Body Of Research: An Experiment In Hotwifing

by Arnica Butler

  I mean, that much was true.

  I was omitting, of course, that after Jen tossed her phone on the bed, she sighed again. “Dammit,” she cursed. Then she folded her arms.

  “You could use my phone,” I had suggested. “Tomorrow, I mean. I'm working from home.” (Lie). “And I'll unlock it and run your updates.”

  Jen had looked confused for a moment. “What updates?” she had said, vaguely, and the whole idiotic scheme was almost blown. But she was tired, and she shook her head, and the fact that running updates on a phone was probably the most nonsensical and moronic of things, she shrugged and stomped off to the bathroom. “God, whatever. I have such a headache. Can you fix it by Thursday? Jesus, this whole thing is such a mess, that stats guy is the biggest idiot, we have to find someone else, I can't understand a goddam word he says, you know? Like, when have you ever met someone from Sweden who spoke shitty English? He's got to be, like, the only person in that country...” She had turned on the water and kept talking.

  Back in the present.

  Dr. Heller stared at me through my silent reverie. “Let me ask you a question, and I want you to think very hard about it: why do you think you lied to your wife about the phone?”

  I didn't hesitate, or give it much thought at all. “I didn't want to get caught.”

  I mean, Jesus. Why the fuck would anybody lie about anything?

  “Okay. Let's explore that. What do you think would happen if you were 'caught,' Chris? What is it she would have 'caught' you doing?”

  Oh, Dr. Heller. Such a smarty-pants. I looked at the ceiling. I sighed.

  “Spying on her, I guess.”

  Dr. Heller lay her notepad down on her lap and looked at me plainly. I knew she was doing that, even though I couldn't see her eyes. The woman had a way of quite suddenly boring through you like a laser cutter. Surgically. Ruthlessly.

  “I think this is the most shallow answer to the question that you can think of, Chris. I think there is something deeper there. There is another thing that you're doing, and I think that is this thing that you don't want to be caught doing.”

  I should have been a psychologist, I thought. Just tellin' people obvious things about themselves in cryptic, backhanded ways, and then taking their fucking money.

  Terrific racket.

  “Uh... no,” I corrected her. “I don't want to get caught spying on her.”

  Heller tilted her head, which made her perceptive face look a little hawkish.

  “I suppose my question would be: why?”

  “I don't want her to yell at me,” I offered.

  Heller have me a small smile, of disappointment. She reserved it for moments when I was being a smart-ass. “Why are you spying on her, is what I meant. I think that's the most interesting question, and the one you should think about this week,” she raised her arm and shook the loose gold watch she wore, “because we are very nearly out of time. I've moved your next week's appointment, make sure to get a reminder card from Anna.”

  *

  So there was not much time to tell Dr. Heller the rest of the story.

  That I had waited for Jen while she took her shower, with the idea of her phone, and the secrets it kept, burning in my mind. That she had come into the office to say goodnight to me. That she was wearing a short terry-cloth robe, one that revealed her long, slender thighs. It was crossed loosely over her small breasts. Her toasted almond skin was everywhere, glowing pink from her signature ultra-hot shower. Her hair was wet, and dampness clung to her skin like sweat. When I spun around in my office chair to look at her, a drop of glistening water had slid down her inner thigh, licking her deliciously along the length of her lean muscle.

  I had rolled over to her and placed my hands on her sculpted thighs. I pulled her gently toward me, driven by the excitement from earlier, the excitement of breaking into her phone, of nearly finding evidence of some thing I seemed to want to find. Driven also by the fact that my wife, who nearly always wore some kind of hasty outfit – a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, which looked good but did no justice to her figure – was wearing a skimpy robe. My hands moved up her thigh.

  “I'm sorry I was cranky,” she said, ruffling my hair.

