3
A week passed. Then two. I got used to Laura being gone every evening.
The fantasies didn’t stop. They got more specific. I started dropping hints. Small ones at first, comments about Ellis being handsome, about Laura having a crush. She laughed them off. Then the hints got less subtle. I told her I’d dreamed about them together. She looked at me for a long time.
“Be careful what you wish for, honey,” she said then left for headquarters.
One night, I drove down there. I told myself I was picking her up, saving her the cab fare.
The headquarters was on a side street in a part of town I didn’t usually visit. Smaller operation than I’d imagined. When I parked across the street, the main lights were off. The front room was empty. Tables stacked with flyers, a row of computers, all dark.
I went inside. Closed the door behind me. There was a light on in the back office, the door half open.
“Laura?” I said. “Came to give you a ride.”
“In here,” she called back. “Just finishing up.”
I walked to the door and pushed it open. Damon was in the chair behind his desk, leaned back, his eyes half-closed. Laura was standing behind him, her thumbs working the muscles at the base of his neck. His collar was loosened.
It was nothing. A colleague rubbing another colleague’s shoulders after a long day. People did this. It was fine.
Then Damon’s hand came up and covered hers. His fingers laced through Laura’s. He held her hand against his shoulder. Laura didn’t pull away.
She looked up and saw me in the doorway.
Damon let go of Laura’s hand and sat forward in his chair. “Greg.” He looked at me steadily. “I’m not going to insult your intelligence. Nothing has happened between your wife and me.” He paused. “But it probably will.”
I appreciated that. I didn’t want to, but I did.
He could have played dumb. He could have made Laura pull her hand away and pretend the shoulder rub was physical therapy.
Instead, he had looked me in the face and told me the truth, and I understood in that moment why people were going to vote for him.
Laura came around the desk. She didn’t stand in front of me. She leaned against the edge of it, arms crossed, and she looked scared. Not of me. Of the situation. Of what was about to happen to us.
“Greg, I wasn’t going to do anything.” Her voice was smaller than I’d heard it in years. “I mean it. I’ve been coming down here, and stuffing envelopes, and making calls, and I wasn’t going to let anything happen.”
“I know,” I said.
“But you kept …” She stopped, uncrossed her arms then crossed them again.
“The things you’ve been saying. The hints. The way you look at me when I come home. I started thinking maybe you wanted this. And once I started thinking that, I couldn’t stop noticing him.”
She glanced back at Damon. “I couldn’t stop noticing how much I wanted it, too.”
Her eyes were wet. Not crying. Close.
“We should go,” she said.
She looked back at Damon. “I’m sorry. I should have stopped this before it got here.”
She picked up her purse from the desk. She was going to walk out. We were going to drive home in silence, pretend this hadn’t happened, and go back to polite sex twice a week and cold pizza on the couch. In twenty years, we’d be the Hendersons, complaining about someone’s cat.
“Wait,” I said.
Laura stopped.
I had been thinking about this. Every night for three weeks.
In bed with my wife’s back against my chest.
On the couch with the TV on and my hand in my lap.
In the shower, in the car, in the middle of a conversation about groceries.
The image of her with him. The sound she’d make. The way he’d look at her.
“I want you to,” I said. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. “I want you to do it.”
Laura stared at me.
“I want to watch,” I said.
The room was quiet. Laura was holding her purse against her chest like a shield. She looked at Damon. Damon looked at her. Then they both looked at me.
“You want it, don’t you?” I asked, knowing the answer. “You want to fuck him.”
Laura nodded. Her eyes didn’t leave mine. “Yeah,” she said. “I want him to fuck me. Right now.”
The words landed in my chest and between my legs at the same time.
I looked at Damon. “You all right with this?”
Damon nodded.
Laura turned to him. Her hand came up and rested flat against his chest. I watched her fingers spread against the white cotton of his shirt.
She looked up at him. He looked down at her. Then they kissed like two people who had been thinking about this for exactly as long as I had.
I leaned against the wall, my legs not entirely reliable.
Laura’s hands went to his buttons. She worked them open, one by one, her mouth still on his.
She pushed the shirt off his shoulders. His chest was broad, dark, the muscles defined in a way that mine hadn’t been since my twenties.
Laura ran her palm across his skin, her white hand stark against the dark of him, and made a sound against his mouth that I felt in my own body.
Damon’s hands found the hem of her blouse.
He pulled it up over her head, and Laura raised her arms to let him.
She was in a black bra I’d never seen before.
New. Bought for this, or for the possibility of this.
The thought hit me the same way it had hit me in my fantasies, except now it was real and six feet away.
He turned her around. Unhooked the bra from behind.
