CHAPTER 1
Toby’s scowl made almost three bulges of skin in his forehead as he surveyed the dim street to the left and right of his truck.
Force of habit.
There were parts of town where you could leave your vehicle unattended, provided you had enough cash on hand to buy your tools back from whoever had stolen them. It was the price of doing business in certain parts of town, and Toby didn’t even get worked up about it anymore: he just carried the cash.
There were other places in this city where leaving his truck parked on the road could possibly invalidate his insurance policy. At first glance, the area around Salty’s Haven gave off a bit of that vibe.
The neon sign (reading only “Saltys,” no apostrophe) was partially illuminated, the first “s” a bright, flamingo color that drained away to grayish-pink by the end of the word, reminding anyone who looked at it of stale meat. The outline of the martini glass that followed the final “s” was more corpse-colored, once having glowed blue. The tropical color scheme, faded or not, was spectacularly out-of-place in the Midwestern climate, below freezing for six months of the year. As if to punctuate the joke, someone had set a palm tree, made of plastic and tinsel, next to the entranceway.
“Hooooly shit,” Toby said under his breath.
He looked at his phone again, re-reading the text message from Heather: yes, this was the place. Salty’s Haven on 17th and Sheridan.
The picture began to look less ominous as he crossed the street: the cars in the parking lot were new, but affordable, family cars. A sign of respectability. If the cars were old, this was a shit part of town. And if the cars were new but unaffordable, tinted and tricked out, then it was a good idea to – in the parlance of some inhabitants - “bounce.”
Toby opened the door to Salty’s Haven and relaxed even more. The clientele as evidence, Salty’s was clearly one of those bars that delivered the ambiance of a dive-bar to suburban mid-career “suits” who worked in the office parks several blocks away.
Toby scanned the room quickly and located his wife among a throng of loud, drunk women. He typed her a message to let her know he was there. She was caught up in a story, and if there was one thing Heather hated, it was to be interrupted. He decided to wait at the bar.
The bartender was a young, brown-skinned, good-looking guy. Clean-shaven and athletic in appearance. He approached Toby right away, with one wary eye on the table of women, who were being fairly rowdy and looked like they might boil over into table dancing or stripping. Something about the kid’s haircut and police-face said he didn’t let that kind of noise go on in his bar.
He sized Toby up with a quick up-and-down. The two men had an instant impression of each other, both athletes who would recognize the other as such. They were both stars of soccer and hockey, wily forwards who relied on skill and speed, but Toby had the small paunch of a man who didn’t take it, or himself, quite as seriously anymore.
The bartender was still ripped. Give it time, Toby thought.
“W’can I get you?” the bartender asked, leaning on the bar with his arms spread open wide, an unconscious demonstration of his physical prowess.
Toby leaned on the bar. He was past his own prime, starting to feel it in his knees, had a rotator cuff injury that would never heal, and he couldn’t spread his arms out like that anymore. He felt the electric tremor of competitiveness kicking around in his gut. He’d have liked to have shown this kid a thing or two on the ice or the field, but it was eleven o’clock on a Thursday night in Toby’s world: a babysitter was being paid for, his wife was drunk, and he had to be up at five in the morning.
Toby turned on what he was calling his middle-aged man charm instead. “I just need your finest, cheapest beer, good man,” he said, in a jovial tone he had cultivated for situations like this one.
Probably because they were cut from the same cloth, even if it had been tailored twenty years apart, the kid smiled and the rapport became instantly friendly. “A Budweiser man?” he suggested. “Or MGD?”
“Coldest,” Toby said. He was also a man who was long past debating the qualities of shitty beers. A peal of laughter, of the kind unique to groups of middle-aged women who have stayed out way too late on a weekday with too much wine, erupted from the direction of another table, where yet another group of ladies was cloistered.
“Ladies’ night?” Toby asked the bartender, who grinned as he removed the cap of an MGD bottle with an expert motion.
“This place is right by the hospital, man,” the kid grinned. “Medical staff, admin ladies. Nurses. Line ‘em up, knock ‘em down.” He shook his head and looked down at the bottle of MGD, as if disappointed in it suddenly. “You want a glass for that?”
Toby swiped up the beer and shook his head at the same time. He took a generous swig and swiveled to face the table where his wife was sitting. His phone was in his left hand, ready to send a second message and get her out of here without having to be introduced, in turn, to each of the crowing birds Heather was entertaining.
But Heather was already standing up, an unusual smile attempting to crack through the typical seriousness of her mouth. It was clear from her smile, her bright eyes, and the slightest wobble as she took a first step, that she had consumed too much alcohol. For her, that probably meant two glasses of wine. Five foot six (eight in heels), very slender and well-toned, Heather’s body size was easily saturated by a single glass of wine. Added to that, her generally uptight nature forbade drinking in most situations. Heather was a cheap, but infrequent, drunk.
Toby smiled over his beer as he took a swig, thinking of what he would say to her. He was annoyed by having to come pick her up, but Heather’s tipsy walking and loose smile changed his sentiments immediately. Maybe this was one of those nights that Heather would let loose and be fun.
It could even lead, he dared think, to sex.
On a Thursday night.
But Heather was up to more than simply being drunk this evening. Making a sharp turn toward the bar when she reached it, stopping far short of where Toby was sitting, she leaned provocatively on the bar, one leg crossed over the other. She gave a flirtatious toss of her shoulder-length blond hair, and the bartender dropped Toby like he was dead weight.
Smiling, obviously flirting, he approached Toby’s wife. “Whatcha need, pretty lady?”
Toby rolled his eyes and took another swig of beer with his eyes closed.
When he opened them, the bartender and Heather were leaning toward each other over the bar, their heads almost touching. The bartender said something, and Heather’s mouth turned up in a smile just before a tinkling laugh spilled from her lips.
The sight of it was so jarring that Toby misjudged the distance to the bar and set his beer down with a too-loud crunch. Neither one of them looked over. Heather tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and smiled at the bartender.
Toby’s cock thickened with a single pulse as a slow-burning sensation, equal parts jealousy and arousal, filled him as though it had been poured down his throat like hard liquor.
Had she not seen him sitting here? he wondered. A slew of partial thoughts burned through him, settling in his chest and his cock, fluttering like butterflies in both places.
The bartender pushed himself away from Heather and went around the bar to fetch something. Heather turned to look at Toby point-blank, finding him with her eyes, right where she expected him to be. She had seen him, all right.
Mystified, Toby stared at her.
“What brings you here?” she asked, putting her hand on her hip and leaning against the bar as she rolled her body to face him.
