The weather was pleasant out. Afternoon was fading to a lovely evening free of clouds or darkness. The sun crested on the poplar trees behind the Sampsons' household, a shadow from the roof casting down, just beginning to creep up the base of the trees, crawling up the shed, making the wood look as though it had been deeply flooded. Inside was a similarly passionate scene. A creaking sound informed on the nursery's door, a woman with child stepping out, and making their holy way down the mid-level's small flight. The boy nursed easier on the couch, she thought, so she took him there. In the arms of Stacey Sampson, a newly wed and new mother, was a little boy, small, completely unconscious of his mother's adoration, and yet somehow appreciative no less. He radiated warmth like a little spoonful of sun. His name was Joseph Sampson, and he was seven months old.
When the boy's father slid quietly and smoothly onto the couch beside the two, neither the boy nor the mother were startled, despite the first knowing of him being an arm draped weightily over the mother's shoulders. In fact, she nestled back into him, and all under the silence of a lovely sunday afternoon. The mother's name was Stacey, and the father's Alexander.
Chapter 1 - Work.
The light of the early morning was as a cloth, blue and pale, settling over everything having, weighing it down the absence of a long night's rest. It was a morning like any other for Alex. His wife was conducting the orders of the morning with her typical speed. He tried to help, but he found that it was more of an interference, and sat back down, drinking the orange juice she had poured him, and just watched her go, industrious by nature. Her eyes were hard, passing all the things that weren't Joseph or her husband- even he was sometimes exempt from that list- a cold glance, an assessment, before it was taken care of with graceful yet direct motions. This had a fortunate effect on Stacey's body. She was a tall woman, a bit taller than her above-averagely sized husband, and was known as lean. Having a kid had changed her a bit, though. Baby Joseph just banged on the table, using his toy like a hammer, as he was like to do.
Where she once had a lean rear, a product of her training in the pool, there was now something pillowy and wide, wonderfully shaped. It didn't look bad, Alex remarked. In fact, it looked strangely enticing- refreshing, even. He knew that the tough ass he loved was still under there, if only under a few inches of maternal weight. She was looking at him, he was surprised to see, watching him gaze until he realized he was hardly being so sly. He looked away, bashful as a joke. She laughed, to his relief. It was going to be a good day when she could smile before breakfast was over. She passed him a plate, and started on her own, glancing at him over a forkful of eggs, giving the smile right back. Other than that exchange, it was a breakfast just like any other. Hands full of used dishes, Alex found it a fine time to ask,
"So, excited for your new job?" Over the sound of a hissing tap, Stacey nodded, still chewing her last forkful, and grabbing her bag. Little Joseph looked from parent to hectic parent without a peep, and resumed banging on the table, like a little judge banging a gavel.
"Yeah, I really am. The radio's a great place, and they always need techs and stuff, plus I heard everyone's really nice," Stacey went on, speaking without much intonation as she gathered her things, eyes only going from item to item: keys, coffee, coat, and so forth. Alex, again, just watched her go, industrious and mechanical at a moment's notice. By the time she looked back, she was already at the door, ready to go. He smiled back, pocketing his hands.
"Go have fun, sweetheart~" he told her. Bang bang bang, agreed Joseph, extending up to see his mom go. She smiled not coldly, and she went.
The remainder of Joseph's morning was, unsurprisingly, taking care of his son. He fixed bowl of mashed carrots and such set to the tune of baby-babble, and, just as Joseph's mumbling started to make strange sense backed by Alex's fatherly replies, the boy gumming on mouthfuls of his simple meal, sufficiently distracted. Alex checked his phone between rounds of 'here comes the airplane!', and only found a few paltry notifications, which he flicked past. They were some stupid things posted by this relationship magazine's twitter page, something that he really only included to feel less guilty about his almost strictly pornographic twitter feed, which was even strange considering the explicit nature. His son was blabbering again, and reaching for the spoon Alex had forgotten. Alex dropped his phone and got back to feeding Joseph, a decision that the baby boy seemed to approve.
The boy was napping in his crib before Alex could even check the clock again. He flipped the stereo-system on his course to the couch, pulling out his phone as the jams of his favorite station came on the air, and found that article from before.
It was an op-ed thing on the psychology of relationships. Its headline read, quite bluntly, "Is your spouse truly satisfied?", and continued as follows,
"Observing the animal kingdom, the domain that precedes mankind, monogamy is a rare adaptation. Sexual access is a resource in such a place, and so is naturally, and completely, exploited. Male specimens of the most fit tier will have a myriad of mates, and females with any sort of frugality will see contests for their males to compete in- to find the best, obviously, but also to drive them to new levels. This is antithetical to monogamy, and yet has produced an incredible natural world. Why should mankind not follow?"
