CHAPTER 6
She had seen Toby talking to Ron. Sure, he was facing away from him, looking at her, but he had his head turned slightly and was speaking low, so his voice would reach Ron. And whatever he said, it made Ron’s head snap up, his eyes look for her reflection on the sofa, and a strange expression take hold of his face.
Heather looked at her fingers. She had been almost sober at one point, and now she was drunk again. When she was less so, the whole evening had seemed like the actions of another woman. Almost hard to believe they had happened to her.
By her. She had done them.
But now she was here, and she had slipped onto the couch seat so that Ron would sit next to her. She could picture the rest of the evening playing out, Toby watching with his jealous, mad eyes, while she flirted with Ron. What would she let him do? It wasn’t even so much that Ron was all that attractive to her: sure, he was young, good-looking, a good dancer. He was dumb as rocks, but what did that matter? She was only doing what she was doing because the idea of Toby watching her, burning up with desire, was appealing to her.
It came to her like an epiphany, as she watched Ron approaching: she liked driving Toby wild. It was fun, in a deeply troubling way, to feel another guy’s hands on her body, and there was the thrill of the illicit, the un-composed, the totally inappropriate behavior that was so far outside of what she
normally did, how she normally behaved. But the real thrill came from thinking about herself as Toby would see her: being touched by another man, letting someone else touch her body while he watched and waited to see if she would come back to him.
It was a wildly drunk thought, and she knew it, but sometimes those thoughts were the clearest.
Ron had a smirk on his face as he approached. Heather gave Toby another glance, but he was studiously watching the political debaters in the middle of the room.
“So,” Ron said, sitting next to her. He handed her a bottle. “These were the last ones I could get. Your husband there is going for some more.”
She looked up to see Toby leaving while Ron emptied the contents into her plastic cup. “You want a mixer? I think I saw -”
Heather shook her head. Ron had turned to face her, his hand on her knee. He was stroking her from the sides of her thigh inward, fingers light on her skin, tickling a little until they met at her kneecap and then moved downward again. And up. He edged a little further up with each stroke, and each descent and ascent of his fingertips sent refreshed, concentrated arousal through her body.
Ron’s voice was just above a whisper. “So are you, like, swingers or something? You and…?”
“Toby?” Heather asked, taking a sip of the burning, straight vodka in her cup. She didn’t need it, so she let some of it leak from her lips back into the cup. Her voice was steady but she felt like she was on a boat in a storm, flailing for the railing. Ron’s hand was halfway up her thigh now, burning, the heat traveling along her leg and licking at her cunt like a flame. “Not exactly,” she managed to say.
She wasn’t a swinger. That was ridiculous. She didn’t know what she was, but that wasn’t it.
She was impressed with this line, because it was true and sounded good. Confident. Mysterious. Toby would be back soon, maybe see this guy feeling her up, and then they would decide what to do… surely she would just go back to her room with him, laugh about this, and have hot sex.
“So what’s the arrangement?” Ron purred. He leaned on his arm next to her head and moved in closer. The fingers of his left hand were in her hair, his attention on her lips and her breasts. Her nipple panged, the ghostly feel of yet another man’s lips on her breast becoming visceral. Her nipples hardened, and she felt like her body was taking her mind hostage.
What’s the arrangement?
“Arrangement?” Heather said, not really thinking about the words she was saying. “Arrangement” was making its way through her mind to her conscious thoughts, but it had an uphill battle through the flesh-bound cravings that were eating her alive.
“He said you had an arrangement,” Ron purred, and he dropped his lips to her neck to nuzzle her. His lips were warm, and the muscle beneath her skin was massaged to fiery life. She was being attacked from both directions: her neck, her leg, even the follicles of her hair.
Arrangement.
As Ron’s hand traveled further up her leg, precariously close to finding her wet panties, probably already encountering the sticky cum mingled with her own juices in rough patches dried to her thighs, probably already feeling for himself that she was some kind of slut, Heather fought to think.
Did they have an arrangement? And if they did, what was it?
She looked back at the bar, and Toby was gone. Surely he had seen Ron next to her, surely he knew that if he left her there she was bound to do something over the line with him.
Arrangement.
A flare of anger erupted in her chest. They had no arrangement. They weren’t swingers, they had no rules or assurances, no guarantee of what would happen. And what the hell was Toby doing, leaving her here?
Ron’s lips were nearing her mouth, and she let him kiss her, her eyes open. Ron’s were closed, his kiss insistent, assured. He was kissing her the way men kiss women they know will respond to them. The kiss was entitled, a prelude to something else that Ron apparently believed he could get.
“What did he say this arrangement was?” Heather asked, when Ron let her mouth go for a breath.
