I took a step back toward the open bedroom door, slightly regretting my intrusion upon her late-night conversation with him. Maybe whatever difficulty Jake was going through needed the kind of confidential relationship he might have with a therapist or a doctor. And I was in danger of breaching his doctor-patient trust. Now I was worried that Hanna would discover me there, and get angry with me for invading their privacy.
But as I edged back into the bedroom, I heard Hanna say: ‘Okay, Dude. You have a good one, okay?’
Again, friendly rather than loving.
I saw Hanna quietly close the lid of her laptop, and I prepared to flee back to bed. She didn’t rise from the couch, however. She placed the laptop down on the floor beside her, then gave a long sigh, and drew her hands down over her body to nestle between her legs.
She lay still for a moment or two, and I wondered if she was about to fall asleep right there where she lay on the couch. But then as I grew bold enough to edge back out of the bedroom, to get a better view of her, I saw that between her thighs her hand was moving a little. She was stroking herself there. I felt a jolt of surprise shoot through my chest, and my manhood thickened back up to full hardness.
I saw her thighs fall open, and her hips were tilting to offer herself easier access. Her fingers were dancing over her underwear, as one hand pulled up her nightshirt.
I caught my breath.
I heard her breathing deepen as she pulled the narrow band of white cotton covering her sex aside, so that she could steer her fingers over her exposed sex. She sighed quietly, and there was a slight tremor in her breathing as her other hand glided up and under her nightshirt to cup one of her breasts.
Oh God.
I could see over her shoulders, down her body as one of her fingers dipped inside her pussy. I was so hard, watching her. Not only was it simply beautiful to watch— the way her body moved, rising and falling in gentle undulations as she coaxed the little moans from her body—but it was such a buzz that she’d just been secretly chatting with Jake. It had to be connected, even if her vocal sign-off with him had seemed anything but romantic.
I watched as she built up quite a head of steam. Her fingers were working hard, turning circles around her clit, pressing against her increasingly slippery folds, delving deep inside her.
She had been worried about waking me, but now she was lying back and moaning to the point where it seemed she was trying to actively wake me, or had forgotten about me entirely. Should I step forward? Act like she had woken me up, and maybe join in?
I was so hard, and it was so tempting—but the suggestion that she had been talking with Jake behind my back, the implication that it might mean she was actively cheating on me troubled me too much. I didn’t want to get involved, and have all my concerns about what she was doing with Jake blurted out accidentally. For one, I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about it. There was the breach of trust, sure. I was more than disappointed at that. But it was still enticing to have her committing adultery, it seemed to me. Somehow. And wasn’t adultery purest when it was behind the husband’s back?
I stepped back, allowed her to reach orgasm alone, but as hot as it was, I slipped back into bed and tried to calm down. It wasn’t easy. I wanted to storm out there and demand to know why, when I’d taken the bold step of actively allowing her to sleep with a guy—guys, if she wanted—other than myself, could she feel the need to keep anything she had with Jake to herself?
Wasn’t that a key issue? It wasn’t just that she was falling for him: it was that she was circumventing me, she wasn’t involving me. And to get around our marriage vows, it seemed to me that I had to be involved.
I waited. I heard her return to bed.
Somehow, I slept.
Chapter Eighteen
The next morning, Hanna seemed noticeably upbeat. She was very chatty as we had breakfast, talking about the new creative brief she’d been given to lead at her agency, making me wonder why she hadn’t mentioned anything about it the evening before. She was wearing a skirt with her suit for the first time in I don’t know how long, and though it came down to her knees it did show plenty of leg. Her heels were a bit higher too than what she normally wore. She seemed to have a touch more perfume on than usual, and unless I was imagining things, she’d been a little heavier with the lipstick and eyeliner than usual that morning. And I swear, her bust was pushed up more than usual—and it wasn’t just the cut of her suit.
She looked gorgeous—and very flirty.
I tried not to appear as though I’d noticed anything. No doubt she might say she was making more of an effort because she was now leading a team at her advertising agency, and wanted to make a good first impression that morning. Part of me—the part between my legs, no doubt—hoped that perhaps there was some new guy she had her eye on in her office. Would she tell me if something like that happened? We’d never actually talked about her having sexual freedom beyond what had happened in the chalet, but she knew what my big sexual fantasy was. Perhaps she felt free to act on it.
My conscious mind, however, felt the flicker of anxiety overwhelming everything. I felt nervous as I ate my own breakfast cereal on one of our couches while Hanna fixed her own grapefruit extravaganza in the kitchen. Was she meeting Jake for lunch? Were they already beyond casual lunch meetings, moving on to full-on mid-day sex at a motel somewhere?
It was so confusing. I was so turned on by the idea, and yet the anguish about her doing things behind my back was truly awful.
I played along, chatted as cheerfully as she did, responded to her career news proudly and with real interest. I kissed her goodbye before getting ready for my own work day, which involved much less smart clothing and no early starts, but actually paid me on a level with Hanna.
