Arnica Butler - Well-Constructed Affairs Read online

  They were both so wound up, and, she supposed, both so caught up in their own personal fantasies, that even though John fucked her too gently, they both rose to a shattering orgasm in no time. As always, his final thrusts were the kind she wanted: hard, and filling.

  She twisted her hands from her panties and straightened them out while still facing the wall. Whatever had happened, it had left her tingling all over. “Whoa,” she said, to the dark brown tile.

  She heard John pull up his zipper. He was still breathing hard.

  She turned to face him and saw that he had a confused ecstasy on his face.

  She liked that she had wound John up to this point. His jealousy made his “roughness” more real. More real than when he just pretended for the sake of pretending. Her teasing had excited him, she could see that. It had excited her, if only for having given her fuel for her fantasies, fantasies that seemed to be of other men. Not her husband.

  Something must have clouded her expression, because John reached out and touched her cheek. “What's wrong?” he asked. Tenderly.

  She shook her head and put on a smile for him. “Nothing. That was great,” she said. “Let's have dessert at home?”

  8 THAT'S MARRIAGE

  Once they were in the car, they fell into a strangely awkward silence.

  This one didn't seem as friendly as the one they had on the way down here.

  “You okay?” John said, looking over at her after a few minutes of quiet.

  “Yeah, why?” she said, but her voice was distanced.

  John shrugged.

  Then he pulled over.

  Adria turned to him. For a moment she blinked slowly, applying a layer of her “Dumb Face” and trying to act like she had no idea what was going on. But John kept looking at her, and she dropped it.

  “Something's off,” he said.

  She rubbed her face. “Yeah.”

  “What is it?”

  Adria bit her lip and looked at her lap.

  This was it, John realized. This was the moment he had been trying desperately to avoid. He hadn't asked the question he was about to ask because he didn't want the answer, no matter what answer she gave him.

  He already knew the answer, he realized. He just didn't want to hear her say “no,” and have it be a lie, and he didn't want to hear her say “yes,” and have it be made real..

  “I want to ask you something,” he said, and his voice was barely a whisper. He had to wring each word from his mouth, carefully, so that he had the courage to go on. Because he knew that now was the time, the time when Adria was going to answer honestly.

  She shivered.

  “Do you need something else from our sex life?”

  She put her hands to her eyes. The answer was in that simple gesture.

  John was surprised by his own reaction, Instead of feeling as though he were being crushed, he actually felt like a weight was being lifted.

  “I don't...need anything,” she said, and her voice was quiet and shaky. She turned to him and he could see her eyes were wet. “I love you,” she said, and let the sentence linger in the air with an unspoken “but...”

  “But do you want something else?”

  Adria let out a sigh and pressed herself against the back of the seat, using her feet to push herself against it. She was nervous. She shook her head. “I don't...I don't know. I don't know what to say.”

  John reached out and pushed her hair over her ear.

  He was finding the path through this difficult topic to be completely different than he had expected. He had expected to feel tormented, ashamed, humiliated, by the confirmation from his wife that she needed something he couldn't deliver.

  Instead, he found himself aroused.

  Extremely aroused.

  Adria exhaled and looked out the front window, her gaze rigidly on the street.

  “Let's talk about it,” John said.

  Adria blinked, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “I don't want to,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  She shook her head. “I just...I don't really want to.”

  John withdrew his hand. “Look. It's all sort of out there anyway, right. I think I know what you're going to say. So why don't we just both say it, tell each other what's going on, and see where it takes us.”

  Adria cracked a smile. “That's very sensible, John,” she said, in a goofy voice. She wiped her nose and sniffed. “You go first.”

  “Nice one,” he said, and let himself fall back into the seat.

  There was a long silence.

  “I could send you an email,” she offered.

  He laughed.

  Then he found himself blurting out:

  “I think I know you're going to say that you want me to be...I don't know, more...manly. Rougher. And it just doesn't work for you when I do it. Is that it?”

  Adria turned to him, and her mouth was slightly open in surprise.

  “And I think,” he continued, before she could say anything, “that you secretly want to try something out, something new, something with another man -”

  “No,” Adria said quickly. “No, I wouldn't do that.”

  John was suddenly irritated. This was going the wrong way again, before he had a chance to say what he wanted to say.

  “John, I take our marriage really seriously,” she was saying. “This is just..a glitch, you know...everything is going to get back on track in no time...I don't really want to talk about it anymore.”

  Every time, he thought. This happened every time.

  “God,” he muttered. “This happens every time.”

  Adria looked at him. Now she was annoyed. “What does?”

  “Just...you...I never get to say what I want to say.”

  “What's there to say? That's what I'm saying! It doesn't matter if I feel this way or that way -”

  “I'm trying to talk here!” he practically shouted. Then he lowered his voice. “I'm trying to say...I have something I want to say, to explain to you. I want you to listen!”

  Something about his tone must have been extraordinary, because Adria closed her mouth and turned in her seat. “I'm...I'm sorry. I didn't realize.”

  John rarely lost his temper, even in the mildest of ways. Adria could be volatile: she'd toned it down since she started working, but it had been a gradual process. She had thrown quite a few fits in her day. John, on the other hand, was nearly always calm and raised his voice so rarely that when he did, it was extremely effective at spooking everyone around him.

  “I can tell you want something else. I can tell there's no way I can give it to you-”

  “This is what-”

  He held a finger up to silence her, and she had to fight hard to be quiet. She folded her arms and bored a hole into the glove box with her fixed stare.

  “And there's no way I can give it to you, but I think you can also pick up on the fact that I have my own...well, thing. Right?”

  She looked up now. She looked confused. “That you like me to flirt?” she asked, and it was a genuine request for confirmation.

  John turned to look out the window. “Okay. Yeah. Sort of. I like you to flirt, but...”

  He sighed.

  Adria leaned forward. “But...?” she prompted.

  John let go of the steering wheel. He had been gripping it so fiercely his hand was hurting.

  “But...I think I could go for...I don't know. A little more.”

  Nothing.

  Then:

  “A little more?” Adria said. “A little more what?!”

  He turned to her and raised his eyebrows, as if by explanation.

  He watched her face. Scorn and disbelief alternated on her mouth.

  Or did they? Maybe those weren't the feelings she was expressing at all.

  What was Adria thinking? She was playing at being so innocent, such a virtuous wife – an appealing notion, to be sure – but she was acting as though she hadn't participated at all in this evening's escapades. As though she w
ould never! even dream! of flirting with another man.

  “Adria, you know what? Don't act like you didn't have fun tonight,” John said, finally. He was surprised by his own boldness, and also surprised by how annoyed he had just become.

  She opened her mouth as if to say something, and he could see that she was a little shocked by how direct he had just been. She ended up saying nothing, just folding her arms over her chest and settling against the seatback with a huff.

  “I just mean,” he said, more gently, “that you seemed to have fun playing this game, too. So...I don't know. It's okay if you want to tell me...or maybe you feel deep down inside, that you maybe are attracted to some guy...that's okay, is all I'm saying. I'm not trying to trap you here. I'm just being honest.”

  Another silence.

  “It seems...wrong,” Adria said finally. But her voice sounded odd. Unconvinced.

  John looked out the windshield. “What, like 'morally' wrong?” His voice sounded more incredulous than he meant it to. It was a bad habit of his, one borne of the fact that he was, actually a great deal smarter than other people and had very little patience for a lot of things people said. Adria was as smart as him, and he hated to think, perhaps smarter in a few ways – this statement didn't irritate him for its stupidity, just for its uncharacteristic “morality.”

  “You aren't seriously taking the moral high ground route here,” he said.

  Adria looked over at him, and he instantly regretted what he had said. She looked hurt. “I'm just thinking about our marriage,” she said. And then, as she often did in emotional matters, she went from injured to fierce: “Like what would happen to it if we started fucking around. You fucking ass.”

  Adria's temper flared like this. John was used to it: it burnt like phosphorus and then settled to a nice workable light.

  John looked out the windshield again.

  “I don't know,” he said. “It seems like a lot of people are doing just fine. With their arrangements.”

  Adria rolled the window down and propped a bare foot up on the door. “Oh right. A lot of people. Like Lily. You have anyone else?”

  He didn't.

  He could sense Adria rolling her eyes from the other side of the car.

  And so that was where the conversation ended. Oddly enough. John was disappointed and a little perplexed about how an evening that had started so congenially could go so wrong.

  But that was marriage, wasn't it?

  9 ADRIA'S FANTASY

  Adria retreated to her own office when they got home. She wasn't entirely sure how the conversation in the car had gone so wrong.

  There wasn't really any reason for it.

  Even as she had been staring out the window, convincing herself that she was mad at John, she knew that, underneath the facade, she wasn't really angry with John.

  She couldn't entirely understand him. But she wasn't mad at him.

  She certainly didn't feel the way she had acted in the car.

  She sat in front of her computer and stared at the screen. Maybe she could just lose herself in the mindlessness of Facebook. She scrolled through her news feed.

  But her mind never left the events of the evening.

  What she had said in the car was true. She didn't want to screw up their marriage. And there was a part of her – a big part of her – that was convinced that extramarital relations were a sign of something terribly wrong in a marriage, and that they would lead to disaster. No matter how much everyone agreed to the activities and set down rules. No matter how happy Lily seemed, or confident about her choices, there was just a part of Adria that couldn't believe she really was.

  And yet...

  ...it was tempting.

  So very tempting.

  She remembered how hard John's cock had been underneath her foot.

  And: she remembered how excited she herself was, as excited as she had been in what seemed like forever, when she felt his hard cock and realized that it was because she was flirting with Pete the waiter.

  Being even more honest: she had liked flirting with Pete the waiter.

  She stared at a picture of bunnies in jars on her computer screen.

  The question was this:

  Would she ever take it any further?

