CHAPTER 2
The kids were in bed, doors closed. Toby paid Alyssa, his receptionist/on-call babysitter, in cash and stared through her head while she recounted the events of the night, which were incredibly boring. The kids were on their electronic devices, then they fell asleep. Somehow Alyssa, with her monotone voice and attention to detail – two qualities that made her both indispensable and utterly infuriating – managed to drag this saga out for what seemed like ten minutes. She then rattled off all the things she intended to do tomorrow in Toby’s employ, which Toby patiently pretended to listen to while edging her toward the door and thinking about his wife.
He wasn’t sure why he had started the fight with her in the car. Had he started the fight? Was it even a fight? It should have been, but it left him unsettled because Heather had done something he felt he could say with good accuracy she had never done before: admit he was right.
“… and then, if I have time, I’m going to get to work on reorganizing those boxes in the back, the invoice ones? But it really depends on how long it takes me to straighten out that mess with FedEx.”
Alyssa was blinking at him.
You’re right. Okay?
“Okay,” Toby told Alyssa, moving toward her so she would shuffle out the door.
“I’m sorry it’s taking so long,” Alyssa continued, failing, as was her tendency, to pick up on the cues Toby was giving her to wrap up the conversation. “It’s been on the back burner for weeks now, but things just keep popping up.”
“It’s fine,” Toby said warmly. Then, more gruffly, edging Alyssa into the mudroom: “It’s been a late night, Alyssa.”
Her face fell.
“Al,” he corrected himself quickly. For some absurd reason, Alyssa had come into the office a week ago and started insisting that everyone call her Al, which no one could make heads or tails of or do anything about, because she’d been there two years and looked so much like an Alyssa that it defied realism.
She smiled. Toby edged her through the mudroom and opened the door to the front porch as she talked. “Okay, yeah, well, just wanted to let you… thanks for the gig. Anytime, I’m happy to come over, your kids are super-easy… you probably don’t even need a babysitter, but maybe I shouldn’t say that or I’ll put myself out of work…”
She paused to take a breath and Toby said something lame like, “Well, safety first, happy to have you,” and pushed the door closed on her, a hint she thankfully took at the last minute to give a flappy wave and skip down the steps calling, “See you tomorrow! Thanks again!”
Silence.
Toby entered the house, locked the door, and stared into the darkness. A nightlight in the upstairs bathroom cast an eerie glow on the upstairs balcony, connecting the kids’ rooms from the stairway. Beyond the living room, the hallway to the Master bedroom was lit by Heather’s bedside table. The stove light glowed in the kitchen.
Alyssa had temporarily swarmed his mind like an army, bent on tossing the place and filling it with banalities twenty years too fresh for him. Something about “tik-toks,” which he assumed was some idiot Internet thing. She had dampened his libido, and temporarily stunned his imagination. But the light in the bedroom, singular and dim, snaked along the floor and reignited his fantasies, his disturbed thoughts about the evening, the lingering doubts about what had happened. The guilt that he felt when he had thoughts like the ones he had had, and the lurid arousal he had felt.
He walked toward the bedroom, his arteries pulsing with the cool tingle of excitement. The bile of guilt threatening to rise up in his throat.
There were many things Toby didn’t tell his wife, and most of them had to do with sex. He assumed this was the case for most men, because he assumed that most men, like him, were pretty decent guys whose heads had been filled since age thirteen with the most filthy sexual garbage imaginable. That sea of filthy thoughts didn’t even include the shit dumped there by Internet porn: that was just his imagination.
It was the usual litany of filth, the kind of shit you could find on any decent porn site, and if he were to judge by the number of videos tailored to his liking, he was in good company with all the other men out there. Anal sex, a little humiliation, gangbanging women, some dubious consent, some bimbo action, all that.
But there was one little corner of his mind that did not have a huge following, and it was a secret he liked to keep from his wife, any of his buddies, and if at all possible, from himself.
This was the part of him that sometimes watched his wife at a distance, if they were at a party, say, or a bar. The weird part of his mind that observed his wife the way other men would observe her: the straight, no-nonsense natural blond hair, perfectly coiffed. The naturally lean body, carefully molded by targeted weight lifting, swimming, and jogging, into a magnificent form that gave no indication of having given birth to two children. The petite features, the wide-set eyes, the hint of Scandinavian that flared in her coloring and bloomed in the shape of her face and the straightness of her eyelids. Her good posture and graceful movements.