Heather was wearing a charcoal-gray suit with a blue blouse. The top button was undone, something Toby noticed right away because having a top button undone was not Heather’s thing. Heather used a lint brush every morning, and they didn’t even have a pet. Buttons did not get loose on Heather's clothing unless Heather let them get loose. Which she did not do.
It wasn’t a lewd open button; most women, in fact, would wear their blouse opened that far, but on Heather, it looked sloppy. The blouse folded down on the button side, revealing a glimpse of the curve of her small, taut breast.
Toby laughed, a low, almost adversarial laugh. “What are you doing?” he asked.
Heather emitted a sound, a kind of sharp laugh that disintegrated into a lopsided smile, tucked the same strand of her hair back around her ear, and shook her head. “I don’t knoooow,” she purred.
Toby’s gut went cold as Heather stepped closer to him, sliding an empty glass along with her. “I had three glasses of wine,” she whispered loudly. “And a gross cocktail.”
Toby was just making a gesture with his head, narrowing his eyes in confusion and giving a nod of disbelieving approval, when the bartender popped back with a bottle of red wine and a glass. “One Shiraz for the lady,” he said charmingly. A smile was plastered on his face but he was looking back and forth from Heather to Toby, a definitive glimmer of possessiveness in his eyes.
Heather was amused by this, because she gave her shiny hair a shake and smiled.
It was at this specific moment that Toby glanced at her hand and remembered that her wedding ring had been taken in for repair. Her bare fingers were long, neatly manicured, and only the slightest pale shadow of the ring marred her finger. She looked, quite suddenly, very young and very available. Toby’s chest felt tighter, and his cock strained against the confines of his jeans.
Heather extended a hand to Toby as though he were a stranger. “Heather,” she said.
Flummoxed, Toby took her hand, and shook it limply in his confusion. “Coop,” he said. Coop was the inescapable nickname of all men with the last name Cooper, and even Heather had a tendency to use it when she was around his friends, who may have been hard-pressed to remember his given name if asked.
Heather’s eyes glimmered, and she smiled for him, as if he were precisely what he wasn’t: a stranger in a bar. She grinned, and it was sexy. “Chris,” she said, leaving her eyes on Toby for just a moment too long before swinging them toward the bartender. “Thank you for the wine. Put it on the tab. Very nice to meet you, Coop.” She gave Toby a sidelong, very sexy glance, and rolled away from the bar. The two men watched her leaving: a tight, small ass in a dark, shape-hugging skirt that came to just above her knees.
Toby’s mouth was falling open, so he closed it by taking a sip of his beer. Just moments before, he had wanted to get home, but now he was intrigued by whatever it was that his wife was doing and didn’t mind sitting there to watch it.
Whatever it was.
What the fuck was it?
The bartender leaned on the bar, close enough for Toby to hear him over loud top-40’s music that had very recently begun but which Toby only heard just then. “Hospital admin,” he appraised. “Line ‘em up, knock ‘em down.”
Toby looked at the kid incredulously. “Seems a little old for you,” he said.
The athletic swagger erupted inside the bartender, and he stood up to his full height. He was an average height, maybe 5’ 10,” but his abdomen was flat and his muscles were hard in all the right places. He shook his head as if he almost lamented that it was this easy for him to reel the ladies in. He lifted a glass overhead and slipped it onto the rack. “Even better. That one, she’s a suit. Uptight as hell when she first got here.” He leaned back down, closer to Toby. “But those are the hottest ones. Uptight, hasn’t had a good lay in years, a little tipsy... she’s putty in my hands.”
Toby raised an eyebrow. “Oh yeah?”
It was an inappropriate response, and he knew that, but he thought it would be funny when he finally collected his uptight wife and took her home. If there was one word that least described Heather, it was “putty.”
More like steel-re-inforced concrete, buddy, he thought.
The bartender nodded sagely, and then, grinning, leaned on the bar again to confide in Toby. “This whole group of ’em, they’re hospital girls...” He pointed, not even trying to hide it, to each one in turn. “Hospital - slept with her - admin, admin – boned her - hospital, slept with her, her too, admin, that’s who I was after next... and then you have…” his finger ticked to the right and pointed toward Heather. “The Suit. Sales, probably. She’s got a corporate credit card and no limit. Got a little too drunk, see how her hair’s out of place, but you can see…. it isn’t ever like that, usually. She is lookin’ for a good time.”
Toby stared at the bartender. What an arrogant ass.
Although he had to admit – bitterly – that a large portion of the bartender’s assessment appeared to be correct. All but the last part, of course.
Toby finished his beer and flicked it toward the bartender with the back of his fingers, pondering his final comment. She’s lookin’ for a good time.
“Oh, yeah,” he said idly, peeling the label on his beer. “How you know that?”
The bartender rose up, giving a short laugh. “I’ve seen it all from back here,” he said arrogantly, removing a glass from the racks above the bar to wipe it. “Women like that, even if they’re a little older – hell, especially if they’re a little older – you always try to get one like that to go home with you.”
“Uh-huh,” Toby said, half-sarcastically. “And why’s that?”
The bartender smiled at him. “Well, she’s fucking hot, for one thing. And she’s got no ring, but there’s a little tan line on her finger.” He nodded and lifted the cleaned glass to the rack. “Divorced,” he said happily. “Or cheating.” He gave Heather’s table a glance. “She doesn’t seem like the cheating type, but… I could be wrong.”
Toby tapped his beer. “You grab me another one?” he asked.
As Chris-The-Bartending-Asshole pulled a bottle from the fridge, Toby looked at his wife. She gave him a glance – long enough not to be accidental, short enough to be secretive. It made him even harder, though he wasn’t sure why.
Or what Heather could possibly be up to.
“What if she’s just sent her ring out to be cleaned?” Toby mused, when the bartender came back with his beer and set it on the table. Toby glanced at him for his answer.
The kid shrugged and wiped his hands, smiling confidently. “Sure,” he said. “I’ve met a lot of ladies sent their ring out for cleaning, man.” He adjusted a glass. “I’m pretty sure that one’s coming home with me.”
Stunning.
Toby took a sip of his beer. “Oh, yeah?” he said, amusement and competitiveness scratching around inside of him. “You think you stand a chance?”
He could see the kid bristle with the same competitive itch as himself, but he was also young, and the hothead in him had been triggered. “What, you think I don’t?” he said incredulously.
“She seems out of your league,” Toby told him, marveling at how easy it was to get these young guys riled up. He could actually see the kid puffing up like a peacock.
The bartender grinned at Toby, but it was the grin of combat. “Oh, she does, does she?”
Toby nodded.
The bartender licked his lower lip and folded his arms on the bartop, which required him to spread his legs apart. He wagged a finger in Toby’s direction. “Your tab says I get her number.”
