And when he took his shirt off, he had a body. You wouldn’t mistake him for a bodybuilder or a member of the rowing team, but he had a hardness that made me want to rub up against him. I loved exploring his body during sex, feeling his firm arms and then laying my head on his chest when we were done. Most of all, I loved feeling the expanse of his lats when we hugged. I felt like I could spend days just hugging him, running my hands along the lines of his back. A part of me hated myself for it, but whenever we hugged I was reminded that I could never be with a man who didn’t have some muscle.
Coming off of my turbulent relationship with Jason, who was all body and no brains, David was a revelation, a man who was strong and hard but soft and intellectual. He may not have shared Jason’s rabbit-like proclivity for watching porn all day and fucking all night, but at least he had an appetite back then. If anything, his scaled-back libido gave me a break from Jason’s boundless need to bone. It was nice not having to push a guy off of me when I was tired, but it wouldn’t have seemed so nice if I’d known that I’d soon be the one getting pushed off.
“What do you think? Should I hit that tonight?” Casey asks. She’s still eye-fucking Izzy. Once she locks in on a target, resistance is futile.
“The very fact that you’re asking tells me you’re going to,” I say. “I’m kind of surprised there’s someone here you haven’t fucked yet.”
“Bitch,” she says, pretending to be insulted. She pulls her straw out of her drink and flicks droplets of melon-tinged vodka at me.
I know she didn’t take it personally, but I instantly feel bad for calling her promiscuous—both because she’s my best friend and because of the secret fantasies I’ve been having—so I smooth it over with an impromptu toast.
“To my craziest, most adventurous friend,” I say, raising my almost-empty glass.
“To your craziest, sluttiest friend,” she says. She smiles and seductively sips through her straw, leaving me inspired by her ability to own and embrace her bottomless craving for cock.
“What about you?” she says. “Are you getting some on the regular now that you’re hitched?”
“Umm—not exactly,” I say. I wish I could dish about the flagging flames of my marriage. That’s what friends like Casey are for, right? When you get lulled into a pattern of passive, sexless boredom, you need someone who’s hyper-sexed like Casey to jolt you out of your routine. But I can’t bear the thought of painting David in a poor light. He might not fuck me like he used to, but he’s still a great guy, and he doesn’t deserve having his name dragged through our gossip.
“What the fuck?” Casey says. “I thought David was supposed to be a stud.”
“He is. Or he was,” I say. “He’s just been really preoccupied with work lately. He’s travelling back and forth to San Francisco constantly, and he’s zonked when he gets home.” There. That’s not so bad. If anything, I’m sticking up for him. I realize it’s the first time I’ve had to make an effort to keep him on the good side of one of my girlfriends. Usually they see him as the quintessential keeper.
“You think he’s got a piece on the side over there?” she says.
The question cuts through me like a scalpel. I’d never in a million years consider that David might cheat on me, but suddenly my mind’s reeling. Could he really be capable of that? Is that why he’s so spent when he gets home? I picture him fucking some skinny West Coast ho bag who probably can’t do a single pushup. I picture him, shirtless and unbuckled, holding her long blonde hair in a makeshift ponytail behind her head while she sucks his cock. I fume at the thought, and then I realize with horror that I’m slightly turned on by it. God damn it. Is there any topic that my twisted, horny, frat boy brain won’t turn into a sexual scenario?
This is not my voyeuristic urge to watch another woman suck my husband’s cock.
Hopefully this weird mixture of paranoia and arousal is just the vodka at the controls. I’m three martinis into the night, and I haven’t been this tipsy since—since the last time I saw Casey, I guess. I’ve read that low bodyfat makes getting drunk a lot easier, so I guess I have my abs to thank.
“I can’t imagine David doing that,” I say. Never mind that I just did.
“I hope you’re right,” she says. “So how often are you getting your fuck on?” She’s changing the subject. She can probably see that all this talk of cheating is making me uneasy.
“I guess once this month. Though I don’t think we saw any action at all last month.” But the truth is I don’t need to think. I’m fully aware of how seldom we sleep together. I’m just sugar coating it. “Pathetic, huh?”