The fantasies began like this always: an appraisal of his wife as a woman. The way she crossed her ankles when she sat on a certain kind of chair, the suggestion of pertness in her breasts that she kept covered with modest blouses, the seriousness with which she took herself as a professional and the promise of some rowdy sex kitten beneath the clothing.
The fantasy, making good time, progressed from those thoughts to dirtier ones, the kind all men would have. What did it feel like to sink into her wet pussy, and how wet did it get? Was she the kind of woman who would get on her hands and knees and let a man fill her ass with his cock, and how tight would it be in there, what sound would she make when he stretched her open? Was she the kind of woman who secretly, deep down inside, wanted to be thrown on a bed with her head hanging over the side and get throat-fucked like a cheap and dirty whore?
Where the fantasy started to derail was at the next bend. Sitting wherever he was, observing his wife this way, he would take a look around the room and start moving the men around her into position with her. His wife, never a woman whose fealty he doubted, would respond to these men, slowly at first. A shy smile, a tuck of her hair.
And then? Then she would fall on her knees and start sucking cock, or let some burly guy spread her legs wide open while he barreled into her pussy and she shrieked that it was so much bigger than her husband’s.
From there the images became almost too much for Toby to watch: the neatly trimmed triangle of blond hair, slightly darker than the hair on her head, stretched to a thin line around a giant cock, her red pussy slippery and squelching as he plowed in and out of her. Her skin shiny with sweat as she turned over to take it in every hole of her body, all the while clamoring for more.
But you can’t turn off the porn inside your own head: you can only throw the equivalent of a pillow on it and hope it doesn’t make too much noise.
So when he had arrived at Salty’s Haven, and found his normally straight-laced wife even drunker than she had claimed to be (Heather would not even consider driving a car if she’d had even two drinks, and she could only be pressured into driving after one if she had a half hour of soda water and cheese snacks to dilute it), and there was a very eligible male specimen flirting with her behind the bar, Toby had felt his fantasy kicking hard from beneath the pillow he had been trying to smother it with.
And then, in a series of events he could not easily piece back together, Heather had set his demon free by actually doing something he fantasized about.
The hallway to the Master Bedroom was dark enough to look gray in his vision, the light slowly eating up the space between him and the inevitable: his wife. His wife, who was a real person, his real spouse, and who had inadvertently carved out a new, dark channel in his fantasies about her by… what?
Something was nagging at him. Something about the way she had spoken to the bartender? Something that didn’t add up? Was it a good thing or a bad thing, this thought that wouldn’t leave him alone?
She was standing in the ensuite bathroom in her white satin underwear, setting a toothbrush back into the holder. She wiped her mouth and looked up at him as he entered, but he could barely see her face through the darkness. Her movements were loose, she was really quite drunk.
It happened with increasing frequency, this many years deep in their marriage, that conversations went unresolved. He was sure there was a lot more to say about what had happened tonight, and he could sense that Heather felt the same way. It was almost as if the air was thicker between them.
You have to say something, he thought. You can’t just walk into a bedroom and say nothing to your wife.
He started to unbutton his shirt, a plain-looking plaid work shirt that Heather had purchased at an expensive store. Heather was watching him in the mirror, her hands on the counter.
The scent of her pussy wafted up from his jeans when he unzipped them. The scent was enough to nudge the dark monster in his mind, and it was up and roaring before he even had a chance to think about it.
Heather was moving toward the end of the bathroom where the shower was.
“So,” Toby said, looking down at a button on his shirt. He kicked off his jeans and started walking toward Heather. The rational desire to have a conversation about that evening was being eaten by his dark secret in huge gulps, and the desire to do something carnal to her again was taking over.
Heather turned on the water and closed the shower door. “So,” she said. Her voice was shaky, odd. There was plenty to talk about, Toby reminded himself weakly from the corner of his mind the monster was pushing him into. Plenty… to… discuss…
But his hands were on her bare shoulders, his thumbs hooking under her bra. His mouth went to the side of her neck, just below her ear, and he felt gooseflesh fluff her baby-fine, invisible hairs. They scraped his lips, and his cock pulsed. In his mind, he replayed – perhaps with some serious editorial license – Chris The Bartender speaking close to her ear, and his chest grew as tight as his balls.
Heather had turned her head to look at his hand stroking the length of her arm, which was slightly lifted to the shower door. The water kept running, steam was wafting from the stall. This was the kind of thing Toby would have been irritated by, with the same time-tested miserliness of all men about utility bills, but he barely registered the wastefulness of it. His eyes were on Heather’s prickled flesh, on the flush he could barely see spreading down the side of her face, on the heat of her body and the scent of her pussy, which he could smell from where he was.
