Natalie looked at me and her eyes went wide. But she was still in a playful mood, apparently, because there wasn't any anger behind it, just... amazement.
“You, hang your own coat up,” Ethan said to me. “I'm goin' escort this lovely lady inside and get her somethin' to warm her up.”
Ethan's smooth, Southern charm was on extra-high, I noted with a mix of chagrin and slightly perverse delight.
Ethan linked his arm through Natalie's, who turned like a doll in a jewelry box under the guidance of Ethan's stare, as all women did, and followed him.
I was left to handle my own coat.
For the next hour or so, we chatted with the clusters of people at their cocktail party. It was excruciating: the usual volley of what-do-you-do's and oh-how-interesting's, and one upmanship (“Oh you think the Beijing airport is bad, have you been to Taipei?”) I was trying to get Natalie's attention, but she was deeply, deeply immersed in conversation with none other than:
Ethan.
It gnawed at me in a special kind of way that the two of them were hitting it off so well. For one thing, Ethan was everything I would have expected Natalie to hate. He was a jock's jock, he was a dominating, anti-feminist, charmy-charms guy, and he was pathologically incapable of not flirting with every woman he came into contact with.
But maybe that was the old Ethan. I had no idea. I hadn't had a chance to talk to him at all that evening, because his wife, Moira, had pulled me into a conversation with a small group of doctors.
I suppose because I'm a lawyer, everyone figured I'd fit in there.
My attention, though, was really on Ethan and Natalie. The way Natalie's voice kept rising and falling in genuine bursts of laughter. She had a kind of hammy, over-the-top laugh that she got going if she found something really funny, but Natalie was also a tough sell with humor. She only went for clever plays on words, or acerbic, smart jokes, and Ethan hardly seemed like the type to deliver. Yet he had her laughing, had her touching her throat. At one point I looked over to see Ethan leaning in close to her, showing her something on his wrist. He was close enough that Natalie could breathe in his musky man-smell, and maybe he even grazed her cheek with the scratchy stubble that seemed to have grown on his face while we were standing there. Natalie was smiling, and it felt like hot coals were turning over inside of me, thinking about Ethan standing so close to her lips. He was probably thinking about tasting them.
“Don't you think?” Moira was looking at me expectantly when I turned back to the conversation, and my mind was miles away, conjuring up dirty images of her husband and my wife.
“It's an interesting thought,” I said diplomatically, vaguely remembering that the conversation had touched on transportation in Chicago. “But I'm from South Carolina. This stuff is way over my head.”
Blank stares.
“Why, we don’t even have snow there!” I half-yelled, in my Foghorn-Leghorn accent.
The joke, which I kept in my pocket for just such occasions, landed as it always did and charmed the crowd. Their loud laughter allowed the perfect foil for excusing myself to go to the bathroom.
When I came out, almost everyone was gone or leaving, and Ethan finally broke away from Natalie. “Erik, buddy, you can't go yet. I didn't even get to talk to you.” He crossed the room and pulled me along, through the kitchen and out to a semi-enclosed porch, where a heat lamp was blazing away with no one underneath it. It felt like South Carolina on the porch.
He fished two cigars out of his pocket.
A fucking cigar.
He offered me one and shook my head.
“Wow,” Ethan said, cutting the cigar. I'm no aficionado but it seemed like a good one. “Wow, Natalie, wow, man.” He placed the cigar in his mouth and lit it. “She's really something.”
“She is tonight,” I said agreeably.
Ethan raised his eyebrows. I brought my beer to my lips, expecting an onslaught of inappropriate things to come gushing out of Ethan's mouth. So I was stunned enough to almost spit my beer out when he said, in a soft voice: “You guys have a really... nice dynamic. You seem really close.”
He sounded almost... remorseful.
And cheesy.
Jesus, fuck, what was going on?
“Yeah,” I said lamely, not knowing what else to do. As far as I knew, Natalie and I hadn't said two words to each other since we came through the front door.
