CHAPTER 3

 

Don’t worry,” Toby told Heather, passing her a third gin and tonic. “They’re running a shuttle back to the hotel.”

Heather took her drink and looked at it with mixed feelings. She was already pretty slammed: the only thing this drink was going to do was make her feel terrible in the morning.

But if she was going to exercise any self-control, it fizzled instantly in the primary-colored flashes of light from the stage, and opening measures of The Electric Slide.

She tipped her head back and downed the drink. It was a comedic gesture, for Toby’s benefit. She was hardly a hard-core drinker. He laughed and put his fingers gently under the bottom of the glass as if he were helping her. “There you go. That’s it. Just let the gin make it all better,” he said jokingly.

It was a strong drink, burning in her throat. She closed her eyes. “Dang,” she said, wiping her mouth. “That was strong.”

Toby shook the ice in his whiskey. “I got you a double.”

Ordinarily, Heather would have been dismayed by both herself and Toby, getting her that much booze. Since the night at Salty’s that had gotten so out-of-hand, she had kept a lid on her drinking as much as possible, limiting herself to one drink and throwing herself at the opportunity to be a designated driver. She had kept it up for eight months, not wanting an open door to anything like what had happened at Salty’s happening again.

But this was, without a doubt, the most uncomfortable wedding she’d ever been to, and it required some help.

Toby’s hand descended into her lap like a crane, lifting the emptied glass from her loose fingers. “Get you another one?” he asked.

She brought a hand to her face, tapping her lips lightly with her fingers. Her lip gloss stuck to the pads of her fingertips and she pressed her lips together to fix the unevenness made by her touch. “Why not?” she replied. The booze was already going to her head, and it felt dangerous. She didn’t want to smooth away the feelings that kept her far away from doing anything remotely related to what had occurred so many months ago. That included drinking, having fun, staying out late, flirting with or even talking to bartenders. She gave a glance around the lame wedding, and boozily confirmed that there was no danger of any of those things (drunkenness apart) happening here.

Toby departed, and she was left staring at the nearly empty dance floor, on which a handful of couples were trying, with little success, to save the event from itself by dancing without any genuine enthusiasm.

No one was sure what had transpired between the bride and groom, but they were as visibly annoyed with each other as it was possible to be at your own wedding. Dave, the groom, was an old buddy of Toby’s, who had worked for him on and off for years while he circled his career options a little bit like a vulture, settling at last on the carcass of used car sales. Liz, the bride, was a bookish, mousy woman Dave had dated for eternities, who had a PhD in biology, worked for a pharmaceutical company, and tested things on mice for a living. No one present, Heather was sure, actually believed that these two would be getting married without Liz’s job being dangled as a sweetener for Dave: why she was doing it, no one knew for sure, but everyone guessed (without saying it outright) that it was probably fear of loneliness. It was a semi-sad, resigned wedding.

Heather looked at Liz. Her hair was dyed blond for the wedding and piled on her head in a sculpture of curls and hairspray that looked ripped from the pages of a New Jersey hairdresser’s magazine from the eighties. She and Dave were sitting at a table, hands laid on the white tablecloth, Dave’s over Liz’s in a very stiff display of affection.

The cold between them was like a polar vortex, giving the entire party severe wind-chill. Liz’s mother had suffered a mini-stroke two days earlier, and the prevailing rumor was that the wedding itself had caused her so much stress she had literally stroked out, leaving one side of her face mouth drooping slightly more than usual. Not enough to keep her from insisting that the wedding should go on as planned.

Whether this was the cause of the glacial temperatures between the couple, no one knew for certain. But the obvious coolness between them was having a dampening effect on everyone, and the DJ hired at the last minute due to a cancellation by the “real DJ” was not helping anything. They might have been better off with no music at all.

Toby was back. He was pretty lit, and had been since their arrival in New Jersey. He was moving with loose, exaggerated movements, and he plopped in the chair next to Heather with a grin and a fourth gin and tonic, which Heather took from his hands as he had taken her glass from hers, like a crane. “Somebody save this wedding,” she said dryly.

Toby smiled. “It may be up to us.”

This was a vague reference to the jabs they’d been making since they arrived, three days ago, about the general un-coolness of Liz’s friends, who all seemed dazed to be out of the laboratory and not terribly familiar with who Liz was. Dave’s relatives were all people who, like Dave, seemed able to sleep with their eyes open, and appeared to be doing just that. It made uptight Heather and stoic Toby look like party animals.

Three couples and a single friend had gone onto the dance floor at the start of the song, and now only three people remained. The DJ showed no signs of recognizing a problem, and Liz and Dave were now moving their mouths in tight conversational displeasure, without looking at each other.

Okay,” Heather found herself saying, just seconds before slamming her fourth drink. She crunched an ice cube while Toby stared at her from her right.

She lifted her right foot, uncrossing her legs, and her heel made a loud thump on the floor. “Let’s do it,” she said, taking Toby’s hand.