He pushed her hair to the side: it wasn’t long enough to catch on her shoulder so he held it away from the back of her neck to place his lips on her spine. A very small shudder traveled through her. Maybe it was his imagination. “What did you say, exactly, to Mr. Bartender?”
He was out on a limb here, and he knew it as soon as he’d said it. It’s just that there was no putting his monster back in the bottle: he should not talk about this evening, he should enjoy the fantasy of it, maybe try to eke out one more fuck, or maybe just count his blessings and go to bed… but that wasn’t what he was doing.
Heather was still as stone for a moment her mouth open, her face pointed directly at the shower door and her eyes, if he could have seen them, rigidly fixed on something deep in her mind. There was a moment of free fall – Toby was about to retreat, prepare for a fight, curse himself for screwing things up.
And then Heather lifted her arms, and put them on the back of his head. Her silky-smooth skin rolled into contact with him, from her tailbone against his crotch, to her back against his pubic bone, the length of it slowly sinking against him until she was against his chest. He knew she could feel his rock-hard cock, and the pulse of it as she ran her fingers through his hair. “I told him,” she said in a throaty voice, “exactly what you said.”
Her hand dropped to his dick, and he was laid bare by that treacherous organ: any denial he might offer, any words that could come from his more rational head, were canceled by the excitement he could not stop from entering his bloodstream, filling his cock, making it pulse violently at her touch.
Exactly what he said… Toby’s mind spun and spun, like a drunk on the dancefloor alone. What did he say the bartender had told him his wife had said?
“I need to hear you say it,” he breathed against her neck. His voice had a growl at the bottom end of it, a need underlying it that rubbed him the wrong way, a need that Heather would notice.
He brushed it aside, or maybe Heather did, as she nudged her ass against him a little more insistently. “I told him to see if that pineapple drink worked.”
Toby’s hand was against the front of her neck now, and the words vibrated against his hand. Her voice was low, almost like a sexual caress. Her hand moved against his cock, brushing it with her palm. His dick was still sticky with the remains of their last encounter, and damp with fresh precum. Heather grasped him, just in time to feel his dick squeeze itself, his veins pulse beneath her hand.
“You asked him to lick it,” he prompted her, and let his cock do the assuring for her: that’s okay, he wanted her to know. I want you to have said that.
I want you to have done it.
The voice inside his head that made this clear pronouncement was so loud and clear that Toby froze for a moment, thinking he’d said it aloud. Heather’s hair swung as she dropped her head forward, and then sensually back, so that her ear was next to his mouth. The hand he had placed on her throat was still there, but his other hand had trailed down to her pussy, his long middle finger slipping into her very wet slit.
When was the last time he had found Heather so incredibly wet? When was the last time he had been this hard? Being married for so long, they seemed to both have come to accept that every sexual encounter proceeded much more like a checklist for a task or a chore: Heather would stroke him with what he felt was a bit of impatience, and he would play with her clit until she seemed aroused. But now they were standing in the bathroom, naked, having barely touched each other, and they were both ready to go like star-crossed adolescent lovers.
“So, how was he?” Toby growled. “Was he good?”
As if the ideas in his head were suddenly fed rocket fuel, he felt something surge inside of him, expanding so rapidly he thought he might tear out of his own skin. Heather’s loose, liquid body squirmed beneath the touch of his fingers, driving him even wilder. Ordinarily there was some kind of distance between them, the suggestion in her movements that she wasn’t particularly keen to be there. It bothered him like a high-pitched mosquito in his ear – never deterring him, never really showing him where it was, but there nonetheless. Now, Heather melted into him, hot and wet, and the space was gone.
She made a noise, a response to his finger swiping over the delicate nerves of her clit, which darted in her liquid slit like a fish in oil. He found it again and the shudder that went through her body went through his as if he could feel what she had felt. “Did he get to taste you?”
Heather’s head moved, and she looked straight ahead again. If he hadn’t been so lusty, he might have heard the odd, distant quality in her voice. “I have to tell you something,” she said.
Toby was beyond recognizing anything except what he wanted to hear, so he turned his wife around and pushed her against the wall, one hand plunging into her sopping pussy. Heather’s mouth fell open, and then her eyelids became heavy, and a glassiness that was purely carnal consumed her pupils.
“What do you have to tell me?” Toby breathed. “Did you let him eat your pussy? Did he make you come? Is that why you were so wet?”
Several things happened very quickly: Heather's eyes opened in surprise, Toby found his cock and rubbed it against her clit, the sweet, hot, ripeness of her cunt slurping over his crown like a slobbery kiss, and he lifted her leg to better position himself to be inside of her.
