CHAPTER 5
Toby wasn’t entirely clear on how they had ended up walking around in the hot Jersey summer with a group who must have been friends with Liz, because he didn’t know any of them and neither did Heather. Images of the evening were popping up in his mind, flashing around out of order, and the only thing he could think about consistently for more than a second was Heather. Heather on the shuttle bus, Heather’s skirt spinning high above her hips, Heather’s skin being tasted by that guy in the back of the shuttle. Heather's vacant, savory, “I don’t know,” that left him wondering what, exactly, Heather didn’t know about. The promise, in everything that she did, that Heather might just keep doing things she didn’t know about.
Sure, he didn’t like that she obviously felt conflicted and guilty, so he reached for her hand whenever he could to reassure her. This is my fantasy, he kept wanting to tell her.
Really.
Truly.
It was.
He wondered what had actually made her flee the other hotel. He was both grateful she had done so, and still reeling from the dizzying fall of his expectations. Standing there, watching her walk toward the elevator with that man, he had felt like he was getting squeezed in a vice. And yet he had wanted it, wanted so badly for her to disappear through elevator doors, meet his eyes one last time, and then disappear upstairs, that he was pretty sure he had felt his mouth watering.
Now, his mouth was dry, and they had been bounced at a bar named Annie’s before they even got in, because Ron’s date (or whatever she was) was too inebriated. They were walking back to the hotel now, righteously complaining about the bouncer, planning to take over the hotel bar.
Toby would have been all for taking his wife upstairs, sinking into her hot, wet, cunt again, and reliving the whole evening in his mind as he did so.
At the hotel bar they were told they were closing in fifteen minutes. How did it get so late? He bought Heather a drink, trying to resuscitate the level of inebriation that had led her to letting go of her inhibitions. He sipped his drink, feeling devious and maybe even a little predatory for wanting to stay sober. The drunk girlfriend or date or whatever she was disappeared, and it took Toby almost ten minutes to notice she was gone. Ron told Heather she was the hottest woman at either wedding, and Heather rolled her eyes. The other couple – nameless, somewhat faceless in Toby’s memory later, suggested that they continue the party upstairs. Someone had a cell phone out and was texting people who were evidently in room 1204.
These were all just slices of his memory. Walking down the hall behind everyone else, stark hotel lighting making sharp angles of their skin and their bodies. No one able to walk in much of a straight line. An aggrieved woman with a look of studied and religious anger opening the door and glaring at them as they passed noisily by her room. A promise to call the manager. Everyone laughing loudly and reducing their voices to the loudest whisper imaginable. Heather losing her balance and colliding with a wall, laughing. Ron’s hand on her hip, maybe her ass, as he helped her steady herself. A pause, as their faces came close to each other. Toby’s cock, improbably hard again.
He made a note of the room as they passed through the door. 1204. The occupants were already there, someone had turned on some music. It was a very typical wedding after-party, one like any of the others Toby had been to: everyone was drunk, nobody knew each other all that well, they were being too loud for the hotel and drinking the fridge stock like it was free. Everyone was way too old to be acting like this, but nobody cared.
He was pleased when Heather chose an armrest next to Ron to sit down on. She had obtained a plastic cup of clear liquid, and he found himself perversely pleased by that as well. Ron’s face was right next to her well-rounded bottom, the shape of which was hinted at but slightly disguised by the red and cream dress. Ron’s eyes were pulled to it occasionally as though it were planetary gravity. Toby was leaning on a bar, fetching drinks for anyone who asked from the rapidly depleting fridge.
Three people – the couple with Ron and one of what Toby guessed was an occupant of the room, a woman he recognized but did not remember – started having an intense political discussion, two of them sitting on one of the beds, the man standing. Toby sipped a bottle of Jack Daniels.
He heard Heather as she untwisted her hair from its decaying hairdo, shook it, and pulled it back into a ponytail. “I need to get out of this dress,” she complained. Ron was sitting next to another guy. “Noooo,” they complained in unison.
“No, keep the dress,” Ron said, smiling.
Toby moved his eyes to the political debate, sensing what would happen next: Ron shot a look in his direction, determined the coast was clear, and then ran a hand along Heather’s calf to her shoes. Toby thought he heard him make a comment about the shoes. He liked them. They were sexy.
