“Paul!” Mike Levin, a decent friend of mine, came toward me with open arms.
Mike was a hugger.
“Beer,” I whispered frantically in the direction of my wife, but she was already turned and headed to the bar.
Mike wrapped his arm around my neck and pulled me into the crowd. He had evidently taken no notice of Kathy, as hardly anyone ever did. She must have been walking away once he saw me, I figured, and so he hadn't caught sight of her rack.
“There's a bunch of people I want you to meet. We have a new guy on our marketing team who has some great ideas, kind of on par with some of the things you were saying last year...”
I found myself encircled and talking about “new directions in marketing” faster than I could say, “I need a beer.”
I folded my arms across my stomach and waited for Kathy to come and save me. We had a deal: if anyone sucked us into a group like this one for more than five minutes, we had to come to each other's rescue.
The conversation went on and on, and me with no beer. I had my back to the bar, where I had last seen Kathy, but I didn't want to be rude and turn around to see what was taking her so long. There was no good way to excuse myself. I had nothing to hold in my hand. My social anxiety (perhaps better described as social disdain) began to build up in my chest.
“Here, let me get you a beer,” Mike said, clapping me on the arm. And then he was gone, before I could offer to go get it myself and escape the crowd.
But it gave me the opening I needed, to turn my head briefly toward the bar.
I scanned the patrons quickly. The typical businessmen, bored expressions tattooed to their faces, swiping their smart phones. A stern brunette in her fifties. My heart skipped. No sign of Kathy.
Just as I was turning my head back to the conversation, though, I caught sight of her. Her blond hair bobbing. She was leaning on the bar and smiling politely in the direction of someone...
I was already turning my head, so I had to trust my fleeting peripheral vision to identify that she was speaking to a man. I only caught the shape of him, but it was definitely the square form of a man.
I felt a strange feeling flow through me like a drug at that moment. A feeling that allowed me to zone out of the conversation-trap I was in and just savor the thought of Kathy, leaning on the bar, talking to some guy whose eyes were making lazy circles over the shape of her tits.
Mike returned, and he handed me a beer with his left hand, absentmindedly. He sipped his own beer, but he was looking back at the bar.
More cool feelings liquified inside of me, as I realized: he was looking back at Kathy. I could see it in his lecherous eyes.
But a strange thing happened. He didn't say anything to me about it. He turned back to the conversation after yet another lingering walk up and down her body, his eyes moving minutely in a vertical line. Stopping at her ass, stopping at her tits. He took a long drink of her tits.
“Excuse me,” I said, finally, after another painful five minutes of the conversation, and still no sign of Kathy coming to rescue me. I took my phone out of my pocket in desperation, pretending to have a call. (This act had fucked me once before, when I had forgotten to turn down the ringer, and was looking at my incoming call long before the phone actually rang in my hand loud enough for everyone to hear. But I had to take a chance.)
As I maneuvered away from the group, I looked up at the bar where I had seen Kathy.
She was alone now.
She seemed to sense that I was looking at her, and turned to smile at me.
She had a martini in front of her.
“A martini,” I said, raising my eyebrows.
She stifled a laugh and took a sip. She scrunched up her face at the hard liquor. “That guy bought me a drink,” she said. “It was...like, the only drink I could think of.”
My heart had picked up when she mentioned the other man. Buying her a drink.
“A guy bought you a drink?” I said.
Kathy rubbed her nose and took another sip of the martini. “I know. It's...I'm sorry, it was just...it happened so fast.”
“Huh,” I said.
Inside of me, two fierce and different feelings were competing with each other. The first, and probably the dominant one: excitement. I liked that another man had come sniffing around at my wife, tractor-beamed in, no doubt, by her pretty breasts. My cock was pulsing with that excitement. And there was no denying that I had kept a fantasy about this very thing sort of buried and stashed away in the back of my mind for a long time now. Whenever it surfaced, I had usually tried to ignore it.
Because it was ridiculous, wasn't it? Getting worked up by other men flirting with your wife?
Maybe even doing something else…?
The second feeling was a mixture of jealousy and...maybe shame. Shame at thinking such a dirty thing about my wife. Shame about wanting to press the boundaries a little more, or wanting her to. Wanting to feel another little dose of the jealousy that went along with it.
“I told him I was married as soon as I could,” Kathy said. “It's just...it didn't really...deter him.”
I felt my pulse quicken even more.
“Yeah?”
She leaned toward me and said, conspiratorially: “He was like, 'I can still buy you a drink, though, can't I?'” She leaned forward to sip her martini without taking it off the table. Kathy was full of boorish but cute habits, and one of them was sipping drinks this way to avoid clumsily spilling them.
I could almost hear his seedy voice: I can still buy you a drink, though, can't I?
I looked at Kathy's drink as she lifted it again to her mouth. The curved triangle of the glass seemed alluring, arousing. The drink my wife had accepted from a stranger. A stranger who had flown over to her the moment I left her at the bar all dressed up. I felt a pang in my balls. Why was this turning me on so much?
And then the ripple of anger. She didn't have to take it.
And then another jealousy-sweetened throb of pleasure. But she had.
