Mrs. Robinson (Mrs. Robinson #1)

by Seth King

  “Damn. What now, then?”

  I studied him. I’d been wrong – he wasn’t bad – and now our night could continue. I glanced through the doorway to my expansive living room windows looking out onto the street. I was horny as hell, there was no denying that, and I didn’t want my nosy neighbor to keep me from the best sex of my life, and so I closed the doors into the living room and faced Ben. I needed another calming glass of wine in front of the flames of my automatic fireplace before I blew a gasket or something, and I needed it now.

  “Here, let’s sit again,” I said. “God knows I need to sit down and shut up for a second.”

  “Sounds good to me,” he laughed, amused with me for some reason. After I poured two glasses of wine we both settled into the wingback chairs facing the fireplace, which roared and cackled before us. Ben took a long sip and then stared into the flames, lost in his own mind. Soon it started to rain outside, the steady, raw drizzle washing the townhouse clean, the pitter-patter on the adjoining sunroom’s roof lulling me into some sort of trance. But at the same time, my stomach still churned and squirmed from being so close to Ben, which was directly at odds with the peace in my mind. How could his presence be so comforting and so electrifying at the same time?

  “I’m sorry about your sister,” I said again, getting the succinct feeling that I wasn’t the only one in the room who was hurting.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Sorry for ditching you. I missed her, and I was worried about her.”

  “Of course. Are you her – uh, her…”

  “Her caretaker?” he prompted. “Pretty much. Our parents…removed themselves from the situation some time ago. So it’s just me.”

  “You mean they left you? With a sister who couldn’t take care of herself?”

  His eyes grew larger, something seeming to bubble up from somewhere in his soul. “My parents should have never been parents,” he said, a new iciness in his voice. “It is not normal to put out offspring into the world and then just not care about them. But their total and complete failure at being humans taught me a lot, and I am all my sister will ever need, and that is that.”

  I wanted to reach out and hug him, but I couldn’t. “That’s awful that you had to deal with all that,” I said, and he shrugged and looked away. And suddenly I realized the reason behind that strange darkness I’d noticed battling on his face with all the charming boyishness: carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders had forced him to grow up too quickly and become a man in a boy’s body. I thought of my own twenties, when I’d signed up to live in a fantasy and had instead been left alone in a cold, empty house all day, and the light around Ben seemed to change. “Is that – is that what made you do this?” I asked him, unable to stop myself, and he frowned at the flames.

  “That, and some other family issues. It’s…complicated,” he swallowed. “You know, I could ask you the same.”

  “Oh,” I said, caught off guard yet again. Technically, I guess I was pretty powerful in Washington, if only through association, and it’d been years since someone had been so direct with me. “It was…just loneliness, I guess. It’s complicated, too. I know I must look so pathetic, calling you here like this. The typical lonely housewife – it’s the oldest story in the book.”

  “Facades are nothing,” he said, motioning at the luxury surrounding us. “I, of all people, know what desperation can drive people to do.” The corners of his mouth twitched. “And I’m working as a male escort tonight – trust me, I’m pretty sure I’m somewhat below you on the Pathetic Scale.”

  We both laughed and sipped our wine, the fire warming us along with the friction that seemed to fill the air wherever we went.

  “I have to be honest, though,” he said after a moment. “This hasn’t been half bad. You know, it was kind of refreshing to have someone actually act pleased when I showed up at their house. Like you said, I guess that sometimes, in life, you get so used to being abused and mistreated and taken advantage of, you forget what it feels like to actually just be liked.”

  We locked eyes, and for the first time in a long time I felt like someone was really getting me. “I know exactly what you mean,” I whispered. “Sometimes I just feel so…”

  He leaned forward. “And sometimes I can get so…”

  “Fed the fuck up,” we said at exactly the same time, and then we both laughed. After an endless moment, he sighed and leaned back.

  “So what’s your story, Mrs. Robinson? And your real story, not some little two-second snippet, like before.”

  There was something endearing about the way he looked genuinely interested in my dumb little life. Or was he just being paid extra for that?

