2. Giving It Up
two
Giving It Up
Afew weeks later Wendy had a week-long conference, the kind she always came home from talking about commission and bad hotel coffee.
At the curb I said it again, the proposition I’d been making since the kitchen kiss: if Steve flirted, she could take him up on it.
She gave me the usual brush-off and a kiss that tasted like airport gum and the waxy gloss she’d put on in the car.
“Nothing’s going to happen,” she said. “That’s not on my agenda for the week.”
I watched her walk into security with her rolling bag and those tits put away under a travel blouse, looking like every other married woman on an early flight.
I went home to a quiet house that felt like a verdict.
She had said no, but the silence was already telling a different story.
I sat on the couch with a hard-on and an empty evening, caught in the hollow certainty that I was losing a contest I had arranged.
* * *
The next morning I didn’t get my usual call. That was the first wrong note. Wendy checked in when she traveled; it was one of her small decencies. I pictured her sick. I pictured her under him. I sat with both pictures long enough to feel ashamed of my hunger for the second one, then I called.
She answered quietly. Not her voice. Not the bright, slightly wicked one she used on me when she was fine.
“What’s wrong?”
A long pause. Hotel HVAC and nothing else. Then she spoke, her voice soft. “You know how you keep saying you want me to sleep with Steve when he flirts?”
My guts went hollow and my cock went hard in the same second. It wasn’t pride, not some victory for us to toast later. It was sickness and need twisted together, a truth I couldn’t unfeel.
I forced the word out.
“Yes. I want you to.”
Silence.
“I can’t talk,” she said. “He’s in the bar. I can see him from the bathroom mirror.” A pause. “I let him walk me to my room.”
I dropped into the kitchen chair. The wood rattled the table.
“And?”
“He kissed me at the door. I pulled him in.” Her voice dropped to something I barely recognized. “I wore my ring the whole time. Thinking about you just made it worse. God. I have to go. He’s looking this way.”
“Wendy—”
The line went dead.
I sat in the kitchen with a hard-on and no details, the worst combination.
I pictured her smoothing her blouse in a hotel bathroom mirror, checking her reflection, deciding what kind of woman she was going to be.
I pictured a man at a bar waiting for a married woman to come back from a phone call he didn’t know she was making.
My hand found my cock through my shorts.
I didn’t pretend otherwise. I stroked slow, filling in the blanks with everything that hurt.
The phone buzzed an hour later. A text, not a call: He’s gone. I’m alone. Can’t talk. It happened twice.
I typed back: Details. Please.
Three dots, then nothing. Five minutes. Ten. Then: Bigger than you. I’m sore. I liked it. More tomorrow. Sleep.
I came in my fist against the cold kitchen tile. The shower didn’t wash it off. I stood under the spray already late for work, trying to remember which side of the bed she slept on and finding I couldn’t place her there at all anymore.
* * *
The next morning I didn’t get the usual call either. I sat with the phone until it rang. She sounded hurried, breathless.
“I only have a minute. He’s in the shower.”
“Tell me what I missed.”
“I went to his room this morning. Before meetings.” Voices in a hallway. “Shit. I have to—”
“Wendy—”
“I’m staying with him. King bed. I moved my things while he was at breakfast.”
The line cut off. My wife, three states away, had just told me she was living with another man for the rest of the week, delivered with the flat efficiency of a room service order. I went to work ruined, thinking about her folding her clothes into a dresser that wasn’t ours.
* * *
Her evening call never came. I nodded off on the couch and woke after midnight to nothing. I texted Be a bad girl. Love you. No reply. The silence had a shape. I lay there and let it press down on me.
Morning, regular time, the phone rang. Her usual voice. Too usual.
“Were you a bad girl?”
“Yeah. Um. I changed rooms yesterday. Just so you know.” Flat. He was there.
“You’re in his room.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“He’s standing right there.”
“Yeah. This room is better. King bed instead of two queens. I have more room to collaborate.”
“Spread for him.”
“Absolutely. Steve and I found some new opportunities. We’ve been hitting it pretty hard. I have to prep for our first session. I’ll try to call later.”
Hitting it hard. Work and not-work in one neat package for Steve’s benefit. I smiled at the ceiling, a man put in his place in a sentence he wasn’t allowed to finish.
“Showering with him?”
“Of course. Gotta run.”
I went to work ruined again. Steve still thought this was a secret. That was the extra turn. He thought he was fucking another man’s wife. He was. He just didn’t know that man had begged for it.
* * *
Afternoon. A text: Can talk. 5 min. He’s out.
I called immediately.
“He stretches me,” she whispered. “I feel it after. When I walk. When I sit.”
I was hard and small in the same breath.
