Lovers From Beyond Ep. 07

The Second Bedroom

My wife of six years and I had a good falling out, ever since we'd lost the two story house in Murrieta, California. The matter of divorce kept coming up between us, from either her lips or mine. I can tell you for certain that our best years were behind us.

It was with a low heart that I rented out a small, two-bedroom cottage in one of the crappier neighborhoods in San Diego. Ironically it was this same area that we'd both abandoned a few years earlier, when our fortunes and prospects had been much brighter.

Of course, I wasn't the only white-collar worker to lose my well paying job during the economic downturn. Nearly a third of the employees at the computer plant were laid off at the same time I got my notice, over eight hundred souls in total. I wasn't the only person in the world to lose my house either. Plenty of other families suffered similar devastation at the hands of the big banks and their swindles. But all the same, both from my wife's perspective and from that of her merciless and bitter side of the family, I was one hundred percent at fault. Many times over, I felt as if I was the only person on Earth being humbled by it all.

I scrambled about for a few months while searching for a new line of work. This was at a time when the scarcity of jobs was at its greatest. The lack of steady employment further depleted our savings into the high triple digits. It wasn't that long ago when both my wife and I enjoyed bank accounts comfortably set in the high four digits. We were both contributing regularly to our retirement nest egg then, but like the house, all that wealth is gone now.

Getting hired usually meant you knew somebody already employed where you were snooping around for a job. Through an odd combination of both perseverance and blind luck, I happened to run into an old friend. I told my buddy about my plight, he gave me a good reference to his manager, and that's how I was called in for an interview at the Do It Yourself Warehouse. Never mind that I'd already been trying to get a job there for several months already.

After jumping through numerous hoops, including multiple, on-the-spot interviews, a barrage of supposedly meaningful testing and an embarrassing urine analysis, I was given the proverbial thumbs up. My new job was to unload trailer trucks during the graveyard shift, and to roll the pallets out onto the sales floor. I was to stock whatever merchandise needed to be stocked into the racks, then catalog and store whatever remained into the upper shelving found all over the store.

It wasn't as profitable or as glamorous as my previous job. Far from it. My wife had become spoiled previously, by having a nice sum of cash made available to her after each and every paycheck. Understandably, she vented her frustrations on my person and was constantly bickering with me when that sum was no longer available. I was reminded of just how great a disappointment I'd become, nearly every time I lay in bed with my wife and made a sexual advance toward her. I could only watch as she turned a cold shoulder in my direction.

The house we were now living in had been built way back in the nineteen-fifties. It was a smaller companion to the much bigger, three bedroom structure that dominated the wider patch of land directly in front of it. The little house sat there like an afterthought, colored a pasty green. The backside of the larger residence was visible from its cozy living room window. An alley corrupted by trash and graffiti was visible from the even cozier kitchen windows in the back.

As mentioned previously, this cottage consisted of two small bedrooms, of the bare minimum ten by ten variety. The rectangular living room measured about twenty by ten. If you were to cut this distance in three uneven portions, you'd roughly have the dimensions of the crowded kitchen, the small dining area and the even smaller bathroom. The doors and windows were all barred, due to the crime infested elements of the neighborhood. The iron bars remained strong despite showing flaky black paint and frequent flashes of rust.

The property to one side was structured in much the same manner. The only real differences being that the main house and its companion cottage were both hued in a mustard yellow, and the main house had a sizable covered patio in its backyard. The house on the opposite side was blocked from view by a tall, wooden fence. A single-file grove of short, bushy trees ran along that side. The fence barely contained several guard dogs that barked, growled and lunged at the wooden boards in a terrifying manner, whenever I made my way to and from my vehicle.

In no uncertain terms, my wife informed me that she was not about to stay much longer in what she had labeled an atrocity of a home. Constantly, she threatened to move out and live with her parents, or one of her high-maintenance sisters. I had to tread around her lightly or risk having her frequently repeated threats come to bear fruition.

