I'm George, mwm, 52

by George Everyman

  She told me that she had been on a few dates, yes she used that word, go figure, but they hadn't produced any meaningful sexuality and, of course, I asked her to define meaningful, and she said penetration and I asked if the kitty had been attended to orally or manually, and she said yes, and I said which, and she said orally, and I felt a rise in my pants, and I said hmmm. Fairly typical night with Edith.

  Dewayne got up to get a beer, and Abby moved her chair back to let him out since he was in the back of the table and as he moved past her, facing her, his crotch was at about her face level, his back blocking the view from Kim, but not from Edith and me.

  What happened next was one of those things that you see in a movie when the director wants to imprint on your brain something and it is so well staged that you don't know it's staged.

  Someone was directing this play, I was convinced, as I saw Abby kind of pucker her lips and blow a kiss at Dewayne's crotch as it moved about three inches from her mouth, thinking no one saw her.

  Wrong.

  Edith and I shifted our eyes toward each other and then quickly away and the mutual telepathic message we both sent to each other was "did you see what I saw?" and then the mutual response was, again telepathically, "yes."

  Just to make sure I'm being clear on this point, let me say it again. Abby, my dear unfaithful wife, who has been unfaithful with the hero tri-athlete Dewayne, just had Dewayne's cock, covered alas, pass about three inches from her hungry mouth, a mouth that his cock is obviously intimately familiar with, and Abby, thinking back fondly, no doubt, about how wonderful it was to have that lovely cock in her mouth and down her throat, blew it a kiss.

  I turned back around to face the bar with my back to the harlot, and Edith followed suit, setting us up to have a conversation about the cock to mouth incident we had just witnessed. I said, out loud this time, "did you see that?" meaning of course Abby's blowing a kiss to her boyfriend's cock, and Edith said simply "yes," which set me up perfectly for the discussion I was about to launch.

  "Ok Edith" I said, "I've got to tell you all I know about this." She kind of cocked her head just a bit and told the bartender to bring us two more beers.

  This is pretty much what I said to her, not verbatim, but real close.

  "So Edith, I've known you for a long time and what I like best about you is that you are not the typical female. I know we had that brief spat when you joked about chopping off a guy's cock, but that's about the only time I have disagreed with you, and I still think you should consider the possibility that you were wrong, but even if you don't and you think I'm wrong, that's ok because it's only a minor disagreement, in my eyes at least."

  "Anyway, I just thought of another area of disagreement and that's that you think if a man cheats on his wife, he should be kicked out immediately, at least I think that's how you feel, but I'm making assumptions here and I wish I hadn't gone down that path but I did so I have to deal with it. Please be patient with me and forgiving since I'm just trying to be honest. If I say anything that is wrong or insulting, please don't hold it against me, at least not for a long time."

  "I'm trying to let you know that I already knew that Abby was fucking Dewayne before you told me about the inappropriate behavior, and as you can see, it's a whole lot more inappropriate than you thought since they are actually fucking instead of what you saw here before, the last time you were all here."

  "Now comes the interesting part because I've gone through a whole series of emotional shifts since I found out and basically, I don't mind it at all. In fact I like it and I know that if you were a typical female, you'd probably at this point be getting up and leaving because you would have concluded that I was a truly sick motherfucker, but being the atypical person that you are, which by the way, is a good and attractive thing on many levels, I'm thinking that I can tell you all of this and we can talk about it without jeopardizing our relationship which is more than just a friendship, in my opinion at least."

  I paused because I was out of breath and I needed a drink and I also needed to know if she wanted to hear any more and she did because she said, "go on."

  I've got to be honest. I didn't like the 'go on' because it almost sounded patronizing or something sinister as in 'I know you're fucked up, but I need a little more evidence, so keep talking and I will soon have it'.

  But it was way too late to stop so I continued.

  "I know this all may sound bizarre, but if you hear me out, you might understand my mind set better, if indeed you care to understand my mind set at all?"

  She said "sure" which sounded much better than 'go on', which I had probably read too much into anyway, because how could she go from a patronizing or even menacing 'go on' to a pretty nice 'sure' in about fifteen seconds? So I was either wrong about 'go on' being bad or 'sure' being good. They were both probably neutral, but given the hyper analytical mode that I was in, I was most likely attributing too much to both of them.

  "Edith, do you remember when we kissed at my house about fifteen lifetimes ago," I said, and she said "yes" and I tried very hard to read her face but I couldn't, but the fact that she remembered and said yes without hesitation, and that she didn't correct me with 'you mean when you kissed me?', left me feeling kind of strange, in a nice way.

  "Well, ever since that night, I've kind of thought of you differently, not that what I thought of you was bad before the kiss, but afterward I thought there was this connection between us that I couldn't and still can't explain, and I feel that I don't want to fuck it up and I'm hoping that this conversation is not going to fuck it up and I don't think that it will. I felt really bad the other time we were here and we had a disagreement and you probably don't remember this part, but I reached out to touch your hand after that, which is what I do with Abby and she always reaches out to meet my touch, and you didn't and I found myself in this weird mindset of thinking you didn't forgive me, not that I needed forgiving because I honestly don't think I did anything wrong, but still I wish you would have met my touch, but maybe that's not how you do things."

