CHAPTER 4
The guys Heather had “ingratiated” herself with went to the back of the shuttle, a full-length bench that straddled both aisles. Toby followed, his abdomen cold, his chest pounding, unsure of what Heather was leading them towards. His hands were clammy when he rested them on the back of a seat and squeezed his way next to Heather. The driver, who appeared to be an old hand at shuttling hoards of drunken wedding parties to the Hilton, stared into his mirror and repeated that they couldn’t leave until everyone was seated in a monotonous and unfeeling voice until finally the rowdy crowd settled into their seats. The volume was high, the guests all quite drunk. Heather placed her hand on Toby’s thigh while she leaned over to talk to the man second to the left from her. To do that, she had to rest her other hand in the lap of the man to her immediate left.
Toby’s eyes darted from his wife’s hand on his thigh, her thumb absently stroking the top of his leg, but her body otherwise limp and disconnected from him, to her bare back, and a smattering of goosebumps that had streaked over her shoulders with the cool air of the air-conditioned shuttle. Her left hand was hidden beneath her body, but there was nowhere else for it to be except in the lap of the guy next to her.
Over her back, that same man looked at Toby, and grinned.
Was it a grin for the man whose wife was stroking his cock? Was it a grin of challenge? Pity? Shared enjoyment?
Toby just stared. Heather sat back up and turned excitedly to him, saying something about an amusement park. The words careened around in his head, but they held no meaning for him. All he could see was Heather's mouth, her lipstick slightly smeared (had she kissed somebody?) and her hand, between the legs of her next-seat neighbor, fingers down and wrapped around his upper thigh, her pinky resting against his erection.
She leaned back, not moving her hands, and closed her eyes.
The guy next to her edged closer to her, glancing at Toby as though to check for trouble that he had already written off as unimportant. He fingered a loose lock of hair and pulled it from her face to tuck it behind her ear. It slid, wet with sweat, and then cooperated. “Heather,” he purred. “Don’t fall asleep now.”
A smile fought against Heather's controlled expression, but her eyes remained closed. Toby wondered if the man noticed, if he cared, if he knew that Heather was playing a game.
If maybe she wasn’t.
His hand dropped to the edge of her halter top, his fingers tracing the shape of the dress down, along the curve of her left breast to her sternum, then back up, stopping at her shoulder, playing with the material. Toby was frozen, mesmerized by the man’s playing with the strap of the dress. Heather's mouth moved in a twitch, and her eyes opened lazily to look Toby directly in the eye.
The man leaned in and his lips came into contact with her neck. He nuzzled her, and Toby’s cock pulsed with blood so violently he thought he might pop. Heather’s mouth turned up, her eyes locked on Toby’s, and her fingers brushed over his cock, as if asking that part of him permission rather than getting it from his frozen stare.
“Heather,” the man purred. His hand moved down from her shoulder, following the edge of her dress until he reached her waist. He continued down from there, his palm on her thigh, then her knee. And then, making Heather’s pinky jerk in Toby’s lap and her thigh wobble against his, the hand went slowly up beneath her dress.
Time seemed to stop, or slow, so that the moment dragged on for what seemed like an eternity. Toby must have stopped breathing as he watched the bulge beneath Heather's skirt move slowly closer to her waist. Heather’s head was leaning against the back of the bench, her neck on the headrest, her lips parted slightly. Her eyes were on Toby, but they told him nothing. Nothing about what she was feeling as a stranger’s fingers stroked her thigh and moved closer and closer to her panties.
But however long this took in reality, it was eventually heading toward something, and things would have to change: the man’s hand could not forever be close to touching her mound with nothing but her panties between his flesh and hers. He moved his hand and took hers in it, pushing her onto his throbbing cock, conveying to her – he hoped – that she should let the show continue.
The man’s lips were back on her neck now, and then moved lower. They pursed to kiss her on the slope of her breast, next to the fabric of her dress. Beneath her skirt, the lump of his hand was between her legs. Her eyes went glassy and her lips parted in response to whatever he was doing. Toby felt a small jerk in her body and his own body shuddered in response: he must have his finger on her hot spot, he was making her shudder and hum.
