‘You’re giving me a free pass to sleep with whoever I choose?’
He looked up at her and now couldn’t help but picture her out at some wedding, deciding on which guy on the dance floor she was going to invite back to her room to—
Oh, God. Was he really advocating his wife cheat on him just to get even? Once it had happened there would be no going back. She would always have that about her—that one night, even if Noah had allowed it, she’d have been unfaithful.
Taking another man to her bed. Touching him, going down on him, taking him inside her. She would be forever stained by her infidelity, no matter how fair it seemed.
And yet... if it happened, maybe all this pain would finally go away. They could agree to trust one another again, take their relationship back to where it had been. Life as they knew it would not be over.
‘I’m giving you a free pass,’ he said. ‘A Hall Pass for one wedding, one night. You do as you please... then, we put it all behind us, move on.’
The image of his wife being plowed by some stranger while he waited on his own in another room at the wedding venue or a nearby hotel... why did it seem strangely exciting? Because it really wasn’t the kind of thing his wife would do ordinarily? Because it would turn their relationship inside out?
Was his brain trying to protect himself from pain by associating the idea of his wife sleeping with another man with Noah’s own sexual arousal?
God... he was getting an erection at the thought that Adrienne might actually say ‘yes’ to this insane idea.
‘A Hall Pass?’ She said, mulling the words over in her head, getting a feel for them on her tongue.
‘Uh-huh.’
She nodded, frowned, trying to play down her surprise, her curiosity. ‘And you think it’s the only way... We’re going to get through this?’
‘Maybe,’ he said.
She glanced around the room as though she might find some answer hidden somewhere—behind a picture on the wall, perhaps. Then she said slowly, warily, ‘I guess we should do it, then.’
Chapter Two
Adrienne loved going to weddings. Noah hated going to weddings. But Adrienne was positively obsessed, and so she and Noah went to an awful lot of them—five, so far that year alone, with three more planned for later in the summer and fall.
After The Curious Incident of the Blonde in the Night-Time, it seemed that Adrienne had added a few extra weddings to their schedule too, just to get back at her allegedly unfaithful husband.
During their twenties they’d been to every wedding possible involving their close friends and family—no RSVPs were returned featuring a ‘sorry we can’t make it’ at any point; all possible clashes and difficulties were diverted so that they could go. They’d been to the weddings of work colleagues, neighbors, and even two of the ministers who had overseen weddings that they’d attended.
Into their thirties, Adrienne was dragging Noah to the weddings of Facebook friends she hadn’t even talked to since high school, and maybe even then there had only ever been a nod of recognition across the classroom.
The first invite they’d gotten even close to declining had been the wedding of Liona Marx, a friend Adrienne hadn’t even spoken to since junior high school. Adrienne’s boss at her events-planning firm had thrown a tantrum and told her that if she missed their biggest conference of the year because of the wedding of a friend from junior high school, she might as well not come back to her job at all.
Noah had been relieved. Right up until Adrienne said he’d have to go without her.
‘Are you serious? Who am I gonna know at that wedding?’
‘I told her we’d be there,’ Adrienne had said. ‘It’s such bad form to cancel this late. We need to be represented.’
‘They’re not going to miss us at all—you haven’t talked to her since grade school!’
‘Junior high. And that wasn’t my fault—they moved out of state.’ Adrienne said. ‘And anyway, how am I gonna get back talking with her again if neither of us goes to her wedding?’
And so he’d gone to the wedding alone, hating every minute, right up until he’d woken up in another woman’s hotel room, naked and soaking wet. When all was said and done, it was better to keep Adrienne happy. That was why he was so certain he couldn’t have made a conscious decision to cheat on his wife. He’d always done everything he could to stay on her good side, even traipsing to all those weddings.
Maybe someone had spiked his drink—but he had no evidence that they had.
