Page 22 Joint

                                       JOINT OWNERS.                                                                     2-15-10

                                                                     ROY GARDE

          Few students were surprised when the best looking girl in their high school, Sarah Mays, and the best looking guy, Alan Harris, started dating each other at the end of their junior year because by then most of their classmates had been beaten down often enough to accept the fact that while life in general often sucks it is always grossly unfair too in one particular and that is that the richest kids and the most attractive ones tend to get together and exclude all others.

          Alan and Sarah gradually progressed in their make out sessions until they got to within millimeters of going all the way but neither of them wanted the drastic, life-altering act to take place in the back of a car or the like but they didn’t want him to bust an artery either so when his parents told him that they were going to be out of town on a coming weekend – he was an only child and so he’d have the whole house to himself – they welcomed the opportunity to get it on and they planned for it.

          Sarah made up an invitation to a weekend sleepover with friends to fob her parents off and at seven o’clock on that Friday night Alan locked the front door behind them and took her to the sofa in the living room and they started out on an exploratory safari that made them forget that the world outside existed.

She had long known that Alan was big in the love member department – indeed since they’d been going out together she had probably handled it more times, well, certainly for longer, than he had – but she didn’t let its daunting girth bother her over much because she trusted that Nature knew what she was doing. When it got to be time he lubricated himself and then got into position and tried to thrust it in but he made close to zero progress so, after a while, he had to quit trying and lie down for a while.

He was whimpering about having been defeated before even getting started properly and she was frustrated and whimpering about being in pain because the pressure against her hymen for minutes on end had made it sore.

They talked about it again and eventually agreed that he was to keep trying until it got done no matter what because neither of them wanted to be thought a fool and because he doubted if he’d ever be able to walk again if something wasn’t done to bring him relief.

Also, they were both bothered about their status as being just about the only seniors who were still virgins.

          Mother Nature showed them that she did indeed know what she was doing because Alan found that – when he’d gotten back into the battle and had guided it up to her four times and had followed her orders each time: “All right I’m ready again. Push even harder this time . . . ready? Then now! Go. Push!” – after the fifth attempt it went in and then, in spite of her cries, “Oh! Stop! Stop! It hurts. Take it away. Stop!” he found that he’d lost control of his hips and they kept driving and striving until he’d secured a foothold.

When he was all the way in he got some control back and so her real, piercing screams got him to stop moving but then, luckily for them both, his long-dammed-up needs made him ejaculate and that, of course, eased the pressure and her pain.

          He got rid of the condom and then spent some time apologizing and consoling her but when she at last stopped crying he put some balm into her with his finger and that highly intimate act made him get to be hard again and neither of them could ignore its import so he fitted on a new condom.

          What could they do but go at it again? – after all, that is what they’d been longing to do for weeks, even months, on end – so she forced herself to open up again and she steeled herself and insisted that he go very slowly. During their second attempt she distinctly felt some pleasure begin to build up in the general area and it nearly overcame the pain.

          When he came at her again, an hour or so later, she got as much out of it that time as he did and because she’d been able to cooperate that time she found out what a bona fide orgasm felt like for the first time ever. She was so affected by it that she had to be allowed to lie still for a half hour before he could her touch her again without having her whole body go into jerky aftershock convulsions.

When she’d recovered Alan suggested that they go upstairs to see what doing it in a king sized bed was like.

It was the cat crying for food that forced them to come back down to earth around lunchtime on Sunday – it had eaten all of the wet and dry food that he’d put out for it on Friday night – and that made them realize that they should probably eat something themselves too.

          They went to school on the Monday morning and before the week was over the school authorities were forced to write out erstwhile only implied rules and to post them in an attempt to stop the rot –

1, No kissing and no hand holding on school property.

2, No moving desks together.

3, No passing of notes during class.

4, No one is allowed in any of the Janitor’s closets at any time.

5, No lying down in the long grass at the far end of the football field.

6, No using bushes for concealment.

7, Doors to the basement and to the roof will be kept locked at all times.

8,

9,

10,

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The Headmaster thought it prudent to leave space on the page for rules to be added as their need became evident and, of course, the empty areas got to be filled up with ribald remarks and racy observations in a matter of hours.

No eyebrows were raised when the two got married the day after they graduated.

He was his grandparents’, on both sides, only hope of having grand-children and so the four of them had been delighted with the news of the forthcoming nuptials and they teamed up to give the couple a generous portion of the three hundred thousand dollar Colonial house in the suburbs that they’d chosen.

Some head shaking went on all around when it became known that Sarah had had to give up on all thoughts of going to college through having gotten pregnant on her honeymoon and the disdain eased into pity when another baby came along two years later and a third not long after that. All three of the children were girls.

Everyone had known from early on that Alan wasn’t college material and he became an apprentice in a busy engineering shop where he got to be a competent artisan. He was popular with his fellow workers and the management took a liking to him and he was earmarked for early promotion.

He was more than content with his life in general and he doted on his children but, as time went by, because of his competence he was asked to do a whole lot of overtime through the week and so he rarely got home in time to help put them to bed and never in time to have dinner with them so he spent most of every weekend taking them to various fun places in an attempt to make up.

As always under similar circumstances the children associated their mother with handing out chores and giving out orders and saying, “No. No. No.” and, “Put that down.” and, “Don’t touch that.” and, “Because I’m the mother, that’s why.” Whereas it was always, “Sure, lil’ darling. Great idea. Let’s do that.” or, “Go right ahead, babe.” Or, “Sure. Wait a minute and I’ll get it for you.” from their Dad.

They were inseparable from the moment that the first of them was delighted to discover him still in bed on Saturday mornings until their bedtime came on Sunday nights.

Sarah resigned herself to the situation but it wasn’t all that hard for her because, as she said, “Having to cope with the three of them by myself through the week is easily enough bonding, thank you.”

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Just before the Christmas after their oldest child got to be ten years old Alan bought his wife a one-year membership subscription to the local Yoga club. She had casually mentioned in the fall that she thought that she’d quite like to check out the regimen and he had seized on her remark with relief because he’d run out of ideas for presents to give her.

She started off by going to class three days a week, she arranged the times to let her stay until it was time to pick the kids up at school, and again on Saturday afternoons but she gradually tapered off to going in only on one or two afternoons in the week because she much preferred to get her hair done or go shopping or visit with friends when her household chores were done.

That continued until the club got a new instructor named Rudy.

Within days after first seeing him she started taking six sessions a week – he only took Mondays off – and she went to every class that he gave and she endeavored to stay in his presence until she had to leave for one reason or another, or until he left, whichever came first.

Rudy never responded to her amply demonstrated devotion and she got to accept the fact that, for him, she was just one more face in his class but that didn’t stop her from continuing to attend every one of them because just being in the same room with him lifted her spirits and gave her a nice warm feeling in her loins.

When she was undressing one afternoon to take a shower before leaving she overheard one of her departing class-members say to a friend of hers, who was there on her introductory visit, that if she wanted to get the interest of Rudy she only had to “get down to around ninety pounds and then he’ll hang around you like a hamburger patty does to a bun.”

Sarah stayed aware in class from then on and saw that it was true that the thinnest women got the most one-on-one attention from him. She immediately went on a drastic diet and she lost twenty pounds the first month and another twenty in the second one and that brought her down to below one hundred and firmly into his inner circle.

Her emaciation meant that she had to replace most of her wardrobe but what she didn’t replace were the white, coarse, knitted tunics that she wore for his classes.

