Once, I’d done the same.
Now, as I rolled up the asphalt drive and saw William’s car parked in the garage, I felt only dread.
“I’m home,” I called when I opened the door.
I didn’t want to say the words, but William liked the ritual. He liked it more when he came home to me already in the house, dinner on the stove and a smile on my face, but I’d gone back to work this year after three years of staying at home waiting for kids to come when none ever did. I loved working at Entrance Bay Academy, one of the most prestigious schools in the province, but William thought it was unnecessary. We had enough money, he said, and things around the house grew neglected in my absence, especially when you added on my hour-long commute there and back to the small town north of Vancouver that harbored the school. We had no children and no pets, a housekeeper with a more than mild form of OCD who came to the house once a week. I didn’t notice much of a difference but I didn’t say anything. This was because William wasn’t a fighter in the traditional sense. He didn’t yell or accuse, bruise with his actions or words. Instead, he disappeared.
His office became a black hole, a great devourer of not only my husband but our potential conflict and our possible resolution. Every fight we could have had lingered in the spaces between his leather-bound law books, under the edges of the Persian carpet. Sometimes, when he was late returning home, I would sit in his big wingback leather chair deep in the heart of his office and I would close my eyes. Only then could I find relief in my imaginations, yell at him the way I wanted to so many days and so many nights across so many years.
We’d married when I was eighteen and he was thirty-six. I was head over heels in love with the curl in his mostly black, slightly graying hair, his incredible manliness next to the boys that hung around me in school. I was infatuated with him, with how I looked beside him in pictures, so young and pretty under his distinguished arm. I’d known him my whole life so he was safe but also, I thought, not safe, older and worldlier and, I hoped, dirtier than me. There were so many things an older man could teach a naive girl. I used to touch myself at night imagining the things he would do to me, the ways he could make me pleasure him.
Sadly, I still did.
“Beautiful,” William said, smiling at me warmly from where he read in a deep armchair in the sitting area off the kitchen.
He presented me with a cheek to kiss, which I did diligently.
Every time I did, I wished he would grab me, haul me over his lap and lay into my ass with the flat off his palm.
I had these aggressive sexual fantasies often. Wishing that his sweet gesture smoothing back my hair was his fingers digging deep into the strands to puppeteer my head back and forth over his erection. Switching out our separate showers before bed with a shared one, where I bent double with my hands around my ankles as he pounded into me and the water pounded against us both.
I’d tried at first, a long time ago, to make these fantasies realities, but William wasn’t interested.
I knew this, I did, but I was more than a little hot from the blond guy in the parking lot, the way he had commanded those men without even lifting a finger. It was only too easy to imagine the way he might command me if given the chance.
It was him that I had to blame for my actions.
I dumped my messenger bag beside William’s chair and dropped to my knees between his legs.
“Cressida…” he warned softly.
He couldn’t even scold me properly.
I ignored him.
My hands slid up his stiffly held legs until they found his belt and made quick work of undoing it. His cock was soft in its nest of hair but I pulled it into the light as if it was a revelation. It was silky in my mouth and easy to swallow.
William’s hand hit the top of my head but didn’t grab me, didn’t even push me away.
“Cressida, really…” he protested again.
He didn’t like oral sex. He liked vaginal sex: missionary, me on top or sometimes, if I forced him, doggy style.
I sucked him hard until basic biology took over and he grew in my mouth. I slammed my head down his shaft, taking him into my throat and loving the way it made me want to gag.
“Damn it,” William said, not because it felt good, though it did, or because he liked it but because he didn’t want to like it.
I didn’t care. I squeezed my eyes shut tightly as I jacked the base of him and imagined the way the blond king may have held my head down until I groaned and gagged around him. How he might have praised me for taking him so deep and pleasuring him so well.
Instead, I got, “I’m going to come and I don’t want to do it in your mouth.”
“Please?” I panted against his dick, my tongue trailing out to lick over his crown.
It was his turn to squeeze his eyes shut. His legs shook as he orgasmed, his semen landing in my open mouth and over my cheeks. It took him harshly, wrung him up dry and useless afterwards like a used napkin in his chair.
I leaned back on my haunches and wiped my mouth clean with my tongue and then the back of my hand. My pussy throbbed but I knew he wouldn’t touch it so I didn’t try to make him. Sex was for the dark hours and I was already in violation of his unspoken code of sexual conduct.
I knew what his reaction would be but, since I was a glutton for punishment, I waited patiently on my knees for him to recuperate. To open his eyes and pierce me with their disappointed, confused condemnation. He reached forward to touch my cheek softly as he asked me, “Why do you degrade yourself like that, Cressie? I don’t need that.”
I closed my eyes against the hot prickle of tears that threatened to elucidate my shame and leaned into his hand so that he would think I was sorry. In a way, I was, because I knew he didn’t need that to love me. William loved me in a beautiful way, the way one might love a perfectly formed rose, a sentimental trinket. But he didn’t love me in the way I needed, the way I’d wanted secretly since I was old enough to feel a heartbeat in my groin, the way one animal loved another.
“I’ll make dinner,” I said quietly, unfolding from my knees and going into the kitchen.
“That sounds nice,” William agreed, easily forgiving me for my exploitation.
He efficiently did up his pants and went back to the book he was reading while I uncovered the Shepherd’s Pie I’d already prepped the morning.
Our night continued from there in a normal way—happy, trivial conversation about our days over mashed potato-topped meat and veg, an hour or so of reading side by side in front of the fire because we didn’t own a TV and then our nightly, separate showers before going to bed. We didn’t have sex. We rarely did anymore because the doctors had said that the odds of William having children were slim and my husband was of the mind that sex was for a purpose, not recreation.
So, I lay next to him in our beautiful house long into the night until it was the darkest of the evening hours. Only then did I quietly turn onto my back, lift my nightgown and sink my fingers into my burning hot pussy. I came in under two minutes with my clit pinched between my fingers and another two shoved deep inside, thinking of the sexy young blond king and how he would rule me if I were his queen. It was the hardest I had come in years, maybe ever, and right on its heels came the tears. I cried silently and long into my pillow until it was steeped in salty wet and I was steeped deeply in shame. It was in all two hundred and six of my bones, so entangled with my molecules it was an essential strand of my DNA. I’d been living with it since I was pubescent teenage girl and I was so tired of it.