The Need Within Her

by Jason Lenov

  “You can’t just say stuff like that in the grocery store you know?” Emily said, meeting his gaze and not flinching.

  The guy sighed. Just sighed like he was tired of her bullshit already but too lazy to even roll his eyes about it. He rubbed his chin. “All I’m saying is I bet you’re a great lay.”

  This, of course, caused Emily’s jaw to fall even further and her eyes to nearly pop out of her head. She almost dropped the can of coffee grounds. And, to her disgust, she took a step back, unable to believe the nerve this guy had. “I’m…” Her frustration only deepened as she let out a short, exasperated breath, unable to find the words to admonish the jerk.

  Then he looked at her again. In that way guys have that lets you know that in that exact moment they are imagining what it would be like to be between your legs, rutting into your sex and loving it.

  The feeling that welled through her next was terrifying. Not fear of him. Because they were in the middle of a department store in the middle of the morning and there was nothing this guy could do to hurt her or worse. It had nothing to do with how offended she thought she ought to be and nothing at all to do with how big or imposing this guy was, and yet everything to do with it at the same time.

  No. Emily Robertson wasn’t scared of him. She was scared of herself.

  Because deep down in her gut, down beneath her soccer mom exterior, past the part of her that had woken up every morning for the last twenty years and made breakfast for her family and seen them off to work and school, a tickle began.

  It was a wicked thing. A primal thing. A feral thing, or so it felt. Down there where she rarely let her thoughts wander save for in the darkness in bed with Jack, Emily felt a tiny thrumming. Like a banjo in the distance.

  Strum, strum, strum.

  She hated it, or so she told herself. She hated the way it owned her, how it made her mind clear of every other thought and demanded her attention.

  Because in that dark place, now yawning and exposing an Emily she had never in a million years dared to admit she might be, Emily liked what had just happened.

  What she hated about it was how much it made her feel like a woman. Not a genderless, smiling, helpful mom. Not a loving wife whose role in life was to please her husband. Not that Jack would ever demand that of her, not for a second, bless his heart.

  But a woman. A sexual being. An animal that needed just that sort of attention from time to time, a man leering at her and thinking with his prick instead of his brain.

  This, in turn, made her gasp because she had not thought of any man’s cock, save Jack’s, in years as well. And before she could stop it, there was her imagination working against her, exposing the vision of what this man’s cock might look like and, to her utter astonishment, what it might feel like inside her, too.

  That’s when he smirked.

  Which only caused Emily’s shame to deepen. Because she’d seen that look on those cock-sure, arrogant ass holes, too. The knowing smile that lit up on their lips when they realized they’d just caused a woman to think about sex. Sex with them.

  “Anyways,” he said, rubbing the back of his thick, sun-burned neck with a meaty paw. “Have a nice day.” A final lurid glance, not even an attempt at concealing that he was committing the image of her legs to memory so he could jerk off about them later, before he turned and began to walk away.

  Emily was beside herself. She had half a mind to hurl that damn coffee can, which she now somewhat but not entirely, regretted returning for. She stood there and watched the damn bastard walking away, eyeing the shelves and checking his grocery list for what else he needed.

  Which is when Emily made another decision. Or perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps it wasn’t her speaking, not the real Emily. Not the one who fixed lunches and picnics and had driven the kids around in a minivan to their soccer games. It certainly didn’t feel like her when she said it. “Wait!”

  What?

  Wait? Why wait? Why on god’s green earth would Emily call out to the man who’d practically assaulted her, verbally at least, in this box store and tell him to wait?!?

  She froze when he stopped and turned to look at her again. Her blood ran cold and a line of sweat broke on her forehead. What the fuck had she been thinking?

  What the fuck am I doing?

  She cringed at just thinking the curse. Because Emily Robertson didn’t swear, not even at the worst of times. Not even when she stubbed her toe.