She felt her self-control slipping, but the gin was chasing right after it, numbing it before she could stop herself.

Heather was wearing a white sundress heavily saturated by a rose-red flower design, styled after fifties pin-up girl dresses: a halter top that cut low between her breasts. The waist was narrow, and the skirt bouncy to the knees; the dress gave her the appearance of having an hourglass figure. Her own straight, naturally blond hair was gathered and twisted up in a loose bun at the side of her head, with a red flower and sprigs of baby’s breath adorning the knot, and red lipstick in the exact shade of the pattern on her dress. The lipstick was less expensive than her usual brand, and too sticky, but she had applied it in such a way that her lips looked fuller than usual and a bit like they’d been bee-stung. Also a bit… libertine. Or cheaply whoreish. The dress and her general classiness canceled it out, but the sticky, candy-flavored lipstick beckoned with all the taboo promises of a Lolita.

She looked hot, which had not really been her intention. In the never-ending streak of bad luck that had been everything to do with this wedding, Liz’s sister had come down with a debilitating flu, so Liz had asked Heather to stand in for her to keep the carefully orchestrated wedding party “even”. The bridesmaids were all wearing red in some form or another, and Heather had been forced to go shopping the day before the wedding. This was the only dress she had found that fit and didn’t make her look like a streetwalker. Liz had approved it from a photo: Heather had only been thinking of matching the other girls’ outfits. No one had been there with her to tell her she looked too good in that dress to wear it as a bridesmaid, unless she was best friends with a supermodel.

Heather herself, never really a “pin-up” type, had been slow to notice herself. In retrospect, she had gotten more than one very obvious check-out by the guys that she passed in the hotel on her way to the limo for the wedding party. Toby had let out a low whistle, but had waited to make his observation until it was too late:

Dude. You look better than the bride.”

Heather rubbed her forehead, thinking of the memory. She barely knew Liz, and had really been trying to help her out of a jam. Personally, she felt like anyone getting this wound up about a wedding was silly, but there was a sense of female solidarity that had compelled her to agree to be in the bridesmaid clan. She had felt like a shit for looking as good as she did, once she realized it.

She had borrowed Toby’s jacket for the first part of the reception, but the air had become steadily more dank and hot until she couldn’t stand it anymore.

The reception location had also fallen through at some point, and this was Liz’s last choice: a beautiful old mansion with gorgeous grounds and three ballrooms, two of which were on the ground and second floors. This one, the only one that had been available, was in the basement. While much had been done to make it elegant, and the level walked out on one side to the pretty gardens, it was still a basement. Evidently, it was also the sort of area the landlord thought did not require air conditioning, but the natural cool of the basement was no match for the old school DJ lights, the increasingly tense guests, and the scorching New Jersey heat outside.

Heather pulled Toby up with her but dropped his hand almost immediately. She had a plan, and now she was going to put it into action. If there was one thing Heather had become good at in her line of work, it was putting on a show and selling ideas to people. She flounced across the dance floor, the anemic crowd of four – someone must have come back – looking at her with hope. She seemed to be on a mission, and they sensed what it was.

She was drunk, too, but she felt in control of herself. Just more… likely to do what she was about to do now.

She flounced into an empty seat at a promising table. She didn’t know any of these people, or which member of the wedding they were there for, but that almost made it easier. She put her arms on the edge of the table, one long bare arm folded neatly over the other. “Guys,” she told the table. “We have to save this wedding.”

For a moment, it seemed that it would flop as a tactic: one young girl rolled her eyes and complained about the music. A dark-skinned guy asked if there was any salsa, which made the girl to his left quip, “Salsa doesn’t work miracles. And these are white people anyway.”

Heather could feel her features as they morphed into her very best sales face. Understanding, empathetic even. You and me are the same, her face was saying. I totally get what you’re feeling, and if I were in your position, I’d feel the same… but I have something here for you that will make it all better. All you have to do is say yes.

She pointed a finger at the brown guy. “You. Go ask the DJ to play something better.” She moved her finger toward the girls. “You ladies look like good dancers. Get ready.” Then, turning to her right, reading the guy sitting next to her correctly with her well-honed professional talents, she recognized the joker in the group. He needed a shot of something, and some encouragement. “You,” she said. “I can tell you’re the life of the party. What do you need? Another beer?”

His companion snorted, smiles began to sprout around her like a well-watered garden. The Latino kid was already headed to the DJ booth with a smile.

I have work to do,” she told them. “Don’t let me down.”

She flitted off to the next table.

 

*

 

Toby sat for a moment, watching his wife. This sort of performance was not totally out of character for her: she was a people-person, and scarily able to swoop into small groups and establish rapport, then get them all doing whatever she wanted. When she did this, it was as if another personality had elbowed its way through her ordinarily straight-laced, reserved character, and taken up residence inside of her. She became whatever was called for: jocular and sharp-witted with the doctors, complaining and put-upon with the nurses, hard-edged and respectable with the suits. Whatever it was they wanted, she delivered.

