The List

She put a mug of coffee on the table beside me — she does this kind of thing a lot, gives me things when I've not ask for them, just assuming I want them. I find it slightly irritating.

She didn't retreat this time like she generally does, she pulled away a little and looked down on me. "Mike, I think we have to talk about this."

I looked at her over my book, slowly closing it, lowering it to my lap.

"I'm worried." I could see her concerned. "News like this can pull a couple apart."

"We'll be okay, Jude," I said, offering a reassurance I didn't feel.

"I know but still, I think we should be investing ... or start investing more in our relationship ... just in case." She looked miserable; I knew it had hit her hard. "I just think that without children we'll have to look to the future in a whole different way — we'll have to find new ways to get closer ... to keep our relationship alive."

We had learned three days before that Judy had a medical problem in her past that would prevent her from having children. At the time she had been stalwart about the news, that's her nature, but I knew it was bothering her, I just didn't know how much. Sounded like more than I thought. "Sure, I think you're right," which was a lie.

She smiled grimly, even with a touch of embarrassment and said, "Let's think about it," then she turned and left and I picked up my book and absently reached for the coffee.

It was two nights later, we had just finished watching the news, as we always did — we were creatures of habit, when she asked me if I had thought any further about what we had talked about.

It took me a moment to figure out what she was referring to; I said I had and that I thought she was right, we had sort of drifted apart — I thought that's what she wanted to hear; we hadn't really drifted apart: we were never very close.

She asked me what I thought we could be doing about it.

Investing in our relationship? What could we do about it? I had no answer. "I don't know, Jude, what do you think?"

"We don't really spend much time together, do we? Maybe we can start doing more things together."

I gave her an agreeing nod.

She shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know what. We both do housework but we do it at different times, in different ways. Maybe we can do it together, try to have some fun with it ... I mean we have to do it anyway. That's an example ... in little things, stuff we do anyway, routine stuff."

This wasn't going to happen. "Sure, we could give it a try."

"And maybe we could work on our communications: talk more ... about us, about our expectations, about what we want out of life — what we want out of our relationship. We never seem to talk about that at all. Maybe we should."

"I think that's a good idea."

We didn't do things together, she was right, but so what? Things got done: I turned off the television, she took the cups to the kitchen; I turned out the lights, she washed the cups — it always happened this way after the news, we kind of did things together ... without the verbal planning: like I always use the bathroom first while she changed into the long T-shirts she always wore to bed; like I always waited for her in bed to give her a kiss on the cheek before I turned over and tried for sleep.

But I knew she was right, we did have a problem. But it wasn't a new one, it wasn't created by our new reality, that our life together would never include children. Our problem was that we simply aren't really compatible. We had known each other all of our lives and through simple proximity had just continue on together after college as if we had so little imagination we couldn't think of alternatives. Our marriage had been a lazy mistake, at least for me. But it's one I would live with — I owed her that much.

But I did give a little more thought to what she had said. And I did agree with her. I think we both just assumed we would have kids, raise them as parents do then wake up 20 years later and plan for our retirement.

I'm pretty much a selfish prick. Life to me has always been about finding comfort and that comfort for me, more than anything, is about doing what I want to do when I want to do it. And I've gotten away with it from the get-go: she has always been totally supportive. But it sounds like I need to be making a little more effort now, not something I'm good at. But how do you invest in a relationship? I have no idea. I never have. So I didn't try.

And she didn't know how to either. Her idea of investing in a relationship is to invest, not in it, but in me and while that was great for adding to my comfort, it wasn't getting us anywhere

So nothing changed over the next week. I didn't know how to introduce change; she didn't know how to introduce change ... but, she had a friend who thought she did.

A week or so later, after she put the coffee mug down beside me, she sat down across from me like last time. "I was talking to Alice, at work, who said that one of the ways she and her husband made their relationship work is for them to create a list of things to do, things that will help pull the relationship together. I was thinking that maybe we could start a list like that."

