by Amy Hatvany
“Thank you,” my mom said, lifting her empty beer bottle. “I’d love one.”
“My pleasure,” Ben said, taking it from her. “Anyone else? I’m here to serve!”
“I think everyone’s fine,” Tiffany said, giving her husband a weary look. I imagined dealing with her mother’s medical issues—having her live with them—wasn’t easy on their marriage, either.
“Classic car salesman schtick,” Helen muttered, after Ben walked away.
“I don’t think so,” I said, not wanting to add to Tiffany’s emotional load.
“No, Helen’s right,” Tiffany said, stiffly. “My husband doesn’t know how to turn that side of him off. He’s all salesman, all the time.”
“Your husband’s an asshole,” Theresa said. Her blue eyes suddenly looked more focused, like the part of her that had drifted off had snapped back in place.
Helen snorted, Tiffany looked horrified, but before anyone could say another word, Isaac, one of Tiffany’s ten-year-old twins, started screaming for her from across the yard. Another boy stood next to him, holding a red ball up over his head, clearly taunting Isaac with it.
“Excuse me,” Tiffany said, taking her mother’s hand and leading her back across the lawn, in Isaac’s direction.
“That poor woman,” Helen said, shaking her head.
“Dementia?” my mom inquired, looking at me, and I nodded.
My mom shuddered. “If that ever happens to me, put me in a home, immediately,” she said. “I don’t want to be a burden.”
“The minute I start to really lose it, I’m taking a bottle of pills and putting myself out of misery,” Helen said. “I say let me die with dignity.”
My mother nodded. “Maybe I’ll do that, instead of a home. End things on my own terms.” It was a rare for her and Helen to agree with each other, but I knew my mother, a woman whose intellect was the major focus of her life, wouldn’t be able to stand the idea of losing that part of her.
“Can we change the subject, please?” I asked, lightly. “This is supposed to be a party.”
My mom smiled, and Helen laughed, and then asked my mother if she had any fun plans for the summer. As my mother launched into a description of the cruise she and her friends were hoping to take in the fall, I searched the yard for Jake and my dad, and found them standing in front of the bar, with Ben, listening to Tiffany’s husband. My dad had his phone in his hand, rudely reading something, probably a report about one of his patients or an email from a colleague. Even when he left the hospital, he never really left it.
I looked over to the grill, and saw that Charlotte had joined Richard and Bryan there. She stood between them, holding another glass of wine, smiling, nervously, as the three of them talked. Richard began making animated gestures to go along with whatever he was saying, and Bryan’s eyes flickered from Richard’s face to Charlotte’s—the subtlest of movements, but I caught it, though possibly only because I knew what was going on between them. I saw the way she returned his glance, too, with a flash of fondness in her dark eyes that spoke of so much more than a simple friendship. Was Richard really so dense as not to pick up on what was happening right in front of him? And how could Charlotte, who claimed to love Richard, not be honest with him about the fine line she was walking by sharing her intimate feelings about her marriage with another man?
But then, I thought about the texts Andrew had sent, how much I enjoyed having this tiny bit of pleasure that I could keep entirely to myself, and I imagined that Charlotte felt much the same way about her interactions with Bryan. I imagined Jake discovering my texts with Andrew, and flushed with shame and guilt. But how could it be worse than other men kissing me, undressing me, slipping inside me and making me come? If that didn’t make him jealous, a few innocent texts certainly wouldn’t, either.
“Excuse me,” I said to my mom and Helen, who were so engaged in conversation with each other they didn’t respond. I wound my way back inside the house, my phone in hand, heading toward the guest bathroom, anxious to see what Andrew had to say to me next.
Eighteen
My parents flew out late Monday afternoon, and not long after that, Peter dropped Tucker off at our house, exhausted, but happy that his team had taken second place at the tournament.
“What do we have to eat?” Tuck asked, dropping his gym bag and baseball bat in the entryway. Peter stood behind him, looking sunburned and tired, too. When he took off his baseball cap, his short black hair stood out from his scalp like chicken fluff, and it looked as though he had sprouted a few more lines around his green eyes.
“Barbeque chicken in the fridge,” I ssaid as my son passed me by without a hug. “Hey. You’re welcome!”
“Thanks, Mom!” he called out, rushing back to throw his arms around me. He smelled of dirt, and slightly musty, teenage boy sweat; I wondered if he’d showered at all over the past two days. “You’re the best.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, with a shake of my head. He took off toward the kitchen, and I smiled at Peter. “Thanks for taking him.”
“No problem. He played great.” Peter shifted his feet, and shoved his hands in his pockets, dropping his eyes to the floor. “So, Kari’s pregnant. I thought you should know.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling a surprising pang of discomfort. It was a strange thing, watching a person you used to be married to build a family with someone else. I felt a brief sense of wistfulness for what we could have given our kids—a life not affected by divorce, without the back and forth between two houses. Even though I knew it never would have worked long term with Peter, I sometimes felt guilty that the kids didn’t have their biological parents in one home. “Congrats.”
“Yeah.” Peter sighed. “It was a surprise.”
“Ah.” I didn’t know what else to say. Sorry you knocked up your wife?
