Becoming His Mistress

by Murphy, A. E.

  She doesn’t deny it, she just stares at me, chest heaving, nostrils flaring.

  “I’m in love with your son, I know how we’ve gone about it is wrong but it’s not changing, and I don’t want to lose the friendship we had. You might hate me now, but I plan on being with him for a really long time—”

  “Funnily enough,” she says around a sardonic laugh, “his wife said the same thing.”

  I gasp when my warm latte hits me in the face.

  She threw my drink at me.

  She actually just threw my drink at me.

  As I blink in shock she stands and throws a few bills on the table.

  “Affairs never last, he’ll be back with Elizabeth before the year ends and you’ll be the disloyal harlot that never was.” She clutches her purse and walks away from me as I wipe my face with a napkin.

  Need to shower.

  I dig my fingernails into my palms.

  “Are you okay?” somebody from a few tables away asks as I gather myself, trying not to sob like a baby.

  I nod and scarper back to my car as quickly as my jellified legs can get me there.

  Izabella is a fierce Italian woman and is protecting her own. I just can’t help but feel how unfair this is that I’m getting all the blame and losing all the people I love. But then doesn’t that just describe my entire life to date?

  “Ezra?” I cry once in the safety of my vehicle. My hands twist the steering wheel, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth…

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Your mom knows, she just threw a drink in my face.”

  “What?” His tone is deep and dangerous, and I hear his chair squeak in the background. I should really oil that. I keep saying I will.

  “And I lied to her, for you, and she hates me. She’ll never forgive me.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Kennewick’s Café’s parking lot.”

  “Okay, I’m coming.”

  “No… no… it’s okay, you’ve got a lot to do,” I reply, sniffling unattractively. “I’m just going to go home and shower.”

  “I said I’m coming. Stay there.”

  Fifteen minutes later, he shows up, abandoning his car across three empty spaces and pulling my coffee-soaked self into his body. He cups my face after a moment which is clean for the most part and kisses every inch of it.

  “This will not happen again, I swear it,” he whispers, hugging me tighter than he ever has. “Don’t cry, you’re breaking me.” His lips touch my temple and his hand cradles the back of my head. “I will deal with this.”

  I don’t tell him not to because I don’t have the energy to argue with him right now. Instead I climb into his car, trusting him to deal with the other and wait for him to click me in. He kisses my lips as he leans around me and then puts the car in gear.

  He takes me home, keeping his hand on me the entire ride. I can see the tension in his jaw and around the soft lines of his eyes.

  When we enter our building, he winks at me, his lips not quite making a smile, and when we enter our apartment, he peels me out of my clothing and helps me into the shower.

  I hold his naked, wet chest, keeping my cheek against it as his hands roam up and down my back. We shower together, washing each other and staying connected in some way throughout the entire sensual process.

  He’s just everything to me and I’m not sure if he knows it.

  “Nobody believes that you love me, do they?” I say quietly when he sits me on the side of the bed in a fluffy towel while padding to the closet with his own towel around his waist. My heart is a dull murmur in my chest. I have never felt so defeated and stepped on. “She thinks you’re going to get bored of me soon and leave me to go back to Elizabeth.”

  He turns back to me and just looks at me for the longest time. “Does it matter what anybody else thinks?”

  “Yes, because that’s your mom and if we’re going to get married and have lots of little Italian-looking babies, then I need a good relationship with her. Now I’m never going to have one. Your family will only ever see me as the woman who sabotaged your marriage and Izabella will never trust me again. I lied to her.”

  “But you didn’t ruin my marriage and we all make mistakes,” he insists, pulling me up to stand before him. My towel drops to the ground, so he bends, picks it up and kisses my tight stomach on the way up. “I didn’t realize how stale my marriage was until you.”

  “Isn’t that what all married couples say when they have an affair?”

  “Perhaps there’s a reason for that in some of those cases,” he grumbles, wrapping me in a towel cocoon and holding me to his chest. My hands are trapped between us and the soft material that smells like roses. “Do you want to know the truth?”

  “Do I not know it already?”

  “No, we haven’t spoken about Elizabeth…”

  “Because it’s not my business.”

  “But maybe it should be. The other night my wife threatened to kill herself, a ploy to get me close.” I tense at his words, feeling horrified that anybody could be capable of such madness. “She threw herself at me again, like the last time, and I turned her down. It was then that I fully realized something.” He pulls the towel from my head, letting my wet hair fall into a spiral over my shoulder. “My wife didn’t work, didn’t decorate, had no hobby outside of shopping and visiting spas and going for coffee with her friends. She never had time for me and hardly had time for our daughter.”

  That makes me sad to know but I already kind of knew it was the case.

  “She never just dropped down on her knees and took me in her mouth and she always rejected me when I tried to do the same to her. The only time we had sex anymore was in my office and that’s because she wanted you to hear. I loved her, I still do, I loved her, and I was attracted to her, but our levels of passion were never aligned.”

