Her voice trailed off.
She squeezed my hand. “But it wasn't like, I was angry or something.”
Another pause.
“I was just...I liked it because you were finally...I could get you away from work, you know?”
A cool pain throbbed inside my chest. For some reason this meant a lot to me. It was maybe the most romantic thing she had ever said.
“And who the fuck was this kid driving my car?” Jordan said suddenly, smiling to break up the tension.
I wiped my eye quickly because it had started to...let's call it “water.” “Olivia's boyfriend,” I said.
Jordan rolled her eyes. “Oh god,” she said with irritation.
“Jordan,” I said quickly, not wanting her to deviate too much from the topic at hand. “I love you. I'm sorry for all the years I didn't...make that clear.”
I could see that what I had said had affected her deeply, because her eyes watered almost instantly.
She leaned forward, and our lips met.
“I love you too,” she whispered.
“Okay,” Jordan said. “So how do we wrap this up?”
Jordan knew as well as I did that we weren't just going to walk away from all of this, just like that.
“I don't know,” I said. “I want to stop, and I don't.”
She rested her head on my chest. “Me too.”
She moved her head to my shoulder.
“What if we say, one last time with Tyrese? Where you can watch, and then...that's it. It's over.”
There was a silence. I nodded, almost imperceptibly.
It was a good solution.
A good solution like setting a date to quit smoking. A New Year's resolution. It had the exact same qualities to it, and we were looking at it on the opposite side, facing it bravely with all of our enthusiasm and unbridled hope. There were people out there who succeeded! We would be those people!
We laughed at the same time, though I don't know if Jordan was laughing for the same reasons I was.
We made love, a bit more like the old married couple we were, slowly and tenderly. Afterward, I lay in the darkness and felt as though a weight had been lifted off my chest.
For the first time in many, many months, I fell asleep within minutes.
B ALL
“Ooohhhhh,” Jordan said, sitting up in bed at about 6am. She was holding her hand to her head.
I bolted up. “What the matter? You have a migraine?”
She shook her head. “I mean...yes, yes I do.”
She smiled. She pressed her hand to her head harder and grimaced falsely. “Oooohhhhhh...”
I laughed at her.
“I just remembered the charity ball...my head is hurting...”
I pushed her gently backward. “I have a cure for that,” I suggested. The announcement about the charity ball, a fundraiser for the Children's Hospital, had not yet made its way through my skull. I was more focused on the sleepy scent of Jordan's skin, and my morning erection, and the new sense of confidence I had after last night's conversation.
“It's incurable,” she said, pushing me away. “I am so tired of going out at night. How do the rich and famous do it?” She covered her eyes with her forearm. “Ohhhhhh god...”
“Oh god,” I echoed. Now it was all turning to reality: a charity ball, a stuffy tuxedo, a lot of fake laughter and boring conversation.
Jordan got out of bed and trotted into the bathroom. I heard the shower turn on. Apparently whatever she had thought of with this charity ball meant we needed to get up and get going now.
“Do you even have anything to wear?” she called out, over the shower water.
I sat up. “What? I thought...”
I heard Jordan giggle. “I got it. I'm on it. But you have to get up.”
Jordan, luckily for me, had been thinking far, far ahead, and rented a tux using measurements from an event the year before. I stared down at my stomach and sucked it in, hoping it would be okay.
Jordan smiled at me in the mirror, where she was applying a multitude of creams to her face. “I added an inch,” she said. “Just in case.”
I couldn't believe we had to spend most of our day dealing with this thing, but we both knew there was essentially no way out of it. Everyone had to go. It was one of the few charity events that could in no way return to be misconstrued, controversial, or divisive, and bite anyone in the ass politically at some later date. Failing to go was the only thing that could have that unwanted effect.
Jordan got a mischievous expression on her face very suddenly.
“Let's make the best of it,” she said.
The look on her face was one that both pushed me into a state of arousal and sort of terrified me: Jordan could do some pretty naughty things. The fact that she had this expression on while talking about the charity ball, where all of my colleagues would be, sent a jolt of panic through me.
I mean, it was one thing to play with fire in places where we barely stood a chance of seeing anyone we knew...and quite another to do it in a roomful of colleagues.
“Jordan...”
She grinned again and winked at me. “Oh darling,” she said, layering a rich Southern accent all over her voice, “I wouldn't dream of doing anything untoward at your charity ball.”
From a drawer she found a powder puff, almost as if it were there as a prop for this scene, and tapped it against her nose. Powder exploded on her face and she sneezed and waved it away impatiently. There was no way for us not to laugh.
She turned around and leaned against the counter. “No,” she said. “Whatever I do, it'll be just between us.”
I had no idea how to read her, at that moment. Her nose was white with powder, which made the whole scene comical. She was smiling. But her voice was serious and smooth, and in her eyes I could see that same “something” she got when she was trying to trap a man. A pent-up, predatory sexual energy.
Now, what I should have said is:
“How about we go and have a nice normal evening?”
But I didn't.
