by Jaime Thorne
It was like that.
Jacob poured me a drink from a bottle of finely aged scotch and we sat in those chairs and relaxed in silence while we took our initial sips. A silence that we'd grown accustomed to in our decades of life together.
I winced inside of me, knowing exactly where our inevitable conversation would end up and knowing that it was so far from a place that I was comfortable with. Not that I minded locker room talk, when we had been in college swapping stories of conquests had been a part of the fun of those conquests after all, but more because I couldn't stand his approach to life.
“You're never going to believe the gift Emily got me for our anniversary,” he said, taking a moment away from his drink to smile at me with a broad smile that would have been charming if it didn't look quite so slimy, “Took my damn breath away.”
I will admit to a momentary surprise at the fact that Emily was in his story at all. I would have expected one of his mistresses, maybe Julia or Lizzy or whatever their names were. Anyone but his wife, because tales of conquest didn't usually involve those closest to us.
“I'm sorry Jacob,” I told him, “I don't know that I really want to hear about anything that you did with Emily.”
“No you don't understand Jeremy,” he said with a smile, “None of this involves any contact between Emily and myself.”
Curiosity can be a bother, it can be pesky and insistent and guide you to places you don't necessarily want to go. Oftentimes it cannot be ignored.
I gave in with a wave of my hand “Okay fine. What did she do for you?”
He grinned, leaning back in his chair and sipping deeply from his drink while talking with a look of wistful memory on his face.
“She got us some friends, one for each of us. Beautiful and young and attractive and exciting. She set the whole thing up as a surprise. Booked us a hotel suite with double beds right there in the same room and had them wrapped up as presents.”
The glass felt heavy in my hand, the drink burned a little as I took a nervous sip and pressed on for clarification, “So you slept with other people?”
“Not just slept with them,” he said, “No it was so much more than that. It was about the experience of being with her while it happened. Looking over at the bed next door to see her riding some young guy and just loving every minute of it.”
I laughed nervously, trying to keep from letting the mix of emotions show on my face.
“You don't get it, buddy,” he said, conceding to me and taking another deep draw from his drink, “I know you're all faithful and all to your Avril, and I understand and respect that. You know I do. Hell if I had a woman like that I might even keep faithful.”
He smiled at me, a grin that reminded me of the frat brother I'd known countless decades ago, “No let's be honest I wouldn't.”
“But trust me,” he continued, “Trust me when I say that you have no idea what it's like. I've slept around, admittedly a lot, and there was something different about this. Something so much more intense about it.”
“Intense?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.
“Yeah I can't really explain it,” he said, “Hell it sounds weird to me if I try to. I mean there I was fucking a woman who was probably the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in my life. I mean young and eager and enthusiastic as could be.
“But all I could do was watch my wife. Watching her fuck someone else. Watching the way that he pleasured her body, the way that he made her feel.”
Jacob trailed off, shaking his head slightly as he bit his bottom lip slightly.
Our conversation drifted away from it then, it actually did wind up on the business of all things because business was a topic we both knew that we could talk about with authority. Because it was a safe topic.
Jacob negotiated that shift in the conversation, sensing my discomfort at the topic but misreading the source entirely.
I wasn't comfortable with infidelity, but this was something different. This was something far closer to a truth for me, albeit a truth that I was anything but comfortable with.
It was the first time that I'd ever heard anything close to it spoken out loud, but I was intimately familiar with it. It was the source of many dreams and many fantasies and many private moments by myself. That fantasy was one that I had lived with for as long as I could remember having fantasies.
So I wasn't comfortable with his story, not because it made me uncomfortable but because it hit on triggers that I'd long tried to ignore.
CHAPTER TWO
AVRIL
I woke up this morning to three unread emails, two text messages, and four unanswered phone calls from numbers I didn't recognize. Rolling out of bed I swiped all of the notifications away, telling myself that I would look at them later on in the afternoon but knowing that I really wouldn't.
It had been nearly a week since that goddamn anniversary party and still Emily was sending me emails and text messages and calls about my own upcoming celebration. Hell, she'd even gone so far as to give my number out to party planners and caterers and so on top of her contacts to me I'd had to fend off countless strangers who placed unsolicited calls to me thinking that I'd asked for it all along.
I'm sure all of them thought that I was a massive bitch since I was so dismissive to them, but I guess that's just the way it goes sometimes.
My morning routine was set, waking well after Jeremy had his four in the morning start to the day and well after he'd left for the gym and then for work. I padded through our empty house in the nude, enjoying the space that we had and the luxuries that I'd come to expect in life.
Our brownstone was airy and open. It had a fullness to the space that was lovely, and I felt comfort surrounded by the things that I had chosen to surround myself with.
So many of our so-called friends had designed their spaces to showcase their wealth. Even Emily and Jacob had their whole house set out to illustrate that they came from money and power and wealth. That there was a history to their house that no one could deny to them.