Fucking her against the wall.
“Did he make you come?” Toby asked again, thrusting himself deep inside of her. He knew he wanted her to say ‘yes,’ and he knew he was playing a game that he, dangerously, could only be certain was partially a game. Heather gasped, and her body pressed against him, hot and velvety. He stared at her eyes, and her mouth, as her hard nipples gave rubbery scrapes against his chest and she bounced slightly with the rhythm of his fucking.
Heather dug her fingernails into his shoulder and tipped forward slightly, unable to support herself as her pussy spasmed and squeezed, her liquid heat gushing deep inside of her. “Say it,” Toby breathed. He was just fractions of a second from coming, but he felt like he would be there forever, hanging on her words, until she said what he wanted to hear.
“Oh God,” Heather said, squirming. “Toby,” she panted. “I can’t...” her words were eaten up by a gasp, her body going from limp to rigid again, her heels closing around his back and pushing into him to grind herself against his body.
“Say it,” Toby growled. “Say it and then I’ll fill your pussy up with cum.”
He thrust deep inside of her, and she wriggled, trying to stroke herself against him, which was practically unbelievable if she had just come, but everything was so unbelievable and far outside anything they’d ever done that neither one of them could see it for what it was: Heather wanted to come again, and Toby wanted her to squeeze the cum from his dick by telling him she had let the bartender suck her clit between his lips until she did exactly what she was doing now.
He refused to move, even as Heather squirmed and made noises like she had never made before. The look in her eyes, Toby would recognize later, was almost fearful, and though he would never want to admit it to himself, the look made him wilder than her thigh muscles squeezing his chest or her pussy slurping on his cock.
“Say it,” Toby growled, pushing into her and pressing her hard against the wall. She was pinned there, her legs fighting his weight and meeting with no success. The harder he pinned her, the more she seemed to get wet, and the more her pussy spasmed around him.
“Okay,” Heather gasped. “Okay… he made, he made me come.”
“Hard?”
Heather’s eyes questioned him for a moment, flashed with fear, and then seemed to recuperate in a bewildered way. She put her mouth close to his ear. “Harder than I have ever come before.”
Toby gritted his teeth and put his hands against the wall, slamming his dick as deep into his wife as it was possible to go, all the way into the deepest places inside of her. Looking at her face, but with the images of the bartender’s eyes hovering just above her mound, Toby’s cock exploded inside of her. He clapped a hand over her mouth as she began to yell, but didn’t hear himself, the deep, animal groan that was escaping him.
The next segue of events happened in Toby’s memory like a montage of scenes in an art movie: Heather’s head tipping forward onto his shoulder, their chests slippery with sweat, sliding against each other. Heather’s leg dropping to the floor, a trickle of cum sliding down his balls, panting, Toby smiling shyly, Heather twisting her hair above her neck as she stepped into the shower. All the while, nothing said or exchanged.
Toby was in the shower next in the montage, standing behind Heather, his hands exploring her breasts, feeling the heavy weight of them in his hands. Heather’s body was against his, cooler than the water she liked to scald herself with, her hands still holding up her hair. He wondered why she didn’t want to get it wet, moments before, or at the same time that he started to say: “Wow, what was that?”
Or that was close to what he intended to say, at least as far as he remembered it. But the question never left his mouth fully-formed, because Heather let out a strangled sobbing sound, and dropped her hands to her sides. Toby watched water snake down her neck, into her blond hair, the world going sideways or upside down – Heather's sob was so incongruent with anything he was thinking.
His first instinct was to drive the sound of her cry straight to the deep, dark cave where his desire was hiding. The monster was retreating, but Toby caught up with it: of course your wife is crying because you got your dick so hard thinking about her fucking another man. Pervert.
“Heather,” he began, leaving his insides to chastise his impulses and doing damage control outside. “Heather, hey… please don’t get upset, I’m sorry if that was… I thought you were into it, and I...”
He what? What was he going to say?
Heather was already shaking her head, pushing the shower door open. She must be disgusted with me, Toby thought, watching her yank a towel from the rack and wrap around herself. Her movements were jerky; he took them for anger. He tried to prepare a defense, but there was no defense for him, was there?
Heather looked at him, her lips pressed together, head tipped to the side. It was easy to read this as disappointment in him, and inside his chest two impulses began to fight each other for prominence. One was the part of him that agreed with her: he was a very filthy man. A bad man, and he should never have degraded his wife like that. It would never happen again and he was very sorry.
