Tennile stood up.
Shane slapped the table again. “Course. You all staying around here?”
He was looking at Monica for the answer, because he’d figured out that Monica was the weakest link. Her mouth moved like a fish and she said, “Sugarloaf Key.”
I stood up, thrusting my hand toward Shane. “Good to meet you, man,” I said. “Tennile?” I cocked my head to toward the bar. “Let’s pay up. Mon, why don’t you go get Bob in the car?”
Monica looked at me. “You okay to drive?”
“Sure,” I lied. I was wasted, and so was everyone else, but I’d sort out a cab in a bit. Right now, I just wanted to get away from Shane, who was seeming more sinister with each passing moment. Tennile shot me a look, and I shook my head slightly, hoping she’d figure out my intentions, whatever they were.
“I really think we should take a cab,” Monica complained.
Tennile was behind her now, lifting her up by her elbow. “I got it,” she said. “I’ll drive, I’ve only been pretending to drink.”
Monica looked at her. Now that she was standing up, I could see she was pretty drunk. “Oh,” she said, confused. “Let me give you some...”
Tennile patted her on the arm. “It’s fine, Mon. Just get Bob in the car.”
Shane was watching all of this, still seated, with amusement. I could see he was pretty used to sending people scurrying. His strange companion had found himself a chair, and was looking almost comical sitting it, all of his bulk squeezed into the plastic.
Shane turned to Bob. “Bob. My man. You look to have tied one on good. Monica, darlin,’ let me help you with this guy.”
Monica had no idea what to do, so she just muttered something incomprehensible while Shane helped Bob to his feet. “Which way?”
Tennile stepped around them and put her hand on my arm. “Let’s just get the bill,” she said.
We walked in unsteady silence, our backs turned to Shane, Bob, and Monica.
“He’s harmless,” Tennile said, finally, when we were out of earshot.
“What is with that guy?” I said, at almost the same time. I looked behind me. The three were moving to the parking lot, wobbling under the stark light. “I’m not sure if he’s going to kidnap our friends or what.”
Tennile put her hand on mine. “Really, he just puts on a big act, he’s just a huckster. I just want to get out of here. I’ll explain it later.” She stepped onto the porch and started digging in her purse. “I’m too wasted to actually drive,” she said. “Are you?”
“I’m on it,” I said. I had already taken out my phone to get an Uber driver. “I can pull over at the next bar.”
Tennile looked at me with her big eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. She looked back toward the parking lot. “I never thought that place would... touch my life again.” Her eyes narrowed. “What’s he doing here?”
“Just a bad coincidence,” I said authoritatively.
I didn’t know who I was trying to convince, myself or Tennile.
Shane and his hulking friend seemed to disappear by the time we got the bill paid and started back to the parking lot. They walked off into the darkness on the beach, dissolving into the night much they same way they had climbed out of it. I couldn’t shake the nefarious feeling that Shane had brought. It hung around like a cloud. I pictured him lurking around in the darkness, watching our every move.
Bob was barely conscious, so he didn’t have anything to say about the strange, short drive we took to the next restaurant over, and the transfer to the Uber, where we had to pile in the back of the car. We let Monica ride up front, mostly so she wouldn’t ask any questions about Shane, or Tennile’s past. Bob was sandwiched between Tennile and me, his head rolling around on his neck.
“Okay,” Monica said, after we helped walk Bob to their room. “That was... an interesting night.”
She ended the sentence more like a question, looking expectantly at Tennile.
But my wife, always capable of being a consummate diplomat, reached forward and kissed her on both cheeks, effectively wrapping up the night. Tennile has an extraordinary ability to just... wrap things up. “See you tomorrow at the boat,” she said. It was a tone that ended conversations.
I waited until the door clicked closed behind me to start the conversation. Tennile was already sitting on the bed, and she was already turning her head toward me as she sat, a “don’t start” expression on her face. Eyes halfway rolled, eyebrows arched.
“So,” I said, in a mock jovial tone. “Shane, huh?”
