'Sarah, I'm old,' I complained to my wife. 'Look at this. A grey pube. A grey
pube
for fuck's sake.'
My wife glanced at the pubic hair, which I had plucked from my crotch just two minutes ago, and burst into laughter.
In most ways, Sarah and I are a typical mid-thirties couple. We own a small house in a modest area, we have two girls who attend the local primary school, and we drive unremarkable cars.
The only thing that sets us apart from our peers is that neither of us work full time. Five months I ago I saw a job advertisement for a position in my field offering a thirty hour working week. Rather than the usual Monday to Friday, eight to five grind, it was Sunday through Tuesday, eight through seven. The pay on offer was close to my current salary, and when both Sarah and I calculated the cost savings that would result from not it came to not having to pay for as much vacation care during school holidays, we realised that we would end up no worse off if I won and accepted the position.
I didn't expect to receive an interview, let alone to actually secure the job. It might have been 'in my field', but it was a bit of a step up and to the left. All the same, I embraced the position with gusto and last week was informed that I had successfully completed my probation period. My new employers were very happy with me, and I with them.
Since our second daughter was born six years ago, my wife has worked four short days a week for a local electrical goods store. She works in their office, doing underwhelming administration work, but her hours mean that she's available to drop off and pick up the girls from school, and she has each Wednesday off to run errands and do the weekly grocery shopping.
Well, she
used
to spend her Wednesdays running errands and doing the shopping. Ever since I took on my new role, I've been the one doing these jobs on Thursdays and Fridays, and our Wednesdays have become days of strict leisure and enjoyment. How many married couples have an entire day off each week - during school term at least - to spend with one another? And even if we all were blessed with this arrangement, how many of us do you think would spend our days scrubbing toilets, going to the bank, and buying groceries? My point exactly. We spend our Wednesdays fucking each others brains out, which is exactly how it should be.
'I'm not seeing much sympathy,' I told her.
Sarah reached over and plucked the offending item from my hands. She held it against the palm of her other hand to check the colour was indeed what I said it was, then went and tossed it in the bin.
'Devastating,' she told me, in a tone that suggested she found it anything but. 'I'll take this as a sign that our sex life is about to end.'
'Jesus, that's a bit extreme, isn't it?'
Her bright blue eyes were alight with mischief and on her face she wore the kind of expression she always wears when she's messing with me. We've been together thirteen years and I'm more crazy about her than ever. She's a little heavier than she was when we first met, but she's quite fit, so she's both fleshy and firm. Nice tits, nice arse, and a stomach that's incredibly flat and unmarked for a woman who's had kids. Plenty of men still look her way, although these days, the men are in their late thirties onwards and they're more discreet than their younger counterparts.
I could only dream of women gazing at me in a sexual way. Like Sarah, I've not been able to escape the extra weight that comes with age, and I've been noticing more and more grey hairs on my head, in my stubble, and on my chest. I've been starting to contemplate buying some Just for Men and dying it, but it feels kind of weird to ask your wife to dye your hair for you, so I was instead hoping she'd realise what I wanted, and offer to do it.
Sarah walked over to me, stood on her tip toes, and kissed me. 'Let's go and buy some lunch and a bottle of wine, take it back home, and eat out the back. It's a beautiful day.'
I couldn't argue with that. It was a warm spring day, and I was feeling hungry after a Wednesday morning spent doing not much of anything at all. We'd seen the girls off to school, done a little laundry and vacuumed the floors, but that was the extent of our morning exertion.
We hopped in her car, which was parked behind mine, and went to the local shops to buy hot roast pork sandwiches and a bottle of white. Sarah was wearing a blue cotton dress which was tailored to show off her curves without being overly tight. It was a bit too short for a woman her age, and every time she leaned over or a gust of wind came by, I was treated to the sight of her upper thighs. I was planning on getting between those thighs sometime between lunch and picking the girls up from school. I'd woken up horny and the shortness of Sarah's dress was filling my mind with all sorts of ideas.
We drove back to our house to eat. We bought our small cottage on a whim twelve years ago. I always think of it as 'Sarah's house' because she's the one who fell in love with it. She's a bit of a hippy, even if she doesn't want to admit it, and the overgrown gardens, eclectic paint scheme and battered wooden floors were right up her alley. It's on a small block, and because of it's unusual (as the Real Estate Agent put it) décor, it was a relatively cheap buy.
