. 04-06

IV.

The drive home was unusually silent. While Jenn concentrated on keeping the unfamiliar power of the ZX under control, getting them home safely through the dark night, Matt's wandering mind filled with images of erotica characters – "O", Lesley, Beauty – all in the form of Dara, the Sapphire Siren – she seemed to have taken on capital letters – the Sapphire Siren – alias the wedding sylph. Although she was really not quite a sylph – a bit too voluptuous for that – a nymph, perhaps. For reasons unclear to himself, he saw her bound and gagged, being led, head down, to fates unknown. He pictured her strapped over a bolster, being thrashed mercilessly – her backside and thighs striped bright red by the relentless tawse – her pitiful cries falling upon deaf ears. He imagined her moving about a posh lounge, alternately felating guests with abandon and resignedly being sodomized by them. The visions both puzzled and stirred him.

His mind aroused, inflamed with the fantastic imagery it had conjured, he was, by the time Jenn pulled into the garage, very, very much awake. Jenn giggled her relief at being home, as Matt reached over and gave her right boob a squeeze. With the urgency of their suddenly rekindled passion, they bustled into the house, shedding their vestments along the way as they headed pell-mell for the bedroom. They didn't make it.

Jenn, giggling hysterically, stumbled in the hall, and Matt, his hands groping her bottom, tearing at her panties, the last remaining article of clothes on either of them, tripped over her feet and fell upon her. The sheer silk crotch of her bikini was already drenched in anticipation and gave easily as Matt, roaring with delight, tore it from her to expose her dripping snatch. Their laughing and panting lasted a few moments more as they furiously positioned themselves, then Matt drove himself deep into her with one powerful thrust. The sudden intrusion forced Jenn’s breath out in a whimpered gasp. She clasped her hands tight around his back, digging her nails in for grip; her legs flew up to cross at the ankles, pulling against his buttocks, and holding his pelvis in tight.

They paused for a moment, without a sound, without a breath, then Matt pulled back, sliding his cock right out so that his glans just tickled her labia before thrusting in again. He pounded her again and again, his prick repeatedly battering her uterus, invading her most private sanctum. He drew from her the groans and whimpers of unbound lust. He concentrated on her rapidly approaching orgasm, delighting in the uncontrolled shaking of her hips, the insatiable shoving of her sex onto his shaft. Her whimpering rose to a whine and then a wail as she exploded in climax, bouncing her backside on the carpeted floor, grasping and releasing him with her vaginal muscles.

Just as he thought his pecker could grow no bigger, get no harder, he felt it swell further. Banging up against her cervix he felt the trigger being pulled, and, as Jenn shook her head from side to side, digging her nails deeper into his back and singing out the continuing refrain of her orgasm, Matt plunged once more into her quim, mingling his pubic hair with hers, ramming himself hard against her pudendum, threading himself so deep into her that as his elixir boiled out into her their orgasms merged into one. His tool pumped and pumped, emptying much more fluid into his wife than his balls could have reasonably been expected to hold. Their mutual bucking and panting carried on for an eternity, until, slowly, they were able to lock lips and moan their pleasured agreement together.

Finally they came to a stop, and lay motionless, tongues touching, arms tight around one another, Matt's penis still semi-rigid, still filling Jenn's vaguely pulsing vagina. Time started to tick once again. It was late. They were tired – tired and happy.

In the calm, dim settling of afterglow Matt offered a nonspecific "Wow!"

"You're not kidding."

"I take it you're satisfied, Milady?"

"Nooo," Jenn's breathy voice dripped with sarcasm, "Let's try again."

Matt played along. "Really?"

"Oh, no. I'm drained."

"Excuse me?

You're

drained? I don't think so."

They slowly uncoupled; each made a listless feint at picking up the clothes, then arm in arm they went up the stairs towards their bedroom.

"I hope we didn't stain the carpet," Jenn muttered flatly, then twittered at the unimportance of the remark. Matt joined her chuckle as they entered the room and flopped side by side onto the bed. Throwing an arm over her eyes, Jenn heaved a heavy sigh. Matt shuffled into the ensuite and returned with a steaming hot cloth which he gently placed over her matted bush, having already bathed his own pubis.