The Other Toby – this was porn-watching Toby, Toby of the fantasies – was angry and kicking back. So a man has a fucking fantasy, and it’s a little weird. What happened here anyway, besides a little imagination being put to good use? It wasn’t like he had actually asked her to sleep with the guy. For fuck’s sake.
Heather had stomped into the bedroom and collapsed on the bed. She hunched over a little, a disturbing change of her erect and proper posture, which never took breaks, not even at funerals. Toby’s stomach sank, shame beginning to creep around his temples and cheeks, he could feel himself making that face that men make when they’ve done something very, very bad from a woman’s perspective, but very, very delightful from their dark internal monsters’ viewpoint. The one politicians pretty much had permanently drawn on their face: downcast eyes, lips pressed together in a frown so exaggerated it was almost comical.
Part of him was still defiant, sure, but that voice was getting packed away as fast as Toby could pack it, because… well, Heather was going to cry.
She looked up at him, hands together, eyes wet with tears about to slip down her cheeks.
Her own lips pressed together.
Queer, he remembered thinking, and then he pushed ahead, trying to get his apology out as fast as possible: “Heather, please, I’m really sorry if I upset you… I just… I thought you were into this?” He ended it as a question, the dark monster fighting back, a fist through the wall. She was into it, after all. When’s the last time you ever felt her pussy so wet? What was that?
“Oh, Toby,” she sniffed. “I have to… I have to tell you something.”
They had a friend, mutual, named Jake, who was a firefighter in Chicago and one of the most fire-obsessed fuckers Toby had ever met. Jake spent at least an hour at every event creepily, almost sexually, describing how fire behaved, which is why Toby at that moment had a very good mental image of what was happening inside of him. If you had a hot fire in a compartment, it layered like a lava lamp, and you could see it through an opening: super hot gas, hot gas, and then this layer of smoke-free air that was maybe only 108 degrees or something, where people could still be alive. He had seen the videos, because Jake showed them relentlessly to anyone he could convince to watch them. And if you fought the fire incorrectly, you could disturb this layering (he’d shown these videos, too), and the layer of smoke would form waves, wobble violently, and ultimately flip. Hot down, cool up, a total mess, “angry” smoke everywhere.
“And then,” Jake would state theatrically, “you are fucked.”
That was really the only way to describe the effect of Heather's words on Toby’s broiling, layered emotions. She was crying, he felt guilty – and then everything flipped, and everything was on its head. And he didn’t even know what the “something” that Heather had to tell him was. He just knew it was not good.
“Something” is always bad, if your wife puts the words “I have to tell you” in front of it.
Toby’s head gave a small jerk of incomprehension, and no sound came out of his mouth, because he couldn’t have told anyone what was happening inside of him any better than a house filled with a flipped thermal layer could be anything but fucked.
“I… I… don’t know what happened,” Heather whispered, looking past him, at the edge of a wall or a patch of carpet, some place to put her eyes that wasn’t at him. “I really… and then, I didn’t know what to do. At all. So I just… acted like it didn’t happen, and now...”
“What? What happened?” Toby said. His voice was flat, a dull probe, a request for information only, no feeling there. Nothing but angry smoke, whatever that meant. Half a hard-on, whatever that might be. Jealousy, clawing its way back into his chest cavity, making his blood pressure high, ringing in his ears.
Dark-fantasy-Toby was rising up again, ears perked.
Silence banged away at the air in the room and made Toby’s ringing ears tinny.
Heather’s eyes went back to his, then looked away. “You won’t… I can’t even believe it.”
“Heather,” Toby sighed. His right hand hurt. It was balled in a fist when he looked down at it, his knuckles bone-white, and he consciously unclenched it.
Heather wiped a tear from her eye. “How serious are you about this… I don’t know, game?”
A change of subject. The angry smoke in Toby started to flicker with fire. A bad sign in Jake’s world, an unknown in Toby’s.
“Why are you changing the subject - ?”
“It’s relevant,” she said quietly. Her eyes met his to underline this final statement.
Relevant.
Relevant.
How serious he was about this “game” was relevant to what she had to say. Something that happened.
Light was beginning to dawn for Toby, and he was just feeling through the brightening darkness, getting his hands on what it all meant, when Heather blurted:
“I was just playing a game, like you said. I told that guy, ‘oh, that guy over there is my husband so go tell him this’ – the thing about the pineapple juice – ‘and it’ll make his day.’ Something like that. He went along with it, I felt like he was getting a kick out of the game we were playing, right… and so I didn’t expect, Toby I swear, I didn’t think anything like this would happen.”