It's also turned out to be a fucking money pit, but as my wife loves the place, I try not to focus on what it's cost us. It's my home, my little sanctuary from the world, and who really cares if there's a train line three doors down, and a station just two hundred metres away? During the week barely fifteen minutes goes by without a train pulling into the station, but after over a decade of listening to the whoosh, whistles and rattles, I've come to find the noise oddly reassuring.
Town planning has never been the strong suit of Brisbane City Council and our street and the surrounding suburb hosted a dazzling array of architectural styles. Our own little home was sandwiched between an Asian McMansion monstrosity built with zero boundary on the side closest to the train station, and a dilapidated old Queenslander on the other.
We barely saw our Chinese neighbours. They presumably existed, because there were always five or six cars parked in their driveway and outside their house, and the cars would randomly change position, but it seemed that the occupants teleported themselves from vehicle to abode and vice versa.
The Queenslander was another matter. It's owner had aspired to knocking the joint down and developing the land once he got the money together and to fund the mortgage payments in the interim period, he'd had a succession of tenants through the property. None stayed for long. They always left once they realised that the dodgy wiring, dripping taps, and rotting veranda were never going to be fixed.
Sarah and I were probably the only home owners in Australia who couldn't wait for the neighbouring house to be levelled and replaced with an apartment building. You see, the Queenslander had been built not in the middle of the block, but close to the right, which meant that it's veranda overlooked our back yard. This was a problem because to the left of our yard was a beautiful paved area with an outdoor setting, so whenever we were sitting outside we were just four or five metres away from anyone who was on the Queenslander's veranda. This resulted in neither party having any sort of privacy.
We'd been somewhat disappointed when Jim, the owner, had told us that the banks wouldn't lend him the money to develop the land, and that he'd decided to cut his losses and sell the joint. Three times since then the 'For Sale' sign had come up, to be quickly covered with an 'Under Contract' sticker, only for the contract to fall through and be replaced with another 'For Sale' sign. From what Sarah and I had heard, there were significant structural issues with the joint.
A couple of weeks ago the fourth 'For Sale' sign had gone up. As yet there was no 'Under Contract' sticker, but when we arrived at our house we saw a builder getting out of his ute at the front of the property. There was a sign on his vehicle announcing he did building inspections, which must be what he'd come to do.
I glanced at Sarah and raised my eyebrows.
'Again,' she remarked. 'I wish a developer would just buy the place.'
I carried our lunch to the front door of our cottage while Sarah scrabbled around in her handbag for the housekeys. She let out a noise of frustration as they continued to elude her, and started retrieving the usual detritus of parenthood that women normally carry around; tissues, a tangled bead necklace and a wad of school permission forms. The keys, however, remained buried in the corner of her bag, and she put it down on the ground and started pulling out her purse, her make-up case and a half-eaten bag of eucalyptus drops.
As she searched for the keys, I glanced over at the builder's ute. I noticed that the builder hadn't yet gone inside. Instead, he was gazing at Sarah as she rummaged through her bag.
I followed the tradesman's line of sight, and realised he was getting a pretty good view of her thighs, and maybe even a glimpse of her panties. The realisation he found her attractive hit me with a force, bringing about the usual combination of pride and annoyance.
'Found them!' Sarah cried triumphantly, holding up the keys.
I glanced at the builder and saw that he was heading inside the Queenslander. He'd been sprung and he knew it, and had obviously decided just to get started on his inspection of the Queenslander.
Sarah opened the door and we went inside.
'That builder was easy on the eye, wasn't he?' she remarked, cocking her head in the direction of the Queenslander. 'You'd think after all the work we've had done on this house we'd be due for a good-looking tradie, but we always end up with ones who are still wet behind the ears, or two years off retirement.'
When Sarah and I were first dating, I made the mistake of telling her that Jessica Alba was my celebrity crush. She took the statement as a sign that we were one of those couples who would mention to each other whenever we found anyone attractive. Since then I've become acutely aware that she likes tall, tanned, rough men, which would be fine if I was tall, tanned and rough, but the reality is that while I'm six foot, I'm also fair skinned, dark haired and stocky. I'm pretty much the polar opposite to her usual preference.
Sarah hummed around the kitchen, collecting wine glasses and plates, before leading me out the back door. We went to our outdoor setting, spread out our food, and poured glasses of wine. As I ate my roast pork sandwich, I wondered how the building inspection was going. I glanced up at the Queenslander. It was in a serious state of disrepair. How was it even worth bothering with?
'It'll cost a fortune to make that place habitable,' Sarah remarked, staring at the Queenslander. 'If it's even salvageable.'
'It'd look pretty shit hot if it was done right, though,' I replied. 'You'd just have to have enough money.'
