My What If

Ashleigh didn't say much. Lunch was over, and she begged off to go get ready for the reunion later that evening. I went home feeling like a fool. Damnit. I had totally blown it. The one chance, the one never expected, recognized it when it came, and totally blew it chance with the one that got away! We exchanged contact information. A few days later I got an e-mail saying how nice it had been running into me again after all those years. My 'what if' was now my 'what had I done.' I didn't hear any more from her and didn't expect to. Then, a few months later, the phone rang.

"So, do you still want a roommate?"

She moved in mid-summer. When she came to check the place out before moving in, we naturally had 'the talk' where, given our past interaction, we set out the expectations for our current situation. That expectation was, of course, no expectations of any romantic or physical relationship between us. I mean, that was fair. Not that I didn't do little things to endear myself to Ashleigh's good graces. For example, when showing her the house, she made an offhand remark about my bedroom having a closet while the room slated for her use didn't have one. So, before she arrived, I switched rooms. I ended up with a better view, but she got her closet.

Our interactions during summer were polite. We were clearly tiptoeing around each other, still trying to figure out our new reality. We were giving the other a lot of space, whether it was expected or not. For example, the bathroom was upstairs, and I don't think I was ever upstairs while she was in the bathroom for the first two months she was living in the house. Just give her space, give her privacy.

That all went away once the school year started. We both came home exhausted after long days and collapsed on the couch. We both had areas where we could prep lessons and grade papers, but as I had done while living alone, they were soon abandoned in favor of piles of stuff on a coffee table in front of the TV. Our proximity and our familiarity were growing. We were bonding over complaining about the politics of our respective jobs and the satisfaction we both got from them.

One evening, I had stayed on campus late, and when I got home, Ashleigh didn't seem to be around. I was trying to remember if she had something late going on, too, but I couldn't think of anything she had said. I was mentally exhausted and wanted to shower, flop onto my bed, and sleep. I tossed my backpack down on the couch and started to head up the stairs when I heard a noise in the bathroom. I froze, listening to the changing pitch of the vibrations emanating from behind the door.

"Oh. Oh, my god. Holy fuck. Holy fuck yes." The tone of the noise was changing rhythmically as she, I assumed, fucked herself with a vibrator. She let out a cry, and the noise steadied for a few seconds before another one was let out, and the noise resumed its rhythmic pitch change only faster than before. "Oh god. Oh god yes. Yes. Marcus. Fuck me. Fuck me, fuck me!" She uttered an even louder cry than the others, followed by a squeak and a grunt. "Oh, fuck yes Marcus."

The noise continued as I very, very, slowly backed down the stairs. It was an old house; everything squeaked, and I didn't want her to know I had heard her masturbating. Not only masturbating but thinking of me while doing it. I gathered my things and went back outside. I waited a minute or two, slammed my car door extra hard, and then made a show of 'accidentally' setting off its car alarm with the key fob before walking into the house and making a fair amount of racket. I heard the shower running this time. Hopefully, she had heard me "arrive" at home. The shower turned eventually, and Ashleigh emerged from the bathroom.

"Hey. I'm home." I shouted up to her.

"Okay." I heard her bedroom door shut. I went up to use the bathroom, trying not to think about what she had just been doing there. I didn't notice at first, but it seemed that the noise I had made had spooked her after all, which was the idea, as her vibrator was tucked in behind the open shower curtain. I pulled the curtain away slowly so as not to make any noise louder than the running vent fan. It was a green rabbit vibrator with a suction cup base. My mind raced with a thousand dirty things to do at this moment. I wanted to lean over and smell it. I wanted to rub my rapidly hardening cock along it, to know some of Ashleigh's cum was rubbing off onto my cock once again. Hell, I had fantasized about her for so long that I would have gladly sucked the thing off, knowing that it had just been in her pussy. But I didn't. I didn't do any of that. I moved the shower curtain back into place, concealing it again, and carried on as if it didn't exist.

But that night, alone in bed, as I masturbated, oh, my fantasies of Ashleigh took on a whole new dimension. I admit that despite trying to think of her in a non-sexual way since she had moved in, I had failed completely. And from the sounds of things, she was of the same mindset when she thought about me. My mind raced with images of her, some a decade old, mixed with green vibrators and exquisitely arousing sounds that were fresh in my mind. For weeks afterward, I couldn't help but notice whenever rings, presumably from the suction cup base of her vibrator, appeared along the wide edge of the bathtub or on the shower's tiled walls.

