She told the lie with such ease, such a convincing tone to her voice, that for a moment I almost believed it. “Uh... okay. I will... just make myself dinner.”
“Sweetie, I'm sorry,” Tennile said. “I just.. this stuff comes up sometimes.”
The bitch!
“That's okay. I guess I'll have Jiang's since you're out.”
“Ugh,” she said. “I'm so tired of that place.”
Of all the things she said in this conversation, that, oddly enough, this was the one that bothered me the most. That she could be so casual in this conversation, and talk about something so trivial as Jiang's food and how she was tired of it, scathed me to my core.
“I won't get you any, then,” I said bitterly.
She gave a slight snort of disbelief, and sarcastically retorted, “Okay fine, then, don't. Listen, I have to go, I just wanted to leave you a quick message and let you know I'll be late.”
“How late?”
She sighed. “Rich... I don't know. Late. These things are just...” She sounded exasperated. “I gotta go. Love you.”
And she ended the call. Just like that.
I stared at the phone, as though it had swallowed up not just her voice but everything I had ever thought about my wife and sealed it in another universe.
“Boss!” Corey called again.
I looked over at him. He was shaking his head, holding his hands up, palms outward, in that universal gesture of “this fuckin' guy isn't listening to me, it's a no-go.”
The phone buzzed in my hand.
I looked down at the message, an outgoing message, a message from my wife to the mysterious phone number.
[Me]: arranged. usual place and time.
“Boss?!” I followed Corey, that disconnected feeling coming over me again. My mind was miles away while I negotiated with Cimex. The words from her message floated through my head: arranged, usual... so she had been doing this for a while now, had a regular place.
And the tone. Again that same transactional tone.
In a way I was happy: my wife was perhaps having the affair solely for the purposes of having sex. Maybe Shane was that good, so good she had remembered it all when she saw him and decided to get what she needed from him. Maybe I wasn't satisfying her anymore (we had been married for six years, after all). Maybe I never satisfied her. Maybe Shane had a really huge cock (he certainly acted like a man who did) and she couldn't help herself.
Instead of making me entirely miserable, which is what all of these thoughts should have done, if I had been a normal man, they were instead making me aroused again. I wanted to pursue them, I was desperate to pursue them.
I wanted to catch my wife in the act. I didn't like it, and there would definitely be an emotional hell to pay, damage to our marriage, things to talk about ad nauseum and late at night with red, puffy eyes. Maybe I couldn't even forgive her.
But I wanted to catch her. I wanted to see her. I was excited by the idea of actually seeing her with Shane. Seeing her professional, lawyerly attire next to his grungy... whatever he wore. To see her smooth, unblemished skin against his tattooed, rough body.
And my intellect – the part of me that knew that this damaged the trust we had in our marriage, perhaps forever, the part of me that knew there would be a long road ahead to heal what this was breaking – just couldn't smother the carnal side of me that was looking forward to it. The side of me that felt like an adolescent who just kissed a girl for the first time as I practically ran off the job-site, disregarding my personal safety, fumbling with my keys and my phone and arranging things in my car so I could follow my wife to wherever she was going, whenever she decided to go there. My pulse was rapid and I was sweating as I drove off the site. I was high as a kite.
I ended up going to Jiang's after all, because of course my wife's plans for infidelity did not magically align with my discovery of them. I ate in the car after driving to a side street a few blocks from her law firm, my phone on my seat, checking her position on GPS every five seconds.
I was prepared to throw my fried rice across the car if necessary to follow her. I'd been warned by TrapHer's website that the GPS was only accurate to 100-250 meters, so I'd have to follow her if I wanted to see where she actually went.
But time moved slowly on, and my wife's blip didn't move on the screen. She sent two text messages and disregarded three incoming calls, but that all seemed to be business-related.
And then she sent another message to the number (that I was assuming was Shane):
[Me]: be there in 15
I started the car and pulled onto the street her firm let out to. A parallel space, only partially illegal in the vicinity of a fire hydrant, was there for me as though I were in a movie and the whole thing were choreographed. I waited, and sure enough her car rolled out.
Annoyingly, she was going the opposite direction from the way I was parked. I had to sweat through oncoming traffic for what seemed like an eternity in order to flip around, and then I was caught at a red light while the blip representing my wife blinked down the road.
There would be other chances, I reminded myself, if I missed her.
This was an ongoing affair.
I probably wasn't going to get to see what I wanted to see this time anyway.
I pounded on the steering wheel with the palm of my hand.
Finally the red light disappeared and I lurched into the street, my eyes on my phone and not the traffic. Following her, downtown.
Spying on my wife.
I followed her for thirty harrowing minutes. She headed into the downtown corridor.
She parked about two blocks away from a Hilton. Parallel to the street, leaving me with no option but to pass her, in the far right lane, close to where she was digging into her purse for something.
I looked directly at her window, maybe hoping she would look up and see me. That I could see an expression of shock, her shame at being found out, and all of it before she went into the hotel and this was all so real.
