It's a weird thing, catching my wife in a lie. I go to work, but can't focus on a damn thing. I don't even remember walking in the front doors. Or riding the elevator. Or booting up my computer. All I know is that right now, I have Facebook open and am typing “Ashton Brooks” into the search field.
His name turns up more results than I expect, but he’s at the top of the list, with 3 mutual friends. Ashton’s profile pic looks like a professional headshot—a black and white photo featuring his chiseled good looks staring intently into the camera lens. His hair is light, although I’m not sure if it’s sandy blond or gray, and he’s sporting the kind of scruff that’s too perfect to be anything but cultivated.
He’s a photographer, I see, which seems to explain the photo. Clicking into his profile, I find that Kylie is, indeed, one of the three connections to him. The other two are friends of hers from college.
I follow a link to Aston’s website and click through some of his portfolio. He's actually very talented, I admit begrudgingly. Most of his photos are of women, artistically rendered shots that tease without ever crossing a line—even the nudes are tastefully done.
I don't spend much time there, though. Not at work. And besides, it's not what I'm after. What I want to know is his connection with Kylie.
I find it on his About Me page. He got his master’s in art composition from Kylie’s college, and his time in grad school there would have overlapped with hers.
It all comes rushing in—the photos being out, her more carefree attitude, the fact that this guy has a studio. He's the TA she had a fling with, and here he is, back in her life to rekindle that fling.
My whole world comes out from beneath me. It spins and spins. How could she do this? Was this guy so good that Kylie would risk it all for an afternoon of fun?
I grow cold. Maybe it's not just an afternoon. Maybe this has been going on for a while, right under my nose.
I grab my coat before all the questions and revelations have time to catch up to me. I'm stewing, and there's no point pretending to do work anymore.
It's just after noon by the time I pull back into our neighborhood. I'm not sure what my plan is—didn't even occur to me to come up with one on my drive home. I'll just come out with it, I figure. Tell her I saw the texts, ask her how long it's been going on.
Even imagining the question, I feel something cold wrap around my heart. It pumps faster.
The minivan is gone. She's not home. I park and check anyway, my heart racing as I walk through my own house. I’m not sure what I expect to find—lingerie and sexy outfits strewn across the bed, maybe. Or an empty box of condoms carelessly left in the bathroom waste basket.
I don't find any of that. The bed is neatly made up. Everything is tidy. Spotless. I open her closet, where her dresses hang, and check the back, where her one LBD hangs. It's still there.
“Huh,” I say aloud, adrift in the anticlimax. I go to our home computer, again thinking I'll find something incriminating on the browser. Instead, I find nothing notable. Not even Facebook—although Kylie mostly checks that on her phone these days.
She must be dropping the kids off. Or maybe she took them out to lunch before heading to her mom's.
Or maybe she's having lunch with Ashton Brooks.
The possibility stabs at me. I parry it as best I can. His message said that he would see her at 3. Not at noon. Not for lunch.
I pull out my phone and start to compose her a text before I realize that I have no clue what I want to write her. Do I accuse her now? Over SMS? Without any real evidence, or even the chance to look her in the eyes and see how she reacts?
I darken the phone again and think. I can wait at home—stew some more. Go back to work and try to be productive—not happening. Or I could go out and catch her in the act. I know where she will be, and when. It's just a matter of figuring out how to leverage that.
Again, before I can think this plan through, I pull up Ashton’s website. I shouldn't be surprised to find it saved in the browser history, but it sets off butterflies in my gut. She's been here. She's even looked up his address, just as I am now.
Something about her carelessness calls to mind the younger, freer Kylie. The one I've created in my head but never really met. Is that why I feel a thrill as I jump back in my car? Is that why, despite all the evidence that suggests my wife is having an affair, I don't feel like this is truly the end?
~~~
Ashton Brooks shares a studio with a group of photographers under the name of Chromium Gallery and Photography. It’s off the main drag in the city, in an area of converted warehouses and auto body shops. A lot of the buildings are now loft apartments and condos.
