A Glorious Tease Ch. 01

Looking back now, I'm not sure how it ever turned so suddenly from casual flirtation to all-encompassing, overpowering lust. Everything had moved so slowly - imperceptibly even - for so long. I guess I can't really identify any exact moment of change in our relationship, but I can start by telling you when I first met her.

I was new to the city. I was new to the country, in fact, having just moved to the Netherlands from the United States. I had a three-year contract to work as a research associate on a big artificial intelligence project at the University of Amsterdam. I brought my family with me, my wife, Christie, and our three young children, one of which was a newborn. It was a difficult adjustment, and it wasn't until about two months after we got there that I felt I had the time to myself to start exercising again.

I love to exercise. Or at least, I love to stay fit. Three years of being overweight when I was a just entering puberty instilled that need in me. I entered high school as a short, chubby, immature dork. I discovered exercise by my sophomore year and finished high school as captain of the swim team. It was a nice change. Girls finally noticed me. I was still a dork, but now I was a lean, muscular dork and it's amazing what a girl will overlook when confronted with a nice body.

I'm 41 years old now, and it's a lot harder to maintain a nice body. I work out every day, and I still can't seem to find the bottom two abs in my six pack. But even so, I've managed to keep my wife interested, which is very important to me, because I'm a lot hornier than other men.

And Christie is a lot hornier than other women, truth be told, but with three young kids wearing her out daily, we're on about a slightly-more-than-once-a-week schedule for sex. That's great compared to some couples our age, even couples younger than us, but I'm more like a slightly-more-than-once-a-day kind of guy. So, I masturbate a lot. And I look at other woman a lot. And I masturbate about other women a lot. But I had never been willing to do anything that would break my wedding vows until I met Emma.

There are a lot of things you could point to as reasons why a loving husband might cheat on his wife. Some people would say it was a midlife crisis. After all, I did turn 40 only six months after I met Emma, before any of the more blatant flirting began. Some people might say it was the change in environment, that the move to a country foreign to me made me feel alienated and detached from my life before the big change.

And related to this, my professional life was much more separate from my family life in this new location: whereas in the USA Christie had known my colleagues, in the Netherlands Christie had met my colleagues only a handful of times, and they were all younger than me and wrapped up in very different lifestyles than the lifestyle of diaper changes and bottles.

And on top of all that, before the move I had been living a life of strict discipline stemming from a drug and alcohol abuse problem I had in my early twenties, and thirteen years of abstinence later, after thorough consideration with Christie, we had decided I could relax some of that self-restraint. This newfound freedom reawakened some of the hedonist in me - I had been so fucking good for so fucking long, now I was primed to follow feelings of pleasure wherever they might take me ...

So yeah, you could list any number of specific details about the timing and context of it, and say that's why it happened. But at the risk of seeming like a hopeless romantic, I think Emma would have been irresistible to me at any time in my life.

She was the reason.

I liked her an unreasonable amount even the first time I met her.

Emma worked at the gym. She showed me around my first day there, and it was really nice. Emma was local: a Dutch girl. Dutch girls are smoking hot. They are all tall with long legs and short skirts. They're all blondes or redheads, sometimes a mix of the two. I spent my first weeks in Amsterdam just dying to see a Dutch girl naked. I love a blonde pussy. I love a fiery-red pussy.

The Dutch women ride along the canals on bicycles wearing those short skirts, and some, wonderful percentage of them either don't care or just outright enjoy letting you see up those skirts as they pedal by. It's a glorious tease. I love a good tease. Which was perfect, because Emma loved a good tease as well.

At the time of writing this, I've never seen Emma in a skirt. I'd love to, but I've never even seen her outside of the gym. She always wears those loose, baggy workout pants at the gym. Her ass looks awesome in them: it presses out in all the right places, begging to be held, lifted, pulled back and parted to open her from behind. God, her ass!

