No More Secrets

ONE

My wife, Linda, had taken the boys and gone to surprise her widowed mother on the occasion of her 74th birthday. Still young enough to be excited by the prospect of seeing Nana again, Ryan and Alex—7 and 4 —chattered ceaselessly at breakfast, their little mouths stuffed with pancakes, syrup spilling off their Styrofoam plates and onto their bare legs, clearly offending the delicate sensibilities of the elderly woman at the next table while charming the gaggle of high school girls working the counter at this particular McDonald's. At home, Linda hosed them down, buckled them into the Escort, and drove off in time to complete the 4 hour trip before sundown. I smiled and waved as she backed out of the driveway but being nervous about the trip and miffed at me for letting the boys make such a mess at breakfast, she waved but she didn't smile. Her furrowed brow and barely contained anger left me feeling guilty and sad—emotions I had become all too familiar with in the last year.

Somehow, in the last year, Linda and I had lost something. That spark. That passion. That...thing. It happens to all married couples eventually, doesn't it? Still, I was surprised somehow that it was happening to us. Linda and me, that lovey-dovey duo that inspired equal parts annoyance and envy in all of our friends. We were in love, damnit. What the hell happened. Sure, the job—my job since Linda had taken a leave of absence from teaching—had intruded but I thought I was doing what we both wanted. Making money, moving up, building a future. I was given a promotion eighteen months ago, a second one three months later and now I was assuming even more responsibility—and at a particularly inopportune time. This weekend was supposed to have been a romantic getaway for Linda and me—to Cape May for a few nights at the Abbey bed and breakfast. No Cartoon Channel, no midnight visitors, no e-mails or phone calls from my office asking me to 'peruse memos' or 'approve expenditures'. This weekend was designed for shopping, sightseeing, reading Michener on the beach and, I hoped against hope, regenerating our dormant sex life. Mostly, it was about finding that...thing all over again. Alas, tt was not to be—the last expenditure I was asked to approve on Wednesday came from my supervisor. Though the payment requisition was carefully disguised as a 'fundraiser,' I became suspicious when I saw that $500 in cash had been earmarked for a 'professional entertainer.' A quick call to the phone number on the bill confirmed my suspicion that the 500 bucks was for a stripper who, as it turned out, picked up a couple thousand bucks of company funds for blowing my supervisor and his two idiot assistants in full view of the well-oiled partygoers, including his horrified female secretary and her 16 year old daughter who had been hired part-time by the caterer. On Thursday morning, my supervisor tearfully confessed the whole thing to his boss (after his secretary had already given her the gritty details of the 'fundraiser.') He was promptly fired and I was immediately given his position, his corner office and his watchdog secretary. The promotion meant I had to work through the weekend to bring myself up to speed for my first senior staff meeting on Monday morning. Cape May was not to be so off Linda went to see her mother and, I'm certain, get away from me.

Rather than spend the weekend in the office, I filled my trunk with file boxes, burned 4 CD's worth of material from my ex-supervisor's computer and brought everything home to work while the family was off in Nana-land. Actually, I enjoyed those rare occasions when I had the house to myself. Making all the noise I wanted without concern for waking the kids or annoying the wife was almost as pleasurable as sitting in the stillness and silence of the old house, feeling a sense of peace and solitude that was hard to find anywhere else. I put in a full day on Saturday, stopping work only once to talk to Linda and get the full report on the drive to Nana's—there was hardly any traffic until she got to Columbus which she hates driving through, just hates it! The boys were fine until then but, of course, in Columbus they got hungry, had to pee, started hitting each other, Alex started to cry and wet his pants so they had to get off the highway, stop at a McDonald's. Two happy meals and a new pair of pants for Alex later, they were on their way again when the car started to "shimmy"—she couldn't get any more specific than "shimmy", which had stopped by the time she got to Nana's and now the car was running fine but what should she do if it started "shimmying" again for which I had no satisfactory answer. Nana was surprised and thrilled to see them and, my, hadn't the boys grown and Linda looked lovely though, naturally, "Mother said I had gained weight which I haven't" and she hadn't and I told her she looked great, her figure was as enticing as ever to which she replied "Don't start in with that again." That killed a half-hour.