“Huh,” Toby said, getting in the spirit of things. “That’s not much of a challenge.”
The bartender gave him a look of disbelief. “No, pops? What would impress you, then?”
Toby gave it some thought. “For my tab?” he asked.
The bartender nodded.
“And I do what… pay you twice if I lose?”
Another nod.
“Not a very risky bet,” Toby commented.
“Good for you, because you’ll lose it,” he said, tone joking, eyes full of the amplified seriousness that all men in their twenties seemed to have about anything requiring even a drop of testosterone.
“You gotta get some kind of physical interaction,” Toby said, suppressing a smile. “Before I leave, and you have to give me proof.”
It should be interjected here that Toby, like most men of his ilk, was drawn to gambling like a moth to a flame. Chris The Bartender was the same kind of guy, only younger, and so they were settling into the language and trade of gambling men. Toby wasn’t actually thinking about what he was saying, any more than a sailor is thinking about a knot when he ties it. It would only come to him later that he was betting his wife.
The bartender spread his arms wide and bent them at the elbows to lower his head close to Toby. “You see that table she’s at? I’ve fucked two of those chicks. In this bathroom.”
He waved a hand toward a passageway that evidently led to the bathrooms.
“No shit,” Toby said. He was fucking with this guy now, but there was an element of seriousness brewing in his own dark places. That serious element was inflating his cock, which pulsed painfully against his zipper as he thought of his wife pressed up against a bathroom wall with Chris’s cock sawing at the juicy gash between her legs.
Toby smiled. “What’s your top shelf whiskey?” he asked.
The bartender pushed off the bar, his eyes locked on Toby’s, his mouth turned in a smile, and fetched the whiskey without saying anything more.
Challenge accepted.
Toby accepted the whiskey, smiling, but when Chris turned away to attend to some other customers, the sky fell down on him.
What had he just done? Made a bet with a total stranger over whether the stranger could fuck his wife in a bar bathroom? Was that the bet he had just made?
He glanced over at Heather, who was chatting with the dwindling group. She was leaning on her elbow, her stray lock loose, her long legs crossed, the slit of her skirt revealing her leg all the way to her upper thigh.
Almost, Toby thought, as if she were inviting something.
Interesting threads of guilt, cold jealousy, and excitement wound around his insides. He took out his phone and typed a message to Heather.
This kid at the bar just made a bet with me that he can get you to fuck him in the bathroom
he typed. His finger hovered over the “send” icon (I am sending this to my wife, what am I doing?) and then, as if his hand had been taken control of by someone else, jerked to press it.
He watched Heather as she slid her phone across the table to read the message. Her face remained expressionless as she scanned the screen, looked at the woman she was talking to, and then discreetly shifted her gaze in Toby’s direction. Her lips tightened, but turned up in a wry smile.
Toby’s chest felt like it was being crushed – in a good way, the way a pretty girl you have a crush on could squeeze the air out of you just by walking by. The feeling was one he hadn’t had for a long time, but he could taste the familiarity of it, working through his system like a drug.
Heather typed something on her phone, and it was almost as if he could feel each finger that touched her screen poking at his heart and his balls simultaneously.
Really. What an ass.
Both of you.
Toby read the message and smiled, but a new message was materializing beneath it, and it stopped his heart right in his chest when it appeared.
What’s the bet?
Toby’s hands were shaking slightly. He looked over at Heather, who was feigning absorption in a conversation with the ladies at her table, her fingers stroking her wine glass seductively. He typed. Sent. Stared at his screen.
My tab
It took Heather a long time to respond, and Toby had a feeling he had pissed her off. His head was swimming: what the hell was he playing at? His stomach contorted into electrifying twists. Of course, Heather wasn’t going to sleep with some bartender, he thought, trying to be reasonable. She would laugh it off here, and there would be hell to pay in the car on the way home. Rightfully so. He could almost hear Heather now: “I mean, what kind of man barters his wife at a bar?”
He stole a glance at Heather’s table. She was looking at him, her mouth tight but smiling, a curiously mischievous expression on her face.
She started to type, carelessly, with one finger, as if she couldn’t be bothered to answer a text. Toby watched her reply materialize on his screen.
So you want to gamble your wife for an MGD…
He looked over at her. She was smiling pointedly at him, and on her face was an expression similar to the one on the bartender’s face when he made the bet. A competitive, challenging look. All in good fun. A smirk. Heather made sure he was looking at her and rolled her eyes.
I did just order a whiskey…
he typed.
Heather smiled as she read the last message.
Toby was overcome by a sudden desire to make Chris look like more of an asshole than himself.
He said you’re an easy mark
No ring, probably divorced
...Hospital staff…
Heather added before he could look up.
He nodded at his screen and smiled. He added:
Line ‘em up, knock ‘em down he said
When he turned to look at Heather she had the phone in her fingers, and was looking at her screen with amusement. The bartender finished serving drinks to the batch of customers – some worn-looking ladies in scrubs who smelled like ashtrays – and spun around to clean something up at his drink station. Toby slid his phone into his pocket but stopped to turn it toward him when it pulsed with an incoming message.
Guess if it’s for a good cause.
He IS pretty hot
He was frozen for a moment by the chill that ran down his spine, the second or so that it took for his reasoning mind to kick in while his gut instincts seized him by the insides and made his blood pound in his ears.
It was a joke, he told himself. His wife was not going to fuck a bartender in the bathroom of Salty’s Haven.
But his heart was beating like maybe she would: strong kicks that felt like ice picks, all the blood gushing into his cock and staying there, straining against the physical realities of his flesh.
In the time it took him to un-freeze, Heather had stood up and crossed the small room toward the bar. She had a grin on her face, an unusual expression Toby wasn’t accustomed to seeing and truthfully had never expected to see on Heather's face. She didn’t so much walk to the bar as saunter, her hips moving sensually side to side, the loosened neck of her blouse shifting precariously over her bosom, promising but failing to deliver a glimpse of her breast down to the silky bra that cupped it.
The bartender gave Toby a haughty glance as he moved over toward where Heather was approaching, sliding a clean white rag along with him. If Heather found him to be “an ass,” she kept it hidden in her face.
She looked, quite suddenly, like a different woman. Toby watched as though he were the audience at a movie theater, and Heather was a woman who was not his wife, as she smiled at the bartender and leaned against the bar.
The bartender leaned over to speak to her, and the two put their heads very close together. Toby couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Heather’s expression reminded him of a poised viper. She was going to say something seductive, he decided, and then kill his hopes with a well-placed dagger. I’d love to hook up with you, she would purr in his ear. But see that man over there? That’s my husband.
