Seven Dates: A Different Kind of Hotwife (4 page)

I woke up to the unmistakable sound of a woman sucking cock. A wet, sloppy, gagging, spitting blowjob. The room was bathed in light, so bright that I couldn’t even bear to look at the windows. I stumbled upright and moved to the sounds. Into the bathroom, which looked more spacious than usual this morning, whiter also, a big glass shower, like the one in the hotel where we’d honeymooned. I looked inside. The shower was running. Joanie was naked, on her knees sucking off a man with a huge cock, he winked at me… Donald.

I shuddered awake. It was 6:20am and still dark outside. Joanie was in bed beside me, still bearing the aroma of cigarettes and whatever the fuck else she’d been doing. Was that story of hers a fucked up dream as well? No… I didn’t think so. That part had happened. Ambien always gave me weird dreams though.

I let her sleep. I dreaded what would happen if I woke her up. Anyway, I need to get back into the office.

On the metro ride in, I reorganized my notes on the contract issue. I’d done this a hundred times already, but it was the most important thing in my life right now… at least the most important I felt I had any control over.

The
Joanie Situation
as I’d begun got think of it, which sounds like the name of a bad novel, definitely felt out of control. Our problems had been building for a while. The move, my long hours, my reluctance to have kids yet had all contributed to the tension. My acknowledgement of some level of sexual incompatibility, at the margins surely, was enough to set her off.

But good God, couldn’t she have picked a better time to snap than when my professional world was blowing up. And what was the right answer? More apologies? Denials that I had meant any of the things I’d said? She wouldn’t believe them anyway and it would just lead to accusations of patronizing her. No easy solution. I just needed her to calm the fuck down.

I took a deep breath. The
Joanie Situation
would have to wait.

The contract though… the problem was that the money was in a particular sweet spot. It was too much to ignore, and yet too little to make the company pull together and go to war. If we had to sue, we’d burn through the entire amount at stake in depositions. So I could see how the logic of the situation from Donald’s perspective was to either make me solve it myself or throw me under the bus for failing to do so. And yes… I should have caught the mistake. I needed to own up to that.

The key, as with any negotiation, was leverage. I had none. Tanner knew that and wouldn’t budge. Unless I could find his initials on an incriminating document, ideally right beside the new language for II.C.8 I couldn’t force him to help me. But maybe I could find some way to encourage him to do what I wanted.

It occurred to me that there might be another way around the third-party allocations issue. In theory, there were unlimited potential third parties, in practice just two. Briand, a French company, had a stake in the action, and so did XCOSA, a Mexican one. I wasn’t too worried about Briand. They had largely bid themselves out of the market anyway. Only EU regulations kept them in business across the Atlantic.

XCOSA was more complicated, and my spreadsheet estimate of the cost of the contract error was, in fact, based on an early XCOSA bid. If they happened to sweeten their offer, there might be even more at stake. But if they raised their price… then suddenly the value of the third-party allocations would plunge and TKD’s interest in keep the clause would diminish, maybe even to the point where it wouldn’t be worth it to insist upon if it poisoned the well with us… or me at least.

***

Tanner is an asshole, but that doesn’t mean he’s stupid. If I could figure out the XCOSA option, he could. Which meant I needed to point him in a different direction. I called him up.

“Hey buddy,” I said pleasantly.

“Hey man, I’m sort of busy right now.”

“Yeah, I bet. Still drinking champagne on my dime?”

“Look, I gotta go.”

“Wait, I got a deal to talk to you about. You’re not retiring are you?”

He laughed. “I wish. But look, I don’t know about you, but I don’t get paid to reminisce about old deals. I get paid to make new ones. ABC, baby.”

Always Be Closing.
I’d seen the movie too.

“This is a new deal. Let me buy you a drink and we’ll talk.”

“You’re buying? Okay, Sparkles at five.”

“Sparkles? Really?”

“Well, if you’re buying the drinks, then I wanna go someplace where I’ll get my money’s worth.”

That doesn’t even make sense.
“Okay, whatever.”

Sparkles, of course, is a strip club. And that is something I definitely wouldn’t be mentioning to Joanie. Bad family history there. Well, she wasn’t expecting me home anyway, and she’d be out… somewhere… as well. So it should all work out.

