Without a Compass

I thought of it as 'either or', not 'something and'. Sex I mean, specifically sexual relationships. You navigated through sex because certain things were a given. One of those was that my wife Jilly was not a lesbian. I mean, she had never shown the slightest sexual interest in women. Lesbian themes on TV or film appeared to be distasteful to her. But then she met Adele and my life became unhinged. Unhinged because I didn't believe that I knew Jilly anymore. Unhinged because I didn't understand how lesbians might see a cuckolded husband? Were husbands to be abandoned, excluded, despised....what? I didn't know. We just felt our own way.
A psychologist once described risk to me as consisting of two things. First there was the likelihood that something threatening might happen. How likely was a given event? Then there was the significance of the event, what it meant to you, how much it changed your life. The first risk element was the sea on which you sailed, the second was what a wave there could do to your boat and course. Well, Adele wrecked me I can tell you on both counts. The new boss at my work posed a threat to my marriage from a direction that I could never have guessed at, and when it happened it was so profound that it left me wondering whether I knew anything about my wife Jilly, or myself at all! I don't know what a lesbian is supposed to look like. I know, i know, we shouldn't have stereotypes, but if we're talking risk here, then you still need to typify what risk looks like. I supposed that lesbian women signalled certain things. They needed (understandably) to attract partners like the rest of us, but they needed too to indicate their sexuality so that men wouldn't make unwelcome advances to them. It was about etiquette. Well, Adele didn't fit any of my inadequate assumptions about lesbian women. She dressed immaculately, smart, chic and feminine. She is thirty, five years younger than I but it was easy to respect her because she exuded style. You can relate to a boss who has real presence, who exudes an authority because of how she presents herself. But that image for me was about hard headed career woman attitude, it wasn't about sex. 

I have to say that I started talking about Adele a lot. Like the other men in our division we wondered what it would be like to have a female boss for the first time? We ran the speculations. She would be balsy and over aggressive, proving herself in a man's business world. She would be uncertain and uneven in her management style, oone minite hard, the next soft and supplicant, trying too coax us forward. Perhaps she would be emotional, a short fuse with a female temper. Adele was none of those things. Adele was Adele and when I marvelled at the fact, that she seemed to step outside every damned stereotype that I ever used, Jilly my wife smiled. She liked the fact that a woman had shoved me out of my comfort zone! 

My wife met Adele through a team building weekend. It was the company practice to have a team go away, with spouses and partners for a long weekend, where everyone was engaged in some sort of fun prooject, soomething that taught us about ourselves and which made us feel goood about what we coould achieve together. Our project was to help a Devon village community develop a strategy for using their village facilities to best community effect. There was a village hall (which I and others renovated) and then there was to be a monthy mnewspaper that the villagers produced to keep themselves together as well as to bond in people with holiday homes. I'll never forget the first morning. Adele had already surveyed the situation and stood before us in the tightest designer denim jeans and high heeled boots. She looked so posh, so in charge. I stared at her and Jilly smiled. I and four other guys were assigned to 'sort the village hall out' and she and Jilly were to lead some locals on the newspaper planning. I descended into dust and rubble and paint and Jilly joined Adele in her Blue Maserati sports car as they zoomed about doing research work at the local newspaper and checking out advertisers who would spomnsor the village rag. 

Christ the chemistry was instant. jilly seemed transfixed by the bitch. She wore designer everything, clothes, and jewellery and I think that astonished Jilly in an instant. Wearing a Rolex, really expensive perfume, carrtying a chic Gucci shoulder bag aseemed to assure success. I remember as I sat munching dusty sandwiches, Jilly told me that Adele had breeding. Adele got her own way because she had always got her own way.  She expected to command and had been raised that way. The women had talked private schools, character and strength of conviction. They lunched together at a smart pub on the river and even worked in some shopping. Jilly saw some swanky riding boots and a new pair of jodphurs which Adele bought her. My wife had protested that such clothes were only for the riding stables, but Adele simply asked 'why?' The next day Jilly wore the new things and I thought wow! She was transformed. She had in an instant started to look madam. I gawped at her and she told me curtly to stop staring. A woman wore what she wanted, how she wanted to. It was like a sermon from the book of Adele. I just said, 'of course.' 

The next day was 'assigned work'. Adele and Jilly came in to see how we had progressed and my wife watched as boss bollocked us for not working to best effect. I was to roll my sleeves up and do more of the manual woork to help out the retired villagers who were shifting rubble. We needed to see a clear effect by the end of the long weekend. Jilly watched it all, the complete control that Adele had. She didn't smirk, laugh, comment or demure. A woman directs. That afternooon a new found village friend reported something that shook me. Adele and Jilly had been seen in the village pub, the Wyvern. The women had been laughing and joking, but then Adele had kissed my wife....on the lips. I laughed and said that they were mistaken, business women 'air kissed' and everyone was 'hun' or 'darling'. But my informant said no. Country women didn't kiss at all, so a kiss on the lips, well, it had drawn some looks.  

