Their Wayward Wives Page 3

  He slipped between the sheets, and they kissed—Cathy definitely liked kissing, and John liked kissing her, even though she seemed to be trying to keep their bodies from touching except at the lips. When he moved his hands down the silky fabric of the little nightgown, Cathy shuddered; when he drew the nightgown up and touched her down there for the first time since the night before he shipped out, John discovered that she had regular nylon panties underneath. Cathy said, with what sounded like reluctance in her voice, “I’ll take them off,” and did, making sure the covers concealed the act of removing her underwear.

  She turned back to him with what seemed to John, in the very dim light coming from the bathroom, a look of resolve and a tight smile. “Where were we?” she asked, and they started to kiss again. A little uncertain now, John put his hand back down and raised the hem of Cathy’s nightgown again. She gave a tiny shiver as he stroked her gently between her legs, felt the soft curls whose actual color he didn’t even know, though he always pictured them as flaxen like the hair on her head, and the sweet slit they covered, rubbed a little more firmly where he knew she felt the most pleasure.

  He looked into her face, and saw in the semi-darkness that she had her eyes closed, had bitten her lip. For a moment he thought he might have aroused her, the way he believed he had when she had told him he was being naughty, the only other time he had touched her there. His cock had certainly come fully to life at the lascivious feeling of having his fingertips on her warm pussy. She hadn’t yet touched him, and she would find him very hard and aching for her.

  To his surprise, though, Cathy whispered, “I’m ready,” and turned on her back, spreading her legs. Part of John wanted to say, “Hold on,” and ask his bride to hold his cock, get used to what it felt like, learn how to make him feel good. As a gentleman, though, he knew he should let her decide how it would go, since she was the virgin and he wanted her wedding night to be the way she had imagined it.

  He got on top of her, managed to get his cock in position, rubbing it up and down her pussy until he lodged the head inside. She wasn’t very wet, but she made little whimpers that encouraged him, said again, “I’m ready, John,” and then, because her pussy felt so good, so tight and warm around his hard cock, he couldn’t stop himself: he thrust in hard, and Cathy gave a little cry as he deflowered her. He fucked his virgin bride, then, as she kept her eyes shut, holding himself up on his strong arms and enjoying the feeling of mastering her that way, not caring, in that moment at least, about the way she lay still under him and only gave voice to the tiniest of whimpers.

  Nevertheless Cathy seemed to come, just before John did, with the same gasping little cry she had also given every other time they had sex from that day to this. When John asked, as he held his no-longer-virgin bride afterward, she said yes, she had, and snuggled her face into his chest, as if she didn’t want him to look at her.

  John liked fucking his wife—he would never say otherwise. They had sex Friday nights or Saturday mornings, always the same way, with the lights out and the covers up, in the missionary position. He was far too much of a gentleman to accuse her of being boring in bed. He had never before said anything like what he had said when they had heard the Landises—asking why Cathy never screamed the way Mindy Landis had screamed—and he felt sure he never would again, but surely they couldn’t help being neighborly?

  Chapter Four

  Cathy had never felt so uncomfortable in her life. At first, when they arrived at the Landises, she couldn’t look at Mindy or Doug during the brief tour their neighbors gave them of how they had furnished—very stylishly, Cathy had to admit, and certainly much more nicely than the Smiths had done—their new house. Then, when everyone had his or her beer and they all clinked bottles and toasted, at Doug’s suggestion, Neighbors, Cathy found she couldn’t stop looking at Mindy, unless her eyes had flicked briefly to Doug instead.

  He’s not even as big as John, she thought. How can he feel like he has a right to… to do that to his wife?

  What did being big have to do with it? Cathy had no idea, but it didn’t seem to stop her mind from going there, as she looked at the Landises over their patio table and drank their beer and ate their chips and salsa. She had brought a crudité from their own garden—broccoli and cucumbers and tomatoes—and both Mindy and Doug seemed genuinely grateful and impressed by Cathy’s skill as a gardener. Somehow that made it worse, though, that Cathy couldn’t stop trying to find in Mindy’s face the signs of fear and despair she thought should be there.