In the next frame of his memory, Toby was standing next to Ron, facing the bar. There were no drinks left. “Shit,” Ron was saying.
And then Toby was talking. The voice was his and he could feel his mouth moving, but it was, for not the first time, a lot like watching a movie.
“You know,” he heard himself saying. His voice was low, made gravelly. “You don’t have to worry about me, you know, and you putting the moves on Heather.”
Ron froze, and his eyes went to the mirror above the bar to look at Toby, then quickly away from his gaze.
“We have an arrangement,” Toby said.
He sounded smooth now. It was almost repulsive how smooth he sounded. Ron was still frozen, lifting his hands with the palms forward, shaking his head, about to make the universal gesture of not having anything to do with something, or knowing about it, or having any fault for it. “Hey man,” Ron started to say.
Toby, not himself, made a half turn and leaned on the bar so he was facing the room, and gave a quick glance at Heather, who was watching him, perhaps because she knew what he was saying. “I’m serious,” Toby said, so only Ron could hear. “We have a deal. So no worries on your end. Just… well, it’s Heather’s choice in the end. I’m gonna run to our room and get some more booze.”
Toby punched Ron lightly on the arm and gave Heather a meaningful glance. “I’m going for more drinks,” he mouthed to her, and pointed down, in the direction of their room.
He turned away from her as she looked alarmed, and strolled out of the room.
It was madness. Careless, unthinking, drunken madness. The hallway swam around him as he made his way back to their room. Down the hall, wait for the elevator, turn, turn, keycard in, door opened too harshly, bang against the doorstop. A loud click as it closed behind him.
Their room was silent. Heather had gotten dressed and put everything away in her suitcase as neatly and tidily as possible. His own preparation was sloppy: ties here and there, a shoebox discarded on the floor with the tissue paper tossed out of it at the last minute. In the silence of the room, the single light coming from the bathroom, the full weight of what he had just done washed over him.
He remembered his excuse for being there: the booze.
He emptied the fridge into a handbag of Heather’s and stood up, feeling dizzy. What was Heather doing, right now, at this moment? He sat on the bed and fished around in his suit for his phone. Did he even want to call her, to interrupt what she was doing? Or was he just concerned about his phone as an object, a lifeline he had no intention of using?
He had no arrangement with Heather. No “deal,” as he had apparently told Ron. He had just left his wife with a man who was obviously into fucking her, and he hadn’t said anything to her about it.
His phone was missing. Sitting, the full picture of his drunkenness coming into focus, he patted his suit repeatedly wherever there was a chance of a pocket existing. Nothing.
He stood up, clumsily, and retraced his steps with the handbag clutched unceremoniously in his hand. Mouth dry, heart pounding. How long had he been gone? Where was his phone? Where was his wife, right now, and what was she doing?
He stood outside of room 1204 for a few moments. The political debate was still raging. Someone was laughing. He rapped on the door and the voices went quiet. Toby swayed in front of it, holding the bag of drinks in two hands like an imbecile.
He was an imbecile. An imbecile who had just told another man to fuck his wife, without ever really finishing the conversation about that with said wife. A man who was paying far too much attention to how hard his dick was and how much his balls ached, and not the very real consequences of his actions.
No one answered the door.
He knocked again. “It’s Toby,” he added after a moment. “I have the drinks.”
His voice was loud in the hallway and he half-expected someone to come out and shush him. Footsteps approached the door, and it clicked open.
There was a different vibe in the room now, and it took Toby a second to scan it and figure out what it was. Fewer people? New people?
No Heather.
No Ron.
The loveseat they had been sitting on was empty.
Someone took the bag from his hand as the realization that his wife was missing hit him like a series of concrete waves. Gone. Gone. Gone. And he didn’t know where to.
He patted himself again for his phone. His mouth was dry, he reached for a bottle of water, which they had in abundance on the littered bartop. No one paid him any attention, except for one guy, who lifted a small bottle of vodka and grinned at him. “Cheers, man,” he said.
Toby, stunned, looked around for help. A clue. For a moment he soared on the hope that Ron was a smoker, and maybe Heather had gone out with him to have a drag. She did that sometimes. Always a drag, never a cigarette. She had never smoked a whole cigarette in her life.