“Is Ella home?” he asked, peeking over my shoulder into the house.
“She’s working,” I said. “I told her she needs to save up at least a thousand dollars this summer if she wants to go to Nationals next year.” Ella’s dance team had placed high enough at the state level in spring to qualify to attend Nationals the following winter, but it cost almost two thousand dollars per girl to make the trip, and Jake and I had agreed that if she wanted to go, she needed to pay for half of it herself.
Peter nodded. “She told me. She wasn’t happy.”
“Too bad,” I said, with a short laugh. “You agree with me, right?”
“Yep. She needs to have some skin in the game.”
My phone buzzed, then. I glanced at the screen, and sure enough, it was a text from Andrew.
“I’ll let you go,” Peter said.
“Tell Kari I said congrats, too,” I told him as he turned to walk away. He waved in acknowledgement, and after I shut the door behind him, I eagerly looked at my phone. Andrew had sent me a picture of him lounging in bed, showing off his chest and arms, and the chiseled “V” of muscles that pointed below his waist. It was a black and white image, and one of his hands was resting flat on his stomach, his long fingers splayed. “I’m thinking about you,” his text said. “It’s making me hard.”
I smiled, feeling a stab of daring excitement in my chest. “Show me,” I quickly typed, and my breath quickened when less than a few seconds later, the picture I’d requested came through.
“Honey?” Jake called out from the kitchen. “Is there any more chicken? Tuck doesn’t want to share.”
“Coming!” I said, but before I went to join them, I sent Andrew a text: “I can’t wait to feel you in my mouth.” This was foreplay of the most exhilarating variety. All of this mental build up, Andrew’s provocative words flying around inside my head for days before we planned to meet. It was different than simply showing up at his house to have sex, as I had with the others. This man had to touch himself at the very thought of me and wasn’t afraid to say it. It made me desperate to want to see him.
It made me want to do things I’d never done.
THE
week seemed to go by more slowly than usual, even though my days were peppered with text exchanges with Andrew, distracting me from the listing agreements and contingency forms that littered my desk. I went home every night, every cell in my body stimulated from the way he spoke to me. It was different, somehow, than when Jake whispered suggestive words in my ear. He’d seen me when I was tired and cranky, when I was sick with the flu and throwing up in a bucket next to our bed. He’d been with me almost every day for almost thirteen years, seeing me with makeup and without, on the days when I remembered to shave my legs and the winter months when I turned into a sasquatch, reasoning that I could get away with it because I mostly wore pants. He knew the ugliest things about me. He’d dealt with my PMS, and on more than one occasion, listened to me rant and complain about my parents or a deal at work that wasn’t going my way. I wasn’t only one thing to Jake; I was a million things, good and bad, rolled up into one. All of that was inside his head when he touched my body or said something sexual simply to get me wet. But with Andrew, I was only one thing—the woman he wanted to fuck. There was nothing else clouding how he saw me, no lingering disagreements or hard decisions we had to make about parenting. So the things he said to me, the way that he said them, felt more pure—and so much more intense. My body ached with longing, every nerve beneath my skin on high alert.
“Before I let you come tomorrow night,” Andrew texted me on Thursday afternoon, “I’m going to take my time getting to know your body, how it tastes. How it smells. How it reacts to my touch. I’m going to work you into an unbridled need to be fucked.”
I was with clients when this showed up on my phone, so I couldn’t text him back. But my body responded—blood rushed to the cleft between my thighs; my breath became shallow—and I hoped my face didn’t give away the nature of what I’d just read. And then, as my clients and I got into my car, more words came: “I always wondered what you’d be like in bed,” Andrew said. “That sweet, pretty, curvy little twenty-one year old girl who got married too young. I used to jack off thinking about what your tight little pussy would feel like around my thick cock. I used to wonder if you’re the kind of girl who would take it the ass.”
I wasn’t that kind of girl—at least, I hadn’t been so far—but suddenly, I imagined myself doing exactly that. Not with my husband. With Andrew. The debauchery of his suggestion permeated any previous boundary I had. Anything felt possible; there were no limits to what we might do.
Haunted by his words later that night, once the kids had disappeared into their rooms for the night, I dragged Jake into our bedroom and tore off his clothes. I dropped to my knees, took him in my mouth, and then, after a moment, I pulled him down to the floor straddled him right there, riding him until we both came.
“Someone’s excited about tomorrow night,” Jake said after we were spent, and lay together with our legs still entwined. My head rested on his chest, and I could hear his heartbeat thudding away.
“Mmm-hmm,” I said, feeling a nip of guilt that he didn’t know how, exactly, that excitement had been fueled. Just tell him about the texts, I thought, as we climbed into bed, turned off the lights, and he curled behind me, as he always did, before we went to sleep. Tell him and get it over with. Make it sexy. Make him part of it.
But I held my tongue, again reasoning that I was simply doing what Jake had suggested in the first place—making the experience more exciting. What did it matter if he didn’t know about the texts, if in the end, I still came home to him and told him every detail of what I’d done?