He waited, smiling as if it had already played out as he imagined, but Heather was leaning in to speak to the bartender for far too long. The kid was still smiling arrogantly, and his arrogance only seemed to increase the longer she stood there.
Toby’s heart had another moment of motionless panic when Heather lifted her finger to the kid’s chin, placed it beneath his jaw, and said something to him with her lips very close to his mouth.
Close enough that bartender-kid would have felt the warmth of her breath, smelled the scent of her lipstick, imagined the taste of her lips vividly enough to make his dick hard.
There was no punch line. Heather leaned toward his ear, her finger still on his chin, and said something into it that made the bartender shift his feet and drop his mouth in surprise. Heather turned away, and the surprise turned to arrogance. He made his way over to Toby and swiped at the table, humming with conceit.
Toby stole a glance at his retreating wife, punched down the growing arousal and jealousy brewing in his gut, and waited.
The bartender stole a glance in her direction before looking back at Toby, conceit in his eyes. “Looks like you’re leaving a big tip,” he said. He let out a low whistle and swiped at the table. “Tell you what though, we’re cool. That one is a… real dirty girl. Ready to jump on it. Even I didn’t see that coming.”
Toby burned inside and out. He was sure a patch of red skin was creeping from behind his ears to his face, but he couldn’t place a finger on the emotion driving it. Was he angry? Humiliated? Turned on? Jealous?
He cleared his throat. “So… you gonna tell me what she said?” he asked, trying to sound like his interest was purely of the brotherhood type.
The bartender shook his head, cleaning the bar distractedly. “I am… not even sure I can repeat it,” he said.
This answer seemed genuine. He actually seemed like he might have trouble repeating it.
Toby’s phone buzzed. He felt for it, but his eyes were on the bartender, who still seemed so impressed by whatever Heather had said to him that he didn’t know where to put his hands, his eyes, or his brain.
“C’mon,” Toby urged him. “Can’t be that good.”
“She told me,” the bartender said, looking up at him half-seriously, half-greedily, as if he had won the lottery and just couldn’t believe it yet. He paused, leaned closer, stole a glance at Heather’s table, and then whispered: “She asked me if I’d be into helping her out with something.”
Toby glared at him and didn’t speak.
“She said – and I kid you not, man, believe me even I had this gal wrong – that she wants me to taste her pussy and tell her if the pineapple juice worked.”
His eyebrows were pointed straight at the ceiling, and he gave a disbelieving laugh, a gruff, “hee-hee,” before returning to shaking his head.
Toby stared at him. “That woman,” he said, finally, hooking a thumb in his wife’s direction. “She just walked up to you and said that,” he said doubtfully.
The bartender shrugged. “Lady needs help,” he said, as if the matter were beyond his own pay grade.
Toby pulled out his phone after he walked away.
Tell me what he thought of that
A throb gripped Toby’s penis so fiercely he almost dropped his phone. His eyes jerked from the bartender to his wife to the bar and all around again. What was the game plan? What were they even doing?
I think he jizzed his pants a little
Toby wrote honestly, scarcely able to believe this conversation was occurring with his wife.
He must be in a dream, he decided. He even tested the theory by looking down at the floor, which he noticed was missing in most dreams.
A worn, thrice-painted wood floor stared back at him.
He looked back at Heather, who was sharing a meaningful glance with the bartender as he prepared some drinks.
Okay but seriously,
Toby wrote, when Heather didn’t look over at him for a full five minutes. She had finished her wine. Toby had ceased drinking the whiskey – he had only ordered it to run up his tab in a show of confidence. He felt like things were slipping slightly out of his control, like he wanted the game to end.
Sure, he might have wanted to see it play out, just as the bartender hoped it would… but Heather wasn’t doing anything more than teasing, and this guy was going to get pissed off once he figured out the game they were playing.
I think this guy is going to get pissed when he figures out what’s going on
Better go
He watched Heather reading her phone. The smile on her face felt like a kick in the balls for some reason.
Of course she had known that’s what would happen. She had probably played this game just to prove her point.
This thought provided Toby with a modicum of relief: Heather was just being regular, old Heather, and he was going to get a lecture all the way home about not wagering his wife at bars for drinks, and that was good.
That was what he wanted.
So soon?
Heather was looking at him after he read the text. He couldn’t figure out what she was getting at: was she being serious, or was she fucking with him? The reins in this game had somehow come into Heather’s hands, and if the smile on her face was anything to go by, she seemed to be… enjoying herself?
I think so, Toby typed. Guys don’t really react well to getting wound up and then disappointed
Hmmmm
Who says I’m going to disappoint him?
Toby was a machine guy. One of the things – maybe the thing he liked about machines is that they didn’t get out of his control. When things did go sideways, he was really good at rectifying them.
This felt like everything was going sideways, and Heather was some kind of rogue machine that wouldn’t come back under his control.
He pondered it for a moment. Heather was pushing the envelope, or something… it was hard to say because this wasn’t a game they had ever played before, and he had not expected her to react this way at all. Things had definitely gone into uncharted territory.
Adapt, he told himself. ROTC training was good for something.
There were two options: one, just get up and go outside, wait for Heather, make her feel bad for taking things so far.
Appealing, though not technically very fair.
And very un-technically, not what he felt like doing in his gut.
For some reason, in his gut, he had the inclination to do just the opposite. He actually had a sliver of hope that Heather would take things to the actual limit.
She would not, he knew.
But they could get close.
Now why did he want that?
Because Toby, forty years old or not, was a guy, this last line of questioning dissolved in his head like a sugar cube in hot tea. He gave a final size-up glance at the bartender, who didn’t seem like the actual fighting type, but who Toby was also fairly sure he could take down if he got too riled up.
Risks and rewards tallied themselves loosely somewhere in his mind, but he was typing long before the accounting had actually been done, probably because there was much less blood in his brain than there should be.
He stared at his phone, trying to think of what to write. Something clever, something fun, but something firm, to make his real intentions clear.
Heather was rising from her chair, standing up to her full, glorious height. Another button had somehow popped open, and now, when she moved, the shiny, clean white of her satin bra winked from behind her blouse.
She was looking at Chris, a smile on her lips. She waited until she had his eye, and then she briefly turned up the volume on her smile. She looked away; she walked toward the hallway Chris had pointed at earlier.
There was, in the world of men, no mistaking the signs. She wanted Chris to follow her, and the thing he was following her to was undeniably sexual.
Chris clapped his hands together and rubbed them, his eyebrows high, his eyes wild, looking at Toby. He touched the tip of his tongue to the center of his teeth and grinned. “Looks like somebody’s losing a bet,” he told Toby. “Gotta go wizz. You need another drink before I go, sailor?”
Toby lifted his glass. He did not.
