by Unknown
Her eyes snapped open, and she was suddenly very serious. She held up a finger.
“Ees not cheap,” she warned.
Lily closed her eyes again, while Adria stared, too shocked to reply.
“You call me if you want her number,” Lily said with a smile.
“I won't,” Adria said, shaking her head but smiling.
Lily really was something.
6 ARRANGEMENTS
John heard Adria come into the house from his office, a small room built off to the side of their pretty brick bungalow. He waited until she was in the bedroom, and, he hoped, undressing, to wander back and talk to her. He liked Wednesday nights, when she worked out, because he liked the salty taste of her sweat on her shoulder, and the scent of her body. He also liked that she talked away, usually about whatever crazy antics her friend Lily had been up to, while she took a long shower behind a glass door. It allowed him to watch her without appearing overly lecherous.
Additionally, Wednesday night often ended with sex.
Adria was in the bathroom, and she had already peeled off most of her clothes. Usually, she was clad in only her boy-short Lycra workout pants and top, and John knew there were no underwear beneath them. Today, though, she seemed to have showered and returned to her work clothes.
A haze of delicious thoughts rose up in his mind. Why would she do that? Maybe she had a lover at the gym. Maybe she had showered because the scent of his muscular body had dripped all over her.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and surreptitiously picked up her racer-back Lycra shirt from the bag on the floor. “How was it?” he said, holding the shirt to his face and inhaling the sweet scent of her sweat, while looking over the top of it at his wife's fit figure, as she shimmied her underwear down her thighs. She bent over slightly to get them down to her feet, giving him a nice view of her ass, and then she stepped out of them.
There was an unusually long pause. Adria turned on the water. He was about to ask again when she replied: “It was, uh...well, fine, I guess.”
John set the shirt down. He sensed a disturbance in the force, which also meant a disturbance in his hopes for having sex. He stood up and approached the bathroom. He leaned against the counter.
Adria was leaning back into the shower, getting her hair wet for shampooing. Water streamed over her fair skin, dropping from the points of her nipples, sliding over her firm thighs. He let his gaze do the same. “What's up?” he said. “Sounds not very fine.”
“Adria rubbed her eyes. “No, it's...fine,” she said. “I just...” She put some shampoo into her hand. “I sort of had a...weird conversation.”
John slid a magazine out from under a towel next to him. He flipped through the pages, but he kept his eyes on his wife. “With Lily?”
Adria sighed.
“What did she do now?” he asked, slightly amused.
Adria shook her head. “I mean...she's pretty crazy, you know?”
They all knew. Lily had quite a reputation.
“But I never really talked to her about it, like...in detail, you know? Before today.”
John felt his cock twitch from its semi-hard state to rock hard in three quick pulses. The thought of his wife talking about “it” (which they could all safely assume was Lily's libertine sex life) was quite arousing. He waited.
“So?” he finally asked, impatiently.
Adria opened her mouth, and then closed it. “Well,” she began. “Okay, I am telling you this in confidence, because you aren't...like you wouldn't run off and tell someone, would you?”
“Only my closest girlfriends.”
It was a joke because John didn't really have a lot of – or want any – friends of either gender.
Adria smiled and rinsed her hair. “Let me finish this,” she said.
John rose and went into the bathroom area.
John leaned against the counter, happily watching soap bubbles slide over her tits and snake between her thighs until she turned off the water. She leaned over with a towel to wrap up her hair. “Okay, so did you know? That she slept with Mike Sternum?”
Mike Sternum. John did his best to feign that he couldn't remember who Mike was: the tall, muscled, good-looking black man he had frequently imagined seducing his wife. He felt his stomach twist (it was as pleasant as it was unpleasant), and his pulse quickened as he lied: “Mike who?” He turned around to hide the flush that he could feel creeping across his cheeks.
“Sternum,” Adria said, apparently not picking up on his false amnesia. “You know, Mike, I just took over for him at Bridge Street, he's a big guy. He's black. We've had this conversation a hundred times. You know Mike.”
Oh John knew. John knew all of these things.
“No shit,” he said. He felt like his voice was shaking.
“That's all you have to say?” Adria said, and he picked up on the renewed amusement in her voice. And something else. Something he wasn't quite sure how to identify. A loud splash ricocheted on the tile as Adria unwrapped the towel and combed more water from her hair. She was looking at him through the glass now. She rubbed a patch of steam away to see him better.
“She's married, you know,” Adria said, her eyes meeting his in the mirror.
His stomach wrung something cold into his pelvis, and his heart felt gripped. His erection somehow ballooned even larger.
He grabbed a toothbrush and put it into his mouth without applying paste. “Maybe she just...needs something she can't get from her husband,” he said, trying to make it sound casual.
Adria made a strange noise. It sounded either like she snorted or she sneered somehow. She finished drying herself off. “So that makes it okay?”
John felt his whole chest go cold.
He honestly hadn't expected a conversion like this one to come up anytime soon. Or maybe ever. He was a planner, and he was still in the process of preparing to plan to maybe broach the subject with Adria, and he had been for some time. Planning.
