Mr. Williams, the old man who lived at the end of the block, died last summer, and in the early fall his son came in from Florida with a U-Hall truck and cleaned things out. A few days later a FOR SALE sign appeared on the lawn. I teased Michelle that we should buy that house; it was bigger than ours—more room for the twins as they grew. “Of course you’re only teasing,” Michelle said, “but it’s not a bad idea, except that on a corner lot there’s no backyard at all. No place for them to play. Besides, that house is so way overpriced it’ll never sell.” And it didn’t—not all through the fall and winter. Day after day, night after night, the house was dark, and the FOR SALE sign sat out on the lawn.

But now it’s spring, and driving home from work, I notice that the sign has been taken down. I’m not sure why I notice; it’s not like I’d noticed every day that the sign was still up. But notice I did, and a moment later I see the girl. She is blond, early twenties, short and pretty, and she is walking a little white dog along the sidewalk. Maybe it’s a toy poodle—I don’t know. I’m not really up on dog breeds, and anyway I’m paying much more attention to the girl. As I drive past, she smiles at me, an amazingly fetching smile, all white teeth and juicy lips and sparkling blue eyes—it makes me feel good. More than just a friendly feel-good smile, it’s a sexy smile, an amazingly sexy smile—lips, tongue, teeth, eyes. It stuns me, it elates me, it fills me with such feeling that my eyes stay too long in the rear-view mirror and I overshoot my driveway.

I circle the block, but on the second trip the girl with the dog isn’t there. Safely in my driveway, I spend some time calming down, waiting for my erection to subside. The girl with the dog must have moved into that house at the end of the block. Mr. Williams’ house. What other explanation could there be? Michelle will know.

Michelle has made meatloaf for dinner, and it is delicious. Even the kids like it, and they’re fussy eaters. “This is so good, honey,” I say, helping myself to seconds. “I love your meatloaf.” She smiles, a pleased sort of smile, a “love-my-meatloaf love me” sort of smile, and suddenly my mind returns to the blond girl. ‘Returned’ is putting it mildly: A startlingly vivid pornographic fantasy jolts through me. The girl is giving this guy a blow job. It is as if I am seeing a film of it, very up close and personal, her lips on the guy’s cock, slipping and sucking around the rim, a mischievous look in her bright blue eyes; and suddenly she ohs her mouth, and the cock starts jetting its stuff into it, stream after pulsing stream of thick white fluid. When the spewing stops she engulfs the cock again, and some of the excess goo drools out of her mouth, eases past her plump lips and down along the shaft’s fat flank. Then, moving slowly but inevitably, her pretty mouth catches up with the flow, and by the bottom she’s recaptured the slippery stuff and is sucking so smooth and hard my whole body trembles.

“Are you all right, hon?” Michelle asks.

“Oh, yes.”

“You looked...” She leaves off with a shrug.

“I was just thinking about this meatloaf and how much I love you,” I tell her. No way can I ask Michelle about the house on the corner now.

That night after the kids are tucked in and Michelle and I are in bed, I ask her to suck me. I don’t ask very often, but Michelle is rarely sexually aggressive, no matter how many times I’ve mentioned that I really like it when she is. “Okay,” she says, rolling back the cover. It is good. So good I almost don’t think about the blond girl. But then suddenly, just when Michelle’s nimble mouth has me near the edge, there she is, the blond girl, smiling at me, grinning, and in my imagination she aims a video camera right at me. I erupt. “Oh, honey,” Michelle says a few moments later. “So much!” I pulled her into an embrace and we cuddle and until sleep comes.

Next day, all through work my thoughts return to that blond girl. It’s hard to get anything done. “This is silly,” I tell myself. “I’m not a teenager. I have a beautiful wife. Even if she’s not aggressive, we have a good sex life.”