  I pulled her closer, and she stumbled a little with the awkward motion and her lean belly bumped into me. Feeling particularly aroused, I bit into the terrycloth belt and tugged a little. The robe parted, and a little more of her hot, damp skin came into view: the small curve of her breasts, almost to her dark nipples. A sliver of her flawless abdomen.

  My hands moved along the back of her thigh. As I came closer to the center of her legs, my fingers felt the heat of her body radiating from the inside out. It was nearly 11:00, and Jen was obviously tired, so the rejection that was imminent came as no surprise to me. She ruffled my hair playfully and wriggled a little. “I'm just really tired, really annoyed by all these problems...” she said.

  The tip of my middle finger pushed onward, and brushed over her damp curls.

  “Chris,” she said, pushing my head away.

  The robe opened a little more.

  She smelled fresh, like the expensive bar of soap she used, strangely enough labeled as lettuce soap. The scent was neither feminine nor masculine, just clean. Underneath it, the tones of her skin – sweet – and her pussy (I probably imagined this) drifted into my nose and stirred me to slide further up her leg. A drop of water sprung loose from her bush and ran down my finger, while the tip of my index finger sank into silky folds.

  Wet.

  Wet, but slippery.

  Not shower-wet.

  Aroused wet.

  Jen pushed away, and yawned. “I'm pretty tired,” she said. “Sorry.”

  My head spun with possibilities. “Sven was that good, huh?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh god. That guy. 'You heev hahbenuhn angelahn yadder, no?'” She rubbed her eyes. “I have to go to bed.”

  She was moving away from me.

  It took me a moment to bring myself back down to reality. The (fully anticipated) reality that I was not going to convince her to have sex with me. I rubbed my fingers together, feeling the slick moisture on them, wondering why she was so wet and yet so unwilling.

  The possibilities were delicious. Even more so because I knew she held some kind of secret now, and I had proof.

  Proof.

  With a start, I remembered the phone.

  I rolled back to the table, trying to keep calm. “The offer still stands, you know,” I said, in my wise-crack tone. “I can regression you binarily.” My voice was shaky with excitement, less now the excitement of possible sex and more the excitement of breaking into her phone and her dirty secrets.

  Jen gave me a light laugh. “Okay,” she said, in a husky dork-voice she used to turn me down for sex.

  I waited. Just a second. One second for believability.

  A second, while my heart seemed to flutter a thousand times and my whole body went cold.

  “Oh Jen?” I said, spinning around. “Before you go, gimme the code to your phone.”

  She stopped in the hall. It seemed like an eternity, the whole of which I enjoyed in immense, pleasurable pain. Did she pause too long? Was she pausing with some kind of fear... fear of being caught? Did she just realize that her apps menu was peppered with dating apps, and did she stop cold because she knew what was in them? My heart beat slowly but hard, thumping in my chest. I expected her to make an excuse, say she would just wait for it to unlock, try to discourage me from opening it and her secrets.

  “Uh...” she said, instead. “It's... here, let me see it, I can't remember unless I look at it.”

  She came back, and stood next to me. My hands went back to her thighs, trying one more time to convince her. She squirmed away and put the phone back in my hand. “731731.”

  Ah, yes.

  She gave me a peck on the cheek, and scurried away. “Sorry I'm so tired,” she said. And then she yawned, a yawn that almost seemed forced. Like a fake cough into t
he phone while calling in sick for work.

  But now that I could unlock her phone, I didn't care so much.

  I spun back around to stare at the screen of my computer, imagining what it was that I would find on Jen's phone, just as soon as the lock-down timeframe passed and I could dig into her apps.

  C hapter 4

  UNLOCKED

  When I got home from Heller's appointment, I had two full hours to wait until the phone allowed me to unlock it. Two hours to consider the treacherous possibilities that I would uncover. Two hours to imagine that my wife Jen was out screwing around on me.

  Two hours, of course, that could have also been used pondering Dr Heller's very apt question.

  Why was I spying on my wife?

  But that isn't what I dedicated my time to.

