Take Top This Time

This is a follow up to "A Secretary's Revelation" (1/24/17) and "A Shift in the Balance of Power" (2/2/17), both published in the non-erotic section. "Take Top This Time" does include graphic sex. However, the emotional dynamics of the characters' relationship is the primary focus, not the sex. Therefore, non-erotic still seems the most appropriate place for it. Enjoy.

*****

It started with an abbreviated IQ test called the Wonderlic. Kevin Fleming had no idea that his live-in fiancé, Jennifer Vollmers, was bright enough to score in the 95th percentile. He was the smart one, or so he always thought and she always said. After all, he killed her in Jeopardy and Trivial Pursuit and had a college degree, while Jennifer had gone no further than high school. His position with local government paid more than her secretarial position in private industry.

All that changed when Kevin, seeking a management position with Easton Pharmacy (her employer), took the Wonderlic himself (required to gain an interview) and scored no better than your average security guard. Feeling empowered by her high Wonderlic score, Jennifer convinced the brass at Easton that she deserved a promotion, while Kevin didn't test high enough to even score an interview. To add insult to injury, Jennifer's new position with Easton paid her ten grand more than what Kevin earned as a social worker with the state.

Kevin's insecurities and Jennifer's newfound confidence via her promotion changed the dynamics of their relationship. Jennifer became more assertive and independent. She didn't become bossy; she just didn't defer to Kevin as much when it came to making decisions.

It came to a head one morning just before Kevin left the house for a five-mile run, something he does thrice weekly. Kevin called her "uppity." Jennifer called him "paranoid." Their set-to escalated, then reached a crescendo with Jennifer belittling Kevin for scoring a measly 17 (she scored 34) on the Wonderlic, a score that suggests an IQ in the double digits, while her score correlates to an IQ in the upper 120s range, not quite MENSA material, but damn close.

Things cooled down when Kevin returned from his run. They kissed and made up, exchanged words of love and agreed to move forward with their wedding plans. Then they hit their bedroom. The story picks up from there.

*****

Kevin's insecurities regarding his fiancé's alleged cognitive superiority melt away at the sight of sexy Jennifer in her sexy blue nightgown worn over thong panties. The way she's combed her hair—the front hangs over her left eye peek-a-boo style—adds a hot touch. He's clean and smelling like that green bottled soap he used for his shower, and she's smelling pretty good herself, her fresh, natural scent enhanced by a dash of Arpege. She's wet before he even uses his tongue. Even so, she implores him to get busy. It's one of the sexual games they play, teasingly fun.

"Oh, please give me one of your famous tongue lashings. Please, you must!"

"Well, I don't know."

"Pretty please?"

"Begging will get you everywhere."

For Kevin, oral sex is an acquired taste, no pun intended, and he's acquired it quite well. He now actually enjoys it for the sheer pleasure of watching his future wife go nuts. It's even better now, now that in his mind he sees her as almost a different woman than the one he knew before she revealed her Wonderlic score and the promotion that followed: Jennifer Vollmers, reincarnated into a Superior Being. She looks the same, smells the same and sounds the same. He's the one who's changed. More accurately, his perception has. Perception is reality, as they say, and Kevin Fleming is living a new reality, one steeped in the humiliation of scoring low average on an intelligence test tempered by a weird kind of masochistic erotic rush of being with a woman that tests show is his cognitive better. His college degree and her lack of one only add salt to the wound, both sour and sweet.

"You love my tongue on your sweet, wet pussy, don't you?" he says, wedged between her full, milky white thighs, his feet dangled off the edge of the bed, his cock hard and straining against the mattress.

"No, not much. You're only taking me to the moon."

Per his request, she takes topside, planting her bare feet on the bed and humping him in a squatting motion, with her short nightgown pulled up just below her small, bullet-shaped boobs. The view from here allows him to watch the goings on, his cock pile driving into her; her amazingly luscious legs pumping out reps of quarter squats; her boobs, firm and perky through the sheer material of her nightie; and her face, flushed and moist and loving.

"Almost there, Kevin, almost there," she cries. "Can you wait for me?"

Oh, he loves this, she putting him in charge, asking if he could defer his orgasm until she gets there first. "Take your time, I'm in total control," he assures her. Being in control—or at least sharing the control—isn't something he's enjoyed since she got her promotion. Here in the bedroom, it's a different narrative, the place where his cock takes precedence over everything else.