Perhaps she missed the 'for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer' portion of our wedding vows. Presently, those vows felt as if they were both ancient and nebulous, and somehow no longer held any relevance to our modern plight. Perhaps we were destined to split apart at some time in the near future. At that moment in time, I wasn't in such a great hurry to find myself living alone. Having no one to really talk to, or to prepare a warm plate for me when I arrived home from work.

As stated before, I worked graveyard hours at the time. My usual shifts started at eleven or twelve at night, and lasted until seven or eight in the morning. I'd taken to sleeping during the heart of the day, leaving my wife and I about as far apart as two people can get when they're living under the same roof. I'd get up around four or five pm. This was usually a good time for an argument to erupt between us. My wife would go to bed at eight or nine, at which point I was left to stare at the clock until it was time for me to leave for work.

After about two months of this routine, strange things started to happen. I won't make an attempt to sway your thoughts about these incidents. I'll just state the facts as I saw them with my own eyes, or felt them with my own senses. Whether you choose to believe me or not, I will leave that up to you.

My wife has a bit of a phobia when it comes to sex. Irrationally, she checks to make sure that all the doors are locked, so that nobody might walk in while we're involved in the act. My wife also checks to make sure that the curtains are shut all the way across the window, to make sure nobody might have a peek at us going at it. Finally, she turns out all the lights and closes the bedroom door, to ensure that we both have complete privacy. She does this every time, before we proceed any further than walking into the bedroom holding hands together.

To be honest, she even has a noticeable discomfort about performing the act while there is still daylight outside. Thanks to all of this, it was with some effort that I managed to coax her into performing oral sex on me deep into one afternoon. All was going well, until my wife got the sudden impression that we were being watched. This disturbed her so much that she immediately halted her actions. My wife even went around the house convinced that there had been some sort of breach in her safeguards. She found none, but rather than admit that she might have gotten a touch of paranoia, she insisted that she'd sensed someone in the house. No manner of pleading proved enough to induce her to resume her part in our lovemaking.

As it was a pleasant week, I nearly got lucky a second time just a few days later. My wife and I were lying in bed, nude. It was in the midst of foreplay, when she sat up and commented that there was a man standing in the living room. How she could see this in the dark, with the lights shut off and the curtains drawn, was beyond me. Hoping not to be left out to dry again, I volunteered to go out and take a look around. Of course, there was no one about. Just the same, my wife was already getting dressed by the time I went back into the bedroom.

While cursing her in my mind for her fickleness, I asked what this man looked like. I got this for an answer; he was a tall fellow, with his head shaved and a goatee. The man was walking through the living room moving his head as if he were listening to music through earphones. He wore no shirt, revealing a strong physique with muscles, tattoos and scars. He wore baggy red pants, and was either barefoot or wearing light colored sandals. Also, my wife divulged, the man was the color of a strong coffee.

A bloody good description, if you ask me. I began wondering if I should shut the cable off to prevent her from sitting in the house all day and watching reality shows and the like. We had a good argument then, where I, admittedly with no evidence, accused my wife of sleeping around behind my back. This resulted in her becoming angry enough to order me to empty out the second bedroom. Previously we'd filled up a good portion of that room with our furniture and boxed items from our old house in Murrieta.

The rest of the afternoon I spent clearing out the bedroom, and moving most of the boxes and miscellany into various closets or into the living room. Although we had no second bed frame, we did have a couple of extra mattresses that my wife could sleep on. I guess I could have given her my bed frame out of chivalry. Initially I held back from doing this, because I was hoping she'd reconsider and come back into my bed.

As per our normal routine, she went to sleep at her usual time of around eight or nine. I waited for a couple of hours until it was time for me to go to work.

My wife and I hardly spoke to one another after that. We could have been complete strangers to an outsider looking in. I was always asleep during the day. My wife would spend a large part of her day out of the house, usually wandering off to her mother's to gripe about me, or otherwise going out shopping with the spendthrift bitches that were her sisters.

