Never a Lie

It had never been like this before. Before it had been cold. Any warmth had died when Lyle finished. It had never been about her before. She had never been worshipped before. No one had adored her body before. No one had attempted to make her burst into flame before. No one had recognized her heat and passion before. Not until Joey.

He dropped to his knees before her. He pressed his hot lips against her stomach. His hot kisses travelled lower, lower, through the tiny thicket, to her nether lips. Now he licked, his tongue warm and caressing. Oh God it had never been like this. He pointed his tongue and directed it in, slipping between her lips and seeking her inner essence. His thumbs held her open for him, his fingers gripping her backside, holding her steady. Had he let her go she would have fallen.

Joey luxuriated in the feel of this woman, his woman. Experienced she might have been, but not like this. Clearly no one had ever tried to pleasure her. For a moment his lip curled. Stupid bloody moron, making no effort to please someone who deserved every pleasure. He fought down his anger. He was going to pleasure her, to ensure she realized the true gift of sex, the loving, the sharing, the exploding heights. He was going to teach her what real pleasure was.

Lids falling, head tilting back she grabbed his head for safety and joy. Joy to hold any part of him as he gave her this previously unknown pleasure. Far, far more than she'd ever given herself. His tongue retreated from her depths, lavishly coating her lips with a mix of him and her. He licked her again, tongue flat, then slipped it under her hood to where her clitoris stood ready to emerge. The touch speared her, throbbed through her. Inside the tension was building in her, seeking an outlet for release. He tongued her clitoris again, a swipe with the flat of his tongue, a gentle lip bite and she was over the edge, spiralling into nothingness, stars shooting through her head as she fell into a mindless state of orgasmic bliss. Her hands tightened on his head. Her knees collapsed and she hung on him, hands gripping his head while he supported her buttocks.

"Never, never, never like that. Oh Joey, Joey."

She couldn't stop herself now. He needed to know. She couldn't tell him, but he needed to know.

"Joey, I love you."

"I love you, too, Artie, my Artie."

He eased her quivering naked body over to the narrow bed.

Naked, boneless, exploded, she yet lay in expectation and anticipation. More, more. She yearned to be filled, desire still thrumming through her veins. She caught her breath, slowed her breathing, stopped panting with the sheer breathless ache of her climax. There would be more, she knew. Could it possibly be as mind-blowingly ecstatic as it had already been? She watched him, poised over her. He suckled her breasts again, the assault on her sensitive nipples sending her mind reeling once more.

Joey stared into her eyes, watching, seeing the warmth behind the desire that clouded them. He dropped to lie naked atop her, her breasts caressing his chest, then rose to insert himself into her. Slowly and lovingly her penetrated her. No pain. She was slippery. He slid easily. She could feel him filling her. Deeper and deeper. It was heaven.

For Joey it was the greatest pleasure he'd ever know, being inside this warm and willing woman, his woman, the woman he'd claimed for his own.

He started to move within, in and out of her, a smooth, slow rhythm that jolted her awareness each time he thrust forward, filling her again and again with his warmth. She clutched at him, arched her body beneath him, drove him further inside. She was live beneath him, her inner muscles grabbing him each time he thrust into her, her arms holding him tight, her hips rising into him, her mouth kissing him greedily.

He began to move a little faster, and then faster yet. He could feel the tension rising within her. He fought to hold off, to put off the explosions he knew she would give him, fought to make her pleasure the equal of his. He thrust harder, deeper yet, again and again and again. Suddenly she was there. He could feel the tension suddenly release. Her muscles spasmed, inside and out. She bit into his shoulder to stifle her cry of release and joy. Her involuntary muscle spasms within pulled him over with her. He spent himself deep within, the shocks coming again and again.

They collapsed together, each pushed beyond the limits of sanity for a time.

Eventually they both returned.

"Artie, that was the most intense experience of my life. You are wonderful, dearest, fabulous . . . I've run out of bests. You are all of the bests. God, I love you."

"Oh Joey, I can't say what I mean. I mean all the best things you could ever say. I do love you, Joey, I do."

"It was glorious, that first time, Joey," Artie's voice came from the bed. It was getting darker. Night was falling. "It was always good with you, Joey, always good, but our first time stands out. I never expected it could be like that, never. And it's been like that ever since. Fifteen years of joy, Joey. You gave me that."

