(Or the anatomy of a seduction from the husbands point of view)
This is not my normal subject and after a lot of thought I'm placing this story in the loving wives category, although it could just as easily be in Romance. Let me know if you think I was wrong.
If you are looking for a BTB or cuckold story
stop reading now
you are only going to waste your time. For me Loving Wives is all about relationships on the edge, problems, their solutions and redemption.
This is a long and convoluted story of a naive talented young artist, a marriage under attack and a husband's response to a predatory older, world wise man. It charts the attempted seduction of the wife (you will need to read the tale to find out if he succeeds). It builds up slowly, you have been warned!
There is some sex but not as much as my other stories.
I can't thank Romantic1 enough for the time he spent reviewing, commenting on and editing this story, any remaining mistakes are mine.
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Prologue.
Wood: a simple word that can never do justice to this wonderful gift that the planet earth has given us. I've been in love with it for as long as I can remember. Wood is alive to the touch and no two pieces are the same. It warms to the touch and the very smell of freshly sawn timber is so evocative. It can be rough or smooth, a symphony of shades and textures.
My grandfather, a jobbing carpenter gave me my first carved piece when I was four. I still have it, a rough carved oak horse. He taught me all he knew and when I'd drained him of his skills, he took me to his masters of forming wood. I sat at their feet and learnt my trade.
I work with wood and I love what I can do with it almost as much as I love my wife. But there can come a time to all men when enough is enough and I had finally reached that point.
What you ask could I be blathering on about? Well it's simple, well simple to me. After ten years of what I thought was a happy marriage my wife had just dropped the proverbial bombshell.
Ok, let's back up a moment and give you a chance to get up to speed with the events that are unfolding about my hapless head. A bit of background would help as well I guess.
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I'm Dave and I'm married to Zoe. We met at Art College in the south of England twelve years ago. I was at the college to put an academic stamp to the woodworking skills I'd acquired during my teenage years. It was a compromise my parents had insisted on. They would support the direction I wanted to travel so long as I had a degree to fall back on. So at the end of a pleasant three years I graduated with a degree in fine arts.
Zoe's a portrait artist who has been steadily gaining a local reputation. Two years ago she exhibited several nude and semi-nude studies in a small gallery in Brighton. Now she's begun selling canvases nationally. She's been getting more and more requests for sittings.
One of our friends once described us as an average couple. And I suppose in a way she was right. I'm thirty-two, and I'm average height, five foot ten. I'm reasonably muscular, a benefit of working with my hands I guess. Dark brown hair and steel blue eyes set in an angular face. Personally, I've never thought of myself as average.
Zoe will always be beautiful to me; she's a year younger. She has a cute but not classically beautiful face, long light brown hair that's always flecked with paint, blue eyes, and a cute little button nose. She's five foot six and has a slim build and I'm madly in love with her, and she with me. If she has one fault it's that she's too trusting of people. More than once I've had to extricate her from a situation that had got away from her.
The one thing about us that I would never describe as average was our love for each other. You see those trashy magazines descriptions of 'soul mates', well that's us. From that first time we met, neither of us has ever considered a life apart. Our love life is extensive and inventive, and is still as vibrant as the first time. Now we have a five-year-old daughter, Siobhan who is the apple of our eyes.
At heart I'm a simple man who loves making beautiful objects from wood. I've translated that love into a small business making bespoke pieces of furniture from exotic woods. I make less than twenty pieces a year, but I sell them for a ridiculous amount. My order book is full and I have enough work for the next two years. How much do I make a year, I'm not sure. My furniture sells for between £20,000 and £50,000 depending on the size and complexity. You do the maths. Of course the furniture pays the bills but my true passion is the small wooden sculptures I fashion in my spare time. I have a piece by an artist called John Fox; it's of a cat sleeping on a pillow. A beautiful simple piece that's also a little box, the curled up cat is the lid.
Over the years I created a few pieces that hopefully have given others as much satisfaction as that cat box still gives me. I don't sell them; I wait until I find the right person and give it to them. I recall one night drinking in the local pub with Zoe. In my pocket was a small carved mouse that had been sitting on my bench. I'm not sure why I'd picked it up that evening but I had. A woman in her forties walked in with a younger copy of her and sat down at a table near us. It felt like the mouse was fighting to get out of my pocket. I walked over to her and placed it in front of her.