The truth was somewhere in there:
I didn't want to take old Jordan to the ball.
I wanted take this woman to the ball.
Jordan suddenly snapped her fingers. “Hey!” she exclaimed. “I can use that dress again!”
She pushed past me, on her way to the closet.
When we got to the dinner preceding the ball, it was just as awful as we imagined: boring entertainment, long speeches, bad decor.
But because Jordan had made a sort of promise to get up to something “fun,” the whole evening was injected with excitement right from the start.
First of all, her dress was killer, and her presence sort of swept through the room like a magnet, drawing everyone's eyes to her. Even women. There were ladies dressed to the nines there, in long, glittering dresses that should have been more eye-catching than hers. But the dress was a mere accessory to what Jordan had: herself.
At the last minute, she had found a shrug to put over the dress, taking it from “hot date-night” to “hot charity ball.” But the shrug still couldn't hide the sweet curve of her breasts, or the bare skin beneath the transparent material, or the perfect roundness of her ass.
I enjoyed the satisfaction of having Jordan on my arm. She was my wife, and the shifty, wandering eyes of other men told me they coveted Jordan. But since our conversation the night before, I felt a change in my insecurity about Jordan.
Don't get me wrong. When I thought about Tyrese, it wasn't as if the conversation the night before had just swept everything under the rug about him. I still felt a flush of jealousy flash through my cheeks, and my heart pounded with exciting fear, thinking of just his name.
But in a setting like the charity event, I could relax and enjoy Jordan's devastating good looks, and savor the reverse of the jealousy I sometimes felt: there was a special kind of zing to watching other men covet my wife.
My wife, who was wearing the same dress she had
worn on her first date with Tyrese. The same dress he had worked his fingers underneath to finger her in the back of a taxicab.
But Jordan still enjoyed making me feel nervous.
We made the rounds, exchanging hellos with our friends and acquaintances, with Jordan clinging to my arm. But I was much more attuned now to Jordan's every flirtatious gesture: when she extended her hand and held someone else's just a little too long, or batted her eyelashes just a little more than needed for blinking, or shifted her weight to very subtly stick her hip out and accentuate her curves, I was not some clueless man. I saw everything she did to sparkle and grab the attention of every man we spoke to.
Then we sat down at our table, where we were, thankfully, seated with Doug and his wife.
Doug's wife was a civil- liberties attorney, and if Doug looked the part of hard-on-crime prosecutor, she was his opposite in every respect. Doug was a beefy man, to say the least, and Ellen was the sort of washed-away thin girl you saw on college campuses dressed in black and headed for a protest. She looked more swallowed by her black dress than anything, and she had pulled her normally wild, hippy hair into a severe bun, giving her an androgynous, almost futuristic appearance.
Still, it was nice to have someone to chat with at this thing, because I couldn't just spend the whole evening ogling other men ogling my wife.
In a break between the seemingly endless speeches and what was billed as “entertainment,” Jordan found my leg under the table, and stroked my leg with her stockinged foot. She had evidently kicked off her sexy heels to get beneath the tuxedo fabric and get my attention. I felt a small flutter of terror when I looked at her and a mischievous smile twitched at the corner of her mouth.
Her foot disappeared, and then almost immediately she rose. Doug's eyes went involuntarily with her, as did Ellen's, along with eyes of everyone at the table. “I'm running to the bar,” she told me. “Get you anything? Ellen? Doug?”
We all shook our heads.
I watched her walking away, her long strides graceful, almost as if she didn't touch the ground. She sort of glided. And as she glided, she dragged every man in the place toward her. Some of them moved only inches in her direction, like plants turning to the sun.
But others moved. You could actually see men making excuses to go the bar. Marty Harris from the Public Defender’s office actually slammed a half-filled snifter of whiskey to head off in her direction.
From across the room I enjoyed the sight of that little pipsqueak inching closer and closer to my wife. I wondered if he knew who she was. I hoped not. He was running his eyes all over her body, stepping closer, telling her jokes and making her smile. Jordan was batting her eyelashes and sipping the drink she was supposed to bring to me.
I didn't get as worked up watching this play out as I would have just two days before. I shook my ice and asked Doug a question about work, and when I returned my gaze to Marty and my wife I was calm. A nice little shiver ran along the front of my thighs when she raised the whiskey glass in her hand and pointed to me from across the room with a smile.
Or did the shiver come from watching Marty's face fall?
I raised my glass and turned back to Doug, who was answering the question I had asked him in a monotone voice, oblivious to the fact that I wasn't really listening. He was pretty drunk already.
Jordan was cutting through the tables now, sashaying her hips.
Jealousy still burned through me, but I was feeling, for the first time in a while, that I had regained some of the control over the situation. Jordan's winks seemed to be more complicit; her smiles seemed more like an act for me than for the men she was flirting with.
My mind was determined not to go to the darkest possibilities.
I realized, for the first time in a long time, I was enjoying myself immensely.
It felt so good, and so liberating, that I decided to dance.
