My name is Pete and my wife Ellie and I live near Portland Oregon. When Ellie was thirteen she started attending an after-school drama workshop in downtown Portland, called MiMi's, and stuck with it until they tore the old playhouse down to put up an IHOP in the late nineties. Her and her friends still boycott IHOP, since, according to her, the group had been a second family and then the pancake pricks left their family homeless. She took a few acting classes in community college, but her talent already surpassed anything they could teach, thanks to all her competitive peers at MiMi's and the dedication of the couple who ran it, and ended up switching majors during her second year. She managed to remained in contact with all her friends from the after school workshop and together they formed a theater ensemble of their own, calling themselves the Popular Cabal and producing shows down at Kimberly Hall.
The theater antics of the Popular Cabal kept Ellie pretty busy and satisfied her love for the stage during our first four years of our marriage. But Ellie had shared her real dream with me, and that was to sneak off to LA and become a movie star, so that's exactly what I believed she should do. Three months before our fourth anniversary we began planning to move and gave ourselves one more year in Portland to save up money and get our shit together. She'd be twenty-six by then, still young enough to make it, but in the event that we somehow miscalculated our chances, I'd suggested she try her hand at writing screenplays as a possible contingency plan. Initially she liked the idea, since she'd always wanted to write a play, and had something about two thirds complete before realizing she didn't have an ending for it. Three months later the play sat unfinished, awaiting the return of her creative spark. But I understood, it was semi autobiographical and that made it hard to just slap something on.
My plan was equally ambitious, if not more so. To make a long story short, it started with me learning photography, and ended with me becoming a film director. I'd moved out of my mother's house when I was sixteen, right after getting into a fist fight with her boyfriend, yet I still managed to complete my rotation in a lab, earn a Bachelor of Science degree, and at twenty-eight become the Chief Technologist at the same lab. Several of the people working under me still remembered me as the 'cleaning kid'. So if anyone had the tenacity to make it in Hollywood, it was me.
The only part of the plan that concerned me was whether or not Ellie could remain content in our small cheap apartment and refrain from spending a ton of money. It was frustrating, because she kept coming up with reasons why she
had
to spend money on something, and so on the eve of our fourth wedding anniversary, on the drive home, she confessed to buying a theater ticket and a new dress for a combined total of four hundred and fifty dollars, and that's when I completely lost my temper. Four hundred and fifty dollars, plus the two hundred we'd just spent on our anniversary dinner, meant we'd have to dip into our savings to pay off the credit card bills and set our out entire plan back a month. That pissed me off.
"I don't see why you're so upset," she said, as I pulled into our parking space, "how much did you just blow on a camera?"
"That's part of the plan. The dress isn't."
"So the plan is you get to spend as much as you please and I need to budget every penny?"
"How am I going to learn photography without a camera?"
"I don't know. How am I ever going to get any work acting if I always look like crap?"
I went to let her out of the old Corvette but she'd already exited and slammed the door.
When she started up the stairs towards our second floor apartment, I watched her twenty-five-year-old ass sway. The snug, black, satin dress she wore that night caught the light from the pool in the courtyard, a bluish under lighting that made her ass seem extra full and her dress extra shear.
I'd been with her when she'd purchased that particular garment. Entering the boutique I'd seen two chicks marveling at the same dress on a mannequin, as one of them said, "That really is cute, but a hem that high wouldn't look anything like that on a real person." Shortly afterwards, Ellie stepped out of the dressing room wearing it. It fit perfect and looked hot as all fuck. Her B-cups were just big enough to tent the chest, but not enough to stretch it out of shape. She'd actually started modeling when she was seventeen, she looked that good, and she could have made a mint if she stuck with it, but she quit in order to focus entirely on acting. The two chicks were still quietly browsing around the boutique trying not to pay any attention to us, but they had to have seen her spinning around in front of the mirror, and I knew deep down inside they hated Ellie something wicked. That was probably the first time I'd recognized just how beautiful Ellie really is.
By the time her ass had reached the top of the apartment stairs, I'd decided to initiate our house rules on arguing. As we entered through our door, I said, "Off with the dress!"
"Ha, not tonight, I'm really not in the mood!"
"Doesn't matter if you're in the mood, you can be pissed all you want, but noooo dress."
"Fine," she said, "Unzip me!"
Our deal was simple, if an argument ever ensued we'd have to disrobe and settle it in the buff. Silly sounding, I know, but it worked, our fights never lasted long. I unzipped her, and her dress collapsed to the floor, where she then left it in a tiny pile. The one time I described Ellie as waif I took a serious punch in the arm for it, so I won't. Instead I'll just tell you that she stood about five-four, and having never peeked at her driver's license, I'd guess her weight at a hundred and ten.
In less than two minutes the rest of our clothes where scattered on the carpet along side of her dress, and we picked up fighting where we'd left off, except nude.
"Look," she said, folding her arms over her tits, "You're about to really piss me off, and even though I'm keeping the dress, I'll make sure you never see me wear it. And believe me; you want to see me in this dress!"
For the moment my preference was for her to stay naked, but I said, "I'll never see it because it's going back!"
"No it's not, and neither is the ticket. Rico's in a traveling production, do you know how big that is? And you spent just as much on the camera––"
"I bought a camera so I can get a job!" I interrupted, yelling.
I think my tone must have scared her a little, and she actually took a moment before speaking again. "OK, I'll make you a deal, I'll take the dress back, but only if you walk around the balcony like you are now, with nothing on. And you have to make it all the way around."
I was caught completely off guard by this challenge, but she knew I had a weakness for dares, and the next thing I know I'm turning off the porch light and stepping out of our front door bare-ass-naked. Immediately the night wind stroked my privates, a sensation so rare that it felt alarmingly unnatural. I stepped away from the door and froze, as more of the pool below came into view from over the concrete edge, and its blue light passed though the black iron fence and lit up my chest and face. Ellie put out the living room light and sat in our dark open doorway, hugging her knees to her chest. I wished I was there, halfway into the refuse of our home and watching all this with a huge smile on my face. Instead, I was feeling waves of terror as I introduced my balls to the night's breeze. I took a few more steps, hearing something metal rattling in the wind out front, which interfered with my ability to listen for footsteps or rustling in the apartments.
The balcony was a rectangle with a line of ten units on each side and four at either end. I made it to the third unit on our side, where Christian Man lives. Christian Man was our nickname for this guy who hung giant Jesus banners on his door every Christmas and Easter. There was a dull thump from inside his apartment, and I whipped my head around and stared cautiously at the thick orange curtain filling his large window. It was impossible to detect any movement through the opaque fabric, and when I heard the sound again, I sprinted back to our door, Ellie barely getting up in time to let me pass.
Dull thumps were now coming from my own chest, fast and numerous. We were both laughing and she kept asking, "What happened?" When I explained about the noise she laughed even harder, "You are such a chicken!"
"Like you wouldn't have come running back!"
"Well, looks like I've got a new dress."