Being alone in the house means that I can watch whatever movie I want when I want without concern for offending my wife's tastes or exposing the boys to sights and sounds that they should not yet be seeing or hearing. I don't normally enjoy pornography though I certainly won't look the other way if Nicole Kidman or Susan Sarandon suddenly decides to jump into the shower as part of the perfectly justified dramatic action. And yes, I have rewound the tape to re-watch Kate Winslet pose for Leonardo DiCaprio in that movie about the big boat. I had something similar in mind as I poked through our disorganized video cabinet. I had to dig through an ocean of Blue's Clues videos, wade through the swamp of Disney movies and crawl across the desert of Linda's DVD's "that I would really enjoy if I would just give them the time" and besides "not all movies are about big guns and big tits!" True, but maybe they should be. I had found what I was looking for—"Basic Instinct!" Sharon Stone crosses her legs a nobody and uncrosses them a star.

I cracked open a beer, popped some popcorn and settled into my chair for a few hours of decadent entertainment. It was a bad copy and I impatiently played with the remote trying to get a clear picture but to no avail. I was about to take it out of the VCR and find something else when the screen went blank. I heard a familiar voice coming through the TV and a muffled male voice in the background. The familiar voice—female—was saying "OK" every so often to the muffled male. It wasn't until I heard her utter a full sentence—"On my knees or on here?"—that I recognized the voice. It was Linda.

TWO

This was not the Linda that pulled out of the driveway in a bad mood this morning but the Linda I knew in college a decade ago—bright and happy, smart and funny, with a killer ass and a pair of 36D's that she loved to show off (though she never admitted so) by wearing halter tops or unbuttoning her blouses just enough to show some cleavage for her aging male biology professor who always gave her better grades than she deserved. The voice coming through my TV was that of the girl who once accepted a dare (and won a hundred bucks) to go skinny-dipping in the college pool during regular hours; the carefree, slightly naughty girl who posed naked for an art class and gave me a blowjob in the front hallway of her parents' house while the rest of the clan was on the front lawn playing capture the flag. The voice belonged to a girl who used to whisper "My cunt is wet" to me during biology lab and frequently demanded that I "cum on her tits." In the last year, our once fruitful sex life dwindled and Linda hadn't 'whispered' anything to me in nearly four months so hearing her young voice made me hard in spite of the fact that I couldn't imagine what the hell she was doing on my copy of "Basic Instinct".

No picture had yet appeared on my TV but I could hear the sound of men working in the background: shuffling feet, furniture scraping across a concrete floor, the whirring of electronic devices. My wife's voice had disappeared and for a moment I concluded that it wasn't Linda after all, just someone who sounded like her. And that this program, whatever it was, had been recorded by mistake in the five years since my last encounter with "Basic Instinct". I convinced myself that this was indeed the case and waited patiently for the glitch to stop.

But it didn't stop. After about thirty seconds of the work sounds, a male voice shouted out, "OK, let's shoot one."

And suddenly an image appeared on the screen. Nothing conspicuous, just a pile of scrap wood heaped in a corner. The camera swept suddenly to the right and landed on what looked like the bottom rail of a bed. A man's bare legs crossed in front of it and, shortly after that, the bed shook slightly under the weight of someone sitting on it. The camera moved up slowly and I could now see the naked body of a man, his toned ass center screen. A woman in baggy jeans and a Grateful Dead t-shirt stood on the far side of the bed reading off of the clipboard. The man said something inaudible; the woman giggled, pushed his shoulder teasingly with her free hand and walked away. The man rolled onto his back, revealing a large, flaccid penis that flopped toward the camera. He was casually smoking a cigarette while another woman—a girl really, skinny and pale, in a dirty brown tank top and tight fitting cut-offs—stepped into the picture and sat on the far side of the bed.

"I'm Lisa," she said timidly.

"Where's Lorraine?" asked the man.

Lisa shrugged.

An offstage voice called out, "Jail."

"Again?" said the man. "Christ. OK, Lisa. You clean?"

She nodded.

"OK, do your stuff. No teeth."

And without another word, Lisa leaned over and took the man's penis into her mouth. The man's face registered nothing but boredom although his penis did get bigger and harder as she sucked on it. Lisa ran her tongue around the tip of his huge dick, smiling into the camera as she did so. The clipboard woman reappeared and, taking no notice of Lisa's performance, took the man's cigarette and walked away.

