What was she saying? I wondered. I could guess. She might already be telling John where her room was. Or maybe she had gone even further, to tell him what she would do to him there.
“I bet she does,” Ben said. “Look at that. What the fuck is she saying to John? He looks like he's gonna splooge all over the table.”
Kate Orel's eyes were still on mine. I could see her lips, very clearly, form the word “cock.” It was the last word she said before pulling away from the now-speechless John Wilde. She kept her eyes on me, gave me a smile, before she turned to speak to someone behind her.
I tipped my glass again, trying to milk one last drop of whiskey from it.
Fuck.
I'd created a monster.
*
As I suspected, Kate left after dinner, which she barely touched. And John made a lame excuse that no one could even understand about ten minutes later.
I picked at a Sous vide salmon. I knew enough about pretending to be sophisticated to know I shouldn't be as repulsed by it as I was. I found the texture and the flavor disgusting, but I ate it to give myself something to do while my wife flirted shamelessly with John Wilde.
My stomach, which was twisting into knots as it was, had not appreciated the gesture. I was pretty sure I was going to throw up, though I couldn't be sure it was the salmon and not my wife flirting with John Wilde. Of all the fucking people. I stared at his square jaw, the sandy stubble with a little, masculine smattering of wise and wealthy gray in it, and though about how he would make Kate laugh as he dragged his sandpaper jaw over her stomach. Moving down.
I twisted the fork again.
Ben had taken up John's job as head of boring conversation, and I was actually grateful because it allowed me to drink and silently fume.
The frown that had threatened my smile for Kate earlier was in full-force now, which prompted Ben to ask if I was okay.
Was I okay?
I had no reason to be pissed off. I had no reason to feel...what? What was I feeling?
Most people would think it was jealousy. But it wasn't. Jealousy was a feeling I used to have. The feeling that had driven me to drive my wife to this strange place we were in in our relationship. Jealousy was a sweet emotion compared to what I was feeling.
I couldn't put my finger on where it had happened. Why the scales had tipped in favor of this bad feeling more than the good ones. It had maybe been a slow creep. An unexpected slow creep.
After all, back in the day, this whole thing had been my idea. Kathy had been reluctant. Kathy had taken some cajoling and coaxing. Kathy had been a big woman in oversized clothing, trying to hide her impossible to slim-down curves. A woman with dirty-blonde hair and slightly slumped shoulders when she stood talking to people without much confidence.
Kathy Banks had been there all along, coming to these conventions with her husband Paul Banks, but people don't even remember her. Sure, they might remember I was married, and that once upon time I brought my wife. But even if you said to people, straight to their face: “Oh hey, you know Kathy Banks? She's also Kate Orel,” they would look at you like you were on crack.
No one remembers Kathy Banks.
Kathy Banks, neé Orel hasn't been here for years anyway.
This is some other woman.
Orel. The word means “eagle” in Russian. I sometimes caught a glimpse of her eyes and felt like she'd taken the meaning to heart. Was that what made me uncomfortable now?
Was it the fact that every single convention brought a new, sexier Kate Orel with it?
When she had begun dressing more sexily, I had been thrilled. When she had come to her first convention as Kate Orel, and awkwardly flirted with another man, it had set my pulse racing and my head spinning.
But now it was...she was...terrifying. She stopped conversation in whole rooms full of people. She flirted with every step she took. Her hips swung side to side like an invitation to anyone who could see them.
Was I starting to worry that Kate Orel would merge with my wife, and I would live in a house with a sex bomb? The woman who had left my house two days ago was still the same old Kathy Banks, but sometimes she was not. Sometimes I saw more of Kate Orel in her than I wanted to. Sometimes she put on a racy top and went to the grocery store. Sometimes she lowered her zipper absentmindedly while she talked to the FedEx guy. Sometimes she wore a dress like this green one to go pick the kids up from school.
I tried to stamp out the feelings that were snaking through me.
The whole thing, after all, had been my idea.
And there was no denying that, as angry as I was, as out-of-control as I felt, my cock was throbbing against my unforgiving zipper. My blood was pumping and my skin felt like a layer of electricity hovered on top of it.
There was a reason, after all, that I started the whole thing.
I fucking loved it.
C HAPTER 3
FIVE YEARS EARLIER
“What do you think?” Kathy said.
I looked up with reluctance from the TV and stared.
Kathy tugged nervously at the dress, trying hopelessly to lengthen its flared skirt, which wasn't overly short, but was much shorter than she generally wore. It showed off a nice slice of her thighs.
I felt my eyebrows rise with my blood pressure.
For reasons that no one could explain, Kathy's luggage was on its way to Iceland. It wouldn't get back until the day before we left, and there was a cocktail event that evening. Megan Hardy, the wife of another operator, had loaned her the dress, which looked as though it should have been on permanent loan to a thrift store. But Kathy's full figure had pushed the dress out to conform with the shape of her body.
It was easy to see that the dress would not have been particularly flattering to anyone but Kathy – it crossed over in the front, a little like a warp-around, but because Kathy had such generous tits, the tacky formlessness of the dress was plumped out to near-stylishness.