"Ahh," she intoned, as she let her hand take the cloth and clean up between her thighs.

Exchanging her cloth for a dry towel, in a time-practiced maneuver, Matt remarked, “Seemed

especially

good tonight, eh?”

Jenn replied with a smile, “Patrick was certainly perky, wasn’t he?” There was, however, an unverbalized conditional on the end of her remark, which Matt chose to ignore.

Patrick the Trouser Snake was the name Jenn had given his member the first time they’d had sex. She had declared that, as it had had a life of its own, it should have a name of its own as well. The name had stuck, with a few variations like Patrick Penis or Pat Pecker.

"You might even say he was rampant, eh?" Matt suggested, feeling more content than he had for a long while.

"Yeah, that's for sure." She paused, trying, it seemed, to decide how to say what she obviously wanted to say. "But," Matt felt vaguely alarmed as Jenn tried to voice her feelings; "I don't know. It was very good, I mean VERY good, but, I don't know," she seemed almost hobbled by her intended diplomacy. Matt just wished she would get it out. Finally she did. "You didn't seem quite all here – to start with, at least. Like you were a bit preoccupied. You were so pensive all the way home and you still seemed to be just landing back on this planet when we got into the house. I felt like saying 'Welcome back.' What were you thinking about?"

Matt knew his face flushed. What could he say? "Oh, I don't know," he stammered. He was shocked that she had noticed his inattention, his preoccupation. He felt guilty when he thought of the images he had conjured up. "Just the wedding; people at the reception."

"The girl in the bright blue dress?" Jenn proposed, with a sly grin.

"Well, yeah." Damn! He'd been caught. Adultery of the mind. He was guilty as sin; he had been fantasizing, almost obsessing over visions of another woman. Jesus he was a bastard. "An others," he fibbed, "like her sister and the groom's mother."

Even in his guilty exposure, racy images suddenly sprung up and rushed headlong through his thoughts, unbidden, unconstructed – random scenarios that, interestingly enough, also included sister Caroline, the obese mother, the groom's mother, the bride and several other wedding guests; even, somewhat objectively, Jenn.

"But you got my attention back, eh?" he smiled sheepishly.

There was a note of pride in her voice when she whispered, "Yeah, I guess I did, at that."

V.

Over the next two or three weeks Matt was fraught with an overbearing, shapeless disquiet. His time at work was a sham, despite the 'projects' he had underway. Jobs around the house struck him as increasingly futile, the hundreds of little things to do that had, up until now always provided, if nothing else, a satisfying diversion for him, seemed pointless. He rattled about the office and rattled around the house. He was suddenly ill at ease with himself; he couldn't get comfortable when he was alone. Only Jenn's soothing presence could calm him – let him rest easy for a while. If not for their sex – recharging and invigorating him – and the afterglow that let him view the next hour or next day from a more tranquil vantage point, he knew he would have sunk into dissolution.

However, Jenn still worked on a call-out basis, as well as going to aerobics once or twice a week, so, sometimes when Matt got home to an empty house, if Jenn wasn't expected back for a while, he would masturbate – slowly – before going out for a good, long run. Recalling exciting incidents of the recent past, he'd stroke himself to erection – Jenn settling naked over his stout flagpole, then riding it like a bronco buster as he molded her warm perky tits with his hands. But visions of the young woman at the wedding – Dara – began to insert themselves into his masturbatory daydreams. First he would just imagine her as she danced her seductive steps on the dance floor, then he started to imagine what must have taken place shortly after they left the reception. The boyfriend's hand on her muff, panting and slobbering while she took his tool out of his pants and jerked him off. Or maybe, reclining his seat and straddling him, lowering her tight snatch onto his shaft and bouncing, with her elbows on the steering wheel for support. He began to see visions of her opening her honey-pot for him – lying back on the bed and spreading her legs – fantasies in endless variations.

Matt watched on the inside of his eyelids as Dara's thick black bush descended onto his face. He could almost feel her lips take the place of his fist, surrounding his rigid tool. His hand accelerated on his cock until his breath began to rasp, and, pumping his erection violently, his spunk erupted, running in gobs over his knuckles and into his pubic hair.

