I opened my wallet. Great. Only five dollars and a handful of change. At a place like this that barely covered my beer.
I looked around again. I caught her eye and waved at her. She mouthed “just a moment,” and went back to whatever she was doing.
I pulled out my phone. The blip on the screen was essentially over the restaurant itself still.
I had to get back to my car, almost four blocks away at the Hilton.
I felt like a shit, but what can you do?
I crumpled all of the money together, as if the crumpled ball could hide that I was actually a thieving (and crazy) patron, and I dashed out the door.
Fewer people were on the street, and so their heads were easy to spot. Tennile's black hair in her tidy up-do, Shane's ugly blond mop. I wondered if they were holding hands. They seemed to far apart to be doing that.
I speed-walked to catch up to them, part of me hoping that Tennile would sense me, turn and around and see me. That I could put a stop to whatever was happening.
The other part of me was launching them into a perverted fantasy. Would they fuck in the car? Were they finally going to a hotel?
I decided to let my fate be decided by... well, fate. I strode past them, close by, close enough to smell Shane's faintly sweaty, cheap-aftershave smell as I passed. He was stepping into my wife's car, getting in. Tennile was looking down the street at traffic, deciding when to open her door. I turned and looked at her, and watched her face as she looked to her right. All she had to do was turn toward me, and she would see me, and she would be caught.
Just imagining the look on her face made my cock pulse.
But she didn't turn, not as I passed. I was already well in front of them by the time she did.
I could feel the scene behind me on my back, almost as though it were reaching out and playing its fingers along my spine. My wife, sitting in the car, Shane in the passenger seat.
The scent of his aftershave lingered in my nostrils. It was the sort of inexpensive, alcohol-infused smell Tennile claimed to despise.
Was she just slumming it?
And why did that have this effect on me? I should have been repulsed, angry, anything but what I was, which was turned on. My cock was aching.
I started walking faster, head down, not running yet in case they saw me. In case it drew attention to me. I pulled my phone from my pocket and looked at it as I walked.
And then in my peripheral vision I saw the silver car, the lamp-lights sliding over the chrome, then the brake lights. I moved closer to them as a red light held them at the next block. Maybe they would see me. Maybe she would look in her rear view mirror and see me walking along as she pulled away.
The light turned green, and then they were gone, turning left and driving away.
I started to run for the car.
Luckily enough, my car had not only not been towed, but it had not been ticketed. I threw myself into it and clumsily fumbled with the keys. I was excited now, my hands shaking, but not with fear – shaking with excitement.
The blip on my screen was moving down Concorde Avenue, not making any turns, easy enough to catch up to if I got good lights. I didn't know where they would be going: Concorde led to an industrial wasteland.
Maybe Tennile had some kind of fetish. A fetish for a more blue-collar guy, for tattoos and industrial scenes. Maybe she wanted to fuck him in a factory or something.
Who knows. People are weird.
My stomach was cold and writhing with that very pleasant nervous ache as I closed the distance between us. Tennile's car was in sight. We kept going, the traffic thinning out around us. I wondered if she would look in her rear view mirror, think that maybe she was being followed? I wondered if she would recognize this car.
Nah. It was night. Too nondescript.
The shops and well-kept streets started to sort of disintegrate. Here and there, vacant lots with rusted fences on them. New construction, though. Pretty soon this part of town would be gentrified and as expensive as the rest.
The excitement I was feeling started to be tainted by an ominous feeling, the further we went down the road.
I don’t know how long that went on. It felt like an eternity, a surreal landscape of decrepit buildings and an endless road (where did that road end? I would wonder later).
The brake lights came on abruptly, and Tennile's small car decelerated so fast I could have easily rear-ended her if I had been looking away for a second. Her car squealed into a parking lot, and I had no choice but to keep going.
I looked to the left, and my poor yo-yo-ing heart skipped around again: Concorde Regal Motel.
Chipped white paint and red-orange trim. A sign made in the seventies and never repainted. A second floor that seemed to sag in the center. The kind of place where people paid in every imaginable increment of time: hour, month, year.
Exactly what I had imagined before.
Motel.
The heavy, icy weight moved around inside of me, my cock pulsed again.
Motel.
I pulled into the adjacent parking lot – also a dingy motel, and I turned around, peering through the weed-choked fence that divided the two buildings to keep an eye on Tennile's car. It wasn't hard, the lot was nearly empty.
I decided to park at Robyn's Motel and observe from there: Tennile's car was still running, the brake lights bright. Her foot was on the brake.
I strained to see what I could, what I wanted: would their silhouettes come together for a kiss? The kind of impatient, wet, sloppy kiss that people exchanged when they couldn't keep their hands off each other long enough to get into the hotel room?
Maybe this was her first time, I thought. Maybe she had been resisting him, saying she couldn't possibly, and now he was drawing her nearer, getting to a “yes” from her...
This went on for five full minutes, while I was left to imagine that they were making out. Shane, sliding his fingers along her thigh, feeling under the material of her skirt, working his pinkie up to where he could brush it over her panties. Biting into her lower lip, slipping a finger into her soaked folds. Just a quickie, he was saying. You know you want it.
