Robin's Fix: A Hotwife Novel

by Arnica Butler

  “Um, I’m not the one who was playing strip poker,” I said, pointedly.

  Robin bit into the bread and leaned out to catch some of the crumbs in her hand, looking a lot like she was eating a too-hot pizza. “Oh yeah,” she laughed.

  I dropped a sponge I was using to swipe the counter off half-heartedly. “’Oh, yeah?’” I said.

  I wasn’t really sure why my voice was coming across as so angry.

  “Yeah,” Robin said, dropping the remaining scrap of bread she hadn’t eaten onto a plate.

  She was a little annoyed now. She brushed her palms together, as if to say, “You gotta problem with that?”

  “It’s not like I actually stripped,” she said to my silence.

  I glared at her, looking for the right words to say.

  “Anyway,” she said. “You seemed to like it.”

  This woman, who was sitting in the kitchen with me, was acting so unlike my wife I could hardly believe it. I opened my mouth to say something, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say.

  “What the hell, Robin?” I finally managed.

  Robin’s eyes flashed black with irritation. ‘What the hell?” she repeated. “What the hell, you.”

  I shrugged. “Oh, I just didn’t know you were so in to stripping in front of a bunch of strangers.”

  Robin’s temper, I could tell, was about to go extra-nuclear-holocaust. Her temples were bright pink, and her nostrils were doing this thing they do, where they kind of flare out and she reminds me a little of some kind of wild animal in a cartoon. Like a boar, but a cute one.

  Then, just like that, it was gone.

  “Look,” she said. “They told me accessories were in. I knew I wasn’t going to have to take anything off that was important before the game was over.”

  I stood there, sponge in hand, mulling it over. It actually did seem like a reasonable explanation.

  Still, I couldn’t get that wild, hungry look in Heath’s eyes out of my head.

  Or the way Robin’s pussy had been so hot, so wet, like never before.

  I dropped the sponge into the sink. “Robin,” I said, and my voice was very serious. “I don’t know about leaving you alone at this place anymore.”

  I made her a coffee while she fumed in silence in response to that statement, which was about what I expected.

  I set the coffee mug down in front of her.

  She glared at me.

  “Just what the hell is that supposed to mean?” she said finally.

  Ah, yes. That was Robin’s feminist voice, which also came out for discussions about laundry and grocery shopping.

  And then, like I pretty much expected, she started doing that thing where she answered for me.

  “Ohhhh,” she said, waving her hand in the air. “I see. Before, when I was just going to be here at a boring campground with a bunch of septuagenarians playing croquet, you couldn’t possibly be bothered to help me out. But now that Blondie-sweet-tits plays strip poker at the neighbor's, you have all this concern for me.”

  Her tone was extremely sarcastic, in case you were wondering.

  “No,” I said, annoyed. “No... no. That’s actually not it at all.”

  And it actually wasn’t. Though I had enjoyed seeing “Blondie sweet-tits’” tits, I was actually having reservations about my decision to go back into town for other reasons.

  Reasons like Heath, I thought.

  Heath, and the other non-septuagenarian men around here.

  “Are you trying to tell me,” Robin said, pulling her legs up onto the chair and catching them with her hand, so that I got a nice glimpse – but nothing more – of her trim bush and the sweet pussy between her legs that set my cock to throbbing lightly, “that you don’t trust me here?”

  Leave it to Robin to cut to the chase. It was one of the things I liked most about her (when it was directed at someone else) and one of the things I liked least (when directed at me).

  I pondered my options for a moment. Robin was sipping her coffee, looking over the edge of the cup with an expression that said she had my number.

  I sighed.

  “Look... I’ll be the first to admit that it’s kind of an asshole thing to say,” I said.

  (Don’t go thinking I’m actually a big enough person to say something like that because I actually believe it or have a really good sense of myself or anything like that. I said it to Robin once during an argument and she loved it, so sometimes when I want to get away with saying something that I sense will be poorly received by Robin, I say this first and it seems to smooth things over).

  “...but this place is a little... I don’t know. More of a party place than I thought. I feel like it’s a college frat house.”

  Robin turned her cup with her fingers and smiled. “What’s wrong with that?” she said, shrugging.

  For a moment, I took her seriously. Then her eyes flipped up and she looked at me, and the grin from her mouth broke faint wrinkles on the outside of her eyes. She was fucking with me.

  She set her coffee cup down. “Okay,” she said. “I get it. Last night I was a little drunk. I won’t play strip poker while you’re out.”

  She was smiling.

  But her smile seemed to me to be more a smirk, like she thought I was being an ass. I sighed audibly and tossed a cup into the sink. “Robin... it isn’t just the strip poker,” I said, highly irritated.

  “No?” she said, and now she sounded annoyed. “What it is it, then?”

  When I didn’t answer, she blinked at me, slow and flippantly. “You’re the one who didn’t have time to stay here, Tony. So you really have no business getting pissed off about it now.”