I was instantly on guard. It was just like Ethan to lead you up the path of some genuine-seeming conversation about feelings, and then be a huge dick. A peal of laughter came from the kitchen, and it wasn't Natalie's.
This made Ethan's face fall a little.
Even though Ethan had punked me so many times with a conversation just like this one, I felt the usual need to cheer him up. Man, some things don't change no matter how many years go by.
“Moira is great,” I said quickly. “And, shit, Ethan, this house... you've really done well for yourself.”
“Thanks, man,” he said, but it was almost as though he hadn't heard me. He took another puff of his cigar, staring into the semi-darkness of the kitchen through the glass doorway.
He didn't seem too happy with the compliment, which was extremely un-Ethan-like. The Ethan I had known was a narcissist who loved hearing about himself or the things he possessed.
An awkward silence descended.
“Uh... so, what are you doing these days?” I tried. “Looks like I need to get in on it.”
No answer for a beat.
“Hedge funds,” he said. “I told you that, didn't I?”
He had, but it was really unlike Ethan to remember anything about a conversation. He sounded almost sad.
“I don't really want to talk about work, man. It's stressful,” he said, before I could try to smooth over the weirdness that again loomed over the conversation. He brightened and asked: “What are you guys up to? How's Yorkdale? You got kids, right? Dogs? See any people from school?”
“Uh, yeah,” I stuttered. “Good. Things are good. Two kids. One dog.”
I left the “people from school” bit alone. I preferred to never see, or talk about, any of those yokels again. I could barely believe I was back there, living in the same town I had grown up in.
“What's Natalie do?”
“Uh… she's home right now, she's an artist, so she works on that, but it's sort of... I dunno, hobby-work. The kids keep her busy.”
This conversation was weird.
“What kind of art?”
I was caught off-guard. Ethan seemed genuinely interested in the answer.
“It's... sort of...”
“Paintings? Sculptures? What?” Ethan was getting his fast-paced talking on. He was a really impatient, demanding person, so hedge-fund management didn't seem that out there as a career for him. I just hadn't known he was any good with numbers.
“Paintings,” I said.
“Of what?”
How to describe? “You know, I... you'd have to have Natalie explain it to you, really, I'm not very... good at it.”
I wasn't. Natalie's paintings had moved into strange farm scenes with brightly colored horses and donkeys and birds on old bicycles, and they were pleasing to the eye but beyond that I didn't have the vocabulary to talk about them. No matter how much I listened in on art conversations, or wine conversations, I just couldn't get it up to dish out all those cheesedick adjectives about paintings or wine.
Ethan shocked me even further by saying: “You gotta pay more attention to your wife than that, man.”
Before there was any time for me to stand there looking stupid, or stunned, or to come up with some kind of answer, Natalie came into the kitchen for more wine. As she popped the cork, the strap of her dress slid off her shoulder and she grinned at us both. “Are you guys bonding out there or are you coming in sometime? We're having the best conversation about Moira's work, you have to hear some of this stuff.”
We went back into the living room. I sat next to Natalie, and I was please
I noticed that Ethan sat in a chair, far away from Moira, who was curled up on the sofa opposite us and telling us about crazy patients who had gone through the ER. She was a great storyteller, and we were all laughing within five minutes.
Whenever I looked over at Ethan, though, his eyes were either distant, or his gaze fell somewhere on my wife. I looked over at Natalie's legs. She, too, had curled up on the couch, with her legs folded up to the side of her. Her dress had bunched up a little, and so I couldn't see but could imagine the view that Ethan had of slender thighs, one on top of the other, all the way up to the dark shadow between her legs. Without leaning over her, there was no way to tell if the dress had gone right up to her ass; it was entirely plausible to believe that Ethan had a view of her panties. And by the way he was staring, it seemed he might.
