The Hobby Job: A Romantic Wife-Watching Novel

by Arnica Butler

  But Laura was the one, very suspiciously, I might add – and this only fueled my desire even more – who was at work on my boxers. Working her fingers between the fabric and my skin. Her smooth knuckles caressed my lower pelvis, her fingernails moved like a breath over my pubic hairs, disturbing them only lightly, each one sending a sweet jolt through me. I looked down to see her hands dipping into my underwear, and up to see the smile on her face.

  Why was Laura so suddenly frisky, in this particular way?

  Her fingers were slightly cool when they closed around my cock. Her eyes glimmered when she found me, already hard, and she squeezed my cock with an excited, inviting, almost needy clasp, in both of her hands. Her fingernails swept over my balls, raising hairs the same she had done as she had moved her hands down, just moments before.

  I used one hand to grasp the back of my shirt, and pull it over my head. The move was clumsy, but she didn't seem to care, and she slid my boxers away as I did it, so that they fell down around my ankles. She stepped back, but kept one hand making smooth circles over the tip of my shaft, so that I could pull my shirt from my arms.

  When my clothing fell away, I had a brief image of her driver of the night, and his younger frame, his taut torso and muscled arms. I hadn't stood naked in front of Laura like this for a long time, and as she ran her eyes over my body I wondered if she was using her imagination to brush away the inevitable changes of time. I was in in good shape, but I was not the same man she had met at twenty-two. I was not the same guy as her youthful ride home. I wondered if she was seeing me but imagining him, and the idea licked at me from the inside, almost sweetly.

  It was not entirely unpleasant, the thrill it was giving me to think of her driver leaning over to whisper to her, to touch her, to touch her inappropriately...

  The idea sort of percolated up inside of me: maybe this was why Laura was so horny right now. Wasn't it strange, in every way, that she was making such an aggressive move? Right after a long shift? This was very unlike Laura, and when I had that thought, it started the fluttering in my chest anew.

  Maybe she was turned on because she had gone just a little too far with her buddy in the car.

  Maybe she was turned on because she hadn't, but she wanted to.

  She pulled me down the hall to the guest bedroom.

  I pushed her onto the bed. I felt a new, animal instinct surging up inside of me. I had a desperate need to pull her jeans off, to place my hand on her panties, to slide my finger inside of her and see how wet she was.

  And I knew what I wanted to find. I wanted to find some evidence that she was up to something. That she was more turned on than she could possibly have been by this brief interlude with me.

  I jerked her pants off after unbuttoning them, and they were so tight they almost pulled her with them, off of the bed. She kicked at me playfully and said, much too loudly, “Conrad!”

  Seductively.

  She kicked herself back up and onto the bed, and looked at me half-imploringly and half-confused.

  I climbed on top of her, and reached with no hesitation for her panties. I cupped her mound in my hand, and the feel of the fabric, warm and undeniably moist against my palm, sent a shudder of incredible pleasure through me.

  “You're very turned on,” I half-whispered, almost accusingly.

  Laura brought a finger to her mouth and bit it, playfully mimicking a “sex kitten” pose. She would never actually act like that, she thought it was silly, but she enjoyed making fun of it and for me, the effect was essentially the same.

  Curious, though. Curious that she had nothing else to say.

  A sense of urgency overtook me suddenly. A desire to feel more than just her being “very turned on,” through her panties. I wanted to feel inside of her, get my fingers slick with her juices. Maybe taste her, as if I would be able to find something in the way she smelled. Maybe she would be too wet, too wet for it not be cum. Maybe she would stop me, tell me I couldn't go any further, try to get me to stop because if I came too close to her cunt I would find some other scent there...

  My thoughts went on and on like this, and I didn't do much to stop myself, even though the same thoughts were sending waves of anxiety and then pleasure, heat and then painful cold, despair and elation through me. What the hell was I doing? What the hell was I accusing my wife of?

  I jerked her panties away, without pulling them down, and I heard the fabric rip.