She hung on to them because she knew that when she took up one called-for position the front would fall down and away and clear of her body and someone who was on a dais in front of her, Rudy for example, got to look at her nice breasts and as far down her tunic as her navel and could sometimes catch a glimpse of the dark promise of her pubic hair.

Surprisingly, despite her drastic weight loss, her breasts stayed pleasingly pert and her face didn’t lose its attractiveness and so it wasn’t too long a time before, at his suggestion, she claimed as her own a place front and center in his classes and he often called for everyone to take up what she re-named the ‘seal’ position – the Burmese, or whatever, name for it was around fifteen unpronounceable syllables long – and she renamed it because it called for her to kneel and hold her head up while supporting her upper body with her arms and then, “Lean forwards and hold . . . . now, backwards and hold . . . . now, forwards and hold . . . . now, backwards and hold . . . ”  rhythmically. It meant that he, and he alone, could then see everything that she had come into sight and then provocatively get covered up again and he ensured his pleasure by calling for that particular exercise far more often than any of the others.

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Rudy – Rudolph Stravolinski – had been up to then more or less happily married to a nurse who, co-incidentally, worked for the same company that Alan did and they had three children, all boys. When he had asked Julia to marry him she was a thin quiet woman who he’d thought he could keep in line but when she found herself safely husbanded she blossomed out and learned to appreciate her five senses fully and after that she had to try hard to keep from becoming more equal than he was.

   He was deeply disappointed when their first child turned out to be a boy and his disappointment increased as each of their other two sons were born.

His mother had been a cold woman and his siblings were all male and he no longer ever saw them and the only other kin he had were two impoverished aunts. He’d been sent away to a private military school and by the time that he’d managed to be asked to leave, and had graduated from a regular high school, he was desperate to find a soft, small, (he, himself, was only five feet eight) girl who would never defy him nor shout at him and who would know no swear words, not even the mild ones, and who wouldn’t even understand what the rougher ones meant if she heard them.

So, when Julia metamorphosed into becoming an active, well-endowed, attractive woman it was a blow for him and when getting her degree turned her into a take-charge woman at all times and when having three sons to raise forced her into becoming the dominant force in his home he sank into a just barely controlled despondency.

One day Sarah dropped off her three girls at their school and they shouted out their thanks and goodbyes as they ran to meet up with their various friends, as was usual. However, that day, something clicked in her when she’d seen her daughters, and the other fifty or so preteen girls, go up the steps into the main entrance of the school building so instead of pulling away she switched off her turn signals and put her car in ‘park’ and then just sat there.

“How could I have been so stupid?” she asked herself.

Rudy didn’t want just slimness in his favorites, he was, of course, looking for pre-pubescence in his favorites.

Such was her attachment to him that she didn’t let her insight make her dismiss him out of hand as a nasty pederast but, instead, she looked for ways to accommodate his inclination and thus gain from it.

When she got home she took a shower and she shaved her underarms and her legs as usual and then she tackled her pubic hair.

She put on a plain denim dress and Mary Jane shoes and she tied her hair in two pigtails.

She waited just outside her changing room until Rudy came in sight and then instead of calling out “Hi” she said, mincingly, “Good morning, Mr. Rudy” and then she tossed her head so that her pigtails flew out and then she giggled into her hand and then ran into the changing room.

When he called the class to take up position for the ‘seal’ routine she kept her eye on him when it got to be time to flash him and then she sucked in her stomach to provide him with a good view of her bald vulva and she saw his face go white and then she realized that he was mesmerized so she let her stomach relax and then she lowered her body to block his view altogether and thus helped him recover his composure before any- one else noticed.

He stammered out that the class was to do twenty full routines and then he walked awkwardly out of the room holding his roll-call clipboard low in front of him as he went.

Their relationship developed steadily after that. The next step came when he’d become inured enough with being able to see her naked vulva without calling attention to himself – from then on he made his, “hold,” orders last for much longer – and the next step called for the exchange of meaning-full looks with him when he was staring at what she had. That proceeded to their taking juice breaks together and then to clandestine hand holding and whisperings and then to short kissing sessions and murmurings out on the landing beyond the fire door when he was between classes.

While they both reveled in being swamped with the marvelous vibes that they got simply from being close to each other they tried to stay in bounds and deal with their infatuation by using the Hindu philosophy that yoga is based on and it turned out, sure enough, that while they were meditating or were taking up the various positions conducive with engaging in mind cleansing and soul purification they could cope with having to stay on a platonic plane but at other times their down-to-earth needs were ever present – and ever growing. She became so enamored of him that she’d feel weak if his hand merely brushed hers when he was handing her a glass of juice, or some-such and, when their relationship had progressed some more she’d have a whole series of what had to be close to being orgasms when he was merely kissing her mouth and pressing against her body.

Her close to over-powering feelings for him made her the best student that he, or the school, had ever had because she was able to come at transcendentalism from both sides now.

They knew that their situation had to be resolved rationally before it resolved itself irrationally with probably dire consequences – like both of them falling into a trance in class and then maybe disappearing in a whirl of blue smoke – and so they decided to book into a motel for an afternoon, to ensure their privacy, and they figured that once there they’d have time, and the necessary quietness, to talk and then meditate and search their deep inner selves for a way out of their dilemma.

When they’d closed the door of their room in the sleazy motel they closed with each other and when she’d undressed and was spread eagled on the bed for him her worst fear was put to rest when it became obvious to her that he knew exactly how old she was.

He did a whole lot of communing with her inner spirit via her defoliated center before getting around to trying to connect more fully with that same inner spirit and before they left the room, just before their four hours were up, they both knew that they’d closed forever the part of their lives in which they could exist separately from each other.

Even though she’d long appreciated having to cope with Alan’s monstrously sized member she wasn’t disappointed with the size of Rudy’s equipment, in fact she hardly registered the fact that it was only of average size because having him lie on top of her, full length and skin to skin, was enough for her on its own and that was backed up by her knowing that he’d chosen her from all of his other acolytes to help him meet his needs and the two things saw to it that she always got a series of orgasms of her own while he was striving to get one for himself.

No discussion on possible future procedure was ever needed by them because from the moment that their naked bodies came together in the bed in that motel it became patently obvious to them both that there was only one way for them to go and that was total defiance of anybody or any force that might try to keep them apart.

They sat in his car and took the time needed to come to an agreement about how it would be prudent to follow convention for a while but only for long enough to not hurt their families over much.

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When she got home she got through the rest of the evening all right but when it was time to get into bed with her husband she knew as sure as cornflakes that the very thought of allowing him to ‘know’ her body again was out of the question and so, in spite of her promise to Rudy about keeping their relationship secret, when it came down to it she realized that she could hardly not tell Alan that she was never going to let him sleep with her again, and why that was so, because she figured that she owed him that much.

His brain couldn’t accept any of it and it was only when she insisted that he was to sleep on the sofa in the living room that it filtered through to him that she really meant the foolishness that she was going on about as to having found her spiritual and physical ‘soul mate.’

He somehow managed to get up and drive to work the next morning and he got on with his job when he was there but, for the first time ever, he decided to go home at the change of shift at four thirty that afternoon.

He collected the children at his home and drove to their favorite grandmother’s house – one look at his face was all it took for her to accept them and then let him go back out to his car without a word – and when he got home again he made Sarah sit down across from him at the dining room table and he asked her to go through it all again.

He understood nothing of what she told him so, before accepting his fate, he unhappily got up and fetched a yellow pad to order his thoughts by being able to see all of the facts written down.

