Chapter 4
MADDOX
Parking outside Gwen’s lake house, I was a bit baffled. I wasn’t hard yet. Usually on nights with her, just the anticipation had me straining against my zipper before I’d even killed the engine.
This couldn’t still be some kind of reaction to Callie, could it? Was I feeling worse about disappointing her than I thought?
No, I just had to get my head in the game. I pushed thoughts of my wife aside as I stepped out into the balmy spring evening. This really was horny weather. Perfect sex night. I just had to run with that.
Not that there was anything to worry about. In my entire life to date, there hadn’t been one night, one partner, one time, where my dick hadn’t delivered, and we sure as hell would not start having problems tonight, of all nights.
Gwen opened the door completely nude. Except for a pair of high heels, which she wore because she knew how wild that made me. The way they sent those full breasts plunging out… I couldn’t wait to get my mouth on her tits.
I stepped over the threshold, and she launched herself at me. I caught her as she wrapped her legs around my waist, kissing her with feral intensity as I carried her deeper into the house.
“It’s been too long,” I said.
“It has,” she breathed. “I’m glad I had to cancel Bryce tonight.”
That pissed me off. “I don’t want to hear about your other men,” I growled.
And at that moment, her hand groped my crotch. To my utter mortification, I watched her eyes widen in surprise at what she did not find there.
Gwen sneered. “Just his name made you shrivel up?”
Ouch. That struck me as a little mean, given my track record with her. She knew I always delivered. “I just need a drink. It’s been a stressful day.”
“Sure, a drink. I’ll grab you a beer.” Gwen pulled apart from me and smoothly walked off to the kitchen, every lithe and graceful movement calculated for maximum seduction. It seemed impossible, but there wasn’t a flaw on her. She knew just how to carry herself to drive me out of my mind.
So how was I still not responding? I was watching my physical ideal, fully nude, slinking across a room to serve me. And… nothing was happening down there? Not even half-mast? It didn’t make sense.
“I’ve also had a stressful day, dealing with Bryce,” Gwen called back, eager to punish me. “I’ve had him in my rotation as long as I’ve had you, and would you believe the bastard was never even married?”
She returned to the room with an open beer, shaking her head in frustration.
A shake that gave a slight jiggle to her breasts, which is where I tried to focus as she prattled on.
“He’s been wearing a fake wedding ring the entire time.
Can you believe that? From now on, I’m checking for tan lines.
” As she passed the beer to my right hand, she grabbed hold of my left and yanked it to her.
She slid my wedding ring up and sighed approvingly when she found the tan lines she was seeking.
“Well, glad you sent him packing,” I offered, in a bid to wrap up this unpleasant topic.
But if Gwen noticed I spoke, she didn’t show it. “I can’t believe all those hookups with him were lies! You know the only thing that turns me on is picturing lonely wives home alone and crying while their husbands are inside me! But his wife didn’t even exist! I feel so stupid.”
I was desperate to pivot to another subject. But I knew nothing about Gwen’s personality (did she have one?) or interests (maybe sex was it?). What was I even supposed to ask her about?
“And you want to hear something truly sick? The picture he’d showed me of his ‘wife’ was actually his sister!
” Gwen fell onto the couch with a groan of disgust. “People today can be so depraved. There’s no integrity anymore.
I can’t believe I wasted so many nights getting railed by a man who was available. ”
I had to end this. A newscast was barely audible from the TV in the other room, and I jumped on the fragment I overheard: “record-breaking tourism numbers in Nightshade Cove.”
“What are you watching?” I charged into her TV room before she could respond, giving her no choice but to hop up and follow.
As we entered the room, a witch from the Nightshade Cove Office of Tourism and Visitors was being interviewed on the nightly news. She was hyping up the community’s recent rebranding as the “Vegas of witchcraft,” as the chyron blazed across the screen.
“Have you ever been to Nightshade Cove?” I asked. “Maybe we should pop up there for a weekend sometime.”
“A weekend? Don’t get clingy with me, Maddox. We’re not dating.” She snatched the remote and clicked off the TV. “And no, I have never been to the witches’ tourist trap. I wouldn’t be caught dead there.”
“You’re not curious?” I kept to myself thoughts of: how could you not be? It was barely five years ago we all thought magical witchcraft was just fiction, but now witches have become so public they have their own thriving tourist destination.