I imagined Tennile melting as her body gave over to the naughty pleasure. She wanted him, and she was already this far... what difference did it make if she fucked him?
Or maybe she had her eyes on the bulge in his jeans.
Maybe her hand was running over the shape of his cock, feeling how large it was, itching to hold it in her hand, the skin sticking to her slightly.
Maybe she liked to be daring, and I would get to see her head disappear into his lap.
My cock thickened, thinking about what it would be like to watch the shape of Shane's head – for that was really all I could see – slam back against the headrest in ecstasy as my wife's mouth closed around his cock, in the passenger seat of our car, in front of this shitty hotel.
The brake lights went black. The car was off.
The doors opened, and my fantasy was demolished: Tennile was in her suit, unruffled. Her hair was all in place.
I stared as they exited the car and Tennile followed Shane down the ratty sidewalk to the stairs.
I jumped out of the car and scuttled along the fence, out to the street, into the parking lot of the Concorde, just in time to see a door close on the second floor.
The curtain was drawn and the light was on behind it.
I stared at the yellow rectangle of light. The locked door, that had closed with a slam.
Cold pain coiled up in my stomach, settling in, spreading out to my limbs.
I was frozen to the ground, my mind taking me to all the possible actions I could take. I could walk up there, stand by the window, maybe see their shadows moving on the floor. Maybe I would hear them, hear my wife screaming as she let Shane fill her cheating pussy with his huge slab of meat.
It made my mouth dry.
And then what? What would I do after that?
It was a good thing that I stood there so lo
ng, creating images of them in my mind, tearing each other's clothes off, slamming against the walls and knocking the lamp from the table. Shane's muscular ass bouncing on my wife's small body like a trampoline while she moaned and squealed in delight.
Because after about ten minutes, the door opened.
Frantic, I lunged behind a truck.
“Whatever,” Tennile's voice said.
And then I heard her heels clacking on the grated stairs.
I slowly peeked over the door of the truck, through the dirty window.
Shane was silhouetted in the light of the room behind him, leaning on the door frame. He brought a cigarette to his lips and watched Tennile, who didn't look up, and moved quickly to her car.
I surveyed her appearance. Ten minutes was a short time to have fucked in, and even shorter if you had to put yourself back together like that. But Tennile didn't have a hair out of place. She was still coiffed, poised, spotless.
Yet... maybe they just fucked against the wall, not taking their clothes off.
Maybe she just sucked his cock.
She got in to her car. The brake lights turned on. The car backed up.
Upstairs, Shane shook his head, though with what kind of expression I could not say. The door closed. Tennile turned right on Concorde, and headed back toward the city.
I stood up and stared at the scene in front of me, so seedy moments before, now completely changed.
There was a hole in the fence behind me, so I ducked under the rusted ends of the cut chain links, and headed for my car.
I sat down, befuddled, and put my finger to my upper lip.
What the fuck?
I sat there quite a while. As long, it turned out, as it would have taken Tennile to get back to her office. And then my phone buzzed against my thigh, shaking me from my reverie.
[Nila]: on my way now. Did you go to jiangs yet? I've changed my mind.
I stared at the message.
What the fuck was going on?
Driving home I thought of many possibilities. I clung to the idea that perhaps they were just quick lovers, out for a thrill, and that Tennile didn't take her clothes off because she wanted to get back as soon as possible.
For some reason, this tantalized me. I would smell his aftershave on her then, in her clothes. I would be able to go through all of them before they went to dry-cleaning, feel the dried cum, sniff up his scent mixed with hers.
Or they could have had a fight. That happened.
It put me in an awkward situation, though: did I confront her about Shane, having seen what I saw and knowing that she was lying to me?
Or did I just keep watching her, sinking even further into obsession and deception?
There was that part of me that still hoped to see her with him, at any cost. That part of me was exerting a dangerous pull on me.
And then there was always the odd possibility that something else entirely was going on.
Oh come on, Rich. When people go to hotel rooms there's only one thing going on.
I cursed my bad luck.
I didn't think I could continue the deception with Tennile. Putting the spyware on her phone had been bad enough, but it had been in the name of catching her. For some reason this seemed not as bad as continuing to watch her.
I had caught her in her lie. And now I needed to talk to her about it.
Anything else would be purely... wrong.
I considered getting something from Jiang's as I drove past it, but I decided not to. By now, Tennile should be home.
The wild excitement in my stomach turned on me, and it hardened into a knot. Now I had to confront her.
7: C ONFRONTATION
Tennile was right behind me, so I had hardly any time to pace in the house, thinking over everything I had just seen and second-guessing myself, alternating between fury and believing there must be some rational explanation.
When she entered the house, her distraction was evident, even if not a hair was out of place. She turned on the lights in the kitchen absent-mindedly, not even seeming to realize that something was amiss, that I was standing around in the dark with only the stove light on. Just standing there, waiting for her.