"Sex, the great equalizer," Kevin whispers softly to himself, his utterance deaf to Jennifer's sonorous verbiage of superlatives and other sounds one wouldn't find in either Merriam-Webster or on the scrabble board. Her eyes remain half-open and beads of sweat form on her flushed cheeks and between her boobs. Rarely does Jennifer announce she's coming; she normally just lets it fly, lets her body do the talking. This time, she does, a simple "Yes, I'm there!" followed by antediluvian shrieks of delight.

He takes it as his cue to follow and he does, sans the vocal display of his partner, though his more measured response in no way reflects a lack of enthusiasm. On the contrary, he thinks it eclipses the best sex he's ever had with her.

"Supremo," he says

She bends over and kisses him. "Supremo is an understatement. More like super supremo."

They're on the same page, as well as the same bed, canoodling and smooching, a picture of harmonious bliss, a sharp contrast to the acrimony that took place earlier in the kitchen, when voices were raised and buttons were pushed. "This is as it should be," she says. "I can't wait to marry you."

"I never want our honeymoon to end," he says, aware of the metaphorical way he uses the word. "So let's set a date already."

They do, six months hence, plenty of time for the modest affair they plan, shared with close friends and family.

Meanwhile, Jennifer proves herself so good in her new position at Easton Pharmacy, upper management promotes her again, giving her a commensurate raise in salary. Kevin isn't so lucky. Again, he applies for a management position in private industry. Like Easton, the company requires all potential hires to take the Wonderlic, with no consideration given to people scoring below 25. For poor Kevin, it's déjà vu all over again.

*****

"Cheer up, Kevin, at least you're improving," Jennifer says, after Kevin tells her he scored 18 (out of 50), one better than his 17 when he applied at Easton for a similar position.

They're in the kitchen, lingering over coffee and rum cake dessert. She means to humor him. However, Kevin remains stuck in his funk, sulking and gloomy. "I wonder how you'd feel in my position, trying to get ahead and getting nowhere fast," he spits out, literally, for a fine spray of saliva rides piggyback on his words.

Her smile collapses. "Look, you've already got a job with the state with good benefits. It's better than being unemployed. But if you want a management position in private industry so bad, pick a company that doesn't require the damn Wonderlic."

He grits his teeth against what he considers her smug tone. "Pick a company that doesn't require the Wonderlic because I'm not that smart you mean. Right?"

She holds her head and growls. "Here we go again. I never said you weren't smart enough. Don't be so damn defensive."

"You implied I wasn't smart enough."

She looks up at the ceiling as if begging for Devine help. "It's amazing how fast things can spiral out of control." She pushes the palms of her hands flat on the table to calm herself. "Insecurity and lack of confidence, not lack of intelligence, is your problem."

He bangs his fist against the wall. "Tell that to the brass at Easton and this other company that also wouldn't grant me an interview because I couldn't make the cut based on my Wonderlic score."

"You need to chill, Kevin." She wags her finger at him.

"Stop acting like some scolding schoolmarm."

"Then stop acting like some whiney schoolkid."

"Look, Jen, you need to understand where I'm coming from. It's easy for you to tell me how I should act and feel after being promoted to positions that ordinarily require a college degree. Look at you, a brainy, sexy woman who beat the system by testing high on an intelligence test. You're probably the only secretary at Easton to have ever done that. Am I right?"

"Perhaps. Look, it wasn't just my Wonderlic score that got me promoted. It was all those times that I helped people above me, including senior management, solve problems, some related to computer software, others related to streamlining, making things run more efficiently."

"Right. So who wouldn't be confident doing what you managed to do? You say I'm insecure and lack confidence. Well, walk a mile in my shoes and then tell me how secure and confident you are then."

She looks down at her rum cake, barely touched and now unwanted. She's beginning to fume. "I've been in your shoes, damn it. You're the one with the college degree. You were the one making more than me. You ARE the one whose fund of knowledge is way beyond mine. When I was a lowly secretary, when did you ever hear me complain? You didn't because I didn't. I accepted our relative professional positions without complaint or resentment. But you can't seem to do that. Your fragile male ego can't stand the fact that I'm moving past you professionally—"

"Sure, rub it in."

"Let me finish! That I'm moving past you professionally, earning more and working at a job that requires me to perform high-tech tasks, analysis and problem solving. From what you've told me, social work doesn't require those skills, at least on as lofty a level."

"What you're saying is, you're smarter than me."

"No, you said that. What I'm saying is that marriage will never work with us if you continue to resent my professional success, if every time I get a promotion, you lapse into a fit of self-pity and hostility."

