The Photos I Found

People always tell you to be yourself. And you should. But not for the sentimental reasons you see splashed across some nymphette's Instagram feed. No, you need to live your life your way because whatever life you live, you have to live it. Whatever fallout comes from the actions you take, you have to deal with them. If you let other people make your decisions for you, you'll still be the one cleaning up if it all goes south.

This was the mistake I made when I got married.

My wife, Angela, and I came from the same world. Small towns, red states, that variety of Christianity that will support a politician who cheated on his wife so long as he opposes gay marriage. The difference between us is that she was a good girl and I rebelled—hard. I went emo in middle school, then shifted into goth.

Freshman year of high school, I buddied up with another small-town outcast, Jen, over a mutual love of Marilyn Manson. She got me into Rob Zombie and from there my goth phase began shifting. At 16, I used my part-time job money to buy a used Harley. By the time I finished high school, I was a full-on gear head. I was friends with every other biker for three towns in any direction. On weekends, we'd get together to ride, drink, smoke weed, and fuck whatever girls were into it.

I didn't go to college. I just moved to the nearest big city and got a job in a repair shop. The other guys in my high school circle stuck around, as well. One or two moved away, in time, but for three years, I was living an insane life. There are a dozen stories there of all kinds of craziness. I could tell you some of those, but I honestly don't remember them that clearly. Too many shots, pills, and sleep depravation.

In that third year, when I was twenty, I felt something shifting in me, again. It all started feeling like something I had to do, like an obligation. One night, I was going out with some friends and I just did not want to drink, much less anything harder. So, I told them I wasn't feeling it, tonight. To my surprise, they were cool with it and bid me good-night. I'd been afraid to say anything, but the guys were cool with it.

Walking home, I started remembering all those scared-straight types churches had talk to the youth group. They were always washed up partiers who hadn't been fulfilled by all the blah, blah, blah. I got it into my head that that was what was happening.

Six months later, I was starting university, studying business. My plan was to open up a car detailing and tuning shop of my own. I was trying to get straight, be the man my parents had tried to make me. It didn't fit, but I kept trying. Loving cars and motorcycles was fine, just no more booze, fights, and certainly no more tattoos.

Angela and I started dating in school. She was a couple years younger than me and exactly the kind of girl my parents had envisioned me ending up with: blond hair kept a respectable shoulder-length, knee-length skirts, never went outside in anything so revealing as a tank top. She was part of me getting my life together. We had a few big fights over the years and even sort of broke up a couple times, but I had really good lines to get her back.

We graduated and I got a job at an up-scale auto shop. Rich guys brought in their mid-life crisis mobiles and we turned them into things of beauty. It was my menagerie of tattoos that got me the job. The clients loved the idea of having a reformed-biker-gang guy—I was not that, but I had the look—approving of their vehicle choices.

Not long after that, my parents started pushing me to marry Angela. We weren't even living together, like most of our friends. Marriage held no interest to me. I loved Angela, sort of. Looking back, I would later realize that I loved the idea of the life she represented. But after a couple long nights of fighting with myself, I decided to do it. I proposed, we got married, got a house together. It was all as it should be.

We had problems from the very beginning. Neither of us had ever lived with a significant other before, so there was all of that relearning how to be at home. It was deeper, though. We simply did not belong to the same world. I was bored by her friends and she was always worried I would lapse back into the liquor, drugs, and sluts. After two years, I admitted to myself that the marriage had been a mistake. However, it had been my mistake. There was no reason for her to suffer for it.

I scheduled us a cruise and took tons of photos for her Instagram. She loved it and every time I started to hate it, I would just space out and think about cars. You're allowed to space out for a bit on vacation, so it worked out. I put some randomly timed reminders on my phone that just said her name. When they came up, I'd have flowers delivered to the dentist's office where she worked or make reservations at a restaurant. One time, I just arranged a bunch of tools in a heart and texted her a picture.