But she didn't look up. And then I remembered that she had been carrying on like this for some time.
How long, I wondered? How much of a fool was I?
I cursed at the lack of parking spaces, turned a corner by the hotel, found none there, and finally, desperately, turned into the Hilton's parking lot, hoping that my car would be taken by the staff as the vehicle of a registering guest just long enough for me to...
What? What was I going to do?
I looked down at my phone. The blip that was my wife had not moved, but then I supposed that was because of the accuracy problem. Still... it was blinking on the map two blocks away from the Hilton, right where she had parked.
I went into the lobby, my mind grappling with all of my immediate problems at once: one, my car; two, my wife not moving; and finally, just what the hell I thought I was going to do. Hide behind a tree?
The rich interior of the Hilton, newly renovated according to the signs in the lobby, sent a knife straight to my heart. I had pictured something seedier, something less classy... something that Shane had paid for. A dirty motel I could peek into from the balcony.
My high-class wife slumming it a little.
Not this.
I looked at the phone.
I blinked.
The blip representing my wife had not only not moved any closer to the Hilton, it was actually moving away.
I stood in the lobby, staring at the screen. It was so unexpected that it paralyzed me for a moment. Like anyone, I suffer from having trouble shaking a conviction, but I'm usually capable of it. It's part of my job to change direction all the time.
Moving away, I remember standing there thinking.
And then I realized: I was going to miss her if I didn't get going.
I forced my legs to work, stormed out into the street. The light was fading, it was nearly nighttime now.
I was no longer thinking of how I would not be seen. I was driven then by curiosity, a desire to catch her,
to win the game I had created inside my own mind.
There were a lot of people milling around on the wide sidewalk, window-shopping, smoking cigarettes outside of the bars that lined the street. The evening was just getting going; all the women were smiling, looking pretty, maybe one and a half glasses into their wine.
I started to get a sinking feeling as I walked along, listening in on the snippets of conversations, watching the faces of the women smiling at men, standing close to them, inching closer.
Not this, I thought. It was fine to imagine her in a hotel room, fine to imagine that she had some obsession with his physique or his bad-boy tattoos, fine to think that she was having a purely carnal affair.
Well, not fine, just... this was worse. Was she meeting Shane for dinner? Would she lean her elbows on the table and push back her hair from her glittering eyes, teasing him by crossing her long legs at an angle as she did? Would she be bright and attentive at the other side of a little table, her fingers playing with each other, her lips shining with fresh lipstick, her mouth broken into her sensual smile?
My heart was plummeting already, straight through my body, when I saw her: her hair was still up tidily in her lawyer up-do. She was wearing a gray suit, and it was sexy because all things were sexy on her. It was a form-fitting dress with a long jacket that went over it, one I had seen before.
She opened a door, entering a restaurant.
She was maybe 100 meters ahead of me: I hadn't known that because of all the people between us. I stopped awkwardly, lunging at a newspaper machine and fishing into my pocket for a quarter even though the machine was empty and newspapers haven't been for sale for twenty-five cents since before I was born.
My heart was pounding.
She had gone into a restaurant.
Really? I could almost hear myself confronting her now. Now my fantasies were fading away into a simple rage. Really, Tennile? Dinner, with that guy?
My heart ached.
But I needed proof. I needed to see it.
I wanted to see it, as perversely as I wanted to see them together, fucking.
I looked up at the sky. Clouds had moved in, trapping the city light beneath them. A greenish hue, sort of wildly sick-colored the way I felt, was building up in the air.
I turned abruptly, cutting off a pedestrian who breathed through her nose angrily at me. I walked toward the door my wife had opened. To my left the restaurant's huge windows, open to the night air, probably allowed my wife to see me, but I didn't care.
Inside, the restaurant was dark. Intimate. The people inside were huddled over small tables, crammed close to each other. A Cuban theme on the interior surprised me, disoriented me: I had been expecting a drab, modernist hipster bar. A hostess had to push the fronds of a fat fern out of her way to reach me.
She looked at me, her impatience radiating from her.
I was scanning the restaurant, looking for Tennile's gray dress.
“Are you meeting someone?” the hostess asked me, taking a menu from below the pulpit she was standing behind.
“I... no. Just, it's just -”
I found Tennile. She was crammed into a corner, sitting as I had expected her to sit. Her legs were crossed, slightly off to the side, so her narrow shins were lined up next to each other. They ended in sexy black pumps, both pointed neatly at the same angle as her legs.
In front of her, with his back to me, was the unmistakable greasy mop of Shane's hair.
I felt cold overtake me, steeling me, reducing me to the same calm state I had been in when I had installed the TrapHer app on Tennile's phone.
I looked at the hostess, and my expression must have been stern, because she was instantly cowed.
“I need a table,” I said calmly. “But I need it in a specific place. There's a woman over there, in a gray dress, and she's my wife. She's with another man and I want to spy on her.”
I had my hands in my pockets. My voice sounded strange to me.