I think I had been the only one, that I knew of at least, who had set out to build a place of comfort. To make a space that was livable first and aesthetically pleasing second.
Because both Jeremy and I had our priorities in order.
I could not care less about the specifics of a party that I didn't even want to throw. I could not care less about what food was served or whether or not it was a black tie affair. I didn't give a damn about any of the details, and in the end I'd task one of my husband's assistants with setting up the whole damn thing just like I always did.
None of this has anything to do with my husband, who I absolutely adore. Jeremy and I have an absolutely wonderful marriage and I truly treasure every year we spent together. I love him as much today as the day that we married, and I know that we'll keep on that path for the rest of our lives with a certainty that is core to the heart of me.
But I just wish we didn't have to spend our lives surrounded by these sort of people.
Moving from coffee to the shower I clean and dress myself, flicking on my phone long enough to note and dismiss the four new notifications that have shown up just then. I wish I could say any of this has caught me by surprise, but that would be a lie. Emily is one of many, one of hundreds or maybe even thousands of vapid and personless people that I've known in my life. Frankly I can't blame her for her choices or decisions, she just doesn't know any better.
All my life I've lived in this sort of society, in a world of expensive homes and expensive lifestyles, surrounded by the sort of opulence that others would gawp at. As terrible as it might sound I've become a bit desensitized to it, or at least... hmm how do I put this without coming across as a terrible bitch.
If you eat only the finest wagyu steak each and every night it will lose its luster. It'll become commonplace, where it should be special. It'll start to become an expectation, and will lose the grandeur that should be associated with it.
But more than just lo
sing the 'special' side of it, you'll start to become a snob for it. You'll find yourself criticizing perfectly fine meals and bemoaning things that are exceptional because they aren't as exceptional as you might imagine.
And that just makes you an asshole, believe me, I've seen more than a few of them in my time.
Not just Emily and not her jerk of a husband Jacob. No there is Celemente and Eleanor. There is Michael and Xander and all of the dozens of men and women out there who crowd those familiar rooms sipping drinks that would make normal people gawp at the prices and pretending that they're unimpressed by all of it because it's all just a big ego measuring contest to see who can be the most detached from reality.
It was a game I didn't want to play.
So I stay out of it. I don't make friends with the wives and I do little more than smile politely at the husbands. I live my own life separated from the rest of them, with my only tenuous connection to that life being through my husband Jeremy.
I make a conscious choice to detach myself from their reality because otherwise, I'd be sick to my stomach. I've long found that it's all about the choices that you make in life.
That's the lesson my family taught me.
Even this morning, heading to the gym, is a choice. I can choose between hundreds of gyms in this city, ranging from dirty and dank to upscale and ornate. All of the people in our circle go to one specific gym, a location where they slowly walk on their elliptical machines to give the illusion of exercise, but where breaking a sweat is almost certainly a banworthy action.
The gym for them is not about exercise, it's about putting in the time to be seen. It's about making the right impression and making sure that everyone knows that you were there. It's about a lie by omission, refusing to let people who you said were your friends see your vulnerability because those people aren't your friends they are your direct competition.
The truth is that working out is ugly, and so they see it as something to do in privacy. All of those women hire personal trainers to work them out at home instead, letting them have the exercise they need to keep up appearances but also letting that exercise happen without any prying eyes.
And then, of course, there is the added bonus that most of them are fucking their personal trainers.
None of that appealed to me, I didn't care what other people thought of me and I didn't really want to have to double my time working out. Not that I didn't like being in shape, but I just had other and more important things to be spending my time doing.
And as for infidelity the thought honestly never even crossed my mind. I love my husband, and I am firmly and truly committed to him and to our marriage. I'd seen the slow destruction of lives around us from cheating, the way it became an 'accepted part of doing business' and it made me sick to my stomach. I didn't want to be one of those couples.
One of those couples who smiles and pretends that everything is just fine. One of those couples that let the world rock and roil around them and smiles through it all, even though they know that everything is falling apart.
It doesn't matter if it's a year or ten or thirty, it will come to an end. That unspoken truth will grow and grow until it's too much to manage and then it will tumble forward and ruin everything. Their lives will fall apart and they won't know how to deal with it.
I couldn't become one of those people. I was determined not to.
My gym was two things: close and simple. It was close enough that I didn't need to drive halfway across town to get to it, close enough that I could actually walk. It was simple in its approach, the primary focus being getting and maintaining bodies rather than free juice bars or a picturesque setting.
The clientele here as well was focused on getting in shape as their primary goal. People sweat here, they worked hard here. They didn't treat this as a club or a place to have fun, it was a place to work.
But of course, that doesn't mean that people don't get distracted.
