Leigh was even redder. Now he could see that it was a combination of embarrassment and rage. She was acting blindly, her heart beating wildly, her mind obviously consumed by some illogical idea that she could do something about this. “I'm going to call Dmitry,” she said.
“Dmitry?” Jeremy said. “Who is Dmitry?”
He had a lovely flash of hot-red jealousy sear through his chest.
“He took the photos!” Leigh practically shouted.
Leigh was actually coming a little unhinged. It was not the reaction Jeremy had expected, though as he watched it, he wondered why he hadn’t anticipated that Leigh would act like this. If she really hadn’t known that her photos would be used this way, it was only natural that she would come unglued.
It was just too much impropriety for Leigh.
She started pressing the screen of her phone, her hands shaking. “I can't believe this,” she muttered. She ran her fingers over her hair. Then she pointed at the phone in Jeremy's hand with hers. “That's porn. I'm in porn on the Internet now.”
Jeremy reached for the phone and took it from her hand. “Hey,” he said, gently. “Give me this and let's think-”
“Jeremy, hey. Give that back!” she screeched.
Jeremy pocketed the phone after ending the call. “Leigh. In a minute. But don't call him angry. Stop for a second and think.”
He wasn't sure where his calmer-than-Thou attitude was coming from, but he was pretty happy he'd managed to tap into it. He put a hand on Leigh’s arm and stroked it, trying to calm her.
The anger was radiating off of Leigh. He hadn’t seen her this flustered, or angry, in all the years of their marriage. But she was thinking. She didn’t reach for the phone.
Leigh put her hands up to her hair and smoothed it, even though not a hair of it was actually out of place. Her eyes were fixed on a point in the wall, and she was obviously not looking at it: they were unfocused as she thought.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She put her hands together and moved her wedding ring in circles around her finger.
“So… when you took the photos,” Jeremy said. “What did he say they were for?”
“Stock photos, I told you,” Leigh snapped.
“Well… I mean... Leigh, come on. What did you think a photo like this was going to be used for?”
To him it seemed the most obvious use of the photo he could think of.
He was also thinking about the fact that she had taken photos with another man. She hadn’t mentioned that, and he found himself wanting to hear about it.
A lot about it.
His question, though, really pissed Leigh off. Her eyes flashed with anger as she looked at him sharply. “I’m in a dress. I’m sitting on a bed. I’m not… wearing lingerie and doing this!” She made a face at that moment, pushing her lips into a pout typical of models wearing racy lingerie and trying to look sexy.
It was both hot, and hilarious. Leigh really exaggerated it, sticking out her butt and putting her hand on her hip to make her point.
Jeremy snorted. “True,” he said. He held up his phone and looked at the photo. “Still… it’s obviously a… sexy picture. And what about the one with the guy?”
“It could be for jewelry, or a dating service, or something like that!” Leigh protested. Her eyes moved without looking at anything, searching her memory. “Dmitry told me that it couldn’t be used for any porn.” Her voice was getting a desperate ring to it.
Jeremy looked at the photo. “I mean, technically speaking, it isn’t.”
“Isn’t what?” Leigh’s voice was sharp.
“Isn’t being used for porn,” he said.
Leigh’s mouth fell open. She was furious again. “What do you call that? Jackie’s Big Boss? What-”
“-Julia’s Big Boss -” Jeremy corrected quietly.
“-is that if it’s not porn. I don’t care what the name is!” Leigh shrieked the last bit.
“But you’re not in it,” Jeremy argued.
Leigh took the phone from his hand with a swift, snappy movement. Wielding it like an automatic weapon she was very familiar with, she swiped and typed while looking at Jeremy with a stone-cold stare.
“So when someone reads,” she said, her eye finally dropping to the phone, “‘She squealed as the first thick inches of Mr. Carson’s meat stretched her pussy wide. Her legs trembled and she tossed her head back and forth on the pillow. ‘I can’t take any more!’ But he pushed inside of her, and Mike’s cock dribbled with precum as he watched the last thick inches of Julia’s boss sink into her cheating cunt.’ - who do you think they’re picturing?”
