Following are a trio of short stories resulting from interviews. None have sufficient depth for a standalone tale but all have facets that it would be a pity to lose. The three stories respectively are
Beef
,
Family Ties
and
Three card trick
.
*****
Beef
When I married Amanda three years ago I knew that she had been with a load more guys than she admitted to. I mean, with her kind of looks, especially that fabulous figure, it was obvious that she must have been very popular. So although her sexual experience was vastly greater than mine, I was just grateful that it was me that she happened to fall in love with. I felt so lucky that she had chosen me; it was very easy to make concessions. For example, right from the start Amanda said that she intended to carry on going out on Friday nights with the girls and young women that she worked with. I would have preferred for it to be just the two of us seven days a week but for the sake of a peaceful life I raised no objection.
My wife's best friend from work is called Carole. She is another fabulous looking woman and when I see them standing side by side, it is hard to decide which is the best. I do know that on Friday nights when Carole arrives, all dressed up in her disco gear to pick up Amanda for their evening, the sight of her short skirt, high heels and tits almost hanging out, makes my pants feel extremely tight. But perhaps it is not so much the sight of Carole as her reputation that turns me on.
One night when we had been married some fifteen months, Amanda arrived home slightly less inebriated than usual. Reaching out for the hot drink I had prepared for her she remarked, "I don't know where Carole finds the nerve. Over the last six months I don't think there has been a single Friday that she hasn't finished up getting shagged by someone - if her husband ever finds out he's going to go absolutely bonkers."
I was shocked. I knew that they danced with men and got chatted up but I had no idea that things could go further than that. "And what do you do?" I asked suspiciously.
"No more than most of the other girls," she told me blithely.
"And what exactly is that?"
"You know. A bit of snogging and get my tits felt up but I've never let any guy put anything more than a couple of fingers inside me. I promise that I never will, so you have nothing to worry about."
That was more than enough but something made me ask, "Are you sure that you have never done anything else?"
Amanda looked uneasy and then admitted, "Well on two occasions I tossed the guy off but it was only to get out of a difficult situation - it was either that or risk getting raped."
I did not like any of this one little bit and I told her so. I finished by saying, "When I agreed to your Friday's out with you friends it was because I thought I could trust you. Now I feel betrayed."
"You are silly. Can't you see that it's just a laugh, a harmless bit of fun? Do you know, the best bit of the evening is in the taxi coming home when we all pull the guys we've been with into tiny little pieces. It's hilarious. If any of them heard what we say about them, they would want to just curl up and die."
It must have been fear of appearing to be a prude compared to the other apparently permissive husbands that caused me to accept her standards. I do know that from then on her Friday nights out were a constant torment as I sat at home wondering what she was doing.
In addition to her regular Friday nights, Amanda had evenings nights out. It started when she mentioned that a girl at work was getting married and asked if she could go on a mid week hen night for the bride to be. I agreed then that she could go on any hen night that cropped up but thought it would be a rare occurrence. The trouble was that Amanda worked with a large number of young women and one or other seemed to be always getting spliced - usually after cohabiting with the guy for two or three years. The morning following one Thursday day hen-night, Amanda was so badly hung over that I rang her place of employment claiming illness as the reason for her absence. By the time that I arrived back from work she was just about recovered but had still only bothered to knock me up a scratch tea. During the evening she seemed to be in a funny mood and I got the impression that she was busy thinking instead of watching the TV programs. Late on during a commercial, she said suddenly, "I don't think that fidelity is all that important - do you?"
Now I thought she was talking about 'high fidelity' to do with midi-systems so I told her, "I don't know all that much about music."
She laughed. "I mean staying faithful. I think that if two people really love each other like we do then if they sleep with other people occasionally it doesn't matter at all - for instance, I wouldn't mind at all if you wanted to have sex with Carole."
"Really?"
"Yes really - you do fancy her don't you?"
"She's all right," I said.
"Come on, it's more than that. You fancy her like crazy - I've seen the way you look at her."
"Carole has a smashing figure and she is very good looking - it's quite natural to like looking at her," I admitted what was impossible to deny.
"Well she fancies you too, did you know that," Amanda declared looking at me challengingly. "She said that if I ever want to get rid of you then to point you in her direction. She is a very sexy girl"
"Did she really say that - I mean in those very words?" I asked, very thrilled despite my pose of being disinterested.
Amanda hesitated and then told me, "What she actually said was, 'If you ever need a break from Derek, I'll open my legs for him any time'. So now you know, what are you going to do about it?"
"I don't know. I never have cheated on you and up to this moment, I hadn't planned to."
"Never - you mean you haven't even thought about it?"
"No - have you?" Turning the question round caught my wife completely by surprise and she blushed bright red. I immediately put two and two together, "That other hen night you went on - the one for Avis where her boyfriend dumped her the next day. You were somehow involved in that weren't you? The way that your pals giggled and whispered, I thought then that something had happened that I was not meant to know about."
Amanda let her breath out with a rush and said a bit too willingly, "OK, I'll tell you everything that happened. Right from start Avis hung around the band and didn't join in the laugh at all. Then when the strip-o-gram that we had ordered arrived, we told her that there was someone wanted to meet her but she stayed by the stage saying, 'If it's some manky male stripper you can play with him yourselves.' So that's what we did. I look a bit like Avis, particularly from the side, so he performed to me as if I was the bride to be. I smeared the baby oil on his chest as usual and let him rub himself suggestively against me. The point of these do's is to get pictures of the girl who is going to be married, doing things that are a bit naughty. The idea is to get a laugh by flashing the snaps at work and also threatening to show them to her husband at the wedding reception - so when Avis wouldn't play we had to forge some pictures with me pretending to be her."
"When the guy finished had finished his act he offered to pose for some extra photo's and someone suggested that, because Avis had been such a cow, we should get a picture of her with the strippers cock in her mouth and then really show it to her boyfriend. Everybody agreed so I put on a bride's head-dress someone had brought. It hid most of my face while I did it. There was nothing for you to be upset about because the guy's cock was only in my mouth for a moment." Amanda paused, bobbed her head from side to side as she thought back and then said, "Well possible thirty seconds because there was a bit of messing before they got the camera to work."
"Thirty seconds!"
My wife obviously missed the horror in my voice because she qualified quite happily, "Well certainly not much more than a minute. It didn't taste very nice, in fact it burned my tongue - I think he had put something on to keep it stiff during his act."
I couldn't believe the whole horrible business. "Are you telling me that Avis lost her future husband due to a photo that you degraded yourself to provide?"
Amanda laughed gaily at my wrong conclusion. "It was nothing to do with the photo. Roy dumped her for spending that night in a caravan with three guys out of the band."
Nothing more was said just then but the subject was not finished in my mind. I felt vaguely uneasy with the niggling impression that I had been bamboozled. It was not until we were lying in bed that my suspicion crystallised. "Forget the stripper. Have you cheated on me since we were married?"
Amanda answered categorically, "No Derek, I have not cheated on you with anyone at all since we were married, I promise."
I heaved a sigh of relief and snuggled down preparing for sleep until a little devil in my mind asked, 'Why didn't she just say no - was there a reason for that very precise answer.' "What about before we were married?"
"That wasn't really cheating," she said. "For a start it wasn't planned and I don't even think that I enjoyed it."
Jerking up in bed I switched on the light and turning to my blinking wife I accused, "So you have had full sex with someone else."
"I suppose so but there's no point asking me about it because I don't remember a damn thing."