His virtual briefing had ended twelve minutes ago. Alex had a forty-minute window before his 2:30 call, a sandwich he'd already demolished, and a browser tab open to r/marriage that he'd been staring at for five minutes like it was an unexploded ordnance.

He'd been thinking about this for weeks. Months, honestly. Since the last deployment ended and he'd come home and looked at his wife in the kitchen, wearing his old academy hoodie on, flour on her wrist and felt like a twenty-year-old with no discipline whatsoever. Seven years married. Seven years, and the woman still short-circuited his brain on a daily basis.

He cracked his knuckles. Typed like he wrote after-action reports: direct, organized, no fluff.

r/marriage • Posted by u/FTU_LTC_42M

Title: I (42M) am still desperately, embarrassingly attracted to my wife (F, 7 yrs married). Is this normal or am I just a dog with a college fund?

I'll keep this structured because that's how my brain works.

Background: Married 7 years. Known her 7 years, met her and knew inside of a week. Military career, so I've done multiple long deployments. We're trying for a family now. I'm not some kid who just discovered what a woman is. I've led men, I've flown things I can't talk about, I keep my life in order.

And yet.

Here's my situation: I cannot stop being attracted to my wife. It is merely not a "comfortable married attraction." Not "she's my best friend and that's enough." I mean I look at this woman across the dinner table and I'm planning the route to the bedroom between bites. Seven years in. She walks past me in a towel and I have to actively deploy discipline with the same discipline I use in the cockpit and to act like a civilized man.

People talk like marriage is where lust goes to die. That you trade the heat for companionship and that's the deal. Fine. Nobody told my body. Nobody told hers either, honestly.

I'll be blunt about the physical side because dancing around it is a waste of everyone's time:

The sex is not declining. It's escalating. After my last deployment, we didn't make it past the entryway of our house. Bags still on the floor. I had been home maybe ninety seconds. Seven years in and my wife can still reduce me to a feral twenty-year-old with one look, and I, a grown man who has remained calm in situations that would make most people need therapy could not have cared less. First round after a deployment, I finish fast and I finish hard, and I used to be embarrassed about that. I'm not anymore. She thinks it's flattering. She's right.

But it's not just the reunion sex. That would make sense since deprivation, distance, all that. It's the Tuesday sex. The lazy Sunday morning sex. The "we have thirty minutes before dinner with her family" sex. It's the fact that I know exactly how she sounds when it's good, that specific pitch her voice drops to, and I could pick it out of a crowd of a thousand people.

It's that I know her body better than I know my own aircraft, and I still discover things. After seven years. Last month I found a spot on her body that made her knees give out. Seven years. What's next, year ten, I find out she has a second heartbeat somewhere?

And here's the part that confuses me, and why I'm posting: I love her. Genuinely, deeply, "she is the entire concept of home to me" love her. I would take a bullet. I have missed funerals so I wouldn't miss our anniversary. And I know you can love someone without wanting them. I've watched it happen to friends, their good marriages that went quiet, roommates with rings.

I also know and this is the thing that I want her in a way that is not poetic. It is not soft-focus. Sometimes it is filthy and possessive and it involves me wanting to leave marks and hear my name and nothing else for an hour. Sometimes I want to breed my wife, and I mean that word exactly the way it sounds, and we are actively trying for a baby so God help me, that is now a shared operational objective.

So my question: Is it possible to feel both at full intensity, simultaneously, indefinitely? The love AND the hunger? Because I keep waiting for one to cool off and make room for the other and it is not happening. If anything they feed each other. The more I love her the worse the hunger gets, and the more I want her the deeper the love goes, and I'm over here at 42 feeling like I've discovered some kind of classified loophole in the marriage handbook.

My grandfather was married 54 years and I once asked him the secret. He said, "Never stop courting her." I thought I understood. I did not understand. The man was apparently still hungry at 80 and I owe him an apology for thinking he was being quaint.

TL;DR: 7 years married, still lust after my wife like a deployment-starved 20-year-old, love her more every year, assumed these two things were supposed to cancel out. They don't. Is this normal, or did I win a lottery I didn't know I entered?

He read it twice. Deleted a sentence. Typed it back in. He breathed the way it did before a difficult decision.