On one occasion, I had the night off. During the wee hours, I was sitting at the kitchen table and looking at pictures of bikini-clad women on my laptop. That's when I caught the distinctive smell of marijuana wafting through the house. Of course I was no stranger to weed, but I hadn't smoked it in years. As far as I knew, neither had my wife.

I wondered what my wife would be doing lighting up at three o'clock in the morning. In fact, I went over to her bedroom to reprimand her. When I opened the door to the room I found her still fast asleep. Even stranger, the smell wasn't coming from her room, my nostrils informed me, but from the living room instead.

After checking to make sure all the windows were shut, which they were, I walked around the living room and tried to localize the smell. There was one corner where the odor was the strongest. Unexplainably there was no source for the scent whatsoever. I began to consider whether or not I was losing my mind, as I returned to my laptop.

A second later, I again became engrossed in wet tee shirts and thongs. I happened to glance away from the joke that was the dining area, and over to the living room. I looked directly to that specific corner where the smell of marijuana was emanating from. In a vague and shadowy guise, I saw a black man sitting back in a plush recliner. His legs were stretched out on the footrest, and he was smoking a good size blunt. This man looked just as my wife had described, with a shaved head, a tidy goatee, and a dark-skinned body with prominent muscles and visible dark tats and scars.

The moment I stood up, the vision disappeared. I found myself questioning sanity once again. Not my wife's this time, mind you, but my own.

At about this time, work started getting a little slower. It was late in the fall and approaching wintertime, a period of the year when there is very little construction work going on. As a result, my shifts got shorter and my days off increased. In order to keep myself from going bonkers, I stuck to my routine of sleeping during the day, and I kept myself awake nearly the entire night.

One week, I had three straight days off. On each of those nights, I could hear my wife tossing and turning, and even moaning in her sleep. Out of concern, I went to check on her, using the light from my bedroom to illuminate into hers. She'd kicked off her covers and was lying on her side. Her body faced away from me. She wore the set of loose, satiny blue pajamas she always wore to bed. From the purrs and moans she made, I assumed she was having some sort of erotic dream. As soon as I thought that, I resented it, because of the way she'd barred me from sleeping with her.

I checked on her the second night as well, with the same result. My wife was rolling about passionately on the low-lying mattresses. I was left wanting with my cock in my hand, figuratively speaking of course. Or literally, if you like, since a short time later I went back to my computer and rubbed one out in honor of a swimsuit model. I did that out of spite for my wife.

When the pattern repeated itself on the third night, I didn't even bother leaving the dining nook. She could have her sensual dreams, I thought, as I was having my own sexual fantasies with the pretty girls on my computer.

The following week was a rollercoaster of one day of work, followed by one day off, for seven straight days. It was a pretty stupid schedule, if you ask me, but I guess such creative decision-making is why middle management gets paid so much higher than the rank and file.

I was sitting there, looking up softcore porn yet again, because some of the harder stuff I just can't tolerate, when I happened to glance over at the living room. There was that same phantom black guy, lying back on his ghostly recliner. He was having himself another joint. When he finished that, the recliner straightened up and the man got to his feet. He reached up to the waistband of his baggy red pants, and slid them down until they were loose enough to drop to the floor.

I've got to stop here for a moment, because you're going to think I'm leading you on, or about to give you the punchline to some horribly twisted joke. I swear, what I'm about to tell you is the truth. Or the truth as I saw it that night, anyway.

I've never been around too many naked black guys to say whether they're hung better than any other race. I've never been around too many naked guys of any race to make a reasonable comparison. But I've got to tell you, this guy's limp cock had to be at least eight inches long. It looked like a big friggin' piece of salami.

I watched as this black guy casually stepped out of his red pants, walked out of my sight and over toward the bedrooms. Of course, I jumped out of my chair and rushed over, but by then he'd vanished into the shadows.

I went in and checked on my wife, without turning on her bedroom light and waking her up. Undoubtedly, this would have resulted in what you'd call an Armageddon-type argument. She was sleeping peacefully at first. As I'm watching her, she starts rolling around and making those sex noises again, as if she was having another erotic dream.

