The Houseguest: A Novel About Sharing (and) Temptation

by Arnica Butler

  Natalie looked at me. Her face was twisted up in a confused frown.

  “I just want you to tell me about it, whatever happens.”

  Natalie sat down on the bed. “I don't know,” she said.

  I sat back on my heels and stroked her arm. I kissed her shoulder. “What don't you know?”

  She turned to me. “It's just... I guess I'm having a hard time, you know, trusting that this is okay. I feel like... maybe this is just your fantasy, and if it gets real, you're going to see it and it won't be good at all and then there's going to be a thing between us.”

  I kissed her shoulder again.

  She had a point, and a better man might have let himself be a little less led around by his cock. But this was a fantasy I had kept bottled up for so long, with no hope of it getting let out, and this opportunity seemed like it was going to be the only real chance we ever got. So instead of thinking things through as much as they probably warranted, I did a lawyer-thing.

  I made it sound like I was conceding her point, while still marching ahead with what I wanted anyway.

  “You're right,” I said. “We need to think about this. But I promise you, as far as I'm concerned, this is what I really want. I won't have any regrets.”

  I paused, just the right amount of time. So much of talking people into things is in the perfect mix of silence and sound. “How about this? Let's just play it by ear. See what happens with Ethan. Just react... however you feel.”

  I knew that Natalie was enticed by the idea of doing something with Ethan. I could see it in her flushed face, her quick breath.

  I stroked her arm again. “If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out... just let it happen however it feels right to you. Okay?”

  Natalie nodded. She looked at herself in the mirror. I really wanted to see if this conversation had gotten her as worked up as it had me, and I felt pretty sure that it had. But I resisted the urge, because this was a delicate moment, the moment to convince her to finally go through with what I wanted.

  I waited. She gave herself one last look in the mirror, and went out the door.

  Ethan, to everyone's surprise, was up and making pancakes, bacon, and eggs when we came out of the bedroom.

  He flipped a pancake with grace, caught it in the frying pan, and smiled warmly at us. First at Natalie – a special, very charming smile; and then at me. “I,” he said loudly, “have prepared an authentic Southern breakfast for you, my lady, so you can paint all day and take the art world by storm.”

  “There's nothing authentically Southern about this breakfast,” I said, kissing Natalie on the cheek as I squeezed past the stool was sitting in so I could get to the fridge.

  “Has it been cooked by an authentic Southern gentleman?” Ethan asked the four corners of the kitchen. “Then it is an authentic Southern meal.”

  “It's been cooked by an authentic Southern asshole,” I quipped.

  Natalie was looking from one to other of us and obviously having a thoroughly enjoyable morning sitting on her barstool and being entertained while someone else did the cooking. She was smiling for both of us.

  “Even more authentic,” Ethan said dryly.

  But he wasn't looking at me, he was looking at Natalie.

  And he winked.

  I took a fresh juice shake out of the fridge and shook it. I surveyed the scene in front of me, and decided it was very much proceeding according to plan. When Ethan turned his back I raised my eyebrows and looked at Natalie. She raised hers back.

  “I gotta run,” I said.

  Ethan held up a hand. “I'll take good care of your wife for you, buddy.”

  Natalie didn’t look over at me, she just leaned into the counter and bit on one of her fingers.

  But the smile that moved underneath her mouth was for me.

  CHAPTER 6: ACCORDING TO PLAN

  The kind of work I do as an attorney doesn't require a ton of brains. I don't even really know how I ended up here. I was a pretty good performer in trials, back when I worked in Colombia after I got out of school. I do well in small claims court.

  I just didn't see the point of working so hard when you can make pretty much the same kind of money just filing papers and getting home by 5pm.

  One thing that my work does require, however, is paying attention to fucking detail.

  And there was none of that going on.

  I wondered how long Ethan would wait before he swept in hard and fast on Natalie. He was flirting with her right under my nose, and while he did a good job of creating a plausible “joke” out of it, his intentions were clear, as they always were with Ethan.