  I folded my arms. “Oh, okay, so I can’t get irritated that my wife is playing strip poker one hour after she meets some hot guy at a restaurant?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  But then she set them on me. “So, what are you saying?” Her voice was icy cold. “You think I’d run off with the first piece of... you know... man-meat I saw? Is that it?”

  I stifled a laugh – and I think she did, too – about “man-meat.”

  “Maybe someone around here has a guilty conscience,” Robin said. She folded her own arms.

  Ugh. How did marital discussions always de-rail like this? It hadn’t been my intention to say I didn’t trust her. Or even to say that I didn’t want to leave her here alone – I had to go back to work.

  I wasn’t even sure what I had meant, but I certainly meant for it to come across more caring than this.

  “Robin,” I sighed.

  She held up her hand, snatched her coffee from the table, and walked outside. “You're being absolutely ridiculous,” she seethed. “And I don’t enjoy being treated like we live in the 1950s and I need a chaperon.”

  She walked past me.

  “Well,” I said loudly. “Maybe if you didn’t play strip poker with strangers, I wouldn’t think you did!”

  “Phbbbt!” she said, and I didn’t have to turn around to know she was giving me the bird.

  This was not a good start to this whole adventure.

  *

  I went outside and sat down next to Robin, who had taken some coffee with her without my noticing. I set another cup next to her and she looked down at it and had to laugh.

  “That came out all wrong,” I said.

  Robin squinted at me.

  “I... look... how much do remember of last night?”

  Robin rubbed her eyes. “Really? All of it, Tony, what does that have to do with... how I’m right and you’re wrong?” She smiled underneath her hands.

  It was an old joke by now, a good one we used for diffusing stupid arguments.

  “I didn’t say any of that stuff because of... look, this just isn’t what I expected. And, there are a lot of guys around here, and I just don’t... I don’t feel as comfortable leaving you here. I thought there were going to a be a lot of, I don’t know, upstanding eighty-year old gentlemen here.”

  Robin snorted
.

  “I’m trying to say I’m sorry,” I said.

  “But...” she prompted.

  I shrugged. “But... whatever, it’s just how I feel.”

  She looked at me. “So, what are you going to do? You can’t cancel work.”

  “No.”

  She slapped me playfully on the thigh. “I was fucking kidding anyway. This is what I’m so annoyed by!”

  I gave her a confused look. As Robin was prone to do, she had gotten really worked up in a few seconds.

  “You’re basically saying, you don’t trust me to stay here by myself,” Robin said. Her tone was accusatory.

  I opened my mouth, but found no plausible denial within it.

  “Ugh, Tony. That’s so irritating.”

  She took a sip of her coffee.

  “Well,” I said. “What was all that stuff last night?”

  Robin rolled her eyes and waved her mug around as she spoke, sloshing hot coffee on my pants for emphasis. “It’s playacting,” she said. “You know. Like when I let you call me a dirty little whore, or say I want an ass full of cum.”

  My cock was hard.

  It had been a very long time since Robin had said any of those things, which, it was true, she wasn’t really into doing. We had tried anal one time when we were both very drunk and it really hadn’t been very great because of that, and I didn’t actually think my wife was a dirty little whore...

  Or want her to be...

  Did I?

  I took a sip of coffee. “Yeah okay, I get it.”

  “Those guys are like half my age anyway,” she said.

  We looked into the forest.

  “They probably have so much stamina,” Robin couldn’t help adding.

  I laughed, appropriately, like she wanted me to.

  She was right, after all: there wasn’t much that could be done. I couldn’t get time off work now, and she needed to get this place cleaned up for sale. She had taken time off her own job and that couldn’t be undone. And I really was saying, essentially, that I didn’t trust her not to go fucking her way around camp with some young guys.

  My cock twitched again when I had this thought.

  But I kept that bit to myself.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, scratching my head. “I really don’t know what got into me.”

  Or you.

  Robin nudged me and placed her head against my arm.

  *

  I ended up puttering around, helping Robin move some furniture out of the way for future painting, and having lunch before I left. By the time I got out the door, things seemed patched up between us, comfortably normal again, and I was “over” my streak of jealousy.

  The cottage was about five and a half hours from the city, with no stops and a liberal interpretation of the “limit” part of “speed limit.” It precluded any commuting on a daily basis, although there are people who apparently do that kind of thing. I drove slowly, and stopped frequently. It took me seven hours to get home.

  By the time I drove home and opened the door to our empty town-home, I had oscillated between driving back and taking Robin home with me, and calling into work and saying I had a funeral to attend to, so I could spend the week there. I had pictured myself pulling over on the side of the road and turning around, and then spying on her from behind some trees in the empty lot across from the house.

  I called her when I got home. The service was terrible and the conversation was spotted with patches of emptiness, and I spent most of my time asking if she was still there. Then came the inevitable attempts to call each other back (I’d said a thousand times that whoever made the call should call back if it was dropped, but Robin always forgot the rule, leading to endless calls to busy signals.)

  I was extremely annoyed when Robin sent me a text.

  [Robin]: this sucks. I have the internet people coming on Tuesday let’s Skype after that

  So annoying.