  The signs, she refused to admit to herself, Cathy hoped would be there.

  Doug and John got along well enough, at least, that she didn’t have to worry about the conversation lagging. They talked about helicopters, mostly, though that led to a few of John’s favorite stories from his tour, and Doug had stories to match. When Mindy’s eyes met Cathy’s, they had the sympathy of one military wife to another, and Cathy could easily return that kind of look—or at least, at appropriate moments, make her horrified scanning of her new neighbor’s face into that kind of compassionate expression quickly enough to avoid detection.

  But she dreaded the inevitable moment when Doug would take John to look at his fishing tackle, or his medals, or his sports memorabilia, and she would have to find a way to make one-on-one small talk with the woman she had heard being punished by and then having sex with her handsome husband who wasn’t even as big as John but apparently still… What?

  In her nervousness, seeking the social solution that had served her well, for the most part, in college, Cathy drank two beers in quick succession. With her small frame, as she well knew, by the end of the second beer she would feel at ease no matter what the group dynamic. But she still felt so uncomfortable even smiling when the story being told required it that she decided she had to move on to a third beer, asking John to get it for her as the men went into the kitchen to fetch the steak, the preliminary to them standing next to the grill while—much, much too early, Cathy thought in desperation—their wives chatted about decorating, or romantic comedies.

  John looked at her a little strangely—Cathy wasn’t sure she had had a third beer since her sorority days, actually—but brought it and put it down in front of her, then bent over to kiss her.

  “Aww,” Mindy said in a genuine, kind voice, and then Cathy realized she had gotten much drunker, faster, than she had supposed she would, because otherwise the thing that happened next could never have occurred.

  As John straightened up, and Cathy felt the glow of his affection receding, she thought about their sex life—their marital relations—as her mother called the matter. She thought about the swoony feeling of seeing him in his uniform on their wedding night, and about the gentlemanly way he had taken her virginity, about the panties she hadn’t taken off under the lacy nightgown.

  Cathy thought wildly, There’s nothing wrong with our marital relations.

  Then she said to Mindy, “Why did you get spanked this afternoon?”

  If John hadn’t said the thing about the way Cathy never made much noise during their lovemaking, maybe she would have been able to tell him exactly why what they had overheard coming from the Landises’ breakfast room disturbed her so much. Or maybe she could have at least made the attempt, which might have caused him to turn down the dinner invitation.

  Who did she think she was kidding, though? Could Cathy even articulate to herself exactly why she found the thought of her next-door neighbor being punished so disturbing? She couldn’t have made an attempt to explain if her life depended on it.

  All Cathy knew was that it had something to do with the stories her grandmother would tell her, when Cathy was little—stories that came from Gran’s own grandmother, of a girlhood on a Southern plantation. Stories that very often featured girls getting a whuppin’ or getting switched.

  Once, Gran had even told Cathy a story about a young woman who had kissed a boy. “Let me tell you, sugar, her daddy blistered her tushy so good she couldn’t sit down f
or a week.”

  Once, not in a story but really just in passing, Gran had said that she missed Cathy’s granddaddy, who had died before Cathy was born. “Lord, he would whip me good when I sassed him, but I loved him more than anythin’.”

  Cathy had always taken for granted that anything Gran said defined the way things ought to be. Her mother certainly did everything in her power to reinforce that idea, but though Cathy never asked about the corporal punishment in Gran’s stories, she always wondered whether her mother had heard the same tales growing up, and what she had thought of them.

  For Cathy’s part, they dwelt in her memory, floating around freely and disquietingly until in high school and college, she had started to learn about feminism. As a Southern belle (or as close to one as her mother could make her despite their family’s having come down in the world) and a sorority girl, Cathy liked her family’s lifestyle too much to think of trying to rewrite the marriage-and-kids script, but she also knew herself to be intelligent, and the ideas she encountered about the patriarchy hit home. Gran’s tales of family discipline in the Old South fell easily under that rubric.