I imagined her talking about our problems with her girlfriends, if that's what they are — she didn't seem close to very many people. I felt a flash of annoyance. Did I want strangers to know what was going on inside these walls? No, but I didn't let my anger show. "Sure, how would that work?"

"It would work the way we'd want it to work. Alice suggested that we come up with an idea, talk about it, refine it to what we both want then write it down and maybe put a due date against it, you know, so it would kind of force us into doing it. Something like that."

I didn't know Alice but I could tell she was a meddler. "Okay, sure. Did she suggest anything we could put on the list?" I said that with some sarcasm but I knew Judy wouldn't pick up on it.

She laughed, sort of -- she doesn't have much of a sense of humour. "She asked me if you ever bought me any, ah, you know, ah, unmentionables. I told her you never have. She suggested that that could go on the list — a lot of husbands do, they buy their wives those types of things." She quickly added, "She had other ideas, too ..."

I quickly stopped her. "No, no, I can do that." I picked up my book. Unmentionables. Had it really got to that?

I'm cool but I'm a bit of a wimp, too: on the surface I was fine with buying my wife some underwear but the more I thought about it I couldn't see me pulling that off. What was I supposed to do? Walk into one of those stores, smile at the other guys, paw through the stuff and present my offerings at the counter? Really? The thought terrified me ... I knew other men did it all the time but it wasn't me; I wasn't the type.

But at 6:07 the next evening I was — I forced myself to do it and do it fast because I didn't want to lose any more sleep over it and because I knew if I didn't do it as soon as I could, I never would.

It was awful: I felt like a little boy being naughty. I got in and out in minutes and was still so pissed off at that meddling Alice that I wanted to get back at her and the only way I could think of doing that was to not give Judy what I had bought. Let them both wait. I'd get my sleep.

Judy usually went into her office at least an hour before I did — that was her; she has always been a keener. On these days I would wake up for just a few seconds, say bye, then roll over and nap until the alarm.

I didn't this morning. Judy always gets dressed sort of half-way behind the closet door -- she wasn't exactly hiding but she sort of was, too. I watched her this morning because I imagined her yesterday when I was in the store, imagined her in the things that were hanging from hangers on the walls and in racks and I imagined her in the things I bought. I think for the first time in my life I actually sexualized the woman. As I sipped a beer in the lounge across from the store — trying to calm my nerves, I imagined her shapes and contours in what I had bought: her erotic mound under the silken sheen of the light yellow panty and how the elastic would bit into her lithe thigh; I imagined the curve of her breast in the flimsy, sexy bra with the bright pink straps and the little yellow rose between the cups — Judy has oddly shaped breast, they flop noticeably and have nipples (when I have seen them) that naturally point towards her feet. I've never liked her body ... until my mind slipped it into that sexy underwear.

That was in the bar. When she left for work I did it again, I lay there and imagined her as I had yesterday in the flimsy things I had bought for her. As in the bar I got an erection almost immediately but I knew it wasn't her that gave it to me, it was the underwear. I lay there for awhile just thinking about it, then it occurred to me the underwear was in a bag in my closet. I quickly jumped out of bed, got the bag, pulled out a pair of bright pink panties and lay back down and looked at them and started doing something I rarely did, I stroked.

It was fabulous. It was the material, the colour, the shape of them, the naughtiness of it and it was imagining the middle age woman who was standing a rack away with a pair very much like these ... she was deciding whether or not to buy them; I was imagining her putting them on.

I was just barely stroking as I replayed the scene, I was so close, just holding on when another thought pierced my sex-clouded funk; it must have come from my youth. I nearly sprang out of bed, got to the hamper in a few strides, rummaged through and found a pair of her panties and was quickly back in bed, back with my hand on my cock, back slowly stroking but this time with her panties in my hand, her white cotton panties dangling from my fingers waiting to squeeze it around my cock, to catch my cum, to clean me off.

