"Are you ready then?" asks my wife.
"Yes," I tell her. I'm standing in the bath with my back to her and my legs apart. I feel her hand as it reaches between my legs and takes a grip on my balls, which are soft and loose from my bath. She begins to tug at them and knead them. My dick begins to swell, my balls to tingle with delicious sensations. I lower myself a little, pressing my anus onto her warm bare wrist. Her fingers continue to fondle me: with her nails she makes little scratching movements, down the sides of my balls, tugging my scrotum with them. My dick is straining at the leash now: by my groans my wife can tell that I'm ready: with her free hand she reaches round and takes a firm grip on my cock. All the sensations in and around my genitals come together now, rise to a peak: a few tugs are all it takes before I shoot my load fiercely over the bathroom wall, groaning with pleasure.
My wife removes her hands: I hear the sound of water in the wash basin.
"I'll be home about five," she says. "Make sure you rinse the tiles down."
With that she leaves, and I slump down onto the side of the bath, savouring my third handjob of the week, at least my hundredth of the year, and reflecting on how things came to be this way.
I met my wife, Julie, at college. She had lovely fair hair, a curvy, full-breasted figure and a warm, sensuous face, and looked, not just to my eye alone, as though her natural habitat was the bedroom.
But appearance can be deceptive. It was only after I had courted Julie and we had married that I came to learn that she had never really liked sex.
"I tried," she told me. "It wasn't that I had any moral or religious scruples. But I never really enjoyed it. Even before I met any boys, when my friends were all raving on about masturbation, it all seemed a lot of hard work for next to nothing."
She tried with me, too: and made such a good job of disguising her feelings that it was over a year before I was forced to confront the fact that sex was not working for her.
"It's not you," she told me. "It was just the same with my earlier boyfriends. I wouldn't say I don't feel anything down there: but what I feel is so mild that it's hardly worth the bother. It takes me ages to get anywhere near to wanting an orgasm, and when I have one I don't feel any better for it: as like as not I've just got a headache."
"But you've gone along with it," I said. "Was that really all for my benefit?"
"To be honest, yes," she said. "I know how much you wanted it. But more and more I came to resent it. I'm sorry: but I can't go on pretending any more: the truth is I just hate being poked about down there, and I hate having you inside me."
As you can imagine, this was a bitter blow to me. But we talked through the issue exhaustively, Julia all the time reassuring me that she still loved me, and although I made various suggestions as to how sex might be pleasurable for her, none of them worked, until one tearful evening Julia told me that she just could not bear to have me inside her again.
"I'm really sorry," she said. "And if you want to leave me I'll quite understand, though that's not what I want. But I can't have sex with you any more, it's making me far too miserable."
"So that's the end then," I said, feeling resentful even though I was trying to be understanding. A life of celibacy from now on."
"It doesn't have to be quite that drastic," Julia said. "I know you have your needs too. I'm not going to have sex with you any more, but I don't at all mind giving you a handjob. In fact, you've only got to ask: any time you want me to sort you out just let me know. I can't say fairer than that, can I? But in return you have to promise not to maul me about or pressurise me to make love to you."
"Well," I said. "That's something I suppose. At least I won't die of frustration."
"I don't want you to be frustrated at all," said Julie. "But I have to do this for my own sanity."
"What about a blow job?" I asked.
She pulled a face:
"You know I've always hated that," she said. "You would too if you'd ever had a mouthful of spunk. No - I'm afraid it's got to be hands only."
What could I say? I still loved Julie, and I didn't want to leave her. It had been a long time since I'd hung out in clubs and pubs, I'd never enjoyed it much then and I really didn't want to go back to that life again. Besides, I couldn't be sure I'd find another woman - and if I did she would not be as loving and attractive as Julia.
So I turned to Julia and hugged her.