(No seafood was harmed in the making of this story.)

Had it been one of those small, gentle urges she probably would never have awakened. Instead of being a tiny, "you-know-a-good-fuck-would-be-nice-right-now" kind of urge it was a "fuck-me-now-or-I-might-explode" craving. Needless to say, she was through sleeping for the night. She stretched out her arm, expecting the familiar warmth of his body next to hers in bed.

"Damn," she muttered under her breath. The Alaskan sun was glowing warmly through the window, but the clock next to the bed revealed that it was just past 3am. "Saturday," she sighed, as she realized that he must have unwittingly awakened her when he left at 3:00. "Fishing again." She rolled to his side of the bed, savoring the scent left on his pillow.

She hated fishing season. Hell, it had gotten to the point that she hated fish all together. Sex between them was almost non-existent from June to August, and weekends were horrible. He brought his fishing gear to work with him and spent hours each evening standing hip deep in Ship Creek casting over and over. Early morning weekend sex--a mainstay during the long, dark winters--was a thing of the past. Saturdays meant up before what passed for dawn in Alaska, and out the door for hour after hour of floating this creek or that river. Home late smelling of algae and sweat and, damn it, fish.

When he was home, they were both either cleaning, curing, packing, and cooking, or cleaning up after cleaning, curing, packing, and cooking pound after pound of Silvers and Kings.

She hated fish.

She hated fishing season. She loved him, but she hated pixies and fly rods and those fucking feathers that littered her kitchen table all summer so that he could be the all-mighty fisherman. After all, he had patiently explained time after time, REAL fishermen tied their own flies. REAL fisherman knew what the fish really wanted better than any mass-production factory.

She hated fish.

However, as much as she hated fish, she loved her husband. She'd entertained passing thoughts of illicit summer affairs and hot, passionate sexual encounters while her husband blissfully floated his raft down the Russian River. She'd dreamed of chasing her own form of "spawning red." She sighed. It would never happen. Just about the time she had screwed up the courage to approach that deeply-tanned construction worker or that unbelievably sexy road crewman, fishing season was over, the salmon runs were gone, and she had her husband back.

She reached down over the side of the bed, fishing for her "smut basket" as her husband teasingly referred to it. Instead of finding her trusty butterfly and dog-eared copy of Slow Hand, her fingers brushed across a flap of mesh, then caught painfully on a sharpened barb of a fishhook.

"Damn!" She drew her hand back and sucked lightly at the pierced fingertip. It didn't really hurt, but it was yet another reminder of why her bed was empty.

She reached down again and pulled husband's tan fishing vest up to the bed.

"Hm. He must have been moving pretty quickly this morning to walk off without his vest. Ah well, it serves him right," she said to herself bitterly. "Let's see how many fish he catches with only his..." she let the thought drift, unfinished, as she brought the vest to her face and inhaled. It smelled of him, but the 'good' him, not the 'fishing' him.

She let the vest drape over her bare breasts, and she realized the fuck-me urge that originally woke her was quickly returning. Her fingers danced slowly across the rough fabric, the different textures playing with her senses. Her nails scraped along the mesh, catching softly in the fluttery feathers of the flies. As she pressed against the cloth, she could feel the seam of the vest hard against her nipple. Her eyes closed as she imagined his teeth, his lips scraping along the sensitive, puckered skin. She twisted and pulled as he would, her nipple hardening under her touch.