Red Roses Ch. 05 - Blue Roses

"I think it did. She related a handful of other statements over the years, where she really felt as though you were her protector and guide, and keeping her from harm."

"Hmm." I rolled my tongue over my teeth. "Did she tell you how she almost cheated on me ten years ago?"

"Yes," Brenda said without hesitation, "and it was the only point in our session where your wife cried. You may not know it but she still carries an incredible amount of guilt over that whole episode."

"I... I did not know that. How did that even come up?"

"Did you ever meet the man she worked with? The one with whom she had that emotional affair?"

"Just once."

"What did you think of him?"

"Honestly?" I wiped my hands on my pants legs. "I wanted to kill the motherfucker."

Brenda chuckled. "Understandable."

"The only thing that stopped me from going for his throat right then and there was that I had my kids clinging to my pant legs at the time. They were only five and three. I think shithead realized it too, since he backed away from me and put a conference table between us."

"Trish and I discussed it, because it plays into the greater relationship dynamic that you and her share, I think."

I frowned. "This isn't the point where you tell me it was my fault she got attracted to him, is it?"

"No, not in the slightest. That's on your wife and she doesn't blame you at all."

"Okay, so what do you mean?"

"I've never met the man, of course, but from what Trish tells me, you and him are alike in many ways."

My lip curled. "I don't make a habit of seducing married women."

"I mean in the sense that both you and he are confident, bold, and when you see something you want, that you go for it." Brenda leaned back in her chair. "Do you think Trish was wrong about that--at least, as far as you're concerned?"

"I guess not. I've always been kind of a hard-charger... but you know, Trish has too. She was very ambitious and career-oriented before the kids came."

Brenda gazed at me. "Including with your sex life?"

"Well, sure. She was the one who started our encounters. She still initiates sex."

"I admit that my time with her was limited, but given what she told me, I believe that proposing the encounters to you was the second most difficult thing she had ever done in her life."

"What was the first?"

"Going to Tampa to throw herself on your mercy."

I shook my head. "No way. That was a slam dunk. She already knew I loved her."

"Maybe, Justin, but not from her perspective. Not only was she deathly afraid you were going to reject her, she was forced to take control of the situation--a situation involving romance and intimacy, which is the area where she has the absolute least amount of confidence. I honestly think the only way she was able to do it was that she was, for a brief period, more afraid of losing you for good than she was of talking about love with you." Brenda paused. "As for initiating, how often do you reject her when she does?"

"Other than the time immediately following her fling with the shithead, I'm not sure I ever have."

"Exactly. It's hardly a daring step when you have a one-hundred percent success rate. She tells me that even knowing you're going to agree, she still gets very nervous when she does it--butterflies-in-the-stomach-nervous."

"Okay, Brenda, so what does this all add up to?" I admit, I was starting to get a little impatient and anxious over the whole thing. "What is Trish missing from our sex life that has her unsettled?"

"It's early to make a definitive diagnosis but I think Trish is what we would call sexually submissive."

I laughed. "I have a hard time squaring that with the wife who has thrown me to the bed to have her way with me."

"Then tell me," Brenda said, a knowing look on her face, "what happens if you reverse it on her? If she starts something, and you turn it around, does she object? Does she complain if you roll her over? Does she turn you down if you make a bold, confident move as opposed to a subtle hint? Has she ever?"

I didn't know how to answer that. As I thought about my history with Trish, as much as I hated to admit it, Brenda was probably more right than wrong. I shifted in my seat. "So, what's the answer here?"

"Justin, how much do you know about BDSM lifestyles?"

I hesitated. "You mean like whips and chains and slaves and masters?"

"Yes, though it's more than that." Brenda uncrossed her legs and crossed them the other way. "Some of the lifestyles do involve those things but there are as many permutations of it as there are people. The core of it is about submission, about subsuming your will to that of another person."

"I see." I wasn't sure I did, though.