***

The day went by quickly. I locked my office door, drew the blinds and crunched on my scheme. So many moving parts, so little time to pull it together. Neither Donald nor the company lawyers pestered me, which at the time I was grateful for, but which struck me as ominous as I made my way to the strip club to meet Tanner.

Sparkles is actually a pretty neat place, architecturally speaking. It was at one time an old-fashioned, New Orleans-themed steak house, and there are two levels, the upper level where the VIP booths look out onto the main stage through wrought iron railings, and the main floor with two stages. The two story main stage allows the more intrepid and athletic dancers to perform almost twenty feet in the air. There is a large horseshoe bar that at one point had a raw bar in the middle, but now had a smaller stage with a stripper pole.

Tanner was at the main stage, sucking on a martini, and throwing singles from a fat wad at a young, heavily tattooed blonde in patent-leather, thigh-high boots and nothing else.

“She’d make a delightful Mrs. Alden,” I commented.

“I’d let her suck on my dick.”

“Generous of you.”

He waved for the waitress and ordered another martini. I got myself a beer. I gave her two twenties for our drinks. Before we could start our conversation, two strippers approached and sat in our laps. Sisters, or they could have been, Eastern European, though mine had dark hair and his was blonde. They were dressed in similar lingerie, though mine’s was white and his girl’s was black. Clearly some thought and coordination had gone into this, and they seemed to have an act down pat.

“You wan’ see me suck sister’s titties?” his girl asked in thickly accented English.

“I’ll pass,” I replied.

“I do,” Tanner interjected. “Go ahead, man, buy me a private dance with these two cuties, and I’ll be in a much better mood to listen to your pitch.”

Luckily I’d dropped by the ATM before heading over. “How much,” I asked the girl in my lap.

“Five hundred for half hour and we make sure he never forget.”

I laughed. “Two hundred for fifteen, and make sure he comes back alive.”

They nodded and led him away.

I drained my beer and ordered another. I was almost three hundred in the hole and hadn’t even spoken to the fucker yet. Still, I couldn’t deny the view was nice. Tattoo-girl left the stage and was replaced by a little, blonde cutie in a school girl outfit… or at least the stripper equivalent, which replaced the traditional knee-high socks with thigh-high stockings and of course featured a trashy red bra peeking through a sheer, tied-off, white blouse. She had her hair up in pigtails, which I thought was a little over the top, and the inevitable lower-back tribal tattoo, though more understated than what most girls had at the club, still seemed out of place. But there was no arguing with her big innocent eyes and tight little ass that almost tempted you to take a bite out of it. It was a look Joanie could easily pull off. Was it really too fucking much to ask for her to do something like that once in a while?

Even though the schoolgirl was undoubtedly stripper crazy, I suspected she would have no qualms about sucking me dry after a hard day at the office. Of course, Joanie was working on that, wasn’t she? What had she tried to sell me last night? Oh, yeah, the neighbor, John with the big cock, coming in her mouth four times
and
also once on her tits. Quite an impressive performance for an out-of-shape guy in his mid-fifties.

He finds me more exciting than you do.
Well, sure, any guy is going to go bonkers for a sexy neighbor showing up one night and offering to blow you unconscious. Just a matter of putting a little work into it.

Schoolgirl was definitely putting some work into it. She’d removed her bra and untied her shirt, but kept it on, letting it hang loosely. The effect was more erotic than if she’d just been completely topless. There was a sense of getting away with something each time I caught a glimpse of her pretty, little titties beneath the loose, shifting fabric. She did a similar thing with her panties, slipping them off while leaving on her tiny plaid skirt. When she crawled around the stage, flashing her meaty, shaved pussy it was an instant hard-on. All I could think about was how much I wanted to grab a hold of those pig tails and ram her hard from behind, a desire that almost instinctively manifested itself in me peeling off dollar bills and throwing them at the stage.

She finished off her set, collected her bills, and put on her bra and panties, even as she scanned the room looking for likely lap dance buyers. Her shameless casualness about her nudity was wildly erotic. I hoped she wouldn’t come over. I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist the offer of a dance, but I needed to stay focused on Tanner. Still, I was disappointed when another guy snagged her just as she got off the stage and took her into the back. Lucky fucking bastard.

