Xmas Wishes: How Do You Sleep BTB

He looked up as the flight attendants gave their usual safety procedure lecture and went over the way we were expected to conduct ourselves while on the plane. Finally, they locked the door and the plane began to taxi forward.

Jared released a big breath of air. "Do I need to hold your hand?" I asked. "Are you still nervous about take offs and landings?"

His head turned towards me and our eyes met. In that faction of a second, I saw him go through recognition, anger and finally resignation. "I'm fine," he said. Then he pulled out a magazine and busied himself reading it.

It had been a big step, he now knew that I was there and sitting right next to him. He hadn't cursed at me or tried to get one of the flight attendants to change seats.

The giant silver beer can with wings that we were sitting on gained speed and gradually lifted its bulk into the air. Even after all of the flights I've been on, I'm still astonished that something that big can propel itself through the air. The instance where we stop rolling and start flying is one of the most amazing things in the world to me. This plane, like all the others I've been on, made the transition as effortlessly as possible. We gained altitude and then executed a long sweeping bank to align ourselves in the direction of our course.

The captain said a few words over the intercom that I was simply not paying attention to. The flight attendants walked up and down the aisles greeting everyone and answering questions. We hadn't been in the air for a full two minutes yet and those fembots were already annoying me. It took every bit of my self-control not to scream at them for being so God damned cheerful.

Jared, on the other hand, found his magazine mesmerizing. In fact he hadn't looked up from it even once.

"Can we talk?" I said out of the blue. His brown eyes looked up from his magazine at me. They scanned my face as if looking for something. Whatever he wanted to see there, I hoped to God that he'd find it.

"What would be the point?" he asked. His voice was masked by neutrality. I had no idea of how he felt about talking to me. He could have been seething with anger, wincing in pain or simply totally disinterested. I just couldn't tell.

"Jare, we never got a chance to talk, uhm afterwards. I never got the chance to apologize or explain. I didn't get a chance to say anything to you. We never got any form of closure. My shrink says that after a traumatic experience, both parties are in a kind of limbo until they get a chance to come face to face and express their feelings or their viewpoints on the incident to the other concerned party."

He looked at me as if he didn't understand what I was saying. His look had no anger in it, only curiosity. He wasn't trying to hurt me. It was as if he simply couldn't comprehend why I'd want to talk to him or why he'd be interested in listening.

"Interesting," he said. Then he turned back to his magazine.

Jared always did have a way of frustrating me. In this case, he wasn't holding a conversation with me. I'd imagined this moment thousands of times over the last year. There were so many things that I wanted to say to him. I'd practiced answering any and all questions that I was sure he'd ask. I had responses to all of them and I even had answers to his responses to my questions.

As usual, Jared wasn't doing what I'd expected. He not only wasn't having a conversation with me, he wasn't refusing to speak to me either. I'd been ready for him to refuse to speak to me. I had a whole speech or three prepared for handling that. Two of them included starting out with things that were outright lies just to draw him into the conversations. But Jared, with his refusing to refuse to speak, yet not actually speaking, avoided them all.

He was so different from everyone I'd ever met. He was smart. He was sexy and he danced to the beat of a drummer that seemingly only he could hear. At the same time, if he liked you, he had no problems drawing you into his world and allowing you to hear that drummer and jiggle just a little bit to his unusual rhythm right along with him. Fuck, I missed that drummer.

When we first got together, both of us were out of college and deep into our twenties. We'd both started our careers and were both between relationships. I met him through a friend of a friend. She liked him too but he had simply never noticed her. Guys always talk about how much they hate being locked in the friend zone. I think that we women don't know it but sometimes guys make a move on us that is totally inappropriate on purpose.