"The simple answer is that we do. Many women feel a basic urge to mate up in dominance hierarchies, and it's in many men's natural interest to claim as many sources of reproduction as possible. So they cheat, "adulterating" the strictures of monogamy as they've been taught. Many who have been cheated on report feelings of anger, rage, defeat, and betrayal, all at once, like crystals being sheared by impact. And yet, some report excitement, an inexplicable arousal (in the sexual sense, not to be enraged, though the duality of the term is poetic) stemming from jealousy, the prospect of your significant other kneeling at the privates of some fat-cocked, broad, muscled, hairy man without even telling you about it. Or else, informing you beforehand, but never asking. Or, for women en masse, they are thoughts of male partners conquering and enjoying the bodies and expressions of women other than yourself. I exclude the sexually queer because, in many situations, they are beyond this anxiety.
The thoughts of this will stir anyone deep- and so, we label them as taboo. As a behavioural psychologist, I say it's past time we peel off that label, and inspect it as a way of life, and not as a tragedy. Though, to any man or woman reading this, your position in this refurbishing of modern relationships stands on a knife's edge, no matter how sure your footing is now. On which side will you fall?"
-Amelia Sweet-cheeks
He didn't know why, but he was breathing heavy, and was hard, leaking lubricant into his sweats. An image sat in his head, one of a radio-station, sparsely lit, with the silhouette of a long-haired man sitting in a thick-windowed broadcasting booth, a head of blonde hair bobbing and gagging in his lap, her ass just visible from the door, thick with a few inches of pregnancy weight. His eyes looked down, and he found his hand grasping himself, pumping slowly, sweats around his ankles. He had hardly even been conscious of what the vision compelled his hands to do, but he was doing it, and he was getting wet. His dick, of average length, was getting rigid and swollen at the thought of his wife doing those things with that man, that man he had no idea even existed. It would seem that his body didn't care, though. Just as his other hand grabbed at his balls, and the other began to speed up, a shadow blocked the living-room window. Standing there was a slim, well-shaped silhouette, and beside her was a much larger, blockier one. Alex gasped, and his eyes focused. She was shocked, but livened with humor. The man was amused in a more expectant way. Alex scrambled to clothe himself before his wife, and the long-haired man his fantasy informed him to be her new boss.
***
It was uncanny how dramatically the man his wife had brought home had resembled the man from his involuntary fantasy. Perhaps it was a vision whose perverse mechanism went so deep it eluded him entirely despite informing him of this man. Or it was coincidence, Alex frustratedly posited to himself. That article really was getting to him. Again, maybe it was just the shock and residual embarrassment of being caught in such a position, but he was struggling to slice the sourdough for sandwiches, and his erection had failed to leave him in peace. The latter was harder to explain. He continued to rake and dredge over his thoughts, preparing lunch much slower than he otherwise would have. He rejoined his wife and her boss at the dinner table, and, though he could hear them clearly before, had only now observed that the both of them were rather calm about the ordeal. In fact, his wife was laughing lightly, probably over some anecdote that Alex had spun in the moments previous.
He set their plates on the table, and took his seat, only to see that they hadn't taken them from where they'd been placed, preferring to keep talking. He huffed, and arranged them more to look like place-settings, not just plates deposited on a table.
"Oh, thanks man!" Stacey's boss graciously thanked, even interrupting his own similarly enthusiastic story with a hearty mouthful of sandwich. His voice was scratchy, just like it was on the radio. And man, was he big, Alex thought. Alex wasn't small by any means- a respectable five-ten, and no more weight than his strength vouched for, but christ, this man was something separate entirely. The scraggly haired man before the couple sat like a grizzly bear, or some fur-matted grinning ape. He was far from lean, but his broad frame, potent musculature, and lightly tanned, rugged flesh met it twice over. He towered over Stacey- she only came up to his adam's apple- while she and Jacob shared a height. He's even better than I thought was the strange thought which Jacob happened to be fighting at that point. The man was bearded with wirey hair, a poorly kept handlebar filling the space between his grin-stretched upper-lip, and his hooked, black-head sewn nose. His hair was long, going nearly a foot down his back. At least that was well kept. "Mm, ga'damn that's a good sammy!" he declared in his usual rasp, looking back to Alex, who was slow to respond.
"Oh, glad you like it, misterrrr?..." he trailed, not knowing the man's name quite yet.
"Linetti. Henry Linetti, but most just call me Hank. Or 'Harder daddy!'" He gave a chuckle through his remaining mouthful of sandwich. Alex chuckled too, a little caught off guard, but Stacey laughed hard enough to be startling. But she caught herself and blushed, making it perhaps worse. Her leggings-clad ass, a fat thing that both Hank could see on his left, and Alex on his right, shifted in her seat uncomfortably, jiggling just a touch. Alex saw, in a flash of a stare, that her boss was looking at it too. He also saw that her rear was more towards her boss, though that might just be because she was trying to hold back her all-too-loud laugh. He was thinking at a hundred miles a minute. And worse, Alex's erection wouldn't go away, like the presence of that article in his mind.
In a nervous tone, Alex broke the silence, drawing the eyes of that big, beardy, grinning man that his wife had brought home. "So, wh-what were you guys talking about?"
"Oh," he began with a rasp, "We were just talking about all the turnover at the studio."
"Turnover? What do you mean?"
