It was Valentine's Day and I was sitting in the left hand corner of the tavern thirty minutes early nursing a Lynchburg Lemonade. The way the room was configured I could see the front door and most of the bar with its waist high top rail and the stools in front of it for the customers. My best friend since we were both three and our moms began hanging out together, Daniel "Danny Boy" O'Shea, had allowed me to unscrew the bulbs in the fixture above my table so that it was dim with only the light from a wall sconce five feet away preventing it from being totally dark. The person I was waiting for would not be able to tell who was sitting in the corner which was my objective all along.
I saw someone approach the front door five minutes past our arranged meeting time and recognized the parka and knew she had arrived. When she paused and took one last drag off the cigarette she was smoking before flicking it away out into the street; I thought to myself: "When did she pick up that filthy habit again?"
She entered the tavern and hung her coat on the coat tree beside the door then proceeded to a stool dead center of the bar. She had lost a lot of weight since the last time I had seen her which was exactly one year ago on this day, but my wife Chelsea was still a sexy lady even in the loose fitting, long sleeved, ankle length dress she was wearing. I watched as the bar tender sat a white wine down in front of her which confirmed that she was a regular at the bar. I knew from Danny Boy she'd been trying to get him to tell her how she could get in contact with me for the past year, but he was more loyal to me than she'd proven to be.
"Why had I avoided contact for a whole year from the woman I had loved for the last twelve years?" You're asking. For the answer to that question I need to introduce us and go into a little of our lives together.
I am Dale Stringer and I met Chelsea Chambers a month after returning home from graduating college. My best friend, Danny Boy, and his wife, Irene, had set us up on a blind date and I had been smitten by Chels the very first time I saw her. She was the most beautiful woman I'd ever dated and I wanted to make her mine. The fact that she had already been married and divorced once despite her being only twenty three and a year older than me; didn't bother me. She was almost as tall as my 5'9" at 5'8", was a brunette with shoulder length hair, had green eyes perfectly spaced over a button nose with full kissable lips, and a voluptuous body.
We fell in love, got married, lived in a small apartment while I began the climb up the corporate ladder and Chels began working as a receptionist at a realty company and eventually earned a realtor's license. Everything in our lives seemed perfect for the next seven years then things began to change.
Our sex life had been great from the first time we had sex up to the seven year mark. Sure it had declined from our newly wed years, but we still had sex three or four times a week and had tried different things to keep it fresh and exciting in the past. The problem in our sex life was my fault entirely or to be more accurate, my shift in priorities from happy home life to workaholic, nothing's more important than the next promotion dumb ass. Between the late hours at work and being too tired to perform when I was at home, our sex life shrank to once a week and I rushed through that most of the time so I could either get some sleep or get back to working on whatever I'd brought home to finish. Chels finally got fed up and confronted me.
"Dale, I need to talk to you and you need to listen so get your ass into the kitchen right now." She said firmly to me the night our marriage began to change.
"I love you and I'm proud of you, Dale, but you've changed over the last six months and I don't like it." Chels started saying to me. "You've been so wrapped up in work that you've neglected me both as a husband and a lover. I need more sex than you've been giving me so you need to decide how we fix that. I won't cheat on you, but unless you start fulfilling my needs again, I will find someone who will. I would much rather be getting regularly fucked by the man that I love and I hope still loves me, but I am going to get fucked more than once or twice a week from now on.
"If you can't or won't do that, then it will be another man. If you can't live with that, then we'll have to divorce. I love you and want to grow old with you so you need to get on board with this or get out of my life."
I was dumb struck to say the least by what my loving wife had unloaded on me at that moment. I had known she wasn't happy, but I never thought she was that unhappy.
"I don't know what to say, Chels. I'm sorry that you're so unhappy that you've even thought about having sex with another man and I promise I'll cut back at work and give you what you need." I told her with every intention of doing what I'd promised.
I managed to keep that promise for the next three months, but after that I gradually began to slip back into the work consumed idiot I'd been before so it was no surprise when Chels hit me with her ultimatum again.
"Dale, you know I love you and wouldn't do anything to hurt you." She said to me as she sat in my lap one Saturday afternoon after we'd finished making love to each other. "And I love the way you make love to me when you put in the effort."
"But?" I interjected before she could.
"You've reverted back to that workaholic you were before and haven't been putting in the effort like you promised. Yes, you tried and I love you for that, but we're back to where we were six months ago and it looks like I'm going to have to change our situation because you haven't.
"I will be enjoying sex with other people and it won't be cheating." She told me matter-of-factly.
"How can you say it won't be cheating? I don't want you to be with other people." I said angrily as I tried to push her off me.
Chels hung on to me with all her strength and short of hurting her; I couldn't get her off of me.
"It won't be cheating because you will know. I won't keep secrets from you and will tell you as much as you want to know. I won't become emotionally attached to anybody else, male or female, and will always come home to you. I'll never deny you sex even if I've been with someone else that day and I swear you'll never get sloppy seconds. Please Dale, agree to let me do this or we're going to end up divorced and neither of us want that, do we?"
I don't know which part of her little speech shocked me more, the sex outside of our marriage or the male or female statement.
"Male or female?" I blurted out when I was able to.
"Yes, male or female. I hadn't told you before now because it never came up, but I did do some experimenting with other girls before my first marriage and I met you. I've never went all the way to actually having sex with another woman, but I remember how different it felt to be making out with another woman, feeling each other up, and how excited it made me. I want to go all the way with another woman at least once and if you agree to my being free to enjoy myself outside of our marriage; I'll be able to do that."
"If you had told me this before, we could have done that together." I managed to say when my second big shock of the day had eased and my brain was able to function again.
"I didn't want us to do that when we were fulfilling each other's sexual needs. I know how some men get addicted to that type of sex and it ruins the marriage and I was afraid you'd be one of those." She said with a pout on her face.
"And I know of women who say they can handle an open marriage without getting attached or addicted to sex with other people and end up ruining their marriages. That's what you're talking about here Chels; us having an open marriage because if you thought it'd be alright for you to have sex outside our marriage and expect me not to then you thought wrong.
"How do you know you won't become one of those women who love the lifestyle more than they love their spouse?" I asked her in a raised voice which always happened when I got angry or excited and at that moment I was a little of both.
"I could never love anything or anybody more than I love you, Dale. I promise I'll stop if you say I'm getting too involved with the "lifestyle" as you called it or if you think I'm getting too attached to another person. I love you and want us to remain a happy, loving couple, but right now I'm not happy and short of you quitting your job, which I don't want, this is the only way I see for us to both get what we want.
"I know how important your career is and how much you want to become one of the vice presidents in the company and I want to do everything I can to help you make that happen. I don't want a divorce, won't sneak around behind your back, promise to be discrete, never ever stop loving you, stop encouraging you, and will not let anyone come between us, I swear.
"As far as us having an open marriage, I hadn't thought of it like that. I hadn't ever thought of you being with another woman especially if I continued to fulfill all your needs at home, but you're right, it wouldn't be fair for me to be able to do something like this and you not be able to. I can't say I like the idea of you with other women, but I know it's only fair for me to agree to you being able to if you want to."
We talked into the wee hours of the night about opening up our marriage after we finally agreed that something had to be done or our marriage was doomed. We came to an agreement that we both could live with and that was the beginning of the next chapter of our lives together.
