My wife Carrie was beautiful. With a ripe apple on her head she still wouldn't have been too many inches over five feet tall. She was lithe, slender and wiry. She had long golden brown hair that came to her waist and smallish tear drop breasts ending in half dollar sized areolae and pert little nipples. They would swell when she was aroused and those areolae would get puffy and sensitive, so much so that you had to be gentle with them. She'd let you know quickly-and none too sweetly- if you got too rough with them. She could be snippy and petulant. Her legs looked long even at her diminutive size. It was the seventies and so she wore minidresses and hot pants everywhere, which gave her a chance to show off those gorgeous gams and give a glimpse of her perfect little ass. . We didn't call shorts Daisy Dukes back then. It was hot pants or short-shorts. The travesty known as "Dukes of Hazzard" had not yet polluted the airwaves.
Carrie had a temper, the little firecracker. Which is why I often imagined her with an apple on her head and me with a bow and arrow. I couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with an arrow even if I threw it overhand. . At the drop of a hat she'd blow her cool, almost none of it worth an argument let alone a fistfight. But she'd often come out swinging at the least difference of opinion, so often that I began to have serious doubts about our marriage. She was only nineteen when the story I'm writing about happened. I was twenty six and it was the first marriage for both of us. It may have been rocky, tempestuous even, but it sure as hell wasn't dull.
One Christmas Eve Carrie jacked my jaw about a half inch out of plumb when I refused to traipse all over creation visiting folks we hadn't seen or talked about all year. I worked long hard hours laying bricks and blocks and it was a holiday for me. I wanted a quiet dinner with family, where I could park it in an easy chair and nurse a beer. She volubly demurred. I didn't budge, and finally told her that as much as I wanted to spend the holiday with her, she'd have to put the miles on her own car and catch up with me later. Apparently this was a sticking point in her platform of negotiations because right about the time I told her to go fuck herself she landed a wild haymaker with her right fist to my jaw. I instantly saw red and pushed her back onto the bed. I pounced on top of her, sitting on her comely chest and holding her arms under my knees with my hand over her mouth to muffle her spitting and cussing, while I made her promise to keep her hands in her pockets for the duration of the bargaining session. A woman will sometimes give you a good reason to haul off and sock her and she had just offered me one, but you just don't hit a woman no matter what the provocation.
She complied but we nevertheless did not part amicably. She stormed out and I went to my folks' house as we had planned on doing for weeks, before she sprung all this on me. I figured I'd show up at her parents' place Christmas day and by then she'd probably have cooled down. Usually after her tantrums she needed some time to think it over and she'd be ashamed of herself. She'd surely be embarrassed at showing up without her new husband when she paid her courtesy calls that evening. We'd only been married a year. As it turned out she showed up at my Mom and Dad's house about an hour after I got there. She made a whispered and sincere apology and I accepted it... but I was a bit cool in my acceptance. I was still pissed that my young marriage was turning into a brawl, and I was losing faith in my bride.
Carrie went further in her reparations later that night when we went home to bed, trying to persuade me that she was genuinely contrite. She gave me a twenty seven speed Osterizer of a blow job, draining what felt like a half cup of baby butter from my poor balls. I was appreciative but still put on a slightly cool and injured attitude. I now had the upper hand and was gonna milk it for a while. In the interest of full disclosure, I was probably also hoping she'd be milking me too, as long as I didn't overplay my cards. That had been an above average effort at sucking my dick. I don't think she left a single spermatozoa circling the pool in reserve.
Like I said, I was having my doubts about my pretty blonde bride. Carrie was a tiger in the sack, and not many young men can stay mad for long given the charm offensive that her supple young body and enthusiasm for making the beast with two backs went on. She fucked me stupid for at least a month. Your average twenty six year old male can get a hard on from a slight breeze that had picked up the scent of a woman a furlong away. I was perpetually hard and I punished her tender young pussy with it. The first night we had hooked up a buddy loaned me the shack he sometimes lived in and told me to knock myself out and fuck her til she couldn't walk. I tried hard- he was a good friend and I'd have hated to give him a bad report.