All he could remember was what happened at every wedding. Crammed into the pews at the back of the church to witness the ceremony, then shunted into a big marquee to awkwardly chat with people he’d never met before and never would see again, around a table munching on food that looked fancy but tasted like cardboard.
He had talked business to anyone who would listen as an attempt to pass the time without going insane. And he didn’t like to think about work when he wasn’t on company time.
‘Oh, you know, with the subsidies available in this State, this thing will pay for itself in five years—and then it’s just free money after that.’
‘Really? And no utility bills?’
‘Uh-huh. Seems like a good deal, huh?’
Okay, so maybe he’d been so bored he’d lost track of how many glasses of Champagne he’d had. That was a possibility. Yet a drunk Noah wasn’t a lecherous Noah. Even to the point of collapsing, he really wasn’t the type to make passes at women, to hit on anyone. It was such hard work.
But here he was, he couldn’t deny the circumstantial evidence. And that blonde—wow. She’d been quite the looker. Perhaps a little seduction from her direction had been just too much for Drunk Noah, he couldn’t entirely discount the possibility.
*
Here he was, on the morning of yet another of those Facebook weddings, waking up with his eyes crusty from sleepy dust, to see Adrienne walking out of the bathroom without a stitch on her—and he nearly had a seizure as he saw her.
Dear God.
She was freshly showered, all pink and clean and flushed from the heat, her long wavy brown hair washed and dried and spilling all over her shoulders. Her pits and her legs were all freshly shaved.
And her pussy, too.
‘What…?!’
Adrienne simply smiled innocently at him and perched on the little stool in front of her vanity—facing him, though, not the mirror—and began applying lotion all over her skin. It was something she always did before date night with him, he knew. Made her skin that much softer, apparently.
‘You shaved?’ he said. The words just kind of fell out of his face while gazed at her sex, which she did not hide from him as she rubbed the white cream into the soft skin of her arms, over her shoulders, her breasts. God. She’d always had a tidy bikini line, but she’d never done anything even remotely like this before.
‘Uh-huh,’ she said with a smirk of dry amusement. Surprised that he’d acknowledge it quite so bluntly, perhaps.
To be honest, he’d kind of assumed she was against this kind of hairlessness. A woman should be able to groom herself entirely as she wished, right? Not according to the expectations of men swayed by celebrities and pornography.
But here she was.
‘When did you decide to do that?’ he said, meaning to ask ‘why’, though his tongue tripped over his lips as the sight of his wife’s completely hairless pussy threatened to overload his circuits.
‘I don’t know…’ she said, affecting a casual tone to hide her amusement as she parted her legs to rub lotion all around and over her beautifully bare sex. It looked so much like masturbation that it inspired an intense erection on Noah’s part. ‘…Probably just after we agreed that I would get a Hall Pass for the next wedding we go to.’
Noah felt strangely light-headed as she said that. His chest burned as though he had really bad indigestion.
‘Oh… uh… right. We still doing that?’
‘Of course.’ There ha
d been a hint of fire in Adrienne’s eyes as she confirmed it. A threat, almost. Like, if you don’t carry out your end of the deal, we’re going to have the argument to end all arguments. And you won’t like how that ends up, Buster.
He felt a little sick.
He couldn’t really believe she intended to go through with it. When the offer was made, it had almost been like some kind of metaphorical offer, hadn’t it? Only, thinking back to that awful argument, he had got to the point of saying, Honey, I’d do anything to stop you feeling this bad, to turn back time and avoid any of this.
Even so, when she’d accepted the semi-joking offer of a Hall Pass to even things up, it had seemed at the time she was doing it to make a point, to make him think about just how it might feel to have the shoe on the other foot. To make him realize that he would owe her for the rest of his life.
But no, it seemed she had meant it literally. And he’d totally agreed to that.
Jesus.
‘And you felt the need to shave… all of it?’ he asked her.
He tried to hide his hard-on in the sheets. Even the smell of the lotion was making it worse—it was a smell his subconscious linked to sex, because that was always part of how Adrienne smelled when he made love to her.