"I always wanted to give you joy, Artie. You deserved joy."

It seemed that her mind was beginning to wander a bit. She was all there, just not focussed so much on the far past.

"You know, Joey, life sometimes goes in patterns. Who would ever have guessed that Lyle would have been my first, and my last, but that I'd have been loved by you for fifteen years in between? Who would have guessed that he hadn't learned anything in the fifteen years in between, despite being married to one of the sweetest people we know? Strange."

I let it go the first time, though it jolted me. Was Artie confessing to an affair with Lyle? With that bag of shit? She had never lied to me. Not even the littlest white lie to smooth things out a bit. Artie was compulsively honest. And now she was confessing that she'd been unfaithful to me. The blood roared in my brain.

"I never meant to be unfaithful to you, Joey," she whispered again. "It's just that Lyle came over to the house one day when you were at the office. Probably he was supposed to be working. He treated me all nice. I don't think he had clued in yet that you owned the company. He came on pretty strong. I don't know whether he would have raped me if I'd fought harder. Anyway, I decided since it looked like it was going to happen to see whether he'd learned anything. He hadn't. I guess the experience only made me love you more. I didn't mean to hurt you. I can't leave you with the lie, though. I'm sorry, Joey."

Joey couldn't say anything. That Artie had been unfaithful hit him in the gut. He froze up. It was all he could do to make himself leave without saying anything. He wanted to lash out. He couldn't do that to a dying woman. He left without saying goodbye. Artie looked after him, love flushing her countenance, making her even more beautiful. Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes. That, that had been so hard. It was so hard to hurt him. She'd never, ever, lied to him. It had to be done. She wasn't going to die until she did. She couldn't be sure she'd live long enough to do it later. Maybe there wouldn't be a later. It had to be done.

Six days later she was dead.

*****

Karen had seemed more broken up at the funeral even than Joey. He was of two minds. She only had one. Her best friend in all the world had lost his wife, his soul mate. She'd lost a good friend, too. The only person who still treated her as anything more than that bastard Lyle's wife. God, she wished she'd married Joey instead. Wished she'd gotten beyond that stupid shyness around him. Learned to treat him as a man, not the little boy she'd gone to school with forever, treated him as more than the wonderful friend he'd been. Artie had been gloriously happy in their marriage. She should have been. She had Joey. She'd made Joey happy, too. Karen hadn't realized at college that there were depths to Artie that didn't show. Nothing else could have made Joey so happy. He wasn't the type to glory in the trophy that Artie was.

She'd married Lyle on a curious rebound. Joey and Artie had started going together in final year. It was only a couple of weeks and they were living in each other's pockets. A month and they were married. No children appeared to explain the fast marriage. No cracks appeared in their lives to justify the thought that maybe they'd married too fast. It had been true love and they'd seen it and seized it. How many of us ever do that? Karen had missed her chance.

Karen had been hurt by Joey's marriage. She thought she'd lost her best friend. Artie never came between them. She made every effort to be friends with Karen, and had succeeded. Artie was perhaps the most selfless person she'd ever known.

There'd been a reason to be hurt but it didn't make sense. She had no claim on Joey. She'd slept with other guys. Sometimes, when it was especially good, she dreamed afterwards that it had been Joey. She'd never let him know. When Lyle had proposed she'd accepted even though she didn't know him all that well. She'd been bereft. She'd been on the rebound from an impossible dream. He'd been okay.

Then he turned her life from a dream to a nightmare. He didn't do anything to hurt her physically. He never tried to hit her. She had two brothers as big as Lyle. If he'd even thought of hitting her they'd have beaten him into a pulp. They were vindictive. They'd have done it again and again. The one time he'd raised his hand during a quarrel, his temper so badly frayed he might not be seeing straight, she'd muttered "Kyle and Kevin" and he'd backed off so fast it was almost funny. He never lost his temper that far again. It would have been life-threatening if he had. His life.