She was flitting from table to table like a sexy butterfly, her lean legs dangling from the full skirt to her red shoes. Toby watched her mouth as she spilled whatever convincing words she was choosing to the people seated at the tables, and Toby was mesmerized as they responded to her. Smiles broke out, feet shuffled, people spread out from their tables to the dance floor and the bar.

The music changed suddenly: by the DJ booth, the Hispanic kid who Toby was pretty sure was a cousin of some sort, was waving his hands emphatically for the DJ to turn up the volume. Toby didn’t know what was playing, but they seemed to have entered the twenty-first century with the change, and the beat was well-received by Heather’s minions, who were now pouring onto the dance floor.

And then, there she was, floating through the crowd she had created, towing Liz and Dave behind her, her lips twisted in a triumphant grin, her eyes on Toby. She released the wrists of her bride and groom captives, and they melted into the now-fun, gyrating group. Her eyes were still on Toby’s and his heart was soaring, crushing itself into a ball, his fears clawing at their jail cells, his pride swelling in his flesh: this was his wife, this magical woman with the red lips that looked ever-so-slightly slutty. This glorious, blond siren, who looked voluptuous even though she wasn’t, was walking straight toward him.

She gave a spin when she cleared the dancers, and her skirt rose up with the momentum, higher, higher, almost high enough to glimpse her panties. If she had continued turning, it would have revealed everything below it to the entire room, but she stopped with surprising grace, given how drunk she must have been. The skirt fell into place over her hips, and the disappointment from all the men in the room who had seen her spin was palpable.

Her hands were reaching for him, a smile on her mouth. “Come on,” she was laughing. She pulled him into the growing group of dancers, and Toby, drunk enough at that point, began to do what most white, middle-aged men do on a dance floor, which involved balling his hands into fists that he kept next to his ribs as he moved his hips somewhat in time to the music.

But no matter: the black cloud lifted from the ambiance of the wedding, and Heather let loose in her incredibly hot dress, which was only looking hotter as both of them consumed more alcohol. Heather had done her job invigorating the party, she was dancing sexily, but she was with Toby, spinning for him, smiling for him, while everyone else envied him having such a beautiful wife.

Wow,” Toby said at some point, as they collapsed at a table near the bar. “You really turned this party around.”

Heather’s skin was faintly luminescent, a sheen of light sweat mixing with the extra makeup she had put on for the wedding to create an ethereal glow. Her blue eyes sparkled, and she brought a drink to her lips. “I did,” she said proudly.

She set the glass down with a thud – Toby remembered looking at it at that point, and thinking it wasn’t even Heather’s drink. This may have been the turning point of the evening, but who could say? Heather stared at the dance floor like a proud mother for a moment, then blinked slowly. “I have to find a bathroom,” she said at last.

She was gone, and Toby remained seated to catch his breath. A lot of time had passed since they had started dancing, and he realized he was much more intoxicated than he had thought. He waited, ordered another drink, and as the dancing fizzled a little in Heather's absence, he began to scan the room for a sign indicating where the bathroom was, or the red and cream dress, or the shapely body of his wife.

But she wasn’t there. He stood up, took a walk around, chatted with Dave, who was incredibly drunk, for a few minutes. Spotting a small hallway with a sign for the restrooms, he walked down the hall and discovered at the end of it not restrooms but a stairwell that led to the ground floor and, evidently, the restrooms.

When he finally wound up the stairs and down yet another hallway, he found the restrooms and waited outside the women’s door. The wait dragged on, laughing, giggling groups of women came and went, but there was no sign of Heather, or her dress, and he really had to take a piss. He waited, kidneys beginning to scream, not wanting to be in the men’s when Heather popped out, until he could take it no longer and hurried in, rushing the job to get back out to the women’s.

A woman in a blue dress who had come out of the bathroom earlier and had given him a friendly, almost flirtatious smile, looked him up and down as she passed him to go into the bathroom again. “Didn’t I just see you here?” she said.

Waiting for my wife,” Toby said, and the full depth of his drunkenness became apparent to him: the words clung to his tongue and left sluggishly, in pieces, like someone was pulling cotton from his mouth instead of him speaking.

The woman’s smile changed from flirtatious to motherly, which might well have been in Toby’s imagination. She shook her head the way she probably would for a lost three-year old and in the same tone she might have used, said: “I don’t think she’s in there, honey.”

Toby must have looked sad, even if he only felt confused, because she reached for his arm and gave it a squeeze in the same motherly way she had spoken. “I’ll check it out for you, what’s her name?”

Heather,” Toby said earnestly.

Fabricated memories of the bathroom scene he hadn’t even seen for himself at Salty’s began to invade his mind. Like a mob of children in a control room, they started to punch at his emotional buttons, triggering anger, jealousy, arousal. Nausea.

The woman disappeared through the swinging door, and he heard her through the opening as an emerald-clad teen exited and glowered at him. “Anyone in here named Heather?”

The door swung shut, and what seemed like an eternity later, the woman exited and gave him a shrug.