‘A lot of guys like it like this,’ she shrugged.
Adrienne stood to apply lotion to the backs of her thighs, her behind, down her legs until her entire body glistened. He caught his breath. Well, it had been a full week since they’d had sex. And that was confusing him, because it was so hot seeing her like this, naked and… different.
She’d shaved her pussy, for God’s sake!
This wasn’t what Adrienne did. She organized events for a living, she told people what to do all the time, she inspired clients with her brilliance, her sharpness, her intelligence. She shared clever, feminist quotes on Facebook all the time. She wasn’t the kind of woman who shaved her pussy like this.
‘A lot of guys?’ he mumbled quietly.
She laughed, ‘Well, I do have a Hall Pass… but I didn’t mean it like that… I’ll be happy with just the one at the end of the night.’
Well now he just about gasped, and it seemed like somebody had sucked all the oxygen out of the air. His heart hammered inside his chest as though desperate to keep what little oxygen remained in his lungs from being wasted.
‘I thought… I didn’t think… I thought…’ he stammered.
‘We have a deal, right?’
She’d always had an uncanny way of making him agree to her wishes with this tone of voice, a tone that suggested if he objected he would be kind of an idiot. Because this was the way things were.
‘I guess…’
He felt a surge of fear sweep through him, leaving his skin feeling clammy, sweaty, strangely cold. He felt slightly nauseous. His head was spinning a little, as though he was hungover.
And yet the powerful erection remained. He couldn’t push it down, couldn’t stow it between his thighs, he could hardly conceal it in the sheets without it looking faintly ridiculous.
Was his body trying to force him to go get her, to pull her down onto the bed and mate with her like some caveman trying to claim her as his own, to persuade her not to do this terrible thing? It wasn’t just her shaved pussy. No. The excitement was more about seeing her like this, freshening up, preparing herself—and knowing that she wasn’t preparing herself for him.
Why should that make him feel aroused like this?
‘You don’t have to come,’ she said, and Noah looked up at her turning round to face the vanity, to start putting on her make-up.
‘Wha—’ he said, suddenly concerned she was teasing him about his erection.
‘To the wedding,’ she said, smiling back at him via the mirror on her vanity. ‘Well, fair’s fair, right? I didn’t get to go to Preston and Liona’s… and you may not want to see me… you know… with someone else…’
He was shocked for a while, watching her put on her mascara, eyeliner, thick scarlet lipstick. Applying the makeup so heavily—and yet she’d never been particularly one for much makeup. The dark liner around her eyes, the mascara, made him think of Cleopatra, for goodness’ sake. The heavy, bright lipstick made him think of lips stretching and sliding wetly up and down a big, hard, glistening cock.
Wow. There in the bed, he very nearly came. Felt that bubbling energy begin to rise up inside his loins.
He coughed, spluttered, and sat up, doing everything in his power to keep from making telltale messy stains in his PJs.
‘You all right?’ Adrienne said, a note of concern masking her underlying amusement as she knew perfectly well that this was all affecting him like nothing else.
‘The wedding’s in a night club?’ he asked her.
She laughed. ‘They’re a different crowd than we’re used to,’ she said. ‘You know… high school crowd. I moved to the city, but none of them really did.’
Finally, she pursed her lips, put down her lipstick and turned toward him to give him the full effect. She looked younger, almost like a teenager who feels the need to flaunt her sexuality to the maximum because she doesn’t yet know just the kind of power she really has over men.
‘You like them?’ he asked her.
‘They’re fun,’ she shrugged. ‘Some of them.’
She stood up, and Noah could see in the light from the window just how hard her nipples were. The shadows they caused on her pale breasts.
‘Any of your friends going?’
‘Nobody I really know that well.’
At the wardrobe, she sifted through her dresses as though there was still a decision to make, as though she hadn’t just bought the perfect outfit at the mall the other night, when she found herself thinking about shaving her pussy smooth for the benefit of a one night stand who was not her husband.
