Lisa and I had reached that point in our marriage that most couples do. You know the one if you've been married for more than five years. The jubilant early days soon turn into day after day of trying to succeed in our careers, survive the crap the world throws at us, and gather enough personal energy to get through the week.
Nightly sex becomes a few times a week, then a few times a month. Putting heart and soul into wild fucking is replaced by going through the motions. It wasn't that we didn't care anymore; we were too damn stressed and tired. The goal went from bringing each other to loving ecstasy to just getting off and getting to sleep.
We fought the good fight on two fronts, the physical and the mental. Physically, we began forcing ourselves to work out together on a strict schedule. No matter how bad the day had been, we pushed and prodded each other to our workout room, followed by our evening run. It took a bit of motivation to get us to that point.
We lived in a modest four-bedroom house that we bought with the assistance of our parents when we married five years ago. We wanted kids one day in the not-too-distant future, and the house was perfect for a young family. The kids weren't on the way yet, and we had an empty bedroom that we had never gotten around to furnishing. The other was a guest bedroom used only when our parents visited.
Converting the unfurnished room into a workout space required cleaning it out first. The room had ended up as a collection point for stuff one or the other of us brought into the marriage that had no apparent use. Stuff like college mementos, the clothing we never got around to giving away, old diaries, pictures, etc.
The cleanup process moved at a snail's pace in the beginning, mainly because we kept getting lost exploring the contents of all those moving boxes. When we started that first day, we quickly got sidetracked while re-living the past. I thought of a fun way to move things along. "Lisa, I have an idea. I'll go through your old stuff while you go through mine. We can set aside any clothing we would like to see each other in, keepsakes, and anything interesting we want to talk about."
She was hesitant at first. I could see the wheels turning as she tried to remember if there was anything she absolutely did not want me to see. I think what convinced her was knowing she could dig through my stuff.
The honest truth, for my part, was there wasn't but one thing worth discovering, and she was going to have to do some digging before she found it. Sure, some old porn mags were probably buried in that stuff somewhere, but nothing too weird. I was almost giddy thinking about finding her diaries and going through her unmentionables from those bygone days.
I also thought the idea had the potential of creating some fantasies and thus helping us with the mental part. Let's face it: we fell into a rut because our minds led us there. We needed our minds to get us out of it. If digging through my old stuff gave her a bit of a thrill, I was all for it.
The second evening, while working on the mess, she found the small bundle of pictures. They were in a small wooden box covered with seemingly worthless crap that, at one time in my young life, held a lot of meaning for me. I could have told you the story behind the bottle cap, the empty condom wrapper, or anything else in that box. At the time, they were important to me. Now, they were the past. My life was so much richer now. Even when our sex life was at its most lethargic, I felt as blessed as a man could be. Lisa is a treasure beyond compare, and I'm still surprised she even likes me, let alone loves me.
Lisa called out from across the room. "Hey! What's this? Is my hubby a perv?"
She held up an old Hustler magazine, and I gave her a serious look. "You don't know what you are holding in your hand. That is the issue with the interracial couple that led to Larry Flynt's obscenity trial. It's a collector's item, so don't wrinkle it."
For a second there I had her, but I couldn't keep my grin from forming. She acted like she wanted to throw the fuck-book at me but opened it instead. She found the pictures in question and spent the next twenty minutes studying them closely. The woman in the spread was a petite brunette. The man was a tall black man with a prodigious member. It was the first men's magazine that left no doubt that the models were actually fucking. Before that, fake fucking was the best you could expect, and rarely at that. I pounded my meat many times while looking at the pictures of that hot little brunette as she so obviously enjoyed his black cock. I'd found the magazine in a used books store under a stack of old Hot Rod magazines. I was super excited when I took it home with me.
What surprised me though, was her reaction when she found the lesbian pictorial. I could tell by the red rising up her neck that she was more than a little turned on by what she was seeing. Hmm, I never knew she liked girls. This may be something worth exploring.
I was pulled out of my thoughts when she tossed the magazine aside instead of throwing it in the trash. I watched as she reached into the moving box and pulled out my wooden keepsake box. She opened it and started digging. "What's the deal with the bottle cap?"
"That bottle cap is bent like that because I was holding it in my hand when Suzy Jackson gave me my first handjob. Suzy was three years older than me, home from college, and probably bored out of her mind. She was the first girl ever to make me cum, and I fell in love with her instantly. She quickly cured me of that, but we did have fun that summer."
"And the empty condom wrapper?"
"That would be Suzy again. I wore the condom from that wrapper when she took my virginity the next day."
"This golf pencil?"
"First blowjob, number three hole at Willows Country Club."
She grinned at me. "I'm beginning to see a trend here."
She held up a tiny jar of Vaseline. "Do I even need to ask?"
"Nope. It's pretty much what you're thinking."
She continued to dig, and I pretended to do the same, all the while watching her from the corner of my eye. She pulled a small bundle out of the box. The bundle was wrapped in notebook paper and held closed by several dry-rotted rubber bands that crumbled when she tried to remove them. She unfolded the paper to reveal a stack of Polaroid photos taken with my dad's old camera. The stack was upside down, and I turned to watch her as she flipped it over, revealing the first picture. "Oh! This must be Suzy?"
I got up, walked over to Lisa, and settled on the floor beside her. "Yes, she was quite the babe. Not in your league, but not bad for a barely eighteen guy with zero clues about women. I think I turned into a bit of a project for her. None of her friends were around, and she was bored to tears."
Lisa slowly flipped through the pictures, commenting as she went, until she got to one picture in particular. "Uhm, Suzy liked girls too, huh?"
I nodded and waited for her to put two and two together. She studied the picture. "The other woman looks a lot like her. She's too old to be her sister. There must be at least ten years between them."
I smiled a bit nervously. "She's a bit more than ten years older. That's Suzy's mom."