Toby watched her turn the corner of the hallway before he rubbed his forehead. Of course Heather wasn’t here.

He wondered how long he’d been idiotically standing there.

For whatever reason – it was something he only half-thought about, for a fleeting second – he followed the blue woman’s exit path, in the opposite direction from the stairway leading to the wedding he was attending. The hallway twisted and turned and dumped him smack dab in the middle of a wedding on the ground floor.

This wedding was more lavish, more merry, and better attended than Liz and Dave’s function. It seemed as though a hundred people were on the dance floor at that moment, bouncing and laughing and making all kinds of noise. The scene looked like someone had tried to suffocate a rock concert with a giant doily. Hands were in the air, and the crowd was yelling the words to “Sweet Caroline” like it was the greatest song they’d ever heard.

He scanned the room for an exit strategy, mostly because he didn’t have the sense to turn around and go back the way he came in. His eyes found Heather immediately, hand in the air, wide smile on her face, red and cream dress gorgeous on her bouncing body. It took his mind a moment to believe the sighting, however, because his wife was in the middle of the dancefloor as though she belonged at that wedding, and that made no immediate sense. He kept scanning until, like a record scratch, his thought came to an abrupt halt and he snapped his gaze back at Heather.

She was oblivious to him standing there, and some instinct made him want to secure that anonymity. He edged himself sideways until he was standing by a large potted tree drizzled with fairy lights, and stood basically beneath it, where he was sure the wildly dancing Heather would not immediately notice him.

And he watched.

It didn’t take long to see that Heather was with the Hispanic guy from Liz and Dave’s wedding. His jet-black hair was shiny and full, easily recognizable. He was tall, his back to Toby, but he was definitely that same young guy.

The cool feeling Toby had experienced at Salty’s nearly eight months before began to pour over him and well up from deep inside as the whole scene began to materialize before his eyes. Heather laughing, smiling, dancing. Now the Hispanic kid was giving her a spin, her delicate pale hand in his. She stumbled, or was pushed by the crowd, and fell right into his chest. When she looked up at the guy with her hands on his chest and her mouth open in a wide smile, Toby felt like someone had actually grabbed his balls and given them a hard squeeze.

She’s just dancing, he told himself. He could hear himself forcing the words on the man inside of him who felt jealousy in the way men were expected to feel jealousy. As though he were trying to talk himself down from a rage. But the voice was also like a seductive, beckoning finger, drawing him toward it to feel the peculiar sensation he had felt at Salty’s, the rush that had overcome him when Heather had told him what Chris had done to her. It was the same part of his mind that had savored the story for eight months, picturing Chris’s fingers slipping beneath the fabric of his wife’s panties while Toby jerked off in the shower.

He watched her for a long time, losing himself in the moment so completely that he forgot he wasn’t at the right wedding, and gave no consideration to what he might look like, standing behind a LED-drenched potted plant with a zombie-like expression on his face, getting an erection, at a wedding he wasn’t even invited to.

Heather spun under the guy’s arms again and laughed. He was pulling her closer with each turn, and Heather was melting into them a little too much. With each song, they seemed to be getting closer to each other, Heather's hands were on his chest, feeling his muscle -

Can I get you a drink? Sir.”

A waiter had materialized next to him, and he had the stern, well-practiced expression of a man who has dedicated his entire life to being a head waiter and lives in eternally renewed disappointment that butlers are not much of a thing in America.

His question was a polite suggestion that Toby get lost, and he somehow radiated, very professionally, that he knew that Toby was not part of this wedding.

I’m sorry,” Toby said, flustered. He had a picture of himself suddenly, and realized he probably looked crazy, on the verge of disorderly conduct or flashing someone. “I just...” he pointed at the dance floor, specifically to Heather, “got lost after the bathroom and my wife -”

Aha,” the man said. “You’re from the party downstairs.” Extending his arm in concert with a slowly rising, terse smile, and without taking his eyes off Toby, he indicated the hallway. “That hallway will take you right back downstairs. Happens all the time.”

He remained motionless, his smile frozen and his arm elevated, for just a portion of a second, but long enough for Toby to see that he would find a walkie-talkie soon and have Toby tossed on the lawn or something if he chose not to leave via the hallway, so Toby mumbled “Thank you,” and wriggled toward the door.

He cast a look back at the dance floor, where Heather was still bouncing happily with the man Toby was privately referring to as Jose, but she didn’t see him and he didn’t want to linger. He staggered dejectedly along the hall, down the stairs, and back into the wedding he was invited to.

With Heather and Jose gone, the dancing had fallen apart, but most guests were drunk enough that it seemed like a loud bar instead of a funeral. Toby’s vision was swimming, and the image of Heather laughing and falling against Jose’s chest with a big smile on her face was replaying in his mind to the point that it was, occasionally, all he could see. He zeroed in on the bar and ordered two drinks, one a gin and tonic for Heather, but he suspected he would be drinking it himself.