I got very close, very fast. I slowed down. I stopped. I looked at them again and imagined the white cotton tight against her pussy; her dense black bush a shadow behind the bright white. I sniffed them; I could smell her, faint, musky, sweaty. There was a single curly black hair caught inside. I picked it out and twirled it between my fingers. It was mine in a way. No one else had ever seen one one of her's; had ever held one. I could tell her to put her whole forest of them in my face and she would, I knew she would, I have never asked her to do that but I knew she would. I dropped it in my pubic own hair and scratched it in.

I thought of her on my chest, I thought of her sliding her pussy along my chest towards my face, her breasts flopping down, her large black eyes looking down at me in confusion. I could feel her hair against my face, feel the wetness of her, smell her, much stronger than what was in her panties. When I came I was rubbing the panties against my lips and nose.

And then I did it all again.

The feeling of my orgasms stayed with me as I cleaned myself with her panties, as I wiped the semen off my belly and my still erect cock, which only got stiffer when I turned her panties inside out and rubbed the slight stain against it.

When I finally had to get out of bed I wonder why I had never done this before; it was such an unbelievable rush.

I put her panties back in the hamper, pushing them deep to bury the evidence, but after I had showered and got ready for work I went back to the hamper, pulled them out and laid them on top. If she saw it, fuck her. Deal with it.

My attitude towards Alice was changing big time as I drove to work.

And I change my attitude towards panties. When I was a kid I filched my mother's a few times and once I even took Judy's from her room in her parent's house — she found them in my room at home and put them in her purse as if she had left them in my room by mistake, like that could have happened.

All day her panties were swirling in my brain, not so much because of the store, but because they had given me such fabulous orgasms, the best I could remember — so good that I saw a future now of man-time in our bed, stroking and thrusting and shooting into the delicate colourful fabrics I had stored in a bag in my closet. I had some form of an erection pretty much all day.

I'm usually doing something while she cooks supper, I wasn't tonight, I was sitting at the kitchen table watching her, wondering what colour panty was inside her jeans. She has a great ass, I've always known that, but to me it was always a great ass wasted on her; sexless.

But tonight it was the ass that would be in he yellow panties I was rubbing against my face. And it was that ass in the white panties I took from the hamper and would take from the hamper tomorrow morning ... or maybe I'd do it tonight, maybe when they're still warm, still fragrant ... spend some time on the toilet.

There, sitting at the table I could see the hint of her panty line. I put my fingers on my erection and squeezed then I got up, went up-stairs, rummaged through the hamper, found a light blue pair and caught myself with them after just a few strokes.

As I ate I thought about the bag of panties in my closet and why I didn't want to give them to her. Maybe I didn't want to appear too eager. Or maybe it was because I didn't want to change the equilibrium in our marriage: better the devil you know than the devil you don't. Maybe I didn't want her to de-sexualize something I had worked so hard to sexualize: my fantasies were vivid, consuming and wonderfully productive. Did I want her fucking with that? No.

But she wanted change. She opened talks again later that night. Again, with another, 'have you had a chance to think about what we were talking about?'

I'm not a prick, well, I am but I try not to be. I knew we had issues and I knew the baby thing was a big problem for her, but I said what I was thinking anyway. "They say when you've had a big change in your life you shouldn't make big decisions. Maybe we should wait a bit, recover a little ..."

"We had problems long before the news, it just puts the problems into greater focus. We aren't close, Mike. We could have another 40 years together. Do you want to live like this?"

I didn't want to be on record. "So what do we do?"

"We talk, we try to find a way forward — we're friends, Mike, we've always been friends, we can do this, the question is, do we want to do it?"

That was a question I could hardly avoid. "Yes, of course we do ... I do, don't you?"

"Maybe we should create the list, talk about things, see what we want to put on the list and then put a due date against everything so we have to do it, otherwise, it would be just too easy to let things slide."

"Ya, sure, that's a good idea."

"I've mentioned cleaning together ..."

"And you said you want me to get you some underwear."

She flinched. "If you want to."

"Sure. OK."