  They definitely didn’t have anything to do with sex, which was something Cathy didn’t generally think about at all, even when kissing boys—even when kissing John, to whom she had pledged eternal fidelity with all her heart because she knew him to be such a gentleman. He had even won over her mother despite being from New Jersey, and from proud working-class people there.

  The night before he shipped out, when she said she would wait, she had had two beers because she knew she had to give him some kind of reward. When his hand moved down to her thighs, she didn’t do what she had always done before—pick it up gently, kiss it, and return it to him with a meaningful my-family-expects-me-to-wait look—but instead she let him move it slowly up under her skirt, and let him find the waistband of her sensible nylon panties; practically the same ones she would ‘forget’ to take off on their wedding night. She let him put his hand inside her underwear, as her face got terribly hot. She let him make her warm down there, and she whispered, “That’s so naughty.”

  She loved him so much: his bigness and his gentleness, the way he had a temper ready to defend her and the way he calmed himself down. She wanted to make him happy, but even though she could give him that naughty reward when he had to ship out the next day, and let his fingers come away smelling wickedly of her most private part, and even though after they were married she could let him have sex with her because marital relations formed an important part of life and you couldn’t have babies without them, sex was naughty and there was no way around that fact.

  If only she and John could just cuddle, those Friday nights and Saturday mornings—until they were ready to have a baby, of course. And that would be soon—as soon as they could get ahead a little, and Cathy didn’t need to work anymore. All the things John said about his business making enough money didn’t amount to getting ahead—Cathy didn’t need her mother around to tell her that. Getting ahead meant feeling completely secure, like nothing could go wrong. Cathy felt sure John could make that happen, if he worked hard enough.

  She knew she couldn’t refuse sex once a week, even if she would rather just have cuddled, and she knew again how much of a gentleman John was for not pressing her for more than that—more than lying on her back with her legs spread, after secretly putting the personal lubricant down there in the bathroom, the way her mother had taught her.

  More than his powerful body on top of hers, and his eyes surely looking down, and surely seeing even in the dark—as Cathy required the room to be—the shameful sight of his penis in his wife’s vagina. Cathy always kept her eyes closed so that she wouldn’t have to see it, or see John watching his manhood thrust in and out, but she knew he did, because even gentlemen must do that. All men did that, but gentlemen like John didn’t talk about it, or press their proper wives for more.

  Until this afternoon, anyway, when he had said the thing about how much noise Mindy Landis was making, having sex after her spanking.

  When Cathy asked her awful question, Mindy instantly looked over at Doug to see if he had heard. She had an expression of distress on her face that made Cathy’s face instantly flush as hot as the sun. Doug, it seemed, hadn’t heard, but John had.

  “Cath!” he said in a shocked, angry voice she had heard him use only very rarely. “Mindy, please… Cathy doesn’t mean anything by it.”

  Doug turned, with a puzzled expression on his face. “What’s up?” he asked.

  John, obviously doing his best to gain control of the situation and prevent an incident that could make for terrible discomfort between people who had to live next to one another for the foreseeable future (part of Cathy knew this very well even through two beers), said, “Cathy asked an inappropriate question, Doug. I’m really sorry.” He turned to Mindy. “I’m sorry, Mindy. As you can see, Cath’s a little tipsy.”

  Then, worst of all, he turned to Cathy. “Cath, go ahead and apologize, please.”

  That was the worst part above all because Cathy knew she should do as her husband had said. But he had said the thing about making noise during sex, and he had accepted the invitation to dinner when he must have known it would make her uncomfortable. She would never have had the two beers if she hadn’t been so uncomfortable! This was John’s fault, and he wasn’t being a gentleman at all, now!