He cleaned up quickly and, while the flush of release was still warming him, jumped into his running garb and headed out onto the streets. Five years earlier, when he was thirty-six and anchored to his office, he realized that he was a prime candidate for a heart attack. He had never been a really active person but since they had had kids he'd found that he could get along with almost no activity at all. He hadn't given his sedentary lifestyle a second thought until he heard about a friend of a friend who had keeled over at thirty-eight years old. Matt had never really liked running all that much but he couldn't swim worth beans, his tennis game was marginal at best, and he hadn't had a bicycle for years, so he decided to 'run for his life'. Initially it was everything he was afraid it would be – fifteen minutes of hell, giving him sore knees, sore feet and a ragged throat. But he persevered. Eventually, he replaced his fashion sneakers with real running shoes. It made a universe of difference. Suddenly it was not such an ordeal; suddenly he could actually stay out for more than twenty minutes without considering suicide.

That was over four years ago. Now he could turn in a forty-five minute ten K; if he got out less than four times a week, he would get edgy. His running had been a lifesaver after the children's deaths; he knew he needed it to help him get through this too. However, recently, he even felt rattled running. The freedom of pounding road was a relief, but even that didn't quite fill the hungering spaces within.

When he was alone, trying to hold the ominous veil of discontent at bay, trying to concentrate on a book, writing a report, doing just about anything, he began to be disconcerted by random and explicit visions of Dara. While he was masturbating, or thinking about it, he expected them, but out of the blue? For no apparent reason he would suddenly picture her hanging by her ankles and wrists, as in the Hall of Punishment, her face between her knees in the inverted pike position described in Sleeping Beauty; her genitals exposed, open to the whims and torments of whoever passed; or he would see her with a horse tail protruding from between her whip-striped bottom cheeks, performing dressage on the sawdust floor for the castle court. He saw her in a Sultan's palace, hanging semi-clothed, hands above her head, doing a wild dance on her tiptoes in a futile attempt to escape the jabs of the bee-sting coated needles in her thighs and buttocks; and he saw her at a trapeze, like Marilyn Chambers in Behind the Green Door, surrounded by and filled with throbbing cocks. And it puzzled him that in every scene he imagined she was in a submissive role, whereas, the only time he had actually seen her, she had full control over the situation.

The strange tableaux confused him, for he could not understand why he was being haunted at a time when he was so close to collapsing anyway under the weight of this melancholy. As much as the erotic dreams didn't exactly exacerbate his depression, they certainly complicated it. While his confusion mounted, so did his dissatisfaction. He tried to keep it to himself – tried to discover what he wanted, what he was missing, why his thoughts roamed into such strange quarters, and what, if anything, this all had to do with his treatise on passion.

Matt started reading more and more erotica; and rereading the titles that dealt with submission and subjugation –

The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, The Story of "O", Blue Velvet, Lesley

and

The Gardens of the Night

. In the rereading of those, he found the material to be – more than just suggestive, arousing and exciting – strangely, deliciously disturbing. Such stories caused peculiar sensations – in a way, almost revulsion – feelings of guilt and fright, yet also of morbid curiosity, even delight. Were such scenes of complete domination actually possible? Did they really occur – anywhere? He became nervous and shaky while reading; his stomach would knot up in an odd way; but he would be entranced. He invariably had difficulty putting down such a tale once begun. It was almost as if he were addicted to the sensations produced by those pieces of erotica. And the stimulation was overpowering. Very often – usually – he would need to masturbate while reading these passages, compounding his self-inflicted guilt. Only after his climax, which was always very powerful, would he be able to put down the book. Often, in fact he found that he

had

to stop then. He couldn't take any more imaginary stimulation – he just couldn't read any more.

Once again, after being shown the pictures of her daughter's discipline at school, Lesley was being required to felate the Headmaster who had done it. She was being whipped until she complied. Matt knew the segment very well. He stroked his rock-hard penis with slow, deliberate strokes, as he read the passage again, disregarding the ignoble stains on the pages. He occasionally let the edge of the book flick over his nipples. The stress was building. He could feel the growing ball of fission in the centre of his groin. As Anton's whip finally yielded results, Matt could almost feel Lesley's mouth descend over his tool; but it was now Dara's backside Matt saw in his mind, striped red from the thrashing, and Dara's warm mouth reluctantly taking him in. The book fell limp in his hand as, throwing his head back with a groan, his orgasm rumbled up from the depths to explode in creamy spurts into his lap.

