Isaiah Hardy strained at the icy wheel as the howling wind battered his schooner, Lorelei. Fishing the Grand Banks in the late fall is always a crapshoot, particularly in early November. But Hardy and his crew had been working the oxygen-rich Labrador Current for a fortnight, and the haul of catch in the ship’s hold would solve everybody’s financial woes. So, the risk had been worth it.

It had been fair and cold as the ship’s dories harvested cod and haddock from sunup to sundown. But every sailor keeps a weather eye out for storms. So, when the sky turned that eerie shade of yellowish green that always presages a major Atlantic blow, the crew hauled in their nets, piled on the sails, and ran west by southwest, desperately seeking safe harbor.

But the raging storm had become so formidable that the topsails had to be taken down, and the gaff sail on the main and foremast stowed. Now, Hardy’s ship was running with nothing but a headsail to maintain way on against the twenty-five-foot Atlantic rollers.

Hardy was a good-looking man. The ladies swooned over his square jaw and his wealth of wavy hair. Nonetheless, his dark, penetrating eyes were what sealed the deal. When he looked at a woman, they felt like he was looking directly into their soul. At present, however, Hardy’s eyes were peering intently into the sea’s infinite darkness, searching for the Baccalieu Island Light at St. John’s, Newfoundland, which was only a half day away, by Hardy’s reckoning, roughly thirty miles on the rhumb line.

That was when Hardy heard a roaring noise, like a dozen express trains. Alarmed, he glanced to port and saw his death looming fifty feet above the tips of Lorelei’s mast. Rogue waves are rare phenomena, but they DO happen, especially during a violent storm. The wave that Hardy was looking at was a 90-footer – taller than the tallest building in Boston. Hardy had time to murmur one last word as he was blasted into the endless darkness – “Catherine.”

Kit’s real name is Mary Catherine, but she prefers to go by Kit. My wife is aptly named. She’s as playful as a kitten and twice as cute. Kit’s petite —just five-two. But her small frame is ideally proportioned, featuring long legs, a curvaceous body, full, high-riding breasts, and a heart-meltingly beautiful face.

A man named Isaiah Hardy had built the house that we’d just bought. Hardy was a legendary skipper in the fishing trade in Marblehead during the nineteenth Century. He and all of his hands were lost in the Great Storm of 1898. But he must have been successful because his house was stunning.

Our new house sat high on a rocky cliff overlooking the ocean, with a deeded beach below. The surroundings featured beautiful gardens, with flowering climbing vines and a spacious four-car garage. Don’t bother telling me ... I know the garage was added after Hardy died, since automobiles were in their infancy back then.

Inside ... the great room had an enormous stone fireplace, vaulted ceilings, detailed original woodwork, and sturdy ceiling beams. There were four bedrooms in total, including a primary suite as spacious as our first apartment. But the real attraction was the distinctive, forty-foot-tall octagonal tower. That tower resembled a lighthouse sticking out above the house’s roof. It had a sitting room at the top, with eight floor-to-ceiling windows that provided limitless views of the ocean.

Kit and I were able to purchase this superb place because I had sold a piece of advanced AI to DARPA. Nerds are like happy trolls ... we doodle away in our workshops. Then, occasionally, we develop a game-changing technology. Machine independence has numerous applications in defense and self-driving cars. So, the final sale was in the neighborhood of eight figures. That transformed Kit and my simple life into something entirely different.

Two years earlier, we had been living in a one-bedroom apartment near Tyson’s, and I commuted to work on the Silver Line. Now we were the owners of this extraordinary place. Both of us liked coastal New England. It didn’t matter whether it was Massachusetts, New Hampshire, or even Maine. Hence, it was a no-brainer when this particular house came on the market.

Kit came over to me as soon as the realtor left. She gave me a big hug and put her sweet head on my chest. That was easy for her to do since there was well over a foot difference in our heights. She said, “Thank you for this, Erick. I feel like a fairy tale princess.”

The house had been all Kit’s idea. She was a normal human female. She cared about the practical things. Think about it, dude. It takes both kinds to make it work. Real men don’t care whether we live in a den or there’s food in the pantry. We have guy things to do. I mean, seriously ... the species would have probably died out eons ago if it weren’t for women handling life’s little details, like shelter and food.