I do a drive-by first, searching for our minivan, but don't see it along the street. I do find a street spot, though, just around the block and take it. I still have no real plan.
The front of the studio is a gallery of the photographer’s work. I enter, pretending to browse, when none other than Ashton Brooks emerges from a desk in the back corner of the room.
Panic swells through me. My head snaps in his direction, like I suddenly realize I've been trapped in a room with a lion.
“Afternoon,” he says
I fight the almost uncontrollable urge to run. This guy is every bit as good looking as his Facebook profile. He's wearing faded jeans and an untucked shirt of rich, cobalt blue. He's left more buttons undone than I could pull off, and his week-old beard is perfectly scruffy. I imagine Kylie reaching out and brushing her hand across his cheek, and shudder.
“Can I help you find anything?”
I snap out of my daze. He doesn’t recognize me. He doesn’t know that I’m the husband of the woman he’s trying to seduce. “Um…” I grasp at words. “No, just browsing.” That doesn’t sound like enough, so I add, “I’ve walked by this place a lot of times. Always wondered what was in here.”
I see him dismiss me as a non-customer, but he’s friendly about it. “Well, feel free to have a look around.” He nods at the desk in the corner. “I’ll be right over there if you’ve got any questions, or want to buy anything.” He adds the last comment after an afterthought.
“Sure thing,” I say. He starts to turn. “Hey, any of your stuff up?”
I bite my tongue, wondering if I’ve gone too far. I expect him to look me over again, this time unmasking me and seeing me as the amateur detective that I am. Instead, he gestures to a set of photos on the opposite wall. “I’ve got a few things up over there. Working on some new things though, so anything you like I’ll give it to you at 50% off.”
“Cool.” I don’t go there immediately. I’m circumspect. But I want to. Especially when I realize that all of the photos along his side of the wall are nudes. Tasteful, artistic nudes, but still...nudes.
It’s weird, being in the same room as the man that I suspect is seducing—or has already seduced—my wife. I glance at him as he clicks away at something on the computer, oblivious to who I am. I feel like I should say something, confront him or something. I don’t. Instead, I make my way along the edges of the gallery like I care at all about these photos.
The other three photographers also feature figures posing in the studio, but they don’t have the same eroticism as what I glimpse from Ashton’s. They’re serious, or self-serious, or just kind of boring.
Ashton, on the other hand, seems to have a knack for pulling out the unusual beauty in his subjects. I recognize his style from those photos Kylie kept, seeing similar techniques, refined over the years, right there on the wall. He catches the model’s coyness as she smiles over her bare shoulder, the curves of a woman’s midriff, the sheen of her thighs and hip.
A couple of the photos go a bit beyond just hints of the erotic. One shows a close-up of a woman’s breast, focusing on her nipple, which stands hard and excited. Another, a woman’s ass and a hint of her lower back, where a tattoo of tiny, Chinese characters walk up her spine.
It's the final photo in the series that sends a quiet sh
ockwave through me. It’s of a woman’s midsection and hip, the shades of gray rolling like a desert landscape. One thigh folds over the other, but doesn’t quite hide the trimmed thatch of her dark bush. The only thing blemishing the artistic nude was a small birthmark on her hip. I knew that birthmark. It was Kylie’s.
I freeze, staring, as the implications roll over me. If someone blew on me, I’d probably hit the floor. Instead, I scan the picture for some other evidence, some other proof that this is Kylie. The bush is wrong—I never knew her to keep something so full—but maybe she had in college. Are her hips narrower? Is her midriff flatter than a woman’s could be after two kids?
The door behind Ashton opens, and a woman with short, pink hair emerges, a camera bag on her shoulder. “Hey, Ash, I’m taking off. You sure you’re good to close up?”
“I’m good,” he says.
“Cool, man. Have a good weekend.” She glances at me as she moves to the door, then looks at the nude of Kylie that I’m obsessing over, then back at me. She smirks, and my face goes red. “He’s got more of that one, if you’re interested.”