He didn’t have to list his own strengths and weaknesses nor his assets and debts, of course, but he was, by then, a foreman at work but he was still in the union and so he made close to a hundred thousand dollars a year along with good benefits because the union was long established and was strong and active. By doing a lot of overtime, at time and a half and sometimes at double time, he’d been earning seven figures in wages for several years.

He asked her about this Rudy guy and what was his situation regarding family and job. Then he asked her how much did she think that he made annually. She told him that he’d mentioned to her at one time that he doubled his twenty thousand base salary by working from morn to night six days a week.

He put the pad down and asked, “How the hell are the two of you going to live on that?”

“We don’t need much money. Anyway you’ll have to give me child support.”

“Oh, shit no! You’re wrong there because child support won’t come into it in our case because I’m keeping the children here with me but he’ll have to give his wife some for his own kids and what with that and the rent and the utilities and the groceries for your new apartment that forty thousand gets to look a bit inadequate. Don’t you think? Besides that, you’ll see far less of him than you’ve been seeing of me because he works late every night and on Saturdays too if I understand you correctly.”

“What do you mean ‘you’ll keep the children’? Let me put you straight there. Of course I’m going to keep them with me. No one would even think of separating children from their mother and Rudy and I won’t have a rent problem because it’s you who’ll be moving out of here not me and the alimony that you’ll have to give me will pay the mortgage. This is our home, not just yours and the children need stability.”

“You’re living in a dream world, d’you hear me? No way can an adulteress get to keep her children and the same thing goes for keeping this house. You’ll end up living in a studio apartment way out in some nasty grotto and even then you’ll be begging your family for help with the rent and for food and – Hello! Wait a minute here – didn’t they ask you for a ‘loan’ a couple of months ago to buy a new refrigerator? Slim pickings there I’m afraid. Does this guy have any relations with lots of cash to spare? You’d better hope so.”

She began to experience a sinking feeling because she knew that Rudy’s kin hardly had a pot of their own to expectorate into.

Nevertheless she soldiered on.

“If you think that I’ll give up my children and this house you’re crazy. And if Rudy doesn’t come to live here who’s to say that I’m an adulteress? Any judge in the county will give me my children and this house to raise them in so get used to the idea that you don’t live here anymore.”

He was so angry that he stormed out without another word and he went to a local bar and he stayed there until he got asked to leave at closing time, which was at two in the morning. And then he went home and slept on the couch again.

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The next day he went to see his Union’s lawyer and was told by him that he was not to leave his home for even one night until things got to be more clear because his moving out could then be labeled ‘desertion’ by her lawyers and would be accepted by the courts as such and he’d probably be left without a home and with only visiting rights to his children.

He was told to engage a divorce lawyer of his own immediately and so he picked one out of the yellow pages.

When they met up his new lawyer agreed with the advice that the union lawyer had given and told him further that if he was foolish enough to go and live somewhere else then besides having to give up all rights to the house he would certainly have to pay his wife substantial alimony along with child support, “That’s because you have such a high income. And listen to this Alan – please don’t talk to me about whether it’s ‘fair’ or not. Everybody knows that it’s never fair but it’s the law and that’s how the Judge has to rule and that’s how he will rule.”

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Alan had converted the attic in the house into a playroom for his children when their third one was on its way and while he was about it he’d had a bathroom put in up there too to save them from having to do a lot of stair climbing.

Having decided to follow advice and not leave the house he figured that he could live up there in the attic so he piled up all of the climb-on and ride-on and lie-on toys in the corners and then he bought a single bed and as the days went by he liberated various carpets and tables from the basement and from around the house and with that and the purchase of a chest of drawers and a clock/radio and a standing lamp and a television set and a recliner he made it half way to being comfortable.

It soon became known as ‘Daddy’s Room.’

Having to eat all of his meals at cafes and restaurants didn’t much bother him.

Sarah’s divorce lawyer told her that she was to never let her lover come to her house because her husband needed all the help he could get to prove her adultery and if one of her neighbors saw a strange man visiting her there in the day her husband might well be told – she went on to say that she’d found that some people who are secure in their marriage seem to delight in getting the chance to undermine others by being the ‘good neighbor’ – and then her case, overall, would be substantially weakened.

This restriction made it difficult indeed for Sarah and Rudy because they were more in need of being with each other than ever and so they had to put up with hand holding in cafes and groping each other under the cover of their raincoats on park benches and with fellatio behind trees or bushes. After a few weeks of doing that their needs for total body contact would build up to near bursting and so then they’d drive way out of town and pay for a motel room for the afternoon using money that neither of them found easy to come by.

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Rudy’s wife, Julia the nurse, began to notice that she was experiencing a near total lack of contact with her husband. She didn’t much mind about losing the cuddling part and the kissing part because it had been a long time since they’d done much of that but it turned out that her body had gotten used to having regular transfers of male juices and, besides that, she was surprised to discover that she also needed, for her mental health, the action that the transfers called for because they helped her believe that she was maintaining her place in the main stream of life.

Ever since they’d gotten married he’d wanted to use her every night before going to sleep and that had been fine with her but after giving birth to her first child she found that doing so had given her newly acquired libidinous idiosyncrasies that called out for far heavier pounding than he could give her but she’d stoically reconciled herself to taking what was available and she helped her own cause by making sure that she was ready for him by the liberal and expert use of various devices, before he came to bed. Another source of annoyance for her was that seeing what his profession was he knew how to use yoga to prolong his ecstasy and to extend the time it took to descend back to earth but she compensated for that by following several procedures that helped her during the various stages. One of them was – when he was lost in one of his semi-trances on his way to Valhalla he would slow down to almost a stop and so she’d arrange her body just so and then go to sleep while he was lost in his, “Ommmmm-ing.”

She was a handsome woman by anyone’s standards but she’d gotten to be way too much of a woman for Rudy who was two inches taller but weighed the same one hundred and forty five pounds that she did. Because of that she had long learned to control herself and to not take charge nor to show over-much enthusiasm while he was starting his thrusting because he could easily get disconnected, due to his modest equipment, and even dismounted entirely as he had been several times just after she’d found out that this sex thing lived up wonderfully to its hype and had then gotten too exuberant. She’d had to drastically modify her MO to get him to trust her again.

She didn’t at all like having a student of yoga in bed with her because it meant that he stayed over-aware of his progress and that forced her to stay in control at every stage of every get-together otherwise neither of them would ever get any straight-forward rest at night. Through all the years of her marriage she’d yearned to find out what it feels like for a woman to be able to surrender herself to her lover and give herself up to passion and get well and truly ‘fucked to a frazzle.’ In a word she wanted to sometimes fully experience a woman’s prerogative of being allowed to drop all of her defensives and surrender herself to a – let’s hope – singularly-well-equipped, single-minded brute of a male.

In her baby bearing years both she and Rudy had wanted to have a girl child. She hadn’t liked any part of the birthing process but she went along with him when he pleaded that they go around again to try for a daughter and then yet again after having produced another demanding son. To compound Rudy’s misery his third son sported an erection when he was being bathed by a nurse, after having his cord cut, and she’d called the doctor’s attention to it and he’d looked and said, “Well, isn’t that amazing? I’ve never seen that before. His parents had better look out when this one comes of age!”

She’d expected to put on weight when she was producing children and did so but afterwards she couldn’t get back down to what had been the reasonable, reachable weight that she’d maintained since she’d been eighteen years old which wasn’t what Rudy wanted in a wife.

He’d manfully held his tongue about the added poundage for years but one night he’d uncharacteristically drunk a whole bottle of wine on his own and he’d blurted out, as they were about to get into bed, that he was disappointed in her for having so much blubber still and that it was surely high time that she got her schoolgirl figure back.

