One Step Behind

"Where did you learn that?" I panted, still thrusting, my arousal mounting faster and faster.

Caroline didn't reply, but a look of mischievous pleasure crossed her face as she bit her lower lip, tipped her hips forward and tightened her pelvic floor once again, this time much harder and for much longer.

"Oh my God I'm going to cum!"

My cock gripped and twisted as if by a fist, I thrust into her harder still, increasing the force and pace of my strokes, my rhythm breaking as a painful and copious ejaculation began to bear down on me.

The wet slapping sounds that emanated from our conjoined loins filled the room more and more. Caroline's soft gasps grew louder and higher in pitch until finally, they were choked off completely by the arrival of her orgasm; the first she had ever experienced at my hands.

Her mouth fell open in silent scream, her hands grabbed at my waist and buttocks and her legs wrapped themselves tightly around my thighs as she came hard beneath my wildly thrusting body, a body that a few moment later was shaking uncontrollably as my own climax hit and hit hard.

With a pulsating, trembling body and hard, throbbing cock, I emptied the entire contents of my tight, swollen balls into Caroline's vagina for the first of many, many times, in a heart-rending orgasm I can still remember today.

And throughout the whole wonderful coupling, Annabel and Simon had not even entered my mind.

Chapter Ten

I spent the night with Caroline in her single student bed, fucking until we were both sore and exhausted. It was awkward and cramped, neither of us slept much but as we joked the following morning, with my body on top of hers so often, on average, there was plenty of room.

Her housemates seemed surprised that in a single evening, quiet, reserved Caroline had gone from not even mentioning me to spending a noisy night with me in her bed, but they were polite and friendly when we eventually emerged for a very late breakfast of tea and toast.

They were even more friendly when Caroline explained just how long she and I had known each other.

To cut a long story short, she and I became an item that night and have remained one ever since. Throughout the rest of our University days we were a couple, spending night after night together either at her place or mine, making love as if our lives depended on it.

I soon found out that Marcus had been right; Caroline was indeed a tiger in bed.

Lulled into a false sense of security by the relative romance of our first night together, I was completely unprepared for the energy and proficiency of her performance in bed the following night, and throughout the years that followed.

Though still sweet and shy in public, in private, Caroline threw herself into sex with an energy and abandon that completely belied her quiet, conventional appearance. Though seldom taking the lead, she was open to almost any and every idea or suggestion that I made, and took on each new experience with passion, lust and a spirit of adventure that took my breath away.

Her oral skills took me by complete surprise, as did the demands she put on my own mouth and tongue in return. Many was the morning I woke with a badly stiff neck, swollen lips and a gooey face.

The demands she made on the rest of my body and stamina were astonishing too as, over the first few months of our relationship, I fucked her progressively in every available orifice and position in the metaphorical book.

And the things she could do with her pelvic floor...

Where this expertise had come from remains a mystery. As far as I knew, her entire sexual history had been with Marcus and with me -- and she certainly hadn't learned it from me. If I ever came close to commenting on her sexual proficiency, she would become very embarrassed and self-conscious, and for days afterwards would be stiff and awkward in bed.

Naturally, I quickly learned not to look a gift horse in the mouth, and seldom mentioned it again.

Having an exciting and regular sex partner allowed me to stop trying to play the field and concentrate more on my academic studies. My results improved considerably over the coming terms, as did Caroline's, so we graduated the same summer with good degrees.

Afterwards, determined to stay together, we both found good jobs in London. With a little help from our parents, we rented a flat and passed the psychological watershed of moving in together.

There were a few rocky patches on the road to domestic bliss, but we eventually navigated them and began our lives as a real couple, both in and out of bed.

For the first few months of our co-habitation, sex continued at the same high-frequency, high-energy levels that had characterised our courtship. It was true even then, that the pace was being set by Caroline, and that I had to run to keep up, but we were young and deeply in love and it all seemed simply wonderful.

For a man to have a lovely, sexy woman demanding sex with him almost every day and in almost every way, does his self-esteem no harm at all.

