by Nicky Wells
‘Sure.’
‘Wine?’
‘Do you reckon? I mean, is it a good idea?’
Casey pursed her lips. ‘Abstinence hasn’t made a difference, so why not have a drink or two?’
‘Good point.’
So they watched the medium-rated porn flick together, sipping wine, cuddling into each other, and pretending this was all very normal.
The very weirdness of the situation was arousing, and Alex yearned for action. Yet he held himself back.
‘Alex?’
‘Hm?’
‘How about…’ Casey looked at him expectantly, not finishing her sentence, clearly hoping he would read her mind. Alas not.
‘How about what?’
Casey blushed. ‘I really… I could really do with…’
Alex finally nodded. ‘Same here, my sweet. Same here.’
For a moment, they got distracted by the couple climaxing on screen, and they watched the contortions on display in stunned silence.
‘Wow.’ Casey breathed. ‘I don’t know if I could do that.’
‘We could try?’
‘We’d have to order the Kama Sutra first for instructions.’
‘I’m sure that could be arranged. We can probably download a copy right now.’
‘Maybe some other time.’ Casey waved a dismissive hand. ‘But…’
‘But what?’
Casey blushed again. ‘Would you mind… Could we perhaps… Maybe we could just…’
‘Maybe we could just—what?’ Alex was lost again.
‘Do it ourselves. You know. To ourselves. As it were.’ Casey stumbled over her own words. ‘I know it sounds stupid and dumb, but I’m so desperate. Would you mind if I…’ She cleared her throat. ‘Helped myself?’
Alex let go of the breath he had been holding. ‘No. No. Of course not. Oh my gosh, let’s go for it.’
He put a hand on his hardness and was immediately flooded by a delicious warmth, a firm promise of release at long last. ‘Oh gosh, yeah, let’s do this.’
Casey leaned back on the sofa. ‘You don’t think it’s wrong?’
Alex groaned, already halfway on the road to oblivion. Now that he had started, there was no holding back. He was loath even to talk, but he forced out a brief response.
‘I think—it’s totally and utterly—phoar—weird—but who—gives a damn?’
A gentle sigh told him that Casey was surrendering herself to herself, but he was too wrapped up in his own pleasure to give her a second thought or even the merest glance. No distractions for him now. This had been coming far too long, too long, too long…
The promise of release became a reality, and for a small moment, the world was perfect again.
~Casey~
‘Morning.’
‘Morning.’ Alex grunted over the rim of his coffee cup. Sitting at the kitchen table, he was surrounded by sheet music and pens, and his laptop was perched on a stack of books with his favourite music transcription program open and waiting. Alex was working. Casey smiled to herself. If Alex was working, he was happy. And that was good.
She was happy, too. Semi-delirious, in fact. The unexpected release of the previous evening had been gratifying in more than one respect. Casey felt immensely reassured to know all her bits were still in perfect working order. There was nothing wrong with either of them. They had gone to sleep happier and more relaxed than they had for days, even if perhaps their union hadn’t been strictly speaking of the marital kind. Who cared?
In fact, Casey felt so buoyed by happy hormones that she had concocted a new plan. One that was inspired by a combination of trying on her black lacy underwear the other day and watching that porn flick. One that she would never previously have considered but was now totally hooked on. However, she didn’t want to give herself away, so she took care to arrange her face in a neutral expression.
‘You going to be working for some time?’ she asked innocently.
‘Huh?’ Alex looked up, clearly distracted, then computed her question. ‘Oh, yeah. If you don’t mind. I feel inspired today.’
‘I bet,’ Casey whispered to herself. Aloud, she said, ‘Do you want another cup of tea?’
‘Yes, please. If you’re making one.’
‘Have you had breakfast at all?’
‘Huh?’
Casey laughed. Alex in working mode was like the proverbial genius, all distracted and in faraway places. She was reasonably sure that he hadn’t eaten. Nor had he got dressed or shaved.
‘Toast? Bacon?’ she suggested cheerfully.
‘Err yeah, why not.’ Alex waggled his fingers in a ‘go for it’ gesture.
