by K. A. Berg
That was a whole other issue I had going on lately. I kept picturing the kinky sex where the girl was being hammered into in oblivion or tied up while she came over and over. It was hard to come when thinking about that while having sex missionary style.
Sweat dotted Matteo’s hairline. His forearms strained on either side of me as he held himself up and his hips thrust back and forth. He was so sexy as he loomed over me, his abs flexing as he got close to his climax. Unfortunately, I wasn’t any closer than I was while still dressed. A twinge of guilt hit me deep in my gut. I wanted to come with my husband; I did. I loved him. I was attracted to him. He made me feel special, but during the actual sex part, I felt nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada.
What was wrong with me?
I raised my hips and met Matteo’s thrusts. I panted. I mewled softly. I even squeeze my muscles together like I was doing Kegels to make it feel real as I faked my orgasm with my amazing husband, and he came with a grunt.
Matteo smiled down at me and kissed the tip of my nose. “I love you.”
God, I felt like the worst wife in the world. I just faked an orgasm with my husband who only ever tried to make me happy. I wished I had a way to tell him that this wasn’t working for me anymore, but the last thing I wanted was to make Matteo feel as if he weren’t enough. He was everything. I just had to try to figure out what was happening on my end. Then I could fix myself, and we would go back to being the way we were.
That was it. That was all.
“I love you too.”
We rolled out of bed, and I headed for the shower first. With Matteo’s back turned to me while he grabbed a pair of sleep pants from his drawer, I swiped my phone from my dresser and slipped into the bathroom. After turning on the shower, I typed in the name of my favorite porn site and pulled up a tag that I knew would help me get the job done quickest.
I stepped into the shower and let the hot water hit my back while I watched a pretty brunette get both of her holes filled by two large dicks. Her face twisted in pleasure as they worked in and out of her. My fingers found my clit and rubbed back and forth, up and down. The sensations began building quickly, and a few minutes later while I watched the muted girl screamed out her pleasure, I bit my lip and came from my own hand.
The guilt from deceiving my husband crept back in, and I felt that shame that washed over me every time this happened, but a girl had to do what a girl had to do.
Chapter Two
Matteo
If I didn’t know my wife the way I did, if I was insecure in our relationship, then I would have thought she was having an affair. But I knew Natalie better than any other person on this planet did, so I knew that, without a doubt, she was not cheating on me.
Not that knowing that did anything to help me understand what Natalie was going through or why there was a disconnection between us in the bedroom. It seemed to be the only part of our relationship that had shifted. Everything was fine, and then it wasn’t. Or at least that was how it felt to me.
I questioned myself over and over, forcing my mind to think back, find signs I missed. How could I claim to know everything about my wife—like how she wouldn’t eat Oreos without peanut butter or that she twirled her hair around her finger when she was nervous—but not understand why she suddenly couldn’t come during sex?
She did her best to pretend, but she also didn’t realize she squeezed her eyes closed while she faked her orgasms. Watching her eyes as she climaxed was my favorite part of making love to Natalie. Her eyes were a unique shade of brown that was mixed with a deep honey. Watching the way her eyes rolled back and how the flecks of gold in her irises glowed made my dick swell.
When Natalie faked it, she closed her eyes. She was overthinking the act, making it sellable. When she came, she didn’t think about it, and her eyes just followed the sensations of the release.
As soon as she closed her eyes, it was like looking at the side-by-side photo in the kids’ Highlights magazine where you had to find the six differences between the photos. She overarched her back, pitched her moans a notch too high, and squeezed her eyes closed.
When it happened the first time, I waited for her to tell me what went wrong and why she couldn’t get off. But she didn’t say a word and acted as if it were business as usual. I didn’t bring it up for fear of embarrassing her. Maybe she didn’t want to discuss it at that moment. Maybe she needed time to process what happened and why she didn’t finish. Typically, the only other times that happened were because we’d been interrupted.
After that first time I noticed it, the faking became more of a regular thing than coming. It wasn’t all the time, but it was far more often than not.
I couldn’t figure out what was going on with her, and it was driving me crazy. For me, sex had always been more than just getting off. It was about the connection. I didn’t care how much of a wuss that made me. I loved my wife more than anything, except for Jackson and Emma, and I cherished those moments where we were one.
The instant I met her, I knew she was different. She hated math, and I was trying to help her understand it, which never really happened, so that smile I desperately craved from her seemed unobtainable. The urge to soothe her worries consumed me, so I kept at it. She was stressed and wound tight, but she drew me in.
When Nat came to our tutoring session after passing the first test she took with my studying help, she graced me with the biggest, brightest smile I’d ever seen. It was beautiful, and I was addicted. Her smile was my drug. We had been working together for a few weeks by that point, and I was already crushing on her, but after seeing the way her happiness could light up my world, I was a goner.
I had no doubts that Natalie was the one for me. She was the one I wanted by my side always. A life with her and everything it had to offer us.
