When he grasped the tree I was holding up, he placed his strong hand over mine. The feel of his touch sent electricity through my body, and I felt myself flush and begin to harden up. I didn’t want this to happen. I hadn’t wanted to be pulled into that vortex ever again. I had thought I was finished with him.

“Here, Eddie, could you help this couple?” he was saying, indicating Karen and me. “Another guy is showing up to dicker over a tree we’ve discussed before. I need to handle that.”

He released my hand, and I felt like I was jolted back into the present, flooded with a sense of relief, but also with a twinge of regret. I watched him walk off, his tight jeans molding his bulbous butt and those soccer-player thighs, and I wanted to moan. He was a lumberjack kind of guy, from his barroom-fight battered, yet still-handsome face, down to the bulging biceps and chest in the double layers of checked flannel shirt, firm belly, and the extra-large cupping at the crotch, barely contained by the worn jeans, the fabric worn a lighter shade of blue on the crotch like he’d been rubbing himself there.

I was stunned from the moment he’d walked up to us and said, “A nice tree for you and the pretty lady?”

I couldn’t have said he had sneered when he said that—and certainly hoped Karen hadn’t taken it that way—but it did seem that he was conveying something to me. Not just with the way he referred to Karen and me as a couple but also because, having come to us and made contact, he immediately brushed us off onto someone else.

This man, obviously boss here, who I already knew was named Dutch, walked back and whispered something to Eddie and then went on to tend to the other guy looking at the trees. I felt my ears burning. I was struck with the wish to know what he’d said to Eddie.

Trying to push this all out of my mind, I turned back to the chore at hand. Karen and I had come out to the Christmas tree farm to pick out the perfect tree for our first year together. What we were here for was a Christmas tree. That’s all that had been in my mind when we’d come out here. And it was Karen who had picked this place out anyway.

“I don’t know, Karen, what do you think? You think it’s too tall? And maybe a bit scrawny at the bottom.”

“Hmm, maybe.” Karen said. “I really like the shape of the top, though.”

“You can always cut the bottom out,” Eddie said helpfully. “Then you’d have both the perfect shape and a tree that wasn’t too tall.”

“That’s an idea,” Karen said. “And I could use the cut-off limbs to make a door wreath perhaps. That would save having to buy a wreath. And maybe a centerpiece for the dining table as well.”

“Speaking of saving,” I said, “How much is this tree?”

I was speaking to Eddie, but my eyes had wandered off to where Dutch was now talking with another customer, a young man who looked like he was a bit nervous. Dutch had a hand on his arm and was leaning in to him, which was making the young man look even more skittish. I remembered having had the feeling with Dutch myself. Men like Dutch were overpowering. They demanded so much. And they usually got what they were demanding.

“For you, we could go, say, $60.”

At the same moment I heard Dutch saying to the young guy, “$100,” and the tree they were dickering over was short and scrawny compared to the one we were looking at.

“Can we put that aside—so no one else can take it before we decide—and look around a bit more?”

This was so like Karen—maybe so like most women.

“You just were saying how perfect this tree is, Karen,” I said. “Let’s just buy it and go home and get it up.” Maybe the comparison between this one and the one Dutch was trying to get more money for had brought out the protective instinct in me for this tree. Sure, there were hundreds of more trees on stands throughout the lot, and maybe a tree more perfect than this one. But this one obviously was a bargain. What if someone actually did snatch it from us while Karen was feeding her need to shop?

I looked around. There weren’t too many other people looking at trees. And even Dutch and the young guy with the scrawny tree were somewhere out of sight.

“Well, how will I always know we got just the right tree if we don’t look at any others,” Karen said.

I heard Eddie sigh. But I’ll bet he went through this every time a woman showed up to buy a tree here. He certainly was looking stoic.

“Yeah, I guess with that logic, I could go through life worrying about whether I’d bought the perfect tree for our first Christmas in the apartment.”

“For our first Christmas together,” Karen said in that “we’re so blessed” voice of hers, as she put her arm through mine. “Let’s look down that row over there. I saw some other people headed down there. There must be some great trees on that row.”

“Well, sure, why not? I think I just saw one rustle its needles into hiding down there.” I was still trying to shame her out of needing to see more trees—and I almost laughed at her logic that people were going into a particular row because some premonition had told them that was where the best trees were—but she was having none of that. It was going right over her head.