She went on the Atkins diet after that and was still on it officially four years later but she often fell off the meat wagon and everytime that she did so it was with a flimsy excuse. Because of that ‘wiry’ and ‘lithe’ were two words that weren’t applied to her ever again.

She had been experiencing pangs of rebellion about her lot for several years and they multiplied enormously when she realized that Rudy had to be giving what was rightfully hers to someone else because although he continued to sleep in her bed every night he’d turn away from her immediately after getting into it and would pretend to go straight to sleep even though he knew full well that she was a nurse and that the various breathing rates are necessarily very well known by everybody in that profession.

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All of Alan’s physical needs and comforts were taken care of, when ‘Daddy’s Room’ got to be adequately furnished, with one exception.

Those were his sexual ones.

After sleeping alone for a few months he began to get woken up in the night regularly with an attention grabbing erection and, the first time that it happened, he was forced to take time to think up a way to deal with it because he’d forgotten, and didn’t want to have to remember, how to appease it singly, or double, handedly.

He’d had close to zero experience with flirting and the like for around a dozen years by then and also he had no idea where he should go to look for a woman to flirt with. It came to him that maybe he should try to get close to one of the women in his factory because they were there for most of every workday as was he and so it stood to reason that it shouldn’t be difficult to check them out.

He ran them all through his mind and found slim pickings indeed. There were only four altogether and two were over sixty and another one was gaunt and unpleasant and that left the nurse.

He remembered that she was a rather heavily built woman, named Julia something – a Russian sounding name – but in his need he got to see clearly that he’d only thought that he disliked big women in order to conform with the general thinking on the subject but now it was perfectly obvious to him that he’d a hundred times rather take one of Ruben’s big, well endowed women to bed than anyone who looked like one of those ‘please feed me’ modeling wraiths who walked so weirdly knock-kneed up and down the runway at fashion shows on TV.

In the darkness and warmth of his bed, on the night when he’d decided to hit on the nurse the next day, he figured that it would be a good move to complain to her about having a pain in his lower abdomen because that would mean that she’d have to touch his belly area but in the morning good sense told him to hang back on that idea and so he made up a wrist-tunnel-syndrome ailment for an excuse and on the strength of that he found himself in the First Aid office just after it opened which was two full hours after he’d started work that morning.

Julia Stravolinski was the first aid nurse for the two hundred-odd men who worked in the factory and she was well used to having them come into her office with spurious claims just to get away from their work station for a while – she also thought that some of them simply got the urge to be near a female – but she’d never seen Alan in her office before and she didn’t have a file on him even though he’d been working there for longer than she had.

She saw at first glance that he was good looking, what her friends in nursing school would have called a ‘hunk’, but that didn’t much concern her except for knowing that it would certainly make her task, whatever it turned out to be, a little less onerous.

All nurses learn how to touch in a special way and after a while they can’t stop doing it. It’s a touch that soothes fractious babies and gives comfort to hurting children and reassures women in pain and nearly always gives pleasure to men even when they know that it’s only a necessary investigative touch and that it might well change its character soon and cause them jolting pain.

Alan, who’s arm was fine, knew that nothing she could do could hurt it and he’d heard the rumor about nurses’ magic touching powers and was eager to prove or disprove it.

She had him position his arm just so on a pad on a table and when she touched it he had to clamp his mouth nearly shut so that the sigh of contentment that it generated couldn’t be recognized for what it was but stood a chance of being interpreted as a groan.

She clearly saw through his ruse because she had only smoothed his forearm to locate the affected muscles prior to probing them. When she started in on the relevant muscles in earnest she knew from how he tensed up his arm that he wasn’t reacting to pain but was trying to subdue his natural urge to press back against her hand to prolong the connection and/or to get more contact.

She didn’t find anything wrong in his arm – no muscle knots nor tense tendons and no unexplainable hot areas – but she rubbed in some embrocation anyway and then gave him a wrist brace and a little vial of ointment and told him to rub it in three times a day and if his forearm still hurt when he’d used it all up he should buy one of the commercially available balms or salves.

They heard the bell of the coffee-cart just then and Alan offered to get coffee for them both and she told him that that would be nice and went on to say that while they were drinking it maybe he’d be kind enough to fill out a standard form for her files.

While he was out of her office she wrote up a concise report of his visit and when it was done she drew an asterisk in the side column.

When he got back with the coffee she took out a standard form and asked him to fill in the particulars but he was astute enough to tell her that he couldn’t hold a pen properly “what with my infirmity” and so she sat him down in front of her desk and went through the form line by line.

“Full name?”  – – – – – – – – – – – “Huh huh.”

“Address?”     – – – – – – – – – – – “Huh huh.”

“Punch card number?” – – – – – “Huh huh.”

“Social Security number?” – – -“Huh huh.”

“Marital Status?” – – – – – – – – – “What do you mean, ‘married, sort of’?”

He told her about how he was still living in the same house as his wife and children but that he spent the nights and most of the rest of the time that he was home in his attic room and how he got all of his meals in the factory cafeteria or in cafes and the like.

She motioned for him to go on because his situation interested her seeing that it was close to what was happening in her own life except for the separate room bit – although for all the good that it did her Rudy could just as well be sleeping up in the attic too.

She put down her pen to assure him that none of this would be entered in his file.

He still felt her touch on his arm and he’d seen both concern and interest in her eyes on hearing his story and he wanted to tell it all to someone who seemed sympathetic about his misfortunes – besides that he didn’t much want to go back to work anyway and wasn’t this visit, he reminded himself, supposed to be a wooing? – so when he’d drained the coffee from his paper cup and had dropped it into a wastepaper basket he told her about how for more than ten years he and his wife had been seemingly happily married and how recently she had come at him with the bombshell news that she wanted a divorce and that she wanted him to go away and let her lover come and live with her.

He started telling about his lawyers’ arguments and was surprised to see increased interest in her eyes rather than going MEGO on him and so he went on with the details.

When he’d gotten it all out he finished with a huge sigh and then, “And all of this mess because of some penniless Yoga Instructor that she only met because I stupidly gave her a year’s membership to his classes as a Christmas present!”

He had held her full attention throughout his potted history but after that last bit her mouth gaped open in a very unattractive manor but luckily he was staring at the carpet at that moment so as to hide his tearing-up eyes from her.

“Does this Yoga instructor have a name?” she asked in a shaky voice.

“Uh – yes. It’s ‘Rudy’ something.”

Even though she’d already been pretty sure as to what the guy’s name was hearing it spoken came at her like a fist.

She turned in her chair so that he wouldn’t be able to see her distress and when her anger had died down she found that several sinful and vengeful thoughts were involuntarily running through her brain –

He really is good looking.

He is clearly attracted to me.

He is essentially living alone.

She really does need some good loving.

He’s demonstrated that he’s loyal and genuine.

With his large hands and feet it surely follows that . . .

What swung it for her was that it would be such sweet justice.

She turned back and then reached out and patted his hand as she said, “Oh, you poor, poor man. How awful for you.”

The patting turned into squeezing and then he turned his hand palm up so that they got to be holding hands.

She was no blushing teenager and for years and years her MO was that once she’d decided on what should be done about something, on just about any subject, she was to act on it there and then.

She touched his cheek and then she lifted his ‘hurt’ arm up and pulled it against her bosom in a very unprofessional way as she said, “I’m sure that your poor arm will heal in less than a week and I do hope that you find a way out of your personal trouble soon.”

