But what would he have said? What did a man say to his wife. Exactly, when he wanted her to have sex with another man?
His head was a mess. He took a sip of water and saw that his hand was shaking.
Rachel turned away from Arthur as he was talking, and her face was red with rage. She trounced back to the table and collapsed in her chair. Her chest rose and fell with her rapid breaths. She had pressed her lips together so tightly they almost seemed to disappear.
Josh reached out for her elbow.
She turned to him. “He won't listen to me,” she spat.
Josh knew she meant Arthur.
“I just think it's a little inappropriate,” she said, “if your employee is being objectified on blogs, to auction her off, even for charity.” She bore into Josh with her eyes. “Don't you?”
He should be glad, shouldn't he, that his wife didn't enjoy being the object of every man's sexual objectification? He should be pleased that she didn't have a taste for flirting and inviting other men to fawn all over her.
Right?
He touched her elbow. “I agree with you. But you know what?” he said. “Just have fun with it.”
What was he saying?
Rachel was staring at him in disbelief.
He felt like he was on thin ice. He began to walk over it quickly, a little out of control. “If there's nothing else to be done, you know...just own it. If you seem uncomfortable it will only make it worse. What are you...I mean what did you auction, exactly?”
Of course she wasn't going to say, “A night of wild sex,” or “A pussy-eating contest,” but it didn't stop Josh from secretly hoping she would. His breath was caught in his throat anyway, as if the possibility existed.
“Lunch,” Rachel said. Her voice was flat. She was looking at him strangely, almost as if she were trying to dissect him.
Lunch.
Was it relief that was flooding over him? It certainly didn't feel like it. It should be. He should have been relieved, but instead he felt as though a door was slowly closing on his fantasy, leaving it in the dark.
“See?” he said. “Not so bad. So just...yeah, own it.”
Rachel stared at him. It was much the same way she had looked at him the night before.
“Oh yeah?” she said. He couldn't tell if she was challenging him or implicitly thanking him for the advice. There was a hardness to her voice.
Did she smile?
She turned to the stage, and folded her arms over each other. He could tell by the way her foot was moving that she was thinking. Plotting something. Scheming. But what he didn't know is how she felt about it. Was she angry? Was she humored? It was impossible to tell.
And not knowing was acting on Josh like the high of a drug. He felt his head getting lighter and his southern head getting heavier, as blood rushed away from one and to the other.
Rachel stood up, and went to stand by the stage, a wry little smile on her lips.
She was looking at Josh, and her eyes seemed to have mischief in them.
Or did they?
He felt ill, suddenly. What had he set in motion?
“And now I think I speak for all of us,” the announcer, who Josh vaguely remembered from a Christmas party as an anchor of some kind, “when I bring our next bid up to the stage. Rachel Elliot!” There was a ricochet of hoots around the room. “Rachel has kindly donated...” he frowned at the card as Rachel stepped up onto the small stage and walked closer to him. She was looking at Josh as she leaned in close to the mic and tossed her hair.
“Just lunch,” she said sweetly, with a shrug. “A nice, long lunch at my favorite restaurant, and I'm paying.”
Josh felt himself in a tailspin. There was nothing about what she said that was particularly...well, even interesting. It was the way she said it. A nice. Long. Lunch. Each one of those words slow and deliberate, dripping with a vague innuendo that, Josh could tell by the way the entire room crackled, no one had missed.
Lllloooonnnngggg, she had said.
Even Dave, Dave the announcer, was thrown a little off his game. He stared for a moment at Rachel.
For Rachel Elliot was known to be cute. Rachel Elliot was the cute-hot girl of KRTV.
But this Rachel sounded...
Sexy. Fucking hot. Dirty-filthy sexy-hot. Like she was going to want a “lllloooonnnngggg lunch” in every hole of her body.
Dave recovered. “I am...disappointed that I can't bid on this nice, long lunch with Rachel Elliot myself,” he stammered. He was trying to make a joke, but it came out awkward because his voice betrayed him: he really would like to bid on this nice, long lunch with Rachel Elliot.
“All right, I'm going to call on my auctioneer, James, to come up here and do this because I can see that this is going to be hot one.”
It was disgraceful. It really was. Rachel smiled for the audience, and gave a little twirl. She was being utterly unlike herself: purposefully flirtatious, purposefully sexy.
The audience loved it. People were shouting at the stage, clapping for her.
Obscene.
Hot as hell.
Josh stared, open-mouthed, unable to do much else, as the bids rose higher and higher and Rachel followed his advice to “have fun with it” in increasingly obscene bouts of giggling and expressions of fake shock, until finally the auction ended at five thousand and one dollars! To the gentleman in the leather jacket.
Josh felt his head move, and his mind slowly return to the room, from the strange heights it had been taken to as his wife pranced on stage and giggled and flirted and was auctioned off like a piece of meat. He looked for The Gentleman With The Leather Jacket.
How much “fun” was Rachel going to have now that the auction was over, after all?
