This chapter contains a long section in which Sandy is the narrator rather than Steven. It is set in Italics. When the text switches back to the regular font, Steven is acting as narrator.
*
It was a several days before Sandy returned from her latest trip to London. While she was gone, Lisa came by and made the final selection of the paintings for my opening show at Wendover's Gallery. The subject of sex didn't come up. We were both very focused on the pictures. A day or so later a woman from the framing shop came by and picked them all up. I wouldn't see them again until the night of the show's opening, still several weeks off.
I spent the next few days working on the drawings I wanted to make of Angel. First I just did maybe a dozen pencil sketches. Then I settled on half a dozen I liked best and went to work with the pastels. It was the kind of work I just immerse myself in. I saw no one, ate junk food, slept hard, and didn't give a thought to sex, which I always found a little strange given the erotic nature of my art. Eventually I completed a series of six pastels of Angel. She was naked in all of them. In some she was sleeping or at least near sleep following our love making session. In others she was masturbating as she watched Rachel and me fucking, and there was one in which she was looking with concern at the wild sex Rachel and I were having. In all of those pictures she was sitting or curled up in the armchair at Rachel's, but I had changed the color so it contrasted better with her olive skin. She looked stunning. I thought the pictures looked great. They were too late, of course, for the current show, but they might work well in another show, assuming things went well enough so there was another show.
Now that the work was done I began to think about sex again—sex with Sandy to be specific. I was playing back in my mind the fabulous fuck we had in the front hall when she returned from her London/San Francisco trip. Yes, that was I wanted. I even began a sketch of Sandy and me standing naked in the front hall, her leaning against the wall with legs wrapped around my lower back, and me with her ass in my hands and my legs bent just enough to give me a spring board as I rammed my cock into her pussy. I hadn't been drawing male figures and that aspect of the image was proving difficult.
I was sitting at my drafting table, pencil in hand, trying to sketch the lurid picture I had in my head when the phone rang. It was Sandy calling from JFK to tell me she had just landed and would be coming straight home.
"Oh good!" I said. "I was sketching a naked Sandy, but I would much rather have the real thing."
"I'll be there in an hour. And don't start jacking off to any of those nasty pictures you draw," she whispered. Apparently she was still on the plane with strangers around her.
"I'll wait," I promised. "Are you wearing underwear this time?"
"No. I lost it all in London."
"Really! Lost all your underwear in London. Now how did that happen?"
"It's a long story. It'll have to wait until I get home."
"Sandy, were you a bad girl while you were in London? Did you do something nasty?"
"Yes," she hissed. "Now I have to get off this plane. See you in an hour." The phone clicked off at that point.
I had a knot in the pit my stomach as I set the phone down. What had she done? Sex with another woman? Probably. But had she fucked another man?
"Wait!" I told myself. "We agreed a week ago that we were both free to have sex with other people. That included men for Sandy. Besides, I had screwed both Angel and Rachel the day Sandy had left town, so I was in no position to complain."
As I scurried about the house cleaning up the mess left from my four or five days of intensive drawing, my anxiety about what Sandy had done and with who slowly converted itself into horniness. I wanted her to tell me, and I wanted to hear this story while we were fucking, or at least during foreplay. I was curious as hell. I was horny as hell. Was it some guy who picked her up in a bar? An old friend? A co-worker? The list in my imagination went on and on.
About 45 minutes later I heard a key in the door. I hurried to the front hall to meet Sandy. She barely got in the front door before I had my arms wrapped around her and my lips pressed against hers in a kiss. She responded, and as our tongues dueled I spun her to the side so she was leaning against the wall, her hips pushed against mine and her breasts smashed against my chest. I wanted to fuck as we had a week ago.
"Wait. Wait," she said, pushing me away. "We'll get to this, but there are some things we need to talk about."
Oh, not again, I thought. This is becoming an every week event. My wife goes away for a week, comes home horny and is about to fuck me when she tells me, "We need to talk." Of course there was the little matter of the six new nude pastels of Angel hanging in my studio. We needed to talk about those. But they were far from the first thing on my sex-obsessed agenda.