He moved his arm enough to make her aware that he liked having it there and he let a quiet “Mmmmmmm” come out of his mouth and then he said, in a whisper, “My arm is feeling much better now, thank you.”

Now that it was established that something was definitely going on between them she relaxed a little and became aware again of where they were so she let her professionalism return and she gave his arm back and moved away from him and she went to her desk and wrote down her address and gave it to him as she told him that if he wanted to he could come and pick her up at her house at around eight that night after she’d cooked and served dinner to her children because her mother would look after them and her husband never came home until around nine o’clock and usually just watched TV after eating and wouldn’t even notice that she wasn’t around because she usually read to the children in their bedroom and then went to bed to watch TV.

The rapport reappeared when they were sitting in his car together as they were driving towards a restaurant.

She’d already decided that it would be best to get everything out in the open right away and so she told him what her husband did for a living and what his first name was and how they hadn’t made love for months.

There was a convention in town and so there was a long wait for a table at the restaurant that they’d chosen but it didn’t overly bother them because they had a lot to find out about each other.

 When they were driving away after eating she took his right hand and her touch had the same affect on him as it had that morning so he moved his hand so that it was both holding hers and resting on her upper thigh. She involuntarily pulled his hand inwards a little and then, voluntarily, pressed down on it slightly.

They both knew that she had to sleep in her own bed that night, and every night in the foreseeable future, but that left them an hour or two to be together and she fully expected that he’d know somewhere where they could go and lie down.

He thought that he did but he soon found out that he didn’t.

Because of the convention all of the motels and hotels that he did know, the ones within a reasonable distance, were showing their ‘NO Vacancies’ signs.

When they’d resignedly accepted the fact that they’d have to revert to high-school practices and park somewhere that was secluded, and move to the back seat of the car, they did just that.

She got thoroughly felt up and the hardly remembered but strangely thrilling and intense excitement that it engendered stifled her misgivings somewhat about having to give up so much dignity. She realized that she still felt as she’d done when she’d been seventeen years of age and was in similar circumstances. The same misgivings came back to her too and they were that it is all so unfair for girls because the guy is simply intent on getting full access and goes about it single-minded-ly and gets a great deal of pleasure at every step, taken oh so tentatively, of the procedure – and how, once each step is conceded, takes re-visiting rights there for granted – then he uses that gain as the base for starting the move to get to the next stage and all the while the one who’s putting up with all of this conventional strategizing – after all why else is she in the back seat with him and shouldn’t it be mutually rewarding and exciting from beginning to end? – has to gradually yield ground and yield and yield some more until, at some arbitrary point which is usually when her panties are on the front seat and she’s opened up enough to accept his middle finger, she’s suddenly expected to stop retreating and to drop all modesty and acknowledge that she’s handing over control to him by not only opening her legs wide but also by voluntarily reaching to guide the end of his nasty member to her entrance and is then expected to show enthusiasm as she’s getting hurt and to pay no mind about being soiled.

When it got to the final stage with Alan she told him yes dear but please put a condom on and he told her that he didn’t have one with him. Well!  Nurses know to prepare for these things, and they always half expect laymen to fail at the essentials, so she searched out the one that she’d brought with her and then took it out of its little pouch.

As she was opening it she heard and felt him easing his pants and underpants down and so when that had stopped she reached over with her free hand, eager but strangely shaky, to find the nature of the beast that she was going to have to sheath and then slip the sheath on it.

She had zero problems with finding it and when she touched it she barely kept from yelping. It was huge. She couldn’t get close to making her middle finger and thumb meet around it.

“Oh, my,” was all that she said but there was both joy and apprehension in her voice.

She wanted to subdue her awe a little by getting more familiar with it but as she was running her fingers along it she felt, expertly, that it was dangerously close to its point of exploding so she hurriedly tried to fit the condom on it but it was so big that it kept shouldering away her best efforts. After several attempts the ring broke and she was left with fingers full of shredded and useless acrylic that she could never bring herself to misname ‘rubber’.

By then she was fully committed to getting to know his night-monster better and, also, she knew that she really should do something nice for the guy after receiving all of that extended – in his eyes, expert and tender – love play only to have her fail miserably at sheathing it. She was pretty sure that if he didn’t get some desperately needed relief PDQ then she had little hope of ever seeing him again.

She knew that she could appease his need with her hands or by simply leaning over and blowing him but she’d read her Germaine Greer when she was around sixteen years old and she’d fully agreed with her then, and still did, that for a woman to unilaterally help a guy to ejaculate with hand or mouth was appalling and fundamentally anti-feminine so she did not entertain those two ideas for more than a second.

She remained adamant about it having to be mutually rewarding so she whispered to him to take his pants off completely so that they could do some lovely sixty-nine. She would have much preferred to have conventional sex, she could hardly wait to find out what that would be like with Mr. 14 EEEE, but she hadn’t been given much notice – and none at all about the stupendous size that she’d have to deal with – and thus hadn’t taken pills or brought along her diaphragm to give her protection. All that aside, she knew, from her extensive nurse’s training, that no woman has ever gotten pregnant via the stomach and, also, she’d been totally confident that she would only need the contraceptive aspect of a condom seeing that she now knew the full history of her soon- to-be, let’s-hope, lover’s lovelife.

It so happened that she’d once had the same make and model of car as the one that they were sitting in so she knew that if she pushed the passenger seat fully forward and then pushed the head rest down she would be able to pull on a lever that would let the back of the seat fall to the rear until it got to be level with the seat in the back and, after doing the same thing to the driver’s seat, she would have arranged for an adequate platform for their needs.

Being a competent, practical woman she opted to deal with the seats herself, anyway he was too excited to be able to do much more than moan in anticipation and hold himself with one hand and play grab-ass with the other one, and so she disentangled herself and then went ahead and conjured up the needed flat surface. She was about to crawl onto the platform when she remembered the massive size of the instrument that he carried around with him and she realized that it could well be dangerous for her if she was underneath him where she’d have zero control over IT’s performance so she wisely asked him to lie down on his back and prepare to receive her on top of him.

It had been months since he’d had any interaction with a woman and consequently he came about one minute after she’d stopped marveling, and pondering on the possibility of getting lockjaw, and had accommodated him, very slowly, and had successfully found the optimum rhythm to get the deed done.

While she was dealing with his mess, by spitting it into some of the tissues that she had in her bag, he held her body where it was until she was ready and then he expertly gave her an orgasm with his mouth and tongue.

They then reset the furniture and sat close to each other in the back seat and he held one of her hands and cupped one of her magnificent breasts with his free one and they were both quietly and happily content with having found each other and they exchanged kisses as if they were teenagers again and they both marveled at the strength of the need to couple by deprived humans. They’d almost forgotten that such enthusiasm existed.

He was grateful to her for letting him get back to a state of calmness and so – seeing that besides having had a wonderful time with her he liked talking with her too – when he was dropping her off a half block from her home, he asked her to please go out with him again the next night.

As all men know, doing sixty-nine is all very nice while it’s happening – there’s the wonder at knowing what’s actually going on down at the other end and, in your face, is the in-your-face fact of being as close as you’ll ever get to knowing that you could ease all of your pain forever if you could only find a way to get your whole head in there and at the same time it is tremendously gratifying being able to give the woman a whole lot of pleasure and hearing about it in real time – but there is usually very little of the needed intensity present while she’s going at her task and little long lasting satisfaction afterwards. It seems to be merely relief and surcease rather than driving accomplishment and – like with getting hungry again an hour or two after eating a Chinese meal – the guy’s needs haven’t been properly and decisively met but only placated.