Casey busied herself making breakfast. All the while her mind was formulating her plan, and she couldn’t wait to get out of the house. Actually, she couldn’t wait to get back into the house and see the look on Alex’s face.
‘I’m off,’ she announced at last. ‘I’m going for a quick trip to outer space. You don’t mind?’
‘What? No, of course not. Have a great day.’
Alex hadn’t listened to a word she said, but it didn’t matter. The surprise would be awesome.
~Alex~
The front door slammed, and Alex gave a start. He hadn’t stopped working since six a.m., and he had only a vague recollection of Casey getting up, fixing him breakfast, and then rushing out. It appeared she was back, although it was only—he checked the time on his laptop—noon. It wasn’t like Casey to be back so soon. She normally took ages to do whatever it was she did. Besides, hadn’t she said something about checking out a space? He had assumed she was looking at new venues for their private music teaching business.
In their spare time, when they weren’t practicing, recording, or performing, they gave singing and drumming lessons to bolster the unpredictable and relatively slim income they received from the royalties for Blue Heart’s music. While the band was destined for great things, they couldn’t quite make a living out of it yet, and they didn’t want to have to rely on cover gigs at the weekend for much longer. Hence the lessons business. Anyway, that was what he thought Casey had been up to. But she was back already. Maybe it hadn’t gone well.
‘Everything all right?’ he called out.
‘Perfect.’ Casey didn’t stop to talk to him but raced up the stairs instead.
Alex shrugged and read through his most recent composition. He was calling it ‘Twisted Love’, and it was a fast song with a pounding beat. A love song, but not of the traditional kind. He wondered what Casey and the rest of the band would make of it.
He was tapping at the keyboard to make some adjustments to his arrangements when Casey stepped into the kitchen.
‘Hello, gorgeous,’ she murmured. ‘I hear you’ve been naughty.’
There was something in her voice that made him look up even though he was in the midst of a critical harmonic tweak. His jaw dropped.
Casey was practically naked. Except she was wearing an impossible black rubber-and-string contraption that should have been repulsive but looked unbelievably sexy. He stared and gawped even while the heat was rising in his body.
Casey gave a slow, provocative half-twirl, revealing exactly what she had on. There was a lacy rubber G-string under a body-hugging halter-necked rubber wrap that was held together—just—with a silver chain criss-crossing her front and only barely managing to contain her breasts. Her feet were in impossible black stilettos with a silver spike for a heel. Alex felt himself stiffen in all the right places, and his breathing quickened.
Her hair was scraped back into a severe ponytail, and while Alex was still drinking in his wife’s unexpected dominatrix attire, Casey revealed with a flourish her last accoutrement, which she had been hiding behind her back: a whip. She flicked it experimentally before poking him under the chin with it, forcing him to raise his head and look her squarely in the eyes.
‘Naughty, naughty, naughty,’ Casey purred in a voice so husky and raw that it was nearly an octave deeper than normal. A
lex swallowed hard.
‘I’m sorry,’ he squeaked and bit his lip, trying not to laugh at himself.
For a moment, Casey’s extraordinary façade slipped and her lips creased into a lopsided smile. She, too, suppressed a giggle.
Alex half rose from his chair, but she patted him on the shoulder with her whip and commanded him to sit. Alex obediently sat, relishing the heat between his legs and the tremor in his fingers. This was going to be good—oh so good. If this was what their little performance problem brought out in them, then wow. So be it.
He succumbed to Casey’s game, playing along at every step of the way as she pranced around him, placing her stiletto’d foot brazenly between his legs only millimetres from his groin, running her fake black fingernails along his cheek—surely they were fake, they had to be, they weren’t there last night, but oh, he rather liked them, the tingling feel of them, the shivers they sent down his spine…
Alex grew dizzy with desire.
‘Kiss me,’ he pleaded.
‘Not so hasty,’ came the reply.
Casey shimmied some more, pulled at some straps, and suddenly released the G-string from under her wrap. Now she was bare in all the right places under that rubber dress of hers, and Alex realised that he had access to all areas.
