Susan made her bed for the second time that day. Mac had just left, and her body held that wonderful feeling of happiness and satisfaction. Almost two months had passed since their first lovemaking in his truck, after he’d rescued her from being stuck in an ice storm.
"He rescued me from more than a storm," thought Susan as she surveyed her newly-taut body.
The image looking back from the full length mirror in her bedroom was not that of the woman who stood there three or more months ago. Instead, this visage was of a proud, happy woman standing proudly in the bedroom she shared with her husband, and occasionally, with Mac, her lover, trainer, friend and increasingly, her Master.
From the moment that Susan had met Mac as her personal trainer at the gym, he was a strong and commanding presence. Yes, the former Navy Seal and Secret Service agent was capable of unspeakable violence should the need arise, but as a civilian and, especially with her, Mac was the soul of gentle kindness. His soft whispers were commands, his suggestions, orders and his words of encouragement sometimes left Susan as breathless as a high school girl. That they both hailed from the south was but one of the shared intimacies that bound these lovers to each other, for their mild accents distanced them somewhat from those around them in Maine.
In some ways, Susan compared herself and Mac to characters in the Hugo Award winning sci-fi novel, “Stranger in a Strange Land.” The novel is about a human male, born and raised on Mars during an expedition after his scientist parents are killed in a crew accident. He is raised by Martians and acquires their skills of nearly perfect control over their minds and bodies. Some twenty years old now, a second expedition reaches Mars and he returns with them to an Earth he’s never seen. Additionally, he is heir to the royalties from his mother’s many inventions, not the least of which is economical space travel.
As Earth’s gravity is much greater than that of Mars, he is quite weak here and confined to a hospital where he bonds with a woman, the only Earth female he ever has met. In an effort to cheat him out of his financial due, the government tries to discredit him and they become terrified of the psychic power and superhuman intelligence that he gained on Mars, while somehow retaining a childlike naiveté. The woman stands by him and it is literally the two of them against a hostile world.
While Susan didn’t really see the world around them as hostile, there were similarities. She was in a marriage gone beyond stale. Mac was in a similar situation, perhaps worse, because his wife was even more addicted to outbursts of misdirected rage than she was to alcohol, literally a one-two punch. Although both Susan and Mac were well above average or even high-average intelligence, their accent and slower speech patterns were hallmarks of social prejudice, considered outward signs of stupidity by many locals. Further, although their town was a virtual Peyton Place of extramarital bliss, their relationship would be judged harshly if found out.
Even everyday expressions such as having a coffee on the veranda had to be altered to say ‘porch’. Susan was reminded of a trip she’d taken to England once and how isolated she felt by colloquial terms and words that she knew but couldn’t place into sentences. A ‘Band-Aid’ here is a ‘sticky-plaster’ there, ‘awe-struck’ was ‘gobsmacked’ – that sort of thing. No one treated Susan or Mac unkindly in any way, they just smiled in a patronizing way as though dealing with children. And so, she and Mac shared a cultural bond and kindred spirit that helped to bridge any gaps between them.
Early on in their trainer / student role, Susan had become determined to be Mac’s best student. If he asked her to do ten reps during an exercise, she did twelve.
She’d count them off, “One, two three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, one for you and one more for me.”
If she was counting calories, Susan counted each and every bit of food. Teaspoons were level, never rounded. Originally, her husband had given Susan the gym membership and personal training voucher because he wanted a trophy wife on his arm, even as he sat in his recliner night after night emptying beer cans and potato chip bags into his expanding body. He joked about his gut calling it his, ‘One-pack abs.”
Also telling, was the fact that Tom never once congratulated Susan on her weight loss and tone-up. It was as though he didn’t even see her. Mac, on the other hand, was lavish in his praise of her. There were days when he dreaded coming to work to listen to the excuses of students who so completely lacked motivation and really were beyond his help. When he came in to train Susan though, Mac felt ebullient, and thrilled to work with her. Once their relationship had become a love affair, the only difficulty Mac had was to retain his professionalism at the gym when others might see him together with Susan together.