That weekend ended and I dismissed the kiss. I didn't even mention it to Jilly. The relationship though didn't end. Jilly casually announced that she was spending a day down in Brighton with my boss. I watched Jilly dress to the nines, looking svelte in a pair of leather jeans that she only ever wore on high days and holidays. She was dressing for a date! I couldn't describe it any other way. I stared at her all over again. Imagine it, two beautiful women cruising in a sports car along the promenade street. You'd may be worry about the local lotharios trying to pick them up. You wouldn't...shouldn't worry about whether your wife was being seuced by her new girlfriend. Jilly wasn't asking my permission about Brighton, she was telling me what was happening, that's all. Adele came over, gave me some last minute work to be done and said that I was to stay up late and finish the project. It had to be emailed to our office in Amsterdam by nine the next morning. The work, shit, the work was a mess. Someone had made a fuck up of it. I worked until two a.m. by which time Jilly hadn't made it home. 

I next saw my wife the next evening. She never did come home and i had to go to work dog tired. Jilly wore a designer watch too. I remember glancing at it and then forcing myself not to stare. Normally I would enquire about a trip out, had it been fun, what had they done? With Brighton though I didn't. It was as if I shouldn't. It was as if Brighton, the trip, the day, had been covered in a cloaking device, an impenetrable shield that could not and must not be breached. So I didn't do 'anything vulgar', interrogating my wife. Jilly didn't like 'fussy', 'fretting', demonstrating a weakness throughh undue analysis. This fell under that category. I remember that evening, picking up Jilly's panties and the other things for the wash, whilst she had her shower. I sniffed the panties. They smelled of sex, of a climax. It was a musky, an animal and intensel female smell. I imagined Adele fingering her, petting her toi a climax and I shook. I literally shook thinking about it. Threat from an unseen quarter. A threat that spun my compass. 

I suppose that a threat so weird and unexpected stuns you. At any rate, I didn't feel that I could ask about things. Jilly and I retired each evening for the next two weeks, pretending that all was fine. Adele would drive over and the women went out together every second or third night. But things were changing. There were little niggling criticisms from my wife. She found new things irritating. Stupidly I thought that fucking would reduce the tension. I wasn't thinking entirely straight, but I suppose that I reasoned that if we fucked then my imagined nightmare couldn't be true. I kissed her ear in the way that I sometimes did. I kissed her shoulder and throat in a way that once signalled passion for us. Jilly let me, but she was cold. 

Then she whispered, 'Lick me between my legs....only Adele kisses me.' 

I was stunned. 

I was eviscerated by the simple instruction.

I blinked at her again and again. 

'Lick me' she ordered again and shit she had that same self assured do as you're told look that Adele often wore. 

I remember sliding down, without the slightest coomment, without kissing her breasts or tummy and running my lips over her curly haired pubes. She watched me indolently, as if inspecting the progress of a harmless lizard down a tree. It was as if my proogress intrigued her, but wasn't entirely important. It was as if I did something that amused her, slightly, but which was worthy of note and not too much more. 

I licked her pubes until her auburn hair glistened with spittle. Her labia were prominent, sticking out in a puckered taunt. I licked those too and she let me. When she moved her leg to allow me to slide into position and lick upwards, slowly, between her lips she watched me again. I realised with a plummeting heart that she watched me as a matter of control. Jilly was concentrating on what it felt like to control me. When she studied me it was because she was deciding what i now was. If i wasn't her husband any more, her monogamous partner, what was I? Another partner, a junior partner, an occasional amusement, something to be decided later. I was licking with the tip of my tongue and she moved gently against that. Dear God, what a relief. She enjoyed being tongued. I opened my mouth tentatively against her. I did it in millimetres, my heart racing. I started to run my tongue lavishly against her sex and she permitted that. There, how she started to grind against my mouth. She started to wriggle against my tongue. 

A moment, and then change. I had slipped my hands up so that I could part her labia and lick luxuriously her peachy wet interior. 

She cuffed my ear with her open hand. It wasn't a full bloodied blow, but there were to be no hands. I opened my mouth to her in the supplicant way. We rolled over and I was required to have my arms by my side, pinned by her legs, whilst she sat on my face. She looked down at me as if I was still nothing more than a lizard. She studied me quietly. I hadn't asked anything, I hadn't exploded with indignation. She oponed her own sex, with manicured fingers and showed me her clitty, swollen and surprisingly large. It was so close, so in my face that it seemed commanding. 