She looked at him, as if her confession were over, she was so sorry, and now she had the relief that comes with lifting a weight off your shoulders.
“Like what?” Toby asked. It would have been anyone’s guess what he sounded like in that moment. A hungry dog? An angry boyfriend? An adolescent football player? A reasonable guy? “Anything, like what?” he clarified.
Heather looked confused for a second, then stricken as she herself realized she hadn’t told him anything at all.
“I didn’t think -” she began again.
“What. Happened.”
A sniffle. Her fingers wiped away a tear with impatience. She bit her lower lip and pushed her hands against the bed, lifting her butt slightly from the bed. “He met me in the hallway. I said, ‘how did it go?’ or something like that.”
She looked at him again, and this time it was a plea.
She didn’t want to finish the story.
Toby stared back. Two Tobys, actually: husband Toby, who was making a good show of being mad. And Fantasy Toby, who was grinning and drumming his wedding-arched fingers like a ghoul.
“It was just.. it all happened so fast...”
“Heather!” Toby snapped, unable to take the suspense anymore, tiring, both as Husband and Fantasy Toby, of the time it was taking her to tell him.
“He just… slid his hand up my leg, and then… and I was so shocked I just… let him.”
There was no more thermal layer inside of Toby to upset. He blinked, his cock twitched, his pulse pounded in his ears.
“Tonight. This happened tonight,” he said.
Heather nodded.
A sob. “I’m so sor-”
“He stuck his hand up your skirt, tonight, and you just… what?”
She shrugged helplessly. “I didn’t-”
“Under your panties?”
Heather, shocked, nodding.
Toby closed his eyes. Did he want this to go away? His cock was throbbing to life again, but the feeling in his stomach was one of impending vomit. Fantasy Toby was cheering Heather on, begging for details, painting a vivid picture in his mind.
Husband Toby was sick. This was too far, not what he really wanted. This was all supposed to be a game, just a game, not real.
“Did you like it?” Toby heard himself, recognized his own voice, felt his own mouth moving. But it was as if he were watching a movie now. He wouldn’t have said that.
Heather couldn’t look any more contrite or shocked, so she remained just as she was, mouth open, eyes brimming with tears.
“Did he make you come? For real, not in -”
“Of course he didn’t… make me come!” Heather said. “I just told you, it happened so fast that I -”
“That you what? Let some guy stick his fingers in you in a bathroom and then, oops! I forgot to -”
“You were playing a game!” Heather shot at him. “You obviously liked it! I don’t know what happened, I don’t know why I did any of the stuff I did!”
Heather’s eyes dropped to Toby’s groin, where he had been holding a towel loosely. It was no protection for the growing erection. Heather’s eyes went wide, and she got the gleeful look she got whenever she remembered some key point she wanted to make in a marital fight. “Why did you do it, anyway? Why were you so turned on by it?”
Her eyes narrowed, she folded her arms across her chest. She had, like an animal being attacked, been cornered, and now she was turning back on her attacker, teeth bared.
“That is...” Toby began. He was going to say, “not the point,” or maybe “not the same,” but Heather looked at his dick pointedly, and so he stopped.
“I mean, what am I feeling bad for?” she said, throwing a hand toward him. “You obviously get off on this. Bartering your wife.”
“When I thought it was fake,” Toby said, but he could hear the lack of conviction in his own voice. For a moment Heather looked as if tears would brim over in her eyes again. And then, as if she had caught something in the air, she sniffed and pointed at his cock, saying: “You don’t think it’s fake right now, and you’re getting off on it.”
It wasn’t surprising, Toby thought, that she said that.
Worse for him, it was true. But not surprising.
It was true that each word of her confession had strummed at something inside of him, that picturing her in a hallway, or a bathroom, or wherever she had been, with Chris’s hand up her skirt, made him hard. It was true that replaying in his mind the way Chris had brought his hand to just under his nose to sniff the smell of Toby’s wife – the real smell, caught on the fingers that had touched her body – drove him wild.
Heather was gathering herself up, morphing from the crumpled and tearful heap on the bed to an increasingly angry, disappointed wife. Her back was erect now, her arms folded across her chest, her features hardening.
They stared at each other. Toby desperately wanted to escape from this twist in reality. If he could find a way back to where Heather hadn’t mentioned this one final detail, to where they were both consumed by their fantasies…and away from what now seemed like a confrontation, and one that did not look likely to end well.
