Talkin' In Your Sleep

"David, what's wrong?" she asked.

"Tammy, I know that you love me," I began. She went into shock. We had never told each other about our feelings. That was almost a huge mistake on my part. I almost let a cat out of the bag that I probably wouldn't have been able to put back in.

"I never said that," she blurted out angrily. "When you assume..." But she never finished her statement. She just looked up at me in confusion. "Davie, are you some sort of psychic?"

"It doesn't matter, because I think I love you too," I said. "But I keep hearing things from my friends and..."

"You're worried about being seen with the town whore, right?" she spat, almost in tears.

"You're right Davie. Guys talk about me. I've dated a lot of guys. I've had sex with a lot of guys. I like sex. You certainly don't seem to mind fucking me. Why is it that a guy who screws around is a stud, but a girl who does the same thing is a slut?" She looked at me with tears running down her face.

"Okay, Davie, I get it," she said. "You're tired of fucking me too. You want someone new or maybe no one at all. So as a way to get away from me, you're throwing my past in my face. I wish I could throw yours at you, but the girls you've dated all told me how nice you are. Not that I needed them to tell me that. But I'll make it easy on you. You don't have to date me anymore and I'll let everyone know that it wasn't your fault. And if you ever..."

"If you ever shut up, maybe we could talk about this," I said putting my hand over her mouth.

"Tammy, I don't care about the past," I said. "I'm worried about the future."

She just looked at me strangely. "What future? Can you see the future? Is that another one of your psychic abilities?"

"Our future, Tammy!" I said.

"You still want to date me?" she asked. She wiped away the tears and her smile lit up the room.

"No, Tammy," I said. "I don't think that will work."

"Oh," she said almost in tears again. I began to see how much control I had over her emotions. I realized then that she really did love me as much as I already knew.

"Tammy, I was thinking that maybe you and I should be exclusive. And that maybe when I graduate in a few months we should get engaged, but I'm kind of worried about..." Before I could finish talking she was in my lap and had her arms wrapped around me.

"But I'm kind of worried about..." I was able to slip in between kisses.

"Stop worrying," she said kissing me again. "Davie, I would never cheat on you. I've never cheated on anyone. I've never been in a relationship with any of the guys I dated. We went out, we had sex. As a matter of fact I want you to think about something. Of all the guys I dated, have you ever heard about me screwing any guy while I was dating another?"

I had to admit that I hadn't.

"Of course you haven't because I've never done it," she chirped. "And Davie, there's something special about you. You're my first boyfriend. The rest were just guys I dated with no strings. But you're also the first guy I've ever spent the night with. Every other guy, I just had sex with, and then he went his way and I went mine. When the sex was over there was no reason to be around them.

But with you Davie, I dream of just lying there in your arms. I love waking up with you. Ask all of your friends if I ever actually slept with any of them."

It made sense. It was probably the reason that I knew the things I knew.

She was looking at me with a sort of desperation in her eyes. "I believe you," I said.

"So, I'm officially your girlfriend?" she asked excitedly. I smiled and nodded. "And I can tell people and everything?"

"Yes," I said smiling.

"Are you ready for the test?" she asked.

"What test?" I asked.

"There are three parts," she said. She pulled her sweatshirt over her head and lifted her big breasts out of her bra. "Suck these," she said. I passed the first part of the test with flying colors. For the second part of the test she sucked my dick until I was dying to cum, but she wouldn't let me.

For the final part of the test she wrapped he legs around my waist and fucked me like crazy. Tammy and I had sex pretty often. She was always spending the night with me after our dates, but that day we broke new ground. It was also the first time we tried anal sex.

I was sure it was painful for her. So I tried to stop, but she insisted. "I need you to have something that no one else has ever had," she said.

"Tammy, Honey, I already do," I said. She looked at me again. "I have your heart," I told her.

"And you have the rest of me too, Davie," she said. "I am your property. I belong to you from now on. I had to fuck a lot of frogs to find you, but I found my prince. I'm not going to do anything to break us up."

