Reacquainted Pt. 01

"Uh huh."

"Even though we both know it's my turn?"

"Sure."

"Ok, I owe you a donut. Thanks, man."

Theo wrote up the report. He investigated the incident. He canvassed neighbors. He checked with body shops, junkyards. He sniffed around the local ERs and doc-in-the- boxes on the off-chance that the hit-and-runner was himself hurt. He never got a break, and he never did find out who done it. Early one evening, three weeks after the incident, he called Jennifer Ludlow—he'd memorized her number—to report his lack of progress. She picked up her phone on the third ring.

"Hello?"

"Miss Ludlow?"

"Speaking."

"This is Officer Sutcliffe..."

"Um, sorry, who?"

Theo had had very little experience with women up to this point in his life, but even he knew this last was not promising. "Officer Sutcliffe, ma'am? My partner and I responded when you were hit...um...in your car?"

"Oh, right. I'm sorry. Um, were you the tall one, or..."

"Yes, ma'am, I'm the tall one."

"Oh, good. That might not have been...never mind. What's going on? Did you find the creep who totaled my car?"

"No, ma'am. I'm sorry, but we haven't. We'll keep the file open, but I wanted to let you know it doesn't look good. I don't know where you are with your insurance company, but you might just want to put in the claim and get what you can. Even if we somehow find the guy, we might not be able to prove it, and he probably doesn't have insurance anyway, so, um..."

"And you called to tell me this? To report, like, total failure?" Theo winced. "I mean, thanks, I guess."

"No...uh, that's not actually why I called."

"Oh?"

"No, er..." Theo decided that he was going down in flames and had absolutely nothing to lose. Perversely that made his next question easier to ask. "Would you like to have dinner with me?"

Silence. Theo didn't think she'd hung up. Then: "Um...you're asking me out?"

"Yes."

"So telling me that you couldn't find the guys who smashed my car, was that...uh...small talk or something?"

"No, no. I mean, I needed to tell you that too."

"Not much of a line, is it?"

"Ma'am?"

"A pick-up line, officer; I mean, do you get a lot of women to go out with you by telling them you're no good at your job?"

Theo supposed he deserved that. "I'm sorry, ma'am, I just...have a nice..."

"Wait, wait. Now I'm sorry. That came out harsher than I meant it to. But...I mean, seriously; do you often...um...date women you've met...professionally." That sounded all kinds of wrong. "I mean...I don't mean hookers or...shit,shoot!"

"I understood you, ma'am. No, I don't. Or I never have...um...asked a lady out like this."

Jen found herself smiling. The whole situation was goofy, but she'd liked that he'd said "lady." And she didn't have much going in the way of a social life. She tried to bring the cop's face to mind. He was kind of cute, right?

"You're sure you're the tall one?"

3.

"Within a month we were dating, and within a year we were married. We're what, 28?" Mags nodded, but said nothing. "So Theo and I have been together for almost 5 years. Wow!": this last more to herself than to the woman sitting across from her. Jen looked up. Mags was silent, still, and attentive. Jen resisted an urge to look at her watch. She'd been promised half-an-hour. "Here's where I have to get a bit...personal. Please let me know if I'm making you uncomfortable."

Magnolia smiled at that. Less than a week ago, a local orthodontist had paid her an absurd amount of money to put a diaper on him, and then to paddle his ass as a punishment for wetting it. She doubted that pretty little Jen Ludlow-Sutcliff had the vocabulary to make her uncomfortable, much less the life experience.

Jen read the smile as permission to continue. She took a breath: "Theo and I were both virgins on our wedding night. I guess that's a little weird in this day and age." She paused, wondering how much context Mags would need to advise or help her, then she continued: "It wasn't as if either of us had planned it that way; at least, I hadn't. Maybe Theo did, a little; his family is pretty religious, but maybe not. I never asked, so I don't know. Anyway the point is that we learned everything we know about sex from each other." Another pause; Jen waited for some kind of comment. None came, so she soldiered on.

"I love Theo, and I have no doubt that he loves me. I...well, I love sex with my husband. He feels wonderful...um...inside me. Sometimes I...climax, and sometimes not. He always does, of course. And if he does it before I do, he touches and kisses me while I...oh, you know: take care of myself. God, this is strange. I've never talked with anybody about this before. I'm making it all sound kind of clinical.

