by Amy Hatvany
“Shit, that’s right,” Jake said. “What would I do without you?”
“Good thing you don’t have to find out.”
“Good thing.” He knocked back his drink in one gulp, and then grinned again. “Wanna dance?”
I sucked down my entire drink, too, cringing at the alcoholic burn, and nodded, puckering my lips. Something about the way the vodka immediately loosened the tension in my body felt extra pleasant. It had been a rough week, with four closings crowding in on each other, and two new listings. What better than the combination of drinking and dancing to lead to some ripping-our-clothes-off-as-we-stumble-through-the-front-door sex with my husband?
Once we were on the dance floor, Jake pulled me closer to him and pressed his hips up against mine, keeping one hand on my lower back. I raised my arms and moved to the music, feeling the spin of the alcohol reach my head. I stared at my husband deliberately, intently, and he put his fingers on the curve of my waist, running them up and down my sides, brushing my breasts with his thumbs. He put his head next to my ear and whispered, “God, you’re hot.”
I smiled, seductively, and we continued to dance until the song was finished and the DJ spun another. “I want another drink,” I said, pointing toward the bar, and Jake nodded, leading me back to where we’d stood, before. He ordered us two more, and once they arrived, he sipped at his while I sucked mine down almost immediately. We smiled at each other like idiots.
“I feel like we’re doing something wrong,” I said, feeling giddy. I glanced at my watch. It was close to eleven o’clock. “We’re usually on the couch by now, trying not to fall asleep.”
“You’re not getting any sleep tonight,” Jake said. His blue eyes had darkened, a tell-tale sign he was turned on. I flashed back to the moment years ago, when I found him in bed, in the middle of the day, waiting. Already hard. The same hungry look in his eyes.
“Oh, really?” I said, finishing that last swallow of my drink.
“Really.”
I opened my mouth, about to say that he better follow through on his words, when I felt another body bump into me from behind. I turned my head, and saw an attractive blond man who looked to be about our age, maybe a few years older, smiling at me.
“Sorry about that,” he said, taking a small step back.
Something about the friendly smirk on his face told me that was a lie. “That’s okay,” I said, tilting my head toward him so he could hear me over the music. “It’s crowded.”
“Have you been here before?” the man asked, and I shook my head. “I’m Will,” he continued, holding out his hand.
“Jessica,” I said, shaking it. “And this is my husband, Jake.” I moved so that Will could see I was there with someone, despite being flattered that he seemed to be into me. He wasn’t my normal type—I tended only to like dark haired men—but he had a nice smile and an open, relaxed demeanor. He wore a tailored, white button down and a pair of jeans that fit well enough to make it clear that he spent a good amount of time at the gym.
“Nice to meet you,” Jake said, shaking Will’s hand, as well.
“I hope you don’t mind me saying this,” Will said, “but I was watching you two out on the floor. Your wife is sexy as hell.”
My breath caught in my chest as I looked at Jake, worried he might be offended and the lighthearted mood of the evening would be ruined. But Jake only sipped his whiskey and smiled. “She is, isn’t she?” he said. He leaned over to kiss me on the side of my neck, sending shivers across my skin.
“Would you mind if I asked her to dance?” Will said, and I started to protest, thinking this guy was being way too forward, but then Jake put his mouth next to my ear.
“Do it,” he whispered. “I want to watch.”
His words caused a rush of arousal between my legs, and I looked at him with wide, questioning eyes.
He nodded. “It’s up to her,” Jake said, “but I’m fine with it.”
“Thanks,” Will said. He held out his hand to me and tilted his head, charmingly. “What do you think?”
I glanced at Jake again, whose eyelids had become slightly hooded, and something about that made me follow Will only ten feet or so away from my husband, and let this other man—this total stranger—put his hips against mine and begin to move my body with his.
