their shared New York-Style Cheesecake dessert with extra whipped cream on the side, which the management provided, compliments of the house, after their waitress was reduced to tears of joy after overhearing the proposal and acceptance. The honeymoon was as spontaneous as the wedding, just a few days at the beach, even though it was not the season. Besides, it was not like they left the hotel much anyway, except to get some excellent Polish sausages and ice cream, as well as the pepperoni and cheese deep-dish pizza the beach town was famous for.

All that was why, one month after signing their names to join themselves together legally, Jim was sitting at the kitchen table in their apartment in growing confusion as his new bride treated him to a honey-we-have-to-talk moment.

As she spoke, however, the words coming out of her mouth sounded to Jim's brain like the garbled nonsense of Charlie Brown's teacher in any of the Peanuts television specials. The sounds then became more chaotic in Jim's brain, morphing into a cacophony that was somewhere between a madman trying to play the bagpipes quietly during a howitzer-firing convention and an elephant herd farting wetly into kazoos.

He tried for a moment to make sense of the sounds but could not. Whatever words his brain had received, it had deleted them as being impossible combinations of speech fragments beyond the deciphering capabilities of his battered mind.

"I'm sorry. Say that again. I didn't quite get it," he told her, struggling to come back into a world that made sense.

Marie's shoulders slumped in frustration. She rolled her eyes.

"I'm trying to tell you that I'm asexual."

"Asexual."

"Yes, asexual."

"Like 'a sexual' person?"

"No."

He paused and thought. She looked at him, apparently hoping for understanding. He tried again with a growing, horrifying realization of where this conversation was going, all while trying to keep the dread from showing up on his face.

"Or do you mean 'asexual' with the 'a' in 'asexual' being the Greek-origin prefix of negation for the word it precedes?"

She frowned.

"What?"

He forgot. She has studied sociology or psychology or something similarly useless.

"What I mean is that you are telling me you don't want to have sex anymore. That about sum it up?"

She pursed her lips for a moment. She shrugged.

"Yes."

Jim briefly thought of getting up and checking under the beds and chairs for pods to see if some alien life form had replaced his wife somehow, signaling the start of an invasion of the Earth. That made as much sense as anything else he could come up with. With one exception. He chanced it.

"Are you fucking someone else?" he asked.

Her mouth opened in shock.

"How can you even say that?"

"Well, for most of the past year, you and I have been fucking up a storm. Now you tell me that you don't want to anymore. From what I hear, that usually doesn't happen until we've been married for a few years and had a couple of kids. So, it's only natural that I would suspect that you have someone already doing the work for me. Maybe you're just asexual with me but hypersexual with someone else."

"I love you," she told him. "I just was never into sex that much."

His eyebrows raised on their own.

"You could have fooled me," he said.

She at least had the grace to look a little embarrassed. She looked down at the table as she spoke.

"I wanted you to like me. I wanted to make you happy. But I have been asexual for a while. I was scared to tell you before. I thought that if I told you, you would leave me," she said.

No shit, he thought.

She kept talking.

"Now, I feel secure enough to come out to you about my sexuality."

"That's nice," he said.

"Don't worry though," she told him as she took his hand and looked into his eyes again. "We'll still have sex so we can have children. Just not for fun."

To shove a stake into the heart of what was looking like a mockery of a marriage, part of him wanted to suggest that he just jerk off into a turkey baster and then stick it in her and squeeze, if she was so down on sex but still wanted a baby. But he did not want to give her any ideas. On the other hand, maybe he could get a vasectomy on the sly and then spend a lot of time trying to make her pregnant before she figured it out. In the process, he might be able to re-sexualize her. It was worth thinking about. Nevertheless, it would take a while to adjust his thinking, and he was not sure he even agreed. After all, his vision of their lives together certainly included a sexual element. A pretty big one, frankly. He would not have proposed, if it had not. Crude but true.

"I don't know if I can accept this," he told her as he left the table and settled down in the living room to watch television so that he could turn his brain off. There did not seem much point in having it turned on. He ignored her for the rest of the night. She had the grace to give him some space and quietly left him alone.

The problem came a few nights later in bed. Jim woke up in the middle of the night to find Marie spooned up against him. It was her doing whether consciously or not because she was way over on his side of the bed. His cock was hard enough to cut diamonds. Almost without thinking, he began to stroke her butt and belly lightly. Still asleep, she shifted and opened her legs. He took that as an invitation and began to diddle her clit gently. She began to moan quietly and move around. A moment later, her eyes shot open, she rolled away, and began to berate him for molesting her without her consent. When she did not seem to be about to shut up, he got up, left the bedroom, and went to the living room to sleep on the recliner, slamming the door behind him.

Breakfast was frosty the next morning. It got worse after Marie informed him that The Group, which he learned was her Facebook supporters club of fellow asexuals, had called him a "beast" and a "mindless animal" who only wanted sex and refused to see her as a person. Rather than just cuddle, he'd gone straight for the sex, ignoring her wishes. The Group consensus was that Jim was not able to control his needs and was soulless because he could only experience a physical, not higher, connection. She recounted The Group's consensus without comment, apparently agreeing with it and hoping that the weight of digital opinion would sway him.

