Game Changer

by Max Sebastian

  The most important issue, I decided, was my own bond with Hanna.

  We were married, and yet more and more it felt as though we were siblings, rather than lovers. I couldn’t be sure whether she thought about Jake when she touched herself, but watching her touch herself after those nightly conversations with my friend had made me feel excluded. Simply because she was doing it in secret. Now I could concede that feeling that way was unfair to Hanna, since I probably masturbated as often, if not more so, than she did, and I didn’t always think about her when I masturbated.

  But how could I turn things around? How could we turn things around? Did Hanna have any interest in turning things around with me?

  A few evenings later, I had drinks out with Hayden after work. After everything that had happened at the chalet, and my mountainside conversation with him, I felt able to open up to Hayden about what was going on.

  ‘It was a pretty strange time,’ he said, ‘back in that chalet. I’m not surprised she can’t stop thinking about it.’

  ‘Thinking about ‘it’, or about him?’ I asked.

  He sighed. ‘Well, you got to go with your gut, haven’t you? You think she has feelings for him.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘So you have to expect she’s been thinking about him, not just the basic cheating thing.’

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t cheating,’ I smiled. And I guess when I said it, I was kind of reminding myself that nothing Hanna had done had been without consent from myself.

  Hayden looked suddenly a touch surprised. Well, I suppose I hadn’t told him the whole truth before. I guess I hadn’t explicitly told him I enjoyed many aspects of Hanna’s extramarital liaisons. ‘Not cheating?’

  ‘Well, you know I allowed it all to happen.’

  He nodded. ‘I suppose you did. But you regretted that, right?’

  I shook my head. ‘Only the part about her falling for him. And even that—I guess I’ve been thinking that if it makes her happy...’

  Now he was a trifle shocked. ‘You’d really... let her... fall for him?’ I got the sense that he couldn’t get his head around the thought that I would allow another guy to sleep with my wife. I wasn’t ready to completely spell it out to him, not when I was still in two minds about everything. But I gave him a kind of picture in which I was obviously open to the possibility of something unconventional happening.

  I said, ‘I guess if she still loves me... and she doesn’t want to leave me... what would be the harm in her loving someone else as well?’

  ‘Okay...’ he said, not quite knowing what to say to that.

  ‘I mean... we spend a lot of time with each other... there’d plenty of time for her to see him as well... the only issue is... whether she’d still want to be with me if she had him.’

  ‘I suppose a lot of guys... if they wanted some guy’s wife, they wouldn’t want her to keep on seeing her husband,’ Hayden nodded.

  ‘Most wouldn’t,’ I agreed.

  ‘But this is Jake. He’s your buddy, right? He’d never take her from you.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. But they are talking behind my back. And she... well, she clearly still wants him.’

  Hayden pointed a finger at me, ‘But what do you want? I mean, in a perfect world?’

  What did I want? That was a question.

  ‘I just want to know that she’s not going to leave me,’ I said. Sounded kind of pathetic, I suppose. ‘I don’t mind if she wants to see him... if she wants an affair... I just want...’ It was difficult to open up completely. To admit that I wanted Hanna to sleep with whoever she wanted, that the thought of her being unfaithful was sexy to me.

  ‘What? What do you want?’ he prompted me.

  I took a deep breath. ‘I kind of want her to have an affair,’ I admitted. I felt an odd surge of sexual arousal as I admitted it. ‘I think maybe she needs to do it... but I don’t want her to feel she has to leave me to do it.’

  I looked warily into Hayden’s eyes, thinking he’d be disgusted with me for saying such a thing about my own wife, for giving up my marital rights just like that.

  But he seemed only understanding. Maybe even mildly impressed, for some reason.

  ‘Maybe you need to talk to Jake,’ he said.

  ‘Jake?’

