Fortune and Men's Eyes

Then she went limp on my chest with her insides still churning like the ocean in a force five hurricane. My own consciousness was lying in about a thousand pieces on the bed. I started the task of picking it up and putting it back together.

The time was right. I thought, "It's now or never."

Karen came back to me almost immediately. She sighed deeply and rolled off onto the bed, making a sucking sound as she did. She lay next to me panting, one arm over her eyes.

I thought I'd wrap my curiosity in flattery. So, I said idly, "How did you get to be such a fabulous lover? I've never met a woman so totally satisfying." Of course, that was a lie. My only sex up to that point had been short drunken gropes.

I was hoping that Karen's outstanding skillset didn't involve the crew of an aircraft carrier. But I was willing to live with whatever she told me. I was that smitten.

That's when I heard about Jacques.

I already knew that Karen was from California and I knew that she was one year older than your average freshman. What I DIDN'T know, was that she had spent a year abroad.

It seems that her parents, had grown concerned that their precocious little eighteen-year-old darling was a bit over-interested in the wrong kind of guy. They also wanted to teach her how a rich young lady ought to behave. They were THAT upper crust.

So, they took the steps to get Karen as far away from her unsavory "friend" as possible. Specifically, they packed her off to Villars-sur-Ollon for a little bit of "finishing." Villars has very expensive boarding schools and it's situated on top of a Swiss alp. What could possibly go wrong in THAT scenario?

Well, there might not be boys within miles, either vertically, or horizontally. But there WERE male teachers and Karen was a rare prize.

Karen's tutor was named Jacques. He was forty-five years old and French. I think you can see where this is heading. Jacques took one look at Karen and seduced her.

It was the hoary old "come over to my place for some tutoring" gambit. They split a bottle of red and one thing led to a carefully choreographed other.

The two of them spent every night for the rest of the school year fucking. Jacques's culture and sophistication made Karen starry eyed. He, in turn, taught her about sensual pleasure.

All in all, Karen's trip to that Swiss prep school was an extremely educational experience. In that, a forty-five-year-old French master of the art gave her an intensive one-year lesson in everything that she would EVER need to know about sex.

Karen slowly turned her head to study my face. She needed to see my reactions. She knew that telling me her story would blow my mind. So, she wanted to be as careful as possible, hoping that I would understand the stakes for us.

She added simply, "Jacques didn't love me. There was far too much difference in age for that. But he DID teach me HOW to love."

She continued, looking me directly in the eye, "Like anybody else I had to learn how to be a lover. The act itself can involve many different, sometimes conflicting things for a woman; from self-loathing, to ignorance, lust, dominance, and manipulation."

She said brightly, "It can also be a true act of giving. That depends on your attitudes and how you channel them. But it mainly depends on the man you are with. Jacques knew how to make love to me not just fuck me."

That explained why she saw through Montana so fast.

Karen added frankly, "We would meet in his chalet, and he would gently and knowledgably lead me to feelings that I had never had before. I have to admit that I couldn't get enough of it. As a result, I was totally devoted to him."

Her voice turned nostalgic as she said, "It was almost like coming off a narcotic drug when I returned home. He had a wife of course. So, my departure was a given. But it was Jacques who gave me the ability to understand and accept my sexuality."

Seriously??!! The little voice in my head thought that maybe I should send the guy a card, perhaps candy, or flowers.

My sweet little girlfriend ended with, "For a woman; closeness, the ability to feel a connection with the other person is the essential part of making love. It is one of the reasons why I am devoted to you now."

Devoted??!! You know how you can sometimes intuit that something is true. Well - I was utterly certain that Karen believed what she had just said. Whether that feeling was reciprocated remained to be seen.

My dilemma was that the woman I had fallen in love with was a full-fledged Jedi Master of sex, honed to absolute perfection by a cheese eating version of Yoda - "Come, or come not, there is no TRY."

In my mind, Karen's enhanced capabilities weren't a sign of a moral defect. In fact, it reinforced the belief that she was trustworthy. She had conducted a committed adult relationship, as doomed as that connection was from the start. She was with just one man and she gave her heart to him.

