"No!" she said. "No fucking way. No! No! No! Is there any part of that you don't understand?"
She didn't leave me with many options. I had just asked my wife of fourteen years if she'd be willing to fulfill a fantasy of mine of seeing her with another man. I knew her well enough to know that this would probably be her first reaction but still her vehemence startled me. I could tell that she was upset and very hurt.
"How could you want such a thing? Why? To see some strange man use me. No. No... fucking... way!" Her eyes glistened with tears.
I put my arms around her. She was stiff and distant, her eyes averted. I held her and stroked her back. My desires weren't something I could easily explain. I loved her. I loved her so much. And our sex life wasn't bad although we'd settled into something of a routine. But I had the feeling we were missing a dimension of life and somehow this idea of including another man seemed like it would open a door to that space beyond. It was a feeling I found impossible to communicate.
We both felt bruised for the next couple of days. And the week or so after that was a mixture of remoteness and quiet flashes of the old intimacy. Finally, as we watched an old movie on TV, the lost warmth returned and she came to lie beside me on the couch. It felt so good to feel her pressing against me, rubbing her bottom against my crotch, and later, to feel her kisses grow hot as I touched her soft smooth skin and her slick wetness, to hear her sighing as I slipped inside.
Yet that small grain of irritating sand that I'd brought into our relationship remained. For me it was a matter of struggling to come to grips with what it was I really wanted, what it was I felt was missing. For Adele, my wife, as I learned only later, the experience was one of opening a place in her mind that had been, until I'd given her a key, tightly padlocked with fear and the strictures of convention.
At the time we each felt totally alone. We could share sweet warmth within the confines of the old assumptions but as we explored further, roaming among the possibilities of love outside the norm, the air grew more frigid. But, as we subsequently discovered, we each, in our own way, found the adventure bracing.
For a long time I couldn't get past the images of seeing Adele opening wide and a stranger's cock invading her. She'd, to the best of my knowledge, and I believed her, only known two other men before me. Two short term affairs before we'd met. So I thought it was the invasion, the taboo, that stirred me. In my imagination I heard her quiet cries, stranger's names spoken with ardor, but didn't really listen.
Unbeknownst to me, while I was at work and before the kids came home from school, Adele had begun searching the Internet for ways to use this little key I'd given her, ways to assuage the irritation of the grain of sand. Seek and ye shall find, we're told. Seeking on the Internet can go a long long way. No telling what you'll find. One of the doors that opened for Adele was a site that offered a smorgasbord of people with a jaw dropping variety of sexual interests. Very timidly, after going back to the site again and again, she decided to place a little profile of herself. One not entirely true. She was not in the least bit prepared for the onslaught.
The first day after placing her profile there were twenty two messages from men. The day after that there were thirty four. Plus four from women. It got worse after that. At first it was kind of interesting to look at a strange penis but once she'd seen about thirty five the novelty sort of wore off. She began looking for something a little more distinctive. Most of the messages were short and not very illuminating. Occasionally a man would send a clothed photo. Once in a very great while a man would send a clothed photo and a message that appeared to have been written by a thinking person. These were the ones she decided to answer. The first order of business being to straighten out all the crooked parts in her profile.
One of the first men she connected with was a man named Rob who lived about two hours away. Far enough not to be an immediate threat but close enough to be available. She quickly learned that Rob had some knowledge about the kind of situation I, her husband, was proposing.
"Why!?" she wailed, via email. "Why would he want me to fuck some stranger?"
"Who do YOU want to fuck?" was his reply.
That brought her to a standstill. She worked through a gamut of responses. It took her four days to get back to him. "I'm happy with Greg... he's my husband... I love fucking him. It's gotten kind of same o' same o', I'll admit, but he's still my main man."
"Why'd you place the ad then?" Rob asked. "If you're really happy that's fine. I'm delighted for you. But I can't help but feel that there's more to this than that. I've done group sex, I've been in threesomes, and I know that women can get into these things just as much as men. You say that you're happy with Greg, and as far as I can tell you are, but I get the sense that you're hoping there's something more."
It took seven days for her to get back to him. "I apologize for taking so long to write. You gave me a lot to think about in your last email. It hasn't been easy for me these last few days. When you talk about group sex and threesomes I have to tell you, even though I've known you for so short a time, it makes me wet. I feel really nasty telling you that. But I think you're right that I'm looking for something. Greg has no idea. You know, when he first told me he'd like to see me with other men it made me feel all shriveled up inside. Like I wasn't good enough or something. But when I started writing you I began to think, 'This could be my experience... I could have fun with this.' and it made the whole thing feel completely different."
"Of course it's your experience, Sweetie," Rob replied. "You're the one creating this, not Greg. He may have gotten the balls rolling, so to speak, but you're the one who placed an ad. You're the one who asked the questions. You're the one who got wet when I started talking about threesomes and moresomes. And I'm here if you need me. I don't need any particular thing to happen. I'm simply trying to help you discover what it is you want."
As I said, this colloquy, for the most part, was occurring at times when I wasn't present. And, to be quite frank, I wasn't aware of the effect they were having on Adele for some time. She was more responsive, yes, and we made love more frequently. But, with a solemn bow to the male ego, I assumed she was finding me somehow more stimulating. Little did I know that Rob was the midhusband (as opposed to midwife) of my marital pleasures. But gradually even a head as thick as mine has to absorb a few shafts of light.
I began to realize that Adele was much more involved in the computer than she'd used to be. Checking email before we went to bed, rising early to be the first one on. When I asked her directly about it she just said it was some new game she'd found or an email she expected from a friend. For awhile this made sense to me but I slowly became aware of the fact that the urgency with which she approached the keyboard outweighed the ostensible purpose. And then, one afternoon, while Adele and the kids were safely at the mall, I explored the system until I found Rob's emails and email address. It wasn't all that hard, since Adele was hardly in the hacker class of computer user.
The following Monday I sent him an email from my office computer informing him of my discovery. His reply was terse and to the point.
"Hi Greg, It doesn't surprise me that you broke the code. There probably wasn't one. But I'm her friend, not yours. At least not yet. And I won't betray her confidence, if there's any confidence left to betray after your snooping. --Rob"
I wrote Rob back to tell him that I loved Adele with all my heart and that I had absolutely no wish to hurt her. I told him that the main reason I'd contacted him was to open a dialogue with someone who obviously meant a lot to her.
He wrote back to say that he thought it should be Adele's choice to decide whether he and I opened a dialogue.