  He squeezes me again, grinding his hardened cock against my groin. I hold back a whimper, wishing we could end this conversation and just fuck. I don’t want to hear about him and his wife.

  “I saw that passion in other people who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves. And I realized that’s how I felt… that’s what I wanted but I just couldn’t coax her into it. I wasn’t unhappy, I accepted it for what it was and moved on.” He smiles sadly and kisses the end of my nose.

  “But then I found you. I craved you. I hungered for you. I felt the type of passion and desperation that I’d been looking for.” His eyes darken and his hands grip my rear squeezing it until it almost hurts. “I fucked my wife over my desk and pretended she was you. It’s the only place I could get hard anymore. She started noticing that my interests were drifting, I couldn’t help it, but I couldn’t get hard for her anymore. Except in the office, and even then, it was stale. The sex was just sex. The hardest I’d come in months since seeing you in that red dress in Houston was the moment you walked through the door and caught me fucking my wife.”

  My breath catches at his admission and moisture pools between my thighs.

  “I saw your eyes, your startled look, your perfect fucking lips parting as though beckoning me to push my cock between them, and I came so hard and so fast. In my wife.”

  I close my eyes, remembering that moment. This is making me so hot when it shouldn’t be.

  He continues, his voice soft, “Does that make me a terrible person? Fuck yes. But I know that even if you leave me, I will still want you and not my wife. This isn’t right what we have but we have it and everybody will get over it. I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to lose this. I refuse. I love you, tesoro mio.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “My treasure,” he replies, pressing his forehead to mine. “Robert was wrong what he said about me ever being in love with Elizabeth. I have never felt like this about anybody except Maria and that’s a different kind of love.”

  “Obviously.”

  He smiles with his eyes and I lose myself in thei
r perfection, not needing to count the flecks and shards because he makes me forget about counting and my anxieties.

  “I would give my life for you, cuore mio, and I wouldn’t have to think about it.”

  “You hardly know me.”

  “I know you.”

  “You d—”

  “I know you,” he insists, giving me a pointed look. “I don’t know everything about you, but I know enough to know that I want to be with you. Don’t you feel the same?”

  “You know I do.”

  “Then let’s keep going as we are. I will deal with my family. They will come around and all will work out for the best.”

  “Promise?”

  “I do. I’m not walking away from this, Rose. I’m not walking away from you.”

  I kiss his chin, smiling when his growing mustache tickles my nostril. “Were you serious about that trip away?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Then let’s do it.”

  “I will make the arrangements.”

  At that, I snort and raise my brows.

  “Okay, I will have my beautiful PA make the arrangements.”

  “Figured as much.” I drop the towel and pull away his. “We have time, right?”

  Grinning, he throws me backwards onto the bed making me squeal and then covers my body with his.

  We have the most amazing sex as always and lie together in each other’s arms soon after. Sweaty and panting, but sated and relaxed.

  “We’re going to tell people we’re dating,” he says suddenly and my heart stops. “No more keeping you in the shadows like some dirty secret.”

  “What?”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  He makes me feel beautiful. So beautiful.

  This week has been all about those confessions and being honest but telling Laurie over cookie dough might not have been my best idea.

  She drops her loaded spoon onto the table, her mouth hanging open. I’ve never seen her so still. For a moment I worry I might have shocked the tics right out of her.

  “YOU’RE FUCKING YOUR BOSS?” she shrieks, finally coming out of her awake-comatose state.

  Everybody looks our way… she was that loud.

  “Shhh.” I flick a bit of ice cream at her face from my spoon. “There are children present.”

  She searches the room with her wide eyes and gaping mouth. I don’t think she’s breathing.

  “Do you hate me?”

  She sits back and covers her face with her hands, eyes peeking through gaps in her fingers.

  We sit like this forever, letting ice cream melt and cookie dough cool as she practices a certain stillness that she never has been able to before.

  “Do you hate me?”

  “No,” she blurts, letting both palms hit the table. “How could I hate you? I’m surprised. I was not expecting that at all. Truth be told I was worried you were going to get back with Pax, so this is actually a bit of relief.”

  “Eww. No way.”

  “Exactly… I guess… One, I’m jealous. Two, Mrs. Cuntyflaps is on my shit list, so I don’t care. I’m just glad you fucked her husband before I did purely to piss her off.”

  “Not funny.”

  “It kind of is.” She stifles her smile with the tips of her fingers. “I mean you’ve had office sex… you. With your married boss. Nuh-uh. No way. You never did.”

  “Why is that so hard to believe?”

  “You didn’t lose your virginity until college and you cried for two weeks after. You wouldn’t kiss boys on the mouth because it’s gross. You passed out when we watched porn together as teens.”

  “It was anal,” I hiss, glaring at her. “It freaked me out.”

  “ACHOOO!” she yells and then shakes her head violently. She didn’t sneeze, she just had a big tic release. She must have really been stifling herself.

  “Oh God no, you’re not starting that one again, are you?” I ask, frowning. It’s the only tic of hers that I struggle to deal with because it makes me jump. It’s such a loud and aggressive sound. She said it constantly for about four months once. It was hell for me because we lived together back then, but worse for her of course because it really held her back.

