We burst through the door as we entered our home; happy, exuberant and eager to undress and make love. It was after midnight and we were returning from celebrating our 20th anniversary with a small group of family and friends.
"Twenty years," I told my wife Lila, "twenty years and not a single regret. I love you more now than ever and I thank you for every minute we have been together."
"I love you too." she replied, "You are the only man I have ever loved or want to love. I am happier now than I have ever been."
"No regrets?" I questioned, picking up on her omission.
"Not a one......except..........well........maybe...."
"Come on, out with it. You know you can't keep any secrets from me."
"It's not a secret; it's just some thing that I realized when I was having a talk with Kerry this afternoon."
"She's in college and nineteen years old. She must be accustomed to being away from home. Surely you talked to her about the birds and the bees before this."
"Of course I have," she replied, "our daughter is very knowledgeable when it comes to sex; much more so than I was at her age."
"You were nineteen when we got married, so how can she know more than you did?"
"That's exactly it. I was a virgin when we married. You are the only man I have ever been with. She has been with two boys in high school and Ryan is the second one she has slept with in college so far."
"So far? Are you telling me our daughter is a slut? What the hell is going on under my nose? I'm not about to support a son and daughter to sleep around in college. And what about if she has a baby.......?"
"Calm down honey," she interrupted my tirade, "her virginity is long gone and no one seems to care about that these days anyway."
"Then why are we talking about this? How did we get on this subject when we were so happily celebrating our anniversary?"
"You asked if I had any regrets and all I could possibly think of is that Kerry already has had a much more varied sex life than I ever had."
"Well let me show you that quality trumps variety anytime," and I took her to bed and made love to her the best way I knew how. When we cuddled afterwards I kissed her and said, "Good night Lila, I love you, you're all the woman I will ever want."
"I love you too Max, good night."
************
I am a lawyer, a pretty good one, and I put in a lot highly paid billable hours. Lila and I lead a very comfortable life. But I come from very humble circumstances. My paternal grand parents come over from Eastern Europe bringing my father as an infant. Grandpa worked in the steel mills around Pittsburgh and my father followed him into the mills until they closed down in the seventies and eighties. Times were tough for us then but somehow my parents made it through and my Dad made sure I went to college and law school so I would never have to be dependent on a mill job like he was.
My way of giving back for what they did for me was to run the pro bono section in our law firm. Pro bono is a free service we provide for people who have been wronged, often by the intricacies of the law, and cannot afford the legal fees needed to obtain justice. I did it once a week, after office hours, from 6 pm until we finished up, often until midnight. I donated my time and paid the one secretary who stayed late to help me. I had been doing this for many years every Thursday evening and Janet Hobbs was the secretary who most often stayed as my assistant. She needed the money because she was a recent widow with two teen aged children to support.
About a week after our anniversary we were finishing dinner when Lila brought up the subject again.
"Max," she said, "I have been thinking....." She let the subject hang.
"About what?" I bit.
"About age and experience."
"What are you getting at Lila?"
"I'm 39 years old and in a few more years I will start menopause. I'm getting old and I am so inexperi0enced. My daughter has had more varied sexual experiences than I have had and the six years you had in college and law school gave you a lot more chances with a lot more women before we got married,
"Lila, you have had twenty years experience with me. We have tried lots of things together, even some things you didn't like and refused to do. I never forced you."
"That's just it, you never forced me. You love me too much."
"How can I love you too much?" I didn't like where this conversation was going. "Just what is it that you are trying to say?"
She hesitated, afraid to say what was on her mind and then suddenly blurted out, "I want someone different than you, some one who doesn't love me, some one who just wants to fuck me. I just want to try someone different and I want your permission before I do it."
There it was; a big fat elephant in the room, sitting on his rump, his truck upraised trumpeting his triumph and that stupid elephant smile on his face.
"You want my permission to fuck other men? Are you crazy? You are my wife! How can I give you permission to fuck some one else? Well my answer is, NO! It's like playing with fire. Some one will get burnt. No good can out of such an arrangement."
"Please Max; this is something I have to do. I don't want to do it behind your back, I don't want to cheat. I'll tell you all about it when it happens, every detail."
"Good grief woman, why would I want to know that? I don't want to know about it, I don't want to hear about it and I certainly don't want to hear the details about it. I won't ask and you won't have to tell."
What I didn't realize was that with what I said, she took it that I implied permission for her to pursue her delusion as long as she didn't tell me about it.
