Well-Intentioned

The darkness brought all these memories back, the darkness and the future that lies before me. Six years since that late night post-coitus conversation with Nora, and I can still hear the anguish in her words, the wish for a different way forward.

The memories of that conversation brought me back to the memories of the way we met that second time, at lunch with her ex-husband. Those led me to the first time I met Ella, my second day in my first house, and everything that had gone into making us us, all the lies and fear and the good and bad through those years and beyond. Of cowboy movies and showdowns and heroes that ride off into the sunset alone.

--

She was right. In another time, another place, another world, a different us might have existed. This wasn't that world, though, and as much as I trusted her and, yes, loved her, the doubts would always exist. Maybe that wasn't fair; people change. I had. I believed she had, too. I truly did.

There's belief, though, and there's acceptance.

People are pattern recognition machines. We excel at it. A birth of twins causes too much strain on a tribe's meager resources, so twins must be a curse. An allergy to a certain food causes anaphylactic shock in the child of a king, so that food must be unclean. A swelling population of cats in a medieval town coincides with a plague; they must be the cause, not the rats that they feast on.

A young man is tutored by his elders in the ways of their tribe, leading to great success in his life; he accepts their wisdom when asked to go along with something he knows is wrong.

A young husband sees the success of his fellows and strives to be like them, not understanding the hollowness of that success, how much more it takes than it gives.

A young wife pushes herself to perfection for her family's happiness, unable to see that the wisewomen gave her advice that only barely worked even in their time and their context; when she breaks, as many of them did beforehand, they encourage her to follow them in their selfishness and dishonesty, insisting she's doing it for her family.

An old man, terrified that a tragedy from years ago might repeat itself, encourages a community to hide a young wife's lie, not knowing how many other lies he's papering over with his decision.

Two people that had come through hell, first as friends, then enemies, then friends again, then lovers. Two people who danced around infidelities that she'd committed against another man, almost a decade and a half before, and around belief versus acceptance. Two people in a pattern that could destroy their friendship if they didn't stop.

All of us, stuck in toxic patterns we didn't see in time to change them.

I didn't have an answer for her that night. She wasn't wrong about any of it, but that didn't mean she was right, either. I just couldn't find a way to make it right, to make us right. We were perfect for each other, even if it had taken us a lot of mileage, a ton of therapy, and almost a decade and a half to get there.

It wasn't until the night after she left my bed that third time that the answer finally came to me. A minute after that, I was out the door to tell her.

"Friendship."

She'd been crying before I'd banged on the door, and her voice croaked, "What?"

"Friendship. That's the answer."

Nora snorted, tired, eyes rolling with indignation. "Yeah, no shit. That's what we're going to be now, I guess. Just friends."

"No! No." I shook my head. "Not 'just' friends. Not just 'friends with benefits,' either. I want more, too, but... I don't want to get married again. I've had my kids, I don't want to deal with any of the legal bullshit, and I don't need a piece of paper to tell me who I belong with."

With a deep sigh, she asked, "Okay, and?"

"What's a marriage?" She opened her mouth, but I answered my own question. "Besides the piece of paper, besides the ceremony and the flowers and the joint tax returns and all the other stuff? It's a friendship. It's a friendship that lasts your whole life, if you do it right.

"It's not dating. It's not... trying things out and kicking the tires. It's a commitment to keeping this friendship going, for working at it as hard as you need to, for as long as you can. For a lifetime, if you can be honest enough and love each other enough.

"That's the question, then: Is this a friendship that you want for the rest of your life? Not dating. Not kicking the tires without committing one way or the other. I don't need the words on the paper or the ceremony. I don't want it. I don't want to define who we are by... by what didn't work for us before. By the things we thought we should do because the people that came before told us we should.

"I want to be your friend for the rest of our lives. I want that friendship to come with certain benefits that you only provide to me--" She grinned through new tears. "--and once we've committed to that, I want you to be as honest with me as you've been since we started getting to know each other again.

"I don't want to rely on good intentions and oaths and guessing games to keep us happy and together. I don't want to get stuck in a pattern that can't work for us, one that we're supposed to just because everyone else we know has. Can you--"

"Yes!" Nora's joyous shout could have been heard a block away as she threw herself into my arms. "Yes. I want to be your friend, your only friend with benefits, for the rest of our lives. I want to be the drinking buddy you come to when work sucks, and I want to be the bitch that tells you when you've fucked up. I want to- I want to-" My best-friend-with-benefits kissed me deeply, molding herself to my body. "I want to take you inside right now and show you how good of a friend I'll always be. Can we do that?"

--

We could. We did. We still do.

No piece of paper legally binds us. No rings signify our commitment. No label defines us. We could walk away from each other today without needing to do more than break the lease on a condo and divvy up our book collection. Because of that, because the only things that bind us are love and honesty, we don't. We found a new pattern, one that works for us.

When she has an unpleasant truth she needs to tell me, she does, albeit with kindness. I do the same. Whether it's "Yes, your butt looks big in that," or "I got kinda turned on when that guy at the gym checked me out," truths that might create cracks in other peoples' relationships strengthen ours. We talk about problems before they happen instead of after, and without pretending that making vows is the same thing as honoring, loving, and cherishing each other.

