A Well-Laid Trap: The Story Of A Professional Hotwife

by Arnica Butler

  Her voice sounded strange on her message. I realized I hadn't heard it for a long time. The message. I almost never called her. She always answered when I did.

  Did her voice sound the tiniest bit sultry?

  I wiped my forehead. I was sweating.

  This was just the heat, the infernal radiator heat that never ceased in this building.

  I summoned the image of the woman in the bar. I knew it was too late to be recalling information: whatever I had really seen was being corrupted by my own paranoia. Now she had her hair in a bun, now she turned to face me and she was Jordan, now she was flipping me off.

  The logical quagmire I had stepped into hit me suddenly in the face: by assuming it was Jordan in the bar, I had decided to call her on her cell.

  But she wasn't the woman in the bar, so she was home.

  I almost laughed out loud.

  I called the house.

  “If you are a telemarketer, I'm letting you know, it's 9:01 EST and I will be filing a complaint with the FCC.”

  Olivia. Her voice was made of whorehouse velvet and satin, crimson red and entirely inappropriate for a nineteen-year-old, especially one I had known since age nine.

  “Liv,” I said. “It's me.”

  A silence.

  “Is Jordan there, please?”

  Another silence. I felt like I could hear my watch, a gift from Jordan for my birthday, ticking away for hours.

  Why the pause?

  Finally Olivia's breath rattled through the phone.

  “I'm trying to get people to call me 'Olivia.' Or 'Olive,' if you must do something to my name. Liv is just so...Liv Tyler.” she said.

  Her voice sounded disinterested, as always.

  Olivia and Jordan were full sisters, but they couldn't be more unalike. Jordan was sunny and likeable, responsible and smart, and Olivia was...well, a crazy fucking bitch. Physically, only their enormous tits were similar. Olivia was tall, had big, Amazonian hips, had huge features and dark eyes in pale skin, and did indeed look a great deal like Liv Tyler. No one, upon hearing her called “Liv,” failed to point this out.

  “I don't mind Liv Tyler,” she continued, when I didn't answer. She yawned. “It's just, so...”

  “Have you been smoking?” I snapped. For a second my problems with Jordan were overshadowed by my irritation with Olivia.

  Liv Tyler Deux was the bane of my existence. The last thing I needed on my climb up the ladder was a deadbeat sister-in-law smoking pot in my garage and probably growing it somewhere on my premises.

  “Smoking what, Patrick?” Olivia yawned again. Very deliberately, very falsely. She wanted me to know that she was faking. Olivia loved getting under my skin, or anyone's skin, and then acting as though she had no idea what was going on.

  “Put Jordan on, would you?” I said, recovering from my flurry of rage and using my Most Patient Voice. With Olivia, like with a toddler or a dog, it never paid to get flustered.

  “Jordan...is...not here, I'm afraid.”

  The cool feeling I was having before Olivia drove me half-insane with her Cheshire Cat routine started to return. It was spreading out, into my limbs. My skin prickled.

  “Where is she?”

  “Uh...I don't know. I think...the gym or something like that.”

  My temples burned with frustration and I could feel my blood vessels hardening with the pressure. “Did she say where she was going?'

  “Probably. But you know I'm not very good at listening.”

  Olivia was oh-so-amused with herself.

  “Okay. How long has she been gone?”

  Olivia's voice cracked back into perfect sobriety like a whip. “I don't know, Patrick. I forgot to set the timer when she left.”

  “Could-you-estimate?” I sang.

  I could almost see her, holding her fingernails in front of her with amusement, or twitching her tail like a psycho cat. A low hum came from the phone. I knew she was pressing her lips together, a smirk on her mouth. “Mmmmmmmm.....”

  And then, perkily:

  “Nope.”

  I hung up, secretly pleased that it would irritate her that I had done it first.

  I stared at the wall. Someone funny had penciled some balls onto a phallus-shaped stain.

  Where in the fuck is my wife?

  I had half a mind a mind to ditch Doug, and my cases, and return to the bar. Just to verify that it wasn't her.