After about 30 seconds, the man said, "That's enough" but Lisa was still performing and kept sucking the man's dick, taking it as deep as her pretty little mouth would let her, until a male voice from behind the camera said, "That's enough, honey."

Lisa smiled mischievously, pulled down her tank top to reveal two small, innocent looking breasts while mouthing the words "Fuck me" into the camera.

"Get her outta there!"

A voice in the distance called out, "I'll fuck her. Put the camera over here! Can I fuck her?"

Laughter followed until the clipboard woman grabbed Lisa's arm and pulled her out of the shot as the man absent-mindedly stroked his now rigid cock.

At this point, another woman walked into the shot. Her back was to the camera, she wore a bathrobe, and the top of her head was out of the shot but I recognized the strain of her frame immediately. It was Linda—the college girl Linda. She was being touched up by clipboard woman until an off-camera voice barked, "All right already. We're doing porn, not the cover of Vogue. Christ." Clipboard woman scurried out of shot, as did a few crewmembers behind her and for the first time, I could see the setting—a locker room.

For a split second as Linda removed the robe, I tried to convince myself that it wasn't her but if the thick reddish hair tumbling down her back didn't give it away, that amazing naked ass did. It was more beautiful than I remembered and I remembered it well. Clipboard woman jumped back into the shot, took a comb to Linda's patch of pubic hair and disappeared.

And then Linda turned around.

THREE

Even today, after nine years of marriage, the site of Linda naked still arouses me instantly. Every night before bedtime, she will sit on the edge of the bed absent-mindedly applying lotion to her hands and legs. One ankle is propped on the opposite knee leaving her vagina slightly open, the pink of her vulva peeking through the thick, reddish brown patch of hair. Her round, voluptuous breasts are topped off with large areolas and pink, puffy nipples, still pert and inviting after all these years. Linda has always been proud of her body, and when we were first married, before the kids were born she would spend Sunday mornings walking around the apartment wearing only a tight fitting tank top, the sweet scent of her cunt filling the air. On Sundays, we made love at least twice before noon and usually once more before sunset. I would fuck her from behind while she mixed up the pancake batter or tongue her clit during "Meet the Press." She would be wet again within an hour, her juices leaving a telltale stain, always an invitation to another erotic adventure. In those days she was insatiable, her hands almost constantly fondling some part of me—the back of my neck, my shoulders, face, back, thigh, ass, cock. We would be in the midst of a conversation about politics or art or where to go for dinner and she would work my dick free and take it in her mouth without missing a beat. Sometimes she swallowed, sometimes she spit, letting it drool over her lips and onto her chin. Or she would take me out at the last minute and let my seed shoot all over her breasts. She liked to rub it around on her tits, getting hotter as she did so until she had to ask me—no, beg me to "stick your tongue in my cunt." It was bliss and my longing for it now was painful and intense. As I watched this video of my young bride my cock was harder than it had been in years.

"Hi. I'm Linda."

My naked and beautiful wife, her nervousness betrayed by fidgety hands, goosebumps and magnificently erect nipples, was speaking to the hunk of testosterone spread out like a roasted pig before her. Her eyes flicked back and forth between his face and his dick, which he continued to stroke.

"Turk. Give me the blowjob first—no teeth, I don't like the teeth—then Ill eat your pussy for a minute, maybe more if you're diggin' it. Then I'll fuck you. You like it up the ass?"

"Ummm...not this time if that's OK. It's my first...one of these."

"One of these what? Fucks?"

"No. Um...movies. Sex scenes."

"Oh. Whatever. I look good doing it doggie style so we'll start and finish that way. Mix it up in between. Where you want it?"

"I'm sorry?"

"You want me to cum on your face, your ass, your tits?"

"Um... I like it on my breasts."

She instinctively covered her breasts with one arm.

"You got nice tits so, yeah, that's fine. Hey, how 'bout I fuck your tits? You like that, the titty fuck?"

She shrugged shyly.

"We'll see where it takes us. Oh, and don't forget to say stuff."

'Yes, I've been told—"

"Y'know, fuck me, fuck my pussy, I want your big cock in my mouth, spank me—spanking OK?"

"I guess. Not real hard but—"

"Those are some great fuckin' tits, honey. You'll do OK in this business."

Without a word, he put his hand up to her vagina and ran two fingers inside. She gasped and tried to hide the fact that she was aroused by Turk's bold gesture.

