Its Only Acting

For the past five years Kelly, my gorgeous wife, had worked in the city. It was a high-powered job, made even more demanding by the hour-long trip to work and then another hour home again. It wreaked havoc on our private life, and our sex life, but it was brilliantly paid and most of the time she enjoyed it. Her huge salary and perks helped us knock over the mortgage, buy a small holiday place as an investment and really set ourselves up for the future.

With all that achieved Kelly then got a job closer to home, not as well paid, but with weekends and most nights off as well. We were luxuriating in the first few weeks of the job, sitting in front of the fire talking and drinking wine, lots of it, at night. It was nice to have her home more often. My work as a writer allows me to spend most of my time at home anyway.

She always said she envied me my creative life-style, though it always seemed like work to me. One night, while chatting away, she said she would like to use some of her new found time to re-discover her creative side and get back to acting. At University, she had been a member of the dramatic society. It’s how we met. I used to write skits for the annual review. Part of the tradition of the review was gratuitous nudity. I decided to extend it in my year, ensuring the males had to strip as frequently as the females. Kelly starred in a little scene about a hens party where the male stripper gets gang-banged and the women all sat around afterwards saying he deserved it … if you go around looking like that you have to expect to get raped. It was a post-feminist piece that she seemed to find attractive and she made a point of meeting me and we hit it off from there. She was, I discovered, a woman not frightened to push the boundaries of a man’s world.

She finished Uni, we got married and she landed a job with a huge stock-broking firm and her financial career took off while her acting career, such as it was, ceased. But she was a good actor and enjoyed it and I wasn’t surprised she would want to rekindle that part of her life. As it turned out the local professional theatre group was having auditions for what they described as an experimental theatre season. Kelly showed me their ad in the paper and asked me what I thought.

“Go for it,” I said. So on the appointed night, she headed off, full of anticipation.

I was working late when she got home.

“Well,” I said? “I think I’ve got a part,” she said.

“That’s great, what’s it all about?”

She hesitated.

“Well,” I said again.

“Ummm, I think you ought to know it’s a pretty raunchy play by some European playwright with a fair bit of nudity and sex scenes and … “

“And,” I said.

“Well, I think I’ve got the lead role so long as I am happy with it.”

“Why wouldn’t you be,” I said?

“Well, the raunch, I’d be naked on stage and I have to seduce the lead male character with a strip-tease and I, well, I didn’t know what you’d think.”

“Surely you didn’t say to them you’d have to ask your husband first, did you?”

“No, I just said I needed time to think about whether I was ready for something like this first up,” she replied.

“Good I said because I want you to know right now it’s your decision not mine!”

“But the nudity and the sex scenes.”

“It’s only acting isn’t it?” I countered. "It didn't cause any problems in the Uni review, I recall. But hey, if you don’t want to do it, it’s up to you but don’t use me as the excuse.

“Let me sleep on it,” she said.

We made our way to bed and just as I hit the sheets, I felt a hand reach into my groin.

“You really don’t mind,” Kelly whispered, “that I’d be nude on stage with another man, pretending to make love to him?

“I can’t think why,” I replied.

“Okay,” she said. “That’s it, I’m going to do this thing!”

The next thing I know her lips were around the head of my penis. I lay back and thought of many things, though oddly enough, not England, and came inside her mouth.

I stayed well out of the negotiations of the next few days. I heard her on the phone talking to the director, well I presumed it he to whom she was talking. Once I heard her say something like if I’ve got to be naked then he should be too.

A couple of days later in another phone conversation she said to the director she wanted to make the scene as realistic as possible, that she would trust his judgement on that and yes, she was ready to start rehearsals. She was also chuffed to learn she would get $1000 for the season, plus $100 per rehearsal.

Rehearsals started and she would fly home from work, shower, change, rush out again and return around mid-night. I noted she had become extremely vigorous in bed. Often she would come straight through the door and jump into bed and make love to me.

One night she asked me if I was still okay with her doing the play. I said nothing has changed since the first day as far as I was concerned.

She stopped for a minute, then said … “umm, they have a bit as far as I am concerned.”

“How,” I asked?

“Well, it’s sort of like this, after I do my strip-tease, one a bit like that Kim Basinger scene in 9 1/2 Weeks, my boyfriend in the play and I are supposed to jump into bed and have red hot sex.”

“Knew that,” I said.

“Well, the plan was to do it under the sheets and just mess around a bit and make it look like the real thing. Well after a couple of run throughs, the director took us both aside and said quietly that it really didn’t work within the context of the play.

“Without thinking it really through, I said that’s because we’re hiding it from the audience. After a strip-tease like that two people aren’t going to bonk coyly under the sheets.

“I didn’t mean to suggest what I was suggesting. It was an honest answer but I realised it had taken us to what the director was politely alluding. He wanted us to have sex without the sheets and I had already agreed to it without being asked.

“Anyway, that’s how it is, we do just about everything without actually fucking and in full view of the audience. And that’s how it is.”

“So,” I asked, “what is supposed to be my response to this?”