  And I wondered what Natalie would do. I'd given her license to do what she wanted. How would she play it? How did she feel about Ethan, to begin with? Was she actually be attracted to him, or was she just appeasing me by playing my game? Would Ethan charm her into a real attraction? Would they just watch me drive down the road and then tear each other's clothes off and fuck on the kitchen floor with all the drapes open and the neighbors watching?

  My thoughts went from psychological to physical imaginings in a hurry. They could be kissing right now, Ethan pushing Natalie up against a wall, his hand sliding down her shirt, finding her nipple and squeezing it....

  At ten o'clock I texted Natalie.

  [Me]: So. How's it going?

  There was no reply.

  I tapped the phone nervously and read through a will without seeing what was on the paper. I started over, and my thoughts wandered again.

  It wasn't unusual that Natalie hadn't answered. She wasn't one to carry her phone with her everywhere.

  But was she not answering because she was busy with something else?

  I had a brief flash of panic. I had actually just given my wife permission to flirt with a predator, and what's more I had basically told her to do whatever she wanted.

  She could be fucking another man right now.

  It seemed so real, when I thought about it like that.

  “Shit,”I said aloud.

  My whole life is one long story of things like this, so don't go thinking I'd lost my whole mind over this. I was always trying to get the ball rolling, jump in, get things started, and then having my second thoughts about twelve hours later.

  But there was no answer from Natalie all day.

  I put myself to work doing the easiest jobs possible, jobs that were really for Sandy, who was out for two days doing some kind of Civil War re-enactment or maybe paintball...unimportant. It was all I could concentrate on. When I ran out of paralegal work, I set to looking through my own files and found that I was staring at them blankly. My thoughts were all paranoia and fantasy.

  I gave up, and headed home.

  I wasn’t actually expecting much to be afoot when I got home. I was actually impatient to get things moving faster. I envisioned ways of throwing gasoline on the fire as I drove through the easy-going late afternoon streets.

  Little did I know how silly that was.

  There was no answer when I called out Natalie's name as I walked through the door to the garage and into the kitchen.

  The door to the back porch was open, and I pressed my face up to the screen. “Nat? Ethan?” I squinted to see into the yard, out to the shed, hoping to catch a glimpse of Natalie bending over provocatively while Ethan looked on.

  But no one was in the yard.

  I spiraled out of control with my thoughts pretty quickly. I looked around the kitchen and held my breath to be able to hear the rest of the house better. Trying to hear the sounds of two people fumbling around for their clothes on the floor, or trying to grind into each other as quietly and as quickly as possible before the husband comes through the door. What would Natalie do, if she was about to get “caught?” And what kind of slut had Natalie been, to fuck Ethan so early in the game? Were they in a room of the house right now, unable to hold back their needs?

  I heard nothing.

  I crept down the hallway on the main floor. By then I had
half-convinced myself that they were, really, behind the closed door of the guest room (where Ethan was staying), writhing on the sheets. I put my hand on the knob and turned it slowly, making no noise, in the event that I could get a glimpse of their bodies wrapped together or Natalie's legs spread wide and Ethan's bare ass bobbing between them.

  But there was no sound through the door, and no sound when I opened it a crack wider. I pushed it open fully with my fingertips and stared at the bed.

  It was unmade, and that gave me a little flicker of hope. It died out quickly, though: the bed was unmade but looked like a single person had slept in it. The covers were thrown back for one person, not two fucking lovers.

  I went through all the other bedrooms, excitement building at each door, disappointment and relief sliding over me when I found each room empty.

  I had almost forgotten the real mystery. Where the hell were they, if they weren't here?

  I texted Natalie from the kitchen, and her phone rattled on the counter no more than half an inch from my pinkie finger.

  I went outside. I felt claustrophobic all of the sudden. I was letting way too many awful thoughts surface in my mind: thoughts of betrayal, absurd thoughts about Ethan having seduced my wife in a mere afternoon, and having convinced her to run away with him.