I went onto Facebook. It seemed like a fairly stupid place to start—if I’d been thinking rationally, I’d have said there would be no way Hanna would admit to meeting Jake for lunch on Facebook if she wasn’t going to openly tell me about it to my face. And of course, I found nothing suspicious on her timeline. I scouted around her posts, her list of friends, finding nothing but distraction. Then I glanced at Jake’s timeline. Jake was in Japan, according to his latest few posts. I was mildly impressed. Apparently he was there on business—but what was a lowly accountant doing in the Far East on business?
His posts from Japan were actually kind of interesting, and had far too many comments on them from friends and especially family to be in any way fake. I was kind of relieved, he couldn’t possibly have been meeting Hanna for lunches and more. Not recently, at least. Perhaps before the trip, of course, but my gut feeling was that Hanna’s late-night chats with Jake had not been going on for long. I would have noticed the upturn in her mood much earlier, I was sure.
I signed out of Facebook, my IT executive’s brain trying to think whether I’d left any kind of trail that would make Hanna suspect I’d been trawling through her Facebook timeline—but Hanna wasn’t the kind of person who would know how to find any kind of incriminating signs of my suspicion, I was fairly sure.
Now I was late for work, but feeling better about things.
*
That night, I watched my wife some more.
This time, I didn’t go to sleep. It was crazy, but I was so obsessed with seeing what my wife and my best friend were doing at night, that I stayed up. I couldn’t afford to set any kind of alarm to wake me up at 3am—and yet I couldn’t rely on my body clock to simply wake me at the right time, either. So I just stayed up later than usual, telling my wife when she was ready for bed that I wasn’t feeling sleepy yet. I did go to bed around midnight, however, as I didn’t want Hanna to get suspicious. But, I didn’t go to sleep.
Staying awake wasn’t so difficult once Hanna was asleep beside me, thanks to my smartphone. Netflix, podcasts, YouTube, the New York Times—it was all there to keep me occupied for a few hours, while lying motionless beside my wife.
About 3am the alarm on Hanna’s phone went off. It wa
sn’t quite as loud as it could have been, but I was still a little taken aback at how bold she was waking herself up that way. She had to be confident that I was a heavy enough sleeper. Confidence, as it happened, that was perhaps misplaced—although I suppose I hadn’t really been woken by her phone alarm the last time.
She immediately shut off the alarm on waking, then paused for quite a while to make sure I was still asleep. I was pretty good at faking it. After a while, she seemed satisfied enough that I was fast asleep, and crept out of bed. She paid a brief visit to the bathroom—and left the light on, I noticed, after she left—then checked on me one more time before venturing out into the living room.
I did well at portraying a man in deep, deep sleep. At least, it seemed to me.
I waited for her to get comfortable on the couch, and then crept out of bed myself, the cool air raising goose bumps on my skin as I went. This time, I peered through the crack in the bedroom door to see that Hanna had camped out on the far end of the couch, closest to the windows. She was facing me, so there was no way I could creep out of the bedroom to make any kind of attempt to see what she was typing to Jake.
‘He’s asleep.’
Her voice surprised me. She spoke quietly, and the noise of the extractor fan in the bathroom didn’t help me to hear, but skulking that close to the bedroom door I could just about make out what she was saying.
‘The fan is on in the bathroom, so he won’t hear us,’ she said.
I didn’t hear Jakes’s side of the conversation. Was he on headphones? I couldn’t quite see Hanna well enough through the crack in the door to tell.
‘No, he’d get all suspicious,’ she said, and I was naturally suspicious about her theorizing about my getting suspicious. ‘It’s not worth it—he’s asleep, that’s fine. So how’re you doing?’
It was friendly, it was bright and breezy. She found out all about what he was up to in Japan, how his day went out there, investigating the accounts of some Japanese corporation that was due to merge with an American company. I had no idea that was the kind of thing Jake did for a living. I guess my assumptions about accountants were that they simply did everybody’s taxes once a year.
‘Don’t you think you should learn some phrases, you know, if you’re going to be there a whole month?’
She sounded like his best buddy. I felt strangely jealous that she was infringing on my territory as Jake’s friend. I could tell quickly from the conversation that he had been feeling pretty lonely and isolated, adrift in the middle of the colossal city of Tokyo. Why hadn’t he persuaded me to chat with him in the early hours of the morning instead of Hanna?
My guess was, he needed some female company—even if, as I listened, this seemed to be strangely platonic, despite their recent sexual encounters. Jake could talk to Hanna in a way he couldn’t with Hayden or myself or one of the other guys. He could open up a little more, reveal more of his vulnerabilities.
‘You should definitely visit the Imperial Palace, it’s supposed to be amazing...’
I wouldn’t have said it was 100% platonic, though. The two of them were flirting, even if they weren’t actively having phone sex together. I guess that was another reason why Jake was confiding in Hanna, and not me.
‘How could it possibly be depressing going to Tokyo Disneyland? Even on your own.’
But there was no lovey-dovey stuff. None of the sorts of I-really-miss-you or I-wish-you-weren’t-so-far-away or I-can’t-stand-that-you’ll-be-gone-for-a-whole-month kind of heartfelt, bittersweet expressions of long-distance longing. I listened to her, and I felt entirely unthreatened by my wife’s secret conversation with my friend. My guess was that when Hanna had told him I’d get suspicious, it had been after Jake had suggested they come clean and tell me she was chatting with him to help him cope with the solitude of his daily life in Japan.