Jeremy’s mouth was practically on the floor, and his cock had gotten hard in three almost painful throbs (at the words “squealed,” “stretched,” and “pussy,” respectively). He had probably never even imagined hearing his wife say the words “pussy,” or “cunt.”
He had certainly never actually heard them leave her mouth.
And then there was the fact that she had a point: in all likelihood the reader of the book was in fact imagining the woman on the cover of the book.
He was.
“Well,” he said, in a desperate effort to make her feel better, “Craig said it’s hotwife erotica...”
“What the hell is that?” Leigh said.
‘I don’t… I don’t really know...” Jeremy said.
But somewhere in his mind, he realized that he did, actually know what it was. He found himself saying: “It’s the kind of erotica that men read who like to think about their wives with another man.”
He sounded very authoritative.
“So probably,” he added, “they won’t imagine you. Just their wives.”
This made Leigh’s mouth snap closed like a turtle.
Jeremy was actually stunned by how smooth of an explanation and an assurance he had just given.
Then Leigh’s mouth dropped open again. “What?!”
And then to his surprise, she laughed.
Jeremy smiled.
But then she frowned again. “But this might not be the only one.”
Jeremy made a face. “Yeah… it’s, uh… not.”
Leigh’s eyes went wide. “How do you know this? How do - ” She cut herself off, seemed perplexed for a moment, and then waved her hands wildly as she practically shouted: “You know what? I’m calling Dmitry.”
Jeremy pulled the phone away from her and she glared at him. Then she lunged at him and snatched her phone from his pocket. Jeremy was too shocked to respond. Leigh never did things like that. She made an abrupt about-face before walking out of the kitchen, phone to her chest.
3: LEIGH THE MODEL
Leigh lost steam as she stormed down the hallway and up the small flight of steps to the master bedroom, a suite tucked a half-floor up in the back of the house. She closed and locked the door, and looked around.
She probably didn’t even have Dmitry’s number in her phone anymore, which she had realized almost as soon as she had taken out her own phone the first time. But she felt like she needed to do something. There had to be something that could be done about this.
She crossed the room to the large glass doors that opened to a small porch that wrapped around the back of the house. After several turns, it connected to the porch outside the kitchen. She locked the sliding door, just in case Jeremy decided to follow her.
Her breath was unsteady and rapid, and she could almost feel her heart in her chest.
Calm down, she urged herself. Calm down.
She held the phone away from her and swiftly scanned her contacts. She knew Dmitry’s number wasn’t there – she had never added it because in her mind, he wasn’t really part of her life if she didn’t.
And neither were the photos, then.
And neither were her lingering doubts about what she had done.
And there were doubts.
Sure, she was a pretty conservative person and she knew a lot of people made snide remarks about it behind her back.
She knew she was a little bit of a joke with some of her friends, for wearing knee-length skirts and not talking openly about sex.
But she wasn’t naive. When she had taken the pictures in the dresses, and then with the men, she had pretended to be naive. She had pretended so hard that a part of her even believed it herself.
But deep down inside? She wasn’t born yesterday. She had known there was a chance something like this would happen.
Just… hotwife? What the hell did that even mean? She had thought maybe she’d end up on some dirty romance blog, or a website for meeting women, or some telephone sex line or webcam service home page.
She had never thought of erotica.
She stared at the cover of Julia’s Big Boss. The words she had read aloud to Jeremy re-surfaced in her mind and she shivered thinking about the sound of them as they had left her mouth. Cunt.
Pussy.
It had all begun innocently enough.
Jeremy had moved for his job, and they had bought a house in South Carolina. Since they were taking their equity from New England to the South, they had purchased a big house, more than they needed, because why not?
They could afford it.
And then the cuts had come, and Jeremy could either move back to his original location, or lose his job. Unfortunately, they had landed in a real estate market that was sinking fast. All their equity had gone up in smoke, and not only that, it had cost them ten grand to get out from under the house.