Tennile took off her shoes, pretty high-heeled sandals that wrapped around her ankle and drove me wild. She drew her hand along her calf seductively, but her eyes were cold. “What do you want to know?” she said.
“So he worked at the strip club, I take it?”
Very few people, other than the patrons of Stampede Gentlemen’s Club, circa 2008-2009, knew or even would have imagined in their wildest dreams that the very proper, very professional Tennile Mathews had been a pole-dancing sensation to pay for law school.
I was not a patron of Stampede, for the record.
Tennile had confessed to her job in a tearful meltdown the night before our wedding.
It was extremely difficult to imagine Tennile as a stripper, if you knew Tennile the way I knew her. She was that girl who had actually read all the assigned reading, the girl with slightly outdated glasses and conservative sweaters hiding a killer body, the girl who ate 1500 calories a day and went jogging at 6am and had an organized closet.
Tennile was a women’s-rights-marching, largely conservative dressing, get-your-eyes-up-here-buddy kind of girl. She’s the kind of woman you’d expect to see in one of those You Tube videos where a guy tries to grab her ass and she kickboxes him through a door and then beats him soundly with her briefcase.
And not only was it hard to imagine Tennile being a stripper, it was even harder to imagine her doing it in a place that... well, seedy. Stampede was a notorious club, notorious for attracting rich clientele and the mob, notorious for drug dealing, ruining political careers and marriages, and for having a stable of very sexy ladies. But really, all I knew about it was what showed up in the papers or the rumor mill. It wasn’t like I’d ever been there.
When she confessed to me, I admit I felt a little weird about it. But we’d talked all night, and the wedding was all planned, and in the end, what was I going to do? Tennile was a stunning woman, she had a law degree and a job lined up, she was smart, funny, and sexy, and I loved her. What did I care if she had done a little dancing in her lifetime?
And then, I have to admit, the idea planted a lot of seeds in my mind. I realized, after a few weeks of very, very twisted fantasies that not only did it not bother me that Tennile had been a stripper, I liked the idea. I enjoyed the admittedly perverse pleasure of thinking about her dancing, sliding up and down a pole while dirty men gawked at her.
I liked it so much, in fact, that I started turning that fantasy into something far more filthy. Men didn’t just watch her, they reached out and touched her. I pictured Tennile’s long legs encased in knee-high, glittery silver stockings, a little strip of silver covering her waxed, bare slit. Two little strings of silver barely keeping the triangle covered, the whole thing sliding over her skin, promising with every swoop of her torso and bend at the waist to just come undone and show the bright pink center of her cunt to everyone watching.
I imagined how they all waited breathlessly for her silver top be untied, her fingers tugging on the strings, slowly tantalizing them. And then her bare breasts, round and pert, with her dark chocolate nipples and big, mocha areola jiggling inches from their faces as she leaned over and smiled at them, kneading her breasts with her hands.
Sometimes I even imagined that Stampede was a fully nude stripclub (it wasn’t), and that my wife got on her knees and gyrated, letting some drooling man use his fat, grubby fingers to untie her silver bikini bottom. The strings would slip apart, and then she would lean her other hip t
oward him, her hands pushing her breasts together, running her tongue over her upper lip, and he would untie the other side. The little bottoms would fall to the floor with a plop, and the whole gang of them would stare at her cunt.
And then my wife would lean back, do one of those helicopter moves with her legs, flashing her pussy for them while her long legs – still encased to mid-thigh in silver stockings – swirled around.
And sometimes, I even imagined that she would pause, her legs open, her pussy just inches from someone’s face. She’d draw her slender fingers through the glistening folds of pink between her outer lips, and hold it open with two fingers at the top. “Want a taste?” she would ask.
And I didn’t stop there. I imagined lap dances in private rooms, Tennile stretching her legs open in the splits with no underwear on, letting seedy mob bosses stare at her cunt. Tennile stretching out flat on some kind of mirrored table, her head at the end of it, the long spikes of her slutty shoes in her hands, knees bent, ass in the air... and her mouth open for the cock some guy was taking out of his pants.