Right on cue, she sat on his lap, rubbing against him. Moaning, breathing heavily, licking his ears and his cheeks. And finally, finally kissing him deeply, greedily, hungrily.
They clung to each other like they were drowning, and when they eventually overbalanced, they toppled off the chair and fell to the floor in a tangle of limbs. Somehow, Casey ended up on top of Alex, and the sight of her breasts straining against the rubber and chains sent him mad. He pulled roughly at her ponytail so that her head yanked back to expose the long, delicate curve of her neck. For a moment, he fantasised about being a vampire and sinking his teeth into her tender flesh. That had never occurred to him before, but he didn’t have time to dwell on the notion.
Casey was up for it too, he could tell. She was panting hard and clawing at her outfit.
‘Get it off,’ she whimpered. ‘Get it off, get it off!’
‘Not so fast.’ Alex decided to turn the tables and tease his wife a little.
‘Please,’ Casey begged, increasingly desperate.
‘All in good time,’ Alex gasped, although he knew he wouldn’t be able to restrain himself much longer.
‘Please,’ Casey wheezed one more time. And then she passed out.
~Casey~
‘What happened?’ Sasha was completely agog. It was a Saturday nearly two weeks after the rubber dress incident, and Casey and Sasha had holed up at Sasha’s flat for a girls’ night in while Alex and Myles went to paint the town red. Blue Heart was having a rare weekend off.
Casey crinkled her nose. ‘I had an allergic reaction. I spent the rest of the night in a tepid bath trying to soothe my skin. It was red and blotchy, and it looked like it would flake off in big strips. It was awful. Alex very nearly took me to the hospital.’
‘An allergic reaction?’
‘Yup. Apparently I’m really sensitive to rubber, even the anti-allergy stuff that they sell in the shop.’
‘What shop?’ Sasha was confused.
‘You know. The shop where I bought the outfit. It was meant to be hypoallergenic. Yeah, right.’
‘You bought a hypoallergenic rubber dominatrix outfit in a kinky shop to play bedroom games with Alex, and you had an allergic reaction?’ Sasha repeated.
‘Yup, that’s the long and short of it.’
‘But why?’
‘Because I’m allergic to rubber, and I didn’t know.’
Sasha grabbed a sofa cushion and whacked Casey with it. ‘No, silly. Why did you buy the outfit in the first place?’
‘Oh. Yeah. That.’ Casey could feel a blush spread across her face. This was the moment she had been dreading. It was also the moment she had been working towards. If she couldn’t unburden herself to her best friend soon, she was sure she would implode. But now that the time was upon her, she felt reluctant to breach Alex’s confidence.
On the other hand, she needed to talk to someone. She needed some help. They needed some help.
She gulped. ‘Okay. Here goes. But you must swear on your mum’s life never to share this with anybody.’
Sasha adopted a serious look and raised her right hand. ‘I solemnly swear.’
So out tumbled the whole story, starting with the wedding day and ending with her near-trip to the hospital after the rubber experiment.
Sasha was horrified. ‘You mean—you’re saying you can’t have sex with each other?’
‘That’s about it, yeah.’
‘But why not?’
‘We don’t know!’ Casey’s voice was a near-wail. ‘I wouldn’t be telling you all this if I had the answer.’
Sasha sipped at her wine. ‘Have you Googled this?’
‘Have I Googled this? Sasha, we’ve both been all over the Internet. We’ve bought self-help books. We even downloaded a copy of the bloody Kama Sutra. Oh, and “The Joy of Sex”. But we can’t do it.’
Sasha giggled. ‘You’ve got a copy of “The Joy of Sex”?’
Casey rolled her eyes. ‘Yeah, we’ve got a copy of “The Joy of Sex”. But it ain’t helping us one bit.’
‘So you’ve actually read it?’
Now it was Casey’s turn to thump Sasha with a cushion. ‘Yes, we’ve actually read it. Together. In bed. Completely naked and ready to follow instructions. But it’s not bloody working for us, and I’m a desperate woman. Wanting to make love has become the big white elephant in the room. It’s always there, but we pretend we don’t see it.’