“Extremely,” Casey says with a smirk.
“And the shitty thing is, ever since all of this started happening”—I point emphatically at my frame with both hands—“I’ve been wanting it more than ever. It sucks.”
“Jesus Christ, Faith. Are you becoming a horny slut in your old age?” She smiles playfully to soften the barb. We’re the same age after all.
“I think so,” I laugh. “Who’d have thought, right?”
“Me for one,” she says. “I always knew you had an inner horn dog. How do you think we became such good friends?”
I could hug her. After all the self doubt I’ve been facing about my new appetite, it feels so good to sit and have drinks with someone who has zero interest in judging me. But at the same time, whatever inner slut she saw in me in college is nothing compared to the hardbodied sexual fiend I’ve become in the past year.
“Plus, remember when you traded in that skinny librarian-looking guy for Jason?” she adds. “Remember his abs? If you were any other friend, I’d have fucked him out from under you without a second thought.”
“I’m sure he’d have gone for it,” I say. “I wonder what he’s up to now.” Except that I’m not wondering for Casey—I’m wondering for me. I start thinking about whether he still looks as good with his shirt off. It sounds terrible, but if I bumped into him here tonight, I just might be drunk enough to fuck him. Part of that thought scares me, but an even bigger part sends blood rushing below.
“Is it a dick problem?” Casey asks. She points at the ceiling and then slowly and sadly curls her finger toward the table.
“Not really. He gets it up, though it’s never as hard as it was when I met him,” I say. “Sometimes I wonder whether it’s because of me or if that’s just something that happens when guys get close to thirty. He certainly doesn’t finish as quickly. You’d think that would be a good thing, but lately I’d give just about anything for a five-minute quickie of rough, rowdy fucking.”
“Jesus Christ, listen to you!” she says. “Take it from your slutty friend who’s fucked more than a few guys a lot older than your hubby: when they want you, they want you. And fucking look at you! Unless he has a serious medical issue, there’s no reason in hell that he shouldn’t be ripping your clothes off and pinning you down every time he walks through the door.”
“Oh my God, you have no idea how much I want him to do that,” I say.
“Fuck, Faith. You shouldn’t have to want that in vain. I’m not knocking David, and I’m not suggesting there’s not some explanation for why he’s not fucking your brains out every night, but you’re way too hot not to be getting fucked properly and regularly.”
“But aside from increasing my monthly lingerie budget and hoping he comes around, there’s not much I can do,” I say. “I’m married now.”
“Yeah, to a dud it sounds like,” she says. “I don’t mean for that to hurt. I’m just saying that you’re hotter than a sauna, and life’s too short not to be having steamy sex. One day you’ll wake up and look in the mirror, and you’ll be an old married woman with a saggy body and a bunch of vanilla memories.”
“Shit,” I say. As usual, Casey’s talent for brutal clarity hits home, and some subconscious part of me decides to do whatever it takes not to become that old, flaccid woman.
“Shit indeed,” Casey says. “I think we need more drinks.�
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It’s my turn to buy, but Casey’s up and on her way before I can volunteer. As she makes her way toward the bartender whom she’ll almost definitely fuck tonight, I stare at her ass and compare it to mine. Casey always had an amazing bum in college. It was kind of her calling card, and I used to make a game of watching guys pretend not to stare at it. It had some kind of weird power over them. When she walked by, they’d do everything they could to avoid staring until they were sure they wouldn’t get caught, but they always found a way to look. Now I’m the one staring, and I’m suddenly not so sure what all those guys saw. Her tight jeans are giving it shape, but I realize now that what everyone called a good ass was really just a small ass, and it looks kind of pointless and deflated. I bet she doesn’t even have a gluteal fold.
I consider bringing Casey to Rev with me so I can teach her to squat and deadlift and do kettlebell swings to build an ass like mine, but rays of jealousy dry up my goodwill when I picture Chad fucking her in the dingy change room.