My mouth goes dry. “I…”
The pink-haired girl leans in, her brows going up wisely. “And you definitely should be interested.”
“It beautiful.”
The girl laughs and turns back to the door. “That’s one way to put it,” she says without looking over her shoulder. The door shuts. I’m alone with the lion again.
“Hey, man, I need to take care of a thing in the back,” Ashton says before the silence fully settles over me. “And I need to close up in about fifteen.”
“Got it. I should be going, too.”
He grabs a business card off the desk as he walks over to me. “Take this. Shoot me an email if you’re interested in seeing more.” His eyes drift to the nude of my wife. I think he’s going to say something. Instead, he just smiles to himself and waves the business card in front of me.
“Thanks,” I say, taking it because I don’t know what else to do.
He leaves me, humming something I don’t recognize as he pushes back through the door that his pink-haired colleague came out of. I pocket the card and check the time. It’s 1:45. Still over an hour and a half before the appointment. There’s a coffee shop across the street that I can hang out in. I start to head there when something stops me.
Glancing quickly at the door that heads into the back, I quickly move to the desk where Ashton had been sitting. Just behind the keyboard is a key with the logo of the gallery on the keychain. I don’t think. I’m beyond that. I grab the key, shove it into my pocket, and fight through the thick haze of recklessness on my way to the door.
I expect Ashton to emerge, to yell at me, to tackle me before I reach the door. My steps grow faster. I stumble, pushing open the door with more force than I intend. Outside, the sun is still shining. The sounds of the city still fill the air. My heart is still beating.
I stick my hand into my pocket, fingering the key as I look behind me, at the door and its lock, like I can somehow match the shape I feel with my thumb to the tumblers inside the deadbolt.
“You’re a fucking idiot,” I mutter to myself. I can’t get my heart to slow down, or get my breath under control. For a second, I almost hyperventilate, right there in front of the gallery.
But the deed is done. There’s comfort in that fatalism. No sense in trying to replace the key. No sense in trying to change the past. It would be better to just toss the key in the trash than to sneak back into the gallery and return it. I almost do throw it away as I pass a bin on the street corner. But I don’t. Of course I don’t. I have a plan, as manic as it is, and I’m going to see it through. I’ve come too far to stop now.
I cross the street and head for the coffee shop. What I need now is a place to chill. A place to catch my breath and let my heart settle. Unfortunately, the best spot for my surveillance only serves caffeinated drinks. I go in anyway.
~~~
I spend most of the next hour trying to figure out what I'm doing—not just my crazed actions of the moment, but my longer term plan. Unsurprisingly, given the revelations that seem to keep coming, it’s hard to focus on that.
For one thing, apparently, at some point, Kylie posed nude for photos. She never mentioned them, certainly never showed or shared them. If they were all similar to the one hanging in the gallery, they're artistic rather than risqué, nothing that I would get upset with. So I tell myself now, but is that realistically the way I would act?
Thinking back on when we first started dating, I remember the man I was—the man I was worried a girl like Kylie wouldn't be into. I was in business school. I wore khakis more often than jeans. I was about as square as one could get in college, and dating Kylie, I was painfully aware of it. I was always afraid that I would do something to mess up our relationship. It never occurred to me until now that maybe she was just as worried. And given that, how hard would it have been for her to confess that she once took her clothes off in front of a camera? It took her years just to share the clothed ones with me.
Okay, so fine, she didn't tell me about that. I could rationalize that. But the photo shoot that's about to happen, the one she definitely did not tell me about, is a harder truth to swallow.
And yet, here I am, sitting across the street, waiting for Kylie to make her clandestine meeting with an old boyfriend who is currently hanging a photo of her naked self in his gallery. I don't text her. I don't call or confront her. I wait, like this is a trap that I've set, not the beginning—or middle—of an affair.
Affair. The word rips through me, hurtful and clawing. Why am I trying to catch her? Why don't I stop this before it goes too far?
