Saturday Night Living

"Wanna fool around?"

I was lying on the couch; Amy was on top of me. She responded: "I thought you wanted to watch SNL."

I had wanted to, ever since I'd found out that Scarlett Johansson was hosting and Bjork was the musical guest. That's a lot of hotness squeezed into one standard-definition TV screen. How could I resist?

But then the show started, and Scarlett hit the stage for the opening monologue in a black mini-skirtish sort of number with a neckline that was — and I'm sure this was purely coincidence — designed to accentuate her beautiful, um, tracts of land. And then there were the black stockings. Oh, and pumps with four-inch heels. I barely remember the skit (she sung something with an actor doing Sanjaya). Once Scarlett was on stage, all I could think about was doing Amy.

I explained it much more simply to Amy: "I did want to watch it ... until I saw Scarlett. Now I just want to fool around."

"Um ... Okay."

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In case you didn't pick it up from her response, Amy wasn't fully on board. Maybe she felt some innate pressure since it was technically still (for the next few minutes, anyway) the anniversary of when we met.

It used to bug me a lot when Amy would "concede" to sex. "Never mind" would be my passive-aggressive reaction. But my thinking has evolved over time such that I've come to terms with this. I now understand that sometimes — sometimes, mind you — it's okay to go ahead and take when the giver is not gung-ho but still willing to go with it.

It's probably not an apt comparison, but there are plenty of other areas in our lives where I happily concede to do things for Amy that I'm not thrilled about. Shopping for clothes for her comes to mind — but not for the reason you might figure. I love shopping for clothes with her. But these days, my job on shopping excursions is de facto babysitter, keeping the kids from bothering her too much so that she can accomplish something. I happily make dinners she likes that I'm not necessarily wild about. I really have no interest in gardening, but I obediently play her weekend worker-bee as she plants and weeds in our yard. (To put it in more sexual terms, her gardening libido is much stronger than mine.¹)

These examples I bring up are, of course, the typical sort of give-and-take concessions that anyone in a healthy relationship regularly performs. So why does sex seem different?

Your response might be: "Well, Denis, sex should be more than an errand, more than a chore." Well, yeah. Ideally sex is an intimate, enthusiastic act that helps people connect on a romantic, or carnal, or — dare I say — spiritual level. But let's face it, for some women (and some men), sex is, on some occasions, an obligatory part of the relationship, performed for the good of the relationship. So while it might be a little pathetic to compare my conceding to weed a flower bed to my wife conceding to fuck me, when you get down to brass tacks, that's just the way it goes sometimes.

I had a good (female) friend once who joked about how, sometimes late at night when her husband was rearin' to go, she'd tell him: "You can do anything you want to me — just don't wake me up." She admitted that there was an underlying truth to the joke: She would occasionally consent to sex when she wasn't really into it. And that was fine. As long as the rest of the relationship is relatively healthy, and as long as it doesn't always seem like drudgery, one-sided sex is perfectly acceptable. (This is probably not a revelation to many of you; for me, guilt-ridden and over-libidoed, it's a relatively new concept for me to struggle with.)

And who knows: Once things get going, maybe she'll like it! In fact, when these circumstances arise, she often does. Which brings me to thought (or "justification," if you prefer) number two: On occasions when I am aware that Amy has agreed to sex with a degree of ambivalence, let it be known that I work my ass off to make sure it's worth her while. Ha — that statement sounds like a distant cousin to that age-old (and hilarious) belief that some men have: "If I could just sleep with that hot lesbian, I could turn her straight!" While I might not succeed every time, my chances of success are much better than those idiots'.

+++
"Did you see if we got a package today?" Amy asked as we tossed the back couch cushions onto the floor so that we could lie side-by-side.

I knew what she was really asking. "You mean, did we get the next movie?" We'd ordered another porn video, but it hadn't arrived yet. The very fact that she was asking indicated to me that she was looking for "assistance," an arousal pick-me-up. "Do you want to watch one of our other ones?" I asked.

"No, that's fine. I just wondered."

