Flesh Wound

Chapter 2 - Cathy's Story

OK, I'm the terrible wife in the first story. Gary - that's Garth Winter, my husband - showed me his story, and then the comments people sent him about it. And about him. And me!

Well, all that happened nearly ten years ago, and despite what a lot of people assumed, we're still together, and happy. Well, I think we are, as far as you can tell these things. That weekend with Mark didn't come out of the blue, you know. All sorts of things went before it. One lady who commented said that some weird stuff can go on in any marriage, and that's certainly true!

I think when two people really like each other, and are always very honest, they can decide for themselves what's for them, but sure, we all make mistakes.

Also, people seem to have missed the humor in what Gary said about the episode. At the end, though we were both pretty sore in our separate ways, we were still laughing and cracking jokes and pillow-fighting in the middle of the night. That's how our life together has always been.

Gary piled on the agony a bit in his story - he says this was to make it more dramatic! -- but there was never any serious chance that he'd leave me, or that I'd leave him. And he is very far from being a wimp. Mark was not my lover, as some people have said. He was a friend and colleague, a nice guy whose discretion we trusted. Unattached, and actually quite awkward with women, he thought all his birthdays had come at once when I invited him to stay, and he certainly pigged out on me! But although we gave each other extreme pleasure, well, some of the time, there wasn't any depth of commitment or even much relaxation. And there were no laughs! He was serious. He was a man on a mission.

I would never in a million years have preferred to be with him. He knew this. He knew it was a one-off. And we never had trouble working together afterwards. He eventually left for another firm, but I don't think it had anything to do with me: for one thing, he'd found himself a wife by then.

I suppose I'll have to explain the physical bit, otherwise people won't understand. Gary is laughing at my embarrassment, pointing out quite rightly that my intimate details are now all over the internet anyway. The thing is, girls and boys, I have a vagina that is nice and narrow, but extremely short. Gary probably wouldn't get into the record books, but he is pretty big, too big to fit me easily. We were so horny for each other when we first met that we didn't care, but it certainly turned into a problem for both of us over the years. Thank heaven for that sense of humor again!

We made love all the time - still do - but we were always having to be careful how we did it. Frustrating for both of us: Gary wanted to give me a real athletic seeing-to sometimes, and I wanted to let him be as vigorous and even rough as he liked, but you can't squeeze a quart into a pint pot, even a receptive one. It was, if nothing else, a nuisance.

Hence the conversation that started Gary's story - though it was really many conversations over time. And - the big thing Gary left out, "in the interests of a good story", he claims - I wasn't even the first to seek "alternative therapy"!

So let's get the record straight here. . .

I've now read Gary's story very carefully, and there's one thing that leaps out at me. All the sexy passages, are they factual? No - they all take place in his own head! Was it really like that? Absolutely not!

So, having agreed to something he'd already tried for himself, he made himself extra-miserable by letting his fevered imagination run riot. What does this mean? It means he's a very silly boy - as he soon agreed.

The episode with the misplaced keys is all too painfully true, and typical, if I may say so. And before that, when he heard me pleading with Mark to "Wait!", it was not transports of bliss he was overhearing, it was the frustration of repeated unsuccessful attempts to achieve intercourse at all. Put simply, for the first day and a half Mark couldn't get within a foot of my pussy without exploding. I should have been warned when he groaned and came in his pants the moment I took off my bra and let him see my top-heaviness in all its, er, marbled glory. We'd spend a nice time getting each other ready, I'd manoeuver him into position, and. . . oh dear, Goodnight, Vienna. I like to be thought exciting, but not that exciting. It was like going straight from foreplay to afterglow with nothing in between. And very messy.

He was a quick learner once he did manage it, though, I'll give him that. And we did fuck a lot, there's no denying it. Well, come on, that was the object of the exercise. But it wasn't the "walking hand in hand through paradise" of Gary's fantasies. If only! It was friendly, and straightforward, and it certainly got the job done but, to be honest, I was quite ready for him to leave when that last morning came. We hadn't been able to do much for the last day, anyway. Mark managed to nick his foreskin and get brush burns on the end of his dick by being greedy, which was admittedly flattering, and I was pretty battered myself. We were not among those people who find pain erotic, thank you very much. We found it just painful.

I had to grin when I got to the part of the story where the narrator creeps into the bedroom and, finding his wife deep in a post-coital slumber, can't resist quickly slipping her a length, without waking her. Please! How could I have slept through that? I'm not that far gone. I just let it happen. I was sort of shocked, but understood it was a spur of the moment thing he just had to do, or probably go crazy. And I was so touched when he covered my nakedness with the dressing gown. That little gesture felt so like love, and I nearly cried.

I will say, though, that I didn't know Gary would be so jealous, and I think it took him by surprise too. After all, I hadn't been jealous when he had his turn. . .

That was, oh, a couple of years earlier. He was too much of a gentleman to say anything, but I could tell our lovemaking was always leaving him unsatisfied, and I thought he deserved a chance to let himself go. As you know, I was later to discover that he felt the same about me. I knew we were together for life, like Catholics and penguins, I wasn't insecure that way. So I resolved to give him a present. And the present was my Aunt.

No, don't worry, this isn't going to turn into one of those weird stories where a guy gets to bed five generations of the same family and lives to tell the tale. Real life is often simpler, and stranger. And a lot sexier.

And Judy certainly was sexier. Sexier than me, I'm sure, and only two years older. Recently and thankfully divorced from an idiot who spent all her money as well as his own and got heavily involved in white-collar crime, she was pursuing her former calling as a painter, living alone with her cats in a small house by the sea, and vowing to have nothing more to do with men, ever. Until, that is, she realised she really really needed one.

