Back to Vanilla

by Jennifer Maschek

  I am totally at your disposal in this matter. I know that you and I have a lot to share and discuss privately, and when you decide to involve your master is entirely in your hands.

  At this point, too, I want you to know how much I look forward to our meeting and to initiating you in the ways of the good little sub I know you’ll be. Truly, I can see it in your eyes.

  Love, Daddy Xxxx

  20. Megan

  Megan had been, as she had promised herself from day one, true to herself. After the day when, over that greasy lunch, she had told Rich of her intentions, she had continued to talk. If she’d paused a little more frequently for breath, she might have noticed the one-way nature of many of these chats, but she was determined to share where her head was with her husband, both in the name of honesty and because, to be frank, it was good to have a sounding board, although his responses tended to be nodded rather than spoken.

  On PhetX, polyamory was a reasonably popular lifestyle choice. It was fairly obvious why, Rich thought, when she spoke to him about what she was learning. The idea of remorse-free indiscretion was surely a tempting one in any man’s book, and what man wouldn’t say no when offered an open permission slip?

  What got him, though, was the amount of energy she seemed to dedicate to the scene. If Ms Opportunity came and knocked on his door, okay, yes, he was, theoretically at least, now free to open it, but he couldn’t imagine having either the time or stamina that Megan seemed to commit to the cause.

  He was bewildered by the direction that their conversations, once dominated by talk of their children, had taken. The most bizarre thing of all, he thought, as he listened to an in-depth account of an online conversation she’d had with a transsexual who had recently left the army and was fighting the Anglican Church for the right to become a nun, was how bloody mundane the most extreme acts of sexuality could become when they were reduced to small-talk. Having taken a few casual steps down the path of BDSM, her stroll seemed to have gained huge momentum lately, and she was now running at a speed he didn’t have the spirit or desire to keep up with.

  The vestiges of guilt he’d had for the minor offences he committed all those years ago had long vanished. He found himself less and less interested in his wife’s pursuits, and as she, although always an attentive mother, spent more of her free time hunting for the elusive “something”, he threw himself increasingly into domesticity and fatherhood.

  Megan had not mentioned the waters she had been testing with Kindly_Meister. She told herself that this was because while she knew for a fact that Rich would support her, as he had done throughout this journey, of all the things she had told him and asked of him, this, she knew, was undoubtedly the trickiest.

  Unlike Lisa’s husband in Decently Indecent Proposal, who had been past it and all but impotent, Rich had, until this whole business started, been a fairly regular and enthusiastic lover, if a trifle vanilla by her current standards. Since that initial chat, though, he had taken to falling asleep most nights on the couch downstairs, so much so that the kids had started referring to it as “Dad’s bed”.

  Getting him to read the story, Alasdair’s tale, which had so deeply touched her, seemed like the most logical place to start. If nothing else, she thought, it would show him quite clearly where her head was at the moment, as well as introducing the concept of the man she was considering to play the part of Mike.

  It was late on Sunday night; she had school the next day and she was weary to the core. With Rich not due home until the small hours, she WhatsApped a link to the story to his phone, along with a message saying, “Let me know what you think. Love you X”, snuggled under her voluminous duvet and went straight to sleep.

  As the frog-sound alarm on her phone began burping a cheery wake-up call a few hours later, she reached straight down and checked. He’d seen the message – the two blue ticks confirmed this – but had sent no response as yet.

  Downstairs, her husband was already up and crazily lively in the way he tended to be around their children, despite his late arrival home and the minimal amount of sleep that inevitably ensured. As she walked into the kitchen, he was pouring milk on to Sam’s breakfast cereal to the noise of what sounded remarkably like the drone of a 1940 Spitfire.

  “Hey-hey-hey!” he called out at her arrival, making Sam look up and beam at his mum. “Look who’s here!”

  Megan was immediately caught up in the mêlée of family life, which swept her from that first point, through a cup of tea for herself, past breakfast for three kids in varying states of awakeness and more or less continued as she walked out of the front door, the two girls in tow, 32 minutes later.

  It being a Monday, Sam was staying with Rich a while longer, to be dropped off as the nursery doors opened just after 9am. For the next 13 hours nothing counted except work and family – children. There would be no time even to think, and the lack of mobile reception anywhere on the school premises rendered checking her messages futile.

  In fact, it would be four more days before she saw Rich alone, during which time Daddy’s_BiGal had got to know her potential master incredibly well, online at least.

  Their contact wasn’t constant by any means – that didn’t suit either of them – but each night, as the house finally fell into the hush that so evaded it during most of the day, the two would speak through what she already knew to be her own wants and what he was gradually suggesting to her might be her needs. Through what some might call a manipulative drip-drip-dripping of ideas, Megan became obsessed with the burgeoning notion of a threesome unlike any she had previously contemplated.

  Their messaged conversations would often start with almost an academic tone, but as they spoke, a new fantasy was formed, and the exchanges took a more feral turn, exciting them both. His words were, more often than not, the last she saw each night, and for Megan there was no reluctance or scepticism whatsoever.

  She was going to meet this man.

