And then all this joking. All this happy, carefree Jordan. Wasn't that unusual? Where did it come from?
My vision was getting blurry, staring at the screen.
I was staying up because I wanted Jordan to fall asleep. I wanted to go and dig through her immense side of the closet. Find her purse. Break into her phone.
This is when I started thinking about the scene I had walked in on this evening. Replaying it in my mind, looking for damning clues, looking for signs of my own deranged paranoia, making myself crazy because I didn't know which story I wanted to be true.
And I saw it in my mind. The white phone.
Her phone was black, wasn't it?
Another dark thought slithered through me: Did Jordan have two phones?
I shook my head.
Had I even seen a white phone?
Every witness is a shit witness. Every fucking witness is completely full of shit.
Doug's voice again, rattling away in my head. I didn't even think Doug had said that to me, ever.
It was true, though. You couldn't trust yourself, or what you thought you saw.
People saw what they wanted to see.
Every now and then I would turn this observation back on myself. Ask the painful question:
Is this what I wanted to see?
I was too much of a coward to answer.
Around 1am, I went to the kitchen. My eyes scanned the room for Jordan's purse, and found it, sitting on a set of drawers.
Olivia, annoyingly, came trudging in almost immediately. She had a bowl of cereal in her hand and ate a spoonful of it while glaring at me. “Want some Cap'N Crunch?” she said, with hostility.
Did her eyes go to the purse? Did Olivia know why I was here? My pulse started racing again.
“Don't you ever sleep?” I sneered.
She took a box of that atrocious cereal out of the cupboard, and looked at me while she poured more into her bowl. “You know, Paddy, you really look like shit. You should get some rest or something.” She waved her spoon at me. “I look so fucking good the world would implode if I got any more beauty sleep, so...”
Her eyes held mine just a moment too long. And then she left.
But she plopped onto the couch in the living room, close to the kitchen, where she would see me in her peripheral vision if I made a move for the purse. Her nightie slid down her thigh.
Fine. No purse.
I got a glass of water, to pretend I had a reason to be there, and then I went back to the bedroom.
Jordan was sleeping. Or appeared to be.
I got into bed, and lay down with my eyes open. Listening to her breathing.
It was slow, steady. She was really asleep. Wasn't she?
Jesus, Paddy. Do you think you're a spy now? Spying on your own fucking wife?
I sat up slowly. I moved to the closet.
At first, I fumbled with the clothing without the light on.
You know that it's your closet, Paddy. You can be in your own closet, if you want to. You fucking idiot.
I closed the door and turned on the light, hoping it wouldn't wake Jordan.
I scanned Jordan's clothes.
I knew what I was looking for: the damning piece of evidence. The gray dress. The suede shoes.
Or anything sexy like that.
Or new clothes.
Okay, Paddy, now you're stretching it.
The gray dress would damn.
Sexy clothes would suggest.
New clothes, you fucking idiot, would mean your wife, like every other woman on earth, went shopping.
I pawed through the plastic dry-cleaning bags. All of these clothes looked new. Why did I never see any of this stuff?
You're never home, Paddy.
A red suit, a plaid skirt...a little short, Jordan...a black cocktail dress, with a very low neckline....
I looked over her shoes.
A lot of heels. Sexy shoes, but none of them like the gray shoes.
The cocktail dress is from Maron's wedding.
I closed my eyes. These were all very normal things to have in her closet. She worked in an office. She dressed like a professional. I was never home so I only saw her yoga pants. It was almost 2am, and I was very tired, even though I had done no work and would have to get up and get in by six-thirty.
Go to bed, Paddy.
You look like shit, Paddy. You look like you could use a rest.
PARANOIA
I had to abandon my paranoia for a few days. I was late for court. I was unprepared for a witness, though I smoothed it over pretty well. A judge I wanted to impress was annoyed by a piss-poor brief and granted a terrible motion from the defense out of what seemed like fatherly-tough-love.
I was coming undone.
I spent my time in the car trying to avoid thoughts about Jordan and what she was up to. Or what it would mean for our marriage if she was having an affair.
Or the fact that something buried deep down inside of me was attracted to the idea. Kept coming back to flutter around it.
I tried to think about hings like how we got here.
It was all because of me. I was gone all the time, I didn't pay enough attention to my wife.
And when I did, it was to be paranoid and crazy.
As soon as I got caught up, I was going to take Jordan somewhere. The Caribbean maybe. Just for the weekend, of course, and maybe a day, because I couldn't be gone any longer than that, with so many things hanging over my head...
I sighed.
Then I pictured a warm beach, Jordan in her bikini. Time with her, and her alone, away from all of this. It would straighten my head out.
But not now. I thought with disappointment.
And that's what always happened. We could never do it “now.”
I imagined myself going home and having a conversation with Jordan about our life. About our sex life, and whether she was satisfied. About how things had panned out, after all this time. It was so easy to be straightforward in my job. With Doug, with cops, with perps, with myself in the car, with Jordan, in my mind. But I knew when she was standing in front of me, the words would fail me.