It fell. His hands came around and cupped her breasts, his dark hands holding her pale skin.
The contrast was exactly what I’d been picturing at three in the morning for weeks.
Except, my imagination hadn’t gotten Laura’s face right.
The way her eyes half-closed. The way her lips parted.
The way she pressed back into him like she was trying to disappear into his body.
Damon’s hand slid down her belly, and Laura’s breath caught. His fingers went to the waistband of her skirt, found the zipper, and worked it down. The skirt dropped. She stepped out of it. His hand kept going, over her underwear, dark fingers pressing flat against white cotton.
Laura moaned. Her eyes found mine across the room. “He’s barely touched me, and I’m already soaking.”
Damon slid her underwear down. Laura stepped out of them. She was naked in the back office of a campaign headquarters, and the man running for mayor had his hand between her legs from behind.
“Sit down, Greg,” Damon said, nodding at the chair in the corner.
I sat. My cock was straining against my khakis and sitting made it worse, the pressure obvious, impossible to ignore. I didn’t try to hide it.
Laura sank to her knees in front of him. She undid his belt, unzipped him, drew his cock out. I saw it for the first time. Thick, dark, hard. Bigger than me. Not cartoonishly, not absurdly, but enough that Laura wrapped her hand around it and her fingers didn’t quite close.
She kissed the tip. Then she opened her mouth and slid him in.
I watched my wife’s lips stretch around another man’s cock, and the world reduced itself to this room, this chair, this view.
She worked him slow. Her hand at the base, her mouth on the upper half. She was learning him. Every movement a question, every response an answer.
Then she opened her eyes and looked at me. Not at Damon—at me. Her husband, in a chair, with his cock tenting his khakis, watching her suck another man. She held my gaze and took Damon deeper.
I could see it in her eyes. She wasn’t just enjoying his cock in her mouth. She was enjoying me watching her with his cock in her mouth. That was the thing that was making her moan.
I had my cock out. I couldn’t remember deciding to. It was just in my hand, and I was stroking it slowly. Laura’s eyes went to it, and she smiled around Damon’s shaft and kept going.
“She’s good at this,” Damon said. To me. Looking right at me while my wife sucked his cock.
“Yeah,” I said, “she is.”
Damon pulled out of her mouth. Laura looked up, breathing hard, her lips wet.
“Turn around,” he said. “Bend over the desk.”
Laura stood, walked to the desk, and bent over it, her forearms scattering campaign flyers, a coffee mug shoved to the edge.
She looked back over her shoulder at Damon.
Then at me. Her ass was in the air, her feet apart, and she was offering herself to him in front of me with an expression that was half dare and half plea.
Damon stepped behind her. He ran his hand down her spine, over her ass, between her legs. Laura’s head dropped.
He took his cock in his other hand and dragged it along her, not pushing in, just letting her feel the length of him against her.
“Please,” Laura said. I’d never heard her say that in bed. Not once.
Damon didn’t rush. He ran the head of his cock along her slowly, teasing her opening without pushing in. Laura’s hips pushed back, trying to take him. He pulled away. Did it again. Laura whimpered against the desk.
“Damon,” she said. “Please.”
He pushed the head in. Just the head. Laura’s fingers went white on the edge of the desk. He held there. I could see her body adjusting around him, the dark shaft against her pale thighs, her breathing fast and shallow.
“More,” she said.
He gave her another inch. Pulled back. Another inch.
Pulled back. Each time, Laura made a sound I’d never heard, a low, catching exhale that seemed to come from the bottom of her lungs.
I was watching my wife discover what it felt like to be stretched by a cock bigger than the only one she’d known, and every sound she made was a small, precise humiliation that made my cock throb in my fist.
I was gripping myself so hard it hurt, afraid to stroke, afraid that one movement would finish me before they’d even started.
He pushed deeper, his dark hands gripping her white hips. Laura’s forehead dropped to the desk. Her mouth open against the scattered flyers.
“Oh god,” she said. “Oh god. Oh fuck.”
Damon bottomed out. He held there, his hips against her ass, his hands on her waist, letting her feel all of him.
Laura was shaking. Not from fear. From fullness.
Then he started to move. Slow at first. Long strokes that pulled almost all the way out before pushing back in.
I could see his cock each time he withdrew, slick with her, dark and glistening.
Laura’s body rocked with each thrust, her breasts pressed against the flyers, her hair falling across her face.
He built the pace gradually, and Laura’s sounds changed with it.
The low catching exhale became a moan, then something louder, less controlled.
The careful composure of a woman who’d always had quiet sex in a house with thin walls was falling away.
She was loud. She was loud in a way she’d never been for me.
“Harder,” she said. “Go harder.”