Susan was brought back from the mirror and into her bedroom when she realized that Mac’s cum trickled slowly down her thigh. She opened her robe and wiped it off with the palm of her hand and brought her hand to her nose to breathe deeply of his salty masculinity. She shook off the urge to suck Mac’s cum from her fingers and padded off to the shower.
The stinging hot water teased her nipples to full attention and Susan relived the past two hours of her time with Mac. Her husband had never made a bed in his life, so there was no way that he’d ever discover the restraints tucked neatly between the mattress and foundation. These were wrist and ankle straps that attached to Velcro pads that gripped the sheet mightily, and held Susan exactly where she longed to be – beneath a pumping, grunting Mac as he filled her with pleasure and seed. She loved studying Mac's face as they made love, how he was soft and gentle until the point of demand after which he was a wild man. His upper lip would curl back over his teeth and his eyes blazed fierceness. Susan wondered if that same look was part of his battle face in military combat. The look didn’t frighten her for she trusted Mac completely, but there was no doubting the single-mindedness and intensity of his determination.
Strangely, Susan felt proud to be secured with straps beneath Mac. Sometimes when she was alone in her room, she’d place the straps on her wrists, just to feel them and to remember. At first, she’d felt shame and guilt about desecrating the marital sheets in her home. Still though, it felt less creepy than the motel they had been using. Also, there was less chance of getting caught because there’d be no money missing or motel receipts left to be found either by Tom or by Mac’s wife, Helen. After all, the infidelity was the big lie, everything else was just everything else. In time, Susan even skipped changing the sheets between their trysts because Tom seemed so oblivious to her that he seemed not to notice sex odors on the bed or faint stains on the sheets. He came to bed buzzed most nights and so it was easy for Susan to hide in plain sight.
Maybe it was Susan’s imagination or maybe the alcohol had its hooks deeper into Tom, but his eyes seemed further apart than she remembered; and the look reminded her of a time when she’d taken her kids to the zoo. A children’s animal instructor held a class to introduce them to hunting animals and those that were prey. The instructor taught them a little rhyme to remember the eye placement on – say – a rabbit versus those on a hawk.
“Eyes on the side, I like to hide,” she said; and “Eyes in the front, I like to hunt.”
Was that Tom’s way of dealing, or rather not-dealing, Susan wondered? Was he hiding and oblivious to the signs all around him that his role as a husband was fading away week by week? Or, had the alcohol taken him to a place where Susan and Mac could’ve fucked wantonly in the bed right beside Tom without his ever actually noticing? Susan knew she was being facetious, but in truth she did seem almost invisible to him anymore. There was little doubt where Mac’s eyes were when they made love, for he looked deeply into hers. Yes, Mac ‘liked to hunt ‘and Susan was there to be hunted and had, loved and taken. She’d rather be chased than chaste.
Susan’s biggest complexity was fitting in time with Mac, when her children were at school and Tom at work. Because Mac’s schedule had flexibility, it was easy for him to work around her schedule. And, there were occasions when Mac had to cancel and call out of work because his wife was too intoxicated to care for their children - “Mommy’s sick days” be told his children - but overall, the timing usually worked out well between Susan and himself. They were careful to delete the tens of emails and text messages that passed between them each day. In many ways, the relationship between Susan and Mac actually glued-together the fragments of their broken marriages, because their emotional needs were met in each other. Without each other in their lives, they would have to face into the emptiness around them and leave their mates and maybe subject their children to the ‘fallout’ of marital dissolution.
“My lover is good for my marriage,” Susan mused to herself while showering away the evidence of this afternoon’s coupling.
The relationship between Susan and Mac got a real boost when Susan’s husband Tom was sent off for a two-week training session in Arlington Heights, a suburb of Chicago.