  I was just letting the words flow out now, not trying to control them or direct them figuring that the super brain knew what it was doing, since I was convinced that it was in control.

  I continued with "I'm getting a little off track, but I did want to throw that out there because nothing like that has ever happened between us and it felt weird."

  She reached her hand out and touched my hand, like I wish she would have done that night and she said "is that better?" And I said that I would have preferred a blow job but still I appreciated the touch.

  I felt like our relationship was back on track.

  "OK back on track," I said, "and now I've got to tell you my take on marriage and cheating and openness and sexuality and sensuality and lust and I just had a flash that it's way too complicated to do here and now and I think we should continue this discussion later, and besides, we have some serious observing to do."

  She laughed, turned around in her bar stool, and so did I.

  Nothing much was happening with the bike Nazis and I was getting tired and a little drunk, so I thought it would be good to stumble home before I said something inappropriate, which I didn't really do much anymore, but you never know.

  I learned a long time ago that I should never say to Abby, "it's getting late, should we head home?" So I just said to her, "I'm tired, see you later." She said "ok" and then I told Edith "it's been real" and I left.

  I admit it. I'm not very good at bars. Not good at all. Because I like to talk about important things. Chit chat drives me fucking nuts, so I just don't do it. And then when I get going on important things, like my marriage and my wife, and her boyfriend, with a willing listener like Edith, I just cut off the conversation with some limp excuse because I think it just can't be accomplished in the time allotted for it.

  Bars are for picking up people. Or getting drunk. They are not for solving the world's or my personal problems. God, I wanted to fuck Edith righ
t then. But I was walking home.

  Abby came home a while later and we spooned because it was cold and the door was open. I was glad she came home. Not sure what I expected since Dewayne was now married and Kim probably, or most likely, expected him to come home too.

  Chapter 72: Typical Sunday

  I felt pretty good about telling Edith all that I had told her, even the next morning when I was sober. Edith, even though she was a member of the tight knit bike group, was not some sort of chatty woman. Not to denigrate chatty women, because there are chatty men too, who feel compelled to tell everybody everything about their life right down to what they had for breakfast. At least I hoped Edith was not a chatty woman. And anyway, in this convoluted and complex saga that was developing, rapidly, even if someone knew about my desires for an open marriage, the fact that my wife was already doing it would no doubt also come to the surface, taking the heat off of me for having some sort of perceived weird notions about conventional marriage.

  Also, I was getting to the point in my life, pretty rapidly, that I wanted to merge the inner man and the outer man, so that I had one identity and one persona so that I didn't have to be careful around certain people about what I said and did. That reminds me of a co-ed at the local University who started a BDSM bulletin board about five years ago and was openly into that lifestyle, using her real name, and I know this from doing an online search on BDSM and the University.

  I wrote her an email and told her she had balls doing that and she wrote back that that was one of the best compliments she had ever gotten, so we were both happy. I thought then that she was going about life in the right manner, not pretending to be someone she wasn't and allowing her inner desires to rise to the surface with no shame and no compulsion to hide them. I wish I had her balls.

  The next day, Sunday, I didn't confront Abby about her almost giving Dewayne a blow job right there in the middle of the bar in front of dozens of people, including me. And she didn't broach the subject either, so we had a good Sunday.

  I like Sundays too because I can grill out, if I haven't already done it on Saturday. Of course I could grill out both days, but it's a pain and also it's illegal, because charcoal grills are not allowed on decks in the city limits, and you know that I refuse to use gas, or you should know, based on my BBQ diatribe.

  I also like Sundays because I get to read the newspaper. Not that I can't on other days of the week, but the Sunday paper has the college football scores and I like to see who has lost. That probably says a lot about me, i.e. I like to see who lost instead of who won. And isn't it interesting that every tiny college in America is now a University, but we don't read about University football, do we?

  So I take my two hour six mile walk, buy the Sunday paper, and come home to have my half toasted bagel with half of the half buttered and the other half of the half with cream cheese. Also some grapes, and Abby has made coffee. On Sundays she always asks if I want coffee and I say yes and she brings it over to me where I am sitting on my couch. That's pretty nice of her, and I'm sure she has to balance her sense of being an independent non-subservient liberated woman with doing this non-independent, subservient, non-liberated act, i.e. waiting on her husband. But I'm guessing that in her brain, somewhere, there is a little woman, like my little man, who tells her that doing something nice for her man, once in a while, like once a week at most, is not compromising her individuality all that much. And who the fuck is going to know, I know she is thinking.

  I read about the losing teams, read the local news which is mostly about who killed who and who died in car crashes, read the obituaries looking for anyone I knew, and eat my half bagel. Abby eats her breakfast at the kitchen table checking her email, as she always does, and listens to me, occasionally, as I read anything of interest in the paper to her, as she doesn't like to actually read it, but likes to hear about the news.

  Abby usually goes for a bike ride with one of her girlfriends, or so she tells me, on Sundays after breakfast and I go to the office to catch up. It also gives me a chance to check out my emails from one of the several dating sites I subscribe to, but those are almost always empty. Why the fuck did I say almost? Sometimes a wave of nostalgia sweeps over me remembering the day Lara answered my ad and my thirty seven days of bliss with her.