We’ve been thrown some curve balls along the way, but we always came out stronger. I liked to believe that was because we had this way of understanding each other. Yin and yang. Natalie was the anxious one while I was the calm one. She had the temper where I could defuse the situation. Emma was a mini Natalie in every way possible, except math skills. Emma was almost better with numbers than I was. We understood our differences, embraced and leaned on each other, talked about things, which was why her lack of openness with our bedroom issue confused me.
I was fairly certain it wasn’t an attraction problem either. Natalie was still attracted to me. I could feel it in her touch. Plus, it wasn’t as though she was turning down sex, which I assumed would have been the case if she didn’t want to be with me. She just wasn’t climaxing during sex. She was getting herself off in the bathroom alone instead.
It was hard not to feel hurt after I saw her in the shower last week. We had finished making love, and she went to shower, which wasn’t out of the ordinary. Except, when I popped into the bathroom to grab my glasses and contact case, I saw what she was doing.
Through the frosted glass of the shower doors, I could see Nat’s silhouette. She was holding her hand out in front of her. I couldn’t quite figure out what the hell she was doing until I saw where her other hand was and where it stayed long past washing. Natalie was rubbing one out in the shower, watching something on her phone, porn I presumed.
We had just finished having sex, where she faked her orgasm, only for her to go flick her bean in the shower. I had a ton of questions, mainly I wanted to know why. Why not ask me? If the dick wasn’t working, why not ask for my tongue or fingers? Why wasn’t my wife talking to me about this?
If she wasn’t discussing the issue with me, she had to be talking to someone, which was why I broke the cardinal marriage rule: No snooping through the other’s electronics.
I needed to know what was going on, and I wasn’t going to wait any longer. I’d been patient for three months. It was long enough.
Natalie’s new exhibition opened tomorrow so she was working late, and Scotty’s mom was dropping the kids off from their after-school activities, so I had some time alone.
I went for the tablet first. Natalie’s entire life tied into one device—her phone, iPad, and computer.
The first place I thought to check was her messages. I searched my name in the search bar and scanned through the conversations where my name was present, hoping to find some answers.
She wouldn’t have discussed bedroom issues with any of our parents, so I scrolled passed those. My sister was out because I doubted Nat would discuss our sex life with Isabella. She might discuss it with her sister, though, but only if there was no one else in the world to speak with, so I doubted Deanna knew anything. I scrolled through, looking for anything sex related over the last three months, but came up empty. There was nothing in her conversations with her two best friends, Norah and Penelope either.
Maybe it was in an email. I checked her email next, searching Norah and Penelope’s names first, thinking they would most likely be her confidants for something like this. They’d been close since college, and I was fairly certain nothing was a secret between them—those three had no boundaries.
But, again, I came up empty. I checked her sister’s email address next, but nothing was there either.
The image of Nat in the shower, touching herself, flickered in the back of my mind. I clicked the Safari app and checked her search history. Scrolling back to the week before, I found something useful—Natalie’s porn views in the browser history. Link after link of videos she’d clicked on.
I felt guilty, as if I were invading her privacy, but I pushed through it and clicked on the first link.
Holy shit.
The video was of a woman sandwiched between two men, each one thrusting in and out of her body. I clicked back and found links for a few more of those. Then I found one of a woman tied to a bed with a man using toys on her, making her come over and over. There were videos of anal and even a few threesomes with two women and a guy.
Jesus, I would have never guessed that was what Natalie was getting off to. Was this what she wanted? Threesomes, anal sex, and bondage? No wonder she wasn’t getting off during regular sex. She wanted more.
A conversation I walked into a few weeks ago dinged in my mind. Penelope and Norah were here, and the girls were discussing some book. When I entered the living room, they were gushing over a woman being collared by two men.
When I asked what that meant, I got more than I expected in an explanation. They rambled on about the inner workings of the relationship then fawned over the way she was loved by two men, blah, blah. I wished I had paid a bit more attention since this was what my wife seemed to be into. At least to two parts, I didn’t think Natalie was looking for a BDSM relationship.
I closed out the Safari app and opened the Kindle app. Maybe I should see what kind of books she was reading. That may shed some more light on the things Natalie found enticing. I made note of the title she was reading and the last few she read. I grabbed my iPad and opened my Kindle app. We shared the Amazon account, so I had access to all her books and she mine. I downloaded the ones she read most recently before closing out of the app and returning her iPad to her nightstand. She’d be none the wiser that I had snooped through it.
The porn was an eye-opener. The books would be helpful too. She was always talking to Norah and Penelope about how sexy these book boyfriends were, so there was no harm in seeing what made these men so damn appealing. If they were anything like the porn scenarios she was watching, I sure had my work cut out for me.
Chapter Three
Natalie
With having to run a few extra errands after work, it was close to seven when I finally pulled into the driveway. The house was oddly quiet as I walked in, yet the scent of something delicious filled the air.
There was no fighting over who would set the table for dinner coming from the kitchen.
