by Amy Hatvany
“Yes,” he said. I heard him unbuckle his belt and the quick zing of his zipper being pulled down. “You want to be used a little, don’t you, Jessica?” I heard the rustle of a condom package being torn open. The slick and swollen warmth between my legs throbbed. “You also don’t want this to be over, do you?” he continued as he jerked my panties out of the way, not bothering to take them off. His fingers probed at me, and he chuckled again, a low, appealing sound. “You wouldn’t get this wet for a man you didn’t come here wanting to fuck.”
But before I could respond, he slipped inside me in one quick motion, and I couldn’t help it, I cried out. He leaned over and clamped one hand over my mouth, plunging inside me again and again, until he stopped, suddenly, and pulled out. He rubbed his cock in between my buttocks, the tip of it pressing at the opening no other man had ever touched. “You never told me if you’re the kind of girl who takes in the ass.”
“No,” I said, tense, but panting. “I’m not.” I was motionless, waiting, afraid that he might take what he wanted without my permission. But maybe, on a deeper level, hoping that he wouldn’t bother to ask.
“I don’t believe you,” he said. And then, it happened. He slipped inside me, just a little, and I gasped. He stood unmoving, letting me get used to the feeling of him there, inside my most vulnerable spot. “Do you want me to stop?”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. The sensation was exquisite, drawing the thinnest of lines between pleasure and pain. My clit ached, and I moved one hand to rub it, frantically, as he began to move, slowly, in and out. It didn’t take long for me to cry out again, my body jerking as he continued to fuck me, gently, slowly and deliberately, until he let out a low moan and finished, too.
He lay on top of my back, the same way Jake had on Saturday night, and I closed my eyes. What are you doing, Jess? I thought. I’d never been with another man without telling my husband I was going to do it, first. Not to mention how I had so easily revealed my deepest, most depraved fantasy with Andrew, but never shared it with Jake, who I’d also told that I wasn’t interested in anal sex—I worried it would hurt too much. Of course he, being Jake—being the husband who would never want to do anything to cause pain to the woman he loved—respected my feelings and never brought it up again. Why did I let Andrew do this to me, and not Jake? I felt a little sick, realizing what I’d done. The lines I’d crossed.
Andrew straightened, allowing me to, as well. I pulled up my panties, and then walked over, on wobbling legs, to the couches, where I found my clip on one of the cushions and proceeded to put my hair back up. I didn’t know what to say.
“Not what you expected, I take it,” Andrew said as he threw away the condom and quickly zipped up his pants.
“No,” I said. I smoothed out my dress and frowned.
“Are you angry with me?” He sounded legitimately concerned.
“I wouldn’t say that.” I hesitated, trying to find the right words. “I’m just....”
“Conflicted,” he said, finishing my sentence for me.
“Yes. This is not how I’ve done things.” I still couldn’t believe the fantasy I’d shared with him. I’m supposed to open myself up to Jake, I thought. Not you.
“Go home and tell your husband about it,” Andrew suggested. “I bet you he’ll think it’s hot. Tell him you planned it. That you wanted it to be a surprise.”
I considered this possibility. Jake had said he wanted us to up the ante, but I wasn’t sure he’d classify what just happened as me pushing “our” boundaries, or as me, betraying his trust.
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling a tremor in my throat. This was yet another thing I would have to keep from Jake. That was the things with lies—once you told one, you inevitably ended up having to tell more.
“Oh shit,” he said. “Please don’t cry. You’ll make me feel like an asshole.”
“Maybe you are an asshole,” I said, but I did so with a small smile. “And I’m not crying. I’m just trying to figure out how I feel about all of this.”
“I’m sorry if I made things worse,” he said, coming over to stand next to me again. “I couldn’t help myself. You do something to me. I lose my senses.”
You and me both, buddy, I thought. But Andrew didn’t have anything at stake the way I did. My guess was that there wouldn’t be any consequences for him if people found out. People expected men to have casual sex with women they barely knew. They didn’t expect the same of women like me.