She was trying, as well. Her lingerie game went way up. The vague stories I had told her about my life before university gave her the impression I was kinkier than I really was; so a lot of her lingerie choices did nothing special for me. Then, she got a tattoo. It was a typical good girl tattoo, but I saw what she going for. We did our best to be romantic, but it didn't help us talk. It didn't help us spend time together. We weren't connecting, anymore, and by the time our fifth anniversary swung around, neither of us had much in the way of illusions. We decided to just give each other gifts and call it a day.

She had actually gotten really into tattoos, sending me pictures and asking what I thought. That was all over for me, but it was nice that she had a hobby I understood. So, I got her a gift certificate to the place where she had gotten her last two. By this time, she had five; all small and in styles I wasn't into, but it was her canvas to paint. She got me a beat up old Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, so I could fix up a car for myself instead of for some old, rich dude. I had no special connection to that model, but it was still a nice gesture and I did want a car to fix up on my own.

It was nice. We were less a married couple than roommates, at that point, but our relationship was supportive, if nothing else.

A couple months later, one of my regular clients offered me a business proposition. He wanted to open up a muscle car shop out on the west coast. He and his business partner were going on a buying spree soon, but neither of them were mechanics. They loved driving the cars and knew the history, but worried someone would see them coming and unload a bunch of lemons on them. Six weeks in California, inspecting the new cars and hiring a competent team of mechanics; that was the job. The money he was offering was half a year's salary for me.

I told Angela and she looked as excited as I should have been. Once I got her approval, I started getting excited, myself. I actually couldn't sleep the night before my flight. We said goodbye and I was off. We texted and had a few phone calls while I was in LA. I was having a ball and she was happy for me. All was normal. Then, two days before I was to return, she told me she would meet me at this hotel near the airport, the Skyview. After that, silence. I would text her and she would just say 'See you at the Skyview'. You know what that can do to a person and, by the time my plane touched down back home, I was convinced that she would have all my things at the hotel with a room key and divorce papers.

I got a cab to the hotel and went to the bar. Where else do you meet people at a hotel?

I ordered a drink so as not to piss off the tender. I texted her and waited. The mood I was in, waiting for my impending divorce, I barely looked up from my glass.

"Excuse me," a woman said, pushing in beside me to order a drink.

I shifted over in my seat a little and turned to look at her. She was turned away from me. Her vibrantly red hair hung halfway down her back, brushing the skin exposed by her profoundly backless dress. That skin was covered in an intricate black ink tattoo. I hadn't seen anything like that so up close since I was a biker punk. It depicted a grand building, like one of those city halls built in the 1920's, with muscular men holding lightning bolts on the front. The building was crumbling, being reclaimed by flowering vines growing up around it. The dress framing the scene was, fittingly, the color of dried blood and she had to have chosen it to give the monochrome tattoo a little extra something.

Somewhere in admiring the art, part of my brain registered that the redhead wasn't wearing a bra.

"Why don't you take a picture?" She asked, her voice husky. I looked up and she was regarding me from over her shoulder, face mostly obscured by that cherry-red hair.

I was embarrassed. I was too old and too married to get caught staring like that.

"Go on." She said, pulling her over her shoulder to expose the full tattoo, daring me to make good on my stare. "I know you have a camera."

That got me. "What?" I said.

"I know," she repeatedly slowly. "You have a camera. You wanted pictures of all those sweet little rides you were drooling over in LA."

"Angela?!" I nearly fell out of my chair.

She turned to face me and flung her hair back over her shoulder. Even then, I barely recognized her. There was the dyed hair which already made her look like a different person. Then, she had clearly paid someone to do her make-up. Her eyes were rimmed in smokey darkness, her lips matched her hair, and some cosmetic magic had made her cheeks look sculpted from marble. And the dress... It was cut in such a way that there was actually a fair amount of sideboob.

Trying to balance on my stool, she seemed to tower over me. She reached out a hand and put two fingers under my chin, then pushed my jaw open to close my mouth.

"You'll catch flies, darling."

"Holy shit,"

"I'll admit," she continued in that deep, husky tone; like young Kathleen Turner. "Part of me hoped you would fall to your knees and worship me as a goddess. But I'll take that, too."

