That Green Dress

[Author's Note: This series is a sequel to the

Those White Jeans

series. For full appreciation of this series, it is necessary to read

Those White Jeans

to completion first. Also, take note of the story's keyword tags before you read on so that you are not surprised.]

Beth was the first girlfriend who cheated on me. She and I had gone to high school together, but didn't hook up until the summer after graduation. She gave me her virginity sometime in late June. We spent the rest of the summer reenacting that event as often as possible. At the end of August, I began classes at a local university, while she began hers at a school three hours away. We talked on the phone every couple of days to maintain what had become for us a long distance relationship. This occurred in the year or two just before cell phones became ubiquitous, so these phone calls were over landlines.

Beth came home for a weekend around one month into that first semester. We were hanging out at her house when the phone rang and she picked up. It was her new friend, Frank, from the university. They talked for ten minutes about nearly nothing while I sat patiently next to Beth. While they spoke, I searched my mind for every reason why Frank should have her parents' home phone number so early in their friendship. I found none. It made no sense to me. The number for the phone in her dorm room? Yes, that made sense. But her parents' home phone for her first weekend away from the university? No.

Immediately after their phone call ended, Beth asked me if I would ever cheat on her. Even at our young age, it was obvious to me she posed that question to force me into a defensive position, deflecting any pressure that I might have put on her to explain that phone call with Frank. My reply was a flat "no," and then I promptly rose from my seat and left her home without another word. I'm sure my abrupt departure impressed upon her my understanding of her relationship to Frank. We never spoke to each other again.

A year later I had transferred to another school and was living in the dorms. I met a girl named Jackie and we soon started dating. It felt much different from the relationship I had with Beth. Within a few weeks I thought I was in love. Maybe I really was. But within a couple months we had a fight and broke up. By the worst coincidence, her ex-boyfriend lived next door to me, and the wall we shared between our rooms was thin. Late in that first Friday night after the breakup, when I heard a girl's voice coming through the wall from his room, I knew it was Jackie's. I could hear the sounds of happy conversation, but couldn't make out the words. No doubt she was rekindling that relationship. I put my ear to the wall. When Jackie's words were less intelligible and echoed more, she was lingering about the far end of his room. When Jackie's words were more intelligible and echoed less, she was nearest to me, perhaps just inches from the wall where I stood. I never did decipher exactly what they were talking about. It didn't matter.

What did matter was that eventually their conversation gave way to silence, and after a while, the silence gave way to the sounds of his bed's headboard rhythmically bumping the shared wall just behind my bed's headboard. Exhausted by my newfound feelings of desperation and overcome by the resulting feeling of physical sickness, I laid down in my bed. Except for the thin wall between us, Jackie's head was within reach of mine. I heard clearly her moans as they had sex. My heart was already broken from the breakup, so the sounds of my Jackie enjoying another man's cock was pure torture. My stomach remained so knotted, I thought I could vomit at any time. Tears streamed from my eyes. The deep ache of jealousy plagued my groin, forcing my hand to squeeze and pull my dick into hardness. I cried and I masturbated as I listened to my girl fuck on the other side of the wall. His headboard continued to slam into the wall as he moaned through his orgasm, which forced upon me the mental image of them in the missionary position, his cock pistoning in and out of her pussy as he came inside her. That image made me cum. I felt relieved afterward. I wondered if they used a condom.

Over the next week I heard Jackie in his room twice more, and twice more her visits ended up with her in his bed and me jerking off while I listened to her getting fucked in it. It really was torture. I couldn't bear it any longer. I called her on the phone and succeeded in patching things up. We got back together.

I'm sure both that she knew about the thin walls and that she was using her ex-boyfriend to make me jealous. It worked. She won. But at least I no longer had to listen to the girl I thought I loved fucking someone else. The downside was that those sounds never left my head, driving me to a constant state of horniness, which in turn drove me to fuck Jackie constantly. Often while we fucked I secretly imagined her ex-boyfriend was fucking her. The strong feelings of jealousy heightened the pleasure. Jackie had permanently damaged me. I didn't dare tell her any of that. I never let on that I knew she hooked up with her ex-boyfriend while we were broken up, allowing her only to assume I wasn't in my dorm room when she fucked him in his. She never knew what kind of pervert she and the thin walls had actually caused me to become.