But he knew, as he crossed the room, his stomach coiling into cold, slithery knots, that Heather and Ron were not outside smoking.
How long had he been gone? Not that long. Not long enough for his wife to have disappeared on him like this.
“Hey,” he said, leaning toward the bed to get the attention of one of the political debaters, a guy who had gotten tired of the conversation and was staring at the wall. “You seen my wife?”
The guy looked at him, confused.
“The blond. Red dress?”
The guy pointed at Toby suddenly, recognition on his face. “The calendar girl?” He made a motion on his chest indicating the cut of Heather’s dress. “Dude, that’s your wife?”
He looked as if he were really expecting an answer, so Toby nodded.
“She was here,” Toby said impatiently, waving at the sofa. “With Ron. Any idea where they went?”
The guy was shaking his head and lifting a drink to his mouth. “No, bud, sorry,” he said. His eyes traveled up and down, sizing Toby up, wondering almost loudly enough to hear how Toby snagged a wife like that. Wondering how a guy could be such an idiot to let a wife like that stay in a room with a guy like Ron, by herself, unsupervised.
He waited, simmering, apart from the party in every possible way. Glaring at the door, his heart wild, his mind full of dirt and angst. He felt for his phone repeatedly, rose to get a drink and then, halfway to standing, decided better of it and sat back down to collect his thoughts.
What had he done? What had he said to Ron, what had he said to Heather?
Heather. For all her pretending to be scandalized by his fantasies, she certainly got up and went off with a guy the first chance she got.
The feel of his wife’s pussy clenching around his cock, the rough stucco of the hotel beneath his hands, her legs bouncing in their heels next to his thighs, rose up in his mind almost as though he were actually doing it. Superimposed over it, the image of her swanlike neck stretched back against the shuttle bench, her lips parted, her eyes consumed by their pupils and pleasure.
Inside of Heather, it all said, in pictures smeared by his drunkenness, there lived a wild slut.
His cock throbbed, and he wriggled to make his erection less obvious. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and one of the women arguing her political point, which had somehow turned into a vicious debate about going to the moon, gave him a strange look before turning her attention back to the conversation.
Toby looked around. He knew none of these people. Heather’s handbag, which he suspected was extremely expensive, was still sitting on the bar.
And Heather, it was plain to see, was not coming back.
He felt for his phone again, but gave up without much of a fight, because he knew it was missing. If he’d had it, he could call her, tell her to come back to their room, put an end to this.
Or just find out what “this” was.
An image of Heather, propped up against a hotel wall, her legs spread open for Ron’s dark Latino cock, bubbled to the surface of his mind and clouded his judgment. His cock throbbed again. He gritted his teeth, stood up, snatched the purse, dumped the bottles he’d stuffed inside, and pushed his way to the door.
No one said goodbye.
*
Their room was empty. Toby spun around in it, turning things over, looking for his phone. Wandered in and out of the bathroom, cursing, giving things a toss here and there as if he were looking for something, but he wasn’t anymore.
He sat on the bed. Discontented and restless, he went to the bathroom. He could feel himself taking his cock out, holding it in his hand. His left hand was against the wall, the toilet below him, his balls aching. But he couldn’t see anything except Heather, sexy red shoes dangling in the air, cream and red dress bunched up around her waist, head against the stucco wall, rolling in his direction. Her voice a porn star’s moan as her lips opened and she told Ron to fuck her harder.
Heather, on all fours, ass being slapped hard by Ron’s thighs, pussy squelching with every thrust, pussy getting filled with another man’s cum.
Toby didn’t have to work hard to make himself come, only to hold himself against the wall and get what he could in the toilet as his orgasm squeezed his abdomen so tightly he thought he might fall over. As his ropes of cum splattered against the white tile and the toilet lid, floating uselessly in the water, he saw nothing but Heather: Heather with her mouth open and her limbs rag doll-like, surprised that Ron’s cock was so big.
Some of his need having exited his body, Toby looked at himself in the mirror, panting. The shame that usually came after watching porn tried to wrap itself around him, and almost succeeded, but the knowledge that his wife was on the loose somewhere with Ron pushed it out of the way fairly quickly.
From there: a missing piece of time.