The following week after the discussion I had with Lila, I finished up my Thursday night pro bono work earlier than usual. When I got home Lila wasn't there. As I was preparing for bed she came home. I could tell she had been drinking and she smelled of cigarette smoke.
"Where have you been and why are you dressed like that?" I challenged her. She was wearing tight jeans and an even tighter sweater. She looked very sexy.
"I was out. I didn't feel like staying home alone. It's not like when I had the kids for company every Thursday while you worked late."
"Does this have anything to do with what we talked about last week?"
After a moments hesitation she gave me defiant, "Yes."
"Lila, please don't do this. We have had twenty wonderful years together, two children to be proud of and a lifetime of good living in front of us. Please don't jeopardize our future together."
"I haven't done anything that I am ashamed of nor do I intend to do anything that I can't tell you about. I will freely discuss anything you want to know any time you ask."
"No thanks, if what you are doing is what I think it is, it's not something I can be comfortable with. I'm not one of those guys who gets off on his wife's adventures. I didn't give yon permission to do this and there is no way I can stop you if you persist except to say that you are putting our marriage in jeopardy."
"Well I'm not doing anything wrong and if you don't want to ask then I don't want to tell so let's just leave it at that."
Well, I couldn't just leave it at that, I had to know what was going on, on Thursday evenings. So I hired a private detective to follow her. The report came back and it wasn't all that bad. She was going to a bar/restaurant called 'The Cougar's Club', an up scale establishment not far from where we lived. There, she spent the evening seated at the bar conversing, and some times flirting and dancing with several men and even some women. There was nothing in her behavior that was really objectionable. She was always home by midnight and I called off the surveillance, until the night she came home drunk and horny.
I had walked in a few minutes before her and I had just started washing up before going to bed. She walked up behind me as I was standing in front of the sink, I could see her reflected in the mirror. Her hair was tousled and her face was flushed. She was wearing a scoop necked sweater and her pushed up tits were almost overflowing her neckline. Her skirt was as least four inches above her knees. She looked sexy as all hell and acted just the way she looked. She also smelled of booze, pot and after shave.
She walked up behind me and put her arms around my waist, pressing her erect nipples against my back and her pelvis against my ass. It was obvious that some one had her hot and horny and all worked up and she had not been satisfied.
"Come on honey, take me to bed and fuck my brains out." she said as she kissed my back and her hands crept inside of my boxers to play with my cock. I don't know why, but I was pissed off because I imagined what some guy must have done to have gotten her so aroused. Someone else must have had his hands on her ass, or tits and gotten her to the point that she wanted to be fucked.
I knew she hadn't been brought to completion but I still felt as if she was offering me sloppy seconds and I turned her down.
"I'm sorry babe, it's just been too long a day, and I don't think I can get it up."
I could be just as stubborn as she was. I could tell she was more than disappointed. Probably very angry because she looked at me for a long moment and then said, "OK, if that's the way you want it."
The next week she didn't come home until after I was asleep but I woke up when I heard the shower running at 2 am. She never showered when she came home on any of the previous Thursdays. I was feigning sleep with my back to her when she got into bed and kissed my shoulder.
"It's a good thing you won't ask," she whispered, "because now I won't have to tell."
God damn it, what had she done! I laid there stewing, my imagination running wild. In the morning at breakfast I refused to say anything about what time she got home or ask about what she had done. But the tension between us was palpable. I didn't even kiss her goodbye when I left for work.
I was more than a little annoyed at what was going on and I decided to check out the Cougar's Club for myself. I went there for lunch; it was a pretty big place with two big bars with a large settee area in between. Sofas and love seats and hassocks spread out. The restaurant was an after thought, tucked in the back behind a small dance floor. Everything done in dark colors and dim even in the afternoon.
I sat at the bar and watched the few people there, three women sitting singly, two of whom soon paired up with two guys. I said to the bar tender, indicating the women with a nod of my head. "Not much action today?"
"Naw," he said, "never is much during the day, mostly housewives who can't get out at night. The real action is mostly nights, Thursday night seems to attract the married ones and Friday and Saturday nights, the single women."
"How real is the action?"
"Well we don't allow any obvious fucking but almost anything up to that goes on. I've heard plenty of women getting it off while they were wrapped around some guy."
I took out my wallet, I had a head shot of Lila in it. I laid it on the bar.
"Ever seen this woman in here?" I laid a $100 dollar bill next to it.
