Challenges to modesty

One of the recurring challenges that Debbie and I faced while in Scotland was the simple one of modesty. As I mentioned before, of course we have seen each other naked in the past—it's sort of inevitable when you fuck—but that was a long time ago. We have managed to avoid nakedness in each other's presence during any of my other visits, and of course I had promised Marie "no sex and no quasi-sexual activity." Avoiding nakedness is clearly an important part of that.

On the other hand we shared a room in every single hotel we stayed at.  Mostly, each room had an attached bathroom. (You may recall that when we stayed at The Drovers Inn, in Inverarnan, the bathroom was a shared one down the hall, like in a dormitory.) But one way or another, modesty turned out to be … well, … not altogether easy to maintain.

We started simply enough, by changing clothes in the bathroom. (Or if one of us ducked into the bathroom to change, the other might take advantage of the momentary privacy to change at the same time. I did that several times.) Each of us had brought a set of pajamas to wear to bed. I wore mine over top of a T-shirt and a pair of boxers. So I was well clothed for sleep as well as for daylight. I did not look closely enough to establish what Debbie wore under her nightclothes. 

This system worked, as I've said before, up till Day 4, when we arrived at Inverarnan and the bathroom was down the hall. Since it was distinctly inconvenient to retire to the bathroom to change, we just changed clothes in the same room together and made a point of each turning to look at the wall while we were doing so. I finished a moment before she did and was in the process of turning back when I caught a glimpse of her bare back with no bra-strap across it; so I turned back to the wall for another minute until she had pulled on a shirt.

So far, so good.

Blast from the past: Boyfriend 1 visits us (B1, part 2)

I told the beginning of this story yesterday, in this post here. (And, to some extent, in this post from two-and-a-half or almost-three years ago.)

So Wife and I left graduate school, and moved home. We found an apartment. Wife found a well-paying legal secretarial job, got fired, found a second legal secretarial job, got fired, and finally in November found a teaching job that she kept for the next three school years. Somewhere in those first few months I found a job as well. (It was after she found her first job, but before she got the teaching job.)

Boyfriend 1 lived in the same state, but some considerable distance away. Wife had gone to visit him for a weekend earlier in the summer, before I moved back with our stuff and before she had secured an apartment for us. (She was living with my parents at the time, and my father was pretty sure she was fucking someone else. Wife was never nearly as good at secrecy as she prided herself on.) After we were settled … I forget. Did she spend a weekend with him? Possibly not … her job situation kept her pretty well occupied for a while, and not in the fun sense.

But sometime in those first few months, Boyfriend 1 finally made the trip to visit us.

Twentieth date

I think this must be a record -- four months between dates is a long time. But we have had a lot going on, D and I. She moved some eight or nine hundred miles from where she had been living (depending on whether you fly or drive), to take a new teaching job in a place I'll call Weather City. A couple months into the job she figured out that the administration was even crazier than at her last place; also they seem to have bitten off more than they could pay for in hiring her, and so were trying to encourage her to quit. I know, it sounds nuts -- but that what she tells me and I don't know any more about it. A couple of weeks ago she finally quit, and has been looking for a new line of work. (She may have found one too, but that's a different post.)

For my part, I had a couple trips out of town in August (when she was trying to start up at the new job) but then nothing for a while. And the trips in August were timed in such a way it would have been awkward to steal some free time between them anyway. So what with one thing and another we hadn't seen each other since the end of June. Add to that that I had more or less unilaterally cut back how often we wrote or talked, and the result is we were beginning to drift out of touch. And then I had a week in one of our European offices, at the end of October. D couldn't join me in Europe -- she was still extricating herself from her job at that point -- but I routed my return flight through Weather City and stopped off for about 18 hours. It wasn't a lot, but it was a visit.

D was practically giddy when we met at the airport; I may not have been quite as goofy, but of course I was glad to see her. We kissed and kissed ... then periodically stopped and kissed again as we made our way out of the airport. (At one point someone else on the same airport shuttle cracked, "Get a room" ... which of course we were already planning anyway. We just laughed. I'm pretty sure it was meant good-naturedly, if only because there are some things that people get more tolerant of when they see grey hair.) On our way to D's new apartment she told me she had woken early that morning from a nightmare: "I dreamt we had some big argument and you wouldn't sleep with me! And you were trying to sleep on the sofa in my living room and complained how uncomfortable it was ...." Gosh, sweetheart. Have you been anxious lately?