“I’ve seen better asses,” a man says close to my ear. The faint Australian accent sounds familiar, but I can’t place it.
Shit. I’ve been caught staring. I turn to see who caught me, and double shit—it’s Hunter, the photographer with the jacked forearms. He’s wearing a black linen shirt that clings to his perfect pecs, and it’s open just enough to make me want to pull apart the rest of its buttons.
“It’s you.” It’s all I can say in my increasingly inebriated state. So clever. I should write for a magazine or something.
“Hunter,” he says.
“Right. I remember. I’m Faith.” Me Faith. You Hunter. My frat boy libido definitely didn’t come packaged with frat boy game.
He laughs, which is incredibly kind of him because I didn’t say anything funny. His white teeth glow against his tanned skin under the club’s trippy lights.
“The fitness models I work with are usually in bed by nine and eat nothing but baked tilapia and asparagus,” he says. “You don’t often see them at a club this late with a bunch of empty glasses in front of them. You know there’s heaps of sugar in that shit, right?”
“So you’re not here picking up models then?”
He laughs again. Maybe I’ve got a little game after all. “Friend’s birthday,” he says. He points to a bottle-strewn table surrounded by collapsed couches. Perched on the edges of the cushions are a coterie of attractive, tanned mannequins. The women are wearing weird amounts of makeup, and the men have overly quaffed hair and inexplicable jewelry. Every one of the guys looks like he could be a photographer who takes pictures of fitness models’ asses for a living.
“It’s getting sloppy already,” he says. “They won’t notice if I slip away for a while.”
A while? What does that mean? I guess this isn’t a passing hello, which means I’ll have to polish my flirting skills. But fuck it. If I can power clean a barbell with a pair of forty-five-pound plates on it, I can talk to the tanned Australian photographer with ripped forearms for a few minutes.
“Mind if I sit?” he asks.
I scan the bar for Casey. She’s laughing and poking the chest of Izzy the bartender. He’s mock-flexing it for her, and I can’t tell whether he’s being ironic, because he has the chest of a malnourished choirboy.
I tell him to have a seat and then ask what he’s drinking.
“A bottle of frothy, cold cliché,” he says, turning the Foster’s in his hand so I can see the label. He holds it like it’s a product showcase on The Price Is Right. “The amber nectar” he says in a deep-voiced Aussie accent that’s too over the top to be real, and he laughs some more.
I laugh too, and not just because I’m trying my best to flirt. Funny and sexy with an appreciation for toned asses is an irresistible combo.
“So when did you come to the States?” I ask. His actual accent is a shadow of his beer-commercial voice, so it must have been a while ago.
“When I was twenty-one,” he says. “I started in San Diego and then moved my way down the coast as my career got going. Then LA started getting on my nerves, so here I am.”
“Here you are,” I say. Shit. Did I just give him bedroom eyes?
This would be a good time to tell him that my husband is in California at this very moment. On business. Through which he makes good money doing fuck knows what. Money that pays for the two-hundred-and-thirty-dollar jeans that are making my ass look outstanding tonight. Money that pays for our stylish town home with its high ceilings and Martha Stewart kitchen and master bedroom with my massive walk-in closet—and the chair that I already know I’ll picture Hunter sitting in the next time I peel off my wet gym shorts.
But I don’t mention any of that. It’s at this moment that I realize I didn’t put my wedding ring back on after my workout this morning. I envision it sitting in its little wooden box beside the coffee maker, and I feel an immediate pang of guilt deep in my belly. I steal a look at Hunter’s right forearm as he grips his bottle of cliché, and I douse the guilty feeling with a long sip of my honeydew martini.
Casey catches me off guard when she returns from the bar. She’s flashing a freshly added contact in her iPhone as she approaches. Hunter’s sitting next to me with his back to her, and she looks his body up and down before shooting me a look that says, “Nice going, you sexy bitch.”
Only it won’t be nice going now that she’s here. Casey’s a good friend, but she’s not used to being sloppy seconds. There’s no way she’s going to sit idly by and watch me clumsily flirt with the most fuckable man in the club.
