A Bestiary of Unnatural Women

by Ashley Zacharias

  Unless it’s Friday night. Sometimes we do it on some other night and sometimes we miss Friday night, but mostly Friday’s the night. Then, I guess he has to look at me to try to get himself turned on. But I don’t see how he can. I’m not sexy in the glare of the bedroom lamp.

  I’m better in the dark. All cats are grey in the dark, so, I guess when leave the flannel pajamas under my pillow and crawl into bed nude and turn out the lights and he feels me up, he can pretend that he’s holding a younger and prettier pussy. I expect that all women’s crotches feel about the same, so as long as he keeps his hands down between my legs and doesn’t let them wander up to feel the folds and sags and puffy fat above, he can think about someone sexier while he gets himself turned on.

  But it’s our twenty-first wedding anniversary and he says that he wants a gift from me. I haven’t given him so much as a card for years and now he wants a gift? Sure, he always gets me a box of chocolates and a card but I let him eat most of the candy. I don’t need the calories. He buys the kind of chocolates that he likes because he knows that he’s going to be eating most of them. And I always make love to him on our anniversary night, even if our anniversary doesn’t come on Friday. That’s expected, isn’t it? Anniversary sex. But a gift? We’ve got enough money that he can buy himself whatever he wants whenever he wants. He doesn’t need anything from me. What kind of gift can I buy him that he doesn’t already have?

  He tells me what kind of gift he wants from me. He says that he wants an hour of my time. He says that will be the best gift that I can give to him: for me to let him do what he wants for an hour. I know what he means. He means to do whatever sex stuff he wants to do to me.

  When he asks, he looks so sad. Worse than sad, he looks scared that I’ll say no. He doesn’t leave me with any choice. I have to say, “Yes. Okay. As long as you don’t hurt me or anything. I’ll do what you want for an hour. But it can’t be anything disgusting.”

  I don’t think that he’d hurt me. Not deliberately. He never has before. Not really. He tried to do anal intercourse on me once, and that hurt so I told him to stop when he was only half-way in, and he stopped as soon as I told him to, so that was all right. I’m sure that he doesn’t want to hurt me. Pretty sure. Besides, he knows that if he does anything violent, I’ll go to the cops and report him and throw him out of the house. I’ve made that clear from the day we started dating. I won’t ever be an abused wife. He knows that.

  But I like our marriage. When he looks at me, kind of sad, I’m afraid that I’ll never get to throw him out because he might leave me first. He should be happy. Real happy. But he doesn’t act happy. It’s that damn porn that he was looking at on the Internet. I hope he doesn’t think that real people act like that. Those’re just pictures. Staged pictures with models. They aren’t real women really being tied up.

  He says that he wants an hour of my time on Sunday afternoon and I have to give it to him because I don’t want to be divorced like my friends. Too many women at work have been divorced and I hate to hear them talk about dating. It’s hell for women our age. I see the men that they have to bring to our dinner parties. Losers, all. If I have to do something experimental for Bert to keep him happy, I guess I’ll do it. But he better not hurt me. I won’t put up with that. He better remember that.

  He brought home some wood. Long boards or planks or something – I don’t know much about wood. He told me to stay out of the basement and he’s been down there all day on Saturday, sawing and hammering. I don’t know what he’s doing but I don’t like it. I smell sawdust. He better not get any sawdust in the furnace. It’s a new furnace and I’m going to go ballistic if he gets it all gunked up with sawdust and it doesn’t work right any more.

  He thinks he wants a wild woman? Well just let him wreck our new furnace and he’s going to have a wild woman on his hands and we’ll just see how much he likes those apples.

  I could sneak down on Saturday night or early Sunday morning to see what he’s been up to, but I don’t. He wouldn’t have wanted me to. I’ll let him have his surprise. Besides, it doesn’t make any difference. When he does show me, then I’ll decide if I’m going to go through with our agreement or not. If he’s made something awful then he can just forget the whole thing. Sometimes he doesn’t have much sense.

  I make him a nice lunch on Sunday afternoon. A tuna sandwich with chopped pickles in it. He likes the pickles in his tuna sandwiches and I always try to make food that he likes. I don’t think he appreciates how hard I try to do things that he likes. I make him tacos every couple of weeks because he likes them and I let him watch those awful police shows after my soaps because I know he likes them, too.

  After lunch, he leads me downstairs to show me what he’s built. I hope he remembers how much stuff I already do for him. He whispers to me that I promised him an hour and he hopes that I can enjoy it a little bit, too. He says that he’s been really looking forward to this. He says it again: that he hopes that I can enjoy the hour, too. I don’t like the sound of that, but, when he says it, I think he’s being sincere, not mean. I think that he really does hope that I’m going to enjoy whatever he has planned.

  The room is clean. He’s vacuumed up all the sawdust. I think he even dusted a little. There’s a chair sitting in the room and a big clock hanging on the wall. The clock wasn’t there before. It has a white face and big black hands that say that it’s five minutes before one. I guess his hour starts at one o’clock.

  I guess I’m going to have to do this now. Whatever he has in mind.

  There’s something new in the middle of the room: the thing that really holds my attention. It’s a frame. A big wooden frame that goes all the way up to the ceiling and has rings screwed into the corners. I don’t need a diagram to know what it’s for. I want to say, Oh, no. I’m not doing that! You’re not going to put me in that thing! but he’s looking at me like he loves me and I can’t turn him down. Not after he spent so much time building the thing. And that wood must have cost something, too.

  I told him an hour, so I guess I can put up with his kinky stuff for an hour. An hour’s not so long, is it? I mean, it’d be a long time if he was hurting me, but he’s not going to hurt me, is he? I ask him what he has in mind and he says exactly what I’m thinking: that he’s not going to hurt me. He just wants to tie me up a little. Is getting ‘tied up a little’ like getting pregnant a little? Either I’m tied up or I’m not. If I can get away then I’m not really tied up, am I?

  He’s trying to reassure me. He says that I won’t be too uncomfortable. He just wants to try something simple and easy. Just to see how I like it.

  Yeah, right. ‘How I like it.’ I can’t believe that he’s talking about ‘how I like it’ when he knows perfectly well that I won’t like it one bit. I won’t like anything like this. I like simple, straightforward sex once every couple of weeks and that’s it. He knows that. And he knows that I give him sex more often than that, every week, regular as clockwork, just to make him happy.

  This isn’t about what I like. This is about what he likes and nothing else.

  But he went to all the effort of building this thing and I said that I’d give him an hour so I guess I have to give him his hour. If I refused now, he’d be disappointed. What would he think of me if I said no after he went to all the work of making this thing? It took him all day and it’s only going to take me an hour and then he’ll see that it’s not as much fun as he thought. I don’t look like the young chicks in the pictures on the Internet, and he’ll get those ideas right out of his system.

  He wants me to get undressed. He starts to unbutton my shirt, but I push his hands out of the way. I tell him that I’ll do it, myself. I’m not a baby. I can undress myself more quickly than waiting for him to fumble with my buttons. Even when we were dating, he never could get my bra unhooked without spending twenty minutes fussing around with it. He looks a little hurt and I feel a little bad, even though I know that I shouldn’t. He should have just asked me to undre
ss and not tried to do it to me. I already said that I’d do what he wanted.

  When I’m nude, I feel chilly. I don’t know why, it’s summertime and the basement isn’t cold at all. I’m even sweating a bit so I can’t be cold. I must be a little nervous. That’s to be expected, isn’t it? Anyone would be a little nervous when her husband says that he wants to experiment with her and won’t say what the experiment is all about. Anyone would want to know what’s going to happen to her. That’s normal.