We got to her apartment -- simple, elegant, almost spare except for all the books. (I know, like that's a big surprise.) She showed me around and I'm sure I spent at least five or ten minutes putting down my bags and appreciating how she had decorated before we settled onto the bed, began kissing again, and then fucked like maniacs. Sometimes, four months can seem like a long, long time. But it was blissfully calm, afterwards, just holding each other ... staring at each other as the sun went down and the room darkened.

What about dinner? She had planned a recipie she wanted to show off to me, so we got dressed and she began puttering about in the kitchen. First order of business was that she opened a bottle of wine.

"Umm, D?" I demurred. "I'm not sure if I should be drinking. I'm afraid I'll snore again like the last time; and I really felt awful about that. I really don't want to do it again." In the back of my head I reminded myself also that I had lost almost twenty pounds in the four months between then and now, which might also help. But yes, I was still worried.

D dismissed the worry abruptly. "Don't be silly Hosea. I'm not going to fret over whether you snore or not. Do you think I'm crazy? I've got a man in my bed tonight -- the last thing I would do is jeopardize that! Drink the damned wine; it'll be fine."

Dinner was delicious, although D insisted that the organic chicken she had bought tasted fundamentally different from factory-farmed chicken and it tasted the same to me. After dinner we sat in her living room talking for a bit, and then started kissing, ... and then somehow I found myself suckling her nipples as she was pulling her pants out of the way and my fingers were nestling into her crotch. Amazing how the conversation wanders ...! Somewhere along the line I realized that she had never bothered to close any of her windows, and I wondered if I should be a bit more self-conscious. I didn't see lights in any of the adjoining apartments, and in any event anyone who lived there would be a total stranger to me. But the only person with any call to pause at this was D, and her mind was absolutely elsewhere. So I dismissed the thought and went with the moment ....

After a while we found our way to bed -- and I'm sure there was a third time somewhere before dawn, though I can't quite place it now. In the middle of the night I woke up with a mysterious headache -- "mysterious" because I almost never get them. Was it the wine? The jet lag? Not enough coffee the day before? I'm really not sure. After some rummaging, D found a couple of baby aspirin in her bathroom and I settled back to sleep. We both realized with a bit of a smile that it would have been a lot easier to find medications back home, where Wife stockpiles so many of them.

In the morning, as we were breakfasting, I mentioned the windows to D. She shrugged and said, "Well, maybe we gave the neighbors a show last night. OK, well I guess I've always been a bit of an exhibitionist." Then she told me amusing stories about those neighbors she has met as we got ourselves back to the airport.

In the end we got there in plenty of time but I spent too long gazing fondly into her eyes and had to run for my plane. But it was worth it. When I finally got home, Son 2 was bouncing off the walls with excitement to see me, and Wife complained in a sullen monotone about everything that had gone wrong since I left ... which seemed to be a long list. Yup, I guess I was back home.

Seventeenth date 5, Fun and games

I spent Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday in the office, so we didn’t have a lot of time for play. Still, we did manage to have fun. Wednesday night we had dinner at a wine bar, where we managed to put away four carafes of very excellent wine in addition to a little bit of careful and elegant food. The final tab was in excess of $150 – so much that there’s no way I can expense all of it, and I had to ask the waiter to split the check in several parts. What’s more, D found she could hardly walk under her own power back to the car, and then from the parking lot into the hotel. She told me later that she didn’t think she had ever drunk so much. From her stories of dinners with Rog, I think that can’t be exactly true; but it is very likely that on those other nights she ate a lot more food, to buffer the wine better. Still, it was a lovely meal.

Thursday night we went out to a play, a delightful new comedy recently off-Broadway. We both enjoyed it immensely. Of course, that was the night that I later fell into my deep depression, but we both now think that was probably the result (at least partly) of our stopping in afterwards at a very noisy bar for some after-show drinks. I don’t do well with noise.

Friday, as I mentioned, we stayed in bed and talked. I called down to the front desk to get us some more time before we had to check out, and then we ordered breakfast. After breakfast, we fucked like demons. In the middle of all this the front desk called back asking when exactly we were planning to check out – great timing, guys! I had enough breath to answer and therefore did. (D was gasping enough she couldn’t possibly have answered the phone.) Anyway, we wrapped up a while later, got a shower, and finally checked out of the hotel with about five minutes to spare before our absolute deadline.