  Laura rose beneath me, to try and crane her neck down at her underwear. “Shit, Connie,” she said, but her outcry ended in a laugh and she tossed her head back on the bed. “Grrrrr,” she said, making a tiger growl that was not in any way intended to be sexy, only funny.

  My heart tripped inside my chest. She was just being silly. I caught the scent of whiskey on her breath again and realized that she was just very, very drunk -

  But my fingers dipped inside of her, and the silky oils of her wetness coated my fingers. She was so wet there was almost no friction as the superheated flesh of her pussy closed around my fingers. Two fingers, and they slid in as though into a pail of melting butter. My mind started up again, thinking things, believing things, convincing myself of things. Was she looser? More pliant? Stretched out?

  You're imagining things.

  Laura's eyes half closed and her breath rattled in her throat like a growl. The effect was intoxicating, when stirred together with thoughts of her fantastical – or were they? - transgressions, so I pushed further, harder, clawing forward to press her clit from the inside against my thumb on the outside of her pussy.

  She yelped a little, and pleasured, sexy yelp. She wanted more.

  I rubbed again, and she purred.

  I could make her come like this, she was so close.

  But my hopeful paranoia, this strange thing that was taking me over, made me pull my hand from inside of her. Her eyes fluttered open, suddenly sobered, disappointed.

  I moved down, down her body, taking the distended panties with me. I stared at her cunt as I did. It was dim in the room, but here was enough light from the outside porch light that I could see that she had shaved herself into a very tidy triangle. My mind spun. She wasn't a full-bush, let-it-get-out of control type, but wasn't this a little...too trim?

  You're really, really imagining things now. Starting to lose it. Falling apart.

  I hesitated, in this weird reverie. I had been planning to go for her, to graze my mouth from her calf to her inner thigh, to the bone that joined her leg and hip, to the line of neatly trimmed hair, where I would be able to smell her tangy scent. And anything else that might be there..

  But my hesitation cost me, and Laura giggled, and slid forward with her panties, and then she was on the floor in front of me.

  She was on her knees.

  I opened my mouth and sucked in my breath, as much for my surprise about how the situation I had been unfolding in my mind had been snatched away from me. And by Laura, once again, diverting to sucking my cock.

  Which, don't get me wrong...but...

  She waved a finger at me, smiling, telling me not to say anything stupid. She was sort of drunkenly giggling, some mischievous thought swirling in her own head.

  By then she also had my cock in her hand, and she was guiding it to her mouth.

  With almost no hesitation whatsoever, she opened her mouth and took me inside of her.

  What should I call the feeling that had gone through me when she had thwarted my plans to lick her and taste her sweet cunt? To maybe find that she was far too wet, that her pussy was full of her own cum, or that – and the thought tantalized me as much as it terrified me – it was full of a saltier, bleachier kind of cum? Disappointment isn't exactly the right word, because it was disappointment and relief. Whatever it was, it was washed away by the feel of her hot mouth on my cock.

  This felt so good.

  Laura had been much wilder than I had expected, when I finally got her into bed. But lately she had just been going...over the top. Over th
e top for where we were in our marriage, so many years in. Over-the-top for thirty-eight.

  And where was it coming from?

  I looked down to see her lips encircling me, moving down the length of my cock, coming closer and closer to the base. The heat and the wetness of her mouth was enveloping me. Not just my cock, but all of me.

  I gasped.

  And then my mind, my mind that was getting so out of control, slipped away again.

  To another crazed thought. She was probably only doing this because she had wanted to stop me from finding her full of...

  Stop it.

  But the thought stayed in my head. And I let it. I let it stay there and sink into the whole moment. I let it stay there as I watched Laura's fingers close around the base of my cock and her head begin to bob over the end half of my cock, her tongue working her magical swirls around my shaft as she moved up and down it, her hand pumping in perfect rhythm with the movement of her head.

