Chapter 1

It all started innocently enough. Beverly and I had been married for about fifteen years. We'd know each other since high school, but hadn't dated until after college. We had a good life, three kids and a nice house in the typical American suburban paradise.

I don't know if this happens to other couples, but while we still loved each other deeply, there was still something missing. At the beginning, everything was sparks and flashes and power. We both seemed comfortable and happy with the way things were now, but we weren't thrilled, at least not as often.

Don't get me wrong. Seeing her naked still got me hard, and I loved making love to her. Unlike many of the other middle-aged moms that were in our circle of friends, she kept her shape and cared quite a bit about how she looked. She was always a little bit more voluptuous than the "ideal" and I loved that about her, so maybe it was easier for her to keep her youthful figure.

On our monthly date nights, she'd still turn heads. I think she liked that. Other men, and sometimes women, noticing the curve of her breast under silky fabric, the turn of her ankle in sheer stockings, the glimpse of a soft, braless breast in a low cut top.

But it just wasn't happening often enough. It felt like the energy was gone.

One night I received an invitation to a bachelor's party for an old high school friend. I read Bev the e-mail, which came complete with a link to the "gentlemen's club" they planned on attending. I thought we'd both have a laugh about it before I deleted it.

She surprised me, "You should go."

"What?" I hardly knew Tom in the first place. I doubted I was on the top 25 list of his friends in school, and figured I'd gotten the invitation by mistake. "You know they are going to a strip club, right?"

"Yeah ... c'mon, admit it. Haven't you ever been curious to go to one of those places?"

The truth was that I used to go to "those places" a lot when I was in college. I missed it, too. But that was before Bev and the kids. I had resolved to put those days and those places behind me to become a family man. All that said, I really didn't want to miss this opportunity.

"You wouldn't mind? Those places are filled with naked women."

"I don't mind as long as..." she held up her hand and ticked off her points by folding her outstretched fingers. "You don't spend more than a hundred dollars, you don't have sex with any of those skanks, you swim in the pool to wash off the cigarette smoke before you come into the house, and then you fuck the hell out of me afterward." She closed her thumb over her four clenched fingers to make a fist and shook it at me with a flirty smirk. "Got it?"

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I sat there with my mouth open.

"We both know you've been looking for a spark, as you call it. Maybe we'll both get a spark out of this. Give it a shot."

"Okay," I said, trying not to sound too enthusiastic.

"But if you fuck one of those strippers, you'll never touch me again, and you're out on your ass? Got it?" She wagged her fist at me again for effect.

I was about to ask if getting a blowjob counted as fucking, but I rethought that stupid idea real quick. She had a pretty good right hook.

Two weeks later I was entering a strip club I had never heard of before, with a group of guys I hadn't seen in twenty years. In fact, it didn't really look like a strip club at all from the outside. Just a simple neon sign "The Velvet Slipper" on a plain red brick storefront. Clearly the club relied on a clientele who knew the location, and not walk-in business from the surrounding bars, hotels and restaurants.

Two weeks and two hours later, I was sitting with the guest of honor at a small table near the main stage in the cozy club. It's a different experience going to a strip club with a group of older, mostly married, guys than it was in my college days with my group of rowdy friends. Even when drunk, the men are far more respectful and appreciative than the younger crowd, and far more generous, too.

Tom leaned over to me and yelled above the music, "You're the luckiest fuckin' guy in here, you know!"

"How so?"

"Because you fuckin' ended up with Beverly, you fuckin' geek!" Tom was a little drunk, and a little sloppy.

"I didn't realize it was a competition." We had all been in the same high school together, but Beverly really ran with a different crowd. I was more in the science nerd group, and Tom and Bev were both in the high status clique of jocks, cheerleaders and rich kids. I only knew Tom because I tutored him in math in his senior year so he could get his grades high enough to qualify for a football scholarship.

"Man, it was always a fuckin' competition, and Beverly was the grand fuckin' prize!" Apparently it was a vocabulary competition, and it was easy to tell how Tom lost.

"Did you date her?"

"Depends on what you fuckin' mean by date." He dissolved in loud, obnoxious laughter.

I was going to follow up on that comment, except that at that moment the guest of honor was scooped up by two women, gloriously nude except for acrylic platform heels, and wrangled to the stage.

