The Present

For my birthday last year, I asked my husband for a ménage a-trois. I brought it up after having brought his Big Boy up.  Sweaty and hip-to-hip, my left breast exposed and his long leg dangling over the Queen mattress, I said, “you know, my birthday‘s soon.” 

“You don‘t say.”  I watched as the tangle of hairs on his chest bobbed to match the still-ratty rhythm of his exerted breath.  I longed, even after all these years, to massage them into place with a caress of my palm.   

“Next month,“ I continued the hint, “The 5th.” 

“I heard a rumor that’s when it happens every year.”   

He was in the perfect coy mood.  He’d been in the mood since he’d finally gotten tenure and to celebrate I’d arranged for one of my husband’s college kids to take our four-year-old son to the park for the afternoon so that mommy and daddy could play mommy and daddy alone. 

“If you haven’t bought me a present yet, I have an idea for the perfect present,” at this I set my palm migrating down the wiry muscular length of his torso, hovering just short of its ultimate destination where Big Boy rested, recharging. “In fact, I think we’d both like this present.”   

“Oh, you do, do you?”   

“Oh, yeah. I think you’re going to like this present, too,” I kneaded my fingers into the skin of his cock like I know he loves, massaging the slit in soft circular motions, hypnotic head-trails, until I felt the firming, until his knees started involuntary quivering and I heard the guttural growl of  pleasure escape his lips. 

“I’d give you anything you ask right now. Anything. You. Fucking. Want.”  And that’s when I gave the big reveal, right after he‘d shattered his seed into my palm there on our marital bed. 

My husband had shared his three-some experience with me before, and more than once it had served a role in our foreplay, especially when it‘s been a rote day of piled laundry and sippy cups and my mojo‘s taken a hiatus for the mom role. His threesome had been with his graduate school girlfriend, years before, “at one of those parties where every guy’s a horny dickweed and every girl’s skirt’s too short ‘cause she’s just dumped somebody or been dumped.”  They’d had a few shots of this, a hit of that, then with pants around his ankles he’d taken his girlfriend while licking out a freckled clinical psychologist on the host’s bed.   

The part he most liked to tell: “I woke up around 2 am with morning wood, and my tongue was trying to lick away the freckles on her aureole.  I swear to god, she had tiny freckles even on her aureole.”   

This is also his favorite part to tell because he knows exactly how I feel about breasts, how I’ve always had a fetish for the voluptuous undercarriage, the cupping flesh, the sheer poetry of a nipple growing turgid to the flick of a tongue or fingertip trail’s touch. The curve of tit flesh spilling from a deep v on a dress has been known to get my clit in fine form and fast, even though in numerous other ways, in fact in every other way, my husband’s body and my hunger to possess it demonstrates my otherwise straight proclivities.   

I’d never had a menage-- though we’ve half-teased about the possibility from time-to-time. I had been thinking for weeks, while vacuuming the Cheerios from the rug in front of the television, while driving our son home from soccer practice, about how and when I’d have the balls to ask for it.  Finally, I’d asked for it. 

He turned his head on his pillow, a devilish grin on those lips I’d soon sip, and uttered, “it can be arranged, who do you want?” 

Who do you want? Oh, I wanted him.  And I had a wish list for our her. With 45 minutes more until our son ran through the front door calling, “mommy!  Casey got me a butterfly in a net and everything! Look, look!”  we lay there in the warm cocoon of our love nest, me with my most intimate intimate, my only lover of the past seven years, planning the kind of woman I would pick for us to fuck.  We idly compared notes on buttocks (cellulite was fine, ‘cause hey, life happens), legs (“I like a little something to wrap around me, but maybe you wouldn’t find that as necessary,” he said, a twinkle of starfire in his blue-gray eyes), and breasts (my husband said cup size never mattered, but I wanted them lush and womanly as, with my pert A-cup titties with their acorn-top nipples, I‘ve always envied women with big voluptuous ones-- this would be my chance to have them, second hand). It was a gleefully heady business. 

We began playing a game hubby and I took to calling, “Plus One.”  The juicy redheaded Christina Hendricks look-alike with the va-voom boobs filling out her clinging sweater who offers to fetch my size in the pink lace thong from the stockroom at the lingerie shop at the mall, “Plus One?” my husband asks, waggling eye-brows.  The leggy blonde who runs her black lab in the dog park where we take Gia and Mia, our terriers.  “Plus One?” he asks, as we pass her, leading the dogs down the trail before our breakfast, but after dropping our son at the pre-school he attends twice a week so I can make an attempt at writing.  That morning, as all mornings, our son had tumbled from bed in his pjs looking every bit as scruffy-cute as when his father does.  What about the server at lunch who licked her full lips just a little, rubbing (accidentally?) my back with her torpedo breasts as she sat the platter of sizzling frijoles and beans before me, “careful, hon, that’s hot.”  She’d said.  She hadn’t even been out of earshot before my husband leaned in and took my hand, giving it a teasing squeeze, “Plus One material.”  All I felt was the material of my panties soaking up the wet of my inner core, as I excused myself to the bathroom.   