  “Miss?” The aged cashier was standing next to her. Concern furrowed her brow as her eyes darted between the meathead and Emily. “Everything okay? You want me to call security?”

  His reaction to the woman’s question was as perplexing and infuriating as the rest of him. Not even a hint of apology. No explanation. Just that steely-eyed stare that said “go ahead. Make. My. Day.”

  The relief the cashier’s appearance had brought waned quickly. Sucked back into Emily like the receding tide and replaced with trepidation. Because, as good as the woman’s intentions had been, she had just unknowingly placed Emily in a dilly of a predicament.

  There were now two choices. Call the guy’s bluff and have security called or tell the woman he wasn’t being any trouble and with that make another, this time silent, admission. That she didn’t mind his lewd attention.

  Later, Emily would tell herself that she didn’t want the trouble either. Filling out forms and reports, rehashing what had happened over and over. She would explain that, being a feminist herself, she would not play the wounded victim.

  But in that moment Emily knew why she did what she did. It terrified her but she understood it as well as she understood anything. A part of her had liked hearing that she had nice legs. A part of her felt somewhat drawn to this brutish, uncultured beast of a man. And a part of her felt a powerful, almost dizzying need to be dominated by him.

  Yes, dominated.

  She shook her head. “There’s no need for that,” she said, offering a shaky smile to assuage the cashier.

  The woman shot the guy one final look of disdain before turning to look at Emily again. “You just let me know if you need anything,” she said, squeezing her arm in that way women did that meant they were sisters together in the fight against oppression. Then she walked away and it was just Emily and the guy again, standing ten feet or so apart and staring at each other, both wondering where this would go next.

  The guy glanced at her left hand. He didn’t smile when he looked into her eyes again, though he wore a somewhat understanding expression.

  This, Emily hated as well.

  “Married?” the guy asked.

  Her thumb twisted her wedding ring around her finger and she thought she might scream. Yes I’m fucking married! So the whole store could hear. She had no idea what to say and no hope that anything clever might pop into her head.

  “Looking for a little something on the side?”

  This shocked her and yanked her out of her paralysis enough to reply. “I am not!” she spat.

  The guy shrugged again. He reached into his pocket and fished out a card.

  Emily’s knees felt a little weak. Her lip trembled.

  Taking three steps toward her, he came to stand a very intimate distance in front of her and pressed the card into her hand. The smell of his sweat was barely masked by the deodorant he wore. “Hey look I get it. Life ain’t always what you think it is. I used to be married. Stepped out a couple times. No big deal.”

  Emily smirked and the laugh that came burbling out of her sounded far too close to a cackle for her liking. “How’d that work out for you?”

  “She died. Cancer.”

  More hot shame and embarrassment flooded through Emily, followed by an instinctive maternal compassion. Because even ass holes had feelings. “Oh god, I’m sorry,” she muttered. Because despite the way this brute had just treated her, she wasn’t heartless.

  Shrug.

  “It is what it is.”

  And before she knew it she was holding the card and t
he guy was stepping back, turning around and wandering toward the food aisles again.

  Emily was floored. Still stunned, her eyes fell to the card bearing a tacky logo of a back-hoe and his information in a comic sans font. Probably designed it himself.

  Carter Graves

  Landscaper

  Followed by his phone number and email.

  A tremor shook through her as she realized that this fairly innocuous encounter was as close to cheating on Jack as she’d ever come. It was terrible. She felt like shit. The can of coffee seemed to suddenly weigh as much as a cinder block. So why did she call out again? “Wait! I’m not…”

  Carter turned to stare at her again.

  I’m not what?

  Not that kind of woman? I’m not into cheating? I would never? I love my husband.

  All of the possibilities presented themselves as clearly as the light of day. And yet Emily chose none of them.

  “Hey don’t worry about it,” Carter said with another infuriating shrug. “In case you need any landscaping is all.” Then he was gone, disappearing in the aisle with olive oil and pickles.