The next girl on stage wasn’t my type. Nice body, but Goth and covered in tats. I know some guys get off on that look, but for the life of me I can’t understand why. Well, to each his own, I guess.

I checked my watch. Almost fifteen minutes had passed, and sure enough, like clockwork the two strippers were leading Tanner back, his goofy grin a testament to their effective work.

He plopped back down in his seat and waved for another martini. I groaned, drunk was okay, passed out would be a problem.

“You ready for some business?” I asked.

He waved his hand at me, a bored expression on his face. “Yeah, yeah, go ahead.”

I pitched a potential deal involving our South Korean subsidiary, a back door partnership with a Chinese firm. It was a dog, but anything involving China has a surface plausibility. Still, Tanner saw right through it. He was shaking his head before I’d finished the pitch.

“Won’t work,” he said with a cocky grin, as if explaining the obvious to an idiot. “You won’t be able to distribute expenses across the tax zones. Every cost effectively get doubled.”

I shook my head. “No, man, trust me, I ran the spreadsheet.”

He was scouting the room for another lap dance. I needed to close this conversation down before he could waste another couple of hundred of my dollars.

“Look, you owe me,” I whispered urgently.

That got his attention. Nothing like a little desperation in a negotiating partner to set up a lucrative deal.

“Just look at the numbers,” I pleaded. “I’ll send them to you before I leave for Marsailles.”

I saw him perk up at that. Bingo!

“Alright, alright, send them over.” Then with a forced casualness, he added, “what’s in Marsailles?”

I paused, deliberated rolled my eyes to the right, then spoke in a quick, clipped tone. “Nothing, just vacation you know. Had a hard week. Great bouillabaisse.”

He nodded. “Okay, so send the numbers. I’ll review them when I can.”

“Thanks man.”

I threw down another couple of twenties to cover his latest martini and hightailed it out of there.

No one vacations in Marsailles. It’s a seedy port. But Briand was headquartered there, and Tanner knew that if I could lock down a Briand deal, I could flip the third party allocations issue on its head. He’d figure out this was a ploy soon enough, but a couple of days of him focused on Briand rather than XCOSA was all I needed.

I dropped by the office to crunch some numbers, so I didn’t get home until almost midnight. The house was empty. The
Joanie Situation
.

I cracked open a beer and changed out of my work clothes, slowly roaming around the house looking for clues she might have left me about where she’d gone.

I was going to have to get a handle on this thing with my wife somehow, though since I wasn’t sure what was going on, it was hard to do. And one of the reason I wasn’t sure what was going on was that I hadn’t been paying enough attention to her. Even before the TKD contract fiasco, I’d been working too many hours, just coming home to eat, sleep, and occasionally screw. Not exactly a perfect marriage. It didn’t help that she didn’t have a job and that she didn’t really know many people in town.

It occurred to me that I’d been treating Joanie like just another counter-party in a negotiation. She wanted to make me jealous and mad, I wouldn’t let her. That was her strategy, her leverage, and I knew how to combat that. I’d been doing that for years, now that I think about it. But that win at all costs approach, successful as if might be in a place like Marston was disaster in a marriage. I’d been squeezing Joanie, grinding her down. She couldn’t out-negotiate me, but she shouldn’t have had to. That was on me.

On the other hand, it isn’t like I had it much better, dragging my ass into the office every day, working for an asshole boss, dealing with jerks like Tanner on a daily basis. And I was doing it all for her… so we could save enough to have a decent house, kids, all the stuff she wanted. Yeah, I wanted it too, but I don’t know, they seemed more like her goals that I was working for. She could cut me a little slack, throw me a bone. Instead, she was playing some sort of weird game with me.

I chuckled. Weird indeed. Out of character. For a girl built like Lara Croft, she was surprisingly uninterested in sex. Well, no, that’s not right. She liked sex. Enjoyed it a lot even. But she wasn’t very adventurous. At the end of the day, she was still an innocent Catholic girl, full of guilt and sexual repression.

Or maybe she
was
right, and I was the fucked-up one. Maybe I was letting porn shape my expectations of what a girl with that kind of body should be into. But then again Stacy was that kind of girl, in real life. So this wasn’t
just
some crazy male fantasy.