“I don’t know, really I suppose I am just wanting to let you know so that if you don’t want to come you don’t have too, or if you do you will know what you are letting yourself in for.”

“I knew what I was letting myself in for the day I married you,” I said. “You threw yourself into your old job at a million miles an hour and I had no doubt you would have thrown yourself into this at the same speed.

“Look it’s not going to worry me one bit, it’s only acting, surely?”

“Of course it is, I wouldn’t want to have sex with Kingsley, either on stage or at any other time.”

So that was settled. Kelly continued to go to rehearsals and come home and have sex with me, hot sex. I half thought about a preview of the strip-tease, but didn’t want to ask.

The night before the big opening, she told me the theatre had sold out, but she had one ticket put aside for me if I wanted to go.

“Of course I do,” I said.

“You sure you will be okay,” she said? “It’s even moved on a fair way since our last chat. Dress rehearsal last night was pretty realistic.”

“I thought it must have been, judging by the way things went when you got back here,” I said.

So the opening night arrived. Kelly went to the theatre much earlier than me. Later I made my way to the box office and asked for the ticket in her name.

The bloke behind the counter looked at me, smiled and said, “aaah yes, Kelly’s husband, we were wondering when we’d see you”.

I took my seat in the dimming light and I reckoned I noticed a few other people look at me and smiled in the same as the bloke at the ticket office.

Up came the curtain. Kelly was on stage from the outset. She played a high-powered business woman whose life was so full of work she had little time for anything else until she meets the libidinous Chris.

He teaches her to explore herself in full. In one scene, he gets her to masturbate through her business outfit … to find the true woman inside.

As she falls into his web, her job suffers and she is torn between him and career.

She takes extended lunch breaks to be with him, or leaves work early to spend the night with them. It's on one of these occasions that the strip-scene occurs ... to the old Ike and Tina Turner song, Nutbush City Limits, so it's at real pace. She flings off the dress, the slip, jumps on to Chris while he’s sitting watching, leaps up again and takes off her bra, so that she’s just in her panties and high heels. She was also wearing a pearl necklace.

The music stops and they walk across to the bed. Chris takes off his clothes and lies on his back. She slips off her panties, leaving the shoes on, and climbs on top of him.

Then it really started. He kisses her tits while she pretends to ride him. She moans and says fuck me, fuck me Chris.

They roll over and she spreads her legs and he moves his mouth from her breasts to her stomach … and in the shadow, it seems even lower.

Then he moves up to kiss her lips and lies between her legs. Kelly wraps her legs around his back. They are both breathing and moaning. Kelly whimpers, then screams an orgasm while he grunts to his own.

They then sit naked on the bed for the rest of the scene, smoking, talking, stroking each other.

Eventually, as the play unravels, their relationship fails. She was too orthodox for him, he was too much of a ne'er-do-well to hang in with one women for too long.

Both characters comes out at the end and sit on separate sides of the stage to explain what they got from their time together, as impermanent as it inevitably was.

It was good gritty "love, the universe and everything stuff" and there were half a dozen standing ovations.

I moved out of the theatre, again followed by the smiles of some of the theatre staff, and went home. I thought the play was good, I thought the sex scenes were extremely realistic … and yeah, I was a bit shocked, though I had been warned. After all, it was my wife up there, bollocky naked and getting what appeared to be a good going over from another bloke.

But I had said it was okay and I couldn’t waiver now.

Kelly came home late from the first night party. She’s had a fair bit of champagne to drink and was pretty drunk.

“Hi nice man,” she said with more than a hint of a slur in her voice. “What did you think?”

“It was very well done. You acted brilliantly and so did he.”

“No,” she said, “what did you really think, about the sex scenes.”

“Well they were certainly realistic, just as you explained,” I said.

“So you weren’t shocked?”

“I wouldn’t say I wasn’t shocked. I think the whole idea of those scenes is to shock.”

“No but you weren’t shocked to see your sweet little wifey doing that sort of thing?”

“Yes, but I said from the outset it was your choice and yours alone and I accept your judgement on their importance to the play.”

I knew I was stumbling a bit here. I hadn’t expected the cunnilingus nor the realism of the intercourse, either with my wife on top or the other actor on top.

“It was very realistic, which is what I suppose you were all trying to do,” I said.

“Oooooh very realistic,” my wife said, "very realistic.” I suddenly realised she was very drunk, the drunkenness that leads to true confessions.

“A couple of times during dress rehearsal Kingsley’s penis actually went into me,” she said in a soft slurred voice.

“And it happened tonight. Only he and I know that, and now you. We were actually fucking up on stage until he could get it out in time with the scene.

“Darling, you watched your wife get fucked by another man, right in front of 1000 people.

“And now, I want you to finish the job he started. I am so horny.”

I was stunned, but not so stunned not to want to go to bed with her.

As I pushed into her, I felt more than the usual "Kelly’s turned on" moistness. There was the stickiness of semen. I must have stopped for a moment in surprise.

“Yes darling, he did come inside me, it was the only way we could finish the scene without the audience knowing. I hope you understand, it was only acting!”

I too, came - straight away.