Chapter Two

Claire

“Someone sounds chipper today.”

“Hmm?”

Jim has come into the kitchen to rustle up some breakfast before heading in to work.

“I said what’s that you’re humming?”

“Oh…I don’t know. Something I used to listen to in high school, I guess.”

I’m not about to reveal that it’s Al Green, my favorite masturbating music. In truth I was hardly even aware that I was happily humming at all as I puttered around the kitchen. Strange, really, since this isn’t a normal habit of mine. A show of good spirits was something else that was discouraged in me from an early age. No wonder Jim was moved to comment. He raises his eyebrows now, inviting an explanation. Rather than give him one I merely fall back into “Tired of Being Alone”. Whether I’m feeling sexy or not is really none of his business.

This may seem an odd state of affairs between husband and wife, but we are really more like housemates. As I’ve indicated, our marriage is merely a convenient fiction, a way to pair up and get along without arousing suspicion in a community that would ostracize us both were our true natures known to anyone but each other.

Jim is secretly gay and I’m a secret atheist, facts that would devastate our respective families and destroy our limited social circle.

Potential outcasts both, we cover for each other: acting loving only in public, while at home we merely get along, respecting each other’s boundaries in a way that allows us to carry on our charade with a minimum of discomfort. We rarely even share meals or watch TV together, and haven’t attempted to get intimate since the night he took me to the Senior Prom and we so uncomfortably discovered the truth about each other. With his silent inquiry rebuffed, Jim becomes all business as he opens the refrigerator for some eggs.

“They’re sending me to Tallahassee again next weekend. So I’ll be gone from Friday, that’s a week from today, through Sunday night. Is there anything we need done before then?”

Supposedly the company sends Jim on these trips every month or so, and for a week or more a few times a year. I rather suspect this is a fabrication, a convenient cover for a highly circumspect sex life that I’m quite frankly perfectly content not knowing about. If he thinks he’s needling me with this hint in return for not confiding in him, he couldn’t be more mistaken. Both the information and his question fit in perfectly with the plans I’ve been developing to establish a secret sex life of my own.

“Not really. I was thinking about cleaning some of the clutter out of the attic that weekend, things too bulky to move myself. But I suppose we could ask Brian next door if he wants to earn a few extra bucks.”

“He usually does.”

Jim emerges with the butter and eggs, a block of cheese and an onion and green pepper for making an omelet. “We’ll see the Garveys at church on Sunday and ask him then.”

“Good enough,” I reply, and pick up my humming again as I head for the laundry room, leaving Jim to his late breakfast. With my back to him I grin with satisfaction, running a hand down the front of my slacks. Under these I’m now clean shaven and even scandalously bare of underwear – a precaution to keep my scraped skin from itching too much.

I caught those telltale light flashes twice as I bathed and shaved this morning. I bet Brian loved watchingthat. After the way I kept him up late last night he’s lucky he didn’t fall out of the tree. Too bad for him he can’t jerk off perched