Anyone expecting Judy to be a pneumatic stunner with the face of a movie star and the body of a porno queen is about to be seriously disabused, I'm afraid. She has cropped ash-blonde hair and wears little glasses. It's possible she has a figure, but it hasn't been seen for years under the style-free clothes she always goes for, certainly not by me. And yet. . . and yet. . . whatever it is that makes men turn their heads in the street, and sigh with nostalgia for a love-life they maybe never had in the first place, Judy had it. And still does. And Gary is no indiscriminate lecher, but I'd seen him look at her as if wondering. . . well, I'm not sure what exactly he was wondering, but he was definitely wondering something.

She confided all her troubles to me one evening over several glasses of sherry too many as we looked out over the ocean. We'd never had secrets from each other - or so it seemed - although we were technically of different generations. But I guess there are always things you're not in a hurry to talk about, not to anyone. In vino veritas, it's said - in wine lies the truth - and sure enough, the more wine we got through, the more truths we started exposing!

"I was so pleased to be free", she said, "but there were things I didn't expect. Oh, God, the lust! It arrived without any warning, really urgent and kind of adolescent. It's driving me insane! And where are all these men they say come out of the woodwork to 'help out' any woman who's just been divorced or widowed? Where are they? That's what I want to know. I thought perhaps if I ignored it and worked hard it would go away, and I'd paint great works of art with all that energy and desire I'd freed up. Some hopes! I can't do a damn thing, I just get these. . . images, bombarding me, coming into my head just when I don't want them there."

She reached to the low table and poured another serious measure of amontillado. "The rules of the game have all changed since I last played", she went on, a bit slurred now. "All the men I know are either gay, or divorced, with a great big 'Why?' hanging over them. I'm sure I can't handle any kind of relationship" - she spat out the word as if she'd found a maggot in an apple - "and, and, I'll be fucked if I'm going to start doing the singles bars."

There was a pause, and then we both started laughing fit to pee ourselves. "You certainly will", I said.

The room fell silent as we calmed down somewhat. We were both seriously drunk by then, but a cunning plan was starting to hatch in the few cells still functioning in my brain. It became clear to me that there was a way for us all to feel better about life, for a while at least.

"Jude, how about this. . ." I hazarded, and warmed to my subject with all sorts of tempting offers. Relieved of all inhibitions by the booze (and, I'd like to think, by the congenial company), she didn't even go through the motions of pretending to be shocked or pleading "No, I couldn't possibly". She just giggled, probably for the first time in years, and blushed to the roots of her hair.

"OK, if you're sure, but do you really think you can sell the idea to Gary?", she asked, doubtfully. I managed to keep a straight face. "Oh, I think I can probably talk him round", I said.

*******************

I had to call Gary to come and collect me. I couldn't have driven. I was, however, sober enough to make it clear to him that it would probably be worth his while.

Well, I won't go into all the details of how we fell into bed and I got him to believe it was his idea to spend a few days by the sea with Aunt Judy, as he laughingly called her. You'll have to use your imagination. We have our methods, eh, girls?

"But do you really think you can sell the idea to Judy?", he asked.

*******************

Now, I'm sorry if this isn't explicit enough for some people here, but I'm afraid I really have no idea of exactly what they got up to, but everything suggested it was highly satisfactory. I guess men and women are a bit different that way. I didn't really want to know, but I could certainly imagine, which is a lot sexier anyway. I only cared that they'd had a good time, that it hadn't been a disaster. I'd have felt responsible! One glance at Gary when he arrived back in the house with his holdall, looking as though he'd been dragged through a hedge, and hugged and kissed me as though he'd been away at the war for years, was enough to reassure me on that score. What I do know is that for the three or four days and nights Gary was away I'd been hornier than a rhino in heat. It was terrible!

I tell you, I practically sprained my wrist strumming the old pink banjo, over and over and over again. I know you guys think it's cool that women can have one orgasm after another, but imagine what it's like when you just came five minutes ago, and now you've just got to do it again, or go out of your mind. And then again. Even after walking the dog for hours, I couldn't get to sleep for the movies playing in my head, of big cocks doing unspeakable things, to me, to Judy, to every woman on the planet. As you know, it hasn't actually been ideal for me to be impaled and slammed around the bedroom by a large one, but I realised - now it wasn't to hand, so to speak - that I really got off on the idea of that great thing: that it was like that because of me, and for me. I could look at it and think "I did that". When we were out at dinner or at the theatre, I could think about what I had and the other women didn't know about. It was sort of empowering.

************

I've never asked Judy about it either, but a big spray of flowers was delivered from her the following weekend. I do still tease her about it sometimes, and she just giggles. She gets out in the world a lot more now, making her own friends, and no doubt her own arrangements. Gary just said it had been one hell of an experience, and that Judy was a lovely lady. And it certainly had no effect on his desire for me. It's as if he's content to put the whole episode away in a drawer. I suppose it was inevitable - though I hadn't really thought about it - that before long I might want to "try someone else out" for myself. Gary was enthusiastic about the idea at first - or so I thought - and I'm afraid I wasn't too good at reading his true feelings at the time. Too horny, I guess. You just don't hear what you don't want to hear. If I'd known he wouldn't be able to handle it, I wouldn't have gone ahead. It wouldn't have killed me. I seem to have been born without much jealousy - it's not Gary's fault that he wasn't. I certainly wore us both out trying to make it up to him!

But that was then. We're OK, I think. We're fifty, and still laughing and loving a lot together. I'd be surprised if we're not in it for the duration. But I guess you never know. . .