But as I was saying, I've never seen Emma in the typically Dutch short skirt, and further, Emma's not a blonde or a redhead, and Emma's not very tall either. After all my lust for iconic Dutch women, I fell for someone not at all typical. Emma has really rich, healthy-looking brown hair, with some sun-bleached strands that look too natural to be bottled highlights. I wouldn't call her short at all, just shorter than the average Dutch woman. I'm a bit above average height for an American, a little below average compared to Dutch men (they are so goddamn tall here), and Emma is about half-a-head shorter than me.

I love the way she looks. She's slim and very toned, with perky breasts that would fill my cupped hands just perfectly. Her eyes kill me. Light blue-green, though the saturation of either color depends on the light. They look so good staring out of her olive complexion. And she's always staring. It's not a creepy stare, she's always just looking directly at me. She can hold eye-contact for days. I could go on, I'm infatuated with her, but you'll get to know her in good time.

And so Emma welcomed me to the gym, asking me if it was my first time there. She started in Dutch, but flipped to English in a flash when I said I didn't understand. I told her I was new to this gym, but that I had been weight-lifting and exercising for many years and that I knew how to use all the equipment safely. Everyone must have a tour their first time there, she insisted, and I wasn't complaining.

And this was the first thing that fascinated me about her. I felt a subtle vibe. I felt a mysterious chemistry. I felt attraction from her, but I couldn't put my finger on anything she did or said that signalled attraction. It was all business. She gave me the tour, politely, with warmth, but with no flirtation that I could identify. And still, I felt I was being flirted with.

I'm reminded of an interview I once read with the actor Christopher Walken. He said that sometimes during his scenes, in those pauses in his lines, he will intentionally, as a part of his craft, ask in his mind what the other actor thinks of his hair. So for example, he's about to kill Dennis Hopper in True Romance, and he's questioning him first, considering torture, and in a pause as he looks at his victim, he asks, in his head "what do you think of my hair?" I think he called it subtext, I call it fucking fantastic. Emma might be like that.

Maybe it was Emma's internal dialogue that I was picking up on, that vibe. Maybe that silent, direct look was her, internally, telling me that she was a raging inferno of sexual passion, and that she might just unleash that blaze on me if the moment took her. I wanted that moment. Fuck, I wanted that moment.

Over the course of a year, with me there every morning working out, we developed a relationship somewhere between acquaintances and friends. We had time to chat here and there. She would sit a minute and watch me do deadlifts, asking how my work was going. I'd pause before leaving the gym to ask about her dance class, or to wish her luck on her motorcycle exam. I learned she was a thrill seeker.

She was about to get her motorcycle license and had already identified a Ducati monster as her iron horse. She said the lines were feminine, and the sound was wonderful. I thought to myself that the sound of a motorcycle translates directly to how it feels between a woman's legs. I'd love to see her hit the throttle on that thing. Naked, with me holding her from behind... She was also into skydiving and bungee jumping. Not all the time, but any chance she got, really.

She loved to travel, and spent three weeks on safari in Africa at the end of that first summer that I was in Amsterdam. She was cool. She was this cool chick who was hot, and open, and friendly, and who I could never quite believe was really flirting with me. Who I could never quite be certain was actually flirting with me. But I couldn't shake the feeling, and I didn't want to. We were flirting.

Emma had a boyfriend, but we never really talked about him.

One day, about three months after I had started working out at her gym, I told her I was married. It should have been more awkward than it was, because I kind of made a big deal out of it, like it was some sort of confession.

Pulling her aside, just before I left, I told her I felt I had to tell her something, and that I was embarrassed. I said that for three months, as we'd been chatting, I had never once mentioned my family, and now I felt silly and kind of guilty, like I was trying to hide something. I kind of pushed the words all out in a row, rehearsed. I told her I was married, and that I just needed her to know it so I wouldn't feel like I was hiding it from her.

I wasn't making a pass at her. I was actually just being honest - I did feel silly and guilty that I had never mentioned my wife and kids in three months of conversations.

She seemed a little puzzled, and asked me if she had done anything to make me think she was coming on to me. And of course she hadn't.

"Only in my fantasies." I said. Happy with my response.