Being a formal ball, they played mostly tame, slow music that everyone could dance to as a couple. A lot of older songs, because the white-haired patrons were the ones with the deepest and broadest pockets.
I spun Jordan around theatrically, not knowing how to really slow dance at all. She laughed appreciatively.
“So listen,” she said, running her fingers along the lapel of my suit jacket. “I've been thinking about our plans with Tyrese.” She danced a little with me, letting her words sink in, just as she had probably hoped, down at my crotch, where my cock was pulsing to life.
“This might be the one and only time we do something like this this. I want it to be a really, really great performance.”
My cock was at full attention now, and I pressed myself close to her as we spun around to hide my erection from the guests.
As a rule, I didn't dance, but this was very nice.
Especially since my wife was talking to me, in a low, sultry voice, about her plans for having sex with another man while I watched.
She played with my tie. “I was thinking, then, that maybe I should get some practice in. You know that black men have a certain reputation,” she purred. She leaned close to me and dropped her voice to a whisper. “And I was thinking, since it's maybe a once-in-a-lifetime thing, I should do...well...everything.”
Everything. The word crawled inside of me, slamming into my cock, burning right through my balls, clanging around in my pelvis. I almost felt myself get weak in the knees.
“So I think it would be best if I had a little practice first. Don't you?”
I was too stunned, too worked up, to answer. My mouth was hanging open.
“Well? Paddy?” She was smiling now, enjoying her power over me. She placed her arms on my shoulders, and danced so that her body was grinding against my very, very hard cock. “Do you want to go home, and fuck me in the ass, so I get nice and ready for another man's big cock going in there?”
An actual haze of red, maybe from blood loss, crept into the lower field of my vision.
I grasped Jordan by the lower back and pressed her to me.
She moved against me. It was now utterly improprietous, and I knew the stuffier women at the party were tisking silently. I also knew their husbands were watching with jealousy, wishing sincerely that they had a hot, stunning wife who turned slow-dancing into...whatever this was.
Jordan raised her eyebrows. “Well?”
“I do,” I croaked. I clasped her close to me and spun her around. “I want to go right now, I just...don't leave me standing here with this boner.”
Jordan threw her head back and laughed loudly, and without looking, I could sense the heads of attendees whipping around to look at us. She leaned close to me, at least, to say: “Boner? Oh my god, you sound like you're thirteen.”
“I feel like I'm thirteen.”
She ground against me. “You do. But..you had better try to be a little more sophisticated than that.”
I clasped her hand. “Stop doing that, or we'll never get out of here.”
P RACTICE
When we got home, we found our trash cans from Friday – which we had not noticed when we left – knocked over and all over the street. We sighed together. No matter what you did, you still had the reality of children who did not do simple chores to deal with. I went to get them, and Jordan went inside.
I felt like the evening's fun had maybe been destroyed by the event when I didn't find Jordan at the kitchen counter when I came in. We had planned in the car to have some more wine when we got home. Jordan was in a giggly, fun mood.
I set my keys down.
I loosened my tie.
I went to the bedroom to change. Whatever we were doing, I could do it out of a tux.
Jordan was waiting on the bed. She was sitting kneeling, resting on her heeled feet, still wearing her underwear. But nothing else. She looked over her shoulder to me with a grin.
I clawed at the buttons of my shirt after tossing the jacket aside. I pulled the shirt over my head, undershirt and all, and hastily removed my pants. Jordan kept her eyes on me, e
xpectantly. It felt great to have her looking at me, the way I looked at her, with desire.
But this was also about other things, I realized. All the way home in the car I had been getting even harder, my blood had been pumping faster, and I was now raging to get my hands on Jordan and complete her “practice.” Because I realized, this was going to give me back the control I wanted.
I moved to the bed and placed my hand on Jordan's neck. Gently enough, but with authority. I pushed her forward until she was on all fours, and she stretched into the pose with a feline movement.
I left my hand on her neck, and I pulled her panties down with a firm jerk. The scent of her excitement flooded my nostrils almost immediately, and the evidence of her arousal was glistening between her thighs as well.
I took in the still-intoxicating sight of her bare pussy, lily petals clasped around the red, hot depths of her body. I pushed her ass open, to view the place where I had been given permission to spend most of my time this evening.
Jordan was ahead of me, however: I watched as her long fingers appeared between her legs, and she spread her pussy open with two fingers, sliding a third into the sopping flesh of her cunt. She made long, leisurely strokes up and down the length of her slit, swirling over her clit until it was engorged. She started to rock her hips, and she fell onto her chest to get another hand in on the action.
“Do you think Tyrese will like it if I play with myself like this?” she said.
I watched, unable to speak for a moment, as her two hands worked together, one pulling her lips open for the other to stroke her pussy. Viscous juices dropped from her folds.
“Play with your ass,” I growled.
It seared through me as my command was followed and she pushed her finger upward, drawing some of her honey to her light pink anus. She drew it around her hole in a circle, and I saw her pucker.
A Well-Laid Trap 2: The Story Of A Professional Hotwife Page 11