Kathy normally took great pains to cover up and restrain her breasts. (In fact, when they had bounced out of her bra the first time we slept together, I had actually gotten a little scared. They were that big, and they were that well-hidden).
Her waist was also visible for once – she always tried to wear things that hid her very firm but slightly thicker waist. And the dress, buoyed by her ample cleavage, came to just a smidge higher on her thigh than I knew she was comfortable with. Kathy felt uncomfortable about her legs because they weren't the stereotypical long, ultra-slender legs she had always wanted to have and which seemed to be preferred by magazine ads. Still, her legs were very shapely, and I myself was happy to seem them for once.
She looked fucking amazing.
She adjusted the dress again. “I don't know,” she said.
“You look hot,” was all I managed to say.
She frowned as she turned to the full-length mirror. “This top is really...” she ended her sentence in exasperation. “I can see my bra.”
What you could see was a lot more than that, I was tempted to say.
I blinked. Since Kathy had never been one to wear very revealing clothes, she looked more stunning than even I had envisioned she could.
Especially in that dress, which had looked so awful on the hanger.
“You could take it off,” I said.
She shot me a look. Then she laughed nervously. “Oh my god. No way. No...I just...” she came and sat down in exasperation on the bed. “What am I going to do?” she said. She looked at her phone. “All the shops are probably closed by now.”
“Kath, you look great,” I said sincerely. “It's fine.”
I really wanted her to wear it, now that I saw her. I really wouldn't mind the way everyone's head would turn if they saw my wife in that dress.
She looked down at her bosom. Her bra – a worn item that was 100% functional, with wide straps to hold up her enormous tits and a thick band at the bottom to ensure that nothing weighed too heavily on her – peeked out from the folds of the d
ress, especially when she sat down.
“It's unsightly,” she said. She shook her head. “I can't go like this.”
“Hey,” I said. “Just take it off.”
“The dress?”
I grinned. “Well, that would be...something.”
She snorted, half-annoyed and half-genuine.
“I was thinking the bra,” I explained.
“Oh God,” she said, holding her hand to her face. “I'll fall out!”
I shrugged. “Just try it. See what happens.”
She looked at me incredulously. “I know what will happen,” she said.
I know a lot of guys think having a huge rack would be some kind of boon to any woman, but I think we only think that because we're guys. Kathy would have traded her tits in anytime for a smaller set, mostly because she thought they ruined her whole figure. They did make her look sort of dumpy if she wore, say, a sweatshirt or a baggy t-shirt, her usual choices. It never bothered me that much because I knew what was under her clothes, and there wasn't any convincing her to wear something a little more form-fitting.
But today she was stuck.
“Honey,” I said. “You look fucking hot in this thing.”
I could tell she didn't believe me, and she smiled but she rolled her eyes. “I think I'll just stay home.”
I shook my head. “Will you try taking off the bra,” I said. “For me?”
She stood up, clearly annoyed and eager to prove her own point, and went into the bathroom.
When she emerged, I sucked in my breath.
I could see that, as much as Kathy also loved to win an argument, even she couldn't deny that she looked pretty fucking good.
Now that the confines of the bra were gone, her tits were pressed up and full against the crossed fabric. Without the slightly yellowed strap of satin at the bottom, the full shape of her tits was silhouetted, or, in the case of the smooth crease between her tits, fully exposed. The lumps beneath the fabric where her bra has been were smooth now, and the whole dress seemed to have transformed even more.
“Whoa,” I said. “See?”
Kathy was still looking at herself in semi-disbelief.
She gave a faint smile, then turned to me.
She suddenly seemed to change her mind. “Oh, no...it just isn't me,” she said. “What else can I do?”
“Kathy!” I said, standing up and turning her back toward the mirror. “Look at yourself. You look fucking amazing. Will you please, please just wear this? It's just tonight, and then we can get you another dress for the fancy-pants ball.” I kissed her neck and slid my arms around her waist.
She grinned sheepishly when she felt my erection.
“See?” I said. “It looks great.”
I started to move my hands down the sides of her body. It looked so great, in fact, that I found myself in an unusual state of arousal for a man of ten years of marriage at at four pm.
She pushed my hands away. “Okay!” she said. “I'll wear it.”
“Well, maybe you should take it off and then put it back on,” I said suggestively, nuzzling her neck. “Just to be sure.”
She rolled her eyes and pushed me away again. “I think it'll rip if I do that. Let's just get to this thing and get back before I pop out of it.” She looked at herself again. She covered her face. “Oh God. I can't. It's just too -”
I moved backwards and sat on the edge of the bed. “Just wear it,” I groaned. “Please. You look great.”
She turned back to me. “But you love me,” she said.
It was absolutely true. There were many things I would forgive about Kathy even if she hadn't looked so great in that dress. “I do,” I said. “But I am telling you. Please wear the dress.” I smiled. “I sort of want to show off my hot wife.”
I still think a lot about that scene. How everything sort of started there. Sometimes it gives me the chills, just thinking about how I had no idea how prescient I was; how exciting that moment really was at the time, if you consider that we were at the very edge of our great adventure.