  He leads me to the frame and has me stand in the center of it. He has a rope; it must have been sitting on the shelf behind the books where I couldn’t see it from the other end of the room. He probably did that deliberately so that I wouldn’t freak out on him. It’s a big, soft, red velvet rope like you’d buy in a fabric store to tie back curtains if you had no taste at all and wanted your room to look real gaudy. Or maybe if you were too far gone into a retro sixties thing.

  He asks if I trust him as he ties the rope around my wrist. I nod but my nod is a lie. How can you trust a man who’s tying a rope around your wrist? I’ve been married to him for twenty-one years, but the man that I was married to for all that time never tied me up. This is a different Bert than my husband. He might have the same face and the same voice and the same name but he’s not the man I married.

  He wraps the rope around my wrist many times, maybe a half dozen, before tying it off, so it’s like a big soft cuff; and he doesn’t pull it very tight, so it doesn’t bite into me. I have to raise my arm so that he can tie the end to the steel ring in the upper corner of the frame. As soon as he finishes and drops his hands from the knot, I relax my arm. It stays pointed toward the corner of the frame. It’s not comfortable. The rope is soft and doesn’t hurt; it just feels weird not being able to put my hand down by my side. It feels not right. And it feels even more not right when he raises my other arm to the other corner and ties it up, too, in the same way.

  So I’m standing nude with my arms raised above my head and stretched apart and I look down and see that my breasts are pulled up by my arms so that they look like they don’t droop quite as much as they usually do. But they’re still droopy. They aren’t the breasts that I had when I was a young woman.

  Bert kneels at my feet and wraps another length of rope around my ankle the same as he did with my wrists. He asks me to spread my leg out so he can tie it to the lower corner of the frame and I do it without saying anything. It’s too late to fuss about it now. But I don’t like the feeling of my sex being exposed. And I know that I’ll be pulled completely open when he stretches my other leg to the other corner.

  It’s easy to balance myself while I’m spreading my legs because the ropes tied to my outstretched arms take my weight and keep me upright.

  When he stands up to get the last piece of rope, I can see a big bulge in his pants. He’s turned on by this. I have no idea what’s going through his mind. No idea at all.

  When my last limb is secured to the last ring by the last length of red velvet rope, Bert walks back to the chair, his chair, and sits down in it and stares at me. His stare feels like a punch in the gut. The clock says that it’s five after one and I can’t move, not even to cover myself with my hands, so I guess I am going to be stared at for as long as he wants, maybe for a full hour.

  I can see him staring at my breasts and I want to cover them with something. I pull on the ropes without thinking, a reflex, but that only pulls the knots a little tighter. The ropes are deceptively soft and pretty; it is easy to forget that they are strong and well-secured. I cannot hide any part of my body. I have no choice but to endure his ogling.

  His eyes drop to my crotch and he stares at my sex. My hair down there is beginning to turn grey. Not very grey. Not grey like the hair on my head would be if I didn’t dye it once a month, but a little grey. Not the young grayish brunette like when we got married, but an old lady grey.

  He stares and I look hard into his face, trying to see the glint of disgust; trying to read the thought that he wishes that I was younger, prettier, thinner. I see nothing but a man ogling the flesh of a woman who has no way to hide. He looks like a man in lust. I don’t understand him at all. I can’t guess what is going on in his mind.

  He looks at my face, long and deep, and finally speaks. He says that he loves me. He sounds like he means it. He probably does. He’s stayed married to me for long enough. Then he says that I am beautiful with equal conviction, but I do not believe that.

  When the hands on the clock reach one fifteen when he stands up and walks behind me. I do not turn my head to follow him, but keep facing forward, watching the slow sweep of the second hand on the big clock face.

  My arms feel tired and I try to relax them. I have been tense, holding my arms up when I didn’t have to. I let them rest in their bonds, let the rope hold their weight instead of using my muscles. My legs are a little tired as well, but I cannot rest them, they have to support me and that takes extra effort when they are stretched wide apart like this.

