Three Sides of the Coin (Catherine I) (5 page)

             
Steven sat in a chair looking out over the lake, with egrets and hawks swirling about, as Catherine and their daughter (In for a second opinion, which Steven always knew would approach Xerox level correlation with Catherine's, so why did she bother?) circulated through the rest of the house opening cabinets, discussing where everything would go.  Steven would get one fairly large closet, as long as Catherine controlled all the others.  Closets were to women looking for houses what nuggets were for gold miners, enjoyed for their beauty, twirled through their fingers, letting the light catch and dazzle the eye.   Catherine insisted he look at the garage for tool storage and investigate the yard for whatever man joy he could find to embrace there.   But when she found him sitting in the chair looking at the birds, he stunned her with his opinion that he saw himself living in this house.   For Steven was not a man prone to ESP or beliefs in ghosts or spirits.  The closest that he ever got to believing in previous lives was a sense that his ability to speak awkwardly and place stones in lovely patterns with one try, might come from him once being a German stone mason.   People found his word choices mildly amusing and his stone work a clever, but fairly worthless skill.   So he amended his belief to being a fairly poor German stonemason in a previous lifetime.

             
So his pronouncement went straight to Catherine's heart.   Steven never stopped being a source of joy to her, from the moment she first laid eyes on his hands in the photograph, to the first meeting where he was funnier than she had hoped and better looking.  But, my oh my, better with those large hands than she had imagined.  And his cleverness with his tongue made him more valuable yet.  We will let the previous statements about his awkward skill with word choice sink in, along with what she was hoping for with his large hands, to allow the reader time to appreciate what lingual skills we are talking about here.   But all of that aside, Steven's statement here set a cascade of actions that would lead to the purchase of this house being 1.) Enacted and 2.) Blamed, in a nice way, on him.

             
For his part, Steven never imagined the owner would come down in price, as this was the start of a huge home buying binge for the entire country, no more frenetic than here in Arizona.   And even if he did, he never imagined the Bank would be willing to loan them the money.  The house was more than eight times more expensive than the last one they bought, and even with inflation, more than four times what their old house could possibly be worth, even in this crazy market.   But somehow, Catherine, through dint of desire and creativity pulled off the stunt and he found himself signing and initialing endless pages.   

             
The next phase was to finish the previous house, where he found himself embroiled in each night after his job, working on tasks and then moving a little bit of stuff from one house to the other.  It turned out that he and designer Catherine had started seventeen different projects in the Phoenix house that never quite got finished before Catherine was onto the next design.  Some were little touch ups to draw to a close, but others were much more difficult to complete.   But with weekends and late nights Steven finally brought all the loose ends together and as he finished the last job, he and Catherine looked around and decided that the design of that house had been outstanding.  Steven was wistful, seeing the completed house for the first time after ten or twelve years in the house, but Catherine was thinking, "Thank God we're done.  I never really liked the place."

             
They placed it on the market, and being what it was at the time, it sold on the first day and that was with six different people bidding the price up. 

             
If Steven had illusions that the workload would be any different on the new house 1.) He wasn't paying any attention, and 2.) They didn't last very long.   At one point he griped to Catherine that he didn't understand why she bought this particular house because she kept throwing it away.  They became known regulars at the dump as they took sheetrock and old cabinets, rotted boards, miss-colored rocks and stones and portions of walls to the landfill.   It was this last piece of design that was most interesting.  At one point Catherine flung her arms to the wall and said, "You see those windows there?"  When he said, "There are no windows there."  Her reply was, "Exactly!  Let's do something about that."   That led to seven, (count them, seven!) four foot by eight foot double paned windows being installed.  Two of them were in place of a masonry wall (no small task there).  And three of them were twelve feet off the ground on the east side of the house, where there was no room for a scaffold and barely enough room for a ladder.  And lest the reader believe that Catherine and Steven were capable of hiring an outside contractor to do such work, that was not the case.   In fact, it is widely believed that if Catherine thought it all possible, she would have built a kiln in the backyard and would have blown the glass plate and cast the extruded metal and would have built the windows herself.   But to her credit, she felt that a bit too much to ask.