"Babe?" Nora's sleepy voice shakes me from my reverie. "You okay?"

"Yeah. Just thinking about things."

She curls up to me, stroking my chest. "Go back to sleep, babe. Busy day tomorrow."

"Yeah, I know. Can't, though."

Yawning, she asks, "Jetlag still?"

"Mostly. Get some rest. We can talk tomorrow."

"I know we can, but I want to talk now."

"C'mon, babe. Zoe's going to be pissed if the mother of the bride looks like a zombie." Neither of us was thrilled with the destination wedding thing, but Lance had been willing to pay for it, so who were we to say no?

"If you want me to sleep, then tell me what you were thinking about."

Snorting, I said, "Fine. Cowboy movies."

"Ooooh." She knew the whole story from my side of things. That had been part of building our new friendship, talking about everything that had led up to each of us leaving King's Forest. 'Cowboy movies' was our shorthand phrase for the whole mess. "You okay?"

"I am. Love you. Get some sleep."

"Love you, too." She sleepily grinned. "You tired me out earlier, you know? Did I not do the same for you?"

"Of course you did, but you know how I get when I can't sleep." She'd had six years to learn, after all.

"I do." Her hand slid under the sheet as she ran it over my chest and down to my stomach. "Mmm, I know how to help you sleep, too."

"Thought I tired you out."

Nora kissed the side of my neck, rubbing my hardening cock. "You did, but I'm jetlagged, too. C'mon, marshal." She cast the sheet with a chuckle, slapped her thigh, and invited me into her embrace. "Mount up."

Grinning, I eagerly took my leading lady into my arms. "Yes, ma'am." Together, we rode off into the sunset.

Hey, there had to be a sunset somewhere, right?

--

One of my favorite things about Loving Wives is that you don't know what you're going to get when you start reading a story. Okay, admittedly, if it has the words "Cucked By" in the title or "I burned the bitch" in the description, you might have some inkling. But the best stories in the category, at least in my opinion, take you on a journey that you don't often see in most of the others. Regardless of whether it ends in revenge, cuckolding, hotwifing, romance, reconciliation, or any of the other possibilities, a good LW story should keep you on your toes.

That's why I want to recommend a newcomer today. vhs_kitten, while not a first-time writer, posted her first story on Literotica earlier this year, here in Loving Wives. An Evening at Crystal Lake is well written, but that's not the main reason I want to bring it to your attention. It is, frankly, one of the best pairings of category and story that I've seen here, in that the ambiguity of the category heightens the tension of the story.

It's only about 4,000 words long, so a little longer than a Literotica page. Go read it and come back. If you don't want to do that, I'll give a summary below.

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A photographer husband and model wife decide to do a horror-themed photo shoot for their portfolios. They contact a guy to play Jason from Friday the 13th, and when he shows up to the cabin by the lake they've rented for the shoot... things happen. Sexy things, for those concerned, not violence/drama, and it's a funny, happy story for the most part.

But.

Throughout the whole thing, there's an air to it that maybe it's not going to end so nicely. The guy playing Jason shows up in full costume with FX prosthetics and doesn't speak. He's carrying a sharp machete. The writer places a big emphasis on how accurate the costume is, how imposing the guy is, etc. The location, although vhs_kitten doesn't explicitly say it, looks very much like one of the classic F13 movies, down to the lone overhead light on the dock. The FMC smokes a joint to get into character. Just tons of nice detail that, until it takes a turn towards the overtly sexual, could signify something wholly different.

It would have worked fine in any other category it might have fit in: Erotic Couplings, Group Sex, maybe Exhibitionism/Voyeurism. If the story had gone in a bad direction instead--if the husband objected, or if the guy actually had been Jason--it would have done wonderfully in Fetish, Nonconsensual/Reluctance, or Erotic Horror.

However, putting it into any of those categories would be giving the game away; almost nothing "bad" ever happens in the former categories, and "bad" things are the default for the latter ones, Fetish arguably excepted. Making the story ambiguous at the beginning (and even, to an extent, all the way through, until "Jason" speaks near the end), would only work so well, because of that.

Because it's in LW, though, the "safety net" of the other categories is gone. Not knowing the direction makes it a better story, and, I'd argue, a sexier one. When it turns out that it really is just a stranger in a costume having a fun time with a willing wife and a reluctant but ultimately enthusiastic husband, there's that sense of relief there, too: you're glad it's just three people having fun and not a prelude to murder

The best LW stories, IMHO, are like that: anything could happen. But anything could only happen because anything (within reason) does in that category; outright murder after the sex almost certainly wouldn't have flown, for example, and would have either not made it past moderation or would have seen it reported almost immediately. However, I could easily see a dozen different versions of that story that belong in there, all with wildly different outcomes. And the best bit is? The reader wouldn't have known which until they got to the end, just like in this case.

It's probably my favorite story I've read this year, even though it's not my kink, precisely because it does use the category's ambiguity to the best effect I've seen in a long time. Hopefully we'll see more from her soon.