  Emily felt like a ghost as she made her way to the cash again. She struggled to keep her hands from shaking as she placed the can on the counter next to her coffee maker.

  The cashier offered a sympathetic smile. “Men,” she said.

  “Men,” Emily quipped, grateful for the opportunity to return to herself. Her real self. The Emily that didn’t tell strange men who stared at her legs in stores to “wait!” After paying she made her way out to the parking lot, got into her car and took a deep breath. She turned to stare at the coffee maker she’d bought and a wave of guilt rolled over her at what had just happened. Why? She hadn’t done anything.

  But she knew that was not the case. Despite herself, despite every carefully curated idea about the sort of woman she was and about how she would react in just such a situation, despite knowing she hadn’t done anything wrong, Emily knew something had happened.

  Something wicked. Something beyond her ability to control it with a forced smile and her usual cheery expression.

  She’d felt something about that landscaping thug. Something terrible and, somehow, delicious.

  It was for this reason that she felt very guilty.

  She would tell Jack about the coffee maker after all. He deserved to know.

  Chapter Three

  Jack Robertson arrived home that evening to find something unexpected. Crossing the threshold of his modestly furnished suburban two storey, he found the darkness within illuminated not by the bright light of the energy-saving LED lights he had installed just three weekends ago, but rather by candles.

  Candles glowing in the kitchen. On a Monday.

  On a Monday?

  He stopped for a moment and stood stock-still. Work had been a whirlwind of pointless meetings punctuated by the odd opportunity here and there to actually get something done. His position at Mutual Benefits Insurance Company required more of him than he would have liked to give. But at forty-one he sat perched on the cusp of a promotion to corporate. It had cost him more than he cared to admit.

  Overtime. Working weekends. Missed opportunities with the kids. And now they were gone and that time wasn’t coming back.

  But he felt lucky nonetheless. Lucky that he’d been able to provide for his family. Lucky that he could assure Emily every comfort and some small luxuries, not that she ever asked for any. Through the years he’d relied on the steady, somewhat mundane rhythm of their lives to keep him on track.

  Candles on a Monday were not part of that rhythm. This was unsettling to him. He had only a moment to steel himself against the inevitable surge of angst that accompanied such incongruity. It shook through him, making his stomach clench, then his throat tighten, then his head throb.

  It was only vaguely unpleasant but entirely all too familiar.

  Because handsome Jack was, by most measures, a thoroughly ordinary man. In the best way. He had invented this version of himself twenty-some years ago when they’d first found out Emily was pregnant. There had been a few days of regret, certainly. Not at what the future held, of course. Not at the beautiful, terrifying life that was growing inside Emily. That, of course, was precious.

  The regret had come at the doors that had closed as a result of it. They were young. College kids who didn’t know better and had let one slip past the goalie. Felt good in the moment and all that. But there would be no more lazy days together. No drawn out honeymoon or shared vacations. Their beautiful little mistake had thrown them straight into the hungry jaws of reality.

  But Jack was not a brooder. Nor was he a loser who did not accept the consequences of his decisions. Finishing his finance degree in record time, he secured a junior position at an insurance company and set about the business of being a Man.

  He watched his kids grow up. Comforted his wife through her tears at their various rites of passage all the time maintaining a cheerful stoicism about his role as Provider and Master of the Family. In those ways Jack was beautifully ordinary.

  In one way, he was not.

  Why?

  Because handy Jack who never drank during the week and fixed things around the house on weekends, who played ball with his kids and raked leaves into piles for them to jump in, had a secret.

  He didn’t gamble. He would never look at a woman other than his wife. He rarely used pornography and when he did he always deleted his browsing history.

  Nimble Jack who exercised dutifully and kept in good shape for his woman had a fear. Well, a fear and a pleasure, if the two could coexist as one thing.