My reaction to it, however, was a wild mixture of feelings. Every time I looked over and saw his gaze drifting over Natalie's body, I felt a pang of jealousy, sure. But it ached in a thrilling way. There was also the usual feeling I had around Ethan, the one I hated but couldn't really shake or stand up to, the feeling that Ethan would just do whatever he wanted and I didn't really dare to tell him to stop.
I also enjoyed that my wife was so beautiful, her legs were on display so perfectly (because there really wasn't a sexier way for her to be sitting, from Ethan's point of view) that she was catching Ethan's attention. Finally, I had the hot chick, the cool chick (and Natalie was on fire tonight on both counts) and Ethan, who always won at everything, was the one feeling envious.
I couldn't really enjoy that feeling so much, though, because of the strange aura of pathos that was radiating from him. Especially when he laughed at Moira's jokes, kind of like he was doing it as part of an act. His eyes looked vacant when he wasn't groping Natalie visually.
He looked, on the whole, sort of sad.
And that was an emotion I had never, ever seen from Ethan Cooke.
The evening went on and the guests trickled away, and we decided at some point to get up and leave. I was pretty lit, and Natalie was getting tired. Ethan seemed to cling to us, asking us to stay for another drink, bordering on pathetic without ever quite getting there. But we resisted, and soon we were on our way back to the hotel.
Natalie was looking out the opposite window when I finally got away from Ethan and dropped into the seat of the cab. The door closed and we drove away for a few minutes in silence. The cabbie wasn't a talker; he had a foreign-language radio station on and seemed to be about a hundred years old. I said a silent prayer he didn't drive us through the side of a house he had mistaken for a thoroughfare.
Natalie's hand slid over to mine and she took it. It was a tender, unfunny gesture. I looked over at her.
“I'm really glad we have each other,” she said.
She was being totally serious now. It was a drastic shift from inside the house, so I cocked my head slightly. “What makes you say that, sweetie?” But I closed my fingers over her hand.
Even I like a little cheese every now and then.
“Just... oh, I don't know. Seeing those two. Really makes you realize what you have.”
I furrowed my brow. “What, Moira and Ethan?”
She nodded.
Then she saw that I was confused, and I think I even caught a mild eyeroll from her. “They have all this money, and they both have these great careers, but they're so... unhappy. It's like they don't even know each other.”
“Really?” I said. I was sort of taking pleasure in this, I'll admit. But I was also a little in the dark. I hadn't necessarily picked up on anything all that weird between those two.
“You couldn't tell?” Natalie said.
There was a faint hint of danger in her tone. It was the kind of danger that lurked in questions like, “What do you think of this dress?”
It was time for diplomatic and non-committal answers, but I was pretty drunk so I didn't have much faith in myself.
“I, uh... well, now that you mention it...”
“Right?” Natalie said, to my relief. “There's like a wall between them.”
I was sort of thankful she looked out the window again thoughtfully.
Mainly, I was interested in saying the right thing to steer this ship back in the direction of fun, friendly sex, which had been on my mind since she'd put the dress on hours and hours ago. But Natalie was teetering on the edge of some kind of over-emotional breakdown, which could happen to her if she had too much to drink.
“Let's never get like that,” she said wistfully.
Oh God. Tippppppping....
Think, Erik, think.
“And what about Ethan?” Natalie burst out, turning to me and quite unexpectedly back to her mischievous personality. “Did you see the way he took that shawl off of me?”
I had.
I had no idea where this was headed.
“You told me he was a bit of a player but that guy...” she shook her head.
But she was smiling.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “You didn't mind it that much, did you? A bit of good, old-fashioned Southern charm?”
Natalie laughed and tipped her head back, bringing her fingers to her throat and sending my cock into a spasm again. Her laugh was low and sexy. “Yeah, his accent is just too much. Why don’t you sound like that?”
“But you didn't really mind, did you?” I ventured.