So it was with Alan.

When he got into his bed and had arranged himself for sleep he found that he already wanted Julia again and he found it difficult to drive the details of her generous body out of his mind and so he got little sleep that night. He promised himself that he would positively get to lie down with her on their next date.

That took place on the following Saturday and when they’d had a few drinks and were eating dinner they told each other that they felt cheated by having gotten to know each other intimately but still didn’t really know each other. They both wanted to put that right ASAP and after establishing that fact they hurried to finish the main dish and didn’t bother with dessert or coffee.

She’d already told him that her mother was with her children and that her husband thought that she was going to spend the night at her friend’s house who had recently lost custody of her children for the second time and needed help to keep from trying to crawl inside a vodka bottle. That was quite true except that it was another friend who was doing the hand holding that night.

They got into his car and drove around and they saw that the ‘NO’ part of the ‘NO Vacancy’ signs that had been lit up the night before were all still doing their job of negation.

They were both fully determined to find a bed to lie on that very night so, in near desperation, he came up with the idea of taking her to his home. He explained that the children would be in bed and fast asleep by then and that his wife would be whispering into the phone in the back room as was her usual practice and thus wouldn’t see that he wasn’t alone when she heard him come in and then go up the stairs to the attic.

Julia knew, and wanted to tell him, that it wasn’t a good idea but not having a better one of her own she felt that he knew the situation in his home much better than she did so she should go along with it. Also she was close to whimpering from frustration by then and so the sure prospect of their getting to be in a bed, any bed, soon was highly welcome.

It worked out just as he’d hoped and the fact that his bed was only a single one didn’t bother either of them a bit.

Unfortunately, because they’d been going at it half the night, they slept late the next morning.

Fifteen minutes before it was time to leave for church Sarah sent one of the children up to Daddy’s Room to find out why he hadn’t come down to take them there as usual.

The girl found that the door was locked, for the first time ever as far as she knew, and so she knocked on it and then banged on it and then kicked it until she heard her father say, “All right, already. Enough with the banging.” and he called out that he would be down as soon as he could.

The girl went downstairs and told her mother what had happened and after hearing about the locked door Sarah immediately put a label to the strange thumping noises that she’d heard in the night and she quick-wittedly decided that it would be best all around if she took the children to church herself, for once, and so she went upstairs and called through the door to Alan what she was going to do and then went back down and got them all dressed and then they all piled into her car.

Alan took off the clothes that he’d hurriedly pulled on and went back to bed much relieved because for a few minutes there he’d been frantically wondering how to get Julia out of his house and back to hers without being seen.

When they heard the front door close and then the car start up and pull out into the road they both laughed out loud with glee and then threw back the bedcovers and for the first time could indulge in totally uninhibited explorations of each other in broad daylight. Then they had sex again which left him happy but exhausted and her happy to the core but sore there too.

Julia had been merely enthused with Alan up to then but during their drawn-out session – when she could look at his nice face and kiss it all that she wanted and had been allowed to check-out up-close the member that had left her battered but fully aware, finally, of the capabilities and the scope of her femininity along with the fact that it had shown, by deed, how wonderfully compatible they were – she was moved to acknowledge to herself, and then to him, that she wanted him in her life permanently.

Sarah didn’t say anything when she got back from church nor when Alan helped the children to get dressed for the trip to a museum that had been agreed on the day before nor when he’d brought them all back home. However, when he came home from the diner where he’d gone for dinner she waylaid him and insisted that they talk.

They both knew that seeing him bring a strange woman into their home, or even knowing that one was there, would be traumatic for the kids and was very much to be avoided.

She told him that the answer was obvious to her and it was that he wasn’t to do it ever again. She said that if she could banish her own lover then it followed that he could do so too. “Surely it’s a matter of simple restraint?”

He said that at that moment he could easily promise her what she wanted but in a few days his need would build up again and because of that he might have to bring his lover home with him again.

“But that makes zero sense and is totally unfair to me. Do you think that maybe I’m not aching for Rudy every minute of every day? Do you think my need is less than yours? Are you saying that people’s behavior is completely dominated by whether or not they have high levels of testosterone in their blood?”

“I’m sorry but that’s pretty much the truth of it as far as I’m concerned and you should know that better than anybody in the world. Well now, I’ve been thinking about this a lot today and I’m pretty sure that what makes it difficult for both of us is the fact that neither of us has ever had to go without having good sex whenever we wanted it since we were about seventeen years old. We can’t expect our bodies to adjust to not being able to get relief when we need some in a matter of weeks or even months.”

“Now you’re saying that we’re no better than animals?”

“In this regard, yes. Well, I’m saying that because it’s so primal that there’s no wiggle room left for a difference to show up.”

“Oh, Alan – – – – – – ”

She got up and went into the kitchen for a glass of white wine and when she got back she set it down on the table and then walked back and fore for a few minutes.

And then – “Well. We’ve both been through a lot together and so when you admitted, a few minutes ago, to sometimes behaving like an animal it came to me that I’ve been doing the same thing too lately and that I should therefore try to look at the situation from your side. For God’s sake, we aren’t enemies, are we Alan? Have we gone that far? No, of course we haven’t.

“Well. I went to get this glass of wine because I needed a few moments to think and it came to me that, I hate to admit this, that maybe you’re right. Forgive me for what I said about your being an animal because, as I just said, I’ve acted that way too lately and so I shouldn’t keep up this hypocrisy any longer, especially with you. I have to admit that at this very minute my whole body is yearning for fiery lovemaking and if Rudy showed up here right now I’d probably say to hell with it all and I’d let him in and then take him to my bed. My God, Alan! What are we going to do?”

“Poor kid. I know you so well that I can practically see your need. Listen Sarah, don’t get mad and don’t say anything harsh for a couple of minutes but it so happens that I’m completely satiated right now and so I could just hold you for a while in bed if it would help. What do you think? Do you want to try? Shall we go to bed together right now? Just to comfort each other.”

 “Just listen to yourself, ‘Just to comfort each other’ Ha! Knowing you I don’t doubt for a minute what that ‘comforting’ will turn out to be – it’ll be . . . But, no! Oh Alan dear, I just did it again didn’t I? Being a hypocrite I mean. The truth is that my body misses you and – yes, it must be said if the truth is to be known – your monster of a penis too but, even so, I’m never again going to let you put it into me, you hear me? That’s reserved for Rudy and only Rudy from now on. So, that being said I must admit that I’m very tempted. Uh, do you promise that it will be just holding and cuddling? – Yes? – then yes. OK. Yes. Let’s.”

He was indeed satiated from his all night session and so he was able to stay calm and objective as he watched his wife get undressed. He could hardly believe how different her body was. She was close to half the woman that she’d been before Rudy had come into her life and so she no longer needed a bra seeing that her downsizing had firmed up her breasts. He figured that that was a plus for Rudy maybe but decidedly not for him. Her whole body was taut – another plus for Rudy maybe but he thought of it as being boyish – and when she’d eased her panties down he was intrigued to see that she’d shaved her pubic hair and he found it difficult to believe that her vulva must have always been that small and demure – it seemed to want to slip back between her legs and disappear – but, for him, it was taking its charm with it. He couldn’t keep from allowing a shudder to show as he made a mental note to not look at her body in future – if this ‘comforting’ thing came to be a regular happening for them that was – because his eldest daughter had as much adipose as her mother did now, and more pubic hair. He made a mental note to never again help his daughters to bathe or get dressed or undressed.