‘Oh…’ she said suddenly, looking over at her husband as though she’d quite forgotten something important.
‘Yeah?’
‘Honey… could you just grab me something from my bottom drawer?’
She nodded over to the chest of drawers by the door to the bathroom. Noah couldn’t refuse, it would have been out of character for him, and he desperately didn’t want to do anything out of character for fear that she would think him weak.
Or was it because he didn’t want to discourage her from it?
Well, that was a dark little thought. His erection was beginning to influence his mental state. The sight of her naked, shaved, with slutty makeup on her face, was confusing him into thinking he was excited by the prospect of her going to a wedding to hook up with a stranger.
‘Sure, sweetie.’
‘There’s some nice things on the right-hand side,’ she said, turning back to the dresses.
He climbed out of bed, turning his back to her in an attempt to keep his huge bulge hidden. Crouching, squatting down to reach that bottom drawer. Had he ever looked in this drawer before? His heart skipping a beat as he eased it open to find it stuffed with dark, lacy lingerie—a few things he recognized from their dating days, but here on the right-hand side were things he’d definitely never seen before.
He picked up a tiny scrap of white lace and satin strands, and at first wondered what it was for.
‘Yeah, that one’s nice,’ Adrienne said, and as he held it up he realized it was a thong, a tiny little lacy thong that was kind of see-through. ‘And the garter belt to go with it?’
The look on her face… teasing him, testing him, maybe paying him back for hurting her—and yet also, loving him, recognizing the angst tearing him up inside, even admiring him for dealing with it rather than yelling at her and refusing to let her go to the wedding at all.
Noah was almost visibly trembling as he found the white garter belt with the same pattern of lace. Thinking, since when had she ever worn a garter belt? Stockings? Jesus.
He turned to find her standing over him, mouthwateringly beautiful, and yet terrible like some dread goddess who had the power to devast
ate his life with one flick of the wrist. That shaved pussy just inches away from him as he handed her that thong, the garter belt.
‘Do you think I need a bra?’ she asked him.
The dress—perhaps that should be ‘The Dress’—now hung from the doorway to the bathroom, a floral pattern in ivory and blue, but so small it looked like a child’s dress.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, trying to keep calm though she was obviously trying to provoke him.
His cock was throbbing away in his PJs and he was so frantically trying to hide it from her. Not just the thought of her going out to seduce some other man—but the fact he was helping her decide what to wear for her wedding date.
He gazed up at her pert breasts, mottled by goose bumps, and found he wanted men at the wedding to be drawn by them.
‘Maybe not,’ he said, feeling bold about this now, about embracing the strange perversion that was apparently seizing hold of him in this moment of crisis. Well, if he embraced it, perhaps it would rain a little on her parade, as she tried to rub it in his face that she was going to wreak revenge on him for his apparent adultery.
‘Hmmm…’ she said, trying to hide her surprise at his decision, and the fact he didn’t seem to object to any of her scandalous clothes. ‘I guess if it’s cold people might see my nipples through the dress…’
‘You’ll just have to get on the dance floor if you start feeling cold,’ Noah said, even managing a chuckle. Was he teasing her back, now? But the thought of her going out on the dance floor, opposite some young guy… why did that make his prick twitch?
‘Stockings?’ she tried again to fluster him. ‘They’ll be in the drawer above.
The drawer above, another place unknown to him. Strange in such a small apartment that there was somewhere he’d never even seen before, but he’d never had reason to. There were ordinary pants and socks here, but also unopened packages of nylon hose and, as it turned out, stockings.
He sifted through the stockings like a pilgrim examining a trove of the holiest of relics. When had she bought these? Why had she never worn them for him? Why did they seem so very naughty, why did them make him react so sexually when they were simply something to cover the legs?
Hotwife Hall Pass Page 2