It was odd, at first. Another man hadn’t touched me that way for years. But I felt Jake’s gaze on us, unwavering, so after a minute, I started to sway my hips even more sensually than I had with my husband. I let Will’s hands roam up and down my back and I gave his well-muscled arms a deliberate stroke with the tips of my fingers. He turned me around to face Jake, and then stood behind me, lifting one of my arms up to rest on his shoulder and putting his forearm across the front of my waist. My husband stared at me with a shade of desire I couldn’t remember seeing on his face before. It vibrated in the air between us, a living, breathing thing. He watched me with Will, the two of us keeping rhythm with the music until the song ended, and then Will led me back to the bar. To Jake.
“Do you guys want to get a table?” Will asked. “Get to know each other a bit?”
“I think we’re going to head home,” Jake said. “But thanks.”
“Okay,” Will said, reaching into his back pocket and handing me a business card, which I slipped into my small purse. “In case you ever want to get together another time.” He smiled. “Thanks for the dance, Jessica. And Jake, for allowing me the pleasure.”
“Sure,” I said, barely able to tear my eyes away from Jake’s face.
“Let’s go,” he said, in a husky voice. He caught the bartender’s eye, threw a few twenties onto the bar, and she lifted her chin in acknowledgment. He grabbed my hand and pulled me through the crowd again until we were outside in the night air, which seemed substantially cooler than it had before we’d entered the overheated club. We hurried toward the parking garage, still hand-in-hand, and when we got to our car, instead of unlocking it, Jake pushed me up against it and kissed me. I snaked my hands up around his neck and pressed my body against his, feeling him already hard as he used his hands on my breasts. Ache and wanting throbbed between my thighs. This, I thought. Oh god, all of this.
“That was so fucking hot,” Jake murmured against my mouth. “Watching him touch you like that. Seeing you touch him.”
“Take me home,” I said, breathlessly, but he shook his head.
“I can’t wait.” He glanced around the dimly lit, almost empty garage, and led me behind our black SUV, which was parked in the far corner, away from the entrance. He used his fingers to quickly unbutton my jeans, and then his own. “Turn around,” he said, gruffly. He grabbed my long hair at the base of my neck and gave it a gentle pull. “Now.”
Surprised by his assertiveness, but too aroused by it to protest, I complied. It didn’t matter that we might get caught. All that mattered was getting my husband inside of me as soon as possible. I wriggled my jeans down, and he did the same with his. And when Jake entered me, reaching around and pressing his fingers against my clit at the exact same moment, I couldn’t help it, I cried out. He clamped his other hand over my mouth as he moved, muffling the noise I made, thrusting until both of us shuddered.
“Holy shit,” I whispered as his body went limp, the weight of him resting upon my back. We both were breathing hard, but we quickly refastened our jeans, and then he kissed me again, this time, softly, with a familiar tenderness.
“I can’t believe I did that,” he said, giving his head a little shake. His cheeks were flushed.
“It wasn’t just you,” I said. My legs trembled as I took a couple of steps toward the passenger side door, waiting for him to unlock it. He did, and then held it open for me. Once I was in my seat, he shut me inside, and then went around to climb in, too. We sat in silence a moment, both of us trying to catch our breath. My heart pounded. My head was spinning. I didn’t know what to think. Or say.
“Are you okay to drive?” I finally asked him.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I barely touched that second drink.” He paused, and then looked at me again. “You got his number, right?”
I pressed my lips together and nodded, my gaze fixed on his.
“Good,” he said, that one word splitting my thoughts in a hundred different directions. Something between us had shifted.
Two
By eight a.m. the next morning, the parking lots at Marymoor Park fields were already full. Jake and I had arrived at seven to set up, fueled by two Venti, quad shot Americanos we’d picked up from Starbucks on the way over. Ella’s game was scheduled to start at eight-fifteen, and Jake was currently leading the girls in warm up exercises on the sidelines, while the head coach spoke with the coach from the opposing team. I, on the other hand, had settled comfortably into my camp chair on the other side of the field, sipping the last of my now-lukewarm coffee as I watched my husband encourage Ella and her teammates to do jumping jacks.
