How Marcus Met His Wife

(Author's note: This first installment is weighted more toward humor than erotica -- if you're looking for hardcore fucking right away, check out some of my other stories instead.)

Chapter 1. Marcus' Personal Ad

Mountain Man seeks SWF who can run a chain saw. Include picture of chain saw. Ad #7689.

***

Hi, I'm Marcus. I'm a 29 y.o. SWM, 6'2", 195#. I like cooking gourmet meals and sunset walks on the beach. I love children. I'm funny, sensitive, and intelligent. I'm seeking a drug-free SWF who is kind and smart. Ad #7690.

***

Marcus' younger brother Boomer splashed milk in his Cheerios, and then stabbed a finger at The Seattle Times. "Got an article here 'bout a kid who accidentally shot his sister. The parents think our legislature should ban handguns. Nobody forced them to buy a guy and not fucking supervise their children. Maybe they should ban children, or at least require you to pass an IQ test before procreating."

Marcus looked up from his bowl of Top Ramen and grunted. Best to keep quiet when Boomer started ranting this early in the morning.

Boomer tossed the rest of The Seattle Times on the bright orange shag carpet, where it joined a stack of empty pizza boxes, ground-in dirt and cat fur, a pile of empty Red Hook beer bottles, a centerfold from Velvet magazine with a mustache drawn on the bimbo's lip, and several hundred fleas. The thump of the paper startled Spare Kitty, who had been gnawed scraps of cheese off pizza crusts. The cat darted behind a disassembled Husqvarna dirt bike engine that oozed black gunk and wafted a stench like tires pan-fried in rancid olive oil

Boomer dumped peanut butter flavored Captain Crunch in his Cheerios, then picked up The Weekly. Halfway through his bowl of cereal, he slapped the paper down and pointed. "This your ad?"

Marcus squeezed more chocolate syrup in his coffee and splashed in some Bailey's liqueur. He grunted and nodded his head 'yes'.

Boomer raised an eyebrow. "So when did you become a 'leatherboy'?"

Marcus grabbed the paper and looked at the ad below his:

Leatherboy needs discipline and flogging from a stern master. Force this groveling piece of shit to lick your boots until they gleam. Ad #7691.

***

Marcus seductively batted his eyelashes. "Don't be tho silly, you butch boy. You know I detest leather." He jabbed the paper with his finger. "What about my other ad?"

"If I was a District Attorney, I'd accuse you of 'material misrepresentations' in that ad."

"If you were a DA, we wouldn't be sharing this dump of a house and eating Top Ramen and Captain Crunch for breakfast."

"If I was a DA, we wouldn't be talking at all," Boomer said. "Do you think I'd share my mansion with a dirtbag like you? Unless you were staff. Unless you served me breakfast, then cleaned up the dishes afterward with the slatternly maid, after I had cheap sex with her in the linen closet."

"You got a point to this tirade?"

"The point?" Boomer jabbed a finger in Marcus' chest. "This ad is packed with lies. Like that rot about cooking gourmet meals, unless you consider spaghetti with Spam meatballs a gourmet treat. And 'loves children'? Please. Then all those words you left out. Words like 'atheistic', 'introverted', 'dysfunctional', and 'pathologically lazy.'"

Marcus thought about the final Friday night that impelled him to resort to a personal ad. As usual, he'd stood alone at the edges of a crowded singles bar, drinking too much to get his courage up and then shyly asking women to dance. The women glanced at his gangly frame and thick glasses, then flicked their eyes back to their girlfriends and resumed chatting. Marcus drove home in the drizzling mist, and then huddled in a rocking chair on the cold porch. He rocked and stared at bare tree branches silhouetted against an uncaring moon, blinking back tears, nowhere to go and no one to see.

"I need a date," Marcus said. "I'm desperate. So I told a few lies in my ad. Big deal. You're one to talk – those words I left out describe you too. Plus a few more words, like 'slovenly', 'abrasive', and 'misogynistic.'"

"I resent that. I'm not introverted. Or an atheist." Marcus rolled his eyes. "You, religious? You believe in a kind, merciful God who created Hell?"

"Aaah, God doesn't give a rip about us. We're on our own. And She didn't bother making Hell. She knew if She gave us the cinderblocks, barbed wire, and plenty of no-necked thugs to man the machine-gun towers, we'd build our own Hell."

