"I Love My Wife"

I Love My Wife

I love my wife.

And if anyone even dreams of saying that I don’t…

Man, they better wake up real quick and apologize.

I do love her. I love everything about her. Her cocoa brown skin. Her sexy brown eyes. Her body, so fine and thick that when she walks across the room, my eyes zoom in on her like lasers.

I love the little things, too. I love the way the bathroom smells after she has finished taking a bath. I love that sound, that hiss, as she pulls that hot comb through her hair. I love the way her big toe curls slightly towards her middle toe. Her laughter when she talks on the phone to her family and friends is music to my ears. I love watching her as she reads a bedtime story to our son. I stare at her for hours as she sleeps, wondering if she dreams of me. Her light snore lulls me into a peaceful sleep at night.

Yes, I love my wife. She is a good wife, more than I could ever ask or hope for.

But I also love the chase. The chase is where it’s at, and the chase is all I think about. The high I get when I bed a new woman is a high better than free drugs. Going to a club, sitting at a bar, and catching the eye of some hot young thing at the far end is the sport of champions. One flash of my million dollar smile and a casual wink of my eye are my rod and reel. I reel them in like a fish. They're ready to be cleaned, battered down, and fried. Hell, It ain’t even necessary to hide my wedding ring. This is 1981. There are women out there, looking for a man, any man, married or not. And I’m a tall fine dark brother. I am what they all want. I am what they all need.

I please those women. I know I do by the way they moan my name late in the midnight hour. They worship the ground I walk on. They plead with me not to go, but I slip on my clothes and tell them that I have to go. It ain’t nothing for me to bed them and get up and get on to my house, to my wife, to my own bed.

Now, most of them have their own places. I would never take a woman back to my place. Not to the bed that I share with my wife.

That would be disrespectful.

I love my wife too much to do something as foul as that.

I’ve ran as many as eight women at a time, and that’s not easy. Some want more time than others, and some are just happy to get a moment of my time. Some are wild and kinky. A few are innocent and needy. Sometimes it’s hard to keep everybody straight.

No, maintaining eight different households wasn’t easy. It's easier to keep five or six different chicks on the team. My wife Sylvia always runs point.

And as long as they all play right, they all stay in the game.

And if anyone of them acts up? That broad rides the bench.

Hell, she might even get traded.

But I always come home to my wife. She never asks questions. Never fusses or nags. She always has a good hot breakfast ready, even taking the time to fresh squeeze my orange juice. She knows to have my newspaper on the table, open to the sports section, when I come in from a long night out.

But it has been a couple of years since I’ve touched her in a way a man touches his wife. The last time we had sex, I stared into her eyes, and her eyes said two words…

“I know.”

The look in her eyes was a storm cloud of shame over my head. It got to the point where I couldn’t even make eye contact.

No, she never whines or fusses. Afterall, she didn’t have to.

She knew she was the one that held all the power.


*repost, circa 2006. Offshoot story from Sweet Heat from character Fred Ellison's point of view, part of the Buttermilk Biscuit Blues Anthology.