We started with gentle kissing. I was thinking momentarily about what it was like to kiss her that first time all those years ago. Either too much time has passed or my brain wasn't up to the task, but I couldn't really recapture that experience in my head. Part of the problem with my failed reverie was that Amy had removed her shirt, and her breasts were now sort of spilling delectably out of her bra. I paid them considerable attention, working along the edge of the bra with tongue and teeth. Then to the neck, then back to her mouth, then an ear ... nice and slow. Amy released the bra's front clasp, and I pulled back the bra with my teeth. Some tonguing of her nipples, and I was starting to hear actual sounds of interest.

She rolled me on my back, sat up, and then laid back on my legs. She kicked in the air as she pulled off her jeans and panties in one motion, and then, lying back, spread wide. There wasn't much I could do with her on top of my legs! Awkwardly, I pulled them out from underneath her (I wondered if this clumsy seduction hearkened back to our first night together!) and removed my own jeans. My dick bobbed and pointed like Dionysus' own divining rod ... right to where my mouth wanted to be.

I sucked and nibbled on her labia, working them open and finding Amy's clit. I began working my tongue flat against her, slow circles, occasionally throwing in more pointed tongue-dances down the length of her slit. I thought she was getting into it when all of a sudden, she said:

"Do you know what I want to see?"

I looked up from between her legs. "What?"

"I want to see that scene from that movie we watched the other night, when he has her tied up."

Her wish; my command. Off I went to retrieve The Masseuse, along with the lube.

Here was an odd situation: I was more interested in playing with Amy than watching the movie. I can't recall her ever being more into the porn than me. Oh, I found ways to amuse myself. Moving slightly to one side, I pushed my dick toward her mouth, and it was willingly accepted and lightly sucked while she watched. She occasionally looked up at me, smiled, and ran her tongue up and down the shaft before returning her focus to the movie.

I went down on her again and then moved into a position where I could tease her clit with the head of my cock. Amy picked right up on this, grabbing the dick herself and "using" me to masturbate. I love it when she does this, when she makes it more about her pleasure than mine. I would occasionally glance at the screen, but 95% of the time, I was watching Amy get into the scene.

At one point, I buried my head in her neck again. I whispered: "Tell me what's happening."

"She's sucking his cock now," Amy said. This was the final shot of the scene: While still tied to her crossbar, Jenna's mouth is fucked until Justin unloads a creamy cumshot on her mouth and chin. Just like the first time she watched this scene, Amy was impressed. She pushed my cock the rest of the way inside her. The scene over, we moved down on the couch and picked up our own tempo.

"So," I asked, "would you like to be tied up like that sometime?"

"Um ... Yeah," she said, as if the thought of it was both revelatory and genuinely arousing.

"I'll make sure that happens sometime soon," I said.

She reached down between us and began masturbating as we fucked.

"Yeah," I whispered, moving up so she could get her hands down there, and so I could watch. "Bring yourself off. I wanna see you come."

She worked herself for awhile as I continued my slow fucking, but then she abandoned that in favor of pulling me back on top of her. I was close to coming already from watching her, and this dramatic move on her part finished me off. I felt my cock pulse five or six times deep inside her.

"You aren't finished!" I announced heroically, and we both laughed as I made my way back down her belly, found her clit, and began a no-nonsense muffing that brought her to a quick and jerky climax.

She sighed. Stretched out on the couch. Accepted my head in the crook of her shoulder. And said: "So .... You wanna go back to watching Saturday Night Live?"

I didn't. I was certain that the show's mediocre quality would interfere with the moment we had just had. (Turns out I was right: I finished watching the episode last night, and it was horrendous.) We went to bed.

At the risk of being too nostalgic over the last 48 hours, I said to her one last time in bed: "I'm really glad you agreed to kiss me that night." She mumbled something affirmative, but she was already falling asleep.

It hadn't been a fireworks-inducing evening, like it might have been in, say, 1991. But really, is that even possible? There's no question that the way we love each other has changed as we've taken on different roles in different chapters of our life together. But there's also no question that the intensity of my love for this woman — and, let's face it, the sheer carnal lust for her — has not abated one iota.

--
¹ Let's stretch the metaphor too far: I'm not a size queen or anything, but my wife has a very large green thumb! [Return]

Return to the Fold. More Specifically, Her Folds.

"April is the cruelest month." - T.S. Eliot

Nothing tailor-made to lose your porn-hungry audience faster than kicking off your return to blogging with a quote from Eliot! But Tommy was definitely on to something when he wrote that. After the first three weeks of this month, I'm convinced that the whole March "in like a lion" stuff we hear is total bullshit. April is the killer.