  I leaned on the railing and tried to calm myself.

  Then I heard Natalie's laughter. It clattered in my right ear, and for a moment I had an awful thought: they were in my bedroom, on the floor, and I just hadn't seen them. I spun around to go inside, and that's when she caught my eye.

  Natalie. A tight white t-shirt clung to her body. She still had the workout shorts on, but the shirt made me narrow my eyes in suspicion before I even took in the rest of the scene.

  And then my blood boiled. She was walking next to Ethan, but she was walking so close to him. She was leaning into his arm with her whole body. Their outer arms were pressed against each other, and they were walking as though they were two drunks holding each other up.

  They looked like a couple.

  A very well-matched pair.

  They also, I noted with a stab of pain, looked like they had known each other a long time. Natalie was laughing again, and it almost looked as though she had placed her head on Ethan's chest.

  They were holding something in their hands.

  This hadn't taken very long, I thought, and even though it was what I had believed I wanted, the fact that it had taken less than 24 hours for Ethan to get my wife snuggling up to him was too much.

  And Natalie. What a fucking act she had put on this morning, when in reality she couldn't wait to get Ethan to “seduce” her. And with my permission no less.

  And why was she wearing that white t-shirt? It was one she professed to hate, and one I loved, because it was made of very thin material and her skin showed through it in a very sexy way.

  I felt like my blood pressure had probably doubled.

  The two kept walking toward the house, oblivious to everything except -

  Except.

  Well, they weren't necessarily pressed together as I had thought at first sight. They were sharing a phone, and walking very close to each other.

  They were also eating ice cream.

  I closed my eyes for a second, picturing Natalie placing her lips on a big scoop of ice cream and sucking it up into her mouth, or placing the blade of her tongue on it the way she had lapped at my cock. And Ethan, sitting there watching her, thinking about how he could get his cock right where that ice cream was -

  “Oh! Hey honey!”

  I opened my eyes.

  The two of them were a couple of inches away from each other now. And as they walked toward me, saying, “Oh hey buddy,” and “You're home early,” they seemed to get further apart.

  I felt more fingers of painful jealousy working through me. It was a sign of guilt, guilt at standing so close together, which could only mean one thing: there was some inappropriate behavior there.

  Natalie smiled at me and twisted her ice cream under her tongue, staring straight at me as she did. “We would have waited for you if we had known you would be back early.”

  She winked at me.

  This was a reminder that we were playing a game here, and I was the one who had suggested it.

  I looked at Ethan. He flipped his phone around so I could see the screen. “Check out these dogs,” he said.

  I looked at the screen. Innocuously enough, a large Great Dane took up most of the picture, and seated on its head was a Chihuahua. It was Reddit-worthy pointless cuteness, and in the background were the obnoxious teal and hot ink stripes of Clancy's Ice Cream. The place down the street.

  It was now the turn of disappointment to roll over me. They had just been laughing at the dogs. They had only been walking close together to look at their sixteen-photo series of the Chihuahua sliding off the Great Dane's head and the big dog catching him by the scruff.

  I looked at Natalie.

  I reached for her torso and brought her close to me. Her skin – a little tan for some reason I still hadn't figured out – showed through the thin material of her shirt.

  As well as the pale blue of her bikini.

  I kissed the sliver of her skin between the shorts and the shirt. I inhaled at the same time, hoping to get a whiff of a scent that came from Ethan, but instead got a faint whiff of chlorine. “Did you go for a swim?” I asked, and the question was originally meant for Natalie, but I looked at Ethan while I asked.

  “Gotta get a suit,” he said.

  It still begged the question: had he gone to the pool and watched Natalie swim? Or sunbathe, as she seemed to be doing much more of than she ordinarily did.

  Ethan looked at Natalie, and they seemed to exchange a look between themselves. A look like: “Oh, wasn't the pool so much fun?”