Toby was moving his body, forming a smile, and remaining rigidly calm on the exterior, but behind this facade, his blood was churning and hot. Chris hopped over the swinging half-door to the bar, and pointed at a customer on the other side of the mirrored island. “Be right back, buddy, just have to see someone about a horse.”
Toby lifted the whiskey to his lips and looked at his reflection in the mirror.
Calm down, he told himself. Heather was not going to fuck some kid in a bathroom at Salty’s fucking Haven.
It was way too unhygienic for her.
Seconds elongated, while a burning in his chest made him feel like he was holding his breath. His cock throbbed, his ears were ringing. Part of him wanted to leap from the table and kick a door open back there, but another part of him wanted to wait in this cold puddle of jealousy and see what happened.
Nothing would, of course, but it would be… what? Okay? Nice?
Terrible. Terrible, if it did.
A minute had gone by. Nothing strange about that, Toby told himself, taking another sip of whiskey. His wife was a woman. Women took notoriously lengthy times in the bathroom.
The minutes ticked by, feeling like hours, while Toby’s neck grew hotter. He could feel his skin reddening, sweat forming at the nape of his neck. A droplet formed and slid down his spine. He picked up his phone, typed a message to Heather, and held the device in his hand, his thumb hovering over the send icon.
What are you doing?
Something – something he couldn’t name – immobilized him. His breath was cutting through him in ragged, ice-cold slashes. More minutes – or were they days? - passed, while a tunnel formed in his vision, straight to the yawning hallway, blurring out the vivid scene at the bar. Into the blur went the sounds around him: the voices, the clatter, the irregular bursts of high-pitched, female laughter. All that remained was his own heart, pounding in his ears, the sound of his blood squishing through his veins.
And his hard, aching cock.
Chris The Bartender came through this tunnel, eons later, an arrogant smile on his face. He hopped over the door again, a smooth movement, hand on the hard surface of the tabletop, legs swinging easily and high to the side. Clapped his hands together, rubbed them, and grinned at Toby.
Chris was lifting his hand to his face as Heather appeared in the hallway behind him. Hair still slightly mussed. Lips reddened slightly with lipstick. Her walk unsteady but composed, her face devilishly angelic. She was looking at Chris, her features stitched together in a look that approximated “I-told-you-so.”
And in the foreground, Chris’s finger, just beneath his nose. His nostrils flared slightly as he sniffed the tips of his fingers.
Chaos reigned inside of Toby’s chest: fury gripped his esophagus, sent his heart into an erratic pattern. The heat on his neck squeezed another droplet of sweat out, and it snaked down his spine. An urge to reach over the bar and grip Chris’s hand like a vice, sniff the fingers he was implying had touched his wife’s pussy, and then slam his head into the table, felt so visceral inside of him he thought for a moment he had actually done it.
Heather was sitting down, dropping casually into her seat, the flock of females around her closing in like a gaggle of geese.
Toby’s vision went black for a second, or blinding white, and then Chris was standing in front of him, grinning. “Too easy,” his mouth was saying, the words liquid and dissolving in the rush of blood in Toby’s ears. “I’m not gonna make you pay up.”
The phone in Toby’s hand vibrated. He was still paralyzed. Chris was shaking his head, reaching for a glass; Heather was laughing, pushing the hair from her face in his peripheral vision.
His cock throbbed again, reminding him of the terrifying mixture in his system.
Chris was pouring a whiskey. He set it in front of Toby and looked at him seriously over the bar, one elbow down, a glint of male bonding in his eyes. “Hey man, this one’s on me, chill out.” He looked down at the phone in Toby’s hand and his smile became somehow condescending. “Read your message, man,” he said, shaking his head.
Toby tilted the phone.
Time to go, bad boy. You good to drive?
“It’s seventeen,” Chris said, still wearing that peculiar grin. “Last one’s on me.”
“I gotta drive,” Toby found himself saying, his hands working to take money from his wallet, a twenty. Vague wisps of thoughts urged him to leave more, make a sportsmanlike show, but there was no five in his wallet. Heather was standing up, walking toward the bar. Slinking, if you were to be fair about the way she was doing it.
Chris and Heather exchanged glances, they burned like kerosene in Toby’s veins. Chris was on the machine now, turning it over to Heather, she was signing a receipt, no words exchanged.
Heather set the pen down. “Thanks,” she told Chris, who only smiled and tore off the second copy as it was ejected from the mouth of the machine.
She turned, waved at her table, and walked out.
Another smile from Chris, his head shaking in… what? Disbelief? Condescension? Who could tell?
Toby’s legs threatened to give as he stood up, ears still ringing. His tender cock chafed against his jeans. “Thanks,” he heard himself say. He wanted the whiskey but didn’t trust his hand not to shake when he picked it up, so he slid it to Chris’s side of the bar. “That one’s for you.”
Another slow shake of the head, but Toby was already turning, walking away. His groin ached, his abdomen was spasming, and the ringing was so loud now he wouldn’t have heard anything Chris said to his retreating form.
But Chris said nothing.
*
Heather had a buzz, and it unsettled her that she liked it as much as she did. Outside the bar – Salty’s had been the choice of the staff she was romancing, not her own – the world was brighter. The streets were shiny from a brief downpour she couldn’t remember happening, the atrocious neon lights of the “Saltys” sign pooled in impressionistic puddles of light. In her ears, a high-pitched buzz roared above the wet tires on the street and distant honking.
Toby was crossing the street. He looked like she had expected him to – well, like she had thought he might, if her suspicions were correct. In his eyes something she would have mistaken for anger was burning, but it wasn’t anger. It was something else entirely.
He walked toward her as if he had no intention of stopping, and for a second or two, she second-guessed herself. Had she been wrong, thinking that he enjoyed the show she had given him? A moment of clarity worked its way into her alcohol-soaked high as he approached her, something intense burning inside of him. For a second, she was gripped with the terrifying thought that he might strike her.
He stopped abruptly, just inches from touching her body, and stared at her. The night had cooled, his breath was visible as it left his mouth, his jaw shifting from side to side slowly.
They stared at each other, the air almost on fire between them. Heather, a woman of carefully plotted daily schedules, of precise career planning and weekly meal preparation on Sundays, her Germanic origins alive and well in each punctual, orderly task she did in her life, felt the rare sensation of something being out of control in her world. The feeling snaked around her like a beast, and her cheeks flushed with excitement.
Toby put a hand on the window of the truck, stepping closer to her. He was raging inside, and Heather couldn’t help but feel the effect of it. Even if he was mad, it was intoxicating to see something, anything, swirling beneath his placid and resigned exterior. She hadn’t seen anything there for years.