I guess I'd gotten jealous at a figment of my own goddamn imagination, because I went ahead and turned on the light in the second bedroom. My wife snapped awake and began to give me such an earful that I almost wished I hadn't done it. She was so mad at me that as revenge she kept waking me up the next day. I was in a bad way when I set off to work the next night, when midnight finally rolled around.

I took some sleeping pills in the morning, to make sure I'd get some shut-eye. Once I woke up around four in the afternoon, the first thing my wife said was that a few pieces of mail had been left in our post by mistake. I saw the address on these letters. Since they were from the little cottage next door to mine, I went ahead and took the short time to walk them over.

I guess curiosity got the best of me, when I laid eyes on the old lady that lived next door. Very quickly, I noticed that she was the amiable and talkative type. Not only did I give her the letters, but I also struck up a polite conversation with her. As pleasantly as I could, I asked if she'd known the previous tenant that had rented the place I resided in now.

He was a bad sort, the woman said. He was always selling drugs to the high school kids that walked through the alley on their way home. The police always came by trying to bully their way into the house, but for whatever reason, they were never able to catch him in the act. The kids all called him Big Tef, she said, because he was like Teflon in that no charges ever stuck to him. He'd gotten his Devil's due in the end, the older woman revealed. The drug dealer had been gunned down just a few months prior, while he was driving around in his fancy Cadillac and showing off with his ladies.

I went back home. When I tried to explain all of this to my wife, she somehow twisted it around and made it sound as if I was trying to kick her out of the house. What I really wanted was for the both of us to get the hell out of there, because I suspected that this black phantom we'd been seeing was none other than Big Tef. Can you believe that my wife slammed the door on me? In frustration, I went into my bedroom for a nap.

The early hours of the next morning found me doing what I usually do, which is to look up pictures of pretty women in skimpy clothing. These women are always smiling in my direction and they never, ever make me feel like an ugly piece of shit. I'd found two models I could get myself to nut to. While I was trying to decide which one would be that night's wet dream, I glanced over and saw the ghost of Big Tef, just as he was getting to his feet and dropping his red pants again.

This time, Tef scared the crap out of me, because he was staring directly into my face for a few long, tense seconds. Then, he started pulling on that water hose of a dick of his, until he got it good and hard like a billy club. The ghost sauntered off toward the bedrooms. Toward my wife's bedroom, to be specific.

I felt a cold and creepy sensation surround my body as I followed. This time, Tef didn't disappear, but he went all the way through the living room, and turned into the second bedroom's doorway. I was scared out of my mind, but I managed to walk over. After I turned on the light to my bedroom, to shine out and into the other, I saw this Big Tef guy just standing there. He stood right over my wife's mattresses, looking at me as if he was waiting for me to show my face. Tef still had his large dick in his hand, and he was stroking it to keep it from going soft.

Yeah.

Now, about the rest of it. My wife told a different story to the cops, but that's not what really happened. I did not set anything up. After the cops had checked it all out, and after they'd taken samples from her insides, they ended up agreeing with me. This is what took place that night, from my perspective. This is what really happened.

My wife was lying there, sleeping peacefully, when Big Tef went down on his knees beside her. He started feeling her up, before my eyes. Tef rubbed on her back, and later moved on to her thighs. My wife responded to it as if she was having one of her erotic dreams. I'm only then starting to realize that Tef must have been responsible for my wife's erotic dreams all along.

I tried to go in and put a stop to it, but it was as if my whole body was stuck in place. I couldn't move forward or back. I couldn't even lift my hand up to turn on the bedroom light and wake my wife. I was frozen solid, it seemed. Somehow, the big black gangster had mesmerized me.

I watched this guy Tef, as he started feeling up my wife's ass. When she turned onto her back, he started working on her tits. With a growing disgust, I watched him rip open her pajama top, which sent the little blue buttons scattering all over the place. By this time, I'm thinking that maybe my wife was mesmerized too. Even though her blouse being wrenched apart should have been enough to startle her awake, she still looked to be fast asleep. She never wore a bra underneath her pajamas.