Then he was standing in the hotel lobby, a full-on erection developing again already. “I need to know where Ron… Ron, with the wedding party for Liz and Dave Gleason, is staying. I don’t… I don’t have his last name, but he’s in the block with the rest of the...party.”
The night manager was shaking her head, her lips pursed together in the expression of polite negation, the kind of smile people gave you right before they had you removed by security. She couldn’t give that information out, sir, and if he didn’t know Ron’s last name, she was very sorry, but she couldn’t even -
“Did you see a woman with a cream and red dress walk past here?” Toby interrupted her, causing a flicker of annoyance to erupt on her face. She shook her head. Toby could hear the slur in his words, feel how close to a police escort he was probably getting, but he kept going. “It’s just… that’s my wife. She has my key. Has anyone turned in a cell phone?”
The night manager shook her head, politely and without judgment, at all of this. If he was locked out, she could get his key, just provided he had his name and room number available.
But Toby, annoyed at this woman who did not understand the depths of his problem, was already backing away, shaking his head, sounding like a stoned adolescent saying: “Nah, man, that’s okay, I think they might be outside...”
Which he didn’t, but he was suddenly captivated by the idea that his phone might be by the wall where he had fucked his wife, and by the outrageous idea that she might be right where he had fucked her, just with a different man in her pussy. These ideas, and the slowly dawning realization that he was making a total ass of himself, propelled him out the door.
The traffic had died down, but not that much. It was anyone’s guess what time it was. Toby turned the corner and was met by the loud hum of the air conditioning unit, and empty shadows and pools of orange light. No Heather.
Then he was looking disbelievingly at the ground. His phone. Resting on a tacky red mulch bed. He stared at it, disbelieving his good luck, as he often did when he was drunk and actually managed to find something.
It was face up, a blue light pulsing in the corner. Messages. Notifications. Could be anything.
He leaned against the wall as he swung at the ground with his arm and scooped up the phone.
It took a few swipes to unlock, but there it was; six messages from Heather, the last one partially displayed.
412
His insides burned as he stood up. Heat crept up from some unknown source, setting his neck on fire and wrapping around his face. He was suddenly, inexplicably, absolutely sober. His thumb moved easily to bring up the previous messages.
Ditto actual yell this guy we hab nt arrangement
Okay.
Toby
Okay. So I’m going
Room 42251
421
The messages, all but the last, were spread out, five to seven minutes apart from each other. Toby’s pulse raced: how much time had passed since he had left the room, returned to the twelfth floor, gone back, jerked off, talked to the manager, retrieved his phone?
Long enough.
*
Time flowed like lightning and mud at the same time. Toby, walking back into the hotel, the night manager looking at him suspiciously. He held up his phone. “Found it,” he told her, and passed her before she could reply. Hands in pockets, waiting for the elevator. Impatience grinding against his spine, looking for the stairwell.
The ding of the elevator as soon as he opened the stairwell door. A fire hose, terribly bright lighting. He was out of breath when he reached the fourth floor, and his abdomen felt like ice. A hum in his ears matched the pitch of the lights, tuned to a dark and steady hum with the drumbeat of his pulse beneath it as he turned the corner, stared at the signs, took a moment to blink and calculate: Rooms 401-415 this way, 415-445 to the right. He turned left, but pulled out his phone to double-check his destination. His hunch was correct, it was not 412 but 421.
That could have been embarrassing.
When he turned around, the hallway loomed before him: the room would be in the middle of it, and he could not get there any slower or faster. It seemed to come at him, rather than the other way around, a tunnel that moved around him and brought him closer to the door behind which, apparently, his wife was ensconced with Ron.
Eternities and not even a second passed as he walked to stand in front of room 421. Heather, laughing, his wife, taking care of his children and baking cookies. Heather, pressed against walls with the fingers of strange men in her cunt. What on earth would have made him say that he had an arrangement with her? What arrangement?
His chest was sore from the incessant pounding of his heart against his ribcage as he swayed, suddenly drunk again, hand raised to knock on the door. He leaned close to it, hoping to hear something before knocking. Part of him wanted to walk away, pretend to have passed out in their room, pretend that none of this had ever happened. He checked his phone again.
Heather’s voice came through the door. Speaking, a low drawl, a sexual sound.
Toby knocked.