  [Me]: great so youll have internet by next thursday

  [Robin]: lolololololololololololrotflmoalolol

  Robin hated acronyms like “lol” and so when she actually thought something was funny she overused them clownishly.

  [Me]: I love you

  [Robin]: love you. Have a good night and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do

  I held the screen to my lower lip, trying to think of a good comeback. I typed a few messages and then deleted them. By then, ten minutes had gone by, and I hesitated to write back.

  I laughed at myself. What the hell was going on that a conversation with my wife of seven years was causing me as much trouble as if we had just started dating?

  It made me uneasy, but it was also a little thrilling.

  So I sat down on the couch.

  TV all to myself.

  Shitty snacks and a beer with no slightly-frowning look.

  Great.

  I was asleep by eight-thirty.

  4: A LONG WEEK

  Robin got internet on Tuesday as expected, and sent me a text asking for a Skype date.

  Robin wasn’t exactly the most up-to-date in the internet world, so I agreed to Skype at 7:30.

  Then she sent me this text:

  [Robin]: ill make sure you get quite a show

  [Me]: um... a show, huh? What kind of show?

  [Robin]: oh sorry babe that wasn’t for you

  Now a word here on Robin’s kooky sense of humor. It’s really kooky. So it was entirely possible that she was, in fact, just attempting to be funny all along, and that I didn’t quite get it. In fact, that was the most likely thing that was happening.

  But is that how I took it?

  No of course not. Instead, I decided that Robin had sent me a text accidentally, one intended for someone else.

  Someone like Heath.

  What kind of show would she be making sure someone got?

  And was there any way to interpret a text like that as anything but a promise for the show of the kind I was thinking of? Showing her tits, showing her ass, showing someone how she could get a whole huge cock deep in her throat?

  I stared at the message so long I started to see double.

  Then I shook my head. What the hell was wrong with me? I was spinning off the road, making private accusations about my wife at the slightest provocation.

  Still... I didn’t want to look like some fool here.

  So I pondered it, and I elected to ignore the text. Which doesn’t mean I stopped thinking about it.

  Unsurprisingly, the first attempt at Skyping was a failure. Something was wrong with the internet, and Robin sent a slew of increasingly frustrated texts telling me she’d have the internet guy back to check it out.

  We hadn’t really spent that much time apart from each other in many, many years. Not like this, where there was very little chance of communication. I know it sounds cheesy, but I was missing the sound of her voice. I started regretting the whole stupid plan we had cooked up: I should have rented a car for her, and we should have tested the phone service before I left. In fact, I shouldn’t have left her there at all; I should have just taken the time off work and stayed with my wife.

  Wednesday came and went, and I was left with nothing but a handful of text messages from Robin, saying that the internet guy hadn’t come, and she had to go use the office land line every time she wanted to make a call, and then this:

  [Robin]: I think I have it worked out.

  Mysterious. So unlike Robin, who ordinarily liked to detail everything. Especially if she was texting.

  I typed: “How so?” but deleted it. I was doing my best not to be a freakish husband, who was mildly suspicious of his wife for not getting internet installed properly in the boonies within 24 hours.

  “Great!” I typed instead, and felt like an ass.

  [Robin]: I miss you. Still coming on Friday?

  [Me]: Of course. I hope we talk by then tho

  There was a very long delay between my text and Robin’s reply. The minutes ticked by, and each of them sliced at my ins
ides like a razor. Finally, after twenty minutes:

  [Robin]: should be done tonight. If not, tom

  [Robin]: for sure

  I responded with another “great.”

  That was the last time I heard from Robin on Wednesday.

  I spent the night trying to keep from pacing, from texting, from jumping in my car and going to see what she was up to. If the internet guy didn’t come, why wouldn’t she just tell me? Was the internet actually that slow, that it didn’t work? Was Robin just making all of this up to keep from talking to me while she got up to something else? Something with the good-looking guys of Camp Taghkana?

  I was being ridiculous.

  I called my buddy Dan, who was really less of a buddy than a dude I knew from work. But he was a tennis player, and we both had a membership at a gym with a racquetball court. To my surprise, he was able to go, and I had my mind off Robin for at least an hour while I unleashed fury on the court.

  Dan, to his credit, raised his eyebrows, asked me once if I was okay, and left it at that when I said I was fine, in that voice that is an indicator that you are most certainly not fine.

  And then another restless night.

  And then it was Thursday.

  When I didn’t hear from Robin by lunch, I texted her.

  [Me]: Babe? What’s up with the internet? I haven’t heard from you.

  Infuriatingly, my wife did not write me back for almost an hour, while I fretted that something had happened to her, or that she was too busy sucking on Heath’s cock to write me back. Finally, my phone, which I left on my desk, face up, and which sucked all of my mindpower away from me the entire hour I waited for her call, buzzed and began a little clockwise spin on the table.

  [Robin]: Oh hey. He’s here right now so hopefully tonight...

  My cheeks flushed with anger. I typed: