Restless

Note to readers: This is the first chapter in a story which will hopefully be many chapters long. As such, there is very little sex in it. This story (of which this is the first chapter) is meant to stand alone and apart from other pieces I have written. If you don't like stories of sharing, voyeurism, extramarital sex and the like, you really shouldn't read this.

Chapter One. The Starting Place.

To try and find a starting place. That is hard. Very hard. Was it in my childhood, in some now forgotten episode which forever twisted my perception of relationships? Or was it later, perhaps? In my adolescence, or teenage years. Those years of experimentation wherein we all search for our inner voices, our inner selves. Maybe I was just born like I am, and none of my experiences count for anything, although I seriously doubt that option.

All I know is that it happened slowly, over time. The seeds for it were sown long before I met my wife, but those seeds did not blossom until well into our marriage. If she had been a different type of individual... no, I can't go there. If she was different, I wouldn't have been attracted to her in the first place. Other than physically, of course. She was incredibly beautiful, and very sexy. Five foot nine, a hundred and twenty pounds of toned body, her wild dark hair cascaded down around her shoulders. She was the perfect dichotomy for me, she knew she had a great body, but she had no concept of how truly beautiful she was. She was one of those girls who was a late bloomer. She didn't go on a single date throughout high school, not even to her prom, but by her graduation, she was already turning into the beautiful woman I met five years later.

Which is precisely what I needed. I knew I was shallow enough that the person I would marry had to be very good looking. If she wasn't, I'd be one of those men who had a roving eye, trying to get into the pants of everything with breasts. All right, perhaps not everything, but near enough so as to not make much of a difference. Yet, I wasn't giving Mel Gibson any sort of a run for his money, if you know what I mean. I relied on whit and charm to get by. Don't get me wrong, I'm not ugly, just not handsome. Average. That's what I am. Average.

And we hit it off. She was wild, yet relatively inexperienced. I had the experience. We were married within months of meeting. It was a completely physical thing. No one had ever opened her up to the sensual side of herself, let alone the sexual. She had always professed how inexperienced she was, that she had never had sex. Bridgett told me that she had come close several times, especially with this one guy she went out with for over three years, but she could never bring herself to have sex before marriage. I guess I believed her, especially since we didn't have intercourse before we got married. At least a part of me did, but there was always this little voice in my head telling me that someone who moved like she did, who abandoned herself so during intercourse, couldn't possibly be so inexperienced. It was such a small voice, though, I shoved it into the back of my mind, yet it would feed directly into my problem later on.

We were so into each other, as most new couples are, that we didn't see the problems that lay ahead for us. Actually, there were only two problems, one for each of us. Hers was, and still is, to a great extent, her inability to be truthful about her inner feelings, about who she is and what she wants and likes. To a great extent, this stems from her religious beliefs. My problem was with jealousy, which I now know stemmed from my own lack of self-worth and the anger which that generated. Which is why that voice in my head fed right into my fears.

So you have a sexy woman, who has been starved for male attention all her life, and a jealous man. Not a great combination. We would go to parties, or out with friends, and she would dress incredibly erotic. Then she would bask in all the attention she was getting from the guys. She would flirt right back with them. She would deny she was flirting, of course, and at the time I was unsure whether she was simply unaware of her flirting, or if she was lying to me. It turned out to be neither, she was simply lying to herself, on the conscious level. Subconsciously, she knew she was flirting, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Not only did I feel that she was flirting with these men, but I felt that she was trying to get them interested in her. Which, she was, let's face it. She was enjoying the attention. But I mean that she was trying to get them interested in her so that she could then act upon their interest.

We would fight, and argue, until the point where neither one of us could take it anymore. We decided she would move out. Looking back, I think this may not be THE beginning, but it was A beginning of the road we traveled. We set a date for her to move out, and she began looking for an apartment. But when I would get home, we'd discuss if she would begin dating right away. And she said she was unsure, but she thought so, it wouldn't be good for her to sit at home alone. We would start foreplay and she would tell me what she planned to do when she dated. I think she started out trying to make me jealous, trying to get me to stop her from leaving, but what ended up happening, was that we both got so turned on by her envisioning her dates, that we'd have incredible sex.

After several nights of this, as the day was approaching for her to move out, I came to the first of what was to be many realizations. If I wanted us to stay together, and I did, I was going to have to do something about my jealousy. I felt that she needed to be more honest with herself, but if I could overcome the jealousy, than we had a chance.

We decided she shouldn't leave. At that point in time, I allowed myself to take all the blame for the problems in the relationship, laying them squarely on my jealousy. I knew that at some point we'd have to address her underlying issues, find the causes, but I also knew that they weren't the immediate problem. We could deal with them later, and we would.

