This could become a very complicated emotional story so I'll try to simplify it.
Barbara and I used to be an item. For six years, we did almost everything a sexy couple could do. Well; we did everything we could think of and had heard about.
Normal, oral, anal, toys, enema, binding, strap-on, golden showers, public places, suspended from the beams, tied together immobile, pumped up and squeezed down, fisting for us both, inflated with balloons and fluids almost to bursting point, rubber, ropes, Scuba. You get the idea?
But our big discovery was corsets. For years, I laced her into increasingly tight corsets. She wore one day and night for four years; getting smaller all the while. Her waist became tiny, so I could hold her in my two hands with fingers and thumbs touching. She loved the sensations of the tightness, and the effect the corsets had on her figure, and a greatly enlarged sex-drive in her and in me, of course. I used to get erect just touching her through her clothes; or even just by watching her move around with the knowledge that she was held in an hourglass by her underwear.
"Lace me and do me until I burst wide open," she used to say. Of course, she never did burst, but we tried!
"Lace me so tight I can feel you in my throat," that was regular request and I really tried to get that much of me inside her. I can tell you, she was so tight, I wondered how her insides could recover when the corset was let out or came off afterwards.
"Plug me up back and front, and then lace them out of me. Make it so tight. Then you can do what you want with me." We did that many times also, and I debauched us both to frightening point afterwards. Did you ever get both your hands inside a woman, back and front, and also have her swallow your full erection? Let me say it took amazing contortions on both of our parts, and it was worth it. And she could accept anything I did with her. Amazing Barbara.
If you've never made love to a woman in a tight corset, then I would say you've missed something important in your sex-life. The pressure on her and the tension you can feel in your hands. The hardness of the bones and the laces mixed with the softness and flexibility of her body as it's squeezed into the shape you want. The extra resistance inside her body as you penetrate. The extra swelling of her labia and her rectum as you play around on her and inside her. You imagine you can feel your own erection squeezing into her confined body, though your hands on her rigid waist.
This is true especially if you get behind her and she leans forward or kneels. Then you can hold that tiny waist and feel the tensions as you plunge and pull. As you hump into her, you imagine the tugging and the pressing on her insides. As if her organs and her intestines are massaging you with their extra compression.
All amazing and impossible to describe until you've experienced it.
And then our life fell apart. Barbara was divorced and had two boys. The boys kept regular contact with their father, who was a construction engineer but also, as an absorbing hobby, a martial arts expert. He won contests and had medals and cups for his successes. And the boys liked that.
And guess what: I just didn't compare with their dad, did I? I'm an academic; a mathematics teacher, Professor in my own department in a minor university, written books, appeared on quiz shows on TV. Successful in my world but nothing to compare with jiu-jitsu or aikido. So one day the boys told their mum, my shapely Barbara, that they wanted to live with their dad; not keep having me around the place. All four of them had a pow-wow and I was duly removed from the scene.
"For the sake of the boys, you must understand," she explained though her tears one day, "I want them near me, not just living with him."
"But what about us β our love for each other β our plan to make a life?" I argued.
"Try to understand me. Don't be so selfish," she came back.
After that, it became a shouting session. Wagging fingers. Shrugging shoulders. Bad tempers. Words that sounded like "...never speak to you again..."
And that was that. I stormed out.
You see what I mean; complicated.
So to bring us up to date; I had spent 12 years away from Barbara but still living alone. And lonely much of the time because I never found any one so lovable, liberated or openly sexual as she'd been. I'd moved away; 300 miles away, to new jobs and better career prospects.
Then three months ago, an older colleague of mine died at the university near Barbara. The Vice-Chancellor [College President in USA, I suppose] called me at work one day and says that Professor So-and-so has died suddenly.
"The day before he died, he asked me to contact some of his old colleagues, to see if they could visit him. But then he died after only a few hours, and that was a big shock to us all."
I got the funeral arrangements from him and decided I'd make the trip to see of the old boy; and maybe meet up with some former friends. It was to be just four days later, so I made my travel plans. Checked over the car, got out my funeral clothes, told my remote family I'd be away for a couple of days. Cancelled the milk and grocery delivery. You know the kind of thing.
But I decided on one extra item. I sent a text-message to Barbara. After all these years, I still had her phone numbers but hadn't called her even once. This message was simple,
"Visiting your area suddenly for funeral Tuesday morning. Can we meet Monday afternoon or evening?"
Her reply was terse to the point of being a rebuff, it seemed to me.
"Sorry can't."
I interpreted that to mean "No. Too much time has passed. Life has moved on. Don't contact me again."
So I set off driving the 300-plus miles to a hotel near the funeral. I allowed seven hours to account for traffic and roadworks; a perpetual problem in Britain and has been for the forty years of my driving career. The highway authorities seem never to finish a road-building or repair project, before another one is necessary on the same stretch. Is it the same in other countries, I wonder?
At about the half-way point in my journey, my car-phone rings.
"Hello," I replied in the usual unhelpful manner we all use.