I scrambled for something to say. "We should be in a much nicer hotel." I managed.

"All you've seen is the bar." She smiled with half her mouth. Her little purse was on the bar and she extracted a keycard from it. "Care to see more?"

She walked ahead of me to the elevator. I have no idea what everyone else thought. Here was this woman—in red carpet make-up, a dress that was constantly threatening to slip a nipple, and the sort of heels you can use for self-defense—being followed by some dude in old sneakers, blue jeans, and a Tool t-shirt pulling a carry-on bag behind him.

In the elevator, she just looked straight ahead, thrusting her half exposed breasts against the fine material of her dress. I was about to jump out of my skin. Questions I already knew the answers to spiraled through my head: Why? How? Why? Part of me wanted to say something dumb like "So, how was your day?" but I was loving the tension. I hadn't felt this excited about her in years and spoiling the mood she was creating would have been just wrong.

Out the elevator, down a hall, she unlocked a door and stepped inside. It was not a moody room; just that sparse white with a few grey and black touches here and there. Also, it was only five in the afternoon. I decided to ignore the room and focus on my wife's ass, shifting under the draping fabric of the dress.

The bed was large and took up nearly the entire room. Narrow as she is, my wife threaded between the bed and the TV stand without much trouble. Purposefully, but without urgency, she pulled the darker curtains halfway closed, bringing down the ambient light.

I propped my bag by the door and pulled off my shoes.

There was a rather comfy looking chair by the window. Angela walked to it and sat down, running her hands down her ass as she did so to smooth out the dress. Legs crossed, she looked at me.

"Take off your shirt." She said. I whipped it off and dropped in on the floor and started for my belt, but froze when she spoke again. "So, you liked the tattoo?"

"Yeah," I exhaled. My heart was beating out my chest, but I knew I had to do better than that. "It's gorgeous."

"It's art deco being overtaken by art nouveau. Modernity and progress being destroyed by the dynamic forces of nature."

I got it, now. She knew I was of the tattoos-should-mean-something camp. Her other ink was just ornamental, so she had gotten one that made a statement. A statement over her entire back! It was a huge tattoo.

"That's very you." I replied; my voice lower, more controlled.

"Okay," she said. "Now the belt."

I undid it slower than I had with my shirt. Deliberate was the mood at hand and I was more than happy to play this game with her.

"There's another surprise I have for you." She said.

"Another one?" I said, summoning confidence into my tone. "I suppose there are crueler ways to kill a man. When do I get to see that one?"

"You can't see it." She said, then very deliberately uncrossed and recrossed her legs.

It took me a minute, but I remembered how she had said a few times that she wanted an IUD; hating the hormone weirdness of the pill.

"Oh," I replied. I really felt like a poor kid at Christmas.

"Now," she continued. "Your pants."

I did my best to imagine how a stripper would do this. My jeans were buttonflies and I undid each button with a dramatic flourish. Then, I hooked my thumbs into the waistband, getting under my boxer briefs. I ran my hands around my hips slowly before taking a step forward, then turning around.

Mind you, this was nowhere near normal for us. I had never stripped for her, though I made a mental note to watch some videos on how to. She seemed into it and that dress alone was worth a couple fantasies from me.

A wave of panic swept over me as I was slowly revealing my own ass to my wife. I had no idea how I was going to get my socks off while keeping up this Magic Mike thing I was already stumbling my way through. I hadn't watched the movie. Did strippers even wear socks? Probably not. Like the majority of us, I had seen dozens of when strip in movies, but not men.

She was the one being all bossy with her back to the room's only active light source. Maybe part of this was getting to do the traditionally male things. So, I decided to do what movies have taught a woman would do.

I thrust my jeans down into a pile at my ankles and stepped out them as I turned back to face her. Despite the shadows, I could see that she had one finger slipped under her dress and a sliver of light on the dress kept shifting rhythmically. Her finger playing with a nipple.

Then, I started walking towards her. My shoulders are twice as wide as hers, so I wasn't going to be able to just sweep by the TV. I grabbed the big screen with one hand and lifted it half an inch off the stand, then set it as far back against the wall as possible. I continued towards her, shoulders squared, but my leg still scraped against the bed.

