“You always said you’d help me out, you remember that? Well, now I need me a lawyer.”
“Tennile,” I began, without really knowing where I was going.
“Don’t worry, Richie,” Shane said. “This is all on the up-and-up, I don’t need no pro-bono. Just a good lawyer. Someone I know I can trust.”
This final sentence was heavy with something, and there was a long pause while I sat there feeling like an ass.
Tennile reached into my pocket. “You have any of my cards in here?” she said, taking out my wallet.
I stared at her. She opened the wallet and found one of her business cards. “Tell you what,” she said. “Get in touch with me through work. I don’t know if I can help you,” she added. “If not, I can refer you to someone who can.”
Shane took the card, smiling like he’d won some sort of battle. “That’s just great, Tennile.” He flipped it over and over in his fingers while we all stared at each other uncomfortably for just a moment too long. “I’m pretty sure you’re just the kind of lawyer I need, though.”
“What do you need a lawyer for?” I said, giving Tennile an icy look.
“Oh... just some maritime stuff. Treasure. Investments.”
I didn’t even hear what he said. “Well, Tennile doesn’t specialize in anything like that, do you honey?” I reached forward and took the card from his hand. “So...”
Shane’s eyes went to mine, and his mouth opened in a craggy smile.
“Tennile Mathews, 727-624-8081,” Shane said. He pointed at his head. “It’s all up here. I’ll be giving you a call,” he said to Tennile.
“For a reference,” I said, coolly.
Shane looked at me, his face turned up slightly to the sun. “That’s right. A real good reference, it’s just what I need.” Another laden pause, and he jumped backward, shooting his arm out at the horizon. “Y’all be careful out there, looks like another storm’s brewing up.”
I looked out at the water, which was clear as crystal, the sky cloudless and blue.
When I looked back at Shane, he was retreating, his back to us. “Backing wind,” he said, moving his hand in a circle above his head. “Y’all are amateurs. Shoulda been out by sunrise.”
I looked at Tennile, who let out her breath sharply, as though she’d been holding it the whole time.
“Well,” she said. “Thank God that’s over.”
I waited until he seemed out of earshot.
“Why would you give him your number?” I said sharply. “The man’s fucking crazy.”
Tennile turned to me, and her eyes cut right through me. “I told you he’s harmless. I’ll send him on to someone else.” She snatched the card from my hand, giving me a look that told me she was pretty pissed off. “I told you to trust me. It’s fine.”
We spent the day on the water in that silence that enters marriages when you want to have a fight but other people are around. Monica and Bob, like all good married friends, put on the counterweight act to that marital silent-treatment. They were especially cheerful, especially fun, and especially hospitable.
Bob was too hungover to do much, so he propped himself up on the deck and had a good chin-wag with the crew while we asked to be taken to a shallow reef where we could snorkel, because nobody was in the mood to scuba.
The ride back was silent, a storm did appear to be coming in, and I had plenty of time to think about my wife and Shane while we skipped across the water headed to the marina.
We bid Bob and Monica goodbye and promised to meet them for dinner after a nap, and they looked happy to see us go. They knew something was brewing under the surface, and that something was Shane.
The hotel door closed behind me with a bang, and I took it like it was a start signal at a race. “So,” I said, and my voice was hostile. I was on the attack. All the time on the boat had given me plenty of time to be inside my own head, making my own arguments. You had to do that with Tennile: be prepared. She was a lawyer, after all. “You want to tell me why you’re giving out your number to a psychopath.”
Tennile walked to the bed and folded an article of clothing lying rumpled on it with an obsessive-compulsive zeal masked by her slow, steady movements. “I see. So that’s what you’ve been all sour about all afternoon.”
Women, I fucking swear to God.
“Oh cut the shit, Tennile.”
Tennile turned to me, put her hand on her hip, and tilted her chin up. She gave her hair a shake and it looked like I was about to get it. A twenty-minute opening argument that would have this case closed and me looking like the loser. The end.
“I gave him,” she began, “my business number, first of all. It’s a perfectly easy way to get rid of him, and you’re the one who had to step in and make a bigger deal out of it than need be.”
And then, to my complete surprise, she turned and began folding the shirt up again.
I held my hands up and let them fall with a slap against my hips. “So that’s it? That’s all you have to say about why this psycho is following you around, telling you he needs a lawyer, making his, I don’t know... sinister comments? ‘I need someone I can trust.’”
“You sound ridiculous,” Tennile said.
“I do, huh? No, you sound ridiculous. That guy is an obvious psycho.”
Tennile shook her head.
“And what’s this stuff about you promising him something, or whatever he said?”
Tennile looked at me, her big eyes blinking with the most false confusion I have ever seen. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about, Tennile, when he said you said you’d help him out. His words. And how is that he knows you’re in contract law?”
There was a long pause here, and Tennile blinked slowly.
Then her shoulders sagged. She wrapped her arms together in front of her chest. “Okay, look,” she said. She sat down on the bed, her hand to her face and shaking her head. “I didn’t want to tell you this.”