So when they came back (settling in the less-expensive, though further-from-the-city Riverdale), Jeremy had a job, which was great in the long run. But Leigh was back to square one with seniority at the community college she taught at, and relegated to contract work. Not only that, rent had soared, and so had house prices. They were set back ten years on everything.
So she started taking odd jobs. She had paid for a lot of her college years by waitressing: she was pretty and friendly and she usually got good tips.
But she had wanted to step it up a notch. A friend of hers, Cecelia, suggested Hooters. She had worked there before; she knew the manager. The outfits weren’t really that skeezy (they were for Leigh, but for a lot of women these days they were practically modest).
In retrospect, Leigh didn’t even know how she had been talked into setting foot in Hooters, let alone working there.
But she needed the money. But after working her first shift and only making $120 in six hours on a slow lunch, she decided there had to be something else she could do for $20 an hour that didn’t involve short-shorts and getting a pat on the ass.
(She had never told Jeremy about that one).
It was actually Cecelia who told her about Dmitry. He was a Russian photographer with no work permit, waiting on his visa paperwork and making money taking stock photos and selling them on different stock photo sites.
Well, Leigh had steered clear of that at first. It sounded sketchy, and in no small part because the guy was Russian.
But Cecelia had a way of selling her on ideas. He paid cash, she could make $100 a shoot, just to stand around with coffee in her hands or smiling or something. It was kind of fun, and better than working at Hooters.
And “stock photos” sounded so… well, boring. Like cardstock or stocking grocery shelves.
“No racy shots?” Leigh remembered asking Cecilia.
“Not if you don’t want to. Those pay more, but he needs all kind of stuff,” she had assured her.
Cecelia had introduced Leigh to Dmitry. He had been almost exactly what Leigh had been envisioning before she met him: stubble on his face, intense Slavic eyes, the long hair and general look of a photographer. He was rough and artistic at the same time.
She would be lying if she said that she didn’t feel a tinge of attraction toward him.
But when Leigh felt things like that, she was very good at building up a wall between herself and whoever it was. After all, she loved her husband and she didn’t need to indulge in any feelings or thoughts about another man. She decided to be cool and professional at all times.
Professional, even though she had never modeled before. It turned out that she was pretty good at it, or at least Dmitry and Cecilia concurred on this. “Lot of people think there is nothing to modeling,” Dmitry said. “But it has its own art.”
Leigh took this for more gratuitous flattery of the kind men were always giving her and dismissed it. She sat in an office chair in front of a white background and pretended to type and use her phone for half an hour while Dmitry snapped photos of her.
Then she did the same in the coffee shop next door to his studio, which was in an unappealing and un-sexy strip of shops in the suburbs. He paid her $100 and told her he’d contact her if he needed more photos.
You couldn’t argue with that kind of money, especially if you were going underwater and could only get 10 hours a week at the college.
Leigh showed up for three more shoots – one that took about two hours and another that took almost three because of the makeup. She didn’t even care when that reduced her hourly rate to $33 an hour. It was better than Hooters, still some good money, and Cecelia was right: it was fun.
Dmitry had approached her about the photos with a man after the fourth shoot.
In his abrupt, Russian way, he had broached the subject by getting immediately to the point.
“I need model for romantic shoot. You are perfect. Want to do this?”
Leigh remembered the way he had stood there, about a foot taller than her, his impassive Russian features sort of boring into her, and she had felt a strange and unauthorized flutter inside of her. She couldn’t say exactly why – intimidation? Attraction? Money? The appeal of doing something a little reckless? Whatever it was, she had caved right then and there.
She had nodded, quickly. Cool and professional, she had told herself. Professionals just did what needed to be done, and that’s what she was going to do.
“Text me,” she had said.
And feeling very, very guilty, very nervous, and – down where she wouldn’t admit it, kind of excited – she had left the building, her ponytail bobbing in a way that she would never know made Dmitry Kislev's cock hard as a rock.