  “ACHOOO!” she goes again, this time both of her arms fly up. She bangs one of them on the underside of the table.

  I laugh and rub it for her. “You good?”

  “I’m just startled by this information. Good girl Rose, my little flower, my virginal nun buddy…”

  “Okay, I was never that bad.”

  “You fainted at the sight of anal sex.”

  “At that point I didn’t even know what real sex was,” I whisper.

  “ANAL SEX IS A TREE-HUGGING WEIRDO!”

  I press my lips together. “Is it really?”

  Her hands go up again as do her nerves when everybody turns our way and a woman at the table to the right of us snarls, “Do you mind?”

  “MIND MATTERS AND THE BUM PEAS!”

  “Cool band, bro,” I say, still trying not to laugh.

  “What is wrong with you?” the woman hisses, and I see Laurie’s face fall.

  “She has Tourette’s syndrome, she can’t help it,” I explain, a warning bite to my tone.

  The woman, sensing my willingness to stick an ice cream in her face, looks at her friend with a roll of her eyes, but her friend is smiling kindly and mouths an apology our way.

  “Fuck her husband while you’re on a roll too,” Laurie says way too loudly, pointing her thumb at the woman with a stick up her ass.

  “Okay, let’s go,” I say, standing and now I’m definitely laughing.

  “So…” Laurie hooks her arm through mine as we go. I can feel her constantly twitching and wonder if she forgot her meds this morning. “What’s he like?”

  “I’m not talking about it.” My cheeks are heating when I think of how he had me on the kitchen worktop just this morning. I lose all inhibitions with him, but I suppose that’s what’s supposed to happen.

  He has been so good to me since what happened with his mom. He yelled at her over the phone in Italian, I even heard him curse a couple of times. But whatever was said he didn’t bring it back to the bedroom, he just let it go and we cooked dinner together after going grocery shopping. Since he made the decision to tell his wife… ex-wife… whatever she is, he’s been more brazen with our outings.

  They’re getting together after their first divorce hearing next week and he’s going to tell her then. After they’ve resolved childcare issues, he wouldn’t put it past her to use Maria as a weapon, something that absolutely cannot happen.

  I’m scared but also excited because this is the end of all the sneaking. We can now be open about our feelings for each other. And true to his word, Ezra has funded a week break for us. I’m disappointed that we can’t take Maria but it’s understandable. It’s too soon for that and Ezra is spending the following week alone with her anyway. I’ll be going back to work that week and taking over his job too which means double pay, woohoo.

  “So, you definitely don’t hate me?” I ask Laurie, just to confirm.

  “No, I don’t hate you. You’re too nice to hate. You maybe shouldn’t have fucked a married man, but you don’t know the bitch, you don’t owe her anything and she was always a massive cunt to you anyway.”

  I hug her arm and sigh. “I just don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

  “Meh. Life hurts. Just guard your heart. I know he’s adamant he’s leaving but if I had a quarter for every time a married man actually leaves his wife for the mistress… I’d have less money than I have now.”

  “I’m not worried about that.”

  “You probably should, if only a little, just to prepare in case.”

  Maybe she’s right. But I feel like I stressed myself out enough over all of the worrying I did before.

  “Stop it,” she admonishes, pulling me to a halt in the busy street. “I can see you panicking but you need to stop. You’re not a bad person. You’ve fall
en in love and so did he. That’s a beautiful thing. Focus on that part of it, okay? You have a man that loves you enough to yell at his own mother to defend you. That’s fucking huge. ACHOOOOO!”

  I pull her in for a hug because that’s exactly what I needed to hear from her. “I love you, Laurie. Family until we die.”

  “Duh.” She leans back. “Are you on birth control?”

  “I’m almost twenty-five. Of course, I’m on birth control.”

  “Good. Me too.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  Her head twitches to the side and she startles a man passing us by shrieking, “STOP LOOKING AT MY CAR!”

  “The fuck?” he whispers, eyes wide as he passes us sideways.

  “Babe, you don’t have a car.”

  “Shut up.”

  I pull her along, giggling as I go.

  * * *

  “Happy birthday, handsome,” I say, kissing his cheek and then his ear.

  He groans and stretches when I move away to grab the breakfast tray that I placed on the nightstand.

  “It was my birthday two weeks ago,” he responds but is still smiling.

  “Duh,” I reply, waiting for him to sit up and rub his eyes before I rest the tray on his lap. “But I didn’t get to see you, so I figured I’d surprise you when you least expected it.”

  “You certainly have,” he murmurs, tilting his head back for a kiss.

  He yawns and sips the coffee I made for him, yanking on a lock of my hair when I neaten the square plate on his tray, so it lines up perfectly with all the edges. “You’ve been anxious since what happened with my mom.”

  “Can you blame me?”

  “No. But I hate to see you so clearly agitated all the time.”

  “I’m sorry.”