“Maybe you should wear a dress like that more often,” I said. “We could get through the week on a tight budget. Free meals. Free drinks. Whatever.”
Kathy set her glass down and gave me an annoyed look. The tone of my voice had wavered wildly between joke-y and serious, accusatory and encouraging.
“You told me to wear this dress,” she said.
I looked up and across the bar – a squared of barstools with the bartender and drinks in the center. Across from us, two guys were talking, with their eyes occasionally sneaking a peek in our direction.
In Kathy's direction.
I narrowed my eyes when one of them saw me watching him and looked away quickly.
I was getting filled with such high doses of emotion. What the hell was my problem?
I turned back to Kathy. She actually looked a little hurt.
“I was totally joking around,” I said, trying to sound as convincingly sweet as possible. “I think it's great you got a free drink. I sort of...like it.”
Kathy scrunched her face up and looked at me strangely. “Huh?”
I shrugged. I felt a lot of genuine thoughts coming forward in my mouth, and I wasn't entirely sure how Kathy was going to take them.
She sipped her martini.
“I don't know,” I said. “It's...you might think it's sort of weird, but it's kind of...fun to see you getting hit on by another guy.”
Half the martini was gone now, and I could see the veil of inhibition slowly lifting from Kathy's face. She rarely drank, and so when she did she went from sober to “spirited” pretty quickly.
Instead of reacting as I might have expected her to, her pupils seemed to widen and she looked down to sip her drink without clanging the glass into her teeth. “Really?” she said. “How's that?”
I was stunned that we were having this conversation. This was nearing a fantasy world of mine that I had given up long ago. I even side-stepped it in my own mind if I could. My jaw fell open a little.
Really? Did she really want to hear this?
“I guess it's like...sort of flattering,” I said, and as soon as the words came out of my mouth I regretted the choice I had made. This was surely going to end with Kathy asking if I thought she was chattel.
She set the martini down and sat up straight, arching her back slightly. I couldn't tell if she had done this purposely to make herself sexier, or absent-mindedly because she had forgotten what kind of dress she was wearing. The slit of the dress slid slightly more open, and I sucked in my breath. An image flitted through my mind, of the man who had bought her a drink placing both of his hands on her breasts and pushing the material with his fingers, just a little bit more, just a little bit of help, until her nipples popped out into the air.
But Kathy just grinned.
I stared at her. Her grin quickly changed, and then she leaned forward again. “Wait. Flattering for you, or flattering for me?”
“Uh...well...I meant...” I stuttered.
Kathy started, to my amazement to smile.
“Don't say for it's for me,” she said, nodding slowly. She got it. It was flattering for me, and that's all I was really thinking about. She tapped her glass. “I see.”
To my surprise she was smiling.
“What about you?” I said.
Kathy pressed her lips together. She was smiling lightly. “What about me?” she asked, turning her head toward me and blinking dramatically.
“Okay,” I said, feeling like I was admitting defeat. Nothing had really been said in this conversation, but it seemed like Kathy was getting a little prickly about it.
She surprised me again by saying, almost as if the conversation were changing topic: “Yeah, actually, it was kind of fun.”
“What was?” I asked almost immediately.
She shrugged. “Just...I don't know, having another guy pay attention to me.”
She had a little bit of a sadistic glint in her eye as she said this. Or at least, that's how I perceived it. Was she trying to get back at me for the things I had just said, for the fact that like a complete fucking idiot I had just admitted (to my wife) to enjoying showing off my wife's tits?
My cock twitched.
Or was she being perfectly sincere?
“Uh...do mean you like it?”
As a man, I always go with the most idealistic of possibilities where sex is concerned.
She held up her glass. “I don't know.” She took a sip. “It just seems so...wrong,” she whispered.
She seemed very sincere. To be sincerely telling me she had sort of enjoyed flirting with another man.
Getting attention from another man.
I felt a pulse ripple through me. If she could enjoy flirting, maybe she could enjoy something a little more. And then maybe something a little more than that...
Well, Paul. Now or never.
I put my hand on her thigh and started to slide her skirt up a little. “It's very...arousing,” I said.
Here's the thing: this last bit? I expected it to go over like a load of lead balloons. I expected Kathy to roll her eyes or call me a pervert. It's why I chose the word “arousing,” instead of something else. It was so I could roll the “r” in “arousing” and say it with a hammy aristocratic accent and claim to be joking about it moments later, when she got pissed at me.
Kathy downed what remained of her drink. But as she did, she slid her hand over my thigh and into my crotch. She raised her eyebrows.
“I see,” she said, her fingers playing with the base of the martini glass. A smile played on her lips.
“Well,” she said suddenly. She was in motion, the way she got when she was a little drunk. A little looser, a little louder. She reminded me of jingling bracelets. “Let's have another drink, shall we?”
I was totally taken by surprise, and so I just sat there, staring and paralyzed, as my tipsy wife slid away from the bar and walked toward the ladies' room.
Where she disappeared for more than a few minutes.
“Jesus,” said a voice from behind me, and Mike Levin pulled in to my left. He was also getting a little loopy. “How'd you wrangle that broad into talking to you?”