When I got home that night, everything was in place the way it “should” have been: Olivia was watching trashy TV, like a permanent art installation on my couch. The kids were doing “homework” in the glow of their laptops, and Jordan was in bed with a book.
The normalcy of it all was in such stark contrast to my paranoid thoughts, that it jarred my mind.
Maybe I really was just going crazy.
Having a midlife crisis.
“Do you think I'm having a midlife crisis?” I said to Jordan. She hadn't noticed me in the doorway, staring at her, for five minutes.
She lowered her book. “Oh, hello to you, too. Thank God. I can finally stop reading this crappy book and go to bed. There's some spaghetti in the fridge.” She smiled, and shook her head to warn me off it as she said, “Olivia made it.”
Was this how it happened? Was this how marriages fell apart? Piece by piece, because every time you needed to confront something, it was the wrong moment?
It seemed insane, with the clock in the hallway ticking and Jordan folding her book up and the house so clean and quietly suburban, to ask Jordan if she was happy with our marriage, if she was having an affair, if she regretted anything in our lives. It seemed insane to repeat my question. I was relieved she had ignored it.
I knew needed to right the ship, so to speak. Even at that point, I realized it.
But like so many people do, I thought I could find a better moment for it.
So I kissed Jordan on the forehead, and went to my office to send off final emails for the day, convinced for that particular evening that I was the one who was acting crazy.
RED-HANDED
A few weeks may have gone by. Normal dinners stashed away in the fridge, normal fights with Olivia, normal, normal, normal. It was easier with each passing day to ignore the things I had seen, forget the things I h
ad suspected, and to act like nothing had ever happened out of the ordinary. I knew it had, of course, but it was easier to sweep under the rug.
Then.
I went home early one day. Early for me is usually 6:30-7:00. But I remember finding my afternoon, miraculously, cleared of everything. Judge Lee, sick again, rescheduling a slew of hearings. I remember telling Doug I had a dentist appointment. I remember being appalled by the traffic at that hour. I remember feeling guilty because I should have stayed at work and cleared up things that I had put on the back burner for far too long.
That day, I told myself I wasn't expecting to get home and find anything suspicious. I really wasn't. I was actually just excited to get home, maybe talk Jordan into skipping the gym. Take her out to dinner. Leave Olivia, specifically, behind.
But my thoughts, for the first time in a long time, returned to my suspicions from weeks before. It occurred to me that whatever it was happening with Jordan, I had a big part in it. Why wouldn't Jordan seek the attention of other men? Available men? Men who had time to talk to her, appreciate her good looks, not take her for granted?
I was going to take advantage of my free afternoon to spend some time with my wife, figure out what was going on with her. Maybe we could make it a regular thing.
This is what I was telling myself as I drove home.
There is a possibility, of course, that deep down inside I wasn't thinking about taking Jordan out to dinner, or spending time with her.
Maybe I was planning something else all along.
Hoping to catch Jordan at whatever it was I believed she had been up to the other night, when I had come home and found her car in the driveway. The night of the strange phone, the change of plans, the secret looks between her and Olivia.
I didn't, after all, call Jordan to tell her I was on my way.
I drove home, in a state of conflicting feelings, wanting to right the apparently lilting ship of my marriage, wanting to catch my wife unbuttoning her blouse on our marital bed while another man watched her lustfully, wanting all of the things that had made me suspicious to have been a mirage. It was hard to explain even to myself.
From down the street, I could see that Jordan's car was, yet again, parked in the driveway. I narrowed my eyes and my pulse raced.
It might help to know why I was so suspicious of this. Jordan is pretty anal-retentive about putting things away. When I met her, she was a slob. She had a baby, and she turned into a total tidiness freak. So Jordan, the Jordan I had come to know, would not just leave her car in the driveway.
Then, my heart skipped a beat and very soon after, felt as if it actually stopped, when the door to the car opened and a figure emerged from the car.
I was close now, maybe three hundred yards away. I took my foot off the gas and the car sort of coasted down the slight hill while I gripped the steering wheel, totally transfixed. My mouth was open. I was on auto-pilot. Or auto-non-pilot.
The figure was not Jordan. It was a man.
I drove past the house and around the corner and then into a side-street before the cul-de-sac. Not caring what it might look like, I left my car parked in front of an empty house. I walked to my own house, my mind spilling over with dark thought after dark thought.
A man. A man. A man had stepped out of Jordan's car.
Black hoody. Medium build. Dark jeans. The movements of a young man. Careless, aggressive, masculine.
I stopped at the corner that intersected with our street and stared at the house.
Think of alternative explanations.
It wasn't Max. He didn't have a license.
Fear seared through me. Black hoody, young guy: car thief? Robber?
I walked across the street.
Later, I would think about this, and think how stupid it was. My own paranoia, my own desire to find the man who had come to my house in bed with my wife, overwrote all common sense. The explanation that he was a robber made more sense than the story I was telling myself, as I opened the gate to my own backyard, in the deepening darkness. As I crept beneath the windows of my own house, like a burglar. The story I worked up where the guy was Jordan's lover, one of many, and he had run out to the store in her car for...
For what?