“Good. I want you feeling it on the flight home.”
“Is this still—is this what you want?”
“I’m jealous. That’s the point. I’m stuck here while you get used by a man who fills you better, and I jerk off to it. Do you think about me while he’s in you?”
Quiet. Then: “Yes. I look at my ring. I come too. Every time.”
“I want you bad. And I want you to be his.”
“I can’t—I don’t know when I can call again. He’s always here.” She stopped. “The diaphragm. I have to put it in before he gets back. He doesn’t know about it. He thinks—”
“He thinks he might get you pregnant.”
A sound, not quite yes. “He wants to. He asks. Every time.”
“And you?”
“I—” The door opened, close this time. “Oh god. That’s him. I have to—”
The line died.
I sat with a hard-on and half a conversation, my wife's voice still in my ear saying he asks every time. I stroked slow, picturing the scene she couldn’t describe: her in a bathroom, legs apart, inserting the disc that would keep another man's seed from taking hold, then walking back to bed where that man would try anyway.
I came thinking about her stretched, sore, full of him, and still unreachable.
* * *
Five minutes later the text landed. Frisbee in. Time for fun.
I dropped my pants in the hallway and worked myself slow, trying to time it, trying to guess when he bottomed out and when she came on a cock that wasn’t mine.
I didn’t last. I came in my fist thinking about my wife’s legs open on a king bed I would never see, a disc in so the man who thought he was stealing her could finish like a husband.
I pushed a cold dinner around my plate. Two hours later: Barrier in. I’m his for the night. #slutmode
I came again on the couch with the TV on mute, the hashtag sitting on the screen like a status I had applied for.
I slept like shit. Three a.m.: Waking him up.
In the shower I thought about her mouth on him in the dark, married, whispering hush so the next room wouldn’t hear the cuckold’s wife being a hole. I toweled off and the phone buzzed again. Full of him and leaking. #slutmode
I went to work because that was what the second man does in the morning. Mid-morning she checked in, her tone as detached as a project manager's. Everything OK? You getting my messages?
Yes. I love #slutmode. Waiting for #unprotected.
Glad you like #slutmode. So do I. #unprotected leads to #notyourbaby.
I stared at that one at my desk until the words stopped looking like a joke. Then I typed OK with me. It was the truth, and a lie would have been the first betrayal of our new arrangement.
She sent the crazy-face emoji. I sent nothing else. I stayed at my desk with a hard-on and the first complete version of the fantasy: not just her cheating. Her bringing home proof I didn’t put there. A souvenir that would outlast a hotel week.
Just after lunch: #slutmode tasty #lunchbj
I typed swallow?
Every drop. Every time.
I locked the office door and came into paper towels thinking about my wife on her knees in the middle of a workday, throat working, wedding ring on the hand that held him, then going back to a booth with his taste in her mouth and a smile for the client, oblivious to the taste in her mouth.
* * *
The rest of the week was that. Frisbee. Disc. Egg guard. #slut. #slutmode. Morning. Night. Sometimes lunch. Sometimes just the hashtag, which was enough. I knew what it meant. She was on her back. He was in her. I was the man getting a status update.
She was giving him her married pussy every hour she could steal.
The thrill didn’t fade. It became the whole structure.
My job was waiting. Hers was getting used.
He still thought I didn’t know. That was the part I turned over in meetings like a coin.
He got the cunt. I got the truth. He wasn’t allowed to know they were different prizes.
* * *
Pickup day she called just before takeoff, a little out of breath, gate noise behind her.
“Hi. You still coming to the airport?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“After this week. After I — Steve—” She could text it. She still couldn’t say it, not cleanly, not with a gate full of people listening.
“After #slutmode with Steve all week,” I said. “I want you more than ever.”
She let out a breath and I hated that I noticed.
“Unless you’re going home with him.”
“I’m sure his wife and kids would love that.” Her voice was cool, the words as smooth as if rehearsed. “I told him this was a one-time, out-of-town thing. Boarding. See you soon.”
She hung up.
I idled in the pickup lane with the image of her telling him it was once, and the knowledge that a man who had just spent a week in my wife’s cunt was not going to treat once like a closed door.
I didn’t want him to. I wanted him hoping.
I wanted her wet on the flight thinking about the next time.
I wanted to stand at baggage claim and kiss a mouth that had been on him that morning and taste that I was second.
One time, she’d said.
I didn’t believe her. I didn’t want to. I wanted the complication she had sworn she didn’t need, and I wanted it in our house, in our bed, in the soreness I’d see in her walk as she came through the sliding doors.
I put the car in park and waited for my wife like any other husband. I was waiting for the lie in her kiss, the taste of being second, the proof.