His hand was on her throat. How it got there – in a sudden movement, a pulled punch, or slowly, trembling – she had no idea. But it closed around her neck gingerly, applying no pressure, only the insinuation of… something. His thumb stroked the hollow of her throat, and the sensation of it traveled straight to her pussy, where it bloomed into a pool of electricity. She dedicated a moment’s thought to this feeling – she was actually turned on.
“What did you do?”
His voice was shaking – only barely, hardly noticeably at all. But she felt the tremor like hands on her body, and it made her shudder.
“What do you think I did?” she countered. His thigh was close to her, and she felt the jerk of his cock when she uttered this question, confirming that she had guessed right, played the game right. Why she had done that, she couldn’t say. But he was turned on, all right.
Guilt, she knew, should be coming for her now. But it wasn’t.
Toby’s hand was at the side of her leg now, bunching up the fabric of her skirt. His jaw had stopped moving side-to-side, and his hazel eyes seemed almost rigid in their fixation on her own. She noticed the stubble on his jaw, had a tremor travel down her neck as she thought of it scraping the inside of her thigh, the side of her own jaw. His fingers were moving along her leg, past the thigh-high nylons he had never paid attention to, pausing to investigate the lace that bound them to her skin.
His pupils dilated when his fingers encountered the uneven slipperiness between her legs, the dampness of her panties. Was he investigating, or was he there simply to pleasure her? Did it matter to her which it was? His touch was igniting her like it hadn’t for maybe a decade.
“Did you win your bet?” she said, and she was excited that his cock pulsed again, next to her thigh. Now that he had hiked her skirt up, she could feel against the front of her leg that his jeans were wet with precum.
“Did I?” he asked. His eyes were on her lips now, trying to find something there, maybe thinking of how he could actually eat them. His finger hooked beneath her panties and he pushed himself closer to her. A car passed them: they were in public for Christ’s sake. “Yeah-ha,” a boy’s voice called from the vehicle.
Heather’s lids were half-closed now. Toby had his knuckle on her clit, a finger inside of her, a move he had never done before. He ground his finger against her swollen button, which sent a jolt of pleasure through her and made her whole body give a tiny jerk with each rhythmic pulse. She felt her lips peel away from each other and her mouth fall open to take a breath. Stars began to invade at the very corner of her eyes.
Another car, another lewd comment, Toby’s hand on the door handle next to her, her body pulling forward, his hands pushing her into the truck, lifting her by the hips so she could scoot in, a depression in her high as his fingers left her body and left her hanging so close to orgasm it made her teeth hurt.
He was climbing inside. He had given a short look to both sides of the truck while he unfastened his belt and drew his zipper down. He had the look of a man who was no longer going to fuck around on his face; he was driven too far. It had been a long time since she had seen that look, more than a decade. In fact, the last time she had seen was the night they had first had sex, much the same way, in her car, in the parking lot of student housing. Sweet Toby who she had been stringing along had begun by making out with her through the window, and then, like tonight, the look of hunger consuming him now had traveled across his face and he had opened the door, flung the seatback down, and fucked her right there in the car.
His hands pushed her skirt up and pulled her panties down. She was his helper in clearing them from her legs, one shoe fell to the ground with a sickening plop, but the price of them and the possibility of a scuff marring her perfect appearance evaporated from her mind when Toby climbed on top of her, one hand wrestling with his cock in his pants.
There was no more talking, their eyes were locked, and Toby was inside of her in seconds. The scrape of his stubble on her neck made her shudder, she could feel his jeans and the zipper somewhere on her thigh as his very, very hard cock filled her. She was slippery, sloppily wet: there were no rubbery places where his cock squeaked by, no softness in his dick, none of the usual semi-disinterest in either of their bodies.
He grabbed her hair and pulled her head up, bit her upper lip over-zealously, and fucked her. She felt herself boiling over almost immediately: the orgasm came on so quickly that the images in her mind sped by, layer after layer, no narrative composed in them at all. She lifted her head to bite Toby on the shoulder, her body spasming so violently that when Toby came inside of her she almost didn’t realize it.
Toby leaned his forehead against hers. Her legs were shaking, he was panting, sweat had beaded on her upper lip. They remained like this, both of them stunned by the passion that had gripped them, the sweetness of it. A loud honk behind them, and the teasing call of a male voice, made a curtain fall over Heather's mood suddenly.
She sat up and slid into the driver’s seat. “Close that door,” she ordered Toby. “Oh, shoot, no, wait… get my shoe, grab it off the ground!”
The dreamy state she had been in was evaporating quickly: she had just fucked her husband in the car, on a street that, while not exactly a freeway, was busy enough that three or four people had seen (and commented on) what they were up to. Her clients could have come out of the bar at any moment…
She flipped the mirror toward her face and straightened out her hair – she was a wreck, but it was easy to fix. She dabbed at her mascara, straightened a blurred line of lipstick, and smoothed her tidy blond hair back into place. “Oh my God,” she commented, daring at last to look toward the entrance of Salty’s. “I can’t believe we just did that.”
Toby was smiling. He had the satisfied smile of a man who has just gotten laid, and anything else he was thinking about seemed to have gone out the window of his mind. He chuckled and handed her the dropped shoe, as she straightened her underwear, feeling his warm cum slippery on her thighs.
“You’re not driving,” he told her.
Heather gripped the steering wheel. “I know,” she said. ‘I’m just making sure none of those ladies see me switching seats.”
Toby scooted closer to her. “You can climb over my lap,” he said.
Heather could feel her uptight nature clawing toward the surface. Sometimes she felt like it was a zombie in some B-grade horror film, clawing out of the dirt of a grave, moaning incoherently. She looked at Toby and bit her lip, not aware that she was doing it, not knowing that she was only driving Toby a little crazier by doing so.
She looked at the door and scooted sideways. “Okay,” she whispered. “Let’s go.”
As she passed over Toby’s lap, she felt his cock, still hard, against the very top of the indent of her crack, hard against her tailbone.
Still hard, after all that.
She had a fluttering feeling in her abdomen, and her dripping pussy squeezed tight against the ache that was resurging.
Toby turned on the truck. “What was that?” he asked.
Heather was far from sober. All that had transpired in this odd evening was welling up, flooding her mind, making it impossible to see any of it clearly right now.
They stared into the street.
Her chest started to feel cool again. It was the coolness of worry and guilt, and it only amplified itself, because she felt guilty and worried that she enjoyed it.
She looked over at Toby when the staff she had brought to Salty’s exited the building. Good: at least they hadn’t seen her.
But this didn’t lift the clouds that hovered over her head: to the contrary, it made it all that much darker.