Especially when you kick it off with a virulent (and particularly late-in-the-season) flu that kicks the snot out of you — literally and figuratively. And then you pass it off to everyone you know and love ... but slowly, so that the effect can be stretched over many weeks. Both my kids had it to a lesser degree. Amy is just now shaking off the last vestiges. And two of our babysitters came down with minor versions, forcing Amy and me to take more time off work to cover.

The symptoms were the same as just about any flu, but one in particular was much worse than usual: the energy depletion. For instance, just when I thought I was past the worst, I took a four-block walk to my car ... and had to take the rest of the day off. I'm no Superman by any means, but hell, I'm not a couch potato! I do exercise! Nonetheless, I'm just now beginning to feel like something better than a bed-ridden old man.

Needless to say, both of our libidos were almost entirely extinguished. I can't recall a three-week period with so little innuendo thrown at my wife, and with fewer hints that I'd rather be fucking (than, say, doing our taxes). Sometimes this was true even when I was horny! I'd think, God, I so want to fuck her.... and that would be followed immediately by: ... But a nap sounds pretty good too.... So I didn't even try. And neither did Amy, whose biggest issue was clogged sinuses. I don't have to tell many of you how fun a blowjob would be for her in that state, right?

And then last Saturday night, I was taken by surprise when Amy took me up on a half-hearted suggestion to watch a video we had procured just before the Great Flu of '07. I think my incredible attempt at seduction had gone something like this:

"We still have that movie sitting around. If you're up for it. Not sure I am, but...."

Really, what red-blooded American woman could resist that come-on? And so, an hour later, apropos of nothing, she said, "Sure!" I was so far past thinking about it that I had to ask what she was talking about it. It was already 11:00 p.m. And she was still sort of sick. Was she serious?

She was. So, down to the basement we headed, not only with the DVD but also with a new vibrator. I still wasn't sure we'd get anywhere — or, let's be honest, if we even remembered how to have sex — but I think we were both feeling that it would be nice to capture a vague sense of "normal" again.

+++
The movie was the 2004 update of The Masseuse, starring Jenna Jameson and her then-husband Justin Sterling. (This is basically a review; if you're not interested, you might want to skip down a bit.) We were interested in this one because the original 1990 version of the movie, starring Hyapatia Lee and Randy Spears, was one of the first pornos Amy and I had watched together. With our relationship being so new at the time, I was wading into risky waters, not really sure how much Amy liked porn — or if she did, what she liked. She wasn't really sure, either. This soft (but still hardcore) "couples" film was a good, safe entry.

The 1990 version is included on an extra disc when you buy the DVD of the 2004 version, so we had a chance to reacquaint ourselves with it. My, how far we've come! The 1990 Masseuse is a painfully slow-moving trek toward a single fuck scene at the end. Along the way, Hyapatia gives Randy (who plays a twentysomething virgin) a handjob, a blowjob, and just about any other safe foreplay as we slowly wander toward the climactic scene where she takes his cherry. It couldn't be much more tame without becoming one of those god-awful Playboy-produced softcore numbers you catch at the SpectraVision in your Motel 6 room just off the highway. That said, there's no question in my mind that Hyapatia was incredibly hot.¹ She had a gorgeous body with natural tits, and when the sex finally happens, she was clearly into it.²

The updated version follows an almost-identical plot: Justin Sterling plays a similarly awkward, socially inept virgin, though he's a lot kinkier than Randy Spears was.³ He has no idea how to interact with women — something he shows when a co-worker (Wendy Devine) throws herself at him and he botches the kiss. He eventually turns to the services of a massage parlor and — what do you know! — the luck of the draw lands him in Jenna's room. And of course, he almost instantly falls hard for her. After she shaves his balls and gives him a handjob (both his requests), she finds him adorably endearing and invites him to come back any time.

This is where one encounters the big believability stretch: All masseuses — Hell, let's call her what she is, shall we? — All sex workers have rules, and Jenna's masseuse breaks almost every one of them. She lets Justin kiss her and, fully aware that he's falling in like with her, she agrees to "date" him outside the workplace. Justin's creepiness is somehow filtered as endearing by Jenna. Within minutes on their first date, she allows him to tie her up in his "shed." Even by the end of the movie, when Justin's obsession with her lands him on her doorstep, she freaks out at his "ruining everything" ... and then fucks him.