Matt sat still and silent, dazed, as his breath and pulse slowly returned to normal. As awareness returned, he marveled at the intensity of the climax – a climax brought on by the vicarious passion of printed words. His masturbatory orgasms seemed to be increasing in strength, and the post-ejaculatory trances getting longer. Why that should be the case, Matt didn't know; but he was sure it was all interconnected – the whole passion/dissatisfaction thing. He had to do something, make something actually happen, otherwise he would end up spending the rest of his life jerking off.

His thoughts repeatedly returned to 'The Sapphire Siren'. She probably wasn't the key to his concerns, probably not even part of the elusive solution, but she might be a place to start. In this way, finally, slowly, he decided to seek her out. What he would do or say if and when he found her, he hadn't the slightest idea. "Hi! I'm Matt and I fuck…” He'd run that scenario before, it seemed to him. Her sister had implied that she was kind of wild, even loose. Maybe, he could just ask her to coffee and go from there. Maybe, even, she'd suggest that they get intimate – "get on down" as it were. He'd never had an extramarital affair; in fact his only exposure to them had been on the television and in the movies, so he didn't know what one might expect – what it would be like. The plot line of

Fatal Attraction

flitted past. "Just a story," he reminded himself. Of course, he was getting just slightly ahead of himself. He had to locate her first and he had absolutely no idea how to do that, but at least he had decided on a course of some sort.

Having a goal of sorts raised Matt's spirits immensely. He was still haunted by disturbing, exciting images, but now they served to keep him focused. While he wrestled with plans to find the girl, well, woman of his fantasies – tangible ideas like finding her in the telephone book – then what; the personal ads – maybe; bulletin boards on the 'Net – possible – he found himself invigorated. Suddenly he was running better, feeling better, making love to Jenn more often and enjoying it more – not that he ever didn't enjoy it – even enjoying his masturbation more while doing it less.

He had actually composed an ad for the personals column of the local semiweekly rag, but hadn't yet submitted it when, in the post-race crowd of a popular fun run, the Tri-City Classic, in the parking lot of a Coquitlam mall, he caught sight of her. She had just removed her sunglasses to wipe her face before replacing them. Pennies from heaven. A moment earlier or later and he probably wouldn't have recognized her behind her shades. The old line "when what to my wondrous eyes should appear" ran through his head as he struggled to keep her in sight while making his way toward her. The ascending sun, finally burning off the last Sunday morning mists, streamed down onto the milling tide of sweaty bodies, imparting to the otherwise deserted lot a carnival mood. Thousands of recreational runners of all shapes and sizes, ages and ethnicities, genders and preferences ebbed and flowed about the refreshment tables, results boards and awards podium. Head up, wide-eyed, Matt squeezed and slid through the masses, trying desperately not to lose her. He felt obsessed; it was definitely a sign – an omen. His pulse, having recovered from the ten kilometres, accelerated once again, leaving him somewhat lightheaded.

She wore a tight sapphire tank and matching tights. She obviously knew that the colour suited her well. Her body was firm and athletic looking while still eminently feminine. Drenched with sweat, as he was himself, her exposed skin glistened and dripped in the clean morning air. She was at least as enchanting as he remembered, in fact, having more nuances in the flesh, she was actually more alluring than his fantasies – if that was possible. Shouldering his way in beside her as they reached a table of bottled mineral water, he grabbed a couple and handed one to her. "Hi." That always seemed such a weak opening, but it invariably fell out before one could think of anything better to say. "Nice day for a run, eh?"

She took the proffered bottle. "Yeah, thanks." They snapped off the caps and guzzled the cold clear liquid in unison.

"How'd you do?"

"Great. It was a great run, all right." She paused, before adding, as if it were purely a matter of form, "And you?"

"Oh," Matt stuttered, his brain was running a different program, "Pretty well, I guess – I hope."

"Good. See ya."

Before she could turn away, he said, "You know, I think we've sort of met before." He couldn't help but detect a resigned 'here-we-go-again, I'm-really-not-interested' curtain descend over her face.

"Oh," she replied with about as little enthusiasm as possible, "Where?"

VI.