He sat down, and a stranger who seemed to think he knew him began chatting amicably. Toby’s mind was upstairs, his eyes drawn to the hallway to the bathroom and the entrance to the ballroom from a main set of stairs. His eyes must have looked like jell-o as they darted back and forth. His companion paid no notice.

The wedding was slowly fizzling, while Toby was slowly burning up inside. He drank Heather’s gin and tonic and looked at his watch, but the time was meaningless given that he had never looked at it before. How long had she been up there? Was she still up there? Was she ever coming back? Was it minutes or hours? He had no idea. Could he legitimately text her without looking crazy, or had she only just left and his imagination was running wild to the point of destroying his sense of time?

He was about to get up when the doors to the main stairway – not the bathroom hallway – opened, the flash of a reflection from the DJ stage catching Toby’s eye.

They were together, Heather smiling, her hair slipping from the many pins she had used to hold it in place. Her lips were freshly reddened, Toby could see them from where he sat. Did that mean she had returned to the women’s room to reapply her makeup again, after making out with Jose, who was also smiling? Or did it mean she had done exactly what she said she would do, and Toby was acting like a psycho?

They entered together. Heather opened the door, tipping her head back to laugh. Jose was talking. They moved like a couple – not touching, but complementing each other’s movements, not total strangers, with some intimacy between them. Toby’s neck burned and he loosened his tie and collar.

Heather was so busy chatting with her friend, so oblivious to how much time she had been gone, that she walked right into an empty chair at the table closest to the door. Jose steadied her by wrapping his dark fingers around her pristine, porcelain flesh, and they both laughed.

Toby was now boiling.

Heather stopped abruptly, and Jose bumped into her, his hands midway up her bicep, his chest against her back. It was definitely not the embrace of a total stranger. It was the way you held women who belonged to you, or who you wanted to belong to you.

Heather was looking around, making no effort to wrest herself from Jose’s grip. Her search of the dancefloor was lazy, she leaned her head toward Jose to say something, he smiled, her head turned slowly like an owl’s.

When she saw Toby she said something again, and Jose looked right at him. The old direct-in-the-eye stare. An apelike string was plucked inside of Toby and he felt like snarling, but his arousal was stronger, and so he remained seated as Heather wormed her way through the tables. Jose followed at a safe distance, his eyes on Toby.

Toby’s spine tingled. Heather stumbled into a chair and her skirt caught on it, showing a healthy expanse of bare thigh and the glimmer of white panties. She pushed it down with a laugh and stumbled to the chair next to Toby. “That party upstairs is off the chain,” she confided to Toby breathlessly.

Her skin was damp to the touch when Toby put his hand on her back. He wondered if she noticed that he was not looking at her, but at Jose, who was walking gracefully to the edge of their table, standing, something in his body language on the offense.

The voice of the DJ broke through the ringing in Toby’s ears, which he hadn’t realized was there, just as Heather's foot rubbed against his leg. “Last few dances, everybody, get your requests in... the first shuttle is leaving in ten minutes for the hotel….” his final words were eaten up by the music.

Toby’s attention drifted to Heather’s foot, bare, and the sexual motion she was making along his calf, a twisting, snake-like rub that traveled directly to his cock.

Oh no,” he heard her say. “We were just getting started.” Then, theatrically, facing Toby with a strange expression on her face, she waved her hand up at Jose without looking at him. “This is Ron,” she yelled over the music.

Toby and “Ron” looked at each other over Heather's floating, sculpted arm. They gave each other the half-hostile nod that men give to other men who might, somehow, be in competition with them, which is pretty much all men at all times.

Want a drink?” Heather shouted at Toby, trying to stand up.

Toby put a hand on hers. He wasn’t sure what he meant by it, or what he wanted to do, but the idea of sitting there with Ron while Heather fetched drinks was unappetizing for some reason, so he rose while pressing her gently toward the table. “I’ll get it. Same?”

Heather smiled and shrugged as if she didn’t care. Toby met Ron’s eyes. “Ron?”

Sure,” he said. “Beer.”

Toby moved in a daze, the presence of his wife and Ron burning against his back as he deliberately turned fully away to walk to the bar. It was as if they were radiating cold against his flesh. He let the feeling simmer while he ordered the drinks and waited for them, his eyes on the hands of the bartender, his mind on what Ron and his wife were doing behind him.

The wedding was thinning out. Somehow, he realized, they had missed Liz and Dave’s departure; the bride and groom were long gone. Ron had taken a seat next to Heather, who was reclining gracefully in her chair, dress clinging to her for dear life, her breasts seemingly wanting to burst from the halter of her top. The image burned through Toby: they weren’t touching, or even talking, but a familiarity existed between them that rankled as much as it aroused.

He set the drinks on the table with deliberate slowness and remained standing. There were a few pitiful dancers on the floor. This wedding was, in comparison to the fun he had witnessed above, a sad affair. He sipped his drink and realized he had no recollection of ordering. A sour and sweet taste announced that he had somehow gotten a whiskey sour – not what he wanted at all.