Ron smiled. His confidence faltered. “He didn’t,” he told her, brushing his lips over hers. Teasing, igniting something in the lowest parts of her abdomen. She could actually feel her clit pulse in the wet liquid around it. Ron’s fingers moved up her leg, found her panties. He sucked in his breath.
A flurry of thinking happened inside Heather's mind, and she put a hand out to Ron’s chest. Her thoughts were totally unclear, she had never concluded anything, but this felt like the right direction. Ron’s heart thumped against his sculpted chest, a hot and beating need beneath his skin.
“Not here,” she told him. He went in for another kiss, and she put her finger to his lips, stroking them to keep him heated, a gesture of incubation, meant to put him on hold while she straightened out her plan. His fingers beneath her skirt played with the sticky wet fabric of her panties and she let him for a moment, enjoying the feel of it, the uniqueness of each man’s exploring fingers. Then she stood up, pushing his hand away, bringing her drink with her.
She downed it, thinking she would need more liquid courage, or less inhibition, for whatever it was she was about to do. She turned and bent to scoop up the tiny handbag she had with her – in it she had red lipstick, her phone, fifty dollars, and their room key. She slipped the phone out as Ron took advantage of how she was standing to slip his hand up her leg.
As she moved her finger over the screen and rose back up to standing, Ron got his head beneath her dress and brushed his lips over her thigh just below the line of her right buttock.
Heather looked up. The political debate had paused, while they watched her, and looks of vague confusion, judgment, and surprise began to creep drunkenly over their faces.
This annoyed her, so she put a hand on her hip and contorted her face into an expression of careless contempt. Yeah, and?
She pushed against Ron’s head, laughing, as she typed a message for Toby. It was garbled by the movement of her body, and Ron began to stand up so she hurried to send it before he could see it.
Did you tell this guy we have an arrangement?
That wasn’t, ultimately, what was sent from her phone, and she knew it, but Toby was a smart guy, had enough context to figure it out. She dropped the phone into her bag and turned to Ron. “You have a cigarette?” she purred.
She was buying time, waiting for Toby to respond. The easiest thing for her to do, she realized she had decided, was to punt this back at Toby. He could make the decision. He said he wanted her to do this but she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe him.
Ron’s lips were on her shoulder now. “No cigarette,” he breathed.
“Hey,” she said, approaching the group on the bed. “Any of you guys smoke?”
Someone produced a cigarette, and they left as a group of three, Heather leading the way to the elevator. She pressed the button, stood back, feeling her loose, flirtatious movements, disbelieving the way she was acting as she smiled at Ron. All the time waiting for the quick buzz of her phone. Nothing came.
In the elevator she checked again. Then again, as they walked through a ground-floor door outside. The evening was still hot. Ron decided he wanted a cigarette, his hands were on her lower back as they smoked.
She stole away by turning her body from the two of them, to type. Still nothing from Toby. She started and deleted a few sentences, then wrote:
Okay
What did that mean?
Toby
Nothing. The third person left. She was standing with Ron, half a cigarette still in her hand. She’d only had a drag. She brought it to her mouth and inhaled it, noticing that she did it with a deliberate thrust at sexiness.
“So what’s the deal?” Ron said, pushing her back into the wall, his hands on her hips. Heather smiled to demur, dropped the cigarette, gave Ron her full attention. The seconds ticked by and Toby did not reply.
The deal, it would appear, was that Toby was not going to make the decision for her. Ron looked from side to side and pressed against her, a hand wandering under her halter. “Are you one of those, what-happens-in-Vegas-stays-in-Vegas couples?”
She didn’t know. But she didn’t like the idea of Ron thinking she didn’t know. She smiled mysteriously and Ron put his mouth against hers. Adobe finish behind her crumbled and trickled down her back.
Ron’s mouth moved along her jawline and then up to her ear. His hands were everywhere now, too many points of attack for her to monitor and defend, and she felt her body giving in to him, her grip on her thoughts losing the battle.
“Or does he like to watch?” Ron whispered. “I’m cool with that.”
His breath felt deliciously foreign on her ear. He was doing something with her nipple that no man had ever done before. Against her hips, she could feel the hard outline of his cock, and it seemed larger than Toby’s.
Her recurring masturbation fantasy bubbled up again in her mind: the blindfold, the tied hands. The curiously arousing idea that she might not be able to identify her husband’s cock from another man’s.
And then there was this guy. She would never see him again, never have to answer for her sins, never face him sober. She could ask him to do things like that to her, whether Toby was there or not, and never have to deal with any of it again.
“Sometimes he likes to watch,” she said quietly into Ron’s ear. “And sometimes he doesn’t. But I can tell you what I want.”
Ron pulled away from her, and she felt a corkscrew of power twisting through the center of her body. She had Ron’s attention as fully and completely as she had ever had anyone’s, and the thrill of it was delicious.