  Sunday afternoons consist of me cooking something on the grill or inside such as roasted chicken, or maybe a pot roast when the weather is cold. I also coordinate Abby's dinner, which I like to do for her, and which she is genuinely appreciate of, not in the blow job appreciation sense of course, but in the sense that she tells me "honey, this is the best fish I have ever had." And that's usually enough for me.

  While I'm making our dinners, which we generally eat on our respective couches, hers about an hour before mine because I like to drink more than she does and once I start eating, the drinking stops, so I wait a while before I eat. We watch one or two movies that I have rented from one of those kiosks in town. We used to go to the local movie theater until it closed down. I liked that. So did Abby. It was dirty and grungy but it was two dollars and it was close and the movies were pretty current. It took me about a year to start to like the rentals better, but now we both do because we have more choice as to what to see and I get to fool around in the kitchen cooking, even though Abby gets a little annoyed when I put the movie on pause, which I do on occasion as I slowly do prep work in the kitchen, but she doesn't usually say anything because, after all, I am cooking her dinner. And when it's done I bring it to her on her couch, along with a towel and big glass of ice water, and salt which she uses a lot of. I also usually bring her fresh cut lemon to squeeze over her broccoli and fish, and I warm up her plate with the steam from the broccoli, then dry it, so that everything stays warmer.

  Regarding movies, Abby likes romantic comedies and I like action movies and science fiction, and documentaries, so obviously, we watch romantic comedies exclusively.

  On Sunday, we have an amended five o'clock rule for cocktail hour, so it's at four thirty and I pause the movie for this, and this pause is just fine with Abby.

  I've usually cleaned all the dishes I used in cooking and also Abby's dinner dishes, but I do leave my dinner dishes in the sink after eating because I've had a few glasses of wine by then, and I have decided that breaking any dishes would not be worth the risk, and Abby must agree because she does them without complaining, even though I have told her on many occasions that I will do them in the morning, but that's not possible for her, i.e. leaving dirty dishes in the sink overnight.

  I just wanted to show you how ordinary our lives are, in most respects. I don't consider ordinary anything but good. Predictable is good. Boring, but good.

  Chapter 73: Kim Changes Her Mind and Edith Wants to Walk

  I was still staring at the email from Kim when Edith called. This was a crisis moment. In the first place, Edith never calls. She called once and left a very generic message for Abby and me on the recorder to meet the group at the bar on Saturday night. But this time it was a call for me alone. And live, not a message on the recorder.

  Shit. I had to close the mental door on Kim's email, which has just devastated me. I definitely couldn't deal with two serious situations at the same time.

  "Hi Edith," I said.

  She was telling me that we should take a walk which was strange. Absurd in fact. This woman rides her bike a hundred miles for fun. She never walks. What's this walking shit about? Had I pissed her off in the bar the other night? I hardly remember what I said. Oh shit, I really needed to work on drinking less and remembering more. And what's the 'should' shit? Should didn't sound good at all. 'Would you like to take a walk' would have been ok, except for the fact that she doesn't walk. She obviously was pissed about something. Damn. I couldn't refuse this so I tried to delay it with "sure, just let me know when."

  And she said "now."

  I was fucked.

  After I told her I could meet her in an hour, which she was barely ok with, wanting to make
it sooner, I shifted back to Kim's email.

  Vague and painful memories of Lara and the inglorious end to our thirty seven day affair, internet affair to be exact, flooded my brain. Damn, this was a fucked up day for sure.

  Kim's email simply said, "We can't see each other again."

  No sorry. No reason. No sympathy. No empathy. Just hard fucking reality, leaving me to figure this out. Just like Lara. Not quite really because Lara just disappeared. At least Kim told me she was fucking me over.

  Ok George, get a grip. It's only going to take you ten minutes to get to the park to meet Edith, so you've got fifty minutes to figure the Kim thing out. No wait, you can still be figuring on the drive so you've got a full sixty minutes. No wait. You've got to take a shower. Just in case. That's five minutes. But wait, you can figure in the shower. That gives you a full sixty minutes less the five minutes you've already blown trying to get a grip. So much for getting a grip.

  Somehow I knew this was going to be a bad day. Do you ever get those feelings? I truly think the moon plays a role. My funkiest days are about seven to five days before a full moon. I don't really think about it, but if I have some really strange or bad days in a row, then the moon thought pops into my brain and I make a mental note that it must be about six days before the full moon, and then when I'm walking in the morning on my two hour six mile walk, about a week after the bad days, there is the full fucking moon, and I know I'm right about its influence, on me, at least.

  I made a mental note that in about seven days, I'd see the full moon.

  So as I was taking my 'just in case Edith wanted to fuck' shower, I was thinking about the absurdity of thinking that Edith might want to fuck me. Hardly. She was on the female warpath, and that's a dangerous place to be, i.e. on the other side of a female on the warpath. I'm not being a sexist here because I know it's just as unpleasant for a female to be on the other side of a man on a male warpath.