  And that's what you would be doing, isn't it, Patrick?

  Because your wife does not own designer suits. She doesn't wear hooker boots. She doesn't flirt with fat men at an expensive bar.

  Your wife wears yoga pants and buns, and goes to the gym.

  You're imagining things. You haven't had sex forever, you work too much, you never see your wife, her fucking sister is driving you crazy, and you're imagining things.

  I put my phone in my pocket.

  I had no idea what to do. The amount of work that was piling up upstairs was absurd. I should go, finish my motions, review my notes for tomorrow's dep, think out some solution for the weak and risky Styles domestic violence case, and then go home. To find everything the way it should be: my wife in her bed, Olivia stoned and watching a screen saver while listening to bluegrass-techno or whatever she was into, kids glowing blue beneath their covers, texting eternally into the night.

  I walked back upstairs.

  “I have to take some of this shit home,” I said. “I feel awful.”

  Doug shrugged. He had fished out a sandwich, in spite of having just eaten, and made himself some coffee. “Hope you feel better, man.”

  Doug was not a man of ambition, he just hated going home. He liked being a fat, slobby prosecutor, and he liked staying away from his wife, and he liked making sure good police work saw its day in court. He just wanted to eat meat sandwiches (his wife was a vegan) in peace and put people in jail.

  I locked my computer down and slipped it into my briefcase.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  I felt like someone else, someone else entirely, as I fast-walked down the street.

  My life was all about looking calm and collected at every moment, and as I headed back to The Mile, I looked more like junkie. My pulse was racing, and my eyes were watering, and I had the undignified walk of the unhinged.

  Believe me, I talked to myself all the way there, trying to get myself under control.

  I threw open the door to The Mile, and a gust of wind caught my trench coat and my hair. A few patrons turned toward me, and their faces registered mild disgust before they turned back to what they were doing. The beefy bartender folded his arms, ready for trouble if I was going to cause it. I'm sure I looked insane as I scanned the bar.

  The man was gone, and so was the woman.

  I let the door close.

  My jealousy seized me again, and I threw it open, stepping into the restaurant. I sought out Anna, who was busily circulating through her section. I pushed my way through the bar, and grabbed her arm. “Anna,” I said. “Anna. I need you to look at something.”

  Her eyes narrowed slightly in irritation, but most of her face remained unchanged.

  I held up my phone, showing her a picture of Jordan. “Was this the woman, you know the woman we were talking about earlier, the prostitute, or...Doug asked you if she was? You saw her, right? Was this her?”

  Anna looked at the phone, and then lifted her eyes. She looked sleepy. “Maybe her. A lot more makeup. Maybe.” She shrugged. Her face was made of stone. “You are police?”

  I shook my head.

  What she said next did not seem contingent on how I answered her question. “I am busy.”

  She departed.

  I turned, all ready to ask like a crazy person at the bar and ask everyone sitting there if they had seen Jordan. The big bartender caught my eye and shook his head.

  It was time for me to go, his face said.

  So I left.

  I drove home much the same way I walked to The Mil
e. Too fast, not thinking well. I saw my eyes in the mirror and I looked crazy. At a stoplight I patted my hair down.

  We had moved, recently, to the suburbs. It had been a depressing moment in both of our lives. It was the place we had always said we didn't want to end up: gated community, cookie-cutter houses, affluent white people everywhere with labradoodles. In truth, the city was either unaffordable or horrible, with nothing in-between. The schools were better, having a pool was nice. The grocery store was clean and had no homeless people in front of it. No one wanted to admit it, but we liked it here. We were suburban people.

  Middle age.

  The move had required us to get two cars, another thing we hadn't wanted to do.

  And Jordan's car, the other car, was not in the garage. I watched the door open to emptiness and my heart began to flutter wildly again.

  Olivia was standing, suspiciously and theatrically, in the kitchen. Leaning over the island counter top, flipping through a magazine. She looked up, and when she saw it was me, I saw a mixture of panic and disappointment flicker over her face.

  Did I see that? Is that what I saw?

