[Me]: Why couldn’t you have sent a text or something?
The message was sent by a clumsy swipe of my thumb before I had time to retract it, and as I read over it I realized it seemed pretty possessive. A little whiny.
[Me]: I was worried.
Robin’s message seemed very delayed. Too delayed? Or was I being paranoid?
It came to me two minutes later.
[Robin]: phone wasnt charged. Misplaced the charger. Sorry
I stared at the text.
Okay.
On the one hand, that was a perfectly reasonable explanation for every thing that had happened. Everything that had happened and was bothering me, like a low-grade toothache. So her phone wasn’t charged. What else could she have done?
On the other hand, it was a perfect excuse for not getting back to me, while she was up to more interesting things with better-looking, newer men.
My phone buzzed in my hand, interrupting my thoughts.
[Robin]: So is it a date? You have time to talk earlier?
Sure I did, I typed. And we planned a call for 3:30.
I took a break outside. Feeling a little perversely strange about this call to my wife, I sat in my car with the engine and the air on, logged in on Skype on my phone and waiting for Robin’s call.
After an excruciating few minutes ticked by after 3:30, the screen lit up and the lilting song announcing a call blared into my earpiece. I adjusted the volume and answered the call. The screen froze for a moment, and I feared that I wasn’t going to get to talk to Robin at all.
“Dammit,” she said. “This is still so slow.”
“Hello to you, too,” I said.
Robin laughed lightheartedly. “Hi, sweetheart. Listen, can you kills the video? I think it’s... ugh, this is so frustrating.”
“I’m just happy to hear your voice,” I said, and it sounded sappy. The honesty of it laid me bare.
“Hi,” Robin said, sexily.
“Oh, hi,” I said. It did feel good to hear her voice.
“Ugh. I’m sorry about all this phone business. It’s really making my life a pain,” Robin said.
“Well... I’m glad you have it taken care of now. But I wish we could get video going.”
There was a pause. “Yeah...” Robin said. “It’s probably something I’m doing. Maybe you can look at it when you get here?”
“Sure.”
There was an uncomfortable pause.
I hadn’t felt this way with Robin since we’d spent a short time apart, long-distance dating, when she attended a summer course in Europe while she was finishing up her degree. The same oddness filled the space between us, an inability to connect; I was in my car and she was in the cottage, I was in the city and she was in the boonies.
I cleared my throat.
“So, uh... how’s the cleaning going?”
“Oh, God,” Robin complained, jumping right into the conversation with sudden gusto. “The air conditioner is on the fritz, so it’s like a hundred and twenty degrees upstairs.”
A pause.
“You must be pretty sweaty,” I said.
Robin, instead of continuing her complaint, as she ordinarily would have, made a throaty noise. “So sweaty,” she said.
Suggestively.
Then she changed the subject. “Um... so I’m going to head into Stockbridge and get a new air conditioner and some paint and stuff,” she said.
I was caught off-guard. “Wait... I thought I was bringing all that,” I said, thinking of a lengthy text she had sent me earlier detailing what I needed to bring up that weekend. “I could also get you a new air conditioner.”
Robin sighed. “Yeah, I just can’t... I can’t do anything without the air-conditioning. I’m dying. It’s a long time to wait.”
“How are you getting there?” I said.
There was a pause. Not a long one, just one that was a little too long. Long enough that it set my suspicion hairs on edge. “Uh...” she began. “You know that guy that we met at the party?”
I put my lips together. Heath.
“Mmm,” I said, trying to sound as disinterested as possible. “Which one?”
“Heath? He’s the one who invited us, actually. Anyway, he um... came over and tried to fix it, and then when he couldn’t, he offered to take me into Stockbridge.”
I was the one to pause now. “Oh he did, did he? He tried to fix your air conditioner.”
A sliver of very perverse pleasure traveled through me.
I could almost hear Robin rolling her eyes through the earpiece.
“Anyway,” she said. “I’ve got to get this taken care of.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
Another pause. “What is it?” Robin coaxed.
I shrugged and sighed. “Just... you know... I’m not sure I like this Heath guy taking my wife out on the town.”
“We’re going to a Home Hardware,” she said, her voice dry. “For an air conditioner,” she added, even more dryly.
She sounded annoyed.
I decided to humor my way back into her good graces, even if I was still a little wary of this whole thing. “I get really turned on by air conditioners,” I said.
I heard a slight pop as Robin did this thing she does with her tongue and her cheek when she can’t decide if she’s going to continue being mad or laugh at me.
Then she laughed.
And then:
I heard the strained metal creak of the porch door.
“Oh hey.” A male voice. “Damn girl, you look good. You ready to go?”
“Just Skyping with... Tony.”
Now, it’s totally up for debate whether I heard this or imagined it, or maybe I heard something else and turned it into something different in my mind, but it sounded to me like the male voice went: “Oh, shit,” in a whisper, tinged with a laugh.
Not wanting to look like an asshole, I decided against demanding to know who was there or ask any questions about what was going on. I was grateful that the video wasn’t on, because my eyes felt like they turned red and I definitely felt a hot stain of anger spread over the back of my neck and onto my cheeks. “That your ride?” I managed to say, jovially.