I put my hands on both of Kit’s shoulders and turned her to face me. She was breathing raggedly. I looked into those enormous, hazel eyes, and she was staring back at me with undisguised adoration. You can’t fake a look like that. Kit stepped into me, put her hands on both sides of my face, and pulled me down to a very hot kiss. She moaned loudly, her mouth opened, and we began to exchange tongues.

I walked her backward to the old couch, which was the only piece of furniture in the great room. Our apartment had been tiny, and we hadn’t gotten around to furnishing the new place. Kit was making little cooing noises. While, at the same time, she dropped both hands to tear at my belt.

We’d just about gotten to the couch when I pushed her back on it. She still had hold of my belt, which she ripped through the loops and right off me as she fell. That dropped my pants to the floor. They were bunched around my ankles, so I tripped over them and fell face-first with my nose buried between her widely spread legs. Okay – that was a Keystone Cops moment, but I had to start somewhere.

So, I addressed the prospect directly in front of me. I pulled her panties aside, licked, sucked, and generally ravaged her little pink lips. She let out an unearthly groan and grabbed the side of my head, settling me into position to go to town on her. In the meantime, she was uttering loud moans and cries, telling me in rather explicit terms how good it felt.

Then suddenly, she hyperventilated and bucked herself into a bow, back and butt resting where I was feasting on her, her arms were above her head, her legs were elevated and shot wide, and she began a cadence of shrieking. Then her legs slammed back down on the couch, and she began quivering like she had contracted a sudden case of severe malaria.

She reached down and grabbed my head in both hands and began desperately dragging me up her body, all the while yelling, “Get up here and FUCK me!!! You have to fuck me NOW!!!” I had to follow my wife’s lead, or I was going to lose both ears and perhaps my entire head.

Kit did all the work. The moment I got situated between her widely spread legs, she bucked up and took me to the hilt in a single motion. It wasn’t like she was loose. She was tight and very hot. But she was THAT lubricated. Then she turned into a crazy woman, making low feral noises like an animal in heat and scratching my back in a way that made me pretty sure I was going to be wearing a t-shirt for a while to hide the claw marks.

We fucked like that for about ten minutes. I was absolutely pounding my wife, and she was writhing and moaning and scratching like a wildcat. It is impossible to sustain that kind of stimulus for very long. In my case, I could feel an orgasm coming from someplace long-ago-and-far-far-away. When it hit, I heard myself roaring like a Grizzly Bear, “OH FUCK YESSSS!!!”

In the meantime, Kit, who had been urging me to “cum” in her, in increasingly louder and more frantic tones, seemed to have passed out. I didn’t need to be a doctor to figure that out. I knew it because my wife was motionless underneath me.

Kit began to stir as I shrank out of her, which elicited a little moan of loss. I was supporting myself on my arms just staring into her pretty face with its long, exquisite nose, sharply pointed chin, and incredible sculptured lips. Kit’s unusual hazel eyes popped open, and she looked dazed.

I said, a little worried, “Welcome back, are you all right?” She smiled languidly and said, “I’ve never been more all right in my life. Do you know how I feel about you now? Do you understand how much I love you and appreciate all the things you have done for me?”

I said with a little grin, “Well, let me see if your feelings are close to mine? I want to wake up next to you every morning and spend every day with you. I want to be your best friend and devoted lover. I want to see things and do things with you, have children with you, and die in your arms. Does THAT come close to summing up what you had in mind?”

Our days in Marblehead were idyllic. The house was situated adjacent to the Marblehead Neck Wildlife Sanctuary, with Castle Rock Park just up the coast. So, we had plenty of green space. The boom of the wild Atlantic drummed constantly at our feet, and the sea air was bracing.

We were living on the Neck, which forms the outer part of the protected Marblehead Harbor, just a fifteen-minute bike ride from the historic town on the landward side. And if you want to immerse yourself in the creepy goings-on of the witch trials of three hundred years ago, you can pedal the additional five miles from Marblehead to the fine village of Salem.

Historically, everything in that part of Massachusetts stinks of Puritanism, from Plymouth to the south, all the way up to Endicott to the north. Fortunately, the insanity never reached as far as Marblehead, which had been a town for seventy years prior to the time that the citizens of Salem got the passing fancy to hang witches.

Of course, Yankee money whitewashed the sins of those ill-considered forefathers. Now, the whole area is preppified to within an inch of its life. That sort of ingrained arrogance is almost genetic, passed down from one snobbish generation to the next. So, as far as the natives were concerned, Kit and I were both arrivistic outsiders.

That made no difference to either Kit or me, because we both had each other, and that was good enough for us. We are what the sociologists call a binary couple. Meaning we got our motivation and intellectual stimulation from one another. We didn’t need anybody else.

A typical day began with Kit and me reading the Globe together, drinking our morning coffee, and talking about that day’s news. This either happened at a big umbrella table on the patio overlooking the cliffs or in the sitting room in the tower. It depended on the weather.

The tower had a traditional widow’s walk, which a genuine widow had once trodden. Reports were that Hardy and his wife, Catherine, had a legendary love. It was sad to imagine how the poor woman must have felt, vainly gazing out to sea for a husband who would never return. They say that the wife died shortly thereafter from a broken heart. A schmalzy little tale, but the Victorians liked romantic fables.

Kit and I were comfortably settled into our new digs as the light of summer faded into the darkness of a long New England winter. The coastal towns undergo a personality transformation when the late October gales begin to blow. Towns go from being a leisurely and genteel tourist trap to buttoned up in sturdy houses with no interest in going out into the slate grey rain.

I had hired trustworthy people to run the new company. I mean, seriously! What do nerds know about operating a multimillion-dollar business? Nonetheless, I had to travel sometimes. Those trips were mainly to Boston to sign legal things. However, I sometimes found myself back in DC, representing the company. Most of those visits were speaking engagements. So, I could fly in in the morning, do my thing that evening, and come back the following day.

It was a mild, sunny October 31st, Halloween, when I threw my suit carrier over my shoulder and walked toward the garage for the hour-long drive down to Logan. Kit was trailing along behind, fussing as usual. You would think that I was eight years old the way she fretted over me before each trip. She said, “Now you be careful and call when you get there.”

I looked into Kit’s beautiful oval face with its huge eyes, high cheekbones, and wealth of auburn hair and said, “I’m staying ten miles from where we used to live in DC, not the Congo.” Kit smiled, kissed me on the nose, then much more passionately on the lips, and said, “I don’t want to lose you to some DC courtesan.” I laughed all the way out to the garage. How could I top the woman I was married to?

The flight from Logan to DCA feels like a takeoff, followed shortly by a landing. It’s an hour and a half. But once you’ve settled in, placed your drink order, and opened your laptop, they tell you to put it away. I rented a car from Hertz and arrived at the DC Hilton in plenty of time to shower, dress, and get downstairs for some rubber chicken and a speech.

Afterward, I called Kit, just to tuck her in for the evening. But the call went to voicemail. I called fifteen minutes later and then half an hour after that. I tried one more time before going to sleep because I was concerned she would worry. Still no answer. That was odd? Maybe her phone had run out of juice.

I was going to give Kit a massive kidding when I got back that afternoon. But the flight to Logan was delayed by a prolonged ground stop at the destination. As often happens in New England, the delightful weather of the prior day had been the precursor to a genuine Nor’easter. So, I didn’t arrive back in Boston until the evening.

I found my Land Rover in the covered parking deck and drove it out into what felt like a car wash, complete with streaks of lightning and thunderclaps. It’s easy to see why they have odd superstitions if you spend any time in that part of New England.

An eerie feeling hit me as I pulled out of the downpour and into our four-car garage. Kit’s sporty little Miata was sitting in the neighboring spot, so she was home. But she hadn’t been answering calls, and I was concerned.

I dropped my laptop carry-on in the foyer and called, “Kit?” There was no answer. So, I took my suit carrier up to our bedroom to hang, preparatory to tracking down my wife. That was when I heard a distant cry. Of course! Kit was in the little bedroom up in the tower. She must have slept up there after watching the storm come in.

I climbed the narrow flight of stairs to the sitting room. Kit wasn’t there. But the door to the darkened bedroom was open. So, I went in, snapped on the overhead light, and found my wife lying naked, face down on an utterly destroyed bed. A pile of pillows elevated her beautiful, round ass, and her legs were spread wide—the place stank of sex.