The answer lies in that squirmy sensation that works through my gut when I think about what “going too far” actually means. It’s the same one I felt when I first discovered that she had a fling with her TA—or whenever I think about any of her indiscretions back in her more free-spirited days. Only this time, I’m not thinking about the past, but what’s to come.
Before I can answer any of my unspoken questions, though, Kylie drives by the window, the minivan rolling slowly as she searches for a place to park. I see her through the front window, her light brown hair looking somehow different—hanging loose, curling slightly inward around her chin. Styled. In her dark sunglasses and rusty red lipstick, she looks incognito. It wouldn’t surprise me if she hopped out wearing a trench coat and a popped collar.
I lean back into the coffee shop, just in case her eyes drift up to those windows, and wait. The minivan rounds the corner, out of sight. A couple minutes later, Kylie comes back into view. She’s not wearing a trench coat, but a pair of tight, black pants and a loose yoga tank top, its straps making a complex pattern across her shapely back. Anyone passing her on the sidewalk would assume that she’s on her way to yoga class, not...wherever she’s going.
That quake is back, starting in my gut before moving out, through my heart, across my balls. I shouldn’t have ordered that second latte. I grab it, take a sip anyway, just to occupy my shaking hands.
Kylie stops before the studio, looks up at the sign, and hesitates. Is that guilt? Nerves? She taps her fingers on her gym bag, looks up and down the street. A man, passing by her, glances at her ass. I can’t blame him. She looks great.
The door opens for her before she can retreat, the decision taken from her. Ashton is there, tall and broad chested, his smile wide. He swings the door open and gestures for her to enter. She moves past him, brushing close—by design?—and saying something I cannot hear and cannot interpret. He nods, shutting the door. Shutting me out. The last thing I see is the sign in the window as it flips from “Open” to “Closed”.
~~~
I give them twenty minutes. I’m not sure how I last that long, given that each second feels like an eternity. I finish my coffee. Go for a jittery walk around the block. Return to the coffee shop to relieve my bladder.
I consider leaving, consider just igno
ring whatever is going on. We have a good thing between us, a good life. She loves me. I don't doubt that. She's not doing this to leave me. She's just scratching an itch, one that’s been there all along, one that a square guy like me never could.
Thing is, I can’t unlearn what I already know. If I close my eyes now, I’ll never be able to stop wondering. The doubt will eat me alive. What if I’m just misinterpreting? What if this is all some big misunderstanding? I need to find out, even if it means the end of us.
Also, tied up in all of this is the fact that I’m buzzing with erotic nervousness. Even peeing is an effort to do with my cock as hard as it is. I splash water on my face to get things under control, and barely recognize the crazed man staring back at me. I stop, take a deep breath, and shrug at myself. Now or never.
I cross the street, fingering the key in my pocket, and nearly get run over by a bicycle messenger. “Watch where you’re going, asshole!” he shouts angrily as he zips past me.
I barely even notice. I’m focused on the door in front of me and the lock that bars my way. Part of me hopes that it’s locked and that the key that I pilfered is the wrong one. I could go home then. Fate would be directing me to leave this one alone.
I reach the door, and it is locked. I pull out the key, and for a moment, I feel resistance. For a split second, hope and despair rise through me. Then the key gives. I hear a click. The door opens silently.
I step inside before someone sees me lurking and questions me. It doesn’t even occur to me that Kylie and Ashton could still be in the gallery, that I could bumble in with nowhere to hide and no explanation for being there. I just act, and blissfully, the room is empty.
Shutting and locking the door behind me, I tip-toe into the room. The bright wooden floor boards, mercifully, don't creak.
Now that I'm inside, I realize that I have no idea what to do next. The only door leading out of here stands against the back wall, taunting me with the unknown. I move to it, carefully tucking the stolen keys back into place behind the monitor. It's so still in here, the muted sounds of the traffic outside not loud enough to drown out my beating heart.
Best Hotwife Erotica Vol.3: Caught! Page 7
