Training the Neighbor

Becky blushed at my last comment and I worried that I had been too bold. We started our run, however, nice and slow like we usually do and the first mile is usually at a pace that allows for easy conversation.

"Well," Becky finally started in, "I don't even own lingerie that revealing."

I laughed again, but in a playful way to let her know I was not making fun of her.

"Jeff doesn't buy that stuff for you?" I asked. "I never let a gift giving occasion pass without something naughty being included in the gift bags," I bragged.

"No, that's not really his style," Becky answered, her voice a bit softer than before.

I thought perhaps I had finally been too bold, but then Becky surprised me.

"You don't have to answer, so forgive me if this is out of line, but how often do you and Kim have sex?" Becky asked, her voice firm and confident despite having just asked a very uncomfortable and private question.

I wasn't sure how explicit to be in my answer, and I was worried about giving up details about my sex life that Kim might not want volunteered, yet Becky seemed genuine, as in genuinely concerned or interested. I didn't get the vibe that Becky wanted lurid sex details but instead wanted validation or comparative data.

"Honestly, it's not something very regular," I started out in response. "We tend to have bursts of sexual activity and then we take some time off. I'm not sure why it has evolved this way for us, but it works for us."

Becky didn't say anything as we bore down a bit to climb a short hill, but after cresting she took a deep breath following the exertion of the climb and rephrased her question.

"So, like a couple times a week then a week off?" she quizzed with less confidence in her voice.

"Sure, something like that," I answered. Honestly I didn't know how much more to say and while I was intrigued to see where she was going with her questions, I didn't want to lead her into territory she, or I, would not be comfortable with. I left my answer sufficiently vague, figuring if she wanted more details she would ask. And she did.

"How long exactly, if you don't mind me asking, is your time off," she finally blurted out, "like what's the average time you go without sex?" she continued.

I tried to act cool, unsurprised and un-phased by the topic, as if this were our normal subject matter on runs.

"Well, maybe a week or 10 days max, but generally less than a week... say 5 days," I answered.

Becky didn't even hesitate this time around, her voice now carried an amused tone as she asked, "Well, then how many times do you do it when you're in one of your 'sex-bursts?'" Becky even used air-quotes as she said 'sex-bursts'. It was cute.

I was starting to get an idea of where Becky was going with this. Her tone and amusement hinted that my "break" from sex was probably much less than what she expected so I figured my frank honesty in how often we do it when we are on a streak would probably really surprise her.

"Well, we might get in three or four times over a day or two before we cool off and take a break," I proudly told her.

Her silence told me much, a couple times a day is a lot, I realize. I never stopped to think if our lovemaking routine was odd or irrational compared to others, it simply worked for Kim and I and had never left either of us wanting. We communicated openly, we shared explicitly, and we considered sexuality to be fluid -- a dynamic between people that shouldn't have a lot of rules other than mutual respect and fulfillment.

We ran for almost a mile in the wake of my confession before Becky spoke up.

"Don't get me wrong," Becky said with a bit of defensiveness in her voice, "I don't mean to sound like a prude... but four times a day?"

Smiling, I picked my words carefully, "Well, I did say over a couple days mind you. Maybe that's still a lot, but it would take me telling you details you probably don't want to hear in explaining why it's not. Let's just say we like variety, games, and sometimes sex doesn't have to include sex."

I liked the vagueness of my answer, I liked that Becky seemed to think I was some kind of sexual beast and I liked the look on her face as our run came to an end and the words, 'sex doesn't have to include sex' hung in the air.

A week later, our mileage was topping out at where I felt it should in preparation for Becky's race goal. While we would continue to work on speed, I didn't want to push mileage up much more for fear of causing over-use injuries that are so common for new runners. Becky, however, was a little disappointed that we were going to level off after months of increased training. She had eaten up everything I had thrown at her and her ambition seemed to have no limits, so I felt odd about having her slow down.