  It was Thursday evening and with Rich on early shifts for the next few days, she had decided it was worth staying up for that chat. The link she had sent him had been greeted only with silence. She hadn’t pushed it. While his compliance in anything she chose to do was something she assumed rather than sought, this was still a hurdle over which they had to jump before she took things with Kindly_Meister any further. And even though she knew he would say yes, she still needed to find the words to ask.

  Alasdair was at the monthly munch in his home town and they’d not chatted all day, so in a twist so rare of late as to be remarkable, she had spent the two hours before Rich’s return from work at 11pm sitting in front of the TV, phone unglued from her left hand and lying glow-free on the kitchen surface. For the first time in the weeks since meeting Kindly_Meister online, she was totally relaxed as her husband walked through the door, and the smile with which she looked up at him from the couch lacked the distracted distance she had done little to disguise recently.

  As a result, Rich was instantly warmed and pleased to see her; it felt, for the most fleeting of moments, like old times. Instead of walking into the kitchen, offering tea and pottering, he came straight in and plonked himself down next to his wife, cocking his head a little to the left to stare into her eyes before speaking.

  “Well… you look…”

  “Like a lazy-arse couch potato surrounded by evidence of her insanely sweet tooth and other debauched tendencies and appalled at being so cruelly caught out in this way?” Her arm moved in a circle to gesture at the scattering of chocolate wrappers strewn around her, along with an empty wine glass.

  “No! Okay, yes, that too, but it wasn’t my immediate thought. You look… relaxed. Happy.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess an excess of sugar, fermented and otherwise, surging through your veins, tickling your funny bone, combined with an evening of Dinner Date and The Millionaire Matchmaker will tend to do that to a gal.”

  And they laughed.

  “I’m serious though, babe. You look good. Tea?”


  “My job. You sit. The exercise of moving from here to the kettle is the most I’ll have done all evening and I reckon those clogged arteries and wasting muscles will thank me for it. Play your cards right, and I’ll throw in that final KitKat which has spent the past 47 minutes taunting me from the cupboard.”

  He did as he was told and sat, smiling at the mumbles from the kitchen as she slipped into her familiar habit of talking her way through every activity, even when she was alone. She’d told him it was from 12 years of childrearing, at home and now at work too, but he was sure she’d been doing it as a teenager when they’d first met.

  When she came in a few minutes later, it was with a large square tray, which she placed on the table next to the couch. She scooped up the rubbish around her seat, stuffed it into the bin and sat back down.

  “How was your day?” They both asked the question simultaneously, leading to more laughter, before they settled into a chat about the perplexing political hierarchy at his hospital, which made the lives of him and his colleagues so complicated as they tended to the bureaucratic overgrowth at the expense of caring for the patients. A recent high-profile inquiry into a hospital cock-up at the other side of the country had concluded that “lessons must be learnt”, which, Rich told her, meant nothing more than endless red tape slowing down everyone who did anything other than a pen-pushing job at his place.

  “God, you know, it seems so long ago, my day, that I have no clue how it was,” Megan said when Rich turned the focus on her. “I’m pretty sure that the home bit was fine. Kids are all okay, though Sam has a bit of a sniffle coming on. Shattered, like me, I guess, and ready for the weekend.”

  “Good, good. Maybe we could do something? You and me, Sunday morning… breakfast, brunch, talk, fix things maybe, drop them off at Mum’s on the way? She’s always asking… I know it’s not a romantic dinner, but, hell, I’m sure the budget could run to a pudding too, if you’d fancy.”

  “I’d like that. Yeah, I really would. We… I mean, there’s a lot I’d like to talk to you about and maybe home isn’t the ideal place…”

  “Uh huh,” he said, his tone making a joke of the genuine slump that hit him with her last words. “Should I be worried here?”

  “God. No. Sorry. Nothing ominous, just… did you read that link? The one I sent?”

  His expression spoke the answer.

  “Ah. Oh… Jeez, Rich… do you even still have it?”

  “I suspect so, I mean, you know I never delete. Was it important? I meant to check, but then things got busy at work… What was it? Something to do with your job? Your training?”

  She sighed. As comfortable as she was with the notion, this was a tricky one to start from scratch, and now was probably not the time. But then she’d never been blessed in the art of choosing the right moment, and he knew that.

  “It was a story. It was a story I wanted you to read. Written by a guy I know.”

  “A story, like fiction? Okay, erm, so… you think I might like it? Who wrote it? You know me and fiction, babe. I’m a real facts kind of guy. I mean, is it sci-fi?”

  This was an unusual turn for him and he had no idea where it was going. Clearly this was important, but, for the life of him, he couldn’t imagine why.

  “Is this to do with the kids…?”

  “It’s nothing to do with space or the kids or anything. It’s a story written by a guy I’ve been chatting to. Online. He’s a journalist and he writes fiction too.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I want you to read it. Because. I want you to read this story because this is how I met him, by reading his tales, and because I like him and because I like what he writes.” Although this wasn’t strictly true, the reality – “He’s a dom I met on a BDSM site and he needs your permission to fuck me” – didn’t trip quite as fluidly off the tongue.