And, this was the really weird thing. In a crazy way, I sort of liked Joanie’s game. Of course, she hadn’t really blown our neighbor, but it was undeniably a hot image. The idea of her walking across the street and offering to blow him until he couldn’t get it up anymore was weirdly erotic. Partly because it was out of character. Partly because just the idea of it was sexy, a wet-dream come true. At some level, it suggested that maybe she was coming out of her sexual shell.

I almost wished she’d given me more details instead of phrasing her revelations as a series of questions about male sexual response. What had she said to him when she’d gone over? Had she shown him her tits? Well, I knew she had, since she said he’d come on them. But was that his idea or hers? Had she stripped naked?
If you’re going to torment me, Joanie, at least make it entertaining.

As if on cue, I heard her key scraping in the lock. 12:45am. I walked back toward the front door and we met in the foyer. She startled… guiltily?

“I thought you’d be asleep,” she explained.

She really
did
look freshly fucked. Her hair was disheveled, her little black party dress wrinkled. She looked flushed and was carrying her black, spiky heels in her hand, almost a caricature of a party girl completing her walk of shame. I wondered if she’d thought to stash her panties in her purse to complete the illusion.

“You look like you had fun.”

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t know about fun, but I learned
a lot.
”

“John again? You’re going to put the poor guy into an early grave.”

She gave me a queer look. “You think I’m making this up.”

“No, not at all,” I replied, suppressing a smile. “It would be out of character for you to lie to me.”
But not half as much out of character as going out and screwing strangers.

She hesitated and then decided not to bite on that. Better to continue her little game. “No, not John. You made it quite clear I should go out and experience other
men
, not one man, multiple times.”

I laughed. “I’m not sure I ever quite said that…. But okay, so who? Do I know him?”

“You’re not going to be happy about this,” she replied, flashing me a Cheshire Cat grin.

This would be good. Who would she pick? She didn’t know Tanner, otherwise I had a sense she would say she had been with him. No, it was obvious. Donald. That’s what would most get under my skin.

I shook my head. “Probably not. So?”

“I didn’t have much time to plan…” she was dragging it out, obviously enjoying the game. “But he lives nearby and he does seem like a
typical
man… so….”

“Yes?”

She blushed and smiled yet again. “Cody.”

I groaned despite myself. She’d outdone herself. Cody was my half-brother. It still felt weird to think of him as that. I’d never known he’d existed until seven years ago. Seems that my dad, some twenty-two years ago, hooked up with a stripper name Starlight a.k.a. Rene Simmons a.k.a. Cassidy Roy Johnson a.k.a. God knows what else. But sure enough, paternity tests proved it. It had torn our family apart, and was the reason I couldn’t admit to Joanie that I’d gone to a strip club. Family history was not on my side. Graham men can’t be trusted around strippers.

Cody, by coincidence lived north of town, in a trailer park and he was indeed a typical man, if by that one thinks of a beer-drinking, NASCAR-worshipping, unemployed Neanderthal. Even after Cody turned eighteen, he still was constantly after my dad for money, and when we moved to Boston, he even paid me a visit asking me for help.
We brothers after all.
I’d never seen him sober or without his hand out.

I hadn’t reacted as she’d wanted to her “John the neighbor” story, so she’d pulled out a bigger gun.

“So, how is old Cody doing?” I managed to choke out.

She grinned again. She knew she’d gotten to me.

“Do you mind if I sit down? He really wore me out.” She squeezed past me, again the smell of cigarettes and sweat, mingling with a sickly sweet perfume.

“You take up smoking?” I asked, following her into the living room.

Her eyes flashed. She’d been waiting for that question. “Well, not really, but it does help to get the taste of… you know… out of my mouth.”

I felt a lump in my stomach. I groaned again, annoyed at myself for being so easily manipulated. I couldn’t help but picture it. My beautiful and voluptuous Joanie, in her clubbing dress and high heels, rapping on the thin, aluminum door of Cody’s singlewide. The look of surprise and delight on his unshaven mug as he realized what she wanted. In that dress, there was little doubt.
Why are you here?

“What did you say to him?” I blurted out.