  She looked steadily up at John—or as steadily as her tipsiness allowed—then turned to Doug, then to Mindy. “No,” she said. “I want to know why Mindy got spanked. I want to be sure she knows she can get help if she needs it.”

  Mindy’s eyes went narrow, and her nostrils flared. For all the stupid bravado Cathy had just demonstrated, she lost a good deal of fake courage at that moment, because the look on her new neighbor’s face diverged wildly from the one she had expected.

  Doug said, “Cathy, you’ll have to forgive Mindy here. We’ve encountered this kind of reaction before.”

  Cathy swiveled her head to look at him, but he was turning to the grill to take the steaks off, and it was Mindy who spoke next.

  “I will say, though, Cathy,” the pretty redhead said slowly, her calm demeanor—to Cathy’s renewed surprise—visibly returning, as if Doug’s placid reaction had given her strength to deal with her neighbor’s unpardonable nosiness, “that you’ve asked in a much more forthright and even open way than the last woman who decided I was abused did.”

  John tried again, valiantly, to defuse the conversation. “Maybe you two girls should talk this over between yourselves, another time.”

  But Doug, bringing the steaks to the table Mindy and Cathy had set what seemed like a week ago, now, even though only twenty minutes had elapsed, said in an affable voice, “Actually, John, I think it probably makes sense to have it out a little among the four of us. I think Cathy will understand better if she sees how things work between Mindy and me.”

  Chapter Five

  Part of Mindy wanted to giggle, and part wanted to cry. How could she be right back where she had been with June Stanton, in Minnesota? Cathy had seemed so nice. But the way Doug handled the situation made it all seem so funny, too. Maybe because they’d already been through it once before, it wouldn’t be wrenching to have to say the things Mindy really would much rather never got said.

  But the June Stanton situation had cost her many tears and not a few sleepless nights, as she had tried to get used to the idea that in some fundamental way she wasn’t like the cookie-cutter modern, independent woman, even in the military-wife model who seemed to at least make some concessions to traditional femininity. Here in Yerba Linda, she had thought that John and Cathy Lind might become good friends—that Cathy, who seemed so tiny next to her enormous ex-Marine husband, might be someone Mindy could confide in even about how things were with Doug, might be someone to talk to about how unjust it was to judge her based on her need to submit to her husband.

  Here they were, though, apparently right back where the
y had started—except that instead of June Stanton yelling at Mindy in the locker room, it was four adults around a table. Most important, Doug sat right there, to help the Linds understand. She reached out to him, and he took her little hand and held it in his lap. Mindy saw uncertainty flash in Cathy’s eyes at that simple gesture, and that glimpse of the other woman’s possible liability to persuasion helped Mindy’s confidence a little: the giggle trapped in her chest rose in strength, though of course it wouldn’t be a giggle of pleasure, but of anxiety. Still, there had seemed nothing at all to giggle about when June Stanton had confronted her.

  “Why don’t you go ahead, babe, and tell Cathy and John about what I’m guessing they heard this afternoon?” her husband said gently.

  Mindy looked into his eyes, feeling her face twist into a mask of consternation, and the tears now start to win the little battle. Her nose prickled, and her lip quivered. “Do I have to, sir?” she asked in a whisper.

  She heard Cathy give a little gasp at the word sir, and she thought she saw John’s eyebrows go up, out of the corner of her eye.

  “Would you like me to start you off?” Doug asked, stroking the hand he held. “I don’t think it will be convincing until they hear it from you, in your own words.”

  “That’s right,” Cathy put in, a kind of recklessness coming out in her voice even in those two words. She didn’t seem very drunk, and Mindy wondered what the emotions were that roiled the pretty blond woman’s heart, to act this way. Suddenly she suspected that this situation might play out quite differently from the one in Minnesota. “That’s right,” Cathy repeated, seeming to become aware that her husband and her neighbors were all looking at her, now, rather than Mindy, with puzzled expressions. She focused on Doug. “I won’t accept that she’s okay until I hear it from her, and… and I know she’s not, you know, going to…”