My heart sinks as she takes her seat across from us. “Hi, I’m Casey,” she says, thrusting her manicured hand in his face.
“Hunter,” he says, turning to look at her. And then, as if by some Haitian voodoo zombie spell cast by my hot new body, he returns his attention to me. If someone as socially awkward as me can recognize the cue, I can be damn sure Casey registered it. I watch her expression as Hunter turns away from her. Her smile stays frozen on her face, but it instantly loses its glimmer. To her credit, she doesn’t take it hard. Instead, she looks at me and excitedly mouths the words He wants to fuck you.
“We’re having a bit of a girls’ night,” I sheepishly tell Hunter.
“I’m really just trying to get Faith drunk so she’ll do something foolish,” Casey says. Oh my God. What is she doing to me?
“Oh? And what sort of behavior counts as foolish for a girl like Faith?” he says.
“Well, let’s see,” she says. “She gave up wheat, sugar, and alcohol, which all sounds pretty foolish to me. But then again, look at the results.” Casey gestures to my body, inviting Hunter to assess me.
“Pretty spectacular,” Hunter says, showing me his pearly whites. Casey doesn’t know that he already conveyed his appreciation the moment he met me, but that doesn’t stop me from blushing a second time.
“Of course, all of that foolishness has probably left her with some serious cravings,” Casey says.
Hunter’s eyebrows jump. Even he’s lost for words now. Good God, Casey. Why don’t you just pull out his cock and hand it to me?
“So what do you do?” Casey asks him.
“I photograph bodies like Faith’s, actually,” he says. “I work with fitness models mostly.”
“That’s too funny,” Casey says. “Faith was just telling me she wanted to get some tasteful nude shots done. Weren’t you, Faith?”
Oh God. I must be beet red now. I tell him I wasn’t, as if he took Casey’s claim seriously.
“Did you start out in the industry as a model?” she asks him. It wouldn’t surprise me. He has the looks to pull it off. I wonder whether everything beneath his shirt is as toned and tight as his forearms.
“I did some work,” he says. “No covers or anything like that.”
“So just stuff beneath the covers then?” Casey says.
How the hell can she be so quick? Now it’s Hunter’s turn to blush. Or at least it would be if he weren’t so tanned.<
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Suddenly Casey’s attention is diverted back to the bar. “Is that Caleb?” she shouts. I have no idea who Caleb is. “That’s fucking Caleb. Hold on, that handsome bitch owes me a drink.” And she’s back to the bar, leaving Hunter and me to iron out the tension she deliberately created. It’s definitely a ploy to get us alone. She wouldn’t have given a shit about the drink Caleb owed her if Hunter weren’t sitting here.
“She seems fun,” Hunter says when Casey’s out of range.
“It’s good to have adventurous friends,” I say.
“I’ve found that it’s good to be adventurous in general,” he says. Good God, he’s staring right at me, and his gaze is penetrating. As I stare back, the din of shouting voices and clinking glasses and the flashing lights disappear into the background, and I’m sucked into a world where it’s just Hunter, me, and a muffled electronic drumbeat that mimics my racing heart.
After a long silence, he says, “What’s that?”
I tell him I didn’t say anything. My mouth didn’t even move. And I’m pretty sure he knows that, because he’s been staring right at it. What’s he up to?
“No, I definitely heard something,” he says. He’s leaning in to speak close to my ear now—almost whispering. God it’s sexy. “I couldn’t quite make it out, but it sounded like you were saying you wanted to dance.”
It’s an adorable technique—I have to give him that. But I smile and shake my head no. I can’t even remember the last time I danced in public. A friend’s wedding maybe? Dancing was always Casey’s thing, and I wouldn’t have a clue what to do if she weren’t there for me to clumsily copy her moves. And aside from the occasional just-for-me strip tease in the full-length mirror in my closet, I’m completely out of practice.
“Yeah, you definitely said you wanted to shake your ass,” he says.
“I said shake my ass? That doesn’t sound like me.”
“I don’t know. It sounds like something your ass would really enjoy,” he says.
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