A curious thing, this. Here I was, so close to getting confirmation that my wife had probably let that rancid, slimy man with the tattoos have sex with her, and I should have been repulsed. But instead, my heart rate was picking up, skipping along, getting excited.
“Just tell me,” I said tenderly. I used that voice that said I already knew anyway, that everything would be okay. I sat down next to her and placed my hand on her back. Her skin was hot, radiating through her cover-up. Her shoulders were brushed with a tawny-pink glaze, a slight sunburn. I kissed her shoulder, pushing her hair out of the way. She was salty with ocean water. “It’s okay, whatever it is.”
And please let it be what I’m thinking it is.
Why would you think that, man? Why are you such a pervert?
“It’s so embarrassing,” she said, putting both of her hands up to her face.
That’s it, I thought, and a delicious burn was ripping through my chest.
“Did you date him?” I said.
She shook her head. “Not so much date...” She shook her head again, her face covered by her hands.
And my cock was hard, just like that.
Tennile and I had been through the numbers of who we’d slept with, and I always wanted to talk details, but she didn’t. “It’s in the past,” was Tennile’s favorite thing to say. We’d come out about even, number-wise, and she’d admitted to a few crazy one-night stands. But that’s all I really got.
But Shane?
I was pretty sure I’d never heard anything about him.
“Was this like, a long-term thing?” I said. I was trying to keep my voice even, and I hoped that Tennile believed whatever was shaking underneath it was anger. Because if she knew the truth – that it was excitement, the prospect of getting some juicy details about one of her past lovers, the prospect of being able to imagine her with Shane, that scuzzy, wiry, tattooed guy – she’d probably lose her respect for me.
I mean, I had sort of lost respect for myself.
My mind was already doin
g me the disservice of bubbling over with images of her and Shane together. Shane and his permanent, pale five-o’clock shadow grazing the inside of her thighs and making her shudder, Shane’s tattoos moving over his muscles, drops of sweat sliding over the blue-black tattoos as he slipped and slid over her body, their mutual sweat greasing them up, her pussy filled up with her excitement and his cum, overflowing...
Jesus. Stop.
Tennile, oblivious to my thoughts, sighed. “Ugh, God, not really,” she said impatiently. “It was just... I don’t know. He worked there, I worked there, we’d all go out for drinks at this steak place that was open for night shift workers, you know, they served beer in the morning. One thing led to another. I mean, you know how it is.”
I didn’t, really. I did not have any idea how strippers and bouncers lived their lives at steak places that served beer at breakfast time.
My mind flashed to picturing them in a booth, their tongues darting in and out of their mouths in a dirty dance, his hands all over her body, his fingers slipping under her little stripper panties, half-eaten steak strewn messily on the table in front of them.
Stop.
“So... what? What’s this deal you have with him?”
Tennile rubbed her face. “There’s no deal,” she said firmly.
And then, I saw her eyes moving, the way they do when she gets a plan. “I mean, it was one of those things,” she said, and she lifted her eyes to look at herself in the mirror. “Like, we’re just talking, he knew I was in law school, we were really drunk one night and he was like, ‘so you can be my lawyer someday,’ you know, because he was always in the clink for one thing or another -”
“’In the clink’?” I interjected. “What are you, Mafia Susie?”
Tennile looked at me, her face pricelessly incredulous. “Mafia Susie? What is that even supposed to mean?” She looked back at herself in the mirror. “I mean, like, ‘Mafia Maria,’ okay.” She snorted. “Mafia Susie.”
“Anyway,” I said. I was humorless.
“Anyway,” Tennile said. “That’s all it was. I don’t even know how the conversation went. It was one of those times we were like, I don’t know, I was on a break, we were standing around in the back, just shooting the shit. And he was like, ‘get me out of jail someday,” and I was like, ‘okay,’ and he said, ‘I’ll hold you to it.’” She turned to look at me. “I wasn’t serious.”
“He was,” I said, dryly.
Tennile rubbed her forehead again. “I guess. Look, it isn’t a big deal. He’ll call, I’ll tell him I don’t handle whatever... I mean, it’s some kind of criminal shit or something, you can bet, and I’ll just send him on to Mike or somebody I know in Criminal. It’s...” she sighed. “It’s the least I could do.”
My mouth fell open.
She looked at me. She shrugged. “I know he looks like a shit, but he was nice enough.”
“That guy?” I said. “Shane?”
Tennile shook her head and stood up. “Yeah, look. Whatever, okay? It’s not anything to worry about.”
“Nila,” I said. “He’s a really creepy dude.”
Tennile pushed past me, gently shoving me toward the wall to get into the bathroom. “And I know creepy dudes, because I’m a project manager and I have one creepy dude a year work two hours for me before I fire him. I once came within ten yards of a jail,” she mocked.
I was surprised by how mean her tone had become. I glared at her.
“It’s fine. Okay? Do me a favor and don’t be so fucking condescending.”
She shut the door on me.
A flare of anger, that in my younger days might have translated into me punching a wall, rose up from inside of me and flashed over my face. My vision went starry and red for a millisecond.
But I was a middle-aged guy, at the end of the day, and I had been married for eight years.