“Better them than us, eh?” a familiar voice behind me said, and I turned around to see my best friend, Charlotte, approaching. She had gorgeous bluntly-cut, shoulder-length auburn hair, the build of a runway model, and the mouth of a trucker. We’d met six years before when her daughter, Bentley, who was seven at the time, told Ella, the same age, to fuck off during soccer practice. After apologizing profusely for her daughter’s behavior, Charlotte had looked at me with a twinkle in her brown eyes and murmured, “I don’t know where the fuck she learned to talk like that.” I’d laughed, and we’d been friends ever since.
“No shit,” I said, now, maybe a little too loudly, because two other mothers of girls on the team sitting a few feet away scowled at me. I gave them a cheery, innocent smile and then looked away.
Charlotte set up her own camp chair right next to mine, then plopped down and crossed her ridiculously long legs. “How are you?”
“Good,” I said, feeling my cheeks warm as an image from the night before in the parking garage flashed inside my head. It still didn’t feel quite real.
“Hold it.” Charlotte peered at me, pulling her black sunglasses down to the tip of her nose. “I know that look. You got laid!”
I laughed. “Can you say it a little louder? I don’t think everyone on the other side of the park heard you.”
She made a dismissive motion with her hand. “Richard and I haven’t had sex in three months. I don’t think I’ve even seen him naked since March. I need details.”
“It was nothing,” I lied. I finished my coffee and set my travel mug on the grass by my feet. “We went out for dinner downtown, and then had a couple of drinks at a club. We danced. We felt young again.” I still didn’t know how to feel about what had transpired on that dance floor, let alone our behavior in the parking garage, so I wasn’t ready to share the details with anyone. Even with Charlotte, who I usually did tell almost everything.
“Shut up. I don’t want to hear it.” Charlotte was forty-seven, after getting pregnant by an anonymous one night stand when she was thirty-three—“Forgot the condom. Whoops!” she always said—and then met Richard, a corporate attorney, at a library benefit she had organized when she was five months along. To his credit, the idea of raising another man’s child didn’t faze him. He fell in love with Charlotte’s headstrong, brash nature and was ready to settle down, so they got married before Bentley was born. Charlotte liked to complain about their lack of a sex life, but so did a few other moms I knew. More often, though, they complained that their husbands wanted sex too much, too often. “Doesn’t he understand how tired I am?” they’d whine. I’d nod sympathetically, despite having the opposite problem. Even though Jake complimented me and verbalized his desire to have sex, when he failed to act upon those words, I wondered if something deeper was going on. Over the last year I’d had terrible flashes of insecurity, worried that maybe he wasn’t turned on by me anymore.
“Do you feel like we do this enough?” I asked him several months back, not long after the holidays. We were in bed, having just managed a quickie, which I’d initiated by dropping to my knees in the bathroom while he was brushing his teeth. Not giving him a chance to say no.
“Do what?” he replied, rolling over to his side to face me.
“I feel like we’re so busy, sex has sort of fallen off our radar.”
“That’s normal, isn’t it?” he said. “We’re not newlyweds anymore.”
“I know. But I feel like we talk about it more than we do it.”
“I like talking about it,” he said. “Don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling like I wasn’t doing a good job of getting my point across. I tried again. “I just want to be sure that you’re getting enough sex.” I paused, and tried to keep my tone lighthearted. Opening myself up, showing vulnerability, even with someone I loved and trusted as much as Jake, was not my strong suit. “You know what they say. If a man isn’t fucking you, he’s fucking someone else.” I’d never been cheated on—at least, not as far as I knew. But what if that pudge of my belly was turning Jake off? What if something about me, about the mundane-quality our daily life together had taken on, had driven him into another woman’s arms? I lay totally still, holding my breath, more than a little terrified to hear his reply.