             
But it was Catherine, the infinite fount of design ideas, who was most unhappy with the pace of the Lake House (as she began to call it) rebuilding.  The house was a huge canvas and she had ideas that knew no bounds.  But the house ate up almost all of their discretionary income.  And with Steven gone so much, she knew she would have to find a way to grow their income, or be patient with the slow dribble of extra funds to reshape the house.   But patience was not her best feature.

             
It took a while for Steven to determine what he loved most about her; mostly because there were so many things.  But eventually he decided that he loved the fact that she was a happy person.   This might seem trivial in all the other things about this beautiful woman, but it wasn't.  In fact, it was the essence of her.   Her first husband, Richard the Dick, had accused her of "Being happy to see the sun come up."  He did not mean it as a compliment.   Steven was not prone to get angry, but when he heard this he was upset at the Dick.  First, he loved the fact that she would forever enjoy the little things in life.   And second, he thought it would be a tragedy if someone would extinguish that joy in another human.   It was like imagining the life fading slowly from the eyes of a dying human.  How sad.  And how sad that people had to be so irrationally angry at the world that joy was a thing to be slandered rather than embraced, or, at least envied.

             
So Steven was anxious when she was unhappy.   And perhaps she wasn't so much unhappy as unfulfilled.  She was a designer, and their financial situation was just so that she was like a bird in a cage, unable to unfurl her wings and take off.  He had enough design sense to realize what an elegant and beautiful house she was designing.   And he knew it bothered her not to see the pieces coming together faster.   He saw her pride in how well the Phoenix house turned out, but it, too, was a delayed gratification.    The Lake House meant a whole lot more to her he knew, and as a result, it hurt him to know that the unfinished home they lived in was a constant reminder of what would, some far off day, be.

             
It was his desire to see her happy forever, but Catherine believed in self determinism.   For her, all people possessed the power to make themselves happy or unhappy.  This did not forbid her from being upset with selfish people, and this did not seem a conflict in her philosophy.    Her motto in this regard was, "We do not control the wind, but it is up to us to trim the sails."   So with an occasional fist to an angry wind, she set about sailing herself about her world.   Not that she didn't appreciate, and for that matter, take advantage of Steven's efforts to keep her happy; and not that she didn't deliberately do things that she thought would make people, (only those she cared about), happy, but she treated those acts like she would any other act of charity.  It was something she would do out of the goodness of her feelings, but never as an obligation.   She would contribute to a worthy cause, but nobody better even think about taxing her to give to that same charity. 

             
This difference about the two of them set up an interesting dynamic that spilled over into their sex life as well.   Steven was raised a good Catholic, with the Blessed Virgin Mary being a near deity and the very idea of letting a woman coming to harm, leave alone doing harm to a woman was a sacrilege.   Catholics being prodigious producers of children, (he was fourth of a litter of six); it set up a confusing matrix of ideas.  Sex was good.  But doing sex to a woman was a secret thing, and they needed to be treated like virgins, and indeed could on rare occasion, give virgin birth.  It is little wonder that he was more than happy to let women take the lead with sex.  If they took the lead, then there would be no question that it was their desire leading the way and not his obnoxious sex drive that was interfering with her perfectly pure world.   As one could imagine, in his early sexual awareness years, this concept did not win over many of the fair sex who were equally unsure of themselves.  So as a result, he was well into college before his own virginity was sent packing.   In fact, many mothers of his high school dates sensed his reticence and encouraged the relationship.   It was likely no worse indictment could put cold water on a teenage boy's sexual prospects than the approval from a girl's mother.

             
But as girls became women and their curiosity of the bad boy dating scene was assuaged, Steven's style became more in vogue.    In this respect, Steven fared well and his willingness to place women on a pedestal was not only appreciated, but encouraged.   A sense of enjoying women's pleasure made him a connoisseur of the cunnilingus art form.    She always came first. 

