Human Interest: A Lead-In To Wife Watching

by Arnica Butler

  And though she knew she should move away, press the elevator button, get out of here...she couldn't help wondering what he was insinuating by what ideas they might get.

  Part of her wanted those ideas to consist of pushing her up against the wall, lifting her with his two strong arms, and filling her full of cock right there.

  His lips were so close to hers she could almost taste them.

  Rachel felt a stab of pleasure reach up from her quivering pussy to her chest, raking at her insides like a wild animal.

  So far, you haven't done anything.

  She pulled her head away. “This is a bad idea,” she managed to say.

  Xavier seemed to expect this. He cocked his head and smiled. “Why's that?”

  Rachel held her hand up. “We're married. You're...I'm married. You're married.”

  She was babbling, and she hated how flustered she was.

  “It's not a problem for me. Tyra and I have an understanding.”

  Rachel couldn't help but put her hand to her mouth to cover her look of shock. This made Xavier smile in amusement.

  “You're...swingers?” Rachel whispered.

  Xavier mocked Rachel's expression. “You're not swingers?” he said, imitating her voice.

  Rachel dropped her hand. “Sorry,” she said. “I mean, it's just...”

  “Just what?” He was looking at her again, his face serious and his expression disarming. Rachel couldn't stop herself from squirming.

  “Just...surprising,” she said. She shook her head, as if she wanted to erase what she said. “I don't know. I've never met anyone who...”

  “Oh I'm sure you have,” Xavier said. He leaned closer, or maybe it just seemed that way to Rachel. “What you haven't met, is someone who propositioned you with the idea.”

  It felt as though he had somehow found a way to reach inside of her and stroke her insides. She was so uncomfortable with the feeling inside of her that she had to move her body. She shifted from one foot to another and shook her hands. “That's not...I mean...”

  Xavier had moved closer to her yet again. “You don't think about it all?”

  She felt the rush of blood that colored her cheeks and she felt like closing her eyes in mortification, but she forced herself to keep looking at him.

  “Because I do,” he said.

  He retreated slightly, but he was still within inches of her. She could feel the heat of his body, and she had to fight with her fingers to keep them from reaching out to feel the contours of his chest. Or lower. To find out what she didn't want to admit that she wanted to know: what his cock felt like, hard and heavy in her hand. What the bristle on his jaw would feel like, dragging along her inner thigh.

  She was breathing in ragged, uneven gasps. She couldn't move her body, and the parts of her that were moving were not obeying any command from her higher reasoning.

  A stream of incoherent syllables came from her mouth. She managed to form the word “Josh.”

  Xavier put his arm up on the wall behind her, and the dark heat of his muscled bicep seemed to radiate into her face. She felt the fine hair on her neck rise as though a balloon were being rubbed against her skin. The shiver traveled across her back and down her right arm.

  And lower.

  Xavier was very close now. So close that she could feel his thighs brush against her legs. His chest was close enough to her that her nipples were caressed by the friction of their shirts. She thought she felt the shape of his cock, hard, against one of her thighs as she moved, and it sent a shudder through her.

  “So it's Josh,” Xavier said.

  He nodded, though it was not the nod of a man who was conceding anything. It was the nod of a man who was accepting a challenge.

  Rachel felt like she had been turned to a liquid from the inside out. There was no longer anything holding her up. She was going to disintegrate.

  “You know, you'd be surprised what a lot of men might do if you just talk to them about it.”

  He pushed himself away abruptly, and pressed his lips together.

  “You might just have a talk with him,” Xavier said.

  He slid his backpack, which he had been holding in one hand, over one shoulder. Rachel was still pressed against the wall, because if she stepped away from it she felt sure she was going to crumble.

  He pressed the elevator button.

  Xavier gave her a mock salute. “See you tomorrow, Rachel Elliot.” He turned and strode back down the hallway. “I always take the stairs,” he explained, as she stared after him.

  Rachel let the elevator come and go, and waited a good ten minutes before she pressed the button again. She rushed to her car. She wanted to put as much distance between the scene that had just unfolded and herself as possible.

  She wasn't thinking. Thought – rational thought – had been cut off completely since Xavier stepped toward her. The only thing happening in her mind was a replay of the scene, over and over again. The feel of his body, just out of reach. The guilt and longing, braided together and writhing in her chest.

  His smug fucking look as he left.

  She shook her head. “Talk to him?” she muttered, in a fierce whisper. She started the car and backed out much too fast.

  Who just talked to her husband about...about what? What would a woman even say? I want to have an affair, is that okay with you?

  Please.

  She almost got sideswiped by a car as she pulled into traffic. She drove blindly for a few blocks, but when the car behind her honked because she was sitting through a red light, she knew she had to pull over. She turned on a residential street and sat in the car, parked on the curb.

  Her pulse was still racing.

  You know, you'd be surprised what a lot of men might do if you just talk to them about it.

  He wasn't serious.

  No. He was serious, because he wanted to fuck her. Naturally. He would say anything, just like all men would say anything. She, Rachel, was the crazy person here, because she was actually taking the idea seriously.