She dropped heavily onto the sofa.

“I told him you wanted me to have more experience with men,” she replied simply, as if this were a perfectly normal thing to say. “But he didn’t seem to believe me…. at first.”

She waited for me to react, but I managed to hold my tongue. I could tell that annoyed her.

“Well,” she continued, “he told me that if I was serious, I should come on in. He swept a bunch of beer cans off his table and told me to bend over it. So I did.”

Too much Joanie. Gotta keep it believable.
I looked away so she couldn’t see my smirk.

“Do you want to hear the rest?” she asked.

“You seem to want to tell it.”

“Well, I
am
doing this all for you.”

“Yes, of course.”

On that we could agree. She was definitely making all this up to get back at me.

She tried to read my expression for a bit, but I managed to keep my poker face intact.

“That’s when he told me to lift up my dress and pull down my panties.
I wanna see your ass,
” she concluded in a passable imitation of my half-brother’s surly drawl.

I rolled my eyes.

“What? He said it!” She paused, giving me an opportunity to respond, but I again opted for silence. “So I did what he told me to. Pulled them down just enough to let him see… everything. That seemed to get him going. He had a lot to say about you.”

“I bet.”
Fuck.
I need to stop letting her bait me.

She smirked.
Victory
. “He said that he wasn’t surprised that I was there. That he’d always known I was too much woman for you. But you know what Kel? I guess in some ways that’s a compliment, but it didn’t feel like it.”

For Christ’s sake, Joanie, get it out already.
I realized I’d have to change tack. Unless I hastened the process, she was going to drag this out all night.

“So what did you learn from him?”

Another satisfied smirk. “Well, I have to admit, I don’t really understand men. He took me from behind like that, bent over his table. And it was like he was angry at me! When he wasn’t saying you were a wimp, he was calling me a slut and a whore. Then when he finished told me to strip and get him hard again… which I did… and then he put me on my hands and knees and again did it from behind, even rougher this time, pulling my hair and slapping my butt.”

“Well, at least you didn’t have to see his ugly, rat face while he was doing it,” I snarked.

“Oh, he’s not that bad. He’s in shape and he’s big too.”

“Of course,” I sighed.

“But seriously, Kel. I mean, even when he took me to his bed, he yanked me so that I was almost falling off the mattress and he screwed me standing up with my legs over his shoulders. And then –“

“I get it. It felt dehumanizing?”

I get it Joanie. I’m sorry I acted like you were a sex object that only existed for my pleasure.

She nodded. “Yes! Exactly. Like, you know, he almost hated me because he wanted me. Like he just wanted to satisfy his urges in the most impersonal way possible.”

I sighed. “Okay. You’ve made your point. I’ll say it again. I was having a bad day, and I’m sorry about what I said the other night. It was wrong of me, and –“

“What are you saying Kel? Are you saying that you wouldn’t have wanted me to, what, service you like I did John and Cody?”

I groaned. She was going to make me not only apologize for what I’d said, but what I’d thought.

“I was being insensitive and –“

She shook her head. “But that is what you wanted?”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“The truth.”

You can’t handle the truth
. I smirked, immediately regretting it.

“I regret having those thoughts. I’ll try harder to be more considerate in the future.”

“So you mean that in the future you’ll keep those thoughts to yourself?”

“Sure. Yes. Of course. Joanie, I love you and –“

“Well, I love you too Kel, and that’s why I want to better understand –“

“Can we stop this now? It’s getting late. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

She rolled her eyes. “God, you still don’t get it. That’s not what I am looking for. I’m not looking for sorrys. I’m looking for understanding. How it is that after five years of marriage I still have no idea what you expect of me.”

Now I was genuinely speechless. Out of words. I had no idea what she wanted. And as the moments stretched on, neither of us speaking, I could see her getting more and more frustrated. It is a weird, helpless feeling to be in a situation like that, seeing things going horribly wrong and yet completely unable to conceive of a useful course of action. Should I have taken her in my arms and hugged her? Apologized again?

Finally she broke the silence. “Fine, then I guess I need to continue my research. I’d show you what I’ve learned, but like last night, I’m too worn out for now.”

And with that, she rose and without looking back, she went upstairs to bed.