Chapter 2

My wife, Kara, could barely contain her excitement. “Oh! This is going to be so much fun,” she’d already decided. “I’m going to find the perfect costume for you, don’t worry.”

“It’s just another Halloween party,” I reminded her, but I had to admit that I found her happy mood just a tad contagious.

That’s a good thing, too. The two of us had been going through a bit of a rough patch and I’d been somewhat depressed of late. Kara as well, I think, although I always thought she was much better at controlling her emotions ... er, usually. At the moment, my beautiful blonde spouse could barely sit still as we perused Halloween costumes together on the sofa. Luckily, I was holding the laptop and she was the one scrolling rapidly through the catalogue with the tips of her fingers. She was so impatient that one finger just wouldn’t do!

“Whoa! Slow down, baby,” I said, chuckling. “You’re not playing the banjo here.”

“I’m looking for the good stuff,” she retorted. “Turn it a little more. I can’t even see what I’m doing.”

I took a deep breath and obeyed her command. It’s what I seemed to be doing more and more, but I suppose that’s normal for any married couple. We’d been together for three years, ever since meeting at the start of my sophomore year of college. Kara had already graduated the year previously and been accepted into a post graduate program. Ten months later we’d had a June wedding in her father’s back yard. They were divorced, her parents, but the day had gone off without a hitch.

Of course, people wondered why a grown woman of twenty-three would be hitching her wagon to a twenty-year-old boy who couldn’t even drink champagne at his own wedding reception. The answer to that was a very simple one: We were deeply, madly, hopelessly in love with each other. Everyone says we make a good looking couple, but our mutual attraction runs much deeper than just the physical. We complement each other, like two pieces of a whole. Kara is more outgoing, for example, somewhat adventurous and given to spontaneity at times, while I’m content to follow her lead and play the straight man when her audience requires one.

And she does have an audience. Kara has the classic girl-next-door beauty, with her thick blonde hair and baby blue eyes, and a fresh, innocent face that Norman Rockwell would have been quite happy to put on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. My wife has always drawn a lot of attention when we go out on the town. She pretends not to notice, but I know her well enough to know that she’s pleased with the effect she has on most men, and a few women, for that matter. But what woman doesn’t want to feel desirable? And it wasn’t as if I didn’t enjoy showing her off myself.

My god, I loved my wife.

What never failed to surprise me was that if you asked Kara about me, she would probably say something very similar. I knew I was a decent enough looking man, but I didn’t think I was anything special in the looks department. Girls had always liked me, some of them anyway, and I’d always liked them right back. But I never had an ego. I hadn’t been the Homecoming King or anything special. I was just me and I never really paid attention to whether or not anyone was checking me out, but my wife did, apparently.

“I’m really going to have to watch you at this party,” she said, pausing at a male vampire costume just long enough to say, “That one sucks.”

“Watch me?” I grinned. “What do you mean?”

“Remember the last Halloween party we went to, honey?” Kara was smiling sweetly, but her eyes were a little less than kind.

“Uhhh...” I tried to think. I remembered the party well enough, but I didn’t recall anything particularly special about it.

“That senior mixer last year?” she hinted, and when I didn’t answer right away: “I caught you in the bedroom with the Wicked Witch of the West.”

“What?” I laughed. “There were twenty people in that bedroom!”

“Yeah, but she was hanging all over you, lover boy.”

“Noooo...” I rolled my eyes, and I’d gotten a bit drunk that night, so I didn’t remember everything, but the only thing that witch had done was ask for my phone number. I’d wiggled my wedding ring in front of her nose and pointed her towards one of my buddies.

“Just remember, I’ll be watching!”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to leave your side all night,” I assured her. “Some of those guys I work with...”

“Oh?” Kara narrowed her eyes. “What about them?”

“Just, you know...” I shrugged. “They’re guys.”

My wife laughed. “Well, it’s not the guys I’m worried about.”

“You don’t have to worry about the gals either,” I said, glancing down at my crotch without thinking. I wished I hadn’t and immediately felt my face growing warm with humiliation.