  Billy Stone popped into her head. Pete the waiter. What if someone else had been outside the bathroom door that evening?

  She opened her Messenger and stared at Lily's name. She clicked on it. Their last conversation had been about a barbecue nearly a year ago. Lily had wanted to know if she could bring Mexican food. And if she would be the only one eating spicy sausages at the party.

  Which meant precisely what it seemed like it meant.

  Adria closed her eyes.

  Did she really want to be asking for advice from Lily? About her sex life? And her marriage?

  She already knew what Lily's answer would be, anyway.

  I have her number. If you ghuant it, give me a call...

  The thing of it was: it wasn't so much that she wanted to have an affair. It wasn't that she was tired of John. It wasn't even that John wasn't satisfying her.

  Well, not exactly.

  It was this goddam obsession that had overtaken her. This desire to have a different kind of sex. The kind of sex that John just...couldn't give her. Not just because he was John and he didn't do rough sex very well, but because he was...well, he was John.

  He wasn't dangerous.

  She knew him too well.

  She rubbed her eyes again.

  It was there, way below the surface, and she didn't really want to tap it. Her fantasy was a lot darker than all of that. She could barely bring herself to admit it, even in her own mind.

  Hastily, she typed to Lily:

  I need to talk to you. Meet up before Wednesday? Can you?

  She stared at the screen. Lily didn't read the message. Fifteen minutes went by.

  Adria went to the bathroom. A trickle of pee tinkled in the toilet: she was really there to see if John had gone to bed. Assured that he was at least in the bedroom with the light off, she went back to the office.

  About a year ago, she had stumbled on to her own attraction to watching porn.

  The website name she had gleaned from snippets of conversations on the job site. She wasn’t even sure why she had gone there – curiosity more than anything, maybe. She had watched porn before, like anyone her age. She hadn't gotten all that much out of it. Turned on, but not obsessed the way guys seemed to get.

  And then she found herself doing what she was doing now.

  Searching for a very specific set of terms. One it took her a long time to figure out.

  Rape, after all, didn't fly on mainstream porn sites.

  She clicked on forced.

  And she began to watch (what she would never admit to being) her favorite video.

  The premise was, like all porn, utterly ridiculous. The star, a wispy girl with reddish hair and a tattoo on her lower back, big puffy lips and the fearful, doe eyes of all porn stars, was walking to what was apparently a parochial school. That part – and the silly three-inch long plaid skirt and cut off white blouse the girl was wearing, were not of any real interest to Adria.

  It was the part where the girl was kidnapped, and through the magic of porn transported to a basement of some kind, where she was tied to a contraption made of PVC pipes. Her arms were pressed up against the pipes, and extension cords wrapped around the length of her forearms and biceps, holding her immobile against the posts. The pipes joined at the top, forming a u-shape, and the height of the structure forced her to tilt her head back to rest her chin on the pipes.

  She was blindfolded, and naked now, and for a few moments the camera simply circled her as she squirmed and asked to be let go. “Please,” she sobbed.

  But the kidnappers could not let her go.

  She would do anything, she explained.

  And now a man appeared on screen. He was a man of wiry, builder’s strength. Tattoos covered his
arms, and he had the set jaw, scruffy stubble, and hardened eyes of a man who got what he wanted. He ran his fingers through her hair, and guided his enormous cock to her lips.

  “I can't,” she sobbed breathlessly. He held her by the hair and rubbed the tip of his cock over her lips. The size of it, its bluntness, must have been evident to her as just the crown covered her poofy lower lip. She tried to twist her head away, but his grip was fierce and she could not. He told her to open her mouth, and she shook her head.

  The man appeared amused, and her stoked her cheek. “That's fine,” he told her. “But I'll have you begging to let me put my cock in your mouth.”

  And then he went around to the where her ass was propped up for him. Her feet were tied to two hooks in the floor, and she began to cry and tell him she was sorry when he slid his fingers between her legs.

  At this point the video did a particularly delicious thing, and split into two screens, so that one side showed her face, and the other showed what he was doing to her from behind.

  She moaned and whined as he fingered her pussy, slowly finger-fucking her as she squirmed and begged him not to.

  Then he drew his finger up from her cunt, and tapped it on the puckered hole of her ass.

  “Oh, no...” she began to sob, and she gave a real performance. She shook her head and seemed genuinely frightened. “No, not that.”

  But it was too late for her, and he was already guiding his enormous cock to her asshole. It looked far too large to be possible, but he pushed forward. On the right side of the screen her mouth opened stunningly wide in a silent scream, and on the left the first inches of the man's fat cock slid into her ass.

  The next five minutes or so of the video were simply her crying and screaming, as he slid deep inside of her and began to fuck her, slowly at first as she wailed in agony, and then faster, pounding into her.

  After abusing her for a good long time, without stopping, he asked her if she wanted him to keep fucking her in the ass. He told her he could go all night.

  “No, please,” she sobbed. “Please, no more, I can't take any more.”