She put her hand out to Toby’s thigh. The words were coming out of her mouth before she had even completed a thought. Was it because she was drunk? Was it because she couldn’t believe what had actually happened? Or was it because… she was the sort of person who could convince herself, really convince herself, that things had happened exactly as she had planned for them to happen, if only she told the lie frequently enough, and with conviction?
“Nothing happened with that guy,” she said. So much time had passed that it didn’t seem like a response to Toby’s question anymore, more like an unbidden confession.
Toby turned to look at her. The expression on his face was hard to get her head around.
“I could see you were getting hotted up about it,” Heather sighed, waving a hand dismissively, “and I was drunk, so I waited for him and then I told him, ‘hey will you go pretend something happened between us, it turns my husband on?’” She leaned her head back on the seat and looked at Toby.
He couldn’t deny it turned him on, she thought, as she waited for his response. She pushed hard against the guilty feeling that was trying to trample through her memory. What she had just said was true… this is what she had said to Chris. Word-for-word.
Toby was still looking at her strangely. “You what?” And then, interrupting himself: “What did he say to that?”
Heather surprised herself by being ready for this question, just in the nick of time. Somehow, she had sensed Toby would ask just that, and she kept her face perfectly still, her eyes on his, and in the fractions of seconds that she had to think about her answer, she decided to keep some of the truth concealed.
After all, what would come of telling Toby anything but this:
“He was like, ‘No shit.’ And he shrugged and said, ‘well, helps me win a bet.’”
And this was exactly what Chris had said. Word for word. So when Heather dropped her voice to a rugged baritone, imitated Chris’s young, iGen accent and the way he shrugged his shoulders, she came across as believable.
Because, Heather reminded herself, she was telling the truth.
In another flash, she resolved to tell the truth, the whole truth, if Toby were to ask any more questions.
If he said, for example, “Did anything else happen?” she would tell him.
She would.
Toby shook his head and looked out the window. “Well,” he said.
He put the truck in drive.
“That was pretty hot,” he added, finally.
Heather’s heart soared, relief rushed through her veins. And then, following behind it, black and thick and slow-moving, came guilt.
“It was,” she said, smiling.
That was true, too, she reasoned.
Toby pulled into the street and made a three-point turn to take them out to the highway. They drove in silence, Toby with a smile on his lips. Heather smiled, too. But it was mostly to erect a wall, so that Toby would not turn to her and ask: “What happened after that?”
Because Chris had shrugged, and he had said, no shit. Well, helps me win a bet.
And then he had loped into the hallway, where she was waiting by the women’s bathroom, and they had high-fived. Chris had moved closer to her with each exchange of words they shared – and what had they spoken about? Chris had said something about this being a common fantasy for men, she had expressed surprise.
He had moved closer. Close enough to notice the stubble just crowning on his jaw, the shape of his muscles under his shirt, a slight bend on the bridge of his nose. That he smelled like cedar for some reason.
“It is,” he had told her, his eyes freezing her in place like they were a tractor beam. “I don’t mind playing my part.” He had leaned toward her, into her, while in one motion so smooth and quick it was happening before she had any time to think about it, let alone stop it: his fingers were under her skirt, right against her clit through the fabric of her panties, and she stared at him as he looked in her eyes and grinned.
Through her body a tremor passed that felt like nothing she had ever felt before. She would think about it later: was it the illicitness of what they were doing? The fact that the bartender was so hot, or that he was technically assaulting her? Was it that the game had gone too far, that she held some resentment toward Toby for playing it at all? Was it the possibility of being caught, or the thrill of getting away with it? Was she doing it because she had led Chris on, and she felt like he deserved something at least? Because Toby had a point: men didn’t enjoy getting fucked with when it came to this particular topic.
She would never know why she stood there, frozen in place, her lips parted, staring into Chris’s eyes as he hooked a finger under her panties, gave her clit a practiced and skilled rub, then pulled his hand from out of her skirt and strolled away down the hall.
It was almost – almost – as if it had never happened at all.
Returning her conscious mind to the car, Heather leaned against the back of her seat, fighting a frown that threatened to turn her mouth down. Guilt was blackening her good time.
Toby put a hand on her knee, and the heat of his touch traveled down her leg and to the center of her pussy. A flash of Chris’s lips, the hard muscle of his body against her, the too-bright hallway light, the fear closing around her neck…
And Heather, who would have been the last person to suspect herself of it, was suddenly almost uncontrollably horny again.
They drove like this for a while, out of the seedy part of town and into the suburbs, where bars like Salty’s did not exist and you could leave your car on the street with the keys in it and reasonably expect it to be there the next morning. Safe, bright streetlights flooded the avenues and courts and circles with names like Trailhead and Rainbow Creek. It was the safe, comfortable, income-affluent part of the city.
The sizzle between them – did Toby feel it, too? - seemed to dampen as the lights grew brighter and cleaner. Heather looked out the window, and felt the danger and taboo of what she had just done becoming more absurd with every new, well-lit street sign they passed. She felt like she should say something, and the closer they came to home, the more she felt like it needed to be said. The distance between the drunken high and the crazy behavior at Salty’s grew, and she began admonishing herself for acting so insanely.
And yet, if she let it tempt her, the memory of the evening pulled at her, drew her into a dark corner of her mind where she kept her desires and bad habits as tightly locked away as possible. She could feel the pull of doing something reckless, something free and different. Something bad.
She looked over at Toby almost the exact moment he narrowed his eyes, and opened his mouth to say something. He took a sharp inhale, and then paused, as if he had decided it was best not to say it.
“What?” Heather said, in that tone of voice that wives everywhere reserve for their husbands when they bit their tongues. She regretted prompting him immediately, and looked away.
For a moment there was hope: Toby said nothing and she couldn’t see his face changing in the corner of her eye. Perhaps Toby, too, thought better of mentioning anything that had just happened. As the physical distance between them and Salty’s grew, the absurdity of what they had done grew as well. At least for her. Surely for Toby, too.
“It’s just...” Toby said, his voice trailing off as they turned the corner onto High Creek Trail Court, their own street.
Heather felt cold descending through her body from her cheekbones. She didn’t move.
Toby pulled the car over three houses from theirs. They had parked here more than once when some marital spat had continued from the Costco or the bank, and they wanted to end it before they went into the house.
Heather turned to Toby and gave him a smile, racking her brains for something to say. Anything. Anything to distract him from whatever he was about to ask, because she was drunk and the whole evening was really, really weird, and inside her chest two feelings she rarely let affect her – thrill and guilt – were tearing her apart.
Toby was looking at her. “It’s just… what did you say to him at first? At the bar?”
The question made Heather blink slowly. It wasn’t the dreaded question, the one that would open her up to admitting something she actually couldn’t believe had happened, something she would take back in an instant if only there were a way to do it. Something so wrong, so out of order, that she almost felt dizzy thinking about.