“We just have to give it time,” Kara said, softly. She leaned close and put her arms around me. “It’s only been a couple weeks. We don’t even have all the test results back yet.”

“I know.”

“We’ll get through this, okay?” She kissed my cheek. “Look at me ... Look at me, John.”

I turned my head, but I just couldn’t look into her eyes. I’d been impotent for a month already. I’d seen a general practitioner at the clinic and he’d run a half-dozen tests, so far with negative results. That news was both good and bad, but there were other tests and other results we were still waiting on. Something like prostate cancer hadn’t been entirely ruled out as yet, but my PSA was normal, so...

“I love you,” she said, kissing my mouth this time. “We’re going to relax and have fun at this party. I’m finally going to meet your friends and we’re going to drink, dance, and remember that our lives don’t always revolve around your penis.”

“Uh...” I blinked, not quite expecting her to say that!

“I know you think otherwise, but it’s time to face the truth, darling.” She was trying hard not to giggle. “I have the pussy.”

Shoot, she’d made me smile, but I really wanted to pout a little longer.

“We could always stay home,” I suggested, but I knew that was wrong as soon as the words fell from my mouth.

We’d moved to this city about six months before and Kara had made a few friends. She went to the gym three times a week and then we went together on Saturday mornings, and so she’d met some women there and seemed to be enjoying herself. I’d invited a couple of married guys from work over, like my boss and his wife, just because that seemed like a good idea. But this would be the first time we really socialized with my coworkers and I knew Kara wanted to be more involved. She wanted me to share more with her than just ten minute anecdotes over the dinner table. I spent 40 hours a week with these people and naturally, she wanted to know them.

“Do you want to stay home?” Her voice had taken a slight edge, and it was my fault. Everything seemed to be my fault these days.

“No, I didn’t mean...”

“Because if you really don’t want to go to this party, I’ll go by myself,” she said. “It would be awkward, but I’ll do it and you know I will, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” I nodded quickly. “I’m sorry.”

“In fact, I might just go by myself anyway,” she said, pursing her lips as if thinking hard.

“Alright, alright...” I sighed. “I said I was sorry. I’m just not feeling much like a party, you know?”

“I do know, and I understand completely, but you have to realize that you’re not going to start feeling better about yourself until you start actually doing something.”

“I know.”

“Look at me,” she said. “Do you think I don’t wonder what I’m doing wrong? Why can’t my husband make love to me anymore? What’s wrong with me?”

“It’s not you.”

“I go to the gym and my friends tell me how lucky I am to have such a sexy husband,” Kara continued, letting it all out now that I’d pushed the wrong button. “They tease me about how much sex I must be getting from a young stud like you.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated; my new mantra, it seemed.

“And I just smile a lot and nod my head, pretending like I’m too shy to really talk about our love life, when all I want to do is run away and hide.”

I felt about two inches tall and I’d suspected that my wife was harboring these sort of feelings, but she’d never expressed them out loud. She was always smiling and loving, taking every opportunity to touch and kiss me. And all I ever did was feel sorry for myself. I felt another wave of guilt and shame washing over me, but this was worse. A thousand times worse, because I was finally getting to hear my wife’s side of the story.

“So, the least you can do is take me to this stupid party and pretend to have a good time,” she finished. “Do you think you could do that for me, John?”

“Yes, I can do that for you,” I said, quietly.

I was looking down at my hands, watching my thumb and forefinger twisting my wedding band around my ring finger. It was loose. I’d been losing weight over the last month and if I wasn’t careful, I thought, it could fall right off and I’d lose it forever.

Later that night, after spending most of our Sunday afternoon and evening apart, I asked Kara, “Are you still angry with me?”

She lay on our bed, with the covers pulled up and over her breasts, reading something on her old Kindle. We hadn’t argued, not really, but that day we’d probably come as close to an argument as we’d been in a long time. It was my fault, of course, and I’d known that instantly. But I still resented my wife’s blunt response. She’d been painfully honest and I probably should have been grateful for that. I’d become so filled with self-pity that a proverbial slap across the face was exactly what our relationship needed.