In the meantime, other major changes were occurring in our lives. My father had a major heart attack, after which we moved from Los Angeles to New York to be closer to my parents. We both got day jobs to cover our bills, her as a receptionist in an advertising firm on Madison Avenue. Me as a finance guy for a major corporation downtown. But we both continued to pursue our careers in the arts. Bridgett joined an off-Broadway theater company, while I renewed an acquaintance from college who was now into television production.

We would go out on the weekend, usually with another couple or a group of friends. We might be invited to a party, or a concert. We were having fun, as young couples are supposed to. And every time we went out, I would work on the jealousy. Every time. I would remember the conversations we had when Bridgett had been thinking of moving out, and I would use that arousal to overcome the jealousy. Little by little, over time, I learned to control it. But it was always there, right below the surface.

We went on like that for a couple of years, several times a month, sometimes as many as a dozen, I would have the opportunity to work on my jealousy. Then an interesting thing began to happen. I mean interesting in the purest clinical sense of the term. Earlier, I mentioned that she had joined this theater group, but up until that point she had always worked on monologues, or a scene with another woman. That spring she began working on a scene with this guy, Rick. Rick Morole. A good looking guy, Rick. Tall, dark, ruggedly handsome, he spent three days a week in the gym keeping his body toned and tight. The type of guy girls just seemed to roll over for (or perhaps on top of?).

I had seen him, once, when I picked Bridgett up at her theater. They met twice a week in the theater to rehearse and critique each other. Bridgett had joined the company after they had cast their most recent production, which ran for about two years. The company had just cast their next show, and Bridgett was the understudy for the female lead. Rick was the male lead's understudy. The company director thought that in addition to running the lines to the play, they might build up some nice chemistry if they worked on another scene as well.

They would stay late on the nights the company met to run the lines from the play, and several times a week Bridgett would head down to his place to work on their scene. I asked her once why they never rehearsed at our place, and she just said that Rick lived alone and their were no distractions there. Plus, his place was larger than ours and it was easier to move the furniture around to set up the scene.

They rehearsed for almost three months. I could only smile to myself while I watched her get ready to head over to his place; how carefully she chose her outfits, always sexy, but never too blatant. She would then spend an hour doing her hair and make-up. I could not say a word, for fear that she would only see it as my jealousy re-appearing. Sometimes she would come home hours after she said she would, occasionally smelling of wine, or perhaps a hint of marijuana.

After three months, I could no longer hold it in. I had to broach the subject. I knew that I could not just blurt it out, that the matter demanded delicacy. I waited for her one night for her to get home from rehearsing at his place. She was wearing a short denim skirt, and a blue and white tank top, which buttoned down the front. The first two buttons were undone, showing a nice amount of cleavage, without being too overt.

As I guided the conversation around to where I wanted it to go, she bristled at first, knowing where the discussion was heading, but then she smiled and took the ball out of my hands, so to speak. She assured me that while she did think that Rick was attractive, all right gorgeous (and that's exactly how she said it), and she was flattered by the attention he was giving her, there was absolutely nothing going on. Then she would gently trace her fingers up the inside of my thigh, till they came to rest on my groin. She'd then talk of what she would do with Rick if she weren't married. The two of us got so turned on that all thoughts of jealousy were quickly forgotten.

Occasionally, Rick would drive Bridgett home, instead of her taking a cab from downtown to our apartment in Chelsea. We had an agreement, that she would always call when she was leaving his place, so that I could know when to expect her. That way I wouldn't worry that something had happened to her en route. On the nights he would drive her, I could always wait at the window, waiting for them to pull up. Invariably, they would sit outside in the car for another hour, talking, their heads very close.

After our discussion, a change, albeit subtle, came over Bridgett. She would almost lead me on, teasing me with thoughts of her with someone else. Sometimes it would be Rick, sometimes someone else the two of us knew, and other times it would be someone who she said she had met. All the while reassuring me that I was the only one. She would only do it while we were having sex, at first, which would turn both of us on, but as the weeks went by, she would drop hints at other times as well. It was almost as if she were testing me. Seeing how far my new found non-jealous state went. Her flirting when we went out became more blatant, her touching more personal. She would constantly look to see if I was watching her, which would always elicit a smile from her. Maybe she would blow me a kiss. Then go right back to her flirtation.

The following month, when their scene was produced at a fund-raiser for the theater group, I went to see it of course. It was a smashing success, the best scene the group did that night, and I could tell that the company's director was well pleased with them. He asked them to immediately start on another scene, to which they both readily agreed.

This new, sexier, more flirtatious Bridgett continued on. Sometimes I think she was trying to see how far she could go until I would explode. She wasn't far from getting what she wanted, either. I couldn't give her the satisfaction. I began to rely more and more heavily on the arousal aspect of seeing her flirt with someone else, and still I could barely keep the lid on my jealousy. The defining moment of the next ten years of my life was just around the corner, and I didn't even know it.