Husband Hands: A Vignette About my Hands

The body knows.  It  has its own clock which wakes me mysteriously a few minutes before my wife's alarm clock will go off.  We lay like logs side by side in the dark as time goes by.

I can feel in the dark that she is awake too.  After a moment she rolls on her side facing away from me and then the alarm goes off.  She fumbles in the dark, whaps the clock and flops down again, still laying on her side with her back to me.  I've been dreaming of figs.  Figs sliced in half, wet, purplish and oddly cavernous.  A moist eatable cleft.  When I dream of figs I wake up erect.  I'm erect now and tear off the CPAP mask and switch off the machine.  I hang the mask on the bed post and drop back on my right side facing the same way as my wife.  It's funny, but though I've worn that CPAP mask for a decade I never dream of masks.

I wiggle stealthily across the mattress up close to her and press my boner up snug against her ass so she can feel it, the way our cat wraps itself around her ankle when it wants her attention.  Her warm and familiar ass.  This is marriage.  Old marriage.  Marriage laying in the dark covered by the habits of years.

We've made love in many places, most usually in the bed in a straight forward manner.  Sometimes a surprise visit in the shower, which is mechanically awkward to pull off because even turned around she stands much shorter than me and I am short so I have to scrunch down to get it in.  The sofa is a favorite place when we have the house to ourselves.  Usually a little rough and enhanced by the possibly of discovery  in the act by family members.  The code word between us, and old relationships have many code words is - did you lock the door?  I don't suppose old couples ever just say "Wanna fuck?"  I think kids do these days, they "hook up",  They say, without looking up from their smart phones  "Wanna hook up tonight?"  as if you were offering to change her oil.

Is the door closed?  Usually by the time I've checked the lock on the knob and turned around her clothes are on the floor.

I press my boner more conspicuously against her ass.  She presses back with the solidity of her body as I answer with my thighs against the backs of her thighs.  My right arm is pinned under my right side.  It has nothing to do with what follows.  It is a voyeur.

My left arm, free and frisky, snakes around her waist crosses over her belly and assertively pulls her closer.  My face is buried in her shoulder and I smell the scent of her skin and the cloth of her unwashed pajama top.  She makes a soft welcoming giggle of assent.  Barely audible.  In itself, another code word, this sound.  "I have to get up soon," she whispers.  She always says that too.

But she continues to stay.  My hand begins to travel.  It slips, as though under a security fence, inside the boundary of her pajama top and smooths it's way inside, palming the warm skin of her belly.  She always wears a top of some kind but never wears a bottom, whether for comfort or easy access I don't know.  We don't talk about these details much anymore.  She has tried to get me to wear pajamas, but I wasn't brought up to them, and I like the initial delicious shock of bare skin on cold sheets in the winter months when you bury yourself down in the blankets trying to warm up the bed with your body's heat, now shared.  With my nose pressed into the cloth of her shoulder, breathing her oniony body scent, my left hand caresses in lazy circles her charming little pot belly.  The scar of an operation.  Moving a little higher the dip of her belly button.  She moves noncommittally.  Again her consenting, almost conspiratorial giggle as though her father, long dead, might open the door to catch his daughter in the act.

This privileged hand, this fortunate hand which usually carries the donkey burdens of things when the right hand swings free, wanders down, ignoring the lure of her breasts for now. My hand caresses the rise of her belly, the descent of her waistline, the curved hillock of her hip and comes up against the hem of her panties.  Fingertips lift the fence again.  The hand opens the tent of her underwear and enters the forest of mammalian wiry curls like an animal seeking warmth.

I press my boner harder against her ass as my hand wanders, like a child in a magic forest, through the curls between her thighs exploring, insinuating itself like a hot stranger, maybe to linger awhile by the fire.

I am a strange man who loves women's unspeakable body hair.  I remember riding the local gypsy buses in Panama, the "Diabo Rojos" and there were these women from some Christian sect who never shaved their legs.  Their hairy legs were so erotic to me, they haunted my solitary fantasies.  I love to run my fingers through the thick aromatic pubic hair between my wife's legs more than I enjoy touching the thick perfumed public hair of her head.

On a lucky night I love to nose that hair, to feel it tickle my face as I give her pleasure with my tongue.  Sometimes I break off to bury my face in that private hair, knowable only to me and breathe in my wife's musky response to my patient licking.

If it were Saturday, and her so unresisting, I would persist and go lower, ease my fingers between her thighs and pry them apart searching for her body's code sign of willful wetness.

"I have to get up soon," she says.

Soon does not mean now, I tell myself and keep my hand there feeling the cleft, a little wet, but still dry.  But I will have that scent now on my fingers to enjoy later, whatever else.

My left hand moves away, back up, releasing the tented rise of her panties, up the hill of her belly, the valley of her navel, up to the first bone above her diaphragm and then a little more.

Caressing the bones of her rib cage, as though defining them one by one.  Feeling the rise of her inhalation and sigh.  Approaching the round swell of her breast.

