Game Changer

by Max Sebastian

  I shrugged again. ‘I don’t know... She’s had a taste of this new relationship, and she doesn’t seem to want it all to suddenly end.’

  ‘And that was never the deal,’ Hayden said, and he was kind of correct, and yet not entirely there because of the information I failed to share with him.

  I picked up my pack, and stood up. ‘I don’t know... I’m probably just paranoid about all of it. She told me she doesn’t love him... I just need to trust that she really does mean it.’

  Hayden followed my lead, packing up his water bottle, readying himself for the climb to the top of the mountain. He said, ‘I can have a talk with Jake. You know, make sure he gets how it is.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t need to do that...’

  ‘He needs to know this was all about the vacation. Providing some distraction when we were all going nuts. You know... that it all ends when we fly home. We treat it as though none of it ever happened.’

  ‘I guess he does.’

  I was grateful for Hayden’s support.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It took a while longer to reach the top of the mountain than either Hayden or I had anticipated. All day, in fact. Neither of us were complaining—the views as we got higher and higher were just stunning, real life experiences. We took hundreds, maybe thousands of pictures. The sun was going down as we finally returned to the little town, and eventually back to the chalet.

  Hayden and I didn’t talk about Hanna and Jake for the rest of the hike—not after that pause in the clearing halfway up the mountain. I think it was good for me to stop thinking about it for a while. Like some kind of therapy session, I’d gotten my thoughts and fears off my chest, and now I felt like I could move on. I had to trust Hanna, I had to trust my wife. If she said she didn’t love Jake, that had to be good enough for me—the ring on my finger said as much.

  And as we returned to the chalet, the incredibly welcome smell of roasting meat greeting us, I soon felt that my trust approach was the right one.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’

  Hayden’s question, as we came into a chalet filled with the smells and sounds of decent cooking, was the same as mine, he just beat me to the punch. Jake and Hanna were all smiles and part-way through fixing the most wonderful meal. In the kitchen there were pots and pans everywhere. On the table there was cutlery ready to host a feast.

  ‘We went down to the grocery store—and there was a whole farmers’ market outside!’ Hanna revealed.

  ‘You’re kidding me!’

  ‘So what’s on the menu?’

  ‘Chicken—the biggest, fattest, juiciest chicken you ever laid eyes on. And bacon... and potatoes... carrots... parsnips...’

  It was a wonderful meal. It was like a ragged, skin-and-bones sailor marooned on a desert island watching a luxury yacht coming steaming directly toward him. Jake and Hanna seemed like the picture of domestic bliss as they served up—which wasn’t great for my paranoia, I can tell you, although I hung on tight to my new insistence on trust in my marriage.

  Conversation was buoyant, however. I guess it was our last night, we were all relieved that we would all be soon heading home, despite everything that had happened. We all looked over the photos Hayden and I had taken on our tour of the mountain. We appreciated the various foods Hanna and Jake had found at the farmers’ market. We were in jubilant mood, and there was no mention of poker, or of what Jake and Hanna had done on two crazy nights in that chalet.

  And even though there was no alcohol, keeping Hayden safe from his addiction for another night, the quantity and quality of food we ate, compared to everything that had come before, was intoxicating in itself. We all ended up in something of a food coma—and after a fairly physically active day, were all quite exhausted that night, too tired to even think about more strip poker.

  Everyone ended up collapsing into bed relatively early that night, which was not a bad thing when we had a crucial rendezvous with the airport shuttle bus to meet early the next morning.

  I didn’t even really think too much about whether Hanna had spent all day fucking Jake before they’d gone out to find the farmers’ market. With hindsight, I’m guessing that was why Hanna and Jake were as exhausted as Hayden and I had been after our climb to the top of the mountain. But that night I was too tired to think about such a thing, too tired to initiate anything with Hanna, and even relieved to find she was as eager as I was to just fall into bed and go to sleep.