  After all, the answer was in there somewhere, and I saw a glimpse of it now and then. Just because I might not be able to articulate it precisely didn't mean I didn't understand myself, or what I was doing, or why I wanted to break into Jen's phone.

  I dedicated my time instead to imagining that Jen was actually never even working late when she said she was. Instead, she was out prowling the town, getting messages from Tinder hopefuls and fucking in the bathrooms of bars and in disgusting college dorms and apartments. She was out seeking things I couldn't give to her: youth, a hard fuck, ropes and whips, an athletic endurance. A big, huge cock.

  I worked myself up, picturing Jen pressed against the wall by a hefty, muscular man – a linebacker, perhaps – with her legs spread open and his thick meat filling her until she squealed in delight. Jen giving head on a crumb-covered couch, after responding to an invite to “Netflix and Chill.” Her latest conqueror’s hand on her dark hair, the slurp of her mouth just a decibel above the dampened sound of some terribly unwatchable movie. Her mouth filling up with cum.

  I jerked off in the shower. Then I waited, scarcely able to do anything but fidget with the mouse next to my computer.

  Half of me, of course, was hoping and practically praying that my eyes had deceived me. That my own perverse fantasies had somehow distorted what I had seen, and that when I finally gained access to her phone I would see nothing of the sort. DeBauch had actually been DeVries or some shit. The hearts were all actually health-monitoring apps. The one I thought looked like an ass was maybe some political satire app.

  And, in fact, it made more sense. Why else would Jen just give me access to her phone?

  But the other half of me was hard at work creating a dark fantasy. Spinning all of it up into an out-of-control, orgied, frenzy. Creating dirtier and dirtier scenarios involving my wife.

  After all, I'd been living off of these scraps, this idea that she was fucking Dr. Emery, who was such a prick that I really had to stretch my imagination to be turned on by it.

  Okay, that's an exaggeration, but ideally, if my wife was fucking someone else, Emery was not the... exact type I had in mind.

  These dating apps opened all kinds of delicious possibilities.

  I waited through the eternal minutes.

  At 7:17pm, I was able to open the phone at last.

  I swept my fingers over the screen, and stared at the icons that slid across it. Now even more of them stood out, drawing my eyes directly to them. All the matchmaking and dating apps, there among her maps and games and calculators:

  Plenty of Fish, DeBauch, Tinder, Once...

  They were so numerous that my vision began to blur them together. I swept through the apps screens over and over, in seemingly endless circles. After countless swipes, I realized I wasn't breathing when my body forced a tremendous exhale from my tight chest.

  Well.

  This was what I wanted to find, wasn't it?

  It was both my greatest fear and the thing I had secretly hoped for.

  I gave the screen another voyeuristic perusal, looking over the many, many apps... so many... savoring them.

  I wasn't familiar with most of them, but I knew what they were when I saw them..

  Then I set the phone down.

  I didn't know what half of the apps were for, other than dating. If they were trashy, hook-up oriented apps, like Tinder, which I only knew about because a guy at the office talked about it all the time. Or Plenty of Fish, which he also wrote a whole blog about, in unimaginably callous and juvenile detail. (Posts like: “How To Guarantee A Good Lay From A Twenty-Year Old on POF”)

  My heart felt like someone had put it in a vice, and my stomach gave me a warning twist, a faint bile taste at the back of my throat to warn me it intended to rebel.

  But with shaking hands, and a mind-set that could best be described as insane, I did quite the opposite of what I'm sure my shrink, Dr. Heller, would have advised me to do:

  I did not sit there thinking of ways to talk to my wife.

  I delved into her phone.

  And her apps.

  And her profiles.

  *

  In the hours between Jen's arrival and my discovery of her dating apps, I had discovered a lot of very disturbing things about my wife.

  Disturbing.

  Arousing.

  Fascinating.

  Awful.

  I had started with Tinder.

  I went on a high and then on a strange low: her profile was barely used.