A soft squeeze.

Answered by a soft giggle.

This would be her right breast, the one easiest to reach in this position, closest to the mattress, resting like a warm kitten on her arm; the other partly sheltered by her left arm laying against her side.  Instead of palming her breast, the obvious thing, my left hand insinuates its fingers under it, lifting it, wanting to find the mystery place, that hot, slightly oily place where the breast lays against the chest, slipping my fingers into that folded plain, feeling the soft weight of her breast resting on the tops of my fingers as I give it a playful nudge, a little heft, turn my hand over and caress now the underside of her breast, holding it like a baby bird in my hand.

The window brings the sound of a passing train and the neighbor's dog is awake.  I am holding my wife's breast in the palm of my hand, moving my fingers gently under it, enjoying the round pliant weight of it.

My fingers slip away and wander above, finding the nipple.  I want to know the state of her.  Is she erect as I am?  My finger tips wander the landscape of her stippled aureole and find the nipple - yes.  My wife has a terrific boner.  Affection stuns me.  My woman has a good solid hard on to rival mine, solid as a pencil eraser.  I pinch the very tip a little and she presses her back into me as if trying to escape the urge she is feeling.

My hand moves vertically to the other breast, dangling down a little from above.  But that nipple is relaxed.  A challenge.  I attend to it, my fingers teasing lightly, resisting the male impulse to handle and roughly squeeze.  My fingertips lightly circle the aureole at the base, subtly ignoring the nipple itself and I listen to the rising change in her breathing.  Is she deciding something?  Is she thinking about the time which is going by as we dally or thinking she'll follow through?

I feel proud of my erection this fine morning.  Youthfully, stubbornly rigid, insistent, not always a reliable state for such an aging man and usually not to be wasted.  Or trusted.  But this is Monday morning.  I think at it - my boner - 'where were you yesterday, why did you not raise your head on Sunday morning, all stiff and solid as a frozen chicken neck, when we might have done something good with you?'

"I need to get up," she says.

There is a hard rough crust of dried super glue on the tip of my left hand middle finger from repairing a broken cup yesterday afternoon.  I touch the scaly, spiky surface of my finger tip to the tip of her nipple and make tiny circles there.  It answers my gentle teasing, following my finger like the head of a sunflower following the sun; though I can't feel it much through the cracked shell of glue.  But I feel it rise.  Her erection.  Now my wife of many years has two erections standing taut and true  to my poor one.  What a miracle a woman is.  I spread my hand and  span the two stiffened nipples and play with them, brushing them both at the same time with one hand.

She presses her ass against my cock and the pressure draws my underwear down.  The head peeks out.

"I have to get up," she says, a little more serious now.

"I know," I say.

My left hand leaves her nipples in that state, and travels down the territory of her body back to her thighs, which lying on her side as she is, lay tightly shut against me on top of each other.  The hand will not be discouraged.  Fingertips gently caress first the thin, almost membranous skin of one thigh and then the other, sneaking up to touch the moist mound I feel through her underwear as she feels my cock rub against her ass.

I have a very pretty cock when its erect.  I think so.  It looks like an ugly limp worm when its's flaccid, true, but when it's as solidly  firm as it is now I like to lift my underwear and admire it.  Its circumcised, smooth, bald and helmeted, very symmetrical and classical looking, a beautiful, shapely, friendly phallus.    There is a male thrill I look forward to during the commencement of the act when I remove my underwear and reveal my phallus to her.  A boner is a statement.  It is a response.  An affirmation of desire.  It has nothing to do with being merely naked.  It's not something a man controls, like making a fist or a smile.  A boner is like a sneeze or laugh.  It isn't decided.  It happens.  It is an emphatic expression of how a man feels towards that woman at that moment.   Its an assertive, affirming, extremely healthy thing to do to take out your erect phallus and show it to your wife in that special moment of consent.  Maybe this is how women feel when they expose their breasts.

My left hand caresses the inner thigh of her, picking playfully at the stray hairs poking out under her panties edge from the night's tossing.

If this were a leisurely Sunday morning, she might give me the ultimate wifely code sign between a long married couple.  She would roll onto her back.

If so, I would sit up and straddle her, one knee on each side.  My two hands, now united would snatch up the hem of that pajama top together and pull it assertively right up to her chin   Maybe slowly and teasingly.  Maybe roughly, commanding.

You are exposed, my hands would say.

You are naked in my eyes.

I have exposed your breasts.  I have exposed your breasts because I wish to see them.

You are mine now.  You are conquered.  You are seen.

"I have to pee," she says and swings her knees and thighs away from me and my hand is in the air, bereft and embarrassed.  Exposed.

She switches on the lamp and yawns loudly.  The room is full of light now.  My unwanted phallus, shrinks and slinks away to oblivion almost whimpering.

She smiles coquettishly over her shoulder and pads off to the bathroom in dingy white gym socks.

I swing my knees over and chew at the dried glue on my finger tip running down my to-do list for this day.