Months later Jackie and I broke up again for more permanent reasons, and sometime after that she found a new boyfriend who, thankfully, lived on the other side of campus. On occasion she would still come visit just to fuck me, because she was, quite simply, a slut. One of those times she even spoke to her boyfriend from my dorm room on her new cell phone. She lied to him about where she was while I silently undressed her. She was still talking to him on the phone as I began to fingerfuck her. It felt so much better to be on "this side of the wall."

My next girlfriend, Heather, sat me down "to talk" one day after months of steady dating. Of course right away I knew she was going to break up with me. She told me that she wanted to be honest, that she had met a guy named Rich, they had become friends, and she recently realized that she had developed strong feelings for him. She thought we should break up before she pursued a relationship with him. I respected her honesty, had no ill feelings toward her, and even thought at the time that we truly would remain friends...until, that is, I later found out from her former friend, Amy, that Heather fucked Rich within hours of first meeting him, which happened more than two weeks before she broke up with me. I wasn't sure to believe Amy until she told me how she knew.

Amy and Rich had just started dating and went to a house party together. She introduced Rich to a bunch of people there, including my Heather. Amy and Rich circulated through the party somewhat separately through the course of the evening, and after several drinks, apparently Heather and Rich ended up dancing together among others in the living room, drunk enough to care for nothing beyond themselves. The dancing got close. Soon they disappeared into the basement, unaware that they were seen absconding. Someone alerted Amy. Amy quietly descended the steps to the basement to see Rich fucking Heather from behind as he bent her over an old billiards table.

Worse: I soon realized I fucked Heather later that same night. Still worse: In time I learned that some of my friends were at the same party and knew that Heather cheated on me, but they chose not to tell me, because they "didn't want to get involved."

Consolation came only from the sexual relationship between Amy and me that developed in urgency after she told me that story. Her injury was approximate to my own, so we shared in our therapy. We spent weeks fucking while we verbalized lurid fantasies about her boyfriend fucking my girlfriend. We spat obscene words and twisted phrases as we fucked our way through every dirty scenario our minds could dredge up from the dark depths of our depravity. We even visited the scene of the crime to fuck on the billiards table right where her Rich fucked my Heather. When finally our imaginations grew bored with those objects, Amy and I grew bored with each other, and our relationship came to an end. Still, sometimes I miss her.

In the several years following, I found no woman to love. It may have been that I was incapable of loving in that time, or it may be that I found the quality of women to be consistently undeserving. I don't know for sure, but I think it's safe to say that I had grown cynical.

Without getting into the details of the arguments I had with all my cheating girlfriends, I can summarize what I learned from them about women: All women cheat if given the opportunity. They're all sluts. They will lie to get what they want, and they will stand steadfast behind even the weakest lie, even knowing that you know it's a lie, and use anger - real or imagined - to put you on the defensive, to convince you that you're wrong, or to at least cause your acquiescence. And by the way, if you actually catch them cheating, it's still your fault somehow.

Over time, my cynicism softened. It became something more like this: Most women cheat if given an attractive opportunity. Some of them are pathological liars who will resort to abusive tactics to get what they want and keep you under control. Others make the mistake of cheating in a weak moment, then look for a way out of the situation that causes the least amount of damage, which will often employ lying. The latter has the potential to become forgivable, or perhaps at least understandable; the former has no similar potential. Such was my state of mind just before I first met my wife, Melissa.