In the weeks leading up to my decision of a playmate for my birthday, I’m supercharged and perpetually horny to the sensuous details all around that normally get lost in the flow of everyday bill-paying, car-pooling, bottom-wiping that I literally feel myself shimmering inside my skin.  Can anyone else tell I’m perpetually ready to finger and frolic and hump like Gia and Mia in heat as I catch myself ogling the bouncing firm buttock of the children’s librarian where I return books for my son or the delicious imprint of a tack-hard nipple against the soft silk dress of an acquaintance we run into at the dry cleaner‘s while dropping off my husband‘s suitcoat?   

If no one else notices, my husband does and that’s what counts. A week after my request, my normally mortgage-obsessed husband comes home, frisky as the first few weeks I‘d met him, and hands me a package.  

“What’s this?” I ask as his arms playfully enfold my waist. 

“Just open.” He grins and continues grinning. 

I peel back layers of paper a woman in a gift shop has obviously fashioned and from the bed of crinkling tissue I take a sexy pair of filmy black lace garters. Like I’d long admired. He’d bought them for no reason, no special occasion, other than that they pleased me.  For no reason other than that soon they’d please him and our Plus One. This is the first out-of-the-blue, just-because present he’s bought since we were newlyweds. The artfulness, the forethought, was back in our fucking again, and we both thrived on it. The anticipation ignites us; with our son transfixed before a blaring cartoon clown on television, we slip down the hallway to lock ourselves in the bathroom.  The garters were barely on before we sprinted to an explosive finish.  

As we cup after our quickie, my ass resting bare on the cool vanity tiles, hubby leaning in to rub my back, I note something different again in the barometric pressure between us. Namely, suddenly we were scorching for each other again.  

“This little birthday present,” my husband breathed into my ear, flicking his tongue into the coral curve, “has got you all torked up, hasn’t it?“  My palm dipped in beneath the band of his jeans, petting Big Boy until he’s hard enough to jerk off and we‘re hot and heavy again before I break apart, panting like a marathoner, to check on our son (the cartoon glow falling across his sandy blonde hair, he hadn‘t even realized we‘d left the room).   

I made the reservation at the posh hotel twenty miles outside the city that normally we’d drive past without a thought as to our staying, even for an anniversary splurge.  It would be important for our Plus One to understand it would be a one-time occurrence with the three of us.  We’d play but I‘d call the shots and call it off at any time if it became too much or, conversely, wasn‘t enough to satisfy me. We’d wear protection, if little else.   

At times, washing dishes at the sink, sudsing the ketchup and honey from my son’s and husband’s plates I envisioned dressing our Plus One in a rubber cat suit and then the illicit crack of the whip across hubby’s back as I came watching them.  Others, it was something softer, her cotton candy frilly under things as I reached around to unclasp the spring of her bra, her plush purr as the hush of cups fell and her tits spilled, overflowing my palms, and I nipped the undercarriage of her breast and she laughed a feathery sound of the deeply casually pleased while hubby held us, one per arm, against the hard length of his body. All systems go.      

But two days before my birthday, an about-face.  I develop second-thoughts.  Cold fear grips my belly as I dressed après shower in the morning. What was I doing?  A housewife with a stable relationship and a son and the c-section scar slashing above my once taut and pierced navel to show for it?   

I could--maybe I should--call the friend of a friend of a friend I’d met casually at the gallery opening and call it off.  She would understand, I consoled myself, warming to the idea as I scrubbed my skin dry once more.  We’d gotten to talking over the sculpture-- she, too, had been a nude figure-study model, although the last time I’d shed my clothes for a class had been before the new millennium and judging by her Marilyn Monroe curves in the slinky wrap dress hers had been a lot more recent--  and I’d found both enough shared experience (she’d also flirted with majoring in English before switching to another field) and a sensuous mouth that I’d wanted to taste as I’d spotted her tipping her third glass of red.  She’d understand.  I could back out. Hubby would be disappointed after all of the build-up, after all of our romping before and because of, but he’d ultimately go along with whatever I waned, I knew-- this was the man who’d held my hair as I dealt with unbearable nausea in my first trimester.  He’d give me whatever I wanted-- or, conversely, something else for my birthday if that’s what I wanted. 

What was it I wanted?  What was it I was asking for?  Would it change us?  How much I’d already changed!  As a former visual artist turned stay-at-home mom, this was as naughty and alive as I’ve felt in I don’t-remember-how-long.  Now I was carrying around not just my son’s Social Security card and my cell phone full of friends’ numbers I seldom found time to call but a juicy secret that I’d grown to savor.  A reason when I’d gone to the mall to try on a $650 pair of Italian leather go-go boots we couldn’t afford because there was a fantasy about to unfold in the middle of my very usual life.  If I didn’t go chicken, if I didn’t call it off.    