However, the pressures of work and much desired early promotions did eventually wear us down, and by the time the first year together was closing, we had fallen into the habit of making love only a couple of times a week.

These couplings were still exciting and energetic; the quality had been maintained if not the quality and I was still leading a pussy-whipped existence.

Further promotions for me followed over the next three years, but the company Caroline worked for suffered the fate of many businesses in that period and ended up going bust, leaving her unemployed.

Never one to get depressed, she decided to take the opportunity to re-train as a teacher and between us, we took the monumental decision to get married and start a family.

Long before the ceremony took place, Caroline had come off the pill and we were trying for a baby.

I know I speak for Caroline too when I say that deliberately trying to get my wife pregnant resulted in the best, closest and most meaningful sex of our lives -- at least up to that point. If our bodies had merged as we made love before, the conscious insemination of Caroline's soft, open and we fully intended, highly fertile womb with my seed, took that unique bond to an entirely new level.

As with many couples, the process led to both her libido and mine simply soaring. Tiredness meant nothing; every day and at least twice every weekend, she would lie under me, climaxing freely while I delivered load after load of thick, creamy semen into the depths of her belly.

Afterwards, she would lie on her back with her knees raised for a good half hour to let my sperm do their important job.

It worked better than we had hoped; conception happened within two months - and a good few weeks before our wedding though not long enough to affect the cut of her off-white dress.

What was more of a surprise, was the way her pregnancy, far from making her feel heavy and unattractive, raised her libido to hitherto unimagined levels. With increased responsibility at work, extended office hours and frequent weekend working, I could barely manage to keep her satisfied no matter how hard I tried.

Vaginal, oral -- even our first attempts at anal sex were on the menu on a daily basis, all chasing the rapidly-receding goal of orgasm for my increasingly insatiable wife.

It sounds a terrible thing to say, but after a couple of months, the novelty of constantly fucking Caroline had worn a bit thin. What should have been a very pleasurable merging of bodies and souls, had become an exhausting obligation that left me permanently aching and decidedly sore.

What it was doing between Caroline's thighs could be seen every time I penetrated her angry pink passage, but something deep within was driving her on to greater and greater sexual athletics.

Eventually our first baby was born and to my relief, Caroline's libido returned to more manageable levels. I was promoted at work too, and we moved into a larger flat.

Caroline had put on quite a few pounds during her pregnancy. She lost some of this extra weight after the birth, but less than a year later, we agreed that it would be best to have our children close together and the whole process began again.

The presence of our first baby made our usual noisy, energetic sex much harder to manage, but at Caroline's insistence we persevered and, eighteen months after our first daughter was born, our second arrived.

Our family now complete, my much-needed vasectomy followed swiftly after.

With two small children in a small flat, the pressures on us were multiplied. What with another promotion at work, and the demands babies make on both parents, we found less and less time to be a couple, both in bed and out with our friends.

Unsurprisingly, our sex life suffered badly, along with sleep, exercise, healthy eating and every other adult pursuit apart from alcohol and gaining weight.

Before long, we had both lost touch with the last few school friends with whom we had maintained contact.

I hadn't heard from or about either Marcus or Annabel in over five years.

Chapter Eleven

Fast-forward sixteen years and you find us in our forties, still married, living in a large, four-bedroom house in the Thames Valley west of London. I was, and still am a Senior Executive in a software company. Caroline works part time, teaching in a local school.

Our two kids, both girls, had been in the sixth form in another local school, not far from the one in which their mother taught.

The older girl -- who looks more like me than her mother - was about the same age her mother and I were when this story began. I was pretty sure that her virginity had been discarded a long time ago; I even worried that she might have acquired a reputation for being an easy lay, but of course there are many things a father has to pretend not to notice.

Disconcertingly, our younger daughter was the spitting image of her mother when I had sat next to her in class. Like Caroline, she was sweet, curvy and had the same dark, fiery eyes that her mother still possessed and which both women could use on me to devastating effect.

As a family, we were outwardly very happy but as so often happens in long term relationships, there was a certain amount of trouble under the surface.