  *

  Afterwards, of course, I looked back on that night as a missed opportunity. Not only because we could all have played another evening of poker, and Hanna could have ended up sleeping with Hayden, or even Jake again. Also because I didn’t get to appreciate how wicked she had probably been with Jake for the whole day Hayden and I had been gone.

  There wasn’t even, really, a right moment for me to ask her about it all.

  Neither did I get to ‘reclaim’ her as my wife, to give any kind of closure to our vacation adventure.

  In the morning we were all up and furiously packing and showering and cleaning up the chalet, so that we could power down the sloped streets to the main road, and the bus stop. It was all too feverish to pause and ask Hanna what she and Jake had got up to prior to their shopping excursion.

  I’ll tell you, though, that from her attitude and subsequent behavior, it seemed to me that whatever outstanding feelings she had for Jake had been resolved. Once we left the confines of the chalet, she didn’t refer to Jake as anything more than one of our friends. She didn’t speak about what had happened between them. I know, it was the deal: whatever happened in that chalet stayed in that chalet. It was surprising, though.

  To some degree, it was a relief that our argument also seemed to have been left behind, forgotten completely. Hanna was the same bright and breezy brunette she’d always been, the same sharp and pretty girl I’d married. There wasn’t even a hint that she had romantic attachments to Jake or anyone else.

  Arriving back home in Brooklyn, however, it also seemed to me that the whole discovery of my strange affinity for Hanna to see other men was also forgotten. Hanna certainly didn’t refer to it, didn’t tease me about it, didn’t use it to spur on our sex life. In fact, our sex life soon returned very much to the way it had been before we’d flown off to Eastern Europe. Regularly scheduled on Saturday nights. Short, efficient, skipping on the foreplay. It was strange how easily we just fell back into the same old rut.

  I guess both being back at work, in fairly high-stress jobs, we were inevitably going to return to our exhausted lifestyle and find it difficult to find time for extended sexual appreciation of each other. But the way we looked at each other, the way we treated each other, it almost seemed as though we were faintly embarrassed at everything that had happened back in the chalet.

  It was a shame.

  And the four of us didn’t even really speak about our time in the chalet, either. When we went out with our other friends, the ones with kids who couldn’t justify ski vacations even if they were only once a year, the subject of our latest trip hardly even came up.

  ‘What the hell happened over there in Europe?’ Hardy, who’d been a surprising convert to the whole marriage thing some three years before, asked us at one point over a few beers in a bar downtown. ‘Normally you guys are filling the whole of goddamn Facebook with your little jolly skiing snaps—but this year you haven’t posted a thing.’

  ‘We told you, didn’t we? There was no snow,’ Hayden said, as the four of us who did go on the trip gave each other awkward glances.

  ‘So my question stands,’ Hardy said with a whiff of smugness. ‘What the hell happened over there? What do you do for a week in a ski resort nobody’s ever heard of when there’s no snow?’

  ‘We watched TV, we played card games, we went hiking,’ Hanna said, and that was about as close as anybody got to detailing what we’d all done on that week away.

  ‘Sounds incredibly tedious,’ Hardy declared, and so it seemed none of our fr
iends were motivated to find out the details of what had gone on in that chalet, even if any of the four of us had been prepared to tell.

  Life seemed to go back to normal, in pretty much every way. When Hanna and Jake were both present at drinks out after work, the two of them treated each other as friends, and made it seem that nothing untoward had ever gone on between them.

  It was so much like nothing had ever actually happened in that chalet that more and more, it felt as though one—or all—of us had simply imagined it.

  For me, though, once you’d discovered a taboo-busting sexual fantasy like the one I had about sharing my wife, you couldn’t just ignore it and return to the way you were before the idea had ever come to mind. When I found myself in bed with Hanna on a Saturday night, rushing through sex in an attempt to come as quickly as humanly possible, it was the memory of her time with Jake in that chalet that allowed me to finish as rapidly as Hanna seemed to want me to finish.

