Looking back now, I'm not sure how it ever turned so suddenly from casual flirtation to all-encompassing, overpowering lust. Everything had moved so slowly - imperceptibly even - for so long. I guess I can't really identify any exact moment of change in our relationship, but I can start by telling you when I first met her.
I was new to the city. I was new to the country, in fact, having just moved to the Netherlands from the United States. I had a three-year contract to work as a research associate on a big artificial intelligence project at the University of Amsterdam. I brought my family with me, my wife, Christie, and our three young children, one of which was a newborn. It was a difficult adjustment, and it wasn't until about two months after we got there that I felt I had the time to myself to start exercising again.
I love to exercise. Or at least, I love to stay fit. Three years of being overweight when I was a just entering puberty instilled that need in me. I entered high school as a short, chubby, immature dork. I discovered exercise by my sophomore year and finished high school as captain of the swim team. It was a nice change. Girls finally noticed me. I was still a dork, but now I was a lean, muscular dork and it's amazing what a girl will overlook when confronted with a nice body.
I'm 41 years old now, and it's a lot harder to maintain a nice body. I work out every day, and I still can't seem to find the bottom two abs in my six pack. But even so, I've managed to keep my wife interested, which is very important to me, because I'm a lot hornier than other men.
And Christie is a lot hornier than other women, truth be told, but with three young kids wearing her out daily, we're on about a slightly-more-than-once-a-week schedule for sex. That's great compared to some couples our age, even couples younger than us, but I'm more like a slightly-more-than-once-a-day kind of guy. So, I masturbate a lot. And I look at other woman a lot. And I masturbate about other women a lot. But I had never been willing to do anything that would break my wedding vows until I met Emma.
There are a lot of things you could point to as reasons why a loving husband might cheat on his wife. Some people would say it was a midlife crisis. After all, I did turn 40 only six months after I met Emma, before any of the more blatant flirting began. Some people might say it was the change in environment, that the move to a country foreign to me made me feel alienated and detached from my life before the big change.
And related to this, my professional life was much more separate from my family life in this new location: whereas in the USA Christie had known my colleagues, in the Netherlands Christie had met my colleagues only a handful of times, and they were all younger than me and wrapped up in very different lifestyles than the lifestyle of diaper changes and bottles.
And on top of all that, before the move I had been living a life of strict discipline stemming from a drug and alcohol abuse problem I had in my early twenties, and thirteen years of abstinence later, after thorough consideration with Christie, we had decided I could relax some of that self-restraint. This newfound freedom reawakened some of the hedonist in me - I had been so fucking
good
for so fucking long, now I was primed to follow feelings of pleasure wherever they might take me ...
So yeah, you could list any number of specific details about the timing and context of it, and say that's why it happened. But at the risk of seeming like a hopeless romantic, I think Emma would have been irresistible to me at any time in my life.
She was the reason.
I liked her an unreasonable amount even the first time I met her.
Emma worked at the gym. She showed me around my first day there, and it was really nice. Emma was local: a Dutch girl. Dutch girls are smoking hot. They are all tall with long legs and short skirts. They're all blondes or redheads, sometimes a mix of the two. I spent my first weeks in Amsterdam just dying to see a Dutch girl naked. I love a blonde pussy. I love a fiery-red pussy.
The Dutch women ride along the canals on bicycles wearing those short skirts, and some, wonderful percentage of them either don't care or just outright enjoy letting you see up those skirts as they pedal by. It's a glorious tease. I love a good tease. Which was perfect, because Emma loved a good tease as well.
At the time of writing this, I've never seen Emma in a skirt. I'd love to, but I've never even seen her outside of the gym. She always wears those loose, baggy workout pants at the gym. Her ass looks awesome in them: it presses out in all the right places, begging to be held, lifted, pulled back and parted to open her from behind. God, her ass!
But as I was saying, I've never seen Emma in the typically Dutch short skirt, and further, Emma's not a blonde or a redhead, and Emma's not very tall either. After all my lust for iconic Dutch women, I fell for someone not at all typical. Emma has really rich, healthy-looking brown hair, with some sun-bleached strands that look too natural to be bottled highlights. I wouldn't call her short at all, just shorter than the average Dutch woman. I'm a bit above average height for an American, a little below average compared to Dutch men (they are so goddamn tall here), and Emma is about half-a-head shorter than me.
I love the way she looks. She's slim and very toned, with perky breasts that would fill my cupped hands just perfectly. Her eyes kill me. Light blue-green, though the saturation of either color depends on the light. They look so good staring out of her olive complexion. And she's always staring. It's not a creepy stare, she's always just looking
directly
at me. She can hold eye-contact for days. I could go on, I'm infatuated with her, but you'll get to know her in good time.
And so Emma welcomed me to the gym, asking me if it was my first time there. She started in Dutch, but flipped to English in a flash when I said I didn't understand. I told her I was new to this gym, but that I had been weight-lifting and exercising for many years and that I knew how to use all the equipment safely. Everyone must have a tour their first time there, she insisted, and I wasn't complaining.
And this was the first thing that fascinated me about her. I felt a subtle vibe. I felt a mysterious chemistry. I felt attraction from her, but I couldn't put my finger on anything she did or said that signalled attraction. It was all business. She gave me the tour, politely, with warmth, but with no flirtation that I could identify. And still, I felt I was being flirted with.
I'm reminded of an interview I once read with the actor Christopher Walken. He said that sometimes during his scenes, in those pauses in his lines, he will intentionally, as a part of his craft, ask in his mind what the other actor thinks of his hair. So for example, he's about to kill Dennis Hopper in
True Romance
, and he's questioning him first, considering torture, and in a pause as he looks at his victim, he asks, in his head "what do you think of my hair?" I think he called it subtext, I call it fucking fantastic. Emma might be like that.
Maybe it was Emma's internal dialogue that I was picking up on, that vibe. Maybe that silent, direct look was her, internally, telling me that she was a raging inferno of sexual passion, and that she might just unleash that blaze on me if the moment took her. I wanted that moment. Fuck, I wanted that moment.
Over the course of a year, with me there every morning working out, we developed a relationship somewhere between acquaintances and friends. We had time to chat here and there. She would sit a minute and watch me do deadlifts, asking how my work was going. I'd pause before leaving the gym to ask about her dance class, or to wish her luck on her motorcycle exam. I learned she was a thrill seeker.
She was about to get her motorcycle license and had already identified a Ducati monster as her iron horse. She said the lines were feminine, and the sound was wonderful. I thought to myself that the sound of a motorcycle translates directly to how it feels between a woman's legs. I'd love to see her hit the throttle on that thing. Naked, with me holding her from behind... She was also into skydiving and bungee jumping. Not all the time, but any chance she got, really.
She loved to travel, and spent three weeks on safari in Africa at the end of that first summer that I was in Amsterdam. She was cool. She was this cool chick who was hot, and open, and friendly, and who I could never quite believe was really flirting with me. Who I could never quite be
certain
was actually flirting with me. But I couldn't shake the feeling, and I didn't want to. We were flirting.
Emma had a boyfriend, but we never really talked about him.
One day, about three months after I had started working out at her gym, I told her I was married. It should have been more awkward than it was, because I kind of made a big deal out of it, like it was some sort of confession.