They do this because they want to break out of the friend zone. The friend zone is hell to a guy. It means that he can do everything in the world for us but we're still never going to fuck him. We treat the guys in the friend zone like they're girlfriends who just happen to have dicks swinging between their legs. We can meet and totally hate other guys. We can think those guys are total assholes. But those assholes are still more likely to fuck us than the guys in the friend zone are. So sometimes those friend zone guys will grab your ass or your tits, knowing that they're destroying the friendship with us just to get out of the friend zone. To them, it's better to be an asshole that may someday get laid, than to be stuck having to listen to the details of every bad date a woman has been on, without the slightest chance of ever fucking her.

Anyway, Connie was in Jared's friend zone. She would stop over to watch football with him, even though she didn't know a thing about it. While she was in his apartment, she'd accidentally spill beer all over herself and have to change into something of his. She told me once she wore one of his t-shirts with nothing on under it for a whole game and he simply didn't make a move.

It was very demoralizing for her. She knew he wasn't gay, and yet there she was sitting only inches away from him with her nipples as hard as diamonds and her pussy so wet you could hear it splashing, but Jared didn't notice. Things like that are hard on a girl's ego. So she decided to fight fire with fire. She pretended that she wasn't interested in him either. She even went as far as to suggest other women that he might be interested in. She wasn't stupid enough to suggest anyone who was more attractive than she was, or anyone she thought he might like better, which was where I came in.

She brought me over to a party she was hosting and introduced me to him. It was a fucked up situation, because I really wanted to help her out. But the problem was the first time I laid eyes on him, I wanted him. At that time I was twenty six years old and working as a secretary. I dated frequently but hadn't found anyone really serious. I wasn't a prude but I insisted that my dates had to take the time to get to know me before we got physical.

After we talked and I heard Jared's side of the story, I realized that he was even worse than I was. He simply didn't sleep with women that he didn't really sense a connection with. If he couldn't imagine himself married to you, he simply wouldn't sleep with you.

Apparently, we both passed each other's standards because less than two hours after we met, Jared dick was in me as far as he could get it. My legs were so far apart trying to pull him in me even further that I expected my hips to pop out of their sockets at any second. It felt so good that I just didn't care.

I lost Connie as a friend, of course, but shit, it was all her own fault any way. In a way, Connie had insulted me. She'd only introduced me to Jared because she thought that she was prettier than I was. She also thought that she was built better than I was and she thought that I had no chance with him. It was her loss and her fault.

I still laugh sometimes thinking about how she must have felt after introducing us at that party, only to see the two of us leave shortly thereafter. She must've felt really bad to leave her guests just so she could follow us back to my apartment. She waited outside for over four hours until he left, so she could run up to my apartment and confront me.

I opened the door thinking that he'd forgotten something. I hadn't even bothered to put any clothes on. I still had bite marks all over my neck and his sperm running down my leg. She took one look at me and burst into tears before calling me every kind of whore and tramp she could imagine.

"You're not as pretty as I am," she cried. I just nodded my head. "Your tits are too small and your ass is way too big," she screamed. I nodded my head again. "You're a whore. You fucked him on the first date. You didn't actually even go on a date." Again all I could do was nod my head in agreement with her.

"What do you have that I don't?" she cried.

"Well, for starters," I said. "His cum in my pussy and no intention of giving him back to you." I slammed the door in her face and ended five years of friendship. But it was also the start of my relationship and eventual marriage to Jared. He was and still is the love of my life.

In those first few weeks with Jared, I quickly learned what love really was. We spent almost every possible second together. We spent a lot of that time in bed, but we also spent time getting to know each other's likes, dislikes and personality quirks as well. There were a lot of days when we'd go to bed with each other and not have sex. We'd simply lay there touching each other.

After we got married, it got even more intense. Jared became consumed with making our lives together the best they could be. He bent himself over backwards trying to make and keep me happy. We saved every penny we could to buy our house. The plan was that we'd start preparing for our eventual genetically perfect nuclear children. I noticed after a while that for Jared, while we didn't have very much money coming in from our jobs above what we needed and the little bit that we could save every week, there was a double standard.