Now Mags did speak: "Not at all. You don't have much of a sexual vocabulary, I suppose, but all in all you sound like a somewhat inexperienced woman who loves, and enjoys sex with, the man she married."

"Thank you, I guess. That's pretty much what I am."

"So what's the problem?"

Jen frowned a little, as she thought about how to respond. "That's part of my...I mean, I'm not even sure there is a problem. Maybe I should start by saying that we don't seem to...do some of the things other couples do, I think. Like oral sex: I tried taking Theo's...you know...in my mouth once, but I might have done it wrong, or maybe it just made him uncomfortable. And I don't really feel good about him licking me down there either. Frankly I think I'm a little self-conscious about the smell. Anyway, some of my girlfriends talk about it like it's really terrific; they'd rather receive than give, I think, but we don't talk about it much, and I don't really miss it, since I've never had it."

"How often do you have sex?"

"Oh, depending on his watch schedule, three or four or five times a week. We really do enjoy it."

"Always in the same position?

"Mostly. Sometimes Theo likes it when I get on top, but I like it better when he is. He's...that's to say his...um...it's kind of thick, I guess. I mean I don't have much to compare it to, but it can hurt a little when I ride him."

"Do you use birth control?"

"Condoms at first, but then I got on the pill. Skin on skin just feels better. And it's easier for me to...that's to say I'm...um...wetter, when it's just him."

Magnolia tried surreptitiously to check the time on her cell phone. She had errands to do: bank, dry-cleaning, post office, pharmacy. It all had to get done, but none of it was urgent. She had imposed the half-hour limit on her old classmate on the assumption that Jen would do the usual more-or-less discrete prodding about the local scene, and Mag's life as a dom, etc. She hadn't expected the somewhat tentative personal/sexual biography, particularly from a woman whom Mags remembered as confident and mature, if a little square. Now she found herself intrigued, not by the narrative itself, which was ordinary enough to border on cliché, but by why Jen was trotting it out. Where was she going with all this?

Jen had caught her glancing at the phone: "I'm sorry, Mags. Do you need to go?"

"Forgive me for a minute. Let me send a quick text...there. I've just bought myself a little more time. Please continue."

Surprised, but pleased to find her time limit extended, Jen continued: "Anyhow, like I said, I'm happy...that's to saywe'rehappy with our sex life, limited as...well, as some people might consider it. At least I thought we were happy..."

"Until..." prompted Mags.

"Well, until I found my husband's porn stash."

"Ah." Mags couldn't help being a little disappointed. "Most men have one, you know. It's not unusual, and it doesn't necessarily mean he's not perfectly happy with what's on offer at home."

"Oh, I know that." said Jen. She said it quite casually, and once again, Mags was intrigued, without knowing exactly why. What was so compelling about this pleasant woman and her cookie-cutter sexuality? "It wasn't the fact of the stuff that troubled me," continued her former classmate, "it was the stuff itself."

Mags: "I see. What kind of stuff are we talking about here?"

Jen: "That's why I thought you might...I mean it's not exactly what you, or what I kind of imagined that...but maybe...I don't know."

4.

Theo had another week on Second Shift: 3:00 pm-1:00 am. Jen being a 9-to-5-er (Office Manager for a small firm which developed industrial real estate), Second was her least favorite. When Theo worked First, their schedules meshed almost perfectly, and even when he worked Third, they usually managed to hook up for an evening meal—dinner for her, breakfast for him—and the occasional quickie. But Second just sucked; he was asleep when she left, and she was asleep when he came home. So for the two weeks out of every seven that her husband was on the Terrible Two, she spent her evenings seeing friends, catching up on projects around the house, or just puttering.

It had been toward the end of last year. A friend of a friend was getting married. The bride had gone to elementary school with Jen. Did she happen to have any old pictures, class photos, anything? Jen had said she'd look, and one evening, after goosing the heat a bit, she headed up to the attic to hunt for a box.

Jen and Theo had married young, and neither of them had had much in the way of stuff, so their attic, a large, low-ceilinged room lit by dormer windows during the day and a couple of bare bulbs at night, was not particularly crowded. What was there—a few pieces of redundant furniture, boxes with household papers, a few boxes of books (hers) and old jazz lps (his)—tended to hug the walls. Access to the attic was through a trap door in the guest bedroom, and by means of a drop down ladder attached to the attic floor. On the night in question, Jen had headed up into the attic, turned on the light and made for a row of file boxes along the back wall. She'd intended to label the wretched things, but kept forgetting, so now she had to hunt through tax forms, some professional files, a few of their less fortunate wedding presents, the books and the records, before she found the box with the...