I sometimes tried to open the door to these fantasies with Tennile. If we got drunk, I’d ask her to dance for me. I’d gotten one striptease so far, and it was hot as hell. My plan was to get her to do that, and then start adding little elements of my fantasy. Let me lick her pussy and I could pretend I was another man. Suck my cock with some slutty heels on.
I’d just imagine the rest.
Because it was pretty fucked-up, the stuff I was thinking about.
Even I knew that.
But back to the present night, at the hotel in Key West.
I had just asked Tennile if Shane had worked at the strip club.
Tennile paused with her shoe in her hand, and she twirled it. “You know he did,” she said.
It was a strange way to answer. My suspicion radar went into high gear.
“And he was a bouncer?”
She dropped her eyes to arrange her shoes neatly at the foot of the bed. “That’s what I said.”
Another strange answer.
“It’s pretty crazy that he ran into us here,” I said. I could hear a tone in my own voice, a tone of accusation. Even I wasn’t even sure what I meant by it.
“I mean, it was bound to happen sooner or later,” Tennile said casually. “Better here than back home.” She stood up, and slipped the cover-up over her head. Beneath it she was wearing a black bikini, and I admired the view for a moment. Her breasts were small but pretty, her torso long and narrow, flaring into the soft curve of her hips. She had dressed as Jasmine the Disney Princess one year for Halloween, and she had looked the part exactly.
“Hmm,” I said. I could feel that I wanted to pick a fight. Or something. I wasn’t sure what my deal was. “So Shane the bouncer has probably seen you dance,” I said suggestively.
Tennile turned toward me and unzipped her jean shorts. She shimmied her hips and they slid down to the floor. She cocked her chin at me and kicked the shorts up to catch them in her hand. “Yeah. So what of it?” She shook the jeans out and folded them with a kind of violence that made her sexy shimmy less inviting than scary.
I was drunk. I was feeling hostile about something but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Shane had given me the creeps. And my sexy wife was standing there in her swimsuit, looking hot, and I couldn’t tell if she was pissed at me or starting some kind of invite to wild sex.
I decided to put all my money on sex, which is the reason the conversation didn’t wrap up the way it probably should have. I stepped toward her and reached out for her bikini, in the middle between her breasts where it had a ring that held the two pieces together. I was sorting out some clever thing to say, but the fabric pulled away from her breasts and flashed her nipples at me. A little line of sand was stuck to her skin on the rise of her right breast, and I brushed it away with my fingers.
Tennile reached behind her, and tugged on the straps of the suit. Her body swayed a little as it came undone, and then the whole thing slipped to the floor.
As always, even though I had been married to Tennile for six years, I was left a little speechless as I looked at the naked body of the woman I married. Her toasted skin, the faint stripe of her suit outlined over her breasts and the triangle where her pussy was shaved bare except for a landing strip of downy black hair. Her limbs were long and pleasantly shaped, toned easily by light exercise. She was beautiful, and she took my breath away.
“Well?” she said, giggling. She jumped onto the bed. “Are you just going to stare at me or what?”
She was on her knees, inviting me in, her small breasts jiggling lightly.
The sour mood that had been creeping up on me dissolved. Tennile, as always, had managed to turn things around. Her eyes were bright and beckoning as I shook myself out of my own clothes and climbed onto the bed toward her. Her body was warm and soft against mine as we met on our knees, and I kissed her. She tasted like the ocean, and we probably should have showered, but my cock was ahead of me and my hands were everywhere on her silky body.
I pushed her onto the bed and lay down next to her, a little clumsily because I was drunk. I made several passes over the length of her body, teasing her nipples, her long stomach, the inside of her thighs, and back again. I finally settled my fingers onto her gash, and slipped between her folds. She was warm, getting wet, and with just a little massaging of her clit I could feel her welling up with desire.
I used my forefinger to stroke her clit until she was rocking her hips against my hand, hungry for my cock inside of her.