             
Other things in the mental mix here probably distorted his view on sex, but which of us came unscathed through that psycho-physical transformation?  It was not like our parents were on top of things here.  For them, it was likely that if we survived the teenage years without becoming deviants, unwed parents, drug addled or some combination thereof, then a major accomplishment could be claimed.   For Steven, the first, (hand delivered) orgasm was such sweet pain, it was hard for him not to associate the Catholic induced feeling of guilt about sex with a mixture of pain and pleasure.   And if he could be bound for such events, then he would be free to enjoy them fully.   So his early fantasies involved women binding him before wrenching a reluctant orgasm out of the good boy.  The pleasurable guilt of having an orgasm by himself did nothing for removing either conflict from his mind.

             
But time heals all wounds and by the time he and Catherine had met, he was fully able to perform without being hogtied first.  But that didn't mean he didn't think it just might be fun sometime, but it is certainly not something that one brings up to someone so self assured and confident as Catherine.  

             
There was nothing in her background to guide her to a sexual deviancy, as any good psychologist would be able to tell you.  No parental abuse, either physical or emotional; no Catholic or Jewish guilt, only good Protestant (Not even an evangelistic twinge) upbringing; no fervor of feminism nor anti-feminist rants or even exposures to any of these.   For all practical purposes, Catherine was raised perfectly.   She neither rushed into sex, nor feared it.  In fact, perhaps it was this that made Catherine special.  For her, sex was no less important than eating, or sleeping, nor more so. 

             
In fact, this relaxed openness on her part contrasted with the intensity that he felt.   Where she thought little about sex until it was time for a fill up, he like many males, seemed to think about it all the time.   With two kids and a full time job, and despite his willingness to take a share of the workload, she was typically exhausted at the end of the day.  As a consequence, sex was eventually a once or twice a week thing for them.   And while Steven could have used a more frequent topping off, it was anathema to his psyche to push himself on to her and so a couple of times a week would find him stealthily rubbing his own.  

             
In his fantasy, he would wait until her breathing became slow and heavy, occasionally with an unladylike snore.   Then he would slip his hand down and slide his underwear down until it supported his cock and balls, almost binding him.  He would gently stroke with one hand, the other holding the covers up, so not as to stain the sheets when he would come.  Meanwhile he cautiously listened for her breathing to change.  It she started with her own snores on occasion, waking herself up into that gray area between sleep and wakefulness, he'd freeze, hand on his penis, and he'd wait as her subconscious mind searched the room for the source of her sleep interruption.  Then with a blush of embarrassment, realize that it was only herself, she would relax and fall back in slumber's arms.   He would then slowly start the strokes again, hoping to achieve that exquisite and sharp painful pleasure of a rush of semen flowing out and over his hand, wanting to stop the sharpness, but loving, at the same time the thrill, quivering and stroking, the lubricant and his soft hand coxing just as little bit more pleasure out from underneath the cloak of intense sensitivity.   Then, fearing the shame of being discovered from the detective Catherine, he would creep to the bathroom and wipe himself dry, taking care to not stain his underwear or the sheets.

   But in his fantasy, it never got that far.
  There, lost in the dash to finish line, he misses the change in the cadence of her breathing and suddenly, she has the light on and is staring at him in anger.   Fearful, he freezes as she surveys, calculates, and decides on a plan.  "What are you doing?"  cannot be well answered and as he stumbles with apologizes and blushes deep pink, she orders him to show her.  Despite his reticence, she overwhelms his shame with her orders and he strokes himself.  She teases and taunts him for his weakness.  "A real man would force himself on me and have his way with me.  A real man wouldn't jerk himself off.   A real man would never let his wife order him to jerk off for her amusement.   I like this.  No mess for me.  Do you eat your cum?  Of course, you do.  No man would do that.   Keep tugging on your little thing and when you cum you will beg to let me allow you to eat your own cum.  That's it.  Yes, look at all that mess.  Now beg.  Harder, or I'll never let you cum again.  Much better.  Here, let me put the first gob in your mouth.  That's a good boy.   Maybe this will be the only way I'll let you cum.  Maybe I'll make you beg to eat your cum out of me each time.  I'll laugh at you for being such a pussy to beg to eat cum.  That's right, pussy.  Keep eating that slimy stuff.   I hope it is bitter and you gag a bit on it.  It's better if you hate it.  It's more humiliating if you beg to do something you hate.   From now on, whenever you get the urge to cum, you'll wake me up.  You'll beg like a little pussy to jerk off for me and eat your own."