She ignored my questioning look and began to walk off down the hall, peeling her clothes off as she went. I took that as a good sign.
"Steve," she said as she walked away, "I think we need to have our talk in the bathtub. I'm going to go fill the tub while you take my bag to the bedroom. Oh and there is a bottle of cold Champagne. I picked it up on my way in from the airport and buried it in my bag to stay cold. Please bring the Champagne and a couple of glasses to the bathroom." She did a quick pirouette at the end of the hall and stood, naked from the waist up, looking to me for confirmation.
I stared in silence, stunned by her beauty. It always amazed me. After all these years of marriage she was still so stunning every time she took her clothes off that she left me breathless and wordless, just as though it was the first time I met her.
"Okay?" she asked. She was facing me, her weight back on the heel of one of her spiky pumps, a hand resting on a hip thrust to one side. As she waited for my answer, she reached back and tugged down the zipper on her skirt. It fell in a pool at her feet, leaving her naked but for her pumps and a string of pearls.
"The bath tub," I said. "Yeah, sure."
"And the Champagne. Don't forget the Champagne. We have something to celebrate."
"Yes. Of course," I said, struggling to focus on anything beyond the beauty of my naked wife.
As I turned to pick up her bag, still lying in the open doorway to our apartment, I heard her clatter away on her spiky heels toward our bath. By the time I turned to look again she was gone, leaving a trail of clothing. No bra or panties, I noticed.
I took the bag into the bedroom and begin to rummage around in it in search of the bottle of Champagne. I found it buried near the bottom of the bag, still cold. I noticed in the course of my search that there was no underwear in the bag—no bras, no panties, just some thigh high nylons. Apparently she
had
lost her underthings in London.
By the time I took the Champagne to the kitchen to get glasses and returned to the bath, Sandy had filled the tub and was lying naked, submerged in the steaming water up to her chin.
"Steven," she said. "There are a couple of things I want you to do for me."
"First, take off your clothes."
I quickly complied, continuing to stare in silence at my beautiful and naked wife.
"Good, and now that's that done, open that Champagne and pour us each a glass."
I extracted the cork with a satisfactory pop (really, what would Champagne be without the pop of the cork) and managed to do so without releasing a fountain of foam (a waste of good wine I always thought, unless it was cheap Champagne, in which case it should be sprayed on the winners of NASCAR races).
I poured each of us a glass and handed one to Sandy and then started to step into the tub.
"Wait," she said, her tone a bit harsher now. "There's one more thing."
"Yes," I said, freezing with one foot in the steaming tub.
"Before you get in this tub with me, who is the beautiful young woman in the new paintings on the wall of your studio?"
"Oh," I said, stepping back out of the tub. This wasn't exactly the way I had planned on telling her about Angel. Apparently she had looked in the studio on her way to the bath. "Well, that's complicated," I continued. "Rachel was involved."
Sandy smiled as she looked at me over the top of her champagne glass. "I should have known. You might as well get in the tub before you start to explain. Nothing involving Rachel is ever simple, and it is so much nicer in this warm tub." She didn't sound upset. A good sign.
As I settled into one end of the tub and let myself down into the water, Sandy sat up to give me room. My god, her tits looked sexy as the water dripped off her nipples. Our legs were quickly tangled and we each managed find a foot pressed against the other's crotch.
"Before we get into whatever no-good Rachel has gotten you into, let's talk about the Champagne."
Whew. A reprieve, I thought. "Sure," I said. "It's good Champagne."
"It had better be for what it cost."
"Oh. And can we afford it?"
"Now we can. I've been promoted to partner, and now I'm in charge of the AIM audit."
"Congratulations," I said, raising my glass in a toast. "But, I thought you were already in charge of the AIM audit." I could feel her toes stroking my erect cock. I returned the favor by pressing my big toe firmly against her pussy.
"Umm. That feels good," she said, momentarily distracted.
