It was Olivia, standing there looking like she herself was being accused of something, that would keep my suspicion stoked. Because Jordan furrowed her brow. She took her phone from her purse (black, this one, there could be no doubt) and plugged it in to the charger.
“I just got home,” she said. As if I had asked the most ridiculous question in the world. She took her purse, and disappeared down the hallway.
I set my briefcase down and turned to Olivia. She had her thumb up against her front teeth, and flicked it out. “I made coffee,” she said. And then she walked away.
Jordan was gone a little too long. I had plenty of time to go through several cycles of paranoia, have several conversations with myself in which I told myself I was acting like a crazy person, and then convince myself that I was not.
What did I want to prove anyway?
Why didn't I just talk to my wife?
I started to walk down the hallway, in the direction Jordan had gone.
What was I hoping? To catch her on the phone, telling a lover she couldn't meet him tonight?
She appeared in front of me, and jumped. “Jesus!” she said.
I had my mouth open to ask her where she had gone, but she extended her hand, with something in it. Something she wanted to give me. “Here.”
I held my hand out, and felt the weight of two batteries drop into it.
I looked down at the batteries without comprehending.
When I looked back up at Jordan, her eyes were narrowed. Now she was the one with suspicions.
“For the opener?” she prompted.
She pushed past me, and I thought I saw her shake her head.
“I made coffee,” she said. “I have a lot of work to do. You?”
My heart started to thump against my chest again.
It was something like that, some little detail, that always gave everything away, if two people try to tell a lie together. Who made the coffee?
No one forgets whether they made the coffee or not; no one tries to claim credit for making someone else's pot of coffee.
So one of them was lying. And the question was, why? Why tell a lie like that, unless you were already lying about something else?
I stared down the darkened hallway to the study. “Yeah,” I said, miles away, in answer to her question.
There was no answer from the kitchen.
And so, I headed to the study.
In the study, I opened my computer and waited for it to decrypt itself. At some point it must have asked me for my password.
I stared at it, unable to recall, by any stretch of my imagination, the thirty characters, assigned at random and painstakingly memorized by me, required to decrypt my laptop. It was the requirement, if one wanted to bring work home from the DAs. Only I knew the password. If I forgot it, IT had informed me many times, I was fucked.
In that moment, with my head filling with scenario after scenario, I was sure I was fucked. In more ways than one.
Jordan. She did say, “I have to go.”
She was putting things into her purse, not the other way around.
Right?
My wife is having an affair.
But what the fuck was she doing?
She could have told me she had to go back to work.
That she was on her way to an emergency meeting.
Any lie. She could have told any lie, and I couldn't have called her out on them. She worked for a PI.
So why, when I caught her leaving, did she decide to stay home, instead?
The cursor blinked at me.
It was all so absurd, suddenly.
I laughed at myself.
I was making myself crazy. I was making bad decisions. I was allowing myself to see evidence where there was none. All because of one thing I had witnessed. And I could not be sure of it anymore. Was Jordan the woman in the bar? Did I talk to her? Did I confront her? No.
And why not?
Probably because I knew it wasn't her, and I wanted it to be her.
The perfume, Paddy?
The perfume. The perfume was a problem.
Except...was I really an expert in perfumes?
I began to grill myself. I had always wanted to be a defense lawyer, really. Standing around and sowing doubts. “Isn't it true, Mr. Goodall, that you smelled a perfume. And that you were already suspicious of your wife, and that you allowed yourself to believe that the perfume you smelled on her was the same as the perfume you smelled in the bar?”
Objection. Leading.
“Are you a smoker, Mr. Goodall? But you were in the past. Has smoking affected your sense of smell at all? It does for most people.”
Objection.
What about the makeup?
What about the shaved pussy?
You're seeing what you want to see, Paddy.
The question before you is not one of whether or not there is evidence to make you doubt the accused's innocence. Remember that. The question before you is whether or not there is reasonable doubt about the accused's guilt.
Was it reasonable to doubt that my wife was the woman in the bar? That my wife was having an affair?
Doug's voice, like a voice-over, crackled in my head:
It's not your job to doubt, Paddy. You are the fucking prosecutor.
This is not a courtroom.
This is my life.
I heard the bathwater running next to me.
I looked at my screen.
Honestly. Really. I had no idea what the goddam password was. Not the first character, not the last. My head had been flooded and now everything was flotsam.
I slapped the screen closed.
And then, not knowing what I was as I entered the room – prosecutor or defender; loving or jealous husband – I went into the master bedroom.
Jordan gave no indication that she saw me. She was already in the tub, and the water, clouded over by a few bubbles, had not reached her breasts. They were there, spectacularly on display, a swirl of milky white soap curling up at their full base, the color of cum -
Jesus fucking Christ, Paddy.
It smelled, to be honest, like the same perfume I had believed so fervently had been the perfume at the bar, and then again when I saw her at home.
I looked at the container.
Lemon-mint.
So much for having a good nose.
I sat on the edge of the tub.
I was feeling almost sick, a strange kind of sick. The kind of sick I got when I finally got the balls up to ask Jordan to marry me. The kind of sick I felt when she told me she was pregnant fifteen years ago. The kind of sick I felt the first time I stood up in court.