  “There no story,” I said. “I mean, look at me.”

  “I see you,” he told me. “And I’m intrigued.”

  Oh, I thought. Well then.

  “Well, I have no story,” I blushed. “Let’s get real: I’m forty-two, bored, and wanted to try something new. There’s nothing special going on here.”

  “I beg to differ,” he said quietly, his eyes burning like the fire in front of us, and suddenly my mind raced with questions about him. I tried to stop myself, to tell myself none of this mattered. These thoughts were dangerous – I knew that. I wasn’t even allowed to know his phone number, much less ask him about his life. But he was a magnet and I was powerless.

  “So this is your first time?” I asked, and he gulped.

  “You could say that.”

  “Did you do it because of Miss Jill?” I asked. The stuff with Miss Jill was…weird, to say the least, and I didn’t know to feel about it in my heart, but I did know how it made other parts of me feel…

  But was I just as bad as Jill for doing what I was doing? What was the difference?

  “Huh?” he asked.

  “Like, your older woman fetish?”

  “Oh,” he half-smiled. “Coincidental. I didn’t seek out this job, I was approached. But yeah, I mean, I do enjoy the company, like I said. And speaking of why I’m here,” he continued, somewhat uneasily, like he wanted to change the subject, “I was wondering something – I get a sense that the man that lives here with you, you’re not really a fan of him. Just a wild guess?”

  I bit my lip. “You’re astute. That’s all I can say.”

  “I’m good at spotting scars – I’ve got a few of them myself,” he said. “Maybe we can get back at the people who left them tonight. Am I also astute in my assumption that your downloading of Hookd was, in some way, an attempt at revenge?”

  “You’re getting more astute,” I said, blood rising to my face. “How’d you know?”

  “Look down,” he said, and I glanced down and noticed I was gripping the arm of my chair so hard, my fingers were white.

  “Sorry,” I said as I snatched my hand into my lap. “That’s embarrassing. I guess I’ve let some anger build up.”

  “It happens,” he said as he balled his fists, and suddenly I realized our common ground, the origin behind that spark of understanding that kept flowing between us: our anger. I was a Georgetown socialite with an eight million dollar townhouse, he was a working-class McLean boy with a sick sister, but there was one thing we held in common: we were absolutely fed up with the world.

  He glanced backwards, his eyes growing darker – and hungrier – by the second. “Can I ask you something else?”

  “Yes.”

  He licked his lip. “…Would it add on to the revenge factor on your husband if I bent you over that desk, which is obviously covered with a man’s belongings, and let my mouth did what it wanted for an hour?”

  As a wave of something hot and thrilling rolled over me, I reached up and adjusted my dress. Ben was clearly connecting the dots, too, at least where the anger issue was concerned. “Ummm…”

  “And where else would you want to get revenge?” he asked. “His closet? His favorite chair? The hood of his car? I’m all yours, if you want me to help.”

  Good God. I was literally going to exp
lode if he didn’t either bend me over the desk and fuck me, or just stop talking.

  “Let’s just…go somewhere more private, shall we?” I asked. “How about I give you a little tour of the house, and then we go upstairs?”

  “Sure.”

  I smoothed my dress, got up, and led him into the kitchen, which Richard had just redone, adding white marble countertops and gleaming white cabinets.

  “Beautiful,” Ben said, trying not to notice that everything in the kitchen was divided into twos: the plates still sitting on the counter from the dinner Richard had never come to last night, the cubbyholes for shoes beside the door, even the key holders on the wall. “Anyway, what’s on the rest of the first floor?” he asked.

  “Just the study and the library. Oh, and the gym. And I guess the beauty salon…God, I’m starting to sound so annoying. Just come with me.”

  We crossed the kitchen and entered a short, narrow room with clothes hanging on either side.

  “What’s this?”

  “Oh, this is the cedar closet, we have to walk through to get to my sitting room.”

  “You have multiple walk-in closets?” he asked, stopping to take it all in.

  “…I guess I like to shop,” I blushed. “Trust me, it’s not like I have much else to do.”