The girl looked at me in disbelief for a few seconds, and then she turned around and surveyed the restaurant.
“I have just the thing,” she said. “But you have to wait.”
And she waved me toward the enormous fern.
She was excited, complicit. I think she even winked at me.
I turned my head slowly to look at Tennile through the fern.
The situation was so ridiculously cartoonish I had to stifle a laugh.
At first.
From where I was standing, I was now looking at Tennile more dead-on.
Her mouth was in a tight shape, her lips pressed together. She wasn't smiling, and her eyes were not alive with wonderment or acceptance. She looked nothing like I had imagined.
In fact, I thought, one might even go so far as to say she looked... businesslike.
She was not leaning in to the table, trying to catch Shane's every word.
I was starting to lean deeply into the fern. I leaned back, staring at the scene.
Tennile had her hand on a piece of paper, and she was tapping her finger against it. Her mouth was moving now, her eyes meeting Shane's across the table, but not in a way that made them look connected like lovers.
What if I had been wrong? What if Tennile was only here in her capacity as a lawyer?
“Okay,” the hostess said, popping up next to me. She slid some menus into her pulpit. “The people who are there are paying right now. It's a seat on the other side of the fish tank.”
The remnants of my sense of humor, though tattered, found this highly amusing in spite of myself.
And that's how I found myself sitting next to a fish tank, peering into it, twisting my neck to look over at my wife with Shane.
I ordered a beer and something random from the appetizer menu to get the waitress out of my hair, As I had walked to my table, Tennile had gone from stern and professional to leaning closer to Shane, her elbows on the table. The water distorted her face; I couldn't tell if her expression was the same, or now more alluring.
I felt myself plunging again on the roller-coaster ride of my emotions. Then flying high. Shane's arm extended across the table to where Tennile's was. My heart felt as though he wringing it out with his wiry strength.
Was he touching her? It was hard to see through the water of the fish tank.
There were many ways to view what I was seeing through the fish tank, and I was unsurprised by myself but a little dismayed that I chose to see Tennile's face as smiling, their hands as touching. I pictured it with such detail that I felt I could actually see his pointer finger making a circle on the top of her hand. Her body trembled as his touch reached through her, the circles on her hand echoed between her moist pussy lips, her mind wandering to how it would feel when his tongue moved over the hard center of her clit.
A fat yellow fish drifted in front of me, blocking my view.
I glared at it and hissed, like it was a cat who would scram. The fish's eye stared at me, unmoved by my anger. His disc-shaped body moved slowly, slowly from my view.
They seemed even closer now. Tennile had leaned in, and she was looking into Shane's eyes with intensity.
I couldn't see that, of course. I couldn't see how she was looking at him really, but my cock was getting hard thinking about what I wanted to see.
Would they kiss over the table here? Were they going to share their food and be cutesy like a couple?
The yellow fish made a turn, and I sat back in my chair and rubbed my neck as he went by. I didn't want to get caught by looking beneath him or over him. It was too undignified, no matter how hard it was to wait for him to move.
The bright yellow blob seemed to suspend himself for half an hour in my way, his little fins flickering.
I stared in front of me, my mind racing.
How could she do this to me, to our marriage?
Why was she eating with him, holding his hand over the table, letting him stroke her hand like that? And dinner? Conversation? With that guy? I could understand the carnal passi
on, the desire to be fucked in some animalistic way or the appeal of doing something naughty.
But this aspect of it I could not get my head around. Going to dinner made it more like a real affair, the kind of affair that could end with her leaving me.
My beer arrived. The fish moved slowly away, and Tennile's face, then Shane's, came into view. She was no longer leaning toward him. She was sitting back in her chair, arms crossed, her body language hard to read. An untouched glass of water was in front of her. Shane was drinking a beer.
I took out my phone.
I must have expected that she wouldn't answer, because I had no plan for what I was going to say. She removed her phone from her purse, and looked at it. When she frowned and swiped away the call with her thumb, I could practically feel her finger swiping over my chest.
Then my heart dropped again as their figures rose, and with them their voices, floating over the low din of the other customers.
Tennile: “...car's out front on Seventh.”
Shane: “Let me get the check then, pretty lady.”
I scrunched a little to keep myself blocked as they went over to the bar, where the waitress rung them up. Tennile stood with her jacket folded over her hands. Her slender figure looked great in spite of the sack-like contours of the gray dress. Her tan legs and toned arms contrasted nicely.
She still had her hair up, though.
I watched as they crossed the room. Shane held the door open for Tennile and watched her ass as she walked through.
I could see her face clearly now, and she looked almost plastic. Not annoyed, or happy, or sad. Just completely frozen in a nothing expression.
A wisp of hope joined the other feelings churning in my chest.
I could be misreading this -
Fuck.
Fuck, I realized just then that they were leaving.
Together.
Going to her car.
I looked around in desperation for my waitress.
Nila's Long Con: A Hotwife Adventure Page 7
