I Love You, Dumbass; Take Off Your Pants:
Prologue
She surged her hips forward harder, then back again, and faster once more, forward, awash, as she was, in sensation. In the back of her throat she could still find the faint alkaline after-taste of the cranberry punch. Between claps, she could hear the uneven breathing of the room surrounding her and the gentle friction noises from cloth on flesh and from flesh on flesh. At each intake of stale air, she smelled sweat -- hers and theirs comingled: the strange and the familiar. She felt...everything. And she saw nothing there in the dark. Then the lights came on again, and to her great, great surprise, she surged her hips forward harder still, and then back again.
Chapter 1 -- Be Adventurous
"Why are we going to this?" he whined, as he came into the bedroom.
"We need to get out more - socialize."
"You're not selling me," he replied, flopping backward into the softness of the duvet while rubbing the sides of his forehead.
Nicole stood at the large vanity mirror, brushing hard against the wet resistance of her glistening strawberry blonde hair, and wondering if she had time to let it dry on its own or if she needed to blow-dry. She knew that his argument was moot. Caleb was already in his black khakis and untucked navy blue dress shirt, a definitive sign that she had already won this battle.
She was quite sure in fact that he wasn't arguing with her at all, just making up an excuse to be around while she dressed. He thought, as he often did, that he was being subtle in finding excuses to always be in the room whenever she first got out of the shower. He was, as he often was, quite wrong about that. She knew exactly what he was doing, and exactly what he wanted.
Years ago now, Nicole had committed to never calling Caleb on this and instead she sort of just lingered in the implied flattery, or even, on occasion, seeking to prod him just a bit with the command that she knew her body held over him. More elegantly than was necessary, she unwrapped the towel from around her breasts and glanced at the reflection of Caleb in the mirror to see that his eyes were on her, even during his child-like fit of complaint.
"OK, then, because Lucy invited me, and I like her and want to be nice to her," she said while sliding on a pair of black cotton panties and pulling them into place far more slowly than could have accomplished anything beyond further seizing Caleb's attention.
Caleb's eyes ran up Nicole's soft, supple body, the kind that models weren't allowed to have anymore but that everyone felt a stirring of the emotions to behold, a longing to caress. Where there might have been rigid muscle and the protrusion of bone against skin, Nicole was instead a symphony of graceful curves. In stillness, she was beautiful. When she moved, however, to see her was to know a mindless sort of desire. To his credit, Caleb recovered from the obvious pause he took fairly quickly, and acted as if nothing had happened, stating with a dry mouth: "Remind me who Lucy is again?"
"She does my nails."
As she tucked her large breasts into her matching black bra with a white lace trim at the top, and clasped it tight behind her, Nicole's effect on Caleb settled somewhat and he regained a more passable sense of composure.
"Have I met her?"
"Like five times."
"Ugh." His eyes rolled back to stare at the ceiling in dismay. Caleb was long and lean, and had a cyclist's build with the metabolism to support it. He was tall, at 6 '2, but not large, built for speed and endurance, rather than strength. His hair was dark brown, shaved close to his head, and his chin was almost blockishly square. He had a large wide mouth, and deep dimples emerged on his cheeks whenever he smiled.
"Quit your whining. Nicole said there will be good food and chess. That's two out of your favorite three things."
"What's the third?"
Nicole turned to face him and leaned her face in close with a wry smile. "Me," she said, her large blue eyes glinting in the light of the room, as if on cue, "and I'll be there too." Still performing, she stepped gracefully into her maroon, satin dress and dragged it slowly upward across the peaks and valleys of her silhouette. It was a knee length cocktail dress, cinched at the wait so as to maximize the shapeliness of her form. All told, it gave off an air of delicacy -- like a fragile curtain too easily blown by the wind to expose the vista beyond it.
Caleb's mind drifted in that space for a moment, before settling back to reality again. "I have so much work to do." Somehow his tone had grown poutier as she put on the dress. He always seemed less compliant the second that her clothes were all on. She was still, however, quite sure that he was bluffing.
"Just come to this thing," she said, tightening the spaghetti straps that held her dress aloft to their perfect measure. "I'll make it worth your while."
Magically -- the kind of stupid, simple magic that constitutes the male libido -- his tone changed again, as he sat up to face her. "What does that mean?"
"What do you want it to mean?"