Condoms? Lube? Ice Cream? Did she like to slather herself in chocolate and let him lick it off her creamy skin? I could feel my cock twitching with every ridiculous thought I was having, of Jordan rubbing baby oil all over her body until she was shiny like a goddess, and the two of them could roll in the sheets like damp, sweating animals...
My thighs burned as I crouched under the kitchen window and slowly raised my head to see into the kitchen.
Empty.
And where the fuck were my kids? Shouldn't they be home from school? How the fuck did they even get home? Where did they go? What the fuck was happening in my own goddam house?
I was getting angry, more with myself than anyone else.
I had a sudden urge to be a man. To stand up, not caring who saw me, and storm into the kitchen through the back door.
A sliding door. Unlocked.
Jesus Christ these people were living in la-la land. Time for more lectures on crime.
I stood in the kitchen. The house was almost silent.
At that moment, my heart slammed against my chest like a block of ice. Maybe this fucking guy was a burglar. I didn't have a gun, I was going to get killed. Or at least hit over the head. All the burglaries-turned-robberies and second-degree-murder cases I'd ever handled flew around in my mind (in truth, maybe three) and I went numb with fear.
And then, I heard it.
The lilting cackle. The Jordan laugh.
And beneath it, the low rumble of a male voice.
Another laugh.
Then a clatter, and a thump.
My crazed, fever-dream of Jordan cheating on me was becoming real right before my eyes. The thought seized me and almost made me double over. So it was real. Everything I had imagined, all the time never really believing it, was real.
Another thump.
The sound was coming from upstairs...
The laugh again. Followed by a little shriek.
I moved deeper into the kitchen. Toward the living room. Toward the stairs that led up to the single room and bathroom on the second floor, where Olivia stayed.
The laughter had ceased, and so had the talking.
In a daze, wanting to both go forward and back, I stepped on the first step, and then the next. creeping like a burglar in my own home, wanting desperately to see what was upstairs, painting images of what I would find, and also wanting for nothing I was experiencing to be real.
Did I want to go upstairs and see my wife being fucked by another man?
Another step. I was on the third and fourth step now. The sounds coming from behind the upstairs door, slightly ajar, were of heavy breathing, kissing, skin slapping against skin in fervent, passionate lust.
There was really no turning back. How could I get this close to whatever was behind that door and not look at it?
The stairway seemed to get longer with every passing moment. The house was new and so there was no squeaking to worry about, but every sound made as I stepped on each step seemed amplified, as though it were being broadcast through a blow horn.
And who cared? This was my house. This was my wife. Part of me wanted to stomp up the stairs, throw the door open, and prosecute the fuck out of everyone in the room.
Something else inside of me, though, wanted to sneak up on them. To find them. To remain hidden, and see whatever I was going to see. This force was driving me now. Quietly up the stairs.
With a hard, aching cock.
I was on the fifth step from the top when I paused and crouched on the stairs. There was a door at the top of the stairs, to create a living space apart from the main section of the house. Perfect for Olivia. I hadn't been up there in years.
The door was slightly ajar, and the pair was on Olivia's bed.
The light
of a lamp, evidently knocked over in a passionate tussle onto the bed, cast the merged shadows of the two bodies against the wall.
I went completely cold. Here it was. Evidence. The smoking gun.
The shadow of Jordan's body was sitting upright, moving like a woman on a horse. Her mane of hair and her big tits rocked with her own movements.
The movement of fucking.
Another man.
In my house.
My blood ran so cold it felt hot, or so hot it felt cold.
The bitch.
At the same time, what was I doing here? With a fucking huge erection? Watching?
I saw the pale skin of my wife's elbow at the edge of the door.
I stepped up closer to the door.
Jordan was, thankfully, facing the wall opposite the door. I squinted into the room: the two had evidently disturbed a pair of lamps, and one of them was shining almost directly into my face.
I could only see her pale skin; it seemed to fill the room and the universe. Her hair was loose and drifting across her smooth back. Her ample butt faced me, displayed in all of its glory, heart-shaped and bubbled. Her legs were spread and the hairy calves of her lover were between them. Her hair shimmied across the skin of her back and she moaned.
Then she put one hand up to her hair, and pushed it up in the cliched porno-move of wild abandon. Her body rose, and between her legs, where I had a good view, I saw the dull pink of her lover's cock. It was thick, veined, and as she rose it seemed to go on and on, until she reached a kneel, and could go no further. I stared. Nine full inches of cock stretched between her pussy and the man beneath her, and his cock was still sheathed in her slit.
I watched as she reached down with her hand and bent the big cock to remove the last few inches from inside of her. As she did, she leaned forward and I had an excellent view of the red gash of her pussy.
Evidence.
Jordan's pussy was, in point of fact, full of another man's cock.
She teased her lover by rubbing his cock all over her cunt, between her thick inner and outer lips, along the ridge of her clit.
My own cock seemed to absorb the torture as though she were doing it to me. I could imagine the agony of feeling the hot folds of her pussy, being so close to the inside of her. And here she was letting another man have her.
A Well-Laid Trap: The Story Of A Professional Hotwife Page 5