Personally, I like to add yoga into my training routine and do at home yoga sessions two or three times a week. I had previously talked with Becky about the benefits of yoga and decided to offer her a trade. We would take Friday off from our run schedule, pack those few miles into longer Saturday runs for the final few weeks until the race and I would introduce her to yoga on Fridays as a trade. I had no doubt that Becky would fall in love with the practice of yoga and also knew very well that it would help her overall strength and flexibility, but I had never shared my yoga time with any of my prior trainees. Since Becky was right across the street I figured it would not be a terrible hassle to work out the schedule with her on Fridays while saving my other yoga sessions for my personal time, meditation that I valued privately.

Becky asked, since her running attire had not been appropriate when we started, what the right clothing was for yoga. Since she didn't own any yoga specific clothing I told her to wear loose shorts or capris, and a comfortable shirt that would allow movement and stretching.

I have a few dozen yoga videos on DVD and subscribe to online yoga instruction as well, so it was easy to find an entry level routine that I felt would be appropriate for Becky and her abilities. Becky arrived promptly, as she always does, and settled in after I instructed her to remove her shoes and grab one of the yoga mats I had on hand.

The first few minutes of the video were slow stretches and movements to simply warm up the body and prepare it for more difficult positions and poses. Becky had found a pair of shorts that were probably shorter than she felt comfortable in, but justified them as the only loose pair she felt she could stretch in comfortably. As we moved through several different poses, I had to watch where my gaze was directed since the shorts were so short, and so loose, that they left Becky rather exposed at times. In only a few minutes of working out I already knew that Becky was wearing black panties with a lacy black trim and full coverage on the bottom except for the fact that they were riding up her ass a bit. Too bad I was not bold enough to suggest a thong instead! To her credit, if Becky noticed me staring at her exposed underthings, she didn't show it or at least she didn't seem to mind.

We progressed through the standard poses and Becky was wonderfully adaptable to the practice. I had a feeling Becky was going to really enjoy yoga and even the more difficult aspects of this beginning video didn't seem to challenge her. Yes, she held a few poses with poor posture and yes, she had beads of sweat on her forehead as evidence that yoga is much more work than is appears but she was almost glowing near the end of the workout. We headed back upstairs after cleaning up to grab some water and snacks.

Relaxing on the bar stools in my kitchen; Becky ate a few carrots as I told her about some of them more advanced yoga workouts we could try next time. She was genuinely excited about the prospect but at the same time seemed to be rushing her answers as if to move off the subject. We confirmed our run time for the morning and then ate a few more veggies while we finished our water.

I was cleaning up, my back to Becky as I put things into the refrigerator when Becky quietly cleared her throat and asked, "Hey, can I ask you something? You don't have to answer if it is too private... but last week you kind of left me hanging a bit."

"Ok," I replied.

We had not talked about the sex topic since the prior week and I had not wanted to make her feel uncomfortable so I decided to let it drop. I was somewhat intrigued, like any man would be, to know what sex in Becky's marriage was like, what she enjoyed. I wanted to know if her passive bear of a husband was treating her right and with Becky's cute little body -- a body that was getting more toned and more athletic every day -- I could not help but find her in my thoughts on a somewhat regular basis. And those thoughts were no longer contained to just thinking about running and yoga and races.

"Again, please don't answer if you don't want too," Becky continued. "But how is sex sometimes not sex?"

I smiled. I was glad that my previous, intentionally nebulous answer had left her thinking. I liked to imagine she had played out those words in her mind, over and over for the past week and I was glad she was feeling comfortable enough with me to bring them back up for discussion.

"Oh, I don't mind talking about this," I said. "I am pretty open and we are both adults, so unless what I say makes you uncomfortable, I am cool with it."

"Yeah, I don't really talk about sex with anyone so forgive me if I sound a little naïve," Becky offered.

"Well, what I mean is that foreplay and sex games and just playing with each other is sometimes far more fun than just quickly making love and calling it a night. Sex doesn't have to mean sex," I offered.

Becky looked confused so I continued, "To be blunt, you don't have to orgasm every time you play -- or at least that's the way Kim and I see it."

Becky looked even more baffled at my last statement but before I could say anything else she jumped in with an awkward exclamation, "Wow, that would blow Jeff's mind!"