Her eye was drawn to a stack of two file boxes she hadn't remembered seeing before. They were half hidden under a drop cloth and some painting supplies. She hadn't put them there, so they must be Theo's. None of her business, really, but what was with the painting supplies? They'd been in the house for a little less than two years, and while they had talked vaguely about painting here or papering there, they hadn't made any definite plans. She didn't give it much thought. She just wandered over, put the drop cloth and roller pans on the floor, and lifted the lid of the first box.

5.

"It was full of dvds, and what looked like home-burnt cds in little envelops and colored plastic cases. At first, I thought they were just movies and music. I saw titles likeBatman, Iron Man, The Avengers, Spiderman,maybe. I pulled one out—I think it wasSuperman, or maybeSupergirl, I don't remember. Anyway, the picture looked...off. I mean there was this muscular guy—soSuperman, I guess—in the blue tights, with his hands on his hips and what not, but instead of a big "S" across his chest, he had an "X." So it was porn—I mean obviously, right;Supermanporn,Batmanporn, and all the rest of it. I do know how they don't get their butts sued off. Anyway, I took a couple of the little home-burnt things and played them on my laptop. Andtheywere...I don't know how to describe it, like lower-rent versions of the same thing: women (mostly) in colorful costumes and masks, and—forgive me, but this is what made me think of you, because I had just read that interview in "Art House"—some of the women were tied up, and being...um...done by guys in the mouth, or from behind, or maybe even...all the way behind. But in some it was men being tied up, and this one guy was being whipped by this girl in lingerie and cat-ears, and his...his penis was in this kind of cage. I...don't know. I didn't know exactly what to do. I felt like I was supposed to feel one way: maybe outraged or angry or...who knows? But I didn't. I felt a little sad, I think; maybe a little curious..."

Mags said: "Were you at all turned on by anything you saw?"

"Not then, really. Or maybe I should say 'not yet.' It sort of blew my mind, some of what was...being done. But I wasn't repulsed or anything either. I just...felt like I didn't have a mechanism, or a context, or...you know what it was like?"

Mags waited.

"It was like being handed the book that everybody's been reading and urging you to read, but the copy you've just been given is in Russian, or Chinese or some language with a completely different alphabet, and you can't even begin to...like there's no way in."

"What was in the second box?" asked Magnolia. Jen looked up into the other woman's face. Mags' expression, like her voice, was calm and interested. She wasn't smiling, and for that Jen was profoundly grateful. Her companion didn't seem to be either dismissing or patronizing her.

"Magazines mostly; some comic books, but not titles I recognized. I mean I don't know much about comic books, but I didn't seeSupermanorSpidermanor any of the famous ones. There were somePlayboys, somePenthouse, and some other less...likeHigh Societywas one title, and I think there were a couple calledOuiandChic. And there were some...kind of paperback comic novels, and some of those looked like they were from Europe. I'm pretty sure one was in Italian, or maybe Portuguese..."

"And did they deal with the same kind of comic book content: people in costumes and masks and what not?"

"Yeah, same stuff. The magazines would usually have a photo set on some kind of superhero theme, or maybe they reviewed a video or interviewed the porno actress playing Batgirl or Catgirl or whatever."

"How much of it did you look at?"

"Over the course of that week, I probably watched parts of a few of the dvds—I watched theSupermanone pretty much all the way through—and a bunch of the shorter clips. And I read a couple of the comics and graphic novels, I guess you'd call them; the ones that were in English, anyhow."

"Has Beans" was beginning to fill up, as the first of the after-work crowd drifted in for their evening lattes. Mags looked around: "How about we walk over to the park, and maybe stroll along part of the path around the golf course? We'll have some shade before the sun gets too low."

Jen looked up. Her thoughts had turned inward as she re-visited her discovery of the boxes and her response to them. "Um, sure, that sounds nice, but do you have the time? I mean, I thought you had to be someplace..."

"To tell you the truth, I said that to give myself an out. I'd expected to be...well perhaps I should say that I didn't expect this conversation to...go in the direction its going."