It wasn’t the most creative sex, but we were past that at this point in our marriage. Her body was moist and hot when I rolled my weight onto her and my cock slid into her opened legs. I closed my eyes and absorbed the smell of her, the feel of her silky hair against my face, her hardened nipples against my chest, and her heels at the small of my back, digging in as we rocked ourselves toward a nearly simultaneous orgasm.
Tennile’s pussy shuddered around my cock first, and she gasped her delightful, almost scandalized gasp when she came. I felt her nails in my left buttock, which held me off for a little while, but soon I was filling her up with my cum, holding her thighs from the outside.
We lay face-up afterward, and Tennile found my fingers with hers, as she always did. “Goodnight,” I think she said. “I love you.”
But we were both pretty drunk – too much to even turn out the light, and before I knew it was morning and Tennile was in the shower.
In retrospect - the kind of retrospect I only dug into because of everything that was about to happen in this story – this is how Tennile’s past remained as distant as it always did. As unearthed, undiscussed, un-probed. All she had to do was beckon me, and I forgot whatever it was I had meant to ask her. We were busy people, we’d been married a while, we didn’t make love as much as we used to, as much as I’d like to.
If a woman like Tennile, a woman I loved dearly, wanted me to lie down inside of her, I wasn’t going to miss the chance.
A lot of things got swept under the rug that way. I see that now, in retrospect.
2: N O DEAL
“Jesus,” Tennile said, holding her hand over her sunglasses and looking down the dock.
I knew before I looked that I was going to see him. Something about the way she said, “Jesus,” about the persistence of the man, the way he had seemed determined to grind us all down the night before.
Of course he would have followed us, or tracked us down.
There was something else he wanted.
And there he was, strolling down the dock, his angular body moving with a half-pimp, half-thug roll. All of his energy moving in hundreds of unpredictable directions. His blonde hair was smoothed back today, and he was wearing a wet-suit.
“Look at this here,” he said, his arms open. It was then that I realized he was sober now, and had been drunk the night before. Like I said, he was the sort of guy it was hard to tell.
He walked toward
me, hand extended. “Man, I’m sorry. I forgot your name.”
Now he was all used-car salesman, a smooth-talker. All “sir,” and “man” and Southern politeness. But the snake was there beneath it.
I took his hand. “Rich,” I said.
“Rich, no Lexus,” he said, and grinned as if it were some kind of hilarious joke. He pointed at me, and then slapped me on the shoulder. “I’m sorry if I was rude last night. I was stoned as fuck. Sometimes I creep people out. I just couldn’t believe I ran into this little lady after all this time. How many years?”
Tennile was still squinting, and her mouth was forming into a tight, constricted heart-shape. This was a sign that Tennile was about to go cold-hearted assassin on your ass in a deposition.
What it meant in this context, I had no idea.
“Shane, what a surprise,” she said, a hint of sarcasm in her voice.
Shane looked to the right and extended his arm toward a boat at another dock. “That’s me,” he said. “Goin’ diving. Treasure hunting.”
We all looked over to see Ri, the silent partner from the night before, waving casually from a dinghy of a boat.
“Treasure,” Tennile repeated, her tone softened by both surprise and incredulity.
I mean, who goes hunting treasure and actually says so.
“That’s why they call it The End of The Rainbow,” Shane said, rubbing his hands together. He cocked his head to the side as though this were something we should all know.
“Honey,” I said, “our boat...”
Tennile turned to the boat, exasperated. “Well, that’s us,” she said. “Gotta go. Scuba diving. To look at fish.”
Shane talked over her last words. “You said you were a lawyer last night, that right?”
Tennile made a face that neither affirmed nor denied this.
“I happen to need a lawyer,” Shane said, as though he were musing about something. Then his voice became sharp as glass. “Contract law, right? That’s you?”
My heart picked up again. Something sinister was creeping into the conversation again. I could feel it. “Listen,” I started, but Shane cut me off. He was whittling the world down to just him and my wife, his eyes on her like a tractor beam.
Nila's Long Con: A Hotwife Adventure Page 2