This was kicking it up a notch. He realized that he had to get away to think or else he would say something that could not be taken back. After work that Friday, he packed a bag as Marie wept. He drove away into the mountains. There, all Jim could think of was how much he missed her. Her change of heart was strange, maybe even suspicious, but he decided to give her the benefit of the doubt, just because they got along so well on everything else. He had to wonder how much sex married men really got anyway? If it was a lot, there would not be so many jokes about wives' headaches. And he knew that he could get through life by relying on masturbation. He had been a teenager, after all.

So it was that he found himself back in the apartment on Sunday afternoon, resolved to see the marriage through. As long as she shut up her friends who were putting him down for his "beastly" needs, he could make it work. He would not tolerate the disrespect her friends, digital or not, showed. She would obviously have to let him watch porn, though. He could only compromise so far.

Marie was not in the apartment when he got back. After his drive, Jim was starved. A cheese omelet with a side of sausage was just what he needed. As he rummaged through the refrigerator, he became confused. There were no eggs. Or cheese. Or sausage. There had been, however, before he left on Friday. That was why he was thinking of the omelet. The yogurt was also gone. And the butter. There had been lunchmeat, too. That was now also missing.

He heard the door open as Marie entered. She looked at him and her face lit up.

"I'm glad you're back," she said.

Jim gave her a half-smile. They could delay the serious talk until after he had eaten.

"I wanted an omelet. Where are the eggs and cheese? And sausage? We had a bunch a couple of days ago. None of it should have expired yet."

She sighed.

"I threw it all away. This is a vegan household now," she said as she locked eyes with him, measuring his reaction.

"Vegan."

"Meat is murder."

He knit his brow.

"So, what, we're just eating vegetables now? What about fish, chicken, and eggs?"

"No animal products. No eggs, no cheese."

"No yogurt?" he asked in growing shock.

"All of those animal products are produced by exploiting the animals in inhumane industrial production facilities. It's no better than slavery."

He just stared at her.

"You're serious," he said with resignation.

For argument's sake, he gamed it out.

"Can I have a burger at lunch out of the house when you're not with me?"

"That would be like cheating. And animal products are bad for you anyway," she said.

"I thought animals were 'mindless beasts,' which is why they only think about sex," he said.

She just glared at him, not happy to have her words thrown back at her.

"That doesn't mean we can torture and kill them for food," she said as she crossed her arms under her glorious bosom.

He sighed.

"I guess this was who you really were all along, too, but you were also afraid to tell me before."

She shrugged, then looked him squarely in the eyes.

"I ate meat before, obviously, but I have come to understand now that a vegan is what I am. The Group helped me understand this."

She added, "If you really love me, then you'll do this."

That was the question: did he love her enough to do what she wanted and give up sex and eating animal products? He certainly did love her and, in many ways, she was his soulmate. But she was asking him to give up eggs, and bacon, and sausage, and pizza, and ice cream, and yogurt, and cheese, and burgers, and crab dip, and shrimp, and steak, and Chick-fil-A. And sex.

He then looked briefly around the apartment and imagined it full of cats. He did not know of a single vegan who did not have at least five cats, at least two of them feral rescues. Jim hated cats. Even if they did have cats, the cats would probably be getting more sex than he was, at least until they were neutered. Which was basically what she wanted for him.

OK. Bill Clinton was kind of an exception. Instead of five cats, he had one. Maybe that was where it started. But that would be funny because cats are super-carnivores. Anyway, Clinton had gone vegan for a while after those bypasses. But he only went vegan after he had a lot of sex in the first place. And Jim had heard Clinton was back to eating fish now, so draw your own conclusions, he thought.

He looked at Marie and saw her looking back with hope in her eyes. Jim was wavering, but then he remembered that movie, "The Road to Wellville," where the patients got no sex, only ate vegetables, and the only yogurt they got was in the form of enemas. None of those people were happy. In fact, they were sneaking off to do all the beastly stuff on the side.

Fuck all that! Guess I don't really love her after all, Jim thought, as he went to the bedroom without a word and began packing. Really packing. He had only a couple days' worth of clothes in the bag he took to the mountains. In less than thirty minutes, he had grabbed everything he wanted and was out the door. She did not try to stop him and just sat in the kitchen watching him go.

He found a friend who had an unfinished basement where Jim could bunk on a spare mattress, hanging his clothes on an old iron pipe. The friend charged no rent, but all he watched all day long on television was golf, so Jim spent as little time as possible upstairs. Thankfully, the friend had decent wifi, so Jim stayed in his bunker, ignoring Marie's calls.