In fact, there had only been three men in Karen's life TOTAL, the aforementioned "wrong sort" of guy, the inimitable Jacques, and me. Whereas, I had been with more than twice that number of no doubt unsatisfied females. Of course, the quality of the sex with Karen was light years apart and there was no comparing the degree of connection during the actual act itself.

More importantly, the U might be a big campus. But the grapevine is decidedly small-town. So, we residents of the treehouse always hear about any exceptional performances.

What?!! Do you really think that horney twenty-something guys attend college because of their devotion to the liberal arts??! But I digress...

Anyhow -- an exhibition of my sweet girlfriend's particular-set-of-skills would have generated more headlines than the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And I hadn't heard a peep.

Still, I think you can see my problem. Chronologically, I was two years older than Karen. But on the sexual maturity scale I was at least a couple of decades less experienced. Even worse, short of hiring myself out as a boy-toy for Madonna I was never going to close that gap.

The obvious question was, "Why would it matter?" I was the lucky beneficiary of Karen's year of intensive training.

Well... The obvious first concern was that I wasn't Jacques. I was just me and the girl I loved was light-years out of my league in one critical part of our relationship.

I propped myself up on an elbow and looked down at her naked little body. It was the striking contradiction, that is the female form, hard and soft, wide and narrow, flat and round, solid and flexible.

I said cautiously, "If you had such an intense physical relationship with your tutor, wouldn't you be constantly comparing me to him? I love you. But I'm never going to be able to give you the sexual experiences you had in Switzerland. How can we build a life together if you are always comparing us?"

Karen laughed out loud. That hurt.

She said still laughing, "Jacques was a man of great wisdom. He knew exactly what a woman wanted and how to give it to her. But he was no more-or-less well-endowed than you. He had a giant French honker and male pattern baldness. He was forty-five years old, five foot seven and perhaps a hundred and fifty pounds soaking wet."

She rolled over, hoisted herself up, threw a leg over me and straddled my hips. Then, she placed her still hot mound against my totally drained unit and braced her hands above my shoulders. She tented her hair around both of us and positioned her face six inches from mine.

My girlfriend was going to make a robust point.

She said, "You are six-one, and two-hundred pounds of rock-hard muscle. You have a noble Anglo-Saxon beak and no hair. But that's because it's a buzz cut. So yes, I compare you two all the time and you always win."

Then she added, fiercely, "The difference between Jacques and you is that you and I have a future. We are similar people with the same values. You can learn the things that he taught me. All you have to do is give us time."

Okay!! That made a whole lot of sense. Still, there was one part of me that wanted to congratulate myself on my maturity and there was another that wanted to slap myself silly. Only time would tell. But at that point in our relationship, I was not stupid enough to look a gift horse in the mouth.

I said, "I have felt a close connection to you from the moment we met. We think alike we enjoy each other's company and we both have the same tastes and interests." Then I hesitated. This was the point where I was going to go all-in.

I said, "I could spend the rest of my life looking for somebody as well-matched as you, and I'd never find her. We just 'get' each other. I understand that. So, we belong with each other."

Karen nodded her head eagerly. I could tell that was what she was alluding to when she used the terms "similar" and "future" to describe the conditions for us being together.

Trust requires faith and there was something in our subliminal connection that gave me a nascent belief in our long-term prospects. Karen was right of course. Sex is part of it. But relationships that are built strictly on sex don't last. Ours was one of mutual respect and shared interest.

Hence, as they say in golf and other sports, "Never up -- never in." And so, the lessons began.

*****

We were married the month after I graduated. Karen still had six years to get her law degree. I was stuck on campus anyhow. So, I decided to go all the way for a doctorate. In a lot of respects, those were the best years of our lives.

We had the normal existence in a married housing ghetto. Everybody in that over-educated assemblage of tiny apartments subsisted on Ramen noodles and cheap red wine. It was a point of pride. We worked hard and made love every night. Karen was a demanding teacher.

Still, higher learning is a cruel mistress and we were both away a lot. I spent more time than I wanted to in the computer lab. Computers weren't carried around in your pocket like they are now. So, I had to be someplace that had a connection to the mainframe.