"Why don't you just think about it. I'll draw up a list format, put a couple of things on it, you can see them, agree or not, put on some of your own — we can see where it goes. OK?"

"Sure." I was feeling a little shitty: she was trying, why wasn't I? Then I thought about her underwear drawer and wondered why I had never looked in it.

I did while she watched the news, I took each pair out and looked at it, trying to find the sexiest ones. I found them after a methodical ten minute search. They were black, they had embroidery along the elastic and they were made of a very soft, very sexy fabric. I held them up as I sat on the toilet, held them up as I pumped, held them up and imagined her slim hips and hairy pussy disappear into them. I caught myself with the blue ones still wet from my earlier visit.

I lay in bed with my eyes wide open. The clock read 4:13. I hate disruption and I hate it when she's unhappy, and she is, I know that. And I knew that if our marriage was going to work I had to start taking her seriously. She deserved that; Judy has cared for me for my entire life, even as a kid she was looking after me.

I've often looked for the one word to explain why I married her. Certainly the word wasn't 'love.' In fact, I don't think there is a single word, but, like a recipe, there are a few of them: a measure of respect, a dollop of admiration, an abundance of familiarity — we were practically neighbours, our parents were best friends, we went to the same school, sometimes the same class. That I actually graduated from high school and university had more to do with her force-feeding me lecture notes than any ambition I ever had to succeed.

And she helped me early on in my career, too, helped me when I desperately needed it, the maturity part, the nose to the grind-stone part and the whole part about taking life seriously. By default I'm irresponsible and lazy. My innate inclination has always been to just piss away my time on video games, long walks and impulsive hobbies: modelling, remote control airplanes, web design — I've tried dozens of things to occupy my time but always dropped them before I mastered them. That was me, The Idler.

She brought me gravitas, a whole boatload of it. She's an industrious, focused, humourless, successful engineer. Enough said? It gets worse. She appears to be the very person she is. She's medium height, hasn't got an ounce of fat on her, is not at all good looking — not ugly but with a cluster of facial features that just don't work well together: big nose, medium mouth, huge eyes, low forehead, pointed chin, sharp cheekbones — the affect would be interesting if she was interesting, but she isn't, she's just a good person who has always been very, very good to me in a supportive, motherly kind of way. So I did the noble thing: I married her four years ago after sort of going out with her for most of my life, sort of because I never liked to do the things she wanted to do and I never much wanted her around the other time.

I know, this says more about me than it does her. I get that. As I said, I'm an idler; when she pressed for marriage I just didn't push back.

Our life together had unfolded pretty much like I knew it would. It's predictable, boring, unimaginative and devoid of any adventure. But, even if it isn't warm, it's comfortable and because of that and because I'm an idler, I'm in it for the count, and God knows she is, she hasn't got the imagination to get out of a failed marriage ... and anyway, life without me would be unthinkable to her.

But it ain't all bad. We are comfortable; I sort of admire her; I do respect her and, to a significant degree, I profit from her, so who cares that it's not much of a challenge? Who cares if we aren't close? Who cares if we don't have a sex life? I don't. Really, I don't. She leaves me alone.

I thought about the ass that was now touching my hip, the ass behind the long t-shirts she always wears to bed. I thought about touching it, thought about running my finger gently along the crack, running it up and down, touching her. I thought about this until 5:23 when I got up and deposited another load into the still damp light blue panties.

I know why I went back. The cums I had were just so over-powering — and I associated them with the store, with all the underwear hanging around and the women shopping for them. The place was such a multimedia temptation I couldn't stay away, sick though it is. And I no longer had the same fear of the place. That first time? I couldn't get out of there fast enough, but I knew it wouldn't bother me as much this time and when I sauntered in, the woman's smile was all the more encouraging.

"Last time I was in such a hurry to get out of here I forgot a few things on the list," I said, as cooly as I could.

She smiled even more encouraging now, as if she remembered me. "It happens a lot. First-timer's realize we don't bite. What can I help you with?" She did remember me.