That evening as my car turns the last corner onto my block, I’m sure I’ll see the blonde. My intuition is wrong, more or less; I don’t see the blond girl or her little white dog, but I do see a big German shepherd tugging an Asian girl along the sidewalk. This young woman seems to be about the same age as the blonde, early twenties, but she’s taller, with long, jet black hair and endlessly bare legs under a very short skirt. As my car rolls past, she glances at me, and there is a kind of a helpless shrug in her look, a “what can you do?” expression in her eyes, followed by a shy grin. And then the shepherd’s leash snaps her forward and her skirt lurches up and I can swear she isn’t wearing any underwear.

“Honey,” Michelle says when I meet her in the kitchen. “How’s my big man?” We embrace and kiss. “Mm, you are big,” she says, rubbing herself like a cat against my erection.

“Where are the kids?”

“Playing Nintendo with Josh next door,” she answers. “I was just about to call them home for supper.”

“I’ve been thinking about you.”

She laughs. “I can see that.” She gives my penis a playful squeeze through my trousers.

“I really liked the way you sucked me last night,” I whisper.

“Me, too.”

“Can we... ?”

“Maybe later,” she says. “They’ve got homework to get through after supper.”

“What are we having?”

“Meatloaf.” Her eyes twinkle. “You liked it so much yesterday.”

“I thought I finished it off? That sandwich I had for lunch?”

“You did. I was just teasing you. I got some take-out from Woo’s. It’s all laid out and rarin’ to go. Okay?”

“Great.”

“And there’s black forest cake for dessert.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. I never kid about black forest cake.”

We have our pieces of cake with coffee after the children are asleep. “Jimmy says he wants his own Nintendo, just like Josh’s,” Michelle says.

“Maybe when he’s ten.”

“They turn eleven next week,” Michelle says.

“So soon? Seems like just yesterday they were five.”

“Uh-huh.” Michelle frowns. “If we get Jimmy a Nintendo, what are we going to get Jenny?”

“A Porsche?”

“Oh, right, just what she needs. What’s she going to do with a Porsche?”

“Nothing. Just leave it in the garage. By the time she’s twenty-one it will have tripled in value. Of course I’d drive it now and then. Just enough to keep it in tune. Yeah, I think a Porsche for Jenny. The more I think about it the more perfect an idea I think it is. Either that or a new Barbie.”

“She’s too old for Barbies. What she really wants is a dog.”

“A dog? What kind of a dog?”

“Any kind of a dog. As long as it’s a puppy.”

I take another forkful of cake. I think about that dark-haired girl walking her German shepherd. I think about her bending over. Those endlessly long legs. And suddenly she’s naked. She’s looking back over her shoulder with that “what can you do” grin. The dog is licking her bottom. Licking her asshole. Making it all frothy wet and slobbery. But it isn’t the dog who fucks her. It’s the man. His cock slides in easily. Filling her asshole. I see his cock going in. I feel the heat of her. The squeeze. The point at the nape of her neck. Her whole body trembling.

“Honey?”

“What? Sorry. I was just...”

“Thinking about a dog for Jenny?”

“Yeah. I don’t know. I think she might be a little too young for a dog.”

“But old enough for a Porsche?”

I shrug.

“Finish your cake,” Michelle says. “And let’s go to bed.”

I’ve never fucked Michelle in the ass. I’ve thought about it. I’ve wanted to try it, but in all the years I’ve never been bold enough to suggest it. Sometimes I tease her there with my fingers. Sometimes she lets me, and sometimes she brushes my hand away. This time she doesn’t brush my hand away. My fingers circle her there, lightly rubbing as we fuck. We’d been fucking for a long time, a slow cruise of a fuck, with stops along the way for kisses, long hot kisses, and now we’re kissing and fucking, and my fingers are teasing her there, circling and shuffling, and some of the wet has come down, and I’m sliding it and rubbing it. Suddenly my finger goes in, just a little, but in, and her asshole grabs my finger, squeezes it hard, and then relaxes. I take this as a sign to continue. I work my finger further in, slowly, gently, gradually, until there is nothing to stop it. In one slow slick swoosh it goes all the way up. Michelle moans, a long low moan, and the contractions begin. I can feel them, feel them with my cock, feel them with my finger, feel them rippling through her cunt, her asshole, her whole body; they are wonderful, and my cock begins contracting in answer, echoing her orgasm. Long after I am empty, Michelle’s cunt continues to flutter; my finger feels it all, every sweet quake, every delicious twitch, every shuddering spasm, and soon my cock fattens again, my finger in her ass feels my cock pushing through the melt, and we fuck and fuck long into the night.