Heather rubbed her nose. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do, and then… everything happened so fast…” Her voice trailed off, her eyes wandered to the side, staring emptily. She suddenly collected herself, and looked up at him. “But I’m not going to feel really bad about it, not when you don’t even seem to… it’s not even that you don’t care, it’s like, you like that this happened.”
Toby cocked his head. Now she sounded accusatory, and he felt cornered. “I don’t...” he began.
“Don’t, what? Like that your wife flirted with another man? Or that something actually happened between us? Or… what? What is it you don’t like, Toby, because I can’t be sure.”
“I don’t like,” he started again, but he needed more time to be able to finish the sentence.
“What kind of man wants his wife to do things with another guy?” Heather demanded, and the tables were abruptly (and deftly, Toby noted, with some admiration) turned on him completely.
He began to splutter, much like Heather had, and shook his head. “I don’t… you’re not… You’re missing the point,” he finally spat out.
“You started that game.”
Heather’s voice was cold.
Toby was silent. He was no longer in control of the narrative: not the one between Heather and himself, nor the one inside his own mind.
“You’re the one who was turned on by -”
Toby jumped at this. “Oh, me? Me, I’m the only one turned on here? So tell me this, Heather: why were you so wet when we had sex in the truck? Huh?”
There was a very, very tense moment while they looked at each other with a vibrant passion that could easily have been hatred or love. Heather dropped her eyes and said nothing.
Toby looked at the ceiling.
“Why are we fighting about this?” he asked the ceiling. Heather, he could see, near the bottom edge of his eye, shrugged. Toby walked to the bed and sat down next to her. He had a deep desire to start anew on a venture into lovemaking, but he sensed it was probably the wrong time. For Heather, anyway. He put a hand on her thigh, and his cock clenched as he felt the smooth perfection of her skin. “Look,” he said, softening his tone, and as he did, Heather’s hand fell to rest on top of his. It fell as if someone else had been holding it and let go, hitting his with a splat, a sound of resignation more than anything else. But it was progress. “We both had a good time, didn’t we? I mean us, together. Right? So who cares about this little detail? If -”
“Detail” had reacted inside of Heather and brought her back to life. She whipped her head to face Toby.
“Detail!?” she asked.
He had known, as soon as the word had sailed from his lips, that it was a poor choice.
“I didn’t -” he started.
“You think of this as a detail? Another man touching your wife’s-”
“Heather!” he barked, taking her by the shoulders. “Stop trying to make this into a problem!”
Heather stopped mid-sentence. Her surprise registered in her arched eyebrows, her mouth half-open.
“But it is a problem,” she insisted. “Isn’t it?”
Toby held up a finger, because he could see that they were going to get stuck in endless circles if someone didn’t get this conversation off the track they were laying. “Don’t,” he urged her, “interrupt me, and try to turn this back into a conversation about how I’m a bad person because I liked feeling jealous. Okay? Let’s talk instead about the fact that we both liked what happened.”
Heather – and this really did seem like a first to Toby – clearly had no idea what to say. Her features bore an expression so foreign to her face that she didn’t even look like his wife for a moment.
He pressed on, sniffing, if not victory, at least the possibility of a truce. “You enjoyed it, Heather. You can’t lie about that any more than I can.” To illustrate the last point, he waved vaguely at his cock.
Heather stared.
“You can’t say you didn’t.”
Heather looked for a moment like she might pick a fight, and then she shook her head again. “I just… it feels so wrong to… you know. Say something like that.”
Toby waited.
“I guess I just can’t believe that you actually liked that,” she said. “It’s like.. it seems like a setup. I mean, what kind of guy wants another man to touch his wife? That’s like, it doesn’t even make any sense. And we’re married. This isn’t supposed to be… going on.”
Toby scratched his head with the back of his thumb. “There are more men out there who like this kind of thing, actually,” he said. “And women, too. It’s just that -”
“Oh, right. Swingers. People who say they have an open relationship and act like everything’s fine except they get divorced every two years? No, thanks. That’s not my idea of marriage.”
Toby rubbed his face. “I’m not sure what kind of conversation you want to have, here, Heather,” he said. “I don’t -”
“I want to talk about what happened!” she shrieked. “That’s the conversation I want to have!”
“But you’ve already told me what happened. And you want… what? What do you want me to do?”
Heather was apoplectic. Her mouth opened and closed like a goldfish’s for a moment.
“I want you to… I want you to be, I don’t know. The kind of man who gets mad about this sort of thing, or the kind of guy who is actually jealous when his wife gets hit on by a stranger, or something.”
