When we first bought our 1882 painted lady Victorian home ten years ago, I repainted the master bedroom. At first, I was proud of what I did. It was a masterpiece of faux-finish. It almost looked like brown leather and would have been perfect for a library or old-fashioned smoking room. But for a bedroom, even I admit that it was just wrong. It was heavy and oppressive in a space that had to be lighter and airy.

It needed to be repainted.

This bedroom’s a beautiful space. It has hardwood floors and brass appointments on the copious stained and lacquered wood doors and trimmings. The transom above the double-door entrance even holds panels of stunning stained glass.

One of the oblique walls in the center houses a fireplace with a fantastically painted metal mantle.

We had to honor this beauty and not just slap paint on the walls, so we chose a wall to be an accent wall. We felt that the wall surrounding the fireplace deserved something special. So, about two years ago my wife found a high-end wallpaper purveyor. It took a while to decide on a style. However, eventually we did, and my wife stashed the sample that gave us the product ordering information.

Deciding and acting are not always in harmony, because we’re insanely busy.

Fast forward two years. We were still plagued by the brown leather faux finish, but I miraculously found a window of time that I could move forward on the project.

I knew I could easily paint the other walls myself but felt it was best to leave it to the professionals to install wallpaper. We just had to find the sample and order a sufficient yardage.

That was a problem. My wife stashed the sample in her office.

Oy.

Her office is a maelstrom of chaos. She holds onto everything. I get it…so many papers our son did when he was a wee lad. How do you get rid of them? You don’t. But rational people stash them in some sort of protective receptacle for indefinite storage.

Only that...well, she didn’t. They were everywhere! Combine the nostalgic items with the avalanche of academic papers, deceptively official-looking crap that in all likelihood didn’t matter anymore, and truly important documents that never found a proper home - the room was a breeding pit of sheer entropy.

So there I was one Friday afternoon, in her office, searching for the wallpaper sample she swore was in some stack. I wanted this project to be completed, and I knew that she wanted that specific wallpaper. I was determined to find it.

I rooted through everything. It took hours, even though the room is only 12’ x 12’.

I staved off the impulse to sentimentally linger on our kid’s pictures and youthful artwork. I rifled through stacks of papers, barely gleaning what was contained therein, instead focusing on finding the sample.

There were so many notebooks, so many jotted intellectual ideas, much of which made little sense, mostly because of her poor handwriting! I tore through those stacks as efficiently as I could.

At some point I stumbled upon a leather-bound, artisan notebook that I remembered buying at an art fair many years prior as a special present to her. I don’t remember the specific occasion. I just remember it was special because at the time I was young, broke, and spent more money on it than I could afford. She LOVED it, and that made it worth it. But I didn’t see it again, until the day I tore the office upside down looking for the sample.

I mused over the memory and then noticed that the pages were not totally flush, as they would have been had she not written in them.

She HAD written in them!

I undid the leather cord that was wrapped around a silver button on the outside.

Whoa! My wife, before she was my wife, used it as a journal! This was a chronicle of her life in the late 1990s, before we were married.

I couldn’t resist reading, and I was pretty sure she wouldn’t mind. So much time and so many life events had passed since.

I read passages about how she doubted her intellectual ability, as she was immersed in an Ivy League PhD program that was a wicked mind-fuck. Turns out she’s a total rockstar and made her way brilliantly.  

I read passages about how she thought I was wayward in my focus and could do better in life. At the time, she was right. Don’t worry, I eventually got myself together and now people call me doctor.

I read passages about how she was attracted to one of the students in her cohort, and how she struggled with letting me know. Again, don’t worry. She eventually let me know, and I encouraged her to run free. That’s what you do if you truly love someone and don’t want to hold them back. I’ve never regretted it.

That’s where we were at that point in our lives. I remember after deep soul-searching talks, we decided to try non-monogamy. It wasn’t out of boredom with each other, but rather because we got together when we were so young. Each of us had only one partner prior to us becoming a couple.

We weren’t stupid and understood human nature and sexuality. We didn’t want to live with regrets for paths untaken. Not knowing where it would take us, we decided to allow ourselves to experience new sex. Would jealousy be our undoing? We had no idea but knew that that was something we had to do.

I had more lovers in those years than many have in a lifetime. It sounds great, but even the better trysts were just mediocre, and most were downright disappointing. New is always exciting, but it was never anything close to what she could do. She was, and remains, supreme.

Those days, I encouraged her to branch out. Why not? I did!