The next day, I barely got through two meetings with clients at the office and three showings before I rushed home to make sure the kids left for Peter and Kari’s house by four. When Jake came home from work at five-thirty, I was starting to feel jittery, which was normal before I would go to see a new lover on my own, but this was the first time I’d done it without Jake being part of the process. More significantly, perhaps, it was the first time I was going to be with a man I’d allowed access to not only my body, but my mind.
“You’re sure you’re okay with this?” I asked my husband, after I’d showered. It was part of our ritual, Jake watching me get ready to go be with another man. He liked to see me do my hair and makeup, and help me pick out what I should wear. He would end up touching and kissing, but nothing more than that, driving me crazy with want. Tonight was no different. He sat on the toilet with his hands resting in his lap, his blue eyes skating over my body, taking in every inch of me.
“I’m sure,” he said. “Are you?”
I stared at him a moment, my mind flashing to the litany of texts Andrew had sent me. Jake wants me to do this. “Yeah,” I told my husband. “Maybe a little nervous. It’s the first time you haven’t met someone I’m going to be with.”
He got up and came over to where I stood, in front of our long, double vanity. He cupped my face in his hands, kissing me tenderly before pulling back and dropping his hands to my waist. “You’re amazing, you know that?” he said. “You’re so fucking sexy. You have no idea how hot it is for me to know what you’re about to do.”
I reached a hand between his legs. “I have some idea.”
He groaned. For him, the anticipation, the self-denial, was all part of the thrill. This time, because we were doing something so different, I imagined these feelings were amplified.
He’s enjoying this as much as I am, I told myself as I stood on my tip-toes and put my mouth next to his ear. “I want you to send me a picture of you stroking while I’m gone.” I bit the side of his neck.
“Jesus,” he muttered, and he shivered.
“I want you to think about his hands on me,” I continued, enjoying his reaction. “How his mouth will be between my legs, tasting me. How I’m going to use my mouth on him.”
“Baby, you need to stop, or I’m not going to let you go,” he said. He kissed me again, quickly, and then stepped away. “Look at you, with that smirk on your face. You’re still a fucking goddess, you know that?”
I nodded, still smiling, thinking about the time a couple of years back, when we’d just met Vincent, that Jake and I had another conversation about why he was so turned on by me fucking other men.
“Did you ever think about doing this with any of the other women you dated before you met me?” I asked.
“Sure,” Jake said, “but I never brought it up.”
“Not even to Carmen?” Jake had only had one long term relationship before we met, and that was back in Florida, when he was still in college. He was with Carmen for three years, and they only broke up because he moved to Seattle. She was his first love, something that used to bother me to hear about when he and I first began dating. I knew everyone had a past—I’d been married to Peter and had two kids, for god’s sake—but I couldn’t help but be a little envious that I didn’t get to have Jake’s love and devotion, first.
He laughed. “Carmen would have tried to beat the shit out of me if I suggested we have a threesome, let alone that she should have sex with someone else and tell me about it, later. Colombian women are a little crazy when it comes to fidelity.”
I nodded, immediately picturing Carmen—Jake had shown me a picture of her once, after which I’d tried, and failed, not to compare myself to her exotic features and petite, but somehow also perfectly curvy frame. I imagined her shouting expletives at Jake in automatic weapon-speed-Spanish, pounding on him with her small fists, and then the two of them ending up in bed for hot makeup sex.
Jake must have seen the shadow cross my face as I pictured this, because he put his arms around me and pulled me to him so that my cheek was pressed up against his chest. “I’ve always been attracted to strong women,” he said. “But you, Jessica, are by far the strongest woman I’ve ever known. When I met you, I loved how you knew your own mind. The way you stood your ground with your parents, and even when things didn’t work out with Peter, you made a life for you and the kids with not much help from anyone else.” He took a deep breath, and then cont
inued. “After watching my mom manipulate every guy she was with into taking care of her, I admired that about you more than I can say.” I nodded, my head still against his chest, listening to the reassuring thump of his heartbeat. “Seeing you have sex with someone else, or even just hearing about it, reinforces the strength I’ve seen in you from the start. That’s part of what turns me on...the way you aren’t afraid to do what you want...fuck someone, right in front of me...or even without me. There’s something phenomenally sexy about a woman confident enough to do that.”
I reminded myself of that conversation as I finished getting ready to meet Andrew, putting on a blood-red corset and black garters and stockings to wear under my dress. My husband loved me, more than he’d loved anyone else, and I felt the same way about him. It was the only way we were able to do something as exciting as this—it was the thing that made me believe that whatever happened with Andrew, nothing between Jake and I would change.
“Be safe,” he said as I climbed into my car, and I told him that I would.
After backing out of the driveway, I punched Andrew’s address into my GPS, and then shot him a text, letting him know that I was on my way.
“I’m ready,” he responded. “The front door’s unlocked.”
I felt my cheeks flush and my breathing become more erratic as I thought more about what it would be like to see him. What if it didn’t live up to the anticipation? What if he was a terrible lover, and I immediately regretted agreeing to be with him? I told myself I could leave, if I wanted to, that I was under no obligation to go through with what we had planned. We’d discussed that, briefly, in a few texts, and he’d made it clear that if I didn’t feel comfortable or safe, that he would be totally fine if I decided to go home.