His blood went cold as he saw Rachel bounce down the stage steps, smiling broadly and genuinely for her buyer. She embraced him. They hugged and he picked her up and gave her a little spin.
For a moment he couldn't comprehend the image he was seeing, until it all came into focus:
Xavier.
Xavier had purchased his wife.
And Rachel had forgotten all about the auction itself, and the game she had been playing with it. She was no longer looking at Josh, no longer putting on act. She was really, truly happy to have been purchased by Xavier.
Josh felt a little ill.
But isn't this what you wanted? he asked himself.
It was. It was, in one way, exactly what he wanted. Excitement coursed through him. There was no denying that he liked seeing Rachel spinning in Xavier's arms, and that in some corner of his mind he was imagining Xavier whispering in her ear: “We'll have more than just lunch, baby.”
Sure, something was nagging at him, in the back of his mind. He had a vague idea he should be doing something else, something besides sitting there and watching this like a horny idiot. But he just sat there instead, enjoying what he had put into motion.
With no idea whether to be proud of himself or horrified that he was an idiot, he went to the bar as Dave ended the auction.
16: PROPOSAL
“So that was really nice of Xavier to bid on you,” Josh said. Even the words turned him on. Even as PG-rated as the whole event actually was, he was getting a thrill out of his own version of the auction, in his own mind. Replaying Rachel saying “lllloooonnnngggg.”
“Wasn't it,” Rachel said dryly.
She was angry.
“You seemed to get into it. You weren't exactly being...shy.”
Rachel shot him an icy look.
“Something wrong?”
She flipped her hair as she turned to him. “No. Nothing,” she said, in that overly casual voice that meant everything was wrong.
Josh looked out the window. “Okay, just tell me.”
She was shaking her head. “I shouldn't have to,” she said.
Josh sighed.
“You should have bid on me,” she said suddenly. But almost as quickly as she said it, her anger disappeared. She held
a hand to her mouth. “Oh well, whatever. Forget it, actually. Xavier saved the day.”
The words sliced through his chest.
Of course he should have bid on her. He was taken aback by the fact that the idea had not even occurred to him for a moment. Not until this moment.
It would have been the chivalrous thing to do.
It would have been a way to solve Rachel's problem, of being auctioned when she was so embarrassed about her internet fans, creatively.
He could always claim that the bidding had simply gone too high.
For it had, in the end. Much higher than he felt like going, or they could really afford to go.
But he had never even bid at the beginning.
Why was that?
Because the thrill of watching his wife get auctioned off had overpowered him. He had just sat there, enjoying the spectacle of it and the perverted fantasy in his own mind, because it made him so hot he was acting like an idiot.
That was why.
“I thought maybe...” his voice trailed off.
Rachel shook her head. She didn't want to hear it.
They drove home in silence, and Josh had the sense that this was another moment of opportunity, and it was slipping through his fingers.
He just had no idea what to say. He couldn't even tell, as he occasionally glanced over at his wife, if Rachel was really mad or not. Her body was folded in indignation, but her eyes were distant, and her lips seemed to be relaxed and almost smiling.
What was she thinking about? Because it did not seem to be making her as angry as she wanted Josh to believe she was.
Rachel hustled to the bedroom as soon as they arrived, and not in a very sexy way. She kicked the door with her foot but it didn't close completely, which usually meant she wanted Josh to feel like she wanted him out of the room, but didn't really.
It usually meant that.
Josh followed her into the room.
She whirled around, throwing a shoe on the floor at the same time.
“So?”
Josh was genuinely confused. “So...?”
“So, now that you've had time to think of a good answer, do you want to tell me why you let your wife get auctioned off like that, right after I – she – told you that it was...” she stared up at the ceiling, searching for a word. Josh could tell she had worked herself up in the car.
He sighed and leaned on the doorknob.
He hadn't really thought of anything to say.
And what was she doing, being angry anyway? He knew it had filled her with a rush that Xavier had bought her lunch date.
He could see it on her face.
He might as well be honest.
“Okay. Okay. Look...I have to be...I'm going to just be honest with you, here. Okay? Don't flip out.”
Rachel folded her arms and raised her eyebrows.
It wasn't the greatest circumstances under which to have this conversation, but he realized that fate would eventually run out of opportunities to give to him to squander. “I didn't bid on you...because...”
Rachel was staring at him. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Okay...don't freak -”
“I won't freak out,” Rachel snapped. “Now spit it out!”
Josh opened his eyes. She was very close to being unreasonable.
It was now or never.
“It sort of turned me on. Because it sort of turned me on.” He dropped his hand from his face.
The admission felt good, on the one hand. It relieved him a little to say it aloud. To face up this confrontation, or fear, or whatever it was.
Rachel's face had not changed at all. It was her newscaster mask. She applied it whenever she heard shocking things.
Josh hated this look. She looked, suddenly, like a Stepford wife turned to plastic. It was creepy as hell.
“Don't freak out,” he repeated.
“I'm not,” she said calmly.
A little too calmly.
