Grant Roberts: The Reluctant Swappers

"Sharon… Christ… I'm sorry, baby. I don't know what came over me … Sharon?"

Ron heard the sobs catch in his wife's throat as she attempted to bring herself under control, only to break out anew with heart-rending force.

"Sharon?" he called again.

"Go away. Leave me alone."

"Sharon, I'm sorry, I don't know what happened. I must have been drunk."

"You're… you're an animal," the sobbing young woman said through the door, "I've never felt so… so humiliated… so filthy… so used in my life…"

"Oh baby, please, I'm sorry. Please. I didn't mean to do anything…"

He was intercepted by a fresh outburst of pitiful crying from inside the bathroom, and sank to his knees outside the door, his head in his hands.

He heard Sharon choking on her words as she tried to speak.

"Maybe you didn't mean to, but you did," she cried, "and you did it like I was just some… some prostitute you picked up off the streets somewhere."

"Sharon, baby, I love you… you know that."

"Not after tonight I don't… I don't know anything."

Ron noticed a touch of anger coming into his wife's voice now, and it irked him slightly. Maybe if he didn't have to fight all the time to bring a little variety to their sex life, maybe if he wasn't always so frustrated by her goddamn refusal to make love any other way but with the same straight dullness…

"I don't know baby," he said, trying to explain himself, "I just went wild. I guess I thought you were pulling away from me, that you didn't want me, and I guess I just got mad and…"

"Didn't want you?" Sharon sobbed harshly from the bathroom. "How could you think that? It was beautiful before you started… started pushing into me like some kind of stud bull!"

Ron cringed. She was absolutely right. How could he have been so crazy!

He got up from the floor, and went over to the bed and sat down on it, his face a contorted mask of self loathing. He stayed that way for a long while, until he was raised from his reverie by Sharon's voice.

"Ron?"

He looked up slowly, and saw his wife's naked young body standing in the open door of the bathroom, her cheeks stained by dried tears, her thighs smeared with the drying waste of his spilled seed. On her face was painted an almost angelic concern. Without answering her, he dropped his head once more in his hands, feeling his chest knot up with an unbearable tightness.

"Ron, I'm sorry. I know you didn't mean it. I shouldn't have yelled at you."

Ron winced under the soothing gentleness of her words, and wished instead for her voice to lash into him with the punishing effect of a whip.

"Don't… don't apologize to me, baby… I can't take that."

Sharon came slowly over to where he sat on the bed, gazed down on his nakedly powerful body with love and compassion, and took his head in her hands. He suddenly threw his arms around her, pressed his face into the smooth cool flesh of her exposed little belly, and tried to squeeze his love into her. She didn't move.

"I think I understand, darling," she said quietly, with infinite forgiveness, "it wasn't you doing it, it was the alcohol, and you were tired from your trip to L.A. We'll just forget about it, like it never happened."

"But it did happen…"

"Well, maybe it did," Sharon smiled, with almost motherly affection.

"But it wasn't on purpose. And I do forgive you." She leaned down and grazed the nape of his neck with her lips, letting her full dangling breasts caress his bowed head.

"Sharon… please… don't forgive me too quickly."

For even as his wife's soothing voice calmed him down, reassured him, Ron knew that the passions, the frustrations, that had caused his unforgivable loss of control had not disappeared in the least. Rather, they had grown even stronger, as weeds will when exposed to sunlight and Ron was worried. He knew he would have to talk to his wife one day, one day soon. He would have to make her see that it was her own coolness towards anything but straightforward sex that frustrated him, and that he felt that even then she was sometimes performing in bed rather than enjoying. He would have to tell her that he needed more than a dutiful wife, he needed someone who enjoyed sex for its own sake, he needed a seductress. He would have to tell her soon…but not now… not tonight. Tonight he had to apologize.

Ron Fleming woke the next morning to the familiar sound of dishes clattering and the smell of cooked bacon. He opened his eyes slowly, saw the late morning sun patterned on the wall opposite the bed, and stretched his sleep stiffened limbs under the rumpled sheets. He yawned his body awake, and then lay still, listening to Sharon's movements in the kitchen.

The memories of the night before grated in his mind along with the pain of a slight hangover, and he groaned. What had possessed him? He had tried to make it up to his upset young wife, but nothing had seemed to work, and Sharon had steadfastly refused his attempts to make love any further. She had said he was forgiven, but somehow he doubted it. They had fallen asleep on opposite sides of their large double bed, with an uncomfortable silence separating them like a wall.

Ron got up and made his way to the bathroom. He looked at himself in the mirror, frowned, and reached for the aspirin in the medicine cabinet. He took two, pulled his bathrobe from the hook behind the door, and wrapped it around his powerful body. With a look at himself he then made his way out of the bathroom towards the kitchen, determined to talk to his wife about the night before, and about the reasons he had acted the way he had. It was time she knew how he felt about what he considered her coolness toward love making, otherwise he knew that, sometime in the future, last night's scene would undoubtedly repeat itself.

Sharon turned her lush, fully clothed body to him as he came into the kitchen, and then moved quickly over to the stove where two large eggs were popping and crackling in a hot frying pan.

"Good morning, darling. Did you sleep well?" she asked with her back to him.

"Yeah, like a log. I must have been more tired than I thought," he answered her, moving to the small breakfast table.

"Well, it was silly to go out to a party right after you'd stepped off the plane. We should have told the Lewis' we couldn't make it." She scooped up the fried eggs on two inexpensive china plates, added the bacon from where it lay drying on the double folds of paper towel, and brought it to the table with a forced smile on her face. "Like some coffee?"

"Please… no cream."

"Head bothering you?" Sharon asked solicitously. Ron nodded, passing a hand in front of his bloodshot eyes, then looked up to where his wife was busying herself pouring coffee and orange juice. Her face was scrubbed and shining, her dress neat and freshly ironed.

"You got dressed early this morning," he said simply.

"Yes, I did. I've got a lot of things to do this morning, and I thought I'd get an early start." She smiled again as she brought the tray with the glasses and set it on the table, seating herself like she was in some restaurant rather than at home. Ron noticed she wasn't letting her eyes rest on his for very long at a time.

"I want to talk about last night, Sharon. I think we both ought to…"

"Oh, darling, not now. I've really got to gobble this and run. I made an appointment at the hairdressers for 9:30. It was the only time he could fit me in."

Ron remained silent momentarily, watching his beautiful young wife eat her eggs and bacon with studied precision, using her napkin and sipping her coffee as though she were on stage.

"Aren't you hungry, dear? Would you like something else?" she asked him, obviously a little uncomfortable under his gaze.