In particular, Caroline and my sex life had ground almost to a halt.

It will come as no surprise to any reader that a couple who have been married for over twenty years no longer copulated with the energy and frequency that they had enjoyed two decades before. Most of our married friends seemed to be in a similar position, the downturn driven by a combination of extreme familiarity with each other, a lack of imagination in terms of technique, and in the case of Caroline, the approach of the menopause.

We still loved each other very deeply, and sex did still feature in our lives, but over time the gaps between copulations had grown from hours to days, from days to weeks then finally from weeks to months.

You can see couples like us on every street in every town in every country. And we could have remained at this level of bland contentment for many years had it not been for the one key incident that literally changed the course of our lives.

The Facebook message came out of a clear blue sky one Saturday morning.

'You have a friend request from Marcus'

I stared at the screen in amazement. Marcus? My best friend from school? Was it really Marcus getting back in touch after twenty-odd years?

I clicked on the icon to look at his profile. It was sparse but from the picture, it was definitely him, and he had made a positive move to get in touch with me. I accepted his invitation eagerly and a day later, had access to his posts and pages.

I read them with fascination, along with the private message I found in my inbox.

The gist of the message was that Marcus was planning to return to the UK after a life spent working in the Middle East. From what I could gather from his profile and pictures, he had recently made a killing on one particular deal; enough to allow him to return home and retire early.

He wanted to smooth his return by making contact with a few blasts from his past. To my delight, this included me, and he was keen to arrange a meeting as soon after his return as possible to make up for lost time.

I replied very positively and after exchanging half a dozen short messages, all was set for us to have a pint together in a few weeks' time.

In the interim, I studied his posting and profile in more detail, along with any other social media activity I could find. I quickly learned that Marcus had been married at least twice had no children from either association and was now single again.

To my chagrin, I had to admit he looked remarkably like he had looked all those years ago when we were leaving school. Tall, good-looking and athletically built but with fashionably short greying hair instead of the longer, dark brown locks that had been so popular in the seventies and which elicited only amusement whenever photos of that era were viewed. Add to that, a deep tan and a neatly trimmed beard and you had the archetypal rugged, well-travelled Englishman.

I looked in the mirror. My own unruly hair had been receding and turning grey for some years and, like Caroline, there was a padding around my waist that most certainly had not been present during my schooldays.

I resolved to deal with these issues as soon as possible -- certainly before Marcus arrived back in the country and we met up again.

For some reason, I decided not to tell Caroline about any of this.

***

"You haven't changed a bit," Marcus lied, smiling broadly.

We were sitting across a small round table in a typical London pub a few weeks later. Two tall, dark pints of bitter were on its shiny, damp surface, one of which my friend picked up and sipped lovingly.

"You won't believe how much I've been looking forward to this," he said, smacking his lips.

"Seeing me or the pub?" I teased.

"Both," he replied after another long pull at his glass. "But fifteen years in back end of beyond places with little or no beer sure as Hell focuses the mind".

"When did you actually get back?" I asked.

"The day before yesterday. I'm staying in an Air BnB place in Fulham."

"Why Fulham?"

"It's where my first ex-wife lived, so I know it better than most places."

"How many exes do you have?"

"Just the two if you mean marriages," he smiled sheepishly. "A good few more if you count girlfriends."

One of the earliest of those exes was of course my wife Caroline, but that had been a very long time ago before she and I got together so neither he nor I mentioned the fact.

I looked across at the man who used to be my closest friend. Despite his long time in the heat of the Middle East, life had treated him kindly. He looked every bit the Marcus I remembered, but a little older and a lot more worldly-wise.

His Facebook page didn't do him justice. However difficult his working life had been psychologically; it had done him no harm physically. Marcus exuded health; from his short but full head of grey-streaked hair to his trendy trainers, he looked like a man who had taken good care of himself. Wiry and athletic rather than muscular, and without a spare ounce of fat, he looked like what I subsequently discovered him to be: a serious long-distance runner.

