But you could see why the nagging thought that I was being a fucking jackass cuckold was never far from my mind.
C hapter 10
FISHING
It was some time later. A vaguely foggy evening.
“I've got one,” Jen said, her fingers swiping over the screen of her phone.
I shouldn’t have been driving, I realized, wiping sweat from my forehead.
I'd had a few drinks. Not enough to make me a bad driver.
Maybe a puff of weed?
My mind was foggy. Where was, I even? It was Halloween, somehow, already.
I looked down at Jen's legs again. As she shifted in her seat, her firm muscles flexed inside the orange and white thigh-high stockings of her costume. Incredibly, filthily sexy thigh-high stockings.
The fog lifted in my mind. Yes. Halloween.
Ironically, Jen was dressed as a fish. Ironic, because the dating app she was swiping away at that evening – the dating app she had used to find her date that night - was called Plenty Of Fish.
It was also ironic that the costume was so fucking hot.
A fish costume.
The stockings weren't the half of it. I believed, but wasn't sure, that she was supposed to be “Naughty Nemo,” but who cared at this point what she was supposed to be? The leggings were hooker-height, coming to a few inches above her knee. They went down to her ankles, where they ended without covering her foot. When she moved, the fabric slipped away from her ankle and it peeked out from beneath the fabric. Inexplicably, this peek-a-boo game with her ankle was driving me wild. She was wearing a pair of stripper-height platform black shoes that made her my height exactly, and drew her already-long legs to a cartoonishly, slutty length.
From the shiny orange band at the top of her thigh-high Naughty Nemo stockings, her cinnamon-mocha thighs were bare, all the way to a frilly lace tutu-like thing. It barely covered her ass, that dress. Sitting in the car, the whole getup was scrunched up and I could see flashes of white panties when she moved.
The panties. Wearing plain white cotton panties like some dirty schoolgirl, driving me insane.
The skin-tight white and orange tube top of the dress barely made it to her tits. The dress had crushed her small, model tits together to make a deep crevice between them.
There was all of that, getting me hard as a rock, making my balls ache. Distracting me from looking at the road.
That was why I was so… foggy.
There was the beer and a few puffs of a joint I had mistakenly taken to calm myself down. They rose up though my memory like bubbles in a lava lamp. Edgeless, unreal.
Did that really happen?
There was the fact that my wife was swiping away at a dating app.
Looking for a hookup on Halloween night.
An actual hookup.
Thinking about it, thinking about what we were planning to do, squeezed another injection of adrenaline into my blood.
I felt beads of sweat form and start to drip along my ribs.
“Here, turn here,” she said, pointing her whole hand with the phone at one of the dark streets in the conglomerate of filthy, overcrowded and half-destroyed student homes bordering the university.
The university. My heart fluttered again and my eyes wandered to Jen's slender legs and the phone in her hand. In the blue light of the phone, holding it as she was, she looked incredibly young. Incredibly young, and incredibly slutty.
Why were we here? Why the university?
I gripped the steering wheel and pulled my eyes away from her. Why the fuck was I getting so worked up about this? My cock was throbbing – actually throbbing, like 20-years-ago-, adolescent-, surging-, testosterone-filthy-throbbing.
And I was driving my wife around, looking for…
It came back to me as I grasped through the fog: her university-aged “date.”
The streets were dark and humming with activity. It was Saturday night, after Halloween, but it looked like the party hadn't stopped since the night before. Students were out, drunk, horny, and all dressed up for Halloween.
The knot in my stomach was getting bigger, threatening to twist my stomach inside and out and make me throw up. I was sweating through my own costume, one I borrowed from a friend.
It was a Yeti costume, and even without the head on, I was baking.
More costume irony.
I had the heat on for my scantily-clad wife. But it also didn't help that my blood was boiling in anticipation, and maybe fear, of what we were about to get up to.
Or what she was about to get up to.
“God,” she breathed. “There's no parking.”
She looked at me. Her pretty brown eyes were framed by dark liner, a smattering of glittery orange and white eyeshadow (the effect, like her schoolgirl white panties, gave her vaguely juvenile look. It made me think of lip gloss and bubble gum, and should have been highly disturbing, but instead only ratcheted my fucking cock up another ten clicks). Her lips, painted light pink, turned up and then down, a sign of indecision.
My heart rose and fell with her mouth, soaring and then crashing.
“Maybe it's a sign,” she said lightly. “Maybe this is a bad idea.”
I braked hard for a gang of frat boys who were crossing the street. One of them held his hands up in the air and yelled, for no apparent reason. I stared him down, not knowing whether he was being aggressive or just a jackass.
“How old is this guy?” I said.
I was talking about her date.
I felt a terrible and delicious thrill as the dirty truth wriggled through my mind: now that Jen looked so...young...I was leaning more toward someone a little older, perhaps.
Someone who would know what he was doing when he slid those white panties down to her knees.
I wiped my eyes. Jesus, I was coming fucking unhinged.
Really unhinged. What the fuck was I doing? How the fuck had these thoughts gotten inside my head?
I didn't actually want my wife to act like a slut, did I? I didn't actually want someone peeling that fish costume until her pert breasts popped out of it and bounced in front of some other guy's mouth.