The man’s right fingers crawled up from the right, which was now facing Heather more than the front of the van. They pulled at the cream and red fabric, tugging down as his lips traveled with the retreating dress, until her breast pulled free of the material and her nipple poked out, hard, pink, and beautiful. Within seconds, it was caught up in the man’s lips.
Toby’s eyes were frozen now on the sight of his wife’s nipple between the teeth of a total stranger. Right next to him.
The whole shuttle had gone eerily quiet, but that was all that Toby could have been relied upon to say about what was happening. He saw only Heather’s flesh, the pink crest of her creamy tit being swirled by another man’s tongue. Squares of light ran over the ceiling and back into the dark night, but for Toby the world had stopped moving except for the man and Heather.
It took a moment for him to realize that Heather was squeezing his cock, and he looked up at her sharply when her fingers dove into his suit, wriggling to get under the belt and toward his shaft, her hand backward, back of her palm against his pelvis.
Staring at the rhythmically moving lump beneath her skirt, Toby fumbled with his belt and managed, somehow, to unloop it. Heather’s fingers moved down, but her attention had been taken away from Toby, and her fingers moved with an absentmindedness that revealed she was not really thinking about him, or what she was doing to him, not nearly as much as she was thinking about the mouth on her nipples or the fingers moving beneath her skirt.
The shuttle rolled to a stop and the lights came on. As if they were children on a school field trip, the three of them jerked their hands from wherever they had been and began to put things away, straightening pants and skirts and whatever else had been jostled out of place by their adventure. Heather looked at Toby, no anxiousness in her expression, and wiped the corner of her mouth to clear the smeared lipstick, a smile behind her open mouth. She pressed her skirt daintily around her with her other hand, as though she were trying to be proper for church.
The man who had just sucked on his wife’s tit and probably fingered her looked at Toby with a smug grin. “Party in my room?” he suggested.
It was only at that exact moment that Toby realized that the man hadn’t pieced together that he and Heather were married. They were all very, very drunk.
Heather looked at Toby, who was unable to say at the moment what forces were overcoming him. Heather looked, suddenly, like someone else entirely. Was this his wife? Was this real life? Had this man just asked them if they wanted to come upstairs and fuck?
But he was standing up already, Heather’s hand in his grip. Heather stood, and followed, and Toby followed closely behind her.
He found her bottom and cupped it, the skirt between his hand and her skin. She leaned back against him. Perhaps she was doing that for another reason, perhaps she wasn’t even aware of what she was doing. But Toby’s mind was only able to think of one thing, and so Toby breathed in her ear:
“It’s your call.”
Toby didn’t even know if he was included in this offer himself, so he clung to Heather’s hand and squeezed. For a terrifying moment, he could feel what it would be like if Heather left him standing in the lobby, waving goodbye with a corporate-style finger wave.
Toodles. Back in three hours.
She paused at the steps to the hotel. A breeze picked up a loose strand of her hair, and time warped again. The moment was eternal, nothing but the pulse of Toby’s heart marked the passage of time. He would never be able to know what Heather thought about in those seconds that seemed to last forever: did she consider it, see the evening unfolding ahead of them, feel her pussy pulse like Toby felt his cock?
He waited, suspended in time, cold with fear, excited with passion.
She gave a quarter-turn toward Toby. “Give me ten minutes,” she whispered.
*
Heather’s pulse was so fast, and her blood pressure so high, she could see it pulsing in her wrist, beneath the surface of her skin. She was buzzing all over, reeling inside.
Ten minutes... to what?
She didn’t know.
She did know, beneath the ocean of alcohol and the strange, lustful pull inside of her, that she was not this kind of person. She wasn’t a person who said things like, “Give me ten minutes,” unless she knew what she was going to do, and that it would, in fact, take her ten minutes to do it.
She was drunk; her thoughts came to her lazily, only under duress, and they had to fight through her wild emotions, her physical feelings, her racing heart, to even get to the first layer of her conscious thoughts. She had just let this guy – she didn’t even know his name, and wasn’t even sure she could pick him out of a lineup – slide his finger up her leg.
He had sucked on her breast in the back of a hotel shuttle.
In front of her husband.