"Good, you're already wet. C'mon, let's shoot this puppy. I want to fuck this girl. What's your name again? "

"Lin—"

But the director interrupted her. "You two got this straight? Dialogue first, then suck-lick-fuck-fuck-spritz. Where you gonna do it?"

"She wants it on her tits," said Turk, helpfully.

"And great tits they are. OK, let's shoot one. Speed?"

"We have speed."

"Camera?"

"Yep."

"Slate it."

"Cunning Co-eds number 22, scene 5a, take 1."

"And...action."

FOUR

Linda was married before she met me. The man's name was Eliot Brody, they were married for six months before he was arrested—I still don't know why—and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. Linda, barely nineteen at the time, divorced him immediately after the arrest, her father coming to her welcome if somewhat smug and "I-told-you-so-ish" rescue with a pricey lawyer who, according to Linda, "waved his magic wand" to bring the whole sad affair to its anticlimactic denouement. She enrolled in college the following fall where she strode absent-mindedly into the snack bar late one Tuesday night. I was there, my shaggy mane dangling over an economics textbook and that first glimpse of her—in ripped jeans and a red t-shirt that read "I make boys cry"--pierced my heart with the kind of instantaneous fervor bordering on madness that you read about it in novels by women with names like Juliet Cornwallis and Alicia Haverford St. John. There—now you know as much as my wife's first marriage as did I at the time. For a while, I was obsessed with learning more about this dark chapter of my beloved's romantic history. One night after a bout of deliciously sloppy lovemaking a month prior to our wedding, I pressed her for details. She got out of bed, left my apartment and disappeared for three days. When I finally tracked her down at her parent's cabin on the Outer Banks, I apologized tearfully and vowed never to ask her about Eliot Brody again. And I never have. Might I now be watching a remnant of her mysterious past? No time to consider that now. I had a video to watch!

On the word 'action' Linda's body language changed instantly—her hip shot out as she shifted her weight to her right leg. The arm that had been shielding her breasts was now propped haughtily on her hip while her other hand reached behind her neck and ran through her long, thick red hair. Her back arched and her breasts quivered as she launched into the corny porn dialog.

"Hiya, coach, they told me I could find you in here. What's that you've got in your hand?"

"This?" asked Turk. "This is what I call...the shotgun?"

"The shotgun? What's that?"

"Here, let me show you," he said, placing her hand on his penis. "You cheerleaders oughta be good for something. You know what to do, don't ya?"

Linda smiled mischievously, fell effortlessly to her knees and, staring hungrily at his rock hard mass of unleashed sexual power, licked her lips and said, "Mmmmmm."

I had my own cock out by now and was stroking it as my young bride took Turk's cock in her mouth. A poorly executed zoom brought the camera close enough to see the streams of saliva winding their way down Turk's mighty shaft. He let out a satisfied sigh and Linda responded by taking the cock from her mouth, stroking it with both hands while she said, "I like the shotgun." She consumed it now, almost the entire shaft disappearing inside her mouth. Sucking feverishly for a full minute, Linda finally stopped long enough to say, "Oh, coach, I want my cunt full of your cock. Do you want to be inside me? Do ya?"

"Oh, yes," he replied.

She stood up, a hand still rubbing his dick. "Eat my pussy, first, little boy. Stick your tongue in my cunt."

Linda straddled him, slowly lowering her pussy to his mouth as his tongue reached toward her hungrily. Finally lowering her box onto his face, she let out a long low moan. "Oh, yes. Lick me. Lick my pussy, coach." I knew Linda's orgasms well enough to know that the shrieks and moans she emitted over the next few moments were genuine. At one point, she grabbed Turk's hand and placed it on one of her tits. His other hand spanked her ass harder than I would have ever dared and she received it with a squeal of delight.

The camera backed away and in the corner of the screen I could see a movie camera dollying in for a close-up. It became apparent to me then that the video I had been watching was not the actual film but a lesser quality video camera—a movie of the movie. I couldn't figure out why they'd make what must have been a lesser quality video like this. But then I noticed something unusual—Linda looked directly into the video camera and made a face, a 'can you believe I'm really doing this' look. "Goddamn," said the unseen cameraman—whose name I suddenly suspected was Eliot Brody. "Goddamn!"