I wasn’t grateful, though. I hadn’t learned my lesson yet. I only wanted things to go back to the way they’d been yesterday. I could feel sorry for myself and Kara could just sit back and enable my guilt with her sympathetic smiles and lazy love.

Fortunately for me, I hadn’t married a woman nearly that shallow.

“I was never angry with you.” She looked at me over the Kindle. “I’m simply unhappy with how you’re handling the situation.”

“And how exactly am I supposed to handle it, Kara?” I asked, standing awkwardly in the open doorway of the bedroom. I’d been looking for permission to enter, as much as anything else, and she hadn’t yet given it to me.

“By taking responsibility, for one thing.”

“Responsibility?” I snorted. “Have I been blaming anyone? Have I blamed you?”

“No, and you know that’s not what I mean.”

“Look, it’s my fault,” I said. “How many times do I have to say it? It’s my body, my dick, and it doesn’t work. So if that’s not taking responsibility, I don’t know what it is that you want from me.”

“I want you to stop acting like you’re a paraplegic or something. We can’t fuck, so what? We can still do everything else. You...” she stared at me. “You can do everything that you did before. There’s nothing wrong with the rest of you.”

I frowned, wishing I had a sharp retort, but I didn’t.

“Maybe it never occurred to you, but I can’t fuck either,” she continued. “I can pretend. I can use my fingers or find a nice big cucumber down at the grocery store, but that isn’t fucking. I need your cock for that, John.”

I felt sick to my stomach. I’d pushed another button and I just wanted her to stop. It hurt too much to realize how selfish I’d been, how careless with my wife’s feelings. She’d been trying for a month to be strong enough for both of us, but she couldn’t keep going like that, not forever. Caregiver burnout, isn’t that what it’s called. She deserved better. She deserved to be happy.

“You could always find some...”

“If you tell me to find some other guy to fuck me, I will fucking leave you.”

“No.” But that was exactly what I’d been about to say.

“Good, and just so we’re clear, if you ever cheat on me I’ll cut off your balls and then fucking leave you.”

I considered that for a moment, took a deep breath and nodded. “Yeah. That’s fair.”

“Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about how we’re going to get you to stop thinking about your penis all the time.”

“Uhhh...”

“That is the problem, right?” Kara asked, patting the bed beside her. “Sit down. I’m being serious. You worry about your penis way too much and it makes you depressed. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“No, you’re probably right,” I said, sitting beside her on the edge of the bed.

“If you didn’t think about that little thing all droopy and flopping around in your pants...”

“Kara!”

“ ... all day long, you’d be your normal, handsome self,” she continued. “You have such a great smile. God. The first time you smiled at me, I creamed my panties.”

“No way!” I said, smiling.

“Yeah, that one,” she sighed. “That sweet, shy smile like you just stole a cookie and can’t believe you got caught.”

“Really? Let me go look...” I started to get up as if going into the bathroom, but she grabbed me with a giggle.

“You gave me that smile and I grabbed Linda’s arm...”

“I don’t remember her.”

“Shhh...” Kara frowned. “Don’t interrupt me.”

“Sorry.”

“I grabbed Linda’s arm and said, ‘That guy just smiled at me and I think I creamed my panties!’”

“You liar!” I laughed.

“And she said, ‘Well, you’d better marry him then!’”

“Wait a second...” I snapped my fingers. “I do remember Linda. I smiled at her in the bookstore, but she totally ignored me and I ended up with her ugly friend.”

“Ugly?” Kara’s blue eyes widened as she tried to look suitably shocked.

“Sorry, I meant homely.”

She giggled. “You’re in so much trouble, Mister.”

“Do you want to, uh ... spank me?” I asked.

“I should, but I don’t want to spoil you,” my wife replied. “We could try something else.”

As odd as it may seem, given my near constant state of unhappiness, our sex life hadn’t diminished at all. If anything, we’d somehow become even more active and adventurous in the bedroom, and I don’t think either of us really noticed. I mean, we didn’t plan on it or anything, our ... evolution, for lack of a better word ... seemed to happen not despite my impotence, but rather because of it. Over the last few weeks we’d started playing with BDSM, which I don’t think had ever interested either of us.