Friday morning, around seven in the morning. We'd gotten in a little late from our shoe-shopping run to Memphis. It had not been a quick walk-in, walk out deal. I should have known. It had involved stops at Fredericks, Victoria's Secret, Christie's, and dinner at the Olive Garden before we drove the hour back home with not one but four pairs of shoes, more stockings, a new bright red bra and panty set from Fredericks, a few new toys, and so on. At this rate I needed to start hitting the casinos again. I was hemorrhaging money on her from the "gray cash" (shady but explainable) stash, and didn't want to tap the "black cash" (what I'd taken from Joe after his, uh, "disappearance").
The only good news was that all those errands could all be accomplished in the immediate area of the mall, with a stop at the grocery store for a pumpkin on the way home. This meant we had to get to bed quickly if we were going to have our usual amount of fooling around, and that had been hard. We'd gotten our jack-o'-lantern carved and out on the porch with a couple 12-hour green chemlights in it. But then Michelle had then felt compelled to try on the new red heels with the white thigh-highs for tomorrow night (assuming the SCA sewing expert didn't have the jacket at noon), and yeah, use your imagination. Suffice it to say I was not in a hurry to get out of bed. My alarm clock wasn't even set to go for another fifteen minutes.
I didn't have a choice about getting out of bed today. Michelle had her usual Marketing Admin at 9 and I had German Lit at ten before we could hit the gym and could be done for the day. Standard M-W-F schedule. After years of slogging through retakes of math classes, German was the only thing still keeping me in school so I could finish up the two years' foreign language requirement. I just did history things like Special Topics to stay in practice. Michelle was already out of bed, and I heard a loud "Oh, god-DAMN!" from the bathroom next door.
"You OK, dear?" I yelled.
"Yeah, but come here and look at this, please?"
Ugh. I don't wanna get out of fuckin' bed. I'm hurting and I'm tired. Courage, Dave, courage. A little pain in the knee, back is aching, but a nice hot shower...fuck it, I'm going to go sit in the hot tub for a while.
I got up, and stumbled up the hall to the bathroom. Since I was as much a housesitter as a tenant, what was now "our" bedroom was not the master bedroom of this four bedroom house. The General's bedroom was at the end of the upstairs hall, with the master bath off of it. I only went in there to run a vacuum cleaner now and then and wipe the dust off the horizontal surfaces.
The hall bathroom door was cracked open, and I leaned in there. Michelle was on the porcelain throne, reading one of the stack of old Penthouses I had kept in there for those occasions when I hadn't carried in a book.
She turned it toward me. "Oh my God, what do I have to do to get a pair of those boots?"
They were over the knee in height, black leather, chromed stiletto heels, half a dozen buckle straps up the back of each calf, and were very heavily accessorized with chains and chrome studs. Perfect 1980-early 90's rock video vixen wear. All of us of a certain age remember the style. The little index of such things in my head started spinning as I recalled the blonde bent over the red motorcycle. "Huh, that's Melissa Wolf under one pseudonym or another, looks like an Earl Miller picture..."
"Uh, don't know, don't care. I can tell she's not a real blonde and that's it. But the piece of my girly brain that likes sexy shoes is fuckin' overloaded. Look at those things!"
"Honey, they have so much metal on them they probably weigh five pounds each."
She started laughing. "Yeah, like I am going to WALK anywhere in those things. The hardest part if they're that heavy is pointing the heels at the ceiling like a good slut is supposed to. Who the hell are we kidding?"
I had to laugh at her cheerful honesty. "All right, I get the point, we can research it and find you a pair like them. Meanwhile, are you almost done or do I have to go in the other bathroom to piss?"
She looked a little abashed. "Um, I'm still working on it. Would you mind turning the fan on on your way out, Master?" I laughed again, blew her a kiss, and quickly retreated to borrow the master bathroom.
While relieving the pressure on my bladder, I thought about it, backwards-planning the morning the way airborne and air assault operations are scheduled. It was the same thing three days a week, but it never hurts to recheck the plan. Michelle to class at nine, thirty minutes to get there on average, leave here at 0830, fifteen minutes to get dressed and cleaned up, oh, cool, leaves me at least thirty minutes in the tub for a nice hot soak even if I was still making breakfast. Hell yes, it was a compensation for being awake early. I flushed and headed for the deck. Fuck clothes. I just made sure I had my old dive watch with me. I didn't have a clock out there.
I flipped the cover back and settled carefully out of the chilly air into the steaming water. Keeping the thing running all the time was a contributor to the electric bill, but I really didn't care. One, I considered it a medical necessity at times. Two, I could generally afford it. I closed my eyes and sat back.
No more than five minutes later, I heard the patio door slide back and forth, and Michelle joined me. I felt the disturbance in the water as she stepped down into the tub. I opened my eyes, appreciated her nudity for a moment, and then we quietly looked out across the foggy lawn in the early morning light. She looked over at me with a smile. "You know what I think is funny in that pile of porn magazines?"
"What's that?"
"The yellow Post-It notes marking your favorite pages."
I shrugged. "Had to find the good parts again somehow."
"Yeah, but you know what I like? The number of bookmarks that were for big-chested brunettes, like Stacy and Gina and so on. It's a turn-on for me to know I was your type before I myself was your type, like before we met."
"While you're quite attractively packaged for consumption, Miss Marketing Major, it's your dirty mind that is your most appealing point to me."
She mock-pouted. "See, it's not as much fun for me to know that a skinny blonde with B-cups could turn you on as much if she was also a masochistic little nympho slut. I think I'll go with my original theory, that you looked at Stacy or whoever and thought of me."
"Stacy Moran was the Pet of the Month four years before we met, and in that issue she was dyed blonde. And Gina Lamarca has been dyed red for most of her career. I don't think that was her natural color though. The carpet doesn't quite match the drapes."
"I swear, I ought to have a serious accident with my teeth the next time I'm blowing you. It would totally be worth the punishment afterward. You're just infuriating."
"If punishment is its own reward, I ought to not do it then."