I had seen Melissa once or twice each week at the gym for months. Gym-goers tend to fall into regular schedules, especially for their particular favorite classes. I used the gym mostly for the rowing machine, the Stairmaster, and the sauna, not classes, but nonetheless I kept a regular schedule. While I was on the machines I would usually see Melissa walk by, with her dark brown hair pulled up into a neat ponytail, going to or coming from her yoga or Pilates classes. It didn't take long before seeing her in gym outfits became the highlight of my visits, and I'd miss seeing her on the few days she didn't attend. It's not that she wore anything that was overtly provocative or sexy. I just thought she had a beautiful figure, and her gym clothes accentuated it well.

Melissa was among the tallest of the women at the gym, if not the tallest. Her narrow shoulders and long neck looked delicate, lending her an air of elegance. She might have otherwise appeared waifish if not for the muscular build she maintained upon her thin frame. Her hips were narrow, like her shoulders, but they were not without the feminine flare typical of the female form, enriching the shapeliness of her ass. Before I had even met her, that ass and the slim muscularity of her long legs impressed upon me the idea that she was an accomplished distance runner.

As physically attractive as she appeared to me from afar, for a long time I was disinclined to approach her. A girl that looks that good, I figured, either has a boyfriend or is married, and I already pitied her man for the gut-wrenching day he finds out she cheated on him. Because, of course, as the theory goes, a girl that looks that good can fuck anyone she wants, so there's no doubt she'll cheat if she hasn't already.

Over the same long time, however, I continued to pick up on small details about her, causing my interest in her to gradually increase. One day, when one of the new meatheads working out with free weights introduced the entire void of the gym to his obnoxious grunts, I caught Melissa rolling her eyes, then smiling and shaking her head, herself the only intended audience of her expression, which I found adorable. On another day, I saw her from a distance talking to a guy near the front desk, and I suspected he was going to ask her out on a date. I had seen him around the gym for a long time, and he seemed like a good-looking and well-mannered guy to me, so I figured he might succeed if she were single. He had spent a few minutes engaging her in conversation before her body language suddenly revealed to me her rejection of him, which was soon followed by her polite verbalization of that rejection. She accomplished it gracefully, giving him no cause for any awkward embarrassment.

On a different occasion, as I rowed on the rowing machine and she walked alone out of her yoga class, I realized that she didn't seem to have any friends at this gym. She would talk briefly to the workers at the front desk upon her entrances and exits to and from the building, and once I saw her talking to that guy asking her out on a date, but that was it. Otherwise, she kept to herself, just like I did. A moment after this realization, I observed her talking to the worker at the front desk, and in the midst of that conversation, Melissa wrote something on a clipboard that rested on the countertop. Soon after her departure, I approached the front desk and looked at the paper in the clipboard. It was a sign-up sheet for a new kickboxing class. The last name written on the sheet was Melissa's. That's how I first learned her name. I signed mine just underneath hers. My gym schedule was about to change.

Before that first kickboxing class, I gave consideration to what I wanted with Melissa and how I would approach her. An honest conversation with myself about my whole life grew out of that. I was already approaching the age of 30 years, and I was without any serious relationship with a woman since college. I knew I was bored with dating, but eventually I would like to have a family. Having a family depended upon being able to trust a woman enough to marry her. Therein remained a roadblock. I was incapable of fully trusting a woman and probably would always be. Since I was being honest with myself, I also gave consideration to the fact that I still masturbated to memories and fantasies of past girlfriends cheating on me. The sounds of Jackie fucking on the other side of the wall of my college dorm room still made me cum, as did visualizations of a naked Heather bent over the billiards table for another man. These sounds and images would probably always be a source of sexual arousal - scars on my libido that would never fade.

It followed, then, that to realize my goals of getting married and having a family, I would have to accept my mistrust of women, but never allow that mistrust to manifest itself. That cheating was a source of sexual arousal would forever remain a secret. It would have to be buried deep down, along with my true dating history and the scars it caused, or else the marriage would be doomed. I would also have to actively build trust in my significant other as much as I could, as the absence of trust is filled by a quiet hell, the minimization of which is imperative to sanity and happiness. I needed to change.