  He nodded. ‘He’s a good guy—we both know that. He doesn’t want to hurt you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So maybe you just need to sound him out about... you know... having an affair with her... without breaking up your marriage.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  I emailed Jake. It seemed like the easiest way to start up some conversation with him, considering the time difference between us. And because writing to him, rather than talking initially face-to-face, seemed like the least humiliating way to get into the possibility of him having an affair with my wife.

  I kept things light in my message, or as light as possible, but dropped in a little hint of things that needed to be resolved after Slovakia, before asking if he might be able to talk sometime, perhaps via Skype or FaceTime. I mentioned that I’d seen on Facebook that he was in Japan, and expressed mild surprise that he hadn’t said anything about his upcoming trip. I suggested that maybe what had happened back in the chalet had taken a toll on our friendship—even though, as far as I was concerned, neither of us had done anything wrong.

  Then, I asked whether he might be able to help me with something. I suggested that Hanna had seemed a little down recently, and that as far as I could tell it had started not long after we’d returned from Europe. I told Jake I thought that, perhaps, she had had such an adventure with everything that had happened, that now she was going through a withdrawal of some sort, whether she realized it or not.

  It was mostly honest and on the level. I didn’t talk about my concerns about her falling for him—but then he had to be aware of what Hanna and I had argued about back at the chalet. I didn’t talk about my strange sexual fixation on Hanna’s infidelity, either. I wasn’t entirely sure how to talk about that with a friend. And anyway, I was trying to keep the message short and not too heavy.

  I wasn’t sure how he’d take it. I wasn’t sure how strong he felt about Hanna, and whether he still saw me as a friend or a rival. But even if I felt nervous to press that ‘send’ button, it did also feel cathartic. I was getting something off my chest that needed to get gone. I was taking a pre-emptive strike that would allow me to gauge how Jake really felt about Hanna, and whether I needed to do something about it.

  It seemed to take ages to get any kind of reply. I suppose by the time I’d written and rewritten that short message over and over and over, and finally sent it, it was getting on for noon in Brooklyn. With 14 hours’ time difference to Tokyo, that meant Jake would receive the email at 2am. Such an awkward gap—no wonder Hanna had to get up at 3 in the morning to chat with him.

  I couldn’t get it off my mind all afternoon. I was working on a website for a company that made vacuum cleaners, and couldn’t do much to keep my focus on the coding.

  All afternoon my paranoia twisted things in my head, I started worrying about what I’d said to Jake, and about how he’d interpret what I’d said. When I’d told him Hanna was going through some kind of withdrawal, was I suggesting that the solution was for her to start seeing him again? In which case, would a fairly normal monogamous type of guy like Jake assume that I was suggesting that Hanna should start seeing him instead of me?

  I started foreseeing a video call with Jake in which he agreed that Hanna should leave me to hook up with him—and that when I refused to give her up, anger ensued.

  What if he started messaging Hanna about my email? My wife might be surprised at hearing that I thought she’d been down in the dumps since we got back from Europe. She might be suspicious that, after she’d started secret chats with Jake at night, I was now getting in touch with Jake trying to get involved with their relationship. Would she think me manipulative? Devious?

  What if my interference actively pushed Han
na into Jake’s arms, and away from our marriage?

  If she did want to end our marriage, we had no kids to worry about.

  I stayed unusually late at work, hoping for a reply. If only I’d requested an alert to tell me if Jake had read my message—but I was naturally cautious about doing such a thing, it was all too easy to find out if someone had requested such an alert, and I didn’t want to come across to Jake as desperate or suspicious—or, come to think of it, threatened.

  About six in the evening, I was thinking Hanna might be home already and wondering where I was. I didn’t really want to reveal my full hand to her, either. What if Jake didn’t even read my email? There was the chance it would go into his junk mail folder, or even that it would simply be overlooked among the flood of marketing materials that, these days, even managed to get past junk mail filters. He might wait days just to pluck up the courage to open my message.

  I waited. I didn’t want to go home and have all of this playing on my mind. I texted Hanna to let her know that one of our website projects had a problem that required me to stay late.