I turned to Mike.
Really?
For a moment I let myself be pissed that Mike didn't recognize my wife. But then I realized: he had seen her only a handful of times, always looking frumpy. And he was probably wasted.
I opened my mouth to clarify, but then I decided better of it and just shrugged. Mike held his hand up to the bartender and ordered himself a vodka soda.
“You scare her off?” Mike said. He turned around and leaned against the bar. “Probably for the best. Where's Kathy anyway?”
I was silent. I was staring at the swinging doors to the bathroom hallway, and my mind was caught up in what Kathy was doing in there.
Mike was content to carry on the conversation by himself. “That's right. She's not a big drinker. Melanie either. I tell you though...” he sighed, and sipped his drink, “makes it sorta hard when I see all these hot chicks, like especially when we go to some tropical place.”
“We only go to tropical places,” I said dryly.
Mike harrumphed, as though he believed he had made his point.
“You better get in on this, buddy. I'm tellin' you, that guy John has some great ideas. We're in at the ground level...”
Blabbitty blah. Still no Kathy.
Mike departed, but I had tuned him out so much I couldn't have said exactly when. The group behind me was probably itching for me to return – after all, that's why we'd flown 3,000 miles. To network and talk and form alcohol-induced bonds. But I felt cemented to the barstool for some reason. I kept feeling Kathy's hand stroking my cock through my pants, kept seeing her delicious wink. The only thing I cared about was what she was going to do next, and since we were so far out of our usual territory, I sincerely had no idea what it would be.
Kathy appeared moments later. Whatever she had been doing in the bathroom, it seemed to have altered her appearance. I scrutinized her face. She had put on a darker lipstick than she normally ever wore, and she had let down her hair.
And somehow, in doing so, she seemed to have applied a mask not only to her appearance but also her personality. She was not walking out of the bathroom, she was strutting. Instead of adjusting her posture in another failed attempt to diminish her tits, she had them thrust forward proudly.
She sat down opposite me at the bar, instead of coming back over.
What the hell?
My blood was racing.
Wasn't this exactly – but exactly – what I had secretly hoped my wife would someday do? Cocoon herself up and emerge sexy, maybe even a little bit...slutty? It had all happened so fast I couldn't even believe what I was seeing.
“Banks,” someone was saying behind me. Kathy gave me a grin and looked down at the drink napkin in front of her.
“Banks. Paul. Hey, man.”
No. The smile had not been for me. Kathy was fluttering her eyelashes and smiling shyly for...the bartender. She placed a hand under her chin and twisted the napkin flirtatiously in her fingers.
Jealousy pierced my heart.
The bartender tapped the bar. He would be right back to take her drink order. I smiled at her, and she gave me a nervous grin in return. She shook her head quickly. This was too crazy for her.
Her smile slammed a lid on the fire of jealousy. I felt both relief and disappointment.
Someone clapped my shoulder. “Paul. What the hell? You sick or something?”
I looked up to see Mike standing next to me.
He looked in the direction of my broken stare.
“Ah,” he said knowingly. “Fucking great view, buddy. But probably out of your league. You gotta get back in here, man.”
He turned slightly to indicate the group of guys he was talking to. I followed his signal and gave a wave to a few of them.
“Yeah,” I said.
I looked back at Kathy.
Th
e bartender was now setting a glass in front of her and pointing to someone on the other side of the bar, sitting in a booth.
My pulse started racing again. The lid came off the greasy fire of jealousy again.
Kathy took a sip of the wine, looked up at me, and shrugged with a slightly embarrassed smile.
It was all too easy for her to pick up men, her smile said.
She looked down at her great breasts, as if to explain to me what had happened.
Then she shrugged again and stood up.
I watched her walk over to the man who had bought her a drink.
What had that taken? Under five minutes? Not even five minutes.
Mike clapped my shoulder again. “Okay then,” he said, and gave me a strange look.
“Just a minute,” I croaked, wagging my finger at the bartender for another drink.
I watched Kathy as she slid into the booth across from the guy who had purchased her drink.
My heart burned like phosphorus. What the fuck was she doing? She could have at least waited for him to come to her.
Smiling, she began to chat with him.
But the way she leaned into the table, dropping her breasts low so he could stare right into them. The way she tucked her hair behind her ear even seemed more sensual, almost dirty.
I tried to sip my next drink but I ended up slamming it.
Kathy. She didn't even look like my wife over there, smiling for another man.
My eyes flicked over to him. He was an older guy, but fit. No beer belly hanging over into his lap. His hair was dark with a few streaks of gray. His clothes looked expensive.
I looked behind me. Mike was staring at me, and he jerked his head impatiently.
What a fucker. He just wanted me to get in there and be as bored as he was.
I knew I should be networking and all that jazz, but I couldn't tear my eyes away from the scene unfolding in front of me.
When I looked back, Kathy's face seemed much different. She had a film of shock and discomfort on her face. She was still smiling, and I guessed the guy in front of her would never know the difference. But I could tell she was distracted, and something was wrong.
A Conventional Hotwife Page 3
