And then, just like that, there he was.
“Hi. Mr. Richter? I'm John.”
The man in front of me, standing on my porch, was at least six-foot-five. He had an athletic build, and beneath the orderly and expensive fabric of his suit shirt, googyouthful muscle gave him definition. His hand was extended, and after pausing idiotically, I took it. He gripped my fingers in a firm handshake. A wiry strength pulsed in his squeeze, hinting that he could crush my hand if he wanted to.
I stared.
“John Smith? I'm...Mark Shapiro's cousin? He recommended this place to me as a rental?” the man continued, in response to my dumb stare.
His voice was calm, a tone of self-assured professionalism about it. He had released my hand and returned to his agile stance, his brown eyes revealing not a trace of discomfort with my awkwardness. He waited patiently.
I heard Anna walking up behind me. I felt her hands on my shoulders, stopping me from speaking. Anna frequently saved me from saying something stupid. Her career had trained her well in smoothing things over.
On the other hand, she sometimes jarred people with her directness, which I had a feeling she was about to do.
She scrunched up her nose, and extended a hand, which John took in his long, large fingers. His face had brightened at the sight of my wife, and he smiled. A smile of bright, straight teeth. “I'm Anna,” Anna said, and she gave him a smile that sent my stomach into a tailspin right through my feet, because I knew something “direct” was coming.
Something “so Anna.”
I worried, sometimes, that Anna was going to get someone punched in the face. Anna. She possessed a not-so-secret desire to make people uncomfortable with her directness. In her defense, she claimed that her directness (better described as a tendency to bring up anything and everything that everyone else in the room preferred to leave unspoken) eventually made everyone more comfortable.
But Anna was beautiful. She could say whatever the hell she wanted.
I was the one who was going to get punched in the face.
I could tell “directness” was coming because she always had a particular, wooden smile on her face right before she dropped something like this:
“He's just surprised that you're black.”
Oh lord.
The brown eyes, set in rich chocolate skin, turned to me. John cocked his head, and the teeth flashed again. A quiver of fear snaked through me. For a moment I was unsure if his smile was friendly, or the smile of a wolf right before eating a meal.
It was true: I was surprised that John was black. Okay? I was surprised that he looked like an NBA player in his physique, I was surprised that he looked like a model, and again, I was surprised that he was black. This is because Mark Shapiro was a stout Italian man with a stout Italian family.
John didn't miss a beat. “Not as surprised as my daddy was.”
My mouth hung open. This shut even Anna up for a second, and John let us stand there, unsure what to do, for a good half a minute, before he reached out and slapped me on the back. “No man, I'm just kidding.”
I could feel Anna's delight with his edgy humor. It was sort of radiating off of her. She loved a quick mind and she loved a sharp joke that was almost over the line.
Surprisingly, John put me at ease with his slap. His smile was friendly and immediately took the edge off his joke. Somehow, it also communicated that it was okay that I was a stupid white man who had acted like a fool when someone's cousin turned out to be black in the year 2015.
Anna pulled the door open and waved John in. “We're happy you're here. Come in, please.”
“You know,” John said, and his voice was friendly but authoritative. He straightened his tie. “It's nice of you to invite me in, but I have a ton of work this evening for a deposition. Do you mind if we just go down to the place?”
It was a Saturday. Anna's eyes sparkled with recognition of another person just like her, a person who wore a suit on a Saturday and made plans to do work all afternoon.
“Sure,” Anna said. I could tell by her voice that she liked him very much and would rent him the apartment without even checking his credit. “Let me get the keys.”
I stood awkwardly by the door.
“So...” I said, and I cringed at the sound of my white-guy-trying-to-be-cool voice.”What law firm you work for?”
“Look man, don't even worry about that whole thing,” John said, and like his smile, he had a soothing effect that put me even more at ease. “Mark loves to pull that one. 'Hey, my cousin needs a car, let me send him by.' He doesn't bother saying 'he's a brother.' People don't see it coming. I get it.” His eyes moved away from mine as Anna approached.