  The idea that she could talk to her husband about having an affair.

  With Xavier.

  She tried to make herself feel indignant and frustrated. She tried very hard to talk herself in to outrage. How dare he?

  All that.

  But there was no denying that a bubble of thrill was filling up inside of her.

  Xavier wanted to fuck her.

  13: SWINGERS

  Josh knew Rachel had something she wanted to tell him.

  When she had something to tell, she twisted her fork more than usual. If she wasn't eating, she twisted her hair.

  She was maniacally doing both, and scrunching up her nose for no one – because she was having a conversation about her secret with herself, in her own mind.

  He felt another sweep of pleasing jealousy, and longing, and fear. The three traveled together now, playing off each other, ricocheting inside his mind and body. Sometimes he felt sick, sometimes he felt high.

  He sliced a piece of chicken and grinned. “So? What's the gossip?”

  Rachel immediately dropped her hands to her lap. She knew her tells, but she was powerless to stop herself from doing them.

  Josh felt himself begging the universe that whatever she was about to say had something to do with Xavier.

  She started twisting a strand of her hair with two hands. She bit her lip. Josh felt a flush of attraction in its most simple form wash over him. His wife was adorable. She didn't even mean to be.

  “Okay,” she said, suddenly, turning toward him with her eyes lit up with a strange energy. She reached one hand out and tapped her finger on the back of his hand. “You know how I was all worried, you know, about Tyra and Xavier, and Tyra being mad about...you know.”

  Josh nodded. Inside his abdomen excitement was writhing like a nest of snakes. He waited patiently for her to continue.

  “So it turns out...they're...there's no reason to even worry about it. Because...Xavier told me this just to
day...” she paused. An odd look came over her face, almost like she wasn't sure of she should keep talking.

  “Told you what?”

  She bit her lip again, and lowered her voice as though they were in a public place and someone might overhear.

  “They're...so they're...swingers.”

  Josh's mouth fell open a little. It took a moment for the words to get through his head, and register.

  And then it felt his mind blooming with ideas. He felt his cock shake to life.

  Swingers.

  The hair on the back of his neck prickled to life.

  Swingers.

  “No shit,” he said calmly.

  He turned to his chicken and began to slice it again into minute pieces.

  He knew Rachel was looking at him. But with what expression?

  What did Rachel think about this news?

  Surely not the same thing he did.

  He watched his hands using the fork and knife to slice his chicken to smithereens. A new discomfort was wedging itself into him, and he couldn't figure out where it came from.

  He looked up.

  “And, how is it you ended up on this topic?” he said. When he began the question, he had meant for it to sound like mere curiosity. Once it started to leave his mouth, however, it took on a more accusatory tone.

  After all: how had they ended up on that topic?

  He watched Rachel's face. He didn't like that he wasn't able to read her expression. That many different feelings played out on her face, and she was so evidently trying to hide them.

  She finally shrugged, and her shrug struck a dagger right through his chest.

  Below the table, though, his cock was registering excitement. Filling up with it, in fact.

  “I don't know,” Rachel said. “We just...got on it.”

  Was her voice just a little casual? Did it contain a layer of guilt?

  He looked at her face. It did.

  Josh took up his fork and knife and cut some more chicken. It was now turning to a shredded mass on his plate. “How does one just 'get on' the topic of swinging, I wonder?”

  Inside of his own mind, he was shaking his head at himself. What the hell was he doing? He wasn't even as defensive as he was acting. He was turned on. In the far corners of his mind, he was even playing out a fantasy in which Rachel and Xavier were wrapped around each other. So why did his voice sound the way it did? Why was he saying the things he was saying and shredding his chicken?

  Rachel stabbed her chicken with her fork. Her guilt turned to something else.

  “Well,” she said icily, “we were fucking in the back of the van, and I was like, 'oh, what about your wife,' and he was like, 'don't worry, we're swingers.”

  She took a bite out her chicken.

  Josh was taken a little aback. It wasn't like Rachel to make this kind of joke. Was she doing it because she was annoyed with him? Or was she doing it because she felt guilty...guilty the way Josh did, about having the thoughts he had been having? Was she having the same kind of thoughts?

  He was curious. More curious than he was interested in salvaging the evening.

  So, where he would ordinarily have said: “Yeah, okay, I deserved that,” and they would have laughed immediately and decided to open a bottle of wine, he instead had the urge to say:

  “Oh. So how often do you two fuck in the back of the van?”

  Rachel paused, obviously not expecting this reply.

  Josh half-wished he could take it back, and part of his mind was careening around, looking for a way to turn it into a joke.

  Rachel pressed her lips together, dropped her cutlery, and folded her arms. “This was the first time,” she said, hotly. “Usually, we fuck in the boardroom.”

  Now it was Josh's turn to be caught off guard. He wondered, if like him, Rachel was now sorry for taking things too far. If she also wanted a way out of this “joke,” but didn't know what to do.

  Or maybe she was serious.

  Or maybe, like him, she was partly joking and partly serious: part of her wanted to stop this duel of verbal dares, and part of her wanted to see where it went?