“I’ve been thinking about you pretty much constantly since Saturday night,” he said.
“I can only see you once a month.” What am I saying? I thought. I was supposed to tell him that I couldn’t see him at all.
“That’s how you’ve done it before?” He was only a few inches from me, and I looked up into his dark brown eyes, searching them for something I could use to reject him. Some hint that he wasn’t a person I should spend more time with. But there was only kindness there, and concern.
I nodded.
“I’m not sure I can only see you once a month,” he said.
“I’m not sure, either,” I whispered. What I felt in that moment wasn’t romantic, exactly. My stomach wasn’t filled with butterflies and my head wasn’t swimming with images of us holding hands or taking walks on the beach. Instead, what I saw was the two of us in his bedroom again. His naked body pressed against mine. His fingers entwined in my hair.
“It’s just sex,” I told him. “Nothing more than that.”
“Whatever you say,” he replied, and then, before I left, I kissed him again.
Twenty-One
For the next few days, I didn’t answer any of Andrew’s texts. I tried to talk myself into blocking his number from my phone, but couldn’t convince myself to go that far. Instead, I focused on work, and spending time with my mom, who, surprisingly, had been hanging out with Helen during the day when I was at the office or busy with showings, helping Charlotte’s mom organize her next protest march.
“It’s pretty amazing what she’s done for women’s rights,” my mom told me, on Thursday night. She was lounging on the couch in the family room with a glass of white wine, while I stood at the island in the kitchen getting dinner ready.
“Well, I think it’s amazing you’re spending so much time with her,” I said, as I used a pair of tongs to toss the sesame chicken salad I’d made. Jake was working late, wooing a couple of out-of-town, high level executive candidates with a Microsoft expense-account dinner at Daniel’s Broiler in Bellevue. Ella was at the movies with Bentley, and Tuck was upstairs in his room.
My phone buzzed, then, and even though I tried to ignore it, I couldn’t. I worried that in avoiding Andrew, I would miss a client trying to get in touch with me.
“I’m thinking about the taste of your skin,” Andrew’s text said. “The sweet sound you made when I flicked my tongue against your clit.”
My breath hitched, remembering his touch, and I slammed my phone upside down onto the counter. Fuck, this man is getting to me. I hadn’t told Jake that I’d gone to see Andrew in his office, let alone what had happened when I was there, and the secret felt like a giant splinter lodged inside my chest. It was starting to fester.
Tucker sauntered into the kitchen, then.
“Hi honey!” my mom said to him, brightly.
“Hey, Grandma,” he said. “How are you?”
“I’m good,” my mom said. “What are you up to?”
“Nothing,” he said. He put his hands on the edge of the island countertop and knocked out a few pushups. His arms were thin and wiry, but strong; he reminded me so much of Peter, the two of them could be twins. “Can I spend the night at Sawyer’s?” he asked me.
“Sure,” I said. Sawyer was his best friend from the baseball team, and lived only a few houses down. “After we eat.” I gestured toward the big bowl of chopped cabbage, shredded carrots, and grilled chicken in front of me. Thank god for Costco prepackaged meals.
“Salad?” he sai
d, wrinkling up his slightly up-turned, freckled nose. “Really, Mom?”
“Really.” Unlike many of the other parents Jake and I knew who allowed their kids to dictate the household menu, our rule was that the kids had to eat whatever we prepared.
He gave me a dubious look. “I’ll eat at Sawyer’s.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, with growing irritation. My phone buzzed again, and I grabbed it, quickly, ready to tell Andrew to leave me alone, but this time, the text was from Jake.
“Both of these guys are idiots,” he said. “One of them just bragged that he spent the summer playing ‘sport pussy.’ What a pig.”
“Oh, let the boy go to his friend’s house,” my mom said. “You and I can have salad.”
“Thanks, Grandma!” Tuck said, and then dashed back up the stairs.
“Please don’t do that,” I said to my mom, after he had left.