  Then, finally, at around six-thirty, Jake sent a reply.

  Hey Buddy, how’s things? Yeah, it’s been crazy for me at work recently— and the Japan thing hit me without warning, so I never got the chance to really tell anybody about it. Hanna actually messaged me about it because she noticed it on Facebook before you did.

  Sorry to hear what’s going on—I guess things got a little insane back in the chalet. To be honest I wasn’t sure what to say to you guys about it afterward. I figured we had said that what happened in the chalet would stay in the chalet, so it seemed to me that no one wanted to talk about it once we left. I don’t know what I can do to help—maybe we can talk about it, though?

  Japan’s been interesting, and the work’s okay, but it’s kind of intimidating if I’m honest. I feel a long way away from anybody I know, and not knowing anything about the language, I feel kinda lost most of the time.

  Anyway, I’ve had a lot of time to think, and to be honest, I’m kind of regretting what happened back at the chalet—you and Hanna seemed to want it to happen at the time, but it should never have gone that far. I guess we were all feeling crazy stuck in that chalet with nothing to do all week, huh? Maybe it would be best to just forget about it, but I’m not sure what we could do to help Hanna to move on.

  I’m just off to work, and I usually get back to my hotel by about 4pm, but with the time difference I guess maybe we could talk just before you go off to work in the morning? Let me know, Buddy.

  - Jake.

  I read and re-read the message a few times as I sat on the B, heading from my office in Midtown Manhattan back to Brooklyn. On the whole, I’d say I felt relieved by the tone of his reply. It did feel as though he wasn’t telling me the whole truth—for one, he’d reduced his nightly chat sessions with Hanna to her having messaged him. I guess you could say he was truthful, just not quite laying it all out there. The truth, but not the ‘whole truth’, so to speak.

  But then, wasn’t it also true to say that I hadn’t laid out my whole side of the deal to him either? We were both as bad as each other.

  From his message, I could just about accept that he’d been talking to Hanna out of loneliness. It also seemed, if he was being straight, that maybe he had moved on from what had happened back at the chalet. His tone suggested that he wasn’t trying to get things re-started with Hanna, that he even thought she needed help ‘to move on’.

  Why would he lie about that, if he intended to have a secret affair with her, or worse, planned to take her from me permanently?

  He was in Japan. It seemed to me there was no point in lying about anything—he could tell me straight that he’d been talking with Hanna and the two of them wanted to start seeing each other, and she was thinking perhaps it might be best if she left me. He could shield himself from my anger by totally ignoring me online.

  The truth, I felt certain, was that Jake had decided we needed to push past what happened in the chalet and remain as friends.

  The only odd thing seemed to be the way he’d played down his chatting with Hanna at night. I could only suppose that it was a difficult thing to open up about—oh yeah, Buddy, I’ve been talking with your wife every night trying to get through this horrible loneliness. I suppose it wasn’t easy to admit the extent of loneliness, and maybe it was easier to admit to a female friend than a male one.

  Would he be having another secret chat with Hanna that night? He hadn’t mentioned anything about it, of course, hadn’t invited me to join. But then we were intending to talk about Hanna, so needed our own private time.

  When I returned home, Hanna was on the couch watching the TV show The Good Place on Netflix, curled up with a takeout pizza.

  ‘Hey, how did it go?’ she asked as I came in. ‘You guys get everything sorted?’

  ‘I think so,’ I lied, though without really saying anything.

  ‘Want some pizza? It just came.’

  I dropped down on the couch beside her, trying my best to act normally, though I was being cautious, attempting to work out whether Jake had said anything to her about my emailing him. As the evening wore on, I had to believe he hadn’t said anything to her—and that seemed to me to underline his credentials as a friend looking to get past a brief fling with his friend’s wife, rather than attempting to conspire to steal her.

  What would he think about me wanting him to have an affair with her?