Onto her.
No, Brian, you're being a fucking crazy person.
And a racist crazy person at that.
Anna flashed a quick smile at John, and hopped down the steps. We followed her.
My face was aligned with John's head even though he was step ahead of me. His back stretched his shirt with hard muscle.
The guy was extremely attractive. Even I had to admit that. I don't have any gay tendencies, I'm sure of it – and after so many years of living in San Francisco, you get plenty of opportunities. But I had to appreciate the guy's looks. His calm demeanor. He was the kind of guy I'd like to be like.
Anna unlocked the entrance to the apartment and we filed in. The apartment was small but better refurbished than our part of the house. It didn't take long for us to look it over: bathroom, living room with a small enclave with French doors to be used as a bedroom, tiny kitchen.
John glanced over everything perfunctorily without saying anything.
I watched Anna, who seemed to be watching him. My mind was utterly distracted from the main idea here: we were finally going to rent this fucking apartment and be able to pay our mortgage without having to cut back on food. It should have been exciting, but my mind was miles away, reading into every movement of Anna's face, searching for flickers of attraction to John in them.
“Look, if you all are ready to sign on this, this place will work great for me,” John said abruptly. “I've got a load of student loans and I need to rent something ASAP. The price is right.” John was standing with hands in his pockets, looking casual but in a hurry at the same time.
I shifted from foot to foot. I could feel Anna glaring at me through her skin.
“We've already looked at your application,” Anna said, casting her a brief flare of a warning smile in my direction, because in truth we hadn't done much with the application besides look at it sitting on our table. “And honestly, we'd be thrilled to have you. You're a perfect match for this place.”
My mouth opened, and I wished it wasn't doing that. Words began to come out of it, and I cringed as they did. “Yeah,” I said. “You're not a drug addict or unemployed.”
There was a pause as the two of them looked at me strangely. I wasn't even sure why I said that.
“I assure you I'm neither,” John said in his rich tones, smoothing his tie against his hard chest, as neatly as his voice smoothed the whole thing over. To Anna: “Do you have an agreement?”
Anna produced an agreement, seemingly from thin air. And a pen.
I watched the whole thing like I was watching a movie.
What could I do?
Did I even want to do anything to change the outcome of this exchange? The guy was a perfect renter: busy, professional, single, hardly ever home.
Handsome.
Hot.
Maybe a little too perfect.
I looked at Anna, studying her features as she folded her hands to wait for John to read through the agreement. Was she too interested in him? Looking too closely at his face?
Don't be a fucking idiot. She's looking at the paper, not him.
Watching his hands, probably. His big, strong hands, dark on the back and pale on the palms, able to grip anything in his wide palm. A basketball, a woman's head...
Get. A. Grip.
&n
bsp; “When can I move in?” he asked, his pen hovering over the paper.
“Anytime. We can pro-rate the rent to any date.”
Was Anna's voice her usual professional voice, or did I hear a tinge of sultry breathlessness? Come-fuck-me intonation?
Stop.
“How's tomorrow?” John signed the paper as he asked. His signature was a bold, legible slash of dominance on the white sheet. He looked up at my wife. His eyes crinkled with a boyish charm.
I looked at Anna's reaction. Was she melting for him? She smiled and fell back on her heels. “If you want to, that'd be great.”
He extended his hand, and again my wife's small, pale hand was covered in his grip. “Excellent. Warn the neighbors...and I'll see you tomorrow.” He looked at me, winked, and then exited.
Anna closed the door behind him, waving at him almost obscenely as he drove off. She pressed her back against the door and rolled her eyes skyward. “Oh. My. God.”
“Pretty hot,” I said. I wasn't sure if I was irritated or somewhat turned on by how silly my wife was acting. I wasn't sure if I wanted to draw more of this attitude out if her, or if I wanted to call John and tell him to never come back.
Anna blinked.