"For someone who wants to surrender themselves, it can be very rewarding to do so, if it is to someone they trust. It can make them feel very safe." Brenda paused. "Given the way you talked about her in both our joint session and this one, I gather that you love your wife very much."

"Of course I do."

"And that you like having an equal partner... someone you can rely on to help you when you're down, raise your children with you, and otherwise have your back, and that you'd do all the same for her. You know, the old idea of, 'you and her, two against the world.' Am I right?"

I nodded.

"Then consider the possibility that the only area you would need to take charge might be in the bedroom. I think Trish is, at the end of the day, a very sexually submissive person. Further, I think she would like to act on that--or rather, act on that again."

A light bulb went on in my head. "Is that what you think the encounters were? Her being submissive?"

"I do think that. She enjoyed having the control taken from her. She did not have to think whether she was doing anything right or have time to dwell on the shame her parents instilled in her. She only had to do what she was told to do. Without those worries, she was free to really let herself go. Trish told me that those encounters, and some other times since when you've assumed total control, like when you seduced her at night on your balcony in Nassau, were many of the most sexually gratifying experiences of her life."

I thought back on that last night of our honeymoon. It had been incredibly hot. "I didn't have to seduce her. She was already very worked up that night."

"And yet, I doubt she would have made a move to have sex where everyone could see her if you had left her any choice. But according to her, you didn't. You just acted and pulled her along and she went with it." Brenda smiled. "I have a feeling that if you were insistent enough, Trish would go along with just about anything you proposed, sexually."

"If that's true, that's a little unsettling." My mind shot back to her near slip-up. "By that logic, if someone else put a strong enough press on her, she'd go along with it."

She shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. I think a good portion of it comes from the trust and love Trish has for you. She might feel comfortable with someone else but she doesn't forget it's you that she loves. I think she felt safe with her coworker. That, coupled with her attraction to his confidence is how she ended up in that position in the first place, though she figured that out before it went too far and she ultimately did reject him. She also related to me a time from before you when a guy got too aggressive and she bloodied his nose."

"Yeah, she told me about that."

"Your wife does have a very strong personality, though I think when she feels secure and safe, she's willing to let go of the control, because she's more comfortable that way." Brenda paused. "Though with you, I suspect the opposite is true."

"What, you think I'm afraid of giving up control?"

"No. It's not that you're afraid to let it go but that you don't fear having it either. You're a leader and as far as Trish is concerned, you're a protector. That's part of being a good dominant. The more the submissive puts themselves in your hands, the more you have to act in their best interests. It involves a ton of trust on both parts. This brings us back to what I asked you earlier, about a dominant-submissive relationship."

My head swam with all of this information but I knew the other shoe was about to drop. "And?"

Brenda's eyes bored into mine. "And a lot of what happens next depends on you."

#

We discussed it more in our next joint session, where I was surprised to find Trish agreeing with pretty much everything Brenda had said. My wife blushed mightily and wouldn't look at me but said that she wanted to try a light dom-sub relationship, at least in the bedroom. I was a little skeptical about the whole thing but I figured it might lead to some good sex, that it seemed relatively harmless, and was something the love of my life wanted to try. Brenda gave us a few pointers about how to go about it, plus a sheet with a bunch of reference material, so I figured we would give it a try.

Two nights later, after the kids were in their room, I ordered her to the bedroom and told her she'd been a bad girl and she was being punished and had to do a striptease for me. In retrospect, I admit I had no real idea of what I was doing and was just flailing in the dark. I thought that I would start by ordering her to do something and see what happened.

I sat in a chair as she obeyed, and she did, giggling the whole time. I wasn't giggling. I was watching her and sporting a full-on chubby. Trish had the body she'd had at twenty, and her ass was still tight enough to bounce a quarter off it. I never got tired of seeing her take her clothes off. She hadn't ever gotten past a B-cup, even while nursing the kids, but that just meant her breasts were still pert and firm, with very little sag. When she bent over in front of me and slowly lowered her panties, looking back at me the whole time with her sultry, bedroom eyes, I just about lost it. The moment her labia came into view--clearly visible between her slender thighs--I was out of the chair and tackled her to the bed. Twenty minutes later, we'd both come. It had been fun but as I lay there with sweat pouring from my forehead, I wondered if this was what Trish was really looking for.

