The following week was also empty of “jobs.”
A different kind of man, a less paranoid man, a man who was less of a sexual junkie, might have taken this at face value: it was just the way the market was. Sometimes up, sometimes down. Everything in capitalism was like this, up and down.
That was all there was to it.
But I was not a less paranoid man.
I was a sexual junkie.
I began to compulsively check my phone for texts from Jordan. I began to pace in my office in the afternoon. I began to invent twisted fantasies in which Jordan was still doing her job, with very attractive men, and had simply decided to cut me out of the picture.
A step further: it had been her plan all along to do so.
I loved Jordan, and I trusted her. We had talked all of this out, and I had felt comfortable with it. I loved her but I just actually couldn't stop myself from creating these fantasies.
Don't worry. I knew I was acting like a crazy person. I talked to myself, straight to my own reflection in the mirror.
“Paddy,” I told myself, my brow furrowed with sternness. “You're a fucking lunatic idiot.”
I didn't listen to myself though. Even though I could already see the cloud of disappointment that would darken her bright face as she realized I was a strange, possessive, troubled man, I couldn't stop myself from driving home one day and picking at the issue.
Jordan was home, exactly where she should be, her hair in place and a track suit hugging her incredible curves.
For a moment the nauseating madness that had gripped me back before I knew what Jordan was really doing (honey-trapping) and I thought she had been having an affair, rose up inside of me. I tried to back away from that place, where I was a paranoid and insecure man, and I knew it, and I behaved so irrationally...but it was already enfolding me.
Was Jordan's hair just a little too in place?
Track suit? Didn't that seem staged? Jordan did yoga, and who wore track suits these days anyway?
Olivia was looking at me strangely as I stood in the kitchen, saying nothing and most likely looking like an untamed animal. She rolled her eyes and walked out of the room. “You two are fucking annoying,” she quipped on her way out.
Jordan opened her mouth in indignation, and for a moment she had the appearance of a sixteen-year old girl in fight with her younger sister about shoes or hair ties. But she closed her mouth without saying anything and turned to me.
She folded her arms. “Looks like you've got some kind of weird bone to pick.”
This was bad. She was already on the defensive.
There was a mirror over one of the counters in the kitchen and I turned to look at myself in it. I looked like the Mad Hatter.
I looked back at Jordan. It was a wonder this woman put up with me at all.
I could have easily told her this. Told her I was sort of insecure, told her I was being a little crazy and getting a little paranoid. Explained that with such a beautiful wife, it's easy to tip over into the madness of jealousy. Sometimes just saying your crazy thoughts aloud can cast a new light on them, release you from their power…
I thought of all this, of course, in retrospect. There was no reasoning with myself at this particular moment.
“Have you been at the gym?”
Jordan's face twitched. The emotion behind it was a mystery. “Not this again,” she said finally.
Spot-on. She was spot-on; she knew exactly where I was coming from. It irritated me.
“Not 'what'? I'm just asking, if you've been to the gym.”
I'm just being a huge dick.
Inside me, a little voice was telling me to shut up, for the record.
“It's casual wear. I have been wearing it since 6:17 pm, when I arrived home and made roasted broccoli and salmon for dinner.” Her tone was sarcastic, laced with venom. She grasped her collar and sniffed her track suit. “Hmmm. Even smells like fish.”
Olivia walked back through the kitchen, theatrically on her tiptoes. “Just...going upstairs...” she whispered, grinning at her bitchiest level of amusement.
I submerged my desire to throttle Olivia.
We waited in silence for her footsteps to disappear up the stairs.
Jordan rolled her eyes. “God, she's such a bitch. I can't wait 'til she moves out.”
She said it in a valley-girl accent, and I could see it was a ploy to diffuse the tension.
I forced myself to smile for her.
“So seriously Paddy. What's your beef?” she said.
The little voice of reason in my mind managed to elbow its way to the forefront of my thoughts and urge me to stop being a psychotic dick.
I exhaled. “I guess I'm just tense about…you not getting as much work.”
She squinted at me, obviously not believing that this explanation even made any sense, which it didn't, really.
“Arest doesn't seem worried about it,” she said. Her eyes, though, conveyed to me that she knew this was a straw man.
I just kept going.
“But you just said he doesn't have any clients lined up.”
Jordan put her hand on her hip and cocked her head. “Are you worried about money or something? We're fine.” She began to fold some napkins that were scattered on the kitchen table.
I'm not sure if other people experience this, but I am occasionally filled with a deep rage when women behave like this. I'm not even sure where it's directed: at them, or at myself. So dismissive, so un-needy, so able to take sex or leave it. So infuriating. I felt the anger flash across my cheeks, but thankfully, it subsided.
“It's not about the money,” I said.
Jordan looked up. She swung a napkin neatly against her stomach to fold it, and then she set it down.
Her eyes were reading my face, moving quickly over my features.