  I am startled to feel a gentle touch on my shoulders. It is the first time that Bert has touched me since he finished tying my last ankle. His touch is light, feathery, and I wait for more. I am not disappointed. He runs his fingers down my back over my shoulder blades, down either side of my spine, to the curve of my buttocks. There, he spreads his fingers and lays his palms flat on my cheeks. Gently, firmly, he squeezes them for a few seconds, almost a massage but not quite. I feel my ass being pulled apart slightly in response to the pressure and wonder if he has separated them far enough to see my asshole. I hope not. I showered this morning and should be clean down there, but who knows what he might find lurking. I tense my buttocks and try to push them together to close my crack against his inspection. He releases me and then rubs his hands over the outside of my hips.

  I wish I were fully clothed again but this is his hour and if he wants to feel my body, I will allow it. Allow it? I can’t stop it. Unless I tell him to stop. I’m sure that if I told him to stop, he would untie me right away. But I don’t have any reason to stop him. I mean, I want to. I sure do want to, but I promised him an hour and I can put up with this for an hour, can’t I? And if I don’t tell him to stop, he can do a lot more than this before the minute hand finishes circling the dial. I wonder if he is going to try to make love to me while I’m tied in his frame and helpless. We made love the night before last, but I know that he would like to do it again. It seems so soon to me, but he’s always made it clear that he’s like to make love more than once a week. He’s a bit of a beast that way.

  I wonder if he could do it to me standing up.

  He can do that if he wants. This is his hour. But he better not try to force himself into my asshole. I will tell him to stop if he tries that. I will. I don’t care if it’s his hour or not. I try to clench my butt again but he’s moved his hands back up to my shoulders and I don’t know if he even noticed.

  It’s twenty after one when he steps back around the frame and stands in front of my face. He pushes the hair away from my eyes. There is no need for that – my hair is not long, my bangs too short to reach my eyes – but he does it as a gesture of concern anyway: a reminder that I cannot do it myself; that my hands are unavailable for my use; that he has made me dependent on him for even that slight need.

  He presses close and hugs me. When his arms wrap around my back and pull me into him, my naked breasts press against the rough fabric of his shirt; his chill belt buckle digs into the fat below my navel. As he pulls me forward, my arms are stretched by the ropes that restrain them but he is gentle and does not pull them hard enough to cause pain. He rocks himself forward, tight against me and leans his head down to press his cheek against mine. For a long time, he holds me, caressing my back lightly with his fingers while he moves slowly against my body, not rubbing against my skin, but moving my skin up and down and around with his motion.

  I have not been held and hugged for such a long time since I was a teenager. These days I don’t have
any patience for standing and being held for minutes at a time. But, bound into his frame, I cannot pull away. And he has given me no reason to ask him to release me. Having promised him an hour, I have no choice but to endure his affection. I may as well relax into his arms and enjoy his caress as best as I can. I find, to my surprise, that I can enjoy his hug. There is something comforting about being wrapped in my husband’s strong, gentle arms when I am tied to this frame, stretched and helpless. Paradoxically, he makes me feel like he is protecting me even though he was the man who tied me here.

  I wish that my arms were free so that I could hug him back. There is something unsatisfying about receiving a hug without being able to reciprocate. But I realize with a twinge of dismay that, if I were free, I would not reciprocate. I would not grab him and hold him for as long as he wanted. If I were free of these ropes, I would be free to push him away. I would be free to climb back upstairs and clean up the kitchen. I would be free to start the laundry. I would be free to watch my usual Sunday afternoon television programs.

  Is that the wife that I have become? A wife who would rather watch some minor television celebrity landscape a stranger’s yard than give her husband, the supposed love of her life, the long intimate hug that he wants from her?

  I suppose that I have. But knowing that does not change me. I am who I am. If this were not my husband’s hour, if I were not tied to this wooden frame, I would give him a quick squeeze and then push him away, impatient to get about my daily duties. I would be helpless to do otherwise. Knowing different does not make me different. I would be lying to myself if I said that it did.