“Who?” she said innocently. “John? The renter? I didn't even notice.”
I felt a little bit like I had just swallowed a hot stone. A pain spread throughout my body, but it was pleasurable as well.
There had been a time when Anna and I had played these games, before we were married. But they had been dropped with our monogamous commitment. I had never been sure if Anna had taken them as seriously as I had, and we had never really hashed out our feelings about them: it had just been something fun to do. I had set my feelings and my desires aside, but I could feel them stirring now.
“You didn't notice his bulging muscles?”
Anna opened her mouth wide and shook her head. Her eyes were alive, very quickly, with interest. “Really!” she proclaimed.
I moved closer to her. “You didn't rent to him without a credit check because you thought he had...”
“Excellent assets?” Anna offered.
I could feel my cock twitching to life, between Anna's unusual interest in the middle of the afternoon, and the way she was teasing me playing into my fantasy. I pushed my hand underneath her shirt.
“It would be convenient,” Anna mused.
“What's that?” I asked, hoping she would give me what I wanted.
“To have a nice young man around to pay the rent,” she said, and slapped me playfully.
I put my lips close to hers. Was she deliberately teasing me, with the promise of talking dirty about the neighbor and then switching off so quickly? Or was she just honestly not aware of how much it turned me on?
“What would you do,” I said, and I let my lips graze hers, “if John couldn't pay the rent one month?”
She bit her lip, and brushed her lips against mine. Now the electricity between us was palpable, and I felt the old, familiar excitement of our younger days building. She waited the perfect amount of time, breathing softly on my lips, her body pressed against mine, before summoning her sexiest voice. “But he's a lawyer,” she said in a half-whisper. “He'll always be able to pay the rent.”
I moved my hand up her shirt, and under her soft bra. I found the little knob of her nipple and squeezed it lightly. “Pretend,” I said. “Use your imagination.”
Anna gave me a smile that made it seem like she knew exactly what I wanted to hear, and exactly how deeply I felt it inside. It was a smile of complicity, and it sent a near-orgasmic wave of pleasure through me. My cock was rock hard.
“A hypothetical,” she said.
“Yes.”
I squeezed her nipple a little harder, and her mouth turned up and down in both pain and pleasure.
“John can't pay the rent...” she said. “And I'm all alone in the house one night while you...”
I almost never did anything at night. “Go bowling,” I offered.
It almost broke the mood. Anna blew a laugh out of her nose and had to raise a hand to keep it from splattering me. “And you,” she repeated, placing her head back against the door, “are bowling...”
I was still serious. I was lifting my thigh to get it between her legs, and pressing her up against the door. Everywhere she touched me my skin was burning. I rubbed her nipple between my fingers.
She pushed away from the door and we began moving toward the bedroom. “I'm all alone, and I would call John and tell him he could work off his rent if he came up here to do some odds and ends,” she said.
She twisted past me, ran down the hallway, and jumped into the bed in the spare bedroom, like a young girl. She bounced on the bed. “He would have to start here,” she said. “This bed is very squeaky.”
I closed the door.
She threw herself down on the bed, and leaned over the side. “I think the problem is somewhere around here,” she said.
I wasted no time taking her cue, and I was so hot for her I had no more time to let this delightful game play out much longer. I went around to the side of the bed where her legs were and I yanked her toward me. She played along and let her legs open and her skirt rise up to her waist. I pulled her panties down and admired her beautiful ass, and the area between the two hills of her buttocks: brown, silky hair, shaved neatly into a rectangle for her revealing swimsuits. Her pink flesh in the center, wet with excitement.
Her fingers appeared between her legs, sliding along her engorged slit. “I think the problem is right here. I think John could pay the rent by paying special attention to this area, right here,” she said.
I could take the hint.
I lowered myself down, and when my face was still nearly a foot away from her body, I could feel the heat radiating from between her legs, and smell the tangy sweetness of her ripe cunt. It was unusual, nowadays, for Anna to be so ready, so willing, so wet, in the middle of the day. And I had barely touched her.