“Do what?”
“Interfere with the kids.”
My mom drew her pointed chin into her neck and raised her eyebrows. “You’re obviously upset about something, but I don’t think it’s that. Or what Tuck’s having for dinner.”
I didn’t say anything, silently seething over the fact that however self-involved my mom could be, she could also read me like no one else. I was upset—with myself. Because all I could think about was how I could find a way to get back to Andrew’s house. Not in a month, tonight. It had only been three days since I’d seen him at his office and my body vibrated with need. The pull to see him again was magnetic. Jake and I hadn’t had sex since I came back from Andrew’s house the first time, and the tension inside me was so extreme that earlier today, I’d even snuck into the bathroom at work and quietly gave myself a few orgasms. It wasn’t enough.
“Bye, Mom! Bye Grandma!” Tuck said, as he pounded down the stairs, past us, and toward the front door. His backpack was slung over his shoulder, and he carried his Xbox controller.
“I love you!” I called out, deciding that trying to get him to stay home and eat salad wasn’t a battle worth fighting.
He slammed the front door behind him, and my mom and I sat down at the table to eat. I put enough salad in a bowl for each of us, and then poured us both a little more wine. I took a hefty swallow before I picked up a fork.
“Have you talked to dad at all?” I asked my mom, feeling the warm alcohol instantly smooth my sharp, internal edges.
“No. He’s called a couple of times, but only to lecture me about how dramatic I’m being.”
“Ha. That’s what you used to say to me.”
Her fork stopped in mid-air. “I did?”
“Oh my god, Mom. Are you kidding me? You said it all the time! Whenever I was upset.”
“Hmm,” she said, setting her fork on her napkin. “I don’t remember that. I do remember trying to get you to focus on the facts of a situation, so you wouldn’t feel so bad about whatever was going on. It was a technique I learned from a psychology professor, to help people with anxiety. Identify the facts, so you can let go of the things you can’t control. It’s supposed to be soothing.”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t.” I felt shaky, talking to my mother about this particular issue. We normally kept our discussions on the surface. But since we’d had that brief moment of emotional connection when she told me she was happy that I had such a loving relationship with Jake, I needed to try to be more open. Keeping that in mind, I kept talking. “It pretty much made me feel more anxious, because I had to push everything down. I felt like I couldn’t talk to you about anything that had to do with my feelings.”
My mother frowned, and her thin, silvery-brown eyebrows furrowed. “I honestly thought I was helping you develop better coping mechanisms.” She took a swallow of her wine. “Why haven’t you told me this before?”
I laughed, and shook my head. “That’s my point, Mom. I couldn’t. You and Dad were so logical and practical all the time. Scott, too, actually. I felt like something was wrong with me.” My voice broke, and I cleared my throat, not wanting to cry.
“Well, shit,” my mom said, and because she rarely swore, it made me laugh. She smiled at me, fondly. “I never meant for you to feel that way. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you,” I said, a little shocked that she’d apologized.
“Your father and brother are definitely cut from the same cloth,” my mother remarked after she took another bite of her salad.
“Have you talked to Scott, lately?” However comforting it was to connect on a new level with my mother, I was happy for the change in subject. “I texted him a few weeks ago, but never heard back.” This wasn’t unusual for my brother; the only way I knew he was alive was from his occasional Facebook posts, which were usually only links to articles he’d either written or contributed to in the field of biological engineering.
“Your brother’s not a talker,” my mom said. “That’s what I have always loved about you, Jessica. You speak your mind. Even when I disagreed with your choices, I was proud of you for making them.”
“Thank you,” I said, again, quietly glowing on the inside. I wished I had known she felt like this, sooner. I looked down at my salad, suddenly not hungry any more. It had been a long day. “I’m feeling pretty tired,” I told my mom. “I think I’m going to go upstairs and lie down. Maybe watch some Netflix. Will you be all right?”
“Of course,” she said, waving me away. “Don’t worry. I’ll clean up.”