  Had Hanna so easily forgotten about her two nights with Jake?

  Chapter Seventeen

  A few months after we got back from Europe, I woke to find myself unexpectedly alone in bed.

  My first thoughts didn’t immediately jump to paranoid fears about where my wife was, or what she might be doing. But as I waited for her to come back from the bathroom, I spread my arm out over the mattress and felt that the sheet where she would ordinarily sleep was cold. She’d been out of bed for a while.

  My bedside clock said it was 4am. What time did she wake, three?

  I actually wondered if Hanna was sick, or something like that might be hitting her sleep.

  Then I heard a little giggle from out in the living room.

  My first thought was that she was out there watching TV, either on the big television screen with the wireless headphones or on her tablet with headphones. It wasn’t unusual when one of us was tired, and one was wired for some reason during an evening for us to go down this route: one of us would sleep while the other got on with their evening using headphones. But this was 4am, so she must have had some serious insomnia, the like of which I’d never known her to have.

  I was about to get out of bed and wander out there to see what was up with her, but then I heard her giggle again and say: ‘No!’

  My heart skipped a beat.

  You didn’t watch television and interact with it like that. You didn’t say ‘No!’ like that to a TV show. It wasn’t a long, drawn out Noooooo that you might say when your cornerback misses a tackle and the opposition’s wide receiver sprints 50 yards and straight into an unguarded end zone. It wasn’t a shocked ‘No!’ that you might emit when finding out that Marlena Evans is the killer on Days of Our Lives. The sound I had heard from Hanna was light-hearted, flirty.

  My paranoia—and, I guess since the events of the chalet, my libido—jumped instantly to the conclusion that Hanna had woken up at a time she felt certain I’d be sleeping soundly to secretly chat with Jake.

  Since the adventure in the chalet, I had been pining for something unusual to happen in our sex life, to be sure—even if that meant Hanna cheating on me. For some reason I felt unable to talk to her about it—as though talking about it might return us to the argument over her feelings for him. Ever since our trip to Europe, when Hanna had gone out for the night with her friends or co-workers without me, I would be hoping fervently that she would stay out late and get a little drunk and be tempted into something wicked. My hope was always that she might meet someone new, some guy at work, perhaps, or a stranger in a bar. That she might remember, even though I had concerns about her falling for Jake, that underneath it all, my fantasy was for her to sleep with other men.

  I was always a little disappointed when she came home without any tales of debauchery. I guess over the weeks she could even have forgotten about my fantasy—or had she really left everything that had happened in that chalet back in that chalet?

  Suddenly I was both excited and terrified that she had been seeing Jake behind my back. I felt sick to my stomach that she might have broken my trust by doing such a thing—and yet my manhood thickened up quickly at the thought that she might have been tempted into genuine adultery. It was a confusing mix of feelings. I’m not even sure what I thought I would do if I discovered that she really was cheating on me with Jake. Confront her? Try to get her to open up about her sexual experiences to pander to my perversion?

  It would seem most unfair for me to reveal to her a desire for her to sleep with other men and share the details with me, if she then decided to sleep with other men in secret.

  I slipped out of bed. I think my biggest hope was that, somehow, she was flirting with a new guy online. Perhaps she was going to set something up, and then present me with a wonderful surprise: she was going to go on a date with someone, to help rekindle our own sex life. But as I padded across the soft carpet toward our closed bedroom door, there was another giggle, and the tone was flirty and yet friendly. It made me feel that chances were that she really was talking to Jake.

  Had they met up in real life to continue their adultery? Or had they simply started an online flirtation that might lead that way at some point?

  I put my ear to the door. Another giggle. It confirmed to me that she was on our couch, which stretched along the wall separating our bedroom from the living room of our small apartment. She was sat at the closest end of our couch, and I was fairly sure that meant she would be facing away from the door, toward the windows.