So I gave the closed door the middle finger, and sat down on the edge of the hotel bed. I turned on the TV and flipped through it, and before I knew it I was watching Duck Dynasty and my blood pressure was down.
What was I thinking, after all? I’d been watching way too many thrillers. Shane was probably just some dude from Tennile’s past, and he probably needed a lawyer because he hadn’t registered his boat, and Tennile would send him on and that would be the last we’d ever hear of him.
And I didn’t have any right to be mad at Tennile for having slept with some guy when she worked as a stripper, for which I’d already forgiven her. Or at least told her I’d forgiven and forgotten.
There was, in fact, no really reason to be mad at Tennile, and she was probably, as usual, about 75% right.
She was taking the kind of pointed, angry shower that would last almost an hour, so I scooted back on the bed, staying on top of the covers to keep the salt or sand out, and before I knew it, I had fallen asleep.
3: S LIGHTLY OFF
We had driven to the Keys, a decision we regretted about halfway through the trip. The idea had been to take a roundabout way through the Everglades, which neither of us had ever seen. We weren’t Florida natives, which is why we thought that would be a good idea.
“Never again,” Tennile had said, about an hour into it.
We regretted our decision even more on the way back. Tennile worked at a pretty high-pressure firm and handled large, corporate contracts. The minute her vacation officially “ended” she was getting pinged left and right, and spent almost the whole drive typing out emails and saying “Jesus,” under her breath.
This was yet another reason that we didn’t talk about Shane again. He just sort of faded away, a relic of Tennile’s past that had risen to the surface, and then churned away with time.
We both went back to work, paying for our vacation with weeks of overtime and stress. I was a project manager and, much like Tennile, it seemed to me that anything and everything that could fall apart while I was gone for four days did.
So for several weeks, we hit the ground running at our respective jobs. I was home late, she was home late, we went to bed exhausted, snuck sex into Saturday mornings, and tried to claw our way back to having dinner together before 9pm.
This isn’t to say that I never thought about Shane again: I did.
It was then that I began to circle around the reason for my bad feeling.
Our run-in with Shane had triggered something inside of me. A heightened sense of suspicion, maybe. A tendency to think Tennile was up to something, in an ambiguous situation. A desire to pry a little bit. A re-awakening of curiosity about her past.
And though I hate to admit it: a little bit of gnawing, delicious hope. Hope that I might find something dirty, somewhere in the past. Get a better view of it. Maybe catch her doing something she shouldn’t…
But there was never any time to do more than have a fleeting thought.
This is why I didn’t notice things at first.
My suspicions started in earnest one evening when I finally managed to make it home at a decent hour.
The house was dark when I got home.
I had the windows down, I heard the tires turning on the cement, and I stared at the gray eyes of the front of the house.
I looked at the clock, as if there had been some kind of mistake. I don’t know why; like I said, we were both working late all the time to make up for our vacation. And Tennile was a lawyer: she worked late. That was sort of what lawyers did.
There was really no reason to be stunned that she wasn’t home. It was eight-o’clock, not two in the morning.
But for some reason, her absence bothered me that night. It was heavy, like the darkness of the house. Ominous. I couldn’t put my finger on why. Was it just because I was witnessing her absence for the first time in a few weeks?
I got out of the car, the uneasy feeling twisting in my stomach. Unlocked the door, the one that let out to the carport (we had moved into a trendy neighborhood where all the houses had been built in the sixties, with carports and that vaguely nostalgic neighborhood a
ppearance, long bungalows with huge yards and big, shady trees).
The door shut behind me and I stood in the silence. The darkness swelled around me, pulsing like the quiet.
Why? Why was this bothering me so much?
You’re being over-dramatic. Turn on a fucking light.
I slid my phone from my pocket and stared at the top of the screen, where there was no incoming message icon. I scanned my messages anyway. Tennile had last texted me two days ago.
[Nila]: be home around 8 want jaiangs?
That was all for messages from Tennile.
There was no message today.
I exhaled sharply and started to type a message to Tennile. (Sometimes I was my own worst enemy.)
[Me]: You working late tonight?
I set the phone down on the kitchen counter and walked through the house. I intended to take a shower, leaving the phone out there on the kitchen counter in a gesture (to nobody but myself) to indicate that I didn’t care where Tennile was, I had perfect trust in my wife and no curiosity about what she was doing. I wasn’t paranoid and I definitely wasn’t thinking -
fantasizing -
about what she was doing.
I turned on the shower and peeled my work clothes off. I scowled at the fine dust that mushroomed out from under my jeans when they dropped to the floor. My shirt, at least, was soaked with sweat. I looked at myself in the mirror.
I was aging, but I was doing all right. I was on the lankier side, not an especially muscular guy, but I was fit. I looked better in my clothes than out, I would say. Thin and solid, but not muscular. No defined biceps on my arms. My face was boy-cute. No hard features, deep-set eyes, and square jaw covered with bristling man-beard.
Still, I was an attractive guy.
I thought of Shane’s hard-looking body. He was one of those guys who was all muscle, nothing soft.
Did Tennile secretly go for that kind of guy, deep down inside? It was one of those rumors going around.
Nila's Long Con: A Hotwife Adventure Page 3