There were some people who were very happy for us. Tammy's parents seemed to be ecstatic. I was the first man she had ever brought home to meet them. I think that both her mom and her dad had heard rumors about her around town and seeing her in what seemed to be a stable relationship made them feel better.

Her closest girl friends were also happy for her if not a little bit surprised. That surprise was magnified when she abruptly stopped going to parties or anywhere without me. She didn't even go out on their girl's nights. "Why the hell would I want to?" she asked. "The whole point of girl's nights is to go out and meet some guys. I've got mine."

There were also a few girls who weren't quite as happy for her. They included some of the girls I had dated and few others who thought of Tammy as a slut and didn't think she deserved a good guy.

But by far the most upset about us were my friends, including my best friend Jeff. A group of them spoke to me at school about it.

"What the hell are you thinking, Dave?" asked Jeff. He seemed to be the spokesperson for the group. "Tammy isn't the kind of girl you want to get tied down to. You date her for a while and then you move on to someone more suitable. Then someone else has her. Or if you're between relationships, Tammy is your girl."

"Maybe that's the way it was," I said. "But it's not the way it is. From now on, Tammy is all mine."

"That slut will cheat on you the first chance she gets," he said.

"Jeff, we've been friends since we were wearing short pants," I said. "And I appreciate your concern, but don't call her a slut again."

"I'll call that whore a slut or anything..." He abruptly stopped talking when my fist hit his jaw. Jeff and I had come to blows a few times over the years. We were both fairly athletic. I ran track and cross country and Jeff was a serious baseball player with aspirations of becoming a pro. My first punch had rung his bell and Jeff was loopy. He was also enraged.

"You thelfith thon ob ah visch," he screamed. I guess having his jaw rapidly swelling up had affected his ability to properly enunciate his curse words. He swung at me wildly but my starting gun honed reflexes from all of those track meets helped me. I sidestepped and Jeff punched the brick wall behind me so hard that I swore the building moved.

Jeff started screaming in pain and jumping up and down holding onto his right arm. "Get him," he said to the other three guys who'd come with him. They looked confused and then took off running. Both of them apparently had better sense than Jeff did. As the three guys disappeared, I turned back to Jeff who was writhing on the ground in pain. I picked him up and hustled him over to my aging bit still powerful 1988 Mustang. That car was my first. It got me all the way from getting my license at 16, to graduating from college. My parents had bought it for me used, but I had never cared. I loved that car.

Jeff was so out of it that he barely understood what was going on. I drove him to the hospital on campus. I filled out his registration card in the emergency room and called his parents. I also called the baseball coach.

As it turned out, nothing happened to either of us. Originally, I was suspended from the track team for fighting and Jeff and the other three guys were suspended from the baseball team. The other three guys had their suspensions lifted because they showed good judgment in refusing to take part in the fight. My suspension was lifted, because I had showed leadership qualities in putting the fight behind me and taking Jeff to the hospital.

Jeff's suspension was lifted because he was off the team. Jeff had shattered three finger on his pitching hand and destroyed something called the metacarpophalangeal joints on the same three fingers. He also had a fracture of several of the bones in his wrist, and a spiral fracture of his radius and a posterior dislocation of his shoulder joint. It took four surgeries and a bunch of rods and pins to put Jeff's pitching arm back together. According to the doctors he would regain a very fragile but almost normal use of the arm eventually but with certain limitations. I thank the heavens that I moved, because with all the damage Jeff did to his hand and arm, I could just imagine what he would have done to me if that blow had landed.

Unfortunately one of those limitations was that Jeff would never throw a baseball again. He would also have to rethink his career, because baseball had been Jeff's true focus. Most of his classes had been geared towards that and a career in physical training as a fall back. Since Jeff wouldn't be able to lift anything heavier than seven pounds without damaging his right arm. He would also be limited to activities with his right hand that didn't require a lot of fine motor control. Even Jeff's signature changed.

It took a long time for Jeff and I to get over it. I often wondered why Jeff wanted to fuck Tammy so badly that he tried to hit me hard enough to kill me over it. It was hard to imagine your best friend literally trying to kill you over something or someone that didn't belong to him.