Excited-sick. Doomed-sick. Adrenaline-sick. All of it combined together.
I willed myself to not shake, including my voice.
I put a hand on her foot. Incredibly, almost as though my body was no longer communicating with my mind, I felt my hand stroke her leg, down her calf, and toward her inner thigh. I felt my cock get hard.
What the fuck was I doing?
I was here to ask her about her clothes. Make her flinch. Make her feel guilty, or confess. That she was having an affair, that she was unsatisfied with our marriage.
Wasn't I?
Or was I just here to enjoy the sound of her lying to me?
Or was I here to get my cock inside of her, like that would somehow give me insight to the real truth?
Jordan smiled. Just barely.
She had cucumbers on her eyes.
“If that's you, Frank, you had better scram. My husband came home early tonight.”
I went numb in my limbs. My cock went hard as stone.
First of all, Jordan never joked like this. She didn't make jokes about sex or infidelity.
Second...she didn't know what I was thinking? Did she?
She couldn't. I hadn't shared it with her.
I moved my hand down her inner thigh, close to her outer lips. I stroked her skin with my forefinger. I faked an accent, but not a very go
od one, a kind of Pan-European sludge:
“But-ah your husband, he's a-work in the office.”
Jordan snorted. “Frank. Is that you? You sound like an Italian meat delivery man with a concussion.”
I smiled, because it was funny. But it made me uneasy.
Not Jordan's kind of joke.
Or was it?
Maybe it was. Maybe it had just been so long since I'd been around her. Maybe her sense of humor had changed, and I hadn't noticed. Maybe Jordan was actually...funny. Like this.
“Frank is a big, hung...Asian... man from Jersey,” she purred. “He's like Jet Li.”
Just as I was starting to get sucked into some kind of serious, albeit strange, fantasy, she added:
“With a lisp. Like this: “But your husband, he is wolking in the offithe!”
She peeled off her cucumbers and laughed. Then she looked at me. My fingers were frozen, right where they had been when she started cracking wise. I was totally unsure of what to do.
To be honest, she almost seemed like a different person than my wife.
She looked down at my hand, submerged in the water (I had at least rolled my sleeve up, but the shirt was still soaked). “You going anywhere with that?” she said, looking down at my arm and smiling.
Then, she grabbed my wrist, and guided my hand, almost forcefully, to her pussy.
My fingers scraped over the ultra-smooth outer lips, and again they sent a jolt through me, as much of pleasure as painful suspicion. But my fingers were too entranced by the feel of them, by going further, into the hot inner lips, into the slippery juices that were inside.
“You have to be quick,” she whispered. “My husband's in the next room.”
Was this a joke? Why was she playing this game?
I didn't care, really.
My hand didn't care. I slid a finger into her pussy, and I felt it ripple with my touch. Craving. She rocked a little, getting her body against my hand so that it was where she wanted it. Her eyes closed partially, and she growled a little.
I began to move my fingers inside of her. They slipped easily in her hot, silken flesh. I found her clit with my thumb, and bent myself awkwardly to pinch her between my two fingers. Her reaction was breathtaking: I must have hit something much more right than usual. She sucked in her breath, and her eyes flew open. “Oh god!” she breathed.
Her face started to flush. Her excitement was consuming me. I stroked her clit with more force, and she squirmed but arched her body up to me. She wanted more.
She was staring at me. I watched her eyes, pupils growing, as I clasped her clit between my pointer finger on the inside, and my thumb outside. I felt the hard nexus of nerves beneath my fingers, darting from side to side beneath the pressure of my fingers. Her mouth opened, and she gasped again. Her hand gripped mine, but not to stop me, no: to steady herself.
And then, just as I could feel her cunt closing around my fingers more tightly, welling up with her slick juices, I felt my ass slide out from under me.
I was going down. I pulled my hand from inside of her, hoping to steady myself, but it was too late.
The water closed around me, and instead of shocking me, it felt sexual. It was hot, it soaked my shirt, and it felt like two lips closing around me.
Jordan was not so pleased. “Oh, fuck!” she said. She had been so close. Her smooth legs lifted my head out of the water, and we slid around in the tub until I was submerged at the waist, my feet hanging out on the side, my torso against the deep, opposite wall.
I started to laugh, but Jordan was unamused. She wriggled out from under me, and her hands went to work immediately to free my cock from my pants. I thought about suggesting that we get out: but the clothes were already ruined, and her face was set to an expression I hadn't seen in a long time.
Well, since the last time we had sex.
Yesterday.
Yesterday.
Hunger.
She pulled my cock out, and her smile told me she liked how she found it. She climbed on top of me, and matched the tip of my cock to her wet pussy. A rubbery squeak at the entrance, where water and bubbles had washed away her smooth moisture, and then she was coating me with her heat and slippery flesh.
She came quickly, grinding her hips a few times and then tightening all around me. I felt a burst of hot liquid inside of her, and then the writhing of her flesh around mine.