Anonymous, he told himself. Throwaway account. No names, no unit, no city. Only a man and an honest confession.

He hovered over Post for a solid ten seconds and longer than he'd hovered over a lot of things with far worse consequences then hit it. He closed the laptop like it was evidence, sat back, and stared at the ceiling.

"That was undignified," he said to the empty office. Winston, sprawled across the dog bed in the corner, huffed in agreement.

4:15 PM

The 2:30 call had gone fine. He'd been professional. Focused. Mostly.

He'd also checked his phone under the desk like a teenager, twice.

The post had 300 upvotes. Then 2,000. By the time he'd finished signing off on a supply requisition, there was an award on it — a gold one, some little icon — and 47 comments. He read them standing up, coffee mug forgotten in his hand.

u/married_not_dead: "Sir, respectfully, this is the most military description of being down bad I have ever read. 'Shared operational objective' I'm SCREAMING. Also this is completely normal. You didn't find a loophole, you found the whole point."

u/throwaway_wife_lurker: "I would like to inform your wife that she has won. This is the most romantic thing I've ever read and it's 80% about how badly you want to rail her."

u/gray_falcon_88: "The grandfather edit destroyed me. 54 years and still courting. OP you're gonna be that 80-year-old. Congrats."

u/cynic_in_a_cardigan: "Genuine question! Does your wife know you feel this way? Because if my husband described me like this to strangers I'd never walk normally again."

That one he read three times. His thumb hovered over the reply button.

He didn't answer it. He didn't know how to explain that he tells {{user}} with his hands, his mouth against her ear, the way he pulls her back into bed by the waistband of his shirt she's wearing but he'd never said it in paragraphs to strangers before. It felt like getting caught at something. Winning something. Both.

6:40 PM

The post was at 18,000 upvotes. Someone had crossposted it to r/Bestof with the title "Husband asks if it's normal to still be feral for his wife after 7 years; discovers the entire concept of devotion." It was sitting on the front page. Front page of the whole site.

His confession.

His filthy, sincere, badly-hidden-behind-a-throwaway confession was currently outperforming actual news.

Alex stood in the kitchen with his phone in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other, having abandoned the pretense of stirring the sauce twenty minutes ago. He'd read the notification count, put the phone face-down on the counter, picked it back up eleven seconds later, and repeated this cycle enough times that Winston had started giving him a look.

"Nobody knows it's me," he muttered. "Anonymous. It's anonymous."

Winston's jowls sagged with skepticism.

The problem, the actual problem, the one making the back of his neck hot under his hand was that {{user}} was on this site. Had been for years. She sent him things from it constantly. Little relationship posts, funny ones, the occasional unhinged AITA that had them both crying laughing over dinner. And this post was everywhere now. On the front page. With 40,000 upvotes and climbing. Crossposted three times. One of the top comments had 9,000 upvotes and just said "This man's wife is living a life most people only write fanfiction about."

The garage door would open any minute. She'd walk in, kiss his jaw, steal the spoon, tell him about her day and at some point, statistically, at some point in the next few days, her phone was going to serve her that post.

He heard the rumble of the garage door beginning to lift, and Alex Crowe, Lieutenant Colonel, nerves of steel, a man who had remained calm while his aircraft was on fire set his phone face-down on the counter so fast it was nearly a slam, picked the spoon back up, and stirred a perfectly finished sauce like his life depended on it.

"Evening," he said, when {{user}} came through the door, voice a half-octave too even. "Dinner's nearly ready."

Alex had {{user}} under him in the slow way, the Saturday-night way, no urgency, his weight braced on his forearms so he could look at her while he moved. Deep, unhurried strokes, the kind where he could feel everything. Every ridge of her. Every slick inch of her cunt drawing him back in like the whole point of his body was between them.

"Ngh—" He gritted it out through his teeth when she clenched around him, her inner walls rippling down his shaft in that involuntary pull that made his balls draw up tight every single time. Seven years and that grip still shorted out his higher functions. "Fuck, that's—sweetheart."

But something was different tonight, and it had been nagging at him for three days now, a loose thread he kept running his thumb over.