But that wasn’t Toby’s question. Toby’s question was about something else entirely, and it confused her thoroughly, so she stumbled through several starts to her own question. She shook her head, babbled, and generally made herself look as guilty as she felt, even if it was about something else entirely. “Wh – huh? What? At the bar?”
Toby gripped the steering wheel and faced the windshield, his eyes narrowing, his mouth sort of puckered. This was his expression for when something was amiss at work, or the kids lied to him about something.
Heather's stomach curled into a tight knot.
“At the bar. Before you disappeared down the hallway. You came over and leaned over the bar and said something to him.”
This hit Heather like a brick wall, and her mouth fell open soundlessly. She had been so caught up in what had actually happened in the hallway, that she had wiped this entire scene from her working memory.
But it was there, for sure: all that had been required was for Toby to dredge it up.
“Uh...” she stumbled. “When I was at the bar...”
She had said: That guy over there is my husband, and he likes it when I talk dirty to strange men. The only problem is, I can’t think of anything dirty to say. So maybe you should think of something.
And Chris had leaned next to her ear, his breath moist and hot against her skin, a smattering of stubble scraping her cheek and making her instantly wet, all of her inhibitions melting in his baritone voice:
I think you can come up with something.
And then, she could remember this, but under the streetlight in her own neighborhood it seemed more like a scene from a movie, an actress who looked like her and not herself. The actress was smiling, and the actress had her lines ready, and they came out of her mouth as if she had rehearsed them a thousand times, shamelessly:
Okay, tell him I need you to see if that pineapple drink did me any good.
This was a reference for Chris alone: the rowdy hospital girls she had taken to the bar had struck up a conversation with him upon their arrival. They got drunk quickly and they were young and pretty, which is probably where the hospital staff reputation came from. Within minutes one of them had squawked at Chris: “Is it true pineapple makes your pussy juices taste better?”
So Chris had lined up six drinks with pineapple juice and said coyly: “Tell you later.”
This had been early in the evening. Heather had rolled her eyes. Just another dumb-dick bartender with decent looks who said this kind of thing with impunity because his looks happened to be boyish and clean-cut.
What had happened between that moment and when Chris, boyishly handsome, athletic, bartender-slut-man, had slid his finger into her panties, she couldn’t say.
But that was then, and this was now. And it seemed impossible to explain to Toby now.
She shook her head. “Honestly, I can’t even remember,” she said, her voice light and carefree as she could make it.
Toby turned upon her, incredulity on his face like someone had slapped it there. “You don’t remember,” he repeated. The tone of his voice was flat, but very, very pregnant with the idea that he didn’t buy it.
Heather looked at her hands. “Oh...” she said, and whatever end she had intended for that expression eluded her instantly. “I don’t… it was just something to like, make you think I was saying something dirty to him. It was… I was just playing along.” She stopped herself there: when she was fibbing, or outright lying, she had a tendency to jabber away until she’d told the whole truth, and this was as dangerous professionally – and now personally - as it sounded.
“Because he told me what you said.” Toby’s voice was cold.
This had her attention. She snapped her head to look at him. She raised her eyebrows and made a gesture that was her attempt at saying “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Something about pineapple juice?” Toby prompted.
Heather put a hand to her face, covering her mouth: the movement was involuntary. “Oh God,” she said. And then, hurriedly: “I forgot I said that.”
“That’s pretty bold, Heather,” Toby said. “I mean that’s… that’s like, really leading a guy on.”
Toby’s tone was different than she expected, and it gummed up her thoughts.
He turned to face her. “Don’t… okay, don’t get me wrong about any of this, because, I don’t know, it was a game and we were playing it, and it was really hot. Okay? But… I don’t know. You can’t say stuff like that to a guy like that and then just… drop him on his face in the hallway. You know? That’s like… really dangerous.”
Condescending. That’s what was in Toby’s tone. A thousand marital fights before this conversation, left like cooling coals in some compartment of her mind, sprang to life as if someone had thrown gasoline all over them and fanned them for good measure.
“Excuse me?” she practically yelled, folding her arms. “Don’t take that father-knows-best tone with me. You’re the one who bet some rando bartender that he could fuck your wife. For a tab.” She was seething by the time she arrived at this last part.
Toby unclenched his fists, putting his palms out. “Look,” he said sternly. “I am not trying to start a fight here. Okay? I’m just telling you, as a guy, that if you come up to me and whisper in my ear that you want me to lick your pussy and tell you if it tastes like pineapple -”
“That is not what I said!”
“ - whatever, something like that, I’m paraphrasing here, then I am -”
“Well, that is a mighty big liberty you took with your ‘paraphrasing,’ Tob’, because -”
“I am going to, as a guy, be pretty ticked off when you are like,” Toby switched to a high-pitched, bimbo-voice that drove Heather absolutely bonkers, “‘Oh, hahaha I’m actually married and I just want you to pretend that I let you lick my cunt...’”
Heather’s head was imploding, and she knew she was losing control of her emotions, and about all the wrong things. She hated that fucking voice.
“Oh. Okay. But, ‘hey, buddy, I’ll bet you you can fuck my wife’” - Heather used a deep voice with moronic intonation - “will just charm everybody.”
“It was a game. You were playing it.”
Heather’s mouth fell open in outrage, and she made an incoherent noise and shook her head wildly before stammering: “A game, huh? Except now you’re going to tell me that I’m out of line, that -”
Halfway through her sentence, the fist of guilt reached out of the place she was trying to bury it, and then pulled its whole decaying body right out of the mood to leap at her. Sure, she could argue the procedure of the argument here, but at the end of the day, she was the one who had taken things too far.
Way, way too far.
Did it matter that Toby was admonishing her for the wrong thing completely?
Heather swallowed.
It would have mattered, in another life. Now she was just a woman who had let Chris The Bartender slip a finger in her panties. A woman who had kind of liked it. But definitely a woman who had taken things too far, even for a game.
“That?” Toby prompted.
Heather put a hand to her mouth and looked out the passenger window. She shook her head. “You know what?” she said. “You’re probably right.”
Toby stared at her for a full minute. She expected him to make a joke (write the date down! I am right! Heather said so!), in fact, she wished he would.
But he didn’t.
And deep down inside, where she didn’t want to think about it or even look at it, she had a suspicion that he said nothing because he knew that his wife, Heather, Attila of Arguments, was backing down for some other reason.
She turned to him after a few minutes passed and said hotly: “You’re right. Okay? Now let’s get home.”
Toby stared a few seconds more, and then he slid the truck into gear, and let it roll to their house.