Another man that I didn't recognize came to sit next to me while I watched the guest of honor get a series of lap dances from a parade of strippers. I couldn't pay close attention to what was going on because Tom's words, and the insinuation they made about my wife, kept echoing through my head.

I was imagining my wife in her high school cheerleader days, in the back of Tom's Buick after a "date" where the big spender had taken her to the diner and bought her a hamburger, and figured he was entitled to free her big soft breasts from her sweater and squeeze them, and suck her broad dark nipples as a reward. Or maybe he had convinced his big brother to buy them some beer and plied her with a six pack in exchange for her hot wet lips sliding up and down his hard shaft behind the bleachers in the gym.

The thing was, I wasn't upset or jealous about these fantasies. The image of my beautiful wife as a high school slut, sleeping with one after another of the men in the group at the strip club, was thrilling me. I imagined each of the men in the room, in their youthful high school incarnations, strong and lean and arrogant, in passionate encounters with my wife of the present day.

The irony wasn't lost on me. My wife had sent me her tonight to get my blood flowing by watching young strippers, most just recelntly of legal age, so she could take advantage of my arousal. And here I was ignoring a bevy of sinewy, bare-assed beauties to fantasize about my glorious, middle-aged housewife having sex with high school boys. My heart was beating hard, and my cock was throbbing.

I didn't even realize how long we had been at the club. The dancers, once finished with Tom, were taking their final tour of the room. Given the right amount of incentive, they were providing last lap dances to the remaining men, with maybe a little extra if the incentive was right.

I did glance over a couple of times to the stranger sitting next to me, and noticed that the man was staring in rapt attention at every action occurring on the stage. He brushed off the advances of the dancers that approached him looking for their last tip of the evening. He seemed to be waiting intently for something else.

As the last of the dancers finished on Tom's lap, the final dance rotation of the night was over, and the club owner took the microphone to call for applause for 'Crystal' as she stepped down off the stage and directly into the dressing room.

I knew enough of the routine of a club closing for the night to expect the house lights to come up, for the owner to shoo the guest of honor off the stage, and the rest of us to finish our final drinks. Instead, he shielded his eyes from the stage lights and did a quick survey of the remaining clientele. Besides our group and the stranger, there was no one else here.

"Gentlemen, I have a special treat for you, if you are interested, another dancer, Miss Jessica Scarlett!" A shapely feminine figure stepped out of the dressing room, barely visible as she crossed through deep shadows onto the back of the stage and disappeared behind the behind thick black curtain. The stranger sitting next to me started a round of enthusiastic applause, and we all joined in as though it was contagious.

The emcee whispered conspiratorially into the microphone, "Now friends, we're not technically open at this point, and Miss Scarlett is an independent act, so, I'm saying, gents, what happens in the Velvet Slipper stays in the Velvet Slipper..." He nodded to the bouncer, who theatrically bolted the front door from the inside and shut off the neon sign.

The spotlight narrowed to a tight beam on the curtain as the sound of the plucked acoustic bass played the familiar opening notes of Amy Irving's "Why don't you do right?" from the movie Roger Rabbit. Long, feminine fingers glad in lavender elbow-length, satin gloves gripped the edge of the drapes. As the singer's sensuous voice began to purr out the suggestive lines of the song, Miss Jessica Scarlett revealed herself fully to the rapt attention of the crowd.

The featured act was coifed and dressed identically to her cartoon namesake. The sparkling shoulderless dress with heart-shaped bustline barely concealing her full, natural breasts, the slit from the hem to her waist exposed the full length of her bare, shapely leg as she gracefully stepped onto the raised stage from behind the curtain. Peeptoe red pumps and naturally red hair, curling gently down in waves across the dancer's face, completed the stunningly accurate, and wonderfully provocative illusion.

Miss Scarlett prowled the stage with long, slow sweeping steps as the short song progressed. As she approached me I found myself holding my breath. She was older than the rest of the dancers by at least ten years, and quite a bit rounder and more womanly than any of them as well.

The feminine eroticism of her graceful shape expressive motions made the other performers seem like frantic impersonations by comparison. The awed silence of her audience confirmed that she had us all trapped in the same spell.

When the song ended she had just sat her full, firm bottom onto the lap of the slumping guest of honor, still seated on the simple wooden chair on one side of the stage. She wiggled lightly, feeling his stiffness against her as she ran her fingers through his hair and brought her red painted lips to his ear for a gentle, fluttering kiss.