The “romantic shoot” had been just that, in her opinion. Dmitry had them get dressed up in period costumes for a series “for Highlanders” as he had put it. Leigh had been given a green velvet dress with a tight bodice that shoved her ample bosom up and out of it. When she had left the dressing room Dmitry had come over to her and adjusted the dress by pulling on the bodice, his fingers brushing over her breasts. The touch was feathery, and Leigh was aroused by it – but she tamped down the feeling and pretended it never happened.
“You are falling all out of the dress,” Dmitry had murmured, and his voice was sensual, vibrating somewhere inside of Leigh that she didn’t dare admit to herself. “You are perfect Highland lover.”
She knew that Dmitry’s words made her cheeks turn hot, and something twisted inside of her, but he had his back to her and she regained her composure by the time she walked over to the white backdrop.
Her companion for the photo shoot was a heavily muscled, dark-haired guy with a white shirt that was cut open to reveal his hairless chest.
Guys like that didn’t really do anything to Leigh. As they took the photos, it was the man behind the camera who was stirring her emotions. Dmitry told them to embrace, to stand here while he grasped her from behind, to fake kiss and swoon. He got a fan going to create some wind, and the whole thing ended up being lighthearted and fun. Again.
And Leigh had driven home, her mind on Dmitry. Wondering what Dmitry thought of her, wondering how he viewed her through his lens. She didn’t want to have an affair with him, she knew that. She just liked to fantasize that…. what?
That he wanted her.
Sure, the clothes were a little offensive, she thought. But there was something in her, again, deep inside, that had actually enjoyed wearing the low-cut bodice, seeing her full breasts pi
llowing out of the tight green velvet. Something inside of her that had enjoyed the way both the other model and Dmitry had been unable to keep their eyes from wandering to it, taking it in, savoring the shape of her breasts.
So when Dmitry called again, she went again. Another silly romantic shoot.
And what had she been thinking, then? Dmitry had told her they would be used for the covers of romance novels. It seemed likely enough. She didn’t ask any questions. She was clothed, they seemed like all the cheesy romance covers she’d ever seen.
Why ask?
So when he asked her to do the other shots, just by herself – the sexier shots – she had agreed. She had insisted that she wouldn’t pose in lingerie, and he had said that was fine.
But even without the lingerie, the dresses were sexier. And the makeup was sexier. And she was sitting on beds or draped on couches, giving him a sultry look (he called it “sool-try”) over and over again.
Leigh knew what she was doing, and she knew that these pictures would be used for something other than a “romance novel.” She had never had the courage to ask Dmitry about it outright: how it worked, where her pictures would end up. She had never wanted the truth to be spoken aloud. She was the one who had fabricated stories about how they would be used for dating websites; these were lies she told herself.
But deep down inside, she knew that the content would be much more sordid. She was no idiot.
And even deeper, where she had buried the thought of it – she liked the idea. She liked the idea of men looking at her, the way Dmitry did, the way her male model companions did (when they weren’t gay). She liked the thought that somewhere, a man was looking at her and getting a hard cock.
(This was very, very deep down inside, at the level of subconscious thought.)
Back in the master bedroom with the phone in her hand, Leigh was still living out her lie to herself, and pretending to be very, very horrified by the whole thing.
But she abandoned her contact list. She had no intention of calling Dmitry, and she had known that all along. When he had started insisting she wear lingerie, she had gotten spooked by the whole thing. The reality of what she was doing, and where her pictures could end up, had begun to sink in, and she hadn’t taken any more work from him. Anyway, she had nothing to say to him now. He had never misled her, and she knew that as well – even if she had a hard time admitting it to herself. She had signed a release in exchange for her wages, and Leigh was the type to read contracts thoroughly: the pictures were going to be put up on several stock photos purchasing sites. From there, the image could really end up anywhere.
Leigh Uncovered: A Wife Sharing Novel Page 4