"You think God's female?"

"You think a male God would design women who ambush you after sex and nag you about where the fucking relationship is headed? Women whose tits and asses sag before they hit thirty?"

Marcus slapped his forehead. "Just when I think you'll say something sensitive ..."

Boomer glanced at the clock. "Whoops. Gotta jet. Gotta date with this nasty-looking little hardbody I snagged at the Square Cow last night, named ... uh ..." He looked puzzled, then pulled a tiny notepad from his back pocket and flipped through it.

Marcus stopped slurping noodles. His forehead crinkled. "You have a date with someone, and you don't even know her name?"

Boomer shrugged. "Can't expect a man to remember every picky detail about a chick he's only fucked once."

Chapter 2. Why Marcus Chucked Personal Ad Responses

•No phone number, no return address, no last name.

•Shaky grasp of grammar and spelling. A tendency to ramble, including two pages of chatter about how Aunt Tilly blacked out at cousin Arthur's wedding after polishing off most of the spiked juice in the punch bowl, then woke up naked from the waist down in the petunia patch with the Nicaraguan gardener.

•Loves being a prison guard. Fond of her charges. Too fond.

•Drug and alcohol problem "under control now." Vague definition of "under control." Inappropriately short time since last use: "I haven't done any smack for almost a month now. This time, I know I've kicked it."

•HIV positive.

•Answered someone else's ad. Hard cheese for Brent the stockbroker and his hot new Porsche convertible, missing out on meeting a "slim, tanned blond with great hair" who writes in purple ink and who is a perky little bundle, judging from her endearing habit of dotting her 'i's with hearts.

•Height proportional to weight. Obsessively so. Denies bulimia. Denies anorexia. Other mental pathologies evident.

•In prison. Desperately lonely. (Marcus forwarded this one to the prison guard.)

•Inappropriate gender.

Chapter 3. Marcus' First Date With His Future Wife

Karen pointed. "There's our farm."

Marcus stopped the black Thunderbird by a barn with a few shreds of red paint still clinging to the weathered boards. Dust wafted through the open doors, along with the reek of fresh cow shit. Marcus held his nose and coughed.

Karen looked at him like he was a wuss. "You get used to the smell."

A huge, grotesquely obese Labrador charged up and clawed at Marcus's door, helping break in the paint job. The dog stuck its muzzle through the window and bellowed. Marcus flinched.

Karen got out. "Don't mind him."

"Call this beast off. Fer chrissakes, what'd you do, cross a St. Bernard with a sea lion?"

Karen shrugged, "Yeah, he's kind of fat." She petted the dog. "Ooh, you're a good girl. Does um good doggies want his tummy wubbed? Yes he does."

"That dog is 'kind of' fat in the same sense Hitler was 'kind of' lax at Affirmative Action hiring." Marcus warily got out of his car and ruefully stared at the claw marks on his new car.

They walked inside a huge barn of a house. Karen, who Marcus had picked up at the hospital an hour ago, pointed at blood spatters on her surgical scrubs and said, "I want to shower and change out of my scrubs. You OK with waiting?"

Marcus waved her off, and watched her pleasingly plump buttocks sway as she left the room. He eyed all the dead animal heads on the walls. Deer. Elk. A moose. A mountain lion.

They should hang up mice heads, he thought. Or a cow's butt, or maybe a cat with tire tracks across its hide.

A large obese woman with big feet strode into the room and said, loudly, "So what are your intentions toward my daughter?"

Marcus thought of the obvious: 'I'll try to have sex with her.' Naah.

"Nothing but the best intentions."

Karen's mother stuck out her big mitt. "Hi, I'm Ingrid."

She proceeded to tell Marcus how her grandparents moved from Sweden to Yelm because of the cheap land. And how she met a handsome Italian boy while bucking hay. How he got her knocked up one night after she got ripped on margaritas and Bunny Flips. Marcus opened his mouth to ask what the hell were Bunny Flips, but by then Ingrid was rambling on about Karen's other dates: The Navy boy. Much of the rest of the Sixth Fleet. Dozens of rowdy farm boys in rusted pickups. The city slicker with the Saab and the attitude.