He steeled himself to go and get between the sheets and when they met up in the middle of the bed he held her close as he’d promised and, after ten minutes or so of murmurings and smoothing, out of curiosity he smoothed her buttocks and found that it was as if they belonged to someone that he’d never been with before. Because doing that brought zero protestation from her it came to him that it might well have conditioned her to his touch, and mellowed her too, and he wondered if he could take a chance and feel her breasts and then progress to investigating her intriguingly shy and shorn center. He had to move his body away a little to get at her breasts and she not only acquiesced she began to murmur right back at him so that led to kissing and sucking and then he moved his head on down.  She sighed as she opened up for him and before long he got fully reacquainted with her smell and her taste and then, no doubt due to the novelty factor that over-rode his satiation, he began to rise to the occasion and so he moved back up and kissed her mouth and saw to it that she knew that IT was present and correct. She reached down and squeezed it in a friendly manner that was very familiar to him and then she used both hands to bring it fully erect and then she guided it inside her as if it was completely legal, which it was, and completely normal, which it wasn’t.

It had been many weeks since she’d last accommodated him and so when it had been carefully pushed all the way in she gave herself up to experiencing the marvelous feeling of being filled up completely again. Although it was true that she was transported every time that Rudy so much as touched her, no matter about when he was making love to her, and the whole experience also remained on a higher plain than the satisfying animalistic pleasure that she’d experienced with Alan for many years but, for weeks by then, she’d regretted its absence from her life and she’d guessed then, and knew for sure when it was pounding away at her, that her life wouldn’t be complete without regular parameter-stretching ‘visits’ by it.

What she’d missed most was the initial penetration because, even after the large heads of his babies had turned her love canal into a birth canal three times over, the stretching and yielding that her vagina had to do to accept the enormity of him was breathtakingly satisfying and got her to forget that she was no longer eighteen years old and was – uh – overly slack down there.

In the morning, the garbage men woke them and from long ingrained habit they immediately moved to the center of the bed to cuddle and when they looked at the illuminated clock they saw that they had an hour before it got to be time to wake the children and they decided to stay close and talk about their odd situation.

She knew that it was up to her to go first and she also knew that she had to defend her past behavior or else look like a thick-headed fool so she told him that while it was very nice being with him and getting to be fully – “uh, utilized” – again what she felt for Rudy was on a different plane and was divine and was so intense that just by having him lie next to her was as good for her as having multiple orgasms with Alan.

She told him that all rational thinking just about went out the window the second that she so much as thought about Rudy and she thought about him all the time.

“Were you thinking about him while we were doing it last night?”

“Well, no. Taking care of you without getting hurt was far too attention grabbing for that but I do think about him most of the time.”

“Don’t you think that maybe you’re betraying this Rudy right now?”

“Not really. Not with you. You’re my husband.”

“You’re not being honest with yourself. You know better than that.”

“Well, yes, I suppose I do. But he’s sleeping with his wife too, remember? What happened between you and me last night, and is happening right now, is just interim and convenient.”

“You’re still not being honest. I happen to know, and you must know it too, that he sleeps in the same bed that she does but only because there’s no place else in their house for him to lie down properly. They put cushions between them in their bed and they haven’t made love to each other for months.”

She tore herself away from him and sat up and said, “Come on, Alan. How can you possibly know that?”

He told her who the woman was that he’d brought into the house the night before.

After that they both knew that they had a whole lot more of talking to do and although the situation was bizarre it was somewhat ameliorated in that it was ‘en famille’ and so they gradually reconciled themselves to their weird circumstances and when they’d fully accepted it he pulled her on top of him for some of the French kissing that they both loved and she cooperated fully and then confirmed their new status when she reached down and slipped his penis – alas, only half hard and it stayed that way in spite of her expert inducements – into her vagina for mutual comforting and for safe keeping.

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At Rudy’s and Julia’s apartment reconciliation took a different path.

Even after it became common knowledge to them both that their new ‘assignations’ were taking place regularly they’d still had to share the same bed every night because there was nowhere else in the entire apartment where he could lie down and that was because even though their three sons were sleeping in bunk beds, so as to be able to share one bedroom, Julia’s mother had the other one. The sofa in the living room was too small for sleeping on and so the only thing that they could come up with to establish their ‘separation’ was to put a line of cushions down the center of their bed.

One Sunday night Julia was woken up by the shaking of the mattress under her and she quickly pinned the reason down to the fact that Rudy was masturbating.

She was appalled and she felt that the situation was both ridiculous and untenable, in spite of her antipathy towards him, so she reached a hand through the cushion barrier and she stayed his busy hand and said, “Rudy, I’m still your wife, aren’t I, so please let me take care of that for you. OK? Good. Well, why don’t you get rid of these cushions while I go and put my diaphragm in? I’ll be back in a just a minute.”

She did so and then she remembered who she was dealing with so she took off her pajamas and put on a light robe that fastened up the front and then she freshened up her private parts before going back to bed.

They both dropped easily into their long established custom of dealing with an extra-curriculum erection that had woken him up in the early hours, after he’d kindly woken her to let her share it, which was for her to lie on her back and start undoing her nightgown. Then, by the time that she’d undone the last button, he’d have taken up the right position to be able to slip her panties off when she lifted her bottom.

Sure enough, that done, he established his dominance by driving all the way into her at once because he figured that having done that it gave him the right, in his mind, to then pull out to be able to go down and ‘pay a friendly visit’ to her center.

When he’d had his fill of her essence he mounted her properly again and completed the act in as short a time as was possible.

When she got back to bed, after dealing with his mess, he thanked her profusely and when she answered by saying, “You’re welcome.” they both turned away and went to sleep but before that happened they both knew that that, “You’re welcome.” of hers meant that he’d been given permission – the next time that it happened to him – to revert to his long established method of communicating his plight which was to seek out and squeeze one of her buttocks, or weigh one of her breasts, to wake her up and call her to her duty. She wasn’t exactly thrilled about it but she’d loved him once and they’d shared good times and he was the father of her three children. Also, she was a nurse and was thus very aware of stress and bodily needs.

The very next time that Sarah and Rudy got together they both knew instinctively that something important had happened to them both and, seeing that they were so close to each, they both wanted to confess their sin which was that they’d been ‘unfaithful’ and had made ‘convenient’ love with their spouses.

Later that night, as she was cuddling with Alan, Sarah told him what had happened in Rudy’s house and they both knew that things had changed radically in their lives again and, a little later, it occurred to them that, logically, their loving arrangements should be expanded to openly encompass all four of them at the same time because, clearly, they then knew that it was already happening privately and clandestinely.

They went about it tentatively and so it took a whole week before they all four arrived at an all round suitable and satisfactory arrangement.

Once the new procedure was agreed on in principle they all liked Alan’s practical idea that the first step to reaching their goal might be for all of them to ‘discover’ that their long lost strong love of playing poker had returned and that they all wanted to take up the game again which would mean regular, innocent-seeming get-togethers. After a lot of discussion they eventually came up with a plan in which they were to meet up at Alan and Sarah’s house every Tuesday and Thursday evenings to ‘play.’ They decided against going to Rudy and Julia’s house because of the convenience of having Julia’s mother at hand and willing to look after the boys on those nights and get them ready for school the next morning.

The principals met up at eight o’clock or so, after both families had eaten at their respective houses, and they’d have a drink and then set up the card table and play until it got to be bedtime for the three girls.