Life went on for us. The kids were doing well in school, Trish was doing well at her job. At my job, we'd had a new manager come in to take over the production branch. Her name was Meredith Carter. She'd been the head of our DC office, so I knew her somewhat. A competent manager but arrogant as they come. We butted heads a few times before our CEO sent us to our corners until we could play nice. After that, we settled into a relationship of professional courtesy and personal dislike. My only consolation is that she seemed to be pissing off the other branch heads too.

My curiosity stoked by our counseling sessions, I read up on the dominance and submissive lifestyles. I'd known about such things, in a passing fashion, but had never really delved into it. Like Brenda had said, there really were numerous varieties and I was amazed at the differences. Some people only involved it in their sexy times, while others did it for every facet of their lives. Some couples did it for limited time periods, like a weekend away, while others lived it full time, even when they were out socializing and at their jobs. There were variations that involved bondage, sex toys, and devices they kept on at all times, piercings... It was an overwhelming amount of information. There were a few things that I made note of, that I could approach if Trish was willing.

The one thing that jumped out at me was that the healthiest relationships all established boundaries upfront and all involved a high degree of consent. Those facts were good to know, but I didn't see them as issues for us; considering the rules we'd had around our encounters, and the fact that I'd never make Trish do anything she didn't want to do, those things didn't worry me.

Why worry? I thought. We're nowhere near any of this.

The truth is, I wasn't exactly sure where we were with any of it.

Our sex life had been fine, but then I thought it had been fine before. Trish had stopped initiating and I seemed to be taking the lead pretty much all the time--not just in initiating but in directing what happened in the bedroom. We'd played a little bit, like the striptease incident, but we really hadn't done anything all that unusual for us. She had demurred when I had tried to sneak a quickie in a department store changing room. I hadn't forced it but I'd questioned the point of being in charge if she could veto my directions.

I also bought a couple of toys for the bedroom but never found a good time to suggest their use. Trish seemed content and I was getting laid about three times a week, which for a couple in their forties with two teenagers running around, wasn't bad at all. Still, something about the situation wasn't sitting quite right and that niggling feeling refused to go away--like a pebble in your shoe you can't quite shake free. I didn't like that I had shouldered the entire burden of our sex lives but for the short term, it was tolerable. I planned to let things go a few months and revisit the setup, to see how Trish and I were feeling about things by then.

You know how it is. Man plans and God laughs.

It came to a head on a Friday, about nine weeks since our last counseling session with Brenda Wright. My mind was on fire for my entire commute home from the office, as it had been one hell of a week.

First, Thanksgiving had been the week before. We'd hosted at our house and had both sets of parents over. Our folks had known each other since Trish and I were in elementary school, and they were old friends. My mom, however, had gotten a little brusque in her later years; she tended to talk without thinking about what she was saying and as a result, often came off as inconsiderate. One snarky comment had set her and my mother-in-law at each other and they had both retreated to separate rooms to cry, while their husbands stood there looking at each other and trying to decide what to do. Dinner was awkward and even though the ladies apologized to each other in stiff-necked robotic fashion, the hurt lingered in the air, which of course affected me, Trish, and the kids.

Second, Mason had gotten his learner's permit and while we were out that Monday, we'd been rear-ended by another car while we were sitting at a stop sign. No one was hurt and the damage was light but the other driver, on learning Mason was driving on a permit, tried to duck his responsibility, saying it had to be my son's fault. Mason had started to panic, which had pissed me off, and the argument got heated. It took me literally threatening the guy with reporting him for fleeing an accident to get him to give up his insurance information. I wasn't sure what the clown's end game was; he hit another car that was sitting still at a legal stop and he was clearly at fault. I managed to keep it together and reassure my son that he wasn't responsible but the incident compounded my stress.