Then after Hanna said goodbye to Jake, closed her laptop and put it down on the floor beside her, I could just about see through the gap to know that, once again, she was lying back on the couch and tending to her own sexual frustrations.
I took full advantage of her distraction to quietly turn the handle on the door and ease it open a little more so that I could see properly.
There she was, lying flat on her back, head up against the cushions in the corner of the couch, one knee up against the back of the couch, one leg draped over the edge toward the floor. Since she was facing toward me this time, I had an even better view of what she was doing—her thighs parted, her pea-green nightshirt pushed up, one hand cupping a breast through the shirt, the other sunk beneath her silky gray panties, stroking her pussy.
After a while she lifted her hips briefly, and removed her panties completely, and I could see everything as her fingers strummed her soaking sex. So beautiful to watch her, and startling because before the previous night, I’d never gotten to watch my wife touching herself—masturbation was a private thing in our relationship, even after seven years married.
Once again I was tempted to intervene. Once again I stepped back, leaving her to it. It seemed like such a personal time, I didn’t feel I had the right to intrude.
I closed the door again and returned to bed, and, despite the continuing hum of the bathroom fan, I did hear her moan as her orgasm finally hit. Was she thinking about Jake when she touched herself? It couldn’t be a coincidence that she was moved to masturbate immediately after their little international chat came to a close. And yet... maybe this was one of the only times in the day or night when Hanna felt she had genuine privacy. She knew I was asleep, so she just went ahead and dealt with her sexual needs.
I mean—it wasn’t as though I didn’t masturbate from time to time. I tended to do it in the shower, but I still needed my own private time to do it.
I did feel uneasy as Hanna came to bed, however. Our sex life had gone back to a regular unfulfilling quickie each Saturday night. I’d tried to spin things out a little, here and there, but it felt wrong, and Hanna had seemed impatient somehow. It had felt as though I was trying to resurrect how we felt each other while in Europe, in the chalet, and yet our argument had closed the door on that.
It made me wonder what other doors between us might have also closed.
*
Hanna and I were at a dinner party with some of our married-with-kids friends out in the suburbs. Once again, the topic of our trip to Europe came up—how could it not? Our friends were jealous that we got to travel, that we got to go skiing, that we got to sleep at night. Hanna and I told them that there had been no skiing, that there had been no snow, but we didn’t mention anything else about the trip. Thankfully, there was no ‘what did you do, then?’ kind of follow-up question from anybody. Conversation moved briskly on to something else about some of the kids.
I think normally, Hanna and I would have suffered through a dinner like that. We’d tried so hard to have kids ourselves, but even when my equipment was working fully, that pregnancy had just never come along. I guess it was to the point where we needed to get properly tested, to see if there was an infertility issue somewhere. But it was so humiliating, as far as I was concerned, and I suspected Hanna felt similarly. We’d wait a year or two, the biological clock would tick loudly enough that we’d overcome that sense of humiliation, I figured.
This time, though, we were just happy that our friends weren’t talking about what had happened to us on our trip to Europe, we were relieved they weren’t trying to grill us for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
I looked across the table at Hanna, and we smiled at each other to share our relief that our friends were so totally absorbed in their own family life these days to really pay much attention to other people. It wasn’t often you’d be relieved about that, but there you go. As she smiled at me, it really struck me just how pretty she was, how beautiful she was when she smiled. She looked amazing too, wearing what seemed to be a new strapless red dress. And it struck me that she really had to love me, properly love me, to smile at me l
ike that. Even if she did actually love Jake as well, she did love me.
Then as my attention finally returned to dinner, and the conversation before us, Patricia Wallace was talking about having her new baby, and about how it had been for her first child to get used to having a baby brother all of a sudden.
She said, ‘It’s a big change mentally, of course. Because when it’s just Brady... you know, mommy and daddy love him more than anything in the world. And then along comes this other little person, and mommy and daddy love him more than anything in the world, too.’
Jenny Goldsmith, who had four kids by now, said, ‘It’s always like that with the first one. It’s like they think love is like a pie: the bigger the piece you give to the new baby, the less there is for them.’
Something inside my head clicked, listening to them.
‘If you start loving somebody new, it doesn’t mean you have to stop loving your existing kids any less. And it’s the same when the third one comes along...’
‘Maybe not the fourth one, though,’ Donnie Goldsmith joked, attracting an eye-roll from his wife.
Gayle Morgan said, ‘We told our kids that love is more like TV—it’s always there when you need it, and it’s available to an unlimited number of people, and the signal doesn’t reduce the more people are watching it.’
‘I guess it’s just really frightening,’ Jenny said, ‘to feel maybe you’re not loved as much anymore.’
Was that how I felt about Hanna falling for Jake?
It seemed like it to me. So, I was just a big kid, worried about losing my portion of the love pie. But it really made sense to me. Love is unlimited, so why should I feel threatened if Hanna slept with Jake, and ended up loving him, too? As long as she continued to love me. That was the important thing.
Game Changer Page 14