3. What Kind of Cuckold
three
What Kind of Cuckold
At baggage claim, I searched her for a mark.
A tell in her walk. Something in her eyes that said she was still full of another man, that she hadn’t come all the way back.
But she looked like my wife. Travel clothes, hair up, rolling her bag toward me.
The same woman I’d kissed goodbye a week ago, my mouth tasting of airport gum.
I smiled anyway. If she saw my face for what it was, she might flinch, and I needed her mouth on mine before she had the chance to be careful.
The hug was normal. The kiss wasn’t. She hesitated, just a fraction, like her mouth had learned a different shape and had to remember mine. I didn’t hesitate. I kissed her as if I could find him in the taste. Coffee. Him, maybe. The week. I didn’t care who saw.
“What’s wrong?”
“Not here.”
I put it in her ear so the carousel crowd wouldn’t get the good part. “Does it feel strange to kiss me after a week of him?”
Her eyes said yes. She didn’t insult me by lying.
“Good,” I said. “You gave it to him. I want to taste that.” I put my hand on her ass, possessive and wrong for a public terminal, and her eyes searched mine, as if she was still trying to find the husband who’d been joking about Jack in our kitchen.
That man was gone. This one was harder, and smaller, and offered no safety.
“I can’t believe you’re actually okay with this.”
“I asked for it.”
“Would you be jealous if I had fun? If he was better than you?”
There it was. The test. A stag says no, babe, we’re a team, your pleasure is my pleasure. I told the truth, because it was the only thing I had that was mine.
“I am jealous. I also hope he was better. Apparently he’s bigger.”
She spotted her bag on the belt, looked at me once, and said, “Much bigger,” as she bent to grab it.
From where I stood I could see the line of her ass in those slacks and I thought about how wide she’d had to open for him, how her body had learned a shape I hadn’t given it.
I was hard in a way that felt like punishment, blood pooling with illicit purpose while I stood there holding her carry-on.
* * *
In the car she lasted three minutes of highway before she said, “I’m sorry. The much-bigger thing. That was mean.”
“It’s not mean if it’s true. I like thinking about his cock stretching you. Legs around him. Tight at first. Then not.” I kept my eyes on the road because if I looked at her, I was going to pull over. “I want the details. All of them.”
She was quiet. I could hear her thinking, deciding whether to protect me. Then she made her choice.
“He is much bigger. It was a tight fit. He had to work. “Then my body just… gave. It just opened for him.”
“Did a bigger dick feel better? Did you come harder?”
She looked at me. I didn’t give her a grin to make it safe. I wanted the answer raw, sitting in the car with our grocery bags of a life in the back seat.
“Yes. I came almost the whole time he was inside me. It wasn’t even close to us.” She said it with an apology that was also a boast. “I want to do it again. He made me come and come and come. “And I’m not sure I want to stop.”
I could hear the vow forming in the silence. Never again. A mistake. A complication with a coworker. I had to cut it off before she said it, before she made it real. I had to make her step sideways.
“Did you get out at all? See the city?”
She snorted. “You mean besides the ceiling? I got out. CVS. More contraceptive gel. We went through the first tube.”
I parked in our driveway and killed the engine. We sat in the ticking silence, the house we paid for together waiting. “You didn’t have to do that,” I said, thinking of her at a CVS checkout, buying the gel that let another man finish inside her.
She got out without a word and followed me inside. She dropped her carry-on in the hall with a final thud, then turned on me. Her face was flushed, the whole week of him suddenly in her walk.
“You really want me to risk getting knocked up? Slut isn’t enough? “You want me knocked up with another man’s baby?”
Her words hung in the air, an invitation. The joke I would have made a week ago died in my throat. I didn’t want to shut this door; I wanted to walk through it.
“You keep talking about a baby.”
“Our baby. I always thought it would be ours.”
I pulled her in by the hips and put my hand on her stomach over the blouse, over the place a kid would live if we ever stopped being careful.
“Does it matter who the father is? It would still be yours. You’d still come home.”
She stared at me. I kissed her. When we broke she looked punched. The sentence had landed somewhere she hadn’t built a wall yet.
“What?”
“Kissing you,” I said, “knowing those lips were on him.”
“Mmm.”
“On his cock.”
A little smile, mean, the wicked one from the party years ago. “And on his balls. He made me. In the shower. This morning. Before the flight.”
“Fuck.” I had her moving toward the bedroom before she finished the sentence. She came with me. She didn’t pretend she didn’t want the next part.
* * *
Shoes off. Slacks down. She still smelled like hotel soap and whatever he’d worn into her skin, a cleanliness that wasn’t ours. Her thighs were slick, and it wasn’t me.
“That’s him,” she said, watching my face the way she had in the first-night call, checking whether I would flinch. “The last time was in the family restroom just before the gate. I didn’t clean up. I wanted you to feel it.”