“I would never do that to you,” Jake said, vehemently. He moved his hand from my breast to my chin and forced me to look at him. “You know that, right? We’re busy, yes. Are we having as much sex as we used to? No. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want you.” His blue eyes searched mine, suddenly concerned. “Do you still want me?”
“Always,” I whispered, as a few tears escaped. Not only did I believe him, but I also hadn’t considered the possibility that Jake might worry that I wasn’t as attracted to him as I used to be. Our dwindling sex life had taken on a self-feeding quality: when Jake stopped initiating sex as much, so had I. There were moments when it would feel like we were becoming my parents—two adults living in the same house, raising children together, but not connecting on a deeper, more meaningful level—and it scared me. Jake was everything my father—and Peter—was not: emotionally present, self-aware, affectionate, and a little goofy. When we met, I thought, This is what love is supposed to be like. And yet, here we were, focused on everything except our romantic life.
After that conversation, I told myself that everything was fine: we were still attracted to each other, and the way we talked and flirted was enough to keep us connected and intimate. Sex would happen when time and circumstances allowed. Still, actions meant so much more to me than words, which is why last night at the club had been so thrilling. When we had gotten home, we were barely through the door before Jake was kissing me and leading me up the stairs to our bedroom, where he stripped off my clothes, then his, all while whispering about how Will had touched me, how obvious it was that this other man had wanted to do more with me than dance. Then, we whispered about what we’d done in the parking garage, after that. Replaying how intense it was; how incredibly satisfying. It was the best sex we’d had in years. Maybe ever.
“We did it twice,” I whispered conspiratorially to Charlotte, now, feeling like I had to give her something or she’d never stop pressing me for details. It was either that or tell her about the contingency mess I managed to sort out for one of my clients yesterday, and I knew she didn’t give a shit about real estate. She was an event planner, more interested in appetizers and flower placement than plumbing issues and property line infringements.
“Oh my god!” she said. “I’m so jealous I could scream!”
“Jealous of what?” another voice said, and we both looked up to see Tiffany Mitchell standing next to us, clad in her standard Lululemon uniform. Her straw-blond hair was pulled into a ponytail, high on top of her head, and she wore full make up, including false lashes, to attend her daughter, Lizzy’s, soccer game. She was the head of the PTA at the middle school, and wedded to her college sweetheart, Ben, who owned a chain of several successful car dealerships on the Eastside.
“Jessic
a got lucky last night,” Charlotte informed her.
I gave my best friend’s forearm a playful smack. This was partially why I hadn’t told her about dancing with Will, or the parking garage. She delighted in shock value so much that discretion wasn’t always her forte. I also wasn’t sure how she’d react to my dancing in front of Jake with another man. Before Charlotte met Richard, the great love of her life was a photo journalist named Alex, whom she’d lived with for several years in her late twenties before finding out that he had been cheating on her almost the entire time they were together. As a result, she was especially touchy when it came to any situation that even hinted around infidelity, and while I’d only danced with Will, I worried it still might upset her. After getting married and having kids so early in my twenties, I’d lost a lot of girlfriends who were on different paths. I treasured what I had with Charlotte; I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize our friendship.
Tiffany made a pinched face. “That’s not really something I needed to know.”
“Oh, come on,” Charlotte said, teasingly, clearly enjoying herself. “Don’t you and Ben get crazy on occasion? Maybe a birthday blow job?”
“Charlotte,” I said, with a touch of reproach. I loved her, but sometimes, she took things too far. Even though the sun was shining, the wind picked up, so I zipped up my fleece jacket and stuck my hands inside its pockets.
“It’s fine,” Tiffany said, brightly. “You know what they say people about who talk about sex all the time.” She gave Charlotte a pointed look. “They’re the ones not having any.”
I had to repress a smile. Tiffany might look the part of a dumb blond, but she was far from it.
“Touché,” Charlotte said, cheerfully, but I could tell from the way her body had tensed that Tiffany’s comment had hit a little too close to home.