Did I?
“Jesus,” I whispered aloud.
Jen was staring at the frat kid, who apparently had forgotten either his anger or enthusiasm, and was now running across the street to jump into a bush. Heavy bass vibrated in the street beneath us.
“He's supposed to be a grad student,” Jen said, shrugging. It took me a moment to realize she was answering my question about her date.
Grad student. That could mean he wasn't too far from Jen's age.
I edged forward down the street. “He could be lying,” I thought aloud.
Jen snorted.
Of course. If there was one thing she'd figured out by doing research on dating apps, it was that everyone was lying.
Also, she had lied. Profusely. In her own profile.
I had lied profusely.
Memories tumbled around in my mind, loose and disorganized:
Writing her profile.
Did that happen?
Spending hours on Jen's dating apps, sorting through her choices, salivating over the possibilities. Making her appealing. Sexualizing her, Making her younger, much dumber, much more like a silly slut than she could ever possibly, actually be.
The profiles I'd made. Were they real?
Jen was not 22.
She wasn't at a community college. She wasn't a flight attendant. She wasn't any of the extraordinarily easy, slutty things I'd made her into.
And now I was driving her to meet some guy, with the hope in the back of my mind that she would act out all the filthy things I wanted to see her do.
Wasn't I?
I looked around the car, seeking signs of reality. Condensation stared back at me from the bottom of the windshield, realistic, far too real.
I looked over at her again, uneasily.
It was a strange unease, the feeling inside of me.
I had done all of these things, hadn't I?
I'd effectively pimped my wife out on the internet, and gotten hard thinking about it...but...
She was into it.
She was so into it. She was having as much fun as I was. She had slipped so easily into her role as a slutty bimbo that I had to wonder how it was possible. I had begun to suspect her of dark secrets, of a former life in which she had been the dirty little slut she was so easily becoming.
Not yet, I reminded myself, squeezing the steering wheel.
Nothing had actually happened yet.
Up until now it had all just been a game.
Up until now we had just flirted with the idea.
The memories of the things we had done swirled in my mind. Just out of reach though. Slippery and ephemeral. Had they really happened?
We had posted her picture and sent a few sexts. We had teased a few guys and then Jen had told me dirty, made-up stories while I fucked her.
My head felt foggy. We had done all of that, hadn't we?
But we had never actually gotten into the car, and gone after a guy.
Until tonight.
Jen interrupted my thoughts by fishing a mask from her purse: a simple, lacy, carnival-style half-mas. She pulled it over her face. She flipped the mirror down and started putting on some new lipstick. Bright orange, to match her clown-fish costume, and compliment her cream-and-coffee skin.
Halloween was the perfect night to actually do it. People were dressed like whores, everything was make-believe. I could hide my erection and myself in this hairy fucking Yeti costume. I could stare out of the plastic grid of the eye-holes while my wife actually did some of those dirty things she had been promising for months.
My stomach flopped.
“Let's say this,” she said, and pressed her lips together. Her calm demeanor unnerved me. “If we don't find a parking spot up here, like, say, between here and Proctor, let's just take it as a sign and go home.”
I looked over at her. Here was my wife all dressed up like the sluttiest fish you ever saw, her phone glowing in her left hand with the profile of her choice of hookup for the night, applying lipstick with the calm of a woman who was maybe on her way to work in the morning.
She pressed her lips together and looked over at me.
“You don't want to do this anymore?” I blurted. My voice sounded strange, almost like someone mangled it. My stomach gave another violent flop.
How could she just go hot and cold about this?
How could this woman be so willing to get dressed up in a whore fish costume – as she never had before, she hated slutty Halloween costumes – and go out looking for a man other than her husband to fuck one minute, and then the next minute dismiss it all with the wave of her hand?
How could she take it or leave it like that?
Jen's eyes were dark behind her mask. Coffee-colored until her pupils were almost consumed, her eyes seemed black in the dim light and surrounded by her adolescent eye shadow. The effect was startling, making her eyes large and almost frightening. I could read nothing from them.
My own eyes met hers, flicked back to the street, then went back to her face. Then my fucking eyes tipped my hand. They fell to her pert breasts swelling out in the wave of orange at the top of her costume, and the tapering of the dress to her narrow waist.
“I didn't say that,” she said.
Her voice was teasing. Or was it? I tore my eyes away from her and looked back at the road. I was paying about 1% attention to driving. I could have plowed over ten students and not noticed, the state I was in.
I swept my eyes over the side of the street, searching for a parking space. I both wanted desperately to find one, and desperately not to.
Probably, this was all a mistake. I knew that. I could feel it snaking around in my body: the cold, exciting feel of a mistake. But at the same time, it was tugging at me, whispering in my ear, seducing me.
“You don't sound too convinced,” I said, and I realized I was just saying it to make myself feel better. “Maybe you want to call it off.”
“Do you?” Jen said, and now her voice had swung back in the other direction, to a concerned tone. “I don't want to -”
And then, there it was. A Beetle pulled out abruptly, right in front of us. And the parking space we needed was not only there, beckoning us, it was only two houses away from our destination.