“It turns you on, huh?” she said. Her voice was cloying. She spun and sat down on the bed. “What it is it that turns you on, Josh? Hmm?”
Although her voice was angry, and very definitively not “sexy,” Rachel's thoughts seemed miles away. Her eyes were fixed on something outside of the room, a thing only known to her, inside of her mind.
There was a silence as Josh stood, searching her eyes with his own, scanning her expression. And in the way that most of his insights occurred to him, like a gas leak that caught fire, he knew he had it:
Rachel wasn't angry. She wasn't remotely angry at the suggestion. Rachel, like him, was confused and enticed.
She wanted this as much as he did, which is to say – she wanted it and didn't want it. She desired it and she feared it.
“Admit that you're attracted to Xavier,” he said. The sentence burst from his mouth quite unexpectedly, but he wasn't sorry he had said it. In fact, he felt a surge of pleasure as he seemed to grab the out-of-control situation by the reins.
She turned to him, summoning what Josh could see was the indignant fury she “felt” she should have at such a statement. “What?!” she said. She stood up, and in her action Josh could see that he was right. He was dead-on right.
There was a certain wisdom that had come to him from his work at the CDC, and it was why he was given the assignments he was given: being right was not the endgame. Few people realized this. The CDC was always as right as it was scientifically possible to be, but it didn't matter if they could not convince people to behave the way they wanted them to behave.
He let his flush of self-righteousness die down. He had also had the insight, long ago in his marriage, that being right should not be the endgame.
It was the means to the endgame.
Now was not the time to gloat about being correct, or about having discovered Rachel's secret desire.
Now was the time to coax.
He took a deep breath.
“What if I said that I think you and I share a similar...desire?”
He watched her un-prickle. Ever so slightly. Her head leaned to one side. She was curious now. At least a little bit.
“What?!”
Her tone was sharp still, but it had a filed-down edge to it. She had seen the bait, and now he needed to make her take it.
After all, they did want the same thing, didn't they?
“Okay, not exactly the same desire. Mine is different, in a way.”
She was listening. Her shoulders were softening. She was thinking, but now she was thinking about how she could circle in on what she thought Josh was saying. Confess her own desire, without risking that it wasn't what he was talking about.
Someone had to jump.
Josh sighed. “I want to tell you about something I've been keeping a secret because I was worried about how you would react,” he said. He watched as she opened her eyes a little. She was curious, and she was hopeful.
This was the perfect time to add: “I'll share it with you, if you tell me what your secret is.”
He knew that later, when she thought about this conversation, she would get annoyed with herself for falling for Josh's typical tricks. Rachel always fell for this because she was, in her heart, a journalist and therefore a gossip. She had her own secrets, and she liked to share them. And she could not resist the temptation to get someone else's secret out of him.
Still, she wasn't stupid. She would divulge her secret and then realize he had used one of what she called his “dork bureaucratic public-policy diplomat tricks” on her.
He knew she would be mad at herself later. But it was worth it, if he could just get her to say...
“Okay fine. You know what? Fine. I'm attracted to Xavier. I am.”
Her voice, far from being tentative, was confident and icy. As if she had wanted to make the admission for a long time.
He felt a rush crawl around inside of him.
“Okay,” he breathed, and the excitement strangled his voice to a whisper. He barely
dared to say what he realized he had wanted to say all along, ever since he had found out about Tyra and Xavier.
A proposal.
His voice was shaking as he said: “Then that could work out, because my secret is...I like the idea of you sleeping with another man.”
Rachel's face went blank.
“I want to watch,” he added quickly. “And I...like the idea of it being...Xavier.”
He could see that while she may have suspected any number of things to come out of his mouth, this was not one of them.
“What?”
Josh paused. Had he gone too far? He couldn't read Rachel's voice. There was shock in her tone, but he had no way of knowing what she was shocked about. The suggestion that she sleep with another man? The fact that he was admitting his own fantasy to her? What about this conversation made her say “what?” the way she did?
Rachel folded her arms.
Josh decided to take the bull by the horns.
“Look...why do you say it like that? I'm trying to tell you about something that...you said you're attracted to him. You said they're swingers. I'm telling you...I have a thing. I'm just telling you because...I don't know. It could all maybe work out so everyone could get what they want. Or at least be okay with it.”
Rachel was frozen. Her lips were pressed together.
“Why does that upset you?” Josh inquired.
She spun and sat on the bed.
Suddenly she shook her head. “I don't...I don't know. It just seems...not right.”
Josh sat down next to her. She bristled slightly.
“I mean, what kind of man wants his wife to...you know?”
She seemed sad now.
Josh put his arms around her. “Look, Rachel, no, it isn't like that. I don't want to make you sad. Really. I don't even know where it comes from. I've had these thoughts for a while. I even...I even researched them. And now that there is this...obvious attraction...between you and Xavier, it seemed like a good time-”
She wriggled out of his arms, sitting bolt upright. “What do you mean, 'this obvious attraction?'”
Human Interest: A Lead-In To Wife Watching Page 11