Natalie opened her mouth to say something, and then she looked up at the cabby in the mirror. She looked from me to him, and smiled.
Whatever she wanted to say was inappropriate for the Pakistani cab driver.
I felt a flush of excitement.
And then I scooted over a little.
Our hotel was on the outskirts of Chicago, because it was cheaper, closer to Evanston, and Natalie's friend lived out that way. We had quite the drive to go, maybe twenty minutes at least.
I put my hand on Natalie's knee. I looked out my own window, as though I was up to nothing at all for the benefit of the cabby, and then I slid my hand up, along her thigh.
I could feel Natalie's body stiffen up with excitement. In the corner of my eye I saw that her lips parted slightly and she let out a little puff of air. I used my pinkie finger to stroke her inner thigh, and I was sure I could feel the pleasure raise bumps on her skin. I moved up, and as my hand went closer to the center of her thighs, the air against my hand was warmer. When I touched the fabric of her panties with my pinkie, I could feel that it was damp.
And Natalie hadn't moved. Not to cover up what I was doing, not to push me away.
I used my thumb and pinkie to push her legs open a little more, and she simply let me. I stole a sideways, downward glance at the short skirt that was creeping up to mid-thigh, a little higher, as her lean legs parted.
I slid my pinkie finger beneath the fabric of her underwear. Now her wetness was obvious, and my finger was hot and slick as I brushed up and down the downy hair and into her soaked folds.
The angle was awkward, and I was gripped by a dizzying desire to throw myself onto her face-forward and rip her dress up and her panties off, but I held my gaze out the window and my body steady as my fingers dipped into her wet cunt.
She was so wet, I thought with pleasure.
And then I treated myself to the thought that maybe she was so excited because of Ethan's Southern drawl. That maybe what was making her stiffen and shudder next to me was not just my fingers brushing up against her swollen clit, but the thought of Ethan's hands sliding down her arms.
Her eyes dropped to half-closed, and I luxuriated in the pleasurable thought that she might be thinking about Ethan, imagining that if such a feather-touch could come from such wiry and strong hands, what could he do elsewhere?
As I thought about my wife thinking about another man, I used my pinkie finger to stroke the nub of her clit, which was hard and protruding through the layers of her soaked flesh. I dipped my ring and middle finger into her as I did this, and pressed upward to pinch her clit from the inside out. This drove her wild, and I could feel her excitement coiling up inside her body, which she was trying to keep immobile to hide what we were doing from the cabbie. Her lips fell open a little more, and her chest fluttered with her ragged breath. My thigh was against hers now, and I could feel the tension building in her legs.
My own cock was throbbing, and I could feel the sticky stain of precum oozing out of the crown. I wanted to fuck my load into my wife like I hadn't in a long time. But for now I had to settle for making her burst quietly in the seat next to me.
If the angle of my hand had been less twisted, she would have come in an instant. Instead, I had the fun of torturing her a little, making her wait, as I slowly stroked her clit. She lifted her hips a little as she neared her climax, to grind herself against my touch. I pulled away, and gave her a look to get her to settle down. I liked the control I had over her in that moment, and the way she had no choice but to sit back down and let me slide my finger over her at my own pace. The way she had to hide her excitement outwardly.
Finally, I felt her whole body turn to steel, and her eyes squeezed shut. A flush of crimson stained her cheeks, and she bit her lip. Her pussy seemed to explode into wet, sticky cum, and her legs quivered against my hand.
I kept going, because her orgasm was driving me wild. But she squeezed her legs together to crush my hand, and looked over at me fiercely. Her hair was a little damp near the temple. Her eyes were glassy with the look of just-earned pleasure, and she smiled a little. She shook her head slightly. “Not now,” she mouthed.
I pulled my hand from between her legs. I waited a moment before I brought it to my nose, and inhaled her wildly excited scent. A mistake, because it only served to make my cock ache painfully, and we were still about ten minutes from our destination.
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