I pulled into the parking space, giving a look of dismay to the cars surrounding us. Beat-up student vehicles, old models handed down from parents. I had a nice car, because I was old.
Something about the entire, preposterous idea of what we were doing struck me in that moment, and I realized I didn't really want to be there at all
“Jen,” I said, ready to give her a big speech.
Jen snorted and covered her face. Then she pulled the mask down around her neck. “Oh my god,” she said. “I know what you're about to say. This is ridiculous. These guys are...puking. In the bushes. Oh god. It's too gross.” She shook her head. “No. Yeah...no, this isn't any good.”
I hadn't turned the car off.
“Call it off?”
She held her phone up, teasing me by flipping through the “grad student's” profile: an impossibly good-looking guy with straight dark hair and a million-watt smile flashed his fucking grin at me.
Jen smiled. “He's too good to be true, probably. And who makes a date on Halloween?”
She swiped the window closed and tucked the phone into her fish costume. “Too bad, Marcus Harris.”
“Marcus Harris,” I said, backing up with a smile. I was relieved, to tell the truth. Not because there was no excitement to this, not because I totally hated the idea of my wife with another guy, but because this scene – this drunken, wild, college-aged scene – was grossing me out a little. “Sounds completely made-up.”
I pulled into the street and moved as quickly as possible through the throngs of drunk party goers.
The sense of relief I felt sort of evaporated as we pulled back onto the highway, headed into the city and our regular lives.
“We still have that party at Frank's we could go to,” she said, glumly and out of nowhere.
Frank had a Halloween party every year, and it sounded about like what it probably would be: sort of fun.
It would be, at least, respectable. More respectable than those kids throwing up in the bushes. More respectable than sneaking around in the bushes myself, trying to watch my wife hooking up with Marcus Harris.
I looked over at Jen.
“It would be a shame to waste that costume,” I commented.
She grinned. “Or that one,” she said, indicating mine.
“You want to go?”
We both knew what we were discussing. We had left behind all of that adrenaline, that excitement, and we were headed to a house full of married couples with kids. Conversations about finance and mortgages.
Jen tapped the phone to her lips. “Yeah, okay,” she said finally.
So we went.
And then we were there. So suddenly, as if we had been going there all along.
I let out a low whistle when we pulled up to Frank's new house.
Jen peered up at it as we passed by.
“Hmmm,” she said. “So what it is that Frank does? Maybe I should have hooked up with him.”
She was joking. It was an old joke.
It still sent a delicious stab of pain through my gut. And then my head spun with images of Jen with Frank, her Nemo legs wrapped tightly around him.
I wondered what the hell was wrong with me and parked the car.
We stepped out and looked up and down the street. It seemed that quite a few adult parties were going on. Inside the homes, behind the vast windows of the McMansions crammed together on the street. Adult parties.
I felt a twinge of disappointment again. I followed Jen, admiring her ass in the tight shiny white material of her costume. The flouncy black lace lifted and fell, tantalizing with snippets
of the bottom curve of her asscheeks. God, what a slutty costume.
What a slutty thing she had been about to do.
Hope fluttered again in my heart as I looked up to see Frank's house crammed full of people.
Maybe she could find someone here...
Jen looked back at me, almost as if she had read my thoughts. She gave a wink and a smile. She slipped her mask on, and rapped on the door.
Frank, dressed as The Hulk, opened the door and stared, dumbfounded, at Jen. I had the Yeti head under my arm and I was still walking up the steps. Frank's eyes moved slowly up and down Jen's body. Surprised. Pleased. Trying to place her. Trying to understand how on earth fortune had deposited this hot little slut on his porch steps.
“Jesus,” I whispered to myself again.
I saw a few guys crane their necks, bending away from the conversations they were having to get a good view of Jen.
Frank's eyes flicked over to me. I saw the wild surprise he registered, and then I saw his mind wheeling as he tried to put it all together. He moved his eyes from Jen to me and back again. “It's..Chris! And....” He stared at Jen. He looked quickly back at me.
“Nice. Forgot my name. You're off my Christmas list, Frank,” Jen said.
Frank's jaw was still flapping around.
I had a rush of pleasure as I watched Frank's hungry eyes soaking up the sight of it all with surprise and admiration. He watched Jen's ass as she stepped into the house and then turned back to me. “Holy shit,” he said, plainly. He waved me in and guzzled his beer. As he closed the door I heard him breathe: “God I fucking love Halloween.”
I smiled, because I really didn't know how else to react. Frank's outright lechery as he watched my wife was doing exactly the same thing to me that her dating accounts were: making me sweat, getting me excited, and making me halfway sick.
And then there was Jen herself. I stepped through the living room, trying to follow my wife and her every move. I got caught up in a few conversations. I lost her and then I found her again.
Time seemed to move in jumpy segments.
I poured myself a conservative glass of wine while I watched her through the windows of the kitchen. Her small, almost- exposed ass was turned up as she leaned lightly on the railing of the balcony. She had already attracted quite a following: men had clustered around her and were regaling her with stories about something.
Body Of Research: An Experiment In Hotwifing Page 12