He looks down, twirling his dessert fork, imbibing her words, stinging and truthful to the core. He can't mount a counter argument because there is no counter argument. "I love you, Jen. But sometimes I don't feel worthy of you."

She shakes her head, throws her hands up. "Why, because of some stupid test score? How ridiculous! A test score, a fucking test score. Laughable if it wasn't so sad."

"It's what that test score implies, what it says about where we stand on the bell curve. By the way, you should read it."

"Read what?"

"The Bell Curve, a great book by authors Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The first chapter is the most interesting, where they write about the cognitive elite. You're among them, you know."

She throws back her head and laughs. "You're giving me far more credit than I deserve."

"Think so? Think again. The gap between those with superior intelligence and just average folks like me is widening because technology is becoming more complex. The elites, being able to master it, move ahead, while the not so bright fall further behind. You just said so yourself when you described your job as one of high-tech tasks and problem solving, a job that requires more brain power than my job."

She releases an exasperated sigh. "Kevin, would it make you any happier if I was still a secretary and we had comparable Wonderlic scores?" She locks her blue eyes onto his. "Is that what would make you happy?"

"I'd settle for scoring on your level and getting a management position in private industry."

"Well, Kevin, it doesn't look like that's happening for you. We all have limitations, dude. Nobody's good at everything. Deal with it and then get past it. I think it's about time you count your blessings, one of which—Jesus, I can't believe I'm saying this—is marrying a cognitive elitist."

He guffaws.

"Silly, isn't it?" She grins watching him double over. "Bell curve...I'll give you bell curve, up your silly ass."

He straightens up, holding his stomach. Then, in code familiar to them both, he says, "Instead of that, how about my SUV parked in your garage?"

"Now you're talking. But please, no more talk of bell curves or any of that cognitive crap tonight, okay? It's exhausting, not to mention divisive."

"It's a deal."

She notices him staring at their uneaten rum cake. "I'll take care of this. Meanwhile, why don't you head upstairs and get ready."

She wraps up the dessert in tin foil, then sticks it in the fridge. She's excited but also apprehensive. She can't wait to get naked with him, can't wait for him to lick her from boobs to cunt, can't wait for him to park his "SUV" in her "garage." Yet she also knows to expect a repeat of what just happened. Not tonight, but sometime in the not too distant future, when he gets down on himself because he scored low on another Wonderlic or because she got another promotion or because for no particular reason other than what he is, insecure and hung up on something she finds absurd.

She knows she loves Kevin, knows also that love alone can't keep people together, won't keep them together. She's not about to compromise future career opportunities in order to placate her fragile Kevin, adroit lover, body beautiful, Trivial Pursuit hotshot, and a few other nice things. He's also, according to IQ tests and much to his chagrin, not as smart as she, not even close. She can't deny the feeling of power this revelation gives her. Not a problem as long as it doesn't corrupt her, if she treads lightly, uses her smarts wisely. Money is power and power is money, and she's beginning to make a lot more of it than he. That fact, she surmises, entitles her to make more of the major decisions in their relationship, something she's certain he won't take too kindly. He'll whine and complain, argue and flail away like some hapless animal caught in a steel trap. The trick, the challenge, is to make him think otherwise, make him think that it's he making the decisions, that he's the one in charge—from the bedroom to the boardroom.

Sneakily, though not maliciously, she grins. "I can do this, I can make this work."

He's sitting up naked in bed when she enters their bedroom after changing into the red teddy he bought for her from Victoria's Secret. Her cunt oozes with juices, her heart with passion. "Ooo, that's some SUV you've got," she gushes, watching him slide his hand up and down on it, slow and rhythmic. "All for me?"

"All for you," he asserts, his back propped against pillows against the headboard. "It'll need plenty of parking space."

"I see that." She spreads her labia. "I've got all the space you need. But not yet. First things first. Our usual preliminaries, foreplay in bedroom vernacular. Fucking my titties. Licking my nipples. Eating my cunt. Stuff like that."

"What about your massive IQ?"

She rolls her eyes. "Oh boy. What about it?"

"Can I lick that too?"

"Um, sure, honey, that too." She rolls her eyes again.

His wide grin says it all: pleased as punch. "Got you covered then."

She sits on the bed and begins to stroke his sex. "Take top this time, will you? It's where you belong."

"Sure. I mean, we both could use a change of pace. It keeps things fresh. Being on the bottom gets old after a while."

She grins, proud and confident. Her "plan" seems to be working.