Fifteen minutes later, still not having managed to get a word in edgewise, Marcus sat on a barstool near a huge kitchen furnished with a rusty industrial-sized refrigerator, dark wood paneling, and clutter everywhere: glass penguins, ceramic penguins, penguin wind chimes, stacks of unopened mail, dirty dishes, a bird cage with no bird, two reeking trash buckets labeled 'pig slops' and 'regular', and a center island furnished with flies buzzing around and sampling scraps of food and getting trapped in the flypaper, little legs frantically waving trying to get free.

As Ingrid was rambling about Dotty Halvorsen's alleged fling with the brawny forklift operator at Oleg Gudmundsson's lumber yard, a grizzled wiry Italian man stomped in and yelled at Ingrid. She yelled back. The argument escalated. Marcus stared. He wasn't sure what they were squabbling about – something related to chopping 'green feed', whatever the hell that was.

They must be married. It's gotta take decades to learn how to piss each other off that badly.

Ingrid stomped out, muttering. A tractor engine coughed into life.

Karen's father brushed the biggest chunks of brown stuff off a huge weathered hand and offered to shake. "I'm Mario. You must be Karen's date."

Marcus shook, reluctantly. He eyed Mario. Several days' stubble. Curly black hair sporting an oily sheen, dust, and embedded nettle stickers. Bushy eyebrows that could use a good trimming with a weed-whacker. A manure-splattered T-shirt with the logo "Tansy ragwort is a pain in the grass" – a shirt that evidently hadn't been cleaned since the glaciers last rumbled north.

Mario started bitching: "These damn kids of mine don't mind eating my food, but watch them disappear when the green feed needs chopping. Hell, if you don't keep chawin' at them every minute ..."

The glaciers started rumbling back. Finally, Mario said, "... but I'm burning daylight. Got to fertilize the front thirty." He walked out, still grumbling.

Karen walked in while Marcus was washing his hands. She wore a pastel violet sweater and wafted traces of lilac-scented perfume. He eyed here, hoping she was adopted, but noting hints of her father in her wavy black hair, dark eyes, and olive skin, and traces of her mother's genes in her stubborn chin and voluptuously plump figure.

"Hi. Met your parents."

Her forehead crinkled with concern. "How were they?"

Marcus thought of the obvious: 'Were you adopted?' Naah.

"They were ... OK. Talkative."

"Oh, good. Sometimes they're a bit much."

As they walked to his Thunderbird, Marcus reached in his pocket for his keys and realized he'd forgotten to bring a condom. He looked at Karen and smiled, studying her face. She beamed back.

Naah, Marcus thought, too innocent. Be lucky to get her bra off this date.

* * *

Karen gazed at Marcus as he drove the car toward Mount Rainier and rambled on about the implications of Einstein's Theory of Relativity, how if you tossed a trial lawyer into a black hole at nearly the speed of light, the tidal forces would shred him into bits and make the world a better place.

I like him, Karen thought. He's sweet and funny. His shoulders are a bit scrawny, but then I'm no model either. Thank heavens my parents behaved.

Chapter 4. The Hot Tub

Later that night, a full moon reflected on the shimmering water of the hot tub as Marcus eased into the steaming water next to Karen. A cow mooed, and the snow capped bulk of Mount Rainier glowed softly in the distance.

Karen slid over so her plump, freshly shaved thighs touched Marcus' leaner legs. "Doesn't this feel good?"

Marcus put his hand on her kneecap and gently kneaded it. "Sure does."

Karen laid her head on his shoulder, her black curls tickling his neck. "So, do you like me more than the other girls who answered your personal ad?"

"Mmm, you bet." Marcus' hand moved off her kneecap and started kneading its way up her thigh. The first few inches went swimmingly, then the water splashed as Karen gently slapped his hand, halting the stealthy advance.

"Hey, what kind of girl do you think I am?"

"Umm -- the sexy kind who looks really hot in that rainbow swimsuit?"

This was apparently the right answer, as Karen lifted her head off his shoulder and gazed at him with her smoldering dark eyes, her full lips parting. Marcus' heart raced, and he slowly leaned in and gently kissed her full lips. The kiss lingered, and then her tongue slipped between his lips ...