CHAPTER 12.
After leaving Ben, Erika went to complete a few tasks. While she set the tables for dinner, she thought about what was developing in her relationship with Ben.
His wish to photograph her and to have her sexy pictures on his Ipad pleased and excited Erika. To pose for Ben in the enticing underwear she had bought with and for him was a sexual thrill. So was the idea of him frequently looking at it. Erika decided, therefore, to text Ben tonight and make a date for their photo-shoot.
For the moment, Erika did not want to think about -- beyond his titillation - what her images on his pad were going to be for Ben. Would it be a memento of something past, or become a token in their ongoing digital relationship of what they could not share in the flesh? There were only two weeks left until Ben would leave for Germany. Would that be the end of their relationship, or would they, by mails and texts as he seemed to want, stay connected in most intimate touch?
Unlike Ben's wish to photograph her, it was the sexting relationship that continued to be for Erika a problem. In suggesting it, Ben talked about the lonely nights to come, and his wish to keep their sexual relationship through sexting alive. How would this work out with her present sharing-all with Christine? It raised for Erika up to now unfaced questions.
Erika had, of course, read Christine's suggestive texts to Ben on their shared Pad. At this stage, she was only mildly discomfited by Christine's intention to get with Ben sexually involved. They had acquired the Ipad to share in the pursuit of sexual interests. And now Christine seemed to expect that she and Erika would also share Ben as a lover.
Christine made her expectations clear with her sexting: If Erika objected, she was going to be a competitor; if Erika agreed, she consented to share in a Threesome. If the latter would have happened, for example, with a hotel-guest attractive to both for a sexual holiday-diversion, it would have been no problem. Shared sexting could have merely added spice to a brief, possibly full-on Threesome adventure.
The complicating issue in what had developed was that Ben was not a stranger. For both, Erika and Christine, Ben had been their first, by circumstances unfulfilled love. Erika and Ben had left it unconsumed. With fifteen-year-old Christine, her passion was unrecognised and then only half-known by herself.
Now, twenty-five years later, as mature married women, the sisters met Ben again. Their sexual desire for Ben arose not out of a wish for an opportunistic fuck, but for a sexual relation charged with the fire of long-time emotions shared by the three. For Erika and Christine, it was not the porn-scenario of sexually frustrated housewives in search for larger cocks. And neither was it for Ben, they believed, just an opportunistic adventure. It was the bursting of a long-time emotional smoulder into a fire. Like once before, it was again unlikely to extinguish with Ben's departure and their separation.
The problem was for Erika a peculiar one. While surprised by her own reaction, Erika had been neither hurt nor greatly jealous by the likelihood of Christine and Ben becoming lovers. What put Erika's mind in turmoil was the shared Ipad.
If she joined Christine in sexting Ben, it would indicate her willingness to share Ben not in a discrete one-on-one, but in a Threesome. Through sexting -- as Ben's and Christine's had already shown - it would also be a relationship of unreserved intimacy. It would go well beyond knowing that they shared in a lover. And as Cristine's sexual interest in Ben rested as much as Erika's in long-held emotions, she would expect to be included in any long-term connection with Ben. It was for Erika a prospect that both intimidated and scared, as well as excited her.
She also knew that she could not avoid a decision. Her unwillingness to continue to share would be seen by Christine as a betrayal that would destroy the closeness of their relationship. It also was clear to Erika that the unusual nature of such a Threesome-arrangement would actually suit the circumstances she and Christine were in.
Erika and Christine were in marriages that had left them sexually unfulfilled and emotionally unattached to their husbands. Neither she nor Christine was, however, on the lookout for an alternative, monogamous relationship. They were modern, clear thinking women whose disaffection was as much with marriage and its stultifying constraints as about the men they had married.
Erika and Heinz had in the twenty years of their marriage grown more and more apart. Starting off without a particular strong sexual and emotional bond between them, it never developed within their marriage. From its beginning, Heinz' career made ever-increasing demands on his time. Nothing in his work, in his task-centred social circle, and in his highly specialised interests could be shared by Erika. Heinz's professional success secured for him and his family a high status in their community as well as financial rewards. But, as a husband and man, Heinz always had too little interest, time or attention left over for Erika.
Theirs, therefore, never was a life together. Erika accepted it as a given, neither blaming him nor herself. With no hostility in their relationship, a settled, almost comfortable living occasionally side-by-side, and an almost grown-up son, Erika had no desire to change or upset her life. She wanted to stay married to Heinz.
Christine's marriage to Gerd differed in that it had been for both nothing more than a convenient arrangement. They had known each other for years. Gerd was the son of the elderly owners of the hotel for whom Christine not only worked, but had, eventually, managed and modernised their property. With frequent contact over more than ten years, Gerd and Christine, both single and of similar age, could have developed a romantic interest in each other. It did not happen.
When Gerd, a professional soldier, became the reluctant and unprepared heir and owner of the hotel, he continued to rely upon Christine as manager even more so than his parents had done. While Gerd had no interest in the hotel business, he relied on the income it produced for his indulgences. His all-consuming interests were in the hunt he had inherited with the hotel. His membership in the brotherhood of fellow hunters combined rather neatly with Gerd's love of cards, gambling, and heavy drinking.
Gerd was intelligent enough to acknowledge Christine's exceptional ability in running his business and thereby producing the means to finance his hobbies and interests. So, he proposed marriage. Christine, by then in her thirties, set some conditions and accepted Gerd's proposal.
In speaking with Erika about her marriage to Gerd, Christine was unapologetically blunt. There was no love, no buzz of sex involved in her decision, she said. She and Gerd had known each other for ages. It was for her an advantageous contractual arrangement that made her part-owner and sole manager of the hotel.
Regarding Gerd's 'marital rights', Christine shrugged her shoulder, saying that, after all, she had had sex with men she didn't love before. Gerd was neither physically repulsive nor an objectionable bully that made occasional sex with him an issue for her. Besides, he had never been sexually interested in her, and marriage did not change this. There were also the factors of Gerd's almost nightly absences, his alcoholism, and his deteriorating health. She suspected, Christine said in finishing off the topic with Erika, that Gerd's sex drive was already too low to make her sexual disinterest in him an issue.
Christine had, unlike Erika, no affection and respect for her husband. But she also had no wish to end her marriage and to risk losing what she had gained. And both of them were, within their small-town social environment widely known, watched and scrutinised, and threatened by gossip. Christine was a hotelier and Erika, the wife of a local legend. Being suspected of or getting caught in an extramarital affair was for both of them a risk.
It was this very fact that made their joint affair with Ben additionally attractive. Firstly, there was, of course, for Erika and Christine their shared and long-standing emotional attachment to Ben. Then, paradoxically, he had re-entered their life as a foreign guest in their hotel. For the short time of his visit and him a stranger to any possible scrutineer, they could have with Ben a sexual relationship that neither threatened their marriage nor reputation. And remaining in a powerfully sensual relationship via regular mails and sexting with Ben would be attractive for the same reason.