  It had overwhelmed him on a number of occasions similar to the one he was currently in. It would come out of nowhere, swelling through him and ensconcing him, making his brain burn and his guts wrench and form a bulge at his midriff. It was prompted always by the same thing.

  Perhaps an out of place item of furniture. Maybe one load of laundry too many, folded when he came home at the end of the day. Or a turn of phrase he hadn’t heard beautiful Emily use before.

  It would grip him and twist him and shake him to the point where he almost couldn’t speak or breathe. The thought that, in his absence, perhaps his smiling sweet-faced little Emily might have acted so ludicrously out of character that the very thought of it was absurd. That she had given in to a side of herself, a side of her womanhood that Jack feared and revered. That she had caved to a craving that no amount of good-boy-Jackness could sate.

  It was there. It was there in her even if she didn’t know it. That might have been what scared him the most, that she didn’t. Because his pretty princess, his queen, was as innocent as she was sweet. Or so he told himself through clenched teeth in the darkest part of night when he couldn’t sleep.

  He’d been her first and her only, for which he was eternally grateful because the thought of her lying with another man sent the thing twisting through him as well. The idea that there was a base need in her, one that existed in all other people (but surely not his precious Emily!), one that had the ability to control what they did, was as terrifying as it was thrilling.

  Jack liked control. He arranged his life in a way that, even while leading from behind as he preferred to do, as any good manager does, he knew he still had a grip on the reins.

  Except for this thing. This one thing he could not master. This thing mastered him and made him think thoughts he would never, could never admit to anyone. Or so he thought.

  This idea that Emily might one day see a man and that this man would be so unlike anything she professed to love about men. That this man would awaken inside her a need, the one she didn’t know was there. And finally, that despite their twenty (was it twenty already?) years together she would fall from grace and give in to it, crack open and let it invade her, fold and let it consume her and drive a wedge between them in a way that no amount of quick-thinking, cheerful smiling or hard work would yank out.

  At the same time it caused him to harden
. Every time it caused the blood to drain from his head, pump into the source of his maleness and make it salute his depravity. While he didn’t understand it, he occasionally allowed himself the indulgence of relishing it. The way it burned in him. How it held him in it’s grip until he pumped it out with a release.

  So this was one such occasion. Because candles did not belong on a Monday and Emily, when she stepped out of the kitchen, did not belong in that dress.

  She was not meant to saunter toward him that way, sultry and smiling. She certainly should not have loosened his tie and undone the top button of his shirt and lean forward and kissed him gently on the cheek.

  Not on a Monday. That was not what Monday’s were for.

  Monday’s were for leftovers. Monday’s were for soda and chips on the couch. Monday’s were meant to be ordinary. This was not ordinary. This was…extraordinary.

  In the moment before she spoke Jack Robertson braced himself for the same thing he’d been bracing himself for for the last twenty years when things seemed misaligned with his Emily. Words that haunted him sometimes in daylight, sometimes in his darkest fantasies. Words that would hurt as much as they pleased.

  Honey? I have a confession to make.

  Words that would tear him apart if they were ever spoken.

  “Honey?”

  Jack let out a tight grunt at the way she’d whispered it.

  “I have a confession to make.”

  It nearly ripped him in two.

  So this was how it felt. This was how it started. A confession couched by an intimate dinner. A revealing dress to try and coax him back, away from the shards of a shattered marriage, back between her legs, cooing and soothing him and saying it would never happen again.

  What Jack feared was not Emily. What Jack feared was the vixen that he was certain lay dormant within her. Waiting for the right moment to be unleashed. “Oh god…” he muttered.

  Her smile faded. Her brow furrowed. “What’s wrong?” she asked softly.

  Just get it over with.

  “Nothing,” he said instead, shaking his head and forcing a smile. Because on every other occasion this sort of thing had ended well. And had he revealed the source of his dread he would have been humiliated. “What’s the confession?” he managed to say his stomach hollowing and his knees going weak as he steadied himself for the answer.