Now, I realize that porn is rarely believable, but this movie has been heralded for its "realism." Some also consider it a great dramatic accomplishment, and I suppose one has to take into account its competition when assessing that statement.. But I still cringed. While Justin isn't half-bad as the bumbling semi-stalker, Jenna is pretty wooden and vague in many of the "dramatic" scenes. And any plot that has a single sex-worker/mom falling in love with her virgin client has stretched beyond any hopes of being taken seriously.⁴

Still ... the sex is incredibly hot. (You almost forgot I was a typical male, didn't you?) The opening handjob was disappointing (that's the one scene where Hyapatia blows Jenna out of the water), but everything after is delicious. Especially the bondage scene with Jenna, and a great exhibitionistic frigging that Wendy Devine performs for Justin in their workplace. (Clearly, I'm in the wrong office.) While Amy and I were pretty worried at the beginning, we finally did start to "warm up" a good half-hour into the movie.

+++
When the bondage scene got going, I repositioned the two of us on the couch so that Amy was prone but still able to watch while I frolicked between her legs. Removing her jeans and panties, I discovered that the movie had revved her up: Her pussy was warm and inviting. I took my time licking and stroking her as I moved back and forth from her cunt to watching the movie. It was a lovely, drawn-out laving. At some point, Amy laughed at my reverence and asked, "You've really missed going down on me, haven't you?"

"Can you tell?" I asked as my tongue took another long drag.

I picked up the new toy, a bright orange Lucid Dreams No. 14 vibrator, and lubed it up before rubbing it along Amy's slit. After things were good and slick, I twisted the dial to its lowest vibration setting. The exceptionally quiet vibrator let me hear Amy's own purring.

We really don't use toys very much; they've always seemed awkward, and the arousal payoff hasn't been that amazing. But in the name of fun and variety, we thought we'd try again. It turned out to be worth it.

The vibrator's head has a "bullet" built into it, which is advertised as being good for clitoral stimulation. But it's clear from the shape that this baby is made for the g-spot. So after a few minutes more of letting my tongue and the vibe take turns, I eased it into her. Amy enjoyed this,but wanted to take the wheel: I wasn't quite coming in at the right angle. I gladly let her take over and continued to snake my tongue around the toy as she did her thing.

I could tell from Amy's sounds and movements =that this was a different (read: more positive) vibrator experience. It seemed to keep her at a higher state of arousal as I continued to diddle her clit. At some point, she pulled the vibe back out again and went to serious work on her clit. My tongue stimulation, along with the visual of a bound Jenna getting her mouth fucked (eventually bathing in a gooey facial) sent Amy into an extended, undulating release. She came down almost as slowly as she had built up. A beautiful, gentle climax — perfect for the woman still recuperating.

Amy apologized in advance for not being able to orally return the favor, but I understood. Besides, it gave me the opportunity to enjoy my most recent obsession: handjobs! Amy lubed up her hand and languidly worked my cock as we continued to watch. We took turns stroking me until I told her to bring me off during the final scene, where Jenna and Justin fuck.

All in all, a lovely, mellow evening, considering I wasn't expecting any action at all. It was great just to feel sexual again, and the positive vibe (no pun intended) was a bonus. Amy has been making noises about doing something again, though the sinusitis continues to threaten any plans. But hey, I'm a patient guy ... something I remind Amy on a regular basis. Don't worry, I am properly slapped each time I say it.

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A sincere thank-you to so many of you who expressed your appreciation and well-wishes, both on the blog and in email, during my time away. It's good to be back.


--
¹ I'm using past-tense here not because there was some tragic porn-star ending to her life; she just retired from porn. [Return]

² And really, there's little else I ask from my porn: That the performers be genuinely into getting laid that day. If they don't appear to be enjoying it, neither can I. [Return]

³ I attribute the difference largely to Sterling's character's access to the World Wide Web — something Spears didn't have "back then." And I know I'm overthinking the plot to a porn film. Need I remind you that I'm not making you read this? [Return]

⁴ The really sad thing is that Paul Thomas, who wrote the original version of The Masseuse and directed both, had two chances to get this right ... and he screwed them both up! [Return]