I dragged two fingers through her and held them up. Wet. Used. A week of him and a stall and a flight, and she had walked through baggage claim with that on her. I put my fingers in my mouth. She made a small sound that wasn’t protest.
Then I pushed inside her.
She was looser than I was used to. Not ruined.
Opened. Wet in a way that made me bite down on my own sound, so I wouldn’t say something I couldn’t take back.
She came fast, her eyes on the ceiling. I knew she wasn’t all the way home.
She was still on a king bed in another city with a cock that actually filled her, coming the way she had described in the car, the way that wasn’t even close to us.
I lasted worse than I wanted to. I came in her thinking I was writing over him and knowing I wasn’t.
After, she pressed two fingers to her sternum like she was checking for a pulse.
I stayed on top of her, smaller, spent, listening to her breathe, feeling the week in the way her body held me without effort.
* * *
After a while she said, “Tell me what you actually want. Not the joke version.”
I stared at the ceiling. My throat was dry.
“I want you to give it up. Not just Steve. Any man who gets you wet. Hotel. Office. Parking garage. I want you to open your legs and let them have the part of you that’s supposed to be mine.”
She didn’t interrupt. Her hand was moving between her legs again, slow, listening with her cunt.
“I want them to use you. Stretch you. Come in you when you’ll let them.” I had to take a breath. “I want to hear about it after. When I’m the one who gets what’s left. I want to be the man at home while you’re on your back for somebody who fucks you better.”
She turned her head on the pillow. She met my eyes, as if lining up a word she’d been circling since the airport, maybe since the first night she called me a freak and didn’t have the vocabulary yet.
“You want to be number two.”
I swallowed. “Yes.”
“You want other men to take me. “Own my body. Use me.”
“Yes.”
“And you only get me when there’s no one else. Seconds. Leftovers. After.”
My throat was tight. “Yes.”
“You want to be cuckolded.”
The room went very quiet. She didn’t dress it up. She didn’t say lifestyle or hotwife or our little game. She put the word on me as she had put Steve’s week on her thighs and walked it through an airport.
“Yes,” I said.
That was it. She named what I was, and I didn’t crawl out from under it. The only new thing was that she had said it out loud, so I couldn’t hide in a joke anymore.
She nodded once, filing me, the way she filed clients.
“Okay. Then I’m not going to pretend this was a one-time conference thing.
Steve already thinks he can have me. After this week he’s right.
” She paused, and I watched her draw the line she needed so this didn’t turn into a collar.
“I’m not his slave. I’m not moving out. I come home to you.
But when he’s in me, he’s in me. You don’t get to be first. You don’t get to be bigger. You get me after.”
“That’s what I want.”
“Slut,” she said, trying it in her mouth. “Not whore. Nobody’s paying me. I give it away.”
“Slut,” I agreed.
“Any guy I want?”
“Any guy who gets that far. You already did it with Steve—moved into his room, let him use you. Don’t stop there.”
“I did.” She was rubbing herself deliberately now, wet again, watching me watch her. “I liked being his slut. I can do it again. With him. Other men — I don’t know.”
“Be open. If somebody attractive flirts, “don’t say no.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll try.” She came on her own hand saying it, eyes on me, her mouth still open around my name.
* * *
In the morning she dressed for the office, a woman who hadn’t spent a week getting opened up. High collar. Jacket. The conservative lie she wore to sell things. Then she paused at the door with her bag on her shoulder and looked at me over it.
“I’m going to see him today. Meetings. He’ll look at me like he still has me.”
“He does,” I said. “Let him.”
She nodded. “If he texts for a room, I’ll tell you before I answer.”
“Okay.”
“And if I go, I’m going as the woman who already gave it up. “Not as somebody pretending it was just once.”
I kissed her at the door. She tasted like toothpaste and last night. I watched her walk to the car knowing there were no panties under the skirt. I knew because she had shown me before she pulled it down, a little flash in our hallway, a promise she was taking to a conference table.
Steve still didn’t know I knew. That was the edge. He would look at her across a room and think he was getting away with another man’s wife. He was. He just had the man wrong.
* * *
A text came in at 2:40. It was her. “He’s looking at me like he already knows I will.”
I saw the three dots of a second bubble and crossed my legs so hard the chair squeaked.
I wrote back, “Open them.”
Her reply was a photo of the floor under the table. Skirt, bare knees. The caption said, “Not today. But I packed the thought.”
That was my afternoon. Staring at a photo of my wife’s bare knees, knowing Steve was across the table from her. Both of them held a secret I now owned. I had asked to be number two. She had called it what it was.
Cuckold.
I said it once, under my breath, to the empty office, so the word would stop feeling like it belonged to other men. So it would start feeling like my name.