My cock was almost paining me, as I delighted in the thought that perhaps Anna was turned on by the same idea I was turned on by. Maybe really turned on, not just by the idea in the abstract, but by the idea of really going through with it.
I inhaled her scent, a mixture of ripe fruit and almost a spiciness, a flavor and smell that were totally unique to Anna and dissimilar to every woman I had ever known. She had none of the cloying sweetness of most women: she was less sugary and more tangy. I extended my tongue and traced it along her inner lips, then moved down to where her swollen clit was stretched with excitement and easy to find. I found the bundle of nerves in the center, and rubbed hard on them with the tip of my tongue. I was thrilled by the way Anna's body jumped lightly, and her muscles tensed with almost too much pleasure. She stopped talking and breathed heavily.
I kept going, sensing that she was wet enough and riled up enough, whatever the reason, that she would come quickly. I was right. Her thighs squeezed inward, tight against my ears, while her ass rocked lightly. I grasped her with both hands to keep her still, and kept going. She began to mewl, and I did not relent. Her pussy was dripping all over my face now, and making her inner thighs wet. I felt her grow as hard as stone everywhere in her body, and begin to squeal.
When she came she bucked away from me, and I let her shriek and grasp the sheets, but I held her ass close to me as I stood up on my knees and guided my cock to her opening. I wanted to be inside of her while she was still shuddering and clenching from her climax.
Anna collapsed in submission, and I glided into her pussy easily. She was drenched, and the walls of her flesh were squeezing still in uneven rhythm as she rode out the last of her orgasm.
Which was fine. I was so hard I almost came as I slid into her.
“Will that do it,” I asked. “For the rent? Or do you need more?”
But Anna was done. She was done talking dirty, and she was especially spent after her orgasm. She balled the sheets in her fist and moaned.
I slammed inside of her, imagining I was John, filling her up with my huge, black cock.
In no time, I was groaning and gripping the flesh of her ass as hard as I could. “Fuck!” I yelled.
We collapsed on the bed, and gave a shared laugh for the fact that we had messed up the spare bedroom – a room that, until this moment, had gone utterly unused.
At the time, it was just a game. I don't think there was any part of me that really believed things would get as serious as they did.
3: MOVING IN
The next day, Anna was watching John with her arms folded. “He doesn't have much stuff,” she commented.
I looked at John warily. He was wearing a t-shirt with the sleeves ripped out of it, giving any woman around a lovely view of his enormous biceps. They were constantly flexed to grip the large boxes he was unloading from a small rental van.
I was looking for ways to make him seem like less of the handsome, clean-cut, all-around nice guy he seemed to be. When I found it, I pounced on it: Why didn't this guy have any buddies?
Probably because men hated the fucking guy. He was probably an asshole, I thought.
“God, he must not even know anyone here since he just moved,” Anna murmured, and as always, whenever she seemed to have read my mind, I felt a shiver of fear sneak through me for her uncanny abilities.
I said nothing.
“We should go help him,” Anna declared.
I knew what was coming.
“Well,” she corrected herself, “You should go help him. I'm just a girl.”
She looked down at her nails in sarcasm, because she loved saying this kind of thing (Anna was anything but 'just a girl'). She crossed the kitchen to make coffee.
“It's three pm.,” I said involuntarily.
“It is. And I'm making a coffee for myself because I want a coffee,” she snapped. “I'd ask you if you wanted one but you'd probably tell me this is why I have insomnia, or some other shit I don't give a damn about.” Anna had no tolerance for me, or anyone else, even insinuating that she should do something besides whatever she had decided to do. The more trivial the activity, angrier she got. If you wanted to see Anna really blow up, you could keep bugging her about whether or not she was too hot or too cold, like so many people have a tendency to do. I know exactly how fucking hot I am and it's not your fucking problem! she would scream at anybody's grandmother.
The Tenant: A Very Naughty Hotwife Novel Page 2