In the few moments of silence between us, I desperately hoped we didn't have to drag this conversation out. I liked watching my wife with other men, and her honey-trapping assignments had given me a free pass to doing just that. I had been able to avoid what would have been a difficult conversation, and everything feel sort of neatly into place for me.
Now, I was going to have to talk to her about how I was desperate to watch her again. How I was desperate to at least believe we were getting closer to her finding a man to go all the way with again. How I was a man obsessed with the thought of seeing her defiled, being close enough to smell the sweat on her skin and the skin of the man who was touching her.
And frankly, I hadn't minded not having to state all of this explicitly.
Jordan pressed her lips together.
Then she shrugged, and picked up another napkin. “We could always just find our own 'targets,'” she said. “There's no reason it has to come from Arest.”
Her words traveled like a shockwave through me. A wave of arousal, a wave of affection, and a wave of fear.
I should have just been thrilled. And I was, don't get me wrong. Here was my wife, telling me she understood my obsession. Telling me she would still try to give me what I wanted. Saying exactly what I wanted to hear. Once again, being extremely diplomatic and letting me off the hook for almost starting a fight.
Our own targets. A simple solution.
An elegant solution, and Jordan herself had proposed it.
And yet...
This was also a little like jumping off a cliff, I realized.
At least when they were assignments there was something holding us back from...I don't know... “anything.” There was a safety net, there was a fence around the realm of possibilities. There was also a way, however unlikely it might sound, to claim that it was strictly professional if someone caught us somehow.
What Jordan was proposing was to throw all of that out the window.
And once again, I was staring at my wife as though she were a stranger.
Jordan was cool as a cucumber. She had proposed this idea and she was now folding a napkin into a neat, store-quality square. He
r heartbeat was not elevated, she wasn't panting like an animal. She didn't even appear to be thinking about it. Her features were untroubled and relaxed.
On the other hand, I felt as if I were standing over a cliff, and I had just looked down. I was struggling to keep my balance, to not get ill and fall over. It didn't help that I apparently had some addiction to the mixture of risk and sex, buried inside of me. It didn't help that what Jordan had just proposed was, in one way, exactly what I wanted.
“Let's take this into the bedroom,” she whispered suddenly.
This wasn't an invitation, necessarily, for sex. She was cocking her head in the direction of the rest of the house, taking note of how indiscreet it was to have this conversation here, where the kids might somehow overhear.
Or fucking Olivia.
She walked back to the bedroom, and I followed her.
She watched me close the door. “Okay. What's up with you?”
When I didn't answer, she climbed onto the bed and began to waddle toward me on her knees. “We don't have to. I just thought...you'd like the idea, and it'd be a good substitute...basically, it's the same idea.”
She was right. She was the one with the ice-cold logic. She's the one who should have been an attorney.
She was close enough now to extend her arms and rest them on my shoulders. She stroked the back of my neck and sent a tsunami of involuntary shivers down my spine and up to the crown of my head. My cock was unhelpfully twitching to life, and I could already tell that I was going to get nowhere with logical thoughts.
I knew this was what bothered me. I never had a moment where all of my blood was being delivered to my frontal lobe, or whatever it was that I needed to think my way through this haze. Consequently, I felt like a man trapped in the body of a teenager, with no control over my decisions.
Exhilarating, but clearly not the best idea.
As I was struggling to think, Jordan had come closer to me. Her warm breath was on my ear. “I just thought, it's been such a long time since you saw me from across the room, all dressed up for another man...”
Jordan's hand traveled down to my cock. She rubbed it through my boxers, gripping it tightly. A shudder went through me.
“I just thought maybe you'd want to see another man do this,” she said. She leaned back on her heels and slid the straps of her shirt down her shoulders. She peeled the shirt away from her breasts. I watched her fingers move over her skin, first in wide circles, far from the almond centers of her breasts. As she touched herself, her nipples shook themselves awake, rising to attention. Her fingers swept closer and closer, until at last she grasped her own nipples with her fingers and squeezed.
The image she had planted in my mind, though, blossomed: another man was touching her breasts, and another man was going to taste them.
“We could pick him out together. Actually this way, we'd have so many more options. So many more men to choose from...”
I spun Jordan around and pushed her onto her hands and knees. My cock was so hard now that it was painful, and I wanted to slam inside of her the way I wanted another man to slam inside of her.
“And what kind of man are you looking for?” I growled.
I pulled her track pants down, along with her panties, and wasted no time on foreplay. Her pussy was already wet, and jealousy and rage and filthy arousal cut through me like bullets, in quick succession. I jerked her hips toward me to impale her with my shaft.
“A big man. A good-looking man.”
“With a big cock?”
“A man with a huge cock.”
“And what's he going to do with that cock Jordan?”
She tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Who says he's going to do anything with it?”
I started to pound her, imagining her on her knees, attending to another man's cock...licking, slurping, eagerly bobbing her head up and down his shaft. I imagined another man's fingers in her hair, his knuckles bending as he grasped her to pull her closer and get himself deeper into her throat.