She wasn’t so forward, so her “body count” isn’t as high as mine. I even needed to facilitate some of the action for her, but she had some fun.

I even arranged getting together with the man in her academic cohort. While she may have casually slept with a few other men, she came to truly love him. I loved him too, but not in the way he would have wanted.

He wanted us as a couple, both sexually and romantically. I couldn’t give that back to him, as I just don’t lean that way. I quickly found out in our first tryst that I’m simply not gay or queer-leaning. Pity, as she would have preferred that.

To make a long story short, we had many threesomes. Our threesomes were more like my wife-to-be having sex with two men at the same time. I know they were great for her, and I also learned that I’m immensely turned on by watching her, the love of my life, have sex.

As I said before, I’m not jealous, and I love seeing my love pleasured. It was kinky and hot. I could use more descriptive language here, but I’ll leave that for your imagination.

Eventually, the threesomes fizzled out. She still occasionally had sex with him (without me there), but even that slowly faded away.

This was the sexually vivacious period in our lives when she was writing in this journal, and I chanced on some pages in which she chronicled one of her hotter trysts in explicit detail.

It was in the late 1990s. I remember the evening clearly. We were at a medieval re-enactment festival, and were young, free, and both smoking hot.

I remember her coming up to me that night, her stunning face lit by the torches that blazed along the path, after enough libations to lower our inhibitions significantly. She said to me, shocked, “I was just approached by a woman that wants to have a three-way with her boyfriend! Should I do it?”

My inebriated but honest response was to look at her with incredulity and say, “The fuck? They hot? Of course, you should!”

She smiled at me, kissed me quickly, and strode off. I drunkenly and stupidly grinned watching her perfect ass as she strutted off to make it happen.

In retrospect, I was an idiot and should have followed her, not only to ensure her safety, but I probably could have taken part in it as well. My face wasn’t hard to look at, and my body was, at that time, very muscled and well-proportioned. But I was immersed in socializing, joking with friends, and other nonsense. I also had quite a few drinks under my belt and was slow on the draw.

I found her in the throng of party-goers dressed in tunics a few hours later and asked her, “Did you do it?”

She looked at me with a broad smile and twinkle in her eye, and said, “Yes!”

That night, and over the course of the many years after, I pressed her for details.

Her response was always the same. She said she was intoxicated (but still in control), so her memory was lacking. She even said she didn’t remember where she wound up, or the path to the place. Pity.

She said that she went to “a tent” and “had a threesome.” Her details were not actually detailing. They were frustratingly vague.

I wanted hardcore and detailed descriptions, but her narrative was bland. She, another woman, and a man apparently went back to a tent. They kissed. It happened. She didn’t come out with much more.

What exactly happened? I wanted all the kinky details!

Getting details was like pulling teeth. When I pressed her, she said that they kissed, and that his cock was about as large as mine, and the woman was a true blonde (she would know). Not much more.

How did she know how big his dick was? Did she stroke it? Did she gaze upon it under torchlight? Did she suck it? Or did she only get an impression when he slipped it inside of her? I still don’t know.

I asked her if she sucked his cock, and she said, “I don’t think so.”

What the fuck does that mean? I remember the feel of every clit of every woman my tongue ever touched!

She said that she “thought” the woman licked her pussy. That was nice, if true, but what did she mean by saying, “I think?”

When I pressed her, she told, in non-descript language, of how the man penetrated the other woman missionary position, when she was on top of her, kissing her.

Sweet! I’ll take that!

Then she related that the guy pulled his dick out of the other woman, and then she let his penis enter her. According to her story, I gleaned that the guy fucked my then-girlfriend from behind until he finished, releasing his seed into the condom he was wearing while still inside her. How long did he take? I have no idea.

That was it. That was all I got from her. It was hot, but vague, and frustrating to me, wanting deep and descriptive details!

Little did I know that her recollection was far better than she let on, and the details were far kinkier. She never shared them with me, to my dismay, but she did write them down. Perhaps she feared telling me how far they went or how immensely pleasurable it was to her? Did she fear a jealous response on my part? To this day, I don’t know.

If she was fearful of a jealous response on my part, her fear was unfounded. I would have lapped it up.  But now I have those details, and I read them often. Fuck porn. This was real, and with my wife. Reading the entry, I can’t help but stroke myself. I release quickly.

Every. Fucking. Time.

This is her Journal entry:

Want to know what happened? You have to wait for part two!