  I tried to pull away from her at one point, so obsessive became my desire to feel inside her cunt, even if it was with my cock.

  But Laura released my shaft, and reached behind me to grasp my ass, and then she pulled me to her face. My cock impaled her, and I felt the tip of me against the back of her throat. A small spasm as she gagged slightly.

  I could feel myself going over the edge. My paranoid thoughts and my imaginings and real images from the last hour collided in my mind. I gave in, I let her press me closer and closer, and I let myself disappear inside her hot mouth.

  I pushed her hair away and whispered her name when I felt myself coming – Laura wasn't big on swallowing, she liked to give very intense descriptions of the rancid qualities of cum – but she resisted, and dug her nails into the flesh of my ass.

  I arched backward, and looked up at the ceiling. I groaned, trying not to yell too loudly, as my cum boiled up inside of me, filled my cock, filled her mouth. I felt the muscles of her throat constricting around my cock, and it sent an electric ripple through me, riding on the ending wave of my orgasm. I couldn't help it. I yelled.

  Laura fell backward onto her heels, releasing me. She was laughing, holding one hand up to her mouth to wipe away the excess cum she couldn't swallow, and the other with a finger extended to tell me to be quiet. But her own laughter escaped her, and she collapsed on the floor, trying to smother the noise.

  And I stood there, in disbelief.

  It was a strange feeling, seeing Laura like that. A younger version of Laura, more like the Laura I had married. Silly, a little too tipsy. Laughing, doing naughty things and not worrying very much about the consequences.

  And then a Laura I had never met before. Even at her drunkest and therefore dirtiest, when we first started dating and sleeping together, Laura had never grabbed my ass and shoved me into her throat, or let me burst inside her mouth.

  A strange brew was inside of me. There was attraction, almost relief, that my plan was working on Laura, that she was relaxing and having fun one night a week, and, let's be honest, that said relaxation and fun had led her to feel more like having sex.

  And then there was suspicion. Confusion. Why was Laura so unlike herself? I couldn't help but think her “friend” from the restaurant had something to do with it.

  I couldn't help but think that Laura had stopped me from going down on her because she hid a very naughty secret between her legs.

  Laura sat up. She was waving at the air. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I don't even know why I'm laughing so hard.”

  Was Laura just in a carefree, tipsy mood, and laughing at something only because it was late at night and a sense of decorum demanded that she be quiet? She was always losing her shit during serious and solemn moments. She had a peculiar quirk, of finding especially serious moments to induce laughter. She had to leave a funeral once because she couldn't hold it in. She laughed all the time at church services and weddings. Sometimes even a serious movie could set her off. She claimed to have actually peed her pants when we saw Pulp Fiction, not because it was particularly serious but because the audience we saw it with was plainly horrified and didn't get the black humor, which had sent her into a fit of uncontrollable laughter.

  But this was different, wasn't it? It wasn't a really solemn occasion.

  Was she laughing because she held some private thought, or private joke, inside of her?

  I picked at the painful wound inside of me.

  Maybe she was laughing at me.

  She looked up at me, wiping her eye. Her face fell when she saw my expression. I must have looked very glum, or very pensive. Either way I was serious.

  “Hey,” she said. “What's with you?”

  She stood up. She put her arms on my shoulders. She tossed her hair behind her. “I've got a joke. Ready? I heard it tonight. It can't possibly not cheer you up. You ready?”

  I nodded. Why was she bothering me so much, in this happy mood?

  “A horse walks into a bar,” she said, and the punchline got ahead of her and made her lip quiver.

  She waited for me to say, “Yeah?”

  Was it because I felt like I was losing control of her? What the hell was wrong with me?

  I knew the joke. I felt certain I had told it to her a long time ago, though maybe I hadn't.

  Or maybe she'd forgotten.

  “The bartender says, 'why the long face?'”

  Her mouth broke into an irresistible smile, and she looked up at he ceiling. “Ahhhhhh, Connie, please, it's a good joke.”

  I smiled for her. “It's great.”