  She was in a baby-pink nightshirt that came just below her ass, and white bobby-socks. Her long, brown hair was loose and carelessly pretty. She recovered from her moment of shock or let-down, and went back to her magazine. “Hello, Patrick.”

  “Still not home,” I mused. “That's a very long time at the gym.”

  Olivia gave the magazine a turn. I noticed that she did not have a copy of Cosmo, but instead a long-form magazine that she wouldn't ordinarily be caught dead reading. I set my briefcase down.

  Now.

  Now it was starting to get very suspicious.

  Olivia is in on it. Of course she is, the horrible little bitch.

  I snatched the magazine away from her and flipped the cover toward myself. “The New Republic.” I arched my eyebrows at her, and she snatched the magazine back. “Very political Olivia,” I sneered.

  What the hell was I doing?

  “You,” she told me, “are very rude. Does Jordan ever tell you that?”

  “Where is Jordan, Liv?”

  I had gone into interrogation mode.

  But the sound of the garage door made Olivia stand up, give me a very condescending look, and wave her finger at the ceiling. “Why, that must be her now, Patrick,” she sang snottily.

  She turned away from me and started to reach into a cupboard. I tried not to look as the nightie rose up, revealing a plump portion of her lovely behind.

  The door opened and Jordan came through the door.

  I looked at the clock.

  It was now 10:21.

  My eyes returned to my wife. She had several heavy bags in her hands. One duffel, another a wheely-cart she used for work. Her hair was in a bun. She had no makeup on. She was wearing black yoga pants and a gray sweatshirt. She struggled through the door and dropped the bags.

  “Oh hey,” she said. “I thought you had a bunch of work to do.”

  I looked at her face. She seemed genuinely surprised to see me. She did not seem shocked, however. She was not acting strangely. She was acting like a woman who had just gone to the gym, and returned home to find her workaholic husband here instead of still at work.

  She smiled, and looked from me to Olivia, almost incredulously. “Whhhhhhaaaaaat are you guys doing?” she asked.

  I felt relief, dumping into my system like anesthesia.

  Obviously, this all added up to...nothing.

  Obviously, I was a crazy person.

  “I decided to work at home,” I said cheerfully. “I never see you guys, so...”

  Jordan approached me, and gave me a kiss on the mouth. “Oh, so sweet. If I had known, I would have-”

  “He just got here,” Olivia said, dryly.

  And then, juts as quickly as my suspicions had disappeared, they were rekindled.

  Not like a suspicion. No, very suddenly, they were on fire again.

  Why was that? I couldn't even put my finger on it.

  I looked to Olivia, and saw the very last moment of a look. Her eyebrows were up, her face had jerked forward slightly, her lips were pressed together.

  She was telling Jordan something with that expression.

  It was that look that people with a secret give each other.

  A warning? A prompt? What was it?

  My eyes went to Jordan next, this time with more scrutiny.

  She was wearing gym clothes, yes. Her hair was in a bun, yes.

  But her hair was smooth. There was no fringe of frizzy, escaped hairs that she would normally have.

  She had no makeup on, true.

  But there was a gray smudge beneath her left eye.

  Circumstantial.

  But convincing.

  Jordan was the woman from the bar. I could feel it.

  “Well,” she said, pushing nonexistent stray hairs from her face. “I'm going to take a shower.”

  And then she walked past me. Another look to Olivia, who shrugged.

  I stood there, and Olivia sauntered to the living room, her middle finger extended as she walked out of the kitchen. Mostly a joke we “shared.” It was a few seconds before it hit me.

  Linen, and jasmine. A clean, floral, expensive scent. Some kind of spice in it.

  New.

  The same smell that had lifted my eyes in the bar.

  Faint, as though it had been washed away, but still there.

  I took my computer to my office, shaking.

  My wife was the woman at the bar.

  My wife was the woman at the bar.

  I stared into the oblivion of the screen.

  SMOOTH

  It wasn't long before Jordan opened the door to the office, which was unusual. She usually left me alone to work, and called out a goodnight from behind the door.