“Uh, yeah,” Robin said, in a tone I couldn’t read very well.
She sounded distracted.
In my mind, I pictured her standing up, embracing Heath, pressing her body close to him. Maybe she was whispering to him, close to his ear, not to say anything else. Maybe his cock was getting hard and pressing up against her thigh, and she was telling him to just let her wrap this up...
“Okay,” I said, and my chest burned at how lame I sounded and felt. “Well, you better get going.”
I felt like there was another too-long pause. Maybe while Robin and Heath played with each other’s tongues, smiling. And then Robin said, “Okay, sweetie. I’ll call you later.”
The strange squiggly sound of the call ending was the last word on the topic.
I stared at the screen, and then looked at my lap.
My cock was hard as a rock.
*
Men have always been attracted to Robin, and so I’ve witnessed my fair share of men flirting with her. And I always felt a little of two minds about it: I liked it, and I hated it. I’d always assumed that I liked it because it was flattering. Men thought my wife was attractive.
The end.
But now, alone in the apartment with Robin miles away, standing in that cottage with Heath the young good-looking frat-surfer-boy, I found myself thinking long, dark, deep thoughts about what they were doing.
I imagined Heath making a slow circle around Robin’s pink nipples and then sinking his teeth into them unto she gasped. I pictured her hand sliding under his jeans, grasping his cock, her eyes wide with pleasure when she measured the size of it.
I could have dismissed these as intrusive thoughts and nothing more, except...
My cock was so hard it ached, and I could even feel a bead of precum boiling up at the top.
It wasn’t as though I had never pictured this kind of thing. I imagined Robin with another man all the time. But that was a sort of pornographic play I put on for myself, and the man was never really anyone in particular.
This was different. I was thinking specifically of Heath. Specifically of the pain that I would feel if I could only catch Robin with her mouth around Heath’s cock, if only I could see her face when she looked over at me. I pictured her eyes moving toward the doorway where I stood, the surprise that flickered in her eyes for a moment, and then, with Heath’s meat sliding in and out of her wide-open mouth, the glint of a smile. I pictured Heath’s cock leaving her mouth, the sticky spit from the back of her throat threaded to the end of his cock for a moment, just before it slopped down across her chest. I pictured her looking right at me, with her hand around Heath’s cock, her mouth still open. She gave me a smile, and then she kept her eyes locked on mine as Heath fed his meaty snake back into her mouth, puffing out her cheeks, making her eyes water, then moving like an animal down her throat. Robin’s eyes grew wet as she strained to breathe and take all of the cock inside of her, all the while looking at me -
I cut my thoughts off, and turned the air-conditioning right onto my face. I still had to get back to work, punch in a few more hours, get home. I could think about this there.
I don’t want to give the impression that I thought I was totally alone in this fantasy at this point in the game. I knew I wasn’t completely alone. I’d looked into it, in the same place everyone looks into everything: the internet. In a few searches – very tentative searches at first, my heart pounding the way it had when I’d stolen liquor from my parents’ cabinet the first time, my finger fumbling the way they had when I’d unhooked Krista McDonald’s bra for the first time so many years ago – I discovered that there was apparently an ecosystem of men out there. Men who thought the same thoughts I did, had the same fantasies I did.
But those men seemed so much more comfortable with themselves, and with their wives actually doing these filthy things.
I had ended every search almost running away from it: slamming the computer closed, turning it off the way I turned off porn I secretly liked but consciously found a little disgusting. My thoughts returned to the idea, again and again, and sometimes I went back to the forums and read them greedily and quickly so that I could close the window again and try to deny to myself that I wanted anything to do with it.
Not really.
But it was creeping up on me now, that desire.
And what kind of person did it make me, if I liked thinking about my wife fucking another guy?
I finished work in a listless daze, all of these thoughts crowding out the things I needed to concentrate on. I finished reports and sent them away, and then felt as if I had dived off a cliff, realizing suddenly that I didn’t know what I had written.
When I got home, I resisted the urge to get on the internet and waste my time in forum after forum of hotwife conversations, hotwife pictures, hotwife porn. I waited for Robin to call me back, and the hours ticked away slowly.
I sent her a text around 7:30:
[Me]: You back yet? Want to Skype?
My phone stayed blank, and my suspicions deepened with every passing moment.
I couldn’t resist any more, and I got onto a thread on Reddit where men post pictures of their wives with other men.
It was a dirty, quick, jerk-off, while I looked at a picture that caught my eye for reasons I couldn’t really explain and wouldn’t want to: the woman was blonde, not dark-haired, but she had blue eyes like Leigh’s, and she was looking into the camera, or at her husband (supposedly her husband) while her tongue made lazy circles around the crown of an enormous black cock, endlessly, in a .gif.
Then I lay awake, staring at the ceiling. Until a fretful sleep took over, assisted by a few glasses of whiskey I had poured myself, my mind was a jumble of erotic thoughts and guilt, jealousy and desire. All of it boiling up in lewd images of Robin and Heath, Heath and Robin. Robin’s tongue making slow, lazy circles around the crown of Heath’s cock, while she looked at me.