Lyle hadn't hit her. He hadn't tried to run her down. He never complimented her, though. He never said anything nice to her. He never remembered her birthday, or their anniversary, not that she was willing to celebrate it. He never got her flowers or a gift for the sake of giving her something. It really hurt when Artie would show her the latest thing Joey had given her. Some stupid little ornament, only a couple of bucks, meant to remind her of something they'd shared. It wasn't the money. Lyle had gotten her one of the biggest rocks going for an engagement ring. It was that Joey was always thinking of Artie, and Lyle never seemed to be thinking of her that way.

Lyle never really said anything bad to her. He never said much at all to her. There was no excuse to leave him. He worked hard, or at least it seemed so to her. He made decent money. There was nothing she could tag as a reason to leave him, not and end up involved with someone like him, only worse. What could she tell him to explain her leaving? Perhaps it was that stupid reluctance to commit herself that had lost her Joey. At least she'd never given Lyle children.

She was never tempted to have an affair. The chances were there. She still looked as good as she had in college, still slim and fit. She'd turned down offers. Lyle was unfaithful, repeatedly. She could always tell. That wasn't her style. If she was going to be with someone else, she'd leave Lyle. Someday soon. Who was she kidding, she thought. She wasn't going to leave Lyle. After fifteen years it was too late. She'd never find anyone else. It didn't occur to her that life without Lyle was better than life with Lyle even if she was all alone.

Then, at the end of the funeral and the committal, after they'd all thrown their sods on Artie's casket, she'd hugged Joey.

"I know how much she meant to you, Joey. You two were the happiest couple. I always envied you. If there's anything I can do at all, anything to make it easier for you, tell me."

Joey hadn't answered. He was sunk too deep in his grief. Perhaps he'd remember when he started trying to live without Artie. It was going to be tough. She thought she'd pity him, then recalled that he had fifteen wonderful years that most people didn't succeed in finding. His memories would all be of love, affection, kindness, honesty. She didn't have memories like that.

*****

It was a month after the funeral. Joey was still plagued by both the loss of his wife and her terrible admission a few days before she died. She'd been driven by her impending death to confess an affair with possibly the worst possible villain he might have contemplated, her boyfriend from the days before they were together. He'd always thought that Lyle was gone for good and all once he and Artie started going out. She'd been forever telling him how much more she liked him than Lyle, how he treated her as a person and not as a thing the way Lyle did. Lyle had treated her as no more than a trophy. They'd had sex because that was what you did with a trophy and anyway he needed to get his rocks off. Joey had always treated her as someone he liked and later adored, especially when they made love.

Artie had been a trophy, of course. She'd been quite gorgeous. Even after the cancer had started to eat her away she was beautiful. The pain lines couldn't take that away from her. Joey remembered his last sight of her, there in the hospital, after that amazing confession when his stomach was roiling with the unfairness of it all. She still looked great, her look especially loving, almost as if she'd known she would never see him again in this life. She hadn't. Joey couldn't bear to see the wife he had loved so much again after she'd admitted to that fling with Lyle. All right, it had been a fling, not an affair, but she had been unfaithful. The last time she made love in her life and it had been with Lyle, that bastard. He'd abused their trust. Lyle and Karen had been friends, not because of Lyle, who was an arrogant sod, but because both Joey and Artie had liked his wife Karen.

Karen had been Joey's friend, never anything romantic, for years and years, going back to their early days n grade school. After he and Artie got together, Artie had made a special effort to be friends with Karen because she was Joey's friend. They'd drifted apart a bit when Joey set up the company and developed it into a leader in its field. Joey and Artie moved soon after graduation to be closer to their major market. Though they'd never lost touch, Lyle and Karen hadn't come back into their lives until about five years before when Lyle's new job took him to their community. They picked up where they left off with Karen and tolerated Lyle.

Once, back in college, Lyle had twitted Joey about having had Artie before she'd gone to him. Joey had simply told him that he obviously couldn't satisfy a good woman. He, Joey, could. Lyle never brought the subject up again. He hadn't much liked Joey before, but he detested him after.

Joey had never figured out why Karen, surely one of the sweetest women he'd ever known, had married that egotistical asshole, but she had.