"Why," I quickly asked, "is he starved for good foreplay?"

"Oh... no... more like the idea of foreplay is a bit foreign to him," Becky said, "so the concept of foreplay only would make his head spin."

Becky wasn't smiling at this point, as if the topic had become more meaningful and less embarrassing for her.

"Pity," I offered, "there is nothing better than foreplay that lasts for hours and hours."

"And you don't get there... you know... climax?" She asked, still in a bit of disbelief.

"Well, sometimes we do, sometimes we don't, sometimes one of us does and the other waits, it just depends on the mood, what kind of game we are playing, how desperate we are."

"What kind of games are you playing?"

"Well, nothing formal it's more like extended teasing and just finding ways of keeping it unique, fun, erotic," I said, smiling broadly as I thought about 'our games'.

Becky was lost. I was both surprised and accepting of the idea that she might have no idea how to make sex, well, sexy. I had plenty of Mormon friends who complained about the lack of variety, frequency, and eroticism in their love life. And it must to be hard in a strictly ascetic religion that castigated sex outside of marriage as very, very wrong. A religion that shamed the human body with extreme standards of modesty, that taught that masturbation was a serious sin. My own stereotyped image of Mormon sexuality envisioned a dark room, missionary position intercourse, and the woman rarely reaching orgasm. I hated to think I was allowing such a generalization to color my entire view of sex in that religion, but Becky was confirming this image thus far so I decided to press on for details and see how right or wrong I was.

"Come on, Becky, you don't ever shake things up over there," I asked. "You don't put on a blindfold or leave him naughty notes in his car to find on his way to work? No playful dirty talk while out on a date? No occasional nurse uniform with the skirt cut way too high?"

"Never," was all Becky said in reply, blushing and looking at me as if I just told her aliens had landed in her backyard.

"Can I ask you something more personal," I said in a more serious tone, "you don't have to answer..."

"Sure."

"Do you orgasm during sex? Always? Never? Sometimes?"

Becky seemed to almost be expecting that question and her answer was exactly what I expected: sometimes.

"So you use blindfolds and talk dirty and Kim wears naughty nurse costumes," Becky continued, smiling again and effectively reducing the tension brought on by her climax confession.

"Sure we do," I replied. "Not all the time, not even most of the time. It's about keeping things interesting, not getting bored, although we do have a couple go-to games that we favor more often than others."

"Go-to games?" Becky asked.

"Let's see, one of our favorites is the color game. Long ago we assigned different kinds of sex-play to the color of panties Kim wears so if I find her bending over to tie her shoes, for example, in an obvious way that exposes her panties then I know what kind of mood she is in. Or if she is making a show of getting dressed or letting them ride up a bit above her jeans then I know she is sending a signal and I need to pay attention to the color."

"You have a specific thing you do for each color?"

"Yeah, we kind of defined that a few years back and they stuck. It's a fun way to communicate subtly with each other and not have to explicitly state what she wants."

"So give me some examples," Becky asked but now her entire tone and tenor had changed, her smile was genuine and it felt very much as if she were eager for the dirty details instead of this being the more sanitized discussion we had started.

"Black is the easiest," I said, "It means fast, hard, now." Knowing Becky was wearing black panties right now, I purposely picked this color to start with and watched her closely to gauge her reaction, but she played a poker face as if I had not fazed her at all, so I kept going.

"White is the color that means she is not playing... it's her standby color so white means she is NOT trying to send me a message. Yellow means she would like oral from me, pink means she would like to give me oral."

Still no reaction from Becky so I continued.

"Green means she wants to be teased, red means rough... 'R' for rough."

This finally made Becky's eyes go wide, her smile fall off a bit.

"Rough, huh?" Becky asked. "How rough?"

"Well, nothing that's going to leave marks of course, at least not most of the time," I teased back. But Becky still looked at me expectantly, not letting me get off the hook with my silly answer.

"Sometimes she likes to take it up a notch," I continued. "You know, the basic stuff like spankings or being tied up so I can do what I want with her. All in good fun, of course, but she likes to be taken, forcefully, giving up control and surrendering normal limits."