  “Okay. You can’t just tell me about it? I mean, it’s great to share each other’s interests and all, but, erm, isn’t it a bit like me sending you a New Scientist link and you laughing blatantly in my face…?”

  Another sigh.

  “I can tell you about it, but I’d rather you read it. It’s how I feel, and I think it’s what I want… what I want us to do…”

  The lightbulb flickered above his head.

  “You don’t need to tell me this. I mean, I said, when you asked, I said do whatever makes you happy, but I don’t need to know what that is.”

  “You don’t need to know what makes me happy?”

  They both knew she was twisting his words, and there was a pause.

  “Okay,” Megan conceded, “but it’s more than just that, more than knowing about me. I want you to know about him and I think you can see that through his writing. I want you to know why I need to meet him. But I want you to trust him and to know I’ll be safe.”

  “I trust you,” and his tone was unmistakably cold here, “which is all that matters to me.”

  During the brief silence that followed, she was aware that she was biting her lips to keep words from pouring out before their time.

  “I know you trust me. You trust me and you can always trust me, Rich, but there’s something I need to do and I can’t do it without your help. I want your help and I need it.”

  And so he sat in all but open-mouthed silence as she explained what the story was about. Well used by now to turning men on with her words, she added explicit details of her own in the expectation that what worked for prowling guys online would work for him, like one size truly fitted all.

  It didn’t.

  But still Rich remained silent as he sat through the fantasy being concocted before him, staring at his wife’s familiar face so animatedly jabbering away and wondering when exactly this had happened and whether he could have done anything along the way to prevent it.

  The hunch taking shape in the back of his consciousness was that he could have, that he could have avoided all of this if he had done… something; he wasn’t sure what. It was that thought, creeping in, that kept him there and listening, and it was that same thought that eventually made him nod, just slightly, but enough to detract attention from the resounding fuck-you that had begun to echo loudly inside his head

  21. Kindly_Meister

  A tough task lay ahead of Alasdair as he sat in front of his laptop. Writing – letters, emails, articles, stories, complaints – had never been challenging for him. Words were his tools and they tumbled from his fingertips and on to the keys in front of him without conscious though.

  But this was different; this required his utmost. Sobriety was a given, although he was sure that he would deserve a drink afterwards. And sensitivity: however enthusiastic to please her Megan had made her husband sound, and she certainly had, it was imperative that he did not tread on this man’s toes or they would both lose the dignity of manhood that needed to be maintained before, during and after this process. This was a delicate business and Alasdair took nothing for granted here.

  Megan’s dream, her fantasy, had built up as their chats had intensified. She wanted, she wanted, she wanted – he knew everything she said she wanted, and had promised to help her achieve it all.

  Through her, he had a mental picture of her husband: a man much younger than him but one whose open-minded understanding and desperation to please his wife surmounted all. From what she had told him, Alasdair believed his request to be a mere formality, like asking a future father-in-law for his daughter’s hand, a question to which the answer was already a default “yes”. He felt, too, that this was the moment, that he could do the right thing by Rich, while signalling to Megan that he was both in control and to be trusted. It hadn’t taken much to convince her to pass on her husband’s email address.

  Two hours later, having written, rewritten, thought, edited and started again from scratch entirely, he finally clicked the send button and fired off the email. And yes, he had been right; a drink was the first thing he reached for.

  My dear Rich,

  I hope you will fo
rgive the familiarity of an old man, but if things go as I feel they might, I will both owe you a great debt of gratitude and we will know each other on a level that supersedes that of a casual acquaintance.

  I want you to know how much I value the trust you have put in me by simply reading this letter. Most men, as we are both aware, would be threatening guns at dawn at the mere suggestion of what I’m about to ask, but to me, you are by far the greater man for listening to your wife rather than to the macho ravings of a society desperate to keep us all enslaved by the falsehood that the chains of monogamy are the key to successful family units and are at the very core of love.

  Bullshit is the correct name for that, I believe.

  I want you to know that I have a great deal of respect and admiration for your wife too. She has come so far along her journey – this can’t have been easy for either of you – and I would be delighted if you would permit me to help in her search for a destination as yet unknown.

  The practicalities of this remain to be worked out, but this is no problem. The important thing is that we are all happy with things as they stand and with the path we hope to take.

  There is also, I want to stress, no rush here. As I have told Megan, I will be here to discuss anything with either or you, but, as the sign in my old corner shop used to state: a refusal will not offend.

  I hope to hear from you, either directly or through your wife. The rules are flexible until we agree on them and this can be an evolving process, mostly between the two of you.

  Whatever you decide, I stand here in total respect and I thank you for the chance to get to know your wife. She is a remarkable woman and you clearly have a very deep and honest relationship.

  Your friend,

  Alasdair Hammond

  ********************

  Having sent the message, he had, for the time being, no real interest in the answer. It was strange how unimportant that suddenly seemed. His main concern now was a text message he had received on his antiquated phone earlier that day from Jane, short and sweet, as was her way: “Frank wants more. Hmmm. Celibacy beckoning?”