As it relates to Melissa, my plan was as follows: If I were to succeed in having any relationship with her whatsoever, it was crucial for me that it be founded in a strong friendship that preceded anything romantic. My approach toward her will have to be glacially slow, I thought. Introductions first. I wanted her to know my name and I wanted her to tell me hers. Simple greetings and occasional comments to each other from time to time. But no advances. No suggestions for dates. Nothing to suggest taking the relationship outside of the gym, and nothing to suggest I wanted anything beyond having an acquaintance with whom I could casually chat. That was my safe zone. Let her steer us toward friendship, if that's what she desires. If she were interested in taking it further, let her somehow make it known by a hint or a comment. Any trust I could have in her would be predicated on the knowledge that she first wanted me enough to make some sort of move toward me. And if a friendship evolved into something romantic, let that romance persist for at least, say, two years before even considering something more. An investment in time would aid to build my trust, I decided.

Of course all of this planning was for a hypothetical relationship. I had no illusions about my chances with Melissa, and actually expected she would have little or no interest in me. But my interest in her was strong enough that I was compelled to at least try.

Melissa and I met in the first kickboxing class. I stood near her from the start, so that if the instructor asked the class to pair up for some exercise, I might have a good chance of pairing up with her. I got lucky. We were indeed asked to pair up, and Melissa turned slightly to face me, then leveled a hand toward me, palm up, in a suggestion that we be partners. I executed according to plan, immediately giving her my name and shaking her hand as she answered:

"I'm Melissa."

"Pleased to meet you." Understatement of the century. I felt a jolt of electricity when our hands touched. Finally seeing her up close and hearing her voice for the first time instantly brought me a sense of optimism toward all the women of planet Earth. The existence of this woman gave hope to us all.

I had not anticipated such a strong attraction to her from the start, but I successfully managed my feelings, outwardly displaying a simple friendliness that could have registered barely above disinterest. In the next forty-five minutes of class, we exchanged a few interspersed comments related to our activities, but little more before our conventional goodnights.

Naturally, recollections of Melissa filled the vacant spaces of my mind in the days afterward. Her eyes, gray-green like the color of sage, though large, were set deep in their sockets, giving them a faraway and unreachable look. Her forehead rose high above a sharp brow that matched her straight and noble nose. The apparent strength and intelligence of these features contrasted with the smallness of her chin, the gentle curvature of her jawline, and the innocent playfulness of her smiles - those smiles each accented with deep dimples that appeared from nowhere high in her cheeks, and emphasized by the thickening of the dark folds that defined her lower eyelids. Across the bridge of her nose and beneath her eyes danced an array of freckles, so unlikely for someone with otherwise flawless, medium-toned skin.

Melissa's voice was deep for a woman, but decidedly feminine and sensual. Every word was pronounced with an uncommon huskiness. Her word choices were careful, and her sentences weren't marred by fillers like "uh" or "um." Her manner of speech, like her face, disclosed her intelligence and portrayed her as both confident and direct.

At the second kickboxing class, I approached and greeted Melissa right away to encourage the idea that we should partner up again, if the instructor asks. And again we did. After that, the ice had been broken, and Melissa and I began engaging in easier conversation when we saw each other at the gym. I stuck to my original plan, never impressing upon Melissa the idea that I wanted more than that. Mostly we talked about impersonal subjects, like sports, the gym, or gym activities. I did find out that she used to be a competitive long distance runner, as I suspected, but after college she gave it up in the interest of preserving her knees. She replaced running with swimming for cardio work, and now kickboxing for the same reason. I asked her about rowing, and she told me she never tried it. That led to the two of us rowing together on the rowing machines, which she quickly took to.

And that's how things were for about three months. We saw each other at the gym every Monday and Thursday evening between 7:00 and 8:30. We exercised together and we spoke on benign subjects. Every evening we said our goodnights with a consistently satisfied finality, mine with the intent to convey that when she was out of my sight, she was also out of my mind. We hardly knew a thing about each other, not even professionally. The sum of my knowledge of Melissa concerned her appearance, her mannerisms, and her demeanor. She was always in a pleasant mood when I saw her...until one particular evening at the end of those three months.