When my alarm goes off the next morning, Michelle doesn’t move. I shower and dress and get the kids up and make them breakfast. “Is Mommy sick?” they want to know.

“No, she’s just resting, now hurry up, you don’t want to miss the bus.”

After they’re on their way, I go up to check on Michelle. She is still asleep. I bend over her and move her hair out of the way and kiss her neck. She rolls over.

“Mm, honey, that was so ... so ... mmm,” she says.

“Yes, it was,” I answer. “I have to go to work now.”

“Do you have to?” She sighs.

“Yes,” I say.

“Okay,” she says, and her eyes flutter shut.

On the way to work I look at the house on the corner. Dark inside. No sign of anything. No curtains yet.

Midmorning Michelle calls. “You were so naughty last night,” she says. “I can hardly move. I made cookies.”

“Cookies?

“The kind you like. Gingersnaps. Two big batches!”

“Seems awfully early in the day for baking cookies.”

“I know, but I didn’t know what else to do. I’m going to get dressed now. Love ya.”

The rest of the morning I think about Michelle baking cookies. I think about her bending over the oven, naked, the heat rushing up against her breasts. Such nice breasts. Gently pear shaped. With such suckable nipples. Instantly I’m hard. I consider driving home for lunch, or rather driving home so I can suck Michelle’s nipples. Maybe if I rushed home right now we could shower together. Or I’d interrupt her in the shower. Maybe she’s masturbating. Touching herself in the shower. Maybe she’s soaping herself and pushing her finger into her asshole and remembering last night, thinking about my finger, thinking about my cock, about my cock fucking her there. I think about calling her. But what if she is in the shower? I could leave a message. I could say I’d been thinking about her. About sucking her nipples. About my finger in her asshole. About her finger in her asshole. About fucking her there. But I can’t leave that kind of message. What if she doesn’t check and the kids came home and they listen? I take a deep breath and try to clear my head. Strange that there were no curtains in that corner house. People could see in. Probably there were curtains in the bedrooms. I like gingersnaps, but sometimes I eat too many and my teeth hurt. I don’t call. I don’t rush home. I try to get some work done.

Wild red curls leap up into the afternoon sunshine. A sleek Irish setter trots out in front of her. The dog barks. The girl waves. She waves as if she knows me, and I wave back, and her green eyes glint and her hair red hair jangles in the sun. She is tall, taller than the others, but just as shapely, and I sit in the driveway thinking about her pussy hair, cozy red ringlets puffed up above her cunt, and her clit, hard and plump and ruby red, and her sex lips, opening, slippery with sex juice, slurpy under the strop of my tongue. I get out of the car. I look down the block. She is gone. I turn back to the house, go around back, adjust my erection as best I can, and go in.

The kids are working puzzles on the kitchen table. “We’re having corned beef,” Jimmy says. “Your favorite, Daddy,” Jenny says. She is right about that.

“Mm, smells good. Where’s Mommy?”

“Right here, honey,” Michelle says. She stands in the entryway with a basket of laundry. “Want to help me fold and sort?”

“I was thinking of reading the newspaper.”

“You can read the silly paper any day,” she answers. “Come here. Come on, boy. Come.”

“Corned beef,” I say as I roll up a pair of my socks. We’re in the dining room, clean laundry spread out all over the table. “And gingersnaps. You’re too good to me. Or are they all gone?”

“Plenty left,” Michelle says. “I am too good to you. Give me a kiss.”

I kiss her. It is a sweet kiss, but soon she is shimmying gently against my front. “You’ve been awfully frisky lately,” she says. “What is it? Something in the air?”

“Just spring, I guess,” I say. She presses closer and her tongue teases mine.

“We should have spring more often,” she says, and she strokes my erection through my pants. “I’ve been thinking about you all day.”