Sarah and Alan would come back down to the living room after settling them into bed and the dealing would start again and would continue until Sarah guessed that the kids were all fast asleep and she’d say something to that effect and they’d play a last hand and they’d make it ‘no limit’ but it didn’t much matter because although from the beginning they’d decided to give the white chips a value of one thousand and the blue chips five thousand and the red ones ten thousand they never did decide on what the ‘thousands’ represented. Besides that, they all knew that it didn’t much matter anyway because they got just as much fun out of it as if real money was at stake and they all had zero respect for actual gamblers and wondered how anyone on God’s earth could into to a Casino and see all that opulence and not relate its very existence to their chances of winning anything.

On the last hand they’d bet a hundred thousand on a picture card and anything higher than that got a call of, “All in, here!” and that would be quickly followed by, “Me too.” and, “Me too.” and, “Me too.” And then they’d stand up and throw down their cards and leave them and their chips strewn all over the table in an effort to fool the kids in the morning and then they’d all go up the stairs together.

At the landing they’d wave and mouth, “ ‘Bye,’ ” at each other and Rudy would follow Sarah into the master bedroom and Alan and Julia would climb the stairs to the attic.

They all four got to be on good terms once common sense had told them that it is not possible to commit adultery with one’s legal spouse and, more importantly, that breaking up two families when they’d found a perfectly acceptable way to deal with their needs was decidedly the wrong way to go.

When the thrill had worn off a little, and they could talk about it calmly when they were all present, they agreed that the men should regain normal visiting rights to their wives over the weekends and for ‘emergencies’ through the week.

None of them were much over thirty and they all had healthy libidos and as their confidence grew – and because their core needs were being regularly and royally appeased which mellowed them all out – their arrangement progressed until it occurred to them that their foursomes at the poker tables could profitably become foursomes in bed too and so Alan and Sarah changed their queen sized bed for a king sized one and they pushed the single bed that was in ‘Daddy’s room’ into a corner and the children were allowed to reclaim the room and rename it.

They all soon got to be blasé about undressing in front of each other and although the initial sleeping arrangement was with the two men on the outsides of the huge bed they never woke up with that configuration and they didn’t know, or care, what combinations of couplings had gone on after the first, the urgent one, had been dealt with.

Sarah and Julia both stopped using the pill and reverted to wearing diaphragms at all times, except for the first time that they did it on their poker nights when they were positive sure who would be injecting them, because they knew that that way they were giving themselves a close to absolute guarantee as to what the gender of their next baby would be.

 Over time, their get-togethers settled into following a routine in which, when the ultra serious insemination process had taken place and the spermatozoa had been given ample time to establish a beach front, both women would insert their diaphragms and then lay back and happily accept whatever came their way but they always became well aware of who it was who was hovering over them, and waiting for guidance, the second that they reached a hand down to do so.

One Wednesday morning, just after dawn, Rudy was lying on top of Sarah and had been doing so for close to two hours – he was barely moving, as usual, and he was well along on the road to Nirvana but she’d been asleep for more than an hour by then although, in her defense, she was having a nice dream – when he was brought back to earth by feeling the mattress being stressed severely.

There was plenty of light coming in so he saw that Alan was lying on his back with Julia astride him and that they were holding each other’s wrists so that she could keep in place and so that he could help her to lift up after each downward stroke. She had just broken into a canter and that was why the mattress was shaking.

Her unfettered breasts were, of course, bouncing around nicely and her belly was clenching and then relaxing as called for and her mouth was hanging open as she panted from her efforts and her eyes were open but unseeing and her face was blotchy and empty of everything but fervent determination.

When he looked at Alan he saw that his eyes were closed tightly and that his whole being was locked into single-minded acceptance of the moment and he, Rudy, also saw that Julia and Alan were demonstrating the epitomization of immediate, here-and- now, all-encompassing, there-is-no-room-nor-need-for-anything-else, carnal knowledge that was well on the way to giving them both the ultimate, sublime, pleasure.

The picture made Rudy get shocked out of where he’d been hovering somewhere close to infinity and he too became fully aware of here and now and that life was for embracing not hiding from and he knew right then that he was never again going to waste even one more minute of his time searching for ‘completion’ ethereally because he could see it, plain as day and right there at his side and that it could be not only arrived at relatively easily but the experience could be, had to be, shared.

It came to him that while there are many legitimate paths that lead to heaven and the one that he’d chosen to follow up to then might well be as good as any of the others but it wasn’t necessarily better than any of them and the path that Alan and Julia were sharing at that moment was more convenient by far.

He also got to realize that he’d persuaded himself over all those years that he, being an ascetic, had to prefer thin women but now he knew that what he really wanted in a woman was what all other men want and his wife had it all and then some.

He had enough sense to not broadcast his revelation, he wanted to think long and hard about it, but Sarah knew that something important had happened because she was suddenly brought awake by something that was swelling inside her and then she’d been forced to get to be fully awake in a hurry when that same something started to move in and out of her and she sensed that she had better come aware quickly to protect herself from possible harm.

At first, of course, she thought it was Alan who was pounding away at her but then she realized that because she was getting cumulative amounts of pleasure, both sensual and spiritual, it had to be Rudy who was using her and she was astonished by that even as she found that she had to put her ankles up on his hips to get to be open enough for him.

When he’d finished, and she’d recovered, she held his face so that she could rain kisses on it and then she alarmed Alan and Julia when she started in on praising him to the skies.

Rudy calmed her and whispered that he’d explain what had happened later on and then Alan and Julia could, and did, go back to sleep but neither Rudy nor Sarah got any more of it that night as they cuddled up and marveled at what had happened. She was enthralled and he was fully replete as well as enthralled and he silently congratulated himself when it came to him that he’d have all of his wife’s charms to himself the following night and for five nights every week and would still be able to enjoy the contrasting charms of Sarah regularly.

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Alan – now that everything was all for the best in the best of all possible worlds for him – decided to leave the union and accept a supervisor’s job, at $80,000 a year plus an Xmas bonus, and, when he’d promoted the mechanic who he’d trained to do the job of foreman in his place, he was able to leave for work later every morning and he got home at just before six every night. That delighted his children, of course, and the difference that it made in Sarah’s life was immediate and palpable. Her “No, no, no’s” mostly became “Yes, lets do that,” and when they all felt sure that the change for the better was permanent the whole family let the hard times that they’d gone through slip from their minds and they became close again.

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Rudy quit his yoga instructor’s job and he joined a health-food company that only paid its new employees a little over the minimum wage but assessed their work capabilities every three months and gave raises based on them. It also had an inflexible policy that everybody who worked for it had to be engaged in getting a degree and if they already had one then they had to be actively working towards getting another one. He decided to study Physical Therapy.

 Rudy’s boys began to see a whole lot more of him because of his new, fixed hours job and they all played games after doing their homework and they ate dinner together every night. However, on card playing nights he made them play non-active games so as to let him rest up and stay sharp for the challenge that was coming.

Because of the very welcome changes the three boys, and Alan and Sarah’s three girls, all began to believe, firmly, that poker had to be a wonderfully healing practice.

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Not surprisingly, both women found out that they’d gotten pregnant again after around two months of playing poker regularly. They didn’t bother with asking their doctors to do a sonogram when their bellies got to be big – they readily recognized the different symptoms that they had and could consult with each other on the relevance of them – and they swapped mounds of blue baby clothes for pink ones and, of course, vice-versa. Also, boxes full of spurned and/or out-grown toys were regularly sneaked out of both houses and dropped off at the other one.

All four parties of the first part dropped all of their suits and countersuits, of course, and for days after that there was a good deal of gnashing of teeth by lawyers in the four offices involved but when the union lawyer was informed he was delighted because he was salaried and his work-load was horrendous.

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