  He frowned, his eyes full of pity, and all at once I realized how pathetic I must have looked to him. I must’ve seemed like the ultimate cliché: a lonely, deluded housewife sitting in her cold empty mansion, unimpressed with the fruits of her privilege, sitting by the phone all night waiting for a call from her neglectful husband that would never come. And then I discovered that wasn’t just how I looked: it’s who I really was. That was my reality. I had no idea I had let things get so out of control.

  And suddenly, I started wondering if I had to be like that anymore.

  “These are beautiful”, Ben said as he stared up at my couture gowns, which I hung down here for preservation’s sake. Valentino, de la Renta, von Furstenburg – all the pretentious European-sounding names were here, not that they’d ever brought me any real joy. “I bet you wear them well,” he said as he reached up and ran his finger along one particularly gaudy, poufy, lacy white gown – a gown that made me want to slap myself the second I laid eyes on it.

  “Oh, God, that’s my wedding dress,” I said as I reached up to tuck it away, wincing as I remembered my picture-perfect wedding ceremony. Reliving the happy memories hurt the most, much more than the sad ones, because every flashback was a reminder of what I’d lost, and that things could have ended differently. “I took this out a few weeks ago to get it repackaged and preserved,” I explained, “but I totally forgot about it. Here, let me hide it or something, that’s very inappropriate…”

  As I reached up, my ankle turned on my heel – I never did quite get the hang of wearing these things, no matter how many events Richard dragged me to in order to show me off and put on the show of a happy couple – and I stumbled to the side. To keep from falling I instinctively grabbed at the gowns, and suddenly the rack snapped off the wall and banged Ben in the head, making both of us tumble to the floor in a heap of tulle, lace and organza. I landed on his legs as we both squirmed and wriggled, trying to escape the mess, and once the dust settled I reached for his head and gasped.

  “Oh, God!” I said as I felt the already-growing lump. “I am so sorry! Did that hurt?”

  He grabbed his head, let his mouth fall open, and then burst into laughter.

  “What?” I asked, resting a palm on his head. “Are you delirious?”

  “No, I’m fine, I barely felt it,” he said as he pushed some fabric away from his legs. “God, what is wrong with us? We’re a mess.”

  “You got that right,” I muttered as I dropped my hand, relieved.

  “Wait – don’t get up yet,” he said as I started to push myself off the floor.

  “Why?”

  His eyes softened. “Because I want to do this.” As my pulse sped up and my nipples hardened, he snaked his hand around my shoulder, bringing his forehead to rest against mine. “You are so beautiful,” he whispered. “I hope whoever is the reason behind the sadness in your smile knows that, and kicks himself every night over it.”

  A large tear suddenly fell from my eye and slid down a fold of the filmy white fabric of my wedding dress, coming to rest on Ben’s black combat boots. He wiped my cheekbone slowly, deliberately, and for all I knew I could’ve been sitting on a cloud. Maybe I’d gotten this wrong. Maybe I wasn’t the sad, desperate predator trying to feel young and whole again by seducing a younger dude – maybe we were just two humans, two souls, lost and confused and running from our monsters, meeting in the middle.

  “Enough tears,” he said, placing a finger on my chin. And then he kissed me right there, surrounded by gossamer clouds of doomed white lace. He wasn’t lying about his neighbor teaching him the ropes, either – he was better at kissing than Richard had ever been, equal parts hungry and delicate, forceful and intimate. He was perfect, and I wanted more.

  “Sorry, but I just wanted to do that,” he whispered against my mouth when he finally came up for air.

  “I liked it,” I heard myself say, despite every ounce of sense within me. And for a reason I will never know, I cleared my throat and said the following: “I haven’t had sex in seventeen months, you know.”

  “What?”

  I looked away and then laughed like a crazy person.

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously,” I said, trying to pull myself together. “And I haven’t had an orgasm in eight. God, we are breaking so many rules right now.” I motioned at my wedding dress under us, thinking of the promise I’d made in it twenty years ago tonight – the promise I was breaking right now in spectacularly unGraceful fashion.