The thought of punishment for Lyle crossed Joey's mind, went on, circled back, settled in. Lyle worked for the same company as Joey did. Joey had learned about the hiring too late to stop it. There was a significant difference between their positions in the company, though. Lyle was in the lower levels of middle management. Joey owned the company. It would be an easy matter to get Lyle fired. The company could stand the penalties. He resented giving Lyle the best part of a year's salary for nothing, letting him lie back and continue seducing respected wives from their previously faithful ways, just as he'd done to Artie. Maybe there was something better, more appropriate to the crime.

His mind wandered back to a conversation he'd had with Artie a few months back, before she'd failed. The cancer was there but there was still hope for remission. They'd been talking speculatively, the way they sometimes did, nothing practical, just exploring the way each other thought. They'd done something like that for the whole of their married life. They had each taken joy in all the aspects of the other for all of those fifteen years. That had been love, truly, deeply felt by them both, he thought.

"Artie, what do you think a man should do if he finds out his wife has been unfaithful to him?"

"Depends, I suppose. That's a pretty nasty supposition. You can't parcel out blame. They would both be equally responsible and anything done to the one has to be done to the other. I don't think anything physical, though. Even an unfaithful wife doesn't deserve to be beaten. A real man could never consider hitting a woman."

"No, I agree with you there. It's not very liberating of you, though."

"Perhaps not, though mostly the woman is weaker, and it's never been right to pick on someone weaker just because you can."

"True enough. Back to my question, though."

"As I said, it depends. Are you prepared to forgive this woman? Does she mean that much to you? I don't mean just because she comes crying to you and begs forgiveness. Every woman will do that. Trust has been destroyed. You toss her out and hope she can survive. You don't do any more than the law makes you do. If that happens, all you can do is remember all the good times. They might be tainted, in hindsight, but that's all in your mind and, most of the time, you'd be wrong to let them be tainted.

"On the other hand, if you still love and want this woman I guess you have to try to allow her one mistake. I don't know how you could. If you were ever unfaithful to me I'd be tempted to kill you and the other woman no matter how much I still loved you. It depends on how much you love her. The only thing you'd have to be absolutely certain of is that you could never, ever tax her with that mistake. Otherwise you haven't really taken her back. You've just found a different way to punish her."

"Suppose a case where you couldn't take your wife back. Maybe you're glad enough to be rid of her, maybe she's actually gone to the other man, maybe she's died or lost her mind. That just leaves you with the chance to wreak some sort of vengeance on the other party."

"If you're glad to be rid of her, take the excuse and run. She'd deserve your congratulations, not your punishment. The other guy's actually done you a favour, bringing the crisis to a head. If she left you, sometimes that's enough punishment and sometimes not. Somewhere along the line she'll want to come back to you. Don't let her. Even if she won't do it again, and most of them will, you can never trust her again. If for some reason your wife is beyond any possible punishment, deserved or not, the simplest and often best punishment for the other party is to take his wife away from him."

"How does that help?"

"Assuming the guy is married he has some feeling for his wife, even if it's only as a possession. Losing her would pay him back. It's a direct strike at his masculinity. I'm assuming here that his wife is worth an effort. If she's a tireless shrew, leaving him with her is a worse punishment than taking her away. Sometimes the wife is worth having for yourself. In that case you have no guilt at all in taking her away. Do unto others, you know. I don't think you would want someone you could take away from another man, though. How would you know she wouldn't leave you for someone else? After all she's already done it once.

"Mostly what you need to do is make her leave him. Usually that's doing her a favour. Maybe down the road when they're divorced she'll want you and you'll want her. It would be all right then."

"You have a deliciously devious mind, dear."

As Joey thought about the discussion it came to him that the answer to Lyle's deceit would be to take Karen away from him. If he could. Karen was honest and true, completely faithful. Did he want to destroy that, destroy her, just to get back at Lyle? He did have all those years of friendship to work with and he had Karen's own sweetness and sympathy. He also had, now that he was beginning to get into this revenge business, Lyle's own selfishness and egotism to turn against him. Best of all, he might actually get Karen, and she was worth the having, as much as Artie. He'd just have to make sure that she never realized it had started as a vendetta. Maybe Artie's fall had opened up a way for him to be happy again even after she'd died. The Artie he'd known would have been pleased for him. He wasn't sure about the woman who'd revealed herself in the hospital. He didn't think Artie had changed that much.