Looks like that first shuttle is full,” Heather mused, seemingly apropos of nothing except the hollowed dance floor and diminished presence at the tables. “When’s the next one?”

She dropped her bare arms to the table, her fingers folded together. It was a fawnish, somehow sexual gesture that did not go unnoticed by Ron, whose gaze traveled along her arms to her shoulders and then drank in the thrust of her breasts as they squeezed together and pressed out against the confines of her dress, teasing anyone who looked with the possibility of just bursting out.

What happened next remained a haze for Toby. They started to talk to each other: the topic of conversation being whether or not they should dance, how soon they thought the shuttle would be there, whether anyone would want to continue drinking at their hotel or if maybe they should go out.

How many minutes went by? Ten? Fifteen? They were rising from their chairs, presumably they had decided to get on the next shuttle. They were crossing the dance floor, the promise of something illicit and tantalizing happening between Ron and Toby’s wife evaporating, Toby feeling too drunk to reason, Heather seeming more sober than he, Ron not even looking back at them. Disappointment started to snake through Toby, a measure of relief behind it like an aftertaste.

The music at their own wedding stopped abruptly for a moment. The DJ was having trouble, making an announcement. There was a general shuffling of people, a sense that the party was being packed away, a clatter of stacking chairs somewhere and the glassy ring of dishes being hauled away in the background of it all.

Amid the cessation of music in their ballroom, a rumble started above them and an enormous cheer wound down the stairs and through the ceiling to the floor below. Heather, who had been digging through her purse, which she had acquired somehow, stopped dead in her tracks as though someone had played an air raid siren. She looked at Ron first, grinning wider with each passing second. Eyebrows went up. Toby failed to recognize the tune. Heather looked at Toby next and clutched his wrists. “It’s Lagrimas Negras!” she squealed. Then she swung an arm around Toby’s shoulders, and one around Ron’s, pulling them close to her face.

She was very, very drunk, Toby realized, just as several other, more salacious thoughts occurred to him.

Guys,” Heather said. “I’m going to go dance upstairs. Are you with me?”

She was already spinning away. Music cut into the silence with a blast and then an awkward strangle, before starting up again full-voiced in the basement. Heather was sashaying toward the bathroom stairway, not looking behind her. Ron had his hands in his pockets and shrugged.

Toby followed, his eyes on Heather, his mind on Ron, who seemed to be coming with them. Heather glanced over her shoulder and grinned when she saw them coming. Then she was gone, skipping up the stairs, surprisingly graceful.

Hallway, dimness, stairs, bathrooms, girl in a green dress scowling, lights. Heather stopping just short of the dance floor, turning to Toby and Ron as if they were one unit. “You know how to salsa?” she asked.

It was a question for either one of them, but felt like an icepick in Toby’s heart. He didn’t, and she knew he didn’t. Ron looked at him deferentially, Toby felt his body moving, his hands gesturing toward his wife with open palms. Heather reached out for Ron’s hand and grasped it before jumping excitedly. They plunged, together, into the dancers on the floor.

It was a fact, usually inconsequential, that Heather knew how to salsa. Something that had bobbed around in general conversation: she had had a roommate in college who had taken her along to salsa nights and Heather loved them. It was something she had mentioned when they first started dating, and invited Toby, too. Toby had managed to avoid going, he could never remember how. They had gotten married, and salsa had made appearances only in stories from the past, only as a secondary character. The conversations usually ended with someone saying, “You should go sometime!” in a saccharine female voice, and then being forgotten for years on end.

So Toby had never seen Heather dance. He had, in fact, never seen anyone dance salsa. It was hard to see Heather and Ron at first, because this was a raucous wedding, full of, Toby was noticing, a lot of Hispanic-looking people, and everyone present seemed to like salsa. He could see the flair of Heather's skirt, the blond of her hair, the sheen of Ron’s black mane. They were in motion, synchronized, and that was all he knew. The bile of jealous arousal rose up in the back of his throat, he stared.

And then, as if by magic, the dancers around Ron and Heather thinned and moved away to give the pair more space. The reason was obvious: they were out there spinning around, looking like professional dancers. Close together, sweat forming on their skin and shining under the wild lights the DJ had chosen for this particular set, predominantly a primordial, seething red that bathed everyone in a pattern of sexual black and scarlet shadows.

Toby stood apart, as if time had utterly stopped where he was, and a tunnel alone afforded him a view into an alternate reality. A reality in which his wife was not his, did not love him, and would not lie down next to him tonight, but rather, she was the lithe and graceful dancer in the arms of Ron, her Latino lover, who could pick her up and spin her around so that the pinup girl skirt she was wearing flew up and the whole party could see her white panties and long, sculpted legs.