  I imagined Ethan lounging on a chair, watching Natalie's ass and her long legs as she slinked around the edge of the water to the deep end, stretched her arms over her head, and knifed it into the pool. Then watching her walk back to the chair next to him, slicking her hair back, every long, exposed inch of her dripping wet.

  I felt my cock twitch with envy and lust.

  But just like that, the look between them was gone, and I was never really given an answer as to whether Ethan went to the pool with her or not.

  Natalie suggested hamburgers. I ended up on grill duty while the two of them reclined in Muskoka chairs we had brought back from a trip to upstate New York. Natalie stretched her legs out across another chair, right in front of Ethan's eyes. She was really laying it on thick.

  I stared at her legs over the warped hot air of the barbecue and watched her shake her hair loose. She twirled a lock of it in her fingers. She was staring at Ethan while he went through his usual repertoire of lady-killing jokes and compliments.

  I knew that I had asked Natalie to do this, and to be honest, it was turning me the fuck on. But there was an unexpected edge to it, something unsettling. Did she have to be so into it, so good at it? She hadn't flirted with a man in thirteen years (at least I hoped). How was she picking it up so easily? And why was she so happy to throw herself into the job? Had she been craving this kind of attention, maybe, and was now relieved to finally have permission to seek it?

  And fucking Ethan. What a guy. Of course I had no reason to be angry. I knew what Ethan was like, I knew he'd chase any skirt in the world and that he just didn't see things the same way other men did. He wouldn't view another man's wife as out-of-bounds.

  I had invited him here specifically because he was like that, after all.

  Still. What a fucking piece of work, moving in on another man's wife like that right under his nose.

  I flipped a burger, and the sizzle of the meat snapped me out of my reverie.

  I looked back up at the two of them.

  On the other hand, they could just be two people stretching out on lawn chairs on a hot summer day, having a good conversation.

  I squinted t
hrough the wavy air.

  It was possible I was just getting ahead of myself, letting my fantasy-nightmare alter my perceptions.

  The moment I had that thought, though, Natalie brought one foot to the shin on her opposite leg. She used her pretty toes – which I noted, she had painted a coral-pink – to scratch an itch on the front of her leg. It was a very deliberate action, and very unnecessary. It was designed to do exactly what it did: it spread her legs open a little, probably revealing whatever she was wearing or not wearing under her jean shorts. And it drew Ethan's eyes directly to the center of her legs, where they lingered for just a moment too long. When he looked away, he had to jerk his eyes from what he had seen.

  The interest in his eyes was very apparent.

  Just then Natalie looked over at me. She had a mildly triumphant look on her face. She lifted a bottle of beer to her mouth and took a sip of it, letting her lips linger for along time on the edge of the bottleneck, conjuring all kinds of filthy ideas for me (and I hoped, for Ethan). Then she stood up and came over to the barbecue.

  She slid her hands around my waist, stood up on her tip-toes, and kissed me on the neck. “How long 'til those burgers are done, honey?”

  “You're certainly laying it on thick,” I said, in a low voice. Ethan had gone over to inspect something by the shed and was too far away to hear us now.

  Natalie purred in my ear. “Do you know the best part?” she said.

  I didn't answer, just sort of flinched as she moved her hands from my waist down to my cock, where she ran her fingers over my erection. So much for pretending I didn't like it.

  Her mouth was very close to my ear now. “When I got back from the pool, I didn't want my bikini bottoms to get my jeans all wet,” she said. “And I couldn't find any clean underwear...so...”

  She gave me a final squeeze, and as she did she surely recognized that my cock had gone to rock-solid with her words. She trotted back to her chair, and then, pretending that there was something on the ground, she bent over. The jean shorts rose up, up, all the way to reveal her bare bottom. While I couldn't see all the way to her snatch, just the idea that it was there, exposed, with nothing between her and her jeans, sent a shudder through me.