I finally found out years later that Tammy had been Jeff's first. And that whenever he was between girlfriends, he always ended up back in her bed. At the time of our fight, Jeff had been publicly dumped by one of the cheerleaders. So he'd been humiliated and he was very horny at a time when Tammy was unavailable. His anger and his hormones had combined to make him crazy enough to try to kill me and end up killing his career.

Things buzzed along for Tammy and me as if they were fated. A lot of guys thought that I was a fool and so did a lot of the women, but I knew that Tammy loved me. I also knew that I would know if she ever cheated on me. I in fact knew something about Tammy that no one else knew.

Tammy and I got engaged as scheduled on the day that I graduated. And less than a year later we were married.

Married life for Tammy and me was great. I got a job as a construction site manager and worked my ass off to provide Tammy with everything she wanted. By the time we'd been married for seven years we moved into the nicest house we'd ever had. We met and knew most of our neighbors, but our best friends lived directly across the street.

Bob Enthrust was a guy who at forty seemed to have life by the balls. Over the next few years, Bob became the friend that I had lost after the incident with Jeff. We golfed together. We fished. We hunted. And we had a lot of barbecues. Our wives became friendly too. But they were never as close as Bob and I.

Bob and I had a lot in common, but we had a lot of differences too. Bob always wanted to be seen and admired. He wanted things. He always wanted the best of everything. Bob was proud of the fact that unlike me, he owned the business he worked for. Bob had a chain of printing stores and the dream of taking his chain national or even worldwide.

I worked for a large building company. I had degrees in architecture and building construction but worked for someone else as an engineer and site manager. To Bob appearance was everything. He drove an aging and unreliable Bentley that he'd gotten at an estate sale. The car had once been beautiful, but Bob could barely maintain it. The parts and service fees for the car were immense. I drove a brand new 2014 Mustang GT. I loved my car although Bob looked down on it. But despite what he claimed. I saw him secretly glancing at it several times. And he always noticed when people complimented it.

Our wives were also different in their approaches. Tammy was a stay at home housewife. Bob's wife Samantha was a secretary.

The only time that I remembered anything odd happening between us was about six months ago. It was right after Tammy and I celebrated our seventh year of marriage. We were out on the deck behind our house and Bob asked me if I had ever given any thought to swinging.

"Swinging what?" I asked. "Is this another pitch for us to take golf lessons at the club? Shit Bob, we play golf for fun. I'm not paying a hundred bucks to have some has been golf pro watch me with a golf club and tell me what's wrong with my swing. If any of those guys were any good, they'd still be playing on the pro circuit. So why do I want to swing a golf club like some guy that lost?"

"Not that kind of swinging, Dave," he said. "You know;, the kind where we pick a night or two each week where you turn left and pull into my driveway and I turn right and pull into yours. Then we go into each other's houses and do what comes naturally."

"Bob, are you out of your mind?" I said. "Tammy would never go for that and neither would Samantha. Samantha had gone home a while before that because she had to be up to go to work the next morning.

But when I looked at Tammy, I got a surprise. "Honey, I told you a long time ago that I loved you and I'm your property. I'll do whatever you want me to."

"Well, I don't want you to do that," I spat. "Bob, I think it's time for you to go home." I was pissed. It just seemed like I was about to lose another friend. It just seemed like every guy I knew wanted to fuck Tammy. In Bob's case it made no sense. Samantha was beautiful. In terms of pure aesthetics she was far more attractive than Tammy. Bob was a fool.

All kinds of things went through my head that night as Tammy and I settled into bed. I remembered the song they had played at our wedding reception. The one song that I picked for people to dance to was part joke and part confession. Tammy knew that as a boy growing up in Royal Oak, Michigan, I had taken guitar lessons at Music Castle on Woodward Ave. My guitar teacher was Mike Skill who used to play in a band called the Romantics.

So when I had them play "Talking in your Sleep," at our wedding reception, everyone thought it was a nod to my youth, but there was more to it. That song was running through my mind as we went to bed.

"When you close your eyes and you go to sleep.

And it's down to the sound of a heartbeat

I can hear the things that you're dreaming about.

When you open up your heart and the truth comes out."