I headed for the stairs, my phone in one hand and my glass of wine in the other.
Once inside my bedroom, I closed and locked the door behind me. I took off my work clothes and lay down on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, thinking about Andrew. About what I’d let him do to me in his office. I was still a little sore, there, in my most tender, previously untouched, spot, but it wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. I’d thought about it more since the last time I saw him, and realized that what had turned me on the most was the way Andrew planted the seed of this particular act as a possibility in one of his texts—I always wondered if you were the kind of girl who took it in the ass—so when that moment came, part of me had already decided that I wanted to let him do it. It hadn’t been a conscious decision; it happened somewhere deep in my psyche that Andrew seemed to have direct access to. No one had ever read me that easily—not even Jake.
I rolled over, feeling twitchy, desperate to find some sort of relief from the mounting tension in my body. The orgasms I’d had at the office that morning only seemed to increase my longing instead of taking it away. Every time I thought about Andrew, my nerves shot off sparks, recalling the unspeakable pleasure of his exceptional girth filling me. How I couldn’t wait to fuck him again.
I grabbed my phone from the nightstand and read through a few of the texts he’d sent me over the past few days:
“You need to be held down and fucked. Your wrists pinned over your head. Your legs spread-eagle. Your body completely exposed. Totally powerless.”
“I want you to smother my face again. I want to feel you come on my mouth.”
“Your pussy is mine, now. You know that, right?”
I groaned, astonishingly titillated by the way he talked to me. Every fiber in my being told me to go see him. But every inch of my heart screamed that I should never speak with him again.
I looked at the clock. It was only six-thirty, and I knew from experience that Jake’s business dinner would last at least until ten o’clock. That didn’t leave me enough time to get to Andrew’s house and back, and besides, my mother would ask where I was going. If I lied to her, she’d likely be able to tell. The last thing I needed was to have her mention to Jake that I’d disappeared for a couple of hours to some undisclosed place, and then come home with flushed cheeks, messy hair, and a satisfied smile on my face. There was no doubt he’d know what I’d done.
I stood up, and went to stand in front of the full length mirror that hung on the back of the bathroom door. I stared hard at my reflection, noting how my face started to l
ook less like me the longer I looked at it. I reached my hands up and gently pinched my nipples, feeling a resultant, pleasant shock in my clit. My head rolled back as I used my fingertips to lightly brush over the outline of my curves, the same way Andrew had the first night we’d been together. I thought about his mouth, the wet swell of his tongue as it pressed against mine, the delectable softness of his lips brushing over the thin skin of my neck. I thought about his words in my ear: My cock. Your pussy. That’s all that matters. Understand?
I never knew I could be so aroused by the dominant nature of his words. What did that say about me? Why hadn’t I ever had these same feelings come up with Jake? I wasn’t a submissive woman, by any means. My husband loved that I was a strong woman—I knew that side of me was much of why seeing and hearing about me having sex with another man turned him on. He admired my strength, my willingness to explore the depths of my desires—to be comfortable of satisfying my urges. But did that mean that I was weak, then, because of how much I liked the way Andrew had been more dominant? Or was it more that it was a relief to not have to be so strong and in control all of the time?
Yes, I thought. That’s it. With the other men I’d been with—even with Jake—I took the lead. I was used to doing that, and not just in the bedroom. I’d been raised to be independent—to never solely rely on a man for anything. So when I thought about all the ways Andrew touched and had spoken to me that first night, it struck me that the most intimate act he performed was wiping off my makeup. I remembered how exposed I’d felt in that moment, and again, when he was fucking me, and demanded that I open my eyes. He took away my armor; his words broke down my walls. He saw into me in a way no other man had before.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand, next to my half-full wine glass, where I’d left it. I walked over and looked at the screen through slightly hooded eyes, my heart banging like a drum. Andrew had sent me a close up of his hand wrapped around the base of his thick, beautiful cock, along with the words, “What you do to me.”