“I want you,” she said, gaining a bizarre kind of confidence with each word, “to take that tie off and blindfold me with it. And then, you’re going to take off my dress, and tie my hands up, and do whatever you want with me.” Her pussy throbbed. She leaned forward, a boldness she had never possessed in this particular arena of her life gripping her. “But I hope,” she added in a whisper that was throaty and low, gravelly because of the puff of cigarette, “that you’ll make me suck your cock.”
She turned, feeling taller than she was, electricity traveling up and down her spine, and neatly removed her key card to open the door.
By the elevator, Ron’s erection harder than ever against the small of her back, his hands moving all over her body, he breathed against the back of her neck. “And hubby?”
It sounded like “Toby.” She flicked her phone out, her lips a sudden straight line, and, finding no messages from Toby, something inside of her clicked. Well, fine, she thought.
“We’ll see.”
They were in the elevator making out so long that the doors reopened. Heather laughed, and Ron broke away from her to punch them closed. “What floor?” he asked.
A chain of events flashed through Heather's mind: waking up with Ron in her room in the light of morning, having to face him. Forget it.
“Your floor,” she said.
Ron looked crestfallen, and he started to explain what Heather suddenly remembered for herself: his date was passed out in there. Words began to come out of his mouth, but Heather leveled him with a look and shook her head slowly.
He took his phone out. The elevator doors opened again and he held it out of the shaft to get better reception. “Those guys aren’t using their room right now. Hang on.”
They stepped out of the elevator and Heather took her phone out again, disbelief trying to seep into her raging body when she saw that Toby hadn’t written back. Ron was talking on his phone, a short conversation, a glance in her direction to see if she was listening. She was leaning against the wall, a foot crossed over the other, and she leveled him with another glance. You solve it, her expression said.
She liked how that felt. She had all the power, and she could make everyone do whatever she wanted.
Except Toby.
Okay so I’m going
She typed. Then she dropped her phone into her purse.
Ron was putting his away as well. “Sorted out,” he told her.
They went into the elevator, and he pressed level two. They stepped out and Ron pressed her against the wall next to the elevator. “Stay right here, I’m getting the key.”
Heather leaned against the wall. She looked at her phone again, still nothing.
She brought up Toby’s number to the phone. Her fingers hovered over the call icon, while she weighed everything that she could.
But if Toby was going to answer the phone, she thought, he could just as well answer a text.
So there wasn’t any need to call him.
Ron appeared, loping like a wolf. “Got it,” he growled, and slid his hand around the back of her neck, his fingers tugging slightly at her hair. His other hand was loosening his tie, his fingers working the knot, the implication of what he was preparing for making Heather’s pussy throb.
Guilt stabbed her stomach with the rise of the elevator, but it was brief. Maybe it was just the elevator.
Fourth floor. Ron had his tie undone, he whipped it off his neck. Heather smiled at him.
So Toby had lost his chance. That was his problem.
“What room is this?” she said, taking the card from Ron’s hands as they stumbled down the hall to a t-intersection.
“Four-twenty-one,” Ron said, looking at the card, pulling one arm behind her, ready to tie her up.
She slipped away from him, pulling the card from his hand. As she walked she tried to key the message into her phone by typing surreptitiously, one hand stuffed in her bag and propping it open with her wrist. It didn’t work, it was garble.
She turned on Ron, remembering her power over him. He had her wrist in his grip, she held her other hand up with one finger sharply pointed at the ceiling. He grinned as she took out her phone, typing carefully.
421
“Just in case,” she murmured. “He wants to join.” She lifted her eyes to gauge Ron’s reaction.
He looked as if he could go either way about it, but Heather sensed this was probably just her female interpretation of a man’s reaction. It was a commonly traded fact among all the women and men that she knew that guys with a hard dick “this” close to having sex wouldn’t say no to anything you proposed. Men agreed this was true, to a man.
Women tended not to believe it, but here they were.
She leaned against the door and dropped her phone into her purse. The ease with which the lie left her lips surprised her, and made her swell with the same confidence and power she had felt downstairs.
“We like to a play a game sometimes,” she purred, the deception effortless on her lips. She waited for Ron’s body to perk up and electrify, for his interest to narrow to what she would say next, before she leaned even closer. “We like to see if I can tell which cock is his, if I’m blindfolded.”
She put her finger in her mouth to emphasize her point, felt a rush as Ron’s cock spasmed in his pants and kicked against her leg. Then she dropped it, smiling, and felt the outline of his dick with her hand. “It should be easy,” she told him – and it would; he was thicker and longer than Toby, and she could feel that through the fabric - “But it’s a fun game anyway.”
A pulse of his cock, the key card dropping into the slot.
“You okay with that?” she asked him.
And then, proving every conversation she had ever had about this topic, of men being okay with anything, Ron pushed the door open, spinning her around to tie up her hands with his tie.
He was okay with it.