We only grew more familiar as the months rolled on. What had been frequent talk by Ashleigh about finding her own place was becoming less and less frequent. As fall morphed into winter, she joined in more often with my constant house renovations, taking a greater interest, and her opinions were often willingly acted upon. The house was slowly becoming just as much hers as it was mine.

We were in the dining room at the back of the first floor, the blustery wintery weekend before Thanksgiving. We both had the coming week off of work. I had been renovating the room slowly for a couple of months, upgraded all the electrics, patched the cracks in the plaster walls and ceiling, fixed a severely jammed double hung window and a cracked pane of glass or two, and salvaged and refinished all the old trim work. It was time to paint the walls and ceiling before all the details were added back, completing the room.

The color scheme was one of Ashleigh's choosing. Whereas I had renovated the living room before she moved in and painted the ceiling and walls all white, she insisted that the walls be a different color. She had picked out a very light grey. I thought it was almost white, but I didn't argue. The old walls were already white, and as I had sanded them down while repairing the plaster, we risked skipping the primer coat. We taped off the areas that needed taping off, spread big canvas tarps across the floor, and set off with our paint; she with grey for the walls, and I with white for the ceiling.

I cut in the corners between the wall and ceiling with a brush and then switched to a roller to cover the field while Ashleigh did her own cutting in with the grey paint. The single bare light bulb, temporarily installed where a fancy light fitting was destined to go over an eventual dining room table, gave off a harsh light. Still, it was enough to show we were making progress. I was miles ahead on the ceiling and somehow got it into my head that we were racing each other to see who would finish first. I mean, it was stupid; she had two walls with a couple of windows each to paint around and two more that had large openings to the living room and kitchen, respectively. In contrast, I had one solid ceiling interrupted by a single light-fitting. I was going to complete the painting first. But I was racing. I was not on a stepladder built for racing. I was on an ancient wooden step ladder I had found in the house's basement when I moved in. It was built to fail and dump me off it when I hurried around with a roller and tray full of paint.

Crash. I hit the floor. Hard. Paint flew everywhere. I was covered. The tarps on the floor were covered. Ashleigh's freshly painted walls were splattered.

"Oh, Marcus! Are you okay?" She rushed over and put her hands on my cheeks, a deep look of concern on her face.

"Yeah. I think I'll survive. I guess the ladder gave out or something." I looked in its direction and saw one of the steps cracked and rotated 90 degrees out of its normal position. I tried to move, and the pain hit. I groaned as I tried to get up.

"Here. Careful. Let me help you." She held out her hands, and I took them, and she helped pull me to my feet. Once I was standing, she started to laugh. "Oh, look at you." I looked down; the paint tray had landed on me, and I was absolutely soaked in the white paint for the ceiling.

"Hey now..." I said as I stretched and tried to assess the damage, thankfully not much, that the fall from the ladder had caused me. "It's not nice to laugh at somebody who just fell off a ladder."

"I know. It's just." She managed to get out between fits of laughter. "You're such a mess."

"I notice that you're not." I must have had a wicked look in my eye.

"Oh no. No. Don't you dare." Too late. One step. Laughter. Two. Shouts. Three. And she was in my arms. Paint squishing from my saturated clothes onto hers. I didn't kiss her. She didn't kiss me. We kissed each other. There wasn't any hesitation from either of us. Five months of cohabitation, ten years of what if. "What took you so long?" she asked when our lips finally parted. I looked into her eyes and grinned at the paint on her face. At her face. At her. Her.

"I guess good things are worth waiting for." We stripped off our paint-covered things right there in front of the windows. We didn't care. The floor under the canvas tarps was undoubtedly ruined by the spilled paint and would take loads of work to clean and repair. We didn't care. We ran up the stairs, tracking paint from our messy feet all the way to her bedroom. We didn't care. We made love for the first time. We cared. We went and showered and scrubbed the paint off of each other and then went back and made love again, and again, and again.

-----

Eventually the Missus and I moved out of that little old house as our family was outgrowing it. We moved to a house in some of the new urban sprawl on the east side of town, a home that happened to be built in an old field right at the foot of a hill with a water tower on top of it. It's a nice house, not as much character as the old one. Still, it's usually quiet and private, except on Friday nights in the summer when the races are taking place.

We climb that hill fairly often. I've taken to mowing the trails in the grass, giving it a more park like atmosphere for people to enjoy. As to whether or not we ever made it back up there to roll around naked in the grass like we were eighteen again, well, she's a teacher in the local public schools, I'm a professor at the state university, we're both respected members of the local community. But our second child's middle name might be 'Tower' for a reason...

No more what if. Now, only what next.