From there we went to have lunch – a very pleasant meal whose conversation I have already described. And then it was time to drive back to the airport. Only … well gosh, we were a little ahead of schedule as far as our flights were concerned. So somewhere along the way we stopped at a very pleasant-looking lake, got out, and walked around. There was a path leading right up to the water’s edge; and while the road was nearby (and a McDonald’s parking lot was just over yonder), we couldn’t see a soul. The sun was dappled on the water, the air was warm, the breeze was soft. We sat down near the bank, and began to kiss. And kiss. And kiss! In the end we didn’t have a lot of time, and we were very exposed, so D just loosened her bra and I played with her nipples for a while. (She is frequently orgasmic when her nipples are stimulated, and on this occasion she sighed most satisfactorily.) As we climbed back into the car, she said a little wistfully that she was trying to figure out a discreet way to slide down her pants … then finally concluded that sliding down her pants would be indiscreet however she did it. Still, it was a delightful way to wind up the week.

And then we got to the airport, and flew to our respective homes.

Sixteenth date

Only a month after our last date, D and I met again, in International City. Two days, three nights, all over the weekend before my actual work started. Naturally Wife wondered why I had to be gone so long, and I tried to suggest that spending the weekend there would help me get over jet lag. Uh huh. I think this excuse is getting weaker and weaker, even though it turns out to be true.

Much of this date was like many of our others: we went to museums, we walked around, we discovered new restaurants, we talked endlessly, we fucked. So far, so good. Let me try to identify a couple of the points that were maybe a little different from the normal round.

D asked me if I had made any decisions on the question I described here. First I explained that Son 2 will definitely be attending the class at the Shakespeare Festival; then that Wife has said that as long as our finances are separated, she can't afford to go. D asked if I plan to pay for Wife to go there, and I said I hadn't decided yet. Then she asked if I had asked Wife about D herself also attending.

I fumbled a bit and then told her that I had asked the advice of some friends (that would be you) and had gotten several people all saying exactly the same thing, namely that it was a really bad idea. Why hadn't I told her before now? She proposed the theory that I had in fact already decided to pay Wife's way so we could make a lovely family event of it, and that I was being dishonest with her by not owning up. I tried to explain that no, I really haven't thought about it yet; I suggested that cowardice and dithering are better explanations for the delay. Well then, why at least didn't I tell her that all my friends thought it was a bad idea for her to join us there? After all, she added, she too had thought it was a bad idea (not that she said this at the time), so what was the big deal? Good question, I guess. We bickered about this for longer than we should have.

D also added that I have to assume Wife has been denigrating both of us to the boys consistently enough that I probably can't reveal the relationship right after separation, because her image will have been poisoned in their minds. She said I had better be prepared for it to be years, until the boys are older and can look at everything with different eyes ... and that our relationship will have to remain a clandestine affair till then.

In the process of bickering about this subject, as I explained myself by emphasizing my cowardice and indolence, I mentioned that when I sit down to write about what is going on in my life (meaning here) I often emphasize those parts of my character that are least admirable, as if I were setting out to look my worst instead of my best. I just tossed off the remark with an "Isn't that silly?"

D: Well, obviously you need a father confessor. You should look for a Jesuit.

Hosea: Yeah, right.

D: I'm serious. In fact there is a retreat house not too far from where you live, staffed by Jesuits. I looked it up to see if I might come out there some time, before ruling out any visits to your area. [She smiled.]

Hosea: Oh good. I can just see starting that conversation off. 'Father, there is this married woman I'm involved with, and I'm not treating her very well. How can I do better?'

D: And what do you suppose is the single most common thing they hear about in the confessional?

Hosea: I have no idea.

D: Infidelity. You're not going to shock anybody.

Hosea: Maybe not. But isn't there kind of a difference between 'not being shocked' and 'aiding and abetting'? I'd be looking for someone who didn't mind aiding and abetting our affair, after all.

D: That's why it has to be a Jesuit. They are uniquely good at ... ummm ... understanding how to engage with the World.

O-kay-y-y ....

Our last evening we went out drinking at a jazz club. Plenty of wine, lots of fun. Somewhere in the course of the evening I mentioned that if you handle it just right a MFM V-shaped triple can work out well enough, especially for the woman in the middle. Then I had to explain how I knew this (ancient history, back in the days of Boyfriend 1 and, later, Boyfriend 4) and D got very thoughtful. For a while she seemed concerned, as if sex with her (as just one person) might somehow be too boring for me. (As if sex with someone as passionate as D could ever be boring!) But I also think it set her to pondering. When we got back to the hotel, and had taken our clothes off, and were deeply enmeshed in each other, she suddenly said, "Open the door."

Huh?

"Open the door."

So I did. The hotel was silent, because it was so late. We didn't have an audience. And we wound up as passionately as ever. But later D simply said, "If I'm going to have to hide our love for years and years, until your boys grow up, then tonight I was prepared to show it off to anybody that walked by." Of course we are abroad here, so they would all have been strangers. And in any event nobody walked by.

But I have thought about that night a lot ever since then.