Kathy appraised herself one more time, with her hand twisted backward and covering her mouth in an awkward gesture that she used while she was thinking. Then she shrugged. “Fine,” she said reluctantly. Then she turned around and went back into the bathroom. “I guess I have to do something with my hair also.”
The door closed lightly with a puff.
“We only have like twenty minutes,” I called.
I reclined on the bed, and cast an eye at my suit. Then I turned on some trash TV. No point getting myself into a hurry. Kathy would be at least another thirty minutes grappling with her long hair.
Instead of allowing myself to get sucked into the abysmal reality programming on the hotel channels (an inane pleasure I secretly looked forward to when we stayed at hotels), I found my mind wandering to Kathy and her dress. I was enjoying the idea of Kathy finally showing off her figure. Drawing attention. I didn't want to admit it, but I was sort of relieved she would be wearing something like that dress, instead some shapeless, long, mumu-type thing. Just so people would know that my wife wasn't trying to cover anything up with her goofy outfits. They would know that she had a great figure. I was already savoring the looks Kathy would get, and the hidden but perceivable jealousy and approval that would ripple through other men.
I was turned on by the idea so much that I had an erection. I lost track of time, and had to scramble into my suit when I heard the door to the bathroom open. Kathy frowned at me. “You're not ready?” She smiled. “That's a real change of pace.”
What was a real change of pace was how Kathy looked. She caught me staring and rolled her eyes. “This sort of hooker getup is temporary,” she said.
But I could tell she enjoyed the attention. I winked at her as I put on my tie in front of the mirror, and she blushed.
“You do look great,” I teased, catching Kathy admiring herself tentatively in the mirror of the elevator as we descended to VerdeCo's casual cocktail party in the hotel bar. She swatted at me, embarrassed that I had caught her checking herself out.
After thirty minutes, she had emerged with her hair in a very sassy ponytail, the sort of wound and complex hairstyle that made a seemingly simple thing like a ponytail look good enough for a cocktail party. She had also done the unusual thing of applying some eye-catching make-up – not much, because Kathy wasn't really into make-up and professed to not even understand it that well. But she had a little flair to her appearance that night that I hadn't seen in a long time. Her face was pretty and bright, and her light eyelashes were stained dark. It gave her a vaguely vampy appearance.
“You don't think I look a little...I don't know...whoreish?” she said, leaning in to the mirror to wipe a miniscule shred of mascara from below her eye. As she leaned slightly, her breasts went on display for me in the mirror.
I shook my head slowly. “No one,” I commented without really thinking, “is going to be looking at your eyes.”
Kathy looked for a moment like she had gotten an actual electric shock. “Oh God,” she said. She turned to me. “What is that supposed to mean?”
But surely she knew what it meant?
“Just...I mean...”
Kathy looked at me.
“The dress is very...eye-catching,” I managed to say.
Kathy frowned. “I'm not sure this is a great idea,” she said. She adjusted her dress again, trying to pull the material up and over her tits. A useless attempt, because the top of the dress was completely filled by her breasts, and there was not a millimeter of give.
I swatted at her hand gently. “Stop doing that,” I whispered, even though there was no one in the elevator with us. “That is sort of trashy.”
Kathy gave me a brief glare in the mirror, but she put her hands down. “It's just so hard not to,” she said, in exasperation, tugging one final time at the dress before the elevator bell dinged.
We smiled at each other and stepped out.
*
> I had been fantasizing about the way men would react to Kathy's appearance, but I had been expecting a more subtle reaction, to be honest. Maybe because I had been married to her for so long, and while she looked great in that dress, it wasn't anything I hadn't seen before. I had expected to “sense” the pleasure the sight of her full tits would give every man. To be able to imagine what broiled underneath their expressionless faces as they tried to imagine my wife's tits fully exposed. As they tried to picture the color of her nipples, the size of the aureole that would crown the peak of her firm mounds. The heat of coveting that would burn inside of them, knowing that I was the man with the answer. I had expected simply to intuit all of this, maybe even to just imagine it for myself.
But from the moment that we stepped out of the elevator, it was clear that I had either forgotten about or misjudged the power of a woman's full rack to suck any man's eye toward it. Perhaps because Kathy never flaunted her breasts, I was wholly unprepared for the way that the eyelids of every guy we passed dropped as Kathy neared, their greedy eyes locked on her chest, and almost no effort made to hide that they were staring at her tits.
Kathy noticed it, too. She stopped and turned toward me. “Oh my God, everyone is staring at me,” she whispered. “Am I falling out of this dress?”
I could feel my cock twitching with arousal in my pants. I squeezed Kathy's hand. “Kath,” I said. “Guys can't help but look. You look great.”
She rubbed her chest and folded and arm over it. I gently pushed her hand down. “Just...look, guys are always looking at your shirts anyway. Just own it. They're just looking because it's...a nice sight.”
She rolled her eyes. “Such a feminist,” she said. But she dropped her hand and we continued through the vast lobby and into the hotel bar.
“I'm going to get a drink,” Kathy hissed in my ear. “You want anything?”
Kathy's response to any situation that caused her stress was to “get a drink,” which meant she would ask for some silly drink like a Whiskey Sour and then not drink it.
A Conventional Hotwife Page 2