Heather’s hair was falling out of her careful bun, getting damp, clinging to her skin. Her eyes were locked on Ron’s as if they had known each other forever, and their embrace between bouts of spinning was so charged with feral sexuality that Toby could feel his hard-on all the way through his abdomen. Heather, ordinarily pressed neatly into a model of thorough tidiness, was slippery in her own sweat, glowing under the red lights, streaked across the face by damp strands of loose hair, and her dress was moving around her as though it were a creature with its own agenda, spinning up, folding forward, revealing parts of her body in flashes that tantalized every man in the room.

The song ended with a blaze of trumpets that both Ron and Heather seemed to anticipate coming, because as if they had worked on the choreography for years, they entered into a final frenzy of spinning that sent Heather round and round in circles with her dress flared out and her pretty legs pirouetting for all to see, right up to her panties. When the crescendo came to a final, clamorous stop, she rolled up into Ron’s arms, her own arms resting on his shoulders. Her eyes were locked on his, they both breathed heavily from the exertion, but it could easily have looked like lust that made them pant against each other. Toby felt ill: their sweat was mingling, their lips hovering inches from each other, the taste of his wife was within centimeters of this total stranger.

And they looked good.

The crowd cheered and moved back in on the dance floor, obscuring Toby’s view. He leaned against a wall and stared at the pieces of his wife that he could catch amid the raucous group. She was still, leaning close to Ron, and then she was gone.

She reappeared, smiling, her hands in her hair, rearranging the loose locks and tidying herself up. She was looking at Toby, a grin on her lips and a glimmer in her eye.

Toby had no idea what to say. Since their evening at Salty’s so many months before, he had decided it was best to submerge his fantasy in some cold water, certain as he was that Heather would never play such a game again. Not that he hadn’t kept the flame alive inside his private world, but this was different. It was Heather who appeared to be breathing life into it, rekindling the flames. He had no idea whether he could trust his judgment or not, how to know if he was only reading what he wanted into what he was seeing.

So?” Heather said, tucking a bobby pin into her hair and smoothing it down with an efficient set of movements. “What did you think?”

Toby wasn’t sure what this question really meant, so he stumbled over his response before answering, somewhat awkwardly, “I think… you’re a really good dancer,” he told her. He sounded like some guy who had a crush on her in seventh grade and was seeing her at a high school reunion.

Huh,” Heather said, leaning toward him and placing a hand on his chest while she dipped past him to a table, picking up a glass of ice water. “Is that all you think?”

The profile of her face was next to him, the graceful curve of her cheek above her red mouth. Her skin burned through his shirt, her sweet sweat, infused with lavender, rose up to his nose and sent a shudder through him. Heather stood up, sipped the water, and sucked an ice cube into her mouth, while Toby stared at her, weighing the signs she was giving off.

She had a certain look in her eyes, a flicker of mischief that Toby had only seen once before: that eventful evening at Salty’s. Was it entirely alcohol-induced? Was it only a tease, a thing she would snatch away from him in a moment to call him a crazy pervert?

Or was it real?

Heather set the water down, leaning over and then back again with the same warm hand against Toby’s chest. As she stood up again, her hand moved slowly down the front of his body until it reached his crotch, where her fingers stroked the outline of his erection and made his cock pulse under her touch.

The mischief ignited in her eyes, and her mouth turned up slightly as her other hand came to her lips to pinch the ice cube between two fingers and pull it from her mouth with her lips wrapped around it, until it popped filthily from between them.

A shudder traveled through Toby as his wife, who had never done anything even remotely like what she was doing, drew the ice cube from her lips to her neck, and then down to her chest, over her breasts. Her pale skin turned slightly red where the ice cube traveled, and then faded to pink and back to white. She moved the ice cube to the back of her neck along a route that transversed the plump hill of her breast, the hollow of her shoulder, and just below her earlobe. A tear-shaped droplet of water bulged on her chest and then rolled between her breasts.

The fingers of her other hand, meanwhile, traced a lazy circle over his dick through his pants.

And her eyes glimmered with mischief, locked right on his.

The ice cube was popped back between her lips, and she melted into Toby much the same way the ice was melting inside her hot red mouth. She kissed him, the cold of her lips invigorating but almost distressing, her tongue darting into his mouth. It was like a kiss from a different woman, and Toby felt as though the world shifted around him.

What if I told you,” she whispered in his ear, her voice just audible below the pulse of new salsa music, “that I learned a very, very dirty trick with ice tonight?”

The music, and the lights, changed abruptly, and with the sudden change Toby’s world altered as the words Heather had spoken made their way around and around in his head. It was so unlike Heather to talk this way, and now she was backing up, grinning wildly, rolling the ice in her mouth. Her hand was still in his, and then it wasn’t, and she faded into the dancing crowd while Toby tried to orient himself.

He was following her onto the floor, just walking, staring at his wife, his mind zig-zagging between terrifying and exhilarating thoughts. Or maybe they were one and the same. He was going to vomit, he was going to ejaculate in his suit on the dancefloor if she touched him again, he was jealous and looking for Ron, hoping he would be there with his hands on Heather's waist, sucking the ice cube from her mouth, and praying at the same time that he was gone. Forever.

