I felt horny and frustrated, although feeling that way didn't seem to be anything unusual just lately. That was basically because I'd lost my job a few months ago and my wife, Ellie, apparently felt that sex with man who is out of work was beneath her. Okay, so it was my own fault that I'd become unemployed, but there are times when bosses treat their workers with just too little respect, and mine had. Sarcastic remarks over my wanting a couple of hours off to see an emergency dentist in order to get a missing filling replaced had been the last straw, and I must admit that I did enjoy seeing him sitting on the floor looking bewildered, with blood dripping from his nose and my clenched fist held in front of him as a warning of more to follow.
Ellie appeared to think that I ought to have let him carry on calling me a wimp for not wanting to put up with raging toothache, but perhaps she hadn't realised that this was just the latest in a long line of managerial put-downs I'd taken from him. But whatever she thought, she used it as a reason to call a sex strike until I was back in employment. Not that she'd explicitly said so, but every time I made advances, she pushed me away, claiming to be too tired after working at her part time bar job three evenings a week. Strange that, because previously she'd regularly been as randy as a rabbit before when she came home. I could tell things had changed when she began wearing a nightie all of a sudden, and in midsummer too. I refused to play her game, I still slept nude, when I could sleep at all that is. You tend to punish yourself enough for being out work, without having your wife promptly jumping on the bandwagon as well.
This particular night I lay beside her, listening to her breathing and wishing we could make love the same uninhibited way that we always had over the preceding eight years of marriage. She wasn't asleep, or I didn't think she was, but she presented me with the cold wall of her back and began breathing deeply in a pretty good imitation of slumber. I knew I was wasting my time, but I still loved her and needed the feeling of closeness with her, and so I rolled on my side and spooned against her back, hoping that she either was asleep, or was too close to it to object. Soon, lulled by the sensation of intimacy her nearness produced, I was dozing off and, right on the edge of sleep I moved closer, doing what I had naturally done countless times before, wrapping an arm around her and cupping her breast. I didn't even realise I'd done it until she spoke, her voice harsh and cold. Obviously I'd been right when I thought her awake.
'Take your hand off me, I can do without that.'
'Well I can't.' I told her, starting back into wakefulness. 'I need a little love from my wife occasionally.'
'You should have thought of that before you threw your job away.'
'For God's sake, leave it alone won't you.'
'I'll leave it alone when you leave me alone. You can't expect me to be the only worker in this family and then do without sleep just to satisfy your needs. You might have the energy, I don't.'
'But you weren't working this evening.' I complained.
'And you're not working any evening, or any other time for that matter.'
I won't go into the details of the row that followed as it was pretty much just more of the same. She claiming to be the hard done by breadwinner whilst I was the layabout husband, and me trying desperately to get her to see my side before finally I giving up and verbally lashing out just as spitefully as she did. The final straw came when she told me she needed to sleep and would I fuck off into another room and have a wank or something. I was out of bed in a flash, thoroughly pissed off and needing to go somewhere and cool down before things got completely out of control. I hauled on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, rammed my feet into a pair of shoes and headed off out, grabbing my old leather jacket from behind the door on my way out. The church clock struck midnight just as I pulled the gate shut behind me.
I ought to explain that we live in a tiny village built at the convergence of two roads leading to the local market town, and so the houses are mostly built in a kind of an arrow head shape along the two roads, facing inwards to the village green and its medieval duckpond in between. The lay of the land is such that one road, the one opposite mine, comes down a gradual slope towards the junction and that there is a steep drop from it down to the edge of the green. Below that drop and opposite my house but about sixty or seventy yards across the pond is a bench, and that is where I tend to head for whenever I need to be on my own to think things over, although not usually in the early hours.
It's funny how the dark and the peaceful stillness of night can calm things down almost immediately, and by the time I'd walked around the apex of the green and was headed for my thinking seat I'd already stopped muttering and sulking.
That turned out to be just as well, for when I got there I found that somebody had beaten me to it. It was so unexpected to find someone there at that time of night that I hadn't even contemplated the possibility and their presence didn't initially register. It wasn't until I was a couple of yards or so away that I looked to see where to sit, and then stopped dead when I saw this person already sitting right in the middle of the bench.
It was the woman from the couple who had moved into one of the much bigger and more modern village houses on the higher road only a couple of months earlier. I didn't know them, but they seemed a nice enough couple, she smiled and he nodded whenever they passed people in the street. He was a little bit older than she was, maybe in his mid fifties, a bit of a bank manager type of person, red faced and pompous, his complexion speaking of a life dedicated to the brandy bottle, but having said that, I always found him to be pleasant enough. She herself was, I guess, around early fortyish, about ten or a dozen years older then I was, slim and elegant with blonde hair and blue eyes, although her brown eyebrows revealed that the blonde probably wasn't altogether natural. It must be said that she wasn't particularly elegant this time though. She was dressed in just a dark jacket thrown over a knee length white silk nightie and slippers. She'd obviously come out on the spur of the moment just as I had.
I'd spoken to her briefly perhaps two or three times since they'd moved in, and I'd found her to be very pleasant, with a ready smile and easy manner. There was nothing snobbish about her, although to afford the house they had bought they certainly weren't short of money. But that didn't help the fact that she was in what I had come to regard as my seat by the pond. When I saw her and came to a surprised and slightly surly dead halt she was already looking at me in some alarm. But I suppose I couldn't blame her for that in the dead of night and on her own, and I guess I must have looked still ready to do battle with somebody. I felt I just had to try and reassure her, although I didn't really choose quite the right words and they came out a bit more gruffly than I intended.
'Oh, hi! Don't worry; I'm not the local rapist on the prowl.'
'I'm glad to hear it.' She answered carefully, looking at me a little sideways. 'But you'd hardly say you were, would you?'
'No, I suppose not. Sorry, that didn't come out too well, did it?'
'Not if you were trying to set my mind at rest, no.' She smiled thinly, looking maybe just a little less apprehensive. 'You're the man from across the green, aren't you?'
'Yes.' I confirmed. 'The fourth cottage along after the post office.'
'Well I don't suppose any self-respecting rapist give me his address, or would be looking for victims at this time of night for that matter, so I guess I'm pretty safe.' She didn't sound as though she altogether believed it, though she was starting to relax a little.
'Truth to be told.' I began again. 'I've just had a row with my wife and so I've come out of the way for a bit. I tend to come here to cool down.'
'And I've come out to get a little relief from my husband's drunken snoring, so I suppose we've got something in common. But if I've stolen your usual seat you're more than welcome to join me.' She indicated the bench beside her, the explanation seeming to reassure her. 'I could use a little company, I'm not used to being out on my own at night.'
'Thanks, I will.' I sat down next to her. 'Nice to meet you, I'm Matt.' I thought I ought to introduce myself.
'Francesca.' She looked across and smiled, more openly this time. 'But just Fran to any midnight wanderers I happen to meet.'
We sat silently for a minute or two, neither of us having anything much to say, but then she spoke again.
'We've moved from the city not long ago you know, and it's strange but being out at night never bothered me there, but here, where I know statistically I'm much safer, I don't like to be out alone.' She shrugged. 'It's the unfamiliar sounds that do it, owls and such like.'