Jared, denied himself even the most inconsequential things, but he'd always splurge on anything I wanted. I didn't realize what he was doing until the summer that he didn't even drive his Mustang once. That way he told me, he could save the entire cost of the car's ridiculously high insurance rates. He could also save the increased spending on gas for its powerful motor.

I walked away from him shaking my head when I realized that only the week before he'd taken me out to dinner at a very expensive restaurant that I wanted to try and he'd bought me three new outfits, that I had to admit I didn't really need.

It had started to sink in, that this man loved me. He hadn't married me simply because he liked fucking me. He really wanted me to be with him for the rest of his life. He was going to be more to me than the daddy figure to my kids. Jared was the missing piece of my soul.

I applied for and got a position at work in the sales trainee program. After six months, I was a full- fledged salesperson. I had and fought for accounts and everything. I did notice that my sales weren't nearly as high as some of the guys'. I thought it was long term relationships with their customers or other factors like that.

I listened to some of the older salesmen sometimes. I noticed that they all had ways of "Sweetening" their deals. Some of them invited their customers to parties or barbecues. Others played golf or invited their customers to go gambling. But all of those guys got the best accounts and the highest sales numbers and the best bonuses.

I guess it was about 4 years ago; I'd been a sales person for about 3 years. One of my best customers was Mick Fleetwood. Mick had been one of my first accounts but he still only gave me small sales. He sometimes called some of the other salespeople for his bigger sales even though technically he was my account.

Mick was 68 years old and his health was bad. His wife had died a couple of years before that and I'd gone to her funeral. I thought that we had the kind of relationship where I could ask him anything, so I did. I asked him why he gave me all of his regular day to day small order business, but deferred his big machinery sales to John Mcvie or even Lindsay Buckingham.

He told me that those guys had a way of sweetening the deals for him. It turned out that those guys were getting the randy old bastard hookers. I was desperate for a bonus, so I could stay in the sales force. I really needed to do my part to help Jared save for our house. So I slept with Mick.

I really didn't consider it sex. He was 68 years old. Even with Viagra he could only keep it up for about ten minutes. There was also the fact that no man alive could compete with Jared when it came to sex. We were just so perfectly matched. We fit so well together and I loved him so much. You simply couldn't compare him to anything else.

After a couple of bonuses, the extra income really helped us. After a while, we bought our house and actually seemed to be doing well. Jared had gotten a couple of promotions at work and was now bringing in a lot more money. We traded in his Mustang on a newer and better Mustang. I got a new car as well. We still saved money but it was more like a rainy day fund.

Finally, we began to talk about me giving up my job so we could start having kids. We figured that I'd finish out the year and then give my notice early on in the next year. I was in Chicago having dinner with one of my biggest customers. I wanted to go out on a high note. I wanted to win the highest sales award for that quarter. I'd come close several times before but neither I nor any female salesperson in the company had ever won it.

After dinner, I retired to my room in the hotel with the customer. I was lying there imagining that the 60 year old guy humping away at me was Jared and we were making a baby. "Come on baby give me that juice. Make me a mommy," I said. The old fucker on me was out of breath and really didn't give a fuck what I said, as long as he got some. I could have called him Jared and he wouldn't have blinked.

That was the way I got through the sex. I just closed my eyes and imagined it was Jared. Of course, it never felt as good as it did with Jared but your mind can work wonders. Only that last time, something told me to open my eyes. I did and my world ended. As my eyes focused, I noticed Jared standing there in the open doorway with several of my colleagues and my boss. He had tears running down his cheeks. I tried to push Harvey off of me. He was partially deaf and didn't realize what was going on.

"No!" I screamed.

"Goodbye, Audrey," said Jared. "I loved you."

Even as he turned and walked away, I was pulling myself out from under Harvey's bulk. The reactions of the men still in the room, as I tried to dress and follow Jared were all markedly different.

My boss was livid. He stood there turning redder and redder like an old steam furnace. He was going over the facts in his mind, almost as if he was collecting steam before he blew. The tittering expressions on the faces of my colleagues were also varying. I heard everything from, "I knew there was a reason the cunt was out selling me," to "Hey, we all have our ways of closing a deal."