Karen was constantly in class, in the law library, or in study groups. Those groups frequently met in a little outdoor Italian joint that served sangria in pitchers. It was right across the parking lot from the law school. I'd usually meet Karen there when I got out of the lab.

I was doing an extended run on a big dataset and the lab's 3081D was a ponderous beast. So instead of getting out at 4:00, like I expected, it was closer to 6:30. I hustled over to the law-school and parked our battered old Mazda GLC in the only spot available. It was way over on the street side of the lot, away from the law school building, facing the Italian bistro.

I could see Karen sitting at an outdoor table with the dinner-leavings of a lot of people scattered around. She was alone. Her head was bowed, hair obscuring her face. It was like she couldn't hold it up. A dude named Eric was sitting next to her.

I had met Eric several times in the past and he struck me as the kind of douchebag who got off on counting coup on married women. Karen was the sort of girl he would no doubt find challenging, even if he didn't know about her hidden talents.

I walked up behind the couple. Dipshit had Karen by the shoulders like he was trying to move her. She, in turn, wasn't cooperating. His voice was wheedling, "Come on Karen. My place is right around the corner. You can call your husband from there. You need to lie down."

I stood directly behind him and said, "No need for that. I'm here now. Sorry about the delay."

His head whipped around. I was standing far enough behind him that he had to shift in his chair. He gave me a "caught with his hand in the cookie jar "smirk.

I gave him a hard stare that said, "Back off asshole."

He was my height and perhaps thirty pounds of blubber heavier, with a carefully honed Ivy League look; middle parted hair, tailored cotton white shirt, whip-cord khakis, oxford brown penny loafers and the Trapp P3 tortoise-shell glasses that all the good little preppies wear.

He even had the requisite florid, very smooth, almost translucent skin that screamed, "Never worked outside a day in my life." He wouldn't be challenging me.

Karen mumbled, "Honey?? Where've you been?" Then she added mystified, "I'm drunk!!"

I said lovingly, "I can see that babe. Let me get you to the car and we can sober you up when we get home. How about a nice hot shower?"

I gave fuckface a look that said, "And I'll be soaping her back and other things."

Karen continued to whine, "Honey, I'm drunk." I was gently helping her stumble toward our ancient hooptie.

I said, "How much did you drink? It isn't even seven-o'clock?"

She shook her head and said, "Dunno!! My glass was always full."

I wrote down a little note-to-self that said, "Have heart-to-heart with Frodo Douchbaggins!!"

We'd just made it inside our little apartment when Karen sagged against me and passed out. I found myself in a pitch-dark room holding a 110-pound sack of potatoes.

The problem with cheap student housing is that the rooms are small. I mean, it's designed to be low-cost. Hence, I was pretty sure that if I tried to swing Karen up and carry her to bed Fabio style, I would either fracture her skull, or knock over one of the lamps.

My best option was to throw my arms around her ample chest and walk her down the hall like a puppet. Unfortunately, that embedded my crotch between her rock-hard buns and the last thing I wanted to have happen, was precisely what sprang to life in my pants.

As I walked my poor dead wife down the hall, the twitching of her butt made my little fellow grow ginormous. And to make the problem even worse, she started to make noises like she liked it. So, by the time I got her to her side of bed I felt like we ought to have a post-coital cigarette.

I eased her onto the pillow and pulled her feet up on the bed. She was out cold, and I considered just leaving her that way. I was a little disgusted with her, to tell the truth. But she was down for the count and I didn't want her to wake up in her clothes.

So, I carefully unstrapped her sandals and eased them off her feet. Karen was a dancer for a lot of years, which explained her magnificent hard body. It also explained her feet which are the price that a dancer pays for having that body.

Looking at them I couldn't help but give the poor things a quick massage and I got a long and contented sigh for my efforts. Getting the rest of her clothes off, which included a very sexy thong, took a little wrestling. But I finally had my wife stripped naked and under the covers.