Suddenly Ron was there, and Heather was fawning all over him, leaning close to him to talk. They were moving to the music, so it was inevitable that their bodies came into contact: lip on jaw as Heather was jostled, hand on shoulder, breasts against chest. Toby had stopped advancing and was standing two feet from them. Heather gave him the side-eye, and Ron looked at him for a brief moment, and then Heather leaned over, one hand still on Ron.

The last shuttle is leaving!” she yelled. “From downstairs. But I don’t want to go yet!”

Toby stared at her as she hollered something in Ron’s direction. Her hands were now on both men’s shoulders, she was pulling them together, talking loudly from one to the other, wrapping them up in a plan. “I say we stay and crash this wedding!” she yelled, pulling their three heads together for a huddle. “I’m not ready to go home.”

Toby stared at her. Ron shrugged, looking at Toby. Then, smiling, he directed himself to Heather. “Don’t you think these folks will notice we’re not part of this wedding?”

Heather shook her head vigorously. “No way. And they have good music. And better food. I say we stay.”

How will we get home?” Ron shouted, glancing at Toby with a grin that was almost friendly, nearly conspiratorial.

Heather shrugged. “Uber!” And then she spun and started to dance.

Toby was left looking at Ron. “It’s up to you, man,” Ron shouted, leaning in and down a little to be closer to Toby’s ear. Up close, he was quite tall. He had his hands in his pockets, fingers splayed out. He was letting Toby take the lead.

Toby shifted his eyes to take in his spinning, drunk, flirtatious wife, and for a moment his hopes went soaring. Sure, he knew they would come crashing down again, but maybe he could eke out some more really hot sex after they played this game.

I do what my wife tells me,” he shouted solemnly at Ron, over the music.

And he brought his hands to just below his shoulders, in fists, to do his imitation of dancing.

 

*

 

At some point over the next two hours, which unfolded in a hazy blur of drinking and dancing, Heather by the minute becoming looser in her movements, her dress rising with more frequency to show her panties, her skin glistening with sweat, Toby found himself watching his wife dance with not just Ron, but a few other guys at the wedding.

The group thinned out, and it became pitch-black outside the windows. Heather barely paused to sit in unoccupied chairs while Toby fetched drinks for her, for her and Ron, for himself, alone and watching his wife dance shamelessly. It would live on in his memory as a montage of hands on Heather's small waist, flares of her dress exposing her entire thigh, resting moments when she leaned on the table and drew her finger in sexy circles around the rim of her glass and laughed at other men’s jokes while her foot crept up his own leg suggestively.

It seemed there was never a time to ask her what she was doing: Heather clearly had a plan, and he was relegated to observer of it as it unfolded. Did she know that she was giving him exactly what he wanted? He saw the way other men looked at her wedding finger and then furtively looked at him, but he returned their questioning glances with an even stare.

What’s the trick?” he asked her at one point, as she spun around him, her lips freshly anointed with red lipstick.

Heather knew what he was asking her about and responded by winking. “I’ll show it to you later,” she promised.

The DJ was wrapping up the music what seemed like an eternity later. The music had died, chairs were being stacked, bright, awful lights had been turned on. The bar had been packed up without his noticing, because his attention had been so focused on his wife.

We better call an Uber,” he said to her, as she took a pause to drink a glass of water. She was flushed, her hair loose again, and very, very drunk. She fell toward him, her hand on his chest again. “I have a new plan,” she said throatily. “These guys are all going back to the Hilton, in a shuttle.”

The Hilton was next to their own hotel, and Toby knew, basically, what she was suggesting even before she said it. He looked around for Ron, but he was nowhere to be found. Heather was already walking away from him toward a group of guys who looked single and hungry, and their eyes were on her as she approached. Her words drifted from her mouth as she walked away, low and intended only for Toby’s ears, but they floated around him for a few moments before he was able to parse them:

I’ll just go ingratiate myself with these guys and we’ll get a free ride.”

Ingratiate myself.

The phrase coiled around Toby’s cock, coalescing deep in his balls, deep inside of him, wrapping around his soul like a boa, squeezing until he was sure he would burst. An announcement was made about the shuttle, and Heather linked an arm in one of the guys’ arms, walking with the remaining party toward the exit. She turned only after a few paces, only to glance at him, only to smile that same terrifying smile.

Toby followed, sure that he was not in his own body. Heather was clinging to her choice of man – a tall, jock-ish man in his early thirties with lustful eyes that seemed to always land on her breasts.

The evening became a blur: he followed his wife to a shuttle full of people they had never met, from a wedding they didn’t belong at, with Heather looking back over her shoulder. The expression on her face was the thing he would remember best, as odd as it might seem after everything that was about to happen, happened.

A smile he could not recognize, and something he couldn’t describe in her eyes. The sort of look it is impossible to categorize as complicit or competitive, friendly or dangerous.

In the end, the image burned into his cornea, where it still resides, as indecipherable to him as the thoughts of the woman he married, but maybe didn’t know.