Gwen’s face twisted with revulsion. “I don’t need to mingle with handmaidens of the devil. We don’t know anything about what these monsters are capable of. Does anyone even check out of their hotels? How do we know they don’t just eat their guests?”
I had a few buddies who had gone there and returned uneaten, but I didn’t think she wanted to hear that right now.
“The world was better off when witches were hidden and afraid, and we didn’t have to worry about whether the waitress might hex your food if you looked at her wrong,” Gwen finished, every syllable dripping with contempt.
This conversation revealed why it had been an excellent idea to never talk to her that much. “I just thought—”
“No.” Her lips pressed together, irritation sharp in her voice. “I don’t want to talk about witches, and I definitely don’t want to vacation with them.” She lowered her gaze and gave me a sultry look. “Now, are you ready to be a man and pound me senseless?”
At that, I downed the rest of the beer. “Hell yes.” I pulled off my shirt and stepped out of my pants, and as I wrapped my arms around Gwen, all my distracting thoughts melted away.
The senses of her overwhelmed me. The warmth of her body, the softness of her skin, the delicate scent of her perfume. It was all so intoxicating.
And yet… still dead down there. No response at all?!? Still?!?
Grinding against me, Gwen stopped hiding the impatience in her eyes. “A break for a drink doesn’t seem to have helped much, does it?”
“Getting there!” Damn. I’d heard my pitch go up on that one.
I felt a desperate urge for a quick moment to myself. That’s all I needed, just to get out of my head for a second. That would snap me out of whatever the hell this was.
I gestured at the beer I’d just finished off.
“Quick piss, and then I am ready to go.” I disentangled from her and hustled into the bathroom before I could get too clear a look at the slow-boiling anger rising in her eyes.
* * *
The minute I got the door locked, I dropped my boxer briefs and gave an accusing glare at my flaccid cock. It was just hanging there. Soft. Lifeless. And totally screwing me over!
I hung my head, studying my crotch miserably. “What’s going on, buddy? You’ve never done this before.” Oh god, did I actually say that out loud?
I wrapped my hand around myself and started stroking, trying to coax a response. Just a little manual encouragement while thinking dirty thoughts, and I’d be good to go.
But as the seconds agonizingly crawled into solid minutes of effort… I’d felt harder noodles.
Fine. New strategy.
I opened the hidden photos folder on my phone, where I collected every nude that was ever sexted to me.
So an immense database at this point. Image after image of the most gorgeous women I had ever come across (and on, and in), legs spread, or on their hands and knees, or bent over, making every sexy pose under the sun for me.
As I rapidly swiped through the images, my masturbatory imagination took me vividly back in time to each actual encounter.
The inspired cocksucking technique of Redhead Bartender.
The awed gasps that Blonde With Glasses had released when she first laid eyes on my dick.
The perkiness of Needy Secretary’s breasts.
And yet, even though I was giving my cock the most surefire strokes it knew, while flooding my brain with images of all the hottest women I’d had in my life—there was nothing happening. Nothing!
If anything, my dick was getting smaller in mortification, shriveling away into itself.
WHAT WAS HAPPENING? What did I do? This couldn’t be happening to me. This didn’t happen to me!
I twinged in pain as I gave my dick too hard of a tug. “Come on, buddy,” I whined. How could he break down on me?
Gwen picked that exact moment to begin furiously banging on the door. “Are you wasting my time tonight?”
I caught my reflection in the mirror. Nude, hunched over, underwear around my feet, hair messy and plastered to my forehead.
I had worked up a sweat trying to jerk myself to the occasion, but my dick was looking so defeated and shrunken I barely recognized it.
There was a wild, desperate, vulnerable look in my eyes.
Oh my god.
I looked like the most dickless loser who’d ever walked the face of the earth.
Gwen continued to call through the door. “If you’re not up to it tonight, I know Jeremy will be! Are you still going to be hiding in there when he gets here?”
And it was then that I had to face the most brutal truth of my twenty-nine years to date: I would not be able to perform with Gwen tonight. There was no hope. It wasn’t happening.
How could I escape from this with any dignity left? Was my only recourse to fully crawl out the window and forget I ever met Gwen? If my pants and car keys weren’t out in the living room with her, that would have been my choice.
The thought of her, or anyone, seeing me looking like this was too much to bear. This was the most debasing moment of my life, and I didn’t know how I’d ever show my face again if anyone ever saw me like this.