"Like raping her," Becky almost gasped out, her eyes searching and dark as she blurted her question, insistent for my reply.

"No, well... yes. It's consensual but then again it's not." This was harder to explain but now I felt as if I needed to clear my name, make sure Becky didn't think I was abusing my own wife.

"It's safe, we have a safe word we use, but yes she wants me to take her and do what I want. It's very mental, a psychological game more than the sex itself. Let me ask you something... have you ever wanted something, sexually, from Jeff but been afraid to ask or been afraid of his reaction?"

"Maybe, I dunno...," Becky stammered, "sure... I guess."

"You hold off because if you admit you like something that perhaps your partner does not, you might feel guilty or perverted, right?"

"Sure..." Becky again answered in a weak and uncertain voice.

"For Kim in this game, she can remove responsibility from herself, let me take pleasure and give pleasure and she can all but absolve herself of what happens because it is out of her control. That's a powerful way to make love and experiment. Let me explain it this way: if you really wanted your spouse to completely ravage you in a genuine way, but had to explicitly ask to be ravaged, wouldn't that feel less genuine?"

Becky smiled back at this; she seemed to understand how this worked now. So I continued, "It's like sex in general, you want your partner to feel desire for you and genuine want for you. If you have to ask for sex, then sometimes it feels less personal, like a chore."

Becky nodded her head but said nothing, as if she was relating but not yet ready to comment.

"So if I see red panties, Kim gives me a subtle signal and then I can act on it. Maybe not for hours or even days, but I know the next time the situation presents itself, I am going to totally consume her. And unless I hear our safe word, I can explore and press boundaries."

Becky was absorbing now. It took a few seconds but finally she asked, "What's your safe word?"

"Snowman," I replied bluntly.

Again, awkward seconds as Becky's mind geared around our conversation.

"Red is for rough, green for teasing, yellow for oral, pink for a blowjob," the word 'blowjob' feeling like a dirty slur coming from Becky's mouth, "black for fast and furious, white for off limits."

I was impressed, Becky had a great memory.

"Any other colors," she asked as she glanced at her watch.

But before I could answer Becky jumped off the stool after realizing the time. She was late getting home and her kids were probably wondering where she was. She apologized for having to run off so quickly and I confirmed our time for our run the next day as Becky sprinted across the street.

The Friday before the race, I had Becky come over just for stretching and to talk about a few last minute details about the race. She was nervous, worried about getting to the start on time and other details all first time racers are anxious about. The amount of time in training and the months of anticipation build up a certain level of stress for new runners and the day before a race can be worrying. Moreover, in the last few days of training Becky's calves had starting to ache and tighten.

The very common types of over use injuries afflicting new runners included Achilles tendinitis and I knew it would not be a problem for Becky if she iced, rested a bit before the race and used the roller to keep the tendon pliable.

Becky iced her legs while we talked about the schedule for tomorrow morning and when she was done we headed down to the gym to stretch and roll her Achilles. We had not talked about sex at all since the conversation about the panties color game I played with Kim, but to get to the basement stairs we had to walk past the laundry room. Kim glanced in at the pile of laundry on the floor, which was topped off by a half dozen pair of Kim's underwear, a rainbow of colors lacing the stack of laundry.

"Geeze, fun past few days," Becky exclaimed.

She was teasing and I knew it, I laughed to acknowledge her joke and when we continued to the basement. Becky sat on the floor and we went through our normal routine of stretches that included a few basic yoga poses that helped to stretch the lower legs and hip flexors. Several times I thought I caught of glimpse of green flashing from Becky's black shorts.

Becky had become comfortable enough around me that she had given up on the extreme measures of trying to stay safely modest at all times so a glimpse of her panties were common enough and I generally thought nothing of them. Workout clothing does not always make for the best coverage, especially when stretching and doing yoga, which puts the body in a number of unusual positions. In fact, what made a flash of green stand out today was that I knew Becky only wore white or black panties. I had never seen anything different. Black and white, I figured, were conservative choices and made sense for a woman who rarely wore regular underwear, thus making panties a risky proposition to begin with. But today, did I really see green?