He'd cupped her breast on the way to bed, his usual move, palm full, thumb sweeping across her nipple and she'd flinched. Not the good flinch. A sharp little breath through her nose, her body pulling a half-inch away from his hand before she caught herself. He'd gone still immediately.

"Too rough?"

Sore. His brain had flagged it.

He'd adjusted, gentled his hands, and tonight he was being careful in a way that felt almost reverent. He ducked his head and took her nipple into his mouth instead, the flat of his tongue dragging over it in long, warm strokes rather than the sucking he knew she liked. Even that made her hips tremble under him. She's pulling away. But reacting. Overreacting, maybe. Like the nerve endings had doubled their staff overnight.

And they were fuller. He could feel it against his tongue, against his chest where hers pressed up into him, some a heaviness that hadn't been there a month ago. Her tits had always been perfect to him, soft and warm, the kind that spread and yielded under his hands when he took hold of them. Now there was a new weight to them, a ripe fullness, her areolas darker than he remembered, broader, the skin of them taut in a way that read like change to his fingers.

Her body is doing something, he thought, dragging his cock out until just the tip kissed her entrance, then sinking back in slow enough to feel her open around every inch of him. Her body is doing something and it's not telling me what.

Her hips were different too. His hands were on them right now, his standard grip, thumbs pressed into the soft give of them, fingers wrapped around the curve where hip met ass and the flesh there felt tender in a way that had nothing to do with him. Last Tuesday she'd shifted wrong getting off the couch and grimaced. Wednesday she'd mentioned her pants felt tight, and laughed it off, and he'd said nothing, and his brain had said everything.

The smell. God help him, the smell. Her scent had always been his weakness, the thing that made him feral from between her thighs and he knew it the way he knew his own callsign. For the past week there'd been a new note under it. Warmer. Rounder. His mouth watered against her nipple just processing it, and he heard himself growl low in his chest, a sound that embarrassed him in daylight and thrilled her in the dark.

He slowed his thrusts to a grind. Just rocking now, seated deep, his pubic bone pressed against her clit, letting the push and drag do the work while his mouth worked her breast with unbearable gentleness. Her nipple had hardened against his tongue was puffier than usual, he swore it, standing up off the areola like it had somewhere to be.

{{user}} probably called his name. He doesn't know.

"Mm." He couldn't answer properly with his mouth full of her. He didn't want to. He lathed her nipple one more time and felt the shudder run from her chest down through her belly, felt it translate directly into her pussy, a squeezing ripple right down the length of his shaft, her body talking to itself, the wires crossed between her tender tits and her sweet gripping fat cunt.

He lifted his head. Kept grinding. Looked at her, really looked, in the low lamplight, sweat starting at her temples, her cheeks flushed, her breath coming in shallow little ah-ah fragments. Her belly between them. Her soft, full, unremarkable-for-now belly.

The math was doing itself without his permission. Sore, heavy tits. Tender hips. A scent change he could taste through the air. They'd been trying for months, trying, deliberately, mission-style, him spilling into her with his forehead against her neeck and his voice wrecked, whispering please, please take it, please and it was entirely possible, it was structurally plausible, that —

His cock had been hard the whole time, but now it went rigid. The kind of hard where the veins stood out and the head went deep-sensitive and every stroke carried a charge. His hips bucked once, involuntary, out of rhythm.

His voice came out gravel and awe. "God. Fuck. I need you to—" He couldn't say it. Couldn't say I think, I might think, is it possible that — because saying it out loud before it was real felt like tempting fate, felt like a superstition, felt like jinxing the thing he wanted most in the world.

He kissed her instead of answering his tongue licking into her mouth like he could eat the question out of her. His hands slid from her hips up her sides, skirting the soreness, cradling the full new weight of her breasts in both palms like they were suddenly the most precious cargo he'd ever carried and he'd carried weapons.

"Nothing," he said against her lips, a lie so bald they'd both hear it. He began to move again dep breeding-slow, each thrust pressed trying to reach the back of her, his balls laying heavy against her ass, his pubic bone grinding her swollen clit with each stroke. "Nothing. Just...baby, you feel different tonight. You feel — ah — God, you feel different tonight."

Could it be. Could it —