Before stepping into my pink thong, I traced the fissure of my c-section scar and sighed into the mirror.  Did I want her to see this?  Was I comfortable enough to share my body not only with my husband, who has seen and experienced so much of what my physical self could once do and could do now, but also with this beautiful stranger?  What was it I wanted? 

I wanted the experience.  

Plus One brought me a rose (yellow, not crimson or scarlet as I’d have thought more symbolically appropriate, but still sweet) and (even better) a strap-on party hat with glitter and pink faux fur rimming the cardboard bottom.  It was hopelessly cheap and cheesy-- but pleasantly loosened up the initial tension of what-are-we-about-to-do-here and how-does-this-begin-anyway.  She flirtingly spread the string and tucked it under my chin, then leaned in first for a cheek kiss that smelled of honeysuckle and lipstick, then nipped in to my lips, quick and keen as a bee’s sting, as my husband popped a bottle of chilled champagne that he’d ordered from room service when we’d checked in with a carry on bag that clearly wasn’t luggage.   

The entire evening felt deliciously irresponsible, it felt tantalizingly decadent, it fell into place as our bodies across the embroidered footstool, spread-eagling the plush duvet, then onto the piled rugs, balanced on the bathroom vanity, pressed flesh-to-flesh against thin wallpapered walls, his foot banging the dresser drawer as on hands and knees her supple lips kept time to my bidding. And as it turns out, although a few years younger, Plus One had her own c-section scar crisscrossing her tummy like a skin zipper, along with a tattoo of a butterfly that I watched jiggle as she rode and was ridden.  Her body wasn’t perfect, but it was perfectly succulent, giving me courage about mine. 

As resident Birthday Girl, life had its privileges aplenty. The sense of relief-- of the body’s release-- was so intense that I didn’t want for anything in those hours.  My body and there’s followed each of my succeeding whims, my body and theirs did only and exactly as I commanded them-- my supplicants and sucklers, at once changlings and cherished.  

I had the lay of the land and orchestrated how I wanted to be laid.  I wanted more overtly, more verbally, than I ever had thought possible.   

“Reverse cowgirl in front of the open window while she pulls down her panties and tickles her pussy.”   “Yes, Birthday Girl. Immediately.” 

“Lean closer. Birthday Girl wants to suck your left titty while he licks me out.” “Yes, Birthday Girl.  How close?” 

 “Spread me open before the wall-to-wall bathroom mirror and trace my clit with your fingers while she kneels below and blows you. With lipstick to mark her prints on your dick.  Wait-- get the feather mask, I want her to wear it.”  “I always did reflect well, Birthday Girl. However did you know?” 

After seven years, you’ve learned to decipher each fidget and gasp.  For good or for bad, sex becomes a means to an end or a happy ending before the baby monitor sends off a peal of your child’s cry down the hall and you sigh and he finishes off, half asleep or you’re too tired when you return to the bedside from the emergency that wasn’t an emergency but you went just in case.   

But here, in the rented hotel suite, was a radical relearning of our body’s pain and pleasure threshold, here was another pair of eager ears, lips, legs, and breasts (yes, lusciously ample as I‘d wanted) to open us to our bodies’ core possibilities, for us to relearn the strange and succulent landscape of the capable but seldom practiced.   Here was an evening entirely devoted to frippery, to every frothy flight of fancy and fantasy I’d ever pondered but not dared ask for by name.  Here was an experience that took me out of my skin and yet every part of my skin was pulsating, supple, multi-sensory.   

Now in our own bed again across the city, Hubby and I lay, an entanglement of sweaty spent limbs and the familiarity of hip-to-hip together, my fingers snaking through the plush of his chest, but there’s something spicy and strangely new between us, recounting our experimental play deliciously snakes into new lovemaking. And not just the moves, the positions, but what we savored about my birthday present (him-- “it got me off, hearing her mouth make you moan like that,” me-- “when you bent me over doggie, cupping my breasts while I watched her finger herself as she watched us, that was so hot”), what we didn’t (he-- “at one point I was all elbows, like do I go in here or approach from there or rub your back or hers or what?’ me--  “you know how much I love nipple play, but I thought she was going to rip it off there at the end”).  

Most of all, my birthday tryst has made us more adventurous about expressing what we’d like to try together, far more than we’ve verbalized since vows and rings (he-- “that thing she did with her lips suctioning my balls-- my god! But I bet you could do it even better with that naughty mouth of yours,” me-- “a little more of two particular numerals could really get me going--let’s call it 6 and 9 lives.”)  Partaking of Plus One, we have reawakened a raw intimacy between us that had been lost in the minutiae of decidedly unsexy everyday decisions. 

And while it’s unlikely we’ll have another threesome soon-- I’m in my first trimester with our second child this summer and most mornings in the thrall of nausea--I’m more than open to the idea for the near future.  And more importantly, I’m more than open to any ideas that will pleasure the body--for his and an as-yet unchosen second Plus One and yes, especially, for my perfectly imperfect body. That’s the present that keeps on giving through the present.  Happy Birthday to me.     

John Holmes Extreme Facials