“You want me to go and defend your honor?” Toby asked. The first half of his sentence was wary, because there was nothing on earth that would likely move him to go “defend” his wife’s honor at Salty’s, especially not against Chris. “What, you want me to get mad at you, call you a slut and beat you or something? Stop talking to you? What?”
“Slut?!!” Heather screeched. “I’m not a -”
“I’m not saying you are,” Toby said, holding a hand up to stop the deluge of epithets leaving Heather's mouth. “I am just asking if that’s what you want from me.”
“No, it’s not what I want from you!” Heather sneered. “I want… I want… I don’t know. I want you to care that this happened and I don’t want to have an open relationship and I just want… I just wish this evening had never happened.”
Toby’s heart sank with disappointment.
“Why?” he asked.
Heather looked at him incredulously. He took her hand in his and kissed it, then massaged it between his two palms. “I’m asking a serious question here. Why does this bother you so much? Mm?” He kissed the back of her hand by linking his fingers to hers, and then lifting her hand to his lips. “Maybe this is like, I don’t know, an opportunity. We both had fun. Real fun. So why does that have to be a problem?’
Heather shook her head. She squeezed his hand, and a tear rolled down her face. “It just is,” she breathed.
“I’m not mad,” Toby said bravely. “Are you?”
Heather rubbed her forehead and leaned her face into her palm, resting her elbow on her bare knee. She had to know that if Toby couldn’t claim to be mad, she really didn’t have a leg to stand her own anger up.
“Just be honest,” Toby continued, feeling like he was making headway, but through a minefield. He squeezed her hand again. “We did something new and you liked it. I liked it. Why does it have to be a problem?”
It was a conversation he had fantasized about having with his wife, but never believed for a moment would actually take place. The sensation of watching a movie returned to him. Things could have gone any way at that point. Toby had no idea what she would say or do next.
“So,” she said, her voice quiet. “You’re saying, I guess, you don’t really care?”
“That’s a loaded question, Heather, if I ever heard one -”
“No, specifically about what happened.”
A pause.
“Okay look, Heather. You’re trying to make this into something like, it means I don’t care about you because I don’t care – in the sense that, I’m not mad about it – that Chris felt you up. But it’s not that I don’t care about it, or don’t care about you. It’s…” he sighed, looking up at the ceiling. “It’s just not something I ever told you about because I felt like you would react...”
“How?” Heather demanded.
“Like this. Exactly like this.”
Heather’s eyes narrowed and she stared at the wall in front of her, but said nothing for a few moments.
“So you actually like that this happened,” she finally said.
Toby paused, trying to find the best way to agree with her without setting off some other argument. Finding none at the ready, he nodded his head instead.
“Well,” Heather said, “I don’t think this is a very good idea.”
Toby’s heart sank.
“I think we better just act like, I don’t know. This didn’t happen, or something.”
“Why’d you tell me about it, then?” Toby complained.
Heather shot him another look. “I felt guilty,” she said. “I didn’t expect you to… to… get a hard-on about it.”
“But this is what I’m saying,” Toby said, exasperated. “If I have a hard-on, and you are into it… then what’s the problem? Maybe this is something that will, like, we could get into it.”
“Get into it,” Heather said flatly.
“Or not,” Toby added quickly, wanting to prevent Heather from flaring up again.
“I don’t want to be a swinger,” Heather told him, again, in a flat and resolute voice that seemed to have no potential bend in it.
Toby laughed. Even if the idea was blooming in his mind at that very moment, with possibility and arousal, he knew that saying anything but what Heather wanted to hear right now would be a terrible idea. “No one is saying that,” he said reassuringly, bringing a hand up to her back. “It was just a little fun.”
Heather looked at him. “So you’re not mad?”
“It was just a game,” Toby said. “It got out of hand.”
He could feel himself talking Heather off the ledge, Her body was leaning into him, she was feeling better… it was disappointing, in a way, but a relief in the other. He might have sexual fantasies, but he didn’t need them fulfilled so badly that he would risk losing his wife. Or even spend a whole night arguing.
Heather sniffed. “It did.”
Toby pulled her close to him and rested his chin on her head. They sat like that for a long time, and then Heather rubbed her nose and squirmed away to her side of the bed. “I’m so tired,” she said. “I’m so… drunk. I need to just go to bed.”
She rolled onto her side and burrowed under the covers.
Toby stared at the wall, the empty bathroom, the odd light from the shower still on and casting a strange glow over the sinks.
When he turned around to look at Heather, and maybe say goodnight, she was already asleep.
He turned off all the lights but the one on the bedside table, and padded to the junk room/office. Because Heather might be tired, but he definitely was not.