‘Wow.’
‘Yeah. Wow. Not sure “wow” is the best word, but it’ll do. Wow.’ Casey grimaced some more.
‘What a bummer.’
‘Eloquently put. Anything else you’d like to say?’
Sasha turned serious. ‘I’m sorry, Casey. I don’t mean to be callous. I’m simply—I’m so stunned. You two have always been like the incarnation of true love…’
‘I know, I know,’ Casey waved her arms. ‘I’m sure we were sickening in our perfection, but we’ve got our come-uppance now.’
Sasha scratched her head. ‘There must be some sort of reason.’
‘That would be good, because then we could fix it. Right now, we daren’t even look at each other for fear of getting horny and not being able to do it—again.’
‘More wine?’
Casey giggled. ‘You’re incorrigible. Yes, more wine please.
‘It’s like you’ve been cursed,’ Sasha ruminated.
‘Hear, hear,’ Casey mumbled through a mouthful of wine. ‘Don’t think I haven’t Googled that too. But I don’t believe in curses, and, even if I did, I can’t come up with anything that would explain our situation.’
‘Have you upset anybody? Maybe some mysterious woman is sticking pins in your respective voodoo dolls every day.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Casey snorted. ‘You don’t believe in that crap, do you?’
‘Of course not. But some people do.’
Casey shook her head. ‘I think we’ve got to a place where we’re totally overthinking it. And then nothing happens, because that’s precisely what we fear.’
‘But everything else is hunky dory?’ Sasha launched a sideways enquiry. ‘You know, being married and all that?’
‘Everything else is fine. Being married is no different to having lived together for two years, except I’m now legally Mrs Morgan. But it’s good. We’re good together, like we’ve always been. We don’t argue, we rehearse, we record. Alex writes songs… Everything’s perfect except for this one thing.’
‘Hm.’
The women sat in silence for a few moments.
‘I suppose it’s not that big a thing,’ Sasha finally offered.
‘It’s not?’ Casey had been rationalising her thoughts along the same lines, but she was ea
ger for affirmation from her best friend.
‘It’s only sex, right?’
‘It’s only sex,’ Casey echoed. ‘Although…’
‘Although what?’
‘It’s difficult to start a family without having sex.’
‘Ah. Yes, that is a problem.’ Sasha nodded thoughtfully. ‘Are babies on the agenda?’
‘Well, no, they’re not. At least not yet. But I can’t help thinking that they won’t be on the agenda at all if we can’t get this sorted out.’
‘Is there a blazing hurry about the babies?’
Casey shook her head. ‘No. Definitely not.’
‘In that case, I prescribe yet more wine, and let me dig for solutions. Meanwhile, have you tried celibacy?’
‘We have. That’s kind of where we’re at right now.’
Sasha grinned. ‘What can I say? Keep up the good work. We’ll figure it out. We can’t have the rock star couple of the decade not getting down and dirty with each other. I’ll do some research for you. Have faith.’
Chapter Six:
Getting Down to Play
~Alex~
‘Are you all right, man? Only you’re looking kind of hungry.’ Myles sniggered and elbowed Alex in the ribs. They were in a super-trendy dance club in Farringdon, and a whole truckload of dolled-up girlies on a hen do had just arrived. Alex snapped to.
‘Come again?’
‘Now that’s fightin’ talk,’ Myles guffawed. ‘You look like you wanna come again—with that bird over there.’
‘What bird?’ Alex had been miles away, thinking of Casey. Missing her. Ridiculous, he knew. She was only up the road with Sasha, but still. This was their first night apart since the wedding, their first night off from weekend gigging, and he couldn’t help but notice her absence. He supposed that was a good thing, especially considering their precarious circumstance. He smiled.
‘That bird. The one you’re making moon eyes at. Say, mate, aren’t you getting enough with the missus?’
‘Myles!’ Alex surprised himself and his best mate in equal measures with his shouted reprimand. He made an effort to drop his voice. ‘But really, can’t you lay off Casey? What’s eating you?’