The festivities commenced at around ten that evening and we were still locked in tight embrace and humping by the dawn's early light. Then we rested a while, kissing and making out, before I fucked her in the ass. It was glorious. Lord, she loved that. She told me it had hurt some, but I was gentle and having given her plenty of tender loving care and patience, she consented to have me pile drive her perky little butthole for a solid fifteen minutes. (There wasn't any clock in that shack, or even any electricity, but the sun was appreciably higher and the birds were warbling and serenading the rectum wrangling going on in the love shack. Birds are horny fuckers.) Some women never have their come-to-Jesus moment regarding ploughing the old dirt road but this night, or morning, I had made a new convert. It was an epiphany for the both of us. It was her baptism of butt darts. She never did like it much doggy style but she'd pull her legs back nearly far enough to lock her ankles behind her head and mutter encouragement at me like a jockey to a promising thoroughbred. She said it felt better that way, and I liked the looks of adoration she gave me when I was busily plugging her bunghole. After I'd exploded in her bowels and began to go soft I swear I saw tears in her eyes when my dick popped out. She'd whimper "Oh no...leave it in! You feel so good in me."
This is what I was up against when trying to retain the high moral ground with Carrie. Sigh. We all have our cross to bear. I could fuck her six or seven times a day. Not more than a couple of days in a row, mind you- I wasn't Superman- before I needed a respite- and she'd still have liked more. Hell, even in my mid twenties I needed to sleep once in a while. And we'd fuck so much we'd both get sore and have no choice but to take some R&R. So eventually she screwed the hurt, anger and self righteousness out of me and we settled into making love, fucking and arguing about what to have for dinner and what movie to see. No more fisticuffs. I wasn't sure she'd learned her lesson but life was reasonably placid on the surface.
Over the last few months Carrie had taken to having a girls' night out with her single friends. Lately it was turning into once a week, on a Friday or a Saturday night. She liked to dance, drink and raise hell. I liked to go to the quiet corner bar and watch the Ali-Frazier fight with a friend or two. I never did really get into dancing. Sure, I liked rubbing bellies and massaging her delicious little tush in a slow dance, her fresh and supple body pressed against mine, but I never really caught on to the efficacy of performing the Funky Chicken. I wasn't really entirely happy with the situation, but hell, it was the seventies, you know? I was sensitive to a woman's needs and I didn't own her. I wasn't exactly sure what all went on during girls' night out but I didn't press her too hard on it.
A few of my friends would get together for poker once in a while. It wasn't a regular game that rotated venues, but they met at least once a month, wherever was available, sometimes more and often less. It was kind of erratic, and mostly it was an excuse to drink free beer and smoke somebody else's dope. I was never much of a poker player. Pinochle was my game. I had a hard time remembering which poker hand beat which and I knew I didn't know the odds very well. I just hadn't played enough. But there weren't any pinochle players among my friends- my kin were rabid for pinochle but I didn't know anybody else who played. I did like drinking beer and smoking dope, so a couple of times when a buddy invited me I'd tag along. They took it easy on me. None of the games were high stakes. I'd have declined to play for sure had they been high dollar games. I worked too hard for my bread to gamble it away.
At one game Ray, an ironworker and a casual friend, suggested I host a game.
"Hell, your place is vacant every weekend anyway. Your old lady's out cuttin' a rug and tyin' one on at the Keg Korral. You could host a game sometime." He smirked at me and I didn't much like the smirk.
It pissed me off. I thought it was pushy of him, since I only attended the games on invitation once in a while and I wasn't into poker anyhow. I didn't want this crowd trashing my place on a Friday night, grinding potato chips into the rug and pissing on the toilet seat. We weren't exactly friends. I didn't like the implication of his remarks about my wife either. That was my business and mine alone. He was just a guy I knew and sometimes I worked on a jobsite with him. That didn't make us pals and didn't give him an opening to invite himself to a party at my house. I had a wife and a clean comfortable home. Most of these other guys were single, and the ones who were married weren't exactly exemplars of husbandry in general. I wasn't thrilled at the idea of spending a Saturday cleaning up after drunk construction workers. I blew it off, never answering. I just shrugged and passed on it.
A month later Ray's sidekick Gene brought it up again. He and Ray were exchanging looks and smirking. That irritated the shit out of me. I well recalled the last smirk and it rankled. I was just about to get up and walk out rather than argue the point when my best friend Sean said he'd help me host a game. He'd bring the beer and help me clean it all up when the game was finished. This really annoyed me and put me on the spot. I didn't want to turn down my best friend's offer. It was one thing to blow off the other guys. I did't give a fuck about them. But Sean and I went way back, best friends since we were knee high. As soon as I said it I regretted it, but I agreed to host a game, just to try it out and see how it went. So the poker game was set for Friday night at 7:30 two weeks from then. Fuck! I really didn't want to do this, but to hell with it. It was only one night. I silently swore I'd never do it again.
I didn't say anything to Carrie about hosting the poker game at our house until the night of the game. And it figured- she got her nose out of joint about it.