*
When I woke up around seven, there were three messages from Robin, stamped 10:05, 10:13, and 10:20.
[Robin]: i cant believe this but my phone died again I left the wifi or whatever on all afternoon
[Robin]: hey im back want to talk?
[Robin]: im sorry i missed you sweetie. I love you cant wait to see you tomorrow xoxoxoxoxo
My stomach growled. I had forgotten to eat dinner.
I typed, half-angry, half-relieved.
[Me]: call me now?
And then I made a big act out of being nonchalant while I made myself some coffee and washed down some Advil for the headache I had gotten. I examined the whiskey bottle, which revealed that I’d had more to drink than I thought.
My insides burned, burned thinking about Robin. She couldn’t expect me to believe her fucking phone died again, could she?
I went back and forth wildly, thinking I was being a bit psychotic, and then thinking I was being taken for a ride if I let Robin talk me into this stupid story about her dead phone.
She was notoriously low-tech, Robin. She often plugged the charger into her phone and then failed to plug the charger into the wall, to be fair to her.
But twice? When she was out in the middle of nowhere?
With Heath?
My abdomen felt cold again.
Then the phone began to sing, the low-tech Skype call had begun.
I answered with video without thinking.
But a blurry, whitewashed image of Robin, pixelated to all hell, slowly materialized, and her voice came through a moment later. “Oh hey! I can see you!”
My heart warmed to my smiling wife, her sleepy eyes, her disheveled hair.
“I’m sorry I missed you last night,” Robin said, her throat a little froggy. “I left the... you know, the wifi thing on, and then I plugged it in, but I don’t know, I think some of these outlets don’t work...”
her voice trailed off. “Anyway. It’s good to see your face.”
Then she frowned, as I said, “Hey.”
“Hey,” she said. “Hey, aren’t you going to be late for work?”
I rubbed my eye with my hand. “A little, unless I hustle.”
“You’re still coming tonight, right?” she said.
And then she added, “Because I miss you.”
“Yeah,” I said, formulating a plan in my mind. It was a sort of shitty plan, the kind of crap plan a jealous husband would make, but I was already setting off down that path and I knew myself well: there was no turning back. “Yeah. I’ll... be there around eight, I guess?”
“Cool,” Robin said.
The choice of word was strange for her. It made her sound too young, like a character on a TV show.
“Okay,” I said. “I’d better... get to work. Everything okay? You got your air conditioner?”
Did I imagine it again, or was there another pause?
“Yeah,” Robin said. Then she yawned. “Everything okay with that.”
“Okay... well, I’ll call you when I’m on my way,” I said.
I was lying.
Robin blew me a kiss.
“I love you,” she said. “Drive safe.”
“Love you, too.”
5: EARLY
It took some finagling, and a lot of careless mistakes were probably made, and I had to promise to pick up a lot of shitty work for Dan in the future, but I managed to leave work earlier than I had planned.
I drove way too fast on the highway to try and get to Camp Taghkana hours before Robin was expecting me. My plan worked: I got there at four in the afternoon.
I left the car at the main road, not wanting to alert Robin to my presence. All the way there, I found myself thinking about all the ways I could catch her, thinking about what it might look like if I found her.
Catch her at what? Find her with whom? Heath of course, and even though I
knew it was a little ridiculous to even be thinking these things, still, there I was. Trying to catch my wife in an affair I’d probably entirely made up.
I had no idea what I was going to tell her about why I’d left the car up the road, but I didn’t really care.
I crept up to the house and around the back. It was silent, and all the windows were open, so I was already feeling my hopes dashed before I peered into the windows.
The living room furniture had all been pushed into the kitchen, and the drapes had been taken off the windows. Blue painters’ tape ran along the ceiling and floor boards, and the wall gleamed white. Rollers and paint trays were strewn across the tarp-covered floor.
My heart feel a little, even as I breathed a sigh of relief.
I stepped into the kitchen. “Robin?” I said.
There was no answer, but my paranoid desires made me go upstairs to check anyway.
I stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked around the living room.
Obviously, Robin had been working hard at doing exactly what she said she was doing. The room smelled of having been freshly painted – in fact, it was still wet.
But where was Robin?
I was irritated as I headed back to the car and climbed in, turned it on and parked it in front of the house. I had no reason to be angry at Robin, but I was having a negative feeling toward her nonetheless. That she wasn’t there. Almost like I was upset that she wasn’t there doing something illicit.
I shook my head at myself and turned off the car.
It made sense that Robin would take a break. It made no sense to be upset that I hadn’t caught her fucking another man.
I decided to walk up to the bar, along the path that led along the creek and the past the swimming hole, to see if I ran into her. There didn’t seem to be much else she could be doing, especially without a car.
The walk turned out to be longer than I remembered, and it was sweltering. Bugs started biting me and I was in an extremely foul mood by the time I reached the swimming hole, but it didn’t stop me from crawling through a bunch of bushes to sneak up on the place and try to catch Robin in the act.
Robin's Fix: A Hotwife Novel Page 6