She was entering the lobby now, light cascading over her and everything she was doing. She thought of Toby’s face, staring down at the stranger’s mouth, latched to her breast, his tongue making circles around her hardened nipple.
She liked thinking of Toby watching her as much as she liked the feel of another man’s mouth on her nipple. The way his tongue moved, the unfamiliarity of it. The feeling that she was putting on a show.
The realization that she liked these things came to her as an ache in her pussy.
At the check-in desk, there he was: the man who had sucked her tits in the back of a hotel van.
Shame crept over her skin, traveling along her spine, heating her neck, making her nipples harden beneath the fabric of her dress.
It’s your call, Toby’s voice echoed in her ears.
Her call.
He – shuttle guy - was coming toward her now. He had a smug look on his face, the idea in his head that he could have her again, any way he wanted to. If she was slutty enough to let him finger her and suck on her tit in public, what would she let him do in private?
What would she let him do in private?
He was younger than her; closer to the bartender Chris’s age than to Toby’s. Early thirties, possibly late twenties. Well-groomed. Fit. Pretty good-looking. His fingers hadn’t been expert, but they also hadn’t been clumsy.
“Want a drink?” he was asking. He looked over at the bar, then back at her. “I have a full bar in my room.”
Where was Toby? Heather thought suddenly. This was a real invite, a ticket to a hotel room with a man who had already felt her wet pussy. Saying yes would seal the deal: she would follow him, he would let her take a sip of her drink, and then he would be on her, trying to get her dress off, convince her to lie down…
She glanced behind her. Toby was standing in the lobby. He looked odd, if you considered him by himself, and if there hadn’t been so many people filing in just then, he would have looked insane. His hands were balled up, his eyes wild, his mouth open slightly. His eyes were rigidly fixed on Heather, and the man she was talking to.
And what if she did say yes, but first she told him that her husband had to come and watch? What if she took control up there, instead of letting him take her drink from her hand minutes after he poured it? What if she finished her drink, and held them both in suspense, before getting down on her knees and giving this guy a blowjob, knowing that Toby was standing behind her like he was right then, watching?
She could actually feel the hot liquid in her pussy ooze from inside of her.
“I never got your name,” she said, to buy herself time to make a decision.
A flash of confusion crossed his face, and he said, “I’m Jeff. The brother.”
“Right,” Heather said, putting a hand on his chest. She played with his tie with her fingers. Teal. Sure sign of being in a wedding. This wasn’t even their wedding.
A flash of porn that had come to her unbidden raced through her mind: a woman, blindfolded, giving a man a blowjob with her hands tied – by a suit tie – behind her back. She didn’t know why she had liked it, but the image stayed with her, and she breathed life into it sometimes when she masturbated.
Was there a way to get herself into that position? Sucking not one cock, but two? Would she know her husband’s dick from this guy’s?
This slew of thoughts paraded through her mind, and her vision swam. Jeff, The Brother, placed a hand on hers, and began to turn toward the elevator bank. He had her hand between his fingers, his thumb was stroking her palm. Her pussy was throbbing, her mind was spinning.
Toby.
It’s your call.
She took a few steps toward the elevator with him. The truth was that she didn’t know what she was going to do until she did it. Had ten minutes passed? Would she really have this guy’s cock in her mouth in ten minutes? Would Toby wait down here, or would she ask if he could come up, too?
She slowed, enough that after a few steps she caused some drag on their walk. Jeff looked back at her. He was already preparing to be turned down, racking his brains for a convincing anecdote, frowning a little.
“I’m married,” Heather said.
This amused him. He held up his left hand, saying nothing. There was a ring on his annular finger.
Never mind where his wife was. Why would his wife not be at this wedding?
She gave a glance back at Toby. Still frozen to the spot, still staring. Jeff looked behind her, but he didn’t seem to spot the husband, or perhaps he didn’t care.
“Come on,” Jeff said. “Just a drink.”
His eyes dropped to her breasts, and she could see that he was savoring the memory of her nipple in his mouth.
They were walking again, Heather feeling unsure, the elevator being called. She tipped her head to look at the floor numbers, saw them coming for the first floor.
She broke free of his hand as the door opened. “I can’t,” she said. She was shaking her head. “I’m sorry.”
A look of confusion. Disappointment. And then, below the features he contrived to give her a smile, anger. “You sure?” he asked. “I make a mean vodka martini with mini bottles.”
Heather had a lot of things to say. She was a gin girl, she was married, she kind of wanted to be a slut with him but she didn’t know how to make it work, Toby was freaking her out, she was too drunk to make a responsible decision…
She said nothing, just gave her head a quick shake and spun on her heel, walking quickly to toward the exit.
To her right side, Toby stared at her, his head turning with her as she passed by, her heels clacking on the floor.
She ran out to the parking lot, worked up into a frantic dash by the time she got there. It was dangerous, toying with men like this, but when she reached the parking lot there was another shuttle, a lot of people, and it occurred to her that Jeff “The Brother” wasn’t going to follow her out and try to drag her to a hotel room with all these people standing around.
She turned to face the entrance. A few of the wedding attendees passed her and waved with familiarity. She must have really been putting on a show. Jesus. She had just crashed a wedding. What if someone called them out about it?
But Toby was pushing against the crowd, coming out of the lobby, and the sight of him filled her with relief, and a renewed sense of humor about everything that had transpired. Toby gave her a strange smile, nodded in greeting to a gaggle of girls from the wedding who seemed to know his name, and then trotted down the steps to Heather.
She seized his hand. She could see the bulbous trees that lined the grounds of their own hotel, blasted by ugly lights from below, over the tops of the bushes at the end of the parking lot. She pulled him, laughing, toward the side of the lot. They ran, laughing, looking back behind them like two kids who had just blown up a mailbox in an eighties movie.
There was no talking as they scrambled over an unexpected wall and squeezed through the bushes to get to the grounds of their own hotel. This was not the kind of thing Heather had ever, ever done in her life, but she was drunk enough that the absurdity of it – the possible legal ramifications, the utter lack of decorum that she would die of mortification if any of her colleagues (or God forbid, her boss) knew about – did not strike her at all.
What did strike her was the fun of it, the excitement pulsing beneath everything they were doing. She felt alive, outside of a box she had been living in, where all things were planned and done with utmost care.
Toby exited the bushes and stood next to her, shaking cedar sprigs from himself, while Heather marveled drunkenly at the night sky, as if there were anything to see up there but the sodium orange glow of the city reflected back to them by the eternal Jersey haze. The hotels were on an expansive strip of loud street that would qualify as a freeway almost anywhere in the world, and the din of the cars added to the feeling of movement. A breeze picked up a loose strand of Heather's hair, and Toby reached for it to pull some cedar loose.
She grabbed another and pulled it across her lip, looking at Toby. Their eyes met and they laughed.
The laughter died down, and there was a moment of awkward silence. Neither one of them, obviously, knew what to say. But there was a deliciousness in it, Heather thought. It was an ingredient that had been missing for a long time now. Once you had been married so many years, well… you already knew what the other person was going to say, didn’t you? They never did anything unexpected. Even an angry silence was predictable: you’d had the fight a million times before and you already knew what they would say, how it would resolve, and when it would be over.
Not in this moment. This moment had the delicious feel of uncharted territory, the excitement of wondering what the other person would say next, or do.
“You mad?” she asked Toby finally, pulling at another loose strand of hair. It clung to her lip and Toby reached to help her, shaking his head. But then, unexpectedly, he seized her and gave her a possessive kiss, holding her head in his two hands and pushing down on her lips with his mouth until she had no choice but to melt into his embrace.
It seemed ludicrous, walking backward into the shadows and making out against the wall of a hotel they had a room at, but that’s what they did. Toby guided her to a single dark patch tucked away in the drab landscaping, between two large and shapeless bushes that were clearly never meant to be examined up close.
“That was hot,” Toby said at some point, but there was no real room for talking while doing what they were doing. She was against the wall, the industrial-grade stucco scraping at her back, the heat of the day radiating against her skin.
It was exhilarating, feeling Toby’s fingers under her dress, touching her where a stranger had just placed his hands, knowing that he knew, and was remembering right then, that someone else had felt her. She could feel his jealousy in his fingertips, in the insistent way he found her pussy with his hands, felt it as though examining it for something to have changed, felt the stiffening of his entire body when he encountered her as wet as she had ever been.
How long had it been since they had had sex and not cared where they were? Before Salty’s, before this turn in their marriage, sex had slowly wound down to a thing that seemed scheduled, a chore, never exciting in the way it was now. Never a thing they felt they had to do so badly that they couldn’t enter a building and go up two floors to a private room. No, they were here in the shadows because they couldn’t wait that long.
Toby pushed his fingers inside of her and lifted her slightly with the force of his hand, pushing on her clit from the inside out. His eyes were like steel as he wrapped her leg around him and somehow shrugged his cock from inside his pants. She bit his lip when he entered her, not to tease or as part of any plan to create a “feeling” of passion as she often did – but because her breath was actually taken away by the feel of her husband thrusting inside of her. She could feel his need to fill her, to reclaim her as his own.
She barely noticed the scraping of her back against the rough stucco, her absorption in the feel of Toby inside of her was so complete. They stared at each other as he fucked her – and there was no other word for it – hard, his eyes on hers, the lust in them as all-consuming and arousing as the feel of his cock.
When she came, her orgasm seized her whole body, as if from behind, wrapping itself around her and making her stiff with its power. She could feel herself clamping down on Toby’s dick, her heels digging into his back, her head tipping back and no sound escaping her open mouth as she screamed silently. And then his hot cum was inside of her, his mouth on her neck, and wave after wave of pleasure rolled through her for what seemed like minutes.
*
There is a special kind of awareness that settles in instantly after you have sex in a public place, or even a semi-private place, and Heather couldn’t remember the last time she had experienced it. They looked at each other, having the same realization at the same moment, and flushed as they became aware that, while what they were doing had been the only thing they could see or hear, it was probably also obvious to anyone within 200 feet.
“Oh my God,” Heather said, straightening out her skirt. “Let’s get inside.”
Toby was right behind her, his hand making a delicious swirl over her back. “You scratched yourself,” he said, but his fingers felt exquisite and not painful. They clomped out of the damp grass and onto a service road that led to whatever the hotel wanted to be shielded from the public eye by wooden gates. They were holding hands, something they hadn’t done in forever, either.
“So...” Toby said.
It was only then, as the glow of sex was fading and the insanity of having it against the wall of a hotel outside was gripping Heather with its impropriety, that the other acts she’d committed that evening began to close in around her.
“So…?” she said. Her voice was carefree and lilted playfully, but inside she felt like a weight was dragging her down. What the hell had she done? What were they doing?
“What happened with you and that guy? Why’d you run?”
Heather stopped and faced Toby. She had no idea why, but she felt a little like crying for a second. She could feel the hot tears in her eyes threatening to spill over. “I don’t know what happened,” she said. “That was so, I don’t know… out of control...”
“It was hot,” Toby said, his voice steady and assuring. He pulled her closer to him. “I wanted you to do it. It turns me on.”
Heather could feel the scrape of his stubble, smell his sweat, the muskiness of his body. Jeff had tasted different than Toby, smelled foreign. The thought blossomed in her mind and surged inside of her.
She wondered if she should tell Toby about those thoughts. Did he want to hear them? Would he want to know what she was thinking about, right at that moment, as she was inches from her husband’s lips and feeling guilty that she had acted like a slut in a hotel van, as she was hoping for forgiveness and affirmation – would he want to know that she was thinking of the way another man smelled, wondering, still, what it would be like to have someone else’s cock inside of her, the heat of another man’s body against her skin?
Or was this all some kind of set-up? Something destined to go wrong? Toby wasn’t the kind of guy to lay traps for his wife, not the kind of guy who said things he didn’t mean.
But… if anyone had asked Heather if Toby was the kind of guy who wanted his wife to sleep with another man, she would have laughed that idea away. And yet, here they were, and Toby seemed to be exactly that kind of guy.
“What are you thinking about?” Toby asked tenderly, brushing some hair from her face.
She wouldn’t even know how to say it. She shook her head, gave him a smile. “I can’t believe I did that,” she said, and maybe that was really what she was thinking.
Toby turned with her hand in his and started leading them to the hotel entrance. “What did you say to that guy?” And, without waiting for an answer: “Why’d you leave?”
A shiver traveled down her spine. She’d have been hard-pressed to identify it as either excitement or remorse. “It just… he was married,” she said.
She sounded exasperated, and they both laughed at how ridiculous the idea of the other man being married was, in light of themselves.
Heather’s laugh faded before Toby’s and she turned serious. She was certain she had something serious to say, if only her intoxication didn’t keep pulling it away from her. “But no, you know? Where was his wife? And he was also the brother of the groom. So… I just got scared. I don’t know. That we would get busted. Or something.”
“Or something,” she delivered with an ominous whisper. Was she afraid of getting busted for crashing a wedding? Sleeping with another woman’s wife? Or was she scared of something else?
The thought was like a black eel in her mind, she couldn’t hold onto it for long, nor did she really want to.
Toby was nodding, looking at his feet, smiling. Heather knew he probably heard this as a linear narrative: she got scared because he was married and the brother of the groom. As in, afraid of getting caught at the wedding.
But she had actually meant it as three separate thoughts, each of them part of her feelings but not necessarily causing one or the other. She had gotten scared, but it wasn’t because he was married or because he was Jeff, The Brother. Something else scared her.
“Heather,” Toby said calmly. “I don’t want you to ever do anything you don’t want to do...”
There was a “but” at the end of this sentence, at least implied in Toby’s tone. She looked at him.
“But I did think it was...hot. I don’t want you to feel bad about anything that, you know, you do. When it’s like that, I mean. I’m into it. Really.”
Heather looked at him. It was hard to believe that, even if she really wanted to. Also, he was drunk. Would all of this seem different in the sober morning light? She looked up at the sky and made a sound like a sigh. Toby squeezed her hand.
“What?” he asked her.
What? What was troubling her?
“I just don’t know,” she said helplessly, as if Toby had asked her that very same question.
“What don’t you know?” Toby said, pulling her toward him.
Heather shrugged into his embrace. She felt another wave of tears coming on, which made her frustrated at herself. “I just don’t… know. I don’t know about all this.”
Toby had a finger on the hem of her halter, his flesh hot where it touched her, moving down the outside curve of her breast, over her wildly beating heart, to the bare skin just below her sternum. He slipped his thumb under the fabric and rubbed the nipple Jeff had played with. There was still a tenderness from Jeff’s attentions, and when Toby moved her hardened nipple in a slow circle with the pad of his thumb, it ignited an erotic quiver through her whole body. This was so wrong, so bad, so… delicious.
“Hey! You made it!”
Toby’s thumb slipped smoothly out of her dress and he moved away from her, smiling. Her nipple throbbed, connected through her body by what seemed like a coil carrying electricity, right to her pussy. He turned his head slowly in the direction of the voice. A glittering laugh erupted in that direction: a female voice. Another low male baritone.
Heather turned, confused, to see Ron and the woman she just then recalled as being his date, and another couple who looked familiar from Liz and Dave’s wedding, crossing the parking lot, headed toward Toby and Heather.
Toby and Heather separated a little from each other, one of those consensual partings from their adolescence, made to look like they hadn’t been doing anything there in the shadows of the parking lot.
Ron was smiling, his girlfriend was so wasted she could barely stand. “How’d you guys get home?”
Heather was lifting a hand toward the other hotel, trying to find a way to explain that they’d hitched a ride with the wrong wedding and she’d let the brother of the groom (or maybe the bride, who knew?) feel her up and bite gently on her breast on the way home.
But because everyone was so very drunk, the conversation moved along quickly and disjointedly. Ron told the girl draped against him, happily, “This is my dance partner,” and the other couple invited them to go to a place called “Annie’s”. One of the girls linked an arm with Heather's. Heather remembered exchanging a glance with Toby, and feeling like there might have been more to discuss or decide upon, but by the time she got around to thinking that thought with any seriousness, they were all on the sidewalk, traffic roaring next to them, hot summer breezes snaking around her skirt, cool where Toby’s cum was still wet on her inner thigh. Headed… somewhere.