Now he had a window of opportunity, and he was paralyzed by fear.
“Well,” he said, and his voice was hoarse. “I mean, if...maybe they have some kind of...”
“Arrangement?” Adria said, and something about the way she said the word made his cock press against his pants with a thud. “I'm not sure they do. But still...” she pushed the glass door open and stepped out. “Don't you think that's pretty bad?”
John looked at Adria in the mirror.
He could have sworn that something was different on her face, different than he would have expected had he thought about this conversation beforehand. Normally a conversation about other people's misdeeds or strange sex lives was very lighthearted. Adria usually ended them quickly, because she didn't like to judge and she didn't like to gossip. Not only that, she had usually made up her mind about how she felt about things.
Now she was looking at John as if he had the answer she was looking for, and she was really interested in what he was going to say about it.
He opened his mouth. He snapped it shut. “I...well...I mean...if they have an arrangement, then...”
Adria leaned on the counter. She looked into her own eyes for a moment, and John felt another stab of fearful confusion through his chest. She almost looked as if she were doing the sort of soul-searching he did himself, when he was alone in the bathroom. “Huh,” she said.
The next bit seemed to happen in slow motion.
She looked down at her feet, and stretched on out in front of her. Then she leaned to touch her own leg, running her hand over her smooth shinbone.
“So if I had an arrangement with you, you'd be okay with that?”
Another fist of lust punched through him. He felt like he might not be able to speak. His entire abdomen was seizing up on him now.
He found himself saying: “What kind of arrangement?” with a dry throat.
Adria looked a little shocked, and he was deeply embarrassed for a moment: from her face it seemed that she had meant it as a joke only.
But then she said: “The kind like that. Like if I could...you know...with whoever I wanted.” She turned back to the mirror. “That's the arrangement Lily has. I think.”
John's head was racing.
This was skirting around the issue – the deep secret – he had been keeping to himself for a long time now. It was a secret that woke him in the middle of the night, that made him question himself and his masculinity and his love for his wife. It made him feel perverted. It plagued him. And it plagued him all the more because it did all of these things, while at the same time it worked its fingers inside of him and around his cock, and turned him until he was dripping from the crown of his dick and his erection made it hurt to walk quietly into the bathroom, hiding from Adria, and relieve himself.
The secret, his fantasy: coming home in the afternoon to find Adria on the bed with her legs wide open and her pussy filled with a huge cock, just like Mike's. A desire to see Adria's head tossed back against the pillows, her mouth open in ecstasy, the kind she never achieved with him. The detailed images he created of his wife being manhandled by any one of her construction crew, grinding together on the dirty upper floor of a half-finished site, her screams echoing through the bare concrete structure.
“Forget it,” Adria said, shrugging and turning on the water to wash her hands. She smiled, and it was the smile of a joke. John felt the pain of a lost opportunity, and he moved his mouth, trying desperately to think of something to say that might get them back on the topic. Adria leaned in toward the mirror to examine her face.
John thought he saw the smile fade a little, and an expression of disappointment that closely matched his own, slide over her face.
It was brief, though, and then she turned to him.
Her eyes fell to his pants. He knew his erection was, by now, very obvious. A smile flickered on her mouth, and he felt a surge of hope. Hope that she would say next: oh, I see, that turns you on. Let's talk about it some more.
There was a moment, and it seemed to last too long, where they just stood there staring at each other.
John felt a surge inside of himself, of uncharacteristic bravery. “So if we had this arrangement,” he said bravely. “What kind of guy would you go after?”
Adria lifted her eyebrows. He saw her cheeks redden, and her eyes tore away for a moment. A brief moment: she brought them back to meet his eyes in a hurry.
But he had seen it: she had a thought.
“A guy like Mike?”
He thought he saw a ripple over her skin. A moment of truth that rearranged the features of her face; a fleeting second of fear, of being found out.
But then it was gone. She rolled her eyes. Her voice was dripping with sarcasm when she said:
“Oh yeah. A guy just like Mike. A big meathead who can't do his job, and only has one thing that women want.”
She leaned toward him. He knew she wasn't being serious, but she was turning him on anyway. He felt her hands grasp his cock through his pants, and she pulled him close to her.
“And what's that?” he said, trying to act as comical as she was, and sensing that he failed miserably.
“A nice,” she squeezed his balls, “big...” She squeezed a little harder. The liquid ecstasy that was pumping through him now surprised even himself. He was actually salivating for the next word.
“Dewalt cordless drill.”
She laughed.
John smiled, doing his best to join her mood. But he was disappointed. Inside he could feel an animal clawing for attention, wanting her to feed it, and the only thing that would satisfy it was if she would say something else.
“Oh yeah?” he said, and spun her around toward the bed. “Must be some drill.”
“It's the Cadillac of drills,” she said, her voice going from silly to sultry and making his cock throb again. He walked her back to the bed and she threw herself onto it. “All the girls want one.”