Of course, being the good husband that I am, I had to carefully examine her body to check for any -- Ummmm -- damage? I marveled at how totally feminine she was. Meanwhile, Karen was snoring like a lumberjack and mumbling something in her sleep about ducks. I closed the door and sat down in my chair to think.

I had always been aware that I was punching above my weight with Karen; looks, personal presence and maybe smarts. But we had so much in common in every other aspect of our lives that the connection seemed unbreakable. However, none of the predators knew that.

Every guy wants a woman as gorgeous as Karen. But they are also aware that every other male in the room wants her too. The hunter just sees a hot female and a basically geeky grad student, with almost no spendable cash and a lot of demands on his time. So, why not take a chance?

It was the old question of faith. I was going to run the current varmint off. But I would have to trust Karen's personal integrity to preserve my happy life.

I thought about it a bit. We both understood how tight our bond was and it was that deep personal connection that I was counting on. Of course, she'd also given me no reason to doubt her. In fact, in the period after Karen's great revelation we'd actually talked about the ground-rules for the fidelity element of our relationship.

The two of us are polar opposites. Yet, rather than that being a bone of contention, we each recognized that our dissimilar natures filled in the bumps in life for both of us. It made us essential to each other.

Karen made my life vital and interesting. I'm laid-back and cerebral. I live in my head. It's a nerd thing. So, I miss a lot. My wife has a discriminating social eye, and she can explain incomprehensible things to me; like sarcasm, which I always took literally.

My role was to recurrently peel Karen off the ceiling. She's passionate and energetic. Her emotions are what power her extraordinary sexuality and it freaks her out to get patted on the head by life. She, quite rightly, feels condescended to. So, every time somebody patronized her, I had to point out that was a tactic designed to keep a beautiful woman in her place.

I eventually convinced her that passive aggressive, not confrontation, was the best way to suffer fools. I would come to regret clueing her in on that. But that was much later. It was almost midnight. So, I went to bed still confident in my marriage and my wife.

I got a good night's sleep lying next to her corpse. She didn't move once all night. I had been up a couple of hours when the spitting image of the term, "death warmed over," emerged from our little bedroom. I said cheerily, "You're up!"

That was mean. But she deserved it.

She moaned and plopped down in the other kitchen chair, dropping her head on her folded arms. She said plaintively, "Kill me, now!!"

I said keeping up my irritatingly sprightly manner, "You look a bit hung over."

She propped one eye open and eyed me hostilely. She said. "It's like somebody's scrubbing the veins in my brain with a rusty pipe cleaner." Then she got a stricken look, popped to her feet and disappeared into our little bathroom.

The next five minutes featured the sounds of garish yakking. I heard the toilet flush and my beautiful wife emerged looking grayish. I plopped a couple of pieces of dry toast down in front of her, added a steaming cup of black coffee and said, "Try this, you'll feel better. Then, let's talk."

I was sitting in our living room, doing some calculus homework, when Karen emerged. She was wrapped in her ratty old bathrobe; her hair was a mess and she looked like she'd spent a very rough night. But she was ready to talk.

I said, "You know what that guy was up to, right?"

She got a grimace on her face and said, "Is there anybody you can trust? He's the editor of the Law Review. He told me that he took special interest in me because of my performance in moot court."

I laughed and said, "That line probably dates back to Caligula."

She said earnestly, "Nothing was ever going to happen. I wasn't going to go anywhere with him. You know that, right?"

This was an important moment. We both recognized what she was asking, and my reply was going to set the tone for our long-term future.

Mutual respect is the bedrock of marriage. That's because respect underwrites trust. If you truly believe in the other person's inherent honor and dignity, then you can be certain that they'll make the right decision.

More importantly, you have to let them know that you believe in them. Hence, the absolutely wrong thing to say would be, "Well, you're really hot and you were pretty drunk."

Instead, I said, "Duh!! If you're asking me whether I think you'd blow up our life to have drunken sex with a random cock, then my answer is, of course not!! I know that you value yourself and what we have more than that."

I paused to make a point, "I also know that you're experienced enough that the only way something like that would EVER happen would be if you wanted it to. And I count on the life we've built together to ensure that you don't ever get close to THAT line."