  Normally, she would have known something was wrong. She would have had to sit there and talk to me about it, dissect it, make me tell her. She always spotted my fake smiles from miles away.

  Tonight though, she kissed me on the cheek. “I have to go shower,” she said. And she pattered away to the bathroom. The downstairs bathroom again.

  I sat on the bed. I lay down on the bed and I looked at the ceiling.

  There were plenty of things to think about at that moment. Like the fact that Laura had been in such a hurry to take a shower. The white shirt in the car that drive her home. Why she was home so late. Where she had been and what she had done. Why she had such crazy sex.

  Laura often says that I'm a surprisingly deep man. She doesn't mean that it's surprising, like I'm too dull to be deep.

  She means it like, some of the shit lurking around in my mind surprises her.

  Sometimes I even surprise myself.

  Because what I thought about, sitting there on the bed staring at the ceiling, was not Laura at all.

  Not in any kind of direct way, anyway.

  What I thought about was my college buddy Troy.

  And his girlfriend from back in the day.

  Eliza.

  And how I had submerged the fantasy of being not myself in that story, but Troy. Feeling the serrated edges of pleasure and pain slicing through me while I watched my girlfriend – or even more intensely, my wife – with another man's cock in her mouth, pleasing me by pleasing him, pleasing me by torturing me.

  And as I sat there thinking about it, despite the odds, my cock got hard again.

  P ROBLEMS

  LAURA

  Thoughts are just thoughts.

  And I was right. That's all they were. At the time.

  They were burning through me, though. Making me crazy.

  And thoughts are thoughts, but I was doing things, wasn't I?

  I knew Conrad was not some kind of idiot. I knew he was suspicious of things. I could tell by his frowning smile. I could tell by his clouded eyes. By his distance sometimes, at night. By the way I caught him staring at me. Looking for details.

  Sometimes this rattled me, because I knew I was up to things that were not over the line, but pretty close to it.

  And then sometimes I just got angry.

  After all, I hadn't done anything.

  And I was entitled to my own thoughts.

  And anyway, hadn't all of this made our sex li
fe better?

  I knew Conrad got into the porn at night. All men did. And what's more, I didn't care. After all, we'd been married for eight years, we had two kids, we were busy people and it was just hard to find time or passion. Whatever worked for him.

  But if Conrad had his porn, then it was only fair that I had my own thoughts.

  At night, in bed, as I drifted off to sleep.

  But your thoughts, Laura, have real people in them.

  That was also true.

  But not real scenarios.

  (I mean, also, to be fair, porn has real people in it.)

  Not people he actually knows.

  That was also true.

  I wasn't going to feel guilty about a little harmless fantasizing.

  About a twenty-three year old.

  Legal. Perfectly legal. And anyway, it was just fantasy.

  It was all just fantasy.

  Anyway, I didn't really get into some kind of crazy detail with my fantasies. They were sweet, flirtatious, almost romantic. Unrequited. Maybe a make-out session or two.

  I was always shaking my head and saying, no, I can't, I'm married.

  And then...

  Okay, maybe it didn't always end there.

  Maybe Nate kept burning into me with his ice-blue eyes, and then he just wasn't able to hold himself back, and he kicked the freezer door shut and pushed me up against the wall. Maybe it was ice-cold against my back and searingly hot against my abdomen and chest, and he pushed my arms up above my head and held my wrists there.

  Maybe he didn't hold my wrists at all, but held my head still with his fingers on the back of my neck and his thumb stroking the soft dent of my throat. Holding me still with his eyes, his breath crystallizing in the air, our lips dangerously close.

  I can't, I might say, feebly, one more time.

  But Nate's hands are already sliding underneath my shirt. His mouth is already on my lips. We're tearing our clothes off and we can't feel the chilled air at all...

  It's not so much about sex with these fantasies anyway.

  It's the cold twist in my stomach. The longing. The aching sweetness of thinking about getting something you want, but never getting it.