  She was wrapped up in a fluffy white bathrobe, and my suspicious mind immediately went to dissecting everything about her. Where was the robe from? Was it a hotel robe? It looked like one. She smelled different now. Was she covering up her previous scent?

  She put her hands on my shoulders and leaned over to kiss me on the cheek.

  She surprised me by brushing her lips over my ear. Her robe hung open and I caught a glimpse of her breasts. A tawny nipple teased me with the phantom feel of it in my mouth, all of her creamy skin against my face.

  She picked up my files – carefully, closing them and setting them in order on a safe shelf – and then leaned against the empty space she had created on my desk. She loosened the tie of her robe, and it burst open. Her full breasts were the first thing to emerge, and catch my attention. The robe opened until I could see only the full mound of her flesh, just before it peaked in a pool of toasted aureola and her button-like nipple. Her flat stomach was next, and I noted with a mixture of pleasure and trepidation that her abs were cut through by a line of muscle. She had been working out, and it was paying off.

  But working out for whom?

  My eyes went lower, to where I expected to see her fairly unruly snatch, a deeper, browner mahogany, nearly black.

  A chill went through me instead.

  She was entirely smooth.

  “What the?” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. The cold fear and the numbing jealousy and a hot lust spiked through me and made my hand move, almost like a reflex, to touch her smooth snatch. The feeling of her bare lips sent a shiver through me. When I moved down, I found moisture at the edges of her bare folds.

  Many things were going through my mind now. A blizzard of images and thoughts: The shimmering auburn hair at the bar this evening. The possibility that Jordan was cheating on me, and the avalanche of consequences. A vision, for some reason, of Olivia's ass and her bobby-socks. My career. An image of a cock, filling my wife's pussy.

  Everything burned so much I couldn't tell if it was erotic or a nightmare.

  Jordan's bare snatch.

  She scooted up and onto the desk. “Do you
like it?” she said.

  Her voice seemed merely casual. Normal. Like she was really asking this question.

  But bare? Completely smooth? My hand made another pass at her and I felt an electric snap in my cock. This was...too much.

  “This new girl at my wax place talked me into it. At first it was awful. But I got used to it and I like it. I've been waiting to show you.”

  “Wax place?” Since when did my wife have a “wax place?”

  My mind went reeling through our last sexual encounters, trying to picture her bush.

  But usually, they were brief, tired affairs. In the morning, rolling over and having standard missionary sex.

  There was no way of knowing if this was new or old, this “wax place.”

  As I was thinking all of this, Jordan ran her fingers down the lapels of the robe, and pulled it open. At the same time she parted her thighs, and gave me the full view of her smooth pussy. As she spread her legs, the lips of her snatch opened up, and they radiated a puff of warm, honeyed moisture. I looked at her pink folds, which she used one hand to expose.

  I forgot immediately about my suspicions when she placed her feet up on either side of my chair and used her well-sculpted thighs to pull my chair toward her. Her hand slid over the crown of my head and pulled me gently in, closer to her smooth cunt.

  Never mind that Jordan never did this kind of thing.

  Never mind everything I had just suspected.

  I grasped her thighs with my hands to hold them further apart, and allow me to steer her pussy toward my mouth. I ran my tongue along her outer lips, and then I dipped into the tangy sweetness of her soaked inner labia. I looked up at her, to see her mouth hang open, and her eyes close to half-mast. Fluttering. I sought out her clit. It was hardened, and easy to find the smooth nub of it where her nerves were coiled. I ran my tongue over it and felt her legs shake in my hands.

  I began to work on her, moving slowly at first, enjoying the feel of her winding up from head to toe. Her juices began to well up and coat my chin, and her bare lips. They smeared into her thighs as she twisted in my arms. I enjoyed the guttural moan that came from her throat, the squealing that rose from her chest. And then, a sudden freeze, as her orgasm seized her. I sucked up her clit in that moment, and I could feel how it unleashed a panic inside of her. Her fingers clawed at my head, and pulled my hair hard. She snapped her thighs together, enclosing me in her gushing thighs.