  “So? Is the 'bbc' all it's cracked up to be?” Josh lifted a glass of water to his lips, in part to hide his discomfort, in part to give his runaway mouth something else to do.

  Rachel's eyes widened, and then they narrowed.

  And then she leaned back over her plate, and began to cut her chicken calmly. She smiled.

  And said nothing.

  Josh set his water down.

  He knew he should shut up now. The “joke” had somehow gone too far. Even though he had been craving this very scenario, it felt derailed somehow.

  And at the same time, Rachel's coy smile was making his cock rock-hard beneath the table.

  She was still smiling. She wriggled in her chair. Josh had a hard time deciding if she was feeling triumphant for having won a silly marital showdown, or if she was actually smiling, thinking of a big, black cock.

  Xavier's big black cock.

  This is why, quite unauthorized, his mouth must have kept moving.

  “Is that a 'yes'?”

  His tone was almost desperate, though what kind of desperation it was, he couldn't be sure. Desperation to hear her say “yes,” or desperation to hear her say “no?”

  Rachel rolled her eyes skyward. “Okay. That's enough. Stop acting like an idiot, Joshua.”

  Josh's face was hot. His cock was painfully hard. His mind was offering up image after image of his wife's mouth getting closer to the tip of Xavier's cock, opening for him, licking the tip of him.

  Rachel looked at him. She gave an expression of disdain. “You. Are. Serious. Oh my god.” She stood up, grabbing her plate. She spun around, headed for the sink.

  “Rachel,”

  She held up her free hand.

  “Okay,” Josh exhaled. “That got out of hand, I'm sorry. But you still haven't answered my question. How did you get on the topic of swinging with Xavier?”

  Rachel set her plate down. She turned around. Her mouth was open for a pithy reply, but she seemed to have thought better of it and forgotten to close her lips.

  She folded her arms again.

  “I don't know,” she said simply. “I don't have any idea.”

  She was a little angry, and instead of making Josh feel bad, it only turned him on a little more.

  And again, he felt one of the many feelings inside of him go into free-fall, while another was buoyed.

  Of course she was telling the truth. Of course it made sense, if one wasn't having an affair with a coworker, to not remember how a topic like this came up. It wasn't impossible for it to have happened, especially with everything that was going on on the internet.

  Yet, there was also the possibility that Rachel just wanted it all to look like that. She wanted him to believe that she was just innocently stumbling into conversations about swinging, when in fact she had brought the topic up because there was something she wanted.

  Something dark.

  Something black.

  Something other than her husband.

  Exasperated, presumably because Josh had disappeared into his own thoughts for too long, Rachel turned and walked out of the kitchen with a sigh. “I really don't know,” she muttered, but this was not in reference to how her conversation with Xavier started. She often said this, or a version of this, in reference to Josh. He had a tendency to space out and start thinking, leaving a conversation and leaving Rachel stranded by herself. It aggravated her, and they'd had more than one fight about it. But like so many things in marriage, they had made an uneasy peace with it: she would mutter and walk out of the room, and then he would go and apologize.

  Only now, he had other things on his mind.

  14: THE CONVERSATION

  Her heart was pounding as she stomped out of the kitchen.

  Josh could really be a horse's ass sometimes. She wondered if he had Asperger's, at moments like this.

  She rai
led about it for a while, locked in the bathroom, where she sat on the toilet lid fully clothed. The bathroom door was the only one that locked.

  What had just happened in the kitchen?

  She tried to replay the conversation, and make sense of it, but she was having a hard time. It had gone...well, south...so fast and so unexpectedly, that she wasn't sure at all if she was angry, if Josh was angry, or if the opposite had happened.

  She hadn't expected this reaction.

  She could feel her heart inside her chest. She felt guilty. She felt...what did she feel?

  Was it disappointment? Had she wanted the conversation to go differently, as in, for Josh to say: “Oh, how interesting. I've always wanted to be a swinger, I think we should try it, and you should try it first with your hot black co-worker, Xavier.”

  She bit her lip. That was ridiculous, but there was a small part of her -

  Scratch that. A large part of her -

  that actually did want for that to have happened.

  She looked at the ceiling.

  Was that really what she wanted?

  She shook her head and closed her eyes.

  This would all end badly, wouldn't it? Affairs never ended well. And she didn't actually want to do this, did she? She didn't want to jeopardize anything with Josh. It wasn't like she wanted to run off with Xavier. It wasn't like she was fantasizing about anything but...sex.

  Right?

  She searched her thoughts, treading carefully, almost like spying on herself. Was she fantasizing about something more than sex?

  She liked Xavier. There was no denying that. He was a good friend, a fun wing-man. A lot of what she found sexy about him had nothing to do with his...body. Did that mean that she wanted something more from him? Something deeper?

  A knock on the door interrupted her thoughts.

  She had no idea what to say.

  It wasn't as if Josh didn't know she was in there.

  She knew what she wanted to say.

  She wanted to say something to let him know she was sorry. She wished she could take back the whole scene in the kitchen.

  “I'm sorry,” Josh said first. “That was...out of line.”

  You know, you'd be surprised what a lot of men might do if you just talk to them about it.