“I’ll put this one aside, shall I, and meet you over in that row,” Eddie said with a tone between “don’t rile the customer” and accustomed resignation.

When he came back, Karen hadn’t found anything she liked better.

“So, can we buy the first tree now?” I asked.

“Well, yes, Mr. Antsy, if you must get back so fast. There’s a football game on TV you want to see, isn’t there?”

“Yeah, you found me out,” I answered. There wasn’t, that I knew of, but I’d find one I really, really had to see. What I really wanted to do was to get away from here. Seeing Dutch, and realizing the effect that he had on me, had me wanting to get away from here as fast as possible. That could only be for the good of Karen.

“Well, OK. You give him the money, and let’s get it on top of the car. You’ll help me with that, Eddie, won’t you? Scott’s such a fumble-fingers with anything mechanical. The two of us can get it done faster ourselves.”

“Sure, I can put it on the car for you,” Eddie said. He was looking at me with a little sneer on his lips.

I felt totally emasculated. Why did Karen do stuff like that to me? She was right that I had no sense of mechanics, but that didn’t stop me from making more money than she did—or from being able to make her go all glassy-eyed by putting my dick inside her. Was she going to be like this after we were married? Worse, I’d been told.

“Umm. It’s a long drive back to the city,” Eddie then said. “If you need the can or anything, it’s behind the office, over there. A Johnny’s John. You could take care of that while we took care of the tree.”

I don’t know if he was trying to give me a less-deflating out or what. But he was right about the drive. “Yeah, thanks. I should do that.”

I didn’t think of Karen needing to go too. She could hold it like a camel, and just the mention of a Johnny’s John was enough to make her cross her legs and scrunch up her nose.

I walked behind the office building and headed straight into the Porta-John. Eddie had figured me out. I’d needed to take a piss since we’d gotten here. It hadn’t sweetened my disposition any.

I wasn’t as task oriented when I left the Porta-John, which is probably why I even noticed there was a window into the office right next to the john.

I looked in and froze—in horror. And in something else. Something remembered and something I didn’t want to remember. But something I never could forget.

The young man was stretched out on his belly over the desk top, gripping the far rim with white-knuckled fists. His coat was off—and so were his trousers—but he was still wearing a shirt, open and flapping at his sides. Behind him, shirtless and his jeans bunched around his ankles, stood Dutch. Dutch had one hand on the young man’s belly and the other buried in the hair on the back of the young guy’s head, jerking his head back and making his slim torso arch back.

Dutch’s undulating muscles—his biceps, shoulders, even those of his bulbous butt cheeks—were putting on a show of their own as Dutch pistoned the young man’s channel with his cock. I could hear, through the window glass, the young man’s cries of pain-pleasure and his begging for Dutch to brutalize his ass.

The scrawny little Christmas tree had been unceremoniously dumped at the side of the desk. I could tell now that the $100 the young man had been quoted wasn’t for the tree.

I moaned, immediately transporting myself to that young man’s position. I was transfixed for several moments, both mesmerized and dismayed. When I could take it no longer, I turned and lunged into the Porta-John, fumbled with my zipper, and jacked myself off until I spouted down into the grim hole in the john. Then, steeling myself not to look again, when I exited—but doing so anyway, and seeing that Dutch had ridden the young man up onto the top of the desk and was doggy fucking him on all fours now—I fled to the car and to the questioning eyes of Karen on what could have taken so long—and, I thought, the knowing look and little smirk that Eddie gave me.

“Is this perfect enough for you. Still think it’s the perfect tree?”

“Oh, Scotty. Oh, Scotty. It will be perfect. I promise.”

If only, I thought.

Karen had gone to great pains to make it perfect. The tree was trimmed, the fireplace was lit, Nat King Cole was crooning Christmas songs on the CD player, the eggnog was waiting patiently on the coffee table near us, and we were stretched out between the fireplace and the tree on the snowflake rug Karen’s grandmother had hooked.

I sort of wondered if this was the use Grandma had intended for her rug.

Karen was on her back, laying on the arm I had wrapped around her shoulder blades, the hand of that arm reaching around and toying with one of her puffed-up nipples underneath her bra, her blouse open. I’d already hiked her skirt up to around her waist. I was laying on my side against her, stretched her full length and then some. I’d already taken my shirt off.