She laughed mildly. I said it was all no big deal and that I really felt silly saying something now, but I just needed to say it for my own comfort. I left feeling that maybe things would be a little awkward the next time I saw her.

But really, nothing changed that day.

*****

Months later, the flirting was real, even if I was still just as unsure as ever where that vibe was coming from. It was friendship flirting, but the vibe was still hot, pulsing sex.

And then suddenly I was joking about her sending me a naked picture.

It all had progressed so naturally. It was just about a bikini picture when the joke started. We were at the front of the gym where her desk was, and she was showing me a couple of pictures on her Facebook page. There were some from her trip to Africa, and I just wondered aloud if there were any bikini pictures.

"There might be a couple, but I'm not showing you those." And suddenly I was excited.

"Why not?"

She was coy. I could feel it. She wanted to tease me a bit about being married.

"You shouldn't be looking at any bikini pictures, and you know it."

And suddenly that option was on the table.

There was this movie she kept telling me to check out, but after I couldn't find a version with English subtitles, I had given up on it. She joked that it was my homework assignment, and at some point I joked back that if I ever remembered to watch it, I'd write a report and my reward should be getting to look at one of her bikini pictures. It was that innocent, and she laughed it off. And it didn't come up again for a while more, but the next time it did, I was all over it.

"Have you watched the movie yet?" she asked.

"Are you prepared to send me a picture of yourself in a bikini" I questioned in return.

"Ok, Ok, I won't ask again." I could see a little exhilaration this time. I was being more aggressive and she liked it.

And of course, one day she asked about the movie again. She had said she wouldn't, but I knew she would, and I was ready, and confident. She knew what my response would be. She wanted my response. So this time I held back just a little.

"I know I should, I keep meaning too but I can't find a version with English subtitles."

"I'll send you the link."

She had found a version with English subtitles. She would need my email address.

I had wanted to be able to email her for so long, but it made me nervous. My email was often left open on my computer at home; what if Christie happened to see a playful email from a woman she had never heard of?

I wrote down my email address on a piece of paper. There was a lump in my throat as I did.

When she sent me the link, I couldn't resist making a big play for the picture. I wanted to see more of her so badly. Her ass looked so good in those baggy pants, and the tight, shirts with low necklines drove me wild, but I wanted to see more of her skin. I wanted to be able to imagine running my tongue along her lower belly, kissing her bare thighs. I wanted to see her skin and I wanted her to want me to see her skin.

I wanted her to want me to masturbate about her, and I wanted her to do something that showed that she wanted me to masturbate about her. I wanted her to intentionally, with full understanding, help make my fantasizing about sex with her that much more accurate... more intense. To be just slightly involved in it, by sending me the picture. I replied to her email:

Please read the following instructions to avoid spam filters when emailing links to file-sharing websites. This is an automated message.

The University of Amsterdam discourages proliferation of pirated files. However, if an email with a link to a file-sharing website also contained a sexy image of the sender, the spam filters will not be able to deny the recipient such an intense pleasure. Therefore please attach a picture of yourself in a very small bikini, lingerie, or possibly wearing a wet t-shirt or reclining in a bubble-bath to ensure that your email passes our filters. Full nudity is also accepted, and strongly encouraged...

Failure to comply may result in the intended recipient never seeing that great movie you want him to see.

It was bold. Yes, it should have been in Dutch, but I don't speak Dutch and writing it in English made the joke more self-deprecating. But it was so much more than a joke about a bikini picture. It insinuated that I would pleasure myself while looking at the picture, and it asked for more than just a bikini, with emphasis on sexy. It was a large step beyond any flirting we had engaged in before, and I was nervous about both her reaction, and about how far I was willing to go in my flirtation with her. It was blatant. It would make Christie furious if she found out.

It was funny, Emma would like that. Could it just be considered funny?

I sent it.

She replied with a big smiley face, but no picture. That was enough to fill me with giddiness. She hadn't slapped me down. She liked it. It was funny, but it was heavily flirtatious. We were at a new level and she was enjoying being there.