Without much warning, an orgasm seized me. I held on to Jordan's hips, as though for dear life, as I plunged as deep inside of her as I could go.
She also came, howling a little as she did.
It was great, rocketing, mind-blowing sex, as it always was when Jordan talked like that. It was better every time, as Jordan fine-tuned her talking to tell me exactly what I wanted to hear. It was even better now that we had already crossed the line.
Now that we were talking about crossing another, well...what could be better?
So why, after all of that, after Jordan handed me this fantasy on a silver platter, was I lying awake at night?
I was bothered by the fact, I suppose, that my wife was as turned on by what we were doing as I was.
I NTO THE ABYSS
Want to make it a date night?
It was Thursday evening. I held my phone in two hands, staring at the text from Jordan.
I stared so long, weighing the pros and cons of all the possible answers I could give her, that she sent me another text.
Hello. Paddy? Date tonight?
There was no need, of course, for her to explain what “it” was, and how we would make “it” into a date.
My heart rate was doubling by the second. I stared at my phone until the colors began to go gray.
What should I do?
As in every step we had taken on this journey, a seductive lure had snared part of me. But I was also terrified.
Another problem was that I didn't really know how to stop, if I actually wanted to.
And so, knowing it was a bad idea, I typed:
When and where?
My fingers hovered over the screen. Did it seem too cold-hearted to write that message?
I added:
baby?
I stared for another thirty seconds, my heart kicking with terrific force against my chest.
I sent the message.
I immediately regretted it.
When and where, baby?
Was I some kind of fucking idiot?
I was overcome by the same sensation I had felt several times since Jordan and I had begun this “game.” It was both a pleasant and an uncomfortable feeling: I felt much like I had just started dating Jordan. I felt the thrill of not knowing how she felt, of not knowing how she would react to something.
There was something delicious about the unexpected.
At the same time, I also had moments of panic, when I felt like I was out a plane with no parachute.
This was my wife, after all.
What happened if things went totally wrong?
What happened if she thought my message was lame and never wrote me back, and then went out on her own? I had seen first-hand the power Jordan had over men. She would pick up a suitable man in no time. She could leave me behind...be off to better-looking, more attentive, more exciting pastures -
My phone jittered in my hand, saving me from more painful thoughts.
Baby, I'll text you the details later. But let's say eight downtown somewhere. Can you do that, baby?
This was Jordan making fun of me.
But at least she hadn't dumped me for being a world-class idiot.
I swept my eyes briefly over my desk: the haphazardly piled case boxes; the urgent items in the diary on the screen of my computer; the empty chair where Cassy was supposed to be sitting and straightening this shit out (she was instead getting a root canal). I definitely would have been able to spend the whole night here and not get caught up.
But I typed:
I'll be there.
I saw Jordan walking from quite a distance away. She had a new dress on, a sea-green, summery dress, tight across her chest and plunging, like all of the clothing she wore now, to show off her incredible tits.
She smiled when she saw me, and sort of slinked toward me, flirtatiously. “Hey baby,” she said, and then she snorted a little. She linked her arm through mine.
I looked down at her feet, because s
he was almost as tall as me. She was precariously perched on the tallest shoes I had ever seen her wear: ankle-high heels made of some kind of twine-like material.
She followed my gaze. “Too much? These are Cindy's.”
“They're hot,” I said. “I just...how can you walk in them?”
“I can't,” Jordan said. “Not for more than five minutes.”
She was in a very sunny mood. It was delightful, of course, but it also turned on a small drip of dread in the back of my mind.
Wasn't she just a little too excited?
Would she be this excited and this bubbly if she was just meeting me for an old-fashioned date? Would we have the same joking repartee without bringing these dangerous other possibilities into our lives?
“It's just down the street. Cindy also recommended the place.”
I felt my heart leap. “You don't tell her...”
Jordan looked at me, nonplussed. She blinked slowly. “Well, I only tell Cindy.”
A chill sank through me.
“And Candy, and Cherise, and Liz...”
Jordan was smiling at me now, and before I could react to her joke and let her know I “got” it, she slapped me on the shoulder. “God, I'm just joking you dork. She recommended it to someone else, and I overheard. She says there's a lot of hot guys here, but like, our age.”
I tried very hard to maintain my composure, and perhaps regain a bit of my dignity. But my pulse was racing so quickly I knew it was affecting everything I did. “Show me the way,” I said, but I felt like my voice was still shaking.
It's a terrible and extraordinary feeling, being disarmed all the time by your own wife.
“You go in first, and find a place to sit.” She looked at my face. “We can't go in at the same time, silly.”
This was advice for novices, which we really weren't. We had done this exact same thing so many times before. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with me.
I nodded, and stuffed my hands in my pockets, and headed down the street.
“Hey, tiger!” Jordan called out behind me.
I spun around.
“You want to know the name of the bar?”
The name of the bar was Washington's.
A Well-Laid Trap 2: The Story Of A Professional Hotwife Page 3