Bright and early on Tuesday, Jim was in a lawyer's office discussing an annulment of the marriage based on fraud concerning Marie's views on sex. Apparently, lying about the scope of a future married diet—assuming she had really changed her mind recently about the vegan thing—was not a basis to seek an annulment. That did not seem fair. In any case, the attorney thought Jim had a 50% chance of success due to the weird facts just on the sex part but, at the very least, the annulment action would seriously be yanking Marie's chain. If the annulment did not work, they could just get divorced after the required separation period, which would probably pass anyway by the time they got to a hearing. That was good enough for Jim, so he approved the plan.

Marie was served a copy of the marriage annulment petition that Friday and went ballistic, leaving over 30 screaming voice mails about Jim's insensitivity. Jim was surprised. He thought vegans were supposed to be serene or something thanks to their regular, fiber-rich, firm bowel movements. With all the screaming voice mails, it was easy to get a restraining order. He did not need one, but having such an order pissed her off more, which was just what Jim wanted right now.

Jim was able to raise her blood pressure even more when his attorney made sure to circulate the annulment complaint to various news organizations and online media aggregators. The story had that "weird news" vibe that made sure it had a lot of coverage, especially when Jim's lawyer started giving interviews. Jim himself kept a low profile but let his lawyer chatter away. In exchange for all the free publicity he got, he was hardly billing Jim at all.

That was fortunate. Marie had found an eager young lawyer, apparently from The Group. Whatever she lacked in experience she made up for with boundless energy and quasi-religious conviction. She filed motions galore. She insisted on a lengthy deposition of Jim when the issues were quite simple. Jim paid that back by getting his lawyer to depose Marie under oath and discuss all the times she had eaten meat in the previous five years, as well as making her name all her lovers for the same period and describe the sexual nature of her relationships with them. Turned out, she had ingested a lot of animal protein and rutted actively before they got together. Old Marie seemingly had turned into New Marie suddenly, rather like Saul of Tarsus suddenly became Paul the Apostle on the road to Damascus. Jim would have found the story inspiring, and personally satisfying, if it had gone the other way around, although there might have been obvious reasons to question the likelihood of her fidelity in such a scenario.

Finally, after months, they came before a circuit court judge for a hearing. He seemed to be amused throughout the proceedings. At least that was better than having him fall asleep, however it went, Jim thought.

As plaintiff, Jim went first, with his attorney questioning him, and Marie's attorney cross-examining him. Surprisingly, given all the preliminary maneuvering, it was fairly painless. After all, Jim had a simple story to tell. One day, they are screwing like minks and, the next day, they weren't. And they weren't going to be. Ever again. With a few exceptions when it was time to make kids.

Then, it was Marie's turn to testify. Jim saw the judge checking out her body as she walked to the stand but, being judicious, the judge kept his mouth shut about her outstanding physical attributes. Despite some jousting, she gave her testimony similarly without causing much excitement. In her deposition, she had admitted engaging in sex before the marriage but then closing the gates to the castle after the marriage because of her asexuality, which she had not previously mentioned. Jim's lawyer even got Marie to admit to being a vegan now before Marie's lawyer realized what was going on.

The vegan admission got the judge interested. His smile broadened. Jim guessed that this annulment was probably way better than the boring contract disputes, supermarket slip-and-fall cases, and sick criminal matters that the judge usually heard. The judge then started asking his own questions about what they ate before they were married and then what she wanted him to eat afterwards and why.

Finally, the judge finished his food questions, and Marie returned to her seat. With no more witnesses, the judge said he thought they could skip closing arguments because he was ready to rule. Jim's lawyer had no objection.

"Your Honor! May I be heard?" Marie's lawyer asked as she jumped to her feet.

Jim saw a universe of snide remarks play over the judge's face, but they all dissipated, like fog on a sunny day and he resumed his judicial aura with a broad smile.

"Sure," he said with radiance.

"We are requesting judgment in my client's favor. Mr. Maddox's case is a farce and, if the Court grants the relief he seeks, then we will be forced to file an appeal."

The judge allowed himself a raised eyebrow. He then crooked his fingers for the lawyers to approach the bench so the court reporter could not hear them.

"Counsel, you have to do what you think is best for your client but, in my view, the controlling law is not on your side."

Marie's lawyer was chomping at the bit and started to launch herself into passionate advocacy.

"With all due respect, your Honor, in 'Phelps versus Phelps,' . . . ."

The judge interrupted her abruptly.

"That's fine. You can put that in any motion you file. I'm sure it will be interesting reading. But let me tell you a little story. I know all of the judges on the appellate court. I went to college with two of them. Doesn't help me much when they disagree with me from time to time and overrule my decisions, but we know each other. Know what I am thinking now about them? These two former classmates of mine were total horn-dog frat boys in college. Nailed everything that moved and was female. Weren't particular about the species after they had drunk enough alcohol. Kind of hard to believe, but they both settled down and both of them have been married now for 25 or 30 years each. I've met their wives. Both couples are very touchy-feely in public—in a sweet way, not lewd—by which I infer that both these guys still have active sex lives with their legal spouses."