Just before I left the room for the bathroom I heard, "Shit, I should have been fucking her myself."

Harvey was smiling and high fiving the guys. His new found studliness by far out-weighed any possible damage to his marriage.

As I finished cleaning myself up and threw my clothes into a suitcase, I noticed that all of the guys with the exception of my boss, Darren, had gone.

The pain and despair I'd felt finally also worked its way out of me. It came out in the form of long mournful wails and sobs. I couldn't stop crying no matter what I did. Darren was trying to explain to me how they'd come to be there.

There hadn't been any kind of surveillance on me, there hadn't been an investigation. Darren had discovered that I'd already won the top salesperson award for the quarter. He'd called me to tell me and had forgotten that I was on the road. When he told Jared about the award, Jared had confessed that it would probably be my last trip, since we were going to start our family.

Both Darren and Jared thought that surprising me with a cake and a little ceremony would be a great idea. Only they were the ones who ended up surprised. He told me that I should probably give Jared some time to get over his shock before I started trying to talk to him.

Darren had been married and divorced three times. Wife number four seemed like she'd be the one to stick. He'd been through and seen it all. He'd even been through this once. He tried to explain to me what Jared was feeling or something like it since every person was different. He told me that tomorrow would be soon enough to try to talk to Jared.

He told me to get my story straight and be prepared to be humiliated and to take a lot of shit. He told me that it would probably take some time, but that Jared and I loved each other, so he thought that if we fought hard, we could make it.

He also told me that I was fired. As soon as I was done packing, I checked out and headed for the airport. My flight wasn't scheduled to leave until the next afternoon. I'd missed the last flight out that day by less than a half hour. Unfortunately, Jared had been on it.

When I got back to the hotel, Harvey was sitting and drinking with the guys. I didn't go over to them, I stayed in my room crying and trying to call Jared. He never answered or returned any of my calls. My staying away from the guys didn't stop them from trying to come up to my room though. I was no longer a colleague in their eyes. I was merely a slut. There were no longer any rules of workplace conduct to prevent them from hitting on me.

When I flew out the next day, I'd spent the entire night preparing for my confrontation with Jared. I was prepared to get down on one knee and kiss his ass or whatever else he wanted me to do. I expected him to have changed the locks and changed the garage codes. I tried to get into the garage first. My remote worked on the first try.

I knew then that as angry as he probably was, it wasn't a deal breaker if he still allowed me access to the garage where his precious Mustang was stored for the winter. As the garage opened, my despair deepened. Jared's Mustang was not only gone, in the middle of winter with snow on the ground, which was unheard of. My car was in the garage.

A lot of you won't understand what that means. Jared's car had not only never seen snow, it had never seen rain. Jared only drove that car in the summer on absolutely dry days. The underside of that car and all the rest of it was still showroom new. The car had never been washed in a car wash. He lovingly washed the car every third day, all summer no matter what. It slept all winter in a heated garage and he still washed it to keep dust off of it, even though it was covered.

There was only one meaning for this message, he'd left me. Jared was gone and he wasn't coming back.

I fell down crying in the garage all over again. As I sat there crying a UPS truck pulled up in front of the house. The driver got down and gave me a big package. It wasn't very heavy. I signed for the package and the driver gave me a cheerful, "Merry Christmas," and left.

I knew what was in the box. It was one of Jared's Christmas presents. I'd bought him a suede and leather jacket with Mustang emblems all over it, so he could remember the stupid car even when he couldn't drive it.

I noticed a lot of junk piled up in front of the house. I overlooked it as I went to the door and tried my key. It still worked, of course. I didn't know what to expect when I walked into the house. I guess I thought that maybe Jared would have gone crazy and damaged a lot of our belongings and messed up the house. I knew that things could be replaced so I was prepared. But Jared had changed the house in a way that I never expected.