  “Some rules are more fun to break than others,” he smiled. Then his expression darkened.

  “What is it?” I asked. He bit his lip, his eyes glittering.

  “I can’t believe I’m asking you this while we’re sitting on your wedding dress, but I’ve had enough of the tour already. Tell me, Mrs. Robinson…will we be alone for a little while longer?”

  “Well,” I gulped, “I think I’ve put off Cynthia until morning, and my husband’s staying in town, so…probably.”

  “Okay, and tell me something else – it has to do with something I used to do with Miss Jill.”

  My heart thumb-bumped in my chest. “Yes?”

  “Do you have a removable showerhead in your shower?”

  Oh, God. Why did he have to ask me that?

  Something within me clenched and then rolled over, and the hairs on my arms stood on end. But as horny as I was, I was disgusted with myself even more. This was so wrong. So, so wrong. Here I was, surrounded by the biggest reminder of all of the vows I had made to my husband, exchanging dirty talk with a male hooker half my age. This was insane, and I was wrong for being aroused by all this. Sure, Richard had probably slashed our vows to pieces before the ink on the marriage certificate had even dried, but hadn’t my mother taught me that two wrongs didn’t make a right?

  But then again, if two wrongs didn’t make a right, then why did being in the wrong feel so…well, right?

  “Yes,” I said finally. “I have one.”

  He reached down and ran a finger over my panties, making my breath hitch in my throat. He was such a natural. I was by no means an innocent – early in my marriage, there were stretches when I’d happily have sex two or three times a day – and my books had taught me volumes of sexual knowledge since then. But still, I was nowhere near as good as Ben at all this. And being with someone was so different from Richard, whom I still had sex with roughly three or four times a year. Ben was so firm and lean, his skin so soft and supple, his voice so virile-sounding; and compared to Richard, it was like an apple next to a rotten apple. Just imagining his potential stamina level aroused and exhausted me in equal measure. I looked into his eyes, wide and closed-off and unreadable, and wondered wh
at strange world lived within them. Above all, the fact that a twenty-something year old guy was invading my mind like this, snaking his way into my brain and rooting around, making me overturn stones I hadn’t touched in years and question beliefs I’d never wondered about before, was…bizarre, to say the least.

  “You shouldn’t have told me that, you know,” he whispered, and I swallowed hard as a new surge of moisture hit my lady parts. This was out of control – Cynthia or my husband or his security could walk in at any moment, and I’d be doomed. Beyond doomed…

  “Why’s that?” I asked, my voice shaky. I wasn’t sure I could walk away now even if I tried – I’d judged Ben horribly wrong, and there were unknown depths beneath his flashy surface.

  “Because I want to do something Miss Jill taught me,” he said slowly, and then he motioned at the dress. “Speaking of that, we obviously need a change in venue. I want you to go walk into your shower, take that showerhead, hold it on your pussy, and wait for me to come give you further instructions. Can you do that for me?”

  “I think so,” I breathed.

  “Good,” he smiled, and then he picked up my hand and kissed the back of it. I sat there, paralyzed, as he reached down with his other hand and started stroking his cock, which was erect beneath his jock strap. I’d been wondering if he really wanted me, if he was really aroused by me, and I guess the answer was a resounding yes. He smiled, and for a moment his face looked young and vulnerable again, reminding that I was with a boy who was a teenager a matter of months ago. No matter how sexual he seemed, I was still corrupting the hell out of him. And one final question loomed: did I really want to do this, or had I simply taken my quest for revenge on Richard too far? What was really my motivation here?

  “Mrs. Robinson?” he asked.

  “Yes?”

  For a moment I was afraid of the sparkle in his James Dean smile, but suddenly I realized that whatever was going to happen next, and no matter the reason why it was happening, I didn’t want to let go of this feeling. Because after years of existing in shades of grey, I finally felt like I was seeing – no, living – in color. Suddenly I went back, back, back, back to before everything had become dull and muted and fuzzy like a rainy Sunday evening, back to the days when I got excited about things, when my emotions had a little kick to them, when I didn’t walk down the street with a plastic smile and a black heart…