He unzipped his pants. He was no longer certain if Adria was playing at sexual innuendo or not, but she certainly seemed to be posing very sexually on the bed. As if to answer his question, she threw her towel open. Her freshly washed skin radiated a scent of lilies and some undertone of fruit. Her feathery bush glistened with water.
He shimmied out of his clothes, unable to believe his good luck. Whether Adria was on the same page as him with her dirty talk was hardly important: they never had sex this frequently anymore and he knew a good deal when got one.
And then the thought stabbed him, like an ice pick through his chest:
Maybe Adria was energized by all this talk of other men. Maybe that's what had her so turned on. Maybe he was just a poor substitute for what she really wanted.
The thought made his cock drip with precum, as much as it hurt in his chest.
He fell onto Adria, planning to warm her up with his fingers. But she pushed his fingers away from her cunt impatiently, and grabbed his cock. “I want your cock inside of me,” she said. She wrapped her legs around his hips and pulled herself by her legs up and onto his cock.
She was dripping wet, and her pussy was hot. John could feel himself nearing the edge in just a few short thrusts, and he made the mistake of trying to think about something else to keep himself from tipping over. But the thought that entered his mind was that his wife was so wet because she was thinking about Mike, seriously. Imagining Mike's huge black cock filling her up...
He squeezed his eyes shut but there was no stopping the racking orgasm that shook him from head to toe. He yelled as he came inside of Adria, and he felt her grinding furiously, trying to get off before it was over. She tipped her head back and moaned as she, too, went over the edge.
Her eyes closed.
God only knows what dirty, unfaithful, thoughts were in her head. John's cock pulsed, and there was no way for her to know (though he did) that it was a pulse of coming back to life, not the last throes of his orgasm.
He lay on top of her briefly, and then he rolled over, almost as much to hide his perversion from himself as from her.
She put her hand to her head and brushed her hair from her face. “Man,” she said. “I had no idea you liked Dewalt so much.”
He laughed for her. She kissed him on the cheek, and returned to the shower. “Now I have to re-do everything,” she said. “Story of my life.”
Just a joke. A joke she made all the time.
The cloud of paranoia would not leave him, though. Partly, he supposed, because he held on to it so tightly.
In the shower, Adria turned around and around, not even realizing she was doing so. It was a nervous habit. She moved with her thoughts. And right now they were going round and round.
She had been surprised by John. It was a rare thing, to be surprised by him. Something she liked about John was that he was predictable, that he seemed to have no secrets.
The conversation had made such a strange turn, and it had frightened her as much as it exhilarated her. She had resorted to joking because she hadn't known what to do, or what to say: she had been expecting John to call Lily a crazy slut and agree with her wholeheartedly that a lifestyle like Lily and Steven's was crazy.
Instead, they had both edged toward something else.
It almost felt like a game of chicken.
Adria slipped, and braced herself against the shower wall. She had gotten thinking so much and spinning so hard she felt a little dizzy.
She wondered where this was going.
7 THE WAITER
“Let's go somewhere different,” Adria said, after about ten minutes of silence in the car.
They were driving to dinner, a Saturday night ritual, sort of a “date night” that they had never officially declared. Somehow, despite their mutual disdain for too much routine in their own lives and for people who had too much routine in theirs, they had ended up going to the same restaurant week after week.
It wasn't to say they didn't have a good time. It just felt...stale. A little inescapable.
John had wanted to sug
gest this very option – at least trying something new – for some time.
There was a new energy between them. It was palpable. Ever since their strange, and mostly unfinished conversation Wednesday, there seemed to be some kind of connection between them, one that wasn't there before. Even if it was unspoken, there was something electric flowing between them; even if they had never really stated the fantasy he had dreamed about so often, there had been a piece of it in the room with them. And it had been invigorating.
“Done,” John said, without fretting about it like he often did. It was Saturday night, most places needed a reservation or would have a long wait, and this was the kind of thing that would ordinarily drive him crazy. But he felt an urge to be different, and it was fueled by this new energy between him and his wife.
“How about here?” he said, zanily. Surprised, in fact, by his own zaniess. He made a sharp right into the parking lot of the restaurant he had just pointed out, and the tires squealed as they pulled into the lot entirely too fast. He hit a bump and he heard the bottom of the car scrape a little, which is another thing that would ordinarily have grated him down to his last nerve.
Not today. Today it was no problem.
Adria's eyes were wide open, and she had put her hands on the ceiling of the car to steady herself. “Whoa,” she said. Then she laughed.
Her eyes were lit up with excitement. Her skin was flushed. John took a moment to appreciate her baby-blue dress. The blue set off her eyes like icy jewels in her pale face. It was a little more risque than her usual attire: it hugged her figure, and dipped low across her chest, so that if she moved just right he could get a glimpse of the lovely dim valley between her breasts.
And so could anyone else. The thought made him jerk to life in his underwear.
“Don's Catfish House of Cajun,” Adria read from the sign. She turned to him. “What does that even mean?”
John shrugged. He was liking his new, freewheeling personality. He felt like someone had breathed new life into him, but actually breathed it into him. “Who cares?”