A new possibility had entered Caleb's mind, and a new awareness of how beautiful his wife looked in her dress. Where at first he had only seen it as an obstacle to the familiar curves that he obsessed over, he saw it now as a sort of accentuation, and a reminder of how beautiful she was as an aesthetic beyond simply her body. The vision of her in this light felt profound to Caleb, and he immediately felt a deep sense of shame when his mouth opened, seemingly outside of his own volition, and stated something that was so, so far from profound.
"Take off your panties."
Nicole raised an eyebrow and her wry smile fell into a frustrated frown. "We don't have time for that."
Caleb was undeterred, rolling with the instincts of his voice and spurring the idea onward without retreating because his own earlier ineloquence. "That's not what I meant. Leave them here."
Nicole explored the possibility in her mind, not landing on one side or the other of it. "All night?"
Caleb sat up straight, his posture transitioning seamlessly from petulant child to confident, worldly man's man, as best he could muster. "Well, you're not going to come back and get them, right?" He practically winked at her, but had just enough sense to tone it down before reaching that point.
"Seriously?"
For a moment, the faux confidence that Caleb put on vanished behind something sincere and compelling. He looked up into her large, beautiful eyes and suggested "be adventurous."
Nicole met his gaze, trying to make sense of it in terms of both its implication and its promise. She loved him dearly, and she held in her hand something that could make him happy at that lizard brain level. In some ways, it was an easy concession. She wasn't stupid, however, and made sure she'd get back something else in return.
"And you'll come? And you won't complain?"
"Absolutely," he said, far too urgently. "Take them off."
"Come over here and take them off yourself."
Chapter 2 -- This Ditch Looks Romantic
In the depths of the winter season as they were, the sun was already set by the time they left the house. The potential for feeling despondent at the early darkness was balanced somewhat by the bed of white snow all along the ground and amidst the trees. It caught the light of the moon overhead, and of the street lamps that lined the road, and of the headlights of Caleb's truck as they drove along the road - the night was imbued, as a result, with an ambient glow.
"Is she taking us the right way? I didn't think there were any houses back here." Nicole sat rigidly in the passenger seat, all too aware of her missing underpants. She wanted, however, to appear free-spirited and unphased, so she said nothing on the subject whatsoever. Had the cabin of the vehicle not been so dark, and had her husband not been so dense on the matter, her posture would have completely given her away, however.
"I trust the robot," Caleb replied, referring to his phone's GPS and the steady stream of instructions guiding them through the small town of Ayr, then out past farmland, and forest, onto unfamiliar roads.
'How long 'til we get there?" she asked, unsure whether she was anxious to get out of the cold air of the truck, which may have been contributing to her awareness of the absence, or whether she was anxious about going to a party without being properly dressed.
Caleb peaked at the screen to his left. "8 minutes."
Nicole was a little surprised with herself for giving in to her husband's request. It was an out of character move for her, but she liked the idea of being sexy, of feeling sexy. She allowed herself to feel that through the anxiety.
Even so, her mind sought solace from anxiety in the familiar. Nicole was 19 when she first became physical with Caleb. They had met at a summer internship with a museum -- he got the job she had wanted, despite her stronger qualifications. She had resented him at first for that, but found herself spending more and more time around him, nursing the hatred through proximity, until, by the end of the summer, it was the proximity alone that she craved -- the hatred had vanished.
By October of that year, they had started dating. They took it slow -- both of them young and inexperienced. The December that followed was the coldest in a decade, but their hormones ran at an altogether different temperature. Living, as they did, in the homes of their respective parents, they were only able to indulge the yearning of their bodies in parked cars on the sides of lonely country roads, the kind of roads they were driving on now, years later.
The first time he truly touched her was on one such night and one such road. The temperature had fallen to thirty below. It was her car. She had parked along a seldom travelled gravel road not far from city limits and slid over to his lap in the passenger side of her old grey sedan. They had kissed as they always had but she wanted more, and he was all too eager to provide. When he'd reached for the button of her jeans, she permitted, and pivoted her body around to face the windshield, and the darkness beyond. She wanted to be clear with him, so she'd pulled down her pants and underwear herself.
She was remembering hard now, and the memories were making her feel the same sort of bodily rush she had that night when he slid his fingers down to receive her warmth, her wetness. She rubbed her knees together in the truck just thinking about it.
