Dirty secrets

…tap tap tap.

“I see you’re using my name for this deidre project.”

“Whose would I use?”

“I wasn’t consulted.”

“I see you’ve decided to crawl out of your little bunny cage now. Where were you the other day when I had time to do some writing?”

“Sleeping. Why are you calling it `Secrets’? Isn’t that giving it away? How about `The Beast’?”

“One word title rule. Haven’t you read anything deidre wrote? Besides, get over `the beast’ thing. Seriously.”

Tap tap tap…

…”There’s no other way to get our data back. The hard-drive is almost trashed.”

She looked at the monitor’s blank screen, no trace of the Window’s 95 colors or icons remaining. “What does your program do, exactly?”

I slipped the floppy into the disk drive and re-booted the machine. “It just tries to bring back everything that was stored on the computer. Hopefully it will get all our financials back. I should have bought that zip backup.”

She watched the little 486 power back up, noticed me watching her, and smiled warily. “It will get everything back, then?”

I rubbed her shoulders and felt her tense.

“It should. Everything that hasn’t been over-written or corrupted.”…

…tap tap tap.

“Who uses 486’s and Windows 95 these days?”

“This isn’t happening `now’.”

“So when is it happening?”

“Figure it out. Sometime between ’95 and ’98.”

“Ahh, subtle.”

“Subtlety is what it’s all about.”

“Maybe. Maybe it’s also about tying and gagging and whipping and crying and surprising and lesbian kisses and evil twists.”

“Sometimes it is. Definitely twists, although rarely evil. Innocence, too.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“Pithiness. That’s the point. Don’t you have something better to do?”

“Nope. Stop pithing on my parade.”

Tap tap tap…

…I woke sometime around midnight and realized she wasn’t sleeping beside me. Soundlessly, I padded out to the hall and followed the soft glow to the doorway of the den. She was sitting at the computer, head resting on her arms, gently snoring. I padded in, quietly realizing how delicate she looked, especially when she slept. Two of our kids would grow up to look just like her.

The program was still chugging away but I noticed that she had inserted a floppy of her own into the drive and had copied a few files from the machine as they were recovered. She was typically a sound sleeper but I still moved quietly to pull out the floppy she had and replaced it with a fresh one. I slipped her disk into the pocket of my robe and padded back to bed…

…tap tap tap.

“He’s going back for some ropes, right? Gonna go and rope that wife of his. Tie up her breasts, you know.”

“Do you have any idea why that sounds silly? Why that totally is `not’ what is going to happen next?”

“It never sounded silly before. Breasts `always’ get tied in our stories.”

“You haven’t a clue, have you?”

“Perhaps.”

Tap tap tap…

…She got back home from her Aids Awareness luncheon a little late. I was home early and I knew she didn’t expect me. The kids wouldn’t be home from school for a few hours yet. A worried look crossed her face when she saw me home at this hour but that look changed to curiosity when she noticed the bag in my hand. Without a word I pulled a silk scarf from the bag, blindfolded her and led her into the kitchen.

She tensed and almost tore the blindfold off when I gave her over to Celeste, our next-door neighbor. Celeste whispered to her in reassuring tones and I knew that the rest of the scarves in my bag wouldn’t be necessary, not that Celeste didn’t know how to tie someone tightly.

Celeste bent her over the kitchen table and with a wink in my direction, slapped my wife’s ass a few times before taking the K-Y Jelly from my bag. My wife moaned but didn’t protest as Celeste applied the cool jelly and I wondered if she would let me take her ass right then. But with a knowing grin, Celeste wordlessly buckled on the strap-on and shooed me away.

I pulled the floppy from my breast pocket and closed the door to the den. I’d never contemplated Celeste wanting to bring my wife into it. It was the floppy – Celeste loved the floppy. My wife was one hell of a writer, that was for sure. As I heard her moaning in pleasure from beyond the den door I wondered how much writing she would have time for now. Or whether it was needed…

…tap tap tap.

“Now what?”

“What do you mean?”

“What happens next? He goes back out and they both do his wife? Whose name, by the way, happens to be deidre?”

“I should be so presumptuous.”

“But that’s what you’ve done, isn’t it? You’ve written about deidre.”

“Look, this story is about a suburban housewife who gets a pleasant surprise when her loving husband stumbles onto her kinks and decides to start giving them to her in real life. The twist is that the husband was into it already, only not with his wife but with his wife’s best friend.”

“So much for subtlety now, right? You pithed on your own story. You’re also presuming to explain what happened to deidre.”

“Get back in your bunny cage. Or your cement coffin, or hidden basement root cellar or wherever you’re calling home these days.”

“Don’t talk to your muse like that. I might just fall asleep for a long, long time.”

“So, what else is new?”

“And you want to know another thing? I’m going to keep all this in. Just so everyone knows how you treat me. And I’m calling it what I want, one word title rule or not.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”