"Unlucky in love?" I asked cheekily.

"Unfaithful, more like," Marcus pulled a face.

"Sorry, Did I hit a nerve?"

He grinned.

"Not really. It's mostly me who cheated," he confessed. "I always try and be the faithful husband or boyfriend, but then something or someone new comes along, and I can't help myself."

He sighed then grimaced.

"It's not always that way round though. I do know how it feels like to find out some other man's been fucking my girlfriend."

"Really?" I asked, surprised.

Marcus leaned closer.

"There's not a lot to do in these isolated places. Between you and me, a lot of swapping and swinging goes on."

I sat back on my stool in surprise.

"I'd have thought it was mostly men out there," I said.

"It is mostly," Marcus agreed. "So when someone brings their wife or girlfriend out, they get, shall we say, a lot of attention." He raised an eyebrow. "Some of the girls enjoy it and get into it more than others."

I sat back, surprised.

"You and your wife were into swinging?"

He raised an eyebrow.

"Yes. Both of my wives in fact."

"Wow!"

"Karen, my first wife couldn't stick it long term and left me."

"The climate or the swinging?"

"Both! Or neither!" he grinned. "At first she got into the whole swapping thing big-time. We had a lot of fun with a lot of people and had more sex in three years than I thought I would ever have in my whole life."

This was like a letter from one of the porn magazines we used to steal from our parents and read when we were at school. I could hardly believe my ears, but my old friend appeared to be sincere.

"It's true," he insisted. "Karen was drop dead gorgeous, so all the guys wanted to fuck her." He leaned closer and whispered. "And she let a lot of them do just that while I fucked their other halves close by."

Although this was fascinating, I found it embarrassing to hear my friend's confession, especially in a pub. Marcus must have spotted this because he laughed aloud.

"You are so fucking British!" he exclaimed. "Perhaps I've been abroad too long. I'd forgotten how any talk of sex makes the Brits blush."

This embarrassed me even more, but I tried hard not to let it show as he continued.

"I have a fair-sized cock, so the women were usually happy. But like they say, size isn't everything. I also have a problem with delayed ejaculation."

"You mean you need Viagra or something?" I asked naively.

"No, dum dum. It's the other way round. I can stay hard for as long as I like, but when it comes making babies, it's a problem. I find it hard to cum, okay? I can keep fucking literally non-stop for an hour but can only do the sperm business once in a blue moon. That's the main reason I have no kids."

"Is that why you and Karen broke up?"

He shook his head sadly.

"After a year or so she had a road to Damascus experience. She suddenly decided all that sex had become too shallow, and she needed what she called a normal marriage to a normal guy with the prospect of children at some time. The divorce was civilised -- well mostly civilised."

"That's tough," I responded, not knowing what else to say.

He shrugged. "She's married to an accountant in Croydon now. She's got four kids and has put on three dress sizes. Waste of an amazing body!" he sighed then grinned cheekily. "To be fair, she is happy as Larry though. And I bet her husband is too. When it comes to sex, I trained her well!"

I grinned too.

"My second wife Claire was on the staff over there. She was -- probably still is a lovely girl, and I fell for her head over heels. We were married quite quickly, and I tried hard to remain faithful while at the same time, trying to get her interested in a bit of sharing on the side.

"Claire wasn't naïve. She knew what went on from the other girls in the office but for a long time didn't want to take part no matter how hard I tried. In the end she did weaken and agreed to an evening with a couple we knew well."

"How did it go?" I asked, fascinated.

"It was okay, but no better than that. To be fair to Claire, she went the whole hog -- dressed sexily and spent most of the night with him while his wife and I were having a great time in the room next door. It was only when we were driving home in the early hours that the guilt and remorse hit her, and she started crying."

"The poor girl."

"We talked a lot. She admitted that she had really enjoyed it physically, but that just seemed to make the remorse worse. Needless to say, she refused to join in again, I got frustrated and eventually, the inevitable happened. I cheated, she found out and the relationship was over. I've only had short flings and affairs since then. It seems I'm not the marrying kind."