"This wants to belong to you," I said.
She picked it up and looked at it for a long time as it sat on her upturned palm. I swear I saw it twitch and then settle down. She looked up and smiled at me with tears in her eyes. "Thank you; today would have been our 20th anniversary and my husband's pet name for me was
'Mouse'.
I could stand and watch Zoe work for hours when she's concentrating on a model and the creation of an image on the canvas in front of her. I love the way she chews on the end of her brush as she concentrates. And the way she flicks the hair back behind her ear sings to my heart. She loses herself to the passion of her art. The model would be posed and then Zoe would move to a separate plane. More than once I've had to take the brush from her tightly bent fingers, and release the poor model at the end of a long all-day session.
Not that I'm the only one to watch the other. I would catch glimpses of her sneaking glances at me while I'm crafting my wood, smiling to herself as she did so, sketching away. I found her notebook on her bench one afternoon. It was full of charcoal sketches of me. In our bedroom hangs the only full-size painting of me she's completed. I'm bent over my bench concentrating on the piece in front of me. It's one of the few she's finished of me. She tells me that I'm her hardest subject. She's never satisfied that any of her paintings or sketches of me are good enough. She never feels that she can capture the essence of me in paint. That one she tells me is the closest she's ever come to showing the depth of my love of the wood I'm working on.
There are a few pieces of carving I've kept hidden from her. For every now and again I would come a piece of wood that would hint of a figure hidden deep within its heart. I would work to release its soul. In the early days I found figures of Zoe, but after our daughter was born, mother and child appeared. Into each of the pieces I poured my soul and the love I have for the subjects. I've never shown them to any one, not even Zoe. They sit hidden at the back of a locked cupboard, all twelve of them.
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We first met one sunny afternoon in May, during my final year at college. She was in her second year. At the time I was living in Brighton with a couple of other art students. The house was included in the Brighton artist's open house scheme. If you've never heard of this then you are missing an amazing opportunity to meet artists and view their work in their own homes. It runs for a couple of months every year. Some impressive local artists open their homes to the general public. One of my housemates was an outstanding sculptor and our place was a popular stop on the tour. He was happy for the rest of his housemates to show a few of their pieces alongside his. So I would display a few of my smaller carvings and at least one piece of furniture.
My carvings are very tactile, they beg you to pick them up and feel their sinuous curves. For the last two years I'd place the same piece in the middle of the table. I told anyone who looked at it if they could work out what it was and it represented they could keep it. In those two years a lot of people had offered their opinions but none had been right. A few had recognised that it was a stylised woman but none could see the emotion it portrayed.
On the Saturday of last weekend of the years' open days I saw a young woman pick the piece up. She held it reverently as she slowly turned it over and over in her hands and I saw tears forming in the corner of her eyes.
I walked over to her, "What do you see?" I asked.
She looked up at me from the piece in her hands. "A beautiful woman," she said. Looking back down she added, "A beautiful woman twisted in grief for the loss of a loved one."
Again she looked at me, "This is your work." It wasn't a question. "You knew the subject." Again it was not a question.
I nodded, "It's my cousin, she'd just lost her six month old daughter in one of those out of the blue cot deaths."
I had poured all of my own grief into that piece. I'd offered it to Gina and her husband but she couldn't take it. 'It's too powerful a piece' she told me. 'The emotions are too raw, I'd cry every time I saw it'. So it sits on my table waiting to find the person who deserves to own it.
And that was the first time I met Zoe. I tried to give her the carving but she wouldn't take it.
"It's part of you, you should never give it up." And I realised she was right the piece had found its owner, only I'd been too close to it to realise that it had been me all along.
As a consolation prize I offered to take her out to dinner. She'd accepted with a gracious smile. Over dinner later that night we'd exchanged our life stories and by the end of the meal I knew I was in love with the woman sitting opposite me. Our first tentative kiss as I walked her home sent shockwaves coursing through my body. Zoe gasped and pushed herself against me, her lips seeking mine for a second longer deeper kiss.
We both did something that night we'd never done before. We made love on a first date - and again on many more dates.
Within weeks Zoe moved in with me for my last few months of college. A year later, just after she graduated we got married.