The next time I saw her at the gym she told me that she had actually looked through a bunch of her pictures to find one to send. She had been so close, but had held back. But telling me that, it was pretty much as flirtatious as sending a picture. Now she had admitted she wanted to. She admitted she wanted me lusting over a sexy picture of her. And so now it would be that much easier for me to keep asking her for it. And I did.

And eventually she asked me what she would get in return.

She was wearing her typical baggy workout pants, but with a form-fitting black shirt that had a low neckline so that the tops of her breasts spilled out a bit when she leaned forward. And she was leaning forward now, standing over me as I stretched on the floor.

I laughed, turning my face down again to avoid her catching me drooling over her cleavage. I said I was sure she didn't want a dick-pic. And before she answered I went on.

"You would get the satisfaction of knowing that you had given me very intense pleasure..." I looked back up at her, trying to match how direct she always was, and dared to say more. "...Intense pleasure while looking at that picture, in private.' I couldn't stop my quirky, half-embarrassed, half-confident, all-horny smile from surfacing, but I think she liked it.

"What would you want?" I asked in response to her silence, surprised at myself that I hadn't asked right away. The phone on her desk rang.

"Saved by the bell," she said, and walked away.

*****

I had been dying to kiss her, to touch her for so long, when she told me her birthday was coming up.

"That will be a good excuse to finally kiss you." I said.

"You could do that." She said back, immediately.

It's no big deal really. The Dutch greet family and close friends with three kisses, on alternate cheeks, and it's about as sexy as a handshake. But it would be a hell of a lot sexier between her and me. We had never touched at that point, ever. Not at all. Ok, maybe a shoulder pat once, I guess, but I think that was it.

But if I got a chance to kiss her cheeks, I was going to linger. I would put my hands on her hips. I would inhale her. I would probably get hard, I knew.

She was absent for five days straight around her birthday, taking a small vacation. I missed her terribly at my morning gym sessions. After two days, I e-mailed her, just to be in touch. Just to confirm again that I was going to kiss her. I couldn't wait to kiss her:

Hi Emma, I hope you have wonderful birthday!

x Mike

It was nothing. Short and lame. Needy almost, I felt embarrassed about it. But the little x was there to remind her: I was coming for that kiss

It was all about how she replied, and it couldn't have been better:

Thanks Mike, see you Tuesday!

X Emma

It took my breath away. A capital X!! She had held down that shift key to give me the big X (or autocorrect had made it capital, but fuck that, it was her intention). She had made it capital. She wanted a big kiss! My head was spinning. I couldn't stop thinking about it.

I was in the shower when I had an especially amazing masturbation session about her. It was unusual for me, because my masturbation fantasies are almost always about a girl getting me off: fucking, or a girl using her mouth or her tits or her hands or all of the above on me. But this was about me getting Emma off. And I came so hard. This difference fascinated me. I wanted to share the fantasy with her.

*****

When Emma returned to work I got my three Dutch kisses, and they were very nice. And I could tell they were very nice for her too. But they were fast and public. I wanted the big kiss but there was no privacy. I told her so.

"I wanted to kiss you on the lips."

"But you didn't have the balls?" Harsh, she was teasing me.

"I didn't have the privacy." That gave her pause. I went on:

"Do you have the balls to follow me into the bathroom?" The bathroom in the gym was unisex, with a common sink area, and then separate stalls for men and woman. We had never been alone in that bathroom before.

"No, I'm not brave enough." For the first time since I had known her, she seemed timid. For just that second, she was vulnerable and scared. But as always, direct and honest. She wanted that kiss, but it seemed like it was a dangerous thing to do. I let it go. I tried to finish my work-out with a half hard-on pushing against my thigh.

I knew for sure now that I turned this woman on. She was lusting for me even as I was lusting for her. But she was still more measured than me, more reserved, more skittish. She was staying a little more "good" than I was. She had a boyfriend. I was married. This was fun, but it was not something she wanted to engage in with complete abandon. I liked that. I wasn't that much beyond where she was at that point. At that point, the kiss was all I wanted.