Her breasts, large and shiny, a few bubbles sliding down their amazing curves, were in front of me. I placed a hand around her left breast, squeezing it – but it was firm and gave very little. Her nipple flickered upward, right to my mouth. I made a sweep around her aureola, and then found the small pebble of her nipple with my lips. She turned rock-hard in my mouth, under my tongue, and I swirled my tongue around her. I was rewarded by a light gasp, and a crushing pulse in her cunt.
I turned my attention to her other breast. I licked her aureola with the flat of my tongue, and blew over the marble of her nipple, making it turn to stone in the cool air. Another wave of pleasure rippled through her and my cock was squeezed in her cunt.
She was hungry again, and she had started to rock back and forth on my lap.
But suddenly, she moved her feet, and placed them on either side of me. She rose from the water, and stepped out of the tub. I was still reeling from the disappointment of her sudden departure, sitting there in the tub in my clothes, when I realized that she was going for the bed.
She was still shiny and soapy with water from the tub. She climbed onto the bed, on her hands and knees, and looked behind her. I was wringing myself from my clothes, and the comical sight of it made her smile, but only for a second. I watched as she moved her fingers between her legs, to her glistening cunt, and began to move her pointer finger, with its long, manicured red nail, along the hardened nub of her clit and down, to the gushing hole of her slit.
I wriggled of my clothes – the suit had clung to me like Saran Wrap, and my cock was robbing my body of most of its blood and finesse. Jordan's sliding fingers and bare pussy were not helping. Her wet, pink folds were all I could see or concentrate on. Finally, free of my pants, not bothering with my shirt, I stumbled to the bed and grasped her hips. My cock was so hard and ready, and her slit so wet, that I entered her easily, and sunk back into her hot flesh.
The view from above her was incredible. It had been a long time since we had sex like this, doggy style. Her ass was round and firm, forming a heart shaped pillow for my hips to slam against as I pounded into my wife. I watched my cock moving in and out of her hole, wetter and stickier with each thrust.
Jordan leaned forward, and let her chest fall to the bed.
Then I felt it: her hand, reaching up through her legs, and grasping my balls. She squeezed, and I shuddered. She grasped my balls and they pulled to a near-painful stretch when I moved my hips backward. The sensation was exquisite. I could feel myself getting closer and closer to the edge. But I wanted her to come again, and feel her pussy explode into a hot, sticky mess all over my cock. She squeezed again. I was lost.
“I'm going to come,” I breathed, and she squeezed my balls again. Then she pulled them with the flat of her palm, and mashed them against her clit. She rubbed my balls against her clit, making it impossible for me to move back or forth, and I closed my eyes with the sudden torture of it. I was so close, and I wanted desperately to move, but her grip on my balls was so firm, and she was rubbing them so furiously against her clit, that all I could do was feel my orgasm surge up from inside of me, out of my control.
She released my balls just as the first wave exploded inside of me, and she smashed her ass back against my hips, forcing my cock deep inside of her. She wiggled, more side-to side than back and forth, and her pussy clenched around me. The motion was unusual but hot as hell; the stimulation was so different from the norm it was almost painful. I shuddered, and when I came I yelled loudly. I had to lean forward and support myself on her back as she ground against me until she, too, let out a gasp, and ca
me.
We collapsed on the bed, and there was silence for a moment.
But just as quickly as sex had taken over my thoughts, they returned. All of the dark, looming doubts.
“Wow,” I said, wishing I wouldn't speak. “You sure learned a lot from Frank.”
What was I doing? I knew I wasn't playing some silly game, like she must have been. Pretending to have a lover, a private joke for the evening, discarded the next day for being silly and pointless.
No. “Frank” was real to me.
Or I was trying to make Frank real.
Jordan might have said a hundred things here. She might have laughed, or denied it, or played along. She turned to me, though, and told me I was getting the sheets soaked.
She stood up, her back to me, her ass looking glorious, my cum dripping between her legs. Then she walked across the room and got back in the tub.
“That was fun,” she commented, putting the cucumbers back on her eyes, and sliding deep into the water of the tub. She turned the hot water on with her toe.
I sat up and peeled the wet shirt off my torso. I couldn't really read her mood. She seemed like a completely different person. Everything that had just transpired – while extremely hot, and extremely fun – was so unlike Jordan that if I were more of a sci-fi fan or conspiracy theorist, I'd have believed aliens had snatched her body.
“Hey honey?” she said, as I exited the room, pulling a shirt over my head.
“Uh-huh?”
She lifted a cucumber and winked at me. “Tell Frank he can-ah come back, any-ah time, eh?”
The cucumber dropped, and her face went back to neutral. Revealing nothing.
What the fuck?
I stayed up late. I got nothing done for work. My mind went in endless circles, none of which led me to the remotest clue what my password was.
My mind was being eaten by obsession.
Was my wife cheating on me?
Or was I losing it completely?
The jury was out on that one. Way the fuck out to lunch, with no answer.
Now this new thing, this way that Jordan was fucking.
It was hot. It was really fucking hot. It was refreshing, it was fucking inspirational.
But was it too hot? Wasn't it just a little too energetic, a little too unusual? A little too new?
A Well-Laid Trap: The Story Of A Professional Hotwife Page 4