The lyrics of the song went through my mind and as Tammy fell asleep, I concentrated on staying awake. It wasn't that I didn't need sleep. I had another hard day on the construction site ahead of me. But I needed confirmation more. And after an hour or so, I heard Tammy begin mumbling.

"You tell me that you want me.

You tell me that you need me."

You tell me that you love me.

And I know that I'm right.

'Cause I hear it in the night."

I listened closely and heard the words I needed to hear from Tammy's own lips.

"Love you, Davie," she mumbled. "Love you so much. Don't be angry. Backed into a pole and busted my tail lights. Love you Davie.

I was pissed. Tammy had told me that some kid had backed into her car and damaged her tail lights and had driven off before she could get his license plate number. Our insurance had gone up when I filed the claim. But I was far happier that nothing was going on except that. I fell asleep with the jangling sounds of the Romantics' guitar riff playing in my mind.

"I hear the secrets that you keep.

When you're talking in your sleep."

I hear the secrets that you keep.

When you're talking in your sleep."

I felt so much better. I wrapped my arms around Tammy and she sighed contentedly as I joined her in sleep. From the first night that Tammy fell asleep with me in my apartment, I had noticed something about her. I guess it hadn't gotten around because as Tammy had told me, I might not have been the first guy she fucked, but I was the only one she had ever slept with. That was probably why I was the only person who seemed to know that my wife talked in her sleep. Every one of us lies, hides the truth, or just bends it a little. Tammy was no different. But whatever was on her mind, be it good bad or in-between came out while she slept. And it came directly from her subconscious. There were no lies and no half truths. Things that Tammy would never tell a soul were there for the taking. I knew far more about Tammy than she would ever tell me.

So that night I was ecstatic that the only things she had to say was that as usual she loved me and that she had torn up her own tail lights and lied about it. Tammy had lied about it because she had a habit of running into things when she drove. Tammy was a terrible driver. It was why as much as I loved her, there was no way Tammy would ever drive my Mustang.

A couple of days later on a bright and beautiful Saturday morning, Tammy came over to me while I was washing my car. "Honey, I need your help in the garden," she said. "And I'm willing to pay for it."

When Tammy said, "pay for it," we both knew that she was talking about something sexual. That was the way that Tammy always wanted to do everything. The two of us had more sex than any couple I knew. As we'd gotten older Tammy's sex drive had gone through the roof. Not that I ever complained about it. She never wanted to do anything weird or kinky, she was just happy to be there in my arms. But she used sex as currency for everything, changing a light bulb that she couldn't reach, to giving her a kiss. That one always seemed silly to me. "Davie, come over here and give me a kiss," she'd say. "I'm willing to pay for it."

So I followed her to the garden that she had put in behind our garage. The garden was more a hobby for Tammy than anything else. It was something that she could do outdoors, usually while I puttered around, working on my a Mustang. But it was also a social thing for her. And that day there were a couple of our neighbors who also had gardens who'd come over to help her.

"I brought my hubby, he's a genius," she said to the ladies who stood there with cold glasses of lemonade. They were staring at the ground around a couple of plants and a lot of weeds. After they talked about the problem of clearing the weeds and aerating the areas between the small delicate plants and the difficulty of doing it with a full sized rake, I suggested one of those smaller handheld tools. They immediately discarded that idea because they couldn't get enough leverage with the smaller ones to break through the hard packed clay.

"Give it some thought, Honey," said Tammy. She and her friends went around to our deck and sat at a table to sip their lemonade and gossip. I looked around for a rake. I had the idea of cutting the ends off of the rake and leaving only two or three tines on it.

"Anyway a few days later after knocking the shit out of myself with a rake that Tammy had left in the doorway of the shed, I invented Pike's Pick as we called it.

Bob had come over that Saturday to apologize too. "Dave, I guess I was drunker than I thought," he said. "I probably shouldn't have presented an idea like that to you so soon. Can we play some golf?"

I noticed that as he waited for me to get my clubs, he spent a lot of time looking at Tammy's boobs, and her ass as she bent over the table to serve the other women drinks. He smiled when he noticed me watching him.