To top it off, Meredith Carter had chosen that Friday's meeting to make her power play against me over one of our product lines. She promised Gerald Briggs, our CEO, a step-up in production if my development team could make a minor adjustment to a component for which there was already a steady supply. The way she'd spun it had made it seem like a simple fix of swapping two parts. The reality would have completely changed the power demands on the entire system, necessitating a partial redesign and a new round of tests. In response to my protests, she'd produced a set of calculations that had clearly come from a member of my team, stating it could be done as she proposed. I balked, because I also knew damn well I'd be held responsible if I signed off on it and something went wrong with the product. We went back and forth and I basically had to call in a favor from the Chief Operating Officer, who had been my supervisor when I started with the company. In the end, Briggs ordered production to be halted while development studied the component swap, ran the numbers again, and presented the pros and cons of going that direction. He gave us a few weeks.

Somehow, I kept a lid on my temper. Though we could do what Briggs wanted, it was going to put tremendous pressure on our team through the holiday season. But I had my marching orders, and I had to do it knowing I had an informant undermining me. From Meredith's knowing smirk, that was exactly what the bitch had intended.

So by the time I drove home Friday, I was ready to chew on a steel girder.

I tried to expunge as much of it from my mind as I could before I got to the house. Both Mason and Tabitha were staying with friends overnight and Trish was going out with our old friends Jan, Tina, Brianne, and Jillian. Since I was going to have the house to myself, I thought I'd go to our exercise room in the basement and hit the heavy bag for a while, then have a couple of beers and watch a brainless action flick. Between exercise, alcohol, and lots of explosions, I hoped I'd slough off some of my tension.

I walked in around six. The kids bolted up from the dinner table the moment I did. Mason babbled something about his friend Derek having just gotten the latest console and they were going to play until they passed out, which would probably be a full twenty-four hours later. Tabitha just said she and her girlfriends were going to hang out and talk all night, which meant who-knows-what in teenage-girl-speak. Regardless, I barely got a chance to say goodbye before they were both gone for the evening.

Trish smiled at me as I entered the kitchen, where she was plating grilled salmon with a tomato relish for me. She wore a nice blouse and slacks for her night out. I know the whole "girls night out" thing comes with red alerts but I wasn't worried. All of our old friends had been married for years. The ladies usually went to dinner or a movie, and were back at one of their houses by nine, where they drank and gossiped until midnight. They'd used our house as their landing pad before, though they were going to Tina's that night. I was half-tempted to call Tina's husband Jim, with whom I was friends, and ask him over so he could escape listening to the coven but I knew I wasn't in the mood to be a good host.

"Hey, sweetie." Trish put the plate in the microwave, put her hands around my head, and gave me a quick kiss. "Dinner's ready for you."

"Thanks."

She tilted her head and furrowed her brow. "You okay?"

I sighed. "Yeah. Rough day."

"Poor baby." She kneaded my shoulders. "You want me to cancel tonight? Stay here?"

"No." I grinned at her willingness to sacrifice her time for me. "You go have fun with your friends."

"If you're sure..."

"Yeah, I'll be fine. I'm just going to unwind."

"Okay, I'll see you later then." She grabbed her purse, gave me another kiss, and headed out.

With alternating visions of the rear-end-car-guy and Meredith Carter's face spinning through my head, I pounded on the bag for half an hour, then ran through the shower, heated my dinner, and cracked a beer. The movie Con Air caught my eye and a couple of hours of Nicholas Cage hamming it up with more explosions than the Fourth of July helped me relax. I had another beer, then another. The clock crept past ten. I felt my eyelids drooping and I slipped off.

I woke with a start. A glance at the clock said it was about a half-hour after midnight. I yawned and called, "Trish?" I ambled around the house but it was obvious she wasn't there. I picked up my phone and looked for a message. Our standard rule was that if we were not going to be home when we planned, we'd text and let the other know where we were. It wasn't about permission but consideration for a partner who might be worried if the other of us was late.