She set her bag, a kind of fashionable briefcase-bag, on a stool, still staring vacantly even as she greeted me. “Hi,” she said.
Nothing more.
I scrutinized her face, trying to figure out what was beneath her distracted stare. Did she feel guilty? Was she thinking of telling me about her misdeeds? Was she calculating something devious, even more betrayal? Had I seen her breaking things off with Shane and now she regretted it?
But her thoughts were unknowable. She was a good actress, and she was a collected person. The fact that she even looked distracted was extremely uncommon for her.
Anger flared up inside of me.
“How was your meeting?” I said, and my tone was venomous.
Tennile shrugged, lifting a glass with water in it from the table. “You know. A meeting.”
“Who was this with?” I asked.
Her eyes lifted to meet mine. “You know I can't tell you that,” she said. She gave me a smile, a strange one that I couldn't read.
“But a client?” I pressed.
The penny dropped. Tennile's cool facade fell like a curtain, and a dark look was behind it. Her eyes narrowed and her pupils dilated, alert to the danger in my voice. I knew something. And she knew it now.
She shrugged again and looked down at the water, running her slender finger over the rim. In spite of my irritation, the gesture was incredibly erotic. “Yeah, of course a client. What kind of question is that?”
My heart kicked at my chest and my stomach went ice-cold.
“Where did you meet?” I said, my voice edgy.
Tennile pressed her lips together for a moment.“What do you mean, 'where did we meet?'”
“You know. Did you meet at the office, or go get drinks?”
I enjoyed the guilt playing over her face, the fear that streaked across her cheek as a red blush. She was weighing her options now, wondering what I had on her, wondering how much truth to tell me.
What a lying bitch, I thought. The idea flew out of my head as quickly as I thought it.
Still, I loved her.
“Why would you ask that?” she said, a beat far too late, her voice trembling.
I slid around the counter toward her. I would be lying if I didn't say that her discomfort was giving me an intense thrill, no matter what it was that she had done.
“You know, I hear that there's this place on Seventh that is absolutely fantastic. It's some Cuban place. Sort of tacky decor, with the fish tanks and all that.”
I watched her face as she tried to keep it all in place: her eyes, her neutral expression, the color of her skin. But heat flashed up over her cheeks that I could feel even where I stood. Her chest moved rapidly, and her eyes remained on her fork, that she was endlessly, mindlessly twirling in her noodles.
Her lips trembled.
My own heart was beating loudly into my ears, the sound of it drowning out the silence that had come over us.
Would she lie again? She seemed to be searching for a lie, the right lie, feeling out how much I knew, hoping this was all just a coincidence.
But she did the unexpected, and turned toward me abruptly. As she lifted her eyes to meet mine, they overflowed with tears that had obviously been building as she stood there.
“I'm so sorry,” she said. “I... I'm just glad you know. I can't... I don't know what to do anymore.”
She shook her head and covered her face with both hands.
I returned to my stool and sat down, stunned. So there it was.
My wife had just admitted to cheating on me.
I wished I had more of a game plan. I wished I felt like a man should feel: purely angry. I wished I didn't have that other feeling lurking around, confusing me.
What now?
“Did he tell you? Is that how you found out?” Tennil
e sobbed.
She dropped her hands and wiped a tear from under her eye.
I let my jaw drop open, planning to be done with the nasty part of my own business. No, I found out because I tapped your phone -
But then the oddity of the question surfaced in my mind.
Why would Shane do that?
Why would he tell me?
There was more to this story than what I thought.
Tennile wiped another tear from her eye, looking upward, trying to save her mascara. “This is what I should have done from the beginning. Because now...” She looked at me. “I didn't want you to know, and now I'm just in... too deep.” She was meandering around in her thoughts, confessing to something, but not what I thought. She became angry, suddenly, and mumbled, “And then he goes and fucking tells you anyway.”
I was losing the thread.
She shook her head. “What a fucker.”
And then she sobbed.
I didn't know what else to do so I let her fall into my chest and cry.
“Oh God,” she wailed. “It's such a mess!”
She began to sob so uncontrollably – and this is so unlike Tennile that it frightened me – that in spite of myself I stroked her hair.
“Look,” I found myself saying. “We'll get through this.”
I didn't actually know anymore what “this” was, but I did feel sure we could get through it.
Couldn't we?
Tennile made a sound that was terrible. “No. You don't know... God, you can't possibly know what I've found out. What I've done. It's all...” She turned to face the wall, and she put her hand to her mouth. “I'm going to be disbarred,” she said vacantly.
I stared at her.
She shook her head. “Any way you look at it it's bad. Either I face all of that ridicule, lose my chances, forever, at any kind of reputable firm... or I... God.” She reached for my hand and looked at me desperately.
“What?” I said, without thinking.
This conversation had definitely taken an abrupt turn to a bad place.
She shook her head again. More tears. “I just didn't know what to do. And now look, the thing I most didn't want to happen has happened and I'm in this mess so deep. It was all for nothing.”
Nila's Long Con: A Hotwife Adventure Page 8