'Will you get a tongue stud if I tell you to?' she asked. 

I nodded. Dear God, I felt rudderless. Why did I say that! Why did I not stop this and press my flood of questions. 

'Alright...' she murmured, 'lick it.' 

Jilly used me. She used me to secure a bucking, writhing climax and after it was done, it was done. Afterwards there was noo conversation, no masturbation, no coupling. I lay beside her, beneath the duvet, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling paintwork and wondering what the hell I was meant to say or do. She didn't seem to want to cuddle. 

'If you won't go to sleep, go into the other room' she instructed irritably. 

The insecurity of not knowing what had just happened, what it represented and how we were too relate to one another now, was immense. Try to picture it. Your wife has an affair with a man, there are conventions of response, but they're based on heterosexual norms. This wasn't....it just wasn't! I didn't know what the norm was. THERE WAS NO FUCKING NORM ALL OF A SUDDEN! Sorry...it just gets me. Breakfast and again, we were living as though nothing had changed. I made eggs benedict. I poured fresh cold orange juice. Jilly checked her Cartier Roadster watch said that she had to go to work and would be out for dinner with Adele that night. I usually kiss her goodbye but she wouldn't let me. She said it again like it was a bludgeoning. 

'I will be out for dinner with Adele, understood?' 

'Yes' I answered irritably. You would too. You would snipe like that. 

It didn't seem to phase her. 

'Go and check out the stud work' she said calmly. 

By the end of that day I would have ganwed my finger nails up to my elbows. You cannot imagine what this does to your head. You cannoot imagine how it feels to suddenly realise that you don't understand, no, even know, your wife. I was grumpy at work. Adele watched me. She let the morning go and then called me into her office. There was no let's chat in the casual chairs, the usual mark of work consultation. I was required to remain standing. 

'Are you going to be awkward about Jilly and my friendship Richard?' she asked going straight to the problem. 

I wanted to ask, 'what fucking problem! We're pretending that there isn 't a problem!!' I wanted to ask, 'are you a lesbian then? is this a lesbian relationship...for pity sake, I need to know.'

But I didn't say any of that. 

'No..'

Adele studied me. You can tell whether she isn't sure of you. The next questions come slow and measured. Her next statements become uber calculated. 

'It might be easier to have you seconded to the Birmingham office for three months' she observed. 

Look, Birmingham isn't commutable from here and she knew it. She was threatening to send me away whilst she and Jilly cemented their thing. 

'It won't be necessary M'am' I insisted. We only ever called her M'am if therte was a big bosses or shareholder visit. Otherwise we used plain Adele. I used the address instinctively now. Look small, don't make yourself a target. 

'We won't tolerate interference or quizzing Richard' she told me. 

Really? REALLY!!?! I would never have guessed. 

'I appreciate that M'am' I answered. 

She nodded. She could have explained things then. She could have. But she didn't. I was simply sent from the office and told to 'lighten up'. I was making the others tetchy. If needs be Birmingham was still an option. 

Insecurity became an arm lock then. Silence was a set of manacles. I simply wasn't allowed to interfere. Night after night I came home and we did the usual things. I guess that Jilly knew that Adele had spoken to me for she seemed to relax. I had been warned. That which was vulgar wasn't allowed. Three weeks later and Adele and Jilly went to a wedding together. They went as a couple, amidst Adele's friends. I watched Jilly get into her tight new dress. Before all was done up though, constricted, she said quietly,

'Lick my cunt'. 

Jilly had never used that word. 

'Yes....of course' I answered, trying to push back the surprise, the shock of word, circumstance, of demand. 

I knelt...and licked her 'cunt'. 

She didn't say anything. She held my head against her sex and rubbed luxuriantly. I felt her stocking suspender straps brush my ears as she used my mouth. She was wiping her sex against my face. I heard her gasp, moan, her body shivering against my hot cheeks. 

I wasn't allow to trigger an orgasm. This was a teasing pleasure. She had me fix a suspender strap that had lost grip on her stocking. 

'You will sleep in the guest bedroom from now on do you understand?' she asked. 

'Yes' I conceded and felt the heartsink over again, ten fold. 

'You'll have the stud put in your tongue' she continued. 

'Yes'. 

It was something. Can you understand that. In the unknowing, when there is no compass point to follow, something, just something makes a difference. If i had a stud in my tongue, then I had a purpose. If i had a purpose then perhaps I need not be discarded. I had no understanding of how these affairs did or didn't involve a man. Dear God, the requirement to arrange that stud was a sweet relief, no matter the pain, no matter the nudge nudge teasing at work. 

Below, on the drive the horn of a blue Maserati sports car sounded. Adele was here. 

'Move your clothes out today, and the photos' said Jilly. 

I blinked. 

She hadn't waited for my response.