  Chapter Twenty

  That night, Hanna did, indeed, wake up at 3am once again to talk with Jake. I had a better strategy this time round: earlier than usual in the evening I told Hanna I wasn’t feeling so hot and needed an early night. I managed five hours of solid sleep, then woke myself up with a vibration-only alarm on my phone at not long after 2.30am. I set additional vibration-only alarms in case the first did not wake me, but it did.

  Once again, Hanna woke at 3am. She crept out of bed, and set up on the couch. I went to the doorway and silently opened the door to watch her. As with the previous night, she seemed confident enough in the soundness of my sleep to talk with Jake instead of just typing messages. If anything, she was even slightly louder than the previous night—I guess I’d proven myself to be a reliable sleeper.

  ‘Hey, man, how you doing?’ she greeted him cheerfully. It was still a risk, talking out loud like this, but from the way she spoke with him I guessed that he had said something about it being good to hear her voice. It had to be better, if you were lonely and remote from everyone you knew, to talk with someone directly and not via a keyboard.

  ‘You are kidding me!’ she said, and for a moment my heart seemed to stop beating, and I felt certain Jake had just told her that I’d gotten in touch and had said some weird things about wanting to talk with him about her.

  But then after a moment or two, she said: ‘You went there? Was it as good as everybody says?’ And, proudly, ‘I told you it would be something good to do.’

  They chatted, innocently. It seemed that Jake didn’t tell Hanna at all that I’d been in touch, or that I was apparently worried about her. Surely if he was being all best-buddies with Hanna, he would have mentioned something? Hey you know what? Thad emailed me yesterday, said he wanted to talk. Said he was worried you’ve been feeling down lately. Maybe she would dismiss my concerns, tell Jake she was perfectly fine. Maybe she would wonder if I had discovered she was talking to him at night, maybe she would ask if Jake thought I was getting suspicious about them. But none of that came to pass.

  I listened, and they chatted. I quickly zoned out—mostly it seemed to be Hanna getting Jake talking about Japan, but since I couldn’t hear his replies, it was hardly enlightening. Hanna chipped in with a few tidbits about her life, her work and so on, but she’d already told most of it, and the rest was just small-talk. There was really no mention of any romantic stuff, no sexual stuff. Even the flirty nature of their conversation seemed to have toned down somewhat.

  But no
w came something different: when Hanna said goodbye to him, and closed down her messenger app, she didn’t shut down the laptop, she didn’t put it down on the floor beside her. This time, I saw her open up the photos app on her machine, and now she was scrolling through pictures taken during our week in the chalet.

  These were not pictures I had seen. These were not the pictures taken by Hayden or myself on our hike to the top of the mountain—and I hadn’t realized any other pictures had been taken during that week, because our mostly-tedious time in the chalet itself hadn’t warranted recording our experiences photographically.

  My heart started pumping forcefully as I saw her open some of the pictures—they were all of Jake, some of herself, some of her with Jake. She started looking at pictures the two of them must have taken during their day at the farmer’s market, and preparing food for our final feast. But then she was looking at more risqué pictures, taken from within the chalet, during the nights she’d spent with Jake.

  I was so hard as I saw what she was looking at. Shots of Hanna and Jake with no clothes on. There were selfies the two of them had taken while kissing—and apparently, the act of taking selfies while also making out had been challenging and highly amusing. Then it got more explicit. I caught my breath at the sight of Hanna straddling Jake, his erect cock held firmly in one hand. Then there was a picture of her face, close up but with the end of his cock touching her lips. Next: she was kneeling in front of him, his cock filling her mouth. After a few more similar shots, where she was licking him, stroking him, they moved to the bed and she was lying between his thighs, taking his hardness inside her mouth.

  As the pictures started appearing where Hanna was riding him, and Jake’s cock was clearly buried inside her pussy, my heart was pounding so hard I thought I might keel over if I wasn’t careful. I had to be careful that she didn’t hear my breathing as I peered over her shoulders at the screen of her laptop.