  I silently turned the handle on our bedroom door to open it. I thanked my lucky stars that the well-oiled door and its handle opened without a sound—although I was prepared, at any point, for her to notice me and to sleepily inquire as to her well-being and reasons for being up and about. At any moment I would just spring into innocent mode, acting the innocent husband responding to the realization that his wife was no longer in bed even though it was 4am.

  As the door opened, however, Hanna showed no signs of noticing. I saw her stretched out along the couch, facing away from me, lying on her back but with her head and shoulders propped up by a cushion and the armrest. Her laptop was on her thighs, and she was typing into it. I only had to crane my head slightly to see what was on her screen: a messenger app. And I could see Jake’s face on screen, captured via a webcam.

  I felt my stomach drop, my heart nearly seize up in horror—and yet my manhood thickened up dramatically.

  How could she? How could she talk to him like this, behind my back?

  I felt nauseous. I felt the anger rising inside me—and yet what tempered it was the very clear arousal I also felt. I waited a moment—still not wanting a real confrontation with her, despite the betrayal I felt. After a few beats, a few deep breaths, I started to calm down. I felt the faint whiff of irony, that I had been so supportive of my wife sleeping with my friend, but now she was here chatting with him on a computer. I was all riled up.

  Maybe there was an innocent explanation.

  Even though Hanna was facing away from me, I had to be careful that Jake didn’t see in the background of his view of my wife that I was hiding in the doorway. It meant I couldn’t lean out and attempt to read what the two of them were talking about while Hanna typed.

  Hanna giggled again, in response to something she read on her screen.

  My erection responded to her obvious cheerfulness. It made me think how down she’d been, on the whole, since we’d returned from Europe. I wouldn’t exactly say depressed, but certainly not what you’d say was obviously happy. Come to think of it, she’d been much like that before the trip to Europe. Was that how she’d become through our marriage? It was nice to see her happy again, though, even if it was because she was talking to Jake. I hated to jump to the conclusion that she was lying to me, cheating behind my back. The nausea felt awful.

  Maybe she was just chatting with Jake about the possibility of persuading me to allow them some time together again. That would be okay, wouldn’t it? Maybe she would remind me of my fantasy, tell me that she wo
uld be careful not to fall in love with him, but that she needed his big cock.

  I waited, I watched her tap-tap-tapping away on that keyboard. She laughed occasionally, sighed. Sometimes even gasped, or at least caught her breath at something he said. She really was all bubbly and chirpy and light now that she was talking to Jake. It was wonderful to see, even if it irked me slightly that it wasn’t me that made her feel that way. It made me think that at least a small part of my strange fantasy was the desire to make my wife happy, at any cost, even if that meant sex with someone else. I liked the idea that she could have the excitement of a new sexual relationship.

  After a while, I could see her fumbling with something—there was a small click as she plugged something into the side of her laptop, and then she put a small headset on, the kind she occasionally used for Skype calls with her parents when the line quality was especially poor. In this case it seemed that it allowed her to talk to Jake quietly, supposedly to avoid waking me.

  ‘Yeah... this is my actual voice,’ she said softly, barely more than a whisper. ‘But only for a minute, okay?’

  I couldn’t hear Jake’s reply, which was fed through the headset.

  Then she whispered, ‘No, I told you. It’ll wake him.’

  It seemed amusing to me that she wasn’t aware her giggling had been loud enough to wake me anyway.

  I listened to her for a few minutes, and she wasn’t saying much more than: ’Yeah... yeah... no, seriously?’

  Then, she said: ‘Okay, Buddy. I hope you can get some sleep. Yeah... okay...’

  It wasn’t exactly what you’d call sexual. The tone of her voice was more friendly, platonic. Like she’d been supporting him as purely a friend in a time of difficulty. I started thinking that perhaps Jake had some issue in his life that caused him stress or anxiety. Had a family member died? He had both parents, still, and I hadn’t heard of any serious illnesses or anything. But perhaps he needed Hanna as a friend to help him through something like that.