  Her profile picture was a woman who looked like her, so much so that I didn't immediately recognize that it wasn't. The picture she had used – and who knows where she had gotten it from? – was of a pretty girl with obviously similar heritage, doll-like features and brown eyes – but it was definitely not Jen.

  I furrowed my brow, so much that I eventually gave myself a headache.

  What the hell would she be using a dating app with the wrong picture for?

  But a similar picture.

  I explored a little, my curiosity piqued. Profiles of good-looking guys popped up. I was prompted to like or dislike them.

  Enraged, I disliked them all, until I had the idea to like one of them. The app prompted my with a little “i,” which I didn't hesitate to press, and I found out that the man in the picture – a dark-haired jock-ish looking guy who also seemed quite young – was only a mile away.

  I quickly closed the app, fearing some sort of imminent connection.

  Next up was Plenty Of Fish... equally horrifying and equally mystifying.

  First of all, Jen's profile picture on this app was really her. A photo I had never seen before...and she looked quite different, but it was definitely her. Her hair was down, she had put some makeup on, she looked much more like a 22-year old sorority princess than the 28-year old sociology posdoctoral fellow that she was.

  But in the POF profile she had a false name, and nothing about her profile seemed particularly true or real about her. She even claimed to like horses, which I had on very good authority she disliked intensely due to a number of bad experiences with them.

  I squinted.

  My heart dropped and soared. What the fuck was my wife doing? I felt rage and infuriation fill my arteries.

  But other feelings were mixed in there, too.

  I have to be fair: the idea that Jen was posing as a 22-year old bimbo, and maybe even acting on that profile, going out to hook up with guys like the profile of “Jake” - muscular, young, athletic guys with thick necks and square jaws, who looked like they would have meaty cocks they could ram into her while holding her up against a wall...well, the idea didn't only make me angry.

  It also wound me up.

  I got hard, just looking at the profiles on those two apps.

  But there was another, disappointing curiosity here: these apps, too, seemed largely unused.

  Largely unused.

  I fumbled around, looking for any messages that had been exchanged between her and some other guy.

  There seemed to be none.

  But that didn't mean there aren't any, I reassured myself.

  She could have deleted them.

  I didn't stop there.

&n
bsp; I went through app after app, some of which I had never heard of, some of which I couldn't navigate and had to look up on the internet. Once, for example, was one I had never even heard of. It turned out to be more awful than I had imagined: the app sent a match to you (or better stated, to my wife) only once a day. The romantic quality of the app sickened me much more than the others that seemed geared to sexual encounters, mostly meaningless.

  Especially wrenching about Once was that, while the profile was a fake name and a photo that seemed eerily like Jen but was not, the profile information was very much like her.

  Very much more truthful.

  I tried very hard to think through possibilities of what she was doing. The hot-coal pain of the idea of Jen cheating on me was also arousing, though. It clouded my ability to think rationally.

  Perhaps she enjoyed pretending to be someone else.

  A lot of different someone elses.

  She was bored, I bored her, and she sought her entertainment elsewhere.

  With other men.

  But she obviously didn't want her real self to appear in these apps. Hence the lies, the pseudonyms.

  But why only on some of the apps and not on others?

  For a moment, my heart soared: at least she still loved me enough to be herself for me.

  Then my mood plummeted.

  She was just trying not to get caught.

  After all, why does anyone lie about anything?

  Was it really possible? Was my wife really lying to me when she stayed out late to “work?”

  I envisioned it with excruciating detail: Jen with cocktail dresses stashed away at her office. Closing the door and locking it against the prowling janitors while she changed into a sexy black dress. Pulled silken stockings up to her thigh.

  Shimmied into black silk lingerie I had never seen...

  Jen with a locker at the rec center of the university. Peeling her damp skirts and rumpled shirts away, stepping out of her high heels, peeling away her dirty, stained panties. Taking a shower before she climbed back into her jeans and sweatshirts and came home, to her husband.