6.

The day was warm, but not unpleasantly so, and the shade helped. The two women wandered along, mostly oblivious to the stares they received from the occasional passing jogger or dog-walker. They made quite a sight. Two beauties: one with dark hair and pale skin, tall and lean, leggy but curvy, with a bosom like the figurehead of a ship, the other honey-blonde, smaller and slighter, with the quick and athletic stride necessary to keep pace with her taller companion's graceful lope. Popular with the exercise crowd, the path along which they wandered was crowded in the morning, but now, as the sun glided between scattered clouds low in the west, the two women had long stretches of their walk to themselves.

Mags asked: "So you watched a few of the discs. How was that? Or perhaps I should begin by asking if you've ever watched porn before."

Jen shrugged: "I've seen some, mostly in college. These days, with the internet, it's tough to avoid. As to quality: I mean who knows? The smaller clips ranged from cheesy Halloween costumes and painted paper backgrounds to...I don't know. Some of them looked pretty good; I mean well lit, money spent on costumes and...equipment. Like the little cage the guy's...penis was in. I mean that couldn't have been re-purposed, right? That's a thing, isn't it?"

"Sure. It's called a chastity cage, or sometimes a cock trap..." Jen snorted, as if she was trying not to laugh, and Mags smiled. "I own a couple, as a matter of fact." Jen couldn't control herself and succumbed to a fit of giggles. Eventually her companion was chuckling too. "They are kind of funny, I suppose, although...I've been told they can be very uncomfortable, if you know how to use them."

"You see, this is why I wanted to talk to you. I don't think I know another human being who could bring him or herself to say...cock trap...oh, hell..." Jen collapsed onto a convenient tree stump, howling.

Mags supposed her professional dignity should be affronted, but in her almost five years as a dom, she'd been paid to do and say some tolerably silly shit. And it's really hard to stay angry at anybody laughing as hard as little Jen Sutcliffe had for the last minute or so. At last she began to get herself under control.

"Sorry," she panted, "Mags, seriously, I didn't mean..."

"Please don't worry about it. Frankly I prefer your reaction to some of the more puritanical responses to my interview. One particularly bloody-minded collection of prudes even tried to picket a show I had at a local gallery, and we wouldn't have been able to do a thing about it if one of them hadn't got into a shoving match with a patron. The police eventually arrested them for something...disorderly conduct? I wonder if your husband was one of the officers."

"I'll ask him, or maybe I won't, given what we're talking about."

Mags waited. Eventually Jen got up, and the two women started walking again. "I guess one of the big questions I wanted to ask you...cripes, this really feels strange. I mean how would you even know, right? He's my husband."

Still Mags said nothing.

"So obviously Theo has an...interest in this kind of comic book/superhero..."

"A fetish." Jen stopped walking and bit her lower lip. She looked like she was about to cry, so Mags continued. "Don't be afraid of the word. Your husband's not a pervert or a sexual deviant, or at least not more than most men. Fetish just means a specific sexual interest. People have all kinds. Men who are turned on by women's feet—or I suppose women who are turned on by men's feet, although I've never met one—are called foot fetishists. Guys who like ladies in sexy underwear are lingerie fetishists. Your husband has a bit of a comic book fetish. Or maybe it's the spandex. There are guys who are into leather, or rubber, or spandex. It's not all that unusual. Actually, given his line of work, it even makes some sense."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, what are superheroes, really? Costumed crime fighters: men and women whose physical and mental powers make them better able to fight crime, or to commit it. I mean you never hear of some guy getting bit by a radioactive sea turtle and using his powers to become the world's greatest accountant. These guys are essentially fantasy versions of your husband. And then there're the women. Comic books are designed primarily to appeal to adolescent boys, and the women are usually pretty sexualized, right?"

"I guess I don't really know. I was never into comics."

"Browse in a comic book shop one of these days. It's like no woman was ever born smaller than a D-cup; superheroines, super-villainesses, damsels-in-distress: they've all got the wasp waist, the round ass, and the big tits."

"So you're saying Theo gets a charge out of imagining a world where he rescues ladies with big boobs...?"

"Look," Mags began, and then she stopped to gather her thoughts. "I mean I don't know much about police work, but I think it's more complicated than that. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that many people who become cops do so with really good intentions, right?"