I know enough about myself to know that people find me attractive. It's been a factor my whole life, why wouldn't it continue to be a factor? Especially considering I was in the best shape that I'd ever been in.
So walking into the gym I could see heads turn. I could see men all around me watching me walk through the space and take up my place on the treadmill. I kept my eyes forward and outwardly I didn't show a single sign that I'd reacted at all, but inwardly I was smiling.
Smiling at the way they tried to hide it, but the way their initial reaction gave everything away. Head on a swivel watching me pass. Eyes wide for a moment before they were able to recover. Returning to their exercise with renewed effort, this time posing and making sure to preen just a little to try to get me to notice them as they had noticed me.
It was flattering, even if I wasn't going to react to it. Even if I was going to let it pass by without seizing any opportunity that didn't mean that I didn't notice the opportunities. It didn't mean that I didn't do my whole workout with them in mind.
Because I too was posing and preening. I wasn't giving any outward reaction but I was breathing deeply of the musk of manliness in the gym and making sure to let my sweat linger on my skin to leave it glistening. I was letting them see everything in me and all of me.
People say that exercise is a type of meditation, and I guess in a way that it was for me as well.
Not that regular sort of clear mind and focused body sort of meditation. No mine was a meditation on a subject, considering and imagining it from all particular angles and sides until I'd examined it thoroughly.
And my examinations always fell firmly into the realm of fantasy, a world much like the one that I was in. I was there and so were all of the occupants of the gym, all of us breathing hard with our firm bodies heaving just as we were now, but just with far less clothing and far more physical contact.
The fantasies would consume me so much that by the time my exercise was done I would be gasping for air, partly because just like always I'd pushed myself to my very limit but also because of my thoughts. Knowing how wrong they were but choosing to seek them out all the same.
And as I took a long drink of water at the end of my exercise I'd always let that cool down my head and bring me back down to earth. I'd tell myself that fantasy is fantasy and reality is reality.
It's fine to imagine something fun, what crosses the line is when you try to make that fun a reality.
Or at least that was the way that I would justify it.
CHAPTER THREE
JEREMY
I was lying in bed waiting for her, my fingers nervously tying up the bedsheets as I ran through my argument and tried to make sure that I'd be making a compelling case to her. I knew that this was crossing a line and that terrified me. I knew that all of this was so very fucked up to even consider, but I didn't see that I had any other choice.
Since that day of the anniversary when Jacob had pulled me into his study to talk, I couldn't get the idea out of my head. It had festered and grown into a voice that consumed my every waking hour. Waking or sleeping I was thinking about the possibility that I could make this a reality.
For Jacob, it had been a novelty at first. Then at his insistence, that novelty had become a regular occurrence. It had been only two weeks since their anniversary party, but probably two months since that first encounter and they had pursued it again and again during that whole span of time.
And not just pursued it but expanded it. Their sessions had become more and more frequent, with participants that were varied at first but gradually settled into a specific few and then narrowing down to just two.
And the activities had changed as well, starting with the two of them separately engaging with their new partners and then shifting to focus on all of them together before ultimately separating again.
But lately it had all taken a shift to an entirely new direction, entirely by accident.
In the most recent session, the woman who was meant for Jacob hadn't been able to attend. She'd been caught with the
flu or had to go out of town or something along those lines. Jacob wasn't entirely clear about the specifics but what he was clear about was the timing, specifically that it was far too late to cancel things outright.
I think he was using it as a justification for what came next, either to myself or just to himself, because they pressed on regardless.
Three people in a hotel room. Jacob and Emily and her lover, a handsome young man named Roger that Emily was particularly excited about.
If you're wondering how I knew about any of this it was because Jacob liked to tell me these stories. Because he'd corner me in my office under the pretense of a private meeting between the owners and he'd let me in on every single detail.
Before the anniversary party all these stories had been about some hot young woman he'd picked up on a business trip. He'd tell me about how she bent for him when he brought her back to his hotel room. How she knelt for him and devoted her slim and trim young body to servicing his every need. He would tell me about how she would give herself to him fully, never satisfied until he was satisfied.
But after the party it had all been stories of his wife and him exploring things together, two or three times per week he'd tell me these things. Telling me how it was changing their marriage, breathing new life into what was previously dull and making him excited to go home at night again. How it made him see his wife in a whole new light.
He told me about this particular story three days ago, and the memory of it has been so firmly seared into my brain that I couldn't forget a single detail.
“It was awkward at first,” he had told me, “Walking into the room and explaining to Roger what the plan was, how it was going to have to be adjusted. He'd been with us a few times, that weekend upstate was with him, so he was familiar with a particular scenario but this took a bit of adjustment.”
Jacob was leaned up with his back against the door to my office while he spoke, his head laid back against it and his eyes staring off out my window into the sky. He had a wistful sort of look in his eyes, a look driven by a fond remembrance.
