Striptease

Sexy, Earl thought, very sexy. He was sitting in bed with a book lying open and ignored on his lap, watching Adelaide get ready for bed. She was trying to pretend that she didn’t know he was watching her, but her motions were too deliberate and calculated to tease for her to be totally unconscious of his eyes on her. Adelaide was now straddling the small stool in front of her dressing table clad only in the blue blouse she had worn with her business suit today, a garter belt and stockings. She was slowly brushing her shoulder length black hair. Earl loved her hair. It shone from the vigorous brushing Adelaide had been dishing out as she placed her brush on the dressing table. Without looking back at Earl she took off her blouse, letting it carelessly fall to the floor, and stood up.

Even though they had been married for nearly 18 years, Earl sucked in his breath with appreciation. They had 3 children and Adelaide’s figure was no longer that of the 25 year old vixen he had married, but he loved this riper, mature and Rubenesque woman even more. Adelaide gave Earl a saucy wink which set him to laughing as she twirled and spun her way shamelessly across the room………and into the bathroom.

“Be out before you know it, Stud-muffin – and you better be wide awake and rarin’ to go!!!”

Earl grinned as he settled back onto the bed to wait for Adelaide to join him. He closed his eyes and his mind began to wander back over the years they had been together. So many of their friends had gotten divorced, sometimes more than once, and he contemplated what was different about their relationship.

When they had first met, they were both graduate students full of idealism and themselves. At first, Earl had been put off by Adelaide’s often acid wit and sharp tongue. As their paths continued to cross, however, he was able to see that this was the shield she placed between herself and the world. The challenge of getting inside that wall tantalized Earl, and he slowly worked at stripping away that layer of protectiveness. Finally she shed it, in the first move of an intricate dance of seduction that had lasted nearly 20 years – so far.

They spent more and more time together and Earl began to suspect that Adelaide, ever the model of a strong woman, had a deeply sensitive side as well. Again, he was tantalized by glimpses of another layer and captivated by her as the dance intensified and she stripped that layer away as well.

Adelaide was a brainy one, there was no doubt of that. She earned her living dealing with numbers and statistics and her world was anchored by those things which could be proven and touched. But as Earl pursued his vocation as an expert and professor of world religions, he cam to realize that there was a deeply spiritual layer to this very practical and scientific woman. When he joined stepped into the dance and slowly, sensuously peeled the pragmatic overlay, letting it fall carelessly to the floor, that spiritual layer was there naked to him.

At that point Earl had been sure that he had seen all the layers of Adelaide. But then they had their first child and yet another layer of enigmatic garb was stripped away as the heart and soul of a mother lay radiant and exposed for the very first time.

Though he didn’t realize what was happening, Earl had been totally captured by the rhythm and movement of the dance. He saw glimpses of still more hidden delights in Adelaide’s make-up. There was creativity, the soul of a poet to strip bare and expose. And next…..well, next, he didn’t quite know, but he was sure that he had not seen the final act yet of this most tantalizing and long-lived striptease he had ever witnessed.

“Hey Studley! I’m coming for you!!!” Adelaide called out from the bathroom.

Earl fluffed the pillows, smoothed the blankets, laid his neglected book aside and prepared to lose himself in the dance.