It's almost six o'clock by the time I get all the weeds out of the south garden, and my whole body is sore and aching from the work. Whoever said that retiring at forty would be a life of leisure has evidently never undertaken a landscaping project. My back feels like it might stop being stiff sometime around the next Presidential administration.
Still, it's worth it to look out of the bathroom window and see the dark, loamy soil I put down just waiting to grow something beautiful. The dirt will wash off, the aches will fade, the scratches will heal (even that one down my left arm from digging out the rose bushes that went wild when the previous owners moved) but what Jen and I are making here is going to last us a lifetime. That's more than worth a few aches and pains. And the cost of a tube of Neosporin. And the blisters I got when I was digging out that patch of thistles on the north side of the house. And... um, okay, so it's been a pretty long week.
I get in the shower and scrub myself down, getting the water as hot as I possibly can to help massage out some of the soreness in my back and shoulders. It works, as far as the pain goes, but the heat and the humidity leave my muscles feeling as limp as a rag doll. It's all I can do to heave my body out of the shower once the water's turned off, and drying myself feels like more work than the digging I did this morning. (Oh, and I also manage to find a whole bunch of new scratches I didn't remember getting. Terry cloth is good for a lot of things, but massaging scraped skin isn't one of them.) I grab the bottle of Advil and stumble out of the bathroom, heading to the bedroom and a change of clothes. Or maybe just a silk robe and a cold beer.
I don't make it. As I'm crossing through the great room, Jen gets back from the supply run she went on this morning. She comes through the door with a double armload of shopping bags and sees me, naked and exhausted and covered in scrapes and bruises. (I don't think I mentioned the bruises. There are bruises. I whanged myself pretty good on the shin when the wheelbarrow caught a root.) She takes one look at me, and I guess I most look even worse than I feel because she sets down the bags, points to the recliner, and says, "Sit. Now."
I don't argue with Jen when she uses that tone of voice. I also get kind of hard, normally, but I'm a little too tired to do more than twitch right now. I flop down into the cushions of the recliner with a weariness that tells me that I was sucking it up a little harder than I realized. Once I sit down, it feels like I may never get back up again.
Now, I know that some of that is down to Jen. When we finally got the house renovated enough that we could move in, she decided to take advantage of our newfound privacy to indulge a few of the fantasies she'd been saving over the years. Not that she didn't get a pretty big kick out of playing with my head on a regular basis even when we were both working, but she had a whole lot of fantasies that involved unlimited free time and no neighbors within twenty miles, you know? And the recliner was one of them. The recliner was the center of a lot of them, to be honest.
She didn't let me sit in it just any time I wanted. We had plenty of couches to cuddle on if we just wanted to watch television or something. No, she saved the recliner for special occasions, when she was feeling a little bit frisky and a big bit toppy and she wanted me to start feeling groggy and fuzzy almost as soon as I sat down. She only let me sit in this chair when she was going to hypnotize me, and I knew it. And knowing it made me start to slip away into trance just a little bit even before she used any triggers or inductions, because the feel of the chair under my body was automatically and irrevocably associated with the trance experience. She calls it an anchor. The chair is anchored to trance in my mind, because I only sit in it on those special occasions.
We, uh... we have a lot of special occasions these days.
The point is, though, that when I sit down, that wave of complete exhaustion that slaps me hard into the cushions isn't just me being tired, and it isn't just me starting to remember that my wife found out about 'erotic hypnosis' about ten years back and has gotten really good at it. It's both, hitting me at the same time. The bottle of Advil falls right out of my hand as I suddenly can't make my muscles hold on to it anymore, and my eyelids sink shut like they're made of lead. About the only part of my body that doesn't go limp is my cock. That perks up a little and starts paying attention.