Getting right up to her, my half-hard cock still held by the tight fabric of my underwear, I lifted one foot and set it on her leg. (The socks were clean that morning and I hadn't done much walking that day.) In the dim light that reached her face, I saw her holding back a laugh, but she reached out placed both her hands on my calf. She ran her fingers along the skin until she reached my sock, then began rolling it down towards my foot.

I slowly pulled my foot back, sliding out of the sock. Then, placed the other foot up. Again, she stroked my calf before removing the cotton. This time, as I pulled my foot back, an electric line burned across the bottom of my foot; one extended pinky nail sending electricity to the happiest places in my brain.

She tossed the socks over one shoulder. We never found them.

Clad only my boxer briefs, I stood before her, awaiting my next task. In answer, her heel-strapped foot rose. The slender stiletto slid under my balls and her toes pressed against my almost hard cock.

Making a guess, I reached down with both hands and began taking long, gentle strokes of her calf. My arms weren't long enough to get past her knee was her stocking were well up her thigh. Running one hand under knee, I pressed upwards on it as I pressed a bit of body weight against her foot. It feel great, but it was great for the mood. Her knee took the hint and both of them bent up towards her chest. My hands ran down over her thigh, the dress pooling at her hips. One foot was digging into my groin, physically painful, but mentally nice; and the other foot began drawing lines up and down the outside of my thigh.

I brushed my fingers over the tops of her thighs and the elastic stocking tops before going further. Her knee was up at her shoulder, now, and I was bent at the waist to put my face within breathing distance of hers. My hands slid over her hips and down to her ass. She propped up on her elbows, so I could pull her panties off. They were just thin strips of lace and I made a mental note to ask her to wear them again when I could get a good look.

Once the delicate network of fabric strips was around her thighs, I began to pull back. Her foot followed, so we could both imagine that she was the one pushing me back. I kept my arms at full extension and stepped back to keep sliding the thong from her legs. The bed was right behind me, I knew, and took a venturing step back to feel for it. Then, I sat as the white-pink panties hung up with her shoes.

Angela snapped her knees together, but kept her feet up as I untangled the fabric from her heels.

Now, she rose to her feet. The dress was clinging to the little sheen of sweat she always got when she was aroused. Her hands slid idly down the fabric of the dress, then grabbed handfuls of it, to pull it up above her knees. She straddled my legs and we kissed.

Finally, we kissed. The first time in weeks and with a passion neither of us had shown in years. Her mouth was hungry, lips frantically pressing and retreating against mine. It was the sloppy, ugly kind of kiss of a pair of virgins giving in to themselves and giving over to each other. Her hands clawed into my hair and I pulled her hips in tight to mine with both arms. I was fully erect, now, and her pussy was like a warm washcloth, leaking through my boxer briefs. The musk of her arousal hit my nose and I wanted to flip on her back and take her, right then; but she was driving this car.

Her fingers left my hair and traveled to my shoulders, pressing me down on to the bed, but she didn't follow. She grabbed the sides of the dress and lifted it up over her head. Like a curtain that's missed its cue, I watched the rapid fabric reveal my wife's body to me. It was just as I remembered, but the memory was sweeter than it had been in a long time. Nude save for her stockings and heels, her hands rested on my chest, squeezing her breasts together, putting them on full display as she took deep, fast breaths.

I knew that body so well, then her hair tumbled over onto her chest and I stopped recognizing her for a moment. In that moment, the strange woman who had picked me up the in air, leaned forward, setting her her hands on the bed above me and walked her knees up past my shoulders. Knowing this move, I lifted my hands to her hips and took hold. Her feet slid under my shoulders and she lowered her pussy down to my face.

The scent hit me and sent me through a decade of wet-dream-worthy memories. Her clit was low on her vulva and surrounded by long labia. I opened my mouth wide to gather her labia petals into my mouth and suck gently before releasing and repeating. The long, deflating moan told me that the redhead liked this as much as the blonde had. I teased the labia out like this until her hips started to move.