The kids’ backpacks weren’t abandoned on the floor for me to step over as I hung my jacket on its hook.
No sound heard from any of the televisions.
I didn’t hear any TikTok music coming from phones.
Matteo’s car was in the garage, so I knew he was definitely back from picking Jackson up from practice and Emma from the library. Maybe he took them out for a quick bike ride or walk or something. Maybe I should enjoy the rare moment and embrace the quiet.
“Matteo? Emma? Jackson?” I called as I entered the living room.
“In here,” Matteo answered from the kitchen.
I followed his voice and the scent of garlic to find him standing in front of the stove cooking. The table had been set for two, complete with wine ready to be poured and a single red rose in a vase sitting in the center.
“What’s this?” I asked, wracking my brain to see if I’d forgotten some important date. It wasn’t our anniversary, a romantic holiday, or my birthday. I had no idea what the occasion was.
He turned from whatever he was making in the skillet, looking casual in his jeans and gray T-shirt, and smiled. “Dinner.”
Well, the table settings and smell of food gave that away.
“Where are the kids?” I asked. Fridays were typically a free-for-all after a week’s worth of school, activities, emotions, and exhaustion.
A gleam I hadn’t seen before shone bright and sneaky in his green eyes. “I dropped them off at my parents’ for a sleepover.”
“Oh?” I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice. Matteo didn’t typically make plans for the children without checking with me first. Not that I required him to check with me, but we worked as a team and kept each other in the loop. “But Jackson has a lacrosse game tomorrow.”
“I know.” That was all he said. No elaboration as to why plans had changed or how Jackson was getting to his game. He just turned back to the stove and turned off the burner as though his making us dinner with no kids was an everyday occurrence.
He was acting super weird. I didn’t know whether to be frightened or intrigued.
“Why the change in plans?”
He grabbed the skillet from the stove and made his way to the kitchen table. “I have plans with you,” he answered ominously as he plated what looks like shrimp scampi. My favorite.
Hmm. Dinner. No kids. My favorite meal. It almost felt as though he was buttering me up for something—or apologizing, but nothing had happened. At least, nothing that I was aware of.
“Plans with me?” I asked like a dolt because I had no damn clue what was going on.
“Yes.” He nodded. He was being succinct, not giving anything more than the bare minimum of information. As if he held a secret he was protecting. Nothing like Matteo usually was.
The golden-brown flecks in his green eyes melted a bit as he pinned me with a stare. “Now, sit, please. Dinner is ready.”
Was I in the damn twilight zone? Matteo, who was always easygoing and soft-spoken, was ordering me around with a bit of bite in his tone? What the hell was going on?
I sat, mostly because the deep timber of his voice had me following his orders as if I were conditioned to obey his command. “Shouldn’t I be aware of the plans too?”
He heaped a generous helping of pasta and shrimp onto my plate. His eyes zeroed in on mine as if he was trying to convey some kind of message, but I wasn’t getting it. “You’ll find out soon enough.”
“Matteo, what’s going on?” I was starting to get a bit worried. Everything was so out of the ordinary. “What’s this all about?”
Moving from my plate to his, he filled it before answering. “I said”—his voice was rugged and authoritative—“you’ll find out soon enough.”
That was unsettling and appealing at the same time.
Matteo and I had been together since our sophomore year of college. I’d never been a math person. Okay, I hated it, s
o I put off starting my requirements until second year. After I miserably failed the first test of statistics, I bit the bullet and got a tutor. Taking the class once was bad enough, having to retake it wasn’t something I wanted to do. The school assigned Matteo as my stats tutor. He was patient and calm. He never laughed at my dumb mistakes or batted an eyelash when I threw a fit as I tried to figure out the odds of certain outcomes at the roulette table. Who asked questions like that anyway? Bookies and gambling addicts.
He had this way of settling me from the very beginning. He’d done it during our study sessions and then again eleven months after barely passing stats when the second line appeared on the pregnancy test I took in the bathroom of his college apartment he shared with two of his friends Adam and Trevor. It was the spring semester of our junior year. Then he kept me sane, again, when the doctor told us we were expecting not one but two children. His ability to soothe me continued through summer courses and online fall courses, all so I could graduate with my art history degree before the babies came in January. It was there and stronger than ever when we threw the shotgun wedding into that crazy mix.
Matteo had always been the calm to my storm.
So, seeing this gruff, short, and commanding side of him was new. While I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it, it made something flutter deep in my belly.
“How was work?” he asked as he picked up the bottle of wine, poured me a glass, and then one for himself.
I followed his every move as he took the seat across from me. “The Emergence exhibition finished today. The crew was working on getting everything ready to be shipped out as I left. Oh, and Bastien has decided that he will use the Portland Gallery opening as a platform to reveal his newest collection.”
“That doesn’t sound all too surprising.” He sipped his wine. “It’s been about two years since his last show, hasn’t it? The new location makes the perfect setting.”